The Philosophy of Disgrace

by Ann Troup

  Sid obliged, and together they coaxed the heavy wardrobe into a reluctant slide across the wooden boards. As Rachel bent to retrieve the key, something prodded at the edges of her awareness. ‘I didn’t know that was there’ she murmured, standing up and looking at a door, which had been hidden from view by the wardrobe.

  ‘Built in cupboard’ Sid pronounced knowledgably. ‘What d’you need a wardrobe for if there’s a built in cupboard?’

  Rachel shrugged. ‘More junk for you to get rid of I expect.’ she said, prising open the cupboard door and cringing as the hinges squealed in protest.

  The cupboard was surprisingly empty, given the rubbish that had always cluttered the rest of the house. A faint flurry of fetid air wafted into their faces as they peered into its dark recess. On its single shelf stood a biscuit tin and on the floor there was a metal box. Rachel took down the biscuit tin and levered of the lid, various bits of paper and old photographs nestled there, mostly showing Frances as a young child. The papers proved to be old school reports, all describing Frances‘s attributes in glowing terms. Rachel couldn’t recall Valerie keeping a record of either her, or Stella’s school records, though Frances probably would have burnt them if she had. Neither had she ever seen a photograph of herself as a child anywhere in the house.

  Under the photographs was a small red book, the type that had a tiny lock, she took it and the photographs and stuffed them in her back pocket, maybe Frances would want them, maybe not. The rest she put back in the tin and threw the whole thing into one of the black sacks that flanked the room.

  Sid grabbed the metal box, ‘Bloody hell, this is heavy. Hey, perhaps we’ve found the family jewels!’ he quipped.

  Rachel responded with a sardonic smile. The box was little bigger than a loaf of bread but looked like it weighed a ton. Sid placed it at Rachel’s feet.

  ‘Want to do the honours?’ he asked.

  She shook her head, watching as Sid attempted to release the lid. Though the metal had been galvanised, some substance had affected it, causing rust to scab the edges and eat into the structure. Sid took out a Swiss army knife and used the screwdriver bit as a lever, giving a satisfied grunt as the orange crust gave way. He lifted the lid, revealing the contents. ’It’s full of sand.’ He said, puzzled.

  ‘Sand?’

  ‘Hang on, there’s something poking out of it,’ he tugged, dislodging a torrent of dry, gritty matter as the object released.

  It was some kind of parcel, wrapped in dirty cloth. Sid unwound the material, causing more sand and grit to fall and glitter the floor, as each layer of fabric came away and disintegrated in his hands.

  ‘What is it?’ Rachel asked, peering over his shoulder at what appeared to be some type of shrivelled, leathery doll.

  However, Sid didn’t speak. His skin had turned a ghastly shade of grey and all Rachel could see as she peered at his stricken face, was his Adam’s apple, bobbing up and down like a fishing float as he fought for words to describe the thing that was now lying on the floor.

  Frances’s scream literally rattled the glass in the rotten window frames. Buffeting Rachel’s eardrums and snapping Sid out of his shocked stupor as effectively as if it had taken tangible form and slapped him in the face. Once the sound receded, everything became horribly quiet as if there had been a sudden solar eclipse and the birds had stopped singing in deference to the dark. Time seemed to become elastic, as seconds extended themselves into blurry, suspended pockets of disbelieving minutes. Then, Sid’s mobile phone began to ring. The tinny, incongruent tones of ‘My Way’ shattered the silence and stirred him into action. When he finally answered the thing, after fumbling for it in every pocket, Rachel could hear Steve’s tremulous voice in the background, panicking as he told his boss of the scene outside. Rachel doubted that Steve had ever uttered so many words in one go before, which was probably why he was confused. She could have sworn she heard him say that there was a dead body in the shed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rachel didn’t know who to deal with first, the paramedics who had arrived, speeding up the drive, sirens blaring, or the police who were wandering around shouting things into their radios and telling people what to do.

  Sid still didn’t look a good colour and was being tended to by a pretty Detective Sergeant, who had given him a blanket and a cup of tea. Steve wasn’t faring much better, he just stood in the middle of the melee, staring at his bloodstained hands like a confused Lady Macbeth. Frances was out cold, and was being loaded into the back of an ambulance, as Rachel watched the incredible scene unfold.

