A Recipe for Murder Read online

  ‘I’ve heard nothing,’ Scott replied. He replaced the receiver.

  *

  In his office, Craven yawned. ‘Well?’ he said, when the yawn was finally over.

  ‘I’d say there’s not a shadow of doubt she’s dead,’ replied Kelly, who sat in front of the desk. ‘There’s been no movement in her bank account for a week although before that she was always drawing money.’

  ‘Where’s the body?’

  ‘If the tide took it well out to sea, the coastguards say there’s every chance it won’t come back ashore.’

  ‘All right, let’s accept that she’s dead. Was she murdered, did she commit suicide, or did she die in an accident?’

  ‘There’s nothing to indicate suicide. Accident? Was she too boozed to know what she was doing and in the car park engaged drive instead of reverse and was over the edge before she could react … I’ve been on to Traffic and they’ve estimated that, taking a starting point from ten feet behind the wooden railings, there was enough reaction time available, even allowing for the effect of drink, for the driver to comprehend what was happening and to panic brake. On top of that, the lights weren’t switched on, a man was driving the car when it passed Polgate Wood, the driving door was probably sprung deliberately, the steering wheel was wiped down as was the bottle, there was a thread caught up in the driving door, and there were marks in the ground which could very readily have been made by someone’s shoes … I’d say it was murder.’

  ‘What was the motive and who was the murderer?’

  ‘Avis Scott was worth a certain amount of capital and there’s another woman. Scott isn’t very successful in his writing: I talked to a bloke I know in a bookshop and he reckons Scott will be lucky to clear fifteen hundred a year. That won’t keep any sort of a household going to-day.’

  ‘The facts seem clear, but you sound doubtful?’

  ‘Mrs Ballentyne swears there’s never been anything between them and maybe I’m becoming soft, but I keep wanting to believe her.’

  ‘What’s this paragon of virtue like? A twenty-year-old blonde with a figure of fire?’

  Kelly smiled briefly. ‘She’s homely, but fun.’

  ‘Make your mind up. You don’t get a woman who’s both.’ Craven yawned again. ‘We’re going to have to widen enquiries. And it’s time to search his place. See a magistrate first thing to-morrow and swear out a search warrant.’

  16

  The car turned into the drive of Honey Cottage. ‘It looks a bit of a lop-sided shack,’ said Detective Constable Thompson.

  Why couldn’t Jim Thompson realise that much of the charm of the cottage lay in its twisted angles which spoke of past centuries? wondered Kelly. He parked in front of the garage and climbed out of the car. Thompson came round the bonnet: he was a large man in his early twenties with a very full face that became almost puffy around the lower cheeks: he had a bluff, cheerful manner, but there was often a challenge to this and he had a quick temper.

  ‘Don’t push him, he’s not that kind of a bloke,’ warned Kelly.

  ‘I don’t push anyone unless he tries to push me, Sarge. D’you say he writes books?’

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Kelly, as he reached into the back of the car to bring out a small, battered suitcase.

  ‘There’s a pansy job for you.’

  Kelly led the way round to the porch. He knocked. As they waited the wind, a little stronger and perceptibly colder than the day before, plucked at their clothes.

  Scott opened the outer door.

  ‘’Morning, Mr Scott. D’you mind if we come in to have a look around the house?’

  ‘The answer to that is simple: yes, I do mind, very much.’

  ‘I promise everything will be left exactly as we find it.’

  ‘You’ll leave everything, full stop. I subscribe to the old idea that a man’s house is his castle.’

  Thompson said belligerently: ‘We’ve a warrant.’

  As subtle as a seven-pound hammer, thought Kelly annoyedly, as he led the way inside.

  ‘May I see it?’ demanded Scott.

  Kelly handed him the warrant, folded into three with the embossed seal outwards. He skimmed through it. ‘All right, I can’t legally do a damn thing to stop you. What d’you expect to find: a skeleton in the cupboard?’

