‘She’s not here.’
The lie was patent. ‘Who was that woman who just went into the house?’
‘I didn’t see any woman,’ Bysouth returned. ‘Probably the cleaner.’
He stared her down. And short of forcing their way into the farmhouse and searching for Vera Bysouth, there was nothing they could do, as well he knew.
On their return, they found the incident room in a state of mild excitement. While they’d been out, at last a break – of sorts – had happened.
A delivery man, just back from holiday, having seen for the first time the appeal in the local paper for information on the dead woman, had come into the station and offered what he thought might be some useful intelligence.
Several times, he said, during the week before his holiday, while he’d been delivering feedstuffs to the farm, he’d noticed a blue Fiat, with a woman in the driving seat, parked in the same spot where Jenny had parked the car. He’d wondered what she was doing. It wasn’t the sort of area frequented by picnickers and sightseers.
Nowhere to sit except scrubby, sodden fields full of reeds and nothing to see except more of the same – and anyway, it was hardly picnic weather, was it? Plus, it had been earlyish in the morning each time he’d seen her. He’d thought she might have been some sort of artist, drawing or photographing the flooded landscape.
Unfortunately, that was all he could tell them. He hadn’t noticed the number of the car, or even much about the occupant,
except that it was a woman, he’d been too concerned with negotiating his truck down the narrow lane.
Caution dictated that no automatic assumption should be made that the car had belonged to the dead woman, but no one seemed to be doubting that it had, that its driver had ended up in the Kyne. And what about the car, had anyone else seen it – where was it now? More door-stepping might provide some of the answers, and the first of those to be questioned were the folks at Kyneford. ‘The Bysouths?’ asked Jenny.
‘And someone else,’ said Abigail. ‘Mrs Osborne.’
‘I’m going to find a few minutes to visit Ted during my lunchtime,’ she told Jenny. ‘I need to stock my fridge up as well, so I’ll kill two birds with one stone and get him something nice to eat while I’m at it.’
‘He’ll appreciate that after two weeks of hospital food. Give him my love and tell him to watch it, with those nurses,‘Jenny said. ‘I’ll pop in when I can.’
‘I will.’ Abigail laughed. She and the middle-aged, laconic sergeant had been partners for a very long time, and she found the picture of Carmody chasing the nurses, even had he been in the best of health, entertaining. Possible, of course, anything was possible, but she thought he’d be too afraid of what his Maureen would do if she caught him, for one thing.
She wandered around the shelves at Tesco’s, shopping for one, since Ben – don’t think about it! – was unlikely to be there to share her meals for a while. What she did buy still looked depressingly meagre and spinsterish at the bottom of the trolley, especially following the woman in front of her, who seemed to have been shopping for England. How many cats did she have, for goodness’ sake, twenty-five tins of Kit-e-Kat, and three bags of kibble? Not to mention how many children. Dozens of packets of crisps, cornflake boxes the size of suitcases and enough sliced white bread to feed starving Africa. Abigail’s own supplies for a week barely filled one plastic bag when she’d emptied her trolley, even with the huge box of chocolate gingers she knew Carmody doted on and a bunch of grapes. She hadn’t been able to find anything else she thought he might fancy that didn’t need cooking, except fruit and chocolates.
On the way out, pausing to adjust her slipping shoulder bag, she caught a glimpse, through the potted plants that screened off the coffee shop, of a woman with pale auburn hair. She paused and looked again. Yes, it was!
She was sitting alone, in front of a cup of coffee and the largest cream pastry Abigail had ever seen, an expression of absolute bliss on her face as she dug in her fork and transferred the load to her mouth.
Reluctant to interrupt such communion between a woman and her comfort, Abigail knew she might never get another chance to speak to her. She slipped into the coffee area through the space between a huge indoor tree and a
Fatsia japonica
. Plonking her plastic bag on the floor, she slid into the free chair opposite the woman, who looked up with a guilty start, at the same time trying with a futile, involuntary gesture to shield the plate containing the cream cake. And then her face became suffused, a burning ugly red sweeping in a tide from her neck to her hairline.
‘Mrs Bysouth? Mrs Vera Bysouth?’ Abigail pushed her warrant card across. ‘I’m Abigail Moon, Lavenstock CID.’
