Through a Narrow Door

by Faith Martin

  The little girl shook her head and began to suck on the ear of the stuffed dog. Her mother moved, as if to take it out of her mouth, then thought better of it. Obviously, for once, this childish habit wouldn’t be admonished.

  ‘Do you know who has allotments as well as your Dad? I bet you do, and all their names.’

  The little girl nodded solemnly.

  ‘But you didn’t see anybody there today, when you went to get Billy?’

  ‘No.’ The word was whispered, as if it had been a great secret.

  Hillary nodded as solemnly, the keeper of the secret. ‘And no strangers either? No,’ she echoed, as Celia Davies once more shook her head. ‘How about a car then? Did you notice a car parked on the road, by the allotment gates?’

  The girl thought about it, briefly raising Janine’s hopes, but she quickly lowered her notebook again when the little girl shook her head.

  ‘All right, Celia, that’s all for now. But we might talk again in a few days time, when you’re feeling better. All right?’

  The little girl nodded solemnly, and gave the dog’s ear a particularly ferocious suck. It had one time been a standard poodle, but the nylon material it was made out of had long since lost its shape. It must be years old, and taste terrible.

  Hillary rose, feeling her knee joints wince, and vowed once more to stick to a diet. Then she opened the door and looked wordlessly at Marilyn Davies, all but willing her to follow her out. The other woman sighed, gently pulled the hair back from her daughter’s head and whispered something to her, then followed them out. She left the door open, so that she could hear if her child should cry out.

  ‘Do you have any other children?’ Hillary asked softly as they walked, single-file, down the stingy corridor and into the small lounge. This was papered in woodchip and painted the ubiquitous magnolia. There was a rug, rather than a carpet on the floor, and the cupboard standing in one corner was obviously between-the-wars utility. The two-seater sofa and battered reclining chairs looked like charity-shop purchases. A small telly stood in one corner. There was not a piece of artwork on the walls.

  ‘No, all we have is Billy and Celia.’

  Hillary took one of the chairs, and felt a spring dangerously close to her posterior shift alarmingly beneath her. ‘You own your home, Mrs Davies?’

  ‘Rent. One of those Housing Association things. Used to be the council, took ’em over from the estate, now it’s some place in Banbury. Rent man comes every month.’ Marilyn Davies looked around, as if not recognizing where she was, then slowly took a seat on the sofa. Janine stayed upright by the door, discreetly jotting down shorthand into her notebook.

  ‘I understand from your husband that you were all at home today, for various reasons. Billy wasn’t well?’

  ‘No, he said he felt sick in the night. Didn’t eat much breakfast. I thought it best to keep him off school. He’d have gone back tomorrow though …’ she added firmly, then trailed off, as she realized that her son would never be going back to school again.

  Hillary got the feeling that, like her husband, Marilyn Davies didn’t really believe in this ‘tummy bug’ excuse Billy had given for not going to school. Which prompted an obvious question. Had he skived off school deliberately, or did he just feel lazy? Had he gone to that allotment shed intending to meet someone? Because, having been there and seen it, Hillary was having a hard time believing this could be an opportunistic crime. Some passing pervert, spotting a young lad and taking a chance just didn’t wash. How much traffic did the narrow country lane ever see? And unless a stranger in a car just happened to see Billy Davies walking the short distance down the road from his home to the allotment gate, nobody would ever know the allotments themselves were there.

  ‘Did Billy often have days off school?’ Hillary asked casually and saw Marilyn frown.

  ‘Sometimes. He was bright, like, and liked school well enough, I ’spose. He wasn’t no dunce. But he sometimes liked a day off, yeah,’ she admitted with a sigh.

  Hillary wondered if she was aware that she’d all but admitted that her son was a regular truant, and thought that she probably didn’t. And what did it matter now? The thought hung between the two women like a two-edged sword.

  ‘So, what time was it that Billy went out, do you remember?’ Hillary asked, after a moment of awkward silence.

  ‘Dunno. About half one. He hadn’t wanted any lunch, or so he said. Felt like a walk, maybe over by the folly.’

  ‘Folly?’ It was Janine who echoed the word, obviously puzzled.

