‘Alexa?’
‘Yes, we’ll have to tell her, won’t we?’
‘Perhaps you could telephone her,’
‘Me?’
Beyond them, the busy-eyed woman in the pale green overall had paused with a tray of empty plates. Mrs Shute made no acknowledgement of the alarm in her daughter’s tone.
‘Yes, please Roxanna, if you would,’ she said.
Out in the car park she stood with a formal composure, her handbag over her arm, she might have been waiting in the introduction line at some civic event. She did not look over as her daughter and the sergeant climbed the metal stairs to the chalet flat. When he had fixed the seals Sergeant Bee followed Roxanna back to reception, he waited while she tried to telephone the third sister. Returning to the car park, he spoke quietly to Monica
‘She couldn’t get hold of the sister, she supposed she must be en route to Truro. I think she was relieved to be honest, bit of a reprieve from breaking the news, but she says she’ll keep trying and I’ve got the details of the shop.’
He held out a dove grey business card with an illustration of an ornate wardrobe, the doors and drawers opened to show the contents. The text stated that the Wardrobe Boutique sold exclusive French and Italian ladies wear and accessories. As Monica was reading the card a red Alfa Romeo Spider turned into the car park and the sergeant murmured an admiring comment. Conrad Gerstmann emerged from the car, a heavily built man in late middle age. His sandy hair was receding and combed sideways across his baldness, he had protruding blue eyes, a large drooping moustache and a gap between his front teeth. This wide gap and the drooping moustache and his portliness seemed to suggest that he might be about to do or say something jovial or comic; an expansive mine host. He wore a cravat in the open neck of his shirt and a blazer with brass buttons. As he walked towards them he hitched up his trousers waistband.
‘Marilyn,’ he took Mrs Shute’s arm, ‘Marilyn, what is it, what has happened?’
‘It’s Amanda, Conrad. She’s dead.’
‘No!’ he said, and then again ‘No, good God, no!’
Monica stepped forward, ‘I’m afraid that we need Mrs Shute to come and make a formal identification, in Newquay. Perhaps if we lead the way …’
‘Of course, we will follow you – is that okay with you, Marilyn?’
She nodded briefly and resettled the cardigan shoulders. From Monica’s car they watched as Conrad guided her into the passenger seat, one arm under her elbow.
‘He’s showed more emotion than either of them,’ the sergeant observed.
As they followed the coast to Newquay, they watched the Alfa move in and out of their wing mirrors, vanishing at the bends and then reappearing, jaunty and bright in the clear summer morning light.
They turned onto the main road into the town. On both sides most of the Edwardian villas and the pebbledash bungalows had been converted to bed and breakfast accommodation. As they passed, Monica read the names of the businesses painted on wooden signboards: Driftwood Spars and Resthaven, Pebbles and Avalon, Aloha, Waikiki and Surfside Stop. Hooks were screwed into the base of some of the boards so that an extra small square sign lettered with ‘No’ could be hung in front of the word ‘Vacancies’.
‘Do these places really all make a living?’ she asked.
‘Very much so. They call this road the Golden Mile; the locals resent it because they say most of the businesses are run by people from Birmingham. They also resent the holidaymakers for blocking up the roads – emmets they call them. You’ve not seen the town yet in high summer, have you? Pandemonium, to put it mildly. The number of calls we get every Saturday about kids with nowhere to stay who end up at the coach station with bottles of Merrydown cider …’
‘And do people come here to surf?’
‘Some do, but they wouldn’t stay along here - these places cater to the standard bucket and spade holiday families. The surfers all live in their camper vans in the beach car parks – until we move them on - or there’s a doss house run by an Aussie lifeguard up in the old part of the town. A lot of youngsters come down from up country, hoping to get casual work in the big hotels for the season.’
The sergeant slowed at a turning. A signboard advertising the King Mark of Cornwall public house was formed as a giant and hairy man in the garb of an ancient warrior.
‘That’s the Celtic Revival, I suppose,’ said Monica.
