Plots and Errors Read online

  Josh Esterbrook had already shot someone dead? My God, that put a different construction on the bodies at Little Elmley, if Esterbrook was a convicted killer. Fifteen years ago, thought Tom. That would be when Lloyd was in the Met, so he wouldn’t have known anything about it. And he still didn’t know. He abandoned the other questions he had been going to put to Mrs Esterbrook in favour of making sure Lloyd didn’t end up like Angela and Paul Esterbrook.

  SCENE X – BARTONSHIRE.

  Sunday, September 28th, 10.30 a.m.

  On the Road from Little Elmley to Penhallin.

  Lloyd was glad Josh had accepted his offer to accompany him to Penhallin; he thought it best that the Mr and Mrs Josh Esterbrooks be questioned separately, and that might have been difficult, since they had no reason to suspect either of them of Mrs Esterbrook’s murder. But Lloyd was certain this was not as straightforward as it seemed, and this way they might get to the truth.

  When the car had arrived Josh Esterbrook had taken his leave of his wife, and there had been nothing lovey-dovey about it, no extravagant shows of affection. But there had been an obvious, open belief in one another that had convinced Lloyd that Josh had not beaten up his wife. And if his brother had, and his brother was dead, then Josh Esterbrook had to be a suspect for that death, however apparently extreme that action would have been. There were so many cross-currents and undercurrents in this family that the beating could merely have been the culmination of all manner of resentments and betrayals.

  The powerful car had left Little Elmley, its blue lights flashing, going as fast as the traffic conditions allowed, in an effort to cut down the journey time, and they had spoken a little about Josh’s relationship with his half-brother; it had not been good, and had been getting worse. He was entirely open about it, or at least seemed to be.

  Lloyd’s mobile phone rang; he answered it to Tom, and listened with interest to what he had to say. ‘Do you have one of these?’ he asked, waving his mobile at Josh as he put it away again.

  ‘Sure,’ said Esterbrook, pulling his from his jacket pocket. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  Lloyd smiled. ‘We got issued with ours a couple of months ago,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how we managed without them. For instance, that was my sergeant, telling me that you keep a revolver on your boat. Is he right?’

  ‘He is.’

  ‘And did you get a look at the revolver beside your brother’s body?’

  ‘Half-brother. I did, and yes, it certainly looked like mine. A Smith and Wesson .38, blue steel, walnut grips.’

  ‘Who else knew about it?’

  ‘Paul, Elizabeth and Sandie. I showed it to them. Paul’s been giving Sandie lessons – she’s a very good shot.’

  SCENE IX – CORNWALL.

  Sunday, September 28th, 2.00 p.m.

  A small Cottage in Penhallin.

  They had been to the boat, and Lloyd had got the SOCOs to go over it very carefully indeed; he hadn’t expected to find anything; he just wanted as much evidence as he could get about who exactly had been on Lazy Sunday since it had come back from the boatyard.

  Then it was on to Mrs Esterbrook’s cottage, sitting alone on the headland, the sea around it dark green and slightly threatening today as the autumn weather began to take hold. Josh Esterbrook let them in, and they looked round downstairs. Lloyd wandered into the kitchen. The larder held dry goods, the kitchen cupboard the usual sort of stuff. A torch and candles for when the weather on this exposed coast cut off the power, cleaning materials.

  ‘Chief Inspector?’ Detective Sergeant Comstock said, and Lloyd went back through to the living-room-cum-office.

  Comstock was the local man who had been assigned to him on his arrival in Penhallin. One of the scene-of-crime men came over to the desk, closely followed by Esterbrook, and they all looked at where Comstock was pointing. In the wastepaper basket were the incinerated remains of a sheet of paper. The letter? It seemed likely.

  ‘Beyond resurrection, I imagine,’ said Lloyd.

  ‘Don’t be too sure,’ said the scene-of-crime man. ‘I’ll get the specialists to bag it up. Daren’t do it myself, not when it’s in that state. But you never know with lab technicians these days – they can perform miracles. They might get it so some of the writing can be read.’

  Lloyd looked at the unlined A4 pad on the desk, and glanced at Comstock. ‘Do you suppose she used that?’ he said.

