A Market for Murder

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Oh, no,’ Geraldine said emphatically. ‘Mary was most definitely not there then. You must have been mistaken. Got her muddled up with someone else. She can’t possibly have been.’

  ‘Well, she was. I spoke to her. I was speaking to her when the bomb went off. As plain as I’m speaking to you now.’

  ‘And you told the police?’

  ‘I did, yes. They wanted to know if I’d recognised anybody when I was there.’

  ‘If Mary was there, then she’s a fool,’ Geraldine murmured to herself. ‘What’re we going to do now?’

  ‘You’ll have to explain this to me. It’s beginning to sound as if you and Mary are involved in something I wouldn’t like.’

  Geraldine said nothing, which gave Karen time to straighten her thoughts.

  ‘Do you mean you know who put that bomb there?’ She heard – and felt – again the blast, the breaking glass, the fear for her small daughter, and sensed a mounting rage.

  ‘Of course I don’t. At least …’

  ‘It wasn’t Mary,’ Karen supplied with a brief laugh. ‘But there’s obviously something going on. Aren’t you going to tell me?’

  ‘Truly, there’s nothing to tell. It’s only the usual stuff – the Food Chain business. Mary and Hilary and I have been passionate about changing people’s shopping habits for years now. And the rest of it. It’s all been going so well – this is absolutely the last thing we needed. And we don’t want the police to start thinking we’re activists or anything of that sort. Not when there’s so much of that going on.’

  ‘You mean protests against GM crops? Tearing up the maize? Have you been involved in that?’

  It was a delicate question, which had occurred to Karen before. A large group of hooded protesters had uprooted a ten-acre field of experimental maize, a few miles south of Bradbourne, only two weeks earlier. They’d succeeded in evading the police, and everyone in the area had their suspicions as to who might have taken part. Suspicions, however, which largely remained unspoken, since the vast majority of the population wholeheartedly endorsed the action.

  Karen expected a wagging finger, at the very least, for daring to mention it, but Geraldine’s expression was oddly soft and pleading.

  ‘Not that, no. This is something you’d approve of if you knew about it. And we really do need Mary to be kept out of the limelight, if at all possible. With any luck, the police won’t bother to follow up what you told them about Saturday. They’ve got Peter’s murder to worry about now, after all. The bomb’s going to be old news.’ She seemed to be speaking more to herself than to Karen.

  ‘Except they’re quite likely to connect the two,’ Karen said, half hoping to startle the woman with this remark.

  ‘No, no. They’re not bright enough for that,’ Geraldine dismissed.

  ‘You mean there is a connection?’ Karen demanded. Geraldine looked at her with a scornful little smile. ‘Of course there is,’ she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘I’m going to go and see Mary,’ Karen announced to Drew for the third time. ‘She’ll be able to explain it to me.’

  ‘Leave it alone,’ he warned her tiredly. ‘It sounds to me as if you’re far better off staying right out of it all. There’s something very nasty going on. And I doubt very much if the Thomas woman would tell you anything anyway.’

  Karen huffed out a long breath of frustration. ‘I know she was in those protests against live exports,’ she recalled. ‘And there’ve been other things. She’s an activist.’ She stressed the word portentously.

  ‘What if she is? Aren’t we all, round here, in one way or another? Trying to change the world, make people see sense. Me, you, Maggs – all of us.’

  ‘Not Den,’ Karen couldn’t resist. ‘Den’s avoided all that sort of thing.’

  ‘Not really,’ Drew defended Cooper, as he always did. ‘He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty, and see if he can do his bit for justice, like the rest of us. Why are you always so down on him?’

  ‘I’m not,’ she snapped. ‘I just don’t see what you and Maggs obviously do. I think he’s wasting his time, when he could be making so much more of himself, that’s all.’

  ‘You sound like his mother.’

  ‘We don’t know his mother.’

  ‘No, I mean, you’re saying the sort of things a mother would say. How did we get onto this, anyway? I’ve got to open the office. Maggs isn’t here yet. We’ve got Miss Lincoln at two, and the grave’s not dug yet.’

