At that moment they were all startled by the unexpected sound of someone clearing his throat behind them.
A youngish man in a sports jacket was standing in the doorway. He was carrying a medical bag.
‘Dr Stewart,’ he introduced himself. ‘Come to see Mr Twelvetrees.’
‘Your patient is in here,’ Markby told him. ‘But I’m afraid you’re a little too late.’
As they all were.
Stewart uttered an exclamation and hurried past him into the parlour.
As he passed Dilys, she spoke for the first time. ‘No use hurrying yourself, doctor. He’ll wait for you.’
Her voice was swallowed up in the noise of a car drawing up. Pearce’s voice could be heard calling, ‘Superintendent? Are you in there?’
Markby went into the hall and found Pearce just ducking his head beneath the low lintel to enter. Behind him stood Ginny Holding and, in the background, a uniformed man.
‘Where’s the woman?’ Pearce asked bluntly.
Markby jerked his head towards the parlour. ‘In there with her father who’s just died. You’ll have to tread carefully, but I think we can be sure we’ve got the murderer of Hester Millar. As to why, I’m sure we can work that one out now.’
Meredith came out of the parlour, pale-faced. ‘I feel dreadful. I should never have left the poor old chap alone. He insisted. He said his daughter would be coming in soon. I’d told the woman at the pub to call Dr Stewart and I – well, I was desperate to find you and tell you about the things in the kitchen. Are they still there?’
‘Damn!’ Markby muttered. He ran down the hall and into the kitchen. The table was bare. He swore loudly and forcefully.
Meredith appeared at his elbow. She glanced at the bare table-top and observed, ‘I really screwed this up, didn’t I? I should have stayed here until I could get you on my mobile, kept an eye on Billy and made sure the box of oddments wasn’t moved. Sorry.’
He hunched his shoulders. ‘Don’t apologize. You reacted naturally given the shock you’d had. Either Dilys before she set off after you or the old man himself before he collapsed hid the evidence. Let’s hope it was the old man. He couldn’t have moved far and it’s probably still on the premises. Dilys, on the other hand, might have got rid of it anywhere between here and Stovey Woods. It’s easy to guess what happened. She came home moments after you left her father, heard from him that you’d brought him home and you’d gained entry to the cottage via the back door and the kitchen. She knew you couldn’t have missed his box of trophies and you were bound to tell me about them. She set out after you,
determined to reach you before you reached me.’
‘She nearly did,’ Meredith said with a shudder.
‘Yes.’ Soberly he added, ‘I should have thought of that. I’d been putting it together in my head slowly for the past week, but after I’d spoken to Linda Jones I was sure. Old Billy Twelvetrees was the Potato Man of twenty-two years ago. I should also have realised that Dilys must know and have known for years.’
‘And have kept silent?’ she stared at him incredulously.
‘Would you have spoken up in her situation? She lives in this village. She has nowhere else to go. Besides, twenty-two years is a long time ago. She’d believed it buried and forgotten.’
He shook his head and added, ‘You know, the problem with meeting for the first time people who are already very old, is that it’s hard to imagine them younger and even more difficult to imagine them involved in violence. You knew Twelvetrees only as an old fellow, lame and using a walking stick, wheezing with breathing problems. How could he ever have been a threat? Even to suspect him of anything must seem uncharitable. I or someone else must have interviewed him years ago when we talked to all the village men, but he was so changed that even I saw him as a totally different person, a new acquaintance. I only recognised Martin Jones because I saw him in his own stables. Out of his familiar environment, who knows, I probably shouldn’t have recognised him, either!
‘I see now I made a mistake too, back then and again now. I was assuming that rape would be the crime of a much younger man, someone in his twenties. Yet Ruth had tipped us off, had we had ears to hear. She told us, if you recall, that running from Stovey Woods where she’d encountered Simon Hastings,
she almost ran into Twelvetrees. But, as she pointed out to us, he was a lot younger then, not “old” at all, only in his late fifties, hale and hearty. He worked for Martin Jones right by Stovey Woods. No one would ever give a second thought to seeing him around there. Ruth didn’t. It was where he was supposed to be.’