  Comstock bent down, looking at the pad from table-top level. ‘There are imprints,’ he said. ‘It’s probably her shopping list, but it’s worth a try.’ He took out an evidence bag, and the A4 pad was sealed inside it.

  ‘What’s upstairs?’ asked Lloyd.

  ‘The bathroom and my stepmother’s bedroom,’ said Esterbrook.

  And the latter was where, upon opening the door, Lloyd saw his third corpse.

  SCENE XII – CORNWALL.

  Sunday, September 28th, 2.30 p.m.

  The Bedroom of the Cottage.

  Lloyd asked permission from the evidence-gatherers before he went in, then stood for a moment looking round the room. The bed was made, spread with a duvet that matched the curtains and cushion covers on the window-seat; the bedside cabinet had a table-lamp, a radio-alarm-telephone and two paperback books, neatly arranged; the dressing-table had toiletries and cosmetics, a comb and brush, laid out ready for use; the window-seat’s cushions were plumped up and placed just so; the old-fashioned wardrobe doors were closed, a small key in the lock.

  And the only thing out of place was the body, lying on its side on the carpet, the yellow hair matted with the blood that had seeped from a gaping wound in the back of his head. It was the body of a youth; no more than a boy, really, his unbuttoned shirt half-tucked into jeans with the fly undone, as though he had been killed in the act of dressing or undressing.

  Lloyd crouched down, feeling the skin. The boy’s shirt had pulled away from his neck as he had fallen; the bared shoulder revealed what looked like a spider tattoo. A mobile phone, which, as Josh Esterbrook had said, everybody had these days, was tucked into the shirt-pocket. Lloyd looked up and saw Esterbrook’s face, much more shocked than it had been when they had found his brother.

  ‘Do you know him, Mr Esterbrook?’ he asked.

  The other man nodded. ‘His name’s Rampton,’ he said. ‘Billy Rampton. He’s one of the people who come diving with me on the boat.’

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Fifteen, I believe.’

  ‘What else can you tell us about him?’

  ‘Not much. He’s a rent-boy, basically. Is that what you wanted to know?’

  Ah. Private investigators, rent-boys, threatened inheritances . . . it was money, not sex, that was at the root of these killings, but it was sex, illicit sex, that had been the catalyst. Was Billy the companion that Paul Esterbrook had been unable to recall? And if so, had he really made that call five weeks ago, using Billy’s phone? And if he had made the call five weeks ago, what had gone on here this weekend? Nothing, if you looked at this room. Something quite dreadful, if you looked at the boy.

  ‘How well did you know him?’

  ‘Well enough to know he was a waste of space.’

  Lloyd shook his head slightly. ‘That’s a very harsh judgement on a very young man,’ he said, straightening up, joining Esterbrook on the landing.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Lloyd regarded Esterbrook, his eyebrows slightly raised. ‘It looks as though your revolver may have been the instrument of all these people’s deaths, Mr Ester-brook. How do you feel about that?’

  Esterbrook shrugged.

  Lloyd looked again at Billy Rampton, and wondered about Paul’s inheritance, and the threat to it that his mother might or might not have posed. Tom said that if Paul Esterbrook had been proved guilty of adultery, he would have been disinherited. So now they had a motive to go with the apparent scenario at Little Elmley. That was very handy, very neat. Almost as though it had been produced to give them all the information they needed to wrap
the whole thing up.

  ‘It’s beginning to look,’ Lloyd said slowly, ‘as though your brother shot this boy and your stepmother in a desperate attempt to hang on to his inheritance.’ He turned to Esterbrook. ‘Does your position under your father’s will alter if that is the conclusion at which we arrive?’

  Josh Esterbrook looked back at him, his eyes thoughtful. Then he smiled. ‘What’s my situation under the will got to do with it?’ he asked. ‘Are you accusing me? Are you going to arrest me for murdering them all just because it was my gun?’

  Lloyd smiled back. ‘You seem somewhat lacking in the opportunity department, if the boy’s been dead as long as I think he has. But of course it isn’t necessary actually to pull the trigger to be guilty of murder, as you, of all people, must know. Would it alter your situation? If Paul had murdered his mother?’

