Turning Nasty (Anna McColl Mystery Series Book 4)

by Penny Kline

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. ‘If you give me your home number I’ll call you later this evening.’

  ‘Would you really? That’s awfully kind.’ She scribbled a number on a pad and tore off the top sheet handing it to me as if she were giving me a prescription. She didn’t look as if she thought I was awfully kind. If anything, I guessed she was annoyed I had failed to fall in with her request straight away. But perhaps I was being unfair. Wanting to do her best for Ian Hazeldean, though aware that she had taken advantage of me, her defence was to turn back into a practice nurse. Efficient, humane, but keeping her distance.

  ‘I’ll hope to hear from you then,’ she said. ‘And don’t forget, if you need an antibiotic just turn up any time and we’ll make sure one of the doctors fits you in.’

  Not much of a deal really. Side-stepping the appointments book in return for taking on a bereaved father and son.

  *

  The van in front of me, a battered Transit, swayed precariously from side to side, its back doors held closed by a fraying rope and only one of its braking lights in working order. Leaving the stream of traffic in Gloucester Road, I turned left and drove slowly up the hill, trying to remember if I had ever noticed a school.

  Owen would be looking at his watch, making himself a drink, reading a few pages of his library book, a prize-winning novel about a sheep farmer in New Zealand, the kind of thing that bored me to tears. Not that a differing taste in novels was any indication of serious incompatibility and, in any case, nothing was fixed, definite. We saw each other when we felt like it, but not so much that we tired of one another’s company. What could be better? So far it was working pretty well. We shared some of the same interests, more or less the same sense of humour, and quite often the same bed.

  Edgerton Brow, Melbourne Road, Beauchamp Road, I could cruise round for hours and never find the house. I should have asked Howard Fry for more details but that would have aroused his suspicions, allowed him to think I was going to make a few investigations of my own. What did I expect to find? A pile of ashes? The front wall of a house destroyed, revealing the charred contents of two rooms, one on each floor?

  Leaving the car in a side road, I started walking towards a pair of high gates I could see in the distance that looked like they could be the entrance to a school. It was nearly six-thirty and the street lights had come on. A red and white barrier had been erected on the pavement, and an old man was staring gloomily down the manhole beyond it. When I drew level he mumbled something about how someone was going to hurt themselves, how there ought to be lamps.

  ‘Looks dangerous,’ I said, hoping if I managed to engage him in conversation he might mention the fire.

  He nodded, drawing deeply on his last half-inch of cigarette. ‘Wife won’t let me smoke indoors. Can’t say I blame her. Live round here, do you?’

  ‘Friends in Queen’s Drive. They’ve been telling me about the fire.’

  ‘Fire?’ For a moment he looked puzzled. ‘Oh, you mean the poor lady they took away in an ambulance. Must’ve been asleep when it happened. Should’ve had one of those smoke alarm things.’

  ‘Over there, was it?’ I said, pointing in the direction of the main road.

  ‘Eh? You just passed the turning. Down the end there, on the left.’

  The last house, at the end of a short terrace, had been built at right angles to the rest. When I approached I saw at once that the blue paint on the front door had bubbled off with the heat and there were black scorch marks on the brickwork. The window next to the door had been boarded up, but the one above still had its glass intact. Margaret Hazeldean must have smelled smoke, come down from her bath to investigate and been overcome by the toxic fumes from the furniture. Did asphyxiation take place that quickly? Couldn’t she have escaped by another exit?

  The road was deserted, silent apart from the faint sound of a television in the next-door house. What had I expected? That the house would be cordoned off, with a police constable on duty? Nearly forty-eight hours had passed since the fire; whatever evidence remained would have been collected up in bags long since and carefully labelled, pending a court case. Ever since Howard Fry’s visit I had been unable to stop myself imagining what it would be like to have someone you loved killed in a fire. Not knowing, that would be the worst part. Facts and figures, from a book on forensic science I had been reading only a few weeks before, filtered back into my head. Out of 60,000 house fires per annum 20 per cent are non-accidental. And in nine out of ten cases the bastards get away with it. Most deaths occur from inhalation of smoke and noxious gases. Burns that take place before death have fiery-red margins.

