The Rotting Spot (A Bruce and Bennett Mystery)

by Valerie Laws

  ‘You mean they may have killed her?’ Erica was startled.

  ‘No, I just meant Paul might not have been keen to face her family. Might have lost his temper when she refused to have an abortion. Killed her on impulse.’

  ‘Come on Hassan, you’re starting to take this way too seriously!’ Will blew on his tea then put it down.

  ‘I think it’s worth looking at Guv, as a theory. And of course, there’s Spence. Molly stayed there. And we know what he got up to … from young – the alleged victim of his abuse.’

  ‘Stacey Reed,’ Erica said flatly.

  Will ignored her contribution. ‘Yes, you’re right, Hassan! If Mickey took advantage of Molly, he wouldn’t want anyone to know.’

  ‘I didn’t tell you this to give you more ammunition to shoot at Mickey! Remember Molly boasted of a great new bloke, and fond as I was of Mickey, you couldn’t call him fit by any means.’ Erica thought of Mickey’s pale eyes, bald head, shambling gait. Not the stuff of young girls’ fantasies. She kept to herself her doubts about Mickey; she hadn’t mentioned the ‘desperation’ in Molly’s eyes. It was only an impression of Julie’s, she told herself.

  ‘He might have been fitter a quarter of a century ago,’ Will said, with the air of delivering a coup de grace.

  ‘It could have been some other lad from school, a teacher even, maybe unrelated to her murder. It’s going to be hard to use this.’ Hassan filled the silence between the other two. Erica was floored by Will’s point. She only thought of Mickey as she’d known him in the mid-Nineties onward. Will and Hassan were right, it could have been anyone, some village lad she’d met at the Stone Arms maybe … something niggled at the back of Erica’s mind, something someone had said at the pub some time … what was it …

  ‘Anyway, thanks for the ‘information’.’ The quotes were audible. ‘If you find out anything else, do let us know.’ Will rose to his feet. Erica stood too, looking up at Will, her new knowledge about Lucy’s recent activities burning her tongue worse than scalding tea. The urge to open her mouth and let it all out was so powerful, she didn’t trust herself to speak.

  ‘Hm.’ Will got into the car. ‘In a right radge, wasn’t she? Couldn’t speak! Quite an improvement, if you ask me.’

  ‘Don’t you think we might check it out though Guv? To be on the safe side.’ Hassan started the engine and pulled out of the small parking bay.

  ‘Oh, I’m doing more than just check it out Hassan. I’m uneasy about that whole Spence scenario, as you know. We’ve got two bodies, Molly’s and Spence’s, and a lot of loose ends to tie up. No, I think a DNA test would be well worth doing.’

  ‘Guv? On who?’

  ‘Lucy, of course. She’s the one with confusions about her parentage.’

  ‘Great! I was hoping – but you said the other day, when we’d been to the cottage…’

  ‘That was in front of Erica. In fact, I think I’m within my rights to get Lucy’s DNA tested. She’s missing, her supposed surrogate mum’s daughter’s been found dead, and we’ve got the blood sample taken from her car seat. All we need is some DNA from her parents … all three of them!’

  ‘Erica’d be pleased to know you’re taking it further.’

  ‘I don’t care if Erica is pleased or not. She’s a pain in the arse. The amateur sleuth died with Miss Marple, and the sooner she gets that into her head the better. As to the pregnancy story, I think we might check that out too. I want a word with Peg Westfield when she’s calmed down a bit and her watchdog sister’s not hovering over us or sticking her with dope.’

  Erica dumped the mugs in the sink, chipping one in the process. What can I do now? I can’t get near Peg to ask her side of the story. I can’t check confidential records, like Will could … Is there anyone in the village who’d remember when Molly was born … forty-odd years ago … anything odd about it …

  ‘Violet!’ she yelled. Surely Lily would have confided in her best mate when her grandchildren were expected? Erica was already through the door.