  There was a moment of silence before Esterbrook answered, during which he looked at the boy’s body. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t affect the IMG shares – they go to the Esterbrook Marine Research Fund if Paul has in any way disqualified himself from inheriting. But Little Elmley could be up for grabs, I suppose.’ He shrugged philosophically, and smiled at Lloyd. ‘I expect there would be a lot of legal wrangling. I doubt it, to be honest. You’ve got a copy of the will – maybe you can work out exactly who gets what now that this has happened, because I’m damn sure I can’t. This is a situation my father failed to foresee.’

  ‘Then you seem to be a little lacking in the motive department, too,’ said Lloyd. ‘If that is the case. I don’t think we’re going to arrest you, Mr Esterbrook, at least, not for the moment. But the Penhallin police will want to talk to you about Billy, since you and he went diving together. And they will be interested in your revolver, whether or not it was used to kill Billy or anyone else.’

  Comstock had checked the last number called from the phone in the bedroom, and had found himself talking to the scene-of-crime people who were searching Angela Esterbrook’s study in Little Elmley. ‘So that call you found on the answering machine was the last one made from here,’ he said to Lloyd, as they went back downstairs.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Lloyd. ‘I’ll just check the hall phone.’

  Comstock frowned. ‘Won’t that be the same?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Lloyd. ‘It’s the phone itself that records the last number dialled from it, not the line.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Comstock, startled. ‘I never knew that.’

  Lloyd checked the hall phone, to be answered by George Farmer, First Class Butcher, who thought it must have been at least two weeks ago that Mrs Esterbrook had rung him. Wanted to know if he had any pheasant. Partial to a pheasant, was . . .

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lloyd, hurriedly, before he was taken on a gastronomic tour of Mrs Esterbrook, and hung up, hoping that somewhere in Penhallin there was a George Butcher, First Class Farmer. Then he left the local SOCOs to it, and accompanied Josh Esterbrook to Penhallin police station, to which reinforcements had been called in the shape of Chief Inspector Brian Vickers, who knew all about Billy Rampton, apparently.

  Lloyd sighed. Comstock might not be privy to the arcane workings of modern telecommunications, but he had been right; the call to Angela Esterbrook’s answering machine was the last one that had been made from the cottage. And it looked as though it must have been made by whoever shot Billy.

  SCENE XIII – CORNWALL.

  Sunday, September 28th, 3.30 p.m.

  The Police Station in Penhallin.

  Vickers was of much the same low opinion of Billy as Esterbrook, Lloyd discovered, when they retired to an empty office.

  ‘He was what is called ‘‘gay for pay’’,’ Vickers said. ‘I think, to be more accurate, he was anything at all for pay. He was a nasty piece of work who worked out of Plymouth mostly.’

  Where Paul Esterbrook had chosen to stay when he went on his diving weekends, Lloyd thought. More evidence for the prosecution.

  ‘Good riddance, if you ask me,’ said Vickers.

  Lloyd sighed. ‘He was a fifteen-year-old boy,’ he said.

  Vickers shook his head. ‘He was very attractive to look at,’ he said. ‘People who didn’t know him trusted him, but people who did know him were scared of him. He was a sort of turn-of-the-century Pinkie, if you know what I mean. A vicious little crook – not your average fifteen-year-old boy.’

  Lloyd was pleased to hear a reference to literature from a fellow police officer, a rare and unexpected occurrence, but he couldn’t agree with Vickers that Billy’s life could be dismissed like that. It was still murder.

  It turned out that Billy had been seen alive and kicking on Saturday morning in Plymouth, and the medical examiner said that he had been dead for between twenty-four and thirty-six hours, so Josh Esterbrook was in the clear, having been taking a highly visible part in the affairs of the Little Elmley Sub-aqua Club at the time of Rampton’s shooting.

  He was not, however, in the clear about the revolver, which was the weighty matter that had really taken up the time of Penhallin’s finest. In the end, they decided to send details of the firearms offence to the CPS to see if charges should be brought, which puzzled Lloyd a little. It was, after all, a reasonably straightforward offence.

  At last, they were on their way back, and Lloyd settled back in the car, trying to catch up on his sleep. He had a lot of thinking to do, and he’d do it better when he wasn’t tired, because the more straightforward this business seemed to be, the more complex it got.

