by Alice Castle
Copyright © 2018 by Alice Castle
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Editor: Christine McPherson
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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Crooked Cat Books except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are used fictitiously.
First Black Line Edition, Crooked Cat Books. 2018
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To William, Ella and Connie,
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Acknowledgements
Thank you so much to everyone who has been so generous in their enthusiasm for the first three books in this series, Death in Dulwich, The Girl in the Gallery and Calamity in Camberwell. Special thanks to my family and to Lucy and Clare, the New York Dolls. I owe so much to Christine McPherson, my wonderful editor. And thank you, Laurence and Steph at Crooked Cat, for making it all possible.
Alice Castle
About the Author
Alice Castle was a national newspaper journalist for The Daily Express, The Times and The Daily Telegraph before becoming a novelist. Her first book, Hot Chocolate, was a European best-seller which sold out in two weeks.
Alice’s first and second books in the bestselling London Murder Mystery series, Death in Dulwich, and The Girl in the Gallery, have topped Amazon’s satire detective fiction chart. The fifth book, Revenge on the Rye, will follow next year.
Find Alice’s website at www.AliceCastleAuthor.com. Alice is also on Facebook at www.facebook.com/alicecastleauthor and Twitter at www.twitter.com/DDsDiary
She lives in south London and is married with two children, two step-children and two cats.
Homicide in Herne Hill
The Fourth London Murder Mystery
Chapter One
Beth Haldane lay under her flowery duvet, taking stock. Only a small nose – and a lot of unruly fringe – was peeking out into the chilly bedroom. It was 7.30am; she’d been semi-conscious for at least two minutes, and she was gingerly probing the furthest corners of her psyche to see where the looming sense of dread was coming from.
Unpaid bills? No, thanks to her job at Wyatt’s, those were mostly a thing of the past. Problems with her beloved ten-year-old son, Ben? Nope, he was being a sweetheart at the moment. That could be suspicious in itself, but for the time being she was glad to embrace his apparent newfound maturity. Relationship? Much to her surprise, she sort-of had one, after a long period of lonely widowhood. And the thought of her boyfriend – ridiculous word for a woman in her mid-thirties – still gave her a tingle of pleasure, not the swoop of doom she was currently feeling in her solar plexus. So, what was the problem?
She opened her eyes and fumbled for her phone. An alert flashed up. School Nativity, 2pm. Ah, that was it. Instantly, she felt the tell-tale clutch of anxiety.
Normally, it wouldn’t be an issue. Ben showed absolutely no signs whatsoever of being a budding Olivier, so he would be consigned to a spear-carrying role. She’d be lucky to spot him right at the back of the stage, where he and his best friend, Charlie, would inevitably jostle each other and lark about. She and Katie, Charlie’s mum, would sit together and the afternoon would pass with the odd mild snigger at someone else’s child having a tantrum, forgetting their words, or somehow comfortingly making their own boys look really quite good by default.
But this time, it was all going to be different. Katie had already taken Charlie out of school, and by now they’d be halfway up a mountain in Courcheval, enjoying the first days of a luxury skiing holiday. Michael had swept his family off, declaring they all needed the break after the awful year they’d had, which Beth thought was a bit rich. It was she who’d had the year from hell, with Katie only peripherally involved as a concerned bystander and provider of cappuccinos, though Charlie had had a very lucky escape at one point. Michael was just using the recent goings-on in Dulwich and Camberwell as an excuse. Fabulous holidays were about the only thing that reconciled him to the long hours and high stress of his big-fish job in publishing.
So, Katie had stealthily sprung Charlie from school early, against all the rules, and they wouldn’t be back until the New Year.
