The Case of the Screaming Beauty Read online

  “It deflects blame,” Graham said, ignoring the unruly teens, “We always imagine that the killer strikes and then flees the scene. But more often than you’d think,” Graham said, “the murderer stays around, gathers information, and just tries to blend in. Some criminals get a kick out of watching the enormous amount of fuss their crimes generate.”

  Harris thought it over. “Do you see Tim as the type to cause a stink and then stay around to enjoy the results? Struck me as a bit too high-strung for that kind of caper.”

  “I don’t. But I also don’t love the theory which implies that the murderer walked in off the street, clubbed Norah over the head, and then vanished. I mean, there are such things as contract killings, but they’re exceptionally rare.”

  Harris nodded. “And I don’t see Mr. Travis stumping up a couple of grand for someone to bump off his wife.”

  “Not even for a minute,” Graham agreed. His phone rang. “It’s Bert. You know where to turn, right? Junction eleven.” Harris nodded and Graham took the call. “Hello Bert, what’s the good news?” Graham listened for a minute or so, thanked the pathologist, and hung up. “He’s identified our murder weapon.”

  “Wait, what? We already know it was a golf club!” Harris asked, confused.

  “No, sorry,” Graham chuckled. “I mean, Bert knows what kind of golf club it was.”

  “Ah,” Harris said, slightly disappointed. “Thought we’d cracked it.”

  “It was a driver,” DI Graham said, making another note in his book. “Big, powerful. Ideal for knocking down a defenseless woman.”

  “Even if wielded by another woman,” Harris said experimentally.

  “Who, Amelia? What possible motive…”

  “Or Doris?” the sergeant tried next. “Decides she’s fed up with people leaving their dirty towels on the floor,” he said, affecting her accent, “what with her bad back and all…”

  “Be serious, sergeant,” Graham said mildly. “Besides, Doris has a gold-plated alibi.”

  “Well, bugger,” Harris said, deflated.

  “Bugger, indeed,” Graham agreed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DUSK WAS SETTLING on the village of Chiddlinghurst when the two officers arrived back there. They made straight for The Lavender, parking the police car in the gravel driveway around the front. Graham always felt a little self-conscious about showing up in such a highly visible police vehicle, but his own unmarked Audi was in London. He justified his misgivings on the basis that there was a reasonable theory that the public gained security and confidence from seeing the badge of the constabulary, especially just after a gruesome and unexpected murder, right in their midst.

  Cliff Swansbourne greeted them at the door. “Welcome back, travelers. Did you find answers in London?”

  Graham shed his suit jacket and loosened his tie. “Somewhat, Mr. Swansbourne. Could we bother you for a cup of tea?”

  “Of course,” Cliff replied, but then seemed to beckon slightly for the two men to follow him. “Got a couple of details I wanted to pass on,” he whispered. “Things that might help your investigation, you know?”

  They retreated into the private kitchen, which seemed a little overly cautious to Graham, seeing as the inn was virtually empty. “You’ve already been very helpful, Mr. Swansbourne,” Graham was saying. “It can’t have been easy…”

  “Tim Lloyd,” Cliff said without further preparation. “I had a word with him, earlier today, while you were in town.” Cliff tossed a teabag into a remarkably ancient teapot and followed it with boiling water. “Amelia was there too, but she’s visiting her sister tonight. Every Tuesday evening, without fail. Murder investigation or none.”

  “Nothing more important than family,” Sergeant Harris contributed, then winced slightly.

  Graham took the offered mug of tea. “What did Mr. Lloyd have to say? Please be precise. I’m sure I don’t have to remind you,” he said, reaching for his notebook, “of the seriousness of this matter. You must relay everything he said, word for word if you can.”

  Cliff was nodding. “It’s just that… Well, we’ve known Tim since the first week we took over the place. He loves it here. Home away from home, all of that. He’s never caused any trouble, except maybe just occasionally being a little too familiar. I mean, we’re hoteliers, not his family, though he’s been very kind and a very regular guest. Amelia indulges him, you see,” Cliff explained, turning to Harris. “She’s got a soft spot for him. In fact, she told me not to pass any of this on, but I just have to…”

  With a flat palm extended, Graham said gently, “Take your time, sir. These things are always easier if you take a couple of deep breaths first.”

