Echoes of Silence

by Marjorie Eccles

  Richmond saw what she meant about crowded. A couple of dozen in here and they’d be pushing the walls out. ‘I can see why you’re busy if that’s a sample of your food,’ he said, as she began clearing his dishes, ‘You do the cooking yourself?’

  She seemed pleased and told him she did, and then, as she took his payment, she said, ‘Maybe I’ve been talking out of turn, but … there’s something about him that doesn’t half give you the creeps, that Nagle, I mean. You notice his eyes?’

  Richmond had. Grey and flat. Cold, empty. ‘How do you find him and his wife, as neighbours, Mrs …?’

  ‘Hoddinott. Susan.’ She screwed up her pretty face. ‘Hard to say. She’s all right, I suppose, when you get to know her. But him? I’d rather have his dog. This one, anyway.’

  ‘He has others?’

  ‘Used to have a pit bull terrier, horrible thing it was, till it savaged a little lad down in Rumsden and had to be put down.’

  On the upper floor of Low Rigg Hall, Philip Denshaw had what it had amused Freya to refer to as his executive suite. It was far from grand, however, comprising a small sitting-room, an even smaller bedroom and a bathroom. But it suited him, gave him all he needed in the way of comfort. When he had come to live here, after Laurence’s death, selling his own house and almost its entire contents, he had first made sure he could get his piano in, his music books and all his paraphernalia for listening to music. Then he’d had it painted white, installed a couple of comfortable chairs and bookshelves, and that was that.

  He sat back in a chair that had, over the years, accommodated itself to his shape, listening to a Radio Three concert, the score open on his knees, not reading it, however, but watching through half-closed eyes the small, silent figure perched on the arm of the opposite chair.

  ‘I’m almost sorry she’s dead,’ Elf said suddenly. ‘Almost. You’ll miss her. You thought a lot about her, didn’t you?’

  The words cut brutally across the third movement of the Bruch Violin Concerto and Philip’s eyes flew wide open. He wondered what on earth had given her that idea, it had never occurred to him to believe that anyone could view his relationship with Freya in that light. Everything they’d ever been to each other had been a matter of expediency. But he supposed he would miss her being there. He hadn’t yet allowed himself to think of the changes on the way.

  Her death had caused all sorts of strangenesses – that he should be talking to Elf for one thing, like this, when they hadn’t spoken anywhere nearly so intimately for years. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ he rebuked, genuinely repelled. ‘You’ll miss her, too.’

  ‘Me?’ Elf looked sardonic.

  ‘She was very good to you,’ he reminded her gently.

  ‘And never let me forget it! Everything she ever did for me I had to be grateful for, every minute of the day.’

  ‘That’s a cynicism that doesn’t become you.’

  Her chin went up, she looked out of the window, watching the noisy, bad-tempered crows. ‘One thing I’ve always wondered,’ she said, turning back to face him. ‘Did you ever tell her about - that day? In the garden?’

  Shocked to his conventional core, colour rising to his pale cheeks, he stared at her. ‘Of course not! And I don’t think it’s a subject we should discuss, either.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you do. You never want to face anything unpleasant, do you, Philip? You’ve always hidden behind someone else, somebody’s always made out for you, let you off the hook -’

  ‘Elvira. Do you realise who you’re speaking to?’

  She looked at him then, her little pixie face creased, her ageless black eyes curiously blank. ‘Oh, yes. I never forget that. And I don’t forget what you thought you saw, in the garden, all those years ago -’

  ‘You’d better not go on.’ Abruptly he reached out to the radio and turned up the volume, but the exquisite violin cadences were now too loud and screamed on his taut nerves. He adjusted it back and her voice rose above the music.

  ’ – what you thought you saw. There was nothing wrong about it, it was quite innocent, until you came and destroyed that innocence.’

  ‘It wasn’t innocent as far as Peter was concerned!’

  ‘Peter wanted to paint me, that’s all!’

  ‘In the nude? An eleven-year-old girl?’

