“Hole in one, sergeant.”
The Mitsubishi owned by the Boxgrove woman was some distance away, near the beach café and close to the last remaining barbecue. This owner was not so tidy as Dr Wilkinson. The floor was littered with used tissues and parking tickets. A pair of shoes. Sweet wrappings. The tax disc was a month out of date.
“Do you want this one opened, ma’am?”
“Please.”
The jemmy came into play again, but not for long. From behind them came a scream of, “What the bloody hell are you doing to my car?” and a woman came running from the barbecue.
“I thought you told me the owner wasn’t around,” Hen muttered to the sergeant.
“You bastards! You’ve smashed my bloody window and the paint on the door is chipped,” Ms Claudia Cameron protested. She was wearing a white wrap made of towelling and candy-striped sandals. Her spiky blond hair looked like the result of poking a wet finger into a live socket.
“Hold on, love,” Hen said as if she was speaking to a child. “Didn’t you see us checking this vehicle?”
“Yes, but I thought you might go away. I’m only a few days over on my tax. It doesn’t give you the right to smash your way in… does it?”
“You’re Claudia Cameron?”
“How do you know that?”
“You’ll be compensated, Ms Cameron.”
“That isn’t good enough.” Now that she had a legitimate grievance, she was going to get some mileage out of it. “Just who’s in charge here?”
“Speak to the sergeant, OK? He’ll need your address and so on.”
She was part of the action and obviously didn’t want to be sidelined. “This is about the dead woman they found, isn’t it? Did you think my car belonged to her, or what?”
“Did you see her yourself?”
“No, but everyone is talking about it, poor soul.”
“So how much do you know, Ms Cameron? Did anyone say anything at all to you that might help us find out who she was?”
“Not really.”
“‘Everyone is talking about it’,” Hen repeated to Stella in a good imitation of Claudia Cameron’s voice as they walked away, “but what did everyone see? Diddly-squat. What’s the betting Dr Wilkinson is cooking sausages at the same barbecue and will presently notice her beautiful Range Rover being hoisted onto the transporter and come running over?”
“Don’t even think about it, guv.”
“Actually, I’d welcome it.”
“Why?”
“I wouldn’t mind seeing a doctor.”
“Aren’t you well?”
“It’s in my head. I’ve got this feeling the whole world is against me, and when that happens all I want to do is shut myself in my car and listen to my Agatha Christie tapes.”
Stella laughed.
4
Hen had chosen to direct operations from her own police station at Bognor rather than park a mobile incident room beside the beach at Wightview Sands. The crime scene wasn’t likely to yield any more evidence than they’d picked up in that first search. Two high tides had already rearranged the sand and stones. The Range Rover was no longer where it had been found. It had been transported to the vehicle forensic unit.
“We have a possible victim, playmates-and I stress that word ‘possible’,” she told her team, assembled for the first formal briefing. Small as she was, there was no disputing her authority. “She is Dr Shiena Wilkinson, from Petersfield, whose Range Rover was found in the car park close to the scene last evening.”
“Don’t we have a positive ID yet, guv?” one of the team asked.
“Later this morning, I hope. One of the other doctors is going to the mortuary.”
“A photo?” Stella Gregson said.
“Not yet.”
“There ought to be one in her house.”
“And the lads doing the search have been told to look out for it.”
“Sometimes they have the doctors’ pictures on view in a medical practice.”
“Not in this case.” Stella was right to pick up on these points, but Hen wanted to get on. “The car is Dr Wilkinson’s. That’s for sure. All the others have been accounted for. She’s thirty-two and a GP, one of five who practise from a health centre in the town. She is unmarried and lives alone in Pine Tree Avenue, a newish development of detached houses overlooking that golf course that you can see from the Chichester Road to the south. She wasn’t on call over the weekend. She’d arranged to take three days off, Saturday to Monday. Likes going to the beach, apparently. But before we all get too excited about Dr Wilkinson, let’s get back to what we know for certain.”
She took a drag at her cigar and pointed with it to the poster-size colour photo of the face displayed on the board behind her. The woman’s wide-open eyes had the glaze of death and the mouth gaped. “Our victim has copper-coloured hair. All that was found with her was the two-piece swimsuit she was wearing. The towel was recovered from the water not long after. We were told she was partly hidden by a windbreak, but it was missing when our patrol arrived. Going by the quality of the towel and swimsuit, she wasn’t short of cash. She had a nice haircut and well-kept nails. No jewellery.”
“Do you think the motive was theft?” George Flint asked. George was the pushy sergeant who wanted Stella’s job.
“It has to be considered. But you don’t need to commit murder to nick a handbag from a beach. People take amazing risks with their property every time they go for a bathe. If you want to steal a bag all you have to do is watch and wait.”
“I know that, guv.”
“She may not even have had a bag with her,” Hen pointed out.
“So where did she keep her car key?”
“A pocket.”
“In a swimsuit?”
“They can have pockets.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Actually, this one didn’t,” Hen admitted.
“So where were her clothes? In the car?”
“We found no clothes in the car, and no bag either.”
“Then the killer walked off with her clothes, or her bag, or both. We’re dealing with theft here.”
Hen tilted her head sharply. “You don’t give up, do you? OK- probably she did have a bag. But theft may not be the real motive. The killer may have taken the bag to make identification more difficult. I don’t see the link between strangulation and stealing handbags.”
“What’s left if we rule out theft?”
“Wise up, George. Most killings are carried out by people in a close relationship with the victim. Family, lovers, ex-lovers.”
George Flint had hammered away at this theory for long enough. It was another voice that asked, “Guv, do we know if she was alone on the beach?”
“We know nothing. The lifeguard claims he didn’t see her alive. The witnesses all left before the patrol car arrived.”
“We’ll have to put out an appeal, guv.”
“I’m coming to that.”
“What about this lifeguard? Is he a suspect? Can we believe everything he tells us?”
“He’s an Australian named Emerson, and he’s not comfortable. I dare say there are things he doesn’t want us to know about how he got the job. But he was on duty. To have killed her, he’d have needed to leave his post for a while, and someone might have noticed.”
“There must be other lifeguards. I’ve seen more than one of them sitting up there. He could ask one of his mates to cover for him and take time out to kill her.”
“For what reason?”
“Who knows? He recognised her as someone who dumped him some time in the past?”
“Not much of a motive,” George Flint commented.
“We don’t have any motive yet.”
Stella nudged the discussion in another direction. “If the victim is this doctor, we could have another motive: the patient with a grudge.”
“That’s good, Stell,” Hen said, forgetting her own insistence that they’d said enough about Dr Wilkinson. “I like that. GPs deal with life and death issues every day. There are always people who feel they were denied the right treatment, or misdiagnosed.”