This wouldn’t usually be such a crushing blow for Beth; she was capable of being friends with more than one person at a time, really she was. But today’s Christmas show was coming hard on the heels of another ceremony – the small funeral for Jen Patterson. It was a week since they’d gathered at the grim municipal building, like a library gone badly wrong, in one of the farthest-flung bits of south east London. A celebrant who’d never clapped eyes on Jen in life had droned on about her many good qualities in death, managing to make her sound like a total bore, not the funny, feisty woman Beth had been so fond of. Jen’s daughter, Jessica, and her ex, Tim, shell-shocked, slumped in the front row like second-hand soft toys.
A patchy congregation tried to do justice to The Lord’s My Shepherd, said to be Jen’s favourite hymn. But nothing could plug the most obvious gaps: the glaring absence of Jen’s dodgy new husband, Jeff, who’d scarpered to Corfu; and, even worse, Tim’s evil second wife, Babs, currently on remand in Holloway, charged with Jen’s murder.
It had been a toe-curling experience. As if being killed at 36 wasn’t bad enough, there was the impossibility of mentioning the absentees, the cruelty of the crime itself, and the awful situation Tim now found himself in. Then there was Jessica – motherless at ten and saddled with a spineless father. At the dismal wake afterwards in a nearby Wetherspoon’s pub, there had been more elephants in the room than the entire cast of Dumbo put together.
All right, thought Beth. So at least today’s show was going to be better than that. But she’d still miss Jen terribly. She had been one of the few women Beth had really gelled with at the school gates. Both working mums, and single for much of their time, they’d found a rare accord in SE21. Many of the other mothers floated around in a Marie Antoinette-style bubble, where the only things bigger than their houses and cars were their husbands’ pay packets, and the astronomical private school bills which thumped onto doormats at regular intervals. Beth and Jen, though, had both had their feet firmly on the ground.
Now Jen’s were six feet under and, well, Beth would just have to make some new friends, fill the gap. She put on the duck-shaped slippers which Ben had thought were an hilarious present last Christmas. It wasn’t as though she didn’t know enough people in Dulwich, Beth thought to herself sternly. She’d lived here her whole life, grown up here, gone to these self-same schools, albeit in an era when Dulwich had seemed much less shiny and perfect. Her mother, who still lived nearby, was very happily retired and played bridge with everyone from the lollipop lady outside Ben’s nursery school to the last director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. She did, however, draw the line at the current scary post-holder, Drusilla Baker.
No, thought Beth, she’d just have to make an effort. There were plenty of lovely people in Dulwich, loads of delightful mothers at the school. She’d just have to find them.
Sitting in the audience a few hours later, after skedaddling early from her job as archivist at Wyatt’s School, Beth looked around hopefully. She’d been running late as usual, so hadn’t got prime position. That, of course, had gone to Belinda MacKenzie, who was sitting right next to the harassed head teacher of the Village Primary, smack bang in the middle of the front row.
Even though Belinda had a bird�
�s eye view of the stage, Beth knew that if not prevented, the woman would be up like a shot the moment the curtain rose, blocking the view of all the parents behind her as she captured the antics of her sons, Billy and Bobby, for posterity. Beth was pretty sure these boys were about as talented as her own lackadaisical lad, but it was a foregone conclusion that both of them would have speaking parts. Once, long ago, when Belinda’s daughter, Allegra, had been at the Village Primary, the girl had been consigned to a role in the chorus. The memory of the terrifying series of altercations that had ensued could still bring on the deputy head’s psoriasis. No teacher would ever make that mistake again.
There was a buzz of excitement as parents filed in and hailed friends or avoided enemies, haphazardly filling the rows of tiny, primary-size plastic chairs. Beth was halfway down on the right-hand side, with a goodish view, as long as no preposterously tall daddies appeared to block her sightlines. That was unlikely, though. Fathers were usually only wheeled out sporadically for parents’ evenings, tending to keep their powder dry – from what Beth had heard – for the higher reaches of academe, rather than wearing themselves out by dashing back from important jobs while their kids were still at the colouring-in stage.
