A Nice Place to Die (6 page)

She wished she hadn't mentioned anything about Dr Henson to these officers. She certainly wasn't going to allow herself to be drawn into mentioning Donna Miller.

‘I'm sure it was nothing,' she said. ‘People get the wrong idea, don't they?'

Rachel Moody asked, ‘What about your neighbours on the other side, the family who live at Number Two. What can you tell us about them?'

‘Nothing. Nothing at all,' Alice said.

Watching her, Sergeant Reid thought, she looks exactly like a tortoise retracting its head into its shell. She's not going to tell us anything useful. She's scared stiff of something.

He and Rachel Moody exchanged glances. They were both convinced that Alice was hiding something.

‘What about the people on the other side of the Millers?' Rachel asked. ‘Who lives there?'

‘Oh, that's Terri and Helen,' Alice said.

The DCI and Jack Reid both noticed that she was relieved to change the subject.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, Alice smiled. ‘I call them the Odd Couple. There's a young girl who looks exactly like Helen, so I suppose they're mother and daughter, and Terri looks after them. She's a sort of father figure.'

‘Are you saying she's gay?' Rachel Moody said. She didn't think she was getting anywhere and wanted to stop Alice's pointless speculations. On the other hand, gossiping was giving Alice confidence. Something useful might come of that.

‘She's a lesbian,' Alice said bluntly. Then she added, ‘She and Helen are like a married couple.'

She wanted to offer them something interesting which might take their minds off the young vicar's death.

‘I'm afraid, though,' she went on, ‘Helen is cheating on Terri behind her back. With a man.'

Alice had played her trump card. She looked at the police officers with smug satisfaction as though they'd been testing her and she knew she'd managed to exceed their expectations.

‘Do you know who this man is?' Sergeant Reid asked. He scented a possible suspect. He was convinced that the Reverend Baker had been killed by a male. It wasn't a woman's crime, he'd put money on that. When Alice mentioned Terri, he'd flirted with the possibility that she might be the sort of female he was no longer allowed to call a bull dyke, a militant who might take revenge on the male sex and the old-fashioned moral attitudes of the church by beating a vicar to death.

He dismissed the idea as absurd. But now the introduction of a red-blooded man with a secret to hide made the Sergeant perk up.

Alice said, primly, ‘No. But he's not a gentleman.'

The spinster speaks, Jack Reid thought, she's a virgin, I'd put a stack of money on that.

‘What makes you say he's not a gentleman?' he asked Alice.

‘He often seems to be drunk,' Alice said. ‘He leaves his car outside my house and you should see the way he parks. No consideration.'

Even to her, it sounded feeble. What she'd wanted to say was that when she saw the way he made love to Helen when Terri was out of the room, he behaved like a wild animal, really quite violent with her. Nothing at all like the gentlemen lovers on the television, men like Mr Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice
, or Mr Bingley, even. Not that Helen seemed to object to Dave's ungentlemanly treatment, Alice admitted to herself.

But she wasn't going to tell the police that she watched what her neighbours did in the privacy of their own homes. She said to herself, the less I say to anyone about what I see from behind the living room curtain the better.

Alice took a deep breath and smiled at the police officers.

‘I'm sorry I can't help you,' she said. ‘I was watching television most of yesterday, there's not much else to do this time of year. I didn't see anything.'

SIX

N
ext on Detective Chief Inspector Moody's list for interview were Peter Henson, the retired paediatrician, and his wife Jean, a former primary school teacher.

‘Pillars of society,' Rachel Moody muttered under her breath as Sergeant Reid knocked on the front door. ‘They'll help if they can.'

‘Want to bet?' Reid said. ‘Once they would have done, but not now they're retired. That changes everything. They had careers, they used to
be
somebodies, and suddenly that's all gone. Now they're nobodies. They won't tell us anything. They'll be afraid of their own shadows.'

‘Why would professional people like them end up living in a place like this?' Rachel said.

