Corpse in Waiting

by Margaret Duffy

  ‘Perhaps he took my wanting my own house as some kind of rejection,’ I said to the four walls of the kitchen after the call.

  There was something in me that prevented me from ringing the agents and calling the whole thing off. An independent streak? Bloody-mindedness? But if Alexandra had put in a higher offer and the vendors had come to their senses I might have already lost it anyway.

  I was still sitting there, agonizing, when my phone rang.

  ‘I’m at the nick,’ Patrick’s voice said. ‘D’you want to join us?’

  ‘You have the car but I think there’s a bus in a couple of hours’ time,’ I replied, not about to be anybody’s right now.

  ‘I’m sure Mother’ll lend you hers.’

  ‘I happen to know that she needs it to go shopping, your father’s off to a meeting of some kind and Carrie’ll be using hers to take Vicki, plus Mark of course, to Toddlers’ Club in Wellow.’

  ‘Then call a taxi and charge it to expenses.’

  ‘I’m not optimistic – all the local ones are on school runs at this time of the morning.’

  I distinctly heard Carrick say something in the background.

  ‘OK, James is sending a car for you,’ Patrick reported briskly. ‘See you later.’

  Why did I get the distinct impression that it had been James’s idea I should join the team?

  ‘We have no idea if it’s the same woman but I’d like you to take a look at this,’ the DCI said, pushing a photograph across his desk in my direction. And then to Patrick, ‘I’ll be delighted if you’ll dig around the district for dental records and so forth. It’ll save us work and it’s imperative we discover who this woman really was. If you get the dental records we’ll know straight away.’

  I gazed at the picture. It was a mugshot of Irma Burnside provided by the Criminal Records Bureau. She had brown eyes and dark wavy hair just short of shoulder-length, the jaw square and determined-looking. The accompanying notes indicated that now she would be thirty-eight years of age, was five feet four inches in height and of medium build. There were no birthmarks or scars.

  Was this the woman whose head I had found in the cupboard? The hair was similar but I had felt no frisson of horror upon first seeing this photograph.

  ‘So far, there’s no trace of her around here now,’ Carrick said to me.

  ‘Where did she come from originally?’ I asked. ‘Was Bath a bolt-hole?’

  ‘Bath is often a bolt-hole,’ he answered with a rueful grin. ‘Yes, lover-boy Capelli was based in Romford, Essex and that’s where she’d been in trouble with the law. She served eight months for supplying drugs having been given a suspended sentence two years earlier for handling stolen property.’

  ‘She might have gone back there.’

  ‘You don’t think she’s the dead woman then?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Commander Greenway has an idea that Martino Capelli is planning something from inside prison. She could be involved, acting for him on the outside.’

  ‘He’s Tony Capelli’s cousin,’ Patrick said. ‘Mike rang me a few minutes ago.’

  I did not comment on that particular gangster further. As well as Carrick, Joanna, his one-time sergeant, had been involved at a time before they were married and Joanna had been shot and seriously wounded by Capelli’s henchman, Luigi. Patrick, acquiring a sniper’s rifle, had ensured that he had not fired again. I had not been present.

  ‘You can use my office,’ Carrick said, rising to his feet. ‘I have to go out.’

  ‘Strange though to change your name from Irma to Imelda,’ I murmured to myself, still looking at the mugshot. ‘They could be sisters.’

  ‘Or sisters-in-law if one married the other’s brother,’ Patrick said. He had already found a phone book. ‘Dentists, loads of ’em.’

  ‘I’m going to take another look at the crime scene,’ James said to me. ‘D’you want to see if your famous intuition comes up with anything?’

  Alexandra Nightingale was arguing with the constable on duty outside the house, her hired car and a police van parked nearby.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Carrick asked.

  ‘This lady—’ the man began.

  Alexandra butted in with, ‘This will shortly be my house and I demand to be allowed inside.’

  ‘The property is a crime scene, madam,’ Carrick told her, having introduced himself. ‘I can’t believe that you’re not aware of that.’

  She caught sight of me. ‘You! Sticking your nose in again?’

  It occurred to me that she had been drinking. I said nothing and neither did Carrick, just regarded her steadily until she got the message and departed, violently slamming the door of her car and then, with a blare on her horn, swerving to miss a cyclist, just, whom she had not previously noticed.

  ‘She’s over the limit,’ I said helpfully.

  ‘I think you’re right,’ James said and found his mobile. ‘That’s her?’ he enquired, having given Traffic the car’s registration number.

  ‘Too right.’

  All was quiet within the house. Motes of dust were floating, moving serenely with the air currents in thin beams of sunlight that were finding their way between the leaves of the plants growing across the living rooms’ windows. The big spider in the grate came out to investigate our vibrations and then shot back in again as I walked closer to the fireplace. I resolved that it, or more likely she, would not die when the place was renovated. It deserved to live.

  But then I had to remind myself that it wasn’t my house. Alexandra would get it.

  ‘Was any evidence found in the garden other than the stuff that had been buried?’ I called across to Carrick, who had gone into the other front room.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not even anything that might suggest she was killed out there?’

