Fell Purpose dibs-12

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Mrs Wilding had automatically sized Atherton up and begun to react to him as a man, before her eyes leapt past him to Connolly’s uniform, and her inviting smile spontaneously aborted for a look of alarm.

  ‘Oh my God, it’s Zellah,’ she said. ‘What’s happened? Is it an accident? Is she all right? It’s a car accident, isn’t it? They went out in the car after all! Oh my God, what will her father say? He didn’t want her to go anyway, not to sleep over, but you can’t keep them locked up at their age, can you? Sophy’s only just got her licence, and Daddy stipulated they mustn’t go out in the car without a grown-up. He said Sophy was too young, but her father gave her a car as soon as she passed the test, and you can’t argue with how other people bring up their children. But Zellah promised she wouldn’t let Sophy drive her.’ She was wringing her hands now. Strange how people really did that, Atherton thought. ‘How bad is it? Where is she? Oh, how will I ever tell her father? He dotes on her!’

  Atherton managed at last to interrupt the flow. ‘Mrs Wilding, we’re from Shepherd’s Bush police station. I’m DS Atherton and this is PC Connolly. May we come in?’

  A new apprehension came to her. ‘Detectives?’ She stared from one face to the other. ‘Not drugs,’ she almost whispered. ‘Not our Zellah. Say it’s not drugs. This’ll kill him.’

  But she let them in. There was a tiny hallway with stairs going straight up in front of them, a sitting room to the right, and the kitchen straight ahead, with a glimpse of the sunlit garden through its window. There was a smell of washing powder in the air, and the chugging of a washing-machine out of sight in the kitchen. Mrs Wilding walked before them in a rigid, apprehensive way into the sitting room. It was neatly but cheaply furnished, everything clean and polished, with a small upright piano occupying one chimney alcove, knick-knacks and ornaments along the mantelpiece and on shelves in the other alcove, and framed photographs on the walls instead of pictures. Central on the left-hand wall was the largest of them, head and shoulders of a remarkably pretty girl with shoulder-length, corn-blonde hair, smiling straight at the camera. The shirt collar and striped tie visible in the vee of the navy sweater said that this was an enlargement of a school photo. Atherton was impressed. Who looks good in their school photo? Only a real beauty.

  ‘Mrs Wilding, is that Zellah?’ he asked gently.

  She was standing in the middle of the room, staring at them blankly. New and different fears were coming and going in her face. Her lips moved but she seemed for the moment to be out of speech. She nodded.

  ‘Is your husband at home?’ Atherton asked.

  ‘He’s out the back, in his shed,’ she said. Her words were oddly jerky, as if she didn’t have much control over them. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Perhaps we ought to get him in,’ Atherton said.

  ‘No. Tell me,’ she said. ‘Tell me first. He won’t be able to . . . You don’t understand. Tell me first. What’s happened?’

  Atherton took out the diamond pendant in its plastic bag. He had brought it in case extra identification were needed, but now it seemed a gentler way than words to tell her. He extended his hand and opened his palm.

  She looked at it, then looked up, appalled. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it’s not possible.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said gently. She was probably still thinking it was a car accident, but maybe it was better to do this in stages. Dead was the first, but probably not the hardest step, with murder still to come.

  He saw her remnant of beauty drain from her face as she read the end of everything in his. She shook her head again, and sat down abruptly, without even looking behind her to see where the chair was. But she must know this small house so well that all the distances were programmed into her body.

  ‘She’s seventeen next week,’ she said, as if that would get her let off. A plea of mitigation. ‘Daddy’s going to give her driving lessons. He said better he taught her himself than someone else and not do it right.’

  ‘Mrs Wilding, I really think we ought to get your husband in.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ she said blankly, and then looked bewildered as she found she couldn’t get up.

  So Atherton went.

