The Rotting Spot (A Bruce and Bennett Mystery)

by Valerie Laws

  ‘Doesn’t matter now. She doesn’t need your help, you don’t need hers. You’ve both moved on and all that.’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe. But you know, I owe Lucy. And I can’t do anything about it now. But if she ever does need me, I’ll be there for her. I will. God I’m pissed.’

  The sea rocked Erica in her dreams in Rina’s spare bed, and a girl stood on the headland in silhouette, against a white sky. Was it Lucy, or Molly? She didn’t know. She tried to reach her, but the girl vanished.

  5

  Lunchtime, Sunday June 15th

  Hex Tower House, Stonehead

  The day her daughter disappeared, Liz Seaton had made the mistake of relaxing. It was Father’s Day, a beautiful June morning, the sea indecently blue, and everything seemed to have come together; all her life nested like a Russian doll; the outer layer, Stonehead village, the beaches stretching away like amber ribbons, the sea rolling splendidly like lit green music, the boats in the harbour bobbing round the headland, where a mist of sea pinks rattled in the salt breeze.

  Her house, Hex Tower. She never left it or returned to it without a lift of the heart; this is mine. An achievement she stroked like a cat in her heart.

  Her family, the inner and most precious layer. Lucy, of course, and little Toby. Her sister Peg, always and still with her. So much she’d done to protect her, so much she’d concealed. Peg had always been – different.

  And Seymour, the lover, the husband, she’d set her heart on all those years ago. And there he was! Hesitating on the threshold of the Stone Arms, catching at the doorframe, almost seeming to reel a little. It must be the sun after the dark cool of the lounge bar. He straightened up and Liz watched him walk towards her.

  She still loved Seymour so much, even after thirty-seven years of marriage. So handsome, even at sixty-one, his thick hair becomingly grey, his fine features and figure still eye- catching. She could see the flash of his smile as he greeted the locals. They all loved him. Who wouldn’t? Now she could see his face clearly, the arched brows, still dark, the greenish hazel eyes, features he’d passed on to their daughter Lucy. He’d seen Liz, and he raised a hand in a salute-like gesture. Her prince. Coming to join her in her tower. Hers, and always would be. She’d always known how to wait, how to win.

  Now she could see Seymour gallantly chatting to a local fisherman’s wife. Liz remembered the precise configuration of the woman’s vagina, and smiled to herself.

  Soon, Lucy and Toby would arrive for Father’s Day lunch. Liz felt herself relaxing for the first time in years. No- one had really relaxed since Molly had run away. Was Molly dead, and if so, where was her body? If she was alive, why did she stay away? Liz couldn’t help but wonder, looking around at the friendly locals, if someone knew something … Peggy had never been right since.

  But now, suspended in this golden day, with everything coming right, and Lucy at last, despite the recent hitch, well on the road to the life planned for her, surely it was safe to leave the past behind.

  ‘It’s only me!’ Peggy’s little-girl voice broke in on Liz’s thoughts. Always ostentatiously using the back door. She stumped fussily into the sitting room, the heat making her face shine, her mouth stretched in its usual smile, incongruous in that harmonious room, with her cheap Sunday market clothes. Liz turned to look at her sister with the old inescapable mix of irritation and affection.

  ‘Where’ve you been, Peg? Surely Sunday service finished ages ago?’

  ‘Putting flowers on George’s grave. He was a father too, you know.’

  She went over to the table and began to tweak at the napkins, spoiling their folds. Liz suppressed her annoyance.

  ‘Are these the napkins I hemmed for you?’ Peg beamed.

  ‘Yes of course, you made such a lovely job of it.’ Peggy’s knitted soft toys were famously awful, but if she was given strict instructions, her skills with needle and thread were formidable, as her skills at butchery had been when George still had his shop. It gave her pleasure to do the few things she was better at than Liz, or so she liked to think. It was no coincidence that these were the same things Liz had no interest in doing herself.

  Peg joined Liz at the window, standing at her shoulder, like a fairground mirror image, shorter and wider.

  ‘Seymour been in the Stone Arms?’ asked Peggy, dreadfully bright.

  ‘Just a quick lunchtime chat with his pals.’

  The sound of Peggy not saying anything was deafening. Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging. That’s what she’d be thinking, Liz reflected. When did Seymour ever rage?

