“Evidently. Or so the TV series tell us.” Harry scratched one ear lobe, a habit which Sylvia had noticed several times.
She said, “Jemima D’Orsay? She’ll be hard to investigate after all this time. But that’s what you want to do, isn’t it, play detective?”
Harry scratched the other ear. “Not play. Do it properly.” He leaned forwards, elbows to his papers. “I used to like investigating mysteries. Archaeology. Technology. What’s the use of having a brain if you don’t use it? But this is different. God alone knows what that poor girl suffered, and it haunts me. I was the first to see her. That feels like a responsibility. Fate. Destiny. Something like that. I owe it to her. Hopefully the police will find out long before I get close, but I should try.” He looked at those deep blue eyes over the table. “Want to help?”
“I’m mobile enough, but I own no car and can’t drive.” Sylvia tried scratching her earlobe but found it brought no sense of ease whatsoever. “But I have no objection to travelling, and no objection to most other things. The thought of investigating a situation which is wicked, insane and cruel, and of conceivably helping to save one more woman from such suffering and death, is a very sensible idea, and an excellent way of passing a useless old age, instead of sitting choking on car fumes.”
“I do have a car,” Harry smiled. “It’s old and has rather a lot of fumes too. But it works. Well – most of the time.”
“Then lead me to your chariot and onwards into the wilderness, Mr. Joyce.”
Something had worked for her bed had grown comfortable again. But still Sylvia lay awake for some time before sleep, wondering how you could recognise a depraved killer from a decent and kind man.
Chapter Three
With an obligation to behave as a typical English country pub, the Brass Farthing was all wooden beams, oak panelling, window boxes, seats outside under shady umbrellas, and a fairly good menu of pub food. Tony was half way through his steak and mushroom pie, with a neat drip of gravy on his T-Shirt, just where it started to say I Love Las Vegas. Harry lifted his pint and buried his mouth in the foamy head, emerging with a fluffy white moustache, matching his hair. Ruby had the hiccups and Sylvia sipped white wine with a faint smirk.
“The Effluence gang, then?” Through hiccups.
“The Jetsam Mob?” Tony suggested.
“We haven’t got a spaceship.”
“Like flotsam and jetsam.”
“Can’t we just be us? “
More hiccups. “How boring, Sylvia.”
Sylvia finished her wine. “Are you quite sure you wish to be part of this, my dearest Bluebell?” she demanded. “I imagine police work is usually boring.”
“Not sure I want to be part of it,” nodded Tony. “It was a nasty business. The wife is quite upset with it all.”
“It is upsetting. My regards to Isabel.”
They wandered home in the pooling twilight, with the trees like looming black scarecrows silhouetted against a still blue sky. Tony left where his street forked off, but Harry walked on to the Rochester Manor with Sylvia and Ruby.
The old manor stretched its timbers back over a couple of hundred years, with a fireplace dated to 1595 and a pair of chimneys to 1540. Most of the building had been rebuilt in the Georgian era, and a few extensions added in Edwardian times. Only the kitchen, huge and turquoise peeping out into the kitchen garden sprouting its greens, was modern. Somehow, most of it matched and inside it flowed with three staircases, each larger than the other, eight enormous bedrooms with en-suites, and six others tucked into the annex. The grounds, although some had been sold off over the years after the war when the house had ceased to be privately owned, were still extensive and drifted finally into a small forest. Sylvia had one of the larger bedrooms, but it meant climbing the stairs.
Arthur Sims was hovering at the doorway. “’Night, Mrs. Greene. Just waiting to lock up.”
“I have my key, Arthur.” She led Harry inside.
Following, shadows enveloping, “Are you permitted secret assignations with the opposite sex, Mrs. Greene?”
She chuckled. “We are, as yet, free to behave in any shocking and licentious manner, Mr. Joyce. Actually, we own the place. Sixteen inmates, and we pay the upkeep between us.” She smiled at those still sitting in the salon. Two watched television. The others were reading. One looked up. Sylvia said, “Any wine open, Derek?”
“No idea, Greenie. Call Pam.”
