Rat bites. Jennifer Lawson was angry. The rats had been breeding and growing in the front garden of number 6 and had been all over Lynda’s body in number 10. She was the rat sandwich of number 8. She decided she would bloody well find the rats herself and then she could get Gordy back.
She rummaged around in the wardrobe for her wellies, her old wellies from way last winter. From the previous house, in fact. She pulled them on and rolled up an old pair of socks, stuffing them round the top and ramming them in tight so it made her calf hurt when she walked. Then she made her way downstairs, and found a hammer, a torch, one oven glove and one leather glove. She felt invincible. She swapped hands and swung the hammer about a few times. Then she took a deep breath to calm her racing heart and started down the basement stairs. A little slide, a slippery feeling underfoot, probably just the wellies on the wooden steps. The wood seemed slimy, dry and raised looking. She put her hand against the wall for support, feeling the plaster soft and crumbling under the quilt of the glove. At the bottom of the stairs she switched the light on. There was no sense of movement, no sense of anything scurrying away. No living thing had heard she was coming and vanished before she got here.
It looked the same as it always did. Plastic storage boxes piled up. Stuff she hadn’t got round to unpacking. An old exercise bike, a bookcase that needed fixing, or demolishing. An old office chair that was to go with the desk, once she had got round to building the desk for the laptop.
That had no Wi-Fi yet.
All those things she was supposed to do.
She walked into the middle of the basement, took a good look round. She knew the house at the top of the road, the double-barrelleds, had converted this room to a sitting room. The previous owners had got as far as putting down a carpet and somebody, maybe the owners before that, had Artexed the walls, roughly; too rough to use this room as a playroom for the wee ones without stripping it off or covering it. And then somebody had painted it all green. Army green.
She tapped her way round, climbing over boxes and cases, looking for gaps in the skirting board where rats might get through. There were bits where the Artex was coming away. She wondered if there were any holes behind it, and if the rats might be slithering between the layers as she stood here. She knew they could get into tiny places. She sniffed. The air was cool and fresh. The bad smell had vanished, as usual. It was never there when she needed it. Maybe it was all her imagination. But the little bleeding marks on Gordy’s fingertips and toes, the scrapes on his face were not in her imagination; they were real enough. His disease was real.
She swung the hammer at the top, as far as she could reach. Little bits of flaked green Artex rained down on her. She tapped a little lower into the corner. It sounded fine. She got brave and started tapping it with her knuckle, the way builders did before telling her it was best to do the job properly and it was going to cost but he would try to do it for a good price. In the middle of the wall, lower down and behind an old TV set she wasn’t even sure was theirs, the wall sounded hollow. She stopped, thinking that it might be better to get a builder now, in case she brought the whole wall down. Maybe even the whole house. But that would involve phoning Douglas and trying to get some money from him. He didn’t need to add to his worries. But then, if she made a mess of it, he would have to stump up for a professional. She carried on tapping and then prodding with her forefinger. The plaster gave slightly, as if the whole wall was paper thin. She felt along the bottom, along the top of the skirting board, feeling for a patch that gave a little more.
She tapped it hard with the hammer. It flaked – green then dirty white, then wee lumps of wood. Then a hole big enough to get her fingers through. But she couldn’t see what was on the opposite side and she wasn’t taking any chances. She got up, feeling her jeans slightly damp where she had been kneeling, swinging the hammer again until it stuck, then pulling back so the claws ripped through the Artex and the thin wet plasterboard behind. She hooked the claws in deep and it came away easily. No mass of rats leapt out. Just a faint gust of air from somewhere. The hole was dark, very dark, and very wet at the bottom. She was looking at a wall of different colours of mud, layer upon layer; some black, some almost red. She made the hole a bit bigger, more confident now. She pulled the torch from her anorak pocket and shone it around, her nose catching the smell of something that was unpleasant, something sweet and rotten.
Keeping well back she pointed the light beam around, taking in the gap, the bricks of an old wall that had crumpled, the small amount of water seeping through it. The overhead light blinked on and off, then on again. She waited; it went off and stayed off. As she knew it would. That would be the water seeping into the electrics. That was a bad mix.
She got up, her torch beam moving as she did so, casting its light vaguely round, here and there, and, in passing, highlighted a face behind the wall. A face that looked back at her with big laughing eyes and a smile the width of the Grand Canyon.
