Death Scene Read online

  Henry harrumphed and put the newspapers to one side. Albert glanced up and saw what he had been reading.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that one. Purple prose incarnate.’ He either had not noticed or chose not to comment upon Henry’s photograph being in the news. He returned to his reading and Henry finished his breakfast and announced that he must leave.

  ‘I’ve told Sheppard to bring the car round but that you will be doing the driving. You’re all right with Cynthia’s car, ain’t you? It seems foolish to keep sending a driver back and forth when you might need the vehicle during the day. Let us know when you’ve done with it and we can arrange for collection if you can’t get it back to us.’

  Henry thanked him and agreed that this did indeed make more sense. It meant that he could drive back to the crime scene this morning, take another look and then drive back up to London rather than catching the train. He wasn’t sure that this would be a quicker option but it did mean that he could take himself straight to the post-mortem instead of summoning a driver to pick him up from the station, and it gave him more uninterrupted time to think.

  Henry always found the other people in the railway carriage something of a distraction, especially when Mickey Hitchens wasn’t with him. Mickey, as his sister Cynthia had once commented, was his ‘people person’. The one who was nice to other people so that Henry didn’t have the bother of it. It had amused her greatly and Henry himself saw the truth in the jest.

  He went up to his room to collect his belongings and then drove back along the coast road to Shoreham.

  NINE

  ‘We’ve identified the boy,’ Henry was told when he reported in to the police station that morning. ‘We got the little toe rag down in one of the cells if you want to speak to him. His mother knows he’s here, says he’ll get a right pasting from her when he gets home too.’

  Henry nodded briefly and requested that the boy be brought up so that he could speak to him.

  The child was led into one of the side rooms, little more than a cubbyhole where records were stored and there was room only for a single wooden chair and a tiny table. Henry took the seat and the child stood opposite him. A police constable stood in the doorway to make sure he didn’t make a run for it.

  He was a tiny scrap of a thing, skinny and freckled, dressed in a shirt with odd buttons and a pair of shorts that were too big round the waist and kept up with a cut-down leather belt. He glared defiantly at Henry though the dirt on his face betrayed where the tears had run down.

  ‘How old are you?’ Henry asked him.

  ‘Nowt to do with you,’ the boy said. The constable swiped him round the back of the head.

  The boy put his hands on his head and howled.

  ‘I’m told that your mother knows you’re here. I imagine you’ll have worse from her when you get home.’

  The boy stopped howling and went back to glaring.

  ‘So, someone gave you money to tell lies to the constable. Is that about the size of it? You can tell me now or I can let them put you back in the cells.’

  Henry saw the boy’s lower lip trembling. In truth, Henry had no intention of sending him back downstairs and also planned to try and placate the mother’s anger, but he wasn’t going to tell anyone that.

  ‘So,’ he began again. ‘Was it someone you knew? Was it a stranger? What I’m assuming here is that you probably meant no harm. That you thought it was a bit of a laugh. Maybe this stranger told you that it was a joke. That was a strange kind of joke to tell a constable that a young girl might be drowning. Did you never hear about the boy who cried wolf?’

  The boy immediately looked puzzled. ‘Ain’t got no wolves round here,’ he told Henry, looking at the officer as though he was mad.

  Henry sighed. ‘So describe this man to me. Or was it a man?’ Something in the boy’s eyes told him that he had hit on the truth. ‘A woman, then? A woman asked you to fetch the constable and gave you some coins for your trouble. Is that it?’

  The boy nodded. ‘This woman, she said there was a little girl fallen in the water. She said she knew where a doctor lived just along the bungalows and there would be a policeman nearby, because there had been a murder. We all ’eard about the murder.’ He looked hopefully at Henry as though wanting details.

  ‘Did she seem distressed, this woman?’

  The boy nodded. ‘Crying, she was. Said there was a little girl fallen in the water. Said the fisherman was trying to get her out. Said to get the doctor and the policeman. So I ran. And I fetched ’em. I didn’t do no ’arm. It was the woman what told me.’

  Henry studied the boy for a few minutes, the child squirming under his gaze.

  ‘Stand still,’ the constable ordered and raised his hand again, but he did not hit the boy this time, noting Henry’s slight shake of the head.

  ‘This woman, did you know her?’

  The boy shook his head no. ‘She weren’t from round ’ere. I thought she must be a visitor.’

  ‘A visitor. And yet she knew about the doctor and about the policeman.’

  ‘Everyone knew about the policeman. Everyone knows about the murder,’ the boy said reasonably.

  ‘But not about the doctor. Dr Clark, as I understand it, had only just arrived. He’d come down for the weekend and had been in Shoreham for less than an hour when you ran to find him.’

  The boy shrugged.

  ‘Describe this woman to me.’

  The boy seemed to be at a loss. He shrugged again. ‘Looked like a woman, didn’t she?’

  ‘A rich woman or a poor woman? An old woman or a young woman? Tall or short?’

  ‘Not old like me mum. Not young like my big sister. She’s married with a little ’un. Lives just up the coast. Not tall. The height most women are, I suppose.’

