Bottled Spider Read online

  ‘And the firm was?’

  ‘Jewell, Baccus & Dance.’

  ‘And Forbes? Apart from his advisory capacity, who does he work for?’

  ‘Himself, I think. The City, I gathered. Big-wheel financial advice.’

  ‘And when was this?’

  ‘Oh, just after we got engaged, and I’ve seen him again since then. Jo had people in for drinks, two, no three months ago. Barry Forbes was there. Knew her very well indeed, they talked about his sister, and he knew Jo’s parents.’

  Barry Forbes, Emily Baccus — yes there was an address and telephone number — then Gerald Vine.

  ‘Gerald Vine?’

  ‘The actor.’

  Of course, she thought, she knew the name. ‘Gosh, Gerald Vine’s a friend?’

  ‘And Betty Tinsley, Gerald’s wife. Don’t forget that Jo did two years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art before she came to the BBC. Betty was a contemporary, she’s a good deal younger than Gerald.’

  Gerald Vine had recently starred in a swashbuckler made out at Pinewood studios. Gerald Vine and Betty Tinsdale both. Suzie had at one time been a shade star-struck and remembered Gerald Vine from his great early success, Ball at the Palace, in which he had played a dark, brooding landowner in the Mr Rochester mould.

  She also remembered Dorothy Wood, Michael Judge, Harry Henton, Roland Gee, Mavis Truebridge, Leonne Carter and Elizabeth Briggs. The names were in Jo Benton’s address book and Suzie could put faces to all of them, huge faces as seen on the silver screen.

  ‘Before RADA where did she go to school, Mr Fermin?’

  ‘Farnham Place in Surrey.’

  Suzie knew about Farnham Place because St Helen’s had played hockey against them. Farnham Place was one of those schools that girls at St Helen’s longed for: an experimental mixed boarding school where, so all the stories went, the pupils ran the discipline and went to the classes they chose; where everyone was known by first names. Teachers and pupils.

  The members of HM Forces who were in Jo Benton’s address book had all been school friends; all the right age: Leading Wren Monica Parker; First Officer Maureen Riseque; Section Officer Polly Smythe: Lieutenant Commander Jock McCormick RN; Captain Martin ‘Midge’ Fowler MC; and not least Squadron Leader Fordham O’Dell DFC. Each one, she presumed, had played a significant part in Jo’s life. School friends you keep up with usually did, and that night she travelled back to St Martin’s Lane with lists of names running through her head. It was like the end of the film Goodbye Mr Chips, she thought, where the old man lies dying and the long lines of boys he has taught are superimposed on the image: their voices running on the soundtrack. She laughed because Ned Griffith had called the film Auvoir M. Pommes Frittes. She had thought that was very funny.

  Now, she could also see the names: long columns of the names, their addresses and telephone numbers running inside her head.

  Jerry wasn’t over tonight. He was bombing Liverpool with the lights of the Republic of Ireland pointing the way, and markers set up by patriotic Welsh Nationalists on the Pembrokeshire coast — though that didn’t get into the papers at the time.

  Suzie walked, lonely, back from Leicester Square tube station without any contact with humanity except for a warden who told her to watch it with her torch. Bloody little Hitler.

  It was a crisp night with more than a hint of frost there among the buildings, the pavements glittering like diamonds from the compound they used, and the music in Suzie’s head straight from her teens — ‘He dances overhead / On the ceiling near my head / In my sight, through the night.’ She had seen the film — Evergreen — with a bunch of school friends on a Saturday afternoon, back in the early ’30s. Jessie Matthews was the star and Suzie had longed to be just like her: an all-singing, all-dancing beauty full of confidence, drawing men to her like the proverbial flies to a honeypot.

  She got into the flat just before midnight and the telephone was ringing.

  Eight

  It was Suzie’s sister, Charlotte. She had been ringing every fifteen minutes since ten o’clock and she was concerned. She had even rung Camford nick, then lost her nerve and said it was a wrong number when she got through. ‘It’s the number you asked for,’ the operator told her accusingly.

  ‘You okay. Suzie?’ There was worry in her voice. ‘I thought something had happened to you.’ They knew each other inside out: not only did they look like twins, but also they could read each other’s minds, think each other’s thoughts.

