Mistress Murder by Bernard Knight Page B

Eustace Soames usually does this part of the Home Counties. And tell the Yard Laboratory to join the party as well.’
    Bray went out with Burrell to the charge room to use the telephone while his boss got on with the talking. Archie tapped the pathetically thin folder which contained the few documents so far collected about the Laskey case.
    â€˜All we’ve got here is the fact that this woman lived in an expensive flat in the West End and was kept by some man, so far quite unknown to us.’
    The Oldfield inspector nodded. ‘That’s all we could ruddy-well find out. I’m afraid, apart from the fact that she was separated from her husband, who lives in Luton. Can’t see him as a suspect; he didn’t want to know about her when we had him here for the inquest.’
    Benbow looked thoughtful.
    â€˜Better get hold of him again I think, and give him a working over; he may know something that he didn’t think he knew at first.’
    â€˜He was a full-blown nobody,’ commented the inspector. Said he hadn’t seen her for nine years and wasn’t madly keen to see her for another nine … he moaned like hell when old Smythe swung the cost of the funeral on him.’
    â€˜Well, he won’t have to pay for the exhumation, if that’s any comfort to him,’ grinned Benbow. ‘If Bray does his stuff out there, we should have her up by first light in the morning.

Chapter Five
    â€˜It’s nice to have you at home at the weekend, Paul.’
    The Jacobs family were at home, enjoying tea at the fireside of their Cardiff home. A wicked east wind howled outside and the shaking trees in the garden added to the comfort of being inside.
    â€˜Old Ben can look after the shop till Monday,’ he drawled in reply. ‘We never do much on a Friday afternoon.’
    Paul’s legitimate business was in a lock-up shop near the docks, where an aged, but experienced, assistant ran the sales during Paul’s frequent trips to London to ‘buy stock.’
    He leant back comfortably against the arm of the settee and looked across at his wife.
    She was a calm woman of his own age, by no means glamorous but with considerable character. He had met her in London six years before, when he ran a similar business in Finsbury as a cover for the same smuggling racket. She was a schoolteacher and, by some magic of compatibility, he soon found that he wanted to marry her.
    He had a mistress at that time, but his knack of running a double life was already well developed and he found this no bar to a rapid courtship.
    His wife wanted to go back to her home in Wales and, as this suited his Jekyll and Hyde existence very well, he sold up and started a shop in Cardiff. At first heavily subsidised from his smuggling, he found to his surprise that after a year or two it began to break even and now was actually paying its way.
    His wife had no idea of his other life or of his true identity. She was not over-inquisitive, one of the factors that attracted him to her. She realised that he was of foreign origin, but his carefully prepared story of being an Austrian who had fled the country in 1938 and spent the war in the British Merchant Navy satisfied her completely.
    He stretched his feet to the fire and prodded the dog with a toe.
    â€˜Better off here than Glasgow, this time last week,’ he lied easily.
    His wife looked up, her grey eyes looking steadily from a long face free of any make-up.
    â€˜Why Glasgow all of a sudden? I thought you did all your buying in London.’
    Paul nodded lazily.
    â€˜Until now … a new firm has opened up there, a few points lower in price, so it’s worth my while going up to get the edge on the London values.’
    He was building up a cover for the future. Now that his usual routine was threatened by the unknown man on the tape, he might need more time away. It was better to prepare the ground beforehand than to make lame excuses