Scar Tissue

by Judith Cutler

  As I twisted to get a better angle to work at, a simpler explanation occurred to me: that the police had done nothing at all and were bluffing me, to save themselves hours of tedious paperwork. I wouldn’t have blamed them, but there was no need for Marsh to have been so nasty to me. Maybe I’d give Messy Mascara a bell in the morning to see if he was usually like that or if he’d produced a special performance for me. Maybe it’d be safer not to bother.

  I peered down at the tyre tracks crisscrossing the semicircular gravel drive in front of the house. Even if they’d been on snow or mud, I couldn’t have made much of them. So I couldn’t have swept back into Ashford police station demanding the head honcho to tell him one of his subordinates was a lazy, lying layabout and waving the photographic evidence under his eyes. But maybe I could photograph one thing. Paula insisted that we keep in the van glove-box one of those party cameras you use and throw away. People see big vans involved in road accidents and assume it’s been driven by some testosterone-fuelled youth who’d ploughed it into innocent hapless family cars. Paula reckoned that if we could take photos before the vehicles were moved, we’d always be able to prove we were the innocent parties – which we damn well had better be. Maybe the camera worked like a rabbit’s foot, or maybe we were too scared of Paula’s response if we bent her Trev so much as a thou. out of true. So far, anyway, there’d been no need for the little gizmo.

  I nipped down the ladder, retrieved the camera, small enough to tuck into my bib, and swarmed back up again. Just think, out there are thousands of women paying millions of pounds to their local gyms just for the privilege of doing an exercise I get to do for free every day.

  I was sure there were all sorts of technical procedures for photographing through glass, but I’d no idea what they might be. I tried pressing the lens right up to the glass, and holding it well away, straight on, diagonally across. And then I realised that the light was better than it had been all day for this particular bit of fascia board, so I applied my efforts to that.

  It usually takes me about twenty minutes to do a section the size I was working on. Because I was on my own, and I didn’t want to take unnecessary risks leaning to the side, I decided to quit after ten minutes to shift the ladder a little. I’d forgotten, as I always did, just how heavy it was. It’d be so easy to let it slip the tiniest bit and put one of the sides through the window. So very easy. And so very tempting. But before I could let my nosiness overcome my professional pride, I found another pair of hands was helping me. Paula’s. And Paula’s hands did not let ladders slip within half a mile of vulnerable glass.

  ‘Working late,’ she observed, treading on the bottom rung to plant the end firmly in the earth.

  Paula didn’t ask questions. She made statements. You had to respond to the statement.

  ‘There was a little problem earlier,’ I admitted. ‘So I thought I’d put in a bit extra to finish off.’

  She waited, unsmiling. Although she’d only be about ten or twelve years older me, mid to late thirties perhaps, she had this nasty habit of making me feel about thirteen again, having sneaked back into school for a bit and then being carpeted by my headteacher for not going more often and staying longer. Perhaps it was Paula’s size: she was about five foot ten and strongly built. She dwarfed me, although I turned in at five-five and eight and a bit stone. To be fair, Paula had shown more kindness while I’d been with the Pots than the headmistress had the whole time I’d been technically in school. But I wouldn’t push my luck.

  ‘As a matter of fact, it’s easier now – the sun’s at a better angle.’

  ‘Quite.’ She still didn’t smile. There was more to come. If not now, later.

  I put my foot on the first rung.

  ‘Client confidentiality, Caffy.’

  Honestly, she made us sound like plastic surgeons or bank managers. I took a risk and shot upwards. Perhaps that’d be the sum total of my bollocking. Perhaps it wouldn’t.

  To be fair, she didn’t leave me to tidy up on my own, but busied herself down below while I finished my section and rather more than made up the time I’d lost. Lost? Wasted? Used doing what I saw as my duty?

  Risking a snub, when I was on terra firma again I asked, ‘Fancy a drink? Down at the Hop Vine?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ll meet you there.’ She locked the garage, checking the padlock twice before she was satisfied, and set off in her hatchback.

  Forgiven but not quite not forgotten. I, too, gave one last check round, then another, pressing my nose against the windows. There was something wrong somewhere, wasn’t there? Surely? If only it showed.

