And wear your dark blue shirt, please. The one with the buttons.
Chris is used to Donna by now, so he does as he is told. As always, he gets changed without looking in a mirror, because who wants to see that? He texts back.
Yes, ma’am, anything for a bit of Jason Ritchie. On my way.
Donna’s date had clearly not been a roaring success.
110.
She keeps them in storage, John,” says Elizabeth, holding the manila file. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been? It’s files of all her old cases. You’re not supposed to keep them, but you know Penny. She made copies of everything, just in case.”
“In case they might help catch a killer many years later,” says Joyce.
“Anyway, John, after Karen Playfair recognized you, it got me thinking, and I just needed one final thing checking in one of the files.”
John’s eyes are on Elizabeth as she begins to read from the file.
“There was a case in Rye, in nineteen seventy-three. Penny must have been very junior. I can’t imagine Penny ever having been junior, but you must remember it clearly. Probably seems like yesterday. The case concerned a girl named Annie Madeley. You remember Annie Madeley, Penny?”
Elizabeth looks over to where her friend is lying. Listening? Not listening?
“Stabbed during a burglary, and bled to death in the arms of her boyfriend. Around came the police, including Penny; that’s in the file. Found broken glass on the floor where our burglar had got in, but nothing stolen. The burglar had been surprised by Annie Madeley, panicked, picked up a kitchen knife, stabbed her, and fled. That’s the official account, if you want to read it. Case closed. But Ron was the first to sniff it out. He didn’t like it one bit.”
“It stunk, Johnny,” says Ron. “A burglar in the middle of the day, on a busy estate? With people at home? You might burgle on a Sunday morning while everyone is at church, but not Sunday afternoon, not the done thing.”
Elizabeth looks over to her friend. “You must have thought that too, Penny? You must have known the boyfriend had stabbed her, waited for her to die, then called the police?”
She dabs Penny’s dry lips.
“We started looking into it months ago, John. The Thursday Murder Club. No Penny, but we carried on. I was surprised we’d never looked at the case before, surprised Penny had never brought it in. We started looking at it, John, seeing if the police had got it wrong all those years ago. I read the report on the knife wound and it didn’t seem right to me, so I asked Joyce about it. In fact, it might have been the first thing I ever asked you, Joyce.”
“It was,” remembers Joyce.
“I described the wound and asked her how long it would take to die, and she said around forty-five minutes or so, which didn’t fit the boyfriend’s account at all. He had chased the burglar—no one saw this, John—rushed back to the kitchen, held Annie Madeley in his arms, and rang the police immediately. I then asked Joyce if someone with any medical training could have saved her, and what did you say, Joyce?”
“I was certain it would have been easy. You’ll know that too, John, with your training.”
“Now, the boyfriend had been a soldier, John, invalided out a few years before. So he could have saved her, no question. But that’s not the way the investigation went. I’d like to say that things were different in these cases back then, but no doubt he’d get away with it today too. They searched for the burglar, but with no luck. Poor Annie Madeley was buried, and the world kept turning. The boyfriend disappeared after running from Penny’s squad car, and we come to the end of the file.”
“So we were looking into all of this, but then events took over, of course,” says Ibrahim. “Mr. Curran, Mr. Ventham, the body in the graveyard. We put the case to one side while we had a real murder right in front of us.”
“But we all know we don’t come to the end of the story, don’t we, John?” says Ron.
Elizabeth taps the manila file. “And so I sent Ibrahim off to look at the file, with one question. Can you guess what it was, John?”
John stares at her. Elizabeth looks at Penny.
“Penny, if you can hear, I bet you know the question. Peter Mercer. That was the name of the boyfriend, Peter Mercer. I asked Ibrahim to find out why Peter Mercer had been invalided from the army. And if you hadn’t guessed the question, I bet you can guess the answer, John. Have a go; it’s all too late anyway.”
John buries his head in his hands, drags them down his face, and looks up. “I assume, Elizabeth, it was a gunshot wound to the leg?”
“It was just that.”
Elizabeth pulls her chair nearer to Penny, takes her hand, and speaks to her quietly and directly. “Nearly fifty years ago Peter Mercer murdered his girlfriend, then vanished into thin air. And everyone thought he’d got away with it. But it’s really not all that easy to get away with murder, is it, Penny? Sometimes justice is waiting just around the corner, as it was for Peter Mercer one dark night when you paid him a visit. And sometimes justice waits fifty years and sits beside a hospital bed holding the hand of a friend. Had you just seen one too many of these cases, Penny? Tired of it? And tired of no one listening?”
“When did she tell you, John?” asks Joyce.
John starts to cry.
