The House Sitter

4

Hen had chosen to direct operations from her own police station at Bognor rather than park a mobile incident room beside the beach at Wightview Sands. The crime scene wasn’t likely to yield any more evidence than they’d picked up in that first search. Two high tides had already rearranged the sand and stones. The Range Rover was no longer where it had been found. It had been transported to the vehicle forensic unit.

“We have a possible victim, playmates-and I stress that word ‘possible’,” she told her team, assembled for the first formal briefing. Small as she was, there was no disputing her authority. “She is Dr Shiena Wilkinson, from Petersfield, whose Range Rover was found in the car park close to the scene last evening.”

“Don’t we have a positive ID yet, guv?” one of the team asked.

“Later this morning, I hope. One of the other doctors is going to the mortuary.”

“A photo?” Stella Gregson said.

“Not yet.”

“There ought to be one in her house.”

“And the lads doing the search have been told to look out for it.”

“Sometimes they have the doctors’ pictures on view in a medical practice.”

“Not in this case.” Stella was right to pick up on these points, but Hen wanted to get on. “The car is Dr Wilkinson’s. That’s for sure. All the others have been accounted for. She’s thirty-two and a GP, one of five who practise from a health centre in the town. She is unmarried and lives alone in Pine Tree Avenue, a newish development of detached houses overlooking that golf course that you can see from the Chichester Road to the south. She wasn’t on call over the weekend. She’d arranged to take three days off, Saturday to Monday. Likes going to the beach, apparently. But before we all get too excited about Dr Wilkinson, let’s get back to what we know for certain.”

She took a drag at her cigar and pointed with it to the poster-size colour photo of the face displayed on the board behind her. The woman’s wide-open eyes had the glaze of death and the mouth gaped. “Our victim has copper-coloured hair. All that was found with her was the two-piece swimsuit she was wearing. The towel was recovered from the water not long after. We were told she was partly hidden by a windbreak, but it was missing when our patrol arrived. Going by the quality of the towel and swimsuit, she wasn’t short of cash. She had a nice haircut and well-kept nails. No jewellery.”

“Do you think the motive was theft?” George Flint asked. George was the pushy sergeant who wanted Stella’s job.

“It has to be considered. But you don’t need to commit murder to nick a handbag from a beach. People take amazing risks with their property every time they go for a bathe. If you want to steal a bag all you have to do is watch and wait.”

“I know that, guv.”

“She may not even have had a bag with her,” Hen pointed out.

“So where did she keep her car key?”

“A pocket.”

“In a swimsuit?”

“They can have pockets.”

“Ah, yes.”

“Actually, this one didn’t,” Hen admitted.

“So where were her clothes? In the car?”

“We found no clothes in the car, and no bag either.”

“Then the killer walked off with her clothes, or her bag, or both. We’re dealing with theft here.”

Hen tilted her head sharply. “You don’t give up, do you? OK- probably she did have a bag. But theft may not be the real motive. The killer may have taken the bag to make identification more difficult. I don’t see the link between strangulation and stealing handbags.”

“What’s left if we rule out theft?”

“Wise up, George. Most killings are carried out by people in a close relationship with the victim. Family, lovers, ex-lovers.”

George Flint had hammered away at this theory for long enough. It was another voice that asked, “Guv, do we know if she was alone on the beach?”

“We know nothing. The lifeguard claims he didn’t see her alive. The witnesses all left before the patrol car arrived.”

“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.”

Olga was relieved. “That’s what I was thinking, too.”

“We could have been a million miles away. We saw nothing.”

“When we came back from our swim, and Haley was missing, I thought the woman was asleep,” Olga recalled, picturing the scene. “She was very still. She could have been dead already.”

“Must have been.”

“I wouldn’t put it quite so strongly as that. When Haley went missing, you went off to look for her and I was in no state to notice anything. The woman could have been strangled while I was standing there, looking along the beach. What a ghastly thought!”

“Unlikely.”

“And when the lifeguard brought her back, I ran up the beach towards them. It could have happened then.”

“Does it matter?” Mike said. “The whole point is that we don’t know because we saw nothing.”

“You were the first to find her dead.”

“Someone was going to find her. I’m keeping out of this, Olga. Our life is heavy enough. We can do without this.”

He’d talked her round. She was uneasy, but she didn’t want another argument. There had been too many in their marriage in recent days.

“What’s she like-Dr Wilkinson?”

Stella had targeted the receptionist she reckoned would say most if encouraged, the smiling woman in her fifties with carefully made-up eyes that gleamed through dark-framed oval rims. Mrs Bassington would have you believe she ran the entire health centre without interference from doctors, nurses or her fellow receptionists. She had shown Stella straight into Shiena Wilkinson’s consulting room, a stark place with little in it suggestive of the doctor’s personality except a Vermeer print on the wall behind the desk. There was a box of tissues on the desk. No family photos.

“What’s she like?” Mrs Bassington repeated. “A sweet doctor, very popular with the patients.”

“I meant in appearance.”

“Oh. Rather pretty in an intelligent way, if you understand me. She’s slim and about your height. Lovely hair with a reddish tinge to it. Natural, I’m sure. You can tell, can’t you?”

