The man blinked and swayed a couple of times.
Angel said, ‘Can you walk?’
Malloy struggled with his shoulders and arms. ‘My hands. What have you done to my hands?’
‘Are you all right?’ Angel called out above the roar of the fire.
‘You bastards. You’re a right pair of bastards.’
‘Can you hear me, Malloy?’
‘Of course I can bloody well hear you.’
Angel looked at Carter and said, ‘You do it, lass.’
She nodded, turned back to the man and said, ‘Malcolm Malloy, I am arresting you for the murder of Luke Redman, Ingrid Underwood and Angus Peel. You do not have to say anything…’
Chapter Sixteen
It was 8.28 a.m. the following morning, Thursday, 4 June. Angel arrived at his office whistling, ‘Oh what a beautiful morning. Oh what a beautiful day…’
He hadn’t reached his chair before the phone rang. It was Taylor. He sounded very bright. ‘I hear you got him, sir? Congratulations. Who would have thought it was Malloy all the time.’
‘Thank you, Don. You did your share.’
‘By the way, sir, this morning I realized that that piece of timber with the fancy Norwegian letter “ø” stencilled on it, used by him to sprag the accelerator pedal in the van, would likely have been from a crate of newsprint used by the printing press of The Bromersley Chronicle.’
‘Most likely,’ Angel said. ‘We’ll make a detective out of you yet, Don.’
Taylor grinned.
Angel replaced the phone.
There was a knock on the door.
‘Come in,’ he said.
It was Ahmed with the morning’s post. ‘Good morning, sir. And congratulations. I understand you’ve solved the serial murder case. And that you’ve arrested that clerk from The Bromersley Chronicle office. That’s great, sir. We all knew you would do it.’
Angel pursed his lips, then said, ‘Well, DS Carter needs credit for making the actual arrest.’
He looked surprised. ‘Really? And she only weighs eight stone, four pounds.’
Angel frowned. ‘How the blazes do you know what she weighs?’
‘We were talking about diets and stuff, and she told me, sir,’ Ahmed said putting the envelopes on the desk in front of him.
Angel frowned and shook his head. ‘The things you talk about…’
Ahmed went out.
Angel began fingering through the envelopes, when there was another knock.
‘Come in.’
It was Carter. She came in all smiles, carrying a notepad. ‘Good morning, sir. I hope you slept well.’
He looked up, pointed to the chair by his desk.
She sat down.
Angel said, ‘You don’t have to continue the social chit-chat you used to mesmerize Malcolm Malloy last night, you know.’
‘It worked, sir,’ she said with a big smile.
‘Not really. Anyway, it might work on vain people. Not on hard nuts like me.’
She laughed then said, ‘How’s your back, sir? What did they say at the hospital?’
‘It’s all right. In their lingo, it didn’t perforate any vital organs.’
She nodded. ‘I bet it’s painful.’
He frowned and looked at her. ‘What do you want anyway?’ he said.
‘A question, sir.’
‘Go on.’
‘I only remembered this morning. In that room…that shrine. There were four blood-stained sheets hanging down. And four photographs on the table. Yet, as far as we know, there are only three victims?’
‘Yes,’ he replied and licked his bottom lip with the tip of his tongue. ‘I noticed.’
‘Did you manage to see who the people were in the photographs?’
‘No, I didn’t. I had a few…other things on my mind.’
‘Yes, sir. Of course.’
The phone rang. He reached out for it. ‘Angel.’
The caller said something to which Angel said, ‘Right, sir. I’ll deal with it straightaway.’
He replaced the phone and turned to Carter. ‘That was the Super. A triple nine just in. Another body with a wound in the chest. The landlord of the Wentworth Arms has found the body of a man behind some dustbins at the back of the pub.’
‘That’s the fourth victim, sir.’
Angel nodded. He rubbed his chin, sighed and said, ‘It’ll be Kenneth Lamb. He lives at…lived at 72 Wentworth View. It’s just behind there.’
‘Must have happened sometime yesterday,’ Carter said. ‘He wouldn’t go into hiding.’
