THE APOTHECARY’S DAUGHTER an absolutely gripping crime thriller that will take your breath away

by Jane Adams

  Awkwardly, Ray cleared his throat, glancing around to make certain he was unobserved. ‘I’m a bit late,’ Ray said softly. ‘About four months too late, and I don’t even know what you thought about dying, so I can’t even think of any words to say.’

  Unexpectedly, Ray felt tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. He wiped them away with the back of one large hand, then got to his feet hurriedly before any more should fall.

  ‘Better to be busy,’ he told himself, allowing his mind to drift on to other things, like what he would need to renovate Mathilda’s garden and how he should find out who cleaned the cottage and that he should contact his solicitor and tell him whether or not he wanted to live in the cottage or to sell. The list went on and on.

  Feeling impatient again, he turned sharply and walked back towards the village to buy the other things he needed, promising himself that he’d call the solicitor as soon as he got home and then make a start on the garden.

  Home. It was funny but Ray found he was already thinking of the cottage in that way. He’d have to add that to his signs of normality list. It sounded like a good word to add.

  * * *

  It took longer than Ray had anticipated to get back, through the village. Everyone he met seemed to know who he was and want to stop and talk. To ask if he planned to stay and how he was feeling now. It was both gratifying and exhausting. He answered them as best he could, told anyone who asked that he might well live in the cottage and tolerated their reactions to his scars. He had grown used, but not resigned, to the whole gamut of reactions from outright disgust to sideways embarrassment. People here were no different. Some made an obvious effort to look straight at him, as though overanxious to show that the way he looked didn’t interest them. Others shuffled their feet and looked anywhere but directly at Ray, making him want to turn their heads forcibly so that their eyes met his.

  It was almost eleven by the time Ray got back to his cottage. Someone was singing as he opened the front door. At first he thought it must be coming from outside the cottage, perhaps from the churchyard beyond. But, no. The ardent strains of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, sung with more gusto than skill, were echoing happily from his own kitchen.

  Ray’s first impulse was to creep silently to the fireplace and clasp the largest of the fire irons. He replaced it immediately. Burglars didn’t generally announce their presence by singing in their victims’ kitchens. Instead, he crossed the room, shouted loudly enough to register over the noise and opened the kitchen door.

  ‘Hello. Who’s there?’

  The woman, busily arranging flowers at this kitchen table, turned with a bright smile. ‘Well, hello there. You must be Ray.’

  ‘Er, yes.’ He felt more than a little taken aback at finding himself on first-name terms with this unknown woman. He found his hands in hers, both of them being shaken enthusiastically and had the strong notion that he’d only just escaped an equally effusive hug.

  ‘Evie Padget,’ she announced by way of introduction. ‘Used to clean for your aunt.’

  ‘Oh,’ he managed, beginning to make sense of the situation. ‘You, er, you must be the one who cleaned the place up for me.’

  She nodded, beaming. ‘Not that it needed much doing, love, tried to keep it nice for you, we did. I’ve been in once a week, regular as ever since your auntie died. Be a shame, I said, really a shame to let the place go and you not fit to take over.’

  She had released his hands now and was bustling about unwrapping his shopping and putting it away. ‘Ah!’ she pronounced with great satisfaction. ‘You’ve got yourself a kettle. Now I’ll just boil it out for you, then we can do it up again and have a nice cup of tea.’

  Ray stared, knowing he’d been well and truly invaded, though the sheer enthusiasm with which she greeted him made it difficult to take offence.

  Evie had filled the kettle, plugged it in and turned back towards Ray, who stood like a socially inept child lost at some grand occasion. She smiled beatifically, clucked her tongue at him and came over for a closer look.

  ‘My, but you made a mess of yourself!’ she said, contemplating the scarring on his hands and face, her tone and gestures just those she might have used for the same child when it fell down in the mud and spoiled its party clothes.

  ‘Be able to do much more about it, will they?’ She pulled out a chair, gestured Ray to sit down and began to take cups and saucers from the cupboard.

