A Fatal Obsession. Faith Martin

these damn letters, how can we be sure?’ Sir Marcus demanded fretfully. ‘It may well turn out to be some demented old woman who gets a kick out of scaring people, or some weedy little clerk in one of my back offices with a Napoleon complex or bearing a grudge of some kind. But then again it might not! Damn it, man, I can’t go around the rest of my life looking over my shoulder!’

      ‘No, sir, of course you can’t,’ Jennings said, and not without genuine sympathy for his point of view. ‘And we’ll definitely look into it for you. If you could just provide us with a list of anybody you think might, even by the remotest chance, have some sort of grudge against you or your family, sir?’

      The businessman nodded glumly and rose ponderously to his feet. ‘Very well, I’ll do that. And you’ll be at the house tomorrow?’ he demanded, drawing out one of his personal visiting cards and placing it on the desk. ‘This is the address.’

      ‘Yes, sir, my Sergeant and another constable will be there bright and early,’ Jennings promised. ‘I take it your son lives with you?’

      ‘At the moment. He has a flat in London, of course, but he’s still up with us for Christmas. He likes to attend the Boxing Day hunt,’ the older man said, a fond glint coming to his eye as he talked about his son and heir. ‘So he always stays on for another couple of weeks to enjoy the gallops. Boy always was horse-mad, and rides every day he’s with us.’

      Jennings, not one whit interested, nodded vaguely. ‘I see, sir. Well, leave it with us. Sergeant, show Sir Marcus out.’

      Outside, Trudy stepped smartly away from the filing cabinet and nonchalantly moved back towards a free desk.

      Sergeant O’Grady shot her a quick look, lips twitching, as he ushered their visitor out.

      Once back in with the DI, he sighed in sympathy. ‘It’s a bit of a pig, sir, and no mistake,’ he said flatly. ‘But there’s nothing much we can do for him, of course. Sooner or later our letter-writing friend will just get bored and move on to some other target. And as for the chances of anything funny happening tomorrow bang on noon…’ O’Grady snorted. ‘Well, that’s about on a par with pigs being seen flying over Brize Norton airbase.’

      ‘No good telling Sir Marcus that, though,’ Jennings said with a brief smile. ‘And I don’t mind telling you, that threat to his son was a bit odd. Naming a specific date and time like that.’

      ‘Yes,’ O’Grady agreed uncertainly. ‘It’s not the usual run-of-the-mill thing, I’ll grant you.’ And he wondered if his superior had picked up on the slight hesitation when he’d asked Sir Marcus if he had any idea what the letter writer meant by ‘doing the right thing’. Because the Sergeant was sure Sir Marcus had definitely looked a bit shifty-eyed then. And if the millionaire didn’t have a skeleton or two in his cupboard, he’d eat his hat. The rich, in his experience, always had something they’d prefer to keep quiet about.

      ‘Well, go and hold their hands tomorrow anyway,’ Jennings ordered briskly. ‘And although I agree that the chances of anything coming of it are virtually nil, take a strapping lad with you just in case. Broadstairs, perhaps. He’s handy to have in a scrap.’

      ‘Sir.’

      ‘Oh, and Sergeant…’

      ‘Sir?’

      ‘When you go tomorrow, take WPC Loveday with you, will you? All week long she’s been giving me long-suffering looks. It’s beginning to get on my nerves. She can help question the housemaids or something. They won’t know anything, naturally, so it won’t matter if she cocks it up.’

      O’Grady grinned. ‘Good idea, sir. It’ll be good practice for her too – honing her questioning skills.’

      Jennings shrugged indifferently.

      But as he closed the door behind him, Mike O’Grady didn’t think it was at all likely that WPC Trudy Loveday would cock anything up. She was a bright enough girl and, being pretty and personable as well, would probably have Sir Marcus’s domestic staff quickly eating out of her hand.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      The next morning, Mavis McGillicuddy dunked a soldier into her boiled egg and glanced at the kitchen clock. She had an hour yet before she had to get her granddaughter up for school, which was just as well, since, at ten years old, Marie was fast getting to the stage where her endearingly childish eagerness to please was beginning to transform into something more mutinous.

      Not that Mavis minded all the ups and downs that came with child rearing, even at her age. Most women in their early sixties might have thought all that was behind them now, but Mavis was very much aware that without her son and his daughter living with her, she’d be just one more lonely widow.

      And she’d much rather be rushed off her feet or dealing with a childish tantrum than sitting twiddling her thumbs.

      On the wireless the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, was saying something dreary, as he always seemed to be doing, and she was half-tempted to get up and fiddle with the dial to see if she could find something more cheerful to listen to. But nowadays the radio stations seemed to play nothing but all this modern music the youngsters were going for. It was all Be-bop-a-lula this, or Poison Ivy that. And it was getting harder and harder for her to find the music she liked – recordings of the Glenn Miller Band, say, or a nice bit of Vera Lynn.

      She looked up as the kitchen door opened and her only child swept in. ‘Morning, Mum. Seen my boots anywhere – the ones with the toe-caps? I’m uprooting some old apple trees today, and I don’t want… oh, I see them.’

      The sight of her son, Jonathan, always brought a smile to Mavis’s face. At just turned thirty, he was still a handsome lad and looked far younger than his years. He’d inherited his thick, wavy blond hair from her and striking hazel-green eyes from his father. At nearly six feet tall, his work as a landscape gardener kept him fit and lean.

      As she fondly watched him pulling on his work boots, she sipped her tea in contentment. Although life had been hard for Mavis in her early years (and during the war, naturally), she had to admit she’d had some luck in her life, and never ceased to be thankful for it. Outside the window of their modest, tiny, terraced house, the suburb of Cowley was going about its busy business, with the majority of the men in the neighbourhood flocking into the car works. But, thanks to help from Jonathan’s father, Mavis actually owned the little house they lived in, and was the only one in their street not to be renting. She had been able to afford to send Jonathan to the local grammar school, which in turn had led to his being able to do a bit better for himself than his peers, first becoming apprentice to the head gardener at St Edmund Hall, before striking out on his own and setting up his own little business.

      Yes, in many ways, Mavis knew, she had been lucky.

      ‘Marie still in bed?’ her son asked now, pouring out a mug of tea for himself and peering through the window. The last few days had been wet and relatively mild – perfect for grubbing up stubborn tree roots.

      ‘Yes. She’s not happy to be going back to school after the Christmas holidays, though,’ Mavis said with a smile. ‘So I suspect I’ll have a bit of a job getting her up in time. But don’t you worry about it, son – I’ll not be having any of her tantrums. She’ll soon settle down again.’

      Absently, Jonathan walked behind her chair and kissed the top of her head. ‘Thanks for looking after her, Mum. Don’t know what we’d have done without you.’

      Jonathan said this often, more out of habit than anything, although he was vaguely aware that what he said was perfectly true.

      He’d had to marry young, at just twenty, when the girl he’d been going steady with had fallen pregnant, and in truth, he’d never felt really happy about it – something that had always made him feel guilty. But there was no point in denying he’d felt trapped and a little resentful, and when