A Species of Revenge

by Marjorie Eccles

  But now, apart from the shirt-sleeved police swarming all over the wood, and the sounds of their voices, the Close itself was silent as he guessed it rarely was – older children now in school, younger ones kept protectively indoors. Murder close to home had a sobering effect.

  He completed his circuit of the wood and came back full circle. ‘Somebody’s going to miss this,’ Dexter was saying. ‘These don’t come cheap. Hundred and fifty nicker at least, I’ll bet, probably more.’

  ‘Hundred and fifty, for a biro?’ Kite echoed. ‘Strewth!’

  ‘It’s a fountain pen. Last you a lifetime, this would.’

  ‘If you don’t lose it,’ Kite said, looking at the slim, mottled brown-and-gold plunger-action pen with the gold fittings, engraved with a stylized gold flower, which Dexter was carefully putting into a polythene evidence bag. ‘Or drop it at the scene of a crime.’

  ‘There’ll be prints, hopefully,’ Dexter said, moving off.

  ‘Who was it found her, Martin?’

  ‘Chap at number thirteen,’ answered the lanky sergeant, running his hand through his curly, fair hair. ‘Name of Lawley, looking for his cat. He was going to take it to the vet today, for an operation on its ear, but he can’t find it. Maybe the moggy’s got wind of what’s to happen to it and it’s taken off, you know what cats are. Anyway, Lawley came in here calling for it and found the girl, recognized her immediately.’

  His usually cheerful face was grim. ‘Lucky it was him, and not any of the children.’

  Every other policeman there, those who were parents and those who weren’t, was undoubtedly thinking the same thing. ‘Anyone taken his full statement?’

  ‘On my way now.’

  ‘Don’t forget to ask him if he’s lost a pen,’ Abigail reminded him.

  As she spoke, someone called out to Kite from the other side of the wood. The sergeant raised a hand in reply, but the dead girl was being placed in a body shell, and he remained quietly with the others while she was removed to the waiting ambulance, thence to be transported to refrigeration in the mortuary.

  Her parents would have to be told.

  ‘There’s only one, her mother. Divorced,’ Abigail said, ‘and she was an only child.’ She looked up from her clipboard, pushing her hair back. ‘Life’s rotten, sometimes.’

  She didn’t usually let things get to her, but this was different. This he could understand. In the rare moments when he was feeling low, when he’d been a parent coping on his own, his wife dead and his daughter Julie still a teenager, this was the sort of thing Mayo had always dreaded. But Julie had never remotely encountered any violence, she was alive and well and living abroad at the moment, he’d never personally had to confront such an appalling tragedy as was facing this unknown woman, Patti’s mother, whose life would never be the same again.

  And it was Abigail who was going to have to tell her.

  Informing a parent that their child’s life had just been snuffed out was the worst task any of them ever had to perform, but it was something they’d all had to do, and would no doubt have to do again. He thought about suggesting someone else do it, but he knew Abigail wouldn’t appreciate it. She never asked for concessions.

  He watched her for a moment, and was reassured. Cool, apparently unruffled, wearing a summer skirt and a light cotton shirt this hot morning, her bronze hair drawn back into a thick plait. She’d cope.

  ‘There’s also an aunt,’ she was saying, brisk with herself once more. ‘She lives here in the Close, a Mrs Bailey, the mother’s sister, and she wants to be the one to tell her ... it seems they’re very close. I’ll give her time to break the news, get the worst over, before I go and see Mrs Ryman. By the way, she’s asking to speak to you personally, before she goes to see her sister. She won’t speak to anyone but the "top man’’. Claims she knows who did it.’

  ‘She does?’ He gave her a sharp glance. ‘With good reasons? Or just suspicious?’

  ‘I don’t know. She wouldn’t say anything more.’

  ‘I’d better see her, then.’

