Revenge on the Rye

by Alice Castle

  ‘Um, yes. Well, via Katie’s. And the park. And then we couldn’t go to the park, so we came to the Rye…’

  ‘Spare me the details,’ he snapped.

  ‘You did ask,’ said Beth, stung.

  ‘Look, I don’t think you realise quite how difficult this is for me. It’s one thing you enjoying a bit of amateur detection in your spare time. But this? It’s beginning to look like a habit. You’ve got a better hit rate than most cadaver dogs. And this stuff is dangerous, don’t you understand? My job is hard enough without having to worry about you all the time.’

  ‘Well, for your information, it was actually Teddy who found this one. Maybe he’s got a career ahead of him in the Met dog squad, or whatever you call it. And however hard this is for you, I know someone it’s much harder for,’ snapped Beth.

  ‘Who? Not you? Because I really don’t think—’ said York, folding his arms across his broad chest and staring down at her.

  ‘No, not me. Him,’ said Beth, pointing at the corpse. At that moment, the Labrador let out a piteous howl. One of the SOCOs had got very close to its master’s head, taking a close-up of the injuries. Beth turned away quickly. She knew how the poor dog felt. It wasn’t pretty.

  ‘I tell you what, you could do something useful,’ said York slowly, looking over at the corpse with a speculative look in his eye.

  ‘What?’ Beth asked a little warily. Much though she wanted to get back into York’s good books, she wasn’t sure what role he could give her to play in a murder enquiry – officially, at least.

  ‘You and Katie could take that dog away.’

  ‘Teddy? Don’t worry, I was only waiting for you. We’ll finish our walk now.’

  ‘No, not that mutt. I mean the big chap, sitting there. Poor old boy. We don’t need him in our hair right now, and it sounds like he’s going to make a right fuss when we have to shift the body.’

  Beth felt mulish for a moment. The one thing worse than being out for a walk with the ridiculously bouncy Teddy must surely be having to take a recently bereaved, ponderous Lab along for the ride as well. But she could see the truth of York’s remark. It was definitely going to be traumatic for the poor old dog when his master was zipped into a body bag. And, perhaps if she was helpful now, Harry’d be a mite less cross later. Though there was something about the stern side of him that she did find rather appealing. She surprised herself by giving him a coquettish little smile and, after a beat, the corners of his mouth tugged up by a millimetre or two in a slow response.

  ‘Only if you give me a kiss,’ she said, astonished at her own daring. Who would have thought, a year ago, that she’d be flirting with a big policeman in the middle of the day? If anyone had even suggested to her that it might be a possibility – and in the presence of a dead body – she would have said they were crazy.

  That thought suddenly sobered her a lot. There was an appropriate time for a bit of jousting with her paramour, and this surely wasn’t it. A man had lost his life here, and that was a serious and desperately sad business. Although she’d been at more than her fair share of crime scenes recently, she must never get used to it or treat it lightly. If she did, part of her own humanity would be leached away.

  As if thinking the same thoughts, York tutted again, but bent down and brushed her cheek very quickly with his lips. Then he turned back to the SOCOs, daring them to have noticed the exchange. Unlike her, they didn’t seem to enjoy any aspect of his grumpy side and they all bent to their tasks, brushing and bagging with redoubled concentration.

  ‘And don’t forget – get yourselves over to the police station today to give your statements about finding the body. Just the factual stuff. No embroidery or speculation,’ York said brusquely to Beth, almost as though he wanted to undo the revealing tenderness of that little kiss.

  Beth, not nearly as chastened as York clearly felt she should be, walked over to Katie with Teddy, and passed his collar over to her friend. ‘Do you think you’re well enough to go on? I think they’re going to start to get busy quite soon, we might want to, erm, not be watching…’ As Beth had hoped, this grim prospect was enough to get Katie on her feet. ‘There’s just one bit of bad news…’

  ‘More bad news?’ asked Katie weakly.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t put that very well,’ admitted Beth. ‘The thing is, we’ve got to take the other dog with us. Harry thinks he might not react well when they have to, well… move the, er, body.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Katie, closing her eyes briefly and taking a deep, calming breath, then exhaling through pursed lips. Beth rather envied her friend’s instinctive ability to delve into her yoga training in moments of stress.

