by Mosby, Steve
She shines the torch into the corner, at the beams and the taut blue sheets stretched between them like sails.
The bumblebee nest is in there somewhere, she knows. But she can hear nothing for now but that rush of air.
Over the past days, she has found herself going out into the garden more and more. It is always when the neighbours aren’t there, so it is a half-victory at best, but still. She sits on the doorstep with a cup of tea and a book, and it feels as though her small patch of the world is a little more friendly than before.
Following the conversation with Karen, she senses a kind of unspoken truce. Even if that is just in her head, the neighbours no longer seem quite so threatening. Karen and Derek. She tries not to worry about the messy tangle of weeds in the garden. Kieran remains adamant that he won’t tackle it, but Margaret recognises that particular brand of masculine stubbornness – that constant, wearying competition – and knows there is no point to it. She will either persuade him to help or else hire someone who will. Anything for a quiet life. She will meet the neighbours in the middle.
Most of the time outside she spends watching the bumblebees. She admires their industry, the way they work at the buds, then loop upwards, laden down with satchels of pollen. She can never keep track of them for long individually, but by not focusing, she detects an underlying pattern to their movements. A tiny piece of organisation occurs within each bee, as though they are all small, separate parts in the same hugely intricate piece of clockwork. Occasionally, one buzzes close to her face before swirling away, and she thinks hello there, as though the creature has come to see her. And that is how she feels about the nest as a whole. In a strange way, she is almost humbled that they have chosen to come and stay with her. That an old lady’s house has purpose again.
As she watches them today, she loses herself slightly, transported back to idyllic memories of childhood: a bright, primary-coloured garden; the smell of the flowers and tousled grass; a rusty fence and the polished, evergreen gleam of holly. Just fragments, really, but they cohere in an odd way, and somehow make her feel young and hopeful without reminding her that she is not. There were always bees back then. It is as though the arrival of the creatures now is tying the beginning and end of her life in a bow.
‘You’ve got bees.’
Her eyes are closed, and the sound of his voice shocks her. She opens them to see him standing opposite, right up against the fence. Derek, she remembers. He is staring over at her, his forearms resting on the wood. Karen is standing a little way along the path, her sunglasses on, looking down at her feet.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Bees.’ He nods at the roof. ‘You’ve got a nest up there.’
‘Oh, yes. I know.’
Margaret stands up. She can’t retreat inside now – not in the middle of a conversation. And anyway, what is there to be scared of? He isn’t threatening her, and with his body obscured by the fence, he doesn’t seem as intimidating as he usually does. Perhaps Karen has spoken to him and he is even trying to be friendly. To look out for her. She forces herself to walk a little way down the path towards the fence.
‘They’ve been there for a bit. They’re bumblebees.’
Up close, Derek seems much younger than his wife. His face is tanned and smooth, and his receding hair is cut short and neat. Those forearms are thick, and not so much muscled as meaty, as though he is a man who doesn’t need to work out, who is just naturally strong.
As Margaret reaches the fence, he still hasn’t replied to her, and it throws her a little. Yes, she has bumblebees, and they’ve been there for a week or so. Surely it is his turn to speak now? The silence makes her feel flustered and awkward. She looks at Karen, who is still staring down, and then back to Derek.
‘I quite like them,’ she says. ‘They’re very pretty when you see them up close. Nice to watch. And they’re not really bothering anyone, are they?’
His expression flickers slightly at that, but she doesn’t have time to read whatever was momentarily there.
‘You need to get rid of them.’
The words are so definite that everything sinks inside her, and for a moment she accepts the encounter on his terms. Why does she have to get rid of them? It’s not fair. All she really wants is to be left alone. Derek and Karen on that side of the fence, and her on this. That doesn’t seem too much to ask.
‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ she suggests. ‘They’re not causing any harm.’
‘They’re bees. Sooner or later you’re going to get stung.’
‘They don’t sting unless they’re threatened.’
‘They’ll sting when they swarm.’
That makes her feel a little brighter.
‘Oh, but they don’t swarm,’ she says. ‘They’re not like other bees. And there aren’t that many in there really. The nest doesn’t even last very long.’
She expects him to see sense at that, but if anything, the expression on his face has hardened. He isn’t listening, she realises. In his mind, this isn’t a conversation. He has stated what he wants done, and that is not going to change, regardless of anything she has to say.
‘You need to get rid of them,’ he repeats. ‘You’ve not been stung. But it’s not just you. Do you really not understand that?’
Margaret blinks. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s like with the state of the garden. You think you live in a bubble.’ He turns slightly, gesturing past Karen, who remains standing still, to his own well-kept lawn. ‘I mean, look. They’re down here too. Why should I have to put up with them? Why should my wife?’
‘I …’ But she doesn’t know how to answer. Does he really expect such total control and dominion over the world that he thinks he should be able to shut nature out of his property? That the potential danger of his wife being stung outweighs Margaret’s rights over her own home?
‘Karen—’ Margaret says, but Derek interrupts her.
