A Fatal Obsession. Faith Martin

of booted feet, served to keep him in ignorance of the figure creeping up on him.

      Away to his left, Jonathan McGillicuddy heard the mellow tones of the bell of the village church begin to strike twelve.

      It was the last thing he ever heard.

      Lady Deering began to laugh. Out in the hall, the grandfather clock chimed the last of the twelve strikes. The silence after the last one seemed profound.

      Trudy felt like laughing too. Had she ever seriously imagined that some madman would burst in, spraying gunfire? Now she felt vaguely ashamed of her fears.

      Anthony Deering looked up from his nearly completed crossword puzzle and grinned at his mother. ‘Feeling better now?’ he asked.

      ‘Much, darling,’ Martha agreed.

      ‘See, Dad…’ The young man turned to his father. ‘I told you nothing would happen!’

      It was six o’clock and fully dark before Mavis McGillicuddy began to really worry. It wasn’t like Jonathan to work this late. It had been fully dark for nearly two hours. Where on earth could he be?

      At nine o’clock she nipped next door and asked her neighbour if she wouldn’t mind sitting with Marie for a while. The little girl had gone reluctantly to bed, but Mavis feared she might be naughty enough to get up, claiming she wanted a drink of water, and she didn’t want her to find the house empty.

      Marie, too, had expected her father to be home in time to read her their usual bedtime story, and Mavis wasn’t sure her granddaughter had believed her lies about his arranging to meet with some friends and have a drink with them at the local pub.

      The desk sergeant at the police station listened patiently to Mavis’s report, then told her that her son, in all likelihood, probably really was currently drinking in some pub somewhere, just as she’d told his daughter, and that it was far too early to panic just yet. Only after Mavis had vehemently insisted it was something he’d never done before did he promise to check there had been no road-traffic accidents reported, involving Jonathan’s van.

      And more to get rid of her than anything else, he then rang around the local hospitals to see if anyone of Jonathan’s description had been brought in.

      No such reports had been made.

      Eventually, knowing she had to get back home, since she couldn’t expect her neighbour to sit in her house all night, Mavis forced the sergeant to promise that, first thing in the morning, he’d send a constable round to the garden where her son was currently working. Just to check all was well there.

      On nearing her house, her footsteps quickened with hope. Surely she’d find that Jonathan had come home while she’d been out? He’d be full of sheepish apologies on finding their neighbour in residence in the sitting room, and she would tell him off roundly.

      But when she got there, there was still no sign of him.

      Not surprisingly, Mavis didn’t sleep a wink that night.

      Mavis McGillicuddy was up with the dawn, and was sitting dry-eyed and hopeless in the kitchen, her hands feeling as cold as ice even though they were wrapped around a hot cup of tea, when she heard the knocking on her door.

      She dragged herself to her feet and out into the hall. Through the frosted glass in the front door she could make out a large, ominous shape. When she opened it, it was to find a policeman looking back at her solemnly.

      It was only then that she began to cry.

      Sir Marcus Deering rose that morning with a cheerful whistle on his lips and ate a hearty breakfast. The whole mood in the house was jubilant now, and faintly shamefaced, as if acknowledging they had been silly ever to have worried.

      Anthony was once more out on his beloved horse, since he was due back in London soon and was determined to make the most of a dry, if cold, day.

      By nine-thirty Sir Marcus was seated behind the desk in his study, reading the morning post. There had been no green-inked missive to worry him, and if any more came, he would simply toss them, unread, into the bin. The poison pen had shot his arrow and missed by a mile. And never again would Sir Marcus be foolish enough to be conned into worrying about ‘doing the right thing’.

      When the telephone on his desk rang he reached for it absently. He heard his secretary telling him there was a woman on the line who insisted on speaking to him but wouldn’t give her name.

      ‘Oh?’ Marcus frowned. ‘That’s odd.’ His daytime calls were invariably with other businessmen or their secretaries – none of whom was unwilling to identify themselves. ‘Well, put her through.’

      ‘Yes, sir,’ his secretary said. There was a short delay, a beep, and then he heard a tentative, tearful voice.

      It took a moment for him to realise who it was on the other end of the line, and when he did so, his first instinct was to look furtively at the closed door of his study. ‘I told you never to call me here,’ he hissed angrily into the receiver, getting automatically to his feet. ‘If my wife were to…’

      But the voice frantically overrode him – something that had never happened before. And as he finally took in what was being said, all the anger washed out of him, along with the colour in his face, leaving him sitting white and shaken in his chair and fighting the urge to be sick.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      At St Aldates police station, DI Jennings looked gravely at the faces turned towards him.

      ‘Let me repeat, this is a murder investigation. Sometime yesterday, somebody brutally killed Jonathan McGillicuddy by bashing him over the head with his own spade.’

      He went on to give details of the deceased, his work as a gardener in a house where the owners were absent, his failure to return home and the missing person’s report filed on him by his mother as a result. He then went on to relate the discovery of his body in the morning by the PC sent from Kidlington, in response to the request from the desk sergeant on duty at Cowley police station.

      ‘He subsequently found the victim dead in the orchard,’ DI Jennings concluded heavily. ‘He’d clearly been working clearing out the old trees, and our police surgeon reckons he’d been dead at least twelve hours – possibly fifteen. Probably longer, but he can’t be sure. He’s also given a preliminary cause of death as blunt-force trauma to the head – but again he won’t sign off on it until after the autopsy.’

      Trudy Loveday, along with the others, listened to all this dry-mouthed. It wasn’t often that they had a murder case to deal with, and such a cold-blooded, savage attack was very unusual. Around her, everyone else was also tense and alert, and listening intently.

      That poor man’s mother, she thought, swallowing hard.

      ‘The lad who sometimes worked with him as casual labour has been traced, but he confirmed he wasn’t working that day with Mr McGillicuddy, but at a warehouse in Bicester instead. His alibi has since been confirmed. According to Mrs McGillicuddy, her son had no enemies, wasn’t a drinker or troublemaker, and had always been a responsible, respectable lad. Widowed young, with a little girl to take care of, he’d lived with his mother all his life. And he’s certainly not known to us,’ the DI confirmed heavily. ‘But it’s early days yet. Somebody had a reason to kill this man. And that’s where we need to start. Since the killer used the victim’s own spade, one theory is that the murder was unpremeditated. Our MO confirms the initial and primary wound was to the back of the head, with several more blows as he lay prone on the ground. Now I want you to sort yourselves into teams and find out all you can about our victim. His mother says she knows of no female friends.’ The DI paused and smiled at this. ‘But that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist – only that her son played his romantic cards close to his chest.’

      The DI shrugged. ‘Then we need to find out all about his finances. He was basically