The Maggie Murders (19 page)

There had been at least a packed
gallery for Connie to play to… Jane caught herself as she thought this; she was
turning into her boss. Connie looked genuinely distraught and it seemed that it
was only the presence of her rather haughty looking father which kept the
grieving widow upright on her exquisite heels.

There had been very few people at
Kellow’s funeral, though she had preferred the calm and timeless atmosphere of
Littleham’s pretty, medieval church to this concrete and steel mausoleum.  Then
there had been only a handful of local journalists, but now the vultures from
the Nationals had descended.  The idea that these killings might be linked to
Thatcher had given this story legs. Outside the crematorium TV news crews were
in position to glean material for the nightly news and even some foreign
journalists were in attendance.

Colonel Redfern stood with a not
unattractive woman near the front, if that was Mrs Redfern then she would only
be in need of one pair of knickers today, thought Jane. Taking a closer look at
the Colonel’s companion, Jane decided that it was unlikely that the deceased
had ever made a play for her as she was a million miles out of Connie’s league.
Even if there was an outside case for someone like the Colonel once being
jealous of the Sergeant, how on earth would it connect to Kellow’s murder? She
fought down an inappropriate giggle as she wondered if Mrs Redfern had been
getting an extra helping of sausage from the late butcher?

As Spilsbury faced Nigel Byrne
across the interview desk he took an instant dislike to the cab driver. There
was something pathetic about a middle aged man who still dressed in a t-shirt
displaying his taste in Heavy Metal and who wore running shoes on feet which looked
incapable of supporting his chubby frame over even a sprint. Not that Spilsbury
was one to judge a man for being fat, he knew his own girth had slowly inched
towards the XL end of the spectrum over the course of his career, but at least
he dressed his age.

Yet it was more the fawning
sycophancy of the man which made his gut rise. There was a greasy quality about
the man which oozed from every lying word he said and yet Spilsbury had been
all but directed to take the man’s testimony as gospel.

 An off the record interview with
the Deputy Chief Constable had made it very clear to Spilsbury that his early
retirement was not the ‘line drawn under it all’ solution to the charge of
assault  Andrew Sullivan had filed against him. He still couldn’t believe that
the man had had the nerve to complain and that anyone had bothered to take him
seriously. Yet Dent was now using it as leverage to get a conviction in the
Baker case, something the aspirant Chief Constable was desperate to achieve. He
had even handed Byrne to him as a means to this end. The equation offered being
Spilsbury’s early retirement on his full pension in return for using the taxi
driver’s evidence to secure Connie’s conviction for the murder of her husband.
Otherwise Dent was going to ensure a full and frank investigation into
Sullivan’s complaint, with a heavy hint that it would be upheld with grave
consequences for Spilsbury’s planned life of leisure.

Fifteen years ago, Spilsbury
would happily have told Dent where he could stick his deal, but now he had
neither the heart, nor spirit to take on his superiors. If he had felt that
Connie was innocent, he supposed he might have been prepared to make a stand,
but his gut told him she was guilty, even if the evidence being presented him
for this was about as Kosher as a pork pie.

Byrne had been picked up by
uniform for a string of minor offences ranging from having a bald front tyre to
a broken tail light; given Byrne’s previous offences he was most certainly
going to lose his licence and his livelihood. The fact that they’d also
discover enough cannabis resin to have him up for dealing meant he was more
than likely to be losing his liberty as well. At which point he’d told the
traffic boys that he had information about the Maggie Murders, just as Dent (who
had an annoying capacity to try and micro-manage everything) had been carrying
out one of his ‘touching base with the troops’ tours of the custody suite.
Salmons, the custody sergeant, had immediately gone crawling to the DCC with
the information.

He listened as Byrne told him a
cock and bull story about picking up Connie Baker from a hotel on the seafront
on the night of the murder and dropping her off at her home in Brixington. The
only trouble was that the times tallied with when her husband had died… The man
was either psychic, or very well briefed about the murder.

‘Do you know what perjury is?’

‘Would that be the number of
people per jury?’ Byrne answered with a sickly smile.

Spilsbury couldn’t work out if
the man was attempting a joke, or really was ignorant.

‘It’s lying in court, ‘growled
Jane.

