The Case of the Screaming Beauty Read online

  “We’ll have to wait until Bert tells us more about the cause of death,” Graham told his colleague. “But I can tell that you’re leaning towards the jealous husband.”

  “I am,” Harris agreed, chewing a fry, “but don’t crazy ex-husbands normally beat up the new boyfriend as well?”

  Graham was nodding. “He shows up, finds them together, perhaps even in flagrante, who knows, and then boots him out before smacking his ex-wife on the head with a golf club. Simple.”

  “What, Lloyd doesn’t stay and defend her?” Harris argued.

  “Nope, he turns tail and buggers off, leaving the defenseless Norah to the jealous rage of the incensed husband,” Graham said, continuing the thread. “And Tim doesn’t report the murder or call an ambulance. He just hangs out at the B&B until poor Mrs. Tisbury finds Norah the next morning.” He sighed. “It’s a bit thin, isn’t it?”

  Harris nodded. “It’s a bugger. And then, for Lord knows what reason, we’ve got Lloyd acting like he’s some kind of amateur Sherlock bloody Holmes,” Harris added. “You heard Cliff say that he was all over the crime scene.”

  “Bert will be able to tell us if anything is amiss,” Graham said. “He’s a thorough man.”

  Harris finished his pint. “We need to talk to the husband. But if he has a half-decent alibi, we’ll be back to square one,” he admitted.

  “Let’s see,” Graham said, finishing his own drink. “But whatever he’s done or not done, I don’t think for a second that he’ll be pleased to see us.”

  Harris felt his phone vibrate. “Oh, lovely jubbly,” he explained. “Background check on the aforementioned Mr. James Arthur Travis of picturesque Peckham in south London.” Harris summarized the report for the DI. “Two convictions for driving offenses, license currently suspended owing to a second conviction for driving while intoxicated.” Harris tutted like his grandmother used to. “Three arrests and two cautions for fighting in the neighborhood, one charge of assault on a police officer, later dropped, for whatever reason. Served three months for affray and breach of the peace, but the other cases didn’t go to court.”

  “Lovely fella,” Graham said brightly. “I’ll take him home next weekend to meet my mother.”

  Harris continued reading. “Currently address is blah-blah, phone number, you know the drill… Ah, what’s this?” Harris said, tilting the phone slightly. “’Suspected involvement in the Hatton Gardens jewelry heist,’” he read, eyebrows raised, “‘either as an advisor or accomplice to some degree, but no charges ever brought’. What a scintillating and varied career the young man has had. Wife is Norah Taylor, twenty-seven, ‘estranged.’”

  “Much more than they know,” Graham added sadly. “Fancy a trip into foggy London town tomorrow, Sergeant?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I SUPPOSE YOU’D better come in.” The house was an identical copy of all those around it, neat but just a little box-like, Graham thought, with a climbing frame in the front garden and a crumbling, forgotten hosepipe propped up against the wall. The place could definitely have used a lick of paint and looked rather forlorn under London’s typically cloudy, mid-morning sky. However, he was careful not to judge Nikki Watkins during one of the worst weeks of her life.

  “I’d like to begin,” Graham said delicately as they took seats on two sofas in a living room which smelled pungently of cigarette smoke, “by expressing our condolences, Ms. Watkins. Your sister’s passing was a terrible tragedy, and I want you to know that we’re putting everything we have into finding out what happened.”

  Nikki was perhaps thirty, but the cigarettes and cheap gin were unkindly adding years to her complexion. She said nothing but lit another Chapman’s with a big, heavy butane lighter and sat cross-legged on the couch opposite the two officers.

  “We interviewed everyone at the inn, and we’re going to be speaking with Mr. Travis this afternoon,” Harris added.

  Nikki gave a strange, dismissive snort and took a massive pull on the cigarette, pluming a cloud of grey smoke into the already thickened air. “That bastard,” she croaked. “Good-for-nothing sack of…”

  “It’s Mr. Travis you’re referring to?” Harris checked as he typed.

