Suspicious Minds

Chapter Twenty-Three

Today, as always, the calm of the courtyard garden at the Bluecoat was as welcome as it was unexpected. This was a sanctuary for refugees from urban life. Less than one hundred yards away people swarmed through the city’s shopping centre but here you could forget for a while the noise and ugliness of the world outside.

Harry walked through the back door of the art gallery building into the open air. Jonah was sitting on a wooden seat in the midst of trees and troughs of flowers. The old man was rolling a cigarette, careless of the tobacco he spilled on the ground.

“Jonah, you’d pollute the Garden of Eden.”

“Stop mithering and take the weight off your feet. I’ve earned this. Want one?”

“No thanks.” Harry was briefly nonplussed by the uncharacteristic generosity until he remembered that Jonah knew he had given up the weed.

Jonah finished his act of creation, lit up and then puffed reflectively, testing Harry’s patience to the limit.

“All right, this place, isn’t it? Peaceful.”

Aware that he was being teased, Harry spoke in a mild tone. “You dragged me over here,” he said. “What’s your news?”

“All in good time, Harry.” Jonah exhaled and a smile began to scale his rocky features. “Surprised you, did it?”

Harry could still scarcely believe what the detective had said on the phone, but he’d turned the idea of a relationship between Alison and Cathy over in his mind. And the more he considered the new picture, the more he began to understand.

“You’re absolutely certain?”

Jonah tugged at one of the hairs growing from his nostrils. “Is the Pope a Catholic? I tell you, those women are holed up together, close and cosy as peas in a pod.”

“Go on.”

“Sure you wouldn’t like a smoke?”

Jonah had the true storyteller’s knack of building suspense, Harry thought to himself. He was in the wrong job.

“Give me a break, Jonah. I know you’re dying to get it off your chest.”

“All right then.’ Jonah cleared his throat in ceremonial fashion, like a scruffy Poirot, about to reveal all to hapless Hastings.

“See, the problem I’ve had all along is the lack of leads. No one had any idea what this Alison Stirrup was up to. I had to assume she was alive until the opposite was proved. Trouble was, I had nowhere special to look.”

He paused, as if expecting sympathy. Harry waited for him to continue.

“So I started by trying to think of what she might be up to if she’d deliberately decided to cut herself off. Maybe with some bloke Stirrup knew nothing about. Yet no one so much as hinted at a boyfriend in the background.”

“Doreen Capstick was adamant there was no one when I spoke to her. Said the same to you, I imagine.”

Jonah winced at the memory. “Mutton dressed as lamb, that one. No way would her little girl play fast and loose. How often have I heard that from parents in my time? Not that I thought she was lying. Mrs. Capstick hates Stirrup, she’d have been glad for Alison to give him the elbow. She just hadn’t been let into the secret.

“Any road, I dug around a bit, didn’t turn up anything new. You could count her friends on the fingers of one hand and she didn’t seem on the same wavelength as her mother. Made me wonder if she hadn’t been trying to escape the Capstick woman as well as Stirrup.”

Jonah’s voice had lost its histrionic edge. He was talking to himself now and Harry felt he was catching a glimpse of the shrewd policeman Jonah had once been.

“I was trying to work out what Alison was like. I talked to her neighbours in those posh houses in Caldy, but the size of the bloody gardens gives people no choice but to keep to themselves. They agreed on a few things. She was a loner. Hard to get to know, not any kind of a flirt. Didn’t sound to me like a happy woman, though with a husband like Stirrup and a step-daughter who could be a real little cow, who could blame her?”

He finished his cigarette and had ground it with his heel into the path before Harry could utter an environmentally conscious word of reproach.

“She read a lot, people said, long boring novels. And made patchwork quilts — that was the closest she came to a passion. They take an age to design and stitch together, apparently. Lonely business, by the sound of it. Nobody could tell me anything else. When you’d said that, you’d summed her up.”

A rare cloud masked the sun. It was as hot as ever in this endless summer, but Harry shivered. Although he had known Alison Stirrup for years, he could not add to Deegan’s thumbnail sketch of her. How little we really know of the people we meet in daily life, he thought, how seldom we guess what lies behind the camouflage of social conversation.

“One thing bothered me. She had a friend I couldn’t get to see. The wife of Trevor Morgan. Stirrup told me the two of them were pally, but it turned out Cathy Morgan had done a flit a few weeks before Alison disappeared. That got me interested. I decided to find out a little more about Mrs. Morgan. And, curiouser and curiouser, there were several similarities between her case and Alison’s. A sudden departure, tracks well covered. No known boyfriends lurking in the background. One big difference, though. Cathy Morgan was loaded.”

Harry stared. “Loaded?”

“Her father was Paul Newman. The builder, not the film star. You’ll have heard of Newman’s Estates, more than likely. They threw up several of those barrack estates over the water. Mostly on the edge of Birkenhead. Newman died in the early seventies before Cathy got married. He and his wife only had the one kid. They’d had Cathy late in life and before long the old girl went senile. She had to go into a home and bloody Cathy never bothered much with her. And though the mother died six months ago, Trevor Morgan told me he thought she was still alive.”