Beth was starting to have that paranoid feeling that always gripped her at these events. No-one was going to want to sit next to her, and she’d be publicly stamped a Johnny no-mates as every other seat got taken up. There were loads of people she knew piling in, but alas, no-one she liked that much. Why did she have to be so picky? It was all very well, on a day-to-day basis, but left her fearfully exposed at times like these. She could feel her cheeks heating up already, when a newcomer bustled in with not one but two bulging supermarket carriers, scanned the room for somewhere to sit, and lugged her shopping over to Beth’s row.
‘This taken?’ she said perfunctorily, plonking herself down next to Beth, and indeed, right on the corner of Beth’s coat, with a heavy sigh. ‘Bus was murder,’ she explained. ‘Should have walked but got all this, see?’ she said, gesturing at the bags, which were now spilling open to reveal a cache of E-numbers, white bread, and multi-packs of crisps that would have had Ben thinking he’d gone to heaven. They weren’t even Bags for Life, Beth noticed, but the 5p throwaways she tried to avoid in what she knew was a pretty feeble gesture towards dolphins. She looked at her new neighbour with a sneaking admiration. The woman was breaking at least five cardinal Dulwich rules already, and they hadn’t even been properly introduced.
‘I’m Beth, my son Ben is in Year 6,’ she said, proffering a hand. Her new companion, busy rooting through the pockets of a puffy winter jacket, didn’t seem to notice. ‘Yeah, Nina,’ she said. ‘My Wilf’s just started this term, Year 1. I know who you are. You’re the one who keeps catching murderers.’
‘Oh!’ Beth was stunned. She’d realised she’d been getting a few sidelong glances in the playground recently. But were people saying that about her? And was it even true? ‘I’m not sure that’s really… I just seem to be in the right place. Or maybe the wrong place, if you know what I mean.’
Nina gave her a level look. ‘Just as long as I don’t get knocked off just for sitting next to you,’ she said. Then, just as Beth started to worry she was serious, she let out a huge guffaw. ‘Nah, you’re all right. At least you’re doing something interesting. I get the feeling that if I hung out with some of the other mums, all I’d get would be a bad case of baby brain. And that I can do without,’ she said, nudging Beth sharply in the ribs. To her surprise, Beth found herself laughing. There was something infectious about the twinkle in Nina’s eye.
Just then there was a loud call of ‘sh!’ from Belinda in the front row and the beleaguered head got to his feet. He’d just cleared his throat and was about to speak when Belinda shot up and clapped her hands loudly, shouting, ‘Silence please, ladies and, um, gentleman, our Head is trying to make himself heard.’
‘Er, thank you, Mrs, er, ahem,’ he said, accidentally delivering the best possible put-down to Belinda MacKenzie, who prided herself on being known by all. ‘I’d just like to welcome you all to our little nativity play. As you’ll know, the children have been practising very hard to make this a really special occasion for you. I’d like to thank…’
As the speech meandered through the roll call of long-suffering teachers who’d been attempting, since the first days of September, to knock the show into some sort of shape, the audience palpably zoned out. More and more parents started fiddling with their phones, ostensibly to switch the ringers off but often just to check that nothing major had happened on their Facebook feeds since they’d last looked five minutes ago.
To Beth’s surprise, Nina didn’t fish out an iPhone, but gazed into space, apparently perfectly happy to think quietly for a few moments, or possibly even to listen. Beth hastily switched her own phone to camera mode. Perhaps this year she’d be able to catch Ben doing something worth sending to her mum. She caught Nina looking at her.
‘I’ve got five years’ worth of blurs from this show stored somewhere in the Cloud. I’m hoping I’ll get a proper photo this time. Aren’t you going to take pictures?’
‘Tell you the truth, my phone’s as old as the mills,’ said Nina with a shrug.
Beth was confused for a second. Nina certainly had a way with a phrase. Then her face cleared. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Mine’s three years old. Practically a museum piece. My emojis won’t even update.’
