Not a Very Nice Woman

by John Eider

The next day was far from the rush Cori foresaw. After a straight five hours of report writing, form checking and statement rereading (for several of those he’d spoken to had since come in to go on record) Grey found himself hitting lunchtime; and what for him was a time of day that, with nothing happening to distract or excite him, could prompt a fall into a mid-afternoon lull. Cori was in a similar situation along the corridor with her own pile of paperwork.

  Throughout the day new information had come in: reports on the plant matter found around Stella’s injuries proved inconclusive; though the walking stick was definitely covered in blood, and there seemed no way it wouldn’t be found to be Charlie Prove’s. However, in a shock move it later appeared that none of this fact checking might prove vital after all, a visit by Superintendent Rose to see Patrick Mars, with his solicitor at his bedside, bringing the news that Mars would sign a confession if it saved his daughter Esther and second wife Ludmila from the trouble of a court appearance.

  Perhaps Mars had loved the women in his life all along, pondered Grey; before realising that of course he had, it was letting this love show through the gauze of suspicion and distrust cast by his father that had always been the problem, and the confusion caused by this inner-conflict that had seen him lash out so violently.

  He wrote a note of thanks to the Kehoes, wishing Stacie the best with her studies; and made a mental note to speak with and thank Campbell Leigh next time his business with the Hills Estates Community Forum brought him to the station. The archive file on the killing of Eunice Prove sixteen years ago was also on his desk, to be looked at in detail when time allowed.

  Grey then rang Andrea the solicitors’ secretary to make an appointment with Raine Rossiter for any time she was free the next week; for there was business in that office that he felt could still use going over. He worried later though that Raine might interpret his appointment as a wish to see her for herself. This wouldn’t have bothered him so much had he not from somewhere gained the impression that however married she may be, she would be quite willing to forget this fact while it remained inconvenient. He meant no offence to the woman, rejecting this imagined possibility, she was simply not his type.

  He stopped and examined his feelings here: how was she not his type? He couldn’t say, in fact imagined she might be quite jolly company, once they were far enough from town and sure that no one she knew was seeing. Perhaps he simply didn’t want the tangled situation; and realising how free he suddenly felt not to be having to manage such a clandestine affair brought a wave of relief that felt like a man trapped below ground breathing fresh air.

  He realised he had played this whole drama out in his mind based on nothing, and was suddenly embarrassed at what she might think in their meeting could she read his mind. He’d also assumed she would have noticed him that way to begin with; and anyway, for any woman to believe he had engineered a situation to meet her again assumed he was any good at making such moves.

  He knew why he was thinking such speculative things, and it was down to no greater fact than that of his mind being again free to do so. The end of ‘the Mars case’, as he had begun to name it in his mind, was a mental liberation, for him and all his colleagues: a freedom from every thought, every decision, potentially meaning someone’s life and death. Soon he would have to take up the less-pressing cases put aside for this emergency: the minor frauds and pub punch-ups, the family feuds and smashed car headlights. He would face these Monday. Meanwhile, was there anything left pressing re: Mars?

  Sifting through the paperwork on his table, something came to hand that reminded Grey of a conversation he had had earlier with his boss.

  ‘There is still the question of what to do with your friend Waldron,’ was how Superintendent Rose had put it during their briefest of chats after his returning from Mars’s bedside. ‘The way I see it, it all rather comes down to this letter he left you.’

  The police had little room for relativity in their operations: a crime was a crime, their job simply to investigate and apprehend. Yet what hung over the Super’s desk between them that morning was the question: what harm had the self-styled ‘unlikely avenger’ of Stella and Charlie’s memory actually achieved?

  Rose spoke the unspoken, ‘Your letter makes it clear he meant to kill Mars, all that stuff about landing “one lucky blow”. Without it we don’t even know that that screwdriver wasn’t just in his pocket when he went out, or that he was doing any more than – I don’t know – conducting his own ham-fisted investigations at Stella’s old house.’

  ‘Before getting into a scrape with Mars?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Grey felt the notepaper still in his pocket where it had been for twenty-four hours, it having felt more personal than anything he’d want to log as evidence. In truth, he’d put off the decision.

  ‘You’re offering him a way out of trouble, sir?’

  ‘How old is he now,’ asked Rose. ‘Late Sixties? You’re fine after your knock-out drops, so’s that housekeeper I’d imagine.’

  ‘Duty Manager.’

  ‘Quite. And after seeing Mars I don’t think he’d have the gall to claim assault, not with all his deeds weighing heavy on the other side of the scales.’

  The Superintendent continued, ‘You know, this morning Mars seemed really quite placid about it all, now he knows he’ll never see another member of his family ever again.’

  Replaying this talk in his mind reminded Grey that he had meant to go and see Natasha sometime that day, though he remembered now that there weren’t visiting hours again before seven that evening. Picking up the papers that had interested him from the pile, he gathered himself for one last walk to the Cedars.

