Wings over the Watcher

by Priscilla Masters

  Why had the consequences been so great? Why had Beatrice died? Had it been similar to the Guy farce? A terrible showdown? There had been marks of violence on her body but no sign of sexual activity.

  What a strange lover this secret person was.

  Chapter Seventeen

  At some point in July you become aware that the summer will not last forever. The nights are starting to lengthen; the swallows gather in increased numbers and chatter on telegraph wires. Late at night when the house is cooling you are reminded of the first breath of chilly autumn and think about gathering logs in preparation for the long winter’s nights when a fire and the television beckon.

  Apart from the odd few hot days the summer had been disappointing with so little sun Joanna had almost forgotten what a summer should be like: ice cubes and gay umbrellas, endless barbecues, the search for shade. However the plants and weeds were thriving. Many loved the luxury of so much rain although the flowers with large petals, petunias and roses in particular, suffered, rotting on their stems. Owners of country pubs and restaurants were unhappy too, thinking of lost business and doubtless the ice-cream manufacturers would have suffered a fall in their profits. The populace were staying in the towns, not tempted to lower the roofs on their convertibles, take in the country air, drink the country beer and eat the country food.

  Joanna was conscious of autumn lurking around the corner as she climbed onto her bike that morning. There was a dull, unfriendly edge to the day. She freewheeled through the village of Waterfall and along the country lanes with their high banks of rosebay willow herb and scarlet corn poppies. Less than a week now and Matthew would be home. As usual when she thought of her partner, he provoked mixed feelings, a sense of intense pleasure, tinged with sick worry. They had unfinished business and they both knew it. Since he had left four months ago for Washington D.C. to study the effects of gunshot wounds he had said little in his emails, only the bare bones of his flight details. But she knew him well enough to know that Matthew’s style was to lock horns physically – not deal with the issue through letters, emails or telephone calls. He knew her well enough to know that she would move heaven and earth to be at the airport to meet him and that they would tackle their problems face to face. She also knew that their relationship had reached a watershed. Their ultimate test – so far. They never could go back now to those new and heady days of simply being together. Their relationship had entered the realms of being hugely complicated, with its imperfections exposed and raw. If they survived they might emerge stronger. If not – She didn’t want to think about it. At heart Joanna was a fatalist. This was the reason she had embarked on the affair with Matthew while he had still been married to Jane. It was why too, she had fallen back into it when their work had brought them so close together. To her it had been inevitable. Fate. Kismet.

  She sped down the hill, feeling the wind ruffle her hair. She would pay the price later; she would have trouble getting a comb through it. Matthew had bought her a helmet for safety after an accident when she was knocked off her bike but she frequently forgot to put it on and didn’t bother putting her hair in an elastic band either so it blew, thick, unruly and tangling. Unbidden, she recalled Beatrice’s hair, blowing in the wind too. Another woman who scorned the use of a helmet.

  She reached the dip and glanced upwards before starting to stand up in the saddle, climbing the hill with the steady, rocking motion of a regular cyclist, pedalling steady and quick, panting a little as she reached the top, only to speed down the hill again and then start the slow climb back into Leek.

  She arrived at the station breathless, warm – and still aware of the autumn sneakily hiding behind the summer mantle.

  She showered quickly in the female changing room, bundling her trainers and cycling shorts in her locker, changing into a blue cotton summer skirt and a white t-shirt with sandals and spraying herself with eau de toilette before wandering into her office. She had scheduled a briefing for nine and wanted to talk to Mike first.

  Oddly enough at the same time that Joanna was acknowledging the creeping presence of autumn so was Arthur Pennington. He had noticed that the daylight in the early morning was ebbing away like a late spring tide. Each day as he drew back the curtains he was aware of this dinginess which crept into the room. He turned back to look at the big double bed with its bright duvet cover and caught sight of his pale, strained face in the dressing table mirror. He dreaded being alone in the long winter nights. He had been used to Beattie being there, with him. Quiet they were but at least he hadn’t been alone. He padded downstairs to make himself a cup of tea, hearing the ringing silence in the house and wincing when he saw the foil dishes of last night’s takeaway still scattered all over the work surfaces. He hadn’t realised how much Beattie had tidied up after him. She’d done it in such a quiet, unobtrusive way.

