An Accidental Shroud

by Marjorie Eccles

  On the morning after the storm, George Fontenoy awoke to an awareness of calamity, to an undefined feeling of trouble. Specifically, that something was wrong about the light filtering through the curtains. He could hear rain still lashing down as he got out of bed, walked stiffly to the window and drew the curtains on to a scene of carnage.

  The old cedar of Lebanon had finally succumbed. It lay across the length of the garden, just missing the house but almost obliterating everything else. It had, after all, been a mighty tree, nearly two hundred feet high and with a spread of fifty feet. The robinia had gone down with it, and the old magnolia, and it had flattened the massive spread of rhododendrons and the laurel hedge separating the garden from its neighbour. The difference was astonishing. The abundance of light, the excess of space created a new world. A double-decker bus cruised surrealistically past in the previously hidden road behind the garden wall. On the top deck people were staring and pointing out the fallen tree to each other. The cedar had been a well-loved landmark in Lavenstock, so much so that when workmen had arrived to lop overhanging branches which were said to be obscuring road signs, an immediate outcry had prevented them. Instead, it was the road signs which were moved.

  The tree was known to have been at least two hundred years old, as old as the house itself, at a guess. George had climbed it as a boy, gathered its fragrant cones for winter fires and to gild for Christmas decorations; his mother had wheeled a trolley out for tea beneath its spreading branches on summer afternoons. As a baby, he'd slept in his pram under its shade and, in their turn, his children. His wife, Margaret, had set up her easel and painted the house from there.

  Lightning was not supposed to strike in the same place twice but the cedar had been struck three times to his certain knowledge, each time damaging it and weakening its structure further. The last attack had been in the previous year, when one of its three massive limbs had been lost and the lightning had corkscrewed down the trunk, through the roots and into the earth, leaving great red weals in its bark which had wept for weeks.

  He too wept a little now, unashamedly, mourning the cedar and many other things besides, then braced himself to face the day. But the calamitous death of the tree wasn't, by a very long chalk, the worst of it. There would be more to weep over before long.

  8

  The two detectives stood in the cordoned-off alley in the pouring rain, she with her raincoat collar pulled up and a sou'wester jammed over her hair, he towering over her with the hood of his waterproof well down over his long, lugubrious face. The area had been taped off, a yellow tent covered the place where the body had lain, a police constable stood on guard to ward off the curious, though there was nothing to be seen.

  It wasn't unusual for the police to make a pick-up in Nailers' Yard. Drunk, drugged or homeless – occasionally dead. But it was unheard of, shocking and somehow faintly reprehensible for a man like that to have been found there in the small hours of a wild night, bleeding to death in a dirty puddle among the overturned dustbins and other debris that had been whirled into the cul-de-sac on Force 9 gusts. He'd been knifed and was in a bad way and, though he had immediately been taken to the County Hospital, he'd died before he could be put into intensive care.

  When one of the constables on patrol, diving for cover into the Rose's doorway, had literally stumbled over him, the alley had been mysteriously free of any of its regulars, the usual shapeless bundles huddled into cardboard boxes. The storm could have accounted for it. Be that as it may, anyone who might have witnessed the deed had long since departed elsewhere.

  There was nothing to identify the body. His wallet had disappeared along with his attacker, but a sharp-eyed nurse at the hospital had recognized him as he was later being prepared for the mortuary. He was Nigel Fontenoy, owner of Cedar House Antiques. Locally well-known, in his midforties, unmarried, said to be a fastidious and cultured man.

  'So what was he doing in Nailers' Yard?' Abigail Moon asked, a rhetorical question because the end of the passage had long been bricked up. There was wasteland beyond, but the yard itself now led nowhere except to the side entrance of the Rose.

  Carmody raised a cynical eyebrow. Fontenoy wouldn't have been the first to find his way to the side door and up to the private rooms, though he might well have been the first to come out alone.

  'Nobody's admitting to seeing him in there if he was. Cellini says there was only himself and two of his girls upstairs all last night. He shut early because of the weather. Says he doesn't know Fontenoy but he would say that, wouldn't he? Avoiding trouble's second nature to our Sal.' He swiped water from the end of his nose. 'Bloody rain.'