  The question of how a devoted gardener coped with a contiguous wilderness of weeds was answered as he stepped out. The chain-link fencing between this garden and the wild strip had been taken down, and the wilderness tamed. Right at the far end, the blue-painted eight-foot builder’s hoarding that cut off the pavement and road beyond was disguised by the original hedge and trees of the demolished house, now grown high and thick. They overtopped the hoarding, and from the road must have given the impression that nothing had changed in here. But to either side, new-looking six-foot-six larch-lap shut off the neighbours, and inside these barriers the extra bit had been incorporated into number two’s original garden. It was, of course, slightly illegal, but Atherton thought Slider at least wouldn’t have blamed them. Who was hurt by it? The land had been left to rot through twenty years of political dither and budget shenanigans, and as a country boy Slider hated the waste of land. Better, he would think, that the Wildings – or Mr Wilding, probably, because Mrs Wilding with her manicured hands did not look like a gardener – made use of it in neat vegetable beds and grew cabbages and runners and carrots and – what was that? It looked like coriander. Coriander?

  In the middle of the far end, up against the riotous hedge – it had been privet, but buddleia and elder had seeded themselves into it and waved gaily out of the top – there was a large, stout garden shed, with the door slightly ajar. Not wishing to frighten the occupant by suddenly appearing in the doorway, Atherton called out, ‘Mr Wilding,’ as he approached, and they reached the door simultaneously from opposite directions.

  ‘Who are you?’ the man demanded, with justifiable surprise and faint irritation.

  He was a little taller than Atherton, and a lot bigger, bulky about the shoulders, thick in the middle in the manner of an athlete – a rugby player perhaps – gone to seed. He was evidently quite a bit older than his wife, though it was hard to tell by how much. He was well preserved and might have been anything from mid-fifties to mid-sixties. His face was large-featured and had been handsome – they must have been a golden couple, these Wildings – and his straight grey hair was bushily thick and strong, giving the impression of irrepressible growth that would have to be pruned back hard every few weeks. He was wearing grey slacks and a dark-blue check short-sleeved shirt, and he was holding a large screwdriver in one hand. The hands were grey with working dirt, thick-fingered and scarred with cuts and nicks of various ages, the hands of a hands-on workman. Atherton guessed carpenter: his bifocal glasses bore a surface sheen of fine dust; there was a delicate curl, like a feather, of a wood shaving clinging to his trousers, and the unmistakable tang of sawdust was in the air.

  ‘I’m sorry if I startled you,’ Atherton said, and introduced himself.

  Over the man’s shoulder, he caught a glimpse of the shed’s interior, well fitted-out as a workshop. There was a good, high bench with cramps and a vice, a heavy plane lying on its surface, and a drill, plugged in to a long strip of sockets behind; shelves loaded with jars and boxes of screws, nails, Rawlplugs, hooks, hinges and so on; a pegboard on the wall with tools neatly hanging. The work in progress was on the bench – a wooden railway engine, about the size of a child’s pedal car, partly constructed and lacking wheels yet.

  Wilding intercepted the glance. ‘I make toys for the Lions Club,’ he said shortly, as if to get that out of the way. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news. Would you come inside? It would be better to tell you and your wife together.’

  He looked angry. ‘Is it Zellah? If there’s trouble, it will be Sophy and those other girls. Zellah would never do anything wrong. She’s a top student, all A grades; she plays the piano and flute, she’s going to university. She’s a good girl. If they’ve done something it’s those others who thought it up. I said she was too young
to be staying over, but her mother insisted. Nobody brings their children up properly any more. They let them run wild. What have they got her into?’

  He folded his arms and stood immovably in the doorway of his shed, and obviously was not going to stir until Atherton told him. Perhaps, after all, it was better to tell him first, away from his wife – let him take it to her.

  ‘I’m afraid I have to ask you to brace yourself for a shock,’ he said. ‘Something very bad indeed has happened.’

  Wilding’s eyes widened and Atherton saw his nostrils flare. It was an animal’s reaction to threat; but no parent could ever be prepared for this.

  He hated this bit. But there was no way to say it but to say it. ‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you this. Zellah is dead.’

