Murder Most Merry (47 page)

Oh dear, she was better off thinking about the Mitzi Field case. Very well, Noel Sarum was in the clear. He could have printed that school magazine himself, or altered the date, but only in a Golden Age detective story. He’d been far away, and Connie French had confirmed his reason for haunting Grand Drive at a particular time of year. Further, while everyone was a potential life-taker, Noel Sarum belonged at the safest, last-resort end of the spectrum.

And that revived Superintendent Haggard’s imperfect crime. She could picture a man on perhaps his first and last sojourn in the city, stopping at a street woman’s signal and unrecognized, very likely unseen, driving away with her. To drive on, soon afterwards, taking care to stay away.

“Hopeless,” Jill mumbled and, skipping breakfast, went off to her broom closet, cardboard-flavored coffee, and the case file.

It assured her that everything needful had been done. A fruitless check for witnesses to the crime, an unrewarding search for tire tracks, footprints, any physical evidence apart from Mitzi Field’s body. Local and then regional sexual offenders interrogated. Other prostitutes questioned, fellow tenants of her last known address, the demolished squat, traced and interviewed.

Nothing to go on; conscientious Detective-Inspector Poole, exactly the breed of plodder who catches most criminals, had demonstrated that if nothing else. Or had he?

Inspector Tierce stood up awkwardly, massaging scar tissue through her skirt. She hadn’t thought the location significant, merely incongruous, when Superintendent Haggard told her of it. Previous reading of the file had left her cold. But now it was different because... because of Connie French. Something—
what?
—that she’d said last night.

She’d said so much, that was the snag. Squinting, lips moving silently, Jill talked herself through a lengthy and meandering conversation. Until reaching the point where Connie had lamented an uncaring daughter... bingo.

Children coming home for the holidays, of course. That’s what families did at Christmas, families and friends of the family. Driven by nostalgia, tradition, the chance to purge year-long offenses during the annual truce, or (if mercenary souls) simply to collect presents, they headed for hearth and home.

She leafed through to a terse section of the dossier, the London end. A few discreet sentences covered Mitzi’s life from just before her ninth birthday until she absconded from the council home six years later.

Lots of digging needed. Inspector Tierce felt sorry for Len Poole, and profoundly grateful that she did not have to follow up her idea.

Inspector Poole, a careworn, resigned character, took one look at the name on the file and groaned, “Haggard’s got you at it as well, has he? Wish he’d mind his own business.”

“Amen to that, but I’m stuck with it. Len, what was that girl doing on Grand Drive? Haggard thinks she took a client to a road full of snobs and busy-bodies because she didn’t know any better. Or the punter was ignorant and Mitzi Field didn’t care. Did you buy that?”

“No opinion—I’d need facts to form one, and the only certainty was that she was killed there.” He wasn’t being awkward, that was how his mind worked. “Long way to go for a quickie in a motor, right enough. Then again, Vice was chasing street prozzies at the time, she might have wanted to get well away from the redlight area.”

“Supposing,” said Jill, “she wasn’t taken to Grand Drive and killed? Supposing she was
leaving
there, heading back to her beat, when it happened?”

“I’m not quite with you.”

“She didn’t walk all the way, wasn’t dressed for it, therefore she went in a car, that’s the conventional wisdom. Doesn’t follow. A bus runs from dockland to a stop round the corner from Grand Drive every half hour. She could have taken herself there, right? Visited somebody, left again, and either her attacker was waiting, or he was the one she’d called on, and he chased her out of doors.”

“Try reading the file,” Inspector Poole urged. “No known sex offenders among the residents, remember. We grilled all Les Girls, whether or not they’d associated with Ms. Field, and none of them had a client in Grand Drive; far as they were aware, that is. Down-market hookers don’t keep names and addresses. Her mates were sure Mitzi had never been up there before.”

“Yes, but it was Christmas, Len. When we all get sudden urges to see Mum and Dad, look up Auntie Flo, send a card to that nice former neighbor who nursed us through whooping cough. Mitzi Field had a family of sorts, once upon a time.”

