by LJ Ross
“You said she had been…had been…”
The woman buried her face in her hands and sobbed, the harsh sound of it reverberating around the small sitting room. Her mother raised a hand to rub soothing circles over her back, murmuring quietly.
Ryan gave Nina another minute to compose herself.
“Mrs Matthews, is there anything we can get for you?”
The woman scraped her fingers through shoulder-length blond hair, drawing it tightly away from her scalp while she fought to stay lucid.
“No, no, I’ll…I suppose I’ll need to call Krista’s mother,” she whispered. “They didn’t get along but—”
“We can do it, if you prefer?”
She shook her head, bearing down on the waves of grief.
“It will be better coming from me,” she said, looking up at Ryan as if seeing him for the first time. “I seem to recognise you.”
He said nothing and waited for her to make the connection.
“You’re the detective who brought down the cult circle, aren’t you?” Her voice was stronger while she focused her mind elsewhere. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard about it on the news last summer.”
“It’s my job to seek justice for the dead,” Ryan said simply.
Tears swam in the woman’s eyes and she nodded, trying to organise her jumbled mind so that she could help him.
“Krista went to work as usual yesterday. She rang me at lunchtime to say that she might stay for a few drinks with her colleagues to celebrate the long weekend but she’d be home by nine-thirty.”
“Did Krista say where they planned to go?”
“She thought they would head into town, maybe try out the All American Diner.”
Ryan and Phillips exchanged an eloquent look as they thought of the man who owned that particular establishment—a notorious gangster called Jimmy ‘The Manc’ Moffa. He was like a bad penny, turning up in one form or another in their investigations and no amount of man hours had elicited sufficient evidence to charge him with any crime.
“Was that the last time you heard from her?”
“No, I had a text at around nine o’clock to say that she would be heading home soon. I texted back, then put the kettle on.” She looked down at the tissue in her hand, now torn and shredded.
“Would you mind if we looked at the messages?”
Nina gestured to a smartphone sitting on the oak coffee table between them and recited the passcode for him in a dull voice. Ryan spent a minute or so flicking through the text messages and found that the timings matched Nina’s story, with the following text received at 21:08:
Hi babe. Heading home now, will probably get a taxi or walk. See you soon! Love u. xxx
The tone was that of a contented woman, looking forward to returning home to her wife. Nina’s reply, sent a couple of minutes later, was equally loving:
Oky doky. Will put the kettle on! Love you too xx
With a heavy heart, Ryan thanked her and moved on to the next question.
“When did you begin to worry?”
“When it got to ten o’clock and she still wasn’t home,” Nina whispered. “I tried calling her mobile but the number was disengaged. I started to panic, so I rang a couple of her colleagues and they told me she left the pub around quarter past nine, just after she texted me. I tried her number a few more times and then I rang the police.”
Ryan had already listened to a recording of her frantic 999 call.
“They told you to wait a bit longer, to be sure?” It was protocol in Missing Persons cases.
“Yes,” she nodded helplessly. “I was beside myself. I rang mum and dad,” she turned to her mother, who nodded her agreement and continued to rub slow circles on her daughter’s back.
“We came over straight away,” she agreed.
Ryan ran his tongue over his teeth and prepared to ask a trickier question.
“I’m sorry, Nina, I have to ask. Can you account for your whereabouts last night?”
The woman paled but answered without a qualm.
“I finished work at about six. I-I’m an architect, at Vaughn & Rodgers, on Grey Street. You can check with them. I walked home and let myself in at around six-thirty, then put a frozen pizza in the oven. I had a quick shower and then watched television mostly. After…after Krista didn’t come home, I told you what happened then. Mum and dad came over and stayed here all night. I’m sorry, that’s the best I can do.”
Ryan continued to hold her gaze for a moment longer, then nodded his satisfaction. If necessary, they could triangulate her location from her phone usage. Besides, every instinct was telling him this woman was genuine.
“Did your wife have any enemies? Anybody who gave you cause for concern?”
Nina shook her head miserably.
“Nobody. Everybody liked her.”
“Not everybody agrees with gay marriage. Did you experience any bigotry?”
Nina closed her eyes and re-opened them tiredly.
“We were lucky. Friends of ours have had people shout at them in the street, a few scuffles, but that never happened to us. Everybody has always been supportive and I suppose we surround ourselves with good people. I don’t know anybody who could possibly do this to Krista. She is—was—the gentlest woman. All her students loved her and so did I.
“So did I,” she repeated, as the tears began to flow again.
* * *
MacKenzie and Lowerson were getting to grips with the small, close-knit community of Rothbury. They made their way along the high street, taking their time chatting to passers-by and noting down their idle comments concerning the death of Barbara Hewitt. They nodded at appropriate times and tried not to grind their teeth as they heard the same thing, repeated in different ways, from different mouths.
“We’re getting nowhere,” Lowerson burst out eventually. “If I have to hear one more person telling me that Barbara was a miserable woman, God rest her, I’m gonna kick off.”
MacKenzie cast an amused glance in his direction.
