Cause of Death

by Jane A. Adams

  Karen felt a pang of guilt that she was not still looking after George. Not directly, anyway. But that had largely been George’s choice and she tried not to blame him for it.

  He was one of the last to emerge, coming out through the big double doors and then dashing back in again to collect a forgotten something. The girl with him rolled her eyes and then stood and waited for him to return. Blonde, slender and, Karen had to admit, very pretty, Karen knew that Ursula was George’s best friend at Hill House. And from the way he briefly took her hand when he returned, something more than that now?

  Karen was so taken aback that she almost forgot to look properly at her brother. When she did, she was doubly shocked. He had grown! Long limbed and skinny, now tall enough to tower over Ursula, she could not believe how much he had changed in the months since she had last seen him. He had gone from being a child to a young man and she had missed it.

  For a moment Karen felt utterly bereft. It was, she thought, almost like a parent missing that moment when their child takes its first steps. George had changed almost beyond recognition. He pushed back the red curls falling across his forehead and laughed at something Ursula said before clasping her hand once again and walking with her to the minibus.

  Karen felt that her heart would break. Of course she wanted George to be happy, she wanted that more than anything, but, oh God, they had been so close for such a long time. All of George’s childhood, Karen had been there – his support, his confidante, his parent when their own had proved so inadequate.

  Karen smiled at the thought. Not done such a bad job there, she told herself, and allowed that small sense of satisfaction to grow and replace the momentary hurt. George was her success story and nothing was going to change that.

  The minibus pulled away and she lost sight of it behind the tall trees that bordered the drive. Karen turned and, keeping close to the line of overgrown shrubs that edged the rather scrubby lawn, made her way back on to the cliff path and then back to her car.

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ George said. ‘I’ll be there and so will Cheryl, and if it all gets too much you just walk away and we’ll bring you back home.’

  Ursula laughed. ‘God,’ she said, ‘I never reckoned either of us would think of this place as home.’

  George grinned. Neither had he. He could recall the time he had first come to live at Hill House. Dank, wintry days when he’d hated the place and the only bright thing anywhere had been Ursula’s friendship. He’d been almost thirteen then; now they were both close to fifteen and just starting the first year of their GCSE studies.

  He dug in his bag and consulted the still unfamiliar timetable. Three days in and Ursula had already committed hers to memory. He groaned as his worst suspicions were confirmed: ‘Double maths and then double history.’

  Ursula laughed. ‘Could be worse.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You could have that cow Tonks for maths. I mean, how did someone like that ever become a teacher? He hates kids, despises teenagers even more, and he stinks when he leans over you as you’re trying to work. Bad breath and BO and cigarette smoke. Ugh.’ She shuddered elaborately and George laughed. Miss Patel who taught his group for maths was actually OK, or seemed to be so far, and he was getting most of what she was trying to drill into them, which was a welcome change. They had moved about so much when he was a kid that George’s education had been at best patchy, and often lessons from his big sister, Karen, substituted for school. Much to his surprise, though, he was being entered for eight GCSEs and everyone was tentatively confident he’d get A to C grades in probably six of those.

  There was a momentary pause and George knew what was coming next.

  ‘Do I have to go on Saturday?’

  ‘No. You can tell Cheryl that you just don’t want to. No one will make you.’

  No one but Ursula herself.

  She grimaced. ‘I can’t do that though, can I? I mean, it’s the first time he’s been well enough to want to see me for ages. I can’t just . . .’

  George said nothing.

  ‘You’ll come in with me,’ she confirmed, and George squeezed her hand and told her that he would. There were times when he was profoundly relieved he had no father to make demands on him, and there was only a garden of remembrance to visit when he wanted to think about his mother. He felt a pang of guilt as he thought how infrequently that was. It was like it was another life and another George back then and he hated being dragged into the past.

  ‘I hate hospitals,’ Ursula said. ‘And I hate that place even more.’

