The Wigmaker Read online

  ‘He certainly made an excellent job of concealing her ID.’

  ‘There’s plenty of body parts: hair, skin, fluids for DNA.’

  ‘Yeah. But we need something to compare it with. Anyway, thanks, Mac.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  He replaced the phone. He rubbed his chin. Things were looking good. Everything pointed to the corpse being that of Katrina Chancey. But it would have to be proved positively before it could be legally accepted that indeed it was her. DNA was looking to be the only way. There was no knowledge of any family. Nobody knew anything about where she came from. Chancey wasn’t likely to assist, even if he knew. Indeed, he had put everything in their way to make it impossible.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Scrivens with the tall, handsome dark-haired womanizer, Gabriel Grainger. His arm was in a sling and there was a small sticking plaster above his left eyebrow. He was obviously going to be cagey. He looked sidelong at Angel.

  ‘Thanks Ted,’ Angel said.

  Scrivens went out.

  Angel nodded at Grainger, looked at the sling, pointed to a chair and they sat down.

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, Inspector. Not a thing, you know. You need to understand that.’

  ‘How’s the arm,’ Angel said evenly.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Grainger said with a shrug, then he winced. The movement produced pain the man hadn’t expected.

  Angel almost smiled.

  ‘Tell me what happened on the night of Friday, the thirteenth of April. That was the night of the mysterious phone call, when you packed a suitcase and left Zoë.’

  ‘I didn’t leave Zoë in the way that you make it sound. It’s all been very difficult. I’ve been unable to get a job for six months, you know. Everybody wants references. We’ve been living on dole money.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Angel said.

  ‘Yes, well, a week or so before I left, I had answered an ad in the paper for a smart, young executive, over six feet, dark hair, good physique. I had all the qualifications for the job, and I was interviewed by Frank Chancey in his posh office at his big factory. He was offering three hundred quid a week. It was a short interview. He didn’t ask many questions and he said he would consider me and let me know. I thought it was a brush-off. I had had so many. I was getting used to it, you know?’

  Angel nodded.

  ‘Anyway he rang up in a panic on that Friday night. He said he wanted to offer me the job and told me that it was all hush-hush. He said he wanted to buy the timber rights for a massive area in Cumbria, when they came up on offer. He wanted me to be placed in a strategic position, able to be the first to become aware of the rights coming on the market, and the first, maybe the only one, to put in a bid on his behalf. All I had to do was look as if I was on holiday, tell nobody I was there and ask no questions about timber. I was not to mention his name, because he was so well-known in the timber business he said it might interest other possible purchasers and thereby push up the price. At that money I naturally agreed. He said that he’d heard rumblings that this deal might be coming to a head very soon indeed. If I wanted the job, I was to pack a bag immediately that night, tell nobody and meet him at the end of the street in ten minutes. He would give me five hundred pounds and then send me three hundred pounds each week in folding money by registered post. He told me that there was a train leaving at ten o’ clock for Leeds, then up to Penrith in Cumbria. Then it was about a half hour’s ride by taxi to a little hotel called the King’s Arms at Ridley Stewart. I agreed, of course. I was very enthusiastic about it. I told Zoë what I could earn, being a millionaire’s representative. I thought it was the beginning of a break for me. Anyway, the hotel was in the middle of nowhere. I was comfortable enough, and he was paying the hotel bill, but bored out my skin. The following Tuesday I got another three hundred quid. I was rolling in it. I couldn’t contact Zoë because I’d said that I wouldn’t and I didn’t want to stop the gravy train, now did I? I wasn’t to know what was going to happen. Anyway, yesterday morning, I was in the hotel at Ridley Stewart. I had just come back in from a stroll to a petrol station along the road to buy a newspaper, when a big man in a clown’s mask came in. He was waving a gun.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘About twelve noon.’

  ‘Yes. Go on. What did he say?’

