by Clare Curzon
Flat boards balanced on decorators’ trestles had been set up and covered in sheets of clean newsprint. On them a fire investigation officer was developing an indexing system for samples of debris as each layer was exposed. To Zyczynski’s unpractised eye there was little to distinguish one blackened chunk of material from another, but those bending over them were warming to the task. Under their instruction she was willingly pressed into donning latex gloves and bagging exhibits as labelled.
At a few minutes before midday a dark van appeared and a trolley was wheeled close to the excavation. It was still another half hour before the body could be lifted on, lightly covered with green plastic sheeting. The more usual mortuary bag was unsuitable due to the fragile state of the charred flesh.
The Coroner’s Officer informed Zyczynski that Professor Littlejohn was week-ending in North Wales, but he had been in touch with the pathologist by telephone. A post-mortem examination was already fixed for 10am next morning.
‘I’ll let the Boss know,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be attending, but he may want to look in too.’ She turned to the Fire Chief. ‘Is there any hope of a fire report to read along with the Prof’s findings?’
‘How can you doubt it?’ His sarcasm wasn’t wasted on her. He cast his eyes upwards on the lookout for aircraft. ‘Trouble with these pigs is you must duck when they’re flying over,’ he said drily. ‘No. It’ll take Divisional experts a day or two. But one thing I can tell you, off the record.’
He looked across to fresh plastic screens being set up. ‘We’re fixing a roof over where we brought the body out. That’s certainly the location where the fire first started.’
He sucked in his cheeks and added a cautious proviso. ‘One of the places it started, anyway.’
‘Thanks. The Boss’ll want to know. We’ll keep that under our hats till it’s official.’
She supposed she should go back and check on Mrs Dellar and give what comfort she could, but there was no answer when she phoned the house at Chorleywood. A second call, to the Greythorpe Hotel, confirmed that she wasn’t there either. So perhaps she was lying low at the Monkey Puzzle pub, among friends. Best let it ride until tomorrow. The last thing the woman needed was to have police bothering her in her grief. Time enough when they’d identified the body.
With the departure of the mortuary van, Z had a word with the constable left on duty and phoned base explaining she could be reached at home, where she’d be writing up her report. Then, thankful that she had avoided Aunt Alice’s tea party, she turned the car towards Ashbourne House.
The move into her apartment there was recent enough to bring a comfortable glow at the prospect of relaxing over a chilled jug of crushed lemon, and mooching around in a state of undress with the windows open to a cooling breeze off the river. The early morning’s haze had turned by noon into a cloudless heat that built by the hour, making her grateful she’d exchanged city streets for open fields.
Circling the house, she saw a green sports model parked by the open door to her garage, so Max was here. He wasn’ t in her flat, which meant he’d be downstairs with Beattie, catching up with gossip on the other residents.
Two of the seven flats were for resale since the double murder* in the house the previous winter. Potential buyers had visited and been put off by the crime’s bad odour. Other visitors with a taste for scandal had for a while been attracted by the notoriety, roamed the rooms and gazed their morbid fill before going off furnished with a gloating subject for social chat. But by now even that interest had waned.
Only the ground floor flat opposite Beattie’s had received a second visit and an offer from a bank manager impressed by the exceptional security arrangements. Z had grown accustomed to the apartment opposite her own remaining empty. Until now the suicide jump from its balcony had outweighed the low price which the estate agent had twice felt obliged to reduce.
Z, untroubled by ghosts, since her work desensitized her to such fancies, welcomed silence across the landing. Now, having showered and changed, she prepared to go down and discover why Max hadn’t instantly appeared when her car swept past Beattie’s windows.
* A Meeting of Minds.
As she double-locked her door she paused at the unaccustomed sound of music. An old Eric Clapton recording, surely coming from the unoccupied apartment. And the door stood invitingly ajar.
Closer, she listened for a moment, could detect no movement, then knocked quietly. She heard chair legs slide against woodblock flooring and someone padded in sock soles from the direction of the drawing-room.
