Shrine to Murder (21 page)

Session One: Thursday 23 July

`
When I was a child they used to put me in a cage if I did something wrong. Is that what you want me to talk about? That sort of thing?’

`Talk about anything you want to talk about.’

`Oh, there’s nothing I want to talk about. There isn’t any point, is there? It’s not going to make any difference.’

`What had you done the first time they did it?’

`I hit my stepmother. I can still see the mark I made. Two nice, neat half-moons — dark blue and angry red, they were, with blood all swelling up where I’d broken the skin. It tasted disgusting, her skin; sweet and faintly sticky.

`
She had smooth, soft pudgy hands. When She fondled me or my brother — only if my father was watching, of course — they stank, stank of insincerity and cheap hand cream. Rose perfume. To this day the smell of rose perfume turns my stomach.’

`Why did you bite her?’

`She had leaned across the Sunday lunch table to chuck my chin, laughing after one of her silly remarks. “Come on,” She said, “smile, just for once.” I hated her; She was always my enemy, and quick as a thought I slashed at her with my teeth. Like an animal.

`
Only animals raised by my father didn’t bite. He trained all his gun dogs by love and patience, and they had mouths like velvet. Even the ferrets with their steel trap jaws never closed them on his hands. He gentled them into tameness, and he was proud of that. He wasn’t soft, though — don’t get me wrong. His gentleness was as powerful as some men’s cruelty.

`
So he was mortified as well as angry. As She screamed he jumped up. His face was crimson, but my brother’s had gone white, his eyes and mouth three round ‘O’s of shock.

`
She started sobbing, of course, always the drama queen. Her tears made streaky white runnels in her make-up, and the mascara that always clogged her eyelashes began dissolving into sooty panda patches round her eyes. I wanted to laugh.

`
He went to her and helped her out of the chair, his arm round her, protecting her, I suppose. She was ungainly in late pregnancy, and She stumbled a little. Deliberately, probably. That would have been typical of her.

`
As my father steadied her he glared at me. He had warm blue eyes, you know, with crinkles of good humour at the corner — kind eyes. But they were savage now. I’d never seen him look like that before.

‘”
We have been patient, and more than patient.” That was what he said, and he said it terribly. Then, “Enough is enough.”

`
When they drove off to the hospital in his old battered Land-Rover, the stones spurted up from the gravel at the side of the cottage as he turned it too fast.’

`How did you feel then about what you had done?’

`I didn’t care. I was glad, I think. Yes, I was glad I had hurt her, because She had taken my father away from me.

`
I said to my brother, “Stand with me. Stand together and we can drive her away. She’ll find somebody else, just the way Mum did.”

`
He nodded at me solemnly, as if he agreed, then put his thumb in his mouth. Well, lie was only five, after all, four years younger than me.

`
He had missed Mum, of course. I hadn’t. She was a wicked woman, my mother. There were — men, men who came when Dad was away doing a shoot, when she would send us to play in the woods and lock the door. She hit me for telling Dad that. Then she just left us. I didn’t care. I’d taught myself not to care, but I had to try to teach my brother. If you don’t care, they can’t hurt you. Most people are a lot more than nine years old by the time they work that out, aren’t they?’

`How did your father manage after she left?’

`Oh, it was good, it was good. We were close, just the three of us. A team. We didn’t need anyone else. We managed somehow, the food and the cleaning and the laundry and we laughed a lot, though my brother cried sometimes at bedtime. I didn’t like him to cry; “You’ve got me,” I used to say to him in the darkness of our bedroom. “No matter what happens you’ve always got me and I’ve always got you.”

‘”
Forever and ever and ever?” he would say, and I would say, “Forever and ever and ever,” and he would stop crying and go to sleep.

`
Then She came.’

`Who was she?’

`She was working in the pub he went to on a Saturday night. Oh, not that he was a drinking man, my father, but I suppose it was a bit of company for him. She got her claws into him, and then he married her and ruined everything. She would look after us, be our mother now, he said. But we had him; what did we need a mother for? Anyway, we still had the chores to do, because She wanted to keep her fat little white paws soft and paint the nails glossy and red as if they’d been dipped in fresh blood.

