‘This is the south of the house,’ Patterson muttered. ‘Any sun would get lost on its way passing that.’ His face changed as he gazed through the window. It twisted, seeming to gain an energetic malevolence of its own. ‘I used to think you could adjust to anything,’ he said. ‘I was wrong; quite wrong. I tried. For years I tried, but I just couldn’t. She won – in the end. She beat me.’ Without another word he drew the curtains back and the room was again in total darkness. But Spite Hall still managed to intrude.
As he closed the door behind them he again muttered. ‘So Nancy’s dead is she?’ And all three of them must surely have been thinking the same thing: that with Nancy dead Spite Hall could be pulled down.
So the Georgian house could be restored to its dignity, its isolation, and its view. But looking at the bent, tired old man Joanna felt his release had come too late; he lacked the energy, the strength, the health to do anything but sit and wait for his own death in this crumbling mansion.
And although Joanna believed it could have no bearing on his sister’s murder she was compelled to ask it. ‘How did all this happen?’
‘My father,’ Patterson said simply. ‘He had a wicked sense of humour. Left me the house, Nan the land.’
‘But surely …’
‘You’d have to understand my dad. He had a streak of...’ Patterson fumbled for the word, failed to find it. ‘Well, put it like this, Inspector, he liked to put the cat among the pigeons and watch the feathers fly. Only this time, of course, he couldn’t because he was dead. But I reckon while he was dying he must have been chuckling, having a good belly laugh. He knew how Nan felt about this place.’ Involuntarily Joanna glanced around her, at the high-ceilinged hall, at the dirt, the decay. The neglect.
Patterson was watching her. ‘It weren’t always like this,’ he said. ‘Fifty year ago it were grand, just grand. As a child Nan would go strutting around these very rooms playing the part of the great lady. Much good it did her, much good. She wanted to live here more than anything in the world, and all I ever cared about was the land to farm. So what does the old devil do? He leaves me the house and her the land with the condition I was not to sell the place in my lifetime or it reverted to her, and she couldn’t sell the land either; she had to take up residence on some portion of it else I got it.’ He looked up at the ceiling. Joanna could see cobwebs. She had the feeling he could see something quite different: the old man laughing down at him.
Patterson’s eyes returned to them both. ‘He knew I was condemned to stay here. That I couldn’t move.’
And so the seeds had been sown, the stage set carefully by old Mr Patterson. To give his children contention for their entire lives Spite Hall had been built close to the house Nan Lawrence felt she’d been cheated out of. She must have inherited some of her father’s malicious characteristics to have built it so intrusively near.
‘Couldn’t you have come to some agreement? Let her live here, with you, and allow you to manage the land?’
‘You didn’t know Nan,’ Patterson said. ‘There was not a bone in her body that weren’t contentious. Her and my wife.’ Patterson’s face cracked into a smile, ‘like crossed swords they were.’
‘And Nan? She was married?’
‘David. He was a local farmer. Broke by the war. Died soon after. A wreck of a man before he was thirty.’
‘Children?’
‘Me or her?’
‘Both of you.’
‘I got the one son,’ Patterson said grudgingly. ‘Nan never had any. She was married in the war and when David came home, well, let’s just say he weren’t up to it.’
‘And your grandson? The one who lives here. How old is he?’
‘Nineteen.’
Both Mike and Joanna were thinking the same thoughts; the attacks against the widows, the robbery, the violence, the escalation bore the marks of youthful, possibly drug-related crime. They would find it interesting to meet Arnold Patterson’s grandson.
Patterson turned to stare at Joanna and she felt embarrassed. He had read her thoughts, all of them. ‘My grandson’s name is Christian. He has the top floor.’
‘Permanently?’
‘Aye. His mother turned him out so he moved in here. He’ll be upset when he hears about Nan. Fond of the old girl he were. Too fond, if you ask me.’ Patterson swivelled round. ‘It doesn’t do to swim in vats of poison,’ he said.
The statement was so sudden, so unexpected that Joanna was taken aback. She wanted to ask, had Nan Lawrence been such a malignant influence?
