Bold Counsel (The Trials of Sarah Newby) (27 page)

The shaft went home. ‘Look, Sarah, I didn’t come here to quarrel ...’

‘Who’s quarrelling? I just asked ...’

‘Yes, well it’s my business, not yours. They need a new house, really. This one’s only rented, as I told you, and it’s ... in a poor state.’

‘Oh. So I should sell quickly, you mean? Before March - that would suit you, would it? And Sonya.’

‘If you did, there’s be less pain for everyone. We could both make a new start.’

‘Really.’ Rage seethed inside her, but she held it down. ‘I hear you phoned Emily.’

He nodded. ‘She took it hard, I’m afraid. Understandable, of course. But I think, by the end, she saw my point of view.’

‘Which is what, exactly?’

‘You know, Sarah. What I told you before. We had twenty good years, but we’ve grown apart. We’re different people now than we were before.’

He’s right about that, Sarah thought bitterly. It’s not just the clothes and the cigarette - something’s changed in his mind. It must have been there before, growing like a cancer in the darkness behind his skull - but now it’s burst into bloom and sent its spores through his whole brain. This isn’t the man I married. It isn’t even someone I want to be married to any more.

I loved him once. We shared half of our lives together. And this is how it ends. Not with a whimper, with scorn. Without finishing her coffee, she got to her feet.

‘Goodbye, Bob.’ She held out her hand, then changed her mind and took it back. ‘I’ll let you know about the house as soon as I can.’

She walked out of the café alone.

She took the train back to York and strode into the first estate agent’s she saw. Yes, he could value the house next day, he said. On reflection she arranged for a second to come the day after. That’s what Michael would have done, she realised. Some of Saturday’s conversation came back to her - tales of wildly different estimates from estate agents, builders, and plumbers. It was the sort of decision she’d once left to Bob; now she’d have to manage these things on her own.

Entering the house she looked round, and thought how untidy it was. The washing up wasn’t done, the bin in the kitchen was full, there was a pile of clothes waiting to be ironed. There were lines of fluff on the treads of the stair carpet, a litter of make-up and moisturisers by the bathroom basin, a smear of lipstick on the mirror, and limescale on the shower screen. Well, she’d never been much good at housework. She normally had cleaners in to take care of it, but there’d been a problem at the agency - her regular cleaners had left, two others had been ill. So she’d told them not to worry, she could manage on her own for a while. After all there was only her.

But clearly she couldn’t manage as well as she thought. Not at present, anyway. Drearily, she put on an apron and set to work. She didn’t want to be embarrassed in front of the valuers. After all, a good impression might make the difference of a few thousand pounds. Yes, she thought, but not for me - half of that goes to Bob, the bastard. She jabbed viciously at the stair carpet with the vacuum cleaner. Why isn’t he here to clean his own house, if he wants to profit from it? That’s men all over. File for divorce, swan around in new clothes, turn your ex-wife into a cleaning lady.

They’re all the same, she thought, scrubbing energetically at lipstick on the bathroom mirror. She remembered how it had got there. She’d slipped on the bathroom floor while hurrying with her make-up because Michael was due in ten minutes. So excited she’d been, and why? Because a man was calling for her! I should know better.

That had been a good day, though, for much of the time. She’d enjoyed the drive, the visit to the farm development, the lunch, the new found friendship. But then there’d been that scary incident on the roof of the windmill, and awkward silences on the drive home. So he isn’t perfect either. Maybe he thinks the same about me. When they got home she’d asked Michael in for a coffee - meaning just that, coffee, no more - but he’d declined. Looking round critically at her house now, she was glad he hadn’t come in.

She’d gone to bed gloomy, her mood not enhanced by a phone call from Emily who’d just spoken to her father. Predictably, he’d put the blame on Sarah, and poor Emily, listening, had felt her loyalties torn.

‘Couldn’t you have tried harder, Mum?’ she’d asked, and Sarah, for once in her life, had been stumped for an answer. It had been the pain in her daughter’s voice, more than the injustice of the question, that had hurt the most. So Sarah had agreed to go down to Cambridge to see her next weekend, before the end of the university term. Her chance, it felt like, to make amends - for a break-up she hadn’t wanted in the first place.

