Marjorie Needham stood near the fireplace thoroughly enjoying the excitement of it. She was dressed in an ancient semi-threadbare rose pink candlewick dressing-gown with frayed and dirty cuffs and her stance, with both hands on her hips, was almost combative. Juliet held out her own hand.
“DC Juliet Armstrong,” she said. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you so early. Is there any more that you can tell me about Ronald Atkins? You say that you’ve seen Hedley Atkins as well, but could you have been mistaken? It’s my understanding that he’s on holiday in Scotland at the moment.”
“Not any more, he isn’t. Hedley was here last night. Definitely. It’s the first time he’s come to see his Dad, to my knowledge, since Ronald moved in.”
“You’re quite sure it was Hedley?”
“Oh yes. I may not have seen him for a while, but I’ve known him since he was a little lad. He’s put on some weight since I last saw him, but he still has the same peculiar expression on his face. I’d know it anywhere.”
“Did you see him leave?”
“Yes. It was late – almost midnight. I’m not usually up at that time myself, but I just happened to . . . what with all the comings and goings in Bevelton’s yard.” Marjorie’s account trailed off lamely. She had the grace to look a little sheepish about the fact that she had clearly been spying on her neighbours.
“It’s a good thing you were,” said Juliet briskly. “Was Hedley alone when he left?”
“Yes. Why?”
“You’re quite sure?”
“That’s the second time you’ve asked me that. I may be old, but I’ve got all my marbles, you know. Hedley was certainly on his own.”
“Did you see Ronald yesterday? Did he come out to meet Hedley when he arrived, for example, or wave him goodbye when he left?”
“I didn’t see him at all while Hedley was there, but I did catch a glimpse of him much earlier, coming back from somewhere. He was carrying a parcel of some kind. He used the side door –the one that leads to the corridor beside the shop – which was not like him. Why do you ask?”
“I’m just making routine enquiries, for the moment, Miss Needham. I would ask Mr. Atkins himself if I could make him hear me. I suppose he could have slipped out earlier this morning, before you got up?”
“He could have,” Marjorie agreed, “though that wouldn’t have been like him, either.”
“Well, if what you say is correct, which I’m sure it will be, he did a number of things that weren’t part of his regular routine yesterday. I’ll go to see if I can raise him again. Thank you very much for being so helpful, Miss Needham.”
“That’s all right,” said Marjorie Needham. She felt a sense of anti-climax as Juliet prepared for her departure by wrestling with the door again. “Any time. You know where I am.”
Standing out on the street once more, Juliet noticed that the neighbourhood had started to stir. She consulted her watch. It was almost nine o’clock. She decided to have one last try at raising Ronald. She seized the letterbox doorknocker and rapped it continuously for about a minute. Then she bent to shout through the letterbox itself.
“Open up, Mr. Atkins. Police!”
The house remained totally silent and in darkness. In the street behind her, daylight was rapidly replacing the early morning gloom. The interior of the empty shop loomed at her spookily through the plate glass window. If Ronald was inside the house, he would surely have been up by now, or at least sufficiently roused from sleep to hear her knocking. There were three possible explanations: either he was inside and did not want to answer the door, he was there and could not answer the door, or he had gone somewhere else. If it was the last of these reasons, it was almost certainly because he had done a runner. “Put the wind up him,” mused Juliet to herself. “Of course we have, if he had anything to hide. But we couldn’t arrest him before – we didn’t have anything to arrest him for – may still not have, in fact.”
She debated what to do next. The shop door would be difficult to break open, because it was made almost entirely of toughened glass, and Tim had told her that it was fastened with a paranoid number of Chubb locks. Trying to force it would also attract an unwelcome amount of attention from passers-by. Already the two or three people who had walked past on the pavement had loitered as long as they could, curious to see whether they were about to witness some kind of scene. She decided that the best thing to do would be to go back to the tractor yard and force an entry via the back door.
