Murder in Mind (19 page)

‘What do you mean, “safe”?'

‘They were being hounded by reporters, who broke into the house. We got away just in time. Evan refused to budge.'

‘You're being ridiculous. Reporters don't break into houses. I'd better get over there.' She disconnected.

Angelika said, ‘And . . .?' She produced her own mobile.

‘Try Evan. Diana said he didn't pick up when she dialled.'

Angelika tried it. ‘It's gone to voicemail.'

‘The police are on their way over. Perhaps they know what's happening.'

The front doorbell rang. Steadily. A murmur of voices in the hall. Thomas, showing his visitor out. Thomas would let the police in when they arrived.

At least, Ellie hoped it was only the police and not reporters. She didn't feel up to dealing with either. She looked at Vera, who nodded and removed herself. A chatter of voices in the hall.

Vera put her head round the door. ‘Mikey's just arrived and wants his lunch. He'll have curry and like it. So will I. Anyone else want some?'

Ellie shook her head and then changed her mind. ‘Not curry, but there's some home-made soup in the freezer, Vera. I expect Thomas would like some, too, though he might like a curry; yes, he probably would. Anyone else fancy a curry? No? How about a ham or cheese sandwich?'

Vera disappeared, and the doorbell rang again. Ellie hauled herself to her feet and beat Thomas to the door.

‘Ellie, my love?' Thomas, reading glasses high on his forehead, looking puzzled. ‘What's Vera doing here? And her boy, who—'

‘I'll explain in a minute. I think this may be the police.'

It was. Ms Milburn. Hurray.

Plus – oh dear! – the inspector with the sticking out ears, which turned bright red whenever he was stressed. Ellie had nicknamed him ‘Ears' when he was rude to her at their first meeting, and the nickname had stuck, which hadn't endeared her to him. No.

She ushered her visitors in, telling herself that she really must find out what the inspector's real name was, as a matter of courtesy, and write it down somewhere, so she didn't forget.

His ears were already burning scarlet. Oh dear. This interview was going to be difficult, wasn't it?

‘Do come in. You know my husband, don't you? Mrs Hooper and Freya are in the sitting room, both very anxious to know what's happening. Is Mr Hooper all right?'

‘Don't give me that!' Ears was in fine form. ‘Which one of you did it, eh?'

Ellie opened her eyes wide. ‘Did what, precisely?'

Thomas moved to stand at her side. ‘Would someone like to fill me in?'

‘Yes, of course.' Ellie gestured to the sitting room. ‘Come on in, all of you. Take a seat. But first, the girls are in great distress. Is Mr Hooper all right?'

‘As if you didn't know!' Ears was really angry, a sheen of perspiration on his forehead.

‘Why, what's happened?' Ellie looked to Ms Milburn, as being the more sensible of the two.

Ears strode into the sitting room and pulled up short at the sight of Angelika, prettily laid out on a chair near the window. Angelika tried on a pale smile, specially for him. It didn't hurt that she'd chosen a chair near a table with a vase of autumn flowers on it. What a pretty picture she made . . . if you didn't realize she'd moved to that chair on purpose.

Ears recovered himself, went to sit on a chair nearby, found it occupied by the sleeping Freya, and transferred himself to the settee. ‘Mrs Quicke, this is not the first time you've interfered in one of my cases, but I sincerely hope it will be the last. I believe my colleague here warned you specifically to keep your nose out of it. But no, you turn up here, you shove in there, you waste police time by making alarmist phone calls, and finally, you whisk away not one but both of the witnesses to a murder case.'

‘Murder!' Angelika, hand to where she, mistakenly, believed her heart to be.

‘Murder?' Ellie looked at Ms Milburn. ‘Not Evan, too?'

‘No, no. But he is in hospital.'

Angelika shrieked and fell back, sobbing wildly. ‘Evan, oh! Not Evan!' She held out her hand towards Ears, and he caught hold of it. Embarrassed, he didn't seem to know whether to throw it away, or pat it. Angelika turned tear-filled eyes towards him. ‘My husband! Oh, please tell me it's not true!'

Ellie reflected that Angelika could certainly lay it on, especially where an impressionable man was concerned.

Not everyone was taken in. Ms Milburn looked down her nose. Thomas stroked his beard. Neither of them seemed amused by Angelika's histrionics.

