An Accidental Shroud (7 page)

Joss, unable to wind down either, was smoking in bed, his thoughts jumping back to that September evening when Cassie had called him into the garden to eat.

It came to him in a series of images, sharp and clear: the scruffy old table with the wonky leg which stood under the three arthritic old apple trees. Its grey weathered graininess and the stains of countless bird-droppings. The empty plates on the table, cleared of the illicit Chicken Chasseur. And the wine bottle, Naomi's glass. Cassie, lying on her stomach in the grass, her chin propped up on her hand, her eyes black and shining, exhilarated by the Wagnerian
Sturm und Drang
issuing from her radio. The end of a sweltering day and the dusk giving the garden an illusion of tranquillity. The scent of apples and, barely visible in the dusk, some woody Michaelmas daisies, bleached of colour by neglected old age and the half-light, reflecting the white blur of Naomi's face as she leaned over to pick up her glass.

He'd seen that she was worried about something, or as worried as Naomi ever could be, and that in itself gave significance to the moment. It couldn't have been the bills which were piling up, for she simply tossed them aside, nor the repairs the house needed – she knew all about these things, and that retribution was only a step away, but let them slide off her consciousness like water off a duck's back. He knew this was something a good deal more fundamental.

A few minutes before, Cassie had been clearing windfalls to make a space to lie on the grass, examining the apples for worms or wasps and putting the best to one side, suggesting, without much hope, that they could be made into a pie. Apple pies, unknown in Greece, were just another part of the British way of life that Cassie had embraced with such fervour.

She hadn't wanted to come here originally, but it was obvious that she was now in her element. She loved the English countryside, its green lushness; grey English cities, strawberries and cream, ready-sliced bread for toast, and even the soft English rain. This year, there had actually been sun. She was well on the way to becoming a born-again Anglophile.

Now, at the mention of apple pies, Naomi was rolling her eyes as if she'd never heard of such a thing. 'What ideas you do get! You pick them up and make one if you want one so much.'

'All right, I will!'

Naomi laughed and Joss had been furious with her. He lounged back in one of the old-fashioned deck chairs they'd found in the outhouse and put his feet up on the table, to annoy her. She didn't even notice.

Cassie glared at Naomi, too, and turned the Valkyries off mid-ride, with a snap that nearly broke the switch. She was strong willed and quick to anger, and she could have no idea how to set about making apple pies, but he knew she'd find out. She had a tenacity he envied. If she was determined to do something, she'd do it, come hell or high water. He and Cassie, separated by eight years, had come from the same mould, but her anger was quick and violent, whereas his was a slow burn.

As if what he'd been thinking about inside the house had transmitted itself to her, Naomi, her tongue loosened with alcohol, had unexpectedly broached the subject of his working for Jake Wilding. 'I wish you two weren't so involved with the Wildings, with Jake and Matthew.' She watched Cassie under her eyelids.

'Why? Does it matter?' Joss had asked, lazily, trying not to let her know that she had the whole of his attention. She had Cassie's too, he could tell from her sudden tense stillness. Naomi took a deep breath and then in a rush, she told him it mattered very much, because she had once not only known Jake Wilding, she had been married to him.

'Right,' he said, draining his wine.

There was silence. 'You knew,' she said. 'Who told you?'

'I've known since I was fifteen.' He watched for her reaction as he told her about opening that letter from England.

'Joss!' She wasn't shocked, hardly surprised; amused, in fact, a small smile touching the corners of her mouth. 'Opening my letters! That was never one of your most endearing traits. You were bound to find out something disagreeable sooner or later.'

He'd allowed the silence to lengthen, and felt rage tightening his skull. She'd known. She, his mother, had known all along what he was doing and had never tried to stop him. Both he and Cassie had opened their mother's mail since they could first read, just as they'd helped themselves to money from her purse, or from odd amounts left lying around, by her or anyone else. They'd become adept at steaming envelopes open and sealing them up again un-noticeably, enough to fool Naomi, at any rate, though it usually wasn't worth the effort they put into it. Mothers were supposed to stop you doing things like that – yet she'd known and never even tried to show him that it was an activity that was to say the least socially undesirable. She'd let him carry on doing it, simply because she was too lazy, or too uncaring, to stop it. She'd probably known about the pilferings from her purse, too. Sometimes he felt like killing his mother.

