Flowers for the Dead (32 page)

Another case wrapped up, Mike ploughs through the paperwork, then stares at his computer. Bored again. He taps his fingers impatiently, toying with an idea. He can’t help with the Brookman case, but it has brought another unsolved murder to the forefront of his mind. Julie Clayton.

Perhaps he could do a little digging around of his own into Simon’s old case. Nothing that would interfere with the investigation, which is dead in the water anyway, just a bit of lateral thinking to see if he can come up with a new angle.

He straightens in his chair as he pictures the crime scene he had visited. What were the things that had really stood out for him? The removal of the lips, of course. But that is what Simon’s team had concentrated on.

Mike closes his eyes and remembers the field of yellow daffodils stretching almost as far as the eye could see, and how the killer had picked a posy of them for Julie’s body. He opens his eyes, thinks for a second, and then starts typing words into the search engine.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

~ Tuberose ~

Dangerous Pleasures

Five days after the skeletal remains are unearthed, Lisa’s identity is confirmed. This pushes the investigation to new heights. In the intervening time old case notes from her disappearance have been gone over, and people who had been interviewed sixteen years ago have been located once again. Now, the officers begin working through the list, re-interviewing. They start with those still in Colchester and Essex, but eventually will move on to those who are further afield.

Mike offers to lend a hand with the interviews, as he has nothing more urgent than a house burglary and his own investigations into Simon’s old Julie Clayton case. That very day he is given a couple of interviews. He gets straight onto them, but they say nothing new. One is her old teacher, now retired, whose statement sounds as if she is reading from a school report.

“Lisa was talented at music and writing,” she recalls, sipping her tea. “A very popular girl. Too chatty sometimes, but intelligent when she applied herself. On the whole a very hard worker.”

“She wasn’t being bullied?”

“Oh, no. The school would never have tolerated that. It would have been nipped in the bud.”

“Any particular friends? Any boyfriends?”

“No boyfriends that I knew of, but then why would I know? You know teenage girls.”

Mike has vague recollections of teenage girls from the days of his youth. They had seemed infinitely more sophisticated than he or his friends, tended to giggle and whisper a lot about mysterious things, and moved around in impenetrable groups. He is not looking forward to Daisy hitting that stage.

The teacher gives him a list of Lisa’s school pals, but again it is nothing that was not noted during the first investigation.

When he arrives back at the station, Mike reports back to the lead investigator, DI John Louth.

“I only wish I had something interesting to tell you.” The words are heartfelt.

“We’ve got the family arriving any minute to do an appeal,” says the DI, grimacing.

It is never easy seeing the victim’s family making their speeches in front of the media, but it often gets results, spurring people to come forward with fresh information.

Mike knows the stress involved so makes himself scarce. As he walks down the corridor he sees a couple in their fifties being led in the opposite direction. They hold hands, clinging to one another, giving off a strange mixture of hope and grief.

It is Lisa’s parents, Mike recognises them instantly. He saw them all those years before making their tearful television appeals for their daughter to come home, for anyone who knew her whereabouts to come forward, for their daughter to just give them a call to let them know she was all right.

Now those same parents will be back on television again, making more heart-breaking pleas. They look older than their years thanks to the terrible toll of having a child who is missing. Mike has seen it before. The waiting is torture. They hold at bay the grief they have for a child they are convinced is dead, because they feel they cannot give up hope: to give up feels almost as if they themselves are killing their child. They are caught in a limbo. For many, it is almost a relief when remains are found and at last they can know what happened to their little one. It is the not knowing that is the worst pain.

Mike has no clue how he would cope in that situation. He is not sure he would.

At least now Lisa’s parents can bury their child. They may even finally get justice for her, and their hope for that is as etched on their faces as their mourning.

***

“Please help us find out what happened to our daughter,” begs Mrs Brookman. Her eyes are red-rimmed and baggy, flesh hanging as if it is trying to slide off a face that was clearly once plump but became suddenly gaunt many years ago. Beside her sits her corpse-like husband, staring straight ahead, the only movement to betray he is alive is an occasional blink.