  ‘Charles. Yes, I’m fine and no, nothing’s happened to me. It happened to somebody else.’ She told her sister about the murder, the victim and her part in the inquiry.

  ‘What, the winter-drawers-on girl?’ Charlotte squeaked, proving that it was not just men who remembered Jo Benton for her one tiny lapse of taste. ‘How? How was she killed?’

  ‘I promise, Charlotte, you really don’t want to know. Change the subject — how’s Vernon?’

  ‘That’s one of the reasons I’ve been ringing you. I had a letter this morning. He’s not going to be home for Christmas like he thought.’

  ‘Oh, Charles.’

  Vernon was just completing the recruit training at the Royal Marine Depot at Deal. He had been coming home on leave for Christmas, before going to the pre-Officer Cadet Training Unit (Pre-OCTU), at Exton, in the New Year.

  Marines from up North and from Scotland were getting the New Year leave not Christmas. Charlotte told her, ‘Then they suddenly needed an extra two marines to cover guard duties over Christmas and they drew straws for it.’

  ‘And Vernon lost?’

  ‘He’s pretty chocker about it, but there’s nothing he can do, and now I’m getting pressurized by Mum. She wants me to go to Newbury for the whole holiday and I really can’t face the bloody Galloping Major with the kids. Lucy would be okay but it upsets Ben to be away from home. He needs routine and familiar things, he finds it very difficult at grandma’s. The Galloping bloody Major doesn’t help either, treats him like a mentally defective.’

  ‘I know. I’ve seen it.’

  Ben would be five on his next birthday, their firstborn, a cerebral palsy case who was profoundly and incurably deaf: therefore couldn’t speak and had his legs twisted, so that he could not walk. As so often with such cases, Ben was alert for a lot of the time and picked up some skills quite quickly, but he needed constant care and could do very little for himself, locked as he was into his own private world. His big problem was that he could not communicate.

  But he showed emotions: tears, misery, unhappiness and pleasure. He expressed delight and happiness by rapidly jerking his arms about — sometimes an involuntary action — and making little hooting and tooting cries as he flapped his hands, something that gave him great joy. He could colour things with crayons and he was also showing skill at doing jigsaws. Suzie would sometimes weep at the thought that this lovely little boy was unlikely ever to talk or have any real understanding of the life so close around him.

  ‘Anyway,’ Charlotte said, ‘I wondered what you were doing. For Christmas. I mean.’

  ‘Don’t know if I’m going to get any time off.’ Then she began to sing quietly, ‘Bumpety-bumpety-bumpety-bump ...’

  And Charlotte joined in, ‘Here comes the Galloping Major.’

  So they both had a short laughing fit.

  Christmas had once been the most joyous day of the year for the girls. When Daddy was alive he seemed to be the very spirit of Christmas, infusing everyone around him with the delights of the season. Even now, in her early twenties, Suzie experienced a thrill of anticipated pleasure and excitement as she lay in bed on Christmas Eve. Until now that is, she reminded herself.

  ‘If I do get some leave I’ll have the same kind of pressure from Mum. She’ll want both of us in Newbury.’

  ‘And you’d want to be there?’

  ‘I’d like to see Mum, of course, but the bloody Major, well, he’s not your Ghost of Christmas Past or Present, is he? I can really live without him ba
nging on about Christmases when he was a boy, and yule-tide on the Western Front — in the trenches

  — and what unrelieved hell it’s going to be when Hitler finally invades.’ The Galloping Major had been sunk in gloom ever since Dunkirk, talking himself into believing that it was the end for Britain and the Empire.

  ‘Well, I thought you could probably explain my situation to Mum better than I can do it myself.’ There was a long pause at Charlotte’s end. Then — ‘Listen, Suzie, if you do get time off, could you come down here? That’s what I’d really like: a great Christmas together, the two of us with the kids: especially now Vernon’s not going to be around until the New Year. You really can’t be looking forward to spending time with the Galloping Major.’

  ‘Charlotte, yes, of course that’s what I’d like to do. Tough on Mum, but if I do get time off ... Well ... Yes. I’ll spend it with you, Ben and Lucy.’

  ‘You promise?’

