A Wreath for my Sister Page 18

  Her eyes were on Mike as she spoke. ‘We’d better get across to Blyton’s straight away.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was still only early afternoon but it was dull and grey. The threat of further snow hadn’t quite receded. The lights were already on at Blyton’s, pale spots winking through the gloom, and as Joanna and Mike drew up they could hear the clank of machinery.

  During the journey she had filled him in on some of the details, but there were more – many more – that she hadn’t told him and she knew she never would.

  The secretary met them at the main door, her pale eyes bright with curiosity and suspicion.

  But Joanna was being careful. She had learned before not to cast blame until she was 100 per cent sure. There was still room for doubt.

  In spite of the plaque with Stuart Thorr’s name on the door she didn’t at first recognize him. Out of his cycling shorts, helmet and Oakleys and in his dark suit, plain tie and white shirt he looked completely different ... more ordinary, shorter, less muscular, his face a little plumper.

  She recalled a caption from a magazine, ‘Cyclists are sexy’. On their bikes, maybe, she reflected grimly. Off them, you might not recognize them.

  This wasn’t the Stuart she knew. And it seemed he had the same difficulty.

  ‘Joanna?’ he said, frowning. ‘Joanna?’ Then he stood up, half smiling, disbelieving but still welcoming. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ The smile lasted until he caught sight of Mike. ‘Who are you?’

  To cover both anger and embarrassment, Joanna took refuge in formality. ‘Detective Inspector Piercy,’ she said, ‘and this is Detective Sergeant Korpanski.’

  Stuart remained silent.

  ‘I believe you knew a woman called Sharon Priest.’

  At the station Stuart refused a solicitor and sat opposite Joanna across the interview table, his eyes fixed on her face as though he trusted her. She found his whole demeanour puzzling. Surely he could not be relying on her to get him off? It didn’t make sense. He must see what a poor position he was in.

  She pressed the record button on the tape machine and read out the date, the time, the officers present.

  ‘You answered an advert in the personal column of the Evening Standard?’

  Stuart nodded.

  Mike had to remind him to speak. The result was a quiet ‘Yes.’

  ‘You exchanged letters?’

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘And all the time she didn’t have a clue it was me.’

  ‘And eventually you arranged to meet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the twenty-seventh of September you met at the Quiet Woman public house?’

  Another quiet ‘Yes,’ and Joanna moved her hand towards her face. This was all going a little too well. He was too comfortable and his expression was still too trusting.

  ‘Stuart,’ she said, ‘are you sure you wouldn’t like a solicitor present?’

  He looked almost amused. ‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for that – really. No need.’

  ‘So you met Sharon at the pub.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then what?’

  He gave a secretive smile. ‘I’d planned to ...’

  Joanna hardly dared breathe.

  Stuart looked up, innocent-eyed. ‘I’d planned to take her home to meet my mother,’ he said, oblivious to the effect he was having on the two police officers present.

  ‘She’s a remarkable woman. I think she and Sharon would have had a great deal in common.’ He smiled. ‘You see, both were single parents. Sharon was having a struggle bringing up her three on her own and my mum had been through exactly the same with me.’ Again he gave that strange smile. ‘My mother would have helped her.’

  ‘So you took her back?’

  ‘No. She wasn’t at all interested in meeting my mum.’ He sounded puzzled. ‘In fact ...’ His voice was growing angry now. ‘She didn’t seem pleased that it was me at all. She looked quite put out. I’d thought ... after all ...’

  He leaned forward, forearms on the table, confiding now. ‘I was really the one who broke up her marriage. If it hadn’t been for me ...’

  Mike spoke brusquely. ‘Getting caught with your trousers down?’

  Stuart flushed.

  Joanna shook her head very slowly and, switching off the tape recorder, she motioned Mike outside.

  ‘He’s a nutcase.’

  ‘A guilty nutcase?’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to realize what sort of position he’s in.’

  She peered in through the window of the interview room. Stuart was leaning back in his chair, his hands, relaxed, on his lap. There was not a trace of tension about him.

