Murder at the Old Vicarage Read online

  There had to be a simple explanation. There had to be. But she hadn’t given them one. And he had thought that they were just trying to alarm her into producing an explanation, when they’d asked her to go with them. That was why he’d said they would have to arrest her. Because he thought they couldn’t, not just on that. But they had arrested her, as though confirmation about the dress had been all that they had needed. What else could they possibly have found to link Marian to it? And so what if she had burned the dress? It was her dress. She could do what she liked with it.

  At the back of his mind, a doubt was creeping in. He’d told her she was wrong about Eleanor. Surely, surely, she would have told him about having burned the dress then? Or was she ashamed of having done it? He’d asked her why she wasn’t wearing it, once he’d noticed. She had said it wasn’t a good fit. Why hadn’t she just told him the truth? Or had she just hoped that he would forget about it? Hadn’t she realised the consequences of failing to mention it to the police? Hadn’t it occurred to her what the police would think when they discovered it? Or did she think that the fire would have destroyed it completely?

  Anyway, his mind asked him, despite his conscious effort to make it stop, when did she burn it? Elstow was in the room all the time . . .

  George’s eyes were tight shut. ‘I need some air,’ he said, scrambling out of the car. He ran to the bushy hedge that ran along one side of the car park, and was violently sick.

  Joanna watched impassively as her father bent over in the bushes, his shoulders heaving. She couldn’t help him.

  Whatever nonsensical idea the police had got would be disproved; if her mother had burned the dress in a fit of pique – though that was hardly like her, but if she had – then she would tell them, and they would let her go. But she obviously hadn’t told them, doubtless in a misguided attempt to shield her father from embarrassment. And if that was the case, then he should go in now, and tell them why he thought she’d burned the dress.

  It was ridiculous, her mother being in there, under arrest. Almost laughable. She supposed her father thought that eventually they would realise what a ludicrous mistake they were making, without his intervention. And they would, of course, in time.

  Joanna was rather looking forward to the moment when the sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued Sergeant Hill would have to climb down and apologise. Because she would have to; there was no possibility of their continuing to imagine her mother guilty. None. It was a combination of circumstances, that was all. It would get sorted out. It probably took them hours to unarrest someone. It would get sorted out. It had to. Tears rolled down her face, unchecked. But crying wouldn’t help. Throwing up in the bushes wouldn’t help.

  She dried her eyes, and got out of the car. Up some steps to a door, slightly ajar. Joanna took a deep breath, and went in.

  She was in a corridor, with doors off it, all closed. There must be someone somewhere, she thought, as she walked along. She heard footsteps behind her, and turned to see a young constable.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I want to see Sergeant Hill,’ she said.

  ‘If you’ll come with me,’ he said, ‘I’ll see if we can find her for you.’

  She followed him round into the main entrance, where he asked her to wait.

  A few minutes later, he came back, and she followed him once again, through a room full of people, into an ante-room. Sergeant Hill stood up when she came in.

  ‘Joanna,’ she said, her face concerned. ‘Have a seat.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Joanna didn’t know what to say now that she was here. Screaming abuse at her would hardly help, but that was all she really wanted to do.

  ‘We were given no option but to do what we did,’ Sergeant Hill said.

  ‘No option?’ Joanna shouted. ‘You can’t seriously believe my mother killed Graham!’

  ‘We just wanted to ask her some questions, Joanna. It needn’t have been like that.’

  Somewhere, at the back of her mind, behind her desire to call her names, Joanna knew that she was right. Her father had forced them into a corner.

  ‘But why?’ she demanded. ‘Why did you want to question her? Because of the dress? My father thinks she did it because she was angry with him – it was his Christmas present to her.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Sergeant Hill. ‘Why was she angry with him?’

  ‘I don’t know! You’ll have to ask him that.’

  ‘Where is he?’ she asked.

  ‘Being sick!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Please sit down, Joanna.’

  Joanna felt some of the anger drain away, to be replaced by hopelessness. She sat down. ‘Why have you arrested my mother?’ she said again.

