The Glass Wall: A Superintendent Mike Yeadings Mystery (Superintendent Mike Yeadings Mysteries)

by Clare Curzon

  ‘Whatever and however, it resulted in her being totally cut off from the family. It seems that both sides continued procreating until now only this Rachel and I are left to make what we can of the way things are.’

  ‘And you see it as up to you to provide a happy ending.’

  ‘Not exactly that. I just feel …’

  ‘That you owe Emily something.’

  ‘In a way. But she fascinates me; rather, I imagine, as she did Gran. You have to admit, Keith, there is something about her.’

  ‘Something that makes her present nearest and dearest disinclined to take on caring for her themselves.’ There was more warning in his voice than condemnation.

  ‘That’s partly it: as if all the way along she’s been done down, cheated of her birthright. Which is hurtful. Why do you think that after all this time she still uses her maiden name? And insists on being “Miss”? I feel I need to make up to her for the past. Is that silly of me?’

  ‘A tad fanciful perhaps, but kind. That’s the main thing.’ He watched her gathering their soup plates together and balancing them on one arm as she made room on the small table for their next course.

  ‘No silver service,’ she said, laughing. ‘I think I’ll dish up in the kitchen. It’ll keep everything nicely hot. Come along and choose your vegetables, straight from the saucepans!’

  He followed her, bemused. At home it would have been so different. Since Audrey had given up on normal meals he’d become accustomed to sitting alone, served by a silent Mrs Marsh, in a dining room heated only for the occasion by a single-bar electric fire. He would swallow what was presented, without tasting or appreciation, eager only to have done with it for the companionship of the living room’s flaming logs or, more often, to go wearily to bed.

  ‘This,’ he told Alyson, ‘is a rare treat. Thank you for taking pity on me.’

  She turned back from the opened dishwasher, her eyes smouldering with something like anger. ‘It’s not pity. You know that.’ Her eyes held his, challenging him.

  ‘I think I do,’ he admitted humbly. ‘Only I don’t know how to …’ He held out both arms.

  ‘No,’ she said with finality. ‘Say nothing. It’s best. I was stupid to pick up on that. Forget it, please. Please, Keith. Let everything stay the way that it is. It has to be.’

  He let his arms drop. Looked anywhere but at her. After a moment, ‘What’s for afters?’ he asked, managing to sound like a greedy schoolboy.

  ‘I’ll see what I can find,’ she told him, sharp and distant. But when she brought it to the table she was smiling again.

  They were drinking decaff coffee when the call from Rachel Howard came.

  Alyson took it on the lounge phone, signalling him not to go away. He listened while she explained herself to the unfamiliar voice, giving the hours at which she could be reached on home duty.

  ‘Yes, all night, every night, from eight-thirty until noon next day. Of course it will be convenient if you visit. I look forward to meeting you, Mrs Howard. I’m sorry: Miss Howard, then. Yes, thank you. Goodbye.’

  ‘Short and to the point,’ she told Keith, replacing the receiver. ‘She’ll drop in tomorrow morning, before returning to Edinburgh.’

  ‘I had already gathered they weren’t a family to waste much time on sentiment,’ he observed drily. ‘Do you think she’ll be suggesting we move Emily to a hospice?’

  ‘I hope not. Surely in the little time left …and if she sees how comfortable Emily is here, among her own things …’

  ‘Don’t worry, Alyson. I shouldn’t have brought up the possibility. Certainly if my opinion’s asked I shall come down heavily on things remaining as they are.’

  Nevertheless the conversation seemed to have cast a shadow that wasn’t there before. Keith looked at his watch. ‘I guess I’d better go back and look in on Audrey again, then get along home. Catch up on some of the sleep I lost last night.’

  She brought him his overcoat, warmed from the airing cupboard. They said goodnight formally at the apartment door. No handclasp, no touching. Just a rueful smile from the man; a nod from the girl.

  She stood long minutes in the dimly lit window until he appeared below, leaving the crossing. Then both raised a hand in salute, and he was gone.

