Killing Me Softly (22 page)

‘How much d'you bet we don't find her here?' Carmody asked as he banged on the door.

‘No takers.'

If Barbie Nelson had indeed been the one to shoot Wishart, the chances of finding her at the one address they had for her were not high. It was a starting point, that was all.

The woman who opened the door was a solid, heavily made-up lady who wore highly coloured clothes and the sort of swept-down spectacles which looked as though they had been put on upside down, by mistake. She received their introduction with some hostility, annoyed at having been interrupted in her intention to go out shopping for groceries. ‘We're right out of everything,' she complained in a gravelly, gin-and-cigarettes voice. ‘Had flu, like everyone else, and I'm due back at work tomorrow.' But when they told her that their business concerned Barbie Nelson, the hostility subsided somewhat and she stood back to let them in.

‘Phyllis, somebody at the door!' called a querulous voice from the back regions of the house, as they stepped over the threshold.

‘It's all right, Mother, I'm seeing to it!'

The shout echoed down the hall and then, lowering her voice and timing the start of their visit by a glance at her wrist-watch, she announced, ‘I can give you ten minutes. I really have to go out and I can't leave my mother for long.'

Her name was Phyllis Whitelaw and she worked in the local job centre. She had a strong face, pepper and salt hair which she wore tightly permed.

The sitting-room was cold, stuffy and furnished in the same spirit as she had dressed herself: with no inherent sense of style, she'd tried to find it in strong and not always complementary patterns and colours, in a patently unsuccessful attempt to update the old-fashioned furnishings. It was a room evidently not often used. It smelled of stale tobacco and mothballs.

‘Looking for Barbie, you say? Sorry, but she's not here,' she told them, lighting a cigarette.

It seemed that Barbie, who had worked with her at the job centre, had lodged with her for about a year before leaving to take the job at Miller's Wife. ‘She left her flat in Birmingham and came here after that terrible business about Paul, told me she was trying to get over it in a new place. I did hope it might have become permanent, staying here with us, she was good company.' The woman's red-lipsticked mouth drooped at the corners, her heavily pencilled eyebrows followed the line of her spectacles so that her whole expression was very nearly as mournful as Carmody's. She was single and obviously on the verge of retirement, and her disappointed tone suggested a loneliness she probably wouldn't have admitted to.

‘Phyllis! You get them Jaffa Cakes?' screeched the old voice again.

The daughter rolled up her eyes. ‘Haven't gone yet, Mother! I won't go without letting you know.' She looked at her watch again, squinting through a plume of smoke. ‘I was sorry when Barbie went, but she was wasting her talents working at the job centre. I missed her though, she used to make me laugh.'

Jenny felt sympathy for her. She'd have put money on it there weren't many laughs now in Phyllis Whitelaw's life.

‘What do you mean, wasting her talents?'

‘Well, she was a qualified accountant, wasn't she? She only took the job with us until she could find something better. A pity her new job was so far away, but she wrote and said how happy she was there, how pleased they were with her running their finances. They're going to miss her if she
has
left.' She squashed out the cigarette, while Carmody and Jenny exchanged looks at what was news to them regarding Barbie's position at Miller's Wife. ‘But that's not like her, you know. She wouldn't just go and leave them in the lurch.'

The sound of pots and pans being banged about in the kitchen made her look apprehensively at her watch again. Jenny glanced at Carmody and they stood up.

‘Thank you for your help, Miss Whitelaw.'

‘She's not in any trouble, is she? Sorry, silly question, you wouldn't be here if she wasn't. But I hope it's not serious?'

‘I hope not, too.'

When they had asked her at first if she knew where Barbie was, she'd said she couldn't help them, but as she opened the front door for them, she suddenly changed her mind. ‘I can give you her father's address. She might just have gone there.'

It was in Herefordshire, which meant that they weren't going to get there that day. They thanked Miss Whitelaw once more for her help. They'd barely reached the end of the street before they saw her emerge from the house with a shopping bag on a trolley.

Abigail stood in the doorway of the small ward and looked towards the woman seated by Nick's bedside. It was Roz, all right.

