A Nice Place to Die

by Jane Mcloughlin

  You fool, Tim told himself, of course it’s school holidays.

  ‘That’s your advice, is it, Rev?’ the boy on the motorcycle said. ‘That’s what got you to where you are today, is it?’

  The boy slowly and deliberately rolled a joint, lit it, then inhaled and passed it to one of his mates.

  ‘You want a drag, Rev?’ one of the younger kids asked, pushing against Tim and blowing the aromatic smoke in his face.

  ‘Don’t you know that stuff’s dangerous,’ Tim said, trying to sound like an older brother, not the heavy father. ‘You could get addicted,’ he said. ‘It affects your brain, leads to short-term memory loss . . .’

  ‘What brains are you’re talking about?’ the first boy said. ‘Don’t you know we don’t have no brains?’

  The kid with the joint reached up to touch Tim’s dog collar. ‘Woof, woof,’ he jeered and they all laughed. The boy, encouraged, grabbed the collar and pulled it off.

  ‘Walkies, walkies,’ he said, imitating Tim’s voice and accent. ‘Look, Kevin, I’ve let him off the lead.’

  Tim suddenly felt horribly vulnerable.

  ‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘Things to do, places to go.’ He very nearly giggled in his embarrassment. It was a nervous habit he had never been able to break.

  ‘Yeah?’ Kevin said. He picked up Tim’s new blue bicycle and threw it at him. Perhaps he didn’t actually intend it to hit him, but the young vicar was moving forward and the bike knocked him down.

  ‘Oh, I say,’ Tim said.

  He could hear the way he sounded and he knew that they would mock him for it because he was old-fashioned and had nothing in common with them.

  His spectacles had fallen off. Without them he was almost blind.

  ‘These what you’re looking for?’ one of the boys called, and Tim heard the crunch of glass as his tormentor stamped on them.

  The boy pushed the spectacles roughly against Tim’s face, nicking his skin with the broken glass so that blood began to dribble down the side of his nose.

  ‘Four-eyes, four-eyes, you got a bloody nose,’ one kid began to chant.

  He was so young his voice hadn’t even broken.

  ‘No, it’s just a scratch,’ Tim said, trying to wipe away the blood with the back of his hand.

  ‘Not good enough for you, Rev?’ Kevin said, ‘You looking to be some kind of martyr, are you? I’ll give you a bloody nose.’

  He hit Tim hard in the face. The sudden pain left the young vicar confused, struggling to catch his breath as blood poured out of his nostrils.

  Tim tasted the blood at the back of his throat. As more teenagers began to hit him in the face, he put up his hands to try to hold them off, but he couldn’t see where the blows were coming from. He couldn’t speak, either; he just made a silly little protesting sound that seemed to enrage his tormentors further. He began to pray silently, Please, God, what do I do now?

  He started to blubber, trying to get to his feet because he knew from the old days at school how his tears inflamed bullies. He could make out Kevin’s voice, deeper than the rest. ‘You trying to run out on us, Rev?’

  ‘No, please, we can talk this through,’ Tim was trying to say, and as he heard his own words in his head, he was mortified at the absurdity of what he was saying even though he could not make himself heard.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere till we’ve shown you what we think of people like you,’ Kevin said. ‘You want to talk? Here’s what I’ve got to say.’

  He kicked Tim hard in the crotch. Then the others joined in. Someone hit him at the base of the spine with something metal, and then there was a flash of iridescent white as one of the teenagers pulled a knife and sliced through his sleeve and forearm to reveal the bone and a silvery tendon. Then it disappeared under the dark flow of blood.

  In Tim’s last conscious moment, he remembered something he’d heard recently about a gang of girls seen playing football with a live rat. Somewhere in Yorkshire. Who’d told him about that? Had it been on television? It was no good, he couldn’t think. Please, God, what is the world coming to?

  He was unconscious by the time a car turned into Forester Close and the teenagers scattered.

