Whisper the Dead

by Stella Cameron

  ‘So where did he go otherwise?’

  ‘I’m no wiser than you. The house in Winchcombe where the woman was found, I suppose, but if O’Reilly and Lamb know that for sure, they haven’t told either of us. The Hills told our boys Pullinger moved out of the carriage house and the place is under renovation now. The boss said Robert Hill was cagey about Pullinger’s living arrangements. He answered questions but he didn’t volunteer any information. Our job is to get in here—’ he tapped his finger on the carriage house again – ‘and see what, if anything, we can find to help us with the mystery of Mr Lance Pullinger, architect. Hill sidestepped any suggestion of looking at the place. He said there was nothing to see, just building supplies.’

  LeJuan scooted down in his seat and crossed his arms. ‘And since we don’t have enough of an excuse for a search warrant we’ll have to try doing this without being seen. But start thinking up excuses, just in case.’

  ‘I think O’Reilly’s hoping there’s an easy way around the warrant,’ Barry said, frowning and rooting around in his pockets. ‘He’s always liked the element of surprise. Here. You’re better at this than I am.’ He gave LeJuan his lock-picking set.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘Hello, me darlin’,’ Dan sang out, knowing he took his life in his hands if Molly Lewis was in a foul mood, dealing with a hangover, perhaps.

  As promised, she waited for them about a half mile from the busy village center of Bourton-on-the-Water.

  Seated on a flat rock beside the shallow waters of the River Windrush, she looked toward them. When they got close enough she waved and called out, ‘Aha. Good. My entertainment for the morning has arrived. Gird your loins, m’boys. I’m ready to cut you to ribbons and feed you to these fine ducks.’

  That, Dan realized, was probably as close as Molly would come to humoring him. She wore a puffy blue coat large enough to exaggerate her small stature, black trousers and boots, and large, dark glasses. Her blond hair was incongruously bouncy and completely at odds with her basic personality.

  ‘Glad you’re in such fine fettle,’ Dan said. He perched on the edge of a smaller and very uncomfortable rock while Bill crossed his arms and remained standing. ‘I didn’t know you were an outdoors woman.’

  ‘This is close to home for me,’ Molly said. She turned her face away as if closing the topic.

  The yellowing stalks of reeds poked brokenly from the snow-covered muddy riverbank. A sky, so gray and heavy it met the mist-shadowed branches of trees not yet showing as much as a leaf bud, hung like billows of gauze about to burst.

  Rivulets of water ran through melting snow between the rocks and the slimy towpath had taken on a gelatinous quality. ‘Being outside always cheers me up,’ Molly said. ‘Mr Pullinger was either dead or close to death when he was blown out of the back of that trailer. I’m prepared to bet on dead.’

  Dan looked into the lenses of her dark glasses. Here was a woman momentarily removed from a life dedicated to death. Who, he wondered, was Molly Lewis other than a crack pathologist?

  Two small boys squelched purposefully past, each clutching a bag filled with pieces of bread. ‘Ducks,’ the first, towhead child announced, raising his bag aloft.

  Dan said, ‘Good for you,’ and waited while a woman walked in the boys’ wake, casting curious glances at the unlikely trio he, Bill and Molly must make as they hung out beside the river.

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ Dan asked when the duck-hunters were well away. ‘Or perhaps I should say, why is there a question and why does it matter?’

  Molly hiked her feet higher on the rock and fastened her arms around her knees. She chuckled softly. ‘Yesterday I might have wondered the same myself but I was missing … no, not missing anything, just unaware of all the evidence. By last night it all came together.’ She jiggled the toes of her boots and smiled to herself.

  Snow, the small sharp flake variety, started to fall and grew denser by the moment.

  Seconds ticked by. Bill swiped a hand across his eyes, cleared his throat. ‘Are you going to share your great discovery with us?’

