He took them upstairs to a vast, oppressive corner room. God help the poor soul who seeks solace here, thought Ellen. ‘We need to see Mrs McQuarrie’s files,’ she said.
O’Brien was on firm ground now; resistant ground. ‘Janine appointed me to look after her records in the event of anything happening to her. It’s standard practice,’ he said, to forestall any objections that the police might like to make.
‘May we see those records? We need to identify anyone who has a volatile background and rule out everyone else.’
‘A fishing expedition? Request denied. You’ll need a warrant, and even then you’ll need a good reason, and we’ll challenge it.’
Ellen sighed. She knew that a magistrate would grant a subpoena without hassle, for this was a murder inquiry, but only if the police could present a compelling case for the murderer being one of the dead woman’s clients rather than anyone else. ‘All right, then perhaps you can tell me the sorts of people Mrs McQuarrie counselled.’
O’Brien breathed out heavily. ‘Children-bedwetting kids and troubled teenagers. People grieving the death of a loved one. Women finding the strength to leave unhappy marriages. All kinds of ordinary afflictions, and none that might give rise to the impulse to murder, I wouldn’t have thought.’
Ellen agreed privately. According to Challis’s descriptions of the circumstances, Janine McQuarrie’s murder had been a carefully arranged contract killing, not the product of impulsive or skewed reasoning. Her mind drifted. Women finding the strength to leave unhappy marriages, she thought. Is that what I need?
Scobie Sutton broke in. ‘We’ll need to see her desk calendar, and talk to everyone in the clinic, before the press do.’
O’Brien rolled his eyes. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
He showed them to the conference room and for the next hour they interviewed the staff: O’Brien, three other therapists, the office manager and the receptionist, all of whom had solid alibis for earlier than morning. The office manager, a vigorous, no-nonsense woman named Iris, was the most helpful, but her information merely bore out in clearer terms what everyone was saying: that Janine McQuarrie had been a real piece of work, not only considered a poor therapist but also reviled. A woman whose bitter personality had permeated the building, she had minions, not friends. She was manipulative, a gossip, and would spread rumours against those whom she believed had wronged her. At staff meetings she liked to chuckle over her clients’ sad secrets and off-the-wall phobias. She wasn’t motivated to help, Iris said, but to bring down people and institutions, and she was obsessed with money: accumulating it, not spending it.
Scobie Sutton stirred, as if money, or all of this dirt being spread about Janine McQuarrie, was distasteful to him. ‘Was she a gambler?’
‘Not her,’ Iris said. ‘Gambling is a sign of weakness, quote unquote.’
‘Any irregularities in the firm’s bookkeeping?’
Iris bristled. ‘I keep the books.’
Scobie back-pedalled. ‘I mean, did she have access to the books? Was she keeping income back from the firm? Anything like that?’
‘Not that I’m aware of…’
‘Her clients,’ said Ellen. ‘Were any of them unstable enough to murder her? Did she offend any of them?’
‘She whisked them in and out, or met them elsewhere, so I wouldn’t know,’ Iris said.
‘What about her private life? Anyone in the background? Friends? Enemies?’
‘Look,’ said Iris. ‘We pitied her more than anything. We avoided her. She was most probably lonely, but everything about her said “back off”. I wonder how on earth she found herself a husband and mothered a child, frankly.’
‘Do you know who she was seeing this morning?’ Ellen had examined Janine McQuarrie’s desk calendar, and the day’s entry was typically cryptic: Penzance North 9.30.
‘No.’
That was all they could get. Ellen called Challis’s mobile number. ‘We’re on our way back to Waterloo.’
‘Good. I want a quick briefing before we talk to the super’s granddaughter.’
‘Be there in twenty minutes,’ said Ellen.
9
Scobie drove, with Ellen sitting tensely in the passenger seat, her hands braced on the dash, her foot on a phantom brake pedal. Sutton’s driving style was full of fits and starts, swivel necking, and hand gestures as he talked, punctuated with occasional swigs from a bottle of mineral water.
‘You know the Cobb family?’ Scobie said. ‘From one of the estates?’
‘One of the kids took a marijuana plant to school for show-and-tell,’ gasped Ellen.
‘Correct.’
‘What about them?’
‘My wife’s had dealings with them.’
Ellen knew that Scobie would get to the point eventually. She’d met Beth Sutton a few times, at police picnics and Christmas parties. A plain, good, churchgoing woman who worked for Community Health and was given to helping the unfortunates of the Peninsula. Nothing wrong with that, except that people involved in good works often seemed to wear an air of piety and satisfaction, which often grated on Ellen. She waited, said ‘Really?’ to prompt Scobie.
‘When I was in court this morning I let slip that I was married to Beth. Now Natalie’s going to be suspicious of her.’
‘Scobie, suspicion of the police is inbred on those housing estates.’
‘I know, but it needn’t be. Beth keeps her work and mine completely separate.’
They lapsed into silence. The road was wide and flat now and Ellen relaxed fractionally. Her mind drifted. There was a possibility that one of Janine McQuarrie’s clients was the killer, but getting access to her records was going to be a headache. At the same time, all of the circumstances of the murder indicated a degree of planning and professionalism, as if the killers had been hired.
The woman’s finances would have to be examined minutely. Did everything come back to money? Ellen wondered, thinking about her husband’s own futile rants centred on money. They were struggling, despite their combined salaries-one of their cars was for the scrap heap, and their daughter’s rent and university tuition fees were crippling-but Alan’s resentment sometimes took strange turnings. Only last night he’d said, with a sidelong glance, ‘Don’t you think it’s interesting that it’s always plainclothed police who go up on theft or corruption charges?’
Plainclothed police like her, he meant. ‘Your point being?’
‘They bring decent police into disrepute.’
Guys like him, he meant. Rarely was the Ethical Standards department of the police force obliged to investigate the guys who worked in the Traffic and Accident Investigation squads.
Alan was full of undercurrents. It was very possible that he was depressed. But, more than anything, Ellen was scared that he’d found her out. Now and then over the years she’d pocketed money at crime-scenes, $50 here, $500 there. Probably no more than $2000 in all, over a ten-year period, and she’d even put one haul, of $500, into a church poor box. But the pathology was there in her and she was afraid. It had started with chewing gum at the corner shop when she was eight years old and although she’d more or less stopped, the impulse hadn’t. Maybe she needed a psychologist. Maybe she needed to make an appointment with Dominic O’Brien.
God, what would Challis think of her if he ever found out? She felt sick at heart at the thought. Her palms were damp. She dried them on her thighs, letting Scobie Sutton wander all over the road and talk and talk.
They arrived to find that Challis had brought in two DCs from Mornington and, with their help, set up the first-floor conference room as an incident room: extra computers, phones, fax machines, whiteboards, photocopiers and scanners, and a TV set. But, more than anything as far as Ellen was concerned, he’d brewed coffee and placed a box of pastries in the centre of the conference table. She sipped and nibbled as he introduced the Mornington detectives and outlined the case, reading from his laptop.
Finally he turned to her. ‘Ellen?’
She brushed flakes of pastry from her lapels and summarised the results of the Bayside Counselling interviews. ‘We need to look at those files,’ Challis said. ‘Meanwhile, I carried out a Google search on the husband. He’s a well-known hard case in the finance world, good at firing and downsizing, so no doubt he’s got some enemies. When Ellen and I have finished talking to his daughter we’ll head up to the city and check him out.’