One Way Ticket (18 page)

“I aint done nothing,” the man told us, trying
to wrestle himself from our grasp.

Addi rustled in his pockets and pulled out
a pair of handcuffs as I tried to keep hold of the old man’s arms. It seemed a
bit wrong to handcuff an old man but he was stronger than he looked.

“I am arresting you for the murder of Tina
Lloyd,” Addi informed him, trying to clip on the cuffs. After struggling
successfully to lock the second one, Addi started to march his captive back to
the car. I followed, out of breath with the sense of exhilaration.

Had we caught a murderer?

22 The Last In Line

My adrenalin was running so high
it was a few minutes before I took in what the old man was saying as Addi put
him in the back of the car.

“Murder? Murder? Are you crazy? I haven’t
murdered anyone!”

“So why were you running away?” Addi asked
him.

“I aint saying nothing more,” the old man
told us angrily.

I felt a little vulnerable having him
sitting behind me in the car, so I turned slightly to keep him in view. I also
couldn’t help the small doubts starting to form in my brain. I tried to dismiss
them with the thought that, as Addi had previously pointed out, all criminals
deny their crimes.

When we arrived back at the police
station, Addi took him up to the desk to be booked in. I plonked the man’s
carrier bag I’d picked up off the street on the desk next to him.

“I’ll do this, you’d better go back to
your office,” Addi told me.

I’m never around for the good stuff. Now,
I’d have to hang around trying to pick up titbits of information. On the other
hand, it was well past lunchtime. I went back to my desk and got out my
lunchbox. It took depressingly few minutes to demolish my sandwiches, apple and
crisps, and feel that familiar sense of disappointment once the box was empty.

More case notes had appeared in my in-tray
so, despite it being Christmas, someone was actually doing some work somewhere.
I began to type them up, keeping an eye on the corridor. I don’t know why,
they’d had to have to conducted the interview with cue cards for me to be able
to see anything from where I sat.

I’d almost gotten to the end of an
interesting case of cat harassment when Addi came in. In my opinion, he didn’t
look overly happy, not like someone who’d just caught a murderer should.

“It’s not him,” he announced, pulling Vara’s
chair over and sitting down heavily.

“He’s not Joe Harris?”

“Yes, it’s him but it’s not him.”

I gave him a quizzical look.

“He’s not the murderer.”

“So why did he run?”

“He’s been scamming women, claiming to
want to marry them to get at their money.”

I opened my mouth to protest that he
couldn’t possibly appeal to women, before remembering Kostas wasn’t that much
of a looker either. I shut it again.

“Tina could have found out about him,
threatened to reveal all? Good motive for murder.”

“Yes, except he was in England when she was killed. We’ve just confirmed with the airline.”

“Oh. Murder conviction looking a bit less
likely now?”

“We may be able to get him on a fraud
count, but that’s it.”

We sat and mourned our almost victory for
a few moments.

“Fraud’s not bad,” I said eventually.
“It’s something, the day hasn’t been a total loss. You can tell the mayor you
arrested someone else.”

Addi just looked at me.

“Look, we’ve completed all the house to
house interviews, that’s another task we can tick off.”

“But we didn’t learn anything new, not
about the murder.”

“At least we’ve talked to everyone now.
We’re leaving no stone unturned.” I could see Addi didn’t understand why I felt
so happy about this.

“We’re doing things properly now, being
thorough,” I explained, waving the completed interview forms at him.

“I’d rather we caught the murderer than be
thorough.”

Some people are just born picky.

“We haven’t gotten any further,” Addi
bemoaned further as I began my typing again.

“That’s not true, we’ve eliminated more
people from our enquiries.”

“Yes, but we’ve eliminated everyone! What
do we do now?”

I stopped typing for a moment to consider.
“Start from the beginning again? Go back and talk to the people from the start?
None of those interviews were done properly.”

My companion let out a loud groan.

“What about Tina’s job back in England in the doctor’s surgery? Aren’t there any leads there?”

Addi got up. “I’ll get the patient list.
There aren’t any names on it I recognised though.”

He came back with a fair wodge of paper.
“This is confidential, yes? The names on here.”

“Naturally,” I told him felling slightly
affronted. “I didn’t realise policework involved so much reading. I thought it
was more getting out there and chasing people down.”

