by Clare Curzon
‘Why the interest?’ Madeleine asked with suspicion.
‘What’s he to you?”
‘Nothing. Less than nothing. Just thought I’d seen him somewhere before.’
‘Not in your shop. He’d hardly be the betting sort.’
Piggott gave a throaty chuckle. ‘That’s what you think, eh? And you’re an expert on the punters! He’s on the books. Clever he may be, but he can’t pick a horse. Too bloody high-and-mighty to come in himself after the first time. Runs a Special Account. Uses the pseudonym Vector, whatever that means.’
He swung himself into a chair at the formica-topped table. ‘So what else, family has he?’
‘I told you once before but you never listened. They’ve two kids. The boy’s left school and the girl’s fifteen or sixteen. You’d best ask Duncan, since it seems he’s been in there.’
Piggott spun to his feet, opened the back door and roared for his elder son. Duncan wandered in from the terrace, a split grass stem between his two thumbs. He blew on it to produce an ear-splitting shriek. Jeff cuffed him into the house, closing the door again for privacy. At the garden’s far end he’d glimpsed Patrick perched high in the old pear tree, binoculars trained on the garden next door. Well, at least one of the kids was awake.
As he might have guessed, Duncan could tell him nothing. Just that the Knightley’s house was ‘nice’ inside, not modern, and Chloe was ‘all right really’. He’d met her mother too. She’d been washing china in the conservatory and had asked him about school.
‘The girl goes to a private school. Fancy uniform with a purple blazer,’ Madeleine put in, adding some body to the skeletal information. She couldn’t think why Jeff was interested at this point. He hadn’t been when she told him what a helluva lot the house was sold for. He’d simply said that some people had more money than sense, and that anyway all she knew was the asking price: it could have changed hands for a lot less.
But Sally Ellis who sold it said the new people hadn’t quibbled. They’d paid in full, for fear of being gazumped. So then Sally wished they’d slapped another ten thousand on, except that admittedly there were a number of repairs to be done, one or two of them structural.
Patrick slid in from the garden, his face puckish with gossip ready to spill.
‘There’s been a right barney going on next door,’ he said happily. ‘But then a big man made them all sit down and I couldn’t hear anything. But he was giving them a real pi-jaw.’
‘The white-haired one with the stick?’ Piggott asked sharply.
‘No, another one. I think he was a plain-clothes policeman. He had a woman with him, with a notebook.’
‘So it’s not just a traffic inquiry. I wondered why that copper was on duty outside. Maybe they’ve been burgled.’ Piggott eyed his son with suspicion. ‘You making this up? How could you see all this from the tree?’
‘Some I could. But there’s a big knot-hole in the fence by their conservatory. You can see right through into their lounge from that.’
‘Patrick, it’s not nice, spying on people,’ Madeleine limply scolded. ‘That’s how trouble can start between neighbours.’
‘Maybe they’ve started enough for themselves,’ said her husband with a smirk. He pulled his mobile phone from a pocket.
Patrick watched enviously as he rang one of his minders to come and pick him up. The man’s name was Walter Pimm, a weasely man whose party piece was making his knuckles crack. He shared a flat with a massive bloke called Big Ben. Dad called them his heavies and made it sound like a joke.
Patrick wondered what chance he’d have if he asked for a mobile himself for his next birthday in October.
If Piggott had stayed on ten minutes after Pimm whisked him off he could have watched yet another car pull up at the neighbouring house and a tall, fair-haired man whom he knew as DI Angus Mott arrive to take Professor Knightley away for questioning. It was done without fuss and the three remaining Piggotts were unaware of it, being inelegantly draped around the kitchen, feasting on chilled lemon squash with cheese’n onion crisps and defrosted doughnuts.
Superintendent Yeadings was glad enough to extract himself from the Knightleys’ troubles and - even on a Sunday - return to check on a deskload of other serious crimes. He left Z behind to await experts who would take apart the sealed bedroom. It wasn’t an obvious scene of crime, but at this juncture you couldn’t be certain. Leila had been kept tied up somewhere before her body was dumped in Shotters Wood, and that was only half a mile away. Carpets in all the rooms would also be combed for fibres to match the microscopic threads already at the lab.
