Chapter 25: Aggressive Maneuvers
Barnaby was fuming. Outside the front of the Gooders' house in the sea of light from the ambulance and the SOCO van, and the harried words of the constables, paramedics, and technicians rushing to and fro, he was beginning wear a path as he paced in the grass. Three calls—three—and Troy had still nearly missed the final one. His sergeant was capable of abominable idiocy, but never anything that threatened to derail his career ambitions. And tonight of all nights...
Curses danced on his tongue—his hands balled into fists—his fingernails felt like they were cutting into his palms. Barnaby had known not to expect his daughter home early in the evening, or even by eight o'clock. But when the call from CID had come through at nearly ten, Cully was still nowhere to be seen.
Three phone calls to rouse Troy's response! With his next step, Barnaby ground his foot into the soil.
A young constable slowly approached him, his face sallow in the electric lights. "Chief Inspector," he said in a soft voice, retreating briefly when he looked at Barnaby directly, "Dr. Bullard finished his examination of the body."
"Good to know someone can show up for his job," Barnaby muttered, scanning the drive another time for Troy's car. It remained absent. "Did he find anything unusual?"
The constable shook his head. "He didn't say, sir. I think he's waiting—"
"Tell me what you know."
"I—I just know—what came through on the call, sir." The constable looked over his shoulder, up at the first floor of the house. Light blazed through every window, though silhouettes only marred one window, coming and going and melding into one another when they crossed. "A middle-aged white female was killed and it was phoned in by a Mrs. Julia Gooders—"
"Never mind," Barnaby said, shoving his hands into his pockets, the bottoms of his palms still burning from the pressure of his nails. The cool night wind bit at his chest, and he held his arms stiffly to his sides to keep his jacket closer. "Go on with whatever you were doing."
"Yes, Chief Inspector," the man said, his pace increasing with each step he took toward the nearest police vehicle.
Nothing new, then, Barnaby thought, quickly running a hand over his hair and returning it to his pocket. The victim's identity was all but certain and the killer's known beyond a shadow of a doubt. Why, though...If all of this began with a new will written by Karl Wainwright, then Suzanna Chambers and Julia Gooders were as deeply involved as Tristan Goodfellow and Kenneth Gooders, no doubt about that.
Yet something had shattered the wall of silence they had constructed with their lies, and the rubble still concealed the answer to the most important question: who? Was the rogue agent within or without? Conspirators turned on one another with such regularity that Barnaby was shocked conspiracies were still plotted and carried out. But conspirators who were spouses and lovers? Those ties were often tight enough to hold the most fragile plans together.
Was that all this was, the elimination of the final loose end? No, he didn't like that answer. In her panicked phone call, Julia Gooders had freely admitted her actions: she had shot an intruder, though she did not know the person's identity, and fled downstairs.
Did she possess the calculating mind to carry out these new crimes? Not the easily agitated woman who had been found shivering and almost unable to speak in her sitting room by the paramedics. A cup of tea with several sugars was all they had given her for the shock; the stronger remedies she was accustomed to needed to wait. Those nerves explained her actions tonight, but he did not see her hand in the other deaths—not all of them, at least. But then how many murderers awaited discovery in Midsomer Magna? Something else was simmering beneath the surface, someone lurking—
Another car turned into the drive with a screech of tires, pulling into the grass alongside the official vehicles. Barnaby didn't bother to watch as the driver's door opened and closed, or while the driver himself hurried across the front garden. The almost criminally atrocious operation of a motor vehicle was identification enough.
"What the hell were you thinking?" he shouted as Troy approached. Three bloody phone calls!
His sergeant's quick steps ceased a few feet away, his pale face gleaming beneath the floodlights. "I'm sorry, sir—"
"You can't just ignore your phone! Not at a time like this."
"I know—"
"Don't give me that claptrap if it doesn't mean anything, Troy." Whatever the man wanted to say, it could wait—he didn't want or need to hear it now.
"It's not—"
"So it won't happen again?"
Troy's eyes narrowed. "No, sir."