Jennifer screamed and fell backwards over the old TV she didn’t even think was theirs and landed flat on her back on the basement floor. The torch fell with her, hitting the carpet somewhere above her head and she knew no more.
Costello followed the woman down to the checkout, feeling a little elated, feeling like a spy. So many of her colleagues were doing things ‘off the record’, there was no reason why she should be acting any differently.
Life moved in small circles sometimes. Wyngate knew somebody who worked at the school where the geography teacher had once been married to the man who had been first on the scene in the Altmore Wood murder case. A quick check of records proved that it was correct. Costello could imagine how such gossip would delight the pupils.
A call to the school told her that she had missed Mrs Prentice, but that she would be in Asda wearing a white trenchcoat, and gave her a mobile number. Costello did not bother ringing her; she went to Asda and watched. She had found her straight away. Catherine White, as she had been born. Kate Prentice, as she was now. Cathy Griffin, as she had been when married to David. She had married again, with two kids, eight and ten. She looked as though she had popped into the supermarket for a pint of milk and a loaf, and ended up with half a trolley full.
Costello waited until Kate was through the checkouts and on her way to the car park, then stopped her near the queue for the kiosk.
‘Kate? Kate Prentice?’
The petite woman looked uncertainly at her, a nervous flick of fingers through short dark hair. ‘What do you want? I am not buying anything.’
Costello tried to smile at her, trying to engage her. ‘Would you mind if we had a cup of tea?’ She pulled her warrant card from her pocket and flashed it at her, covering it with her palm. ‘You are not in any trouble.’
‘It’s about David, isn’t it?’ Kate was on the ball, already suspicious of why the detective was here.
Costello nodded, looking about her, making sure nobody was overhearing.
‘Are you on a murder case? Sue Melrose? Helen McNealy?’
‘Helen?’ asked Costello.
‘Just somebody, it’s fine.’ She glanced at her watch – nothing evasive, just checking the time. ‘I have twenty minutes, half an hour, before I need to go and get the kids. Will that do you?’
In the end, Kate had phoned her mum to go and get the boys from the football training they attended after school. She seemed glad to talk, a black coffee and a Bakewell tart in front of her. Her first question was interesting to Costello’s trained ear. ‘He can’t trace me through you, can he?’
‘No, not at all. But I found you easily enough. Was it a bad divorce?’
‘He divorced me, broke my heart. So why do you want to talk to me?’
Costello started the conversation with the party line on the case of David Griffin and the Melrose murders. It was a terrible thing for a young police officer to stumble across.
Kate agreed that it was. Griffin was not the same man after that, and she was sorry the marriage had fallen apart. Some marriages can’t stand that sort of challenge.
Costello agreed, ‘Perfectly normal personalities get caught up in something that human psychology cannot cope with. The mind crumples; the emotional state goes into some kind of high alert. It becomes difficult to live a normal life after that. Normal things don’t seem important any more.’ She realized she was talking about Anderson, but she thought it might hit home and get Kate to open up.
‘Oh, he was a bastard before I married him. He was a bullshitter; he’d never amount to anything. He talks a good game, that’s all. I know that now, but back then I loved him. What can I say?’
‘Really?’ Costello was surprised. So David Griffin, a rising star of the force, was a dirtbag, in his wife’s opinion. Had the legend become bigger than the man? He had left the force, so what evidence was there that he was going to reach the dizzy heights? Had Anderson been beguiled by that as well?
She sighed; there was a strange friendship in there, between the two of them, and she was going to have to tread lightly. She needed to know more about David Griffin, the sensitive young policeman who bravely tried to save the life of a young woman who had had her chest cleaved open with an axe.
And why would his ex-wife mention a specific name in conjunction with Griffin and the word ‘murder’? Kate was not a stupid woman; she had made a connection in the back of her mind somewhere.
‘Do you ever get the feeling at work that the place has too many chiefs that never tell the ground troops anything?’
‘I’m a teacher, it goes with the territory.’
‘Nobody has told me anything about Helen McNealy?’
‘Oh …’ Kate Prentice tried to smile, then it folded. ‘I don’t think I should be saying this.’
‘Saying what?’
‘The big stress for David, I think. Was keeping quiet about Steven?’
‘Steven?’
‘Yes, it only came clear in hindsight, when I read about Helen McNealy.’
‘Do you want another coffee?’