`
She hated me, and She complained to my father all the time about what I did, or didn’t do. He talked to me — or at least, he said words to me, but I couldn’t talk back and reach him, with her in the way. She circled round me, killing my laughter, killing my comfort. Trying to kill my soul.’

`Why did you feel so threatened by her?’

`Oh, don’t be stupid! If you can’t see why I felt threatened, there really isn’t the smallest point in talking to you. Anyway, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to talk any more.’

Friday 10 July

Chapter One

‘Now, ladies.’ The woman who stood in front of the relentlessly swagged drapes and layered nets of her lounge bay window might be little more than five feet tall and upholstered in electric-blue double jersey as snugly as one of her overstuffed armchairs, but she wore her lilac-rinsed cap of tightly-permed curls like a military helmet. There could be little doubt that her ‘Now ladies’ equated to the ‘dear friends’ more famously exhorted before a more celebrated battle.

Tessa found herself sitting up instinctively straighter in her chair — a white rickety one with a cane seat pressed into service from the bathroom — then glanced about the packed room feeling foolish. The other women nearby, the ones astute enough to have annexed one of the components of the drawing-room suite or a Parker-Knoll brought in from the family den, seemed unmoved, having no doubt been subjected to Dorothy’s Agincourt address before. It was Dorothy’s custom to ‘throw the house open to My Ladies’, as she termed it, for the final meeting to put the last touches to the plans for the Friends of the Hospital coffee morning and summer fair tomorrow.

`A dozen scones,’ she was saying now, ‘and a dozen cakes from each of you. And ladies, I want
really
nice
cakes. Everyone always says that the Friends’ coffee morning is something quite special, and we don’t want to lose our reputation, do we? And apart from that,’ her voice sank to a suitably hushed tone, ‘we mustn’t forget it’s for the sick that we’re doing this, so nothing but the best will do.
Really
nice
cakes, remember! And Marjorie, I’ll be relying on you to mastermind the coffee, of course—’

How, Tessa found herself wondering insubordinately, were the sick to benefit from Really Nice cakes, as opposed to ordinary ones, consumed by the healthy and prosperous Stetford ladies who would patronise the hospital coffee morning largely because the price charged for the coffee, the scone and the Really Nice cake was hopelessly unrealistic, undercutting every tea room in the town by approximately fifty per cent. And then of course there was the additional benefit of the stalls, where by a bit of judicious waiting they could snap up bargains at the end once the price had been reduced, and still go home in a warm, self-satisfied glow because they had done their bit for charity.

Oh dear. She was trying hard to conform, but she couldn’t help her rebellious thoughts, could she? She sighed unconsciously, earning herself a sharp look from Mrs Superintendent Barker, sitting next to her as her sponsor for Dorothy’s very select Friends of the Hospital committee. There were, Tessa had been given to understand, women who would kill for the privilege of sitting on a creaky bathroom chair, breathing the air scented by Dorothy’s orange spice potpourri while admiring the coal-effect gas fire, the awesome architecture of the silk floral arrangements and the collection of Lladro figures above the Adams-style fireplace with its inset Wedgwood-style plaques.

Mindful of David’s career, Tessa smiled at Mona Barker, humiliatingly aware that she was raising her upper lip a little too far in an ingratiating gesture any passing chimp would instantly recognise. Not that a chimp was likely to pass through Dorothy’s lounge, more was the pity. She would have more in common with one of the upper primates than she had with the women packed in here like very superior sardines (the chocolate kind in blue tinfoil you can buy in Paris, perhaps), unassailable in their designer knitwear two-pieces, with their expensively-coiffed heads and the layers of gold chains whose brilliant brassiness proclaimed as vulgarly as a car bumper sticker, ‘I’ve been to the gold souk at Dubai.’

For David’s sake, Tessa had made a real effort. She had pulled back her heavy fall of straight brown hair into a black velvet scrunchy for the occasion, and put on her favourite raspberry crushed-velvet pants with a silk shirt made up from one of her own screen prints. She had put on the delicate silver ear spirals her friend Marnie Evans had made for her birthday, and the necklet she had bought to match them with the birthday cheque from her mother.

