Murder In Law Page 23
Susan put dirty plates into the dishwasher and wished she were not such a dimwit. The protection officer’s remarks had struck home.
Of course Lesley would ask Rafael what he knew first. I did mess up this afternoon, didn’t I? The officer had been right to point out what I’d done wrong but, well, it still hurt. And though I might have got some things wrong, surely she ought to have discussed it with me, respecting my point of view, instead of dismissing what I said as the chit-chat of a dum-dum? Oh well, I shouldn’t have interfered. Obviously.
Lesley wouldn’t expect me to have anything worthwhile to say. Why should I? I’m just the person who looks after the children while the professionals go about their daily tasks with their heads in the air, not listening to a child who might have something very important to say.
Aargh! Stop being so sorry for yourself, Susan. Sit down and listen to the adults for a change.
Rafael did indeed have something to contribute. ‘Well, first of all, I phoned Ellie and brought her up to speed. She was saddened but not particularly surprised to hear what Diana’s been up to because Ellie knows exactly what her daughter’s like. I half expected her to say I ought to give Diana the benefit of the doubt, but she didn’t. She said that if she had a penny for the times she’s helped her daughter out of trouble, she’d be a very rich woman. I did say I might have an idea of how to help Diana, and Ellie said I shouldn’t go out of my way to do so, because I might get drawn in to something unsavoury. She was concerned about the children until she heard how brilliantly Susan was coping, and she said how pleased she was that we had Coralie to help. Ellie says that Jenny needs watching, but that Evan is a little soldier.’
They all smiled at that. Ellie, as usual, had hit the nail on the head.
Rafael said, ‘I said Susan had got Marcy to put the house in order and asked if she and Thomas were going to fly back early to deal with Diana and her problems and she said she was taking a back seat on this one, and that we were perfectly capable of sorting it out ourselves.’
Lesley looked doubtful. ‘I wish she were here. She sees things so clearly. She understands people better than anyone else I know.’
Susan made a cup of tea all round and offered her aunt some aspirin.
Rafael continued, ‘I wish Ellie were here, too. We’re doing our best, but there’s so much that doesn’t make sense. I spent a considerable amount of time today on the phone at work, researching Cynthia Cottrell’s family business empire. The balance sheets are healthy. They pay dividends to shareholders as and when they should. Gossip says that some of their contracts were obtained through the Old Boy network and others through the system which says, here’s a nice holiday for you in the Maldives in return for a favour. But the only link I can find between Cottrells and Diana is through her agency selling houses at that one site. I’ve put out feelers with various business acquaintances asking for their opinion on the Old Man but didn’t find anything of interest except a general feeling that it was better not to cross him.
‘I went on to see if he could trace Diana’s bolthole. Susan and I did wonder if she might be using one of the top rooms at the hotel next door because it overlooks the back of our house and the garden, but even when I described her to the receptionist there, she denied they’d ever laid eyes on her. I’m not sure that I believed her. The police might have more luck?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Lesley. ‘I still can’t believe she’s gone to ground without leaving us a contact number. What would have happened if the children had been kidnapped this morning and we couldn’t get hold of their mother!’
Susan said, in a quiet voice which they could ignore if they wished, ‘They weren’t after Jenny. Just Evan.’
‘You think so?’ Rafael wasn’t that interested. He produced his smart phone. ‘I researched houses and flats advertised by her agency which have recently been sold at a knock-down price. I came up with two addresses which might be of interest. Both are studio flats, one is in a prestigious development down by the canal and one in a block of flats just off the Avenue. Both were sold to a builder as the buyer moved to a new house in Keith’s company, the Betterment project. Diana handled the sales.
‘Builders do this sometimes: they buy a smaller property that’s not moving in the market, in order to sell a much larger one. Usually the first property goes back on the market but in this case one of them has and the other hasn’t. I wondered if perhaps Diana might be renting one of these studio flats for herself, by special arrangement with the builder. It’s a long shot, but you might like to send someone to check them out?’
Lesley said she was supposed to be off work for the time being, but would pass the tip on in the morning.
