‘I live here,’ said Saul Desmond, universally known as Saturday. ‘Remember?’
‘I remember,’ Ash said tersely, ‘that you buggered off to London, without a word of explanation, without so much as a postcard to say you were OK, leaving Hazel distraught with grief and guilt.’
‘I never blamed Hazel for what happened.’ Saturday’s voice was low.
‘Well, you could have stuck around long enough to convince her,’ snarled Ash, entirely unappeased. ‘You broke her in half, running off like that.’
‘It wasn’t the easiest time in my life, either,’ retorted the young man rebelliously. ‘You know that. Why are you angry with me?’
‘Because that was more than a year ago, and this is the first either of us has heard from you since! We thought you were dead. No,’ Ash corrected that, ‘I thought you were dead. Hazel always thought you’d come back. For months she kept your bed made up, changing the sheets although no one had slept on them. She kept this house on because she believed you’d show up one day needing your old room. Why didn’t you call? Or text, or e-mail, or write? Anything, just to let her know you were alive and’ – he paused in his tirade to look Saturday up and down – ‘well.’
‘I should have,’ admitted the youth. ‘At first, I couldn’t face doing because it was all too raw. And later, I couldn’t face doing because I should have done it sooner. I’m sorry, Gabriel. I’m sorry if I hurt her. I didn’t think … I didn’t expect … it would matter to her that much.’
‘Of course it mattered to her!’ shouted Ash. ‘It mattered to both of us. You matter to us. Anything could have happened to you. You could have been dead in a ditch somewhere, for all we knew. And now’ – his anger revived like a stoked fire – ‘you turn up out of nowhere, without a word of warning, just roll up here and let yourself in and go to sleep as if this was still your bed!’
Saturday looked around him, trying to see what harm he’d done. ‘I was tired after the drive. I left London at seven this morning. So I fell asleep: so shoot me.’
‘Don’t tempt me!’ yelled Ash. Then, scowling: ‘Drive?’
Saturday had never been easily chastened. At that he looked positively chipper. ‘Yeah. I got a new car.’
‘You can drive now?’
‘Of course I can drive. I’m eighteen, you know?’
‘And you can afford a car?’ The last time they met, Saturday had been stacking shelves in an all-night service station. The first time they met he was living on the streets.
‘I got me a proper grown-up job. I’ve got my own flat and everything.’
The echo of his earlier remark came back to Ash. ‘You drove up this morning? So you haven’t been in Norbold this last week? You didn’t leave flowers and wine on the doorstep? You didn’t let yourself in a couple of nights ago?’
The teenager’s face, a fraction broader than Ash remembered it, was a picture of confusion. ‘I told you: I got here about an hour ago. I still had my key, so I thought I’d wait for Hazel inside. Do you reckon she’ll be long?’
Ash considered. ‘Actually, yes. I took her down to stay with the Byrfields for a while. Things have been going on here that she needed to get away from. I have to get back to the shop now – I left Patience holding the fort – but we need to talk.’
‘What shop?’
Almost more than anything else, that brought home to Ash how long Saturday had been gone. ‘I opened a second-hand bookshop. I’m never going to get rich, but it’s good. Give me a lift down, and I’ll bring you up to speed on what’s been happening.’
Saturday locked the front door, and Ash made sure he’d done it right. In his mind, Saturday was still an irresponsible adolescent, not to be trusted with anything important. They walked round the corner into Alfred Street, where Saturday stunned Ash to his boot-soles by nonchalantly opening neither the maroon hatchback nor the grey van parked there, but the sunshine yellow sports car.
Like most sports cars, it was designed for people like Saturday, not for people like Ash. Which is odd, because most people who can afford sports cars are more like Ash than they are like Saturday. But Ash finally folded his long legs into the well and shrugged his broad shoulders together enough to get the door shut. ‘This proper grown-up job you got,’ he ventured.
‘Cyber security,’ Saturday said complacently. ‘They pay me silly money to hack into corporate systems and figure out where the weaknesses are. Which is a riot, because if they weren’t paying me silly money to do it, I’d probably still be doing it and they’d be trying to put me in gaol.’
He started the car. The throaty rumble made curtains twitch all the way up the street. But instead of driving off, he twisted in the close confines of his seat so that he could see his passenger’s face. ‘Just one thing, Gabriel. In all the circumstances, that was a bit tactless.’
‘What was?’
‘Accusing me of buggering off.’
