Woolgar scratched his chin.
‘So there were two at least – one to go for him, one to keep her quiet?’
Darbishire had assumed this from the start, and Deedar agreed. ‘Hence the bruising on her arms and legs. She didn’t scream, but she fought against it. She knew what was coming.’
‘She could have been the one killed first.’
‘Not impossible,’ Darbishire conceded. ‘But the bruising suggests otherwise. They used the missing stocking on her, by the way. The seam’s still visible on her neck.’
Woolgar winced. He wasn’t good when it was a woman. He definitely wasn’t cut out for long mornings in a mortuary.
‘She was washed before she was put in position,’ Darbishire added. ‘Curious, no? Not all over, but enough to get rid of whatever blood was on her, which would’ve been mostly his. Wet towel dumped beside the bed. No decent prints anywhere. Then she was laid out in that ritualistic way, with the purple flowers—’
‘Lilacs, guvnor.’
‘Lilacs, if you say so . . . taken from the vase in the other room. Shoes put on her bare feet, tiara arranged nicely in her hair, even if the updo was missing a few pins by then. They didn’t rush. No sense that they were under pressure or worried about witnesses.’
Which is why the Artemis crowd were in the clear. None of them would have had time for all the artful arrangement, and to clean themselves up too. Or the opportunity to hide the girl’s missing dress and the stocking used to strangle her.
‘What if . . .’
‘What if what?’
There was a light in Woolgar’s eye. ‘How about if it was some sort of satanic ritual and he was the collateral damage . . .?’
‘Nice idea. Except, Gina Fonteyn wasn’t supposed to be there, remember?’
‘What if it didn’t matter who she was? What if—?’
‘That’s enough of the “what ifs”, Woolgar. If you set out to do that sort of thing to a girl, you don’t ensure you’ve got a jumpy gangster in the middle of it all, do you?’
‘No, sir,’ Woolgar conceded, reluctantly.
It wasn’t a cult. It was a gangland revenge killing of some sort, surely? That’s what they thought at the station, too. The East End visiting the West End, with a cosh and a garrotte.
‘Interesting that they didn’t take the diamonds,’ Darbishire added. This, too, had been bothering him.
‘Perhaps they thought they were paste?’
‘Even so, good repro gems are worth a bob or two.’
Woolgar shrugged. ‘Dunno, sir.’
On that, they agreed. The inspector preferred not to think of the young woman’s face in the mortuary just now. Human faces do not fare well after a strangling and a week lying undiscovered on a bed. Her peroxide hair, soft and curled and lacquered into a sophisticated style, looked horribly out of place against the skin. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were dark, he’d noticed. As was – and it was necessary to look – the rest of her. The limbs were slim and athletic. It could easily have been the body of the twenty-three-year-old she’d told the agency she was, though Deedar thought she’d knocked a few years off her real age.
‘Wrong time, wrong place,’ Darbishire concluded. ‘Unlike Beryl, who so conveniently wasn’t here.’
‘Yes, guvnor.’
‘And why were they in this room at all? When any minute a senior member of the clergy might come and find them at it?’
‘Dunno, sir.’
Darbishire pointed at Woolgar’s notebook. ‘We need another word with that charlady. I suspect that’s how the girl got the key to let herself in.’
‘At least we know how they got out,’ Woolgar suggested.
When the police had first arrived, they found the back door unlocked and unbolted, but otherwise untouched. Moreton swore he always kept it bolted from the inside, hadn’t touched it for months, and the char swore she hadn’t touched it either, so if they were telling the truth, the killers couldn’t have got in that way. Moreton said he couldn’t remember seeing if the bolt was in place before heading home to his cathedral on the Monday morning, so it was probable that they had escaped via the little yard.
‘Getting out was easy. It’s still the entry we need to worry about.’
Woolgar’s shoulders slumped. ‘So we’re back to the dean.’
‘We’re back to the dean.’
Who, in Darbishire’s considered opinion as a policeman with twenty years’ experience, couldn’t have done this. Not physically, on his own, and not psychologically in any way, shape or form. Having met the man, the inspector could easily imagine the Very Reverend Clement Moreton killing someone in self-defence, but not like this. Not with that girl watching, and then kill her as well, and go to his dentist for his Monday morning appointment in Harley Street and back to his cathedral as if his worst care in the world was toothache, as every witness swore he’d done.
Besides, there were those forty-five minutes to account for between Perez’s arrival at number 44 to join Miss Fonteyn, and Moreton’s return from the Artemis Club with his friends at a quarter to midnight. Darbishire really didn’t think the tart and her client had spent them playing cards, or talking philosophy. They were together here at eleven, and almost certainly dead by eleven thirty. Killed by persons unknown. Who teleported, like something out of H. G. Wells.
Woolgar pocketed his notebook and they headed back outside, into the pink light of a spring evening. Darbishire rolled his shoulders, glad to be in the fresh air. He wondered about the main witness that night: the young woman in the mews house opposite, up all night with her baby, who saw the comings and goings of Perez and Fonteyn, the dean and his guests. Her statement fitted in with the reports of taxi drivers and the suspects themselves, so she wasn’t making it up. But she didn’t see the men who must have done it. She had been interviewed by one of the sergeants and was very helpful at the time. Obviously, given her importance, Darbishire needed a personal word and soon, but like Beryl, the missing tart, she seemed to have gone to ground.
Once again, he wandered down to the end of the street, to get a sense of the yards behind the houses and their relationship to the gardens of the grand villas beyond. They were separated from each other by a motley collection of sturdy walls and flimsy wooden fence panels. The killers may have escaped across a series of yards until they were further down the street, but it seemed more likely they went straight over the ivy-covered wall of number 44 into the garden behind. Some of the ivy roots had been pulled away and a couple of crushed shrubs the other side of the wall were vaguely suggestive of a heavy landing, although the damage could equally have been made by a large animal. It hadn’t rained, and there were no telling footprints in the earth. There never were.
‘Off home, sir?’ Woolgar asked.
Darbishire nodded. He lived only a couple of streets away, in a nice new block of flats purpose-built for the police on one of the few local bomb sites, a couple of years ago. This area had been miraculously spared by the Blitz – as if the golden denizens of the nearby stucco villas had been protected by the Luftwaffe themselves. There had been some tragedies, of course, and some empty sites, even now, like missing teeth. But mostly it was a place of Edwardian mansion flats and cheap hotels, of large Victorian houses, churches and schools, all muddling along comfortably together between the medley of shops along the King’s Road to one side, and bedsits of the Old Brompton Road to the other.
Darbishire liked it round here. He liked to keep it tidy. He didn’t like it when someone strangled and garrotted two people to death and left their bodies for a traumatised charlady to find. He intended to deliver whoever did it to the hangman’s noose as soon as he could.