  Saturday night. Fire-engine sirens, the wail of a police car, following close behind. A faint prickle ran up the back of my neck. Of horror? Excitement? The sensations are impossible to distinguish. Margaret Hazeldean, the woman I had never met but who had been preoccupying my thoughts for most of the day. Dead, destroyed, and for those who had cared about her the world was now a different place.

  *

  It looked like every dish and saucepan I possessed had been used for some unspecified purpose, then piled up on the draining board, encrusted in the cold, congealed remains of Owen’s culinary experiments.

  ‘Rigatoni,’ he announced. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do the washing up.’ He didn’t ask why I was back nearly an hour later than usual.

  ‘I had to call in at the health centre,’ I said. ‘A dog bit my ankle.’

  Stirring something in a pan with the heat turned up too high, he took a moment to take in what I had said. ‘A dog? What kind of dog?’

  ‘Who knows? What difference does it make? A brown thing with a face like the back of a bus.’

  He slid the pan on to one of the other rings and crossed the room to give me a gentle hug, as though he thought the injury might be somewhere on my upper body. ‘Where did it bite you?’

  ‘I told you.’ I held out my right leg.

  ‘Poor old you,’ he said, taking in the small size of the bandage. ‘Dog bites are nasty. I remember reading somewhere — ’

  ‘I know. It’s the rotting meat between their teeth.’

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t laugh. ‘What on earth were you doing?’

  ‘Me? I wasn’t doing anything. Just waiting outside a shop.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What d’you mean what for?’ No sympathy, just an insinuation that I must have provoked the horrible animal in some way. ‘If you must know I was trying to find your precious olive oil. The thing rushed up, grabbed my leg in its jaws and sank in its teeth. I’m pretty certain it belonged to a guy I saw earlier in the day. Aggressive-looking bastard with a thick neck covered in tattoos.’

  ‘Rottweiler was it?’

  ‘No, it looked like some kind of cross. Bull terrier and something else. Streaky brown, longish legs.’

  ‘Brindle,’ said Owen, setting the record straight before he returned to the cooker.

  Although he was a couple of inches under six foot, fairly broadly built, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary, he seemed to take up most of the kitchen. Chairs had been pulled out and covered with bags of shopping, the evening paper, a couple of unopened letters he must have picked up from his flat, and his old threadbare duffel coat. It was pitch dark outside but he hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains. In the street below a beaten-up truck I had never seen before was attempting to squeeze into a space that looked about half its length. I asked Owen where he had left his car.

  ‘Up near the adventure playground. Then I called in at the shop in Queen’s Road. It stays open late every day of the week, including Sunday.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I said irritably. After three years in the area did I need to be told which shops were open when?

  Owen picked up the crossness in my voice and turned to face me. ‘Leg hurting?’ ‘No.’

  ‘Bad day at the office?’

  ‘No. Yes.’ I was putting off mentioning the fire, wondering whether it would be
all right to tell him Maggie Hazeldean had made an appointment with me. Since she was dead it could hardly be called a breach of confidentiality. Since she was dead…

  Owen frowned. ‘Invading your space am I, making you feel territorial?’

  ‘Yes, but it’s not your fault.’

  He picked up his coat and carried it to the bedroom. I followed him, and he put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. For a moment I thought he was going to laugh, then his expression became serious. ‘Someone in the Child Development Unit’s been killed,’ he said. ‘She was burned to death in a fire.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But she wasn’t burned, it was fumes from the furniture that killed her,’ I added stupidly, as if it made a difference.

  He said nothing for a moment, just looked slightly puzzled. ‘You knew Maggie?’

  I shook my head. ‘I’d heard of her. I expect you mentioned her name. As far I know we never actually met.’

