Embroidering Shrouds

by Priscilla Masters

  Marion smiled. ‘Oh yes, sitting very stiff and straight, right at the front where she could watch the vicar from, in an old-fashioned black straw hat. We offered her a lift home but she refused, said the walk would do her good, it wasn’t far. We saw her later, stumping along the pavement with her walking stick, towards her home. For all the world looking like a modern-day witch. If she’d been born a hundred and fifty years earlier she’d have risked her fate on the ducking stool, I’m sure. I watched her for a while in the wing mirror, fading into nothing. It was the last time I ever saw her.’

  ‘What time was that?’

  ‘One o’clock. That’s when the service finishes.’

  ‘Was she alone when you saw her?’

  ‘Oh yes, almost always was. Sometimes Christian would meet her and walk back with her. It was a struggle for her with her arthritis. But she was a stubborn old thing. You had to admire her in some ways, she had terrific strength of character.’

  ‘Did you talk to her on Sunday?’

  ‘Not for long. Ralph, my husband, was ready for his dinner.’

  ‘Did you see her speak to anyone else?’

  Marion Elland shook her head. ‘Most people gave her a wide berth.’

  ‘And you’ve never noticed anyone hanging around Spite Hall? She never mentioned anyone watching her? Unexpected callers?’

  Mrs Elland didn’t even need to think. ‘The image I shall always hold of Nan Lawrence’, she said firmly, ‘is of a very lonely old woman, friendless and unloved.’

  ‘Except by her great-nephew,’ Korpanski put in.

  Marion Elland gave him a hard look. ‘And that’, she said, ‘is the greatest puzzle of all. Ralph and I have often wondered about young Christian. He’s a very clever boy, that one.’

  Joanna stood up. ‘Would you mind coming round to Spite Hall to check whether anything’s missing?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘The sooner the better,’ Joanna said. ‘If anything was stolen, tracking it down might help catch her killer.’

  Marion Elland put a hand on the detective’s arm. ‘I’ll do anything’, she said, ‘if it’ll help catch him.’

  They left then and headed back into Leek, passing straight through to the Macclesfield side and Spite Hall. It didn’t take long for the home help to scan the four rooms. ‘Nothing’s gone,’ she said. ‘Nothing at all except ...’

  Joanna interrupted briskly. ‘The tapestry has been taken away for forensic analysis. Nothing else?’

  Marion Elland shook her head. It wasn’t a surprise; they had never really thought burglary a serious motive for Nan Lawrence’s murder. They thanked her and one of the squad cars returned her to her home. Joanna and Mike got back in the car. ‘Fasten your seat belt, Korpanski,’ she said with a grin. ‘It’s your afternoon for visiting the sick and elderly, and I want all your impressions.’

  Since breaking her hip Emily Whittaker had moved to a ground-floor flat on the Buxton Road. It was sheltered accommodation with a warden easily summoned by a pull cord in every room. As Joanna parked the car in the forecourt she reflected that here lived yet another old woman whose life had failed to return to normality following a crime. It never would now. Before the assault she had been independent, someone who had organized church fêtes, baked cakes for good causes, made jams and pickles, visited the sick. Now she was just another old woman who needed visiting and supervision herself, who sat in a chair, watching TV and getting older.

  Joanna pressed the bell with a feeling of deep depression. Another life permanently destroyed as effectively as Nan Lawrence’s had been. Emily Whittaker had lost so much more than her health; the attack had taken away her belief in people. They heard slow, uneven footsteps approaching the door, which opened as far as the brass chain would allow it. She looked less than pleased to see them. ‘I hoped you wouldn’t come again,’ she said, ‘ever. I want to put it all behind me, forget about it. Every time you come to interview me it reminds me. Why have you come again?’ Her voice was querulous and weak. ‘I’ve nothing more to tell you.’

  ‘We want to find the people who are doing this,’ Joanna said. ‘If we had caught them when they first attacked you other incidents wouldn’t have happened.’

  ‘You mean Nan Lawrence’s murder,’ Emily Whittaker said shrewdly, releasing the brass chain and opening the door fully. ‘So you do think it was the same people.’

  ‘It’s likely.’

