Grey Ladies

by William Stafford

  Miller introduced herself and Woodcock to this man, guessing he wasn’t the eponymous Patsy.

  “Haha, no; Patsy’s the wife. Or was, like. Just keeping her name going. Keeping the dream alive, like.” He opened his arms in an expansive gesture that took in the whole stall.

  “Our little empire.” He sniffed sadly and then turned his customer service smile back on. “What can I do you for?”

  They showed him the sketch. He was unable to help and seemed heartbroken because of it.

  Woodcock bought a whoopee cushion to try to cheer him up.

  Aww, thought Miller.

  ***

  As well as biscuits, Sandra had also brought a photo album that she insisted the new resident must look at. Brough had wailed inwardly but in order to keep up the pretence, cooed excitedly and allowed Miller’s mother to turn page after page pointing at people he didn’t know and never would.

  But there was Miller! As a happy round-faced baby; as a curly-haired toddler covered in jam; posing proudly in front of the fireplace in her first school uniform; grinning without her front teeth; strutting in her mother’s high heels with her face like a maniac’s colouring book...

  Brough found he was able to make genuine responses of delight. Oh, he could tease Miller about this until the cows came home. “You were cute as a child; what happened?” That kind of thing. He couldn’t wait to get started.

  He decided to respond to Miller’s mother - and indeed everyone else - in a kind of dumb show, with only the occasional non-verbal sound to make his meaning clear. It was easier than trying to maintain an old woman’s voice for a prolonged period with any continuity or credibility. It had been simpler the last time he had gone undercover. Then he had been playing a version of himself. Then the danger of his situation had fuelled his performance. He had become addicted to the fear, the adrenalin rush, the living on his nerves.

  Now he was posing as an old woman in a nursing home and the only danger was of being found out. He had serious doubts that this hollow masquerade would lead to anything worthwhile. He was almost entirely convinced that wanker Stevens had proposed this crackpot idea just so he could have a laugh at Brough’s expense. Wanker.

  The image of Stevens’s face laughing until he was breathless and crying made Brough’s head even hotter than it already was beneath his wig.

  “I said,” Miller’s mother gave him a nudge with a sharp elbow, “did you bring any pictures with you, dear? Any photos?”

  Brough shook his head and looked sad.

  “Aww,” Miller’s mother sympathised. “That’s a shame, love. Still, you’ve got your memories.” A look of panic washed over her face. “Unless you’ve got the - you know - the memory thing?”

  Brough shook his head. Miller’s mother patted his hand. He hadn’t put his gloves back on. He withdrew his hand slowly, hoping she wouldn’t notice their manly hairiness.

  “You’ll have to meet my daughter when her comes in,” Sandra got to her feet with a grunt. “Her’s like me only not as pretty!” She cackled, pleased with her remark and shuffled out. Brough was about to breathe a sigh of relief when she stopped and turned back.

  “Don’t want to embarrass you, love,” she whispered, “but if I was you, before I went out into the common room, I’d make sure my wig was the right way up.”

  ***

  Miller and Woodcock trawled the mall for an hour or so, looking for other places that might stock the moustache in question. They came up with nothing. Miller complained that the floor made her feet ache.

  “I’m not going to carry you if that’s what you’m after,” Woodcock smirked.

  “I’m just suggesting we stop for a coffee or summat,” Miller pointed at a nearby outlet. They were everywhere these days. Queequeg’s.

  Woodcock insisted on paying. Miller wasn’t going to stop him. She found a table outside the shop but still within the mall, which sort of defeated the purpose of sitting outside the shop, and waited for him to bring tall mugs brimming with foaming milky coffee-based pretentiousness.

  “I took the liberty,” he sounded apologetic. He produced two rather flattened muffins from his jacket pocket and dropped them onto the table. “You can have the chocolate one if you want.”

  They sat watching the shoppers go by. Woodcock pulled his blueberry muffin apart with his fingers and extracted the lumps of dark fruit.

