Death at Hazel House Page 8

  It might have been easier to bear if she had a close woman friend, someone she could open her heart to, but there was no one. She felt no affinity with the wives of Hugo’s business and golfing cronies and she suspected that they despised them both, probably laughed behind their backs at his pretensions and her efforts to copy their speech and manners. She could never confide in any of them, not in a million years.

  Then a thought occurred to her. Perhaps there was someone after all. She went to the telephone and tapped out a number.

  Eight

  Terry sang along with the van radio as he drove home. He felt he had won the first skirmish with Charlie Foss very handsomely. Not only had the bastard ended up with a well-deserved ducking – Terry broke off in mid-warble to have a prolonged chuckle at the memory – but he’d capitulated hands down, handed over a nice little fistful (a quick count had revealed exactly five hundred smackers, all in used fifties), and even promised to consider taking him into partnership. That hadn’t been a serious suggestion. The last thing Terry wanted was to get mixed up with a crowd of toffee-nosed yuppies, but it warmed his heart to think that he had enough hold over Charlie to make him feel under pressure to arrange it. He couldn’t wait to get home and tell Rita. She’d have to take back all her gloomy predictions. He took one hand off the wheel and patted his pocket, enjoying the feel of the roll of banknotes. Wait till you get an eyeful of these, my girl, he thought. And this is only a fleabite compared with what’s to follow.

  His ebullient mood was only slightly dented when, on arrival in his home street, he found a strange car parked outside his house. It wasn’t one he recognised so he couldn’t blame any of his neighbours. It meant he had to park several yards farther down, but he told himself it wasn’t important, it was all going too well to let himself get narked over a little thing like that. He was in such a hurry to tell Rita the news that he went straight indoors in his working gear. She hated him coming into the house looking scruffy and dirty, so he normally took off his overalls and the shabby old trainers he wore on the job and left them in the van. She wouldn’t nag him today, not when she heard what he had to tell her.

  She must have been listening for the sound of his key in the lock because the second he opened the front door she was there.

  ‘Sorry I’m a bit late,’ he began, ‘but wait till you hear what I—’ He broke off, feeling a stab of alarm at the look on her face. ‘What’s up, love? Is something wrong with Billy?’

  ‘No, Billy’s fine. He’s having tea with one of his mates.’ She lowered her voice and cast a fearful glance behind her. ‘Tel, the police are here. What’ve you been up to?’

  ‘I ain’t been up to nothing.’ The denial was automatic, but the news was like a punch in the stomach. Charlie must have shopped him after all, but how had he known what address to give? There was the phone book, of course, but there must be any number of Hollands, so how would he know which was the right one? He wasn’t listed in Yellow Pages – couldn’t afford it, not yet. He was on the verge of panic when a thought struck him. ‘How long’ve they been here?’ he asked.

  ‘Nearly half an hour. I told them you’d be home any time and they said they’d wait.’

  Terry blew out a huge breath of relief. It couldn’t be anything to do with Charlie, there hadn’t been time. His brain began to function more calmly.

  ‘Did they say what it’s about?’

  ‘I asked them, but they wouldn’t tell me. Tel, are you sure you haven’t – I mean, you’re awfully late.’

  ‘It’s all OK. Tell you later,’ he whispered. ‘It’s probably to do with the van,’ he continued in his normal voice, taking her by the arm and leading her along the tiny passage. ‘Maybe they found out who nicked it.’

  There were two plain-clothes detectives in the sitting room and they stood up when Terry and Rita entered. They showed him their identity badges: Detective Sergeant Radcliffe, grey-haired and middle-aged, and his younger, fresh-faced colleague Detective Constable Hill of Gloucester CID.

  ‘We understand you recently reported the theft of a white Ford van, registration number DF 191 X,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘That’s right.’ Terry sat down on the shabby settee with Rita beside him and indicated with a nonchalant wave of a hand that the two officers should resume their seats. When they were all settled he said affably, ‘Last Friday it was, and your boys found it the same day. Brilliant – must be a record!’

