Homicide in Herne Hill

by Alice Castle

  ‘The thing is,’ Beth said earnestly, ‘I really didn’t know there was anything going on, till I was in it. And it was all quite peaceful. People were just so upset. That guy’s dog was some sort of four-legged saint, it turns out. Did you know about this awful poisoning business, anyway? Why didn’t you tell me about it?’

  ‘Excuse me, I don’t have to tell you every crime that occurs in a one-mile radius of your favourite café, you know.’

  She had to admit that was fair enough. And anyway, she wasn’t really interested in lost bicycles and pinched iPhones – unless they tied in with a case. But that’s what Nina’s business had become, she realised with a jolt. It was a case, and for better or for worse (probably for worse, she thought with a slightly sinking feeling) she was investigating it. Not that she needed to trouble Harry with all that now. He had enough on his plate. Nevertheless…

  ‘But this dog thing, I mean, it’s so cruel, it’s… just so awful. And I do have a pet, you know. I think you should have informed me, just to keep Magpie safe.’

  Magpie, who’d stayed outside for long enough to realise it was exceptionally cold, even if you were wearing a nice fur coat, sauntered back in at that moment. She scrambled up onto the sofa, stepping delicately over Beth to stand on York’s legs, staring at him for a moment as if to dare him to complain, and then proceeded to knead his legs enthusiastically with her unsheathed claws.

  ‘She’s wrecking my trousers,’ he yelped. Both Beth and Magpie’s surprised glances gave him to understand that to complain was to announce yourself as an irredeemable wimp. After he’d gritted his teeth in silence for a minute, Magpie settled herself down with a whump, like a hovercraft coming to rest.

  ‘Magpie is a cat, not a dog,’ said Harry, getting back on track and daring to move his legs a little. Beth watched as Magpie dug in a warning claw. She didn’t tolerate a lot of fussing from her chosen cushion of the evening. She was bestowing quite an honour, and the best way to show you were worthy was not to move a muscle, unless it was your stroking hand, and that should be applied lightly and reverently.

  Harry winced and continued, ‘Magpie’s in no danger. And she can definitely look after herself.’

  ‘You say that, but this awful person could start on cats next. What if they’re just warming up on dogs? And anyway, do you know for sure that it’s poison? Is there definitely someone out there killing pets?’

  Harry gave Beth a level look. ‘You know I can’t tell you anything about ongoing investigations. Where would that end? I know you love to be involved, and you somehow get involved, but it’s not a good thing, Beth. You’ve got no legal status, you’ve no back-up if things go wrong. It’s just asking for trouble.’

  Beth gave him a reproachful look. ‘I just want to keep my cat safe. And what about friends who’ve got dogs? What am I supposed to say to them? Presumably, if this goes on, there’ll be some sort of guidelines, won’t there? You could see the way feelings were running high, tonight.’

  Harry sighed deeply. Beth could tell he was mulling things over. Her point about guidelines had to have struck home. There must be plenty of things people could do to protect their dogs, after all. And things to look out for.

  ‘Is it similar poison in every case? Is that how you know these deaths are all linked?’

  Harry rolled his eyes. ‘Look, I will say this. It does seem to be the work of the same perpetrator, so far. But at this stage we don’t want to whip up any hysteria.’

  It was like sitting next to an official press spokesman, thought Beth. Dry as dust – and almost as much fun as that sounded. She didn’t want to wreck their unexpected evening together entirely, but on the other hand, while Harry was here, she really felt she ought to pump him for every detail. She knew Nina, living so close to the unfortunate Rosie, would be full of questions for a start.

  ‘There’ve been at least three or four dogs so far, haven’t there? Roxie, the little dachshund; that was before school broke up. And Lola the spaniel, too. Then Lancelot, the Great Dane. Now Rosie. And possibly one called Truffle as well, though that’s not clear. Is there anything linking all these dogs, apart from the fact that their owners are all in Dulwich or Herne Hill?’

  Harry was looking at Beth in astonishment. ‘How do you even know that much? We’re just piecing things together. Honestly, I ought to just tap your phone line. It would cut our investigation time in half.’