  The rain had been the killer's biggest ally. Getting the injured man to hospital had been a first priority; by the time the Scenes of Crime team had arrived, traces of any struggle that might have taken place had been obliterated. It was still raining in a steady downpour, though the gale had blown itself out, leaving the town to lick its wounds and assess the damage. Carmody looked without enthusiasm at the mess of stinking dustbin contents, fish and chip papers, burger boxes and worse, blown into a drift against the end wall, all of which would have to be meticulously picked over by the luckless search team.

  Nailers' Yard, older than the nightclub it flanked by several hundred years, had seen plenty of violence in its time. An inn had once occupied the place where the Rose now stood, having bequeathed to the club only its name. Iron nails had once been forged in the nail shops behind the hovels at the end of the yard where the nailers had lived. A rough, drunken lot they'd been, fighting drunk by Saturday night, spoiling for a punch-up with the local colliers, who were drunk all the time. There were no nailers now, no colliers, but nothing else much had changed in three or four hundred years. Yet the past couldn't be ignored. The man who'd been stabbed had had a past, which may have contributed towards his death.

  Abigail said, 'The weapon?'

  'No sight of it yet. Doubt if there will be. The river's too handy.'

  'Organize a search for it, Ted, all the same.'

  The side door of the Rose opened and they watched Cellini approach: a short, stout individual whose sallow complexion was not appreciably improved by the light filtering through a green and yellow striped golf umbrella.

  'You in charge here?' he demanded of Carmody in a broad Brummie accent. There was little left of Salvatore Cellini's Italian origins now except his name, his curly black hair and his big, dark, oh-so-innocent eyes.

  'No, Inspector Moon here is,' Carmody said as Abigail held out her hand. 'I'm Sergeant Carmody.'

  The nightclub owner looked taken aback. 'Where's Mayo, then? Job of this sort not important enough for him?'

  'Never mind that. And you mind your Ps and Qs, Sal. Detective Chief Inspector Mayo to you,' Carmody answered. 'And we're asking the questions, so likewise.'

  It made a change from domestic violence, thought Abigail. Which was what had been occupying her latterly, until her recent promotion. A highly stressful job, involving the sordid and messy results of mostly marital discord, but it was better than one of the safe backroom jobs all too often allocated to women. Or so she'd imagined, until picking up the pieces of shattered lives, and not always being able to put them together again, had somewhat altered her ideas.

  'Well, if you're in charge here, Inspector Moon, I'd very much appreciate it if you'd get them goons off of my premises,' Cellini grumbled, indicating the odd police bods hanging around. 'They won't find nothing – you ask me, they're just looking for excuses to get out of the rain and drink my coffee.'

  Abigail didn't blame them. She could have used a cup of hot coffee herself, her hands and feet were frozen. She looked at her watch. She had to report back to Mayo and had the PM to attend in an hour and could well push off and leave the rest of this to Carmody, grabbing a coffee at the station on the way. He was unflappable and reliable, and experienced enough after more than twenty years with the police in Liverpool to cope with a simple mugging. If it was simple.

/>   Of course it was. It would be a big mistake, just because this was the first actual murder she'd encountered in her new capacity (although some incidents had already come perilously close to it) to blow up this run-of-the-mill mugging out of proportion. But intuition told her it wasn't as straightforward as that. If Fontenoy hadn't been in the nightclub, then what had he been doing in Nailers' Yard? What had he been doing out at all, come to that, on a night like last night? Without even a coat?

  He'd been left for dead by whoever had stabbed him, but he hadn't been, not quite. Had the constable stumbled over him earlier, he might still be alive. An amateur killer then, and if not a mugger, then one who had taken some trouble to remove anything personal from the body. But why? Identification would have been delayed, but not for long. Fontenoy would soon have been missed. But whether it was a mugging gone wrong or not, the result was still murder.

