Cause of Death

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘And have you found somewhere?’

  ‘Yes, a bungalow about ten minutes’ walk from us, nice garden and good views. Of course he’s got to get his place sold first, and things aren’t shifting very fast. It’s not the sort of place to appeal to the second-home brigade and it’s too expensive for first-time buyers, so I guess we’ll just have to hope that a family will like it and not mind that it’s out there on its own and in a lousy catchment area for schools – and that the bungalow is still on the market when the time comes.’

  ‘He does have a really big garden,’ Andy remembered.

  ‘Yeah. It was when the company that was going to build the estate went bust and the rest of the estate wasn’t going to get built after all, I think the receivers said did the residents want to buy up some land. I suppose it was a way of getting some money back for the creditors. Anyway, Dad bought that big chunk going down to the field boundary. You know, the bit he called his allotment, near the wildlife pond.’

  Andy remembered. The pond had actually been on the farm side, but the field was fallow and used only for grazing so no one minded the kids going pond dipping. Ted had grown fruit and veg and all manner of stuff. More than his own family could eat. Andy had often gone home with carrier bags full of fresh veg. It had been a very welcome addition when things were short.

  ‘Didn’t he keep chickens for a while?’

  ‘Abigail and Bertha, yes. They were never very good layers and a fox got Bertha and that did for Abigail. Turned up her claws and died a week later.’ She laughed.

  ‘There was that great big smelly compost heap,’ Andy remembered. ‘Near the pond. Your dad reckoned there were newts living in it.’

  ‘Oh, there were. He showed me. It was a lovely garden. Lovely childhood, really, despite, well, you know.’

  Andy nodded. ‘He said she’d gone off with someone,’ he told Stacey.

  She halted. Turned to look at him in surprise. ‘He said that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No!’ She laughed and walked on. ‘No one ever thought that. Something happened to her. She couldn’t come home because something bad had happened. She’d never just go.’

  No, Andy thought sadly. He didn’t reckon she would either, but he also found it impossible to see Ted Eebry as any kind of killer. None of it seemed right.

  Andy spent the rest of the morning on the phone. As would be expected after all this time, many of the names and numbers were either unobtainable or owned by someone else. He struck lucky with the college, though. The language school still existed and there was a woman there who could remember Kath Eebry. Theresa Leary had been the receptionist back then and was now chief administrator.

  ‘She was a lovely lady. Very sweet and calm and got along so well with the students.’

  ‘What exactly was her job?’ Andy asked.

  ‘Well it was sort of the precursor to mine, I suppose. The language school was smaller then, just two floors and four classrooms, we’re double that now. Kath looked after things like arranging accommodation, sorting out financial problems, making sure the students knew how to get around the city and that sort of thing, and on top of that she managed the diary for all the teaching staff. We’ve always used part timers, so she kept on top of who was doing what and made sure they submitted their time sheets and all that sort of stuff. It was mostly routine, but she was really organized,’

  ‘And well liked. I get the impression from the statements that she was popular.’

  ‘Well yes, from what I can remember she was. It was easy to like Kath, she was always happy and cheerful and would do anything she could to help out.’

  ‘Are you in touch with anyone else from back then?’

  He felt the hesitation. ‘Does this mean you’ve found her?’

  ‘I’ve been given a batch of cold cases to work through,’ Andy said. It was close enough to the truth.

  ‘But you must have something new?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Andy said. ‘I can’t really comment, you understand.’

  A second or two of silence. ‘I see,’ she said, though it was clear from her tone that Theresa Leary really didn’t.

  ‘Other members of staff?’ Andy prompted.

  It turned out she was still in contact with two. One was a teacher and probably wouldn’t remember Kath well. Andy took the details anyway; it was not a name he already had on his list, so worth a try. The second was Terry Birch, the man who had reported Kath missing in the first place. Andy could have cheered.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When Karen had told Vashinsky she had two killings in mind, she had not been joking. It had taken her a while to get access to this second man, another associate of her father’s in times gone by, because he’d been in jail.

  Out for three weeks now, he was the final element; the one thing left to do before she went away. He’d been living in a halfway house, this last target of hers, but had just moved into a bedsit at the top of a three-storey building in a very run-down area. It was a long way from Frantham; truth be known it was in Vashinsky’s territory, but that didn’t bother Karen. Brig Morten was not the sort of man Vashinsky or anyone else was going to be bothered about.

  She could remember him from very early in her childhood, from even before George came on the scene. She could remember the smell of him: beer and cigarettes and an odd overlay of wet dog and what her dad had called funny fags. And she could remember his hands: calloused on the palms from the weights he used to lift and tattooed across the backs and knuckles. He was younger than her dad, and if anything even more vicious, and Karen knew this was not going to be as easy as David Jenkins had been.

  She sat on the very edge of his bed in the dingy little room, waiting for him to return. Beneath her feet she could hear the banging and clattering of the tenant a floor below. He’d been playing music when Karen let herself in – the lock on the door was scarcely deserving of the name – but he’d been shouted at to turn it down about an hour ago, and after a brief argument had complied. Karen had heard the sound of knuckles meeting flesh and a great deal of swearing in the aftermath. She knew that all the men in this building were ex-cons. It was a dumping ground for those kicked out of the hostel after two weeks and who had no family or friends to take them in.