They had only ever met once before, and that briefly, but Abigail was unlikely to have forgotten her. It had been during a case in which her sister, Sophie, had been largely involved, when Abigail had been a mere sergeant, and their meeting had been one of the reasons why Abigail had finally decided her dwindling affair with Nick must cease.

It had all been more complicated than that, of course, affairs usually were, and more difficult to end than it seemed in retrospect, and it had uncovered a ruthlessness in herself she hadn't liked to admit to; but there had never been any doubts that she'd done the right thing, as far as both her career and her personal life went.

As for Nick, and Roz, and the child who'd since died – well, it had been all set to work out for them, and might have done, who could tell? She'd done what she could. Though a marriage which had never been very stable from the start hadn't really stood much chance, she had to admit.

Roz, the cool, very together lady that Abigail remembered, was looking distraught. She couldn't touch Nick but her hand was laid on the coverlet, her face ravaged as she gazed at him. She looked at Abigail without recognition.

‘DI Moon,' Abigail said, automatically producing her warrant card.

For an instant, the tiny room held a boding stillness like the eye of a storm, and then Roz rearranged her face and said coldly, ‘Is this a personal visit, or are you here in an official capacity?' She wasn't going to make it easy for Abigail.

Abigail was saved by footsteps outside, and voices, and then two doctors came in, followed by a young woman in a white coat wheeling an instrument trolley, with Staff Nurse Storey bringing up the rear. One of the doctors went to the bedside and looked down gravely at the patient without saying anything.

‘I'm afraid we shall have to ask you both to leave for a while,' the nurse told them. ‘We're going to do a few tests. Why not go and get yourselves some lunch? We shall be some time here.'

Out in the corridor, Abigail said, ‘Maybe we should do as she suggests? I'd like to talk to you, if you're willing. PC Spellman can fetch you if necessary.'

Spellman said, ‘Sure,' and after a moment, Roz nodded and they moved off together.

Roz toyed with a salad as she said, ‘All right, you don't have to try and convince me. I know it was all over between you, long since, and I know you were the one to finish it. I've nothing against you now, not really. For Michael's sake I was grateful to you for what you did, but getting back together with Nick was never a permanent solution. We're a no go area, the two of us.'

‘Was that why you decided to go away?' Against all expectations, Abigail was finding herself liking this woman who'd been little more than a name, a presence, a source of guilt, to her for so long.

‘Partly. It was just that I suddenly had to get away from everybody and everything, get my head straight as they say. I told Nick I was going to Tuscany, it was the first place I thought of, anywhere to stop him coming after me. But then I realized there was no need to go far, I remembered my sister was in Egypt, her house was empty, so I went to stay there, didn't answer the phone or the door. I had plenty of books and the TV and radio for company, and Sophie keeps enough food in the freezers for a siege. When I heard the news about Nick, on the radio, I came over straight away.'

‘He was very worried about you – genuinely. You left your own fridge full of food, for one thing –'

‘I know, I remembered later. Nothing I could do, then.'

‘And one shoe by the door.'

‘A shoe?

‘Black suede, strappy.'

‘Oh, that! A buckle came off one. I picked the pair up to have it mended, then saw it was daft to take both, so I left the other in the hall. I'd forgotten all about it. You don't mean he thought ...'

Her glance fell to her plate. She appeared to be struggling against tears.

‘He thought all sorts of things. He asked me to help find you.'

Abigail explained, as briefly as she could, what had passed between her and Nick. ‘What's puzzled me is why he was so reluctant to try and find you himself.'

Roz speared a piece of tomato, stared at it, then laid down her fork. ‘It might have been because of Miller's Wife – at least because of Tim Wishart.'

Abigail stared at her. Was Roz going to say that she and Wishart had had something going? That Nick had been jealous?

‘Could you tell me about it?'

It was some time before Roz was able to find the words. ‘It's difficult for me to say this, but ... Have you any idea why Nick left the police?'

‘Not really. Except that I wasn't surprised. He never really fitted in, you know.'

