‘Presumably it was taken from the old boy by Milosz Gadzinski or his thugs when they beat him up?’
‘But why would they beat him up?’
‘To get the hipflask. He’d presumably contacted them to say he’d got a valuable silver hipflask and wanted money for it. They went to find him, having decided that they’d take it from him without giving him anything for it. The old man put up a fight. They beat him up.’
Carole sat back, content with the sequence of her logic, but when Jude didn’t respond, said, ‘Why? Do you have an alternative explanation?’
‘I’d prefer to think of the two crimes as connected.’
‘They are connected, Jude. By the hipflask. As you say, Pawel must have stolen it from Burton St Clair’s unlocked car, and it was because he had it that he was attacked by Milosz Gadzinski’s gang.’
‘What makes you so sure it was them who attacked him?’
Carole was getting exasperated. ‘Really, Jude, we’re just going round in circles. Milosz Gadzinski’s gang attacked Pawel because he’d told them that he had the hipflask! Come on, do you have an alternative scenario?’
‘Yes. Whoever murdered Burton St Clair knew that he – or she – had contaminated the hipflask with chopped walnuts or walnut oil or walnut extract. His or her plan worked. Burton died. But the next bit of his or her plan was to remove the only piece of incriminating evidence – the hipflask – from the BMW and destroy it … possibly by throwing it into the sea.’
Carole caught on. ‘So you’re suggesting that the murderer came back to the car and found no sign of the hipflask?’
‘Exactly. Which might have been good news or bad news, depending on who had got the wretched thing. But if our murderer found out for certain who did have the hipflask … well, that person immediately represented a danger. The person now in possession might even have witnessed the murderer doctoring the hipflask earlier in the evening. The person, once they had been identified, therefore had to be eliminated.’
‘And Pawel was attacked by the same person who killed Burton St Clair?’
‘That’s the way I see it, Carole.’
‘Hm. So who do we talk to next?’
‘I think there’s more information to be got out of Steve Chasen.’
From their previous encounter, Jude remembered that God’s gift to science fiction worked weekend night-time shifts at Sainsbury’s on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. She also remembered that he was ‘one of those people who can’t go into a pub and not have a bevvy.’ It therefore seemed a safe assumption that he might agree to meeting for a drink in the Crown & Anchor on a Tuesday evening.
So it proved.
She could hardly believe that only a few hours had elapsed since she had left the pub with Zosia. The shock of discovering Pawel’s bloodied body made that departure feel like a very long time ago.
Steve Chasen was dressed in Doc Martens and different camouflage patterns – clearly, he had a whole wardrobe of them at home – and he turned out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a lager drinker. Having introduced Carole, Jude went to the bar and ordered a pint of Stella and two large Sauvignon Blancs. In the absence of Zosia, Ted Crisp served them, but that was no hardship. On a cold January Tuesday, the Crown & Anchor had very few customers.
When they were settled with their drinks, Jude said formally, ‘It’s very good of you to agree to meet us, Steve.’
‘No problem. Anything I can do to help.’ There was caution in his voice. Jude got the feeling he’d agreed to meet so readily because he wanted to assess how much they knew, and whether they had found out about information he had been concealing.
‘When we talked last Friday,’ Jude went on, ‘you said you’d never met Burton St Clair before he came to the library on Tuesday.’
‘That’s right.’
‘We have reason to believe that your memory on that may be faulty.’ This from Carole, who was very good at playing Bad Cop when required.
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Jude talked to a woman called Nemone Coote.’
He shook his head. ‘Never heard the name – and it’s not the kind you’d forget, is it?’
Jude took over. ‘Nemone Coote was Centre Director at the Wordway Trust house called Blester Combe where you attended a crime writing course some fifteen years ago.’
‘Oh God, yes. I do vaguely remember her. Big butch lady, looked like a lezzie but was actually straight.’
‘What a good memory you have when it’s jogged,’ Carole observed acidly.
‘I can’t be expected to have instant recall of people I met fifteen years ago,’ Steve Chasen whined in self-justification.
‘Perhaps not,’ said Jude, ‘but maybe another jog to your memory might help you recall a fellow participant on the course?’
His brow furrowed. ‘We are talking a long time ago.’
‘Burton St Clair was on that same course.’
‘What!’
‘Back then he would have been calling himself Al Sinclair.’
‘Oh. Blimey!’ He struck his head with the heel of his hand. ‘I do remember someone called Al. It’s all first names on Wordway courses, so I’d never have known his surname. But now you mention it, yes. I seem to remember he used to write crime novels under a pseudonym and paid for them to be vanity-published, if we’re talking about the same person. And are you telling me that guy became Burton St Clair?’
As a piece of acting it would have been a shoo-in for a Golden Raspberry Award. Carole and Jude looked at him sceptically.
‘The fact that you had met Burton St Clair before,’ Carole observed, ‘does put rather a different complexion on the events of last week, doesn’t it?’
‘I don’t see why,’ he said aggressively.
‘I think you do, Steve,’ said Jude. ‘Nemone Coote told me that Burton was always going on about his walnut allergy. No one who’d been on that course could have avoided knowing about it. And you—’
‘Oh, no.’ He held up his hands to stem her flow. ‘I see where this is going. If you’re trying to shift the blame for murdering the bastard on to me, then you are very definitely on the wrong track.’
‘Have the police interviewed you yet?’ asked Carole.
‘No.’
‘Because when we spoke on Friday,’ Jude recalled, ‘you said they’d left a message asking you to make contact.’
‘Which I duly did the next day. They said they might need to talk to me at some point, but I haven’t heard anything since.’
‘Hm.’
There was panic in his eyes. ‘Why, you’re not planning to contact them about me?’
‘No, no,’ Jude soothed.
‘It wouldn’t be our place to do that,’ said Carole piously. ‘On the other hand, it is rather interesting how much information you have withheld.’
‘I haven’t withheld anything! Like I say, the police haven’t even spoken to me.’
‘No, but you’ve withheld information from Jude. You’ve lied to Jude, in fact. Lied about not knowing Burton St Clair before last Tuesday, lied—’
‘Look, I told you I didn’t know it was the same bloke!’
‘Lied about not knowing he had a walnut allergy.’
‘If I want to lie, I’d have thought that’s up to me – and certainly if the only people I’m lying to are a couple of nosy old biddies like you two. I haven’t lied to the police. If they question me, I’ll tell them the truth.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Carole drily.
‘But I still don’t like the way you’re trying to pin this murder on me.’
‘We’re not trying to pin anything on you,’ said Jude. ‘We’re just trying to get to the truth.’
Carole picked up the line of thought. ‘And to do that, it makes sense that we should look for someone who was antagonistic towards the murder victim, who knew about his walnut allergy, who knew he always carried a hipflask, who—’