Cause of Death

by Jane A. Adams

‘No,’ Andy admitted. ‘I’m trawling missing persons, but it’s a job and a half. You’d never reckon so many folk just drop off the planet.’

  ‘’Ow far you goin’ back?’ Bec asked, and Andy knew he’d hooked her. He celebrated silently and played it cagey; best to be a bit conspiratorial with Bec and his mum.

  ‘Oh, we’ve narrowed it down far as we can, but . . .’

  ‘There was that woman end of Newell Street. Ran off and left her kids. Hilda someone. Must be thirty years ago now.’

  ‘Too far back,’ Andy said.

  ‘And old Mrs Took. Though I always reckoned her son just put her in a home.’

  ‘Too old,’ Andy said. ‘If she was old enough to be put in a home.’

  ‘You think it’s a young woman then?’ his mother asked.

  ‘Youngish. I mean, best guess is between twenty-five and fifty. There’s not enough bones for anyone to be really sure.’

  Bec snorted. ‘Bit of a spread you got there, ain’t it? I thought these ’ere CSI could tell to the year what age a corpse was.’

  ‘It’s not a corpse,’ his mother defended. ‘It’s just bones. It’s not the complete skeleton, then?’ she asked, picking up the implication from what Andy had said.

  Andy shook his head. ‘Just a sort of random selection.’ His mother and aunt exchanged a look. ‘This is confidential stuff, you know,’ he reminded them, and comforted himself with the thought that anyone who actually read the local papers would have been able to figure that out for themselves anyway, so it was almost public domain, though as neither his mother nor Aunt Bec read anything more exacting than the odd female magazine, he had to admit they’d never have found out themselves.

  ‘So.’ His mother dried her hands and took a seat opposite her sister. ‘What are you looking for? What sort of missing woman?’

  Andy wiped and stacked another plate. ‘That’s the thing,’ he said. ‘The bones were clean and dry and we reckon they’d been stored somewhere else. Best guess is the woman died not more than twenty years ago, but it could be as recently as five. And it was somewhere they hadn’t been disturbed by wild animals or anything. No teeth marks on them or ’owt like that. And –’ he took a deep breath – ‘boss reckons they were local and whoever dumped them was local and knew the place well enough to get there at night without falling in a ditch or getting caught on the cameras up at the site.’

  These had, in fact, been Andy’s own conclusions, but he knew his mother would take Mac’s view much more seriously.

  Bec snorted again. ‘We all know where the cameras are,’ she said. ‘Up on that damned great pole.’

  This was true, Andy thought. They’d been set high and made deliberately obvious in the hope this might persuade the kids on the Jubilee Estate that it wasn’t worth their bother to thieve from the site.

  ‘So. A local girl, then.’

  Andy noticed that his mother had automatically gone for the younger age estimate and diminished it still further. It was funny, he reflected, how the young and the very old garnered more sympathy when they were dead or lost. The middle-aged seemed to make less of a ripple in the public consciousness.

  She and Bec exchanged another meaningful glance.

  Andy waited.

  ‘You’ll need your notebook then,’ Bec told him. ‘And a pen. There’s paper and pen on the side near the telephone if you’ve forgotten yours.’ The thought of Andy without the tools of his trade made her laugh.

  ‘Best get the paper and pen anyway,’ his mother said. ‘Those silly little books they give you, what can you get in them?’

  Obediently, Andy went through to the hall and took the note pad from beside the telephone, then braced himself for a long afternoon.

  Lunchtime at the Martin household was interrupted by the sound of the letterbox rattling. Rina would have assumed a delivery of junk mail and ignored it, but she happened to be about to go through to the kitchen to get more gravy, so she glanced at the mat on her way through.

  The package that lay there was definitely not junk mail.

  Gravy boat in hand, she bent to pick the stuffed brown envelope from the floor. Just her name on the envelope, but in handwriting she recognized. Rina opened the front door, but she knew the young woman who had posted the envelope would already be gone.

  Karen, Rina thought. Now what?

