Peter Lovesey - The House Sitter

“We’ll have to put out an appeal, guv.”

“I’m coming to that.”

“What about this lifeguard? Is he a suspect? Can we believe everything he tells us?”

“He’s an Australian named Emerson, and he’s not comfortable. I dare say there are things he doesn’t want us to know about how he got the job. But he was on duty. To have killed her, he’d have needed to leave his post for a while, and someone might have noticed.”

“There must be other lifeguards. I’ve seen more than one of them sitting up there. He could ask one of his mates to cover for him and take time out to kill her.”

“For what reason?”

“Who knows? He recognised her as someone who dumped him some time in the past?”

“Not much of a motive,” George Flint commented.

“We don’t have any motive yet.”

Stella nudged the discussion in another direction. “If the victim is this doctor, we could have another motive: the patient with a grudge.”

“That’s good, Stell,” Hen said, forgetting her own insistence that they’d said enough about Dr Wilkinson. “I like that. GPs deal with life and death issues every day. There are always people who feel they were denied the right treatment, or misdiagnosed.”

“Or refused the drugs they want.”

“Would you take that on, Stella? Go to the health centre and find out what you can.”

“You mean look at patients’ records?”

Someone sitting near Stella murmured in a sing-song tone, “Data Protection.”

“Talk to the receptionists, pick out the gossipy one and ask about the nutters and complainers they have to deal with,” Hen said. “You’ll get names. Then try the nurses and the cleaners and the caretaker. I don’t have to tell you, Stella.”

“But you did.”

Smiles all round, Hen’s included.

“Getting back to what happened on the beach, we need to find this guy who alerted the lifeguard. He was asked to remain at the scene, and didn’t. We have a description of sorts. Tall and thin. Short, brown hair. Around thirty years of age. Skin turning red, so presumably he wasn’t a regular on the beach. And we have his name… Smith.”

She timed the pay-off like a stand-up comic and got the laugh she expected.

“He has a wife or partner, short, a bit overweight and with dyed blond hair. Also a five-year-old daughter called Haley.”

“Are we regarding him as a suspect?” a youngish DC asked.

“Because he left the scene, you mean?”

A sergeant across the room said dismissively, “He called the lifeguard. We can rule him out.”

“Not yet, we can’t,” Hen said. “It’s not unknown for the perpetrator to blow the whistle. Ask any fire investigator. In a high proportion of arson cases the informant is the guy who started the fire. They think it draws suspicion away from them.”

“Does that hold for murder as well?”

“I said it’s not unknown, sunshine. Let’s say Smith is our principal witness. I want to talk to all three members of that family and anyone else who was on that stretch of beach. I’m going on the local TV news tonight-by which time we should know for sure if Shiena Wilkinson is our victim.”

The Smiths lived on a housing estate in Crawley, close to Gatwick Airport where Mike was manager of a bookshop-the terminal bookshop, as he called it in his darker moods. As usual after the weekend mayhem, Monday had been chaotic, with the shop still cluttered with unsold Sunday papers, two staff off sick (hungover, Mike suspected), three mighty boxes of the latest Stephen King to find shelf-room for, a couple of publishers’ reps wanting to show their wares, the phone forever ringing and a problem with one of the tills. He wasn’t in a receptive frame of mind when he finally got home at six thirty.

For Olga, also, the day had been stressful. She worked on a checkout in the local Safeway, an early shift that freed her in time to collect Haley from school at three thirty. At lunchtime in the staffroom, she had seen the Sun’s headline STRANGLED ON THE BEACH, and was appalled to discover it referred to the dead woman at Wightview Sands.

“I’ve been waiting all afternoon to talk to you,” she said as soon as Mike came in. “I tried calling the shop, but I couldn’t get through.”

“Something up?” he said without much interest.

“This.” She held the paper up to her chest, watching for the headline to make its impact.

“You think I haven’t seen that? We sell papers-remember?”

“It’s the woman we found, Mike. It says Wightview Sands. They’re appealing for witnesses.”

His offhand manner changed abruptly. “You haven’t phoned the police?”

“Not yet. I thought you’d like to speak to them.”

“Whatever for?”

She stared at him. “I told you. They want to hear from witnesses.” She slapped the paper on the table in front of him.

“That isn’t us. We didn’t see anything.”

“I spoke to her, for God’s sake. She was sitting right in front of us.”

“About what? What did you say?”

“I don’t know. Something about Haley.”

“What?”

“Her high spirits, her energy, something like that.”

“That’s all?”

“It was just a few friendly words.”

He tossed the paper across the room onto a chair. “What use is a few friendly words? They want witnesses to a murder, not people making small talk. You’d be done for wasting their time.”

“That isn’t true, Mike. It says they want anyone who was there to come forward, however little they saw. We can tell them what time she arrived-soon after us-and that she didn’t have anyone with her. No, hold on, there was that guy who tried to chat her up.”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“Black T-shirt. Tall, dark, with curly hair. This was before lunch. You were asleep. She wasn’t amused, and he walked off, not too pleased. It didn’t amount to anything, but…”

“If it didn’t amount to anything, forget it.”

“They may want to know about him. She seemed to know him.”

“OK, she recognised someone. Big deal.”

“He didn’t upset her, or anything. She was in a cheerful state of mind, or she wouldn’t have spoken to me.”

“We know bugger all about her state of mind,” he said, troubled by her old-fashioned faith in the system. “You can’t read anything into a couple of words exchanged on a beach. Forget it. Other people may have seen something. We didn’t. We’re minor players. They don’t want the likes of us wasting their precious time.”

“Do you think so?” The force of his words was starting to tell on Olga.

“I know it. Listen, do you want a police car outside the house and all our nosy neighbours having a field day? That’s what’s going to happen if you call them.”

“I don’t care what the neighbours think. This poor woman was murdered.”

“Right. And what can we expect if we call the police? They’ll tear us to shreds. They won’t believe we sat on the beach all afternoon and saw sod all. The woman was murdered a few yards away from us. How come we didn’t notice? We’ll look a prize pair of idiots.”

Olga hesitated. She hadn’t thought of this.

“And that’s not all,” Mike hammered the point home. “If the case ever goes to court, we’ll be called as witnesses for the defence . Think about that for a moment. You and I will be the dimwits who failed to spot the killer. How do you fancy being cross-examined by the prosecution about your memories of that afternoon just to save some pervert from justice?”

“But if it’s true that we didn’t see anything…”

“They’ll make a laughing stock of us. We’ll be filmed going into the court and coming out of it. People will think we’re on the killer’s side. You know what I think?” he said, letting his voice sink to a lower, more reasonable note. “I think she was killed while we were swimming.”