Nor All Your Tears (5 page)

‘Some sort of curved blade? Like a scythe?' asked Sergeant Abelson, speaking for the first time. She had a slightly husky, soft voice.

Masson grunted. ‘Are you suggesting,' he enquired of his sergeant, ‘that Death himself was the killer?' It was asked in a tone that might well have shrivelled a delicate flower.

Dad, helpful as ever, was not backward in coming forward. ‘Or it could have been a very old farmhand,' he offered.

This contribution did not help the chief investigating officer cope with his customary incendiary temper, one that he appeared able to control only by several deep breaths and pulling so much air through his cigarette that it was in danger of imploding into his upper respiratory tract.

Mark frowned. ‘Hardly anything like that. It wasn't very sharp. These are heavy blunt injuries.'

Abruptly Masson swivelled around to Abelson, a delicate pirouette that I thought he did rather well. ‘Any news on her personal circumstances?'

She shook her head but did so almost defiantly and I found myself warming to Sergeant Abelson; she was not about to go readily into that good night. Although Masson was not happy, she did little in the way of flinching, even as he said, ‘Well, get some.'

He then turned to us. ‘Thanks for your help.' Which, it appeared, was as close as he came to a gentle dismissal. I smiled at Mark and then Dad and I trudged away; we had almost reached the doors when a cry came from our right, one that echoed around the vast room. Everyone turned. A middle-aged, emaciated man in plain clothes was calling from a side room. ‘Sir? We've found something.'

Everyone converged, of course; Dad and I were quite close so we had a head start, but Masson did a bit of battling and pulling of rank so that he got to the front. We were crowded into a side room on the floor of which was a padded mat, perhaps used for judo or something; there was a trail of red – clearly blood – across the diagonal,

At the back was an array of body-building equipment – dumb-bells of all sizes, medicine balls, complicated pieces of torture equipment – and a man and a woman were standing to one side at the end of the red trail across the mat. Masson walked a parallel line to the bloodstains as he crossed the mat; Dad and I, along with everyone else, walked around the edges.

The exhibit?

It was a small dumb-bell that seemed to have been dropped in a puddle of blood in the corner of the room. You didn't have to try too hard to fit the curves of the weights to the curves in the head and face of Marlene Jeffries.

NINE

T
hat evening I took Max to the cinema –
Annie Hall
– and was less than impressed. I preferred Woody Allen when he did funny stuff –
Sleeper
had me almost wetting my Y-fronts – and this sort of sensitive, caring, witty stuff seemed a bit tame; I just wanted him to go suddenly into fast-forward and run around a lot. Max surprised me, though; I had expected her to love it – what is wrong with women? – yet, although initially she seemed to fall for the irritating sentimentality of it all, her mood did not last. She had been subdued when I picked her up and had only slowly become her usual self; during the course of the film, she began to fall back into melancholy. Afterwards, I tried to engage her in some chat about the film, arguing in a friendly fashion that Woody Allen had become not so much a master of cinema, more a self-obsessed nerd, but it did little good. We had a Wimpy burger (as good as ever) at our usual vendor – St George's Street, Croydon – and it was then that I began to work out what was wrong with her.

Max is a vet and, so I believe, a very good one, but she has yet to learn clinical detachment; if you look after the sick, then you will never be one hundred per cent successful, and you must learn this quickly. Some of them will die; on occasion, it will seem as if every patient you come across has only a fifty per cent chance of survival, as if you dispense death as often as you restore life. You have to accept this, because not to do so leads to a very unhappy life. You are likely to have to become a public-health consultant or, worse, work in occupational health; these are jobs that, like telephone sanitizers and dental hygienists, are completely unfulfilling and unnecessary. It's the same with vets, too; unless they accept that it's a job and not a whole life, they end working for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

In this case, she had that day been forced to put down a dog – a beautiful Alsatian. It had been badly injured two weeks before in a road accident, and although Max had initially hoped to save it, this happy outcome was not to be. She had been giving me daily updates on its progress and up until forty-eight hours before she had still been hopeful; that she had failed had hit her hard. Two weeks is a long time to be with a sick person, and if you're not careful, you bond and that way lies disaster; a bond with an animal can be just as strong as a bond with a human.