Newquay Hospital stood on a hill among roads of 1930s bungalows. The single storey building also resembled a bungalow, one extended at the edges with extra corridors and wings. At the back of one wing steps led down to the mortuary entrance. Dr Skerrett stood waiting to meet them. He shook hands with Conrad and called Mrs Shute ‘My dear’. He was wearing green surgical scrubs. Some of his chest showed at the neckline, the skin was tanned by sun and wind and there were stray white chest hairs.
Thick blue lino deadened the sound of their footsteps along the corridor.
‘Not until you’re quite ready, my dear,’ he said to Mrs Shute but as she did not pause he led them into the mortuary. Monica and Martin Bee stood back as the doctor lifted the sheet with a practised, Communion-like reverence. The corner of the sheet had letters and numbers embroidered in red cotton, a laundry mark. In the car park a vehicle was turning, it sounded heavy, a delivery van perhaps.
‘Good God,’ said Conrad and he clapped his broad and stubby-fingered hand to his mouth and turned away.
‘That is her,’ said Marilyn Shute, ‘That is my daughter, Amanda Shute,’
In this situation, Monica knew, people did not always immediately confirm the corpse’s identity in words. Some, in their shock and grief, were capable only of a gesture, a frenzied, compulsive movement of hand or arm, as though flapping away the pain of an insect sting or a scald. Some made merely sounds, incoherent but unequivocal. On one occasion she had witnessed a woman, the supposed next of kin, emit an unearthly keening trill of relief: the corpse revealed was unknown to her. The woman had cried out over the slab as a sleeper emerging into the day from a nightmare. Sometimes over the years Monica had hoped that such a miracle of errors would occur again, but it never did.
Marilyn Shute had made the process brisk and straightforward for them. They waited to see if she would say anything further or make any move towards the body, but she turned away and so Dr Skerrett whispered ‘Let’s tuck you up again, shall we,’ then he said
‘If you’d like to sit quietly for a little while, my dear, there is my office …’
‘Would you, Marilyn?’ Conrad asked.
She shook her head ‘No, I must get on. Take me back to the hotel would you please, Conrad.’
As they watched the red car drive away it seemed that Conrad was deliberately throttling down the highly tuned engine, muffling its sound in deference to the dead girl.
‘Again, he showed far more emotion than the mother,’ said the sergeant.
‘Mrs Shute is certainly a woman very much in control of herself. But then, I suppose she’s had to be … anyway, let’s go and see what the third sister is like.’
The journey from Newquay to Truro took some thirty minutes. The landscape was farmland and small villages which seemed to Monica to follow a pattern. A ribbon of cob cottages, a pub with a green and white sign for the Devenish brewery or a black and gold sign for the St Austell brewery, a chapel grey and unadorned, a grocery shop, sometimes a hairdressing business run from a net curtained front room. In the distance the peaks of the china clay tips were visible, glinting in the sunlight like dirtied snow.
‘You can see them from everywhere,’ Monica remarked.
‘Cornish Alps,’ the sergeant replied.
In Truro they left the car on a wide cobbled road in the centre of the city. There was a British Home Stores and an electricity show room. Women with carrier bags and small children waited to board a blue bus. They entered a narrow alley of shops leading to the cathedral. The alleyway recalled the medieval street pattern of other cities, yet Truro’s cathedral was a Vict
orian construction.
‘Excuse me one moment,’ said Monica. In the car, she had not wanted Martin Bee to see the Sellotape bound cigarette packet. In the alleyway there was a tobacconist. It was a traditional and specialist shop, it sold no sweets or newspapers, only the materials and paraphernalia of smoking. There were pipes and tobacco and snuff jars, lighters and spills and cigars and columns of cigarette packets, including French and American brands. The counter was a glass display cabinet with arrangements of Meerschaum pipes. Behind it stood a red-haired man with skin pale almost to translucency. He had an eager, searching, childlike smile. Monica smiled back at him and began to speak but he shook his head vigorously and held up a sign handwritten on a sheet of cardboard. The sign read ‘I am profoundly deaf. Please speak slowly and clearly.’ He smiled again and nodded in emphasis.
‘Of course. Do forgive me. Benson and Hedges please. Twenty.’