  ‘Uplifting sermon today.’ A hint that Seymour should have been in church instead of in the Arms of alcohol. Anybody’d think he was an alcoholic, Liz thought. As if she, a doctor, wouldn’t know.

  ‘Good.’ Liz was cool, as always. The tension and irritability Peg evoked from her were habitual, they didn’t detract from the overall exultation of the day.

  ‘Oh, look, it’s that Mickey Spence,’ Peg said. ‘Look at the state of him.’ Seymour had greeted a shambling scruffy figure.

  ‘Mickey’s harmless,’ Liz said.

  ‘All those young girls he has up there. And collecting skulls! How you could’ve let our Lucy work for him…’

  ‘Well that was years ago … here is Lucy!’ A powder-blue VW Beetle convertible had swung into their drive. Seymour hurried over to seize in his arms the girl who jumped out, laughing. Both the sisters’ eyes filled with tears, for different reasons. Liz strode smoothly to the front door, Peg scuttling behind, and flung it open. Lucy hugged them all, and then plucked Toby out of his car seat. Three generations together in the sunshine. Liz sang inside with triumphant joy.

  ‘It’s such a shame our mam can’t be here,’ Peg said, hugging Toby to her soft breasts. The four-year-old’s brown legs dangled almost to the ground, his expensive trainers bumping Peg’s shins. ‘It doesn’t seem right somehow, does it Tobykins?’ She gazed dotingly into his eyes. He began to wriggle in her arms, until she had to put him down.

  Liz said evenly, ‘Mother’s better off at Point View.’ It certainly costs enough, she thought. And she doesn’t know who we are most of the time.

  ‘Well darling,’ Seymour’s rich voice rang out. ‘Here’s our princess, our star student!’

  ‘Here you are Dads.’ Lucy handed over an expensive bottle of Scotch and a card. ‘Happy Father’s Day!’

  ‘Ah, my girl knows what her old dad likes!’ Seymour held the bottle to his chest as if it was precious. Look at him, Liz thought indulgently, a present from Lucy means the world to him.

  ‘I’ve got a present for my daddy,’ Toby informed them, reclaiming the attention that was his right, ‘it’s a Ferrari!’

  Amid a laughing chorus of oohs and aahs, Lucy amended it to, ‘A Ferrari beach towel, he means, don’t you Tobes?’

  ‘Your mummy’s going to be a doctor like your grandma,’ Peg told Toby.

  ‘And my daddy,’ he said. ‘Poor Mummy’s had exams.’

  ‘You make it sound like measles,’ laughed Lucy, as they took their places at table and Seymour crossed to open the champagne. ‘We’re going to take Steve his card and present later on, after we’ve been to see Gran in Point View.’

  Her bright face did look strained. Heaven knew, Liz was in a position to fully appreciate the toll medical training took, she’d been through it herself. And there’d been times she’d thought Lucy wouldn’t make it. Erica Bruce, with her dangerous ideas, still casting a shadow over Lucy’s life. But it was going to be alright. The worst was behind them.

  That was Liz Seaton’s mistake.

  There was a picture of Lucy Seaton in her grandmother Lily Travis’ room at Point View care home. But it was another girl’s smiling photograph which made care assistant Julie Reed pause at the door.

  Julie always felt she was walking into a trap, somehow, even though Lily was an old duck. Lily was sitting in an armchair in the bright, spacious room, painted primrose yellow.

  Outside, on a bi
rd table festooned with monkey nuts, a blue tit worked itself silly to extract a tiny shred of kernel. Julie knew just how it felt.

  ‘Good morning, Lily! Lovely day!’

  Lily’s face turned to her, and a genuine smile displaying false teeth lit up her face.

  ‘Have you come to take me home?’

  Julie sighed. Same question every day. But she was a sweetie. Humour them, humour them.

  ‘Maybe a bit later on, Lily!’

  Julie lifted the old woman to her feet. Lily’s dementia was smoothing out the wrinkles in her face even as it tangled her brain. She looked young for her eighty-three years, and happy.

  ‘Have you come to take me home, Lizzie?’ The endless round of repetition went on.

  ‘I’m not Lizzie, Lizzie’s your daughter, I’m Julie. Remember?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course.’ Lily looked up at her still smiling. Thank god she was as small and dry-boned as a bird. Julie’s back gave her merry hell sometimes, heaving the old souls about, and her over forty now. ‘Life begins!’ As if, as her kids would say. It didn’t help that she was carrying too much weight, but she longed for pastry, and cream, and the sweet consolation of cake. What else did she have now, with her two boys flown the nest, and as for Stacey …

  The familiar litany ran through her head, as repetitive as dementia, as she helped Lily to the toilet.

