Not a Very Nice Woman

by John Eider

Professional disappointment didn’t even come into it, as Cori acknowledged they wouldn’t have the answers they needed from Esther today. The teenager was still a child, soft in the centre, not yet hardened by the world no matter the blows it appeared to be throwing her. So, sat in that comfortable, colourful room alone, Cori did what she was taught to do, and put herself in Esther’s situation that crucial afternoon.

  What would Esther have spotted from the letter as she tried to read it? That the painting mentioned could only be the one in her father’s house; also that the names of the purchasers were Mars; and if she had ever been told that her grandfather’s name had been Samuel, then that ‘Mr S Mars’ was as likely as not him. The next deduction was the crucial one; and depending on how clearly Esther was thinking at the time and on how much her mind was able to admit to itself, she would have realised something somewhere between at the very least, that in having this letter in her flat meant that her tutor, Stella had something to do with her family; and at most, that Stella had somehow been, in a previous existence, nothing less than her grandfather’s wife, her father’s mother, her own grandmother.

  Cori wondered whether those facts would all have been too much at once; not that deep down Esther wouldn’t have begun to realise them. But such speculation was all academic, for without anything on tape or any route of Esther’s discovery getting to Patrick Mars, then Cori and her fellow officers were in the same situation they had been in last night: that of fiercely believing Mars’s guilt, but having no way of proving that he knew where Stella was living to be able to go and attack her there.

  She switched her phone back on, and felt it buzz at least five times. The briefest of calls to the station confirmed the bare bones of what had gone on elsewhere this morning, and had her up and looking for Catherine. She would be able to tell Cori of the procedure now with regards to Esther’s interview, and whether it wouldn’t be worth her while instead heading back to the station. In the tiny kitchen at the centre, Cori found Catherine with Maisie Night,

  ‘How’s Esther?’

  ‘Better, thank you. She wanted some time alone.’

  ‘That’s understandable.’

  ‘Drink?’ asked Catherine.

  ‘No, that’s what I’ve come to ask you. There’s a lot going on back at the station, and if you don’t think there’s any prospect… then I might go back for a bit and help out?’

  Catherine looked similarly doubtful, ‘I don’t think we can ask Esther to go through that again today.’

  Cori had guessed as much, but something held her back from leaving; Maisie finally asking her,

  ‘You’ll have figured it out then, Sergeant, what’s upset her?’

  ‘Did you know Stella yourself?’ she asked back.

  ‘I knew of her,’ answered Maisie. ‘I’d read her name on papers. Patrick hardly spoke of her.’

  ‘But he kept her things, didn’t he: the glassware?’

  ‘Yes, there were nice pieces in the house and I’d guessed they weren’t from his father. That house needed all the brightening up it could get. She collected silver too – I’d seen the receipts – though there was none of that there by my time. Maybe Samuel had sold it off?’

  ‘So did you know who Esther was referring to when she asked you if you knew a Stella Dunbar?’

  ‘No, it didn’t click, until I saw the letter later on. In fact I remembered, when Esther showed me the letter, that Patrick had told me the story of when they bought that awful bear painting.’

  ‘Oh, please tell.’

  ‘Well, the family had all gone to London on holiday, to stop with Samuel’s relatives; Patrick would only have been about five. And there was an auction on in town that Patrick’s mother had read about. Anyway, whatever it was they’d gone there for, what they ended up buying was the painting. You see Patrick had been walking around the hall with them viewing the lots, when he’d seen the picture and was captivated, couldn’t take his eyes off it, he said. So they bought it for him, and he said that when his mother made the winning bid and the hammer came down that he turned and hugged her. In fact, that might be one of the few times I caught him remembering her kindly.’

  ‘And unkindly?’

  ‘As I say, for the most part his family were a closed book: who knows what pain he felt there. But when our own marriage broke down: when he began to get controlling, and his anger really showed, then he would bring up his parents to punish me, saying, “My father always told me you couldn’t trust women, they let you down, aren’t loyal, and then they run out on you”.’

  ‘Maisie, you don’t have to go through this,’ began Catherine, but the woman clearly needed the release,

  ‘He’d say, “My mother abandoned us, and now you’re abandoning me.”

  ‘”I’m not abandoning you, Patrick.” I’d say. “You’re pushing me away, you’re making my life unbearable”.’

  ‘What would cause his anger, Maisie?’ asked Cori.

