A Nice Place to Die (15 page)

‘Oh,' he said, ‘they feel threatened by all the people moving in, and what that means. They used to be free, in control of their own lives, and then there's all the stuff that comes with masses of strangers moving in you know; government interference, rules and regulations, restrictions, that sort of shit. Nothing stays the same.'

‘That's crazy,' Jess said, ‘we don't give a toss what those old villagers do.'

‘That's part of the trouble,' Mark said, and he felt suddenly very sad. ‘We know your lot have no idea what they're doing to us.'

‘What's with this “us”?' she said, and moved closer to him. ‘The only us that matters here is you and me. What does it matter what they think, they're well past it. It's what we want that counts.'

Mark gave up. There was no point in talking any more. All that mattered this minute was the way her hot wet mouth felt on him and the taste of her on his tongue.

She broke off to look up at him. ‘D'you love me, Mark? Tell me you love me,' she said in a voice hoarse with lust.

‘I love you, girl,' he cried, ‘Oh, I love you.'

EIGHTEEN

T
erri and Helen were having supper together. Nicky had gone up to her room to do her homework, and the house was quiet.

Terri said, ‘Did you tell Dave I wrote that letter to the Millers?'

Helen looked flustered. ‘What letter's that?' she said. Terri wasn't fooled; Helen was playing for time.

‘Don't pretend you don't know,' Terri said. She was impatient with the little-girl way Helen always tried to deflect criticism. Terri resented being cast as the bully.

‘God knows what made you write it anyway,' Helen said. ‘He didn't do anything to that baby; he just picked her up when she fell down.'

‘All men are the same,' Terri said. That was it, as far as she was concerned.

‘Anyway, I didn't say anything,' Helen said. ‘I didn't tell anyone you wrote it.'

Terri said, ‘So why would an outsider like your ex-husband do a thing like that? Why should he care about a bit of graffiti, he doesn't live here.'

‘Why are you making it into such a big deal?' Helen said, sounding irritated. ‘After all, do you want to live in a street daubed with that kind of filth? Someone had to get rid of it. Think of Nicky.'

‘That's not the point,' Terri said. ‘What Dave did by cleaning up that graffiti was a deliberate act of criticism of me. He was making it obvious he thought it was my fault Dr Henson did what he did.'

‘Oh, darling, that's rubbish. You know it is. Why should Dave even know about Dr Henson?'

Helen was still irritated. She didn't like talking about Dave to Terri. She let her irritation show as she said in a voice full of weary disinterest, ‘Oh, Terri, what makes you think it had anything to do with you at all? It's far more likely Dave didn't want Nicky faced with those kinds of words at her age. He is still her father, after all.' Helen paused, then went on, ‘If anything, it was more likely a way of getting at me if he goes for custody. He can say this isn't a proper place to bring up a child, when he has to protect her by cleaning up that muck.'

‘What muck's that?' Nicky had slipped into the room without either of them noticing.

Terri was annoyed. It was frustrating that she and Helen could never even have an argument without Nicky butting in with her child's self-centred interpretation of everything they said. ‘Nothing,' she said.

Then she saw Helen's face and knew that she'd said the wrong thing again. Helen seemed to have no qualms about Nicky being privy to anything that Terri considered confidential between them.

‘No,' Helen said, ‘there was nothing secret about it, darling. We were talking about the ugly graffiti those people painted on the walls of Number Four.'

‘That wasn't people,' Nicky said, ‘that was Kevin Miller and me and Jess. We did it. We all did.'

‘We?' Terri said. ‘We?'

She caught the child's shoulder and turned her to face her. She was shocked.

‘What do you mean, “we”?' she demanded. ‘Don't tell me you had anything to do with it?'

Nicky pulled away from her and went to her mother. She glared at Terri and put her hand in Helen's. ‘I thought you'd be pleased,' she said. ‘You told me Terri wrote that letter warning Jess's mother about that old child molester. I thought you'd be pleased I wanted to help make him suffer.'

