A Nice Place to Die

by Jane Mcloughlin

  To Rachel Moody, he looked like an actor playing a scientist on television. He was constantly peering over his spectacles as though checking everything against an invisible measuring chart. His wife gave the impression that she was a shy and self-facing woman who had given up the struggle to present herself as something very different, her husband’s fantasy of the partner he deserved. She was neat and tidy, and, Rachel noted, dressed in the muted all-purpose costume of someone who attended a lot of charity coffee mornings. She looked habitually puzzled.

  She’s the sort of person who expects to be blamed for anything that goes wrong, DCI Moody thought.

  Sergeant Reid asked the Hensons if they had seen what happened outside the house opposite.

  The couple looked at each other and, in chorus, denied knowing anything about it. They’d seen something mentioned on the evening news on television. They couldn’t believe someone had been killed across the road. Indeed, they appeared very shocked to know that such a thing could happen in a quiet respectable suburban street like Forester Close. No, really, they hadn’t seen or heard a thing.

  ‘You see, we’ve got better things to do than spy on our neighbours,’ Peter Henson said.

  Rachel Moody wondered what they’d say if she asked ‘what better things?’ But she didn’t want to antagonize potential witnesses.

  ‘What can you tell us about the Millers?’ Rachel Moody asked Dr Henson.

  He looked at his wife as though checking that they were going to agree on their answer.

  ‘Nothing at all, I’m afraid,’ Dr Henson said. ‘We’ve never actually met them socially.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jean Henson said, backing him up.

  ‘You must see them around, surely?’ DCI Moody said.

  ‘There are enough of them,’ Jack Reid added. ‘I’d have thought they were hard to miss.’

  ‘We try to keep ourselves to ourselves,’ Dr Henson said.

  ‘People don’t mix much round here,’ Jean Henson said. ‘Least of all the Millers. Why should they? They’ve got each other. You might say they’re a typical twenty-first century family unit.’

  ‘You’re more aware of them in the summer, of course,’ Dr Henson said, making an effort to help. ‘When they’ve got the windows open, there’s a bit of noise. The kids have their friends round. And there’s the child. She’s a lively little thing.’

  ‘The child?’ Rachel asked. ‘We didn’t know there was a child.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Jean said. ‘She must be nearly a year old now. Jess couldn’t have been much more than thirteen when she fell pregnant. Didn’t they tell you?’

  Rachel said, ‘We haven’t questioned the Millers yet, except at the time to take a statement from Mrs Miller about finding the body. We want to try to piece together what really happened before we go any further.’

  Sergeant Reid asked, ‘You’re quite sure you saw nothing suspicious?’

  ‘I expect we were in the garden,’ Jean said, and added, ‘gardening.’

  ‘There must’ve been a fair bit of noise when it was going on,’ Jack said. ‘There were a number of kids involved, according to Donna Miller. You’re sure you didn’t hear anything at all?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ Dr Henson said. ‘What a terrible thing, that poor young widow and her children.’

  ‘It makes it worse that it’s so close to Christmas, don’t you think?’ Jean Henson said.

  Rachel struggled to get up out of the vast armchair where Mrs Henson had invited her to sit.

  ‘We won’t take up any more of your time,’ she said. She tried to stifle the irritation in her voice. She was convinced that the Hensons were holding something back. She added, ‘If you think of anything . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ Dr Henson said.

  And Jean said, ‘You should talk to Alice Bates. She knows everything that happens in the street.’

  ‘But not yesterday, it seems,’ Rachel Moody said. ‘She saw nothing.’

  Peter and Jean Henson walked with the DCI and the Sergeant to their front door and closed it firmly after them. As soon as they were alone, Peter Henson said, ‘They’ve interviewed Alice, then?’

  ‘And she obviously didn’t say anything,’ Jean said.

  Dr Henson followed his wife through to the kitchen.

  ‘Should I have said something?’ he asked. ‘I feel bad about keeping quiet.’

