Grave Stones

by Priscilla Masters

  ‘I think so,’ Joanna said. ‘I think you’re probably one of the few people who can give us any sort of clue as to when he died.’

  ‘It must have been in the early part of last week,’ Kathleen said. ‘Bodies don’t smell straight away.’

  Of course. She was an animal woman. No fool.

  ‘We’ll probably want to interview you again,’ Joanna said. ‘Is there anything you want to add?’

  The Westons exchanged a glance and both shook their heads.

  Joanna left them her mobile and direct dial number and they left.

  When they were safely back in the car she gave vent to her feelings. ‘So tell me more about Old Spice.’

  Korpanski grinned. ‘He’s a particularly handsome Tamworth boar.’ He gave Joanna a sly, sideways look. ‘I suppose he’s a widower now. Poor old Old Spice.’

  ‘Yes. An innocent victim. A bystander to our crime. Shame he can’t talk to us and give us a few clues.’ She and Mike smiled as she handed him the phone. ‘Well, even if he can’t talk to us we’d better find out how this princely boar is.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘The pig is doing fine,’ Korpanski said in a voice almost quivering with merriment. ‘The vet’s fed him and watered him and he’s going to be all right. He’s letting Old Spice stay at another farm in the district, where he’ll be well looked after.’

  ‘Not lodging with our Judy, then?’

  Korpanski made a face. ‘Being as her address is some tiny little town house, I don’t think so. The neighbours might complain.’ They both chuckled at the vision of a neat suburban house with a pig snorting and foraging in the garden.

  The levity about the pig made them both feel better and Joanna promised herself a visit to see Old Spice.

  It was almost six o’clock by the time they were ready to call on number 4 Prospect Farm Estate. As they got out of the car, Joanna studied the house. Even from the outside, it had a different air around it. Silly, Joanna thought, but it felt distinctly cooler. It was as though what sun there was simply didn’t reach this property.

  She frowned and tugged Korpanski’s sleeve as they approached to draw his attention to an upstairs window. They both looked up. All the windows were shrouded. But in this central window there was a small, twitching gap in the curtains. A woman was watching them. She looked pale-faced, with long grey hair and staring eyes.

  Joanna told herself not to be so silly. This was a modern house in the middle of a small housing estate, yet it alone had an air of mystery; it appeared sinister and mysterious. But apart from the drawn curtains, the face watching them from the window and the sunless state of the house, it was hard to see why it was infused with such an air of intrigue.

  She watched the two people approaching the property, knowing already that they were detectives. The woman, who exuded life – health, strength and vitality – and the large man who walked at her side. She resented their presence. She didn’t like visitors. She descended the stairs slowly.

  Joanna got a shock when Mrs Parnell opened the door, even before she’d got around to knocking. She stared at her, thinking what a bloodless, Gothic creature she was. Somewhere in her forties, she was dressed from head to foot in black, in trousers and a polo-necked sweater. There was only one bright spot of colour; a thin slash of red across what passed for a mouth.

  Morticia, Joanna thought. Morticia Addams.

  ‘Yes?’

  Even her voice was strange, flat and distant.

  Joanna was even more taken aback.

  ‘I know who you are,’ ‘Morticia’ said. ‘I don’t need to see your identity cards. I knew you would come.’ She ignored Joanna’s outstretched hand. No, not ignored. She knew it was there but looked at it with distaste, disgust, as though it had been covered in slime and bypassed it. Even Joanna looked at it and wondered why it was so repulsive to this odd woman.

  ‘Excuse me,’ ‘Morticia’ said as she walked back into the house, leaving Joanna and Mike uncertain whether they should follow. Hesitatingly, they did.

  The interior of the house was equally bizarre: dark red walls, doors stained mahogany. They walked through a long hall lined with gilded mirrors, wondering where she had disappeared to. They heard the sound of running water ahead.

  She stood framed in the doorway and led the way into the kitchen, surprisingly modern in white. No other colour but white. Clinical white. White walls, white units, white worktops, even a white, tiled floor. The stark, bright white of an operating theatre. It was a complete contrast to the rest of the house.

