by Alison Bruce
They slipped between the tables and found the entrance to the Excelsior Clinic. There, they buzzed the intercom and heard the door being released. Inside, the walls, ceiling and light fittings were all plain white. Kincaide was about to press the lift button, but Goodhew took to the stairs and he reluctantly followed.
‘It’s a bit clinical,’ Kincaide quipped.
The landing door opened into a foyer, where the all-white theme continued. Here it was toned down with a beige sofa and an oak floor, complete with matching coffee table and reception desk. Apart from being female, the receptionist was about as far removed from the stereotype of her role as Goodhew could imagine. Her fringeless hair – a lack-lustre brown – had been dragged back and pinned at the nape of her neck. Her make-up stopped at her temples, leaving her exposed forehead bare of everything except the two deep frown furrows which dug permanent tramlines between her eyebrows. Hardly a good advertisement for cosmetic surgery.
And worse still, she didn’t smile. But perhaps that was just because she had already realized they were police.
Goodhew spoke. ‘We’re here to see Mr Moran.’
She pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘He’s with a client at the moment. I’ll let him know you’re here, but I expect he’ll be about ten minutes, if that’s all right.’ She lifted the hinged end of the counter and waved them through. ‘Alice Moran is in the office, but that will be the best place for you to wait.’
She omitted the words ‘out of sight’ from the end of the sentence, but they both got her drift. Once they were both through, she slid back the opaque panel which separated her area from the room behind. ‘Alice, it’s the police,’ she announced.
Goodhew and Kincaide entered the main office and heard the door slide shut behind them. The room was small with two desks, one heaped with papers, the other bare. Another door, on the opposite side of the room, stood ajar, with an electric fan positioned near it, presumably with the aim of dragging fresh air in from the corridor beyond, even though the temperature was already fairly low.
‘Alice’ sat at the untidy desk, adding up a list of figures with a desk calculator which whirred and churned out tally roll each time she hit the + key. Adding figures was clearly her forte, as the spewing list stretched to three feet and looked to be growing at several inches per minute. Her gaze flashed up to them, then back to her list. ‘One minute, please.’
It was more an instruction than a request.
The woman looked in her early or mid-thirties. She wore a white man’s shirt folded back to the elbows and chocolate-brown trousers. Her hair was short and her footwear sturdy and, by rights, she should have resembled a male manual worker but, in reality, the effect was wholly feminine.
A tiny amethyst pendant on a fine gold chain sparkled in the hollow of skin exposed by the unbuttoned neck of the shirt. It was her only item of jewellery.
Here was a woman whose appearance implied great understatement, since she knew she could let her bone structure do the hard work for her. High cheekbones and a delicate jawline gave her a face that would turn from above average to striking as the years progressed. She sat upright, making the most of being five eight.
The calculator gave an extra judder as she finished adding, whereupon she copied the final figure from the display, then put her pen to one side. ‘Sorry to keep you, but I was right at the end.’ She stood and shook hands with both of them. ‘I’m Alice, Richard Moran’s sister. I work here part-time. Thanks for coming.’
Kincaide did the talking. ‘I’m DC Kincaide, and this is DC Goodhew. We understand your brother is concerned about one of the staff. Lorna Spence?’
Alice nodded. ‘It’s probably nothing, but we can’t get hold of her.’ She screwed up her nose and looked apologetic. ‘Richard panics,’ she added.
A year planner was pinned to the wall above the coffee station. Goodhew wandered over to inspect it. ‘How long has she been missing?’ he asked.
‘She didn’t turn up this morning, or even phone in.’
‘One day?’ spluttered Kincaide ‘You mean she was in yesterday? That’s not missing; it’s throwing a sickie.’
Goodhew continued to read the holiday chart.
‘I told you,’ Alice sighed. ‘Richard panics.’
‘I am not panicking, I’m concerned,’ snapped an unseen man’s voice. They all looked towards the open door, and it was obvious that the voice belonged to Alice’s brother. Richard Moran was taut and angular, his bone structure like his sister’s, but with less flesh to cover it. He was clean-cut and clean-shaven. He even had her skin colour and the same dark hair. Otherwise, he was dressed in chinos and an open-necked linen shirt, and they looked close enough in age to have been twins.
