Cori chuckled, ‘You make me laugh, sir.’
‘God, what a pair to have around in a crisis though: that Derek Waldron; and Charlie Prove sounds even worse.’
‘They’ve had a tough day, sir.’
‘But honestly, you think at a time like this they’d pull themselves together.’ Even as he said it it sounded harsh.
‘But these are the very times that people fall apart.’
‘We don’t.’
‘Well, that’s why we do the job we do.’
‘You’ll be Superintendent one day with a logical mind like that. So,’ he gathered up the arguments, ‘the major players, her friends: what did you make of them?’
‘Well, I saw Derek Waldron in the dayroom after you’d finished with him. He looked a bit shaken, I must say, I don’t know what you’d been doing with him. He just seemed like a very genuinely upset person, and has given us our only witness statement of interest.’
‘Yes, the girl on the stairs. So, Rachel Sowton?’
‘I don’t think I saw her again after she left us at the third floor flats. You were rather hogging her, I was told — didn’t the pair of you go for a walk?’
‘We bought oranges.’
‘That didn’t do Marlon Brando any good. But from third-party accounts, she is an excellent Duty Manager — tireless, on call twentyfour-seven, even too-hard a worker — and no one here has a bad word to say about her.’
‘Not quite twentyfour-seven — she was out that evening.’
‘Yes,’ Cori rustled the papers. ‘She was one of the first to give a statement before we got here. She was out last night between eight thirty and one am, though she wouldn’t say where she was, only that she was in town and went straight to her ground floor flat afterwards, where no note had been left by the orderlies of anything requiring her attention, so went straight to bed.’
‘And that leaves Charlie Prove. You’ve seen him?’
‘Yes.’
‘A contender?’
‘Not big-big, but solid-shouldered. Of all of the men here I’d guess he’s the one strong enough. But…’
‘Go on.’
At these words Cori said quietly, ‘You haven’t met him yet, have you, sir.’
‘No, and won’t get to any time soon if the doctor keeps needing to sedate him. I do know he reacted so badly when they found her that Derek Waldron half-wished it had been Rachel Sowton’s sorry lot to have to find their friend’s body alone.’
‘Well I can’t say about any of that, sir, only what I saw with my own eyes, when Charlie came down to the dayroom later.’
‘Which was? Spare no detail — fact, not analysis.’
‘Well, I was with the Constables, going through statements, talking to residents, when in he came to sit at one end with people who must have been close friends. Ellie brought him coffee…’
‘Ellie?’
‘The orderly. You spoke to her, with Mr Carstairs?’
‘Oh yes, of course. Carry on.’
‘I caught Ellie’s eye and called her over, and she confirmed it was Prove. Only, no sooner had I got up to approach than he was suddenly crying, making this noise like a screeching that you wouldn’t credit, and hugging a poor old dear in a way I thought might break her in half. Ellie and another orderly went to soothe him and took him away, only for the doctor to arrive soon after and put him under again.’
‘So you didn’t get a chance to talk to him?’
‘No; and going through these papers it doesn’t look like anyone else has either.’
‘So, he’s the last person in the place to give a statement. Interesting timings too, not crying till he saw you there, and saw were looking right at him.’
‘Yes, I wondered if he feared being interviewed.’
Grey wasn’t sure this was entirely what he was getting at, but then remembered the man’s history and felt bad,
‘Yes, you’re probably right. There are things I’ve learned about Charlie Prove today that I need to tell you now before I have a chance to write them up; most importantly, that he reportedly had a daughter who was killed, possibly on the Hills estates.’
‘Oh my. That might have been the last time he spoke to the police.’
‘It might have been the last time he found a body. A couple of other nuggets too: such as did you know that it was Stella who brought him to the Cedars, that she had known him in some capacity before he arrived here, and according to Derek Waldron, might even have been helping with his bills?’
‘And here I was doubting him,’ lamented Cori.
‘Oh, I think we have our doubts on all of them.’
‘I suppose it’s our job to doubt people.’
‘Quite right; and make no mistake, there’ll be one person we meet in the course of this for whom all doubts will prove right.’
‘You don’t thing the murder was in-house though?’
‘What do you think?’
After previous postings where she’d been little more than tea-maker and note-taker, it had taken some getting used to to have her senior officer ask, in all sincerity, what she thought about a case. She had made the decision before now that were she to achieve that rank herself (as she kept being told she would do) that she too would encourage her Constables and Sergeants in this manner. Yet on this occasion, she hadn’t much to offer,
‘Well, I think it’s too early to plum for one theory or the other, sir; but chancing my arm, we know that the schoolgirl didn’t kill her, so that leaves the killing earlier or later than ten; later if we go with the pathologist’s preliminary estimate.’
‘Well let’s hope so, as the other scenario leaves the girl running away after finding the body.’
‘Derek Waldron said she might have been upset when he saw her,’ remembered Cori from her own interview.
Grey considered, ‘But not hysterical, not screaming. She’d have gone and told someone. So if not ten, then what time?’ he asked rhetorically.
‘I’d say at least a half an hour later,’ said Cori leafing through the statements, ‘as ten was when half of these people went up…’
‘… and so no one could have gotten up and down those stairs at bed time without falling over residents and orderlies. No, no outsider could reasonably have done it at that time.’
‘So,’ she surmised, ‘the attack was either later, or committed by someone they’d have expected to see on the stairs at that busy time, popping in and out of rooms, only disappearing for a moment.’
‘I’d say that’s the nub of it. You know,’ he reflected, ‘Rachel Sowton has a theory of her own: that Stella’s routine should have seen her in bed by this time, and so if she was killed later then something had already happened to keep her up.’
‘To do with the schoolgirl? After all, she wasn’t meant to be there so late.’
‘Maybe, maybe. What do I know? We know nothing about the victim yet, and less about her friends. Where is that Holmesian logic when you need it?’
Cori started the engine.
‘And I’ll tell you another person we’ve seen today,’ continued Grey, ‘with the strength to hold a person still and throttle them.’
‘Not Ellie, the orderly?’
‘You said yourself, Cori, it’s our job to doubt people.’
‘But I spoke to her, sir; and had you had a chance to have done properly then you’d know she loves those people like a mother, she couldn’t do a thing to harm them.’