  According to Steve, Frances had taken one look at the contents of the trunk in the shed, had staggered backwards, tripped over a black bag, and as she fell, bashed her head with a sickening thud on the edge of the door. Only when he had stoically dragged her out and put her in the recovery position did he realise that the blood on his hands was coming from a patch of her exposed skull. He had finally lost the plot when he had spotted a piece of hairy scalp dangling neatly from the latch of the shed door. At that point, he had vomited up his lunch, all over Frances’s cashmere sweater. All Rachel could think of was that it was a good thing Frances was unconscious at the time; she could be a bit obsessive about things like that.

  Noticing Rachel’s bemused demeanour, the DS left Sid and gently led Rachel into the kitchen. ‘You’ve had a bit of a shock love, let’s get you a cup of tea,’ she said, her voice soft as she took Rachel’s trembling hand. Rachel never drank tea, but accepted a cup anyway, and sat there in The Limes kitchen staring into the tea’s murky depths as if scrying for an improved view of her world.

  The last time DS Angela Watson had set foot in a house like this had been ten years ago when her history teacher had dragged a group of them around some National Trust pile. Angela had found the whole thing so stultifying that she couldn’t even remember the name of the place now, but she did remember that it had been a lot like this, only bigger and much, much cleaner.

  The only nod towards the 20th century seemed to be the kettle she had used to make the tea, everything else in the room was straight out of a museum. Angela’s taste in kitchens and furniture leaned more toward Ikea than Antiques Road show, and she looked around the room with barely disguised distaste. No wonder these people always seemed to have money, by the looks of it they never bloody spent any. She had just taken out a ten grand bank loan and was using every penny of it to have a new kitchen put in, and if the look of this one were anything to go by it would be money well spent. There was no way that she would stand at an old stone sink, doing the washing up and dumping it on a wooden draining board, not when some genius had invented the dishwasher.

  Bored with critiquing the kitchen, she turned her attention to the woman at the table, who seemed to be trying to read her tealeaves, without realising she had to drink the stuff first. Other than giving her name, she hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived, had just stood around staring at everyone like she was a bit vacant. This was only Angela’s third shift at this station and she hadn’t expected to find herself babysitting a spaced out scruffy woman. God, she hoped she didn’t end up looking like that by the time she was forty, no make-up, shapeless clothes, and hair that hadn’t seen the good edge of a pair of scissors for god knows how long. It was a nice colour though, sort of brown, like conkers. However, those split ends needed to go, she thought, absently running a hand through her own straightened and highlighted hair. The woman was skinny, not in a good way, but as if she hadn’t had a decent meal in years, which always made women look haggard and drawn in Angela’s opinion. This particular observation made her feel better as she thought about the number of points she had left that day, and whether she could sneak a takeaway for tea that night, without it showing on the scales the next time she went to slimming club.

  She supposed that she ought to try to get Rachel talking, but considering that Ratcliffe would be here any minute, there didn’t seem a lot of point. Might as well leave it to the suit to sort out, it was h
ardly as if she was going to crack the case in five minutes flat, besides, looking at the state of Rachel, the only thing she looked like she was capable of murdering was a good meal.

  DS Mike Ratcliffe sat down on a kitchen chair and found himself blushing as it groaned under his weight. He smiled at the woman nursing the cold tea and introduced himself. ‘Miss Porter, I’m Detective Sergeant Mike Ratcliffe. Would you like a fresh one of those?’ He hoped so; he was spitting feathers and looked hopefully at Angela whilst nodding towards the kettle.

  Rachel shook her head, ‘It’s gone cold’.

  ‘I know, would you like another?’ To his disappointment, she shook her head again. He sighed as Angela set the kettle down and shot him a smug look. ’Your sister should be fine, we’ve contacted her husband and he’ll meet her at the hospital. I’m sorry you weren’t able to go with her, but we do need you to answer some questions.’

  Rachel nodded at him then turned her gaze back to her tea.

  ‘Do you know how we can contact your other sister, Stella?’

