Narrow is the Way (6 page)

‘You didn’t notice anything odd about her behaviour? Didn’t see anything strange happening?’

‘No, as I said … well … what do you mean by odd, exactly?’

Hillary felt a little jump in her pulse rate. It was often like this. You’d be interviewing a witness with no high hopes of anything good, and then, out of the blue, a little nibble. ‘Oh, anything at all. No matter how insignificant.’

‘Yes, but I mean, you don’t want impressions, do you? I mean, you police like facts and things.’

‘That’s not altogether true, Mrs Wallis,’ Hillary said
carefully
, not at all sure what she might be letting herself in for. ‘At the moment I’m trying to build up a picture of the victim, and any information, no matter how unscientific it is, could come in useful. You said you got some kind of impression about Julia?’ she prompted gently.

‘Well, like I said, it’s nothing definite. And I can’t say it was important or anything. It was just that outfit of hers. It was quite stunning, and being a fancy dress party, she was so beautiful I can quite see why she’d chosen something spectacular. I rather got the impression she was a bit of an exhibitionist, but … well, to tell you the truth, I felt that she was deliberately taunting somebody with that wedding dress of hers.’

Wendy Wallis stopped, then frowned. ‘It’s hard to put it into words. She was slightly tipsy, I know, and like all young things nowadays, not exactly discreet, but it seemed to me, once or twice, that she was sort of … showing off … no, not that exactly, but somehow making a point. Scoring off somebody. Oh, I don’t know how to explain it,’ she huffed in frustration. ‘She was just up to some kind of mischief; yes, that’s it: definitely up to mischief.’

‘Could she have chosen the wedding dress as a kind of hint to Roger Greenwood, do you think?’ Hillary asked, not sure what Wendy Wallis was getting at.

‘No,’ the farmer’s wife said firmly. ‘I didn’t get the feeling that her boyfriend was the one she was tormenting. She
seemed genuinely fond of him, and the boy was smitten right enough. No, it was someone else. But I may have been wrong.’

But Wendy Wallis didn’t really believe she was wrong, and Hillary didn’t know the woman well enough to gauge if her self-confidence was justified.

One thing was for sure, Hillary thought morosely; if Julia Reynolds
had
been up to mischief last night, using her costume to make some sort of point, then perhaps all her taunting and tormenting had proved far more successful than had been good for her.

Hillary returned to Kidlington, and spent the next few hours dealing with her other cases, including a somewhat cold
telephone
conversation with the prosecutor of her now aborted fraud case. It wasn’t often one of her cases fell down, and it put her in a nasty mood and just the right frame of mind to attack her tray of paperwork.

Mel seemed to be in as foul a mood as herself, and when they found themselves snapping at each other over a minor difference of opinion about the Radcliffe case, with Mel convinced in spite of only flimsy evidence that the middle-aged spinster had indeed been killed by her older sister for the
insurance
money, and Hillary urging caution, they both decided to retire to their corners and cool off. Apart from anything else, Frank Ross had been seriously entertained by their rare show of spite, and was wearing a sneer that would have cracked cutlery, and nobody liked to please the poisoned cherub.

So it was something of a relief when Tommy Lynch, answering a summons from the ground floor, told her that the ‘best friend’ of Julia Reynolds had come in, asking if she could help.

‘I don’t suppose she was at the party, too, was she?’ Hillary asked, without much hope, as they jogged lightly down the stairs and headed towards the interview-rooms.

‘’fraid not, guv,’ Tommy confirmed.

‘Oh well. At least we’ll be able to get a better picture of our vic.’

Tommy nodded. He was looking forward to this. Not only was he always grateful for any time spent alone with the woman he admired and – yes, fancied – above all others, but he was genuinely impressed with her various interview
techniques
. What the public failed to realize (since it didn’t make good drama) was that more cases were solved in the
interview-room
than anywhere else. Sometimes the guilty just needed to get things off their chest and barely required a nudge in the right direction. Sometimes, they were too clever for their own good, and needed to be tripped up and tied into knots. Other times, it was down to the interviewing officer to tease nuggets of previously forgotten bits of information from witnesses, or help them bring to mind events that they hadn’t thought
relevant
. Whatever, most cops needed to have the gift of the gab if they wanted to solve cases, but Tommy had seen Hillary tackle people with an almost paranormal ability to get the most out of them.

He knew he could learn a lot from Hillary Greene, and he was not about to waste any precious chance to watch and learn, not if he wanted to make sergeant by his next birthday.

As his superior officer pushed open the door, Tommy saw a small, nervous-looking girl sitting at the table. She had short dark hair and big brown eyes, covered by a pair of too-small, rectangular glasses. She wore a pair of jeans and a chunky, hand-knitted cream sweater. She was fiddling nervously with a cigarette packet, although she hadn’t yet lit up. He knew that Hillary, a non-smoker all her life, would be relieved by that.

‘Hello, Miss …?’