He closed the door behind him and stabbed the on-off switch to kill the fan. ‘Why do we need this bloody thing in here, Alice? We’re running the air-conditioning and yet you make this place like an ice house.’ He held a pen in his hand and twiddled it between his fingers, and although he was, in effect, standing still, he shifted his weight from foot to foot with an agitated rocking motion.
Kincaide suggested he sat down, just as Goodhew opened his mouth to do the same. Instead of taking the spare chair, Moran perched awkwardly on the edge of his sister’s desk.
Kincaide spoke in an even, unhurried voice. ‘Lorna was due at work this morning at what time?’
‘She usually gets in between eight-thirty and nine.’
‘Why are you so concerned that you decided to report her as a missing person at only eleven? By then she was less than three hours late.’
‘I . . . um . . .’ His voice was tight with nervousness. He coughed to clear his throat and started again. ‘When I couldn’t get hold of her on the phone, I popped round to her flat. Then I heard word that you’d found a woman’s body, though I don’t have any reason to think it’s her. I suppose Alice is right, and I am panicking, but the radio said she was all in black. Lorna always wears black.’
‘So do lots of women,’ Goodhew pointed out. ‘Do you happen to have a photograph?’
Richard nodded. ‘Hang on.’
But Alice was already flicking through a small sheaf of papers that she’d taken from her handbag. ‘I’ve got one here.’
She slid a colour six-by-four print across the desk; Goodhew picked it up and held it midway between himself and Kincaide. Three people leaning across a restaurant table for the benefit of the camera: Richard, Alice and this morning’s corpse. ‘I’m very sorry, but this appears to be the woman we found earlier today.’
There was a moment of nothingness, no reaction from either of them. It was just a second, but it seemed to last longer.
Then Alice gasped, and her hand shot up to her mouth to suppress the sound. Richard gave a grunt, like all the air had been thumped from him. Then he pressed his face into both his hands, as if suddenly desperate for privacy. His shoulders rose and fell as he drew heavy breaths.
Kincaide looked at Goodhew, raising his hand in a ‘wait’ signal. Goodhew nodded and they silently waited.
FOURTEEN
The rest of the day passed slowly. It seemed like a huge contradiction: one person had killed, another had been killed, and yet there was no fast track past the everyday snags. No one filled out forms any faster, or made walking quicker, and the pavements never grew shorter. So, while each point of the investigation was important, the lines that joined the dots were the same old, same old.
Goodhew had accompanied Richard Moran to the morgue. Alice had waited there with her brother and, from time to time took his hand. Richard stayed composed, but Goodhew detected a greater restraint in Alice herself. It didn’t mean she was less concerned, of course; in fact, he guessed the difference between them had taken many years, possibly a lifetime, to forge.
When Richard reached out for his sister’s hand, it seemed to be an automatic movement, almost a reflex. And just as his facial muscles seemed accustomed to running through a gamut of expressions from doubt to fear, s
o hers ranged only from completely expressionless to a look designed to urge him to hold it in. Clearly she wasn’t the heart-on-the-sleeve type.
And the silence maintained had been heavy. Without any doubt, they all knew that the identification would be positive, and the certainty of that meant that Lorna Spence’s flat was already being searched. But talking about it as a fait accompli seemed like wishing her dead. Even though she was.
Goodhew turned his thoughts to Lorna’s flat. Kincaide would be there already, methodically working his way through her things.
Goodhew himself wished he could be in both places at once. He wanted the chance to absorb the feel of her there before her death fully settled in a dusty layer. It often struck him that the last breaths of a life stayed in the deceased’s home long after leaving the body. And, although in his conscious mind he knew it was illogical to assign human attributes to buildings and inanimate objects, his subconscious had never quite been able to let go of the idea that some places waited for a familiar footstep or scent or routine, and that the last remnants of the person were only lost when the feeling of abandonment eventually set in.
