A Nice Place to Die

by Jane Mcloughlin

She shrugged and turned away. He put the pickup in gear and moved off.

  When he was out of her view, he reversed into a side street and then drove slowly back to make sure that she was safe. He felt ashamed, sorry for her, but also relieved. He thought, I made a stand, I made her take me seriously.

  Under the street light, she was talking on her mobile phone. Shouting, really, Mark could hear her.

  Within minutes, he saw a dark figure on a motorbike draw up beside her. Mark knew it was Kevin. Jess got on to the pillion seat and put her arms around Kevin’s body.

  Long after the bike had disappeared, Mark could hear the snarl of its engine and the squeal of brakes grow gradually faint as it raced into the darkness.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Rachel Moody was working late in the office. Really, she was putting on a show of having to work late because she didn’t want to go home. Alone there, she knew that thinking about this case would force her to face disturbing truths about herself and the state of her own life. She could just about hold these at bay at her desk in the police station. At home, though, these questions were harder to set aside.

  She wasn’t usually so involved in an investigation – not on this disconcertingly personal level.

  Tonight, though, two days after the discovery of Alice Bates’s body, even going through the motions of working was getting her nowhere. Anyone who was still on duty in the detectives’ room was either out on enquiries or in the canteen, and Rachel, looking out of her office across the empty desks, found herself remembering what she had told the Superintendent earlier in the day.

  ‘Our questions may be forcing everyone in Forester Close to concentrate on what they knew about Alice Bates,’ she’d said, ‘but what’s becoming more and more obvious is that none of the woman’s neighbours really knew anything about her at all.’

  The Super had grunted and told her to keep at it.

  I don’t need telling that, Rachel thought, I’m going to put Kevin Miller behind bars if it kills me.

  Rachel hated this case. She found her eyes brimming with tears for no reason every time she thought of how lonely Alice must have been. Alice’s death hadn’t been tragic, not like the young vicar’s was; it was just pathetic.

  She remembered how, when the Reverend Tim Baker died, great heaps of flowers in cellophane had been piled against the wall outside the Millers’ house. The Millers of all people! There’d been messages, too, saying how much the Reverend would be missed, and what a good, kind, Christian man he was. Comforting for the family, Rachel told herself.

  There was not a single bunch of flowers left outside Alice’s house. Sergeant Reid, even, had noticed this. He’d pulled a stem of winter-flowering honeysuckle out of a bush in Jean Henson’s garden and laid it on the wall of Number Three. He’d glared at Rachel as though daring her to say anything.

  Apart from Jack and Rachel, no one seemed to notice that Alice left a gap in their lives. Of course, she didn’t have a family; she didn’t have friends, either. She was an outcast from the human race.

  Rachel asked herself, does this death depress me so much because I identify with her. A few years on and I could be Alice Bates – alone, unloved, unimportant. She thought, I wonder when she had the Change? I wonder if she felt the future was as empty as it seems to me? Premenstrual tension is taken seriously; why does everyone ignore what happens to a woman after that?

  While she was talking to the Super, Rachel had thought – but did not say aloud to her boss – that, in a sense, Alice’s actual death seemed to mean very little to anyone because her life had passed almost unnoticed. As a result, all the residents of Forester Close seemed to see what had happened to her simply in terms of its implications for them and theirs.

  Rachel hadn’t tried to explain that to the Super. He wouldn’t know what she was talking about, or why it mattered. He’d probably have put it down as another reason why women weren’t really suited to police work. Too bloody fanciful, he’d tell himself. Rachel thought, it’s probably not relevant to our enquiries anyway.

  Even so, to support her theory that Alice’s death was murder, not an accident, DCI Moody felt that she had to discover something about the woman which, if she were ever going to find her killer, might reveal a motive for murdering her. If there was a killer . . .

  Moody asked herself for the umpteenth time, who was Alice Bates? Where did she come from?

