The Body of a Woman (17 page)

Read The Body of a Woman Online

Authors: Clare Curzon

BOOK: The Body of a Woman
11.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
‘Did the dead woman have any history of involvement in show business?' Mott demanded. ‘I doubt it. And we still have to look into private parties. I've got Davidson's Traffic Department checking for unusually heavy street parking over that period, and patrol officers are collating the same. Also at the general briefing we may collect stray observations from off-duty officers circulating in the area.
‘Uniform branch are continuing a search for the cut-off hair, with no success as yet. SOCO did the same in rubbish containers at the Knightley house. We need to extend it to outdoor containers at other houses in Acrefield Way where access would have been easy from the road. And one street away there's a builder's skip opposite some minor demolition work. That has been sealed for examination and will be gone through today.'
‘Knightley's car?' Beaumont enquired of the DI.
‘Has proved elusive. He claims it had a recurring electrical defect. For a scientist he was surprisingly unspecific. Nor does he know which garage it's been sent to. He left it at a friend's house to be picked up and will inform us when he knows the firm's name. I expect him to ring me this morning.'
‘By which time he will have removed all traces of anything naughty it carried,' Beaumont said bitterly.
‘Only he doesn't know our boffins, does he?'
‘However much or little they may find,' Yeadings reminded them, ‘we could have difficulty proving who was responsible for its presence in the car - or who drove it Friday night - after so much shifting it around.'
‘Which is nothing to the shiftiness of the professor,' Z suggested.
Beaumont gave his puppet grin. ‘Just like Cluedo: Professor Plum, in the car, with a ligature.'
‘So prove it,' said Yeadings shortly. ‘Who is working through the Knightley address book?'
‘DC Silver,' Mott claimed, ‘together with all references taken from the computer. Doubtless there'll be an almighty complaint from Knightley when he discovers we've helped ourselves to it.'
‘Then he'd better have it back,' said Yeadings mildly. ‘We don't want him unnecessarily upset. I might trot along there with it while you're giving the briefing, Angus; see how nervy its absence has made him. I assume everything in it has been downloaded by now?'
‘Everything,' Mott admitted. ‘Silver has turned into Superhacker. It was worth losing him to that computer course. He eats, breathes, dreams nothing else these days.'
Better he than I, Yeadings thought. Young Silver was clearly a man of the future. From such might Chief Constables one day be chosen. He regarded his select team. Beaumont could get back to chasing up the party/cabaret orgins. Z was itching to check on Leila's love life, if any. For himself he'd like a private word with Mott before he went off to brief the extended murder team.
‘Right. On your respective ways then, except Angus perhaps.'
‘Boss?' the DI said, when the other two had departed. ‘I'm due downstairs in ten minutes.'
‘This should take only five. Have you done any thinking about your own situation, Angus?'
‘The future, you mean?' At Yeadings' nod he pulled a sour face. ‘The original plan's in abeyance, if not permanently junked. As you know, Paula's boss has put off his intended early retirement and she's staying on as his junior, building quite a reputation at the Bailey when he gives her the chance. Even at her present level there's a lot more money in defence than prosecution. And with promotion, I still doubt if I could make up the difference. So it seems the wedding is on hold.'
‘I was thinking more about your career options. I get a whiff of something in the wind.'
Mott hunched, silent with bowed head. Then he stirred and sat straight. ‘There are three options, as I see it. One, as Paula suggests, I quit here, transfer to the Met and we marry, take a flat in London. Two, I stay put with Thames Valley, take promotion and am put back into uniform. She stays on in London.' He stopped at that point.
‘And three?'
‘There's this need for an expanded international contingent to help train the new mixed-race Bosnian police force. A friend out there says the Brit group badly needs strengthening at the top, if only to counter more brutal versions of the job being introduced from Eastern Europe and beyond. I thought I might have a bash at that.'
‘That would certainly be to the Bosnians' advantage. What about your own?'
Mott stood up, tight-lipped. ‘It's option three I'm favouring, Boss. It'll broaden my experience and it won't be forever. Paula's coming over this evening and I shall explain to her then. I meant to tell you tomorrow.'
Yeadings' spirits sank. Angus deserved more than to end as a sniper's target or from stepping on a leftover landmine. He managed a shrug. ‘I'd — the team would lose you in any of those options. Can't you wait to see whether the tenure ruling gets changed? There's considerable pressure for CID service to be extended from five years to eight.'
‘I have to make a decision now. I've faffed about long enough, Boss.'
