By the time he reached the junction with the main road, it had begun to snow in earnest. It was the end of a working day, and a steady stream of traffic flowed toward him, headlights flared against the falling snow. His eyes were fixed intently on the road, but he was seeing images from the past.
Gillanne Carr was a child in transition. Thirteen years old, a beautiful child on the verge of becoming a beautiful young woman. She was very tense, but slowly, carefully, Paget had coaxed information from the girl while her brother slept. When Paget asked why he was sleeping, Gillanne said he’d taken an antihistamine tablet earlier in the evening, and it always made him sleepy. “Allergies,” she explained. “They’re always bad for Michael in the spring and summer.”
She went on to tell him that she and her brother had been upstairs all evening, building a model destroyer. She said Michael loved to build models, but sometimes he had trouble with the
instructions, so she would help him. There was something about the way she glanced at her mother when she told him this that made Paget curious, but Mary Carr anticipated the question, and spoke first.
“It takes Michael a bit longer than others to learn things,” she said in a tone of voice that closed the subject.
But Gillanne wasn’t content to leave it there. “He is all right,” she assured Paget earnestly. “I mean he’s not retarded or anything like that. It does take him a bit longer to pick things up, but once he’s got them, he does as well as anyone else, doesn’t he, Mum?”
Her mother had given her a brief hug. “The inspector’s waiting,” she said. “Just tell him what you told me.”
There had been little enough to tell. Working in Michael’s room, Gillanne said, she’d heard the doorbell ring, then heard her stepfather talking to someone as he let them in. No, she hadn’t seen who it was—she hadn’t left Michael’s room all evening—but she was quite sure it was a man’s voice she’d heard. No, she hadn’t heard him leave.
When asked if she could tell him what time it was when the visitor arrived, Gillanne said she thought it would be about nine o’clock. She hadn’t looked at the time, but thought it would be about an hour before her mother had come home.
Asked about possible enemies or if Carr had been threatened, Mary brushed such thoughts aside completely. “He was a very kind and gentle man,” she said. “Everybody liked him. He was my first husband’s partner in the firm for twelve years, so I think I’d have known if he had any enemies.”
“Which firm is that?”
“Lawrence and Carr, Printers and Stationers, in the High Street, not far from where you work, Inspector. Not the sort of business where you make enemies, is it?” A fleeting smile. “That is unless you’re late with someone’s wedding invitations.”
He had let Michael sleep, then spoken to him the following morning, but the boy proved to be even less helpful than his sister.
He said he didn’t remember hearing anyone downstairs. Too busy working on his model.
The post-mortem established that Donald Carr had died of a single stab wound penetrating the heart. The other two wounds had done a fair amount of damage, but would not have been fatal by themselves. The weapon was a thin, broad-bladed knife, such as an ordinary kitchen or carving knife, and several bruises on Carr’s neck, arms, and shoulders suggested that there could have been a struggle. But most disappointing, as far as Paget was concerned, was the lack of certainty about the time of death.
It had been a hot and humid night, and Carr’s body had been found in the sun room. By no means an insurmountable problem as far as establishing the approximate time of death, but the police surgeon, who had first examined the body, made an error in recording the body temperature. To compound the problem, Carr was a vegetarian, and he tended to eat sparingly, paying little attention to what others considered normal mealtimes. While Mary and the children all agreed that Carr had not eaten dinner with them, they had no idea what or when he had eaten. The pathologist, therefore, allowed for a wide margin of error and placed time of death between eight-thirty and eleven.
The police canvassed the neighbours, but no one had noticed anyone entering or leaving the Carrs’ house after Mary left. Her next-door neighbour said she had spoken to Mary when she left the house around seven o’clock, and she had seen Mary’s car in the driveway later on. “But I’ve no idea what time it was,” she confessed. “Mary comes and goes at all hours.”
On the assumption that the killer had taken the knife with him, and would want to dispose of it as quickly as possible, Paget had had the gardens searched on both sides of the street, and when that proved fruitless, he had turned his attention to the victim. Mary described Donald Carr in glowing terms. Not only had he been her first husband’s partner, she told him, but he’d been a friend of the family for years, and when Trevor Lawrence suffered a stroke and
died at the age of thirty-nine, Carr had helped her through a difficult time. They had become close friends, and were married a year later.
“I shall always miss Trevor,” she’d said somewhat defensively, “but it wasn’t as if I hadn’t known Donald for a long time.”
Tracy Morgenson—the friend with whom Mary Carr said she’d spent the evening—was a woman of about thirty-five, small, brisk and forthright, yet she had seemed strangely uneasy when answering Paget’s questions; so uneasy, in fact, that he’d had her come to the station for further questioning. Once there, and realizing that everything she said was being recorded, she’d changed her story.