  ‘They don’t know yet,’ he said, then more defensively, ‘they’ve done a good job so far.’

  She nodded, found the sugar bowl and filled it, making him unaccountably ashamed that he’d used sugar directly from the bag that morning.

  ‘Hard things to treat, burns are,’ she said as she unhooked the kettle and poured the water away before refilling it again. ‘You should always boil the kettle out before you use it the first time. Yes, a hard thing to treat,’ she went on before he had the chance to interrupt. ‘I had a sister worked at the county general. Works in a typing pool out at Edgemere now.’ She paused to plug the kettle back in. ‘Took retraining,’ she added and looked at Ray as though to ensure he understood the importance of that. ‘Always said that burns were the worst thing to treat. You’d see people come in, half their legs hanging off and they’d be out again, all stitched up in no time. Burns though, take months, they do.’

  Ray found himself caught between an impulse to tell her that he knew that already and a strong urge to laugh. Neither seemed appropriate. Instead he asked, ‘She was a nurse, was she, your sister?’

  Evie laughed. ‘Dear me, no. She cleaned the wards, before she took retraining. She did one of these back-to-working courses and ended up fiddling with a VDU all day. Wouldn’t do for me, though. I’ve got enough to do to keep me busy here.’

  It sounded like an invitation and Ray responded to it.

  ‘What do you do then?’ he asked.

  Evie beamed at him and then got up to make the tea. ‘Well, for a start I go on the school bus every morning. Closed our local one down, they did. Said there weren’t enough children to warrant keeping it going.’

  She paused long enough to set the teapot on the table and sit down once more. ‘We keep the playgroup open. I help out there as well three mornings a week. It’s supposed to be three to fives, but we let the younger brothers and sisters stay as well. I mean, most of the mums stay and help so why not?’

  She looked at him as though expecting contradiction. Ray mumbled a response and Evie seemed satisfied enough to carry on. ‘Then there’s some of the old people can’t get out as much as they’d like so I do a bit for them, and of course there’s Mr Padget to look after, my husband, you know.

  ‘You’re pretty busy then,’ he said. Her sudden switch to formality when speaking about her husband had taken him by surprise. It was something he associated with his parents’ generation and he doubted Evie Padget was more than a dozen years older than himself.

  She was telling him about her children — four of them — and their children, and Ray found himself caught up in the essential trivia of the various generations of the Padget clan. He hoped he was making all the right noises at all the right moments and he couldn’t have been doing too badly because eventually Evie turned a smiling face towards him and invited him to return the compliment.

  ‘You didn’t know your aunt that well, did you?’

  Ray shook his head. ‘No, I’m sad to say, I didn’t. Life seemed to get busier as I got older and I’m afraid Mathilda was one of those things I didn’t make time for.’

  She gave him a sympathetic look. ‘It’s a pity, that,’ she told him solemnly. ‘I think you two would really have liked each other.’

  For a moment Ray thought she was going to probe more deeply and found himself frantically searching through his memories for anecdotes that would in some way match Evie’s. He guessed her appetite for the scraps of other people’s lives would be voracious. To his surprise, though, she got to her feet, lifted their teacups and placed
them in the sink and began to gather herself together ready to leave.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I must be going.’ She smiled at him again as though to assure him that she bore him no malice for his neglect of Mathilda.

  ‘We’ll keep the same arrangement I had with your aunt, shall we? Just a couple of hours, two mornings a week. You’ll find her account book in the right-hand desk drawer. I’ve already made out a new column for myself, just the way I used to. Had to up the rate a little bit of course, but you’ll still find me very reasonable.’ She bent towards him confidentially. ‘Don’t feel you have to discuss it now, just do what your aunt did and leave what you owe me on the table in an envelope.’ She smiled again, her pale blue eyes crinkling happily. ‘So nice to have someone living here again.’

