‘My plan’s a bit vague at the moment, but I’m working on it. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’ve figured out the details. I just wanted to be sure I could count on your co-operation.’
Melissa became alarmed. ‘Look,’ she said nervously, ‘I’m not promising anything . . .’
‘Okay, understood. I’ll be in touch. Bye!’
The Rector arrived just as the police were leaving. He came by the footpath, scrambling over the stile and breaking into a shambling trot towards the cottages. It was plain from his demeanour that the news had reached him and Melissa greeted him with relief, certain that Iris would find his presence reassuring.
‘Miss Ash is with me, do come in!’ she said.
‘Thank you!’ he puffed.
She guessed he had run much of the way. His pale hair hung in wisps, his shoes were muddy and the bottoms of his trousers were damp and stained. His normally pink cheeks were the colour of clotted cream, his eyes were dilated and the crevices beneath them glistened with sweat.
‘I’ve just had the news from Mrs Foster at the shop. This is terrible, terrible!’ His hand shook as he mopped his face with a handkerchief. ‘What a dreadful thing to happen in our village!’ he moaned. ‘Who would have dreamed . . .’
His demeanour was not, Melissa felt, very impressive. She was disappointed in him; it was almost as if he was looking for strength and support from her instead of bringing it to an afflicted member of his flock.
‘Miss Ash found the body and she is very distressed,’ she told him, a trifle severely. ‘I hope you will do your best to comfort her. I’ve done what I could but as a comparative stranger . . .’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’ He put away the handkerchief and followed Melissa into the sitting-room. Iris had not moved since the police had finished taking her statement. Binkie, who had adopted Hawthorn Cottage as his second home and slipped in through the open door when they left, lay asleep on her lap. She sat with her head bent over him, cradling him with her arms like a child clinging for solace to a favourite doll. When Mr Calloway entered she managed, for the first time, the ghost of a smile.
‘Oh, Rector! Good of you to come!’ she faltered.
Melissa withdrew, murmuring something about tea. There was yet another knock before she reached the kitchen. It was Mrs Calloway, also in search of Iris.
‘She’s here,’ said Melissa for what seemed the hundredth time that day. ‘Your husband’s with her. I’m just going to make tea; would you care for a cup?’
Ignoring the question, Mrs Calloway brushed past her and rushed into the sitting-room. ‘My dear Miss Ash!’ Compassion softened the edges of the normally shrill and strident voice. ‘What a dreadful shock you must have had! Oh, you poor, poor dear!’ She crouched down, her glasses skating perilously close to the tip of her nose, and slid an arm round Iris’s shoulders. ‘I’ve been in town shopping . . . I had no idea . . . Mrs Foster told me when I went in to pick up the bread. I came at once . . . there, there, it’s all right, here’s a clean hanky if you need it . . .’
‘Got one, thanks,’ snapped Iris, displaying the sodden piece of kitchen paper that Melissa had supplied.
Mrs Calloway returned her handkerchief to the pocket of her shapeless woollen car coat, showing no sign of offence at this ungracious rebuff. She gave the unresponsive Iris a motherly squeeze.
‘You must come and stay with us tonight, mustn’t she, Henry?’ She looked to her husband for an endorsement of the invitation. He jumped as if he had been miles away.
‘Eh? Oh, yes . . . yes, of course, if she’d like to,’ he agreed.
‘We’ve got plenty of room and you simply mustn’t be alone after that dreadful experience,’ insisted Mrs Calloway.
Iris wriggled free of the encircling arm, dislodging an indignant Binkie in the process. ‘Quite all right in my own place,’ she muttered with an obstinate lift of her chin. ‘Having supper with Melissa, thanks all the same.’ The last words came with a certain amount of effort. She might be the Rector’s devoted slave but even in her affliction she was not prepared to accept favours from his wife.
‘But you can’t possibly sleep alone in the house!’
Iris gave a disdainful sniff. All this solicitude from a woman she disliked seemed to be doing more to restore her to normal than the Rector’s inadequate efforts at consolation. Melissa found herself feeling sorry for Mrs Calloway, in whose unpromising bosom there obviously lay a rich vein of Christian charity. She wished Iris would show some appreciation of the woman’s genuine wish to be kind. But Iris would have none of it.
