Scene of Crime Page 9

  “So this row was bad enough for you to feel obliged to cool off?”

  “It wasn’t a row,” Carl repeated. “And I didn’t have to cool off, as you put it. Estelle was—well, she was a very difficult woman to live with. She had mood swings and depressions, she was a hypochondriac, she—” He broke off. “Well—she was difficult. And tonight something happened that—that gave me a great deal to think about. That’s all.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Carl. “I really don’t think it’s any of your business. It wasn’t a row, and if the neighbors overheard people having a row, I can assure you it wasn’t me and Estelle.”

  “No,” said Lloyd. “Obviously not. The sounds they heard were at a few minutes after eight. So it couldn’t have been you, could it? Not if you left at half past seven.”

  “I did leave at half past seven!” Carl said, his voice rising with indignation. Lloyd had been like this all evening; he was tired of not being believed.

  “Please, Dr. Bignall, don’t let these questions distress you. They must be asked, that’s all. It’s my job—I have to investigate what happened to your wife.”

  “Isn’t it obvious what happened?”

  “It’s just the altercation that’s bothering me, Dr. Bignall. The one the neighbors did hear.”

  “And you think it was Estelle and me, don’t you?”

  Lloyd shook his head. “It’s a little puzzle, Dr. Bignall. And I like to get them cleared up as soon as I can.”

  Which meant he did think that it had been him and Estelle. Carl’s head was spinning. This wasn’t happening to him. He hadn’t the faintest idea what had gone on at his house tonight, or who had been having this row the neighbors had heard. But every time he told the man the God’s honest truth, he didn’t believe him. He was very glad when they pulled up outside Denis Leeward’s house and Lloyd wished him good night.

  Eric had watched the last car make its way down the street, had waited until he was absolutely sure that no new cops were going to turn up, and now he went out to the landing, released the catch on the ceiling molding, and let down the ladder, climbing up a few steps to look in at the three men who were playing cards.

  “Right,” he said. “They’ve gone. You can leave now.”

  “Hang on,” said one of the men. “I’m going to win this hand.”

  “I said you can leave. Now.”

  The other two were keener to leave; they picked up jackets and money while the other still complained. Eric stood at the bottom of the ladder as they emerged, then led them downstairs, through the house to the kitchen. “Keep the noise down,” he said as he opened the door and they trooped into the garage in which their car sat next to his own. A moment later their car left his premises; he closed and locked the garage doors and went back into the kitchen. Bloody woman. What with one thing and another, he hadn’t done half what he had meant to do tonight.

  And he was going to have to move everything from up there and get it somewhere safe, just in case.

  “Hi,” said Judy as Lloyd bent down and kissed her head. “How’s it going?”

  Lloyd had sort of moved in. Judy knew what he was doing; if they didn’t find a house they could both agree on, he would by then have established that they lived in her flat, which was actually big enough for a couple with a baby. And, when she thought about it, it might not be a bad idea. Lloyd was still going on about gardens and things, but he’d never look after a garden, and she certainly wouldn’t. There was the park just a quarter of a mile away, and she hadn’t had a garden when she was growing up; she lived in a flat supplied by the university where her father lectured. She didn’t think it had ever done her any harm. But she supposed that other people were the best judges of that.

  “How we’re getting on rather depends on how you look at it,” said Lloyd, sitting down beside her on the sofa. “There’s evidence to suggest that two people broke into an apparently empty house, and the lookout ran away while the other helped himself to the presents under the tree and a couple of other items. Mrs. Bignall heard the window break and came down to investigate, was overpowered, bound and gagged, and forced into the kitchen.”

  “Why the kitchen?”

  “That’s a little puzzle.”

  “And why was she bound and gagged at all?”

  “That’s another. And they’re your department.”

  “Not my job anymore,” she said, but she applied herself to that one anyway. There seemed little point in tying someone up and gagging them if you were only going to take a handful of Christmas presents. “Could the motive have been sexual?” she asked.

  “That’s what I thought, but Freddie says there are no signs of it. He’s not happy that she died as a result of being gagged, though.” Lloyd sat back. “How well do you know Carl Bignall?” he asked.

