Death of an Innocent (Richard and Amelia Patton) Read online

  ‘And perhaps not be out-of-pocket.’ He smiled thinly.

  ‘We mustn’t forget that. And you’ve held on to them for a month...’

  ‘No hurry,’ he observed, ‘if the client had been told it would be necessary to wait for the opportunity.’

  ‘He — the client — gave you the opportunity. He told you when the house would be empty.’

  ‘That’s a flat assumption,’ Harvey shot back at me.

  ‘Yes, Richard,’ put in my wife. ‘You’re making a lot of assumptions.’

  Amelia likes to be helpful. She could see I was working hard to persuade Harvey to part with the envelope. She realized I needed a boost.

  ‘Not at all, my dear.’

  ‘Yes you are. Listen to you, assuming what Harvey did and thought and how he acted and why. It’s a bit of a presumption, I must say.’

  ‘He hasn’t objected.’

  ‘Nor would I, if I heard you making a fool of yourself.’

  ‘In what way,’ I demanded, ‘have I made a fool of myself?’

  ‘He could well have gone there for something else, and come across this envelope by accident.’

  ‘They said there was nothing missing.’ I reminded her. ‘And I’m not at all sure I can rely on your friend and her husband. And there’s the photo, under your nose, and you can’t say it’s a normal sort of photograph to take —’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘It means something.’

  ‘Of course it does,’ she said with scorn. ‘But not a murder. Nobody could read that meaning into it.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ I protested.

  ‘Oh...didn’t you? I must have missed something.’

  Then I understood. Harvey wasn’t going to part with his treasure unless he was sure it wasn’t going to land him in trouble with the police. Amelia had seen a way in which to convince him. I looked at Harvey and raised my shoulders. He grimaced. His eyes had been darting from one to the other of us.

  He changed it to a smile.

  ‘I take it you’ve lost interest,’ he murmured.

  ‘Not entirely. I’m still intrigued.’

  ‘To what extent?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Two hundred.’

  He laughed. ‘The fee mentioned was a thousand.’

  ‘If you hand ‘em over you’ll never know what harm you might be doing. If this is evidence of blackmail, you’ve already put an end to it.’

  This was specious argument, but he seemed to miss the weakness.

  ‘Two-fifty,’ he said briskly.

  ‘Three hundred, if I get the name of the client as well.’

  ‘Come on now...’ He pursed his lips, shaking his head.

  ‘I’d have to make a few more enquiries, and if I find there’s nothing serious going on I could hand this envelope over, intact, to your client. And get my money back.’

  ‘With seven hundred profit!’ He laughed, clearly delighted with the bargaining.

  ‘Which I’d send to you. Otherwise, you’d be out-of-pocket, and I wouldn’t want that to happen.’

  ‘Richard Patton,’ he proclaimed, ‘you’d make a fine black-mailer yourself.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I! Not a good burglar, though.’

  I didn’t dare look at Amelia as I drew out my cheque book. I was going to be overdrawn. ‘A cheque do you?’

  ‘I can’t handle credit cards, and you’ll not have brought the cash. A cheque, then. If it bounces, I’ll be round to collect. When you’re not at home.’

  With my pen poised, I looked up into his eyes. He was not joking.

  ‘His name and address?’ I asked.

  ‘It was at a boatyard I met him. Ruston and Sons, they called it. They might live there. He’s a son, the only one I think. Mark Ruston. It’s a boat repair place on Salhouse Broad, next to Wroxham Broad, where all the yachtsmen hang out.’

  I wrote the cheque. He took it from me without glancing at it and put it in his inside pocket. I took up the yellow envelope. It had a pocket each side, so I put one photograph in each, and slipped the envelope in my own inside pocket. We got to our feet. Business was completed. I was aware that I’d bluffed him, that I’d lied to him by implication, and tried not to be disturbed about it. When he shook hands there was a twinkle in his eyes that warned me of something, but I ignored it.

  ‘Call again,’ he said.

  ‘Unless you call on us first.’