  ‘It’s happened,’ said Thompson, before he appreciated the play on words. He flushed: he could not stand being made to look slow.

  ‘Shall we start upstairs?’ said Kelly.

  Scott’s anger gradually changed to interest as he watched them search, quickly but very methodically, the spare bedroom. When Kelly took a large torch out of the suitcase and switched it on, he said: ‘What’s that for?’

  Kelly didn’t answer until he was kneeling on the well-worn carpet. ‘Sometimes things which you wouldn’t otherwise notice show up in a bright, oblique light.’ He played the beam across the carpet. ‘Like this, for instance.’ He reached forward and picked up a pin which he handed to Scott. ‘Apart from saving your feet if you walk around barefoot, that ought to ensure me good luck for the day.’

  The detectives checked the floor, walls, the built-in cupboard in which hung a number of dresses, the old and battered chest-of-drawers, and the blanked-off fireplace, even to the extent of pulling away the front of the grate and looking through the dust which lay beneath the bars.

  Kelly indicated the small work table on which stood a typewriter with a half-typed sheet of paper in the roller. ‘Is that the latest coming along?’

  ‘It is the latest, but right now it’s more a case of going than coming.’

  ‘I just don’t know how you can sit down every day and write.’

  ‘Nor do I, when the interruptions are almost constant.’

  ‘Tell you what, Mr Scott, you’ll be able to get your own back in your next book: introduce a couple of detectives who are absolute bastards.’

  ‘I write fiction, not fact.’

  Kelly laughed, but Thompson stared with belligerent dislike at Scott.

  They went out to the small landing and Kelly looked up. ‘I suppose that trap door’s up to the loft? We’d better have a shufty up there later on. Jim, you can climb up when it’s time, you’re still young.’

  They entered the second bedroom. ‘I take it this is your bedroom? And you keep your clothes in that cupboard?’ He crossed to the built-in cupboard and opened the doors. In addition to Avis’s clothes, there were inside an elaborately embroidered dressing-gown, one suit, one sports jacket, and three pairs of men’s trousers. ‘Are these all your clothes, Mr Scott?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The sports jacket was a dark green and clearly the thread found on the door of the Jaguar had not been drawn from it. ‘There’s only the one sports coat here — don’t you have at least one more, perhaps for gardening?’

  ‘When I’m working, I wear a sweater. When I’m not working, I wear a sweater.’ Scott smiled, for the first time since the detectives had arrived. ‘No tailor’s ever become rich on my trade.’

  It sounded true, thought Kelly, yet a coat was easily burned. But would a man who had thrown himself out of the Jaguar as it rushed towards the three hundred foot fall ever have realised that he might have snagged his jacket on the car door and that the police might become suspicious and a thread from the jacket would be important evidence? A man who could plot a book might well have the imagination to foresee events …

  He picked up the four pairs of men’s shoes in turn. The brown brogues had mud around their toe caps. ‘We’ll have to take these along with us.’

  ‘What in the hell for?’

  ‘To scrape out the mud for comparison tests.’ He noticed that Scott’s expression remained blank. ‘We’re looking for a pair of shoes which made certain marks on Stern Head.’

  ‘Scrape away, but scratch the leather and I’ll sue you for a new pair.’

  Kelly put each shoe in a large plastic bag: he sealed the bags, tied on to one a card which noted the date, place, and tim
e, and which he initialled.

  They searched the chest-of-drawers, the bed-side tables: they unmade the bed and checked the mattress and base and then remade the bed: they rolled back the carpet and underfelt: they checked all surfaces by torchlight.

  Downstairs, in the dining-room, Kelly studied the sideboard. ‘That’s a lovely piece of furniture.’

  ‘It should be,’ replied Scott, remembering what Avis had paid for it.

  ‘When I was young I thought I’d become a cabinet maker. Trouble was, they wanted me to work for nothing as an apprentice. Couldn’t be managed because the family needed me to make a wage.’ He ran his finger-tips lightly over the marquetry. ‘I often wonder whether I’d have been any good. It would be something to think that in a couple of hundred years a piece of my furniture might come up in Sotheby’s.’

