Grey Ladies

by William Stafford

  She laughed. Miller didn’t. She looked helplessly at the paperbacks before replacing them on the bedside table.

  “Someone mention men?” It was Harold in the doorway. He rapped the door jamb with his knuckles. “Room for a little one?”

  Miller intercepted him before he could get any further into the room. “My mother’s tired, Mr um...”

  “I’m bloody not!”

  The old man doffed his cap in what he thought was a gesture that would never lose its charm but before he could speak, they were interrupted by the sound of a scream from further along the corridor.

  “I say!” Harold exclaimed. He tried to turn to face the source of the scream. Miller, finding her exit blocked by a slowly rotating elderly gentleman, forced her way through, grunting apologies.

  She tore along the carpet tiles, beating most of the residents to the store cupboard door. It seemed all the inhabitants were converging at the scene. Miller tried to get there before anything could be disturbed.

  ***

  “So shall we book us some tickets?” Alastair waved the leaflet in Brough’s direction. They had retraced their steps back to the yawning gateway at the foot of the tower. Of the woman in grey Brough claimed to have sighted there was no sign. Alastair had been surprised at the frantic nature of Brough’s search. Claims that the detective must have imagined it had met with icy stares. And now he seemed distracted and more than a little jumpy.

  “Hmm?”

  “For the ghost walk.”

  “Ah...”

  Brough’s phone began to blare out the theme tune from Hawaii Five-O. He fumbled it out of his pocket and, blushing, accepted the call.

  “Miller!” he gasped. “Calm down and tell me where you are.”

  A few moments later he was striding to the zoo’s car park, a disgruntled boyfriend at his heels.

  “It’s your day off!” Alastair complained. “Can’t someone else deal with whatever it is?”

  Brough sent him a regretful look. He jiggled the passenger door handle, waiting for Alastair to unlock it with the button on his key fob. Alastair hesitated before starting the engine.

  “This is a bit much, David. Not only is our day out interrupted but you expect me to drive you wherever it may be.”

  “I’m sorry.” Brough placed a hand, briefly, on Alastair’s left thigh. “But I don’t want those wankers in Serious to get this one.”

  Alastair shook his head and turned the key in the ignition. The enmity between his boyfriend and the Serious Crimes Department - or ‘wankers’ for short - seemed to fire Brough up more than anything. More, even, than me, Alastair reflected sadly.

  “The Dorothy Beaumont rest home,” Brough sounded like he was instructing a taxi driver. “Do you know it?”

  Alastair sighed and steered the car through the goalpost-like structure that framed the exit. Brough, already in detective mode, picked up on the clues.

  “I’m sorry, Al,” he gave the thigh a squeeze. “Go ahead; book the ghost walk. It’ll be fun.”

  Alastair gave a tight-lipped smile.

  “There’s been a murder!” Brough announced, excitedly in a mock-Scottish accent for some reason. “You’ll probably be called in too.”

  “Yes,” said Alastair, making a left turn. “See you at work, then.”

  A couple of squad cars and an ambulance were already in the street outside the rest home. True to her promise, Miller had alerted Brough first of all, before calling it in to the station. As yet there was no sign of Stevens or any of the other wankers.

  Alastair dropped Brough off at the main entrance and watched the detective practically skip through the front doors. With a new case to solve, there’d be even less time for them to spend together - professional matters most definitely did not count!

  Alastair took out his phone and disabled the silent mode. No doubt a call would summon him to the laboratory before the day was over.

  2.

  Bearing his i.d. like a talisman to ward off old age, Brough strode through the building until he reached the crime scene. A couple of uniforms were standing guard and the door to the cupboard was criss-crossed with yellow tape. The glimpse of whatever it was at the castle (probably nothing) had unnerved him and stirred memories of the first case he had been involved with when he came to Dedley; but now there was work to do, procedure to follow and questions to ask, Brough could put all of that unsettling business out of mind.

