Common Murder

“Haven’t you, Mr. Mallard?” Lindsay inquired. “Thanks very much for your time.” She abruptly rose and walked out. The woman in the front office looked up in surprise as she swept through. Lindsay marched down the main street to the car park where she’d left the MG, irritated that she hadn’t broken Mallard’s self-possession. She hadn’t even thought to ask him who he thought the murderer was. But she knew deep down that the only answer she would have received was the utterly predictable one: “those peace women.” And that would have made no difference to her own gut reaction to Mallard, namely that of all the people she’d spoken to so far, he was her favorite suspect. He had opportunity, she’d established that. He looked sturdy enough to cope with the means. And he had motive aplenty. A rumor with Rupert Crabtree behind it would be enough to terminate a man’s career in a small town like Fordham when that career depended on trust. And Mallard clearly couldn’t afford that, especially not with a wife whose disability gave him another pressing reason for maintaining a comfortable lifestyle.

She drove off, checking her mirrors for Rigano’s blond SB man. There was no sign of the red Fiesta. She pulled into the traffic to keep the appointment she’d made with Paul Warminster and following his directions, left Fordham in the opposite direction to Brownlow. Surburban streets gave way to more rural surroundings. Chocolate-box countryside, thought Lindsay, struck as she was occasionally with a sharp pang of longing for the sea lochs and mountains of her native landscape. A couple of miles out of the town, she pulled off the main road into a narrow country lane. Soon she came to a thatched cottage attached to a converted cruck barn. The garden was a mass of daffodils and crocuses with occasional patches of bright blue scilla. A powerful motorbike was parked incongruously by the side of the barn. Lindsay got out of the car and walked up a path made of old weathered brick.

The door was opened by a tall spare man in his late forties. His gingery hair was lank and greying, his face weather-beaten to an unattractive turkey red and a network of fine lines radiated from the corners of his lively blue eyes. In his tweed jacket with the leather patches he looked more like a gamekeeper than a shopkeeper. With a sudden shock, Lindsay realized this was the man she had seen leaving Mallard’s office a short time earlier. Covering her confusion, she quickly introduced herself and established her bona fides with her Press card. Warminster ushered her into a chintzy, low-ceilinged living room with bowls of sweet-smelling free-sias scattered around.

“So, you’re writing about what local people are doing to put a stop to that so-called peace camp,” he said, settling himself in a large armchair.

Lindsay nodded. “I understand you’ve been quite actively involved in the opposition.”

Warminster lit a small cigar as he replied. “Used to be. Probably will be again soon.”

“Why is that?” Lindsay asked.

“Had a bit of a run-in with that chap, Crabtree, the fellow who was murdered at the weekend, so I hadn’t been doing too much lately. Blighter thought he ran Fordham. Perhaps now we’ll get to grips with those left-wing lesbians,” he said.

“You weren’t happy with the policies of Ratepayers Against Brownlow’s Destruction, then?” Lindsay probed.

He snorted. “Could say that. Policies? Appeasement, that’s what they were about. And look where that got us in the thirties. We should have been taking the war into their territory, getting them out of their entrenched positions instead of pussyfooting around being nicey-nicey to those bloody communists harridans.” Warminster was off and running in what were clearly not fresh fields. As she listened to the tirade, trying to control her feelings of disgust and anger, Lindsay gradually began to understand why violence so often seems a solution.

She pretended to take extensive notes of his speech. There was no need to interrogate Warminster. The only difficulty was getting him to stop. Eventually, he ended up with a rabble-rousing peroration. “Very stirring, sir,” Lindsay muttered.

“You think so? That’s exactly what I told them on Sunday night in Berksbury. I was speaking there, you know, at the instigation of the local Conservative Party. They staged one of those debates about the issues. Had some woolly vicar in a woolly pullover from CND, the local candidate and me. Well worth the trip, I can tell you.”

Lindsay’s mind had leapt to attention as soon as Sunday was mentioned. “That was Sunday night just past?” she asked. “The night Crabtree was killed, you mean?”