‘Mandy Tucker,’ the girl all but whispered, half-rising from her chair, obviously unaware of the protocol.

‘Mind if I call you Mandy?’ Hillary said, with a warm and easy smile. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Hillary Greene, in charge of the Julia Reynolds’ murder investigation. Please, sit down, Mandy. We’re grateful to you for coming in like this.’

Mandy Tucker nodded, and sniffed, then sat down. ‘I wanted to help. Although, really, I don’t know what I can do.’ She was still whispering, and almost maniacally fiddling with
the packet. Tommy had the feeling she’d never been inside a police station in her life.

Hillary sat down and nodded to Tommy to use the
notebook
, not the recorder. She was sure that the machinery would send someone as timid as this into further paroxysms of shyness, and that was the last thing they needed.

‘It’s all right, Mandy, we know you weren’t at the party, and so can’t give us any practical help. We don’t expect you to. All I need from you is to tell me about Julia. The kind of girl she was. You’d be surprised how much that will help us,’ Hillary said brightly, with yet another reassuring smile.

Mandy Tucker gave a slightly tremulous smile in response, and Tommy could see her bony shoulders relax just a bit.

‘OK,’ she agreed willingly.

‘So, how long have you and Julia been friends?’

Mandy Tucker laughed. ‘Oh, for ages, ever since we were five. We went to the same primary school in Kirtlington, then to the Comp. I stayed on to do A-levels, but Julia left at sixteen. But she did my hair for me, and we went to the socials, and the pub for lunch, whenever.’

‘Sounds like you were really close then. So, how would you describe Julia? And please, Mandy,’ – at this point Hillary leaned over and gently placed a hand on Mandy’s own, waiting until the shy girl looked her in the eye – ‘we know that your friend is dead, and it still seems horribly unreal, and the last thing you want to do is talk about maybe some of the bad things about her. I know it would feel horribly disloyal. But the thing is, everybody has good and bad in them; I do, you do, PC Lynch here, everybody. It’s what makes us human. And the chances are that it wasn’t whatever was good in Julia that made somebody kill her, but whatever was bad in her. Do you see what I’m saying?’

She took her hand away slowly, and watched the other girl nod miserably. Although her hands had ceased destroying the cigarette packet, Hillary could see that she wasn’t altogether convinced.

‘You see, Mandy, as hard as this is to understand and
believe, your friend is dead. You can’t do anything for her; you can’t make it better; there’s nothing you can say or do that will make things different. All you can do for your friend now is grieve for her, and help us to find whoever did this to her. She’d want that, wouldn’t she? To know that whoever did this to her was caught and made to pay?’

‘Oh yes,’ Mandy Tucker said at once. ‘She would.’ She straightened a little more firmly in the chair and her eyes became harder. ‘Julia wasn’t a bleeding heart. She thought they should bring back the death penalty for killers. You know, like they have in America.’

Hillary nodded. ‘A lot of people feel that way,’ she said, with careful neutrality. ‘So you know that she’d approve of you being honest with us. From what you say, I don’t think Julia was the kind of girl who’d be afraid of the truth.’

‘No, you’re right. She was always honest, sometimes brutally so,’ Mandy agreed, her own voice strengthening now as she remembered her dead friend’s savvy. ‘She always said what she thought,’ Mandy added, managing another wry smile. ‘Not everyone liked that, you know. But Julia always tackled things head on. Called a spade a spade. Like this
immigration
thing. She said everyone was afraid to say what they really thought, because they were terrified of being labelled a racist. But she thought immigration should be stopped. She said why should she have to give over a third of her earnings in tax, so that some foreigner who’d never paid a penny into the system could just waltz over here and get ahead of her on the National Health queue. She said nearly everybody thought the same, but just didn’t dare say so.’

Hillary nodded. ‘But she
did
say so?’

‘Right. And like fox hunting. She said it was a big lie that everyone living in the country was all for fox hunting. She said that she’d lived in a country village all her life and she thought fox hunting was barbaric. She threw a boyfriend over, once, when she found out he’d ridden to hounds. She told him to his face he was a cruel bastard, and she hoped he fell off his horse next time and broke his neck.’

Hillary smiled and nodded calmly. ‘And who was this, exactly? How long ago?’

‘Oh, ages ago. We were still at school. She’d just had her sixteenth birthday party. His name was Jake Burdage. He’s in London now, I think. A stockbroker or something.’

Hillary saw Tommy note down the name and nodded mentally. Although she thought this antagonized ex had been dumped too long ago to still harbour a murderous grudge, it would have to be checked.

Still, it sounded as if Julia Reynolds had no fears about rubbing people up the wrong way. She’d met her kind before – they were usually unimaginative people, secure in their own identities, who saw no need to cushion reality. They were almost always incapable of seeing a point of view from the other side, and this often led to an unseeing, unthinking and uncompromising outlook which invariably gained them enemies. Other, lesser mortals, thought this mentality was either brave or foolhardy, whilst others, more
au fait
with the world, considered it to be downright dangerous. Hillary was inclined to believe that it was a combination of all three.