  Owen sat on the bed. ‘She’d only been in the job since September. She had a fairly large grant, to investigate the effect of social deprivation on behaviour in the classroom. Terry Curtis said she was good.’

  I rubbed my ankle. ‘It was Grace Curtis I saw at the health centre. She’s one of the practice nurses.’

  He wasn’t listening. ‘I saw Terry this afternoon,’ he said quietly, ‘that’s how I found out what had happened. She was married but apparently they’d been living apart for several months. I believe there’s a teenage boy.’

  I sat down, yanking up the heap of bedclothes that, as usual, had slid to Owen’s side of the bed. ‘Grace Curtis wants me to see him. The son, Ian. Apparently he’s reacted badly to his mother’s death. When I say badly, I mean he hasn’t reacted at all.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I said I’d think about it, give her a ring.’

  ‘When?’ He punched one of the pillows with his fist, then picked it up and turned it over.

  ‘When I’ve thought about it.’

  He nodded, then stood up and started back to the kitchen. I had expected him to put pressure on me to stay well clear, let someone else pick up the pieces. He wanted to do just that, but there had been too many arguments about my over-involvement in my work, and he had learned to leave well alone. Then it dawned on me that he was assuming the fire was an accident. If I told him about the arson I would have to tell him Howard Fry had been in touch, that the police were wondering if the reason for Maggie Hazeldean’s appointment with me could have any connection with the arson attack. But mentioning Howard always created a degree of tension between us and just now I wanted something that would take my mind off the unpleasant events of the day. I would rather have forgotten about the rigatoni and gone to the pub.

  In the house next door the music had been turned up loud. It happened at more or less the same time each evening and, sooner or later, something would have to be done about it. Pam and Ernest, the elderly couple in the flat below mine, were being driven insane. So far Pam had said nothing to suggest she was waiting for me to deal with the problem. She didn’t have to. I could see it in her eyes.

  Owen seemed oblivious of the drum beat on the other side of the wall. ‘Food’ll be ready in about ten minutes,’ he called. ‘I don’t know about you but I could do with an early night.’

  Such an innocent remark but we both knew what it meant. Another argument about the future, or at the very least a discussion about whether or not we would discuss it. Did we want to live together or was it better to continue with the present arrangement? Nothing planned, just decisions made on the spur of the moment, mostly about who was going to stay the night where. In my flat, in Owen’s place off Cotham Hill? Together? Separately? Not knowing from one day to the next added a certain spice to life, but it was starting to create something of a strain with far too much spent trying to guess what the other was thinking.

  The dish Owen had cooked was good, partly because I always enjoyed food better if I had had no part in its preparation. Several glasses of supermarket red had the desired effect, blurring the worry about clients, my ankle, even the fire in the house in Bishopston, turning them into things that could be pushed aside until another day.

  ‘How did you know about Maggie?’ asked Owen, forcing me out of my muzzy state, then standing up and moving towards the other room, without even a token attempt to clear the table.

  ‘Martin told me,’ I lied.

  Owen gave me a long, questioning look. ‘And how did Martin Wheeler hear about it? No, don’t bother to answer, just come and sit down and we can watch the ten o’clock news.’

  ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ I said, ‘or will you complain it’s given you insomnia? It’s all rubbish, you know. I read a recent report that — ’

  He turned and kissed me on the mouth. There were more grey flecks in his hair than I remembered from the last time I checked. It gave him a slightly world-weary look and, for some inexplicable reason, had the same effect that Howard Fry’s smart, authoritarian appearance had had earlier in the day.

  I laughed, but with no intention of explaining what had been so amusing. ‘I like you,’ I said.

  ‘Good.’ He waited for me to go on ahead of him and switch on the news. ‘Well, I think we can say that’s a start.’

  Later, as I was drifting off to sleep, curled up against Owen’s back, an image of the shaven-headed man flitted into my consciousness. A sharp image that my confused brain could have concocted from a memory of something entirely different. An item on the news? A scene in a television series? Next to the purple-hooded skull was a name in thin spidery capitals. I was almost certain the name had been MAX.

