Deadly Alibi

by Leigh Russell

  It was a while before he had begun to suspect her motive for tolerating his Thursday outings might not be as generous as he had supposed. While he was out, playing cards over a few beers, she was at home. He had always taken it on trust that she was alone. But once it had occurred to him that she might have a regular visitor while he was out, he couldn’t get the idea out of his head. He pictured her fury if she discovered his suspicions. Every Thursday evening he had to force himself not to rush home early to check, telling himself he was overreacting. In reality, he was afraid of what he might find there.

  So he had continued to go out on Thursdays as usual, and might have continued doing so indefinitely, if one evening he and his mates hadn’t packed it in early. It was bound to happen sooner or later. He felt as though he’d been sitting on a time bomb, waiting for a terrible truth to blow his world apart. He almost wanted to drive around for an hour, so he wouldn’t arrive back earlier than usual, but something compelled him to go straight home.

  As he drove, he told himself he was being an idiot. But when he reached his front door, he thought he heard voices in the hall. His heart racing, he ran back to the car and kept watch. After about half an hour the front door opened, and he caught sight of a man stealing away from the house. At ten to midnight, this was not a casual social call. A stranger had been in his house, with his wife, while he was out. Given the way Louise had lied about it, there could be no doubt about what was going on. Sitting motionless in the car for a few moments, he was uncertain what to do.

  He was still home slightly earlier than usual, so there was no rush for him to go inside just yet. Meanwhile, his wife’s visitor was hurrying off down the road. Tom was tempted to catch up with him and smash his face in. But after a moment’s reflection, he decided to follow him and find out where he lived. It felt strange, cruising along, trying to avoid drawing attention to himself. He often drove as fast as he could. He’d never before tried to drive as slowly as possible. Aware that he should feel relieved, he was almost disappointed that the man never once looked round. He was oblivious to the fact that he was being stalked by a man who wanted to kill him.

  Eventually, Tom lost him when he cut across a park. He considered abandoning the car and following him on foot. His hesitation probably saved him from doing something stupid. Too angry to think straight, he spun the wheel and returned home, arriving at around his usual time. Louise was already in bed. With a shiver, he wondered if she had been there before her visitor had left the house.

  5

  ‘Bloody hell, will you look at that?’ Moira called out as she approached. Stevie was already in the doorway, sheltering from the rain. Although he had been working as a volunteer in the Oxfam shop for over a year, he hadn’t yet been given a key. As manager, Moira was supposed to arrive first, but Stevie was usually early. She felt slightly guilty, but the young lad never complained.

  ‘I hope you haven’t been waiting long,’ she added, glancing at her watch.

  ‘So not only have they given us their old junk, we’ve got the whole damn bin as well.’ She manoeuvred her way past the green wheelie bin. ‘Still, I suppose we can use it for rubbish.’

  ‘What’s in it?’ Stevie asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Let’s get inside out of this rain before we start poking around. You never know, there might be something nice in it.’

  Stevie grinned. Tilting the bin, he pushed it into the shop behind Moira.

  ‘It’s really heavy.’

  ‘Why don’t you take it through to the back and have a look?’ Moira suggested. ‘Then you can come and tell me what treasures you’ve found.’

  It was a long time since Moira had felt curious about the things people deposited on the doorstep. Most of it was garbage. People tended not to leave valuables outside overnight. Even the things that were donated over the counter were virtually worthless. It was sad, really, watching people give up their old junk with as much fuss as if it had been worth a fortune. Of course it often had sentimental value to the owner, but that didn’t make it worth anything to the shop. She had barely started to key the code into the till when Stevie came running out of the back room, flapping his arms.

  ‘There’s a woman inside the bin!’ His voice was shrill with excitement. ‘I can’t wake her up!’

  Moira smiled kindly at him. Poor lad. He was a good-looking boy. She sometimes forgot he was a bit simple. There must be a mannequin in the wheelie bin, or perhaps a child’s doll.

