Death and Other Obsessions, page 14
“According to Helena, Miss Bailey said a friend was coming to dinner,” said Patel. “She didn’t say who it was.”
Taylor turned to the nearest SOCO and pointed to the glass with brandy in it.
“You get any prints off that glass?” she said.
“Yeah, quite a good one,” he replied.
Otherwise the room was in good order with no signs of a struggle. There was a gas fire masquerading as coal glowing cheerfully in the fireplace and an impressive display of flowers on a console table on the far side of the room.
“If the dinner guest was also the killer we should have plenty of prints and DNA,” said Taylor.
“Not as many as you might think,” said Patel.
“How come?”
Patel led her back into the hall and into the kitchen. She immediately spotted an open dishwasher packed with clean dishes and glasses.
“Don’t tell me all the stuff from dinner’s in there,” she said.
“I’m afraid so,” said Patel.
Looking around the kitchen she spotted two empty wine bottles on a work surface. “What about them?” she asked.
“They’ve managed to get prints from those,” he said. “We’ll just have to hope that the dinner guest helped him or herself to wine.”
“Right, I’d better have a word with the lodger,” said Taylor. “Have you had a look around upstairs?”
“Not yet.”
“Right, off you go then.”
Taylor went through to the dining room. The table was covered with a tablecloth and a young woman with thick fair hair sat on one of the chairs beside it. Her eyes were red and her cheeks stained with tears. Taylor sat down opposite her.
“I’m Detective Chief Inspector Taylor,” she said. “I know you’ve had a terrible shock but I need to ask you some questions.”
The girl nodded.
“How long have you been living here?” asked Taylor.
“Just over a year,” she said.
“How did you come to be lodging with Miss Bailey?”
“I’m in my second year at uni,” said Helena, brushing away a tear. “I was in a hall of residence during my first term but I hated it. Pearl’s a friend of the family and she heard about it and offered me a room here.”
“That was kind of her,” said Taylor. “Where are you studying?”
“At King’s College, in the Strand.”
Taylor frowned.
“Isn’t that difficult to get to from here?” she said.
“It’s fine actually,” said Helena. “I get the Tube.”
“OK,” said Taylor. “Where had you been this evening?”
“Out with friends.”
“What time did you leave the house?”
“About six.”
Taylor scribbled in her notebook.
“What time did you get back?” she said.
“It was just after eleven thirty I think,” said Helena.
“That’s early for a Saturday night,” said Taylor. “Where had you been?”
“Just for a drink with a few friends,” said Helena. “We didn’t stay out late because we’ve all got masses of work to do.”
Taylor folded her arms.
“When you got back here did you notice anything unusual?” she said.
“Not until I went into the sitting room and found Pearl lying there.”
She buried her head in her hands and began to sob. Taylor placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.
“I know this must be very difficult for you,” she said. “We can talk some more when you’re feeling better. Just one more thing, do you have any idea who might have come for dinner this evening?”
Helena sat up and shook her head.
“Honestly, I haven’t got a clue,” she said. “Can I go to my room now?”
“Yes of course,” said Taylor.
She watched as the girl disappeared through the door leading to the hall. Shortly afterwards it opened and Patel came in.
“Find anything interesting?” she asked.
“There are four bedrooms upstairs,” said Patel. “Two of them are obviously not used much. The big one at the front clearly belonged to Pearl Bailey. The small one at the back has a desk in it and there are various textbooks on the shelves. There’s a single bed, but, well, I don’t think it’s been slept in recently.”
“What makes you think that?” said Taylor.
“The bed’s too neatly made up.”
“Maybe Helena’s a bit obsessional,” said Taylor with a wry smile.
A SOCO came into the dining room.
“How did you get on in here?” asked the chief inspector.
“We couldn’t get anything off those chairs but we’ve got some fibres off the armchairs in the lounge,” he said. “There were a few prints on that table but they’re a bit smudged. We’ve still got a couple of hours’ work left to cover the rest of the place.”
“Right, you’d better get on with it,” said Taylor. “I’ll organise a team of officers to talk to the neighbours first thing in the morning but right now I’m off home.”
DCI Taylor climbed back into her car and set off home. As she exited the Tibbet’s Corner roundabout and headed north towards Putney, she realised that she was exceeding the speed limit.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The SOCOs had finished in the study so Patel crossed the hall and went inside. It was a larger, grander room than the bedroom in which Joan Templeton had written her books. At its centre was a large, elegant desk with a computer on it. Otherwise its surface was clear, save for a notepad and pen and a framed photograph of Pearl Bailey with Helena. They were sitting at a table in the open air, each raising a glass of sparkling wine. Pearl’s face was a picture of happiness but Helena’s smile looked a little forced.
Patel turned his attention to the large bookcase behind the desk. One of the shelves was entirely devoted to the author’s own creations. He slid a fat volume out with his gloved hand and inspected it. It was called Hermione Croker and the front cover depicted an elegantly dressed young woman with long blonde hair. Checking the rest of the collection he found that all of them had different women’s names as titles. No Inspector Tewkesbury-type character here, he thought.
