The Diane Dimbleby Murder Collection Volume 2

by Penelope Sotheby

  Shelly Newsome had been dead when they pulled her from the reeds. It was clear that she had been in the water for at least a day; decomposition and fish had taken their toll upon the poor girl. There was not any blood, but the violence of the attack she had suffered could be seen from the rips upon her black dress and the puckered gashes across her forehead and face. Nobody could say whether she had been alive when her finger had been severed, and Diane only hoped that at least that one mercy had been given to her.

  The Inspector had instructed a uniformed constable to take Diane back to her car after the ambulances had removed their grisly cargo. No words passed between them as she walked away, just a glance from the Inspector whose face seemed to be part scowl, part sadness. She had looked away, letting the shock of her discovery slowly leak through her, numbing the tips of her fingers and toes.

  Yet all the while, even as she tried to control her mind and avoid recounting the details of the situation, something else kept distracting her, dragging her thoughts back to where it all began: the finger in the box.

  Once back in her car, Diane turned on the radio and put on some music to try to keep her from dwelling. The inane chatter of a couple of DJs did what she had hoped for a couple of minutes until the news came on and a report that had already been released about the discovery of a body at the lake. The blank look upon the torn face of Shelly Newsome came wavering back to her, and she pulled into a small layby to give her hands a few moments to return to usefulness. She laid her head upon the headrest and closed her eyes, forcing blackness into her mind to overwhelm the staring dead eyes.

  “Why?”

  She had spoken the word aloud but, as she did so, it occurred to Diane that she was not sure where she had directed it. Had it been a plea to a higher power, a request for reasons for the horrors of the world? Or had it been something else? “Why” seemed to be a question that needed answering in this case, and yet the question had eluded a response.

  Why Gary Sandrake? Why Monica Hope? Why a finger? Why now?

  The unanswered questions started to flood Diane’s mind, succeeding where forced distraction had failed, to remove Shelly Newsome’s face from the forefront.

  Why? Why? Why?

  Why any of this?

  Diane could feel that she was missing some piece of information, some half-glance, some casually spoken word or phrase. The thing that would crack one “Why?” and the results would cascade through the rest, ending at the doorstep of the killer. There was reason, no matter how twisted, behind all of the events, and that meant there were tell-tale markers that she had failed to see.

  Diane prided herself on her ability to think like other people, a little of the empathy that had made her such a good teacher and headmistress. She had realized early in her career that the parents and children that came before her were each unique with a story, a life, unlike any others. She had found that she could understand their feelings and attitudes after interacting with them for only a short time, her mind building a personality, a worldview around the casual remarks and inferences to which others might have been blind. She realized that listening to what people said was never as beneficial as picking up what they had implied or left unsaid.

  So why was it so hard for her to see what this killer wanted? Was it her reluctance to stare “into the abyss”? She did not think so. Writing about disturbed minds was her day-to-day life. Thinking from a skewed perspective gave her the plots and ideas that fuelled her books. She realized that the implication was that something in this sick series of events did not seem to belong. But what?

  Diane drummed her thumbs softly on the steering wheel, barely conscious that she was mimicking the beat thudding from the speakers. Her mind played over everything she knew, looking for a red flag or misplaced clue. And she found nothing but her own ignorance.

  With a sigh, she realized what she would have to do: start at the beginning again. Follow through everything that had happened piece-by-piece, meet everyone in order, and dig just a little bit deeper. Something would surface that would slot in like the final edge piece of a jigsaw, leaving the rest as merely clean-up.

  Gunning the engine back to life, Diane pulled out of the layby, merged with a steady stream of traffic and headed to Ironbridge.

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  “Only doctors and nurses inside. Understand?”

  Inspector Crothers watched Gary Sandrake through a thick glass door as the Constable replied with an affirmative. A thick strip of bandage ran over the side of Gary’s face and around the back of his head. Fluids dripped rapidly into the tube sticking out of a limp arm that rest on the pristinely folded white cotton sheets.

  Crothers had cut Gary’s bindings and saved them in a Ziploc bag that was part of his standard dress code. The release had only caused Gary to crumple further into himself, and there was no sign of a physical reaction or relief. Gary had not even woken when being pulled from the car boot and his doctors were unsure when or if the unconscious state would ever change. There were plans for CTs and MRIs and other medical tests, but they were not going to help Crothers in the near term. He had a body with a missing finger, the finger and an unconscious man, and all without any obvious cause.

  He thought briefly of Diane Dimbleby as she had driven away in the squad car. Her face had been pale, and there was a tremor in her hands. He could not tell if it was from the fall or the body she had stumbled across. He had told her to stay in the car, and she had deliberately paid him no heed, which should have angered him. Instead, he felt concern for her. She may have been frailer than she looked, though he had the feeling that the only thing old about Diane was her body. There was a mind of steel in there. It could be dented by a hard enough shock, but it still remained and did what it was designed for. In this case, Diane would bounce back, and she would get back into the fray because she needed to. He felt a faint sense of relief that Diane would be safely out of the way for a while, yet she would keep asking questions.