  ‘Almost anything by the end. He used to get these wild fantasies when I went out, that I was having an affair, that I was leaving him. And heaven forbid if I ever met any male friends. In the end I was scared to leave the house for how he’d be when I returned.’

  ‘You never met his father, Samuel?’

  ‘No, he died when Patrick was Seventeen. I think he was older than Stella, had fought in the War: the North Atlantic, Patrick told me. He had a book of great campaigns with markers for the pages his father’s ships appeared on.’

  ‘Sounds like he was proud of his dad.’

  ‘God, he idolised him.’

  ‘And how did you think of him?’

  ‘He always sounded a bully. God knows how he explained it to Patrick, but one day the boy woke up and his mother had been sent out of her own home.’

  ‘We see it a lot after a painful separation,’ added Catherine. ‘One parent can demonise the other, make them sound worse than they were to justify their own actions.’

  ‘And the end of your time in the house?’ asked Cori?

  ‘The last time… the last time he simply lost control, slipped into some kind of wild state, called me every name under the sun in front of the children before just bursting into tears in front of me, screaming, “Get out, all of you, just get out!” I wouldn’t let my kids in with him again after that: I took them out the door that minute, and he’s never asked to see them again.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I think he honestly thought they’d grow up to “betray” him: just like his mother did, like I did; or so he thinks.’

  Even as Cori wondered how much turmoil one family could bear, there was a fly buzzing in her ear; and then she found it and swatted it,

  ‘You said “children” back there?’

  ‘Yes, Peter and Esther. Peter’s my eldest. I’m sorry, you didn’t know?’

  Cori tilted her head back, as if to ask: and are there any other relatives Patrick didn’t tell us he had?

  Maisie continued, ‘Of course you wouldn’t know, he’s not here at the moment. I’m afraid he never really settled anywhere after we moved; he’s with the Navy Cadets now, somewhere on the Channel. It’s the best thing for him, the active life. It helps him get things out of his system.’

  It didn’t help his father or grandfather, thought Cori.

  ‘And is he still in touch with you, with Esther?’

  ‘Yes, he calls us often. In fact he was the first one Esther called that evening, she told me, asking if he knew who Stella was.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘No, that’s why she came running to find me.’

  ‘And what time did she call him?’

  ‘Oh, earlier, before she caught the coach.’

  ‘Before she went back to the Cedars on the night?’

  ‘I… really don’t know.’

  Catherine gave Cori a warning look, both knowing this was no place for such an interrogation, but she only had one question left and couldn’t leave without knowing the answer,

  �
�Maisie, is Peter still in touch with Patrick?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  Cori struggled for the right words, ‘But is it possible that in such a situation as this, after hearing his sister so upset, he might call his father directly to ask for answers where Esther might be wary of doing so?’

  ‘It’s possible. He’s headstrong is my Peter, but honest with it. Don’t tar him with his family’s brush. He may be a Mars, but not all their men are devils.’

  ‘He kept his father’s name?’

  ‘As I say, he was never really a part of mine and Esther’s project to start a new life: he was already keen to do his own thing. I think he feels the burden of his family’s history as much as anyone… Love! How long have you been standing there? You shouldn’t be listening to this.’

  The women all turned to see Esther in the hallway, easily in earshot.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you, Sergeant. It’s important.’

  Catherine, duty-bound, intervened; but like her mother Esther would not be held back,

  ‘Sergeant, when I went back that evening, there was someone else there.’

  Cori wanted to speak, but the girl continued before she could get a word out,

  ‘You need to know this, to catch him. After I read the letter I knew I had to go back to Stella to ask her: ask her how she had been Mrs Mars, how she had bought the painting. I couldn’t ask anyone else, I had to ask her. So I went back. It was dark by then, I’d spent hours thinking about what to do.’

  Maisie rushed up to Esther and held her, smoothing her hair as she did so,

  ‘You don’t have to say any of this now.’

  ‘No, Mum. I want to. The stairway was empty – I think everyone was watching TV – so I went up, and walked along to her door, but…’

  ‘Yes?’ asked Cori, curiosity getting the better of her.

  ‘Well, I’d never been there at night and it scared me, those plants at the end of the corridor, their shadows. And… there was someone in them, in the shadow, standing there… I couldn’t go any nearer. I didn’t go to her room, I turned around and ran off. I left her there; I left her there to be killed.’

  Maisie clutched her daughter hard as she dissolved into tears; Cori intoning,

  ‘I must find the Inspector, I must relay this to him.’

