The Oxmarket Aspal Murder Mystery

THE JOHN HANDFUL SERIES

BY ANDREW HIXSON

A HANDFUL OF SECRETS

The John Handful Short Story Collection

.

BLIND SPOT

 A bell rings – A rope breaks –A man dies

        PROLOGUE

“
Can we talk?”  The caller asked.

“Of course,” I replied. “Where?”

“Your office?”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”  I said.

I had taken the call on my mobile while I was discreetly tidying up a minor case in the village store that was situated in the main street of Oxmarket Mountfitchet. This ran, like the bar on a capital T, across the top end of Church Lane.  A note on the door informed children that their presence was welcome one at a time.

This stern directive had cut down petty pilfering considerably but there was still a certain amount of stealing.  The proprietor, Mr Ronald Lawes, who watched his young customers as would a hawk a fledging dove, could not understand this.  It had never occurred to him or Sylvia, his ‘good lady wife’ that the culprits might have grown up until I presented them with the photographic evidence.

The shop was very reminiscent of Tudor times.  The price tickets were written in Olde English, as was the notice behind the till:
Pray Do Not Ask for Credit as Ye Refusal Oft Offends
. Originally all the s’s had been f’s which was, as Mr Lawes tirelessly explained, authentically correct.  But no one was impressed by this conceit.  Customers kept winking and asking for ‘a pound of foffage’ and ‘fome tomato foup’ so, after a while, Ronald and Sylvia reluctantly reverted to more contemporary Elizabethan.

While putting my small fee in my wallet and commenting pleasantly on the weather, I declined to spend my earnings on some reduced Jamaica ginger cake, and made my way to my car parked just down the road.

The road from Oxmarket Mountfitchet to Oxmarket wound its way through green countryside, rain washing the windscreen of my Peugeot 208.  Every so often, hamlets of no more than a dozen houses would appear without warning.  The square, weather beaten houses, most made grimy by the elements, all faced the sea. All the better, I supposed, to see the next wave of weather that would come to torment them.

There were no people.  Not one single soul on or by the road.  I saw sheep, though, plenty of them.  I saw seabirds.  I saw horses.  I even saw the brown flash of a hare scampering across the lower slopes of a glassy hill.  I just didn’t see any people.

Suddenly, the road dipped past a landscape that was a battlefield for opposing forces; earth and water colliding, with casualties of war everywhere you looked.  There was barely a piece of hillside that didn’t carry the scars of the North Sea.

Against this backdrop, the first hints of near-urban sprawl came rudely into sight: a shop; a flurry of direction signs; houses packed together in rows; the floodlights of the small football stadium; industrial units; zebra crossings and offices.  I followed the ring road, came to a roundabout and turned left before being confronted by concrete canvas which was painted the drizzly shadows of a small fishing village. 

Welcome to Oxmarket

From here, I got caught up in the Oxmarket one-way system, crept around the market square, which was crammed with stalls covered in bright awnings and traders shouting out impossible never-to-be-repeated bargains. I turned right and pushed aggressively into a traffic jam inching along the High Street before pulling onto a large asphalt parking area at the rear of Handful Investigations.

              I let myself in and made myself a coffee which I had just finished when I heard the deep double chime of the bell in the reception-room of my office and the sound of hinges creaking.  ‘RING AND ENTER’ the legend on the corridor read and someone was doing just that. Ringing and entering.  I had just risen to my feet when the knock came at my inner door.

              A big, burly, red-faced (and with the jowls of a bulldog and one of the few people in the world I could call a friend) entered my office.  DI Silver of the Suffolk Constabulary crossed the cold linoleum floor and sat down in the padded leather armchair on the other side of my desk.

              “Hello, John,” he said cheerfully.  “You’ve got anything on at the moment?”

              “Even if I did have,” I smiled.  “The fact that the Suffolk Constabulary are paying a retainer will always put at the front of the queue.”

              “There is that,” he smiled back.

              “How can I help you?”

              “Have you read about the Faith Roberts case in the Oxmarket Echo?”

              “It was an open and shut case wasn’t it?”

              DI Silver shrugged his shoulders.  “She was hit on the back of her head with some sharp, heavy implement.  Her savings, about nine thousand pounds in cash, were taken after her room had been ransacked. She lived alone in a small cottage in Oxmarket Aspal except for a lodger.  Man by the name of Marcus Dye.”

              “Ah yes, Marcus Dye.”

              “The cottage wasn’t broken into. No signs of any tampering with the windows or locks.  Dye was skint, lost his job, owed rent and has credit card debts.  The money was found under a loose stone at the back of the cottage.  Dye’s coat sleeve had blood on and hair and forensics matched it with Faith Roberts.  According to his statement he never went near the body – so it couldn’t come there by accident.”

              “Who found her?”

              “The postman called with a parcel from
Amazon
.  Marcus Dye opened the door to him and said he’d knocked at Faith’s bedroom door, but couldn’t get an answer.  The postman suggested she might be ill.  They got the woman next door to go up and see.  Faith wasn’t in the bed and hadn’t slept in the bed, but the room had been ransacked and the floorboards had been prised up.  Then they thought of looking in the en suite bathroom and she was lying there on the floor and the neighbour screamed her head off.  The police were called immediately.

              “And Dye was eventually arrested and tried?”

              “Yes.  As you said earlier, open and shut case. The jury were only out for twenty minutes yesterday morning.  Verdict:  Guilty.”

              I nodded.

              “And now the day after the verdict you have come to my office. Why?”

              DI Silver sat forward in the chair. “Because, I don’t think he did it.”

1

              There was a moment or two of silence.

              “I can’t give a reason, a concrete reason.  To the jury I dare say he looked like a murderer – to me he didn’t – and I know a lot more about murderers than they do.”