  ‘That’s nice,’ she said. ‘What else is in there?’

  Stevie looked surprised. ‘There’s nothing else. She’s all crumpled up. I called her, and shook the bin, and she never moved. Do you think she’s dead? I didn’t touch her,’ he added earnestly. ‘I seen the murder shows on the telly. I know you mustn’t touch anything at a crime scene because it could contaminate the evidence.’ He paused, watching her tapping at the till. ‘Shouldn’t we call the police?’

  Moira nodded, frowning. It was time to start the day’s business but she supposed she ought to go and see what Stevie was fussing about before she opened the door. Customers rarely came in first thing in the morning.

  ‘Come on then,’ she said, ‘let’s go and see what you’ve found. And then we’ll get the door open.’

  Following Stevie across the store to the back room, she noticed the hats needed tidying and made a mental note to put Stevie on to it as soon as they had dealt with the wheelie bin.

  ‘Well, what have we got here?’

  Stepping forward, she peered over the top of the bin and drew back with a faint yelp.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, I see what you mean,’ she said. ‘It does look like a body.’

  She leaned forward and stared inside the bin. Below the mannequin’s head, its arms and legs appeared to have been folded up and crammed down. Its face was almost hidden by a wig that resembled real hair. Tentatively she reached inside and touched one of the ears. It felt hard and cold. She turned her attention to the face. Pushing the head backwards against the side of the bin, she squinted down at battered features. That was odd. She had never seen a mannequin with a bruised face before. It must be dirt from the interior of the bin, which would have been filled with rubbish at one time.

  ‘Who is she?’ Stevie asked.

  ‘No one,’ Moira replied. ‘It’s just a model. Now come on, let’s open up the shop. We’re already late.’

  ‘But what about her?’

  ‘We’ll deal with that later. Just leave it here for now.’

  They went back into the shop.

  ‘You’re dirty. You need to wash,’ Stevie said.

  ‘What?’

  Looking down, Moira saw a dark stain on one of her hands, where she had touched the mannequin’s head. Involuntarily, she wiped it on her skirt, leaving a bright red smear on the fabric.

  ‘It looks like blood,’ she whispered.

  All at once she felt sick. Running back to the store room, she took another look inside the wheelie bin. Whoever had abandoned the bin the previous night had not been donating their unwanted belongings to charity. They had been getting rid of a dead body.

  ‘I do believe you’re right,’ she muttered to Stevie, who was also staring down inside the bin.

  ‘Is she dead?’ he whispered.

  Moira nodded.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘We don’t know that. Hopefully the police will be able to find out.’

  ‘I know. They can tell who you are from your teeth.’

  ‘We’ll leave her exactly as she is,’ Moira said, ‘while we go and phone the police. And then we’re going to have a nice cup of tea with plenty of sugar.’

  ‘You don’t take sugar in your tea.’

  ‘That’s true, but I think I will today. This is not a normal day.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed solemnly. ‘This is not a normal day.’

  Stev
ie trotted obediently behind her back into the shop. Moira closed the door to the back room firmly.

  ‘Go and check we shut the street door when we came in,’ she said as she picked up the phone.

  ‘We have to open the door. We can’t shut it. Not when it’s opening time.’

  Stevie seemed more disturbed at the prospect of staying closed during opening hours than at finding a dead body.

  ‘Go on, now,’ Moira insisted. ‘We can’t let anyone in. This is a crime scene.’

  As Stevie scurried over to the door, she picked up the phone. ‘I need the police please. Yes, the police. Someone left a dead body at the Oxfam shop in Highgate High Street. Yes, a dead body. We’ve found a woman inside a wheelie bin, and she’s dead.’