  He felt a momentary panic which rose, sour and stale in his mouth.

  He didn’t want to be alone.

  He couldn’t depend on the children. Apart from a couple of very brief phone calls they’d given him a wide berth, almost as though they blamed him for their mother’s murder. He stood, fighting the rising panic.

  And then he heard the front gate open and close. He peered through the window to see Kerry, the next-door neighbour, in tight jeans and a cream sweater, which slipped off her shoulders so he could see pink bra straps. His mouth tightened in a prudish bunch as he opened the door.

  “Morning, Arthur,” she said jauntily. She already smelt of cigarettes and her hair was straw-dry with a dark inch of roots near the scalp. “I thought maybe we should go through Beattie’s things,” she said. “Time you moved on, Arthur.”

  He felt affronted. “It’s early days yet,” he said. But how glad he was to see her.

  Korpanski looked fed up when he finally appeared at eight forty two.

  He seemed grouchy and tired as he stumped into the corner and parked himself in front of his desk.

  “Late night?” she asked sympathetically.

  “Just tiresome,” he said shortly and switched his computer on without adding anything more.

  “We’ve a briefing in fifteen minutes, Mike,” she said. “I’d really like to move forward in this one.”

  He swivelled round and she caught a flash of temper. “Forward? In our dreams, Joanna. We’ve been floundering now for days. I looked through the statements last night after you’d gone. There’s nothing there. Not a flipping clue.”

  Korpanski had got out of bed on the wrong side.

  “Then we need to look through the forensics again,” Joanna said crisply. “And the diaries.” She decided to ignore his mood. “I think I might have a lead, Mike.”

  Korpanski’s face softened and his brown eyes rested on her. He swivelled his chair around quite slowly, his anger swiftly melting. “Get something last night, did you, Jo?”

  She hadn’t meant to do this – encourage over-optimism – but when she felt so sure they were breaking through it was hard not to share it. “Our mystery woman,” she said. “Beatrice had an appointment with her in the week she died.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because she told Pagan, one of my cycling companions.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’d better look through her diaries again,” she prompted.

  Mike vanished through the door and returned five minutes later with Beatrice’s diary.

  It was a large, desk diary with two pages serving a week. They’d retrieved it from her study. Starting with Saturday and Sunday. Joanna turned to the week beginning Sunday the 13th of June.

  She had obviously used the diary as an aide memoir. There was plenty in it, sometimes the entries spilling over the day-lines in her round, childish hand.

  There was one entry for the Sunday: Bike ride 9.30.

  Joanna recalled the day.

  It had been one of the few really warm days in the entire summer with not a cloud in the sky. She’d overslept after a night out with Sarah and Jeremy th
e night before. She’d woken with a vague hangover, showered quickly and dressed in a sleeveless vest and cycling shorts and arrived at the rendezvous late. The others were already swigging from their water bottles and sweating profusely. But she knew once they had climbed from Thorncliffe to the top of the moors they would soon cool down. Because up there there was always a breeze. She had never known it too hot at that height.

  They had greeted her arrival with relief and a few dark looks. It was one of the unwritten rules of the Femina Club that no one kept the others waiting but she was in no mood to care and didn’t apologise to the already over-heated bunch of cyclists. But she remembered now that Beattie had looked more uncomfortable than the rest, already sweating profusely with half-moons of perspiration staining under the arms of her cycling top. She had thought then that maybe climbing to Thorncliffe wasn’t such a good idea on such a hot day. But, she had argued, there were hills all around Leek. It was difficult to avoid climbing. Joanna had eyed Beatrice with reserve just as Beattie wiped her dripping face and their eyes had met, Joanna’s with irritation, Beattie’s with a dumb apology for needing special consideration.