She told Paget she had worked as a secretary for the two partners for several years before leaving to get married. But prior to working as a secretary for Lawrence and Carr, she had been trained as a hairdresser, and later, when she was looking for a part-time job, Mary had asked her to work for her. Three years later, when Mary opened another salon, she had asked Tracy to run it.
“Mary was devastated when Trevor died,” she told him, “and Don did a lot to help her through it, but I was really surprised when she told me she and Don were to be married.”
“Why was that?”
Tracy looked uncomfortable. “Look, Mary is my friend, and I don’t want to talk behind her back, but …” She’d looked at the tape, then back again at Paget. “You see, Mary looks strong and self-sufficient, but she’s the sort who needs a man; she needs to be told that someone loves her, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure that Don was the right man for her. But what could I say? I mean, they got on well together, and the marriage seemed to be working out all right at first.”
“But something changed?”
Tracy nodded. “I didn’t know anything was wrong until a couple of weeks ago, when Mary came round to see me. She was upset. Said she didn’t think Don loved her anymore, and wanted to know if I thought there was something wrong with her. See, Mary … well,
she enjoys the sex, and from what I gathered Don was keeping her very happy, both before and after they were married. But she said he’d gone off her these last few months. Kept making excuses not to have sex, and she was worried.
“I knew then that Don hadn’t changed since I worked there. He always had some woman on a string; sometimes more than one at the same time, and believe me, I know, because I used to take some of their phone calls. It might have been all right while he was single, but not once he’d married Mary, and I told her so. Big mistake. Mary certainly didn’t thank me for it, I can tell you. Went off in a high old dudgeon, but I think deep down she knew I was right.”
“This was a couple of weeks ago, you said?”
“That’s right.”
“So what about the night Donald Carr was killed?”
“Mary rang me about one o’clock in the morning to tell me what had happened. It was after the police had gone. She was in a blind panic, and wanted me to swear that she had been with me all evening until ten. She swore to me that she’d had nothing to do with Don’s death, but said she couldn’t tell the police where she’d been; said she would explain everything later, and she did when I spoke to her the next day.
“She told me I’d been wrong about Don. She said she’d spent the last few nights sitting in her car in the car park of the supermarket at the end of their road, watching the house, but Don had never left it. She said if I considered myself her friend, the least I could do now was back her story up and say she was with me that night.”
“And you agreed.”
Tracy shrugged. “I didn’t see any harm in it at the time. I mean, I’ve known Mary a long time, and I like her, but … Well, now I don’t know what to think.”
There were five people on staff at Lawrence and Carr, Printers and Stationers. Four of them had expressed shock and sorrow and shaken their heads when asked if Carr had any enemies, but the fifth
one, a short, stout, grey-haired man by the name of Lou Hines, painted a very different picture.
“Not enemies as such,” he said thoughtfully, “but if you’d told me it was Mary who killed him, I wouldn’t have been surprised, ’specially if she’d found out about his bit on the side. Mary’s not the sort to put up with that.”
“Are you saying that Donald Carr was having an affair?” Paget asked him. “Do you have any proof?”
Lou took out a battered tin of tobacco and papers, and began to roll a cigarette. “If it’s proof you want, you won’t have to look very far. It’s young Robyn. Used to work here in the office until Mary persuaded Don to get rid of her. Liked to think she was posh because she spelt Robyn with a y. Proper little cock teaser, she was. Just a bit of a thing, but really built, if you know what I mean. Skirts up to her bum, blouse open down to her belly button, or close to it. Talk about fallout when she bent over; I mean, she was a safety hazard around here every time she opened the filing cabinet.”
“Where is she now?”
Lou stuck the cigarette in his mouth and lit it. Paget watched with fascination as the paper flared and burnt halfway down the cigarette.
“Got a flat over on Norfolk Street.” He jerked a thumb over his right shoulder. “Don set her up there. Goes over there most afternoons—or he did. She can’t be more than half his age. Wonder he didn’t die of exhaustion, what with keeping her happy and Mary as well. And she must have cost him a packet. I reckon that’s why he married Mary. Her business makes more money than ours; has done for years. He married Mary, but Robyn was pulling his chain.”
“Do you know if Mrs. Carr had any idea about what was going on?”
Lou took the limp cigarette from his mouth and eyed it critically. “Dunno.” He shrugged. “Somebody could’ve told her, I suppose.”
“How do you know about this set-up with Robyn … what’s her last name?”
“Summers. Robyn Summers. And it’s not just me; everybody in the shop knows. Just ask ’em. You could hear him on the phone to her all the time.”
By the time Paget left the print shop, Mary Carr’s description of a warm and caring husband had taken on a completely different meaning, and if Tracy Morgenson and Lou Hines were right, it could be argued that Mary could have killed her husband in a jealous rage.
