Corpse in Waiting (7 page)

‘So she was knocked around with what?'

‘The pathologist reckons it was something like a pickaxe handle. There are several broken bones in the hands and arms.'

‘She tried to ward off the blows. How ghastly.'

‘Murder's always revolting.'

‘But surely she would have screamed.'

‘Aye. But if folk have their TVs turned up loud . . .'

‘Which is all about people screaming and car chases and explosions . . .'

‘Life's a bastard sometimes.'

I left him outside and went back into the house, paused in the kitchen, where the sink was still disgusting, looked into the scullery, where the stench still persisted – perhaps from my point of view it would have been a good idea to let Alexandra have another look round after all – and then slowly mounted the stairs. During the past few years I have been in several houses where murders had taken place and there is invariably a nasty resonance. People pooh-pooh this but to me it is real. This little house had no unsavoury echoes, if it had I would not want to buy it. The garden could take care of itself: nature is a great healer.

‘I don't think she was killed indoors,' I said out loud, wandering into the other bedroom.

‘No?' James said, obviously not too far away.

‘I have no evidence of course, just . . . intuition.' I went to the head of the stairs and he was standing at the bottom. ‘Thank you for involving me.'

‘I value your thoughts.'

‘Would you check that woman's name in records for me?'

His eyes widened. ‘You reckon she's dodgy?'

‘Just . . . intuition.'

‘I think we're good enough friends for me to ask if you're sure that's all it is.'

‘I'm sure,' I said with a smile.

‘As a consultant for SOCA you must have all the CRB computer codes.'

‘Patrick has. I'm not good with figures and have enough bother remembering my pin numbers. And . . . I don't want Patrick to know I'm checking up on her.'

There was a little silence during which Carrick regarded me with steady gaze. ‘You say he met her when the pair of you were divorced and he'd just come home with his legs pretty badly smashed up.'

‘That's right.'

‘It would be quite something for him then, to have a woman fancy him when he was on crutches.'

As a student of human nature I should have seen that it would have to be a special relationship, an important ‘something' that even now drew him to her. The woman had found him attractive despite the fact that he had been barely mobile and, having once regarded himself, as do so many young men, as invincible, had been left a little bit crazy by the sheer unfairness of having been rendered permanently crippled, or so he had thought at the time, following an accident with a hand grenade. There was no glory, no honourable wounds, no tales of heroism, no medals, even though he had not been the one who had thrown it. His wife had chucked him out, smashing his classical guitar in the process – has since buying him another, I wondered, a much better one, mended that hurt? – because she found him insufferably superior, a perfectionist who tried to show her how to cook a soufflé that did not sink and that, for her, as well as the business of children, had been the last straw. His wife had not been there for him when he had returned, had not bothered to keep in touch with his parents, with whom she had previously got on well, had not troubled herself to ask how their eldest son had faired on the battlefield.

I had remarried instead, a policeman colleague of Patrick's, Peter Clyde. A little under twelve months later I was a widow as well as divorced, Peter having been killed in a shoot-out in Plymouth. Realizing he was being followed by criminal suspects he had gone to where he knew Patrick had a flat in the Barbican. Still on crutches and too slow because of it, Patrick – newly issued with a firearm by MI5 – had shot the armed intruders who had burst in on them but Peter had been killed in the crossfire. He had actually used his body as a shield to save his friend's life. Ever the romantic, he had made Patrick promise to look after me before he died.

And now I wanted to buy the house this one-time woman in Patrick's life had set her heart on, for whatever reason, and was checking up – out of spite? – to see whether she had a criminal record. Who was the grade one bitch now?

This, mostly unwelcome, retrospection had continued while Carrick was driving us both back to the nick. He had planned to take a longer look at the garden, and the small one at the front, but had received a call that he was needed as the local crime prevention officer wanted to talk to him.

Patrick was in the canteen, finishing off a very late breakfast. I fetched myself coffee and a bun and pulled out a chair at his table.

‘I've tracked down Imelda Burnside but not Irma,' he said, mopping up the last of the egg yolk with a piece of fried bread.

‘So you have her records?'

‘The dentist is putting them on disc for me – it's all digitalized these days – and I'm collecting them in about half an hour.'

‘Is this an NHS dentist?'

‘He takes national health and private patients.'

‘Find out. It'll tell us a bit about her financial situation.'

‘That's a good point.' He glanced at me. ‘Find anything interesting?'

‘Not really. We took some samples of earth where the body might have been decapitated. I don't think she was killed in the house.'

‘Your cat's whiskers?'

I nodded. ‘And . . .'

‘And?' he queried when I paused.

‘I'm going to pull out of the sale.'

‘I can understand that. The place does have an unpleasant history now.'

‘It's not that. It's causing . . . difficulties between us. I don't want that. I've behaved badly over it really.'

Perhaps my unsettled hormones cut in then again or it was the fact that it then came home to me that I still had no writing room, and perhaps never would, and the tears took me completely by surprise. I sobbed into my paper napkin, just managing to get out, ‘When I think about it, I've always behaved badly towards you.'

Patrick replaced the soggy paper relic with his handkerchief and then delved into my bag to answer my mobile, which had just started ringing. Whoever it was rang off as soon as he spoke.

‘Look, we can't talk about it now,' he said quietly in my ear. ‘I must collect the records and then tackle doctors' surgeries and see if I can find out more about this woman.'

‘OK,' I gulped. ‘Is there anything you'd like me to do?'

‘No, not really.'

