MONDAY, 2 OCTOBER
Almost everyone at work that morning had some dramatic story to tell about the storm that had caused so much destruction over the weekend. Low-lying areas had been flooded; fallen trees had damaged houses and cars; slates had been blown off; and out where Ormside lived, greenhouses and cold frames had been smashed to pieces by hail.
“Much damage out your way, sir?” Ormside asked.
“Quite a few trees down, and a lot of flooded fields, but no damage to the house as far as I can see,” Paget told him.
The sergeant picked up a memo and handed it to Paget. “That’s the number of the police garage in Worcester,” he said. “They want you to call back. It’s about the car you had towed in on Saturday. They said the engine block is cracked. It’s going to need a complete replacement, and they need authorization and a work order number.”
Paget grimaced. “That’s going to cost a bit,” he commented as he pocketed the memo.
“What happened?” Ormside asked.
“The oil ran out in the car-park, but fortunately I noticed it before I started back, and had it towed in.”
“So how did you get back?” asked Tregalles, who had been listening.
“I got a lift with someone who happened to be coming up this way,” Paget said off-handedly.
“That was lucky. What was the road like?”
“Wet,” said Paget curtly. “Now, can we leave the subject and get on with what we’re here to do?” He turned to Ormside. “Anything else?” he asked.
“No, that’s it for the moment, sir.”
“Right. In that case I’ll be in my office. I’m expecting Miss Bolen in at nine, so have someone bring her up when she arrives, will you, Len?”
“Will do, sir.”
“I hope this won’t take long,” said Prudence Bolen as she flopped into a seat in front of Paget’s desk. She was dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater at least three sizes too big for her, and trainers. “I have a lunch date with a friend in Bristol at one o’clock.”
Paget ignored the remark. The young woman was forty minutes late for their appointment as it was, and he had no intention of hurrying on her account.
“Thank you for coming in, Miss Bolen,” he said perfunctorily. “I’ll get straight to the point. Can you tell me where you were on the evening of Saturday, September twenty-third?”
Prudence placed a dramatic hand against her chest and widened her eyes in mock surprise. “Me, Guv?” she asked in a hoarse voice. “I ain’t done nuffink, Guv, honest!”
Paget’s expression didn’t change. “If you’ll just answer the question, Miss Bolen.”
Prudence sighed heavily. “I was in Bristol, which is where I should be going now,” she said petulantly.
“Is there someone there who could confirm that?”
“I don’t know why you’d want to, but yes, there is, as a matter of fact. I share a room with another girl, Joan Lassiter. She’ll tell you I was there all night.”
The Lassiter girl had been warned not to let Prudence know that the police had spoken to her, and apparently she had heeded the warning. That should make things easier. Still, he might as well let Prudence hang herself.
“And you were there, presumably, when your mother rang about seven Sunday morning?”
Prudence shifted in her chair. “Well, no, as a matter of fact I had gone out early that morning. I went bike riding with some friends. Joan told me when I came in, and I rang my mother back.” She put on a sad face. “That’s when she told me about Dad.”
Paget frowned. “I was given to understand that Miss Lassiter had already told you what happened before you telephoned your mother,” he said. “Is that not right?”
Prudence passed a hand across her forehead and frowned as if trying to recall. “Yes, that’s right, now you mention it. Although I’m afraid I don’t see the point of any of this.”
“You telephoned your mother from where?”
“Bristol, of course.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t Broadminster, Miss Bolen?”
Prudence became very still. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.
“From the Country Garden Nursery?”
Prudence slid down in her chair, hooked one foot over her knee and glowered at him.
“Your friend, Joan Lassiter, was interviewed by the Bristol police,” he went on, “and she admitted covering for you while you were here in Broadminster for the weekend.” Paget’s voice hardened.
“Now, shall we stop wasting each other’s time and get on with it, Miss Bolen? When did you really arrive in Broadminster?”
Prudence fiddled with the laces of her shoe. “I came up Saturday evening,” she said grudgingly. “Got in about nine. I was going to surprise Mark and spend the weekend with him.” She looked at him defiantly. “Is that a crime?”
“No, and I’m not interested in how you spend your time as long as it has nothing to do with the events surrounding your father’s death. Did you see your father that night?”
Prudence stared at him as if she thought him mad. “He’s the last person I wanted to know I was in town,” she said. “He didn’t approve of Mark. That’s why I didn’t come up earlier in the day. I didn’t want him or anyone else to see me.”
“You were with Mr. Malone all that evening?”
Prudence frowned and pressed her lips together. “Mark wasn’t there,” she said in a low voice. “I should have let him know I was coming, I suppose, but as I said, I wanted to surprise him. He’d gone to Shrewsbury, and he didn’t get back until the middle of Sunday morning.”
