‘I am Detective Inspector Angel. Please sit down, Mrs-er …’ Angel said.
‘Thank you. My name is Elizabeth Reid, Mrs Elizabeth Reid,’ the tubby Scottish lady said in a raw Glaswegian dialect.
‘I understand that you lease out flats in that block at the top of Mansion Hill and that one of your tenants has gone missing, Mrs Reid? Tell me about him.’
‘Yes, Inspector. A man came to me about three months ago. He was after a bedsit. Mr Harold Henderson his name was. I fixed him up with one on the top floor, number twenty. He seemed a reliable, clean-looking man. He paid me a month’s rent in advance. I made out a rent book in his name. He’s now overdue. I collect, normally on a Tuesday. I’ve called the last four Tuesdays. He wasn’t in. He’s never in. I thought it was odd, so this morning, when he didn’t reply, I used my key to take a look … see what was happening, you know. When I got inside, it was untidy, sink full of pots, dirty clothes all over the place. That’s usually what I find with single men … nothing cleaned or dusted. It looked like he hadn’t been there for weeks … like deserted!’
Angel sniffed. It didn’t seem to him to be particularly significant. ‘Don’t you think he could have taken a holiday?’ he said.
‘If he has, I don’t think he took any clothes with him.’
Angel rubbed his chin. Men don’t need much. He could have bought a clean shirt and underwear as he went along.
‘Another funny thing,’ she continued. ‘He’s moved all the furniture round. He’s put the table by the window and he’s moved the bed to the middle of the room. I ask you, who sleeps in a bed in the middle of a room?’
Angel raised his head. His eyes narrowed.
‘Bed in the middle of the room?’ he said.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It’s crazy, Inspector, isn’t it?’
He looked at Crisp. ‘Come on, laddie. We must have a look at this.’
They were at the flats in a few minutes and climbed the three uncarpeted flights of stairs following Mrs Reid. She led them onto the top floor, along the short landing to a door with the printed plastic numbers, two and zero, gold on black, stuck to the top of the door. She produced a bunch of keys and unlocked the door.
Angel went in first. He looked round. It was an untidy room with a small window looking over some of the roofs of houses. The furniture was utilitarian. There was a small table against the window and, as Mrs Reid had said, the bed was right in the middle of the room. The floor was uncarpeted but there was a rug the size of a small hearthrug placed at the side of the bed, so that when Mrs Reid’s lodger got out of bed on a morning, his feet would naturally land on the rug and not on the cold bare wooden floorboards.
Angel crossed straight to the bed, leaned down, dragged the hearthrug away, then bent down to look at where it had been. There they were, as he expected, two very fine saw cuts, three feet apart across two floorboards. They were only visible if you knew where to look. He nodded with satisfaction and with the tips of his hands and fingernails easily managed to lift first one floorboard and then the other. He pulled the two pieces from the support of the beams and handed them to Crisp.
Mrs Reid stood close by and looked on open-mouthed. ‘Goodness gracious me,’ she said.
Angel immediately saw the reason for the freshly made hiding place. It was stuffed with Bank of England £20 and £50 notes bundled in green Northern Bank wrappers.
Crisp’s eyes glowed.
‘There must be thousands, sir.’
‘Aye,’ Angel said. He reached into his pocket and took out his mobile. He opened it and dialled a number.
‘Goodness gracious me,’ Mrs Reid said again.
‘Shall I count it, sir?’ Crisp said.
‘No. Don’t touch any of it. There’ll be some prints on the wrappers, and I want them clean, clear and indisputable,’ he said heavily. ‘Then it can be moved and counted.’
Another ‘Goodness gracious me,’ escaped from Mrs Reid, who then said. ‘What about my Mr Henderson, Inspector? Wherever can he be?’
Angel nodded towards the cache of money.
‘Don’t worry about him, Mrs Reid. We’ll find him. And if we don’t find him, he’ll definitely find us.’
There was a knock at the door. It was Gawber.
‘No joy at that newsagent’s, sir. He has no knowledge of a woman in blue. He has never seen her in his shop that he can recall.’
Angel’s face assumed a grim expression. He pushed his hand through his hair.
‘Lady B phoned the office for a taxi to pick her up outside Wells Street Baths, yesterday at a few minutes to two o’clock. How did she get to the baths? Did she walk it? Does she therefore live in walking distance of there? Would we able to trace her phone call to the taxi office?’
‘I’ve left Scrivens there, sir. He’s still working on it,’ Gawber said.
The phone rang. It was DS Taylor of SOCO. ‘I thought you’d like to know, sir, about that hair we found on the victim’s skirt.’
‘Yes Don,’ Angel said, his face brightening.
‘We’ve got a match, sir, but I’m sorry to say it’s that of her husband, Charles Prophet.’
Angel wrinkled his nose. That was a big disappointment to him. ‘Right. Thank you very much, Don.’
‘But there’s something else,’ Taylor said. ‘Don’t know whether it’s good news or bad. We’ve been through the Prophets’ wheelie bin and, at the top, probably the last item put in there, were four oranges in a plain white plastic bag.’
Angel rubbed his chin. With Reynard’s penchant for oranges, that was something to think about. ‘Yes, Don?’
‘Not likely to be from a supermarket. They were in a plain white plastic bag … probably came from a shop or a market stall.’
‘Yes, but are there any dabs on it?’ he asked urgently.
‘Only smudges and strips: nothing we can use.’
‘Oh,’ he growled.
‘There’s something else, sir. The sample peel we took from the victim’s skirt on the settee is the identical variety and the same maturity as the oranges in the wheelie. Therefore it would be reasonable to assume that there had been five oranges in the bag originally and that one of them was consumed by the murderer, Reynard.’
Angel felt a slight, cold tremor run up his back at the very mention of the name as he thought that he might be so close to identifying and arresting that infamous man.
‘Pity you couldn’t have managed a print off the bag,’ Angel said. ‘It would have been a big step forward.’
‘Sorry sir,’ Taylor said.
Angel thanked him, replaced the handset and brought Ahmed and Gawber up to speed with SOCO’s news.
Then he said: ‘Ron, Nip up to Creesforth Road. Ask Don Taylor for that bag and then go round the town. See if you can find a fruiterer in town or on the market who sold a man five oranges in a bag like that, yesterday, Monday. I know it’s a long shot, but you never know.’
‘Right, sir,’ Gawber said and went off.
Angel watched the door close.
Ahmed came up to the desk. ‘Can I do anything, sir?’
Angel smiled. He liked the lad’s enthusiasm.
‘Yes. Fetch me a cup of tea.’
‘Right, sir,’ he said eagerly, and dashed off out of the room.
Angel reached out for the phone. He tapped in SOCO’s number. He wanted to speak to DS Taylor.
‘Ron, I want you to send a fingerprint man up to Flat 20, Mansion Hill. There’s an impressive amount of fun-time money under the floorboards, and I want to know where it has come from. It wants fingerprinting, counting and depositing in the station safe. Trevor Crisp is hanging on there for you. All right?’
He hung up and pushed the swivel chair backwards and gazed up at the cream ceiling with the grey dust marks round the rose and the electric flex that came down holding the white plastic lampshade. He rubbed the lobe of his ear between finger and thumb.
There were many things that didn’t make sense in this murder case. This orange business was wacky. Why would Reynard buy five oranges, murder somebody, peel one, throw the peel over her, eat it and throw the other four away?