Cursed Inheritance (35 page)

‘Maybe he realised he’d done the wrong thing and cut his losses. ‘

Wesley thought for a moment. ‘So who’s our chief suspect for Evans’s murder?’

‘Let’s face it, Wes, we haven’t really got one. Who was about at the time? Gwen? Brenda? Gibbons? Dylan Madeley, perhaps? Jeremy Elsham? Pandora? And did whoever kill the Harfords kill Evans as well?’

‘Pandora had a grudge against the Harfords for what happened to her father.’

‘Somehow I can’t see Richard Gibbons having the bottle to commit murder. And Brenda Varney. She’s a thief but … ‘

‘Shooting the Harfords?’

Heffernan shook his head. ‘Not her style. I still think Bleasdale’s our man. Don’t know why but … ‘

‘Emma Oldchester named him but what about this other man she mentioned?’

‘If it’s a man, that rules out Pandora, Brenda or Gwen Madeley. What about Dylan? A criminally inclined drug addict. Used to hang round the Hall and wasn’t on good terms with Edward Harford. I’d say he’s certainly worth further investigation. He could easily have killed the Harfords, especially if he was high on drugs at the time.’

Wesley looked sceptical. ‘That’s the point. He’s a junkie who’s been in and out of trouble and presumably he’s been sleeping rough since he was chucked out of the hostel. Evans’s murder appears to have been well planned, calculated. It almost looks like he was lured to his death. Don’t

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forget the lobster in his stomach: cosy meal to lull him into a false sense of security. And the killer used the victim’s key to break into his hotel room. If Madeley was sleeping rough he might have been a bit conspicuous at the Tradmouth Castle Hotel.’

‘Gwen Madeley had lobster dishes in her freezer. Dylan might have used his sister’s cottage as a meeting place.’

Wesley sighed. Somehow it didn’t seem quite right. But maybe it would when he came face to face with Dylan Madeley. Maybe, in spite of the drugs addling his brain, he was a cunning, calculating bastard, quite capable of disposing of a threat. Just as he had dealt with the unfortunate Asian shopkeeper.

‘What if Bleasdale did it? He killed the Harfords then drove straight up to Yorkshire to his new job, not spending the night at the motel as he claimed. Then he destroys his car and disappears. Gets himself a new identity. He was seen with a young woman but the witness is dead and the police didn’t take much notice at the time.’

‘No reason why he couldn’t have met up with a lass while he was up there.’ A faraway look came into Heffernan’s eyes. ‘I knew a girl from Yorkshire once.’

Wesley ignored his boss’s romantic reminiscences. ‘What if he’s living back here under a new identity and he killed Evans when he started getting too close? It would have been so easy to lureˇ Evans to a meeting on the promise of new information for his book.’

‘What about that MP who’s married to Arbel? Anthony Jameston?Could he be Bleasdale with a new identity? Could Arbel have fallen for the gardener and be in on the plot? She did benefit after all. Inherited the lot.’

‘I’ve checked him out. Anthony Jameston seems to be who he says he is. Went to Charterhouse, read law at Oxford, called to the bar, elected MP for a west London constituency. Lifestyle funded by his wife’s considerable fortune. His life’s an open book.’

‘Which brings us back to Elsham. Didn’t his wife

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mention he used to run a garden centre or nursery? I think we should double-check his background.’

‘He was ready to let us hear that tape.’

‘Only after we’d found out it existed.’ Heffeman frowned. He’d had a feeling about Jeremy Elsham from the moment he met him. But even if a man’s a charlatan, it doesn’t necessarily make him a murderer. He looked at his watch. It was time to head off to the mortuary.

The two men walked. It wasn’t far to the hospital and it was hardly worth going to the effort of finding a parking space when they got there.

‘Heard from your mate Neil?’

‘Yes. His grandmother’s just died so he’s cutting short his visit to the States.’

‘Somehow I never think of that Neil as having a family,’ Heffeman observed and said no more on the subject.

Chuck had offered to drive Neil the fifty miles to the airport, which was generous of him. He felt almost guilty for not paying more polite attention to Chuck’s constant stream of baseball chatter. Maybe he’d have learned something.

