The Murder Book Page 25

  I know no one will forgive me and I’m not asking you to either. I love you and it breaks me up that we can’t be together.

  I don’t know where I’ll be going and I couldn’t tell you anyway. You understand that, don’t you.

  I will always love you, my dearest darling.

  Please tell my family that I love them too and I always will.

  Yours, Ethan

  Helen read it twice then couldn’t read it again because her eyes were too blurred with tears. Dimly, she was aware of two people coming up the rise towards her. One was her mother and the other was Robert’s father, Elijah Hanson.

  They were arguing but Helen couldn’t quite focus on the words until Elijah Hanson towered over her, demanding that she hand over the letter.

  ‘No,’ Helen said. ‘It’s not for you. It isn’t anything to do with you.’

  ‘Helen.’ Her mother’s tone was like a slap. ‘Show it to me, please,’ she asked more gently.

  Reluctantly, Helen placed the precious note into her mother’s hand.

  Then she broke down and wept, her heart breaking all over again.

  SIXTY

  The following morning the letter was given to Henry, delivered with the full weight of Carrington’s fury.

  ‘You harass a pillar of our community, you ruin his business and interrogate his friends when you have a murderous gypsy running free, probably having fled the country by now.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ Henry agreed. ‘But that doesn’t make Charles May any less guilty.’

  Waiting outside the King’s Head, Henry saw George Fields.

  ‘I wanted to catch you, Inspector,’ George said.

  He looked older, Henry thought. Old and tired but no longer angry. He seemed to have passed beyond that, or perhaps he no longer had the energy.

  ‘I wanted to tell you that I’m off back to sea. It seems like the best thing. I’ve nothing keeping me here and I’ll gain nothing by hanging around longer.’

  ‘I hope it works out for you, Mr Fields. And I’m sorry I’ve not brought things to a better conclusion.’

  ‘I hear talk about Charles May,’ George said. ‘Do you think he’s guilty?’

  ‘George, I can’t tell you that.’

  George Fields nodded. ‘Truth is, Inspector, if I stayed here I know I might get drunk one night, get myself a bit riled up like and, well, our Mr Charles May might end up … no longer in the land of the living.’

  ‘And I would know who was responsible, George.’

  ‘I know that too. I’ve been asking around, talking to people about my Mary and … I’ve learnt a few things. But that don’t make me feel any different, Inspector. And it don’t excuse what was done to my little Ruby. So I think the safest thing for everyone is if I go away, back on the boats for a bit. Leave you to do your work. I don’t want to have to hang for something I know I might be tempted to do.’

  ‘George, can I ask you something? How easy would it be for someone to get work on the boats?’

  George shrugged. ‘Depends, don’t it. Grimsby and Immingham, your papers have to be in order. You get checked or the master of the ship has to vouch for you. Other places, it’s easier. Crews change all the time, and in the smaller ports it’s easy enough to get yourself on to a boat, especially one of the bigger boats, and hide until you’re out to sea. Chances are they’ll just make you work it out.’ He shrugged again. ‘You’re thinking of the gypsy boy?’

  ‘Ethan Samuels, yes.’

  ‘I hear rumours that he might have killed our Mary too. But I don’t see it.’ He looked thoughtfully at Henry. ‘Those rumours true?’

  ‘A button was found in the bedroom,’ Henry told him quietly. ‘It matched one from Ethan Samuels’s shirt.’

  ‘So he came to visit Mary.’ George shook his head sadly. ‘I knew he … wanted her. He had that look about him, you know? So I discouraged him, thought I’d warned him off but … He’d not have killed her. I don’t believe he had it in him.’

  ‘We know he killed Robert Hanson. He had that in him.’

  For a moment both men fell silent, then George said, ‘If I was him, I’d go down the coast a ways to one of the little fishing ports. King’s Lynn, maybe. Boston, even. Ships come down river from all over the world – mixed crews always in need of deck hands. It’s no harder to get a place than it is to get field work come harvest.’