  So, he had come to the same conclusion as Marianne, without knowing the background. “Why do you ask?” she said.

  “Well, there’s another little puzzle.” He told her about the disturbance that had been heard at ten past eight. “Carl Bignall says he and his wife had words of some sort, but that he left the house at half past seven. It takes twenty minutes to get from his house to the Riverside Center, and you know when he got to the rehearsal.”

  “So there are forty-five minutes unaccounted for? Where was he?”

  “He says he was driving around to sort himself out, whatever that means. How many times have we heard the driving round alibi in our careers? And how often has it been true?”

  Judy told him then what Marianne had said. “She gave me the name of Estelle’s lawyer, so you could check that what she told me is right,” she said.

  “Interesting,” said Lloyd. “What’s your impression of him?”

  “He’s on the committee, so I see him once a month,” said Judy. “And lately when I’ve been helping out I’ve seen him every week. He’s always exactly like he was last night. Bright and breezy and jokey. But I don’t know him any better now than I did when I first met him.”

  “So you can’t offer an opinion on the likelihood of his doing away with his wife?”

  “Not really. But you might want to ask Freddie to test for drugs in her system.”

  Lloyd frowned. “Do you think she was a drug user?”

  That hadn’t occurred to her. “Maybe,” she said. “But that wasn’t what I meant, really. It’s just that Marianne said Estelle changed after she got married, and was subject to unexplained illnesses. Marianne thinks they were imaginary, but …”

  “Perhaps they weren’t,” he finished, yawned, and sat back, his eyes closed.

  “And Marianne saw Estelle today,” Judy said. “She says she was perfectly all right—no sniffles.”

  “Freddie was surprised she was supposed to have a cold,” said Lloyd.

  “So perhaps he was preparing the way for her having suffocated,” said Judy.

  “Perhaps,” said Lloyd. “Or perhaps it was just someone who broke in. Freddie wasn’t exactly definite about her having died some other way, and someone was seen running away, after all.”

  “Who saw him?”

  “He was seen by one Mr. Jones, whom Tom has down as a racist, and apparently not seen by one Mr. Watson, whom Tom has down as a liar.”

  “Why does Tom think Mr. Jones is a racist?”

  “Because the boy he saw running away was black, and every time Tom asked him to describe him, that was all he said. It irritated him.” He grinned. “But then everything’s irritating him since he got his hair cut.”

  “It’s awful, isn’t it?” said Judy. “He looks like Hitler Youth or something. At least he’s not behaving like it, obviously.” Then she felt a little shiver as she realized what Lloyd had actually said about the lookout. “How old was this boy?” she asked.

  “Early teens, maybe younger.”

  She hoped she was wrong, but she couldn’t not tell him. “Dexter’s black,” she said.

  Lloyd’s eyes opened. “If
Jones is a racist, I don’t know what category Tom would have you in,” he said. “I take it you’re not putting him forward because he’s in possession of a black skin?”

  She made a face. “His mother called to ask if he was at the rehearsal,” she said. “After you and Carl left. So he wasn’t at home with the flu, was he? And his mother obviously didn’t know where he was.”

  “Even so,” said Lloyd. “Aren’t you jumping to conclusions just a tiny bit?”

  “Not really,” sighed Judy. “He would have expected the Bignalls’ house to be empty, and Dexter Gibson’s half brother is Ryan Chester.”

  Now Lloyd sat up. Literally. “Ryan Chester? Would that be burglar, car thief, too-clever-by-half, slippery-as-an-eel, more-trouble-than-a-barrel-load-of-monkeys Ryan Chester?”

  “It might just be a coincidence,” she warned.

  “Has Dexter got a record?”

  “No. He’s never been in trouble.”

  “Well,” said Lloyd, “it looks like he is now. Because the Bignalls’ cleaning lady is a Mrs. Gibson. I didn’t make the connection—I’d forgotten that was Ryan’s mother’s name.”

  Judy had hoped that she was wrong. Dexter was a nice boy, and so—in his way—was Ryan. She couldn’t really see him doing something like this, certainly not for what had actually been taken. Of course, he might not think that tying someone up would do them any harm, and maybe he had intended taking a great deal more and panicked when he realized she was dead. And there was no maybe about his record; he was a burglar and a car thief, and all the other things Lloyd had said. Dexter thought the world of him, so he might have become apprenticed in the trade.

