Narrow is the Way (4 page)

Jenny Porter began to cry. Hillary handed over a tissue from the box of Kleenex she’d spotted on the car’s dashboard.

As his girlfriend sniffled, Michael took up the story. ‘I could see at once that things were bad, so I got Jenny out of there, and told her to wait, whilst I ran back to the house and phoned you lot.’

‘You didn’t have a mobile?’

‘Not on me.’

‘And did you go back inside whilst you were waiting, Jenny?’

The other girl shuddered. ‘Oh no. I didn’t want to go back in there.’

‘Did either of you see anybody when you were walking up the track?’

They looked at one another then shook their heads. ‘Did you hear a car start up, or did one pass you by as you walked out the house?’

‘No, it was too early for the guests to start leaving,’ Michael said.

‘Did you recognize her?’ Hillary asked, and saw Michael Wallis tense. He’d obviously been expecting the question, and Hillary was interested to see how he’d tackle it.

‘Yes. Her name was Julia. She came with somebody. The son of one of Dad’s cronies, I think. I’ve seen her around
sometimes
. I think she’s a local girl.’

Hillary didn’t miss the quick, worried look Jenny gave her
lover. But was that just a plain girl’s insecurity, or did she have some other reason to think that Michael’s off-hand admission was just a shade too casual? Hillary made a mental note to find out if Michael Wallis had ever been one of the men Julia Reynolds had liked to lead around on her string, then nodded.

‘OK. You can take Jenny home now. But someone will be in touch to take a proper written statement.’

Michael nodded. He didn’t look exactly thrilled at the prospect.

Hillary climbed out of the car and went back to the cowshed. SOCO were still going about their quiet business, whilst two men waited to remove the body to the mortuary. She had no doubt that she was looking for a man, probably a jealous lover or would-be boyfriend. When a beautiful young girl, not known for her monogamous ways, ended up strangled at a party, you didn’t have to be Hercule Poirot to figure it out: one of Julia Reynolds’ men had turned from a lover to a killer.

Now all she had to do was put a name to him.

Hillary awoke to the sound of arguing starlings. She fumbled from the narrow bed, grabbed a twenty-second shower and dressed. Living on a boat made drinking and washing water especially precious, but she’d long since become expert at using the least possible amount of everything, including the batteries and the calor-gas cylinders.

She boiled the kettle (enough water for one cup exactly) and glanced at her watch, debating whether to head for the HQ or go straight back to Three Oaks Farm. She slung her bag over her shoulder and duck-walked up the iron stairs to avoid banging her head, and absently padlocked the doors behind her.

Over on Willowsands, her neighbour, Nancy Walker, was listening to something weird. Probably some ‘new age’ tape her latest conquest had given her. As a forty-something widow, Nancy trawled the male student body around the environs of Oxford like a killer whale on the lookout for seals.

Once in the car, she decided she’d better check in at the office, and was glad that she did. The moment she stepped inside, the desk sergeant nobbled her.

‘Here, looks like your new super has just arrived,’ the sergeant, an all-knowing, all-wise veteran of twenty years, tipped her the wink before the door had even shut behind her.

‘And?’ Hillary asked, veering off to the desk immediately. As any green flat foot soon found out, if you ever wanted to know what was what, you asked the desk sergeant. His
knowledge
was all knowing and indiscriminate – from who was boffing the tea ladies, to the latest gaffe to issue forth from the lips of the chief constable’s good lady wife.

‘Not married, but no odds yet on whether he’s in the closet,’ the sergeant said now with a quick smirk. ‘Got plenty up here, though’ – he tapped his temple – ‘and didn’t do the usual stints in press liaisons or records. Met rated him all right, but nobody’s yet sussed out why he moved.’

Hillary shook her head woefully. ‘And is that all you know?’ she asked, rolling her eyes. ‘You’re falling down on the job, Harry.’ Everyone called the sergeant Harry, although Hillary had heard that wasn’t his actual name.

‘Give us a chance, guv,’ the desk sergeant grinned back. ‘Give me another hour, and you can place your bets along with the rest of ’em.’

Hillary wondered what, other than the sexual orientation of the new super, would be available for the big house’s gambling aficionados by lunchtime. No doubt there’d be some sort of pool on whether he’d been pushed or had jumped from the Met. Odds on there’d be much jockeying and shoving around about any potential scandals in his background. She might put a fiver down on him being a secret drinker, but she’d have to check the state of his eyes first.

She used her key-card and code to gain access to the main office, and made her way to her desk. None of her team was yet in, and she wasn’t surprised. After pulling an all-nighter, who could blame them? She shifted through the paperwork, noting the preliminary interview reports handed in by the uniforms. She speed-read her way through them, feeling her spirits sink as she did so.

Apparently, the Wallises 25th wedding anniversary party hadn’t confined itself to the main living-room, but had spilled over in to the kitchen, the new conservatory, the library, and various rooms in between. Some hardy souls had even been dancing in the garden, to the music of the live band.