‘Poor Mr Stewart, he was so upset.'

‘These things happen,' I pointed out.

‘But Major was his whole life. He doesn't have anyone else.' Which summed Max up; she wasn't just trying to treat the animal, she was trying to cure the owner as well.

‘Can't he buy another?'

I suppose, in retrospect, this did sound rather heartless and certainly Max's fleeting frown suggested that she had taken it rather badly, although all she said was, ‘I don't think he can afford to do that. He's on benefits.'

‘Ah . . .'

There was silence for much of the rest of the journey; in fact until we arrived back at her house. I had to park the car about twenty yards down the road, just around the bend to the left of her house, and we continued in silence as we walked to her gate, then up the garden path. ‘What's that?' I asked, indicated a dark shape dimly visible against the front door.

‘I don't know,' she said in a voice that was partly curious, partly concerned. ‘It looks like . . .'

But she didn't have to finish, because the headlights of a car turning the corner swept across us and across the front of her house and we could see precisely what it was.

It was Twinkle, her rabbit, nailed to the front door.

I stayed the night with Max, trying to comfort her, finding her inconsolable and myself a total spare part because of it. She had begun sobbing as soon as she laid eyes on the atrocity and didn't stop until she finally collapsed into exhausted sleep a long time later. My first thought had been to remove poor Twinkle from his undignified resting place but almost at once I knew that I should leave it until the police saw it, so I had to take the key from Max, open the door while she stayed at the garden gate with her back turned, then hurry her past it and into the house with her head buried in my chest. I sat her on the sofa in the back lounge and then phoned the police.

It was Percy Bailey who took the call. ‘You what?' he asked in a somehow reassuringly incredulous tone. I wasn't exactly shouting in order to spare Max the verbal descriptions and I suspect he thought he had misheard. After I had repeated myself, he still seemed to doubt his auditory organs. ‘Nailed?'

‘Yes.'

‘A rabbit?'

‘Called Twinkle.'

‘To her front door?'

‘You've got it, Percy.'

I could imagine him scratching his head with the blunt and well-sucked end of his pencil. ‘Blimey,' he opined at last, but that was the end of the official police response for a few moments.

‘Do you think you could send someone to have a look?' I asked eventually.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Yes, of course . . .'

He said it somewhat distantly, though.

Some thirty minutes later and Max had had two cups of sweet tea but was still spontaneously and randomly bursting into bouts of sobbing; I had resorted to red wine before going back outside to make a closer examination of Twinkle. It wasn't enough to inoculate me against reaction to the sight before me, though. Twinkle had been made the subject of mock crucifixion. Spreadeagled and a nail through each paw; two more through each ear, just to add a touch of mockery, I think. I hadn't much liked Twinkle – he, however, had adored me, or at least adored the taste of my flesh since he was constantly trying to bite chunks out of me – but it didn't mean that I wanted such an end for him. Blood had run in irregular trails down the pale-blue gloss paint of the door and Twinkle's eyes were open and clouded. There was an air of cruelty about this that was quite chilling . . .

Because the street lighting didn't reach the house and there was a shallow porch, the sight was fairly well hidden from the pavement, so the two constables who had been despatched to investigate the incident – one male, one female – and who arrived as I was standing in front of this horror did not at once fully appreciate the unpleasantness of the crime scene; accordingly, their demeanour was initially fairly blithesome – I might even have said irreverent – although this soon changed as they hove into sight of poor Twinkle. I had never seen either of them before, but they were fairly young and I suspect that this was most probably their first case of lepicide. The WPC – a fairly sturdy girl with black hair and square features – closed her eyes and dropped her gaze almost at once, and her compatriot (who looked so young he might just only have received his Cycling Proficiency Badge) coughed slightly and frowned, but succeeded only in looking a little sick.