  ‘He didn’t say anything. He opened the door. It wasn’t locked. I was hanging up my raincoat in the wardrobe at the far side of the room. He fired the gun at me twice. It made a hell of a row. The first shot must have missed me: the second hit me in the arm. I feigned a stumble, and was dropping to the floor. There was a tray of dirty breakfast pots, a teapot and stuff on the bed. I grabbed at it, threw it at him then made straight for the bedroom window, barged through it, dropped about eight feet on to a garage roof, ran along it. The big man in the mask fired several shots after me, but he missed. I was petrified. I ran all the faster, lowered myself on to the guttering and dropped the eight or ten feet to the floor. Then I ran like hell. I ran into the trees at the back of the hotel. There are plenty of them up there. Then I was wandering round for an hour or so until I came to a road. It was the main road. I started thumbing traffic. I thought nothing would ever stop, but a diesel tanker wagon did. Gave me a lift into Penrith. Got to the train station. Fortunately I had my money-clip and wallet on me. Caught a train to Leeds, then home. The rest you know. I’ve been wondering what the man in the clown mask wanted, why he wanted me dead. He clearly did. What have I done?’

  ‘Who knew you were there?’

  Grainger looked up. ‘Only Mr Chancey.’

  ‘It’s got to be Chancey, Ron. I asked Grainger who knew he was there, and he said only Mr Chancey.’

  ‘Can we prove it, sir?’

  Angel rubbed his chin. Suddenly he reached out to the phone and tapped in a number. ‘Ahmed, find Ted Scrivens for me. He might be in the canteen.’

  He replaced the phone and turned back to Gawber.

  ‘Trevor Crisp said that he followed Chancey in a red Ferrari and eventually lost him. He couldn’t keep up with him. That’ll likely be the car he’s supposed to have bought for Katrina.’

  Angel suddenly had another idea. He picked up the phone and tapped in another number. He was ringing Crisp. It was soon answered. He asked him for the index number of Chancey’s Ferrari. Crisp soon found it from his notebook. Angel wrote it on a pad in front of him and rang off.

  There was a knock at the door. It was Scrivens. ‘You wanted me, sir?’

  ‘Ah, Ted. This is the index number of Chancey’s Ferrari. I want you to go round to his garage at the side of Chancey House. It should be there. I want to know if we can place it anywhere in Cumbria yesterday. The milometer reading, the earth on the tread of the tyres. If we can, we can get him on the attempted murder of Gabriel Grainger. That would be the beginning of the end of Frank Chancey.’

  Scrivens’s eyes shone. ‘I’ll do what I can, sir,’ he said and dashed out.

  Angel turned to Gawber. He ran his hand through his hair. ‘Look Ron, that body has no face, teeth or fingers. How do we possibly prove who it is? Her hair is the colour of Katrina’s of course. The info that comes in both from Mac and her model agency exactly matches her description, but we still cannot prove it. All the evidence we have stacked up against him is useless unless we can prove that that body is incontrovertibly that of Katrina Chancey. The defence counsel would have a big laugh at us if we could only say it looks like her, but we can’t prove it! Don’t you see, that’s what Chancey was all about? That’s what all the changes to the house have been about. The five plumbers to change all the U bends, the washing down with bleach, repainting the woodwork, the new car, all her clothes to the cleaners or laundry, carpets cleaned. The thirty-six pairs of new shoes: of course the size didn’t matter. The poor lass was never going to wear them anyway. Even her hairbrush had gone, supposedly in her luggage with her to Rome. Huh! We’ll never see that again.’

  His jaw dropp
ed. ‘I didn’t realize.’

  ‘Somehow, we have got to get Katrina’s DNA. A single hair of Katrina’s, from her clothes, from anywhere, that is definitely hers, and we can prove it’s hers, that matches up with the dead body, and we’ve got him. But where can we get that from?’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  * * *

  His office was quiet and still … like a sailing boat in a windless sea. It was the calm before the storm.

  Angel’s enthusiastic team were busy trying to ferret out the final link of evidence that was going to put Frank Chancey away for two murders and an attempted murder. All that was needed was the tiniest proven sample of Katrina Chancey’s DNA.

