Embroidering Shrouds (7 page)

‘She hasn't fallen.'

‘What then?'

‘She's been found dead.'

‘In suspicious circumstances.' Mike spoke from behind her shoulder.

The innocent eyes widened even further. ‘Aunt Nan?' There was a slight tremor in the youth's voice. ‘What's happened?'

Either he was a good actor or he had been genuinely fond of the old woman.

‘She's been murdered.'

Christian looked shocked. His face turned white. ‘How? How did it happen? I was always telling her.' His eyes narrowed intelligently. ‘How did they get in? She bolted that door every night. She never let
anybody
in.' He tried to make a joke of it. ‘Even I practically had to show an identity card to cross the threshold. She's been ever so careful, ever since ...' He looked from one to the other. ‘Well she'd heard about the attacks and burglaries against old ladies in Leek.'

‘Did she know any of them?'

The brown eyes regarded her thoughtfully. ‘Inspector Piercy,' he said with the ghost of a smile, ‘Leek is a small town,
all
the old ladies know each other or did once. The newspaper headlines made Aunt Nan extremely cautious. So how did they get in?'

‘She must have left the door unlocked.'

Christian shook his head slowly. ‘No,' he said firmly. ‘No way.'

‘Well, there's no sign of forced entry; the back door was locked and bolted and the windows were all fastened.'

Mike threw his suggestion in. ‘Perhaps she forgot to lock ...'

‘Look, just because she was old,' Christian defended his great aunt vigorously, ‘she wasn't stupid or demented. Not Aunt Nan, she's pretty amazing.'

‘Was she deaf, Christian?'

The brown eyes held surprise. ‘Deaf? Aunt Nan? Absolutely not. She could hear a pin drop in the next room. She had brilliant hearing and brilliant eyesight. She wasn't like other old women.'

There was something strange about the way Christian Patterson spoke about his great-aunt. As though she were no ordinary mortal but something else, something special, someone revered.

What had her brother said about the relationship between the grandson and his great-aunt, about swimming in a vat of poison? So had Christian swum in the venom too often? Had he then become tainted? Looking at the youth in front of her Joanna could see no evidence of this.

‘How was she killed?'

‘We don't know. The post-mortem will tell us. It's probably tomorrow. But it looks as though –' Joanna searched for a nice way to say it. There wasn't one. She might have been battered with her own walking stick.'

Christian stared at the floor, still pale; when he looked up Joanna was surprised to read the shock in his face. ‘You know the awful thing? She kept that walking stick to defend herself.'

‘Perhaps you'd take a look at the stick,' Mike suggested. ‘It would help if we knew for certain it was hers.'

Joanna looked at him sharply. He wanted to see Christian at the scene of the crime.

And it did seem to rattle him; he licked his lips. ‘You mean you want me to come round to ...'

Joanna wondered whether he would call it Spite Hall. He didn't. He used no name. Instead: ‘When did you say she died?'

‘We didn't.' Mike seemed to produce the sentence like a trump card.

Joanna hesitated. Usually she could read Korpanski like a book but she didn't know what he was up to. She let him take the lead.

‘The signs are that she died sometime on Sunday. When the milkman called on Monday morning the empty bottles had not been put out.'

‘Then she died on Sunday.'

‘How do you know?'

‘Aunt Nan was a real stickler for habits, if the empties weren't on the step for Monday morning she died on Sunday night.'

‘You can be as certain as that?'

Christian nodded.

‘When did you last see her?'

‘Sunday evening,' he said, after some thought. ‘She was sitting in her window, sewing. I was thinking of knocking on the glass and telling her to shut her curtains.
Anyone
could have been watching her.'

Joanna wondered then whether it had been Nan who had drawn the curtains or someone else who didn't want to be seen.

