by Graham Smith
‘We understand your concerns, Inspector, and we will, of course, bear them in mind at all times during this investigation.’ O’Dowd pointed at the door behind Mannequin. ‘If you’ll excuse us, we have work to do.’
Nineteen
As she drove from Penrith’s Carleton Hall to Caldbeck, Beth had to fight her instinctive anger at Mannequin’s little speech. Had she given in to her baser instincts, she’d have mashed her foot on the throttle and pushed her little car to its limits. To calm herself, she repeatedly went over the details she knew about Felicia Evans. She’d thought it would have been too much to hope for that the woman had already been reported as missing, but sure enough, a report had been made.
Felicia Evans was eighty-three and six weeks ago she had been given two months to live. She’d opted to die at her home in Caldbeck, so the hospital had arranged for carers to visit her four times a day.
The file showed her as having no next of kin. Whether Felicia was estranged from her family, or just the last of her line was something she could find out later; for now, all she could think of was an old woman dying alone. Maybe she’d got some comfort from the carers and maybe they’d been strangers who she only tolerated because she had no one else.
Beth closed her eyes and thought about what it must be like to make that decision. To go home and be alone, or to stay in hospital as she waited for the inevitable. It wasn’t one she ever wanted to have to face, and the idea of not having a loved one to grieve her passing terrified Beth.
While the information she had on Felicia – after seeing the woman’s corpse, Beth already felt she knew her well enough to think of her in Christian-name terms only – fitted with her theory about the woman being selected as a victim for the sole purpose of framing the mayor, she knew she had to be careful not to fit the facts to her theory and keep an open mind.
A carer had made a visit to the home of Felicia Evans and had found her missing. The broken timber around the back-door’s lock and the fact that Felicia had terminal lung cancer was enough to have the carer dialling treble nine.
If it was the case that Felicia Evans had been chosen because of some unknown vendetta against the mayor – and it looked very much like she had been – she was the perfect victim. An old woman who lived alone and was in the final days of her life would be missed by fewer people.
What stood out more than anything else in Beth’s mind was that if Felicia hadn’t been killed by the same person as the other three women, the FMIT had two killers to apprehend.
The carer who opened Felicia’s door to Beth was a middle-aged woman with a kindly face and a body that was a perfect cylinder. Her eyes held a mixture of sorrow and wisdom.
As she followed the carer into the low cottage, Beth felt like she was stepping back in time. Nothing in the cottage looked as if was built, decorated or made after 1980. The wallpaper looked old enough to have come back into fashion at least twice since it had been hung.
‘Bare. Dated. Spotless.’
While dated, the house was clean. Cleaner than it should be for someone suffering with end-stage cancer. The areas behind ornaments were clean, which indicated the surface had been wiped by someone who was house-proud, rather than a carer giving surfaces a quick once-over to help out their charge.
Instead of a 40-inch TV, the small lounge was dominated by a wall of bookshelves. When Beth took a look at one or two of them, she saw they were crime novels. The books were in varying conditions, with some worn from multiple reads, whereas others looked pristine. The covers showed an eclectic mix of old and new titles. One or two, like Shutter Island, she recognised as having been made into movies.
The carer took a seat. ‘I don’t know how much I can help you. I spoke to a constable yesterday, nice young man he was, and told him everything.’
‘I know.’ Beth gave a tight grin. ‘I just have a few follow-up questions. You said that Mrs Evans never had any visitors. Did she talk about her family or mention friends to you at all?’
‘Never. She talked about her books and criticised the other carers.’
‘Other carers?’
‘Yeah. When people are terminal and want to pass at home, we come and look after them. We pop in four times a day. There’s three of us been visiting Felicia. I’ll be honest, when I heard the complaints she made about my colleagues, I ignored them. The other girls are professionals. We all are. People in Felicia’s position often feel angry and scared. We come in, disturb them when they’re poorly and they often take out their anger on us.’ A shrug. ‘It’s crap, but it’s a part of the job, so we deal with it.’
Beth couldn’t help but feel for the carer. The woman dealt with death on a daily basis. If not actual death, imminent death. Now she’d met her, Beth had seen that she was a carer in a lot more ways than just her job description. She could even picture her sitting by a bedside, holding a withered hand long after her shift had finished.
As a detective Beth had grown used to deaths, but she’d really only ever dealt with the aftermath of when people had died. While she might learn about their lives in this way, she’d never achieve the closeness the carer and her colleagues did.
She put a few more questions to the woman without learning much at all. Felicia Evans was a solitary person who was happiest sitting in her chair with a good book. Her one self-pitying comment to the carer had been that she’d never get the chance to read all the books she’d collected.
To Beth the books were the key to Felicia’s soul. Whatever had happened to the woman in her younger days, the impact had shaped her life. Whether she’d been shunned by a lover or victimised by someone wasn’t the real point. Felicia’s books were her escape route. She’d avoid her own dark thoughts and live the characters’ lives in her mind.
With the woman’s library made up of little but crime fiction, Beth wondered if Felicia was looking for a fictional resolution that she’d never been given in real life.
