Angel of Death (7 page)

‘You’re sure of that? Have you seen them together? You’ve met him?’

‘Once or twice he come here to pick her up. Not my type, mind. Oh, looks good, got some great clothes – but I like older men, men with a bit of character.’ She fluttered her lashes in Neil’s direction but he was not flattered. He wasn’t even middle-aged yet – what did she mean, older men? ‘But he’s loaded, his dad runs some business, computers, Tracy said, and Sean’s his only kid.’

‘Was it Sean she was meeting for lunch?’

‘Yeah, or why would she say he’d give her a few quid when she asked him? Said he owed her. But she never come back and I never got my money, did I?’

‘What did she mean, he owed her?’

‘How the hell do I know? Tracy said he was going to have to pay for his fun, whatever that meant. She’s nice enough, but she can be a tough little cow. Needs to be, like all of us. The world’s always trying to get us, we have to be tough to survive.’

‘What about her family? Have you contacted them?’

‘She ain’t got a family. There’s her dad, but he’s in a home you can’t get any sense out of him, Tracy says. He doesn’t know who he is, let alone who you are. Nobody’s at home, OK?’

‘And her mother?’

‘Died of cancer while we was at school. Real cut up, Tracy was. Loved her mum. I guess that toughened her up. The social took her away from her dad; he tried it on with her. He was losing it, even then.’

‘Have you got a photo of Tracy? What’s her full name?’

‘There’s this picture of her and me at Brighton a month ago, that suit you?’

They looked very similar, much the same height and make-up, with dyed blonde hair and bright, knowing, eyes. They wore the same sort of clothes, too. Tracy was wearing a lacy top through which you could catch glimpses of her smooth, pale skin; a straw hat with the words Kiss Me Quick printed around a red satin ribbon.

The lacy blouse gave her sexiness; the cheap hat made her look like a schoolgirl; very young and pathetic, perhaps because, mused Neil, the hindsight of suspecting she was dead altered the way you thought of her.

‘Her name’s Tracy Morgan, she said her family came from Wales,’ said Delphine. ‘I’ve known her since school. We both lived around here all our lives.’

He glanced out of the window at the ugly greyness of the streets. A life lived here must be depressing.

‘Anything else you can tell me about her, or the young man she was seeing?’

‘Yeah. She was too good for him, and you can quote me. She was OK, was Tracy. D’you think something’s happened to her? Or has she just gone off with her bloke?’

‘At the moment, I’ve no idea.’

The next time Miranda woke up she was in bed in a quiet, softly lit hospital ward. There was a bed on either side of her, both occupied, the women in them sleeping, the bedcovers pulled up to their necks. There were another three occupied beds across an expanse of polished wooden flooring. The windows had beige blinds drawn down over them. It was night, she realised. Somewhere somebody coughed. Quiet, steady footsteps came from outside.

She had spent so much time in hospital three years ago that this was all very familiar. Almost comforting. In here, she felt safe.

The pain she had been in had diminished, ebbed away. She felt calm and heavy. Miranda knew what that meant. They had drugged her. She recognised this lethargic state, the wooliness inside her head. She was unworried, unafraid, because she was tranquillised.

She carefully moved to see what injuries she had. Her right leg was in plaster, her right arm was bandaged, and there were bandages on her head.

The right must have been the side of her body that was hit by the car. Her left side seemed quite undamaged. She could move her left arm and leg freely, without pain, tentatively fingering the bandages on the other side of her body, investigating what had happened to her.

She wasn’t dead, she wasn’t even dying, she realised. The angel of death had missed again.

At least this time she had not woken up to find him in the room with her, waiting for her to die.

A nurse came over to her bed, smiling brightly, whispered, ‘Back with us again? That’s great. How do you feel?’

‘I’ll live,’ she said, and laughed, although it wasn’t really funny.

‘Well, you sound cheerful! That’s good. My name’s Sally, Nurse Embry. Can you tell me your name? Then we can get in touch with your relatives or friends, or whoever you want us to ring.’

‘I’m Miranda Grey. You’d better tell my mother, but don’t ring her until morning, I don’t want her woken up in the middle of the night and scared to death.’