‘Are you having trouble? Finding someone, I mean. I know you’re on your own. I can have someone come round if you don’t know how. I know people.’
He sounds genuine, but even so, the insult lands. If you don’t know how. It hurts to have it confirmed – that he thinks of her as a feeble, incapable old woman. Karen remains silent. Perhaps she thinks that too. In some ways, of course, they are right, but she is coping. It’s not that she needs help getting rid of the bees. It’s that she doesn’t want to.
And she surprises herself by saying so.
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You don’t want to?’
Her resolve hardens.
‘No. I don’t. They’re not bothering anyone.’
‘They’re bothering me. And they’re bothering my family. You need to get rid of them.’
The final sentence is firm, not phrased as a command, but clearly intended as one. I have said it, and so it shall be done. And with that, Derek walks off down the path, brushing straight past his wife, heading for the car.
For a moment, Margaret feels despondent. She likes the bees; they have made her house feel a little like a home again, and have, in some small way, given her back a piece of the outside world. He isn’t going to take that away from her.
‘I’m not going to.’
He is too far away to hear her now, but the words reach Karen, at least, and she finally raises her head to look at Margaret. With the sunglasses on, it is hard to make out her expression, but she seems to be reappraising Margaret, and a moment later a slight smile appears on her face. There is something about it that seems conspiratorial. Don’t worry. I’ll talk to him. It’s fine.
Margaret nods at her, and then Karen turns and walks towards her husband. She moves a little oddly, and Margaret finds herself hoping that she’s all right.
She takes one last look at the bumblebees meandering around the hedge, and then goes back inside.
Twenty-Two
For the day and a half that Drew MacKenzie had been in custody, he’d belonged to Burgla
ry. They’d spent the time gently persuading him that he was totally fucked – basically – and then teasing out the details of the long list of crimes he was prepared to take off the books for us.
It was standard procedure, and MacKenzie was not about to inject any originality into the process. He stonewalled at first, and then capitulated when it finally filtered through to him that copping to other offences wasn’t going to make his predicament dramatically worse. If anything, a sentencing judge was going to see him in a better light afterwards. It was dispiriting in some ways, but at least it gave the affected households a modicum of closure. The guy who did this to you, we got him. He hadn’t been overly forthcoming about his accomplices, or how he’d got rid of the goods he’d stolen, but again, not bucking any trends there.
A day and a half with Burglary.
And now he was ours.
Nine thirty in the morning, and Chris and I were sitting across from him in an interview suite; one of the newer ones in the department, with polished steel surfaces, hi-tech recording equipment and a wall mirror that looked like it might have an observation suite on the other side. It didn’t. Anybody watching would be doing so via the video feed from the camera in the corner of the ceiling.
A number of people upstairs would be glued to their monitors. The court order for Mayday had come through twenty minutes ago, and that was being pursued right now. In the meantime, MacKenzie had gone up in the world. Overnight, he’d become a person of interest to us.
‘No comment,’ he said.
‘You think this is a film?’ I said. ‘What do you think that even means, no comment? You want to spend this whole interview like a little kid with his fingers in his ears? It’s not going away, Drew.’
‘No comment.’
‘That is a comment. And it’s not one that’s making things look particularly good for you right now.’
He stared at me, a sullen expression on his face. At the Packhorse, with his crew and in his sauce, he’d come across as strong and cocky, but a day in police custody has a way of diminishing the hardest of people. In an interview suite, everybody always looks significantly smaller. He was dressed in T-shirt and jeans, and was much skinnier than I remembered. His thin frame suggested that a great deal of his calories came from alcohol, and he had the pale, unhealthy pallor of an addict.
I was fairly sure that he hadn’t recognised me. But I – at least – knew we’d both come from the same place, and it was odd to see him like this, on the opposite side of the polished steel desk. Our lives had diverged radically since childhood, and that distance was represented by the width of the metal between us.
The more I looked at him, the more I saw traces of the cheeky little boy I remembered. But it was clear that an attitude that had been endearing when he was young had curdled badly with age, becoming something altogether more unpleasant. There was a sneer to his mouth now. A total blankness in his eyes as he stared right back at me. He could have done anything with his life, and he’d done this.
‘No comment.’
I stared him out for a few seconds, until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to look away. It was childish to continue, so I tried to convey yeah, well, only one of us will be going home tonight with a slight smile, then turned my attention to the document in front of me.
‘To repeat myself, what I have here is a list of burglaries you have admitted to carrying out. There are fourteen addresses on this sheet.’
The last was mine, although I wasn’t going to mention that. Either he hadn’t committed an offence since, or he wasn’t copping to it, but that didn’t matter much to me. I was more interested in one a third of the way down. I tapped it now.
‘In the early hours of September the twelfth last year, you have admitted to breaking and entering an address with the motivation of theft. A semi-detached house on Wesley Street, Haydon.’
I turned the sheet round for him to see. He only glanced at it for a second before looking at me again, so I turned it back.
