by Jane Adams
Cate blinked aside the tears that threatened whenever she thought of Allis. She missed her so much she felt almost split in two. The two of them might have been different in temperament and four years apart in age, but they had been very close, especially after their mother had died and so much more of the responsibility fallen on their shoulders. Their mother, Aeldryn, had been at the heart of their small community. Her knowledge of herbs and healing salves and the best plants for dyeing cloth were unchallenged in the neighbourhood. Her death had left a hole that the two girls together had tried hard to fill. Now Allis was gone too and Cate knew herself to be incapable of plugging such a gap. Sometimes the responsibility felt overwhelming for a woman of just sixteen years. Sometimes, she felt such rage at Allis for choosing to go when she, Cate, had no option but to stay. Other times, most times, her grief at her sister’s loss was far greater than her anger.
She looked round at the sound of feet on the steps behind her. Edmund came out and stood, as she had done, staring towards the wood and the path that led towards Theadingford. Golden, autumnal light was giving way now to a blazing red that filled the sky as the sun set beyond the line of trees and flushed the few white clouds with rose.
“What do you think of him?” Edmund asked.
“Treven or Hugh?” she asked.
Edmund snorted. “I don’t need to ask what you made of Hugh de Vries,” he said harshly. “Or what he thought of you. Have a care, little sister. You may not like my brother overmuch, but he’s still your husband. He’d not take kindly to his wife following the way of mine.”
“And what way’s that?” Cate demanded. Then she sighed. “I’m sorry, Edmund. I’d not cause you pain for anything. Allis was strong minded and wrong-headed all lifelong. She’d ever have her own way, no matter who or what stood between.”
“I know it,” Edmund said. “Cate, I think, truly, that she and Eldred would have been better matched.”
“Lord, no. Can you imagine the storms? Each as determined as the other to get their way?” She laughed briefly at the thought of it, but the laughter choked and diminished into sobs that she tried hard to contain.
Edmund reached out and patted her hand. “Her going has caused you great pain, I know. Truth is I miss her too, Cate. While I can’t say with honesty that she was a good wife, she was a good companion when the mood took her. And a more knowledgeable, sharper-minded woman I never met.”
“Nor sharper tongued!” Cate managed a smile. “I know you love her, Edmund.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “I do and, Cate, if she stumbled back here tomorrow or in a year from now and asked me to take her in, I would and I’d face down any man or woman that even suggested I should be shamed to do it.”
“She won’t come back,” Cate said softly.
“Can you be so sure? That . . . man . . . she left me for, you think he’ll give her the life she hopes for?” He shook his head. “No, Cate, I’d see him dead and pay what blood price his kin thought him worth, but I’d have her back.”
Cate didn’t reply, she pretended to busy herself with some invisible tangle in her thread and Edmund chose not to press the point further. Instead, he turned and went back inside.
“She won’t be coming back,” Cate whispered. She bowed her head and the tears fell onto her hands as she wound the remaining twine back onto the spindle. Cate had heard her leave that night and had almost called out to her, begged her not to go. But she’d resisted the temptation to keep her sister there on her own account. She’d seen how happy Allis had been those past months, falling in love with Owain, stealing time with him, fearful of being caught but utterly unable to desist. Cate envied her that passion, that intensity of love that made her risk everything, be willing to leave all she knew behind — including Cate herself — and there was a small part of the younger sister that found that hard to forgive. Cate longed for such devotion.
But in the end, it had all been lost. Cate knew that as surely as she knew, watching the red and gold of the evening sky, that tomorrow would be a bright, fine day. She knew because she had seen another figure leave that night and, much later on, return. She’d seen him throw something the thickness of a man’s arm into the deepest part of the pond and then fall to his knees, weeping, soundless sobs that wracked his body. And Cate had known then that Allis had lost her dream.
Allis was gone. Dead and gone and Cate, even knowing who had been responsible, could tell no-one what she had seen.
