Murder At Midnight Page 12

  Scott waited patiently for the punchline.

  The electrician is a friend of my nephew’s,” she declared gleefully. “Would you believe that there is one entire room in the basement simply cluttered with Lisa Craig memorabilia?” Her voice rang with the joys of victory. “He has all the old newspaper clippings plastered over the walls. It is a shrine, Mr. Preston. Victor Kenny has erected a shrine to Lisa Craig in the room behind his furnace and hot water tank.”

  Scott struggled to maintain a straight face as Vera completed her repertoire of dramatic delivery. He wasn’t entirely surprised by this latest revelation about Victor. For a strange lonely hermit, obsessed by the fascinating Lisa, creating a picture shrine to her memory was simply the next step. But it didn’t prove that he had killed her.

  Hell, he could understand how the besotted man felt. He was almost as infatuated by Lisa himself. While he hadn’t exactly built a shrine to her memory, he did have a framed photograph of her by his bed. She had been a femme fatale of the first order.

  “I believe you’re biased Mr. Preston,” Vera snapped, disappointed that her revelation did not have the desired effect. “You’ve settled on Alec Webb as the murderer, and you’re just not willing to concede that you’ve made a grave error.”

  But the redoubtable Vera was by no means halted by Scott’s disinterest. In fact, his lack of enthusiasm had the opposite effect. It galvanised her into taking further action.

  “My name is Vera Holt,” she began determinedly, when she encountered Slater’s voice mail. “I have some new and vitally important evidence regarding the Craig case.”

  “How long have you known about your neighbour’s shrine to Lisa Craig?” Slater asked, when he returned her call a couple of hours later.

  “Only since yesterday,” Vera assured him. “However, I’ve suspected Victor was your man ever since Lisa was murdered.”

  She explained to him in some detail about what an odd character Victor Kenny was, and about his unhealthy infatuation with Lisa Craig. “I’m certain that he killed her,” she stressed, in a voice that rung with conviction. “And to save you the trouble of asking, the answer is a very definite yes. I most certainly did report my suspicions to your department at the time, but nothing was ever done about it.”

  It was a familiar complaint regarding Len Barthrop’s handling of the Craig case. Slater let it pass unchallenged.

  “So to the best of your knowledge, no-one has ever interviewed Victor Kenny about his possible connection to Lisa Craig?”

  “Well,” Vera hesitated slightly. “No-one except Scott Preston from the Morning Herald.”

  “Oh really,” Slater replied with renewed interest. “What, if anything, did he find out?”

  “Not a thing,” Vera gloated. “Victor told him to take a hike and slammed the door in his face.”

  Slater listened intently, his eyes riveted on the cascading fountain in the courtyard, which some prankster had laced with soap powder.

  “That’s why he dismissed this latest piece of evidence as unimportant.” Vera paused for a second to catch her breath. “He knew he didn’t have a chance of getting anything out of Victor.”

  But while Scott may have felt that Victor’s shrine to Lisa was of no import, Slater certainly did not. He was only too aware of how many murderers of young and beautiful women had kept similar memorials to their victims.

  Cognisant through Vera, of Victor’s great size and limited mental capacity, Slater took a constable with him when he set out to investigate this person of interest, in the unsolved Craig murder.

  This should have been done twenty years ago; he ruminated angrily. And to think Scott never saw fit to pass this information along to him. It was insufferable.

  When Victor at last opened the door to the constable’s persistent knocking, it was just by a crack, as he had done with Scott.

  Slater identified himself brusquely and delivered a terse ultimatum. “You either speak to us here, or down at the police station. Which will it be?”

  The interior of Victor’s shabby home was even worse than the exterior. Obviously built by an amateur long before such practices were outlawed by local building codes.

  Yet in the midst of all the grime and squalor, sat an expensive entertainment centre with a five-foot wide television set.

  “We’re investigating the murder of Lisa Craig.” Slater was blunt. His voice could have pierced nails. “What was your relationship with the dead woman? Where were you on the night she was murdered?”