  Beth didn’t like to admit that most of this knowledge was gleaned on the ground, as it were, in Potter’s office. But she did rather glow at the thought that Harry admired the way she had her finger on the pulse.

  Unfortunately, it turned out he hadn’t meant it that way at all. He was, in fact, building up quite a head of exasperation, which suddenly erupted all over the sofa.

  ‘Beth. Beth, you can’t go on doing this,’ he burst out.

  Magpie gave him a look of total disgust. Honestly. You thought you’d found a nice comfy place to have a well-earned snooze after a frankly exhausting day, you’d finally got all that pointless shifting around sorted out, then there was this shouting. It was too much. She shot up, giving him a last jab with her claws for good measure, and settled on the other side of Beth, flashing him the merest glance to signify her hearty disapproval.

  York immediately started brushing ineffectually at the impressive calling-card of shed hairs Magpie had left behind. The black ones weren’t too bad, the white ones stood out against his dark trousers which, until very recently, had been his smartest pair. Somehow this seemed to crystallise his sense of frustration and annoyance.

  ‘Look, you’ll only end up getting hurt, and I don’t want that,’ he said, as though it had been wrung out of him, his face working.

  For Beth, this was a far more effective tactic than any telling off. She herself had known the awful pain of losing someone unexpectedly. There was no way that she’d consciously put anyone else through that. She put out a hand and Harry grabbed it and squeezed tight. They exchanged a small smile.

  But, thought Beth, on the other hand, she certainly wasn’t planning to modify her behaviour to suit someone who, to put it brutally, might not even turn out to be a permanent fixture in her life. She would never ask him to change careers and become an accountant, for instance, on the basis that numbers weren’t going to hurt him, in the way that a machete-wielding maniac in Lewisham, say, was quite likely to. She knew that being a policeman was more than a job for him, it was part of who he was as a person. He knew the risks and accepted them because he loved his work. Or enough of it to keep the balance. Yes, it was scary, thinking he was out there, up against a London that was getting colder every day, and not just as far as the weather was concerned. But so far, she’d mostly been able to distract herself from worrying about what he might be up to, with her own little exploits. Even if that changed, she wouldn’t feel entitled to ask him to renounce a career he loved.

  She was quite clear that he didn’t have the right, either – or, maybe, yet – to ask for big sacrifices from her. And on the face of it, her job as an archivist could hardly be safer. Short of a large stack of school magazines falling on her, or the very real risk that reading through the collected speeches of previous headmasters might bore her to death, she ought to live for ever, as far as accidents at work were concerned. But she knew that work wasn’t the bit that worried him. It was life, life in Dulwich, which did seem to have taken a turn for the macabre recently.

  Anyway, that wasn’t to say that she accepted his charge that she was always getting into trouble. Was she a trouble-magnet? She didn’t think so. She would plead guilty, yes, to having perhaps more than her fair share of curiosity, and sometimes that had led her to hair-raising places and situations, but she still thought that everything she’d done had been justified by the end results. It wasn’t idle thrill-seeking, after all, that kept her pushing ever onwards, but the need to sort things out, clear up messes, make sure that things were better once she’d finished. And on that score, she really fel
t she was doing pretty well.

  The jury was out on the whole situation at Nina’s work, though. She’d been there days now, poking diligently into things that, no doubt, Harry would think did not concern her, and she had yet to uncover real evidence of wrong-doing. But she had one day left. And she was damned if she was going to give that up.

  No, if Harry was going to worry himself frantic about what she was up to, there was only one possible solution. She wouldn’t tell him.

  It wasn’t lying, after all. It was just avoiding trouble. Maybe she was more like her brother than she’d ever known. He didn’t make promises he couldn’t keep, because he just didn’t believe in making promises at all. No woman, so far, had been able to get him far enough into the commitment zone to make one in the first place.