  “It all begins to fall into place, doesn’t it?” said Lloyd. “Dexter lets slip that the Bignalls’ house is empty every Monday night, and it’s too much temptation for Ryan. He persuades Dexter to go with him and act as lookout, maybe to make certain he doesn’t blow the whistle on him, because it’s reasonable to suppose that the lookout’s heart wasn’t in it, since he seems to have taken off the minute they gained entry.”

  Judy could see Lloyd moving into full-theory mode.

  “Meanwhile, inside the house Mrs. Bignall comes down when she hears the breaking glass. Ryan trusses her up in the kitchen and carries on. What he doesn’t know is that Mrs. Bignall has a cold and can’t breathe.”

  “It seems a very strange thing for Ryan to have—” Judy began, but Lloyd wasn’t listening.

  “And Dexter’s voice hasn’t broken!” he said triumphantly. “So if he did get cold feet, and Ryan got angry—they would have an argument. In Bignall’s garden. Before Ryan broke in. And Jones could easily think it was a man and a woman.”

  “Question,” said Judy. “Why would Ryan call his brother a fucking bitch?”

  “Ah,” said Lloyd. “All right—the argument is still a puzzle. But the rest of it’s okay, isn’t it?”

  “I can’t see why the intruders wanted to tie Mrs. Bignall up if they were only going to take a few items,” she said. “And, for what it’s worth, I can’t see Ryan tying someone up at all. Gagging them. If he was ever surprised by a homeowner, he might knock them over so he could get away from them, but that was all.”

  Lloyd smiled. “I’ll forgive your truly appalling grammar,” he said, “for solving this case so exceptionally speedily. I think we can forget Carl Bignall. Sometimes things really are just the way they seem.”

  “It’s still all pure theory,” she argued. “We don’t even know that it’s the same Mrs. Gibson. And even if it is, you can hardly go steaming in on the basis that a black boy whose description you don’t even have was seen running away, and Dex didn’t turn up for rehearsal.”

  “We’ll need a touch more evidence than that,” Lloyd agreed. “But I think it’ll be forthcoming. Because unless Ryan Chester has changed his M.O. radically since I last had anything to do with him, he’ll have tried to sell some of that stuff tonight. And I’ve got Tom on that.”

  Jimmy’s nicotine-stained fingernail rasped over a three-day growth as he perused the list. “Aw, come on, Mr. Finch!” he said, looking up. “CD ROMs? Personal organizers? This sort of stuff’s being offert roon’ every night! Ye cannae tell where it came frae just by lookin’ at it.”

  Tom smiled. “You find out where it came from, and if it’s from a burglary that took place tonight, you tell me.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re a stool pigeon, Jimmy. A grass. That is your job.”

  “Jimmy” was the inevitable name his informant had been given when he had arrived in Malworth. Despite living just ten miles from cosmopolitan Stansfield, which had become a home away from home for many nationalities and the Scots in particular, the citizens of Malworth still found the Scottish accent exotic and impenetrable, and the Scots themselves alarming. Calling them all Jimmy was their way of coping with that.

  “No’ sae loud, Mr. Finch!” Jimmy used his hands to reinforce his request, like a conductor during a quiet passage. “Ah’d no’ be much use tae ye wi’ ma heid bashed in.”

  Tom smiled again. “Jimmy, we’re sitting on a damp bench on a bridge over a river in a very well-bred part of Malworth in the wee small hours. There isn’t another person up and about for miles.”

  In the pool of light created by the fake Victorian gaslight, Jimmy looked around as though expecting mafiosi to loom out of the murky middle-class night at him, violin cases at the ready. “A’ the same,” he said, “ye cannae be too careful in ma position.” He waved a dismissive hand at the list. “And that stuff’s no’ worth runnin’ a risk fur. Ah’ll tell ye that fur naethin’.”

  “It’s worth more than you think. There’s good money in it for you.”

