Dying to Know (12 page)

‘Before moving to Pollards Hill, they lived in Colliers Wood; we've talked to their neighbours there and the rather sketchy picture we've drawn is one of a couple who kept themselves to themselves, who were courteous but not overly inviting. They had a single son, who you've met, I think.'

‘There's something about that Tom Lightoller, inspector. Are you sure he's just an undertaker? Judging by the men he employs, I think he might be something in the underworld.'

‘Undertaking's quite a hard, physical job,' he pointed out. ‘It's no good employing someone who's too weak to act as a pall-bearer, is it?'

‘One of the two I saw looked as if they could bend a lamp post with their bare hands, and the other one looked as if he'd fillet you with a knife if he got half a chance.'

‘I've looked into Tom Lightoller's background. He had behavioural problems as a child but nothing since he left school.'

‘What sort of behavioural problems?' I asked this in more than just professional interest. When I had seen him he had radiated an air of cold menace that struck me as almost cruel.

‘A fair amount of petty thieving and bullying, mostly. One spell inside for persistent joyriding.'

‘Bullying? He doesn't look big enough.'

‘He got his friends – his bigger friends – to help him out. There was a suspicion of some sort of organized extortion racket, but the school authorities couldn't prove it.'

I thought of his pall-bearers when Masson mentioned ‘bigger friends'. ‘There you are, then. He's the criminal type.'

Masson sighed. ‘Tom Lightoller's odd, I'll own up to that, but he's become something of a philanthropist, if anything. His little sojourn in the nick had a salutary effect. He realizes how hard life can be for ex-cons and makes a point of giving them a job as a start to going straight.' I reflected that this explained the decidedly dodgy appearance of his employees. Masson went on: ‘He's done well for himself. He started out as his father's apprentice in the antiques shop, then moved on about ten years ago. He got a loan from his father and has never looked back. The business is in West Croydon.'

‘It's a bit of a funny transition, isn't it? Antiques to corpses.'

He shrugged. ‘There's no accounting for human beings. I wanted to be an engine driver when I was young.'

The unbidden and faintly disturbing vision of Inspector Masson dressed as Casey Jones in the cab of a huge steam locomotive vied for my attention. Max asked, ‘Who inherits now that both the Lightollers are dead. It's Tom, I bet.'

Masson was imperturbable. ‘So would I.'

‘There you are then!' She was triumphant and I own that I suspected she was a little premature in this.

There were times when Masson could treat patience like a miser treats gold sovereigns but, at other times, he doled it like sweets, as he did now. I thought it was probably because Max was a pretty girl, but I'm prejudiced. Anyway, whatever the reason, he said calmly, ‘We'll check the value of the estate, of course, but I doubt that it comes to more than a hundred thousand pounds.'

‘A lot of money.'

‘Considering Tom Lightoller's got at least that already, and that he has no significant debts, I would discount it as a motive.'

Max opened her mouth to argue but I interrupted by saying, ‘So he was a real antiques dealer?'

He replied, but only after the briefest of hesitations, ‘Yes.' Then he asked, ‘Why?'

‘Because Dad was convinced that he was nothing more than a junk dealer, maybe even a fence for stolen goods.'

‘Most antiques dealers handle a lot of junk. They have to, because by sorting through the junk, they find the treasure . . .' He trailed off, the sentence ending with a silent but very loud, ‘but', which I supplied for him and he continued, ‘Lightoller has been dancing on the line between legal and illegal for years, but he's by far from alone in that.'

‘Does that mean he was or was not a crook?'

‘I think – no, I know – that he was handling stolen goods, but nothing was ever proved. Ironically, I think we've now got the proof, but a day too late.'

‘What proof was that?'

He felt in his pocket and pulled out my mother's brooch. ‘This.' He handed it to me as he went on: ‘It tallies with the description you gave when you reported it stolen, and we've been unable to find a receipt amongst his papers.'