  The big, handsome face seemed to shrink together. The eyes were appalled. ‘No,’ he said faintly. ‘No she’s not. She’s not. She’s not.’

  But he knew it. The truth was in those staring, naked eyes.

  Connolly had made tea, and Mrs Wilding sipped it, more out of automatic social response, Atherton guessed, than because she wanted it. Mr Wilding didn’t seem to know his was there. He stared silently into an abyss before him. Mrs Wilding did the talking.

  ‘Sophy Cooper-Hutchinson.’ She supplied the name of the girl Zellah had been visiting, and even at such a moment there was a hint of pride in it. ‘They have a big house in Netheravon Lane – do you know it?’

  Atherton nodded. It was not that far, in fact, from where Slider lived in Turnham Green. It was a small area of very large, mainly Georgian houses close to the river on the border of Hammersmith and Chiswick. It was where rich Londoners in the eighteenth century had gone to get out of town in the summer, the forerunner of the seaside holiday. If the Cooper-Hutchinsons had a big house there – as opposed to a flat in part of a big house – they must be well off.

  ‘Sophy and Zellah are friends at school. Sophy’s a few months older than her, and she’s got an older sister, Abigail, who’s eighteen – she’s going to Oxford next month, but she’s still at home now – so although the parents are away for the week, we thought it would be all right for them to be in the house on their own. Sophy’s quite a sensible girl really, and they weren’t going to have a party or anything – Daddy and I made it quite clear there wasn’t to be anything like that. They just wanted to be together the way girls do, and you can’t wrap them up in cotton wool, can you? I mean, Zellah’s nearly seventeen, you have to start treating them like grown-ups some time, and it would have made it very awkward for her with her friends if we’d said she couldn’t go when she’d been invited specially. I want her to have friends, the right sort of friends. It’s bad enough us living here—’

  Wilding lifted his head at that moment and Mrs Wilding met his look and stopped abruptly, obedient, but with a touch of defiance in her expression. She went on, ‘The Cooper-Hutchinsons are the kind of people I want Zellah to mix with, not people from round here. I want her to get on, and I wasn’t going to embarrass her in front of them and have them laugh at her behind her back because her parents were so out of touch they wouldn’t let her come and stay for a simple . . . innocent . . . sleepover . . .’

  Shaky breaths that were trying to be sobs broke up the end of the sentence. Connolly gave her another tissue, and she blew her nose, and went on unevenly while dabbing at her eyes.

  ‘They were just going to spend the evening together and cook their own dinner – well, it’s good for girls to do that, learn how to be self-reliant, isn’t it?’ She was going over again, Atherton could tell, the justifications she had used to her husband before the fact. ‘We said she could have a glass of wine with it but no spirits. And I expect they’d watch one of their girly films – Bridget Jones or something like that – and talk and giggle half the night the way girls do. And then on the Bank Holiday Monday they’d planned to meet up with a couple of other girls and go to the Southbank Summer Festival – you know, by the river, next to the Festival Hall. It’s music and dancing and jugglers and mimes and things, and food stalls and crafts. People take their children there, so it’s quite safe. Not like the Notting Hill Carnival. We wouldn’t have them going anywhere near that: that was made very clear indeed. But the Southbank thing is just good, clean fun. They wanted to go on the London Eye but it turned out they couldn’t get tickets. You had to book in advance and it was all booked up. I suppose it would be, on a Bank Holiday.’

  She looked at Atherton with a bewildered air, as if something wasn’t adding up. Relating the arrangements and the arguments in favour of them had kept her for a moment from realising that Zellah – her Zellah, her daughter – had been dead by Monday morning and in no condition to go to the Southbank or Notting Hill. ‘I suppose they didn’t go in the end,’ she said, still not really getting to grips with it. ‘The other thing they wanted to do was go out in the country for a picnic, but Daddy said he didn’t want Sophy driving a bunch of giggling girls without a grown-up in the car. Zellah knew she wasn’t to do that. If Sophy and the others insisted, she was to come home. They were going to go on the tube to the Southbank.’ Her confusion visibly grew. ‘But it wasn’t a car accident, was it? I was forgetting. They couldn’t have gone up to London, then. But what was Zellah doing on Wormwood Scrubs? And why didn’t Sophy ring us? Zellah was staying two nights, Sunday and Monday, and coming home this afternoon. I half thought she might ring up and ask to stay another night. I wouldn’t have minded, though Daddy wasn’t keen. But if she wasn’t with Sophy, where was she?’

