‘Doesn’t mean to say you can go around killing ‘em,’ Kite stated, staring out into the small garden, dominated by tidy rows of vegetables and a small greenhouse, with espaliered plums against the side fence and a couple of ballerina apple trees dead centre.
‘I tried everything else – cat-pepper, string, you name it, made not a blind bit of difference.’ A painted tin cat with glass eyes, meant to intimidate genuine members of the species, leaned impotently against the fence, bearing witness to Stanley’s wasted efforts. ‘It used to sharpen its damned claws on my apple trees!’
‘All the same.’
‘Didn’t mean to kill it, though,’ he said suddenly. ‘I was cutting string to tie the beans up, see, and there it was, bold as brass, behind me. It shot off when I shooed it away but it caught its claw in the netting. I lunged out at it and nicked it with the knife. After that – well, it was yowling fit to bust – I had to put it out of its misery.’
Kite, sickened, recalled the number of slashes in the cat’s body and didn’t believe a word. ‘And then you threw it over the fence.’
‘As far as I could.’
There was no reason to doubt this, at least. A good heave and the cat, thrown over the hedge from here, could conceivably have landed where it had been found.
‘I’d like to talk to you about Patti Ryman, Mr Loates,’ he said.
Stanley’s eyes swivelled. His eyes lost some of their brightness. ‘I’ve already said, I don’t know anything about her. I didn’t even know what she was called till today. She was only the paper girl.’
Beads of sweat stood on his pallid forehead. Unappealing at the best of times, now, stressed by what had happened with his mother and under pressure about Patti, he was probably showing up at his worst. Kite by now had an inkling of what Jenny Platt had been getting at but he wasn’t going to let up out of a misplaced sympathy, simply because Stanley was inadequate, pathetic, because he’d been screwed up by his mother. The man was a toad.
‘You like children, Mr Loates?’
Stanley blinked. ‘Like them? I suppose so, they’re all right.’
‘You give them sweets, watch them when they’re out playing.’
‘What of it? I wouldn’t do them any harm. I like them, yes, and what’s wrong with that? Don’t you like kids?’
Nothing wrong with liking them. Maybe something wrong with a society that had to suspect everyone who was kind to children of having an ulterior motive. But.
‘Patti –’ Kite said.
‘I liked her as well,’ Stanley interrupted defiantly. ‘She was a bonny little thing, she used to wave to me at one time, I don’t know why she stopped. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair of her head.’
There was a certain ring of truth about this, but Kite had heard protests of this nature too many times to have much faith in them. He gazed out of the window, at the garden into which Stanley had put most of his time, energies and talents. The chain-link fencing at the bottom was completely obscured by the quickthorn planted in front of it, which he kept well clipped and which had consequently by now thickened into a well-nigh impenetrable barrier. There was no way that this man, flabby and out of condition, could have got over that and into the wood, and back, not without some assistance, such as a ladder which he might have pulled over after him – had he been more athletic – still less reason for him wanting to do so.
And if he’d gone into the wood by the conventional route, Stanley Loates, slow, lumbering, ungainly, would have been hard to miss, making the return journey between the front of his house and the path.
‘What’ll happen to me?’ he asked. ‘About the cat?’
‘A report will be made to the Crown Prosecution Service. What happens then is up to them, and Mr Lawley, whether he wishes to bring charges or not. And if he doesn’t,’ Kite added, piling it on, ‘you’ll be lucky if the NSPCC doesn’t.’
Whichever way things went, he couldn’t see life being very happy for Stanley Loates in Ellington Close.
Abigail Moon leaned forward, peering through the windscreen for a possible parking space amongst all the vehicles parked nose to tail either side of the streets, while Jenny Platt drove slowly.
‘How the heck do the people who live round here manage?’
‘Anybody’s guess.’
They were at the bottom of Albert Road, near to the house where Patti Ryman had lived. A run-down area of terraced houses, small factories, corner shops, a deserted Methodist chapel and a huge, hangar-like building painted in shouting primary colours that was a DIY store proclaiming itself open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with an enormous, near-empty car park. Jenny was muttering about leaving theirs in the car park and be hanged to it when a battered Cortina was driven conveniently away from the kerbside.
