Tigerlily's Orchids (23 page)

Springmead was next. But here the ugly face of racism poked up in Blakelock's mind. The man who answered the door – or didn't answer the door but came round the side of the house when they rang the bell – was plainly from South-East Asia. China? Malaysia? Singapore? Bashir couldn't tell any more than Blakelock could but Blakelock knew he had to be careful. There was something in the man's wary yet aggressive expression that told him this short, stocky, black-haired, copper-skinned individual would be on the phone
complaining if one of them stepped an inch out of line. This was where a ‘sir' was definitely required.

‘Can I help you?' was all the man said but it was enough to send out a warning signal.

‘Just to ask you, sir, if you've heard of the unexplained death last night of Mr Stuart Font from Lichfield House?'

‘Never met him,' said the South-East Asian man.

‘Don't know him or any of them.' From somewhere he had picked up a useful phrase. ‘We keep ourself to ourself in our home.'

‘Nothing doing there,' said Blakelock when they were back in the road. ‘Now for Mrs Scurlock.'

R
ichenda had finished work at Flat 2 Ludlow House and moved on to Flat 4. The first thing she did wherever she started work was turn on the radio. Stations were unimportant to her, it could be a game show or a comedian or a play or classical music or an economist talking, it mattered not at all so long as she had background sound. Silence made her uneasy. So when Blakelock and Bashir finally tracked her down, a gardening programme was on, a fluting upper-class voice telling listeners they were wrong if they thought nothing was to be done in the flower beds in May.

In her usual costume of miniskirt, high-heeled sandals and tight low-cut top, Richenda caused some eye-bulging in the detective sergeant and a small recoil in the Muslim constable. She no more got a ‘madam' than her husband had a ‘sir'.

‘I knew him well,' she began. ‘I can tell you all about him. His relationship with that blonde woman, for starters. They was having a hot affair. Claudia's her name.'

Blakelock, realising few questions would be needed here, sat down in one of the armchairs and prepared to listen. No,
Richenda didn't know Claudia's surname or what she did for a living, if anything. A man who said she was his wife had burst into Stuart Font's party, attacked him, broken his arm and threatened to kill him. It was much the same as what Duncan had told them but he hadn't mentioned the broken arm.

‘Mind you,' said Richenda, ‘Stuart was a bit of a sex maniac. He got rid of me so that one of those girls from Flat 5 could come and clean for him. Not that there'd have been much cleaning done.'

With no need to enquire but purely out of fascination, Bashir asked her if Stuart had ever made any advances to her.

‘Oh, all the time,' said Richenda.

P
olice had been searching the Kenilworth Green area for several hours, looking for the weapon, but no knife had been found. The evening was still light but they worked on till nine. Half an hour before that they moved into the churchyard. There, leaning against a gravestone not far from the fence, was a large canvas bag, containing a pair of garden shears, a trowel and a small garden fork. They placed it in a plastic bag and took it to the murder room which had been set up in the Bel Esprit Centre.

There, Darren Blakelock examined the bag and its contents, wearing gloves to handle them gingerly. The tools were fingerprinted. Someone had printed
WS
in felt pen on the outside of the bag. Blakelock couldn't immediately connect those initials with anyone he had yet talked to and soon after looking at them, and looking at them again and again with no result, he went home to bed.

He woke up in the small hours and thought: Walter Scurlock. Visualising the bearer of that name, he saw a medium-sized man with an enlarged belly, balding head, unmemorable
features – to himself he called them ‘ordinary' – a nervous man. What had he got to be nervous about? And what had he been doing in St Ebba's churchyard?

If it hadn't been three o'clock in the morning but a couple of hours later, Blakelock would have got up, dressed and driven back to Lichfield House to question this Walter Scurlock. As it was he lay sleepless, thinking about it. When he did get up, he went straight to the Bel Esprit Centre and had another look at the bag, hoping it would tell him more. It didn't. He was wondering whether Scurlock had been in trouble before, in which case his fingerprints might be on record, but that hardly mattered. If the bag was Scurlock's the tools most likely would be. Unfortunately, no knife had been in the bag. He was interrupted by the arrival of a woman who looked fourteen in the distance but forty close to.

