Finally, he stood up.
“We’ll talk again Mrs Davidson. My sergeant may come and ask you a few questions in a moment. I’ll leave you with WPC Grant.”
Just as he was about to leave, Joanne Grant stood up and said, “How did you do that sir? She was uncontrollable two minutes ago?”
Spence just smiled. “I’ll send the DS in. And make sure he keeps his mind on the job.” Her face reddened as Spence left the room.
Spence passed Ferguson in the hallway and motioned him to start questioning Felicity Davidson. “Go easy Ferguson, go very easy. She works in the same school as the husband. Leave that, we’ll follow up on the school connections later.” Ferguson nodded, he had seen Spence do the softly, softly approach many times. He knew what was expected.
“And I’m not convinced by the histrionics. Try and get her to open a little. She has settled down a bit.”
Spence took himself upstairs.
It was dark and so he turned on every light he could find. As he looked around, lots of questions were bouncing around in his mind. The throat neatly, almost clinically slit from end to end, no blood, no struggle, almost as if the victim had willingly placed himself in position for the attack. Drugged maybe? How did the assailant get in? They must have known each other. Did the attacker know the wife was out? And look at this place!
“They’re only teachers,” thought Spence, “how the hell could they afford all this stuff?”
Debts? Criminal activity? He was already working out the first lines of investigation. Spence was renowned for his irreverence and his liking for a good red, but nobody doubted the sharpness of his thinking.
He took everything in. The expensive but classy look of downstairs was replicated upstairs. The bathroom tiles had not come out of Mica Hardware and the bedframe in the master bedroom was solid Thai teak. Spence looked up at the ceiling.
“Ducted air-conditioning. Fuck, what’s going on here? This couple must be loaded.”
Spence finished his reconnaissance, checking out daughter Rebecca’s room and what appeared to be the new nursery. Again, all top quality stuff. He wandered downstairs and found Ferguson waiting for him.
“So what have we got Ferguson?”
“Mrs Davidson is adamant. Her husband had no enemies. He’s popular at work, gets on with the neighbours, and she says nothing out of the ordinary has been going on. I think we’ll need to see her a few times more.”
Spence nodded. “What do you notice about this place Ferguson?”
Ferguson looked around, a little non-plussed. “What do you mean? It’s quite nice, but nothing out of the ordinary?”
“Look closely. Everything in this place has quality written all over it. Expensive. Very expensive. This is Kingsdown for god’s sake, not Broome Manor Lane, let alone Knightsbridge. He’s a deputy headmaster and she’s a classroom teacher. Where the hell do they get the money for all this? She’s dressed as if she is heading to a Polo match, flash car in the driveway, overseas holiday pictures. First thing tomorrow, I want details of Roger and Felicity Davidson’s bank accounts, property dealings, check out his credit cards. See if his or her daddy finances them. Maybe he won the lottery recently. If nothing else, let’s remove the financial from the possible motives. I’ll head into his school in the morning to get a feel of what was happening there.”
Spence headed back out to the biting wind. Mrs Davidson had started up again. “Good luck WPC Grant,” he said to himself. The crowd of onlookers had thinned out. Spence walked down Merton Ave to his car. As he started up, the evening football results were coming through on the radio.
“Milton Keynes Dons 2, Yeovil Town 1. Swindon Town nil, Portsmouth 1.”
Spence switched off the radio. He took a slow convoluted route back to his flat, heading down Whitworth Road towards Rodbourne Cheney and then up towards Old Town along Kingshill.
He had just seen the result of a shocking crime. But what was going through his mind was not disgust or compassion or empathy. He found himself smiling as he started tossing around strategies for dealing with it. His DC, Paul Traynor would check the finances and the family background, and Josie will hopefully come up with something. Ferguson can check on similar cases, and he would go into the school.
“What the hell’s wrong with you Spence? Some poor bastard has been brutally murdered and all you can do is think of the fun you’re going to have solving it. Ah, bugger it.”
Once he was back in his flat, Spence went into automatic. ‘Disraeli Gears’ was already loaded in the CD player, so on it went, straight to ‘Sunshine of your love’ and turned up more loudly than the neighbours would probably like. Time to open his 2010 Annie’s Lane Cooper Trail Shiraz that he had had shipped over from South Australia’s Clare Valley. Spence had read somewhere that it had won some wine competitions in Australia.
“Must go to Australia one day,” Spence mused. “Nah, too many spiders and snakes”.
He slid into his armchair and allowed his mind to wander. He began to think of the break-up of Cream and how Clapton had managed to survive a life of drugs, the fact that this was a beautiful drop of red, and had he really made love to Susannah Pearson earlier this evening? Oh, and that poor bastard Roger Davidson. Clapton, the wine and the solitude were combining to get Spence’s mind into gear.
“Who was out to get you Roger Davidson? What do we know so far? School teacher, seems very young to be a deputy principal. Very posh house, lots of money, but from where? A vicious murder but clinical and so neatly carried out. So it doesn’t look like a burglary gone wrong. A wife who was conveniently not at home this evening, so who would have known that? And was she really that upset? And was her absence coincidence or carefully planned? There was no mess, no sign of a struggle, so did you let someone in Roger that you knew? Give me some clues tomorrow Josie Collins.”
The doorbell rang, and it really did seem that someone was deliberately leaning on it. Spence’s colleagues had mocked him when he had CCTV installed but it did give him advance warning on nights like this when some idiot was banging on his door at 11.00 at night. He looked up at the screen.
Spence smiled to himself. He let the doorbell ring again as he slowly and deliberately took another deep swig of his South Australian Shiraz. He could hear her as he approached the door.
“Let me in. It’s fuckin’ freezing out here!”
He carefully unlocked the front door and with good reason. She almost fell in as Spence pulled the door open. And then she threw up on his beige carpet, specially ordered online from the Flooring Megastore. Now Spence knew why he bought such cheap furnishings. He kicked the door shut.
It was a cliché he knew but he had often said it, “You have a choice of spending money on top quality wine or top quality carpeting? Is there really a choice to be made?”
“Come on. Let’s get you into the bathroom.”
He lifted her up and dragged her to the toilet bowl, getting her there just in time. The stench was putrid, a combination of garlic, fish and lager.
Eventually she ceased heaving and now started sobbing.
“The bastard. The fucking bastard.”
Spence lifted her up and carried her into the spare room. For all his drinking, Spence was still in reasonable shape. He placed her in the bed, pulled off her boots and removed her coat. He wiped the vomit from her face and then pulled the blankets back over. She was already asleep. He gave her a kiss on her forehead as