‘I see. It's your choice, Angus. Thanks for letting me know.' He watched the tall DI pick up his papers and go off stern-faced.
Yeadings knew it wasn't just a boyish yen to be a hero; an updated version of flouncing off to join the Foreign Legion. It owed more to a horror of becoming Paula's poodle.
Separation and their opposing career needs had meant that the relationship had been dragged out like a string of dough, so far that it was thinning to break-point. Despite their promising start Angus and Paula seemed fated to go the way of so many police partnerships.
There but for the grace of God … thought Yeadings. He made a mental note to buy flowers on his way home that evening.
There was a knock on his door and a constable looked in with a note from Traffic: ‘Isn't this one of yours, sir?'
Apparently the joyriders' deaths hadn't put other thrill-seekers off. Yeadings glanced through the copy of a Traffic report: a further incident last night. Two women mown down in a hit-and-run in Acrefield Way.
Coincidence? When you had something specific on your mind, you started seeing it pop up all over the place. One woman's condition critical, now in the ITU at Wycombe: named as Hetty Chadwick.
He whistled between his teeth. This was the cleaner for Knightleys. The other joyrider's victim, a teenager - Chloe Knightley - had sustained only minor injuries.
Yeadings roared down the corridor for a constable and had the Professor's computer loaded into the Rover's boot. He revised his original plan. He didn't see Acrefield Way as a dedicated joyrider's racetrack and skidpan. It was too rural and twisting to offer high speeds, and disappointingly short of the needed hyped-up crowd of spectators.
So this could be a different breed of driver, one burning
rubber while escaping from some crime. Or - more germane to present interests - an attempt to eliminate a witness with information on the Knightley murder? An attempt which could yet prove successful.
He knew well the statistics Traffic quoted for pedestrian casualties: at 30mph nearly 50% were killed; at 40mph nearly all were fatalities.
It might not be possible to get anything yet, if ever, from the critically injured woman, but Chloe was another matter. A bright youngster, she could have spotted the driver; was probably well clued-up on cars. So to Wycombe Hospital first. Her father and the computer could wait.
At the hospital Yeadings met with stalemate. Hetty Chadwick lay in a heavy coma in a shuttered area of the ITU. Chloe, kept in overnight, had received orthopaedic manipulation and was already on her way home, still under light sedation but insisting on being discharged. The ward Sister said she had rung an aunt to come in and collect her.
A uniformed constable seated outside the ITU had been provided with a generous provision of magazines. ‘You can bin those,' Yeadings told him. ‘Stay alert. I want everyone who goes in or out of that room checked against their ID photos: doctors, nurses, porters, the lot. There could still be an attempt on her life. Get yourself a leak now, while I'm here. Then hang on till your relief turns up. I'm having surveillance doubled.'
He put the order through by mobile, then slid the car into gear and set off to the Knightley home.
Driving along Acrefield Way, Yeadings observed Z's blue Ford Escort parked opposite one of the ancient brick and flint cottages. At the adjoining one the nose of a green open-top Alfa Romeo was emerging from the side drive.
A pony and trap might have been more fitting, he thought; but it wasn't unknown for modern opulence to be enjoyed alongside the romantically historical, especially if finances restricted choice. For himself, he would rather go for comfort at home. A car, after all, was a mere means of transport. He took in the floppy-haired, old-young face behind the steering wheel and wrote the man off as a fancy-free bachelor visiting an elderly relative.
He drew in to the kerb, braked and stared back at the Chadwick cottage, curious to know why Z was calling there when the occupier was away.
Just then the front door opened and the woman DS
appeared carrying a travel bag. Double-locking the door, she had her back to Yeadings. When she came down the path she saw him and pulled a gruesome face. ‘I had permission, sir.'
‘From whom, since the owner's unconscious?'
‘When I couldn't get an answer here, her neighbour came out and explained she was in Wycombe General. So I went there, got turned away but offered, as a friend, to bring her some things in from home. It seems she could eventually come round. Her housekeys had been in her skirt pocket, so they let me have them.'
Yeadings sucked in his cheeks. ‘Better you, perhaps, than whoever ran her down. So what did you find?'
Z's eyes went round with innocence. ‘Her clothes, sir. Nighties, tissues, washpack, fluffy slippers, handbag and small change.' Then she grinned. ‘Nothing of special note, sir.'
He gave her a thin smile. Z wouldn't have missed out on the chance to give the cottage a good turnover. ‘We appear to have lost a source of information for the moment, but there are still the Knightleys' nextdoor neighbours.'
