Shadow Over Edmund Street by Suzanne Frankham (best e reader for android .txt) 📗

time again. Every which way they turned, it came out the same. If what they suspected was true, the judge was an opportunistic murderer who took his chances when they

occurred.

Except for Edwina’s death. That was different. Her murder was planned.

All evening they talked, mulled over evidence, tried to understand. In the end they concluded that Edwina, dear Edwina, who had existed most of her life worn down by the struggle of surviving day by day, had acquired enough confidence to do something about Edward, the man responsible for Trudi’s death.

As Jerry said, ‘I reckon Edwina Bloody Biggs must have tried her hand at a spot of blackmail. Bloody shame it didn’t work.’

* Things changed at the police station. The Super became more ground down by the day, his face haggard, eyes hooded and downcast. A man adrift. He talked about going fishing when he retired, set up a calendar and marked the days off—one more day he had survived, one day nearer the end. Alex avoided him as much as possible. It was painful to see the bewilderment in his eyes.

Jerry disappeared down-country to talk to the constable who had attended the death of the father-in-law, Judge Horricks. He came back a day later, disgusted and dispirited.

‘How lucky can this bastard be?’ he said to Marion. ‘The judge got the one cop who has nothing, I repeat, nothing between the ears. The man is an insult to the Police Force.’

‘It was a long time ago, Jerry, and who knows, maybe it was an accident.’

‘Yeah, right. You really believe that, do you?’

‘As much as you do. Doesn’t matter what we think though, does it?’

‘No,’ Jerry said. ‘Bastard.’

Sergeant Grigson, who had dealt with the death of the aged Mrs Horricks, was a different prospect altogether, but as Jerry reported the next day, the results were much the same. Mrs Horricks had moved in with her daughter and her son-in-law. She was eighty, had a bad hip and was quite frail. On the day of her death, the judge and his wife had a commitment they couldn’t avoid, a garden party at Government House. They’d left the old lady in her bedroom, getting ready to take an afternoon nap, and arranged for their housekeeper to pop in later. When the housekeeper arrived, she’d found Mrs Horricks at the bottom of the stairs. She’d called the ambulance, then the judge. The sergeant said it was pretty straightforward. Mrs Horricks had fallen down the stairs and her neck was twisted to one side. He’d seen straight away it was broken.

When Jerry had asked if there was anything, any one thing, he thought was unusual, the sergeant had been silent for a long time. Then he shook his head. ‘Nothing’. The reason he remembered the case as if it was yesterday, was because the son-in-law was a judge and the couple had been at a Government House garden party. Pretty damn swanky. The old lady falling down the stairs and dying was in order. ‘We see it often,’ he’d added. ‘It takes a while for relatives to realise how frail the elderly are. Take the daughter, in this case. She felt it was her fault. Moved the mother in, strange house, thought she was doing the right thing by putting in a stairmaster, and next day, there’s the mother dead because she wasn’t used to it. The daughter was badly cut up.’

‘What do you think, Alex?’ Marion asked. Her pink cheeks were chalky white, her green eyes dull.

‘Try and rustle up a doctor’s report.’ Alex was grim. ‘If the judge pushed the old lady down the stairs, then short of sneaking out of the garden party, he must have done it as they were leaving. I want to know how long she’d been dead.’

‘You do realise,’ Jerry said, ‘if he pushed her down the stairs on her first day, he must have decided to do it before she moved in. Didn’t bother wasting any fucking time. Absolute bastard.’

* The three of them crowded into Alex’s office, Marion and Jerry stiff as soldiers, while Alex read the doctor’s report. It was sketchy. The doctor hadn’t been thorough. No one thought the death of Mrs Horricks was anything other than a tragic accident. The old lady had died from a broken neck as a result of a fall, two to four hours before being found. Death was thought to be instantaneous, or at least that’s what the doctor told the daughter. He had written in his notes the daughter had been distraught and blamed herself for leaving the old lady in an unfamiliar house. He had prescribed a tranquiliser and advised her to see her own doctor the

next day.

Alex finished reading the report, closed the file, then flung it across the room. Marion stood stock-still, open-mouthed. Jerry was silent.

‘This doctor was more concerned with the wife than with the dead mother. We’re going to nail this bastard. We’re going to do it through Edwina. We’re going to reactivate the case. Make it a priority again. We know what we’re searching for now. We’re going to go through it again, all the people, all the evidence. Find the links between Edward and Edwina. We’re going to work on the assumption Edwina was somehow threatening him or blackmailing him, and then we’re going to prove it.’

‘Good one, Boss,’ said Jerry giving him the thumbs up. ‘You’re right. We can’t do anything about these other cases. But Edwina, yeah, we’re still in with a chance.’

* ‘Let me get this straight,’ Mac said. He was standing at the window of his office, eyes fixed on the pigeons below, watching them fly from the ground onto the balcony of the building opposite. His hands were behind his back, shoulders slumped. ‘Number one, you want a constable to moonlight in the pathology lab on a Saturday night. Number two, you want to bring back Meg Johnson who left to have children. But only in a part-time capacity, mind,’ he added. ‘Number three, last but