  Karen and George and their – she hesitated to call them parents – had lived in a great many such places over the years. She had learnt early to stay quiet, to stay curled up in the middle of the bed with her books and her toys and the packed lunch her mum made her before she went out. Karen had taught George to stay quiet too. To be invisible, to pretend they weren’t there. She’d been good at that, and in a way that was why she was here. It was to lay a memory to rest; an incident that stood out so vividly in her mind that Karen had known the only way she could excise it was to excise the man himself.

  She knew she’d have to be quiet now, to be quick and clean and not give him time to call for help. She wondered if anyone would come if he did anyway; in a place like this it was hard to believe that anyone could give a damn about anyone else. They never had in Karen’s experience.

  But she’d given a damn. About herself and her mother and George, and that was all that mattered really. That and the chance to finally remove this last bad thing. Then, she felt, she could let go. Be free.

  Karen looked again around the tiny, sordid little room. Set at the top of the house with a high dormer window looking out at the sky, the walls had been papered and painted over so many times the covering was now the thickness of cardboard. Out of curiosity, Karen picked away at a loose fragment and counted the layers, peeling them off one at a time. She counted ten and there were others still on the wall. Floorboards covered with threadbare carpet offered little protection from the splintered timber, and the bed was a narrow single, sagging at the springs and made up with cheap sheets and thin blankets. An unzipped sleeping bag spread across the top afforded some small comfort. If you didn’t feel like cutting your wrists before you came to stay here,
Karen thought, you sure as hell would living in this place.

  It made her wonder just how she and George had survived. Somehow, they had always believed that life could be better, and as soon as she’d been old enough and capable enough to make stuff happen, things really had started to improve.

  ‘Work hard,’ she had always told him. ‘Don’t be like them. Believe you can be better.’

  Karen had searched the bedsit when she had first arrived but had found very little: spare clothes, a penknife, which she had slipped into her pocket, the bare minimum in the way of toiletries in the sparse bathroom. Magazines stuffed beneath the pillow which she had left alone despite the fact that she was wearing latex gloves. No food in the cupboards and only beer in the tiny fridge. A couple of pizza boxes stuffed in the bin were the only evidence that the man actually ate. A fire escape led down from the kitchen and she had checked that it would open. It did, but the cast-iron steps looked older and in worse shape than the house.

  Best be prepared, though. It had been the first thing Karen had done wherever they had been: check for possible escape routes. She had taught George to do the same and she wondered if it was a habit he’d kept up.

  She could still leave now. Walk away. No one would be any the wiser.

  Karen knew full well that she might need more then a rusty fire escape to get her out of this one. She touched the handgun that lay on the bed beside her. Dave Jenkins had been little challenge, really. Brig Morten was something else again, and for once in her life Karen was less than certain she could achieve what she had set out to do.

  She heard the front door crash open and strained to hear footsteps on the stairs. Twice now she’d heard the door open and twice been disappointed. But not this time.

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs, stomping along the landing, coming up to the top floor. Karen moved off the bed and took up position just inside the door so that it would conceal her when he first opened it. She hoped he didn’t crash that half off its hinges the way he’d done with the front door. She clasped the gun lightly and easily, calmed her breathing. She had no qualms about shooting this man in the back; she figured she’d need all the advantages she could get and, after all, the man had no qualms about attacking those who could not protect themselves.

  Like he’d attacked her mother. Like she had no doubt he would have attacked her.

  Stay quiet, don’t move, don’t say a word. Karen could so vividly remember what her mother had said, how she had sounded, and how she had pushed Karen into the cupboard only seconds before Brig Morten came through the door, drunk as usual and intent on only one thing.

  Don’t let him know you’re there.

  And Karen could so vividly remember how she had hidden her face and crammed her fists into her mouth and bitten down hard enough for it to hurt, but she hadn’t made a sound while Brig Morten raped her mother only yards away.

  Now he seemed to pause outside the door and she wondered if he suspected something, but a moment later he slid the key into the lock, fumbling the operation twice before completing it. He swung the door wide and stepped over the threshold, then paused again, sniffing this time, like some massive old hound. He could smell her, she thought. The only clean thing in this filthy room.

  Then two things happened very fast. Brig grabbed the door and slammed it closed and Karen fired, hitting him in the gut.

  Brig Morten staggered back, momentarily surprised. He stared at her and she saw the recognition dawn. Karen fired again, this time aiming for a head shot, but Brig was far from finished. He snarled, launched his full weight towards her. Karen side stepped and her shot went wide, grazing his shoulder, deflecting him for a split second before he came again.

  Karen swore softly. She was exactly where she did not want to be now, wedged between the door and the bed and the man mountain about to throw himself on her.

  Karen knew she had one chance. She did not fire again. She waited. In reality it was less than seconds, but that waiting time seemed to stretch beyond all reality. She knew this was the only way, knew also that she had, quite literally, just the one chance to get it right this time.

