by Bowes, K T
“Would it be all right with you, Miss, if we checked the property?” the older detective piped up and Jayden looked at him, suddenly alarmed. The uniformed officers seemed rapidly attentive like guard dogs waiting for the order to spring on her. It occurred to her that they had already been surreptitiously looking for something.
“What’s going on?” she asked, widening her pretty eyes at the blonde officer whose name she had already forgotten. He was pleasing to look at and she indulged this new side of her nature, aware that she may be surprised by the things that crawled from the trunk in her soul over the next while. She felt flirty and it was a completely new phenomenon for her.
The other cops disappeared upstairs to the bedroom level in their street shoes. Jayden controlled a fleeting exasperation at their lack of consideration. Didn’t they care that his was her home?
“Please can you tell me your movements yesterday?” the policeman asked with a smile. He had perfectly straight white teeth with enough character not to look horsey. He offered Jayden the sling back and when she shook her head in refusal, laid it on the counter and drew out an official looking notebook from his inside pocket and flipped it open in one smooth, practiced movement.
Jayden exhaled slowly. He stood very close to her and yesterday she would have moved back, her sole intention being to get away from the masculine threat of him. Today she stood her ground, aware of the new game unravelling inside her, a fearlessness born of the realisation that the worst of life had already befallen her. There was little this man could do to her, to humiliate or harm her more than had already been done. It gave her a new and addictive courage which seemed to come from the soles of her feet, arcing over her body like a gossamer dome. God is responsible for my safety.
“Sorry?” the cop said, looking curiously down at her and Jayden realised that she must have murmured the phrase out loud. She smiled and looked embarrassed.
“I think it would be more polite if you helped me make myself a drink to take these tablets with and then explained to me, exactly what’s happened. And then I will tell you everything I possibly can.”
Chapter 15
She hadn’t been expecting that!
“You were seen locking the office up after six last night and it was noted that it was unusually late for you.”
“I’ve told you three times now why I was late going home. I didn’t see anything. This is all too much to take in.”
Jayden wasn’t quite sure why she was lying to the handsome detective, but she suspected that he was aware of it. It was probably why he kept asking the same questions over and over again, even though the tea he had made her was long drained from the cup and the pills were beginning to cloud her brain and dull the ache in her arm. All she wanted to do was go for a lie down. “Who told you they saw me?” she asked suddenly, knowing that it couldn’t have been either of the clerics because they hadn’t seen her.
“I’m not at liberty to say, Miss,” the detective continued, brushing her enquiry aside. “Why did you not get a taxi to Mr...” he consulted his pocketbook, “Abbadeli’s house from work? Why did you walk all the way up here first?”
“I just wanted some company. It gets lonely at home by myself sometimes and Raff is my friend. I walked home and then decided I wanted to be with other people. I knew he wouldn’t mind. It was a split decision.”
The uniformed policemen had left together; straight-faced and empty handed. Jayden wondered what her bedroom looked like, judging by the ‘looking’ that they had done downstairs. They hadn’t quite wrecked the place, but they had moved things. Jayden’s neat-freak tendencies fought her. The older detective had gone outside onto the roof garden upstairs and Jayden could hear his muffled voice through the open door, distorting as it carried down the spiral staircase to the living room. Her bedroom would be freezing when she finally made it up there; which would hopefully be very soon.
She eventually heard a click as the sliding door was closed and locked and his heavy footsteps trod down the stairs still in his shoes. He closed a mobile phone with a snap and slipped it into his pocket and then seized a dining chair and slumped heavily into it. Jayden’s heart sank as her desperate need for rest was pushed further and further back in time. “The taxi driver has confirmed that he picked up a young woman on Silver Street last night around six thirty in the evening and took her to the top of Steep Hill, where he watched you knock on the door of a house there and enter.” Jayden sighed with relief, but the officer hadn’t finished. “He also stated that you were rather distressed and he asked you if you were all right.”