“He stayed there overnight?”
“He said he’d intended to come back that night, but he’d had a few drinks and didn’t want to risk getting caught on the road, so he stayed over with them and came back next morning.”
“So you stayed where?”
“At Mark’s. I’ve got a key.”
“Is there anyone who saw you there? Any way that we can verify what you’ve just told me?”
Prudence shook her head impatiently. “Of course there isn’t,” she told him. “Mark and I had to keep a low profile, so I wasn’t going to let anyone know I was there, was I?”
“Is it true that you had promised your father you would stop seeing Mr. Malone?”
“I don’t see that as any of your business,” the girl flared.
“Your father had warned you of the consequences if you continued
seeing Mr. Malone, had he not, Miss Bolen? And yet you continued to see him.” Prudence remained silent. “Which some might say,” he went on, “would be sufficient reason for killing your father.”
Blood drained away from Prudence Bolen’s face as Paget pressed on. “You admit sneaking back into Broadminster after dark. You undoubtedly knew where your father would be; Mr. Malone was in Shrewsbury—or so you say. But he could just as easily have been at the Tudor Hotel that night, either with or without you. Tell me, do you have a set of keys for your father’s car, Miss Bolen? Was it Malone’s idea or yours to take the car from the hotel car-park while your father was having dinner?
“And whose idea was it,” he ended quietly, “to set things up so that someone else would take the blame for the murder of your father? Your’s? Or Malone’s?”
Prudence stared. Her mouth moved but no sound came out.
“And where were you last Tuesday evening?”
Prudence blinked rapidly and swallowed hard. “Tuesday? I don’t … I was with Mark earlier on, but he had to make a delivery, so I went over to see a school-friend. I can give you her name if you like. But I don’t see …”
“And I will want it,” said Paget. “How long were you there, Miss Bolen?”
Prudence looked confused. “I don’t know. Till maybe ten o’clock. I don’t remember exactly.”
Paget picked up the phone and punched in a three-digit number. “I need an interview room,” he said when someone answered. “And I’ll need a WPC to witness a statement.”
Keith Lambert put down the phone and smiled to himself. He hadn’t expected to hear back from London quite so soon. He had banked on their wanting the future of the Ockrington property resolved as soon as possible, but bureaucrats were not known for
making swift decisions, and he had anticipated a wait of several weeks before he heard anything.
It was a man named Hutchinson who called. The name didn’t mean anything to Keith, but it soon became apparent that Hutchinson was very familiar with the offer he had presented a week ago, and he made it clear from the outset that the offer was not acceptable.
Not acceptable, he hastened to explain, in its present form. The Minister had expressed concern over the fifteen-year time frame, for example, and the amount of money Lambert had offered to put up was, considering the potential of the property, below expectations.
When Lambert asked what would be acceptable, Hutchinson hedged. It was hard to put an exact figure on it until other factors had been worked out, he explained, but if Lambert was still interested, he felt sure that some sort of compromise could be reached. Would it be convenient for Mr. Lambert to come to London? Say, this Thursday? Ten o’clock? Excellent! Hutchinson gave further directions and rang off.
Lambert, hands locked behind his head, rocked gently back and forth in his chair as he re-ran the conversation in his mind. The very fact that they wanted to talk again told him they were eager—more than eager—to make a deal and get Ockrington off their hands.
And what a deal it would be! If Jim Bolen hadn’t been so blinded by his obsession, he might have come up with a more innovative approach himself.
With Bolen out of the picture, it had been a piece of cake. But best of all, Laura was now free, and he couldn’t see her spending a lot of time mourning her dear departed husband.
It was simply a matter of time, he told himself. Just a matter of time.
Paget took Prudence Bolen down to the interview room himself, but once there he left her under the watchful eye of a WPC and went in search of Tregalles. “She’s admitted she was in Broadminster the
night her father was killed,” he told the sergeant, “and what I want you to do is record her statement and take your time doing it. Under no circumstance allow her to get to a phone. I’m on my way to see her boy-friend, Mark Malone, and I don’t want her tipping him off before I have a chance to talk to him. I don’t know whether either of them had anything to do with the Bolen killing, but the girl certainly hasn’t been losing any sleep over her father’s death.”
Twenty minutes later, Paget pulled into the car-park in front of the nursery, where he could see at a glance that it had suffered a lot of damage from the storm. Boxes of bruised and battered plants had been dragged to one side, and leaves and twigs had been raked into several piles. Tubs of trees had been tipped on their sides, presumably to allow water to drain out, and two girls were pulling down the tattered remnants of a plastic greenhouse covering.