‘And you wouldn’t just be telling
us what we want to hear in order for us to go easy on the charges you’re
facing, now would you?’

‘No, course not!’ countered Byrne
in far too quick a fashion.

For a moment Spilsbury feared the
man was going to swear on his mother’s life that he was telling God’s own
honest truth, but Byrne just slunk back on his chair.

‘And you’d be prepared to pick
your passenger out from an identity parade?’

Jane gave her boss a look. Connie’s
face had been all over the papers, picking her out from an i.d. parade would be
easy as picking out Boy George from a male voice choir.

‘Not a problem, you place her in
a line up and I’ll pick ‘er out. I’ve got an eye for faces.’

An eye for the main chance more
like thought Spilsbury; still if the identity parade worked out it seemed it
would get both him and Byrne off a couple of very nasty hooks and Hawkins would
have to lump it. They couldn’t prove a link with the other murder, but he’d bet
his pension that Connie was guilty of this one.

****

Watching highlights of Calum
Baker’s funeral on the local news Catherine Sullivan felt unmoved by the
report. In fact she felt the word ‘highlights’ was for once appropriate to
describe a funeral. As she stroked the unused baby romper on her lap, she felt
glad to see the close up of her rival’s grief stricken face.

She’d known it was true as soon
as she’d seen the woman standing next to her husband. The strange scents on him
had been something she’d been prepared to put down to her hormones going mad
during her confinement; however his increasing late nights at the school needed
explaining. A teacher herself, she still could not understand his Herculean
hours and implausible claims of extra meetings.

The glamorous assistant who had
joined the previous term had already raised her hackles, although she’d felt Connie
had been too old and overly made-up to be a serious rival.  Although it had
never struck her as odd until now that her husband had preferred her with minimal
make-up; she’d just seen it as proof of his decency. Like her mother, he had
always praised her for not wearing cosmetics and for not dressing like a tart.
Her mother certainly would never have employed Connie Baker and she was sure no
school in Ireland would have done – she wondered why Sister Ruth had been so
forgiving?

It was only on their honeymoon
that she’d become apprised of the darker nature of Andrew’s desires. Getting
pregnant had not only been her most longed for wish, it had also served as an
excuse to avoid her husband in his more perverse moods. Some of the things he
had done to her filled her with revulsion. The lesser evil of whiskey had been
used to overcome some of what had happened. She certainly couldn’t go back over
the water now; following her big sister over to England had been a mistake she
would regret over and over again.

Now she could do little without a
drink. The loss of little Aidan had destroyed her.  At times she wondered if it
was a punishment for doing those things Andrew had made her do, at others she
wondered if she should have been more compliant, perhaps then he wouldn’t have
indulged his needs with that woman? She knew that whore would do anything with
a man.

At other times she just wanted
Andrew back at any price. An empty house full of unused baby clothes was
killing her. She may as well be as dead as that whore’s husband for all life
had to offer her now.

****

G is for Guilt

I can’t understand the concept
of guilt – now getting caught, that’s different. Guilt is what they tried to
instil in me at school. A belief that if I sinned, God would be watching me and
that I would feel bad about it until I confessed my sins.

Well that’s nonsense!

I began sinning at school to
see if God would strike me down and do you know what? He didn’t. It only gave
me pleasure. I came to realise all the religious stuff was just another way of
trying to keep us under control; to do things their way.

Cigarettes, stealing, sex.
There was no lightning strike and best of all no guilt.

Yes, I was afraid of being
punished in this world, but I had no fear of being punished in a world I didn’t
believe in.

I’ve become very careful at
not getting caught. Being expelled from school might have been bearable, even
desirable but spending the next thirty years in prison would be hell.

After the first time I was
worried that I had left something behind that might have linked me to his
death. I wanted to go back and check, though I knew that would be a fatal
mistake. Every time the telephone rang or people came to the door, I assumed it
would be a policeman come to make enquiries. I kept rehearsing my alibi in my
head.

I wondered if I would have a
chance to flee. I thought about Brazil – if it was good enough for Ronnie Biggs
to defy the law from, then it would be good enough for me. The pictures I found
of Rio looked attractive enough and it became quite a fond little fantasy of
mine.  I put a contingency fund together and even thought about getting a false
passport made up; however I didn’t know any criminals and it would have looked
most suspicious if I’d been caught exchanging envelopes full of money for dodgy
paperwork in (presumably) some dank dive in London’s East End.

