Embroidering Shrouds

by Priscilla Masters

  She shook her head.

  He moved closer and drew her to him. ‘Is it Eloise?’

  She smiled. How typical that Matthew should believe her inability to sleep was due to the thing he was responsible for when she was investigating a murder.

  She held up the figure to him. ‘No,’ she said. ‘For once it isn’t Eloise.’

  ‘Good.’ He pushed her hair away from her face and kissed her gently. ‘By the way, I almost forgot, she’d have killed me. There was a message on the answerphone. Caro’s coming up tomorrow – today.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Doing something on rural crime, a series of articles that’s been commissioned by Country Life, comparison stuff, I suppose.’

  ‘Country Life? She’s doing well, coming up in the world. I only hope the little worm wriggling on the end of the line isn’t this particular case. I have a feeling there are about to be some hefty twists before we have any idea who killed Nan Lawrence.’

  He was halfway up the stairs before he picked up on her statement. ‘I thought it was just a bludgeoning by a couple of over-enthusiastic, thug burglars.’

  ‘I wish,’ she said. ‘But I think there’s a bit more to it than that.’

  ‘Come back to bed’, he said, ‘and sleep, Jo. Sleep without dreaming.’

  ‘If only.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  6.45 a.m. Thursday, October 29th

  Lydia’s hand wandered towards the antimony box again and found another photograph: a plump young woman with her hand trustingly linked to another’s, a young man with fair hair, staring, strained and anxious into the camera. She smiled at the picture and brushed it with her fingertips, recalling long ago days when she had touched his face in a similar fashion.

  ‘David,’ she said. ‘Oh, David.’

  One glance at Mike’s set face told her his domestic situation was unchanged. They reached her office before he exploded. ‘She is a vicious old –’

  ‘M-i-ike.’ His face was thunderous. It brought it home to her that soon it would be her turn to have an unwelcome guest.

  ‘Hide like a friggin’ rhino,’ he continued. ‘You’d think she’d have the nous to realize she’s outstayed her welcome.’

  Joanna shrugged.

  A little of the mischievous Mike peeped out. ‘Kids found a couple of snails in the garden yesterday,’ he said. ‘Popped them in the old dingo’s bed.’

  She joined him laughing. ‘I think it would take a bit more than that to rid me of Eloise.’

  He gave her a hard look. ‘You shouldn’t cast yourself in the role of wicked stepmother, Jo. It doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘It isn’t me doing the role selection.’

  ‘When’s she coming?’

  ‘Tomorrow or Saturday.’ She knew Matthew had been deliberately vague as to her arrival.

  Then she remembered Caro. ‘Oh, and a friend of mine’s coming up from London. You remember Caro, the journalist?’

  ‘I remember her, skinny thing with sharp features.’

  ‘You could call her that. Does she intimidate you?’

  ‘Not her particularly, I’m just wary of all journalists. By the way, Jo,’ Mike’s eyes were gleaming as he scanned a note lying on top of her desk, ‘Craig Elland was let out of prison on July second.’

  She grinned back at him. ‘Good.’ She stood up. ‘So, let’s get round there and wake him up.’

  Two cars were standing outside the semi on Blackshaw Moor. A Peugeot 205, red, like Joanna’s own but a year younger. The other was far more flashy, a gold Vauxhall Tigra, last year’s registration. It looked like Craig was home.

  Out of habit Joanna checked the tax disc on the Tigra. In date, everything in order. Maybe Craig Elland had learned his lesson, or he was being careful.

  Marion Elland opened the door looking older and more weary than before. ‘What have you come back for? It’s early. We’re hardly up.’

  Both Mike and Joanna knew she was perfectly aware of why they had returned. Her eyes were already drifting towards the staircase. Young Craig, it appeared, must still be in bed, snatching some beauty sleep.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, moving quickly into the sitting room and closing the door behind her. A man of about fifty was sitting on the sofa, reading the paper. He stood up as they entered. ‘Hello,’ he said guardedly. ‘I’m Ralph Elland. What seems to be the problem?’