Initial reactions over, though, they did what police people do, which is to ask a lot of questions, most of which seemed (to my mind, anyway) to be either silly or bleeding obvious. We all sat around in the lounge, Max and I together on the sofa, the two of them facing us in the armchairs, both with notebooks and pencils out, like a synchronized police display team. Max was clutching my hand so tightly it hurt and the whole proceeding was punctuated by her sobs.

Is this your rabbit, sir?
No, it's Miss Christy's.

When did you last see it alive, miss?
I fed it this evening before we went out, at about six thirty.

And you were where, exactly?
At the cinema.

You returned when, exactly?
Just before we phoned the police. About ten o'clock.

Do you have any idea why this might have been done?
(Sobbing.)

Do you get on with your neighbours?
I thought so.

And neither of you has any idea who might have done this?

To which I lied, because Max said, ‘No,' and I agreed.

An hour later, Sergeant Abelson turned up. The Dynamic Duo had reported back and presumably said report had included a lot of puzzlement and little enlightenment, so it had been decided that someone with more experience should attend; killing a rabbit might not be up there with the Ripper murders but it wasn't exactly like a bit of cosy burgling or indecent exposure. After she had taken some photographs, and then examined poor Twinkle (minutely and with great concentration, as if she had seen any number of rabbit-killings and might be able to deduce the identity of the murderer from the modus operandi), she turned to me with a deep frown and pursed lips. She had deep brown eyes and a fringe and pursing her lips made a slight dimple on her chin. ‘This is quite extraordinary.'

I smiled weakly. Max had gone to bed, still weeping. ‘Just a tad.'

‘It's almost like a sign, or warning, or something.'

I said nothing.

‘And you really have no idea who could be responsible? Miss Christy has no enemies?'

I shook my head. ‘No . . .'

She was quick, because she picked up my tone, spotted that it wasn't a totally unqualified negative. ‘No . . . but what?'

‘I have an enemy.'

‘Who?'

I glanced up the stairs, not wanting Max to overhear. ‘Do you think I could take Twinkle down first? It's not very dignified for him and when it gets light, he might upset the milkman, and I know for a fact that the postman has a weak heart.'

‘Of course.'

So I put on some Marigolds and detached Twinkle from the woodwork, putting him in an old shoebox (it was a bit of a squeeze since he had fed well on Elliot flesh over the months), then wiping down the door. Once I had done that, I took the Sergeant into the kitchen and across to the small table where I told her all about Tristan.

TEN

‘
T
ristan Charlton is . . . was . . . my brother-in-law.'

‘You're married?'

‘Was. A few years ago now. Celia. She died, though . . . took her own life.'

She lowered her gaze, made the appropriate response but managed to make it appear that she genuinely meant it. ‘I'm sorry.' It occurred to me that her initial somewhat frosty demeanour was going the way of many chilly mornings and turning into quite a warm day.

‘She had a history of depression.' I didn't need to tell her any more but it was automatic, a defence against having people think that I might have driven her to it – after all, Tristan seemed to think so. ‘She hated being married to me, yet she found that she couldn't live without me . . .' I might have stopped then, but found that I couldn't. ‘She'd tried to kill herself before . . .'

Did she look at me slightly askance, perhaps thinking that I was protesting too much? I couldn't tell and her voice seemed to possess the right amount of understanding as she murmured, ‘I understand.'

There followed the briefest of pauses before I said, ‘Tristan's never been able to accept the loss of his sister. They were close and Tristan is . . .'

I was having trouble finding the right words but she finished for me. ‘Not normal?'

I flashed her a smile. ‘You could say that. He's always had serious psychiatric problems. He attacked me not long after Celia died; did a pretty good job, too; basically left me for dead. He was convicted for that, but he was released last year.'

‘Last year? Where's he been since then?'

And so I went on to explain about Sophie and Leo, her dog, and about what had happened whilst members of the Thornton Heath Horticultural and Allotment Society were dying in their ancient droves. About how Tristan felt that I shouldn't be happy any more, that anyone I fell in love with was a legitimate target.