A Nice Place to Die (11 page)

She checked the cat flap to be sure it wasn't stuck, but it was working perfectly. She opened the back door and called him. Sometimes if she was earlier than usual he was still outside doing whatever he did when he went out at night.

He probably caught a bird or a rabbit or something and he's not hungry, she told herself. She wasn't worried. Phoebus knew how to look after himself. He'd be back when he was ready.

By evening, she began to wonder if he'd found himself a new home. She felt rebuffed. She thought that she had not made him happy. Even a stray cat didn't want to live with her.

Soon after dark, there was a knock on the front door.

No one called on anyone after dark, no one innocent. Alice went into the hall and listened at the door for the sound of voices.

But the silence was unnatural.

‘Who is it?' she called, her voice faint and querulous with anxiety.

‘It's Jean Henson.' Jean's voice sounded more frightened than Alice's. ‘Please, let me in.'

Alice started to unlock the deadlock and undo the bolts. She had taken off the chain as soon as she recognized Jean's voice. Of course, Phoebus must've gone to Number Four hoping the Hensons would feed him. Cats were so greedy. Jean must be bringing him home.

When she opened the door, Jean was pressed so close against it that she almost fell into the hall. She was carrying something covered with a towel.

She gave a quick look behind her as though to check she wasn't followed.

‘Please, quick, shut the door,' she said.

Jean's face was white and pinched, she looked terrified and ill. She had obviously been crying and her eyes were red and swollen.

‘What is it? What's happened?' Alice asked.

‘Can we go in the kitchen?' Jean said. ‘No one can see us there.'

Alice was alarmed now. ‘Has something happened?' she asked again. ‘Where's your husband?'

‘He can't come out,' Jean said, ‘he knows they're waiting for him.'

‘Waiting for him? Who?'

‘Those terrible kids. They'll kill him if they can. If they get him while it's dark, they'll kill him. They've done it before, haven't they?'

‘Done what?' Alice asked. Please, don't let her say it, she thought, she mustn't say it, we must try to forget.

Jean was frightened by what she had said already. ‘The trouble is, there's no proof,' she said, ‘we all know who did it but the police can't prove anything.'

Alice felt oppressed and guilty. She knew that she could have provided that proof but knowing that made her feel all the more terrorized by the feral youths who hung around in the street outside the Millers' at night.

She looked at Jean and saw that her visitor wasn't simply afraid; she was petrified. She was shaking all over, even her lips shook so it was difficult for her to speak. It came as a shock to Alice that Jean and Dr Henson, who, unlike herself, had had real lives in the real world, felt the same terror of the youths as she did. She wished she didn't know that, it made the threat seem much more immediate and real.

Alice hustled Jean into the kitchen.

‘Surely they wouldn't go that far?' she said, and her voice quavered like an old woman's.

‘Look,' Jean said.

She put whatever she was carrying under the towel on to the kitchen table. ‘Look what they've done.'

Jean pulled back the towel the way police pathologists revealed corpses in murder dramas on television.

Alice did not realize at once that what lay on her kitchen table was the carcass of her cat. Phoebus looked like something that had been pulled out of a slurry pit. His orange coat was slimy with drying blood. His beautiful striped tail was stripped of fur. His head had been almost cut off and hung from a thin iridescent sinew. His teeth were bared and the sockets of his eyes were a mass of congealed blood.

Alice could not look. Gently, she folded the towel back over the cat's body.

‘No,' she said, ‘they couldn't. Surely not on purpose. How could anyone do that?'

Jean said, ‘Peter found him. He used to come round to our kitchen windowsill sometimes. We put out milk for him. They must've caught him. They left him on the doorstep. Peter nearly stepped on him when he went out. They must've thought he was ours.'

Alice knew that wasn't true. The Millers knew Phoebus belonged to her. This was a threat meant for her.

