Mrs Pargeter wondered mildly what all that was about, but she had more pressing thoughts on her mind. There was the small matter of the police that required a decision.
Now, Mrs Pargeter did not believe in being deliberately obstructive to the police, except of course when it was absolutely necessary to do so. And in this instance, she couldn’t really pretend that it was absolutely necessary. Could she?
With a twinge of regret, she admitted to herself that no, she really couldn’t.
So, once again, she rang the police informer from the late Mr Pargeter’s address book and gave him the information to pass on.
As a result of his call, by that evening, the official investigators of Theresa Cotton’s murder knew where to find the dead woman’s husband.
They did not, however, know of his alibi for the time of his wife’s murder. Mrs Pargeter didn’t want to make it too easy for them. If they didn’t have to work some of the details out for themselves, it took the fun away, didn’t it?
Once again, Mrs Pargeter felt that she was playing fair by the police. She did not want to solve the case by taking unfair advantage of them, so each time she found an important new gobbet of information, she behaved very correctly, and passed it on.
Unfortunately, this was not a reciprocal arrangement.
The police could not be blamed for that state of affairs. Apart from anything else, even if they had wished to repay information with information, they were unaware of the identity of their benefactor, so would not know where to direct it.
And, being the realistic woman she was, Mrs Pargeter recognised that, even if they knew of her interest in the case, the police might be disinclined to be as generous as she in keeping her abreast of developments in their investigation.
The result of this, however, was that it was some days before Mrs Pargeter heard of the circumstances in which the police did find Rod Cotton.
As intended, the anonymous tip-off led them to the Embankment, but their quarry was not there when they arrived, and rigorous enquiries amongst his fellow-dossers produced no clue to his whereabouts.
It was three days later, when a body was washed up at Woolwich, that the police identified it as that of Rod Cotton.
And it was not until Tuesday, four days after her encounter with the dead man, that Mrs Pargeter read this news in her daily paper.
In the report of the discovery, reference was made to Theresa’s murder. In the inimitably British way that newspapers have of tiptoeing around the Law, the report implied, without of course saying as much, that the two deaths were not unconnected.
And also implied, though with what basis of truth could not be assessed, that the police might be looking no further for the murderer of Theresa Cotton.
∨ Mrs, Presumed Dead ∧
Thirty-One
In all her deliberations about the case, Mrs Pargeter kept coming back to the same question. How much could the murderer have predicted?
The murderer could not have predicted, for example, that Theresa’s body would have been found as soon as it was. On the other hand, he or she could have predicted that it would have been found at some point. So that risk must have been taken into account.
The murderer could also have predicted that, once the murder was discovered, the first person the police were likely to look for was Rod Cotton. Now, if Rod, as the accepted wisdom of Smithy’s Loam had it, was working in the North, the police would have had no difficulty at all in tracking him down. And, once they had tracked him down, they would question him about his movements at the time of his wife’s murder. That time was in fact a very specific and relatively short period. Theresa Cotton had been seen, alive and well, at about seven-thirty on the Monday evening, by Sid Runcorn the car dealer. And she had been safely strangled and stowed away in her freezer by nine o’clock the following morning when Littlehaven’s removal men arrived.
So, if the conjectural Rod Cotton who worked in the North of England had an alibi for that crucial 13 and a half hour period – and there was a very good chance that he would have – then his usefulness to the murderer as a decoy quickly evaporated.
The real Rod Cotton, on the other hand, the drunken, unfocused, washed-up Rod Cotton, who wandered through London without a name or a home, was a much better proposition. Mrs Pargeter had been very fortunate in discovering his alibi for the time of the murder; he was certainly in no state to provide it himself. Anyway, he had to be found first, and it had taken all of the exceptional skills of Truffler Mason to achieve that.
So the murderer might well have felt pretty safe with the real Rod Cotton as a suspect. Rod was one of the lost people of England, one who had lost his identity completely, had simply slipped off the demographic map of the country’s population.
There was a comforting kind of logic to it. The first suspect is the victim’s spouse, because the first suspect always is the victim’s spouse. But then the victim’s spouse can’t be found, suggesting that he has done a bunk and reinforcing the existing suspicions against him.
Yes, it made sense.
Assuming of course that the murderer knew about what had really happened to Rod Cotton.
It became a priority for Mrs Pargeter to find out how many of the residents of Smithy’s Loam had been taken in by the story of his promotion and transfer to the North of England.
And the resident who warranted most urgent investigation was the one who, Mrs Pargeter suspected, had been rather closer to Rod Cotton than the others.
♦
“Well, obviously,” said Vivvi Sprake, “the news of the last few weeks has been pretty devastating. I mean, first Theresa, and then Rod…it’s ghastly.”
Mrs Pargeter nodded sympathetically. She had had no problem at all in getting Vivvi on to the desired subject. Advice on gardeners had been quickly dispensed, and Vivvi herself had brought up the murder. She had been longing to have a really good natter about it, and she thought Mrs Pargeter might be a more enthusiastic participant in gossip than the other, more stand-offish, residents of Smithy’s Loam. She felt drawn to the older woman; though Mrs Pargeter’s background was London, her relaxed conversational approach struck chords from Vivvi’s northern upbringing.
“I mean, it’s dreadful…you know, to think that people you’ve known…could do that to each other.”
“Dreadful. Impossible to see inside another couple’s marriage,” Mrs Pargeter commented, masking her interest in the platitude, and noting that Vivvi, at least apparently, accepted the prevalent view that Rod had killed his wife.
“Yes. Yes,” Vivvi agreed, and couldn’t help adding mysteriously, “Mind you, I don’t think everything was as sunny as it seemed with the Cottons’ marriage…”
“Oh?” said Mrs Pargeter, without too much emphasis. She didn’t think that Vivvi was going to be too difficult a subject to interrogate; indeed, she thought the problem might later be to stem the flow of confidences.
“Yes…Well, I’m only telling you this in confidence, Mrs Pargeter…”
“Of course, of course…”
“But Rod Cotton once made a pass at me.”
“Really?” said Mrs Pargeter, as if dumbfounded.
“Oh yes,” Vivvi’ Sprake asserted with a harsh woman-of-the-world laugh that didn’t quite come off.
“When was this?”
“Rod was around for a while between finishing the job down here and moving up to the new job in York…”
Vivvi was the first of the Smithy’s Loam crowd to mention ‘York’ as opposed to just ‘the North’. That, like the fact that she had had Rod’s office phone number, confirmed the idea of a special relationship between the two.