Then something triggered in my brain. I asked the woman, “Do you have security cameras?”
“Sure.”
“Inside the office?”
“Yes.”
I drove down there and started watching videotapes.
“Guv, I’d like you to look at this.”
“What is it?”
“Pretty sensational I’d call it.”
I ran the video. Two sergeants from CID who remembered Soames from before he went to prison came in to look. The screen showed tedious views of people waiting their turn to speak to the staff. I pressed “Fast Forward”, then slowed it to “Play”.
“Look behind the rows of seats.”
A slight man with straight, silver-streaked hair came into shot and hesitated. He stared at one of the desks where a young woman was being interviewed, partially screened from the rest of the room. He took a step to the right, apparently to get a better view of what was going on.
I touched the “Freeze Frame” and held a mugshot of Soames against the screen. “How about that, guys?”
“My God, it could be him.”
“No question,” said one of the sergeants. “The face, the way he moves, everything.”
“And look at the time.”
The digits at the bottom right of the screen were frozen at 10:32.
“All right. Joke over,” said Johnny. “How did you fix it?”
“I didn’t. This is on the level.”
“Run it again.”
White-faced and muttering, my boss continued to stare at the screen until the figure of Soames turned away and walked out of shot.
“That man died at 9.20. It can’t be.”
“It must be.”
We spent the next half-hour debating the matter. Johnny Horgan, desperate to make sense of the impossible, dredged up a theory involving false identification. Zara had lied when she came to view the body: Soames had put her up to it, seeing an opportunity to “die” and get a new name, and maybe plastic surgery, before resuming his criminal career. She, the dumb blonde, had stupidly blown his cover when I called on her.
It was a daft theory. How had he persuaded his wife Felicity, who had shopped him, to join in the deception? And why would he be so foolish as to parade in front of cameras in the Benefits Office?
“Anyroad,” Johnny said when his theory was dead in the water, “we can’t waste time on it. The post office job was the crime. Attempted robbery. There’s no argument that the robber died of a coronary, whether he was Jack Soames or bloody Bill Sikes. The case is closed.”
For me, it was still wide open. While the arguments were being tossed around, my mind was on a different tack. What had Soames been up to in the Benefits Office? He hadn’t been interviewed, so he didn’t collect a payout.
When the others had left the room, I ran the video again and made a stunning discovery. There had been a crime, and it was far more serious than a botched hold-up. Zara hadn’t lied to me; hadn’t even made a mistake. Impossible, it had seemed, because none of us made the connection. I slipped out of the building.
I found Felicity Soames in her place of work – at one of the desks in the Benefits Office. “It took a while for the penny to drop,” I told her. “I was in here this morning to examine the security videos and I didn’t spot you.”
“Were you expecting me to be here?”
“To be honest, no. You told me you were a civil servant, but I didn’t link it with this. You must have had a shock like a million volts when your husband walked in here on Monday.”
She flinched at the memory. “I was terrified. He stood staring at me, putting the fear of God in me.”
“We have it on tape. I watched it five times before I saw you behind your desk. We were all so gobsmacked at seeing him alive that we didn’t give anyone else a look.”
“He wasn’t there for an interview. He just came in to check on me.
“To let you know he was out.”
“Yes, I’ve lived in terror of him for four years. I put him away, you know. My evidence did it.”
“And you’re all alone in the world?”
“Yes.”
“No, you’re not, love. You’ve got a big brother. And you called him and poured out your troubles.”
At the mortuary, I asked to see the body of the post office robber.
“I had the impression you’d seen enough of him already,” said Dr Leggatt, smiling.
“Would you get him out, please?”
The pathologist sighed and called to his assistant. “Norman, fetch out number seven, the late Mr Soames, would you?”
I said mildly, “Jack Soames isn’t the post office robber.”
The doctor hesitated. “How do you work that out?”
“But I’d like to see his body, just the same.”
Leggatt exchanged a world-weary look with Norman, who went to one of the chilled cabinets and pulled out the drawer.
It was empty.
Leggatt snapped his fingers. “Of course. He’s gone.”
“Not here?”
“Storage problems. I asked the undertaker to collect him.”
“Along with the real post office robber, I suppose?”
Leggatt said, “You’re way ahead of me.”
“I don’t think so, doctor. The man who held up the post office probably died of a heart attack triggered by stress, just as you suggested.”
“What a relief!” Leggatt said with irony. But he wasn’t looking as comfortable as he intended.
“You came out to Five Lanes and collected him. On the same day, Jack Soames, recently released from prison, decided to let his wife know he was at liberty. After a passionate lie-in with his girlfriend, he made his way to the Benefits Office where Felicity worked. She was terrified, just as he wished her to be. He had a four-year score to settle. When he’d gone, she phoned you.”
“Me? Why me?” said Leggatt in high-pitched surprise that didn’t throw me in the least.
“Because she’s your sister, doctor. She’s really suffered for blowing the whistle on her husband. Waking up screaming, night after night, all because she stood up to him. You told us about that after DI Horgan made his insensitive remark about the sub-postmistress.”
“Idiot,” said Leggatt, but he was talking about himself. “Yes, that comment angered me at the time. I’d forgotten. So much has happened since. And you made the connection?”
He’d virtually put up his hand to the crime. Elated, I held myself in check. “I think you saw an opportunity and seized it. You’d already taken in the body of the post office robber, a middle-aged man with greying hair, not totally unlike your brother-in-law. No one seemed to know who he was, so he was heaven-sent. You had a marvellous chance to kill Soames and end your sister’s suffering without anyone knowing. You’re a pathologist. You know enough to kill a man swiftly and without any obvious signs. An injection, perhaps? I think you believed your sister was in real danger.”
“She was.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Leggatt shook his head. “There was no ‘maybe’ about it. He was waiting outside the Benefits Office for her. He wasn’t there to make a scene. He intended violence.”
“And you approached him, invited him into your car, killed him and drove him here. You chose a time when Norman was out of the mortuary – possibly at night – to unload the body into a drawer, the drawer supposedly holding the bank robber. You changed the tag on the toe.”
“You watch too much television,” Leggatt commented.
“When I came here with Zara, you wheeled Soames out. You knew I wasn’t likely to take a close look at the face, seeing that I’d been so troubled by the sight of death. Anyway, I hadn’t taken a proper look at the real robber.”
“Your inspector did.”
“Yes, but he delegated everything to me. He’s new to our patch. He didn’t know Soames, except from mugshots, so when he saw the security video from the Benefits Office he had Soames imprinted on his memory.”