  “Wriggled his way out of three jail sentences. Cheats on his taxes, on his benefits, the bloody lot. But no, Norah never sees that side of him, does she? Always defending him. At least when they first got together. It was always some head-in-the-clouds crap about ‘having a dream,’ and ‘harboring ambitions’”. She chuckled morosely behind her cloud. “As if that man could find his own arse with both hands, map and a compass,” she snorted. “He’s a lazy, no good little…”

  Graham could have written the rest himself. He’d interviewed hundreds of people as part of his investigations – perhaps over a thousand, by now – and there was always that one character in the tale who had never managed to endear himself to any of the others. The object of derision, the perpetual disappointment. The one who’s been “letting himself down,” or “keeping the wrong company.” Most often a young man, he was the one who “everyone always assumed would never amount to anything.”

  “Ms. Watkins, could you shed some light on their relationship? Norah seems to have stayed with him far longer than many would have.” Harris was doing his delicate best, but there was no subtle way of asking what they all wondered: How did a total loser like Travis snag a blond bombshell like Norah?

  “They married young. Too young,” Nikki told them from within her cloud. “She wanted away from our parents, bless them, and Travis was promising that he was on the up-and-up, that they’d be vacationing in the Riviera, or shopping in New York. And she swallowed it!” Nikki exclaimed, still amazed that her own sister could have been quite so gullible. “After six months of marital ‘bliss,’ she finally woke up and smelled the coffee. Norah recognized what we all knew, that he was just a sham. No prospects, no education. Just a career criminal, waiting for his big break.”

  Harris typed fluently, while Graham made shorter, hieroglyphic notes in his notepad.

  “But he couldn’t even get that right,” she commented bitterly. “Got caught or was a suspect and had to lay low. Any number of times,” she recalled. “Chronic underachiever, even when he was on the wrong side of the law.”

  Graham made another note and then said, “Actually, Ms. Watkins, we prefer our criminals incompetent and bumbling. Makes them a lot easier to catch,” he smiled.

  “Well, he was caught but nothing could stick. Norah saw the writing on the wall and decided against spending three or four years visiting that useless nobody in jail, trying to keep it together on the outside while he relaxed in some daycare for the unforgivably stupid.”

  Harris raised an eyebrow to the DI, who returned the glance, too quickly for Nikki to see. “What we’re really trying to decide,” Graham explained, “is whether Mr. Travis should be considered a suspect.”

  Nikki knocked ash down her black t-shirt in a fit of throaty laughter. “Suspect?” she wheezed. “He’s got to be a suspect! Who the hell else could have done something like this?”

  Graham could see that Nikki’s temper was flaring. “We’re seeing the same evidence that you are, Ms. Watkins. But until we can prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, Mr. Travis remains a person of interest in this case,” he explained, “but not yet a suspect.”

  Nikki almost spat the words. “Think whatever you want. Do your interviews, get your lab boffins on it, analyse his DNA and his fingerprints and what have you. But I know, right now, sitting here, that he just lost control after she left him. He couldn’t handle it. Failure in business, in school, even in crime, and now in his marriage, too.”

  “What made her finally leave?” Harris asked.

  Nikki was reluctant now. “Couldn’t say,” she shrugged.

  “I think you can, Ms. Watkins,” Graham said with as much gentle encouragement as he could, “and even if you don’t think it’s relevant, or you aren’t certain it’s true, it might help us.”
r />   She reached for a cigarette before realizing she already had one smouldering between her yellowed fingers. She inhaled the last quarter inch of tobacco with the enthusiasm of one anticipating an elixir, then let the smoke escape in a slightly brown cloud of poisons. The next cigarette was lit even before she’s stubbed the previous one out.

  “She was seeing a man. A nice man,” she said mildly. “Worked near her office in Marble Arch, I think.”

  His fingers already in motion on the tablet, Harris asked “Was his name Tim?”

  “Yeah.” Nikki paused, tilted her head slightly. “He’s not caught up in this, is he?”

  “What can you tell us about him?” Graham asked.

  “I only met him once,” she recollected. “Seemed nice. Certainly a darn sight better than that worthless ex-husband of hers,” Nikki added venomously. “She talked about going on vacation with him.”

