The Corpse of St James's (31 page)

Carstairs nodded gravely. ‘That will be all right, sir. You will be guarded, and Miss Higgins, at her job, could scarcely be safer, now could she? It would have been better if you had come to us at once, you know.' His glance, too, addressed all of us. Alan, Jonathan and I all looked embarrassed.

But Carstairs wasn't finished. ‘In fact, sir, I'd like to have a word with you for a moment. Miss Higgins, you may be excused. We have a car waiting to drive you back to the palace, where we have phoned to explain your absence. I think you will find you will not be reprimanded. Thank you for your cooperation.'

Looking somewhat bewildered, Jemima left, without a backward glance at Bert. Carstairs went on, ‘Some of what I have to say might have been distressing to Miss Higgins, you see. Now. You may be relieved to know that we have been keeping an eye on Mr Welles, and he is now in our custody. It's curious, though.' He leaned forward confidingly. ‘Mr Welles has admitted to improper relations with Miss Melissa, though he insists they were consensual. Given her age, that of course makes no difference to the offence. He admits to damaging your home and property, and I think you might have been right to flee from him. He's very angry with you, indeed, Mr Higgins.'

‘Yes, well, I'm not exactly happy with him, am I?'

‘But the curious thing to which I referred is this. He has been very candid with us about many of his activities. He says he met Melissa the day she ran away, at Buckingham Palace, and they became friendly at once. She came to see him in London repeatedly after that, and he admits he may well have been the father of her child. But he categorically denies killing Melissa. In fact, he claims that you are her murderer. And since I am disposed to believe him, I therefore place you under arrest, and caution you that you do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.'

But Bert wasn't listening. He rose from his chair. ‘That bastard! He hates me! You saw what he did to my home, my life's work! And he would have done it to me, if I'd been around. I'd like to get my hands on him, the bleeding—'

‘Sit down, Mr Higgins.' Carstairs spoke crisply and very, very softly.

Bert sat down.

‘I had given some thought to allowing the two of you a bit of conversation together. As tempers seem to be running a trifle high, however, I decided against such a meeting. I say again that you need not answer me, but I wonder if you have any idea why Mr Welles is so cross with you.'

‘Because he killed my daughter, and he knows I know it! If he could have killed me before I told anyone, he'd have got off scot-free.'

‘Mmm. But you had already told Mrs Martin, had you not?'

‘No! I told her I knew he'd been at the palace when Melissa was there, that first time. But I had no idea he'd killed her, until . . .'

‘Yes, Mr Higgins? Until when?'

‘When he came to the shop, with blood in his eye, out to get me! I got away just in time! The man's a maniac, I tell you!'

‘I see.' Carstairs pulled a sheaf of papers out of a drawer. ‘This is the statement Mr Welles made to us a little while ago. Don't worry, I shan't read all of it to you, but you may find this bit of interest.' He adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. ‘He has just told us that he came to visit you, quote, “because I found out he'd shopped me to the old lady and I wanted to have it out with him”. Then he goes on to say, “The place was shut up when I got there. He'd done a runner. Left so fast he forgot to switch off the kettle. It was just coming to the boil. If he'd been there I'd have blacked his eyes for him, maybe left a few other bruises. But he wasn't, and I went mad, just tore into the place. I don't suppose I left much untouched. A pity, too, in a way. He had nice things.”' He put the papers down. ‘Now if you had left before Mr Welles arrived, I don't quite understand how you learned he was the murderer of Miss Melissa.'

‘I . . . I didn't have to “learn” it. I knew the moment I saw him coming. Why else would he be coming after me?'

‘Ah. I see there is a further area of confusion.' He picked up the papers again and searched for a moment. ‘Yes. Here it is. “I walked from my flat, because I didn't want a cabby to remember me and report to the . . . to you. I was careful to walk at a normal pace, so as not to draw attention. I was sure no one noticed me, but obviously Bert saw me coming. I suppose he was upstairs and looked out the window for some reason. He had to have gone out the back way, because I had the front door in sight almost as soon as I left the tube station.” I don't quite understand how you inferred from his calm, unhurried walk that he had . . . “blood in his eye”, I believe you said?'

‘I . . . he . . . you have only his word for the way he walked! I tell you, I could see that he was furious, and I didn't want to have a row with him.'

‘No, sir, that's not quite all we have. We have the word of several other shopkeepers in the neighbourhood, who saw and heard nothing at all unusual until they began to hear the sounds of breaking glass and so on.'

‘What someone didn't see or hear is hardly evidence!'

‘Not in a court of law, perhaps,' Carstairs agreed smoothly. ‘But it is an interesting indication, don't you think? And as it happens we have something more.' He reached into another desk drawer and pulled out a clear plastic bag. It contained a man's silk scarf, a rather beautiful one in a deep green and blue paisley.

‘Where did you get that?' Bert reached for it.

‘It is yours, then?'

Bert sat back. ‘I . . . I thought it was. Now I see that I'm mistaken. And I don't want to say anything more without my solicitor.'

‘No comment to make about this, then?' Carstairs pulled another rabbit out of the hat.

I gasped. It was a very small, very chic handbag of the sort carried by the young. Carstairs opened it and turned it upside down. Out fell a house key, a lipstick and the latest thing in mobile phones.

‘Found in your flat, sir, between the cushions of the settee, where you presumably overlooked it. The mobile is definitely Miss Melissa's.'

Bert sat silent, looking at his feet.

‘Very well.' Carstairs stood up. ‘I charge you, Robert Higgins, with the murder of Melissa Higgins.' He nodded to the burly policeman who had been standing silently in the corner. ‘Take him away.'

