Embroidering Shrouds (4 page)

The exertion served its purpose, absorbing all her concentration. Eloise was forgotten – for the moment.

Bill Tylman stared for a long time at yesterday's pint of milk still standing on the step. No empties. Something was wrong. In all the years Bill had known Nan Lawrence she had
never
broken her rigid habits: she had
never ever
left her pint of milk out for the day or forgotten to replant the empties. This was out of character.

And Bill Tylman wasn't exactly sure what to do about it. He stood for a moment, glancing nervously around him, scratching his head and pondering. That was when he realized the curtains were still closed.

Joanna used the locker room to change out of her cycling gear into some black trousers and a loose white silk shirt. Mike was in her office when she walked in. She greeted him warily. ‘How are things?'

He made a face. ‘Fran had this almighty row with her last night. The old boot's been feeling sorry for herself, quiet since then, acting the martyr.'

Joanna flopped down in the chair behind her desk and made a token effort of leafing through the pile of papers. ‘No mention of her going, I don't suppose?'

‘Not yet.' He grinned, looking a little more like the Mike of old. ‘We all live in hope.'

The milk float lumbered along the main road, trying to push the vehicle over its top speed of twenty-five miles an hour. Cars raced past him. Tylman's face was white. He had looked in through the tiny crack in the curtain. Now he wished he hadn't because he knew he would
never
forget. It would stick in his mind. Every time he closed his eyes he would see it. Her. He gulped back a deep, nauseated breath. Once he had seen her he had raced back to his milk float with one blind thought. The police. He had to get to the police. Panicked he drove past telephones and houses, people and parked cars, ignoring the chance of summoning the police to him.

He had to reach the police station.

Joanna was drinking her second coffee of the day when the call came through from the desk officer, a stolid local lad named Police Constable Robert Cumberbatch, who had spent the last five minutes trying to make sense of the agitated story.

‘Got a milkman here, ma'am.'

She suppressed any instinct to order one pint or two. ‘Mmm?'

‘Called at an old lady's house this morning. Her milk was still on the step from yesterday.' Cumberbatch's tone was flat.

‘Social services, Cumberbatch,' she suggested gently.

‘Says he looked in through the window.' Cumberbatch looked again at the shaken milkman. ‘Curtains was drawn but they didn't quite meet. He could make her out; says she's lying near the window. And he says there's a lot of blood around, he thinks …'

Joanna stood up, still holding the phone, trying to still the sudden snatch of fear that it had happened. ‘Have you dispatched a car round?'

A pause. ‘Yes.'

‘And an ambulance?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where does this old lady live?' Joanna asked sharply.

‘Macclesfield Road.'

‘The number?'

There was a brief, embarrassed silence.

‘The number, Cumberbatch? The Macclesfield Road goes all the way from Leek ...'

‘To Macclesfield. I know that, ma'am. Well, it doesn't really have a number. It's Nan Lawrence's place. It's in the grounds of... The locals call it Spite Hall.'

‘Spite Hall?'

‘On account of –'

Joanna interrupted; she had no time for local legend. ‘How far out of Leek is it?'

‘Two – three miles, on the right-hand side, just beyond the trout farm and the turning for Rudyard.'

‘OK, Cumberbatch,' she said sharply, ‘get a statement from the milkman and let him finish his round. Alert Sergeant Barraclough and the rest of the SOCO team, just tell them they might be needed.' Already she was sliding her jacket from the back of the chair.

Later she might reflect that while PC Cumberbatch had had no difficulty telling her about the finding of a woman's body he had found it hard to repeat a vernacular house name.

Mike said nothing as they walked across the station car park but as she glanced at his square profile she could see his jaw had tightened. She could read his mind. They had expected this, anticipated it, yet they had been unable to prevent it.

They used a squad car, left the blue light off. The town was quiet and traffic free compared with Wednesday's market day. Three minutes and they were on the northern outskirts, speeding past the Courtaulds factory on the right and Rock House on the left. Another couple of minutes and they were at the trout farm.