  Rachel shrugged, ‘She’s gone. She should be here, Stella’s always been here.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw her?’

  Rachel didn’t even have to think about it, the date was engraved on her mind like a bland epitaph on a tombstone. ‘October nineteenth 1989’.

  ‘That’s both very precise and a very long time ago. I’m told that your mother recently died, didn’t you see your sister at the funeral?’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen either of them since 1989. I didn’t go to the funeral.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Rachel was surprised at the boldness of the question. ‘We had a row; I was excommunicated from the family. It happens. I don’t even know what I’m doing here now to be honest, I should have stuck to my guns and stayed away.’

  ‘Why are you here now?’ Ratcliffe asked. It seemed odd and a little mercenary to ignore the funeral, but turn up to pick over the family bones.

  ‘Frances asked me to help sort out the house. I wanted to see it again, see if it was as awful as I remembered,’ she paused and looked around. ‘It is.’

  Ratcliffe wanted to know why they had all fallen out.

  ‘Money. Always money isn’t it? My aunt died, she left me her flat and some money, my mother and Frances thought I should share and share alike, I didn’t want to, so we fell out.’

  Her answer had been too trite, too neat for his liking. ‘What about Stella, what did she think?’

  ‘I can’t recall her being given the chance to say what she thought,’ Rachel replied. ‘Does any of this have anything to do with the fact that dead bodies seem to be popping up all over the place?’

  Ratcliffe leant back in the chair, heard it moan again as the weak joints adjusted to the shift in weight. Rachel was an attractive woman, natural, with no frippery, simple and wholesome like Felicity Kendal in the Good Life. Nice. It made a change to look at a woman who wasn’t plastered in makeup and parading the latest fashion. She had good teeth and nice hair. Too skinny though. At a guess, he would have put her age in the mid-thirties, and having taken a quick glimpse at the two bodies. His guess would be that she had been a kid when someone had killed them, covered them in sand, and hidden them away. Still, that didn’t really explain her flippant view of the situation. ‘Yes, about that,’ he said, tapping the table with the tips of his fingers. ‘The bodies. Do you know who they are?’

  Rachel wasn’t feeling too good; things were starting to go fuzzy round the edges. She wanted to say, ‘Well, let me see, the big one could be Lord Lucan I guess, and I don’t know, perhaps someone left their doll in the sandbox!’ Instead, she put her head in her hands and said, ‘I don’t know,’ only a moment before she slipped off the chair onto the floor, and began to jerk and twitch like a thing possessed.

  Ratcliffe hadn’t been expecting that, ‘Get Ferris in here now!’ he yelled sending Angela scurrying for the door.

  Julia Ferris was more accustomed to dealing with dead bodies than live ones at that stage of her medical career, but immediately recognised that Rachel was having a seizure.

  ‘She’s having a seizure’ she said with her usual cool detachment.

  ‘Aren’t you going to do anything?’ Angela wanted to know.

  ‘Other than move that chair so she doesn’t smash her face on it, no. She’ll be out of it in a minute or two, just let her settle and give her some water. She’ll probably be a bit sleepy too, so let her rest if she needs to. Now, does anybody mind if I get back to the dead guys now?’ She was peeved; she would have to get garbed up in another paper suit to go back to the crime scene.

  Angela seemed shocked by the Doctors reaction, but Ratcliffe was just relieved that Rachel hadn’t been having a stroke or a heart attack. So far, he had two dead bodies, one witness in hospital, a potential suspect, who was fuck knows where, and his second witness was writhing on the floor like a demented snake. In fact, in that moment she had stopped writhing and just seemed to have gone limp. ‘Get her some water will you?’ he asked Angela as he bent down to help Rachel up. ‘You had me worried for a minute or two’ he said, helping her onto the chair. It took a while for her to recover properly.

  Rachel took the water and drank it down quickly. ‘Sorry, that one seemed to come out of nowhere,’ she said reaching into her pocket and pulling out an old SOS bracelet. ‘I used to wear it, but the catch broke. Haven’t had a fit in ages.’

  ‘Are you okay, do you need anything?’ Ratcliffe asked, his heart rate only just beginning to settle back to its normal pace.