Freya stirred in her sleep, murmuring something indistinct. She made a convulsive movement, clutched her teddy bear more tightly and gradually came back to consciousness. ‘Dad?' She struggled to sit upright. ‘What's happened? Who are . . . are you police? Is Dad all right?'

‘Yes, yes,' said Ms Milburn, in soothing tones. ‘He's in hospital. He fell, got a knock on the head.'

Angelika and Freya looked bewildered.

‘How?'

‘He fell?'

Ears disentangled himself from Angelika. ‘So, which of you did it?'

Monday afternoon

‘H
e was perfectly all right when we left,' said Ellie. ‘Irate, but upright.'

The two girls nodded. ‘On his mobile—'

‘Trying to get the Chief Constable.'

Vera pushed open the door to bring in a tray containing mugs of soup and a small mountain of sandwiches. She took one look at the police and said, ‘Shall I fetch some more plates? Or how about some curry? We've enough to feed the five thousand.'

Ellie reached for some soup and a sandwich. ‘Vera was with me all morning. She can vouch for the fact that Evan Hooper was perfectly all right when we left.'

‘And who is “Vera”, pray?' said Ears.

‘That's me.' Vera dished out plates and mugs.

Ellie warmed her hands on her mug. ‘Vera used to clean for me but doesn't do that any more. She came with me today as a favour, to try to sort out the mess in the Hooper household. But when we got there—'

Thomas took the tray from Vera and set it down. ‘Far be it from me to interfere, but do you think you could start from the beginning?'

‘I don't know where the beginning is,' said Ellie. She sipped from her mug and almost burned her mouth. Aaargh. Just what she needed. She took a second sandwich. ‘Bless you, Vera.'

Ms Milburn flourished her pad. ‘Start with your involvement this morning. I called in on the Hoopers at ten fifteen to take statements relating to the death of the second Mrs Hooper.'

‘Fern.' Angelika nodded. ‘Silly name. Silly woman.' She took a mug of soup, too, but declined a sandwich.

Freya reddened. ‘I hadn't seen Mummy in ages. I wish I'd been nicer to her. She couldn't help the way she was. That was how she was brought up, free living, and all that. She used to try to make me understand, to be more like her, but I guess there's too much of my dad in me to . . . But Fiona loved to visit her.'

‘Yes, yes,' said Ms Milburn, anxious to get on. ‘So what happened after I left you?'

‘I suppose it wasn't long after you'd gone, maybe half an hour or so, that a man came to the door, a reporter wanting to talk to us. Dad sent him off, sharpish. Dad went to his study as he was going to work from home this morning, so when the phone in the hall started ringing again, I picked it up. First it was a reporter asking if I was the mother of the murdered child. I was so shocked, I think I laughed. Anyway, I put the phone down and it rang again and this time . . . ugh . . . I've never had an obscene phone call before.'

Vera pushed a mug of soup into Freya's hand. Freya looked at it, but made no move to drink it.

‘Was it a man or a woman, and what did he or she say?'

Freya reddened. ‘A man, I think. Nasty. Asking what it felt like to have killed your only child. Had I enjoyed it, that sort of thing? Going on to say what he'd like to do to me. Ugh. I went to tell Dad, and he said to take the phone off the hook and he'd report it to the police. He said perhaps we'd have to get our number made ex-directory or something. So I took the phone off the hook. Then I got ready for my morning run.'

She took a sip of the soup, then gulped it down greedily.

‘Why didn't you exercise in the gym?'

‘I never do. Angelika doesn't like anyone but her to use it. She made an exception for Fiona but I wasn't going to beg her for it, and anyway, I prefer to run in the open air. I was just leaving when Mrs Quicke and Vera arrived and I let them in.'

Vera pushed the sandwiches in Freya's direction again. She took two and started to wolf them down. A fraction more colour returned to her face.

‘Over to you, Mrs Quicke,' said Ms Milburn, taking notes.

Ellie was on her third sandwich. ‘My daughter Diana had asked me to get some domestic help to clean up at the Hoopers. I was visiting Vera this morning . . .' Should she explain about the Pryce family connection? No, probably not. ‘So we went along together to see what needed to be done. We saw two men and a woman, I think it was, talking to some people in the street outside the house. I suppose they were reporters, but they didn't see us turn into the drive and didn't try to stop us getting into the house. Freya let us in as she was just on her way out. She told us they'd been bothered by a reporter earlier, but that Evan had sent him off.

