The Other Woman (23 page)

Lloyd produced the key from his pocket. ‘Is this it?' he asked.

Parker nodded. ‘The groundsman will show you which building,' he said.

Lloyd left Judy with him, indicating as he went out that she should continue the questioning in the same vein.

‘Were you and Sharon still seeing one another, Mr Parker?' she asked, joining him on the balcony.

‘No.'

She looked down at the terracing. ‘But you got involved in a fight because you didn't like the way she was behaving?' she asked.

He sighed. ‘She was trying to provoke me, and she succeeded,' he said.

Judy frowned. ‘But if it was all over …'

He turned away, back to his contemplation of the pitch. ‘I always was too possessive,' he said. ‘That's why we split up.'

‘Where does Bobbie fit in?' she asked.

‘Leave Bobbie out of this, all right?'

‘All right,' she said, amiably. ‘But if Sharon could still provoke you, there must still have been something there.'

He turned. ‘We were still friends,' he said. ‘I got her that job.'

‘We have been told that Sharon was picked up by someone in a car after she left the ground on Friday evening, and brought back here,' Judy said.

‘Is that right?' He was endeavouring to look as though this didn't interest him, but his voice betrayed him.

‘Well – it's so far unconfirmed,' Judy went on, deciding to take the matter further, to see if she could produce a definite reaction. ‘But we do know that she had sexual relations with someone shortly before she died,' she said. ‘So it seems likely.'

He was thrown by that, she could see. She had got her reaction, and she pushed the point home before he had time to recover himself. ‘Was she meeting a man here?' she asked.

He turned away again to hide his confusion. ‘ Christ,' he muttered to himself. ‘ I don't know,' he replied. ‘She didn't say.'

‘But she changed out of her working clothes?'

He turned back, and nodded. ‘Maybe she wanted to impress him,' he said. ‘You could be right.'

Lloyd came back with a carrier bag containing the clothes that Whitworth had described Sharon wearing when she left the office.

‘Why did Sharon leave these in the changing room?' he asked, dumping the bag on the table, coming out on to the balcony.

‘I've no idea,' he said. ‘She must have meant to pick them up after the match.'

‘You didn't notice that she left without them?'

‘No,' he said. ‘I was otherwise engaged when she left, if you remember.'

‘Did she tell you who she was meeting?'

His head was shaking almost all the time. ‘No,' he said again. ‘I've just told her that.'

He had come in oozing East End charm and hair gel; now, he was on the defensive. Judy was certain that he did know who she was likely to have been meeting, but she couldn't shake his denials.

On their way back to the station, Judy told him what had passed between her and Parker, but Lloyd barely seemed to be listening. She glanced across at him as he drove, and saw the film of sawdust on his dark suit.

‘Another little puzzle solved?' she said, with a smile, as she brushed his shoulders with her hand. ‘The case of the Mysterious Smell of Sawdust?'

‘Another little puzzle,' he agreed. ‘But there are a lot more than these two, aren't there?'

‘I guess she was with her boyfriend in the car,' said Judy. ‘ Whatever the protocol is about removing clothing. And I think Parker knows who the boyfriend was,' she said. ‘I think he knows who picked her up.'

‘I think she was with
him
,' said Lloyd. ‘Parker himself.'

Judy frowned. ‘But she couldn't have been – he was under arrest at the time, remember?'

‘No.' Lloyd said. ‘Before that. Before the party started.'

Judy frowned. ‘Doesn't that make it too long before the time of death?' she asked.

‘Only if you believe Drummond, and I don't. I think she never left the ground. I think she was killed just after she walked away from the fight.'

‘I've lost you,' she said.

Lloyd waited at the roundabout. ‘ I don't believe that that car exists,' he said. ‘I don't think she was chatting up Barnes, and I don't think Parker thought she was either.' He broke off as he negotiated a particularly tricky layout of mini-roundabouts. ‘I think,' he said, as he accelerated up the hill towards the station, ‘ that Parker is out to deal with this his way, and that we had better find out exactly who picked a fight with whom at that match. Jake Parker wants us to think that he started it, but I'm not so sure about that.'

