Dying to Know (18 page)

The torchlight disappeared, leaving perfect calm everywhere but inside the two of us. For a dreadful, dread-filled moment, I thought that the figure was going to continue its way on up the stairs towards us, but it didn't. It moved, and moved quickly, but it went back down into the hall, then into the front room; five seconds later and it was at the front door and, opening it quietly and closing it even more quietly, it was gone.

I didn't have time to enjoy my relief, though.

‘Come on.' I hauled Max up and dragged her downstairs.

She asked breathlessly, ‘What's going on? Who was that?'

‘I don't know, but I think that the police are outside.'

At the front door, I paused and listened; it wasn't long before I heard faint noises coming from the back of the house. It was at this point that Max whispered in a voice that was completely confused, not a little alarmed and rather too loud for my liking, ‘What are you doing?'

‘Shh!'

She was opening her mouth to argue as I opened the front door and pushed her out of the house, then followed, closing the door as quickly but as quietly as I could. Before she could voice her objections, I whispered, ‘Keep your head down and run to the road!'

Thankfully, she did as she was told and we sprinted up the driveway and then on to the pavement. I didn't look back but I had the feeling that the front door was opening just as we turned the corner.

TWENTY-FIVE

T
he ring of the doorbell came forty minutes later. We had lain in bed, still breathing heavily, listening to the muffled sounds of activity outside, hearing it increase slowly as the police arrived. We were both far too awake to even attempt sleep, what with physical exertion and intellectual puzzlement. In the darkness that was broken only by the muted orange shapes of the street lamp on the ceiling and the faint luminance of the alarm clock to my left, we whispered questions to each other; we did not dare put on the light since our alibi was one of an undisturbed night's sleep, and perhaps it was therefore only fitting that the questions produced little in the way of meaningful answers, little in the way of enlightenment.

When I opened the front door it was to find Inspector Masson standing in the porch looking distinctly agitated and angry; behind him was Constable Smith. I suppose, to a certain extent, Masson always looked like that, but now, in the small hours of a dark, damp November evening, the dial was turned up to eleven and he had put a couple of turbochargers in as well. Behind them there were clouds of fog beginning to form. The fog wasn't dense enough and the darkness wasn't dark enough to hide the police activity around the Lightollers' house, with two cars parked in front and five uniforms milling about.

He pushed past me without a word.

I said, ‘Evening,' as he came in but wasn't even graced with a return grunt. Rather more loudly, I called to his back, ‘Or should that be, “Morning”?'

Smith, following, mumbled something that might have been, ‘Hello.'

In the hall Masson turned as I closed the door and said, ‘I saw your car in the drive.'

Now, I like to think of myself as a patient man, but I thought that he was being just plain rude. ‘Glad to see that your powers of observation haven't failed you.'

‘What are you doing here?'

‘Looking after my father's house while he's in hospital.' I kept a straight face, even though he stared at me in that uniquely ‘Massonic' way.

‘Been asleep, have you?'

‘Yes,' I lied.

‘You don't look sleepy.'

‘I don't, when I'm awake.'

Masson frowned. ‘You didn't hear the cars arrive?'

I had, but I denied it anyway. He commented, ‘You're a heavy sleeper.'

‘I like to try to keep to twelve stone.'

Which went down rather badly; I could spot this because icicles formed on the end of my nose as the room chilled.

Masson said sourly, ‘Then I assume that you haven't heard anything going on next door during the night?'

‘No.'

From the top of the stairs, Max's feet appeared, followed by the rest of her. As she came down, she asked, ‘What's going on?'

Masson turned his head to allow her a dose of malevolence. ‘Someone broke into Oliver Lightoller's house about forty-five minutes ago.'

Max said at once, ‘God! No!' As I looked at her, I appreciated what the RSC had lost when she had chosen life as a vet.

Masson swung round to me, as if to try to catch me out, but I'm confident that I, too, was looking suitably aghast. ‘Yes,' he said.