  “So, was there any evidence that Jimmy Travis knew about Norah’s friendship with Tim?”

  Nikki stubbed out her cigarette and put the ashtray aside. “No, I don’t reckon he knew. But, you know what? He was clueless about her. Just assumed that he was the center of her world, just like he was the center of his own. I think he might actually have been stupid enough to believe that my Norah would come back to him, even after everything.” She shook her head incredulously. “I mean, he tore up their wedding vows during their very first year together. Saw other women, hit her… She had bruises one night, not three months after they were married. I told her to call the police, but would she?”

  Harris fielded this one. “We always encourage victims of domestic violence to come forward, Ms. Watkins.”

  Another derisive snort. “And what the bleedin’ hell do you reckon old Jimmy would have made of that?” she demanded. “Her life wouldn’t have been worth living!”

  Graham followed the thread a little further. “Do you think Norah wanted to come to the police, and perhaps Jimmy threatened her?”

  Nikki leaned back in the chair and lit another cigarette. “I couldn’t say. They fought like cats and dogs, but they were man and wife, you know what I mean? Norah used to say, ‘When you’re married, you fight together, and when the time comes, you go down together. You’re a team’,” she said, her fist clenched.

  Harris was reminded of something his own marriage counselor had said during his first separation from Judith: “A marriage takes two. One won’t do.” Where was Jimmy’s contribution to that contract? Why would an unhappy, beaten, distracted Norah choose to stay in a violent and loveless marriage when there was even the possibility of an alternative? He began to wonder just how their upcoming visit with Jimmy Travis would go. He also wondered if he’d be able to restrain himself from punching Jimmy’s lights out the moment Travis confessed to the crime.

  “You find him, you bring him down,” Nikki said as the two men left. She was looking pale and upset, cigarette ignored and close to burning her fingers, with that look in her eye which Harris and Graham had both seen too often. It was the pain of loss, sudden, irreversible, and impossibly hard to bear, one which would go on hurting and nagging and gnawing for years.

  The only thing, in Graham’s experience, that even began to assuage that pain was seeing someone in the dock, being convicted and sentenced and led away to years of incarcerated misery. It gave his investigations an edge, an oddly emotional resolve, a steely determination; he would find that closure for Nikki, and the Swansbournes, and even snide little Tim Lloyd. For them, and for himself, he’d find the killer, whoever it was.

  * * *

  “Two twenty-five,” Harris countered.

  “Give over,” Graham said. “You can’t ask more than two-ten for that.”

  “Alright, what about this one?” he asked as they drove slowly down the street, looking for number eighty-eight.

  Graham evaluated the house, as they often did on streets like this. “Needs new guttering, yard isn’t all that great. Say, two-oh-five?”

  Harris played his part in their ongoing serialized mini-drama. “Two hundred,” he paused to let the gigantic sum sink in, “and five thousand pounds?”

  “I’d say,” Graham said.

  “For that? We’re not in sodding Kensington, you know,” Harris reminded him.

  “It’s not falling down or anything. Two-oh-five sounds reasonable. Plus fees, and such.”

  “Jesus, but this one really is falling down,” Harris muttered as they pulled up outside number eighty-eight. “What would you pay?”

  Graham made a face. “One-sixty or so, but you’d really be buying it for the land and starting again.”

  “I think we can take it that Mr. Travis is not a man given to spontaneous bouts of home improvement,” Harris concluded. Then he grinned at his boss. “See, I’ll make detective any day now.”

  James Travis had made his home in what was by far the less pleasant half of a semidetached dwelling, perhaps two miles from Nikki’s place and uncomfortably close to one of the main rail lines that brought in commuters from the south. The front yard was a scramble of limp, tangled grass, a discarded child’s bicycle with only one wheel, two or three well-chewed dog bones, and a blue and red garden gnome which looked as though it was someone’s favorite air rifle target. Graham knocked on the door where the green paint had flaked away.

  “Good afternoon,” Graham said as the door swung open. “Would you be Mr. Travis?”

