A Spider on the Stairs

by Cassandra Chan

  “Er,” said Bethancourt, caught off guard.

  His first instinct was to say no. He was not a man who dwelled much on the past, and he had no present interest in Alice Knowles at all. He was ready to admit to himself that had she preserved her face and figure he might not have said no to renewing the relationship—at least on a temporary basis—but as it was, he would refuse that honor.

  But then it occurred to him that, regardless of his personal feelings, Alice was his one legitimate tie to the Mittlesdon murder.

  “I’d love to,” he said. “Are you free for lunch today by any chance?”

  “Why, yes,” said Alice, sounding a little surprised at the promptness of his invitation. “Yes, that would be fine.”

  “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in town, you see,” said Bethancourt.

  “Oh! Oh, of course.”

  “And I’m afraid I’ll have to depend on you to suggest somewhere to meet,” he continued. “I’m quite out of touch with things here nowadays.”

  “Naturally,” she answered. “Let me think a moment. . . . Well, why not Loch Fyne? They’ve got a quite pleasant bar. And it’s just down the street from the bookshop, so you can’t miss it.”

  “I think I know the place you mean,” said Bethancourt. “Just past the bridge, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. Will that do?”

  “Perfectly,” said Bethancourt. “Shall we meet there at one?”

  “Half past would be better for me, if it’s not too late?” said Alice.

  “Not at all. Half one it is. I’ll see you then.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  He rang off and turned to find that Cerberus had followed him and was sitting patiently by the bed.

  “I have no idea what I just got myself into,” Bethancourt told him.

  An hour later, he had showered, shaved, and, seeing that the rain had stopped and the sun was out, given his dog a good walk instead of just letting the animal out into the garden. They had returned and he was consuming his third cup of coffee when Gibbons rang.

  “All serene?” asked Bethancourt.

  “There was some sticky going, but all’s well,” replied Gibbons. “I’m on my way to call at Rachel’s house now.”

  Bethancourt checked his watch. “She’ll have left for work by now, won’t she?” he said.

  “Only if she has a regular office job,” said Gibbons. “I’m feeling lucky—I think she works nights.”

  “That sounds indecent,” said Bethancourt, “but I’m on—at least, I assume I can come with you?”

  “Certainly,” said Gibbons. “I’ll meet you there. You remember the address?”

  “Yes,” said Bethancourt. “It’ll take me ten minutes or so to walk over.”

  “I’ll meet you on the corner then,” said Gibbons and rang off.

  Bethancourt finished his coffee while he donned his boots and coat, and he was on the verge of leaving the house when his mobile rang again. It was not a number he recognized, but he answered it anyway.

  “This is Catherine,” said a languid voice. “I think you must be that charming man I met at the club last night?”

  “I certainly hope I am,” responded Bethancourt, a smile playing about his lips.

  “Tall? Blond? Glasses?”

  “That sounds like me,” said Bethancourt. “As I remember, you are a heavenly creature with long hair in a green dress.”

  “Alas, I took the dress off,” said Catherine. “Does that disqualify me?”

  “It depends,” he said. “Are your eyes still green?”

  Her laughter was a soft trill. “Do you know,” she said, “I believe they are.”

  “Then we’re all set. My, that’s a relief.”

  “Isn’t it? I thought, since you were so interesting last night, you might want to come by Club Salvation tonight and give a reprise. Only, of course, if you felt up to it.”

  “Well, well,” said Bethancourt. “All that interesting stuff does take it out of a chap, I’ll admit.”

  “Does it? I rather thought it came naturally.”

  “No, not at all. Still, I think I might be able to pull it off once more. Actually, now that I think about it, I believe I’m feeling particularly interesting this season. I might be good for a week.”

  Catherine laughed again. “Then I’ll look forward to it. Till tonight.”

  “Till tonight,” echoed Bethancourt.

  He rang off with a broad grin on his face, and was whistling as he locked the front door and went off to meet Gibbons.