Sergeant Reid laughed. ‘Age is a great social leveller,' he said. ‘You're too young to realize. Old people sink to the bottom of the human heap whatever they used to be.'

‘You're a cynic,' Rachel said. ‘There must be more to it than that.'

‘Yes, there is,' Reid said, ‘it's a question of confidence. They'll have lost it. You'll see.'

‘Don't tell me,' Rachel said, teasing him, ‘you'd put money on it.'

She rang the doorbell to reinforce the Sergeant's knock.

Dr Henson was tall and stooped a little. He had white hair and a small neat white beard.

To Rachel Moody, he looked like an actor playing a scientist on television. He was constantly peering over his spectacles as though checking everything against an invisible measuring chart. His wife gave the impression that she was a shy and self-facing woman who had given up the struggle to present herself as something very different, her husband's fantasy of the partner he deserved. She was neat and tidy, and, Rachel noted, dressed in the muted all-purpose costume of someone who attended a lot of charity coffee mornings. She looked habitually puzzled.

She's the sort of person who expects to be blamed for anything that goes wrong, DCI Moody thought.

Sergeant Reid asked the Hensons if they had seen what happened outside the house opposite.

The couple looked at each other and, in chorus, denied knowing anything about it. They'd seen something mentioned on the evening news on television. They couldn't believe someone had been killed across the road. Indeed, they appeared very shocked to know that such a thing could happen in a quiet respectable suburban street like Forester Close. No, really, they hadn't seen or heard a thing.

‘You see, we've got better things to do than spy on our neighbours,' Peter Henson said.

Rachel Moody wondered what they'd say if she asked ‘what better things?' But she didn't want to antagonize potential witnesses.

‘What can you tell us about the Millers?' Rachel Moody asked Dr Henson.

He looked at his wife as though checking that they were going to agree on their answer.

‘Nothing at all, I'm afraid,' Dr Henson said. ‘We've never actually met them socially.'

‘That's right,' Jean Henson said, backing him up.

‘You must see them around, surely?' DCI Moody said.

‘There are enough of them,' Jack Reid added. ‘I'd have thought they were hard to miss.'

‘We try to keep ourselves to ourselves,' Dr Henson said.

‘People don't mix much round here,' Jean Henson said. ‘Least of all the Millers. Why should they? They've got each other. You might say they're a typical twenty-first century family unit.'

‘You're more aware of them in the summer, of course,' Dr Henson said, making an effort to help. ‘When they've got the windows open, there's a bit of noise. The kids have their friends round. And there's the child. She's a lively little thing.'

‘The child?' Rachel asked. ‘We didn't know there was a child.'

‘Oh, yes,' Jean said. ‘She must be nearly a year old now. Jess couldn't have been much more than thirteen when she fell pregnant. Didn't they tell you?'

Rachel said, ‘We haven't questioned the Millers yet, except at the time to take a statement from Mrs Miller about finding the body. We want to try to piece together what really happened before we go any further.'

Sergeant Reid asked, ‘You're quite sure you saw nothing suspicious?'

‘I expect we were in the garden,' Jean said, and added, ‘gardening.'

‘There must've been a fair bit of noise when it was going on,' Jack said. ‘There were a number of kids involved, according to Donna Miller. You're sure you didn't hear anything at all?'

‘No, nothing,' Dr Henson said. ‘What a terrible thing, that poor young widow and her children.'

‘It makes it worse that it's so close to Christmas, don't you think?' Jean Henson said.

Rachel struggled to get up out of the vast armchair where Mrs Henson had invited her to sit.

‘We won't take up any more of your time,' she said. She tried to stifle the irritation in her voice. She was convinced that the Hensons were holding something back. She added, ‘If you think of anything . . .'

‘Of course,' Dr Henson said.

And Jean said, ‘You should talk to Alice Bates. She knows everything that happens in the street.'

‘But not yesterday, it seems,' Rachel Moody said. ‘She saw nothing.'