  ‘And few questions asked.’

  ‘Not if he’s young and strong and willing.’

  George twisted his flat cap between his hands then set it straight on his head. ‘I’d best be off. I’ve a way to go.’

  Henry nodded. ‘Good luck, George.’

  ‘Good luck to you too, Inspector. Seems to me we’re both in need of it.’

  SIXTY-ONE

  Charles May was dreaming. It was actually more in the nature of a nightmare and, worst of all, it was a nightmare about actual events.

  He woke with a start and lay staring at the bedroom ceiling. Light filtered in through the summer curtains, bathing the room in soft, crisp morning. He listened to the sounds of the household moving around him, servants clattering and a car driving up the road outside the house.

  He’d been remembering, he supposed, and that had filtered into his dream.

  He turned over on to his side and stared at the window. It was slightly open and the curtains billowed. They had been Celia’s choice, embroidered with flowers and little birds. Duck-egg blue, like the bedcover. He knew that Celia would never be coming back. That he would have to leave this house, his business and go somewhere else with whatever allowance his father-in-law decreed he might deserve.

  He’d be generous, Charles thought. It would demean him to be anything else, but that was scant compensation.

  And all because of that woman. If she’d been content just to have some fun, earn a little cash. Earn a substantial amount of cash compared to what she could glean elsewhere then all would have been well. But no, Mary was greedy. Mary was unreasonable.

  He’d been horrified when that young man, Walter, had let himself into the hotel room. Mary must have unlocked the door. Charles recalled the shock of looking up and seeing him there with the camera in his hand.

  But she had warned him in a way, Charles acknowledged. There’d been another time when he had booked them both into a hotel. Mary had been pleased, preening herself, making believe that she was a lady when all she was really was a little slut.

  They’d been leaving when Walter had suddenly appeared on the hotel steps and Charles realized he must have been waiting outside.

  ‘Take a good look,’ Mary had said, taking Charles’s arm with a possessive air. ‘Take a very good look, Walter, because this is a very important man.’

  He should have known, then. Should have followed his instincts and broken off all contact. But he’d been stupid and Mary had made certain that he paid for that stupidity.

  And now it was all too late.

  Henry and Mickey had been showing the new photograph of the car round the streets that backed on to the canal. They had focused on those areas where the car could have been parked quietly or even hidden on the waste ground, close to where the candlestick had been hidden.

  So far there had been little result.

  ‘You don’t see many cars parked at this end of town,’ one woman told Henry.

  ‘Which is why it might have been noticed. Why someone might have seen.’

  A shake of the head. ‘I might have seen a car but I can’t be certain of the day. I see a man come down to that bit of waste ground between here and the canal. Can’t be sure of the day.’

  Someone else had heard, or thought they had heard, a gate crash closed on the evening Mary Fields and her family had died.

  Then, one small breakthrough.

  ‘I was up, late. The baby had colic and I’d been pacing the floor with her for a good hour. Every time I laid her down she’d start with yelling again and my Fred, he had to get up for work at five, so I just stood the
re and rocked her in the other room. The front room. And I think I saw a man over at Mary’s place. I think it might have been that night.’

  Nora Mason was a very young woman. Married a year and with her first baby just a few weeks old, or so she told Mickey Hitchens.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell anyone this before?’ he asked.

  ‘Because I’ve been over at me mam’s. I wasn’t coping very well and I’ve no one here but my Fred and he’s no help. What man is when it comes to new babbies? So I went home to mam for a bit. She sorted me out.’

  Mickey nodded his understanding. ‘And you saw someone come out of that house?’

  She shrugged. ‘It weren’t that unusual. Men would hang about till they thought no one was looking and then they’d knock on the window and she’d let them in. She were discreet about it, waited till it were late and most people round here would be in their beds. But I’ve been up nights with our Linda. She just wouldn’t settle. Fred moved into the back room so he could get some sleep and I took her in with me most nights.’

