Weep Willow, Weep : A DI Stella Cole Read online

  Jean’s story was sounding increasingly shaky. But then, she said she’d taken a sleeping pill. Stella never had, but she knew enough to know they could leave users disorientated if woken when the drug was at its most potent. Which presumably would include the wee small hours of the morning.

  Nevertheless, she was convinced Tony had been downstairs, not upstairs, when he was struck from behind.

  Leave that for now, Stel. The question is, where did Tony get the bash on the head? And what with?

  She knew Jean’s grief was all an act. ‘Hollywood’s Weeping Willow,’ indeed! All that guff about silken threads and eternity had come straight from her finest hour. Had she murdered her husband? And if so, with what? The answer she found, was staring her in the face. Or, to be completely accurate, between the shoulder blades.

  She turned to face Oscar. Her date for the rest of the night. He bore no black or silver smudges from fingerprint powder, unlike the bannisters, front door and the hall light switch. Nor did the photo frame she’d righted. The CSIs had ignored both.

  Why wouldn’t they, when Jean had explained how the burglar had entered the house through the bedroom French doors and exited through the front door? If Stella had left the photo frame on its side, that might have caught someone’s eye. Then, she’d been tired, half-drugged with just enough sleep to get her functioning, but not enough to have her in total command of her thoughts.

  Now, though, fired with the excitement that she was closing in on the killer, she felt as alert as she used to before Lola came along. Why was the photo overturned? And why only that one? Why not all of them? Or none? She thought she knew why.

  She took an evidence bag out of her pocket and drew it down over Oscar’s head before picking him up by his head and sealing the bag beneath his plinth.

  At Paddington Green, she hurried round to the forensics department, hoping to find a tech still working. The room was deserted, apart from a single figure hunched over a microscope. No need to speculate on who it was. Lucian Young was the only black man in the department, and by far the best dresser in the whole of the station.

  ‘Hi, Luce’ she said softly to avoid startling him.

  He drew back from the microscope and smiled.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be at home with your delightful little addition?’ he asked.

  ‘I should. But she’s fast asleep and her daddy’s there if she wakes up. I need a favour.’

  Lucian placed a hand on his chest, fingers splayed. ‘If ’tis within my power to bestow it, I shall, my lady.’

  She grinned. ‘Prettily put and not bad considering what I’m about to show you.’

  She plonked the bagged Oscar on the table. ‘Can you fingerprint that for me?’

  ‘Didn’t we do it at the scene?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘OK, well that was an oversight. You shouldn’t need to go out there to bring it in. I’m assuming you want this doing now?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

  He smiled. ‘Come on, you can watch. I might even let you hold the brush.’

  On a white-topped table, free of clutter, Lucian slit the red chain-of-evidence tape and lifted the statuette clear of the bag. He placed it dead centre and pulled an Anglepoise lamp down to cast a bright pool of white light over it.

  Peering at the torso, he nodded. ‘Definitely some latents there.’

  Stella stood a foot or so away, giving Lucian space to work. He selected a tub of black powder and dabbed a fine-haired brush across the surface. He proceeded to twizzle the hairs over the head, torso, back and legs of the statuette, finishing off with the grooved wooden base.

  Stella saw them. Five pristine fingerprints plus a palm print, as clear as if they’d been applied during a training course. Lucian lifted them with adhesive tape and affixed them onto template cards, labelling each one in his precise writing.

  Ten minutes later, after he’d photographed each print, he launched a programme on his PC that would allow him to compare the prints to the national fingerprint database, IDENT1.

  They sat, shoulder to shoulder, as the programme did its thing. Seconds later, a green rectangle popped up. MATCH.

  Feeling her pulse quickening, Stella watched as Lucian called up the record.

  ‘Well that’s no surprise,’ he said. ‘It’s Jean Muggeridge. She was in earlier supplying a reference set.’

  Stella shook her head. ‘You’re right, it’s not a surprise. But can you look at them on the statue, Luce?’

  ‘They’re clearer on screen. We can blow them up to a foot across. Look, there are dozens of points of comparison. It’s hers.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s not the points of comparison I’m interested in.’

  They returned to the table bearing the statuette. Under the harsh light from the specialist bulb, the 24-karat gold plating gleamed.

  ‘Well?’ Lucian asked.

  ‘Can you tell which way up the prints are?’

  He pulled his head back, frowning. ‘I should be able to. Let’s have a look.’

  He fetched a magnifier and lowered it towards the statuette’s upper body. He frowned. Stella caught the expression. She could feel it. She was close. And it wasn’t even twenty four hours yet.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked.

  ‘I need to get her reference set. Hold on.’

  While she waited for Lucian to print off Jean’s card, she bent to look into the semi-abstract features of the statuette and its machine-turned base. ‘Was it you, Oscar?’ she whispered.

  ‘Here we go,’ Lucian said from beside her.