The nurse scribbled on the chart hanging from the end of her bed. Miranda watched her, noticing her pallor and deep-set eyes. She looked tired, and no wonder, working all night. Miranda would have hated the job, could never have coped with the long hours or low pay, not to mention the sheer horror of what nurses had to cope with, broken bodies, blood, death.

‘We’ll need your mother’s telephone number and address.’

Miranda whispered them and the nurse wrote them down with long, elegant fingers.

‘Dorset? That’s a long way off. Is that where you grew up?’

‘No, she moved there when she retired.’

Mum had decided, in Miranda’s last year at school, to sell their London home and move out to the country. She looked for somewhere special for months without success. At last she fell in love with, and bought, a beautiful, thatched cottage in a village set way off the beaten track within miles of the sea at Lyme Regis. There were only two small, rather poky bedrooms, a huge bathroom, a big, country kitchen, a cosy sitting room. It was ideally a house for one or two people at most.

But the garden was what made Fern Cottage a wonderful home. Her mother spent hours in it, every day – pruning, weeding, mowing the lawn, deadheading roses in the busy cottage garden. Warm, pink, climbing roses sprawled across the front of the cottage every summer, twining around golden honeysuckle whose scent on summer evenings was paradisal.

When she had time, her mother loved to sit out there as long as the light lasted, reading or doing embroidery, under the tiny porch which framed the front door.

But she was always very busy. In fact, her social life was positively hectic. Far more crowded than Miranda’s and certainly more crowded than her life in London had been. Country people seemed to take more trouble over their social lives. There were fetes in summer, at the church hall, jumble sales every month or so, flower shows, film shows, gymkhanas and pet shows. Every Saturday, throughout the year, there was a dance at the village hall – country dancing, old time dancing, square dancing, line dancing. Something different every week. The band was the same and not wonderful; they all lived locally and had other jobs but lived for Saturday nights. They had a following locally, people thought a lot of them. When you didn’t have much entertainment, except TV or radio, you enjoyed anything that came along.

Her blonde hair might have turned silvery but Dorothy still had sex appeal although she didn’t work at it. It was simply something she had been born with; men reacted to it on sight, picked up the vibes she gave out, the dazzling come-hither of her smile, the glint in her eye, the sheer liveliness of the way she talked and moved and laughed. Watching men’s faces as they talked to her mother, Miranda could see that to them she seemed almost to glitter like the star on top of a Christmas tree. Men queued up to take her out and she enjoyed their company, but although she kept getting marriage proposals she always turned them down.

‘I don’t fancy being married, again, and tied down to one man. I’m having too much fun,’ she once said. ‘I like them all, but there isn’t one of them I could be serious about. I just want a partner to go dancing with, have dinner with – and I like to ring the changes. Once you really know them, there’s nothing new to learn and it gets tedious.’

‘You’re a wicked woman,’ Miranda had said, laughing. ‘As you get older, you’ll need companionship, somebody else around night and day. Surely?’

‘Maybe, but I haven’t got to that stage yet. You won’t have realised it, yet, Miranda, but life is one stage after another. When you’re young you want to have fun, then you start yearning to get married, to have babies, all that. The biological clock starts ticking. I remember feeling that way. Been there, got the t-shirt. Now I’m on another level. I’ve been through that stage and come out the other side. I’ve discovered freedom and being responsible for yourself. I love running my own life. I don’t want a man around full time. They’re bossy. They can’t help it. It’s the testosterone. They always want to run things, tell people what to do. They feel that that’s their role in life. Well, I won’t put up with it. At the moment I’m free to make my own decisions, and I want to go on doing so. I don’t want some man around all the time, trying to run my life, giving me orders, telling me what I can and cannot do.’

Miranda had stared at her, absorbing what she said, and her mother had grinned teasingly. She still had all her own teeth, small, neat, whitish, just as she had the same trim, healthy figure she had had all Miranda’s life. Dorothy took care of herself; ate a lot of fruit and vegetables, drank the odd glass of wine, walked a lot, swam, was always busy working either in her small house, or out in the garden.

‘Am I right, or am I wrong?’ Mum had demanded.

‘It’s your life,’ Miranda had shrugged. ‘How do I know if you’re right or wrong?’