  ‘He just wanted to paint me, standing near the pink rose. He had this idea – part of it was in full flower, part just coming into bud -’

  ‘Be quiet!’ The colour had left his face. He realised he was shaking and with an effort lowered his voice. ‘It was – depraved.’

  She stared at him, unblinking, ignoring the naked pain in his eyes. ‘Are you sure that’s what you felt? Or maybe you were just jealous? You’ve always liked little girls, haven’t you, Philip?’

  ‘How dare you?’ This was unbearable. His heart was jumping. His eyes had filled with tears. ‘How dare you say that – to me, of all people?’

  ‘Look at it, Philip, face it. You’ve made other people what they are by what you’ve done. Or what you haven’t done – ’

  ‘What I haven’t done? I’ve done everything for you!’

  ‘- retreating into your own little world. Look what’s become of all of us. Me, and Peter. Especially little Beth.’

  He was breathing so heavily his voice came out in a rasp. He snapped off the radio, his pleasure in that particular piece ruined for ever. ‘Exactly how much more do you want from me, Elvira?’

  ‘I think I want justice, at last. For want of a better word.’

  He was suddenly unbearably weary, filled with sorrow for what might have been, remembering the delightful child she once was, consumed with overwhelming pity for her. For the soft, vulnerable, unprotected creature beneath the brittle shell. Pity for himself, too. ‘Don’t you really mean revenge?’ he asked softly, sadly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Elf said, looking suddenly, desperately sorry. Sometimes she couldn’t think what came over her. Sometimes, she really hated herself.

  Outside, the first snow flurry came in on the wind.

  11

  Friday, 13th November had lived up to its reputation for being unlucky, as far as Wyn Austwick was concerned. That was almost certainly the day she’d been murdered, and you couldn’t get much unluckier than that. Glancing at the autopsy findings, Richmond saw that no more precise time of death could be arrived at: the pathologist could only confirm her original opinion that the body had been in the water for approximately three days, would go no further.

  Reading through the rest of the report, cutting through the medical jargon, a picture emerged of the victim being attacked by a right-handed person wielding a heavy blunt instrument; she had apparently received a blow to her left temple which had caused her to fall, in the process catching the other side of her head on something sharp-cornered. Both wounds had caused bleeding, but which of them was the crucial factor in her death was at this point academic, since the pathologist indicated the strong probability was that she had died within minutes of being attacked. But that wasn’t all, as he found a moment later when he received a call from Gillian Hardy herself. Always a conscientious woman, she told him she was ringing as a follow-up to her report. Had he read it through, yet?

  ‘Not quite. It just landed on my desk a few minutes ago.’

  ‘She was in trouble, as you’ll see if you read on. In addition to the fatal injuries, there was an abnormality … the uterus -’

  ‘I hadn’t got so far,’ Richmond intervened hastily. ‘Serious?’

  ‘She was going to need treatment, but chances of recovery in these cases … possible. If you get there in time, that is …’ Guarded, like doctors everywhere.

  ‘Would she have known?’

  ‘Hard to say. Probably no severe pain yet, but not very comfortable, certainly. A diagnostic operation would have confirmed. She should’ve been seen already, but you know how some people react to illness – they shut their eyes to the problem until it’s too late. Don’t want to kno
w, pass it off as being nothing, a temporary hiccup that’ll go away if they ignore it or have a good holiday to tone them up … that sort of thing.’

  ‘I do know,’ Richmond said feelingly, being more than a little inclined that way himself.

  ‘I can say I found no traces in her blood or her organs of drugs, but that could depend on the time of day she took her medication, if any. It’s debatable whether she’d have been given anything. If she had, and she’d been due to take it around the time she was killed, the previous dose could already have passed through her system … Well, that’s it. I just thought you ought to know.’

  ‘Much appreciated. Thanks. What bearing it’ll have, if any, I’m not sure, but thanks all the same.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  He sat thinking for a moment or two after she’d rung off, then picked up the phone again and spoke to Sally Jenner. ‘Find out who her doctor was and see what he can tell us, will you?’