Alice thought she was going to be sick. She leaned on the sink and closed her eyes, rocking to and fro in a helpless, pointless, way. Why did Jean have to bring him here, why didn't she just tell me? That would be enough. Or would it? Alice could scarcely believe the cruelty inflicted on Phoebus. Nothing that Jean could have said would have described that.

‘They know he's mine,' she said. ‘Donna brought him here once when she saw him on the main road. And anyway, why should they hate you or your husband?'

Even as she said this, she remembered the incident involving little Kylie, how Donna had taken Dr Henson to be a pervert who'd targeted Jess's child.

‘Do they still think a paediatrician is the same as a paedophile?' Alice whispered. She could not bring herself to speak the word in a normal voice. ‘They can't think that.'

‘Don't you think so?' Jean said in a queer, faltering voice. ‘I do. They think Peter's a pervert. That butch lesbian and the faded creature she lives with probably wind them up. They hate men, women like that. They're always looking for excuses to blame them for everything. And didn't they once work for Social Services? There you are, then.'

Alice didn't know what Jean was talking about. She had no idea how to calm her. All she could think about was the horrible thing that had happened to Phoebus and why anyone should do it to a harmless cat.

It was unspeakable, that act of pointless violence. But she told herself that Jean must also be afraid of what those mindless thugs could do to her husband to punish him for his imagined crime.

‘What are we going to do?' she asked Jean at last.

‘What can we do?' Jean said. ‘You've seen the cat.' Her voice was bleak.

‘Not the police? No, of course not.'

‘What could they do? We can't prove who did this to Phoebus. He could've been run over. And as for the threats against Peter, they'd say he's a confused old man who's imagining things. The police couldn't do anything. And then those apes would know we'd reported them. It would only make things worse.'

‘Apes wouldn't do a thing like this,' Alice said. She didn't know if they would or not, it was something to say, the best she could think of to convey her helpless contempt for the worst of humanity. But she and Jean both understood that it wasn't contempt she felt; it was extreme terror.

Alice took Jean's arm. ‘You'd better get back,' she said. ‘I don't think they saw you come in.'

‘No,' Jean said, ‘they'll be watching Peter. They'll expect him to bury . . .' she couldn't say the cat's name, she simply pointed at the heap on the table.

‘I'll look after Phoebus,' Alice said. ‘He was my cat.'

But when she had seen Jean out through the front door, she went back into the kitchen. What can I do with him, she asked herself.

She fetched a sheet from the airing cupboard and wrapped it around the remains. Then she put the bundle in a plastic bag from the supermarket and tied the handles tightly. She put the whole thing into the rubbish bin outside the back door. She couldn't bring herself to bury the body in the garden, in case someone saw her do it. She felt bad about putting Phoebus into the bin, but consoled herself that he was dead, there was nothing of that glorious creature left in those hideous remains.

They're not going to sneer at me while I bury him, she thought, I'm not going to give them the satisfaction. This is Kevin Miller's way of threatening me, but why should he? Even if he thinks I saw what he did to the vicar, he must know by now I'm not going to say anything.

The best thing to do, she thought, is to ignore what's happened, pretend that I'm still hoping to find Phoebus.

Alice spent the rest of the evening making a notice. She wrote in big letters with a black marker pen on an old piece of cardboard – Missing: Beautiful big ginger cat, last seen in Catcombe Mead area. Reward. Apply Three Forester Close.

I'll put that up outside the supermarket, Alice thought. I'm not going to give Kevin Miller the satisfaction of knowing how he's upset me.

FOURTEEN

T
he woman behind the counter at the Co-op in Old Catcombe was red in the face with indignation, so strong was her sense of self-justification.

‘I've said it before and I'll say it again, there's a curse on this place.'

DCI Rachel Moody abandoned any attempt at the scientific stance of the professional police officer. She asked, ‘Why? Why should the place be cursed?'

‘Didn't the murder of our young vicar take place on the selfsame spot where way back in the old times Hester Warren was burned as a witch?'

