Brief Cases Box Set

by Andrea Frazer

  Scrutinising herself in the full-length mirror on the wardrobe door, she thought how well she had retained her figure over the years, whereas Alison had allowed her body first to swell, then to sag, as the years took their toll. Well, there was nothing about Abigail’s body that a well-made corset couldn’t set to rights, and she had one of these on for today’s luncheon. Although it wouldn’t allow her to eat much, it did ensure that she could get into a dress a size smaller than she wore on a day-to-day basis, and this pleased her enormously.

  Having not grown much heavier with the years, it meant she was also still able to walk in relatively high heels, and this, of course, would emphasize the difference in their builds. Alison always wore trainers these days, something that Abigail wouldn’t be seen dead in. At least she hadn’t let herself go over the years and still tried to retain a little grace and elegance, particularly when she was to see her old friend.

  She particularly looked forward to these six-monthly lunch meetings with Alison, as it always brought news of other old school chums. They had all started on a level playing field at St Hilda’s, but the winds of life had scattered them in completely different directions, and Abigail revelled in the fact that so many of them had failed to reach their true potential.

  Sally Carter had screwed up big-time, producing five illegitimate children one after the other, and all with different fathers. At school, she had been the romantic, and fell in love at the drop of a hat. As far as Abigail had been informed, she now lived in some sort of hippie commune, amongst all the other dross of the late sixties that had never adapted to the conventions and responsibilities of adult life. Alison said that, even at her advancing years, she still wore flowing kaftans and numerous strings of beads, and plaited her hair in the hope that what sparse growth there was left would turn into dreadlocks if she waited long enough. Alison reckoned that the whole lot would fall out before that happened.

  Suzie Beeton had gone to the other extreme, marrying a man of the cloth, and lived an impoverished life in a house rented from the Church of England, now that her husband had retired, forever waiting for the odd occasion when he was asked to undertake locum work, to bring in a small addition to their meagre income.

  Mary Dibley had had ambitions to be a career woman, but without a chance of even sighting the glass ceiling above her. Always a slow, almost bovine, character, she had worked her way to level two in administration at a large company, and there she had stayed, doggedly working away, year after year, always hoping for but not quite achieving promotion.

  And finally there was Lesley Lovelace, an impatient girl who had never wanted to wait for anything, and who couldn’t stick to one subject for more than twenty minutes before she started to fidget and generally cause havoc in whichever classroom her lesson was taking place.

  Over the years Abigail had listened avidly as Alison had told her of Lesley’s five marriages and four divorces, and she was eager to hear whether Lesley was still with the last partner she had heard about, or had moved on to number six yet. She had also had, to Abigail’s knowledge, two face-lifts, and this was another subject on which she yearned for information. Had number two sagged yet, or had she gone for number three, and ended up looking like some sort of over-stretched monster?

  In Abigail’s opinion, she herself was the only one of the old crowd who had prospered and lived a respectable life, taking care of her social position, and dealing with the ravages of time with dignity. Who would have thought that it would have been her, Abigail Thorogood, as she was known back then, who would have the delightful detached house, the sleek Mercedes, and the membership of the country club – with a holiday home in Brittany too?

  Oh, how she loved these reunion lunches with Alison!

  Alison, as usual, was waiting in the bar for her, as parking in Market Darley was getting to be a nightmare these days, and the hotel car park had been full, forcing Abigail to seek on-street parking, making her arrival a little tardy. But nothing could dampen her good mood today, and she made her entrance to the bar, trailing clouds of Chanel 19 in her wake, a smile of welcome on her face, and a great ball of Schadenfreude in her heart, waiting to be satisfied.

  Lunch was its usual avalanche of news, Alison doing most of the talking, Abigail making suitably smug comments.

  ‘She hasn’t! Not a third one! She must look almost oriental with everything stretched so much.’ ‘Like a wild cat? How appropriate! Lesley always was the catty one at school.’

  ‘Twenty grandchildren? Where on earth does she put them when they visit? It’s just as well she lives in a commune, otherwise she’d need a mansion.’

  ‘Oh, they all get slotted in somewhere. They don’t think anything of it, being brought up as they were,’ explained Alison.

  ‘What a complete whirlwind it must be with their parents visiting a well. Poor old Sally!’

  ‘Suzie, shopping at jumble sales? I thought they’d be better off when her husband retired, but you say the pension is small, and they haven’t got any savings? What a shame. She always dressed so fashionably at school. It must be such a disappointment for her to have to acquire her clothes that way.

  ‘Still hoping for promotion? At her age? Mary must live in a different world to everyone else – one filled with false hopes and impossible ambitions. She’ll be retiring soon. How can she go on chasing promotion when she’s headed for her pension?’

  On and on it went, Abigail’s self-satisfied comments coming faster and faster. Alison thanked her lucky stars that it had been an all girls’ school. Having to provide progress reports on a crowd of boys too, would have been too much. Sometimes she thought that Abigail enjoyed the misfortunes of her old friends just a little too much for comfort, and knew that she thoroughly disapproved of the way she herself dressed.

