by Denise Mina
As she walked past and went in through the door she heard Leonard asking if Kay Murray had been up and being told that she hadn’t. Morrow would have to go and look for her.
Dark porch, the suitcase gone now, but the jacket still there. Dark porch, the shoes, one upright, one on its side. Darker hall, imposing. Through the arch to the stairs. Her shoulders crept up to her ears at the memory of Sarah’s body. The dried, black bloody stamp of her mess still there, on the floor, rising up two stairs as if it was crawling up to the top of the house to hide.
She glanced to the side. The taser phone had been there, but even as she was thinking it she knew she was avoiding looking at the stairs.
She turned her head deliberately.
The blood on the ledge of the steps was still scarlet and tacky but the spills down the side had dried black. Two sets, one very slightly larger than the other, both facing her now. The smaller prints were nearer the black hole where Sarah’s head had been. They were consistently nearer. The bigger feet had made impressions further along the step, away from Sarah.
Morrow stepped back. They were definitely next to her head. On one step she could see that the left foot of the smaller feet had stood alone, the person was standing on one foot, very close to Sarah’s head.
They’d been stamping on her with the other.
She looked at the footprints and imagined the people who made them standing there, arms down, as blank-faced as men in a line-up. They’d be interviewed separately. They’d blame each other, they always did. It didn’t matter and they’d both be convicted, but this time maybe one of them would be telling the truth when he said he was innocent.
She went outside for a breath of air and found Leonard on the step. “Where was Kay Murray working yesterday?”
Morrow paused for breath at the gate. It was a lovely garden. The ground in front of the house was a sea of raked white gravel with a stepping-stone pathway that arced around to the front door. The border plants were brightly colored, pink and blue, hanging over the watery white-marble chips. A high fence protected it from the view of the neighbors, a trestle of brilliant orange flowers disguising it.
Leonard had referred to Mrs. Thalaine’s house as “the old Glenarvon stable block” in the written report. Looking at it now, Morrow could make out a portion of the path to the big house, a stripe of worn ground at the head of the hill beyond the cottage.
It didn’t look like a stables anymore, it looked like a brand-new, whitewashed house designed as a picturesque drawing of a stables. She opened the spindle-topped gate and held it behind her for Leonard. She had been here before and it seemed sensible to bring her back, so Mrs. Thalaine would know who they were and wouldn’t feel the need to waste time with preliminaries.
Morrow rang the bell.
After a short pause a slim woman opened it; a neat woman, her gray hair streaked with blonde, dressed in beige slacks and a matching stone jumper, a blue silk neckerchief loose at her throat, tucked into her crew neck. She looked out at them over half-moon reading glasses and recognized Tamsin Leonard.
“Well, hello again!”
There were no preliminaries. Leonard had promised to come back and inform jittery Mrs. Thalaine if there was a murderer roving around the village and she and her husband should evacuate. She was very keen to establish whether or not this was the case and didn’t offer tea or coffee or a wee plate of nice biscuits but sat them down in the living room and quizzed them about the progress of the investigation so far.
“No one yet, then?”
“No,” said Morrow firmly. “We’re quite sure that whatever led to Sarah’s death was a personal matter and there’s no ongoing threat.”
“So, it doesn’t concern me?”
“No.”
“OK.” She seemed relieved at that until it occurred to her: “What are you doing back here, then?”
“I was looking for Kay Murray.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Kay?”
“Do you know her?”
“Indeed I do. She’s my lady-what-does.” She tittered at that. Morrow declined to titter back.
They looked at each other for a moment. A bird pecked at a feeder hanging in a window, tuck-tuck.
“Did you know Sarah?”
Mrs. Thalaine wasn’t enjoying this. She seemed to realize that Morrow was a different sort of police officer, not the nice sort either. Tuck-tuck-tuck.
“Sarah grew up here. Went away to school obviously, and we keep ourselves to ourselves, but she grew up nearby.”
“What sort of a person was she?”
“She was an only child. Shy growing up. Kept away from the local children…”
“She kept away or was kept away?”
“Well, my children were invited up for birthday parties but we always felt that they weren’t very welcome: they were padding really. My older son liked Sarah very much. Said she was funny. She did impersonations of her nannies. They were all French. She made them laugh.”
“The family fortunes had declined recently, hadn’t they?”
“Everyone’s fortunes have declined recently. Look at someone like Kay Murray, I mean, people get desperate, don’t they? Four children and no husband—”
Morrow snapped at her, “Have your fortunes declined recently?”
Mrs. Thalaine touched her neckerchief with her fingers, at the jugular. She opened her mouth but snapped it shut again. Tuck-tuck-tuck and a flutter of black wings at the window as the bird flew away, sated.
Mrs. Thalaine filled her lungs. “We invested our savings in shares, through a brokerage firm, AGI. They lost it. All.”
“How much was that?”
Mrs. Thalaine tapped her jugular again. “Six hundred thousand. More or less.”
She began to cry but refused to give in to it. Her lips quivered and she pulled a silk handkerchief out of her sleeve and dabbed at the corners of her eyes, trying to preserve her make-up.
