by Nicola Upson
She looked round again, wondering if the room could offer her a shortcut in getting to know her neighbour. The film posters on the walls suggested that at least they had a love of the cinema in common, but there was very little else lying around that was frivolous. Most of the books on the shelves were medical textbooks, and Mary seemed to be as dedicated to her profession in her spare time as she was while on duty; even the magazine that Josephine had collected from the bathroom floor was the latest issue of a nursing journal. She walked over to the bedside table and looked at a small collection of photographs which showed Mary at various stages of her life: as a teenager with her mother and father; in uniform at her graduation; and—more recently—on holiday with a pleasant-faced young man, who could have been either boyfriend or brother; if it was the latter, he had none of the telltale family traits which so clearly bonded Mary with her parents.
There was a small suitcase on top of the wardrobe and she took it down to pack some clothes, choosing items that were both seasonal and as different as possible from the ones that Mary had been wearing the night before. She opened the wardrobe to look for some shoes, and stopped in horror when she saw the words scrawled in lurid pink lipstick on the mirror inside the door: ‘Sleep Tight’. Feeling suddenly faint, Josephine sat down on the bed and stared at her own ashen-faced reflection in the glass. The message screamed out at her, mocking and contemptuous, and it was several minutes before she found the strength to stand up and wipe it off. Why on earth had the police left it there, she wondered? Of course they had more urgent things to do than clean and polish, but surely they must realise the impact of allowing any victim to come home to something so destructive?
She left the house as soon as there was no trace of the lipstick left and closed the door firmly behind her, pleased to lift her face to the sun. Birds were singing in the churchyard opposite, blissfully oblivious to all that concerned her, and she took comfort from the idea that some things could never be tainted, even on the threshold of evil. A familiar wheelbarrow stood just the other side of the railings, and she noticed that the gardener she had met in Little St Mary’s Lane had moved on to work his magic at St Clement’s. He returned her smile when he noticed her, but without any sign of recognition, then carried on with what he was doing. She watched him for a while, enjoying the sense of peace that always struck her in someone who loved the land, be it a town garden like this or the fields that surrounded her Suffolk cottage, but then she noticed how often he looked up from his work to stare at the houses nearby.
Unsettled, she opened her front door and went inside, but now that the idea had planted itself in her head she found it impossible to shake it off. How easy it would be for that gardener to get to know the habits of a street simply by going about his business, she thought. He could have watched Mary’s house for days, getting used to her comings and goings, realising that some of the rooms were empty and watching her landlady leave with a suitcase. She remembered his hands from the other day and thought of the marks on Mary’s sheets, then told herself again that she was being ridiculous: you didn’t have to be a gardener to carry dirt around with you. But there was something else, too: according to the newspaper story she had read with Marta, the last attack had taken place in St Peter’s Street; although Josephine didn’t know where that was, it was reasonable to assume from the name that there was a church nearby. The last thing she wanted was to accuse an innocent man, but what if all the rapes so far had taken place in houses overlooking a churchyard? Surely that couldn’t be a coincidence. She thought of Phyllis, living alone in Little St Mary’s Lane while her mother was away, waving a friendly hello to the gardener as she headed off into town, and suddenly her fears for the girl were more intense than ever.
*
Addenbrooke’s Hospital was a different place altogether by daylight. Josephine arrived amid the hustle and bustle of visiting time, and waited while two nurses stood by Mary’s bed, taking her temperature and making sure she was comfortable. She watched their no-nonsense kindness as they worked, surprised by how intensely their cheerful camaraderie brought back memories of her own nursing days. By contrast, their patient seemed tired and withdrawn, and Josephine guessed that the night she had passed—the examinations and the endless questioning, followed by another visit from the police—had merely extended and compounded the ordeal of the evening before.
The nurses finished their checks and Mary did her best to smile when she saw her visitor. ‘I’ve brought you some clean clothes,’ Josephine said, sitting down at her bedside. ‘You won’t want to put the others back on.’
‘The police took them, thank God,’ Mary said vehemently. ‘I don’t want to see them ever again. But thank you for thinking of that.’
Josephine nodded, wishing that all the other reminders of what had happened to Mary Ennis could be so easily destroyed. ‘How are you?’ she asked. ‘If that isn’t a stupid question.’
‘Better now they’ve let me wash. I must have used up a week’s supply of disinfectant, and I can still smell him. I don’t think I’ll ever feel clean again.’
‘Did you remember anything else to tell the police?’ Josephine asked quietly.
‘Not really. He made me go into the timings in more detail, but I’m not sure it helped. I felt so sick going through it all again, and it took ages for him to write it all down. It was like reliving it all in slow motion, but he was very kind.’ She paused, and looked sincerely at Josephine. ‘And so were you. Thank you for everything you did last night. I don’t know how I’d have coped if you hadn’t been there.’
‘Anyone would have done the same.’ She poured a glass of water from the jug on the bedside table and handed it to Mary. ‘Did the doctor say how long they intend to keep you here?’
