Chapter 9
SIMON
Simon Waterhouse was curious about this Marianne Upton woman, who more than one person seemed to want to kill. He suspected she was as upper-middle class and well turned out as Jemma Stelling, and it was highly unusual to find ladies of nearly seventy of that sort in the role of murder victim.
Maybe he could stay put and make a call … No, he couldn’t. Damn. He’d left his phone and his police radio at the nick, deliberately, so that no one would be able to contact him. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. And he and Charlie hadn’t had a landline phone for years.
He’d told Jemma Stelling he was going home.
He’d meant it, too. And he’d done it. So what if he’d spent half an hour sitting alone at a table in The Brown Cow first, with a pint glass full of tap water from which he hadn’t taken a single sip?
He’d gone home eventually. Anyway, it was up to him what he did.
You’re cracking up. Get a grip.
Seconds later, he was slamming the front door and jogging back to his car, keys in hand.
By the time he’d got as far as Spilling High Street, he felt calmer.
Everything was under control. Indulging his curiosity wasn’t disallowed by the new rules he’d made for himself, though obviously it would depend on what he did with whatever he found out.
That was where the breaking of resolutions might creep in, but only if he let it. And he wouldn’t.
Get it together.
Had he really told Jemma Stelling to murder her stepmother if she wanted to? Yes. He had. Good. If he got fired before Sam and Proust left, at least he wouldn’t have to watch them go.
Ten minutes later, pulling up in the nick’s car park, he briefly considered trying to identify the car of the new superintendent, Fran Whittingham, so that he could piss on or otherwise vandalise it. The idea didn’t appeal to him enough to bother. Not his style.
The uniforms’ nickname for the new super – Dooper – had stuck.
‘Dooper, Dooper, why’d they have to hire you?
’ Sellers had taken to singing whenever he and Simon walked past her office, to the tune of ABBA’s ‘Super Trouper’.
Sometimes, if Sellers had overdone it at The Brown Cow over lunch, he’d throw in another line too: ‘Pooper Scooper, when’s she gonna fire you? ’
It was a good question. Soon, probably, now that Simon was encouraging murders.
Knowing he’d never be able to prove her wrong in her assessment of his professional shortcomings, he’d found himself fantasising about defeating Dooper some other way.
Fat chance. She’d soon have him living on benefits and wishing he’d obeyed more than a handful of orders since the start of his police career.
Luckily, Jemma Stelling was about as capable of committing murder as Simon’s socks were.
Dreaming up an oh-so-clever plan was one thing, but she’d never have put it into action.
She was a trapped-in-endless-emotional-bullshit person, not an action person.
Whatever her manipulation was about, murder wasn’t the aim.
Simon’s best guess was that she wanted two things: to make her fantasy feel more real by getting it immortalised in an official police statement, and – most importantly – she wanted to scare Marianne Upton out of her mind.
I’m assuming you’ll be making contact with her and telling her there’s been a threat against her. Isn’t it normal to warn people?
That’s what Jemma had said. She’d made the point twice. She was Simon’s least favourite kind of person: shamelessly telling a tiny fraction of a story and pretending it’s the whole thing, expecting you to hang on their every word and not notice you’re being manipulated.
He locked his car and walked through the slicing wind up the steps and into the nick.
Once inside, he headed for the new CID room – the first time he’d done so by choice.
He focused on nothing but the danger of running into Dooper, how extremely likely it was, how much he’d hate to lay eyes on her even from a distance.
God turned out to be on his side for the first time in what felt like a long while: he made it to the CID room without so much as a glimpse of Dooper’s shiny mushroom hair.
The first person to notice he’d walked in was DS Doug Brodigan, nearest to the door.
He still had his coat on and was mopping up some coffee he’d spilled on the top of a filing cabinet.
Brodigan was as good a place to start as any, Simon thought.
He’d been with Spilling CID as long as Simon had; they’d trained together.
Simon had an impression of Brodigan as someone who would prefer to say ‘Yeah, course’, rather than ‘No chance’, which made him a promising prospect.
‘Waterhouse.’ Brodigan looked slightly wary as Simon approached. ‘I was sorry to hear about Sam and—’
‘No one’s dead,’ Simon spoke over him. He couldn’t stand sympathy.