The area on the whole was not, in any sense of the word, attractive, and Mailer Street, when they walked round the corner and came to it, stood out like a beacon in comparison, being on the edge of what had been selected by the council as an experimental improvement area, extending from here to the Leasowes. The street itself was short, comprising decent little terraced houses built of dark brick, sloping down to the fish-and-chip shop on the corner of the main road. Now restored to its original appearance when it was first built at the turn of the century, it had a rather self-conscious charm. Encouraged by what the council had done, the residents had made their own contribution by way of window boxes and tubs. The steps of every house were swept clean, the windows polished, as if vying with each other for points on the respectability scale. Bollards, painted a handsome dark blue and gold, had been set into the cobbles, top and bottom, to prevent vehicle access, presumably in the interests of safety as well as nostalgia: the road at the bottom provided a never-ceasing flow of traffic, much of it heavy, on its way to the motorway, less than a mile off.
By the door of Linda Ryman’s house, petunias and heli-chrysum spilled luxuriantly from a trough, and the brass knocker was highly polished.
Doreen Bailey was still with her sister. The two of them were in the living room at the front of the house – there was probably only a kitchen behind – drinking the last of what, in Abigail’s experience of these sort of situations, was likely to have been an endless succession of cups of tea. Unlike her older sister, Linda Ryman showed no signs of tears, but her eyes were huge and overbright in a face drained of all colour. She gazed unseeingly into the dead coals of a living-flame gas fire, her feet neatly together on the hearth rug, her hands clasped tightly on her lap.
‘Go easy on her when you see her,’ Mrs Bailey had warned. ‘She’s had some hard knocks.’
Yet however difficult life had been for her, it hadn’t left its physical stamp. At the moment, her face was set into a mask of grief, yet it remained unlined, pretty, incredibly youthful-looking. The age gap between the two women was so large she might have been Doreen Bailey’s daughter rather than her sister. They bore a faint, family resemblance to each other, but otherwise they were quite unlike. Where Doreen was a large and comfortably upholstered mother figure, Linda was a small, slim, blue-eyed blonde, as her daughter had been.
But Abigail guessed, despite the air of helplessness, that she was a fighter, one who hadn’t let life get her down. She’d done wonders with the house on a limited budget. The sitting room was attractive in a do-it-yourself stripped pine, dried flowers, Laura Ashley way. Built-in shelves in the corner were painted matt green and displayed a collection of pretty white china ornaments. Some old chairs were neatly slipcovered in a blue and green patterned fabric. A school photograph on the mantelpiece showed a younger Patti, her fair hair long and silky, unpermed.
‘Come on, m’duck, drink your tea,’ Doreen said gently, lifting the cup and saucer from the coffee table and putting it into her hands. Linda drank as obediently as a child, evidently still in that state of shock where Abigail doubted any possibility of getting anything useful from her.
‘What will happen now?’ she asked dully. ‘What about the funeral?’
&nbs
p; Abigail explained that there would be an inquest, probably on Thursday, which would be adjourned for further police inquiries to be made, after which the coroner would release Patti’s body, and the funeral could take place. ‘The inquest will be resumed as soon as we’ve found out who killed Patti, and why,’ she added gently. There was no need to mention to her the necessity for identifying the body, since this appalling task Mrs Bailey had already offered to relieve her of. And, mercifully, her mind seemed to have blanked off the horrors of a postmortem.
After telling her what she needed to know, Abigail stood up and Jenny followed suit. ‘We’ll leave you now, Mrs Ryman. I have to ask you some questions, but they’ll wait until you feel able to answer them.’
‘Now’s as good as any time,’ Linda said unexpectedly. ‘I’m not going to feel any better tomorrow. And it helps to talk.’
Abigail hesitated. ‘If you’re sure ...’ She glanced at Mrs Bailey inquiringly.
‘She’ll be all right, won’t you, m’duck?’
Linda nodded.
‘Well then –’ They reseated themselves. Jenny took out her notebook.
There were the usual routine questions, designed to establish the normal course of Patti’s days and to find out whether anything unusual had happened during them which could give a lead on her murder. But her life appeared to have followed its usual innocent pattern of school, homework, sports practice, with all her spare time spent with her friend, Gemma Townsend. They were bosom friends and did everything together.
