The Work of a Narrow Mind

by Faith Martin

  Steven smiled grimly. If that were the case, then who was to say that Chivnor, or someone like him, wouldn’t be able to place Medcalfe himself at the very heart of some of the worst of their crimes? Maybe even place him at the scene of one of the several murders for which they were almost certainly responsible?

  He sighed, realizing that he was fast getting ahead of himself. The likelihood of getting one of Medcalfe’s thugs to grass on him had to be infinitesimal. He’d ask Hillary what she thought about it later on tonight. He’d long since come to value her insight and experience with all manner of villains, and didn’t doubt that any success he might make of the new job would be down largely to her help and input behind the scenes. Nor was he the sort of man who was afraid of taking good advice when he was given it.

  But he also knew that the buck stopped with him.

  He felt a familiar feeling of pleasure wash over him as he contemplated an evening together with Hillary. He’d cook something – salmon perhaps, and bring a bottle and a romantic DVD for them to watch. Then he wondered if, tonight, maybe she’d finally have something more personal to tell him than how to set about clearing out the scum from their city.

  He leaned back in his chair and gently twisted it around, staring up at the narrow, high window that just about reached ground level and gave him a view of people’s passing feet as they accessed the car park. Then he thought of his new office overlooking Christ Church and felt guilty that he was leaving here, and she wasn’t. Was that part of the problem? Was that why she hadn’t given him an answer yet?

  He turned back restlessly to the Medcalfe dossier.

  The next witness on Wendy’s list was out, and the third was a rather deaf old man who thought that they were from the council. Hillary indicated to Jake that they should call it a day for now, and they began to trudge back to his car.

  It was as they passed Sylvie’s old house, that the door of the next house down opened, and a curious woman moved out onto her doorstep and watched them approach with the clear intention of hailing them.

  Hillary slowed down and paused at the end of the garden gate.

  ‘You the police?’ the woman called boldly. She lifted a cigarette to her mouth as she spoke, and squinted at them through the smoke. She had the stick-thin, emaciated look of a dedicated smoker, to whom food meant very little. Her thinning hair was dyed an uncompromising red, and she regarded them with thoughtful blue eyes that seemed to miss very little.

  Hillary estimated that she was probably in her late sixties, maybe early seventies, but there was nothing of Phyllis Drew’s little-old-lady about her.

  ‘Yes,’ Hillary acknowledged simply.

  ‘Thought so. Well, come on in then. I’m Freddie de la Mare.’

  She showed them into a cottage similar in size to the Drews’, but vastly different in every other respect. New double-glazing and doors, along with a modern oil central heating system kept the whole of the interior pleasantly but not overwhelmingly warm.

  The front room to which she showed them had a thick carpet and an obviously well-used but comfortable leather settee with matching armchair combo, and a wooden coffee table in the centre of the grouping. As Hillary approached and took one of the chairs offered, she saw that the coffee table had a glass top over a poster of a pastoral scene by Constable. It was in odd contrast to the vibrant and far more modern-looking landscape paintings on the walls, by an artist Hillary didn’t know.

  Freddie de la Mare seated herself on what was obviously her favourite spot on the settee, having as it did the best view of the flat-screen TV in one corner, and stretched out her long legs under the coffee table. She was wearing a pair of stretch leggings in a vibrant shade of blue, and had a long knitted jumper that reached far below her hips, in horizontal stripes of rainbow hue.

  Her face, however, was all but colourless, making the dark cherry red of her lipstick stand out in odd contrast.

  ‘I saw that young girl who was around the other day. She said someone would be coming around to interview us about Sylvie. So when I saw you go into old Phil’s place, I knew it must be you. Not that you’ll have got much out of Phil and Charlie,’ Freddie said with a wry laugh, and promptly lit up another fag from the dog-end of her old one.

  Hillary resigned herself to an interview in the fug. She could hardly ask the woman to stub out the cigarette in her own home, and in November, with a cold wind blowing outside, she could hardly ask if she could open a window. Knowing her luck, Hillary thought grimly, she’d probably catch pneumonia and sue the police service.

