? The Poisoning in the Pub ?
Thirty-Eight
“God, is there no end to their dirty tricks?” asked Carole. “They deliberately targeted Sylvia to put even more pressure on Ted. A flyer through the letterbox – I bet hers was the only house in the street that received that delivery. Why would a hot-shot lawyer like Melissa Keats, who’s probably exclusively retained by Home Hostelries, bother with a sordid little divorce case?”
“In the cause of feminist solidarity?” Jude suggested.
“I’m sure that’s how she presented it to Sylvia, but come on, you don’t believe that’s true, do you?”
Jude admitted that she didn’t really, no.
“Ooh, this is so frustrating!” Carole pressed her knuckles hard against her forehead. “We’ve now got yet another definite link between Home Hostelries and the harassment of Ted Crisp, and yet we still don’t have a shred of proof! I just can’t think of anything else we can do. I suppose we could try to find Derren Hart again, see if we can get anything more out of him, though I very much doubt if he’ll talk to us. He certainly won’t if he’s had a warning call from Will Maples or Dan Poke. But what else can we do?”
“One thing I could do,” said Jude, “is to have a word with Kelly-Marie. I haven’t talked to her since the day Viggo died. She might have some news from Copsedown Hall. I mean, the police must’ve been there investigating Viggo’s death, apart from anything else. It’s worth trying.”
She rang through. Kelly-Marie had done a morning shift at the retirement home that day. She was back at home. And she’d love to see Jude.
¦
“The policemen talked to me a lot about Viggo,” said the girl. They were once again in her neat flat with all its dog pictures and figurines.
Jude had noticed on the landing that the young man’s room was still sealed off with scene-of-crime tape. “Did the police let you stay here while they were investigating?”
“They said it’d be better if I went to my parents. Then they called this morning to say I could come back if I wanted to. And I did want to. I like it here. I like it at Mummy and Daddy’s too, but here I’m more independent.”
Jude was amazed by the girl’s calm. Here she was in a flat right next door to the scene of a particularly messy death, and yet she seemed to have a method of processing shock that would be the envy of other, more traditionally ‘normal’ people.
“Did you get any impression of what the police thought about Viggo’s death?”
“They thought he was playing a game of Russian roulette.” She spoke the words carefully, as if she had only recently learned them.
“But they didn’t say whether they thought he’d been playing it on his own?”
“I didn’t know more than one person could play Russian roulette.” The girl’s broad earnest face looked puzzled. Clearly the idea hadn’t entered her head that anyone else might have been involved in Viggo’s death.
“Did you tell the police about the man with the scarred face coming to see Viggo?”
“Oh yes. I told them about both times he came.”
“Both times? You told me he came here before Ray died, but when was the other time?”
“He came that evening, the evening Viggo died.”
Jude’s brown eyes sparkled with amazement. “Really? And was he still here when you heard the shot?”
Kelly-Marie shook her head. “No, he had left about half an hour earlier. I was in the kitchen when he went. He talked to me.”
Jude’s mind was racing as she pieced the scenario together. Derren Hart had come to see Viggo, primed him with beer and put the suggestion of Russian roulette into that most suggestible of minds. He had also perhaps loaded the revolver, telling the poor deluded victim that Russian roulette should be played with all the chambers full, or maybe only one empty. The ex-soldier hadn’t actually done the killing, but he had set it up.
But surely he hadn’t done it off his own bat? Derren Hart must have been obeying orders, just as surely as Viggo had obeyed orders to kill Ray. A trail of orders which had to lead back – though probably not in a way that could be traced – to Will Maples at Home Hostelries.
Suddenly Jude remembered details of Viggo’s rambling fantasies, tough-guy talk about orders arriving by text on a mobile phone, the mobile phone being jettisoned and the job done. Was that how he had received the order to kill Ray? And maybe, after Derren Hart’s visit, it had been another text message that had finally persuaded him to pull the trigger of the revolver pointing at his temple?
Hard on the heels of that came another recollection, of something Kelly-Marie had said, about how Viggo had always been throwing away perfectly good stuff, clothes and things, as he underwent his latest makeover. And how the girl had salvaged some of his cast-offs and taken them to the Oxfam shop.
Scarcely daring to hope that her intuition was right, and yet at the same time robustly confident, Jude asked, “Kelly-Marie, did you ever see Viggo throw away a mobile phone?”
“Yes, I did,” came the most welcome of replies.
“When?”
“It was a Sunday. I remember. Because I’d been to have lunch with Mummy and Daddy and they’d just dropped me back here.”
“Do you remember which Sunday it was, Kelly-Marie?”
“Not last Sunday…” She looked confused as she tried to work it out. Then her face cleared. “It was the Sunday that Ray was going to see Dan Poke from off the television.”
Ray Witchett’s last day on earth.
“I remember,” Kelly-Marie went on, “as I came into the hall that Sunday from saying goodbye to Mummy and Daddy, I saw Viggo coming downstairs. And he looked, I don’t know, like he was doing something wrong…there’s a word…?”
“Furtive?”
“Perhaps. I don’t know that word. Anyway, when I got back up here, I looked out of the window and I saw Viggo walking along the street, down that way. And there was one of those big boxes for rubbish…”
“A skip?”
“Yes. A skip. Like in skipping.” Kelly-Marie smiled, pleased at the notion.
“And you saw Viggo drop something in it?”
“Yes. And I thought it was probably something that was still valuable, because Viggo was always throwing away good stuff. So later in the evening, I went down to the…skip…and I found what he’d dropped. It’d had gone quite deep down the side, but I managed to pull it out.”
“It was a mobile phone?” asked Jude, hardly daring to hope.
She was rewarded with a huge beam and a nod.
“I don’t suppose, Kelly-Marie…that you’ve still got it?”
The beam grew broader as the girl crossed to a drawer and produced from it a brand-new-looking mobile phone. She handed it across to Jude. “I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I know Oxfam take clothes, but I don’t know whether they take mobile phones. I was going to ask Mummy and Daddy, but I forgot.”
Jude looked with disbelief at the phone in her hand. Could it be that she finally held in her hand the evidence she had despaired of ever finding?
She was initially frustrated, because, of course, the phone, sitting in a drawer for over a fortnight, had no power. But fortunately it fitted the same charger as Kelly-Marie’s mobile, so they soon had the handset plugged in and active.
Jude went into the ‘Short Messages’ menu and selected ‘Inbox’. There were two messages. Jude opened the more recent one first, the last communication Viggo had received before he threw the mobile away. It was timed at 15.17 on the Sunday of Dan Poke’s gig at the Crown and Anchor, and couched in the sort of espionage-movie language which held such a fatal attraction for Viggo.
AGENT 217 IS BECOMING A DANGER TO THE PROJECT. LIQUIDATE HIM. KNIFE, NOT GUN. THE MONEY WILL GO INTO THE USUAL ACCOUNT. JETTISON THIS MOBILE. K.
Now perhaps they had some proof.