‘Nothing in the least unusual happened? Nothing she seemed worried about?’
‘She was a bit preoccupied last week – her new school project was bothering her a bit, I think. She was doing well at school, she always worked hard – but it was the start of a new term, different teachers. If there was anything else, she’d have told me. We’ve always been like that with one another. I’ve never kept anything from her and she wouldn’t keep anything from me.’
Parents often said that, and the truth was hard to bear. ‘What about boyfriends?’
That roused Linda enough to earn Abigail a sudden, sharp look. ‘Are you asking was she pregnant? Well, I can tell you she wasn’t, not yesterday, anyway. And she didn’t have any one particular boyfriend. I made her swear she’d tell me if there was anybody, I didn’t want her making the same mistake as me, did I? I was only sixteen when she was born, you know, and that’s a rotten start for anybody.’
‘You’re divorced now, I believe?’
Doreen Bailey intervened tartly: ‘He pushed off when Patti was eighteen months old.’
Linda shrugged. ‘Things were never right between us from the start. He was only a couple of years older than me and he wasn’t ready for marriage any more than I was.’
‘It must’ve been hard for you, left on your own.’
‘I wasn’t sorry. We’ve managed. I’d always kept my job on at Nancy’s – the hairdresser up the road, worked there ever since I left school – and I’ve had a good family behind me.’ She attempted a smile at Doreen, and Doreen put her arm round her shoulders and squeezed.
‘Come on, Lindy, bear up, you’ve done wonderful, so far.’
‘Does her father keep in touch with Patti?’
‘He’s dead,’ Doreen Bailey informed them, pursing her lips. ‘Killed just after he left them, in a motorbike accident, and good riddance.’
‘Doreen.’
‘All right. I’ll say no more.’
‘I should never’ve let her take that paper round!’ Patti’s mother said suddenly. ‘I tried not to be overprotective – you need freedom when you’re young, but it was a mistake – I wouldn’t have let her keep it on when the dark mornings came but I thought, this time of year ... and it’s a nice neighbourhood. She begged me, see, wanted to feel she was pulling her weight. Girls that age want clothes and things like their friends, and she knew I couldn’t afford them.’
‘It’s unlikely the paper round had anything to do with it,’ Abigail said gently, and as the difficult, unshed tears began at last to threaten, she thought it might be tactful to leave the sisters alone for a while. ‘Is it all right if we take a look at her room, Mrs Ryman?’
‘Linda, please. It’s just at the top of the stairs.’
No more than a boxroom, really, with the dressing table doing duty as a desk, a T-shirt draped over the mirror to avoid distraction. Bookshelves showing a fairly wide reading for her age, with copies of King Lear and A View from the Bridge, plus A level text notes, on the bedside table. The top dressing-table drawer held a brush, comb and electric hair-curler, the others nothing but underclothes, T-shirts, tops and sweaters. In the single wardrobe were a couple of summer school-uniform cotton dresses, some school shirts, two very short skirts, jeans and a leather jacket. Sandals and a pair of the ugly, clumpy shoes girls favoured at the moment stood on the floor. The walls were covered with the usual pop-idol posters, pictures of animals and two RSPCA posters. There was also an RSPCA collecting box. It was the room of any teenage girl, with nothing in it to give any sort of clue as to why she’d been murdered.
When they returned to the living room, Linda’s tears had dried. ‘We’ve been talking over what you said about there being anything different, well, it’s probably nothing –’
‘Anything at all, it doesn’t matter how unimportant it seems.’
‘It’s just that she came home in a taxi last Saturday from Gemma’s.’
‘Taxi?’
‘I made it a rule she had to be in by ten unless it was something special, and she always kept to it, she knew how I worried.’
‘But it wasn’t usual for her to take a taxi?’
‘Heavens, no! Gemma’s mother always brought her back if it was late, but she’s a doctor, and she was called out during the evening. She knew she was likely to be away for some time, so she told the girls to ring for a taxi when Patti was ready to go home, and gave her a ten-pound note to pay for it. She rang up a minute or two after ten – Dr Townsend, I mean – to see if she’d got home all right. She’s a single parent, too, so she knows the problems. Patti came in the door just as I was putting the phone down and wanted to know who’d been ringing and – well, it ended up with a bit of an argument.’
