by Valerie Laws
She reached the end of the asphalt path at the corner of the cemetery. The crematorium, grey stone mock-gothic, stood silent, the chimney smokeless. No risk today of inhaling somebody’s mortal remains as they puffed out of the chimney straight into her lungs, as had happened disconcertingly before. She thought of them still in there, rising and falling with her breath, embedded in her lungs, living on in her body.
She turned in again to run alongside the cemetery where it ran at right angles to the asphalt track. The ground now was dirt track fringed by long grass, dock leaves, cow parsley, edged with elder, hawthorn and poplars, the golf course on her right. Where the cemetery had been on her left were now the backs of large detached houses, sixties built, their back fences having gates onto the path. Towards the end of the path, before she turned down a snicket back onto the streets that would lead her home, was Kingston’s house. She was right behind it. Well how about that.
She stepped back almost into the twiggy hawthorn bushes against the golf course boundary to see what she could of the house above its high, solidly built back fence. Kingston’s house itself looked just like an expensive, respectable house - there was nothing to say a murder had been committed there, apart from some sadly dangling crime scene tape across his back gate. Taking a side step, Erica felt her trainer skid on something. She looked down and found an empty quarter vodka bottle of a cheap brand keeping company with a couple of crushed beer cans and a cigarette packet, also empty. A few fag ends lay around as a garnish.
Obviously the local youths hung about here. She had seen similar caches among the newer but equally affluent clumps of houses in the area. Kids with nowhere to go. The police called their little refuges ‘drinking dens’, which sounded much more exciting, more reminiscent of prohibition era America with its speakeasies, bathtub gin and tommy guns than the pathetic reality of damp bus shelters or, as here, hollowed out hawthorn thickets forming scant shelter over a fence to perch their bony bums on.
There’d been a campaign backed by the local press including Dunne’s papers which tried to keep in with the mayor and council, to stop outdoor drinking, and byelaws had been hastily passed. The police could show they were doing something about youth crime by stopping party-going youngsters and confiscating their bottles of Irish cider or cheap wine, pouring the contents sadistically on the ground heedless of the effort entailed in obtaining them – the careful coaching of older relatives, the threatening of older-looking friends, the labour of constructing fake ID with attention to detail of which their teachers would not believe them capable. Middle class youngsters could spice up their evenings, as not only were they now hunted and possibly beaten up by ‘charvas’, their natural enemies, but they had the added thrill of smuggling nicked bottles of chardonnay from their parents’ stash, hiding them in shrubbery and over random garden walls at the first sign or siren from the boys and girls in blue of a Friday night.
Meanwhile, normally law-abiding adults found they were now unable to have a glass of wine at a beach picnic or technically, even carry a bottle of immaculate vintage on public transport to a dinner party, without risking criminalisation. Erica pondered this, moving the detritus about with her toe. Sad, the driving underground of alcohol, a proud part of her Anglo-Saxon culture. After all, she could and did assert as a scientist, booze was totally devoid of calories, enabling her to get ratted while clubbing without the usual agonies of guilt caused by ingesting anything more calorific than celery. She looked up towards the house again, and tried jumping up to see over the fence, though the light was fading fast.
‘Hey! What are you up to?’
A man, late middle aged, wearing light slacks, what looked like a cream polo shirt and a powder blue golf sweater was standing in the open back doorway of the next house, illuminated by his kitchen light. He had quite thin legs, but his broad shoulders testified to years of perfecting his swing.
‘I saw you from the upstairs window,’ he said triumphantly, as if this had required hours of surveillance and cunning. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘I was just looking,’ she began, when he jumped in.
‘Well clear off! It’s bad enough around here with all the local riffraff hanging about at all hours, damned hoodies, say anything to them and all you get’s a mouthful of abuse, the police can’t seem to do anything, and now we’ve got passers-by rubbernecking! The street’s a byword, well at least the police can be bothered to turn out for a murder, but the area’s going downhill fast, young lady.’