  ‘These are things we have to find out,’ Atherton said.

  ‘But why didn’t Sophy ring us?’ Mrs Wilding persisted.

  Wilding spoke up for the first time, his voice harsh with the anger that controlled grief. ‘There’ve been some underhand dealings, that’s why. They were never going to the Southbank. I’ll bet they went to Notting Hill, and got in with some bad hats, and Zellah’s paid the price. We’ve been lied to, made fools of by the Cooper-Hutchinson girl and her cronies. I knew no good would come of this!’ His voice began to rise, and he looked at his wife with near hatred. ‘But you – you took her side, like you always do. You insisted, you with your “Zellah has to make the right sort of friends!” Yes, the sort of friends who lie to their parents, conspire behind your back. I said she was too young! She wasn’t like them – sly and worldly and selfish, like that Sophy creature, and those others that hang around with her. All they wanted to do was to corrupt her – and you connived at it! I blame you for this! If I’d had my way she wouldn’t have gone out at all. She’d still be alive!’

  Mrs Wilding had whitened to her lips, but she fought back. ‘You wanted to treat her like a child!’

  ‘She was a child!’

  ‘She’s seventeen.’

  ‘She was too young.’

  Mrs Wilding blazed, ‘I was seventeen when you—’

  Wilding was out of his seat. ‘Don’t you dare bring that up! At a time like this!’

  ‘You didn’t think I was too young!’ Mrs Wilding said viciously, in the manner of one wanting to inflict the maximum hurt. ‘Zellah’s the same age!’

  And in the same manner, he hissed, ‘Was! Was! Was!’

  It was too much for everyone in the room. A hideous silence fell, the Wildings staring at each other with terrified pain and realization, Wilding on his feet, trembling, his wife gripping the arms of her chair so hard her knuckles were white.

  Time for a little time out, Atherton thought. There was history here, which might or might not prove helpful to understanding the situation. Think like me, Slider had said; and Slider would have got to the bottom of it. He caught Connolly’s eye and conveyed his wishes by eyebrow and an infinitesimal flick of the head, and said, ‘Mrs Wilding, I wonder if PC Connolly could see Zellah’s room. And we shall need a clear recent photograph, if you have one.’

  Mrs Wilding tore her eyes from her husband’s like someone peeling off a plaster, and not without pain, either. She stood up, the meat o
f her face quivering with suppressed rage. ‘You want to talk to him on his own,’ she said. ‘Well, you’re welcome to him! Much good may it do you.’A last little spurt of viciousness. ‘Much good he ever did me.’

  A response almost escaped Wilding’s lips, but he held it back, and she walked from the room with unexpected dignity, Connolly following.

  In the silence that followed, Wilding remained standing where he was, as if he had forgotten how to sit down. Atherton, trying hard to imagine what he must be suffering, thought he would probably have welcomed death at that moment, so that he would never have to move on from that moment and face what was coming in the future, for the rest of his life.

  ‘Please sit down,’ Atherton said eventually, half expecting an explosion. A cornered animal will often attack. But Wilding did sit, blindly, staring at nothing again. Slowly he unfurled his clenched fists and rested them on the chair arms with a curiously deliberate gesture, as though determined to remember where he had left them, at least. Atherton sat too, giving him a moment to compose himself.

  But Wilding spoke first. The effort of control was audible in the strain in his voice, but it was a very fair attempt at normality. ‘I apologise for that. My wife is an emotional woman, and . . .’ He didn’t seem to know how to end the sentence.

  ‘No apology necessary,’ Atherton said. ‘This is a terrible time for both of you.’