  ‘Nothing. But don’t forget, quite a lot of time’s gone by since the crime was committed.’

  ‘Has any soil been taken away for testing?’

  ‘I understand a few samples were taken. But where do you start?’

  ‘There’s a patch of herbs growing almost obscenely well close to the back door where it hasn’t been dug over.’

  Across the hallway, our eyes met.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Haven’t you heard the old but true story about the mortuary that had huge and wonderful tomatoes for sale?’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying?’

  ‘Yes, blood. Blood and bone fertilizer. One of the best.’

  Without another word he went out to his car, found an evidence bag and gloves and went into the garden, reappearing almost immediately. ‘You’ll have to show me.’

  Ye gods, didn’t the man know what rampant golden marjoram, mint and thyme looked like?

  To prevent any contamination from tools Carrick dug down with his gloved hands, having hauled out some long grass, while I held the bag open. The earth was dark and rich-looking here.

  ‘This could have been where the head was severed,’ he said, eyeing our surroundings when the sample was safely in the bag. ‘None of the neighbours could have seen a thing with all the trees.’

  ‘So she was knocked around with what?’

  ‘The pathologist reckons it was something like a pickaxe handle. There are several broken bones in the hands and arms.’

  ‘She tried to ward off the blows. How ghastly.’

  ‘Murder’s always revolting.’

  ‘But surely she would have screamed.’

  ‘Aye. But if folk have their TVs turned up loud . . .’

  ‘Which is all about people screaming and car chases and explosions . . .’

  ‘Life’s a bastard sometimes.’

  I left him outside and went back into the house, paused in the kitchen, where the sink was still disgusting, looked into the scullery, where the stench still persisted – perhaps from my point of view it would have been a good idea to let Alexandra have another look round after all – and then slowly mounte
d the stairs. During the past few years I have been in several houses where murders had taken place and there is invariably a nasty resonance. People pooh-pooh this but to me it is real. This little house had no unsavoury echoes, if it had I would not want to buy it. The garden could take care of itself: nature is a great healer.

  ‘I don’t think she was killed indoors,’ I said out loud, wandering into the other bedroom.

  ‘No?’ James said, obviously not too far away.

  ‘I have no evidence of course, just . . . intuition.’ I went to the head of the stairs and he was standing at the bottom. ‘Thank you for involving me.’

  ‘I value your thoughts.’

  ‘Would you check that woman’s name in records for me?’

  His eyes widened. ‘You reckon she’s dodgy?’

  ‘Just . . . intuition.’

  ‘I think we’re good enough friends for me to ask if you’re sure that’s all it is.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said with a smile.

  ‘As a consultant for SOCA you must have all the CRB computer codes.’

  ‘Patrick has. I’m not good with figures and have enough bother remembering my pin numbers. And . . . I don’t want Patrick to know I’m checking up on her.’

  There was a little silence during which Carrick regarded me with steady gaze. ‘You say he met her when the pair of you were divorced and he’d just come home with his legs pretty badly smashed up.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It would be quite something for him then, to have a woman fancy him when he was on crutches.’

  As a student of human nature I should have seen that it would have to be a special relationship, an important ‘something’ that even now drew him to her. The woman had found him attractive despite the fact that he had been barely mobile and, having once regarded himself, as do so many young men, as invincible, had been left a little bit crazy by the sheer unfairness of having been rendered permanently crippled, or so he had thought at the time, following an accident with a hand grenade. There was no glory, no honourable wounds, no tales of heroism, no medals, even though he had not been the one who had thrown it. His wife had chucked him out, smashing his classical guitar in the process – has since buying him another, I wondered, a much better one, mended that hurt? – because she found him insufferably superior, a perfectionist who tried to show her how to cook a soufflé that did not sink and that, for her, as well as the business of children, had been the last straw. His wife had not been there for him when he had returned, had not bothered to keep in touch with his parents, with whom she had previously got on well, had not troubled herself to ask how their eldest son had faired on the battlefield.

  I had remarried instead, a policeman colleague of Patrick’s, Peter Clyde. A little under twelve months later I was a widow as well as divorced, Peter having been killed in a shoot-out in Plymouth. Realizing he was being followed by criminal suspects he had gone to where he knew Patrick had a flat in the Barbican. Still on crutches and too slow because of it, Patrick – newly issued with a firearm by MI5 – had shot the armed intruders who had burst in on them but Peter had been killed in the crossfire. He had actually used his body as a shield to save his friend’s life. Ever the romantic, he had made Patrick promise to look after me before he died.

  And now I wanted to buy the house this one-time woman in Patrick’s life had set her heart on, for whatever reason, and was checking up – out of spite? – to see whether she had a criminal record. Who was the grade one bitch now?

  This, mostly unwelcome, retrospection had continued while Carrick was driving us both back to the nick. He had planned to take a longer look at the garden, and the small one at the front, but had received a call that he was needed as the local crime prevention officer wanted to talk to him.

  Patrick was in the canteen, finishing off a very late breakfast. I fetched myself coffee and a bun and pulled out a chair at his table.

