‘So where do they wear niqab?’ I ask. ‘Where is she from?’
She shrugs. ‘Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Saudi Arabia, maybe Somalia.’
‘And you don’t know her?’
‘No.’ She smoothes the folds of her rather fetching purple headscarf and leans back in her chair. ‘It is clothes for peasant,’ she says.
We are hushed by the appearance of Caroline, who welcomes us and ushers in from the room beyond the group of three small boys who are to be ‘our first performers this afternoon.’ With a minimum of the coaxing and fussing that usually accompanies any performance by small children, they launch into ‘The big ship sails on the alley-alley-o’. They are somewhat overwhelmed by the vigorous piano accompaniment, but one of the trio – the boy Liam, in fact, maker of green jellies – has the strong, pure voice of a potential choirboy, and he it is who keeps them afloat (if you’ll forgive the metaphor since, as we all know, The big ship sank to the bottom of the sea).
They are followed by a group of girls, including Freda, who has been clam-like about the nature of her performance. They sing a song about ‘Auntie Monica’, which I haven’t come across before and which makes me vaguely uneasy:
I have an auntie, an Auntie Monica
And when she goes out shopping
They all cry ‘Ooh-la-la!’
Because her feather’s swaying,
Her feather’s swaying so,
Because her feather’s swaying,
Her feather’s swaying so.
This is then followed by her hat swaying, her muff swaying and her skirt swaying, and it’s all accompanied by vigorous swaying of hips and torsos by these tiny girls which seems to owe rather too much to pop videos. ‘The big ship’ is just the kind of nursery rhyme I like – threaded with tragedy and open to speculation. What was the ship that inspired the song? Is its sailing on the first day of September a clue? Who was the captain who said it will never, never do? And what was the alley-alley-o? (I would say that it’s a rhyme that has ballast but I really must give up the marine metaphors.) ‘Auntie Monica’, though, raises speculation of a quite different kind. The feather and the hat, together with the French associations of Ooh-la-la produce, for me, a picture of a Toulouse-Lautrec Parisian tart, and as for the swaying muff – are we really comfortable with that?
Catching Freda’s eyes on me, I hastily repress these thoughts and arrange my face in an expression of unalloyed delight. Freda is an unabashed performer, working the song for all it’s worth, and my pride in her is only slightly moderated by mortification when she gives a very hard elbow jab to the mite beside her, who gets her verses muddled and puts the skirt before the muff.
I enjoy ‘The wheels on the bus’ mainly because I love watching Farah and Jamilleh mouthing the words. This is followed by ‘Heads, and shoulders, knees and toes’, ‘Five little peas’ and a rousing finale from the full chorus of ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’, in which the audience is exhorted to join. We then applaud vigorously and Caroline asks if we will please wait outside for a few minutes while the children gather their belongings and ‘calm down a bit’.
Acorns was originally a harmless bungalow, minding its own business, pleasantly situated with a view of school playing fields, but some years ago it fell prey to the inexorable advance of Marlbury University, Moving Forward, as billboards announce on building sites throughout the town. Starting as a teacher training college in what was originally no more than a large house in a quiet area of the town, it is now officially a university – charter and all – and it has spread in all directions, engulfing surrounding buildings and consuming them like some giant phagocyte. Mostly these buildings have been replaced by standard edifices of glass and concrete, but Acorns has been allowed to remain almost unchanged, its rooms distributed between babies, toddlers and preschoolers. Its gardens, front and back, remain too, barriered now by six-foot fences and a bolted gate, solid enough to keep escapees in and predators out. In the front garden stands the huge oak tree which gives Acorns its name and most of us make for its afternoon shade as we wait for the children. Making rather effortful conversation with my student Ning Wu, I notice, idly, a woman and child arrive with a dog on a lead. The woman is a redhead, wiry and pale, in a sleeveless white top and skinny jeans; the girl is about seven, in school uniform, and the dog is one of those ugly, flat-faced beasts that you can’t imagine anyone loves.
