Through a Narrow Door (3 page)

‘Constable …?’

‘Wright, ma’am.’

‘Constable Wright. What else can you tell me?’

‘Victim’s name is William Davies, ma’am, aged fifteen. His family live in the last bungalow as you carry on down the road. Aston Lea’s all bungalows, ma’am, built in the
thirties
by the then estate owner for his workers. Father’s name,’ he checked his notebook, ‘is George Davies. Works as a mechanic up at the garage on the main road. Nothing known,’ he added, the usual shorthand for letting her know he had no criminal record. ‘Mother is Marilyn Davies. She works in the shop at the petrol station. Lad was found by his sister.’ Constable Daniel Wright’s face began to darken now, as he carried on. ‘One Celia Davies. She’s eleven.’

Hillary gave a little grunt of distress, then nodded at him to carry on. ‘Seems she’s not at school because of one of those teacher training days or what have you. Anyway, her mum sent her down to the allotment to remind William that she wanted him back in time for tea. Apparently the lad wasn’t well, which was why he was home from his school. Some sort of tummy bug. He hadn’t eaten any lunch, or not
been able to keep it down, and his mum wanted him to have his tea early. A boiled egg,’ he added flatly.

Hillary took another deep breath and let him get on with it. It was the little details that could sometimes break your heart, and you just had to pretend it didn’t.

‘Anyway.’ Constable Wright sighed heavily, and went back to his notebook. ‘She couldn’t see him from the gate so called to him, but when he didn’t come out of the shed, she went in and … found him. She ran home and told her mother, and her father hot-footed it up here to see for himself.’

‘Her father wasn’t at work either?’ she asked sharply.

‘No, ma’am.’

Hillary nodded but instantly wondered why not. And was the fact that the whole Davies family seemed to have been at home today somehow significant? She made a mental note to find out and then nodded at him to continue.

Wright shrugged, as if to say there wasn’t much else to come. ‘Father finds his son and staggers back home to call us.’

‘Did he touch the body?’

‘He says not, ma’am.’

Hillary’s eyes narrowed. She found that hard to believe. Surely a father finding his son in that state would
instinctively
touch him? Hold him, try to pull the blade out. Cry over him, rock him, something. But then, she knew, shock took people in different ways. Perhaps the horror of that scene had frozen him on the spot, and then all he wanted to do was turn away from it. Blot it out. It could as easily have happened that way.

‘What time did the call come in?’

Daniel Wright checked the notebook again. ‘Dispatch has it at 2.53 p.m., ma’am. The timing seems to be right, but I didn’t question the little girl closely, nor the father either, come to that. Most of this is just what he blurted out when we arrived.’

‘He came back to the allotments then?’

‘Yes, ma’am. He was in the road when we arrived, and motioned us in. He was white and shaking, but seemed coherent enough.’

‘Right. Well, I’d best have a word,’ she murmured. ‘I take it the little girl is with her mother back at the house?’

‘Yes, ma’am. I asked her, the mother that is, if she had a friend or wanted a neighbour round, but she said no.’

Hillary frowned. Another strange reaction. But then again, perhaps the Davies weren’t close to their neighbours. And in a tiny hamlet like this one, that factor alone might be significant.

Hillary moved up to the patrol car and Janine, spotting her, got out to give her a quick rundown on what she’d picked up from George Davies. Most of it tallied exactly with the report given to her by DC Wright.

Hillary opened the back door and slid inside. Beside her a man sat slumped forward, his hands dangling listlessly between his spread knees. He smelt, oddly, of paint. He was wearing old trousers with a small hole in one knee, and a shirt that was fraying at the cuffs. Probably his old
working-around
-the-house clothes, donned for mowing the lawn or cleaning out the gutters. But again, Hillary wondered if money was tight in the Davies family.

‘Mr Davies, my name’s Detective Inspector Hillary Greene. I’m going to be heading up your son’s murder inquiry.’ She tried to say the blunt, harsh facts as gently as she could, but as she spoke, she saw his head rear up. He was thickset, like his son, and with the same dark hair, but in his case, it was now going thin on top. He had bright blue eyes.