Morrow would have been ashamed to admit it, but it was quite boring to watch. Thalaine was crying about money while the stairs in Glenarvon were carpeted in chunks of Sarah’s face. When the sobs and hiccups abated Morrow spoke softly, “And AGI lost the money?”
“Did they? Where did it go?” She slumped, as if it was all too much for her, and looked coldly at Morrow. “Do you have any idea who did this?”
“Who do you know in the village?”
“Most of the older residents.”
“Is it quite mixed around here?”
“How do you mean?”
“Old people, families with children?”
“Yes, quite mixed.”
“Many teenagers?”
“Some.”
“Who do you know with teenager children?”
“The Campbells have two daughters, nineteen and fifteen.”
“No boys?”
She stopped, looked at Morrow, knew, somehow, that this was what she didn’t want to hear: “Kay Murray has three boys. Teenagers.”
“I meant in the local area.”
Mrs. Thalaine started crying and couldn’t stop herself. “We’re moving anyway!” She pressed her hankie to her mouth in between fractured exclamations. “We’re going to have to sell our family home and live with our children. We’ve been here for thirty-two years. Now we have to go and live with our children.”
Morrow was sorry for being so dismissive of her loss. She reached forward and touched her arm, apologizing for unkindnesses committed in her head.
TWENTY-FIVE
Kay was plating up mince and potatoes when the buzzer rang and made her flinch. John was expecting his pal Robbie to come up. Robbie had the guilty look of a wee boy who wanked all the time, possibly not at normal things. John had told her three times this evening that Robbie was coming up to do homework, so she knew they weren’t planning on doing that. Still, as long as they were hanging about the house she could keep opening the bedroom door and walking in without warning. Robbie’s brother was on tags for fighting as well. Nasty
family.
The buzzer rang again and she shouted, “John!”
He came out of his room, looking paranoid, and saw her holding the big pot of mince over the plates. She worried suddenly that he might be smoking a lot of hash and made a mental note to smell for it.
“Buzzer. Might be Robbie.”
John picked up the receiver and turned away from her. “Aye?”
The person on the other end spoke too long for it to be monosyllabic Robbie. He was making his excuses, maybe. John pressed the button for the lobby doors and hung up.
“Is he not coming up?”
“Eh?”
“Is Robbie coming up?” she said slowly, and nodded at the mince pot. “Does he want some tea?”
John looked vague. “No, it’s the polis.”
“The polis? Again?”
“To talk to you.” He tucked his T-shirt into his jeans at the back, as if he had a gun, and walked away.
Moving quickly, Kay slapped a ladle of mince on all five plates and dished up the boiled potatoes and beans. She was squeezing tomato ketchup onto four of the plates when a knock rattled the glass pane on the front door.
Stepping out into the hall, she banged quickly on Marie’s door and opened it to an indignant “Hey!”
There were two warped faces behind the mottled glass on the door, and neither one looked like Alex. One was shorter than the other, neat hair, looking down the corridor, the other staring straight at the glass as if they could see through it.
“Tea’s out,” called Kay, watching the front door while moving around the hall. “No ketchup.”
“I don’t want any—”
“Don’t give us any shit, Marie.”
She didn’t have time to knock before she opened Joe and Frankie’s door. “Tea’s up.” She heard them stir, grunting as they got off their beds. She opened John’s door and shouted, “Mince!” over the noise of his stereo.
The police could see her moving around. The smaller one lifted a hand to knock again but Kay opened it before they made contact.
“Yes?” she said.
A man and a woman. The man had a tiny wee mouth too small for his face, and wiry dark hair. She knew the woman from Mrs. Thalaine’s the day before, small, dark, big hooked nose, but she looked different at Kay’s front door, familiar, like a woman she might be friends with.
They introduced themselves—the man, Harris, for the first time, and Leonard smiling, holding her neat little hand out—and asked if they could come in and talk to her for a moment about Sarah Erroll.
Kay sighed, kept a hold of the door so that her arm barred their entrance to the hall and turned back, exasperated and shouted to the kids, “Tea’s UP!”
Joe called that he was coming and Marie arrived at her bedroom door, looked out, seemed annoyed. Kay pointed her into the kitchen. “Your dinner’s in there getting cold.”
Marie sneered at her. “I’m not hungry.”
Joe and Frankie trotted out of their rooms, nodding hellos to the police and John came out, ignoring them, keeping his head tipped down so his skip cap hid his face.
“Well, Marie, you’re getting nothing later,” said Kay, inappropriately angry because she was ashamed of how rude Marie was to her. “So don’t be thinking you’re going to skip your dinner and eat shit all night.”
Marie went into her room and slammed the door so hard that it bounced open again re-revealing her like a magician’s assistant. Mortified, she used both hands to shut it again. Joe and Frankie saw it as they came back from the kitchen with their dinner plates and laughed fondly at her.
The fight went out of Kay suddenly, as it did sometimes at the end of a day. She turned back to face the police—
“Thanks, Mum,” called Joe from behind her, and her mood softened.
She leaned against the door. “What is it you want?”