  ‘Of course. Why do you think I’m freezing my bum off on this rock … for my health? Lance Pullinger had drunk enough alcohol to put him to sleep for a while. Had he been much smaller, he might have died of alcohol poisoning. But I doubt he was unconscious when the whisky bottle was rammed down his throat to choke him. I think it was held there while he tried to dislodge it and it broke. There are consistent cuts on his fingers and palms, in the mouth, the throat and so on. Unfortunately, the only prints on the bits of bottle they found are his, three of them, and one of those is smeared – probably by someone wearing gloves while they did the deed. I’m piecing this together, of course, but I’m more or less right.’

  Relieved to jump up, Dan stood beside Bill. ‘Pretty fit fellow, Pullinger, right?’ He slapped his arms back and forth across his chest.

  ‘Yes,’ Molly said, her face turned up to the weather, a smile showing how much she enjoyed the icy splatter against her skin.

  ‘There must have been one hell of a struggle.’

  Molly looked up at them. ‘Not necessarily. Anything from Arson?’

  ‘It was arson, all right,’ Bill said. ‘Petrol start, probably. We don’t have anything final.’

  ‘And Darla was what to Lance Pullinger? Wife or lover, which do you think?’

  Dan studied the police surgeon. She loved putting as many pieces together as she could manage. He nodded, yes. ‘One or the other. That’s the way it looks, but we’re not sure. She could just have been someone he hooked up with who started using his name. So far we haven’t had any luck tracing her before she and Lance Pullinger showed up with what looks like joint lives. She isn’t on file as far as we can tell. No prints, nothing. And nothing in HOLMES, but we’ll find her.’

  ‘One sharp instrument blow to the back of her cranium,’ Molly said. Her eyes were closed as if she had moved into another realm. Her voice had lost both enthusiasm and expression. ‘Extensive fracture. Second blow most likely from falling on the hearth. Right temporal bone extending to the parietal. Massive injury. Dead or close to after the first injury, she’d have gone down hard, with her weight behind it.’

  ‘And you’re sure she died before Pullinger?’

  ‘No doubt about it. And there was a lot of rage there. Too bad we can’t turn it around and magic the two deaths together into a murder then suicide.’

  Dan met Bill’s eyes briefly. ‘Nice of you to want all of our jobs made easier.’

  Molly held up a hand and Dan pulled her to her feet. ‘Actually, I was thinking of justice,’ she said. ‘Women like Darla don’t get much of that. There are healed and partially healed cigarette burns on the deceased’s back, including her buttocks and the backs of her thighs.’

  ‘You didn’t say anything about them at the morgue,’ Dan said.

  ‘I wasn’t finished then and I had to be sure. I wanted a second opinion. Darla had been tortured … and I use the word in its real sense. There are more scars from burns where they were unlikely to be found unless she sought help – which evidently she didn’t.’

  Dan swallowed. ‘How do you know she didn’t go for help.’

  ‘If she had, it’s likely it would have been stopped. Someone would have been in jail, or so I can tell myself. The newest burns were the ones I’ve already told you about. Most of the older ones, except for the sides of her breasts, were where they were even harder to find and mucous membranes have the capacity to heal very well – and fast. Not so easy to identify. Copies of the reports are on their way to you but I’m sure you can work out what I’m telling you.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘I’m here, Mum,’ Alex called, closing the front door of Corner Cottage behind her. Her mother had chosen her own home for their meeting. The most comfortable surroundings for her, Alex supposed.

  Her mum appeared from the tiny dining room. ‘I’ve got coffee and sandwiches,’ she said, with an unconvincing smile. ‘I thought
I could spread things out on the dining table for us to look at. I don’t know what I expected to find when I picked up Angela’s things in London but some of it makes me glad I decided to go. All of it does, really, if I’m honest. It isn’t a bad thing to shed tears over secrets your mother shares with you.’

  Nodding, Alex followed into the room. She couldn’t think of anything to say other than how she wished, had wished for a long time, that Lily had shared her secrets with her daughter before. The dining-room table was covered with slim piles of papers and photographs; piles Alex wished were thicker. There were two wooden boxes, one painted with bright colors, faded in places, the other carved but dried out and showing some cracks.

  Lily smiled at her. ‘Not a lot for a lifetime, is it?’