  But, alone in her office surrounded by the darkness of the deserted CID section, the question Rachel was really asking herself was not about Alice Bates. If Alice hadn’t been killed, she might not find herself driven now to ask herself, who am I? What kind of person am I? What am I doing with my life?

  My God, she thought, looking out across the empty desks in the open-plan detectives’ room, am I making such a meal of this because I’m afraid I’m turning into Alice Bates? A lonely old crone with nothing to look forward to and very little to remember?

  No wonder I don’t want her death to be an accident, she thought, at least I want her to have made enough impact for someone to have wanted to kill her.

  If that someone was a vicious no-mark like Kevin Miller, so be it. It was better than nothing.

  Rachel tried to remember what the neighbours had said about Alice.

  At Number Five, Terri said, ‘She never mentioned anyone. No family at all.’ Terri was plainly gratified that there was no one to suffer from Alice’s loss. For her, it was the living who counted, not the dead.

  ‘She had a cat and it was killed,’ Helen said.

  ‘She used to watch people,’ Nicky said. ‘She spied on us at night.’ She added in her prim little child’s voice, ‘I think she was a masochist, if you know what that means.’

  DCI Moody said nothing.

  At Number Two, Jess Miller said, ‘She was a witch.’

  ‘A bitch?’ Rachel was astonished.

  ‘I said witch,’ Jess said, sulking. ‘She looked like a witch.’

  Rachel wondered now if Jess had perhaps opened the door to new lines of inquiry. So far, the DCI hadn’t thought that sex could have had any part to play in this case, but now she wondered if she might have been mistaken. Just because she’d taken it for granted that Alice was post menopausal, that didn’t mean she had no interest in sex. Look at me, Moody told herself, I’m not all that much younger than Alice Bates and I certainly don’t feel I’m past it.

  And then she thought, it’s other people who think that.

  Rachel kept asking herself whether any of her own neighbours would pay any more attention than Alice’s if she were murdered. Quite likely they wouldn’t notice. At least, she told herself, I’ve got work and the people here, they know who I am. Alice lived a totally invisible life, and that includes her death.

  Funny, Rachel told herself, how she thought of the victim as Alice now, as though she’d known her as a personal friend. There were very few people in her own private life she called by their first names. Oh God, she thought, don’t say my life’s in such a mess that dead people are the only ones I can feel close to.

  She knew she shouldn’t be wallowing in self pity like this, but she felt helpless to stop herself.

  Then the phone on her desk suddenly started to ring. Saved by the bell, she thought.

  She recognized Jack Reid’s voice at once. He sounded excited.

  ‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘I hope you don’t expect to be paid overtime for this.’

  ‘This one’s on me,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to believe this. I’ve been given a steer on the forensics results. They’ll be official first thing in the morning. Guess what?’

  This must be good, Rachel thought, Jack doesn’t play games.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Kevin Miller’s fingerprints are all over Alice Bates’ house. Including the body.’

  Rachel jumped to her feet. ‘Bingo,’ she shouted. ‘We’ve got him now!’

  She was exultant. It was a professional crow of achievement. The personal angst was gone; now
she knew who and what she was.

  There was a short silence while they both took in the implications.

  ‘Where are you?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ Jack Reid said.

  ‘I’ll wait for you downstairs,’ Rachel said. ‘I’ll alert the custody sergeant. We’ll be bringing Kevin Miller in for questioning about the murder of Alice Bates. As soon as we get the forensics report in the morning, we’ll charge him with murder.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ Jack said, ‘Forester Close, here we come.’

  In the car, Rachel said, ‘It would be just our luck if he’s not there.’

  ‘What, you think he’s in Weston with one of his anonymous pick-ups?’ Jack said. ‘He’s not afraid of us. He got away with the vicar, he thinks he’s in the clear.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Rachel said.

  ‘He’ll be there, I’d put money on it. I’ve got a good feeling about this.’

  ‘Me too,’ Rachel said.

  ‘We’re here.’

  Jack turned into Forester Close and stopped at the bottom of the road. They waited for the squad car with two uniformed officers to pull up behind them.