  When he and Maggs had started out on Peaceful Repose, they’d had a gravedigger working with them. When he had left, in a certain amount of disgrace, they’d persuaded themselves that they could do without a replacement. Drew would dig the graves. Unlike those in churchyards and municipal cemeteries, his were barely four feet deep, and the ground was generally soft. It took a surprisingly short length of time. But when it was raining, like today, he rather regretted his failure to delegate the job.

  Maggs arrived two minutes after he opened up the office, very apologetic. ‘The car wouldn’t start,’ she explained. ‘It doesn’t like wet weather.’

  ‘You’ve still got the bike, haven’t you?’ Maggs had been renowned locally as being the girl on the motorbike, until she met Den and started to travel by car instead.

  ‘The bike?’ She blinked. ‘Yes – but it’s not taxed any more. Maybe I’ll use it again this summer, though.’ She turned wistful. ‘I liked the bike.’

  ‘It had its uses,’ Drew agreed. ‘But I suppose people grow out of things.’

  ‘I haven’t grown out of it. I just like to ride with Den now. We talk in the car. It’s nice.’

  ‘I’m sure it is,’ he said, trying to placate her.

  ‘Miss Lincoln at two, then,’ she went on briskly. ‘Better get digging. I’ve marked the spot.’

  ‘So I see. What’re you doing today?’

  ‘Chasing up the late payers. Chasing up the printers about those leaflets. Maybe phoning Gary to see if there’s any word from the mortuary on the Grafton bloke …’

  ‘Too soon for that,’ Drew interrupted her. ‘Much too soon. And insensitive, probably. We have to wait till the wife or someone calls us.’

  ‘No, Drew.’ She was firm. ‘We might let him slip through our fingers if we don’t stake our claim. We know he’d want to be buried here, but maybe he never said anything to his wife. If I call Gary, and he says something to Stanley while they’re doing the post-mortem, it’ll all help to sow the seed. Stanley’ll be seeing the family as soon as they’ve finished. It could be any time now, come to that.’

  Post-mortems mostly took place in the early morning, and even a murder victim was unlikely to have necessitated the summoning of the pathologist from his normal afternoon routine the previous day. Particularly since the cause of death in this instance was hardly a topic for much deliberation. Anyone could see that the severance of the man’s windpipe and cervical vertebrae, along with the carotid artery for good measure, would lead to rapid death.

  Gary was the mortuary attendant at the Royal Victoria Hospital, and Stanley the Coroner’s Officer – liaising between police and the dead person’s family. An inquest would be quickly opened, and then adjourned, pending further police enquiries into what exactly happened to the unfortunate Peter Grafton.

  Drew had some years of experience of this routine, and the individuals involved. The delicate business of contacting specific undertakers at the time of a sudden death was fraught with competition and ill feeling. Three years earlier, the main Bradbourne funeral director, run by a certain Daphne Plant, had sold out to the multinational conglomerate known as SCI, and had accordingly become a very slick operation. Since Plant & Son retained the same name, many ordinary citizens had failed to notice the change of ownership – although Drew and Maggs wasted no opportunity to publicise it. Plants would almost certainly have been called to remove the body from the market square, and take it to the mortuary, the previous day. This would give them an automatic prior claim to ha
ndling the funeral, since the family would be directed to them by default. The fact that this was very unlikely to have met with Peter Grafton’s wishes was something that could not be relied on to guarantee the funeral came to Peaceful Repose. Not unless the grieving widow could somehow be alerted to the freedom she had to choose a different undertaker.

  ‘It would be better if we could get Karen to speak to someone who knows the family,’ Drew went on. ‘It would look more … casual.’

  ‘No it wouldn’t,’ Maggs argued, changing her original position. ‘It would look transparently sneaky. How do we know what the chap’s wishes were, anyway? Who says?’

  ‘Well … he’s sort of one of us,’ said Drew lamely. ‘He believed in our sort of thing.’