‘It wasn't that. He'd started gambling, heavily, and he was deeply in debt. He'd been taking money from Wishart to pay off what he owed, and he was afraid it would all come out.'

‘
What?
Tim Wishart lent Nick money?'

‘I don't think it was meant to be repaid.'

Abigail was stunned on both counts. Nick had never, to her certain knowledge, been either a gambler, or a grafter. But he
had
needed capital to start up as a private eye. So, rather than take money from Roz, especially in the state their marriage was in at the time, he'd taken it from Wishart. It made sense, in a cockeyed sort of way, if you knew Nick, and his stubborn, macho pride. But –

‘What had Wishart to hide?' she asked sharply.

‘I don't know. I didn't know what had been going on until after Nick had left the police, I swear, not until I went to work at Miller's Wife, in fact. Working there was only something to fill the time for me, I didn't want to commit myself to anything seriously, but Nick went spare when he heard, practically ordered me to leave. Naturally, I refused, why shouldn't I work there? In the end, it all came out, and he warned me that it was dangerous for me to stay there. Wishart was always around Miller's Wife, and he associated with some nasty types. There could be trouble for both of us if he found out who I was, that I was Nick's wife, he'd think I'd been sent to – well, spy on him, I suppose.'

‘
Spy
on him? What was he up to, then?'

‘I honestly have no idea.'

Abigail was beginning to understand Nick's worries when Roz disappeared, his reluctance to start asking his own questions about her anywhere around Wishart. But he
had
asked questions – after Wishart had been removed from the scene. When there'd been no more danger to himself. She didn't say this, because the follow-up was that Nick himself had had a very strong motive for Wishart's removal.

When Abigail rang the hospital the next morning the news was the same as it had been the night before – no change.

‘Does that mean he's come round from the anaesthetic or not?'

‘Are you a relative?'

‘Inspector Moon, Lavenstock CID.'

‘He's not conscious, but your man is still here at his bedside.'

When did being unconscious turn into being in a coma?

This time Jenny drove, while Carmody held the map on his knees.

An hour out of Lavenstock and they were off the motorway, into the rich, red Herefordshire countryside, lush in summer, attractive even on a dull, cold, heavy February day. They might have been in another country. That's what it felt like, foreign country, with the wild Welsh on the other side of the blue mountains. There'd been hoary old jokes about passports before they left the station.

Jenny was full of memories of when she used to come here for holidays with her family, better in retrospect than they'd been in reality. ‘Can't think why I haven't been back to this neck of the woods for so long. All that history! They used to make raids on this part of the country from Wales. Offa's Dyke, Owen Glendower.'

The twisting roads of the border marches were quiet enough today, a wonder after the densely trafficked conurbation left behind. Carmody settled comfortably into his seat as she competently negotiated a sharp bend. ‘You should've been a teacher, Jen.'

Jenny flushed. ‘I nearly was, once.'

‘What happened?'

‘Didn't have the brains for it, for all those A levels.'

‘From what I've seen of my kids' teachers, brains aren't mandatory.'

Jenny grinned. ‘Well, maybe it was the patience I didn't have. Anyway, once the idea of the police grabbed me, that was it.'

‘Big deal.'

‘Come on, I don't believe you think it's so bad, either.'

‘Yeah, well, I lost my starry-eyed look a long time since – and I do believe we're nearly there,' Carmody said, as they approached a quiet town with a profusion of black and white timbered houses along the main road.

The address which Phyllis Whitelaw had scribbled down for them turned out to be set back from the main thoroughfare, a very far cry from the one she herself lived in. It was a tall, brick-built house in a Queen Anne terrace, with gleaming windows, a handsome, glossy black door and shiny brass door furniture. A sizeable property, it was now divided into two flats.

Their visit was unheralded, but they were counting on the effectiveness of surprise tactics to offset any possible waste of time. Luck was with them. When Carmody pressed the bell for Commander H.R.J.Nelson, in the ground-floor flat, it was answered by a middle-aged woman with a flowered, wraparound pinny and a voluble Welsh accent.