Sergeant Bee waited on the doorstep where a mat of black ridged rubber advertised Player’s cigarettes.
‘I decided this was not a day to give up smoking,’ she said.
‘Her shop’s the one over there, it seems to be open, but do you want to have a cigarette first?’
‘I do, but I won’t. My mother had very strong opinions about women who smoke in the street and she drummed them into me.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Oh yes. What about you, did you never smoke?’
‘Sometimes, if I’m out, having a drink. Not otherwise. I can take it or leave it.’
‘You’re lucky.’
They crossed the alleyway to the Wardrobe boutique. The Victorian shop frontage was well maintained, the woodwork was newly painted in grey and white and the brass door handle was polished. Inside, the compact space was lined by hanging rails and tall racks of shoes. On shelves above the rails there were candy striped hatboxes; a bentwood coat stand was hung with scarves and belts and necklaces. On the counter wicker baskets held packets of tights and lace topped stockings arranged in fan shapes. A young woman sat on a high stool behind the counter, she was hunched into a coat that she had draped around her shoulders. She had been crying and in one hand she held a quantity of paper tissues, bunched and rolled into a ball and flecked with tiny black crumbs of mascara.
Monica said ‘I’m Chief Inspector Guard, and this is Sergeant Bee. We are from Devon and Cornwall Police. Are you Alexa Shute?’
‘I am,’ Her voice was thickened by the recent crying.
‘Have your family been in touch with you, Miss Shute?’
She nodded and began to say yes but the form of the word turned into a sob.
‘Would you not like to close up and lock the door, Miss?’ asked Sergeant Bee.
‘I’m waiting for Pat to get here.’
‘Pat?’
‘He’s my boyfriend. He was going to view a sale in Wadebridge. I left a message with the auctioneer.’
She took out a long menthol cigarette and lit it, as an afterthought offering them the green and gold packet, they shook their heads. In her pocket, Monica turned over the Benson and Hedges box. She asked
‘So, you have spoken to your family, Miss Shute, they have explained what has happened?’
‘Roxy phoned me, then Conrad, he’d just got back from the hospital.’
Alexa looked at her fingernails and began to pick at the silvery pink varnish on her cigarette hand. ‘Of course, I suppose my mother’s too busy running the hotel to tell me herself that my sister is dead.’ As she finished speaking she looked at them, perhaps expecting her remark to be challenged or to be smoothed over by a platitude, they made no comment. ‘Yeah, well …’ she said.
Outside two smartly dressed middle aged women who had been looking in the window were about to enter. Sgt Bee opened the door and spoke quietly to them. They nodded and walked away.
‘I’ll put the Closed sign up,’ he said.
‘That would be best,’ said Monica, ‘If you’re up to it, Miss Shute, we need to talk to you about Amanda, to help us to build up a picture of her. We spoke to your other sister very briefly this morning, but she suggested that you two were probably closer to each other.’
She sighed, ‘I suppose. What do you want to know?’
‘Anything you can tell us really, as I said, we need to build up a picture of Amanda.’
Alexa sighed again and wiped her eyelids with the ball of tissue.
‘Amanda was the baby of the family. I was five and Roxy was seven by the time she came along. I’m quite sure mum hadn’t wanted another baby, especially not another girl. To be honest it’s always been perfectly clear that she never really wanted any of us – Dad was the one who wanted children. I suppose you could say Amanda was always difficult, though none of us had a great time, growing up at home. Our parents were always too busy for us, running the different sites at all hours. There was plenty of material stuff, but not much else, not like other families. Dad did his best when he could, I suppose. He used to keep Sunday afternoons free for us, so he could take us to the beach, or to have lunch up at the mess and then go to the pictures, sometimes he drove us to Plymouth. We never really fitted in with the village kids, because we were different. They made up names for us – we were Poxy Roxy, Sexy Lexy and Randy Mandy. Witty lot, the locals, aren’t they? So, we tended to go around more with the children from air force families, but they were always getting posted away so it never lasted. Then Dad died. You’d think that might have been a reason for my mother to take a bit more notice of us children, but she didn’t, she just worked even harder. Roxy got married at twenty, to a pilot. She had a great big do down at St Mawgan village church, the station commander gave her away – he and Dad had been in the same Shackletons crew, then there was a huge reception in the officers’ mess, a marquee, the full works. They got posted up to Kinloss and in less than four years it was all over. She came back and went into the business with mum, leaving her children to be looked after by other people. Ironic, really, when you think about it.’