The children come trickling out, burdened by end-of-term detritus – spare pants, painting overalls, Wellington boots and artwork that has recently adorned Acorns’ walls. Freda, I have learned, is often the last one out on these occasions. I used to panic at her non-appearance, believing that she had been abducted in plain sight, but now I know better: she will be engaged with someone else’s problem – hunting a lost boot, advising on the ownership of a pair of knickers, consoling the creator of a damaged piece of pasta art. The leaving-well-alone-gene missed the females in my family altogether – the sin of the mother punished even unto the third and fourth generation.
Choirboy Liam emerges and carries his burdens to the woman with the ugly dog. I feel a brief pang to think that she wasn’t there to hear him sing, but it is quickly dispelled by the drama that follows. As the woman is struggling to push Liam’s belongings into the plastic bag of shopping she is carrying, the dog manages to yank his lead from her grasp and he rushes, barking furiously, at the niqab woman, who is walking up the path to the garden gate. She tries to get away from the dog, who is on its back legs, pawing at her black robe, but she is hampered by the group of mothers and children who are blocking the gate; the dog’s owner yells at him; her daughter hoots with laughter; I am delighted to find that the dog is called Billy because it’s the kind of dog you’d expect Bill Sykes to have; the dog Billy pays no attention to anyone but keeps barking and pawing; the niqab woman gives him a hard kick and the child tugs at her mother’s hand.
‘She’s getting him! She’s getting him!’ she protests.
‘Billy! Billy!’ the mother calls again.
The woman finally drags her robe away from his paws and pushes her way through the gate; someone manages to slam the gate closed with the dog inside; his owner retrieves him, rebukes her daughter, who is laughing again, grabs Liam’s hand and leaves. Jamilleh slips out of the gate behind her and everyone returns to the business of departure, with the extra zest that a bit of drama always imparts.
Where’s Jamilleh gone?’ I ask Farah, who is minding Jamilleh’s son.
‘To see if she’s OK.’
‘That’s kind. Do you know her?’
‘No.’
I see a flash of irritation. I have made a mistake. I have assumed that all Muslim women in Marlbury must know one another, which is pretty crass.
By the time Freda finally appears, bearing the important news that there are seven pairs of unclaimed knickers in the staff room, Jamilleh is back, looking cross.
‘Is she all right?’ I ask.
She shrugs, exchanges an unfathomable look with Farah and says one word in Farsi.
Peasant, I suspect.
2
17.07.12: 18.45
Crime Scene
DS Paula Powell made her escape from the screaming mayhem that was her seven-year-old nephew’s birthday party and walked home relishing the cooling air of the early evening and enjoying the blessed quiet. It was impossible to tell her sister that she really didn’t yearn for children of her own, that involvement in the noisy, sticky lives of her nephew and niece was not the only brightness in her otherwise bleak and barren life, that pursuing her career as a detective sergeant in the Marlbury police force was not a poor second best to the joys of marriage and motherhood but what she loved. It was impossible to say it without rubbishing her sister’s life, without denigrating the children of whom she was, actually, very fond. She took out her phone to check for messages and found three from DC Sarah Shepherd, each more frantic than the one before, their arrivals unheard in all the screaming. A
bubble of elation rose in her chest. She called Sarah back.
‘Sarah?’
‘Paula. Thank God. I really need you here. Ian’s on holiday, David’s not back for another week and I’m first on the scene at what looks like a homicide and a suicide. Dr McAndrew’s here but otherwise all I’ve got is one uniform keeping the rubberneckers at bay.’
‘I’m five minutes from my car. I’ll be with you in twenty.’
‘You’ve got the address, haven’t you? It was in my message.’
‘Yes. Eastgate estate. What a surprise!’
‘I think you’ll be surprised by this,’ Sarah said, and Paula heard her voice wobble.
‘Keep Dr McAndrew there with you till I come,’ she said and started to run, simultaneously cursing herself for the spindly-heeled sandals she had put on in honour of the party and congratulating herself for emptying into a flowerbed the two glasses of lethal punch that her brother-in-law had pressed on her in the course of the afternoon. She hoped the buddleia growing nearby would be able to cope with it.