  ‘Yeah. Three arches, built bang in the middle of a field. They reckon the big house at Rousham had it build, a couple of hundred years ago. A fashion craze or something.’ Marilyn spoke in a curious, flat monotone. Was that her usual voice, Janine wondered, or had shock deadened it?

  ‘Oh,’ Janine said, and then, aware that she’d interrupted the flow of the interview, shot her boss an apologetic look.

  ‘But when you wanted him to come back for his tea, you sent Celia to the allotments. Is that right?’ Hillary asked curiously.

  ‘Well, not really. Yeah, I did, but I didn’t know if he’d be there or not. He just used to like hanging around there sometimes. And he’d been gone an hour, so I thought he might have had his walk and popped in there. I wanted him to get something down him – a boiled egg, some soup or summat.’

  Once more, Marilyn Davies seemed to realize that she’d never have to cook for her son again, and something in her face shifted. Before she could break down, Hillary took a deep breath and rushed on. ‘So you sent Celia to see if he was there. About what time was this?’

  Marilyn shrugged. ‘Dunno.’

  ‘And after a while, Celia came back? What, five minutes later?’

  ‘Dunno. Could have been. Not that long. I dunno, it didn’t feel that long.’

  Hillary could feel the woman slipping away, and hoped the doctor wouldn’t be long now. ‘What did she say exactly? Can you remember?’

  ‘She said someone had killed Billy. I told her not to be so silly. Her dad was in by then, washing up at the sink. He’d got paint all under his nails. He went haring off.’

  Hillary nodded. Marilyn Davies hadn’t believed her daughter’s wild tale and didn’t want to believe it now. Perhaps she felt that, if she could just keep believing that it was just a little girl’s wild imagination, she could stop her son from actually being dead.

  ‘I need to go and see Billy’s room now, Mrs Davies,’ Hillary said gently, catching Janine’s eye and then nodding towards the kitchen. Janine slipped away and came back a few seconds later with the WPC who took one look at her charge, then went over and sat beside her on the sofa.

  Hillary left them, the WPC hugging the now stiff and unresponsive Marilyn Davies and rocking her on the sofa. Out in the narrow corridor once more, she felt Janine roll her shoulders and realized how tense the situation had become.

  ‘I know, it’s not nice, you feel like a right cow, but it has to be done,’ Hillary murmured. If Janine was going to advance in her career, she’d have to start doing the dirty jobs herself soon.

  The first door she pushed open was obviously the master bedroom. The bed was a double, and a big wardrobe stood beside the single window. Again it was woodchip and paint – this time in a pale mint green. The floorboards were wooden and bare. Again no carpet. ‘I get the idea money is tight around here,’ Hillary mused. ‘Check out their finances and make sure.’ Although she didn’t think money was going to be a motive in this case, every avenue had to be checked.

  ‘Boss,’ Janine grunted, silently congratulating herself on remaining single and unencumbered. And not living in a dump like this. She couldn’t understand why her boss was still living on a narrowboat when she could have lived in a house, but at least the Mollern was better than here. This place gave her the willies.

  ‘This must be his room,’ Hillary said, opening a door, only to find a cramped bathroom instead. There was no bath, only a narrow shower cubicle, growing a lit
tle green mould in the grouting.

  Billy Davies’s room turned out to be directly opposite his sister’s, and was only a little bigger. It held a single bed squashed into one corner, and a tiny wardrobe. No drawers. She opened the wardrobe and saw several neatly folded shirts on a single shelf above the coathangers. The Davies might be strapped for cash, but the boy had had clean clothes to wear.

  On the walls were photographs – lots and lots of photographs. They surprised Hillary, who’d expected football posters, or girl bands. Then she remembered that George Davies had said his son’s hobby had been photography, and decided to take a closer look.

  ‘Let’s have a full inventory,’ she said to Janine, who sighed and rolled her eyes, but began to work. As she moved around, carefully cataloguing and documenting, Hillary gazed around her, trying to get a feel for the life their victim had led here. The woodchip in this room had been painted a pale aqua, the bare floorboards underneath disrupted by a single dark green mat, placed beside the bed. So the boy wouldn’t have cold floorboards to stand on in the winter? There was no sign of a radiator in this room. She hadn’t seen any in the other rooms either. Somehow, this small example of the human desire for comfort made her throat clog and she walked quickly to the window and gazed out. This side, the bungalow overlooked a field of barley; farmland right up to the narrow privet hedge that bordered the property.