So Dad had been right, for once; I only hoped that he would live to gloat about it.

I held out the brooch for Masson to take back but he said, ‘Keep it. It's of no use to me as evidence. We're not going to prosecute, are we?'

Max suddenly burst out, ‘That's why he was murdered!'

Masson looked across, his face neutral. ‘What was?'

‘Because of something he had that was stolen. The thief wanted it back, I bet.'

Masson said gravely, ‘That's exactly what I thought.' It was obvious from the way he said it that he was being patronizing and Max, who was sensitive to condescension, asked at once, ‘Why do you say it like that?'

‘Only my theory involved a man who wasn't himself a thief, but who thought that Lightoller was.'

It took only a moment for me to get what he meant. ‘The watch?' I asked incredulously. ‘You think that Dad bumped him off because he wanted his watch back?'

Masson looked at me impassively. ‘It strikes me as quite a good theory,' he admitted.

‘What about Doris Lightoller, then?'

He said slowly, ‘I suppose if he didn't find his watch in the shop, he decided the next most logical place to look would be the house.'

‘That's almost as barmy as one of Dad's theories. You cannot possibly believe that my father has become a homicidal maniac because he wants his watch back. It wasn't even particularly valuable.'

‘Your father told me himself that it had great sentimental value.'

‘Even so . . .'

Suddenly Masson had had enough. ‘Look, Dr Elliot, I've seen murder committed over a single pound note, over a cigarette and even over a football, so a couple of killings because of a watch doesn't surprise me in the least.'

‘Yes, but not my father.'

It was with the air of a man who did conjuring tricks as a party piece that he produced from his jacket pocket a plastic bag that he held towards us on the flat palm of his hand.

And in that plastic bag was my father's missing watch.

I stared at it and Max stared at me, guessing, I suspect, what it was. I croaked, ‘Where did you get that?'

‘In Lightoller's house, at the bottom of the stairs near where your father was lying. It had rolled behind an umbrella stand.' He looked into my eyes, and I saw within him a blend of triumph and sadness. ‘It's got your father's fingerprints on it. He must have dropped it as he fell down the stairs.'

I like to think I tried, for I said with lips and tongue suddenly dry, ‘This doesn't prove anything . . .'

‘Maybe not,' he conceded, ‘but it does strengthen the suggestion that your father was actively looking for the watch and, quite obviously, he found it, apparently at Lightoller's house.'

I felt myself to be desperate. ‘He wouldn't murder anyone over it, though.'

‘Why not? Anyone can be a murderer; it's not an exclusive club, you know.'

I was running out of arguments, reduced to repeating forlornly, ‘Yes, but not Dad.'

He didn't deign to reply to that, instead saying to the audience in general, ‘So, since I can't find a single reason why Tom Lightoller should want his parents dead and, in fact, I can't find a single reason why
anyone
else should want them dead, I have to consider the possibility that your father is guilty.'

‘You're wrong. Utterly, totally, disastrously wrong.'

Masson stood up. During the whole conversation he had had his hand in his pocket, grasping his cigarettes. He said, ‘I might be wrong, but not disastrously so. We'll wait to see what your father has to say.'

‘In the meantime, you are going to carry on investigating these deaths, aren't you? While you wait for my father to recover.' I said.

‘I've made all the enquiries I need to make for now. There's not a shred of evidence to implicate anyone else. Until I find out your father's explanation for what happened yesterday, I'm concentrating on other matters.'

With which he walked off to the ward to get an update from Smith.

Max was outraged. ‘What's wrong with him? Can't he see that he's completely wrong? If he doesn't get after the real murderer, he could get clean away.'

I sighed. ‘The official mind doesn't think like that. Dad ticks the right boxes in Masson's list of things a murderer should have; if there's nothing to suggest in the slightest that anyone else had anything to do with it, why waste time chasing phantoms?'