“Didn’t he realise there was money in the family?”

Deegan shook his head. “Nor did I till I checked up. The day you saw me coming out of the Probate Registry, in fact.”

The fog in Harry’s mind was starting to thin. “And?”

“Newman died before the seventies property bubble burst. He left his old lady all the loot and she barely touched a penny. So it’s been quietly picking up interest all these years. Cathy must have had a shock herself when Ma died and she finally realised what the old lady was worth. Far as I can tell, she inherited the thick end of six hundred thousand.”

Harry whistled. “No wonder she wasn’t chasing Trevor Morgan for alimony.”

“There you are. Isn’t that women all over?”

The cloud had passed by and the courtyard was bathed again in sunlight. A young couple walked by, their arms entwined. The boy was talking softly to his girlfriend; she laughed musically at something he said. As they disappeared within the craft centre, Harry felt a pang of loss and of jealousy.

“Any idea what Cathy did with the money?”

Jonah’s attempt to look modest yet efficient collapsed into self-congratulation.

“You’re talking to an ex-CID man here, Harry. Finding out is second nature. There was the name of a solicitors’ firm on the probate papers. Maher and Malcolm.”

Harry groaned. “My old firm.”

“Is that right? Well, I happen to know the senior partner there. Geoffrey Willatt.”

A fellow Freemason, thought Harry. The old pals’ act.

“And?”

“I managed to have a word with Geoffrey. He’s the soul of discretion and couldn’t break a client’s confidence, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

“But from what he said I managed to piece the story together.”

Surprise, surprise. “Which was?”

“They’d acted for Newman for years. Wrote his will and his widow’s. It’s a good firm, no reason why the daughter shouldn’t use their services. And Geoffrey did let one thing slip. They’d acted for her in buying a place out in Cheshire. A house with small shop attached. Together with someone she described as a business partner.”

“Alison Stirrup?”

“Correct. The deal went through two months ago, before Alison buggered off, but he didn’t know the background on anything about Alison. The instructions came from Cathy and one of his assistants did the donkey work.”

Geoffrey Willatt hasn’t changed, thought Harry. “And the shop was where?”

“Town called Knutsford. Just off the main street.”

The soul of discretion had obviously been in expansive mood on this occasion.

“And you traced Cathy? Found Alison with her?”

Jonah frowned. He didn’t want to be rushed, to have his narrative flow disturbed.

“I went over there. I’d spun Geoffrey a bit of a yarn about the Newmans being old friends and he got his runner to phone me with the address. Funnily enough, when I turned up for a recce I thought I’d made a mistake.”

Again the significant pause. Harry obliged this time by asking obediently. “And what was that, Jonah?”

“New signboard over the window. Currer and Acton Bell. Trading as Patches.”

Something stirred in Harry’s memory. He put his hand through his hair, trying to visualise the old market town. Years had passed since his last visit, yet he could remember it well. He and Liz had read something in the paper about the May Day procession and had driven over to take a look.

“I know Knutsford,” he said. “Mrs. Gaskell, the nineteenth century novelist, didn’t she come from there? Of course. She wrote about it in Cranford.”

“So?” Jonah looked irked.

“She also wrote a biography of Charlotte Bronte, one of those sisters tucked away in their Yorkshire parsonage, pouring all their imagination into novels in the days when writing was a man’s game. They used pen-names. Charlotte was Currer Bell. Anne was Acton Bell.”

“Bloody fanciful if you ask me.”

“Not so fanciful for two women with a liking for Victorian literature who decided to run off together where no one knew them and set up a little cottage industry, flogging pricey patchwork quilts to the gin and tonic set south of Manchester.”

His thunder half-stolen, Jonah said grumpily, “Any road, I sat myself outside the shop and waited. The women were easy enough to recognise. I’d got a good description of Mrs. Morgan from her husband and Stirrup gave me a photograph of Alison. They seemed very lovey-dovey when they weren’t attending to customers.”

“Jesus.”

Jonah regained some of his original complacency. “Not a bad job of work, though I say so myself.”

Harry grinned and patted the old man on the shoulder. “Bloody well done. Have you told Stirrup yet?”

“No. Thought I’d have a word with you first.”

“Appreciate it.” Harry reflected for a few moments. “Okay, I can see why they wouldn’t move out and set up home together in a blaze of publicity. But why do you think Alison has kept quiet, even though she must have read about Claire’s disappearance and the discovery of her body?”

“I’ve asked myself that one. Of course she didn’t have much time for her step-daughter, but even so…”

“I need to talk to her,” said Harry.

“Thought you’d want to. But don’t get any ideas about doing the decent thing and not letting on to your client if his wife begs you to keep her secret safe. I want my fee paid.”

“Don’t we all? But let’s take it step by step. If Jack finds out Alison has deserted him for another woman and left him to persuade the police that he didn’t bury her in the garden, he just might decide to make up for lost time and drive over there and do her in with his bare hands.”

“And how can you stop him?”

“Your guess,” admitted Harry, “is as good as mine.”