He was relieved that Mott had taken over the investigation. It was his call-out anyway, possibly the last case Angus would handle before the threat of tenure caught up with him. Already he’d run over his five-year stint as DI. The coming change would mean welcome promotion for him, but it meant the team’s break-up.
Angus was a good detective, with a decent record for putting together a convincing case. He’d chafe at being returned to uniform and removed by rank from the sharp end of investigation. Yeadings couldn’t see him taking kindly to admin or hobnobbing with community leaders. Maybe his good looks and law degree would even get him shoved into
PR.
But with the Knightley case it was less on account of Angus and more for himself that he was conscious of a strain easing. Because of the victim. It was nothing new to come upon a body of some person he’d known alive, but here there was a difference. This wasn’t someone with a criminal record, a hard-nosed loan shark who squeezed his debtors beyond endurance or a sleaze-bag running a string of prostitutes, or even an upmarket lady-of-the-night herself - for all that this victim’s get-up had given that first impression.
It seemed now, from the opinion of those who surely must know, that she was an ordinary, well-meaning housewife with family commitments and a respectable part-time job. Which put her in the running to be one of those random victims that stalkers or indiscriminate killers happen upon.
Horror enough. But what made it more poignant to him was how he’d met her in the context of his family life, at a moment when he was feeling bad about letting Sally down. While they conversed he had known she recognised him in his police capacity, and had almost acted upon it.
Preoccupied with his own petty problem, he’d walked away; and so he had this disquieting sense that he should somehow have been able to shield her. Which was totally illogical. Who was he to guarantee invulnerability? Didn’t his job sometimes risk the reverse for those near him?
To be truthful, what bugged him was simple frustration. He’d not stayed and listened to her, and so he had no idea of the importance of what she would have said. It might have been no more than a minor query he could have set her mind at rest on. Or - if the killing wasn’t random and she was under threat already - it could have proved of use now as vital evidence.
That could implicate someone in her circle; possibly one of those he had already met that day. And since statistically the odds were always on a domestic murder, it seemed inevitable that in Interview Room 1 Professor Aidan Knightley and DI Mott would be getting down to a serious discussion.
He was tired; he had not realised how weary until, after half an hour of paper-shuffling and scribbled memos at the office, he reached home and sprawled at ease in his rattan chair on the patio, a tumbler of Nan’s homemade lemonade close at hand. The overgrown ash tree, which he had long intended to cut back, stirred lacy fans overhead, alternately dazzling and dappling his upturned face.
Gently its susurration faded into the sigh and suck of water at a sea’s edge. He found himself wandering barefoot along a shoreline. It was the time of evening when only overhead is the sky still blue. Gradually, towards the horizon, it shaded to an indeterminate yellow like the flesh of a pear, and finally flushed to meet the dark sea. Above him craggy cliffs caught the lowering sun, bunched like an enormous arthritic fist.
At the water’s edge he was quite alone. Down he
re the light was already slipping away. Only gentle ripples and the rim of wet sand showed a faint phosphorescence. He moved his weight slowly from foot to foot, watching water press up between his bare toes, then briefly stay pooled in the imprint as he lifted each foot away, until the sand slid back and no trace remained. He knew that behind him nothing marked that he had come this way.
The thought brought a mild kind of grief, but then ahead phantom pressure marks began to appear in the wet sand. Traces left by finer feet than his own, long-toed and delicate. But with no one there to make them.
Then these imprints too began to vanish. He heard himself cry out in an urgent protest.
He fought himself awake and felt Nan’s hand on his shoulder to calm him. ‘Mike, you were dreaming.’