‘It was erm, me, who found Kingston,’ she said, feeling that the more correct ‘it was I’ sounded too pompous. ‘I’m a reporter for the Evening Guardian.’
‘Fearful rag!’ he spluttered. ‘Had the damn nerve to call me an ‘elderly neighbour!’ Common little chap they sent too. You can tell them from me I want a printed apology.’
‘Ah that sounds like Gary Thomas. I’ll mention it to the editor.’
‘You don’t look like a reporter. You look like a jogger. No sign of a notebook, or anything.’
‘I am a jogger. Multitasking you know. Just thought I’d check the place out while I do my run, come back tomorrow looking more like a reporter. Though I tend to use a digital voice recorder, or this.’ She produced her phone. ‘I can record on here. Make sure I get exact quotes and don’t make any mistakes. And if you still have doubts, you can look in the Daily Courier today, or on the website, you’ll see my picture.’ Next to Gary’s byline. ‘Or the Guardian website. Health page. Hence the jogging, you see.’
‘Hm. I see. But I shall be checking!’ He pushed back a thin strand of grey hair which had come adrift in the breeze.
Erica was quick to take advantage of his mollified tone. ‘What you said before. About the police. ‘At least they can be bothered to turn out for a murder.’ Implying they don’t normally turn out here? I’m surprised they’d ever be needed. Such a salubrious area. Nice houses, nice class of person.’ She dredged up more encouraging language she remembered from various older patients and relatives. ‘What you’d call really decent types. Law abiding.’ She ostentatiously put her phone on ‘voice record’ and held it towards him in a business-like manner.
‘Oh yes, absolutely! I mean, you do expect the odd golf ball against the windows, or through the greenhouse, living here; we don’t mind that too much, most of us play the game. That’s why we live here, to be near the club. It’s just a short stroll to the clubhouse - handy for dodging the breathalyser! But we get youths hanging about... we can’t seem to get shot of the little bastards. Bloody neck-ends! We’ve tried all sorts. I’ve tried. Kingston himself was out here chasing them off numerous times. Even with his connections he couldn’t seem to get anything done. Few times the police did send a bloke, they made off across the course. Back the next night! Kingston thought they put off his patients, though you can’t see anything from the front of the house. But you could hear them all right. Shocking language. I told the police, that’s where you should be looking for your suspect. Look, that’s where the stone came from that the buggers used to kill Kingston. Right next to the den!’
He waved a long arm toward the bushes further along. A pile of hefty sandstone chunks lay there, dumped by some gardener tired of his or her rockery. They were filmed with green, and weeds and garden escapees like honesty’s pale sad satin windows had sprouted among them. One stone was plainly missing. Its place was marked by an impression in the ground, lined with bleached, flattened grass.
‘Yes, that’s where the murder weapon came from alright! Some scruffy young constable was round here checking to see if it fit. He didn’t look much different to the yobbos, if you ask me. ‘
Erica wondered just how much time the old boy spent at his upstairs window. ‘I’m surprised they didn’t take these cans and fag ends and stuff. To test for DNA.’
‘They did. These have just appeared! Tonight!’
‘Bit early isn’t it?’
‘Police have been patrolling every so often, looking
out for anyone who might have seen anything. Bloody hoodies waited til coast clear, dumped an empty bottle and fag ends and scarpered!’
‘You mean sort of reclaiming their bit of territory? Quite sad really when you think about it.’
‘Sad! Yes it’s sad, you scrimp and save, you work hard, you make something of yourself, you buy a house by the golf course, and those little vandals…! They want stringing up. Thumbing their filthy cocaine-stuffed noses at authority. Every damned night... little buggers... they could do with some army discipline.’
‘I’m not sure training them to kill would help.’
He went crimson in the face and started to swell up for another explosion so Erica hurried on, before she got hypothermia standing about in a lycra vest.
‘So I expect the police asked you if you saw anything.’ She rubbed her arms which were rough with goose pimples. ‘Did you?’