Angel’s lips tightened back against his teeth. He shook his head. ‘It would have saved his life. Why don’t people listen to us?’
‘Poor Mr Lamb,’ Carter said, then looked down and shook her head.
Angel stood up and said, ‘Well, come on, Flora. Let’s get on with it.’
She looked at him in surprise.
If you enjoyed Shrine to Murder you might be interested in Night and Silence by Aline Templeton, also published by Endeavour Press.
Extract from Night and Silence by Aline Templeton
Session One: Thursday 23 July
`When I was a child they used to put me in a cage if I did something wrong. Is that what you want me to talk about? That sort of thing?’
`Talk about anything you want to talk about.’
`Oh, there’s nothing I want to talk about. There isn’t any point, is there? It’s not going to make any difference.’
`What had you done the first time they did it?’
`I hit my stepmother. I can still see the mark I made. Two nice, neat half-moons — dark blue and angry red, they were, with blood all swelling up where I’d broken the skin. It tasted disgusting, her skin; sweet and faintly sticky.
`She had smooth, soft pudgy hands. When She fondled me or my brother — only if my father was watching, of course — they stank, stank of insincerity and cheap hand cream. Rose perfume. To this day the smell of rose perfume turns my stomach.’
`Why did you bite her?’
`She had leaned across the Sunday lunch table to chuck my chin, laughing after one of her silly remarks. “Come on,” She said, “smile, just for once.” I hated her; She was always my enemy, and quick as a thought I slashed at her with my teeth. Like an animal.
`Only animals raised by my father didn’t bite. He trained all his gun dogs by love and patience, and they had mouths like velvet. Even the ferrets with their steel trap jaws never closed them on his hands. He gentled them into tameness, and he was proud of that. He wasn’t soft, though — don’t get me wrong. His gentleness was as powerful as some men’s cruelty.
`So he was mortified as well as angry. As She screamed he jumped up. His face was crimson, but my brother’s had gone white, his eyes and mouth three round ‘O’s of shock.
`She started sobbing, of course, always the drama queen. Her tears made streaky white runnels in her make-up, and the mascara that always clogged her eyelashes began dissolving into sooty panda patches round her eyes. I wanted to laugh.
`He went to her and helped her out of the chair, his arm round her, protecting her, I suppose. She was ungainly in late pregnancy, and She stumbled a little. Deliberately, probably. That would have been typical of her.
`As my father steadied her he glared at me. He had warm blue eyes, you know, with crinkles of good humour at the corner — kind eyes. But they were savage now. I’d never seen him look like that before.
‘”We have been patient, and more than patient.” That was what he said, and he said it terribly. Then, “Enough is enough.”
`When they drove off to the hospital in his old battered Land-Rover, the stones spurted up from the gravel at the side of the cottage as he turned it too fast.’
`How did you feel then about what you had done?’
`I didn’t care. I was glad, I think. Yes, I was glad I had hurt her, because She had taken my father away from me.
`I said to my brother, “Stand with me. S
tand together and we can drive her away. She’ll find somebody else, just the way Mum did.”
`He nodded at me solemnly, as if he agreed, then put his thumb in his mouth. Well, lie was only five, after all, four years younger than me.
`He had missed Mum, of course. I hadn’t. She was a wicked woman, my mother. There were — men, men who came when Dad was away doing a shoot, when she would send us to play in the woods and lock the door. She hit me for telling Dad that. Then she just left us. I didn’t care. I’d taught myself not to care, but I had to try to teach my brother. If you don’t care, they can’t hurt you. Most people are a lot more than nine years old by the time they work that out, aren’t they?’
`How did your father manage after she left?’
`Oh, it was good, it was good. We were close, just the three of us. A team. We didn’t need anyone else. We managed somehow, the food and the cleaning and the laundry and we laughed a lot, though my brother cried sometimes at bedtime. I didn’t like him to cry; “You’ve got me,” I used to say to him in the darkness of our bedroom. “No matter what happens you’ve always got me and I’ve always got you.”
‘”Forever and ever and ever?” he would say, and I would say, “Forever and ever and ever,” and he would stop crying and go to sleep.
`Then She came.’