  Miller was engaged in conversation with a stern-looking woman with spiked hair like cigarette ash before it’s flicked off. The D S’s face brightened when she saw Brough approach in that way that always made him uncomfortable. He had hoped the torch she held for him had long since fizzled out.

  “Sir, the scene’s secure and the potential witnesses are all in the building.”

  Brough glanced around. “Not like they’re going to run off, is it?” he laughed. His laughter was curtailed by the icy stare of the cigarette ash woman.

  “This is hardly a matter for levity, Mr...” Her steely eyes bore into him.

  “Brough. Detective Inspector Brough.” He flashed her his credentials and drew himself up to his full height. He gave Miller a nudge. “Who’s this?”

  “This is Mrs Fogg; she runs the place.”

  “Ms,” said Ms Fogg in a voice that could refrigerate blood. “Is this going to take long, Inspector? My residents don’t take very well to having their routines disturbed.”

  “Don’t suppose they take very well to being murdered either.”

  Ms Fogg was appalled by Brough’s retort. “I don’t know what you’re implying, Inspector. My residents enjoy perfect safety and security here. The... unfortunate is a member of my staff. A terrible accident.”

  “Oh?” Brough turned to Miller. “Is that a fact?”

  “I wouldn’t call it an accident, sir,” Miller said flatly. She lifted the yellow tape so she could reach the door handle. “See for yourself.”

  There, in the three foot by three foot space, among the cleaning tools and products, the ‘unfortunate’ as Ms Fogg had termed it, employee was slumped against an upright vacuum cleaner.

  “Victim’s female, early twenties. Probable cause... Well, you can’t miss it.”

  “No, indeed,” said Brough.

  Knitting needles had been rammed into every orifice of the girl’s head. Eyes, nose, ears... From her mouth a ball of wool protruded.

  “Someone’s mistaken her for a workbag,” Brough muttered. “Do we have a name?”

  Miller consulted her notes. “Kyrie, um, Billings. According to Mrs, um, Ms Fogg.”

  “That’s right,” Ms Fogg snapped. “How much longer must I keep everyone confined to their rooms?”

  “As long as it takes,” said Brough. “Forensics will need to get in there. All over the place, I shouldn’t wonder. Now, is there somewhere we can have a sit down and a right old natter?”

  ***

  Ms Fogg’s office was on the ground floor. There was an ante-room in which she received new clients, welcoming family members and getting them to sign on the dotted line and the standing orders. Beyond this tasteful, upholstered space was the office proper, crowded with filing cabinets, potted plants and a desk that was too large for the room. A large chart dominated the wall behind the desk, a grid divided into months and spotted with coloured stickers following some kind of arcane code.

  Brough and Miller were invited to make use of the chairs. Miller sat down at once. Brough preferred to hover, casting a casual glance around the room. Ms Fogg sat in her larger, more swivelly chair, her back upright and her face set grimly.

  While Brough nosed around, Miller asked questions about the victim.

  Kyrie Billings had worked there for three years, having started as an apprentice achieving her NVQ in Elderly Care with di
stinction. “A fix, if you ask me,” said Ms Fogg, which is precisely what the police were doing, “I mean to say, I never saw it. The aptitude I mean, not the certificate. The girl was a lazy oaf and I suspect, simple-minded. She was on her last and final warning for poor time-keeping. But the residents seemed to like her, so perhaps she was not entirely without merit.”

  “And her personal life?”

  Ms Fogg’s whole face shrugged. “I suppose she had one. I tend to keep my distance from the staff room chitchat.”

  “She was wearing an engagement ring,” said Miller as though it pained her.

  “Was she?” Ms Fogg sounded as though she couldn’t care less. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “You have her file, I take it,” said Brough from a spider plant on a filing cabinet.

  “Yes.”

  No one moved.

  “What I mean is,” Brough approached the desk, “you get the file and I’ll take it.”

