by Ann Cleeves
Cullercoats was on the coast south from Mardle, a pretty cove between the wide sweeps of beach at Tynemouth and Whitley Bay. On the front a couple of restaurants and a wine bar looked out to the sea. In the summer it was a place for eating and drinking at tables on the pavement, watching the kids play on the beach. Holly had spent happy evenings in the village with friends. Now, as the light was fading and cold rain blew in from the sea, it was grey and dismal. She parked in a side street and crossed the main road that followed the coast. A light marked the end of the pier. The occasional car splashed through the icy puddles, but nobody else was out.
The laboratory was a red-brick villa with a modern extension, built almost on the beach. Inside, the students were calling it a day, pulling on outdoor clothes and packing equipment into bags. Craggs was a gentle Lancastrian in his sixties. Holly thought he looked too old and heavy to be clambering around in small boats. She found the group in a small room kitted out with lab benches and metal stools and he stood at the front, calling goodbye to the young people, wishing them a happy Christmas. Holly felt a pang of regret. She’d been a graduate entrant into the police service. She’d enjoyed her time at university. Perhaps, after all, she’d have been better suited to life as an academic. Then reality kicked in: Nah, you’d have been bored rigid.
He looked up and saw her. ‘Hello! Anything I can do?’ He was friendly and sounded genuinely helpful. But Holly seldom found older men unfriendly. They were flattered by the attention of a young, attractive woman, even when they discovered what she did for a living. Now the room was clear of students and she identified herself.
‘What’s this about?’ No anxiety. He turned to glance at a row of test tubes behind him.
‘You haven’t heard about Margaret Krukowski?’ But perhaps, after all, it wasn’t so hard to believe. The students wouldn’t be interested in the death of a woman who would appear to them impossibly old. They’d be gearing up for the end of term – this was obviously their last seminar before leaving for the Christmas holidays – and the main preoccupation for everyone seemed to be the weather. And even now Craggs seemed focused on his research. He moved his attention to the microscope on the table in front of him as if he longed to get back to it. He frowned. ‘Kate Dewar’s Margaret? No. What’s happened?’
‘She was murdered,’ Holly said. ‘Yesterday afternoon. Stabbed while she was in the Metro on her way home.’
She’d expected an expression of grief, horror. Even strangers seemed to think a response was needed when they heard of a violent death. But Craggs’s reaction seemed dramatic. The colour appeared to drain from his face and he sat suddenly on the stool by his side.
‘Poor Margaret. What a terrible way to die.’
‘You knew her well?’
He took a while to answer. ‘I’ve been researching in the waters off Mardle since I was an undergraduate, and I’ve stayed at the guest house in Harbour Street at least one night a month since it opened. Kate and Margaret felt almost like a second family. Kate must be devastated. Even now that she has a new partner, I’m not sure how she’ll cope there without Margaret.’ A pause. ‘Do you know who killed her? I’m not sure how you think I could help.’ He sat with his elbows on the bench. Holly saw that his blue rib-knit sweater had been neatly darned. There was a splash of something that might have been egg on the front of it. He looked like an absent-minded professor from children’s stories.
‘We’re talking to all the regulars at the guest house.’
‘Of course.’
‘When did you last see her?’ Holly took a seat herself. They faced each other across the bench. There was a background smell of chemicals and something organic.
‘At breakfast yesterday. She cleared my table as usual.’
‘How did she seem?’
‘Just as she always seemed.’ Craggs played with his wedding ring, turning it on his finger. ‘Polite, helpful, cheerful. I had an early breakfast because I had a full day ahead of me. If there were other guests, they hadn’t appeared by the time I left.’
‘You didn’t have any impression then that she was upset or anxious.’
‘No, but then I probably wouldn’t have noticed. We don’t often notice the people who look after us, do we? Though we’d miss them if they weren’t there.’
Holly thought he was a strange man. She wondered if he was quite as sharp as a modern professor should be. She couldn’t imagine him fighting his corner with university politics or pulling in overseas students prepared to pay high fees. ‘We’re having problems tracing her family,’ she said. ‘Did she mention anyone to you?’