  Unwilling to interrupt the Sunday ritual and knowing if she was much longer getting back to the table a search party would be sent out, she opened the door to her private sitting room at the front of the house – her one real sanctuary – and slipped the package on to the table just inside. She went on into the kitchen, her mind in turmoil. Karen meant trouble. Karen always meant trouble.

  It was another hour before Rina managed to escape, and even then she knew it would be wondered at. Tim, recognizing something odd in her manner, followed her as only Tim was entitled to.

  ‘What is it, Rina?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It seems to be some kind of legal document. Well, several legal documents.’

  Tim read over her shoulder. ‘A trust fund,’ he said. ‘And a will. What’s Karen playing at?’

  ‘I think she’s still looking after George,’ Rina said. ‘And she seems to have made me her executor. Whatever she’s up to, my guess is either she’s going to leave for good afterwards, or she thinks this time her luck might finally run out.’

  Ted returned home late in the afternoon. There was a message on his phone from the estate agent asking him to ring back to arrange another viewing, this one from a couple who wanted a second look. She sounded enthusiastic and hopeful, despite evidently having to work on a Sunday; probably calculating her commission already, Ted thought.

  He stood in the hall and listened to the slight sounds – the fridge, the ticking of the clock, the creaks and groans that every house made and that after all these years he was so terribly familiar with – and he knew that Stacey was right. It was long past time to move on. To leave this place.

  Every day brought new memories and new guilt. It wasn’t that he’d ever expected the guilt to pass, but he had never envisaged how, with the passing years, the memories would pile upon memories and the might-have-beens beckon ever more painfully.

  He had never removed her pictures, not even in those later years when the children had stopped asking when mummy would be coming home. It had been five whole rounds of Christmases and birthdays and anniversaries before he had even summoned up the nerve to remove her clothes from the wardrobe and her cosmetics and jewellery from the dressing table drawers. In the weeks after the event – that was the way he always thought of it – he had moved into the spare room, unable to bear the thought of sleeping in that bed, looking at those things that did not belong to him and now did not belong to her.

  In the end it had been Stacey who had forced the issue. Tired of sharing a room with her younger sister, she had asked him straight out.

  ‘Can’t I move into your old room? You never use it now.’

  At first he had been stunned. Shocked by what he thought was the unfeeling attitude of a teenage girl, willing to wipe out all trace of her mother. Gail had backed her up. She had been five when it happened, she was ten now, and wanted to have friends on sleepovers without having to share her space with a big sister now into music and pop stars and boys.

  ‘You never sleep there any more. It’s a sad room. I’ll help Stacey if you like. You don’t have to do any of it and then I can paint my walls green and have a bunk bed with a spare bed underneath, like I showed you in the catalogue.’

  ‘But . . .’ he had objected. He’d been about to say, what if she comes back, even though he knew that was never going to happen.

  ‘She’s gone, Dad,’ Stacey said. ‘She’s gone. She doesn’t care about any of us any more, so why should we care about her? You should find someone else.’

  He had wanted to tell them that it wasn’t true, that their mother had cared, that she probably still would had she been around, but he just cou
ldn’t bring himself to trot out the platitudes they must have heard hundreds of times – from him, from their friends, from their relations. And so, though he had dug in his heels and argued about it for a day or two, the deed was done. The girls packed their mother’s clothes into boxes and bags and sorted through the jewellery and photographs and silky scarves that she had loved so much, and chatted about what they could remember of her and what they just thought they could recall.

  Stacey had kept a few odds and ends. He had found photographs he had forgotten even existed, and some strings of bright beads decorated his older daughter’s dressing table mirror for a week or so, before they got in her way and were consigned once more to the drawer. Occasionally he would catch sight of something their mother had owned: a ring, a scarf, a pair of red leather gloves. And he knew they still talked about her, speculated, wondered, though never in his hearing and far less now than they had done in those early days.

  Life settled and continued and eleven years had passed since Stacey took possession of what had been their room. When she left home, Gail moved her stuff in, but only briefly. She left for university and came back only when she felt compelled. She still called him once or twice a week, sent him texts when she remembered, and occasionally he’d open his email to find a picture or two of his youngest child.