As they walked back towards Spite Hall Joanna ran through her list of things to do: firstly formal identification of the body, then there was the setting up of an Incident Room, the gathering of the team. They would all be working long hours, in close proximity, discussing the case from all angles. Past experience had taught her that time spent together, pooling knowledge and discussing possibilities and probabilities, testing theories amongst themselves, could prove as productive as the other long hours spent interviewing neighbours, friends and suspects. But the first thing she had to deal with was a full report to her senior officer, Superintendent Arthur Colclough. He of the bulldog jowls, the dubious wit, the almost paternalistic attitude towards her. A senior officer whom she had grown to respect. And only to herself would she admit that the respect was tempered by affection. He was, in a way, the father she had never had. Her own father had been a Peter Pan of a man, who in his middle fifties had found himself a much younger wife and had paid for his passion with a fatal heart attack. Joanna had never quite forgiven him, neither had her mother, nor her sister.

She rang Colclough on her mobile phone. As always he listened without comment, saying nothing until she had finished. His mind followed her reasoning. ‘So you think the same gang is behind first the robberies, then the assaults on the old ladies, and now this?'

‘I think so, sir,' she said cautiously.

‘Piercy,' he said, ‘you're a senior police officer. I don't need to tell you how to work at this.' He did anyway. ‘Look at the MO of these gangs. How did they get in?'

‘Front door entry, sir.'

‘And in the Marlowe case?'

‘Almost the same method, sir.'

Colclough picked on the word like a vulture finding carrion. ‘
Almost?
'

‘It was a downstairs window, sir, smashed in. Cecily Marlowe had had window locks fitted after news of the robberies broke.'

‘Right.' A brief pause. ‘And forensic evidence?'

‘There was so little, sir, except in the Jane Vernon case. I mean – these gangs – they know what they're up to.'

‘Mmm.'

It was a dissatisfied mmm followed by a long pause. Colclough was thinking. And as frequently happened his decision followed closely what Joanna had already decided to do for herself.

‘It might be an idea, Piercy, for you to talk to all these old women again.
If
you're right and the crimes have been committed by the same gang these old biddies have met Nan Lawrence's killer.'

‘The thought had crossed my mind, sir, but they were all very traumatized by the incident. We never did get good statements from any of them.'

‘Well, they've had time to get over it,' he snapped. A touch of humour shone through as suddenly as the sun appears from behind the blackest of clouds. ‘Use those famous kid gloves of yours, Piercy. Now when's the PM?'

‘We don't know yet. I'm waiting for Matthew to let us know.' She paused. ‘He wanted some X-rays doing.'

‘Mmm?' Surprise this time in the expression.

‘He thinks quite a few bones were broken in the assault.'

‘I see.'

They discussed routine points next, available officers, extra phone lines, the Incident Room – a huge caravan to be parked in the drive of Spite Hall – methods of alerting the local public – without firing the entire town with panic.

The call ended with Colclough's usual parting shot: ‘Keep me informed, Piercy.'

And her habitual rejoinder. ‘Yes, sir.'

She found Mike standing outside the front door of Spite Hall, talking to Police Constable Will Farthing. He crunched across the gravel towards her. ‘Post-mortem's fixed for tomorrow morning,' he said. ‘Just had the coroner's office on the phone; coroner wants to speak to you. And the desk sergeant's been sending messages too; Tylman's come back to make his statement.'

‘The milkman? Then that's where we should be.' She handed him the squad car keys. ‘You drive, Mike. I want to think.'

As he turned the car around she couldn't resist turning back in her seat to study the two contrasting houses that had brought so much pain.

Tylman was sitting nervously in the anteroom, a ruddy-faced, plump man wearing a royal-blue overall splashed with the name of the dairy, Addison's. Joanna introduced herself and Mike, and they made themselves comfortable in one of the interview rooms. Tylman looked anxious. ‘I'm not a suspect, am I?'

Joanna bit back the Clouseau reply, that she suspected everyone and she suspected no one, instead reassuring him heartily and adding her thanks to him for acting so promptly both by alerting the police and by attending for interview.

Tylman's face visibly relaxed.

‘Let's take you back to Saturday,' she began.

‘I just left two pints.' And Tylman explained Nan Lawrence's regular habits. ‘She
always
had two pints on Saturdays.'

‘Did you notice anything unusual?'