‘A couple of days, apparently.’
‘What will you do then? You can’t possibly go back to that house on your own.’ Mary was quiet, and Josephine guessed that she was still too shocked to have thought about any practical arrangements. ‘You’d be very welcome to stay with me until your landlady comes back, but I’d also understand if you never wanted to see St Clement’s Passage again.’
‘It’s not that. I’d love to accept your offer, but my parents are coming to collect me and take me back to Yorkshire. They want me at home with them, at least for now.’
‘How did they take it?’
‘They were devastated, but no one shouted or cried. We’re a restrained family. Stiff upper lip and all that.’
Josephine smiled, trying to imagine how difficult it must have been for Mary to break the news to her parents. ‘Well, it’s probably best if they take care of you for a while.’
‘Oh, they’ll do that all right. They were never happy about my leaving home—not coming all the way down here, anyway. Addenbrooke’s was my passport to freedom, but I had to work hard to get it. My parents would much rather I’d stayed at home in a tiny market town and married the boy next door, even though I didn’t love him and never would.’
‘All parents want that, deep down. It doesn’t have to be for ever, though.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Mary said, although there was very little fight in her voice. ‘Where did you do your nursing?’ she asked, changing the subject.
Josephine sensed that Mary wanted to talk about anything other than herself, and she was happy to humour her. ‘In Inverness,’ she said, ‘at a place called Hedgefield. It was a military convalescent home. I’d had some medical training at a college in Birmingham, and I was a VAD during the war.’
‘Why did you give it up?’
‘I didn’t love it, and I think you have to love it to be good at it. Teaching suited me better—for a while, at least. What about you?’ she asked. ‘How long have you been qualified?’
‘Two years. And you’re right—you do have to love it. I can’t imagine doing anything else, and Addenbrooke’s is a wonderful place to learn. One day, I’d like to go abroad and really make a difference somewhere.’
�
��Then promise me that you won’t let this stop you.’
Mary said nothing, staring at the glass and running her fingers repeatedly round its rim. ‘I thought I was going to die, Josephine,’ she admitted eventually. ‘I felt that knife at my throat and I really thought he was going to kill me. For a moment last night, I was so happy just to be alive, but all that’s gone now and I don’t know how to feel. There’s just this void, this emptiness, and I can’t see a way out.’
Josephine took Mary’s hand and spoke as convincingly as she could. ‘I know this is easy for me to say, but his hold over you ended when he left the room, and it’s up to you to decide how much he’s hurt you. You fought and you survived, Mary. Now you’ve got to find the strength to keep doing it.’
13
A copy of Giles Shorter’s post-mortem report was waiting on Penrose’s desk when he got in to Scotland Yard on Saturday morning, together with statements from the vicar’s housekeeper and the attending officers, and he offered up a prayer of thanks for the efficiency of the Essex police. He sat down and glanced through the relevant background information before reading the reports in more detail: Shorter had been vicar at the church of St John the Baptist in Finchingfield for nearly ten years, having arrived there in 1928 after a spell in London where he campaigned on behalf of destitute ex-servicemen; by the time he got to Essex, his more political work seemed to have been replaced by gentler pursuits—an interest in ecclesiastical architecture, on which he had published a number of learned papers, and a fondness for amateur dramatics. He was a bachelor, said to be popular throughout the parish, with a broad network of friends and colleagues whom he had entertained at the vicarage on a regular basis. According to an effusive obituary in the parish magazine, Shorter’s tragic and premature death at the age of just forty-five had deprived his family of a much-loved son and brother, and the village of a wise and sympathetic friend.
By comparison, the findings of the post-mortem report were blunt to the point of brutal. As Fallowfield had said, the vicar died after a fall on the staircase at his home. The accident had taken place sometime during the night of the tenth of August and his body was discovered early the next morning when his housekeeper, Mrs Rogers, arrived to start work. Shorter’s injuries were extensive, but entirely consistent with a fall down a flight of stairs: his vertebral column was fractured in several places, and the post-mortem revealed severe damage to the skull and internal organs, but the detail that caught Penrose’s eye was an unexplained scratch on his face. While the pathologist refused to speculate on the cause of the fall, it had been noted that there was no evidence of intoxication in Shorter’s bloodstream and that the stair rod on the second step from the top was dangerously loose; the most likely scenario suggested at the inquest was that the vicar had tripped on the loose carpet in the dark and fallen the full length of the first flight of stairs. The housekeeper, he was interested to note, insisted that the stair rod had been in place when she swept the stairs the day before, but it was hard to say if her protestations were truthful or inspired by guilt at having inadvertently brought about the accident through carelessness. Either way, there was no suggestion of foul play.