  ‘Where’s Frank? I haven’t made his sandwiches, oh, I must…’ Lily’s face crumpled as anxiety for her long-dead husband moved into her vacant brain.

  ‘Now they’ll be bringing your lunch soon, Lily! And I expect Lucy and little Toby will visit you after lunch! And I’m due to finish me shift and all, I’ve got my family to see to!’

  Father’s Day at Julie’s house; a text and an email from the boys, and Stacey’d gone so far as to pick up a bottle of beer for Paul while buying her fags. As for her new grandchild, Noosh, god alone knew who she should be calling ‘dad’.

  This was the life Julie had taken from Molly, her best friend at school, who should now be forty-one like her. The life, the children Molly should have had with Paul. If Molly hadn’t been removed from the picture. Had it been worth it?

  Julie sighed. She felt giddy, hollow inside. Low blood sugar, she told herself. Julie snatched up one of the Belgian truffles Liz had brought her mother and crammed it in her mouth. It’s not like it was stealing really. The old dear never bothered with them. The sweetly cloying paste of melting chocolate and hazelnut truffle filled her mouth, trickling down her throat in a rush of pleasure and relief.

  She kept her eyes averted from the picture of Molly on the wall, smiling happily in 1977, unaware of what the next year would bring.

  6

  Late afternoon, Sunday 15th June

  Stonehead

  Lucy Seaton knew the symptoms of shock, as a medical student just at the end of her five-year degree. Up to now, however, she had had no idea of how it felt. Her hands were slick with sweat, white at the knuckles. Her breath came fast, heart racing, as her body tried to compensate for the sudden lowering of blood pressure. Her hands and feet felt numb, cold and heavy, her head swam. Waves of nausea washed over her. Her mind speeded up as her brain went into self-defence mode, so that everything seemed to slow down. She had time to think, in a few seconds, of the life she was losing.

  Molly’s disappearance the year before her birth was a pleasantly gothic tale she’d told herself and others in adolescence. Deep down, she’d never thought it would touch her life.

  Father’s Day. Only this morning, a spray of white lilac waving in the Beetle’s cute little vase, she’d driven home, Toby dozing in his car seat, his lashes sweeping the caramel curve of his cheek. She’d given her father whisky; sat down to a family Sunday lunch. The beloved daughter. ‘You have your father’s eyes,’ people had always told her. It had made her think of Saint Lucy, always pictured holding two eyes on a plate.

  Her eyes were open now, when it was too late. She’d taken Toby to his dad’s, and driven straight back to Stonehead to confront treachery and evil head-on. Now she knew that someone you trusted absolutely could change in a second into something monstrous, ugly …

  Later that evening, Hex Tower House

  ‘Lucy’s car’s still here!’

  Liz paused in the act of plugging in the kettle for tea as

  Peg walked into the kitchen and made the announcement.

  ‘It can’t be,’ she said calmly. ‘She left after lunch.’

  ‘It is here, I tell you! She must have come back, haven’t you seen her? Lucy! Lucy!’ Peg began calling flutily.

  ‘No, but I’ve been dozing upstairs, I’m not used to a heavy lunch. I’ve just got up to make a cup of tea.’ Liz opened the door. Lucy’s beetle was there, not in the drive but in the back lane, badly parked on a slant. ‘Odd.’

  ‘Lucy, Lucy! Toby, are you hiding?’ Peg went on calling. No answer. They searched the house. Seymour was asleep in the armchair in his study, Lucy’s present open, beside a sticky tumbler. Peggy opened her mouth to rouse him but Liz stopped her. ‘Leave him to sleep,’ she mouthed as she escorted her sister out. No point worrying Seymour. Not yet.

  ‘Maybe she’s with someone in the village. Mickey Spence, maybe.’ Liz called Lucy’s mobile number, as they walked back outside to see if they could spot her. A reedy piping sounded near them, stopping as Lucy’s voicemail message started in her mother’s ear.

  ‘She’s left her phone in the car,’ said Peg, running over to retrieve it. ‘And her bag, look! Someone could steal it!’ Lucy’s Louis Vuitton handbag lay on the passenger seat. The keys dangled in the ignition.

