by Ann Cleeves
‘Did she mention a lad? A bonny lass like her, there must have been someone…’
‘I didn’t like to pry,’ Phyllis said.
‘Of course not.’
‘They’re very secretive at that age, aren’t they? They’ll tell you nothing.’
‘You’ve been in touch since Easter, though? On the phone?’
‘I phone every week. Sunday. It’s cheap rate then. You couldn’t expect her to phone us, the budget she’s on.’
‘Did you call her landline or mobile?’
‘Mobile. That way she wouldn’t have to stay in specially.’
‘How did she seem?’
‘Really well. Happy. Excited, even.’
‘Do you know why she was feeling so good? Or was she always like that?’
‘Not always, no. We all have our bad days, don’t we? I thought afterwards about what might have made her so cheerful. I asked her if she’d sorted herself out a job for September. “There are things in the pipeline.” That’s what she said. It sounds daft, but you could hear her smiling as she said it. I thought perhaps she’d applied for something locally. Near home, I mean. Maybe even got an interview. But she didn’t want to say anything. Not to get our hopes up, like. In case we were disappointed.’
There was a moment of silence. In the greenhouse Dennis Marsh took a tin of tobacco from his jacket pocket and began rolling a cigarette. Phyllis frowned. She probably thought roll-ups common, something not to be done in front of guests. Not even when your daughter’s just died.
Ashworth leaned forward, caught her attention again. ‘Did Lily ever do a teaching practice in Whitley High?’
‘No, she was a primary specialist. She didn’t do high schools.’
‘So she’d never have taught a lad called Luke Armstrong? Never mentioned him at all?’
‘Why? Is he the one that killed her?’ The words were spat out, so loud and so fierce that she shocked them both.
‘No,’ Ashworth said quietly. ‘Nothing like that. He was murdered too. There are certain similarities.’
Vera left them then. Phyllis was making more tea, just about holding herself together with ritual chat, warming the pot, finding biscuits. She’d have liked Joe Ashworth as a son-in-law, Vera could tell. She might even have been thinking that as she prompted him to take another fig roll. There was a glass door from the kitchen into the garden and Vera went out through that, closing it behind her, shutting out the conversation, knowing she was a coward, but not able to bear it any more.
Dennis must have heard her approaching, but didn’t look up until she appeared at the open greenhouse door. She pulled up a plastic garden chair and sat just outside, facing him. He had the drawn, defeated face of men she’d seen in the cells or sleeping rough. Phyllis would save him from that, at least. She’d make sure he washed and shaved, cut his fingernails, wore clean clothes.
‘Tell me about Lily.’ Vera planted her feet firmly on the grass.
‘I should never have had a bairn,’ he said.
She felt like saying she’d always believed children were pretty overrated herself, but thought that wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
‘I don’t suppose anyone thinks they make a good job of it, bringing up kids.’
‘I can’t even look after myself.’
‘Lily seemed to have turned out all right. University. Going into teaching.’ Vera caught the cheerful tone of the social worker in her voice, hated herself for it.
‘She was never happy, though,’ he said. ‘Not really. Not even when she was at school.’
‘What was she like at school?’
‘Bright,’ he said. ‘Oh yes, always top of the class in the little school. And when she started her A levels they put her down for Oxford.’
Vera was surprised Phyllis hadn’t mentioned that, but understood why it hadn’t come up when he continued speaking. ‘Then she didn’t do as well in her exams as they’d been expecting. There was this lad, I don’t know, she was obsessed by him. Thought she was in love with him. Couldn’t concentrate, it seemed. Got A levels, but not the grades she needed for Oxford.’
‘It happens,’ Vera said. ‘Teenage girls…’
‘It wasn’t normal, though,’ he said. ‘Not a normal crush. She was fixated. Stopped sleeping. Stopped eating. I thought she was ill. She needed special help. Phyllis wouldn’t see it.’
Vera said nothing.