Helen smiled at her. She said sweetly, ‘But Dr Henson was innocent, darling. He didn't hurt Kylie, it was a mistake. You do understand that, don't you?' Helen sounded as though she wasn't convinced at all of Dr Henson's innocence.

‘We were only supporting you,' Nicky said defiantly to Terri. ‘It wasn't us who got it wrong, it was you.'

Helen was placatory. ‘It was a misunderstanding,' she said, ‘but what happened to Dr Henson was a tragedy for poor Mrs Henson, wasn't it?'

Nicky wanted to make peace with Terri. Life was much easier when she and Terri weren't at odds.

‘I s'pose you only did what you thought was right,' Nicky said, sounding like a prim little old lady. ‘It's sad he killed himself, but nobody forced him to. And surely it's better this way? An old man at the end of his life doesn't compare with one innocent child's life ruined by a paedophile. There must've been reasons why he didn't want to go on living. I'm surprised he didn't take that wife of his with him.'

Terri asked herself, why does she always sound like someone reading a political manifesto? She's thirteen, for God's sake. Where does she get the things she comes out with?'

But she smiled. She was glad that she and Nicky were friends again.

NINETEEN

E
arlier in the day it had stopped raining and now the clouds had rolled back to reveal a mass of stars. Alice thought how stark everything suddenly looked outside. There was a full moon, and already the grass on the verges and in the Henson's front garden glittered with frost.

Before she went to bed, Alice took one last look out of her living room window. Now black ice covered the gardens and the street with a diamond sheen in the moonlight.

There was no wind and the scene was as still and dead as an old photograph. This was Forester Close as Alice wished it always was, quiet and peaceful and empty of people. There was an old-fashioned quality about the night here that comforted her. The daytime reeked of the twenty-first century and Alice felt discomfited and out of place; at night she was part of a formal order imposed by darkness.

But as she looked out at this wintry scene, Alice caught a movement in a parked car. She gripped the windowsill for support.

She recognized Dave's battered Ford. His was the only car she knew with a roof-rack piled with what looked like builders' equipment. When he first started to visit Helen, Alice had put him down as some kind of jobbing labourer. More recently, it had crossed her mind that he was sleeping rough in the car while he tried to get Helen to take him back. But she wasn't sure, she'd never seen him.

Now he was parked across the street from Terri and Helen's house. Against the glow of the street lamp, Alice could see him hunched in the driving seat.

He must be going to meet Helen, Alice thought. They must have planned a romantic assignation where Terri can't interrupt them.

As she watched, Dave got out of the car and took some kind of bag off the roof.

Then he jumped over the front wall of Number Five and disappeared round the side of the house.

Dave disappeared for so long that in the end Alice gave up and went upstairs to bed. I'm happy for them, she thought, it's for the best. If Helen goes back to Dave it's good for Nicky. They can be a proper family again.

Before Alice undressed, she took one last look out of her bedroom window. The moon had moved behind the house, and now black shadows made geometric patterns across the gardens and the street.

Alice was about to turn away and get ready for bed when she saw Dave come running round the side of Number Five. She could see him plainly as he crossed the front garden and vaulted over the wall into the street. He pulled open the door of his car, got in and at once drove off as though all the devils of hell were after him.

Alice sighed. He and Helen must have had a row. Or perhaps Terri caught them together. Really, she thought, Helen's hopeless. She might at least put him out of his misery one way or another.

Alice was wide awake now. She went downstairs in her nightdress to check she had put the cat out. She kept forgetting things like that these days. Then she remembered that she no longer had a cat. Fancy forgetting that, she told herself.

The thought of Phoebus made her want to cry. She must think of something else. She opened the back door to step into the garden to enjoy the beauty of the night for a moment before bed.

The air was crisp with a hint of woodsmoke, an old-fashioned, nostalgic smell. She sniffed again. Someone must have had a bonfire earlier, the scent of aromatic smoke was definitely in the air.

