The Marlow Murder Club Page 2

Judith crossed her drawing room to the card table by the bay window and smoothed down the green baize with her hand. Next she reached up onto a shelf and pulled down a sheet of squared mathematical paper. She then chose a 2B pencil from a mug of 2B pencils and, even though it didn’t need sharpening, she pushed the pencil into her metal desk sharpener. It gripped the end, the old electric motor clattering as it spun, and the pencil Judith removed a few seconds later wasn’t so much a writing implement as a lethal weapon.

  Judith smiled to herself. A fresh pencil. The empty squares on the paper in front of her. The fight ahead.

  Sitting down, she picked up her wooden ruler and began to mark out a fifteen-by-fifteen grid of squares. Next, she shaded in a pattern of darker squares around a single line of symmetry, so each darker square had a twin reflected on the right. There wasn’t any particular pattern she followed, it was mostly her many decades of experience that guided her hand.

  Once she had marked out her grid, all she had to do was fill in the blank spaces with words. This, she knew, would take her the next hour or so, and only once she was happy that she had an interesting collection of words intersecting with each other would she turn her mind finally to creating the clues.

  As for the types of clues she liked to set, she eschewed the wilful opacity favoured by many setters, most famously represented by the near-impossible monthly puzzle that used to appear in the Listener magazine. She felt there was something a bit too ‘male’ about how they tried to show off how very clever they were. ‘Look at me,’ they seemed to be saying, ‘you’ll never guess how brilliant I am.’ Instead, like many setters, she aligned herself with the principles of Ximenes, the legendary setter for the Observer newspaper from 1939 to 1972. Accordingly, her clues had to have two halves, the literal clue on one side, the riddle on the other. And the two halves had ultimately to ‘play fair’ with the solver, with the small caveat that if a clue was ingenious or witty enough, she was prepared on occasion to break the rules.

  This morning, however, the muse wasn’t with Judith. Having created her square of blocks and blanks, she couldn’t settle on the correct words with which to fill the grid. She lacked all decisiveness. It was Stefan, she knew. She couldn’t concentrate. She had to know that he was okay.

  Judith reached for her tablet computer. She didn’t much like the device, but it was useful for photographing and then emailing in her crosswords to the papers, so she’d come to terms with it some years ago.

  She held it up to her face, but the stupid machine refused to unlock, claiming it didn’t recognise her. Judith harrumphed, once again cursing at the indignities of being an older woman. The modern world treated her as though she were entirely invisible, and even her own bloody computer criticised her for not looking suitably like herself. But there was no point trying to fight with technology. Judith had learned that a long time ago in an incident that had involved a strawberry-coloured iMac, an electric cable that wasn’t quite long enough, and a trip to Accident and Emergency.

  Judith took a deep breath and composed herself.

  She held the tablet up and looked at it again.

  Nothing happened.

  Bloody thing! Muttering to herself, Judith entered the passcode and then opened her web browser. Maybe there’d been some news about Stefan in the last twenty-four hours?

  She typed ‘Stefan Dunwoody’ into the search bar, but all of the hits told her he owned an art gallery called Dunwoody Arts in Marlow, a fact she already knew. But she wanted to be thorough, so she clicked through the pages of results.

  Although, what was this? One of the later results was a link to a webpage from a local newspaper, the Bucks Free Press. It was the headline that caught her attention: BUST-UP AT HENLEY REGATTA.

  Clicking the link, she found herself reading a diary piece from a roundup of the Henley Royal Regatta, six weeks before.

  Word reaches us that Stefan Dunwoody, local art gallery owner, got into a tipsy dispute in the Royal Enclosure with Elliot Howard, owner of the Marlow Auction House. According to our little birdie, when Mr Howard threatened to punch Mr Dunwoody, the stewards were called and both men were forcibly ejected.

  Judith put her tablet down. So, Stefan had got into a drunken altercation at Henley with someone called Elliot Howard, and here he was, only a few short weeks later, and there’d been another set-to of some sort on his property.