  A doctor pushing through the doorway broke his reverie, and Crothers watched as the doctor flipped charts, tapped on a computer, and scratched his head. The Inspector was turning away when there was a shrill squeal followed by a crash of metal from Gary’s room. As he swung back around, Crothers saw that the doctor had stumbled backwards into a nearby tray of medications and was staring aghast at the bed, where a pale white hand had a grip on the doctor’s lab coat.

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  The large, detached house dominated the street, surrounded by smaller more cheaply built semi-detached houses. It had an angular appearance that was common in Victorian houses and clashed with the square-set buildings around it. Two broad windows flanked a large deep-green door that had seen better days, if not years. The windows vied with the door to express their need for a fresh coat of paint. Attempts had been made to renovate the exterior, though the painting of the red brickwork seemed to have been left half complete, the upper section of the building appearing like the untouched forehead wrinkles upon a freshly Botoxed face. An eroded plaque of stone protruded high up on the wall above the door, though the house’s given name and its date of completion were eroded to the point of nonexistence. Wide as the front of the building was, it was so much deeper, extending backward along a driveway to a small car park in the back.

  Cars filled only half of the spaces when Diane pulled behind the building. She selected a spot next to a small Fiat that she had seen outside her house when she left that morning, which had to be Monica’s car. The parking angle was almost diagonal across the spot and Diane almost clipped the jutting bumper as she turned in. She was even more alarmed when she saw that the driver’s door had been left slightly ajar.

  “The poor girl,” thought Diane. “I abandoned her in a more fragile frame of mind than I thought.”

  Locking her car, she walked around and hip-checked the Fiat’s door shut with a satisfying crunch. She could see that the backseat was a mess of clothes, food packets, and other detritus that
young people seemed to accumulate in cars. Diane wondered what satisfaction there was in accruing such a mess before she realized that it was more of an “out of sight, out of mind” situation than deeper insight into Monica’s psych.

  Beside the door was a long metal plate that housed six dingy white buttons with a scratched transparent slide next to each. Four of the slides had names underneath, slanting handwriting of a barely legible nature on misshapen pieces cut from notebook paper. A circular grille sat underneath the buttons, and when Diane poked at one of the buttons, a tinny facsimile of Monica’s voice came through.

  “Yes?” The voice sounded apprehensive.

  “Hell dear. It is me, Diane. I would like a word with you if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Oh,” came the surprised response. “Okay. You can come in, the front door is never locked.”

  Diane felt a little let down having expected the standard buzzer sound of someone being given access to a building, something she had seen so often in films and used a few times in her writing.

  “Who leaves the main door to a building open in this day and age?” she mused as she turned the large circular knob, her knuckles breaking away a few flakes of paint.

  The entrance hall ran far back into the building, the cracked white tile sliding past two locked doors that faced each other, a large staircase and to a third locked door at the far end of the hall. A table stood behind the door with six pigeonholes for mail. The holes were numbers 1 through 6, and only 4 and 5 had any mail remaining.

  The locks on the door to Diane’s right crunched and the white panel door cracked open slowly before swinging wide to reveal Monica dressed in baggy sweatpants and t-shirt. Her hair appeared to be in the same state as Diane had last seen her in her kitchen that morning. Her eyes darted along the hallway before waving Diane inside.

  As Diane stepped into a studio apartment that closely resembled the back seat of Monica’s car, the door closed sharply, with several locks clicking into place like obedient guards clicking their heels.

  “Should I be happy to see you?” Monica stood with her back to the door, leaning slightly as if bracing for impact.

  “Not really,” said Diane, letting her eyes drop. “We have found the owner of the finger. She was dead, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s who they found at the lake earlier?” Monica reached into her sweatpants pocket and produced a phone that she immediately started flicking at with a finger.

  “Yes. I found the poor girl. Such a horrible thing.”

  Monica looked up, her finger frozen in mid-air.

  “They know who did it though, right?”

  “Well, that’s why I’m here. I want to go back through everything. There seems to be something I’m missing, or that I missed.”

  “But what about the Inspector?”

  “He has his own line of inquiry right now.”

  “So we’re on our own here then? No visitors?”

  Diane looked at Monica whose eyes were wide, partially with hope and partially with something Diane thought might be fear.

  “Correct,” said Diane brusquely, turning to find a chair and only seeing a high tide of clothes.

  Monica walked over to a pile of sweatshirts and pushed them aside to reveal an armchair that faced a similarly swamped bed. Manoeuvring through the mess, Diane lowered herself into the chair, gingerly straightening her right leg. Monica flopped onto the bed and lounged onto her side, hand under her head.

  “I’ve told you everything, I think,” said Monica. “I just got the box and brought it to you. Not much else to tell you.”

  “And that’s where I feel we need to start,” replied Diane. “You’re sure that there is no reason to send the finger to you? A spurned lover? A jilted co-worker?”

  Monica shook her head, waves of her hair slipping across her face.

  “No one. I haven’t dated in about a year. You don’t meet many guys around here that can sweep a girl off her feet in the pub.”