Again he took a while to consider before he answered.
‘All the years that I’ve been staying at Harbour Street I only once had a real conversation with Margaret. She had a flat upstairs and rarely came into the visitors’ areas except for work. But one evening we came into the house together. She’d crossed the road from the church, I think, and I was chilled after a day on the water. I invited her to join me for a drink, and we sat together in that dark, gloomy lounge.’ He paused. ‘I probably talked about my work, my family. I’ve been married for forty years and have grandchildren of whom I’m ridiculously proud. Happy people can sound very smug, and I thought suddenly that she wasn’t happy at all. That the quiet efficiency was a show, and underneath there was a terrible desperation. I asked her about her husband. Did she ever see him? “Oh no,” she said. “He’s long gone.” Then she said something very odd. “Secrets are all I have left.” I didn’t ask her what she meant. I could see that she wouldn’t tell me.’
Holly made detailed notes. Some of it didn’t mean much to her, but Vera had been in the guest house and it would all mean more to her. She turned back to the professor. ‘You spent yesterday with Malcolm Kerr?’
‘Yes. He took me out to Coquet Island. My research is into water temperature and how small changes can have an impact on microorganisms and therefore affect things further up the food chain. We collected samples. It’s meticulous work – some might say tedious. It took until the middle of the afternoon.’
‘You don’t have a student to do the fieldwork for you?’ Holly had once gone out with someone doing a PhD, who was always complaining about doing the donkey work for his supervisor.
Craggs gave a little laugh. ‘I’m what you’d call a control freak. I like to be in charge of my own data.’ He continued to twist the ring on his finger. ‘Besides, I enjoy being on the water. That was what drew me to the subject in the first place. A passion for ecology and for open spaces. I’m due to retire next year. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with myself. Write a book, perhaps, like all retired academics.’
‘You must know Malcolm Kerr well then?’
‘We’ve certainly spent a lot of time together since I began the research. I started working with him when I was doing my Master’s, and his father was in charge of the business then. Malcolm was a bit of a tearaway in those days and could lose his temper in a second. He came in a couple of mornings with a black eye after scrapping with other lads in the Coble.’ Craggs smiled. ‘He settled down, as most of us do when we find a good woman, and it’s only recently that things have gone wrong for him. His wife left and he lost his house and doesn’t get to see his children much. Started drinking more than was good for him. Some days he’s been turning up for work looking as if he’s slept in the clothes he was wearing. He lost his job as coxswain of the lifeboat because the crew thought he’d become unreliable. He’s still an excellent boatman, though.’
Holly wondered if any of this was relevant. ‘What time did you and Kerr get back to Mardle yesterday afternoon?’
‘Three-ish. I’d hoped to be out longer, but the weather forecast was awful. Originally I was going to spend another night in Harbour Street, but I decided to get home. We live in the Tyne Valley and it’s a bit of a trek.’ He looked at his watch again. ‘I’m sorry, I really should get there now. It’s the grandchildren’s school play, and I promised that I’d be back in time for that.’
Holly walked to the door with him and waited for him to lock up. His vehicle was a dirty 4x4 parked on the slipway. By now it was dark. ‘What car does Malcolm Kerr drive?’ The question casual and last-minute, as if it didn’t really matter. Joe had mentioned that Margaret had been dropped off at the Haven in an old car, the day before her death. Showing off with perhaps the one piece of concrete information that they’d had all day. Holly knew that Joe would check with DVLA, but it’d be good to get the information before he did.
Craggs paused for a moment, his hand on the car door. ‘A battered old Golf. His wife got the new Toyota. That was another source of bitterness.’
In the darkness Holly grinned. Margaret had been driven to the Haven in a Golf. ‘How come Malcolm Kerr got such a bad deal out of the divorce?’
She sensed, rather than saw, the shrug. ‘Something to do with the fact that her new man is a lawyer?’ He paused, as if wondering if he should go on. ‘Or that she once accused Malcolm of hitting her.’