The crime scene tapes had already been put in place when she returned to Bevelton’s. PC Cooper was standing in front of them, keeping guard. She ducked under them and saw Tim standing outside the workshop. His expression was stern, but he gave her a brief smile.
“What’s the matter? Can’t you find him?”
“No. He’s not answering the door. I don’t know for certain that he isn’t inside the house. I thought that it would be better to force the back door than the front one, if it becomes necessary. I did see Marjorie Needham, though, or at any rate she saw me. She said that Hedley Atkins came here to visit his father last night. She’s quite sure that it was him. She’s also certain that when he left again he was on his own.”
“Really?” Tim frowned, trying to piece together the logic of what he was hearing. “Yet you say that Ronald isn’t answering. We’d better get in there pretty quick. I’ll come with you. I want PC Chakrabati to stay with Henry Bevelton. PC Cooper can brief the SOCOs if they get here before we come back.”
Juliet saw that the padlock and chain of the garden door that separated Bevelton’s yard from the garden of the old shop had now been sawn through. Tim must have asked one of the Bevelton’s men to cut it for him. Jason Beech and his workmen were gathered now at the opposite end of the yard. There was nothing for them to do until the SOCOs arrived, and they couldn’t go home because Tim had forbidden any of them to leave the premises. They hung around, alternately resting one leg and then the other against the far wall. Some of them were smoking. They seemed apprehensive rather than disconsolate. Juliet thought that their mood might reflect their loyalty to Henry Bevelton, but it was as likely that they just dreaded finding a corpse. Most members of the public were curious about crime scenes, but few liked to witness the actual retrieval of human remains.
She hurried after Tim. He had wrenched open the gate and was walking briskly to the house. Juliet was afraid of running, because the path was almost obscured with slippery mud, a legacy from when the police had dug up the garden a few weeks before. This was the garden that long ago had been Doris Atkins’ pride and main source of recreation – the garden that had ‘killed’ her. It was a sorry sight now.
Tim showed none of her compunction about knocking at Ronald Atkins’ back door, and was hammering on it when she caught up with him. He paused at tried to peer through the kitchen window, which was mainly obscured by a heavy lace curtain.
“Can you see anything through the dining-room window?” he asked Juliet.
She pressed her face against the glass, and held her hands against the sides of her head to shut out the light from the garden.
“I can see a table and chairs – that’s all. If there’s someone in that room, they must be standing alongside this wall. But I don’t think that there’s anyone there. I’ve just got a feeling that the house isn’t unoccupied, though.”
“Funny thing – so have I, though I don’t have a reason for it. We’ll knock again, and if no-one answers, we’ll force an entry.”
He pounded on the door again, and rattled the handle, which did not budge. There was no response from inside the house, though Juliet thought that she heard a door opening very quietly on the Needham’s side of the garden wall.
“Right,” said Tim. “Stand back- I’m going to force it. I’ll tell you if I need your help.”
She moved a few steps back down the path, so that she was standing level with wha
t appeared to be a covered wood-store. She noticed that there were some embossed brass plates hanging just below its roof. They’d probably been slung out years before, but she knew that they were eminently collectible now. There was something wedged behind one of them. She looked up as she heard Tim’s shoulder thud against the door. There was the sound of splintering, but the door held firm. Tim was rubbing his shoulder.
“Juliet?” Tim called. “Can you give me a hand? The door’s beginning to give, but it probably needs a bit more oomph than I can manage now that I’ve bruised myself.”
“Of course, sir,” she said. She lined up beside him, thinking that this mode of entry was becoming a habit, and they charged the door together. It gave way suddenly, with a sharp rending noise. The momentum propelled them both into the middle of the kitchen floor. Juliet almost lost her balance, but Tim caught her by the arm.
“Steady!” he said.
They had each been in that house before and had some idea of the layout, though neither of them had visited the upstairs rooms. The kitchen had the same sour, slightly fungoid smell that they recognised from their previous visits. There were two plates propped on two upturned mugs on the draining board. The door that led to the dining-room was closed.
Tim yanked it open.
