‘Enough! Now please get me this dinner lady person – Stevie, did you say her name was? – and start moving the children into an empty classroom; they must have come from somewhere, and they’ll have to go back to it again for now. No! Not another word. Off with you!’
Charlotte Chadwick complied, with a little smile that seemed to indicate that she liked being taken charge of, and returned a couple of minutes later with Stevie Baldwin.
‘Before you say a word,’ Falconer said, holding up a hand in imitation of the gesture that Charlotte had used on him just a few minutes previously, ‘I realise what the priority is here. Summon whoever you can, to assemble the dining room and get the meal served, then we’ll decide how this is going to work. Shoo! Shoo! Off you go! You’ve got lots of empty tummies to fill, before we can even catch our breath and get started.’ Falconer was surprised at how bossy he could be in self-defence, and realised that he had not issued so many orders in such a short space of time since he had left the army. It felt good!
Carmichael surveyed the inspector with respect. ‘Tummies, sir?’ he said. ‘I never realised how child-friendly you were.’
‘Am I?’ he asked, puzzled; still lost in happy memories of shutting that woman up before he punched her in self-defence.
III
While the children ate, in uncharacteristic silence today, Stevie and Charlotte supervised while Rev. Septimus Lockwood and his wife Ruth contacted the parents of those in the upper class and arranged for them to be collected early.
Apart from the parents’ obvious shock at what had happened, they were almost as concerned about what would happen to all the cakes that had been baked for the sale, due to take place that afternoon. In the circumstances, the vicar felt obliged to promise that he would lend one of the unused rooms in The Rectory tomorrow, so that the event could take place without any disappointment or wastage.
Ruth would have to run that particular bun-fight, as Good Friday is quite a busy day in the Anglican Church calendar, and he had a few worthy stalwarts who would expect him to supervise the Stations of the Cross – all of them elderly, and High Church to a man (or woman).
After the arrival of the parents of the children from the upper class, the parents of the lower class were summoned, as the children would have to be questioned in case they had seen anyone or anything, perhaps through a window, and their parents were required to be present for this. It was lucky for them that several of the pupils were missing at the moment, due to the annual visitation of the chickenpox virus, making their task quite a bit lighter than it otherwise could have been.
The final phone call of that session was to the parents of Miss Findlater, who had been almost hysterical since the body had been discovered. Not only was she not very good with the behaviour of young children, but it seemed that she hadn’t attended even a short course at the School of Hard Knocks, and was still weeping into a handful of tissues in her, by now, empty classroom. They would have to speak to her later, when she had pulled herself together and recovered her dignity.
‘Why on earth did she become a teacher?’ Falconer hissed to Carmichael, as Stevie and Charlotte ushered the older children out of the door and into their parents’ tender care, without being subjected to too much of a third degree. The parents knew that, if the bake sale was taking place the next day, and at The Vicarage, it would also be a free-for-all for gossip as well as cake purchases, and were content to wait until then, to allow more information to become assimilated and made ready to share.
‘How on earth should I know, sir? I’ve never even met the woman before,’ Carmichael hissed back, astonished, never having being taught the niceties of dealing with rhetorical questions.
Without another word, the two men entered the small room that served the school as a library, and contained, in the far right-hand corner, the glass panels that enclosed the office of the head teacher, such an arrangement not only ensuring silence while books were being chosen, but an extra buffer of space in the case of anything really private being discussed within said office.
Just outside the front glass-panelled wall of this structure stood a wooden chair and, a few feet in front of it, and prone on the floor where she had fallen, was the shell of Audrey Finch-Matthews, the Parisian-patterned scarf covering her head and face, just as described by Charlotte Chadwick.
Stepping forward, Falconer whisked away the scarf and revealed what it had hidden; what had been so appalling to a child that it had needed to be instantly extinguished visually. The hair was slightly tousled from its impromptu covering, the make-up barely smudged by the indignity that had been suffered.