  Again George knew better than to say anything. Sometimes conversations with Ursula were more about the silences than anything else. At least they were when she talked about family. And she only did that when family imposed themselves on her life; it was rarely voluntary.

  George had been to psychiatric hospitals. He’d been to ordinary hospitals too, and to refuges and police stations and social service offices and emergency accommodation and cheap B&Bs. Such had made up the landscape of his childhood, so he could sympathize with Ursula’s point of view. Her dad had been in a secure unit for most of the time he had known her, only being returned to open hospitals for brief interludes. He made it to a halfway house once, and there had even been tentative – and totally unrealistic – talk about Ursula moving back in with him one day.

  Ursula and George had both known this would never happen, whatever their key worker, Cheryl, and other professional optimists might say. Ursula’s dad had retreated from the world and George knew there was no kind of road map or mental satnav that was going to bring him back again.

  And there was no way Ursula would ever countenance moving in with her mum, even if the authorities would allow it. Ursula’s mum had left a long, long time ago. This year she had even forgotten to send a Christmas card.

  The minibus halted to drop the twins off. In their final year at primary school, they were the youngest kids at Hill House. Two of the others that had been there when George arrived, Grace and Richard, had left, moving into bedsits in Exeter now they were both seventeen. Theoretically this was supported accommodation, but George wasn’t convinced. He didn’t want to think about the time when he and Ursula would have to leave the relative security of the tatty old Victorian pile up on the cliff top.

  The others on the minibus were all at the same school as Ursula and George, and a few minutes later they were dropped off in the pedestrian area just a short walk from school, the road immediately outside always being so crowded with buses and parents depositing their kids.

  ‘You OK?’ he breathed as they reached the gates and prepared to go to their separate home rooms.

  ‘Yeah, I guess so. Good luck with the maths.’

  George grinned. ‘Have fun with Tonks.’

  She grimaced and walked away.

  Mac had not expected a visit from Rina that morning, and certainly not expected her to be accompanied by Stan. He hid his surprise and bid them both welcome. Rina shook her head as he suggested they go into his office to talk.

  ‘A walk, I think,’ she said. ‘And maybe a cup of that nice coffee.’

  A stiff breeze blew across the promenade, reminding them that the summer months were almost at an end and Frantham should prepare for autumn. A few hardy souls still stripped off for a dip in the sea, and families cowered behind windbreaks, trying to make sandcastles for their infants without being totally sandblasted.

  ‘So,’ Mac said as they leant on the railing enjoying the view, ‘what can I do for you both? I take it you’ve moved in to Rina’s?’

  ‘For the minute,’ Stan said. ‘I’m not going to impose longer than I have to.’

  Rina exchanged a glance with Mac but let it pass.

  ‘And you want to talk to me because—’

  ‘Because Rina persuaded me I owed you,’ Stan said.

  Mac could hear in his tone that he was now regretting the decision. He waited, knowing that Stan, like Rina, could not be rushed.

 
‘I had this idea I could get Haines,’ Stan said at last.

  Mac stiffened. ‘Haines?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s back. There’d been rumours so I went looking soon as I got out. I found some of his people. I don’t think he’s here yet, but he will be.’

  ‘And your plan is?’ Mac made an effort to keep his voice steady, his tone non-confrontational.

  ‘Oh, I did have some idea of getting the bastard and slitting his throat, but, well, it’s been suggested I leave it alone.’

  ‘Rina suggested that? I’m glad you’ve—’

  ‘No, not Rina, Stephen or Matthew or . . . well, anyway. Way I figure it, they’re right. Young Karen will likely save me the bother.’

  ‘Karen?’ Mac could not keep the shock out of his voice this time.

  ‘Apparently she’s back,’ Rina said.

  Mac felt he might need that coffee. Or something a bit stronger.

  They walked and talked and brought Mac up to speed and by the time they had reached the end of the promenade, where it curved back to join the road, Mac knew everything Stan had seen and heard. They paced slowly back towards the café, not saying a great deal.

