But For The Grace: A DC Smith Investigation Page 11

  “If someone I’m interviewing tells me it was ‘perfectly normal’, on a good day I’ll just assume they were being careless with language. I say careless because nothing ever is perfect or normal. But if they tell me it was ‘perfectly normal’ twice in a minute, I start to assume that it isn’t carelessness. Someone who does that is just too anxious to convey that there is nothing for me to worry about. That’s when I start to worry.”

  She hadn’t seen it, and neither was she entirely convinced. It seemed such a slight thing… And yet she had seen Smith catch people out with less than that. She did have something of her own to offer, though.

  “Another little break in the routine as well – Joan talking more than usual about her family? And then not only does Joan stay in her room alone, so does her friend. I wonder what the other two did that night.”

  “I suppose we will find out.”

  Maggie looked up. Something in his voice was different. With Smith’s profile half-turned away, she could not see his face but as she watched she saw him swallow awkwardly, with difficulty. She didn’t know what to say.

  When he finally turned away from the window, he seemed to be himself again.

  “I wonder how much of this carpet DI Reeve and Superintendent Allen would like us to lift up. Just a corner, a little bit of work with the hand-brush? Or do we spring-clean the whole room?”

  “You really think there’s something here? More than whatever happened to Joan Riley?”

  “I think we’d better send for Mr Collins. I’d like to speak to him before he speaks to Nancy Bishop.”

  Martin Collins had also chosen to come to the manager’s office to be interviewed. He sat down heavily in the chair and was a little breathless for some seconds – both detectives waited until he was able to speak without difficulty. Time and his own weight had bent him somewhat but Collins was still a large man – in his prime he had stood over six feet. His big hands rested on the arms of the chair, and his eyes, after looking at them both, eventually rested upon those of Smith.

  “Thank you for coming, Mr Collins.”

  “Aye, well, I didn’t think I ‘ad much choice in the matter. If I din’t come to see you, you were coming to see me.”

  “Absolutely right, sir.”

  The vowels were flat and northern – but not far to the north. Smith guessed Sheffield or somewhere nearby. The man nodded slightly at the detective’s honesty.

  “Do you know why we need to speak to you, Mr Collins?”

  “Summat to do with Joan.”

  “Yes. It doesn’t look as if she died of natural causes.”

  Martin Collins narrowed his gaze and looked down at the surface of the desk, with its papers and open files.

  “I’m not quite sure what you’re sayin’ – sergeant, is it? Are you sayin’ somebody killed her? If so, that’s-”

  “No, Mr Collins, that’s a different thing from what I said, isn’t it?”

  Smith left the man to reflect on that, and then Maggie took over, asking Collins, in her friendly, matter-of-fact way, to tell them what he could remember of the events on Saturday the 6th of December. The story was pretty much the same as that of Nancy Bishop. When asked how long he had known Joan, he said that it would be for at least eighteen months, and that the five of them had been what he called ‘close enough’ for more than a year. Aye, she’d been a bit poorly lately but cheerful enough, you had to be in this place. Sometimes they’d get together on a Saturday night, sometimes not. He’d not been feeling too chipper himself, as it happened…

  Maggie asked him what had been the matter, the way that women do, and Smith carried on reading the file in front of him, Martin Collins’ file.

  “Arthritis in the hip.” He leaned to the side and rubbed at his left hip as if to make sure they understood exactly what he was saying. “Sometimes it won’t straighten. It’s me own, don’t hold with these artificial things, half of ‘em made in Korea. Anyways, I got stuck in the bathroom that night. Like the three old ladies.”

  Maggie smiled sympathetically and asked what happened.

  “I were lucky Ralph came in. He tried to pull me up but I’m too much of a weight, as you can see. So he fetched Kip and they got me back to my room. We sat in there for a while, me and Ralph, watching the football.”

  Smith had looked up from the file with an expression that Maggie recognized.

  She said, “Well, I suppose that’s the benefit of living where there is always someone to help, Martin. Who was it you said that got you out and back to your room?”