It was cold outside. Alice shivered and went back indoors. But that breath of fresh air had cleared her head of sad thoughts about poor Phoebus. And there was something consoling, too, about the smell of bonfire smoke, a nostalgic aspirin to ease the headache of tomorrow. Now she could go to bed and enjoy the simple pleasure of being warm and comfortable knowing it was cold outside, too cold for burglars. Or Kevin Miller.

She thought, I'll take a sleeping pill. Nothing will happen tonight.

Alice dreamed of a dark place full of confusion. She half woke and said aloud ‘This isn't fair, this isn't part of this beautiful night,' but then she went back to sleep.

In the morning she felt as though she had spent a sleepless night. Even after she'd dressed and gone downstairs to put the kettle on, the dream still troubled her. She wasn't sure what had happened in it, or who had been there; she just couldn't shake off the atmosphere of ill-will that had permeated it and persisted now in spite of the blades of sunlight attacking her polished furniture through the window on this bright, clear morning.

What's the matter with me, she asked herself, looking down the street to make sure the Miller kids weren't hanging about before she opened the front door to bring in the milk. It had become automatic, that daily check that the coast was clear.

She couldn't see them, but when she opened the door she shut it again quickly against the smell. There was a horrible chemical smell out there, a sour stench of wet ash and burnt plastic.

From the window in her front room she had a better view. Something had happened to Number Five. There was a vast dark gash in the roof. The front of the house was stained black, and smoke crawled out of a broken window on the first floor. Part of the side wall of the building under the roof had collapsed and the remains of Nicky's bedroom were exposed. The bed was still smouldering, and a teddy bear, mutilated by the flames, hung by the threads of a knitted jacket from the end of a charred joist.

A police car drove up the street, did a screeching three-point turn outside Alice's house, and parked on the verge behind one of several red vans from the fire department. The actual fire-fighting appliances must have been and gone; what remained were Incident and Investigation vehicles.

Alice saw a curtain move in the front room of Number Two. Donna Miller must be watching, too. Has she seen me? Alice asked herself. Does she know I'm here? She wondered, does she think one of her teenagers was involved? And she thought, with satisfaction, whoever did it, they'll get the blame.

But of course Alice knew they hadn't done it. She could scarcely believe it, but there could be no doubt, she'd seen the way Dave had run away from that house in the moonlight.

Maybe Donna is looking at me, she thought, maybe all the Millers are in there together watching me and knowing that I know who did it. But I'm not going to tell. After what those Miller kids did to Phoebus, let them take the blame for this.

TWENTY

B
ecause of their ongoing murder investigation in Forester Close, the Superintendent told DCI Moody and Sergeant Reid to treat the arson attack on Number Five as part of their inquiries.

‘Here we go again,' Jack Reid said as he stopped the car.

‘Ugh,' Rachel Moody said as she got out of the vehicle. ‘What an awful smell.'

When they went into the house, the fire damage was not as bad as it had looked from outside in the street. Only the garage and the child's bedroom above it had suffered much more than cosmetic harm.

The fire investigators were on site.

Sergeant Reid knew their Chief. ‘We might as well move in and save petrol,' Jack said. ‘What's the story this time?'

‘Hello again, Jack,' the Fire Chief said, ‘how's the wife?'

‘Not so bad,' Jack said. ‘What's it this time, kids?'

‘Could be. Deliberate, but it doesn't look as though it was much more than a prank. It could've been so much worse if it hadn't started in the garage.'

‘Some kind of warning, d'you think?'

The Fire Chief shrugged. ‘That's your problem. It was deliberate, but beyond that . . . The garage and the bedroom will have to be rebuilt, but there's no structural damage to the rest of the house. The insurance will be asking a few tough questions, I'd say. They won't be happy, that's all I can say at this stage, really.'

Rachel Moody was in the kitchen talking to Terri, Helen and Nicky. They sat round the table in the open plan dining area drinking coffee Terri had made.