              I nodded in agreement.

              “For one thing he wasn’t
arrogant
.  Not arrogant at all and in my experience they usually are.  Always so damned pleased with themselves.  Always think they’re stringing you along.   Always sure they’ve been so clever about the whole thing.  And even when they’re in court and know they’re almost certainly going down for their crime, they still get a kick out of it. They’re in the limelight. They’re the central figure. Playing the star part – perhaps for the first time in their lives.  They’re-well-you know-
arrogant
?”

              DI Silver brought out the word with an air of finality.

              “And Marcus Dye wasn’t arrogant”

              “No.  He was-well, just scared stiff.  Scared stiff from the start.  And to the jury that would make them think he was guilty.  But not to me.”

              “What is he like?”

              “Thirty-three, medium height, wears glasses-”

              I held up my hand and arrested the Detective Inspector’s flow.

              “I meant his personality.”

              “Oh, I see.”  DI Silver considered.  “Unprepossessing sort of bloke. Nervous, who never seemed to be able to look you straight in the face. He has a sly sideways way of looking at you.  Worst possible sort of manner for a jury.  Sometimes cringing and sometime truculent.  Blusters in an effectual sort of way.”

              “Has he any friends?”  I asked. “Someone who could give him a character reference?”

              “No,” DI Silver shook his head.  “It was obvious he had no friends.  Nobody could
like
him.”

              “But he doesn’t deserve to go to gaol for a crime he didn’t commit, because nobody likes him.”

              “Exactly.”

              “What do you suggest?”

              “I expect you’ve got a pretty good idea of what I’m going to ask you?”

              “The scent will be cold.”  I informed him. 

              “I know, but if anyone can pick it up it’s you.”

              I smiled at his obvious attempt at flattery before asking, “When was Faith Roberts killed?”

              “1
st
of November, last year.”  DI Silver replied.  “I’ve got my case notes which I can let you have.”

              “Good,” I said.  “But for the moment let’s look at the bare bones of the case.  If Marcus Dye didn’t kill Faith Roberts, who did?”

              DI Silver shrugged his shoulders and said heavily:  “I have absolutely no idea.”

              “Every murder has a motive.  What in the case of Faith Roberts is the motive?  Envy, revenge, jealousy, fear, money?  Who would profit from her death?”

              “Nobody very much. She had twenty thousand pounds in an ISA.  Her niece gets that.”

              “That’s not very much.  Did you consider the niece?”

              “Of course,” DI Silver said with a hint of annoyance.  “But she doesn’t need the money.  Her husband is loaded.  She’s a pleasant enough woman, who was quite fond of her aunt.”

              “What about the cottage?”

              “It was rented.”

              “What did you find out about Faith Roberts?”

              “Well, she was forty-six. Widow.  Husband was in data analysis at a local logistics firm on the industrial estate in Oxmarket.  He died              about seven years ago.  Cancer.  Since then, Faith had been going out daily to various houses round about. Domestic chores.  Oxmarket Aspal is a small village which has become largely residential.  One or two retired people, one of the partners in an engineering firm, a doctor, that sort of thing,  There’s quite a good bus and train service to Oxmarket which is about three miles away but Oxmarket Aspal itself is quite pretty and rural – about a quarter of a mile off the main Ipswich to Oxmarket road.”

              I nodded, listening intently.

              “Faith’s cottage was one of four that form the village proper. There is the post office, the village shop, a small pub and two couples live in the others.”

              “And she took in a lodger?”

              “Yes.  Before her husband died, it used to be summer visitors, but after his death she just took one regular.  Marcus Dye had been there for some months.”

              “So we come to – Marcus Dye?”

              “Dye’s last job was with a chilled food supplier in Oxmarket Magna.  Before that, he lived with his mother in Oxupland.  She was an invalid and he looked after and never went out much.  Then she died and left him nothing.  He sold the house and found a job.  Well educated man, but no special qualifications or aptitudes and, as I say, an unprepossessing manner. Didn’t find it easy to get anything.  Anyway, they took him on at
Anglia Meats
.  Rather a second-rate firm.  I don’t think he was particularly efficient or successful.  They cut down staff and he was the one to go.  He couldn’t get another job, and his money ran out.  He usually paid Faith every month for his room.  She gave him breakfast and dinner and charged him a hundred and twenty pounds a week – quite reasonable, all things considered.  He was two months behind in paying her, and he was nearly at the end of his resources.  He hadn’t got another job and she was pressing him for what he owed her.”

              “And he knew that she had nine thousand pounds in the house? Why did she have such an amount in cash in the house, by the way, since she had an ISA?”

              “She was about to book a cruise of a lifetime.  It was under a loose floorboard in her bedroom - a very obvious place.  Marcus Dye admitted he knew it was there.”

              “Very obliging of him,” I said sarcastically.  “And did the niece and husband know that too?”

              “Oh yes.”

              “Then we have now arrived back at my first question to you.  How did Faith Roberts die?”

              “She died on the night of November 1
st
. Dr Reed put the time of death between 7 and 10 p.m.  She’d had her dinner – stuffed chicken breast with garlic potatoes and salad, and according to all accounts, she usually had that about half-past six.  If she adhered to that on the night in question, then the post-mortem put her death about eight-thirty or nine o’clock.  Marcus Dye, said he was down the pub till about nine and then came home and let himself in with his own key and went straight to his own room.  He had his own en suite bathroom. He read for about half an hour and then went to bed.  He heard and noticed nothing out of the ordinary.  Next morning he went downstairs and looked into the kitchen, but there was no one there and no signs of breakfast being prepared.  He said he hesitated a bit and then knocked on Faith’s door, but got no reply.”