progress.
‘What’s this all about, Charlie?’ he asked, slamming his car door.
I told him about my conversation with Lisa the night before, about the suspicions that her father-in-law was mixed up in the Hartog-Praat robbery, and about her intimation that she knew all about it. He gave me a sideways look, as if to hint that there were other reasons, too, for my visit.
‘And her throat’s cut?’ he said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Tell me what you know.’
‘Front door open — wide open, that is. I’ve had a look round the outside and there’s no other sign of entry. Either the door was unlocked or he had a key. No sign of a struggle. He must have known exactly where she was. It’s an en suite bathroom, not where you’d find it if you didn’t know the layout of the house. The water was flat cold. No rigor mortis, but skin macerated. She rang me about ten last night. I reckon she died not long afterwards. The killer left in a hurry. Are you having a look?’
‘I believe you, Charlie. No, I’ll wait till the anoraks have done their stuff.’
‘One more thing. There’s a mobile phone lying on the hall carpet. With a bit of luck he’ll have dropped it on his way out.’
Les’s eyebrows shot up. ‘In the hallway?’ he asked.
‘Mmm.’
‘Just inside the doorway?’
‘About three yards inside.’
‘C’mon, then. Let’s see it.’
It was a Sony. We knelt on the carpet and examined it. Look but don’t touch, as my mother used to say. There really should be a standard for what all the buttons do.
‘Looks to me as if it’s still on,’ Les observed, pointing at the display. ‘Any idea what’s what?’
I shook my head. ‘No, but one of them should tell you the number of the owner.’
‘But which one?’
‘No idea. On mine you press the F button and another, but don’t ask me which. Have it checked for prints, then consult an expert.’
‘I suppose so.’
Someone outside shouted, and we let the SOCOs in. We showed them the phone and they cordoned-off that side of the hall with their coloured tape. Superintendent Isles donned a disposable overall and went with them to examine the body, while I waited outside, where the air was fresher.
He was visibly ashen when he emerged, ten minutes later. ‘It’s at times like this I wish I still smoked,’ he admitted.
‘I doubt if it would help,’ I said.
‘Probably not. How long had you known her, Charlie?’ he asked, concerned.
‘Only met her once, plus a long phone call. She was lonely. She hinted that she’d rung other people, but nobody wanted to talk to her. A look at her list of calls might be a good idea.’ I didn’t mention that I’d suggested she have a hot bath and go to bed.
‘Mmm. She was certainly a looker. Can I leave the calls with you?’
‘No problem.’
‘Where’s that bloody pathologist?’ he snapped.
We stood in the doorway, arranging the mechanics of another murder investigation to go with the two unsolved ones that Les was already overseeing for other divisions. I was hoping he’d leave this one to me, as with the Goodrich case. A red grouse landed on the wall, saw us, and flew off again, cluck-cluck-clucking impatiently as he went. Spots of rain were blowing about in the wind.
My phone was ringing again. I plunged my hand inside my jacket and withdrew it, clutching the dreaded instrument. ‘Priest,’ I said.
The warbling continued. It wasn’t mine. ‘It’s yours,’ I told the super.
‘No, it’s not,’ he said, looking at it. We both turned and stared through the open doorway, to the phone on the floor, chirruping its song of greeting.
Someone was determined to get a reply. ‘Answer it,’ I suggested.
‘God, what if it’s someone for her?’
‘Then they got a wrong number.’
We stepped inside and resumed our kneeling positions around the raucous piece of electronic wizardry. Isles removed a pen from a pocket and pointed at a button. ‘That one, you reckon?’ he asked.
‘I’d say so.’
He eased the aerial out with a fingernail, pressed the button with a little green telephone on it and said, ‘Hello.’
I couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, so I stretched upright. Isles listened, careful not to touch the phone with his ear. An earprint is as distinctive as a fingerprint, and we use all the help we can get.
‘Yes, sir,’ I heard him say, ‘we were hoping you’d ring. Your mobile phone has been handed in to the City Police headquarters.’ More listening, then, ‘Earlier this morning. Would you like to collect it, sometime?’
I couldn’t help smiling. This was too good to be true. Isles said, ‘Shall we say in about an hour. That would make it twelve noonish. If you could give me your name, sir…’ He held a hand up to me, for writing material. I pulled the cap off his pen for him and held my notebook at an open page.
‘And your first name, sir… Thank you. And your address is…’
I couldn’t read his scrawl upside down. He lowered the pen and said, ‘Thank you, sir. So we’ll see you in about an hour. Goodbye.’
I turned the book around and held it towards the light.
‘Know him?’ Isles asked, standing up and flexing each leg to restore the circulation.
I nodded. ‘Yeah,’ I said, when I’d deciphered his hieroglyphics. ‘I know him all right. We go back a long way.’
I’d only met Dominic Watts the day before, but it felt like a lifetime ago.
Personally, I’d have hung on to the phone and let Watts go. Made some feeble excuse about doubting his ownership of it, but we’d let him know, soon as pos. We could have picked him up any time. Mr Isles arrested him and made him strip bollock naked. Even confiscated his shreddies and leather hat for forensic examination. I could have gone down to the cells at City HQ and gloated at him, sitting there in his nifty paper one-piece suit, but I didn’t.
What I did was spend several hours explaining to Isles, a fresh-faced DCI unknown to me and a couple of DSs the relationships between Watts, Goodrich and the Davis family. They met, we suspected, through the diamond investments, which were legitimate but unwise. How Goodrich and K. Tom talked their way out of that, when they crashed, was only conjecture, but maybe the Hartog-Praat gold came into it.
‘Did Watts know Lisa Davis?’ Isles asked.
‘Can’t be sure,’ I told him, ‘but there’s no reason why he should have. Maybe his address book will tell us different.’
‘He’s denying everything,’ Les told us. ‘Claims he never heard of her. He lost the phone somewhere in town and is threatening us with a wrongful arrest suit. He’s an indignant so-and-so.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said.
We were interrupted several times as bits of information filtered through. First of all it was the fingerprint section. The mobile phone was covered in marks, as one might expect, but they didn’t match the ten-print form made by Dominic Watts after his arrest. A small piece of lateral thinking and a call to Criminal Records did produce a comparison, though, indicating that the phone had been last used by Michael Angelo Watts, son of Dominic.
‘Shit!’ growled Isles. ‘It looks as if Sonny Jim borrowed his daddy’s phone. We got the wrong person.’
‘Let’s drag the son in, then,’ the DCI, who was called Makinson, suggested. ‘Then see what Forensic can come up with to put one of them at the scene. One of them did it.’
‘Maybe Forensic won’t find anything,’ I argued. ‘Picture what happened. Someone walks straight in, cuts her throat, walks out again. If they got blood on their clothes they had over twelve hours to destroy them or lose them
