A Nice Place to Die

by Jane Mcloughlin

  ‘Forensics are nearly finished here,’ Reid said. ‘We’ll have to wait for the autopsy, anyway.’

  ‘Find out what’s known about her, will you?’ Rachel said. ‘Alice Bates, I mean. Who was she? Where did she come from? Who did she know? Perhaps the neighbours can tell us something.’

  Jack Reid laughed. ‘This is Forester Close,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t put money on it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Rachel Moody said, ‘but we’ve got to go through the motions. You go back to the station and do what you can there.’

  ‘If you think it’s worth the effort,’ Jack said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’ll stay on here and look through her personal stuff,’ Rachel said. ‘There may be papers, letters, photos, anything to give us some idea why anyone would think it worth killing her.’

  ‘I thought we’d agreed no one did kill her,’ Jack said. ‘She fell down the stairs.’

  Rachel shrugged and didn’t answer.

  He said, ‘You really don’t think it was an accident then?’

  ‘Oh, probably,’ she said. ‘But bear with me. I can’t help thinking there’s something not quite right about this. That look on her face.’

  ‘Falling down stairs would be enough to make her look like that, surely?’ Jack said.

  ‘We’ll do this my way all the same,’ the DCI said.

  Jack was shaking his head as he walked to his car.

  When the last of the Scene of Crime people gathered up their equipment and left, Rachel Moody was alone in the house. The flashing blue lights in the street had gone, and all the unmarked cars except her own. It was once again as though nothing had happened in Forester Close.

  Rachel tried to search Alice Bates’s desk and cupboards. She had a feeling like a series of faint electric shocks every time she touched something that had belonged to Alice, as though she were feeling Alice’s distress at the invasion of her privacy. There was an atmosphere of disapproval throughout the house. Rachel felt she was violating something secret and personal in Alice’s life; something that when she grasped it would be full of menace.

  Why menace, she asked herself. Where does that come from? What could intimidate her in her own home?

  God, Rachel thought, all I know is how scared and unhappy she was.

  But why, she asked herself, why do I think that?

  Rachel was getting nowhere. She rang Jack Reid to see how he was doing. Nothing.

  Jack had even rung a contact on the local paper to see if the press was doing any better.

  The paper had set out to try to discover details about Alice’s past. There weren’t any. The journalists’ best efforts were embarrassed finally by the pathetic facts; a scraped pass at Grade One in piano at the age of twelve; a few undistinguished ‘O’ Levels; lapsed membership of a library in a suburb of the Midlands city where she’d lived most of her life in a tower block with her mother before moving to Forester Close. The reporters could find no evidence that she’d ever been abroad on holiday, or worked in an office; she’d never learned to drive, she’d had three teeth filled as a child, and she was registered with a local doctor in the Community Centre at Catcombe Mead. He had never met her.

  No ex-lovers, no friends, no life at all, as far as the police were concerned. What possible motive could there be for killing Alice Bates?

  ‘Until you tell us different we’ve put this one down as accidental death,’ the reporter told Sergeant Reid.

  But when Rachel ended the call to Jack, she could not leave it at that. For several minutes she stood at the living-room window staring down the empty street. She was trying to imagine how it would have felt to be Alice Bates.

  Somewhere in one of the houses on the main road a dog was barking. A small dog, Rachel thought, probably a terrier. Did Alice like dogs? No one would ever know now.

  Then a cat leapt down from the garden wall of Number Five and streaked across the road.

  Alice had a cat, Rachel told herself. Hadn’t Kevin Miller admitted to killing it?

  He must have had something against her to do that, Rachel thought. He was punishing her for something she’d done. Or, of course, something he thought she’d done. Perhaps that was just the beginning of Kevin’s retribution.

  Rachel opened the drawers in a desk by the radiator. Surely there must be some evidence somewhere of Alice’s life before Forester Close; photographs, perhaps, old letters, or bills addressed to Alice at an old address.

  After more than an hour, Rachel admitted defeat. She had to hold on to the image of that broken old body at the foot of the stairs to convince herself that Alice Bates had existed at all.

  There were no letters, no family photographs, no old bank statements. Rachel had to accept that the woman really had no life. Poor old thing, she thought, she’d died at Christmas. And yet there was no festive food in the fridge; no celebratory bottle of wine; no greetings cards or wrapped presents. There was an old TV listings magazine for the Christmas week. Alice appeared to have planned to spend the festival watching television. That seemed to be the extent of her contact with the world outside Forester Close.

  Half-heartedly, Rachel started asking the residents of Forester Close what they knew about Alice Bates. She had a bad feeling about this inquiry. People weren’t being obstructive; they simply had nothing to offer. It soon became clear that the old woman’s neighbours were aware of her only as an almost unseen presence, watching them from behind the curtains at the window of her front room. They rarely saw her, but they were conscious that she was there, part of the background scenery.

  As for knowing something about her, no one had anything to tell.

  Alice Bates had arrived in Forester Close leaving no trace of how she got there. Her neighbours moved in, and she was already there. And now that she was dead, it soon seemed to Rachel Moody that she was not so much looking for a killer, she was trying to find out who it was who had been killed. Alice seemed to have arrived and stayed where she was put as dumbly as a house plant moved to a larger pot.