‘Ruth!’ exclaimed Meredith. ‘She must be wondering where on earth we are!’
As they hurried out of the house they passed Dilys being ushered into a police car by Sergeant Holding.
‘Tell the inspector we’ve gone to see Mrs Aston,’ Markby ordered her.
Dilys looked up and for the first time some emotion other than the maniacal triumph entered her flat features. Genuine regret touched them before she shook her head and resignation replaced it.
‘You tell Mrs Aston,’ she said to Meredith. ‘That I’m sorry. But it couldn’t be helped. She’d seen what you saw.’
‘You mean, Hester Millar saw your father’s box of trophies,’ Markby said. ‘Where is it now, Dilys?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ her glance at Markby was both mocking and vindictive, ‘maybe you should ask Dad?’
Meredith saw a nerve jump in his jaw but he returned calmly, ‘Why did Miss Millar come to the cottage that morning?’
‘Brought us some jam,’ said Dilys with a sniff. ‘She was always making the stuff.’
‘Jam!’ exclaimed Ruth. ‘That was it. That was what Hester was holding in her hand when she came to tell me she was leaving. A pot of jam. It was such an ordinary thing I didn’t pay any
attention. I clean forgot about it but now you tell me, I can see her standing there, holding it. She didn’t say she was going to Old Billy’s cottage but she must have been. It was my idea—’
Ruth broke off and after a moment added quietly, ‘So I did kill her, didn’t I? Morally, anyway. It was my idea she take the jam to the old man in person. Because she did that, she walked in on the old wretch gloating over his box of trophies.’
‘She wouldn’t necessarily have known what they were,’ Meredith objected. ‘They were just a jumble, a string of beads, a man’s signet ring and so on.’
‘A man’s?’ Markby asked her with a frown.
‘Yes, I realised straight away it was the odd item in the group. All the other things he’d taken from women, beads, earring, hairslide. But this ring was a big heavy thing, definitely a man’s—’ Meredith looked nervously at Ruth. ‘It had the initials SH on it.’ To Markby she added, ‘I was going to tell you about that. I hadn’t got round to it.’
‘I gave that ring to Simon,’ Ruth said quietly. ‘I showed it to Hester before I gave it to him. She would have recognised it. She knew bones had been found in the woods. I’d told her about meeting Simon there that day. She knew the ring must have come from him and she must have let it be seen that she knew.’
‘But she didn’t know how it got to be in that box,’ Markby took up the story as Ruth fell silent. ‘Old Billy had got the ring in the woods, for sure. But had he taken it from a man he’d found dead? Or a man he’d killed? She went to the church and knelt in the pew, seeking guidance. She knew she’d have to tell you, Ruth. And she knew that you and she should tell the
police. It was going to take a lot of courage on your part. The story of your child would become known. She’d protected you before, all those years ago when you were pregnant. But she couldn’t see a way of protecting you now.
‘Dilys had followed her to the church. Hester might have glanced up as Dilys came in, we don’t know, but she wouldn’t have feared Dilys, even in the circumstances. She knew her too well. She might even have thought that Dilys didn’t know where her father had got the ring.’
Ruth stirred on the sofa where she’d been sunk in thought as Markby was speaking. ‘I still find it hard to believe,’ she said now. ‘But perhaps I shouldn’t. The Twelvetrees family was always beyond the pale in Lower Stovey. It’s funny, isn’t it? Every village has one family which is tolerated but disapproved of.’
‘Probably for good reason, even if it was the sort of reason no one spoke of. Perhaps Old Billy was the local drunk?’
‘He certainly drank but whether more than the other men, I don’t know.’ Ruth bit her lip. ‘But looking back, I can see he was violent, even then. Domestic violence they’d call it now. Back then they probably just said he knocked his wife and kids about. Mrs Twelvetrees cleaned for my mother. She often had bruises. The girls had them, too, when they came to school. But they weren’t badly marked enough for a teacher to start making enquiries. I suppose that if they ever were, they were kept home until the bruises had faded. There were days when Dilys didn’t turn up. When she came back she always said she’d had a cold, but I never saw her sniffing.’