  “It were Kip. He’s the best o’ the bunch.”

  “Yes, we’ve already met Kipras, Martin. About what time was it that he came to help you? Can you remember? We’re just trying to find out where everybody was that night.”

  “I can’t be exact about it. But football were on when we got back to my room. He pushed me in a chair, like… So it must have been half nine or so.”

  “How long did it take, Mr Collins, to get you out of the bathroom and back to your room?”

  He looked at Smith almost as if he had forgotten the other detective was in the room.

  “No more than five minutes, I’d say.”

  “And did Kip stay in the room, watch a bit of the footie with you and Ralph?”

  “No… Well, a minute or two maybe, just making sure I was alright. But I was, Ralph being there an’ all.”

  “And this was definitely sometime after nine o’clock that evening?”

  “Aye.”

  As he spoke, Smith continued to write notes in his Alwych – small, neat, already bullet-pointed notes.

  “We specifically asked him, did you stay outside the room? Did anyone else enter the room? Did you wait there as Ms Miller asked you to? Who were the next people to go into the room?”

  “Agreed. It’s possible that he forgot about helping Martin Collins.”

  “On that night? No – he’d remember the dilemma of deciding whether to stay where he’d been told or to help a resident.”

  “So why lie about it?”

  “All sorts of reasons. Most likely he feels guilty about deserting his post, that sort of thing. But it means that the room was unguarded for a few minutes, with Joan Riley’s body inside.”

  “But still locked, DC.”

  He looked at her with a flash of impatience and irritation. There were downsides to working with him, and this was one of them – you could feel stupid at times if you were not keeping up, and he would not hesitate to leave you behind if it meant closing down a case more quickly.

  “OK – keys. A member of staff could have gone inside.”

  “Or?”

  “A resident who’d got hold of a key.”

  “I’m not saying yet that anyone did but now we have to allow for the possibility. Why would they? Again, we don’t know but maybe to tidy up, to check that nothing had been left to incriminate whoever helped Joan Riley out of this vale of tears.”

  “Do you want me to fetch Kipras? Put it to him straight away?”

  “No. Still waiting on Waters for the background. He’s being a bit slow for a whizz-kid.”

  “Ralph Greenwood, then?”

  Smith was thinking hard now, his mouth slightly to the side, teeth nipping at the inside of his cheek.

  “No.”

  “Earlier you said you didn’t want them talking between these first interviews.”

  “This time we’ll let them. See what it shows up, how close they really are.”

  At Smith’s suggestion they opened up the residents’ files and read them again. They were detailed documents and included surprising amounts of information about the earlier lives of the people who now resided at Rosemary House. Smith thought about that and concluded that it enabled the staff to find connections and subjects of conversation with the residents. After a while they exchanged files and read again, trying to develop an overview of the Famous Five and their relationships.

  Eventually Smith said, “You’ve got Joan�
�s there. Remind me what she did for a living.”

  Maggie opened the folder and found it.

  “She was for… God, for a long time she was secretary to the headmaster of the Queen’s School. Almost twenty five years, must have been several different heads in that time.”

  “Major public school. Heads most likely bring in their own staff unless the one already there is irreplaceable. That’s a big job, like your modern PA. What was her education?”

  For some of the residents that information was in the files, and Joan was one of them.

  “Left school at fifteen, but she went to the old Lake High Grammar for Girls. She was a scholarship girl.”

  “Hmm, like my mum…”

  Smith did a calculation roughly and realized that the two women might even have known each other.

  Then he said, “Nancy was a nurse who was a bit of a career girl, got to positions of responsibility. And did you see Mr Collins? I’ve got it here. Engineer on British Railways but not by the look of it a grease monkey. He retired as engineering manager of the Midlands Region. These were, sorry are, bright people.”

  Maggie reached for Elspeth Grey’s file.

  “Elspeth ran her own jewellery business, four shops in East Anglia.”

  Smith picked up the last file to be certain of what he had already read in it.

  “Ralph Greenwood was a solicitor’s clerk in London. That’s all it says.”