Lloyd was working on something, and he wasn't sharing it with her. That always tended to make Judy more than a little apprehensive. He had done another about-turn in his theorising. ‘Are you going to let me in on this new theory?' she asked.

Lloyd signalled left, and pulled into the car park of the police station. He switched off the engine, and released his seat-belt; Judy opened her door, thinking they were going in, but he turned to face her, stopping her getting out of the car. ‘Let's talk here,' he said.

She sat back down again, more apprehensive than ever.

‘Someone started the trouble at the football match,' he began. ‘Parker originally said that Barnes started it, but he changed his mind after he found out that Sharon had been killed. Perhaps someone put Barnes up to that, and killed Sharon before she ever left the ground.'

Judy frowned. That wasn't quite her reading of the situation. ‘We don't know for certain who started it,' she reminded Lloyd. ‘And why would Parker want us to believe that it wasn't Barnes who started it if it was?'

‘Because he wants to deal with it his way,' said Lloyd. ‘And the one thing we do know for certain is that whoever started it, it got Parker out of circulation for three hours. During which his ex-girlfriend is murdered, and his current girlfriend is raped.'

Judy's eyes widened. ‘Coincidence,' she said.

‘How many coincidences are we supposed to accept? I'll buy McDonald and Melissa Whitworth. But one of Parker's girlfriends being raped at the same time as another is murdered?'

Judy stared at him. ‘ Oh, come on, Lloyd,' she said. ‘Of course it was a coincidence We've got a rapist,' she said. ‘ His victims are going to be someone's girlfriend, or wife – and the same man raped her as raped the other women. There's no question about that. That would be more of a coincidence than ever.'

Lloyd smiled. ‘True,' he said. ‘But I think that Parker's up to something with that building project, all the same. The building's months behind schedule. People have started muttering, so the work starts again and he holds an opening in the only finished building there is.'

‘The recession,' said Judy.

‘And now you tell me that he's planning on leaving the country. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that he's got someone's back up.'

‘I think it's a domestic,' said Judy. ‘Pure and simple. Sharon's new boyfriend lost his temper'

‘Oh, before I forget,' said Lloyd. ‘I arranged for your car to be taken to a garage.'

Judy sighed. ‘ Did you, now?' she said.

‘Well, you couldn't leave it there for ever with its locks jammed up, could you?'

‘No, but I would have rather liked to have—'

‘I thought perhaps we could pop over there,' he said, getting out of the car. ‘Once we've dropped these clothes off.' He opened the car boot, and pulled out the carrier bag.

He was sometimes really too much, she thought, getting out. ‘Where is my car?' she asked him.

‘Green's garage,' he said.

‘I see,' said Judy, nodding. ‘Because Gil McDonald works there?'

‘Mm.'

They walked towards the building.

‘Why?' asked. Judy. ‘Because he's a famous footballer, or because he found Sharon's body?'

Lloyd grinned. ‘A little bit of both,' he said, opening the door for her.

‘Are they open on a Sunday?'

‘They are if you want to buy a car,' he said.

‘Lloyd! I can manage my own affairs quite well, you know!'

But she didn't really mind. He was right; there was no point in spending more money on the old one, which only went when it felt like it. And the illicit use of police resources in getting it to the garage was something that would never have occurred to her.

She would look at cars.

Things were getting way, way out of hand. Jake Parker drove out of the sports ground on his way to the village where Lionel Evans lived, and looked across at the centre, at the delayed building work which had been put in hand again with the application of as little hard cash as possible, in order to stop the investors getting fidgety too soon. But now it wasn't the investors he had to worry about. It had always been a huge risk, with huge rewards if he pulled it off, and a prison sentence if he didn't.

And he wasn't pulling it off, despite his desperate attempt to salvage something from the mess. He lit a cigarette, and contemplated the scheme that had been going to make him a millionaire. He simply had to cut his losses. Lloyd was already suspicious, and would soon be demanding answers to his questions, not just letting them go. It was turning into a race against time, and time had a nasty habit of winning.

