She washed up her cup in the rest room sink when she finished that evening, she wouldn’t be going home to an empty house. She knew she had done the right thing.
11
Constable Townsend put his head round Kent’s office door. ‘We’ve got Mrs Flitch outside in the office, sir. She said she had something she thought you should see. Looks like a diary and, more than likely, it belonged to that girl Maureen Carey.’
‘Mrs Flitch?’ He greeted the young woman with a smile as she came into the room. ‘How can I help you?’
‘I think I can help you, Inspector.’
‘I’ll be glad of any possible lead you can give us right now, Mrs Flitch.’
‘Well, I found this in Sue’s room this morning.’ She held out a cheap red school exercise book. ‘And I think you ought to read it. It was Maureen’s; it has her name inside. Sue was hiding it in her dressing table drawer and I thought it might help you to catch her murderer. I’m only doing this because I don’t want some other poor kid to be killed.’
‘Thank you for bringing it in,’ Kent said taking it from her. ‘Did you take a look at it?’
‘I read it and I think she could have done with some help,’ she said, as she left the room. ‘Should warn you though it leaves the Karma Sutra standing behind the starting gate.’
‘What’d you think she meant by that, guv?’ Turner said with a chuckle.
‘We’d better read it and find out, hadn’t we?’ Kent said ruffling through the pages. By rights he knew he should give it over to her parents but was it going to be a bad move? This was something she hadn’t wanted anyone else to read. Especially her folks. She’d left it at her friend’s place for just that reason.
Maureen wasn’t academically bright but she had been careful in her wording. It took Kent some time to read the tiny neat lettering and she used initials rather than using full names. She’d trusted Susan not to understand it, but her mother had and was obviously disturbed at its contents.
On reading it, Kent was surprised to discover that even he could still be shocked. Was she lying or merely fantasizing? They would never know now. Perhaps it was her upbringing at home? Having so strict a parent as Mr. Carey had definitely not helped Maureen in her formative teen years.
Either the girl was very imaginative or she fancied a large number of men. Most of them were much older than her but she mentioned Michael Berkley a number of times. And Raymond figured in it a great deal, in explicit terms, and her thoughts on what she liked to do with him. On reflection, Kent thought he could do with a blue pencil. The language the girl used in it wasn’t taught in school. He wondered again whether he should hand it over to her family but to save them more grief, after it was kept for official use, it could most conveniently be disposed of in an incinerator.
He put it down on the desk at last. And wiped his hands carefully in his handkerchief afterwards. Turner picked it up and started to read it. He surprisingly took it much better than Kent expected, even chuckling over some of it. ‘She must have had asbestos pants, guv. She was quite a fast worker, wasn’t she? A nymphomaniac in the making, I would say.’
‘There’s Roger Welbeck’s name in here. Going by the initials. That’s someone else we have to see. He’s the heating engineer, isn’t he? He does some work in the chapel, checking up on the heating and plumbing, and on her too.’ He chuckled richly. ‘If this is anything to go by, we must find out what time Welbeck arrived home.’
‘We could call on his wife, and get her version of the evening, before he can speak to her?’
‘Good thinking, Turner. We’ll do just that.’
12
The Welbecks lived in a long, tree fringed road of large detached private villas on the left hand side of the park and Kent was taken aback for a minute or so to see the large, white house designed in the thirties style, standing in its own grounds. It was definitely one of a kind. Its many front windows, and the flat penthouse type roof with a flourishing rooftop garden on top, looked like it came straight out of an Agatha Christie TV movie. Shades of Hercule Poirot, he thought with a broad smile getting out of the car.
‘Now this, I could really go for - Turner,’ he said standing in the wide gravel driveway gazing up at it appreciatively for a while.
‘Takes a bit of getting used to at first, guv,’ Turner chuckled. ‘Mrs Welbeck’s grandfather, Paul Grantham, designed it. He was an architect and a good one. He left a packet of money to her mother, Alyne, and the house. Although, Sara’s had it altered a bit since inside. She had a lift put in for her personal use with the wheelchair and she does some painting and gardening on the roof. It’s laid out with flowers up there, you see, real fancy.’