She had presented herself for David’s approval when he had appeared unexpectedly for five minutes at lunch time, as he had been doing more often recently, on his way up to a police station in one of the Welsh valleys on the outlying edge of their patch.

`You’re an inspector,’ she said. ‘Inspect me. Will I do?’ Laughing, she performed an exaggerated twirl.

David turned from his rapid assembling of a cheese and pickle sandwich to look at her, a tall, coltish girl with a creamy skin and glowing brown eyes. He still couldn’t quite believe that after all the messiness and misery of his divorce, and all the loneliness which had followed it, that this embodiment of warmth and vitality was really his.

`Delectable,’ he said huskily, then added on a lighter note, `You did say it was all old biddies on this committee, and not any hunky young men?’

`I think it’s a coven,’ she said solemnly. ‘But Mona Barker made it clear she was paying me an enormous and probably unmerited compliment in asking me to go along, and I realised that if I wasn’t suitably grateful or didn’t come up to scratch you’d find you’d been demoted to one of the Welsh valleys yourself, on the instant.’

`It’s very kind of her, I suppose.’ He caught her sceptical look, and grinned sheepishly. ‘You’ll knock them sideways anyway, my love. Have fun.’ With his sandwich in his hand, he snatched a kiss on the way back to the car.

As Mona greeted Tessa on her arrival, however, her hesitation and the slight freezing of her smile were both eloquent, as was her manner of introducing her to their hostess.

`This is Tessa Cordiner, Dorothy. You remember I told you, George’s new inspector’s wife. She’s very
artistic
, you know.’

And Dorothy, eying her equally doubtfully, had echoed, `Ah, artistic! I see.’

Now, as Tessa sipped tepid dark brown tea out of a wide cup with a rose-infested pattern, and balanced a finger of Paterson’s shortbread in the saucer (Dorothy’s Ladies clearly did not warrant Really Nice cakes), she fielded the inevitable questions expecting the answer yes about whether she was enjoying Shropshire after London.

She had only lately realised what a handicap it was to be by nature incorrigibly truthful. After a bad experience at the supper party the Barkers had so kindly given to let you meet everyone’ (everyone over the age of forty, that was), she had taken time to jot down phrases which were polite without being untruthful; she deployed some of them now.

`So lovely to breathe fresh air instead of petrol fumes.’ ‘It’s certainly a change to have trees instead of traffic jams.’ ‘It’s all so
green
, isn’t it!’

Those always went down well. ‘It’s so peaceful, after London,’ had been a distinct failure though; she had tried that one on Mona, who had bridled and said, ‘Good gracious, there’s never a moment’s peace in Stetford! I can’t remember when George and I last had an evening in together. Once you’ve been here a little longer, my dear, you’ll realise that people in small towns are always far busier than you ever would be in a city.’

Dorothy, who was moving round the room dispensing graciousness and stewed tea, paused to ask Tessa kindly how she had enjoyed her first meeting.

Taken by surprise, Tessa choked on a crumb of shortbread and had to take a gulp of tea to wash it down. Relentlessly refilling her cup, Dorothy smiled reassuringly at this evidence of becoming shyness.

`Now don’t worry too much about the cakes, dear. Being an artist, I expect that’s not really your forte! So just for this year, why don’t you do extra scones instead, just till you’re more into our ways, you know. It won’t matter; I always do an extra dozen or two of my butter-cream angel cakes anyway.’

Tessa was lost for words, and Mona hastened into the breach, with the air of Nanny covering up for the gaucherie of her charge. ‘You’re always so good, Dorothy. Perhaps Tessa could find a few of her little pictures for the craft stall instead. That would go down very well, I’m sure.’

Mercifully at that moment a woman with a face like a disgruntled Pekingese claimed their attention and they did not see the crimson tide of rage which Tessa felt must be visibly darkening her complexion. That was it. Enough! Finish!

She couldn’t trust herself even to produce the formulaic `thank-you-for-having-me-I’ve-had-a-lovely-time’. Setting down her cup, she slipped between the oblivious groups of chattering women and escaped to her car.