The anger burning in Barnaby's chest began to cool as the chaos swarming around them grew, innumerable voices rising in a cacophony of protocol and gathered evidence. Too many other things required his attention for him to worry about—that right now. Paramedics in green scrubs packed away their equipment and removed the stretcher from the back of the ambulance, waiting for Bullard's signal to collect the body. SOCO technicians clad in white paper suits and shoe coverings exited the house laden with sealed plastic bags of evidence. Police constables in crisp uniforms prowled the perimeter of the property, sending away the curious neighbors. It was a familiar, comforting routine repeated at every crime scene as the public emerged from their everyday lives to gawk at the misfortune of others.
"What was so important for you to do something that stupid?" Barnaby asked, staring at the upper windows. God help him, he already knew the answer—but it was not coming yet. "Well?" he added, fixing Troy with a cold glare.
Troy took half a step back, but his expression tightened in anger. "I was with Cully," he said after a moment.
"Cully," Barnaby murmured. Of course. It was the unwanted, but not unexpected, response. It was only made sharper by Troy's appearance: so—casual, just jeans and a t-shirt under his jacket. This man was nothing like the detective sergeant he encountered nearly every day, whose suits and shirts and ties unfailingly matched and who remained at arm's length. Who had remained at arm's length.
Lifting one his arms, Troy began to reach into one of his pockets, but dropped his hand instead. "Her rehearsal ran late."
"They often do." Barnaby pressed his hand to his face, closing his eyes. Never—never—had one gone on as late as Troy was insinuating. And, by some miracle, her rehearsals for this play had all let out on time. "You still haven't given me a good reason for your stupidity."
Troy's gaze fell to the ground. "Just—in the middle of dinner, sir." When his eyes came up, they were unfocused. "I didn't really hear the phone ring—neither of us—"
"Dinner." Barnaby had to repeat the word; it stung like a paper cut. "Again?"
His sergeant took another step back from the lights. "Well, she offered to make something, sir," Troy said, now only half visible. "Better than leftover takeaway."
"I'm sure." God, it was just getting worse. "I'd hoped she would have been home at a reasonable hour—"
Troy frowned. "I didn't know she still had a curfew, sir—"
"I like to have some idea of where she is, Sergeant Troy—"
"You knew I was giving her a lift—"
"Several hours ago!" Barnaby's skin, cool a few moments earlier, was now hot with anger. "Spend a long time talking, did you?"
The man's face suddenly relaxed—his eyes drifting like he was somewhere else—and he swallowed before he answered. "Mostly about her director."
Barnaby choked back an unhappy laugh as he took a step toward the Gooders' house. "Nothing else?"
In spite of the heated words between them, Troy was following him. "You'll have to ask her—sir."
"I'll do that if I ever see her before her play opens," Barnaby said, squinting at the outline of the house. It was large and handsome, the front wall composed of brick with several windows in white frames. White columns stood on either side of the door and a wild tangle of shrubs and vines rose from the beds sitting before the wall. A lovely house, Barnaby knew—even if the gardening was not up to scratch—lately filled with unlovely horrors. "Should I assume you at least got her home before coming here?"
"Where else would she be?"
Where indeed? Barnaby thought, ignoring the feet tramping on the staircase just past the open front door. "I should ask you—"
"Boys, boys," Bullard called as he stepped over the threshold from the foyer into the artificial light, "not around the dead. They still have ears." As always, George Bullard was bright and in good humor, and in his grey suit he looked like a man ready to begin a workday rather than one who had been called back to the front after the end of one.
"We'll finish talking about this later," Barnaby said to Troy. His sergeant was standing at his side again, no doubt wearing an even more confused expression than he usually did when confronting the pathologist. After all these years, George Bullard remained a mystery, and not just to Troy. At times, Barnaby found the man incomprehensible as well. "What do we have, George?"
Plain, clean facts awaited them as they hurried up the stairs after Bullard, taking quicker strides once they reached the landing. "Shotgun wound to the chest," he began as they reached the end of the yellow corridor and its innumerable miniatures in black frames. "Death was instantaneous."
Barnaby was not claustrophobic—phobias were best left to Troy, he had decided—but his chest constricted as they entered the bedroom. Even if the stands of lights and half dozen investigators were removed, he found it difficult to believe the room itself could ever be comfortable. The heavy wooden furniture and old-fashioned patterned wallpaper were heavy, closing in as they watched him watching them, keeping their secrets close.