`Who was she?’
`She was working in the pub he went to on a Saturday night. Oh, not that he was a drinking man, my father, but I suppose it was a bit of company for him. She got her claws into him, and then he married her and ruined everything. She would look after us, be our mother now, he said. But we had him; what did we need a mother for? Anyway, we still had the chores to do, because She wanted to keep her fat little white paws soft and paint the nails glossy and red as if they’d been dipped in fresh blood.
`She hated me, and She complained to my father all the time about what I did, or didn’t do. He talked to me — or at least, he said words to me, but I couldn’t talk back and reach him, with her in the way. She circled round me, killing my laughter, killing my comfort. Trying to kill my soul.’
`Why did you feel so threatened by her?’
`Oh, don’t be stupid! If you can’t see why I felt threatened, there really isn’t the smallest point in talking to you. Anyway, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to talk any more.’
Friday 10 July
Chapter One
‘Now, ladies.’ The woman who stood in front of the relentlessly swagged drapes and layered nets of her lounge bay window might be little more than five feet tall and upholstered in electric-blue double jersey as snugly as one of her overstuffed armchairs, but she wore her lilac-rinsed cap of tightly-permed curls like a military helmet. There could be little doubt that her ‘Now ladies’ equated to the ‘dear friends’ more famously exhorted before a more celebrated battle.
Tessa found herself sitting up instinctively straighter in her chair — a white rickety one with a cane seat pressed into service from the bathroom — then glanced about the packed room feeling foolish. The other women nearby, the ones astute enough to have annexed one of the components of the drawing-room suite or a Parker-Knoll brought in from the family den, seemed unmoved, having no doubt been subjected to Dorothy’s Agincourt address before. It was Dorothy’s custom to ‘throw the house open to My Ladies’, as she termed it, for the final meeting to put the last touches to the plans for the Friends of the Hospital coffee morning and summer fair tomorrow.
`A dozen scones,’ she was saying now, ‘and a dozen cakes from each of you. And ladies, I want really nice cakes. Everyone always says that the Friends’ coffee morning is something quite special, and we don’t want to lose our reputation, do we? And apart from that,’ her voice sank to a suitably hushed tone, ‘we mustn’t forget it’s for the sick that we’re doing this, so nothing but the best will do. Really nice cakes, remember! And Marjorie, I’ll be relying on you to mastermind the coffee, of course—’
How, Tessa found herself wondering insubordinately, were the sick to benefit from Really Nice cakes, as opposed to ordinary ones, consumed by the healthy and prosperous Stetford ladies who would patronise the hospital coffee morning largely because the price charged for the coffee, the scone and the Really Nice cake was hopelessly unrealistic, undercutting every tea room in the town by approximately fifty per cent. And then of course there was the additional benefit of the stalls, where by a bit of judicious waiting they could snap up bargains at the end once the price had been reduced, and still go home in a warm, self-satisfied glow because they had done their bit for charity.
Oh dear. She was trying hard to conform, but she couldn’t help her rebellious thoughts, could she? She sighed unconsciously, earning herself a sharp look from Mrs Superintendent Barker, sitting next to her as her sponsor for Dorothy’s very select Friends of the Hospital committee. There were, Tessa had been given to understand, women who would kill for the privilege of sitting on a creaky bathroom chair, breathing the air scented by Dorothy’s orange spice potpourri while admiring the coal-effect gas fire, the awesome architecture of the silk floral arrangements and the collection of Lladro figures above the Adams-style fireplace with its inset Wedgwood-style plaques.
Mindful of David’s career, Tessa smiled at Mona Barker, humiliatingly aware that she was raising her upper lip a little too far in an ingratiating gesture any passing chimp would instantly recognise. Not that a chimp was likely to pass through Dorothy’s lounge, more was the pity. She would have more in common with one of the upper primates than she had with the women packed in here like very superior sardines (the chocolate kind in blue tinfoil you can buy in Paris, perhaps), unassailable in their designer knitwear two-pieces, with their expensively-coiffed heads and the layers of gold chains whose brilliant brassiness proclaimed as vulgarly as a car bumper sticker, ‘I’ve been to the gold souk at Dubai.’