  ‘It wasn’t even damaged,’ Rita put in eagerly.

  ‘I’m glad we managed to trace it so quickly.’ Radcliffe gave a benign smile. ‘We like to give service to honest citizens.’

  Terry felt a twinge of unease at the final words. Was the guy taking the piss? Had someone turned up his record? He tried to keep up his relaxed attitude as he asked, ‘So what’s the problem? The tax and insurance are OK and it’s passed its MOT.’

  ‘We have no reason to think there are problems in that direction, sir.’ There was something about the politeness of Radcliffe’s manner and the bland quality of his voice that made Terry uneasy. He wasn’t used to this sort of treatment from the police. ‘The fact is, Mr Holland,’ the sergeant continued, ‘we do have reason to believe that during the period when you say the vehicle was out of your possession, it was used in furtherance of a crime.’

  Terry’s mouth fell open. Had he imagined the faintest of emphasis on the words ‘you say the vehicle was out of your possession’, as if the man was hinting he’d only pretended the van had been nicked? It was an old trick, too obvious to be seriously relied on by an old lag like him – except, of course, that they didn’t know he was an old lag and he’d no intention of letting on. He’d have to be bloody careful what he said.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rita’s head twist sharply in his direction. It wasn’t difficult to guess what she was thinking, but he knew he had nothing to hide on that score. ‘A crime?’ he repeated. ‘What sort of crime?’

  ‘Murder,’ said Radcliffe. ‘We’re conducting a murder inquiry, Mr Holland, and we’re hoping you may be able to help us.’ He spoke softly, deliberately, his eyes never leaving Terry’s face. The technique was all too familiar. Watching for a reaction, that’s what the man was up to. Well, he wouldn’t learn anything about a murder by looking at Terry Holland. More confidently than at any time since he’d been picked up and questioned about his first burglary at the age of fifteen, he could look straight back and speak with a clear conscience.

  ‘How’m I supposed to know what the van was used for after it’d been nicked?’ he demanded, perhaps a little too aggressively.

  Radcliffe did not appear to have heard the question. He dropped his eyes briefly to his notebook before asking, ‘Have you ever done work for anyone living on The Hill in Marsdean? A village about five miles south of Gloucester,’ he added helpfully as Terry hesitated.

  ‘Yeah, I know where Marsdean is. I’m not sure I ever… I’d have to check. The log’s in the van, I’ll go and get it.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Radcliffe flicked a glance at the constable, who stood up and followed him as he made for the door.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked resentfully. ‘Think I’m going to do a runner?’

  ‘Just routine, sir.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ In silence, the two men walked the short distance to the van. Terry unlocked the passenger door, took a thick loose-leaf notebook out of the glove compartment and thrust it under the constable’s nose. ‘You’d better carry it back, just in case I tear out the odd incriminating sheet,’ he said sarcastically.

  ‘No one’s suggesting you’d do that sir,’ the young officer replied politely, but he took the book and waited while Terry relocked the van.

  When they were back indoors, Terry asked, ‘Any idea when it would have been?’ and began flipping through the pages. ‘Or who the job was for?’

  ‘Try early May,’ suggested Radcliffe. ‘Mr Arthur Chant.’

  ‘Oh yeah, I remember him – owns all the amusement arcades.
I done a repair job for him after some yobbos smashed a window. Then he asked me to do a private job at his house.’

  ‘What sort of job would that be, sir?’

  ‘He wanted a floor safe installed in his study.’ As he spoke, Terry found the relevant page in the log. ‘Here it is – tenth of May. I charged him twenty quid plus the cost of the safe.’ He handed the book over for verification and both officers looked at it and nodded. The young constable wrote the details in his own notebook and the log was returned to Terry, who looked from one to the other and asked, ‘Anything happened to Mr Chant? Was it him as got topped?’

  ‘You don’t read the newspapers, Mr Holland?’

  ‘Can’t say I do.’

  ‘Then you may not have heard that Mr Chant came home on Friday evening and found his wife’s body in the bedroom. She had been strangled.’

