Henderson Manor

by Emma L. Clapperton

  As she flicked through her recordings on the Sky plus box she found the drama which starred Sam Leonard. It had been on her box for almost one year now and she listened to his voice as she drifted off, completely unaware of the entity still lurking in her home.

  Being surrounded by the sound of his voice comforted Deborah but she knew that she needed more than just his voice. She wanted Sam Leonard to belong to her and only her. She had already stopped at nothing to get what she wanted and she was beginning to realise that she didn’t care who got hurt in the process, so long as it wasn’t her.

  8

  “Are you kidding?” He asked furiously.

  Jenny couldn’t believe that he was so angry, he never normally acted this way when she did something that she thought was right by him.

  “I’m asking you a question Jenny!” He raised his voice again.

  “No, I’m not kidding. Why are you so pissed off?”

  Sam couldn’t believe how calm she was. She had threatened a complete stranger and she thought it was ok. “Why am I so pissed off? I’ll tell you why Jenny. The girl was serving us lunch, not trying to rob us. What the hell is wrong with you?”

  Jenny felt a knot in the pit of her stomach.

  “Well?” Sam persisted.

  Jenny shook her head. “Look, I was just looking out for you. You know, after all the Sarah stuff I thought you would appreciate it.”

  Sam sighed. “I do appreciate it. But that was a little different, Jenny. Sarah was my girlfriend.”

  “Psycho girlfriend,” she rolled her eyes.

  “She wasn’t well in the head.”

  She could see how angry he felt about it and it killed her to see him like this. She felt her heart wrench and instantly regretted what she had said to Claire. “Come here,” she said as she wrapped her arms around him.

  “I’m sorry to shout. I just don’t see why you had to threaten her. She hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  Jenny gritted her teeth but relaxed before she replied. “I know. I just, I don’t know. I suppose I’m just protective of you after everything that’s happened. Is that such a crime?” She pulled away to see his face. His eyes were sad after speaking about Sarah.

  “It will be if you keep threatening people. I’m going to meet someone eventually Jenny and she won’t be crazy. She will be like anyone else, and you will have to learn to trust her.”

  Jenny nodded. “I know,” was all she could manage. She hated seeing him like this, and she certainly didn’t want to be the one to make him feel this way.

  “And anyway, I may have met her already.”

  Jenny let go of him and walked over to the kitchen sink, “Really?”

  “Yep; Deborah. She really is something else.”

  Jenny managed a smile. “You think she’s something special?”

  Sam shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows? But I would be happy to continue to find out. Although after last night I’m not so sure that she’ll want to see me again.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me about Claire last night at the bar, or when we got back here?”

  Sam looked out of the window, remembering the disastrous date with multiple interruptions and then the strange happenings in the flat when he had come home. “Wasn’t the right time to discuss it.”

  “Are we ok?” Jenny asked apprehensively.

  Sam smiled. “I can’t stay angry at you. But just tone it down, Jenny; not every girl I see or even just talk to is going to turn out crazy.”

  Jenny smiled again, knowing that he was right but not willing to admit it. “So, Deborah wasn’t too keen on me appearing last night, was she?”

  “Well considering Claire had turned up at our table discussing your antics I’m not surprised. But don’t worry, once you meet her properly you will be able to show her how nice you really are,” Sam flashed his charming grin. “Listen, I have to get going to see what the reviews are saying about the final night of the play. I’ll see you later. If anything weird happens in here again, let me know straight away, ok?”

  Jenny nodded. She worried that Sarah wouldn’t stop her harassments. The lipstick message was easy to hide from Sam and yes, since he had ended things, the letters and the phone calls had ceased. But what if the lipstick message was the beginning of it all again? Girls didn’t treat Sam like a normal guy. They were all giggly and stupid around him and Sarah had been so head over heels with him that she had tried to drive a wedge between him and Jenny. What if she kept coming back? Jenny pondered with the idea that she should tell Sam about the message but decided against it. He had found Deborah and seemed happier than he had been in a while. Jenny didn’t want to be the one to spoil that.

  9

  There was a strong stench of death and decay as DS Paul Preston entered the manor house he and DC Jim Lang had been called to earlier. It lingered in the air and soon would begin to linger in their nostrils and cling to their clothing. The forensics had been there for an hour or so before their arrival and the area around the house had been taped off by the uniformed officers, who were now standing guard at the bottom of the drive.

  “Oh dear, this doesn’t look good,” Lang said as he examined the entrance hall to the property. He looked at the body on the floor at the bottom of the stairs and grimaced at the angle of the left leg. “Well, I think that this leg is broken.”

  “You think?” Preston replied. Being used to Lang’s sarcasm, he brushed it off.

  The forensic team busied themselves around the two men as they continued to look around the house. It was a large property; a manor house in its day, now just one of the many large houses in the Glasgow area. Over the years its decor had tired and was in good need of some renovation work but its current state was livable. The manor emanated years of life where people came and went, lived and died and spent many happy years. There were picture frames all over the walls and each one was a family picture, with many different faces. The body that lay on the floor looked to be the youngest in the photographs.