  While he waited for the answer, he reached for what had come through from Forensics and Scenes of Crime. The reports were necessarily incomplete as yet, but he’d asked for quick results, and couldn’t grumble at the speed with which they’d sent all that had so far been gathered and analysed. There seemed no doubt that she’d met her death in her own home, and that her assailant was probably someone she knew, or at any rate someone she’d let into the house, since there had been no indication of forced entry. No mystery either about the sharp-cornered object against which she’d fallen: this had been a wooden, rectangular telephone shelf, attached to the wall in the narrow hallway of the bungalow by fancy wrought-iron brackets. An attempt had been made to clean blood off the table, the walls and the carpet – on the face of it successfully, but the Scenes of Crime team had taken the place apart and stringent forensic tests had extracted microscopic traces of blood from the carpet fibres, and from underneath the table, where the blood had flown upwards. A search of the house had yielded nothing likely to have been used as the murder weapon.

  A tidy murderer, as tidy as his victim, just to make things more difficult.

  An opened pack of black polythene bin liners had been found in a kitchen drawer, and the officer in charge of Scenes of Crime was of the opinion that her body had been taken out of the house wrapped in one of them. ‘That’s where he wasn’t so tidy,’ he’d reported at that morning’s briefing. ‘The rest of the bags were stuffed any-old-how back into the drawer, with a corner of one sticking out. He slipped up there. Panicky, maybe.’

  ‘Lucky, though,’ Richmond said glumly. To have had such a quiet area, a road running down the side of the house where a car could have been parked to help him get away. No one around to see when a body was dragged out of the house, and finally driven away to Rumsden Garth. Where there was little that could be expected in the way of tyre tracks from the flinty surface of the approach to the quarry, either.

  But all was not gloom. Arriving at the last page of the forensic findings, Richmond found a nugget of gold. Maybe the killer hadn’t been so lucky as all that, after all. For among the dust particles carefully vacuumed up from the carpet in the hallway and painstakingly sifted through, there had been discovered a scattering of short, grey dog hairs. For all he knew, there could be dozens of breeds of dogs with short grey hairs. But only one breed interested him. Greyhounds.

  The telephone rang again. This time the call was from the legal firm of Rowlands, Marshall and Trimble, requesting an appointment for Mrs Marshall to speak with someone senior. Her secretary implied that it was on a matter of some urgency, but having just returned home from a winter holiday in the Azores, Mrs Marshall found the rest of her day was fully booked. She had time free the following morning, however. Accordingly, Richmond made an appointment to see the solicitor at her office for nine thirty the next day.

  In the incident room, two constables had been sweating over travel agencies and airline manifests with no result whatsoever as to the murdered woman’s holiday intentions. As yet, there was no indication that she’d booked an airline ticket to anywhere, let alone evidence of hotel accommodation. Maybe she’d intended to cross the Channel, taking her own car, and drive to wherever she was going in Spain, that was possible. She’d been all ready to set off, with her case packed – only a small suitcase, not much in it. Her large leather shoulder-bag had been stuffed inside. Wallet, purse and credit cards intact, but no sign of a passport, there or in the house. So had she been intending to go to Spain at all, in fact? Two people thought she had – Mrs Dalton, and Eddie Nagle, since she’d told them so, but she might have changed her mind, or said Spain because it sounded grander, when she was really going somewhere unadventurous in England.

  The young DC, working on his first murder case, wasn’t impressed by the importance of the task he’d been allotted: he felt his undoubted powers of deduction could have been better employed than in knocking on doors, questioning those neighbours not already seen. All of whom, so far, professed to have seen or heard nothing, to have had no more than a passing acquaintance with the dead woman. Most of them were out at work all day, the rest seemed to consist of geriatrics – elderly, housebound, immobile if not bedridden. God, thought Thompson, hoarse with shouting above TV sets turned up to full volume because the owners were deaf, God, I’d shoot myself first.