It was the skewer sticking out of the eye-socket that was so out of place and so disturbing. In fact, its presence was so incongruous as to appear obscene to anyone not expecting to see it there. ‘I want this videoed and photographed to the n-th degree when the SOCO team gets here. I want nothing missed. It’s absolutely grotesque.’
Falconer’s mobile phone rang, and he spoke briefly before returning it to his pocket and turning to Carmichael. ‘The SOCO team is here already, and so are the uniforms, waiting outside in their vehicles, and Dr Christmas is on his way. You stay inside and I’ll go out and organise them. I won’t be more than a few minutes, then we can start to take statements.’
The SOCO team he directed straight in to the relevant room. In addition to these bodies, he had been sent PC Starr, and PCs Green and Proudfoot, the latter not having crossed his path since he had worked on a case in Castle Farthing last year [See: Death of an Old Git].
‘Ah, PC Proudfoot, we meet again,’ he greeted the constable, a dangerous twinkle in his eye, as his memory served him a little snack of ‘previous circumstances’.
‘Good morning, Inspector. Our paths have, indeed, crossed once more,’ he replied, somewhat inadvisably, as it turned out. A salute would have been more diplomatic.
‘And have we let any vicars through to the crime scene on this occasion, Constable Proudfoot? Are there any clerics in the vicinity heedlessly obliterating valuable forensic material? Any vicar-ing vandals marauding around the premises?’
‘No, sir!’
‘Any reverend gentlemen at all, to cavort around and destroy physical evidence of the crime?’
‘Absolutely not, sir. You know how sorry I was about that, sir.’
‘Not even a retired lay-preacher? Or a loose canon?’ Falconer was rather proud of this last one, but knew no one else would appreciate its subtlety but himself.
‘No, sir,’ Proudfoot replied again, his face a big red football that threatened to steam if it got any brighter in colour.
‘Good man, Constable. Keep it up, and you and I shall get along fine.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘Absolutely no bishops or arch-deacons! I’m trusting you on this one, Proudfoot.’
‘No, sir. Absolutely none, sir,’ replied PC Proudfoot, hoping that his ribbing for the day was over and done with now, and he would be left in peace to proceed, unmolested, with his guard duty.
Carmichael squirmed for the poor man on his behalf. He, of all people, knew what it was like to be on the wrong side of Falconer’s tongue, and his look towards the uncomfortable constable was pregnant with fellow feeling.
Abandoning his sarcastic banter, Falconer got down to business, and ordered Proudfoot to remain on duty at the school gate, to make sure that the only people admitted were parents of the children still inside the building. A quick word with Green and Starr established that the interviews would take place, split between the two main classrooms, thus allowing the hall to be cleared up, and providing a waiting space for those waiting to be spoken to.
The lower class children would be interviewed in their own classroom – familiarity might help to unlock any reluctant jaws – with a parent present and PC Starr in attendance. The staff members and anyone else adult would be interviewed in the older children’s classroom, and PC Green could sit in on that one while he, Falconer did the inte
rviewing. Carmichael could speak to the children. Although probably seen as the BFG by the children, he was more at ease with small people than Falconer, and with PC Starr as a further softening presence, they should be able to extract any necessary information.
Leading his troops in behind him, he re-entered the building ready to solve a crime, went through the lower class door, and immediately shut it behind him, in an unplanned attempt to give Linda Starr an unexpected rhinoplasty. He must be hallucinating, and if he was, he didn’t want PC Starr not seeing what he was not seeing, because it wasn’t real.
Before him, over by the window on the opposite side of the room was quite a large rocking horse, and it was occupied and darting backwards and forwards at an alarming rate. As the bang of the closing door echoed down the corridor outside, he assumed his previously-employed hissing tones, and whispered hoarsely (!), ‘Carmichael! What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get off that thing this minute, before anybody else sees you. And don’t do it again! Ever! Even if I’m not looking!’
