Embroidering Shrouds (6 page)

She opened with a deliberately neutral phrase. ‘We've come about your sister, Mr Patterson.'

He wasn't going to help her. ‘I know. You've already said. Which one? I've two, you know.'

‘The one who lives...' The name stuck in her throat.

Not in his. ‘Aye. Spite Hall. Well named, isn't it?'

She tried again. ‘Did you notice lots of cars coming and going this morning?'

‘Can't say that I have. I've had no milk delivered, that I do know.'

‘I suppose Mr Tylman is your milkman too.' Patterson made as though to stand up. ‘If you've come for domestic detail I've no time to waste.'

‘No. No, Mr Patterson. The milkman, Mr Tylman, he found Monday's milk still on your sister's doorstep.' She was trying to ease this frail old man into gradual realization, but he seemed determined to force her hand.

‘They've not got the police in over that – undrunk milk.'

‘No, Mr Patterson.'

‘Then spit it out, young lady. What
have
you come about?' There was a touch of impatience now only slightly tempered by the gentle humour.

‘He found your sister. I'm sorry, Mr Patterson. She's dead.'

A spark of malice hardened Patterson's face. ‘So,' he said, ‘I've outlived her. She's dead.'

‘Not through natural causes.' Joanna leaned forward. ‘Your sister', she said, ‘was battered to death. I'm sorry.'

Patterson looked visibly shocked. ‘What? Nan? You're trying to tell me someone's killed
Nan?
I don't believe you.'

‘I'm so sorry,' Joanna said again.

Nan's brother seemed to have shrunk in seconds; the chair suddenly dwarfed the wizened form.

“Tell me about your sister Nan, Mr Patterson.'

For a minute she wondered whether the old man had heard her. He gave no sign but sat and stared into space. As Joanna was about to repeat the question he uttered just one word. ‘Nan.' Then, after a pause of a few seconds he asked, ‘When did it happen?'

‘Sunday night – Monday morning – early. You didn't hear anything?' Joanna tried again. ‘When did you last see her?'

Patterson still seemed burrowed in his own thoughts. ‘Last see Nan,' he mused. ‘I can't say.'

‘Over the weekend?'

‘No.'

‘Last week?'

Patterson gave a wry smile. ‘Last week?' he said. ‘Last year more like.' His gaze slid away, towards the door, in the direction of Spite Hall. ‘Our paths didn't cross.'

Joanna had a sudden vision of two old people, brother and sister, hobbling about their business, their front doors almost opening into each other's homes. Deliberately avoiding one another.

Patterson stood up with difficulty. ‘Come with me,' he said. ‘Just come and look. You'll understand then.'

Slowly he led the way back through the hall to open one of the other doors leading to a room at the front of the house. The moment he pushed the door open Joanna was aware of stale, musty air, a room that had not been opened for months, years even. The curtains were drawn tight shut; not a chink of light peeped through. When the door was closed the room was in total darkness. Patterson moved towards the window and drew back the curtains using a long pull cord. ‘Look,' he ordered. ‘Just look.'

The window was one of the semi-circular bays that looked so authentic from the outside. But from here the entire vista seemed filled with grey concrete. Though Spite Hall had been built at a lower level the window overlooked part wall, part flat roof; now pooled with rain. It was as bleak and depressing a view as Joanna had ever seen. The ruination was absolute. No wonder the room was never used.

‘This is the south of the house,' Patterson muttered. ‘Any sun would get lost on its way passing that.' His face changed as he gazed through the window. It twisted, seeming to gain an energetic malevolence of its own. ‘I used to think you could adjust to anything,' he said. ‘I was wrong; quite wrong. I tried. For years I tried, but I just couldn't. She won – in the end. She beat me.' Without another word he drew the curtains back and the room was again in total darkness. But Spite Hall still managed to intrude.

As he closed the door behind them he again muttered. ‘So Nancy's dead is she?' And all three of them must surely have been thinking the same thing: that with Nancy dead Spite Hall could be pulled down.

