A Species of Revenge (15 page)

‘What brought this on?' Kite asked her son.

‘God knows.'

All at once the old woman began talking again. Kite was getting used to her and had no trouble in understanding her when she said, ‘He did it, him, our Stanley! He did it, I saw him.'

‘Take no notice of her,' Stanley said scornfully. ‘She's daft as a brush. She doesn't know what she's saying.'

It was possible to feel sorry for him. His eyes swivelled round in his head like a hare's, the sweat stood thickly on his pale skin.

A malicious spark glinted in his mother's old, black eyes. ‘Threw it over the fence, he did.'

Stanley gave a groan.

‘Threw what, Mrs Loates?' Kite asked, and guessed: ‘The cat?'

‘Ar. Been peeing all over his lettuces, that's why. Used to fancy a nice salad, I did, but not now.'

Marsden gave a snort and was quelled by a look from Kite. But once started, there was no stopping Hilda Loates, though she wasn't making sense any more. Her face was plum-coloured. Farrar had made tea for everybody but she knocked the mug out of Stanley's hand when he attempted to get her to drink. ‘Where's that ambulance, for God's sake?' Kite muttered.

‘It's here.'

‘Now, what's all this, Mrs Loates?' the paramedic was beginning, when she made a sort of bubbling sound. She went rigid and the dark colour drained from her face. In a flash, she was wrapped in a blanket, lifted on to a stretcher and borne away in the ambulance.

‘You can come with her,' they said to Stanley but he refused, though he promised to assemble what she'd need and take it to her later, and when the ambulance had disappeared, sat down heavily on the sofa. He looked drained and exhausted, and sagged against the back cushions with evident relief. His eyes, however, were surprisingly bright and alive. At one point he put a hand over his mouth and Farrar thought.
The bugger's laughing
'.

‘I've said, I know nothing about all this,' he grumbled in answer to Kite, who chose to lead in with a question about the cat when it came to question time, but he knew he was cornered, with little alternative now but to tell the truth. He showed no remorse for what he'd done. The animal, it appeared, had been annoying him for years. It seemed to regard anywhere it chose to roam as its own territory and nothing Stanley could do deterred it. ‘Scratching in the seedbeds and piddling all over the veg!' His indignation mounted. ‘If I had a dog. I'd be had up if I let it roam all over other folks' gardens, but cats – they can let ‘em go where they bloody well like and nobody can do anything about it!'

‘Doesn't mean to say you can go around killing ‘em,' Kite stated, staring out into the small garden, dominated by tidy rows of vegetables and a small greenhouse, with espaliered plums against the side fence and a couple of ballerina apple trees dead centre.

‘I tried everything else – cat-pepper, string, you name it, made not a blind bit of difference.' A painted tin cat with glass eyes, meant to intimidate genuine members of the species, leaned impotently against the fence, bearing witness to Stanley's wasted efforts. ‘It used to sharpen its damned claws on my apple trees!'

‘All the same.'

‘Didn't mean to kill it, though,' he said suddenly. ‘I was cutting string to tie the beans up, see, and there it was, bold as brass, behind me. It shot off when I shooed it away but it caught its claw in the netting. I lunged out at it and nicked it with the knife. After that – well, it was yowling fit to bust – I had to put it out of its misery.'

Kite, sickened, recalled the number of slashes in the cat's body and didn't believe a word. ‘And then you threw it over the fence.'

‘As far as I could.'

There was no reason to doubt this, at least. A good heave and the cat, thrown over the hedge from here, could conceivably have landed where it had been found.

‘I'd like to talk to you about Patti Ryman, Mr Loates,' he said.

Stanley's eyes swivelled. His eyes lost some of their brightness. ‘I've already said, I don't know anything about her. I didn't even know what she was called till today. She was only the paper girl.'

Beads of sweat stood on his pallid forehead. Unappealing at the best of times, now, stressed by what had happened with his mother and under pressure about Patti, he was probably showing up at his worst. Kite by now had an inkling of what Jenny Platt had been getting at but he wasn't going to let up out of a misplaced sympathy, simply because Stanley was inadequate, pathetic, because he'd been screwed up by his mother. The man was a toad.