  ‘Ah, but that wouldn’t be by invitation. It’s been very interesting meeting you, and your wife of course.’

  He showed us to the door. Just before it closed, he said: ‘Remember me to Inspector Poole.’

  We sat in the car, me behind the wheel. The temperature was falling rapidly and the windows quickly steamed up. I started the engine, did a three-point turn, then drove out of sight of the cottage before I stopped.

  ‘Now what?’ Amelia asked. She sounded a bit short with me. ‘I’ve stopped to warm up the engine and clear the windows.’

  ‘I meant, what have got for your money? Nothing.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. We have two photographs, which may or may not refer to a crime. Certainly, there’s a dead woman. The two pictures aren’t the same, because the yellow sticker’s there in the one and not the other. So some sort of fiddle was done by the photographer. That suggests to me something like an alibi being rigged, and you don’t rig alibis unless there’s something serious happened.’

  ‘You’re surely not saying —’

  ‘What I’m saying is that your friend, with or without her husband, could well be involved in blackmail. No...make that possibly. These were stolen from Mansfield Park. Challenge Harvey on it, and he’d deny that. He’d say he’d found them, or something. But we know they came from there. Don’t we?’ I tried to press her into an admission.

  She was reluctant. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘So...these photos are either the ones received by a black-mailed person, or copies of the ones sent by the blackmailer. It’s one or the other.’

  ‘Nonsense! Ridiculous!’

  The engine had reached full temperature. I turned on the heater and the fan, and drove away. ‘Which would you rather have?’ I asked.

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Now we’ll have a word with Inspector Poole,’ I told her. ‘Now?’ It was a protest. She wanted more time to assimilate it and accustom herself to the proposition.

  ‘We can hardly avoid it. She’s waiting at the garage on the coast road. Didn’t you spot her little Metro?’

  5

  It was no longer necessary for me to watch signposts in order to get back to Happisburgh. I drove on dipped heads, the lights slicking the tarmac, and made for the lighthouse. Amelia was silent for a while. I knew what was troubling her, apart from the involvement of her two friends, and waited until she got round to it. In the end she spoke in almost a weary voice, as though she was tired of working things out.

  ‘I don’t know what’s got into you, Richard. I really don’t. You promised Harvey Cole — and I must say I liked him — you made him a promise that you wouldn’t take the things to the police. Now you’re going to let him down. You are going to show them to Inspector Poole, aren’t you, even though you’ve said there could be murder involved.’

  ‘She’s waiting for exactly that.’

  ‘You promised him! It’s not like you. Specious and plausible, that’s what you’re being. I don’t like you in this mood.’

  ‘I promised him what?’

  ‘That you wouldn’t give anything away to the police unless there was nothing serious involved. You persuaded him there wasn’t anything serious.’

  I smiled to myself. ‘In which you were of great assistance, my dear.’

  ‘It was what I thought you wanted.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘To cheat him with!’ She said passionately. ‘Now you say it could be serious. Where are you heading with this, that’s what I’d like to know? Do you really know what you’re doing?’

  That w
as the point — did I? I knew what I wanted to achieve, but was far from sure how to do it. ‘In effect, I promised Harvey I wouldn’t hand Inspector Poole anything in which she would have to involve him. I don’t intend to let him down. I also promised Miss Poole something — to show her what I’ve got. Now all we’ve got to do is persuade her that there’s no case in it for her, and everybody will be happy.’

  She muttered something. I said: ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said, I’m far from happy.’

  ‘A bit of a crafty wriggle, and we’ll be home and free.’

  ‘Home?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘It’s a saying. I think we’re a long way from home.’

  Where the side road met the coast road at Happisburgh there was the now dark and silent garage where I’d seen Melanie Poole’s Metro parked. I drew in beside her. The only light was from a distant street lamp, the intermittent flicks of the lighthouse, and what leaked from the windows of the nearby hotel. She’d been waiting a long while. It was nearly ten o’clock. I could just detect her face when she climbed out and stood beside us. I was set, and pinched with cold.