‘I'll be calling there as soon as school's out, sir.'
‘Good.' He drove off, readjusting his mind to face a grieving household - if not the unsavoury background to a domestic murder - turned in at the gates to Knollhurst and pulled up before the open front door.
Before he could knock or ring, the inner glass door burst open and Knightley stood there, unshaven, flushed of face, his hands balled into fists. ‘Can't you leave us alone?' he ground out. ‘Isn't it enough that I should be questioned at a police station, but you must chase me out to my own home? And my phone never stops ringing now you've dragged the Press into it.'
‘I thought,' Yeadings put in mildly as the other man drew breath, ‘that you might care to have your computer back.'
‘My God, did you even help yourselves to that?' So he hadn't been up long enough to check on his study.
‘My team had a warrant to search the empty house,' the superintendent said calmly. ‘Which includes all contents. Under those terms a computer ranks as an electronic filing cabinet.'
‘That is an unpardonable invasion of my privacy! And I have no intention whatever of saying anything beyond the statement I have already made to your Inspector.'
‘If you have somewhere clear to put it I will bring it in.' Yeadings ignored the outburst and went back to the rear of his car. When he returned with the heavy computer Knightley tried to snatch it from him, but too late discovered it wasn't so easy.
‘In the study,' he snarled. ‘First door on the left.'
‘Perhaps you will check that you've received it in good running order, Mr Knightley.'
The man was torn between defiance and protection for his property. Truculently he thrust plug in socket and switched on. The screen lit. ‘It will take longer than this to see whether any data's been irrevocably lost.'
‘You have my guarantee that nothing has been obliterated.' The urbane tone was enough to goad Knightley further. Obliterating,Yeadings reflected happily, was not quite the same as downloading.
‘It's actually your daughter I'd like to have a word with at the moment,' he told the professor.
Knightley looked stricken. Not perhaps entirely on behalf of the girl's feelings. ‘There is no call for that. You should know by now that Chloe was abroad until you - you assumed the authority to have her recalled. There is no way she can provide any information germane to your inquiry. In any case she's not available at present. She was involved in a serious road accident last night and is in need of rest.'
‘She has my sympathy,' Yeadings assured him, ‘but I must remind you that we are investigating a violent death, Mr Knightley. Who is to say at this point what may prove to be germane?'
Knightley turned on his heel and, left to wait, Yeadings reflected that even a violent death can be less a momentary act than a process. Once born we are all on a journey towards one end. Our nearest and should-be dearest have the ability to accelerate or delay that process. In several claustrophobic families he'd dealt with in homicide, the victim had been slowly murdered over years before the final vicious act. And often cumulative torture, mental or physical, had driven the killer himself to that point.
When Chloë came Janey was with her. ‘I'd like my friend to stay,' the girl said and nodded when asked if she felt up to seeing him.
They took chairs on the far side of the room. Yeadings looked at the girl's father. ‘Mr Knightley?' He indicated the door. Knightley stood his ground, affronted.
‘Chloë has chosen a responsible adult to be present, as required.' Yeadings nodded again towards the door, saw an unwilling Knightley through and closed it firmly after him.
‘What did you want to ask me?' Chloë challenged. Whatever sedative they'd given her, she was fighting it off.
Yeadings wandered back and stood leaning with both hands on a chairback. ‘I'm not altogether sure. I just have the feeling you can help me if you will. It's a question of observation really.'
‘You know about last night's accident?' Janey demanded.
‘It's disgraceful what these young hooligans get up to. Can't you police do more to stop it?'
Yeadings treated the question as rhetorical and expressed his sympathy. ‘Chloë, I'm afraid we need to trouble you for an account of what happened.'
She sat straight-backed and spoke in a cold, controlled voice. ‘I told the policeman at the hospital. We were run down by a car. It turned its headlights up and came straight for us. I guess Hetty was dazzled. I know I was. She'd got a bad foot and stumbled. I tried to pull her to the side but she fell and that made me let go. I'm so sorry.'
She shook her head, took a deep breath and went on. ‘It was only a glancing blow on me but she - she hit the bonnet and then sort of bounced off and disappeared. When I got up I couldn't find her. She must have been on the opposite side, but I don't remember getting to her. A neighbour - a man I hadn't seen before - came rushing out of his house and then there was quite a crowd. I must have blacked out then and came to for a while in the ambulance. It's no good asking if I saw the driver. It all happened too fast, and I was blinded by the headlights.'