  ‘Lots of people still think cremation’s the organically correct way of doing things,’ Maggs reminded him.

  ‘True,’ he concurred gloomily.

  Den’s restlessness increased as the morning wore on. Knowing there was a murder investigation being conducted just outside his place of work was distracting. Most ex-police officers found their way into private security companies, or occupations of that sort. Some did actually become private detectives, although Den had never encountered such a person. Driven by a vague but insistent desire to ‘work with people’ and to utilise his hard-won skills, the local Social Services office had seemed an obvious point of call.

  The people there had been friendly, and cooperative up to a point, but the rigours of the bureaucracy involved in hiring new personnel meant that for a long time, Den had still not been employed in any officially recognised capacity. He was entered as an ‘anomaly’ in the files, paid as a special one-off payment every month, and given a handful of vaguely defined tasks to perform. The acute sensitivity to the potential for abuse of clients did ensure that references were sought and taken up with immense care, but that accomplished, Den Cooper was instantly assimilated as one of the ‘support team’, albeit untrained and therefore poorly paid.

  He had quickly discovered that things only happened if he pushed for them, and that it would have been quite feasible to sit in a corner all day, doing almost nothing, and nobody would have felt it incumbent upon them to notice.

  As it was, he developed a strategy of simply putting himself forward for whatever needed to be done. The workforce was overwhelmingly female, a fact that worked in his favour. Regarded as steady, strong, experienced and willing, he tagged along on any procedure that threatened to be unpredictable or particularly untidy. After ten months, someone in personnel showed extraordinary inventiveness by labelling his job as ‘pre-police assessor’.

  ‘That means, you get to work out whether the case needs to be referred to the police, or whether you think we can handle it ourselves. Very useful,’ the woman had explained to him.

  With a proper job description, he was transferred to the permanent payroll, given a rise and his own telephone extension. Apart from that, he carried on exactly as before.

  Sometimes he wondered what in the world he thought he was doing. How could this pretence of a job be preferable to the structure and challenge of the police? As a Detective Sergeant he’d been required to use his brain far more than now. He’d had to collect evidence, conduct interviews, get to know people as intimately as he could, particularly on long investigations. Now he was just a sort of dogsbody, in an artificially created job, surrounded by people who were even more stressed and defensive than the police officers had been.

  ‘I’ll have to get out soon,’ he said to Maggs, every week or so. ‘I’m just wasting my life like this.’

  ‘Something’ll come along,’ she always told him comfortably. ‘Just keep your eyes open, and don’t dismiss anything too quickly.’

  Bradbourne was a quiet town, ringed by quiet villages. The rocky beginnings of the twenty-first century had brought the area its share of trauma, and a collective sense of slowly rebuilding lives and value systems. Not only had foot and mouth disease swept through much of the county, but disconcerting numbers of multiethnic asylum seekers had been billeted in small towns not far distant. This gave rise to flurries of resistance amongst people who had hitherto regarded themselves as tolerant and liberal. Burglaries were automatically blamed on the strange newcomers, as well as a free-floating conviction that they were mostly Muslims intent on destroying the western world. The Social Services department had been closely involved in much of this, and Den had seen at first hand the wretched experiences of many of the refugees. He tried his best to imagine how it must be for them, and developed a profound admiration for their persistence and stoicism in the face of the cold British reception they encountered, which must have come as such a shock; such a grim disappointment. Contrary to Karen’s assessment of him, Den was every bit as committed to the task of changing society as she was; he just couldn’t entirely convince himself that the best way to do it was by growing lettuces and selling them in fashionable little markets.

  There had not been a murder in the region since Den had left the police. Not one, in almost a year. And murders had been Den Cooper’s special interest. Reading the local paper, with the stories of traffic casualties and suicides and alcohol-related violence, he had not missed his former job at all. Not until now.

  Now there was a murder investigation going on, just outside the door – and Den wanted to be part of it.

