Darkness & Light: A Frank Elder Mystery (Frank Elder Mysteries)

by John Harvey

  “So it appears. But there’s no knowing exactly when. It could have been the same time as she was murdered, or it could have been before.”

  “If the bruising was only slight, might that suggest whatever was happening wasn’t against her will?”

  “It might.”

  “As if, maybe, she went along with something until it got out of hand.” Elder did a little pacing up and down. “What did Johns say? It frightened her, the way she got into it—well, suppose she got over that fear. Went off for a weekend of consensual’S and M. And presumably—I don’t know—but presumably with those things you push the boundaries a little further all the time.”

  “Until it’s too far.”

  “Right. Too far for her. And she says stop.”

  “And he doesn’t agree.” Prior stepped sharply away from the car. “What did he call it? A moderate amount of pain.”

  Elder nodded.

  “I don’t need a coffee, Frank, I need a drink.”

  THEY FOUND A PUB JUST SOUTH OF THE ROUNDABOUT, on Colwick Road. Even a recent lick of paint had failed to remove the nicotine stains fully from the walls. Maureen Prior had a large gin and tonic and Elder a Jameson with water on the side. There was a signed photograph of the Notts Country team on the wall, the side that had won promotion to the top flight in the early nineties. Tommy Johnson. Craig Short. Mark Draper.

  Prior had been glancing through the promotional literature Wayne Johns had given them on their way out.

  “Read this and you think, yes, great guy. Successful entrepreneur. All this guff about humble beginnings, picking himself up by his bootstraps—nothing about his police record, umpteen offenses before he was out of short trousers almost; banged up for stomping some bloke half to death.”

  Elder grinned. “Probably didn’t think it would bring in a lot of customers.”

  “Probably not.”

  “I’d like to know, though, if he’s really been squeaky clean ever since.”

  “There’s nothing on his record.”

  “Not here. But take a look at this. All this time he spent abroad. Portugal, Spain. We should do a little background checking, just in case.”

  “When did he come back to England?” Elder asked.

  Prior looked at the marketing pack again. “According to this, BestCon was established a little over eight years ago. Some time before that, I’d guess. A year or so?”

  “So his company was founded at around the same time Irene Fowler was killed.”

  “Around then.”

  Elder swallowed the last of his whiskey and washed it down with water. “The other men on the list,” he said, “the ones Claire Meecham arranged to meet, we should see how many shared her sexual preferences.”

  “You’re right, though if Johns is to be trusted, it might be what happened with him was a first. A first in a long time, at least. It could be it was something she’d been holding back, refusing to acknowledge. In which case, the way she responded could have taken her by surprise as much as he said. Frightened her even.”

  “Johns is what age?” Elder said. They were walking back toward the car.

  “Late forties?”

  “Claire Meecham was fifty-five.”

  “So?”

  “So isn’t it unusual, a man like Johns, a bit full of himself, likely considers himself something of a ladies’ man, he’s opting to go out with someone significantly older?”

  Prior shook her head. “You’ve seen that photograph of her, Frank, dressed up. Looking like that, he wouldn’t have to know how old she was. And besides, maybe there’s something about older women that he likes. Feels more comfortable with.”

  “That they’re more grateful, is that what you mean?”

  Prior aimed a kick at his shins that only just missed.

  ELDER HAD ARRANGED TO SEE JENNIE PRESTON THAT evening, a quick drink in the same bar in which they’d first met. Jennie wearing a black suit with a tapered jacket and flared trousers, a material that shone a little when she moved. Tiredness not quite banished from her face.

  She was there before him, a large glass of merlot and a cigarette.

  “So,” she said, “Frank, how’s it going?”

  “Slowly. When there’s no obvious suspect it takes time. A lot of routine questioning. Checking. Checking again. But I think now we’ve got one or two leads that are starting to look promising.”

  “One or two?”

  Elder smiled.

  “And that’s all? That’s all you can say?”

  He gestured with open hands. “It’s still early days.”

  “Derek said if you don’t catch them in the first—what is it?—forty-eight hours, you don’t catch them at all.”

  “Derek’s wrong.”

  “Is he?” Stubbing out her cigarette, she reached for another.

  “Look,” Elder said, “most murders, the ones that aren’t gang related, they’re carried out by someone close, husband, wife, lover, someone in the family. What’s making it more difficult here is not knowing, any of us, just who exactly Claire was closest to. But there is movement, believe me. The investigation, it’s not stalled. Far from it.”

  “But you can’t tell me...?”

  “Not at the moment, no. I’m sorry.”

  Jennie leaned back and closed her eyes. Work finished, a few more people were beginning to drift into the bar. Men, for the most part in suits and ties. Leather cases. Laptops. Laughter that was too false and too loud.

  “The police,” Jennie said. “I keep trying to find out when they’ll release Claire’s body. For the funeral. Soon, someone says, a couple of days. Next time I ring, it’s ‘oh no, we’re sorry, it may be a while yet.’ I can’t get a straight answer out of anyone.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Would you? I just feel this need, you know, to get things organized. As far as I can, move on.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  Jennie finished her wine. “I ought to be going. Early start tomorrow.”

