Murder in the Cotswolds (3 page)

“Calm down,” said Kate. “These are just routine enquiries. Constable, I’d like you to get Mr. West to show you the various vehicles he’s mentioned. Come back and collect me here when you’re through.”

“Right you are, ma’am.”

“Hey, I’ve got to get back to the stables,” West protested. “There’s work to be got on with.”

“Sorry, but we need your help,” Kate said. “The work will have to wait for a few minutes.”

It suited her to be left alone with Linda West. A cosy woman-to-woman chat might provide some useful background info on the Larimers.

“I’m afraid we interrupted your early-morning cuppa,” she said, with a glance at the teapot. “Don’t let me stop you having it.”

The younger woman took the hint. “Want one?”

“Thanks, I wouldn’t say no.”

They both sat down at the table. The tea was black and stewed, tasting vile.
You ought to get danger money, Kate.

“How long have you been working for Mrs. Latimer at the Grange?” she asked.

“About four years, ever since Ted got his job here.”

“Just you? It’s a big place.”

“You can say that again. There’s a couple of women come to clean in the mornings. Betty Rudge and Marlene Harper. Sometimes I have to do evenings, too, when they have guests for dinner. She always does the cooking—did, I mean. Reckoned she was a
cordon bleu.
But all the dishes she messed up she left for me to see to. And of course I had to wait table for them when they had people there.”

“What was Mrs. Latimer like to work for?”

“A right nit-picker, like Ted said. Just a speck of dust, a glass not polished ... you know. I earn every penny of what I get paid.”

Kate nodded sympathetically. “What about Mr. Latimer?”

A pause for thought. “Oh, he’s all right. Good sort, really. Likes a joke—when his wife’s not looking.”

“Made a pass at you sometimes, did he?”

Kate watched Linda’s mind working. In the end, she couldn’t help boasting. “He’s a man like all the rest, isn’t he? Quite a looker, really. Younger than her.”

Kate smiled the right sort of encouraging smile. “How did the Latimers get on together?”

“Well, he had to toe the line with her, didn’t he? She had all the money.”

Linda had been nervously twisting a ring on the third finger of her right hand. It was an elaborate diamond and amethyst cluster.

“That’s a lovely ring you’re wearing,” Kate commented.

“It’s mine. You can ask Ted if you don’t believe me. My aunt Daisy left it to me when she died. She specially wanted me to have it.”

A curiously over-defensive reaction, Kate mused. She decided there was no more to be got out of Linda at the moment, and stood up to leave.

“By the way, I don’t think you’d better go over to the house until after Mr. Latimer gets back from London.” She didn’t want anything touched until it had been checked over. “You have a door key, I suppose?”

“Course I do.”

“And do the other two women also have keys?”

“No, only me.”

“Well, let them know that they won’t be needed this morning, will you?”

The two men returned just as Kate was leaving, and Ted West slouched past her into the house with merely a grunt.

“No damage, and no unmatched tyres on any of the vehicles I’ve been able to see so far, ma’am,” PC Farrow reported as they walked back to the patrol car.

“Oh well, we couldn’t have expected to get that lucky.”

A Range Rover appeared at the entrance to the stable yard. The driver, spotting the police car, changed direction and pulled up beside them.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded, not getting out.

Kate introduced herself and PC Farrow. “Who would you be, sir?”

“I’m the Hambledon estate manager, Bruce McLeod.” The name matched the faint Scots burr in his voice. “Is something wrong?”

“You haven’t heard about Mrs. Latimer then, Mr. McLeod?”

“Heard what?”

“That she’s been involved in an accident.” Kate doled out the information sparingly, observing his reactions.

“Accident? What kind of accident?” McLeod opened the door and climbed down. He was of medium height, spare-framed, his features a little too large for his face. He carried an air of brisk authority, as if, perhaps, he’d had an army career.

“Sometime last evening Mrs. Latimer was knocked down by a vehicle which didn’t stop. She must have been killed outright.”

“Killed? Good God!”

“This officer tried to contact you earlier this morning, Mr. McLeod, when the body was discovered. But there was nobody at home.”

“I live alone, and I’m always out and about early.” He was fingering his bristly moustache, seeming uncertain.