Mike pointed out a narrow track on the right, almost concealed by an elderly oak, its trunk disfigured with cancerous looking burrs. The track itself seemed little used with turf sprouting up its centre. She turned the car in. The lane bent around to the left and two houses came simultaneously into view: a grey concrete, single-storeyed building, flat-roofed with 1940s metal window frames, and behind it, its ground floor completely hidden by the other, was a beautiful eighteenth-century, symmetrical, bow-windowed Georgian manor house, red brick and elegant. The best of the eighteenth century and rammed up against it the very worst of the 1940s – little more than a troop hut. Long and thin, the smaller building spanned the entire length of the Georgian facade. It was criminal.

Mike made a face. ‘Now you know why it's called Spite Hall.'

Her eyes returned to the red brick. ‘And the other building? What do they call that?'

‘Brushton Grange. Nice, isn't it?'

There was no answer. It was more than nice. It was beautiful. And that made the contrast between the two buildings even more tragic. Only real beauty can be so completely marred.

‘How can they have allowed this to happen?'

Mike shrugged. ‘Post war.'

‘But to leave it standing.'

‘The owners are brother and sister,' he said as though that explained everything.

She climbed out of the car. Signs were already waiting to be read, the milk bottle still standing on the doorstep, ridges in the gravelled drive where someone, presumably the milkman, had struggled to escape the scene, another squad car, its blue light still flashing.

Mike hammered on the door and met six and a half feet of Police Constable Will Farthing walking back around the side. ‘There's no answer, Mike,' he said, ‘and there's someone in there. I was just going to break in.'

They stood outside the front door, solid wood, closed and undamaged, set in the narrow width of the building with two small windows either side. ‘I've tried it, ma'am,' Farthing said. ‘It's locked; I looked through.' He led them around the right-hand side of the building to a large metal window.

It didn't take them long to see what the milkman had seen: through a frustratingly narrow gap in the curtains they saw what looked like a heap of bloodstained rags lying on the floor near the window. In the darkened room they could just make out white hair, caked in a dark, dried pool of blood. Joanna peered through silently for a moment before speaking to Will Farthing. ‘Did you notice any sign of forced entry?'

He shook his head.

‘Then we'd better break a door down.'

Will Farthing led them round to the back. The door was partially glazed with panels of reeded glass and coated in dull green peeling paint. Joanna wrapped a tissue around her hand and tried the handle. It was locked. ‘Let's get in there,' she said.

Mike gave the glass a sharp blow with his elbow, slipped his hand through the hole, turned the key and shot back the bolts. ‘No-one got in this way', he commented, ‘or out.'

They put on overshoes and stepped into an old-fashioned kitchen, small, dark and narrow, running the rear width of the house. It contained a tall green and cream cabinet, an ancient grey gas cooker, a red Formica table and two chairs neatly pushed back. They moved through to a long, dark, hall and headed for the room on their left.

Seconds later Joanna was bending over the crumpled body of an old woman. ‘You can cancel the ambulance,' she said.

Joanna stood in the doorway and looked around her, inhaling the fusty atmosphere. This was not the first body she had seen but it still had the capacity to make her retch. She forced herself not to think but to observe.

It was a narrow, dingy room, the same basic shape as the house. To her right was a small window which overlooked the front door, its curtain tightly shut. She slipped a glove on and pulled it open. Now a little light was let in she could see the room and its contents clearer. The old woman in a dark skirt and black cardigan lay sprawled with her head towards the window, an upholstered armchair tipped over behind her. At her side a small occasional table had also fallen to the floor together with an electric table lamp, its bulb smashed into tiny shards. Already Joanna was starting to anticipate the minds of the scene-of-crime officers. Such sharp fragments easily worked their way into soft-soled shoes. Joanna moved her head slightly. From the position of Nan Lawrence's body it seemed she had been sitting facing the window when she had been struck from behind. Her feet, in brown woollen slippers, were still almost touching the stretcher rail. Joanna's eyes avoided the bloodied pulp which had been her head, instead she continued her silent study of the room. It was shabbily furnished, an oblong of faded green carpet covered the centre, while the border was of dark wooden parquet. An upright piano stood at the end farthest from the door, a cheap, old-fashioned instrument of dark wood with brass candlesticks on its front. An elderly, brown leather-covered sofa curved around a green-tiled fireplace, a crude print above of a vase of cornflowers the only picture in the room. In the corner, next to the piano, stood the sole piece of quality, an antique, long-case clock with a brass face. Everything else was mass produced and tasteless, dating from the 1940s. Korpanski touched her arm and motioned towards something on the hearthrug, a walking stick, varnished blackthorn, splintered and stained along its length.

