A Nice Place to Die (19 page)

Oh, Peter, she said to herself, if only you were here. How could you go and leave me alone like this?

Real or unreal, it didn't matter now. The sirens were screaming, and ghostly giants in weird masks and vast protective suits milled on the street outside her house.

Jean could not bear this alone. She pulled on her coat and slipped out of the house. If anyone knew what was happening, it would be Alice; she'd go and ask her.

But she could not reach Alice's house without running the gauntlet of a posse of police and fire officers. Taking care not to be seen, she fled past the demolished side wall of Number Five to hammer on the back door, calling Terri's name.

Terri, in striped pyjamas, opened the door and pulled her inside.

‘What's Kevin Miller done now?' Jean said. ‘What's happening, do you know?'

‘No idea,' Terri said, ‘but I don't think it's the Millers. Nicky says they're all over Alice's place.'

‘It can't be. What on earth would Alice have been getting up to?' Jean said. She felt weak and dizzy.

Terri took Jean's hand. ‘Don't worry,' she said, ‘it's probably a false alarm. Or perhaps Alice thought she heard an intruder and dialled nine nine nine.'

But Jean could not be placated. ‘Perhaps she did hear an intruder,' she said, and her voice sounded doomed.

‘Those aren't ordinary cops,' Nicky said. ‘It's terrorists at least; or a chemical leak. They've got breathing apparatus.'

She was excited, rushing round the house seeking the best view of what the emergency services were doing in the street.

All day people in white overalls, wearing masks and huge rubber gloves, moved in and out of Alice's house. Uniformed cops sealed off her driveway, and there was a police check point at the end of the Close where it met the main road.

And all day the other residents stayed hidden, watching behind closed curtains, conscious that they were silent witnesses to something stupendous, though they did not know what it was.

The drama was not diminished when they knew what had happened.

The milkman, barred from entering Forester Close, drove his float down the alley behind the houses to make his deliveries.

‘All this is because of me,' he told Terri, Helen, Nicky and Jean, who were gathered in the kitchen of Number Five. ‘I'm the one discovered it.'

‘Discovered what?' Terri asked.

The milkman, called Fred, looked shocked at the enormity of what he had started.

‘Here,' Helen said, ‘sit down and have a cup of tea. You don't look well.'

‘Tell us what happened,' Nicky said. ‘Why are all those men wearing all that special gear?'

‘It was all the milk bottles she never took in,' Fred said. ‘I thought she must've gone away for Christmas and forgotten to leave me a note.'

‘Alice never went away anywhere,' Jean said. She sounded full of foreboding.

‘I took the bottles away when she didn't take them in,' Fred said. ‘It doesn't do to leave milk bottles on the doorstep; it's a signal to thieves. Then after ten days I tried looking through the letter box and saw the post she hadn't collected. But that didn't mean anything, not if she'd gone away, did it?'

‘No,' Terri said, ‘not if she'd gone away.'

Fred began to look green and had to take a swig of tea before he could go on.

‘It was the smell,' he said. ‘I couldn't help noticing the smell.'

‘What smell?' Nicky said.

‘Perhaps she'd put a turkey out to defreeze and forgotten it before she went away?' Terri prompted him.

‘But if she was going away, she wouldn't have had a turkey, would she?' Jean said.

‘No,' Fred said, ‘that's the conclusion I came to myself. I knocked at Mrs Miller's and asked if she knew if her neighbour at Number Three was taking a holiday?'

‘What did she say?' Helen asked.

‘She said she's not the friendly type, I haven't seen her since before Christmas,' Fred said. ‘Some people, eh? No sense of community.'

‘Quite,' Terri said.

There was a pause. Then Fred said, ‘I called the cops. I thought I'd better.'

‘But what's happened?' Terri almost shouted at him. ‘What did they find?'

‘They found her,' Fred said. ‘She'd been dead all that time. She was lying dead at the bottom of the stairs.'

Terri gasped.

‘Alice is dead?' Jean Henson whispered. ‘My God, Alice is dead.'