‘I knew,’ he said. ‘I recognized it. I’ve been in and out of mental hospital over the years. Not so much now that they’ve sorted out the drugs, but I had my first breakdown when I was Lily’s age. Too much of a coincidence, isn’t it? She must have got that from me. She got her mother’s brains. My madness.’
‘Do you remember the name of the lad she fell for when she was at school?’
He frowned. ‘My memory’s not so good. I blame the ECT but it’s probably just age.’
She waited, hoping it would come to him. She didn’t want to bring this up with Phyllis, cause her even more pain.
‘Craven,’ he said. ‘Ben Craven. A nice enough lad. Not his fault.’
‘What happened to him? Did he go on to university?’
Dennis shook his head. ‘I don’t think I ever knew.’
‘You said you had a couple of spells in hospital, Mr Marsh. Where did you go?’
‘St George’s. That place in Morpeth.’
The first link between Luke Armstrong and Lily Marsh, Vera thought. Tenuous, but something at least to work on.
‘And Lily? Do you think she ever went there for treatment? Once she left home, maybe? Not as an inpatient. You’d have heard about that. But to one of the outpatient clinics?’
‘I told her to go,’ he said. ‘I gave her a card with the name of my doctor on it. But I don’t know if she took my advice.’ He made a brave attempt at a smile. ‘You know what it’s like. Two women in the house. They weren’t going to take any notice of me.’
Chapter Fourteen
‘So what have we got here?’ Joe Ashworth said. ‘Some nutter who thinks it’s OK to go round strangling nutters?’
They were in the car on the way to Newcastle. They’d arranged to see Lily Marsh’s flat and to talk to the two students she’d shared with.
‘Maybe.’ Vera was thinking it was all too elaborate. Some game. Some clever bastard pulling their strings. ‘But forget the window dressing. The flowers on the water. If we had two murders this close, same cause of death, what would you think?’
‘I’d still think it was a nutter.’
‘Serial killer?’
‘Perhaps.’ He was cautious, surprised she’d used the word even to him. Serial killer meant the press going wild, hysterical politicians, and that was the last thing she’d want. It wasn’t something to speak of lightly.
‘But if it wasn’t random, if it wasn’t some psychotic who’d taken against attractive young people?’
He took a moment to think. ‘The second murder could be to cover up the first. I mean, we know that Lily Marsh was around in the area. She worked in Hepworth. What’s that? Six miles from Seaton where Julie Armstrong lives. If we can place her in Seaton at the time of Luke’s murder, we’d have a reasonable explanation. She saw something, heard something. Or she was acquainted with the killer, guessed. Confronted him.’
‘You’re thinking a boyfriend?’
‘Maybe. It’s odd that the parents don’t seem to know anything about him.’
‘So what do we do now?’ Vera shut her eyes as Ashworth drove too fast round a bend and had to brake sharply. A tractor was coming in the opposite direction. He didn’t swear, it wasn’t his style. She did, under her breath.
‘Make the link,’ he said, when he’d pulled into the hedge to let the tractor past. ‘Find out where she was the evening of Luke Armstrong’s murder. Talk to all her friends. Her tutors. The people she worked with.’
‘Nothing difficult, then.’ Vera stretched and yawned. ‘A piece of piss.’ Before he could answer she fell asleep.
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She woke when they pulled up outside the house, lucky to find a parking place. It was Saturday morning; shoppers saved paying for city-centre parking by leaving their cars in West Jesmond and taking the metro into town. The flat was the ground floor of an Edwardian terrace; a bit grand, she thought, for a student place. There was blue-and-white tape around the door and Billy Wainwright was inside. She called to him through an open window.
‘You’re OK to come in,’ he said. ‘We’re just about finished. I’ll soon be away to my bed. The search team will be in any time.’
They all stood for a moment inside the front door. Billy seemed tired but too wired-up to relax, fidgeting with the clasp on his case.
‘What can you tell me, Billy?’
‘There’s no sign she was killed here. No break-in. No evidence of a struggle in her room. Apparently the lasses she was sharing with were out for the evening. They’re at a friend’s house up the road now, if you want a chat.’
‘You’ll have had a look in the bathroom?’