He couldn’t speak, lying limply sweating, anguished. At what? A memory rather than the dream. It was a place he’d once visited as a young sergeant with the Met, taking solitary leave in Cornwall. It had been at a turning point in his life as he worked out whether to stay in the job or try for something with better pay; because he’d fallen in love with Nan and he wanted to offer her so much more.
He remembered plodging his feet there at the edge of the warm sea, with his jeans rolled up to the knee. A mudlark sensation, pleasurable and totally physical for the moment.
That was the point where the dream had started to outstrip reality, because it hadn’t mattered then that the footmarks must disappear. It was what happened; something acceptable and accepted. So why the angst of the dream? Some Jungian indication that he feared impermanence? A warning he was getting older, due some day to wear out and himself vanish?
That wasn’t what disturbed him. Already the dream’s outlines were fading. Losing the action, he was still transfixed by the sense of sadness.
Something about those footmarks. He stared into the dark behind his eyelids, and patterns of feeble light started flickering and taking shape.
Then they came back. Not the phantom imprints, but bare feet he had seen elsewhere; on the peaty floor of Shotters Wood. And on Littlejohn’s steel table: fine, arched feet slanting upward and outward in the total relaxation of death. Pathetically toe-tagged.
He stirred in his chair, passed one hand over his dry mouth. Perhaps not so much Jungian as Freudian then? Had Leila Knightley called on his libido from beyond the grave?
Only it wasn’t lust he felt; it was more like guilt.
While Superintendent Yeadings relaxed at home, Z awaited the scene-of-crime experts. She agreed with her chief that it wasn’t an obvious murder scene, but they could not afford to ignore that Leila Knightley had been kept tied up somewhere before her body was dumped in Shotters Wood.
As well as Knightley’s dinner jacket she had also removed the computer from the study to pick over its contents at her convenience. Now she had a tussle with her conscience over having commandeered Chloë’s stack of disks as well. She decided it was better to be over-cautious, and transferred them all to the car, using a grocery carton she found in the utility room.
With Knightley’s departure for questioning, the Hadfields had moved their luggage in, Janey collecting it from beside the front doorstep and transferring it to a twin-bedded guest room at the rear.
‘If Aidan comes back and needs somewhere to sleep,’ she decreed, ‘he can use Eddie’s old room or make up a fresh bed for himself. I don’t mind cooking but I don’t intend waiting on him.’ She then took over the kitchen and started preparing an evening meal.
Charles Hadfield had been curiously silent since Yeadings intervened in the flare-up on Knightley’s arrival. He had been content to listen and ponder. Now, with Chloë pottering about at the far end of the garden, he voiced his opinion that if the police had any sense at all they needn’t expect her father back that night. He appeared to have changed his mind yet again about Knightley’s guilt.
‘They’ll keep him as long as permitted without charging him. Isn’t that thirty-six hours? By which time he’ll have broken down and admitted the killing. I suppose I should get in touch with his solicitor, if only for Chloë’s sake. And we may need someone ourselves to keep those social workers at bay. Not to mention the Press once they’re on to this. Can’t have them upsetting the poor girl.’
For a long time Chloë had stayed crouched on the edge of her bed with her head in her hands. Elsewhere in the house there were sounds of comings and goings. She thought at one point she heard her father’s voice. A little later the front door had closed noisily and a car drove away but she didn’t bother to look out.
It didn’t matter. Nothing did. It was awful, this swirling void. Whenever she closed her eyes she seemed to be moving in a vortex. Needing air she slipped out into the garden. The ground seemed to be tipping under her. Lying flat she had to dig her fingers into the lawn to keep herself from sliding away.
She pulled herself up on to the stone bench by the garage wall. Now at least she had her feet against the ground but still there was movement, and she knew it was inside her head.
Janey had asked if she would ‘like something’; meaning aspirin, she supposed. She had refused because it was both too little and too much. She had feared being any more confused than she already was. What she needed was to go out like a light.
Back at Granny’s she’d believed she was beginning to get herself straightened out, and now total disaster. Leila gone. Leila killed, for God’s sake, by some maniac in Shotters Wood.