Adam stares in disbelief as he watches them on the news. He cannot believe this is happening. His worst fears are coming true. The years have not been kind to Lisa’s parents; has it really been so long since she entered him?

What starts as trembling soon has Adam’s whole body gripped in quakes that threaten to shake him apart as he tries to come to terms with the news that Lisa’s body has definitely been found. He is scared – the kind of fear only his mother was capable of putting in him. He feels dirty and out of control and cannot comprehend what is happening because he thought he had hidden the body so well.

Adam rubs at his face, trying to hold himself together, but the women are screaming inside him, reacting to his own fear.

He is losing command of the situation, things are slipping from his grasp. He likes order, he cannot deal with unplanned things. Did Lisa plan this? Is she jealous of his feelings for Laura, is that why she has done this to him?

He picks up a clock and smashes it against the wall.

That’s better.

He calmly fetches a dustpan and brush, sweeps up the shattered glass, exposed cogs, and metal springs and walks to his office to put the clock back together again. Everything can be fixed.

While he works he makes a decision. He will stay away from Colchester for a few days. It pains him to be away from Laura, but with Lisa’s body being discovered he thinks it wise to lie low.

Despite the wisdom of the plan he feels antsy and cannot settle. The man with infinite patience abandons his attempts at clock repairs after a mere ten minutes. Working out, cooking, watching his love online, nothing soothes him. Even his choice in music is dark and menacing.

He turns to his old faithful hobby, gardening. After days of rain, the weather has turned, a cold snap freezing the ground and refusing to thaw all day long, so he cannot do any digging. Instead he spends time in the greenhouses, pruning, tending, fussing. The restoration of order through waging a war on weeds makes him feel a little more in control.

He is going out of his mind without Laura. Yes, he can still hear and see her through the surveillance devices but it is not the same as being with her. Not even close. Missing her aroma, he goes online and orders the perfume she wears. When it arrives the scent makes him pine for her all the more.

It is so cruel of this to happen just as he and Laura were about to be together properly. He wants to hold her, kiss her, look after her…though he will never contemplate doing anything else with her. Sex is too caught up with his mother, too disgusting for him to think of without recoiling in horror, and he swore off it after he lost control with Lisa. Laura and he have a pure love than transcends the physical.

He still can’t help suspecting Lisa of petty jealousy and sabotage. Inside him, she squirms uncomfortably at the scrutiny she is under, a stab to his heart to tell him of her denial. He is not sure he believes her though. All he knows is that he wants Laura so badly; he aches to hold her, to have her soothe his mind and tell him she loves him. If only he could see her.

Adam is so lonely. Perhaps any company is better than none. In desperation, he walks out of the house in search of the comfort of the populace. The bustle of people walking past him on the high street makes him feels even worse. Families, couples, groups of friends. And him. Alone.

He ducks into a café, remembering how happy he had felt watching Laura at her work. Desperate to recapture the moment, he orders a Sprite, just as he had before, and sits at a table hoping to be soothed by the conversation surrounding him. White noise for his buzzing brain.

“Cold, isn’t it?” An old man is speaking. Adam pretends he has not heard.

“Cold, isn’t it, eh?” repeats the man, louder this time.

Adam has no choice but to turn. He forces himself to act normally, to nod and smile, horribly aware of the delay between the thought and the deed.

The man has twinkly blue eyes and is wearing dapper separates of a linen suit jacket and slightly mismatched trousers. His hair is still thick despite being as white as snow on a mountaintop. The whole effect is of someone who once had money, but now does not; he is of the proud generation that does not want the world to know when they have fallen on harder times. His jacket is worn correctly on his right arm, but simply hung over his left shoulder. Adam makes the mistake of glancing at it and the old gent seizes the opportunity for conversation.

“I had a stroke, you see,” he explains, gesturing with his right arm. “This side’s good, the other…” He shrugs and smiles, gentle and warm.

Adam can feel himself starting to tense. Blood pressure rising, sweat forming. He tries to smile back at the old man, but the muscles feel wrong, stiff and awkward, and he knows he is still frowning.