  The forensic team were dusting surfaces for fingerprints as Preston retrieved a pair of gloves from one of the younger members of the forensic team. Preston had worked in the force for years but it never got any easier seeing a dead body, especially if it had been a possible murder. The face was not recognizable due to the length of time the body had been there and the colour of the corpse suggested that time of death had been around four weeks previous to their arrival. Preston was no coroner but after years of experience he was becoming more aware of time scales in death. It still sickened him a little but the smell was the worst thing about it. He sometimes struggled to remind himself that a corpse that had laid for this long had once been a person; it was hard to imagine, what with the colour and change in appearance. His thoughts were interrupted by his colleague’s voice.

  “Do you think she was pushed?”

  Preston shook his head, unsure of the answer. “I’m not sure. It’s a fifty-fifty chance at the moment since we’ve only just found her. What did the informant say exactly?” He gestured for them to leave and allow the forensics team to get on with their jobs.

  Lang sighed. “Not much to be honest, apparently a local florist who delivers flowers here on a monthly basis hadn’t received payment and had tried to phone to see if everything was all right. When she couldn’t get through, she decided to drop by to check in person. She knocked on the door a few times and when no one answered, she looked through the letterbox and saw the deceased lying on the floor.”

  “Do we have a name?” Preston asked, crossing the threshold and savoring the fresh air that now filled his lungs.

  “Yep,” Lang checked his notebook from his breast pocket. “Sarah Henderson.”

  Preston pulled his gloves off. He looked back into the house and at the girl, now known as Sarah and shook his head. “Ok, we need to speak to this florist, see if she noticed anything unusual about the house when she came to check on her, anything which may have been out of place.”

  Lang a
greed. “Yes, we also need to check her phone records, see who she’s been in contact with. Maybe there’s a boyfriend or someone we can talk to who might’ve been close to her.”

  “Aye, you get on that and I’ll question the florist, and let’s see what we can come up with. You never know; it could’ve been a genuine accident.”

  “Here’s hoping. A house this size; someone could’ve been after her money.”

  Preston nodded. “The world’s not short of a greedy bugger, right enough.”

  As Preston and Lang headed to their car, they could hear the forensic team busying themselves around the house and the grounds, searching the property for any kind of clue which would explain Sarah’s death.

  “If anything crops up, no matter how small, contact either myself or Lang at the station right away. Got it?” Preston called out. The team stopped in their tracks and there were muffled replies of agreement before they continued with the search.

  The gravel crunched under the officers’ shoes as they made their way back to the car. The driveway was extensively large and they had parked just at the entrance. The weather matched their mood with grey clouds hanging over Glasgow’s West End. Clouds always seemed to hang over the city, especially if there was a death to deal with. Preston had seen enough dead bodies in his time and so some would suggest that he would be used to it by now, but it never did get easier. Perhaps it was the father in him, knowing that someone’s child was the victim always got to him. His family meant everything to him and he was never fully relaxed knowing that there were crazy people out there, willing to kill- sometimes for no other reason than because they could. He had come to accept the fact that since the day he had welcomed his first daughter into the world he never would feel relaxed again. He was definitely a soft touch when it came to his girls, but if anyone ever tried to mess with them, God help them. When Ross Turner had been on the rampage, Preston’s heart was in his throat the whole time. Ross had targeted young women like his beautiful girls and Preston had been quietly terrified that his girls would fall prey to his sadistic way of thinking. Thankfully, they hadn’t and Preston was grateful for that but still sorry that someone else had to deal with their daughter’s murder. He remembered Mrs Noble, the mother of Angela Noble and the state that she was in when they had gone to see her with Patrick. He had remained professional, but remembered thinking that he never wanted to feel her pain.

  “You alright there, Paul?” Lang asked, noticing how distant he was.

  “Aye, let’s get back to the station and get stuck into this. The sooner we know what happened to the girl the better.”

  They reached the car and climbed in. Lang brought the engine to life and slowly eased out of the driveway. “Some size of house isn’t it? I mean, why was a girl like her living here by herself?”

  Preston shook his head. “Maybe been left to her in a will. We’ll find out more about her when we speak to the florist, who by the way seems to be the only person to have brought attention to this death.”

  “Aye, that’s a bit strange. Suppose we’ll just have to see what her phone records say. We’ll be able to get a feel for who she was in contact with, see if any of her friends know if anything has happened which could have led up to her death. How long do you think she had been lying there?”

  “I’d say around four weeks, Jim. The stench was unbelievable and her face was pretty much gone. But we’ll wait for the coroner to get an accurate time of death. You never know: she may not have died immediately, or she could have been alive and then died later. Either way, I’m not sure.”

  “Poor kid. What a waste,” Lang said, pulling up to a set of traffic lights. Preston looked up, realising they were on South Street and wondering how Patrick was getting on since deciding not to work with them after the Turner case. “What do you think Mr McLaughlin has been doing since we last saw him?”

