by Clare Curzon
The mask was uniquely striking. And he recognised it. He heard again a whisper of bamboo chimes as the door opened and he stepped into the little gift shop in Mardham village about three weeks back. He saw the black, sharp-beaked, feathered mask displayed with others strung against the bull’s-eye glass of the door. The shop was called PARTY
FUN.
Tonight the carnival bird-face had been worn by a woman going out exquisitely dressed for a very sophisticated occasion. Of all the party junk in that little village shop she had selected the most eye-catching. If she’d intended making an impact, he’d accept she’d done that.
Now she was grotesque, her hair savagely shorn like a traitor’s. Then her killer had replaced the bird-mask over the dead human face and dumped her contemptuously in a public place, to be discovered by children or any sniffing dog let loose in the woodland.
What kind of perverted mind would do that?
And what kind of life would be uncovered once they started digging into the dead woman’s past? A sensation-seeker certainly; not short of money; possibly a drug user? That last would be for Littlejohn to discover when he performed the post mortem.
Despite the warm midsummer evening Yeadings shivered, turned up the collar of his dinner jacket and stomped back to his car. He didn’t trouble to remove his wellies as he rejoined Nan. Tightlipped he put the car in gear and steered off the grass verge.
‘A bad one?’ she assumed.
He nodded. Any magic that the evening had had was gone. Tomorrow could be unpleasant.
Chapter 3
Shaving next morning, Yeadings froze half-lathered and stared at his own reflection. For a moment his nose, protruding from downy foam, had seemed beak-like under the dark brows and slitted eyes. Momentarily, he saw himself as a bird of prey.
The connection was automatic, bypassing last night’s incident and cueing an instant replay of that June Saturday morning when, on a sudden impulse, he’d seized a way out of a personal dilemma. He had braked and drawn into the kerb as he drove home through Mardham.
The little gift shop had an olde worlde frontage, with PARTY FUN scrawled in loopy script over the fascia. In the bulging bay window bobbed heart-shaped silver balloons with cartoon-face stickers and brightly coloured messages: ‘It’s a Boy!’, ‘Happy Eighteenth’, ‘Welcome Home Darling’.
As he opened the door a hanging mobile set off a set of bamboo chimes. Inside, quivering against the glass panes, were strung clusters of fantastic masks, spangled, sequinned and feathered; some exquisite, some comic, others malevolently scowling; all ghosts of a Venetian Carnival.
Immediately ahead he saw enticing trays of hand-made chocolates displayed in a chilled, triple-shelved glass cabinet.
Mike Yeadings had gazed down the shop’s narrow interior, his mind far from partying, having - for the second time within a fortnight - slept in his suit and shaved roughly in his office. It had been a night of sporadic emergencies involving an armed man holed up with two women hostages in a housing estate. Not until dawn had the man thrown his shotgun from an upstairs window and allowed the women to run out.
With that little excitement over, what the superintendent pursued now was no dangerous criminal but a suitable gift to sweeten his delayed arrival home. Something rather special because last night’s kerfuffle had made him fail young Sally, whose birthday it had been.
There were no ‘Sorry I Stood You Up’ balloons, much less any with excuses for the policeman’s lot. There was a rich choice of furry toy animals; covens of plastic witches and trolls; Batman, fairies’, ballerinas’ and wizards’ costumes; crystal balls; dangling spiders; hovering bats; comic hats; strings of tinsel and wads of glitzy gift wrapping; also acres of greeting cards to cover every imaginable occasion except his present one. None would guarantee delight on the morning after he’d missed a special daughter’s birthday party.
Yesterday there had been balloons and gifts enough at home, including his own offering presented solo by Nan. Now had dawned the morning of the juvenile hangover. Not that Sally was spoilt and demanding, but she had asked for a conjuror and he had rashly agreed to stand in as the magician’s apprentice. Moreover he had promised to be there. By now he should certainly have known better.
He made a solemn circuit of the shop, aware of the two women assistants keeping a surveillant eye on his progress (non-progress so far as inspiration went) while the younger, winding a blonde curl round one finger, continued to consider aloud the romantic potential of someone called Josh despite the other’s warning glances.