  A set-to where someone had fired a gun.

  And then Stefan had subsequently vanished.

  Sod this for a game of soldiers, Judith thought as she strode across the room, swept up her cloak from its peg and left the house.

  She went down to her boathouse, approached an old punt that was half in and half out of the water and gave it a shove with her foot. She stepped up onto the back of it and grabbed the punting pole as the front of the boat bumped through the rotten boathouse doors and slipped out onto the river.

  Despite her advanced years, Judith was an expert punter. With a flick of her wrists, she thrust the pole down into the riverbed, bent at the waist and pushed with all her might. As the punt shot forward, she twisted the pole up and out of the soft mud, and the boat had the momentum to cross the river.

  Once she reached the further bank and the river was shallow again, it was no effort to punt upstream the fifty or so yards to Stefan’s house, use the prow of the punt to penetrate the wall of reeds that protected his riverbank, and step up onto his land. She didn’t need to secure the boat. Entirely surrounded by bulrushes, it wasn’t going anywhere.

  Checking her watch, Judith could see that just over eight minutes ago, she’d been sitting in her house, and now here she was, at the sharp end of her neighbour’s mysterious disappearance.

  Stefan’s house was really rather splendid to Judith’s mind. It was a converted watermill with a wooden wheel that still turned lazily, but differently sized rectangular glass windows had subsequently been cut into the building. It was both pleasingly old-fashioned and modern at the same time.

  She went and looked at Stefan’s car in the driveway. Judith knew nothing about cars, and cared even less, so all she could tell was that it was grey in colour, and it was gleaming, not a spot of dirt on it anywhere. She could see no other tyre tracks in the gravel, or any other clues that suggested that perhaps Stefan had left the house in a different vehicle.

  She went for a walk around the garden, trying to work out where the sound of the gunshot might have come from, but it was hard to place herself accurately when her only reference point was from a position in the river below the height of the bulrushes.

  In fact, it took only a few minutes of walking around and inspecting the reed bed by the riverbank for Judith to realise that she didn’t even know what she was looking for. A drop of blood on a blade of grass? A muddy footprint?

  Judith looked at the wooden wheel turning on the side of the house, and the millpond in front of it. Despite the heat of the day, the water here was dark and Judith shivered at the thought of it. There was something about still bodies of water that spooked her. Although, as she looked, she could see that the water wasn’t quite still. There was a slight current tugging at the surface. Where was the water going?

  Judith walked around the edge of the pond until she saw that it fed into a river that was about ten feet across. Where the millpond ended and the river began, there was a narrow brick causeway that crossed from one side of the garden to the other.

  Judith considered the river beyond the dam. It had to feed back into the Thames somehow. But it was hard to see exactly how, as Stefan had allowed this section of the garden to grow wild, and the water soon slipped under dense shrubs and bushes that crowded in from both banks.

  With a sigh, Judith realised she’d have to follow the course of the river. She had to be thorough. So she pushed her way through the bushes, branches whipping her body, cobwebs sticking to her face and hair as she struggled to the other side.

  Once there, Judith was disappointed. It was even wilder in this corner of the
garden, but she could see that the river passed through some iron bars onto a concrete weir that fed the water back into the Thames. There was nothing of interest to see.

  Although, as she regathered her breath after her exertions, she became aware of something in the air, a fetid smell, like an old compost heap. Was it the river? She looked down at the water flowing through the grille. An old tree branch was half submerged, blocking the water, and leaves had backed up.

  But then Judith realised something.

  It wasn’t a branch in the water.

  It was a human arm.

  It was reaching out of the water, the skin of the hand as white as marble. And, deeper still, Judith could just make out the body.

  It was Stefan Dunwoody.

  And in the centre of his forehead was a small black hole. A bullet hole.

  Judith staggered back, her hand going to her neck.

  She’d been right all along.

  Stefan Dunwoody, her friend, her neighbour, had been shot dead.