  Hanging up, she told Stevie the police were on their way. Then she burst into tears.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he reassured her. ‘They won’t think you did it. No one’s going to put you in prison. It wasn’t your fault. Anyway, I found her, so if anyone’s in trouble, it’s going to be me. You don’t need to worry. It’s going to be fine. You’ll be fine. I’m the one who’s going to be in trouble. They’ll find my fingerprints on the bin, not yours. That’s how they do it. They look for fingerprints.’ He looked around, a worried expression on his face. ‘I shouldn’t have touched the bin. Now they’re going to think it was me, aren’t they?’

  ‘Don’t worry, the police aren’t going to suspect either of us.’ She could not help smiling at him through her tears. ‘You’re a good lad, Stevie.’

  ‘I’ll tell them you didn’t have that blood on your hands when you got here,’ he said seriously. ‘Otherwise they’ll lock you up.’

  6

  Without telling anyone at the police station the reason for her absence, Geraldine had booked the morning off. She hadn’t mentioned her mother’s cremation to anyone apart from her adopted sister Celia, who had offered to accompany her. It was a long way for her to travel and, in any case, Celia was four months pregnant.

  ‘There’s no need. You didn’t know her,’ Geraldine had answered. ‘You never met her, and she wasn’t your mother.’

  ‘I want to support you.’

  ‘That’s good of you, but you don’t need to come for my sake. I know she was my mother, but she was a stranger to me too. I only met her once, very briefly. It’s not like when our mum died.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure. You would say if you wanted me to come with you, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, and thank you. It’s really nice of you to offer.’

  Uncertain of her own feelings, Geraldine preferred to go to the funeral by herself. After waiting for years to meet her birth mother, death had cheated her of any hope of ever developing a relationship, or even having a conversation, with her. There was so much Geraldine wanted to know, but her adoptive mother was dead by the time Geraldine had learned the circumstances of her birth. Now her questions might never be answered. She would probably never discover her biological father’s identity. He might not even be aware of her existence. The finality of that thought was like a physical pain in her guts.

  What was particularly upsetting was that it could have been very different. Geraldine had repeatedly requested to meet her birth mother when she had discovered, as an adult, that she had been adopted at birth. For years her mother had steadfastly refused to see her. Only after a coronary had she relented and they had met once, briefly. Shortly after that, Milly Blake had suffered another heart attack, and this one had proved fatal.

  While her mother had been struggling to make ends meet, Geraldine had been brought up in a stable family, alongside her adopted sister, Celia. She understood that, as a sixteen-year-old single parent, her birth mother had felt it was best for both of them if she was adopted. If she hadn’t given her daughter that chance for a better life, perhaps Geraldine would never have become a successful detective inspector, working in North London. Geraldine understood that. What was harder to forgive was her mother’s refusal to meet her years later.

  Before she died, Milly Blake had written a letter informing Geraldine that she had a twin. Shocked, Geraldine had managed to trace Helena Blake, and confirm they shared a mother and a date of birth. Their father was not named on the records of their birth. She knew nothing about her twin sister except the little their mother had divulged, and the limited information she had been able to ascertain from the borough intelligence unit. It was enough.

  Everything she had learned about her twin dismayed her. With no permanent address, Helena had moved around a lot, in and out of London, returning at intervals to South London where Milly Blake had lived. A heroin addict, she had been arrested several times for petty theft and prostitution, no doubt committed to support her drug habit.

  It was distressing but, having discovered she had a twin, Geraldine was wary of meeting her. She had joined the police force driven by a desire to help protect civilised society. Doing what little she could to make the world a better place, she had always considered herself a morally upright citizen. She had no intention of rejecting her own sister because she was a user, the kind of person Geraldine only encountered across an interview table. Nevertheless, it was a potentially difficult situation.

  Geraldine had worked hard for many years to build the life she wanted. Her successful career and her independence were largely a result of her own efforts, with a little help from her inheritance from her adoptive mother. She didn’t want anything to undermine her carefully constructed life. But despite her reservations, she couldn’t suppress her excitement at the thought that she might meet her twin sister that morning. She wondered if Helena felt the same.

