Deadly Secrets (Detective Erika Foster #6)(78)

It took her a while to get there, the size of the house and the stiffness of her legs from sitting for several hours impeding her speed. She opened the first door and went into the cold porch. Through the glass in the door she could see a black man in a suit, flanked by five police officers in uniform.

A black man, she thought disapprovingly as she unlocked the door and opened it. He held up his warrant card.

‘Mrs Elsa Fryatt? I’m Detective Inspector James Peterson.’

‘What do you want?’ she answered imperiously. Despite her small height, the front door was raised up, so she was able to see most of them at eye level.

‘We have a warrant to search these premises in connection with the murder of Marissa Lewis,’ he said, handing it over.

‘This is no use to me; I haven’t got my glasses,’ she said, handing it back.

‘I’m not waiting for you to read it,’ said Peterson. He stepped up into the porch, suddenly towering above her. She put out her arms to stop him, and he gently lifted them away, and moved into the house.

‘You get your black hands off me!’ she cried. The police officers surged around her and into the house, and started pulling on latex gloves. ‘What are you doing? Why are you coming into my home?’

A young policewoman started opening the small drawers in one of the occasional tables in the hall, and Mrs Fryatt tried to close them.

‘Ma’am, you need to step back, or we will arrest you.’

‘On what grounds?’

‘Obstructing a police officer with a warrant.’

She moved to the banister and watched as the police fanned out and started searching through her house. She went to the phone, and with shaking hands, she dialled her son’s mobile phone.

‘Charles? The police are here!’ she shrilled, her voice climbing a register. ‘They say they’ve got a search warrant… They’re going through everything…’ She listened as her son fired questions at her, watching through the doorway to the front room where books were being taken down from the shelves, upended, shaken and dumped on the floor. ‘I don’t know. I haven’t got my reading glasses. They won’t tell me what they are doing. One of them manhandled me on the front doorstep… Okay, come quickly!’

She put the phone down and tried to find a spot in the house where she could wait, but the police seemed to be everywhere. There seemed to be more than the six officers who had initially been on the front doorstep. She went back out to the freezing porch and sat on the small chair she used for putting on her shoes. Her hands were shaking, and it wasn’t just from the cold.

An hour later, Charles Fryatt appeared through the glass outside the front door.

‘Why the hell did it take you so bloody long!’ she hissed when she opened the front door.

‘Where’s the warrant?’ Charles said. He took it from her, scanning the writing on the page and the signature. They moved into the hallway as Peterson was just coming down the stairs.

‘Are you Charles Fryatt?’ he asked.

‘Yes. I think this is quite ridiculous, what could my mother have to do with the murder of Marissa?’ Charles said. ‘Look at her, she’s ninety-seven years old!’

Peterson ignored him. ‘Is the front bedroom yours, Mrs Fryatt?’

‘Yes! You’ve been in there? You?’ she cried.

‘Yes.’

‘I would expect a lady police officer to have been assigned to do that. No doubt you’ve had those hands all over my personal items!’

Charles shot his mother a look. ‘Mum. You need to watch it,’ he warned.

‘I can say whatever the hell I like in my house. There’s freedom of speech for a reason!’

‘We need you to open the safe in the wardrobe,’ said Peterson. Charles looked at his mother; his eyes were wide and fearful.

‘I take it I don’t have a choice?’ she said.

‘No, you don’t. Either you open it, or we drill it open.’

They followed him up two flights of stairs to the front bedroom, which held her huge four poster bed, a heavy wooden dressing table in front of the bay window, and a large fitted wardrobe lining one wall. The middle door was open, showing a heavy metal safe with a combination dial.

‘I’m the only person who knows the combination,’ said Mrs Fryatt imperiously.

‘What if you can’t remember it?’ asked Charles. There was something about the way he said this that suggested to Mrs Fryatt that her son was giving her some kind of cue to forget, but she tottered over to the safe and slowly knelt down.

‘I need you all to turn away,’ she said. Peterson, Charles and two of the uniformed officers also in the room looked away. There were some soft clicks and then the safe’s lock opened. Charles tried to catch his mother’s eye, but she refused to look at him. ‘There,’ she said.

Peterson went to the safe, and crouched down to peer inside. There were three shelves. The first had a stack of twenty-pound notes and some old-fashioned bank bonds. The second was packed with velvet-lined jewellery boxes. The two uniformed officers joined him, and pulled on fresh latex gloves to take these out, placing them on the carpet. The first box was wide and flat and contained a dazzling diamond necklace; the second and third contained a Cartier diamond watch and two bracelets. Peterson sorted through the other boxes laid out on the carpet, which contained a diamond brooch, gold earrings, and another necklace with a six-ounce block of gold pendant. The final two boxes contained a pair of huge round-cut diamonds in gold, and the second a pair of square princess-cut diamonds.