Stone Dead Page 11

  ‘So it was never used in the underfloor hideaway?’

  ‘Not in my time.’

  ‘And later?’

  He shook his head.

  As they were walking to where the cars were parked, Dolly took Charmian’s arm and drew her aside.

  ‘This list of old chums that Charley Briggs is going to come up with, they would all be middle-aged to old men by now. You know that the profile of our killer I have put together is of a man probably not much older than thirty-five, unmarried and living on his own or still with his mother. I don’t see any of Charley’s friends fitting that bill.’

  ‘Oh that’s just the A list. Get it from him and let one of the team check it through, but then you’ll get the B list from him, because there will be one. The younger lads about whom he knows or suspects something. Our man may be there, perhaps he will come up with Joe Davy, our beloved Horseman.’

  ‘Might be a woman,’ muttered Dolly.

  ‘We’ll talk about that later.’

  They had come in three cars, they left in three cars. As the procession moved along the road and then at the junction split away, each on its homeward path, the phone rang on the seat beside Charmian.

  She picked it up, and listened. Then she said: ‘Tell Superintendent Hallows at once. I will come straight round now. Is she there, with you? Good. Ask her to wait for me.’

  She turned the car at the next junction, heading back to her office. Should she ring her husband first? Then she remembered that he was away, but still, she owed him a call. He knew she was involved in the case of the missing women and he had asked to be kept in touch. Nothing she shouldn’t pass on, of course, nothing that was confidential to the police records, but to tell him what she could. He thought he might have an idea.

  Don’t believe it, Humphrey, she said to herself. Police work, especially on this sort of case, is not a question of having ideas, using your imagination, but grind, matching one fact against another: a jigsaw.

  Anyhow at nearly midnight, speeding towards a witness, was not the right time to ring. Tell him about Charley and the schoolboys tomorrow.

  As the thought formed, her own phone rang again.

  ‘Hello,’ said Hallows, his voice alive and eager. They were moving forward now, he knew it. He had that feeling he always got when the logjam shifted. ‘You’ve heard? Just the call. She identified the body. I’m on my way.’

  He had not considered phoning his wife; he was not even sure which country she was in. Maybe South Africa still?

  Dolly Barstow did not get a telephone call and was going to be the last to hear that the woman in the stone coffin had been given a name.

  Tiger Yardley had reluctantly given up his sovereignty of the van-cum-Incident Room now that a bigger Incident Room had been set up in the Porterhouse substation. Tiger was still in his van during the day because the house and the garden were still being studied by forensic teams. Piles of books, from shelves once so lovingly arranged by Birdie and Winifred, now stood about on what remained of the floor. The boards were up for a broad stretch down the centre of the room, shoving aside the round centre table.

  The van outside in the road was quiet, although a light still shone, but the man on duty was DC Arten, newish and young. He was taking his turn.

  Late as it was, there was light, life and activity in the Porterhouse Incident Room. This increased as Charmian and Hallows swept in.

  There was a smaller room, used for interviews, and it was towards this that the two of them walked. The door was open so they could see inside. The man in charge of the Incident Room that night was Inspector Danny James, a keen young officer with a degree in law. He was standing up, talking on the telephone. Sitting in a chair with her eyes closed was a young woman. On another next to her was a uniformed woman officer.

  The Incident Room was manned but less so than during the day, now it had quietened down for the night. Or it had till the arrival of the young woman from Bredon.

  ‘Yes, John, she’s from Bredon, one of yours. She’s made a positive identification … Yes, see you.’

  He looked up, saw Charmian and Hallows, and promptly put the telephone down. ‘Just speaking to Inspecter Deast. He’s on his way.’

  The young woman opened her eyes, blue and large and full of trouble. ‘Wasn’t asleep. Just thinking.’

  ‘This is Ellen Winner, Ellen, this is Chief Superintendent Daniels and Superintendent Hallows.’

  Ellen Winner stood up. She was a tall, slender young woman with a fall of fair hair, her skin was lightly sun-tanned. She was wearing a short cotton skirt with a white shirt. Although she was clearly tired, distressed and a little dishevelled, she looked very attractive. She also looked like the sort of woman who would, normally, be calm and in charge.