  Karen was equally restless in her own way. Wednesday was the day she and Della each looked after her own children. But after the crisis of the previous evening, Karen wondered whether she ought to offer to have Finian and Todd. Timmy’s knee was still bruised, but seemed to be working normally, and wasn’t particularly painful, so that could hardly be used as an excuse for a quiet day. The important thing, she realised, was that she was in search of an excuse. She didn’t want Della’s boys in her house, and she wasn’t altogether sure why. It wasn’t simply the suspicion that Finian had kicked Timmy’s knee: it had as much to do with Stephanie’s manner the previous afternoon. The child definitely had something worrying her, and Karen wanted time with her, in the hope of discovering what it could be.

  The most likely explanation was the supermarket bomb, of course, and Karen tried to talk to Stephanie about it.

  It wasn’t easy. ‘Did you have any dreams last night?’ she asked. Stephanie merely shook her head.

  She tried an even more oblique approach. ‘Would you like to come with me to the shops this afternoon?’

  ‘What shops?’ Stephanie demanded.

  ‘Oh, the fruit place in Bradbourne, maybe. And the cheese shop.’

  ‘Can I get out of the car?’

  Karen blinked. ‘Of course you can. I never leave you in the car, do I?’ The remark was puzzling, until the explanation dawned on her that Stephanie might associate car parks with the bomb. After all, they’d been standing among shoppers’ vehicles when the explosion had happened. So when Karen mentioned shopping, Stephanie had thought this meant being left in a town car park. It made a certain sense, Karen supposed.

  ‘Maybe we won’t go, anyway. The weather’s not very nice for going out.’

  It was raining, which meant she couldn’t easily spend an hour or two in the garden, with the kids playing nearby. That in itself was frustrating, with May such a busy month. And despite Drew’s clear opposition, she still very much wanted to go and see Mary Thomas and get to the bottom of the mysterious remarks made by Geraldine Beech. Mary was reasonably good with children, and would probably have no objection to Karen paying a visit accompanied by Stephanie and Timmy. She had always made a big thing of having an open house, welcoming callers announced or otherwise. Karen had concluded that the woman was lonely, rattling around in that great mansion all on her own, since she’d been widowed some years before. There were seven bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a maze of cold under-furnished downstairs rooms. On the few occasions that Karen had dropped in with the kids, they’d absolutely loved it, given permission to explore at will.

  Peering out of the window at
the burial field behind the house, Karen assessed the prospects for the weather. The sky appeared to be lightening, she thought, and the rain turning more to a misty drizzle. Darn it, she’d go, whether Drew liked it or not.

  Despite their financial hardships in the early days of Peaceful Repose, Karen had always insisted on retaining a car of her own. When she was teaching, it had been a necessity, and since giving up the job, she’d made sure she retained the mobility she felt she was due.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she said to Stephanie, just after lunch, ‘why don’t we go visiting?’

  Stephanie frowned thoughtfully. ‘Visiting?’ she echoed.

  ‘A nice lady – Mary’s her name. You saw her at the …’ She stopped herself just in time. What folly that would have been, to remind the child about those seconds before the bomb blast, when Mary Thomas had been talking to them in the supermarket car park. Damn it, thought Karen – there doesn’t seem to be any safe topic to talk about any more. And what if Stephanie recognised Mary and had hysterics because of the association? Well, she’d have to take that risk. There were limits to the levels of avoidance you could sustain.

  * * *

  Mary Thomas’s house was the dominant feature of Ferngate village, as Karen had explained to the police on Monday. Its name of Cherry Blossoms was amply vindicated by the presence of a large old orchard full of fruit trees, many of them fruiting cherries. The blossom was just finishing now, the petals making a dense sea of white and pale brown beneath the trees.

  ‘Stay here a minute,’ Karen told the children, although they had little choice, strapped as they were into their seats in the back of the car. ‘I’ll just see if she’s in.’

  ‘Don’t!’ said Stephanie urgently. ‘Don’t leave us.’

  ‘Bang, bang,’ said Timmy happily and irrelevantly. Stephanie punched him.

  ‘Hey!’ Karen warned her. ‘Look, I’m just going to the door – there. You can see it easily.’