  ‘You got it?’ she asked

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You certainly took your time, I’m frozen.’ Light flicked across her face.

  And fed up, and about to be disappointed. I didn’t say that, only tried to sound cheerful. ‘We’ll try this place for a drink. You’ll soon get warm.’

  ‘Very well.’ She hesitated. ‘Is it something you can show me in a public bar?’

  ‘Quite innocuous. You’ll see.’

  We hurried into the warmth of the public bar, which was half empty but even so was not sufficiently private. I had to allow for the possibility of Miss Poole losing her temper. We went through to the lounge and found a corner seat. I sat them down behind the table, and fetched beer and two gin and tonics.

  Inspector Poole had forsaken her casual look, and was smart in green slacks, a darker green jacket, and a white shirt. Her hair seemed brighter in artificial light. There was now some make-up on her lips and cheeks, and small ear-rings, remarkably resembling handcuffs, swung from her ears. We sat, the two women on the bench seat, myself on a stool. I hate stools; they make your back ache. Melanie sat back and reached for her cigarettes. She offered one to Amelia, who shook her head. I leaned forward.

  ‘Without any direct admission from Harvey, I got this from him,’ I said, my hand inside my jacket. ‘In court he’d claim he found it in the street.’

  She waved smoke from in front of her face — or it could have been in dismissal of Harvey’s optimism on that score. ‘I don’t really want to see him in court, but...Is that all?’

  This was on sight of the yellow envelope. I opened it and whisked out one of the photographs, the one that included the yellow disc stuck to the breast of the anorak, and slid it across the table to her.

  ‘Is this all?’ she repeated, a touch of anger in her voice, that she’d wasted so much time on it.

  ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that a top man like Harvey Cole had been employed to steal a picture of a dead girl!’

  ‘I’m not trying to tell you anything. Harvey sold me this envelope — sold, Melanie, so that the contents are mine — and it’s not my fault there was nothing in it but evidence of somebody drowned.’

  She looked up into my eyes, hers an ice-cold blue. ‘You’re trying something on, Patton.’

  ‘Look at it, and stop arguing,’ I said, equally cold, though in fact her anger and her sudden distancing of herself from me with the curt use of my surname I found in some way comforting. I didn’t feel so bad about what I was doing.

  ‘I’ve looked. A drowning. The fact that some ghoul or other chose to take a picture isn’t necessarily relevant.’

  ‘Unless,’ I suggested, ‘it was her murderer, recording her death.’

  ‘Tcha!’ she barked in disgust. But at least she returned her attention to it. She was silent. I spoke softly.

  ‘You said “girl”. So you recognized what it is. You knew in a second.’

  She didn’t raise her head at once. I waited. When she did look up the anger had gone from her eyes and her voice was soft with sorrow.

  ‘I went out on this one. There was the question of identification. She wasn’t...’ She glanced at Amelia. ‘Wasn’t recognizable. And though she must’ve been in the water for a week or so, there’d been no report of a missing person that fitted. We found out later that she was supposed to be at college. At home, they assumed she was there. At the University — Birmingham, if I remember correctly — they hadn’t missed her. But we got there in the end. She was nineteen. Her name was Nancy Ruston. That’s without an aitch. Her family does boat repairs...’

  Her voice faded off. She’d been talking too much. The death had affected her. Perhaps they didn’t get too many in Norfolk. I didn’t dare to look at Amelia, no more than a glance at her hands. At the sound of the girl’s name, her fingers had twitched. The liquid was still moving in her glass.

  I gave it a few moments, the time it took to empty half my glass. I tried for a casual tone, the detached voice of a man who’s seen far too many dead bodies.

  ‘This was...when?’

  ‘What? Oh, early on in the year. May. Yes. The season hadn’t really started.’

  ‘So — that photograph was probably taken where she was found, not necessarily where she’d gone in the water?’ In the holiday season she wouldn’t have remained unspotted for a week or so.