  He knew she censored them, sending only those images which showed her in the most suitable light, but he didn’t mind. He, against all the odds and all of the gossip, had done a good job with his girls and he was proud. Of them and of himself.

  But the memories . . . Well, unlike daughters, they continued in residence, year after year, day after day, a solid and ineffable presence, settling more solidly and more ineffably as the years passed and the house emptied and the quiet settled.

  Ted sighed and closed his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he told his dead wife, love of his life and companion of his soul even now that she was dead and gone and lost to him. ‘I am so sorry, lovely. I would never have hurt you. Never.’

  THIRTEEN

  Monday morning brought a positive identification for the murdered man: David Jenkins, aged thirty-eight.

  ‘No actual criminal record,’ Kendall told Mac, ‘but he’s been a person of interest in a number of investigations. Until now, he’s always managed not to be there at the crucial moment.’

  ‘Looks like his luck ran out on Friday night. Known associates?’

  ‘Ah, now that’s where it gets interesting. He was listed as crew aboard The Spirit of Unity when they had that little run-in with the coastguard a couple of years back. Haines’s yacht.’

  ‘So he probably knew Parker, George and Karen’s father.’ Mac thought about it. Was that where he recognized the man from? Had he seen him when he first came to Frantham eighteen months ago? ‘Can you send a picture over?’

  ‘Should be waiting in your inbox already alongside his rap sheet. PM says a single stab wound, double-edged knife – the pathologist is a bit of a whizz at these things and he reckons something like a Fairburn Sykes blade, much beloved of our special forces boys. I don’t suppose—’

  ‘Count Stan Holden out,’ Mac told him. ‘I’m afraid he has an alibi. He was with Rina Martin on Friday night, watching Tim Brandon perform along with another hundred odd people.’

  ‘Right.’ Kendall sounded disappointed. ‘Well, I’ll send over what we have so far, might be worth talking to Holden anyway, likely he’d have known the dead man. And the police artist has pictures of his friends. I’ve sent them over as well, but you know how these things are. Show them to him anyway, he might just recognize someone.’

  Mac agreed, thinking he should talk to George too. Funny how, when listing possible suspects, Mac couldn’t help but put Karen Parker at the top.

  He’d just got off the phone when Andy came through and told him Rina had called. She wanted a word whenever he could manage it. The timing seemed just too appropriate.

  ‘Give her a ring back, will you, Andy? Tell her I’m on my way now.’

  On the short walk to Peverill Lodge, Mac replayed the events that had led to his association with George and Karen Parker. He’d not been in Frantham long and a break-in at an old lady’s house had led to his first encounter with Rina, and later his meeting George and Karen.

  Life had been complicated for the children: violent father and depressive mother, Karen trying to substitute for both. And then the father had come back on the scene and everything had come to a head. Mac knew all too well that Karen was as capable of violence as her father had been, the difference being that Parker had been a common or garden thug; with Karen, well, her skills had been honed to something resembling high art.

  And this meant it was time for a rethink. He’d wanted to believe that Karen had come back just to see her brother, though he’d always known she must have some other reason. Had she come back to deal with this Dave Jenkins? Did she also plan to deal with her father’s one-time boss, as Stan Holden had suggested?

  He really ought to tell Kendall she was here. Not doing so in the first place hadn’t made a lot of sense; not doing so now was purely irresponsible.

  Unusually, Rina was alone at Peverill Lodge, apart from Stan, who hovered uncertainly in the kitchen doorway as she let Mac in.

  ‘Where is everyone?’ Mac asked as he followed her through to the back of the house and took his usual place at the scrubbed table.

  ‘Tim’s taken the ladies out for a while; they wanted to do some shopping so, bless his heart, he’s playing taxi driver and referee.’

  ‘Referee?’

  ‘They don’t think I know but apparently they are off buying my birthday presents. You know how it would be if I liked one present more than the other.’