  Victor looked stunned. He obviously had difficulty keeping up with this sudden and most disturbing development. His face was unshaven, and his eyes bulged out grotesquely from his heavy spectacles.

  “I’m waiting for an answer.” Slater was relentless, as he cut right to the chase.

  “…I…I …loved Lisa…she was my friend.” Victor murmured.

  “What were you doing on the night she was murdered?”

  “…I don’t remember…” He wrung his massive hands together in an age-old gesture of distress.

  “Okay, Victor,” Slater answered. “Now we want to take a look through your house.”

  “ No…I don’t want you to,” he protested, working his unusually small mouth into a grimace of displeasure.

  “We can get a search warrant, but that means we’re taking you down to the station with us while it’s processed,” Slater threatened. “We wouldn’t want you destroying any valuable evidence in the meantime.”

  The ungainly giant at once relented. The thought of being carted off to jail was a terrifying prospect to him.

  There wasn’t much of interest in the upstairs, just a grimy bedroom with some girlie magazines strewn around the bed.

  “You like this stuff do you?” Slater tossed one of the skin mags aside with exaggerated distaste.

  But it was the basement where Slater’s interest lay. In the small room behind the furnace that Victor had made into a shrine for Lisa Craig.

  A large photograph of the murdered woman dominated the poky space, and was surrounded by every newspaper and magazine article ever written about her death.

  But it was the comments, which Victor had scrawled across them that were of supreme interest to Slater. Especially the caption beneath Lisa’s smiling face, in the central picture of the exhibition. “Now you are all mine forever,” he had written in a childish print script with several spelling errors. The message had been penned in bold red ink that bled slightly on the corners.

  Slater raised an eyebrow in the direction of the constable. This was so often the reason that prompted individuals such as Victor, who were not playing with a full deck, to kill the object of their affections. It was the only way, in their sick minds, that they could keep that person all to themselves, for all time.

  There was no window in the furnace room and the only light came from a naked bulb hanging on a frayed cord suspended from the ceiling.

  But if Slater thought Victor’s comments were damning, they were nothing as to compared to what he would find next. It was an old, quite worn golf iron propped in a corner thick with cobwebs.

  Slater picked it up carefully with his handkerchief.

  “My God, that looks like dried blood and hair on the end of it.” He examined it closely beneath the naked light bulb.

  Victor, who watched the proceedings from the doorway looked tearful and ready to bolt. “Don’t let him out of your sight,” Slater muttered to the constable, as he went foraging through the rest of the ghastly room.

  It was quiet down there, unnaturally so, with only the occasional sounds from the street penetrating the unsavoury gloom. A child squealed with delight as another chased him, and a dog barked intermittently from a house across the road. A thick musty odour of mould and dust permeated everything.

  Slater was just about to call it a day when he noticed the narrow shelf, jutting out at an awkward angle, from high up on the north wall. On an impulse, prompted by that irrational sense of knowing, so necessary in hi
s profession, he stood up on an old apple crate and ran his hand along the dusty ledge.

  His hand immediately encountered an object, cold and hard to the touch. Could it be…he wondered in a fever of anticipation? Could it be the long lost brooch? The item missing from Lisa’s body, and known only to the investigators in the case, and of course, to her murderer?

  Slater held it up to the light in a hand that trembled slightly with the excitement and satisfaction of the moment. And there it was, a fine silver brooch in the shape of a sword, with an amber stone on the hilt. Lisa had been wearing it when she left home on the last evening of her life, pinned on the left side of her green cloak.

  It was her mother who had noticed it was missing, when her daughter’s effects were returned to her. “I know she was wearing it,” Adelaide insisted. “Because I straightened it for her before she left.”

  A subsequent search of Roanoke Park and surrounding areas came up negative. So had the inquiries at the Regal Cinema, where Lisa watched her last movie, and the Peach Tree Inn where she ate her last meal. Neither had there been any luck with the Number 42 Wycliffe Bus that carried her to her doom. The brooch had never been found.