“This is the boring part of the job and there’s no escaping it. You got a taste for the action, after all the fun last year. Now everything is back to normal and you’re finding it hard to adapt. Besides, we are getting somewhere. For instance, we’ve confirmed that Barbara didn’t go to the supermarket last Saturday morning as she usually would. Nor did she go to the bakery for her regular croissant at eleven o’clock. Both places said that was highly unusual behaviour, which means our process of elimination is bringing us closer to understanding the dead woman and gives us a better timescale of when she probably died, which the pathologist can hopefully confirm. After our next stop, we’ll start looking more closely at her activities last Friday 18th.
“See? That’s plenty of legwork to be getting along with, Jack.”
Lowerson scuffed his new shoes along the pavement.
“Wasn’t Rothbury the centre of a manhunt, back in 2010 or ‘11?” he asked.
“That it was, Jack,” MacKenzie replied. “There were guns and helicopters and even an ex-England footballer turned up to give us a hand negotiating the suspect’s surrender.”
Lowerson looked around at the quaint buildings and heard only the tinkle of the River Coquet as it passed through the town and made its way through the surrounding hills.
“I can’t believe it,” he said eventually.
“Real life is often stranger than fiction,” she chuckled. “If it’s action adventure you’re looking for, this place isn’t a bad starting point. It’s got a long history of bloody battles, being so close to the old border with Scotland.”
MacKenzie lifted her heavy red hair away from the collar of her suit jacket, surprised to find that she was overheating in the afternoon sun which shone down upon the quiet little northern town.
Lowerson thought briefly of men and women waging their battles on the windy hilltops, then sighed.
“Maybe I do miss a bit of action sometimes,” he confessed. “What do I do about
it?”
“You remember that every suspicious death is important, no matter how it comes about. That’s why we signed up to do this job. We’ll give Barbara Hewitt the same effort, the same concentration and legwork as we would a film star. Death is a great leveller.”
“We don’t know that her death was suspicious at all yet,” Lowerson moaned.
MacKenzie gave him an owlish smile and they stopped in front of a tiny shop built into a long stone building which looked like a former stable. A hand-painted sign declared it to be Sally’s Snips, Barbara’s hairdresser of choice.
“This is the place Carole Dudley was telling us about. Apparently, Barbara came here every Friday morning without fail.”
MacKenzie threw her partner a look of sufferance and pushed open the door, which jingled to announce their arrival.
Inside, the tiny shop had evidently stuck a cheerful two fingers up to the sages and beiges favoured by its neighbours. Clashing, bold colours and reggae music complemented a beachy mural painted on one of the walls and bright spotlighting flooded the room in a jarring yellow light. The shop was brimming with people; so many that MacKenzie concluded that almost the entire resident population must have migrated there for a cut and blow-dry. Every inch of space was in use: styling gadgetry was stuffed into pots and bundled onto shelves; imposing sales racks touted hair-related products and neon cardboard signs advertised ‘2-4-1’ deals to the savvy purchaser. Banks of chairs and washing stations filled the floor space, all occupied by women of a certain age who chattered happily to one another. The remaining walls had been painted a garish shade of magenta and were plastered with faded posters of hair models from the eighties and nineties. Perhaps most eye-catching was the Cliff Richard calendar hanging above the front desk. He was sporting cowboy chaps for the entire month of March.
“Mac,” Lowerson’s throat bobbed up and down. “It’s a bit busy in here, isn’t it? Maybe it would be best if I waited outside—”
“Leave me alone, boyo, and I’ll demote you quicker than you can say ‘short, back and sides’.”
A buxom woman in a glitzy top hurried across the room to greet them.
“Can I help you, lovelies?”
“Ah, we’d like to speak to the manager, please.”
“You’ve found her!” The woman cast an assessing eye over MacKenzie’s mane. “What are you looking to have done, flower? I wouldn’t change that lovely colour, if I were you, but I might think about updating the style, maybe have a few layers cut in.”
MacKenzie opened her mouth and then closed it again.
“We’re from Northumbria CID,” she recovered quickly and retrieved her warrant card. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about Barbara Hewitt.”
The woman—who turned out to be Sally—tutted and shook her head meaningfully.
“Eeh, terrible to hear about what happened to her. Wasn’t it, Gladys?”
One of the elderly ladies sitting nearby with her hair in rollers looked up from where she had been pretending to read a magazine.
“Didn’t come as any great shock to me,” the woman sniffed. “Always was a—”
Miserable woman, Lowerson mouthed silently.
“—very miserable woman,” Gladys finished.
Sally heaved her generous chest.
“I wouldn’t like to say that she was a skinflint, or that she complained about everything. Not now that she’s dead.”
“Of course, we understand,” MacKenzie tucked her tongue in her cheek and decided to let the conversation play out. It was amazing what you could learn if you let people talk.
“She never showed her face at a single one of my coffee mornings,” another woman called out from her reclined position at the basins. “For years, I made the effort to invite her. She never came—not once! I ask you!”
“I know, Penny, I know,” Sally sympathised, then turned back to the two detectives who were watching the byplay as they would a soap opera. “She hardly showed her face anywhere, to be honest, though she always kept her appointments here.”
“Oh? When did she usually come in?”