Beside himself, the only other customer on this early Saturday morning was a dumpy middle-aged woman muttering over the greetings cards.
‘They’re all so sloppy,’ she confided as he passed her. ‘The verses inside.’
Yeadings paused, an eyebrow raised warily. ‘What would you like them to say?’
The woman shrugged. ‘Well, it’s for my ’usband’s birthday.’ Then she let out an eldritch cackle. ‘Cor, they’d never dare print what I reely wish ‘im.’ And, so cheered, she seized on a florid garden scene, matched it to its envelope and waddled off to pay.
Arriving back at the entrance Yeadings made up his mind as promptly. Luxury chocolates were a dietetic no-no in his household, but could flatter a little girl in ankle socks. No harm in just a dozen specially selected and wrapped in one of those gilt boxes tied in blue streamers and with a little silk rosebud tucked in. The cost would, of course, be exorbitant.
The darker-haired of the two assistants opened the glass cabinet with ritual reverence, covered one hand with a latex glove and fastidiously lifted out each chocolate as he made his selection. Yeadings left the shop with the casket inside a dinky carrier bag proclaiming (untimely in his case) PARTY FUN in elegant gilt script.
From the landing window Nan Yeadings had glimpsed her husband’s return. ‘Daddy’s back!’ she called, watching him slither shamefacedly out of the car. Despite a perfect June morning his face as he walked up the path showed left-out-in-the-rain dejection.
Their eyes locked through the glass and he grimaced in mock penitence. Not entirely an act, she thought: Mike took his fathering earnestly, assuming it rather later in life than most. On occasions when police children met, their two gravitated towards the youngsters of junior ranks. Mike’s own team were short on offspring, both DI Mott and Sergeant Rosemary Zyczynski being single, and DS Beaumont’s quirky teenage son already facing serious school exams with hopes of an eventual career in medicine.
Nan kissed her husband at the front door. ‘Sally is making you a special breakfast,’ she warned him.
‘Cremated toast and soggy cereal.’
‘That could well be, but not intentionally.’
‘Good. My absence wasn’t intentional either.’
‘Actually we discussed that last night. You’ll find you’re already forgiven.’
Again their eyes met and she almost giggled, bringing on his rueful grin. He shed his jacket.
‘Where’s my birthday girl then?’ he shouted joyfully, and Sally promptly appeared in the kitchen doorway, her puppyish Down’s Syndrome features earnestly puckered over the task in hand. Her voice was cheerful enough. ‘Daddy, I’m making your breakfast!’
He bent to kiss her. Case dismissed; he was grateful for the acquittal.
Now, weeks later, he grinned at his reflection, completed the lathering and cut the first swathe through with his safety razor. There was nothing like the finish of the old-fashioned method, he considered, rubbing a hand over the smooth surface produced. He even kept an old cut-throat for special occasions.
Littlejohn’s assistant rang through while he was still at breakfast. The post mortem was set for 10.30am.
‘On a Saturday,’ Nan grumbled. ‘He must be keen.’
‘It suits me. Ample time to see the team beforehand. I’d like to get it over.’
‘You’re attending, yourself?’ She didn’t sound surprised, having wormed some of the story out of him before bed la
st night. ‘It’s that mask, isn’t it? You feel it involves you.’
‘I guess so. I should have mentioned to Angus last night that I’d seen it before. The truth is it gave me a bit of a …’ He shrugged. ‘I’d better arrange with him now to meet up beforehand.’
Entering his office the Superintendent nodded to his two sergeants. Beaumont was leaning forward in his seat with a star-pupil intensity, or perhaps more like a terrier poised to leap for the flung bone. Rosemary Zyczynski smiled, casually brushing an invisible speck from her tan linen skirt.
‘I’ll be attending the pm with Angus,’ Yeadings informed them, ‘and since the body’s female, I think we’ll have Z along.’
‘Sir,’ she acknowledged, gratified.
‘I’d not mind a look-see,’ Beaumont put in quickly, unwilling to miss out.