  Was this, after all, going to be one of those open-and-shut cases, where it was immediately apparent who the perpetrator was? Murder occurring out of the blue, for no reason, by some anonymous stranger, was a far rarer phenomenon than some of the more lurid press would have their readers believe. Trouble had more often been openly brewing before suddenly erupting, with disastrous repercussions. Friends, relatives, neighbours could, and often did, point the police in the right direction, leaving them few problems, save those of calming down the participants enough to make a coherent statement. If it was so in this instance, nobody would be better pleased than Mayo, but he doubted it. With nothing more than his gut feeling to go on, he somehow doubted it very much.

  ‘We’ve talked to the neighbours, all sixteen houses in the Close, but no joy,’ Abigail went on, tapping her clipboard, ‘from those we’ve asked so far, that is – nobody saw or heard a thing. A lot of them had already left for work before she was found, mind, we’ll have to see them later ... and two families are on holiday. The rest are mainly mothers with young children, one or two retired couples. I’m just about to start on the two big houses, then we’ll do the rest of Albert Road down as far as Patel’s, the newsagent she worked for. It’s going to be manpower-intensive again,’ she added wryly.

  Mayo’s mind was already working on it, on the transfer of personnel from the Ensor case, which was now going to have to be put on to the back burner. With the department still working through the backlog of summer holidays, several people on annual leave, everything else would now have to go by the board. This investigation would take priority, he would personally see to it that it did. They’d give it all they’d got, work round the clock. Exhausted men and women, stretched resources, escalating overtime figures and budget allocations were the least of it.

  ‘It might help if you left those two houses to me. I’ve met the owners – briefly, but at least it gives me a bit of an edge. I can make a start with them.’ It was doubtful that they could have seen anything behind their shrubberies and high walls. But he knew instinctively that his personal involvement was needed here, that the occupants – the Kendricks at Simla, certainly – should be handled with care. They knew everybody that mattered, they still had poke. He couldn’t afford any cock-ups where they were concerned. But there were other, less obvious reasons why he should concern himself with them, reasons he couldn’t explain even to himself, but were amounting almost to a conviction ... shades of the party he’d attended, of something he’d missed, or subconsciously sensed out of kilter. Catches of that old tune, ‘Alice Where Art Thou?’, which had haunted him maddeningly ever since, began another replay in his mind.

  ‘Right,’ he went on, suddenly realizing that he’d been elsewhere while Abigail had been putting him in the picture, a bad habit of his that he knew irritated the hell out of other people, who thought he wasn’t paying attention, especially since he rarely missed anything. The ability to think and operate on two levels was a facility he’d developed out of necessity. ‘That seems to be it, then, so far?’ he said, recapping correctly on what she’d been saying.

  Patti, it appeared, had left her bicycle where she invariably parked it, just inside the gates of Edwina Lodge. After leaving the papers there and at Simla, she’d gone on to deliver in the Close. The canvas bag, with most of the newspapers and magazines still in it, had been found at the entrance to the path leading into the wood. Traces of blood, still wet and sticky, indicated that she’d been attacked when she was halfway along it, and presumably by someone who must have come up behind her. But she’d actually been found here, a hundred yards further into the wood.

  Why had she been going into the wood at all?

  He stood back, hands in pockets, to get a better view. The Ellington Close houses were all set at angles to the wood, so that only the frosted-glass bathroom windows upstairs overlooked it. Number one had a bedroom window that obliquely looked over the path, but cou
ld be discounted, since the occupants were away. Only the upstairs windows at Edwina Lodge overlooked any part of the wood. Nothing could be seen of the path from Simla, the angle of vision was wrong.

  Whoever had made the attack had still taken a very big risk of being seen. True, it was breakfast time, a busy hour of the day with everyone intent on their own concerns: preparing to leave for work, getting children ready for school, no time to be interested in what was happening outside. All the same, people must have been about all the time, walking past the end of the pathway, leaving in their cars.

