Blue Murder

by Staincliffe, Cath

  She could barely make out the geometric pattern, would never have known it was there if she hadn’t been shown.

  ‘Went to wash his hands, or his shoes?’

  ‘Mr Tulley?’ Janine asked.

  Grassmere shook her head. ‘Different tread.’

  Janine waited at the edge of the area observing the socos at their work. She was eager to hear what they had found, what tiny clues pointed this way or that, but knew better than to press for information too soon.

  She heard someone call her name and turned to look. Someone approaching. Tall bloke, slim build, nice face … she recognised that face … Richard Mayne! What on earth was he doing here? He lived down in London, had done since Tom was a baby. He carried a protective suit closely rolled in his hand.

  ‘Richard!’

  He smiled. ‘Hello, stranger.’

  Janine felt slightly embarrassed as she realised what she must look like in the Andy Pandy suit.

  ‘What you doing on my patch, then?’

  ‘Whatever you say, boss. I’m at your service.’

  Janine shook her head. ‘I didn’t even know you were back.’ But it was great to see him. He was an excellent copper and a good mate. They’d had a laugh in the old days, competed for their sergeant’s badge, enjoyed spinning ideas off each other.

  ‘First day. I never really felt at home down south. Like another planet.’

  ‘Realised what you were missing?’

  ‘Something like that.’ There was a hint of mischief in his eye. She wondered what he meant exactly.

  Then Rachel Grassmere called to them. ‘We’ll turn him, now.’

  ‘Come and see what we’ve got,’ Janine told Richard.

  He unrolled the suit and began to pull it on.

  *****

  Jade was not allowed to play on the allotments. Mam told her very clearly with her mouth pulled back so you could see her gums and the brown bits where her teeth had gone all bad. ‘There’s bad men go there,’ she was told. ‘They get little girls like you and hurt them, cut them into little pieces.’

  Jade’s belly hurt and she wanted to go to Nana’s but if she said then Mam might guess something was up and start asking her and she couldn’t tell Mam that she’d been to the allotments.

  She sat on the back yard wall, watching. There was a funny tent there now like at a Funday and people waiting on the path but there weren’t any balloons or burgers. Mam was still asleep and Jade wasn’t allowed to wake her up. Not allowed. She was starving. Maybe if she had some food the tummy ache would go away. She jumped from the wall onto the top of the wheelie bin then down. In the kitchen she helped herself to two pieces of sliced white bread. She didn’t want jam today. Okay. She didn’t even want to think about that.

  She went and lay in front of the telly. She picked holes in the bread, pulling pieces away and rolling them between her fingers into small, grey balls. She chewed them one at a time. She flicked the channels. Boring tennis, boring film with no colours, boring car racing, boring golf, Channel 5 was so fuzzy you couldn’t tell what was on. She was so bored and her belly still hurt.

  *****

  Eddie Vincent stood at his bedroom window looking at the hustle and bustle below. He shivered and moved a little to the edge of the frame, peered out with rheumy eyes through the grubby, grey floral nets to the allotment beyond. He couldn’t get warm, no matter what.

  Stone-cold from the inside out. There were bobbies swarming all over the place. They’d put some sort of tent up around Matthew Tulley’s shed. He ought to go down there – tell them what he had seen. It was his duty And he had always done his duty. Oh, yes, he thought with rancour, he had always done his duty.

  But he was too sick. They’d come calling anyroad wouldn’t they? Door-to-door. On the knocker. Hah He’d loved the door-to-door. Canvassing in the old days. You always had a few grousers, them that nothing were good for and there was no persuading them otherwise. But the rest, they’d turned out for him. And he’d won, hadn’t he? Elected to the council for a good nineteen years, and then the Trots muscled in. Lads, wet around the ears, full of piss and wind and big ideas.

  Couldn’t do a thing while Thatcher was hacking away at everything. Thatcher, Thatcher, Milk Snatcher. He’d seen things change, then. People ground down, kids going hungry, turning wild. Apathy blooming like black mildew. And now: rickets back, TB back. Kids still dragged up in poverty. He hadn’t been into Manchester for months but when he used to go he saw all the homeless and the beggars. And the NHS close to collapse they were saying.

