Kite had had enough of this. He said sharply, ‘Patti Ryman was sixteen, too. Shall we keep to the point, Mr Lawley?’
Like a finicky housewife, the other man bent to straighten the fringe on the hearth rug, perhaps aware he’d gone over the top in his lament for his cat, more likely just out of a habit of obedience. The house was soulless and unimaginative, so immaculately clean and tidy, without a book or a magazine or a child’s toy in sight, that it was hard to imagine any family life existing in it, much less any pet being allowed to form part of the household. Perhaps it only looked like this because it had to stand in permanent readiness for inspection by any possible client who might suddenly appear on the horizon. More likely Mrs Lawley was one of those obsessive housewives who have a personal vendetta against anything likely to harbour dust and germs.
Either way, Kite began to feel sorry for him. He thought of his own untidy, sometimes chaotic household, centred around two noisy, pre-teenage boys, and his cheerful, always on the go, slightly zany wife, Sheila, and was suddenly, thankfully, happy.
‘So, to recap. You went looking for your cat and entered the wood at half past eight, when you saw the body of a young girl you recognized as Patti Ryman?’
‘Well, I didn’t know her last name. I only knew her as Patti.’
‘Did you touch her?’
"Course I didn’t touch her! I rushed home and dialled 999, for God’s sake, for the ambulance.’ He stopped. ‘I think I knew she had to be dead, though, the way she was lying there – her clothes, know what I mean ... Was she raped?’
When Kite didn’t answer, he added, with unexpected sharpness, ‘If you’re looking for perverts, mate, you want to look at that bloke at number seven, not me. Can’t keep his eyes off of the kids!’
At the door, Kite remembered he hadn’t asked about the pen.
‘A what?’ Lawley said, when he’d described it. ‘A bloody pen, that price?’ He jerked his thumb towards the For Sale sign. ‘You have to be joking!’
At least, thought Kite as he left, he’d succeeded in bringing some amusement into Lawley’s day.
The bay window at number seven gave Stanley Loates an oblique view of the police activity in the Close. Despite the uncomfortable racing of his heart, he watched their comings and goings compulsively, his jaws masticating one lump of treacle toffee after another from the paper bag in his pocket, telling himself repeatedly that he’d nothing to fear. He’d already been questioned twice – once about the girl, and then that young woman detective constable with the curly hair had come back about the cat. He’d told her that he’d seen nothing of Patti the paper girl that morning. She’d seen how surprised he was about the cat, and he was sure she’d believed him on both counts. She’d been very polite, thanked him and told him not to bother getting up out of his chair to see her to the door, sir, as though he was an old man.
Stanley wasn’t old – nearly fifty, but that was young these days – a fattish, flabby man whose shirt and ill-fitting, baggy-bottomed trousers never met neatly, an unprepossessing man with sweaty palms and thinning, fairish hair. He lived with his mother, who was old and senile and ought by rights to be in a home, where she could be looked after properly, anyone said so. But to all such advice Stanley turned a deaf ear. She was his mother, he’d never let her be put away, he told them. He was a good son.
Maybe a few gullible souls were fooled by this, but not anyone who knew the two of them.
The truth was that the council-owned homes were full, with long waiting lists, and though Hilda Loates had enough funds in the bank to pay the costs of a private one, Stanley had no intention of wasting what was left of his inheritance. She’d sold his father’s run-down business (thus depriving Stanley of the only job he’d ever had) and the old house in Grover Street, for what little they would fetch, having taken it into her head to buy this house as an investment, telling him with a cackle he could always sell it at a fat profit when she was gone. That was five years ago. She hadn’t gone yet and you couldn’t give these houses away now.