At home, she changed her shoes, checked that she had all her protective gear, listened again to Sarah’s message and drove the familiar route to the Eastgate estate, generator of – probably – fifty per cent of Marlbury’s crime. Most commonly it was uniformed officers who found themselves there, recovering stolen goods, pursuing vandals and joy-riders, called out to domestic violence or drunken stabbings. Recently, though, Eastgate crime had gone up a notch. Situated as it was between London and Dover, Marlbury had become a convenient link in a chain that trafficked both people and drugs, and Eastgate was playing its part. The police knew that the owners of some impressive houses with high hedges in salubrious parts of the town were playing their part too, but they were more difficult to trawl for, so it was the Eastgate minnows they picked up time and again, expendable food for the big fish. It was the Met’s decision to prioritise breaking this chain that had led to DCI David Scott’s being seconded as liaison to them for three months, leaving her, Paula supposed and hoped, as senior investigating officer on this case.
The planners who designed Eastgate in the 1950s had gone for maximum density; high rise was not an option within sight of the abbey’s celebrated tower, so the houses were rammed together, shoulder to shoulder, their narrow front gardens now crammed with vehicles and wheelie bins, since neither drives nor side gates had been thought necessary. In the great 1980’s council house sell-off, no-one wanted to buy a house here, so there had been no gentrification and precious little in the way of redecoration. Eastgate was, these days, the place where the council put problem families; here they could make problems for each other and everyone else could breathe more easily.
There was no difficulty finding the house: the hubbub of voices led her there and changed its nature as she drew up, got out her gear, locked the car and started to elbow her way through the crowd, her shouts of, ‘Excuse me. Police!’ producing cheers and whistles. She wished she had taken a moment to change out of her flimsy little sundress when she changed her shoes. In spite of her consciousness of being watched as she walked up the short front path, she had time to notice that someone looked after the front garden and the bins were tucked away behind a wicker screen.
In the narrow hallway she came face to face with Lynne McAndrew.
‘DS Powell. Good,’ the pathologist said. ‘I’m just about done here. Your colleague is struggling a bit.’ She pushed open a door behind her so that Paula could see, through the kitchen window beyond, Sarah Shepherd pacing the tiny garden, a clump of tissues pressed to her mouth. At the same time Paula was aware of a smell wafting from the kitchen, sweet and fetid at the same time. She looked at Lynne McAndrew.
‘Yes,’ McAndrew said. ‘I think it was the dog that finished her off.’
‘The dog?’
‘You might as well look at it now, though it’s hardly your priority, of course.’
She led the way into the kitchen and Paula’s eyes were drawn immediately to a bright pool of red in the sink. She approached cautiously and for a moment could make no sense of what she saw, convinced somehow that since this was a kitchen, what she was looking at was something culinary. A dog lay in a puddle of blood, its head thrown back, and under its chin was a deep, dark, red hole with the neck vertebrae glinting white within it. Feeling the saliva rush into her mouth, she fought down nausea. ‘Nasty,’ she said as briskly as she could manage. ‘Let’s go back into the hall.’
In the hall, she said, ’So its throat was cut. What else am I expecting to see? Sarah – DC Shepherd – said a homicide and a suicide?’
‘One upstairs and one down. I’ve finished and the SOCO team aren’t here yet so they’re all yours.’
Paula hesitated. ‘I’d quite like a view from you first. Any pointers?’
Lynne McAndrew gave her a long look. ‘How much of this sort of thing have you seen?’ she asked.
Paula bridled, immediately defensive. ‘That depends on what this sort of thing is.’
‘Violent death.’
‘I’ve seen … well, there’s much less of it than you’d think from watching TV, isn’t there? You have to be a traffic cop to see it on a daily basis.’
‘Right. So you want me to prepare you. It’s not pretty, I warn you, but I’ve seen a lot worse. There’s a child. A girl. Aged six or seven. In her bedroom, on her bed, smothered with a pillow. No blood but not a pretty sight. You can see the struggle still. And there’s cyanosis – the face is blue.’