‘You’re a woman,’ he said. It wasn’t an accusation, or a wonderment, simply a statement. Hillary didn’t take offence, but said simply, ‘yes,’ and waited. After a moment George Davies nodded.

‘You’ll find whoever did it?’

Hillary hesitated for a scant second, then said again, and simply, ‘yes.’

Of course, she’d been on so-called management courses where officers were advised never to make promises of that sort. But Hillary knew what George Davies needed to hear, and after seeing that poor dead boy in his dad’s allotment shed, she meant exactly what she said.

George Davies let out a long shuddering sigh and leaned back against the upholstery. ‘I can’t believe it.’

‘No.’ Hillary didn’t suppose he could. Best just to get straight on with it. ‘Mr Davies, why weren’t you at work today? Yesterday was a bank holiday, isn’t today a working day for you?’

Davies nodded. ‘Yeah. But the boss likes me to work on a Sunday. Lots of folks bring in their cars for fixing then, because of the weekend see. So I always have a day off in the week instead. Whichever looks less busy, the boss doesn’t mind. Except for Fridays. I never have a Friday off. And yesterday, as you said, was a bank holiday, so I thought I’d take today off as well and make it two days in a row. Weather was going to be good, like, and my wife wanted me to redecorate the loo. So …’ he shrugged.

So that was one small mystery solved. And also explained the smell of paint.

‘Your wife wasn’t at work either?’

‘No, we only got the one car, see, so whenever I have my day off, she has it too. Besides, our Celia didn’t have school today, so it made sense to stay home for her like. The garage where I work is attached to the petrol station where wife works. The boss’s wife always minds the shop and sees to the pumps when Mari’s off,’ he explained.

And again Hillary wondered. Only one car then. The Davies definitely weren’t well-off. But seemed to be good parents – timing their work around the needs of their children.

‘And William was ill, I understand?’

‘Who?’ George asked blankly.

‘William. Your son.’

George Davies managed a smile. ‘Oh. No. Billy. He’s always been Billy.’

‘Sorry. I understand he had a tummy bug.’

‘Hmmm. So he said,’ George agreed. ‘Didn’t seem much wrong with him to my mind. But his mum said he was off his food, and there’s been some sort of tummy bug about. One of these twenty-four hour diarrhoea things.’ But he didn’t sound convinced, and Hillary got the distinct
impression
that his father thought that young Billy had been swinging the lead. Still, who didn’t try and get off school once in a while? She had, when she’d been his age. And she’d bet George Davies had too.

‘But if he wasn’t well, why was he on the allotment at all?’ she asked carefully. ‘Was he a keen gardener?’

George grunted a laugh, then abruptly bit it off, as if expecting to be hit by lightning for such an offence. ‘No,’ he said, after a long and heavy moment, having obviously fought off the threat of imminent tears. ‘No, he was a lazy little sod, really. Like all boys his age. But he liked the allotments. Always hanging around, doing nothing much. You knows what kids are like. And he liked to take photographs and stuff. Besides, I think his mum sent him up here for some taters.’

For a moment Hillary was lost, then suddenly twigged. Taters was the old Oxonian country word for potatoes. ‘You keep the winter crop in the shed?’ she asked. So the bag Billy had been found sitting on might have been filled with his dad’s potatoes.

‘Yeah. They need chitting, I ’spect,’ George Davies added vaguely, but the thought of having to do it at some point seemed to exhaust him. She could almost see him wilting. Finally, reaction was setting in, and she quickly folded her notebook away. ‘I’m going to ask the constable here to take you back home,’ she said, nodding to DC Wright’s partner, who was sat behind the wheel, and hadn’t said a word during the entire interview. ‘I think it might be a good idea to have the doctor out,’ she added to the man behind the wheel, a youngster with a shock of very pale hair and a faceful of freckles. He nodded instant understanding, and started the engine as Hillary slipped out.

