‘Matilda’s father. I saw him enter three days ago and I never saw him leave.’
‘That doesn’t mean he’s inside.’
‘There are no lights on, not even at night, and there’s a smell.’
Wendy pressed her nose close to the front door. ‘He’s right,’ she said.
‘We don’t need a warrant for this,’ Isaac said. ‘Ask the uniforms in the patrol car if they have an enforcer.’
‘No need for a battering ram,’ Wendy said. ‘If Amelia’s at home, she’ll probably have a spare key.’
Two minutes later the door to Matilda Montgomery’s house was opened, the key having been supplied by Amelia Bentham. Isaac entered on his own, ensuring that he had shoe protectors on his feet, nitrile gloves on his hands. The old man had wanted to go in too, but Larry had told him firmly that if anything was untoward then the fewer people inside, the better.
The old man didn’t understand. To him, he had alerted the police and that somehow gave him privileged status. A small crowd was starting to form outside the building; Amelia standing to one side with Wendy.
‘What do you reckon?’ Wendy asked the young woman. ‘Stanley Montgomery, have you seen him recently?’
‘Once, but that was when they put it up for sale. He acknowledged my presence, but he didn’t want to talk, never asked if I had a spare key. Unusual, I thought at the time, and why he didn’t change the lock, I don’t know.’
‘Has the place been painted, carpet changed, that sort of thing?’
‘Not that I know of. What if someone buys it, moves in, and then finds out that Matilda committed suicide in there?’
‘I’d say they had a lousy solicitor. The estate agent will only address questions asked, and he’ll definitely not be proffering that fact. It’ll only lower the price, render if virtually unsaleable.’
‘That’s what I thought. Why would he want to sell it so soon after? It makes no sense.’
‘Nor did the treatment of his wife and his children, and they’re all dead.’
Isaac walked along the small hallway, opening a door to one side and entering an open-plan area. Nothing appeared out of order apart from a distinctive smell. He quickly found that it was because the fridge door was open, some cheese inside a delicate mouldy blue. Also, a milk carton was open, its contents gone off.
Isaac felt that there was no more to see and that the small house was in otherwise good order. He checked in the pantry at the rear, nothing to see. He then climbed the stairs to the two bedrooms upstairs. There was no sign of anyone in the first. The second room, the room where Matilda Montgomery had killed herself, was in front of him. Gingerly, Isaac opened the door, not so much from a sense of trepidation, more from a belief that he was interfering in the domain of the dead.
Inside, what he had hoped not to see loomed in front of him. He retreated from the room, retracing his steps, and rejoined Larry and Wendy outside.
Wendy could see from his face that something was wrong.
‘Call Gordon Windsor, tell him to bring his team here,’ Isaac said as he walked away. ‘And get the uniforms to establish a crime scene.’
‘Stanley Montgomery?’ Larry asked.
‘Swinging from the same beam as his daughter. No need to rush in and check his pulse. He’s been there for a couple of days from what I can see.’
The old man adopted a look of ‘I told you so’. Amelia Bentham shed a tear.
‘So much tragedy for one family,’ Wendy said.
‘Is there a suicide letter?’ Larry called to Isaac.
‘There’s one. Wait for Gordon Windsor to give us the all-clear and then we’ll get to read it.’
‘We could read it now,’ Wendy said. ‘It could be important.’
‘It could be, but wait. The man’s dead, and it’s suicide. A couple of hours is not going to make any difference either way.’
Chapter 29
A full team of crime scene investigators were in the house in Pembridge Mews, as were Isaac and Larry. A smell continued to permeate it, no longer coming from the opened fridge but from upstairs where the body of Stanley Montgomery hung.
‘The letter?’ Isaac asked Windsor, the senior crime scene investigator.
‘It’s bagged.’
‘We need to read it.’
‘As long as you sign for it. There’s no doubt that he killed himself, messy though.’
‘That’s what suicide is.’
‘You’ve confirmed it’s the father. She had made a decent knot, even though she would have been strangled, not broken her neck. But he would have suffered for longer. The knot wasn’t tight, and if he had tried, he could have probably used his weight to break the beam, or failing that to have stretched the rope sufficiently for him to touch the floor.’
‘He would still have died.’
‘Probably. What was his state of mind?’ Windsor asked.
‘His son had been murdered, his daughter hanged from the same beam, his wife dead in hospital from a broken heart and malnutrition,’ Larry said.
‘Not much to live for then. There’s a half-empty bottle of whisky under the bed, also a bottle of sedatives.’
‘The daughter committed suicide without any of those.’
‘It makes no difference,’ Windsor said.’
‘Agreed. Now the letter,’ Isaac said.
‘Is it his writing?’ Windsor asked as he handed the letter over.
‘I can’t be sure. What had you hoped to gain from bagging it?’
‘Confirmation that the man had written it. Obvious, I’ll grant you that, considering that it was in the room with him, and no one else has been in. It may help you if we know whether it was written in here, or if he brought it with him. Whether he had contemplated suicide or whether it was spur of the moment.’
‘He had to buy the rope,’