  Feeling somewhat relieved and not a little confused, Ray escorted her to the door. She turned on the way out and laid a plump freckled hand on Ray’s arm. ‘She wasn’t lonely, you know. She had a lot of friends, a lot of interests. Mathilda wasn’t the kind to hang around waiting for people to come to her.’ She patted his arm and departed, marching briskly down the street, calling her good mornings to anyone in sight.

  Ray withdrew gratefully into the tiny living room, looking around him again at Mathilda’s domain, not certain whether he felt comforted or saddened by Evie Padget’s last statement.

  Chapter Three

  Ray had exhausted himself in the garden that afternoon, weeding out what he hoped were weeds, digging up the more open patches of ground and tying the yellow roses back onto hastily patched-up trellis.

  Evening should have found him wanting his bed, but it hadn’t. The unaccustomed exercise had woken his body to an extent he knew he would pay heavily for later, stimulating a mood of restlessness that made it hard for him to settle.

  He’d switched on the television — Mathilda had never bothered with anything more than a badly tuned portable — and spent the best part of an hour trying to coax a less than snowy image onto the small screen. Then having produced something watchable, lost interest and looked for yet another diversion.

  He’d found it in Mathilda’s desk.

  In one of the drawers were receipts, bills and the like from the two years previous to his aunt’s death. Ray fingered them thoughtfully, noticing that they were kept in date order and clipped carefully together, like with like. He’d never thought of Mathilda as being finicky, visits to her home had always been relaxed affairs. But ordered, yes, there had always been the sense of that. It was strange trying to get to know her like this.

  A search through the other drawers discovered letters, a few photographs, postcards and other oddments. Ray skimmed these briefly then put them aside, feeling like an intruder. He’d spent his working life poking about in other people’s concerns, strange that this should feel so odd, so different.

  The centre of the desk hinged down to provide a writing table and revealed an assortment of pigeonholes and tiny drawers. Briefly, Ray allowed himself the childish pleasure of wondering about secret drawers and hidden recesses. His fingers probed and poked excitedly at anything that looked at all likely but he found nothing but assorted stationery and out-of-date stamps. He gave up, turned his attention to the larger cupboards that flanked either side of the central drop-down panel. Both were locked. Keys? He’d seen them somewhere. One of the tiny drawers. He found the right key at the third attempt and opened the cupboard. Formal papers, deeds to the house, solicitors’ letters. Making a mental note to have a proper look at these later, he turned his attention to the second door. The key turned smoothly and the door swung back. Ray reached inside and withdrew the top one of about a dozen identical red volumes.

  Mathilda’s journals. He’d forgotten about them, though he’d seen these little red books often enough on his visits here. He remembered asking her about them, what they were, why she wrote in them. Remembered her answer.

  ‘So that I can keep things fresh in my mind.’

  Possessed of that subtle arrogance of childhood that needs no help to recall the important things, he hadn’t understood then. Now though, as an adult, for whom selected lapses of memory had become part of his daily conditioning, he thought he did.

  Reverently, feeling something like a thief, he took them out and laid them on the rug in front of the fire. Then sat, staring uncertainly at them as though daring himself to look inside, poke around in the private thoughts of this woman who had, he felt, already given him so much more than he had ever earned.

  He put off the inevitable by making coffee, standing in the doorway and staring at the bland, unadorned red covers while waiting for the kettle to boil. He made his coffee strong, then, on impulse made himself a flask of it for later. He had the feeling that it was going to be very late before he took himself to bed. He added a shot of whisky for good measure, then sat down and began to read.

  * * *

  The man’s sandy hair was stained a brassy yellow by the sodium light. He had been standing on the towpath for the better part of the last hour and his coat collar was turned up against the increasing chill coming off the water. Ten minutes ago it had begun to rain. Light rain that seemed like nothing and soaked through everything. It had set the man shuffling and fidgeting, made him hunch his shoulders and dive his hands deeper into his pockets. Sitting in the warmth of the unmarked car, Josephs made a bet that their man would soon give up his vigil and head for home.

  ‘Who do you think he’s waiting for?’ Peterson asked for the fourth time in the hour.