‘Of course. There were a few hairs in the drain, but I’d bet a year’s salary they belong to the tenants. There’s nothing to connect this place with the Luke Armstrong scene.’
‘Bath oils?’
‘Plenty. We’ll get them tested, but I couldn’t recognize anything that smelled like the water when we fished the Armstrong boy out.’ He yawned. ‘If you’re going to be here for ten minutes, I’m going. Like I said, the search team is on its way. The victim’s room is the last on the left.’
When he’d gone Vera and Joe stood for a minute in silence. The hall was cool. The floor was tiled, the ceiling high.
‘Not your usual student gaff,’ Joe said. He pushed open a door into the living room. They looked in at the stripped wooden floor, cast-iron fireplace. There was a sofa with a terracotta loose cover, an upright piano. Everything very tidy, spotlessly clean. ‘I couldn’t afford a place like this on my salary. How do they manage it? And I thought students were supposed to be mucky.’
Vera had moved on to the kitchen, which looked like something out of the style magazines she dipped into at the dentist’s. She opened the fridge. A box of eggs, a couple of bags of salad, some natural yoghurt. In the door two bottles of white wine. French.
There were three bedrooms, two at the front overlooking the small garden and the street, one, Lily’s, at the back. Vera saved Lily’s until last. The front bedrooms were in keeping with the rest of the house. So tasteful Vera had an urge to hang a Boots print on the wall or stick a cheap and nasty vase on the window sill. She’d always thought of the places she looked at in the magazines as fantasies, hadn’t believed they actually existed. They weren’t the sort of rooms she visited often through work.
Lily’s room was different. It was the smallest in the house, smaller even than the bathroom. The furniture was less grand; perhaps it had been left behind by the previous owners when the flat was sold. There were net curtains at the window, which looked out onto a yard where the bins were kept. Inside, a single bed, a desk and computer, a post-war utility wardrobe like the one in which Vera still kept her clothes. One wall was covered with cheap, bare-wood shelving, holding paperback books. Vera pulled on latex gloves, but stood, looking around, not touching anything. The room was so small that Ashworth stayed in the doorway.
‘A diary would be good,’ Vera said. ‘An address book.’
‘Wouldn’t she keep that on the computer?’
‘More than likely. We’ll wait for the experts to do that for us.’ The search team, specially trained. They’d not want her mauling through the evidence before they had a chance to do it properly. She opened the desk drawers. There were ring folders, envelope files, on the desk she saw a library card for the university and another for Northumberland Libraries. Exactly what you’d expect in a model student’s room. But this was like no student’s room Vera had seen. At least in the other two bedrooms there were personal touches. Family snaps, birthday cards, party invitations. Lily had lived in this room for nearly three years, but it contained nothing of her. No photos, no posters. It could have been a room in an anonymous, cheap B &B. She opened the wardrobe door and at last she caught a flavour of the dead woman.
The first impression was of colour. A rack held amber beads, a turquoise silk scarf with a silver thread running through it, long red satin gloves. She pulled out hangers holding a loose velvet jacket, blackberry-coloured, a dress in swirls of blues and greens, skirts in bright cotton prints. On shelves there were folded blouses, lacy underwear. Nothing cheap.
‘So,’ Vera said. ‘She liked to dress up.’ She looked at the labels at the necks of the jacket and the blouses. ‘Some of it from Robbins,’ she said. ‘But not all of it. She wouldn’t have got these at discount. She must have spent all her spare cash on clothes.’
And that, in the end, was all they learned about her. Nothing else in the room gave a clue to her life. They waited in the kitchen for the search team to arrive, not speaking, glad when they heard the van pull up in the street and they had an excuse to leave.
Chapter Fifteen
Lily’s flatmates were staying with a friend who lived in the same road. Another big house, this time on the corner, with a garden at the back. It didn’t seem to be split into flats. A student house, maybe. Vera rang the bell, hit it again when there was no response. She was about to ring it a third time when there were footsteps and the door opened. The young woman standing in the doorway was tiny, with chopped blonde hair, the build of a ten-year-old, eyes expertly made up to look enormous.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Annie’s out.’