She’d wept when that phone call had ended, and felt like praying and cursing both at once. Losing a husband is bad enough, she thought, but if he turns Emily away from me as well, then ... that will be just too cruel.

She finished cleaning the house and looked around. It was a family home, she realised - that’s what she’d told the estate agents. Four bedrooms, spacious living room and kitchen, nice views across fields to the river, secluded rear garden where children could safely play. Only there were no children, not any more. No family either - Simon rarely visited, didn’t like the country, Emily was starting her new life, and now Bob was gone as well. It’s not the right house for me, she thought, not any more. Maybe I really will be better off starting again.

She’d talked over some of this with Michael, when he’d phoned, earlier this week. To her relief the odd, unpredictable silences of Saturday had gone. He’d been cheerful, chatty even, and interested in all her problems. He’d invited her out on a date that Thursday - another meal, at a different restaurant he knew. She’d been unreasonably pleased - relieved to have something to look forward to. But then, on the very evening of the date, when she’d come home early to change, he’d rung to cancel.

‘I’m really sorry, but there’s been a crisis at the farm development. I’m still there now - I’ll be here all evening, I expect. I do apologise, but it’s got to be sorted. Maybe at the weekend?’

‘I’m going down to Cambridge to see Emily,’ she’d said stiffly. ‘It doesn’t matter. You do what you have to. I understand.’

‘Yes, well, all right then. I’ll be in touch.’

But something in his tone made her wonder if she’d have a long wait.

30. Body in the Hall

T
HE CALL came at ten in the morning. Jane Carter picked it up. Her face changed as she listened. She put the phone down and turned to Terry. ‘Possible suicide in Crockey Hill, sir. Shall we go?’

The house, when they came to it, was isolated. About fifty yards down a rough track on the edge of a small hamlet. It was a two storey double fronted detached house, with a small lawned garden and fields beyond that. Behind the house and to the right were woods, the trees standing bare over their dank fallen leaves. There was a circular gravel area in front of the house, on which were parked a Tesco delivery van, two marked police cars, an ambulance, and a muddy green Rover. The paramedics and the uniformed officers were clustered round the front door. When Terry and Jane went inside, they saw why.

They entered a hall with doors leading into two front rooms on either side. There was a narrow window beside the door, in front of the staircase, which was on the left. The hall continued past the staircase to the back of the house and the kitchen. The floor was paved with old red Yorkshire stone tiles, cracked in places and worn in the centre by many years of passing feet. Halfway along the corridor was a wooden dining chair lying on its side. On the tiles beside the chair, with her feet towards the kitchen, lay the naked body of a woman.

Terry stared at it, the shock, as always, draining the blood from his face and making him fight down the urge to vomit. There was no dignity in a death like this. She was a plump woman, he noticed, with brown pubic hair and a varicose vein in her left leg. Her face was dark purple and there was something tied around her neck. There was a puddle of what looked like urine around her legs, and the stink of faeces. As he stared, a cat scurried down the stairs and ran past the body into the kitchen.

‘What happened here?’ he asked.

‘Suicide, looks like, sir,’ one of the young constables said. ‘Delivery man rang the bell and when he got no answer he peered through the window and saw a leg hanging in the air, a foot above the floor.’ He indicated the driver of the Tesco van, who was sitting on a garden bench with his head in his hands, talking to a paramedic. ‘The door was locked, so he called us and we got in through a loo window at the back. The paramedics cut her down, but there was nothing they could do.’

‘Dead for several hours, I’d reckon,’ the second paramedic said. ‘The doctor will confirm that, but her limbs were already stiff.’

‘You’ve sent for the doctor, have you?’ Terry asked the young constable. However obvious it was, only a doctor could officially confirm death.

‘Yes, sir, he’s on his way.’

‘Good. Well, we’d better have a look.’ He glanced at Jane, noticing the pallor of her face and a grim determination around her jaw. ‘Come on. Let’s see the worst.’

The woman’s face was, indeed, very bad. The tongue and eyes protruded, the face was suffused with dark purple blood. Round her neck, so tight that it bit into the skin, was what looked like a patterned silk scarf. The end was frayed, as though it had been cut, and when Terry looked up he saw the other end dangling above their heads. It was fastened by a knot to the banisters halfway up the stairs. The chair lay on its side beneath the dangling scarf.