  Joanna introduced herself and Mike and watched Mr Elland Senior’s face darken. He and his wife both wore the same tired, world-weary air. Life with their son at home must be hard. Joanna addressed Marion Elland who was wiping reddened, soapy hands on her apron. ‘As you already know, we’re investigating the murder of Nan Lawrence.’

  Marion gave a swift, despairing glance at her husband as though pleading with him to reassure her. Joanna could almost guess her thoughts word for word. No, not this too. Not murder. Not of someone so old, so defenceless. Fights outside a nightclub were one thing. This was another.

  It was time to winkle out the truth. ‘Mrs Elland,’ Joanna said quietly, ‘did you have a key to Spite Hall?’ Marion looked struck, her face crumpled, and suddenly she seemed twenty years older. And Joanna knew she had already faced this fact herself.

  ‘Ralph.’ She appealed to her husband.

  ‘Of course she has a key,’ Elland said brusquely. ‘She has to get in whether the old bat’s there or not.’

  ‘And where do you keep it?’

  Again Marion looked at her husband to supply the answer.

  ‘In her purse.’

  ‘Which is?’

  This time Marion Elland looked around the room, homed in on a shabby black handbag and nodded. ‘You want me to ...?’ She picked it up and fished around the bottom until she found a worn leather purse, opened it and handed a Yale key threaded with blue embroidery silk to Joanna. ‘This is it,’ she said.

  Joanna knew Mike’s thoughts would echo her own. The key would be useless for fingerprints, there was not enough of a flat surface. ‘You always keep it in your bag?’

  Marion Elland nodded warily.

  ‘And you leave the bag lying around the house?’

  Again a weary, wary nod. She had been here before. In her worst nightmares.

  ‘Did you take this handbag to church with you on Sunday morning?’

  ‘No,’ almost a whisper, ‘another one.’

  He could have removed it at any time after it had last been used and returned it at his leisure. She would not have needed to use it, by the time she might have inserted it into the lock of Spite Hall Nan Lawrence had been long dead and her attentions as home help replaced by scene-of-crime officers. She would probably not have checked whether it was still in there and to acknowledge that she would focus suspicion on this household.

  ‘We’d like to speak to your son.’

  ‘He’s in bed asleep.’ Again a swift, worried glance at her husband.

  No such delicacy from him. Ralph Elland strode towards the door, flung it open. They heard his heavy tread on the stairs, the sound of voices, angry voices, arguing.

  More steps returning and the door was flung open. Mike was big but Craig Elland almost dwarfed him. Mike’s muscles were formed by hours at the gym, pumping iron. Craig’s bulk was the result of food, plenty of it, almost certainly supplemented as Cumberbatch had observed with liberal helpings of anabolic steroids. He stood more than six feet high, shaven head, huge arms decorated with tattooed snakes along their entire length. He was dressed in judo pyjamas, crumpled white with a black belt, and he was glaring at them.

  Joanna gave him a wide smile which he returned with suspicion. ‘Craig Elland?’

  ‘Cops,’ he said disgustedly, ‘smell ‘em a mile off.’ Mike was treated to a jutting chin and clenched fists. Joanna to a hard, appraising stare.

  ‘That’s right, Craig. We are “cops”. And I think you’ve had a bit of experience of our profession.’

  ‘I’m clean now.’

  Joanna smiled to herself
. They all were. She recalled a visit to a prison years ago and the officer turning to her, smiling. ‘This here is the only place in the world where no one’s done anything they shouldn’t and everyone’s a hundred per cent innocent.’ Of course Craig was clean now. As clean as a skunk sprayed with perfume.

  ‘What’s this about anyway?’

  ‘We’re investigating the murder of Nan Lawrence.’ Joanna was slotting pieces together in her mind.

  Craig fitted one aspect of the crime perfectly, a brutal, opportunistic, bullying sort of criminal. He would be just the sort of person to stand over an old woman half his size and shove her down the stairs, step over her while she moaned with the pain of a broken hip and then three months later to stand over another old woman a third of his weight and batter her with her own walking stick until her head was a pulp.

  ‘I don’t see what a murder’s got to do with me. I ain’t done a murder.’