  He held the card up against the statuette and switched the magnifier from one to another and back again, frowning with each move. Stella had seen it, even if he hadn’t. Because she’d been in the house. And she’d seen the movie.

  ‘They’re upside down, aren’t they?’ she asked, unable to wait any longer for him to see it.

  He nodded, straightening up. ‘You think this is the murder weapon?’

  ‘Mm, hmm.’

  She pulled a pair of nitrile gloves from a box on a shelf below the table. She blew into them to unstick the sides and pulled them on. Turning her arm over, she grasped the statuette by the chest then reversed it so she held it like a club.

  She stared at the carved wooden base and pictured the wound in the back of the dead man’s head. The turned grooves, put there on a master woodworker’s lathe, were a match for the bloody gouges Yasmin had pointed out earlier.

  To make sure, she had Lucian measure them. Then they called up the crime scene photos and overlaid the images. Lucian nodded as the two sets of marks lined up precisely.

  Stella returned to the carpark and sped towards Kensington, weaving in and out of the traffic, using the horn freely and even giving a slow car driver a quick blast of the siren and blue flashers the motor-pool guys had retro-fitted for her.

  Standing outside the neighbours’ house, Stella prodded the doorbell. The door opened. A woman stood there. Seventyish, immaculately dressed in a warm-looking scarlet woollen dress, her luminous dark eyes and light-brown skin suggesting Middle Eastern heritage, Stella thought.

  ‘Yes?’

  Stella showed her ID and introduced herself. ‘Is Jean still with you?’

  ‘We’re having dinner. Would you like to come in, Inspector?’

  ‘Thank you.’ Gratefully, Stella stepped out of the cold into a warm hallway painted a deep pink.

  ‘I’m Mariam, by the way,’ the woman said. ‘My husband is Roman. We’re in the kitchen. Just a little supper, nothing formal,’ she added smiling over her shoulder.

  In the kitchen, Jean sat at a table opposite a brown-skinned man in his seventies, white hair cut short in an old-fashioned style and a matching toothbrush moustache. He looked like an old soldier from some long-forgotten Indian regiment.

  He stood and greeted her politely. ‘How may we help you?’ he asked.

  ‘I was actually hoping for a word in private with Jean, if t
hat’s all right.’

  He smiled and moved to join his wife. ‘Of course. Terrible business, terrible. We’ll be in the lounge if you need us.’

  When she and Jean were alone, Stella closed the kitchen door and took the chair in which Roman had been sitting just a few moments earlier.

  ‘What is it, Inspector? Have you caught him already?’ Jean asked.

  Stella shook her head. ‘Not yet, no.’

  Jean frowned. ‘Was there something you wanted, then? I told you I didn’t really get a good look at him. The burglar, I mean.’

  ‘You said you heard the burglar hit Tony.’

  ‘Yes. It was an awful sound. A real crack. Like when you tenderise a steak.’

  Tears welled in her eyes and she reached into her cleavage, retrieving another lacy hankie. She dabbed her eyes.

  ‘Do you have any idea what he might have used on Tony?’

  Jean’s tear-filled eyes widened. ‘No! I told you, I was too frightened to leave the bedroom. I thought he might murder me. Or rape me,’ she hissed. ‘Can you blame me?’

  ‘No, of course not. Only, we’ve found something at your house that appears to fit the profile of the wounds in the back of Tony’s head.’

  Jean’s eyes flicked away from Stella’s. She sniffed loudly, and Stella watched, entranced, as two fat tears rolled down her powdered cheeks. This time Jean let them fall from her chin without soaking them up in the handkerchief.

  ‘Really?’ she said, her voice breaking.

  ‘Yes. Your Oscar for Lie To Me, My Darling.’

  Jean’s mouth dropped open. It was a good act, Stella had to admit.

  ‘He must have gone downstairs first to get it then come back for my jewels when poor Tony woke up.’

  ‘I suppose that could have happened.’ Stella paused. ‘If there had actually been a burglar.’

  ‘What on earth do you mean? Of course there was a burglar. I saw him with my own eyes.’

  ‘I mean, we found your fingerprints on the Oscar, but nobody else’s. So if your burglar used it, he either wore gloves or took the time to clean it, and then you picked it up and put it back on the mantelpiece. That’s reaching a bit, don’t you think?’

  ‘I can’t explain it. But that’s what happened. I swear!’

  ‘Come on, Jean, or given your performance this morning, maybe I should call you Deanna. Your husband’s lying there, dead and you expect me to believe you checked his pulse, called the police, put your makeup on and then started cleaning up? It was you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘No! I swear, it was a burglar. Oh, why won’t you believe me?’ she wailed, erupting into a fresh bout of sobbing.

  Stella waited for her to finish. It took a while. A minute and half, roughly. Mariyam poked her head round the kitchen door at one point and asked if everything was OK. Stella told her it was fine and please to wait in the lounge with Roman.

