An Unfinished Murder

by An Unfinished Murder (retail) (epub)

  ‘He told us about Dilys.’

  Auntie Nina shook her head. ‘She was a handful, I can tell you! Josh was never any trouble, but Dilys! She was all right with me, but the complaints from other people about her, you wouldn’t credit. She’d fight with any of the other kids, knock seven bells out of them. The parents complained, of course. She was disturbed, you see.’

  ‘Sounds like it,’ said Meredith. ‘And then Josh told you about the bracelet – and the body.’

  ‘That’s it. And that was the first I heard of it, believe me. It fair took the wind out of my sails, I can tell you, especially with Dilys taking the bracelet off the corpse…’ Auntie Nina paused. ‘Dilys was always a bit of a magpie, you know. Anything glittery took her eye. She used to hide away bits and pieces she’d taken, but I’d find them and get them back to the owner, if I could. I didn’t tell the Social. She was in enough trouble as it was. She didn’t need to see more head doctors. She needed time to settle down. But it’s still difficult to imagine her taking a bracelet off a dead girl’s arm. But she did, so Josh says, and you can believe him. Josh doesn’t make things up.’

  ‘I believe Dilys is in prison at the moment,’ Meredith said, tentatively.

  ‘Much good that will do her,’ said Auntie Nina with a sniff. ‘Just make things worse. She feels everyone is against her, you see, and to be frank, mostly people are against her! So she’s not wrong. She left here when she was sixteen. She wanted to go her own way, and she did. She went up to London in the end. Got into more trouble there, of course.’

  ‘But Josh stayed here with you.’

  Auntie Nina only nodded. The budgie chirruped and pecked at a little bell in his cage. It jangled tinnily.

  ‘Do you know what happened to their mother?’

  ‘Dead. Heroin,’ said Auntie Nina briefly.

  ‘Was this before they came to live with you? Or afterwards? That she died, I mean.’

  ‘She died a couple of years after they came here. I was told it was because the heroin had something wrong with it, as if heroin itself wasn’t bad enough. Let’s see, Josh was just eleven. He took it well, didn’t say much. Social Services did try to get them adopted out, but with Dilys being the way she was, no one would take them on. So they stayed here with me.’

  ‘I know twenty years is a long time ago,’ Meredith went on, ‘but do you recall any time when the children seemed particularly upset? Worried about something, perhaps?’

  ‘The way they were, it would have been hard to tell, wouldn’t it?’ Auntie Nina pointed out. She paused, and her brow furrowed in thought beneath the tea cosy beanie. She hadn’t removed it when she’d divested herself of the fleece, and now Meredith wondered if her hostess ever took the crocheted hat off.

  ‘There were a few days,’ said Auntie Nina slowly, ‘when they both went very quiet. I do remember that, although I couldn’t tell you exactly when it was, not to the day. They’d been here nearly a year, I recall, and it was just at the start of the summer, maybe June. It was during the school term and I did wonder if they’d picked up some bug or other at school. But there was nothing going round at the time that I knew of. Even little Dilys went quiet and was no trouble for about a week. That’s why I remember it, because she didn’t go quiet often. I kept an eye on them but they were eating all right, even the vegetables. I had terrible trouble getting them to eat vegetables when they first came. They didn’t know what they were. After a week, or just a little bit longer, things seemed to go back to normal – or what was normal for them. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. I had hoped Dilys had begun to calm down. But she hadn’t.’ A note of sadness entered her voice.

  There was a moment’s silence during which Mrs Pengelly appeared to be thinking about the past. The past, thought Meredith, is where we need to go now.

  ‘Mrs—Auntie Nina, do you remember any talk in Bamford about a missing student, a local girl, twenty years ago?’

  Auntie Nina blinked and returned to the present day. ‘What? Oh, yes, the daughter of those people who ran the travel agency. It was in the local paper and in the big daily papers, too. And on the telly news, as well. Lots of people knew the family. I didn’t myself, because I never had the time for foreign holidays, or the money, come to that. Besides, I never did fancy aeroplanes – travelling in them, I mean. Up there in the sky with nothing under your feet. I’ve been abroad, mind. I went to Boulogne on the Channel ferryboat when I was much younger.’ She frowned. ‘It’s a pity neither Josh nor Dilys said they’d found a body, because it might have been her, mightn’t it? Even though she’d gone missing over Gloucester way. She’d come back to see her folks; but before she got through her own front door, well, we don’t know what happened, do we?’