So nobody would have an air tight alibi, unless they had stuck with one person the whole night. And who did that at a
party? Any one of the – she did a quick mental assessment of the numbers – fifty-five to sixty or so male partygoers could have sneaked out for ten, fifteen minutes, and killed Julia Reynolds.

She began sorting through them, working up a pile of
more-or
-less non-starters. Into these she tossed the too old and the three physically incapacitated (one in a wheelchair, one with debilitating arthritis in both hands, and one who’d broken an arm at golf – a pity the report didn’t say how the prat had managed to do that!) and, after a moment’s thought, the two openly gay couples who had been at the party. She was not dismissing any of them as such, only putting them at the bottom of the pile.

That still left a depressingly large list of suspects. And since there was no such thing as a happily married couple – at least, not to a copper investigating a murder – she couldn’t see how she could cull the list any further. The very young – how old did a lad have to be to be able to strangle a woman? – she also downgraded. Up to the age of fourteen, anyway. Still, teenagers were notorious for being prey to their hormones, and she couldn’t see the beautiful, confident and ambitious Julia Reynolds being particularly kind to love-struck teenagers. There were five between the ages of fourteen and nineteen at the party, most of them sons of invited guests.

Naturally, the married men would have a lot to lose if Julia was threatening to tell the wife about their little fling and had to be prime suspects, until eliminated.

Then there was her boyfriend. She’d noted that several of the witness reports confirmed that Julia had arrived with Roger Greenwood, and that they were considered to be an item. He would have to be top of the list for now. Nor was she forgetting the farmer’s son. Suspicion often fell on the finder of the body, sometimes with cause, sometimes without. The only thing in Michael Wallis’s favour was that he hadn’t been alone. Hillary supposed Jenny Porter could have been an accomplice, but she didn’t think so. But there was nothing to say Wallis hadn’t killed Julia earlier, then suggested the walk to Jenny in
order for him to have a witness to the ‘discovery’. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. Killers knew a lot about the pitfalls of forensic evidence nowadays, thanks to pathology dramas on the television, and forensic-based thrillers. Wallis might have been afraid he’d have left traces at the scene, and returning there to find the body was as good a means as any of explaining away any traces of him found there.

She’d have to get one of the uniforms to press Jenny Porter on who it was who’d suggested the little sojourn in the barn, and who’d been leading the way.

Over the course of the morning, first Janine and then Tommy trickled in, looking heavy-eyed and slouch-footed. Of Frank, mercifully, there was still no sign. Perhaps the aliens had finally come for him and done everybody a favour.

‘Guv,’ Tommy said, glancing at the preliminary forensics reports Hillary was now reading. ‘Anything good?’

‘Not so far. As we thought, the cowshed floor was too contaminated for any really good evidence. There are still one or two things pending, but I think most of our bread and butter is going to come from the corpse itself.’

Tommy, who was drinking coffee, gulped a bit too much and began to cough. Janine half-heartedly slapped him on the back. ‘Got to toughen up, Tommy,’ she muttered, teasingly.

‘Glad you think that way,’ Hillary said sardonically. ‘You can attend the post-mortem.’

Janine sighed heavily. ‘Yes, boss,’ she said. Then added immediately, ‘Why can’t Ross go?’

Hillary rolled her eyes. ‘What have you got against Doc Partridge? You know we have to keep him sweet. If we sic Frank on him, the next four bodies we send over will be put to the back of the queue. That’s what he did last time.’

Janine sighed again, but didn’t argue with Hillary’s logic.

‘Tommy, I want you to get a list of all Julia’s clients,’ she carried on. ‘And no, I don’t think some silver-haired matron strangled her because she hated the colour of her latest rinse, but people talk to their hairdressers. And vice versa. You never know what titbits they might have learned about our vic and
be willing to pass on. And since we’re dealing with a
strangling
, and statistics show that we’re almost certainly looking for a man and that sex is going to come somewhere in the equation, concentrate on her male friends. Stalkers. Some
overenthusiastic
admirer. You know the drill.’

‘Guv,’ Tommy said. He wasn’t sure, being big and black and male, that he was the ideal candidate to go talking to
middle-aged
or timid old ladies, but he’d give it his best shot. For Hillary Greene, he was always willing to give things his best shot.

He watched her now as she reached for the phone, and saw that she was allowing her hair to grow longer than her usual shoulder-length bob. Was that deliberate, or had she simply not realized? He thought she’d look good with long hair - it was a lovely, dark-brown colour, like a hazelnut. He imagined her walking across the car-park, a breeze blowing it back off her face, like one of those advertisements for shampoo. Then he saw Frank Ross pushing through the door and quickly got on the phone himself. The last thing he wanted was for that bastard Ross to know how he felt about the boss. His life wouldn’t be worth living.