  Jean put the kettle on. She had no intention of making tea or coffee, it was an automatic action to try and distract herself from the police visit.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, of course not. I said when you came out to the back garden and told me what you’d seen, we mustn’t get involved. You know what the Millers are like.’

  ‘But that young vicar was killed, Jean, he’s dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jean said, ‘he is, and if you don’t keep quiet, so will you be. You’re no match for that Kevin Miller.’

  ‘But if everyone thought like that . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake, Peter, there’s no point.’ Jean was pleading with him. ‘If you tell the police what you saw, the Millers will just say you’re lying, and they’ll back each other up. Who do you think will support your story? Alice Bates? She’s too scared. Everyone’s far too scared.’

  ‘Alice must have seen what happened. She’s always spying on everyone from that front window of hers. I could talk to her. We could back each other up. That would make the police case against that lout.’

  ‘Believe me,’ Jean said, ‘there’s no point in doing the right thing if you’re dead.’

  ‘You sound as though you don’t care if Kevin Miller gets away with murder,’ Peter said. He sounded resigned.

  ‘I don’t,’ Jean said, ‘not if it means he won’t murder us.’

  ‘It wouldn’t come to that,’ Peter Henson said, ‘surely it couldn’t be that bad? This is England.’

  Jean said nothing. She knew that her husband instinctively still wanted to act with the confidence of a man whose life as a high-powered doctor was spent dealing with terrified people who looked on him as some sort of god. He was humiliated that now he did not dare. She also knew that the Millers’ retaliation would be more than she could bear.

  She was sorry for Peter. It was hard for him to come to terms with being reduced to an ordinary, rather pompous old man whom nobody listened to. We shouldn’t have come here to live when the NHS said he was too old to work, she thought. We should have left England and gone to live in Spain or Australia to be nearer Pat and the grandchildren.

  ‘It’s nearly time for the lunchtime news,’ she said.

  She went into the front room and started to draw the curtains to shut out the street.

  It had begun to rain; a hopeless, helpless quiet outpouring of fine drizzle which fell silently on the carpet of dead leaves in the road. Jean watched the DCI and the Sergeant leave the scene of the crime across the road and walk to their car.

  ‘They’re wasting their time,’ she said aloud.

  She moved away from the window.

  ‘Time for television, Peter,’ she said.

  She turned on the set, but as the newsreader’s face appeared, she switched channels to a documentary about the Second World War.

  Even the War’s better than what’s happening out there, she thought.

  Out there Rachel Moody and Jack Reid stared at each other across the wet roof of the car.

  ‘Don’t you dare tell me you told me so,’ Rachel said.

  ‘It’s just as well you don’t put your money where your mouth is,’ Jack said, ‘you’d owe me a fortune.’

  They got into the car out of the rain.

  ‘What’s the matter with the people in this street?’ Rachel said. ‘They’re so damned defensive. They’re behaving as though someone’s holding them hostages. What are they all afraid of?’

  ‘They’ve had a shock,’ Reid said. ‘A man being murdered in their street is a shock.’ He paused for a moment and then added, ‘But it’s interesting that no one seems surpris
ed by what’s happened. It’s as though they were expecting it.’

  SEVEN

  Jess Miller, too, watched the police leave the Henson house.

  What do they want with old farts like the Hensons, she asked herself. What would they know?

  There was no point that she could see to old people, they just got in the way and reminded anyone around that that was how everyone, even Jess herself if she wasn’t careful, would end up. A waste of space.

  She thought, it’s such a con, what they tell you in school, that there’s a world of opportunity out there and if you work hard you get the rewards. Old people have done that, haven’t they, and look at them. Some reward that is, old age. Jess didn’t intend to fall for that. I’ll have a ball while I’m young, and to hell with what happens after that, the bloody state can provide. It’s like Nicky Byrne says: ‘better dead than decrepit’.