  For one thing, there were too many clues in that cottage. For another, Elizabeth Esterbrook had accused her husband of the assault on Sandie Esterbrook; Lloyd had used the mobile phone that he really didn’t know how he had managed without to talk to Judy, and had ascertained that this time round she had got a different, equally unlikely story from Sandie to account for her injuries. And attempts to get hold of Foster, Elizabeth Esterbrook’s private detective, had failed; he wasn’t at home, and his house was up for sale. But he still seemed to be working for Mrs Esterbrook, so presumably he would be in his office tomorrow.

  And tonight, Lloyd was going to have a word with young Mrs Esterbrook, and she was going to tell him the truth, if he was there until tomorrow morning.

  SCENE XIV – BARTONSHIRE.

  Sunday, September 28th, 4.00 p.m.

  A Small Terraced House in Stansfield.

  ‘It’s just that . . . well, I used to work with your mum.’

  Lucy was putting his flowers in water as Joe Miller spoke. He had picked them from his own garden; they had come up all by themselves, because he hadn’t so much as looked at the flowerbeds. He had mowed the grass when it had started to grow in the summer, that was all. He didn’t even know what sort of flowers they were; Debbie had done all that until she’d upped and left, taking the kids with her. He didn’t blame her, not really.

  ‘How did you know where I lived?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘Oh, you know. Policemen have their methods.’ Kathy had told him where she lived. But his name had obviously meant nothing to Lucy, so she presumably didn’t know that he’d once been engaged to her mother, and she certainly wouldn’t want to know about their more recent relationship.

  ‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said, taking the vase through to the front room, putting it on the table.

  It wasn’t, not really. He had wanted an excuse to see her, to tell her that he really did need to get all the equipment back that he had bought for Kathy, because he couldn’t afford not to have it back. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t make himself ask her about it. ‘I always think it’s a shame giving flowers to—’ He didn’t know what to say. The deceased? Cop-speak got in the way of normal communication. ‘—you know,’ was the masterly substitute he came up with. ‘It’s the people who are left that need cheering up.’

  ‘It was nice of you to come around. Can I get you something?’

  ‘Oh, no, thanks. I won’t stop. I just . . . well, if you can let me know when the funeral
is. I was a friend of your dad’s really, even though I worked with your mum.’

  She looked surprised; that hurt him. Andy had obviously never mentioned him either.

  SCENE XV – BARTONSHIRE.

  Sunday, September 28th, 6.30 p.m.

  Joe Miller’s House in Barton.

  He got home, and poured himself a drink, put a ready-made meal in the oven, having never been entirely sure of the microwave, and switched on the television. The short Sunday news bulletin was full of the usual depressing things, and then the longer Aquarius TV regional news came on.

  ‘Bartonshire police have today confirmed the rumours that a second fatal shooting has occurred at the Little Elmley estate outside Barton, owned by the wealthy Esterbrook family. They are not at present releasing the name of either victim. In a joint statement with the Devon and Cornwall police, they also confirm that they have not ruled out a possible connection between the Little Elmley shootings and the death from gunshot wounds of a fifteen-year-old Plymouth youth, whose body was discovered this afternoon in Penhallin, Cornwall. Mrs Angela Esterbrook, widow of Paul Esterbrook, founder of Industrial and Medical Gases, is known to have a holiday cottage in the area, but a police spokesman would neither confirm nor deny that this was where the youth’s body was found.’

  The news would have been startling to anyone who had been too wrapped up in his own affairs to have heard about the original shooting, never mind the others, but Joe was staring at the screen, his mouth open.

  The pictures of the Little Elmley estate turned into pictures of a rather different kind of estate in Stansfield, of scene-of-crime officers coming in and out of the masked garage of a semi-detached.

  ‘And in Stansfield, Bartonshire, police say that the investigation is continuing into the mystery of a couple found dead in the garage of their home, and that they have not yet ruled out foul play.’

  Joe sat down with a bump, his hand at his mouth, his eyes wide, his brain barely functioning. Oh, dear God, dear God. What the hell had he got himself mixed up in? What in God’s name had happened?