  Until, while under hypnosis just a few months ago, Marjorie Rawlins described it in detail. So they knew that Lisa had been wearing it, pinned to her green cape, when she left the bus.

  Now here it was, lying right in the palm of his hand.

  “Victor Kenny, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Lisa Craig.” The terrified giant shuffled his feet and tossed his head around in an agony of despair. “Read him his rights,” he said to the constable. Slater thought for a moment of Garrick Boyd and how awful it must have been for him to be suspected of a murder for so long, that he did not commit.

  * * * *

  When Scott heard the news of Victor’s arrest he was totally dumbfounded, and felt woefully inept for his misreading of Vera’s new evidence.

  “But I don’t understand,” Ben protested. “Did Victor run Boyd off the road?”

  The newsroom was quiet. A storm brewed in the distance.

  “Slater thinks it was probably just an accident.” Scott shrugged. “I mean no-one could accuse Boyd of blackmailing Victor. The poor guy has been living off a meagre disability pension for years.”

  “What about the attack on Meg?” Ben added. “Is Victor being done for that one as well?”

  “He certainly is, and it seems to make sense.”

  “How so? I thought Meg said that she was attacked by a woman?”

  “She thought it was a woman’s voice that cursed at her,” Scott explained. “But just remember, Victor Kenny has a high pitched feminine sounding voice. I noticed that the time I went to his door, just before he slammed it in my face.”

  “You seem to buy it.” Ben bristled with disappointment and doubt. “I mean what happened to your convictions about Webb’s guilt?”

  Scott sighed and gazed out the window at the teeming rain, which had turned the gutters into mini rivers. “The evidence all seems to point to Victor Kenny as the killer.” He kicked himself mentally for not pursuing that line of enquiry himself. But he had never taken Vera’s accusations about Victor seriously.

  However Ben was not the only one doubtful about Victor’s guilt. Dorothy and Tony Minto were adamant in their condemnation of Alec Webb, and outraged that Vera Holt had stepped in and stole the limelight. She had neatly pinpointed Lisa’s murderer, and snatched the glory.

  “I never could stand the woman,” Dorothy confided, as she regaled Scott with her discontent over a slightly static telephone line. “She’s just an incorrigible gossip, that would do better to mind her own business.”

  Lisa’s mother and aunt remained divided in their views. Adelaide was ready to believe that Victor murdered her daughter, although she still half suspected Webb. While Bernice remained adamant that it was Boyd and only Boyd, who had committed the crime. “Mark my words Addie,” she declared to her long-suffering sister, as she swallowed the tiny yellow pills that helped keep her calm. “Time will prove me right.”

  * * * *

  “So who do you think the killer is?” Violet had recently returned from a trip to Hawaii and looked tanned and relaxed. Married life with Philip Mitford must agree with her, Scott decided. She removed what looked like a Tiffany lamp from a packing crate brimming with excelsior. “As far as I can see, it must be either Boyd, Webb or Victor? What do you think?”

  “I’m not sure,” Scott replied honestly. “It’s a perplexing case that gets more complex all the time. My money used to be on Boyd, and then it switched to Webb. But Slater is convinced Victor is the guilty one.”

  But late that evening another possible candidate was added to the list. The name was provided by a source that could claim insider knowledge of the first order.

  “This is Alec Webb.” The deep slightly nasal voice caught Scott by surprise while he prepared a tuna casserole for himself and Flynn.

  “Oh hello there Mr. Webb,” he responded awkwardly, remembering some of the unfavourable things he had written about Webb in his articles. “What can I do for you?”

  The kettle whistled to a furious boil. Scott leaned over and unplugged it.

  “Regardless of what you may believe, Mr. Preston, I did not kill Lisa Craig. But I do know who killed her. I suppose that makes me an accessory after the fact, or some such thing?”

  This was a turn of events that Scott could not have anticipated in his wildest dreams, Alec Webb confessing to having guilty knowledge of Lisa’s murder, when he had always denied, categorically, any involvement in the crime.