  In the car Donna Miller had seen her sons Kevin and Nate among the group gathered around something lying on the pavement. She saw them look up and then take flight like a crowd of crows rising from a dead rabbit in the road.

  She telephoned for an ambulance.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’ one of the paramedics asked her.

  Donna shook her head.

  The police asked, ‘Did you see who did this to him?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I found him lying in the road like this when I came home.’

  A policewoman in plainclothes seemed to be in charge. She gave Donna her card. ‘If you think of anything that could help,’ she said, ‘ring me. In confidence,’ she added.

  ‘It could’ve been a hit and run, couldn’t it?’ Donna said.

  There was something about Donna’s face that caught the policewoman’s attention. Shock, of course, but more than that an expression where primitive fear struggled with an unexpected defensiveness.

  ‘No, it couldn’t,’ she said. ‘This was a vicious attack and whoever did it will be on a murder charge.’

  ‘I didn’t see anything,’ Donna said.

  TWO

  Hidden behind the curtain at the window of her front room Alice Bates watched the murder of the young vicar.

  The position of her house at the top of the cul-de-sac facing down the street gave Alice a clear view of what went on in Forester Close. She spent a great deal of her time watching everything that happened there. Nor was she a mere casual observer of her neighbours’ doings. She had never even spoken to most of them, but she felt nonetheless intimately connected to them. Watching the secret lives of others from the safety of her front room provided Alice with a kind of virtual life of her own. That, and the television, were the emotional and spiritual touchstones that connected her to other people. They offered her an illusion of being involved in society but at the same time distanced from it. She did not distinguish between the real lives she watched unfold and the fictional ‘realities’ of television drama. Thus she protected herself from the brutal actuality of life by refusing to believe that it was really happening.

  So, for Alice, Number Three Forester Close contained the entire outside world. She was still the same person who would once have written on her prized possessions: Alice Bates, Three Forester Close, Catcombe Mead, Catcombe, near Haverton, Somerset, Wessex, England, United Kingdom, British Isles, Europe, the Western Hemisphere, the World, the Universe, the Mind of God.

  She watched the young vicar cycle up the street. She was afraid he was going to come up to her house and knock on the door. Alice didn’t like visitors. She had no friends to come and see her, and strangers only called if they wanted something.

  So, without losing her vantage point, she moved behind the sideboard so as not to be seen. She saw the young man’s pale, anxious, holy face outside her house, looking as though he was searching for something or someone. She saw that his dog collar was too big for his thin throat.

  He must be mad, Alice thought, coming on his own to a place like Forester Close dressed like that.

  She knew that something bad was about to happen.

  Alice had noticed the gang of teenagers hanging about in front of the Millers’ house before the vicar turned into the Close. They were there most afternoons when Donna and her partner Alan were out. They spent their time drinking and smoking, and jeering at anyone who passed by. Very few people did pass by because there was something savage about these youngsters; they were intimidating and no one wanted to run the gauntlet of their foul language and abuse.

  Alice’s heart was in her mouth as she watched the young vicar get off his bright blue bike and approach the teenagers.

  The older Miller boy, Kevin, said something to him, and suddenly they were no longer a gro
up of kids, they were a pack on the hunt, predatory and menacing. Alice thought, that poor little man, what’s he going to do now?

  She herself had often known what it felt like to be afraid of other people. It was what happened to shy, scared spinsters like herself who never learned to assert themselves. For her, fear was a way of life. Alice was aware – and then ashamed as she watched what was happening to another vulnerable human being beaten – that she felt a thrill of primitive excitement that had nothing to do with concern for the young vicar. The man was weak and helpless and he was a born victim. Some instinct of self-preservation compelled Alice, herself habitually a victim, to be glad to see someone else suffer for once. There but for the grace of God, she thought. But, she said, he’s one of the Lord’s own, how can God let this happen?

  The vicar was knocked down and the youths set on him.

  It never occurred to Alice that she could or should do something to stop the teenagers kicking the poor man to death.