CHAPTER 6
PRESENT DAY
Although Rozlyn had known Charlie Higgins for almost seven years, she had never been to his tiny flat on the sixth floor of Haywood House, one of the few remaining tower blocks in that part of town.
Haywood wasn’t bad, as such things went, Rozlyn mused. Sure, there was graffiti in the stairwell and the lift smelt of piss and drunks, but usually it worked, which was a definite plus in a twelve-storey building. The tower had been taken over by a private housing association the previous year and they’d put security locks on the main doors and provided a man and dog to do evening patrols. They’d also formed a tenants’ association in an attempt to deal with the problems of rowdy teens with nowhere to go and had provided play facilities for their younger siblings. Rozlyn had attended one of their earlier meetings, directed to do so by DCI Brook, who informed her that this month’s buzz was the importance of community policing. To Rozlyn’s reply that community policing was the domain of uniform, she was further informed that the directive from on high was to improve community relations between the police and the ethnic minorities and as one of the few representatives of such they had handy, she’d better get herself down there and show just how inclusive modern policing could be. Rozlyn gathered from this that ‘inclusive’ was another of the latest buzzwords that Brook had finally decided he ought to use.
She went to the meeting.
Charlie Higgins had been there with a handful of other tenants, mainly pensioners, Rozlyn noted. They sat around, staring uncomfortably at the representative from the housing association as she tried hard to find out what it was that they wanted for their community and, more importantly, what was actually possible given a distinct lack of budget.
At the time, Rozlyn had put the presence of Charlie Higgins down to his wanting to impress his pet police officer, but, looking round the flat, Rozlyn began to think there might have been far more to it than that. That Charlie Higgins might genuinely have cared what happened to the place in which he lived.
There were three flats per landing, and two landings per floor, branching off from the staircase. The landings, being communal, depended for their upkeep on the willingness of tenants. Charlie’s landing was spotless. There were even plastic tubs of flowers placed outside the doors, a rarity in Haywood House, where anything not nailed down was likely to be nicked or tossed over the balcony, despite the improved security. The entrance door to Charlie’s flat was painted in a vivid red and the brass letterbox gleamed as though recently polished. The door was open, left ajar by the search team already inside. Rozlyn could hear them chatting and was glad to recognise the voice of DC Jenny Harper. If there was anything to find in Charlie’s flat, Jenny would make certain it surfaced; she had a bloodhound instinct for the relevant. Rozlyn pushed the door open and went inside.
There were three in the search team. SOCO had already done their thing and here and there doorframes and shelves were mired with fine, silver grey powder but, Rozlyn noted, there were remarkably few prints in Charlie’s apartment and, apart from that which the fingerprint officer had left, remarkably little dust. Charlie’s place was beyond clean; well past being tidy. Despite the careful ravages of the search crew, Charlie’s flat was immaculately organised and precisely ordered.
Rozlyn stood on the threshold to the living room and stared about. The walls were magnolia and there was no carpet. The parts that showed revealed the vinyl tiling that the local council used in all its buildings. Most of this was covered by four matching red rugs, precisely pla
ced so that their edges lined up with the squares of tiling. One had already been rolled back and the floor beneath checked, but Rozlyn guessed the others had been left in place precisely so that she could get the best impression of the room as it had been.
Charlie’s furniture was old and worn. A three-seater sofa, upholstered in the kind of sage green moquette that Rozlyn would always associate with nursing homes and two mis-matched armchairs; one blue, the other a dark shade of green.
“He’d covered them with throws,” Jenny told her, holding up a length of cream fabric.
Red cushions, Rozlyn noted, matching the rugs on the vinyl covered floor. The team had removed the covers and examined them before stacking them back on the sofa, covers folded on the arm; cushions on the seat. Rozlyn could almost feel Charlie’s anguish at this disorder and it was all she could do not to begin posting the plump cushion pads back into their velvet envelopes.
“Found anything?”
