And a sudden thought
popped into his head, what he would call ‘out of left field’, to do with Harry
and his sister Corinne. Why it occurred
to him then he couldn’t say, but Corinne did not look like her brother, and
years of working with people and families told him that whilst they were
ostensibly brother and sister, perhaps the same mother, they had different
fathers.
Interesting, a point to
store away and ponder at a later date.
"From what I have
found in Harry's rather odd filing system, made all the more difficult after
being tossed irreverently on the floor is that the first case involved
Jennifer Jones, married to Alphonse or Al Jones, and that she was accusing her
husband of having an affair with the office manager Miriam Walters. He tracked them down to a bar where it seems
Al denied the allegation and in turn asked Harry to catch Joseph Jones, Al's
brother, with Jennifer.
"It seems it's
been a long-standing reason for bad relations between the two."
Sykes watched her as
she turned over several loose handwritten pages in a plain manila folder as
she related the details. It was a
summary and he would need to read what Harry had written. She could not be expected to understand what
was relevant or not.
"So far so
good," he said. "Moving on from that point, I can tell you
Harry was the last person to talk to Joseph before he was murdered in the
street. I found it somewhat suspicious
that Harry was at the scene of that
crime and left before the police arrived, hardly what I would call the actions
of a law-abiding citizen."
Felicity gave him one
of her cold stares, thinking Harry must have had a good reason not to be there
when the police turned up, but also agreeing it didn’t look good. She turned the page in the file slowly taking
the time to consider a suitable retort.
None came to mind. Instead, she said quietly, "He noted he
saw a red car at the scene, saw it drive off very quickly and followed it. It got away but he also noted he saw a similar
car later at the Outtel Finance Company. He couldn't verify it was the same car, but he
noted that the connection of the brother to the company was an interesting
coincidence."
Felicity remembered
running into Harry that day, and the fact they had gone into Outtel. It might be best, she thought, not to say
anything about that.
"You're saying
that he considered it possible the killer might be an employee of the
company?" It was not something that
Harry had suggested to him, so maybe he had a change of heart, or there was
another reason; he was going to investigate it further.
That had, of course,
been one of his theories at the time, that one of the employees should be at
the top of his list of suspects, except they all had alibis, yet any attempt to
break them had not yielded any further evidence. Perhaps this revelation might be an incentive.
"Perhaps, perhaps
not. It seems the driver was a woman in
a red dress and that woman he later identified as Angela Morrison."
"Joseph's
daughter."
"Yes. I’m assuming you’ve spoken to her?"
He had, but with little
success. She was a woman with not such
an iron-clad alibi, and he had long suspected she had been at the Outtel
company the night Al was supposedly murdered.
It was a sticking point
with his Chief there was nobody in the room where Harry had said it was, and
none had been subsequently found. The
blood found elsewhere in the building was not Al's type.
All very convenient for
Al, if he was still alive, which Sykes was beginning to think was a distinct
possibility, and if he was, it was possible he had killed both his brother and
Brightwater. But he needed to prove Al
was still alive.
"I did. What did Harry have to say about her?"
Felicity turned several
more pages slowly scanning the notes, until the fifth page.
"Apparently she
asked him to find Al's killer. My
question to her would be how did she know Al was dead?"
"Harry could have
told her."
"When? Harry dated the request after you found him at
the Outtel building. His phone records
are here, and the number he had for her is not on the account for that day or
the next."
"Then if what you
say is correct, she had to be there with him." Sykes stood. "It seems I have a new prime suspect. Does he have an address for her?"
"No." He watched as she tore off a piece of note
paper from the pad beside the manila folder and write the phone number on it.
"Perhaps this might help find her."
He picked it up. "Thanks. Are you going to be here for a few days?
“Yes.”
“Good. I’ve no doubt we’ll meet again soon.”
After she had shown him
out and locked the door behind her, she went back to the file and read it
again. Felicity thought it odd her
brother had not put it into so many words, but it was evident from the timeline
she was at the scene that night when Harry had been caught by Sykes.
His record of the
interview made interesting reading. She
had not realized Harry could be so eloquent.
She also realized at the same time that Angela Morrison was not the sort
of person she portrayed herself to be but was not so surprised Harry could
lose his objectivity around her.
But was she a murderer,
or would she help a murderer?
She had no doubt Sykes would find out.
© Charles Heath 2016-2019
No comments:
Post a Comment