The scene faded from his mind as the lights of Broadminster appeared over the lip of the hill and he began the long descent into the valley. He geared down, slowed to a crawl, then stopped behind a line of cars. Flashing lights ahead marked the scene of an accident. Uniformed police were milling about in the road, and an ambulance, lights flashing, was grinding its way up the hill, forcing cars to the side as it tried to get to the scene.
He settled down to wait, his thoughts drifting back in time.
He had spoken to Robyn Summers. She was all Lou had said she was as far as looks and figure went, but her main concern had been for her own future: things such as who was going to pay the rent, and what was going to happen to her now that Carr was gone.
“Mind you, I’m sorry he’s dead,” she said perfunctorily, “but I knew something was up. I mean, he used to come round three times a week regular as clockwork, even after he married that cow, Mary, but I haven’t seen much of him lately. Kept saying he had a lot of work on, but I didn’t believe him. To tell you the truth, I began to think he actually preferred her to me—I know it’s hard to believe, but she isn’t all that bad looking, considering her age, and even Don said she wasn’t bad in bed. But when she came round here last week and accused me of taking him away from her, I didn’t know what to think. She was in a right old mood, I can tell you. Started screaming at me the minute I opened the door. You wouldn’t believe the things she called me!”
“Mary Carr came round here? She knew about you and her husband?”
Robyn Summers lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke
toward the ceiling. “Somebody told her. I reckon it was Lou down at the shop.”
“Why do you think it was him?”
She shrugged. “Getting his own back. He used to try to grope me when I worked there, so I slapped his face in front of everybody. He didn’t like that, but he deserved it. Randy old sod. Mind you, I wasn’t going to let Mary have it all her own way, not after what she called me. I gave her something to think about, believe me.” Robyn Summers grinned maliciously. “I told her Don said he always thought of me when he was humping her, because that was the only way he could manage it.” She chuckled. “That stopped her, I can tell you. If you think she was mad before, you should have seen her then. I thought she was going to explode. She went red in the face and just stood there shaking. To tell you the truth, she scared me. I thought she was going to fly at me, so I slammed the door on her and locked it.”
Mary Carr’s version of her encounter with Robyn Summers was somewhat different. She said that Donald Carr had told her of what he’d called a brief affair with Summers, but had assured her it had ended long before he married Mary, and she believed him. But Summers couldn’t accept the fact that Donald was finished with her, and had tried to stir up trouble between them, so Mary had gone round to warn her off.
“You say you trusted your husband, and yet you have admitted spying on him by watching the house. That doesn’t sound like trust to me,” Paget told her.
“I wasn’t spying. I did trust Donald. I knew he loved me, and he’d finished with her, but I just had to be sure, that’s all. And I am sure. He never did leave the house while I was out.”
“Did you kill your husband?”
“No! Donald was dead when I got back. It was a man. Gillanne told you she heard him downstairs with Donald long before I got home.”
“But you were watching the house from the end of the road. You would have seen someone going up to the house.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Neither entering nor leaving the house? Strange. Was that because there was no man? Was your daughter lying when she said she heard a man enter the house?”
“No! Why should Gillanne lie?”
“I should have thought that was obvious—to protect her mother, of course.”
Even now, so many years later, Paget remembered the stubborn set of Mary’s jaw as she said, “I know you won’t believe me, but the truth is I fell asleep. You know what it’s like when you are concentrating hard on something. I’d hardly taken my eyes off the house all evening, and suddenly I came awake, and I had no idea how long I’d been asleep, but it was going on ten o’clock.”
“I do find that hard to believe, Mrs. Carr. Very hard indeed. Why didn’t you tell us this in the beginning?”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t believe me, but it’s the truth.”
They searched the house and garden, and found a knife buried in a flower bed at the edge of the patio. It had been wiped clean, but Forensic found enough traces of blood between the blade and handle to identify it as matching that of Donald Carr. Although not part of a set, the knife did match others in the kitchen drawers, but more damning was the fact that the blade matched exactly the wounds in Donald Carr’s body.
Paget remembered as if it were yesterday going to the house two days later, accompanied by a WPC and a social worker, and Mary Carr’s reaction. She’d seemed almost resigned to the idea of being taken into custody, but when she realized the children were to be taken into care, she’d gone berserk and attacked the policewoman who had tried to calm her down.
It had been bedlam; mother screaming, daughter crying, the boy, clutching his sister’s arm, bewildered by what was happening. Mary
Carr was still screaming as she was half carried, half dragged to the car, calling her daughter’s name.
Paget squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. His head was beginning to throb, and the lights surrounding the accident ahead seemed to dance before his eyes. He leaned back against the headrest and closed them, and saw the distorted face of Mary Carr as she screamed her daughter’s name, Gill-aaanne … Gill-aaanne!
He heard engines starting up, and opened his eyes. The cars were moving. The ambulance had gone, and a yellow-jacketed policeman was calling him on. The images of the past dissolved as he started his engine and slipped it into gear.