Carmichael complied reluctantly, looking momentarily crestfallen now that his mood had been broken, and barely glanced in PC Starr’s direction when she entered the room. Falconer could tell that his colleague was disappointed, because when they had set up the little conversation space in which the interviews would take place, he did not remove his notebook until the first child was ushered into the room.
When Falconer left to start his own interviews in the adjacent classroom, he saw Carmichael take one last, wistful glance at the large wooden rocking horse over by the window. Judging from the look of glee on the younger man’s face when Falconer had entered the room, he reckoned the sergeant was, in his head, about to win the Grand National – Lester Pillock approaching the finishing line, to the jeers of the crowd.
After what felt like a rather bizarre period dominated by the unusual presence of ‘short stuff’, Falconer had PC Green check that the school was clear of parents and pupils, and assembled the remaining adults in the dining room. Luckily for him, Stevie Baldwin had whipped her Spike and Charlotte Chadwick’s Imogen off to her parents’, returning as soon as she could so that they could have a quick pooling of knowledge, before the police contingent returned to Market Darley.
They made a formidable sight, seven adults crouched on tiny infants’ chairs; six tigers crouched for the pounce, and one XXXL grasshopper, with its knees around its ears. If it decided to rub its legs together, they would all be deafened, and with this thought twitching at his lips, Falconer found he was glad that PC Proudfoot was still on the gate. The thought of having to heave that sphere of a man to his feet would, somewhere along the line, need the application of a block and tackle.
The only representatives of the school present were Charlotte Chadwick (classroom assistant) and Stevie Baldwin (lunchtime supervisor), and after making a time-line for the events of that morning, there was little else they could do. It was down to the SOCO team, the pathologist, and a fingertip search of the grounds, to see if there were any clues to the identity of the person who had pushed a barley sugar twist, 1950s skewer through the left eye socket of Audrey Finch-Matthews, sometime between half-past ten and a quarter to twelve that morning.
Little had been learnt from the interviews at the school, but Falconer was confident that they would learn more when they widened their net of interviewees, and spoke to people in their own homes, where not only would they feel more comfortable, but would have recovered somewhat from the shock.
Chapter Three
Good Friday, 1st April
I
The previous afternoon had been a period of writing up notes, hoping for developments to occur without benefit of catalyst, but this latter had been in vain, and although today was a Bank Holiday for most people, for Falconer’s team, it was just another day at the factory, with a murder to solve.
With a rush of déjà vu, Harry Falconer looked up as the (temporary) office door opened to admit Carmichael, and elicit from the inspector, for the second day in a row, a high-pitched, almost girlish shriek.
‘What have you done now, you idjit?’ he boomed, eyes once again glued to Carmichael’s scalp.
‘I just thought I’d try it, as it’s my birthday today. Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me-ee – happy birthday to me!’ he carolled, executing a little (large!) twirl on the spot, before taking a bow.
‘Many happy returns of the day, Carmichael, but why the colourful forelock?’ Falconer asked, once again raising his gaze to his sergeant’s hairline. ‘Why have you got a clump of bright blue hair, as if blonde were not enough?’
‘Because, in my job, red would have looked too much like blood, sir.’ A perfectly logical reason in Carmichael’s opinion, but the inspector still had no idea what he was talking about.
‘Explain it to me, Sergeant, as if I were a dimwit,’ he asked, visions of role-reversal dancing in his head.
‘Food dye, sir. Yellow wouldn’t have showed: red, as I said: green would just have looked as if I’d got grass in my hair. So it had to be blue.’
‘Why did it have to be anything, Carmichael?’ asked a still puzzled Falconer.
‘I told you, sir: because it’s my birthday. Happy birth …’
‘Don’t start singing again! I’ll just not bother to ask in the future,’ he sighed, facing defeat in the face, and simply not caring any more. They must have broken the mould after they’d made Carmichael, not because he was so wonderfully unique, but because he was so terrifyingly so, and they didn’t want to make another one by accident!