‘I know who you are,’ the woman whispered, as if afraid of even raising her voice. ‘I saw you earlier on at the farm.’
‘I’d like to talk to you for a minute or two. Let me get you another coffee, you’ve almost finished that.’
‘No – I really must be going.’ She began to gather her bags together.
‘You can’t leave that delicious cake.’
Vera Bysouth looked at the pastry, wavered, and was lost. ‘Well …’
‘Won’t be a sec,’ Abigail said, hoping the service would be quick, so that Mrs Bysouth wouldn’t have time to change her mind and disappear. She was lucky, and in a few minutes was back with two coffees and a wrapped sandwich for her own lunch. She was famished, but not even in the interest of solidarity and gaining evidence could she have faced one of those sickly confections sitting on the plate opposite, which Vera Bysouth shouldn’t have been eating either, in view of her pasty complexion, and a figure that was flabby, if not fat. Along with the auburn hair, she possessed such pale lashes and brows, such
light eyes that she might almost have been an albino. Even her lips were colourless.
‘Thank you – Inspector, isn’t it?’ she breathed, accepting the coffee.
‘Abigail.’
The woman opposite her opened two packets of sugar and stirred them into her coffee. Her voice was very nearly inaudible, and her frightened glance slid from side to side as she whispered, ‘I can’t tell you anything.’
I haven’t asked, yet, thought Abigail. Vera picked up her fork again. ‘My one treat,’ she explained, softly apologetic, though she didn’t look as though she was enjoying it now. Shame to have spoiled the moment for her, but you couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this. ‘I know I shouldn’t,’ she went on, jabbing with the fork, ‘but it’s the only time I get to myself, once a week.’ She ate the last morsel of the pastry and pushed away the halffinished coffee. ‘Look, I have to go now, get the shopping done, he expects me back by half-past two.’ He. Not Reuben, not my husband. He.
‘Please don’t go just yet. Give me a minute or two of your time. It’s about that poor woman who was drowned. Somebody, somewhere, must be wondering what’s happened to her, and we have to find out who she was and let them know. We’ve very recently learnt that what was probably her car was parked several times in the passing space in the lane below your farm –’
‘No! You’re wrong!’
Abigail gave her a steady look. ‘I don’t think so. Your husband may have been busy about the farm, and not noticed it –’ and she could believe that if she wished! – ‘but I think the spot is probably quite visible from the farm windows, and you may have seen it there.’
‘No,’ Vera insisted, but didn’t raise her voice at all. As if keeping her voice down was another way of obliterating her personality, making herself even more invisible. The hushed whispering was irritating, Abigail had to strain to hear her. But perhaps the poor woman had come to be afraid even of the sound of her own voice.
A waitress, clearing the next table, smiled in a friendly manner, unaware of their tension. Automatically, Vera smiled back. A
weary, defeated smile, but a smile, all the same. She’d once been pretty, perhaps very pretty. Why didn’t she make more of herself, darken her eyebrows and lashes, put a bit of colour on her face? Stupid question. If she had the ability to think that way, she’d be able to break through the inertia and resolve her hopeless situation.
‘If you know anything, you really should tell me.’
‘No, I don’t,’ Vera insisted wanly. For don’t, read can’t. If what Abigail had been told of Bysouth’s previous history was true, his wife was obviously still terrified of him, of being hit if she spoke out of turn, but she was probably even more terrified of losing him. It was something Abigail had seen, time and time again, during her stint with Domestic Violence, an attitude against which you battled, but could do little. But she had to try.
‘Mrs Bysouth, Vera, I know this is a painful subject for you, but you have in the past come to us when you’ve been in trouble –’
‘It’s not like that now! You don’t realise! He’s different.’
That, too, Abigail had heard. Ad nauseam. And knew how little it meant. ‘We can help. You don’t
have
to stay with him, you know.’
‘You don’t understand, do you? He – all right, yes, he’s inclined to lose his temper a bit, especially when he’s had a drink or two, but he’s not always like that … he can be a real charmer, you know.’
Abigail nearly choked on a mouthful of coffee. Reuben. Well, you had to believe her. If she said so.