  He grabbed her hair, tugging her head back, then went for the gun hand. Karen could feel his breath on her face, feel the spittle as he panted with the sudden exertion. He was bleeding heavily but nothing seemed to slow him down. Karen had expected that. Nothing ever slowed Brig Morten down.

  That sense of stretched time seemed even more acute. His hand was about to close over hers, but she snatched it away. Her final shot was upward through his lower jaw, not at quite the angle Karen would have liked, but it did the job. As he began to fall, Karen pushed hard, deflecting the body away from her and skittering away into the corner before leaping on to the bed. She stood there, poised above the man, still not sure, in spite of the fact that the top of his head was absent from the rest, that he was actually dead.

  He didn’t move.

  The noise of Brig Morten crashing down on to his bedsit floor had aroused the ire of the tenant below. Karen could hear him shouting and cursing. Without another glance she hopped off the bed and out through the kitchen, down the fire escape. She tucked the gun into her raincoat pocket and removed the coat and latex gloves. She had blood on her black trousers and just a little on her dark T-shirt. She folded her coat so that the mess was concealed on the inside, barely pausing in her headlong flight down the rusted stairs. A shout from the room she had just vacated evidenced the fact that the tenant below had done more than shout at Brig Morten through the floor.

  Karen loped down the last flight and ran out of the yard and between the houses. Then she slowed down, walked at a moderate pace to the end of the road and only then did she risk looking back. Nothing. No one in pursuit.

  Could have been worse, Karen thought, adrenalin still surging through her body. She turned right at the end of the road and slipped into an alleyway she had scouted earlier, between two rows of houses. Rubbish was out for collection and soon Karen’s coat and gloves and gun had joined it, stuffed in a black plastic bag and then into a half-empty wheelie bin. Then she walked on to where she’d left her car, an odd feeling of emptiness mingled with relief replacing the adrenalin.

  Now what? Karen Parker thought.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Andy had managed to make an appointment with Terry Birch for three thirty that Monday afternoon. He was working as a full-time primary teacher now and finished around three.

  ‘Come to the school,’ Terry said. ‘We can chat before I drive home. If that’s OK?’

  St Anne’s Primary was the sort of village school that had only a few dozen kids, one teacher and a headmistress. Terry met him in the yard and showed him through to the office.

  ‘Sit yourself down. This is about Kath?’

  Andy nodded cautiously. ‘Mr Birch, can I ask you something? Your relationship with Kath Eebry—’

  Terry Birch hesitated. ‘We had a brief affair,’ he said. ‘I don’t think anyone knew about it. I loved her very much but she loved her husband and kids more. We decided it would be better if we broke things off. So she did. Next thing I know, Kath had gone.’

  ‘You reported her missing and not her husband.’

  Terry nodded. ‘She didn’t turn up for work. That wasn’t like her. She hadn’t called in sick, she’d not been in touch at all. None of that was right, not for Kath, she was far too considerate, far too conscientious for that.’

  ‘Did you try and call her?’

  ‘I did, and the principal at the school, Dan Ingrams, he called her too, but there was no reply. In the end I called round. A neighbour told me Ted and the kids had gone away but that no one had seen Kath and she hadn’t been with them. Ted Eebry had told them she’d gone away.’

  ‘And how long after you decided to break it off was that?’

  ‘About a week. We met one last time for a drink. Nowhere local, we didn’t risk that, and we talked things over and decided it couldn’t go on. It was fair to no one, least of all
me or the kids.’

  ‘And did you see her at all after that?’

  Terry nodded. ‘At work. We met on the Wednesday evening. She worked Wednesday evenings and we stole a half hour after that. She came in on the Thursday and the Friday. She said the kids were going out with some friends at the weekend, I think. I said goodbye to her on the Friday afternoon and I never saw her again.’

  ‘Kath had a sister. Did she ever talk about her? Did you not think she might have gone there?’

  Terry shook his head. ‘They didn’t get along,’ he said. ‘I don’t know all the details. Kath didn’t talk about her a lot. When their parents died, and I think they were both gone within a year, everything was divided between the two sisters. Kath, I think, invested most of her share in the house she and Ted bought. She said her sister got through her share in a couple of years and came looking for more. Kath told her where to go. It’s funny, she could be so soft with everyone else, but Jean just got up her nose.’

  ‘What happened to the sister – do you know?’

  ‘Um, someone told me she died a couple of years after Kath disappeared. She was an alcoholic. Kath always reckoned she would never make old bones.’

  ‘And what do you think happened to Kath Eebry?’

  Terry shook his head. ‘What I always thought,’ he said. ‘Ted found out about us and he killed her. I’ll never forgive myself, or him, for that.’

  Mac had reported back to Kendall what Stan had said and what had happened to him.

  ‘You’ve taken a formal statement?’

  Mac laughed. ‘No, and I doubt he’d agree to make one. We’re not likely to be bringing charges, are we?’

  ‘We could try.’

  ‘Oh sure, we bring Haines in on a GBH charge and see how many minutes it doesn’t take his solicitor to make fools of us. You’d not get Stan to testify. He wants to hang on to what life he’s got left.’

  Kendall sighed. ‘And this threat to young George Parker?’