'Is it so "disagreeable" that I'm Jake Wilding's son, then?' he'd asked, when he could speak. He tried to read her face, moon-pale in the dusk, but he was too far away to see her expression. 'He talked about me in the letter – the boy, he called me. Didn't he even know my name?' He couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice and he heard her catch her breath.

By this time, Naomi had drunk most of the wine. She poured the dregs into her glass. A train came out of the tunnel and thundered past. The tree branches bent and several more apples fell to join the others on the grass. The fence above the embankment swayed, the glasses and bottle rattled on the table. 'I hate this house,' she said.

'Never mind the house, it serves its purpose. What about my question?'

Ignoring him, she went on in a dreamy voice, 'My grandfather was a stationmaster, that was how he came to live here. Later, my father bought the house, and my mother kept it, even after she remarried.'

'Will you answer me? I want to
know.
'

'What you both should know,' she said, 'is that the boy Jake referred to in that letter was Matthew. Matthew is my son.'

Whether you believed Naomi or not was largely a function of how young, or how credulous you were. As a child, he'd believed her stories implicitly, until he'd learned scepticism. But that hot September night, after the first initial shock, he'd had no difficulty whatsoever in believing what she said as, word by shattering word, she proceeded to demolish all his previously conceived ideas.

When she'd finished and he was at last able to breathe again, he'd met Cassie's eyes. The tension that was always there between them sparked like two bare wires meeting. They had understood each other perfectly.

On the morning after the storm, George Fontenoy awoke to an awareness of calamity, to an undefined feeling of trouble. Specifically, that something was wrong about the light filtering through the curtains. He could hear rain still lashing down as he got out of bed, walked stiffly to the window and drew the curtains on to a scene of carnage.

The old cedar of Lebanon had finally succumbed. It lay across the length of the garden, just missing the house but almost obliterating everything else. It had, after all, been a mighty tree, nearly two hundred feet high and with a spread of fifty feet. The robinia had gone down with it, and the old magnolia, and it had flattened the massive spread of rhododendrons and the laurel hedge separating the garden from its neighbour. The difference was astonishing. The abundance of light, the excess of space created a new world. A double-decker bus cruised surrealistically past in the previously hidden road behind the garden wall. On the top deck people were staring and pointing out the fallen tree to each other. The cedar had been a well-loved landmark in Lavenstock, so much so that when workmen had arrived to lop overhanging branches which were said to be obscuring road signs, an immediate outcry had prevented them. Instead, it was the road signs which were moved.

The tree was known to have been at least two hundred years old, as old as the house itself, at a guess. George had climbed it as a boy, gathered its fragrant cones for winter fires and to gild for Christmas decorations; his mother had wheeled a trolley out for tea beneath its spreading branches on summer afternoons. As a baby, he'd slept in his pram under its shade and, in their turn, his children. His wife, Margaret, had set up her easel and painted the house from there.

Lightning was not supposed to strike in the same place twice but the cedar had been struck three times to his certain knowledge, each time damaging it and weakening its structure further. The last attack had been in the previous year, when one of its three massive limbs had been lost and the lightning had corkscrewed down the trunk, through the roots and into the earth, leaving great red weals in its bark which had wept for weeks.

He too wept a little now, unashamedly, mourning the cedar and many other things besides, then braced himself to face the day. But the calamitous death of the tree wasn't, by a very long chalk, the worst of it. There would be more to weep over before long.

The two detectives stood in the cordoned-off alley in the pouring rain, she with her raincoat collar pulled up and a sou'wester jammed over her hair, he towering over her with the hood of his waterproof well down over his long, lugubrious face. The area had been taped off, a yellow tent covered the place where the body had lain, a police constable stood on guard to ward off the curious, though there was nothing to be seen.