  “I’ll have Janet find it.” Ms Fogg maintained eye contact.

  “Janet?”

  “My assistant.” She picked up the phone and pressed zero. “Janet? In here, please.”

  Within seconds, the door opened to admit a browbeaten woman in her late forties, spectacles on a chain and her cardigan sleeves shedding her stash of used and unused paper tissues.

  “Poor Kyrie’s file. These nice officers would like to see it.”

  “Yes, Pam,” Janet sniffed. “Allergies,” she explained to Miller. “These bloody plants.”

  She picked up a manila folder from under a coffee mug on Ms Fogg’s desk and handed it to her employer.

  “Here,” she said.

  “Here,” said Ms Fogg, holding the file towards Miller.

  “Cheers.” Brough intercepted it and idly flicked through it. “Ah, next of kin. Good. Come on, Miller. We’ll let forensics do their shit while we go and meet the parents.”

  He breezed out of the office. Miller got to her feet and grimaced apologetically. “He is a bit... It was our day off, you see.”

  “Sorry to be such an inconvenience,” Ms Fogg said with venom. Miller smiled and went to catch up with her superior.

  “I knew that girl was trouble,” Pam Fogg muttered. Janet opened her mouth but could think of nothing to add.

  ***

  “What about her?” Brough pointed his pen over at the common room window.

  “I doubt you’ll get much out of her,” Miller shook her head. “That’s old Mim.”

  “Old Mim - as opposed to? They’re all bloody old in this dump, Miller.”

  “Dump?” Miller fretted. She had had doubts all along about consigning her mother to this place. Had she done the right thing? Had she chosen the right establishment?

  She looked around at the carpets and the furniture. It was all clean and in good repair. The place seemed light and airy - even with the oppressive central heating. Miller had viewed other, worse places. But none of those had members of staff bumped off in a broom cupboard by a frenzied knitter...

  “The needles, sir,” Miller announced. “We need to find out whose they were.”

  “Oh, well done, Miller,” Brough’s sarcasm reminded her why she sometimes didn’t like him.

  “And I don’t think we’ll get much from the um, residents, sir. It’s the staff we need to concentrate on.”

  “Right.” He actually seemed to agree with her. “Did you despatch the uniforms to break the news to the next-ofs?”

  “Sir.”

  “Good. We’ll give them a couple of hours, let it sink in, while we potter around here, and then we’ll go and pay our respects. See what light they can shed.”

  “Sir.”

  Miller watched the detective inspector stride from the common room. You couldn’t tell by the way he walked that he was - you know. The realisation had come slowly to Miller, blinded as she had been by her crush on the man. She cursed herself for being a poor detective, for not noticing the fastidious grooming, the cut of his clothes, the - She sighed. She had beaten herself up about it, unnecessarily. Blaming herself for not being attractive enough to catch his eye and turn his, um, attention. Now, she was back on the internet dating sites and coming up empty.

  She stirred herself to catch up. Having to work with him, the unwitting cause of her disappointment, had its sticky moments but Miller was determined to maintain a professional approach to her duties.

  She found him introducing himself to a couple of workers, dressed in the same slate-grey shirt as the victim. They had obviously been crying - indeed, one of them still was.

  “What was she like to work with?” Brough asked, signalling to Miller to take notes. “Was she easy to get along with? Did she pull her weight?”

  This was greeted with a keening wail from the crying girl. Shevonne - if her nametag was to be believed. Her workmate rubbed her arm and cut her eyes at the detective inspector.

  “Now’s not a good time, mate,” this one - Binnie - muttered, flatly.

  Miller could almost see the question forming on Brough’s lips: What the fuck kind of name is ‘Binnie’? but to his credit, he didn’t give voice to it.

  Half an hour later, after hot drinks that mostly went ignored, it was established that the victim had been well-liked among her peers, seemed to be picked on by the management - more so than usual, Binnie had added with a scowl - and that Kyrie had everything to live for and was never not no trouble to nobody.