  The houses in Forester Close looked like a huddle of hibernating animals, Rachel Moody thought. It was a cold, damp night and there was no sign of life behind the closed, curtained windows. She looked to the top of the street to Number Three and thought of Alice. I hope you’re somewhere you can see what’s going on, Rachel thought, you wouldn’t want to miss watching this. For once in your life, you’re getting your own back.

  She got out of the car and walked back to the waiting uniformed officers. The driver opened his window and she told the men, ‘Follow us up to the house and park the squad car across the drive,’ she said. ‘We don’t want him sneaking past on his motorcycle. Then, one of you, get round the back. He may make a run for it.’ She added to the driver, ‘You’ve got the Enforcer? We’ll probably need to break the door down.’

  The two cars moved slowly up the road and stopped outside the Millers’ house. A uniformed man disappeared round the side of the building to cover the back door.

  Rachel followed Jack Reid and the squad car driver with his battering ram across the driveway to the front door.

  The tattered remains of a giant drunken-looking Father Christmas trailed electric flex across the porch as though holding the reins of a lost team of reindeer.

  Jack Reid pounded on the door. ‘Open up. Police,’ he shouted.

  ‘OK,’ Rachel said to the uniformed man.

  He swung the ram and the door splintered and fell open.

  Rachel ran into the house and up the stairs, Jack close behind her. The uniformed man went through to the kitchen and unlocked the back door to let his colleague into the house.

  On the landing at the top of the stairs Donna Miller staggered out of one of the bedrooms. She was wearing an inadequate T-shirt and nothing else.

  ‘What the fuck d’you think you’re doing?’ she yelled. ‘There’s a child asleep here.’

  ‘We need to speak to Kevin, Mrs Miller,’ Rachel Moody said. ‘Which is his room?’

  ‘How dare you burst in here like this?’ Donna shouted. ‘What time do you think it is?’

  Jack moved forward to open the bedroom doors. Donna stepped forward to stop him. The fight had gone out of her.

  ‘No, don’t wake the baby,’ she said, ‘that’s Kevin’s room next door.’ She turned away, afraid to watch. ‘You’d better have a good reason for this.’

  ‘Oh, we have, Donna, believe me, we have,’ Rachel said.

  Jack Reid went into Kevin’s room. There was a crash, then the sound of a struggle.

  ‘I didn’t do nothing,’ Kevin said. ‘Get your fucking hands off me. You’ve no right.’

  Jack pushed him out on to the landing. Kevin was wearing jeans and a denim jacket.

  ‘He was making a break for it through the window,’ Jack Reid said. ‘He resisted arrest.’

  He smiled at Kevin. Kevin glared at him but it was bravado. He looked cowed.

  God, he doesn’t look much now, not without the other thugs to back him up, Rachel told herself. What is it about him that made so many people scared of him? And then she thought, I’d never realized there’s something quite frightening about Jack when he’s on the job. I’m glad he’s on my side.

  ‘I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Alice Bates,’ Rachel said. ‘We’re taking you in for questioning. Take him down to the car, Jack, and read him his rights.’

  Kevin tried to twist away from Jack Reid’s hold.

  ‘I didn’t,’ he said, ‘I didn’t kill her.’

  He sounded as though he couldn’t believe what was happening.

  Donna stepped forward. ‘This is harassment,’ she said, ‘You’ve nothing on him. Kevin didn’t kill her.’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ Kevin said, whimpering. They could hear real panic in his voice.

  ‘Then why are your fingerprints all over her house?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Our Kevin’s never been in her house,’ Donna said, ‘why would he go in there?’

  ‘OK, I did go to her house,’ Kevin said. ‘I went to warn her about her spying on everyone. People didn’t like it, I told her that.’

  ‘Save it,’ DCI Moody said. ‘Take him away, Sergeant. Sorry you’ve been disturbed, Mrs Miller.’

  ‘You will be,’ Donna said in an attempt at venom. But her lack of conviction made her sound pathetic.

