The Missing Witness

by Jo Smedley

  She lived on Welhome Avenue, a road which ran parallel to the top end of the U-shaped road around the park. At the lower end, the houses actually shared the back alley behind the People’s Park houses, the alley into which we’d forced Russ the week before.

  Just as ours was the first road after the Park Drive turning heading east, Irene’s was the first road after Park Drive if you were heading west. Deciding who was nearer that day might have required a tape measure, but it was very clear why she had willingly come to my house, and it wasn’t just to cultivate a friendship.

  As a house, the building was vast. Irene lived in one of the rare semi-detached Edwardian houses. It had single paned windows which were probably protected with listed status, much like our own sashes were. The house had what an estate agent would probably describe as ‘many original features’ which translated into ‘unmodernised’ the moment you opened the door.

  That isn't to say it was poorly maintained, far from it. It was clearly well decorated throughout. Irene had an eclectic taste when it came to style, with a tendency towards clutter, something I'd never have guessed. The walls contained numerous paintings; some I thought were probably her own creations given that her front room contained an easel and an unfinished watercolour. The coat rack was full to bursting with coats, hats and strangely a dog lead. She caught me looking at it as she hung up her coat.

  “It comes in handy if you aren't around," she said.

  It was nice to know I was so easily replaced, but I could see her logic. It was cheaper than actually owning a dog and with all the dogs running free in the park, so long as the dog walker wasn’t as observant as Irene, her imaginary dog could have been any one of them. I wondered how often she’d used the ruse. Probably more than once knowing her. I had a fixed schedule, and other dog walkers would have been available to her at different times. It made sense, but I was a little disappointed she hadn’t told me. She was probably trying to avoid hurting my feelings. As she hid the dog lead with her coat I resolved to be less needy. If we were going to work together, Irene needed to feel she could tell me everything without worrying about what reaction it was going to have on my psyche.

  I bundled Lillian out of her buggy and into my arms. Given the clutter I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going to put her down without risking some general avalanche. There were piles of books, piles of newspapers, piles of laundry, and buried under another stack of books I saw the ironing board that laundry was supposed to be being ironed on. My guess was the pile hadn’t seen the light of day in a while. The clothing at the bottom had probably had its creases removed from sheer pressure by now.

  I followed her towards the back of the house. The hall still had the original tiles in place, a chequer board of brown and cream, with a border of terracotta rectangles and triangles of the other two colours. The original lincrusta graced the walls, a lovely design of looping stems and flower heads. Our own had nearly all been replaced by wood chip when we moved in. It hadn’t been worth saving the little that remained, and we’d elected to cover up the remaining meters with wood panelling instead.

  The radiators on the walls were the old fashioned iron ones; architecturally pleasing, but not particularly efficient when it came to heating such a large property. With all the drafts from the windows and doors, the house would get cold quickly and be difficult to warm up.

  There were open fireplaces in all the rooms we passed; the front room, a small box style room. Irene led me past the stairs which curved with a quarter turn landing to the second floor, and into what could have been a dining room if the table wasn’t stacked high with various books. A laptop lurked in one corner, an internet Wi-Fi box flashing rapidly beside it, no doubt the source of all her breaking and entering research and eBay purchases. It looked quite out of place seated where it was. Everything else in the room had a historic feel, not old as such and certainly not antique, just old fashioned. The laptop seemed anachronistic within the space.

  Beyond the dining room was the kitchen. Unlike our house, she hadn’t knocked the room through and the kitchen was still separate with a small joining door linking the two.

  The house wasn’t exactly warm despite the mildness of the day. Irene would have taken an age to thaw out in her own house on ‘pond day’. The winter pension allowance probably didn’t stretch very far in a home this size with no insulation.

  I carried Lillian through the kitchen door and stopped short. Irene had already been busy. The kitchen cupboards, the top ones at least, had been turned into a pseudo incident board, the sort that wouldn't look out of place at the police station, if, that is, the police constructed theirs of post-it notes and lengths of wool stuck on wooden cupboard doors with blue-tack.

  "What do you think?" she asked.

  I knew she didn't mean the house, so I gave the post-it note incident board a good look. In the middle was Lesley Cooper, the dead woman. In a circle around her, the immediate family: mum, dad, grandparents, Russ. Russ had a big red cross on his note, and I took that to mean he was eliminated from the enquiry. The grandparents, too, had crosses on their notes.

  "You've interviewed them?" I indicated the relevant sticky notes.

  "No. They're ruled out for other reasons. Too infirm. Whoever wielded the knife had to be strong."

  I looked at the two wall units on either side of the central family section, work colleagues filled one, the other contained names of various other connections, a roller derby team she must have been part of, her immediate neighbours, other friends.

  "It's comprehensive," I said. She smiled, taking the compliment.

  "It's not finished yet. I wanted to add some notes on the family history, but I ran out of space. "

  That was true, she had. Her bank of wall units wasn't particularly large. The rest of the wall had been left as a splash back for the hob, and a boiler was located on the other side. It was an old one, slightly rusty around the edges, and probably not very fuel efficient.

