would never have believed it, but I am glad you’ve been willing to listen to me. May I ask, now that you know the worst, what you intend to do with your knowledge?’
Harry thought for a minute or two before he spoke. The Labrador stirred and considered him with questioning eyes while Kathleen studied her short unvarnished fingernails. ‘What can I do? Ernest Miller, the man who first urged me to believe that Edwin Smith did not kill your daughter, is dead. I’ve turned up several stones during the last few days and I haven’t always liked what I’ve found underneath them. I can’t see how anyone would gain if I were to broadcast what I have learned. Don’t misunderstand me: I can’t guarantee that the truth will never come out. Plenty of people are aware of the enquiries I’ve been making and someone may be able to put two and two together themselves. But I don’t see why I should encourage them to do so.’
Kathleen turned her gaze on him and he saw a flicker of hope in her pale grey eyes. ‘So you are willing to let sleeping dogs lie?’
‘What matters most of all to me,’ he said, ‘is that at last Vera Smith can rest in peace.’
So that’s that, he thought, as he unlocked the MG. Guy killed Carole and, although he escaped the law’s net, he was tortured by remorse until the day of his death. A perverse kind of justice had in the end been done. Ernest Miller’s speculation had been spot on: had that strange old man not set the enquiry in motion, Kathleen Jeffries might have gone to her own grave bowed down by the weight of her unshared secret. It was too late for her to rebuild her life, but at least she too might now have the chance to find a sort of peace.
A thin layer of snow lay on the pavements and his tyres threw up spray as he pulled away from the trim block of flats. Only two questions were left in his mind, yet Harry knew they would nag at him if he did not seek out the answers. First, who was Ernest Miller’s last visitor? Of course, he could now imagine no sinister motive for that unusual house call: Miller surely could have had no idea that Guy was Carole’s murderer and even if he had guessed, no-one had a motive to stop him broadcasting it to the world. Maybe it was simply an unimportant coincidence, like the break-in at Fenwick Court. The second question was something and nothing, really, but he wanted to put it to Ray Brill. Since he was in the neighbourhood, why not call? He decided to see if Ray was at home: he did not relish another trawl of the resort’s amusement arcades.
As he turned into the street where Ray lived, he found himself swerving to avoid a group of passers-by who had strayed from the pavement. He didn’t have time to swear at them: he was distracted by the scene that had captured their attention. A police van with flashing blue lights was parked fifty yards away and the narrow road had been cordoned off. He slammed down on the brake and came to a halt just short of the barrier. A uniformed constable approached and he wound down the window. He could hear walkie-talkies crackling, could see the sombre expression on the constable’s face.
‘What’s going on?’
‘There’s been an incident overnight, sir, I can’t say more than that. Now if you’d be good enough to turn around, you can find your way to Lord Street down the next road.’
But Harry wasn’t moving. The van stood outside the house he had called at before. The front of the building was blackened and all the windows had caved in. As he absorbed the implications of the scene, he groaned.
‘So there’s been a fire? What about Ray Brill — has anything happened to him?’
The constable leaned forward and spoke in an urgent tone. ‘You knew the gentleman, sir?’
His use of the past tense struck Harry like a physical blow — as did the sudden realisation that if Ray was dead, perhaps he had not yet solved the puzzle posed by Ernest Miller after all.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Within an hour he knew as much about Ray Brill’s death as the police — but that was very little. His stroke of fortune had been to catch sight of a familiar figure coming out of the police van. He was a sergeant, universally known as Wedding Cake because he had been married three times, and he was not only a neighbour of Jim Crusoe but also one of Harry’s most dependable divorce clients. Wedding Cake blamed the stress of the job for his matrimonial disasters, but everyone else put it down to chronic lust.
According to Wedding Cake, the alarm had been raised at eleven the previous evening. The fat man whom Harry had met on his first visit here had arrived home from the pub to be confronted with the acrid smell of smoke the moment he walked down the path to the door. The fire brigade had arrived within minutes, but by then the blaze had already taken hold. They had broken into the building to find the burnt remains of Ray Brill sprawled across the floor of his bedroom.
‘Overcome by the fumes?’ asked Harry.
‘We’ll have to await the post mortem to be sure,’ said Wedding Cake primly.
‘Come on. If it wasn’t for me, you’d be funding the Child Support Agency single-handed.’
‘All right, but this is strictly off the record, mind. All the indications are that it’s a put-up job and a pretty amateurish one. We reckon someone slugged Brill, then torched the place to cover his tracks, trying to make it look as though a carelessly tossed away cigarette butt was the cause of it all.’
‘Any leads?’
‘Nothing yet, but it’s early days. We’re going over the place with a fine toothcomb and my bet is that we’ll find some useful forensic before we’re finished. Having said that, right now, you’re probably our prime suspect.’
‘Thanks.’
Wedding Cake smirked. ‘We have to look at every possibility. You say you wanted to talk to Brill, but I still don’t know why. I appreciate you may have been a fan, but shouldn’t you be at work?’
‘Jim would certainly say so and no, I’m far too young to have been a fan of the Brill Brothers. As for my interest in Ray, it’s a long story.’
‘I’ve got plenty of time to listen.’
As Harry gave an edited account of his enquiries into the Sefton Park Strangling, Wedding Cake’s eyebrows rose and when he finally paused for breath, the policeman did not disguise his amazement.
‘No wonder you’re so slow at replying to telephone calls. You’re constantly running round poking your nose into murder mysteries.’
‘I suppose someone’s got to do it.’
‘Ha-bloody-ha. Now listen, do you think there is any connection between the waves you’ve been making and the murder of Ray Brill?’
Harry spread his arms. ‘Who knows? One minute I think the case is all over, the next it opens up again.’
‘Exactly why did you want to talk to Brill? Simply to let him know who had killed his girlfriend of thirty years ago?’
‘No, there was more to it than that. When we spoke, I felt he was holding back on me. I still believe that he was. Yet I can’t understand what he had to hide.’
‘Clear as mud, the whole thing. Anyway, you can leave this one to us now.’
‘If you say so,’ agreed Harry in his meekest manner.
Wedding Cake gave him a haughty look. ‘And if you do happen to make any inspired deductions, let me know straight away. I don’t want to find your corpse stretched out across the floor of your office. At least, not yet. I need to talk to you about the alimony for Sharon. I’ve met this lovely girl, you see, and…’
‘Listen, I’ll promise to tell you my hunches if you agree to have a word with me before you next propose, okay?’
‘Romance is dead,’ said Wedding Cake gloomily.
‘No, but it’s bloody expensive.’
All the way back to Liverpool, the question of why Ray Brill had been killed gnawed at him and by the time he was parking his car at the snow-carpeted Fenwick Court, an explanation was beginning to take shape in his mind. He felt sure he had learned enough over the past few days to fathom the mystery, but one last leap of imagination still needed to be made. Unsure what to do next, he was coming back to the office with the best of intentions; at the very least he knew he ought to check his post and messages. But when he saw Leo Devaney emerging from the