And that concluded the business of the day for Lesley and Rafael.
But not for Susan, who nerved herself to speak. She cleared her throat, and the other two looked at her with slight frowns. Did she really want to say something?
She said, ‘It may be nothing. Your officer thinks I’m off my rocker. It seems I’ve been extremely stupid and compromised the evidence, because I don’t understand grown-up police business.’
Lesley patted Susan’s hand. ‘My dear. Why should you?’
‘No. Well. The thing is, I don’t think Evan died because Diana wanted to rescue incriminating papers from their safe. Why should she get someone else to do that, when she had every right to go into the safe at any time to suit herself?’
‘I agree,’ said Lesley. ‘We’ve been over and over this and it doesn’t make sense that Diana organized a break-in. It must be one of the Cottrells who arranged it.’
‘The timings don’t fit,’ said Susan, sticking to her right to be heard. ‘If Keith had been threatened with divorce by Cynthia then yes, he might at some point have realized the papers could give her ammunition and want them back. It might well have come to that but in fact, as of the night Evan died, there was no hint of it being on the cards. So I can see no reason why Keith should stage a break-in.’
‘True,’ said Rafael. ‘It was either Cynthia or her father.’
Susan shook her head. ‘Cynthia only realized that Diana might become a problem when she talked to Evan that evening. I don’t know who instigated the phone call and it really doesn’t matter because although they might have spoken about divorce, neither of them really wanted it. What Cynthia and Evan both wanted was for Diana and Keith to break off their relationship. Cynthia liked keeping Keith around rather like a pet dog, and Evan needed Diana to keep the household and business running. Neither of them knew at that point about the papers. If they had, that might indeed have become an issue. But they didn’t. Cynthia didn’t consult her father about getting rid of Diana till after Evan died.’
Lesley managed a weary smile. ‘Dear Susan. If you get rid of all our suspects, who are we left with?’
SEVENTEEN
Monday evening
‘Who are we left with?’ Susan nerved herself to share her theory. ‘We’re left with someone who had a different motive. Someone we hadn’t considered.
Someone Diana had upset. Someone who knew she kept valuables in the safe but didn’t know where the safe was.’
Rafael frowned. ‘Oh, I see. You mean Marcy, her cleaner?’
Susan said, ‘No, I don’t mean Marcy. It’s true that Diana sacked her so that she didn’t have to pay Marcy her wages, but Marcy is a realist. She was furious with Diana. I would have been, too. But once she’d thought things through, she accepted the status quo and set about getting herself another job straight away, and that has paid off. As of today, instead of being just another cleaner who’s paid by the hour, she’s become a project manager. They’re as rare as hens’ teeth and she can negotiate her own contracts in future.’
‘That’s true,’ said Rafael. ‘If she does a halfway decent job on Ellie’s house, we could use her on trust properties that need to be brought up to scratch between lets. Because we’ve got so many more properties to handle – thanks to Monique’s gift – our c
urrent team is stretched to the limit and we were thinking of employing someone to help out.’
Susan said, ‘We’ve been working on the assumption that the burglary was masterminded by professional people who would have worked out the odds of doing this and that. But it wasn’t like that. It was Amateur Night at the pub and it ended in tears.
‘Look, let’s start out at the beginning, with Diana having a cash flow problem. Her husband was declining into Alzheimer’s and a wheelchair. He was a drain on their family’s finances. The downturn in the economy meant nothing much was happening at the agency. So what did she do? She cut staff wherever she could and pawned a diamond ring belonging to Evan’s family to get some cash. She sacked Marcy, refusing to pay her wages. Finally she got rid of her live-in nanny, although there was another reason for her doing that as well.
‘Now, Marcy didn’t think Diana would have gone to the pawnbrokers herself and I agree, because if someone had spotted her the word would have streaked around all her friends and acquaintances that she was on the skids. Marcy considered who Diana might have asked to go to the pawnshop on her behalf and came up with the name of their gardener, who Marcy described as young and untrustworthy, willing to take chances, not a reliable sort of person.