  Rachel finished her interviews with neighbours. She returned to Alice’s house and stood in the sitting-room listening to the heavy silence that so often, in her experience, froze the atmosphere in a house after something momentous had taken place there. Jack Reid called it her doom mood to mock her, but it wasn’t so different from the policeman’s hunches he was prone to himself.

  She was about to leave the house when she heard the front door open.

  ‘It’s me, Boss,’ Sergeant Reid shouted.

  ‘Anything to report?’ she said, going out into the hall to meet him.

  He shook his head. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’ he said. ‘I need cheering up.’

  They went into Alice’s kitchen and Jack filled the kettle while Rachel found teabags in the cupboard and milk in the fridge. She sniffed the bottle.

  ‘It’s off,’ she said. ‘It must’ve been sitting there since the day she died.’

  ‘Black tea, then.’ He grimaced. ‘I’ve tried all the neighbours,’ he said, ‘but not one can remember when they last saw her alive. They’re not trying to be awkward; at least I don’t think they are. She seems to have been someone people didn’t register.’

  ‘I know,’ Rachel Moody said. ‘I’ve found the same thing.’

  ‘Surely you don’t still think it wasn’t an accident?’

  She frowned, biting her lip. ‘I wouldn’t put money on it,’ she said, teasing him. ‘But don’t ask me why I’m so sure, Jack. I mean, who’d want to murder someone like that. What the hell was the point?’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Mark Pearson, on his way late in the afternoon to meet Jess on the road outside the supermarket in Catcombe Mead, called in at the Co-op in the village to buy cigarettes. Not for himself, but for Jess. She was always out of them because, she said, Kevin and Nate stole them if she bought them for herself.

  Mark hadn’t seen Jess since the night before Christmas when she’d put the phone down on him. He had tried to
ring her over the holiday, and left messages, but she hadn’t returned any of his calls.

  Then this morning he’d sent her a text asking her to meet him that evening. He’d told her when and where he’d pick her up. He’d ended the message ‘I miss you’. Then he turned his mobile phone off. No point in giving her the chance to refuse.

  He didn’t know what he was going to say to her, but it would help to put her in a good mood if he bought her cigarettes and maybe chocolates as a peace offering. It crossed his mind that he should not give her chocolates, she should lose weight. She’d never speak to me again if she knew I thought that, Mark told himself.

  The Co-op was unusually crowded. Mark joined the queue for the checkout. He was used to the leisurely pace of the service, but today was different. Nobody seemed to want to move forward. They were all involved in what seemed to be a single whispered conversation, all part of a sort of suppressed glee as though they were licking their lips after eating forbidden chocolates.

  ‘What is it?’ Mark asked a young woman holding a child’s hand in front of him in the queue. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Another death on the new housing estate,’ the woman said. ‘A poor old woman battered to death in her own home. On Christmas Day, too.’

  ‘He must be some sort of Satanist fiend,’ said another woman with her.

  An old lady looked puzzled. ‘Who, dear?’

  ‘The murderer of course,’ said the mother’s friend. ‘Wasn’t his previous victim the vicar? And now this one at Christmas. Was this new poor victim a churchgoer?’

  The old lady ignored this. ‘Homicide Close, my Herbie calls it,’ she said. ‘Can you believe it, all that death in one place?’

  A middle-aged man in front of them in the queue picked up his shopping and turned away from the counter. He tipped his tweed cap to the women. ‘They should declare that Forester Close an open prison and have done with it,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing but criminals and perverts living there.’

  ‘The poor woman who was murdered wasn’t a criminal,’ the old lady said.

  ‘That’s why they killed her then,’ the man said, pleased that he had proved his point. ‘You mark my words.’

  ‘Bullies and criminals and perverts every one of them,’ the old lady said. She hesitated and then lowered her voice as though she had a secret to tell. ‘They’ll all be up in arms because of the effect on the value of their houses, won’t they? That’s all they really care about, you know.’

  ‘I wouldn’t live in a place like that if you paid me,’ the young mother said.

  ‘Didn’t we always say that no good would come of building those houses and bringing all those townies here?’ said the man in the cap.

  It’s not fair, Mark thought, not everyone on the estate is like that; Jess isn’t. Should I say something, he asked himself, should I stick up for her?

  He knew there was no point. He didn’t really believe his own argument. Jess was like that, he couldn’t deny it; she’d never pretended she wasn’t, hadn’t she defended Kevin against him.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Mark said.

  He pushed his way past the people crowded round the checkout and out of the shop. Jess would have to go without cigarettes for once, he had to get away from those people and what struck him as their vicarious enjoyment of a local murder. He couldn’t bear their air of expectation of disaster vindicated.

  As he walked towards the pickup he thought, that’s because I feel the same way, I’m like those gossips; I can’t defend Jess against them.

  He wondered, as he drove off towards Catcombe Mead, who had been murdered this time.

  He thought, it has made a difference to me and Jess, the things that have happened. I know she didn’t have anything to do with it. But then he told himself, I don’t know that. I’m not sure. I don’t know which side she’s on. If it’s that brother of hers who’s killed the old woman, she’d cover up for him, I know she would.