Penrose read through the post-mortem report again to make sure that he hadn’t missed anything. Usually a pathologist’s meticulous account helped him to recall a scene that he had witnessed with his own eyes, but the habit of creating mental pictures from the precise language of science served him well here, and, as he read, he saw in his mind’s eye Shorter’s bruised and broken body lying at the bottom of the stairs, clad only in a nightshirt; he saw his limbs twisted at an impossible angle and the livid red scratch on a deathly pale face; and when his imagination got the better of him and left the facts of the report behind, he saw another figure standing in the shadows on the staircase, a figure whose violent intent had taken him to Hampstead and to Felixstowe, but who so far remained stubbornly out of sight.
He picked up the telephone and asked the operator to put him through to the vicarage in Finchingfield. ‘Mrs Rogers?’ he asked, when a breathless voice finally answered.
‘That’s right. I’m sorry, but I’ve just come in from the garden and I’m a bit short of breath. Who is this?’
‘My name is Detective Chief Inspector Penrose and I’m calling from Scotland Yard. I wondered if you had time to answer a couple of questions about the Reverend Shorter’s death?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, but he could hear the wariness in her voice. ‘I did think that was all over and done with, though. I never left that stair rod out of place, I swear I didn’t.’
‘It’s not the stair rod I’m calling about. Actually, I was hoping you might be able to give me an insight into the days that led up to the Reverend Shorter’s death. Did he have any unexpected visitors, or seem out of sorts in any way?’
‘No, not that I can think of. He was worried about his parents—his father had been in poor health recently and his mother was taking on too much in caring for him—but that had been going on for months. As for visitors, Mr Giles had people popping in and out all the time and he loved that. He certainly wasn’t out of sorts.’
‘Did he ever have friends to stay? People he’d known from university, for example.’
‘He’d collected people his whole life as far as I could tell,’ she said, and Penrose was struck by the contrast between Giles Shorter’s life and the solitary existence that Stephen Laxborough had apparently chosen. ‘I dare say some of the regulars might have been from Cambridge, but I wouldn’t really know about that. I just got their meals ready for them and made sure they were comfortable.’
Her tone was increasingly suspicious, and Penrose knew he would soon have to justify his questions. ‘What about post? Did he receive any letters that upset him?’
‘No, not that I’m aware of. I don’t understand why you’re asking all these questions now, though. I would have thought the time to be a bit more thorough was when it happened.’
‘You don’t think that the Reverend’s death was thoroughly investigated?’
She hesitated before answering, and Penrose felt the drawbridge being firmly raised. ‘I know I didn’t leave that stair rod loose. That’s all I’m saying.’
‘All right, Mrs Rogers,’ Penrose said, conceding defeat. ‘Thank you for your time, and if you have any more thoughts on the Reverend Shorter’s death, or the enquiry into it, please don’t hesitate to contact Scotland Yard. I give you my word that any comments you make will be taken seriously. I’ll take care of it myself.’ There was a silence at the other end of the line. ‘Mrs Rogers? Will you do that for me?’
‘Take care—that was strange, now I come to think about it. I’d completely forgotten, but what you just said reminded me.’
‘Reminded you of what?’
‘A couple of weeks before he died, Mr Giles did receive something in the post that he couldn’t make head or tail of. I suppose you’d call it a note, but all it said was “take care”. There was no signature, and Mr Giles hadn’t got a clue who’d sent it or what it meant.’
‘Was there a photograph with it?’ Penrose asked, suddenly excited. ‘A photograph of a large house, perhaps?’
‘No, nothing else. Just a single piece of paper with the words handwritten on it.’
‘I don’t suppose you’ve still got it?’
‘No. I was in the room when Mr Giles tore it up, envelope and all. But there was a book . . .’
She tailed off, obviously trying to remember something, and Penrose waited impatiently. ‘A book with the letter?’ he prompted eventually.
‘No, not with the letter. It was lying next to him when I found him that morning. I wondered at the time if that was why he’d come down in the first place, to go to the library. It seemed an odd thing to do in the middle of the night but he sometimes had trouble sleeping. Anyway, the book was open as if it had fallen out of his hand, and I’m sure there was a photograph of a house on that page. I didn’t take much notice of it at the time,
though.’
‘Was the book definitely from his own collection?’
‘Oh yes, on architecture—he had a lot of those. I put it back in its place on the shelf after they took him away.’
‘Is it still there?’
‘I suppose so. The new vicar hasn’t touched the library yet, as far as I know.’
‘Then perhaps you’d do something for me, Mrs Rogers? Would you look through the book and see if you can find the page again? Once you’ve found the house you remember, perhaps you’d be kind enough to let me know what it’s called. I’ll leave you my telephone number.’
There was a long silence at the other end of the line and he thought she was going to refuse, but when she spoke again it was with a mixture of sadness and relief. ‘I know something’s going on and you won’t tell me what it is, but I have to ask—does this mean it really wasn’t my fault? I know in my heart that I didn’t leave that stair rod out of place, but everyone seemed so sure about what happened and they’ve had me doubting my own mind. I could never forgive myself if Mr Giles died because of me.’
‘I don’t believe he did,’ Penrose said firmly, sorry that she had had to nurse this corrosive sense of doubt for so long, ‘and I hope to be able to prove that very soon.’