  ‘I think that’s enough now,’ Stella said, finally losing patience. ‘Your hearts might have been entwined with a silken thread, but that was never your line, was it? I watched Lie To Me, My Darling this evening with my husband. His mum’s a big fan of yours. I had to leave before the end credits so I didn’t catch the screenwriter’s name.’

  Something happened to Jean’s features. The flesh, so pliant and loose a moment or two ago firmed up. Her mouth tightened into a line. And those incredible dark eyes burned darker. She straightened in her chair and threw her shoulders back.

  ‘It was Peter’s line,’ she said after a pause. ‘My director. A very talented Russian émigré. He fled the pogroms and went to America. The screenwriter was an appalling hack, but Peter had a beautiful gift for English. Maybe because it wasn’t his mother tongue.’

  ‘Did you use it deliberately? Were you trying to get caught.’

  Jean sighed. ‘Honestly, dear? I don’t know. Subconsciously, perhaps, though I don’t really go in for all that Freudian crap. It just popped out in the heat of the moment.’

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘Why do you think? I know I look fantastic, but I’ll be seventy nine in March. Tony was only sixty. He told me he was leaving me. For the simpering little fool who’s ghost-writing my autobiography.’

  ‘You were in the sitting room together.’

  ‘Yes. We’d gone to bed and then he gave me the whole, “there’s something I need to tell you” speech. Well, once he told me about his infatuation with Daisy,’ she snorted, ‘ridiculous name, I gave him what for. I reminded him whose house he was living in and whose carefully invested earnings made his playboy lifestyle possible.

  ‘He put on a nice little act of his own, huffing and snorting like a bloody racehorse. Then he put his dressing gown on, which I bought him, incidentally. Versace ready to wear, cost me a bloody fortune. And he stormed off downstairs.

  ‘I wasn’t going to let him have the last word, so I went after him. I found him in the sitting room. And do you know? He told me to shut my mouth. Said I sounded like a – that word – fishwife. Then he turned his back on me.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, dear but that was really too, too much. So I picked up Oscar and I let him have it. He fell and bashed his face on the edge of the hearth. I knew he was dead straight away. The bit about being a first aider was true: I did check for a pulse.’

  ‘You dragged him into the hall.’

  ‘Yes, and it bloody nearly killed me. My poor chest was still hurting when your officers arrived. That nice female constable brought me a brandy for the shock,’ She cackled. ‘Saved my bloody life!’ The laughter brought on a bout of coughing. Stella waited for it to subside.

  ‘Why did you put your slap on? You must have known it would look suspicious.’

  Jean’s eyes widened. ‘Darling! What if the press had been there, camped outside my doorstep? The paparazzi still love me, you know. Even after all this time. I have an image to maintain.’

  ‘It wasn’t a clever move,’ Stella said.

  Jean shrugged. ‘How did you work out I used Oscar?’

  ‘It was a guess, really. But when you put it back after hitting Tony, you knocked over the little picture frame. Everything else was so neat and tidy, it just stuck out. I couldn’t work it out at the time. Too early in the morning. You must have been in shock, panicking. It’s amazing what we miss when the adrenaline kicks in. They call it tunnel vision. You were focusing on getting your act together.’

  ‘Literally,’ Jean said with a wry smile. ‘So what happens now? Are you going to arrest me?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Jean shrugged. ‘Fair enough. But you have to admit.’

  ‘What, Jean?’

  ‘I deserved my Oscar.’

  Stella nodded and began to recite the caution.

  Fin

  Copyright

  © 2020 Sunfish Ltd

  Published by Tyton Press, an imprint of Sunfish Ltd, PO Box 2107, Salisbury SP2 2BW: 0844 502 2061

  The right of Andy Maslen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Also by Andy Maslen

  The Gabriel Wolfe series

  Trigger Point

  Reversal of Fortune (short story)

  Blind Impact

  Condor

  First Casualty

  Fury

  Rattlesnake

  Minefield (novella)

  No Further

>   Torpedo

  Three Kingdoms

  Ivory Nation

  The DI Stella Cole series

  Hit and Run

  Hit Back Harder

  Hit and Done

  Let the Bones be Charred

  A Beautiful Breed of Evil (coming soon)

  Other fiction

  Blood Loss - a Vampire Story

  About the Author

  Andy Maslen was born in Nottingham, in the UK, home of legendary bowman Robin Hood. Andy once won a medal for archery, although he has never been locked up by the sheriff.

  He has worked in a record shop, as a barman, as a door-to-door DIY products salesman and a cook in an Italian restaurant.

  He lives in Wiltshire with his wife, two sons and a whippet named Merlin.

  Afterword

  To keep up to date with news from Andy, join his Readers’ Group at www.andymaslen.com.

  Email Andy at [email protected].

  Join Andy’s Facebook group, The Wolfe Pack.

  Cover photo by Touann Gatouillat Vergos on Unsplash.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Contents

  1. Weep, Willow, Weep

  Copyright

  Also by Andy Maslen

  About the Author

  Afterword