For David’s sake, Tessa had made a real effort. She had pulled back her heavy fall of straight brown hair into a black velvet scrunchy for the occasion, and put on her favourite raspberry crushed-velvet pants with a silk shirt made up from one of her own screen prints. She had put on the delicate silver ear spirals her friend Marnie Evans had made for her birthday, and the necklet she had bought to match them with the birthday cheque from her mother.
She had presented herself for David’s approval when he had appeared unexpectedly for five minutes at lunch time, as he had been doing more often recently, on his way up to a police station in one of the Welsh valleys on the outlying edge of their patch.
`You’re an inspector,’ she said. ‘Inspect me. Will I do?’ Laughing, she performed an exaggerated twirl.
David turned from his rapid assembling of a cheese and pickle sandwich to look at her, a tall, coltish girl with a creamy skin and glowing brown eyes. He still couldn’t quite believe that after all the messiness and misery of his divorce, and all the loneliness which had followed it, that this embodiment of warmth and vitality was really his.
`Delectable,’ he said huskily, then added on a lighter note, `You did say it was all old biddies on this committee, and not any hunky young men?’
`I think it’s a coven,’ she said solemnly. ‘But Mona Barker made it clear she was paying me an enormous and probably unmerited compliment in asking me to go along, and I realised that if I wasn’t suitably grateful or didn’t come up to scratch you’d find you’d been demoted to one of the Welsh valleys yourself, on the instant.’
`It’s very kind of her, I suppose.’ He caught her sceptical look, and grinned sheepishly. ‘You’ll knock them sideways anyway, my love. Have fun.’ With his sandwich in his hand, he snatched a kiss on the way back to the car.
As Mona greeted Tessa on her arrival, however, her hesitation and the slight freezing of her smile were both eloquent, as was her manner of introducing her to their hostess.
`This is Tessa Cordiner, Dorothy. You remember I told you, George’s new inspector’s wife. She’s very artistic, you know.’
And Dorothy, eying her equa
lly doubtfully, had echoed, `Ah, artistic! I see.’
Now, as Tessa sipped tepid dark brown tea out of a wide cup with a rose-infested pattern, and balanced a finger of Paterson’s shortbread in the saucer (Dorothy’s Ladies clearly did not warrant Really Nice cakes), she fielded the inevitable questions expecting the answer yes about whether she was enjoying Shropshire after London.
She had only lately realised what a handicap it was to be by nature incorrigibly truthful. After a bad experience at the supper party the Barkers had so kindly given to let you meet everyone’ (everyone over the age of forty, that was), she had taken time to jot down phrases which were polite without being untruthful; she deployed some of them now.
`So lovely to breathe fresh air instead of petrol fumes.’ ‘It’s certainly a change to have trees instead of traffic jams.’ ‘It’s all so green, isn’t it!’
Those always went down well. ‘It’s so peaceful, after London,’ had been a distinct failure though; she had tried that one on Mona, who had bridled and said, ‘Good gracious, there’s never a moment’s peace in Stetford! I can’t remember when George and I last had an evening in together. Once you’ve been here a little longer, my dear, you’ll realise that people in small towns are always far busier than you ever would be in a city.’
Dorothy, who was moving round the room dispensing graciousness and stewed tea, paused to ask Tessa kindly how she had enjoyed her first meeting.
Taken by surprise, Tessa choked on a crumb of shortbread and had to take a gulp of tea to wash it down. Relentlessly refilling her cup, Dorothy smiled reassuringly at this evidence of becoming shyness.
`Now don’t worry too much about the cakes, dear. Being an artist, I expect that’s not really your forte! So just for this year, why don’t you do extra scones instead, just till you’re more into our ways, you know. It won’t matter; I always do an extra dozen or two of my butter-cream angel cakes anyway.’
Tessa was lost for words, and Mona hastened into the breach, with the air of Nanny covering up for the gaucherie of her charge. ‘You’re always so good, Dorothy. Perhaps Tessa could find a few of her little pictures for the craft stall instead. That would go down very well, I’m sure.’
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