So the Georgian house could be restored to its dignity, its isolation, and its view. But looking at the bent, tired old man Joanna felt his release had come too late; he lacked the energy, the strength, the health to do anything but sit and wait for his own death in this crumbling mansion.

And although Joanna believed it could have no bearing on his sister's murder she was compelled to ask it. ‘How did all this happen?'

‘My father,' Patterson said simply. ‘He had a wicked sense of humour. Left me the house, Nan the land.'

‘But surely …'

‘You'd have to understand my dad. He had a streak of...' Patterson fumbled for the word, failed to find it. ‘Well, put it like this, Inspector, he liked to put the cat among the pigeons and watch the feathers fly. Only this time, of course, he couldn't because he was dead. But I reckon while he was dying he must have been chuckling, having a good belly laugh. He knew how Nan felt about this place.' Involuntarily Joanna glanced around her, at the high-ceilinged hall, at the dirt, the decay. The neglect.

Patterson was watching her. ‘It weren't always like this,' he said. ‘Fifty year ago it were grand, just grand. As a child Nan would go strutting around these very rooms playing the part of the great lady. Much good it did her, much good. She wanted to live here more than anything in the world, and all I ever cared about was the land to farm. So what does the old devil do? He leaves me the house and her the land with the condition I was not to sell the place in my lifetime or it reverted to her, and she couldn't sell the land either; she had to take up residence on some portion of it else I got it.' He looked up at the ceiling. Joanna could see cobwebs. She had the feeling he could see something quite different: the old man laughing down at him.

Patterson's eyes returned to them both. ‘He knew I was condemned to stay here. That I couldn't move.'

And so the seeds had been sown, the stage set carefully by old Mr Patterson. To give his children contention for their entire lives Spite Hall had been built close to the house Nan Lawrence felt she'd been cheated out of. She must have inherited some of her father's malicious characteristics to have built it so intrusively near.

‘Couldn't you have come to some agreement? Let her live here, with you, and allow you to manage the land?'

‘You didn't know Nan,' Patterson said. ‘There was not a bone in her body that weren't contentious. Her and my wife.' Patterson's face cracked into a smile, ‘like crossed swords they were.'

‘And Nan? She was married?'

‘David. He was a local farmer. Broke by the war. Died soon after. A wreck of a man before he was thirty.'

‘Children?'

‘Me or her?'

‘Both of you.'

‘I got the one son,' Patterson said grudgingly. ‘Nan never had any. She was married in the war and when David came home, well, let's just say he weren't up to it.'

‘And your grandson? The one who lives here. How old is he?'

‘Nineteen.'

Both Mike and Joanna were thinking the same thoughts; the attacks against the widows, the robbery, the violence, the escalation bore the marks of youthful, possibly drug-related crime. They would find it interesting to meet Arnold Patterson's grandson.

Patterson turned to stare at Joanna and she felt embarrassed. He had read her thoughts, all of them. ‘My grandson's name is Christian. He has the top floor.'

‘Permanently?'

‘Aye. His mother turned him out so he moved in here. He'll be upset when he hears about Nan. Fond of the old girl he were. Too fond, if you ask me.' Patterson swivelled round. ‘It doesn't do to swim in vats of poison,' he said.

The statement was so sudden, so unexpected that Joanna was taken aback. She wanted to ask, had Nan Lawrence been such a malignant influence?

‘We'll need to talk to your grandson.'

‘You'll have to come back later if you want to speak to him.' Behind the weariness there was still some fight. ‘Lydia,' he said.

Korpanski eyed him. ‘Who's Lydia?'

‘My sister. My younger sister.' Patterson's face screwed into a smile. ‘She'll have a laugh about this.'

Joanna looked at Mike. What a strange, perverted family.
Have a laugh?

‘We'll inform her for you, Mr Patterson. Where does she live?'

‘Quills,' he croaked. ‘A stupid name for a stupid house. It's a wooden place, a hut, no more than a shack, near Rudyard Lake, along a track. You tell her, and you watch how she takes it. She'll laugh, I can tell you.' With difficulty he straightened his bent back. ‘Now when can we hold the funeral?'