She introduced herself as Amanda Copeland. ‘It was my friend Daphne Jessop who reported to you she'd found a body on Kenilworth Green.'

Blakelock nodded. A woman had phoned them, said she had been exercising her dog and called them on her mobile when she came upon Stuart Font's body.

‘There was something she didn't tell you. She said she didn't want to get the man into trouble.'

‘What man?'

‘I knew who it was all right. She saw him bending over the body but he ran away when he saw her coming.'

And Amanda proceeded to tell him everything she knew about Wally Scurlock and a lot she had imagined.

I
t was about seven on the previous evening that Wally Scurlock realised he had left his bag in St Ebba's churchyard. His first thought was that he must abandon the bag. No one could identify it as his. Initials were nothing, thousands of people must have the initials WS. For all that, he might go up to St Ebba's and check that it was still there. If it was he could retrieve it. He was eating – or picking at – the meal Richenda called ‘tea', though no tea was served and the food consisted of a lamb chop with Bisto gravy, rather hard, once frozen Brussels sprouts and salt-and-vinegar-flavour potato crisps.

‘What's the matter with you?' Richenda said, breaking off from the account she was giving of her encounter with the two policemen. ‘Something wrong with your tea? You're lucky not to get one of those ready meals.'

Wally sounded quite dignified. ‘I have no appetite,' he said. ‘I've been feeling off colour ever since I heard about poor Stuart.'

‘Well, that's funny, considering you couldn't stand the sight of him when he was alive.'

Wally wasn't going to get into an argument. Later on, saying he needed some fresh air, he walked up to the roundabout. Several police had passed him, including a van full of uniformed
officers, but when he reached Kenilworth Green, the last car was moving away.

The place where Stuart's body had lain was still cordoned off with crime tape, but no tape was in the churchyard. He made his way in there just as St Ebba's clock was chiming nine. Where had he left the bag? Up beside a gravestone near the fence, he seemed to remember. But perhaps not, perhaps he had left it on the opposite side, by the grave that overlooked the primary-school playground. There was no sign of it anywhere but Wally began a systematic search of the place, even pushing aside bushes and fumbling about underneath their branches. Then it occurred to him that someone might have found it and put it in the church for safe keeping. Some thoughtful parishioner or sexton, whatever that was. He expected St Ebba's to be locked but it wasn't. The door, blackened wood, thickly studded, creaked open when he pushed it. It swung shut after him but almost soundlessly.

The church was little and very, very old. Wally thought it was in need of a paint, for one of the walls had pale red and grey patches that looked as if they might once have been drawings. It was still and silent, unlit except by the greenish roof light which filtered through the small windows which Wally had expected to be of stained glass but were not. Standing in the nave, looking up at the beamed roof, he felt as if he was in some country place, not a mere quarter-mile from an arterial road in a city. The silence seemed to him unnatural and when he began to walk up towards the chancel he found himself moving on tiptoe. He was very conscious of the lack of any living thing, but not quite a deadness, for he could feel a kind of ancient strength in the place and – though it was nonsense, it was stupid to think this way – something condemnatory, something that frowned upon him and told him, if not in words, that he should leave. He wasn't welcome.

God it couldn't be, he didn't believe in God and never had. But he did believe in the supernatural, he did believe in ghosts and bad spirits and even demons. It must be one of those. He had seen things on television that lived in old churches or came out of graves or stood, waiting, in dark corners. Don't be a fool, he told himself, and searched around for his bag, pushing aside hassocks, smelling the sweetish dusty smell. It wasn't here, he had been sure enough from the start that it wouldn't be. Time to get out, for it was no longer a frown that pursued him but a stare, invisible eyes boring into him, driving him away.

