River Deep (16 page)

After the inquest she felt a desperate need to escape Shrewsbury and during the next day, Thursday, she laid her plans.

On Friday she raced home for five, showered and had the car packed up by six. They put Bobby into kennels – London was no place for a dog. She braved the M54 and the Birmingham box, reaching London late and in time for some supper, a few glasses of wine for her and Agnetha and bed for the exhausted twins.

They rose late the next morning, spent the day at the Natural History museum, ate an early supper and headed for the West End. Agnetha and Sukey went into frenzies as they watched the show and even Sam seemed happy. She knew why.

But all through
Mamma Mia
, however gaudy and wonderful the costumes, however loud and explosive the tunes were, the case continually nagged at the back of her mind like toothache, and just as impossible to ignore.

She thought back to the dramatic discovery of Gerald Bosworth’s body, the river rising steadily, embracing the town and flushing him from the cellar. Coincidence. It had to be. Even she couldn’t believe that a killer could organise a river to flood. And although it was partly predictable what would happen it was never completely so. Even for locals it was still a bit of a shock. Days when the river was expected to peak sometimes passed without incident whereas the unexpected could still happen. That was the point. Rivers were unpredictable. Untameable. Laws unto themselves.

“
Waterloo
…” The show pounded on in candy pinks, gold platform-heeled boots and swirls of lycra bell-bottoms.
The choreography indistinguishable from Sukey and Agnetha’s routine a few nights ago.

What difference would it have made if the river had not misbehaved? What had Bosworth being doing in Shrewsbury – in Marine Terrace? Why had he not gone to Germany? Why had he died? Had it been a random killing? Martha made a face. Difficult to believe. A premeditated murder then? Had to be. So why? How had he been lured there? Why had
no one
seen him arrive? They were all such little questions and so impossible to answer.

Halfway through the show she got restless legs and sat flexing and unflexing her calf muscles until Sam tapped her on the arm. “Are you very bored?” he whispered. She shook her head, laughed, and forced herself to concentrate.

She drove back on the Sunday afternoon after a morning of frenzied shopping in Oxford Street, which Sam had tolerated remarkably well. As soon as they were through the front door Sukey ran to the answerphone to pick up the messages. “Granny,” she hissed, then “Granny again” before listening, redialling and finally putting the phone down. “Our mystery caller,” she said crossly. “The one who never says anything or leaves a number. He gets on my nerves.” She stalked into the kitchen.

Sam was halfway up the stairs. “If the mystery caller never says anything how do you know it’s a man?”

Sukey came out of the kitchen to stand at the bottom of the stairs, hands on slim hips. “I can hear him breathing, Sam. Anyway – no
woman
does that sort of thing.”

And it suddenly hit Martha. There were a lot of anonymous callers to this number. More than there should be by the law of averages. Odd things did happen. A wreath left when there had been no death? A muddy record.
A Message to Martha. What message?
It was beginning to infuriate
her. What message, she was screaming inside her.

And now she believed someone was out there beaming some emotion right into this household. Into her. For what purpose, when it was done so randomly, so ill-directed, so obscurely? What was it achieving? And if it was not malevolent why did they not speak? If there was a message why not bloody well leave it? Why not simply explain what they were trying to say? Was it some nut? Connected with her job? Should she speak again to Alex about it? Request police surveillance? Because of the nature of her job she knew her request would be granted. Provided she made it. And what was it, really? Nothing. There was no threat. She did not feel threatened. More invaded. This was an isolated house. Private. She was a private person. She welcomed the house’s isolation rather than seeing it as a problem. She could consider moving but she didn’t really want to.

Then she started to understand – a little. The reason she did not feel threatened was because she was not threatened. It was not a threat. It was simply a message – for Martha. The trouble was with her: that she could not read it. One day she would. Not yet.

She glanced at the telephone. Strike while the iron is hot. There had been other telephone calls too. She dialled her mother first then Martin’s mother and invited them both to come for the weekend. Both accepted. Husbands too. It would be the weekend of the grandparents and she could tell them about Sam, and Sukey and Agnetha could show them their dance routine. She felt virtuous. Virtue is a pleasant emotion. By Monday mid-morning her emotions were much less pleasant.