‘At school,’ Markby mused. ‘Dilys and Sandra Twelvetrees, two little red-haired girls.’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said in surprise. ‘They did have red hair. Dilys still touches hers up with hair-colourant because she started to go white quite early.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘How did you know?’ she asked.
‘Guessed,’ he said enigmatically, thinking of family photographs on the Twelvetrees mantelshelf. Three small children, all red-haired, and the later picture of Sandra née Twelvetrees posing for the camera in Disneyland, the sun setting fire to her auburn curls.
The duty solicitor, a pale-faced and earnest young man, looked unhappy. ‘My client wishes to answer your questions frankly and freely. Nevertheless, I shall point out to her when she is not obliged to do so.’
‘Fair enough,’ Pearce told him shortly. The tooth was beginning to nag again. He explored it with the tip of his tongue and winced. Beside him, Ginny Holding gave him a knowing look.
Pearce forced his mind from the tooth and concentrated on matters in hand. ‘Right, Dilys. Let’s start at the beginning. When did you realise your father was the rapist of twenty-two years ago?’
‘You don’t need to answer that!’ said the solicitor immediately to Dilys. To Pearce he said, ‘You have no evidence the late Mr Twelvetrees was responsible for the attacks. Why should my client think that he was?’
‘The box,’ growled Pearce.
‘What box might this be? It seems to have disappeared. It was, by the description, if it ever existed—’ The duty solicitor allowed himself a smirk. ‘Merely a collection of objets trouvés.
The old gentleman might have picked the things up anywhere, lying on the ground, things lost in the woods.’
Pearce gave a faint groan. It was going to be one of those days. Again.
But Dilys chose to ignore her legal adviser. ‘I didn’t realise nothing. I always knew it. It was when my mother was bedridden it began. She couldn’t do a thing, not wash herself, hardly feed herself. She got enormous and Dad, he hated her for it. He’s stand in the bedroom doorway and call her filthy names. But he never got any further than the doorway, I saw to that. I’d come back home to live because my husband had left me. He went away with a barmaid, brassy floozy who worked at the pub in the village. Good luck to her, I say, and good riddance to him. I had nowhere to go so I had to go home. Ma had taken to her bed, anyway. Someone had to look after her and him, the old blighter. In that way, it sort of worked out. But that’s when he started that caper in the woods.’
‘Mrs Pullen …’ pleaded the solicitor. ‘This is very unwise and unnecessary.’
‘How did you feel about your father, Dilys?’ Ginny Holding asked in her soft voice.
‘He was an old devil. And when he was young he was a young devil. We were all terrified of him, all us kids. You only had to catch his eye and it got you a clip round the ear. When he came home from the pub in drink, he’d come upstairs and pull us out of bed to thrash us.’
‘Is that all he did, Dilys? When he came up to your bedroom?’ Ginny asked softly.
Dilys glared. ‘Wasn’t it enough? Ma would be hanging on his arm, begging him to leave us be, and he’d turn and smash
his fist into her face. My brother William, the one they call Young Billy, he cleared off at seventeen and went to sea, got out of it. My sister, she married a soldier and went off to live in Germany. But me, I drew the short straw, it seems.’ Dilys’s gaze, as hard as marbles, met Pearce’s. ‘That kind of fear doesn’t wear off when you get older. I might have been too big for him to wallop me but I was still scared of him. See, he had another weapon. I needed to live there. I had no place to go. I had to put up with all his nonsense.’
Dilys’s voice sank and her gaze moved to her hands, resting on the table-top. ‘I knew when he’d been out fooling with those girls. I could smell it on him when he come home. I smelled it on his clothes when I did the laundry, I saw the stains. He showed me those things he took from them. He liked to see the look on my face. He liked knowing that he could tell me and I couldn’t do a thing about it. He was a nasty old bugger and that’s a fact. But my concern was for Ma, that she shouldn’t learn about it. He’d led her a dog’s life. She was just worn right out and she couldn’t do with any more trouble. I didn’t have time to worry about those girls.’
Holding asked, ‘And did he also bother you in that way, Dilys?’