Jenny shrugged. “We only got here half an hour ago. Place was neat and tidy. No signs of anything untoward. SOCO was right, he wasn’t killed here. He took care of his place anyway and from what we’ve found so far, all his personal stuff is in those drawers over there. We thought we’d wait for you. Stan’s in the kitchen and I’ve sent Andy into the bedroom, but it won’t take either of them long.”
Rozlyn nodded thanks and went over to the sideboard Jenny had indicated. It was large, 1930s by the design, with art-deco carving running across the front of the two drawers and trimming the lower border of the cupboards beneath. It had been lovingly polished and cared for. A linen runner, crudely embroidered with flowers, protected the dull sheen of the unfashionably dark wood. A glass tray sat on top of this with matching moulded-glass candlesticks set with great precision on either side.
Charlie had a thing for charity shops, Rozlyn remembered. She wondered if this nasty little runner and cheap glass had been amongst his finds.
Rozlyn opened the cupboards first and peered inside. Crockery and glass, stacked with care on shelves lined with newspaper. Rozlyn bent her head round to see the date. Three months before and taken from a copy of the Sun. Charlie habitually read the Guardian in Rozlyn’s presence or scrounged Rozlyn’s copy of the Guardian, but he always made a point of reading a tabloid as well. He said he’d seen in some film or other that this was the only way to keep up with the news properly. Read a broadsheet and a tabloid every day and what one missed the other got. Charlie had no internet and so had never bothered with online news, as far as Rozlyn knew.
Rozlyn couldn’t recall which film he’d said it was.
“Check underneath the papers,” she reminded Jenny.
“Of course.”
She grinned at her and turned back to look at the drawers.
“Don’t know if you noticed,” Jenny commented. “Nothing in the cupboards match. He’d got a cheap dinner service in the kitchen, half a dozen mugs and the same of glasses, all from the same range, but those things in there . . . mostly thirties, I’d guess. There’s even the odd bit of Claris Cliff.”
Rozlyn looked again at the mix of glass and crockery in the sideboard and saw that Jenny was right. She took out a stack of plates and shuffled through them. “He liked charity shops and flea markets,” she said. “I remember him mentioning it a time or two, telling me what he found.” She remembered tuning him out, too, switching off what she saw as Charlie’s irrelevant chattering and was suddenly struck by a sharp and unexpected stab of regret. What had she really known about this lonely middle-aged man? She recalled Mouse Man’s declaration that Charlie had got into whatever it was that killed him to prove himself to Rozlyn and the shame that she’d taken so little notice of someone that clearly hung on her every word, deepened.
She frowned and mentally shook herself. Charlie was an informant. A tick of a man, just as she’d told Big Frank Parker. But, as she’d also told Big Frank, Charlie had been Rozlyn’s tick and, more and more, Rozlyn was feeling his death as a personal affront.
Charlie had made some cardboard dividers for the drawers. Each one was separated into four sections. Letters, bills and personal documents were filed like with like.
“You seen this?”
Jenny nodded, coming over to stand beside her. “Puts me to shame,” she said. “I just chuck everything in a pile. What was he like, this Charlie Higgins?”
Good question, Rozlyn thought.
“Middle aged. I’d have said fairly well educated, though he never had a proper job that I knew about. Did a lot of little backhanders. A bit of cleaning here and there . . .”
Jenny laughed. “Cleaning! He could have headed up one of those reality TV shows. You know where those two women tell you how filthy your house is?”
Rozlyn shook her head. “Can’t say I do.”
“Oh, I forgot. You don’t watch television.”
“Not often. No.”
Jenny laughed again. “Can’t imagine life without my telly,” she said. “Only thing I feel like doing when I get home. Glass of wine, ready meal, telly.”
“Oh, the sophistication! Left drawer or right?”
“Left. So, what else. You knew him what . . . ?”
“Seven years or so. But I wouldn’t say I knew him. Not as such. He was . . . part of the scenery, I suppose. Just . . . well, just there.”
“Hmmm,” Jenny slid her selected drawer from its space and paused to feel around inside the sideboard before carrying it over to the sofa and placing it carefully on the floor. Rozlyn followed her.