‘You like children, Mr Loates?'

Stanley blinked. ‘Like them? I suppose so, they're all right.'

‘You give them sweets, watch them when they're out playing.'

‘What of it? I wouldn't do them any harm. I like them, yes, and what's wrong with that? Don't you like kids?'

Nothing wrong with liking them. Maybe something wrong with a society that had to suspect everyone who was kind to children of having an ulterior motive. But.

‘Patti –' Kite said.

‘I liked her as well,' Stanley interrupted defiantly. ‘She was a bonny little thing, she used to wave to me at one time, I don't know why she stopped. I wouldn't have harmed a hair of her head.'

There was a certain ring of truth about this, but Kite had heard protests of this nature too many times to have much faith in them. He gazed out of the window, at the garden into which Stanley had put most of his time, energies and talents. The chain-link fencing at the bottom was completely obscured by the quickthorn planted in front of it, which he kept well clipped and which had consequently by now thickened into a well-nigh impenetrable barrier. There was no way that this man, flabby and out of condition, could have got over that and into the wood, and back, not without some assistance, such as a ladder which he might have pulled over after him – had he been more athletic – still less reason for him wanting to do so.

And if he'd gone into the wood by the conventional route, Stanley Loates, slow, lumbering, ungainly, would have been hard to miss, making the return journey between the front of his house and the path.

‘What'll happen to me?' he asked. ‘About the cat?'

‘A report will be made to the Crown Prosecution Service. What happens then is up to them, and Mr Lawley, whether he wishes to bring charges or not. And if he doesn't,' Kite added, piling it on, ‘you'll be lucky if the NSPCC doesn't.'

Whichever way things went, he couldn't see life being very happy for Stanley Loates in Ellington Close.

Abigail Moon leaned forward, peering through the windscreen for a possible parking space amongst all the vehicles parked nose to tail either side of the streets, while Jenny Platt drove slowly.

‘How the heck do the people who live round here manage?'

‘Anybody's guess.'

They were at the bottom of Albert Road, near to the house where Patti Ryman had lived. A run-down area of terraced houses, small factories, corner shops, a deserted Methodist chapel and a huge, hangar-like building painted in shouting primary colours that was a DIY store proclaiming itself open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., with an enormous, near-empty car park. Jenny was muttering about leaving theirs in the car park and be hanged to it when a battered Cortina was driven conveniently away from the kerbside.

The area on the whole was not, in any sense of the word, attractive, and Mailer Street, when they walked round the corner and came to it, stood out like a beacon in comparison, being on the edge of what had been selected by the council as an experimental improvement area, extending from here to the Leasowes. The street itself was short, comprising decent little terraced houses built of dark brick, sloping down to the fish-and-chip shop on the corner of the main road. Now restored to its original appearance when it was first built at the turn of the century, it had a rather self-conscious charm. Encouraged by what the council had done, the residents had made their own contribution by way of window boxes and tubs. The steps of every house were swept clean, the windows polished, as if vying with each other for points on the respectability scale. Bollards, painted a handsome dark blue and gold, had been set into the cobbles, top and bottom, to prevent vehicle access, presumably in the interests of safety as well as nostalgia: the road at the bottom provided a never-ceasing flow of traffic, much of it heavy, on its way to the motorway, less than a mile off.

By the door of Linda Ryman's house, petunias and heli-chrysum spilled luxuriantly from a trough, and the brass knocker was highly polished.

Doreen Bailey was still with her sister. The two of them were in the living room at the front of the house – there was probably only a kitchen behind – drinking the last of what, in Abigail's experience of these sort of situations, was likely to have been an endless succession of cups of tea. Unlike her older sister, Linda Ryman showed no signs of tears, but her eyes were huge and overbright in a face drained of all colour. She gazed unseeingly into the dead coals of a living-flame gas fire, her feet neatly together on the hearth rug, her hands clasped tightly on her lap.

‘Go easy on her when you see her,' Mrs Bailey had warned. ‘She's had some hard knocks.'