  Cliff followed his advice. Graham and Harris could easily see that this unwelcome case had brought with it more stress and distraction than the Swansbournes were ready to cope with. Not only a death in their inn, but a bone fide murder. An accident or a heart attack would have been one thing, but this meant that someone had stolen into their quiet, rural establishment and beaten a woman to death with a golf club…. It would have been hard on anyone, but Graham had the sense that Cliff Swansbourne, for all his maturity and experience, might not be built from the sternest stuff.

  “I went to speak with him,” Cliff confided. “I was upset with him for his behavior yesterday morning. You know, hanging around the crime scene like that, poking his nose in. I thought you were going to tear him to bits when you found him with the body, detective. Would have served him right, too.”

  “Simply trying to maintain the integrity of the scene,” Graham explained.

  “Well, I told him that I didn’t think he should have been there, nosing around. And do you know what he said?” Cliff said. “He told me, as God is my judge, that he and Norah were very close. ‘Closer than any of you think,’ he told me. They were planning to head off to the Caribbean together in a couple of days, for heaven’s sake!”

  Harris was typing, Graham was writing, and Cliff seemed more unburdened with each passing moment. This information had clearly weighed on him all day.

  “Well, as you know,” Graham clarified, “he told us that they were on friendly terms, the occasional coffee, perhaps something more intimate. But going on holiday together… That’s a new piece of information.”

  “I mean,” Cliff said, “I’d always assumed he was trustworthy. But he lied about how close they were, and for no good reason that I can see. Can we trust him, even now?” Cliff asked them.

  Harris did not fail to note the rather odd ‘we.’ Perhaps Cliff was proposing to take part in the investigative team? Like Graham, he’d had it up to here with well-meaning amateurs….

  “Mr. Swansbourne,” Graham began, “we’ll obviously be speaking with Tim again, in the light of this new information. And we must bear in mind that he’ll be much more affected by Norah’s death than we’d earlier assumed. But lots of people tweak what they say during police investigations, sir, and for the most part they’re protecting themselves in a manner quite unrelated to the case.”

  Cliff rubbed his chin. “How do you mean?”

  Harris took over. “Well, take this for an example. It was before the days of DNA testing, and what have you. There was a young man who actually had quite useful information about the murder of a father of two. I interviewed him, along with one of DI Graham’s predecessors, but he kept his mouth absolutely shut. It turned out later that the young man knew exactly who the murderer was but couldn’t reveal himself as a witness because he and the victim had been in a relationship which would have… well, to put it mildly, it would have been a shock to the victim’s wife.

  Graham nodded. “It’s true. I could tell you stories like that for the rest of the evening.”

  “So Tim’s protecting himself?” Cliff wondered aloud. “But why not just tell you everything? Who cares if he was in love with Norah, or about to jet off somewhere with her? She’s divorced, he’s single. It’s the twenty-first century,” he marvelled, “at least that’s
what they tell me. We’ve got men marrying men and women marrying women, bless them all. It’s a much more tolerant society than the one I grew up in. Why would Tim lie about a straightforward relationship?”

  “You’re making some good points, sir,” Graham told Cliff. “We’ll be speaking with Mr. Lloyd some more, rest assured.” Graham stopped short of admonishing Cliff for over-stepping his bounds. This was already an unorthodox discussion between the investigative team and someone who was, good turns and past helpfulness notwithstanding, merely a member of the public.

  “I just want to be as useful as possible,” Cliff explained. “You know, the faster this is resolved, the faster we can put the whole nasty episode behind us. It’s made us both re-think whether,” Cliff said, eyes welling slightly as he glanced around the kitchen, “we really, truly want to be here.”