  Catherine darted up close to the Sergeant, a fellow professional issuing their opinion in compassionate whispers,

  ‘The state Esther was in that night we can’t say what she saw. That statement we just heard wouldn’t stand in court.’

  Cori placed a hand on Catherine’s shoulder, ‘I sincerely hope she doesn’t have to be within a hundred miles of the place.’

  ‘Have you ever heard a story like it, Sergeant? And I don’t think either mother or daughter have begun to fully accept what this all leads to.’

  These were Catherine’s last words to Cori, and stayed with her as she left the Social Services building, Cori remembering that Ludmila Mars had been coming to that same realisation as Maisie the night before, the realisation of their having married a man who could strangle his own mother to death.

  Her most urgent port of call was the Cedars, where amid the busyness of a morning’s routine Rachel Sowton seemed more detached than usual. Had Cori not heard from the station of what had happened here last night, she may have put the Duty Manager’s mood down to recent events catching up with her, maybe even a touch of shock. Even so such disconnectedness was a bad sign, the starting point for all manner of coping strategies that would lead her only to further isolation: drinking, prescription drugs, pessimistic thoughts.

  ‘Sergeant,’ the woman looked up from the duties she was performing automatically. ‘You’ve news on Derek?’ (She had already been told of the fracas at the Mars house.)

  ‘Sorry, no. I haven’t been back to the station. He’ll be at the hospital by now.’

  ‘Yes, I must call them.’

  ‘Look, do you have five minutes?’

  At the top of the stairs, Rachel flicked the switch light as requested. Cori walked along the windowed corridor she had only seen in daylight, looking up to the bulbs above her head, their glow barely visible in the morning sun. Outside the first flat she came to and then outside Stella’s each bulb glowed like a golden chrysalis, throbbing in her light-adjusted eye and leaving coloured splodges; but outside the third flat, the one guarded by foliage, the bulb was a lifeless iris, dust-peppered and silver-grey.

  ‘Did you know this end bulb was out?’ called Cori.

  ‘It has been for months, but then there’s been no reason to change it.’

  ‘Thank you for your help. You can switch them off now.’

  ‘I’ll go and make that call.’

  Only Stella and one other tenant had used this stretch of corridor in recent months, Cori realised as she stood there alone, and so would have grown used to the odd sight of creepers and leaves casting shadows across that far end at night. She walked into the botanical zone, brushing greenery aside and being careful not to tread on a frond or the long thin creepers that came off the cheeseplants.

  For no good reason she tried again the flat door there that she knew to be locked, and looked through the frosted glass to see the interior that she couldn’t quite make out. She turned back to face along the corridor, her view half obscured, and thought of what it might be like here at night. She realised that someone with the required patience could have stayed half-hid here for hours, Stella and the other tenant probably not even casting a glance this way to catch a shadowed face in the moonlight.

  Standing there Cori shivered, feeling something running through her as she inhabited the space that she now guessed had been occupied on Monday night by the killer. Not moving her feet, she looked down and all around for any sign, a clue, confirmation that Esther had not been imagining things. As she stood there the stem of a leaf brushed the back of her left hand, and without thinking she took it, her fingers running up and down its tactile fibres; unthinking, that was, until she felt a deep gouge interrupting the natural pattern. She looked at what she was holding and saw in the stem a series of deep indentations the shape of large fingernails, pushed in repeatedly and carving out little canoe-shaped gullies around which the fibres had since turned brown.

  Her mind turned suddenly to Mars in interview, his gardener’s nails dirtied underneath. Still standing in the same spot, as if to move would be to lose her inspiration, she called the station and from there asked to be put through to the Coroner’s Office; and there to the doctor conducting the autopsy, who answered,

  ‘Ah, hello Sergeant. Your report is being written now.’ (These things were never ready as quickly as in the TV shows.)

  ‘Thank you, but I just needed to know one little thing. I’m not sure how to put this, but around the wound on Stella’s neck, was there anything green?’

  ‘Plant matter? Yes, the tiniest traces: on the bruised skin and in the cuts caused by the nails.’

  God these people were good, she thought,

  ‘And is it possible to match that if I gave you the actual plant?’

  ‘Chlorophyll’s very similar plant to plant, but there might be something in the actual fibres. We can have a look for you.’

  Forensics would already have checked the corridor outside Stella’s flat of course, but wouldn’t have thought of needing samples of the plants. Someone would be with her within the half-hour. Cori only had to pray Patrick Mars hadn’t scrubbed his nails in the meantime.

  Chapter 25 – A Letter from Derek