Dilys’s small eyes moved their stony gaze to her. ‘He didn’t fancy me, most like. I was never anything but a big lump who could cook and clean.’
‘Nevertheless, you were there, under the same roof. You were in no position to protest, as you’ve said. It wouldn’t be surprising if he’d taken advantage of that, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean!’ Dilys’s mouth snapped shut like a trap.
There was a silence. Dilys gave no sign of saying any more. Her eyes were blank. Pearce nudged Ginny. It wouldn’t do for Dilys to clam up now.
‘What happened after your mother died?’ Ginny prompted.
Dilys blinked and shrewd suspicion returned to her expression. ‘After Ma died? What should I do? I stayed there, cooking and cleaning for him. Not that I ever got a word of thanks. I still needed a place to live and as long as Dad was alive and living in the cottage I had a roof over my head. I knew old Mr Jones wouldn’t throw Dad out and I knew young Kevin wouldn’t, not while his father was alive. But old Martin Jones was getting older and so was Dad. If old Jones died, young Kevin might decide to get us out. Or if Dad died, it’d be easy. I wasn’t the tenant. Dad was. I knew Dad wouldn’t ever agree to go to a retirement home. He wouldn’t even go to hospital. So it was in my interest to look after the old blighter and keep him alive, wasn’t it?’ Her flat gaze returned to Pearce’s face.
Pearce felt a deep depression settle over him. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘Tell me about Simon Hastings.’
‘Dad never killed that chap!’ Her voice was vehement. ‘Not intentional, not like you mean. It was an accident. Could’ve happened to anyone.’
‘Go on.’ Dilys had stopped as if she’d expected Pearce to agree with her. ‘Why was it an accident?’ Pearce asked.
The solicitor interrupted again. ‘My client can’t tell you that because she doesn’t know. She wasn’t there when Simon Hastings died.’
‘I know what Dad told me!’ said Dilys truculently to him.
‘Yes, Mrs Pullen, but you don’t know it happened that way.
You weren’t a witness. Your father’s account may have been flawed.’
‘He was telling me lies, you mean?’ Dilys glared at him. ‘So what am I supposed to do? Sit here with my mouth shut and let these coppers think Dad killed that hiker? Well, he didn’t. He told me so and I reckon he told me right. How do I know? Because he was that scared, that’s why. Something had happened he hadn’t counted on, see? You didn’t know my father and I did. You didn’t see him that evening when he come home and told me about the hiker and I did. Fair shaking in his boots, he was, and as white a sheet.’
She turned her attention back to Pearce and Holding. ‘Dad had met Miss Pattinson, as she was then, hadn’t he? Coming from the woods and crying. Dad knew she hadn’t met the Potato Man because he was the Potato Man. She said, she was crying for her mother who’d just died. But Dad thought different. He was curious. He went up to the woods and he came across this chap, a hiker. The feller looked odd, Dad reckoned, as if upset about something and angry. Dad asked him if he was the reason Miss Pattinson had run out of the woods in a fair old state. And the feller just went for him, went for Dad. Swung a haymaker of a punch at him and Dad, he ducked it and fetched him a cracker in return. The hiker went down and hit his head on a fallen tree. That was it. Dead as a doornail. Dad took fright when he saw he was stuck there with a corpse on his hands. He pulled a lot of branches and stuff over him and came home. That night he went back with a spade and buried him. And I know that’s right,’ Dilys added with a glower at her legal representative, ‘because I was there that time! He took me with him.’
The solictor broke in with desperation in his voice. ‘Mrs Pullen, do you realise—’
Dilys turned on him. ‘You don’t need to keep on calling me Mrs Pullen. I’m Dilys Twelvetrees. That’s what I was born and that’s what I’m still.’
‘Did you divorce Mr Pullen?’ Holding asked her.
Dilys stared at her scornfully. ‘What for? He was gone. What’s the point in divorce?’
‘Then technically you are still Mrs Pullen,’ Holding said.
‘I’m Dilys Twelvetrees,’ she repeated obstinately. ‘It was never a name to be proud of but I’d rather have it than Pullen, any day.’