The woman peered into Rachel Moody's face in conspiratorial fashion, cutting Sergeant Reid with his sceptical smile out of the secret she was about to tell.

‘They do say that as the flames consumed her she put a curse on the village and on the descendants of those who put her to death until the end of time.'

Behind the woman's back, Jack Reid caught the DCI's eye and tapped his temple with his forefinger.

‘Ask anyone who lives here,' the woman said, ‘they'll tell you the same. That housing estate was sent to blight our lives and that's what's happened. The people who live there came to do the devil's work. And that's what they've done. The Reverend Tim Baker's death is Hester Warren's revenge.'

‘But why?' Jack Reid asked. ‘Why him?'

‘It was the parson called her a witch. They say he was the one encouraged them to burn her.'

Rachel Moody's ears were pounding. She needed to sit down but instead she leaned against the counter and waited for a wave of dizziness to pass.

Jack Reid knew the signs by now. Rachel Moody had a very low boredom threshold, he thought. This wasn't the kind of information the DCI was after and more and more often she'd pretend to come over faint to put a stop to it. Women could get away with that sort of thing.

‘Why don't you have a look round outside, Boss,' he said, ‘and I'll finish checking if someone in the shop saw anyone using the phone box at the relevant time.'

The DCI nodded. ‘I'll leave you to it,' she said. ‘I'll be waiting in the car.'

‘What's the matter with her?' the woman said. ‘Who does she think she is?'

Jack Reid stared at her in amazement. ‘I don't know what you're talking about,' he said. ‘Can we get back to the point, please?'

‘What can I do for you, then?' she said. She did not try to hide her hostility.

‘Do many people make calls from that public telephone box on the green?' he asked.

They had traced the tip-off about Kevin Miller to that phone. Reid had little hope that anyone saw someone using the box at six o'clock in the morning, but he had to go through the motions.

‘Not many,' the woman from the Co-op said. ‘Why should they? More likely a stranger passing through, though they all seem to have their mobiles now, don't they? Could be a delivery driver looking for an address.'

‘The call I'm interested in was made at six a.m.'

The woman from the Co-op laughed. ‘Only farmers are up at that time of day,' she said, ‘and they're far too busy to make phone calls from the village they could perfectly well make at home.'

Sergeant Reid gave her an arch look, asking for her collusion. ‘Could be a call he didn't want the wife to hear,' he said.

‘Nay, you're clutching at straws, lad. The wives have better things to do than listen to phone calls at that time of day in the middle of winter.'

Jack Reid closed his notebook and put his pen back in his top pocket.

‘No, I suppose you're right,' he said. ‘But we've got to check everything.'

‘Is this to do with vicar's murder on the housing estate?' the woman asked. ‘Why you're making such a meal of that God knows. Everyone here knows who did it. Why don't you just arrest that Kevin Miller. He's the one as did Mr Baker in, no doubt about that.'

‘We need evidence. We can't arrest him without evidence. And so far there isn't any.' Jack was annoyed with himself. His frustration had made him say more than he'd intended.

‘I don't know what's got into your lot,' the woman said. ‘What's wrong with the good old-fashioned ways, I'd like to know? Arrest him on suspicion and force the evidence out of him once you've got him in a police cell. That's what you should do. It's the only way to treat scum like that.'

Sergeant Reid smiled at her. He was beginning to have some sympathy with her attitude. ‘The old ways are the best, eh?' he said. ‘Don't let my boss hear you say that. She wants to dot the i's and cross the t's before she brings a case to court. It's more than her job's worth if she doesn't get it right.'

‘But she would get it right,' the woman from the Co-op said. ‘Kevin Miller killed the young vicar, we all know that.'

In the car, Rachel Moody was sitting in the passenger seat with the door open. She was staring across the village green with a faraway look in her eyes.

Jack didn't ask her if she was feeling better. He thought it more tactful, and much easier, to ignore the subject of her funny turns.