‘H
e was so sure he could get away with it,' I mused. Jonathan and Jemima were sitting in the garden with Letty, Alan and me. It was two weeks later, the middle of a warm, lovely July. We'd had a leisurely tea and were trying to sort out all the details.

‘He was always like that,' said both the young people, almost in chorus. Jonathan grinned at Jemima and gestured, giving her the floor.

‘He was charming. He really was, you know.'

‘I know,' I said ruefully. ‘He charmed me. I liked him, quite a lot, at first. And he was so convincing about Jarvis/Welles, ever so reluctant to implicate him and all that. I should have remembered about Richard the Third, and history written by the villain.'

We were talking about Bert in the past tense. I had no idea what was going to become of him. There is no capital punishment in England, so he would survive, but he could spend a long, long time in prison. At any rate, so far as all of us were concerned, he was in the past.

‘He claims it was an accident,' said Alan, who had spent a long time at Scotland Yard after the rest of us had gone home exhausted. ‘He says he was just trying to keep her quiet, and put the scarf to her mouth because she was shouting.'

‘What do you suppose really happened?' I asked, and then looked at Jemima in alarm. ‘Oh, my dear, would you rather we didn't talk about it?'

‘It's all right. Better now than later. I'm still sort of numb, and I want to know what happened. Maybe then I can begin to make sense of it.'

Alan tented his fingers in his lecturing mode. ‘According to Welles – as that's his real name, I'm going to call him that – according to him, it was Melissa who started it all.'

‘Well, no,' I said sternly. ‘He started it when he started her baby.'

‘Indeed. But the way things played out at the end began with Melissa deciding she must have an abortion. She went to see Welles . . .'

It had not been a successful mission, according to Welles, Alan went on. He had told Melissa that he had no money to spare, that she could always go to a National Health doctor, and that he couldn't be sure, anyway, that the child was his. She argued that she was too young for the NHS, that she had friends who'd had botched abortions and nearly died, and she wanted better care. He, Welles, had been of the opinion that Melissa simply wanted pampering, or else that she wasn't pregnant at all and just wanted money. She said, in that case she'd go to her father, who was rich . . . and she told him who her father was. Welles got the impression she'd known for a long time.

‘But she came to me first,' said Jemima in a toneless voice. ‘She came to her mother, and I turned her away. I thought the same as . . . that pervert . . . that she was lying just to get money.'

‘And so then she went to Bert,' I said quickly. Letty had taken Jemima's hand and was holding it tight.

‘And he went ballistic,' said Alan. ‘That isn't quite the way he put it, but it was easy enough to read between the lines. Here was Welles, who had attracted Bert's notice and had spurned him, and had then messed about with Bert's daughter! He insisted that Melissa tell him where Jarvis was, but she refused. He says that must have been when she left her bag behind.'

‘With her mobile,' I commented drily. ‘Without which no teenager stirs a foot, these days. He must have hurried her out of there, or she'd never have left without it.'

‘Right,' Alan continued. ‘I'm only repeating what Bert said. He claims he then took her to the palace to talk the situation over with Jemima, but Jemima wasn't answering her phone.

‘By then it was getting dark, according to Bert. The argument intensified. Bert half-dragged her by the hand into the park. He saw the gated area, saw that someone had vandalized the CCTV camera and the padlock, and took her in there. They argued.'

‘If only I'd answered my phone,' said Jemima.

‘There is never,' I said firmly, ‘any point in “if only”. Things are as they are, and we can only go on from where we are now.'

Alan resumed his narrative, or rather Bert's narrative. ‘Melissa was, naturally, very upset by now. It had been a long and frustrating day, and in her condition she was tiring easily. Melissa started crying and shouting. Bert says he put a hand over her mouth to keep her quiet, and she lost consciousness. In a panic, he wound his scarf around her face in case she came around and screamed, dragged her under a bush, and waited for her to regain consciousness. In time he realized . . .'

‘That she wasn't going to come around.' Jemima again, still in that dead voice.

‘That's his story, at any rate. I think it's open to question, and the prosecution will make mincemeat of it.'

Yes. He was a good liar, was Bert. Later, out of Jemima's hearing, I'd ask Alan what he thought had really happened.

‘He thought he was safe,' said Alan. ‘No one had seen him, almost no one knew of his connection with Melissa. He didn't know she had told Welles. But when a too-inquisitive lady started coming round and asking awkward questions, he decided it would be useful to implicate Welles, whom he hated. That, in the end, was his undoing.'

There was a silence.

‘When I talked to him about the murder,' I said, ‘that first time when Lynn and I went to the shop, he acted so surprised and shaken, and swore vengeance on the man responsible. He was very convincing. I believed him utterly.'

‘I suspect the surprise and anger were real,' said Alan, ‘but only because you knew about the crimes and about his connection with Melissa, not because of the murder itself. His vengeance might very well have caught up with you, my dear.'

‘I loved him once,' said Jemima, very quietly.

‘So did I,' said Jonathan. ‘He was my best friend, until . . .'

When the silence threatened to become maudlin, I stood up and stretched. ‘And now the two of you are friends again, a great good coming out of a great tragedy. Not much thanks to me, I might add. I didn't really do a thing to clear this one up.'

‘You persisted, my dear,' said Alan gently. ‘You kept the police toes to the fire.'

‘And you believed in us,' added Jonathan, giving Jemima a look that made me want to cry.

‘Well, then. We have a very nice bottle of cognac inside, and I, for one, intend to drink a toast to restored friendship.'

Hand in hand, Jemima and Jonathan followed us inside.