‘What are the police saying?' Terri asked Fred. She looked as though she was about to shake the information out of him.

‘Her face was frozen in an expression of abject horror, one of the young cops told me,' Fred said.

‘Do they think she was murdered?' Nicky asked.

Her clear childish voice in that context shocked them all.

Fred got up to go. ‘I don't know what's happening now,' he said. ‘That's what they're doing now, I suppose, finding out if someone killed her.'

‘It was probably an accident,' Nicky said. ‘Old people fall down stairs.'

‘More likely Kevin Miller's got his own back,' Jean said. Her hands were shaking and she was very white. ‘He said he would,' she said. Then she started to cry.

In Alice's house, DCI Moody and Sergeant Reid watched as the body was removed from the house.

Rachel Moody sighed. ‘Well,' she said, ‘what do you make of it?'

Jack Reid closed his notebook. ‘Not suicide, anyway,' he said.

Rachel gave him a quick look. ‘Are you saying that because you really believe it, or because this is Forester Close and you think the odds favour a violent death?' she asked.

Jack said, ‘There's just no reason to think she killed herself. No note, nothing. And she hadn't made her bed. She was the sort of woman who wouldn't want a stranger finding an unmade bed. It looks like an accident to me. A frail old woman caught short in the middle of the night trips on her way to the bathroom and falls down stairs. It's easily done.'

‘What about that gash on the back of her head?'

‘She could easily have hit her head on the newel post on her way down. There was a lot of bruising and that would explain it.'

‘And the facial injuries?'

‘If she did a somersault after bashing the back of her head in she'd land face down on those tiles in the hall,' Jack Reid said.

‘But the body wasn't face down when we found it, was it?' Rachel said. ‘She was staring up at us with that terrified look on her face.'

‘Are you saying you think she was murdered?' Sergeant Reid asked. He looked doubtful. ‘What would anyone gain from killing someone like that?'

‘Quite,' Rachel said. ‘But then you'd think no one would want to murder a poor harmless little vicar, but someone killed Tim Baker, didn't they?'

‘Don't tell me you think you can pin this on Kevin Miller?' Jack Reid said. He was startled at her attitude. She seemed to be complicating a simple issue, which wasn't like her. ‘What makes you think you could?' he said.

She didn't say anything. She knew that he was thinking she'd taken leave of her senses. Part of her agreed with him.

She shrugged. ‘Hope springs eternal,' she said, ‘but you're probably right. At the moment, accident looks the most likely cause of death. But we'll keep an open mind, right?'

‘Forensics are nearly finished here,' Reid said. ‘We'll have to wait for the autopsy, anyway.'

‘Find out what's known about her, will you?' Rachel said. ‘Alice Bates, I mean. Who was she? Where did she come from? Who did she know? Perhaps the neighbours can tell us something.'

Jack Reid laughed. ‘This is Forester Close,' he said, ‘I wouldn't put money on it.'

‘Maybe,' Rachel Moody said, ‘but we've got to go through the motions. You go back to the station and do what you can there.'

‘If you think it's worth the effort,' Jack said. ‘What are you going to do?'

‘I'll stay on here and look through her personal stuff,' Rachel said. ‘There may be papers, letters, photos, anything to give us some idea why anyone would think it worth killing her.'

‘I thought we'd agreed no one did kill her,' Jack said. ‘She fell down the stairs.'

Rachel shrugged and didn't answer.

He said, ‘You really don't think it was an accident then?'

‘Oh, probably,' she said. ‘But bear with me. I can't help thinking there's something not quite right about this. That look on her face.'

‘Falling down stairs would be enough to make her look like that, surely?' Jack said.

‘We'll do this my way all the same,' the DCI said.

Jack was shaking his head as he walked to his car.

When the last of the Scene of Crime people gathered up their equipment and left, Rachel Moody was alone in the house. The flashing blue lights in the street had gone, and all the unmarked cars except her own. It was once again as though nothing had happened in Forester Close.