  Quickly summing up the individual in front of her, Hillary doubted that any offer of tea or coffee would be forthcoming, not so much out of miserliness, or even out of defiance or absent-mindedness either, unless she missed her guess. No, Freddie de la Mare simply looked to her like a woman who clearly had other matters on her mind.

  ‘So, why are you opening Sylvie’s case now, after all this time, if you don’t mind my asking?’ Freddie got straight down to the point. ‘Has something new come up? There’s been nothing about it in the papers.’ As she spoke, she puffed industriously, and the half-full ashtray that was residing on the edge of the table quickly became the recipient of yet another long, delicate tail of ash.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that, Mrs de la Mare.’

  ‘It’s Ms, actually, but for pity’s sake, just call me Freddie.’

  ‘Freddie then,’ she agreed peaceably. ‘Any relation to the poet by the way?’ Hillary couldn’t help but ask. She hadn’t taken an English degree for nothing. Opposite her, she could see Jake cast her a quick, uncomprehending look. She sighed heavily. It would no doubt do him good to read something other than computer manuals once in a while, she thought, a shade sourly.

  ‘Not that I’m aware of,’ Freddie drawled. ‘My side of the family were more artistically bent,’ she admitted, and cast a hand over the vibrant landscapes. ‘I don’t sign my works,’ she added, with a vague sort of embarrassment that came with acknowledging that the paintings were hers.

  Hillary took another look at the artwork. ‘They’re all yours? You must be proud of them. I know I would be,’ Hillary said truthfully.

  Freddie gave a shrug and puffed on her fag. ‘Oh they sell well enough to the tourists,’ she said gruffly. ‘There’s a gallery in Oxford which takes my work, and one in Woodstock, and Stratford. These are all oils – I hang them on the walls till they’re dry. This lot will be dispatched next month, and then the canvases I’m working on now take their place.’

  ‘It must be nice to earn a living from your own creativity,’ Hillary said. ‘Did Sylvia buy any of your work?’

  Freddie gave a dry, hacking laugh, that promptly turned into a dry, hacking cough. When she’d finished, she turned bright blue eyes on Hillary. ‘No fear. Sylvie thought them far too high-priced. She preferred flower prints anyway,’ she added, with a dismissive shrug that silently acknowledged that there was no accounting for taste. She stubbed out the poor remains of her dog end, and contemplated the packet of cigarettes and lighter next to the ashtray.

  Before she could reach for another one, Hillary tried to distract her. ‘Did you see Sylvia the day she died?’

  ‘No. That would have been the day before,’ the artist corrected. ‘She was going out in her car somewhere, and I was in the garden. I waved. Never saw her alive again after that.’ Although Freddie stated the words flatly, and there was certainly no sentiment detectable in her expression, Hillary was sure that she could detect a true sense of sadness behind the matter-of-fact delivery.

  ‘You’d known her long?’ she asked gently.

  ‘Been neighbours for more than forty years,’ Freddie said abruptly and reached for and lit another cigarette.

  ‘It must have come as a great shock to you when you heard that she’d been murdered.’

  ‘Hell yes.’

  ‘She didn’t seem the kind of woman to be murdered, did she?’ Hillary said, in a slightly whimsical way. Jak
e shot her a keen-eyed glance: he’d worked with her long enough now to know that she never did anything – but anything – by accident. Quickly he turned towards the chain-smoking artist and his eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

  He couldn’t see it himself, but something about the woman had obviously triggered on Hillary Greene’s radar. What the hell was it? Freddie de la Mare had a sort of gruff and abrupt manner of speaking, but he didn’t believe it was that.

  ‘No. When you put it like that, she wasn’t, was she?’ Freddie concurred, looking at Hillary with suddenly near-hostile eyes. ‘Sylvie was the sort to give you the shirt off her back if she thought you genuinely needed it more than she did.’

  ‘A lot of people seemed to think, at first, that a gang of robbers was responsible,’ Hillary said casually.

  ‘DI Jarvis didn’t arrest anyone,’ Freddie said uncompromisingly. ‘And I can’t believe that nobody would have seen them around and noticed them if they’d been here that day.’

  ‘Vanessa Gibson seemed to like that idea.’

  Freddie puffed on her cigarette, eyeing Hillary through the haze of smoke like a cautious cat that was contemplating a creature that it hadn’t encountered before. A snake perhaps, or a stoat.