  Chapter Seven

  Sheena had made straight for the Crown’s saloon bar after work, eager to discuss Alyson’s reaction to Rachel Howard’s visit. Ramón was curiously deaf, and she had to insist quite loudly on him noticing her there. With her second half-pint she was past observing that she had an alternative, more interested, audience.

  ‘Let me get you a drink,’ Markham offered, as though he had just noticed her come in.

  ‘I’ll have a whisky,’ she ordered rashly, avoiding the predictable, and after all she hadn’t to pay for this one herself.

  ‘Find yourself a table. I’ll bring it across.’

  It came as a double, accompanied by a mixer bottle of Canada dry. Markham, guessing she was a beginner at scotch, poured in the ginger for her. She tasted it experimentally and decided it was thirst-quenching.

  ‘Did I hear you mention Rachel Howard?’ he asked casually. ‘I knew someone of that name once. Red-haired girl with a bit of a stutter. Would that be the same one?’

  ‘Nah.’ She gave him the description Ramón had passed on.

  ‘From Edinburgh, you said? Some relative of your elderly patient?’

  She stared at him, uncertain. ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘Oh, maybe it was the barman. He seems to have met her too.’

  ‘Could’ve bin. Well, he was there, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Ah. Your guest, so to speak.’

  Sheena guffawed. ‘Bit of a giggle! She mistook him for a male nurse. Because of that uniform jacket he wears. I bet that’s all the clothes he’s got. Anyway, I let him deal with her, and she seemed quite chuffed with him.’

  The desire to flaunt the burgeoning relationship was irresistible, but she stopped short of explaining why she hadn’t dealt with the visitor herself.

  She still couldn’t get over how calmly he’d taken over. But that was how Ramón was, inscrutable and as if you couldn’t rattle him. Yet something warned her that he could be very different, quite overpowering. A small man like him: it was odd. She’d once felt the same, sort of, in Wales at some enormous reservoir Dad had taken her to on holiday as a little girl. So calm. Not a ripple on its surface, but for weeks after that she’d sometimes wake up in a sweat after a nightmare about the Welsh dam bursting. All those thousands of tons of water lying there deceitfully still and then suddenly gushing out to drown the whole world, with her underneath it.

  Markham seemed still to be pondering what she’d said. ‘That’s nice you can ask friends in. Your boss must be quite understanding.’

  Sheena shrugged. ‘Could be worse,’ she granted. ‘A bit stiff and snooty, though. Still it’s only natch’ral, working long hours on me own, that I deserve a bit of comp‘ny sometimes.’

  ‘Nice for your friends too. Pity I don’t yet count as one of them, or I could drop in on my day off, bring you something fancy from Patty’s Patisserie.’ He leered at her, gambling on the odd free drink having given him some sort of leeway.

  ‘Yeah, that’d be cool, man.’ The mix of drinks was getting to her. She amplified the attempted brother-speak with an extravagant high-five in an over-arm swing. It nearly had him off his seat.

  ‘Right,’ said Markham. ‘Sadly, I have to be off right now, but I’ll hold you to that visit as a promise.’ He grinned, exposing yellowed, slightly overlapping front teeth, slid into the crowd, left by the street door and entered the lounge, careful not to be spotted through the shared serving space. It was one thing to oil what you want out of people, but another to stay and risk embarrassment because they couldn’t hold their liquor. There were locals here who knew him. He had a reputation to consider.

  Already there was an old fellow hanging around wanting to discuss an assault case that had come up last we
ek and been held over on conditional remand for Thursday. In exasperation he’d let slip who’d be sitting then, with Jerome Alcock as Chairman of the Bench. It had plunged the questioner in gloom. ‘Oh Lord, ’e’s a right stinker. That’ll mean the slammer, won’t it? Eh, watcha think, Mr Markham?’

  It was flattering to be appealed to, but he had to get the old ditherer off his heels. ‘Bound to be,’ he told him curtly. ‘He’ll not have a wax cat’s chance in hell.’ He turned his back on the man and pushed forward to pick up his order. He had drinking of his own to catch up on.