“He’s in the office,” one of the girls told Paget when he asked for Malone. “Go through the shop to the back, and you’ll find him there.”
Malone showed no surprise when Paget stuck his head through the open door and introduced himself. It was almost as if he had been expecting the chief inspector. “Have a seat,” he said, indicating a decrepit wooden chair. “Will this take long? I have a lot on my plate this morning.”
“It rather depends on you,” Paget said as he sat down. The chair creaked ominously beneath his weight.
It wasn’t hard to see why Prudence Bolen was attracted to Malone. He was an extraordinarily good-looking man, bronzed from working outside, and there wasn’t a spare ounce of flesh on his body. He wore a T-shirt, shorts and sandals, and looked to be in excellent physical condition. He had a pleasant face, not rugged, exactly, but his features were well-defined, and there were small lines around his dark-blue eyes that made him look as if he were secretly amused.
“Prudence Bolen tells me that you stayed with friends in Shrewsbury last Saturday evening,” said Paget. “Is that true, Mr. Malone?”
“Ah! Yes, of course, that was the night Prudence’s father died. Yes, that’s right, I did. With Peter and Sheila Trowbridge. Known Peter for years. He and Sheila run Lyndwood.”
“So you won’t have any objection if we ask him for confirmation?”
A flicker of annoyance crossed Malone’s face. “I won’t object,” he said. “Although I do question the need. I can’t say I like the idea of having the police asking my friends about me.”
“What time did you leave Broadminster?”
“Somewhere between one and two o’clock in the afternoon. I got to Lyndwood Farm about three, I suppose, and spent a couple of hours with Peter sorting through stock and making out orders. His is a wholesale business as well as retail, and I get a lot of my three-to-five-year stock from him.”
“Which takes us to about five o’clock. What then?”
Malone allowed his annoyance to show more plainly. “I really don’t see the point of all this,” he said impatiently, “and to be frank, I resent the implication of these questions.”
Paget eyed Malone thoughtfully. “Do you?” he said. “Well, let me put it to you this way, Mr. Malone: Jim Bolen was opposed to the idea of your marrying his daughter. He and Prudence had what has been described as a violent argument over it, which resulted in his threatening to disinherit her if she went through with it. She promised not to see you again, but it was an empty promise, wasn’t it? She continued meeting you secretly, and she lied about where she was the night her father was murdered. She lied to me, she lied to her family, and even had her room-mate in Bristol lie for her. In addition to that, she received a panic call from her room-mate here shortly after seven o’clock on Sunday morning, telling her that her father had been killed. Yet Miss Bolen couldn’t even be bothered to go home until late in the afternoon, lying once again to account for the delay.
“And by an odd coincidence, the same night Prudence Bolen sneaked back into Broadminster, her father was confronted by
someone who stabbed him five times. Does that make the situation clearer, Mr. Malone?”
Malone smiled tightly. “Perfectly,” he said. “But it is very hard to be in two places at once, and as I told you, I was in Shrewsbury from three o’clock Saturday afternoon until Sunday morning. I had no idea that Prudence was here until I arrived back around ten, so I’m afraid I can’t help you.”
“Where were you last Tuesday evening?”
“Tuesday? What … ? I don’t understand.”
“It’s not exactly complicated,” said Paget. “Where were you last Tuesday evening?”
Malone scratched his head. “What time?”
“Let’s say from nine o’clock on.”
“I’ll have to check my book, but I think that was the night I made a delivery to the Spencers in Clunbridge.” Malone dug out a tattered book from among a pile of papers on his desk and thumbed through it. “Yes, here it is. Six blue spruce and eight Katsuras.” He showed Paget the entry.
“How long were you out there, and what time did you get back?”
“I left here about seven, and I was out there by half past. Spencer gave me a hand unloading the trees, and we carried them round to where he intends to plant them. We discussed his plans for other parts of his garden, and then we went inside for a drink.”
“And you left there when?”
“Around ten, I should think, but you can check with Spencer if you like.” Malone was visibly annoyed. “Look,” he said, rising to his feet, “I’ve had enough of this, and I have work to do. In case you hadn’t noticed, we had a storm the other day, and I’ve lost almost half my stock.”
“Yes, I did notice.” Paget remained seated. “Tell me, are you the owner or the manager here?”
Malone hesitated as if searching for some hidden significance to Paget’s question. “I’m the manager,” he said. “This nursery is part of
the Beresford chain. I work for Trevor Beresford. He owns Lyndwood Farm as well.”
“Right,” said Paget. “In that case, if you’ll give me the address and telephone number of Mr. Spencer, as well as that of Mr. and Mrs. Trowbridge, I’ll be on my way. But let me know if you intend to leave Broadminster, because I feel quite sure I shall need to talk to you again.”