  Being who she was, though, Alison didn’t care a fig. She dressed comfortably, and was at peace with her life. If she hadn’t been, she would never have continued these lunches for so long, knowing that Abigail merely used them to make herself feel superior.

  There was only one interruption to the flow of their conversation, and that was when Abigail stared beady-eyed across the room, over Alison’s shoulder, and said, very quietly, ‘I’m sure I know that face.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Alison, who had been interrupted mid-news bulletin.

  ‘Nobody,’ replied Abigail. ‘I just thought I saw someone I recognised, but it doesn’t matter. Carry on with what you were saying. What did she do next?’

  At Market Darley Police Station, Detective Inspector Harry Falconer and Detective Sergeant ‘Davey’ Carmichael were deep in conversation on a very important subject, considering what next month would bring.

  ‘For a start, your height and build would give you away instantly,’ Falconer said. ‘Who else could you be, but yourself? Neither of them would fall for that one. Just take them into the bedroom, like Kerry’s always done before, and hope they don’t wake up. If they do, at least you have the excuse that they were left downstairs, and you were just being helpful in bringing them up to their room.’

  ‘But I so want to wear one, and it’s the only opportunity I’ll get in a whole year. I think I’d look great!’ Carmichael almost whined, in his desire to fulfil his dream scenario.

  ‘I think you’d look terrifying. Like the Incredible Hulk does paedophilia.’

  ‘Sir!’ The sergeant was most indignant.

  ‘Well, how would you feel if you woke up and found a great red giant in your bedroom? And you’re sure to trip over something or knock something over. You’re not exactly graceful, you know.’ retorted Falconer. ‘It would be bad enough to find the Jolly Green Giant, without introducing a scarlet one into the mix. Anyway, do they even make them in your size? You are a bit on the huge side.’

  DS Carmichael was nearly six and a half feet tall, and built like a battleship. Considering this last question, he sighed, and admitted that he would probably not be able to buy a Father Christmas outfit to fit him, and that he
’d better leave it to his wife Kerry to drop the filled pillowcases into the boys’ room on Christmas Eve.

  ‘It’s just not fair. Maybe I can get Kerry to run me up one. You know how good she is at making costumes,’ he suggested, wistfully.

  ‘Your wife is due to give birth to your first child in less than two months. Not only has she two boys to look after while you’re at work, but she’s got those two dogs of yours, one of them pregnant, and that stray cat you adopted. Don’t you think she has enough to cope with for the moment? And when would she get the time to just “run something up”? The boys would be sure to catch her at it, and ask her what she was making, and then your cover would be blown before you’d even had the chance to try it out.’

  ‘OK, OK! I get the point! But it’s still not fair,’ replied Carmichael, his face set glumly.

  ‘Whoever said life was fair, Carmichael, was lying. Some things we just have to live with. Anyway, didn’t you have enough of dressing-up when you had that pantomime-themed wedding last New Year?’

  ‘That just gave me a taste for it, sir.’

  ‘Well, it looks like it’s Tough Shit City for you then, Sergeant. Come on, let’s get on, or we’ll never finish this paperwork today.’

  Chapter Two

  Friday 26th November – afternoon

  Abigail left the hotel with the usual smug smile she wore after what she called one of her ‘catch-ups’, but the smugness was tempered with a slight feeling of unease, and she decided to take the long way home through the back streets to allow her thoughts to settle. She had a lot to think about.

  Pulling out of her parking space, she turned into Abattoir Road, one of the old and narrow streets that comprised the old market heart of the town and suddenly jammed her foot on the accelerator. There was a thud as she hit a pedestrian who had appeared in front of her, and then a sickening thud, as the unfortunate man hit the road surface several feet in front of her vehicle which, as she had been so late to apply the brake, was still in motion. When the car reached the body, it did a double bump, as both front and back wheels rolled over it, and by the time Abigail managed to halt the vehicle, she was several yards in front of where her victim lay, mangled and obviously dead.

  She sat for what seemed like for ever, drenched in a cold sweat at what had just happened, her heart pounding, her breath coming in short little gasps. She could hear other pedestrians calling out for an ambulance to be summoned, and for the police to be called, and finally made a shaky exit from the driving seat. What had she done?

  It was a quiet time of day, just after lunchtime, and there were only three people present, at the moment, clustered around the body to see if there was any help to be given to the poor victim. ‘I can’t find a pulse,’ said an elderly woman, who had been a first-aider in her working days.

  ‘He’s definitely not breathing,’ commented a younger woman, who had a pushchair with a child in it, which she had left on the pavement in her haste to come to the victim’s aid.

  ‘No chance. He’s a goner. Look at his injuries,’ added a middle-aged man who had been on his way back to his office, a little late back from lunch today.

  Abigail leaned against her car and tried to take deep breaths, hoping that she wasn’t going to pass out. What on earth had happened back there? What had really happened? It had been all so quick, though, when she thought about it now, it happened in slow motion in her mind, making it all the more horrific. She’d killed a man. What to do? What to do, now?

  Within a couple of minutes a police patrol car drew up and a man and a woman got out of it. PC Merv Green and PC ‘Twinkle’ Starr had been on patrol in the vicinity, and had answered the call for assistance at an RTA immediately.