  ‘And you think if I could have given you a better description back in July –’ She had obviously been pondering the point. ‘It’s not my fault I couldn’t recall things,’ she snapped. ‘It all happened so fast I didn’t get a good look at them. If I’d remembered anything more I’d have got in touch with you.’

  ‘I’m sure you would,’ Joanna soothed. ‘But with your co-operation I’d like to try a slightly different idea. I think it’s possible that if we can get you to make yourself comfortable and fully relaxed, in the comfort of your own home, and with the benefit of a few months’ recovery, that something might surface which helps us. It may be just a minor detail but who knows, it could be enough to pinpoint a suspect.’

  She didn’t want to do it. ‘But …’

  ‘Please.’

  After brief consideration Emily Whittaker seemed to warm to Joanna. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll do it, but I don’t think there’s anything stored in my brain which hasn’t already come out. How do you know it was the same gang who killed Nan Lawrence anyway?’

  ‘We don’t, not for sure. It’s just one of the ideas we’re following up. But Leek is a small town, it would be a huge coincidence if there were two gangs preying on old ladies.’

  It seemed to satisfy her. ‘You’d better come inside then.’

  They followed her into a small, square room lined with bland flowered wallpaper and a pale, patterned carpet. Two easy chairs sat in the centre, a sofa against the wall and a television in the corner. Its sound was turned off but the moving picture gave the room brightness and colour. ‘It’s like company,’ Emily explained. ‘I never feel I’m quite alone when it’s on. Silly, isn’t it.’

  Joanna smiled. Not silly – natural for an eighty-year-old woman who lived alone and must expect few guests. ‘Do you mind switching it off?’

  Emily shook her head. ‘Do what you think’s best.’

  They noticed how stiffly she crossed the room as though there was no flexion in the hip joint, that it had been set in the one position. As she bent to switch the TV off they saw her wince with pain.

  The journey back to the easy chair was equally tortuous. She sank with a sigh and leaned back with her head against the head rest. ‘You really want me to close my eyes?’

  ‘Please.’

  She complied.

  ‘Now think back to July the fifteenth.’

  To both their surprise Emily Whittaker smiled. ‘It’s a hot day,’ she said, ‘hot even for July. I’ve changed the sheets on the bed. They’ve been out on the line. And now they’re dry. I can put them away in the airing cupboard. I can smell newly mown grass on them.’ She closed her eyes even tighter. ‘I can hear traffic, flies buzzing in the bathroom window. I must get some spray.’

  Korpanski interrupted. ‘Can you usually hear traffic from inside the house?’

  Emily Whittaker opened her eyes. ‘No,’ she said, puzzled, ‘I can’t. Not really. Not as loud as this.’

  They both knew. Her front door had opened straight on to the pavement of a busy road, used by motorists as a shortcut from the Buxton Road to the Ashbourne Road avoiding the sometimes congested town centre. This then had been the moment when the front door had been opened.

  ‘Go on,’ Joanna prompted.

  She closed her eyes again. ‘Some of the towels in the airing cupboard aren’t folded properly. I’m taking them out and tidying them up. One of the sheets has a hole in it. Funny, isn’t it? I’d forgotten all about that hole. Quite ragged too, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d caught it on something when I took it off the lin
e.’

  They let her ramble on. This was how you learned what had happened, by allowing your witness to transport themselves back.

  ‘I can hear something in my bedroom.’ Her face changed to an expression of alarm. ‘Something tinkling. Maybe I’ve left the window open and a cat or a bird has got in and …’ She paused. ‘Something’s breaking. Glass. I go out to the landing. A man’s there. I open my mouth to ask him who he is. What he’s doing. Why he’s in my house. He pushes me. He’s a big man, strong, arms like weightlifter’s.’

  Joanna felt Mike’s eyes hot on her. ‘A big man? How big?’

  ‘His head is up to the top of the door frame,’ Emily Whittaker said softly. ‘And he nearly fills it, like a boxer. He moves like an ape, a bit bent.’

  ‘Hair?’ Joanna prompted again.

  ‘I can’t see his hair. He’s wearing a black woollen hat.’

  ‘A bobble cap?’

  Emily Whittaker opened her eyes and smiled faintly. ‘No bobble,’ she said.

  ‘Shoes?’ Mike asked this.

