Frozen Charlotte

by Priscilla Masters

  Hughes and his team looked at one another, shrugged and carried on with their work, certain that a steady stream of elderly ladies would be observing what they could through Mrs Mistery’s patio doors.

  Luckily the ground wasn’t still frozen. The slabs of concrete were heavy and they stacked them neatly against the fence. It took them all day to remove all the stones and underneath was a concrete level, which would take all the next day to take up with the help of a percussion hammer. Hughes swallowed a smile as he saw a rim of bird-like faces watching him through the window. See what the old biddies made of the noise of that. The building work, he noted, had been done very thoroughly. By four the light was going. They set up arc lights (another disturbance for the inquisitive women).

  At six p.m. there was a briefing with plenty to report.

  WPC Delia Shaw related the conversation she’d had with Plumley. ‘I’m just waiting for his call back,’ she said, ‘with the address Mrs Isaac moved to when she left the house in The Mount. He absolutely insists that no one had an unaccompanied viewing at number 41,’ she added.

  Talith related the odd behaviour of Aaron Sedgewick at the Mount the previous afternoon, then Randall picked up the threads of the investigation of what lay underneath the patio stones in Bayston Hill. Could the baby have been kept there and moved? Were there other bodies?

  ‘We’ll know a bit more when we see what SOCO unearth,’ he said. ‘They’re still lifting the patio as we speak.’

  Plumley rang back just as Delia Shaw was putting her coat on. ‘I’ve got the details you want.’ He rattled off an address in Birmingham.

  ‘Do you have a telephone number?’

  There was the sound of papers rustling and Plumley gave her a Birmingham landline. She glanced at the phone. It was seven o’clock. She was already late.

  She dialled the number anyway.

  TWELVE

  A man answered the phone and listened politely as she spoke. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I had read something about a child’s body being found in a house in Shrewsbury but I had no idea that the house in question was my mother’s.’

  ‘Is there any possibility,’ Delia suggested tentatively, ‘that I could come down and speak to you about the property?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, sounding surprised, ‘though I can’t see that I can help you in any way. You do know my mother died a couple of years ago?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘It’s OK. She was elderly. She didn’t suffer. Her last couple of years with us were happy. The children got to know her. No regrets. Anyway, I’m around tomorrow if that’s any good.’

  ‘Yes – that would be really convenient.’

  ‘OK. I’ll see you tomorrow then.’ He sounded buoyant, unconcerned.

  Innocent, she decided. ‘About eleven?’

  ‘That’ll be fine.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said and hung up.

  At least, Delia Shaw thought, as she switched the light off and left the room, now she too would have some contribution to make to the case.

  Maliciously Roddie Hughes started the noisy work digging up the concrete at seven a.m. the following morning and was rewarded by a sleepy looking Mrs Mistery drawing back the curtains and looking slightly less delighted at being at the centre of a crime drama. They had also spoilt her fun by erecting a screen right around the small patio which completely blocked her view. They did not want Mrs Mistery’s geriatric gang of mates witnessing their activities, drinking cups of tea, pointing fingers and generally mischief-making.

  He and the team worked steadily, lifting the concrete until they had exposed the underlying hardcore, finally exposing the soil.

  They had almost finished this task when Shotton returned, bringing Holmes and Watson with him. As soon as they were out of the van, the dogs scampered towards the patio, eagerly pressing their noses to the newly exposed earth. They concentrated their attention over practically the same spot as before, yelping excitedly, wagging their tails and waiting for their reward. The SOCO team looked at one another.

  They had a hit.

  The M6 was its usual nightmare and WPC Delia Shaw worried that she would arrive late for her appointment with the Isaacs, but in the event, with the luck of a sudden clearing of the traffic and the aid of her Satnav she pulled up outside their house only a few minutes after eleven, having left a message at the station to let them know where she was going.

  Mrs Isaac’s son lived in a similar house to the one his mother had inhabited, a large detached Victorian property near the centre of Moseley Village, a stylish suburb two miles south of Birmingham’s city centre. It was an area with its own character, a village green, shops and cafes, both bohemian and cosmopolitan, reminiscent of Greenwich Village, New York.

