Chapter Twenty-Three
I spent the weekend buoyed up with hope that the Meg-test was going to move things in my favor. When on Monday morning there was a knock at the door, I answered, my mind still on Meg and how easily they had fallen for it. The sight that met me wiped the smile off my face.
“Daisy Dixon,” DS Khan said, not bothering with pleasantries. “I’m arresting you on suspicion of death by dangerous driving.”
“Arresting?” I felt myself preparing for fight or flight. “Why?”
“We’ll get to that down at the station. Please come this way.”
I thought about resisting. Or about making a run for it. I looked around for the best way to escape, I should have rehearsed for this, but as DC Parker unhooked a pair of handcuffs from his belt, I just said, “Can I phone my solicitor?”
On a brighter note, I didn’t have to wait long for Tarquin. He already seemed to have been primed and arrived at the police station not long after me. In no time at all we were back in that little room, ready to talk all things Lennie.
For the occasion, Tarquin was wearing a tie that had been chopped off a couple of inches below the knot. Another riotous success by his offspring.
“There’re all like this,” he said. “This was the longest one. No more pocket money for a while.” But I was starting to think he should really get a grip. I would’ve done by now, if they were mine. In fact, it never would have got this far if they were mine.
DS Khan opened a folder. In front of her was some kind of report. She turned straight to a page with a diagram of a human body on it, parts shaded over, with lines linking the shading to notes around the edges.
“Do you know what this is, Daisy?” DS Khan asked and yes, actually, I did.
I’d seen it on documentaries. It was a diagram used to show the injuries sustained by a victim.
I answered her question. She asked another one.
“This report relates to Lennie Green. Do you know what might have caused any of these injuries?”
Yes, of course. “No,” I said.
She started to point to various bits of shading. “Every rib on his left-hand side was fractured, and the sixth rib pierced the lung.”
That probably explained why his breathing had seemed labored.
She continued. “Mr. Green had extensive bruising across much of his torso, a broken radius and thumb—”
“Which one’s the radius?” I asked.
She pointed to the lower arm and continued.
“He had a contusion on his forehead”—I’d seen it done, on the dashcam video—“which may or may not have led to concussion or loss of consciousness.” No, it didn’t lead to loss of consciousness, I could have confirmed that for them.
“All of these are injuries consistent with a collision with a road vehicle. A collision at quite a speed.”
I was about to protest: I hadn’t been driving fast, around thirty, but I remembered my official story and I nodded and looked at her, as if I were keen for the next part.
“The most interesting injury is this one,” she said, pointing to the neck on the diagram.
“Whiplash?” I guessed.
“No, a broken hyoid.”
“Oh, of course!” I’d forgotten that; it had been a clue in many a police drama.
They all looked at me in surprise. I realized why:
“Hang on a minute,” I said. “That’s for when someone is strangled.”
After that the whole thing descended into mayhem, in my head at least. I didn’t strangle Lennie! I never touched his neck. Strangling was the last thing he needed; I’d been trying to help him.
The two detectives were looking at me, waiting for clarity I couldn’t give. I was so surprised, it took me a minute to realize that, if I hadn’t killed him, someone else had done so, and done it deliberately. I turned to Tarquin, who looked equally dumbfounded.
“Are you saying he was killed by strangulation and not by the collision?” he asked.
“It certainly looks that way,” DS Khan said.
I thought back to the moment I’d returned to the drawing room after looking for first aid supplies: James bending over Lennie, “checking for breath,” he had said.
James jumping when he realized I was back in the room. The way Lennie’s head hung so loosely.
“Do you think my client could strangle a grown man?” Tarquin asked.
“A grown man who was already seriously injured.”
I could hardly hear them, my head was spinning, but I remembered a gem from a number of murder mysteries: “I believe it takes a long time to strangle someone,” I said. “I don’t have the patience.”
James was a killer: a murderer. As well as a fraudster. I was just accident-prone. Tarquin was speaking again, but I was hardly hearing.
“And what are you suggesting she did with the body?” he asked them. “I think we’re in agreement that Mr. Green didn’t die where he was found.”
“We agree the body was moved.”
“Do you agree that even if my client could have strangled him, which a jury would find hard to believe, it would be impossible for her to move a man of his size for any distance? Look at her…”
They all looked at me, in a shirt that had started life as a Welsh flag.