“Reddish?”

“Chestnut, I’d call it.”

Would chestnut pass for copper, the description everyone seemed to agree on? Stella wondered. She thought of copper as more red than brown. She was too experienced to put words in the witness’s mouth. “What length?”

“That I couldn’t tell you. She always wears it up, fastened across the back with a large wooden clasp like a geisha. It could be quite long. I’ve never seen it loose.”

“You knew she was off duty at the weekend?”

“Naturally I knew. The doctors’ schedules are my responsibility. Her next surgery was this afternoon.”

“And did she say how she planned to spend the weekend?”

“Not to me personally, but she goes to the beach to relax sometimes. She’s mentioned it in the past.”

“When did she join the team of doctors here?”

“It must be two years now. Her first GP appointment. We were overstretched at the time. Normally I’d ease a new doctor in, specially a first-timer, but she was given a full list straight away and she coped brilliantly. You see, Dr Masood had died suddenly and Shiena had to step into his shoes. We unloaded a few of his patients to the other doctors, but basically she took over his list.”

“Dr Masood? He was here before she came?”

“Yes.”

“And died suddenly?”

“Killed in a motorway accident. A great shock to us all. You don’t really believe Shiena is this woman who was strangled, do you?”

“We don’t know yet,” Stella said. “We found her car abandoned. That’s all.”

“It would be too awful-another doctor dying.”

“What can you tell me about her personal life?” Stella asked, leaving aside the possible implications of another dead doctor. “Is there a family?”

“Not here, for sure. I think they lived abroad. She used to talk about Canada. Her people are over there if they’re anywhere.”

“Any men in her life?”

“Apart from two or three hundred patients? I couldn’t tell you. She isn’t very forthcoming about her life outside this place.”

“Let’s talk about patients, then. I’m sure she must have had a few difficult characters on her books.”

“What do you mean by difficult?” For a moment it seemed Stella had miscalculated and was about to be lectured on patient confidentiality.

“Unstable personalities.”

Mrs Bassington spread her hands and laughed. “They’re two a penny in Petersfield. It’s that sort of town.”

“Anyone with a grudge against her?”

“All the doctors have complainers, if that’s what you mean. People who think they’re not getting the treatment they deserve, or the miracle cure they read about in some magazine.”

“Try and think, please. Someone angry enough to be a threat to Dr Wilkinson.”

“A man?”

“I’m asking you, Mrs Bassington.”

After a significant pause, she said, “Is this strictly between you and me? I wouldn’t want him knowing I gave you his name.”

“He won’t find out.”

She took off her glasses and polished them with one of Dr Wilkinson’s tissues. “There’s a certain man I could mention-a very unpleasant person who treated his wife appallingly, beating her up a number of times. Dr Wilkinson saw the injuries after the latest episode and got her into a women’s refuge in Godalming. The wife is so scared of him she won’t report him to the police. He’s very angry with Dr Wilkinson for interfering in his marriage, as he puts it. He’s not her patient, but he was here twice last week demanding to see her.”

“As recently as that?”

“The second time he marched into her room when she was seeing another patient. She called for help and we had to fetch two of the male doctors to evict him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Littlewood. Rex Littlewood. People in the town know him well. It’s the drink. He gets very abusive.”

“Did you see him yourself when he came in?”

“The first time, yes. No appointment. He came in last Monday morning and told me he wanted to speak to Dr Wilkinson. He isn’t even registered here. He’s not the sort of man who’d go to a lady doctor. I could see straight away that he was out to make trouble. I told him she was fully booked-which she was-and suggested he tried later in the week. Usually people like him don’t bother again if you can put them off. I can be very firm with difficult men. He did leave, but unfortunately he returned on Wednesday, when I wasn’t here, stormed in past reception and into Dr Wilkinson’s surgery, with the result I mentioned.”

“I’ll need his address. Does he have a car?”

“If he does, it shouldn’t be allowed. Each time I’ve seen him, he was smelling of drink.”

“Is the wife all right? Has anyone phoned the hostel?”

The blood drained from Mrs Bassington’s face. “Oh my God! You don’t think he’s killed her as well?”

“We should check. Where exactly is this refuge?”

Outside in her car, Stella asked for a PNC check on Rex Littlewood’s form. He had two convictions for being drunk in a public place, but none for vehicle offences. Nothing, either, for assault or violence. This didn’t mean he was a model husband; just that his wife hadn’t reported him.

Stella was wary. It would be all too easy to cast Littlewood as Dr Wilkinson’s killer, then find he was thirty miles away at the time.

She drove to Godalming and found the refuge north of the town, a derelict mansion someone had rented for a peppercorn. The rotten window frames were barely holding the glass. There were broken tiles on the ground by the front door. But someone answered the knock and it was a relief to hear that Ann Little-wood was alive and still in residence.

The mental picture Stella had built up couldn’t have been more wrong. The battered wife was a huge woman with arms like a wrestler’s. She was sitting on a bench in the overgrown garden, trying ineptly to shell peas. An entire pod’s worth shot out of her hands when Stella approached. Perhaps someone had tipped her off that the police were here.