  “Go on,” he urged, as a pregnant silence built up around them.

  “I’m only doing this because I can’t see an innocent man spend the rest of his life in prison for a murder he did not commit.”

  So there was a loaded endorsement if ever there was one, for the innocence of Victor Kenny. Scott was impressed.

  A prolonged silence at the other end of the line followed. Scott began to fear that Webb had decided against exposing Lisa’s killer after all. But just when he was getting ready to prompt him, Webb breathed a world-weary sigh and muttered in a thick voice, scarcely above a whisper.

  “It was my wife Mr. Preston. Judy killed Lisa Craig.

  * * * *

  “So how can you be so sure that your wife killed Lisa Craig?”

  Webb slumped in an armchair beside the fireplace. Nell lay curled up at his feet. A hushed silence hovered over everything like a shroud.

  “Judy was quite insanely jealous of Lisa,” Webb explained haltingly. Then added hastily. “Quite without reason, of course.”

  Oh yea, and I’m the Sultan of Brunei, thought Scott. Yet he couldn’t confront him with what he knew, because he had seen the photograph of him and Lisa in a nightclub, through an illegal search of Webb’s home. And Philip Mitford had told him about surprising Webb and Lisa dishabille, under the strictest confidence. So he let it pass.

  Webb stretched his legs towards the empty grate, and recalled what had taken place on that fateful night twenty years ago.

  He had been thousands of miles away, at a water safety convention on the other side of the country when Lisa was murdered.

  “Just a minute…” Scott interrupted. “Can you prove that?”

  Webb laughed mirthlessly. “Of course I can prove it.” His voice was bitter.” There are records kept of these affairs, and I was actually the keynote speaker at that one.”

  “But, I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell the police this months ago?”

  “Because I hoped the whole sorry mess would simply blow over. I knew they had no evidence against me. Besides, I had already committed a felony by keeping quiet about Judy all these years. You see at the time, I just couldn’t face all the sensational publicity. It would have meant the end of my career.”

  Webb said that prior to his leaving, there had been a blistering argument between himself and Judy; over the amount of time he spent
with Lisa.

  “I’ve a good mind to go after that conniving little bitch and wring her neck,” she ranted furiously.

  “I returned home the day after Lisa’s murder, and found Judy and all her things gone. I never heard from her again.”

  Webb stared into the blackened grate and kicked at a piece of grit with his slippered foot. “I always suspected that Lisa dropped by that night expecting to find me here alone. I usually was you see, because around that time Shelley Roth was convalescing from an operation, and Judy practically lived at her place. Which incidentally, was conveniently close to the salon where she worked.”

  “The Scissors and Comb.”

  Webb nodded. “When I read your article, about the bus passenger who saw Lisa walking in this direction after leaving the bus, I knew my suspicions had been correct.”

  “So you think that Judy banged Lisa on the head in a fit of jealousy, then drove her body over to Roanoke Park and left it there?”

  “Yes,” Webb nodded. “She would panic afterwards when she realised the enormity of what she had done, and that’s when she would run away. Judy was like that, always allowing her unbridled temper to get her into all sorts of hot water.”

  “But this is really only supposition. You don’t have any hard evidence to link Judy to the crime.”

  “Well what do you think, Mr. Preston?” Webb turned the tables deftly. “Fact: Lisa was walking towards this house on the night she was murdered. Fact: I was not here but Judy was. Fact: Judy was insanely jealous of Lisa, and had actually threatened to do her harm.”

  Scott had to admit that Webb had built an excellent case against Judy as the murderer.

  But although he could prove that he hadn’t killed Lisa––that is providing his alibi checked out––there was still the possibility he had killed his wife.

  When he expressed this thought to Webb, he shrugged and snapped his knuckles impatiently. “Well, I suppose there is no way I can actually prove that Judy was gone when I returned home. Unless…” he hesitated slightly…“I take a lie-detector test.”

  Scott was surprised at his sudden willingness to do this.