  Because she felt helpless to act, she saw herself somehow exonerated from responsibility for what those thugs were doing. She didn’t even go to the telephone to dial 999. If she moved, those kids might see her and know that she was there, watching. They could turn on her.

  Then Donna Miller drove up and the teenagers fled. The poor young vicar was taken away in an ambulance, like a prop no longer needed on set. Alice thought, he looks badly hurt; he could be dead.

  The policewoman who seemed to be in charge was so smart and well-dressed that Alice thought she could be a television presenter. She looked quite out of place in the Millers’ rundown front garden. She doesn’t look to me like any kind of a serious detective, Alice said to herself.

  This police officer gave Donna Miller her card.

  Much good that’ll do her, Alice thought. Donna will cover for her boys whatever they do. She’s their mother, she won’t get them into trouble; mothers never do.

  There was no point in hoping that Alan, Donna’s present partner, would play the heavy father either. He wouldn’t dare. All three of the Miller children were Donna’s, but by different fathers.

  Nor would anyone else in Forester Close get Donna’s boys into trouble. The Millers terrorized all the residents in the street. The entire family recognized no laws or social restraint as applying to them. Donna and Alan, a slob who spent most of his waking hours watching pornographic DVDs from the sitting room couch, had abandoned any effort to control Kevin, who was nineteen, or his younger brother, seventeen-year-old Nate. Or Jess, the youngest.

  Alice felt a certain sympathy for the daughter. Fifteen-year-old Jess was a sullen, doughy-looking creature with weighty tattooed arms and shoulders. She was apparently addicted to having parts of her sizeable body pierced, so that she looked like an overstuffed sofa held together by safety pins. When the Millers first moved in, Alice took the girl to be a blowsy thirty year old, perhaps Donna’s sister, but then she overheard a shouting match about a forthcoming birthday party and realized that Jess was still a child.

  The girl brought a bit of lurid colour to Forester Close. Alice took her to represent what passed as yob glamour. She wore glittery blue eye shadow and thick black mascara, and her hair was dyed a fine dark purple. In the street, where she and her brothers hung around for hours at a time, she was always smoking, and swigged constantly from big brown bottles. In the house, when she wasn’t sulking, Alice could see her slumped on the sofa in the living room watching the clash of aliens on DVDs. Jess also screamed colourful abuse at her mother, at her brothers Kevin and Nate, at the stepfather Alan, and even at her own young baby which the rest of her family combined to try to force her to care for by ignoring it themselves as long as they could stand it crying. Jess’s body language made it clear that she resented this pressure of motherhood. Sometimes she shouted at the older of the two boys, Kevin, that the kid was just as much his as hers and he could look after it himself, she had better things to do. Kevin ignored her. Jess tried to ignore the baby.

  Alice was bemused by Jess. The girl was plainly unhappy. She appeared bored out of her mind by everything to do with her family and Forester Close. Living on the housing estate seemed to strike her as little better than being abandoned in a wilderness peopled by primitive apes. Alice sympathized with that. The girl was lost in her own life.

  Alice believed that as a fellow female, Jess, too, must live in dread of the yobs in her own family.

  But then Peter Henson, a retired doctor who lived with his wife opposite the Millers at Number Four, dared to complain when he discovered Jess having loud and violent sex with what the doctor called a Neanderthal against his garage wall. And the Miller family turned on him as one to defend their own.

  The Hensons, Peter and his wife Jean, became a target for vandalism. The elderly couple could not leave their car outside their house without the windscreen being shattered or the paintwork scored. Every time the Hensons came out of their home, the Millers jeered and swore at them. And Jess was the worst of the lot.

  No, Alice said to herself, all the Millers are the same. No one in the street is going to dare to admit to the police that they saw what happened to the young vicar.

  Alice had no doubt of this because, watching the residents in secret, she had a more intimate knowledge of her neighbours than they could possibly guess. Although she kept herself to herself, and they were strangers to her, she knew things about these families that they kept secret from each other.

  She knew they had one thing in common. They were all afraid of the lurking undercurrent of mindless violence, like the thudding bass beat of Kevin’s music, exuded by the Millers.