‘We’ll need to talk to your grandson.’
‘You’ll have to come back later if you want to speak to him.’ Behind the weariness there was still some fight. ‘Lydia,’ he said.
Korpanski eyed him. ‘Who’s Lydia?’
‘My sister. My younger sister.’ Patterson’s face screwed into a smile. ‘She’ll have a laugh about this.’
Joanna looked at Mike. What a strange, perverted family. Have a laugh?
‘We’ll inform her for you, Mr Patterson. Where does she live?’
‘Quills,’ he croaked. ‘A stupid name for a stupid house. It’s a wooden place, a hut, no more than a shack, near Rudyard Lake, along a track. You tell her, and you watch how she takes it. She’ll laugh, I can tell you.’ With difficulty he straightened his bent back. ‘Now when can we hold the funeral?’
And this was the bit Joanna hated. First of all you inform a family their relative is dead, then you tell them they can’t even have the body for the funeral until the coroner releases it, when the police and the pathologist and the rest of the legal team are convinced every conceivable piece of evidence has been extracted from it. It could take weeks, months, even on rare occasions years, however sympathetic the coroner might be to the family’s needs. As gently as she could she explained to Arnold Patterson that there might be some delay. To her surprise Patterson seemed to grasp the situation quite easily.
He nodded. ‘Will you be wanting me to identify her?’
It crossed Joanna’s mind that contact between brother and sister had been slight, but Patterson was frail and his sister had been badly beaten. Maybe someone else should do the job, someone physically stronger. ‘We usually want a relative, someone who knew her well.’
Arnold Patterson chuckled. ‘Then you’d better have Christian; he said. ‘He’s the only one who knew Nan what you might call well.’
Joanna and Mike moved towards the front door. ‘We’ll come back.’ It was time to leave this old man alone with his emotions, although Joanna was not at all sure what they were.
They had almost reached the front door when music began, thumping out overhead. An unmistakable jungle beat.
‘I thought you said your grandson was out?’ she said sharply.
‘I didn’t say that. I told you earlier he were in. I simply said you’d have to come back if you wanted to talk to him.’ Arnold Patterson was sharper than he looked. ‘He just doesn’t get out of bed until late, keeps different hours from us working folk. He’s a student.’ To Patterson it seemed an answer to everything.
Joanna’s curiosity about young Christian Patterson compounded. Nan Lawrence would have opened the door to her great-nephew, welcomed him in, unsuspecting, returned to her tapestry. She moved away from the door, read Mike’s dark eyes and knew he was tracking along the same lines as herself.
‘I think we’ll just pop upstairs and say hello to him.’
Patterson would have liked to stop her, they could both see that. He lifted his arms up then dropped them again, in the end turning his back on them. ‘I won’t come up,’ he said grumpily. ‘Arthritis.’
They were guided by the music thumping throughout the house. Two flights of stairs to what must once have been servants’ attic rooms. A blue-painted door ahead was closed. Joanna gave it a few hard knocks and the music abruptly stopped although the pounding beat still seemed to reverberate around the walls.
The door opened and a freckled face peered out, tousled r
ed-gold hair tied back with a bootlace, pleasant brown eyes and an engaging grin. Considering Christian Patterson lived here alone with his grandfather, who was almost certainly confined to the first two floors, and probably hadn’t heard their approach up the stairs he didn’t seem in the least bit surprised to see them. ‘Hello there, I thought I heard voices. I was going to come down and investigate but I had an essay to finish.’
Joanna’s eyes roved past him to the desk littered with papers, scrunched balls spotting the floor. The bed was unmade yet the room looked clean and there was a pleasant tang of spicy, men’s deodorant. So far her impressions were good. When she looked back at Christian Patterson he was appraising her just as critically. They smiled at one another.
She decided then that Christian Patterson was clever, personable and by the same token someone to be wary of. But she could see quite plainly why the old woman had formed an attachment to him. He must have seemed like the very essence of youth to the lonely, childless old woman.
‘So?’ Christian Patterson was watching them both enquiringly.