  “Ghost hunting most likely,” Lang said; his sarcastic attitude was never far away when the subject of psychics was brought to the table.

  “Ghost hunting?” Preston raised one eyebrow and smiled.

  “I don’t know, conjuring up spirits, or whatever it is that he does.”

  “Still not convinced then?” Preston laughed.

  “Never will be, no matter what happens in front of me. That Turner case was all coincidental as far as I’m concerned. The guy turned out to be his bloody brother for god’s sake.”

  Preston knew that Lang would never accept Patrick fully and it was fair enough. “If you say so, Jim.”

  “I do say so, Paul. I did come to like Patrick in the end but no one on this earth could change my mind about death and the afterlife. In my opinion, when you’re dead, you’re dead and that’s the end of it. I don’t know, maybe he’s just good at guessing.” They both laughed. Lang may not have ever said it out loud but Preston knew fine well that even if psychics were proven to be one hundred percent legit, Lang would never back down. He had been secretly glad that Patrick had turned down the offer; he didn’t want to be known to anyone as the officer who relied on the word of a psychic. Patrick had told Lang particular things that he couldn’t have known about when they were investigating the Turner case, and at first Lang had begun to loosen up about the whole psychic thing, but not long after that he was back to his old skeptical self.

  The discussion came to a close when they pulled up to the station in Pitt Street. The weather had gone from dull and grey, to rain pelting down from the heavens and as Preston and Lang got out of the car they ran to the entrance, trying to save their suits from looking like they’d just been in the washing machine.

  “Come on Jim, we’ve a lot to get through.”

  As they made their way down the corridor, Lang stopped at the coffee machine. “Fuel for the mountains of paperwork we’re bound to have to go through?”

  “Aye, better make it a strong one. I’ll get in contact with the florist.” Preston replied. Whether Sarah Henderson was murdered or died by accident, Preston had a feeling that this case was going to cause him a serious headache.

  10

  Lang had trailed through endless amounts of Sarah Henderson’s phone records, looking for anything that he could use to find out what actually happened to her. He had written down a few numbers and found out who the servers were, allowing him to match names to the phone numbers. There were a lot of call records, made and received, and they spanned over a number of weeks leading up to Sarah’s death. He sat back on his chair, running his hand over his head and then pinching the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t so sure how he was going to explain to Preston that he recognised two of the names on the records. Of course, Glasgow was a big city and there were likely to be several hundred people with the same name so surely this had to be coincidental. He watched as Preston entered the office, coffee in one hand and a stack of papers in the other. “How you getting on with those phone records, Jim?”

  Lang sighed, “There are a handful of numbers on here spanning over a few weeks; it seems like Sarah Henderson had hardly any contacts.”

  “Ok, so where are we headed to first?” Preston blew into the plastic cup allowing the steam to float up around his face.

  “Paul, you’d better come and sit down. There is something I need to ask you about these records.”

  Preston frowned, not fully understanding the meaning behind Lang’s words. “What’s wrong?” He sat down on the seat next to Lang.

  “Well, I’ve been going through these records and the same numbers have been cropping up from calls made and received, apart from the odd call centre number. So I got in touch with the providers and got the names of the accounts linked to the numbers.” He stopped, not sure where to take it next.

  Preston gestured, moving his hand in circular motions telling Lang to continue, “And?”

  Lang slid the records across to Preston, allowing him to look for himself. Preston lifted the paper and his eyes scanned over it. Lang watched as he read each name and as he expected, Preston’s eyes stopped over
the two names that he knew would catch his attention. He looked up at Lang and simply said, “Shit!”

  Lang nodded. “Do you recognise the number next to the names?”

  Preston pulled his phone out of his pocket and scanned through the names in his contacts list. “I don’t memorize numbers, Jim. That’s what these things are for. I need to check the number against my contacts.”

  A few moments passed where Preston stared at the phone then the paper. “Aye, they match.”

  Lang sighed heavily. “It’s nothing to worry about Paul. We’ll sort it.”

  “Sort it? My daughters’ names are on Sarah Henderson’s phone records and if you hadn’t already guessed it, Sarah Henderson is dead. Whether it was murder or not, I have to go and tell them that a friend of theirs has been found dead.”

  “Do you know that she was a friend of theirs?” Lang asked, trying not to sound too accusing.

  “Well, she’s not family, so I can’t see any other way that they would know her.”

  Lang nodded. He knew fine well that Preston’s daughter’s involvement with Sarah would be innocent but he had to go down every avenue of scrutiny until they were sure Sarah’s death was accidental. “We’ll both go to see them, but I think I should do the talking. You’re the father after all; you have to have some separation.”

  “Aye, I know. Let’s just go and get this over with.”

  ***

  The journey to the Preston household was quiet. Preston never liked to allow work and home life to come together but with this he didn’t see that he had much choice. The weather had turned nasty and the rain battered off the windscreen as the wipers fought to keep it clear. With the rain came the dip in temperature and this followed the dip in Preston’s mood. “Why did I pick this as my career?”