  Outside, it was still light. The temperature had dropped but not by very much.

  “Joanne, Frank,” Jennie said. “Have you seen her?”

  “Not for a while.”

  “You should, you know.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Frank.” She touched her fingers to the back of his hand. “She’s lonely.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “If that’s what you want to believe.” She took a step off the curb. “When you’ve talked to the police about Claire, you’ll phone me?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  A scuttle of heels and she was gone.

  Elder moved away from the entrance. Something Anna Ingram had said earlier was replaying inside his head. Something about the compromises that relationships, serious relationships, demand. The kind of accommodations we make in order that things might last.

  In 1989, when Katherine was just three, they had moved from Lincolnshire down to London, primarily so that Joanne could broaden her experience and further her career. Eight years later, with Katherine on the verge of starting secondary school and Elder well settled into the Met, she had urged them to move again, to Nottingham this time, so that she could manage one of Martyn Miles’s salons. Katherine had moaned, complained, shut herself in her room; Elder had bit his tongue and complied, agreed.

  Now he was back here again.

  And why?

  Because helping out Joanne’s friend had been a way of being close to Katherine, just when he feared they might be losing touch for good?

  Or was it something to do with Joanne herself?

  Lonely?

  Well, there were ways of coming to terms with that, he knew.

  Chapter 25

  1966

  ALICE KNEW SHE WAS TIRED; SHE’D BEEN TIRED FOR THE better part of a week. Longer. But this was different. Sitting there, watching the boy first play with the soft toys, as he now liked to do, then colouring and drawing, Alice encouraging him to
talk, to understand and explain what he was doing, it had been all she could do to keep her attention focused, her eyes open.

  In the staff room, she fumbled a tea bag out of the tin where they were kept and into her mug. Damned kettle taking an age to boil. There was a case conference about the boy and through the open door she could see Felix Gerber, the consultant child psychiatrist, already in there waiting.

  Jock Mirren, the boy’s social worker, nudged her arm as he came and stood alongside. “Enough water in the kettle for me, too, I hope?”

  “What’s wrong?” Gerber said once she’d entered, the words out his mouth before she’d even sat down.

  “Just tired, that’s all.”

  But he wouldn’t be so easily put off. “It’s the boy, isn’t it?” he said. “Something’s getting to you. Something’s up.”

  Alice shook her head. “It’s nothing. Nothing I can put my finger on. It’s just something making me uneasy. I can’t put it into words.”

  “Try.”

  “Yes,” Mirren joked. “Articulate. We are the professionals, after all.”

  “Very funny,” Alice said.

  “All right,” Gerber said, “let’s think through what’s going on. See if we can’t see what exactly the problems are.”

  “Okay. The problem is,” Alice said, “instead of finding it easier to reach him, it becomes more difficult. Every time I seem to be getting somewhere I keep butting up against the mother, and it’s like coming up against a brick wall.”

  “Jock,” Gerber said, “you’ve been seeing the mother.”

  “Should’ve been seeing the mother, more like. Three of the last four sessions she’s cancelled at the last minute. The one time she did deign to show her face, she turned up twenty bloody minutes late and then found an excuse for leaving early.”

  “And when she is there?”

  “Resentful as buggery she has to be in the building at all. Way she sees it, her little darling’s being made a scapegoat by the school because they can’t control him—all the usual palaver. Anything other than admit there’s something wrong. Something amiss that might need to be addressed.”

  Gerber tapped ash from the end of his cigarette. “Trust your instincts, Alice. The situation here—what’s going on?”

  Alice screwed up her eyes. “I think the mother’s seducing the child.”

  “The boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, come on!” Mirren exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “Not that again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and bloody Oedipus. It’s your answer to everything.”

  Alice shot him a slashing look, pushed back her chair, and headed for the door.

  “Alice...” Gerber said, appealing.

  The door slammed shut at her back.

  “Oh, fuck!” Mirren said.

  “You might,” Gerber said, “have expressed that with a bit more tact.”

  TWO WEEKS LATER A COPY OF A LETTER FROM THE BOY’S mother arrived, forwarded by the school: because of personal circumstances, they were moving to another part of the country and she would, therefore, be withdrawing her son from the school. Unfortunately, this would mean that the therapy would cease.

  Chapter 26

  ELDER HAD BEEN AWAKE SINCE SOMETHING AFTER FOUR, thoughts chasing themselves haphazardly through what, at that hour, passed for a brain. Coherence all but impossible. Easing back the blinds, he had stood at the Ice House window, staring out. Two murders, years apart. Two women, two deaths, similar but not the same. Maureen had never been as convinced they were the work of the same man.

  He made coffee and drank it black. He should write things down again, similarities, differences, a list. The coffee was strong with no more than a hint of bitterness. The book he’d been trying to read lay on the floor beside the bed. The Fox in the Attic. Two men, the sea marsh, the mist; a dead girl folded, almost, in two. For him the book had faltered when he was still a good third from the end, casting him adrift amid a tide of German politics he failed to understand. What he would remember always was the image of the dead girl, her heels bouncing off the man’s chest as he walked.