  ‘I need to bring Kendall in on this,’ Mac said. He opened the door and led the way to his favourite seat by the window before going to the counter to place their order. It was still early in holiday terms, just after ten and in that lull between those popping in for their takeaways just before work and the pre-lunch rush of tourists and locals coming in for a snack. The little Italian café had been a feature of Frantham promenade for years, still family owned and always something of an anomaly. The first owner had been a prisoner of war in the camp across from the newly restored airfield. Like so many prisoners in rural areas, he’d ended up helping out on a local farm, fallen in love and eventually married the farmer’s daughter.

  Mac loved it, as had generations of Franthamites.

  ‘So, what do we do now?’ Stan said.

  Rina regarded him thoughtfully. His ‘plan’ had sustained him all the time he had been inside. Now he was out and it was no longer a viable one; it would need replacing with something else. And soon. Stan was not a man who would be comfortable sitting around twiddling his thumbs. Rina understood how he felt, being disinclined to that course herself. He would need managing, occupying.

  ‘Are you a good driver, Stan?’

  ‘Am I a what?’ He laughed. ‘Are you planning something I should be telling Mac about?’

  ‘No, I’m planning to get a little car, and as it’s almost eight years since I last drove I could do with someone to help me get my confidence back. And while we’re doing that, I thought we could take the opportunity to, shall we say, snoop a little.’

  Mac returned to the table and set their coffees down, going back to collect his own. It gave Stan just enough time to change his expression into one more suitable to the circumstances.

  Rina picked up her biscotti and dunked it happily. ‘Smells wonderful,’ she said.

  Karen had booked an appointment with Messrs Colby, Price and Dicks. She had changed out of her jeans and boots and now wore a well-cut summer dress in a pale blue that emphasized her light tan and her dark hair. She carried a leather document case.

  Mr Price welcomed her into his office. She had done business with his firm on and off for a couple of years now, ever since she started to earn decent money of her own and needed a means of disposing of it sensibly and in such a way as she could maintain swift access. Price and his colleagues knew she was a wealthy young woman – though they did not know about the small stashes of cash and bonds Karen had secreted up and down the country, just in case – and they knew she paid her bills promptly, and who were they to argue if she preferred to do it in cash?

  Karen sat and read the document set before her and asked a few questions about the wording, which Price obligingly explained.

  ‘It just requires your signature,’ he said. ‘And I can get my secretary to be witness if you’d like to attend to everything now?’

  She nodded slowly and he could see that there was still something on her mind. He wondered again why such a young and obviously healthy young woman should be making out her will, and also noted that it was a somewhat unusual document. It had taken three attempts to get it to this point. There had been queries, small points of law, little anxieties. Price had discussed the matter with his senior colleague, and he was sure now that it was as unchallengeable as any document ever consigned to law could be.

  ‘All right,’ Karen said. ‘I’ll sign now. And I have the other documents you needed.’

  He stood and held out his hand. ‘I’ll get them copied and verified while you have another read.’

  Karen handed over a passport, birth certificate and various other documents – all expertly forged in the name of Karen Munroe – and Price skimmed through them before leaving the office to have the copies made. Karen did not bother reading through the will again, she knew the wording by heart now, carefully crafted and hopefully as secure as Price told her it would be. She glanced around the dark office. A small window seemed only to offer a view of the opposite house wall, and the light that did manage to sneak in seemed afraid to make the leap further into the room and hung around by the window. Only Price’s chair was properly illuminated, and even at eleven o’clock on a sunny morning the light was on.

  Price returned with his secretary and Karen signed. K.S. Munroe. The signature duly witnessed and her original documents returned to the leather case, Karen took her leave. She had always looked after George and this was just another aspect of that care. Whatever happened next, Karen had provided for him.