  Slowly, Hillary circumnavigated the walls, looking at the photographs. The boy had been good. He’d captured landscapes in both black and white and in colour, and in all seasons. Some shots of farm machinery, obviously abandoned and growing through with weeds. A few urban shots. Shots of what could only be his school, a big, faceless comprehensive by the look of it. And here and there framed pieces of paper. Reading them, she realized they were all prizes for photography – local papers, local galleries. Nothing big, but obviously a source of pride.

  Why had somebody killed a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from an impoverished family, with a love of photography and the desire to skive off school now and then? It didn’t make sense.

  ‘Boss,’ Janine said, nodding to a small item on the bedside table. Hillary looked at it and nodded. It was a small digital camera.

  ‘We got him that for last Christmas,’ George Davies said from the doorway, making them both jump. ‘We saved up all year to get it for him, because it was what he wanted most in the world. We told him if he had that, he couldn’t have anything else. Not another single present. But that’s what he wanted, so that’s what he got. Our Ceel, now, she likes lots of presents to open, so we buy her colouring books and paints, stuffed toys, you know. But Billy was right chuffed with that.’

  Hillary nodded. ‘I don’t see a computer.’

  George Davies barked a harsh laugh. ‘You won’t, either.’

  ‘But don’t you need a computer with a digital camera? You know, to print off photographs,’ she added, indicating the walls.

  ‘Oh, that best pal of his had a computer,’ George Davies said. ‘He’d go over to Middleton Stoney whenever he wanted something printed off. Thick as thieves those two.’ Davies spoke glumly, as if he didn’t approve of the friendship. As if he’d read her thoughts, he added, ‘Lester’s dad owns his own company. Used to show off his computer and all those video games and what not, just to make Billy jealous. I reckoned he looked down his nose at our Billy too, on the sly, but Billy wouldn’t have it. Kids, they think they know everything.’ He shrugged helplessly.

  Hillary glanced once more at the photographs. ‘He had talent,’ she said softly.

  ‘Ah. He reckoned he could make a living at it too. I told him, there ain’t no money in arty-farty stuff. But Billy had it all worked out. He wanted to be one of those daft sods that hang around trying to get pictures of so-called celebrities.’

  ‘A paparazzi?’ Hillary said, somewhat surprised. George Davies shrugged again, then shook his head and turned away. Like his wife before him, he was probably wondering what it all mattered now. Pie-in-the-sky dreams or not, Billy Davies wasn’t going to be taking any more photographs now.

  Hillary and Janine stepped outside, and let out slow, long breaths. The doctor had arrived and, with the WPC, had put Marilyn Davies to bed.

  Outside the back door, Hillary noticed a shed and converted coal-house, and peered inside. Mostly garden tools and the usual paraphernalia: ladders, tins of half-used paint. The odd cardboard box filled with who-knew what. And there, standing against one wall, gleaming dark blue and new-looking in the gloom, the lines of a powerful racing bike. The dead boy’s bike. His pride and joy no doubt. Something else that was now obsolete. Hillary thought back to that allotment shed and that thickset boy with the cheeky blue eyes and thatch of dark hair, and could almost see him racing along the country lanes, legs pumping hard, working up all those fancy gears, revelling in the speed and oblivious, as all children were, to any danger.

  But in this case, Billy Davies had been right to scorn the thought of getting run over by a car. Billy’s bike had been safely tucked away in the shed when its owner had died.

  ‘I don’t understand this,’ Hillary said, as she slowly walked back down the lane towards the allotments. By now SOCO should be well ensconced. ‘Who would want to kill Billy Davies. And why?’

  Janine frowned. ‘Early days yet, Boss,’ she reminded her. She never called Hillary ‘Guv’. But she longed for the day when someone would call her by that sobriquet.

  At the allotment gates, Tommy saw them coming and quickly moved out to greet them. ‘They’re going to be here hours yet, but they reckon they can get the bulk of it done before dark. We’ll have to set up lights though,’ Tommy said. ‘That shed is a tip. All sorts in there and it looks like it hasn’t been cleaned out since before the war. The first one.’