  To my amazement – she was usually slow getting to the bar – Paula had set up the drinks on one of the Hop Vine’s outside tables, the one furthest, as it happened, from the children’s play area. She even smiled as I straddled the bench.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d be able to wait for your Bishop’s Finger,’ she said, toasting me with her glass, which held her usual tipple, red wine. She claimed this had medicinal qualities.

  I raised my glass and drank deep. The beer was just the right temperature.

  ‘The trouble is,’ she said, ‘that mud-stirring sometimes means the stirrer gets splashed.’ If she’d had spectacles she’d have looked over them, meaningfully.

  She didn’t need to. She was referring to my past, wasn’t she?

  ‘The police came to you and told you to shut me up.’ I could make statements, too.

  ‘They came for the house keys, originally,’ she conceded. ‘And then started talking about you and wondering whether I was employing the right sort of person. You were very brave not to change your name, Caffy.’ She sounded as if she meant it.

  ‘Or naïve. But then, who’d have thought I’d be doing anything that’d make the police want to look me up on their computer? I’m only painting up that ladder, you know.’

  ‘Quite. And what interests me is that they knew all about you when they came to see me. Funny they should bother when you’d have thought they might be more interested in looking for this body of yours.’

  ‘There was a body, Paula. Honestly. You don’t imagine things like that, do you?’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  I drew a little picture with my index finger in the pollen dust on the table. ‘He’d be about your height, I’d say.’

  ‘About five foot ten, then.’

  ‘And built, as we used to say in Brum, like a brick sh –’

  I bit back the expression. OK, it was the Bishop’s Finger talking. Paula allowed her smooth brow to crumple in a wince. She had a broad forehead like the women in those paintings of Dutch living rooms, and an expression that was slow to change. Her eyes narrowed slightly in a further warning as she said, ‘So it’d be hard work getting him off the bed and out of the house. Assuming that out of the house is where he’s gone.’

  ‘Rigor mortis,’ I put in, eager to divert her from my vulgarity. ‘Got to consider rigor mortis, too. Heavy and stiff: really tricky to shift. Plus he had some huge, chunky rings: big as knuckle-dusters. They might damage the wallpaper or paintwork.’

  Paula nodded reflectively. ‘Though I can hardly see van der Poele asking us to do any touching in.’

  I hung my head. If the manor were as scruffy inside as it was outside, there’d have been rich pickings for Paula’s Pots. Indoor work was better than outdoor, especially in the winter. As far as I knew, however, we were booked up nearly eight months in advance, thanks largely to Paula’s meticulous working methods. And someone like van der Poele would no doubt be bringing in fancy London-based interior decorators. Not that Paula didn’t have an interior decorator on her team. But Les Sprigg, cut it how you would, didn’t sound remotely glamorous, and he worked not from a design studio, but from the back room of his flat.

  I sank the last of my half-pint. We only ever had one drink, unless the whole team of us were gathering together and we’d draw straws to see who got to collect and return everyone at the end of the evening. ‘Be
st be off then.’

  ‘Eventually,’ she nodded. She was fossicking in her dungarees pockets. At last she came up with a couple of keys on a ring, and a slip of paper. ‘I thought we might try these out first.’

  ‘In that case,’ I said, digging in my own dungarees, ‘we might try this again.’

  ‘Van der Poele’s agent slipped them to me,’ Paula explained, releasing two locks on the back door. She’d made us strip off our dirty clothes, donning the sort of paper overalls that wouldn’t have been out of place at an official crime scene but which she used when she’d got fine restoration work to do. And the overshoes might not have been forensically clean, but were brilliant when padding over valuable carpets to price jobs. ‘He thought it’d be a terrible pain to be here every time we wanted to open a window. But he swore me to absolute secrecy. Seems the Boss Man likes people to jump when he tells them to, regardless of what other jobs he’s also told them to do.’

  ‘Is this how the police got in?’

  ‘After we’d both told them we didn’t have any?’ Slipping on disposable gloves, she locked up behind her, a procedure I wasn’t entirely happy with, I must say. When I’ve been in a tight spot, I’ve always liked at least one way out.