Digesting the implications, Inspector Poole said, “Crumbs.” He did not go in for bad language. “You do get ‘em. the wild hunches. All right, she was Mitzi Field, but her mother remarried, to a man called, don’t tell me... Edwardes. The stepfather who supposedly seduced the little girl. The mother died in 1984. Edwardes was never charged, lack of evidence, they just took the child away. He’d dropped off the radar screen by 1990, dead or gone abroad, certainly hasn’t paid tax or claimed unemployment benefits for a long time. All in the file. dear. I may be slow but I ain’t stupid.”

“Perish the thought. But that still leaves Auntie Flo and the kindly neighbor.”

“Crumbs,” he repeated, even more feelingly, “you don’t want much. We’re talking ten, fifteen years back, and in London.” Inspector Poole took possession of the file. “It’s a thought, I can’t deny it. More’s the pity.”

On Christmas Eve afternoon, Len Poole rapped jauntily at Jill’s office door. “London doesn’t get any better. I’ve had two days up there, and how those lads in the Met stand the life is beyond me. Noise, pollution, bad manners, homeless beggars everywhere. But I did find a helpful social worker, they do exist even if it’s an endangered species, and this chap had a good memory-

“Great idea of yours—but I’m afraid James Edwardes. Mitzi’s allegedly wicked stepfather, doesn’t live at Grand Drive. He works the fairs in the Republic of Ireland, hasn’t been in England for years.”

Hitching half his skinny rump onto the corner of the desk, Inspector Poole added innocently, “No trace of Auntie Flo. But I’ll tell you who did have a Grand Drive address until recently—Anthony Challis.”

Since he had to have worked hard and fast and was full of himself over it, Jill Tierce played along. “Challis?”

“He lodged with Mitzi’s family in the eighties. Freelance electrician, good earner, about to get married. But then Mitzi Field, only she was little Dorothy then, accused nice Mr. Challis of doing things to her. Her mother called the police, and then Dorothy admitted it wasn’t Challis after all, it was her stepfather who kept raping her.” Len Poole grimaced distastefully. “Ugly... my tame social worker said he’d never believed Challis had touched her. What it was, they discovered, Edwardes not only abused her, he practically brainwashed the poor kid, said she’d be struck down if she told on him. When it got too much for her, she accused Tony Challis—ironically enough, because he was kind, would never hurt her. She’d just wanted it out in the open, so the grownups would make it stop. Ruining Challis wasn’t on her agenda, if she had such a thing, but that was the effect.”

“After Dorothy-Mitzi was taken into council care, her mother threw Edwardes out, and Tony Challis went to other digs. No charges were brought in the end—the child was considered unreliable on account of changing her story. Rumors spread, mud stuck, Challis’s fiancée told him to get lost, his regular customers followed suit...”

“Ugly,” Jill agreed.

“Gets worse. Challis is a Wessex man, he talked a lot about this part of the world when he was lodging with Mitzi’s folks. Maybe that’s why she stuck around, having drifted here. Anyway, Challis took to drink, hit the gutter before he straightened up. Returned to his native heath, as posh books put it, found work as a janitor for Coastal Properties. They own several apartment houses on Grand Drive and gave him a basement flat in the end one on the left. Too dark and cramped for letting, and it gave them a good excuse to pay him peanuts.”

“Mitzi Field wasn’t looking for Challis—if she’d had a grain of sense she would have kept well clear—but she found him. Once a month he picked up supplies from a discount hardware store on her beat in dockland. He didn’t notice her, which is natural; the last time he’d seen Dorothy, she was a child. But she must have seen him going in and out of the hardware place and pumped somebody there, discovered where he worked.”

Len Poole sighed and shook his head. “Just as you said, it was Christmas. Tony Challis is watching TV in his basement one night, and suddenly this shabby little tart is at the side door, saying, I’m Dorothy, Mr. Challis, don’t you remember me? Wanted to say sorry, hoped he was doing all right now, she hadn’t wanted to make trouble for him. And so on.”

