Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

‘It is.’

The two cops watched as Max Winner stood talking with a woman many, many years his junior. She was slender, ginger-haired, casually dressed. The woman suddenly stepped forwards and kissed him. Max Winner responded by holding her upper arms, but perfunctorily so. She was more interested in him than he was in her. Their body language said so.

Ken Menninot, Sergeant, CID, listened to Pharoah’s feedback on the PM and her theory about the discarding of the murder weapon. He authorised a small team of divers to search the canal beneath the bridge on which Sadie Winner’s car had been located. The murder weapon revealed itself to have been a smooth rock, large enough to just fit in one hand, inside a woollen hiking sock. When swung, it would have made quite an impact, especially on an unusually thin skull.

Pharoah and Markov drove out to Winner’s house.

‘I thought I’d see you again,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Only not quite so soon.’ He stood at the entrance of his house. As he and the cops stood there, a woman bundled out of the house, elbowing him aside, carrying a cardboard box with her.

The woman stopped at the sight of Pharoah and Markov, both in plain clothes but both with the unmistakable stamp of police officers about them. She turned and yelled ‘Murderer!’ at Winner. Then she stamped off to a small car and drove angrily away.

‘My sister-in-law,’ Winner explained apologetically. ‘Won’t you come in? Please.’

On this occasion Winner received Pharoah and Markov in the sitting room of his house. The cops, reading the room, noted he had a taste for antiques – furniture, china, paintings. ‘The distress you just witnessed,’ he said, settling into a chair, ‘is due in part, I believe, to the fact that my ex-wife’s sister believed that her money troubles would have been solved upon our divorce. My ex-wife’s sister and her husband live a very hand-to-mouth existence. The car she had… I’ve never seen it before. She must have borrowed it. She certainly doesn’t own one.’

‘I see.’

‘Tell you the truth, your arrival rescued me. But she’ll be back, collecting Sadie’s possessions and anything of mine I may be foolish enough to leave behind. In fact, she didn’t make an attempt to remove all Sadie’s possessions, gives her the excuse to come back.’

‘You could leave them at the door.’

‘I could, couldn’t I? That hadn’t occurred to me.’ Winner smiled. ‘It is my house, after all, isn’t it?’

‘Mr Winner,’ Markov said, ‘that young woman that you were speaking to outside the railway station this lunchtime -

‘You saw us?’

‘We were up on the walls.’

‘I see. Yes…that was Julia. Another bane of my life. I don’t really have a great deal of success with women – my ex… now Julia. Julia really was the start of all my troubles ten years ago now.’

‘Ten years?’

‘Julia’s older than she looks. She’s in her late twenties.’

‘Really?’

‘She acts and dresses like a teenager. I confess I worry about her, psychologically speaking. She’s just not with us, it’s as if she’s on another planet.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘She was an employee at the factory. A low-skilled job…a secretarial job, but she seemed to latch herself onto me…speak to me on any pretext…sending notes to my wife. Telling Sadie that she, Julia, and I were to be married. Really set the cat among the pigeons. My ex – my wife – call her my ex, but we were not divorced. I’ll have to start calling her my late wife now – anyway, Sadie. Once that seed of suspicion grew, it grew to something mammoth. A bit like a mustard tree. A small seed grows into a huge tree. So we drifted apart and I had my affairs, but definitely not with little Miss Julia Patton, though she continued to shadow me.’

‘Do you know where she lives?’

‘Tang Hall Estate, Two Cheviot Avenue. Seen the address often enough on the letters she has sent to me. Sorry, you are…?’

‘DCs Pharoah and Markov. In case you should want to contact us – you may need a contact person – we’re working the six a.m. until two p.m. shift this week.’

‘Overtime, then.’ Winner glanced at the grandfather clock. It was two-thirty p.m.

‘Par for the course,’ Markov said, smiling.