How surprising that in this overcrowded age a corpse can remain undiscovered. In a populated area. For more than a month. It had intrigued her before that there were
black holes through which a person can disappear for months, weeks, sometimes forever. But in these sophisticated days instinct and observation have been bred out by civilisation. We no longer use our senses properly – our five precious senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight. Unlike Calliphora whose multi-faceted eyes see all and whose instincts lead her unfailingly to find the right source. Dogs have as keen a sense of smell as Calliphora. And both are irresistibly attracted to the scent of rotting flesh.

Martha was at the hairdresser’s. As usual Vernon had picked up her unruly red locks and scolded her for leaving it too long between cuts. Vernon Grubb was not the archetypal camp hairdresser but a stocky he-man with the build of a rugby player. Whenever she visited him (too infrequently) she was invariably intrigued as to what had led him along this particular career path and how he had coped with hairdresser college. One day, she vowed, she would ask him.

Not today. He seemed in particularly tetchy mood. His x-ray vision homed in accusingly on her split ends as though she had deliberately nurtured each one. She knew he considered so many of them on a client an affront to his profession. She let him rant for a minute or two, reminded of the restaurateur who had first uncovered her inability to set a table properly (a penalty of being left-handed) when she was a waitress during the university vac. Vernon provoked the same mix of guilt and apprehension. However he finally handed her over to a junior shampooist and she was draped in a black nylon gown, her shoulders padded with towels and her head lowered over the sink before the blissful feeling of warm water and rich, creamy shampoo being massaged into her scalp. She closed her eyes, luxuriated …

And was rudely awakened by her mobile phone. She apologised to the shampooist and clamped it to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Martha. It’s Detective Inspector Wendy Aitken, Oswestry police. Sorry for …”

She sat upright. Water dripped down the towels.

“I’m afraid we’ve found another body,” she said, “almost certainly our missing man. He’s in a bit of a state.”

The stylist was watching her with round eyes and scarcely concealed curiosity. Martha responded quickly. “I can’t talk at the moment. I’ll call you back.” She glanced at the number display. “On your mobile. I’ll be about forty minutes. Don’t move the body please.” She ended the call and lay back, her hair drowning, Ophelia-like, in the sink, while she pondered. Two bodies. One killer? Or two? Make no assumptions.

“Conditioner?” She glanced up at the shampooist’s face. And nodded.

Twenty minutes later she was admiring the back of her hair in the mirror and again running the gauntlet of Vernon’s scolding. “Now don’t leave it so long next time. Your hair. It needs trimming – once a month. Or else the condition. Mmm.” He stood back, pursing his lips, patted a lock into place and appraised again.

Martha agreed with him, took a last glance at the unfamiliarly neat, shining bob, slipped out of her gown, paid her bill, tipped the shampooist and escaped. As soon as she was in the privacy of her car she re-dialled Wendy Aitken’s mobile number. The detective answered in a tense voice.

“Whether it’s Haddonfield or not his throat’s been cut,” she said. “Some time ago I would think.”

Martha put her hand in front of her eyes to block out the vision. “Has Mark Sullivan seen him yet?”

“He’s with him now.”

“Which is where?”

The answer surprised even her.

“In the supermarket, Aldi, in the clothing bank.”

She was appalled. “And no one realised?”

“Not until the number of flies began to proliferate.” She paused, adding quietly. “We’re lucky. It was due to be emptied later on this week.”

“And then what?” The possibilities were endlessly
mind-boggling.

“Don’t worry.” She could hear a smile in her voice. “They do sort it out before it gets distributed to the refugees.”

“I’ll be right over.”

As she covered the few miles to Oswestry she couldn’t help thinking. She put clothes in the ragbank. Lots of people did. She drove into the Aldi carpark, disturbed.

Half of it had been sealed off, police tape strung across, a white canopy shrouding the sensitive area. A couple of police cars blocked the entrance and their lights strobing the dull day gave the growing clumps of voyeurs some drama to focus on.

A young, uniformed police officer tried to stop her until she explained who she was and watched his face turn a dark shade of beetroot in embarrassment.