  “You’ve made a right mess of that,” Miller observed, amused by the crumbs in his pathetic moustache.

  “I am a bit faddy,” Woodcock admitted. “I don’t much care for fruit.”

  Learning all the time, Miller thought. “But you drink wine. Wine’s made of fruit.”

  “That’s different,” Woodcock blushed. “Wine’s wine.”

  “You’re not wrong there.”

  They sipped their overpriced and largely flavour free coffees.

  “There’s somewhere we can go,” Miller announced. Woodcock wiggled his eyebrows. “For the moustache,” she added quickly. “Come on.”

  She pushed herself from the table. The chairs weren’t designed for comfort. Queequeg’s didn’t want people sitting around for hours on end. It was all about keeping things moving, getting the next customers through. But at least her feet had had a rest.

  She heard the scrape of Woodcock’s chair as he hurried to join her and the jolt of the table as he barked his leg against it. He was adorable! Perhaps - when the case was closed - they could get things on a firmer... footing.

  “Where’s that then?” He caught up with her when she slowed for the automatic doors to let her out into the glorious open air.

  “Come on.”

  As she drove up to Dedley, she told him of the toy shop she used to visit often as a child. Spending her pocket money on red-faced soap and itching powder, all that kind of thing. And then she had grown out of it. Pop stars had taken over her imagination. But the shop was still there, as far as she knew. They’d had a dressing-up corner. It was worth a look. If not, there was always the online angle. That would take a lot of boring work but hey, wasn’t that what the team at Regional was for?

  Woodcock watched Miller’s profile as she told him all this. She had a pleasant face whichever way you looked at it.

  “Bit of a practical joker in your time then?”

  “Wanted to be. But those things never live up to their promise, do they? They’re never as much fun as the pictures on the packets, are they?”

  Woodcock thought of the whoopee cushion in his pocket. He liked the idea that he and Miller - Melanie - had something in common, even if she had grown out of it.

  She parked on the police station car park, stating there was no point paying to park elsewhere and the shop was only around the corner. Woodcock nodded and began to think he would follow her to the ends of the Earth.

  The Dolphin Toy Shop was situated at the bottom of an arcade that led from the marketplace to a paved square that wasn’t used for much. There had been a beer festival held there in a huge marquee last year but since that had ended prematurely with a grisly murder, no other events had been put on.

  As Miller led Woodcock from the fountain - with the swollen-headed dolphins that gave the arcade its name - in the marketplace and into the arcade, memories from her childhood were confounded. There was the jeweller’s on the left except its windows were coated in fluorescent posters that screamed CASH 4 UR GOLD! rather than the more romantic rows of engagement rings on cushioned trays. Miller had always liked to stop and admire the corner where the Mickey Mouse watches were displayed. This was no more. Do kids still wear watches these days? Or was it all about the mobile phones and the MP3s and what-have-you?

  Most of the shop fronts were empty, soaped over from within or boarded up completely. This saddened Miller. She had always found the Dolphin Arcade an elegant little world away from t
he bustle of the High Street. Halfway down on the right, the little wool shop was still going. Mum used to nip in there for knitting patterns for jumpers she would never get around to making.

  A sudden flash of Kyrie Billings sprang to Miller’s mind. She gave Woodcock a nudge. “We should ask in there. About the needles. You know, the murder weapons.”

  Woodcock’s mouth formed an O. It was like a caterpillar bending over backwards.

  A short flight of steps and a wheelchair ramp took them to the lower section of the arcade. A butcher’s faced a florist’s. The two businesses competed with smells although both were devoid of customers.

  “Here it is!” Miller hurried up.

  The Dolphin Toy Shop was on the right hand corner at the bottom. This meant it had two frontages; one inside the arcade and the other outside on the street. Miller had always liked to stand gazing at both of these windows and their crowded displays as if whole museums were contained within them. There was no time for such appreciation today but even a cursory glance told Miller things had changed.