  This tortuous string of negatives seemed to imply that Kyrie was a popular young woman with no overt enemies. That was Brough’s summation.

  “Apart from the management,” Miller pointed out.

  “Hmm,” said Brough. “I don’t think even big, butch Pamela Fogg would murder her own staff on the actual premises, do you?”

  “Well...” Miller’s eyes grew wide. “So she’s a... she’s...” she searched for a politically correct term, “lesbionic?”

  Brough let out a sigh. “Honestly, Miller -” but he didn’t complete the sentence, realising it would be sensitive, perhaps, and bloody awkward for definite.

  He announced they would revisit that p.a. Janet and gain from her a schedule of who was on duty and who was off. Then they would begin to work their way through that list. After a trip to the victim’s next-ofs, of course.

  Miller followed him out to the car - her car - watching his feet as they stepped across the tarmac.

  No; there was no sign at all.

  ***

  It was after dark by the time Miller pulled up outside the Billings house at the heart of the sprawling council estate to the north of the town centre. It was the kind of estate where the inhabitants would offset their heating bills by setting fire to stolen cars on every other street corner. The kind of estate where the dogs wouldn’t walk around alone, and where childhood was a fleeting moment between birth and baby’s first swearword.

  The uniforms were long gone, having performed that most onerous duty. Informing relatives of the death of a loved one didn’t get any easier - as both Brough and Miller could attest - and when the deceased is so young and victim of a brutal murder... Miller shuddered as she looked at the house. She didn’t envy the poor WPC who had carried out that task.

  The house was distinguishable only from the rest in the row by the number spray-painted beside the front door and the number and configuration of supposedly decorative plastic butterflies attached to the wall and windows. Next door still bore the fading vestiges of a Father Christmas half-heartedly scaling the roof. It was one of the saddest things Miller had ever seen.

  And then she saw Kyrie Billings’s mother: a shrivelled husk of a woman, who had lost her teeth prematurely and whose leathery skin added decades to her forty years. Her hands were stained with nicotine, her yellow fingertips clashing horribly with the silver a
nd gold of her ill-fitting shell suit.

  Mrs Billings admitted the detectives without glancing at their i.d. Brough and Miller walked through to the living room, a space that was apparently doubling as a crèche for the United Nations. Children of all ages, shape and colour were everywhere. They sat for the most part - or stood, or lounged - in a grim silence. The news had obviously hit them hard.

  Mrs Billings carried on through to the kitchen at the back. Voices exchanged expletives in low murmurs and then the doorway was filled by the hulking form of a man, barrel-chested, bullet- headed and adorned with an abundance of tattoos that looked homemade.

  He scratched at a tuft of white hair that poked out of the tee-shirt that was straining to cover his chest and pendulous belly.

  “Barry Stibbons,” he sniffed in a manner that suggested the cops should already know that. “What’s all this?”

  “Your um...”

  “Stepdaughter,” Stibbons supplied. “You caught him yet?”

  “Mr Stibbons, our investig-”

  Stibbons cut Brough short. “Don’t come here, poking your nose in. Your job, mate, is to find who did for our Kyrie. That’s it. And when you do find him, do me a favour: give me five minutes with the cunt and I’ll save you a lot of time and effort in the courts.”

  He punctuated this offer of public service with a resounding belch. He took a swig from the lager can he was squeezing too tightly in his paw. The beer hung on his Freddie Mercury moustache.

  Behind him, Mrs Billings was trying to attract the attention of the detectives.

  “I’ll show you out,” she offered in a reedy voice. Her slab of a partner inched aside just enough for her to squeeze by. She tiptoed through the sea of children, gesturing grandly towards the front door.

  Outside, on the front steps, she pulled the front door shut behind her.

  “It’s been a shock for all of us,” her voice took an apologetic tone. “Barry’s a good man. Deep down.”

  Brough nodded, unconvinced.