“We’ll go upstairs,” Sylvia told Harry. “More private. There’s a bottle of red open in my room, if you’ve any appetite left.”
It was a huge room, richly patterned with walls of books and paintings, and four unmatched armchairs beside the window, cuddling a large round table. They sat there and watched the sky turn black. The wine and glasses were promptly plonked on the table.
“Now,” Sylvia said. “No pretending gangs or mobs. Just us. And have you been able to trace Paul Stoker?”
“After the trial,” said Harry, pouring the wine, “he left Leicester and went to France. Started in Marseilles, and then moved to Paris. After that, he disappeared. Well, perhaps that’s unfair – not disappeared exactly. I just couldn’t find him.”
“And no similar murders in France during those years?”
Harry shook his head. “Murder, slaughter, mayhem. But nothing that matched. Strangulation, not stabbing. No similar torture. Wife abuse, not the erratic capture of strangers. Weird cannibalism. Anger. No serial killers.”
“And in this country?”
“We know so little,” Harry muttered. “The six similar murders I discovered, were all in roughly the same area, and all found within two years. No burials and no hidden corpses. Very purposefully displayed. Is that part of the modus operando? Or are there others hidden away? Dredge the river or dig up the fields? Are they there, but unseen?”
“They say,” murmured Sylvia quietly, “which is something I loathe and shouldn’t repeat, but I have to say it, don’t I? I mean – who are ‘they’? But ‘they say’ method can never change. All killers follow the same method each and every time. Is that true?”
“I’m not the policeman. Your father was. What did he say?”
She nodded. “He said what they say.”
“Therefore the pattern doesn’t change. Enlarges, perhaps. Grows. Matures? But no complete changes. So just six murders many years ago.”
“I think this one’s a copy-cat,” decided Sylvia. “Otherwise there’s too big a gap.” She paused, then said, “How can you tell, anyway?”
The bottle of red was finished, and they were both yawning. She hadn’t asked him to stay the night nor roll into bed with her. Perhaps at seventy seven women didn’t want that anymore. Harry still did, and the warmth and nearness perhaps even more. But he said nothing, didn’t attempt a kiss goodbye, and walked home past midnight. With the pub just down the road from his own home, he hadn’t bothered to bring the car. The air had a fresh bite and the breezes were chilly, while the sky was a silver studded ocean without waves. Much darker than the Mediterranean. He enjoyed the walk back. Harry wondered if Paul Stoker had changed his name. He’d be roughly fifty now. Why would a man of that age suddenly start killing again anyway and why would he ever start the first time? Could it be the work of a father, then carried on by a son?
“Twaddle,” Harry mumbled, and let himself through the back door. The house was as always an echo of nothing.
Audrey would have thought him mad. She might even have thought him suspicious. Pretty, kind, and a wonderful cook, Audrey would never have understood or accepted his need to solve the crime he’d nearly fallen over. But he might have misjudged her. Twelve years dead, and a couple of years of desperate dementia before that, so now Harry thought rarely of his wife, and rather than missing her, he missed the companionship and cosy routines she had supplied without question. It was the empty house he disliked, with its creaking doors and rattling windows. Cotswold stone, sturdy enough and a puddle sized garden still sprouting the bul
bs she’d once planted, it was attractive to most. But it didn’t smile, even in summer.
With Audrey, Harry had worn pyjamas. She had bought them for him every year at Christmas. Striped, plain, silk, woollen, usually from Marks and Spencer’s. Now he simply stripped off and jumped under the quilt. So Harry went to bed and stayed awake for two hours. The first hour passed thinking of murder and motive. The second passed with thoughts of Sylvia.
Tony was taking his wife to Bournemouth for a week.
“An excellent idea.” Harry had never called Tony a friend until, unable to get rid of him, he’d felt the usual sympathy and friendship for a lost and bored soul with little enough happiness in his life. But gradually this meant losing other friends who found Tony a drag. Yet since none of them had mattered much either, Harry had just let it all happen as usual. Now he had somewhere he wanted to go, and preferably without Tony so he had encouraged Bournemouth.
First he made himself a sort of half-hearted breakfast, then took the car and drove those few leafy lanes to Rochester Manor.