  Was it predator or was it prey?

  ‘Vanessa’s shit-scared that Randy did it, that’s why she’s so keen to put the blame elsewhere,’ Freddie surprised them both by stating flatly. ‘I could tell that the first time I met her after we’d all heard the news about Sylvie.’ Freddie grunted another dry, hacking laugh, and tipped her ash into the already burdened ashtray. ‘I could have told her that she was worrying about nothing, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. Women like her were born to worry. Besides, she’d never gone out of her way to be friendly to me, so why should I bother?’ The artist shrugged one bony shoulder indifferently under the vast, multi-coloured sweater that hung over her like a tent.

  Hillary nodded. Yes, she couldn’t see Vanessa Gibson and Freddie de la Mare ever being friends. They were too catastrophically different.

  ‘So you don’t think Randy was to blame?’ Hillary said, allowing herself to sound as curious as she felt. The artist, as she’d just ably demonstrated, observed much, and had the brains to form her own interpretations of what she saw, and if she didn’t think Gibson was guilty, Hillary wanted to know why.

  ‘Not the type,’ Freddie said flatly. ‘For all that Sylvie tried to make his life miserable, most of it was water off a duck’s back to him. The only thing Randy really cares about is keeping the farm going, and trying to please that wife of his. He just about manages the first, but he’ll never manage the second. So he had no real time for Sylvie’s accusations or bile, since it didn’t affect either of those two goals.’

  ‘But she did make trouble for him.’ Hillary wouldn’t let it go that easily.

  ‘Oh yes. She was a little bit unhinged on the subject of her Joe, I have to admit,’ Freddie agreed glumly. ‘She loved him you see, and his loss really devastated her.’

  ‘So she needed someone to blame,’ Hillary put in.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But if she touched a nerve,’ said Hillary, deliberately playing devil’s advocate, ‘he might have snapped. Someone said that she had encouraged ramblers to cross Gibson’s land, for example. Now if that affected his crops, and thus the future of his farm—’

  ‘It didn’t,’ the artist interrupted quickly and emphatically. ‘There’s always been a right of way there; it skirts one of his wheat fields. The ramblers always kept to the hedges, and didn’t do any damage, and Randy knew it,’ Freddie said, contemplating the glowing tip of her cigarette thoughtfully. ‘Besides, like I told you, Randy’s not the type to pick up a poker and bash an old lady’s head in. If he was going to do something like commit murder, it would have to be at some remove. Mow her down in his tractor one dark night, maybe. Or push a lighted, petrol-soaked rag through the letterbox and scarper. But face to face? No way. If he had visited her that day, Sylvie would have made mincemeat out of him and sent him on his way with a proper flea in his ear. Believe me, he’s not the type for personal confrontations.’

  She puffed on the fag, her yellow, nicotine-stained fingers competing for colour with a magenta and emerald-green paint stain on her right hand.

  ‘Have we disturbed your painting?’ Hillary asked gently.

  ‘What? No. Well, yes, but no.’ Freddie contemplated her stained hand with a slightly bemused look. ‘It was time I took a break, I mean. I paint upstairs, in one of the bedrooms. I was thinking of coming down for a coffee anyway.’

  Hillary nodded, thinking that the usually straight-talking older woman was protesting just a little too much.

  So, she’d been looking out of her studio window and had seen them, Hillary mused. And had needed to sound us out so badly, that she’d abandoned her latest canvas without a qualm.

  Interesting. Very. In fact, Freda de la Mare was interesting Hillary a great deal.

  ‘So if it wasn’t robbers, and it wasn’t Randy, who was it?’ she mused, almost teasingly. ‘DI Jarvis, the original investigator was very much in favour of the grandson, Robbie Grant. We’ve just visited him in fact – he’s currently doing time for violent robbery,’ Hillary said. ‘So perhaps she was right. All we need now is to place him in the vicinity at the time. He inherited Sylvia’s estate, so we have motive. Who knows, we might be ready to make an arrest before the end of the week.’

  Freddie nodded, took a long haul on the fag, and once again slowly blew out a stream of smoke whilst watching the glowing amber end of her cigarette.