  ‘What if –’ I began.

  ‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘Well, are you coming or not?’

  I decided to trust her, and thrust my fingers into the clammy latex.

  As I’d thought, the house was decidedly tatty. Rumour, pretty accurate in rural parts, I’d found, suggested he’d picked up the house and contents as a job lot. The kitchen still had an old range, supplemented by one of those microwaves that do everything, playing God Save the Queen while they do it. Some of the furniture was so ugly you couldn’t imagine anyone having conceived it, let alone having spoilt good timber making it. Some of it was so sweetly light I wanted to pick it up and take it home with me. The carpets looked as smooth as silk, but were badly worn in doorways. Someone had replaced old velvet curtains with bright new ones, skewing the whole balance of otherwise interesting rooms. But Paula wouldn’t let me dawdle, imaging things how I’d like them. She led me lickety-split up the main stairs and into one of the bedrooms with an incomparable view of our scaffolding. The sash windows came in a cluster of three, side by side. She opened the widest, the one in the middle. ‘And if necessary, leave any talking to me,’ she said.

  I didn’t argue. The heavy mahogany furniture didn’t encourage arguing. I thought of countless ignorant young brides brought here and forced by this very fireplace into lying still and thinking of England.

  The evening sun fell kindly in the rooms at the back of the house, the rosewood furniture glowing like fire.

  ‘Worth a mint,’ Paula said. ‘Even this stuff, which is fake – see, the grain’s been painted on.’ Going round a house with her when she was preparing estimates was always an education. I particularly enjoyed it when a piece of furniture pernickety couples had claimed was a priceless antique was nothing more, according to Paula, than compressed paper, worth even less than they’d paid for it at some superstore. The thing was, she’d treat the tat as carefully as if it had been real Sheraton, and expect us to follow suit.

  Next on our itinerary was the room I’d peered into. Not only was the duvet dragged sideways, there were a couple of what looked like blue rope fibres on the pillow. There was another halfway to the door. I took photos of the room itself, but doubted if the lens was up to taking details like the fibres. All the same, I tried.

  ‘Something tied in our rope was here anyway,’ she whispered. She picked up one, and wrapped it in a tissue before stowing in her pocket. And then she grabbed my wrist, touching a finger to her lips.

  I heard it, too. The scrape of a key in a badly maintained lock. We were back like lightning into the room the window of which she’d prepared earlier, and out on to the scaffolding’s top platform. We’d both had enough practice closing windows tightly and soundlessly. There was a ladder between our level and the next, where we stripped down to our summer shorts. Paula held out her hand for my overall and overshoes. She balled them tightly with hers, cramming everything into a space between the scaffolding and the planks it supported as if it were there to stop a bit of movement. Down the next ladder to the next level.

  I gripped her wrist – I probably hurt her a lot. Because though I’d have trusted her to talk the hind legs off a donkey, if necessary, I couldn’t see even an explanation that would con Mr van der Poele cutting any ice with his dogs. No wonder she was on her feet, screaming the place down.

  Baying. That’s what they were doing. Baying. I’ve always kept my own counsel about hunting and other countryside issues, never knowing whether my next client would be pro or anti-Countryside Alliance. But I tell you this, I was glad I’d been incarnated as a human, not a fox. There wasn’t a hair on the nape of my neck that was lying flat: I was ready to wet myself with fright. And here was my boss on her hind legs drawing everyone’s attention to our plight. She’d told me to let her do the talking – should I leave the screaming to her as well, or, as my instinct demanded, join in? Those animals must be jumping six feet into the air.

  I decided to scream a bit too. Well, the scream more or less came out of its own accord.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ He didn’t say ‘hell’, actually – he used the sort of word that would have driven even Paula’s eyebrows skywards.

  A man with a bald patch strode in our direction. From here we could see the regular tufts where he’d had hair implanted. Not that his grooming was our immediate concern.

  ‘You – you two up there! What the hell are you doing?’

