Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘Yes?’ The man was well built, fifty-something. A dark-blue towelling dressing gown covered silk pyjamas.

‘Police.’

‘Yes?’

‘Mr Winner?’ Markov approached and showed his ID.

“Tis I.’

‘We have a few questions…’

‘You’d better come in.’

Winner received the police in the hallway of his house, where they sat opposite each other on benches which stood alongside walls of ancient beams.

‘Oh my,’ he said when Markov revealed the reason for their visit. ‘Oh my…’

‘Do you know what her car would be doing on the bridge over the canal?’

‘The bridge in question…it’s on the route that she favours to get from the village to York. She drives it daily. I prefer the main road, but she likes the rural route. But I’ve no idea why she should have stopped where she did. Which way was the car pointing?’

‘Towards the village.’

‘So she was coming home. She was very cautious…she wouldn’t have stopped, not unless it was because she knew someone…someone she recognised.’

‘What time did you expect your wife to return home?’

‘Last night? About nine-thirty, ten. She went to visit her sister, she lives in York. The two of them, once they get their heads together, at my expense…calling up all my past misdeeds and indiscretions. She was about to take me to the cleaner’s… They would have spent the evening planning my ruin.’

‘So, you’d benefit from your wife’s death?’

‘Oh yes… In fact, I’m just beginning to realise just what a great weight might have been lifted from my shoulders…just what a shadow I am escaping from, if it is my wife.’

‘We’ll have to ask you to accompany us to York District Hospital to identify the body…if you can.’

‘The car, the handbag, the clothing you describe – it’ll be her all right. But yes, formality has to be observed.’

‘Before we go, could you tell us where you were at about nine-thirty last night?’

‘Here.’

‘Alone?’

‘Alone. I was working. The industry is in a bad state at the moment.’

‘The industry?’

‘Electronics. I am the Winner of Winner Electronics, the factory on the industrial estate.’

‘Ah yes,’ Markov nodded.

‘I’m asking my managers to put in unpaid overtime to avert collapse. I can’t do that if I’m not prepared to do the same.’

‘Of course.’

‘I made a few phone calls…sent a few faxes… They could be confirmed. I have itemised bills. The people to whom I spoke will be able to confirm that ‘twas I who spoke.’

‘This was at nine-thirty?’

‘No… No, earlier. I was reading reports at about that time…then I went outside. I enjoy the dusk at this time of year – that would have been about nine-thirty, ten, just outside in the garden – but I was alone.’

‘Your wife, was she depressed of late?’

‘No… Just the opposite, in fact. She was enthusiastic in a vindictive sort of way…burning up with determination to fleece me in a divorce settlement.’

‘But she was living here?’

‘All part of the Great Plan to ruin me. Can’t bring a lady friend home while she’s in the house, can I? And she knows it. We sleep separately, but it’s still the one roof… Makes things very difficult for me.’

‘Not the sort of person to take her own life, then?’

‘Hardly.’ Winner smiled. ‘My wife take her own life, I hardly think so… No…not a chance. She had everything to live for, i.e, my total ruin. She was poised to take half of what I possess, plus a massive amount of maintenance. She had a lot to live for. She and her sister had their knives out for me.’

‘So you really have benefited from her death? If it is she?’

‘Oh yes, only the collapse of my business empire to worry about now. A minor headache by comparison. I make no secret of it. I have no feelings for my wife now. I haven’t for a long time. I was angry about the possible divorce settlement because she wasn’t very supportive of me while I was building up…more of a hindrance. I really did it despite her, not because of her.’

‘So, it’s not true that behind every successful man there is a good woman?’

‘Not in my case, it’s not. Just isn’t. I certainly could have used such a female in my life, but it wasn’t my lot. I’d come home each day to a wife screaming for new clothes and no food. She would say that if I was hungry I could send out for a pizza. I went for her looks and found them skin-deep and that the skin was covering a very ugly personality. I should have listened to my grandmother when she told me to shut my eyes and listen to the voice. “Do your courting on the telephone,” she’d say. I should have listened.’

‘She sounds like a sensible woman.’

‘She was. She’s still alive but her mind is away. I visit her when I can, but it’s difficult to sit with a woman who once was full of such horse sense and wisdom who now thinks she’s a little girl and doesn’t recognise me. Keeps asking me if her daddy’s going to come home from the war. Anyway, I’ll claw my kit on, go and see the corpse. Never done this before…’ Winner stood.

‘It’s not like what you may have seen in the films… She won’t be pulled out of a drawer, you’ll see her from behind a glass screen.’

‘It will be as if she is floating,’ added Pharoah.

It was in fact just as Carmen Pharoah had described. The woman floating on a bed, tightly tucked up. ‘It is she,’ said Max Winner. ‘That’s my wife, Sadie Winner, aged forty-five years. Quite frankly, I don’t know which one of us rests in peace.’

Bill Hatch stood – a short, balding, rotund man with stubby fingers. He was the sort of man who would be found in a pigeon loft lovingly stroking his beloved birds, or perhaps reading a tabloid newspaper on the top deck of a bus, or downing pints of mild and bitter in a smoky pub. But he was, in fact, a Home Office pathologist. He examined the corpse of Sadie Winner in the pathology laboratory of the York District Hospital and said, ‘The police surgeon is quite correct. Even before I make the first and even slightest incision, I can tell you that she didn’t drown.’

‘No?’ Carmen Pharoah responded from the corner of the room from where she was observing the post-mortem for the police.

‘No.’ He ran his hands through Sadie Winner’s scalp hair. ‘No, she was hit over the head. A single blow, feels like from behind… We’ll see.’ He took a scalpel and made an incision round the perimeter of the skull above the level of the ears and then peeled the scalp back and revealed the skull. ‘Yes…fractured skull…bleeding was internal…subdural haematoma…a single blow with a blunt object…caused a starlike fracturing. She also had a very thin skull. A person with a thicker skull might have survived this blow, but in her case, death would have been instantaneous.’

Carmen Pharoah met Simon Markov, as arranged, for lunch in the town. Later they walked the walls back towards Friargate, the ancient city spreading out at either side beneath them. They walked in silence, enjoying each other’s company, then Carmen Pharoah said, ‘If you had battered someone over the head, what would you do with the murder weapon?’

‘Get rid of it.’

‘In the first conventional place?’

‘Yes.’

‘Such as a canal, for instance?’

Markov smiled at her. ‘Yes, such as a canal, for instance?’

‘A job for the frog boys. We’ll ask Ken Menninot to authorise it. Meanwhile, to matters of greater import.’ She slid her arm into his. ‘Tonight I thought we’d eat Chinese.’

‘Can do, if you wish. In fact…’ Markov paused and halted. ‘Look.’ He indicated towards the railway station below and across the road from where they stood on the battlements. ‘Isn’t that Max Winner?’