  Diane nodded sagely, having seen the courtship antics of young folk around Apple Mews.

  “Then why?” she said absently, letting her eyes drift across a torn poster of Jimi Hendrix in gaudy colours to a shadowy patch of wall just beneath the ceiling. It was a few minutes before Monica coughed gently and Diane realized that she had drifted into her mind.

  “Maybe it was meant for one of your friends, sent via you?” she enquired. “Maybe a card fell out in the hallway or…” Diane looked around the room and wondered if a dropped card would ever be found again.

  “I don’t think so, I was pretty shaken up when I opened the box, I kind of dropped it on the table in the hall. Then I called Tommy and came straight over to you.”

  “Where was the box when you first saw it?”

  “On the table out there.” Monica motioned her free hand limply towards the door.

  “On the table?”

  “Oh yeah. The outside door stays open all of the time so the postie can come in and drop off everyone’s mail. The box was on the table, not in my pigeon hole. I only opened it because my name was on it.”

  Diane nodded slowly, her mind again drifting. There seemed a glitch in her thoughts, as if a missing part was allowing an engine to grind away without actually doing the work it was designed for. She decided to change tack and see where it took her.

  “I saw on the doorbells that there are six rooms here. Do you know everyone?”

  “Mostly, though people drift in and out quite a lot. We’ve only just filled the last room, it had been vacant for a while. Nice girl as far as I can see.” Diane was talking absently, having pulled her phone up to her face again.

  “Oh, I saw two missing names on the buzzers outside.”

  “One of them is Malcolm. He’s been here longer than me, but he refuses to put his name on the door. I’m pretty certain I saw him in a tinfoil hat the other day, which kind of explains a lot. The new girl would be the other. She’s called Melissa I think.”

  There was a pop in Diane’s head as the missing gear slotted into place. Engines started to strain, and data began to be crunched. She sounded out the name softly, as if the repetition would help with her recall.

  “Melissa. Melissa. Melissa. Why does that name sound familiar?”

  “She’s only been here a week or so. Don’t see her much though, keeps to herself mostly. She’s been gone most days though.”

  The engine stopped, and the output registered clearly in Diane’s mind – the Hargrave girls.

  “Do you know her last name?” she barked sharply. Her eyes focused quickly upon Monica and she leaned forward with anticipation.

  “No clue,” said Monica anticlimactically. “But you can check her mail if you want. She hasn’t picked it up yet. She leaves early every morning for work, I guess.”

  Diane pulled her aching leg under herself, levered herself upwards and went to the door. A few seconds elapsed as she looked over the door locks and tried to work them so that they were all unlocked at the same time. Monica appeared behind her and with the deftness of a magician had the door pulled open.

  They reached the pigeon holes, and Monica pointed to the number 5.

  “That’s Melissa’s.”

  Diane hesitated briefly, realizing that if she was wrong, she would be violating the privacy of someone and handling their mail. The risks of not doing so outweighed this worry however, and she reached for the stack of mail.

  The first piece was for a Mr. Herbert Homburg. Monica said that he had moved out over a year ago, but they kept putting his mail back into the mail system. Every six weeks another piece would appear.

  The next was a W. Penny. Monica didn’t know the name but assumed it must have been a tenant before she arrived.

  “I get mail for three or four different people every week. For all the Post Office or I know, they disappeared without a trace.”

  Finally, the third piece held a handwritten change of address, forwarded from an address in Shrewsbury. Diane showed the letter to Mo
nica, who took a couple of steps backwards and sat on a step of the stairs.

  “Melissa Hope,” said Diane. “That finger was meant for her, not you.”

  Chapter 6

  “Of course, of course!” exclaimed Diane. “This is the Hargrave girls all over again.”

  Monica stared dumbly from her perch on the stairs, the letter still held up in front of her.

  “The who?”

  “The Hargrave girls. They were a couple of teachers that both worked at my school years ago. Audrey and Alison. But you know, being in a school, the students only knew them both as Miss Hargrave. I can’t tell you the number of times I had confused parents come to me during a parents’ evening to complain,” Diane lowered the tone of her voice and altered her accent slightly, “That Miss Hargrave doesn’t know who my son is. She should be fired, not knowing her students. Claimed my boy wasn’t in her class. Said there was another Miss Hargrave. I gave her a piece of my mind.”

  Diane chuckled softly to herself and shook her head at the memory. Her hand still held the other mail with assorted recipients and tapped it rapidly on the edge of the wooden table.

  “Couldn’t tell you the number of times. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier.”

  “But what are the odds?” asked Monica.

  “Exactly,” said Diane. “What are the odds? That’s what makes it so unusual and has taken us so long. We are running behind, and I must tell the Inspector.”

  Diane dropped the mail and reached for her phone, a slight tremor betraying her excitement.

  ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠

  The doctors had given the Inspector the all-clear to talk to Gary, but with the stern warning that if their patient became over-taxed, they would remove the Inspector by brute force if necessary. The Inspector had nodded politely and they had vacated the room, leaving him and Gary alone as walls of instrumentation hissed, beeped, and blipped.