The man, Harris, made a chopping motion with his hand towards the living room. “We’d like to come in.”
Kay sucked her teeth, reluctant. This was her time, her hour or so, when all she had to do was iron and smoke and watch telly and burst into John’s room every time she went to the loo.
But they were the polis. She stepped back and waved them towards the living room. She let them go in alone as she went to the kitchen, picked up her plate and brought it into the living room with her. She was not going to let her dinner get cold while she made them cups of tea, she told herself. No fucking way.
The woman was sitting in the armchair with Kay’s pint of Bru and fags and lighter arranged around it.
“That’s my seat.”
The woman looked to the guy for an order. He gave a little nod to say yes, you may move. They were worse than the fucking kids. Leonard shuffled around the omnipresent ironing board to the settee and Kay sat down, balancing her plate on her knees.
The ironing board was right between them so she reached over with her foot, pushing it towards the telly, careful not to tip it: her ashtray and a half-ironed shirt were balanced on it. Hollyoaks was just starting on TV.
She cut a boiled potato in half and looked at the man. “What is it?”
Harris sat forward on the sagging settee. “OK, Miss Murray, as you know, Sarah Erroll was killed on the…”
He went on, but Kay found her mind yearning for telly and her thoughts wandering, speculating about the Hollyoaks characters and what would happen to them.
“Put that telly off, would you?” Kay was looking at Leonard. “Remote’s on the ironing board.”
Leonard stood up, found the remote and switched it off. She stood there for a minute.
The man looked none too pleased. He caught a breath and started again, “Why didn’t you come up to Glenarvon today?”
She should have. She had said she would but she couldn’t face Alex again. She was still angry with her for coming up alone, knew she wouldn’t have approved of the place, of the house, of her still smoking.
She put a potato in her mouth and shrugged. “Was I supposed to?”
“Yes, you were. You said you’d come up and tell us if anything was missing. You told DS Alex Morrow that in front of DC Wilder and we were expecting you.”
Kay forked a nugget of mince, dipped it in her ketchup and put it in her mouth. She chewed and looked at them. They’d sent two police officers, plain-clothed, higher wages, she was sure, sent them up to her house to tick her off for not pitching up to help them. She raised her eyebrows, daring them to give her a row. “The day fell away from me. What do you want me to say?” She looked from one to the other. “Are you here for a sorry?”
He didn’t answer. He reached down to his briefcase and took out a pen and a clipboard as Kay ate and watched. It was the same clipboard form they’d filled out at Mrs. Thalaine’s house. It must be a standard form they got everyone to fill in.
“Can I have your full name?”
“Kay Angela Murray.”
“Marital status?”
Kay dropped her eyes to her plate. “Not married.”
He filled out bits of the form without asking her—she could see him fill out the address and guess her age at 45–60. She was thirty-eight.
“Have you always been alone?” Leonard smiled a little, not unkindly but pitying nonetheless.
“How do you mean?”
“The kids…” She looked sad.
Kay stared back at her. “I didn’t conceive them on my own, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Leonard smiled dutifully. “Must have been difficult…”
Kay was sick of answering that. She was sick of people assuming her life was hard and she was unhappy just because she didn’t have a husband to hog the remote and shout at her, but she said nothing.
Harris asked for her mobile number and date of birth and she saw him change the approximate age accordingly.
“And are they all your children?” He nodded back out to the bedrooms.
Kay snorted, still smarting from the humiliation in the hall.
“Y
ou don’t think I’d let someone else’s kids speak to me like that?”
“No, I mean, none of them foster kids or anything?”
“No.”
“There’s Marie and she’s…?”
“Thirteen. Youngest.” He wrote as she spoke. “Then John, fourteen. Then Frankie and finally, Joe: fifteen and sixteen.”
“Quite a cluster.” The stupid woman nodded sympathetically.
Kay ate some more dinner. “You got kids?”
The woman shook her head. She was in her early thirties, Kay thought, just the right age to be panicking.
“You don’t know what you’re missing,” said Kay.
That line only worked on people who didn’t have kids. The man did have kids, definitely. He looked skeptical. “You’re not with their father?”
“No.”
“You in touch with him?”
“No.”
He held her eye, wanted her to admit there was more than one father but she wouldn’t. It was none of his fucking business. Sarah Erroll had died, not her. She turned her attention back to her dinner.
“Miss Murray, we’ve been investigating Sarah’s murder, as you know, and all of the carers we’ve spoken to have said that you were in charge of the staff in Glenarvon.”
“Right?”
“How did that come about?”
He said it as if she was up to something. “What do you mean?”
“Well,” he smiled, “are you qualified?”
Kay licked a burning smear of vinegary ketchup off her lips. “No. I got on well with Sarah and she trusted me to look after her mum when she was away at her work. Me and Mrs. Erroll: we got on well.”
“Did Sarah tell you what she did for a living?”
Kay shrugged, she’d never wondered about that actually. She’d assumed that it was something technical that she wouldn’t understand so she hadn’t asked. “Never told me.”
He watched her face to see if she was telling the truth, which she found insulting, and moved on. “In the kitchen, the table in Sarah’s kitchen…”