  The question of what Mayo would do in the circumstances crossed her mind, but she didn't let it stay there. She disapproved of this retrograde kind of thinking. She was still responsible to him, however, and since he'd been largely instrumental in recommending her for this latest move up the ladder, seeing to it she was in the right place at the right time, she felt on her mettle not to make a hash of it. Besides, he was in no mood to tolerate incompetence at the moment. It was rumoured that he, too, was in for a promotion, though if true it wasn't doing his temper much good. She suspected there were reasons for that. Something of his private life was known to her, since she and Sergeant Alex Jones had become friends – Alex, who'd been injured in a shoot-out at a petrol station and was now on extended sick leave. Meeting death at close quarters concentrated the mind wonderfully and she was, Abigail knew, seriously questioning her future. Abigail had her own thoughts on how things might turn out, but only time would prove whether she was right or not.

  'I'm not happy about this, Ted,' she murmured in an aside to Carmody, and to Cellini, 'I'd like a few words with you myself, if you don't mind.'

  With an excessive show of holding on to his patience, the nightclub owner led the way in through the side door and into a small vestibule, off which a door opened into the main part of the premises. The club's front entrance was all black glass and chrome, a thirties decor with a glittering bar behind it, a couple of roulette tables, a square of parquet for shuffling around on and a minute stage draped with black velvet curtains artistically appliquéd with a couple of dancing nudes in eau-de-Nil satin and diamanté. All right, if that sort of thing turned you on. The whine of the vacuum cleaner could be heard coming from this part of the club. Cellini hesitated, eventually waving them towards the floor above, which offered none of the downstairs attractions, only a steep, narrow staircase and an indifferently decorated room at the top with a small corner bar, a few tables and chairs. The punters didn't come up here to look at the decorations.

  Once there, Cellini changed tactics. His truculent expression was replaced by one meant to be ingratiating. 'How about a drop o' summat as'll warm yer up, and I don't mean coffee?' His accent had grown even thicker. He smiled and looked sinister.

  Carmody said, 'Coffee'll do fine, ta.'

  Abigail divested herself of her dripping mac and pulled off her rain hat, freeing her thick, wavy bronze hair, recently cut and still feeling strange. She'd needed to mark her new authority with some kind of statement, but couldn't bring herself to go the whole hog, so it still wasn't very short. She was aware of Cellini's eyes on her even as he pushed open a door behind the bar and shouted over his shoulder for three coffees, automatically assessing the length of her legs, the size of her bra cup. She said coldly, 'Tell us what happened last night.'

  'Nothing happened, and I mean that, worse luck. Scheduled to be a big night, it was. I'd booked a male stripper – not what you might call a draw for most of our gentlemen customers, still, you have to cater for the fair sex nowadays, know what I mean? But apart from a couple of hen parties that left early we didn't get any women in, neither. Dead loss, it was. Buggered things up every which way, in fact, the weather last night, pardon my French, Inspector. Packed it in by eleven and shut up shop.'

  'What about up here?' Carmody asked.

  'Same applies. Anybody comes up here, he's been invited, and there wasn't nobody to invite, was there, Tammy?'

  'Like the grave it was,' agreed Tammy, a Dolly Parton blonde well past her sell-by date, wearing skin-tight jeans and white stilettos and a sweater cut low enough to cause serious concern when she joined them, propping her elbows on the table and leaning over the steaming cups of cappuccino.

  'Special customers up here, Sal?' asked Carmody.

  Cellini didn't bat an eyelid. 'That's right. Regulars. Them as likes a quiet drink.'

  Abigail said, 'Was Mr Fontenoy one of them?'

  'Never clapped eyes on him. Never set foot in the Rose, he didn't.'

  'Maybe he came in when you weren't here?'

  'I'm always here. I don't leave my business to nobody else.'

  Sal Cellini was the sort who lied even when it wasn't necessary, out of habit, but in this case Abigail believed him. He'd come a long way by devious means, and wasn't about to queer his own pitch. He wasn't that stupid. In his way, he was to be admired. He knew the police had a very good idea what he was up to but he was careful not to stray outside the boundaries of what was admissible – a little gambling, no drinking under age, no sex, at least not on the premises. If his girls made themselves available to his clients off the premises that was their own affair; it was unlikely they'd admit to Cellini taking a cut from their immoral earnings.

