Death of a Mermaid

by Lesley Thomson

  ‘It doesn’t mean he or she murdered Karen.’ Toni took a Creme Egg out of her pocket. It had got warm; the foil came off in flecks. ‘What made Mo think that?’

  ‘Karen was wearing expensive jewellery, a fancy watch and she’d recently bought two Alexas – that one we found in Daniel’s room, and she gave one to Mo. She made decent money on the round, but as we said, not enough for luxuries. Her bank account was healthy but not heaving. She had nothing outstanding on her Visa card. Where was this cash coming from? When Mo questioned her about the bloke, Karen told her to mind her own. Mo was sure that if the bloke was single, Karen wouldn’t have kept it quiet.’

  ‘And Mo didn’t think to say this in her statement?’ Toni bit into the top of the egg. She liked to lick a hole in the chocolate and hook out the creme with her tongue, accompanied with a gin and tonic over Netflix. She disliked cramming it down on a pavement, but needs must.

  ‘Claims she forgot. My guess is she’s not happy with us saying her nephew murdered her sister and wants to reel us back. But didn’t Andrew Power also say she had a bloke?’

  ‘That was conjecture.’ Yes, he had. Toni barked, ‘It’s not enough for a case review. If I tell this to Worricker, he’ll call us clowns. I’ll be on points duty and you’ll… never mind.’ Malcolm would have her job.

  ‘Mo said she popped in on Karen after work one night and was sure someone was, as she put it, “skulking” in the kitchen. Daniel nearly gave him away, but Karen shot him a death stare. When Mo asked Daniel about it later, he acted dumb. Mo said Karen had got to him. She said Daniel seemed scared.’

  ‘The kitchen’s off the front room. How hard would it have been for Mo to take a look for herself?’

  ‘I got the impression she was scared too.’

  ‘That figures.’ At the convent Mo Munday had been in Amy’s year and, unlike Karen, a bit of a mouse. ‘OK, you and me will pay another call on Mrs Haskins and ruin another crappy TV show for her.’ Toni got in the Jeep. She tossed the Creme Egg wrapping out of the window. This is between you and me for now, okay?’

  ‘Yes, boss.’ Malcolm picked up the wrapper.

  Toni drove into the town centre, parked and shut off the engine. She rested her head on the steering wheel and groaned.

  Had they slapped a posthumous murder charge on an innocent minor?

  *

  The files for Karen Munday’s murder were on Malcolm’s desk, ready to be filed in the registry. With the practised fingers of a detective, Toni riffled through the top file until she found Karen’s house key, with a pink heart keyring, bagged and recorded.

  After she left Malcolm, still standing outside the Co-op, Toni had intended to go and see Freddy and head for the battery with her. But what Mo Munday had told Malcolm had brought her own doubts to the surface. She had to face them.

  She left the Jeep around the corner from Karen’s house. As she unlocked Karen’s door, Toni expected Mrs Haskins’s curtains to twitch, but all was dark and still.

  She let herself in, kicking aside the junk mail that had piled up since Forensics had finished. The house was tomb silent. The unfinished box of Maltesers was a possible gift from Karen’s killer. It had yielded no fingerprints, no DNA. The crime scene cleaners were due. All trace of Karen Munday’s life with her son would be deep-cleaned away. The house would be sold. New people would live there.

  The room smelled of forensic chemicals. And something else. The smell of abandonment. Of life extinct. Toni ventured up the stairs. She paused on the landing, outside the toilet where Karen had died.

  The bedding, including the mattress, had been taken away. Dust furred the slats of the bed frame.

  Toni had come back to the crime scene in search of anything they had missed. Any sign of the man Mo Munday claimed existed. She had to banish her doubts or it would eat away at her. Karen was not a friend. She had been an enemy. But Toni was a detective; her duty was to the victim. She would do right by Karen. Toni had come to Karen Munday’s house to make peace. Only Karen could whisper from the walls who had extinguished her life.

  Tell me.

  Toni felt confusion mixed with sadness as she explored Karen’s home, noting magazines emblazoned with Kardashians, a huge make-up case with lipsticks of every colour in the bedroom, Karen’s pink teddy on a chair. She had never told the others her fantasies that Karen would die and never come back to the convent.