It wasn't unusual for the police to make a pick-up in Nailers' Yard. Drunk, drugged or homeless – occasionally dead. But it was unheard of, shocking and somehow faintly reprehensible for a man like that to have been found there in the small hours of a wild night, bleeding to death in a dirty puddle among the overturned dustbins and other debris that had been whirled into the cul-de-sac on Force 9 gusts. He'd been knifed and was in a bad way and, though he had immediately been taken to the County Hospital, he'd died before he could be put into intensive care.

When one of the constables on patrol, diving for cover into the Rose's doorway, had literally stumbled over him, the alley had been mysteriously free of any of its regulars, the usual shapeless bundles huddled into cardboard boxes. The storm could have accounted for it. Be that as it may, anyone who might have witnessed the deed had long since departed elsewhere.

There was nothing to identify the body. His wallet had disappeared along with his attacker, but a sharp-eyed nurse at the hospital had recognized him as he was later being prepared for the mortuary. He was Nigel Fontenoy, owner of Cedar House Antiques. Locally well-known, in his midforties, unmarried, said to be a fastidious and cultured man.

'So what was he doing in Nailers' Yard?' Abigail Moon asked, a rhetorical question because the end of the passage had long been bricked up. There was wasteland beyond, but the yard itself now led nowhere except to the side entrance of the Rose.

Carmody raised a cynical eyebrow. Fontenoy wouldn't have been the first to find his way to the side door and up to the private rooms, though he might well have been the first to come out alone.

'Nobody's admitting to seeing him in there if he was. Cellini says there was only himself and two of his girls upstairs all last night. He shut early because of the weather. Says he doesn't know Fontenoy but he would say that, wouldn't he? Avoiding trouble's second nature to our Sal.' He swiped water from the end of his nose. 'Bloody rain.'

The rain had been the killer's biggest ally. Getting the injured man to hospital had been a first priority; by the time the Scenes of Crime team had arrived, traces of any struggle that might have taken place had been obliterated. It was still raining in a steady downpour, though the gale had blown itself out, leaving the town to lick its wounds and assess the damage. Carmody looked without enthusiasm at the mess of stinking dustbin contents, fish and chip papers, burger boxes and worse, blown into a drift against the end wall, all of which would have to be meticulously picked over by the luckless search team.

Nailers' Yard, older than the nightclub it flanked by several hundred years, had seen plenty of violence in its time. An inn had once occupied the place where the Rose now stood, having bequeathed to the club only its name. Iron nails had once been forged in the nail shops behind the hovels at the end of the yard where the nailers had lived. A rough, drunken lot they'd been, fighting drunk by Saturday night, spoiling for a punch-up with the local colliers, who were drunk all the time. There were no nailers now, no colliers, but nothing else much had changed in three or four hundred years. Yet the past couldn't be ignored. The man who'd been stabbed had had a past, which may have contributed towards his death.

Abigail said, 'The weapon?'

'No sight of it yet. Doubt if there will be. The river's too handy.'

'Organize a search for it, Ted, all the same.'

The side door of the Rose opened and they watched Cellini approach: a short, stout individual whose sallow complexion was not appreciably improved by the light filtering through a green and yellow striped golf umbrella.

'You in charge here?' he demanded of Carmody in a broad Brummie accent. There was little left of Salvatore Cellini's Italian origins now except his name, his curly black hair and his big, dark, oh-so-innocent eyes.

'No, Inspector Moon here is,' Carmody said as Abigail held out her hand. 'I'm Sergeant Carmody.'

The nightclub owner looked taken aback. 'Where's Mayo, then? Job of this sort not important enough for him?'

'Never mind that. And you mind your Ps and Qs, Sal. Detective Chief Inspector Mayo to you,' Carmody answered. 'And we're asking the questions, so likewise.'

It made a change from domestic violence, thought Abigail. Which was what had been occupying her latterly, until her recent promotion. A highly stressful job, involving the sordid and messy results of mostly marital discord, but it was better than one of the safe backroom jobs all too often allocated to women. Or so she'd imagined, until picking up the pieces of shattered lives, and not always being able to put them together again, had somewhat altered her ideas.