  Funny place to die, your allotment. He and Maisie had kept theirs on till the end of rationing. Lean years and they’d have been much worse but for the crops they raised there. Not that you could grow sugar or chocolate or butter or raise a pig. But they picked sackfuls of vegetables and fruit.

  When he was overseas, supplies had been regular at first, dull but ample. An army marches on its stomach after all, or crawls on it. It got harder later on. He’d eaten cat in Italy, trapped in the mountains with his chums; dark, stringy meat that made him gag but he forced it down. Not something he’d care to repeat. In fact, he’d no desire to relive any part of his life. His time was nearly up, he didn’t think he’d see the year out and with that thought there came a surprising sense of relief.

  He shivered again and the pain came, sluicing through his belly. He bent forward gasping, then edged along the wall to the chest of drawers. He picked up the bottle, no lid on it, and shook out a tablet. He swallowed it and turned and took two steps to the bed. He climbed in, shucking off his slippers. He pulled the eiderdown and candlewick bedspread round him, curled on his side. His arms wrapped round his belly trying to warm it. The pillow smelt fetid. He imagined clean sheets, smelling of fresh air, a hot water bottle with its rubber scent, warm milk. The comforts that Maisie would have rustled up for him. Or his mother. Dabbing Calamine on his measles, making mustard baths to break his fever, rubbing camphorated oil on his chest on bitter winter mornings. The curtains were still open, the room full of light but he was in bed now. Too weak to move. He closed his eyes.

  *****

  Dean listened to the older ones chatting to the driver as they boarded.

  ‘Cold enough for you, chuck?’

  ‘I hate it. I like the heat, nice and hot I like it.’

  ‘So I hear, but I was talking about the weather.’

  ‘Cheeky bugger.’

  ‘Oy, give her a ticket or we’ll be stuck here callin’ all day.’

  Teasing each other, comfortable, as though the bus belonged to them. The driver whistled all the way. Dean watched the city pass. The bleak suburbs of North Manchester, practically a different country from the south where he lived. No students stayed up this side. No media people, no pavement cafes here or tapas bars. Large areas of old terraced housing had been bulldozed to make way for inner relief roads. Retail parks with their curving paths and burglar-proof metal cabins lay between landscaped areas planted with vicious shrubbery.

  They went past the stadium they’d built for the Commonwealth Games 2002 and the Velodrome. Great that. Having the games. Sydney beat them for the Olympics, he could remember everyone waiting for the announcement back then, the feeling that they were up there with a chance. Gutted, they were. There was a big party down in Castlefield, he’d watched it on the telly, and people not knowing whether to laugh or cry. Least, after that, they’d got the Commonwealth, all them athletes in town, brilliant.

  With a lurch he remembered why he was running. He couldn’t go back inside. He couldn’t. Be Strangeways this time. Twenty-two, wasn’t he. Oh, Paula. Man, what would he tell her? Sick relative? Mate in trouble? Maybe if he turned it round. Told her Douggie needed him, being hassled or something. Make it sound dangerous so she wouldn’t try to come calling. What was he going to do if Douggie was away? The thought drenched his back with sweat. The driver started on a new tune. Oasis – You Gotta Roll With It. Aw, God, thought Dean, if only

  *****
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  The socos took positions at the shoulders, hips, knees of the body. Rachel Grassmere readied the camera and gave the count. ‘On, three. One, two, three.’

  They grunted with the strain as they rolled the corpse. Janine stepped back involuntarily as the mass of guts slithered from the abdominal cavity with a sucking sound and came to rest over the corpse and on the ground. Lurid, multi-coloured coils: a shocking sight. She wished she’d taken two Fisherman’s Friends. She thought of the book Catch 22 where the young air man was complaining about the cold as he held his guts in his fingers. She took a small breath through her mouth. And another.

  She gagged then, silently, feeling the sour wash hit her throat. She swallowed hard, kept her mouth tight shut. Everything sticky with blood. So much of it. Trousers and t-shirt stiff with the stuff. The left side of his face darker where the blood had pooled after death. She was amazed there’d been any left in him.