So he wondered what Kincaide was uncovering there, but he also knew that he wanted to be present, here, when Richard and Alice looked down at Lorna’s face and made the leap from being told she was dead to actually absorbing the reality. He knew that was the moment when spontaneous emotional responses often illuminated both the deceased and their nearest and dearest better than bright lights or an inquisition.
Eventually, they were called in to view the body, and afterwards Goodhew wondered what he’d really learnt from this. Alice stood further away, as if three extra feet of floor space would be enough to leave her detatched. Her spine was poker-straight and her arms were crossed, Morticia-style. The only change the imminent peeling back of the sheet produced was the subtle movement of Alice’s right thumb, which flexed until it was pinching the soft flesh of her upper arm. She fixed her stare somewhere beyond the sheet, still covering Lorna, and resolutely refused to make eye contact with either of the men.
Richard reacted differently. At first, he seemed unable to stand still and kept rubbing his palms against his thighs, but when he nodded that he was ready for the sheet to be lifted, he drew in one deep breath, then managed to stop fidgeting.
His eyes bulged, as if the conflict between not wanting to look and having a duty to, was threatening to make them explode. He swallowed, but didn’t look away from her as he spoke. ‘It doesn’t really look like Lorna,’ he said.
Goodhew looked at Lorna too. ‘But it is?’
‘I can touch her, can’t I? It is all right?’
‘Of course.’
Richard ran two fingertips across the top of her cheek, as if wiping away a tear.
‘We had plans,’ he said.
‘What kind of plans?’
Richard didn’t answer, but instead turned to face his sister. ‘We had plans, Alice.’
‘I know,’ she whispered. He reached out to her and she wrapped him in a tight embrace. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she murmured.
And the whole time, Goodhew never saw her look anywhere apart from the blank wall on the opposite side of the room. He didn’t ask about the plans; sometime later would do for that.
Goodhew hadn’t waited for another instruction from the station; instead, he’d just cleared off to Lorna’s flat. He walked there; the late-afternoon traffic was already thickening, and driving would save him no time. But, more than that, he wanted to lose himself in Cambridge for a few minutes, to snatch a breath of fresh air and remind himself how the city outside the laboratory really smelt. He aimed to step into her flat with a clear set of senses, and thus a chance of snatching a last metaphorical glimpse of her.
The sun was out this afternoon and he realized that it was the first time since seeing Lorna’s body on Midsummer Common that he’d been aware of anything unconnected with her. He could reach her flat with a brisk ten-minute walk along the edge of the pedestrianized shopping streets. As he passed the Cambridge News kiosk on the corner of Sidney Street and Petty Cury, the billboard announced ‘Latest on Midsummer Common Murder’. People walked along with the late edition under their arms or protruding from their bags. Soon her name would be announced, and shortly after that the whole city would be on first-name terms with her.
A few minutes later, he turned from the busy shops in Bridge Street, down Rolfe Place and towards Rolfe Street beyond. No one followed and, ahead of him, the pavements were empty. He could see two marked cars parked in the middle of an atypically empty row of parking spaces. Meanwhile, a lone uniformed officer stood in a doorway. Goodhew knew that every activity would be closely watched from one neighbouring house or another, but he was glad that her home hadn’t yet descended into a general gawping ground.
It was the type of street where the terraces had originally been functionally unglamorous, but now existed in a new incarnation of desirable and fashionable city living. Few had not been ‘modernized’, the term which currently implied adding period features alongside state-of-the-art gadgetry.
Lorna’s flat appeared to have once served as the living accommodation over a shop. The shop itself looked like it had ceased trading somewhere back in the 1970s, when aluminium window frames and stone cladding or pebble dashing were still options of modernization that left one’s neighbours on speaking terms. OK, so the conversion from shop to ground-floor flat had escaped any onslaught on the brickwork, but the metal replacement windows with brown-glossed windowsills were a dead giveaway, and now it stood forlornly empty with a faded ‘For Sale’ board in the window. By contrast, Lorna’s front door was solid wood: not one of those pseudo-traditional knock-offs but, the real McCoy; the two-inch-thick type made half an inch thicker by a century of gloss paint, and still with the original stained-glass panel set in the top.