  They instantly took over the scene, PC Green instructed the middle-aged man to stop traffic at the end of the road – luckily it was a one-way-street, and spoke into his personal radio to ask how long they would have to wait for an ambulance. PC Starr headed straight for Abigail Wentworth, to see if she was in need of any treatment for shock, or would be capable of making a statement in the not too distant future.

  The ambulance arrived in less than five minutes, loading into the vehicle what they knew would be categorised as a DOA, the state of extinction of life and the time of death determined by the doctor who received the body at the hospital.

  As the ambulance team left with their grizzly cargo, PC Green gathered together the three witnesses and took down their names and addresses, asking them if they could make their way to Market Darley Police Station to make formal statements, and offering a lift to as many as they could get in the patrol car. Only the man who had been stopping traffic entering the road claimed that he really ought to pop into his office first, but promised to present himself for interview within half an hour.

  PC Green had transferred his attention to Abigail, whose skin looked grey under her make-up, and every day of its fifty-eight years, immediately after the ambulance had arrived. Within the space of a few seconds, she had gone from a well-preserved, attractive and elegant woman-of-a-certain-age, to a shocked and frightened elderly lady. She was still leaning against her car, and he bent down to speak to her quietly.

  ‘I think I ought to get you back to the station and have a doctor look at you, before we go any further with this matter, but before that, you need a nice cup of hot sweet tea. I can call another car, so that you don’t have to travel to the station in the same vehicle as the witnesses to the accident. That’ll be the best thing all round, don’t you agree?’ he asked, a frown of puzzlement making small creases on his brow. Something here didn’t add up, but he had no idea what.

  At the station, PC Starr had placed her witnesses in separate interview rooms and arranged for tea to be brought to all of them. The elderly woman had given her name as Madge Moth, and an address only a few streets away. The younger woman, pushchair and child still in tow, had said she lived on the other side of town, but had been visiting her mother, and was going to do some shopping before she got the bus home, when the accident had happened. The middle-aged man arrived only a quarter of an hour after the patrol car, and gave his name as Arthur Black, a deputy manager at one of Market Darley’s banks.

  PC Green would not be back until he had a second car in which to transport Abigail, and had summoned a SOCO team to record any evidence of the accident left on the road surface. Someone would also have to erect a ‘road closed’ barrier at the end of the road, and arrange to have the vehicle towed away.

  PC Starr started with Mrs Moth, who was fairly calm, having seen her fair share of mishaps in her role as first aider over the years, and who had a fairly high tolerance to shocks. She was in good shape, and just wished she had more to tell than she did. She had been the only one headed in the same direction as the car and, therefore, hadn’t seen its approach.

  The first thing she had been aware of was the thud, as the car hit the pedestrian, then a squeal of brakes, as the car had tried to stop. She had not witnessed the actual accident, merely been present, but was facing in the wrong direction, when it happened.

  The policewoman waited patiently as the woman signed her statement, and then asked her if she would like a lift home, to which she received the reply that Mrs Moth was perfectly all right, thank you very much, and knew her way home, without the necessity of suffering a police car depositing her on her own doorstep.

  Next, she spoke to Arthur Black, the man who worked at the bank, to find that he had been walking towards the town on his way back to work. He had not particularly noticed the car when it turned in to the street, but had noticed that it had suddenly accelerated after it turned.

  He’d thought, at the time, that maybe the driver was late for an appointment, but then the car had immediately hit a pedestrian, and he was aware, at the time, that it seemed to take longer than he thought would have been necessary, for the brakes to be applied. Events had rather overtaken thought at that point, and he had ceased to think again until after the poor man’s body had been take
n away from the scene of the accident.

  He did admit to being rather shaken by the way that the car had not only hit the pedestrian, but had then continued on, running over the body with both sets of wheels, before coming to a halt. ‘Women drivers!’ he commented, with a sour look. ‘And elderly drivers!’ he added. ‘God preserve me from both of them. They’re a positive menace on the roads! It shouldn’t be allowed!’

  Katy Cribb, the young mother with her child, had professed to have missed the actual accident, because she was picking up a soft toy which her daughter had thrown out of the pushchair, but she had heard the screech of brakes, and had then heard noises that she didn’t want to think about, but which she feared would haunt her dreams for a good while to come. Yes, she might have heard the car accelerate, but on the other hand, she might not have. She really couldn’t be sure, because everything had happened so fast.

  PC Starr sighed, and wondered at the all-enveloping state of motherhood. The young mother seemed more concerned lest her daughter Cassandra had seen what had happened, and whether this would scar her tiny mind for the rest of her life. Starr sighed again, and hoped that when … if … she and Merv made a go of things, and eventually had children, she wouldn’t descend into this morass of maternal fog that blinkered her to the rest of the world and its doings.

  PC Merv Green, meanwhile, had also returned to the station, with Abigail Wentworth in his custody. After the administration of tea and sympathy, he attempted to extract a simple statement from her, but found that she was more concerned with what this tragic accident would do to her social standing, than with the fact that she had killed a man.