  When Toni got to Daniel’s bedroom, unlike the last time, when she had been looking only for clues, she thought her heart might break. The pictures of boats; Ricky holding an oversize fish. A section of trawling net with floats attached was draped from the ceiling. An orange buoy like a baby space-hopper crushed a length of Scalextric. Daniel had abandoned his boyhood. He would never become a man. Toni felt Ricky’s pain. Everything in the room spoke of the boy’s passion. The sea. Toni wouldn’t give Ricky a child of his own. Ricky had lost the only son he’d have.

  Was it only that she couldn’t accept that a boy could strangle his mother? Was that why she was gnawing at the case like a dog at a bone?

  Tell me.

  Toni heard a noise. She crept onto the landing and looked down the stairs. Someone was manipulating the door lock. Toni had slipped the snib up to prevent anyone opening it. A habit gained from examining crime scenes on her own. You never knew who might turn up. She was congratulating herself on taking the precaution when she heard the door open. The snib must have dropped. Whoever it was downstairs was practised at breaking and entering. They had entered.

  There was nowhere to hide. Karen’s wardrobe had been emptied, but she’d be a sitting duck if the intruder looked inside. There was no attic or basement.

  She retreated to Daniel’s bedroom. The nut on the window latch had been sealed with layers of gloss paint, it wouldn’t turn. She heard brushing as the door was pushed over the junk mail. Her finger and thumb damp with sweat, she couldn’t grip the nut. Someone was moving about in the kitchen.

  They were looking for something. Karen’s man? She should ring Malcolm, get backup. Toni patted herself down. Her phone was in the Jeep. Idiot.

  The man – now she was sure it was The Man – was searching for something, something he’d missed, that would give him away. Toni did a mental inventory of the downstairs rooms: the television, a table, a carved wooden giraffe, a photo of Karen and Daniel. None would give the killer away.

  A burglar. The whole of Newhaven knew the house was empty. Toni smacked her forehead. She was a police officer – why the hell was she hiding up there?

  Missing the days when she’d carried a truncheon on the beat, Toni switched on her torch and looked for something that would do as a weapon. A leather belt lay like a snake on the carpet by the buoy. A smack with that might cause surprise but, if it went wrong, he could strangle her with it.

  She heaved up the buoy. It was heavier than she’d expected. She got a grip and lugged it out of the room and, holding it in front of her, struggled down the stairs. Its unwieldiness would play in her favour.

  The living room was empty.

  Covering the front door, Toni inched towards the arch to Karen’s galley kitchen. Had he left the house? She’d have heard. She should have got backup. She didn’t have her radio. Toni had always despised those lone-ranger cops who believed themselves too clever to need the team. She needed Malcolm to walk in.

  A footstep. The intruder had been in the backyard. Toni positioned the buoy. She’d run at him and knock him flying.

  ‘Police. Freeze.’

  A shadow fell across the couch. A tall man filled the archway.

  ‘Good Lord, guv, can I give you a hand with that thing?’ Malcolm asked.

  *

  ‘There’s no way we’d have missed it,’ Toni said again.

  Sealed in an evidence bag, the leather belt lay on the table between Toni and Malcolm.

  ‘Which means someone left it in Karen’s house after we swept it. I went there to look for anything we might have missed, but I didn’t antic
ipate finding planted evidence. It doesn’t stack up. It’s a dodgy strategy – it narrows the field and provides a direct line from framed to framer.’ Malcolm poured sugar into his coffee and tutted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I forgot, me and Lizzie are on a sugar-free month.’

  ‘Don’t stir your coffee,’ Toni rubbed her eyes. She was a dead woman walking. Or slumped in a chair. ‘No one had broken in. They had a key. That narrows it down to Mo. There’s a cousin, I met her, Jade, earlier this evening. Yesterday.’ Ricky hadn’t missed her in bed or he’d have texted. At least she could say it was work and not that she was with Freddy.

  They were at the McDonald’s in the retail park off the ring-road. Through the glass she could see the old Parker Pen factory. Next door was what had been Cash-Bases, where she’d had a holiday job one summer, making the cash trays for tills. The restaurant was empty but for four girls huddled over the debris of a meal, faces in their phones, and a middle-aged man in an anorak at a table near the teenagers munching his way through a box of twenty chicken McNuggets. While the detectives had been there, as if it was television, he hadn’t taken his eyes off the girls. Toni was limbering up for a caution.