Ash looked at him in sudden horror, the enormity of the gaffe making his jaw drop. He was still trying to stammer out some kind of apology when Saturday grinned, an impish grin as sunny as his car; and the griefs and recriminations of the missing year turned to pixie-dust and blew away.
DCI Gorman was in his office – paperwork, he’d discovered, mounted in direct proportion to rank – when DS Presley stuck his head round the door. ‘We’ve got another one.’
Gorman considered. This could mean almost anything: another visit from the IPCC, another strongly worded letter from a local solicitor, or Ralph Percival making off with another unsecured bicycle. ‘No, I’m going to need more of a clue,’ he decided.
‘BFT,’ said Presley.
Like a Labrador at the sound of a gun, Gorman was immediately alert. ‘Who? Where? Another Mauler?’
Presley consulted his notebook. ‘Who: Gillian Mitchell, aged forty-three, of 81 Park Crescent, Norbold. Where: at her home, sometime last night. And definitely not another Mauler. She was a journalist.’
That too could mean almost anything, from international correspondent to writing up the racing pigeon results for the Norbold News. ‘Do we know her?’ asked Gorman.
‘Not really. She’s always lived in Norbold but she’s a freelancer, working mostly for the London press. One of the neighbours called it in. He noticed that she hadn’t opened the curtains by mid-morning. He couldn’t get a response to either a knock or a phone-call, so he used his key – they kept one for each other – to check that she was all right. And found that she wasn’t.’
‘What happened?’ Gorman was already shutting his computer and reaching for his coat.
‘Somebody beat her head in, quite possibly with the same wheel-brace he used on Trucker Watts,’ said Tom Presley.
Which was so odd that Gorman had the forensic medical examiner confirm it. Journalists do get murdered occasionally, but not usually by the same people who murder criminal fringe wannabes like Trucker Watts.
But Dr Fitzgerald had already noted the similarities: lesions of the same dimensions, delivered in a similar manner, ending in an almost right-angled indentation into the skull that suggested a fashioned tool rather than, for instance, a length of wood or metal piping.
Gorman viewed the body before they bagged it, but experience told him he’d see nothing that Fitzgerald wouldn’t have noted and be able to expand on in his report. All he saw was a middle-aged woman in a dressing-gown, face-down on her sitting-room floor, the blood pooled under her head already dark and congealed. One slipper had come off when she fell.
‘So she knew her attacker,’ said Presley slowly, ‘but they probably weren’t intimately involved.’
That was an unusually discreet way of putting it, at least for Presley. ‘And you know this how?’ asked Gorman.
‘Because she was wearing her dressing-gown. If he’d been a stranger, she wouldn’t have let him in after she’d gone to bed. But if they were an item, she probably wouldn’t have bothered with the dressing-gown – we’d have found her in just her pyjamas.’
It was good thinking, except for one thing. ‘It’s the middle of winter. Once the central heating’s gone off, the house will go cold pretty quickly. Check what time the heating goes off – an hour later than that, she’d need a dressing-gown if she was only nipping to the bathroom.’
Presley grunted a fractional disappointment. ‘So it could have been someone she was shacked up with.’
‘Right now it could have been anyone. Mind the picture.’
Presley looked around him. There were pictures on every wall: mostly prints, some watercolours. ‘Which one?’
‘The one on the floor. The one you’re about to put your foot through.’
It was a small watercolour in a black frame, reared up beside the fireplace. It might have been a crowd scene; it might have been a woman’s hat. Presley tried looking at it sideways. ‘Is that what they call Impressionism?’
‘Either that, or somebody’s pet monkey got at their paints.’
The truth was, they were two single men with more interest in sports than art, not qualified to comment on a creative woman’s taste.
‘OK,’ said Gorman, moving on, ‘let’s talk to the neighbours, see what they can tell us. Oh, and bag that.’ There was a laptop on the coffee table. ‘If this isn’t random, if it’s something to do with her work, maybe the reason’s in there.’
Careful in his plastic gloves, Presley went to pick it up. It fell apart in his hands. He raised shocked eyes to his chief, who nodded glumly.
‘Let’s say, the reason was in there.’
But what Gorman and Presley knew, and many people don’t, was that data is not necessary destroyed by trashing the equipment containing it. They bagged all the pieces as gently as they could, and hoped that the skill of their IT experts would prove greater than the fury of the man with the wheel-brace.