  Old Mrs Dalton, across the road from the victim’s bungalow, peeping from behind her lace curtains, had seen him knocking on doors. She hobbled to her own front door and called out to him. ‘I’ve remembered something,’ she said as he came up the path. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea while I tell you. I’ve just mashed.’ He’d already refused tea four times, but decided it might be prudent in this case to accept, and was glad he had when it came, hot, strong and sweet and accompanied by mince pies.

  ‘I make a few at a time to freeze for Christmas. Go on, help yourself, have a couple while they’re still warm,’ she said, pushing the plate across to him in the trim little kitchen, neat as a pin and smelling of spicy Christmas baking. Still game, she was, despite the handicap of the zimmer frame. ‘I just remembered, when they brought me back from the day centre at about quarter past four, there was a car at the end of the avenue. There wasn’t hardly any room for Jim – that’s the ambulance driver – to turn round.’

  What colour and make was it? Good heavens, how was she supposed to know that? Even before she had cataracts forming on both eyes, she’d didn’t know one make of car from another. It was late afternoon, the light was bad. ‘But it was a funny little car – like a Dodgem – you know, them with a pole up the back at the fairground.’

  Could well be a Ford Ka. They were a bit like Dodgem cars, thought Thompson, suddenly very chuffed with the old girl. Nippy little motors, his girlfriend was hankering after one.

  ‘Would it be the murderer?’ she asked eagerly. Thompson, mindful of warnings about scaring the elderly by exaggerating the amount of crime there was around, assured her it was unlikely, though he hadn’t the least idea. She looked disappointed.

  He thanked her and, nicely full of mince pies and hot tea, knocked on the door of the other half of the semi-detached bungalow where Wyn Austwick had lived, relieved at last to find the door answered by someone in his own age group.

  Mrs Austwick’s immediate neighbours were a young couple who worked in the same insurance office and came home together, usually arriving about six. But on Friday night they’d called at the DIY supermarket to pick up some paint and wallpaper - that’s why they were at home now, they were taking part of their holiday entitlement to do some decorating before relatives came to stay at Christmas. On Friday, they hadn’t reached home until around seven. Ian Macallan had been hanging his coat up in the hall when he’d heard a crash, followed by further unidentified noises, from the house next door.

  ‘Sounded like she was throwing the furniture around!’ he said. They’d been surprised, because sounds from their neighbour were rare. Except sometimes, they’d heard her singing. They’d heard she was a member of a choir. />
  ‘We never had any trouble with noise, kept herself to herself,’ his wife added, a trifle wistfully. Perhaps she’d have liked a show of friendship, a wee Scottish lassie far from home.

  Thompson felt inordinately pleased with himself. All this was going to earn him Brownie points. Sounds like that, he was sure, could mean only one thing. His euphoria was only slightly deflated when he learned they hadn’t seen any sort of vehicle parked nearby. So what about the car Mrs Dalton had seen earlier?

  Chief Inspector Richmond, in the incident room when Thompson arrived with his new information, didn’t seem sanguine about the outcome of that one. Four fifteen? Dusk, not yet dark, but still risky to be hauling a dead body about. ‘Impractical, too, getting a body into a little Ka – if that’s what it was,’ he added, with a funny look on his face. ‘Someone parked there with a perfectly legitimate reason, no doubt, but get the ambulance driver – he should remember it.’ He changed his tune, however, when Thompson reported what the neighbours had heard. Even went so far as to say, ‘Good work, Thompson.’

  Sally Jenner came into the DCI’s office, triumphant. ‘Well, we’ve found out why she didn’t make any holiday arrangements, sir! She was registered with the Coledale and Salter practice, on Dr Salter’s list. He’d recently referred her to a specialist at the Infirmary, who’d recommended an immediate hysterectomy. She was booked in for Friday evening, to prepare for her op the next day, but of course she didn’t turn up.’

  ‘Didn’t they try and find out why?’

  ‘They did. They rang her two or three times but couldn’t get any answer, so they gave up. Apparently people do that – just don’t turn up, get cold feet, I suppose, and who can blame them? Then somebody saw in the paper that she’d been murdered, and that was that, as far as they were concerned.’