  To the sound of blackbirds singing in the trees, Inspector Rase walked one last time along Cedars Avenue. The spring had seemed to break through at last, and he held his jacket over his arm. As he arrived at the building he had known only glancingly until three days ago, he took a last look at the frontage as he approached; at its three rows of six large windows, each the portal to the life of a person or couple, and now he could have given you many of the names.

  Top row, end but one, was Stella Dunbar’s room, the first they had been called to; while somewhere on the first floor was Charlie Prove’s, though Grey couldn’t quite place which. Easier was Derek Waldron’s, it being the nearest to the edge of the building that the path and service road ran around, and which Grey now took to bring him to the rear-side and the doors and the dayroom.

  It was a familiar scene that greeted him there, of Ellie and the other orderlies, arms full moving between chairs and tables, and of residents who recognised him by sight now wishing him good afternoon.

  ‘Look who’s here, Derek. I told you they’d be coming to take you away.’ Rachel Sowton was sat at a table in a back corner doing the books. Having gotten to know her a little now, and suspecting her as one of those for whom a streak of irony might be riven through their very soul, Grey recognised how even at a time like this she was working with black humour even as it brought her to within an inch of the anger she must have been feeling towards her old friend.

  Following her gaze as she spoke, Grey saw Derek Waldron sat alone by a window and looking out forlornly. He had taken a battering, still not looking much better yet than he had two days ago slumped in Patrick Mars’s hallway. Barely a part of him that was visible – head, neck, hands – didn’t feature somewhere a bandage, bruise or reddening.

  Grey had made a mental pact with himself on the way there that if Derek was honest enough in the conversation he intended they have, helped him fill in enough of the blanks, then he the Inspector would allow that sincerity to relieve the doubts he had about the decision he already knew he was going to take regarding the letter. Yet now, seeing his state, his boy-told-off demeanour as saddening as his physical injuries (which also mitigated in his favour, it clear his wild adventure of two nights before had brought its own swift punishment) Grey was gripped with an urge to do no more than cheer the
old fellow up; and from that hazy night he’d taken the sleeping draught he remembered when he had seen Waldron at his most enthusiastic, his most animated, his troubles least to the forefront of his mind.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the man as Grey approached.

  ‘Apology accepted. And for the record, I’m only here to talk.’

  Waldron leaned in, whispering, ‘But I drugged you.’

  ‘Which I think you know was a disgraceful liberty.’

  ‘It was stupid, yes, but…’ (Grey watched as the man battled with the memory of actions he could scarcely credit had been his own.) ‘I took the screwdriver, I…’

  ‘…Lunged at someone?’ Grey whispered back. ‘Yes, and an hour later that someone fired a shotgun at a policewoman. You good to walk?’ he resumed full volume. ‘You were telling me before about our town, our buildings. I wonder if you’d take me on a tour?’

  He lit up in recognition, ‘Of the houses?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Rachel from across the room, ‘Get him out in the fresh air a bit, save his moping around indoors.’

  Derek went to find his coat.

  ‘And how are you?’ asked Grey, moving to Rachel’s desk.

  ‘Fine, a bit groggy yesterday. You?’

  ‘The same,’ he answered, though the excitement of the day had quickly burnt it off. ‘And in general?’

  ‘Oh, I could throttle him. And with everything else I’ve got to deal with…’ she gestured with her arms to the table full of papers and accounts. She took a deep breath, ‘Of course I know he meant well, in some hare-brained way. And I’m glad it’s over now.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How is the girl?’ she asked.

  ‘Esther? She’s with her mother.’

  ‘And they really didn’t know?’

  ‘No, but I think the moment Esther did that Stella did too; could work out what Esther had from the letter she’d snatched.’

  ‘Perhaps they’d always known, just needed the facts to tell them?’

  Grey liked the sound of that.

  But Rachel was still thinking of Derek,

  ‘You really can’t take him away. He’s our last original resident now. We’ve lost too many people – you know the Carstairs aren’t coming back either, he needs specialist care.’

  Grey was sad to hear that, Rachel going on,

  ‘We need weight on the Committee, people who can help me run it. I’ve already had Raine on the phone asking what we’re going to do. I’ve called a meeting for next month, but I haven’t even thought about it yet.’

  Grey could see the mantel of Stella’s leadership had fallen on Rachel’s shoulders, whether she wished it or not.

  ‘Of course we’ll give up Charlie’s flat, properly this time. And if the state takes it then the state takes it, their choice of who they sell it to. And then there’s Stella’s flat to sell, and Mrs Cuthbert’s next door; and the Carstairs’ eventually – so much change, it will be good to have the lot of it put to bed.’

  Chapter 29 – The Hills Again