‘Hello, my sweet,’ Max greeted her, grinning like a monkey. ‘Come in and tell me what you think.’
The room was transformed. Gone were the silks and velvet-swagged drapes, the peachy creams and thick pile carpet. Exposed wood flooring gleamed like pale honey. Here and there the bare walls had been daubed with tester shades of matt paint.
‘You’re not serious,’ she accused him.
‘It’s an idea I had. It came over me gradually, after I suggested to Dr Fenner it would make a better sale if it was brought up to date, with all the flimmery flammery removed.’
‘When did you see Dr Fenner?’ she demanded, suspicious.
‘A couple of weeks back. I had a job to do in Cambridge. He dined and wined me in College like a prince.’
‘And you kept it under your hat! You’re telling me he gave you carte blanche to take over the redecoration?’
‘And have all the furniture removed. Yes, with a view to considering its potential for myself. I am sometimes allowed to make decisions on my own, you know.’
He was all wide-eyed innocence. ‘I still haven’t quite made up my mind. If you’ve any objections to me as a neighbour, naturally I’ll call it off, hoping he likes the alterations.’
She walked past him to sit on one of the wide windowsills. ‘It’s unexpected.’
‘You don’t have to say straight off …’
‘I thought things were fine the way they were, that’s all.’ She sounded uncertain. Then, ‘You want to move your toothbrush out, I take it?’ It was an attempt to sound unaffected. A dab at weak humour.
‘Oh, I could just about afford a second toothbrush. And the lease will be up on the Pimlico place in September. The truth is I’m not sure I want to go on living in London. But I can’t impose on you all the time. Being close neighbours seemed the best way out.’
But not as close as being with her in the same apartment. She seemed to hear warning bells. He was making it sound like building something more permanent between them, but at the same time it was a physical distancing. Wasn’t it?
‘I like having you drop in,’ she told him.
‘But I need somewhere permanent as well. If I give up in Pimlico, this would suit me well. The Prof isn’t asking its full value. A snip, you might say. And who knows, you might get to like seeing me on an almost daily basis. As a run-up to taking me on as a full-time husband.’
She couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘Infiltration?’ ‘Something like that. I shall go on proposing, of course, if I see any signs of your relenting.’
‘Ah, that reminds me,’ she said brightly, glad of a sideways shift of subject. ‘We’ve been sent a wedding invitation by Paula Musto. It’s for next Saturday. Short notice, owing to Angus getting special leave from duty in Kosovo. They’re taking a four day honeymoon in Scotland, then he has to go back and finish his commitment out there.’
‘So he’s pulled it off at last! There’s hope for me yet.’
‘We don’t have to act like lemmings,’ she said sharply and caught the flicker of some emotion cross Max’s face. ‘I’m sorry, sorry, sorry. You know how it is. It’s just the idea of marriage, being hobbled; the sameness, the dreariness that must inevitably creep in with familiarity. I don’t want that ever to happen to us.’
He stood there considering her, his head tilted to one side. Then with an index finger he pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose in the familiar way. And just the
n she felt familiar wasn’t such a bad thing. Quite endearing, really.
‘You’ve witnessed too many bad alliances,’ he said sombrely. ‘I have too, but I believe we could make something good out of it. However, I see that now’s not the right moment to start asking you again. Meanwhile, how do you feel about my taking on this flat? As a half-measure.’
‘You must do as you wish,’ she granted ruefully ‘As you said, you’re sometimes allowed to make decisions of your own.’
‘But your reaction is part of what I have to take into account.’
Up until then they hadn’t touched. Now she rose and went across to him, put her arms round his neck and kissed his cheek. ‘I can’t imagine anyone I’d rather have living next door.’
This was his cue for kissing her more thoroughly. From which he finally extricated himself, took a deep breath and demanded in mock-husbandly tones, ‘So, where’s me dinner?’
Back in her own apartment, while she dealt with the steaks he’d left in her fridge, and Max dribbled vinaigrette into tossed salad, she explained what had taken her into work on a Sunday.