‘You remember how Diana got rid of Marcy? She accused her of stealing and pawning a valuable ring. Diana tricked Marcy into holding the pawn ticket in her hands for a moment, so as to get her fingerprints on it. We know now how Marcy reacted, and we can discount her as having masterminded the burglary.
‘But the gardener was something else. He’d done a sneaky job by taking the ring to the pawnbrokers for Diana. Did she pay him an agreed fee for taking the ring to the pawnbrokers? If she ran true to form, she didn’t. Now the young man described to me would not have taken this lying down. He’s not like Marcy, able to calculate the odds, draw a line under an unpleasant experience and get on with life. No. He’d have gone spare. Diana chose the wrong man to upset. I’ve seen the lad – he’s called Cal, by the way – and I agree with Marcy’s assessment of him. He’s a no-hoper with poor education. And he smokes cannabis, which means he’s always going to be short of money.’
Lesley concentrated, with an effort. ‘It’s true that lads excluded from school tend to drift into gangs where drugs are readily available, even if they’re not dealing themselves. Yes, some of them do get odd jobs, nothing too onerous, just enough to keep them supplied with their drug of choice.’
‘Exactly,’ said Susan. ‘Let’s look at it from this Cal’s point of view. He’s been cheated of his due by a lady who lives in a big house, runs an expensive car and operates what appears to be a thriving estate agency. He himself is most likely living in sub-standard accommodation, probably in a block of council flats, eking out some sort of living as a gardener, paid by the hour, and with a habit of smoking weed which has to be paid for.’
Lesley got out her notebook. ‘Cal … what? We’ll check him out.’
‘I don’t know what his surname is or where he lives, but he’s turning up here tomorrow morning at eight and you can arrest him then.’
‘What for?’ Lesley made a stab at taking Susan seriously.
‘Well, for conspiracy to burgle? That would do for a start.’
‘What! But there were three of them.’
Susan was eager to share her thoughts. ‘Don’t you think Cal would know some more youngsters as stupid as himself? They meet at the pub and at football games. They hang around street corners together, chatting up girls. They spend time in games arcades. They’re on the fringe of real crime, paying for some weed here, nicking the odd mobile phone there. I think it would have been easy for Cal to find a couple of like-minded lads to help him burgle the house of someone he had a grudge against.
‘They were amateurs. It was a messy, badly thought-out plan probably hatched in a pub over a few drinks. A couple of Cal’s friends would start off by sympathizing with him for having been so badly treated. One of them would say that it shouldn’t be allowed, and another would follow that up by saying someone ought to teach her a lesson. From there they’d float the idea that it would be a lark to break into Diana’s house and nick something to pay her back for her bad behaviour. They thought the house would be an easy target what with Evan being an invalid and all.
‘Diana must have mentioned getting the ring out of the safe. He assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that it would be in the front room. He recruited a couple of like-minded idiots, one of whom would act as lookout while he and his mate found the safe and forced it open, or lifted whatever small valuables they could lay their hands on to sell.’
Lesley tried to nod and then held on to her head. That hurt. ‘The boy whose DNA we found on the scene – the one who ended up dead on Saturday night – was as you describe, a hanger-on. A no-hoper. Left school without taking any exams. Never had a job, lived on the fringe of crime. He was known to have acted as a runner for drugs, yes. He’s on record for having acted as look-out for a couple of break-ins from shops, but nothing heavy. At the moment we’re trying to trace his associates. If we find that he was at school with our gardener, then certainly we can look into that connection.’
Susan felt a flicker of pleasure. Perhaps she hadn’t got everything wrong, after all. ‘I think the three of them set out on what had meant to be a walk in the park until it turned, shockingly, into murder. Evan woke up, tackled them, they fought back and he died. I imagine the would-be burglars were shattered by what had happened. I don’t know which of them carried a knife but I’m sure they didn’t intend to kill anyone. Once Evan was down and injured, they fled without having got into the safe or stopping to nick anything else. They’d have been horrified to discover the next day that Evan had died of his wounds.