  Jess was sitting on the wall outside the house texting Mark Pearson on her mobile phone. There was no point trying to talk to him, she wouldn’t hear what he was saying because her brother Kevin had turned up the volume on the radio in Alan’s car, which was parked on the drive.

  Jess glared defiantly at Kevin, who was lying on his back next to the car working on the underside of his motorbike. He’d messed up her life. He was her half-brother, for God’s sake, they were family. All he’d ever done for her was make her pregnant with the child she’d never wanted.

  He caught her one night about a year and a half ago when she was drunk in a local disco. She’d had far too many vodkas and a few too many pills and she’d been throwing up in a dark corner, but she was ready for love. He’d taken her round the back of the supermarket and pushed her down on a heap of black plastic bags full of refuse and she wouldn’t have been able to stop him even if she’d wanted to. Afterwards she thought better of it. He was almost her brother, he was supposed to look out for her.

  She was thirteen and a half then. It wasn’t the first time she’d done it with a boy, but Kevin was family and it was different with someone nearly eighteen and your own half-brother. Of course, that made it more exciting. She hadn’t thought much about it at the time, apart from it being different because they were sort of blood. She never thought she could fall pregnant when it was between family.

  Some time later her best friend at school started on about her getting so fat she looked like she was going to have a baby. Jess told her to piss off but she went to a doctor to get some pills to help her lose weight. He told her she was already six months gone. He also told her it was far too late to do anything about it.

  ‘Bastard,’ she said aloud, meaning Kevin but not quite daring to say it to his face. If Kevin knew she was texting Mark he’d break her mobile for her. She put the phone in her pocket and scowled at Kevin, or rather at the soles of his trainers where he was lying flat on his back messing about with his motorbike. Maybe he was family but that didn’t stop her being scared of him. It was all right if he was in a good mood but when he wasn’t he was a right bastard.

  He never actually said the kid wasn’t his, but that was it. Jess wasn’t even sure if he knew the child’s name; if he did he never called her by it. Jess’s mother was the one who’d called her Kylie. Jess couldn’t be bothered deciding on a name. There wasn’t much point trying to talk to Kylie anyway, all she did was cry. What pissed Jess off was the way Kevin could get away with having nothing to do with the kid, but she couldn’t. That one stupid exciting night had spoiled everything for her forever, and for him it was as though it’d never happened. He’d never touched her after that, either, even though for quite a long time she wouldn’t have minded.

  At least Mark couldn’t get enough of her. That was fine, but for her it wasn’t like it had been with Kevin. The most exciting thing about sex with Mark was knowing how angry their two families would be if they knew what was going on. Jess didn’t understand or care why the toffee-nosed people from the old village hated the Catcombe Mead incomers so much. But she knew why the people from the new housing estate hated the original villagers. She hated them too, as did Donna and Alan and Kevin and everyone else.

  They were almost all old, for one thing. They lived differently, they looked and talked differently. They always had really dirty hands from doing primitive things with them. They didn’t know the meaning of having a good time. They were slow and stupid, real hicks compared to the people like her who’d moved in from outside and knew something about real life.

  Mark was one of them, but he wasn’t like the others. He was really good-looking, for one thing; he was cool.

  But Jess was still worried.

  She hadn’t told Mark about having the child. She had tried once, the first day. She’d thought about telling him, anyway, but it was too risky. He wouldn’t want her any more if she did. She showed him a photo of Donna and Alan with Kevin and one of Jess with Kylie and when he asked who the kid was, she lost her nerve and said it was her little sister. Jess was sure that if Mark knew the truth, that would be the end between them. Even if he didn’t mind her having a kid, it being Kevin’s kid was something else. Mark hadn’t actually met Kevin, but he hated him anyway because of that day with his bulls.

  Jess was afraid, too, of what Mark would think of her if he knew that she, Kylie’s actual mother, wanted nothing to do with her? Jess couldn’t explain. She didn’t want to be anyone’s mother, not now, not for a long time to come, if ever. Maybe she was abnormal but that’s the way she was and nothing would change how she felt.

