“Were you intimate with her during her marriage to your brother?”
“Yes,” he snapped.
“But you claim that you did not continue to have a close relationship with her after she left her husband.”
“I maybe saw her a couple more times and had sex with her, but then I met my wife, and by this time I knew Margaret was on the game. I told you how I warned her to take care of herself, but she would still turn up after I got married, and eventually, my wife told me to get rid of her.”
“Get rid of her?” Anna asked sharply.
“Christ! By that she meant, tell her to stay away. We’d got a kid and another one on the way, so I was to tell her to stay out of our lives.”
“Did Maggie ever make any threats?” Barolli leaned forward, resting his hands on the desk.
“Threats? Like what?”
“Well, if your wife didn’t like her and didn’t want her around, it seems to me that maybe she was jealous.”
“She’s fucking ten years younger than Margaret was, and if you mean did she make threats to me, it would be ridiculous! She could see that she was just a slag and was after money, and she didn’t want me shelling out to her all the time.”
“Did Margaret threaten to tell your wife that you’d been intimate?” Barolli was still leaning on the desk.
“Hang on... just hang on a minute here. I know what you’re doing — you’re trying to make out that I had some kind of motive to kill Maggie, right? That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“Young wife, young family, and as you described her, a slag coming round hitting on you. I bet you didn’t like it, did you, Eric?” Barolli leaned in closer.
“No, I fucking didn’t. I made sure she didn’t come to the house.”
“So she did threaten to tell your wife?”
Eric stood up, towering above Barolli. “Listen, pal, are you looking for a smack in the face? I don’t like what you are insinuating. I’ve been honest with you about Maggie, but if you think I’d be worried about any threat she made to screw up my marriage, then you have got it wrong.”
“But she did threaten? Come on, you must have been really pissed off after what you’d done for her.”
“Please sit down, Eric,” Anna said quietly.
Eric sat down in his chair. There was a long pause, and gradually, he calmed himself down. “As I said, you have got it all wrong, mate. Despite all the shit life had thrown at her, Maggie was one of the nicest women I’ve ever met, and she got upset when I told her not to come to the house. Yeah, okay, she did say something about my wife not really knowing how close we’d been and that I wouldn’t like her spilling the beans about us, but she promised that she wouldn’t come over again. She said we could just meet on the odd times, like in the café I told you about.”
“So this last time you saw her, did you part on amicable terms?”
Anna touched Barolli to warn him to move away from the desk.
Eric nodded.
“Didn’t you feel guilty about walking away from her? You knew she was desperate, had nowhere to live, and was working the service stations.”
“Yeah, I knew, but like I also told you, I had warned her over and again not to take risks and said that if she was in real need, of course I’d be there for her. I just didn’t want her calling me at home or turning up whenever the fancy took her.”
Again there was a lengthy pause, and then Eric addressed Anna. “I used to care about her, and all the bad times she’d been through with my arsehole of a brother, losing her kids, being knocked around, sometimes even hospitalized. Despite all that, I never saw her cry — she was a bloody punching bag, and yet she didn’t cry — but that last time I saw her, I turned round as I walked out of the café and she was crying. So yeah, I felt bad, and you can imagine how I felt when I found out she’d been murdered.”
Anna stood up and thanked him for talking to them. As she made to head out, Eric pushed back his chair.
“Instead of wasting time talking to me, you should be out there trying to find who killed her, because she didn’t deserve that. No way did she deserve that.”
As they reached Anna’s Mini, Barolli received a call from the incident room. Anna sat waiting for him in the car. It had been, as she had anticipated, an unproductive interview, and they had not gained any new information apart from the fact that their victim had made some halfhearted threat — unless she had read Eric incorrectly and the threat was taken seriously by him, enough to make him want to get rid of Margaret permanently.
Barolli got into the car. “A woman called in after seeing the TV requests for info. She reckons the last victim came into her charity shop and bought the jacket shown on the TV. It’s a cancer-research shop over in New Malden. Maybe it won’t be a wasted morning after all.”
Chapter Five
Anna and Barolli parked up in a side road by the Waitrose car park, then walked along New Malden’s High Street. There were numerous charity shops, and Barolli double-checked that it was a cancer charity, as there was a children-in-need shop and a heart-foundation shop all within a short distance.
“Lot of Chinese live around here,” Barolli said as they passed a Japanese grocery shop. There were several sushi delis, and High Street was busy with the big department store called Tudor Williams. Every store appeared to be having a sale.
The cancer charity shop was well positioned, with a window display of women’s clothes, china, and children’s toys.
“Well, this looks affluent — must be all the Chinese,” Barolli waffled. “Those boots in the window look very small, don’t they?”
Anna didn’t pay him much attention. It was a long way from Hendon and Ronald Kelly’s business. In fact, it was a village atmosphere. She gave Barolli a nudge, as he was still peering into the window display. They entered the shop.
The assistant, Eileen Mayle, an elderly woman wearing a pink twinset with pearls, had eagerly written down all she could remember on a notepad while waiting. She could describe the redheaded victim, but as the police had shown her photograph on the TV program, they couldn’t rely on this too much as a positive sighting. However, she also spoke of the victim as having a strong accent, possibly Polish, and explained that the reason she recalled this customer was because she had tried to buy the jacket, which was priced at six pounds, with a fifty-pound note. The shop assistants always paid close attention to anyone trying to use fifty-pound notes, because they had been caught out a number of times. In the past, customers had bought a couple of small items for a few pounds and then, having taken their change, left the shop. Later, the notes had been found to be forgeries, so the staff now refused to accept them. The girl was even more memorable because she returned a while later with the correct amount of money to buy the coat.
“Did you think it was a fake fifty-pound note?” Anna asked.
“I couldn’t honestly say, and I didn’t have the marker pen to test it, so I couldn’t take it. She took a while to understand, as, like I said, she didn’t speak good English, and the reason I think she might have been Polish is because I had a cleaner from there once and the accents were similar.”
“Was she alone?”
“Yes, she seemed to be, and I’d never seen her before.”
“Thank you very much, Eileen. You have been very helpful. If there is anything else you can remember, please call this number.” Anna passed over her card.
“I’ve been trying to think of her name, because I wrote a note to keep the jacket for her, and in case I wasn’t here, I put it on the bag under the counter. I’ve been racking my brains to remember, because I’d pinned it to the bag, but she took it with her.”