‘I don’t think it matters if Dilys chose to resume her maiden name,’ Pearce said firmly, with an irritated look at Holding. ‘So, you went back to Stovey Woods that night with your father and helped him bury Simon Hastings?’
‘Mrs – Twelvetrees!’ said the solicitor loudly. ‘You don’t have to answer that. You’ve said quite enough already.’
‘You keep quiet,’ Dilys said to him. ‘I know what I’m minded to answer and what I’m not.’
‘We discussed this, Mrs Pu – Twelvetrees! I explained—’
‘I know what you explained.’ Dilys returned her attention to Markby. ‘Dad needed me to hold the lantern. Anyway, he knew that if I helped him, it’d be difficult for me to go telling anyone about it. I was in it, too, wasn’t I?’
Her expression grew reminiscent and when she began to speak again there was a change in her voice. It had gained the mesmerising quality of a traditional story-teller, softer, inviting the audience in to listen. Pearce realised they were all leaning forward, even the solicitor, hanging on her every word, knowing
they were to be told something that would lodge in their own minds for ever.
‘Dad was pretty sure he could find where he’d left the hiker. But it was pitch black in those woods. You couldn’t see a hand in front of your face and not one thing looked like it did in daytime. We only had the lantern, an oil-lamp, it was. It made the shadows jump around in the trees like a lot of mad creatures dancing around us in the dark. We made a couple of false stops before we reached where Dad thought it should be. He said, “’Tis around here someplace, Dilys. Do you go and take a proper look round.” Well, I wasn’t going poking about in those trees, not knowing what was there, and very likely falling over a dead man. So I held up the lantern high and swung it round. And bless me, there it was.’
The solicitor drew in his breath slightly. Holding was frozen in an attitude of rapt attention. Pearce felt a frisson of anticipation.
‘You saw the body …’ he whispered.
Dilys gave him a curious, mocking look. ‘I saw the hand.’
‘Hand?’ gasped the solicitor.
‘Yes, hand. You deaf? I saw an arm, and the hand on the end of it, pointing up into the trees. It was poking out of the leaves and branches Dad had dragged over him, pointing up like a signpost to tell us where he lay. I said to Dad, “You buried the chap alive! He’s moved. He’s been trying to dig himself out!” But Dad said, “No, he ain’t.” Leastwise not that he knew of it. “It’s the rigor.”’
The solicitor muttered, ‘Good grief!’
Dilys, perhaps interpreting his comment as lack of understanding, went on to to explain it to him. ‘Rigor, that’s what
sets in when something dies. Dad had seen in it cattle and sheep. The limbs go stiff and stick up all awkward. This hiker’s arm had just risen up in the air like of its own accord. The leaves Dad threw over him weren’t heavy enough to keep it down.
‘But Dad was put out because he couldn’t bury him easy with the arm sticking up like that. So he took a great swing at it with his spade. I heard the bones all crack but it didn’t fall because the muscles kept it upright. So Dad went at it like a madman, bashing it until it lay flat. Then he bent down and pulled off the signet ring that was on one of the fingers. He said it would do to go with the other things. I told him he was a fool. It was evidence. He just told me to shut up. But I was right, wasn’t I?’ Dilys put the question suddenly to the solicitor. ‘It was evidence?’
‘You were right,’ he told her faintly.
She seemed pleased, nodding her head. ‘So, Dad dug a grave in another place and we rolled him in there and covered him over. Dad and I pushed the fallen treetrunk on top to stop anything digging him up. We were careful to move dry leaves and such over the place where the tree had lain before, so that no one should see it had been shifted. But in time, something must have dug up bits of him because that doctor fellow found the bones in a fox-hole, so I heard him tell the coroner. And the coroner agreed it’d been an accident, didn’t he? He said there was no evidence of foul play. Now you’re trying to make out different, but coroner’s already said there wasn’t. We went home, Dad and I, and for the first time, I stood up to him. In fact, I fair laid into him. I told him there was to be no more nonsense with the women up there in the woods or on the old
drovers’ way. If it ever all came out, I told him, no way would the police believe the hiker had died by accident They’d believe Dad killed him because he’d seen Dad up to something with one of the girls. And Dad, for all he put a bold face on it, had had such a fright he gave in without a squeak. So that was the end of the Potato Man.’