  The anger in his voice raised the dogs to new paroxysms of baying. I’ll swear you could hear the snap of their teeth as they bit furiously at thin air they’d much rather have had thickened with a nice bit of my flesh.

  I also heard the snap of the whip as he cuffed them back into simmering, resentful silence, legs braced for another attack.

  Paula stepped forward to the edge of our platform. A quick flap of her hand meant I was to stay out of sight. I obeyed. ‘Good evening, Mr van der Poele,’ she said, as if greeting the vicar at the beetle drive.

  ‘Miss Farmer, is it? Would you care to explain what the hell you think you’re doing on my property?’

  She gave him one of her bland, unfurrowed stares. ‘Painting it, Mr van der Poele. Or I was earlier and will be tomorrow. I was just going over tomorrow’s schedule with my employee, here, when we were set on by your dogs. I thought after the last incident you were going to keep them under proper control.’

  So she’d complained to him without telling us, had she? Good for her.

  ‘I’m entitled to set my animals on trespassers,’ he said. ‘Without warning.’

  ‘Fine. But not on my staff. I have an employer’s duty of care, as I said the other day.’

  Van der Poele snarled an order, reinforcing its message with the whip. The dogs whimpered and lay down.

  Paula made another of her statements. ‘When you’ve confined them, we will come down and leave you in peace. By the way, did you know that one of your windows isn’t properly fastened? I found it unlocked when I was discussing tomorrow’s work.’

  Van der Poele barked an order. Another man appeared, leashed the dogs and dragged them off to the outhouse housing our loo. I hoped they wouldn’t stay there – I’d rather wee behind the bushes than brave them.

  For security’s sake, there was no ladder from here down to the ground. ‘So how do we get down?’ I muttered. ‘It’s too far to jump.’ It was dusk, too – and goodness knew what lurked to break an unwary ankle.

  We’d often teased Paula about the little rucksack she always carried. She pointed out – rightly – it was high fashion and we could get our own from that nice shop in the Outlet. We didn’t dispute that, merely pointing out that torches and plumb lines weren’t your average fashion accessories. Nor would we wear ours up ladders. To be honest, where she lived the torch
might well have been useful: there were no pavements and no streetlights. Just to add to the fun there were no speed restrictions either, so if you didn’t want to be squashed as flat as a hedgehog, it was either dress like a traffic cone or flash a strong beam at any oncoming speedster. Anyway, my camera was safely stowed, and Paula’s torch was already in her hand, its beam illuminating bolts making easy hand and foot holds. When I was down she dropped the torch neatly into my outstretched hands and followed suit.

  The van welcomed us phlegmatically enough, starting third go – just enough hesitation to set the dogs off again – and we set off sedately through the lanes. Paula said nothing till I dropped her back at the Hop Vine. I could rather have used another drink, but all she said, as she headed to her car, was, ‘You join the others on the Tenterden job tomorrow. I’ll work on van der Poele’s place myself.’

  I opened my mouth to protest – you get attached to a project, and I’d have liked to be able to point at the newly-painted eaves and say, ‘All my own work.’ But I thought better of it and simply waved her goodnight.

  On the way home I saw bats and a badger, and felt very glad to be alive to see them. But then I came across a lifeless pheasant, its brave tail stuck up like a signal of surrender: life wasn’t all roses, even out here.

  Chapter Three

  ‘You don’t want to worry, Caffy,’ Meg said kindly, first thing the following morning. ‘We’ve all got phobias. I can’t go up ladders the way you do, and mention a bat to Helen here and she’ll go all hysterical on you. And those dogs would put anyone off.’

  Meg was the oldest of the team, forty at least, and tended to mother us all. Her dark hair was streaked with grey, not from age but from where she’d run distracted painty hands through it when we worried her. Helen, her pale, blonde niece, was the youngest, eighteen or nineteen, and thin to the point where I was worried about anorexia. We all kept an eye on her, making sure she ate well while she was working. On the quiet, I watched to make sure she couldn’t wander off and make herself vomit. But she stayed thin. Perhaps she was just blessed with skinny genes, and when we sank into tubby, waistless middle age, we’d be full of envy, not anxiety.