And this was the bit Joanna hated. First of all you inform a family their relative is dead, then you tell them they can't even have the body for the funeral until the coroner releases it, when the police and the pathologist and the rest of the legal team are convinced every conceivable piece of evidence has been extracted from it. It could take weeks, months, even on rare occasions years, however sympathetic the coroner might be to the family's needs. As gently as she could she explained to Arnold Patterson that there might be some delay. To her surprise Patterson seemed to grasp the situation quite easily.

He nodded. ‘Will you be wanting me to identify her?'

It crossed Joanna's mind that contact between brother and sister had been slight, but Patterson was frail and his sister had been badly beaten. Maybe someone else should do the job, someone physically stronger. ‘We usually want a relative, someone who knew her well.'

Arnold Patterson chuckled. ‘Then you'd better have Christian; he said. ‘He's the only one who knew Nan what you might call well.'

Joanna and Mike moved towards the front door. ‘We'll come back.' It was time to leave this old man alone with his emotions, although Joanna was not at all sure what they were.

They had almost reached the front door when music began, thumping out overhead. An unmistakable jungle beat.

‘I thought you said your grandson was out?' she said sharply.

‘I didn't say that. I told you earlier he were in. I simply said you'd have to come back if you wanted to talk to him.' Arnold Patterson was sharper than he looked. ‘He just doesn't get out of bed until late, keeps different hours from us working folk. He's a student.' To Patterson it seemed an answer to everything.

Joanna's curiosity about young Christian Patterson compounded. Nan Lawrence would have opened the door to her great-nephew, welcomed him in, unsuspecting, returned to her tapestry. She moved away from the door, read Mike's dark eyes and knew he was tracking along the same lines as herself.

‘I think we'll just pop upstairs and say hello to him.'

Patterson would have liked to stop her, they could both see that. He lifted his arms up then dropped them again, in the end turning his back on them. ‘I won't come up,' he said grumpily. ‘Arthritis.'

They were guided by the music thumping throughout the house. Two flights of stairs to what must once have been servants' attic rooms. A blue-painted door ahead was closed. Joanna gave it a few hard knocks and the music abruptly stopped although the pounding beat still seemed to reverberate around the walls.

The door opened and a freckled face peered out, tousled red-gold hair tied back with a bootlace, pleasant brown eyes and an engaging grin. Considering Christian Patterson lived here alone with his grandfather, who was almost certainly confined to the first two floors, and probably hadn't heard their approach up the stairs he didn't seem in the least bit surprised to see them. ‘Hello there, I thought I heard voices. I was going to come down and investigate but I had an essay to finish.'

Joanna's eyes roved past him to the desk littered with papers, scrunched balls spotting the floor. The bed was unmade yet the room looked clean and there was a pleasant tang of spicy, men's deodorant. So far her impressions were good. When she looked back at Christian Patterson he was appraising her just as critically. They smiled at one another.

She decided then that Christian Patterson was clever, personable and by the same token someone to be wary of. But she could see quite plainly why the old woman had formed an attachment to him. He must have seemed like the very essence of youth to the lonely, childless old woman.

‘So?' Christian Patterson was watching them both enquiringly.

‘I'm Detective Inspector Piercy, Leek Police. This is Detective Sergeant Korpanski.'

‘Oh?'

There was something about the classic innocent reaction. Too classic. Too innocent. Eye contact straight, true and prolonged, wide open. It made the back of her neck prickle, as though she had touched something electrically live and she was curious.

‘You didn't notice the police cars outside this morning?'

‘Nope. As I just said, I thought I heard voices for the last half-hour or so. That's all.'

Considering the music it was perfectly possible. But the attic window clearly overlooked the entire front of the house including the drive and it was open a few inches.
She
could see the police cars, so why hadn't he? Had he been
so
absorbed in his essay? Or asleep?

Belatedly Christian showed curiosity. ‘What are the police doing here anyway?' He frowned. ‘Why
are
you here?'

‘Your great-aunt,' Joanna began.

Christian interrupted. ‘Not fallen and cracked her hip, has she? I'm always telling her to be more careful.'