She nodded. ‘It could be the murder weapon,' she said, still searching the room. ‘We'll have to see what Matthew says. What's that?' Careful to avoid the glass splinters she crossed the room towards the armchair.

The reason the old woman had sat in the window, by a lamp, instead of nearer the fire, was a tapestry frame, also knocked over but unbroken. Nan Lawrence must have used the daylight to see, and in the evening she had worked beneath the lamp. Joanna bent down to peer at the work, neatly done, evenly stitched in bright silk, and now spattered with blood. She read out the title:
‘Massacre of the Innocent'.

Behind her Korpanski shifted uncomfortably. ‘You could call it that.'

‘Bit ironic,' Farthing commented and Joanna was forced to agree. She took a good look at it. Prettily bordered with scarlet poppies and a bright blue chalice, the content matched its title, a bloodthirsty, classical religious subject. She'd seen paintings like it in art museums the world over – a baby, its mother, soldiers – the depiction of Herod's attempt to slay Christ. A common enough choice for an artist funded by the church but a very strange selection for an old woman to choose to sew late into the nights, even an old woman who lived in a house commonly known as Spite Hall.

Mike's gaze was on the spots of red. ‘I suppose it's her blood.'

She simply nodded.

Their attention was diverted by Sergeant Barraclough arriving noisily with his team of SOCOs. He took a swift look around and gave a long whistle. ‘Nasty,' he said. ‘Very nasty. No time to waste.' He unpacked his scene-of-crime bag and started work straightaway, unfazed that he had arrived before the pathologist. ‘Plenty for me to be getting on with here', he said cheerfully, ‘before he starts his poking and prodding.'

He began by directing the police photographer to record the entire scene. ‘Barra' was experienced enough at dealing with crimes to already start to tie his evidence to a sequence of events. His observant eyes picked out a box of embroidery silks scattered near the window – pinks, blues, browns. Some of them were blood-spattered too.

Joanna waited as the SOCO team erected lights before speaking to Sergeant Barraclough. ‘What happened, do you think?'

Barra gave her a straight look. ‘Well, we'll know a bit more when your boyfriend gets here,' he said, but it looks to me like the old lady left the door unlocked.

She was sitting here.' He indicated the chair. ‘I guess she was deaf, didn't hear someone come creeping up behind her. He grabs the walking stick and crash. Over she goes.'

She knew the hint of flippancy hid a revulsion for the crime as deep as her own. ‘So our killer simply walks in through the front door?'

‘Well, the back door was bolted and there's no damage to the front door. It wasn't forced. It's an old-fashioned mortise and tenon lock, rather than a Yale, which he could have forced easily. Look, she would have had to turn the key to be safe.'

He led her from the murder scene along the dingy corridor, brown-painted walls, more parquet flooring. ‘There isn't a single bloodstain along this entire corridor,' he said. ‘I've already had a quick look. She was attacked in her own sitting room as she sat down with her back to the door. As far as I can tell – so far – that's the theory the evidence supports.'

‘She'd left the door unlocked?' Joanna said incredulously. ‘A woman who is careful enough to
bolt
her back door? After all the panic there's been in this town amongst the elderly population? After what happened to Cecily Marlowe? I find it hard to credit.' Behind her Mike nodded in agreement. They moved back into the sitting room and Joanna continued. ‘I suppose the only other way it could have happened is that she let her assailant in and returned to her sewing, which is even less likely.'