The Final Curtain (27 page)

‘There
was
a sister. Dead now. Her name was Kathleen.'

‘And Timony's mother is, I assume, also dead.'

Diana nodded carefully.

Something struck Joanna. ‘Was all this going to come out in her autobiography?'

Diana Tong blinked then nodded. ‘Yes.'

Joanna stood up. ‘We'll talk again,' she said. ‘But for now I have work to do.'

Diana Tong bowed her head and nodded.

As she and Korpanski, along with another twenty or so other officers, started setting up a major incident room in one of the barns, she was painfully aware of all that had gone wrong. It was almost as though Chief Superintendent Gabriel Rush was already conducting an enquiry, telling her she should have probed more when the call-outs escalated, taken more notice after the cat incident, delved further into Timony Weeks' real history and, in particular, the assault, even though it had been years ago, which had scarred her and almost cost her her sight. She could practically hear him speaking quietly and without drama into her ear with his clipped, public school accent. She knew he would take great delight in her mistakes. Hah, she wanted to say.
Easy in retrospect.
If I'd known she was going to get bloody well shot I'd have taken a bit more notice
.
What about all the other ‘more important' crimes on my desk?
She knew that at the beginning Timony Weeks had appeared a rather histrionic sixty-year-old woman. All the same she could still imagine Rush focusing on all the questions she
should
have asked and hadn't. More detail on the husbands who were still alive. And in all probability Rolf Van Eelen would prove to be her legal heir. So there was a motive. A few million constituted a very real motive for murder.

But what about the fan who
had
tried to kill her, the only person who appeared to have wished the child star real harm? Joanna considered this possibility but was tempted to reject it. That had been the frenzied attack of a madman. Not intelligent, structured intimidation, almost a warning of what was to come, followed by a cold-blooded execution. There was no sign of emotion in the death of Timony Weeks. It hadn't been a jab with a pair of scissors but two accurate shots which had ensured her death. No, for her money she should have pursued Rolf Van Eelen, husband number five; at least found out where he was, asked a few questions about his financial situation. Did he need money? How badly? Of course, he could be purely avaricious but murder was a hell of a risk to take. And what about the woman who had claimed she was Timony's long-lost sister? Who was
she
really? Had the pursuit continued?

Sol Brannigan. Had they been wrong to discount him so readily?

There were the two farmers who were, geographically, in the running as suspects but she judged them both incapable of the more subtle psychological bullying.

And then there was the wild card. Who was Stuart Renshaw? A bona-fide accountant? Son of a friend? Or was there something or someone else that she was missing?

Joanna had to admit: she'd done a very half-hearted job of investigating either Timony Weeks' past life or the more recent complaints. Now she wished she'd spent more time in Butterfield Farm, walked around, looked more carefully and with more insight at the pictures of Timony in her various stages of life, with her multiples of husbands, and listened more carefully to her stories; delved further into her histronics, the supposed blurring of fact and fiction, to seek out the truth. She had heard the tales of a child growing up under the glare of celebrity, and in her day Timony Weeks had been as famous as Cheryl Cole or Kristen Stewart were today. Now it was too late.

Followed by Diana Tong, who was now silent, Joanna wandered around Butterfield, from room to room, realizing that the rooms were set out like a stage set. But even observing the house she couldn't connect the Timony Weeks she had known with someone whose father had been in prison and had spent her early years in abject poverty, living in what had, even then, been classed as a slum. Usually Joanna could detect accents. Most people give their roots away in a tone or a phrase, their pronunciation of one or two giveaway words. But stage school and elocution lessons had eradicated any sign or sound of a regional twang. Her mother appeared to have signed her daughter away, believing that to escape from poverty was an answer to her prayers without considering what really lay ahead for the child. What sort of mother had she been to give her up so completely to a TV set? Back came the answer. A mother who was naive.

So did Timony have any living relatives? Now that it was too late Joanna wished very much that she had done more, had at least glimpsed the real child who lay behind the manufactured fantasy figure.