  26

  The Seatons’ Cottage, Northumberland

  Liz felt sick, hollow inside. While Seymour doped himself with whisky, and Peg dozed under sedation, she struggled to come to terms with the news she’d heard and the story she’d been forced to tell. She spent the next day tramping the hills, moving mechanically, while her mind circled like a leashed hawk. The shock of learning her mother’s secret history was profound. She and Peg, half-sisters! All the years Lily had carried the secret of her first child’s father! And she, Liz, hadn’t known about it! And now, the irony of this family secret being the means of Lucy discovering the other one, was not lost on Liz. Fear, the fear that came with losing control of events, flashed through her, but she fought it down. Instead, as she moved mechanically through the lush landscape, she thought of the past, and why she’d been driven to such desperate measures. To have a baby. To keep Seymour. Measures that had meant years of keeping secrets, and a strengthened bond with Peg. She’d done so much for Peg, making it up to her.

  Back then, Peg had looked for nothing more than a typical post-war ‘get back to the kitchen so the men can have their jobs back’ life. Liz was the one hungry for a career, status, recognition in the world. But ironically it was she who was the more motherly one. Peg was kind to children, in a sentimental way, though she was a little afraid of them once they got to the cheeky stage. But Liz, as lots of girls did in those days, used to take babies out for their grateful housework-busy mothers. Tying on their bonnets or pulling off and on their home-knitted mitts gave her a sleepy satisfied feeling. The scent of their heads, the curve of their little cheeks, filled her with protective love. She took them for walks and showed them the flowers, trees, birds, and insects all around them, which no-one in their families bothered to do. She taught them the proper names, and told them scientific facts about their lives. She answered children’s questions as if they mattered. She burned to make a difference. She patched up cut knees, brought down lumps on brows with witch hazel so the grown-ups said it was hard to tell if she’d be a teacher or a nurse.

  The whole family adored sweet baby Molly, who seemed to have more of Liz’s brains and beauty and independence of spirit; Peg’s attempt to instil Christian values was doomed, all that religion rammed down the girls’ throat and Ladybird books about the infant Samuel … Liz did her best to show Molly a wider world without treading on Peg’s toes. Everyone expected Peg to have more children. There were unwritten rules about how many children you should have. It was universally considered ‘selfish’ to have no children at all then. Liz never understood that, especially as the same people usually said ‘you’ll have no-one to look after you in your old age,’ thus giving the most selfish possible reason for bringing another life into the world.

  Unusually for those days, as a doctor, Liz was kind and gentle to unwed mothers. She fumed when grim-faced families had the babies wrenched from the young mother’s arms and disposed of to adoption agencies. She did your best to help these girls keep their babies. After all, many respectably married women had babies because they were expected to, or didn’t want to be called selfish; she could tell they didn’t appreciate them. Took them home to lie in prams for hours.

  On the other hand, having a large family was called ‘feckless.’ Having one child was similarly frowned on, as it was cruel, unnatural and an only child would be lonely and spoiled. But Peg stopped at one, and was universally applauded, because she did it in a sacrificial spirit, for the sake of her sick husband, so she’d be able to care for him and keep things going in the shop when he took a ‘funny turn’. As Molly grew up, Peg began to knit obsessively, soft toys for children’s charities, as if to make up for the babies she’d never had.

  For Liz and Seymour, it was all about waiting for the right time, the right babies. Even before they were married, Liz made sure she passed on all to him all she’d learned about blood group testing and how a man with a future would have to pay for by-blows, so he’d be careful i
f he strayed with other girls. Which he did, occasionally. Liz was never jealous. The girls had nothing like what she had. It was just they threw themselves at him when he was drunk. He was often drunk, just youthful high spirits, flushed and golden and wild, how she adored him, but she made sure he saw her on another’s arm when his eyes started roving.

  Once they were together, Seymour made money: popular, good at the socialising, networking, drinking with clients. He’d drawn up wonderful plans for extending Hex Tower house for when the children came, golden children as they were sure to be with such parents.