  So they had set out and halfway up the hill Joanna had turned around in the saddle to see Beattie doggedly pushing her bike up. Her resentment had melted then. The woman was trying fearfully hard and something in her admired her for it.

  They’d waited for the straggler at the top, tipped some of their drinking water over her glowing face and t-shirt dampened with sweat then complimented her encouragingly on her grittiness and effort.

  Beatrice had beamed around them all. “Oh, it’ll be worth it,” she’d said fervently and Joanna had stared at her dumbly for a long minute, thoughts pinging around her mind. Nuns must look like this, she’d thought, when they enter the novitiate. New mothers, still tired with the effort of childbirth but exhilarated with their reward. There was something evangelical in the woman’s face.

  Having managed the climb the rest of the cycle ride was much less strenuous and the climate cooler with a fresh breeze evaporating their sweat. They’d stopped at The Mermaid for a sandwich and a drink, Beatrice sitting quietly at the end of the table.

  Joanna was downing an apple juice with tonic water and chewing on her sandwich when Beatrice had sidled up to her and fixed her with her short-sighted stare. “Do you know why they called this pub ‘The Mermaid’?”

  Joanna shook her head.

  “Legend has it that a mermaid lives in Blakemore Pool,” Beattie said, smiling. “And she drags unwary travellers to their deaths. Had you never heard the story? Leek and its surrounds are full of legend.”

  Legend is a consequence of remoteness, superstition and isolation.

  Joanna had realised then that, like many quiet people, Beatrice Pennington was a fund of knowledge.

  For herself she had never pondered the question of the pub name. She had merely accepted the fact that the pub, almost as far from the sea as is possible in England, had the name of a mythical sea creature. So she had looked at the quiet woman through new eyes and when they had all finished eating and drinking it had registered that Beattie had been the first to get back on her bike. Joanna had watched her cycle ahead and thought back ten minutes to that almost beatific expression on the woman’s face and wondered. What had given it to her?

  What religion or love, what desire or dream, had transformed the plain face into the face of a saint?

  “Penny for them, Jo,” Korpanski said in her ear. Abruptly she stopped daydreaming.

  “Oddly enough, Korpanski,” she said dryly, “I was recalling a day out with the dead woman.”

  It shut him up.

  She and Korpanski skimmed through the rest of the diary entries. There was nothing penned in for Monday, June 14th. Tuesday, the 15th, was obviously the day for the Readers’ Group. Three p.m. She’d ringed the time and underneath penned in some notes: Discuss what was in the writer’s mind when he described the legal cocktail party! What stopped Nic Gabriel from moving forward? Joanna was intrigued. Then she’d written:

  The dead woman smiled. How does the phrase work as an attention grabber?

  The rich man who burned in Paradise. The giant who chopped himself in half. The boy who died of shock.

  The two police officers looked at one another. “Sounds quite a story,” Korpanski said.

  “Yes.” The point is, where is our clue to find our mystery woman?

  Joanna turned to Wednesday, June 16th. There was only one entry for that day.

  C 4 p.m.

  “Could be anyone,” Korpanski said grumpily, his bad mood returning.

  “Not anyone,” Joanna said. “We don’t have many suspects called, ‘C’. It lets her two cronies off the hook. It isn’t Guy.”

  “I thought we were looking for a woman.”

  “I’m keeping an open mind,” Joanna said.

  “I think that’s short cut for having no bloody idea,”

  “Well, thanks, Mike. And now, with those encouraging words, let’s go to the briefing.”

  Arthur Pennington was composing a letter to a late-paying client when the phone rang.

  “Someone for you,” his secretary said. “A woman. She said it’s personal.” She put the phone down.

  He pressed the Line 2 button. “Hello?” he said cautiously.