‘I’m Detective Inspector Piercy, Leek Police. This is Detective Sergeant Korpanski.’
‘Oh?’
There was something about the classic innocent reaction. Too classic. Too innocent. Eye contact straight, true and prolonged, wide open. It made the back of her neck prickle, as though she had touched something electrically live and she was curious.
‘You didn’t notice the police cars outside this morning?’
‘Nope. As I just said, I thought I heard voices for the last half-hour or so. That’s all.’
Considering the music it was perfectly possible. But the attic window clearly overlooked the entire front of the house including the drive and it was open a few inches. She could see the police cars, so why hadn’t he? Had he been so absorbed in his essay? Or asleep?
Belatedly Christian showed curiosity. ‘What are the police doing here anyway?’ He frowned. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Your great-aunt,’ Joanna began.
Christian interrupted. ‘Not fallen and cracked her hip, has she? I’m always telling her to be more careful.’
‘She hasn’t fallen.’
‘What then?’
‘She’s been found dead.’
‘In suspicious circumstances.’ Mike spoke from behind her shoulder.
The innocent eyes widened even further. ‘Aunt Nan?’ There was a slight tremor in the youth’s voice. ‘What’s happened?’
Either he was a good actor or he had been genuinely fond of the old woman.
‘She’s been murdered.’
Christian looked shocked. His face turned white. ‘How? How did it happen? I was always telling her.’ His eyes narrowed intelligently. ‘How did they get in? She bolted that door every night. She never let anybody in.’ He tried to make a joke of it. ‘Even I practically had to show an identity card to cross the threshold. She’s been ever so careful, ever since ...’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Well she’d heard about the attacks and burglaries against old ladies in Leek.’
‘Did she know any of them?’
The brown eyes regarded her thoughtfully. ‘Inspector Piercy,’ he said with the ghost of a smile, ‘Leek is a small town, all the old ladies know each other or did once. The newspaper headlines made Aunt Nan extremely cautious. So how did they get in?’
‘She must have left the door unlocked.’
Christian shook his head slowly. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘No way.’
‘Well, there’s no sign of forced entry; the back door was locked and bolted and the windows were all fastened.’
Mike threw his suggestion in. ‘Perhaps she forgot to lock ...’
‘Look, just because she was old,’ Christian defended his great aunt vigorously, ‘she wasn’t stupid or demented. Not Aunt Nan, she’s pretty amazing.’
‘Was she deaf, Christian?’
The brown eyes held surprise. ‘Deaf? Aunt Nan? Absolutely not. She could hear a pin drop in the next room. She had brilliant hearing and brilliant eyesight. She wasn’t like other old women.’
There was something strange about the way Christian Patterson spoke about his great-aunt. As though she were no ordinary mortal but something else, something special, someone revered.
What had her brother said about the relationship between the grandson and his great-aunt, about swimming in a vat of poison? So had Christian swum in the venom too often? Had he then become tainted? Looking at the youth in front of her Joanna could see no evidence of this.
‘How was she killed?’
‘We don’t know. The post-mortem will tell us. It’s probably tomorrow. But it looks as though –’ Joanna searched for a nice way to say it. There wasn’t one. She might have been battered with her own walking stick.’
Christian stared at the floor, still pale; when he looked up Joanna was surprised to read the shock in his face. ‘You know the awful thing? She kept that walking stick to defend herself.’
‘Perhaps you’d take a look at the stick,’ Mike suggested. ‘It would help if we knew for certain it was hers.’
Joanna looked at him sharply. He wanted to see Christian at the scene of the crime.
And it did seem to rattle him; he licked his lips. ‘You mean you want me to come round to ...’
Joanna wondered whether he would call it Spite Hall. He didn’t. He used no name. Instead: ‘When did you say she died?’
‘We didn’t.’ Mike seemed to produce the sentence like a trump card.
Joanna hesitated. Usually she could read Korpanski like a book but she didn’t know what he was up to. She let him take the lead.