"It seems Mrs. Gooders didn't realize who she'd shot until she turned on the lights," Bullard said, turning toward the motionless figure slumped against the wall. Leaning closer, he added, "It's affected her rather badly."
Standing before the body, Barnaby saw what he had expected: Suzanna Chambers dead, her still cooling skin red with drying blood. Conspirators often came to unpleasant ends. But murdered by Julia Gooders with a shotgun, a knife lying where it must have dropped from her hand as she collapsed, clad in an intruder's costume..."Doesn't make any sense," Barnaby said. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he rubbed at the beginning of a headache at the back of his head as he stared at the corpse and wallpaper behind it, a large smear of blood marking where Suzanna had slumped and then slid to the floor. "At all." When each new development approached, he believed he grasped the truth—only for those new facts to shatter any ideas he had constructed.
This woman had been the center of everything—the most willful of all his suspects—and she now lay dead at his feet. Karl Wainwright's heirs were becoming quite thin on the ground, and the count was only worse when Kenneth Gooders was considered. He was dead, Suzanna Chambers was dead, Tristan Goodfellow lay in a hospital bed hoping for word of a matching liver from the NHS. Waiting to be declared dead, Barnaby thought. Gregory Chambers, the man whose disappearance had started all of this, was certainly dead.
"The paramedics have calmed her down some," Bullard said, nodding his head at the staircase in the corridor. "She's in the sitting room, if you want to talk to her."
"Yes, George," Barnaby said as he stood, watching the first few footsteps he took with particular care to avoid the sheet half covering the body, "that would be the next thing to do."
The pathologist led the way out of the room just as he had led the way in. "Just remember, she is still quite shaken," he continued when they were almost at the bottom of the stair, stepping into another stuffy hall lined with dark wooden sideboards and bland reproductions of garden watercolors.
"No surprise there," Troy said under his breath.
The first words from the man in a few minutes forced Barnaby to grit his teeth, holding back the hiss of annoyance. "We need no statement of the obvious, Troy."
"But why would she do it—"
"You mean apart from the knife?" Bullard asked, cutting off Troy's question as he glanced over his shoulder into the sitting room. The paramedic who attended to Julia Gooders earlier was gone and a WPC had taken his place, standing her guard beside a curtained window immediately inside the door. Julia Gooders was curled into a ball in an armchair clutching her limbs to her body, probably to keep from quivering.
Not this woman, Barnaby thought. "The knife is a part of it, but it's not the bigger reason."
"Then what is, sir?" Troy asked, shuffling a half step away from the pathologist.
Barnaby smiled, more of the pieces of this confused puzzle locking together into a single larger picture. "The reason for all of it?" And what a simple one it was. "Money."
"One of the most common motives there is," Bullard said with a quiet laugh. "Money and sex drive a lot of murders. See you tomorrow, Tom?"
Barnaby shuddered, almost gritting his teeth once more. God, it was the wrong word at the wrong time! He took a deep breath of half stale air. "Whenever you send me your first report."
"Bright and early, then." He clapped Barnaby on the shoulder, then nodded to Troy—"Sergeant."—before passing through the front door into the night.
Alone with Troy again—the other men and women in the foyer were too focused on evidence and notes and signatures—the anger rose once more. "In spite of—both of the motives Bullard mentioned," Barnaby said, his voice nearly shaking, "I think we only have to worry about money."
"How does that follow from Julia Gooders offing Suzanna Chambers?" Hardly finished speaking, Troy shook his head as he attempted to hold back a yawn.
What time is it? Barnaby wondered, though he didn't bother looking at his watch. Probably nearer eleven than ten. "Not just money," he said quietly, "but wills, Troy."
"Wills?" His sergeant's mouth twisted. "Plural?"
The nascent end was spinning in Barnaby's skull, the rapidly forming solution pushing all other thoughts aside. "Of course."
As soon as they stepped into the sitting room, past the WPC standing at attention, Julia Gooders came to life, straightening her trembling body in the chair. She was dressed as the paramedics had found her, wearing a dressing gown over her nightclothes. "I didn't know who it was," she said, clutching the arms of her chair with white fingers, "I didn't know!"
