For a second she stood there, staring. He was still in black, but today his dress was casual – jeans, a t-shirt, a leather jacket. His head towered above those of people swirling around him. Whenever she saw him she was struck by his physical presence; his height, his good looks, the piercing dark eyes.
He took a step forward, as if to cross the road to meet her, and she panicked. Twice now she had seen him and death had followed.
Her eyes clouded with unshed tears of fear and misery, remembering the sounds in the bathroom, the way Terry had spoken to her, her lost job, her anxiety for the future. The tears made her almost blind, seeing through crystal, as she had seen shadows through the window of that bathroom when she was listening to the muffled groans of the dying girl.
She forgot she had been about to go into her apartment block. Without thinking where she was going, what she meant to do, she turned and ran towards the corner of the street. She had to get away from him before something happened.
Tearing round the corner she headed across the street towards a small alley which cut through to another road where there was a shopping centre she often visited. In there, she could hide, keep out of sight, sit at a café and observe who went past.
She ran flat out, breathing heavily, forgetting to make sure no car was coming. She was so absorbed that she didn’t hear a car turn the corner, drive up behind her, until too late.
Only when a horn blared did she look over her shoulder. A black car, a foreign make, she thought, was very close; only a few feet away, coming fast. She lunged forward, sideways to the left, to get out of its path, but at the same instant, the car swung left, too, as if the driver was, in turn, trying to avoid her.
The car’s bonnet hit her in her right side. Miranda wasn’t even conscious of the impact. Fear and pain oddly muted her sensations. She did not know that she flew up into the air, arms flung wide, legs limp, body twisting in flight.
She did not know that she landed against the metal wing and was thrown off again instantly, fell on to the tarmac of the road and just lay there, arms and legs sprawled.
She had already lost consciousness.
She came back to awareness to see a ring of faces staring down at her. Miranda focused on the cold, remote, dark eyes, not surprised to see him there.
‘Am I dead, or dying?’ she asked him, and heard the others in the crowd take a sharp, indrawn breath of shock.
He didn’t reply, just stared down at her. Pain beat through her, she found it hard to concentrate through the agony.
She couldn’t be dead, or she wouldn’t be in such pain, surely? Did dying hurt?
‘Hello there,’ a bald man in a green paramedic uniform said, smiling down as he knelt on the road, very close to her. ‘I’m Derek. What’s your name?’
Her lips fumbled sound which didn’t really emerge. She was too tired to struggle to speak; the words she tried to say bubbled silently on her lips.
Living took too much energy – was it even worth it? Had she been happy for an instant since Tom died? She had tried to get over his death, but a day had not passed without her missing him, grieving for him. Maybe she had been meant to die with him? Was that why the angel of death kept haunting her?
‘Haunting me, night and day,’ she thought aloud.
‘What’s that, darling?’ the paramedic asked, bending closer. ‘Can you tell me your name? Then we can let your family know what’s happened to you.’
She opened her mouth to speak but pain held her; she made a groaning sound instead. It hurts, it hurts, she tried to say, staring fixedly at the man’s face. He had a big nose, rough skin like lemon peel, kind eyes. She felt him willing her to speak again and she wanted to, but she couldn’t; she gave up and sank back instead into the well of pain.
The news of her accident reached Sergeant Neil Maddrell the following morning. It was handed to him by his inspector, a comfortably padded woman with startling ginger eyebrows. Neil read the faxed report several times, frowning.
‘What do you think? Is it coincidence? Or what?’ Inspector Burbage asked him in her deep, gravelly voice.
‘Or what, I’d say,’ Neil shrugged. ‘I don’t believe in coincidences this big. But I’d better interview the traffic guy who got there first, then I’ll talk to the witnesses he took evidence from. At least one of them seems to suspect the hit and run was deliberate.’
‘Depends whether the guy is paranoid, some people always suspect accidents are part of a plot. Anyway, there’s something else you ought to see.’ Inspector Burbage handed him another fax, a missing person report from an East End police station.