Yeadings considered. Everything of importance would have been recorded by the SOCO photographer on site. Shots of the body would show detail, but there was still the obscured face. Beaumont was as entitled as anyone to see it revealed in the flesh. He was getting pretty uptight these days about even-pegging his woman rival, and competition would keep him on his toes.
‘All four of us then, with the coroner’s officer,’ Yeadings allowed, his face sardonic as he noted that, appropriately, they would make quite a little party themselves. It was fortunate that Prof Littlejohn thrived on pulling an audience.
‘Any new Misper reported locally?’ Yeadings enquired of his DI as they walked to the lab.
‘Nothing as yet, sir. She looked to be heading for a really wild night out. Likely its survivors won’t be stirring yet, let alone sobered up enough to count heads and find her missing.’
Survivors, Yeadings considered. Like himself Mott had assumed she was bound for some mega-rave. Recall of her outlandish appearance struck him as even more bizarre by the light of day. She’d dressed for a decidedly exotic brand of nightlife. So where could such have been provided?
Obviously at some distance from where she was found, because no one would choose to dump a corpse in their own back yard.
But if the body was discovered without noticeable rigor in Shotters Wood at 11.28pm, she’d not had time to deck herself out and travel far. Bizarre parties of the kind he suspected were unlikely to get going much before midnight. Maybe these ‘survivors’ - ravers, musicians, smack merchants, whatever - would at most have noticed that she hadn’t turned up. Which meant they’d be in the clear, with nothing more to survive as yet than the usual after-effects of alcohol and amphetamines.
So, in mentioning fellow revellers, was Mott already considering collusion in a ritual killing? Even black magic - an arcane satanic ceremony requiring a sacrificial victim?
Certainly the corpse’s masking brought to mind some kind of Comus rout. But in that case the ceremonies would surely have been more protracted and the corpse not released until dawn.
Professor Littlejohn was prompt on the job. When the team arrived they found the body naked under a partly turned-back sheet, toe-tagged and spotlit, ready waiting. Either refrigeration had been minimal or thawing had been started early.
Yeadings had a word with the pathologist as he stood shaking talc into his latex gloves to ease them over his bony fingers. Then he went over to where the merciless lights shone brightest. The team’s other three shuffled aside, making room for him to stare down on the dead face.
That should have been his first sight of it, but, even distorted by a hideous death and shorn of its dark, hennaed hair, it was one that, with sudden shock, Yeadings realised he knew.
He couldn’t put a name to her, but he had watched her, alive, for several minutes; spoken with her. She wasn’t any chance customer of PARTY FUN but the older saleswoman there. She was the dark-haired one who had served him, fastidiously, with Sally’s chocolates; was possibly the shop’s manager.
He moved the sheet to expose the hands. Any jewellery had been removed and bagged, together with the clothing, but on the left-hand fourth finger a paler indentation showed where she had previously worn a ring. Somewhere there could be a husband who had woken up a widower this morning.
Yeadings stared at the scratched black enamel on the fingernails. He remembered the earlier butterscotch shade glinting through the translucent gloves as the manicured hands lifted each chocolate singly and nestled it into tissue paper in the little gilt casket. Now the slender wrists were rubbed almost raw by the chafing of bonds.
It shook him, the pathos of it. Alive she had seemed so elegantly in charge: a breathing, likeable person reduced now to the official police description - “the body of a woman”.
He turned to Mott. ‘Have we a name yet?’
Apparently they hadn’t. He let Littlejohn drone out her physical particulars into the mike clipped on his rubber apron: ‘Body, female, between twenty-five and thirty-two years of age; height five feet six inches; weight one hundred and thirty-three pounds; well-nourished but slender; in apparent good health - apart, as DS Beaumont might say, from being dead.’
Perhaps the killer had done well to replace the mask because, whatever else Littlejohn was to find, she had died from garrotting with a sharp ligature. The features were cyanosed and distorted, eyes staring, purple tongue obscenely extended. Petechiae present on the scalp were barely distinguishable from scars caused by the shearing.
In places the cord or wire used had cut into her flesh, marking it like a finely strung necklace of unmatched garnets. The ligature had been removed after death, then the bird-mask added. Or replaced.