He thought about that. Lionel knew altogether too much, and Jake had failed to scare him as thoroughly as he had hoped to; he was made of slightly sterner stuff than Jake had realised. Getting rid of Lionel seemed the obvious route, but it was a non-starter. Lionel had known that, once he had realised that Jake was not seeking revenge for Sharon's death, but merely a way out of the mess. There was no way the police were going to accept Lionel's sudden demise as being coincidental to everything else.

Jake didn't understand what was happening; he was used to pulling the strings, to making things happen. But things hadn't happened that he had thought would, and had happened that he hadn't, could never have foreseen.

And now Detective Inspector Hill had told him that Sharon had been with someone. He could have foreseen that, but he hadn't. He let the half-smoked cigarette fly out of the quarter-light in a shower of sparks. Sharon had to have been with Whitworth, of course, but Jake hadn't told Inspector Hill that, because then the police would have taken Whitworth in for questioning.

And Jake had other plans for Simon Whitworth.

Lloyd was still inclined to the opinion that Melissa and Mac were a coincidence, and nothing more, but they were on their way to Green's garage not just to get Judy to buy a new car, but to let her talk to Mac, whom she hadn't met, to see what she thought of him. He had been proved wrong once too often already; he couldn't just ignore them. And he had great faith in Judy's judgement.

He was still convinced that Drummond's story about the car picking her up was a fiction, and had instituted what inquiries he could on that front. Even a negative response would help. If no one else at all had seen this car, Andrews might be a little more receptive to Lloyd's belief that Drummond was a wrong 'un, and in this business up to his neck. And he had dispatched people to talk to the other lads involved in the disturbance at the match. He very much wanted to know who had really started that fight. They had seemed a little surprised at being asked to make further inquiries into a minor disturbance at a football match; Lloyd had not enlightened them as to the purpose, mainly because he wasn't too sure himself.

While he was in Malworth, Finch would be seeing what he could pick up about the two officers who had beaten Drummond up. Merrill should have known that Judy couldn't find out anything; she had been disconnected from the grapevine the moment she had told him what she had seen. But Finch, with his guileless schoolboy looks and his one-of-the-boys rank was just the man to find out one way or the other.

They drove into Green's Garage, and he parked beside a brown Ford Escort. ‘Right,' he said, indicating the showroom. ‘Take your pick.'

‘I can't afford a new one!' she said.

He grinned. ‘The used ones are round the back,' he said, getting out.

Judy emerged after a reluctant moment, and looked across at the sea of vehicles.

‘Chief Inspector Lloyd? Can I help you?'

Lloyd turned to see Gil McDonald coming out of the showroom, and smiled. ‘ Not really,' he said. ‘It's Detective Inspector Hill here who would like your help.'

McDonald came up to her. ‘Gil McDonald,' he said, holding out his hand. ‘ Is it about the girl who was murdered?'

Judy shook his hand. ‘Well, I am working on that,' she said, ‘but it's not strictly why I'm here.' She gestured towards the battered, world-weary Mini parked by the workshop door. ‘That's mine,' she said.

‘Oh – I did explain on the phone – there's no one here today who can work on it, I'm afraid. Not until tomorrow.'

‘No,' she said. ‘I'm …' She glared at Lloyd. ‘I'm thinking of buying another,' she said.

McDonald smiled, and glanced at the Mini. ‘I'm not surprised,' he said.

Judy looked a little offended; what she saw in that heap of junk, Lloyd failed to comprehend. She had never bought a car that actually had all its equipment in working order in her life; her idea of a new car was anything that started on the third try as long as it wasn't raining.

‘Will it be worth anything in part exchange?' she asked.

‘I'm sure we'll be able to come to some arrangement,' said McDonald. ‘Would you like to come and have a look at what we've got? I'm assuming that you are looking for a used model.'

Judy nodded, and went off with McDonald.

Lloyd waited until they were on their way, then wandered into the showroom to play at being a customer for one of the cars with so much electronic wizardry that it would hardly seem like driving at all. One day, he told himself. One day, when he won the pools.