  Not that tonight it helped. Especially after that reminder of work. It left him, if anything, more morose, depressed after all the hassle today with the flaming trainee usher following him around. Silly bitch couldn’t grasp the difference between a pink form meaning conditional and a green for unconditional remand. Bloody useless housewife, but they wouldn’t be happy until magistrates’ courts were entirely run by women. Most of the beaks were females already, as well as both clerks and the main prosecution. No place any more for a man, except in the dock. He’d be better off getting out before they found something more to complain about in his “attitude”. There were other ways to earn a living and keep a bit of dignity.

  After a couple more pints, and making certain that Sheena had lurched off leaving the coast clear, he finally left the pub, turning up his collar in the street against what was now no more than spasmodic drizzle. Darkness offered comfortable anonymity. There was nothing further to check on back at the courthouse. Otherwise he wouldn’t have risked alcohol on his breath.

  He would have to watch it money-wise, though. Popping in for the odd lager was getting to be an expensive habit, especially when it included softening up the Lump for bits and bobs of gossip. Not that he could yet see what profit it could be turned to. Still, no harm in knowing a few details about a vulnerable old lady with a lot of money to dispose of. He doubted the Lump had even considered the full possibilities there. Doubted she ever considered anything except what went into her blubbery mouth.

  He collected his car, an eight-year old tan Nissan, from the council car park, and drove the short distance to the yard of the stationery warehouse. The long, single-storeyed hangar showed lights from high-up windows and skylights, indicating that night staff were restocking shelves and making up orders. He turned in at the gap in the outer wall, passing the two vans and four cars legitimately parked there, and drew into the shadow of the blank end of the structure. From there, with the driving window lowered, he could crane upwards and focus on the penthouse apartment where the Lump was employed as a day nurse.

  At that top level the whole wall on this side of the building appeared to be glazed from ceiling to floor, with some kind of low ornamental railing close against it on the outside. The whole was slightly luminescent, more perhaps from reflected moonlight penetrating broken clouds than from the faint glow within. On lower floors windows were brightly lit. Through some he could occasionally glimpse people moving about inside. Nobody here, it seemed, bothered to close their blinds.

  Bitterly he recalled the dingy net-curtain culture of the streets he was brought up in. Don’t let ’em see what goes on indoors! As if the loud rumpus from drunken brawling in the neighbourhood wasn’t broadcast enough. Some home comforts!

  When he was small that hadn’t been the case with his own straitlaced, teetotal parents. Ma, long tamed by hellfire texts; knew better than to step out of line. Godliness through misery, that’s what the old man believed in, with vicious canings for his only son at the slightest infringement of home-imposed laws. He still recalled the salty taste of the leather strap he silently bit on, writhing while his back was crisscrossed with weals after some villainy like riding his bike over the bedraggled grass patch his father called a lawn.

  Then Ma had died when he was nine and things changed. There was a gap when the two of them struggled to get along on their own, until the Slag moved in, big-busted, dripping fag ash, shouting his father out, hands on hips and legs straddled, but giggling into the night while the old springs wheezed in what had once been Ma’s bed.

  By then there was plenty for the net curtains to hide, grubby now and one permanently askew with a hook come loose. Things were as brutal there as in any of the other houses, with his father unhinged by a mixture of lust, frustration and the demon drink he’d always railed against.

  Long-ingrained fear had at least served to make Oliver one of the rare youngsters thereabouts with no criminal record by the time he was forced to leave school. He found work at the stationery warehouse boring and repetitive, but a welcome break from the home from hell. By seventeen he’d saved what he was allowed to keep from his pitiful wage, so in time he’d moved out and moved on.

  He withdrew his head from the car window, wiping rain from his face with the back of one sleeve. From an open fanlight in the warehouse he caught the whine of a fork lift truck and above it a man’s voice singing some indistinguishable pop rubbish, with another whistling along. Discipline hadn’t been so slack when he’d started there at sixteen, burning inside at the injustice of not being allowed to continue on to college and study Eng. Lit. Every time he passed the enormous modern block now upgraded to a University Department he scorned the sloppily dressed kids he saw streaming through its gates. Undeserving scruff-heads, most of them. How much had they ever read, let alone enjoyed, of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Edmund Spenser? He spat out into the dark before winding up the window.