  “Still a good job. You’re right, above average achievers for the times, especially the women.”

  Smith was still reading Greenwood’s file, looking at the same page, a slight frown creasing his forehead. Maggie was right, of course, but he was remembering his first encounter with the ‘solicitor’s clerk’, recalling their exchange by the window.

  Maggie said, “It explains why they all got on – they had plenty in common, I suppose. But we have to remember this is a fairly up-market care home, DC. Most of the people here will have been successful. If only to pay the fees.”

  “Yep. It makes it more interesting though. Not only are we dealing with people some of whom might be losing their marbles occasionally – we are dealing with bright people who have a lot of marbles to lose and who might be doing so only occasionally.”

  A buzz followed by a tinkling sound had Smith reaching for the phone in his jacket pocket. He opened it and read the message.

  “It’s Robin – he must have heard me. I wouldn’t be surprised if he can set this up so he can do that. Anyway, Kipras K checks out. All perfectly legal, full documentation… Is who he says he is… Oh.”

  He stopped reading and looked up at Maggie.

  “What?”

  “Waters knew this was worth including. Good boy.”

  “DC. What is it?”

  Smith could be infuriating at times.

  “Before he left Lithuania, Mr K did a year at university. So much for ‘I am not clever’. Guess his subject?”

  She shook her head and said, “Not maths?”

  “Medicine.”

  As they took the lift up to the first floor, Smith said, “Another thing. There’s a distinct lack of curiosity about what happened to Mrs Riley, isn’t there? Neither of those two, friends of hers, asked for any more information. Sometimes what people don’t say matters as much as what they do – I keep telling Waters that.”

  Maggie considered it.

  “Older people, more respect for the law, the police? Not their place to ask, maybe…?”

  Smith gave a shrug that said he was only half-convinced by the suggestion.

  Ralph Greenwood’s room was at the end of the corridor, the final room in the building, and as a result it was of a somewhat different shape and a little larger than the rooms that they had visited so far. The door was open but they knocked and waited for him to appear. He came from the kitchenette, tea towel in hand, waving them forward with the other. Briefly he peered at them over the rims of his glasses; there were books open on the table and Smith concluded that Greenwood was probably still long-sighted.

  As a result of its extra size, the room had more furniture than most without looking overcrowded – four chairs in total. The three of them sat down, and Smith looked past their host for a moment to the scene beyond the window; no golf course on this side but a view of Lake in the distance, the tower blocks and one of the dock cranes just visible through the greyness of the late afternoon.

  Maggie said, “You have a very nice room, Mr Greenwood.”

  “Thank you. It’s not much but… And please, call me Ralph.”

  It was a good room. Smith looked around, noting the bookcases, the small flat-screen television, the digital radio, a chess set that might be ivory, a compact, quality sound system and the Apple laptop on the table, its screensaver rolling gently around in disappearing spirals like remote galaxies. The bedspread looked hand-crafted, composed of many little squares of knitted material, and on the walls were water-colour landscapes and portraits that Smith was sure would be mostly, if not all, originals. The more one looked, the more one realized that this room was entirely different to any other that they had seen.

  They had agreed beforehand that Maggie would ask the first questions, and when she did so, Greenwood glanced at Smith and gave a brief smile before looking back at the female detective. When asked if he knew why they were in Rosemary House, Greenwood said, “I don’t know any details but I believe that there was an irregularity in Joan’s death.”

  “We have to consider a heroin overdose more than an irregularity, sir.”

  Greenwood looked at Smith, aware of Maggie Henderson’s own surprise at Smith’s interruption, and at the nature of it.

  “Quite so, sergeant – more of a singularity, I’d say. How on earth could she have got hold of such a thing?”

  “Well, that is exactly what we are here to find out. We have to assume that someone in the building gave it to her.”

  “In which sense of the word? Do you mean that someone administered the drug or that they gave it to her and that she administered it herself?”

  “At this point it makes no difference to us, as it happens; both acts are illegal under English law.”