‘Why was that?’
‘It didn’t amount to much, but she went on a bit about being checked up on, and having to be sent home in a taxi, and taking money from Gemma’s mother like that – why couldn’t she come home on the bus, she was old enough, you know the sort of thing.’
‘It’s not what happens on the bus, it’s when you get off – I hope you told her that,’ her sister said.
"Course I did, but girls of that age, you can’t tell them anything. Though I think it might just have got home to her. She went a bit quiet after that, and then said she was sorry for giving me all that hassle. It wasn’t long before she went up to bed.’
12
By the time Mayo had finished talking to Tina Baverstock, he felt in need of something long and cool to wash away the taste of her nasty herbal tea. And not only the tea. The Drum and Monkey was just around the corner. What was ten minutes to a thirsty man?
It was a pleasant pub with a forecourt and tables, and a shady corner, fortunately empty. He carried his half of ginger-beer shandy to the table under a sycamore, threw his jacket on to the bench beside him, took a long, cool swallow and sat back, reviewing his thoughts.
Going straight from one house to the other had given him no opportunity so far to assess the interview with Imogen Loxley, but uppermost in his mind was the notion that if she’d been truthful about sitting at her window like the Lady of Shalott, looking out for the postman – and there was no reason at this stage to think she’d any conceivable reason to lie, or conceal the truth – it seemed clear that Patti’s murder had occurred after she’d delivered the paper to Simla and before Imogen arrived upstairs at, say, five past eight, no more than a fifteen-minute time span. Unless the assailant had either been lurking in the wood befo
re she was attacked, or entered it via one of the gardens which adjoined it – and presumably escaped the same way. But how could he have known Patti would go into the wood?
He didn’t in any case see how anyone planning a murder would have contemplated one such as this, with all the attendant risks. There could have been no guarantee that the perpetrator would have got away without being seen or heard. When questioned about their movements, few people could be exact about what they’d been doing at a precise time during the day, but breakfast-time was different. The human race is on the whole more habit-orientated than it cares to admit. Morning routines are established by office, school and factory starting times, and in his experience, people usually knew exactly where they were, or should have been, when the day was beginning – and which people they normally encountered. A stranger hanging around was almost certain to have been noticed. On the other hand, a moment only would have sufficed to slip along that path and disappear from sight, and the same would apply when he emerged from the wood, not much later.
But it was fruitless at this stage in a murder inquiry to start looking for any sort of pattern. Until more facts were collected, names of witnesses had been obtained, others eliminated from the inquiry, until a suspect emerged and the motive became clear. Speculating before that, there was always the danger of jumping to wrong conclusions ...
A kamikaze wasp, intent on suicide, zoomed in on his beer mug. He moved his glass further into the shade, covering it with his hand. The wasp decided to concentrate on his ear. He flipped irritably at it and watched it land on the table, legs in the air. Gotcha! Where were we? Wrong conclusions ... ah, yes.
It’s a well-known fact that nobody can ever concentrate wholly on one subject for any length of time. According to the shrinks, at any rate. The more you try, the more the mind wanders ...
All right, then. Who had he been, the man with Alex? Jealousy was an immature emotion, not to be considered in well-adjusted senior police officers. Anyway, it wasn’t part of his make-up. He was curious, that was all. Far be it from him to be suspicious of every man Alex had dealings with. She’d worked for years in a man’s world, and not without exciting admiration, and it had never been a problem for him. And it was months – well, a long time, anyway, since he’d thought of Liam, the Irishman. The bad-news man, the playboy of the western world, the hound who’d spoiled so many of the best years of Alex’s life, kept her dangling with promises he’d no intention of ever fulfilling, playing up his so-called need of her, until at last, seven years on and no further forward, she’d come to her senses, seen things as they really were: the wife in the background, still the semi-invalid she’d always been, and Liam, no nearer asking for a divorce than he’d ever intended.
A Species of Revenge Page 12