Nothing resembling the murder instrument had yet been discovered in the locality of Shotters Wood.
‘Are you sure, sir?’ Mott ventured to ask when Yeadings later explained where he’d encountered the dead woman. ‘If you only saw her the once? I mean, there was a lot of facial distortion.’
‘I remember her all right. It was at the shop that sold the mask. There was that small black mole high on the left cheekbone. She’d darkened it with mascara to look like an eighteenth century beauty spot. It added a certain piquancy.’
He recalled how she had paused at one point in the wrapping as if she might start up a conversation, then quickly glanced sideways at the younger woman and thought better of it. It might have been some small help to him now if she’d actually opened up. At least he’d have a shred more knowledge of the person she was.
Accustomed to taking quick stock of strangers, he’d put her down as normally a reserved woman, educated and conventional, perhaps a little lacking in self-assertiveness but meticulous within her own sphere of activity; quite beautiful in a smooth-featured way, yet not trading on the fact.
With Yeadings apparently lost in reverie, Mott avoided Beaumont’s meaningful stare. So what, if the Boss had picked up on such details in a single brief sighting on a drive home through Mardham? He was famously observant.
All the same - when a sobersides like Mike Yeadings got to close-studying racy women …!
Zyczinski read through a list of the dead woman’s clothing, comparing it with what she could see of the plastic bags’ contents. ‘No shoes then?’
Mott nodded. ‘Bare feet when found. And nothing of the sort has turned up yet. Uniform are doing a daylight search of the wood now. Someone transported her there, so let’s hope the shoes are eventually found where they shouldn’t be, to give us a connection.’
‘Without a description how shall we know they’re hers?’ Z grumbled.
‘Feminine intuition?’ Beaumont suggested snidely. ‘Can’t you match them to the rest of her gear?’
‘Only roughly. You’d hardly expect galoshes or trainers. But then, under a full-length skirt she might have preferred comfort to high fashion. I know a violinist who wears fur-lined boots under her evening dress. Chilly places, concert platforms.’
‘What about it, Boss?’ Beaumont pursued. ‘You’re the one who knew the dead woman.’
Yeadings considered this. ‘Saw her once,’ he corrected. ‘So-given the fancy dress and
her earlier appearance - my money would be on fashionable high heels and a collection of straps. But bear in mind what Z says. From the state of her soles we know she didn’t walk the woods barefoot, but she just might have gone there prepared for the terrain. So keep an open mind.’
Now the team were aware of him moving off; apparently he’d seen enough. Was he letting the dead woman get to him? His face gave nothing away.
‘Rather touching, innit?’ Beaumont said in a hoarse stage whisper. ‘Reminds me of that ancient film with Celia Johnson: Brief One over the Counter, or sommat.’
‘The shop should give us a name for her,’ Z said coolly. Of late she’d a convenient way of not hearing Beaumont’s questionable wit. ‘The assistants will know who she is.’
‘Was,’ Beaumont corrected her woodenly. He was back in Pinocchio mode, puppet-faced policeman, totally impersonal.
‘You go,’ Mott ordered him. ‘Slope off now and get her particulars.’ He knew that Littlejohn’s sharp ears could pick up their asides. Anything jokey over the mortuary slab had to be of the pathologist’s own sardonic honing.
Littlejohn looked up now, electric saw in hand. ‘Splendid idea,’ he said lightly. ‘Get me a Saturday Telegraph while you’re at it, there’s a good lad. And have them put it in a carrier bag for you, otherwise all the supplementary bits drop out.’
He swung the magnifying spotlight closer over the chest aperture.
‘Which brings me - if you others are quite ready for it - to the innards.’
The Woman
Chapter 4
Saturday, 12 June
Yeadings might not know her name, but she had known his. He was widely remembered in Mardham because of the murder inquiry two years before when briefly the dozy little Buckinghamshire town hit page one of the tabloid press. The invasive police presence had been at the same time vaguely unnerving and yet a reassurance. She had been reminded of a nature film where a school of sharks swam with silent menace through a shivering mesh of smaller fish: immediate danger suspended but the threat ever present.