  ‘I can’t discuss it with you,’ Sergeant Hill said. ‘But in view of what you’ve said about the dress, I would like to talk to your father.’

  Joanna went to find her father; he was angry with her for telling the sergeant.

  ‘If you think she had a good reason for burning the dress, you have to tell them!’ Joanna said.

  ‘I didn’t say she had a—’ He sighed. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  Joanna waited for him by the desk. It would get sorted out.

  ‘Yes,’ Eleanor said, as brightly as she could, ‘I will think about it. I promise.’ And she waved as her visitor drove out of the courtyard, then closed the door with a sigh.

  ‘You should go,’ said Penny, as she went back in.

  ‘I can’t see myself at a New Year party,’ said Eleanor.

  Penny shook her head. ‘You’ve got to start some time,’ she said. ‘And the sooner the better. You don’t have to stay long. But you should start going out.’

  Eleanor knew all that. But how could she start going out now, for God’s sake? Penny didn’t understand. And she wouldn’t, for as long as Eleanor could keep it that way.

  ‘I’d look after Tessa,’ Penny went on. ‘You know that.’

  Eleanor smiled, ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You’re right. But I just don’t think I could face it.’

  ‘At least do what you said you’d do,’ Penny said. ‘Think about it.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I was wondering,’ said Penny, ‘I know you won’t come – but would you mind if I took Tessa back with me when I go tomorrow night? There’s nothing much for her to do here, is there – and you’ll be working. It would be more fun for her. There’s a little boy next door that she could play with.’

  ‘You told me,’ said Eleanor, with a smile.

  ‘Well? It would be a few days rest for you, and I’d love to have her.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘If she wants to come, that is,’ said Penny.

  Tessa would want to go. There was only one thing she liked better than visiting anyone, and that was visiting her grandmother. They couldn’t ask her then and there because she was off visiting the Brewsters, who had three of the children that Penny kept insisting were non-existent in Byford.

  ‘Thank you,’ Eleanor said. ‘It would be nice to have a break.’

  George Wheeler hadn’t been very forthcoming as to why his wife should have been angry with him. He had just sat there, looking like death, saying that it was a misunderstanding, until Judy had told him he could go.

  Lloyd raised his eyebrows when she told him. ‘Sounds a bit desperate to me,’ he said. ‘The best excuse he could come up with.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Lloyd. ‘I don’t think Freddie’s going to go much for Mrs Wheeler as a likely candidate.’

  ‘Has she said anything yet?’

  ‘No,’ said Lloyd. ‘Do you want to come and have a go?’

  Judy got up. ‘Is her solicitor here?’

  ‘No. I suppose Wheeler did ring one,’ he said. ‘Every time I see him, he’s rushing into the loo.’

  Judy went to the door. ‘Are you coming?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said wearily. ‘Why not?’
/>   Marian Wheeler sat at the table in the interview room, looking entirely unperturbed.

  Judy sat down. ‘Have you remembered where you were on Christmas Eve?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you give us an explanation for your fingerprints being on the poker?’

  ‘No.’

  Judy clasped her hands, and thought for a moment. ‘Did you go into the room when you found Elstow’s body?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Were you in that room at all on Christmas Eve?’

  ‘I was in and out during the day,’ she said. ‘The last time would have been at about two, I think. Just before I went out in the afternoon. I made up the fire.’

  ‘You’re sure that was the last time you were in there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Mrs Wheeler!’ Lloyd suddenly spun round to face her from having his back to her.

  His voice startled Judy, but Mrs Wheeler looked as calm as ever.

  ‘Your fingerprints were on the poker. There had been an attempt to burn a dress – your dress, which had blood on it. Type B, Mrs Wheeler. Elstow’s type.’

  Marian Wheeler didn’t speak.

  ‘You must give us some explanation for these facts, Mrs Wheeler,’ Judy said, her voice as calm as Mrs Wheeler’s.

  ‘I understood I didn’t have to speak to you at all.’

  Judy sighed. ‘You’ll have to give an explanation to someone, some time,’ she said. ‘You will have to defend the charges, won’t you?’