Both of the policemen looked hard at her. Jayden faltered. Her arm felt as though it had been trapped in some kind of heavy machinery that was still crushing and pulsating over the bone and her sleep deprived brain had ceased to function normally. She closed her eyes and prayed for divine help, knowing instinctively that God wouldn’t help a liar. At no point had she mentioned seeing Ed rowing with McLean. She knew that she should, but the words wouldn’t seem to come up to the surface and meet her tongue.
A heavy knocking sounded on the door downstairs and Jayden stayed seated, expecting it to be the policemen returning with a search warrant. Surely that was the next natural progression of this mess. When she opened her eyes, the young blonde policeman was smiling at her but Jayden was far too tired to care. The other man clumped heavily down the stairs and opened the door, speaking roughly to whoever was on the front steps.
Ed appeared at the top of the stairs, having thoughtfully discarded his motorbike boots at the bottom. He undid his tight leather jacket as he came into the room, his black clerical shirt and white collar looking incongruous under the biker attire. He kept the leather pants on over his work trousers.
“You can’t leave that bike there,” the older cop jibed as he puffed back up the stairs, clearly getting more than his usual workout. Ed ignored him, barrelling straight over to Jayden.
“Oh crap!” he said, spotting the cast lying on her thigh under the table. “We should have gone straight to the hospital; I’m so sorry. I didn’t think it was broken.”
Oblivious to the two other men in the room, Ed squatted down next to Jayden’s chair, noticing how dreadful she looked. Dark rings circled her eyes making her look as though she had been thumped in the nose and her body language was of someone defeated. “You look shattered,” he stated the obvious. “I don’t suppose you got much sleep. Sorry, I left you. I should have looked at it better. We were worried sick when you didn’t come in this morning, especially after...they told you I guess?” Ed jerked his head in the general direction of the policeman sitting across from her. Jayden nodded sadly.
“I can’t believe he’s dead. The Reverend McLean. Murdered. It just doesn’t make sense,” she said to him quietly.
Ed ran his hands through his hair leaving his fringe sticking up like a cockerel’s plume. He stood up and assumed his full clerical authority, addressing both men with a voice that dared them to challenge him. “Miss Mitchell is plainly unwell. If you have no further business here, perhaps you won’t mind returning at another time?”
The policemen glanced across at each other, but neither of them moved. Ed hadn’t finished. “Did you find a murder weapon here? No, I guess not. Do you seriously think that someone Jayden’s size could have tipped a large man like Reverend McLean up and over the balcony rail after clubbing him across the back of the head? I guess that’s a ‘no’ as well. So if you don’t mind, either you leave or I will call a lawyer and force you to state your case formally.”
That did it and with a grunt, both men left the flat, stepping crossly down the stairs to the street. Jayden made to get up as the front door closed, but Ed went back down to turn the key in the lock. By the time Ed had run nimbly up the first flight of steps in his socks, Jayden was already upstairs and headed towards her bedroom. All she could think about was a clear path in front of her, leading to the sanctuary of her bed.
Ed found her standing helplessly gazi
ng down at the neatly pulled lilac bedspread, which revealed the corner of a plush matching duvet. He looked at her curiously, noticing out of the corner of his eye that she seemed to be fiddling with something at waist height. As he turned her slowly to face him, he saw that she was struggling to undo the button on her jeans with one hand. He gently moved her fingers away as her head drooped, released the ornate rivet and pulled the zipper down. His full lips parted slightly, but Jayden pushed his hands away and moved towards the ensuite, where she removed her jeans with stubborn difficulty.
Leaving her tee shirt on, Jayden abandoned her jeans on the floor of the ensuite and stumbled out of the room and across to the bed. It felt so far away from her that she allowed the growing delusions to take hold momentarily and cheat her of the anticipated peace. With every step forwards it was as though the bed moved tantalisingly away. Ed’s guiding palm in the small of her back was both welcome and torturous, but she made it to the bed, scrambling in carelessly and letting out a hiss of pain as she banged the cast.