  For once Joanna was lost for words. She couldn’t decide what sort of woman Mrs Parnell was: eccentric, affected, simply odd or stark staring completely barking mad. Her inability to get a handle on her interrogatee stopped her asking the first question.

  Luckily for her, Teresa Parnell took the lead.

  ‘I expect you’re here about the poor dead farmer,’ she said in her pancake voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know he polluted the atmosphere?’

  Again Joanna felt at a disadvantage. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He was filth,’ Teresa said. ‘Filth.’ Her eyes swept round the operating theatre room.

  ‘In what way?’

  Joanna looked around the kitchen for clues as to this woman’s character. There were no jugs or kettles, weighing scales or any of the other paraphernalia of a normal working kitchen. She found only one clue. The sole ornament. On the wall hung a print of Christ tearing open his garment to expose his bleeding heart.

  Teresa Parnell got up without a word and began washing her hands. Methodically, like a surgeon, in the way that Joanna had watched Matthew scrub and glove-up for a post-mortem. She watched, fascinated, as the woman rubbed her palms, hands, up and down the fingers, not missing the thumb, a careful rinse and drying off thoroughly with a towel.

  Mrs Parnell seemed to find nothing strange in breaking off a conversation purely to wash her hands.

  ‘He was…’ Her pause seemed to go on for ever. ‘Malodorous,’ she said. ‘And evil gives off an odour.’

  Joanna and Mike exchanged uneasy glances. This woman ought to be on medication or an inpatient in a mental hospital – if there were such places any more.

  It was time to cut to the business and get out of here. ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Morticia’ was stroking her long grey hair. It made a rasping sound. Wiry and dry. There was something repulsive about the texture. ‘See him?’ she said. ‘I don’t see him. I smell him. I know he is there when I smell him.’

  Joanna was losing patience with this woman. Her oddness, she had decided, was surely an affectation?

  ‘OK,’ she said briskly, thinking, I can play this game. ‘When did you last smell him?’

  ‘Dead – or alive?’

  Joanna and Korpanski exchanged another glance.

  ‘OK, let’s start with alive?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Was this purely a tease?

  ‘Dead, then?’

  ‘He died at eleven o’clock on Tuesday the 11th of September. The same date as the twin towers tragedy,’ ‘Morticia’ said, with more than a touch of melodrama.

  Joanna fixed her eyes on her. ‘How do you know that?’

  Teresa Parnell had an asymmetrical face; one eye that slanted while the other lay straight, a mouth that curved on one side and was straight on the other. Joanna found her so odd it was difficult to concentrate on her words. ‘I am psychic,’ she said solemnly, holding her newly washed hands out.

  I’m not buying this, Joanna thought, and met Korpanski’s eyes with a sceptical lift of her eyebrows.

  ‘I can close my eyes and I simply know things,’ Teresa continued. ‘I am sensitive to the sufferings of people. I can feel their unhappiness.’ She looked straight at Joanna. ‘As I can recognise your uncertainty, Inspector. I knew you would be coming. You had to.’ She turned her head towards Korpanski, wafting her grey hair around her face like a free-floating spider’s
web. ‘I wasn’t so clear about you, though.’

  Thank goodness for that, Korpanski thought, distinctly uncomfortable at the thought of being in this woman’s head.

  ‘It could have been somebody else.’

  She stood up and they knew the interview was at an end. Joanna gave it another shot. ‘What do you actually know about Jakob Grimshaw’s murder?’

  ‘Morticia’ stared past her. ‘He was a long time dying,’ she said.

  ‘Just for interest, Mrs Parnell, where were you on Tuesday the 11th of September, around mid-morning?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Did you hear anything, see anything?’