  ‘And how was she dressed? Would you say she was a rich woman, a well-dressed woman? Was there anybody around who would have seen her?’

  ‘We was on the beach, where the girls collect the flint. The girls were there, they might have seen.’

  Henry persisted in his questions for a little longer and discovered that the woman was wearing a blue jacket and a blue hat but the boy was clearly more interested in the coins she had given him and the message he sought to convey than the woman herself. Henry was left with the impression that the child had believed this woman, the stranger. Had believed that something was wrong and been overawed by the opportunity to earn some coins and pass on a serious message.

  ‘But,’ he asked, ‘if you believed the message to be real and the woman to be honest, why did you run away when you had taken the policeman and the doctor to the scene and there was no one there?’

  ‘Because me mam ain’t bred no fools,’ the boy told him, earning himself another slap. The constable had not looked for Henry’s approval this time. The boy did not bother to howl this time either. ‘I could see there was no one there. I could see that woman, she’d been lying to me. I’d been fooled once, me mam would have been mad enough at me for that, I wasn’t going to stick around, was I?’ He looked at Henry as though the action had been the most reasonable in the world and Henry, despite himself, was inclined to agree that it probably was.

  He told the constable to escort the child home and then walked back down to Cissie Rowe’s bungalow.

  He was pleased to see that the locks had been fitted and the windows boarded but it did make it look a sad place, neglected and unwanted all of a sudden. There were two constables on duty, one beside the door and one he could see patrolling up and down the road beyond. Henry called out to him and then told him what the boy had said about the woman, and that the girls packing flint might have noticed her. He could see them today down by the water’s edge but they seemed to have abandoned their work, paddling in the shallows, stealing an hour to be children.

  ‘Go and talk to them, they may well have noticed a woman in a blue jacket and a blue hat.’

  That’s if she existed, Henry thought. If the boy had not just been telling him what he
thought might satisfy the policeman or what he’d been told to say, should he be questioned? But something suggested to Henry that there was in reality a woman behind this; the look in the boy’s eyes when he had mentioned that possibility had indicated surprise, as though he suspected Henry of knowing too much.

  It was also possible that the woman herself had been duped in some way, simply asked to pass on the message. But the nature of that message suggested local knowledge. That Dr Clark was in residence. That there even was a Dr Clark. Constable Prentice had told Henry that Dr Clark travelled down on a Thursday evening to be with his family during the summer months. They did not reside in the bungalow in the winter but they might come down for the occasional weekend and had been known to have Christmas parties there. That Constable Prentice could know so much detail suggested that Dr Clark and his family were themselves very well known and their habits frequently discussed. But nevertheless, Henry thought, whoever was behind that message would have needed to know enough to make the message convincing. Once again he thought he must look to the local community with suspicious eyes. Or at the very least someone familiar with the local community.

  He wandered slowly around the bungalow, examining the living room once again but knowing he did not really have the time to spend to assess the scene properly. He and Mickey could look at the photographs later before they came down again.

  So what did they have? They had four young men and now this mysterious woman. They had Jimmy Cottee, who was dead, possibly by suicide, but who might or might not have been guilty of more than self-murder. Henry was inclined to doubt this. Then this Selwyn Croft, who had not yet been found though the word had gone out to the local banks that he was required and Henry expected that news to come shortly.

  Then this other young man, this other admirer of Cissie Rowe and the most likely giver of the snake bracelet. If he had a car of his own then he had money. If he could give gifts of gold bracelets then he had money; even if that gold bracelet were nine carat rather than twenty-two carat gold it was still not a cheap consideration. Had Cissie threatened him in some way? Had she threatened to reveal their affair? Henry considered that to be an unlikely reason for someone wanting her dead. It was almost de rigueur, these days, for a fashionable young man to have a fling with a fashionable young actress. Very occasionally such young men even married their paramours but that still raised eyebrows in certain circles, rather in the way that his sister’s marriage had raised eyebrows when she had married Albert – though those who had gained their wealth through commercial enterprise often married in less predictable ways than those who had wealth or status through ancient family connections and family name.

  So who was this young man? What circles did he move in? And why would Cissie want to keep this secret? In Henry’s experience young women who attracted the interest of men of a higher social status tended to be keen to advertise the fact rather than keep it from their friends. Had this urge to secrecy been impressed upon her by the young man she was seeing because his family would disapprove? In Henry’s view that suggested old money rather than new. A set which regarded status as being something to keep at the head of the list of importance, a family that would turn a blind eye to a brief and inappropriate dalliance but certainly not approve should that become more serious.

  And what about this Philippe? When Henry and Constable Prentice had photographed the devastation the previous day he had kept his eyes open for any hints of Philippe but had found none. Or at least none that he could recognize. Last night he had looked again at the photographs that had been on Cissie Rowe’s bedroom wall but had found nothing that helped him.

  He glanced at his watch thinking that he must leave soon, and the constable he had sent to speak to the flint pickers interrupted his thoughts.

  ‘They say they saw a woman yesterday afternoon, quite late – but then neither of them have watches or timepieces so they would not know the time. She was standing just up on the road there and when some children came by, she stopped one of them and spoke to him.