Her head safely on the squashy pillow, Jayden exhaled as safety washed over her. A gnawing emptiness in her stomach disturbed her but the retching was long since done with and she was determined not to go back there to the place of desolation. Ed squatted down next to the bed, his long fingers caressing stray strands of hair back from Jayden’s forehead. His voice was soft, like a lover’s as he spoke gently to her, “I was worried when you didn’t show up for work today. Nobody had heard from you so we kind of assumed the worst. Especially with...” He didn’t finish his sentence.
“What happened?” Jayden asked, but her speech was lazy as the codeine and the drug they had given her at the hospital mixed and mingled in her tired, empty body, colluding and conspiring to form a haze of confusion.
“Don’t worry about it now, Jayd,” he replied, his rough, stubbled cheek resting gently against her temple as he continued to stroke her hair.
A vision clarified itself urgently to Jayden as she plunged into the nothingness. The Reverend McLean was purple with rage, posturing and dancing on uncontrollable feet as he shouted at Ed, ‘How dare you?’ But before Jayden could lay a proper hold of the realisation that came with it, she was gone, plunging down into welcome oblivion where there was only floating peace and absolutely no pain.
Chapter 16
When Jayden woke two hours later, she felt infinitely better. The deep sleep had made up in quality what a day’s worth of catching up on her wretched night might have achieved. She was immensely thirsty and needed the toilet, but her broken bone had dulled to a bearable throb which may well feel the benefit of some more painkillers.
She stumbled out of bed and into the ensuite, not bothering to close the door behind her in the empty flat. She flushed the toilet, washed her good hand and most of her bad hand with difficulty and attempted to clean her teeth. It was easier to splodge out a ball of toothpaste onto the side of the sink with her right hand and then try and scoop it up with her brush, than do it traditionally when she didn’t want to disturb her elbow overly much. Somehow she managed, feeling heaps better now that her mouth tasted less furry.
The sound of someone coming up the stairs caused her eyes to widen in fear and Jayden stopped dead, half way between the ensuite and her wardrobe. If she had an intruder there was nothing she would be able to do about it, not with a broken arm. The colour drained from her face like water furiously leaving a bath and she was frozen in place as she realised that Ed must have left without locking her street door.
But it was Ed’s handsome face which came slowly into the room from the landing. He had stayed. “I didn’t want to scare you,” he said, as though soothing a terrified deer, “but I’m sorry. I can see that I already have.”
Jayden could only nod fractionally, paralysed despite the fact that she was standing in front of the curate in a tee shirt and knickers. He walked over to her and put his arm around her, leading her to sit on the bed. He sat down close next to her and Jayden felt suddenly embarrassed about her lack of makeup and the bird’s nest of hair on her head.
Ed had worn his forty-two years well. His dark skin had shrugged off its early morning shave and black bristles peeked through as the day waned. Crow’s feet decorated the corners of his intense blue eyes, displaying a man that in other circumstances perhaps smiled and laughed a lot. His work at St Jude’s had not been easy and it was probably now public knowledge that he had clashed with the Reverend McLean on numerous issues. It had been a flashpoint, the older man’s flagrant disregard of budgets, misuse of church funds for silly fripperies instead of major concerns and other too numerous issues to dwell on. Surely the police would be heading his way very soon, once the gossips began relaying their poison to the pleasant, blonde cop.
Jayden realised a deeper emotion in play, seeing suddenly that she was jealous of the fortunate woman who got to stand next to this man in his duties, growing heated when she thought of their sinful kiss the previous night. She detached herself from his embrace and hardened her heart to the blossoming affection. He was right. Any relationship between them would be wrong on so many counts. “Will you take over, now that the vicar’s gone?” she asked, ashamed of the wistfulness in her voice. Disappointment surged through her as Ed shook his head.
“No. This role was just temporary. I have somewhere else to be eventually but I’ll stick around until a replacement arrives.”