The old man’s eyes widen and he blinks rapidly a couple of times. He still does not shut up though.

“I was out shopping, you see. And suddenly I felt, well, sort of odd. It’s hard to describe, I just felt so strange and my heart was pounding. Literally pounding, like it was going to come out of my chest. I came into this very café for a sit down, but crashed to the floor. I woke up a week later in hospital. A week, imagine! I’d been in a coma that whole time.”

He tuts and laughs as though he has told a joke. Adam nods and smiles, but all the time his mind is working overtime trying to figure out how he can politely get away. He cannot talk. Not today, he simply cannot today. He tries not to meet the man’s eye. Instead he finds himself studying the broken veins cross-crossing his ruddy face, trying to decide if they are due to too much sun or an excess of alcohol.

“Oh, I’ve a few tales to tell about how clumsy I am,” the man chuckles. “You couldn’t make them up!”

He has a slight lilt to his voice, and Adam seizes on that next, concentrating on trying to place it. Anything rather than get involved in the conversation. Irish, the man is from Southern Ireland. He tries to think of something to say, but his mind has frozen up. The buzzing in Adam’s brain is getting louder, starting to drown out the words being spoken to him, but he can still see the old man’s mouth moving, never stopping. His heart is racing, he grips his cold glass of Sprite more tightly. The ice clinks together as he quakes.

Still the old man drones on, giving another chuckle, gazing at Adam expectantly. Adam’s eyes dart around, trying to capture the memory of what he had been saying. Something about dropping something?

He opens his mouth to try to speak, can feel the words bottle-necking in his throat. Clenches his hands into fists in frustration and…

The tinkling of glass sounds, shattering on the flagstones. Adam had forgotten about the drink he was clutching. The condensation had made it slippery enough to shoot upwards from his grasp as he balled his hands, then inevitably fall to the ground, sending shards everywhere.

Adam stands, dumbly looks down at the pieces. The old man scoots his moccasin-shoed feet back and gives a gleeful chortle as he gazes at the mess.

“I…better…” Adam manages, gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb. He hurries off in that direction to grab a cloth. When he reaches the counter, he looks back, sees the old man watching him expectantly, awaiting his return, and Adam does the only thing he can think of. He scarpers.

***

Paranoid: an extreme and irrational fear or distrust of others.

Laura knows – or strongly suspects – that she only has one person to fear, but the problem is identifying that person. Fear is making her paranoid.

She hates going out for fear of attack. She hates staying in, in case her stalker decides to corner her. She hates being alone, feeling vulnerable. She hates being with people because she suspects everyone. Her only choice is to try to carry on as normal though, withdrawing into her private world of suffering while all the time hiding under a veneer of normality.

The only outward giveaway that something is wrong is that she has stopped talking to Charlotte and Emily again. Although she does not believe they are anything to do with her problems, she cannot be certain.

She has taken a little time to jump onto the computer at work, now and then, tapping away busily when no one else is in the room. A couple of quiet conversations on the bakery office’s phone have been sneaked in too. Aside from that flurry of activity, Laura simply spends most days behind the till, staring at customers, jumping at people who look at her for too long. Sometimes she signs for a delivery, but that is as exciting as it gets.

It has been six days now since Mike came to see Laura. So far she has not heard anything more from him, but her tormentor seems be leaving her alone too, since the delivery of the mystifyingly ugly bouquet of nettles and other weird flowers. She hopes but does not believe that it was his farewell gift to her. Despite the calm, she can feel the crackle of tension building as the inevitable confrontation between herself and her stalker draws closer.

In an attempt to ease the pressure, one night she dances.

“Woo-hoo!” she yells at the top of her voice. “Woo-hoo!” Just like she and Marcus used to together. Leaping, kicking, spinning…

Afterwards she feels momentarily better.

She is constantly looking over her shoulder, and is barely sleeping or eating. But at least she feels in control at last. It is only a question of waiting. Inevitably, her plan will come together.
Play dumb, box clever.