The clothing bank was a large, square metal container with a huge letterbox in the front which folk generous with last year’s fashions posted their offerings through. Behind, the PVC sheeting lights had been erected throwing moving shadows against its sides. She lifted the flap and joined Wendy and Sullivan minutes before they noticed her. They were too intent on two plain-clothes officers removing the back of the container with a oxyacetylene cutters.

It was a sordid sight: the pile of castoffs, wool, linen, silk, rayon, every conceivable colour of acetate, plain and multicoloured, cheap and expensive, rubbing shoulders and knees with each other lit by two powerful arc lights. Some of the top layer of clothes had already been removed and bagged. The smell was overwhelming, every single jaded adjective moving through Martha’s mind to describe it, rotten and stinking, musty, fusty, unwashed and dirty, and even in the cool afternoon the scent attracting marauding flies drawn irresistibly towards their raison d’être: their breeding ground, their fun, their food.

Martha watched only the flies for a moment.
“I,” said the fly, “with my little eye. I saw him die.”
And wondered. Haddonfield had been hidden in the rags.

Except his hair, thinnish, gold-brown, cut short across a white, unlined forehead, and dark eye sockets in which something writhed. Martha’s eyes sorted out anomalies from the tangle of old clothes.

“Rag and Bones, Rag and Bones.” Bound hands, white skin, clothes that were not empty, a pair of grubby blue trainers tossed on the top, a rust-stained nest. Yearned after, dreamed for, borrowed or paid for. Treasured clothes become rags. Loved, adored, feared, hated people are all finally bodies.

The smell was overpowering. Martha backed away, towards the flap rattling hysterically in the rising wind.

March – in like a lion; out like a lamb.

Randall arrived. He raised his eyebrows in greeting and otherwise said nothing, addressing his remarks to the pathologist.

“How long has he been dead?”

“Over a month, I think.” Wendy Aitken tried to explain. “There were a lot of clothes on top of him.”

“How often do the council change the container?”

“Every month to six weeks.” Wendy Aitken again.

Randall looked around. “Is there CCTV here?”

Wendy turned to look at him. “They don’t keep the tapes longer than a fortnight or so. So effectively – no.”

Martha’s turn now. “And is it Haddonfield?”

“We think so. The clothes match the description of what he was wearing.”

Martha was busy working it out. “So he did come back to Oswestry that night. Watkins must have been mistaken. He simply didn’t recognise him. Maybe not surprising on such a dark, wet night.”
Surely the simplest explanation is the likeliest?

“Is he in a fit state to be identified?”

“That’s up to his wife. It isn’t a problem, Mark. We can always use dental records.”

Alex was staring at her. “Well I hope she’s got an iron constitution, Martha. Put it like this. If it was my wife I wouldn’t want her last memory of me to be this.” Haddonfield’s dead, empty face stared back.

Martha moved outside to speak to Randall. “So,” she said, “if Mark’s reckoning is right the two murders took place within a short time of each other.”

He nodded. “DI Aitken and I will work together. We’ll try and get some identification and then the post mortem.”

She glanced back at the canopy flapping in a rising wind. “Good luck,” she said impulsively. “It’s a lot to unravel. But this must have made the case much easier.”

“Yes.” Randall’s eyes flickered and he pressed his lips together. “There’ll be some story behind this,” he said. “Some fraud, some business gone sadly wrong. Money. Greed.”

Martha threw her head back. “Why, Alex,” she mocked.
“You’ve got it solved already.”

His face softened with a touch of humour. “In my dreams.”

“By the way,” she said, “who was the guy in the
puffer-jacket
sitting at the back of Gerald Bosworth’s inquest?”

“His brother. Not too fond of his sister-in-law, it seems.”

“Oh?”

“He’d offered to do the identification but Freddie was having none of it. And she’s the one with all the rights, as next of kin.”

“Quite,” she said.

Then, “I’ll be in touch,” he promised.

Wendy Aitken and Sullivan appeared behind him. “I think we’ll have the body brought back to Shrewsbury for the post mortem. All right by you, Mark?”