  ‘More water please’, she said, still feeling disorientated. Having drunk the second glass straight down, Rachel explained that she suffered from epilepsy and had since she was a child. Though usually well controlled, the fits could be brought on by stress. ‘I think you would agree that my day has been stressful’ she said to Ratcliffe.

  ‘Just a bit. Look, if you need to take a break we can pick this up later,’ he said, genuine concern showing on his face.

  ‘No, I’m fine. I’ll be fine.’ she insisted.

  Ratcliffe looked doubtful about that but decided to press on. ‘When your sister saw what was in the trunk in the shed, she called out before she fell. The young man out there said that she called out the name ‘‘Roy’’. Does that mean anything to you?’

  Rachel blinked at him for a moment as she absorbed his words, ‘Roy? Roy was Stella’s husband. Are you saying that’s him in the shed?’ she asked, screwing her eyes up in an attitude of dazed disbelief. Roy had walked out on Stella thirty years before, just up and left. It couldn’t be him. Then the prickling sensation in her head began again. ‘I’m sorry, but I think I’m having another one,’ she managed to mumble before she went down again.

  It was no good. By the time Rachel came out of the second fit, she was so exhausted that Ratcliffe would have been hard pressed to get her name out of her in any sensible form. The only reasonable thing he could do was to tell Angela Watson to drive her to the hotel she was staying at and call it a day.

  The only useful information he gained from the whole interview was gleaned from Rachel’s parting words as she walked wearily out of the door. ‘By the way, if the body in the shed has a gold tooth, a canine, then it is Roy.’

  Julia Ferris was in the yard discussing the logistics of moving the trunk, complete with sand and body, with the Crime Scene guys when Ratcliffe approached her. ‘Does our victim have a gold tooth?’ He asked.

  ‘Yeah, a canine, why?’

  ‘Cos I think I know who he is, and given that his wife is missing, I think I can make a conservative guess at who killed him. The deceased may well be one Roy Baxter, husband of the eldest Porter girl.’

  ‘The one who’s gone missing?’

  ‘Stella’.

  Ferris frowned, ‘doesn’t mean she killed him, if it is him, which I admit is likely but we don’t actually know yet. What about the baby, any ideas?’

  ‘Not a clue, yet. Anyway, what’s
with the sand? I don’t get it.’

  Ferris stripped off the latex gloves she had been wearing and wiped a powdery hand across her forehead. ‘Whoever did this to them attempted a rudimentary form of mummification by the looks of it. It’s sharp sand, the kind builders’ use, so it contains salt, which absorbs the moisture that bodies release as they decompose. Salt is also a preservative. Whoever it was didn’t do a bad job, the bodies are in pretty good nick.’

  Ratcliffe shuddered, ’But why mummify them, why not just dig a hole and bury them?’

  Ferris shrugged. ’Could be anything, keeping them as trophies ala serial killer maybe, or couldn’t be bothered to dig the hole. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to tip sand in a box, than it is to dig a grave deep enough to bury a body without risking being seen, or the body being dug up by a curious dog or an over enthusiastic gardener. Dunno, you tell me, but one thing, mummified bodies don’t smell so bad, it’s why they don’t decay, they don’t attract flies and bugs and so don’t betray their presence so easily.’

  Ratcliffe nodded thoughtfully, it was a fair point. ‘Sort of gruesome though, implies a lot of thought. How long do you think they’ve been there?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but a fair few years. When did your Baxter guy disappear?’

  ‘Quite a long time ago, I think.’ Hopefully, the sisters would help them pinpoint the exact time period. Unfortunately, what they hadn’t helped with was the preservation of the scene and any potential evidence. Anything that might have offered clues to what had happened, had more than likely been burned, or was now languishing somewhere on ten acres of landfill site. The clearance guy, Steve, had been more than happy to tell him of the enthusiasm with which Frances had disposed of her family’s belongings. Information that told Ratcliffe that Frances wasn’t going to be an easy woman to deal with. So far, all they had managed to salvage were a few bags of Stella’s possessions, a box of kids’ books, an old and seriously ugly wardrobe, and some bags of rubbish. Ratcliffe suddenly felt very tired, he wasn’t going to find out anything worth knowing anytime soon.