‘The signs are that she died sometime on Sunday. When the milkman called on Monday morning the empty bottles had not been put out.’
‘Then she died on Sunday.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Aunt Nan was a real stickler for habits, if the empties weren’t on the step for Monday morning she died on Sunday night.’
‘You can be as certain as that?’
Christian nodded.
‘When did you last see her?’
‘Sunday evening,’ he said, after some thought. ‘She was sitting in her window, sewing. I was thinking of knocking on the glass and telling her to shut her curtains. Anyone could have been watching her.’
Joanna wondered then whether it had been Nan who had drawn the curtains or someone else who didn’t want to be seen.
As they walked back towards Spite Hall Joanna ran through her list of things to do: firstly formal identification of the body, then there was the setting up of an Incident Room, the gathering of the team. They would all be working long hours, in close proximity, discussing the case from all angles. Past experience had taught her that time spent together, pooling knowledge and discussing possibilities and probabilities, testing theories amongst themselves, could prove as productive as the other long hours spent interviewing neighbours, friends and suspects. But the first thing she had to deal with was a full report to her senior officer, Superintendent Arthur Colclough. He of the bulldog jowls, the dubious wit, the almost paternalistic attitude towards her. A senior officer whom she had grown to respect. And only to herself would she admit that the respect was tempered by affection. He was, in a way, the father she had never had. Her own father had been a Peter Pan of a man, who in his middle fifties had found himself a much younger wife and had paid for his passion with a fatal heart attack. Joanna had never quite forgiven him, neither had her mother, nor her sister.
She rang Colclough on her mobile phone. As always he listened without comment, saying nothing until she had finished. His mind followed her reasoning. ‘So you think the same gang is behind first the robberies, then the assaults on the old ladies, and now this?’
‘I think so, sir,’ she said cautiously.
‘Piercy,’ he said, ‘you’re a senior police officer. I don’t need to tell you how to work at this.’ He did anyway. ‘Look at the MO of these gangs. How did t
hey get in?’
‘Front door entry, sir.’
‘And in the Marlowe case?’
‘Almost the same method, sir.’
Colclough picked on the word like a vulture finding carrion. ‘Almost?’
‘It was a downstairs window, sir, smashed in. Cecily Marlowe had had window locks fitted after news of the robberies broke.’
‘Right.’ A brief pause. ‘And forensic evidence?’
‘There was so little, sir, except in the Jane Vernon case. I mean – these gangs – they know what they’re up to.’
‘Mmm.’
It was a dissatisfied mmm followed by a long pause. Colclough was thinking. And as frequently happened his decision followed closely what Joanna had already decided to do for herself.
‘It might be an idea, Piercy, for you to talk to all these old women again. If you’re right and the crimes have been committed by the same gang these old biddies have met Nan Lawrence’s killer.’
‘The thought had crossed my mind, sir, but they were all very traumatized by the incident. We never did get good statements from any of them.’
‘Well, they’ve had time to get over it,’ he snapped. A touch of humour shone through as suddenly as the sun appears from behind the blackest of clouds. ‘Use those famous kid gloves of yours, Piercy. Now when’s the PM?’
‘We don’t know yet. I’m waiting for Matthew to let us know.’ She paused. ‘He wanted some X-rays doing.’
‘Mmm?’ Surprise this time in the expression.
‘He thinks quite a few bones were broken in the assault.’
‘I see.’
They discussed routine points next, available officers, extra phone lines, the Incident Room – a huge caravan to be parked in the drive of Spite Hall – methods of alerting the local public – without firing the entire town with panic.
The call ended with Colclough’s usual parting shot: ‘Keep me informed, Piercy.’
And her habitual rejoinder. ‘Yes, sir.’
She found Mike standing outside the front door of Spite Hall, talking to Police Constable Will Farthing. He crunched across the gravel towards her. ‘Post-mortem’s fixed for tomorrow morning,’ he said. ‘Just had the coroner’s office on the phone; coroner wants to speak to you. And the desk sergeant’s been sending messages too; Tylman’s come back to make his statement.’
Embroidering Shrouds Page 5