  ‘And this night, you were up with her. With her colic.’

  ‘It must have been that night because I went to visit mam the next day. I was at the end of my tether, if I’m honest. You know what it’s like with a baby that won’t stop crying for hours at a time, not even if you give her the gripe water?’

  ‘It must be really hard,’ Mickey said gently.

  She nodded and he could see that she was very close to tears. ‘So I’m standing in the bedroom and watching the street, just for something to do. I sometimes see a fox come trotting down the road, sniffing round the dustbins.’ She smiled awkwardly. ‘You can imagine how lonely it feels when you’re standing there rocking a baby and the whole of the rest of the world feels like it’s asleep? Seeing a fox is, like, the height of entertainment.’

  She laughed and Mickey laughed with her. ‘And this man. Can you describe him?’

  ‘It was dark. He knocked on the window and Mary opened the front door but there was no light on. He was tall and well built, I suppose, and he was wearing a dark jacket and some lighter-coloured trousers. But I couldn’t see him very well.’

  ‘Nora, did you see a car? Was he driving a car, do you think?’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t see him get out of one but I saw a car drive down the end road just before he arrived. It was a small car, sit up and beg style, you know? Dark coloured. I don’t know if it was his.’

  ‘And what happened then?’

  ‘I tried putting Linda down for a while and she settled for a bit but then she woke up again and started screaming her head off once more. So I stood with her looking out of the window again and I saw the man leave. When I came home and heard all the talk about what had happened I said to our Fred, “That must have been the night before I left to go to Mother’s”. He said I ought to say something.’

  ‘I’m glad he did,’ Mickey told her.

  The night of the party Charles May had been wearing light trousers and a dark blazer.

  ‘Do you think you’d recognize the man again?’

  She shook her head. ‘I didn’t get a proper look.’

  ‘And the car.’ He took the photograph of Melissa’s car from his pocket. ‘Did it look anything like this?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t open top, more of the sit up and beg, like I said. It could be that one.’ She looked hopefully at Mickey as though he might provide her with the correct response.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mickey said and saw the disappointment as she realized that this interview was over. That it was time to go back to the crying baby and the husband who needed his sleep. ‘I hope she gets over the colic,’ Mickey offered. ‘I’m told they usually do after the first few weeks.’

  She nodded gratefully, as though he’d offered much more than casual reassurance.

  As Mickey walked back down the street to where his boss was waiting, he was aware of her, standing in the bedroom, the child cradled in her arms, watching him leave.

  Charles May was not best pleased when Inspector Johnstone and Sergeant Hitchens turned up on his doorstep in the early evening. It was time, Henry had decided, to increase the pressure, even if that meant a little bending of the truth.

  ‘A man fitting your description was seen at Mary Fields’ house on the night she and her daughter and Walter Fields were murdered. A car belonging to Miss Melissa Heath is known to have been, shall we say, borrowed from where it was parked at Willingsby Hall that night and seen close by the house where the murders occurred. Yes, you were at that party; yes, you have witnesses but, Mr May, my sergeant and I have been to the hall and we have seen that it would have been perfectly possible for you to leave, unobserved, in the borrowed car.’

  ‘And if you’re so sure of yourself, why not have me arrested? You have nothing, Inspector. It’s all circumstantial. You are playing a very foolish game.’

  Henry nodded thoughtfully. ‘I hear that your wife is filing for divorce,’ he said. ‘Or is that just a rumour? It seems that your wife may well have her doubts.’

  Charles turned on him, furious. ‘That’s low, Inspector, even for a policeman. She’s gone away for a while because she is, understandably, very upset by all this. My wife and children are staying with family in France. And that is all. All.’

  He was shaking, Henry could see that. Barely suppressed rage and what more? A little fear, perhaps.

  Henry knew he had scored points.