‘And did you choose not to go into the family business, Miss Shute?’
‘Most definitely I chose not to,’ she stubbed out the cigarette with vehemence.
The sergeant looked around the little shop, ‘It can’t have been easy, setting up a place like this in the city at your age. Did your mother help you?’
Alexa gave a short and scornful laugh ‘Oh sure, if you can call it help - she’s actually an investor, and she makes sure to take her percentage every month.’
‘And what about Amanda, did she want to stay and work with the family?’
‘Probably not, but I’m not sure what else she could have done. Like I said, Amanda drove everyone mad, pretty much from the day she was born. When Dad was alive, she wasn’t quite so bad, she could twist him round her little finger. When she was tiny she used to insist on following him around everywhere until he gave in and picked her up and carried her on his shoulders. I can remember her sneaking down to the bar in her pyjamas when he was trying to serve customers. She was twelve when he died and it just sent her completely off the rails. She got in with the really rough kids from St Columb Major, drinking, smoking, glue sniffing. Your lot brought her home in a panda car more than once. My mother arranged for her to go up to Scotland for the summer to stay with Roxy but that all went wrong so then she was shipped off to boarding school. She got expelled at fifteen, before she could sit her O levels. Somehow, on the train coming home, she got herself tackled up with a photographer from St Ives. He put it into her head that she could be a model and so she began taking a bit more care of herself. She dropped her old cronies in the St Columb gang.’
‘And did it work out, the modelling?’
‘Up to a point, but she wasn’t tall enough to do fashion and catwalk work, so it was just local stuff – promotions, gala evenings, tourist brochures. Of course, my mother and Conrad and Maria, never ones to miss out on a business opportunity, got her to front a lot of the company’s events.’
‘And what abou
t boyfriends, was there anyone in particular?’
Alexa smiled, ‘Do you want a list?’ then she frowned and picked up the cigarette packet again, ‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, I must sound like an utter bitch, but this is all so bloody awful…’
New tears spilled over. She sniffed angrily before she took out a cigarette. Sgt Bee stepped forward to light it for her.
‘Cheers,’ she said, and flapped the smoke away from her sore eyes.
‘It would be a great help, if you could give us some names,’ said Monica.
‘Sure, okay, well when she was thirteen there was Kevin Jelbert, one of the local yokel gang, bull neck, leather jacket, eyebrows meeting in the middle, it was because of him that she was sent up to Kinloss. After she came back from boarding school there must have been a string of casual ones – they used to fall over themselves for her, men and boys. There was the photographer from St Ives, Roy something … Pennywell, Pennyfeather something like that, Steve Vincent, the rep from St Austell Brewery, he was married, one of the student vets from St Columb, he was over from Canada. Who else … yes, there was Sevvy, he was the Spanish barman that worked at the Old Parsonage one season. Then she actually got herself engaged for a few months, to an RAF engineer, Dougal Michie. He was nice enough, Dougie, steady, you know, but Amanda decided he was boring and called it all off and found herself someone new. Poor Dougie, he was completely heartbroken. The new one was Graham, Graham Jarvis, and she really fell for him. He was also air force, a pilot, a bit older, he’d been married, he had kids, but he was divorced. She was very serious, she told everyone that she was going to move in with him, but then he finished it and she went completely wild again – getting drunk, making scenes, threatening things, tearing around the county in the middle of the night. At one point he contacted Mum and said he’d have to get a restraining order.’
‘And did he?’
‘No, he didn’t in the end. Mum and Conrad were worried about the adverse publicity of course, they got poor old Mr Rosewarne from Walsingham Place onto it, he’s solicitor to the County set, he must be a hundred if he’s a day, he had to give my wild child sister a firm a talking to.’
The Trebelzue Gate Page 3