  Chapter Three

  On the way to Henbury I tried to remember everything Owen had told me about Maggie Hazeldean. It didn’t amount to much. Small, dark, in her late thirties. According to Owen she had attended a seminar on family therapy and during an exchange of ideas had become quite heated when someone suggested that children as young as five should be included in discussions about their parents’ marital problems. What had Owen been doing at a seminar on family therapy? It was part of a conference on health education and Terry Curtis had dragged him to it, insisting the organizers always laid on an exceptionally good lunch.

  The car in front had an L-plate and the driver had stalled at the lights. Behind me the owner of a gleaming new Audi hooted angrily, pointlessly, his face contorted with frustration. He was wearing a navy blue pinstripe suit and had the reddish complexion and sleek black hair of a successful but unscrupulous businessman. My prejudices again. He could just as easily be someone from the university, one of the new breed of dynamic administrators that Owen disliked so much.

  Until the last few days Owen had hardly mentioned Terry Curtis’s name. Now it seemed he knew Terry and Grace quite well but had never got round to introducing me, preferring, as he put it, to keep our relationship to himself. It made me sound like a bit on the side, but that wasn’t what Owen had meant. Anything intimate, anything that might hint at love, was an embarrassment, something personal, private, better kept under wraps, at least as far as his colleagues at work were concerned. But that couldn’t be right either. Grace had known my name so I must have been mentioned, at least in passing. From what Owen had told me it seemed that Terry and Grace had only been together a relatively short time. Before that Grace had been married to someone else and, in order to live with Terry, she had been forced to abandon her teenage child. ‘Abandon’ was Owen’s word, not mine. For all he knew Grace had been desperately unhappy in her first marriage. If she’d given up Terry, because of the child, it would have left home a year or two later and she would have thrown away her one chance… I pulled myself up short. Why did my brain have to keep concocting ridiculous stories based on the flimsiest of evidence? I knew next to nothing about either Terry or Grace Curtis, certainly not enough to justify defending Grace just because Owen had mindlessly chosen the word ‘abandon’.

  A road map of Bristol lay on the passenge
r seat, folded to the area north of Westbury-on-Trym, but there was too much traffic to slow down and check if I was heading in the right direction. Turning into a side street I pulled up behind a skip full of builder’s rubble, switched off the engine and began studying the network of streets that ran between the main road and Henbury Hill.

  I could see the edge of the Blaise Castle Estate in the distance. My ankle was throbbing. The start of an infection? I thought about the man called Max with a tattoo on his neck and wondered if I should phone Howard Fry and ask him to check up on the owners of P-registration brown Allegros. It could well turn out there were thirty or forty of them in Bristol, quite apart from the fact that Howard would want to know what it was all about.

  Snatches of a half-remembered dream interrupted my thoughts. A dark restaurant with an angry waiter, a stony path leading up to the top of a hill. Nightmare sufferers score significantly higher on the EPQ Neuroticism Scale. This dream had been no nightmare but it had left me with a vague feeling of unease, melancholia. I wondered what had prompted Maggie Hazeldean to move out of the family home and rent the house in Bishopston. Perhaps the house owner’s sabbatical in Australia had provided her with the impetus to leave, or had she made up her mind already and been looking round for somewhere nearer the city centre? Was she having an affair? Had she been unhappy for years but stayed in the marriage for her son’s sake, or because she had no income? Had she found out something about her husband that made it impossible for the two of them to continue living together?

  Suddenly I spotted Bill Hazeldean’s road on the map. Ladywell Close was a loop, curving round to join up with the same street where it had started. Quickly memorizing two left turns, then a right, then a left, I started up the engine and began preparing myself for what might turn out to be a less than ecstatic reception. On the phone Bill had sounded flat, resigned. Yes, Grace Curtis had been in touch. Yes, he was a little worried about Ian. Yes, if I thought it was the right thing to do he supposed I had better call round.