Pharoah and Markov drove back to York, through the city centre and out to Tang Hall: low-rise, unkempt gardens, houses with boarded-up windows, motorcycles fastened to lamp posts with massive chains and padlocks, cars in driveways being ‘done up’ prior to resale for a modest profit. Number 2 Cheviot Avenue fitted into the surrounding area, an overgrown garden and a pile of uncollected domestic refuse by the side door. The cops knocked at the front door. The sound of the knocker echoed within.

‘I don’t know why we are here,’ said Pharoah.

‘Because we are,’ Markov replied. ‘We’re here to find what we shall find, if anything.’

The door was flung open and a woman with ginger hair and glazed blue eyes stood on the threshold. ‘Yes?’

‘Julia Patton?’

‘Aye.’ At close hand she did indeed look older than she did from a distance.

‘Police.’

An intake of breath. ‘Yes?’

‘We understand that you know Mr Winner? Mr Max Winner?’

‘Aye.’ She smiled. The name clearly triggered something and she said, ‘Winner by name, winner by nature.’

“You know him well?’

‘Very. Very well indeed.’

‘Where were you last night?’

‘Here,’ she said. ‘At home.’

‘All night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Alone?’

‘Yes.’ She adopted a more aggressive stance. ‘You can ask my neighbours. They’ll tell you my light was on all night, go and ask them.’

‘You’ll know Mrs Winner?’

‘The cow. Of course I know her. She tried to stop me and Max…but she couldn’t. True love will find a way.’

‘You and Mr Winner are in a relationship?’

‘Yes…for years now.’

‘Do you hike?’

‘What?’

‘Walking…long walks in the country, do you do it?’

‘No.’

‘You wouldn’t have any hiking socks, then?’

Julia Patton blushed a deep red but recovered quickly and said, ‘No.’

‘Do you mind if we come in?’

‘Why? There’s nothing to see.’

‘Nothing to hide then, have you?’ The cops stepped outside.

Julia Patton’s house was threadbare and basic. Very basic. Worn-out chairs, no floor covering, and even at that time of the year, it had a chill about it. In the hallway Markov noted a pair of boots. Not hiking boots, but working boots, the sort that would have to be worn with thick socks over ordinary socks. He said, ‘I’ve got a pair of boots like that. Use them for gardening.’

‘Oh.’

‘Have to wear hiking socks with them.’

‘I do, too. They wore out. I threw them out.’

‘They’ll be in the refuse by the door.’

‘No. Threw them out a long time ago.’

Markov picked up one of the boots and examined the sole. The soil trapped on the side was slightly damp. ‘They’ve been worn recently?’

‘Just in the garden. Don’t need thick socks to go into the garden. Will that be all?’

Markov replaced the boot. ‘Yes. For now.’

‘Good. I’ve got plans to make.’

‘For?’

‘My marriage. Max and I are getting married. Nothing to stop us now she’s dead. Heard it on the lunchtime news. Haven’t felt better for years.’

That evening went as planned for Carmen Pharoah and Simon Markov; one recently arrived in York, the other settled but recently divorced, and now having found each other. They met outside the Minster and went on a Ghost Walk to satisfy Carmen Pharoah’s curiosity, she having often seen such walks advertised. They joined a crowd of about fifty who were led around the city by an actor in Victorian dress who took them down the narrow, one-person-at-a-time snickleways, a street pattern within a street pattern, and who showed them the tall house where a hundred years previously a little girl had fallen to her death within, down the stairwell from the upper floor to the cellar, and who can sometimes be seen as she ascends the stairs for the last time. And they were shown the window where the most recently seen ghost in all England – about twenty sightings a year – is to be viewed; a little girl sobbing at the window. The story being that during the Black Death her parents noticed she had the symptoms of the plague and so locked her in her room and fled, not just the house, which they locked and left with the sign of the plague on the door, but York itself. Leaving their daughter to succumb to thirst, or starvation, or the plague. And they viewed the house where once a man had seen a column of Roman soldiers who were marching, as if on their knees, along the hallway of the house. Excavation revealed the house had been built on the site of a Roman road, the surface of which was two feet beneath the floor of the house.