Colonel Aykhurst had spent the fourteen years of his retirement being considered a nosy neighbour. This was unfair, since most of Park Crescent had benefited from his observational skills at one time or another. When there was a spate of break-ins, Colonel Aykhurst it was who knew everyone’s routine and was able to alert the police to the unauthorised activity in time to catch the culprits. When Mrs Delaware’s Lhasa Apso gave birth to a litter of curiously marked puppies, Colonel Aykhurst it was who had noticed the clandestine visits of Mr Wilson’s Jack Russell terrier to her garden nine weeks earlier.
And today it was Colonel Aykhurst again who wondered why Miss Mitchell still hadn’t drawn her curtains by eleven o’clock in the morning, and – not out of nosiness but out of concern – took steps to find out.
As a serving soldier, he had seen action in Bosnia, Northern Ireland and the Gulf. He was no stranger to the mayhem one individual can wreak on the body of another. But seeing it in Bosnia – even in Northern Ireland – was one thing, and seeing it in Park Crescent, in the house next to his, when the body in question belonged to a woman he had known for seven years, was something else again. He was still clearly shaken when the detectives arrived to speak to him.
He might have been shaken, he might have been growing old, but he knew what the policemen needed to learn and he went straight there. ‘I did not see anyone approach or leave Miss Mitchell’s house. But last night I heard voices raised in what might have been an argument, and a noise that I took to be a slammed door.’
Presley was scribbling fast to catch up. Gorman said, ‘What sort of time would this have been?’
‘Approximately twenty past ten,’ said Colonel Aykhurst. ‘I was watching the television news. They’d finished with the important items but hadn’t yet gone to the weather.’
‘You heard this argument above the sound of your TV?’
‘Yes, sir. They were not shouting – I could not hear what they were arguing about – but the tone of disputation was unmistakable. They were in the sitting room, on this side of the house. The curtains were imperfectly drawn and I could see the light through the gap.’
‘Was Miss Mitchell one of the parties arguing?’
‘I could not vouch for that, although it seems likely. I believe I heard one female voice and one male voice.’
‘How long were they arguing for?’ asked Gorman.
‘They were arguing loudly enough to attract my attention for just a minute or two. They may have been arguing more quietly for some time before, of course.’
‘And then someone slammed a door. But you didn’t see anyone leave.’
‘No, sir. And I did look. I went to my window, which’ – he gestured, and Gorman went to see – ‘gives a good view of Miss Mitchell’s front door. There was no one on the drive, and if there was a strange car out there it must have been parked out of sight. I watched for another minute, but everything had gone quiet so I drew the curtain again and returned to the television.’
He hesitated then. He needed to know something and didn’t want to ask for fear of what the answer might be. But Colonel Aykhurst had never allowed fear to keep him from doing his duty, so he drew a deep breath and asked. ‘If I had done something then, could I have saved her?’
Dave Gorman regarded the old man with compassion. ‘I don’t know for sure, not yet. But I doubt it. If everything went quiet, it’s probably because Miss Mitchell had already been attacked. Even if you’d called us – and why would you? Because of a bit of an argument next door? – and even if we’d responded immediately, which we might not have done, the damage was already done.’
‘But she was still on her feet. She slammed the door.’
Gorman was intrigued. ‘What makes you think that was her?’
‘If it had been her visitor slamming the front door as he left, I’d have seen him. And if it was an internal door, wouldn’t that be her – leaving the room but not of course leaving the house?’
DS Presley paused in his note-taking. ‘If it was a door slamming. Her computer had been smashed. Could that have been what you heard?’
Colonel Aykhurst gave it some thought. ‘Possibly,’ he said at length. ‘So at that point Miss Mitchell was already …?’
‘Beyond any help you could have given her,’ nodded Gorman. ‘It seems likely. But you’re not to blame for not being psychic. If I’d heard an argument next door that ended with a slammed door, I’d have gone back to watching the news as well.’
They talked a little longer. The colonel was able to fill in some details about Gillian Mitchell’s life and work, the kind of person she had been, her normal routine when she was at home rather than away working. Nothing he said cast any great light on what had happened, but then Gorman didn’t expect it to. At this point, you just gathered the information. You only worked out what was relevant later.
Driving back to Meadowvale – Park Crescent was on the smarter side of town, the Highfield Road side – Tom Presley said, ‘He seemed pretty on the ball, for an old guy.’
Gorman shrugged. ‘You know what they say about old soldiers.’
But Presley didn’t. ‘What?’
‘Old soldiers never die, they only march away.’ He knew that wasn’t quite right, but it satisfied him more than if it had been.