  The indoors window was full of ‘action figures’, models of characters from films and television shows, most of which she’d never heard of. Woodcock cooed and pressed his face to the glass, marvelling at a character from a science fiction story that may as well have been in Martian for all Miller knew.

  “They’ve got an Octavius Mint!” he gasped. “Complete with hand action!”

  “You’re a big kid,” she told him. “What’s the point of hand action or any other kind of action when the people who buy these things never take them out of the box?” She held up a hand to silence him. “Before you can lecture me about ‘keeping the value’ and any of that, we’ve got a job to do.”

  She pushed the door open and was cheered to find that the little bell still sounded the same. If she had read any Proust, Miller might well have made an allusion to him at that moment.

  The shop was at once familiar and unfamiliar. The busyness and the over-crowdedness of the shelves was the same even though the fashion had changed. Most of the items were merchandise related to something or other. Where were the toys that were famous in themselves and not because they had some cartoon character arbitrarily depicted on them?

  Getting old, Mel, she told herself. Won’t be long before you’re down the road in the Dorothy Beaumont.

  A man in a long blue overall was sweeping the floor although in some places the gap between shelves was too narrow to admit the head of his broom. Miller found her eyes welling up to see him again after all these years, even though she had never known his name and he was a grumpy old bastard if memory served. But he was still there, still going!

  “You okay?” Woodcock whispered. He stepped up to the man and produced the photocopied sketch.

  The man took one glance at the paper and although he had barely seemed to have heard Woodcock’s question, he grunted about moustaches being upstairs’s department. He ambled away with his broom, scowling. Miller wiped a tear from her cheek and followed Woodcock up the painted staircase.

  Compared to upstairs, downstairs was a desert. You could have filled two or three shops with the amount of stock crammed into that space. Miller remembered the thrill of this assault on her six-year-old eyes and envied the children of today who would enter this world of treasure and wonder.

  Except there were no customers. All right, it was a school day and all of that, but Miller got the impression very few little feet climbed that stairway to heaven these days. There was dust on the teddy bears.

  Behind the vitrine that served as the counter, a woman in a light blue overall was perched on a stool watching something about a car boot sale on a portable television. Miller didn’t recognise her from past visits. Perhaps she was ‘new’ or perhaps the grumpy old sod with the broom had made more of an impression on her young mind.

  Woodcock made the introductions. The woman muted the portable.

  She looked at the sketch then pulled out a drawer in the glass cabinet. She withdrew a tray of false moustaches of every style and hue. There was a gap.

  “Oh ar, I remember him,” the woman sniffed, “come in a week or so ago.” She looked at the sketch again. “Ar, that’s him. But tell me, why day you arrest him when you had the chance?”

  Woodcock and Miller exchanged a puzzled look.

  “When he sat for the picture!” the woman laughed. “Only kidding!”

  Woodcock and Miller laughed uncertainly.

  “I remembers him, of course, ‘cause we doe get many up here these days. And Eric says we should chuck all the moustaches and so on but I says you never know who’s going to come in for what and, lo and behold, in he comes and Bob’s your uncle.”

  A smile of vindication played on her lips. Miller asked if she would be able to recognise the man again.

  “Oh ar, lover. With or without the tosh.”

  “Did he buy anything else?”

  “Oh ar. It was quite a good day for us. Said he was planning a surprise party or summat. Lemme see... As well as the tosh he had a good root through my box of wigs.”

  “Did he buy one?”

  “He did, ar. Old woman’s wig. And he bought some face paint. Theatrical stuff, I mean, not the tiger stuff or the Spider-Man that the little ones have. And he had a rubber nose. Bought one, I mean. He asked me about warts and I said, even though I was doing myself out of a sale, he was better off with Rice Krispies and a dab of spirit gum. Sold him the spirit gum and all so it wor a total loss.”

  Miller was jotting all this down in her notebook. She asked if the woman could add anything to the man’s description. The woman looked at the drawing again.