Janine stood beside her and watched the patrol car head through the gates. DC Wright began to close the gate behind them, then quickly opened it up again. ‘Looks like SOCO have got here,’ Janine muttered, as the first of several
mid-range
cars began to pull up on the road outside.

Hillary nodded. ‘Best leave them to it.’ She headed for the gate and nodded at DC Wright as they passed through. Tommy was leaning against her car, talking on the radio, probably reporting in. With a start she wondered if he was talking to DCI Paul Danvers.

She was about to take a deep breath and go and take over, when, behind her, she heard her name being called. Doc Partridge had finished his initial inspection and had declared the official time of death. There was not a spot of dirt or blood on his clothes as he walked up to her.

‘Well, I’m not expecting any surprises,’ he began instantly. ‘I’m sure the obvious thing killed him. Didn’t find any
defensive
wounds on his hands or arms. I think whoever stuck that blade into him took him by surprise. You noticed the shears were open?’ he added, but it was strictly rhetorical. Of course she’d noticed.

Hillary nodded. ‘Using just the one blade made it easier to kill with?’ she asked sharply.

‘I would say so. Shears that are shut up must make a blunter weapon. But the individual blades both look sharp and well maintained. I don’t think the killer would have had to use too much strength to stab him.’

‘So a female killer can’t be ruled out?’

‘No.’

Hillary sighed. ‘Right-handed?’

‘I’d say so, given the angle. And not much taller than the victim, either. Say in the five-eight to five-eleven range. But that’s pure speculation, of course,’ he added sternly.

‘Right, Doc. When can you post-mortem him?’

‘I’ll try to get to him first thing tomorrow. Got a drowning and a suspicious cot death to do before him though. And you know how cot deaths are,’ the pathologist sighed heavily.
‘Have to take your time and get it right with them. Make a mistake of one kind, and an innocent mother or father gets jailed for a murder they didn’t commit. Get it wrong at the other end of the scale, and the next baby brother or sister dies as well.’

Hillary winced, and realized that the old saying was true: no matter how bad you thought you had it, there was always some other poor sod who had it worse. ‘Thanks Doc, I know you’ll do your best.’

Steven Partridge smiled wearily, looking his true age for the first time she’d known him. She watched him leave, then nodded across to Tommy. Of Frank Ross there was still no sign. He’d probably got lost somewhere en route. In the vicinity of a pub, no doubt.

‘If a DS Ross shows up, tell him we’re at the vic’s house,’ Hillary said to DC Wright, who nodded amiably.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘And strictly no press allowed inside,’ she added darkly. It wouldn’t be long before they descended.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Hillary glanced at her car, then mentally vetoed it. ‘Let’s walk,’ she said to Janine. It would give her a chance to get her thoughts in order before she had to talk the grieving mother and a traumatized little sister.

And in the back of her mind lurked the knowledge that most murders were committed by members of the family.

This had all the hallmarks of being a pig of a case.

The Davies bungalow was called ‘The Lilacs’, and at some point George Davies, or maybe his wife, had taken a red-hot poker and burned the name into a rough piece of timber, before hanging it above a rarely-used front door. The rustic tone it set, however, jarred with the building itself, which was a charmless, squat and square, 1950s bungalow. The whitewash had long since faded to a dull grey, and although the garden was neat and tidy enough, and the paintwork on the doors and window frames was fairly fresh, the building seemed unfriendly somehow.

Hillary followed the concrete path to a side entrance and glanced at Janine as she knocked on the door, noting that her sergeant, too, found the family home depressing. The door was quickly opened by a uniformed WPC, who nodded in recognition before Hillary could produce any ID. ‘The mother and little girl are in back, ma’am. Little girl’s in bed; mother’s fussing. She’s in shock, obviously, but seems coherent. Doctor’s due any minute.’