“It would be handy to have this list
online, something searchable,” Addi said. “Someone could type the names into a
spreadsheet maybe.”

I didn’t like the way he was looking at
me. “No, they couldn’t. It’s in alphabetical order anyway, it’s easy enough to
search.” I hunted for the names of people we’d talked to so far. No Roger, no
Simon Richards, no Elsie Meadows (shame), no Louise Allen, and none of the
neighbours we’d spoken to that morning.

“You’re right, there’s no one we know on
this list.”

“It can’t be related to her old job then.”

“Unless… How easy would it be for someone
to change their name coming here from abroad? I mean, what’s to stop me calling
myself Jane Doe when I arrive? If I didn’t know anyone here?”

“Your passport.”

“But who goes round looking in people’s
passports once they’ve left the airport?”

“The bank? When you open a bank account.”

“A lot of these expats don’t open one, do
they? Some of the pensioners carry on using their UK one.”

“True. But what about when they apply for
their residency permit. They’d need their passports for that.”

“Have they all got permits?”

“I guess I’ll have to run their names
against the database.” He got up again.

“And I guess I’ll be here. Typing. Still.”

He came back again, about an hour later.

“Well?” I asked.

“They all have permits apart from Dorothy
White.”

“Who’s she?”

“A friend of Tina’s. Tina was meant to
have dinner at Mrs White’s house on the day of her death. It was Dorothy White
that found her body when Tina didn’t show up,” he said.

“What do you know about Dorothy White?”

“A widow. Used to be a hospital
administrator, now retired.”

“Hospital administrator. And Tina worked
in a doctor’s surgery. Is there a coincidence there?”

“Shall we go talk to her?”

I submitted the interview I’d been typing
up. The clock said 3:10. “Yes, let’s go see Dorothy White. The people who find
the body are always suspicious anyway.”

I picked up my coat and we walked down the
central corridor to the main exit. “I tell you what,” I said, “I enjoyed that
arrest this morning. It was pretty exciting, chasing down a dangerous
criminal.”

“A 68 year old, what do you call it?
Gigolo? With a bad hip. He was hardly an escaped fugitive,” Addi berated me as
we approached his car.

“He could have been armed.”

“What with? A pacemaker? Get in.”

The journey of three streets took
precisely two minutes. “We could have walked here, you know.”

“Doesn’t give the right impression.”

Dorothy White’s address was a small, cream
coloured, terraced house in one of the modern complexes that were springing up
all over the town.

“It would be funny if she tried to make a
run for it as well, wouldn’t it?” I said as Addi rang her doorbell. “Brace
yourself,” I warned as we heard someone come to the door.

Mrs White wasn’t surprised to see us, in
fact, she looked quite pleased as she invited us in and offered to put the
kettle on. It made a nice change from our usual frosty reception. Like the
locals, Mrs White seemed to be feeling the cold and was well wrapped in
slippers and a large cardigan.

“Sorry to bother you again, you must have
answered a lot of questions already,” I told her as we stood in her tidy
kitchen, watching her make three cups of tea.

“Oh, no bother. I’ve had the newspapers
around and all sorts. The doorbell hardly stopped ringing the day after.”

I got the feeling Mrs White wasn’t too
upset about the unexpected attention.

“It must have been terrible for you to
find the…Tina,” I said.

“Oh awful,” she began, handing out the
cups. “I had no idea when I went in. When I saw her lying there in front of the
couch, for a minute I thought she’d passed out or something. It was only when I
got closer and saw her eyes that I realised.” She gave a shudder. “Oh, it
almost gave me nightmares, I can tell you.”

“You were a hospital administrator,
weren’t you? Did you know Tina back in England?” I asked.

“No, I only met her when she moved over
here. Shall we sit down?” she asked, nodding at me trying to juggle writing on
my interview questionnaire sheet with holding the cup of tea. We each took a
seat at the dining table at the end of her kitchen.

“Funny, that the two of you worked in
healthcare,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose it was. I never thought
about that before. Isn’t it strange how you never think of these things until
someone points them out?”

“And Tina had been due here that evening?”
I asked.

“That’s right. She was coming for dinner
just after 5 o’clock. Nothing fancy, just macaroni cheese. I’m not one for
pasta much but I do like macaroni cheese. Probably not good for me, mind, all
that cheese, but I don’t eat it often.”