All this, however, was only partly why he didn’t trouble himself about finding another job, but stayed at home and cared for her. The truth was, Stanley didn’t dare to suggest such a thing as a home to his mother, for he was still terrified of her, as he had been all his life. His brain told him it was quite impossible that she, a weak old woman, could take him, a grown man, by the shoulders and shove him into the dark cupboard under the stairs as she used to when he was a child, but his mind didn’t believe it. She was capable of anything. She’d be able to rise from the dead, he was sure. She’d always had a vicious tongue, and though what she said nowadays, after her stroke, was mostly rubbish, she was aware of everything that went on, and she could talk intelligibly if she wanted to. The reason she didn’t, very often, was that she knew her gobbledegook speech made life more difficult for him. So he gritted his teeth and carried on. He was prepared to do whatever he had to do for her. Whatever. He knew she couldn’t last that much longer and after that – bingo! Life would begin, at last, for Stanley Derrington Loates.
She’d driven his father to an early grave. Alfred Loates, who built up a successful shoe-retailing business in the days when personal service to customers meant something, had been a small, spry, cheerful man, but even his unfailing optimism had eventually been defeated by her. He’d lost heart and his business had gone down the pan. But she wasn’t going to defeat Stanley.
And he wouldn’t be scared by the police, either.
He decided to have a doughnut and a cup of drinking chocolate to soothe his nerves before he went out and finished tying up his beans.
‘Mrs Bailey’s house is the first on the right, number sixteen, the one with the wishing well in the garden,’ Abigail said.
And the frilly nets, and the ding-dong door chimes, and the blaze of petunias and French marigolds lining the path, Mayo found as they walked up to the front door.
‘This is Detective Superintendent Mayo, Mrs Bailey,’ Abigail said as the door opened on the first ring. ‘He’s the senior officer in charge of the case.’
‘Thank you for coming.’
Her eyes were red and swollen, her voice congested with weeping, but she was in command of herself. ‘I was just off to work when I heard,’ she began, indicating the pink tracksuit trousers and T-shirt that were presumably her working garb, evidently comfortable, if all too revealing of ample curves. ‘It’s my morning for Simla, but they’ll have to do without me today. My sister’s going to need me more than they do.’
The tiny hall was uncomfortably crowded with Mayo’s large form, and Abigail, plus Mrs Bailey. ‘What am I thinking of, keeping you standing here! It won’t take any longer if we go and sit down somewhere,’ she said suddenly, opening the door into a spotless front room that smelled of lavender furniture polish.
Waving them to a large, puffy, be-flowered settee with extra cushions embroidered in pansies, she sat down opposite. ‘We’ve never had children of our own, me and Bob, and she was like my own daughter, our Patti.’ Tears welled again and it was moments before she could speak, after employing an already sodden wad of tissues she pulled from her pocket. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s just – I blame myself, I blame myself. I told her, see, that there was nothing to worry about. If all he does is look, I told her –’
‘Mrs Bailey, who are we talking about?’
She stared at Abigail. ‘That Stanley Loates, of course, at number seven! Dirty old devil! Getting his kicks watching her bend down over the letter-boxes to push the papers in. She asked me what should she do and I said leave it, I’ll give him the side of my tongue when I get the chance. And now look what he’s done. I should’ve told you lot right away, when she first complained.’
‘I doubt we could’ve done anything, except warn him off,’
Abigail said sympathetically. ‘We can’t stop anyone looking out of his own window.’
‘Well, he wouldn’t have gone on to rape and murder her if he knew you had your eye o
n him, would he?’
Mayo said, ‘I’m afraid it’s not quite so simple. For one thing, we don’t know yet if she was raped, and it seems unlikely.’
But sexual motivation in some form or another couldn’t be discounted, not when the victim was an attractive fifteen-year-old schoolgirl so small she might easily have been mistaken for a child, especially in her school uniform. Perhaps the name of Stanley Loates would appear when the computer came up with the names of all known child molesters, though it wasn’t one known to Mayo. At any rate, along with all the others he’d be requestioned, minutely and at length, in a painstaking reworking, resifting and correlating of the data already collected in attempts to throw light on the deaths of the two little girls in Hurstfield.