Rachel tried to search Alice Bates's desk and cupboards. She had a feeling like a series of faint electric shocks every time she touched something that had belonged to Alice, as though she were feeling Alice's distress at the invasion of her privacy. There was an atmosphere of disapproval throughout the house. Rachel felt she was violating something secret and personal in Alice's life; something that when she grasped it would be full of menace.

Why menace, she asked herself. Where does that come from? What could intimidate her in her own home?

God, Rachel thought, all I know is how scared and unhappy she was.

But why, she asked herself, why do I think that?

Rachel was getting nowhere. She rang Jack Reid to see how he was doing. Nothing.

Jack had even rung a contact on the local paper to see if the press was doing any better.

The paper had set out to try to discover details about Alice's past. There weren't any. The journalists' best efforts were embarrassed finally by the pathetic facts; a scraped pass at Grade One in piano at the age of twelve; a few undistinguished ‘O' Levels; lapsed membership of a library in a suburb of the Midlands city where she'd lived most of her life in a tower block with her mother before moving to Forester Close. The reporters could find no evidence that she'd ever been abroad on holiday, or worked in an office; she'd never learned to drive, she'd had three teeth filled as a child, and she was registered with a local doctor in the Community Centre at Catcombe Mead. He had never met her.

No ex-lovers, no friends, no life at all, as far as the police were concerned. What possible motive could there be for killing Alice Bates?

‘Until you tell us different we've put this one down as accidental death,' the reporter told Sergeant Reid.

But when Rachel ended the call to Jack, she could not leave it at that. For several minutes she stood at the living-room window staring down the empty street. She was trying to imagine how it would have felt to be Alice Bates.

Somewhere in one of the houses on the main road a dog was barking. A small dog, Rachel thought, probably a terrier. Did Alice like dogs? No one would ever know now.

Then a cat leapt down from the garden wall of Number Five and streaked across the road.

Alice had a cat, Rachel told herself. Hadn't Kevin Miller admitted to killing it?

He must have had something against her to do that, Rachel thought. He was punishing her for something she'd done. Or, of course, something he thought she'd done. Perhaps that was just the beginning of Kevin's retribution.

Rachel opened the drawers in a desk by the radiator. Surely there must be some evidence somewhere of Alice's life before Forester Close; photographs, perhaps, old letters, or bills addressed to Alice at an old address.

After more than an hour, Rachel admitted defeat. She had to hold on to the image of that broken old body at the foot of the stairs to convince herself that Alice Bates had existed at all.

There were no letters, no family photographs, no old bank statements. Rachel had to accept that the woman really had no life. Poor old thing, she thought, she'd died at Christmas. And yet there was no festive food in the fridge; no celebratory bottle of wine; no greetings cards or wrapped presents. There was an old TV listings magazine for the Christmas week. Alice appeared to have planned to spend the festival watching television. That seemed to be the extent of her contact with the world outside Forester Close.

Half-heartedly, Rachel started asking the residents of Forester Close what they knew about Alice Bates. She had a bad feeling about this inquiry. People weren't being obstructive; they simply had nothing to offer. It soon became clear that the old woman's neighbours were aware of her only as an almost unseen presence, watching them from behind the curtains at the window of her front room. They rarely saw her, but they were conscious that she was there, part of the background scenery.

As for knowing something about her, no one had anything to tell.

Alice Bates had arrived in Forester Close leaving no trace of how she got there. Her neighbours moved in, and she was already there. And now that she was dead, it soon seemed to Rachel Moody that she was not so much looking for a killer, she was trying to find out who it was who had been killed. Alice seemed to have arrived and stayed where she was put as dumbly as a house plant moved to a larger pot.

Rachel finished her interviews with neighbours. She returned to Alice's house and stood in the sitting-room listening to the heavy silence that so often, in her experience, froze the atmosphere in a house after something momentous had taken place there. Jack Reid called it her doom mood to mock her, but it wasn't so different from the policeman's hunches he was prone to himself.