  ‘You haven’t charged me, have you?’ Mrs Wheeler looked eager; interested. Not as though it was happening to her at all.

  ‘No,’ said Judy. ‘We haven’t. But we will, Mrs Wheeler, unless you have an explanation. Do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Wheeler.

  ‘No?’ Lloyd said. ‘You mean you don’t know how the blood got on your dress? You don’t know how your fingerprints got on the poker?’

  He leant over the table, and Mrs Wheeler pulled back a little.

  ‘You say you were never in the room, Mrs Wheeler. So how come blood got walked out of that room on to the landing on the sole of your shoe?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t know,’ he said, his voice menacingly low and Welsh. ‘Someone tried to clean up the blood on the landing – did you know that? Someone who left their fingerprints by the stain.’ His own hand, fingers spread, thumped down on the table. ‘Your fingerprints, Mrs Wheeler. You don’t know how that happened?’

  She was getting to Lloyd. Judy could tell when simulated anger was turning to real frustration. ‘I’ve just been talking to Joanna,’ she said, conversationally.

  Mrs Wheeler stiffened.

  ‘She suggests that you burned the dress because you were angry with her father.’

  ‘Does she?’ A frown crossed the serene face.

  ‘Were you angry with him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So that isn’t why you burned the dress?’

  ‘No, of course it isn’t.’

  A silence fell, and Lloyd sat down, leaning back, relaxed.

  ‘But you did burn it, didn’t you, Mrs Wheeler?’ Judy asked quietly.

  Mrs Wheeler nodded, and Judy felt her heart skip a little.

  ‘I wanted him to leave,’ Marian Wheeler said. ‘I wanted him out of the house just as much as George did. I just wanted to ask him to leave. To go away, and stop hurting Joanna. So I went up. But – but when I spoke to him, he just . . . came at me. He was drunk, I suppose. I told him to stop, but he was threatening me. I picked up the poker. I told him to stop. I told him I’d hit him.’

  Judy glanced at Lloyd, whose eyebrows twitched a little.

  ‘Are you saying it was self-defence?’ she asked Mrs Wheeler.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I was frightened. I warned him. But he kept coming. Then he lunged at me, and I hit him. He fell,’ she said. ‘I realised he was dead.’

  ‘We don’t think it was self-defence,’ Judy said carefully. ‘Our evidence suggests that he was lying on the bed when he was attacked.’

  Marian Wheeler’s eyes widened and for a moment she said nothing. Then she shook her head.

  ‘He wasn’t lying on the bed?’

  ‘No. He was coming at me.’

  ‘Where was he when you hit him?’ Lloyd asked.

  ‘Near the fireplace,’ said Mrs Wheeler. ‘That’s why I could pick up the poker.’

  ‘And that’s where you’re saying you struck the first blow?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Lloyd looked at her for a long time, without speaking. Mrs Wheeler looked back, wide-eyed. Judy stayed out of it. After a while, Lloyd sighed heavily, and rubbed his face. ‘I told you that everything in that room had a story to tell, Mrs Wheeler.’

  Mrs Wheeler looked away from both of them, as though something had caught her attention.

  ‘Blood stains,’ Lloyd went on. ‘They talk, Mrs Wheeler. Elstow was nowhere near the fireplace.’

  She looked back then, her eyes defiant. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He was.’

  ‘Then what?’ said Lloyd, abandoning the topic.

  ‘There was blood on my dress. I took it off, and put it on the fire. It wouldn’t burn properly, because the fire was almost out. So I used matches, and firelighters. Then when I left, I could see I’d made marks on the landing. I cleaned my shoe, and then I cleaned up the stain.’

  She paused. ‘I washed, and went into my own room. I put on different clothes, and different shoes, and then I went out to check up on the old people, since that was what I had been going to do in the first place. And I did lock the doors,’ she said. ‘So that no one would find him.’

  Judy noted the emphasis – ‘I did lock the doors’ – but its significance escaped her.