  Hillary grinned, knowing the words had come out of Tommy’s mouth, but hearing behind them a disgruntled techie. ‘Well, you’re in for a long night then aren’t you, DC Lynch,’ Hillary said with a grin, and Tommy groaned good-naturedly.

  ‘Still no sign of Frank?’ she asked, but barely listened for the negative response. ‘OK, Tommy, start interviewing the neighbours and see if anybody heard anything or saw anyone.’ She glanced at her watch and saw that it was just gone 4.30. ‘You’ll probably find most of them still out at work, so hang around and go back after five. Janine, you’d better hang around here. I’m surprised the press hasn’t got here already. When they do show, give them the usual line. I’ll go talk to SOCO, see what they’ve got.’

  As the three peeled off to go their separate ways, a blackbird that was nesting in the hawthorn hedge by the gate shrilled angrily.

  Hillary knew how it felt.

  As Tommy expected, the entire hamlet of Aston Lea seemed to be elsewhere. Apart from the Davies bungalow, there was one two-storey cottage, that looked as if it had been prettified for weekenders, and seven small, squat bungalows. As he knocked on the door of the second-to-last bungalow on the road, he was already anticipating an echoing silence. So when he heard a faint voice calling, ‘I’m coming, hold your horses,’ it had him reaching into his pocket for his ID.

  The door opened to reveal a little old lady no more than four feet six. She had a near electric-blue rinse to a tightly permed mop, and was wearing a flowered apron and battered slippers. The old woman looked up at the big black constable and smiled. ‘Hello, what’s all the excitement then? Nobody ill over at George and Marilyn’s, I hope. I saw the doctor. No good holding that thing up there, I can’t see it. Hang on let me get me glasses on.’ As she reached for a pair of thick-glassed reading spectacles, which were hanging on her flat chest by a chain, she was still rabbiting on. ‘I was pretty sure I saw the doctor’s car. Nothing serious I hope. Oh, police is it? What’s going on? That Billy in trouble?’

  Tommy, trying to keep from grinning, gave up a brief prayer of gratitude for garrulous, curious old ladies, and said softly, ‘I’m Detective Constable Lynch, ma’am. May I come in?’

  Hillary coughed loudly
a few yards from the shed door, and a white-hooded head popped out. She vaguely recognized the boffin inside. His speciality, if she remembered rightly, was clothing. Or was it blood-splatter patterning?

  ‘Any chance of an update?’ she asked.

  ‘Not a cat in hell’s,’ was the cheerful response, and the white-coated figure disappeared again. Hillary blew out her lips. Great.

  ‘Do you want digestives or rich tea?’ The old woman, who’d introduced herself as Millie Verne, poured the boiling water into the teapot and reached for the sugar basin. ‘Only tea bags, I’m afraid. Milk?’

  Tommy, sitting at a tiny Formica table, nodded to both the milk and digestives, and spread his notebook on the table. ‘Is that Miss or Mrs Verne?’

  ‘Mrs, love, though I’ve been a widow now for nigh on twenty years. Reckon I’ll be widowed longer than I was married afore long. Husband drove the buses. Good man he was, but liked his drink.’ Tommy gulped, and was glad he’d never been a passenger on one of Mr Verne’s charabancs. ‘So, what’s going on then? I hope everything’s all right. George and Marilyn are friends, like. Well, Marilyn sometimes gets me some shopping in.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t say just yet, ma’am,’ Tommy temporized. He hadn’t been given the official go-ahead from Hillary yet to release information to the public. ‘Have you been here all day?’ he asked gently, mentally crossing his fingers. The Verne bungalow was well situated to see any comings and going.

  ‘Nowhere else to go, have I, love?’ Millie Verne said without rancour, sitting herself down opposite her unexpected visitor and dunking a rich tea. ‘Course I was here all day. Waddya wanna know?’

  ‘Have you seen any strange cars hanging around lately? And specifically today?’

  ‘No. This place isn’t exactly on the beaten track is it? Most people wanting to get to Steeple Aston, the bigger village down the road a mile, use the other road, the one off the main road; second turning. It’s two-lane see, and closer. So only those of us who live here use this lane. Everybody goes off to work in the morning, around eight, you can hear the cars start up, then they all coming dribbling back around half five time. Bit like watching bees set off on the hunt for honey it is. Only me stays behind. And sometimes that Mrs Cooper. She only works part-time.’