  Looking a lot better already, Katie seemed to be taking things in her stride again. She clipped Teddy’s lead on, as the dog pirouetted around her, licking anything that didn’t move fast enough to evade him. One of the SOCOs trailed over, lugging the reluctant Labrador by the collar.

  ‘Doesn’t he have a lead?’ asked Beth.

  ‘Not that we’ve found so far. We’ll keep you posted on that,’ said the young technician.

  ‘Great. But in the meantime, how are we supposed to take him away?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, Beth, I’ve got a spare. I always bring one in case Teddy manages to lose his,’ said Katie, fishing in her bag. ‘Prepared for everything, I am,’ she smiled, unrolling a fabric leash and attaching it to the big Labrador’s collar. ‘There we are, boy. You can be Teddy’s new chum,’ she said kindly, patting the old dog’s head. His tongue lolled pinkly, and he panted at her in a friendly and accepting way.

  Something on the dog’s collar winked in the weak sun, and Beth had a brainwave. ‘Let’s see what your name is,’ she said, bending to look at the small metal disc that dangled there. ‘Colin.’ The Labrador barked once, in a tired sort of way. Beth smoothed his velvet head absently. ‘Can that be right? Colin? Funny name for a dog. Or is that, could that be, your master’s name?’ Beth asked excitedly. ‘Is your owner called Colin?’ The Labrador barked again, listlessly.

  Beth could see she wasn’t going to get far with this game. ‘Well, we might as well call you Colin anyway, until we know more,’ she said, turning the disc round. There was a mobile phone number etched on the back. ‘Have you got that?’ she asked the technician, fired up again, but he only nodded and plodded away. Beth kicked herself. Yes, of course. She’d thought she was being so clever, but searching the murder victim’s dog for clues was probably on page one of the SOCO Handbook.

  Nevertheless, she couldn’t resist getting out her phone and quickly dialling the number. ‘Do you think you should be doing that?’ asked Katie anxiously, guessing what her friend was up to. Beth turned away slightly, hunching over her phone.

  The SOCO team were bustling around now and York was rapping out orders, but they all heard the sudden warble of a ring tone. Unfortunately, it was the Star Wars theme tune, its triumphant notes rendered horribly tinny by the phone’s speakers. It sounded sorely out of place at this most sombre of gatherings. Beth was tempted to cut the call immediately. After all, it would be little short of a Lazarus-style miracle if anyone picked up. But, despite herself, she wanted to hear the answering machine message.

  After four agonising rings, while the SOCO team prodded and patted down the corpse to find the phone, a recording blessedly clicked in. ‘Leave a message after the tone,’ said a man’s pleasant, light voice. It sounded educated, with a smile in the words that made Beth instinctively warm to the speaker – who had to be the crumpled body lying in front of them. Poor man.

  Beth pressed cancel immediately, just as one of the SOCOs unearthed the handset, but not before York had looked over in their direction and, from Beth’s guilty and surreptitious stance, put two and two together. He’d just started to stride across the clearing towards them when Beth shoved her phone back in her bag and yanked on Colin’s lead.

  ‘Come on,’ she said urgently to Katie, leading the motley group out of the little copse and back out o
nto the Rye. Luckily, Teddy was useful for once. As soon as he’d realised they were on the move, he started pulling like an express train and soon the group of trees was just a speck behind them. When Beth looked back anxiously, she was pretty sure she could still see York staring crossly after them, those blue eyes tracking her every move like lasers.

  Ten minutes later, and Colin was panting heavily as Teddy led them a merry dance all over the open heathland. Katie, having learned her lesson earlier, kept Teddy firmly on his lead this time. Although that horse had definitely bolted – even Beth was pretty sure she wouldn’t be stumbling over another corpse on the Rye that morning – Katie decided she’d had enough experiments for one day. Teddy’s lead was still long enough, though, for her to be dragged hither and thither, while Beth and the trailing Lab brought up the rear, plodding along in a companionable silence.

