Dee was very quiet when Harry came down for breakfast. She’d been asleep when he returned last night, and after what he’d been through with Laura, he didn’t want to wake her and have her asking all sorts of questions.
“Have a good sleep, then?” he asked as he sat down. Dee didn’t reply. She seemed preoccupied, and she didn’t look at him as she set the toast on the table. Probably still a bit jet-lagged, he thought as he opened the paper and scanned the front page.
“Oh, no!” he groaned aloud. “It says here the police are looking for a girl they believe can help with their enquiries. God! I hope she wasn’t one of Jim’s; she’s just a kid! Have you seen this picture?”
Dee didn’t answer. Instead she sat down facing him and raised her teacup. “What did Laura want last night?” she asked.
Harry shrugged. “Oh, she was concerned about a lot of things: how the business would carry on, who would look after all the things that Jim used to take care of. You know the sort of thing.”
“And it took till after midnight to discuss that?” Dee’s voice was flat and cold.
So, Dee had simply been pretending to be asleep when he came in. But why the chill this morning?
Harry set the paper aside. “I suppose it’s a sort of delayed reaction,” he said. “John was over earlier to help sort out the things that have to be done with regard to insurance claims, inland revenue and the like, but she wanted to talk to me about the future of the business.”
Dee set her cup down and took something from the pocket of her apron. “What were these doing on the dressing-table?” she asked as she dropped Laura’s earrings on the table.
“Oh, them. I found them when I was clearing up in the spare room,” he told her. “Laura left them behind, so I put them on the dressing-table so I’d remember to take them round sometime. They were by your trinket box. Why? You didn’t think that Laura had been in our—?”
Harry broke off and stared at Dee. “You did, didn’t you?” he accused. “Oh, come on, Dee, you know better than that. Laura stayed here Friday and Saturday. You knew she was staying here. She was in the spare bedroom and I was in ours.”
Dee’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s just that I found those earrings in our bedroom, and you told me on the way home that you hadn’t told the inspector that Laura was in the house in case he got the wrong impression, and how she came down in her dressing-gown. And then last night, when she wanted you to go over, I couldn’t help wondering …”
Harry came round the table and put his arms around her. “It’s all right, Dee,” he said soothingly. “You were tired after that long flight, and your imagination was working overtime. But you know there is nothing going on between Laura and me. I love you, Dee, and I always will. I like Laura the same way you do, but that’s all. She was alone in the house last night, and she needed someone to talk to, and that’s all there was to it, believe me.”
Dee buried her face in Harry’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Harry,” she whispered. “I don’t know what got into me. Hold me, please.”
Later, as Harry drove to the office, he wondered if he had made a grave mistake last night in promising to keep silent. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be for long, but he would have to watch everything he said to Dee or he would really have a problem.
“Funny you should ask about Mr. Bolen’s clothing,” said Grace Lovett, “because I’ve been doing some checking on that myself.”
She leaned back in her chair and crossed her long, slim legs. Belatedly, Tregalles realized that he’d been following the movement with more than passing interest, and forced himself to look away. There was a hint of amusement in Grace’s eyes as she continued.
“I felt from the beginning that there was something odd about the clothes,” she said, “so I did some checking with Sergeant Ormside. According to several people in the dining-room that night, Bolen was wearing a sports coat, white shirt, dark tie, and charcoal-grey slacks, yet we found no slacks of that colour in his room. The clothing we found on the chair and on the floor, which one would assume he had taken off, consisted of”—Grace consulted a list—“a white shirt, light-grey slacks, black belt still in the loops, blue underpants, grey socks and black shoes.”
She set the list aside. “The sports jacket and a brown suit were hanging in the clothes closet, and there was a brown belt in his suitcase. But when I was bagging the slacks from the chair, it seemed to me that the belt looked short, so I checked it against the belt in his suitcase, and guess what I found?”
Tregalles shook his head.
“The black belt was shorter than the other belt by a good two inches, and the marks made by the buckle were in a different place. In other words, that belt did not belong to Bolen because he couldn’t have done it up—at least not without a struggle. It belonged to a slimmer man.
“And then there were the number of shirts we found. Bolen was supposed to be there in the hotel for four days, yet we found only three shirts.” Grace shrugged. “Mind you, many men wear their shirts for more than one day, but I spoke to Ms. Bolen on the phone, and she told me that her husband invariably wore a clean shirt every day, sometimes more than one. So I took a good look at the collar of the shirt we found on the chair beside the bed. It was perfectly clean; not a hair, not a dark spot on it, and when I took a closer look, I found it had simply been crumpled to make it look as if it had been worn, and there were no marks around the waist where a shirt creases naturally beneath the pressure of a belt.”
Grace rocked gently back and forth in her chair. “Conclusion,” she said, bringing her steepled hands together beneath her chin, “somebody wants us to believe that Bolen was naked when he was killed, when in fact he was at least partly dressed. The autopsy report confirms that. The threads they found inside the wounds will be compared with threads taken from Bolen’s other shirts to see if they match, or at least are similar, and I have no doubt they will be. All his shirts have the same label.”
“Which means,” said Tregalles, “that the killer took away Bolen’s clothes because they were blood-stained, including the belt. He screwed up a clean shirt to make it look as if it had been worn and put another pair of Bolen’s own trousers on the chair. But he needed to find another belt from somewhere.” His eyes met those of Grace Lovett, who was nodding agreement.
“So he used his own,” she finished for him.
Tregalles was silent for a moment. “Which strengthens our theory that there was a man other than Bolen inside the room when Stella Green showed up at eleven, and that means Bolen could have died a lot earlier than midnight.”
“What about Bolen’s brother? He was up there about the right time, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was. Harry Bolen claims his brother was out when he knocked, but he could be lying.”
“On the other hand,” he went on, “it wouldn’t be hard for someone to come up the back stairs without being seen. At the bottom of the stairs there are two doors: one leads into the kitchen, but the other leads directly out to the car-park. The door to the car-park is supposed to be a one-way exit door, and kept closed, but it was unlocked when I looked at it, and some of the staff admitted they come and go that way all the time.”
“And the corridor exit door is no more than ten feet from Bolen’s room,” Grace mused. “Very handy for someone who doesn’t wish to be seen.”
Tregalles rose to his feet. “I’d better get back,” he said. “Thanks, Grace. You’ve been a great help.” He moved toward the door, but Grace stopped him.
“One thing more. In going through Bolen’s brief-case, we found a copy of what looks like Lambert’s bid on this Ockrington project we’ve heard so much about. You might like to pass that on to Mr. Paget. I believe he was asking Charlie about it, but Charlie isn’t here today.”
But Tregalles shook his head. “I shan’t be seeing him until later,” he told her, “so why don’t you phone him yourself? Give it that personal touch.” He winked knowingly. “I’m sure he’d like that.”