The Killing of Katie Steelstock (8 page)

As he said this he shifted his weight slightly, in a movement which seemed to throw his head forward. His eyes scanned the blur of faces in front of him. They were eyes which had seen a lot of brutality and stupidity and evasion and guilt.

“I believe he’s trying to hypnotise us,” said Mr. Beaumorris loudly to Mrs. Havelock. The audience was breaking up and re-forming into groups. A murmur of voices broke out and increased in volume. Suddenly everyone seemed to be talking at once.

“Like a cocktail party,” said Georgie Vigors.

“A slow start,” agreed Mr. Beaumorris, “but getting nicely under way with the second round of gins.”

He had taken a fountain pen from his pocket and was staring at the sheet of paper which Sergeant Shilling had put into his hand.

“Not bad,” said Knott as he shuffled through the papers. “Really not bad at all.”

He was seated behind a big table in the room behind the courtyard at the back of Hannington police station. It had been cleared and equipped for him. The wall facing the window was papered with an overlay of map sheets of West Hannington. These were from the Land Registry Map Section at Tunbridge Wells and were on a scale of twenty-five inches to the mile, large enough to show individual houses and gardens. There was a smaller-scale map of the surrounding area, with the new M4 running like a yellow backbone down the middle of it, from Exit 12 south of Reading to Exit 13 on the Newbury-Oxford road.

“We’ve got three estimates of the time Kate left the hall. Young Vigors, who was dancing with her, says it was about eleven o’clock. He says she slipped away quietly, saying she didn’t want to attract attention. Tony Windle confirms that. Another person who saw her go was Sally Nurse. She says it was a few minutes after eleven. Why she noticed the time was that she was surprised to see her go so early. Our Katie was usually one of the last to leave a party.”

Shilling said, “That puts her at the boathouse between a quarter and twenty past eleven. Always supposing she went straight there. And that fits in well enough with the doctor’s timings. He said most likely between ten past and half past eleven.”

“Yes,” said Knott. He thought about it, screwing up his eyes, as though he was looking into the sun. “It doesn’t give them a lot of time for romance, does it?”

“Romance?”

“Kate and the chap she’d gone off to meet.”

“How do you know she went to meet a chap?”

“When a girl cuts away from a dance on a warm summer night and goes down to a rendezvous on the riverbank, I’d be surprised if she’d gone to meet her stockbroker and talk about investments. Maybe that’s because I’ve got a dirty mind.”

Shilling, who had been turning over duplicate copies of the papers on his desk, said, “If you’re right, it cuts out almost everyone who was at the dance.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” said Knott. “What we’ve got is a lot of nice interlocking stories. Here’s the score to date. The Mariners left, by car, just after Kate. Mr. and Mrs. Nurse a few minutes later. Then that old pansy. What’s his name?”

“Beaumorris.”

“Right. Frank Beaumorris. Used to work in the manuscript department at the Victoria and Albert.”

Shilling looked up for a moment and said, “Did you run into him by any chance?”

“I did,” said Knott. He seemed disinclined to pursue the subject. “He pedalled off at around ten past eleven. Old Vigors went off by car shortly after that. He put it at a quarter past. Then we’ve got a foursome, the Gonvilles and the parson and his wife. They went together to the Gonvilles’ house for a cup of coffee and stayed there nattering until around midnight. Mrs. Steelstock and her son, that po-faced boy – name?”

“Walter,” said Shilling. He had a list of names in front of him and seemed to have been memorising them. “Works in an insurance office in Reading.”

“Right. They were away by eleven twenty. The last to go was the big woman—”

“Mrs. Havelock. J.P. Seven children. Three of them at the dance.”

“She took her three kids with her. And that dotty character – wait for it – Tress. Roseabel Tress. Lives next door to her in a bungalow called ‘Shalimar.’ If anyone came that way, she’ll have heard them. A real nosy old virgin.”

“If you take the latest possible time of death, eleven forty,” said Shilling, “it’s
just
possible, I suppose, for any of those people to have driven their cars to the end of River Park Avenue, walked along the towpath and been in time to kill Kate.”