Smith added, ‘We're fairly sure that there were two of them.'

Masson put his three pennyworths in, and put it in with an unnecessarily menacing air. ‘There are two of you.'

The obvious reply to this was on the point of making its way out of my mouth when Max said, ‘I'm really sorry, inspector. We were fast asleep, but we'd have called you at once if we'd known. What did they steal?'

‘We're checking now.'

I couldn't resist saying, ‘Perhaps it was the real killer, inspector.'

He should have given me a tight smile, but didn't. ‘Did you go out at all last night?'

‘I went to visit my father.'

‘What time did you get back?'

‘I suppose about seven.'

‘It was seven fifteen,' put in Max.

And I asked, ‘Why do you ask?'

‘You didn't go out again?'

‘We stayed right here,' I assured him, reckoning that ‘here' could encompass a fairly large area.

‘All night,' added Max and, whether she meant to or not, added with this confirmation a distinctly salacious tint to our alibi. Masson looked less than impressed while Smith just looked embarrassed.

Masson asked with a scowl, ‘What time did you go to bed?'

Max answered at once and without a trace of guile, ‘About ten thirty, I think; or maybe it was closer to ten forty-five.'

It was obvious he didn't believe her – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he didn't want to believe her – but she spoke her lines perfectly and kept a straight face too, her gaze true and unyielding as they looked at each other.

Abruptly he asked, ‘Do you two want to get dressed?' Since this clearly was the kind of request that did not expect a debate, we complied while Smith and Masson waited in the back room. When we came back down, and after Max had made some coffee which Masson refused curtly and Smith rather more reluctantly, Masson said without preliminaries, ‘We're going over the house inch by inch; in retrospect, perhaps we should have done that before.'

‘Perhaps you should,' I said. ‘Surely you're now coming round to the conclusion that Dad might just be innocent?'

‘I'll admit there might be more to this business than first meets the eye,' he conceded but, before I could celebrate, he went on: ‘He's still got a lot of explaining to do, though.'

‘Isn't it obvious that somebody is looking for something? Two break-ins within twenty-four hours; admittedly the first one was an opportunist, but this one surely wasn't.'

Masson couldn't help himself. ‘The third break-in, actually.' He eyed Max.

The fourth, actually, I thought. If only you knew
 . . .
I asked, ‘Have you found anything?'

Masson nodded. ‘A hidden wall safe.'

I tried to sound and look surprised. ‘Really?'

There was a slight pause, one that was already threatening to become embarrassing, when Max asked, ‘What's in it?' She did so with a perfect mix of curiosity and innocence.

‘We don't know, and we won't until we get the combination. Luckily Tom Lightoller knows it; he's on his way over now.'

And a light went on in my head.

Max sipped her coffee. ‘How did they get in?'

‘Nothing very sophisticated. A chisel or screwdriver was used to prise open the French windows at the back.'

Max shivered. ‘And to think that Lance and I were only a few yards away.'

Perhaps she over-egged things a bit, because Masson appraised her for a few moments. To distract him, I pointed out: ‘If the safe's closed, presumably he didn't manage to open it.'

Masson said, ‘Presumably not, although not necessarily. Clearly it wasn't blown open as you two might have heard it, but that doesn't mean to say that it hasn't been opened and then closed again.'

‘Oh.'

‘Apart from that, we haven't found anything else. Certainly nothing that gives anyone else a motive to kill the Lightollers.'

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Max opening her mouth. Almost certainly she wasn't going to say something about the report of A.J. and J.A. Moss, Consulting Detectives, but I didn't want to take the chance. ‘Maybe when you get the safe open, there'll be something of significance in there.'

‘I hope so.' He couldn't resist adding: ‘For your father's sake, I hope so.'