‘Oh, I’m right. To paraphrase Jean Jacques Rousseau, women are born free and everywhere they are in chains. Even worse, they seem to like it that way. Well, not me. I’ve been married. I don’t want to put the chains back on again.’

‘But you loved Dad, didn’t you? I don’t remember him as some sort of tyrant.’

‘No, of course not, but I was still a prisoner, of you as much as your dad. Duty is the worst prison of them all, don’t forget that. When you have a husband and children, you’re never free. But now I can get up when I like, go to bed when I like, do what I like.’

‘What are you smiling at?’ Nurse Embry asked as she tidied the coverlet on the bed.

‘Something my mother once said to me.’

‘She lives alone? Your dad . . .’

‘Died. You haven’t told me yet exactly what my injuries are.’

‘Your right ankle is broken, that’s why it’s in plaster. That will take a while to heal, I’m afraid. You’ve strained your right wrist, that must have been when you fell, you would have put your hand out to stop yourself. You’ve got superficial cuts and bruises to your head, hence the bandages – but you haven’t got concussion or any serious injury.’

Frowning, Miranda said, ‘Well, that doesn’t sound too bad – I thought it might be worse.’

‘You sound almost disappointed!’ Nurse Embry grinned at her. ‘It’s bad enough, surely!’

Miranda smiled back at her. ‘I’m relieved, believe me!’

A woman in a bed on the other side of the ward raised her head and called, ‘Nurse . . . nurse . . . I feel sick!’

Nurse Embry hurried over there. Miranda closed her eyes and drifted away into a dream about the Dorset garden; the clove-like scent of old-fashioned, frilly petalled pinks, a thrush picking up a snail and smashing it down on the rockery, the sound of the wind in the lime tree, and her mother wandering about clipping and weeding.

At lunchtime next day she was eating a small chicken salad when a man walked up to her bed, drew up a chair and sat down. The other women in the ward watched curiously. One of them bridled and said pointedly, ‘This isn’t visiting time, you know.’

The man ignored the comment. One of the nurses came into the ward and the other patients all watched avidly as she went over to Miranda’s bed, expecting the visitor to be turned out. Instead the nurse drew the curtains around Miranda’s bed and murmured, ‘Now, I told you, you can only stay for a little while.’

Miranda stared at the visitor who smiled.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘You remember me, don’t you? Sergeant Maddrell, Neil Maddrell. I interviewed you a couple of days ago.’

She flinched back against her pillows, reminded sharply of what she only wanted to forget. She had barely taken in what he looked like, but now she realised she did remember him. What was he doing here? Had he come to give her another chilly warning about wasting police time?

‘I’m sorry to hear about your accident. I’ve talked to your doctor and heard about your injuries. I’m afraid you’ll be stuck in bed for a while. That will be boring for you, but at least you’re being well looked after and you can have a good rest in here. You look as if you need one.’

His face was angular, a sculptured mask, the skin pulled tight over the bones and framed in straight, dark hair. His eyes were sharp and intelligent, bright hazel. He wasn’t good-looking, yet he was attractive, she liked looking at him. Perhaps it was that calm, cool expression he always wore? You felt you could trust him. She should have remembered him. He had a memorable face.

‘How did it happen?’ he asked her.

Nervously she whispered, ‘I don’t remember much, just that I was crossing a road when a car hit me.’

She remembered his quiet, level voice very well, she found; the patient technique with which he questioned, water dropping on a stone, repeating every query until he was convinced he had got a final answer. He took her through her accident now in the same way.

‘Did you notice the make of car?’

‘No; just that it was black.’

‘Had you ever seen the car before?’

‘Not that I remember.’ She was puzzled by the question – why should she have seen the car before? What was he implying? Filaments of doubt began twining through her mind. Why was he here, anyway? Why would a detective follow up a perfectly ordinary traffic accident? Surely they didn’t suspect her of inventing it?

‘Did you see anything of the driver?’

She shook her head. ‘It all happened too fast.’ Defiantly, angrily, she said, ‘There were plenty of people around. I’m not inventing it.’

He considered her soberly, his head on one side, then crisply told her, ‘I know you’re not. We have statements from a number of people who saw it happen, including an eye witness who says the car deliberately swerved towards you after you had moved out of its path.’