  Two saloon cars stood in the driveway and the door was opened to her as soon as she knocked. The Isaacs were ready for her. They welcomed her warmly into a large, cosy kitchen, bright with cream bespoke units and amply warmed by an Aga. PC Shaw thanked them for seeing her and reassured them that no suspicion fell on either them or the late Mrs Isaac. They sat companionably around a kitchen table, a cafetière of coffee supplying the dual purpose of scenting the room and providing refreshment. Paul Isaac was a tall, dark-haired man in his fifties. Rebecca Isaac was quite a lot younger than her husband, maybe in her thirties, Delia noted. She was also heavily pregnant.

  Paul Isaac spoke first. ‘I really can’t see how we can help you.’

  PC Shaw gave them both a disarming smile. ‘It’s a very puzzling case and we feel we would like to get to the bottom of it,’ she said. ‘We haven’t really got any substantial leads so we’re clutching at straws.’ Another of her wide smiles. ‘Hence the trip down the M6 to see you. So anything – absolutely anything that you can think of – even if it appears irrelevant to the case, might just be the tip we need.’ Her smile was returned by both of them.

  Paul Isaac spoke first. ‘It’s difficult for us to think of anything that can possibly have any bearing on your case,’ he said. ‘It was about eight years ago now that we brought mother to live with us. She was getting a little forgetful, a bit frail and we thought it safer to keep her under our eye. The house in Shrewsbury is a big place. Far too big for her. She couldn’t really manage it, even with help.’

  ‘What help?’ WPC Shaw asked sharply.

  ‘She had a lady come in in the mornings for a couple of hours,’ Rebecca said.

  Delia Shaw drew out her notebook. ‘Her name and address?’

  ‘Maisie somebody,’ Rebecca said vaguely. ‘I can’t remember her surname. She lived somewhere on Castlefields. I probably threw away her contact details years ago – after mother died.’ She glanced quickly at her husband. ‘But she can’t have had anything to do with a baby. She was well into her fifties.’ Her hands brushed her swollen stomach.

  ‘How did your mother-in-law find her?’

  Again it was Rebecca Isaac who answered. ‘Through an advert in the Shrewsbury Chronicle . She advertised to do cleaning and mentioned that she was particularly happy to work with the elderly as she’d done some sort of nursing. She sounded ideal for Mother.’ She gave another quick, puzzled look at her husband. ‘She was wonderful. She did everything, cleaned and shopped and tidied up, did any errands, even drove Mother to the doctor’s or the dentist’s. She picked up her prescriptions and cooked her lunch. She did just about everything. She was a real treasure. A find. Mother was really fond of her. In fact, she was so good that when we finally brought Mother to live with us we gave her a cheque for two thousand pounds. In recognition of her help.’

  ‘Very generous,’ Delia commented.

  ‘Well – we thought a lot of her. She was a lovely woman and she made Mother’s life so much easier.’ Paul Isaac seemed to think something more was expected and added to his wife’s comments. ‘She was pleasant too. Always friendly. When we visited she cooked us meals and generally made us welcome. To be honest, we couldn’t have wanted anyone better.’
r />   ‘What about her family?’

  They looked at one another. ‘I don’t remember her mentioning a husband,’ Paul Isaac said dubiously. ‘And I haven’t a clue whether she wore a wedding ring or not. She might have had a son or a daughter but I don’t recall anything about them. She didn’t talk about anything to do with her personal life. We certainly never met any relations of hers. It was all about Mother.’

  ‘Do you know if a son or a daughter ever visited her at your mother’s house?’

  ‘Not that we know of.’ They answered in unison without any consultation, Paul Isaac adding unnecessarily, ‘If they visited when we weren’t there we wouldn’t have known anything about it, would we?’

  ‘Quite. And the garden?’

  Paul Isaac answered again. ‘A firm of gardeners came round. Greenfingers they were called.’ He chuckled. ‘A very memorable name. They came round one morning a week, once a fortnight through the winter to tidy up. They did the lawns, the hedges, maintenance. They weren’t cheap but they kept the grounds immaculate. Mother wasn’t short of money and she would have been upset to have seen the place fall into neglect, so it was money well spent.’