  Alan King wafted past and handed her a report. It took one minute to digest the information and repeat it to Mike.

  ‘The shoe showed up plenty of semen. But the semen was different from the samples taken from the murdered women. Not surprisingly Andrew Donovan is off the hook.’

  Mike’s answer was to jerk his thumb towards the door.

  ‘But he’s not.’

  It was their cue to resume questioning.

  ‘OK, Stuart,’ she said. ‘So you met Sharon at the Quiet Woman and took her off to meet your mother.’

  ‘I would have done,’ he said comfortably, ‘but she got really angry about the idea. She started shouting at me, said I had a mother complex.’ There was a quick flash of teeth before he closed his mouth. ‘I haven’t,’ he said. ‘She was quite wrong. I only thought ...’

  ‘So you got angry with her.’ Mike’s voice was brutal. ‘You raped and strangled her, then dumped her body on the moor.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said, eyes wide open. ‘She told me to let her out of the car. It was a cold night, and she was only wearing a thin dress. I offered to drive her back to the Quiet Woman but she didn’t seem to want that. The last I saw of her she was walking back to town.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was only to Mike that she could bear to voice her doubts. ‘He could be telling the truth.’

  He stared at her. ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘But what if it is the truth?’ she insisted. ‘What if he really did drop her off and someone else saw her walking, through the snow, wearing nothing but a thin dress?’

  ‘Joanna.’ He was staring at her as though she was mad, but she persisted.

  ‘What if Thorr is telling the truth?’ He had stopped being Stuart from the moment she had realized he was a chief suspect.

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Improbable,’ she corrected.

  ‘Far too much of a coincidence. Besides,’ he said. ‘Who else?’

  ‘Well, it seems to me fairly important we get that question answered without a shadow of a doubt. I thought we might visit Haworth.’

  Mike just stared.

  ‘We’ve charged Thorr, got him in custody,’ she said firmly. ‘If he is guilty we have nothing to lose. We know Haworth was out the night Sharon died so let’s go and see what he’s got to say. We needn’t tell him we’ve already got a suspect.’ She wagged her finger at the burly Detective Sergeant. ‘Don’t think we’ve got all the answers yet, Mike. We haven’t.’

  Haworth was furious. She could hear him remonstrating through the thin walls of his office ... Police intimidation ... harassment ...

  Not yet, she thought.

  He glared at them as they entered his office.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Haworth,’ she said pleasantly. ‘I’m sorry to have to come and see you again. There are just one or two little problems, you see, with your statement.’

  ‘What problems?’

  Joanna sat down and crossed her legs. ‘Oh, nothing we can’t smooth out, I’m sure.’

  ‘Inspector,’ he said with a scowl, ‘was it really necessary to come here to my office and disrupt my working day? If there were questions you wanted answering surely you could have contacted me by telephone?’

  ‘We’ve wasted enough time already, Mr Haworth
. We’re anxious to get this case sewn up.’

  Mike shuffled behind her, as Joanna spread her hands out on the desk. ‘I want to ask you again about the night Sharon Priest died.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake,’ the accountant said brusquely. ‘I already told you all this. I was at home watching television, with my wife.’

  ‘And your car?’

  ‘In the drive.’ He was close to exasperation.

  Joanna nodded. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘And you didn’t go out?’

  ‘How many times do ...?’

  She leaned across the desk. ‘You didn’t go out – not at all – you’re sure?’

  And then the penny dropped. Something in the man’s face changed. He looked a little less angry, a little more nervous. He narrowed his eyes and spoke slowly.

  ‘What exactly are you getting at?’

  Mike stepped forward. ‘We have a witness who says your car was seen on the Buxton road, heading down from the moors at about two o’clock in the morning.’

  Haworth glared at him. ‘The witness is lying,’ he said. ‘Or mistaken.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Joanna said quietly.

  The accountant shrugged. ‘Well, who is this witness? Is it someone reliable?’

  Joanna stared hard into his face. ‘I saw you, Mr Haworth. You overtook me at great speed.’ She paused. ‘Now, where had you been?’