  ‘I’ve tracked down Imelda Burnside but not Irma,’ he said, mopping up the last of the egg yolk with a piece of fried bread.

  ‘So you have her records?’

  ‘The dentist is putting them on disc for me – it’s all digitalized these days – and I’m collecting them in about half an hour.’

  ‘Is this an NHS dentist?’

  ‘He takes national health and private patients.’

  ‘Find out. It’ll tell us a bit about her financial situation.’

  ‘That’s a good point.’ He glanced at me. ‘Find anything interesting?’

  ‘Not really. We took some samples of earth where the body might have been decapitated. I don’t think she was killed in the house.’

  ‘Your cat’s whiskers?’

  I nodded. ‘And . . .’

  ‘And?’ he queried when I paused.

  ‘I’m going to pull out of the sale.’

  ‘I can understand that. The place does have an unpleasant history now.’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s causing . . . difficulties between us. I don’t want that. I’ve behaved badly over it really.’

  Perhaps my unsettled hormones cut in then again or it was the fact that it then came home to me that I still had no writing room, and perhaps never would, and the tears took me completely by surprise. I sobbed into my paper napkin, just managing to get out, ‘When I think about it, I’ve always behaved badly towards you.’

  Patrick replaced the soggy paper relic with his handkerchief and then delved into my bag to answer my mobile, which had just started ringing. Whoever it was rang off as soon as he spoke.

  ‘Look, we can’t talk about it now,’ he said quietly in my ear. ‘I must collect the records and then tackle doctors’ surgeries and see if I can find out more about this woman.’

  ‘OK,’ I gulped. ‘Is there anything you’d like me to do?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  I did not ring the estate agency, there seemed little point. Alexandra’s higher offer would be accepted: it was her house now. Fine, I thought, I have no writing room: I would just have to get on with it in the dining room. Either that or give up writing altogether. Telling myself sternly that most authors would exchange their back teeth for a beautiful old room like this to work in, with the French doors giving a view into Elspeth’s garden – it was her creation and I could never lay claim to it while she lived – I sat behind the antique desk that we had brought from Devon and switched on my computer. Yes, this was the situation I would have to get used to, to expect anything else was shirking my family responsibilities.

  I dealt with a few emails, one from the fiction editor of my publisher asking how the latest novel was progressing. I told her absolutely fine but without going into details. I had a contract for this one and the deadline was the end of September: I had hardly started it. OK, dig it out and remind myself what I had written.

  The doorbell rang and it was a man who had come to repair Elspeth’s brand new cooker.

  ‘The Reverend and Mrs Gillard live in the annex,’ I told him. ‘That’s what the address says and there’s a notice on the wall outside which clearly indicates you have to go round to the back of the house to reach it.’

  ‘Can’t I come through this way?’ he enquired, all ready to do just that, huge tool box and all.

  ‘Sorry, no.’ I shut the door in his face.

  Right, the story so far . . .

  I read it through, made a few small changes, added a little more but still had no real idea how it would progress, or for that matter, end.

  There was a tap at the door and Elspeth opened it sufficiently to put her head round.

  ‘Elspeth, you don’t have to knock!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Yes – or rather no – but I’m sure you’re working. It’s just that I’m making sandwiches for a rather late lunch as the cooker repairman’s only just gone, John’s come in and I wondered if you’d like some.’

  I glanced at the clock: an hour and a half had gone by.

  I ended up by having lunch with them as it had seemed
positively churlish to take mine away and eat it on my own. Carrie then found me to say that the school had rung with the news that Katie was not very well and could someone go and fetch her? Vicky would enjoy the ride but would I mind watching over Mark for a while as he had only just gone to sleep and it seemed a shame to disturb him? I could hardly refuse to look after my own son.

  Mark decided to wake up and grizzle as soon as she had gone out so I took him downstairs and carried him around the garden; for some reason he loves looking at trees and leaves moving in the breeze. My mobile rang and I sat down in a little arbour to answer it.

  Whoever it was hung up as soon as I spoke.

  ‘That’s the second time it’s happened today,’ I told Mark. I gazed down at him and he looked up at me. ‘So you’re going to be a garden designer one day? A landscape painter? Or just a man who cuts people’s grass?’

  I could not get the little house in Bath out of my mind. Despite all the horror surrounding it, it just cried out to be restored. I had worked out colour schemes and renovation ideas for the interior as well as plans for both the front and back gardens.

  My mobile rang again.

  ‘The dental records are a positive match,’ James Carrick said. ‘Imelda Burnside. The dentist told us that she’s been his patient, on the NHS, for around two years. He thinks she worked as a carer for the elderly. The checking goes on, of course – Patrick’s doing that – but it doesn’t appear, unless it is the same woman and she lived a double life, that this is anything to do with serious criminals. Only the bastard who killed her, of course.’

  I had only just put the phone back in my pocket when it rang yet again.

  ‘Whatever Alex takes a fancy to, she gets,’ a man’s voice rasped. ‘Remember that.’ The line went dead.