It was an ancient Morris Minor, acquired ten years ago with the unexpected windfall of her first major commission. She had sprayed it sea-green and painted sunflowers on the doors; it was called Boris after one of her art teachers who had also been of uncertain temper.

`Don’t dump me in it now, for heaven’s sake,’ she muttered as she turned the key in the ignition, but Boris responded with commendable docility and she was able to make a swift getaway down Dorothy’s tarmac drive.

A few of her ‘little pictures’ for the craft stall! Which did Mona mean, one of the witty, accomplished London scenes which Roddy Anselm had been flogging in his St James Street gallery for £700 a throw, or one of the abstract oils in Mediterranean colours inspired by their honeymoon in Provence, going for more than twice that? She could just see her `little pictures’ priced at a fiver each and sold off at £2.50 at the end because none of the Philistines in this cultural black hole would know how to appreciate them.

In a red haze of fury she flashed through the traffic lights – fortunately at green — then realised that the speed she was doing, in her highly-noticeable car, was hardly appropriate for the wife of Stetford’s newest detective inspector. And she had been well warned that, as a member of a policeman’s family, even her most trivial accident would involve a report to the Crown Prosecution Service.

She slowed to a more decorous thirty-five. At least she had the benefit of inside information on that one; Sergeant Stan Gittins, Traffic, had told her that if they went round picking people up at that speed the system would collapse from overload.

As she headed out of the little English market town, skirting the common which rose behind it and over the Welsh border into the hills beyond, it started to rain. What a surprise. Her spirits plummeted like a stone dropped into a deep, dank well as her indignant rage faded and she remembered what she was going back to. She changed down and floored the accelerator to force the protesting Boris up the long slow rise.

It was just so sad, after their high hopes, that things should have gone so badly wrong. It had seemed such an idyllic place when first they saw it on a blustery, sunny Saturday morning in early March, when the unfurling leaves in the arching tunnel of trees leading to Llanfeddin seemed impossibly green and fresh, after the greyness and grime of London.

Tessa had been enraptured. ‘Oh David, do
look
!
’
she kept saying. ‘Those hills — you’d think they’d been sketched in green pastel, and then smudged with somebody’s thumb! And the sheep — how can they possibly be so white? Do you suppose there’s someone at the Welsh Tourist Board whose job it is to go round and give them all a shampoo and blow-dry before the tourist season? And the lambs — I just don’t believe in them at all. They’re so impossibly cute, I reckon they’re actually virtual lambs they’ve had designed specially.’

David took his eyes off the narrow twisting valley road to smile at her enthusiasm. It was wonderful to hear that note back in her voice after the days of house-hunting in the respectable streets of Stetford, when she had got quieter and quieter.

`All these houses,’ she had said bleakly at last, coming away from a particularly oppressive example, ‘have smug, boring personalities. They all say to you, “Don’t be different. Don’t be adventurous. Don’t think. Just do as everyone else does, and even if you don’t want to, we’ll see to it that you do.”’ She shuddered. ‘I could almost feel the sticky cobwebs snatching at my face.’

David had been anxious, very anxious. For Tessa, pretty, talented and sweet-natured with a loving family and a multitude of friends, the sun had always shone. His own experience had been very different, and sometimes the nine years between them seemed like a lifetime.

His responsibility for her happiness weighed heavily. It reminded him of how he had felt about a very beautiful, shiny toy car he had been given, unusually, one Christmas, and how painful it had been when he had marred its precious perfection with the first mark on the paintwork. And in choosing to come to an environment as different from familiar London as it was possible to be, they were, so to speak, risking the paintwork on their glossy new marriage.

He tried to tell himself that after all, it was only once his car had collected the inevitable dents and scratches that he’d been able to enjoy playing with it, but even so it was a relief to think that this pretty valley would be a congenial setting for his Tess.

The little grey stone house they had come to view faced south above the valley, with a steep terraced garden in front and a green hill rising behind with a tiny stream spilling down over its own miniature waterfall. There was a luxuriant climbing rose trained up over the trellis porch, and a yellow jasmine bush was in flower by the front door; they had made their mind up almost before they had stepped over the threshold and the discovery of a glassed extension at the back giving good north light clinched it.