The Package Included Murder (24 page)

‘You don't feel like paying a visit yourself?' The Hon. Con looked hopefully across the Arrivals Lounge towards Miss Clough-Cooper who, this time, hadn't moved.

Miss Clough-Cooper turned a page in her magazine. ‘No.'

The Hon. Con was near bursting. ‘It might be our last chance for a bit.'

Miss Clough-Cooper turned another page. ‘Why should it be? Still, if you want to go, don't let me stop you. I shall be perfectly safe here.'

But, the Hon. Con knew where her duty lay. She hadn't guarded Miss Clough-Cooper all these weeks just to have the girl croaked the minute they set foot on British soil. Until Penny Clough-Cooper was handed over into the care of her distinguished father, the Hon. Con had vowed not to let so much as one eyelid droop. And it was probably all in the mind, anyhow. The Hon. Con squared her shoulders, crossed her legs and tried to think of higher things. She glowered at Miss Jones who was placidly collecting up gloves and handbag. ‘Don't bother about me!' snarled the Hon. Con.

‘I won't dear.' Miss Jones smiled a winsome smile.

Alone in the lounge, Miss Clough-Cooper and the Hon. Con continued to wait. After a bit Roger Frossell looked in and reported that he hadn't, as yet, even found the car park, never mind their bus. It was also still raining cats and dogs outside. ‘Have they got a snack bar in this dump?' he asked. ‘I could do with a cup of coffee. Or a coke.' He looked round restlessly. ‘Think I'll go and explore.' He disappeared and then, a moment, later, came back again. ‘Oh, I almost forgot. Some little squirt said they were going to close this lounge in a couple of minutes. Put all the lights out and lock up, he said.'

‘And where the dickens are we supposed to sit then?' demanded the Hon. Con, outraged at the inconvenience this would cause Penny Clough-Cooper.

Roger Frossell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Search me,' he said. ‘The joker did mutter something about the Central Concourse being available, but God knows where that is or what. You can't find anything in this crummy hole. P'raps that's where the others have gone. I'll go and see.'

Miss Clough-Cooper shut her magazine with as much of a bang as she could manage. ‘ I suppose we'd better make a move,' she said, ‘before they plunge us into total darkness.'

The Hon. Con gladly burdened herself with Miss Clough-Cooper's luggage in addition to her own. It was a pity about Miss Jones's modest suitcase, which had been placed neatly by her chair, but– the Hon. Con stifled a pang of conscience– old Bones should have thought about that before she cleared off. She (the Hon. Con) had, after all, only
one
pair of hands.

Bleastead Moor's passenger complex was far from being purpose built and what had served the Air Force reasonably well during the Battle of Britain, is not necessarily ideal some thirty years on. The Hon. Con and Penny Clough-Cooper wandered up and down innumerable corridors and passages without, in the end, actually getting anywhere. They penetrated into a number of offices and storerooms and even found the cafeteria. It was shut.

‘Tell you what,' said the Hon. Con, trying to make a joke of it as yet another promising looking avenue turned into a dead end, ‘I think we're lost.'

Penelope Clough-Cooper was looking anxious. ‘It really is too bad,' she complained. ‘This place is like a rabbit warren. The least they could do is put up a few signs.'

‘Funny we haven't come across the others,' said the Hon. Con. Her arms were aching but she wasn't going to make a fuss about it. She was, rather, on the point of making some cheerful observation about their predicament when the screaming broke out. It was loud, blood curdling and coming from somewhere quite near.

Miss Clough-Cooper stopped dead in her tracks and all the blood drained out of her face. She went so white that even the Hon. Con noticed it and, dropping a suitcase, put out a supporting hand.

‘Here, steady the Buffs!' advised the Hon. Con as Penelope Clough-Cooper swayed.

Miss Clough-Cooper pressed a trembling hand over the damp ivory of her forehead. ‘Perhaps we'd better go and see what's happened.'

The Hon. Con was pawing the gound like an old war-horse that hears the trumpets but she hauled the over-eager Miss Clough-Cooper back. It was a good thing, she reflected, that somebody kept her head when all around were losing theirs.

Penny Clough-Cooper pulled herself free. ‘What on earth are you playing at?' she asked impatiently. ‘Somebody may be in danger out there!'