  Harris contributed his two cents. “Anyone would understand that, sir,” he said, handing back his empty tea mug, “but it would be a great shame if a cowardly act like this ended up changing the direction you’re taking. I mean, your reviews are all five-star, and the gardens look incredible…”

  “Amelia’s doing, I assure you,” Cliff said. “She could run this place with one hand tied behind her back. Put her and Doris Tisbury together and literally anything becomes possible.”

  Silently, broodingly, DI Graham let a thought percolate up into his consciousness and, for the first time, receive genuine and careful thought: Capable of anything… Including murder?

  He put it aside for the moment, along with a raft of other theories. “With our interviews complete,” Graham said, “barring one more little chat with Mr. Lloyd, we’d like to move onto the forensic stage.”

  Cliff frowned. This sounded immediately like more disruption, more police presence, more pathologists and scientists busying themselves in his well-kept hallways. “I thought Norah’s body was over at the morgue, you know, for the examination.”

  “It is,” Graham confirmed. “But we’ve got a strong lead on a murder weapon.”

  Cliff brightened. “Oh? That’s good news. And so quickly.” He marvelled again at the pace of change. “Guess you’re just as good as those detectives on TV.”

  Graham let the remark pass but thought to himself, I’m a darn sight better than that fictional shower, Mr. Swansbourne. And I’m still getting warmed up.

  “We’ll be needing access to every single golf club here at the inn,” Harris informed him.

  After another long frown and a surprised shake of the head, Cliff said, “But there are over a dozen of our guests’ golf bags in the shed. Our regulars prefer to keep them with us rather than carting them back and forth, you know. How can you possibly search through all of the…”

  “In actual fact,” Graham told him, “we’ll only be examining the drivers in detail, and the rest more superficially. But there’s a strong chance that the murder weapon is among them.”

  Cliff stood. “Well, of course. Whatever you need.”

  Graham thanked the ageing proprietor, who seemed pale and exhausted by this ordeal. “We’ll make a start first thing,” Graham promised him. “The local Scenes of Crime lads are very efficient. We’ll be here for the morning, I’d imagine, but by lunchtime we should be out of your hair.”

  Cliff saw the two men to their car and then returned to the kitchen table. Perhaps it really is time to pack this in, he told himself. Sell the murder story as some salacious piece of gossip to a glossy magazine, get a handsome check, and retire for good. Sun, sand and margaritas. Right then, at the end of a long and horrid day, it sounded as good as it ever had.

  * * *

  Chris Stevens was the Scenes of Crime Officer on duty, an energetic and thoroughly professional man with a thin, black mustache and almost famously nerdy glasses. Universally respected for his work but not necessarily celebrated for his sense of humor, Stevens was in a bullish, problem-solving mood as he strode down the hallway of The Lavender. Typically, he began sizing up the murder scene within moments of his arrival, just after eight on this promisingly sunny Wednesday morning.

  “There’s always contamination of some kind,” he explained to the small crowd which gathered outside the room – the Swansbournes, DI Graham, and Sergeant Harris.

  Amelia was watching these events with interest, but if she were honest, the proprietor would simply have rather that the whole bunch of them finished their work and disappeared. She liked DI Graham well enough, and the burly sergeant was nice and very professional. She supposed, if there had to be a murder investigation at The Lavender, this was as discreet and helpful cast of characters as she could have hoped for. But their uniforms and medical bags, the paraphernalia of police work and evidence gathering... these things didn’t belong here. They were an unwelcome reminder that mere yards from where she and Cliff slept, something utterly terrible had happened.

  The next to arrive was a curious but frustrated Doris Tisbury, whose sole purpose was to clean the only two occupied rooms. Something about the incompleteness of her task genuinely bothered Doris, as though the murder scene were a missing piece from her personal jigsaw, and only its prompt and thorough cleaning would bring her mind some rest. Her son, a school teacher and certainly no medical expert, diagnosed her with “OCD” or some such acronym, and it drove her batty to hear him carry on about “reward circuits” and “habituated compulsions” that she knew nothing about, but which were clearly directed at her. Back in the day, Doris informed him testily, neatness was praised as a virtue, not frowned on as something requiring treatment by a psychologist. For Doris, it was just another sign that she’d been born in the wrong century.