  Years went by, their careers were established, and Molly, who was three when the Seatons married, was about eight, and Liz’s urge to have a baby was becoming too strong to resist. Instead of a warm empathy, when her gloved hands hoisted a squirming slimy bundle from its muscular prison, she felt a desperate need to feel her own baby in her arms. Seymour, at first, as is the way with men, was not particularly interested in having children. He saw them as a nuisance, an interruption, expensive, damaging to their sex life, taking up time and attention, and was pleased and relieved that they could enjoy foreign holidays and meals out and the good life without them. But he eventually became broody. His friend’s wives were producing sons and daughters and asking when they’d hear the patter of tiny feet from him and Liz? It was barely believed that Liz intended to go on working when a baby came, but she had other ideas, as usual. She could afford a nanny. Peg and Lily were eager to help. Peg and George needed money as the business dwindled, Liz gave it with no strings attached, but that gave Peg a heavy burden of gratitude, and she was eager to discharge it by doing something she could do for her, such as baby-minding. Liz had been beautiful, clever, successful, socially useful: all the village disapproval fuelled by Fifties propaganda about the vital importance of women having babies compared to sterile selfish work outside the home, she’d stopped at source by the very nature of her high-powered but intimately maternal choice of career. Now, the Seatons were also rich beyond the wildest dreams of Stonehead. How could poor old Peg avoid the deep cancer of envy, further exacerbated by guilt at harbouring such sinful feelings that questioned God’s will. God, for whom Liz cared not a bit, showered gifts on her, which he withheld from Peg, no doubt to test her faith, but it was harsh for her. All Peg could do was hope to repay Liz and keep re-reading the Book of Job.

  One day it was suddenly The Day. Liz delivered a breech baby who nearly died. The dad brought their other child to see the new baby. Liz looked at the little girl’s dimpled hand as her new baby brother curled his mottled fingers round it and she knew. The time had come. She went home and flushed her pills down the loo, and dragged Seymour to bed as soon as he came home, feeling a deeper, wilder pleasure than ever before, and a sense of sacred purpose. She didn’t tell him though. Better to wait til she could give him the good news. As his orgasm faded, the expected flood of wetness failed to appear. It had all gone deep into her and stayed there, held by some inner will of her body – it was a good half hour before the hot liquid began to run out. Life had kindled inside her, she knew it. She waited for the inevitable signs.

  The red-brown stain on her expensive underwear, regular to the day, she stared at in disbelief. A period. A full stop.

  Time went on. Seymour dropped hints, then began to ask, about baby’s room, the extension. Still nothing happened, month after month. Liz couldn’t understand it. It just wasn’t possible. If anyone deserved a baby, it was her. More than anybody. Anyone could have a baby, even Peg had managed to bear Molly, a perfect child. It was a while before Liz could bring herself to apply her skill to her own strangely unco-operative body. It seemed like an admission of failure, an alien state to one who’d never failed at anything she’d undertaken. The results stunned her. All those years of careful contraception had been wasted. There’d been nothing to fear. Still she said nothing, to Seymour or her colleagues. When Seymour suggested it was time to have a baby, she invented excuses for a while; her career was on the line, changes, hospital politics … she lost control, clinging to Seymour, suddenly needy and desperate for reassurance, but unable to tell him why. He responded by struggling against these new tighter bonds. He began to display signs of straying, going out alone, inventing conferences, coming home flushed with wine and triumph. Liz was losing him, and losing the life she‘d worked for. Molly was nearly grown up; the Seatons still had no baby. Liz struggled blindly to cope with the bitter blow of blows. All her special skills, gifts, abilities, and she couldn’t do this most basic, primitive, unthinking thing.

  Now the happy families she created at work were a cruel jibe at her barrenness. She couldn’t bring herself to admit failure. Adoption would be the ultimate admission, yet her arms longed for the weight of her own baby. In desperation, she faked a couple of pregnancies, and early miscarriages, which brought Seymour back to her in pride, joy, then sympathy and guilt. For a time.