Vera stood up, gathered her things together. ‘I have to go. And you mustn’t tell him I’ve spoken to you – you must promise!’ Her voice was still barely above a whisper, even in her extreme distress.
‘Not a thing you should say to a lady, but you look tired,’ Ted announced bluntly. He wasn’t looking good himself yet, or anything like it, but a whole lot better than he had, considering he’d been pushed three storeys down a fire escape when struggling with the toerag he was apprehending. His leg was still in traction, but some of the bruises on his face were healing.
‘Well, I’m no lady, so I don’t mind. But tired isn’t in it. Knackered, more like it.’
‘Case going badly?’
It wasn’t that. For the first time in her life, she was sleeping badly, worried about Ben. Worried about the promotion board, too, though she wasn’t going public on that. She was beginning to feel superstitious, talking about it, even to Ted Carmody, whom she’d trust with her life. Especially Ted. The big Liverpudlian, a stolid, salt of the earth detective sergeant, had been her mentor when she’d first come here to Lavenstock and could read her like a book.
She smiled. ‘Cases, Ted, cases, in the plural. You’ve heard there’s been another one? And neither of them exactly spinning along … But never mind that, you know what they’ve said: no shop talk or they’ll ban all police personnel from the ward.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘Don’t be difficult. Here you are. Only grapes and chocs, but they might take your mind off the hospital food. Oh, and Deeley’s sent you a couple of westerns.’
‘The food’s not all that bad. Bloody marvellous after Maureen’s – but don’t tell her that.’ He’d asked his wife for a photo of her to keep on his locker, and Maureen had been so surprised by this evidence of tenderness in her laconic spouse she’d brought three. One childood one of their two daughters and their son, another a holiday snap, Carmody towering above his chirpy little wife, and one of herself when she was seventeen. Not much resemblance to her now, but it showed why Carmody had fallen in love with her. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘my stitches.’
‘Do they hurt?’
‘Only when I eat.’
Along with his fractured femur, he’d suffered a broken collarbone and several cuts to his face, which hadn’t improved his long, doleful countenance, but he’d been assured the scars were only temporary. ‘Come on, blossom,’ he pleaded, ‘bring me up to speed on this latest, that’ll make me feel better than chocolate gingers. Bored bloody rigid in here, I am. Homicide at Lavenstock College, and I have to miss it – I don’t believe it!’
‘You’d better.’ Seeing he wasn’t going to be deflected, she put it briefly together for him, and then told him of the latest developments, the possibility of the same gun having been
used in the two cases, and Cleo Atkins’s sighting of a gun in Mrs Osborne’s house. ‘She only caught a glimpse – she may well have been mistaken, but the whole set-up around there’s a bit peculiar: that woman was found in the river just below Kyneford, and a woman who might fit her description was seen parked in the lane between the farm and the cottage several times the same week.’ She stopped, seeing the odd expression on his face. ‘What have I said?’
‘There’s no such thing as coincidence, right? Bloody wrong, and this proves it!’ He achieved a smug expression, despite his stitches, boredom forgotten.
‘What coincidence? What proves it?’
‘Well, there’s this lovely old girl in here, name of Eileen Totterbridge, works for Dorrie Lockett. Seventy-odd and spry as a cricket –’
‘Dorrie Lockett? You mean Sam Leadbetter’s aunt? Sorry, go on.’
‘She had a hip replacement only two days ago, and she’s taking’em at their word when they say she has to exercise it.’
‘I know,’ Abigail said. ‘My aunt’s just had one. They get them to walk around in a few days. She won’t be in long.’
‘That’s just the point. This one’s already on her feet. Any road, they wheeled my bed down to X-ray this morning and while she was waiting for her turn in the unit, she came up and started chatting. A right old rattle-can she is, jaws never stop, but she’s OK. I’ve been down to X-ray before and I know how long it can take, so I’d taken the
Advertiser
with me. She sees Wetherby’s photo on the front page and we get talking about the murder – and it turns out she works for Mrs Wetherby as well as Dorrie Lockett. But soon as she knew I was a policeman she shut up like a clam. As they do,’ he added with resignation. ‘But you get her talking and you might learn a lot. Worth a try, any rate.’