Martin Edwards - Suspicious Minds

“He told Alison he’d killed his first wife. That’s why she hid herself away.”

“Doesn’t make him a murderer.”

“Let’s hope you’re right. I’d best be off. I ought to phone Alison, put her on her guard.”

“I can save you the trouble. After Stirrup told me the background, I phoned her myself. Thought it best. She made a bit of a fuss. Seemed to blame you. Scared of some rough stuff, I reckon. I told her not to fret, that I’d heard more false confessions than fog warnings on the Mersey. Stirrup simply can’t keep his mouth shut, that’s all.”

Harry eyed the old man. Neither of them could be sure whether Stirrup had killed his first wife. Both of them knew he would never be punished.

“Stirrup’s not the only one.”

A couple of minutes later he was back in the office. Clients weren’t beating a path to the door. The reception area was deserted and Suzanne on switchboard was immersed in the problem page of a woman’s magazine. As he headed for his own room, Jim Crusoe stepped out of the typists’ room and hailed him.

“Hey, there’s a stranger in town. All right?”

“All right? In the last twenty-four hours I’ve lost a girlfriend and the firm its biggest client. Give me a week and I’ll have us both in Parkhurst.”

Jim Crusoe’s solid features didn’t flicker. “Sorry to hear about Valerie. Want to talk about it?”

“No. Thanks.”

“Stirrup, then. Have the police pulled him in? Has he opted for Ruby Fingall’s tender mercies?”

“No. Alison’s alive and well.”

“What’s the problem, then?”

Glad of the chance to unburden himself, Harry described Jonah’s detective work and his own visits to Knutsford and Prospect House.

Jim rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “So you reckon he did kill whatshername — Margaret?”

“I could be wrong. I haven’t been guessing well lately.”

“Think he’ll try to harm Alison?”

“Maybe not. At least Deegan’s tip-off should give her time to clear out. But in any case, Claire’s murder has hit him hard. And he must realise the marriage is dead. The main reason he wanted to know where she lives was wounded pride, I suppose. But the police will lose interest now and with Rita Buxton to offer home comforts, maybe Jack will lose interest in any sort of confrontation with Alison. Looking back on last night, perhaps I should have given him the address. Then we’d still have him as a client.”

Jim shrugged. “Win a few, lose a few. You did the right thing.”

It wasn’t as simple or as obvious as that, and both of them knew it.

“Thanks.”

“And what about his daughter’s murder? Have you heard anything?”

“From the police and from Stirrup, nothing. As you’d expect, that hasn’t stopped my imagination working overtime. With the result that I’ve done my best to get us blacklisted by Balliol Chambers.”

Harry found himself describing the contretemps in the Law Courts that morning. His partner listened as if to nothing more melodramatic than a discourse on the law of registered title.

“It all seemed to make sense,” said Harry, reflecting on the logical steps he had taken on the road to his conclusion about Julian Hamer’s guilt. “The way the girl behaved at the con. Her interrogation of Gina Jean-Jacques. The secret rendezvous last Saturday — presumably with the man who killed her.”

“It might still make sense.” Jim was trying to let him down lightly. “Stand back for a moment. Your clues may have more than one meaning. Remember that old case about the interpretation of a will? The man who left his estate ‘all to mother’? It wasn’t the gift it seemed. ‘Mother’ was his name for his wife.”

Harry nodded. In his mind, suspicions began to reform like patterns in the fireside blaze.

Tolerantly, Jim said, “The look on your face tells me I’ve started you off again. Just try not to pin anything on the Bishop of Liverpool this afternoon, old son. We can use all the divine assistance we can get just now.”

Harry glanced heavenwards. “This time, I’ll be glad to be wrong.”

He hurried to his own room and dialled a Wirral number. At last he’d remembered the question he had meant to put to Gina Jean-Jacques.

“Gina, is that you? This is Harry Devlin. No, it doesn’t matter that your mother’s out. I wanted to ask you one more question. When Claire asked you what it was like being kissed by The Beast… what did you tell her?”

“I never knew a boy so quiet,” said Mrs. Warner. “He was never any trouble to either Hubert or me.”

She sat back in her floral-patterned armchair and sipped her tea contentedly. A large, comfortable widow with white hair, varicose veins and nothing to be ashamed of. Harry was sure she had done her best for her nephew after his mother’s death a dozen years ago and that she had not the slightest inkling of the dark thoughts that must lurk deep within his brain.

When she learned that the quiet boy had become The Beast she had read and gossiped about, her life would disintegrate like an old dock warehouse attacked by a demolition gang.

Harry finished his tea, uttering a silent prayer that his suspicion should prove as unjust and absurd as in the case of Julian Hamer. He cringed when he thought of the accusation he had levelled at a sick man — was it only four hours earlier? Valerie was right to feel disgust.

Yet now he dreaded the prospect of another mistake far less than the possibility that for once he might be right. It seemed like an act of cruelty to sit in this well-kept room, engaging Elsie Warner in friendly conversation, letting her believe his cock-and-bull story. He had said this was no more than a casual call on a professional acquaintance’s home, whilst passing through New Brighton, on the off-chance that her nephew might be around. Guileless, she had invited him in. In truth he was seeking corroboration for the theory he had reconstructed about the identity of Claire Stirrup’s murderer.

Gina Jean-Jacques’s puzzled answer to his intrusive question had confirmed Jim’s point. The fatal sequence of events became clear when you stood back and looked at it afresh. But he knew that this piece of guesswork, like the last, could bring nothing but misery. If only it were untrue. And yet everything Mrs. Warner willingly told him about her nephew helped to paint a picture that she herself could never recognise. A portrait of a murderer.

According to Mrs. Warner, her nephew had always been a lonely young man with very few friends. His parents’ marriage had broken down when he was still in short trousers. The father had been violent, a drunkard and a womaniser whose wife had been prepared to tolerate his blows and infidelities for the sake of the child. But when, in a final beery rage, the man had thrashed the boy, she could take no more. She walked out with her son and they had lived in a scruffy council flat until one day the boy had come home from school and found his mother lying on the bedroom floor in her underclothes, dead after a massive stroke.

“We took him in, of course, Hubert and me,” Mrs. Warner reminisced. “We never had children of our own. I was already turned fifty, but there was no one else to look after him. Of course, there was a what-you-call-it — a generation gap. But we did our best.”

Harry wondered what it is that turns a man sour against women, against life. Of all the inadequates he had defended, he’d never found one common factor to unite them all, to mark them as men whom society should spot and lock away before they could do harm. There had been no lack of love in this household. Perhaps in the boy’s life it had simply come too late.

A gilt-framed photograph on the scrupulously dusted sideboard caught his eye. A head and shoulders shot of a small-featured woman with curly blonde hair, smiling shyly at the camera. A picture Harry had seen before.