  It was funny, this honour amongst thieves. They robbed, they supplied drugs to juveniles, they committed armed robbery but charge them with an offence outside their category and they would use their own previous offences as a defence. She could have smiled, except none of it was really funny. With people like Craig Elland there always was, at the end of their acts, a victim.

  Mike eyeballed him. ‘You nearly did commit murder, Elland. The guy was dead but they revived him in the ambulance. He was never the same again.’

  Elland squared his shoulders, caught something determined in Mike’s face and backed off.

  ‘We may need you to come in to the station,’ Joanna said quietly. ‘We want to interview you and your parents.’

  ‘Why not,’ Elland flattened himself against the door, ‘I got nothing to hide.’

  They never did. Until they were exposed. Joanna watched him from beneath lowered lids. She didn’t have him yet, not by a long chalk, but she was close. Silently she voiced the thought, why look any further? He had opportunity, he could have got in without breaking a window or splintering a door, he could have reached the old lady without her having left her chair. Surely this was how it had been done. More convincing than that he even felt right for the charge, he fitted. But they had no motive apart from his psychological profile.

  She became aware that Ralph Elland was waiting for her to speak. She forced herself to look Craig Elland full in his pudgy face. ‘Just for the record,’ she said softly, ‘where were you on Sunday afternoon and evening?’

  At her side Ralph Elland’s shoulders drooped in desperation. It was an attitude of utter defeat, it told Joanna that whatever Marion believed of her son his father knew he was capable of murder, not only in fisticuffs outside a night club but a planned act, brutal and cowardly. But Craig was ready with his answer. They always were. Alibis were practised as assiduously as a part in an amateur dramatic production.

  ‘I was ‘ere all afternoon,’ he said defensively. ‘I were watching the footie with me dad, Man U was playing.’ He looked to his father for confirmation.

  His father gave it.

  Elland leered at Joanna. ‘And then we ‘ad our dinner.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘We went to Evensong,’ Marion said faintly.

  ‘I went up the pub with me mates. Watched the rugby on Sky.’

  ‘Which pub?’

  ‘The Cattle Market.’

  ‘And who were the mates?’

  ‘Tony Arrandale, Wayne Chiltern, Scott Trent.’

  A well-known set of villains.

  ‘Fine. OK if we check up with them?’

  Joanna knew Mike would be voicing the same thoughts as she was. What was the point when alibis from these three could be bought cheaper than a pint of warm beer? Craig shrugged, almost as though he knew the worthlessness of the gesture.

  Something struck Joanna, usually in this type of situation parents were swift to defend their offspring against police interrogation. They screamed intimidation and victimization when their beloved sons had recently been released from prison and supposedly wiped the slate clean. Yet neither Ralph nor Marion were offering one word of defence. They knew him best. Even Craig himself wasn’t giving out the usual objections.

  ‘We’ll want to talk to you again, Craig,’ she said, ‘after I’ve chatted to your mates.’

  He met her eyes fearlessly. ‘They’ll enjoy that,’ he said, ‘bit of attention from a female dick.’

  Joanna gave her widest smile. ‘One of the perks of the job, Craig.’

  She waited until they were in the car before voicing both their thoughts. ‘So, there we have it.’

  ‘What if they were all seen at the pub right the way through Sunday?’

  ‘Matthew couldn’t be very precise about the time of death. Even if they were seen in the pub it would only have been until closing time, they could have gone round afterwards, they could have gone round before. What’s important is that Craig Elland – a nasty piece of work even by my yardstick – had the opportunity to borrow his mother’s key to Spite Hall. It answers some of the questions we’ve been posing.’

  ‘And motive?’

  Joanna chewed her thumbnail for a minute. ‘What if Marion hinted that Nan had money stashed away? Easy to get the key; in fact, the entire bunch of mates could be the ones –’

  ‘A bit obvious, don’t you think?’

  ‘Well, Craig doesn’t exactly strike me as a subtle sort of a guy.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Try this for size, Mike. We have three mates on a burglary spree. In July they’re joined by a fourth – much more violent friend – recently released from prison. As soon as he’s on the scene petty theft is no longer the object, the emphasis has shifted so the objective is the violence and terrorism itself.’