  Beth had been expecting a bit more reluctance from Colin, perhaps even a Greyfriars Bobby-style refusal to shift from his owner’s side, but it turned out that any walk was a good walk – even a walk away from everything he’d ever known. Every now and then, he turned his head to give Beth a mildly surprised glance, as if they were at a cocktail party together and he just couldn’t quite remember her name. But he was so well brought up that he would no more have dug his paws in and refused to budge than he would have bitten the hand that might well soon end up feeding him. Beth hoped fervently that York, once he’d got over his sudden burst of ill-temper, would be making some urgent enquiries about where Colin lived – and who was going to look after him from now on.

  She hadn’t recognised the dead man at all. That wasn’t altogether surprising, she supposed. She always felt that Dulwich was essentially a small community, a slice of white-picket-fenced heaven that had managed to carve out a charmed existence despite the rest of south east London pressing in on every side. But that, she knew, was an illusion. People came and went in the city as relentlessly, regularly, and anonymously as waves on the sea shore. With ten million people in London, and counting, it simply wasn’t possible to know everybody, even in her own street. The truth was that her own world was very small, and bounded by crucial factors like attendance at the schools Dulwich did so well. It gave her the illusion of continuity and cohesion. But there were plenty of other sides to the place that she really knew nothing about.

  Now she cast her mind back, trying to edit out troublesome details like the damage to the side of the man’s head, the clumps of rusty blood, and worse, his pallor and stillness. With that airbrushed away, could she get a sense of what he had been like, even if she hadn’t actually known him?

  Not old; in fact, probably not much older than her, she decided. Late thirties? That, in itself, was difficult to get her head around. Could life really be cut short so easily? But she knew it could.

  And what had he been wearing? She squeezed her eyes closed for a second, nearly tripped over a tussock of grass, and realised this wasn’t perhaps the moment for a reconstruction. But nevertheless, she’d managed to get some details fixed in her mind. He’d been wearing red jeans. The type that only posh boys bought.

  In this area, that hardly narrowed the field much. But at least it meant she was pretty sure he wasn’t just a wandering tramp. She knew that there were a few who congregated on the Rye, camping out at nights, getting what shelter they could under the trees, and spending their days anaesthetised by Strongbow. None of them would be wearing red trousers, she was willing to bet.

  What had he been wearing on his top half, though? A beige windcheater. Well, it had started out beige, at any rate. That was harder to identify. It didn’t seem to belong to any sort of urban tribe that she knew of, though she’d be the first to admit that the nuances of outfits often passed her by. As a perennial jeans wearer who considered buying a new T-shirt quite a major event, she knew she wasn’t typical of women in general, or Dulwich in particular. Most of the mothers she knew were impeccably turned out, with a different, perfectly coordinated and accessorised outfit on every morning, even if their most pressing appointment of the day was with a changing mat and a toddler’s bottom.

  Men’s clothes were always that bit more difficult to calibrate, anyway. Their colour palette was so restricted, compared to women’s. Blue, black, brown, beige. If it hadn’t been for the red chinos, for example, Beth wouldn’t even have been sure that the chap was from SE21 at all. But when there was little to go on, every element that she could glean about his appearance, position, and even his dog, could be vital in identifying him. So far, Colin – an impeccably well brought up dog of a popular middle-class breed – and the man’s trousers, were telling their own story loud and clear.

  She didn’t need to do this; she knew that full well. It was York and the rest of the Metropolitan Police who were responsible for finding out who the man was and why he’d met his end here. But she also knew, by now, that she wouldn’t be able to rest until she, too, had done as much as she could for him, in her own small way. Fate seemed to be pointing her at these mysteries, and the least she could do was use the talents she’d been given to help unravel them.