  ‘If this belt was left after we finished up, either it was by accident or to incriminate someone other than Daniel.’ Toni unwrapped her cheeseburger. ‘Stupid move, as you say. Someone’s taking the piss.’

  ‘The case is closed. There’s no need to skew the evidence.’ Malcolm stirred his coffee.

  ‘Difficult to leave a belt by accident, unless they changed their trousers and forgot to transfer it.’ Toni pulled a face.

  ‘Could be Mo Munday’s.’ Malcolm ate one of Toni’s chips. This was typical. He’d said he’d had supper so didn’t want food. She’d had supper too. Toni pushed the carton towards him.

  ‘She’s an even less likely killer than her nephew.’

  ‘Until tonight we had him for it.’ Toni squirted a dollop of ketchup on her cheeseburger. ‘Actually, the belt looks like one Ricky has. That fish motif is on a belt I got him for his birthday.’

  ‘You’re never saying it’s Ricky?’ Malcolm watched the man watching the girls.

  ‘No.’ Toni heard her hesitation. ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘We’ll get it examined. See what it throws up.’ Malcolm was tucking into the chips.

  ‘We need to find this man who Mo Munday believes Karen was dating.’ Toni snapped a string of cheese stretching from her mouth to the burger and licked her fingers.

  ‘Mo said Daniel looked frightened. That rules Ricky out,’ Malcolm said. ‘He can’t have been scared of him.’

  ‘You said Mo thought this man was in the kitchen one time she was round. If that’s true, Daniel already knew about him. It sticks a pin in Daniel seeing him with Karen and going nuts. We know they didn’t have sex in the house, there was no semen in the mattress.’ She put down the cheeseburger. ‘If he exists and he’s innocent, where is he?’

  ‘Justice and truth are nothing in the face of putting your marriage on the line. If he isn’t the killer, he’ll think there’s no point.’ Malcolm finished the chips. ‘Or he is the killer.’

  They sat in silence. Keeping a bead on Mr Chicken Nuggets, Toni resumed eating her burger. After a minute she said, ‘Why are you off sugar?’

  ‘It’s a killer. Worse than carbs. And to lose weight.’ Malcolm looked sheepish.

  ‘Christ, Mal, if you lose any more weight, you’ll be the thin blue line.’

  ‘Were you at the Munday house because I said we might have the wrong killer?

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘You have doubts too?’

  ‘Yes.’ Not true. Toni was now certain Daniel Tyler had not murdered his mother. ‘We’ll visit Mrs Haskins in the morning, see if she’s dredged up any detail about this man she saw. Now we have homes to go to.’

  Toni rapped on the creep’s table and flipped out her badge. ‘Time to go, mate. If you stay a minute longer, then myself and my colleague will escort you to the station for a wee chat. About underage sex.’

  Toni was set for accusations of police harassment and wrongful arrest but, shoving aside the box – the nuggets eaten – the man tripped over himself scuttling from the restaurant. The girls, thumbs busy on screens, paid no attention. She made a mental note to tell Uniform to keep an eye out.

  Toni was driving back to Ricky’s flat at the top of Gibbon Road when she remembered Mags. Shit. She didn’t seriously think Mags was in trouble, but she’d wanted to help Freddy. She texted, On my way to pick you up.

  36

  FREDDY

  I’m at the battery.

  Freddy hadn’t expected Toni to come back. Like Ricky and Andy, Toni seemed to believe Mags had gone to Lourdes or Walsingham. But Toni had come back. She had always been there for her. Right from when Freddy turned up on the doorstep of Toni’s family home after her dad had chucked her out. A freak of nature.

  She had been sitting by the fire in what the Kemps called a drawing room. Toni’s mum had given her a bowl of stew with thick brown bread that she’d made herself.

  A steaming mug of cocoa had followed, along with tissues for Freddy’s tears. Toni’s sister, Amy, had played music on the piano, Clara Schumann, she’d said. Toni had said it wouldn’t help. It had. They had invited her to live with them. Two Mermaids in one house, Toni whispered. But Freddy had been forbidden to stay in the same town as her family. And she couldn’t bear to see Mags. She had to get away.

