‘This is real service,’ said Joe.
He stepped out into the fresh air and drew in a deep breath.
Andover was sitting with his back against one of the porch pillars, his head slumped on his chest.
‘You OK?’
The head jerked in what could have been an affirmative.
‘Good,’ said Joe, then walked across to the cherry tree, where he was following Andover’s earlier example when the first police car screamed up the drive.
It seemed that four bodies got you more than a sergeant, which was just as well.
Chivers, first on the scene, clearly saw Joe Sixsmith as a prime mover in all this mayhem. In fact it turned out that when he was passed details of the phone call saying, ‘My name is Stephen Andover. I have just murdered my wife and her family at 21 Coningsby Rise,’ he had wasted several minutes trying to ring Joe’s office. Once he grasped there really were four bodies in the house, he was much inclined to arrest Andover on the spot. Joe protested that the man had been in his company for the past half hour or more.
‘So we’ve got ourselves a conspiracy, have we?’ snapped Chivers illogically, and was cautioning Joe when Detective Chief Inspector ‘Willy’ Woodbine arrived.
Built like an old style pillar-box, he had a matching reputation for getting his message across. Now he listened to a résumé of the known facts, told Chivers not to be a twerp all his life, and put out a general call to pick up Carlo Rocca, age thirty-four, stocky build, with long black hair and a heavy black moustache, perhaps wearing a slouch hat and a grey topcoat with an astrakhan collar, and driving an F registered blue Ford Fiesta.
Then he went into the house presumably to look for clues.
Chivers glowered after him.
Joe said, ‘Can I go now?’
‘No you bloody well can’t! We’ll need a statement, and I’m sure that Mr Woodbine will want to question you personally. Doberley, get your useless body over here!’
Joe looked round to see Detective-Constable Dylan Doberley trying unsuccessfully to keep out of sight by pretending to search the shrubbery. Known inevitably as Dildo, Doberley was an old acquaintance of Joe’s from their co-membership of the Boyling Corner Chapel Concert Choir. Now they also had Chivers’s wrath in common.
‘Yes, Sarge?’ said Doberley.
‘You seen what’s in there, my son?’ demanded Chivers. ‘You realize they must’ve been having their throats slit while you were starting up your car? Call yourself a detective! Defective is more like it. Take a statement from Sherlock here. Then get yourself off round the neighbours and check if they saw anything suspicious, and I don’t mean you!’
Taking Joe’s statement didn’t take long as he’d already been mentally rehearsing it to keep his personal involvement down to a minimum. When they were finished Doberley said, ‘I’d better get on to the neighbours before he starts yelling again.’
Keeping out of Chivers’s way seemed a good idea, so Joe joined the detective as he walked down the drive.
‘On a short fuse today, your boss,’ he said conversationally.
‘He can blow himself up for me,’ said Doberley bitterly. ‘What’s he think I am anyway? Psychic? OK, I saw them, but they was all happy as Larry, jabbering away like they do, all arms and spaghetti bolognese—’
‘You mean they didn’t speak English?’
‘Of course they spoke English! The two young ones spoke it just like you and me. The old pair sounded a bit more foreign like, and it was when they got a bit excited, they all started spouting Iti.’
‘Excited? You didn’t tell them—?’
‘That I’d come to make sure they wasn’t dead? Don’t be stupid. I told ’em I was crime prevention come to warn them there’d been a lot of break-ins round here lately. That was enough to set them off, particularly the old boy. Right little Musso he was, wanting to know why we didn’t hang people and why he couldn’t keep his own personal machine-gun in the house. Lot of good it would have done the poor old sod. Not when your own son-in-law’s just going to walk right in and slit your throat. If it was the son-in-law did it, that is.’
Joe grinned at the sad little straw Dildo was clutching at and said, ‘He didn’t strike you as suspicious, then?’
‘No, he bloody didn’t!’ exclaimed Doberley. ‘I was just walking back to my car when this blue Fiesta turns into the drive. It stopped and he wound down the window and asked if he could help me. I guessed he was one of the family—’
‘Why?’
‘Because he would hardly have asked otherwise,’ said Dildo in exasperation. ‘How do you earn a living, Joe? Also he spoke with a bit of an accent and he looked foreign with that shaggy moustache and slouch hat. I asked him who he was, naturally, and he told me, and I told him who I was, but I didn’t shoot him the crime prevention line.’
‘Why not?’ asked Joe.
‘I thought: He doesn’t look like he’d scare easy; so I asked about Andover, had he been acting funny recently? And that got him going, all this stuff about crazy dreams and so forth. And that was it.’
He laughed without humour.
‘Know what the last thing I said to him was, Joe? I said it would probably be better if he didn’t mention this to the ladies or the old folk, as there was no need to frighten them unnecessarily! Oh no, he said. He wouldn’t do anything to frighten ’em. Then he went in and did that!’
‘Like you say, Dildo, we can’t be absolutely sure,’ said Joe.
‘No? What do you want?’ said the DC, abandoning hope. ‘The angel of the Lord in triplicate? Here, you’d better disappear now, Joe, and let me get on.’
Immersed in their conversation, they had turned into the driveway nearest Casa Mia and were approaching a not dissimilar mock-Tudor villa, only this one was traditionally coloured and called The Pines. Sixsmith could see why Doberley wouldn’t want to have to explain his presence either to the householder or, worse, to Chivers. Unfortunately their approach must have been monitored, for now the door opened and a woman came to meet them.
She was in her fifties, tall and angular, with expensively coiffured grey hair and a horsey face that looked like it had been worked on by a good picture restorer.
‘Hello,’ she cried in the piercing voice of one who expects her own way but isn’t so absolutely certain of personal desert that she can be quiet about it. ‘Police, is it?’
‘Yes, ma’am. Detective-Constable Doberley, ma’am,’ said Dildo, making a chess knight’s move forward in an effort to conceal Joe. ‘Just a couple of questions, if you would, Mrs … er …?’
‘Rathbone. Julia Rathbone. Is it about next door?’
‘That’s right, ma’am.’
‘Ah. I thought it would be.’
Sixsmith, not wanting to embarrass his fellow chorister but feeling it would look suspicious if he just took off back down the drive, moved sideways towards a grey Volvo parked in front of the garage and started examining it with that air of suppressed shock policemen usually adopted when checking his Morris.
‘Why’d you think that, ma’am?’ asked Doberley.
‘Because I saw your cars arrive, naturally. But besides that, I’ve always said it would end in tears ever since they moved in.’
‘You