  She suddenly saw the charms of dancing around the truth, as though it was a maypole that she could garland with the bits that suited her, while ducking under and away when things were less appealing. Beth knew all about sins of omission and decided she didn’t really like the sound of them. She’d be living by a different principle – that of the need-to-know basis. If Harry couldn’t cope with the thought of her getting involved in things that didn’t directly concern her, then such things could just glide away into an interestingly misty hinterland where, in his mind at least, she sat at home most of the time with her son, and did nothing more taxing with her brain than the quick crossword in the newspaper.

  It was a little bit hard to believe that Harry would really prefer this Stepford Wife incarnation of her to the feisty, indefatigable woman who’d infuriated him and intrigued him by turns before – the person he’d found irresistible enough for them to get to this stage. But men, she decided, were strange creatures. She looked over at Harry, where he sat, visibly feeling diminished after having to admit he cared about her welfare. He didn’t like to feel vulnerable. She understood that – no-one did. But most people accepted it as the price of love.

  She’d come to a decision that ought to protect both of them, though, and she was determined that the whole business shouldn’t wreck their evening. She bustled to the kitchen, coming back with a bottle of red, then lighting the reasonably realistic gas fire and, after a moment’s hesitation, a scented candle for good measure. In her scheme of things, this was tantamount to showering Harry with roses while a violinist played That’s Amore behind the sofa.

  Beth pressed home her advantage by leaning forward and puckered up. Someone had told her that if you did this to a man, he was automatically pre-programmed to kiss you, whether he wanted to or not. Sure enough Harry, after giving her a single, distrustful glance, accepted the delicious inevitable. After a prolonged bout of what she still couldn’t help calling snogging, Harry was putty in her hands. Though some of him was not very much like putty at all, she thought with considerable satisfaction.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next morning, Beth lay in bed feigning the sleepy aftermath of bliss while Harry bumbled about getting his kit together. He sighed again over the appearance of his Magpie-modified trousers, stumbled over his shoes and generally made enough noise, with his sneaking off, to wake anything except a small boy. Thank goodness, Ben was always immovable once he’d finally been coaxed into bed, and today didn’t seem to be an exception, even when Harry almost tripped and fell on the stairs as Magpie, in a last bid to do him down, wound through his legs like an Olympic slalom champ.

  As soon as she heard the gentle click of the front door, Beth threw back her flowery duvet – not for the first time, contemplating getting a more unisex cover, then rapidly dismissing the idea as she loved waking up in a bouquet of flowers – and leapt into the shower. She got the breakfast sorted, then woke a tousle-haired Ben and frogmarched him out of bed.

  Luckily, Ben was too used to suffering the odd ways of grown-ups to bother asking why they were getting up earlier during the holidays than they did during term time. He yawned his way through a bowl of cocoa pops – Beth found that unfeasibly large amounts of sugar did help both of them put one foot in front of the other in the mornings – and off they went, trudging down the quiet street.

  Pickwick Road looked as though it had also had a high sugar morning. There was a dusting of frost on every hedge, sparkling in the pale wintry sun. All the cars had been iced with it overnight, like a row of glistening buns. There’d be some grumpy scraping of windscreens this morning, that was for sure. Beth made a mental note to buy some de-icing spray.

  She hardly used her little Fiat, now that Ben had pretty much finished with his tutoring, and the last time they’d had a frosty morning she’d been reduced to using her Tesco Clubcard to clear a little circle that she could see through. All her neighbours had, of course, been brandishing special ice-scraping implements, or at least Waitrose loyalty cards. She was determined not to be caught out again.

  ‘Brrrr,’ shivered Ben, and Beth picked up the pace. ‘Come on, quicker we get there, the quicker you can be doing some fun things with Wilf,’ she smiled.

  ‘When’s Charlie back?’ asked Ben.

  Beth turned to him, concerned. ‘Aren’t you having fun at Wilf’s?’