The television was blaring, and the afternoon news was a belligerent interference as Harry and Sylvia sat in one corner, speaking quietly. But suddenly the news was a blast of shock announcements, impossible to ignore. Both stopped talking and stared across the room. The screen was a flurry of police cordons. The reporter was a young man with a Welsh accent. There had been another murder.
A pretty 26 year old, Clair Neilson worked in a shoe shop, but was hoping to do something more interesting with her life if only she could think of what. She started a blog but then couldn’t decide what to write on it. But her life came to an end lying spread-eagled in a small Baptist church in northern Wales. Stripped and tortured, she had been found the following morning by the woman coming to change the flowers. Now the body was doused in water from the new vase, and a scattered bunch of pink peonies.
“It’s the same man,” muttered Harry. “He’s left Monaco and come home.”
“I thought he lived in Leicestershire?” Sylvia turned to Ruby, open mouthed beside her. “Can I borrow your laptop? I need to look up poor little Clair Neilson’s blog. Finished or not, it may have photos. Facebook too.” She turned to Harry. “Here,” she said the laptop over the table towards him. “You’re the technology whizz. You do it.”
Click, click, google something, wrong person, try again, the sudden vivid colour of a profile against a background of Welsh mountains, two puppies’ racing, a recipe for chocolate cake, another recipe for white cake, no, it can’t be cake, it’s face cream, the puppies making a mess in the kitchen, a young man grinning. He looked up. “So she lived with her boyfriend.”
“Does that make him a suspect?”
“I doubt it. Boyfriends have the girlfriend right there. They don’t need to kidnap and torture her in a church.”
Harry scratched his ear lobe. A tiny tuft of white hair decorated the inner edge. He said, “This is vile. Do we really want to investigate this?”
“Well, do we?” Sylvia paused. “Bluebell, be an angel and call Pam for tea and coffee.” And back to Harry. “I hope the detectives do a better job than we do. They certainly have more resources. But you felt a sense of duty. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but I feel it too.”
“Not that we’ve discovered the slightest useful detail yet. We only have one suspect.”
After a minute, Sylvia said, “You have a car. Neither of us have jobs to drag off to every day. I have money. Both of us have as much common intelligence as any police detective. If we’re going to do this at all, then let’s take it more seriously. Let’s do it well.”
Others were crowding into the chairs close to the television, chattering, arguing, and demanding to know what had happened now. “Another murder?” “Here?” “Of course not. Wales.” “What has that to do with us?” “Nothing. Go back to Bingo.”
Ruby reappeared, carrying a dangerously tip-tilted tray, two mugs of tea, one of coffee, and a plate of ginger snaps. “Pam’s gone into town for something. David made the coffee. I don’t think it’s very good. He’s been crying.”
Harry took the coffee, sipped it, and hastily put it back on the tray. “Who’s Dave?”
“The caretaker’s son. I think he’s a bit simple. He cries a lot.”
“David Sims. Son of Arthur Sims. He’s only 15 or something. Don’t drink the coffee.”
“But I made the tea,” Ruby insisted, “so it’s fine. I’ll get you a coffee when Pam comes back. She knows how to use the percolator.”
Sylvia talked through Ruby. “So we go to Wales tomorrow? It’ll be a nice drive. I’ll pay for a hotel as a thank you.”
She didn’t sleep. The mattress once again rejected her. Surrendering to the inevitable, she began to read books on the subject, old dull hardbacks once owned by her father, and new eBooks’ she bought online. A consensus of opinion claimed that killers, instead of being cross eyed and threatening, looked even more normal than normal. Quiet little men, they were polite and lacking in personality. Sylvia decided this was logical. But she knew so many people like that. Her life had been peppered with them. Her friend’s uncle had killed his wife when she tried to leave him. The puritanically Christian family from which her sweet natured friend had sprung, had also spawned Uncle Pious, a creature of rigid beliefs. But he had been unable to accept his sweet faced wife running away and accusing him of being a pompous bore and a religious zealot. So he had caught her in the local greengrocer’s and beaten her to death in front of the tomatoes. He’d used the hammer he’d purposefully put in his jacket pocket.