‘Tomorrow,’ she added, ‘DI Salmon’s back from leave and the reign of terror will recommence. Meanwhile we’re free to make hay or whatever. That’s my life. So how was your week?’
Settling to an evening of quiet companionship began to lessen her unease. Nothing appeared to have changed. Max was his normal gently droll self delivering anecdotes of newspaper life in the city, and if the alarm bells still sounded they seemed to have become less urgent and more distant.
She had as good as told him to go ahead with his plans to move in next door. If it meant that her own apartment threatened to become sadly empty, at least it wasn’t immediate. He was here now and would be staying on tonight. She switched off all interest in the job to concentrate on the present.
DS Beaumont was shrugging on his jacket to take the dog for its evening walk – euphemism for a pint at the local. When the mobile phone buzzed in his pocket he knew in his bones it was work. And of the worse kind, because DI Walter Salmon had flown home from his holiday in Brittany and required his immediate company for a visit to Mrs Kate Dellar.
It could surely have waited for tomorrow. But, on the other hand, it was himself the DI had preferred to call in, and not Z. Any opportunity to get a step ahead of his rival DS had to be seized. So how far had Salmon acquainted himself with the case as it stood? He must have dropped in at the incident room already being set up, and helped himself to such reports as were logged.
Brought that much up-to-date, the DI had phoned Mrs Dellar and made an appointment, catching the lady as she returned home, actually walking in through the door. Wrong-footed, she’d not had the wit to insist that a meeting was inconvenient.
Beaumont returned the basset hound to the kitchen and flung the end of its lead to his son with suitable instructions. Then he walked to the road’s end and waited to be picked up by the Great Uncouth himself.
He found Salmon unchanged but for a hectic band of scorched skin across cheeks, nose and throat, which ceased abruptly on his brow where some kind of headgear had been pulled down for protection. Beaumont pondered its likely nature: cricket umpire’s panama hat; baseball cap; beret? No, he looked more the old-fashioned knotted-handkerchief type, paddling on the sea’s edge with rolled-up trouser legs and twanging red braces; the sort of belly-bulging, middle-aged man you used to see on saucy postcards, surrounded by fat women and jeering kids. However inappropriate that image, he’d been keen to return a day early to duty.
At Mrs Dellar’s cottage, while they waited for her to answer the doorbell, Beaumont sized up the other man. He was big. The width of his shoulders and the short car coat made a cube of him. The head on top was of much the same shape, with gingerish fair hair close-cropped like a Victorian convict’s. His large, knobbly features were all squashed into the lower three-eighths of his face, and the coarse-lipped mouth stretched almost the full width of his heavy jaw.
Not a pretty sight, but the man himself didn’t appear to hold that opinion. He had, in fact, a mighty conceit of himself.
He hadn’t given any hint of his immediate intentions. Perhaps it was his idea of a charm offensive, familiarising himself with the main players before the game got properly under way, and impressing bystanders with his being in control of the case.
It might not come amiss to warn him. ‘The lady’s very upset, sir,’ Beaumont ventured, deliberately avoiding the term ‘guv’ which was reserved for the absent Angus Mott. ‘She seems the sensitive sort.’
Salmon’s eyes flicked sideways to put him in his place. ‘All the better to gauge her reactions,’ he said shortly. Like Little Red Riding-hood’s wolf, Beaumont noted, and was visited by a second unflattering image of his senior officer, in a granny’s flannelette nightie, peering over the bedclothes.
The door opened. Kate Dellar stood there, white and strained. ‘Is there any news?’ she asked anxiously.
There was no attempt to lead her indoors, to soften the blow.
‘I have to report that a body has been found, ma’am’, Salmon announced baldly. ‘At the scene of the fire. A post-mortem is to be carried out tomorrow and we can tell you more then. ’
It took a moment for it to reach her. Beaumont had time to step forward and catch her as she swayed.