  “Arthur? It’s Kerry.” There was panic in her voice. “I think you’d better come home. Right away.”

  “I can’t just…”

  “I mean it, Arthur.”

  His secretary was agog as he walked through. “I’m just going out for half an hour,” he said uncomfortably. “I shan’t be any longer.”

  He was conscious of his anger as he dropped down the stairs, two at a time. He couldn’t have this, Kerry ringing him at work. What would people think? And his wife so recently dead.

  Murdered.

  It would make the police suspicious. He’d have to tell her.

  He just couldn’t have this.

  Life was not quite so dull here recently, the secretary was musing, in fact it was hotting up very nicely.

  Who would have thought that Arthur Pennington would have led such an exciting life.

  Joanna surveyed the rim of expectant faces. It was difficult to tell them that, though they had no inkling that the net was closing around the small collection of suspects.

  “The entry for ‘C’,” she started with.

  She sensed that Hesketh-Brown was itching to make a contribution.

  “I know we’ve been working on the assumption that it might have been a woman – this mystery person,” he said tentatively, “but I thought I’d have another word with the pathologist, and see if he could tell anything from the handprints on Mrs Pennington’s neck.”

  Joanna waited.

  “He said he was ninety per cent sure it was a man’s hand that had strangled her. He said it was too big for a woman’s.”

  Bridget Anderton spoke up then. “That fits in with what her colleagues said. They just didn’t believe she could possibly have been a lesbian. They said she’d never given any sign that she’d leaned in that direction.”

  WPC Kitty Sandworth stood up. “It’s the impression I got too,” she said.

  Joanna walked in a daze back to her office without waiting for Mike. Ideas were buzzing around her head. She found the telephone number in the file and dialled.

  Waited while they fetched Fiona Pennington then put the question to her.

  “A lesbian? You must be joking. Far too avant-garde for mother,” Fiona said, laughing. “I know you think I didn’t really know mum but it wasn’t that. We simply had nothing in common. Nothing to talk about but we did touch on that sort of thing once or twice. My mother had very normal leanings, I can tell you.”

  Joanna put down the phone and knew Fiona Pennington was right. This hadn’t been a sexual relationship at all. They’d barked up the wrong tree. The play Beattie had made for Guy was proof enough.

  But if not a sexual relationship
then what?

  Chapter Eighteen

  Kerry did look upset; he had to hand it to her. Genuinely upset. She was waiting at the front door, holding something in her hand, her face as pale as milk.

  It is a man’s natural instinct to comfort a woman who is in distress, he told himself. Arthur put his arm around her. “What’s up, love?”

  Without saying anything she held out the letter.

  PC Bridget Anderton had lived in the Staffordshire Moorlands all her life. She knew the people of the town of Leek, knew what was acceptable in their eyes and what was not. So as she sat in the car, opposite the Pennington house, and watched the little tableau being played out in front of her, she knew that this was quite definitely of interest – the bereaved man whose wife had died violently, being so easily comforted by his single, female neighbour.

  Besides – Leek is a gossipy little town and Kerry Frost had a reputation for being a bit of a man-eater.

  She smiled to herself. Against such a professional onslaught Arthur Pennington had no chance. But the real question which intrigued her was this: was Kerry simply being opportunistic with a newly unattached man or had this bond between Pennington and his neighbour existed for some time – maybe even pre-dating Beatrice’s murder. Could it even be construed as a motive?

  She watched the embrace with interest and strained to hear the words before they moved inside.

  “What is it, love?”

  Once inside Kerry handed him the letter. “It’s Beattie,” she said tearfully. “She’d been writing letters to someone.” As she handed him the first page she added softly, “And you so nice, Arthur.”

  He read it through, looked up, looked down again. The passionate words leapt at him from the paper. Kerry’s mouth was open, her eyes wide. She too had felt the scorch of intensity. And from Beatrice.