It was possible that Felicia just liked the puzzles, but if that was the case, wouldn’t it stand to reason she might also have a TV so she could watch crime dramas and quiz shows? While not a novel reader herself, Beth knew that when her mother read, she became immersed in the fictional world to the point where she’d lose track of time and wouldn’t hear her name being spoken.
Beth tried questioning the carer one last time, but she knew her questions were neither new nor insightful. From the way the carer kept looking at her watch, Beth guessed the woman had another charge she needed to visit, so she finished up and let the woman go.
Beth stood in the cottage and drank in everything she could. Every room had been pored over by a CSI team, yet she didn’t expect them to have found anything of note. If this was the rapist’s work, he’d not left a decent clue yet. If he was clever enough to hack into computers and leave fake evidence to frame the mayor, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to expect him to have taken precautions against giving them clues that would lead them to his door.
There was a smell in the cottage that filled every space and she didn’t know whether it was due to Felicia’s personal decay or the years of scents that had gathered in the furniture. Beth took a few minutes to peer into some of the cupboards and poke about in the writing desk. What she found gave her a profound sense of sadness.
The food in Felicia’s cupboards was all supermarket own-brands, while the fridge held tins of corned beef, tongue and spam, a few vegetables, a small block of cheese that was going mouldy and milk that was three days past its sell-by date.
To Beth it spoke of a frugal existence, but the bank statements in the writing desk showed that Felicia was spending only a fraction of her pension. With no known relatives to leave anything to, Felicia was either being overly cautious with her money or perhaps she was punishing herself for something.
For the killer, the taking of such a life would be easier to rationalise. With Felicia being friendless, unloved and near-death from a painful disease, her killer would be able to convince himself that b
y killing her, he was actually saving her pain.
The question that was now bugging Beth was, if this theory was right, how did Felicia’s killer know she was already close to death? Supposedly she was a person who drove others away, didn’t tell anyone what was going on in her life. Therefore her killer must have some connection to her, unless she was chosen entirely randomly.
The more Beth thought about it, the more she wondered what had gone on in Felicia’s past, as other than her books, everything in Felicia’s life was from another time.
With as much insight collected into Felicia’s life as she was likely to get from the house, Beth snipped the lock over and pulled the front door closed behind her. She needed to get to the local shop before it closed.
Twenty
The village shop was just a hundred yards up the road, so Beth set off walking. In villages the shop was the hub at the centre of the gossip wheel. If the shopkeeper didn’t have the answers to her questions, nobody would.
Caldbeck was one of those idyllic villages which had been around for ever. The stone houses aged, yet chocolate-box beautiful. Most had window boxes and hanging baskets providing a riot of colour, and the gardens she walked past were all manicured to within an inch of their lives.
As she walked to the shop, she tried to establish a timeline for the night before last in her mind.
Felicia’s carer had left the cottage at ten thirty and another had arrived at eight o’clock the next morning. At 6.45 a.m. the walker who’d spotted her body had called it in. Therefore Felicia had to have been taken between 10.30 p.m. and 6.00 a.m. at the latest.
The forty-five-minute window Beth had allowed for someone to kill, defile and then transport Felicia to the deposition site on the banks of Lake Ullswater was tight, but she knew that she had to work to the maximum parameters.
Beth rapped her knuckles on the shop’s window a second time but she knew it was a forlorn hope. The shop’s lights were off and the A4 piece of paper sellotaped to the window stating its opening hours told her it closed an hour ago. It was only noon, but in a village this size there probably wasn’t enough trade to warrant longer opening. The locals would all know the shop’s opening times and use it accordingly.
She knew what most of these little village shops were like. They sold newspapers, cigarettes and essentials like bread, milk and cheese. There would be a selection of tinned goods and a limited supply of soft drinks and chocolate bars. The prices would be higher than supermarkets, but the locals would pay them without complaint because the shop was handy for emergency supplies.
Frustrated that she’d missed the chance to speak to the shopkeeper, Beth trudged back towards her car.
When she was halfway back she saw tendrils of smoke rising from the back of a cottage and heard music. It wasn’t loud or offensive, just someone playing a radio in the back garden.
Beth went to the house and knocked on the door in the hope the occupants would know where the shop owner lived.
A teenage boy answered, his face a riot of acne, but he was pleasant and Beth could see that once he grew out of the spots, he’d be handsome.
Two minutes later she was in the back garden waiting to speak to the lad’s parents. A large barbecue was being tended to by the father while the mother was arranging half a dozen chairs around a wooden table on the lawn.
Beth put her questions to the mother first and then the father. Neither admitted to knowing much about Felicia. Their contact with the woman was limited to greetings or short conversations about the weather. They said they used to invite her to barbecues and the odd dinner party but she always declined their hospitality.
As she’d talked to the father, Beth’s stomach had growled at the smell of the burger he was cooking. He’d smiled and served her a burger in a sesame seed bun without even asking if she wanted it. By the time she’d finished the burger, more of Caldbeck’s residents had arrived. The father, being the good citizen he was, directed each of his guests Beth’s way so she could speak to them in turn.