  I don’t trust her, he thought, that’s the trouble. I can’t trust her now. But I can’t tell her that, can I?

  He tried to think of how it was with him and Jess when they were together. When he was with her everything else in the world was suspended and all that mattered was to make her his own.

  But when he wasn’t with her, it was different. We don’t have anything to say to each other, he thought. I don’t want to talk to her, I don’t want to listen to her, there’s only one thing I want and that’s to fuck her.

  He felt lust stirring as he thought of Jess and how hot her mouth was as she kissed him, and the damp feel of her skin and the thrust of her . . . well, he mustn’t think of that, although he knew that when he saw her that was all he could think of.

  He pulled off the road into a lay-by and sat with the truck window open to cool himself down. He had to think before the folds of Jess’s body wrapped him round and squeezed all thought from his head.

  He didn’t understand how, but the news of the second murder in Forester Close had changed the way he thought of Jess. He wished now that he hadn’t sent her that text, or that he was the sort of person who could stand her up. He tried to ask himself why the new murder had changed his mind. Why should it, it wasn’t her fault? But he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that in some way it was.

  He’d tried to believe that the differences between the two of them didn’t matter, that they were created by other people who were protecting their own prejudices. What was between the two of them had nothing to do with that.

  It did, though, he knew that now. Those new estate people were different, they lived worthless, depraved lives and she was part of that. Killing and crime and violence meant different things to Jess than they did to him; she was used to them, not afraid of them. And he was afraid. He was afraid of what was inside her head. He didn’t like to think it, but it was true, he was afraid of Jess.

  No, he told himself, no, this is Jess. Laughing, loving, lustful Jess who smothered him with her affection, who wanted him, who made his head explode with the secret things that were between them. She would never hurt him.

  For the first time, Mark tried to understand how Jess experienced their love. He told himself, she can’t get enough of me; she’s hungry for me all the time. But when she’s feasted, what then?

  He thought, Why me? She’s not interested in anything about me except sex. I make love to her, I don’t just bang her and get up and go away. I try to make her happy. That’s what she likes. All the rest treat her like a tart.

  Mark leaned his head out of the window to feel the cold wind in his face. He wished he hadn’t started this business of thinking about what was between him and Jess because now he knew too much about how he felt. I treat her like a tart, too, he told himself; those things she likes, that’s just because I don’t do it like those yobs like Kevin. I can’t get enough of her.

  He thought, it’s harder having a girl in a place like this, a village, you know you can’t avoid seeing her again and again, she won’t let you forget it ever happened. In a big town, you don’t have to bump into her all over the place. What’s so great about Jess, she’s not always on about getting married like one of the local girls.

  That wasn’t true, though, was it? Jess talked about nothing else but the two of them going away together somewhere new.

  It’s worse with her, Mark told himself, she thinks of me as a way for her to escape. God knows what’d happen after that.

  And then he thought, I don’t want to escape. Not to the kind of life Jess wants.

  Mark started the truck and moved out into the flow of traffic. One more time, he thought, and then I’ve got to talk to Jess about us.

  He saw her standing under a lamp post on the kerb. He could tell from the way she was moving on the spot that she was impatient waiting for him. The street light turned her purple hair and clownish make-up to eerie colours unknown to the palette of Windsor & Newton; colours mixed in mud by a child.

  He drew up beside her and she opened the do
or of the pickup.

  ‘About time too,’ she said. She slammed the passenger door as she got into the vehicle.

  ‘Don’t you know there’s a murderer on the loose?’ she snapped. ‘What do you think it’s like for me, waiting alone like that?’

  He laughed. He wouldn’t have said to her face that she’d no cause to be afraid, the murderer was probably one of her family. But she knew at once that’s what he was thinking, it was why he had laughed.

  ‘The woman who was killed,’ she said, ‘she’s the one who let us hide in her house when Kevin was after you.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’

  Jess shrugged. ‘She was a weirdo,’ she said, ‘she’s better off dead. What did she have to live for, after all?’

  They drove to a quiet track through a wood close off the road to Old Catcombe.

  She turned to him, panting. ‘Put your hand here,’ she whispered, taking him by the wrist.

  He leaned towards her across the gear lever. He felt he was slipping into a vat of honey. He closed his eyes.

  She started to moan, clutching at him.

  Then suddenly he pulled his hand away and leaned back against the door away from her.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Jess, I can’t. That poor old woman . . .’

  ‘You think it was Kevin, don’t you?’ she said. She sounded very sad.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Tell me it wasn’t.’

  ‘Well, I know it wasn’t me,’ she said. ‘But you’re not sure, are you?’

  ‘Oh, Jess . . .’

  ‘You’d better take me home,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jess,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’

  They neither of them spoke. Jess stared fixedly out of the passenger window as he drove, staring ahead at the road.

  He dropped her under the same lamp post near the supermarket. When he stopped under the street light, he could see oddly iridescent tears quivering in her eyes, like tiny bubbles blown by a child.

  ‘I’ll ring you,’ he said. ‘We’ve got to talk.’