“Hello?” he called. “Mr. Atkins? It’s Tim Yates of South Lincolnshire Police. Are you there? Can you hear me?”
He stepped into the dining-room. Juliet followed him.
The room was empty and cold. There was no fire in the grate. It was tidy and unremarkable, except for a newspaper, some of the sheets of which had been spread out across the table. The thin red line performed its perpetual trompe l’oeil. The grass-coloured curtain of thick, felt-like wool that masked the door that led to the passageway and the shop was drawn right across.
“Look, sir,” said Juliet, pointing at the curtain.
Tim nodded.
“Whoever drew that curtain must have entered by the front door and gone straight upstairs without coming in here, or left by the back door,” he said. “Let’s hope it was Ronald.”
“Why do you say that?” asked Juliet. “I thought we wanted to find Ronald . . .”
“We do,” said Tim shortly. “Alive, preferably. I’m going through to the rest of the house. I want you to stay here until I call you. Call me if you hear anything, or, obviously, if you see anyone in the garden. Got your mobile ready?”
“Yes, sir. I . . .”
Tim placed his finger on his lips.
“Quiet, now,” he said. He thrust back the curtain, and then opened the door suddenly. A further obstacle blocked his view: it was the door with the stained glass panels which led into the passage. It had been bent back on its hinges as far as it would go. It took him aback momentarily, before he realised what it was and pushed it shut.
The hall and stairs were in darkness. Tim turned on neither the lights nor the torch that he was carrying. Juliet was right in the doorway, watching.
“Stay there!” he hissed at her. “Go back into the room.”
She did as she was bidden, leaving the dining-room door slightly ajar. She heard Tim ascend the stairs slowly – each step creaked. The creaks stopped when he reached the landing.
“Jesus Christ,” he said softly.
Juliet opened the door a little further and called out to him.
“Are you all right, sir?”
“Call an ambulance, Juliet,” he said. “Now!”
She heard a sawing sound, then a dull thud. Later she realised that she had been listening to Tim cutting down the body of Ronald Atkins, which had been swinging from a rafter in the ceiling of the stairwell.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I’ve repeatedly tried to say that pushing me too far will be dangerous and Peter has taken no notice. Well, I’ve been pushed beyond reason now. My home no longer seems safe – I no longer feel as if I have control of it. When we came back from Scotland, I realised that Peter has made me hate the flat. He has made me hate my life and all that I am. My friend has turned into my enemy. My ghoulish family has risen up to strike out at me again. I shall strike back; have struck back. Who can blame me? I know that my liberty is at stake. The comfortable life that I have dredged out of my horrible childhood is all but destroyed.
I feel homeless, friendless, bereft of all peace of mind, as I plunge into the night. I have a final straw to clutch at. I have agreed to do Peter’s bidding one last time and in return he has agreed to leave my flat and never to get in touch with me again. And never to tell anyone what he knows about me. I know that I shall be able to trust him to keep his word, not because of his sense of honour – I know that he has none – but because what he has asked of me makes him my accomplice. Once it’s done, one word from me and Peter will lose not only all that he stands to gain from the deed, but life itself. One step out of line after it is over and he knows that I will not shrink from killing him. This is where I hold the trump card; this is my great virtue. In this I know myself to be truly formidable; in this I tower above him. I can and will kill. I will take a life if it gets in my way. Peter does not dare. He hasn’t got the bottle. He is just a gadfly. I despise him now that I understand. But I fear him, too. I fear the intelligence that could work out all the details of the past with such cruel accuracy. No-one else could do that; even Tirzah did not get it right.