‘Had he hit her?’
Another shrug. ‘I don’t know? Perhaps. He’s not the most stable of men. With a drink inside him, he might be capable of it.’
Back in her car Holly phoned Joe Ashworth and Vera, but neither of them was picking up. She felt a stab of the usual paranoia about Joe and Vera – that they were a team and she was deliberately excluded – but tried to ignore it. She left a message for each, saying that she thought she’d traced the identity of the person who’d dropped Margaret at the Haven on the day before her death. Even inside the car she could smell food cooking in an Italian restaurant nearby and felt suddenly hungry, but refused to give in to temptation. It was easy to put on weight during a major inquiry – most detectives lived on a diet of takeaway pizzas and chocolate – and soon she’d be home for Christmas, and her mother would feed her up too.
She drove back to Kimmerston. In the police station colleagues were in a meeting room gathered around a television set, waiting to see the coverage of the press briefing. She arrived just in time for the opening titles and there was a cheer when there was a shot of her at the top of the programme, plus lots of ribald comments when it was over. Holly thought she’d handled it well. She’d come over as professional and hadn’t given anything away. As soon as the piece on the press conference was over, the phones began to ring.
Chapter Fifteen
Vera and Joe stood in the entrance of the flats in Percy Street waiting for a shower to pass. Across the road someone was playing a CD of Christmas songs, so loud that the music spilled out onto the street. The Pogues followed by Slade. Vera wondered what Dee Robson would do on Christmas Day, and if Father Gruskin would be a good Christian and invite her into his home. The notion was so unlikely, so incongruous, that it made her laugh out loud. She shook her head to dismiss it and then decided that the old ladies in the congregation would be fighting among themselves to give their priest Christmas dinner.
‘What do you think?’ Joe stamped his feet and put his hands in his coat pocket.
‘I’m not sure our Dee will manage on her own without Margaret to support her.’ Vera knew that wasn’t what he’d meant. ‘Poor lass. Perhaps the Haven would take her back. We should give social services a ring.’
Joe looked impatient. Perhaps he thought her sympathy for Dee misplaced; the woman had disgusted him. ‘What should we do now?’
‘The evening briefing, then I’m going home.’ Suddenly she felt tired and old. ‘I need a hot bath and an early night in my own bed.’ She looked at him hopefully. ‘Fancy calling in for a quick bite on your way back to the family? There’ll be something in the freezer. Joanna dropped in a lamb casserole last week. Their own meat. It’ll soon heat through. And it’ll give us a chance to talk about the investigation in the warm.’
He stood for a moment, his hands in his pockets. ‘It’s not on my way home. And your house is never warm.’ But she could tell he was weakening.
She drove ahead of him and had a fire lit before he arrived. The casserole had already been in the microwave and was now in a pan to finish it off. She knew he’d smell it as soon as he walked through the door. There were bottles of Wylam beer on the table under the window. She’d grown up in this house in the hills. Her mother had died here when Vera was still a child and she’d nursed Hector, her father – the man who still taunted her from the grave – until his death. The house was impractical and mucky, but she knew she’d never move. She hoped that she’d die here too.
In the kitchen she reran the briefing in her head. It had been Holly’s show. She’d been full of the information that Malcolm Kerr drove an old Golf and that he’d been back in Mardle at around three o’clock. Kerr had no alibi for the murder, then. And if he had given Margaret a lift to the Haven, he’d lied to Vera when he said he’d not seen her to talk to recently.
Joe came in without knocking. Vera nodded towards the beer. ‘You could have just the one to keep me company.’ Another ritual. Joe and her hippy neighbours were the only people who ever came into her house. She always offered them beer.
They ate the casserole with spoons from bowls on their knees. It was too cold to eat at the table away from the fire. A loaf stood on a board on the coffee table between them. They drank the beer straight from the bottle. Vera opened a second before they started discussing the case. Joe cleared the crockery into the kitchen – she would have left them on the floor. He came back shivering. ‘You don’t need a fridge out there. Have you never thought of getting central heating?’