  While this went on, Molly hit puberty. Liz would have known exactly how to cope with her adolescent hormone- poisoning, so she’d have been safe, but not alienated. Peg, poor dim-witted religious nutcase Peg, made a total hash of it. Her lectures about God’s anger and baby Jesus’ tears drove Molly to rebel even more, questioning everything her parents stood for. She was going out with Paul Reed from the village, the Westfields didn’t like that though he seemed a harmless enough specimen, not good enough to marry Molly, Liz agreed, but good enough to practise on. Then Peg found her contraceptive pills. Instead of being pleased her daughter had the sense to take precautions to avoid pregnancy, to Peg they were a badge of moral turpitude and corruption, and her little family fell apart. Molly didn’t beg forgiveness with tears, but left home. In the midst of her own concern for Molly, with whom Liz identified, she tried to help but this time Peg was obdurate. So she helped Molly behind the scenes, gave her money, and when she left the Stony Point hostel where she’d been staying with that disreputable skull-collector Mickey Spence, gave her shelter. Arranged for a patient’s family who owned a B&B to house her, meanwhile trying to persuade her to go home, and persuade Peg to ‘forgive’ her daughter. Molly had too much pride to admit she’d done wrong though, she hadn’t done anything wrong by her code and that of most of her generation in the Seventies. Liz’s world was falling apart too. Seymour was slipping away, she had no baby. Each month, though she knew it was impossible, she’d see the renewed signs of her failure with disbelief. Disbeliever though she was, she’d find herself praying for a miracle. Miracles happened, right? Liz should get one, Liz who was supposed to get everything. Each month, she’d get tense and snappy with Seymour and colleagues at work. Liz had no real women friends to talk to. Would have considered it a declaration of weakness in any case. She couldn’t tell anyone, not yet. Just in case the miracle arrived in time. As it must. Seymour was getting restless, bored. Liz almost hated Peg, because now she envied her. A complete, ludicrous reversal of the natural order. Even though Peg was suffering now, she’d brought most of it on herself after all. At least she’d had years of her daughter, and now was throwing her away. For Molly was wild, in full rebellion. Liz tried to help her, reconcile her to her mother, but Molly was almost intoxicated with the sudden freedom after years of devoted spoiling and indoctrination. She was full of wild talk, threats, self-destructive urges to ‘show them’, to make her mark in a way her mother and father would hate, so that Liz feared what she might do. She might leave and never come back. What would happen to Peg then? It was a while before Liz realised she could use her medical skill to have your baby after all. A lifetime’s protective care of your sister was a small price to pay. Liz’d done so much for Peg. She had reason to be grateful.

  Now back at the cottage Seymour was looking at Liz with that familiar air of appeal.

  ‘Lizzie, did you have to tell them all that? About me and Peggy … It makes me sound – as if I’d done something perverted…’ His voice tailed off.

  Liz stroked his hair. ‘Of course I had to tell them darling. Don’t
worry, I’ll take care of everything. I always do, don’t I?’

  ‘First Molly, now this … poor little Molly, all these years I thought she was living somewhere, and all the time … I didn’t know!’

  ‘Of course you didn’t darling. How could you?’

  ‘We should’ve – I should’ve done more to help her, Lizzie.’

  ‘Stop thinking like that, darling. Stop thinking about it. Why don’t you have a nice little drink?’

  An angel of mercy, she installed him on the sofa with the whisky bottle and glass in front of him on the coffee table. For a fleeting second she felt the urge to pour the golden liquid down her own throat, but no. Oblivion was for others. She was at the helm of their little storm-tossed ship, and must not waver from her course.

  Seymour clutched her hand with cold damp fingers. ‘Lucy will hate us now, won’t she? Have we – lost her, Lizzie? I couldn’t bear it…’

  ‘Lucy knows we love her. This is good news, Seymour darling. It means Lucy ran away because she was shocked to find out I’m not her biological mother. She’s not kidnapped or anything! She’ll come back, and then we can explain everything to her.’ Unless she contacts the police or Steve or that interfering bitch Erica first, she thought grimly.

  Her family needed to be tidied away and kept safe, like Lucy’s dolls. She remembered picking them up from the nursery floor and tucking them up in the doll’s pram. As if their plastic limbs could feel the cold.

  Oh, Lucy … how to make her safe and warm? Truth to tell, she’d convinced herself Lucy was her daughter in every sense. It was on her, Liz’s, face that Lucy opened her eyes for the first time, her arms that felt the sweet, damp weight of the new baby.

  Liz shook herself. Exhausted, and with the whisky going down fast, Seymour was lying back, dozing. Liz carefully covered him with the knitted throw from the sofa back, and tucked him in. Peggy. Peggy was the problem right now. Sedation was not enough to keep her safe.