  ‘That is nasty. Very nasty.’ Richard said.

  ‘Thank God I skipped breakfast,’ said Janine.

  She turned away, from the sight and smell, drank in the cold, cleaner air, took a few steps down the plot. He had put a lot of work in here, Mr Tulley. She was no big gardener but she knew enough to recognise the fruits of labour. Rows of cabbages and the tops of root veg at one side. Plots clear and the ground prepared for more. She wondered who he was, this murder victim? What sort of man was he, who’d planted the seeds here and picked the harvest and pottered in his shed? In the hours and days to come she would be finding out everything about him. Nothing would remain private. It would become her property: his life; to study and explore, to sift through and sort and peer into in her efforts to find out who killed him. Who had robbed him of that life, left him to bleed on the cold, winter ground?

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Chief Inspector.’ They called her back. The deceased was now wrapped in a body bag which lay to the right of the path backed by a border of small cyclamens. The juxtaposition made her think of some modern art installation. Doc was packing his bag. Rachel Grassmere stood by the shed doorway. ‘Looks like it started in here,’ she said.

  Janine moved over and Richard followed. She peered inside, careful not to touch the doorframe and spoil any possible prints. The stench of death still tainted the air. The shed was large with potting tables on two walls and tools hanging on the third. Neat and tidy. No smashed pots or spilt compost.

  ‘We’ve blood spray to the wall either side of the door and the floor here. We’ll try for prints on the door frame, the gate, door, tap on the water butt over there.’

  She took in the splashes, ochre against the greying wood of the shed. ‘Rough wood.’ Janine noted.

  ‘Yep. Not promising anything.’

  ‘Probably a knife,’ Richard said.

  ‘Well spotted, Sherlock,’ Janine said wryly.

  Janine retraced her steps to the young PC at the gate.

  ‘Constable.’

  ‘Yes, sir – ma’am.’

  ‘What else do we know about Mr Tulley?’

  He rifled through his pages. ‘He lives round the corner, Ashgrove. It’s a big house on the corner, further up. He’s a teacher,’ he added, ‘the deputy head at Saint Columbus High.’

  Deputy head. A professional man, then. Perhaps the allotment had been his way of unwinding, escaping from the demands of busy school life.

  ‘Lives alone?’

  The eyes panicked, a fine sweat burst onto the upper lip. ‘Don’t know.’

  More officers arrived to be briefed by Rachel Grassmere for a fingertip search of the allotment and nearby area. Janine watched them gather round for their instructions and she signalled with a wave that she was on her way. She removed the bunny suit and slippers and bagged them. They would be retained in case there were any allegations of cross-contamination by the defence should charges be brought. She would call on Mr Simon, the man who’d found the body, and hear the gist of his story. Richard came over to join her. She asked him to set house-to-house in motion and then come and find her.

  *****

  ‘What’s going on?’ Mam said.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Jade said quickly.

  ‘Out there,’ Mam hung onto the sink, stood on tip toes to try and see over the wall. ‘Something is.’ She opened the back door and went out. Jade followed her. Their back gate was broken. The wood had gone all soft and crumbly and one day when Mam was putting the wheelie bin out the top hinge had come loose. Now you had to open it carefully or it swung over and nearly fell right off. Jade never bothered, she just climbed up onto the wheelie bin and over the wall instead.

  Jade watched Mam lift the gate open and go out into the back alley. Jade climbed up to sit on the wall. The stone was cold through her clothes.

  ‘What is it?’ Mam asked.

  ‘They’ve found a body,’ one of the neighbours said.

  ‘What, down there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do they know who it is?’

  ‘Mr Tulley, deputy at St Columbus.’

  They were all excited, like it was a special on East Enders or something. Good and awful all mixed up.

  ‘His insides were hanging out.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘Who’d do a thing like that?’

  ‘Like the Ripper.’

  ‘Only saw him last Sunday at church.’

  ‘He teaches our Joanne.’

