Scene of Crime (6 page)

The evening paper had been running a campaign about the rise in the burglary statistics, complaining about police performance. Last year it had been street crime, and the Chief Constable had decided that street crime must be targeted. If you took resources away from one thing to deal with another, this was what happened. Next year it would be burglary they were targeting. And thefts from vehicles would go up.

“I can assure you we have been working on them, Mr. Jones, but if we could just get back to tonight …”

“Tonight, a young woman has died because of these … these animals! And it’s all very well you and your colleagues coming here now—now that it’s finally happened. The place is crawling with policemen when it’s too late! Why didn’t you try harder to catch these people in the first place? And why aren’t you looking for that black lad instead of making me tell you all about him again?”

Tom was used to getting the blame for all the ills that befell mankind; it didn’t bother him. In a way, it made him feel more comfortable with Mr. Jones; until now, he had seemed to regard the death of his next door neighbor as more of an irritation than anything else. But under all that bluster was someone shocked and frightened, and Tom knew if he didn’t calm Mr. Jones down, he’d get nothing useful out of him. This wasn’t his strong point; he would be much more at home with the burglar. He understood how to talk to lawbreakers and those suspected of having broken the law. Witnesses were different.

“Believe me, Mr. Jones, my colleagues are looking for him. But it would make a big difference if we had a little more to go on. And we find that if we ask people to go over what they saw, they sometimes remember a little bit more than they did originally. So, perhaps you could start at the beginning? I believe you were coming home from work?”

“From my place of business,” said Mr. Jones, bridling once more.

Tom, with a slight movement of his hand, apologized for calling it something so lowly as work, and correctly guessed that Mr. Jones didn’t work for anyone else. “You’re in business for yourself?”

“I have a shop in the High Street. Toys and games. I was open late tonight, so I didn’t get home until about ten past eight. I drove into the garage—”

“That’s at the rear of the house?”

“Yes. There’s a service road running along the back of these properties. The garages are at the rear, of course.”

Tom nodded.

“And as I came back out I could hear an argument.”

“Did you recognize the voices?”

“No. He was angry, and she was crying—it could have been anyone, really. He wasn’t shouting—if anything, he was keeping his voice down. But he was very angry.”

“Did you hear what was being said?”

“Just the odd word—mostly swearing. From him. And I heard noises. A scuffle or something, and what might have been blows. I heard her cry out.”

“You should have gone next door, then,” said Mrs. Jones. “If you thought someone was assaulting her.”

“I thought it was her husband.”

“And that would have made it all right, would it?”

“No, but—” Mr. Jones looked helplessly at Tom, appealing for some male support. “I would have done something,” he said, “said something, if it had gone on for any length of time. But it didn’t. It lasted a few seconds, that was all. Then it went quiet, and I thought it had calmed down. That’s when I came into the house.”

“Did you hear any of this, Mrs. Jones?”

“No,” she said. “But I had the television on. I thought maybe that’s what Geoffrey had heard, because they’d been having a row.” She smiled a little. “Well, they always are in soaps, aren’t they?”

“And that couldn’t have been what you heard?”

“No, of course it couldn’t! I know the difference between the television and real people. Besides, they don’t use that sort of language in soaps.”

“What sort of language?”

“Well, you know,” said Mr. Jones, and lowered his voice, glancing apologetically at his wife. “I heard him call her a ‘fucking bitch.’ ”

“You’re certain it was from next door?”

“Well, I couldn’t see anything, because of the hedge, but it was definitely coming from that direction—and it sounded as though they were outside. It certainly wasn’t the TV.”

“Right,” said Tom. “Then you heard the glass breaking?”

“Well, I went upstairs and I heard it then. It would be about five or so minutes later, I suppose. I looked out of the back bedroom window to try to find out what was going on, and I saw this boy running out of Eric Watson’s garden and off down the back road. Mr. Watson was in the garden—he shouted at him to stop, but he didn’t, of course.”