“I only want to ask about your husband.”

Ann Littlewood didn’t look up. “Don’t want to talk about him.”

Stella picked some of the peas off the ground and dropped them in the colander. “Can I help with these?”

After serious thought, Mrs Littlewood made room on the bench by shifting her substantial haunches from the centre to one end. Stella sat beside her and scooped up a handful of pods.

“This isn’t to do with the way he treated you. It’s about something else.”

“What’s he supposed to have done now?”

“We’re not sure. Does he have a car?”

“A Ford Fiesta. It’s taxed.”

“Does he use it much?”

“Can’t afford to. Didn’t they tell you we’re on the social?”

“Does he ever drive down to Wightview Sands at the weekend?”

“All that way? What for?”

“The beach?”

“You’re joking. He’s never been near the place. He hates the sea. He’s always in the Blacksmith’s Arms at the end of our road or sleeping it off in the churchyard. What would he want with the beach?”

A burgeoning scenario withered and died. Stella had almost persuaded herself that Littlewood had driven to the beach with a few six-packs and chanced upon his enemy Shiena Wilkinson sunbathing close by. She preferred it to the notion that he’d followed her there in the car.

She tried a different tack. “Has Dr Wilkinson been to visit you here?”

“Why should she? I’m all right. It’s just bruises and stuff. You’ve only got to touch me and I bruise.”

“So you haven’t heard from her?”

“She’s busy, isn’t she? Got people who are really ill to look after.”

Between them, they finished shelling the peas.

“I’ll be given a load of spuds to peel now,” Ann Littlewood said as Stella left her. “This is no holiday.”

All the signs were that she would discharge herself and return to her violent husband in a matter of days.

Hen Mallin called St Richard’s hospital at eleven thirty and asked if Dr Mears, a colleague of Shiena Wilkinson, had been in as arranged to identify the body recovered from Wightview Sands. He had not. A call to the health centre revealed why. At eleven fifteen in the Waitrose supermarket one of the doctor’s patients had collapsed with chest pains. Dr Mears was at the hospital, in attendance at an intensive care ward, not the mortuary. The living had priority over the dead.

Hen seriously thought about having twenty minutes with her Agatha Christie tapes. It was that or another cigar. This case was an obstacle course. She had to be certain that the body was Dr Wilkinson’s. Stella had reported back with news of a violent character who had created a scene in the surgery the week before. Really they should interview this man as early as possible. Yet all she could do at present was chain-smoke.

She got through two more deciding how to pitch the TV appeal. She wanted her message to reach the Smiths, the family who had reported the dead woman on the beach. It was a tough decision whether to name them and their child, Haley. Normally you kept children out of it, but this name pinpointed them and might prompt friends and neighbours into asking if they were the Smith family in the news. On balance, she thought she would go for it. The Smiths might not even have heard about the strangling. Some people sailed through life without ever reading the papers or looking at television news.

She would also ask for other witnesses. Plenty of the public had been on that stretch of beach when the body was found. The sight of four men lifting a lifeless woman from the water must have created some interest. And who were those four men? Smith, for sure, the lifeguard for another, and two others. How much had they seen?

By the time she went in front of the cameras she would expect to know if the dead woman was Dr Wilkinson. If the information was right that the doctor’s nearest relatives lived in Canada, she’d make sure the police over there were requested to break the news to the family. Then she could go public and show a photo of the victim on TV-no reason not to-and ask for help in tracking her movements up to the moment of her murder. They’d need a bank of phones to handle all the calls coming in.

Now it was a case of drafting the text for her short slot in the regional news. Maybe thirty seconds. Every word had to count.

Satisfied at last with what she would say, she went for a late lunch in the station canteen. Half the murder squad was down there drinking coffee. She couldn’t blame them.

Hen enjoyed her food. Light lunches were out. She had a theory that in this job she could never be certain where the next meal would come from, so she stoked up with carbohydrates like a marathon runner packing energy before the race. Steak and kidney pie and chips today, followed by apple tart and custard. She claimed she could go for hours after a lunch like that, though she wouldn’t turn down a good supper.

At two thirty-eight, a call came in from a car park attendant at Wightview Sands. Hen was back in the incident room to take it.

“Yes?”

The speaker was self-important, typical of a certain kind of minor official, and he obviously had difficulty accepting a woman as chief investigating officer. “Am I speaking to the person responsible for the murder?”

“Not literally. He’s the one I’m trying to catch. If you want the person heading the enquiry, that’s me.”

“The senior detective?”

“Right. Have you something to tell me?”

“I’m speaking from the car park at Wightview Sands.”

“I’ve been told that.”

“Are you sure you’re in charge?”

“Look, do you have something to tell me, squire, or not? We’re very busy here.”

“I’m not personally involved,” he said. “If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re wrong. I wasn’t even on duty when the woman was found.”

“So what’s this about?”

“Actually a lady here would like a word with you.”

What a relief. “Put her on, then.”

The new voice was easier on the ear, low-pitched for a woman, well in control. “I understand you’ve taken possession of my Range Rover. My name is Shiena Wilkinson. How do I get it back, please?”