Yet however difficult life had been for her, it hadn't left its physical stamp. At the moment, her face was set into a mask of grief, yet it remained unlined, pretty, incredibly youthful-looking. The age gap between the two women was so large she might have been Doreen Bailey's daughter rather than her sister. They bore a faint, family resemblance to each other, but otherwise they were quite unlike. Where Doreen was a large and comfortably upholstered mother figure, Linda was a small, slim, blue-eyed blonde, as her daughter had been.

But Abigail guessed, despite the air of helplessness, that she was a fighter, one who hadn't let life get her down. She'd done wonders with the house on a limited budget. The sitting room was attractive in a do-it-yourself stripped pine, dried flowers, Laura Ashley way. Built-in shelves in the corner were painted matt green and displayed a collection of pretty white china ornaments. Some old chairs were neatly slipcovered in a blue and green patterned fabric. A school photograph on the mantelpiece showed a younger Patti, her fair hair long and silky, unpermed.

‘Come on, m'duck, drink your tea,' Doreen said gently, lifting the cup and saucer from the coffee table and putting it into her hands. Linda drank as obediently as a child, evidently still in that state of shock where Abigail doubted any possibility of getting anything useful from her.

‘What will happen now?' she asked dully. ‘What about the funeral?'

Abigail explained that there would be an inquest, probably on Thursday, which would be adjourned for further police inquiries to be made, after which the coroner would release Patti's body, and the funeral could take place. ‘The inquest will be resumed as soon as we've found out who killed Patti, and why,' she added gently. There was no need to mention to her the necessity for identifying the body, since this appalling task Mrs Bailey had already offered to relieve her of. And, mercifully, her mind seemed to have blanked off the horrors of a postmortem.

After telling her what she needed to know, Abigail stood up and Jenny followed suit. ‘We'll leave you now, Mrs Ryman. I have to ask you some questions, but they'll wait until you feel able to answer them.'

‘Now's as good as any time,' Linda said unexpectedly. ‘I'm not going to feel any better tomorrow. And it helps to talk.'

Abigail hesitated. ‘If you're sure ...' She glanced at Mrs Bailey inquiringly.

‘She'll be all right, won't you, m'duck?'

Linda nodded.

‘Well then –' They reseated themselves. Jenny took out her notebook.

There were the usual routine questions, designed to establish the normal course of Patti's days and to find out whether anything unusual had happened during them which could give a lead on her murder. But her life appeared to have followed its usual innocent pattern of school, homework, sports practice, with all her spare time spent with her friend, Gemma Townsend. They were bosom friends and did everything together.

‘Nothing in the least unusual happened? Nothing she seemed worried about?'

‘She was a bit preoccupied last week – her new school project was bothering her a bit, I think. She was doing well at school, she always worked hard – but it was the start of a new term, different teachers. If there was anything else, she'd have told me. We've always been like that with one another. I've never kept anything from her and she wouldn't keep anything from me.'

Parents often said that, and the truth was hard to bear. ‘What about boyfriends?'

That roused Linda enough to earn Abigail a sudden, sharp look. ‘Are you asking was she pregnant? Well, I can tell you she wasn't, not yesterday, anyway. And she didn't have any one particular boyfriend. I made her swear she'd tell me if there was anybody, I didn't want her making the same mistake as me, did I? I was only sixteen when she was born, you know, and that's a rotten start for anybody.'

‘You're divorced now, I believe?'

Doreen Bailey intervened tartly: ‘He pushed off when Patti was eighteen months old.'

Linda shrugged. ‘Things were never right between us from the start. He was only a couple of years older than me and he wasn't ready for marriage any more than I was.'

‘It must've been hard for you, left on your own.'

‘I wasn't sorry. We've managed. I'd always kept my job on at Nancy's – the hairdresser up the road, worked there ever since I left school – and I've had a good family behind me.' She attempted a smile at Doreen, and Doreen put her arm round her shoulders and squeezed.

‘Come on, Lindy, bear up, you've done wonderful, so far.'

‘Does her father keep in touch with Patti?'