  There was nothing more that Angel could think of to do. If he had had the backing of his superintendent he could have obtained a search warrant and taken Chancey’s study at his house and his office at his factory to pieces. There might, there just might have been something there that could have provided that vital DNA. Of course, the chief constable would have been against it, and Harker would have been against it. Angel wasn’t surprised about the superintendent. He reckoned he was always against everything Angel wanted to do, and he wasn’t up to another round with the honey monster at that time.

  He rubbed his chin and looked at the pile of papers in front of him. He wasn’t up to wading through that paper chase at that time, either. He turned away. His eye caught Peter Wolff’s filing cabinet. He had hardly given it more than a cursory glance since finding the keys to Wolff’s safe. He went over to it and pulled out the top drawer. The many files had names neatly written in alphabetical order. He pulled one out and took it to his desk. He looked carefully at it. Each file was labelled with a customer’s name. It contained meticulous detail of the customer’s requirements, wig size, colour requested, cost, source of materials, time making it, labour amount charged, total cost, total charged and date paid. Angel’s eyebrows shot up. There seemed to be hundreds of files like that, some containing only a single sheet of paper. He rubbed his chin and ran his finger long the tabs of the files down the As and the Bs to the Cs…. To Carter, Caspar, Chalfont, then Chancey. Chancey! He snatched out the file, took it over to his desk and began to read it. After a few moments his heart began to pound. There it was, in black and white.

  ‘Got it!’ he yelled. He looked up, sighed deeply, snatched up the phone and tapped in a number. He was trying to reach Gawber in the CID room. He wasn’t there. He told Ahmed to find him before he went home. He tried him on his mobile.

  The church clock in the distance chimed five o’clock.

  There was a knock on his door. It was Gawber.

  It was ten minutes to six.

  Angel and Gawber were standing outside the main entrance to Chancey House, when Jimmy Lyle answered the door.

  The little man was wearing an uncomfortable expression. ‘I’ll see if Mr Chancey will see you, but it is not his favourite time for receiving, you understand.’

  Angel nodded. He knew that if Chancey wouldn’t see him, he’d wait there and send Gawber back for a warrant.

  They stood there waiting ten minutes before an irritable Frank Chancey came to the door. ‘Now Angel, what’s this all about? And who is that you’ve got there?’

  Angel was seething. He didn’t like being deliberately kept waiting, particularly by a man who was a murderer, a crook and a parasite. ‘Good evening, Mr Chancey,’ he said. ‘This is DS Gawber. Can we have a few minutes of your very valuable time?’

  ‘You’ll have to make it quick. I have a social engagement in an hour and I have to get ready.’

  ‘Perhaps we can have a word in your study?’

  ‘What?’ Chancey sighed noisily. ‘Very well.’

  They followed the tall, handsome figure through the hall, up the stairs, along the corridor to his study. When the three men were comfortably seated, and the door closed, Angel said: ‘It was the change in the length of your wife’s hair that gave me the clue I needed.’

  Chancey blinked. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Tragically, Mr Chancey, I know where your wife is. And she won’t ever be coming back.’

  ‘Of course she will,’ Chancey snapped.

  Angel’s lips tightened against his teeth. ‘No sir. You murdered your wife during a row, in the bedroom upstairs here in this house. It is not certain how, probably a blow to the head. You carried her body round next door, knowing that Lord Tiverton, his wife and their staff were away. You made sure that Katrina would not be identifiable by her dental records or her fingerprints, by brutally destroying her jaws and her finger and thumb ends; you did this on the jetty with a pane hammer. You pushed her into a suit of armour stolen from Lord Tiverton’s outbuildings and wheeled her out to Tiverton’s motor boat in a wheelbarrow. You dropped her inside the steel suit, into the middle of the lake.’

  Chancey stared at him speechless.

  ‘Then you set about covering up your tracks. I now know why you’ve had the house turned upside down, had everything cleaned, polished or changed, even to throwing away all her shoes and replacing them with new. It didn’t matter that some of them weren’t the right size, the poor woman wasn’t ever going to wear any of them.