  ‘No kidding!’ Terry exclaimed in genuine astonishment.

  ‘No kidding,’ the sergeant assured him gravely.

  ‘Poor cow. I remember her… she came in while I was doing the job. Good-looking bird.’

  ‘So I understand.’ Radcliffe paused, then said, ‘There were signs of forced entry; we think she may have disturbed an intruder.’

  ‘So what’s all this got to do with me?’ Terry didn’t like the way this conversation was going, not one little bit. The sergeant’s next words did nothing to allay his anxiety.

  ‘The thing is, Mr Holland, our information is that your van was seen in the vicinity of Mr Chant’s residence at about ten thirty on the morning in question. Did you by any chance have another job in Marsdean last Friday?’

  Terry spotted the trap and avoided it. ‘How the hell could I without the van and all me gear?’

  ‘Of course not, I was forgetting,’ said the sergeant smoothly. ‘You reported the theft at,’ there was more consultation of notebooks, ‘half-past seven that morning.’

  ‘You saying whoever took it topped Mrs Chant? Bloody hell!’ There was nothing contrived about Terry’s expression of shock and revulsion. Violence was nothing new in his life – he’d grown up in one of the toughest areas in South London – and he’d made threats more than once in the course of a robbery, although he’d never had occasion to carry them out. Mostly the victims were too scared to do anything but hand over. But ever since that terrible scene in the bank when Frank had lost his nerve and brought the sawn-off shotgun down on the old man’s head, the thought of actual, deliberate violence sickened him. Putting the wind up someone, roughing them up a bit like he’d just done to Charlie Foss – there were times when circumstances called for that. Murder was something else.

  Radcliffe broke into his thoughts with a question. ‘Have you any idea at all who might have taken your vehicle?’ he asked.

  ‘Course not, I’d have said. But if there’s anything I can do to help—’ He meant it, too.

  ‘We appreciate that, Mr Holland. For a start, we’d like to have the van down at the station so that our people can go over it again, a bit more thoroughly.’ His tone was respectful, almost conciliatory. ‘We realise you use it for your business, so we’ll keep it no longer than absolutely necessary. I understand your fingerprints have already been taken for elimination purposes so we won’t need to go through that again. I take it you have no objection?’ he added, his eyes searching Terry’s in a way that did nothing to put that gentleman at ease.

  ‘Er, no, course not.’ It would be inconvenient to have to part with the van, even for a short time, but that wasn’t his main worry. If some smart-arse of a copper who wasn’t too bothered about sticking to the rules compared his elims with national records and found he had form, he could be in deep trouble. They hadn’t asked him what he’d been doing on the day of the murder and if they did, all he could say was that he’d been kicking his heels at home because without so much as a screwdriver left to his name he’d had to cancel the jobs he’d lined up. He hadn’t stuck his nose outside the door all day. The nearest thing he had to an alibi was Reg Hodson’s phone call and he couldn’t say for sure what time that had come through. In any case, the word of an old lag like Reg wouldn’t count for much.

  ‘Right, shall we go?’ The sergeant turned to Rita, who had been sitting silently on the couch throughout the interview. ‘My apologies for the inconvenience, Mrs Holland. One of our officers will give your husband a lift home – it shouldn’t take long.’

  When they were outside, Radcliffe said, ‘Constable Hill will go with you so he can give you directions.’

  ‘No need. I know me way round Gloucester.’

  ‘He’ll show you the quickest route.’ The tone was courteous but firm. The sergeant was taking no chances.

  Terry shrugged and unlocked the van. ‘If you insist.’

  They reached the central police station and drove into the yard. DC Hill showed Terry where to park the van, took charge of the key and accompanied him into the building. A young woman with dark hair and pale, sharp features was at the counter talking to Sergeant Radcliffe and another man who, like the woman, was in plain clothes. They broke off their conversation as Terry and the constable approached.

  ‘Ah, Mr Holland – this is Detective Inspector Castle,’ said Radcliffe. ‘Mr Holland is the owner of the vehicle we’ve been speaking about, sir,’ he explained. ‘He’s very kindly agreed to allow us to examine it and to cooperate in any way he can.’