“We’re hoping that you can tell us the whereabouts of Mr. Latimer.” Kate observed that Jack Farrow had moved unobtrusively to where he could scrutinise the front of the Range Rover for any sign of damage.

“He’s in London. I saw him setting off yesterday morning.”

“Where is he staying in London? Do you happen to know?“

“Afraid not.”

“A hotel, would you think? Or with friends?”

“I’ve really no idea. Sorry I can’t help.”

“When did you last see Mrs. Latimer, Mr. McLeod?”

“Yesterday morning. She dropped in at the estate office round about eleven.”

“And did you notice anything unusual about her manner? Anything out of the ordinary?”

He shrugged. “No, she was her usual self.”

“I see. Well, that’s all for the present, thank you.”

McLeod stood watching as they moved off in the patrol car.

“I noticed that he didn’t bother to enquire where the accident had occurred,” Kate remarked.

“No more he did, ma’am. Is he our man, you reckon?”

“That’s the big question, Jack.”

As they were about to turn onto the driveway, Kate swung the rear-view mirror so she could look back. With interest, she saw Bruce McLeod heading purposefully for the Wests’ cottage.

* * * *

“What’ve you been saying to her?” Ted West had demanded, the moment he was alone with his wife.

“Nothing special.”

Tension pricked between them. “That bloody woman copper is too damned nosy for my liking,” he muttered. “Coming charging round here like that. You didn’t tell her anything?”

“What d’you take me for?”

“Are you sure? Them and their trick questions.”

“She didn’t want to know anything about
us,
Ted. Leastways, except for asking how I got on with Mrs. Latimer.”

“What did you say?”

“Same as you did, that she was a real nit-picker to work for.”

Ted scowled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. Me and my big mouth.”

“Everyone knows what that cow was like, Ted. What good would it do for us to make out we got on with her fine?”

“What I always say is, the less the coppers know, the better.” He picked up the teapot and started to pour, then looked with disgust at the varnish that came out. “Make some more, can’t you?”

They fell silent, both thinking their own thoughts. A sharp rap on the front door nearly made Linda spill boiling water from the kettle. Uninvited, the caller came walking in.

“I saw the police leaving,” said Bruce McLeod. “What did they want with you?”

Ted turned a no-love-lost look on him. “They were asking if we knew where Mr. Latimer was. You’ve heard what’s happened, I suppose?”

“Yes, I heard.” McLeod paused, considering. “I hope you didn’t go blabbing your mouth off about all and sundry in your usual style, West.”

“Huh! If you mean about her ladyship giving you the push, how long d’you think you can keep that quiet?”

“She didn’t dismiss me. I resigned.”

“That’s a bloody lie, McLeod. She only gave you three months’ notice because that was in your contract.”

The other man’s face flamed with rage, and Linda said peaceably, “Now then, Ted, don’t start on that. It’s none of our business.”

“Why don’t you listen to your wife, West? She has twice your brains.” He left quickly, dodging any comeback Ted might hurl at him.

As the front door slammed, Ted said viciously, “He still thinks he’s a cut above me, even though he got the push.”

“Oh come on, love. Bruce means no harm.”

Ted threw her a suspicious glance. “Fancy him do you? Is that it?”

“Oh, Ted.” She came and clung to her husband seductively, her hands roaming. “You’re enough for me. You do believe that, don’t you, you daft thing?”

He pushed her away. “Leave off, Linda. Go and see to my breakfast. I got to get back to the horses.”

“Oh, bugger the bloody horses.”

But when she put bacon and sausages in front of him, he seemed to have lost his appetite. He shoved the plate aside after a couple of mouthfuls and stood up.

Alone, Linda listened to her husband’s footsteps crossing to the stable yard. For a while she stood motionless, then she went through to the small front parlour. Under a corner of the carpet square was a short length of loose floorboard. She prised it up and felt around in the dark space underneath. Drawing out a large brown envelope, she spilled its contents on the carpet. A chased silver snuffbox, a gold hunter watch, a pair of silver earrings, and a ring ... a far grander ring than the one Aunt Daisy had bequeathed to her. The ice-blue sparkle of diamonds flashed in a thin shaft of sunlight from the window; the large emerald in the centre was a glow of green fire. Linda slipped the ring on her finger as she gazed at it lovingly, longingly, fearfully. Then, with a sigh, she took it off and replaced her little hoard in the envelope, tucking it even deeper into the space under the joists.