  But the time was not normal.

  Charmian found something familiar about her, as if they had met somewhere, and not so long ago, either. Recognition came suddenly. Of course, she was reminded of the corpse in the stone coffin. There was the shape of the body, the colour of the hair, in this girl, unmistakably bearing a family resemblance. The dead woman might not have looked so much like her sister when she was alive, but dead, you couldn’t miss the resemblance.

  ‘Miss Winner was able to identify her sister,’ said Inspector James softly.

  The policewoman stretched out her hand and put it protectively on Ellen Winner’s forearm.

  Ellen did not shake it off. ‘It’s all right, I’m quite calm.’

  It was a controlled calm, on the surface; underneath there was a sea of emotion. Charmian nodded, trying to show her sympathy without making a meal of it. The girl would split down the middle if she wasn’t treated with care.

  ‘It was tough for you seeing your sister.’

  ‘Twin sister.’ She turned her head away. ‘ We’re twins.’

  I didn’t get that quite right, thought Charmian. Not just a sister but half the same ovum. Identical twins …

  Inspector Deast slid into the room having made the journey from Bredon in record time. He nodded at Charmian, and sat back as an observer, leaving the interview to her. Reserving the right to speak up when he so wanted.

  Ellen hardly took in his arrival, she was searching blindly for a handkerchief from her sleeve, reaching for it with her left hand.

  Charmian saw that the handkerchief was to deal with tears which were now streaming down her face, uncontrolled, like blood from a wound. The tears were falling on the floor.

  ‘I thought she would come back. When she first went missing, I thought nothing of it. She’d gone off before, she did, you know, stay away from home for a little, then come back. I always looked after the child, we both love her.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘At home with a friend, she’ll be all right. But I will have to tell her soon, or she’ll hear in a way that wouldn’t be right … I took her on a camping holiday when the handkerchief was sent to the police. I heard about the body you had found when I got back … we didn’t look at papers, Rachel and I, she can read, she’s very clever. Six years old …’

  The tears were heavier; she was making no attempt to stop them, she could no longer speak through them. The policewoman looked at Charmian.

  Charmian shook her head. ‘Leave her to cry.’

  Ellen wiped her eyes clean, almost against her will. The tears were drying. ‘I never believed she was dead, all the time, I thought she was alive. We were close, I used to know what she was thinking. How could she be dead without me knowing? How could she be dead, if I wasn’t?’

  Hallows said in a voice which sounded preternaturally loud to him: ‘We’ll get him, I promise. We’ll get the killer.’

  For the first time, Ellen looked at him, really looked. ‘Him?’ she said slowly.

  Charmian leaned forward: ‘What do you mean?’

  Ellen was quiet, then she said: ‘I sense a woman. I think there was a woman.’

  Her eyes closed. She was silent, then she began to breathe heavily
. ‘I don’t like this.’

  Hallows moved forward.

  ‘Leave her be,’ said Charmian. After a while, she said gently: ‘Ellen, what is it?’

  Ellen opened her eyes, she took a deep breath and started to speak. ‘Hail horrors, hail … The mind is its own place, and in itself …’ She didn’t go on.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s a quotation.’

  ‘I know that. Milton.’

  ‘Paradise Lost, well that’s true enough. My paradise has gone. Don’t worry, I’m not going mad. I teach English at Tadcasters, poetry comes easily to me.’

  Tadcasters was the expensive girls’ school on the outskirts of the town. You need a great deal of money and some social standing to attend Tads – as the alumni called it. There was a good deal of coming and going between Tadcasters and Eton, which was down the road from it.

  ‘We didn’t live each other’s lives, Daisy was an actress. Did drama school, the lot. I didn’t want to act unless you count reading poetry aloud. But our minds were alike, and sometimes we communicated without words. Even at a distance, we knew it happened, but we didn’t dwell on it. For us it was normal.’

  ‘I know twins can be like that.’

  ‘Don’t get us wrong, we were normal … but a bit symbiotic, or do I mean sympathetic?’