  You saw what you saw and shucked the rest.

  Two men.

  Two men, two deaths?

  He finished his coffee, showered, and dressed.

  Two men or one?

  Outside it was cold still, a lingering chill, and he hastened his steps. It was early enough to nod at anyone you passed—dog walkers, joggers, workers coming on or off shift, insomniacs like himself. Sometimes a brief “Morning,” hand raised.

  When had he last slept past four? Four-thirty at best? His body tense for the call that would alert him to some small catastrophe, some dreadful crime. No matter that it was all a way of life he had sought to leave behind.

  Dreadful, he thought again: a word that had lost much of its meaning, except perhaps for himself and others like him.

  The photographs were pinned to the office wall.

  Irene Fowler’s face leaned to one side on the pillow, eyes open and empty; her arms rested across her body, hands touching, a picture of repose and rest. The dress that she was wearing as she lay there was almost without a crease, as if the last thing her murderer had done before covering her was to smooth it evenly down. Beneath it, she wore clean underwear, without spot or stain.

  Elder looked again at the ring on her right hand.

  At the hand from which the wedding ring had been removed.

  The overwhelming impression, the impression Elder guessed whoever had lain her there had been striving for, was one of tranquillity and peace.

  Though Claire Meecham had also appeared to be fully dressed, she had been wearing nothing beneath her skirt and blouse. In his mind’s eye, Elder saw the murderer carrying the body into the room and lowering it onto the bed.

  What then?

  Did he linger in the room, gazing down at his victim? And if so, what thoughts were in his mind? Love? Lust? Regret?

  The marks around Irene Fowler’s neck, where she had been strangled, suggested as little force as necessary had been used; those on Claire Meecham the same.

  For a moment another image came to Elder’s mind—the Stieglitz photograph on Vincent Blaine’s wall, hands reaching up toward the throat, the neck.

  What had Blaine said?

  Up to a point, we all see what we want to see.

  Elder took a step back.

  The way the women had been dressed and left was a conscious, careful, bizarrely loving act. An act, almost, he guessed, of adoration.

  Elder heard a door open at his back.

  “Frank?”

  Maureen Prior came to stand at his shoulder.

  “The early bird, Frank? Saturday, too?”

  He told her what he had been thinking, as clearly as he could.

  ANNA INGRAM WAS WEARING AN ANKLE-LENGTH PURPLE linen skirt and a cream cheesecloth shirt over a camisole top, her red hair pinned into a swirl around her face. “So,” she said, walking almost the length of the long, central room, “you did come after all.”

  “You’re surprised?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Elder had been in the museum a good twenty minutes or so, moving between rooms. Paintings of fishing boats at harbour; lobster pots and nets; whitewashed cottages near the edge of the sea.

  “You’ve had a chance to look around?”

  “A little.”

  “And what do you think?”

  Elder smiled. “It’s very nice” he said, aware of the inadequacy of his reply.

  “Here,” she said, taking him for a moment by the arm. “Let me show you my favourites.”

  She led him toward a pair of oils, quite small, not much more than a metre across. In the first, a woman in a purple hat and white apron stood in the middle ground, a basket on one arm; behind her a tumble of buildings rose above a whitewalled cottage with a thatched roof. In the other, the figure of another woman, buckets in bot
h hands, was shown approaching along a narrow alley, steeped in shadow, the wall at her back the only bright thing in the painting.

  “Mark Senior,” Anna said. “He started painting in and around Staithes when he was in his twenties and studying at Leeds. He helped found the Staithes Art Club in 1901.” She smiled. “Hark at me. I sound like Vincent. Lecturing. Droning on.”

  “No, it’s interesting.”

  “Now you’re just being polite.”

  Elder looked back at the two paintings. To him they seemed oddly unfocused; one even looked unfinished.

  “They’re good, aren’t they?” Anna Ingram said.

  “Yes,” Elder said.

  “I did a dissertation on Mark Senior once, back when I was a student. Now, for my sins, I’m working on a monograph of Harold Knight—that’s one of his over there, the woman with her hands together in prayer. He was born here in Nottingham, you know, Harold. Married a girl from Long Eaton. Laura. Laura Knight as she became.”

  Elder nodded. He’d seen some of her paintings in one of the other rooms.

  “Bit of a star was Laura. Still is. Quite overshadowed her husband.” Anna smiled again, more broadly. “Nice to know it can be done. Once in a while.”

  “So why Staithes?” Elder asked, stepping away.

  “You know it at all? That part of the coast?”

  “Yes.” He knew it too well. The village was not so far north of the isolated spot where Katherine had been kept prisoner. So much kept coming back to that.

  “Once the railway went there,” Anna said, “visitors started coming for more or less the first time. Artists among them. Sea and scenery aside, I think they liked the fact that the village itself still seemed shut off, closed in on itself. There was a rawness about it that appealed. For a while at least.” She looked at him keenly. “You haven’t really come to see the paintings, have you?”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not that interested. Not really.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  Anna’s mouth slipped into a smile. “Once upon a time I would have been vain enough to think it was because you were interested in me, but it’s not that, either.”