  So what if she told Mark the child was hers, and he didn’t care? What if he didn’t mind taking the kid on if that’s what it took to be with Jess? No, she couldn’t even think about that. What she didn’t dare admit even to herself was that her greatest fear was that Mark might find out that she didn’t want her own child and be so repelled by her he’d leave her. She couldn’t bear the thought of losing him like that. He was her best chance of escaping to a new life in a different place, somewhere where the two of them could do what they wanted away from Old Catcombe and Forester Close and the state of siege they lived in.

  But even losing Mark wouldn’t be as bad as having to live at home much longer. It was all very well Donna saying what a nice place Forester Close was to live, with the patch of garden in the front and the pretty trees in the street. But there was nothing there for Jess. Except Mark, of course, and he had to keep away. Even living on a farm like a peasant in the old village as he did, and smelling of animals as he did too, Mark made her life worth living.

  Jess took a few swigs from a bottle of cider Kevin had been drinking. She lit another cigarette.

  She had to get away from the house without anyone asking where she was going. Mark would be waiting for her, parked a few hundred yards down on the main road. The one really important thing now was to get away from Catcombe Mead and find somewhere they could be alone.

  ‘I’m going down to the shop,’ Jess yelled in the direction of the house. And went.

  EIGHT

  The day the police came to question the residents of Forester Close, Terri Kent and her partner Helen Byrne quarrelled over Helen’s daughter Nicky.

  Helen swept out of the house at lunchtime to go back to work, leaving Terri miserable and not sure what to do for the best.

  How could Helen be so cruel? Terri asked herself, how could she say those things? Did she mean what she said?

  She can’t have, she thought, we’re happy together. Surely we are? She’s never said she isn’t.

  But then Helen never said anything much. She just sort of drifted through life, smiling and distracted, not even seeming to think much about what was happening to her.

  Terri’s strong hands were shaking and she felt sick. Perhaps Helen never really loved me, she thought, perhaps she only came to live with me because she wanted to leave Dave and she knew I’d look after her.

  Terri cast her mind back to the magical early days when she and Helen worked together in the Social Services department at the Council in T
orquay. They’d been so close then. Of course it had been awkward because Dave worked for the Council too, except not in the same department. But that had made it more exciting, carrying on under his nose and him never suspecting.

  He’d taken it very badly when Helen left him. That was before he knew about the relationship between her and Terri. He took it that the two of them living together meant Helen had moved in with a girlfriend until she found a place of her own. It hadn’t occurred to him at first what was involved.

  Terri recalled how Helen tried to tell him, but Dave didn’t believe her. He thought she was making it up to punish him for something, and that if he could put that right, she’d come back. If Helen had gone off with another man, of course, he’d have believed it. Dave was never the faithful type himself. He’d probably have picked a fight with the other man. He’d certainly have beaten Helen up, but that would’ve been the end of it.

  But when she finally said she was leaving him because she was in love with another woman, he didn’t know how to deal with that.

  That’s why Terri had bought this house in Somerset and they’d moved away from Torquay. Terri had found work as an administrator at the local hospital, while Helen seemed happy to give up her Council job and work part-time at the local supermarket.

  But Dave found them. Now he wouldn’t leave Helen alone. Terri thought, perhaps he’s been causing trouble, unsettling her. We were fine till he appeared on the scene. Is that it?

  Terri had insisted that Dave should not see Nicky when he came to visit. She’d argued that seeing her father would unsettle the child, that she should be given time to adjust. Helen wasn’t sure.

  Perhaps I was wrong, Terri thought. He must miss his daughter. Perhaps he’d leave Helen alone if he could see Nicky sometimes. Terri didn’t like to admit that the truth was she was afraid of the competition; she did so want Nicky to accept her as a parent.

  Does Helen want to go back to Dave? Terri asked herself. Does that explain the things she said?