‘Maybe when I retire. No point when I’m never here.’ Hector had thought central heating sapped a person’s strength.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Margaret Krukowski. How far have we got?’ She thought this was the happiest she could be. An intricate case and a beer. And someone to share her ideas with: Joe Ashworth, whose wife had ambitions for him and who could move with promotion at any time. Was it only possible truly to enjoy something if you knew there was a danger that it might be taken away?
‘Margaret Krukowski.’ Ashworth repeated the name like the chorus of a song. ‘Kept herself to herself. Why? Because she valued her privacy or because she had something to hide?’
‘George Enderby, that rep who stays at the guest house, thinks she was a spy during the Cold War.’
‘Nah!’ Joe shook his head. ‘This is domestic, isn’t it? Personal. Or some random, delusional crazy on the train. Not political.’
‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I think you’re right.’ But she didn’t believe in the random loony theory, either. He’d been right first time. This was personal.
‘We know that Malcolm Kerr, the boatman, hasn’t been telling us the whole truth.’ Vera had liked Kerr. She could understand his drinking and his desperation. But she disapproved of witnesses who weren’t straight with her. ‘He drives a Golf that matches the description of the car that dropped Margaret at the Haven. And he got back to Mardle earlier than he told me. The discrepancy in timing could have been a genuine mistake, but there was something going on between him and Margaret. Why not tell me that he’d given her a lift that day, otherwise?’
‘Should we bring him in?’ Joe finished his beer and set the bottle on the floor. ‘He might be a bit more forthcoming in a formal interview, under caution?’
Vera thought of the man she’d met in the shed in the boatyard. In the bare interview room of the police station he’d be angry and frightened and he would shut down completely. And she didn’t want lawyers involved at this stage. ‘Let’s leave it for a day,’ she said. ‘I’ll try him again on home territory.’
They sat in silence. Vera wondered if she needed anything else to drink and decided against it. ‘I’d like you to go and see the priest,’ she said. ‘Peter Gruskin. Margaret was a regular at the church and he’s a trustee at the Haven. He didn’t take to me. Maybe he just doesn’t like strong women. If there was anything going on between Margaret and Kerr, there’d have been gossip in a place like Mardle. He’d have heard about it. All those old wo
men bitching as they made tea and polished the silver. Make it clear to him that he’s doing no favours to Margaret by keeping her secrets now.’
Joe nodded.
‘And we’ll send Holly into Kate Dewar’s, shall we?’ Vera felt that she was on a roll. ‘She’ll be a fresh pair of eyes in the place. I can’t remember when George Enderby was leaving. If he’s still there, she can talk to him too.’
Joe nodded again and held his hands to the fire. He shot a look at the clock that stood on the mantelpiece. Hector’s clock, which had always been there.
‘Off you go,’ Vera said, making a shooing motion with her hands. ‘I’m ready for a bath and my bed. I’ll catch up with you at the briefing tomorrow morning.’ She got to her feet.
Joe seemed almost reluctant to leave, but he stood up too. ‘Holly’s press conference will have been broadcast again tonight on the late local news. Perhaps something will have come out of that.’
She gave a little laugh. ‘Our Holly as the face of Northumbria Police. She’ll love that.’ She opened the door to see him out. The rain had stopped and the sky was clear. The stars seemed very bright.
At the briefing the following morning Vera felt full of energy and ready to spread goodwill around the team. ‘Holly had a very productive meeting with Mike Craggs, Professor of Marine Biology at Newcastle University. She filled us in yesterday about Kerr’s car and the time that the boat got back into Mardle, but I’ve been thinking that I’d like a more general overview of the conversation.’
Holly got up to take centre stage at the whiteboard, and Vera thought that the young woman was loving this – it was what she was made for, to stand in front of a team and spread wisdom and light. If I had any sense I’d be grooming her for stardom, getting her ready for promotion. Then they might leave Joe here.
Vera thought that she could never be that cunning, when Holly’s words suddenly caught her attention. ‘Repeat that, would you, Hol?’