  Chapter 3

  An hour later, Judith was sitting on a bench in Stefan’s garden being interviewed by Detective Sergeant Tanika Malik. The police officer was in her early forties, wore a smart trouser suit, and had an air of teacherly efficiency about her that Judith already found irritating.

  ‘But I don’t understand, Mrs Potts,’ DS Malik said. ‘You say you came back to Mr Dunwoody’s property?’

  ‘Yes,’ Judith said, her chin raised in defiance. ‘It’s like I told you on the phone. I knew I heard a shout and a gunshot last night. And if your police officer wasn’t going to investigate it properly, I thought that I should.’

  ‘Was there any other reason you returned?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Were you expecting to find a dead body?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘And yet, you did find one, didn’t you?’

  ‘Which is more than your officer managed, I can’t help noticing. Now tell me, did you know Stefan had a bust-up with a man called Elliot Howard a few weeks ago?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Judith told DS Malik about the local newspaper diary piece that described the argument at the Henley Royal Regatta between Stefan and the owner of the Marlow Auction House, Elliot Howard.

  ‘This was six weeks ago?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I see.’

  DS Malik thought for a moment.

  ‘What is it?’ Judith asked.

  ‘Can I ask you a question? As Mr Dunwoody’s neighbour.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Only, it’s standard procedure to cross-reference named subjects in witness reports with the police database. So I looked up Mr Dunwoody. He doesn’t have any kind of record. He owns the art gallery in Marlow, he lives on his own, it’s all as expected. But five weeks ago, he reported a burglary to us.’

  ‘He did? What was stolen?’

  ‘That’s the thing. He said he’d been out at a restaurant with friends, and when he got home he’d discovered someone had smashed a window and broken into his property. But by the time an officer arrived to take his statement, Mr Dunwoody had to admit that he couldn’t find anything that had been stolen.’

  ‘Nothing was stolen?’

  ‘That’s what he said. And yet it was very definitely a break-in. But his computer was still there. His collection of art. And I can tell you, Mr Dunwoody owns a number of oil paintings, and not one of them had been stolen.’

  ‘This was five weeks ago? A week after the bust-up Mr Dunwoody had at Henley?’

  ‘I suppose so. But did Mr Dunwoody mention the break-in to you?’

  ‘I haven’t spoken to Stefan in weeks, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Or did you see anything suspicious at the time? Maybe someone lurking near his property? Or a car parked by his house that looked different?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t. More’s the pity. The first I knew anything was wrong was when I heard him being murdered last night.’

  ‘Ah, now I’m really going to have to stop you there, Mrs Potts. You see, we don’t know for sure that someone shot Mr Dunwoody.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘We don’t know Mr Dunwoody was murdered.’

  ‘Are you saying the bullet hole appeared in his forehead as if by magic?’

  ‘Well, no, but we can’t rule out that his death was a terrible accident. Or what if he did this to himself?’

  ‘You think he committed suicide?’

  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘Poppycock!’

  DS Malik blinked in surprise. Had the woman in front of her just used the word ‘poppycock’?

  ‘If he took his own life, the pistol would have dropped to the ground somewhere. Before he fell into the river. And I can tell you, when I was looking, I didn’t see a gun on the ground anywhere.’

  ‘Yes, I can see why you’d think that, but maybe the gun fell into the river after he’d shot himself. I’ve instructed divers to search the riverbed for it. In the meantime, you really mustn’t jump to any conclusions, Mrs Potts. We must let the evidence lead us, not our assumptions.’

  Judith appraised DS Malik. The woman might be efficient, capable even, but she clearly lacked imagination. She was a typical ‘head girl’ type, Judith decided, not entirely kindly. But then, Judith had been expelled from the very posh boarding school she’d been sent to as a teenager. She’d also been expelled from the really-very-much-less-posh boarding school she’d been sent to next. And the one after that. Suffice to say, she and the head girls of the schools she’d attended hadn’t ever seen eye to eye.