  “Not really. Your bloke’s got the spit of him right there.”

  “How tall was he, for example?” Woodcock moved his hand up and down in the air.

  “Bout your size,” the woman shrugged.

  “Did he sound local? Was he from around here, do you think?”

  The woman pulled a face while she contemplated this question. “I dunno,” she concluded. “Could be. Sounded a bit, um, educated, but he could be from here. I cor say for sure.”

  A moment of silence passed. The woman’s eyes looked longingly at the television screen.

  “Well, if there’s nothing else...” said Woodcock.

  “Not really,” the woman sniffed. “But he was obviously keen about fancy dress and dressing up and the like, like.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, he looked dressed up when he walked in. Like he was playing some kind of part.”

  The detectives flicked another glance between them.

  “Can you describe what he was wearing?” Miller stood between the woman and the television.

  “Oh ar. Should have said before. He looked like he was off to the jungle or summat. Right bloody nutter, I thought when I first sid him. Coming in here in a safari suit. And a wossname, pith helmet, the lot.”

  14.

  It was understandable, Brough supposed, that no one was paying him, the New Old Girl, much attention, given the staffing problems since the murders began. At least he hoped that was the reason for the neglect. Care workers, who seemed to neither care nor do any work, went past him in the common room on a regular basis as though ticking a box on a schedule. As long as he didn’t appear to have died since their last pass, they left him well enough alone.

  And that suited him. He was able to observe all who came and went. He began to recognise patterns among staff and residents alike. Who spoke with whom, who sat where, who was pleased to be there and who wasn’t. He had no means of making notes and no way of making contact with Miller or anyone else. He hoped for a visit in the near future. He was feeling out of the loop. Perhaps the others were making more progress than he had so far. He hoped that was the case. He wouldn’t mind if they solved it
all without him as long as he could get out of this ridiculous and uncomfortable get-up and get back to normal.

  He’d realised he hadn’t told Alastair where he was going. Oh, Miller was sure to fill him in sooner or later but Brough regretted not answering the phone the last time Alastair had called. He would make it up to him, Brough resolved, when youth and men’s trousers were restored to him. He would even think seriously about perhaps maybe moving in with him.

  “What have you done with Mim?” A bright-faced care worker was suddenly standing in front of him. “Cor find her nowhere.”

  Brough decided not to answer. He had no answer to give. Perhaps the expert from the castle had taken her out for the day or for a bit of air at least? It seemed the girl didn’t expect a response and she moved away apparently unconcerned about this loss of a resident.

  Should I be worried? Brough wondered. Had the killer moved on from bumping off the staff and was now doing away with the residents?

  “Cooee,” a voice from behind sent a shiver down his spine. “Got a word search you can help me with.”

  Sandra Miller sat beside him. She scribbled across the top of her magazine to get her biro working. Brough pretended to be asleep.

  ***

  In a meeting room at Regional HQ, Miller and Woodcock were reporting back to Stevens and Henry. Even Wheeler was present. No one had ever seen her do any work on a case before.

  “So let me get this straight,” Stevens was perched in his usual buttock-on-the-table manner, “We’m looking for a big game hunter with a fake moustache and an old woman’s hairdo? And he may or may not have breakfast cereal glued to his face?”

  No one said a word. The team allowed Stevens’s summation to sink in.

  “Well,” Miller broke the silence, “when you put it like that...”

  “Oh no, love!” Stevens waved a hand. He caught a dirty look from Wheeler. “I mean, on the contrary, Sergeant. Should be easy enough to spot, shouldn’t he? The case is as good as closed.”

  “Let’s cut the sarcasm, shall we?” Wheeler sneered. She seemed at a loss as to what to do with her hands without a remote control or a laser pointer to wave around. “Good work, Miller; good work, Woodcock.” She got their names the wrong way around but both detective sergeants beamed with pride. Wheeler paced around the table that dominated the centre of the room. “What we need here,” she continued, “is some blue sky out of the box.”