‘It seems more likely Patti died from a very violent blow to the head, Mrs Bailey,’ Abigail said.
‘What, him, violent? Hitting her? Stanley Loates?’ Mrs Bailey’s astonishment was enough to stem her tears. ‘He’d be hard put to it to hit the top off a soft-boiled egg! Still, it just shows! You never know with that sort, do you?’
Ways in which the two deaths, the girl’s and the cat’s, could be – must be – connected, were running through Abigail’s mind, all of them nasty. Yet however bizarre the possibility, it had to be assumed that the two killings, so closely related in time and place, were related in other ways, too.
She’d joined two of the other officers – Kite and Jenny Platt – for a quick sandwich in the snack bar a few doors away from Patel’s paper shop. It was pretty basic, but when you were on a job like this, niceties didn’t take priority. And since they were the only customers, inevitably, ideas began to be batted around.
‘She heard what she assumed was someone torturing the cat, went to investigate – and he hit her on the head –?’ Kite suggested.
Abigail shrugged, gulping down coffee from a thick white beaker and finishing a hot sausage roll that filled a corner but didn’t satisfy. ‘I can’t think of any other reason why she’d have gone in there. She couldn’t have had much time to spare, with school starting at half past eight. But she was fond of this cat, you say, Martin?’
‘According to Lawley. If she did hear the noise, she couldn’t have known it was Nero, of course, but it seems he used to wait for her every morning ... well, that’s what Lawley said. And apparently Nero was everybody’s favourite.’ He paused. ‘Though not for some sadistic bastard, he wasn’t.’
‘No ill-feeling between the Lawleys and anybody else in the Close – nobody likely to kill their cat to get at them?’
‘It would seem not, and I’d have problems believing anyone killed it simply to lure Patti into the wood.’
‘But she was there, Martin, they died at about the same time; she may have seen who was harming the cat.’
‘And the bastard killed her for that?’
It was an unlikely scenario, Abigail had to admit. ‘And in any case, if he was behind her, as he must’ve been for her to have got that wound on her head, he would surely assume she hadn’t seen him anyway.’
‘Unless she saw him and turned to run away. Scared he was going to turn on her, maybe?’
It was, at that moment, fruitless speculation. Of more immediate moment was the question of the allegations against Stanley Loates, as she pointed out. How much credence could be given to them, apart from the fact that they came from two independent sources? How much of it was simply malicious gossip and suspicion? Loates was known as a loner, an oddball, a man who kept himself to himself and apparently didn’t mix with his neighbours, who didn’t fit into the same pattern as those other families in the Close ... and people were always suspicious, ready to point the finger at what they didn’t understand.
‘Well,’ Jenny Platt put in, unexpectedly, ‘all I can say is that if I had a life like his. I’d stare out of the windows a lot, too. You should see that mother of his! Can’t be much else for him to do except look after her and that’d be enough to get anybody down.’
Except for the coffee machine burping behind the counter, there was a silence after this outburst. Jenny’s young face was flushed, earnestly trying to put another point of view.
‘Is she bedridden?’ Abigail asked.
‘No, she just sits in a chair by the fire – full on, even today – and makes life miserable for him. It’s difficult to understand what she says but she can convey a lot with her eyes. He never goes out unless one of her old cronies comes to sit with her, would you believe, but there’s no love lost between them. Mind you, he’s pretty loathsome himself, but just because he’s always looking out of the window doesn’t mean he had anything to do with Patti ...’
‘Don’t forget the kids he watches, Jenny.’
‘Yeah.’ Jenny looked down at the grey coffee in her beaker.
‘I know we can’t jump to conclusions, but you don’t suggest we ignore the possibility?’
‘‘Course not. That wasn’t what I meant. I’m only trying to be fair.’