Pearce found he’d been holding his breath. He expelled it in a long sigh. ‘Tell me about Hester Millar.’
Dilys gave an echoing sigh and her shoulders slumped. ‘Oh, that. That was a bit of bad luck, that was. She was a nice lady. I had nothing against her. But she walked in that morning and found Dad messing with the things in that old box. He would never throw it away. He liked to take them all out and put them on a table. He’d pick them up, one by one, turning them over in his fingers and remembering the girl he’d taken it from, chuckling to himself all the while. I hated him doing it. I was always afraid one day someone would walk in on us and I was right about that, too! Because Miss Millar did just that.
‘She just appeared out of the blue that morning early. She came the back way, straight into the kitchen without so much as a by-your-leave, calling out, “It’s only me!” She’d brought a pot of jam for us, dropped in on her way to open up the church. She was a dab hand at the jam-making. She put it on the table where Dad was sitting with the box, looking all pleased with herself. Then she saw what he was at, messing with those bits of jewellery and such. She asked Dad, what all those things were. Dad said, just things he’d found in the woods. But then she picked up the ring and she asked, in a funny sort of voice, “Where did you get this, Mr Twelvetrees? Did you find this in the woods, too?” And I knew, just knew, from her way and
her voice that the ring meant something to her. She’d recognised it.
‘My heart was in my boots. I thought that if I didn’t silence her, she’d go blabbing. It would all come out, after all those years, Dad would be taken away. Everyone in the village would know the truth. Kevin Jones would move me out of the cottage. So I had to follow her over to the church and keep her quiet. She was kneeling saying her prayers when I went in. I called out that it was only me, Dilys, and she didn’t turn round. It was easy. I’ve had more trouble killing a chicken. I didn’t like doing it, mind! But the way I saw it, it had to be done. Then I went home and told Dad I’d done it, that he hadn’t to worry she’d tell about the ring.
‘Dad, he called me a stupid great turnip and asked me what I’d wanted to go killing her for. I told him, because of him, that’s why. It was his fault. He said, I never did do anything right and what if she was only wounded and someone took her to the hospital? She’d know it was me done it. We waited for a while, to see if anything would happen over at the church like someone find her. But nothing happened and Dad got restless. He went over to the church to look, but she was dead all right, so he got out of there. See, Dad didn’t want to be the one to find her and have to answer questions. He got away only in the nick of time because that friend of the superintendent’s turned up and she found Miss Millar. So I had managed it all right, hadn’t I? You’d have thought the old devil would’ve been grateful. I reckoned I’d handled it pretty well. If Dad had had more faith in me and not gone over there prying, that Miss Mitchell wouldn’t have spotted him in the churchyard and Mr Markby wouldn’t have come to the cottage asking questions. I
told Dad, after he’d gone, that from then on he was to leave it all to me. I reckoned I sorted things out pretty well.’
‘Surely you’re not claiming that murder is justifiable?’ Ginny Holding asked incredulously.
Dilys sniffed. ‘Well, it would’ve been, wouldn’t it? If that had been the end of it. But I had bad luck as usual and that wasn’t the end of it. People prying, that’s what causes trouble. That friend of Mr Markby’s, she did the very same thing as Miss Millar did. It’s like you’ve got no privacy in your own home. Dad was took queer in the churchyard and she helped him back to the cottage. She went through the kitchen to open up the front door. Dad, silly old fool, had left the back door unlocked and left all the things on the table. I came in not three or four minutes after she’d gone. Dad was sitting in his chair. He told me he’d had a bad turn but the lady had brought him indoors. I knew she’d got in through the back door and she must have seen everything. I ran outside and I saw her in the distance walking towards the woods. I followed her, kept down on the other side of the stone walls and went along the fields. A couple of times the sheep nearly gave me away, running off spooked. But it was raining that hard I reckon the superintendent’s friend was more worried about that than the antics of a few sheep.’
Holding asked in a despairing voice, ‘And it was worth killing one woman and trying to kill another to protect someone like your father?’