  I looked around. The kitchen was formed of one L shape of units, and a straight, much like our own. Like the rest of the house, the worktops of the kitchen were cluttered. Caddies, jars of jam, honey, piles of cookbooks, tools, artist’s brushes and painting accessories, plants and jars of oddments jostled each other for space along the back of each worktop. Fortunately Lillian was too short to reach any of the exciting piles at the top of the units, which meant of all the rooms in the house, this was probably the most “baby proof”.

  "You can put Lillian down in here if you like,” Irene said. “I'll pull the door to and then you know she won't come to any harm."

  I undid her snow suit and lowered her to the floor. Seeing a row of floor cupboards she immediately went for the handles and gave them a yank. They were lighter weight then our own and the sharp tug sent her crashing to her bottom.

  She glanced up, tears or giggles?

  I smiled widely at her as I shrugged off my jacket.

  She giggled.

  It was great to be able to have total control over a reaction like this. This seeking approval for correct emotional response was new, but it was entertaining in its own way. Lucus hadn't got his head around it yet and called up the "upset lip wobbles" more often than I did. It was a matter of facial expression. I had learned quickly to stop looking shocked or caring. Giggles were easier to deal with than tears. I'd had enough of tears already, giggles were better by far.

  She stood up, closed the door and then yanked it open again and fell to her bottom, giggling at Irene.

  "New game?" Irene asked, taking my coat from me and resting it among a pile of fruit bowls and newspapers on another work top.

  “It's been happening for a few days now. Just keep grinning back. If it hurts badly enough, she'll wail."

  She switched on the kettle. "Tea?"

  I watched Lillian move to another cupboard.

  "She can have free reign, I've moved everything breakable out. I don't have much anyway. Not much of a cook. Hardly worth it for one." She m
oved through the tea making routine with the ease of a home owner. She knew exactly where her tea bags and cups were. I watched. I may need to know where to get things from eventually. We were friends after all. The chances were I’d be over again, and knowing where her teaspoons and teabags were kept just made life easier. She saw me looking.

  “This is exactly why you’re useful,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You. You observe. You do it without thinking. I bet you know where everything is now.”

  I smiled and nodded – caught out.

  “This is why I need you.”

  “Surely everyone does it.” I said.

  “No. They don’t.”

  “Well, the lecturers always said the degree could be turned to a variety of jobs following graduation,” I said. “But I don’t think “private investigation” was one of the ones they meant.”

  "Maybe it should have been. I've started on the crime scene here," she indicated her upright fridge freezer on the other wall. That too had been decorated with post-it notes, the knife, Lesley's body. The hand was Irene’s, I recognised her scrawl, the distinct lack of letter formation. Each word looked more like a wiggly line between two recognisable letters at either end, a slight undulation in the line up or down indicated a tall letter like an “l” or a tail letter like “p”. It was a miracle I could read it, but then I’d had a lot of practise with consultants and doctors handwriting - once you knew the context, the scrawls were easier to decipher. The most critical facts Irene had written in block capitals which gave me the key points from her interviews with Russ. The scrawls were all related to those block capital headers.

  It appeared to contain a lot more information than what we’d gleaned from the newspaper reports.

  "But there was nothing there when we visited," I said. "How...?"

  "Russ." Irene said. "You don't think I handed him in until he'd drawn me a picture and talked me through it, did you?"

  I took another look. Within the centre of a blizzard of notes linked to the middle with string was a free hand drawing of the kitchen as it had been the night of the murder. It wasn’t artistic, if Irene’s watercolours were anything to go by, she hadn’t drawn this view. There was no perspective and few actual straight lines either, but it conveyed the scene adequately enough with a sort of pseudo plan view. Nothing was to scale, that is, unless the knife used to kill Lesley was the same size as the dining chairs, which I doubted.

  “She was seated?” I asked, reading through the explanatory notes. From the scrawl it looked as though Russell had found Lesley upright, on a chair next to the table, not on the floor where the newspaper had reported her.

  “Russ says yes.”

  “A little odd, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. If she was sitting then she didn’t open the door to her attacker.”

  “Or defend herself in any way. She must have known her attacker to have been so relaxed around them, unless… she wasn’t bound or anything?”

  “No. Russ said not. Which means she was totally oblivious to the danger and sitting down when the knife rammed home. He was the one who moved the body. He came down, found her there, first instinct was to go over, see if she was OK. He tried to rouse her and she fell. He didn’t dare put her back.”

  “And the police don’t know this?”

  “They do now.”

  “And these?” I pointed to a series of questions she’d tacked next to the plan.

  C - ps ?(Cups)

  P -- t -- n of ch --- s ? (Position of chairs)

  W -- h --- g up ? (Washing up)

  “Russ couldn’t remember.”

  “You think she had a visitor?”

  “She must have. And if you ask me, whoever it was knew her well and cleaned up after themselves before they left, otherwise the police would have already been looking for another visitor. The thing is, other than the fact Lesley was seated, Russ didn’t remember anything useful. To be honest, he can’t remember much. Too frightened by it all.”

  “Why didn’t he just call the police?”