  Waiting now to drive out on the main road he looked left and saw, beyond the car showrooms, a dark figure hurry from the smoked-glass double doors of the luxury apartments. As he watched, the man – a mature male by the way he walked – crossed by the mini-roundabout, turned on the farther kerb, looked back for several seconds and slowly raised a hand.

  It seemed to Markham that in the dim penthouse window a shadow had moved across some low light-source - perhaps a shaded table lamp – and stood there for the same short period before moving away. He was too distant to be sure it was a woman who had raised a hand in reply, but he guessed it would be the one the Lump said nursed there overnight.

  An outsider to their comfort-wrapped lives, he felt an urge to find out who the man was. All it took was to follow him as he rounded the college wall on foot. Security lamps in the hospital forecourt helped. The man entered by the automatic doors to Accident and Emergency. By the merciless lighting inside, his identity was in no doubt. Markham knew Dr Keith Stanford through an appearance at court giving evidence in a case of serious assault.

  This entrance was closest to where his wife would have been taken after her suicide attempt. There’d been whispers that she also had some kind of wasting disease, but that might not be what had pushed her to the brink. Suppose she’d heard gossip that the good doctor was playing away from home. If so, Markham considered, he might get to learn something of Keith Stanford’s bit on the side, whom the Lump had called Alyson. It seemed she was a hospital nurse moonlighting with care for the sick, rich old lady.

  For Alyson next morning the first light breaking over the distant hills brought back that earlier dawn years before when the shattering phone call had come. So similar – with lemon streaks on the skyline and the underside of layered cloud faintly flushed rose – that it could be that same morning. Recalled from a weekend with friends in Somerset, she’d rushed home in panic to find Gran still alive. But only just. And all she’d managed to say – the last word Alyson had to remember her by – was her sister’s name, Emily, gasped with such agony behind it. The sister she’d been deprived of all her adult life, but strangely dominating her dying mind as the only thing that still mattered to her. Such unnecessary secret grieving, when surely Gran could have sought her out before then and achieved a reconciliation.

  Perhaps, wherever Gran was now, if she was anywhere, she’d be relieved that her granddaughter had at last done that much for her: found Emily before it was too late. And now, probably today, she was to meet her counterpart, Emily’s ow
n grandchild.

  Her visitor, when she arrived at a little after nine that morning, was someone else entirely. Alyson had buzzed her in without checking on the monitor.

  ‘Hello,’ DS Rosemary Zyczynski greeted her. ‘I hope you don’t mind my contacting you at home, but I’ve something to tell you and guessed it might be a tad more private here than at work.’

  ‘That’s fine by me,’ Alyson told her. ‘Come in and let me take your coat.’ She shook off the surface rain and went to hang it in the airing cupboard. As she did so she noticed that Keith’s scarf was left there from last night. Perhaps he’d drop in for it later and bring her up to date on his plans for Audrey.

  Rosemary followed her into the kitchen and nodded enthusiastically at the offer of tea. ‘Yes, please.’

  Setting out the tray, Alyson was aware of the other girl taking in her surroundings. Well, of course, a detective after all. She remembered how she’d said she was in the right job, and smiled. It was the same for herself, so they’d more in common than being of much the same age.

  ‘Let’s go through to the lounge.’ Not having many friends drop in, she was curious to see this room’s effect on her visitor.

  ‘Now that,’ Zyczynski said, ‘is really something.’ She had ignored the art display, going straight across to the glass wall to gaze down at the traffic circulating the town centre. Then she looked across to make out the undulating line of the Chilterns against a lowering sky. ‘How do you ever get any work done here? If you get my point.’

  ‘I certainly do. The view can be quite mesmerizing. But sit down and tell me what brings you here. I’d guess it’s something about my junkie patient.’

  ‘Yes. How’s he doing?’

  ‘Awake now and much as you’d expect. Pretty groggy. We’ll clean him up, ready for a methadone programme. But once the habit’s started, I’m afraid … It’s a familiar story.’

  ‘Discouraging. Like some of our regulars at the nick. Actually I’ve come for confession. The key I found under his trainer’s lining reminded me of a similar one I’d seen. So I took it away with me to check.’