‘Not a thing. They asked me about the early morning and the late night before. Well I went to bed early, and I normally sit in my breakfast room at the front of the house in the mornings to catch the sun, when there is any. So I wouldn’t have seen anything. I didn’t need to! All they’ve got to do is put a man on watch up one of these trees, they’d soon catch the young sods.’
The thought of long-limbed Will Bennett perched in a small bushy tree all night had its attractions, though no doubt it would be one of the young officers who copped that particular bit of surveillance.
‘It might be difficult to prove they had anything to do with the murder,’ she pointed out, jogging on the spot to keep warm and save herself from stiffening up. She crossed her arms and rubbed her shoulders, shifting from foot to foot. ‘After all, anyone could have picked up that rock and used it.’
‘Hardly!’ he barked. ‘Most of the people who walk along here aren’t the type at all. Not like those thugs...’
‘Well, thanks for showing me where the murder weapon came from, Mr er.’
‘Archer. Harold Archer. Esquire.’
Erica solemnly switched off her phone, thanked him and jogged off.
It was true, anyone could have used that stone. The use of something that just happened to be lying around suggested an impulsive crime rather than premeditation. But then anyone who regularly walked that path, the hoodies, dogwalkers, golfers retrieving their balls, gardeners dumping cuttings, kids taking short cuts, might know those rocks were there, ready to hand, a safe weapon that could not be traced back to them. Even if they’d picked up the rock before putting on surgical gloves - which they surely must have unless they were stupid beyond belief - they’d have cleaned it up somehow. If fingerprints would show on rough damp sandstone in the first place.
Erica always liked getting back to her flat, in an old black and white mews which had been part of a coaching inn, historic and a bit tatty, her first proper home after the years of flat-sharing at university. She had a hot shower and made herself a quick dinner, sweet potato cooked whole in the microwave with no fat, and an omelette with minimum oil, plenty of chilli and mushrooms. She opened a bottle of St Emilion. It takes nerve to open a bottle of wine on your own without feeling like a lush. But the flowery, vanilla-scented wine was delicious. She allowed herself another glass.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The research she’d done for the interview came in useful for Kingston’s obituary. Impressive career tragically cut short at only 43; his work as an orthopaedic consultant at the Wydsand General Hospital, his private practice including spells of working in Arab countries treating rich patients who’d crashed their Mercs and Porsches... put more tactfully of course. She included his undoubted successes in surgery, his churchgoing, and being a leading light, in fact a past Captain, of Wydsand Golf Club. She didn’t mention that his widow, 30 year-old Tessa, was living separately at his death, or any other controversial subjects. Not the time or place.
She wondered why his wife had left him. A guy with plenty of money, lots of status, lauded to the skies by all and sundry....maybe he shagged nurses, regarded them as his due? She wondered how he had felt about being left. Can’t have made him look good to his work and golf cronies. He’d struck her as unattractively arrogant though presumably Mrs Kingston must have known him better than Erica did on the basis of their one phone conversation setting up the interview. Perhaps he was charming in private.
His manner on the phone had put up her hackles, as did his reaction when she explained who she was. She’d told him she edited and wrote the You and Your Health page.
‘What qualifies you for that?’ Amused.
‘I have a homeopathic practice in the town - I work on the paper freelance.’
‘Oh I see. One of those ‘alternative’ practitioners. Alternative to real medicine, that is. All these fancy -ologies make our job harder. We have to pick up the pieces when your ‘magic’ fails, as it must.’
‘Really?’ she replied, as calmly as she could, while digging her biro into the notepad viciously. ‘A lot of my clients have already been to doctors and been told there’s nothing wrong with them. Or given drugs that made them ill with serious side effects. Or denied drugs on the grounds of cost.’
‘Lot of hysterical women. I don’t think much of those who make a living out of their delusions. Fake fortune tellers and so on, putting ideas into their heads.’