6
Refreshed by Sunday’s family outing, Superintendent Mike Yeadings had returned home to find three messages on his answerphone. The first assured him that his DI, Walter Salmon, was returning for the Larchmoor Place case and would attend the post-mortem on a body found at the scene of the fire. The second was from DS Zyczynski, bringing him up to date on the findings and giving the time of next day’s post-mortem as 10am. The third produced Professor Littlejohn himself, cheerfully complaining about his long weekend being curtailed.
‘I can’t get a decent fly on my rod but you have to drag me back by the short and curlies, eh?’
In view of the pathologist’s increasingly bald pate Yeadings found this barely apt, and smiled at the man’s deviousness. He hadn’t missed the weather news about torrential rain in North Wales giving rise to flash floods. Under the circumstances it wasn’t surprising if Littlejohn had, so to speak, found better fish to fry nearer home.
It appeared that matters were satisfactorily in hand for the next day.
On Monday Kate Dellar awoke in her own bed to the sound of light rain. After last night’s appalling news she had felt emotionally wrung out. Walls and ceiling threatened to close in, crushing from her the ability to breathe. When the two detectives had left she leaned, stifled, by her open bedroom window and tried to suck in the last of the day’s used air. The tablets she’d taken – twice the normal dose – did nothing to help, only made her less able to cope. When eventually she stumbled to her bed she had left the house exposed, doors unlocked and casements gaping. And now, while it continued to rain, there seemed no point in doing anything about it. She supposed she would mop up the water later. If it ran down and damaged the wallpaper – too bad.
She experienced no sudden shock of memory returning. It had been with her all night, blackly threaded in and out of fantastic dreams, situations where she had been lost, or searching for others lost, always devastated and alone. The twins had appeared fleetingly on the edge of her vision, as young children oddly diminished in size, running handin-hand into a dark tunnel or between close-packed, twisted trees where she couldn’t follow, paralyzed with horror.
Now, with the menace of a new day, she wearily supposed habit would make her get up, shower, dress. Then what?
Wait, perhaps, for the next blow to fall: for the last of her family to be taken from her.
It wasn’t as if she could do anything. Nor had she the energy to try. Fighting demands in her head all night, for the moment she was incapable of more than staring up at the shadowed ceiling.
Above the patter of raindrops against glass she was aware of tyres hissing on wet tarmac as the morning r
ush-hour built. Then a new sound emerged, a bruising thud of heavy plastic against metal, followed by a torrent of tinkling.
Monday: so lorries had come to empty the bottle banks, a row of sturdy green containers with gaping mouths, labelled clear, green, green and brown, in which local residents posted their empties for recycling.
At least the sound had human implications. Despite her torpor she made it to the window, rested her elbows on the wet sill and leaned out. Rain fell cool and soft on her hair and forehead. Through the sparse branches of her neighbour’s young pear tree she glimpsed the bulky lifting device in the public car park. As she watched, the mechanical arm swivelled, angled, and gently lowered the first of the green containers to the ground. The grab released it, groped for the next container, slowly raised it several feet, tipped it and delivered a further shower of glass into the open rear of the transporter. This second load sounded different, less shattered, as though the green glass, mostly wine bottles and usually more robust than the clear shards, had poured out whole.
Wine bottles. She visualized again rank on rank of shelving in the Larchmoor Place cellars, as she’d first been shown them years ago. Old Frederick, Michael’s father and dead for fifteen years, had fancied himself a wine connoisseur. He’d put claret down to mature as an investment. She wondered how much of his treasure remained – had remained until this disastrous fire. Maybe a considerable amount. Carlton hadn’t been unusually self-indulgent, and seldom brought up the best stuff for such entertaining as he and Claudia went in for.
If green bottles were so much more robust, maybe some of the Dellar collection, close-packed and horizontal in their sturdy shelving, could even now have survived the upper storeys’ collapse. Or would they be long gone, sold on by Claudia like the best of the library, to cover expenses in her and Carlton’s final years?