  Ben thought about it. He was a meticulously fair child. ‘It’s fine, but Charlie’s my real friend. And we’ve got a lot of stuff we need to do. There’s a new level we can get to in our game. You know the one, it goes like this, you turn the console like that and then press at the same time and a new screen comes up, and I really need to explain it to him…’

  Beth effortlessly tuned out Ben’s long explanation of the latest gaming techniques, and started worrying about the quality of his holiday instead. It hadn’t really been fair to leave him with Nina and Wilf for so long. He wasn’t going to be small forever; she should treasure these holidays with him while she could, exhausting though they could be. The time would be coming, very, very soon, when he wouldn’t hang out with her for any money. And instead of capitalising on his current acquiescence, she was parcelling him off to a friend while she did, what exactly?

  Maybe Harry was right. Maybe all this was just a silly, and potentially dangerous, waste of time. She remembered that moment with Potter with a shiver of horror. He’d really seemed capable of anything in those seconds. She had genuinely feared for her safety. And yet here she was, not only trooping back there, but getting there extra early. She really needed her head examining.

  But it was the last day – her last opportunity – before Potter shut up for the holidays. She didn’t know what his plans were for Christmas; they weren’t exactly on cosy discussion terms. And if she were honest, her own state of denial about the rapid approach of Father Christmas didn’t help much. She really, really needed to do a bit of shopping. And at least source some sort of turkey.

  If Potter’s financial state was as bad as Nina thought, he ought to be at home in Dulwich throughout the festivities, sharing a couple of crusts of dry bread with his nearest and dearest. But Beth could not see that appealing one little bit to Letty. She’d do her best to probe what the Potter Christmas would be like. It would be a good indication of the underlying state of affairs, she decided.

  As they got to Nina’s, Beth looked around at the other flats, remembering the garish lights and the jostling crowd last night. Today, everything was calm and quiet, the reindeers and snowflakes just outlines in the daylight, waiting patiently for their moment when darkness fell and they would be switched on again to such startling effect.

  There were one or two posters taped to the lamp posts, Beth noticed. She wasn’t sure if they’d been there yesterday. REWARD: Anyone with information on the poisoning of our beautiful girl, Rosie, call this number. Under the writing was a picture of the dog. The photo, which was a bit pixilated, had probably been taken on a phone, then blown up to a frankly unflattering size. Only a mother, or a father in this case, could call Rosie’s slathering chops beautiful, though Beth thought her soft dark eyes did look very kind. Poor dog. She certainly hadn’t deserved her awful fate.

  T
here were a few empty beer cans rolling around in the gutter, and the place had the look of somewhere that had partied hard, and perhaps not wisely. Nina poked her head around the door, her strawberry blonde curls standing on end. She held a fluffy dressing gown up to her chin and looked as though she’d only just surfaced. From inside, Beth heard the theme tune of SpongeBob SquarePants, suggesting Wilf at least had been an early riser.

  ‘You’re keen to get to it,’ Nina said through a large yawn, letting Ben sidle past into the flat.

  ‘Last day before Potter shuts up for the break. It’s now or never,’ said Beth, unable to take her eyes off Nina’s face. She’d rarely seen anyone look so sleepy, and yet be standing upright.

  ‘Sorry, it was pretty noisy last night till the early hours. Turned into a wake-cum-disco. Apparently, Rosie liked a dance,’ said Nina, rolling her tired eyes a bit.

  ‘Really?’ said Beth.

  ‘Any excuse,’ laughed Nina. ‘It was fun but went on that bit too long. I thought we’d have the rozzers round again. There’s lots of old folks round here who probably weren’t that thrilled, but in the end I just fell asleep.’

  ‘Was Wilf ok?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. He’d snooze through the last trump, that one. Up at the whack of dawn like you this morning, more’s the bitty. He’ll be so chuffed that Ben’s here. Not sure what we’re going to do without him.’

  ‘You’re welcome to come to us any time you like,’ smiled Beth, realising she’d become fond of Nina and would really miss her once this little investigation was over. ‘I’m hoping I’ll find something today, it’s my last chance. If I don’t, I’ll feel I’ve let you down.’

  ‘Nah, don’t be silly. I know you’ve given it a really good go. Tell you what, if you don’t find anything, that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. I’ll just take over and keep on digging. Get there eventually.’