Someone had taken his bag, that was clear, but not necessarily the police. Still, he had to admit that the police, who had been searching the place, were the most likely. Would it be a wise move on his part to go to them in the morning, say, play the innocent and ask them if they'd found his bag he'd left in the churchyard? He knew he wouldn't dare do that, not while there was a chance they didn't know he was the WS of the initials. They had already talked to him, they knew his name. Would they make the connection? Walking home as the sun was setting, he looked with fear rather than interest at the police van and the police car parked outside the Bel Esprit Centre. The place was in darkness. Had he known his bag was even at that moment inside the murder room at the centre, already labelled with an exhibit number, he might have contemplated breaking in and taking it. But he didn't know and, in any case, he felt his nerves were at snapping point, for now he remembered something watching him inside the church, some silent entity.

‘You've been hours,' said Richenda. ‘What have you been up to?'

‘I've been for a walk,' Wally said.

‘You can put the recycling out before you go to bed.'

The bins, one for paper and cardboard, one for cans and bottles, had to be carried upstairs and put by the entrance gate.

‘Can't it wait till the morning? They're supposed to come at eight but they never do.'

‘Just this once they will, you'll see. So do it now.'

‘You could say please.'

‘I could,' said Richenda, ‘but you're not doing me no favours. That recycling is as much your rubbish as mine. More. It's you reads the
Sun
, not me.'

Once he was sure she was in bed and the light off, Wally went into the bathroom. He unscrewed the nuts on the bath panel and removed the printouts he had made. Ten sheets of A4 paper, printed with delectable pictures which, to look at, made the blood rush to his head and his heart pound. He turned them over so that he could only see the blank sides. Once, and not so long ago, it would have been easy to destroy them but no longer. There were certainly no matches in the flat and no gas hob or room heaters to emit blue flames. Nor did he possess a shredder. He dared not put the sheets down the lavatory pan lest he block the drains. So he tore them into small pieces and put the pieces in the paper recycling bin. That bin would be gone and its contents lost by, if not eight, nine in the morning.

He carried the bins upstairs. There was no one about and it was dark in the street. He had once seen a programme on television where a man went into a church and saw something and the thing, whatever it was, followed him back to where he lived. A movement among the cars made him jump, but it was only that girl Noor getting out of her boyfriend's Lexus. He muttered a goodnight to her.

Richenda was asleep. He got in beside her and slept fitfully, to be awakened at eight in the morning by his doorbell ringing. The only time anyone rang that bell was when it was
the postman with a parcel that wouldn't go into a pigeonhole, a rare event. He decided to ignore it but it rang again, more persistently. He got up. Two policemen in plain clothes and two in uniform stood outside. Wally's legs felt the way they had when he had seen Rose Preston-Jones talking to that woman with the two little girls, weak and fragile, scarcely able to hold him up.

They came into his flat, pushed their way in just in case he had tried to stop them. Blakelock and Bashir were the plain clothes and the uniformed ones were called Smith and Leach. For the first few minutes they called him ‘sir'.

‘Am I right in thinking this is your bag, sir?' This was Blakelock.

Wally nodded. He was nodding rather too enthusiastically when Richenda came into the room in a red satin dressing gown, her hair wound round an ancient set of Carmen rollers. She looked at the bag and then at the policemen. ‘It's his all right,' she said. ‘Where did you find it?' Without waiting for a reply, she said to her husband, ‘You never told me you'd lost that bag.'

Wally didn't answer. He took hold of the bag and tried to stand up straight.

‘We'll just hold on to that for the time being, thank you,' said Bashir, and then, ‘Did you touch Stuart Font's body? Did you turn him over?'

Less frightened than he would have been by the enquiry he truly feared, Wally admitted it. He hadn't meant any harm, he hadn't done anything.

Then the question came.

‘Have you got a computer, sir?'

‘Of course he has,' said Richenda.

‘We'll have a look at that,' Blakelock said. ‘We'll do it while we're searching the place.'

Richenda opened her eyes very wide. ‘Searching?'

‘If you'll permit it,' said Bashir. ‘We can get a warrant if you won't, so it comes to the same thing in the end.'

Wally felt faint. This was real terror and somehow quite different from the fear of the supernatural he had experienced the night before. This was reality. He lowered himself into an armchair and slumped into its depths like a sick man. Richenda said something to him but he didn't hear her. The policemen walked about the flat, opening drawers, looking inside cupboards. When they came to his desk, the one called Bashir switched on his computer and asked him for his password.