‘Not scared. Got Binkie. Not afraid of ghosts if that’s what you mean,’ she asserted.
‘I really do think . . .’ Mrs Calloway put a hand on Iris’s arm, making one last appeal in the face of defeat. ‘You’d be much better at the Rectory, just for tonight.’ She turned her large brown eyes, which were easily her best feature, on her husband. ‘You talk to her, Henry!’
The Rector put a finger inside his dog-collar and waggled it. ‘Ermm . . . well, my dear, Miss Ash knows her own feelings best,’ he said feebly.
The brown eyes, which had been shining with sympathy, glazed over. It was plain that Mrs Calloway did not enjoy being thwarted. She had come to the house to do a kindness and had got neither thanks from the ungrateful recipient nor support from her husband. She glared up at him for a moment and then rose to her feet. As she did so, her gaze fell on his stained shoes and trousers.
‘What on earth possessed you to go trampling through the woods after all that rain?’ she scolded him. ‘We’d better go home at once so that I can clean the mud off your clothes. It’s plain we’re not wanted here!’
‘It was very good of you to call,’ said Melissa as she let them out. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her. I’m sure she doesn’t mean to be ungrateful but she’s still a bit shocked, you know,’ she added, aware that it must seem a little presumptuous for her to be apologising for Iris, whom she met only ten days ago, to people who had known her for years.
Mrs Calloway was quick to put her in her place. ‘Of course, she’s always been difficult!’ she snapped, with a jerk of the head towards the sitting-room.
Thankfully, Melissa closed the door behind them and went to make the tea. Her next task would be to prepare Iris for the arrival of the press.
Ten
Next morning, Melissa woke early, brewed a pot of tea and went straight to her study to work on The Shepherd’s Hut. She had the capacity to draft chunks of text in her head and to recall them without difficulty up to twenty-four hours later, sometimes longer. All she had to do was to sit at her machine and give her whole attention to what she was writing.
It began well. In half an hour the opening to the first chapter, the few paragraphs that she had composed on the drive home from Gloucester, were on paper. Now the story had to move on. She closed her eyes and projected her imagination into the darkened hut, breathing the foetid air and peering down at the shape in the corner. She conjured up the howl of the wind and the creak and groan of the overhanging trees as her hero became aware of what was lying on the ground.
Normally, she had no difficulty when working in shutting her mind to reality but this morning it was to reality that she turned for inspiration. Yesterday she had listened to Iris, still shaken but rational and coherent, repeating the story she had told the police. Now, hunched over her desk with her hands covering her eyes, she created moving images of Iris in her head: marching off down the valley, light of heart with her plastic sacks and her shovel; plunging into the wood where she had recently spotted a deep hollow beneath an uprooted tree, full of rich, crumbling compost; contentedly filling her sacks, humming to herself as she worked, the way Melissa had heard her while pottering in her garden; pausing for a rest while she listened to the peaceful woodland noises, then making one final thrust and finding that dangling obscenely in front of her. She had stood petrified as the nature of her discovery blasted her mind, then flung away her shovel and fled for home.
Melissa asked herself if a man of the calibre of her detective, Nathan Latimer, would experience a similar reaction. He would certainly not run away but he might, in those chilling circumstances and if her writing was vivid enough, feel a sense of revulsion and possibly shock. She bent over her typewriter, totally absorbed in her task. The milkman and the postman came and went unheeded; now and again the telephone rang but the sound merely bounced off the edges of her awareness.
After a couple of hours of intensive effort she sat back, exhausted but with a sense of achievement. She got up and moved about, flexing her arms, her fingers, her spine. She became aware of the sounds of car engines and banging doors and went to the window. The reporters had begun to arrive. She stood for a while watching the straggling group of men and women picking their way along the footpath, floundering at times on the uneven turf, cameras and notebooks at the ready.