  ‘Who’s worried about what happens in two hundred years?’ said Thompson, who preferred white pine furniture.

  ‘Us old ’uns, lad.’ Kelly jerked his head in the direction of Thompson. ‘These days they don’t appreciate anything unless it’s disposable.’

  The relationship between himself and the detective sergeant defied an accurate description, thought Scott, since it was such a complicated mixture of friendliness and suspicion.

  They went from the dining-room into the kitchen and then into the sitting-room. Kelly examined the two small bookcases on either side of the fireplace. ‘You haven’t any of your own books here?’

  ‘No.’ Scott didn’t explain. Had his books been successful, they might have been there: as it was, he preferred to keep them well out of sight.

  The floral patterned carpet ended four feet from the north and south walls and three feet from the east and west ones. The chairs and settee were set on the cork-tiled floor, just clear of the carpet.

  Thompson picked up the cushions on the settee and then dropped them back in place, unintentionally making it obvious that he reckoned they were wasting their time. Kelly, making a mental note to blast him for his slackness, followed and reached down with his fingers between the sides of the settee and the fixed seat cushions. Half-way along the right-hand side his fore-finger came into sharp, and momentarily painful, contact with something. By careful manipulation, he brought into view a jade seahorse necklace with a very fine gold chain. He studied it. ‘That’s beautiful! I suppose it’s your wife’s?’

  Scott shook his head. ‘It’s not hers.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite certain.’

  ‘Might not your wife have bought it last Tuesday, after you’d gone to London, which is why you don’t know anything about it?’

  ‘I suppose so … But if she were going to buy a piece of jewellery, I’m pretty certain she wouldn’t choose that.’ Avis would never have enjoyed anything so relatively unsophisticated.

  Kelly remembered the withdrawal from her account on the Tuesday — had the sum been large enough to have bought this? The point would have to be checked. ‘I think I’d better hang on to this for the moment, Mr Scott. You’ll have a receipt, of course.’

  After placing the necklace in a plastic bag, he knelt in the middle of the carpet, switched on the torch, and swung the beam around. As it passed the fireplace and approached the settee, two small spots of irregular reflected light became visible.

  He went over and shone the torch directly downwards: he could just make out two patches of what looked like glossy varnish, greeny brown in colour. Dried blood? ‘We’re going to have to lift a couple of the cork tiles and send them off for checking.’

  *

  The detective constable turned off Oxford Street and made his way to Chapman Road. He entered the gaunt building and climbed the stairs to the third floor.

  When Fiona Holloway opened the door his first impression was that she was a badly made-up man in drag. Her hair was bright ginger, her face over-long, her features masculine, her make-up crude: her body was thickset and powerful. But then she spoke and no man could have imitated her rich, musical voice.

  The sitting-room was large but naturally gloomy and it was made gloomier by the many pot plants which all had large dark green, dusty leaves and reminded him of his great aunt who’d loved aspidistras.

  They sat and he told her the reason for his visit and he saw, with embarrassment, tears well out of her large eyes.

  ‘He’s killed her,’ she said, her voice choking.

  ‘We can’t yet even say for certain that Mrs Scott is dead, Miss Holloway.’

  ‘I know she’s dead.’ The tears increased.

  ‘You know Mrs Scott quite well, don’t you?’

  ‘She was my oldest friend.’

  ‘Have you seen much of her recently — say in the past two years?’

  ‘She … she often used to come and stay here.’ She finally used a delicate, lace-edged handkerchief to wipe the tears from her puffy cheeks.

  ‘When she stays here, does she talk much about herself?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Has she ever mentioned any men with whom she is friendly?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Because we have to check the possibility that she may be friendly with a man other than her husband and …’

  ‘I’ve told you, Kevin killed her.’

  The D.C. sighed.

  ‘He hated her. All he wanted was the other woman.’

  ‘Then you’ve no reason to believe she’s friendly with any other man?’