  ‘We’ll make the best of it.’ Alex smiled. She couldn’t help feeling excited. Apart from what little her mother had shared at the Black Dog with Harriet and Mary at the table, this was the first time she could hope to learn more about who she really was.

  Her mum glanced up from studying a photo in a silver frame. ‘Are you all right, Alex? You sound really tense. Is it because of all this?’ She waved at the things on the table. ‘Or has something else happened?’

  Alex considered. ‘There are some troubling things going on, Mum. Gladys’s behavior for one. But really, I only want to think about us – and all this, for now. What’s the framed picture?’

  Lily picked it up and gave it to Alex. ‘You don’t have any idea who these people are but they’re related to me – and to you. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ve never seen any relatives before,’ Alex said, going to a window to look at a picture of a girl and a young man – scarcely more than a boy either, she supposed. They looked like an incredibly happy pair of teenagers. ‘Who are they?’

  When Alex looked at her mother she saw she was crying. ‘My mother and father,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘Angela and Simon Devoss.’

  Alex stared. ‘Devoss? I’ve never heard that name before.’

  ‘Simon Devoss was my father’s name. I didn’t know that either, not until I picked up my mother’s things.’

  Alex looked at the photo again, at the girl’s curly hair, her laughing eyes looking up into the man’s face – and at him staring back at her, an arm around her back, a big hand possessively clasping a small waist. Angela’s dress had a sweetheart neckline and it looked white with small flowers all over the material. Simon wore a dark, flattering suit, white shirt and striped tie. He had a rose in his buttonhole. Angela held several long-stemmed roses of a pale shade.

  ‘This was their wedding photo,’ Alex exclaimed. ‘Wasn’t it?’

  Lily made no reply and Alex kept her eyes on the photo.

  ‘I …’ Lily cleared her throat. She wrapped an arm tightly around her middle and waved the other hand in front of her face as if dismissing both her tears and trembling mouth. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m being too sensitive.’

  ‘You are not.’ Alex moved closer to her mother and pulled her close. ‘You don’t have to be stronger than anyone else – and you don’t have to be strong for me anymore. You’ve always been there for me, I never doubted I was safe and loved – and cared for. And you were young when I was born, Mum. Young but grown-up at the same time.’

  She fell silent, afraid she would put her mother off from telling all the things Alex wanted so badly to know.

  ‘Read this first,’ Lily said, giving Alex some lined paper with a card attached. ‘This starts at our beginning really. We don’t have anything earlier. Sit down. I’ll bring in the coffee and sandwiches.’

  Alex pulled a chair up to the table. First she read the card, then started what her grandmother had written on sheets of lined paper that looked as if they’d been torn from a school workbook. When she finished she crossed her arms on the table and rested her face on top.

  She closed her eyes and thought about two people with every right to love one another and the cruel fate that had taken that love from them.

  ‘Your mother was punished so many times for what she didn’t do,’ Alex said when she heard her mother come into the room again. ‘She fell in love with someone she’d known all her life and married him. How could her own parents treat her as they did? How could his – especially when she was expecting their dead son’s child.’ Pausing, Alex thought about what it all meant. ‘Mum, you have relatives somewhere. From both of your parents.’

  Her mother shook her head. ‘No. They could never be anything to me.’

  ‘But I’m related to them, too.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’ Lily picked up a pile of papers. ‘Would you want to know any of them? These are drawings I did for Angela in the years after I went into foster care.’

  Alex looked at one crayon picture after another. They mostly showed a woman and a child and Lily had sorted them to show how they changed as she had grown older. ‘I wouldn’t want to know those people,’ Alex said. Was that true?

  Gradually they worked their way through everything on the table. Alex took her time, lingering over photographs of people she didn’t know although her mother pointed out herself as a small girl, and some of the people she had lived with when they had taken Angela and Lily under their wings.

  ‘Take it all home,’ Lily said, surprising Alex. ‘It’s as much your history as mine. Take your time. We might want to have the pictures copied properly, make an album for you even.’ She started gathering everything up. ‘I’d like to hang the little wedding picture in my bedroom.’

  Still she showed no sign of talking about the story of Alex. Surely she knew how much her daughter needed to understand her own beginnings.