  ‘But they don’t think she was wearing a blue hat or a blue jacket. In fact they don’t think she was wearing a hat at all. They think she came out of one of the bungalows nearby because they think they’ve seen her before, but it was too far away for them to be certain.’

  Henry thanked him. It was possible that they had seen this strange woman speaking to the boy who had carried the message but it was equally possible that it was just a mother speaking to her children.

  ‘I’ve told them, if they remember anything else, to come and speak to whoever is on duty here.’

  Henry thanked him again. ‘I must leave now to go back to London,’ he said.

  ‘My sergeant and I may be down again this evening or it might be tomorrow morning. Keep the scene secure and if anyone shows an unnatural curiosity be sure to make a note of it. It’s possible that whoever searched the place may not have found what they were looking for. It’s possible they may try to come back.’

  The constable straightened himself up and nodded sharply. ‘They won’t get past us,’ he said. ‘You can be assured of that, Inspector.’

  TEN

  Eight days before Cissie’s death

  The evening of the day when Philippe had first returned to her life, they had gone out for dinner together and mostly it had been Philippe who had talked. He’d spoken about his experiences in the war, about how he had returned to the farm to find the place in ruins, nothing more than stumps of trees remaining in the orchard.

  ‘For a little while, they had used it as a dressing station,’ he had told her. ‘Then the line moved again and the artillery finished the destruction of it. My parents had remained; they were killed. The troops had already left, taking their casualties with them.’

  ‘I am so sorry, Philippe. I loved them, you know that.’

  He nodded. ‘I heard news of your parents’ death just after that. I asked after you, but was told that you’d already gone. That your father had made you leave. I tried to find you, Cécile. I asked everywhere. Someone told me you had been killed, another that you had gone south to Marseille, someone else that you had gone to England.’

  ‘And so I had. My father gave me what money they had and told me to leave. He said there was nothing more for me there and they would try and follow me. But of course they never did. We had nothing, Philippe, we had fled with the clothes on our backs and what my mother could cram into a tiny valise; we kept moving and moving and moving. And eventually they stayed and I moved on. There was nothing else to be done and they would have me go.’

  ‘When did you hear that they had died?’

  ‘It was almost a year afterwards that the news reached me. Philippe, I cried for days and then I heard your parents too were dead and I didn’t believe that you had survived. And now’ – she managed to smile – ‘and now you are here.’

  ‘And now I’m here. And we are together again. Cécile, I am so glad to see you. So happy, you cannot believe. Now we can begin again, just like we planned to do.’

  She had smiled, hoping that he would not realize that her heart wasn’t in it. Somehow, she had buried Philippe when she had buried the memories of her parents. She had been desperately sad that there had been no funeral for them, that she did not even know where their bodies lay. In her mind she had created a peaceful spot beneath the trees in her aunt’s orchard and her father, mother, aunt and uncle had been laid to rest and Philippe beside them, because she had truly believed that he had not survived the war. And she picked up her life and travelled on with it. What else could she do? And in time there was nothing else she had wanted to do. She had created a place for herself in the world, was earning her own money, had new friends and a new name and the past had been left behind where the past belonged.

  The following day she had not seen Philippe. They had made an appointment to meet this morning and now Cissie was regretting it utterly. Today she was not working, but she wished that she had been able to call in a
t the studio and find some task that she could take upon herself, something that would give her an excuse not to see Philippe. There were always odd jobs to be done and if not it was fun just to sit on set and watch the filming. This was her world now. But she had not been able to think of an excuse and she was also angry with herself for feeling like this. Philippe was alive; she should have been rejoicing, shouting the news out loud to the world, and of course she was glad that he had survived, only why oh why did he have to come and find her?

  And why did he expect her still to be in love with him? They had been children then, cousins who by rights should not have been even thinking to have such a relationship. She knew the Church would have frowned upon it and so would their parents if they’d suspected. She’d often wondered how they had failed to suspect.

  On that morning, eight days before she died, Cissie dressed carefully in a neat white blouse and dark green skirt that hugged her waist and hips and flared just a little at the hem, to accentuate the kick pleat. She had arranged to meet Philippe in Shoreham itself, away from Bungalow Town and the studio, away from the eyes of those who might gossip, but she didn’t want to go.

  She checked her appearance one last time in the mirror, adjusting her hat and dabbing one last time at her lipstick. Then she set out to meet Philippe, planning that today she would tell him how she felt. That of course she still loved him – but not like that. Not any more. That there was someone new in her life that she dared to hope might become serious. She knew she was foolish in hoping such a thing, though she didn’t plan on telling that to Philippe.

  No, her life had moved on and the past was in the past and Philippe was part of that past. Although she would always be his friend, always care about him, after all they were cousins. She glanced into the mirror again while rehearsing these lines in her head, trying for a look that was both convincing and concerned and gentle. Yes, they would always be cousins and they would always be friends but surely he must realize, they had been children, they were older now, and a relationship such as they had once hoped for, well, that was a nonsense now, wasn’t it?