And how typical of his sergeant, to have his birthday on All Fools’ Day. He couldn’t make up his mind whether this was absolutely fitting, or wildly ironic. It simply didn’t matter: the day was Carmichael’s, by right and by birth, and he didn’t really want to spoil it for him.
II
Ruth Lockwood had worked like a demon to make The Rectory fit for the school’s postponed bake sale. It really could not be held at the school – not only because of the decorators, who had also been postponed, but because it was an official crime scene. So she had dutifully thrown open the double doors between the sitting room and the dusty dining room, run round with a can of polish, and collected as many chairs as she could find.
If she set an urn of tea and one of coffee on the kitchen table, and left an ‘honesty’ bowl in open view for the money, she had no doubt whatsoever that the ladies of Shepford Stacey would linger with a hot drink, sampling wares that they had not yet bought in bulk, but just might if they proved tasty enough morsels.
And with that ghastly murder the day before, there was plenty to gossip about. Every vicar’s wife knows that gossip breeds money, if only you can find something to sell while it goes on – preferably something either edible or pot-able. The money from the cakes was to swell the school coffers, but the money from the teas and coffees could go into the parish fund, as a reward for her, for stepping into the breach in such a timely fashion. After all, this was supposed to be over and done with the day before, and nothing to do with her whatsoever.
Thus, she comforted herself as she dragged yet another heavy old wooden chair through from the downstairs lumber room, remnants of a previous incumbent that had received no place in their home. That it was all down to her, she had been aware the day before, when it had all been agreed, for Septimus would be trapped in the church all day – fourteen Stations of the Cross, and not a public convenience on any of them, for his bodily relief!
Her last preliminary duty was charging the urns and making them ready to dispense the beverages for which they were labelled. The rest of the surface of the kitchen was covered in cups and saucers, most of them utilitarian white, some of them slightly cracked or chipped, all mustered numerously to slake the thirst of the gossiping hordes.
She opened The Rectory’s double front doors at ten o’clock sharp, her loins girded for two hours of being rushed off her feet selling cakes, tarts, and biscuits, and having her
ear talked off by her customers.
Saul Catchpole, the elderly school caretaker who lived in Victoria and Albert Alms-houses, was first over the threshold, as he was at any sale that involved home-cooked food. Flo Atkins, his next-door neighbour and the school cleaner, was hard on his heels. They both lived alone, and neither could be bothered too much in the way of cooking; opening a tin or heating up something was more in their line, and they relished the thought of home-made sweetmeats for the next day or two, which would be a tasty addition to today’s hot cross buns.
Being quick off the mark enabled them to occupy the comfiest chairs in the sitting room area, the cakes being ranged upon the dining table at the other end of the double room. From here they were lord and lady of all they surveyed, and could engage in their beloved pastime of people watching, while indulging in a little mild malice and sarcasm, while they sipped their tea and nibbled at the cakes they had chosen, to go with their hot drinks.
‘There’s that Harriet Findlater over there with her mother,’ Flo pointed out to her companion. ‘What’s the use of a woman that still lives with her mum and dad, when she’s old enough to have grandkids of her own?’
‘Waste of a life, if you ask me,’ Saul concurred. ‘Here, did I tell you about the right ding-dong they had a couple of weeks ago?’
‘What was that all about, then? And what were you doing, eavesdropping?’
‘I was putting a new washer on one of the sinks in the boys’ toilets, and you know her office is just the other side of the partition wall.’
‘That sounds fair enough to me, Saul. Go on.’
‘Well, that Findlater woman is a few years younger than the late lamented. She wanted to be recommended to take over as Head when Audrey Finch-Matthews retired.’
‘Sounds reasonable enough, I suppose. She’s spent just about all her working life at that school, from what I’ve heard.’
‘It did sound reasonable, the way she put it. She would only be able to remain in the job for two years before she herself retired; she had always wanted to end her teaching career with a headship, and they could get someone younger and more up to date when she’d had her turn at the wheel, as it were.’
Pascal Passion (The Falconer Files Book 4) Page 4