  She stared at him for a long time, then suddenly shouted: ‘She told me, she’s never ever looked at another man.’

  *

  A photo of Kevin Scott, together with a short biographical sketch, was on the back of the dust jacket of all his books and this proved good enough to be cut out and used for identification.

  A D.C. questioned each member of the staff at Ferington Railway station: had he or she ever seen this person passing through the station and, if so, when was the last occasion? One ticket collector thought he’d seen the face before, but as to when that had been …

  ‘No dice,’ said the D.C. on his return to the station. He dropped the photo on to Kelly’s desk. ‘And the job’s given me aching feet and a throat so bloody sore it feels like it’s been swallowing razors.’

  ‘You need a break. See that pile of forms over there? Take ’em off and type out fair copies in triplicate.’

  ‘You just can’t win,’ said the D.C. philosophically.

  *

  Scott was making coffee when a boy of about fourteen rode down to the garden gate, leaned his bicycle against the thorn hedge, and walked round the house a newspaper in his hand, whistling painfully out of tune. He left the paper in the porch.

  Scott collected the paper but didn’t begin to read it until he was seated at the dining-room table with toast, butter, marmalade, coffee, and a four-minute-egg in front of him. He had finished eating the egg and was half-way through his third piece of toast when he turned a page of the paper to see a photograph of Avis. He was shocked even though the telephone call of the previous day should have warned him that a further reference in the press was likely.

  He read the article beneath the photograph. There was still no evidence of what had happened to Mrs Scott, despite extensive police enquiries. Her husband, Kevin Scott the well-known author, confirmed that he did not know where his wife was and Mrs Ballentyne, a close friend, was also unable to help.

  It was all there, for those who could read between the lines.

  17

  Sidney Walsh, the younger of the two receptionists at the Red Barn Motel, finished reading the sporting section of the daily paper and then, since he wasn’t on duty until the evening and had nothing better to do, leafed through the other pages. A photograph of a woman caught his attention. She looked, he decided knowledgeably, a right good screw. He decided that something about her face reminded him of someone. He tried, but failed, to pin down the memory and then read that she was probably dead. He lost all interest in her.

  *r />
  Jane now wished she had refused Kevin’s invitation to lunch. But he’d been so insistent and she’d been feeling depressed … Each time she met him she became increasingly aware of the growing affinity between them and this was something that she still believed she had to fight, though without really knowing why. After all, she could be quite certain that Steven would never have expected her to remain a grieving widow. Perhaps it was the knowledge that the degree of their friendship must rest on whether Avis were alive or dead and that seemed wholly macabre.

  When she entered the small Italian restaurant, with the brightly coloured murals on the wall, she saw that he was seated at a corner table, by a window. He looked up, saw her, and smiled as he came to his feet, but she noticed that even if his mouth smiled, his eyes didn’t.

  They sat. ‘How’s the work going?’ he asked.

  ‘Much as usual, which means that everybody seems to hate everybody.’

  ‘It’s not like you to be so cynical.’

  ‘If you’d seen the work I’ve been doing this morning, you wouldn’t be surprised. Ridiculous little arguments enlarged into great big matters of principle: an ounce of common sense or give-and-take and everything would have blown over ages ago.’

  ‘Fortunately for the legal profession, common sense is almost as rare as a spirit of give-and-take.’

  ‘Now you’re being cynical.’

  ‘Then let’s have a drink and both mend our ways.’ He signalled to a waiter, who handed them two menus. They ordered drinks.

  ‘Do you come here often enough to advise me on what’s good?’ she asked.

  ‘Normally I only come here when I’m celebrating good news from the writing field. I can’t remember the last occasion.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of giving up your writing and turning to something else?’

  ‘No, because it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.’

  ‘If you’re lucky enough to be doing what you really want to, you’ve got a head start on most people, so stop complaining.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  She smiled. He put the paper down by his side on the chair. He had intended to show her the paragraph right away, but he wanted to see her go on smiling.