‘You had no impression of the driver's age or sex?'
‘None at all.'
‘And the make of car?'
‘I've thought about that. It was big. Powerful. I got the impression it was pale: maybe white. Not a Volvo anyway.'
Yeadings stiffened. ‘How can you be sure of that?' ‘Because a Volvos' lights come on with the ignition. And I remembered afterwards I'd had this impression of an engine idling when I came out of the house to go to Hetty's cottage. There was a car parked at the far end of Piggotts' front, near where the wood begins. I suppose it didn't mean anything to me then because couples sometimes park there with the lights off, but usually later at night.'
‘Thank you, Chloe. There's nothing else you remember? A familiar engine sound?'
‘Nothing. It revved up like a racing car. I've never heard an engine roar so, except on TV.'
‘I see. Well, if you think of any other detail later, please ring me or Inspector Mott.' Trust the formality of the words to reduce the tension, he thought. From Chloë's description it would seem the hit-and-run had been no accident, but he was unwilling then to suggest to the women why the older victim might have been targeted.
As if she read his mind, ‘It was deliberate,' the girl said shakily. ‘He meant to kill us. One of us, anyway.'
‘How is Mrs Chadwick?' Janey asked quickly.
‘Her condition's unchanged. Still critical, but there is hope.'
‘I feel responsible. If I hadn't sent Chloe with a message to her none of this would have happened.'
‘You asked for her to come to Knollhurst?'
‘Yes, but at her convenience. We need more help in the house. I thought we should discuss it.'
‘It was Hetty's idea to come right away,' Chloe said. ‘So nothing was planned. Whoever ran at us wouldn't have been expecting to see her. He was just waiting about on the off-chance.'
She stared at Yeadings with fear in her eyes. ‘Right by our house. That's why I think it was me he went for. To kill me.'
It might appear so to her, and there was logic in her reasoning, but he couldn't accept that. She'd been away at the time of her stepmother's death. It was the cleaner who had been on the spot as observer. This was an attempt to silence a witness.
‘I don't think so,' he countered. ‘As you say, the driver wouldn't have expected you. You've heard about the joyriders, I'm sure. I think we may find it was someone like that. But there's another way you can help me if you will. Again it's a question of observation, and you're good at that. Sometimes adults don't realize just how much the younger family members are picking up from their actions.'
‘Regarding what exactly?' She didn't quite trust his change of subject.
‘How happy they are, or worried, or lonely.'
Chloe looked down at the twisted hands in her lap, suddenly darted a glance at Janey and said, ‘You mean Leila. I don't see how she can have been particularly happy. None of us made enough of her. I guess she felt really lonely inside.'
‘I know too that I let her down,' Janey confessed in a rush. Yeadings looked out of the window, his back to them. ‘As we all feel when anyone dies: because it's too late. Guilt over not having done enough: kinder things we might have said
or done; begrudging, when we might have smiled and offered help. I've had all that, when my own father died.'
‘But Leila didn't just die!'
He turned back at the protest in the girl's voice. ‘You're right. However unbelievable, someone wanted to take her life. How can that be?'
‘Some madman.'
He watched her with pity, unhappy that he must push her further. ‘You said your stepmother might have felt lonely. Is it possible she found someone to fill that gap in her emotional life?'
‘You mean a man, a lover. No; she wasn't like that.' Chloë was scornful.
Janey sighed and shook her head. ‘Leila didn't set great store by men. The only two she came close to condemned her to triviality, Aidan regarding her as an airhead, Charles by setting her up in the shop. She was worth more than that. There was nothing trivial about her mothering of the children.'
‘No despairing lover, then? So we're left with Chloë's “madman”. Or could she have been seen as a threat to someone, because of what she'd seen or knew?' he suggested. ‘You see why it's essential for me to understand how she seemed in those last few days; where she went; who she spent time with.'
Chloe was looking puzzled.
‘Can you suggest any circumstances in which she might have seemed a threat to another person?' Yeadings probed. ‘No? A barrier, then, preventing some course of action?'
All the blood drained from the girl's face and she started to tremble. Janey put out a hand to her. ‘They're going to find out, Chloë. Maybe know already.'

Other books

Days Like This by Breton, Laurie
Murder on Lenox Hill by Victoria Thompson
Captain by Phil Geusz
Riverside Park by Laura Van Wormer
Heaven's Bones by Samantha Henderson
The Duchess and the Spy by Marly Mathews
Escapade (9781301744510) by Carroll, Susan