  Joanna was frustrated, believing that the woman was hiding behind her strangeness. Her temper was getting the better of her. ‘We’re investigating the savage and cruel murder of an old man. An old man who had worked hard all his life and didn’t deserve such a dreadful end. If you really know anything or can help us in our investigation you must tell us.’ She fixed the woman with a hard stare. ‘Withholding information from the police in a murder investigation is a serious crime. Now then, I’ll ask you again: is there anything concrete that you can tell us that might help us track down this evil killer and prevent him or her from ever doing anything like this again?’

  Teresa Parnell rose to the anger in Joanna’s voice. ‘You might not have noticed,’ she said, ‘but I keep my curtains tightly closed.’

  ‘And peep out of the windows.’ Joanna was aware that this was turning into a slanging match but she wanted to flush the woman out of her mystic, affected, nebulous comments.

  ‘I saw nothing,’ Teresa said, ‘except in my mind.’

  ‘We will be asking you to come down the station to make a formal statement,’ Joanna said. ‘I suggest you try to document anything that you saw, heard or smelt.’

  Annoyingly she was tempted to ask her straight out who had killed old farmer Grimshaw but even though she thought this woman was talking rubbish she was aware that it could still influence the police investigation. She was equally aware that keeping an open mind was a vital ingredient in police work. Lose that and you can make false arrests, have the case rejected by the Crown Prosecution Service or even if they passed it, have it thrown out of court. It had never happened to her yet but she had watched plenty of colleagues fall into this pit. She didn’t want the same to happen to this case.

  Teresa Parnell shook her head, walked with them to the door, then engaged Joanna once again. ‘Just remember, my dear,’ she said. ‘Pearls are for tears. And black ones – well…’

  Joanna couldn’t stop herself from touching her ring superstitiously. Ignoring Mike’s sudden look of sympathy, she headed for the car.

  ‘I hope you didn’t take any notice of that,’ he said when they were safely out of earshot. ‘She’s just a weirdo.’

  ‘I know.’ She was still fingering her ring. ‘I know that. But the trouble is, Mike, how much of her statement should we ignore on the grounds that she’s strange? Possibly deliberately so. It could even be a cover for her own guilt.’ She felt like banging her fist down on the dashboard. ‘What we need is some good, firm forensic evidence. A clue. A lead. We’ve got nothing.’

  Korpanski touched her arm. ‘Steady on, Jo,’ he said. ‘It’s early days yet.’

  Joanna turned to look at him, a thought seeping into her mind. ‘What if she did hear something on the Tuesday, something that made her wonder? What if she then tucked it away into her subconscious and interpreted it as a psychic insight?’

  Mike, as always, was reassuringly blunt. ‘Why not simply come out with it then?’

  To that there was no answer, except that this was a woman who hid behind a wall of oddity.

  They sat in the car for a while without switching on the engine. It was as though they both needed something to galvanise them back into action. Joanna looked around the estate. It looked so normal, peaceful, so thoroughly twenty-first century. So why did she feel as though it was one of those film villages – little more than a hollow façade, two-dimensional? Never the most patient of people, it was frustrating her. They must make a move.

  In the end she took the initiative.

  ‘The last person we know who definitely saw and spoke to Grimshaw appears to be the Mostyn girl. The children will be out of school by now. Let’s talk to her father and see if we can arrange an interview.’

  They were in luck: Richard Mostyn was at home. He’d been peering frantically into his computer screen when he heard their knock. And Rachel was downstairs, watching television.

  Mostyn came out into the hall just as Rachel was opening the door, looking shyly up at the tall policeman.

  ‘Is your daddy in?’ Mike was good with children. Much better than his inspector.

  Mostyn sidled up behind his daughter. ‘Can I help you?’

  They introduced themselves and his eyes narrowed. ‘So we’d like to ask your daughter a few questions.’

  The little girl looked up at her father for guidance.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘If it’ll help solve this unpleasant business I don’t see any objection.’

  ‘Good.’

  They sat in the sitting room. The light was fading and Mostyn flicked a couple of lamps on before settling down beside his daughter.