  Mrs Wheeler’s statement was being typed when her solicitor arrived, full of apologies to his client for the long delay, occasioned by his car breaking down in the middle of nowhere. He couldn’t even find a phone; he had had to walk to a garage through the snow. He advised her against signing the statement, but she did anyway. Lloyd still didn’t charge her; her solicitor wasn’t happy about that either, but Judy understood his reluctance.

  Back in the office, Judy tidied up her desk. They had informed Mr Wheeler of the course of events, and he’d gone rushing outside. Joanna Elstow had stared uncomprehendingly at them, then followed him. The solicitor had sighed, and gone after both of them.

  ‘Let’s go and talk to Freddie,’ said Lloyd.

  Judy looked at her watch. ‘At the hospital?’ she said. ‘Will he be there this late on a Saturday?’

  ‘Of course he will. He practically lives there.’

  Judy drove them in her car; Lloyd’s had been left at home in favour of the front-wheel drive of official vehicles. Her car might not be in the first flush of youth, she pointed out, but it didn’t get the vapours at a little snow and ice.

  Freddie was, as predicted, at the path lab, as joyful as ever with his choice of profession. ‘Confessed?’ he beamed. ‘Well, there you are. You do win some.’

  ‘Do we?’ Lloyd said. ‘By the time it gets to court, she may well have changed her mind.’

  Judy hated the smell of the place. She didn’t want to be there, and she wasn’t sure why she was. But Freddie was always pleased to see her, so that cheered her slightly.

  Lloyd continued. ‘She’s either going to plead self-defence or not guilty,’ he said. ‘How good a case have I got?’

  ‘She won’t plead self-defence,’ Freddie said decidedly. ‘If she brings in her own pathologist, he can’t not agree with me. The man was lying on the bed when the first blow was struck.’

  ‘She says he was by the fireplace,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Well, you know he wasn’t.’

  ‘Could he have fallen on to the bed? From being hit?’

  Freddie shook his head. ‘He was on the bed,’ he said. ‘There’s no argument – look at the bedclothes, man!’

&nb
sp; ‘I’d rather not,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘All right,’ sighed Freddie. ‘Let’s suppose we get given an argument. Wherever he was, he wasn’t standing up. Or if he was, then his attacker was standing on a step-ladder. There is no way a blow of that force could have been delivered except from someone with a considerable height advantage – so if you’ve got someone nine feet tall on your list, that’s your man.’

  Lloyd smiled. ‘So what will the defence do with a not guilty plea?’ he asked. ‘Apart from produce a nine-foot tall suspect?’

  ‘Well,’ said Freddie, ‘if I was defending, I would go on build. I wouldn’t produce the giant theory, but I would point out how small and slim Mrs Wheeler is.’

  ‘You said a woman could have done it,’ Lloyd said in injured tones.

  ‘Certainly. But Mrs Wheeler’s height and weight would suggest that she’d need two hands to produce blows that strong.’ He warmed to his task. ‘She only used one hand on the poker. So if I can produce a good reason for her prints being there, and ram home her diminutive stature . . .’ He left the rest of the sentence eloquently unfinished.

  ‘Are you saying she’ll get off?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Because she could have done it. If she was frightened enough. Or angry enough.’

  ‘So what are you saying?’ Lloyd asked testily.

  Freddie smiled. ‘If she sticks to self-defence, she’s got no chance,’ he said. ‘If she simply says she didn’t do it, well – you’ve got her confession, her prints, and the burnt dress on your side. She’s got the fact that she’s small, pretty, female and a vicar’s wife on hers.’

  ‘And the fact that she was alone with him in the house at the material time,’ Lloyd said. ‘I’ve got that on my side, too.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Suppose she did hit him by the fireplace?’ he said. ‘Ineffectually. Making him dizzy – he grabs hold of her as he falls. So she’s only got one hand free, and she’s terrified. What then?’

  ‘Is that what she says?’ asked Freddie.

  ‘No,’ Lloyd said. ‘But could that produce what you’ve found?’

  ‘If he happened to fall on to the bed,’ said Freddie. ‘Which I suppose he could have done. It’s highly unlikely.’