  ‘Of course, and I’ll explain it to Mum. Leave it to me.’ She had this idyllic dream of Christmas at Falcon Cottage, real holly and a real tree, decorated with an angel at the top: going to Midnight Mass in the village church; Ben and Lucy excited, though Ben wouldn’t have a clue about what was happening. Oh, Suzie thought, let me get a couple of days off just to be in a normal home — even one with a badly handicapped child —just for a couple of days.

  She would ring her mother tomorrow.

  But tomorrow her mother was ringing her all day. She wanted to talk about the murder and ask if Suzie was really investigating it like the papers said.

  The Daily Mail had a photograph of her with Magnus outside 5 Coram Cross Road, and the headline SUZIE OF THE YARD? The Express had one photograph of Suzie — a close-up of her face looking concerned — and next to it one of Steve Fermin arriving at the house. Their headline was WOMAN LEADS MURDER HUNT. Several other papers had stories on their front pages and the Herald ran part of its leading article under the title IT’S MURDER FOR WOMEN.

  We are all aware that, in the current international situation, women are being called upon to take over traditional male roles. Women now labour in factories doing men’s jobs. Nightly in London we see the frail sex in action with the barrage balloons, the anti-aircraft guns, the ARP and the AFS. We see them in factories and in uniform on our streets, but we draw a line at allowing them to go into battle at sea, in our aircraft or in the front line in tanks or side by side with our foot soldiers.

  But yesterday evening, following the murder of the nationally known broadcaster Jo Benton of the BBC, it was a woman who went to the murder site and was in charge of the investigation. We wonder if this is either right or proper. Murder is a serious, unpleasant and, more than often, sordid business. Last night concerns were being expressed that leading a murder investigation may not be a fitting role for young women, who, by the nature of their sex and upbringing, are probably unfit for this kind of duty.

  New Scotland Yard would make no comment except to say that the officer concerned, an acting Temporary Woman Detective Sergeant, was working under the direct control of a more senior officer at Scotland Yard, the well-known Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Livermore — ‘Dandy Tom’, as he is sometimes called. DCS Livermore has yet to visit the site of Miss Benton’s death.

  And that put the cat among the pigeons.

  ‘This is serious,’ Sanders of the River glared at her across his desk. ‘It’s not the kind of publicity we either like or countenance. The Yard has already been on to me three times this morning. One very senior officer talked to me about the possibility of the public losing its confidence in the Met if they believed women were being put in charge of sensitive cases.’

  ‘Sir, I —’ Suzie began.

  ‘So what’ve you got to say for yourself. Sergeant Mountford?’ He was embarrassed and plainly ill at ease.

  ‘What can I say, sir? I told them there had been a death at the house and that the victim had yet to be identified. I did not give them my name and I did not say I was in charge.’

  ‘Oh!’ Sanders of the River sounded quite pleased. ‘Oh, you didn’t? Good. That’s excellent.’

  ‘No, I did not, sir. You can ask DC Magnus, who was with me all the time; or Sergeant Osterley, who was with me outside when the reporters were asking questions. In fact DC Magnus told them there would be a statement issued later — and it was, sir. Under your signature I understand, sir.’

  ‘Yes. Well, yes, Mountford. Now you have to understand that from now on you’re not to speak to the press. We’re so damned short-staffed that I really cannot raise a more senior officer to come out here at the moment. Carry on, but quietly and gently. Don’t make a fuss, and don’t tell anyone you’re in charge, because you’re not.’

  ‘Sir.’

  In the CID Office there was a message for her to ring DCS Livermore at the Yard.

  ‘He’s not here at the moment,’ a female voice told her.

  ‘Is that Terri? Terri Abrahams?’

  ‘Yes, who’s —?’

  ‘Suzie Mountford. WDS Mountford, Camford CID.’

  ‘Oh, Sergeant Mountford, yes. He left a message for you.’

  Her stomach sank. She was going to get a roasting second hand.

  ‘He said, take no notice of the newspapers. They’d make up things about their grandmothers if it helped sell papers, and they’ll make up things about you. He says he’s been there, so he knows. Right, WDS Mountford?’

  Smiling to herself, she rang Rex Fulbright at CRO. ‘Look, Rex,’ she began.