“And it was just going to be the two of
you?”

“No, Paul, my neighbour, was coming round
as well. I feel a bit sorry for him sometimes, being on his own like me−”

“Sorry,” I interrupted. “Paul? Your
neighbour’s called Paul?”

“Yes, do you know him?”

Be still my beating heart! Had we found
‘all my love, Paul’ from the birthday card at last?

“He was very quiet to begin with, just a
‘hello’ when you saw him,” Mrs White was running on, “you know, but now we get
on like a house on fire.”

“Was Mrs Lloyd seeing anyone at the time
of her death?” Addi edged in when Mrs White stopped to draw breath.

She looked down at the floor. Was she
embarrassed? “I don’t think so, I don’t really know. She had a lot of men
friends. She was a very friendly person. She wasn’t a bad person. My son
says−”

Addi couldn’t wait to hear what her son
said. “So, when Tina didn’t show up you and Paul went−”

“No, Paul didn’t go. We had our dinner
after waiting for a while. Afterwards, when Tina hadn’t responded to any of my
phone calls, I decided to see if anything was wrong. Paul left when I did.”

“And Paul lives next door you say?”

“Yes, number 23, just next door here.” She
pointed to her left.

“And he’s just a friend?” I asked.

Was it my imagination or did Mrs White
blush slightly?

“That’s right. You’re very appreciative of
your friends when you get to my age. It’s all right for you young ones, but
when you get older you need a lot more help−”

“Can I just ask,” I interrupted her again,
“if you know what Paul had been doing that afternoon? Bit of a long shot I
know, but do you remember?”

“I can’t really. I’m not sure he’d been
doing anything but I can’t be certain. It’s a long time ago.”

“No, well, thanks anyway.”

“Mrs White, we don’t have a record of a
residency permit for you,” Addi said.

“A residency permit? What’s that?”

See, I’m not the only one that didn’t
know.

Addi explained to Mrs White. “Do you have
your passport handy?”

“Yes. Somewhere.”

She went off to look for it. I looked at
my watch. We were wasting a lot of time here when Paul next door could be our
killer.

“What?” Addi whispered. “You said we
should do things properly.”

When Mrs White came back, Addi checked her
passport and advised her to apply for a permit as quickly as possible. Finally
we were ready to leave. I waited until we were back out on the street before
talking to Addi.

“I can’t believe we found Paul at last and
you wanted to check her passport.”

“You told me to!”

“Is this guy one of the Pauls you rang?”

“I can’t remember. I’m sure I’d have
noticed one living next door to the woman that found the body.”

“What did you think of Mrs White?”

“Probably a bit lonely. Old people who
talk a lot are usually a bit lonely.”

“No, I mean, do you think she could be
involved?”

“Maybe. Maybe this Paul and Mrs White were
both in it. I mean who meets for dinner at 5 o’clock?”

“Ah. That’s a speciality of older English people.
I don’t think it’s her. I suppose she could be lying for him.”

Addi stared at the front door to number
23. “Ready?”

A crop of butterflies had suddenly
appeared in my stomach but I nodded.

We walked up the path and Addi rang the
bell.

“I bet he’s not in,” I said as we waited.
“After all this, he won’t be in.”

We heard the sound of a door opening
within the house and the butterflies launched up my chest. Addi and I glanced
nervously at each other as footsteps sounded in the hall.

I was holding my breath as the door opened,
wondering what kind of person would be behind it. The man who appeared had a
lot of grey hair, not just on his head but also a beard covering most of his
face. He confirmed he was Paul when we explained who we were, and let us in,
seemingly affable enough.

As far as houses went, I’d seen a lot
better recently. Piles of books, newspapers and boxes down the hallway reached
past shoulder height. We edged past a towering pile near the door and tried to
find somewhere in the crowded living room to sit, ignoring sudden feelings of
claustrophobia.

“Ah yes, Tina Lloyd,” he said when Addi
mentioned her name. “Terribly sad, lovely lady.”

“Could I just ask your full name please,
sir?” Addi said, “for the record.” He nodded at the questionnaire I was filling
in. I’d already put ‘hairy’ in the physical description box.

“Edward Paul Marshall.”

“You go by your middle name?”