Converted from a row of seventeenth-century almshouses, the Chipping Bassett police station was horrendously inconvenient. The quickly improvised Incident Room was a suite of dark offices (once bedrooms) leading off a dank-smelling passage. To provide sustenance for the army of officers who would be coming and going, the nearby Crusty Loaf Cafe had been called in to augment the station’s meagre catering facilities.

By late morning an all-stations hunt for the hit-and-run car was in progress. All garages with repair facilities had been alerted to be on the lookout. Scenes of Crime had narrowed the target very considerably. According to them it was a fairly heavy vehicle with rear-wheel drive and, from minute chips found on the victim’s body, with dark blue paintwork. The vehicle would show signs of impact damage at bumper level, possibly the rear wheel arches would be spattered with mud (pale brown) and torn grass. Most revealing of all, something that would give almost positive identification, would be the tyres—a Dunlop radial on the offside front wheel, and Pirellis on the other three.

“It gives us something to go on,” Detective Superintendent “Jolly” Joliffe had said, when Kate reported to him on the phone. He’d been dubbed Jolly when he first joined the South Midlands Force over thirty years ago, on account of a permanently lugubrious expression which, helped along by a ponderous wit, concealed an undoubted sharpness of mind. Kate felt a proprietorial interest in his nickname, it having been coined by her late father, then a sergeant. As a small girl, she’d often heard him chuckling with her mother about this grim-visaged but astute young PC.

“Let’s hope,” Jolly added now, “that it’s a local vehicle we’re looking for.”

“I’ve a strong feeling that it is, sir.”

“I prefer facts to feelings, Chief Inspector. What is the situation regarding the husband?”

“I’m expecting the Mets to report back anytime now.”

As Kate had hoped, the keyholder at Precision Plastics, the works foreman, had come up with the name of Latimer’s London hotel—the Cranbourne in Kensington. “I’m arranging to have him escorted back here.”

“I seem to recall meeting Matthew Latimer once,” the superintendent said ruminatively. “Quite a charmer where you ladies are concerned. So do watch yourself, Mrs. Maddox, when you talk to him.”

Nice and cool, Kate.
“I’ll try my level best not to let him turn my head, sir.”

Did he detect the sarcasm? If so, he let it ride. “Forewarned is forearmed, eh? Well now, you’d better get cracking.”

Kate admired the way she put down the phone without the faintest whisper of temper.

She was snatching a cheese roll and a cup of coffee at her desk when she received word that Latimer would be arriving home in fifteen minutes. She dug out Sergeant Boulter, who was stretching the resources of the Crusty Loaf to the limit with a plate of bacon and egg, sausage, beans and chips. Kate gave him five minutes before setting out for Hambledon Grange.

“You’d have to be loaded to the eyeballs to live in a place like this,” Boulter commented, gazing around with the comfortable eye of a satisfied inner man.

“You know what they say, Sergeant, money doesn’t buy happiness.”

“So let’s be miserable in comfort. Myself, though, if I won the pools I’d go for somewhere a bit more up to date. This place must go back to the year dot.”

“The central facade would be Elizabethan. The bays on either side I’d put about a century later.”

“Hey, you know about architecture, ma’am?”

“Just enough to realize how little I really know. It was my husband’s hobby.”

The sound of an approaching car obtruded on the hush. It appeared round the bend of the driveway a few moments later and drew up behind theirs. A uniformed constable jumped out and held open the rear door for the man inside to get out. To Kate’s eyes Matthew Latimer appeared exactly as one would expect a husband to look at a time of sudden bereavement; shocked, numbed, bewildered. Was it all an act?

She had been told that he was a few years younger than his wife, and she put him at forty-one or two. He was quite good-looking, with wavy light brown hair swept back from his forehead, and a neat moustache. Of medium height, he carried no surplus weight, and Kate guessed that he took pride in keeping himself in shape. His grey chalk-stripe suit looked expensive.

“Good morning, Mr. Latimer. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Maddox.”

“Detective?” He seemed startled.

“A Fail to Stop fatality is a CID matter, Mr. Latimer.”