  Gibbons’s luck was holding. Rachel Morrison, as it turned out, was a nurse who worked at the hospital and today was her off-shift. They met her on her doorstep as she was returning from the grocer’s.

  She was a thin, sharp-featured woman, but with a wide, warm smile. Bethancourt responded with one of his own, which caused her a moment’s self-consciousness, expressed in a flustered patting of her hair.

  “We were hoping,” continued Gibbons, “that you could give us some information about Jody Farraday.”

  “I know her, of course,” Rachel answered, looking from one to the other of the men and taking in their somber expressions. “I’m surprised to hear she’s come to the law’s attention,” she added. “Here, come inside where we can talk properly.”

  “Thank you,” said Gibbons. “We’d prefer to have a private conversation.”

  “Though I’ll warn you,” she said, allowing Bethancourt to take her bag of groceries while she unlocked the front door, “I haven’t heard from Jody recently, and the last I did hear, she was down south.”

  “She keeps in touch with you, then?” asked Gibbons.

  “In a manner of speaking,” answered Rachel with a laugh. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  She let them into the front hall and led the way back to the kitchen. Just inside the door was a small drop-front desk, and above it hung a cork board filled with various notes, cards, and newspaper cuttings. Rachel reached up and unpinned a postcard from one corner and handed it to Gibbons.

  The picture was of a coastal village. On the reverse was scrawled: “R—I’m settled here at last and think I’ll stay the summer. Got an interesting job at the marina. You know how to reach me if you want to. Or I’ll turn up again. Love, yr. bp.”

  It was dated last April.

  Gibbons read it carefully with Bethancourt peering over his shoulder.

  “How did you reach her?” he asked, looking up.

  “Message on MySpace,” Rachel answered cheerfully. “Jody doesn’t always have a computer, but she finds a place somewhere to check my page once a week or so.”

  Gibbons looked hopeful. “Then she had an e-mail address? How about a MySpace page of her own?”

  “She’s got both,” Rachel confirmed. “But she doesn’t use either one much. She’s funny that way—doesn’t like to be tied down.” She shrugged. “She used to say she was an analog spirit living in a digital age. Really, she’s just eccentric.”

  Bethancourt was still looking at the postcard.

  “What’s ‘bp’?” he asked.

  “ ‘Bp’?” repeated Rachel, looking puzzled.

  “Yes, she signs herself here as ‘yr. bp.’ ”

  “Oh, that means ‘bad penny.’ You know, a reference to turning up again?”

  “Oh, yes, I see.”

  “And this card was the last you heard from her?” asked Gibbons, handing it back.

  “No,” answered Rachel, pinning it once again to the board and moving to deal with the bag of groceries Bethancourt had set on the counter. “She rang on my birthday in June. She was still in Port Isaac then.” She paused to face them, a jug of milk in her hand. “Has she got herself into trouble, then?” she asked, a worried frown on her face.

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Gibbons carefully.

  Bethancourt, who had come forward to help with the grocery unpacking, saw the expression in her eyes change. He reached out to take the jug of milk from her
hand and said, “Yes, it’s bad news. Perhaps you’d like to sit down?”

  Numbly, she let him take the milk while she stared, frozen, at Gibbons.

  “Dead?” she asked at last. And when Gibbons nodded she turned away, putting her hands to her face.

  Gibbons gave her a moment while Bethancourt deposited the milk in the refrigerator, and then caught his friend’s eyes, jerking his head toward their witness.

  Bethancourt nodded and went to put a hand on Rachel’s shoulder.

  “Come and sit down,” he said, moving her gently to the kitchen table. “Would you like anything? A glass of water or some tea?”

  Rachel dragged a hand across her face, wiping away tears.

  “I think I’d rather have a drink,” she said. “There’s a bottle of Bell’s in that cupboard over there.”

  Bethancourt nodded and fetched it together with a glass from the dish drainer while Gibbons settled himself opposite Rachel at the table. She sniffed, took the drink Bethancourt handed her, and had a healthy swallow of it.