  For a moment the accountant seemed unable to speak. He was breathing hard and his face was pale. When he spoke he sounded dazed. ‘You saw me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Joanna said. ‘Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?’ Dumbly he nodded.

  ‘Come on, Haworth,’ Mike was getting irritated. ‘Stop telling little stories and give us the truth. Where had you been?’

  Joanna made a swift decision. She would not tell Haworth she had noted that there was no snow on the roof of his car. Instead she would let him stew – believe they thought he was the killer while she watched him carefully.

  ‘You see, Mr Haworth,’ she said pleasantly, ‘we have a couple of problems. Sharon Priest was murdered that night. And you – for some reason – decided to lie to us and pretend you had been in all evening. Detective Sergeant Korpanski and I both know that you did, in fact, go out – quite late. Unfortunately, being in the police force, we are bound to ask ourselves, Why is he lying? What is he hiding? And, finally, What other lies has he told us?’ She gave him a deceptively friendly smile. ‘I’m sure you can understand our dilemma, Mr Haworth.’

  He licked dry lips.

  ‘So let’s start with where you’d been that night.’

  ‘Just for a drive.’ Haworth swallowed.

  ‘On the moors?’

  ‘No.’ He paused, his eyes darting from one to the other. ‘I was thinking of going up there – just for some peace – time to think, but it was too snowy. I was worried about getting stuck.’

  ‘Well now.’ Korpanski was pressing home his advantage. ‘Inspector Piercy and I have been wondering about another lie you told us – whether you knew Sharon Priest a bit better than you let us believe.’

  Haworth swivelled round in his chair and looked carefully past the burly detective at the white walls of his office. Then slowly he nodded.

  ‘I think it’s time you consulted a solicitor,’ Joanna said.

  Haworth’s solicitor was a smart, trim woman in her forties wearing a businesslike grey suit and little makeup apart from scarlet lipstick, which she licked from time to time as though it had a flavour of its own.

  It was she who spoke first. ‘My client is prepared to volunteer certain information,’ she said, ‘of his own free will, in the hope that it will prove of some assistance in catching the killer of Ms Priest.’

  They were back at the station, in a stuffy interview room. Haworth was tugging at his tie as though it was strangling him.

  ‘So, Mr Haworth?’

  ‘I did know Sharon,’ he admitted. ‘I gave her a lift home one day from Blyton’s.’ He gave an attempt at a smile. ‘It was pouring with rain. She didn’t even have a mac.’

  His words conjured up the image Joanna had been forming of a young woman dressed in a thin dress and high heels struggling through the snow. She gave Haworth a sharp look. It was another small part of the picture.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘I dropped her off at her council house because I didn’t want her to get wet. After that, I frequently took her home. Once or twice I went in and had a drink.’

  Without looking at Mike, Joanna knew he would be rolling his eyes. There was no point beating about the bush. ‘You became lovers, Mr Haworth,’ Joanna said bluntly.

  ‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘So what was it like?’ Mike was sounding rude but Joanna was past caring.

  ‘My wife and I, as I told you, have no children.’ He cleared his throat. ‘In fact we are unable to have children.’ The tiny muscle at the corner of his mouth was twitching. ‘And this is a matter of grief to us both.’

  His solicitor gave him an encouraging smile.

  ‘One night when I spoke to Sharon she told me what a curse both her kids were to her. I found it rather ...’ He winced, searching for the word, ‘... unfair.’

  ‘So you made an arrangement that she should bear you a child.’

  ‘She offered,’ he said. ‘I didn’t ask her. I wouldn’t have done that. It was she who pointed out that she bore children easily and suggested she should have one for us. We were not short of money. She was. It would be a financial transaction.’

  ‘Which didn’t work, did it? Because when it was time for her to hand over the child she refused.’

  Haworth was looking increasingly strained. ‘That’s right,’ he said quietly. ‘She said she loved him too much to hand him over.’

  Mike spoke then. ‘That must have made you extremely angry.’