  “Because he’s stupid,” Irene said simply. “He always has been I’m afraid. Even Jean said as much.”

  “What possessed him to move into the loft in the first place?” I had to know.

  “Money,” Irene said, confirming my suspicions. “He couldn’t afford a rental and had been turned down at the council housing office. Single men don’t rank highly on the emergency accommodation lists. It was homelessness or the loft. He picked the loft.”

  Lillian grabbed hold of another cupboard door, and realising no one was watching her any more, pulled it open sharply, directly onto her face. She dropped to her bottom again and set up a wail.

  I picked her up. Whether she’d meant to or not, she now had a big purple/pink weal down the centre of her face, tears welling at her eyes, lower lip all a quiver. I gave her forehead a rub while Irene rummaged in one of the top cupboards, post it notes rustling as she opened the door. She pulled out a tin.

  “Biscuit?” Lillian’s eyes widened as the tin lid came off and she saw a mix of digestives and bourbon creams. The crying came to an abrupt halt and suddenly she was straining over my arms to reach forward for the tin. Irene handed her a digestive. So much for rice cakes. She’d no longer accept the polystyrene biscuit substitutes after today. Still… at least she didn’t know about chocolate yet. That was still a well-kept secret.

  “So…,” I said. “What now?”

  Chapter Nine

  What now was actually a much harder question to answer than it first appeared. Clearly we needed to know more and there were lots of avenues to investigate, but neither of us had any real connection to the family, or to the woman’s friends or work colleagues. There were no natural links we could pursue for information. We were hardly the police. We couldn’t simply walk up to a stranger and interrogate them. Nor could we speak to the police directly to find out what they knew. They were hardly going to explain their investigation to a couple of strange women.

  It looked to all intents and purposes like we’d reached a dead end before we even started. We knew it wasn’t Russ. We knew it was likely to be one of her immediate contacts from the position of her body and the fact she hadn’t defended herself against her attacker, but we had no way to enter that inner circle to find out which one.

  We pawed through the post it notes. Established we needed to find an avenue in to the different friendship and family groups and then sat there, stumped. How were we going to do that?

  It wasn’t until a day later and Irene had received her copy of the Telegraph that an answer arrived.

  *

  “No. I mean...No. I er... No!”

  We were sat facing each other over a table in the coffee shop at Pennells Garden Centre. A couple of older women looked across from their table in the corner. I hadn't meant to be quite so loud.

  “We can’t!” I said again once they'd turned back to their own cream tea.

  I broke off a piece of my fruit scone and handed it to Lillian, who was gurgling between us on a high chair playing with a lump of cream I had already removed from my own over endowed scone.

  “We can't just crash a funeral.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Because it’s... because we didn't know her!”

  “The family don't know that.”

  I took a sip of my tea, mainly as an excuse to marshal my thoughts. Irene thought so much faster than I did and I was sure she was already two arguments ahead of whatever I was going to say next.

  I glanced around the conservatory looking for inspiration. I didn't find any. The potted palms and the stencilled rose names on the brickwork above were no help whatsoever. Assuming of course Percy Thrower was a rose breed. It could have been potatoes for all I knew… but I didn’t see a King Edward up there.

  We were one of just five groups partaking of morning tea. I knew the restaurant here was usually packed out, but Irene had arranged to meet me at 9.30. This was to
o early for most, but already felt mid-afternoon for someone living by Lillian’s timetable.

  “Thanks for the tea,” I said, hoping distraction was the best plan.

  Irene splotched another dot of cream on the highchair table. So much for ‘don't play with your food’. Smearing cream was Lillian’s favourite activity. It required a bit of cleaning up at the end, but it was worth the peace. She giggled happily to herself. It was a huge improvement on the screaming she had been doing all morning. I passed her another little chunk of scone.

  “It might give us the lead we need.” Irene wasn’t giving up.

  I thought about it as I blew on my tea. She was right. It could give us access to all those circles of contacts we’d reviewed the day before. But attending a funeral, was I really that serious about solving the case, or would I, like every other curious person, simply be content to read about it in the paper and follow the unfolding drama of the murder enquiry on the local news?

  “We promised Russ.”

  “You promised Russ.”

  In my mind I looked through the post it notes on Irene’s units. We needed to think laterally if we were going to investigate the murder. We couldn’t run an investigation the same way as they did on the television dramas. We didn’t have the authority to interview people, we didn’t have the forensic reports to give us any clues. We had only our wits and what we knew from Russ, and his testimony wasn’t particularly useful. Our best lead was the position of Lesley’s body. Her death at the table meant it had to be someone who knew her. And if it was someone close, then we needed to get into that circle of contacts and much as I hated to admit it, Irene was right. The funeral was our best way of breaking in.

  “It's a sign of respect,” she said, seeing me wavering. “I bet Dodger's mum is going.”

  Dodger’s mum lived two doors up. We'd walked around the park with her a few times since the incident. She was a taller woman, dark hair, glasses, thin underneath her padded coat, with ruddy features caused by a rash of purple capillaries across both cheeks. She had been a fountain of gossip; most of it, Irene said, had to be sifted carefully for actual facts.