 The days passed as normal
though and the fear of being caught was replaced by the relief of having
planned it so brilliantly that no-one would ever suspect me of his death. It
made me bolder the second time and gave me the extra confidence I needed to
kill again.

I still need that fear though
and still have a contingency plan. Hubris has been the undoing of too many
murderers. That’s why I occasionally take a detour past the prison, just to
remind myself where I could end up if I get too carried away. It’s a little
note to self that planning is everything.

It’s funny to think that I‘m a
murderer. It’s not one of the career choices they expected me to make at
school. Doctor, barrister, or murderer doesn’t quite have the same ring to it
as doctor, barrister or stockbroker, does it? That raises the question of when
we become murderers, is it when we plan the death, or when we carry it out?

We were always taught that we
sin in ‘thought and word and deed’, so surely most of us have toyed with the
idea of killing someone  and are therefore guilty of it in the eyes of those
who still believe?

It’s such a small step to
cross over that line. That first time it was just the difference between
striking my lighter and not striking my lighter. I’m sure the law would have
given me a good deal less than thirty years if they’d caught me with an unused
lighter in my hand on that night, or if the old man had survived. I might even
have been out by now with the aid of an expensive lawyer. I’m sure I could
pretend to be crazy if the need arose, or preferably suffering from some
psychological neurosis which would explain my behaviour. There must be some
childhood trauma which explains my actions?

And yet how am I so different
from the great and the good? Thatcher kills when she needs to achieve her aims,
just as I do for mine. She’s killed far more people than me, quite openly and
is applauded for it. She’s sunk the Belgrano; assisted Reagan’s bombing of
Tripoli and upheld a shoot to kill policy in Northern Ireland. What’s one old
queer and a cripple compared to that?

****

Spilsbury licked the last of the
ninety-nine from his lips. Given the news he had received he knew he was going
to have to reform his choice of diet, yet at 57 it was going to take the type
of effort he wasn’t sure he was going to be capable of achieving. It had only
been during rationing that he had ever achieved what some might refer to as a
svelte figure, he’d ever since tended to what Felicity diplomatically called
the cuddly.

They’d always been an odd couple
to look at he considered, as three sea gulls on the low wall of the esplanade
fought over the remains of an abandoned burger. His brother had called them the
Laurel and Hardy of Epping Forest, though it had been more than just their
respective sizes which marked them out. Whereas he had set himself out as a
typical working class London lad, with a loud personality and a frame he was
always trying to grow into, she’d been a refugee from Czechoslovakia.  The
tiny, dark haired, delicate girl he’d first seen on his rounds as a bobby after
the War, had been the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

She’d clearly known a better
life. From what he had gleaned over the years, her family had been well to do
in Prague and up until the age of eight she’d lived in a big house with
servants. Given that his mum had been in domestic service, he could appreciate
the social gulf in their pre-war lives. Even if it hadn’t been for the sense of
refinement and good breeding she possessed, he was impressed by her
intelligence and quiet determination.

Most of his career had been
propelled by her. She had been the one to push him into taking his Sergeant’s
exam and then she was the one to encourage him to join the CID. In his initial
rush of love for her he had even talked about converting, this was not out of
any strong religious conviction, more a way of proving himself to her. Having
heard the reports on the wireless of what had happened in the camps and seen
the newsreel footage of them being liberated, like many of his generation he
could not come to terms with what had happened.

Felicity though had wanted to
forget; she had wanted to lose herself in her newly acquired Englishness and so
they rarely talked about her past. She became determined to be more English
than the English and had acquired an accent which soon had the majority of his
relatives thinking he’d married a snob. And yet he hadn’t, he just couldn’t
explain to them how important it was for Felicity to feel that she belonged.
She had chosen Felicity as her new name after the War, she said it had been
either that or Hope. To her Felicity had sounded more English. She was simply
trying to find with him and her children the safety and home life snatched away
from her when she was a little girl.

She’d been the one to ensure that
both Alan and Susan got doused with holy water at their local church, despite
his own lukewarm feelings about the religion he’d been born into. Still at
least the C of E let you keep your knob intact.