  Tammy, when questioned, said she'd left the club at just after eleven, in company with the other hostess, Debbie, a girl with whom she shared a flat around the corner. She was prepared to swear there'd been no one at all lying around in the alley when they left.

  'Sure? 'Course I'm sure! Couldn't hardly help being sure, could we? Any of that lot are around, you're lucky if you get past with nothing worse than a hand up your skirt!'

  Abigail drove back to Milford Road Police Station, assessing her chances of being kept on this case. As a newly made up DI, she was hopeful: she'd acquitted herself well when, as a sergeant, she had last worked on a murder inquiry with Mayo. And at the moment, he was hard-pressed.

  Things might just be in her favour.

  9

  Detective Chief Inspector Gil Mayo was an energetic Yorkshireman in his early forties, a big man with dark hair and searching, dark grey eyes. Sometimes on a short fuse, sometimes incommunicative, inclined to be intimidating, especially with those on the wrong side of the law or those who'd tried to pull a fast one and had reason to fear his wrath. He expected – and got – more from his officers than they thought they were capable of giving. Willingly, to their surprise.

  He watched Abigail carefully while she outlined what had gone on so far, while mentally surveying the resources he had available. The picture, as ever, was not encouraging. He himself was up to his ears, with at least half a dozen overlapping cases, one of them involving the prosecution of the armed robbers of a post office, an incident which had already led to one murder and might turn out to be a double one if the second victim died. He had no other DI available. Atkins was on the sick list and Kite, the sergeant who was like his right arm, had been seconded to a working party on the setting up of drug surveillance teams. In addition the super, Howard Cherry, was currently absent at a high-level conference and a good part of his workload had devolved upon Mayo. He needed someone experienced in this sort of investigation, and wondered whether to ask for someone from outside the division to help out, well aware of what Abigail Moon was hoping for.

  He recognized her ambition, having enough of it himself to be causing problems at the moment – decisions to make, weighing the disadvantages of promotion, of becoming a strategy man and all that went with it, against remaining a hands-on copper. Politics also came into it – you couldn't go on refusing promotion for ever, your motives became suspect, as though you were
aware that you'd reached the limits of your own competence. And when it got to that stage, those who counted soon began to believe it was true.

  He'd reason enough to feel that everything could be going for him, and yet his life was on a see-saw, professionally on the upside, personally right at the bottom. About as far down there as you could possibly go, his future with Alex being uncertain, to say the least. He did his best not to dwell on it. But last night, driving home and climbing the stairs to his empty flat he'd found himself doing just that, like probing a sore tooth.

  He was alone in the flat with only the ticking of his old clocks and Bert for company. His daughter Julie had settled herself in Australia, with no sign of wanting to return in the foreseeable future, and he missed her. Independence was something he'd encouraged in her, then found he didn't much like the form it had taken. As for Alex ... funny that he should feel her absence here so keenly – she had her own flat, had steadfastly refused to move in with him. He was slowly learning that he might have to accept the situation as it stood. To press her too hard into making that total commitment he himself wanted might be to lose her altogether.

  At any rate, nobody could say Bert wasn't pleased to see him. Mayo scratched the parrot's gaudy head as he dished out his food. Very choosy about his food, Bert, picking out the choicest seed from his mixture and disdainfully discarding the rest on to the floor around his cage.

  'At least there's somebody alive when I come in at night, mate,' Mayo told him. Self-pity wasn't something he encouraged in himself as a rule, and Bert very properly responded with a sharp nip to his finger. He was a bird who vocally craved affection but liked to remind people of his independence.

  There had been a postcard from Alex, wedged in between his gas bill and an offer of a timeshare in Portugal. She was enjoying the convalescent holiday with her sister Lois in Devon, the food was good, they'd been walking every day, healthwise she felt back to normal. She didn't say 'Wish you were here'.