‘I think Cal and the second, unidentified conspirator, met up to compare notes the next day. They’d reassure one another that there was nothing to link them to the burglary except, possibly, their lookout boy. And we know he was dealt with on Saturday. Oh, and there was one other who might be a threat to them.’
Rafael followed this line of thought up. ‘They’d known Lookout Boy for ever. They’d know he’d been in trouble before and that his prints were on file. They’d know he couldn’t be relied on to keep his mouth shut if the police started to make enquiries. So they dealt with him?’
Lesley said, ‘Evan’s death could be put down as manslaughter. Killing Lookout Boy was murder.’
Susan shuddered. ‘Poor lad. He didn’t stand much of a chance, did he? I wonder if he even knew why he was killed.’
Lesley said, ‘All right, Susan. Who’s the other person who might have been able to betray them? You think it’s Lucia? But I could have sworn she hadn’t a clue about that, or about anything else, come to think of it.’
Susan said, ‘I think she helped Cal without realizing it. Let’s look at her life as a nanny. She was young and lonely, stupid and available. He was young and reasonably good looking. He would go into the kitchen for a cuppa when he was on his break. She would arrange to be there on some excuse. Using the washing machines, perhaps? There wasn’t one upstairs. She’d have the children with her. Both Evan and Jenny knew him by sight. Lucia probably had romantic dreams about him.’
Lesley sniffed. ‘What, Gormless Lucia meets the gardener and falls in lurv?’
‘We know she covered for him. He smoked sweet-smelling cigarettes, and we know that Lucia would open the windows and doors when he’d gone, so that Diana – who hated anyone smoking in the house – wouldn’t know. Yes, of course she would gossip to him about what Evan and Diana were up to. He knew their timetable, when the children were out and when Marcy was around. But Marcy wasn’t there at weekends. I can see him chatting her up and arranging to meet him when she was off duty of an evening. She might have hoped for more, but I don’t think she’d have got it.’
Susan said, ‘Marcy told me he’d already got too young girls up the duff. Has anyone checked to see if Lucia’s pregnant?’
‘Remember that on the day Evan died and Diana threw her out, Lucia kept on about a friend who lived in Acton. She said she’d tried to contact him or her but failed to do so and she’d been left walking the streets till we rescued her. I think it was Cal that she was trying to contact, but he was in panic mode that day on discovering that Evan had died, and he refused to accept her calls. It was only later, after he’d calmed down, that he began to take her calls again. After that, as we know to our cost, every time Lucia came off her phone from someone, she got more and more stroppy, demanding this and that. Transport back home, four-star hotel accommodation, money, and so on. Conclusion: he was egging her on to make some money out of the situation.’
Lesley said, ‘She could have had other friends. We’re asking at the abbey if anyone recognized her. Someone might be able to point us in the right direction.’
Susan said, ‘He doesn’t strike me as the type to go to Mass, but if she was in any sort of relationship with him, she’d want to keep in touch, and he’d want to meet her to find out how far the police had got with Evan’s murder.’
Rafael was frowning. ‘Granted, she’s no great brain. But surely when Lookout Boy was killed, wouldn’t it occur to her that Cal might have had something to do with his death?’
‘Why should it? She didn’t recognize him when Lesley showed her his photograph. If she’d never seen him with any of his friends, she wouldn’t have any idea there was a connection. I think Cal invited her to meet him on Sunday and she agreed, probably expecting a kiss and a cuddle. Some girls think that’s the way they pay for the attentions of a man. I think Cal was seeing shadows where there were none.
‘He hadn’t meant Evan to die, but die he had. That Saturday night he’d dealt with Lookout Boy. Maybe he’d acted alone, maybe with the friend who’d made a third at the burglary. Perhaps his guilty conscience told him Lucia would soon begin to suspect him, or perhaps even she had begun to put two and two together. So he tried to wipe her out. He scarpered with her handbag to delay identification and so that he could sell her mobile phone and, if she’d taken it with her, her passport as well. Inefficient as ever, he left her alive and at some point she should be able to talk.’