  ‘I don’t see his shoes. He gives me a shove. A hard shove, right in the middle of my back. And he says something.’ She screwed up her face in concentration. ‘Something like, Bye-bye, sister. That’s what he says, Bye-bye, sister. And I’m thinking, I’m not his sister. I’m falling. Someone else is at the bottom, perhaps they’ll break my fall. They step aside. Now I’m in such pain. He’s coming down the stairs two at a time, leaping. He is like an ape or a chimpanzee. He’s near me. I hold my hand out for him to help me, but he doesn’t. He runs straight past me, jumping over my head. He’s laughing, he doesn’t care. I don’t remember anything else’, she said, ‘except the pain. I’m sorry.’

  When they left tears were still glistening on her cheeks. She put her hand on Joanna’s arm in a gesture of surprising strength and desperation. ‘Will he come back?’

  Joanna shook her head in a promise she had no right to make.

  Jane Vernon was less co-operative. She stood at the door, reluctant to let them in. ‘I’ve told the police all I remember,’ she snapped. ‘I’m in a hurry now, I have to go out. There’s no point you coming back, I haven’t got anything more to add.’

  And Florence Price seemed almost unaffected by the robbery on her. At sixty-eight she was the youngest victim of the assaults. She answered the door promptly and they took in her heavy make-up – pink lipstick, blue eyeshadow, rouged cheeks, bleached hair in a mass of tight curls. She put her head to one side. ‘Ye-es?’

  Obviously she didn’t recognize them. Joanna reintroduced herself and Korpanski and they were rewarded by a bright smile. ‘I don’t know what you’ve come for,’ she said. ‘I told you all I could remember back in August.’

  ‘Some of the other victims’, Joanna said cautiously, ‘are able to remember details they’d previously forgotten or blocked out. Now that a couple of months have passed we wondered if you’d go over the night once again.’

  Florence Price opened her mouth. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said reluctantly.

  She ushered them into a room with a bright blue carpet and terracotta-coloured three-piece suite.

  She took up her position in one of the armchairs and gave an alert smile. ‘Why don’t you close your eyes,’ Joanna suggested. ‘It might help.’

  Florence Price eyed her suspiciously, the smile wiped off her face and replaced by a frown. ‘What is this,’ she asked, ‘some kind of psychological test?’

  ‘Just trying to relax you.’

  But Florence’s blue eyelids remained obstinately open.

  ‘It was a rainy night,’ she began, blinking quickly, ‘a dull, boring sort of a day, a grey evening. I was sitting, watching the television when I heard a noise, something in the kitchen. I went out and there were men there, all wearing black masks.’

  ‘Did they say anything?’

  ‘Asked me where I kept my money. I told them I didn’t have any but they didn’t believe me. We’ll torture you, one of them said. I was so frightened, I told them I had money in the tea bag tin. They took it and then they went.’

  ‘What did they look like?’

  ‘I told you,’ she said, annoyed, ‘they were wearing black masks.’

  From the doorway Mike frowned at her and gave the smallest shake of his head. Joanna drew in a deep breath. ‘Can you remember–’ The interview was interrupted by the ring of Joanna’s mobile phone.

  ‘I think you’d better come over to Spite Hall,’ Barra said. ‘As soon as you can.’

  They left Florence Price still sitting on the terracotta-coloured settee. Barra didn’t summon without just cause.

  Shadows were lengthening over the two houses as they pulled up on the gravelled drive, but whatever it was that had excited Barraclough there was no hint of it from the outside, all seemed quiet. Even the Incident caravan looked deserted. Joanna drew up right outside the front door.

  They found the scene-of-crime officer in Nan Lawrence’s bedroom, standing over one of the shoe boxes. The lid was flipped off. The three of them stared into it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Superstitiously Joanna eyed the three objects on the bed, pink tissue paper discarded at one side. A pair of brass candlesticks and a pension book, the name clearly printed on the cover: Cecily Marlowe. The pungent scent of mothballs.

  ‘We’ve already fingerprinted the candlesticks,’ Barra said.

  Joanna already knew what they would have found. ‘Nan Lawrence’s?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Anyone else’s?’

  Barra shook his head. ‘Just hers.’

