Authors: Elizabeth Corley
A frown line appeared briefly between dark, shaped eyebrows at the return to surname terms.
‘Make that two, Nico.’
Fenwick waited comfortably, letting the silence build. She did not break it. When the tall tumblers arrived, dripping condensation, Fenwick took the initiative.
As she looked up, half quizzical, half coy, to salute him over the rim of her glass, he said: ‘I am here to talk about Carol Truman.’ He was looking her straight in the eyes as he uttered his one brief sentence. Trained actress as she was, Octavia was too shocked and surprised to hide her reaction entirely. Her eyes widened, her bottom lip sagged and the sharp gasp was audible even over the hotel music. Soda water slipped over the rim of her glass and down her hand as she quickly replaced the drink on the glass table top.
She busied herself for several moments, mopping up the spill with a tiny napkin provided by the ever-attentive Nico. By the time she looked up she was in control again, face set in an expression of polite enquiry. But there had been no hiding her initial reaction and in her eyes Fenwick could see that she knew it. For the first time since they had met, she could not hold his gaze.
‘I see. I’m sorry, Andrew, for my silly reaction but you have
touched on a very old, and very painful, memory. One that I hadn’t thought about for a long, long time.’
‘Despite the deaths of Deborah Fearnside and Katherine Johnstone?’
‘Deaths? I thought Debbie was only missing!’ This time she let the shock and sorrow show.
‘I’m afraid her body was found some days ago. But I ask you again, did you make no connection between Deborah, Katherine and Carol?
‘No, none. Why should I? Carol died when we were school-children. She was a good friend of mine, Chief Inspector, but that was around twenty years ago. And Debbie and Kate – I didn’t even connect what had happened to them. Kate’s murder was awful, an urban nightmare brought to life. Debbie’s disappearance, well, I honestly thought she might have run off.’ Fenwick experienced a spurt of anger on Deborah’s behalf. Why were people, even her friends, so quick to assume the worst of her when he had such a clear view of the dedicated mother?
‘And now that there are two murders? In total, three deaths from the “Famous Foursome” – aren’t you concerned?’
She flicked an invisible speck from the hem of her silk shirt impatiently.
‘No, Andrew. I’m not. I am
not
a superstitious person and I can’t think why I should suddenly become worried. They
were
my friends – of course they were – but that was a long time ago; it feels like a previous life, another country.’
‘Tell me about Carol’s death.’
‘I genuinely can’t remember much. It was horrible, I know that. One moment we were all of us larking about together – the next, she was gone. And before you ask me, I can’t remember the details. I’ve shut it out. For weeks afterwards I withdrew from everyone I knew, friends, family, teachers. Only my music brought me alive. These days there always seem to be counsellors on hand to help the bereaved. Then, well, you were on your own. I genuinely believe I would have gone mad if it hadn’t been for my music.’
‘What happened after Carol’s death – what did you all do?’
‘You mean immediately afterwards? I can’t remember. We went home straight away, I expect. I recall that later after the body had been recovered, we, that’s Leslie, Kate, Debbie and I, went to see Carol’s family. I don’t know why, we just felt that we should. It was ghastly. They kept asking us all these questions we couldn’t answer. Vic even started shouting and screaming at us, as if it had been our fault, but there was nothing we could’ve done. Nothing. In the end, they just went quiet and we left. They couldn’t even bear to look at us. You could see them thinking why Carol and not one of us. At the time I assumed they hated us but, of course, they didn’t. It was the grief.’
‘Who was Vic – a brother? And I thought her family had emigrated.’
‘Vic was just a friend. It was her aunt and uncle we went to see, of course. And before you ask me, I
don’t
remember their names. Look, Chief Inspector, have you finished? I need to go and get ready.’
‘Just one more question. What was Carol like?’
Octavia looked away from him, out across the marble foyer to the tinted automatic doors.
‘She was lovely,’ she murmured, ‘simply lovely.’
To his surprise, Fenwick saw her eyes fill, her voice cracked. She wasn’t acting this time.
‘Can I go now, Andrew? I’m very late.’