It is dark, and I am seated on the bus that goes to Peterborough. I need to catch the 20.21 train for Liverpool, and I keep looking at my watch. The bus arrives in Peterborough shortly after the hour, which gives me only a few minutes to reach the station and buy my ticket. I know that I will miss the train if the bus is not on time. It is my fault that I have cut it so fine. I’ve spent the day in a kind of waking nightmare, drained of all energy. Peter had to work out the travel details; I could not concentrate enough to do it myself. I glance at my watch again. The bus trundles on through the fens, maddeningly slow. I look out of the window into the darkness, and see my own reflection thrown back at me. I look like a man haunted, beleaguered. I try to smile, but my lips freeze into a rictus, a cruel parody of humour. I feel affronted. I feel outraged. I was just getting on with my life, harming no-one. I do not deserve this. The ever-present mingled panic and despair of the hunted. This anguish that has been imposed on me. It makes me full of rage. It fills me with the fight-back of the hunter.
I am being made to act recklessly now, I who have always shunned risk. And I can’t predict the outcome of what has already happened. How do I know that the police will believe that Ronald Atkins killed himself? He’d already bought the rope. I didn’t encourage him, but I didn’t try to stop him either. I just stood and watched. My dear ‘father’. Father. Father and Mother. Ronald and Tirzah. Dorothy and Colin. Mother.
I would have guessed if Colin hadn’t told me, though perhaps not the exact truth. I knew that I was different. Not like Bryony. Not like my father. An Atkins, for sure, unlike Tirzah; but still not like them.
There were always things about Colin that were difficult to understand. His relationship with my grandmother, for example. I don’t mean in the actual sense: everyone of course knew that they were brother and sister, the two siblings left at the shop which had been in the family for seventy years. What was hard to fathom was the nature of their feelings for each other – or the lack of them. Why did she choose to stay in that house, where she was so shabbily treated? It was easier to work out why Colin did not drive her away: he needed a housekeeper and he was too mean to pay for one. But Doris? She could have left years before, when Ronald first started work. Perhaps it was already too late. Perhaps the shame and the routine were too ingrained.
Colin with his long nose, his deep brown eyes, his hunched back and stocky frame. He looked quite unlike anyone else in the family. Whereas Doris and her other brothers were slender, with round, blue-eyed Saxon faces.
Colin would sometimes talk to m
e about his childhood when there were no customers and he was sitting in the shop on his high stool. He was Eliza Atkins’ youngest child, born six years after Robert, and three after Doris, when Eliza was well into her forties. Colin was the apple of her eye. Her explanation for his deformity was that he had been ‘soured in the womb’ by his father’s brutish behaviour. She insisted that the family always referred to his condition as ‘curvature of the spine’. The children in the street simply called him a ‘hunchback’. Colin was not encouraged to mix with other children and he had started at the Board School a year late, when he was six. From his first day there, Doris was assigned the task of chief nursemaid and bodyguard. Her mission was to protect Colin from every possible harm. Doris was often impatient with Colin and sceptical about his many ills. Colin would tell Eliza if Doris was unkind to him, or if she abandoned him to the other kids.
Colin was always the golden boy. Later on Doris, who had already weakened her relationship with her mother by not adoring Colin, became the mother of the bastard child Ronald and was disgraced. Perhaps that was why she had continued to look after her mother in her long decline, and then had still stayed to keep house for Colin after that: she was continuing to atone for her sins with the penance that Eliza had imposed. Perhaps it was just too late to escape. Doris would hear no ill spoken of Colin, though it was clear that she bore him little affection. There was a lot of poison trapped in the house at Westlode Street. A lot of poison in my (titular) parents’ house, too.
Titular indeed. I couldn’t credit it when first Colin told me, but then when I thought about it I came to see how it might just be the truth. My mother couldn’t possibly have loved Colin, or have even been attracted to him. Even if he hadn’t cut the sort of shambling figure that he did, I don’t think that in any case she thought in such terms. But she did respect property; she did respect wealth, even if of a modest kind; and I think that she had a sneaking admiration for the material success that had grown out of Colin’s grasping nature. Added to that, of course, was her plainly-stated belief that marriage was a form of business transaction. The transaction between herself and Ronald had broken down, though the shell that had housed it remained. I doubt that she would have had the slightest compunction about replacing it with another, on the same exchange-of-goods basis.
In the Family Page 27