The police would still be at the scene; there had probably been an overnight guard on the spot where the body was found. No doubt they were still hunting for clues, possibly digging for remains missed in the previous day’s search. Meanwhile, in some cold laboratory smelling of disinfectant and decay, the pathologist would be continuing the work of trying to establish the identity of the victim and the cause and time of death so that the police could begin tracking down the killer.
Melissa began playing with Bruce’s theory and considering its implications. If, as he maintained, the body was Babs’s, how had it come to this place? Had she been brought here dead or alive? Why had the killer chosen Benbury Woods to hide the body? Was he — it must surely be a he — someone local? A cold hand seemed to brush her spine as she imagined the girl’s remains lying for ten long months under layer upon layer of woodland detritus, part of the long, slow process of disintegration, decomposition and absorption into the soil. Earth returning to earth, leaving only a few bones and sickening shreds of what had once been warm living flesh.
It being Saturday morning, some local children came to watch the excitement. Such a thing had never happened in the village since the death of old Daniel, who was to them no more than a legend from a time long past. This was real, it was going to be in the papers and on the radio, perhaps even on the telly. They stood around in little knots, staring and giggling. A herd of cows wandered down the hill and hung their heads over a stone wall to see what was going on.
Melissa wondered how Iris was feeling this morning. The previous evening she had demonstrated an astonishing resilience. Oddly enough, she had shown more concern for her beloved Rector than for herself. ‘Sensitive man,’ she said more than once. ‘Dreadfully upset by all this. And she’s no comfort to him.’ The prospect of being interviewed by reporters had intrigued rather than alarmed her. She had eaten with relish the supper that Melissa had eventually found time to prepare, sunk a good two-thirds of a bottle of red wine and tottered home around midnight, insisting that she was perfectly all right, thank you, in response to the offer of a bed at Hawthorn Cottage.
As Melissa watched, Iris appeared in her garden. She had abandoned her tent-like pinafore dress and skinny jersey for a quite reasonable looking shirt and a well pressed pair of slacks. Her short, straight hair was smoothly brushed and carefully parted. She began poking a hoe at non-existent weeds in her onion-bed, from where she could keep an eye on the comings and goings down the valley. Presently the reporters began trickling back; they pounced on Iris and plied her with questions. Melissa, keeping well out of sight, watched in amusement as the photographers took their pictures: Iris standing at her front door, Iris leaning on her hoe, Iris pointing down the valley to show where she had made what would no doubt be described in the rubrics as her gruesome discovery. A TV crew appeared with video camera and microphone and she went through it all over again. She appeared to be thoroughly enjoying it.
At about six o’clock, Joe rang.
‘I’ve just been watching the news on the box,’ he said. ‘How come you’ve let your neighbour hog all the limelight?’
Joe, you are disgusting,’ she retorted. ‘Anyone would think it was entertainment.’
‘That’s how the media treat it, and that’s how the Great Unwashed like to think of it. Shock-horror-gloat, they go. And if you’d been there getting in on the act, think of the effect on sales!’
‘Think of the effect on my privacy!’ retorted Melissa. ‘I’m trying to write a novel, or had you forgotten?’
‘But of course not. That’s one of the things I’m phoning about. How soon can you let me have it?’
‘Good heavens, I’ve only done a first draft of chapter one. Christmas at the earliest.’
‘Oh, come on, you can do better than that. Let’s say the end of September. We’ll dream up a good blurb for the jacket: “This novel was conceived and written while a real-life murder hunt was taking place on the author’s doorstep.” With any luck identification will take a while and the killer won’t be tracked down for ages. Your publishers will be happy to slot your book in ahead of schedule on the grounds of topicality. What do you say?’
‘I say you are a heartless, hard-nosed, slave-driving opportunist!’
‘I love it when you talk dirty!’ Joe growled. ‘Let’s see now. Five months and a bit at a thousand words a day leaves you plenty of time over for editing and research. Piece of cake for a writer of your competence and experience.’