  “There,” she said, making an effort to pull herself together. “All right. Tell me what happened.”

  “Miss Farraday was killed on Christmas Eve,” said Gibbons.

  “But how?” asked Rachel. To Bethancourt’s ear, her tone betrayed bewilderment. He slid into the chair on the other side of her, leaning an elbow on the table so that he could see her face.

  “She was the victim of an attack,” replied Gibbons. “We believe she had an altercation with whomever she was meeting that night, during the course of which she was struck. The blow may or may not have knocked her out, but it disabled her enough for her attacker to strangle her.”

  While he spoke, Rachel’s hand sought her throat, and her eyes, now full of shock, brimmed with tears.

  “That’s horrible,” she whispered. “Poor Jody.”

  “Yes,” said Gibbons. “It was a very violent crime. Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to harm Miss Farraday?”

  Rachel shook her head at once. “Everyone always liked Jody,” she said. “There’s no denying she was an oddbod, but nobody ever seemed to mind. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill her. It wasn’t,” she added, “just a mugging then?”

  “No, ma’am,” said Gibbons. “I’m afraid there’s no chance of that.”

  “How long had you known Miss Farraday?” asked Bethancourt. “Were the two of you close?”

  Rachel hesitated for a moment before replying, “I think, actually, I was her closest friend. At least I was the oldest—we met at school in Haxby when we were eight.”

  Gibbons raised an eyebrow. “At school?” he asked. “We understood from Mr. Rhys-Jones that Miss Farraday was homeschooled.”

  “Part of the time,” agreed Rachel. “Although I think that had more to do with where she and her mother found themselves—they moved around a lot. Anyway, she was only at my school for three years. But that’s an eternity when you’re eight.”

  “True,” said Bethancourt. “Still, it’s a long time to keep up with someone, particularly if you don’t live in the same place.” He was mentally riffling through a list of his acquaintances, but could not think of anyone from the second form with whom he still kept in touch.

  “Well, yes,” agreed Rachel slowly, as if she had never really thought about it before. Then she shrugged. “But things are never the way they usually are if Jody’s involved. It’s like she’s a jinx on anything normal.” She gave a half laugh, which turned into a hiccup, and she ended by sniffling and sipping the whisky Bethancourt had poured for her.

  “Being such an old friend,” said Gibbons, “would you know of any family Miss Farraday might have? I understand her mother passed on some years ago.”

  “Yes,” affirmed Rachel. “I went to the funeral. But there aren’t any other relatives—there never have been. It was always only her mother and Jody.”

  “Her mother had no other family?” asked Gibbons.

  “She may have had,” said Rachel, “but she never spoke of them. The story I heard was that she had been abused as a child, and had run away when she was fourteen. So far as I know, all contact was broken off. At least, Jody never met any of them. And,” she continued, forestalling Gibbons’s next question, “I don’t know anything about Jody’s father and I’m not sure she did either.”

  “He was never around?” asked Gibbons.

  “Jody never even met him,” said Rachel. “Her mother always maintained he had died shortly after Jody was born—it was a rather romantic story, really. But later on, after I grew up, I did begin to wonder how true it all was. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he simply deserted Doris when he found out she was pregnant. But I don’t really know.”

  Gibbons absorbed this silently. “In that case,” he said at last, “would you be willing to identify the body?”

  Rachel looked considerably startled by this request, and Gibbons added, “We believe our victim is Miss Farraday, but positive identification has thus far been difficult. We’ve only one rather bad snapshot of her, and have been unable to find dental records or DNA samples. In fact, so far as we can determine, she’s not even been reported missing.”

  “I could certainly identify her,” said Rachel, recovering herself. “But it’s difficult, just now, to get any time away from the hospital. Is she still down in Cornwall?”

  “No,” answered Gibbons. “She was killed here in York. Did you not know she was in town?”

  Rachel sat back, all grief apparently forgotten in her amazement. “Jody was here?” she demanded.