He stood up and escorted her to the lift. So much emotion after such a long time baffled him. His eyes were full of questions as he waited with her.
Before he could say more, the deputy hotel manager, badge glittering in the crystal light, trotted up to them, his arms full of crimson roses.
‘Mademoiselle Anderson, these have just been delivered for you.’
‘Oh how lovely, Jean-Luc. Did the delivery boy say from whom?’
‘No, mademoiselle. Sadly no.’
‘And there doesn’t appear to be a card. Never mind! Thank you.’
‘Does this happen often, unknown admirers sending flowers?’
‘Not as often as you might expect, but this is about the third bouquet of red roses I’ve received during the festival, so I’m not complaining!’ She smiled at him, lips matching perfectly the blood-red blooms.
‘Shall I be seeing you tonight? I know it’s a fringe festival but they gave me my first real break and I’m sentimental. Still, it’ll be my last year; it’s just too inconvenient now.’
‘I doubt that I’ll see you. I don’t have a ticket and I imagine they’ve sold out.’
‘Poor Chief Inspector! All this way and no fun. We shall have to see.
Au revoir
.’
Fenwick was disturbed, during a brief nap in his small, comfortable but unfortunately non-air-conditioned room, by the arrival of a single red rose, attached to which was a dress circle ticket for the evening’s performance. There was no note.
In England, in a muggy, thunder-bug-ridden evening, Nightingale cursed the lack of a national identity system. She had had little luck in tracing Carol Truman’s aunt, uncle and cousin. They were not on the electoral roll in Sussex, Surrey, Kent or Hampshire.
She took a break from the incident room and walked out into the breathless August day. The fumes were terrible and the park too far away. Out of habit she walked the pavements as far as the churchyard in which Kate Johnstone was finally to be buried in a few weeks. She paced the Tarmacked paths, noticed with sadness and disgust a used hypodermic in the grass by a flat-topped tomb, and felt her mood grow sombre.
She was still a trainee detective, painfully aware that her accelerated programme annoyed old hands and contemporaries alike, and frustrated by her lack of progress on the case. Cooper was a stalwart. He did not agree with most of Fenwick’s lines of inquiry but you could never tell, and he drove the expanded team hard, with no room for excuses. He tolerated her with wise amusement, tickled by her initiative, appalled at her cheek.
Going back to Leslie Smith had been a lucky break, but the wretched woman had escaped to Turkey. Tracing poor Carol Truman had been the type of slog that earned silent praise but the poor girl was dead. Now she had to find the aunt and uncle. She started her third circle of the graveyard, wondering at the mess of dead flowers on one of the far graves and casually,
naturally, as she was walking towards it, she found George and Alice Rowland. They weren’t going to run away.
George Henry Rowland and his wife Alice Mary
Beloved parents of Victor.
In life we are in death.
Taken from us 6th and 7th August 1983
RIP.
The double plot was marked by an open granite book. A recent arrangement of white and yellow chrysanthemums was expiring on the closely mown mound. The vase was dry and the flowers drooped. Nightingale carefully poured the remainder of a her warm can of Coke into the container, hoping it would be enough to freshen them for at least one more day. A lot of money had been spent, some would say wasted, on the arrangement, destined to last a few days at most in the flat summer heat.
Another dead end. She sat on a nearby bench and let the detective in her take over. Why spend all that money on flowers, and who had spent it? There was no card but the Cellophane backing had the name of a local florist printed on it in white lettering. It was her only lead in tracing Carol’s living relatives.
She walked back along the path towards the gate, and noticed again the mound of desiccated flowers on a distant grave. Dead roses, dozens of them, had been spread all over the plot. They were lying flat on the ground, sacrificed to the heat of summer. All the other graves were dry, grey-brown in the heat. The extravagance and waste were the more shocking in contrast.
She walked over out of curiosity and felt a premonitory shiver down her spine as she made out the name: Carol Anne Truman. It had to be more than a coincidence, this singling out of the dead to receive grotesque floral tributes at a time when their names had worked their way to the centre of a murder investigation. Or perhaps there had always been flowers. She could find out.
