Killing Me Softly by Marjorie Eccles Page A

bridge. She wasn’t falling over herself to do so, she could smell blood and maybe cordite, and the vomit of the youngest PC, who could be forgiven for being sick, since it was his first death by shotgun. She searched in her pocket for a Polo mint. It sometimes helped.
    â€˜Tim Wishart? Should I know him?’ Mayo asked, joining her.
    â€˜He married Sam Nash’s daughter.’
    â€˜ The Sam Nash?’
    â€˜U-huh. He’s with her now. Wishart’s father was Freddie Wishart. The England cricketer,’ she added, before realizing that such an explanation was probably unnecessary to a Yorkshireman.
    â€˜Good God.’ Mayo searched his memory. ‘Didn’t he blow his brains out, too?’
    â€˜Yes. Only ...’
    â€˜Only what?’
    â€˜Only T-L thinks he didn’t ... the son, I mean. He’s pretty sure someone else shot him.’
    The Super let out his breath between his teeth.
    Someone had attempted to make it look like suicide, only not very successfully. Someone knew enough about the manner of suicides to have propped the twelve-bore shotgun between the victim’s knees, to have crooked his finger around the trigger, but the pathologist had been of the opinion that it was an amateur attempt. For one thing, the spread of the pellets as they entered the face suggested the gun had been fired from more than arm’s length. Would-be suicides made sure by putting the barrel under their chin, or even in their mouth. This was only a preliminary hypothesis, he’d been quick to add, which would need to be confirmed by the autopsy, and backed up by the ballistic report, but T-L wasn’t a man to make wild guesses, only educated surmises based on long experience. He was more often right than wrong, but he was human, and therefore fallible. However, he was also an expert and a respected authority, at the top of his profession, and he didn’t expect them to doubt him for a minute.
    â€˜How long’s he been dead?’ Mayo asked, looking around. Apart from the chimneys of a farmhouse faintly visible some distance away across the river, presumably the Fairmile dwelling, there was no other habitation in sight.
    â€˜Not long – possibly not more than an hour.’
    â€˜Nobody heard anything?’
    â€˜The house has been empty most of the day. The family – there’s his wife, and a boy and a girl in their teens – had all been out separately, but arrived home more or less at the same time, within the last hour. It was his daughter, young Amy, who found him. She was upstairs changing, and happened to look out of the window.’
    â€˜Strewth. Any thoughts so far, Abigail?’
    â€˜It seems he was in trouble financially, according to some letters in his pocket.’ She thought back to her earlier conversation with Ellie, to Ellie’s oblique, but what she now saw as loaded, references. ‘I have the impression his marriage wasn’t any too happy, either,’ she said cautiously. To say so felt dangerously like gossiping about her friends, but that’s how it was as a police officer. It was one of the reasons why you became cautious about making personal relationships, you didn’t have any choice, when it came to the crunch. ‘It’s only hearsay, but I believe the source was reliable. I’ve met his wife a few times, she runs that business near the market, called Miller’s Wife, with someone else I know, a woman called Ellie Redvers.’ She hesitated. ‘To be honest, Ellie’s my source. I don’t know, but I suspect she’s been having an affair with Wishart.’ It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but if it was so, it might well have precipitated this situation. She made up her mind and took a deep breath. ‘If my knowing her’s any problem –’
    Mayo raised an eyebrow. ‘How well do you know her?’
    â€˜We haven’t known each other long enough to have got