“It’s possible,” said Knott. “But I don’t believe it. I don’t think anyone who was at the dance killed her. I think they’re all as innocent as they sound. No. Someone was there waiting for her. Someone who’d planned to get her to just that spot and meant to kill her.”

Shilling had worked with Knott on a number of cases. It had not taken him long to realise that the Superintendent was not an intellectual man, was not, in most senses of the word, clever. But he had one faculty which was based partly on shrewdness and partly on experience. He could grasp the shape and outline of any crime he was called on to investigate. He could sense whether it was a professional job or an amateur job, whether it was motivated by greed or fright or frustration, whether it was the outcome of careful premeditation or thoughtless fury. It was an instinct which had very rarely let him down and had brought him to the eminence he enjoyed.

“I can tell you something else, too,” he said. “You can forget about passing tramps or interrupted burglars. When I said that, I hadn’t seen her bag. That spells premeditation. No question.”

The bag had been found by the searchers. It was an evening dress bag, a pretty little thing with a pattern of roses woven in silk on the outside. The contents were laid out on the table beside it: a running-repair kit, a double folder of oiled silk with a sponge in one pocket and a box in the other labelled “Toasty Beige”; a cylinder labelled “Pearl Spin Eye Glaze”; a lipstick labelled “Mulberry”; a couple of tissues; and a folded pound note.

“If she’d been knocked on the head by some toe-rag who happened to be passing, first he’d have been too scared to stop and search her bag. Second, if he
had
searched it, he’d have taken the money.”

“Someone did search it,” said Shilling.

There was a photograph of the bag lying where it had been found in the long grass a few feet from the body. The contents were scattered beside it and the silk lining had been ripped half out.

“Right,” said Knott. “Someone opened it in a hurry and took something out of it. And I guess we know what he took, don’t we?”

Shilling smiled and said, “No marks for guessing. He was looking for the note he’d sent her, asking her to meet him at the boathouse.”

“That’s for sure.”

“And if there was a note in the bag,” said Shilling, smiling in the shy way that made him look a lot younger and more defenceless than he really was, “it wasn’t the only thing the killer took. Where are her car keys?”

Knott shot a sharp look at his assistant and then said, “Full marks for that one, Bob. I’d missed it. Do you think they could have fallen out somewhere?”

“If they had, I guess the searchers would have found them. They didn’t miss much.”

The search of the previous day had produced a mass of curious articles. The obvious rubbish and anything at all old or rusty had been put in a basket under the table. On the table were spread the more promising finds. They included a scout’s knife, a small compass of the type used by escaping prisoners of war, three twelve-bore shotgun cartridges, an old-fashioned collar stud, a new type tenpenny piece, an old type half crown and a torn shred of grey flannel.

Knott said, “That came off the barbed wire in the field next to Cavey’s cottage. And from what he told us, I can make a good guess where it came from.”

Shilling was still looking at the contents of the evening dress bag. He said, “I suppose all these things have been dusted.” When Knott nodded he picked up the cylinder labelled “Eye Glaze” and drew a line on the back of his hand. Then he repeated the process with the lipstick and regarded the result critically.

He said, “Not such a terribly with-it girl, our Kate.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re top-class stuff all right. But blue eye shadow rather went out last year. The fashionable shade this year is blue-brown. It’s called “Livid.” And I don’t think a blonde who was really giving her mind to it would have used mulberry lipstick. Much more suitable for a brunette.”

“I can see you haven’t been wasting your evenings off,” said Knott. “Maybe it was all part of the pose. The simple village girl sporting with the yokels. We don’t really know much about her yet.”

He paused for a long moment, standing hunched and still in front of the side table, looking down at the odd collection of exhibits but not seeing them. His mind was moving over the information he had collected; over the statements and the photographs and the impressions he had gathered while talking to people. Already he could see the killer. He was standing in the shadow of the boathouse waiting for the girl he had summoned. The girl who must have thought he was in love with her, or at least harmless, or she would not have come tripping so boldly down that dark path to meet him.