  ‘Didn’t you see anything?’ Liz asked Peg rather sharply. ‘You were out here.’

  ‘I had a little stroll after evensong, down by the burn.’ Peg was defensive. ‘I thought Lucy must be inside the house. And where’s Toby?’

  Here in the back lane, surrounded by high walls and the odd dustbin, it was deserted. Liz could hear her blood beating in her veins.

  ‘She was going to visit Mother, and then to Steve’s.’ Liz rang Point View. After a brief exchange, she ended the call.

  ‘Yes, she did visit this afternoon, must have been just after leaving here. Just stayed about half an hour or so. She signed in and out.’ She rang Steve.

  ‘Steve, did Lucy … oh she did. It’s just that … is that Toby I can hear?’ The shrill strains of ‘Bob the Builder’ in the background. ‘She left Toby with you? Did she say why? Oh. Oh, well it’s just her car is here but we can’t find her. At least we know Toby’s safe … oh no, I’m sure Lucy is too. It’s just she left her phone, bag and keys in the car. I’m sure she’ll turn up. Did she mention anybody she might be thinking of visiting? Ricci Bruce? But she hasn’t seen her for years. Oh, Erica Bruce, she calls herself a homeopath now I believe. Suppose we could get her work number from yellow pages, but that won’t be much help on a Sunday evening. All right, Steve, and don’t worry.’

  ‘It’s happened again! She’s gone, just like Molly!’ Peg clutched her sister’s arm.

  Liz felt her heart contract, but she strove to show nothing.

  ‘Stop that Peg! Molly ran away, and she was only sixteen!’ And it was your doing, she thought. ‘Lucy’s twenty-four, a mother … she’s quite able to take care of herself.’

  Peg was twisting a lump of her cardigan hem round and round in her plump fingers. ‘God is not mocked, Lizzie. And neither am I.’

  ‘You’re hysterical,’ said Liz coldly.

  But Peg’s voice had become quieter as her assertions grew wilder.

  ‘Lucy had Toby out of wedlock, I know she did it in self-sacrifice, but you told me they’d get married after finals, and this afternoon Lucy said they’d never intended getting married!’

  ‘Oh, Peggy, when did she say that?’

  ‘In the kitchen, while we were getting the puddings. I asked her when, and she laughed – laughed mark you – and said never! And now she’s gone!’

  Despite herself, L
iz felt a cold hand reach into her chest as she looked at her sister’s transformed face. Peg could convince herself of anything, if she could believe it was God’s will.

  ‘This is stupid!’ Liz went back over to the kettle. ‘We’ll have some tea, and she’ll walk in, and all this fuss will have been about nothing.’ She glanced out of the window, to where the sea still rolled, licking hungrily at the steep cliff above which Mickey Spence’s hostel stood on Stony Point, and the decomposing skulls in his rotting spot waited for nature to clean them.

  ‘I’ll phone round the village.’

  While Liz was phoning Peg sat at the kitchen table knitting, her eyes on her sister’s face. Liz was still beautiful at sixty, her neatly swept-back hair kept expensively pale blonde, her cool light eyes, her austere features making her look like the respected consultant surgeon she was, though now she wore Armani jeans and a simple white shirt.

  ‘You won’t find Lucy by doing that,’ Peg thought. ‘I know you won’t. Sometimes Lizzie, I know more than you do.’ Her hands worked tirelessly. The devil makes work for idle hands.

  ‘Poor Lucy. Poor Molly.’ She repeated the words to herself like a mantra, knitting them into the toy she was making.

  ‘Well, no joy.’

  Liz began methodically to empty Lucy’s bag. She had to do something, with Peg’s eyes on her and Seymour soon to revive. Lucy’s keys, on a ring with a small photo of Toby in a Perspex tab. Purse. Condoms. Tissues. Lipstick. Mascara. Mirror. Biros. Old receipts. Liz made sure the condoms were out of Peg’s sight. She seemed unaware, but you could never be sure what she’d picked up.

  In the purse, cash in notes, a ten and a twenty. A few coins. Debit and credit cards, as well as some other random cards, the university library, the AA and so on. A folded piece of paper. It looked old, the folds were sharp, the paper dry and flat and brittle. Liz opened it up with forensic care. It was a poem, scrawled in faded green Biro on what looked like a torn-out page of a school exercise book.