  Jimmy pulled cigarettes and a throwaway lighter from his pocket and reconsidered. “How much?” he asked.

  “That depends on what you give me. If you get offered any of this stuff—or see it being offered—I want to know. And I don’t want some half-baked story. I want to know who’s selling it and where I can get hold of him. Quickly. Got it?”

  Jimmy looked at the list again, frowning, absently putting a cigarette in his mouth. “Whit’s sae special aboot this lot?”

  Tom wasn’t about to tell him. Jimmy was no hero—if he thought he might be dealing with someone who had killed, however inadvertently, he would be off like a shot. “Mind your own business,” Tom said. “Just do the rounds of the pubs and clubs and report back to me. Ring me. Whenever. I don’t care if it’s five o’clock in the morning.”

  “Why are you gettin’ yersel’ in a state aboot computer games and videos?” Jimmy spoke with the unlit cigarette between his lips. “Is it wan o’ your pal’s hooses that’s been turned over?” He grinned. “Is it yer ain hoose?”

  “Which part of ‘mind your own business’ are you having trouble with?”

  “Is it like in the films?” said Jimmy, ignoring him. “This wee cat—is it stuffed fu’ o’ H or coke or somethin’?”

  “Very funny, Jimmy. Just try and find it. It’s hardly the sort of thing that’s being offered round every night, is it?”

  “Aye, aw right, Mr. Finch. Leave it wi’ me.” Jimmy removed the cigarette and grinned, showing crooked teeth. “Ah’ll get back to you, as they say.”

  Tom got up and walked toward his car, opening the driver’s door and looking back as Jimmy’s face was lit up by the lighter flame.

  “Oh, here, hang on a minute,” Jimmy said, expelling smoke with the words. “Jade’s green, is it no’?”

  “It is.”

  “Big Baz was gaun on aboot a green cat. Ah thought it was wan o’ thae cuddly toys, but maybe it wisnae.”

  “Baz Martin?” Tom closed the car door and went back to where Jimmy sat.

  “Aye. A pal o’ his sold it tae somebody in the Starland. Big Baz couldnae get over it, because the guy didnae want a green cat, but he bought it anyway. Said his pal could sell condoms to nuns. Said it aboot five times—he thought it got funnier the mair he said it. Ah telt
him it wisnae funny in the first place, but that didnae stoap him.” He took a drag and looked up at Tom. “But, aye, it was a green cat he was on aboot, right enough.”

  Ryan Chester was the pal, presumably. It had to be—Baz didn’t work with anyone else but his smarter cousin Ryan. No one else would have him. “So where can I find Baz now?” Tom asked.

  “He’ll still be in there. He was tryin’ to get aff wi’ some bird.” Jimmy looked expectantly at Tom. “So, Mr. Finch. Whit’s that worth tae ye?”

  “I don’t know yet, do I?”

  “Aw, Mr. Finch!”

  “Don’t worry, Jimmy,” said Tom as he went back to the car. “If your information’s sound, I’ll pay out. Even though the risk to your health is what you might call minimal.” Ryan and Baz were not about to leave Jimmy battered on the pavement.

  “Ye’d better.” Jimmy got up. “Oh—and Mr. Finch?”

  “Yeah?”

  Jimmy held up a greasy lock of his own hair and shook his head. “The barnet does naethin’ fur ye.”

  Ten minutes later Tom pulled up in the empty taxi stand outside the Starland nightclub and winced as he walked into the smoky, laser-lit depths and the music assaulted his ears. He must be getting old; he used to like this sort of thing. Now he found himself automatically checking for iffy substances being peddled, and tutting under his breath at the way the girls dressed, at the overt sexual overtures being made by both sexes to both sexes, not necessarily in the conventional configuration.

  And he couldn’t help worrying about his own children, not that much younger than some of these girls, whatever the club policy was supposed to be, and how soon they would be exposed to this. Sex, drugs, and—well, whatever that music was. Not rock and roll, that was for sure. And not glam rock or punk or anything he could put a name to. This stuff would have some silly name that made it sound more like an estate agent’s brochure than music. Garage, house—something like that. He didn’t understand pop music anymore, and he had always sworn he would never get like that.