  Greenwood smiled again and Smith, despite himself, heard the pompous echo of his words.

  “Indeed they are. You must forgive me if at some point I seem to be enjoying this as a diversion, but we get so few here, as you can imagine. And Joan herself enjoyed a murder mystery – isn’t that ironic? How can I help you both?”

  His account of the 6th of December squared perfectly with that of Martin Collins, except that Ralph Greenwood could add more detail, such as which match had been on the screen when Kipras had been in Martin’s room for a minute or two. He told them the time without being asked and mentioned that he had realized something had happened when the trolley was wheeled along the corridor later that night, though obviously he did not know who was involved until the following morning. It was all very sad but one had to remember that here everyone was living in the departure lounge and flights left with monotonous regularity. Was there anything else he could tell them?

  When they stood up to leave, Greenwood saw Smith looking at the chessboard. He picked up a piece, a pawn, and handed it to the detective. As he had suspected, it was made of ivory, and he nodded, impressed.

  “Before you ask, sergeant, it is CITES cleared.”

  “The thought never entered my head until you put it there, sir.”

  Greenwood said, “Do you play?”

  “I have done.”

  “Well, if your investigation isn’t a brief one, perhaps you could drop in and make a move or two.”

  “I don’t imagine we’ll be clearing the matter up this week.”

  “And I can imagine why. A lack of forensics, for one thing, it being at least a month ago. Very difficult for you…”

  “But not impossible.”

  “The perfect witness, DC.”

  They were crossing the car park of Rosemary House, a bitter easterly b
lowing in from the North Sea just a mile or two away. Smith didn’t answer until they were in the car with the engine running. Maggie did a little tidying up of CD cases and mint wrappers while Smith repositioned the vents for maximum effect.

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Obviously as bright as the others. I can imagine them being a handful if they decided to be awkward together – not that I’m offering that as a motive! But what on earth is someone like Ralph Greenwood doing in there?”

  “Irene Miller told us, didn’t she? Had a heart attack, vascular dementia, since which he’s had some recovery of functions. He’s brighter than the other two, by the way.”

  “Well, if that’s ‘some recovery’ I don’t know what he was like before the heart attack.”

  Smith didn’t answer. He was driving slowly because the windscreen was misted over; the cloth had disappeared again and he didn’t want to use his hand because that only made it worse in the long run.

  “And his room was nice, too, a proper little home from home.”

  This time Smith gave a quiet “Mmm” that managed to express both agreement and doubt.

  “What?”

  “I once visited a man called Billy Slater. He had a room like that, different, superior to everyone else’s, all mod cons. Ha, all mod cons! You’ll laugh when I tell you where it was.”

  “Go on.”

  “HMP Littlehey. These blokes are always there. If you’d banished Billy Slater to the North Pole, he’d have had the biggest and best equipped igloo within a month.”

  “What are you saying about Ralph Greenwood?”

  “Nothing – not jumping to any conclusions. But whereas some of those poor old dears are staring all day at the TV and failing to keep up with Antique Bargain Hunt, our Ralph is reading The Times, completing the crossword and surfing the internet. Did you notice the modem? If anyone can tell us more about what goes in Rosemary House, it’s Ralph Greenwood.”

  Chapter Ten

  The Friday was one of those days when nothing quite comes together. The interviews that Smith had planned to arrange with Sarah Bradley, Joan Riley’s daughter, and Dr Miriam Tremewan both failed to take place; the former was at a sales conference in Norwich all day, and the GP was involved in training nurses at Kings Lake General – a busy schedule that could not be interrupted. Smith then thought that it might be worth going back to Rosemary House after all and talking to a few residents more generally about Joan, just to see what might come up – at least they could be sure of regular tea and biscuits there, the canteen boiler at the station having burst sometime during the night. When Maggie came in he put the idea to her and then realized that she wasn’t herself at all – he sat her down, found John Murray and told him to take her home. Apparently she had been feeling unwell on and off through the week but had said nothing to Smith. He kicked himself for that – he’d forgotten how women could suffer in silence.