‘No, I mean really ancient,’ said Nina, taking a Nokia brick out of her pocket. Beth looked at it in astonishment. ‘I haven’t seen one like that for years,’ she admitted.
‘Yeah. It rings nice and loud. And I can text on it,’ offered Nina.
Beth paused for a beat. ‘Well, I can take pics and email them to you, if they come out. But I warn you, I’m the world’s worst photographer.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Nina. ‘Give your phone here. I’ll take the pics. By the sounds of it, they can’t be worse than your usual ones. They might even be better. Be nice to get some good ones of Wilf, too. He’s the donkey.’
Beth didn’t even have to think twice. ‘Great,’ she said, handing her phone over. To her surprise, Nina seemed completely au fait with the camera function, and rattled off a couple of surreptitious shots of Belinda, showing Beth the results. They were hilarious, capturing Belinda looking like Boadicea going into battle while, alongside her, the Head seemed even more shrivelled and careworn than usual.
She was just complimenting Nina when the speakers exploded with a recording of other people’s children singing O Little Town of Bethlehem in tune, accidentally turned up to Spinal Tap-style volume eleven. The show was beginning.
An hour later, and Beth realised she had never enjoyed a Nativity so much. Liberated from the necessity of attempting to record it all for posterity, she was able to savour everything, trying and failing to suppress her laughter when the eager-to-please innkeeper declared there was room at his establishment after all, leading to pantomime-style calls of ‘oh no, there isn’t!’ from teachers offstage. Once the Holy couple was finally established in the stable, which was represented by one packet of fluffy rabbit bedding from the Sainsburys in Dog Kennel Hill, because no-one enjoys clearing up real straw, the fun really began.
The Angel Gabriel was extremely reluctant to hand over the Godchild to Mary, as it was her brand new Luvabella doll playing the pivotal role. Once that tug-of-war was over, one of the Year 1 oxen bit a shepherd on the leg and the Three Wise Men got lost, their Sat Nav having apparently failed in the desert. Billy and Bobby MacKenzie, playing the role of bouncers – characters who had oddly not appeared in the original Gospels – had a not very sotto voce fight over who was going to tether Mary’s extremely uncooperative donkey, and only their mother’s blistering intervention from the audience got events moving again. Finally, one of the angels absentmindedly lifted up her skirts to reveal she wasn’t wearing any knickers, at which point many parents gave up live-streaming the event for fear of prosecuti
on on public decency grounds.
Beth, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes, realised that, as usual, Ben had been just one of a herd of brown-clad, also-ran ruminants jostling for position at the back, belting out a surprisingly aggressive rendition of Once in Royal David’s City. But he had managed to stay on the stage despite the outbreaks of pushing around him, and she was pretty sure that she’d picked out his singing from the crowd. He’d done her proud. And it had been so nice this year to have been able to enjoy being in the moment, instead of hiding behind a device while trying to capture the action. She owed Nina, she thought, looking round for her.
The moment the show had finished, everyone got up at once and bolted for the doors, despite years of experience of annual bottlenecks, proving that three hundred people couldn’t get through a two-foot space at the same time. Beth tried to peer round the crowd in front of her, but as usual her field of vision was severely hampered. Being this height was no fun when you wanted to see what was going on.
She thought, briefly, of clambering onto a chair, but they were diddy little ones anyway, probably wouldn’t take her weight, and the last thing she wanted to do was break school property and mortify her son. Just then, Ben rushed up to her, tearing off his paper crown with two pencils attached. She hadn’t been able to see this detail against the fierce stage lights.
‘Oh, you were a reindeer?’ she said, hugging him tightly.
‘Well, duh, Mum!’ he said, shrugging out of her embrace. She supposed his nose should have been a giveaway, but instead of bright red it was this season’s subtle must-have shade of iced peach and was hardly visible. It must have been lipsticked on by one of the yummier mums helping with the costumes backstage. And despite its delicious barely-there shimmer, it would probably be hell to get off in the bath tonight.