‘Right then, best get on,’ Hillary said, stepping through and appreciating the warning. Once the doctor got here and sedated Marilyn and Celia Davies up to the eyeballs, there was no telling when they might get a decent interview out of them.

The door opened on to a tiny kitchen and, following the WPC’s pointing finger, Hillary went through to a narrow corridor. The door to a compact lounge stood open on one
side, so she moved to the opposite side, listening for voices and finally hearing them at last in the second bedroom on the right. She knocked briefly and pushed open the door.

Celia Davies’s bedroom was obviously the smallest, little more than a box room, into which had been crammed a single bed and a small set of drawers. Dresses hung from hooks attached to the wall above. The décor in here was at least bright and cheerful, and a lemon-coloured wallpaper gave way to marching bands of daisies, cornflowers and poppies. White curtains hung at a small window,
overlooking
the narrow lane outside.

In the bed, a small girl with mouse-coloured hair, and the now-familiar big blue eyes, peered up at her. She clutched a small and battered stuffed white dog a little closer to her in a protective gesture, and Hillary felt her heart plummet. Interviewing distraught children was not how she liked to spend her days. Already she felt like the wicked witch of the west. Or was it east?

‘Hello, you must be Celia,’ Hillary said gently, smiling down and then turning to meet the eyes of Marilyn Davies as she rose from the bed. ‘I’m DI Hillary Greene, Mrs Davies. I just need a few quick words with your daughter, then we’ll chat in the kitchen, shall we? Have a nice cup of tea.’ How trite, how meaningless the words sounded. They made her wince internally even as she spoke them, but in all the years she’d been doing this job, she’d never found words that fit an occasion like this.

‘I don’t want our Ceel upset,’ Marilyn Davies said at once. She was one of those stick-thin women, with wispy
mouse-coloured
hair, that looked as if the next decent wind would bowl her over. Like her husband, her eyes were a vivid blue, but right now they looked watery and dazed. Her hands were obviously cold, for she kept putting them under her armpits as if to warm them, then would catch herself doing it and yank them back down again to her sides. All signs of agitation and shock, Hillary knew. They were going to have to make this quick.

‘Oh, I’ll be quick and gentle,’ she said firmly. ‘Now, Celia.’ Hillary crouched down quickly beside the bed and smiled. ‘I want you to think carefully. When you went to fetch Billy, did you see anyone on the allotments?’

The little girl shook her head and began to suck on the ear of the stuffed dog. Her mother moved, as if to take it out of her mouth, then thought better of it. Obviously, for once, this childish habit wouldn’t be admonished.

‘Do you know who has allotments as well as your Dad? I bet you do, and all their names.’

The little girl nodded solemnly.

‘But you didn’t see anybody there today, when you went to get Billy?’

‘No.’ The word was whispered, as if it had been a great secret.

Hillary nodded as solemnly, the keeper of the secret. ‘And no strangers either? No,’ she echoed, as Celia Davies once more shook her head. ‘How about a car then? Did you notice a car parked on the road, by the allotment gates?’

The girl thought about it, briefly raising Janine’s hopes, but she quickly lowered her notebook again when the little girl shook her head.

‘All right, Celia, that’s all for now. But we might talk again in a few days time, when you’re feeling better. All right?’

The little girl nodded solemnly, and gave the dog’s ear a particularly ferocious suck. It had one time been a standard poodle, but the nylon material it was made out of had long since lost its shape. It must be years old, and taste terrible.

Hillary rose, feeling her knee joints wince, and vowed once more to stick to a diet. Then she opened the door and looked wordlessly at Marilyn Davies, all but willing her to follow her out. The other woman sighed, gently pulled the hair back from her daughter’s head and whispered
something
to her, then followed them out. She left the door open, so that she could hear if her child should cry out.

‘Do you have any other children?’ Hillary asked softly as
they walked, single-file, down the stingy corridor and into the small lounge. This was papered in woodchip and painted the ubiquitous magnolia. There was a rug, rather than a carpet on the floor, and the cupboard standing in one corner was obviously between-the-wars utility. The two-seater sofa and battered reclining chairs looked like charity-shop purchases. A small telly stood in one corner. There was not a piece of artwork on the walls.