Neil half rose as he read, his face suddenly excited. ‘I must talk to this girl at once. If she’s the girl from the Finnigan case it changes everything.’
He began tidying up his desk, locking papers away in a top drawer.
‘Let me know how you get on, don’t forget the paperwork,’ the inspector said, waddling away like a ginger duck.
Neil took some time to get through the clotted traffic on the main road through the East End, the Mile End road, but eventually turned into a narrow lane running down to the river and the long-abandoned dockland warehouses. He parked and went up in a graffiti-scribbled lift to the fourth floor.
A small girl with a face like a petulant kitten opened the front door of a flat on the corner looking over the river and the grey expanse of buildings on the south bank.
‘Mmm?’ she mewed at him, dyed blonde hair cascading down one side of her shoulders.
‘Miss Liddie? Miss Delphine Liddie?’ Was Delphine really her name? Or had she invented it to give herself a more interesting persona?
‘Mmm,’ she admitted warily. ‘Who’re you?’
He pulled out his warrant card and showed it to her. ‘Sergeant Neil Maddrell.’
He saw her withdrawal, sensed she was thinking of slamming the door shut in his face, and added quickly, ‘About your missing flatmate – has she shown up again yet?’
‘Nah.’
A couple of women with shopping bags came past, staring.
‘Nosy cows,’ the blonde girl muttered. ‘You’d better come in.’
The flat was so grotesquely untidy that for a moment he thought it had been burgled; litter on the floor, the furniture, cans of coke standing on radiators, full ashtrays on tables, magazines and CDs lying on the carpet.
Delphine Liddie swept stuff off an armchair to join the other rubbish on the floor. ‘There you are. Take the weight off. Want a coffee?’
Briefly he hesitated, wondering how clean the cup was likely to be, then decided to risk it. Accepting hospitality made him more acceptable himself, in his experience. The public was always more forthcoming to someone they had fed or given a drink to. ‘Thanks.’
‘Black or white?’
‘Black, please.’
She vanished into a tiny kitchenette; he heard her clinking and banging about, then she came back with two mugs of black coffee.
He accepted one, saying, ‘Thanks’, again, and noting with relief that the mug looked perfectly clean. She sat down on a bean-bag shaped like a bright yellow banana, nursing her own mug, staring at him with those big, panda-like, mascara-ringed eyes. Her skin had an improbable tan, certainly not gained naturally – it probably came from a bottle, thought Neil.
‘So, tell me about your missing friend. When did you last see her?’
‘Last Sunday. She was up early, for once, Tracy don’t get up in the mornings much, but she had a lunch date, she was all dolled up for it, must have took her hours just to do her make-up, and she woke me up to borrow a few quid for fares, selfish cow, although she knew I’d been out late on the Saturday night. I only had a ten-quid note, so she took that, and promised to give it back that evening. Said she would get it off Sean.’
‘Sean?’
‘Finnigan. Tracy’s been going with him for a month or two.’
‘You’re sure of that? Have you seen them together? You’ve met him?’
‘
Once or twice he come here to pick her up. Not my type, mind. Oh, looks good, got some great clothes – but I like older men, men with a bit of character.’ She fluttered her lashes in Neil’s direction but he was not flattered. He wasn’t even middle-aged yet – what did she mean, older men? ‘But he’s loaded, his dad runs some business, computers, Tracy said, and Sean’s his only kid.’
‘Was it Sean she was meeting for lunch?’
‘Yeah, or why would she say he’d give her a few quid when she asked him? Said he owed her. But she never come back and I never got my money, did I?’
‘What did she mean, he owed her?’
‘How the hell do I know? Tracy said he was going to have to pay for his fun, whatever that meant. She’s nice enough, but she can be a tough little cow. Needs to be, like all of us. The world’s always trying to get us, we have to be tough to survive.’
‘What about her family? Have you contacted them?’
‘She ain’t got a family. There’s her dad, but he’s in a home you can’t get any sense out of him, Tracy says. He doesn’t know who he is, let alone who you are. Nobody’s at home, OK?’