The milkman shook his head.

‘Did you see her?'

Tylman thought for a moment. ‘Not on Saturday,' he said finally.

‘And Sunday?'

‘I don't deliver on a Sunday.'

‘What do you do?'

Tylman's face broke into a grin. ‘What half the population do,' he said, ‘catch up on some sleep.'

‘And?'

Again Tylman looked uneasy. ‘I went to the DIY store,' he said. ‘My wife's got this thing about having a dishwasher. It wanted plumbing in. I did that most of the afternoon, then I watched a rugby match. In the evening I watched a film.'

‘And that takes us to Monday,' Joanna prompted. ‘What can you tell us about Monday?'

‘There was only the one empty on the doorstep,' Tylman said. ‘Washed. She always washed them. I picked it up. I thought it was a bit funny, I mean, there was always
two
empties on a Monday. I'd never known her only leave the one.'

Joanna cast her mind back to the tiny, old-fashioned kitchen, a fridge had stood in the corner, to the left of the door. She made a mental note to ask Barra what it had contained. Were they to pinpoint the time of death by how much milk was left in the bottle rather than rely on scientific means? Probably. Already she could see that science and social science would together provide answers; if both agreed it would be fixed.

She spoke again to Tylman. ‘And so to Tuesday.'

Tylman swallowed. ‘It was still there,' he said, ‘Monday's pint, standing on the doorstep. I knew then that something was very wrong. I was worried,' he said. ‘I turned the engine off and walked right around the house. The curtains were drawn but there was a narrow crack. Then I saw.' He looked up. ‘You
know
what I saw.'

‘OK. OK.' Joanna stood up. It all seemed logical enough.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Tylman. Is there anything else you want to add?'

The milkman shook his head.

Mike interrupted. ‘Nothing
else
that you noticed?' Again the milkman shook his head, more emphatically this time. She put the statement in front of him and handed him a pen.

Joanna watched the milkman leave with a feeling that there
was
something else she should have tackled him on. It would be later that afternoon before she knew what it was.

Lunchbreaks – even late ones – were already a thing of the past. She and Mike wolfed down sandwiches while preparing for the first briefing, washing the bread down with coffee. Neither spoke.

The assembled officers were waiting for them as they walked in.

Joanna crossed straight to the whiteboard and penned in the facts of the case. First she wrote the details of the eighteen burglaries that had taken place from January to July. All preying on elderly women, widows, stealing easily disposable goods, money, television, videos, pension books, the odd piece of porcelain. No sightings of the perpetrators. Then in July Emily Whittaker had stood at the top of the stairs to find two youths ransacking her house, one in a bedroom who had pushed past her. She had fallen and broken her hip and that had been the start of a change in the crimes. She had described her attackers as young (a description she had later applied to the consultant who had operated on her – a man of around fifty). When pressed by a gentle DS Hannah Beardmore she had said they were hoys' of about twenty. Further descriptions had been elusive, she couldn't remember what they wore, what they looked like, anything, even how many there were.

Joanna moved on.

If Emily Whittaker seemed to recall nothing, what Florence Price remembered was equally unhelpful. She had been robbed by a ‘masked gang'. But the money taken had been real enough. Cash. Three hundred pounds saved out of her pension. Money meant to pay for her winter gas bill. A local businessman had donated the money instead. Florence Price may have been badly frightened but ultimately she had not been out of pocket. Joanna stood back from the board and frowned. What sort of a ‘gang' broke in, robbed and threatened and left no trace of evidence? Beneath Florence Price's name she wrote Cecily Marlowe in large black capitals. She hardly needed to remind the assembled officers of the details of this crime, the slashing of an old lady was memorable enough. Barely a week after the assault on Cecily Marlowe had been the puzzling robbery of Jane Vernon. Thankfully no violence this time. Her purse had been emptied of twenty-seven pounds, and this time the forensics boys had hit lucky. They had found a long, blonde hair. A natural blonde, the report had said. For the first time they wondered whether a female had been involved. None of the other women had mentioned a woman's presence, their assailants had been unequivocally male.