  Mike started the engine. ‘It fits, Jo. Trouble is, we’ve no scrap of proof.’

  ‘So, we need to send some officers to interview Craig’s three friends. We need to know what they were all wearing and we need to get the clothes to forensics. Agreed? And it might be an idea to speak to Cecily Marlowe again and jog her memory.’

  Mike nodded, picked up the phone and rapped out a few instructions.

  But as they approached the outskirts of the town he blurted out, ‘And what about the candlesticks and the pension book?’

  Joanna gave a deep, heartfelt sigh. ‘I don’t know, Mike,’ she said. ‘Let’s revisit Spite Hall, talk to Patterson and his grandson.’

  The day was turning gloomy with thick black clouds bubbling up in the sky. As they turned off the Macclesfield Road the clouds finally burst and blasted rain against their windscreen, drowning the wiper blades however fast they swiped at the water. It made the scene ahead even more depressing.

  As usual Brushton Grange displayed no lights; it looked derelict, deserted. She and Mike picked their way along the narrow, mossy path, made even more slippery by the incessant rain. Gutters spilled their contents over the brim. ‘I’ll never forget this place,’ Joanna said. ‘If Frankenstein himself answered the door I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  Korpanski resisted the temptation to frighten her with a shout and his King Kong impersonation, instead pulling on the bell handle. The peal of the front-door bell echoed inside the house and Joanna was again almost tempted to retreat. The house surely was empty this time. She glanced up at the attic windows, saw a face jerk back, and picked up the bass thump of techno music. Mike clanged the front bell again, and then they heard slow, painful steps tapping across the hall towards them. Arnold Patterson pulled the door open.

  ‘So you have come back.’ He twisted his head to stare at the ceiling. ‘He said you would. He said you’d want to interview him.’

  ‘Can we talk to you first about your sister, Mr Patterson?’

  ‘I’ve nothing to say. She’s dead. We’re well rid. Best she’s forgot.’

  ‘Surely you want her killer caught?’

  Patterson gave her a long penetrating stare. In it she read his blunt comment that her killer was morally no worse than the woman
herself.

  But it did not justify murder. However evil the victim had been nothing justified the brutality of that assault.

  ‘Mr Patterson,’ Joanna tried again, ‘the killer might strike again.’

  This time Patterson’s face gave the ghost of a smile.

  ‘They’ve struck before.’

  He seemed to switch off then. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Why don’t we go in your living room? You’ll be more comfortable there. You can sit down.’

  Patterson turned and walked back inside the house.

  The hall was as dark as a cave with a musty smell of damp. Their footsteps echoed unevenly.

  Korpanski’s huge, flat feet, Joanna’s rubber-tipped heels, the metal tip of Arnold Patterson’s walking cane, the soft shuffle of his slippers.

  The room was as she’d remembered it, scarred quarry-tiled floor, threadbare loose covers on sagging chairs, windows smeared with dust, and today rain whipping against the glass. It was as cheerless as Bob Cratchit’s workplace before the conversion of Scrooge.

  Patterson sank into one of the chairs. ‘I can tell you nothing about Nan’, he said, ‘for the past fifty year.’

  ‘Then tell me about Nan the child.’

  Korpanski was shifting his weight from foot to foot. She knew what he was thinking, that this was a waste of time. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t.

  She prompted him. ‘You were friends then, Mr Patterson, as children?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘All the time you were children?’

  ‘Most of it.’ Some of the lines in his face seemed to smooth out. ‘All children fall out,’ he said, smiling.

  Joanna pushed away the memory of her own sister: hair-pulling, tale-telling, noisy quarrels meant to deflect the attention of rowing parents. But they were always too busy with their own conflicts to even notice.

  ‘But as you grew up?’

  ‘The war came,’ Patterson said. ‘It changed everything.’ He stopped for a moment, his eyes far away from either Brushton Grange or Spite Hall. ‘Everything,’ he repeated. ‘I were called up, plenty others were too – young lads.’ He looked straight at Joanna. ‘We saw things,’ he said, ‘things we never should have. It made us different, different from them at home who’d gossiped and sewed their way through those years.’