When he had gone, we debated whether to go back to bed, but we were too wide awake and Max wanted to look through the dossier. Accordingly, we retreated to Dad's kitchen and from somewhere I managed to find another dose of Shagnasty's Revenger which, although it might not suit the palate of the refined gourmet, hit the spot when I considered all the shenanigans I had just had to endure. I found Max some more wine and for twenty minutes we just sat at the table and looked through the dossier while trying to calm down.

The affair was certainly torrid. During the month that the detective agency had watched them, Mr Hocking and Mrs Aurelia Parrish had met clandestinely – on every occasion in Mr Hocking's bedroom – seven times, their sessions lasting up to an hour and a half. They took advantage of Mr Parrish's visits to the wholesaler which, since he was a successful shopkeeper, were regular and frequent.

Max found some of the photos mesmerizing and, those that she did not find mesmerizing, she found hilarious. Not for the first time, I found her sense of humour and sense of sexuality quite invigorating.

I said, ‘It's hardly a family heirloom, but I think it's pretty obvious what Mr Hocking, master baker and inventive consumer of pastry, was after when he tried to break in.'

‘Lightoller must have been blackmailing him.'

I nodded. ‘Which gives him a very good motive for murder.'

‘So he's the one!'

Max's enthusiasm was endearing but, I was very much afraid, premature. ‘I suppose he could be—'

‘Of course he is!'

‘But don't forget the bloke who came in by the front door.'

‘Gosh, yes! I'd forgotten him.'

‘He had a key.'

‘And he went straight to the safe.'

‘He was so quick, he must have known.'

She frowned. I think she was getting a bit drunk by now. ‘So he did. He knew an awful lot, didn't he?'

‘Yes,' I said, thinking. ‘He did, didn't he?'

There was companionable silence for a while, each of us communing with our drink. Max said then what I had been thinking. ‘Do you think it might have been Tom Lightoller?'

I nodded, wiping some Shagnasty from my lips. ‘I think that it's highly likely. Him, or one of his goons.'

‘But why?'

Our eyes fell on the dossier that lay innocently on the table between us.

Max whispered, ‘He wanted that.'

‘He came looking for us.' She was maudlin, her speech slightly slurred, her gaze slightly blurred. Her wine glass as empty as the bottle.

I was getting fairly drunk myself and was desperately tired with it. ‘I know.'

‘Supposing he'd found us?'

‘I'd have fought him off.'

She nodded, thought about it, then looked up at me, her face frowning. ‘Would you?'

I thought that her tone was unnecessarily drenched in surprise. ‘Of course.'

She continued to stare at me, and I repaid the compliment, until she burst into laughter.

‘Why are you laughing?'

But she was so overcome with hilarity that she had no room left for speech and continued to giggle for an irritatingly long time. Several times I asked her again why she had become a chortling imbecile, but these enquiries only served to exacerbate her condition. Eventually, she calmed down and I sat and watched her while she tried to stop gasping for air.

‘Better?' I asked, and I like to think my tone was suitably bitter.

‘Much,' she said with a smile. ‘Come on, Lance, let's go back to bed.'

Before turning in, I phoned AMH. I think that they were surprised to be disturbed by a worried relative ringing at five in the morning but said nothing. Dad's condition was unchanged which, had I been an optimistic sort of person, would have cheered me; being a realist, I had to fight a feeling of dread as I thanked them and wished them a quiet night.

In the event, it was a feeling of dread that was quite misplaced.

When the phone rang, it drilled down into a sleep so deep it was like a tomb, but from somewhere I knew at once that it was the hospital and was picking up the phone before it had completed its second ring. The light through the windows was gloomy but I could see the alarm clock well enough; it was nearly eleven.

‘Yes?' My head hurt.

‘Dr Elliot?' It was an Australian accent.

‘Yes?' No, I decided, my head was hurting
me
. It had decided that it didn't like me and accordingly was taking agonizing revenge.

‘It's Atkinson-Morley here.'

I knew that. What I didn't know was whether in ten seconds' time I would be laughing or crying. ‘What is it?'