  ‘Buggered if I know. Whoever it is, they’ve a crap idea of timekeeping.’

  Peterson nodded and poured black coffee from a Thermos flask. ‘Want some?’

  ‘God, no. I’m sloshing.’ Josephs shifted awkwardly to ease the pressure on his overfull bladder. ‘I bloody hope he moves soon.’

  The factory car park backed onto the towpath, giving them a clear view of the sandy-haired man. They had parked up in the deep shadows close to the factory wall, their outline broken further by the chain-link fence and winding stems of late bindweed that clambered through it. A gap in the fence, fifty yards away, gave access to the canal and further down they could just glimpse the lock gates and the North Gate pub that stood on the bridge above. Their man had his back to them, gazing fixedly at the bridge as though expecting someone to leave by the back door of the pub and come down the path towards him. Only occasionally did he glance the other way towards the new restaurant and the Victorian warehouses, now redeveloped as expensive flats, set beyond the twin bridges where the river curved and almost joined the canal.

  It was, Josephs thought, a grim place to be standing alone at night.

  ‘He’s moving,’ Peterson said. ‘Must have decided his friend is a no-show.’

  ‘Thank fuck for that.’ Josephs lifted the radio to his mouth, ready to alert those on the bridge that their target was headed towards them. Then he stopped.

  ‘Where the hell did he come from?’

  Their target seemed as surprised as they were. The second figure wore a full-length raincoat and was more heavily built. He must have come from the direction of the Weir Head restaurant, their view of that section obscured by the corner of the factory wall.

  ‘Recognize him?’ Peterson asked.

  Josephs shook his head, mentally reviewing the pictures in the file. ‘Something familiar about him, though.’ He radioed the watchers close to the bridge who might have a better view.

  ‘Our man doesn’t look happy.’

  The two of them were arguing, the man with sandy hair raising his arm and gesturing angrily. The man in the raincoat was more impassive, his demeanour quieter. He placed a hand on the other’s arm as though trying to calm him down.

  ‘Wish we were close enough to hear.’

  ‘We move now, they’ll spot us.’

  The two men had begun to walk away towards the Weir Head, disappearing from view behind the factory wall. They were still arguing.

  Josephs radioed those on the bri
dge. ‘Do you still have them in view?’

  ‘That’s a yes. They’re walking slowly towards the restaurant.’

  ‘We’ll wait until they get to the bridge over the weir then we’ll follow them,’ Peterson said.

  Josephs nodded. At that point the two men would be just out of sight of those watching from the North Gate bridge and far enough ahead not to notice anyone following. He relayed the instruction to the other team, then got out of the car and waited for the go. When it came, the radio seemed overloud in the still air.

  ‘Target has been joined by a third man. Repeat, a third man. He’s standing in shadow, but it looks to be an IC1 male, medium height, wearing a dark jacket. Damn, we’ve lost them at the bend.’

  ‘Roger that.’ He nodded to Peterson. ‘Come on.’

  The two men walked silently along the towpath. There were no lights on this stretch, but here, close to the heart of the city, it was never truly dark and they moved confidently enough, pausing only at the bend where the canal diverted away from the river at the second bridge. It was here that the second team must have lost sight of the three men.

  The towpath narrowed beneath the bridge forcing Josephs and Peterson to walk in single file and duck beneath the arcing brickwork. Up ahead, the towpath was empty. Peterson pointed at the flight of steps beside the road bridge just beyond the Weir Head restaurant.

  ‘Must have gone up there.’

  ‘Bloody shifted then.’ Josephs scanned the bridge. There were a few pedestrians, a group of four crossing towards the restaurant and a second, larger group headed for the student flats. He had a clear view perhaps a quarter-mile further up the towpath, that section being redeveloped and better lit, but no sign of anyone. Then, ‘Shit!’

  ‘What?’ Peterson followed his gaze. ‘Bloody hell. I’ll go in.’

  ‘Like fuck you will. The canal’s choked with weeds and there’s six foot of mud at the bottom of it.’