First thing that morning he’d attended Max’s funeral at a manicured cemetery filled with rows of snowy white headstones. It was a well-ordered place, unlike some of the old cemeteries he’d visited back home. Unlike the ancient churchyard where his grandmother would be laid to rest with its lichen-coated stones and winding paths in the shadow of the old stone church. Max’s obsequies had been a short, solemn affair and Neil was hardly surprised that he hadn’t been invited for refreshments afterwards. He’d been there on sufferance. An unwelcome guest. The illegitimate grandson staining the family name.

He was about to shut his suitcase - not a difficult task as he always travelled light - when he noticed the photocopies he’d made of Edmund Selbiwood’s 1605 account of his experiences in the New World lying on the bed. He placed them carefully on top of his clothes and locked the suitcase

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before looking around Chuck’s spare room for the last time. ‘So long, Virginia,’ he whispered to himself.

, He heard a shuffling sound and Hannah Gotleib appeared in the doorway. She was no longer wearing her customary jeans and checked shirt. Her denim dress was short and displayed her long, tanned legs to their best advantage.

‘I couldn’t let you go without saying goodbye,’ she said shyly.

He stared at her, hardly daring to do what he longed to do. But he needn’t have worried. Hannah walked slowly over to him, stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips, gently at first, but when his arms crept round her waist, more passionately. Neil almost forgot the long journey ahead of him until Chuck burst in and Hannah sprang away.

‘Time we were heading off,’ Chuck said with inappropriate cheeriness.

Hannah was still looking into Neil’s eyes as though she hadn’t heard the interruption. ‘I’ve something for you to read on the way back to England.’ She rummaged in her shoulder bag and produced a sheaf of photocopied papers. ‘Some of our early records. Read them and email me. Tell me what you think. And don’t forget to send more pictures of Potwoolstan Hall. And anything you can fmd out about the Selbiwoods. ‘

‘I promise.’ He hesitated, wondering if what he was about to say was too much like commitment for comfort. But he said it anyway. ‘Why don’t you come over to England? You could see the Hall and I’ll show you round Tradmouth where your settlers sailed from. You could join one of my digs; see how we do things over there.’

Hannah smiled, showing a set of perfect white teeth. ‘Sounds good. I’ll examine my schedule and let you know when 1 can make it. And when we get the toxicology results on those bones I’ll email them to you.’ She kissed him again, this time a chaste peck on the cheek for the benefit of Chuck, who was hovering by the door impatiently.

‘See ya,’ she whispered.

Neil raised a hand in farewell and she was gone.

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‘Turn up for the books,’ Heffeman muttered, breaking the silence as they walked back to the police station.

‘Colin seemed pretty sure.’

Wesley, who’ hadn’t looked too closely at Gwen Madeley’s bloated corpse, had taken the pathologist’s word for it that she had been dosed with tranquillisers then her head had been held beneath the water of the River Trad. There was bruising around her head and shoulders as a result of her having been held until she drowned.

‘If her brother came to her for money for drugs he might have gone for a drive with her then walked by the river, lost his temper and killed her.’ Wesley knew that this was sheer speculation. The presence of tranquillisers suggested planning.

Gerry Heffeman looked at his watch. It was almost lunchtime. ‘Don’t know about you, Wes, but 1 fancy one of Maisie’s hotpots at the Fisherman’s Arms. Coming?’

‘I think I’ll send out for a sandwich and catch up on some work. I’ll meet you there later and we’ll pay Dylan Madeley a visit.’

‘Suit yourself.’ The chief inspector looked disappointed, like a child whose friend wasn’t allowed out to play, and lumbered out of the office.

Wesley opened the yellowing file on his desk. The Potwoolstan Hall murders. There were no photographs of Victor Bleasdale or Dylan Madeley. But there were pictures of all the victims, posed and smiling in happier times. There was a small snap of Edward and Mary Harford, standing close together, looking rather surprised. Catriona Harford, a fair, insipid-looking girl wearing a blue sundress, obviously on some foreign holiday. Catriona’s fiance, Nigel Armley, posed, tall, dark and confident, in his naval uniform. There was Jack Harford in tweeds and cloth cap with a shotgun across his arm, every inch the young country squire - the type many would think of as an arrogant young toff.