  Dressed in black trousers and jacket, with a new white shirt, she sat down on her bed and took her mother’s photograph out of the drawer in her bedside cabinet. It was the only picture she had of her mother, and must have been taken when she was about sixteen. The faded image could have been a photograph of Geraldine herself as a teenager. Milly Blake might even have been pregnant with Geraldine and Helena when it was taken.

  The girl in the picture bore little resemblance to the sick stranger Geraldine had met in the hospital. They would never have a conversation, never exchange a smile. Geraldine would never feel her mother’s arms around her. She supposed she had been whipped away from her mother quite quickly after the birth. The decision to give her up for adoption had probably been made before Geraldine was born. A penniless single mother of sixteen couldn’t have brought up twins by herself in those days. Milly had only kept Helena because she hadn’t been expected to survive for long.

  She took her mother’s letter out of the drawer, where she kept it with the photograph.

  ‘When you were born,’ her mother had written, ‘they told me Helena was going to die. But she didn’t. And then time went by and I couldn’t give her away. It sounds bad, but nothing I ever did went right. Now I’m gone, you need to find Helena, and help her. God knows, I tried. I wish I’d kept you as well but what happened was better for you. The social worker said the family you went to were good people. It would have been better for Helena if she’d gone with you but she was sick and they said she wouldn’t live. I can’t help Helena but you can, if she’s still alive.’

  With a sigh, Geraldine replaced the photograph and the letter in her drawer. They were all she had from her mother. She had recovered from her anger at the way her mother had prioritised Helena’s welfare over her own. Her reservations about meeting her twin had nothing to do with sibling rivalry. She was simply worried about seeing her hard-won life disrupted by a stranger. She had seen too many prostitutes and drug addicts on the other side of an interview table to choose to welcome one into her life with open arms. Her situation was challenging enough without this unlooked-for complication.

  But Helena was her sister.

  It began to rain as she set off for the crematorium. She felt nervous, knowing she might see her twi
n for the first time. She didn’t know if they were identical, but was sure she would recognise Helena if she saw her. By the time she arrived at the crematorium, the rain had passed over. The car park was almost deserted. A couple of men greeted her when she went in.

  ‘I’m here for Milly Blake. I’m her daughter.’

  One of her daughters, she ought to have said.

  The younger of the two men glanced towards a solitary coffin. It looked very small in the empty room. The place was well maintained, with carpeted floor, polished wooden seats and clean white paint on the walls. Compared to a graveside it was very sanitised, with no sign of the furnace concealed behind red velvet curtains. Geraldine sat down near the front and waited. It was very quiet. After a few minutes an elderly priest arrived, a reminder that Geraldine’s mother had been brought up as a Catholic. Her parents had probably not reacted kindly to their daughter’s teenage pregnancy. Milly’s condition was likely to have been considered scandalous to a Catholic family forty years ago. Geraldine wondered how it had come about. She would have liked to have known how her parents had met and whether they had been in love, and if her father had known about the pregnancy. There were so many unanswered questions.

  The priest approached her and seemed relieved when she reassured him that she was happy for him to choose the text for the ceremony. A few moments later he began, mumbling in a dreary monotone about life everlasting. It seemed an odd phrase to use in connection with someone who had just died. After intoning some prayers, the priest announced a hymn and began to sing in a reedy voice. One of the men who had greeted Geraldine on her arrival joined in, his baritone drowning out the sound of the priest’s thin warbling.

  As they finished a hymn, Geraldine glanced around and noticed a woman had slipped in and taken a seat on the far side of the room. Straggly dark hair stuck out from under her head scarf, framing a gaunt face. Despite her skinny build she looked oddly familiar, like a figure glimpsed in a nightmare. With a thrill like an electric shock, Geraldine recognised the large dark eyes that she had inherited from her mother. Helena had arrived.