  ‘Careful,’ he said. ‘Don’t get too matey just ’cos you got your picture in the paper.’

  ‘I’m not getting matey. Sergeant Fulbright, but I need some help.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, not unkindly.

  ‘The current crimes files, Sarge.’

  ‘What of them?’

  ‘I was looking at one a few weeks ago. A murder, somewhere near Cambridge. A girl; thirteen/fourteen years old. Choked with piano wire. About two and a half feet; ends bound with insulating tape. The murderer got in through the back door, and they found a pan of boiling water on the hob in the kitchen.’

  ‘Apart from that you can’t remember a thing about it, eh?’

  ‘Come on, Sarge. I need to know the facts and who I should get in touch with. This is a dead ringer for the Jo Benton thing.’

  ‘I’ll get one of the chorus girls here to take a look,’ he said. ‘And, well done, Miss Mountford.’

  ‘If I’m not in the office I’ll ring you back. Don’t leave a message.’

  ‘You’re learning a bit sharpish, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ve had good teachers, Sarge.’

  ‘Yes, right.’

  ‘Oh, and I’ve just remembered something else —’ She was trying to pin it down: something she’d seen on her first ride out to Camford.

  ‘Well, the day I was posted out here, to Camford, there was a report in the paper — the Evening News — about a young girl.’ She foundered, trying to remember the name. ‘Bachelor, I think she was called. Early teens. In Acton. Went missing one day and then found dead in her home the next. Strangled with piano wire.’ She remembered the report said some of the girl’s clothing was missing, which usually meant only one thing.

  ‘I’ll do my best young Suzie, okay?’

  Magnus and Shirley had come in and they sat waiting for the day’s instructions. Before telephoning Sergeant Fulbright, Suzie had sent Sammy Richards off to chase the fingerprint evidence; Catermole was still interviewing people concerned with the attacks on elderly women in the blackout, while Pinchbeck, Mortimer and Wilf Purser were dealing with a serious robbery that had happened overnight. The local council offices had been broken into and hundreds of pounds’ worth of ration books and petrol coupons had been stolen. Ration books and petrol coupons had become more valuable than money.

  ‘I’m going to interview Jo Benton’s agent,’ Suzie told them. ‘I gather that an agent is usually someone very close to his clients. So close he
takes ten or twenty per cent of his client’s salary.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Magnus asked, in an interrogatory mode.

  ‘Fermin,’ Suzie answered. ‘Before he left last night.’

  Magnus had been slightly withdrawn ever since she had first seen him that morning. Jealousy? she wondered. Just because she’d got herself in the papers. And just as she thought it, again her mother was put through to the office telephone. ‘I’ll ring you later on, Mum. I’ll certainly call you this evening, only it could be late.’

  ‘I’ve seen your picture in the papers,’ her mother said. ‘So has the Major. He doesn’t think it’s very nice, you having anything to do with a murder like that.’

  She wanted to tell her mother what she should do with the Major, but wisely didn’t. No point in aggravating things at this stage. There were going to be ructions about Christmas anyway.

  ‘I can’t talk now. Sorry, Mum, I’ll have to phone you later.’

  Her mother reluctantly hung up and Suzie asked the operator to get her Richard Webster’s number: Richard Webster of Webster and Broome, Personal Representatives — the late Jo Benton’s agent. She was put through to Mr Webster with great speed and it was obvious that both the telephonist and Webster’s secretary knew exactly who she was.

  ‘Sergeant Mountford?’ His voice had the slightest touch of cockney, ‘I was expectin’ you to ring.’ Gs were dropped at the end of some words, but not others: no logic to it.

  ‘I think we have to talk.’ Suzie got down to work straight away. Best to present him with a businesslike exterior.

  ‘When would you like ...?’ he began.

  ‘Really as soon as possible, sir.’

  ‘Will it take long?’

  ‘Depends how much you have to tell us.’

  She could hear pages being turned. Like a radio play, she thought.

  ‘As it happens I’m free just before lunch. Say twelve thirty?’

  ‘That’ll be fine, Mr Webster.’

  She put down the phone and, on cue, it immediately rang again.

  ‘Rex Fulbright. I have those details you wanted.’