Diana Tong observed her activities without comment. But her lips seemed to press together tighter and Joanna had the impression that the companion was not only grieving but uneasy. As she walked past her Diana opened her mouth as though to say something but her eyes slid away and she didn't speak, merely frowned and gave a slight shake of her head.

Eventually Joanna and Mike holed up in the barn, ineffectively heated now by electric radiators; much of the heat seemed to soar into the rafters. They might be cold but the barns were, like the rest of Butterfield, immaculately clean, with no hay and not even the faintest scent of an animal. Joanna had never been in such a sanitized barn. The team gathered around her on makeshift benches and she wrote names on a whiteboard, trying to focus the enquiry, fully aware that she could be accused of ‘shutting the stable door'.

What else was she to do?

She addressed the entire room but in reality she had already decided which teams to allocate and where. ‘Find out all you can about the dead woman, both as Dorothy Hook and Timony Weeks.' She walked across the barn floor and deliberately shut the door. It was possible that when the story broke there would be a prurient interest out of proportion to the secluded life Timony Weeks had adopted in the past few years. The first name she wrote was:
Diana Tong
.

She turned around and addressed DC Hesketh-Brown. ‘Danny, you and Hannah just keep an eye on her, will you? I can't think of any obvious motive she might have for setting up recent events and I certainly can't imagine her killing the cat in such a cruel way, but it has to be said, she's the one on the spot.' She turned back to the board. ‘Bridget, you and Phil Scott look into the ex-husbands, will you?' Again she wrote three names on the board, bracketing them together:

Adrian MacWilliam, Sol Brannigan
and
Rolf Van Eelen
. ‘I've picked Sol out because Timony herself said he was a nasty piece of work, and we know he's been in prison for grievous bodily harm and armed robbery. Adrian MacWilliam – well, no reason really, except that he was her husband.' She turned back to the board. ‘Rolf Van Eelen is probably the only one with a real motive. He is almost certainly Timony's legal beneficiary if she died intestate and they were never divorced. See if you can track these down then speak to her solicitor and find out more exactly how much money Timony Weeks had and who gets it. And while you're at it you might search out Carmen Weeks, last heard of in Dubai, and see if it still rankles that Timony stole her husband.' Bridget Anderton and Phil Scott nodded and smiled.

‘Korpanski, Mike,' she appealed, as she wrote another name on the board:
long-lost sister.
‘According to Diana, Timony or Dorothy Hook had a sister, Kathleen, who has died. Just look into her, will you, please?' She knew he was far more interested in the luxury cars which were vanishing from around the area than the death of the actress. But he raised his eyebrows and smiled. He would not let her down. ‘Take Jason with you and look into this. Alan, you take WPC Critchlow and find out about the
fan
who assaulted Ms Weeks, Paul Dariel. See if you can try to make contact with him.' She gave them all a smile of encouragement then spoke to PC Paul Ruthin, a relative newcomer to the Moorlands. ‘I'd like you to look into the wild card,
Stuart Renshaw.
I just wonder about him.'

Beneath that she wrote,
John Reeves
and
Tom Brassington
, then addressed PCs Timmis and McBrine. ‘You two may as well stay in the moorlands and look into the two farmers whose land borders Butterfield. I'll be honest,' she continued, ‘I can't really see either of them having much to do with this but check it out anyway. And while you're at it you might have another word with the Faulkeners. Just dig around and see if there was any reason why a pair of hikers ended up trespassing on this particular property.' She scanned the room, smiled and finished the briefing. ‘And in case you're wondering what
I'm
going to get up to, I'm going to do a spot of reading.' She risked a joke. ‘No, I don't mean the latest bestseller from Peter Lovesey, though I have to say I'm tempted.' There was a titter around the room. They all knew her predilection for crime fiction. ‘I'm going to take a look through Timony Weeks' autobiography and see if there's anything there that gives us a hint. Let's meet back here, shall we say tomorrow morning, eight o'clock. Any questions?'

There was a general shaking of heads so she thanked them and dismissed them.