Uncle Pious was still in prison when he died peacefully of old age sometime back. Sylvia had never liked the man even before he turned into a recognisable brute, although she had only met him twice, but he wasn’t a serial killer. He killed for hatred and humiliation, not lust. It made a difference.
She didn’t sleep much and woke wondering why on earth she had agreed to become even more involved in horror and drive all the way to Wales with a man she really didn’t know all that well. However, she had no intention of chickening out.
So when Tony finally returned from Bournemouth, Harry and Sylvia were already in Wales.
Sunshine dimmed into grey cumulus, Harry’s Vauxhall was the colour of a sunnier sky than the one above. Some years ago, the car had been considered luxurious, so it was now exceedingly comfortable even though old. The dents on the driver’s side, Harry assured Sylvia, were someone else’s fault, and not his own. With sublime indifference, Sylvia dumped her small overnight bag in the back, settled into the passenger seat, spread her skirts and stretched her toes while Harry adjusted her seat and started the engine.
Over the border into Wales, sweet lanes, bridges over streams, through a valley of green meadows and daisies, then scrub, rock, thorn bush, and back to soft green. Gradually, driving north west, the hills turned rugged and the winds whistled through the valleys. Escaping a pound of tidal ravages, there was the challenge of the coast, and the villages were tucked safely back amongst the trees.
They stopped at the next hotel, tiny enough, dark stone with a tangle of briar roses and ivy, windows peeping from shadowed rhododendron leaf.
Yes, they had two empty rooms, three actually, and promised a good breakfast. They booked two rooms and moved in. The murdered girl had lived in the next village up, and the church was a five minute drive. Sylvia dumped her bag, washed her hands and face, and thumped on the next door along the passage.
“Room service? Or Sylvia?” called Harry through the closed door.
“Greenie Guts,” Sylvia called back. She pushed open the door, and Harry stared back at her. He was drying under his arms, half naked and dripping with water. She looked him over with interest. Not bad for seventy eight. No sagging male breasts, no bulging belly over the trouser belt, no smudge of flaking white hair on the chest, and no floppy lumps on the upper arms. But plenty of wrinkles, and the hair on top of his high furrowed forehead was quite white and receding. She smiled
. “You look a lot better undressed than I do, Harry. Congratulations.”
“Are you going to show me, and prove it?”
Without blushing, she said, “I look far better dressed. Believe me, you wouldn’t want any closer examination. Besides,” grinning, “I was going to suggest dinner and an early night. It’s been a long day.” A faintly enticing smell of hot food, garlic possibly, onions probably, was busy climbing the stairs from kitchen to bedrooms.
“You paid for the rooms. I’ll buy dinner.”
“They’ll just add it to the final bill.” Then immediately, “Have you said anything to anyone? I mean, about that poor girl?”
“No. Clair Neilson was born down the road. I’ll ask our waiter.”
A tall dark suited and elderly man took their order. “Pinot Grigio. Can we have more time to look at the menu?” He came back with the wine within moments, opened the bottle and went through the tasting business, then hovered. Harry said, “Umm. I’ll have the mullet, I think. Now, I don’t want to upset anyone, but we’ve just realised this is where that poor young woman was born. I have a rather unlikely association – well, I won’t spoil our dinner or your evening. But did you know Clair Neilson?”
The waiter shivered and lowered his voice. “Indeed, indeed, I did, sir. Mullet, did you say? Chips or salad, with that?”
“Roast potatoes? Boiled potatoes? How did you know her?”
“Roast potatoes and courgettes, perhaps? My neighbour’s young daughter at the time, as it happens. They moved some years ago, but I knew little Clair as she was growing up. Such a nice little girl. And has the lady decided yet?”
“Yes, she has,” said Sylvia. “Steak, medium rare, and lots of courgettes. Spinach too, if you have it. Leeks? Is that encouraged in Wales? Or too much of a cliché? And have you ever heard of a young man named Paul Stoker, I wonder?”
‘Was that medium rare, madam? And leeks, yes indeed. But no, the name means nothing to me I’m afraid. Is he anything to do with – the other case?”
If When Page 3