I'd been halfway through pouring a cup of tea, and the guilty start I gave at the mention of my own name sent a splatter of hot brown liquid over the table top. I glanced up quickly while Ailsa rescued her forms from the flood and sent Tris for a cloth.
I helped mop up, glad of the pause so I could rack my brains to try and come up with a suitable reason why the police were after me. The first thought that popped up was that it might be something to do with the hooky lap-top Terry had given me.
“Yes, that's me,” I said. “Why, what's the problem?”
Tommy's mate ignored the question. “Is there anywhere we can talk in private, Miss?” he asked.
Tris offered use of the drawing room and led us through, frowning. The room was huge. Clean and bright, with his massage couch set up in the centre and a stack of clean dark green towels on a rattan sofa to the side. Tris hastily shifted the towels so we had space to sit down, and left, still looking pensive.
“So, what's the problem?” I said again when I was alone with the policemen.
Tommy's mate ignored my question a second time. He was really starting to become quite tiresome. Instead, he posed an unexpected one of his own. “Were you at the New Adelphi Club in Morecambe on Saturday evening?”
“Yes,” I said, feeling suddenly cold. I sank down onto the sofa Tris had cleared, and clamped my hands together in my lap.
Even as a kid I've always been more afraid of getting into trouble than of getting hurt. I frantically tried to think back over the weekend's events. I knew, logically, they couldn't possibly be here because of Terry's computer, and I couldn't find anything else that would call for two coppers to be tracking me down at work and giving me the third degree. “What's this all about?”
I'm always wary of the police. You ride a motorcycle and it tends to colour your view of the boys in blue. Still, I suppose it was a nice change to be greeted by a uniform whose opening gambit wasn't, “Are you aware of the national speed limit, madam?” Maybe, in this case, it would have been preferable.
I looked from one to the other. Tommy sat down at the other end of the sofa and tried a reassuring smile, but the other one paced round the room, poking along the bottles of Tris's essential oils and making little snorting noises to himself as he read the labels. “Look at this lot, Tom,” he said. “Frankincense, chamomile, ylang-ylang.” He picked one of the bottles off the shelf, turned it in his hand. “Sandalwood. What's that for, then?”
I dredged through my memory for Tris's explanations. I knew sandalwood was calming, a sedative and an aphrodisiac, but I wasn't going to tell him that. It also had antiseptic properties, and was good for dry skin. “Acne,” I said shortly.
He was still young enough for the terrors of rampant spots to be too close for comfort. He put the bottle back on the shelf quickly.
“Look,” I said, “I very much doubt you two are here for a guided tour of aromatherapy oils, so why don't we just cut to the chase?”
They glanced at each other and the younger one, Tommy, pulled out his pocket book. “According to reports we've received, you had a bit of an altercation with a woman at the New Adelphi Club on Saturday night. A Miss Susie Hollins?”
So that was it. “Altercation isn't quite the word I'd use to describe it.”
“And what word would you use, exactly?”
I didn't like the tone, it was too quiet, too tactfully noncommittal.
I sighed again. “She clouted a friend of mine,” I said. “All I did was hold her off until the management arrived. She started it, as any one of a number of witnesses should be able to tell you. If she's telling you I jumped her, she's lying through her teeth. Is that why you're here? Is that what she's saying?” I looked from one to the other, seeking confirmation, but they were giving nothing away.
“Oh, she's not saying anything, Miss Fox,” the older policeman said.
That chill again. “Why? What's happened?”
“I'm afraid Miss Hollins is dead,” he said. It was obviously the most thrilling bit of news he'd had to impart since he left police training college. He was trying hard to put the right subdued note into his voice. “Her body was discovered yesterday morning.”
I stared at them blankly. Susie was dead? “How?”
Tommy gave me an old-fashioned look which said I should know better than to ask, and consulted his notebook again. “Obviously we can't discuss details, but I can tell you we're now involved in a murder enquiry,” he allowed. “We understand you were one of the last people to see her alive, so we need to know all of what you can remember about Saturday night.”
I told them everything then, of course I did. About rescuing Clare from Susie's attack, about Marc Quinn stepping in to deal with her. “He told us he'd thrown her out of the club, and I didn't see her again for the rest of the evening,” I finished.
“And her boyfriend, this Tony, you said he seemed pretty upset with her?” the younger one asked.
“Highly pissed off, but he didn't leave when Susie did. I don't know when she was killed, but I saw him again a couple of times later on. Once about half an hour after she'd been chucked out. He was consoling himself by chatting up a red-head in the lower bar. When Clare and I left at about quarter to midnight the pair of them were staggering into a taxi, giving each other a pretty good impression of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was a private hire cab, I think, a blue Cavalier. I didn't notice which firm, sorry.”
“That's OK, we can check with the club. They would have had to call it from there.” He made scribbled notes, then backtracked to the previous page. “So, you said Mr Quinn threw Miss Hollins out and then came to speak to you? How long was he with you?”
I frowned, considering. “He was there about ten minutes or so. Then he disappeared and I didn't see him again until just after Dave had done his final set. That's when they presented Clare with her karaoke prize. We left shortly after that.”
“That would be Dave Clemmens, who was the DJ in charge of the karaoke, right?”
I nodded.
“And what about you? Where did you go when you left the New Adelphi Club?”
“Can I prove my whereabouts, you mean?” I demanded. “Why, do you think I killed her?” I held his gaze levelly.
“No, Miss Fox,” he said, with a grim smile. “I don't.”
I didn't understand exactly what he meant by that until later, after the police had gone, when I heard the regional report on the afternoon news. They didn't name her, of course, but I don't think there was more than one murder of a young woman in the area for them to go at.
Details were sketchy, but the reason I wasn't on the suspect list was immediately obvious. I just wasn't equipped for it. In addition to having her throat half cut and being beaten to death, Susie Hollins had been repeatedly and viciously raped.
Four
Clare rang me later that evening. The police had been to see her, too, and she was as stunned as I was by the whole thing. I let her talk it through without major interruptions. To let her equilibrium right itself.
“I can't help feeling guilty,” she finished, illogically. “I mean, it was sort of because of me that Susie got chucked out, and if she hadn't . . .” Her voice tailed off uncertainly.
“Oh Clare, don't even think about that,” I told her. “Susie made her own choices. She just made some bad ones. Getting thrown out of the club was her fault, not yours. You didn't provoke her. And she could have just got herself a cab home.”
“I know, you're right,” she said, sounding forlorn. “I just feel really bad about it.” She paused, sighing. “I'm glad you were there, though.”