He turned the book over and looked at the back of the jacket. He read: ‘Hermione Croker appeared to have everything; the looks of an angel, a large flat in Chelsea and a good job in the city. The only missing ingredient was a man to share her charmed existence. Her search for love is in vain until handsome futures trader Bret Ingles comes into her life. But Bret has a secret.’
The story all seems to be here, thought Patel. I wonder how she managed to produce 500 pages from that?
He replaced the book, went across to the desk and slid open one of the drawers. Inside were a leather-bound desk diary and a new-looking smartphone. He picked up the phone and switched it on. The screen displayed a head and shoulders picture of Helena, bright-eyed and smiling. The expression on her face seemed to say ‘Come and get me’. He tried to open the phone but was confronted by a keypad and the words: Touch ID or Enter Passcode. He switched it off and slipped it into an evidence bag. There was no point wasting time trying to get at the contents now. Back at the station the password would be easily bypassed and the contents made available for analysis.
He turned his attention to the diary. There was an entry for Martin Rogers’ funeral and a few others indicating hair appointments and meetings with her agent but most of the pages were blank. Hopefully they would find more on the phone when its contents were downloaded.
The drawer below was full of bank statements. They indicated consistently healthy balances despite significant expenditure. There were regular deposits from her publisher, Amethyst Press, and Patel was surprised by the size of the amounts involved. However, a moment’s thought led to the realisation that the house and the car parked outside hadn’t come cheap.
The top drawer on the other side of the desk was devoted to tax and contained a mixture of correspondence from the Inland Revenue and a firm of accountants.
The final drawer was full of old photographs. In one packet there were black and white pictures of a group of undergraduates in gowns. Pearl Bailey was easily recognised but at first he had no idea who any of the others were. In one of them Pearl had her arm round another female student. Patel peered at it and it suddenly dawned on him that the other woman was almost certainly Joan Templeton. In a third, Pearl was pictured with Joan and two other students who were arm in arm. Could they be Martin Rogers and Rosemary Smart? he wondered. As he flicked through the pictures he found others in which these four students were together in different outfits and poses. The impression was of a group of close friends who had spent a great deal of time together during their student days. Who was the person taking the pictures? he wondered.
Looking at more of the photographs he noticed that in quite a few of them Pearl had her arm around Joan’s shoulder or waist, while the other couple embraced each other in a similar manner. He remembered that Pearl Bailey had told him that Joan Templeton had been in love with Martin Rogers during their time at Cambridge. There was no evidence of that in the pictures in front of him but perhaps the period when she became ‘besotted with him’, as Pearl Bailey had put it, had occurred later in their student days. He opened another packet. This one contained pictures of Joan and Pearl together. Some of them were sufficiently erotically charged to have been considered scandalous in the less enlightened era of the 1960s.
The picture of Joan Templeton that was emerging was somewhat at odds with the one he had formed on the basis of the previous evidence he had uncovered. There was clearly more to the mousy former schoolteacher than met the eye. Of course it was possible that this was an episode from her past she had put behind her when she left Cambridge. After all, Pearl Bailey had said that they had lost touch after university, only meeting again by chance at the Edinburgh Book Festival. But he still suspected that Pearl Bailey was an unreliable witness. Even if the two writers had indulged in a sexual relationship as students it didn’t explain their deaths, unless Pearl Bailey had killed Joan Templeton and someone else had killed her as an act of revenge. This scenario appeared to him too far-fetched to be credible.
The next packet contained more posed groups, several of them including another male student. He was tall with thick, wavy hair but his most arresting feature were his eyes, which stared at the camera in a manner that Patel found unsettling. In one of them he was alone with Pearl Bailey and had his arm around her shoulder. On the back the words ‘with Michael, 1965’ were written in pencil. Was this the same Michael who had corresponded with Joan Templeton? There was no way of knowing. The rest of the photographs didn’t seem to be relevant so he replaced them in the drawer but he scooped up the student photographs and put them in an evidence bag.
Next he turned on the computer. He was asked for a password. He tried ‘pearl bailey’ typed in several ways without success. He thought for a moment and then typed ‘helena’ and the home screen appeared. It was covered with folders, each with the name of one of Pearl Bailey’s books. He clicked on ‘Finder’ at the bottom of the screen and opened the folder marked ‘Documents’. This in turn was divided into folders with names like ‘Correspondence’, ‘Spreadsheets’ and ‘Presentations’. There were also folders with names that were almost certainly the titles of books. None of the contents appeared to be relevant to the matter in hand.
Next he opened her emails. There were a great many of them in her inbox and he only examined the first few of them before deciding that the rest could wait. Her calendar was empty, possibly because it wasn’t synched with her phone, he thought.
