‘So, it’s not true that behind every successful man there is a good woman?’
‘Not in my case, it’s not. Just isn’t. I certainly could have used such a female in my life, but it wasn’t my lot. I’d come home each day to a wife screaming for new clothes and no food. She would say that if I was hungry I could send out for a pizza. I went for her looks and found them skin-deep and that the skin was covering a very ugly personality. I should have listened to my grandmother when she told me to shut my eyes and listen to the voice. “Do your courting on the telephone,” she’d say. I should have listened.’
‘She sounds like a sensible woman.’
‘She was. She’s still alive but her mind is away. I visit her when I can, but it’s difficult to sit with a woman who once was full of such horse sense and wisdom who now thinks she’s a little girl and doesn’t recognise me. Keeps asking me if her daddy’s going to come home from the war. Anyway, I’ll claw my kit on, go and see the corpse. Never done this before…’ Winner stood.
‘It’s not like what you may have seen in the films… She won’t be pulled out of a drawer, you’ll see her from behind a glass screen.’
‘It will be as if she is floating,’ added Pharoah.
It was in fact just as Carmen Pharoah had described. The woman floating on a bed, tightly tucked up. ‘It is she,’ said Max Winner. ‘That’s my wife, Sadie Winner, aged forty-five years. Quite frankly, I don’t know which one of us rests in peace.’
Bill Hatch stood – a short, balding, rotund man with stubby fingers. He was the sort of man who would be found in a pigeon loft lovingly stroking his beloved birds, or perhaps reading a tabloid newspaper on the top deck of a bus, or downing pints of mild and bitter in a smoky pub. But he was, in fact, a Home Office pathologist. He examined the corpse of Sadie Winner in the pathology laboratory of the York District Hospital and said, ‘The police surgeon is quite correct. Even before I make the first and even slightest incision, I can tell you that she didn’t drown.’
‘No?’ Carmen Pharoah responded from the corner of the room from where she was observing the post-mortem for the police.
‘No.’ He ran his hands through Sadie Winner’s scalp hair. ‘No, she was hit over the head. A single blow, feels like from behind… We’ll see.’ He took a scalpel and made an incision round the perimeter of the skull above the level of the ears and then peeled the scalp back and revealed the skull. ‘Yes…fractured skull…bleeding was internal…subdural haematoma…a single blow with a blunt object…caused a starlike fracturing. She also had a very thin skull. A person with a thicker skull might have survived this blow, but in her case, death would have been instantaneous.’
Carmen Pharoah met Simon Markov, as arranged, for lunch in the town. Later they walked the walls back towards Friargate, the ancient city spreading out at either side beneath them. They walked in silence, enjoying each other’s company, then Carmen Pharoah said, ‘If you had battered someone over the head, what would you do with the murder weapon?’
‘Get rid of it.’
‘In the first conventional place?’
‘Yes.’
‘Such as a canal, for instance?’
Markov smiled at her. ‘Yes, such as a canal, for instance?’
‘A job for the frog boys. We’ll ask Ken Menninot to authorise it. Meanwhile, to matters of greater import.’ She slid her arm into his. ‘Tonight I thought we’d eat Chinese.’
‘Can do, if you wish. In fact…’ Markov paused and halted. ‘Look.’ He indicated towards the railway station below and across the road from where they stood on the battlements. ‘Isn’t that Max Winner?’
‘It is.’
The two cops watched as Max Winner stood talking with a woman many, many years his junior. She was slender, ginger-haired, casually dressed. The woman suddenly stepped forwards and kissed him. Max Winner responded by holding her upper arms, but perfunctorily so. She was more interested in him than he was in her. Their body language said so.
Ken Menninot, Sergeant, CID, listened to Pharoah’s feedback on the PM and her theory about the discarding of the murder weapon. He authorised a small team of divers to search the canal beneath the bridge on which Sadie Winner’s car had been located. The murder weapon revealed itself to have been a smooth rock, large enough to just fit in one hand, inside a woollen hiking sock. When swung, it would have made quite an impact, especially on an unusually thin skull.
Pharoah and Markov drove out to Winner’s house.
‘I thought I’d see you again,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Only not quite so soon.’ He stood at the entrance of his house. As he and the cops stood there, a woman bundled out of the house, elbowing him aside, carrying a cardboard box with her.
The woman stopped at the sight of Pharoah and Markov, both in plain clothes but both with the unmistakable stamp of police officers about them. She turned and yelled ‘Murderer!’ at Winner. Then she stamped off to a small car and drove angrily away.
‘My sister-in-law,’ Winner explained apologetically. ‘Won’t you come in? Please.’
On this occasion Winner received Pharoah and Markov in the sitting room of his house. The cops, reading the room, noted he had a taste for antiques – furniture, china, paintings. ‘The distress you just witnessed,’ he said, settling into a chair, ‘is due in part, I believe, to the fact that my ex-wife’s sister believed that her money troubles would have been solved upon our divorce. My ex-wife’s sister and her husband live a very hand-to-mouth existence. The car she had… I’ve never seen it before. She must have borrowed it. She certainly doesn’t own one.’
‘I see.’
‘Tell you the truth, your arrival rescued me. But she’ll be back, collecting Sadie’s possessions and anything of mine I may be foolish enough to leave behind. In fact, she didn’t make an attempt to remove all Sadie’s possessions, gives her the excuse to come back.’
‘You could leave them at the door.’
‘I could, couldn’t I? That hadn’t occurred to me.’ Winner smiled. ‘It is my house, after all, isn’t it?’
‘Mr Winner,’ Markov said, ‘that young woman that you were speaking to outside the railway station this lunchtime -
‘You saw us?’
‘We were up on the walls.’
‘I see. Yes…that was Julia. Another bane of my life. I don’t really have a great deal of success with women – my ex… now Julia. Julia really was the start of all my troubles ten years ago now.’
‘Ten years?’
‘Julia’s older than she looks. She’s in her late twenties.’
‘Really?’
‘She acts and dresses like a teenager. I confess I worry about her, psychologically speaking. She’s just not with us, it’s as if she’s on another planet.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘She was an employee at the factory. A low-skilled job…a secretarial job, but she seemed to latch herself onto me…speak to me on any pretext…sending notes to my wife. Telling Sadie that she, Julia, and I were to be married. Really set the cat among the pigeons. My ex – my wife – call her my ex, but we were not divorced. I’ll have to start calling her my late wife now – anyway, Sadie. Once that seed of suspicion grew, it grew to something mammoth. A bit like a mustard tree. A small seed grows into a huge tree. So we drifted apart and I had my affairs, but definitely not with little Miss Julia Patton, though she continued to shadow me.’
‘Do you know where she lives?’
‘Tang Hall Estate, Two Cheviot Avenue. Seen the address often enough on the letters she has sent to me. Sorry, you are…?’