  Ted Eebry didn’t have a morning paper delivered so he had not seen the news about the bones. It was lunchtime when he picked up an abandoned copy of the local rag in the café where he had stopped for lunch. And there it was, filling up the front page: Bones Found at Local Dig.

  At first, Ted assumed this was more about the skeletal remains of 2,000-year-old inhabitants. He had followed that story with great interest, discussed it at length with his daughter Stacey and her husband. Speculated about the kind of people who must have once farmed this little bit of southern England and what their lives had been like.

  A quick scan of the article told him this was not the case. The bones were modern. Not fresh, but maybe a couple of decades old. Forensic tests might reveal more, but at the moment the police could not comment and the estimate of how long they may have been in the ground was subject to review. The article went on to speculate about murders and missing persons and whether or not the new airfield entrance would be ready for the official open day just over ten days from now.

  Ted Eebry stared hard at the page and tried to stop his hand from shaking. His recently eaten lunch roiled in his stomach.

  ‘Stupid,’ Ted muttered to himself. ‘So, so stupid.’

  EIGHT

  PC Andy Nevins had spent Thursday morning trawling through missing persons’ reports. He didn’t yet know exactly what he was supposed to be looking for, and he was getting nowhere fast. He’d decided in an arbitrary way to go back fifteen years, keep his search local and see what came up. First impressions from the forensic bods had suggested this was probably a woman’s body, judging purely on the rather gracile nature of the long bone they had found, but they would not be drawn further and so Andy did not have a clue which of the several thousand reports that had emerged from his initial search he could eliminate.

  Frank Baker wandered in and leaned over his shoulder.

  ‘How’s it going, boy?’

  ‘It’s not. How am I going to narrow this down, Frank? I’ve eliminated all the men, but I’ve still got two thousand and thirty seven.’

  Frank drew up a chair. ‘Well, first off you get rid of those what have turned up. Most people do, usually within a week, and a good few more within the month.’

  ‘And how do I do that?’

  ‘Shift yourself over and let the dog see the rabbit.’

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nbsp; A little reluctantly, Andy surrendered the keyboard. He watched as Frank’s fingers picked out letters one by one and then pressed enter. He brought up another screen and then a third, then clicked on a couple of boxes and sat back.

  ‘What did you just do?’ Andy’s original search seemed to have disappeared.

  ‘Watch and wait, boy. Watch and wait.’

  Andy frowned. The screen message was telling him pretty much the same thing. How come Frank knew how to do . . . well, whatever it was he had done?

  ‘I went on a conference thing,’ Frank said, as if he had heard Andy’s thoughts. ‘All about searching these database whatsits. Very useful it was too. Right, let’s see.’

  Andy’s search box had returned, but now very much slimmed down. ‘What did you do?’ Andy asked again.

  ‘I took out all those what had been reported as no longer missing,’ Frank said.

  ‘What? Yes, I mean I figured that much out, but how?’

  ‘Ah, well. I’ll show you in a minute, but that’s got rid of about two-thirds, I reckon. Of course, not everyone bothers to tell us when their relative comes back home, and if it’s an adult and none of the social services or anyone’s got involved, well there’s not a lot we can do about that. What we need to do next is to use our imagination, extrapolate a bit, you might say, and see if anything stands out.’

  ‘Extrapolate? How?’ Andy felt distinctly miffed now. He was supposed to be the techie one in the team, not the ageing Frank. He caught sight of Frank’s sly smile as he once again seemed to read Andy’s thoughts. ‘OK,’ Andy said. ‘So age and experience win this time. What do I have to do?’

  ‘Well,’ Frank continued, ‘we apply a bit of psychology, I reckon. And a few statistics. The CSI tell is that the leg bone belonged to someone what had stopped growing, so we can eliminate anyone younger than, say, twenty-one. Not much sign of wear, no age-related arthritis or the like, so let’s lose everyone over forty. Here, you budge back this way and work the keys and I’ll tell you what to do.’