Barnaby continued forward, though Troy remained just inside the door. "It's all right. You take it slowly, Mrs. Gooders," he said in an even voice, holding his hands steady. The last thing he needed now was to frighten his only witness—and remaining suspect. "Do you feel up to talking to us?"
She blinked several times and nodded instead of answering; Barnaby turned to Troy with a nod of his own. His sergeant closed the door to the foyer as Barnaby reached for a chair, settling it in front of the nervous woman. He perched on the edge when he sat, leaning forward to see her face better. Troy claimed a position at the end of the small sofa. "Now," Barnaby began, "why was there a shotgun in the bedroom?"
The woman held herself very still. "The phone call. It sounded like—like that puppet." Her breathing was faster and her tone was higher. "He said I was next—that he was coming to—" She began trembling again, staring wide-eyed into empty space as her breathing turned shallow.
"Mrs. Gooders..."
Julia nearly said something but stopped before a single word escaped, weaving her fingers together briefly. "I couldn't think—" Another sob almost escaped, but she swallowed and exhaled heavily. "So I took the gun from the gun cupboard." Her eyes were wide and terrified. "It was Gregory. He's alive."
The entire case had grown from the man's disappearance, but Barnaby had not expected his name to be raised now. "What do you mean?"
"They only ever found the hand!" she said, a few tears shining on her cheeks. "Maybe—Tristan never actually killed him, maybe he didn't want to admit that he'd messed up." She turned her head from Barnaby to Troy, then back. "And now Gregory's come back, and he's killing us one by one."
Barnaby glanced to Troy: the younger man's tired expression had vanished, now replaced by an intrigued lift of his eyebrows. But there it was at last, the confirmation of all his suspicions. It was always the final thrill, the final burst of momentum when the answer came at last and only the details remained to be explored.
"He did this," Julia said, the sobs at last breaking through. "He made me do it!" She pressed her hand to her mouth. "Poor Suzanna."
Leaning back in his chair, Barnaby released a quiet sigh. "Are you telling me that you and Suzanna and Kenneth, your husband, and Tristan Goodfellow were all involved in a conspiracy to murder Gregory Chambers?"
Still shivering with suppressed tears, Julia's voice almost broke. "Yes." Her body relaxed as she looked down at the carpet, her arms suddenly slack. "Yes." As if the weight of his gaze was too heavy, she turned to Troy. "What was she doing with the knife?"
The wrong person to look to for sympathy, Barnaby thought. After the interview, he would discuss the new will with Troy—no, that was best left until tomorrow. They still had another conversation to finish. "And you planned to kill Gregory Chambers because of the new will," Barnaby said. "Is that right?"
She slid forward in her chair. "I—I didn't want it to happen." Her nerves were rising again—or at least her hands were shaking. "But when they told me, it was too late—they'd done it!"
"Well, you could have told us about it." Barnaby felt the unhappy smile on his face. "But then, you wouldn't have inherited your quarter of the hotel, would you?"
She drew her body in tighter and smaller. Just above a whisper, Julia Gooders said, "He was my husband, chief inspector."
"She probably won't spend much time in prison," Barnaby said quietly, fishing in his pocket for his keys. Julia Gooders—now properly dressed—had been the first led from the house and quickly bundled into the back of a police vehicle. All the while, she had trembled. Barnaby hoped she had enough of whatever medication she took to last for several weeks; she would want every dose.
"Sir?" Troy asked, standing motionless beside him. "She's confessed to three murders, but what about the other two? She's the only one left—"
"I doubt any magistrate will call Suzanna Chambers' death a murder. And she was a conspirator in the other two cases—but given her husband and her mental state..."
"It's close enough to murder."
"If you believe that nervous woman"—Barnaby waved his hand to the car already pulling onto the road—"who killed Suzanna Chambers only after having the life frightened out of her by the voice of Mr. Punch—"
"That's an easy task."
"Do you really think she's killing her co-conspirators?"
"Why not?" Troy asked with a shrug of his shoulders. The movement was hardly visible despite the floodlights. "If she's the only one left, all she has to do is keep quiet."