  Out in the darkness, waves boomed against the pier. The lights of Brighton along the coast tinted clouds with faint orange light. Although Freddy had grown up by the sea, she marvelled at how it was still there at night with no one watching. Humanity was nothing against the might of nature. Behind her the lunette battery emanated silence.

  Headlights strobed over the beach and Freddy caught a glimpse of the English Channel, a vast, swirling cauldron of black. She started towards the vehicle then stopped. It might not be Toni. She retreated into the entrance of the battery.

  The crunch of shingle. The torchlight missed her. She shrank further, the grille pressed into her back. She felt dank emptiness behind her. Imagined the passageways leading to—

  ‘Freddy?’ Toni hissed.

  ‘Thank God.’ Freddy expelled air.

  ‘I had to stop Malcolm from taking you into custody for further questioning.’

  ‘Ha flipping ha. Don’t expect thanks. God, Toni, I can’t believe you’re still nicking stuff. It’s not like you need the money.’ Freddy’s fuse was too short to mention.

  ‘It’s not about money.’ Toni was gruff.

  ‘What is it about? You’re risking your career for chocolate.’ Freddy had never faced Toni about her thieving. Great timing.

  ‘I’m risking my career being here,’ Toni said. ‘Since Daniel Tyler’s crash, we have had a patrol on the beach. All it takes is for the guys to drive along and see us. I can pull the wool over a cashier’s eyes at the supermarket, but the average copper will see through me at a shot. Let’s do this.’ She shoved the torch at Freddy. ‘Point it there.’

  Freddy shone light on the padlock.

  ‘Hold that.’ Toni passed her something heavy. A sledgehammer.

  She adjusted the aim of the torch. Toni was spraying an aerosol at the padlock.

  ‘Is that oil?’ No point in easing a lock only to smash it with a hammer.

  ‘Cold air,’ Toni muttered.

  ‘Isn’t there enough of that?’ Freddy shivered.

  ‘For metal to freeze it must be at least thirteen below.’ Toni tilted the aerosol to better get her target.

  ‘Clever what you learn in the police.’ Freddy felt a burst of fondness for her mate. Even as her face was going numb.

  ‘I read it on the internet.’ Toni stuffed the can in her anorak. She grabbed the sledgehammer off Freddy, raised it up, then brought it down on the padlock. The clang reverberated in the vault. Once. Twice. Anxiously, Freddy scoured the beach for any
sign of the police patrol. She did not want Toni to get in trouble.

  Toni pounded away with impressive precision. At last the shackle sheared off from the body of the padlock. She dumped the hammer and pushed on the grille.

  It squeaked and whined. Had it never been opened? Freddy wanted to be wrong. She prayed to God. With every bit of her. Please make me wrong. Make Mags be at Lourdes.

  ‘I’ll go first. I’ll need to seal it, if it’s a …’ Toni didn’t need to say ‘crime scene’.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m a police officer. Where normal people run away from danger, we run towards it. Keep behind.’ Toni was trying to make Freddy feel better. Nothing would do that.

  A passage ran the length of the battery in each direction. From her history project, Toni knew that the patches of solidity in the darkness were doorways to the gun cells. From somewhere was a regular drip of liquid. The silence was sepulchral. They moved deeper into the cliff. Freddy could no longer hear the sea. Although they were beyond the reach of the tide and the rain, the walls were coated with brown-reddish slime.

  Freddy felt sick to the core at what they might find. Had Mags fallen and was hurt? If they shouted, no one would hear. Had Mags shouted until she became too feeble? Karen had been murdered by her son. Murder was a way to die. Had someone murdered Mags? As if a voice whispered to her, Freddy knew she would not see Mags again. Breathing in the fetid air, she put her hands to her face. She was in hell.

  37

  TONI

  ‘Nothing here.’ Toni smelled Freddy’s fear. Toni had been frightened of finding Mags, but she could at least retreat into detective mode. She’d worn gloves to smash the padlock and explore the battery. Not for cover, but to keep the scene clean. Mags wasn’t in the battery but, call it a hunch, Toni didn’t think she had fled Newhaven to get away from Freddy and seek solace at some shrine. Mags might not have told Freddy, but she would have told the library the truth. Toni had never known Mags be ill or to lie. Apart from the big one.