He was now close enough to recognize that the constable standing in the doorway was Kelly Wilkes. She smiled in greeting, stepping forward and to one side as he came within a few feet of her.
‘Who’s here?’ he asked.
‘Just a couple of forensics guys and Kincaide.’
‘He’s the only one?’
‘Uh-huh. DI Marks was here earlier, but left Kincaide and DC Charles to finish off. Then, about twenty minutes ago, Charles said he was off too. I think they’ve pretty much finished.’
‘That’s fast going,’ he commented as he stepped through the door. ‘Must be a small flat.’
The hall had a floor laid with the familiar year-dot dark-red tiles, interspersed with black and white diamonds, and a few in cobalt blue for contrast. Four pairs of shoes had been bagged and left at the bottom of the stairs, which, beneath the protective plastic laid down by the forensics team, were carpeted. He ascended the centre of the flight, carefully avoiding touching either wall. Above him, the landing was partially visible, the banisters blocked in behind hardboard panels, but still low enough for someone to look over them to find out who was approaching. On this occasion, no one did.
A single unlit bulb, decorated with hand-painted swirls, hung from an overhead light fitting, and if that counted as an artistic touch, it was the only one. Immediately beside the top step stood a small dark-wood table. Goodhew’s attention settled on it for a moment before being diverted by the sound of Kincaide’s voice. But he had looked just long enough to see that the post contained nothing more than a few advertising brochures.
Kincaide stood close to the top of the stairs. ‘That stuff was on the mat when we arrived, so at least we know she left before the post came.’
Goodhew looked past him into the flat itself, noticing that the curtains were drawn shut and the lights were on. ‘How’s it going?’
Kincaide shrugged. ‘Just about wrapping it up. There’s not much left to do here.’
The living room was a reasonable size, and furnished with a few well-chosen items, mainly in pine. Both the chest of drawers and the bookcase looked like they’d been bought from
local antique dealers, and the soft furnishings from a shop which specialized in neither cheap nor cheerful. Somehow he knew they weren’t Lorna’s own. By contrast, the television, mirror and a frame containing dried flowers had all arrived on a much more modest budget and looked pack-up-and-go convenient. One remote control, two pens, and a box of tissues were the most clutter she’d left lying around. Perhaps she’d been hooked on those sell-your-home shows which preach depersonalizing your living space – anyhow, it wasn’t hard to see why the police search hadn’t taken long.
Kincaide had now moved on, and Goodhew found him adding Lorna’s bedding to the inventory of items being removed.
‘I guess she rented?’
‘Guess so,’ Kincaide grunted. ‘Haven’t got that far yet, but who can afford to buy a place here, in the centre?’ He glanced up, raised an eyebrow, and added pointedly, ‘Don’t even know who can afford to even rent in this town; you’d have to be lucky enough to have it in the family.’
Goodhew ignored the personal dig. ‘Nice bed.’ It was a king-size, with an asymmetric headboard composed of wrought-iron gothic scrolls. Nice wasn’t the right word for it; more like quirky with a touch of the Gaudi-esque.
‘You serious?’ Kincaide looked from Goodhew to the bed and back again, clearly unsure whether he was being had.
‘Absolutely.’
‘Really? I think it looks tacky, like some shitty art college project.’ Kincaide couldn’t wipe the grimace of distaste from his face, in fact he made no attempt to. ‘It looks dodgy to me. Pervy in fact. And hideous.’
Kincaide wandered off again, but Goodhew stayed behind to study the curves of the metal, trying to see it the same way Kincaide obviously had. He found himself pulling that same expression, but still didn’t understand what there was not to like.
Finally, he walked over to the window and lifted the curtain briefly, then dropped it again. He turned back and ran his fingers along the topmost curve of the bedhead, then crossed the room and began opening and closing the wardrobe. There was nothing left inside, no essence of Lorna’s presence left for him to disturb.