‘And her mother?’
‘Died of cancer while we was at school. Real cut up, Tracy was. Loved her mum. I guess that toughened her up. The social took her away from her dad; he tried it on with her. He was losing it, even then.’
‘Have you got a photo of Tracy? What’s her full name?’
‘There’s this picture of her and me at Brighton a month ago, that suit you?’
They looked very similar, much the same height and make-up, with dyed blonde hair and bright, knowing, eyes. They wore the same sort of clothes, too. Tracy was wearing a lacy top through which you could catch glimpses of her smooth, pale skin; a straw hat with the words Kiss Me Quick printed around a red satin ribbon.
The lacy blouse gave her sexiness; the cheap hat made her look like a schoolgirl; very young and pathetic, perhaps because, mused Neil, the hindsight of suspecting she was dead altered the way you thought of her.
‘Her name’s Tracy Morgan, she said her family came from Wales,’ said Delphine. ‘I’ve known her since school. We both lived around here all our lives.’
He glanced out of the window at the ugly greyness of the streets. A life lived here must be depressing.
‘Anything else you can tell me about her, or the young man she was seeing?’
‘Yeah. She was too good for him, and you can quote me. She was OK, was Tracy. D’you think something’s happened to her? Or has she just gone off with her bloke?’
‘At the moment, I’ve no idea.’
The next time Miranda woke up she was in bed in a quiet, softly lit hospital ward. There was a bed on either side of her, both occupied, the women in them sleeping, the bedcovers pulled up to their necks. There were another three occupied beds across an expanse of polished wooden flooring. The windows had beige blinds drawn down over them. It was night, she realised. Somewhere somebody coughed. Quiet, steady footsteps came from outside.
She had spent so much time in hospital three years ago that this was all very familiar. Almost comforting. In here, she felt safe.
The pain she had been in had diminished, ebbed away. She felt calm and heavy. Miranda knew what that meant. They had drugged her. She recognised this lethargic state, the wooliness inside her head. She was unworried, unafraid, because she was tranquillised.
She carefully moved to see what injuries she had. Her right leg was in plaster, her right arm was bandaged, and there were bandages on her head.
The right must have been the side of her body that was hit by the car. Her left side seemed quite undamaged. She could move her left arm and leg freely, without pain, tentatively fingering the bandages on the other side of her body, investigating what had happened to her.
She wasn’t dead, she wasn’t even dying, she realised. The angel of death had missed again.
At least this time she had not woken up to find him in the room with her, waiting for her to die.
A nurse came over to her bed, smiling brightly, whispered, ‘Back with us again? That’s great. How do you feel?’
‘I’ll live,’ she said, and laughed, although it wasn’t really funny.
‘Well, you sound cheerful! That’s good. My name’s Sally, Nurse Embry. Can you tell me your name? Then we can get in touch with your relatives or friends, or whoever you want us to ring.’
‘I’m Miranda Grey. You’d better tell my mother, but don’t ring her until morning, I don’t want her woken up in the middle of the night and scared to death.’
The nurse scribbled on the chart hanging from the end of her bed. Miranda watched her, noticing her pallor and deep-set eyes. She looked tired, and no wonder, working all night. Miranda would have hated the job, could never have coped with the long hours or low pay, not to mention the sheer horror of what nurses had to cope with, broken bodies, blood, death.
‘We’ll need your mother’s telephone number and address.’
Miranda whispered them and the nurse wrote them down with long, elegant fingers.
‘Dorset? That’s a long way off. Is that where you grew up?’
‘No, she moved there when she retired.’
Mum had decided, in Miranda’s last year at school, to sell their London home and move out to the country. She looked for somewhere special for months without success. At last she fell in love with, and bought, a beautiful, thatched cottage in a village set way off the beaten track within miles of the sea at Lyme Regis. There were only two small, rather poky bedrooms, a huge bathroom, a big, country kitchen, a cosy sitting room. It was ideally a house for one or two people at most.