They hadn’t been told that the first time around. All they had known was that Mr. Jones saw him running down the back road. But the back gates to the Bignalls’ garden were locked, so jumping the wall into the neighboring garden would be the quickest way out. Was that how he had come in as well? The hoped-for evidence on the gate wouldn’t be forthcoming if that was the case. And the bit about Watson shouting at the intruder hadn’t been mentioned before either. But perhaps Mr. Jones was embroidering the story second time around, Tom thought.

“Can you remember exactly what he said?”

“I think he shouted, ‘Come back here, you little bugger,’ or something like that.” Another glance in his wife’s direction.

Mr. Jones clearly wasn’t used to swearing in the house; he was almost enjoying the freedom that factual reporting had given him to indulge. And it seemed definite enough, thought Tom. Unless he was a pathological
embroiderer of stories, it did seem that he’d heard Watson shouting.

“And from up there I could see the Bignalls’ French window was wide open, and all the rain was getting in. And there was no light on, so obviously they didn’t know. I didn’t know it was broken, though. It’s just one pane—it wasn’t obvious.”

“I made him go next door then,” said Mrs. Jones. “To tell them about their French window being open.”

“So I went and knocked on the front door, but I couldn’t get a reply,” said Mr. Jones. “The front bedroom light was on, but everywhere else was in darkness.”

“He wouldn’t phone you,” his wife said. “He kept saying they were probably making up after the row and didn’t want to answer the door, didn’t you, Geoffrey?”

Mr. Jones looked a little embarrassed. “Well, you know,” he mumbled. “They’re that sort of couple.”

“Oh?” said Tom. “What sort of couple?”

“Well—you know. Rows and things.”

“Violent rows?”

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Jones. “Never. He was always trying to calm her down when she had one of her turns. She was just a bit—well, highly strung. Sometimes she got a bit depressed, you know. You’d hear her now and then, going on at him. She thought the world of him, really, but she was very suspicious—you’d hear her sometimes screaming at him that he didn’t love her, that he just stayed with her for—”

“Christine!” said Mr. Jones.

Mrs. Jones looked mutinous. “Well, it’s true!” she said.

“Just stayed with her for what?” asked Tom. This was getting very interesting, assuming it wasn’t all just exaggeration.

“Her money,” said Mrs. Jones. “But she didn’t mean it—I know she didn’t. She was always telling me how much she loved him, and how she wished she didn’t say things like that, because she knew they weren’t true.”

“Was she the one with the money, then?”

“Well,” said Mr. Jones, “I don’t know about that, particularly. She had a nice income from a trust her grandfather set up for her. Poor girl lost her parents when she was very young. Her grandfather brought her up on his own—he lost his wife in the same accident. I think that’s why she confided in Christine like she did. A sort of mother figure.”

“How long have you known her?”

“They moved in when they got married,” said Mrs. Jones. “Seven years ago, now. They’re a nice couple, really.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Well,” she said. “You know. They were. But she made his life a bit difficult—she knew she did. They almost split up at one point, but they got over that. She would come and see me when she needed to get something off her chest.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Jones. “Like I say, they argued all the time, and then they’d make up. So that’s what I thought they were doing.”

“But I didn’t think that was very likely,” said Mrs. Jones. “There was the breaking glass and that boy running away and everything. And even if they were doing what he thought they were doing, they could still have been broken into, I said. So eventually he phoned you.”

“Were you at home earlier in the evening, Mrs. Jones?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t notice anything today about teatime, did
you? We’ve been told that kids were making a bit of a nuisance of themselves.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’ve seen gangs of boys from the London Road estate here quite often, though. They’re a bit rowdy, and they can make a bit of a mess, but they don’t really do any harm.”

“They’re probably the ones doing the break-ins,” said Mr. Jones. “Don’t do any harm, my foot.”

“Would you mind letting me see the view from the back bedroom?” asked Tom, getting up.

After a show of reluctance, Mr. Jones agreed that he didn’t mind enough actually to prohibit it. Upstairs, Tom looked out of the window, getting the lay of the land. A six-foot-high wall ran along the rear of the properties on this side of the road, punctuated along its length by wooden gates to the driveways leading to the double garages. The high hedge between the Jones’ garden and that of the Bignalls would have meant that Mr. Jones had no view of the Bignalls’ garden, or of the French windows, until he came up to this vantage point. A low wall separated the Bignalls’ garden from their neighbor’s on the other side. Bricks were piled up neatly beside it; one pile, however, lay scattered on the ground, about halfway down. The intruder could have knocked them over in his haste to leave.

