Embroidering Shrouds (16 page)

Craig fitted one aspect of the crime perfectly, a brutal, opportunistic, bullying sort of criminal. He would be just the sort of person to stand over an old woman half his size and shove her down the stairs, step over her while she moaned with the pain of a broken hip and then three months later to stand over another old woman a third of his weight and batter her with her own walking stick until her head was a pulp.

‘I don't see what a murder's got to do with me. I ain't done a murder.'

It was funny, this honour amongst thieves. They robbed, they supplied drugs to juveniles, they committed armed robbery but charge them with an offence outside their category and they would use their own previous offences as a defence. She could have smiled, except none of it was really funny. With people like Craig Elland there always was, at the end of their acts, a victim.

Mike eyeballed him. ‘You nearly did commit murder, Elland. The guy was dead but they revived him in the ambulance. He was never the same again.'

Elland squared his shoulders, caught something determined in Mike's face and backed off.

‘We may need you to come in to the station,' Joanna said quietly. ‘We want to interview you and your parents.'

‘Why not,' Elland flattened himself against the door, ‘I got nothing to hide.'

They never did. Until they were exposed. Joanna watched him from beneath lowered lids. She didn't have him yet, not by a long chalk, but she was close. Silently she voiced the thought, why look any further? He had opportunity, he could have got in without breaking a window or splintering a door, he could have reached the old lady without her having left her chair. Surely this was how it had been done. More convincing than that he even felt right for the charge, he fitted. But they had no motive apart from his psychological profile.

She became aware that Ralph Elland was waiting for her to speak. She forced herself to look Craig Elland full in his pudgy face. ‘Just for the record,' she said softly, ‘where were you on Sunday afternoon and evening?'

At her side Ralph Elland's shoulders drooped in desperation. It was an attitude of utter defeat, it told Joanna that whatever Marion believed of her son his father knew he was capable of murder, not only in fisticuffs outside a night club but a planned act, brutal and cowardly. But Craig was ready with his answer. They always were. Alibis were practised as assiduously as a part in an amateur dramatic production.

‘I was ‘ere all afternoon,' he said defensively. ‘I were watching the footie with me dad, Man U was playing.' He looked to his father for confirmation.

His father gave it.

Elland leered at Joanna. ‘And then we ‘ad our dinner.'

‘And then what?'

‘We went to Evensong,' Marion said faintly.

‘I went up the pub with me mates. Watched the rugby on Sky.'

‘Which pub?'

‘The Cattle Market.'

‘And who were the mates?'

‘Tony Arrandale, Wayne Chiltern, Scott Trent.'

A well-known set of villains.

‘Fine. OK if we check up with them?'

Joanna knew Mike would be voicing the same thoughts as she was. What was the point when alibis from these three could be bought cheaper than a pint of warm beer? Craig shrugged, almost as though he knew the worthlessness of the gesture.

Something struck Joanna, usually in this type of situation parents were swift to defend their offspring against police interrogation. They screamed intimidation and victimization when their beloved sons had recently been released from prison and supposedly wiped the slate clean. Yet neither Ralph nor Marion were offering one word of defence. They knew him best. Even Craig himself wasn't giving out the usual objections.

‘We'll want to talk to you again, Craig,' she said, ‘after I've chatted to your mates.'

He met her eyes fearlessly. ‘They'll enjoy that,' he said, ‘bit of attention from a female dick.'

Joanna gave her widest smile. ‘One of the perks of the job, Craig.'

She waited until they were in the car before voicing both their thoughts. ‘So, there we have it.'

‘What if they were all seen at the pub right the way through Sunday?'

‘Matthew couldn't be very precise about the time of death. Even if they were seen in the pub it would only have been until closing time, they could have gone round afterwards, they could have gone round before. What's important is that Craig Elland – a nasty piece of work even by my yardstick – had the opportunity to borrow his mother's key to Spite Hall. It answers some of the questions we've been posing.'

‘And motive?'

Joanna chewed her thumbnail for a minute. ‘What if Marion hinted that Nan had money stashed away? Easy to get the key; in fact, the entire bunch of mates could be the ones –'

‘A bit obvious, don't you think?'