  “Mr. Lloyd isn’t up yet, I don’t think,” Cliff told Stevens as the bespectacled forensic scientist located his swabs and a camera. “But he was the only one, besides Doris, who was in here before the police arrived.”

  Cliff and Amelia kept their distance as Stevens began taking a swab from the floor by the bathtub. “I’ll need a DNA sample from him and from Doris. But it’s not impossible that our killer left some small fragment of himself behind.”

  “Or herself,” Amelia added.

  Stevens straightened up and slotted the swab away in its plastic tube. “You know how many murders there are by golf club every year in the UK?” he asked.

  Amelia bristled. She wasn’t sure she liked this officious young man with his know-it-all air. “I’m sure you’ll enlighten me.”

  “Somewhere around none,” the SOCO told her. “It’s an extremely uncommon murder method. I can only think of two, historically, and they were all ages ago. And both were committed by men. In fact, the vast majority of murders ultimately prove to have a male perpetrator,” he added. “Particularly those involving clubs, bats, sticks, or other methods of beating a victim to death.”

  Cliff was trying to see the brighter side. “I don’t know, Mr. Stevens. In the hands of our Doris, I’m sure a golf club could lay waste to nations.”

  Doris loved this kind of banter and gave as good as she got. “Not me,” she said, picking up a massive pile of fresh towels from her cart and heading down the hallway. “I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

  Cliff cracked up laughing as the big-framed Doris marched off to her daily chores. It was the first time he could remember laughing – or even smiling – since Doris had first delivered the terrible news.

  “Well,” Amelia said, close to a fit of the giggles herself. “There’s an image to conjure with.”

  “I’d rather not,” Cliff managed through his laughter.

  Stevens ignored the entire exchange and silently wished for some time alone at the crime scene. There were always curious onlookers, and Stevens didn’t mind, in principle, but they invariably found cause to contribute some theory or other which was apt to knock Stevens off his stride. He was a scientist, not an investigator, and simply wanted to collect his evidence in peace before feeding it into DI Graham’s investigative process. Besides, it was going to be a busy morning, even once he’d fini
shed with this blood-stained bathroom floor.

  Around thirty minutes later, Cliff showed Stevens to the shed and opened the door. There was that reassuring, slightly musty odour of leather and metal emanating from the interior as it creaked open. He had been offering inexpensive, secure golf club storage since their first few weeks as proprietors of The Lavender. It had made economic sense. The only costs were a new lock on the sturdy, old garden shed and a motion-detector system for the back garden, something virtually every home in the area had. There was one problem, however, that Cliff had found straight away. A family of foxes who lived in the countryside beyond the village visited regularly and set off all the security lights as they trotted brazenly through at night.

  Cliff was about to start pulling bags full of clubs out onto the grass for inspection, but Stevens let him know, a tad too brusquely for Cliff’s own tastes, that he’d need to inspect each club as it had been left.

  “We don’t know if the killer might have stashed the weapon here, you see, sir. Or even if he just touched the bag, we might be able to get a partial print off the leather.” Cliff backed off to watch the thirty-something Stevens do his work. In the first instance, he searched for what wasn’t there. “If the murder weapon was taken from this shed, used, and then abandoned somewhere, there’ll be a driver missing.”

  Ten minutes’ careful tallying of the clubs showed Stevens that, rather to his dismay, not a single golf bag lacked a driver. “All present and correct,” he muttered.

  “So what now?” Cliff asked.

  Stevens brought out his forensics kit once more. Cliff was surprised to see that he carried his equipment in a backpack as though he were a college student; Cliff had been expecting some kind of futuristic tool bag which glowed blue neon and jetted out steam when it was opened. Or at least one of those natty, black leather bags, like a country doctor from the 1950s. “Now,” Stevens told him, “I meticulously swab each and every golf club, starting with the drivers, to see if there are any blood stains.”