The florist was shut, early closing. Nightingale pushed a note through the door. When she returned to Division a message
was waiting for her on her desk. ‘Australian Immig called while you were out taking the air!!!’ Cooper’s leathery patience was not weathering the heat well.
His mood had deteriorated to the point where he was communicating in short, grunting sentences; the smell of his tangy sweat and spicy aftershave occupied the room. All the windows had been forced open but the air hung sullenly, refusing to circulate, sticking in sulky clouds around each of the occupied desks.
‘What did they say, Sergeant?’
‘I’m not your answering service, Nightingale; I left the number on your desk.’
‘Thank you.’
He looked up from a portion of the thick computer printout and gave a smile.
‘I thought you’d delegated that lot, Sarge.’
‘I have – well, most of it – but I’ve nothing better to do while we wait for DCI Fenwick to come back from his jaunt in Europe.’
The other constables in the room shifted uneasily. Things were not going well and there was a sense of frustration in the team that was getting the sergeant down. It had not yet flipped into failure but it was not far away. Sensing the tension the other officers variously buried their heads in the files or made yet another phone call in an attempt to match ex-servicemen and women to the names from 1980. At least they were keeping the search focused locally – to start with.
‘Seriously, Nightingale. There wasn’t much of a message – not good either. Both Carol’s parents are dead. The mother passed away shortly after they emigrated; the father died last year. They’ve no record of any other family.’
Nightingale, at Cooper’s suggestion, wrote out a fax to the Melbourne Police Department stressing the importance of tracing any friends and relatives and asking for the name of the lawyers that had handled Carol’s father’s estate to track down any trustees.
She was explaining to Cooper about the graves when the
florist rang. She had gone in to water the stock with all the heat and had found the note. Yes, she recalled the roses well. The customer – a man – had rung a few days before to make sure she had sufficient stock – three dozen crimson. He had come to the shop briefly on Monday to pay for the orders, cash, and had insisted they deliver to the cemetery as he could not go. Odd that, but he had a little map showing where the graves were and the names. No. That was gone with the rubbish that Monday evening.
Despite the value of the orders she had questioned the sense of leaving the roses loose, no water, but he had been insistent. It was the oddest order she had ever taken. He’d never bought from her before.
‘Can you describe him?’
‘A bit. He was tall, well over six foot, I’d say. Dark – short black hair; quite thick hair, it was. He wore sunglasses. And he was tanned, really sunburnt dark.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Well, he was fit, very fit I’d say – you know, athletic. He had a thin white cotton shirt on, and you could see the muscles – a hunk, if you know what I mean.’
‘Sounds to me like you noticed quite a bit about him.’
‘Well, he was a dish – he hasn’t done anything wrong, has he? I mean—’
‘We just want to try and talk to him, that’s all.’
‘Oh, eliminate him, like, from your inquiries!’
‘Something like that, yes. You were saying, he was a dish.’ She tried hard to ignore Cooper’s eyebrows, which were performing a disconcerting dance across his corrugated forehead.
‘Well, yes. I quite fancied him. There was something about him, you know. Nice clothes, lovely shape, but not flash. No gold. No jewellery of any kind, come to think of it. Nice watch though. Big, expensive-looking, like a diver’s watch – all dials and knobs. And he was a bit out of the ordinary, you know. When he was in the shop he filled it.’
‘He had presence, you mean?’
‘Yes, that’s a good word for it. He had
presence
.’
‘Could you spare us a bit of time, to work with a police artist? We’d like to work up a likeness.’
‘I’m not sure. I don’t know. What’s he done? I don’t want to get involved in any trouble.’
‘As I said, we just need to trace him, that’s all. It’s quite important that we talk to him and it sounds as if you could help a lot.’
The woman eventually agreed to come down early the next morning, before opening hours.
No sooner had Nightingale replaced the receiver and given a thumbs-up to Cooper than the phone rang again. It was the florist.
‘There’s one other thing – thought I’d better ring you in case I forget it again. I don’t know if it’s important but I was wrong when I said he hadn’t any jewellery. He had some sort of chain round his neck, not gold, silver-coloured, with something on the end of it, I couldn’t see what.’