  ‘It certainly looks like it. I seem to remember...yes, see there, that’s a yellow bog iris. They were growing on the bank. It’s where she was found.’

  ‘Which was where?’

  She looked at me sharply. ‘You’re asking a lot of questions about this, Richard.’ So I was back with my Christian name. ‘Now you know how things are. It was an accident. The inquest verdict was one of death by misadventure. There’s nothing in it for you.’

  ‘For me!’ I raised my eyebrows at her, looking all naïve I hoped. ‘It’s not for me. Amelia’s friend’s upset because of a burglary that she says is abortive. What am I going to do? Nothing? Or take her a photograph I can’t explain?’

  She pouted at me. ‘I don’t care what you do. For me, her death is a closed file. There was no evidence of foul play. On a Friday, just over a week before she was found, she borrowed a car from a friend in Birmingham. We never discovered why she was in Norfolk, when nobody was expecting her. We never even found the car, which was the only point at all suggestive. But not enough to justify keeping the file open.’

  I nodded. Fair enough. So Harvey Cole need not be involved. I asked gently: ‘But where was she found?’

  ‘You’re very persistent.’

  ‘He always is,’ Amelia put in.

  ‘And?’ I asked, still at it.

  ‘She was found in the River Bure, a mile east of South Walsham. She could have drifted down either the Bure or the River Thurne, which meets it just north of there. As I said, she’d been in the water a few days. The river’s pretty deserted just there, in May. Schoolboys found her, out looking for anything going, I suppose.’

  ‘So that photograph doesn’t change a thing?’

  She skimmed it back at me. There was blue ballpoint ink on her shirt cuff. ‘I’ve got a dozen like that.’

  I stared at the wall behind her. There was a faint glow of satisfaction, that I’d steered her clear of Harvey and now had an open field. Yet there was a vague uneasiness.

  ‘You’re certain of the time she’d been in the water?’

  ‘You know the pathologists are pretty accurate on that. We were given five to eight days, probably nearer five.’

  ‘It was drowning, I suppose?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And she was found on a Saturday?’

  She looked surprised. ‘How d’you get at that?’

  ‘A guess. Schoolboys. May. It sounds like a Saturday or a Sunday.’

 
‘It was a Saturday. The 14th of May.’ She cocked her head. Her tone was sarcastic. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so. Oh...where did she live?’

  She moved in the seat impatiently. ‘I told you. The family had a boatyard, it’s on Salhouse Broad. I hope you don’t intend to go worrying them.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  She rose to her feet. ‘Then I’ll just buy you a drink...’

  ‘Thank you, but no more.’

  ‘I’ll say good-night then.’

  ‘Good-night to you, Inspector. It’s been nice meeting you.’ She nodded. Amelia smiled. Melanie stalked off through the public bar, purposeful and annoyed.

  Amelia sat and stared at her glass. She still had half her drink left, so I went into the bar and got myself another half of bitter, giving her time to mull over what had been said, and for the pain in my back to ease. When I returned she was still frowning and silent. I slid on to the seat beside her.

  I said: ‘Penny for them.’

  ‘They’re not worth a penny. Richard, you weren’t really honest with her.’

  ‘Wasn’t I?’

  ‘That idiotic look of innocence of yours! You know what I’m talking about. You showed her only one of the pictures.’

  ‘I offered her the one I thought she’d recognize.’

  ‘The one with the yellow charity sticker on. Yes, I noticed. But how did you know that was the one she might recognize?’

  ‘She didn’t point out any discrepancy.’

  ‘It was six months ago. She might not have remembered it in any detail. Now be sensible.’

  ‘Of course she remembered. The point is, she didn’t point it out.’

  ‘But why did you show her that one? Why not the other? Why not both — come to think of it?’

  I hid a smile behind my glass. ‘If she’d seen both, that would’ve been evidence of something suspicious, and she’d have wanted to know more. Perhaps from Harvey. Which would involve your friends, Amelia. I had to guess which photo showed the girl as Melanie saw her, when she was found. The odds were that it was the one with the sticker.’