  Reaching back, Lily pulled the long silver chain she’d always worn from around her neck. Alex was so used to it she never gave chain or medallion a thought. Her mother gave it to her.

  ‘My name is on the back,’ her mum said. ‘And it’s got an engraving on the other side.’

  ‘Lily Mary Edwina,’ Alex murmured. ‘My baby’s name, too. I like the cross and the roses on the front.’

  ‘It’s yours now. If you want it.’

  With a smile, Alex slipped the medallion around her own neck. ‘Of course, I want it. Thank you. But won’t you miss it?’

  ‘I’ll be glad you have it, and so would your grandmother – and grandfather – have been. Let’s have this coffee while it’s still hot. Then I’ll put everything into a bag for you to take home.’

  They carried their coffee and the plate of sandwiches into the living room with its small, leaded, bow window and floral damask curtains. A fire in the grate was burning low and Alex put on more wood. Her heart thudded harder and harder. Please let Mum tell me the rest of the story now. Please don’t let her find it too hard to start.

  They sat in soft-seated spindle chairs on either side of the fireplace and Alex’s mother pulled a red Chinese trunk she used as a coffee table between them.

  ‘Eat some sandwiches,’ she said, setting down the plate. ‘You’re too thin, Alex. I think you overdo the worrying.’

  It was hard not to laugh. ‘I’ll remember you said that.’ And with luck her mum would throw off the unhappy cloak she’d been wearing for weeks and everyone around here would feel better.

  ‘What’s bothering you about Gladys?’

  Alex felt like standing over her mother and demanding she stop avoiding issues. ‘We can talk about it another time. It’s probably nothing.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. The look on your face says you’re worried, or upset.’ Lily set down a sandwich without taking as much as a bite. ‘Look, Gladys has known us since I first went to Underhill when you were little. She was so good to me – and to you. If I worked in the evening, she babysat for you. Something’s happened and you’re not telling me.’

  Just like part of my entire life happened without me knowing anything about it? ‘I think Gladys and Frank had a spat, nothing more.’ She didn’t think that but it filled a gap for now. ‘Mum, why did you decide to liv
e in Underhill?’

  Sometimes people turned pale but Lily’s face not only became white, it took on a chalky quality. She sniffed and gulped at her coffee, settled her eyes on Alex’s. ‘I spent a couple of weeks there once and I was very happy. When … when I could finally think clearly and realized I had to make a way for the two of us, I went back there and I was lucky. I had enough money to rent that little flat next to the Lymers and I got a job at the Black Dog. I was so young-looking everyone was nice to me, even the younger men who might have been a problem. Yes, I was very lucky to be in the one place where my life had … well, I liked it a lot around here. There was this camp they held for young people who intended to go to university.’ She turned her face away. ‘That wasn’t to be but I learned a lot there and I was in the open air for the first time – clean, open air. I’d always lived in London, you see.’

  This was it. ‘And you had met my father around here, hadn’t you?’

  Lily looked into the fire and after a while, she nodded, yes.

  ‘Was he as young as you?’ If so it would have made it hard to think of taking on a family.

  ‘Not quite. Alex, there’s something else I’ve got to tell you about, something serious that worries me. I never thought I’d have to talk to you – or anyone – about it but I don’t have a choice anymore.’

  Alex put her cup and saucer on the sheet of glass that covered the top of the carved trunk. ‘Please just explain, Mum. I’m more than grown up so please don’t try to hide anything from me. Anything at all.’

  Lily didn’t meet her eyes. ‘I got a call from someone whose name I don’t want to say. If I can, I’ll forget it. I did that once and I can do it again, so don’t ask me to tell you. She was a social worker when I was expecting you. The foster family I lived with then was lovely and they cared about me, but they were old-fashioned and they didn’t know how to cope with the questions that started. They tried to carry on but the jabs got worse and they had children of their own to consider. Times were different, Alex. So, well … my social worker took me into her home. She was single with a nice house. There weren’t any money worries for her and I suppose she got an allowance for my care, too. She kept me until you were born and took me back to her home afterward.’