“I think you were right last night,” the words stuck in Jayden’s throat like glass and she hesitated before pushing on. “This relationship would be very wrong, not least because of your vows, but lots of other reasons.”
“What other reasons?” he asked, surprising Jayden with the question - as if being a married curate indulging in an affair wouldn’t be reason enough.
“I’m not sure that I would be quite ready, even if there was nothing in the way. I had a...bad experience a few years ago and swore off men for life. It’s only recently that I actually feel like I’m healing enough to even contemplate a relationship one day.”
Ed heaved a sigh of sadness that astounded Jayden as they sat close together on the lilac duvet. He ran his hand across his face and she heard the bristles rubbing against his fingers. “I’m so sorry. I’m not quite sure how to counter that. I’ll keep my prying questions for another time. I should go Jayd. Sal’s rung me four times. The cops are pulling the church apart. You look way too good sitting there in your knickers and I am a cleric after all.”
He smiled and the origin of the crow’s feet was displayed in all its glory. He kissed the side of her cheek gently and then the mattress shifted underneath her as his weight left it. His black shirt was untucked and he had taken off the dog collar and undone the top two buttons. Looking longingly at Jayden, Ed gave a small wave and left the bedroom. She listened to him moving around downstairs, collecting his gear together and leaving. At the sound of the front door closing, she went down and locked it, laying on the sofa and watching daytime TV rubbish for the remainder of the day. Ed had left her a drink of tea with two codeine pain killers neatly popped out beside it.
Despite her previous misgivings, Jayden took the pills, drank the drink and slept the slumber of the just.
Chapter 17
Jayden arrived at work the next day wearing an interesting assortment of easily installed clothing. Elasticated black pants were overlaid with the only tee shirt that would go over the awkwardly bent cast and a classy denim jacket clung to her shoulders with one arm flapping. It was neither professional looking nor practical in the January freeze. Flat black zip up boots complimented the ensemble, specifically chosen for their ease to put on and protection against slipping in the ice and breaking something else. Jayden had considered a taxi but felt vaguely suspicious of the driver who had betrayed her to the policemen. It was wholly irrational as the man had only been truthful, but it had brought a heap of trouble to her hidden front door that she had not needed.
She need not have worried about her dress as the counselling r
ooms were closed and sealed with police tape insisting that the general public should ‘Keep Out’ and she had major difficulties gaining admission herself. Two telephone calls later and production of her driving licence, hastily and fortunately retrieved from its home in the front of her underwear drawer, ensured her access but the church was dead and silent. Jayden’s office door was unlocked, but the filing cabinet containing the privileged secrets of her clients was still secure. Only she and the director of the diocesan headquarters had a key to that.
Jayden was just sifting through some papers on her desk when a sharp rap at the door heralded the arrival of the blonde police officer with the brown eyes. He smiled pleasantly at her and ventured into the room. He wore a grey suit today and his hair was carefully spiked on end. Jayden smiled back and waved her good arm expansively. “Did you find anything else to suggest that I am the Reverend’s killer?” she asked, teasing him. “Oh, apart from my distress on the night in question and subsequent broken arm.”
The policeman laughed and sat down in her client’s chair, resting his black, leather-clad binder on his thigh. “Don’t take it personally, Miss Mitchell. Everyone is a suspect in cases like these.”
Jayden sat herself down on her comfy chair and faced him across the desk. “Cases like these? Do you find yourself investigating a lot of murdered vicars, Officer?”
The policeman smiled, giving her a lopsided smirk. He engaged with a bit of harmless flirting in the hope that she might release the information that he suspected she was hiding. Flicking at an imaginary fleck of dust on his trouser leg, he looked up at her from underneath his lashes, observing her collectedness and beauty despite the pain in her face presumably from the break on her arm.
“So what has actually happened?” Jayden asked him directly, “And why is it being considered a murder? Why don’t you think the vicar just fell off the balcony? He was always up there wandering around. He often squawked down at the curates and choir boys; it was his preferred method of catching them up to no good.”