Tom could see reasonably well because now the lights at the rear were on, but that had obviously not been the case when Mr. Jones looked out of this window earlier. The back road itself was a short, unlit service road, and behind that lay a small wood, so no light was to be had there. He would have been able to see someone running through Watson’s gate two gardens away, but it was
hard to see how he had seen anything more definite than that on this rainy, starless, moonless night.

“It’s very dark,” he said. “How could you be sure the boy you saw running away was black?”

“Watson’s got one of these high-power security lights,” he said. “Goes on as soon as there’s any movement, floods the place with light. I could see that boy as clearly as if it was daylight.”

“Can you describe him?”

“He was black. I told you.”

“Yes,” said Tom, his patience once again severely tested. “Anything else? What he was wearing, perhaps? Did he have short hair, or dreadlocks, or what? Was he fat, thin, tall, short … how old would you say he was?”

“He was black,” repeated Mr. Jones, with a shrug.

“Mr. Jones, can’t you just tell me a bit more than that?”

Mr. Jones sighed again. “Definitely young, smallish—maybe a child, maybe a teenager. Wearing the sort of thing they wear.”

The sort of thing who wore? Black people? Teenagers? Burglars, maybe. The newspaper cartoon image of a burglar complete with mask and striped jersey and his bag of stolen goods over his shoulder came into Tom’s mind. He frowned as he realized something.

“You saw this boy immediately after hearing the window break?”

“Yes.”

Tom didn’t know what, if anything, was missing from next door, but he did know that the intruder had time to make the usual sort of mess. Drawers had been pulled out, cupboards opened, shelves disturbed, and it certainly
looked as though items were missing from them. So if this youth had run away the minute the window was broken, it seemed more likely he was a lookout who had gotten cold feet rather than the actual burglar. Whoever was doing the actual burgling might still have been inside. If Mr. Jones hadn’t wasted almost half an hour between hearing the altercation and phoning the police, they might have arrived with the intruder still on the premises. Or at least in time to save Mrs. Bignall.

“Was this boy carrying anything?” he asked.

Mr. Jones frowned, and thought. “No,” he said eventually. “No, now that you mention it, I don’t think he was. He was running very fast—you know? Arms going like pistons. He couldn’t have been carrying anything.”

Well, at least they could try finding the lookout, if only Mr. Jones could see past the color of his skin to give a decent description. Once they had him, there would be no problem. He was obviously already alarmed, and once he found out that his partner in crime had caused someone’s death, he would be very eager to shift the blame.

Tom tried again, dredging up the interviewing techniques he was supposed to apply when dealing with honest, upright citizens who had inadvertently become mixed up in a criminal investigation. “Now that you’ve got a picture of him in your head, can you remember
anything
about what he was wearing? Anything at all about him?”

Mr. Jones was shaking his head slowly, but then he stopped and frowned again. “One of those bomber jacket things,” he said. “Shiny. Green, maybe. Yes. Yes, I think it was green. But Mr. Watson might be able to give you a better description—he was much closer to him than I
was. He was standing by his greenhouse, and the boy was at his gate.”

Yes, thought Tom, looking over at the greenhouse. He would only be about ten feet away from the boy. The only problem was that Mr. Watson said he hadn’t seen or heard anything or anyone at all, and he had once been a policeman himself, according to the uniforms. But while Mr. Jones might not be someone Tom had taken to readily, it seemed unlikely that he’d imagined all this, so Watson was definitely worth a visit.

“Thank you,” he said, making his way back to the stairs. “You’ve been a great help. And I’m sorry if we’ve inconvenienced you.”

“It’s a terrible business. In this neighborhood, too.”

Lloyd pulled up in the once-quiet street with its handful of well-to-do terraced houses, now alive with vehicles and urgency, and looked at Carl Bignall. “If you’d prefer to go to a neighbor or a friend,” he began, “I can—”