  Delia copied it all down religiously without a clue whether any of it would prove relevant. ‘So you brought your mother to live with you in…?’ She looked up enquiringly.

  ‘October 2002.’

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘She was getting older. Into her eighties. Oh, I don’t know,’ Rebecca Isaac said. ‘The world suddenly seemed to have become a more dangerous place, people a little more vulnerable, families a little more precious. I lost a brother in the Twin Towers attack. He was my only brother. I have no sisters. My parents are both dead. We felt. We both felt,’ she corrected, ‘that we wanted what family we had near. Paul is an only child. The winter was coming. Travel can be tricky. The motorways… well.’ Rebecca Isaac gave her a sudden smile. ‘We don’t need to tell you, Constable Shaw. You’ve come down it this morning. It’s a nightmare. If there had been a sudden crisis we couldn’t have been certain of arriving even using the M54. We didn’t want her to go into a home even if Mother would have accepted that arrangement.’ She waved her hands around vaguely. ‘This is a big enough place. Plenty big enough. We wouldn’t be on top of one another. Paul’s children had both left school to go to university. We’d had some alterations done for her so she had her privacy and dignity, her own bed-sitting room and bathroom. I was more than happy to cook for her and make sure she ate properly.’ She looked up. ‘It seemed the obvious thing to do. We were all happy with the arrangement.’ Paul Isaac glanced at his wife and they smiled at one other. The arrangement, it seemed, had worked for both of them.

  Delia noted the term of affection Rebecca had used for her mother-in-law. She called her ‘Mother’. This gave her a picture of the deceased Mrs Isaac, of a warm, independent person, dignified, loved and elderly. She could have had nothing to do with the concealment of a baby’s body, surely? They belonged in different worlds.

  She tried to retrieve something from the interview. ‘I know this is a long shot but can you think of any circumstance that a child could have been secreted in the loft while your mother lived at number 41?’

  Both of them shook their heads.

  ‘No one ever went there with a baby,’ Paul said, ‘not that we remember. Or pregnant. Our friends and acquaintances would have gone to antenatal clinics and pre-birth exercises, parent classes. That’s the sort of world we belong to, Constable Shaw – not concealing a pregnancy and then a child’s body, being ashamed of it like that. It isn’t our way. It’s not civilized. Even if someone we knew was pregnant and didn’t want to be they’d simply go and have a legal and safe termination on the National Health Service or privately in a clinic. None of our friends or acquaintances would go through the trauma of having a baby away from trained midwives, doctors, pain relief, a hospital, a paediatrician. It’s too risky. But if by a long long stretch of imagination they had found themselves in this awful and frightening situation and the baby died they wouldn’t just hide the body. They would want it buried, have a funeral, mourn. It’s our culture, Constable Shaw. It wouldn’t make any sense. It’s just not the way we do things.’

  WPC Shaw could see the absolute, unarguable logic behind his words. ‘Excuse me asking,’ she said, not even knowing why she was asking this, ‘but how long have you been married?’

  Paul Isaac answered very stiffly. ‘Rebecca and I were married in 2000. If it’s got anything to do with you.’

  ‘I am expecting our first child,’ Rebecca said gently, putting her hand over her husband’s. ‘Paul and his first wife were divorced in the late 1990s.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Delia Shaw knew she’d lost a bit of face with her last question but now she’d alienated the Isaacs she felt that she should try to retrieve something more tangible from the interview even if it was in a misguided direction and distanced them still further from the truth. ‘Your mother’s house was obviously worth a lot of money.’

  The Isaacs waited, looking vaguely affronted at the bluntness of the comment and a little wary.

  WPC Shaw felt she was in pursuit. ‘What was the value of her estate when she died?’

  It brought out the sting in both of them. Rebecca’s mouth tightened and she gave a swift, worried glance at her husband.

  ‘I can’t see what that’s got to do with your enquiry,’ Paul Isaac said stiffly.

  WPC Shaw waited.

  ‘A little over two million in all.’