‘Well, Craig doesn't exactly strike me as a subtle sort of a guy.'

‘No.'

‘Try this for size, Mike. We have three mates on a burglary spree. In July they're joined by a fourth – much more violent friend – recently released from prison. As soon as
he's
on the scene petty theft is no longer the object, the emphasis has shifted so the objective is the violence and terrorism itself.'

Mike started the engine. ‘It fits, Jo. Trouble is, we've no scrap of proof.'

‘So, we need to send some officers to interview Craig's three friends. We need to know what they were all wearing and we need to get the clothes to forensics. Agreed? And it might be an idea to speak to Cecily Marlowe again and jog her memory.'

Mike nodded, picked up the phone and rapped out a few instructions.

But as they approached the outskirts of the town he blurted out, ‘And what about the candlesticks and the pension book?'

Joanna gave a deep, heartfelt sigh. ‘I don't know, Mike,' she said. ‘Let's revisit Spite Hall, talk to Patterson and his grandson.'

The day was turning gloomy with thick black clouds bubbling up in the sky. As they turned off the Macclesfield Road the clouds finally burst and blasted rain against their windscreen, drowning the wiper blades however fast they swiped at the water. It made the scene ahead even more depressing.

As usual Brushton Grange displayed no lights; it looked derelict, deserted. She and Mike picked their way along the narrow, mossy path, made even more slippery by the incessant rain. Gutters spilled their contents over the brim. ‘I'll never forget this place,' Joanna said. ‘If Frankenstein himself answered the door I wouldn't be surprised.'

Korpanski resisted the temptation to frighten her with a shout and his King Kong impersonation, instead pulling on the bell handle. The peal of the front-door bell echoed inside the house and Joanna was again almost tempted to retreat. The house surely
was
empty this time. She glanced up at the attic windows, saw a face jerk back, and picked up the bass thump of techno music. Mike clanged the front bell again, and then they heard slow, painful steps tapping across the hall towards them. Arnold Patterson pulled the door open.

‘So you have come back.' He twisted his head to stare at the ceiling. ‘
He
said you would.
He
said you'd want to interview him.'

‘Can we talk to you first about your sister, Mr Patterson?'

‘I've nothing to say. She's dead. We're well rid. Best she's forgot.'

‘Surely you want her killer caught?'

Patterson gave her a long penetrating stare. In it she read his blunt comment that her killer was morally no worse than the woman herself.

But it did not justify murder. However evil the victim had been nothing justified the brutality of that assault.

‘Mr Patterson,' Joanna tried again, ‘the killer might strike again.'

This time Patterson's face gave the ghost of a smile.

‘They've struck before.'

He seemed to switch off then. ‘What do you want to know?'

‘Why don't we go in your living room? You'll be more comfortable there. You can sit down.'

Patterson turned and walked back inside the house.

The hall was as dark as a cave with a musty smell of damp. Their footsteps echoed unevenly.

Korpanski's huge, flat feet, Joanna's rubber-tipped heels, the metal tip of Arnold Patterson's walking cane, the soft shuffle of his slippers.

The room was as she'd remembered it, scarred quarry-tiled floor, threadbare loose covers on sagging chairs, windows smeared with dust, and today rain whipping against the glass. It was as cheerless as Bob Cratchit's workplace before the conversion of Scrooge.

Patterson sank into one of the chairs. ‘I can tell you nothing about Nan', he said, ‘for the past fifty year.'

‘Then tell me about Nan the child.'

Korpanski was shifting his weight from foot to foot. She knew what he was thinking, that this was a waste of time. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't.

She prompted him. ‘You were friends then, Mr Patterson, as children?'

‘Aye.'

‘All the time you were children?'

‘Most of it.' Some of the lines in his face seemed to smooth out. ‘All children fall out,' he said, smiling.

Joanna pushed away the memory of her own sister: hair-pulling, tale-telling, noisy quarrels meant to deflect the attention of rowing parents. But they were always too busy with their own conflicts to even notice.