  Had this poor man known his attacker? Beth couldn’t remember whether his hands had been damaged. Defensive injuries, they called them, didn’t they? Signs that he had fought back against his murderer. The SOCOs would be looking for traces under his fingernails, preserving them with plastic bags on his fingers. Even the pattern of wounds would tell them whether he’d resisted or been taken unawares. Maybe the blow to his head had immobilised him, and then the killer had been able to do his worst.

  There she went again, making assumptions. The killer might well have been a she. If recent experience had taught Beth anything, it was that there was often a lot more to even the simplest scenario than met the eye. The frustrating thing was that she’d have no access to any of the nuts and bolts of the investigation, unless Harry was prepared to take her into his confidence. And judging from the look on his face as he’d watched her walk away, that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

  Before Beth had time to get downcast, they’d crossed the side road at the edge of the common and reached the grey and orange painted café. For years, there had been a café on the Rye itself, close to the car park and the children’s playground, but it had been closed for some time for refurbishment. While the work was going on, this little place was reaping the benefit.

  Beth was more than ready to stop and get a calming coffee. It had been quite a morning already, and it wasn’t even eleven o’clock yet. But the presence of Teddy and Colin was immediately problematic.

  ‘We can’t take the dogs in, can we?’ said Katie, looking a little hopelessly at the façade of the café. The décor looked fresh and zingy in the weak sunshine, and a window display of intricately-iced cupcakes, millionaire’s shortbread, and brownies, was calling to Beth. The heavenly aroma of cappuccino wafting from the doorway made it all the more appealing. It was suddenly a Shangri-La that these two most determined coffee drinkers might be banished from.

  ‘Do you think you can manage both dogs for a second? I’ll go and get the coffees and we’ll just have to sit outside,’ said Beth. It wasn’t exactly tropical weather, but thanks to Teddy’s exuberant pace, and Beth and Colin’s doughty efforts not to be left too far behind, the women had rosy cheeks and the dogs were now panting steadily like deflating airbeds.

  A few minutes later, and Beth was back outside with a tray bearing a large slab of brownie each, as well as their drinks. They deserved something to keep their blood sugar up, after the shock they’d had. She also had a plastic cup of tap water, to top up the doggy bowl on the ground near the table Katie had chosen.

  Katie was a little hunched into her brand-new dog-walking outfit – an expensive waxed jacket with as many pockets as Teddy had naughty tricks. Beth could tell this was soon going to take the place of the minimalist handbag that Katie still loved, but which was manifestly failing to fit in with her new lifestyle. She’d soon go bagless, as Beth had seen dog-o
wning women do in the playground, and just have paper twists of Bonios exploding from her coat. Beth felt a little sad. She’d loved Katie’s look – part yoga guru, part lady of leisure. She supposed she’d just have to get used to this new phase.

  Thank goodness cat owning didn’t require any special sort of uniform. Beth sometimes wondered if Magpie would miss her at all, if she suddenly disappeared from her life. That was always assuming her new owners had a large bag of premium cat food to give her. If they didn’t, there’d be trouble. But maybe she was being unfair. Magpie did always seem to know when her owner was upset, and would generously arrange her bulk over Beth’s lap in such cases, seeming to believe that a good layer of shed black and white fur could improve any crisis. Beth would be devastated if Magpie ever wandered off or… she didn’t even want to finish the thought. Strange, that she’d looked with a degree of equanimity on the sudden death of a fellow human being today, yet could not contemplate the demise of her cat.

  But many were the times when she’d shed a bitter tear into that fluffy coat, and whispered secret sorrows into those sensitive triangular ears when Ben was safely abed. In theory, she now had York to confide in when things went wrong, but years on her own had made Beth rusty at the whole trust business. She would have said Magpie never judged her, as York often did, but that was wrong. Anyone gazing into those emerald chip eyes could be in no doubt that Magpie was a highly judgemental cat. The soothing thing was that she never, ever shared her views.

  Had Colin’s owner confided in this big, safe lump of a dog? Beth wondered. She inadvertently caught the Labrador’s eye and looked away again quickly. Maybe it was ridiculous, but she felt obscurely guilty, knowing so much more about his master’s fate than this clearly devoted boy did. It was very sad.