  ‘We appreciate that, thank you,’ said Castle. He turned to the young woman and said, ‘OK, Sukey, it’s all yours.’

  She took the key from DC Hill, but said to the Inspector, ‘Could I have a word first, Mr Castle?’

  ‘Sure.’ They moved a short distance away and spoke for a few moments in low tones. Although neither of them glanced in his direction, Terry had an uncomfortable feeling that they were talking about him. Then the woman called Sukey picked up a case from the counter and went out. Terry felt her eyes on him as she passed, as if she was mentally taking his photograph.

  ‘What happens now?’ Terry asked the sergeant. ‘I mean, do I have to stay here and wait for the van, or what?’

  ‘I believe Inspector Castle would like a word with you before you go, if you wouldn’t mind following me.’ Without giving Terry a chance to say whether he minded or not, Radcliffe opened a door and beckoned him through.

  He was left cooling his heels for a good ten minutes before DI Castle entered the room where Radcliffe had left him. To Terry, becoming more fidgety by the minute, it seemed a hell of a lot longer. When the Inspector finally appeared, he pulled up a chair and sat for a second or two without speaking, his hands slowly massaging his thighs. His greenish eyes had a steady, unwavering stare, his nose had a distinct hook to it and his thin fingers curved like talons over his kneecaps. Terry was reminded of a bird of prey. He had once remarked to Rita that he reckoned it was part of police training to fix people in the eye as if trying to hypnotise them into owning up to whatever crime they were suspected of committing. But he wasn’t suspected of anything today – was he?

  ‘We’re most grateful to you for being so cooperative, Mr Holland,’ Castle began. ‘We hope to return your vehicle later this evening.’

  ‘Make sure you do. I need it – it’s me living.’ During his enforced wait, Terry had decided that, as an upright and public-spirited citizen whose ready cooperation with the police was causing him considerable inconvenience, it would be quite in order for him to make it known that his patience was wearing a little thin. ‘And how’m I supposed to get home without it?’ he added aggrievedly. ‘I haven’t even had me tea yet.’

  ‘I realise you’re being put to considerable inconvenience,’ said Castle. ‘One of my officers will give you a lift home shortly. Meanwhile, I have one more small request to make.’

  ‘Oh yeah, what’s that?’

  ‘Those overalls you’re wearing – are they the ones you said were in your van when it was stolen?’

  ‘Yeah, what of it?’

  ‘My Scene of Crime Officer has reminded m
e that a piece of green thread was found on bushes at the point where an intruder entered Mr Chant’s house. We’d like to have forensics compare it with those overalls.’

  ‘You reckon this guy actually dressed up in my gear to do the job?’ Terry was affronted. It was bad enough pinching his van and losing him a day’s work without having the cheek to wear his clothes.

  ‘We think it’s possible. If you wouldn’t mind—?’ Evidently, he was expected to hand over the overalls there and then. He stood up, undid the Velcro fastening and stepped out of them, dragging the legs awkwardly over his trainers. As he handed them over, the hawk-eyes switched to his feet.

  ‘He might even have worn your shoes,’ said Castle. ‘Are those—?’

  ‘Yeah, so what? There must be hundreds of trainers like these knocking around.’

  ‘There are always small differences. Perhaps when you get home, you wouldn’t mind putting on another pair so that—’

  ‘Yeah, OK, anything you say, only please, can I go home now? The wife’ll be worried sick.’

  ‘Please give her my personal apologies.’

  As Castle began stuffing the overalls into a brown paper bag, Terry remembered what was in the pocket. ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I’ve just remembered, I’ve left some cash in there.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ The inspector pulled the garment out again, but to Terry’s dismay, instead of passing it back, he put his own hand into the pocket and brought out the roll of Charlie’s fifties. He riffled casually through the notes before handing them over. ‘That’s rather a large sum to carry around,’ he commented blandly, his eyebrows climbing up his high forehead.