‘No, all we have is Billy and Celia.’

Hillary took one of the chairs, and felt a spring
dangerously
close to her posterior shift alarmingly beneath her. ‘You own your home, Mrs Davies?’

‘Rent. One of those Housing Association things. Used to be the council, took ’em over from the estate, now it’s some place in Banbury. Rent man comes every month.’ Marilyn Davies looked around, as if not recognizing where she was, then slowly took a seat on the sofa. Janine stayed upright by the door, discreetly jotting down shorthand into her
notebook
.

‘I understand from your husband that you were all at home today, for various reasons. Billy wasn’t well?’

‘No, he said he felt sick in the night. Didn’t eat much breakfast. I thought it best to keep him off school. He’d have gone back tomorrow though …’ she added firmly, then trailed off, as she realized that her son would never be going back to school again.

Hillary got the feeling that, like her husband, Marilyn Davies didn’t really believe in this ‘tummy bug’ excuse Billy had given for not going to school. Which prompted an obvious question. Had he skived off school deliberately, or did he just feel lazy? Had he gone to that allotment shed intending to meet someone? Because, having been there and seen it, Hillary was having a hard time believing this could be an opportunistic crime. Some passing pervert, spotting a young lad and taking a chance just didn’t wash. How much traffic did the narrow country lane ever see? And unless a stranger in a car just happened to see Billy Davies walking
the short distance down the road from his home to the
allotment
gate, nobody would ever know the allotments themselves were there.

‘Did Billy often have days off school?’ Hillary asked
casually
and saw Marilyn frown.

‘Sometimes. He was bright, like, and liked school well enough, I ’spose. He wasn’t no dunce. But he sometimes liked a day off, yeah,’ she admitted with a sigh.

Hillary wondered if she was aware that she’d all but admitted that her son was a regular truant, and thought that she probably didn’t. And what did it matter now? The thought hung between the two women like a two-edged sword.

‘So, what time was it that Billy went out, do you remember?’ Hillary asked, after a moment of awkward silence.

‘Dunno. About half one. He hadn’t wanted any lunch, or so he said. Felt like a walk, maybe over by the folly.’

‘Folly?’ It was Janine who echoed the word, obviously puzzled.

‘Yeah. Three arches, built bang in the middle of a field. They reckon the big house at Rousham had it build, a couple of hundred years ago. A fashion craze or something.’ Marilyn spoke in a curious, flat monotone. Was that her usual voice, Janine wondered, or had shock deadened it?

‘Oh,’ Janine said, and then, aware that she’d interrupted the flow of the interview, shot her boss an apologetic look.

‘But when you wanted him to come back for his tea, you sent Celia to the allotments. Is that right?’ Hillary asked curiously.

‘Well, not really. Yeah, I did, but I didn’t know if he’d be there or not. He just used to like hanging around there
sometimes
. And he’d been gone an hour, so I thought he might have had his walk and popped in there. I wanted him to get something down him – a boiled egg, some soup or summat.’

Once more, Marilyn Davies seemed to realize that she’d never have to cook for her son again, and something in her
face shifted. Before she could break down, Hillary took a deep breath and rushed on. ‘So you sent Celia to see if he was there. About what time was this?’

Marilyn shrugged. ‘Dunno.’

‘And after a while, Celia came back? What, five minutes later?’

‘Dunno. Could have been. Not that long. I dunno, it didn’t feel that long.’

Hillary could feel the woman slipping away, and hoped the doctor wouldn’t be long now. ‘What did she say exactly? Can you remember?’

‘She said someone had killed Billy. I told her not to be so silly. Her dad was in by then, washing up at the sink. He’d got paint all under his nails. He went haring off.’