  Judith sighed to herself. Very well, if the police didn’t believe that Stefan had been killed, then she’d just have to investigate his murder for herself, wouldn’t she?

  Once Judith had finished giving her formal statement, she stepped back onto her punt and, with a regal wave at the forensic officers in their paper suits as she passed, she allowed the river to carry her back to her house. She then got out her old bicycle and climbed onto it. After all, if she wanted to discover who’d killed her neighbour, there was an obvious place to start.

  It was only a five-minute cycle along the Thames Path into the nearby town of Marlow, and for once Judith didn’t acknowledge the little nods and waves she got from complete strangers as she whizzed along. But then, she never knew why so many people waved to her at the best of times. It never occurred to her that she was considered something of a minor celebrity in the town. To her mind, there was nothing interesting about her life, and every time she professed herself confounded by someone’s interest in her, she only embellished her reputation for eccentricity even further.

  Turning from the towpath into a little park with swings and slides, Judith saw a flock of pigeons pecking idly at the ground. Filthy creatures, she thought to herself as she sped up her bike, a big grin spreading over her face as she bore down on them. And then, at full tilt, she cycled into the flock, calling out ‘Pigeons BEGONE!’, and scattered squawking birds into the air.

  Judith loved Marlow with a passion. To her mind, it wasn’t too large, it wasn’t too small, it was just right. The perfect town for a Goldilocks like her. The High Street had an elegant Georgian suspension bridge and ancient riverside church at one end, an ornamental obelisk at the other, and, in between, there was every type of historic building from centuries of piecemeal development down each side. To tie it all together into an aesthetic whole, red-and-blue bunting criss-crossed the length of the High Street, creating the sort of ‘chocolate box’ image of an English Home Counties town that jigsaw puzzles were made of.

  But what Judith loved most about Marlow was the way it was so much more than its picturesque High Street. There was the railway station, even if it was no more than a hut, from which it was possible to get trains into London. There was also a thriving business park on the edges of the town that employed thousands of people. And above all, Judith loved the two local schools that churned out a st
eady stream of well-educated teenagers who’d work the tills in the supermarkets or take your order in the coffee shops. Seeing all these youngsters, unfailingly polite and always pleasingly attractive to her eye, going about their day, or having picnics down by the river, or even hanging out in the skate park by the cricket pavilion, gave Judith a real glow of happiness. If this was the next generation coming through, then the world didn’t have too much to worry about, she reckoned.

  Judith was by nature an optimist, it was almost her defining trait, but she also tried to be as honest as she could, and she had to admit that as much as Marlow remained a jaunty place, like all towns in Britain it had taken a bit of a battering over the last decade or so. It was all right if you were a tourist visiting for the day. There were plenty of high-end restaurants and clothes shops, so maybe you wouldn’t notice the dozen or so shops that were empty, their fronts tastefully postered to hide the absence of business going on inside. And the nice man who sold the Big Issue on one side of the High Street had recently been joined on the other side by a homeless man who sat cross-legged all day, a tin for coins in front of him.

  The people remained good, that’s what she reminded herself as she got off her bicycle at the top end of the High Street and leant it against a wall.

  As for where she was going, Judith had made up her mind the moment DS Malik had told her that she was wrong to believe that someone had killed her neighbour. She was going to start her investigation at Stefan Dunwoody’s art gallery.

  Chapter 4

  Judith had never set foot inside Dunwoody Arts before, but then she’d never had need to buy any artworks before. Why should she when she’d inherited her great aunt’s collection of paintings at the same time as she’d inherited her house?

  As Judith entered, a young female attendant looked up from her desk, tears in her eyes.

  ‘Oh,’ Judith said. ‘You’ve heard.’

  ‘The police just called,’ the woman said. ‘I’m still reeling.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ Judith said kindly as she crossed the gallery and sat down in the spare chair at the woman’s desk. Next, Judith rootled in her handbag and pulled out a packet of pocket tissues. She handed one over.