‘She must have stood on the chair, then kicked it away,’ he said hoarsely. ‘She’d be hanging with her feet off the ground.’

‘Or someone else kicked it away for her.’ Jane’s eyes, dark with horror against the pallor of her face, met his across the body. The same thought occurred to them both.
Is this it? Could Peter Barton have been here as well?

Terry nodded. ‘That’s the first thing we have to establish. Whether it’s suicide at all.’

A car drew up on the gravel outside, and the doctor, a stout man in tweed suit and brogues, lumbered in, breathing heavily after the short walk from his car. For form’s sake he felt for a pulse, but the cold wrist told a tale beyond doubt. He peered at the face and the scarf round the neck and shook his head sadly.

‘Can you give us any idea of the time of death, doctor?’ Terry asked.

The doctor felt the legs and arms, lifting them slightly to estimate rigidity. Then, wiping a smear of faeces out of the way, he lifted the pelvis to insert a thermometer into the rectum. When it came out he pursed his lips thoughtfully and looked around. ‘Well, given that it’s pretty cold in here anyway and the poor dear’s quite bare, I would suggest somewhere between ten and twelve hours. Might be longer.’

‘So she was hanging here all night until the delivery man found her,’ Jane said thoughtfully. ‘Poor woman. What a dreadful way to go.’

‘It was that Tesco driver who found her, was it?’ the doctor asked, getting to his feet and stepping carefully round the puddle of urine. ‘I thought he looked a bit wobbly when I came in. I’ll check him over before I go.’

‘We’d better get a statement from him too, Jane, when he’s fit,’ Terry said. ‘You’ll arrange a PM, will you, doc?’

As Jane and the doctor went out, Terry called up a SOCO team on his mobile. Then he stood for a moment, alone in the hall, thinking. Just himself and the soiled, pathetic body at his feet.
Who are you, lady
, he asked her silently.
What happened here last night? What would you tell me if you could speak?

He turned his head slightly and was startled by the sight of his own reflection in a mirror on a wall facing the staircase. He looked at himself - a tall, thin man in a crumpled double breasted suit, with a puzzled frown on his face. Behind his head to the left, he saw the frayed end of the scarf, swaying slightly where he must have brushed it as he stood up. A second shock came to him, a refinement of the horror of finding the body. She didn’t just hang there, he realised,
she could see herself hanging in the mirror!

Jane came back into the hall, stepping carefully around the body. As she did so the cat came out of the kitchen and rubbed itself against Terry’s legs, miaowing hopefully.

‘I’ve spoken to the driver. He arrived here shortly after nine with a delivery of groceries, he said. The uniforms will take him in for a statement after the quack’s given him the okay.’

‘Good.’ Terry showed her the mirror. ‘What d’you make of this?’

Jane studied it, awestruck as the implications sank in. ‘She watched herself die?’

‘Yes. She must have done. Couldn’t avoid it unless she closed her eyes, and ...’

‘How long do you think it would take?’

‘What, hanging like that?’ Terry glanced at the body and shuddered. ‘Not an easy death, no way. No fall to break her neck. She was strangled, suffocated. Could have been three, four minutes even, before she lost consciousness.’

‘And all that time fighting for breath?’ Jane said slowly. ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? Even if you did it to yourself you might have second thoughts.’ The cat got under her feet and she shooed it into the kitchen.

Terry bent down, to examine the woman’s throat. ‘No claw marks, that I can see.’

‘What?’ Jane looked uncomprehending, appalled. Terry realised she’d misunderstood.

‘Not the cat. I’m talking about her own claws - fingernails. If she’d had second thoughts or just panicked as anyone would if they couldn’t breathe, then what would you do? You’d try to tear this thing away from your throat, and probably draw blood in the process. But there’s no sign of that here.’

‘Maybe she did want to die, then,’ Jane said.

‘Her body didn’t,’ Terry said. ‘She was scared shitless. Quite literally.’

‘But that’s just a physical reaction.’

‘Exactly. That’s my point, sergeant, don’t you see? Even if she wanted to kill herself she couldn’t control these basic bodily reactions brought on by the terror of dying. So how come her hands didn’t react in the same way and try to tear herself free?’