  Hallows shifted on his chair. Charmian murmured to him: ‘Let her get on with it. I want to hear her talk.’

  ‘I mean we didn’t dress identically … there were twins at college who did dress the same and it meant a lot to them, if they met and they didn’t match, then one would go back and change. Daisy and I were not like that, I promise you, we wanted to be different, although I must admit that sometimes when we met by chance we would be wearing identical clothes.’

  Charmian could almost hear Hallows muttering: Make her say what she meant about it ‘being a woman’. If you think I am interested in this …

  ‘So when I didn’t get any flashes of pain, fear, despair … I thought that Daisy was all right, off on her own, I was annoyed because she had left her daughter with me.’

  ‘Didn’t the handkerchief turning up alarm you?’

  ‘It did, of course, that’s why I took the kid off for a country trip, to be out of it, but even then I still didn’t have any feeling of real harm to Daisy.’ She gave a half smile. ‘No flashes of pain, screaming, death.’

  Charmian smiled, without speaking, and gave an encouraging nod. Anything else and she sensed that Ellen would blow up.

  ‘But just now, when you spoke of the killer as a man … I had a sense of a woman being there.’

  ‘Couldn’t see what she looked like, could you?’ asked the sceptical voice of Hallows. ‘Be a help.’

  Ellen looked at him blankly. ‘Hands,’ she said, ‘gloves.’

  ‘Like?’ prompted Hallows, a man determined to get something.

  ‘Can’t see,’ said Ellen, ‘just feel. Hands wearing gloves.’

  And what makes them the hands of a woman?’ Ellen frowned. ‘Look, I’m telling you what I feel … don’t be snarky.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Hallows. ‘Just being a copper, it’s my job. I have to ask questions.’

  Ellen closed her eyes. ‘All right. I’m trying to remember … it was just a flash, you see. There, then gone … The hands wore gloves … silky feel. Men don’t wear silk gloves.’

  Charmian said: ‘A witness who might have been in contact with the killer noticed the hands.’

  Had Birdie mentioned gloves, silk gloves? No, but she had talked about the large scarred hands of the woman in the car who had tried to draw her in.

  It might be a good idea to talk to Birdie again. She ought to be questioned again in any case, because she was in the case somewhere. Bad thought, but true. Charmian felt uncomfortable.

  Had Birdie invented her story of the woman in the car because she herself had been the woman in a car? Not then, but some other time?

  ‘Can’t believe it,’ she muttered to herself, turning away from Ellen and Superintendent Hallows while hoping they could not read her mind.

  It was hard to think of Birdie as a killer.

  Equally hard to think of the Horseman in silk gloves.

  Alas, Ellen’s communing with her dead twin was not helping. Definitely it was keep your feet on the ground time, Charmian.

  In pursuit of this sensible aim, she turned to Ellen, meaning to thank her and end the interview.

  But Ellen had something else to say.

  ‘Daisy was missing for some time because the first few days, I didn’t know she was missing. Rachel was with me and we weren’t in touch.’

  ‘Three and a half weeks is about right.’ The police had checked with her landlady and the family in the house next door. Daisy had lived, with her daughter, who by all accounts spent more time with her aunt, as her father was absent. The house was where an island of Bredon ran down towards the Cheasey side of Windsor, not so far from Charmian’s SRADIC headquarters, in a street called Narrow.

  ‘But she hadn’t been dead very long when her body was found?’

  Charmian evaded a direct answer. ‘We are waiting for the pathologist’s final report.’

  ‘I could tell by looking,’ said Ellen harshly. ‘So, there is this gap. So where was she?’

  It was clearly a rhetorical question needing no answer but Charmian did answer it: ‘If we knew that, we’d know a hell of lot we’d like to know.’

  ‘She was held. She was in some sort of prison. Probably in the killer’s home. But she didn’t mind it too much or she would have pushed the feeling across to me … She was held, but it wasn’t worrying her.’ She looked at Charmian: ‘Think about that now.’

  Charmian was thinking about it. ‘Is there anything else? Anything your sister might have said? Any episode worth talking about?’