Hillary nodded. Marilyn Davies hadn’t believed her daughter’s wild tale and didn’t want to believe it now. Perhaps she felt that, if she could just keep believing that it was just a little girl’s wild imagination, she could stop her son from actually being dead.

‘I need to go and see Billy’s room now, Mrs Davies,’ Hillary said gently, catching Janine’s eye and then nodding towards the kitchen. Janine slipped away and came back a few seconds later with the WPC who took one look at her charge, then went over and sat beside her on the sofa.

Hillary left them, the WPC hugging the now stiff and unresponsive Marilyn Davies and rocking her on the sofa. Out in the narrow corridor once more, she felt Janine roll her shoulders and realized how tense the situation had become.

‘I know, it’s not nice, you feel like a right cow, but it has to be done,’ Hillary murmured. If Janine was going to advance in her career, she’d have to start doing the dirty jobs herself soon.

The first door she pushed open was obviously the master bedroom. The bed was a double, and a big wardrobe stood beside the single window. Again it was woodchip and paint – this time in a pale mint green. The floorboards were
wooden and bare. Again no carpet. ‘I get the idea money is tight around here,’ Hillary mused. ‘Check out their finances and make sure.’ Although she didn’t think money was going to be a motive in this case, every avenue had to be checked.

‘Boss,’ Janine grunted, silently congratulating herself on remaining single and unencumbered. And not living in a dump like this. She couldn’t understand why her boss was still living on a narrowboat when she could have lived in a house, but at least the Mollern was better than here. This place gave her the willies.

‘This must be his room,’ Hillary said, opening a door, only to find a cramped bathroom instead. There was no bath, only a narrow shower cubicle, growing a little green mould in the grouting.

Billy Davies’s room turned out to be directly opposite his sister’s, and was only a little bigger. It held a single bed squashed into one corner, and a tiny wardrobe. No drawers. She opened the wardrobe and saw several neatly folded shirts on a single shelf above the coathangers. The Davies might be strapped for cash, but the boy had had clean clothes to wear.

On the walls were photographs – lots and lots of photographs. They surprised Hillary, who’d expected football posters, or girl bands. Then she remembered that George Davies had said his son’s hobby had been photography, and decided to take a closer look.

‘Let’s have a full inventory,’ she said to Janine, who sighed and rolled her eyes, but began to work. As she moved around, carefully cataloguing and documenting, Hillary gazed around her, trying to get a feel for the life their victim had led here. The woodchip in this room had been painted a pale aqua, the bare floorboards underneath disrupted by a single dark green mat, placed beside the bed. So the boy wouldn’t have cold floorboards to stand on in the winter? There was no sign of a radiator in this room. She hadn’t seen any in the other rooms either. Somehow, this small example of the human desire for comfort made her throat clog and
she walked quickly to the window and gazed out. This side, the bungalow overlooked a field of barley; farmland right up to the narrow privet hedge that bordered the property.

Slowly, Hillary circumnavigated the walls, looking at the photographs. The boy had been good. He’d captured landscapes in both black and white and in colour, and in all seasons. Some shots of farm machinery, obviously abandoned and growing through with weeds. A few urban shots. Shots of what could only be his school, a big, faceless comprehensive by the look of it. And here and there framed pieces of paper. Reading them, she realized they were all prizes for photography – local papers, local galleries. Nothing big, but obviously a source of pride.

Why had somebody killed a fifteen-year-old schoolboy from an impoverished family, with a love of photography and the desire to skive off school now and then? It didn’t make sense.

‘Boss,’ Janine said, nodding to a small item on the bedside table. Hillary looked at it and nodded. It was a small digital camera.

‘We got him that for last Christmas,’ George Davies said from the doorway, making them both jump. ‘We saved up all year to get it for him, because it was what he wanted most in the world. We told him if he had that, he couldn’t have anything else. Not another single present. But that’s what he wanted, so that’s what he got. Our Ceel, now, she likes lots of presents to open, so we buy her colouring books and paints, stuffed toys, you know. But Billy was right chuffed with that.’