‘But as you grew up?'

‘The war came,' Patterson said. ‘It changed everything.' He stopped for a moment, his eyes far away from either Brushton Grange or Spite Hall. ‘Everything,' he repeated. ‘I were called up, plenty others were too – young lads.' He looked straight at Joanna. ‘We saw things,' he said, ‘things we never should have. It made us different, different from them at home who'd gossiped and sewed their way through those years.'

Joanna leaned forward to see Patterson's face better. ‘Was that when you fell out with your sister?'

Patterson seemed not to have heard her. ‘Nothing was the same,' he said. ‘We wanted to come home, dreamed about being here again, walking through fields that was green and damp and quiet, and when we got back …' There was a deep, despairing depression in his face.

Mike cleared his throat. ‘It was bound to be different.'

It was his contribution. Joanna turned to look at him. The war had affected him too; Mike's father had been a loyal Pole, repatriated in Leek, married finally to a local girl. Had it not been for the war, the child of Demetri Korpanski would almost certainly have been one hundred per cent Polish, brought up in Warsaw or Gdansk or some other place in the fatherland. German ambitions had changed that too.

‘When did you and your sister fall out?'

‘The end of the war as we came home and our father died. Me and David, we'd fought for peace. But when we came home,' Patterson drew in a long sighing breath, ‘there was none,' he said simply. ‘It had been blown away by the gunfire.'

It was all the explanation he was going to give them.

Patterson's chin was sunk on to his chest. He was far away. Far away and long ago.

Lydia put her pencil down, the time for truth seemed near. Strange how rain, streaming down windows, helped her to see pictures long ago relegated to the back of her mind. Arnold, whipping his hoop along the drive. It wasn't gravelled then, a muddied lane in wet weather, raising fine clouds of dust in hot spells. And the day she recalled had been hot, too hot for her, already too plump to do anything but mope slowly towards the house. Not too hot for her brother and sister. She screwed up her eyes to see the vision all the clearer. Nan, in white pinafore, hair streaming down her back, running behind Arnold, trying to catch him. But Arnold's legs were long and strong – five years older than Nan – and he didn't want to give Nan a turn of his hoop. Nan's voice, clear as a church bell, ringing in her ears. ‘Wait, Arnie, wait for me. Please wait.' And Arnold had stopped dead.

Lydia dropped her face into her hands. She had forgotten the way Nan always called him Arnie, the way he had responded to her affection. Arnie, her very own pet name. Oh, how cruel life could be.

Lydia leaned back in her chair, gasping with the sadness of it all, tears streaming down her cheeks, mirroring the rain washing down the windows. How cruel. They three had started off with everything, a mother, a father, a home, money, and how empty their lives had become. They had lost it all, ended up with nothing. Their homes were a mockery. Mother and father, naturally, both dead. The money, Lydia's face twisted, little of it left now. They didn't even have each other to share their grief with, or mourn jointly as brother and sister for the lost one of the trio.
‘Wait for me. Wait for me, Arnie.'

Arnie would no sooner come to Quills than she would climb the four steps to the front door of Brushton Grange. Would she even go to her sister's funeral? Would he? Would they forget the past – ever? Or were the scars too deep? Too old? Lydia stood up, pacing the room in a burst of agitated energy foreign to her. She was the lazy one, all her energy had been cerebral not physical. Nan and Arnold had been the active ones. Always.

The thump thump of bass beat drew them up the two flights of stairs to the top-floor attic rooms. They had thought their footsteps would be drowned out by the noise and their arrival would be a surprise but Christian was the one to spring the surprise.

As Joanna's foot touched the top step the door to their right was flung open. Christian gave them a quizzical look.

‘Back again, Inspector?'

The dry, sweet smoke of marijuana seeped out from the room beyond. A girl was draped around Christian. Pale-skinned, with long, straggly hair and spaced-out hazel eyes, wearing a long skirt and brown short-sleeved T-shirt. Christian seemed hardly aware she was there.

‘Guess what,' he said to Joanna, ‘my Aunt Nan's gone and left me everything. Solicitor rang this morning and told me.'