Had Julia Reynolds’ bold and unthinking personality blinded her to the dangers that night in the cowshed? Had she told somebody just what she’d thought in that dark, deserted place, and never even considered that perhaps discretion really was the better part of valour?

‘So, she was obviously the kind of girl who could stick up for herself,’ Hillary mused. ‘And she was running her own business, even though she was still very young. Was it successful, her business?’

‘Oh, yes. Well, she always had money to spend,’ Mandy amended scrupulously. ‘I mean, she was always dragging me to Debenhams to buy lipstick and stuff, and was always getting new outfits and CDs, but whether or not it all came from her business, I don’t know. I think her boyfriends gave her money, too, sometimes. She was bored with her job, I know, because she often put down her old ladies when she talked about them, but at the same time, she always seemed to be out and about
with a job on. I think she used to butter them up. She used to laugh about it, and say things like “You know that silly old dingbat what’s-her-name. She showed me this picture of Jennifer Anniston the other day, and asked if I could give her a haircut like that. I mean really! The old girl’s sixty if she’s a day. Can you imagine it? I talked her into a page-boy instead.” And the funny thing is,’ Mandy went on, ‘I would see the woman she was talking about afterwards in a shop or
somewhere
, and all her friends would be telling her how well the cut suited her, and you could tell she would be really chuffed. Because the cut
was
just right for her. That’s why she was always in demand. Julia was like that. She got away with things, because she was good at everything she did. You know what I mean?’

Hillary did. ‘Did she say anything else about her customers? About one of their husbands, perhaps? Or one of their sons, bothering her, pestering her, making a fool of themselves over her, that kind of thing?’

Mandy frowned. ‘No, I don’t think so. She didn’t really ever meet the menfolk much. She’d go to people’s houses in the day you see, when most of the men were at work. Oh, she did say something about … oh, what was her name? Mrs Finch. No, Finchley – that’s it. According to Mandy, Mrs Finchley was always sozzled. She said she had to keep an eye on her when she sat her under the dryer, ’cause she was always dozing off. Anyway, she told Julia once, when she was drunker than usual, something really naff about her husband. Something about how he was doing something dodgy, only she didn’t know what. You know, something criminal.’

Beside her, Hillary could feel Tommy perk up, and gave a mental smile, wishing she, too, could summon up a similar enthusiasm. But she doubted that this would come to much. Many drunk housewives had odd ideas about their spouses. It usually came from the bottom of a gin bottle. Still, this too would have to be checked out.

‘Any idea would sort of crime she was talking about?’ she prompted diligently.

‘Nah,’ Mandy said dismissively. ‘I don’t think Julia was really interested. She said she knew the hubby vaguely – he had a bit of WHT, but he was basically harmless. Probably fiddling his income tax or something, Julia thought.’

She saw Tommy’s fingers move, and looked across to see him tapping the initials WHT and looking at her with an eyebrow raised in question.

‘Wandering hand trouble,’ Hillary murmured with a smile. And wondered if Julia might have been more intrigued than she’d let on to her friend. Had she checked up on Mrs Finchley’s better half and found something juicy? Had she tried a spot of blackmail? It was always possible. She doubted Julia Reynolds would have felt much compunction about it, and travelling hairdressers didn’t exactly earn a mint, did they? The temptation to earn some extra dosh could have been intriguing.

‘I would imagine your friend was popular with men, wasn’t she, Mandy?’ she asked quietly, knowing she had to be careful, now, how she phrased things. She didn’t want Mandy getting defensive, just when she was finally loosening up. ‘We know she went to the party, for instance, with Roger Greenwood. Was she serious about him?’

‘I’ll say!’ Mandy snorted. ‘She thought Roger Greenwood was a really good proposition. Especially if his dad brought off this property deal that he’s been wittering on about for the last few months. She said he could even end up being a
multimillionaire
. Roger’s dad, that is. And that Roger was almost certain to end up vice-chairman of his dad’s company one day.’

‘They’d been going out long?’

‘Nearly a year. Longer than she’d ever been out with anyone before. She kept hinting about a diamond engagement ring, but I never saw it.’

Now it was Hillary’s turn to shift restlessly on her chair. Now things were looking far more interesting. ‘So she thought Roger was going to, or already had proposed?’

Mandy frowned, and began to back track. ‘Oh, I don’t think he’d actually proposed. Not right out and asked her to marry
him or nothing. If he had, Julia would have been bragging about it no end.’

Hillary nodded. Yes, that sounded about par for the course. Julia Reynolds didn’t sound the type to keep her light under a bushel.

‘But I know she was hoping he would,’ Mandy ploughed on. ‘He was smitten right enough, I know that. Mind you, his dad was dead set against it. She said he’d once told Roger that he’d marry Julia over his dead body.
Tres
Victorian, as Julia put it. She used to tease Roger about his dad’s old-fashioned ways a lot.’