  They, like Alice herself, would try to put the incident of the young vicar’s death out of their minds. Alice, like the rest of them, was petrified by what those Miller boys might do to her if she told the police about them. What had happened to the poor vicar was a tragedy but it was something not to be spoken about. Alice understood that. As long as no one knew what she had seen and she herself kept silent about it, she could persuade herself that she hadn’t seen anything. There was nothing to be done, after all.

  She went into the kitchen to feed big, beautiful Phoebus, a ginger cat which for several months now had taken to coming round to her back door every afternoon. Alice thought of him as her own. She could hear him miaowing in protest because she was late.

  Alice thought, it’s nearly Christmas, The Sound of Music will be on television, and all those other old films with nice children and happy endings. Best not to dwell on the bad things, there’s nothing to be gained by it.

  THREE

  The morning after Tim Baker’s death, Detective Chief Inspector Rachel Moody sat in her car at the bottom of Forester Close trying to gather her thoughts.

  This case particularly distressed her. She was finding it hard to maintain her professional cool. In all her previous experience of murder, the killer was usually driven beyond endurance before he did the deed. He lost control and lashed out. She could understand that, however much she disapproved.

  But the savagery of this young vicar’s death was new to her. What possible motive could anyone have for such an unprovoked attack? It was almost as though some sicko had done it for fun. And, Rachel told herself, something like that happening at Christmas time makes it even worse.

  DCI Moody couldn’t get out of her mind the sight of Mrs Tim Baker’s terrified white face last night when she and Sergeant Reid broke the news of her husband’s death, or the way the poor woman had looked down at the Christmas presents piled under the decorated tree in the living room. ‘But it’s not possible, it can’t be true, it’s Christmas,’ Mrs Baker said. And then, with trembling lip, ‘What can I tell the children?’

  Now, parked at the bottom of Forester Close before starting to go through the motions of the routine investigation, Rachel Moody looked around her at the bleak street. It was so ordinary; it could be a cul-de-sac on a faceless housing estate almost anywhere at all. Except that Rachel could still see, like a g
host image in a photograph, Tim Baker’s broken body lying like litter on the muddy patch of garden outside Number Two.

  She asked herself, why am I taking this case so personally? Why can’t I see it as just another murder?

  She tried to imagine what Forester Close would be like in summer, when the trees lining the pavement were in leaf and the gardens in flower. Quite pleasant, probably, full of dappled shade and the smell of the honeysuckle which covered several of the walls dividing the front gardens of the houses from the street. But in the depth of winter the leafless branches of the trees and the drab colourless gardens gave the street a grim and desolate aspect. The blue and white ribbon of the police cordon outside Number Two was a touch of frivolity in comparison.

  There were tears in Inspector Moody’s eyes as she thought of the way the young vicar had died. It’s no good, she told herself, there is something personal about this case. He was acting on behalf of all of us who want the best for others. He was trying to befriend those bastards who killed him; like a puppy wanting to be loved. And it’s Christmas.

  She thought, If I can’t get someone punished for this, everyone who ever wants to do something positive to make the world a better place might as well give up trying. That’s overloading it a bit, but I know what I mean. At least, I think I do.

  Her train of thought was suddenly broken as Sergeant Reid opened the passenger door of the car and got in. Thanks to her they had arrived too early to start their house to house interviews. She invariably did arrive too early. Resigned, Jack Reid had volunteered to go to the café near the supermarket to buy takeaway coffee and sandwiches to eat in the car to pass the time. Nothing was to be gained by starting on door-to-door enquiries while people were still in bed.

  Flustered, DCI Moody put up a hand to brush away tears that might come. She didn’t want to be seen as soft. Not long promoted to Detective Chief Inspector, Rachel Moody had only recently transferred to Avon and Somerset police from Eastbourne, and she was having a hard time of it earning her male colleagues’ respect. But Sergeant Reid didn’t look at her. He was trying to take the sandwiches out of their plastic containers.