The ‘Photos’ folder contained more pictures of Helena. As he scrolled up through holiday photographs and selfies he came across a picture of Pearl Bailey with Anne Gregory. They were sitting in a restaurant and the picture and the date indicated that it had been taken several years earlier. There was a half-empty wine bottle on the table and an empty one stood beside it. Both women had broad smiles on their faces and were raising their glasses to the photographer. Patel presumed that they were celebrating the release of yet another bestselling book. Thinking back, he realised that there had been no similar pictures of author and agent together on Joan Templeton’s computer. He recalled that Edith Skinner had told him that Joan liked to buy her lunch when the editing of one of her books was complete. Perhaps she didn’t do the same with Anne Gregory. Or perhaps it was just that they didn’t take photographs of these occasions. After all, there were no pictures of Joan Templeton with Edith Skinner.
Patel yawned. It didn’t seem likely that there was anything else on the computer that was relevant to the case but a more thorough examination would be required in due course. He shut it down, slipped out of the chair and walked back to the living room. The SOCOs were still at work.
“I’ll be off then,” he said, and one of them gave him a weary nod.
His head was buzzing with possibilities as he walked to where his car was parked.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The following afternoon DCI Taylor collected Patel from Wimbledon Police Station and drove to the Westminster Public Mortuary. Once inside they were directed to the office where Dr Alison Jarvis was speaking into a small dictating machine. On seeing them she put it down and led them to the post-mortem room. They were greeted by a strong smell of body fluids and formalin.
The naked body of Pearl Bailey lay on a porcelain table. The skin of the scalp had been turned downwards and the roof of the cranium had been removed, revealing the irregular surface of the author’s brain. Dr Jarvis stopped at the head of the table and donned a pair of gloves.
“She was hit on the left side of the head with a blunt object of some kind,” she said. “It must have been fairly sizeable. Now that I’ve shaved the head you can see the bruising is more extensive than I’d originally thought. You can see it goes well up beyond the hairline. However, she died from the impact to the right side of the head.”
The doctor walked round to the other side of the table and picked up a pair of forceps.
“Here on the right you can see a fracture line and the bone in this area is depressed,” she said, pointing to the area just above the right ear. “The attacker was a little unlucky, assuming that he or she didn’t intend to kill her. The area of the skull that took the brunt of it, just here, is unusually thin and therefore easier to fracture. The other important thing is the site of the impact. The corner of the mantelpiece hit the side of the head in an area that we call the squamous portion of the temporal bone and a fragment of bone was driven inwards.” She indicated an area of bone with the forceps. “That part of the skull overlies an important blood vessel called the middle meningeal artery. A tear in this blood vessel led to massive bleeding inside the skull. This in turn led to an increase in the pressure inside the head causing compression of the brain. However, it’s just possible that if she had been found earlier and treated in hospital she might have survived, because in my opinion she wouldn’t have died immediately after she was hit.”
“Of course, the murderer wouldn’t know everything you’ve just told us,” said Patel. “Still, you would have thought that if you’d hit someone on the head as a result of losing your temper you’d seek medical help for them rather than leaving them to die. Would it have been obvious that she wasn’t dead do you think?”
“To anyone with a modicum of medical knowledge, yes it would,” said Jarvis. “To an average member of the general public, maybe not.”
“Was it a single blow to the head?” asked Taylor.
Dr Jarvis nodded.
“Yes I think so,” she said. “It must have been delivered with a fair amount of force, otherwise the victim wouldn’t have been knocked unconscious. I’m assuming that she was knocked out, because she was left to die or was thought to be dead already. After all, if she was conscious following the blow, she might have tried to reach her mobile phone to seek assistance and I imagine the killer wouldn’t have wanted that. In any case, there was no evidence at the scene suggesting that she moved from where she fell.”
“I found her mobile phone in a desk in the study,” said Patel. “She’d have had a long way to crawl to get it.”
“Was there a landline?” said Taylor.
“Yes, but the phone was in the hall.”
Taylor nodded and frowned.
“I agree the killer would have wanted to be sure she was dead before they left, if they meant to kill her, that is,” she said. “Now you’ve got more information, do you think a woman could have done it?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Jarvis. “The blow to the left side of the head only needed to be hard enough to knock her off balance. It was hitting the mantelpiece that did the real damage. If she’d been hit from the front, for example, she would have fallen backwards and the impact would have been on the thicker bone here, at the back of the head. In those circumstances she would quite likely have survived.”
“What you’re saying suggests to me that this wasn’t necessarily a premeditated act,” said Taylor.
“That’s an entirely reasonable deduction,” said Dr Jarvis. “After all, it’s unlikely the attacker knew anything about the anatomy of the skull and cranial contents.”
“I see what you mean,” said Taylor. “Did you find anything else?”
“Nothing relevant,” said Jarvis. “She was in pretty good shape for her age.”
“Well it all seems pretty straightforward,” said Taylor. “Anything you want to ask, Sanjay?”
Patel coughed nervously.
“She’d had a lot to drink on the evening she was killed,” he said. “Might that have any bearing on the severity of her brain injury?”