"Which she most certainly did not do."
"Maybe she'd have to be all there to know that." Troy was struggling to find his own keys, digging to the bottom of one pocket before switching to the other. " 'Poor Gregory'?" he said, repeating one of Mrs. Gooders' last statements before she was cautioned. " 'Poor Gregory'?"
"Indeed," Barnaby said with a nod. The words sounded more sincere coming from Troy.
"You'd think she was talking about a lost puppy, not someone she helped murder."
"No murderer likes to be reminded of the—humanity of a victim."
Finally clutching his keys, Troy asked, "Are we back to bricks, sir?"
"If they help your education, then we are."
"You'd think she'd come up with a better way to think about him." His sergeant glanced at his watch, and Barnaby resisted the urge to do the same. It must be well past eleven.
"You can't always understand them," Barnaby said softly.
Troy tucked his hands in his jacket pockets against the chilly night air. "So what's all the trouble about with this new will?"
"What do you mean, Troy?"
"Who inherits, sir, if not the people who expected to?"
"That's the right question."
A small grin spread across the man's face. "Thank you, sir—"
"But damned if I know," Barnaby added.
"Do you think Gregory Chambers was the sole heir, then?"
"Haven't the slightest idea. We won't know anything more until we see the document. If"—Barnaby raised a finger into the air—"we see it."
"You think it's been destroyed, sir?"
"Of course, Troy, use your head!" Barnaby said, beginning to pace anew. Troy had come a long way in the last couple of years, but he still sometimes refused to believe what was staring him in the face. "They killed a man to conceal it—if the will surfaced, the murder and all their plans meant nothing."
"But maybe they didn't!" Troy said loudly, taking a step away from Barnaby's path. "You just said I shouldn't try to understand everything they do—"
"That is true, but I don't see the planners of such a precise crime succumbing to complete foolishness. Finding one of them with that will—and you can be sure Tristan took it off him—is as good as a confession."
That was the truth of it, though: there was no accounting for some choices, no matter how foolhardy. And not just regarding the crimes daily laid before him, for the mystification had crept into his own life as of late. Barnaby ran a hand over his face again. And it was a mystery, a question he doubted would ever receive an answer even if he found a way to put it to his daughter. God only knew what response awaited him from Troy—or if one would be forthcoming at all!
The bile was turning in his stomach, long since finished digesting the new recipe for spaghetti alla puttanesca Joyce had experimented with for dinner. It had stopped protesting its ill treatment hours ago, but still grumbled in anticipation of a cooked breakfast at the canteen in the morning. "I think we're done for tonight, Troy," Barnaby said, ignoring the quiet complaints in his abdomen.
"Didn't you say that earlier today, sir?"
Barnaby nodded. "I did. Hopefully it's true this time." At least now, his stomach was bothered by worthwhile troubles, not—well, thinking about it would only make it worse. If that was possible. "Bullard should have some details for us tomorrow morning."
"Are there that many we don't know already?" Troy asked. He had shifted his keys to his left hand where he twisted them around his fingers. Now, he thrust his right hand into his jacket pocket once more, searching for something else—but his hand was empty when he removed it.
Together, they walked toward the dwindling collection of cars parked in the middle of the grass, Troy's well away from Barnaby's. "Probably not, but it's always good to know all of them," the chief inspector said, opening the driver's door of his vehicle.
"I suppose."
The man was already on his way to his own car, his dark-clad figure melting into the shadows when Barnaby spoke again. "And Troy?"
Troy turned back, a small rectangular object lying flat in his right palm. A mobile. Of course. "Yes, sir?"
"No more phone calls tonight."
"Sir?" Even over the distance, Barnaby recognized the confusion. Or obfuscation.
"You heard what I said." He did not sit but almost collapsed into the driver's seat, exhaustion threatening to devour him. There would never be the right moment to finish this discussion with Troy—he remembered that much—but this was truly the wrong one. "Good night, Sergeant."
Barnaby's mind was already spinning with new revelations, new murderers, newly confirmed innocence—and the need for a new suspect. He had no space in his skull to spare for Cully and Troy.