  They were making a fingertip search of the wood now, outside the taped area around the body and the delineated access path to where it had lain, looking for the murder weapon. Brambles and nettles grew in profusion at its edges, unidentified fungi grew in the undergrowth and on rotten tree stumps, nasty to the touch. There were still damp, muddy areas, even after weeks of dry weather, and evidence that dogs were irresponsibly let out to exercise here. Garden rubbish – and other things which had no business to be dumped there – had been thrown over the fences of those gardens backing on to the wood. ‘The best of British,’ he muttered under his breath as he left, on his way to see Mrs Bailey. It was a long time since that sort of thing had fallen to his lot, thank God.

  ‘Sir!’ It was young WDC Platt, hurrying to intercept him.

  Her pretty face was pale, her curls damp with the heat.

  ‘What is it, Jenny?’

  ‘We’ve found the missing cat, sir. It’s dead.’

  She was looking upset, the way people did over animals, and shocked, evidently thinking, what a place to dump a dead cat, where children played! A hitherto safe area, where they wouldn’t now be allowed to play for some time, even when the police were finished with the locus, Mayo guessed. Parents and children alike would, understandably, be wary of this little wood for some time to come.

  ‘Perhaps you should come and see, sir,’ Jenny suggested. He saw there was something more by her face.

  Abigail accompanied him as he walked over to where Kite and a group of uniformed men were gathered around a deep tangle of undergrowth, and as she peered down at what was there, he heard her indrawn breath, and understood why when he also looked.

  Not just any old cat. A big, sleek tortoiseshell, a handsome animal, plump and healthy-looking, despite its reputed ear trouble. It wasn’t going to need the vet now. It appeared to have been stabbed, not once, but many times. It had had its throat cut. He gently touched the animal. The fur was still warm, the body not yet locked in rigor. He turned away, sickened.

  ‘Poor beast. See we get blood samples.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We’ll need to establish which is the cat’s blood out there, and which came from the girl.’

  Jenny looked even more upset, but she pulled herself together quickly. She was turning out to be one of his best officers, proving to be hard-working and methodical, though she sometimes had to have things spelled out for her. She would probably do all right for herself in the Force, in a steady, unspectacular way.

  ‘We’ll have to have another think now about where Patti was killed, won’t we?’ Abigail, naturally sharper and more intuitive, was saying. If the traces of blood further back along the path weren’t hers, she might have been attacked right by where she was found.’

  ‘Could account for why nobody saw or heard anything of the attack, too. And for the absence of any drag marks on the heels of her shoes or along the path into the wood,’ Mayo said, ‘or the unlikely possibility that her killer picked her up and carried her further into here. I suppose he could have dragged her by her feet, but if he did, there’d have been marks on her, on her clothing. And anyone who did this,’ he said, jerking his head towards the body of the cat, ‘he’ll have blood on him, maybe scratches, unless he wore gloves. I’d guess by the size of it, this puss was a bit of a tiger.’

  There was another shout. One of the uniformed constables had found what was almost certainly the weapon.

  It was a flat, heavy length of iron, flaking with rust, about eighteen inches long by two inches wide, the sort used to brace the concrete posts between which the wires at the bottom of the gardens in the Close were stretched. Its narrow edge suggested the profile of the weapon used to inflict the wound on the back of Patti’s head. Typically, the builders who’d put the fencing up in the first place had simply dumped the surplus material among the nettles and docks in the wood, rather than go to the trouble of carting it away. The killer had made no attempt to hide the piece of iron, perhaps thinking it would be lost among the dozens of similar pieces left lying around, that the blood would be indistinguishable from the rust marks on it, perhaps not thinking at all, only wanting to be rid of it. Only it wasn’t, like the rest, half obscured in the encroaching bindweed and nettles, but had landed on a broken piece of the concrete fencing post, staining it with wet blood. Even then, it had needed someone as sharp-eyed as the youngest constable there to notice the stain.