  ‘That’s a lot of money.’

  Paul Isaac dipped his head.

  Delia Shaw addressed her next question directly to him. ‘Your father?’

  ‘Died back in the 80s.’

  ‘What did he do for a living?’

  The Isaacs exchanged a strained look and appeared even more uneasy. Rebecca Isaac started rubbing her fingers together with a soft, dry, rasping sound.

  ‘He was an undertaker,’ Paul Isaac said reluctantly.

  PC Shaw was taken aback. She hadn’t expected this answer. She had a moment’s hesitation while she wondered what to do next. She didn’t want to go just yet. She felt she was on the verge of discovering something of potential significance. Perhaps she could still flush something useful out of this interview. She stood up, decision made. ‘Would it be an awful nuisance if I took a look at the rooms your mother inhabited?’

  ‘If you must,’ Paul Isaac said reluctantly and WPC Shaw knew now that any pretence of friendliness was over.

  They wanted her to go.

  The Isaacs had converted two large, sunny rooms on the ground floor into a sitting room with an electric adjustable bed in one corner and a walk-in shower and bathroom, everything made easy for the elderly lady. It was clean and had obviously been scrubbed and tidied since the old lady’s death, yet there was still that lingering scent of an elderly female. A little like fusty rose petals. Delia looked around for something which would give her a clue into the late Mrs Isaac’s character. She scanned the room and finally found it in the bookshelves. The late Mrs Isaac had been an avid reader of crime fiction. She found plenty of classics, Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie as well as a few surprises, Patricia Cornwell and Michael Connolly. A Val McDermid.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, turning to see Paul Isaac had dropped his arm around his wife’s shoulder as though to comfort her. Both were looking upset. They didn’t like being in this room. Through affection? Grief? Was there something else? Guilt, perhaps? Or was she simply being a suspicious policewoman?

  ‘One last question,’ PC Shaw said, ‘and then I promise I’ll leave you in peace.’ She caught the relief in the dropping of their shoulder muscles and the release of tension in their faces. But they still braced themselves for this final query. ‘What do you do for a living, Mr Isaac?’

  It had not been the question they had feared and Paul Isaac answered easily enough. ‘I’m in the family business,’ he said. ‘I’m an undertaker too.’ He grinned. ‘Not
the most glamorous of occupations but it’s recession proof. People are always dying and it provides us with a certain lifestyle.’ Again he and his wife exchanged glances.

  WPC Shaw shook hands with them both and climbed back into her car, noting that they were watching her from the doorway. They stood until she had turned the corner out of their drive. Either they were being polite or were simply glad to see the Law off their property. It could be either. She felt an unaccountable twitching in her toes. At the back of her mind was the Sherlock Holmes story of the disappearance of tall Lady Frances Fairfax being buried alive in a coffin which had been designed for only one small, dead, old lady. The coffin had been too big. Then, as she turned onto the Bristol Road she almost laughed at herself. That would have meant a complete reversal of this situation. Not a body being secreted somewhere and found years later. Even she could work out that an undertaker would have had no need to wall up a child’s body. He could have hidden the tiny body in anyone’s coffin whether the corpse was for cremation or burial.

  Bugger, she thought.

  There was still the question of money, she pondered next, as she sped along the Aston Expressway towards the M6. The Isaacs had definitely been sensitive on that point. But again she was barking up the wrong tree. They might have swindled Inland Revenue, even polished off the elderly mother, but even if they had committed both crimes it wasn’t going to solve this case. They were investigating the death of someone right at the other end of life. An infant. Not a wealthy geriatric. All she’d really learned for definite was that the Isaacs were not short of money. And it was irrelevant. A red herring. Paul’s mother could have been worth the entire National Debt and his father Vlad the Impaler, even Anubis, Egyptian God of mummification. It still wouldn’t have had any bearing on this case. This was nothing to do with money or the Isaac’s profession or Mrs Isaac herself. It had been a wasted journey; she’d learned nothing to move the case nearer solution. But she reminded herself of DI Randall’s frequently uttered statement when an entire trail of investigation came to a blind ending. Nothing was ever really wasted.