“Challis says, and I believe him, he was in a daze while she talked to him. ‘Noises, she was making noises,’ he told me. She was dead when the actual words came back to him. Mitzi left, and for a minute—the chap’s a drinker, mark you—he wondered whether he’d been hallucinating. Then he wished he had been. Challis hadn’t hated
Dorothy,
he understood she was a victim who dragged him down with her, no malice involved. But she’d become Mitzi... ruining him and still ending up like that, that was past bearing.”

“Next moment, it seemed to him. he was standing over her in the street, holding one of those little stone lions: half the big houses along the drive had them on either side of the porch. He had the lion by its head, the square base was allover blood.”

“He accepted that he must have killed her, but he didn’t feel like a murderer. All he felt was scared witless. He slipped back to his basement, washed the lion, and put it back in place. Then he prayed. Been praying ever since.”

“From Met Police records and that social worker. I got the names of five people linked to Field when she was a child. Only one was among the residents of Grand Drive at the time she was killed. No problem finding him, he didn’t move far, one of those new council flats near the marina. Soon as I said who I was. Challis goes. ‘Thank God, now I can tell somebody.’ ”

Jill Tierce addressed her folded hands, almost inaudibly. “She wanted to make amends for what happened all those years ago, and he killed her for trying?”

Inspector Poole slid off the desk, his expression mixing wonder and compassion over her naivete. “If you can make sense of the why and wherefore, be sure to tell Challis. He can’t sort it out. It’s people, Jill... she was one of them that gets sentimental at Christmas, never considered she’d be opening a wound. As for him, he wasn’t the kind man who’d lodged with her mum. Not anymore. She stirred up an embittered semialcoholic, temper overdue to snap.”

Len Poole hesitated, cleared his throat. “Nobody’s fault, luv. not even his. Though he’ll go away for it.”

“We got a result, which is all that matters.”

“Not what I meant—though there is always that, at the end of the day.”

Inspector Tierce’s day, apparently over, had a postscript.

She’d wanted to watch the black and white movie of Scrooge for the fifth Christmas Eve in a row but went to bed instead. Her father would be calling “fairly early” to collect her for Christmas lunch, meaning crack of dawn.

The phone woke her. The caller sounded drunk, though on nothing more than girlish high spirits, it emerged.

“We’ve just got back from midnight Mass, now we can be the first to wish you Merry Christmas.”

“Wha? Who is it?” Jill pulled the alarm clock radio round on the bedside table, sending paperbacks, a bottle of cough mixture, and her pain tablets cascading to the floor. “It’s twenty to two!” The voice’s identity registered belatedly. “Connie, I’ll kill you.”

“Don’t be like that. I rang him after all, you see. And I’m so
happy.
”

“Bully for you. What in the world are you on about?”

“Noel, of course. You let his name slip the other night—”

“Did I, by gum.” Fully awake and up on one elbow, Inspector Tierce rolled gummy eyes. “That was very unprofessional.”

“Sarum’s an unusual surname, only one in the local phonebook, and we talked for hours—” Following squeaks and a rattle, Noel Sarum came on the phone.

“And here I am! Well, I’ll be leaving in a minute,” he added sheepishly.

Another interlude of cryptic noises and then Connie French trilled, “He’s so stuffy, of course he’s not leaving at this time of the morning.”

She said something aside, answering Noel in the background. “He wants you to know we’re engaged and says I’m indiscreet, the idiot. I say. you must come to our wedding, it’ll be February or March. You have to, you’re the matchmaker.”

“Let’s talk about it next year. I’m pleased you are pleased. Connie. Tell Noel to go easy on the law in future: he owes me. ‘Bye.”

Lying back in the darkness, a phrase from the Bible popped into her head, a Sunday school fragment clear as if spoken for her benefit: “Out of the strong came forth sweetness. “Something about bees using the remains of a savage lion as their hive. Why think of that? Mitzi Field was battered with a stone lion. Nothing sweet there, that was not the connection.

Connie was gorgeously happy, and Noel worshipped her. It couldn’t last, euphoria didn’t, yet it was a promising prelude to something better. They might fight eventually, but they would not be lonely.

That was what had triggered the parable of bees and a beast of prey. Out of evil, good can come. “Merry Christmas,” Jill Tierce whispered to the pillow.