  ‘Nice one, Kevin,’ commented Kite to the young PC, who flushed and tried to look nonchalant.

  Dexter, summoned to look at it, pulled down his mouth. ‘Don’t expect we’ll get any prints from that rough surface, even if he didn’t wear gloves, but we’ll collect some blood and so on from it, all right. And there’ll be some of this muck and rust in the wound.’ He indicated the flaking surface of the rust-scabbed and soil-encrusted iron bar as he bagged it in a polythene evidence bag and labelled it.

  ‘Do your best, Dave.’

  Mayo was at last able to leave them to it and went, with Abigail, to seek out Mrs Bailey at number sixteen, while Kite went three doors down to take a statement from the man who’d found Patti’s body.

  9

  The tortoiseshell cat’s name was Nero, and the Lawleys had obviously been devoted to it. The news of how it had been killed devastated Trevor Lawley. ‘God, that’s sick!’

  ‘Yeah. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’ Kite agreed.

  ‘I mean, you hear about folk doing these sort of things to animals but you never think ... hell, how am I going to tell the wife? Much less the kids!’

  His Black Country accent came out strongly. He was a smallish man, thin and nervy, dressed in a dark-blue-and-red checked workshirt and jeans, and in his distress over his cat he seemed almost to have forgotten why he was being interviewed.

  ‘Just my rotten luck, ain’t it?’ he moaned, when Kite managed to bring him back to finding Patti Ryman’s body. ‘I tell you straight, I rue the day we ever come here. It was only a council flat we had but we’d have been better stopping there. One thing after another it’s been since the day we moved in. First the wife loses her job, then I’m made redundant, we haven’t a snowball in hell’s chance of paying the mortgage and no hope of selling the bloody house, neither. We don’t need this! If anything’ll put the kibosh on selling it, this will!’

  With all these troubles, it was perhaps understandable that Lawley was morbidly self-obsessed with his ill fortune, and Kite schooled himself not to remind him too tersely that life wouldn’t be fun for Patti Ryman any more, either, or her mother. ‘Mr Lawley, just tell me what happened this morning,’ he said shortly, making a mental note to ask whether the Lawleys had quarrelled with anyone who might have taken their revenge through the cat, though Lawley was quite likely to be as paranoiac about that as everything else, to see himself surrounded by enemies. They were doing another quick round of the Close, anyway, after discovery of the cat, and in a close-knit community such as this, with everyone aware of everyone else’s business, any quarrels between neighbours would soon come to light.

  Kite’s tone, if not the words, had got through to Lawley, making him pause in the airing of his grievances, gnawing his lip. ‘Sorry. Just got to the stage where I can’t take much more, know what I mean? It’s a shame about the little wench.’

  ‘How well did you know her?’

  It wasn’t a question to keep him calm. ‘What do you mean, how well did I know he
r? Here, you’re not thinking I had anything to do with it? Bloody hell, I only knew her through her bringing the papers!’

  Trevor Lawley had been the one to find her, he might also have been the last one to see her alive. Why Patti Ryman had died was as yet a mystery, and there was no reason to believe Lawley had anything to do with it but there was every reason why he should, like anyone else, be subjected to questioning, and Kite told him so. He doubted whether Lawley even heard him.

  ‘Look, she was a nice enough kid as far as I could tell, and I’m sorry this had to happen to her. Why, she used to stop and have a word with Nero of a morning,’ he said, as if the cat had been a human being and their niceness to him was the criterion by which Lawley judged every other human being. ‘He’d taken to sitting on top of the fence post by the path, and she’d stop for a minute or two and he’d let her stroke him under his chin, where he liked it – he wouldn’t have let anybody do that, I can tell you! He was sixteen,’ he said, back with his preoccupations. ‘That’s a good age for a cat, but he could’ve lived for years. He shouldn’t have died like that! Just let me get hold of the bastard what did it! What sort of sicko could do that to a poor, defenceless animal?’