The Hon. Con generously forgave her. Well, you can't expect old heads on young shoulders, can you? ‘And somebody out there may be setting a trap for you, my girl!' she retorted. ‘Not that they'll catch an old fox like me napping, eh? Now then, we'll advance in good order – savez? I'll go first and you stay close behind … whatever happens!'

The Hon. Con had been shutting the stable door.

Mrs Frossell was still screaming when Miss Clough-Cooper and the Hon. Con arrived on the scene and nobody in the small crowd which had collected apparently thought of stopping her. They were all far to preoccupied with staring at the cause of Mrs Frossell's hysterical outburst.

Huddled in a corner, half hidden by the automatic coffee-making machine, lay Mrs Beamish. She was dead. Nobody had any doubts about that at all. There was something unmistakable in the dreadful stillness, in the awkward pose held uncomplainingly and in the reddish brown stain which was seeping through the full-blown roses of the head scarf.

‘For Christ's sake, shut that bloody woman up!' Norman Beamish, paler if anything than the corpse, was the first to break up the tableau. He snapped angrily at young Roger Frossell. ‘Get your mother out of here, can't you?'

Suddenly, everybody was moving and talking at once.

‘I'll get a doctor,' said Tony Lewcock, unable to tear his eyes away.

His brother shook his head. ‘It's the cops we want, Tone! Come on, let's find a phone!'

Miss Jones, a lace-edged handkerchief pressed to her lips, moved away to collapse on a bench up against the far wall. ‘I had a feeling something like this was going to happen,' she wailed. ‘All day long I had a feeling!' She felt the Hon. Con's basilisk eye on her and fell silent.

Young Mr Smith took a firmer hold on his wife. He looked sick and frightened. ‘Somebody ought to cover her up,' he muttered crossly. ‘ It's not decent, leaving her like that.' He pulled his wife away and they bumped into the Hon. Con who was standing, mouth agape, right behind them. She was so taken aback by the unexpected turn events had taken that she didn't even think of rebuking the honeymooners for their clumsiness.

Young Mrs Smith seemed to be in a complete daze. Her husband gave her another tug and this time they knocked up against Miss Clough-Cooper. Young Mr Smith mumbled an apology but young Mrs Smith drew back in horror.

‘Oh, my God!' She pressed the back of her hand across her mouth. ‘Oh, my God!' Her eyes flicked in a panic from Penelope Clough-Cooper to the dead body, and then back to Penelope Clough-Cooper again. She broke into a maniac scream of laughter. ‘They've got the same bleeding coats on!' she shrieked. ‘Can't you see – they've got the same bleeding coats on!'

The Hon. Con was furious. She had, of course, already deduced that Mrs Beamish had been done to death in mistake for Penny Clough-Cooper and it was most off-putting to have a common little girl like Mrs Smith stealing her thunder. Damn it all, who was supposed to be the blooming detective round here? Still, the Hon. Con wasn't one to blub over spilt milk (or over anything else, for that matter) and an astonishing theory was beginning to take shape in her head which, she would bet her boots, little Mrs Loud-mouth Smith wouldn't think of in a million years. Metaphorically rolling up her sleeves, the Hon. Con proceeded to take over the direction of affairs to such good effect that, when the police did finally arrive on the scene, there was really nothing much left for them to do.

The detective sergeant had different ideas, though. He waved the Hon. Con unceremoniously out of the way. ‘We'll get around to taking statements from you all later, missus' he assured her. ‘Meanwhile, if you wouldn't just mind standing to one side …' He grinned cheekily. ‘ Sort of let the dog see the rabbit, eh?'

‘Nobody has touched anything,' said the Hon. Con, standing her ground and getting a nasty jab from a passing half-plate camera. ‘I saw to that. I knew you wouldn't want all the clues and finger-prints messed up. And' – she waved a piece of paper under the sergeant's nose – ‘here is a brief account of everybody's movements from the moment we disembarked from the plane to the moment Mrs Frossell stumbled over the body. I think you'll find …'

A uniformed constable shouldered his way past. ‘'Scuse us, ma!' He nodded at the sergeant. ‘We've got the lounge open, sarge!'