‘The house was in a right mess. The phone was off the hook in the hall. I put it back on and yes, there was an obscene phone call, so I left the phone off the hook. Vera started work in the kitchen. I found Angelika in the gym, and we talked a bit. She went upstairs to have a shower, and suddenly everything went haywire. Someone – a reporter? One, or maybe two – was in the garden and started taking photographs of us through the kitchen windows. It was more than a bit scary. Is there another sandwich, or a drop more soup, perhaps?'

‘Actually in the garden? I don't believe it.' That was Ears.

Vera collected empty mugs. ‘It's true, though. I'll get seconds.'

‘Oh,' said Angelika, meltingly beautiful as she gazed at Ears. ‘It was terrifying. I was so frightened!'

Ellie recollected that Angelika had been upstairs at that time, but said nothing. She continued, ‘That's when Freya started to bang on the front door and to ring the bell, trying to get back in. There were reporters right round her, but we got her in somehow—'

‘How many? Describe them.'

‘I don't know.' Ellie looked at the others for help.

Freya said, ‘They were all round me, shouting. Three or four? Terrifying. One of them grabbed my arm.' She rubbed it, where the bruise was beginning to colour up. ‘Ouch! They wanted me to say, to confirm . . . I couldn't take it in. They were taking photos, snap, snap, non-stop. They seemed to think I was Abigail's mother and that I'd . . . that I'd killed her!' Her voice shook.

‘Going out for a run was foolhardy in the extreme,' said Ears. ‘Naturally, they thought you were making yourself available for questioning.'

There were tears in Freya's eyes. ‘I didn't realize.' She brushed crumbs from herself. Looked for another sandwich.

Ears was censorious. ‘You should all have stayed inside and shut the doors.'

‘Until they broke in?' said Ellie. ‘What ought we to have done then?'

‘Dialled nine nine nine.'

‘We tried that and got cut off. The line went dead. Then we tried one oh one which is the new number, and we argued about whether it was for non-emergency use only but we did get through to someone, and when you're in a difficult situation you don't always remember things like the number for the police being changed. I tried to raise Ms Milburn on my mobile but she wasn't available, and when Vera did get through to one oh one, the operator told her to try the other number.'

‘There really wasn't any reason for you to call the police. Reporters don't behave the way you've described.'

Ellie nodded. ‘That's what I thought, too. It's disturbing, isn't it? We heard a window smash at the back of the house and assumed someone had broken into the conservatory. I'd locked the door that leads from the conservatory into the kitchen, and after a while we could hear someone trying to break through that. I knew that once they were into the kitchen, there was no means of keeping them out of the rest of the house. We thought they were going to be on us at any minute.'

Freya nodded. ‘I was so frightened.'

‘I got my minicab people to send a car for us; we grabbed a few things and left. Evan was in the hall, trying to get through to the Chief Constable on his mobile. We asked him to come with us, but he wouldn't.'

‘Pig obstinate. He abandoned us to our fate!' Angelika fixed large blue eyes on Ears. Blue eyes? Ellie did a double take. Her eyes had been green yesterday, hadn't they? Coloured contact lenses?

‘I'm worried about Dad,' said Freya. ‘We shouldn't have left him. Is he all right?'

Ears pointed at her. ‘You pushed him over, perhaps, trying to get him to leave with you?'

‘Don't be silly,' said Freya, exhaustion overruling the need for politeness.

Ellie said, ‘We got out just in time. Some of the reporters followed us, but we managed to get away from them, and came here. So what's happened to Evan?'

Ms Milburn checked with her boss, and he nodded for her to continue. ‘Two constables attended your one oh one call. They found three reporters sitting outside the front door. They said they knew someone was inside the house but that no one was answering the door. They denied threatening behaviour, said they'd not overstepped the mark in any way.

‘The constables went round to the back of the house, found the glass door into the conservatory had been smashed in. The door from the conservatory into the kitchen had been broken open, too. There was no one in the house except for Mr Hooper, who was lying on the floor in the hall. He was unconscious, but beginning to come round. His foot was tangled in the handle of a large leather handbag, which someone had carelessly left on the floor—'