  No one bothered Jade. There was a lump of moss on the wall. It was dry and soft, like a fairy carpet. Jade stroked it. If she looked close there were tiny brown stalks sticking up from the green with little bells on the end of them. She flicked them with her fingers.

  They talked for ages then Mam said she felt rough and had to go in. She made a drink and took one of her tablets. Pretty soon she started looking sleepy again. Jade said, ‘Can I get some sweets?’

  ‘I don’t know how much there is left,’ Mam said.

  ‘I’ll look.’ Jade brought Mam’s purse.

  ‘Two twenties and a fifty and two tens.’

  Mam gave her twenty pence.

  ‘Can I go to Megan’s?’

  ‘Come straight back if they’re not there.’

  Jade got lollies, they lasted longest. There was no answer at Megan’s. When Jade got back she heard her mam being sick in the bathroom. Yeuch. Double yeuch. Jade waited for ages before she went upstairs. Mam was back in bed. Just a lump under the duvet. Sometimes Mam’s tablets made her sick and sometimes the vodka did and sometimes just a bug.

  *****

  Janine took a bite of chocolate. ‘I hate this bit.’

  ‘Waiting to break the news?’ Richard asked, opening his packet of crisps.

  They were sitting in Janine’s car outside the Tulleys’ house.

  ‘More the forked tongue. Weighing them up. What’s real grief supposed to look like anyway?’

  ‘You do it very well, as I remember.’

  She tipped her head to acknowledge this. ‘A random attack? Or someone who knew him, knew the allotments? Think we can rule out aggravated burglary. Someone after his Flymo doesn’t quite cut it.’

  ‘Might be school not home, trouble in the staff room?’ Richard munched. ‘So you finally got it – your own investigation?’

  ‘Beat you! The Lemon didn’t like it.’

  Richard frowned.

  ‘Hackett,’ she explained. ‘Suits him, don’t you think?’ She screwed up her mouth, wrinkled her face. ‘He’s still getting over my promotion to Chief Inspector. But we’re shorthanded and he’s being leaned on to meet his minority targets – and despite my size, I’m a minority.’

  ‘And O’Halloran’s still hanging on?’ They’d both worked with O’Halloran in the old days.

  ‘Bully Boy. Too right. Lemon won’t touch him.’

  ‘I heard,’ he hesitated, ‘you and Pete.’

  She took a breath. ‘Tina. Latest home help. Helped herself all right.’

  Richard shuffled in his seat. ‘Did he know … you were preg
nant?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. We’d both been in deep shock for a few weeks already. First weekend alone, in Barcelona, for our sixteenth anniversary – big, romantic gesture: all a decoy.’

  Richard looked puzzled.

  ‘He was sleeping with her way back then: bastard. Anyway, too much Rioja and bingo: our own special souvenir.’ She patted her stomach. ‘I’d have settled for a pair of castanets and a straw donkey.’

  Richard laughed. She had always been able to make him laugh.

  ‘How are the kids?’

  ‘Tom’s six, now.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘Been rough on them. Pete’s still on air traffic control, shifts. They barely see him some weeks. They miss him.’

  ‘And you?’

  She sighed. ‘Good days, bad days. It’s not been long. I gave him a second chance, with the baby and all. He moved in with her.’ And it still hurt. That he’d been willing to walk away from all they had, the kids, the marriage, their lives. For what?

  ‘What about you?’ She broke another square of chocolate off.

  ‘Single again.’

  ‘Really?’ She was surprised. Had assumed he’d moved back with his wife. ‘You and Wendy?’

  Richard nodded and then they both heard the sound of a car slowing. Watched the silver Volvo turn into the driveway and park.

  Janine observed the woman, slim, dark-haired, petite, laden with packages as she got out of the car and opened the door to Ashgrove. It wasn’t strictly her job to inform next of kin but in a case of murder the spouse was always a prime suspect and she wanted to scrutinise Mrs Tulley’s reaction to the news. She recorded the time in her notebook.

  She turned to Richard. ‘Take notes while we’re in there.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  ‘Let’s go.’ She braced herself for the difficult task ahead.