He said, “There’s one mistake we mustn’t make. She didn’t spend all her time down here. She had two lives. One of them was lived up in London. We’ll have to divide this. Get back to London first thing on Monday and see her agent. I’ve got his name and address here somewhere.” He searched through a bulging wallet and extracted a card. “Mark Holbeck, 22a Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. He’ll know as much as anyone about her. Don’t be too long about it. I’ll want you back down here. I’ve a feeling we should be able to clear this one up pretty quickly.”

He picked up the internal telephone and said, “Eddie? Would you and Ian come in for a moment, please.” He used their Christian names with a slight hint of irony, as if it was all part of man management and he knew it and they knew it. To Metropolitan officers, country policemen were swedes. Men who checked the rear lights on bicycles, dealt with sheep-chasing dogs and could recognise a Colorado beetle when they saw one, but knew nothing about the realities of serious crime.

“One of them took some nice photographs,” said Shilling. “That must have been Eddie.”

They were good clear colour prints, taken from directly over the object so as not to distort its dimensions, with a yard rule lying alongside each. They showed the body of Kate as it lay face down clasping mother earth. There was a close-up of the deep fractured wound in her head above the right ear, as though someone had been standing directly behind her and she had half turned her head, perhaps sensing at the last moment that there was someone there.

“Right,” said Knott. “Here’s how we split it up. Ian, you tackle the Havelocks and the Tress woman. Eddie, you take the Nurses. The one I’m interested in is the girl, Sally. She seems to have gone for a midnight spin with young Gonville. Interesting to compare their stories. That’s why I want them taken separately. Then you can have a word with the parson and the Group Captain and their trouble-and-strifes.”

Esdaile said, “Is there anything in particular you want us to find out? I mean, they all seem to be—”

“They’re all as white as driven snow,” said Knott. “What I’m interested in is two things in particular. Whether they saw, or heard, anyone else on the move around that time. And what they knew or thought about Katie. What sort of girl she was. What her interests were. Who were her special friends. They may be a bit shy of talking about that, but if you go about it the right way you’ll probably get there in the end. All those people should be available, being Sunday.” He paused, then added, “There’s one other thing. Don’t rely on your memories. Take these with you. They’ll save you a lot of trouble afterwards.”

He pushed toward each of them a contraption the size of a small camera. “Put it in your side pocket. It will pick up a voice speaking normally at five paces. Don’t forget to switch it on.”

Esdaile had picked up the box and was fingering it lovingly. He was a man with a passion for mechanical devices. He said, “That’s a great little machine.”

McCourt said, “I take it that these tape recordings will be in place of written statements.”

“Wrong,” said Knott. “I want both. I want the tape
and
your transcription of it. And I want them both by six o’clock every evening.”

“The thoughts of all of us present here today,” said the Reverend Bird, “must be focused on the tragedy which has struck our happy community like a bolt from the blue. It would be idle to pretend otherwise. It is in times like this that we have to ask ourselves reverently, but seriously, why God should permit such things to happen.”

Matins at eleven o’clock was the popular service in West Hannington. It allowed the men to get to the club for their pre-lunch drink and the women time to cook the lunch for which the men were going to be late coming back from their pre-lunch drink. On this occasion St. Michael’s Church was unusually full.

(“It’s the cohesive effect of shock,” Mr. Beaumorris had explained to Georgie Vigors when he met her in the porch. “How it does bring people together!”)

“Katie was not our private possession. She belonged to the whole country. Nevertheless, having been born here and living here, she had a very special place in our hearts.”

There was a stir at the back of the church, as of an animal moving.

“In spite of her public fame we all knew her for a simple, natural, lovable girl—”

“Stop it,” said a loud and angry voice. “Stop it at once. Leave Katie alone. Get on with your preaching.”

All heads jerked around. The rector seemed to be paralysed by the interruption.

Jonathan Limbery was on his feet. His face was scarlet. “You none of you knew anything about her. And now she’s dead, so for God’s sake let her lie.”

The two churchwardens, George Mariner and Group Captain Gonville, were moving down the aisle toward him.

Their advance seemed to provoke Jonathan. His voice rose to a cracked shout. “All right, you pious hypocrites. You can throw me out, but it’s not going to stop me telling the truth.”