  Mike spoke from behind her. ‘She couldn’t have done anything to Cecily Marlowe,’ he said viciously, ‘she was too frail. So that leaves ...’

  She turned. ‘I know. I know exactly who it leaves.’

  ‘Then we’d better speak to him. Now.’

  ‘Not yet.’ Joanna checked her watch. ‘We’ve a briefing scheduled for ten minutes’ time. And besides, I want to talk to Mrs Marlowe again before confronting Christian with this.’

  ‘We won’t get any more out of her, Jo. Let’s haul him in.’

  Joanna faced her colleague. ‘This entire case is much deeper than a series of crimes followed by a murder, Mike. I want the whole story. If we bring Christian Patterson in now what do we have?’

  ‘We can charge him with malicious wounding.’

  ‘And skate across the surface of the crimes? Why, Mike? That’s the point. Why did he do it?’

  ‘At her direction?’

  ‘OK, then why would she ask him to assault her friend? And why would he have carried out his great-aunt’s bidding? Because he was under her influence? If you believe that intelligent and personable young man committed a serious assault on his great-aunt’s old “friend” just because she asked him to ...’ She shook her head slowly. ‘See the logic, Mike. There’s much more to this case – to these cases – than that. If we watch Christian, knowing what we do, we just might get to the bottom of it. Otherwise ...’

  Korpanski looked disgruntled. ‘You’re the officer in charge,’ he said stiffly. ‘But if you want my advice –’

  ‘We’d haul him in now,’ she finished for him. ‘And I say no.’

  Driving back into Leek Mike made a feeble attempt to lighten the atmosphere between them. He glanced across to Joanna and gave a tentative grin. ‘If this was an Agatha Christie’, he observed, ‘the head pulping would either have been out of vicious, uncontrollable hatred or to conceal the victim’s identity.’

  ‘Instead of to make absolutely sure she really was dead and not just faking?’

  ‘Sure about that, are you?’

  ‘I’m only starting to be sure about a few things in this case,’ she said, ‘and one of them is that the more I think about Nan Lawrence’s murder the less resemblance it bears to the attack on Cecily Marlowe.’

  ‘Go on,’ he prompted.

  ‘Cecily’s was planned. They waited for her. There was intelligence and direction.’<
br />
  He waited.

  ‘Nan Lawrence let someone in she thought she could trust. Emily Whittaker was the victim of thoughtlessness; it was an opportunistic burglary where the perpetrators didn’t care that she fell downstairs.’

  ‘They pushed her.’

  ‘Yes, but they didn’t intend injury to her, they merely didn’t care what happened. Florence Price, if you ask me, was not the victim of an attack at all. And Jane Vernon’s was carried out by someone she recognized and wanted to protect. She’s given us no evidence and is reluctant to help us, if not positively obstructive. So what we have, Mike, is not one series of crimes but a succession of different crimes. What we need to know next is were they like a pack of cards, each one resting on previous events, or were they mere coincidences?’

  They had arrived at the station car park but neither of them moved. ‘Joanna,’ the scepticism was apparent in Mike’s voice, ‘I don’t know how you can possibly come to this conclusion. It’s the most far-fetched, incredible …’

  ‘Bear with me, Mike,’ Joanna appealed. ‘It’s just an idea.’

  ‘One of the stupidest you’ve ever had.’

  ‘Maybe. But if you take the stance that each assault was a result of the previous incident.’

  Korpanski was unimpressed. ‘How?’

  ‘If the story about Emily Whittaker was widely reported and gained sympathy, someone reads their newspaper and thinks –’

  ‘Who?’ Mike demanded.

  ‘Florence Price could have read the account in the paper and was astute enough to realize just how much sympathy – and money – was generated by the assault.’

  ‘Go on,’ Mike said scornfully.

  ‘When newspapers report crimes,’ Joanna said slowly, ‘it has various effects. Some people become frightened of being a victim, we’ve seen that in action over the last few months. Everyone over the age of sixty who lives within a ten-mile radius of Leek has believed they are the next intended victim. But to other people it has another result, they realize that if they commit a similar crime they have a ready-made scapegoat. Initially, at least, the gang will be blamed. It’s possible that that’s how Jane Vernon came to be robbed.’