Korpanski had stayed behind but she didn't know why. She assumed it would be to grumble because he had been pulled off the case of the high-profile cars. ‘Mike?' she queried, knowing he was disgruntled, if not fully understanding why. Later, when she analysed it, she realized his dissatisfaction was, in a way, predictable. Korpanski was a realist, a pragmatist who dealt only in concrete facts, disliked ideas and fantasy. Particularly hunches. He wanted reality. This was the very worst case he could have been asked to work on.

‘We didn't even know her name,' he grumbled. ‘Only her stage name.' His neck was red with anger. ‘Bloody woman, I wish she'd never moved to the moorlands. Or at least,' he conceded, ‘if she did have to move here that when the threats started she'd moved herself out again.'

Her head jerked around. Unwittingly Detective Sergeant Mike Korpanski had put his finger on something. ‘You have a point,' she said. ‘Why did she come
here
in the first place and then stubbornly stay if she was so unnerved by the attention?'

‘Didn't she say something about feeling more comfortable in a remote location than in a city?'

‘It seemed a pretty weak excuse to me,' Joanna said. ‘But if it was true there are plenty of other remote locations. She didn't have to stay here but she was determined to.'

‘She didn't,' Mike agreed, his anger cooling as they discussed the case, ‘but she'd recreated her Shangri-La here, in the moorlands. She'd have had to start all over again, get planning permission in the green belt, which can be difficult to obtain. And it seems that she didn't want just any old house. She wanted to recreate Butterfield Farm. She was lucky to get planning permission for it here. She would probably have had no end of trouble in another rural location.'

Joanna nodded slowly, starting to see things from another angle. She hadn't been able to leave, to abandon this recreation of a happier life. She had been prisoner to the illusion she had created.

Korpanski looked straight into her eyes. ‘There's something else that's struck me, Jo,' he said. ‘These practical jokes obviously unsettled her. So why didn't Diana Tong move in with her permanently?'

‘She needed something, somewhere of her own. Timony would have swallowed her up whole,' Joanna responded, but knowing she had had similar thoughts. ‘Though she did seem to spend most of her time there anyway.'

‘Hmm,' Mike said, turned around and spotted Jason hovering near the door. ‘Well, I'd better be off. Come on, Sparks.'

Joanna felt restless watching the officers depart to their allocated tasks and, on leaving the barn, seeing the forensic teams scour the property in their slow, methodical way. She wandered up to the house with an overwhelming feeling that it was Timony's past which had resulted in her murder. The pranks had been a warning and, when not heeded, she had died. Someone had been trying to tell her something, to warn her of what might happen if she didn't comply. What were those dark memories threatening to surface? If Timony had read the messages she had not heeded them. And Joanna did not understand them. Comply with what?

Where better to look for the answer to that than in her own story of her life? She met Diana Tong, stony-faced, in the hallway. ‘Timony's memoirs,' Joanna said, stepping towards the study. ‘I'm going to take a look.'

‘Whatever for?' Diana Tong looked genuinely puzzled.

Joanna decided she was sick of giving reasons, of being dictated to, of having her strings pulled by others. ‘I don't need to give you a reason, Mrs Tong,' she said flatly. ‘Butterfield is now a major crime scene and her book may hold some clues.'

And so Diana Tong pressed back against the wall and Joanna passed her, feeling the companion's resentment hot and angry. She didn't care.

She reached the study and switched on the computer. No password, she noted. Open to anyone. She copied
My Memoirs
on to a USB stick and took it back to the barn, like a lion hoarding its kill. She moved the heater closer, inserted the memory stick into her own computer. And read.

At two thirty Matthew rang to see if she intended being present at the post-mortem. She looked through the windows as he spoke. Butterfield was a hive of activity and the teams were working equally hard, some on the telephone, others on their computers, and still others had left the area to pursue their suspects. They would all be following up their initial leads but they could do without her for a while. And the post-mortem of a murder victim necessitated a police presence – if only to validate the samples. She asked Matthew to wait for her to arrive, told Mike he would be in charge for the next few hours and drove the thirteen miles towards the mortuary in Stoke. Mark Fask would meet her there.