‘It would be suspicious, I agree,’ said the detective.
‘Did you ask Thea the questions?’ Stephanie enquired, wondering at the brevity of the interview. ‘The ones you came with?’
‘It was really just the one.’
‘And I didn’t know the answer,’ Thea admitted. ‘I’ve been pretty useless, in fact.’
Finch Graham tapped his teeth for a moment. ‘There are a whole lot of connections we haven’t worked out, you see. Along with some findings at the scene.’
‘Which he won’t tell us about,’ Thea said to Stephanie.
‘Well, it wasn’t Mrs Frowse,’ said Stephanie firmly. ‘You should let her go back to her family. Percy’s missing her.’
The return to ordinary family life felt terribly wrong to Stephanie, but she did her best to go along with it. After all, it was still Christmas, and she had failed hopelessly as a detective, so she ought to try and forget the whole murder business.
Timmy was sifting through his new toys in the sitting room, taking them out of the big cardboard box they’d gone into as he unwrapped them, and putting them in piles. ‘Wow, Tim! Look at all those new things!’ said Thea.
‘Lots of them were in my stocking.’ He fingered a puzzle in which you had to move small squares in a frame to make a picture. ‘I like this one. Stephanie’s got one the same – except it’s a different picture.’
‘I had those when I was small. I didn’t know you could still get them.’ Thea was careful to preserve the myth of Santa for another year or two, where Timmy was concerned. One of her ploys was to find unusual items that harked back to an earlier kind of childhood.
Stephanie was inclined to be impatient with all this after the events of the afternoon. She felt superior to Timmy in his artificially preserved innocence, including his determination to believe in Santa Claus. She knew that deep down he was perfectly aware that adult human beings supplied the contents of his stocking, but he still enjoyed the pretence, and wouldn’t hear any suggestion that it was false. It produced a tension in her that was uncomfortable. She snatched at the puzzle toy, and examined it, holding it away from her brother. ‘Mine’s better,’ she said nastily.
‘Hey!’ protested Timmy. ‘Give it back.’
‘Let me have a go on it first.’ She started shifting the little squares, sliding them around each other, but always finding the bottom of the picture stubbornly returning to one side, and the corners refusing to co-operate. Within two minutes she had thrown it back at Timmy in frustration. He took it and deftly arranged it into the finished picture in forty seconds flat.
‘Easy,’ he said. ‘You have to push them the opposite way to what you want, sometimes. You need to think about the gaps,’ he tried to explain.
‘I have a feeling it’s true that boys are better at this sort of thing,’ said Thea. ‘Although my brother was always hopeless at jigsaws.’
‘I am as well,’ said Stephanie crossly. ‘And I bet Mrs Gladwin is, too.’
‘She probably is,’ Thea agreed. ‘Although she seems to work by some sort of lucky intuition, much of the time. She can’t possibly really think Beverley killed that man, can she?’
Timmy looked up questioningly. ‘Does she?’ he said.
‘They arrested her,’ Stephanie informed him.
‘I don’t get it at all,’ Thea went on, not really talking to the children so much as speaking her thoughts aloud. ‘If the man was electrocuted, why do they think it was done deliberately? Isn’t it always an accident?’
‘Not if it’s the electric chair,’ said Timmy.
‘What do you know about that? It’s much too gruesome for you.’ Thea looked mildly concerned.
When the small boy explained about The Green Mile, Drew also took notice. There followed a pointless bit of bickering about the dependability of Oliver’s parents.
‘It’s a very odd investigation,’ mused Jessica, interrupting. ‘I mean – surely the two Frowse men must be the main candidates for killing the landlord bloke? They hated him. He made their lives a misery. With him dead, the place will probably be sold, and a new person would be sure to be an improvement.’
‘Not at all,’ said Thea. ‘That’s wrong in about ten different ways. For a start, it’s Carla who they really hate. Rufus was an idiot, too rich for his own sanity, but not really malicious like her. Plus those terrible daughters, who float around causing trouble and taking up space. Plus, if the estate gets sold again, there could well be ructions for the tenants. It would make Carla even more determined to eradicate them. Beverley talks big, arming herself with all the relevant legal protections, but they’re really very vulnerable. Nobody would speak up for them if it came to the crunch. They’d have to pay for a barrister or something – which they couldn’t hope to do.’
Stephanie was following this closely, wondering why Thea was making it all so complicated. ‘You should just ask Mrs Gladwin to tell you what evidence they’ve found,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that the simplest way?’
‘She wouldn’t tell me. Not while she’s still right in the middle of it all.’
Jessica made an impatient tutting noise. ‘I wish I’d been there,’ she said. ‘She might have told me something – one police officer to another.’
‘I doubt it. She sees you more as my daughter than any kind of colleague,’ said Thea. ‘And I suppose we’ll know soon enough. It’s not really as if we’re personally involved, is it? I like the Frowses, and would do anything I could to help them feel more secure – but this is way beyond anything I can offer them. Beverley going off like that is very mysterious, let’s face it. It looks bad. I’m not surprised she’s top of the list of