Dilys looked affronted. ‘You haven’t been listening! I told you about losing the cottage. How’d you like to lose your home? Besides, I thought perhaps I’d be in trouble because I knew about the women all those years ago, and didn’t tell. I helped
bury the hiker, too. But that wasn’t my choosing. It was Dad’s idea.’ Her gaze met Pearce’s, level and almost serene. ‘None of it was my choosing,’ she said. ‘It was all Dad.’
After a moment’s silence, Pearce said hoarsely, ‘Thank you for telling us about it, Dilys. You did the right thing.’
But Dilys had something to ask. ‘Shall I go to prison?’ She didn’t sound worried, rather curious.
‘If you are convicted.’
‘Because I’ve been thinking,’ Dilys said placidly. ‘Now Dad’s dead, Kevin will have me out of that cottage for sure. But if I’m in prison for a nice long time, it’ll be a roof over my head, won’t it?’
‘I’d like a word in private, Inspector!’ snapped the solicitor.
In the corridor outside the interview room, the solicitor buttonholed Pearce with a fierce gleam in his eye. ‘I wish it to be made quite plain that my client spoke to you so freely against my advice. I warned her against making a confession and I shall be advising her to withdraw it.’
‘Why?’ Pearce asked bluntly.
‘Good heavens, man! Need you ask? Her reasons for making it are extremely suspect. She wants to go to prison because, as she put it, it will give her a roof over her head! If you expect to go to court on the basis of that confession, I should tell you I shall make sure that a jury knows that is her reason. If a judge hears her talking like that, he’ll probably tell the jury to disregard it!’
Pearce was inclined to agree but didn’t say so. Instead he said, ‘You can’t deny she attacked Miss Mitchell.’
‘She may have attacked her. She didn’t kill her. That she
killed the other woman, Hester Millar, is something we only have her word for. The old father probably did it. He was always going in that church, she told me so. He liked to chat to the churchwardens of which Miss Millar was one. You can’t rely on anything she’s told you, and that’s the top and bottom of it. As for that business of burying the hiker in the woods—’
‘Don’t tell me all that grisly detail came out of her imagination,’ Pearce interrupted.
The solicitor looked momentarily disconcerted. ‘Yes, well, we still can’t believe that she witnessed it, just because she said so. The old man could equally have come back and told her about it. Just as he could have come home and told her he killed Hester Millar. Or possibly neither of them killed her. Can’t you see, Mrs Pullen is desperate not to find herself homeless? Now her father’s dead, she sees prison as a safe refuge. The woman’s mind is scrambled.’
‘We’ll leave it to a jury, shall we?’ Pearce suggested.
The solicitor snorted. ‘The whole taradiddle rests on the existence of that box of trophies.’
‘Which Miss Mitchell saw and can describe.’
‘But,’ said the solicitor nastily, ‘can’t produce.’
Pearce eyed the solicitor suspiciously. ‘Tell me, why are you so keen to get her off?’
‘It’s my job,’ retorted the solicitor silkily.
‘There’s more to it than that.’
The young man gave him a dirty look. ‘All right. She’s poor and uneducated. She’s middle-aged, unattractive and totally unaware of the impact of what she says. She was a battered child who grew up in fear under the thumb of that wicked old man. Despite her evasions, I believe he abused her and her
sister sexually when they were children and probably abused her after her mother’s death. You’ll have noticed she avoided straight answers to any question about that kind of abuse being inflicted on her either as a child or later. He beat the kids up, that’s all she’d admit.’
Pearce said thoughtfully, ‘If she doesn’t want to tell, she won’t. Don’t plan on making that part of your defence.’
The solicitor fixed him with a glittering eye. ‘When people like her fall foul of the law and get into the system, they can’t defend themselves. Everything they say or do makes it worse. They make a poor impression on a jury. Yes, I’m going to do my damnedest to get her off that murder charge! And you know perfectly well you have to do more than rely on a confession. You’ve got to have proof.’
He stalked off.
Pearce trudged upstairs to Markby’s office. The superintendent looked up as he appeared and asked, ‘Things not going well, Dave?’