  Standing in the doorway was a shirtless, skinny man of around thirty, with short blond hair and an unimpressed, sneering expression. “Eh?”

  “I’m Detective Inspector Graham, sir. This is Sergeant Harris. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “What about?” Travis asked defiantly.

  Harris thought it, but didn’t say it. “Your ex-wife, who died violently not two days ago. You pig-ignorant troglodyte.”

  “We’re investigating the death of Norah Travis, sir. I imagine you spoke with some of my London-based colleagues this morning.” Travis said nothing. “I was at the crime scene in Chiddlinghurst myself yesterday.”

  “And what?” Travis demanded. “You think I went down there and murdered her?”

  Graham cleared his throat. “Could we speak inside, please, Mr. Travis?”

  “Why?”

  The defiant tone, the “I’m going to appear at my door shirtless just to show I don’t give what-for” routine, and the lamentable state of the place, were all useful data points for Graham. They might or might not implicate James Travis in the murder of his ex-wife. Anyone with a nose, a sense of social justice, or an enthusiasm for human compassion would have found Jimmy repugnant. He was like a lobotomized skinhead on poppers. But everyone, Graham had long ago decided, has a rich inner life, an invisible counterpart to the aspect of themselves shown to the public. Although he may appear one way now, James Travis was almost certainly more complicated than his bony, vaguely anarchistic exterior might suggest.

  “We believe this isn’t a conversation you’d ultimately prefer to be having on your doorstep, sir. May we?” Harris all but barged past Travis and into the house. It smelled of cigarettes and burned toast and was but a single notch above a crack den on Graham’s personal interior design scale.

  “When did you last see your ex-wife, Mr. Travis?” Graham asked, once they were all seated around the kitchen table. Sitting in the living room would have necessitated two hours of assiduous cleaning.

  “Can’t remember,” Travis answered. “It’s been ages. Got no idea where she’s been sleeping or anything.”

  Harris tried something. “We are sorry for your loss, Mr. Travis. This is a terrible tragedy.”

  “Eh?” Travis had still not located a shirt nor offered the officers anything to drink.” Tragedy? Yeah, sure, mate. Call it whatever you want. But for me, she was a pain in the arse when we were married, and she’s been a pain in the arse ever since,” he whined.

  The two policemen exchanged a glance. “Can you account for your whereabouts on Sunday night, si
r?” Harris asked.

  “Hackney. With a bunch of my friends. Got the last bus back at about three in the mornin’,” Travis told them.

  “And,” Graham asked next, “do you play golf, by any chance?”

  A sceptical look jarred Travis’ face. “Do I do what?”

  For the second time since the investigation began, Graham prepared to explain the basics of a globally popular sport to someone. “Golf, you know, with the clubs and the ball.”

  “No, Detective chief whatever-your-name-is, I don’t play bloody golf. Bleedin’ waste of time. That’s for posh geezers, innit? Do I look like I’m bloody posh?”

  Graham let Harris ask the rest of the standard questions. He poked around in the house, the usual procedure, but he was convinced. Back in their car, he gave Harris directions back to Chiddlinghurst and explained his theory.

  “We’ll get the Hackney lot to check our Jimmy’s alibis, but I’ll tell you right now that I don’t think he killed Norah.”

  Harris glanced over at his boss. “Really?”

  “Bet you a hundred quid. Oh, he was glad to be rid of her,” Graham noted, “but nothing about him, however unpleasant and cave-dwelling he might be, said ‘murderer’ to me. And I’ve met more than my share.”

  “So, there’s something else going on here besides the jealous husband and the ex-wife with the new boyfriend,” Harris observed.

  “Could it have been Tim?” Graham wondered to himself. “And, if so, why?” he said next, staring out at the traffic. Rain began to fall, light but persistent.

  “Or, to ask it another way, sir, why would Tim kill her and then hang around the hotel for the next twelve hours so the local constabulary could interview him as part of a murder investigation? What advantage was there to staying here, once the deed was done?” Harris changed lanes to pass a bus full of teenagers, some of whom entertained themselves during their journey by giving the officers a two-fingered salute.