‘Good!' The detective sergeant seemed to forget that the Hon. Con was there. ‘Well, get everybody rounded up and corralled in there, will you, Tom? And stand guard over ' em! Now, have those bloody policewomen arrived yet? And that bloody police surgeon? I thought this kind of emergency had been
planned
for. Well, we can't get very far until he's done his stuff. Fingerprints?' He turned away to deal with an importunate member of his entourage. ‘Well, and what do you propose to test for dabs, laddie? Now, use your brains! You know as well as me that we haven't found the murder weapon yet. I don't reckon it can be far but …'

And there was nothing the Hon. Con could do about it. She was herded, just as though she was an ordinary member of the public, into the newly unlocked lounge and kept waiting there for what seemed like – and, in fact, was – hours. Her cunning ploy of demanding to be allowed out to the ladies' room was an ignominious failure as she was escorted there and back by an apparently stone-deaf policewoman.

Miss Jones was naturally called upon to bear the brunt of the Hon. Con's frustration. ‘This is outrageous!' the Hon. Con had bawled when she was frog-marched back into the lounge. ‘It's an infringement of the liberty of the individual! I shall write to my MP about it! I shall write to the Chief Constable! I shall …'

A policeman bent down and tapped her gently on the shoulder. ‘No talking, ma!' he reminded her.

Even the thickest detective wouldn't have taken long to work out that the members of the Albatross package holiday were the prime suspects in the murder of Mrs Beamish, and Detective Superintendent Mellor, who had arrived with the dawn to take over the investigation, was far from being thick. He devoted a great deal of his time to his work, as any man burdened with a wife, a mother, a mother-in-law and five daughters is apt to do. A tall, anxious-faced man, he emerged from his car outside Bleastead Moor terminal buildings without any unduly high expectations. He quite liked murders, though. They made a bit of a change.

Superintendent Mellor's subordinates were well trained. An office, quiet and comfortable, had been commandeered for him and the murder headquarters set up next door. The necessary staff and extra telephones and typewriters had all been installed and somebody had even got the tea swindle going.

Superintendent Mellor was soon sitting back, warming his hands on a large, steaming cup of the stuff that cheers but does not inebriate, while his sergeant put him in the picture. The superintendent didn't believe in rushing in. Carefully and methodically he checked the murder diary, poured over the already prepared sketch plan of the scene of the crime and ran a practised eye down the list of everybody who'd been in the vicinity when Mrs Beamish had shuffled off this mortal coil.

‘You can see that they'd hardly even got a skeleton staff on duty,' said the detective sergeant. His name was Mortimer but Superintendent Mellor called him Tom. ‘Normally the place would be shut down completely at ten but they had to keep open until this clapped out old kite from Moscow staggered in. As far as I could see, the only thing the manager of this dreary dump bothers about is how much overtime his staff are clocking up. After ten o'clock last night, he was running the place on two men and a boy.'

Superintendent Mellor creased his brow. ‘All the other passengers on that plane had cleared the airport?'

‘Yes, sir. They'd left within twenty minutes of touch-down. The crew didn't hang about, either. The Control Tower lot went and the Customs …'

The superintendent scrabbled around on the desk. ‘Have we got a medical report yet, Tom?'

Sergeant Mortimer found it for him. ‘Preliminary, of course, sir. Seems we're looking for a pretty crude operator. He just ripped one of those fire axes off the wall and smacked her one across the back of the head. Well, more than one, actually. The doc reckons about six.'

‘Sounds like a nutter.'

Sergeant Mortimer shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nutter or not, he wasn't daft enough to leave any fingerprints anywhere.'

‘Sure it's a ‘‘ he'', Tom?'

‘Nope. Doctor Harvey reckons a woman could have done it all right. As long as she was strong enough to swing the axe, the weight of the head would more or less have done the rest.'

‘Oh, well,' – Superintendent Mellor unbuttoned his jacket and loosened his tie – ‘I suppose we'd better be making a start or somebody'll be blowing their top. Any more tea in that pot, Tom?'

They'd been using teabags for donkey's years but Sergeant Mortimer didn't mind fostering the old boy's illusions. ‘I'll see if I can squeeze you another cup, sir,' he promised. ‘What order do you want 'em in?'

‘Oh, – I'll see that woman who found the body first. Er – Mrs Frossell. Then I'll take the rest in alphabetical order.' He looked up. ‘We got any trouble-makers?'

Sergeant Mortimer leaned across the desk and tapped one name with his pencil.