  Ellen shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, we didn’t meet much, we spoke on the telephone.’

  ‘Nothing?’ They were dredging and Charmian knew it.

  Ellen took a deep breath. ‘She did laugh at someone who had asked her to do some shopping. As she said to me: “Anyone who would ask me to shop for them must be mad.” Not something she was good at.’

  ‘Man or woman?’

  Now Ellen did manage a laugh: ‘It would have to be either a very old crippled man or a woman who couldn’t walk. Anyone else, she would have sent in to do Daisy’s shopping.’

  ‘Did she know this person?’

  ‘Might have done. Yes, maybe.’ Ellen tried to gather her thoughts. ‘Look, Daisy knew masses of people. While trying to get stage parts, she had worked as a temp, the Massy Agency in Peascod Street, she went here, there and everywhere. Even worked for your lot.’ She stopped, exhausted.

  Hell, a copper as the killer, that we don’t want, thought Charmian. ‘Thank you, you’ve been very helpful. One last question, Miss Winner … the clothes that your sister was wearing when she was found … you saw them?’

  ‘Yes, I was shown them.’

  ‘Did you recognize them as your sister’s clothes?’

  ‘Those old rags? Daisy would never have worn them in a million years.’

  ‘I thought you’d say that,’ said Charmian. She stood up. ‘You must be tired, Miss Winner. We will get you a car to take you home.’ She nodded to Inspector James.

  ‘I’ll see to it, ma’am.’

  Then Charmian turned to Inspector Deast who stood up. ‘Yes. Miss Winner, I am involved in this investigation too. I would like to talk to you tomorrow.’

  Hallows was getting ready to leave. He looked tired too, more tired that Ellen Winner. ‘See you tomorrow,’ Charmian said to him quickly. ‘ We must meet and talk all this over.’

  She watched the tall, slender, fair-haired figure of Ellen Winner walk away. She felt she was also looking at Daisy. Ellen walked with an easy, confident stride. She looked like a young woman who knew her own mind. So must Daisy have looked. It was painful to remember what she had come to.

>   But Ellen had given them a lot of material to work on, even if some of it was hard to understand.

  ‘What did you make of that?’ She was walking to her car with Inspector Deast. She unlocked the door as she waited for an answer. Hallows was already driving off.

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t go for this telepathy business.’

  ‘She believed what she was saying.’

  ‘Yes, I grant you that,’ admitted Deast with reluctance.

  ‘It’s puzzling. She carried conviction, though, about the hands with gloves. It being a woman … fits in with what Birdie Peacock said about her encounter.’

  ‘If we can believe her.’

  ‘I am inclined to. But if I remember correctly she didn’t mention gloves. I shall have to question her again.’

  ‘I don’t trust her myself.’

  No, thought Charmian sadly. You and the white witches would not be congenial. I bet they don’t trust you.

  ‘Well, she might come up with a few more answers.’ And knowing Birdie, she would do. ‘And I think it’s worth reading Mrs Warren’s statement about her missing daughter, and what she said when she identified her.’

  ‘Not much if I remember right,’ said Deast.

  ‘Worth another look now we have found another victim.’

  ‘Sid Chance might have come up with something more, the Warren girl was in his territory. Found in Windsor, though.’

  ‘Fletely Heath,’ Charmian amended. ‘Edge of Windsor.’

  But Deast swept on: ‘And Mary Jersey’s Windsor bank account was robbed. It’s all Windsor, isn’t it?’ He sounded sadly triumphant, as if Windsor had earned the right to an unhappy crown.

  ‘As you know, there’s one other local in the frame,’ admitted Charmian. ‘Not because we have any hard evidence, but just because he’s the type, with a record of violence and stabbings.’

  ‘Women?’

  ‘No, horses.’

  ‘Oh, the Horseman. I’d like to get him on any grounds,’ said Deast, who liked horses better than most people. ‘What have you got on him? Apart from not liking him.’

  ‘He fits the profile that our psychologist put forward: right age, right way of life, use of knives and the police psychologist predicted him turning to other forms of violence.’