‘It's criminal,' she said vehemently, unaware of the irony, I think. I said nothing by way of reply, was too busy thinking, and she took this as a sign of reluctance to act. ‘We've got to do something now, Lance. There's no one else who is going to look after your father's interests.'

I sighed, then said slowly, ‘I really rather think you're right.'

She was so excited, she was almost jumping around in the seat. ‘Come on, then!'

‘What, though, Max? What do we do?'

‘Ask questions, find witnesses, look into the history of the Lightollers . . .'

Good suggestions all, but I had a better one. ‘No. The first thing we do is go home. We need some sleep.'

SIXTEEN

I
wasn't going to get any, though; not straight away at least.

For the first part of the journey, though – as we made our way through Epsom – there were no smoke signals on the horizon and I was gulled into a feeling of relative security. The cod opera music was on the radio in the background again.

‘What is that?'

Max did a bit of eye-rolling. ‘Honestly, Lance. Don't you know anything?'

‘Apparently not.'

‘Isn't it fantastic?'

I began to suspect that she did not share my opinions regarding the piece's musical virtues. ‘Well, it's different.'

‘I think it's wonderful.'

‘But what is it?'

‘It's called “Bohemian Rhapsody”.'

‘Really.'

‘It's by Queen.'

I'd heard of them, but they'd passed me by, like leaves blown in the wind. There was quiet between us for a while, perhaps that was a mistake for Max suddenly announced, ‘If the police won't do anything, then we'll have to.'

From somewhere she had found a Bounty bar and we were each munching half. I could remember all too clearly what had happened when Dad dragged me into the affair on Thornton Heath allotments and I wasn't keen for a repeat dose of the kind of thing that had befallen me then. ‘We're both tired. We're going to go home, get some sleep, and then go back to AMH. We leave the sleuthing to the police.'

‘But they're not doing anything. You heard him.'

‘So? We both know that Dad didn't do it. I'm sure that when he recovers he'll have a perfectly rational explanation of what he was doing in the house. He'll probably even be able to identify the true killer.'

But I remember a small doubt at the back of my mind, one that pointed out that my father's reasons for what he had done might seem to him to be rational, but there was a fair chance they would appear completely cuckoo to the police and the courts.

And there was also the possibility that he wouldn't recover at all . . .

Max said nothing more as we cut through Sutton and made our way towards the Purley Way and then on to Thornton Heath. Then she said, ‘You'd better take me home.'

I was hurt. ‘Don't you want to come back to my house?'

‘I think I'll sleep better in my own bed.' Perhaps she realized that I was slightly hurt by this, for she then said, ‘I'll ring you later this afternoon, I promise.'

So, I dropped her at her house and we parted with a kiss and I drove home. The Bounty bar had helped but I hadn't actually eaten a proper meal for twenty-four hours and so I made some breakfast of toast and Marmite and tea, then dragged my legs up to bed, confident that I would be in the land of Bedfordshire before the Sandman had even found the address on the map. I had forgotten the brooch in the pocket of my overcoat; I didn't realize then how lucky that was.

Two hours later I was still awake. The reason for this was multifactorial but mainly partly because my mind wouldn't stop going over Dad's predicament, partly because they were digging up the road about a hundred yards away and using no fewer than three pneumatic drills, and partly because I was (as I remember my mother used to put it) ‘overtired'.

Accordingly, when the phone rang, it did not drag me from the deepest depths of slumber, merely from the shallows of sore-eyed frustration.

‘Yes?'

‘Lance?' This was a low, urgent whisper but unmistakably it was the voice of Max.

Accordingly, I enquired, ‘Max?'

‘Lance, I need help.' Still the whisper.

‘What's going on? Where are you? Are you at home?'

‘Shhh!' This vowelless syllable was issued even more urgently.

‘Max?'

Nothing.

‘Max?'

There was another passage of silence, then she said, ‘I'm in the house.'

‘Which house? Yours?'

‘Lightoller's house!' Her whisper signalled frustration at my obtuseness.