‘That address belonged to a woman named Sally Vickers. Does that name mean anything to you, Drew?’
Saying her name out loud made me a little angrier. My mind pulled out an image of her, covered in blood, stuffed down the side of a bed. And then as a still white form in a mortuary. This time, I held his stare.
After a few moments, he shook his head.
‘Subject indicates no,’ I said. ‘Don’t you watch the news, Drew?’
He shrugged, as though wondering why on earth he would do something like that.
‘Sally Vickers was murdered in her home a few days ago. Doesn’t ring any bells?’
That got more of a reaction than I’d been expecting, but it took a couple of seconds for it to arrive. You could see the cogs turning, clicking into place. He still didn’t know who she was, but he understood where this might be going.
‘That’s got nothing to do with me.’
‘I didn’t say it did.’ I stared at him again, and this time he was the one who looked away first. ‘Why so quick to deny it?’
‘I know what you’re like. Always bothering us. I’ve told you everything, and that’s enough. You’re not pinning that on me as well.’
I shot Chris a glance, and he rolled his eyes at me. As well as growing up sullen, it didn’t seem like Drew MacKenzie had ended up all that smart. He seemed to believe it was possible we were going to try to unload a murder on to his charge sheet as well.
I leaned forward.
‘Drew. Listen. Right now, I don’t believe you raped and killed Sally Vickers. But here’s the thing. We still don’t know how her attacker gained access to her property. All we know is that he did, and that he was a bit cleverer about it than you. And you know what? It strikes me as a bit of an odd coincidence that you did it less than a year ago.’
Which was true, although I still wasn’t sure what it meant. We had checked out priors on the properties from the very beginning, of course, but out of the six victims we had so far, Sally Vickers’ was only the second to suffer a breakin. The third victim, Mary Jones, had also been burgled, but that had been over three years ago. Ultimately, we’d discounted the connection.
Now we had burglary number two. As thin as it was, I was willing to seize on anything – grab it and shake it, in fact, and not let go. Even if I couldn’t see the significance yet, there was something here. I was sure of it.
But MacKenzie was shaking his head.
‘I don’t know what you’re trying to say. I don’t know what you’re fucking getting at.’
I pulled a sheet from my file.
‘This is a list of addresses, Drew. I’m going to read it to you, and you’re going to tell me if you magically missed some of these out.’
I read out the addresses of the other victims. It was unlikely but possible that they’d suffered some kind of breakin without reporting it. But to each one MacKenzie just said no, obviously without thinking about it. As an afterthought, I asked about Jonathan Pearson, the suspect I’d visited on the estate.
‘What about Paydale Lane?’ I said.
That at least got his attention.
‘In Thornton?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘That’s where I’m from,’ he said. ‘You don’t shit on your own.’
From the way he looked at me, I wondered if he’d clocked me – if he’d remembered who I was. But he hadn’t. It was just bravado. Just pretending he had some kind of code when he didn’t. I could tell that in his own head he felt superior to me and Chris. Thought that we didn’t know what it was like. That we’d had things easy.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘What did you take?’
‘What?’
‘For God’s sake, Drew. From Sally Vickers’ house in Haydon. When you broke in that night, what did you take?’
‘I can’t remember. How the fuck am I supposed to remember that?’
‘Try.’
‘Stuff. The usual.’
I’d read the report before co
ming in here, and knew full well what had been taken; it was all there for the insurance claim. Not only had MacKenzie and his friends broken in using the same lock-drilling technique they’d employed at my house, they’d apparently taken much the same things. The TV, the Blu-ray player, a laptop. High-value items, basically, along with a scattering of movies and games. He hadn’t thrown stuff around the way he had at mine. A tidy burglary.
‘Stuff,’ I said. ‘But you can’t remember what.’
‘The TV, probably.’
‘Yeah, you love TVs, just not the news. What about the kitchen? You scoop out any drawers?’
‘What?’
‘The kitchen drawers. Is that something you’d normally pay attention to?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Why?’
‘Because that’s often where people keep a spare set of keys.’
I allowed that one to settle in his head. For me, now that I’d said it out loud, the feeling that there was something here grew even stronger. If Sally’s killer had got the keys to her property from somewhere, the prime suspect was sitting in front of me right now.
He looked down at the table.
‘I don’t remember. I don’t.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, you’re going to have to give us some names, then, aren’t you? The people who were there with you. The people you passed the gear on to.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘You really can. And you’re going to.’
He shook his head again, still looking down, his misery evident in what I could see of his face.
There was enough of the kid there, in that expression, for me to remember him more vividly. One time round at Sylvie’s, before John’s influence made us drift apart. Drew had been sitting on a threadbare settee, his bright yellow hair home-cropped short, weaving a battered third-or fourth-hand toy aeroplane in figures of eight in front of his face. His legs were so short that his feet didn’t touch the floor. I concentrated on the image, trying to think about him like John would. Just an innocent little kid. Still too young to have an ounce of any real badness in him.