‘Guv,’ Ross said sourly, scratching under his armpit, leaving no one downwind of him in any doubt that he’d skipped his morning shower. ‘The cowshed is never locked. The steel doors shut with a simple latch and there’s some dim overhead lighting, for the winter months. There’s no valuable milking equipment or anything, it’s just a shelter for the cows, so there’s no security alarm or system. It’s just a bloody iron barn in the middle of nowhere.’

His tone said that he could have told her that without traipsing all over Steeple Barton to find the cowman and asking him about it.

Hillary nodded. ‘Do they have a problem with dossers? Tramps sheltering overnight, new age travellers, that kind of thing?’

Frank hadn’t thought to ask. ‘No, guv, nothing like that,’ he said firmly. He was buggered if he was going to go back to ask
either. It was as plain as the spot on his nose that the vic had been done in by a jealous boyfriend. Everyone knew Hillary Greene went over the top when it came to checking out long shots. And she was always giving him, one of her
oldest-serving
and best sergeants, the scut work. He was getting sick and tired of it. No point in complaining to Mel though; he and the bitch from Thrupp were in each other’s pockets.

Hillary nodded. So the passing-tramp theory didn’t look likely. Still, it had been a wet and nasty night and couldn’t be totally discounted. But even if some gentleman of the road had been kipping down there in the straw and body warmth of a dozing cow, why would he up and strangle Julia Reynolds? And come to that, why had Julia Reynolds been there in the first place?

She’d almost certainly rented the wedding dress, so the last thing she’d want to do is get it dirty and have to pay for cleaning. And a cow-shit infested shed was surely the last place she’d choose to go in a voluminous white gown. Voluntarily, that was.

No, she just couldn’t see how an anonymous tramp would fit in the frame. Something of a relief, that, considering how hard it would be to track down an itinerant.

‘Frank, I want.… Hey up, heads up. Looks like we’ve got company,’ she hissed, straightening up in her chair and closing the folder in front of her, out of habit.

Janine and Tommy, whose desks faced hers, swivelled around in their chairs as Mel Mallow stepped out of his office and cleared his throat loudly. Beside him stood a tall, lean man, with neatly cut dark-gold hair. He was dressed in a
dark-blue
suit and anonymous tie. His eyes, which were scanning the room, didn’t look as if they were missing much.

So this was the new super. The may be gay, may be
scandalous
man from the Met.

‘If I could just have your attention for a minute,’ Mel yelled, although the room had very quickly fallen silent. ‘I’d like to introduce you to Superintendent Jerome Raleigh. Superintendent Raleigh, as you know, is taking over Marcus Donleavy’s old patch. Sir?’

Mel stepped back and Janine winced, knowing how much he must be hating every moment of this. It was no secret between the two of them just how hungry Mel had been for the promotion.

‘I won’t keep you,’ Jerome Raleigh said crisply, ‘I know you’ve all got more cases on than you need, and the last thing you want is to listen to a speech. I just want to tell you that I’m a hands-on copper, and I look after my people. That means I want to be kept informed, and I want anyone with a problem to come to me immediately so that it can be straightened out before it becomes a problem for everyone. It’ll take me a while to learn the patch, so I’d appreciate some patience. I’ve spoken for some time with Chief Superintendent Donleavy, and his methods and mine pretty much gel, so I’m not anticipating too many teething pains. Right, that’s it.’

He nodded once, then glanced back at Mel, who walked him to the door. When he returned, DCI Mallow went straight back to his office and the room held its collective breath, wondering if he’d slam the door. But Hillary could have told them that he wouldn’t. Mellow Mallow hadn’t got his
nickname
through irony. But she and Janine weren’t the only ones to guess just how much he must be smarting, right about now.

‘Wow, what a hunk,’ Janine said thoughtfully. ‘Did you see the colour of his eyes?’

Hillary, who hadn’t (and had been wondering, on and off for some time, whether she should bite the bullet and get an eye test) shrugged. ‘Can’t say as I noticed.’

‘Sherry,’ Janine said definitely.

Frank Ross snorted. ‘You mean red? I bet he’s a boozer. That’s why the Met jettisoned him.’ But he sounded cheerful at the thought of another kindred spirit, and one in a
high-ranking
position at that, occupying his nick.

Janine didn’t deign to reply. Instead she transferred the brochures she had in her desk drawer into a plain beige folder and made her way nonchalantly to Mel’s door. A few grins broke out as she knocked and entered, but nobody begrudged the DCI some loving comfort just then.

‘Hey, he didn’t look anything special to me,’ Janine lied, shutting the door carefully behind her. ‘I bet he’ll be gone by the end of next year.’

Mel, who was staring out of the window, looked back at her and shook his head. ‘I don’t know. He’s a close sod, I’ll give him that. I spent nearly all day yesterday with him, and didn’t get even a hint of what made him tick.’