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  ‘It’s a terrible world, sometimes. Things you see on the telly, read in the news… It’s like everyone’s gone mad…’ Auntie Nina paused to meditate for a moment on the state of the world, then she fixed bright eyes on Meredith. ‘Your husband’s going to look into it, is he? That story Josh told him?’

  ‘Alan’s retired. He has reported it. If anyone looks into it now, well, it won’t be him, and it all depends on whether they find the remains.’

  ‘Of course,’ Nina Pengelly resumed, ‘I can understand why the two of them never told anyone. I’m not sure the police will be sympathetic. But the children thought they’d get into trouble again.’ Unexpectedly, a look of satisfaction appeared on her face. ‘They’ll be digging in the spinney, will they? Perhaps they’ll take away all that rubbish down there. I’ve rung the Council twice about it, and they say they’ll send someone out. But they haven’t. We’re not important enough.’

  ‘I don’t know whether they’ll be digging or not.’

  ‘If they do, I’ll know about it, I suppose,’ said Auntie Nina. ‘Be able to see something of it from my kitchen window, perhaps. I can see the spinney. But I can’t see into it, if you know what I mean. But a lot of police cars and diggers and so on, I’d see them all right.’

  Meredith drained her mug and returned it to the tray. The fake logs flickered reassuringly. Bobby rang his bell again several times, following that with an impatient squawk.

  ‘If you want to let him out, I don’t mind,’ said Meredith. ‘Even if he lands on me.’

  Auntie Nina fixed her with a beady eye that suddenly struck Meredith as very birdlike. Then she stood and went to the cage. There was a flutter of wings and a light draught caressed Meredith’s ear. Bobby landed on the back of his owner’s chair and perched there, studying the visitor, turning his head so he could assess her.

  ‘Does he talk?’ asked Meredith.

  ‘No,’ said Auntie Nina, ‘but he understands what’s going on.’

  Pet owners often said that of their animals. Dogs and cats, possibly, thought Meredith. But she wasn’t sure about birds. On the other hand, there was something knowing and distinctly unsettling about Bobby’s bright gaze.

  ‘I looked into the spinney before I drove up here,’ she said next. ‘I saw it’s a bit of a mess.’

  ‘It’s disgraceful!’ snapped Auntie Nina. ‘It never used to be like that.’

  ‘Who lived in Brocket’s Row twenty years ago, do you remember?’ Meredith made a determined effort to avoid staring back at Bobby, because she felt that in any contest, she’d surely lose.

  Nina Pengelly leaned back in her chair and pursed her lips. ‘Let’s see. Next door to me were the Fletchers, Molly and Keith. He worked on the railway. They’re both dead now. The Stokes, at the far end, they were here the longest, moved in before I did. When I say “they”, I really mean Maggie Stokes and Fred, her son. Her husband, I never knew him, because he’d left her when their child was about three. That was well before my time here, years ago. When I came to live here, Fred was a grown man.’

  Nina paused to consider the past again. ‘I don’t know if that’s why Fred never married – because he felt he had to look after his mother. I think it’s a shame, ac
tually, because Maggie was a nice-looking woman and if Fred had found himself a wife, Maggie might’ve found someone for herself. But as it turned out, Fred never left home, and he’s still there.’

  Briefly, Meredith wondered whether Mrs Pengelly had ever drawn a parallel between herself and Josh Browning, and the situation with Fred Stokes and his mother.

  ‘When Fred was working, he drove the big lorries, up and down the country and across the Channel, right across Europe. Then he had to give up because of trouble with his back.’ Nina allowed herself a grin. ‘I sometimes used to wonder what Fred got up to when he drove abroad. He wasn’t a bad-looking fellow then. He’s getting well on in years now, and he’s more disabled. It’s made him cantankerous. But I suppose you can’t blame him.’

  Nina paused to finish her tea. Bobby flew round the room, landed back where he’d started, and resumed staring at Meredith.