  ‘She thinks he’s guilty,’ Rachel said quietly to Jack as they got into the car.

  ‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she?’ Jack said.

  Kevin was slumped beside Rachel in the back seat.

  ‘You’ve got it wrong,’ he said. They could hear the fear in his voice. ‘I didn’t do it.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Next day the news that Kevin Miller had been charged with the murder of Alice Bates was the lead story on the local television lunchtime news.

  By teatime, reporters were crawling all over Forester Close. They were there the next day and the one after that. But they discovered no new information to shed light on the murky details of Alice Bates’s death.

  Curiously, though, the reporters succeeded in opening lines of communication between the residents of the Close. Where people had instinctively always been wary of each other, or actually afraid, they began to recognize a common humanity even in those they distrusted most. They could not remain in fear of people whose faces they were seeing in their own homes in the newspapers or on the television screen.

  If this was the first labour pain in the birth of a community, Jess Miller became its unlikely midwife.

  A reporter from a Sunday tabloid asked Jess how having a second murder in the street had affected her life, especially as her brother was accused of the killing.

  Jess was in a bad mood. She had recognized that something important had happened in her relationship with Mark on that horrible night when he rejected her advances, and then dumped her on the street to find her way home as best she could.

  She’d tried to shrug it off, it hadn’t meant anything much. He was all mixed up, that was all.

  But she was desolate. She’d spent all the next morning trying to text him. He didn’t reply. But then, she told herself, Mark wasn’t at all mobile-literate. He treated the cell phone as a tool of his farming trade, and his messages to her might as well have been to DEFRA or the Milk Marketing Board for all the intimacy they had in them.

  So when the reporter asked his question, she snapped, ‘How much?’

  ‘What’s it worth?’ he asked. ‘Depends what you’ve got to tell.’

  ‘Give me a grand and I’ll tell you plenty,’ Jess said.

  ‘OK,’ he said. He told himself that if the editor objected to the payment, by then he’d have got his story and he could run out on her and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. If she had nothing to tell, he wouldn’t pay anyway.

 
; Jess let rip. She told him about the warring families from Catcombe and Catcombe Mead who would not let her and Mark be together; she told about their secret trysts behind Alice’s house, and that was why Alice Bates had to die.

  Jess was carried away by the drama she was creating. ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Alice helped us before. She once rescued Mark and me from my brothers. This feud, it’s like The Godfather. She didn’t obey the rules; she had to die.’

  ‘You’re having me on?’ the reporter said. ‘Aren’t you?’

  Jess shrugged. ‘Ask around,’ she said. ‘We all knew that if Kevin found out Alice helped Mark, he’d kill her, no sweat. She knew it, too, she was terrified of Kev.’

  ‘It’s incredible,’ the reporter said.

  But incredible or not, it would make a terrific story for the paper.

  ‘It’s like we belong to rival gangs,’ Jess said. ‘God knows what started it. It’s to do with history. It’s the way things are. It’s not just Mark and me; it’s the whole village against everyone on the estate. It’s primordial.’

  Primordial was a word Nicky used all the time, to express contempt. Jess had taken it up because she liked the way it sounded.

  The reporter didn’t know this. He liked the idea of a primitive local feud as a background to murder. The alleged murderer, after all, was this girl’s half-brother.

  ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘It’s like Shakespeare.’

  So Mark and Jess briefly became Romeo and Juliet. The reporter set their romance against a background of barbarian warlords and undercover violence set in a despotic no-man’s-land in rural England where the forces of law and order were helpless to act.

  Jess was right, the reporter told himself, it was primordial. And it all happened quite close to where, only a few hundred years before, the Monmouth Rebellion and the Bloody Assizes had ravaged backward farming families in Somerset.

  The publication of his story was devastating to the residents of Forester Close.

  As long as they had kept themselves to themselves, they had been able to see where lay the unspecified but nonetheless present danger which haunted all of them. As long as each family saw its neighbours as the source of that danger, they had felt that they could contain the perceived threat.