“Look at her size, not at her clothes,” Tarquin clarified, but instead we all looked at the stub of his tie.
“We think she had help.”
I came back to attention at this. At last, we were getting to James and his part in it.
Khan continued. “Your husband tells us you are having an affair.”
James had told them that? From what was on the forum, I’d thought James wanted to steer them away from that.
“An affair?” I repeated. “Who with?” With whom, I should have said.
“That’s for you to tell us.”
“I don’t know. I never meet anyone I could be having an affair with.” Although I thought wistfully of Arty. “Who does James think?”
“He doesn’t know, but certain people in the village have said it might be Doug Newman,” DS Khan said. “Can you shed any light on that?”
I shook my head to bring myself back into the real world.
Khan was still talking. “Mr. Dixon said he’d suspected an affair for a long time.
He said on the night of the accident he’d had a lot to drink and he passed out almost as soon as he got back to Langley Hall.
So, he can’t be a witness to what you did next, but he knows that when he fell asleep his Audi was in the garage and when he went to get it, to go to work the next morning, it was gone.
A lot of people remember him driving a classic Rolls Royce that day. ”
Tarquin and I sat in silence.
“Did he report it as stolen?” Tarquin asked.
“Not straightaway, the garage hadn’t been broken into, so he knew it wasn’t thieves.
He said he knew immediately that it was Daisy.
He didn’t want to get her into trouble for what he thought at the time was a domestic matter.
Later, he helped her by falsely reporting it as stolen.
Foolish of him, but the things we do for love. Then he heard the news reports.”
DS Khan sat back, triumphant, while DC Parker picked up the narrative.
“So, Daisy, we believe that you and your unknown beau arranged a rendezvous once your husband was asleep that night. Somehow, what was probably initially an accident occurred and Mr. Green came to grief. Instead of helping him, for reasons best known to yourselves, you decided to finish him off. Then you took him back to your estate to dispose of the body.”
I’d once heard that when you’re telling a lie, you should try not to deviate too far from the truth, and it sounded as if James had heard that same advice. Well done.
“Is that what happened, Daisy?” Khan asked me. “Or is there anything you want to tell us?”
I looked at them, wondering what I might want to tell them. Parker spoke next.
“Because there’s another death to take into account and a version of events that means it may have been six of one and half a dozen of the other.”
“What?” Tarquin said.
“In a nutshell, we think Daisy was responsible for Mr. Green’s death, but who killed Mr. Newman? That is a different question. Who might have had a motive? A lovers’ tiff between him and Daisy or a crime of passion committed by someone else?”
This was my chance to tell a load more lies, to say that, yes, I was having a fling with Mr. N and point the finger at James.
“How well did you know Doug Newman, Daisy? Did he come up to Langley Hall often?”
I opened my mouth to say, yes, I was Mr. Newman’s other woman.
We met at Langley Hall when James was at work, we christened every room, as well as Mr. Billings’s shed.
We fantasized about running away, just us and Meg, we laughed at the ignorance of James and Jo.
We were the Romeo and Juliet of Upper Iffley.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sit there and say I’d had an affair and make up scenarios in which we met and tell them about the things we did. For a start, how explicit would they want me to be?
“I don’t know what happened to Mr. Newman,” I said. “I don’t know how he died.”
DS Khan reached behind her for a clear plastic evidence bag. Inside the bag was a phone.
“Do you recognize this, Daisy?” she asked.
“No,” I said, but I could make a good guess at what it was. Whose it was. Khan confirmed my suspicions, and more.
“It’s Mr. Green’s phone,” she said. “Your husband gave it to us. He said he found it on your side of the lounge.”
James had it. No wonder he wasn’t worried when I said it was missing. And I thought Mrs. B had taken it. I’d plotted to kill her because of it. Now I remembered I’d lost my hairbrush that day. Was that what she’d pinched? James must’ve taken the phone at the same time as he killed Lennie.
Now it was Parker’s turn to reach behind and bring out a much larger item in another clear bag. Lennie’s satchel.
“Do you recognize this, Daisy?” he asked.
Out of habit, I shook my head, but I knew what they were going to say.
“Mr. Dixon gave it to us. He says you had it.”
“No comment,” I said, my answer of last resort.
“What’s more, a witness says that a satchel, the contents of which point to it having been the property of Mr. Green, was seen at Langley Hall on the morning after his disappearance, but it never appeared again.”