‘Look at it this way,’ returned Pearce gloomily, rubbing his jaw. ‘She’s confessed but it’s just our luck that her solicitor is a crusader.’
He explained, summarising what had happened in the interview room.
‘Doing his job, Dave,’ said Markby. ‘Like he said. And we’re going to do ours.’
‘Patronising, public-school ponce!’ growled Pearce. ‘Sorry, sir, I meant the solicitor. I didn’t mean you.’
‘Thank you, Dave. I appreciate you making that clear.’
‘I mean,’ Pearce pursued the point. ‘I don’t suppose Dilys would have liked to hear herself described the way he described
her. Anyway, he’s wrong. He’s talking as if she’s simple. She’s not. She’s a cold-blooded killer and she’s what my grandma used to call as artful as a cartload of monkeys. She’d run rings round that solicitor any day if she put her mind to it. And now she’s running rings round us.’
‘You mean the remark about wanting to go to prison,’ Markby said.
‘That’s it. Confession? It’s worthless. She made it worthless the moment she said that about going to gaol to have a roof over her head. What’s more, she knew it and didn’t need the solicitor to tell her so!’ Pearce snorted.
Markby nodded his agreement. ‘A confession without evidence to back it is, in any case, worthless. We must find that box with the old man’s collection in it.’
‘We’re turning that cottage inside-out,’ Pearce protested.
Markby sat silent. The Potato Man had escaped justice. Left to the eager-beaver solicitor, the Potato Man’s daughter might yet beat a murder charge, unless they could come up with some tangible evidence.
‘And we had it,’ he said softly. ‘We had it and I didn’t realise it. Jam! I had jam on my shirt cuff when I left that cottage. She was bending over the pedal-bin throwing something away. She was throwing away that pot of jam! If Ruth had just remembered, while I was talking to her at the vicarage, that Hester had been holding a pot of jam, I might have got on to Dilys straight away!’
It hadn’t been the only indication. Hindsight was a wonderful thing and Markby reflected ruefully on what it was telling him now. Another image had filled his head, that of Dilys opening the cottage door to him when he came to seek her father and
her immediate declaration on seeing him that, ‘We’ve got nothing to do with it!’ He might well have asked her, there and then, with what? For Dilys hadn’t been among the spectators at the church so how had she known what to deny? Of course, she might have popped her head out of her front door and a neighbour given her the news. But her denial, when she’d been asked no question, told its own tale. It was the reaction of her type to any suggestion she might be responsible for anything meaning trouble. He should have twigged that her defensive reaction to the mere sight of him meant she had something to hide, that the use of ‘we’ meant they both did, she and the old man.
There was a rap on the door. ‘Sir?’ It was Ginny Holding’s voice, and seconds later her excited face peered round it. ‘Sorry to interrupt but thought you’d like to know.’
Ginny wasn’t without enjoying a moment of triumph. She paused then threw open the door wide so that she was revealed clasping a soot-streaked shoebox. ‘They just brought it in, sir! They found it stuffed up the chimney. All the things are in there, the ring, everything.’
A smile broke on Markby’s face. ‘Well done, Ginny.’
‘Great!’ said Pearce in a muffled voice.
Markby looked at him. Pearce was holding his hand to his jaw again.
‘For crying out loud, Dave,’ Markby said wearily. ‘See a dentist about that tooth first thing tomorrow morning. And when you have, come in and see me. We’ve got another line of enquiry to open up.’
‘What?’ Pearce gazed at him baffled.
‘Come on, Dave. You said yourself the woman is a cold-blooded
killer. Mr Pullen and his girlfriend, the barmaid, both disappeared overnight and were never seen again. Dilys never bothered to file for divorce. She wouldn’t need to, would she, if she knew he was dead? Look, the same scenario has been replaying itself at that pub for weeks now. Norman Stubbings, tired of his wife Evie, has been fooling around with Cheryl Spencer. The difference is, Evie hasn’t taken a kitchen knife to Norman – yet. Well, go on, then, get to it.’
Outside his office, a dismayed Dave Pearce turned to Sergeant Holding. ‘He’s not serious, is he, Ginny? I haven’t got to dig up those bloody woods again?’