Abigail was quite aware that, despite her defence of Stanley Loates – or at least, of his rights – the last thing Jenny wanted was to go back to number seven and talk to him again. She’d no need to say how much he made her flesh creep, that she hated the foetid smell of the house, the overpoweringly heated sitting room where that ancient old woman sat silently in the chair by the fire, but Stanley Loates had to be questioned, and the sooner the better. And Jenny’s – or anybody’s – feelings, however, weren’t paramount in this, something Jenny knew, and accepted.
It was unfortunate for DC Farrar, tall, blond and good-looking, with his propensity for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, that he should have entered the café in time to overhear the last exchanges, and to have summed up the situation with his quick intuition.
‘Just lie back and think of England, Jen,’ he advised, smirking as he came back from the counter with his coffee and a pie.
Abigail gave him one of her looks. ‘There won’t be any need for that, Keith,’ she said, making her mind up. ‘Sergeant Kite will be interviewing Stanley Loates, and you’ll be going with him. I want Jenny with me when I go down to see Patti’s mother.’
‘Right, ma’am,’ said Kite, catching her eye and turning a look on Farrar that wiped the smile from his face.
10
Mayo drove himself back up to Albert Road, after a snatched lunch and a couple of hours at his desk, during which he returned numerous phone calls and spent a brisk half hour with his part-time secretary, Delia, disposing of all but the most pressing of his commitments for the next couple of days and dealing with the reports that had landed on his desk. He noted in passing that Abigail had left him word that another prestigious car had gone missing, this time a top-of-the-range Rover, and that the file on Philip Ensor had grown no thicker.
He drove out of Milford Road and was caught, as usual, by the badly phased traffic lights at the corner of Victoria Road, swearing as he waited for them to change. Like every other frustrated motorist in Lavenstock, he didn’t understand why the devil Traffic couldn’t get it sorted, why you only went forward two or three cars before the lights went again to red, why there had to be these long periods when no traffic lane at all moved, as if frozen at the whim of some higher authority.
But it was this hiatus which afforded him the glimpse of Alex in the Italian restaurant on the corner. She was sitting at a table a little way from the window and facing him, though she was too immersed in conversation with the man sitting opposite her to look up and see him. Her companion had his back to the window and Mayo had no chance, before the lights changed again, to assess who it might be. He frowned a little. A client? She hadn’t said she was lunching with anyone – but then, of course, there was no reason why she should have.
She’d been smiling, leaning forward in a friendly, even intimate, way. There’d been wine on the table.
His first call was to Simla, the house he’d previously visited in vastly different circumstances – the welcome party for Dermot Voss and hi
s family – but he was unlucky in that only Imogen Loxley was at home. She’d told him when he’d telephoned to arrange his call that her sister Hope, as he’d expected, would still be at the Princess Mary School where she taught and wouldn’t be home until around half past five. He intended to see her when he made a visit to Patti’s school the following day, but he was disappointed now to find that her brother Francis was in London, lunching with his publisher, combining the day with doing some research at one of the museums – Imogen couldn’t recall which – and had arranged an overnight stay in the hotel he always used on such occasions.
He was informed of all this in a prettily furnished room which overlooked the garden, a large room giving an overall impression of lightness – an astonishingly attractive room to find in that dark house, whose heavy, fusty, last-century ambience he’d found so depressing on his last visit. Here, there was a thick blue carpet, with a Chinese hearth rug in creamy pastels and deep, chintz-covered armchairs. Taupe-grey velvet curtains stirred in the breeze from the open window. Flowers were massed in bowls, and the walls painted in a shade that glowed like lighted alabaster, iced with a delicate white cornice and frieze. Imogen Loxley looked equally elegant, and expensive, decorated with the sort of gold jewellery he thought should be described as ‘understated’, wearing a slip of a dress, cream coloured, short and sleeveless, nothing to it – though one thing he’d learned was that the cost of women’s clothes couldn’t be judged by how much there was of them.
Come to think of it, Alex was spending a lot on clothes lately. He’d accidentally come across one of her bills and had to be resuscitated by a large malt. Not like Alex, to be extravagant ...
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