Beth had been at the house for an hour or so when she realised that other than paying a jobbing builder to rebuild her garden wall, Felicia had kept contact with her fellow villagers to an absolute minimum.
A neighbour Beth had chatted to said that when Felicia was in her garden, she’d either be gardening or reading. The neighbour had tried chatting to her over the wall but it had become clear that the woman just wanted to be left alone.
The burger in her stomach felt good as Beth drove out of Caldbeck. She’d not had the chance to eat today and as she navigated the narrow road south to the point where it joined the A66, she was wishing that she’d been offered a second one.
While her body was mostly content, her brain wasn’t. She’d put a call in to O’Dowd and had related her lack of findings. The DI had been crotchety, but not too bad.
To Beth’s way of thinking, Felicia Evans’s lifestyle spoke of either self-flagellation for some reason known only to Felicia or a desire to hide away and delight in solitude. Beth knew that she would have to investigate the victim to catch her killer. What she had to find out was the reason Felicia had chosen to shut herself away from the world. She’d meant to run Felicia’s name through the PND and HOLMES to see if it came up with anything relevant, but after Mannequin’s arrival into the office, the idea had been forgotten.
It would be the first thing she did upon her return to the office.
Twenty-One
Beth’s desk was as tidy as her mind. Everything had its place and while she didn’t have any OCD tendencies, she liked to have everything in its rightful home so she knew where things were without even having to look for them. The pile of notes and folders she kept to the left of her keyboard looked haphazard to anyone else, but Beth knew what was in each folder and what each note was relevant to.
Sitting at her desk, reading the files on her screen, she found herself understanding the old lady’s need for isolation.
Felicia Evans had been gang-raped in the early 1970s. She’d reported it and her rapists had not only stood trial, but they’d been convicted.
That Felicia had been the victim of a sexual assault in death, as in life, somehow made it all the more horrific. Before death, she’d been a lonely woman, cloistered away and friendless. The way she’d hidden herself away spoke of a lasting trauma.
Reporting a rape and seeing it followed through right to conviction was an emotional and sapping ordeal in today’s world, even with measures such as video testimony to lessen the impact of giving evidence. Beth couldn’t begin to think how horrific it would have been over forty years ago, when attitudes were different.
The fact that Felicia had endured the challenges of reporting her rape, and the subsequent trial, spoke of a massive inner strength. Whether she’d been fuelled by a desire for revenge or retribution wasn’t important, what mattered was that justice had been served and that Felicia would have had a crumb of comfort to help her manage any nightmares she had.
On the off-chance that Felicia had been murdered by one of the four rapists who’d assaulted her, Beth ran their names to see where they were now. Three of the four had passed away as they’d been a minimum of ten years older than Felicia and the fourth was back in prison for another sexual assault he’d committed.
Regardless of the fact she had few clues to follow, Felicia’s plight made Beth even more determined to solve her murder.
Another thing that was playing on her mind was the rapist’s change of tack. Instead of penetrating Felicia himself he’d used a sex toy or some other object. It didn’t make sense to Beth, but she couldn’t think of a credible reason for the change.
Whatever else broke with the case, no matter how many hours she had to work, Beth made a silent promise to Felicia that she’d catch her killer, and another to young Kerrie Newham that she’d make sure the person who robbed her of her mother would pay.
Even as she began to pack up her things for the day, an idea of how to identify the rapist cam
e to her. It was too late in the day to pursue it now, but she planned to put the suggestion to O’Dowd the next morning so she could pursue the idea.
Twenty-Two
Beth parked her car in The Lanes car park and sat where she was for a moment collecting her thoughts one final time. She’d put the idea she’d had about tracing Felicia’s killer to O’Dowd and, while the DI had agreed with her line of thinking, O’Dowd had told her that she’d had instructions from on high and that Beth was to spend her time trying to identify who was framing the mayor, as the DCI and chief super both believed that was the best way to catch Felicia’s killer.
The playlist she put on for the journey had been stocked with power ballads. It was her ‘calm down’ music, as she wanted to chase away the anger at what she felt was unnecessary interference from the higher-ranking officers.
She accepted that the case had generated a lot of media attention. The killer had been dubbed ‘the Lakeland Ripper’ by the ITV news. As was typical, once someone had christened the killer, the name had stuck and other members of the press were sure to use it.
Once she got to the outskirts of Carlisle she managed to refocus her mind from its wandering across all aspects of the case and concentrate on how she would handle the mayor.
O’Dowd had made it clear that she must be respectful and that she had to apologise for the ways she’d pressured him on Monday. That wasn’t something she was looking forward to, but she was aware it had to happen whether she liked it or not.
The greater concern to her was how she should act around the mayor. There was no doubt in her mind that behind his public image he was a different character. That he wasn’t as squeaky clean as he made himself out to be. The fact someone was trying to frame him as a rapist and a murderer was a big red flag as far as she was concerned.