  Mac laughed. ‘I can imagine.’ He made a mental note to remind Miriam about Rina’s birthday. She was far better at choosing gifts than he was. ‘And the twins?’

  ‘The boys have gone off to the Marina to have lunch.’

  ‘Oh, of course, it’s Monday,’ Mac said. ‘I’d forgotten that. So what did you want to see me about?’

  ‘I didn’t expect you to come straight over?’ Rina made a question of the observation.

  Mac smiled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But as it happens I need a word with Stan.’ He took the pictures Kendall had sent over from his jacket pocket and set them on the table. ‘David Jenkins,’ he said. ‘I’m guessing you knew him?’

  Stan nodded warily. ‘He works for Haines. What about him?’

  ‘He was stabbed to death on Friday night,’ Mac said. ‘Oh, I know you didn’t do it, but what I would like an opinion on is the likelihood that Karen Parker did.’

  ‘Karen?’ Rina sounded shocked.

  Stan picked up the photograph and studied it carefully. ‘He was thick with Parker,’ he said. ‘I think they’d known each other a long time.’

  ‘So it’s likely he’d have known the family?’

  Stan shrugged, then nodded. ‘Maybe. I didn’t like Parker, had as little to do with him as I could get away with, but I’ve got a feeling Jenkins was the one that recommended him to Haines.’

  ‘And could you speculate on why Karen might want him dead?’

  Stan shook his head slowly. ‘I can speculate,’ he said, ‘but no more accurately than you could. Jenkins was as much of a thug as Parker, but he was smarter, faster, better at getting away with it. Haines used Parker when all he wanted was a bit of muscle. Jenkins was better at persuasion, if you see what I mean.’ He cast an uncomfortable glance in Rina’s direction.

  Mac nodded. ‘So,’ he asked Rina, ‘what did you need me for?’

  ‘Karen,’ Rina said. She got up and fetched a brown envelope from the dresser. ‘I found this on my doormat yesterday. I could do with some advice.’

  Mac read through the documents Karen had left and drew the same conclusions Rina had done. ‘What’s she playing at?’ he wondered. ‘Rina, I think you need more than my advice on this. I think you need to talk to the solicitor who drew these papers up
.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve already made an appointment,’ she said. ‘He seemed to be expecting my call, but I thought you ought to be kept in the loop, as they say.’

  Stan replaced the pictures on the table. ‘She never had direct dealings with Haines, did she?’

  ‘Not as far as we know.’

  ‘But he was complicit in what her dad planned to do. He knew what Parker had in mind and he approved. He said family should be loyal and Karen deserved all she got.’

  ‘But there’s no direct link to Haines other than her father’s employment.’

  ‘No,’ Stan said thoughtfully. ‘But I heard things about her and about a chap called Vashinsky. I think he and Haines were thick.’

  Mac nodded. ‘We met once,’ he said. ‘I know he wasn’t happy with Karen. He tried to have her killed. She escaped.’

  ‘But the price is still out there. Vashinsky’s still prepared to pay. Haines would kill just for that.’

  ‘You think he’s threatened Karen?’

  Stan shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know. All I do know is Haines gets around to everything in time. I’ll be on his list somewhere, probably Karen is too. Maybe she plans to get in first.’

  ‘Then why put him on his guard by killing one of his men?’ Rina argued. ‘No. I think this is personal. She was after this Jenkins for her own reasons.’

  ‘And now she’s done that she’ll bugger off?’ Stan laughed. ‘You’re both kidding yourselves if you think that. I know people like Karen Parker. They don’t back off, not until they’ve completed the mission.’

  ‘Mission?’

  Stan shrugged. ‘Call it what you like. She’s got something in mind, something big. I figured from the start it would be about dealing with Haines. And before you object on the ground that Haines had no direct dealings with her, stop thinking like a logical, normal person because Karen won’t be. If she wants him dead then she’ll find a reason.’

  Rina was momentarily taken aback but Mac nodded. What Stan said felt right. It felt like Karen.

  FOURTEEN