  Joanna opened the questioning, addressing the child. ‘You like riding?’ The question conjured up an image of the ten-year-old Eloise, neat in jodhpurs and Pony Club sweater, and a pony named Sparky. She brushed the memory away.

  The girl nodded enthusiastically. ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And the farmer let you ride his pony?’

  The girl looked suddenly distressed. ‘Daddy told me he’s had an accident, Mr Grimshaw.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is Brutus all right?’

  Brutus, presumably, was the pony. Korpanski stepped in to fill the breach of knowledge. ‘He’s fine, love. He was safely up in the top field and has looked after himself ever since then.’

  Phew, Joanna thought. She wouldn’t have liked to have broken the news that the pony was dead too.

  She continued. ‘You last rode Brutus on the Sunday, a week and a bit ago?’

  The girl nodded, happy now. ‘We didn’t go far,’ she said. ‘He liked me to trot around the field so he could keep an eye on me.’

  Mostyn nodded his agreement.

  ‘He said,’ she was laughing now, ‘that I reminded him of his daughter when she was little and nice. He said it was a long time ago.’ She looked proud of herself for relating this conversation and looked to her father for approval – which she got. Mostyn smiled at her and nodded.

  ‘Was anyone else there?’

  The girl shook her head. ‘There was never anyone else there.’ She paused and said with childish insight, ‘He was quite lonely, I think.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  The girl nodded. ‘Oh yes. He really liked it when I went to see him. He said,’ her eyes opened very wide, ‘that he looked forward to my visits.’ She looked very pleased with herself now and with that pride came confidence, which Joanna intended to try and use to her advantage.

  ‘Did he say if anyone had been annoying him or hanging round the farm and making a nuisance of themselves?’

  The girl shook her head.

  ‘Did you ever hear him shouting at anyone?’ Again this elicited another shake of the head.

  ‘This next one is a difficult question, Rachel, but I can tell you you’re helping us very much, so I want you to think carefully about your answer. Do you know if Mr Grimshaw kept any money around the house?’

  Her eyes were as round as saucers. She swallowed hard, again looked at her father for a cue. ‘He did,’ she whispered. ‘One day someone came with animal feed. A big lorry. He went upstairs. I don’t know where but when he came down his hand was full of twenty-pound notes. Full,’ she repeated.

  Joanna looked at Mike. This was one avenue they had omitted to explore. But now…

  She tur
ned back to the little girl. ‘This won’t get you into trouble, I promise. You’ve done nothing wrong. But did you tell anybody about the money?’

  The girl’s head shot round to look at her father. Richard Mostyn flushed. She might as well have pointed the accusatory finger.

  There was an awkward silence, which the child filled with her plaintive voice. ‘Will I be able to ride Brutus again?’

  ‘I don’t know, love.’ Mike said. As a father, he knew better than to make idle promises, to keep it vague. ‘I expect so. We’ll have to see what happens to him and then ask his new owner.’

  Again the child looked at her father and asked the tacit question. This time he shook his head with regret. Rachel didn’t protest but lowered her head before looking up again and volunteering new information.

  ‘He didn’t like me going near the pigs, though.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He said they were capable of eating me.’ She looked at Mike. ‘Is that true?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ve never heard of a man-eating pig, have you?’

  By turning the grim question into a joke he’d reassured the child. Though where this little gem of information could possibly lead, Joanna couldn’t guess. She kept trying. ‘Is there anything you can think of that might help us know who hurt Mr Grimshaw?’

  Again that doleful shake of the head.

  They thanked the Mostyns, father and daughter, and left.

  * * *

  So what had they gained?

  They were back at the station, drinking yet another coffee out of a styrofoam cup. The station had recently installed a coffee machine so they were on cappuccino, which wasn’t as bad as it might have been.

  Joanna leant across the desk and spoke to Korpanski and DC Alan King. ‘So far, we’ve concentrated on the inhabitants of the estate,’ she said. ‘But Rachel Mostyn’s claim that there was money stored at the farm makes me wonder how far that story might have spread. There are plenty of villains hanging around who would kill for a fistful of—’