  ‘We’ve got different people living here now. Next door to me here, they’re foreign, but they’re very good, quiet. Not there all day, out at work. It’s not them who go dumping stuff down in the spinney. It’s the other houses, between this pair and Fred at the other end. Coming and going all the time, never the same people from one week to the next. The Council puts them in there temporary, until they can find them somewhere better and more permanent. So, of course, they don’t bother, do they? Every time they move out, they take their rubbish down to the trees and chuck it. I said the Council hasn’t been, but that’s not right. They did come once, ages ago, and took away some broken bits of furniture and stuff. But now they need to come back again. The turnover of tenants now is so quick, you blink your eye and there’s a new neighbour.’

  ‘Is Mr Stokes on his own there? I mean, he must be getting on.’ Meredith hoped this was tactful and her hostess didn’t take it as a comment on her own age. It was hard to tell how old Mrs Pengelly was, but Meredith was inclined to agree with Markby’s guess.

  ‘Fred is eighty-two,’ Auntie Nina told her, which was a lot older than Meredith had thought she’d say. Nearly twenty years older than her hostess.

  ‘His back’s got worse over the years, poor man,’ Nina was saying. ‘It’s got so he can’t move without pain. Can’t bend, can’t reach up, can’t turn. The last five or six years he’s been in a wheelchair. He had a carer who used to come in, morning and evening, but he was so disagreeable she wouldn’t come any more, and he didn’t want her. I go along there every day to check on him, and I make sure he’s got his dinner. That’s where I was coming from when you met me, outside the house here…’ She paused and frowned. ‘I don’t suppose he’s been upstairs in that house since he took to the wheelchair. Well, he couldn’t, could he? He gave up trying to get up and down the stairs even before that, and took to sleeping downstairs. I shudder to think what the place is like upstairs now. Must be thick with dust. The Social Services put in a downstairs toilet for him.’ The beanie hat bobbed. ‘Can’t be helped, can it? “What can’t be cured must be endured!” Never a truer saying!’

  With a rustle of wings, Bobby took flight and made a couple of circuits of the room. Then Meredith felt something land on the top of her head.

  ‘Told you he’d do that,’ said Auntie Nina, nodding.

  Bobby walked up and down Meredith’s scalp a few times. She could feel his claws, not unpleasant, more of a tickling sensation, making her want to scratch the area. Then, suddenly, she felt a painful tug at her hair and, despite herself, she yelped.

  ‘He does that sometimes, too!’ said Bobby’s owner. ‘That’s very naughty, Bobby!’ she admonished her pet. ‘Go on, now!’ She clapped her hands and, to Meredith’s great relief, Bobby flew off again to perch high on the curtain rail and stare down at her in triumph.

  ‘I’ll put him back in his cage,’ said Auntie Nina. ‘Or he might escape outside when you go.’

  Meredith interpreted this as a hint. She realised that talking so much about the distant past had unsettled her hostess. She wanted to stop now. Meredith thanked her and got up.

  Nina Pengelly escorted her visitor to her front gate. A wind had sprung up and brought with it the noise of traffic.

  ‘Hear that?’ She jerked the beanie hat in the direction of the sound. ‘That’s the motorway, that is! It’s got to be three miles away at least but when the wind’s coming from that direction, you’d think it was at the bottom of the hill.’

  ‘This must always have been a quiet spot,’ said Meredith, snatching at an errant lock of her hair caught by the culpable wind.

  ‘Very quiet, dear,’ said Auntie Nina. ‘Never see a soul, like I told you. When we had the other families living here, in the old days, it was a proper little community. Everyone was very respectable, too. And all the time, someone was down there in the spinney burying that girl. It fair gives me the creeps. If people here had known about it at the time, they’d have been that shocked, I don’t know what they’d have done. But now, I seldom see anyone.’

  As she ceased speaking, and as if in contradiction, they heard the sound of an engine in distress and a battered tradesman’s van chugged up the hill. It passed by them and stopped at the far house. A thickset man in a donkey jacket clambered out.

  ‘Fred’s got a visitor,’ said Auntie Nina. ‘That’s nice. He doesn’t get many. That’s Mickey Wallace, that is. He and Fred are old cronies.’ She peered towards the new arrival, who appeared to be scrabbling at the letter box of Fred’s front door. ‘Hang on a minute,’ she said to Meredith. ‘I’ll just see him go in. The key should be there, but if it isn’t, I’ve got one.’