‘That’s an interesting diagnosis,’ she managed to say without choking. ‘Of course some would say that surgeons make a living out of arthritis, which might be helped more cheaply and effectively by diet and lifestyle changes. There are many points of view, aren’t there? And not all my patients are women by the way. Some of them even play golf.’
He laughed, but he sounded angry. More than he had any right to be, considering how offensive he’d been. Was he unused to people, women, who talked back?
‘Surely all that homeopathic claptrap has been proved to be a load of bollocks? You should try and look at some real, hard science, if you can manage to understand it.’
Simon Singh again! And again, Erica was driven to defend her practice even though the crusade of Singh, one of her personal maths communicator heroes, sometimes tested her own faith.
‘I’m a maths and theoretical physics graduate so I’m not a total stranger to science. There are many things which can’t be proved by current methods. Many scientists believe in god, even though nobody’s been able to isolate any evidence apart from a placebo effect there. I believe you attend St Mary’s?’
‘Good grief, maths eh. If that’s true,’ his tone made clear he doubted it, ‘you should go in for accountancy and earn an honest living. Not that equations would do you any good if you sustain significant trauma.’
Horribly like Will Bennett. Recalling the conversation now, Erica kicked herself for not thinking to hit back with the mathematical geometric equations involved in the forces applied by the Ilizarov frame, Kingston’s stock in trade. Still, the guy was dead so scoring points was rather pointless.
He’d finished with, ‘I’ll give this interview, but I’m not debating crap like that. No-one has any right to question my work, except possibly another surgeon of equal seniority, and none of them would. I’ll talk about my surgical work, and that’s it. I can give you half an hour. Some of us have real jobs to do.’
She’d agreed. He seemed happier once he had, as he thought, taken control of the situation. She’d been willing to let him think so, for now. That’s why she borrowed the dowdy clothes. She was hoping he would condemn himself out of his own mouth - if not, well, she was a professional journalist, even if only part time, and she didn’t have to like everyone she dealt with. She’d hoped she’d never be on the receiving end of his bedside manner if it was anything like his telephone one. As it turned out, it was him who sustained the ‘significant trauma.’
Good thing Will Bennett hadn’t seen her biro-ravaged notepad with its blue-stained stab wounds, or he’d be giving her the third degree. However, Kingston couldn’t argue for himself anymore, so she tried to leach all her
dislike out of the obituary. She had to go through it several times, reading it aloud to make sure it was as bland as ricotta when she emailed it in with the regular features of her page.
She was interrupted by a phone call from Miles, the hypnotherapist at Ivy Lodge.
‘Erica, can you come over, if you possibly can. Your client Beccy’s here and she’s in a bit of a state. I’ve told her you’re not in this morning, but she keeps insisting. She refuses to come back this afternoon... she’s going to upset the other clients.’
‘OK, I’ll come now. Lucky I’m not far. Take her into my room and give her four drops of Rescue Remedy, tell her I’m on my way.’
When she got to Ivy Lodge, Miles intercepted her outside her room.
‘I didn’t like to leave her alone, but I’ve got one of my smokers waiting for treatment... I’ve been darting in and out, reassuring her, rushing in to check on my client. I’ve got some of that whale music miaowing away, it’s supposed to be soothing, but it’s not having much effect. Maybe you have to be a whale. I’ll get back to my client He’ll be dying for a fag by now as it is.’
‘Thanks, Miles. Sorry you got lumbered. If she turns violent, I’ll call you to come and do an emergency hypnosis.’
Beccy was sitting on the edge of the chair beside Erica’s desk, hunched over, every line of her radiating tension. Her beautifully cut and streaked ash-blonde hair was all over the place, and her eyes bluer than ever under a film of tears. One hand was curled inwards, pressed against her abdomen, and the other was clenched on the upholstered arm of the chair. She had been watching the door like a child at the dentist’s, and the intensity of her gaze hit Erica like a physical blow. She turned off the whalesong as she approached the sobbing girl – of course she was a woman, really, not a girl, no need to buy into her helpless habits of body language and appearance.