There was no sense in anything any more. She had almost made up her mind to tell Leila everything once she got home, in maybe two or three weeks’ time, but now - She found she was rocking forward and backward over her knees. Like a madman in some gothic film, she thought. She had to force herself to stop and sit stiffly straight with her arms wrapped about her. And still her brain felt to be sloshing to and fro, knocking against the bony inner skull.
Someone came out on to the patio. Janey, calling her name.
‘Not now,’ she cried desperately. ‘Leave me alone!’
But that was the opposite of what she wanted. It scared her being abandoned. She wanted Leila there, close, holding her, talking in that low, level voice that could turn the worst nightmares normal.
Janey wouldn’t do. How could she understand, being so old and so odd? Things like this didn’t, couldn’t, happen to Janey. But Leila - who knew men could be shit and still remained sane - Leila just might have understood.
At first the very idea of admitting what had happened was impossible, a grotesque extension of the original horror. But by getting away she had achieved a sort of perspective, if only a slightly skewed one. She’d had time to draw breath, believe that she’d almost escaped, survived without permanent damage. But still there were decisions to be made. She had to put a finish to it forever or she couldn’t live with herself again. And Leila might have helped her there, although it wasn’t clear just how. Now she had no one. How could so many hideous things crash down on her at once?
She shook her head wildly, angry at seeing herself at the centre of this new horror. It was Leila it had happened to, Leila abused, done away with. Something that left her outside. It made her hate herself more.
‘I want to die,’ she growled through stiffly clenched jaws. But she knew she didn’t: there was too much anger boiling away under the shame.
She wanted to forget, yes. Only there’d been so much confused blurring of her mind already, with patches of time gone missing, that she’d thought she was going insane.
No; what she fervently wanted was for none of it ever to have happened: to go back to that afternoon of the French orals. It had been a Friday, so afterwards she’d walked to the Uni’s Faculty of Science to beg a lift home with her father. Leila had gone north for the weekend, to the annual trade fair, so there was no one at home, and Chloe hadn’t yet been given a doorkey for the new house.
That had been the beginning. That was the last moment life had been normal, without unnerving distortions. The afternoon that she’d got involved wit
h Beryl Ryder.
Chloë
Chapter 14
I had admired Beryl Ryder from afar. She was one of those willowy, superior blondes worshipped by some of the juniors at my girls’ day-school. My own respect wasn’t so sloppy, but I would have given a lot to be like her. What I most envied, beyond her tall beauty, was her obvious lack of concern for any of the people or things which cramped my own horizons.
She had no idea who I was. Her gaze was far above the level of someone with the main subjects of GCSE still to master. She had already survived those exams to reach the Sixth Form. Although automatically a prefect through seniority, she had somehow steered clear of other student chores - School Captain, Head of House or Games Captain. If the positions had been elective and not from the Head’s choice she would probably have filled them all, but I could never see such a brazenly free spirit organizing school charities or team lists.
When she swanned into my father’s room that afternoon I assumed she’d become one of his students, and I realized then that I hadn’t seen her about the school corridors for some months.
She stood draped in the doorway, one hip exaggeratedly jutting, fabulously slim - almost anorexic - and sneered at me. ‘For godsake,’ she challenged, ‘lectures ended at four. What the hell are you doing still here?’
She sounded so officious that I bobbed up from my chair and explained I was waiting for my father.
She took one look at my uniform and placed me as a student applicant due to be picked up after an interview. I didn’t trouble to put her right because her lofty attitude was beginning to make me bristle.
She brushed past me with assumed authority, seated herself at Miss Morris’s empty desk and began opening drawers and riffling through them. On Fridays my father’s secretary left soon after lunch, and I wondered if Beryl was appointed to replace her part-time.
After a minute or two of silence she picked up the internal phone. ‘Joanne,’ she complained, ‘have you any idea where Aidan’s got to? There’s a schoolgirl here who’s expecting to be picked up by her family. D’you know anything about it? Well, can you …?’