Finally, he came to a picture of Martha Wallace. She was

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sitting on a deckchair in a garden with a colander on her knee and there was a pile of what appeared to be pea pods on the floor by her side. A little girl sat on a rug at her feet, grinning up at the camera. Mother and daughter shelling peas together, a picture of contented domesticity. He estimated that the child must have been around seven so it couldn’t have been taken very long before Martha had supposedly shot five people before shooting herself, leaving her daughter traumatised and motherless. Looking at that picture he knew for certain that it hadn’t happened that way. There was no way that Martha Wallace would have put her child through that. Martha had been murdered like the others. But he was no nearer identifying her killer.

He put the photographs to one side and took the crime scene pictures from the file just as DC Paul Johnson placed the tuna sandwich he’d ordered on his desk. He thanked Paul and paid the money he owed before eating the sandwich. He had always subscribed to the theory that it was easier to think on a full stomach.

He turned over one photograph, then another. Martha Wallace, slumped at the kitchen table, her astonished eyes wide open and the gun held firmly in her right hand. Surely it would be natural for someone to close their eyes if they were about to shoot themselves, Wesley thought before looking at the other pictures. The Harfords lay together, their hands touching in a fmal gesture of farewell. They must have been only too aware that they were about to die together. Then there was Catriona sprawled across the doorway of the drawing room, the entry wounds caused by the bullets that killed her, standing out red raw on her forehead and her throat. Jack was slumped against the doorframe, staring ahead in amazement, killed just like his sister with a wound to the head and one to the throat.

Then Wesley turned over the fmal photograph and was confronted with the worst image of all. The mess of blood, bone and brain where Nigel Armley’s face should have been. Wesley glanced at it once, then looked away. The

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very sight of it made him feel sick. Or maybe there had been something wrong with the sandwich he’d just eaten.

He arranged the photographs of the victims as they were living and as they were dead, side by side on the desktop like a macabre game of patience. The juxtaposition of life and death was disturbing. All that smiling cut short in a moment. Life ended on somebody’s whim.

Glancing at his watch, he realised that he had arranged to meet Gerry Heffeman in the Fisherman’s Arms before visiting Dylan Madeley. Pleasure before duty. He would have preferred it the other way around.

Wesley and Heffeman drove over to Morbay in silence, travelling on the car ferry. The young man collecting the money looked bored, having recovered from the excitement of spotting Gwen Madeley’s body in the water. Wesley sat in the driver’s seat staring ahead, feeling slightly nauseous, longing to reach the other bank and be back on dry land.

At Morbay police station the desk sergeant greeted Gerry Heffeman like an old friend and when they reached the interview suite Dylan Madeley was waiting for them.

Dylan scowled as they sat down. Hardly a warm welcome. But then they hadn’t been expecting one. He was a gaunt, wiry man with a shaved head and he looked considerably older than his years. His blotchy face bore a day’s stubble and a sickly pallor and one of his front teeth was missing.

Wesley spoke first. ‘I’m sorry about your sister,’ he began, .

Dylan’s expression softened for a moment and he gave a curt nod of acknowledgement.

‘We’d like to ask you a few questions about Gwen. When did you last see her?’

Dylan sat in silence, his hands and feet twitching as his eyes darted about, looking for an escape route.

‘It’s a simple question,’ Heffeman growled. ‘When did you last see your sister?’

Dylan shifted in his seat. ‘I called at her place a few days

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ago. She usually bunged me a few quid if I asked.’ The voice was hoarse, hardly audible.

‘And did she this time?’

He focused his eys on the tabletop and the twitching stopped for a moment. ‘Can’t remember.’

‘When exactly was this?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘Think.’

‘I can’t bloody remember. All right.’ His lips curled into a snarl as he slumped back in his chair, his arms folded defensively and his right foot beating a rhythm against the table leg.

Wesley sensed that he’d say nothing more on the subject. It was possible that he’d killed Owen because she refused to give him money. It would be a convenient solution. But had he killed Patrick Evans as well? And had he been the gunman who shot the Harford family? Perhaps a few more well-chosen questions would provide the answer.

‘Where were you when the Harford family were shot?’

Dylan Madeley looked wary. ‘I’d just got a place in Morbay. I was there.’ He paused. ‘I was in a pub with a mate that night.’