  “Yes,” said Gibbons. “She didn’t let you know of her plans?”

  Rachel shook her head emphatically, but then paused as a thought struck her.

  “Yes?” prompted Gibbons hopefully.

  “I wasn’t here,” she said. She spoke half to herself and her tone was one of sorrow and regret. “My family always spends Christmas at my grandmother’s in the Lake District. Jody knew that, of course. And she probably came up on the spur of the moment—it was the way she did most things. In fact . . .”

  Her voice trailed off as she looked about the room. Gibbons waited patiently until at last she looked back at him.

  “I’m just wondering,” she said, “if she was here after all. She had keys and she would have known I was away. There were a few things out of place when I came back, but my neighbors had been in to feed the cat so I didn’t think anything of it. But it could have been Jody.”

  The mention of keys struck a chord in Gibbons’s mind. “Rhys-Jones said Jody kept a collection of keys. . . .”

  “True enough,” agreed Rachel. “It was totally pointless to try and prevent her from adding your house keys to her collection.” She sighed. “I always wondered what a psychiatrist would have made of those keys.”

  “Keys or no, she couldn’t have still been staying here on Christmas Eve,” put in Bethancourt practically. “We haven’t found any of her things, and surely you would have noticed if she had left a bag here.”

  Rachel frowned and nodded. “That’s true,” she said. “No, there was nothing left here. But I can’t think where else she would have stayed.”

  “But you would have expected her to come to you if she had arrived before you left for the Lake District?” asked Gibbons.

  “Oh, yes, certainly.”

  “And when did you leave?”

  “On the twenty-third,” Rachel answered. “Jody couldn’t have been in York before then.”

  “What about Rhys-Jones?” asked Bethancourt. “Might she have stayed with him?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Rachel. “They were still on friendly terms, but he had gone back to his old girlfriend and Jody knew that. I don’t think she would have intruded.”

  “There wasn’t a lot of animosity over the breakup then?” asked Gibbons.

  “Not on Jody’s part,” said Rachel. “She liked him, but she never thought it would work out for the long term. Jody, well, she had trouble trusting people ve
ry far—you had to prove yourself over time.”

  Gibbons nodded. “Can you think of any other friends here she might have rung up? Mr. Rhys-Jones mentioned some other people. . . .”

  He consulted his notebook and read off the names Rhys-Jones had given them. Rachel identified them readily as people she had introduced Jody to and supplied surnames and phone numbers.

  “And Wilfrid,” she said with a laugh, “that would be Wilfrid Jenks. He’s another one from our school days. But I don’t think he lives around here anymore—he was probably visiting when Gareth met him. I don’t know, he was never a particular friend of mine, but he was someone Jody kept up with sporadically.”

  She paused for a moment, thinking, and then added a couple of others, including Tony Grandidge, the young man who single-handedly managed Mittlesdon’s stock room.

  “That was how Jody got the job at Mittlesdon’s,” she said. “She ran into Tony at a café and the two of them got talking. I think they went out once or twice, though it was never anything serious.”

  Gibbons noted this down and then asked, “You’ve said that both Miss Farraday and her mother moved around a lot. Was there any reason for that? I mean, did you ever have the impression they were running from something or someone?”

  “No.” Rachel shook her head. “They were just very odd people. Jody always seemed to me to be afraid of getting tied down, of having anything regular in her life.” She looked wistful. “Although when I last spoke to her, I thought she might be mellowing a little. She talked about maybe getting a dog, and that’s definitely a responsibility.”

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed Bethancourt.

  “And you can’t think of anyone who might have had a grudge against Miss Farraday?” asked Gibbons. “Sometimes even a small thing will lead to murder.”

  Rachel began to shake her head, but then paused.

  “Have you thought of someone?” asked Gibbons as the silence lengthened.

  “Not someone,” said Rachel slowly. “But Jody liked to know things, including other people’s secrets. She never told,” she added hastily. “But she did find out things—she’d surprise me sometimes with something that she had known but never mentioned.”