“Anyone to miss him?” Jenny asked.
“I really don’t know.” Mouse Man. Mouse would miss him. Rozlyn too, in an odd sort of way. Like she’d said, Charlie had been part of the scenery. Now there’d be a piece missing. A small piece, granted. So small as to be almost unnoticed — until it wasn’t there.
“Sad, that,” Jenny commented. “Living fifty-odd years and no one to care when you’re gone. Not much of a footprint to leave behind.”
“Footprint?”
“Oh,” she grinned. “I had this boyfriend once, into all this eco stuff. He had this poster, said something like ‘leave only footprints and take only photographs.’ We had this big argument over how much damage you could do if you left too many footprints. Silly really, but I got this idea afterwards, that some people leave the buggers all over the place. Others, there’s not even a single one.”
Rozlyn nodded. It was a sad thought. She allowed herself a brief moment of self-pity as she wondered who’d be there to miss her should she depart this life as unexpectedly as Charlie Higgins had. Apart from her grandfather, a man now so sick that he could not even recall Rozlyn’s existence, never mind notice her absence, there was no one really. Mouse would notice, she thought, and her colleagues, but would she really leave much more of a footprint than Charlie Higgins?
“What have you got?” Rozlyn asked, concentrating on the matter in hand and telling herself firmly not to be so maudlin.
“Bills, in date order. Look, he’s written down the date he paid them. Telephone, utilities . . .” She paused and looked around. “Funny . . .”
“What?”
“There are phone bills, but no phone.”
“For a landline? I only ever knew him to use a mobile. Before that, he’d call me from pay phones.” Rozlyn took the bills and examined them. The latest was for two months previously. “No,” she said. “Look, they’re not for this address. They’re for a flat on . . . well must be on the third floor, I guess, number 303. What’s all that about, then?”
Jenny shrugged. “Want me to go down and knock on the door?”
“Later. Finish up here, see if we have any other anomalies, then I’ll tag along.” She looked at the bills more closely. They seemed to be for some kind of low-user tariff and, in all, recorded maybe a dozen calls per quarter, most of which were to Charlie’s mobile phone. Scanning them, Rozlyn could see only two other numbers recorded.
She handed them back to Jenny and returned to her own se
arch. “Personal documents,” she said. “Birth certificate, medical card. I don’t think I even know where mine is. Marriage certificate! Charlie was married?”
“So there might be next of kin after all. That looks like an address book.” Jenny fished in the bottom of her own drawer and withdrew a black bound book. “Yep, telephone numbers, mostly, but it’s a start. Hang on, there’s another one here. You think he ran out of space?”
Rozlyn frowned suddenly recalling something she should have noted at the crime scene. “He had his wallet on him,” she mused. “The body had been dumped and the wallet chucked away a few feet from the body. They’d left his wristwatch — not that it was worth anything — but no mobile and no address book . . . no keys either. Jenny, was there anything to suggest you weren’t the first to get in here?”
She shook her head. “Nothing, but we’d a man on the door from an hour after the body was found, I believe. Of course, they might have come here straight after they killed him but if they searched this place they must have been super careful. Like you say, his wallet was found same time as the body, but there was no address book in the inventory, I’m sure of that. Did he always have it on him? What about these?”
Rozlyn frowned, trying to remember. Charlie was meticulous about his phone numbers, both those in his phone and those in his little black books. Rozlyn would never have noticed him changing them had Charlie not pointed it out. It was a regular habit to update his book every six months or so, copying his numbers with care into an identical new book, leaving out anything not current. He hated anything to be out of date.
Rozlyn picked up the collection of books and skimmed through until she had the most recent. She knew it had to be this one because her own new mobile number was listed with her old one crossed out. Three or four such amendments would have been enough for Charlie to have abandoned this little book and start another. Charlie hated disorder and crossings out were disorder in Charlie’s mind. Rozlyn found she had absorbed all of this without being aware of it. Evidently, more of Charlie Higgins’ ramblings had permeated her brain than she had initially thought.