  ‘He was a wrong ’un, right enough,’ she agreed gruffly. ‘Not that Sylvie would have it, mind.’ She smiled grimly, showing, for the first time, the full extent of her own misshapen and yellow-stained teeth. ‘For a bright woman in every other way, she had a blind spot where he was concerned. But it won’t do, you know,’ Freddie said, shaking her dyed red head sadly.

  Hillary, who had anticipated some such rejoinder, went very still. ‘Oh? Why not? The young man didn’t strike me as having anything even remotely approaching a conscience. And for all his protestations of loving his old nan, his own creature comforts were clearly far more important to him. I could see him killing the old lady for his inheritance very easily.’

  ‘Oh yes, I dare say all that’s true,’ Freddie agreed, still contemplating the tip of her cigarette as if it could give the Sphinx a run for its money in providing enigmatic interest. ‘He’s a total little shite, and no mistake. But he wasn’t here that day – the day Sylvie died. I knew the sound of his car, see. It had something wrong with the exhaust, which gave it a distinctive, throaty sort of roar. So I always knew when young Master Grant had come calling on his granny to touch her up for some cash. And I didn’t hear or see his car that day.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem,’ Hillary said casually, wondering just how much out on a limb the woman was willing to go. ‘He could have borrowed a mate’s car, for instance.’

  Freddie de la Mare slowly raised her fag to her lips and looked across at Hillary. ‘But I didn’t see him. And since I was upstairs painting that day, I would have noticed him.’

  ‘But according to DI Jarvis’s notes, you didn’t see anyone entering Sylvie’s house that day. And yet, evidently, someone did.’

  Freddie shrugged, unwilling to be phased by the clever little riposte. ‘Unless they came in the back way,’ she countered instead with superb elan. ‘And that little scrote had no reason to. It would involve walking all of twenty yards more. He was too lazy to do that when he could just park outside the gate.’

  ‘Unless he came prepared to kill her,’ Hillary argued reasonably. ‘Then he wouldn’t want to be seen.’

  ‘Rumour has it that Sylvie was killed by her own poker.’ Freddie tossed the ball neatly back into her court. ‘That doesn’t smack of pre-meditation somehow, does it?’

  Hillary smiled gently. ‘Perhaps not. A member of the family then
?’ she mused.

  ‘What? One of her girls?’ Freddie scoffed. ‘No way. Sylvie’s girls all loved her to bits. And why not? She was the salt of the earth. She loved those kids, and looked after them, and gave them the best damned start in life that any kid could possibly want or reasonably ask for. And they all loved her back, in their own unique way, believe me.’

  Hillary nodded, abruptly changing tactics. ‘Well, thank you, Miss— Sorry, Freddie. You’ve been very helpful, and we may have to come back and speak to you again soon, but for now, I think that’ll be all.’

  She got up, her abrupt departure catching Jake as much by surprise as their witness, and pausing on the way to the door, Hillary stopped before one of the oils hanging on the wall. It depicted a cold, wintry scene, with snow-capped bull rushes lining a frozen-rimmed pond. A pair of grey cygnets paddled about in the middle, one stretching out its neck and wings prior to take off. A lemon-coloured sun cast a wintry light over the bare, skeletal trees. It was distinctive and competent, whilst at the same time dripping with a near natural-Gothic atmosphere.

  It made her shiver appreciatively.

  ‘Which gallery in Oxford did you say sold your canvases?’

  Freddie named a well-respected establishment in St Giles. Hillary nodded thoughtfully. She would look out for them. If they didn’t blow the budget totally, she might treat Steven to one. It was his birthday soon, and she knew he’d appreciate Freddie’s stark view on the natural world.

  ‘Sorry about the smoke,’ Freddie said, noticing, as she opened the door to the hall that a vapour trail of grey miasma was being sucked out. ‘I’ve been on the cancer sticks for so long that I just don’t notice it anymore.’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ Hillary said, nevertheless glad to know that she’d soon be stepping out into the bracing, clean air. ‘Your home, your rules.’

  Freddie shot her a quick, uncertain look, then gave a wry smile and a brief nod. Although exactly just what it was she was acknowledging, perhaps neither woman would have been able to say.