Charlie had said the other day that most of their colleagues, close and distant, were more concerned for him than they were for Proust and Sam.
Simon wished she’d kept that observation to herself, though he knew she’d meant well in telling him.
‘Sure,’ said Brodigan. ‘But to lose two members of your team … That’s rough. Has Superintendent Whittingham—’
Simon cut him off with a terse, ‘How likely are you to remember a case from 2012?’
Brodigan looked surprised to be interrupted. Then he nodded. ‘Marianne Upton?’
Simon was about to ask how he knew, then realised word must have got round about Jemma’s supposedly preventative murder confession.
‘Worked that one myself and won’t forget it in a hurry,’ said Brodigan. ‘Bloody odd one, it was.’
‘Tell me,’ Simon said.
‘Formidable lady, was Mrs Upton. Minted, too – massive house in Sleatham St Andrew. Wife, mother, grandmother. She was attacked in her mansion while babysitting her granddaughter. Had her throat slashed. Nasty. She was lucky to survive – only did because the scrote got her trachea, not her arteries. Could still have died, though, if she’d been found thirty seconds later.
Ambulance got there just in time. She nearly drowned in her own blood. ’
Simon said, ‘Stepmother and step-grandmother, I heard.’
Brodigan shook his head. ‘We were given strict instructions by Marianne herself: she was as much the little girl’s grandmother, and Jemma’s mother, as if they were her flesh and blood.
No “step nonsense” would be tolerated – that’s what she called it.
I remember her saying, “It makes a huge difference, what we decide to call things.” I’ve never forgotten it.
She’d always yearned for children and grandchildren of her own, she told me, so why would she let any step nonsense put an unnecessary distance between herself, Jemma and … no, can’t remember the kid’s name.’
‘Lottie,’ said Simon.
‘Right.’ Brodigan chuckled. ‘I tell you, she was a right old handful, was Marianne Upton, even half dead.’ Lowering his eyes and his voice, he said, ‘Snowman alert.’
Simon turned. Proust was standing in the doorway of the CID room, holding a file under his left arm and a banana in his right hand. Without being summoned, but feeling a kind of internal pull, Simon told Brodigan he wouldn’t be long and moved towards his DI.
‘Would you like a banana, Waterhouse?’ said Proust. ‘This banana?’
‘No sir.’
‘You’ve gone bananas, though. I brought you this to celebrate. From the canteen.’ The inspector held it out and Simon took it. ‘Did you encourage a woman to murder one of her relatives this evening?’
‘She isn’t going to do it. She never was.’
‘Maybe was. Definitely isn’t going to in the future,’ said Proust. ‘I see. You haven’t heard, have you?’
‘Heard what?’ said Simon.
Proust nodded, as if in response to an answer rather than a question. ‘We’re the sane ones, Waterhouse. Me and you. It’s the rest of the world that’s abandoned sanity, and we’re the ones who have to suffer for it.’ He plucked the banana out of Simon’s hand and marched out of the room.
‘What was that about?’ Brodigan asked a few seconds later.
‘Not a clue. Could have been his idea of a joke.’ Unlikely, though.
Normally anyone in the vicinity suffered the scalding agony of an ice-burn whenever Proust deployed what passed for his sense of humour.
‘Tell me about Marianne Upton in 2012,’ he said to Brodigan.
‘Everything you can remember. How was it an odd case?’
‘Well, we thought we had it in the bag, but then we had the rug pulled from under us – by none other than the victim herself.’
Simon knew he ought to wait and let Brodigan tell the story in his own way, but he was too impatient. ‘Could Jemma Stelling have done it?’ he asked.
‘Nope. Jemma was in a taxi with her husband when it happened, on their way home after trying and failing to go to London. Loads of witnesses saw them in the taxi queue and the driver confirmed it. No question about it – they were both ruled out very quickly. Normally they stayed in London overnight every Thursday, at the same hotel, while Marianne Upton babysat for little Lottie, but on this occasion their train stopped between Rawndesley and Stevenage and decided it wasn’t going any further.
You know what trains are like. Eventually the driver headed back to Rawndesley, all the passengers got off, including Jemma and her husband, who got a taxi from there to Sleatham St Andrew.
They got back to Marianne’s to find that—’
‘Wait, she was babysitting at her house, not theirs?’ asked Simon.