  Wallace had apparently found a key, and he opened the door. Meredith was denied a view of Fred Stokes, but from the sound of voices, the thickset man was being welcomed in. The door was shut.

  ‘Nice to meet you, dear,’ said Nina Pengelly to Meredith as she turned back to her own front door. ‘I’ll look for another of your books when I go down to the library!’ she called back over her shoulder.

  As the door closed behind her, the front door of the end house opened again, as if in some synchronised movement. Meredith, who had been about to get into her car, paused, then slid into the driver’s seat and waited, watching through the windscreen. As a precaution, she slid a lipstick out of her bag and turned down the inside mirror, to give herself a reason for lingering.

  The first thing she saw was a set of feet and lower limbs, tilted upwards. There was more uneven movement and then a wheelchair appeared, together with its occupant. The wheelchair itself wasn’t of the sturdy type she’d expected, but lighter in style and collapsible. She’d already built an image of Fred Stokes in her head, long immobile and probably by now enormous. But the wheelchair’s occupant was a withered wisp of a man, bundled up in outdoor clothing that gave him some bulk. But without that, Meredith realised, there would be a near-skeletal figure.

  So much, she reproved herself, for trusting to preconceptions. She had known that Stokes had been a lorry driver. Lorry drivers tended to build up their upper-body strength and were generally burly men. Like Mickey Wallace, for example, who now appeared, manhandling the wheelchair fully through the doorway. He paused to pull the door shut behind them and then pushed the chariot and its occupant down the path to his van. There he lifted his friend from the wheelchair with little effort and lowered him into the passenger seat. Wallace folded up the chair with a practised movement, carried it to the rear of the van, opened the doors and stowed the chair inside. He returned to open the driver’s door. Only then did he pause, with one hand on the frame of the door, and looked back towards Meredith’s car. It was a very direct stare. Meredith lifted the lipstick and busied herself with an inspection of her appearance in the mirror. This seemed to satisfy Wallace. He clambered into his van and the vehicle rattled away. Meredith glanced at her wristwatch. They’re going to the pub, she guessed, for a pint and a bacon roll, probably.

  Meredith heaved a sigh of relief. Had Wallace decided to approach her car and demand to know why she had been gawking at his invalid fr
iend being helped into the van, it would have been embarrassing. Perhaps she was making another erroneous judgement, but Mickey Wallace looked like an awkward customer.

  * * *

  Markby had received a visitor, too. The knock at the door came about twenty minutes after Meredith left to seek out Mrs Pengelly. He went to answer it and found an elderly man on his doorstep. He was tall, thin and slightly stooped, wearing a raincoat. His hairline was receding and his remaining grey-white hair was thin and wispy, worn a little long. His expression was anxious. Markby thought that he ought to know him, but he couldn’t put a name to him. That’s how it went when you met so many people in such varying walks of life over the years. Had this man been a witness? A victim of crime?

  ‘My name is Hellington,’ said the man on his doorstep. ‘Arthur Hellington. I don’t know if you remember me? You headed up enquiries locally into the disappearance of my daughter, Rebecca.’ Apologetically, he added, ‘It was twenty years ago.’

  ‘Yes, of course I remember,’ Markby assured him, truthfully, because as soon as the man said his name, his several encounters with Rebecca’s near-hysterical parents came flooding back. ‘Come on in, won’t you?’ He held the door open.

  Hellington hesitated. ‘I don’t mean to take up your time.’

  ‘I’ve got plenty of time!’ said Markby. To himself he was thinking that Meredith was right. He did have more time than he had jobs or interests to fill it. ‘I was just about to make myself a cup of coffee. Would you like one?’

  Hellington, still apologising, accepted his offer and sidled into the hall where he was persuaded to divest himself of his raincoat. Markby showed him into the sitting room and left him while he went to make the coffee. When he returned, he found his visitor standing looking out of the window towards the road, in the same spot where Meredith had stood after he’d told her of his visit to Trevor Barker. Markby set down the coffee mugs and Hellington moved awkwardly away from the view of the road to sit down on the nearest chair, still ill at ease.