‘Stop flannelling,’ said Melissa. ‘I’ll do it in my own time, thank you very much, and if you lean on me too hard I’ll give up crime and start writing for the parish magazine. Ten per cent of my share of twenty-five pence a copy a month will just about buy a lemon for your gin and tonic. So there!’ She banged down the receiver, imagining with glee Joe’s frustration at not having the last word. She had let him set the pace for far too long.
Bruce rang a few minutes later.
‘Is the coast clear?’ he asked.
‘Clear of what?’
‘My fellow newshounds. I’m anxious not to be associated with the “Grisly Find in Picturesque Woodland” story.’
‘Is that what they’re calling it?’
‘Haven’t you seen this evening’s Gazette?’
‘I have not. I’ve spent the entire day working. What does it say?’
‘The police have issued a brief statement. Preliminary examination of the remains indicate that they are of a young woman and that she has been dead for some considerable time. What did I tell you?’
‘It’ll be some time before there’s any positive ID. There may have been other girls gone missing in the last few months . . .’ She knew that her voice lacked conviction even before Bruce pounced.
‘You don’t really believe that . . . and you did agree to help.’
‘I never promised,’ she said feebly.
‘Please! Think of it as research.’ Bruce was beginning to reveal considerable powers of persuasion.
Melissa heaved a sigh. ‘Tell me what you have in mind, then.’
‘You really want to know?’
‘You’ll give me no peace until I let you tell me. Do you want to come round for a drink?’
‘Be with you in twenty minutes.’
He was at the door in eighteen. Seeing his sharp outfit of dark blue shirt and light blue designer slacks with a matching jacket slung over one shoulder, Melissa was glad that she had put on some make-up and changed out of the elderly tracksuit that was her normal working garb into something more flattering.
‘You know,’ he said as he followed her into the sitting-room, ‘you are not at all like the usual run of women crimewriters.’
‘No? How many have you met?’
He grinned. ‘Actually, you’re the first. I think I’ve based my conception on portraits of Dame Agatha. She always seemed to look forbidding and faintly sinister.’
‘I’ve always thought she was a fine-looking woman.’
‘I think you are,’ he said softly. ‘But much more feminine.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied drily. It woul
d not do to encourage this line of approach. ‘What can I get you to drink? I’ve got the usual things.’
‘Perhaps we could leave the drink for later. What I’d like to do before it gets dark is visit the scene of the crime.’
‘I’m not exactly sure where it is. I’ve never been to that part of the wood.’
‘You mean you didn’t join the merry throng of sightseers? I pictured you up front, notebook in hand, soaking up the atmosphere and recording everything for a future bestseller!’
Melissa poked out her tongue at him and the laughter lines at the corners of his eyes deepened in response. It was good to relax after a day of intensive effort and Bruce’s combination of youthful enthusiasm and mature assurance was both stimulating and restful.
‘I’ve been keeping out of the way while the press were swarming about,’ she told him. ‘Anyway, what are you expecting to see? The police will have been over every inch of the ground with a toothcomb so there won’t be so much as a trouser-button left lying about.’
‘I know that, I’m not looking for clues. I just want to figure out the lie of the land. Presumably it’s some way from the road?’
‘I told you, I’ve really no idea.’
‘Then let’s go and see for ourselves. A walk in the fresh air’ll do you good after a day at your desk.’
‘That’s true. Well, if you insist, I know the way roughly from what Iris told me and there should be plenty of tracks to follow. It’s probably muddy,’ she added, eyeing his spotless clothes. ‘You’ll get your trousers stained if you’re not careful.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll tuck ’em into my socks,’ said Bruce cheerfully and did so. ‘There! What about asking Iris to come along and show us the way?’
‘I doubt if she’d agree. She’s had a nasty jolt and I think she’ll be avoiding that part of the wood for quite a while. The Rector could tell us though. I suspect he went to look even before coming to see Iris.’ Involuntarily, she smiled at the memory of Mr Calloway’s sheepish expression as his wife scolded him for getting his clothes muddy. ‘He might even enjoy the chance to do a bit of sleuthing. He’s one of my most faithful readers!’
Murder at Hawthorn Cottage_An absolutely gripping cozy mystery Page 9