‘Right. And?’
‘And there’s a woman – young, late twenties probably – with two slit wrists. Lots of blood.’
‘OK. So one scenario is a woman at the end of her rope who kills her daughter – and her dog – and then cuts her wrists. Or we’re looking for a partner or ex-partner and this is a revenge thing. But he’s tried to make the woman’s death look like suicide and that would be surprising, wouldn’t it? Those kind of men – they want people to know it’s them. Their pride’s been hurt and they want to get it back by showing what big men they are. They usually kill themselves afterwards or go on the run. Does it convince you as a suicide?’
’It does and it doesn’t. The wrist slitting was quite professional – no sawing away across the tendons but a deep incision into the artery. And the incision on the left wrist is deeper than the one on the right, which makes sense if she was right-handed. On the other hand, wrist cutters often don’t do much to the second wrist at all. People will instinctively start with the knife in their stronger hand and then when they come to do the second wrist they’re not only using their weaker hand but they’ve got blood gushing out of it. There’s some bruising, too, that needs thinking about.’
She paused and looked around for her case. ‘I’ll take a better look at her when I’ve got her in the lab. If she killed the dog, I’d expect to find canine blood mixed in with her blood. And she’d had a lot to drink – reeked of gin. I’ll be interested to see the toxicology.’
She stood with her hand on the catch of the front door. ‘I should have preliminary results by the end of the day tomorrow,’ she said. ‘But if you’re going to be the SIO on this then it’s about time for you to go and look for yourself, Detective Sergeant, isn’t it?’ She closed the front door behind her.
3
Tuesday 17th July
A Crime Seen
I pedal Freda away from the nursery in the child seat on the back of my bike and drop her off at her home, the tiny terraced house that Ellie, my elder daughter, and her husband, Ben, are not quite managing to pay for on two teachers’ salaries. I stop long enough to commiserate over Nico’s earache, to give an account of the afternoon’s festivities and to impress on Ellie, at Freda’s insistence, the unparalleled panache of her performance of ‘Auntie Monica’.
‘I’m sorry I missed it,’ Ellie says, and she means it. I feel bad. I should have offered to stay with grizzly Nico while Ellie went to watch Freda. ‘There’ll be other times,’ I say feebly.
I get back on my bike and head for home, wondering whether a salad would be a good idea for supper, after all that cake and jelly. I know that there is something wrong the moment I turn into my road and spot, outside my house, an acid green Smart car which belongs to my younger daughter, Annie, and, behind it, a beaten-up Volvo with a flat front tyre. I know what this is and I feel a fool. A couple of people to stay for a couple of days, Annie had said, and I gave a breezy agreement when twenty years’ experience of Annie’s talent for manipulation and dissimulation should have warned me to demand details – names, dates and terms of residence, not to mention setting a few house rules. I get off my bike and take a look at the Volvo, which looks alarmingly roomy. How many of them are there?
The house is quiet as I enter but, dazzled for a moment by coming in from bright sunshine, I trip over several backpacks artfully arranged in the hall. Rubbing a bruised shin, I go down the hall to the kitchen, find the back door wide open and see, sprawled on the grass outside, a group of five, lounging together in a rough circle, wine glasses and cigarettes in hand, two bottles and a couple of packs of Kettle chips nestling among them. I take a deep breath and step outside.
‘Hello,’ I call in a tone that neatly combines greeting and challenge. They turn to look at me, Annie’s eyes bright with reciprocal challenge, the other faces bland and smiling. They are under the impression that they have been invited, aren’t they? They are envisaging clean beds and regular meals for however long Annie has offered them. I move down the garden towards them and one of the boys jumps politely to his feet, which is disarming enough, but when he then says, ‘Would you like a glass of wine, Mrs Gray? I’ll get you a glass,’ and speeds back to the house, I am ridiculously charmed even though I know quite well that it is my wine they are drinking.
Weep a While Longer Page 2