  ‘You thought that, whatever evidence against you we might be able to obtain, no case could be brought against you if the victim could not be proved to be Katrina Chancey. So the house was scrubbed down, painted and polished, her clothes laundered, and so on, because you thought that you could destroy all traces of her, even her DNA. Without DNA or any distinguishing marks, you thought that the police wouldn’t even be able to trace her. If they were able to find a dead body, there would be no possible way to prove it was her and thereby accuse you of murder. You remembered that Peter Wolff had bought some of her hair, and that he might still have some in stock, perhaps labelled with her name. So you burned every hair in the workshop and murdered him in the process, presumably because you couldn’t possibly explain what you were doing. Murder him and he’d never talk. Destroy every hair in the place and nobody could find any of Katrina’s DNA. The plan, in theory, was perfect.

  ‘You even produced a fantasy scenario to explain her disappearance. You paid a handsome Romeo figure, Gabriel Grainger, to disappear at the same time as you had murdered and hidden her body. Then you tried to start a rumour that the two had gone off together. What you didn’t tell Grainger was that you had planned to murder him in due course so that he couldn’t come back and destroy the fantasy, which would certainly have given you away.’

  ‘This is all nonsense.’

  ‘I can prove it. It was these photographs of your dear wife Katrina that gave me the clue,’ he said, indicating the four walls of the study.

  Chancey glanced round at them and smiled. ‘Oh yes. A tad too exciting for you, Angel, weren’t they?’

  ‘I can take them or leave them, sir. The thing I want to draw your attention to is the length of her hair.’

  ‘Very sensual, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s more than twelve inches long.’

  ‘Eighteen inches, I would say.’

  ‘But that photograph in your desk drawer … would you be kind enough to get it out for me, sir?’

  Chancey snatched open the drawer and tossed the silverframed picture of Katrina roughly on to the desk top. It was fortunate that the glass did not break.

  ‘Now there,’ Angel said. ‘Her hair is short. Very short.’

  Chancey shrugged. ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘I have been looking very closely through Peter Wolff’s meticulously kept records that escaped the fire you started. They say that Mrs Chancey had her hair cut short on the second of April. And that the beautiful locks were subsequently made into a wig.’

  ‘I know all about it,’ he said sneeringly. ‘I should know! Katrina was the most beautiful as well as the most expensive woman on this earth. Hell, I paid a thousand pounds for it! I should know.’

  ‘But that wig wasn’t made for her, though, Mr C
hancey,’ Angel said as he walked round the back of Chancey’s chair.

  ‘I don’t know why you are making such a big thing of this, Angel,’ Chancey snarled, trying to keep Angel in sight as he passed behind the chair.

  ‘Because,’ Angel said grandly, ‘her hair was cut and dyed and trimmed and a wig was made by Peter Wolff at your wife’s instructions especially for you.’ With a flourish he leaned forward and boldly grabbed hold of Chancey’s hair. The beautiful black wig came away in Angel’s hand, leaving Chancey as bald as a polished newel post.

  ‘And it was this one, wasn’t it?’ Angel said, waving the wig triumphantly.

  Chancey jumped up. His face was as red as a judge’s robe. His head was totally hairless and shone like a pink Belisha beacon.

  ‘Give it here,’ he bawled.

  ‘This was the wig made from Katrina’s hair,’ Angel said. ‘And one hair from this wig will be more than enough DNA to put you away for life.’

  ‘Give it me, here,’ Chancey cried. ‘It’s not true. It’s all lies. I did it for Katrina.’ He leaned out to Angel to try to snatch the wig back. But Angel had already stuffed it into an evidence bag and was sealing it.

  ‘It’s evidence now, sir,’ he growled and turned to Gawber.

  ‘I’ve got everything I need now, Ron. Cuff him, charge him with murder, and let’s get off home.’

  It was 8 o’clock when Angel arrived home. He was tired but quietly elated.

  Mary wasn’t pleased.

  ‘Your dinner is ruined! Ruined! I don’t know why I bother. You didn’t even have the courtesy to ring and let me know.’

  ‘I am sorry. But I was in the middle of a very complicated case. It just wasn’t possible.’

  ‘Sit down. I’ll bring it through.’

  ‘Very complicated. But we got Frank Chancey for murder.’

  ‘There’s some more gravy, but I still think it will be dry.’