  ‘I may be joining them,’ Charles said. ‘Some time away would be a good thought.’

  ‘I’d advise against it,’ Henry told him.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Edmund Fry had spent the previous day in a state of anxiety. The feeling had grown, overnight, that something was terribly wrong. That Charles might be guilty of more than just having an affair. The upshot of this anxiety, that had interrupted his sleep and troubled his dreams, was that he confided in his wife over the breakfast table.

  Delia’s eyes widened as she poured his tea from the forget-me-not blue pot. ‘You can’t be serious. Can you? Charles and Celia are our friends.’

  ‘And Celia hasn’t contacted him since she left for Nice. She has her father’s lawyers involved. She’s looking for a separation.’

  She looked down at her plate, suddenly guilty.

  ‘You knew that already?’

  ‘Oh, dear. I didn’t want to mention it, not until … You already seemed so upset by all this.’ She took a deep breath and reached across for more toast.

  ‘You want the marmalade?’

  ‘Please. We talked, just before she left. She said that she was furious with him because of the affair. I think she was offended, if you must know, that he’d chosen a woman like that to … well, anyway.’ She paused, scraped butter across her toast then added a spoonful of marmalade. ‘She didn’t want the boys to overhear anything. Young Robbie is off to school next year; he’s old enough to ask questions.’

  ‘And does she think he … did anything else?’

  Delia looked sternly at her husband. ‘You mean, does she think he might be a murderer? No, of course not.’

  ‘You don’t sound so certain. Delia?’

  She dropped her toast back on to the small, square plate. ‘Edmund, I don’t want to think he could do anything like that, really I don’t, but I’ve been talking to our friends, people who were with us at the party and, well, we all want to think that we knew what Charles was doing all evening. That we can give him an alibi. In good faith, I mean.’

  ‘And you think we can’t.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘Darling, I know she was, well, a prostitute, but she was still a woman.’

  ‘Not a very nice woman. But no. I do take your point, personal enmity aside. And believe me, dear, I’d never wish anything to have happened to the child.’

  He sat back and studied the breakfast table as though the eggs and toast, dishes of preserves and the forget-me-not pattern on his wife’s cup could provide him with solut
ions.

  Delia retrieved her toast then put it down again.

  ‘And what do they all think?’ he asked her. ‘I don’t know how much …’

  She sighed. ‘Oh, dear. Well, the fact is we did our best to put it together, to find out who’d seen him and when and what he was doing. There’s a great big gap when no one seems to have known where he was.’ She looked slightly shamefaced and then added, ‘Toby suggested he might have been otherwise engaged with a woman. He could have slipped up to one of the bedrooms and no one would have known. I mean, with a woman we know, rather than a woman he … paid.’

  Edmund nodded, his appetite suddenly fading. ‘Let me think about this,’ he said. ‘Delia, I need to think about this for a while.’

  She nodded. ‘Do you think he was as desperate as all that?’ she asked.

  ‘If Mary Fields threatened him with blackmail I think he would have been very desperate,’ he told her candidly.

  She shrugged impatiently. ‘Then he should have just given her the money, shouldn’t he? Made her go away. A woman like that, he could have paid her off. He didn’t need to … not that I’m saying he did.’ She looked across the table at her husband, noting for the first time how pale and worried he looked, how … creased.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she said again.

  By early afternoon Edmund Fry had made up his mind. Charles had not come to the office again that day. In fact, it had now been three days since Charles had last come to the office and the days before when he’d actually arrived he hadn’t stayed for long. And he’d been drinking. Properly drinking, not the odd, sociable whisky in the office.

  He called his partner at home but was told that Mr May didn’t want to speak to anyone. So at half past two, his last appointment of the day dealt with, Edmund Fry went to call on his friend and see if he could get any sense out of him, face-to-face.

  ‘He’s sleeping, sir. He had a bad night, I believe,’ Charles’s man told him.