But the garden was what made Fern Cottage a wonderful home. Her mother spent hours in it, every day – pruning, weeding, mowing the lawn, deadheading roses in the busy cottage garden. Warm, pink, climbing roses sprawled across the front of the cottage every summer, twining around golden honeysuckle whose scent on summer evenings was paradisal.
When she had time, her mother loved to sit out there as long as the light lasted, reading or doing embroidery, under the tiny porch which framed the front door.
But she was always very busy. In fact, her social life was positively hectic. Far more crowded than Miranda’s and certainly more crowded than her life in London had been. Country people seemed to take more trouble over their social lives. There were fetes in summer, at the church hall, jumble sales every month or so, flower shows, film shows, gymkhanas and pet shows. Every Saturday, throughout the year, there was a dance at the village hall – country dancing, old time dancing, square dancing, line dancing. Something different every week. The band was the same and not wonderful; they all lived locally and had other jobs but lived for Saturday nights. They had a following locally, people thought a lot of them. When you didn’t have much entertainment, except TV or radio, you enjoyed anything that came along.
Her blonde hair might have turned silvery but Dorothy still had sex appeal although she didn’t work at it. It was simply something she had been born with; men reacted to it on sight, picked up the vibes she gave out, the dazzling come-hither of her smile, the glint in her eye, the sheer liveliness of the way she talked and moved and laughed. Watching men’s faces as they talked to her mother, Miranda could see that to them she seemed almost to glitter like the star on top of a Christmas tree. Men queued up to take her out and she enjoyed their company, but although she kept getting marriage proposals she always turned them down.
‘I don’t fancy being married, again, and tied down to one man. I’m having too much fun,’ she once said. ‘I like them all, but there isn’t one of them I could be serious about. I just want a partner to go dancing with, have dinner with – and I like to ring the changes. Once you really know them, there’s nothing new to learn and it gets tedious.’
‘You’re a wicked woman,’ Miranda had said, laughing. ‘As you get older, you’ll need companionship, somebody else around night and day. Surely?’
‘Maybe, but
I haven’t got to that stage yet. You won’t have realised it, yet, Miranda, but life is one stage after another. When you’re young you want to have fun, then you start yearning to get married, to have babies, all that. The biological clock starts ticking. I remember feeling that way. Been there, got the t-shirt. Now I’m on another level. I’ve been through that stage and come out the other side. I’ve discovered freedom and being responsible for yourself. I love running my own life. I don’t want a man around full time. They’re bossy. They can’t help it. It’s the testosterone. They always want to run things, tell people what to do. They feel that that’s their role in life. Well, I won’t put up with it. At the moment I’m free to make my own decisions, and I want to go on doing so. I don’t want some man around all the time, trying to run my life, giving me orders, telling me what I can and cannot do.’
Miranda had stared at her, absorbing what she said, and her mother had grinned teasingly. She still had all her own teeth, small, neat, whitish, just as she had the same trim, healthy figure she had had all Miranda’s life. Dorothy took care of herself; ate a lot of fruit and vegetables, drank the odd glass of wine, walked a lot, swam, was always busy working either in her small house, or out in the garden.
‘Am I right, or am I wrong?’ Mum had demanded.
‘It’s your life,’ Miranda had shrugged. ‘How do I know if you’re right or wrong?’
‘Oh, I’m right. To paraphrase Jean Jacques Rousseau, women are born free and everywhere they are in chains. Even worse, they seem to like it that way. Well, not me. I’ve been married. I don’t want to put the chains back on again.’
‘But you loved Dad, didn’t you? I don’t remember him as some sort of tyrant.’
‘No, of course not, but I was still a prisoner, of you as much as your dad. Duty is the worst prison of them all, don’t forget that. When you have a husband and children, you’re never free. But now I can get up when I like, go to bed when I like, do what I like.’
‘What are you smiling at?’ Nurse Embry asked as she tidied the coverlet on the bed.
‘Something my mother once said to me.’
Angel of Death Page 5