Peter and Jean Henson walked with the DCI and the Sergeant to their front door and closed it firmly after them. As soon as they were alone, Peter Henson said, ‘They've interviewed Alice, then?'

‘And she obviously didn't say anything,' Jean said.

Dr Henson followed his wife through to the kitchen.

‘Should I have said something?' he asked. ‘I feel bad about keeping quiet.'

Jean put the kettle on. She had no intention of making tea or coffee, it was an automatic action to try and distract herself from the police visit.

‘No,' she said, ‘no, of course not. I said when you came out to the back garden and told me what you'd seen, we mustn't get involved. You know what the Millers are like.'

‘But that young vicar was killed, Jean, he's dead.'

‘Yes,' Jean said, ‘he is, and if you don't keep quiet, so will you be. You're no match for that Kevin Miller.'

‘But if everyone thought like that . . .'

‘For God's sake, Peter, there's no point.' Jean was pleading with him. ‘If you tell the police what you saw, the Millers will just say you're lying, and they'll back each other up. Who do you think will support your story? Alice Bates? She's too scared. Everyone's far too scared.'

‘Alice must have seen what happened. She's always spying on everyone from that front window of hers. I could talk to her. We could back each other up. That would make the police case against that lout.'

‘Believe me,' Jean said, ‘there's no point in doing the right thing if you're dead.'

‘You sound as though you don't care if Kevin Miller gets away with murder,' Peter said. He sounded resigned.

‘I don't,' Jean said, ‘not if it means he won't murder us.'

‘It wouldn't come to that,' Peter Henson said, ‘surely it couldn't be that bad? This is England.'

Jean said nothing. She knew that her husband instinctively still wanted to act with the confidence of a man whose life as a high-powered doctor was spent dealing with terrified people who looked on him as some sort of god. He was humiliated that now he did not dare. She also knew that the Millers' retaliation would be more than she could bear.

She was sorry for Peter. It was hard for him to come to terms with being reduced to an ordinary, rather pompous old man whom nobody listened to. We shouldn't have come here to live when the NHS said he was too old to work, she thought. We should have left England and gone to live in Spain or Australia to be nearer Pat and the grandchildren.

‘It's nearly time for the lunchtime news,' she said.

She went into the front room and started to draw the curtains to shut out the street.

It had begun to rain; a hopeless, helpless quiet outpouring of fine drizzle which fell silently on the carpet of dead leaves in the road. Jean watched the DCI and the Sergeant leave the scene of the crime across the road and walk to their car.

‘They're wasting their time,' she said aloud.

She moved away from the window.

‘Time for television, Peter,' she said.

She turned on the set, but as the newsreader's face appeared, she switched channels to a documentary about the Second World War.

Even the War's better than what's happening out there, she thought.

Out there Rachel Moody and Jack Reid stared at each other across the wet roof of the car.

‘Don't you dare tell me you told me so,' Rachel said.

‘It's just as well you don't put your money where your mouth is,' Jack said, ‘you'd owe me a fortune.'

They got into the car out of the rain.

‘What's the matter with the people in this street?' Rachel said. ‘They're so damned defensive. They're behaving as though someone's holding them hostages. What are they all afraid of?'

‘They've had a shock,' Reid said. ‘A man being murdered in their street is a shock.' He paused for a moment and then added, ‘But it's interesting that no one seems surprised by what's happened. It's as though they were expecting it.'

SEVEN

J
ess Miller, too, watched the police leave the Henson house.

What do they want with old farts like the Hensons, she asked herself. What would they know?

There was no point that she could see to old people, they just got in the way and reminded anyone around that that was how everyone, even Jess herself if she wasn't careful, would end up. A waste of space.

She thought, it's such a con, what they tell you in school, that there's a world of opportunity out there and if you work hard you get the rewards. Old people have done that, haven't they, and look at them. Some reward that is, old age. Jess didn't intend to fall for that. I'll have a ball while I'm young, and to hell with what happens after that, the bloody state can provide. It's like Nicky Byrne says: ‘better dead than decrepit'.