“Fridays at nine o’clock sharp,” Sally answered without a pause. “She liked to have the first available appointment on Fridays.”
“She never came in on other days?”
“No, never,” Sally replied, then laid a conspiratorial, manicured hand on MacKenzie’s arm. “You have to understand that Barbara was a finicky woman. She had her own ideas about what she liked and woe betide anybody who suggested otherwise.”
Sally pouted, remembering a past altercation.
“How did she like her hair?” Lowerson looked up from his inspection of the calendar. “I’m just curious,” he added quickly.
“I did her hair for years,” Sally leaned against the front counter and turned her assessing gaze onto the young detective, approving of his generous use of hair gel on his voluminous quiff. “She always had the same style: a cropped bob around her face, trimmed neatly, blow dried with a bit of body in the crown. I suggested that she dye it after the greys came in but she wouldn’t have it.”
“Ah. Right.” Lowerson said, inadequately.
“I said to her, ‘Barbara, God wouldn’t have invented hair dye if he didn’t want us to use it’,” Sally finished, to nods of approval from her comrades. “That made her even more irate.”
MacKenzie’s ears pricked.
“Why?”
Sally shrugged.
“Common knowledge that Barbara hated the church. If anything ever came up about religion she always liked to have a good rant about it.”
“She was an atheist?”
“She was certainly something,” Sally snorted. “Rude, for one thing. Only last week, I saw her arguing with Father Healy outside St Agnes’. Now, that man is kindness personified, but I can tell you he looked as if he wanted to wring her neck.”
MacKenzie raised a finely arched brow.
“Last week?”
“Mm hmm,” Sally said, distracted by a tap on the shop window and a wave from one of the locals. “It was right after she left her appointment here, last Friday, because I remember she’d forgotten her purse and I ran after her, to give it back. It felt really awkward, I can tell you.”
She paused for breath and then seemed to remember why they were there.
“Anyway, what did you want to speak to me about?”
* * *
MacKenzie couldn’t say what it was about the town of Rothbury that set her teeth on edge. On the face of it, the setting was idyllic. Its old stone buildings gleamed silver-grey in the late afternoon sun and the landscape undulated in a blanket of green and gold, all the way to the misty outline of the Cheviot Hills even further on the horizon. It was middle-class heaven, populated by people who could afford to live a commutable distance outside of the city. Its strategic position allowed the residents to take advantage of the nearby amenities of larger settlements, not least the swift and personal service of the Northumbria Police Constabulary, whose headquarters lay a few miles further south.
DC Lowerson bade a polite farewell to the hill farmer who had engaged him in a long discussion about the changing economics of his profession and strolled across to where MacKenzie stood waiting for him.
“Feels like it’s been a long day and it’s not even over yet,” he remarked, with a longing glance in the direction of his car.
MacKenzie said nothing at first and continued to watch the townsfolk of Rothbury gathering in groups of two or three to chatter about the ‘goings on’ in their quiet, ordered world. She looked back across at Lowerson. He was thirty but his face was smooth and unlined, his hair cut into a sharp style to match his tailored grey suit and shiny shoes. His eyes were wide and hopeful, betraying a lingering optimism that human beings were essentially good, despite all he had seen to the contrary in his short years working as a murder detective.
MacKenzie envied him that look in his eye; the idealism she had lost somewhere along the way. Still, she
couldn’t bring herself to lie to him, not even to preserve the fairy tale. She thought about saying something flippant to lighten the mood, then she spied a man walking down the high street wearing the quintessential garb of a priest.
“Sally says she saw Barbara having a steaming argument with Father Healy last Friday morning, around quarter to ten. Let’s go and see what the local cleric has to say on the subject.”
* * *
Father Simon Healy was a seasoned man, well used to the various eccentricities of his parishioners. He stood tall and commanding with salt and pepper grey hair smoothed back from a handsome, strong-boned face that belied his advancing years. Though the number of people who would identify themselves as ‘Catholic’ continued to fall nationally, the figures remained strong in his parish thanks in no small part to Healy’s own natural charisma.
He was exercising some of that charm upon a group of local volunteers when he spotted MacKenzie and Lowerson strolling along the pavement towards him and—just for a second—he faltered. He blinked twice but was careful to keep a smile pinned on his face for the benefit of his audience.
The likeness was uncanny, was all he could think, before they were upon him.
“Father Healy?”
“Yes?”
“DI MacKenzie and DC Lowerson, Northumbria CID. I wonder if we might have a word in private?”
His face fell into aggrieved lines and he excused himself from the gaggle of admiring women.
“I was very saddened to hear the news about Barbara.”
He raised a hand to greet a passing local, then tucked it back inside the pocket of his tweed blazer. They began to walk in the direction of the small church of St Agnes and the shelter it would provide.
“How long had you known her?”
He calculated the dates swiftly in his head.
“Goodness, it must be over twenty years. I believe she moved to Rothbury in the mid-nineties to join her parents and help to care for her father, who was ailing at that time. I have been a priest at St Agnes’ since the mid-eighties, although I serve other parishes.” He gave them a rueful smile and added, “Even the clergy has to make cutbacks, in this modern world.”