I did not ring the estate agency, there seemed little point. Alexandra's higher offer would be accepted: it was her house now. Fine, I thought, I have no writing room: I would just have to get on with it in the dining room. Either that or give up writing altogether. Telling myself sternly that most authors would exchange their back teeth for a beautiful old room like this to work in, with the French doors giving a view into Elspeth's garden – it was her creation and I could never lay claim to it while she lived – I sat behind the antique desk that we had brought from Devon and switched on my computer. Yes, this was the situation I would have to get used to, to expect anything else was shirking my family responsibilities.

I dealt with a few emails, one from the fiction editor of my publisher asking how the latest novel was progressing. I told her absolutely fine but without going into details. I had a contract for this one and the deadline was the end of September: I had hardly started it. OK, dig it out and remind myself what I had written.

The doorbell rang and it was a man who had come to repair Elspeth's brand new cooker.

‘The Reverend and Mrs Gillard live in the annex,' I told him. ‘That's what the address says and there's a notice on the wall outside which clearly indicates you have to go round to the back of the house to reach it.'

‘Can't I come through this way?' he enquired, all ready to do just that, huge tool box and all.

‘Sorry, no.' I shut the door in his face.

Right, the story so far . . .

I read it through, made a few small changes, added a little more but still had no real idea how it would progress, or for that matter, end.

There was a tap at the door and Elspeth opened it sufficiently to put her head round.

‘Elspeth, you don't have to knock!' I exclaimed.

‘Yes – or rather no – but I'm sure you're working. It's just that I'm making sandwiches for a rather late lunch as the cooker repairman's only just gone, John's come in and I wondered if you'd like some.'

I glanced at the clock: an hour and a half had gone by.

I ended up by having lunch with them as it had seemed positively churlish to take mine away and eat it on my own. Carrie then found me to say that the school had rung with the news that Katie was not very well and could someone go and fetch her? Vicky would enjoy the ride but would I mind watching over Mark for a while as he had only just gone to sleep and it seemed a shame to disturb him? I could hardly refuse to look after my own son.

Mark decided to wake up and grizzle as soon as she had gone out so I took him downstairs and carried him around the garden; for some reason he loves looking at trees and leaves moving in the breeze. My mobile rang and I sat down in a little arbour to answer it.

Whoever it was hung up as soon as I spoke.

‘That's the second time it's happened today,' I told Mark. I gazed down at him and he looked up at me. ‘So you're going to be a garden designer one day? A landscape painter? Or just a man who cuts people's grass?'

I could not get the little house in Bath out of my mind. Despite all the horror surrounding it, it just cried out to be restored. I had worked out colour schemes and renovation ideas for the interior as well as plans for both the front and back gardens.

My mobile rang again.

‘The dental records are a positive match,' James Carrick said. ‘Imelda Burnside. The dentist told us that she's been his patient, on the NHS, for around two years. He thinks she worked as a carer for the elderly. The checking goes on, of course – Patrick's doing that – but it doesn't appear, unless it is the same woman and she lived a double life, that this is anything to do with serious criminals. Only the bastard who killed her, of course.'

I had only just put the phone back in my pocket when it rang yet again.

‘Whatever Alex takes a fancy to, she gets,' a man's voice rasped. ‘Remember that.' The line went dead.

FIVE

I
t appeared that while the house was still a crime scene all matters concerning its sale were definitely frozen. I confirmed this when I rang the agents to impress on them that I was still interested in purchasing it. Polite persistence on my part elicited the information that a higher offer had been received but, as before, matters were on hold. I was desperate to know whether it was the owner's solicitor who had panicked when the price had been dropped so drastically in an effort to get a sale or whether they had been acting on the instructions of someone else – the nephew who might be due to inherit? – as surely the owner, the old lady, was incapable.

Carrie returned, we established that Katie had a slight temperature and some of the other children were away from school with bad colds so she was popped into bed and instantly went to sleep. TLC and something tempting to eat would be administered later. The youngest, also fast asleep by now, was laid in his pram in the garden. Their mother, actually feeling light-hearted, happy even, that she had established a link between Alexandra and someone who was nasty enough to make veiled threats, went back to work.

I sobered up, fast. This woman knew where I, we, lived. Did one confront her with what had happened? No, she would deny any involvement and accuse me of making yet more trouble. She would insist that she did not know my mobile number. How had she got hold of it? Had Patrick given it to her for some reason? At least that could quickly be established.

There was one completely unbiased element in all this: James Carrick.

‘You'll have to get Patrick on board,' was his advice. ‘I haven't had time to do any checking on her – as usual I'm up to my ears in work. Sorry to be a bit blunt but you are folk also with the means of finding out such things. But I promise I'll get back to you, Ingrid, when things aren't so manic here and help if I can. And please be careful.'

I then called Michael Greenway only to be told by his deputy, Andrew Bayley, that he had taken a two days' well-earned leave. He went on to ask if he himself could help. I decided not to involve him: he worked mostly in the main office and I did not want to risk my worries being aired to all and sundry. Men gossip.

Patrick rang.

‘I might be a bit late. I'm going to give James a hand for a while longer but with something that isn't really anything to do with the case as he's snowed under. And Alex has had some photos she took when we first met emailed from London by a friend. As they include some of the rectory and Mum and Dad I thought I'd take a look at them with a view to having them ourselves.'

‘That's fine. You and I can eat later,' I said.

‘No, it's all right. You have yours with the family. I'll have a pie and a pint, or something.'

I was stung to say, ‘But surely she could email them to
you
.'

‘She says she doesn't know how to. See you later.'

I did not throw my mobile across the room after this conversation, it doesn't like it.