‘I’m not looking for Annie.’ Vera flashed her warrant card and walked in without waiting to be asked. ‘It’s Emma and Louise I’m after. Lily’s friends.’
The woman seemed flustered. ‘Of course. Sorry to keep you waiting. Annie’s taken her daughter to ballet. Lou and I were having a late breakfast in the garden. After hearing about Lily, then camping out here, neither of us slept very well. Come on through. I’m Emma.’ Not a local voice. Southern. Rich.
She was wearing leather flip-flops and tripped ahead of them, talking all the way. Not a student house after all. No beer cans or loud music, unsafe wiring or peeling wallpaper. A family lived here. There was a small bicycle propped against the wall in the corridor, a child’s paintings on the kitchen notice-board. But still wealthy. If Annie was a single mother she wasn’t struggling financially.
‘Is Annie a student too?’ No reason for needing to know, but Vera had always been nosy.
‘No. She’s older than me. She lectures. On the course Lily was taking, actually. She’s a sort of cousin of mine. Her husband works away a lot and when we were flat-hunting, we thought it would be nice if we could find somewhere close.’
‘Very convenient,’ Vera said, wondering what it was about this woman she disliked so much.
‘Yes.’ Emma turned briefly then led them out onto a flagged patio where four wooden chairs stood around a table. The garden was small, surrounded by a high wall. Blackbirds were calling somewhere in the ivy.
Emma continued talking. ‘This is my flatmate, Louise. Lou, it’s the police.’
Louise seemed still to be wearing pyjamas. Her feet were bare, her hair unbrushed. She nodded to them, played with the croissant flakes on her plate.
‘I’ll just put on some more coffee,’ Emma said.
Vera sat down heavily. ‘Not for us, pet. This isn’t a social call. We’ve not much time. We just wanted to talk about Lily.’
‘Of course.’
‘How long have the three of you been living together?’
‘Well, we met up in the first year. Same hall of residence, though we were all doing different stuff. Lily was into English, Louise did languages and I’m a medic. That’s why the three of us are still here when most of our friends have left. Our courses last longer than the standard three years and Lily was doing a PGCE. We shared a kitchen then, got on OK, decided to move in together.’
‘How could you afford to live in a road like this, like?’ Emphasizing the accent, playing the dumb cop. It never hurt if they underestimated you.
‘Well, it was down to my dad, actually. He thought he might as well buy somewhere. Thought it would be a decent investment. We’d pay enough rent to cover the mortgage. I mean, it’s still not cheap, but when you look at some of the places other students live… My parents are great. They give me an allowance.’
‘But Lily didn’t come from that sort of background, did she? How did she keep up with the rent?’
Emma shrugged. ‘She never said. I think her dad was made redundant at the end of her first year and gave her something to start her off. She didn’t pay as much as us, because her room is a bit smaller. And she worked on Saturdays and in the holidays.’
‘Tell me about her. Living together that long, you must have known her as well as anyone.’
For the first time Emma seemed lost for words. It was Louise who answered.
‘Nobody knew her very well.’
‘But three lasses together. You must have confided in each other.’
‘Not really. Not Lily.’
‘There’d have been nights out in town, a few drinks. She’d let down her hair then.’
‘I don’t think Lily ever let go in that way, Inspector. She was very controlled, very focused. Ambitious, I suppose. Something to do with the background she came from. She worked much harder than the rest of us.’
‘Was she ever ill?’
‘Nothing serious. A cold, throat infection. Just like the rest of us.’
‘You never worried that she might be depressed? Keeping herself so isolated.’
‘No. I don’t think she was that isolated. She just didn’t include us in the rest of her life.’
‘Where were you both last night?’
Louise answered. ‘It was my birthday. We went out for a meal. A whole gang of us.’
‘What about Lily?’ Vera asked. ‘Were you expecting her to be there too?’
‘I asked her of course, but I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t turn up. It wasn’t really her thing.’