  ‘Yes.’ Too late he realized what he had said. ‘I mean, no. Not that angry. I – understood. I helped her, gave her money. After all, the child was my son.’

  ‘But when you saw her walking along the road, back towards the town, you picked her up?’

  ‘I admit I was out that night, just driving, but I didn’t see her. If I had I would have given her a lift certainly. It was a cold night.’

  ‘And yet again she was inadequately dressed.’

  But Haworth was too sharp to fall into that trap. ‘As I didn’t see her,’ he said, ‘I really can’t tell you what she was wearing.’

  Joanna played her trump card then, turning to the solicitor. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Mr Haworth is Ryan’s father. Presumably this could be proved by DNA testing?’

  The solicitor nodded, flicking a glance at Haworth. ‘And if it was proved by DNA testing I assume he would have legal rights over the child in preference to anyone else?’

  The solicitor nodded again.

  ‘I thought so.’

  Haworth was blustering. ‘It’s no motive for murder. Surely you wouldn’t think I’d kill her to get at my son? I’d be in prison.’

  ‘If you were found out.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  It was past eleven by the time she arrived back at the cottage, but then she was lucky to get home at all. Neither Thorr nor Haworth would see their own beds that night. Even as she put her key in the door the telephone was ringing. Wearily she picked it up. It was Matthew and he sounded upset.

  ‘Please, Jo,’ he said, ‘can I come round to the cottage tonight?’

  He knocked on her door five minutes later.

  ‘I thought you were away for a few days, on your conference.’ She studied his face. ‘Blackpool, wasn’t it?’

  He nodded, gave a feeble attempt at a grin. ‘Joanna,’ he said.

  She moved towards him, let her head drop against his shoulder.

  ‘Joanna,’ he said again, brushing her hair with his lips. Then he lifted her chin upwards.

  It was much more than a hungry kiss. As his arms tightened around her she could feel his heart
beating, his chest movement with each breath, the heat from his body. But it was the violence of her own reaction that shocked her as she clung to him.

  ‘Joanna,’ he was murmuring and she looked again at his face. His troubled eyes looked bark brown. And she knew that something was very wrong.

  ‘What is it, Matthew?’ she demanded, pulling away from him.

  He was still watching her with that hungry, desperate look, frowning and breathing hard as though he had been running.

  ‘Are you going to tell me or do I have to guess?’

  He let her go and led her to the sofa, still gripping her hand.

  ‘I was fool enough to think I had everything worked out,’ he said quietly. ‘I moved out of the farmhouse. I thought Jane would be able to sell it eventually.’ He smiled. ‘I found myself somewhere to live. I took out a short lease on a flat. Plenty of time, I thought, for us to work out what we really wanted.’

  He looked at her with anguish in his face. ‘Can you explain why,’ he said, ‘if four out of ten marriages end in divorce why the hell I can’t seem to manage it?’

  ‘Matthew,’ she said, pulling her hand away, ‘are you going to explain what you’re talking about?’

  ‘Eloise is in hospital,’ he said. ‘The little tiger is starving herself until Daddy comes home.’

  Joanna nodded.

  ‘The little tiger,’ he said with a touch of pride, ‘is currently being drip-fed in the paediatric ward of the hospital. She insists she’s on a hunger strike.’

  Joanna felt hatred for the child searing through her, hot and furious. She stood up. ‘You’ve come to the wrong place for medical advice, Matthew.’

  He stood too, taller than she, eyes blazing.

  ‘We’re talking about my daughter here,’ he said. ‘My daughter’s life.’

  Joanna was shaking with rage. ‘Then go home,’ she said. ‘But don’t involve me.’ Her fury made her incautious. ‘And if you want to know how other people can manage to divorce, I’ll tell you. Because you, Matthew, may be sexy and intelligent and, yes, very good looking. But you’re weak. Your wife is icy, cruel, selfish and unstable. However, she has an iron will and she has no intention of letting you go – ever. And as for your daughter ...’ She took two steps forward. ‘Eloise is a monster.’