Killing a Unicorn (10 page)

Read Killing a Unicorn Online

Authors: Marjorie Eccles

BOOK: Killing a Unicorn
5.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
‘You won't find him,' Chip was saying, ‘we've already looked.'
Not professionally, Kate thought, and held her breath, hoping Crouch would have the sense not to voice the grumbles he'd made to her on their way here: Bloody amateurs, trampling down the evidence, any hopes of finding anything to do with Bibi Morgan's murder now gone for a burton. Why the hell couldn't they have waited until we got here? But Crouch was being unusually silent, leaving her to get on with it.
‘I expect you've been told that later on we shall need you to come and identify Ms Morgan's body — when we've finished here, that is. I'm sorry, it's a rotten thing to have to do, but I'm afraid it's necessary.' He accepted this with a nod, without raising his head. His feet planted squarely on the ground, leaning forward slightly, hands on knees, he was apparently absorbed in tracing, with the toe of a well-polished loafer, the complicated geometrical pattern on the oriental rug, its predominant burnt oranges and peacock blues still bright and glowing, ancient and threadbare though it was. ‘What I have to say now may come as rather a shock, Mr Calvert,' she ploughed on. ‘We've already conducted a post-mortem, it was pushed forward to accommodate the pathologist, who had to catch a flight abroad. I'm afraid he came to a rather disturbing conclusion.'
‘Are you saying it wasn't an accident?' he asked quickly, glancing up. There was an odd, strained note in his voice. ‘You mean that she …?' He resumed his study of the rug again. ‘Well, I didn't imagine it would be straightforward.'
Kate didn't look at Crouch, but she could feel his interest sharpening. He was stroking his chin with his big, hairy hand, and she distinctly heard the faint rasp of bristles. She addressed the bereaved man gently. ‘No, Ms Morgan didn't take her own life. But it was no accident, either. I'm sorry, Mr Calvert.'
The silence became acute. Chip met her gaze fully at last, but straight away she saw that even this news wasn't as much of a shock as one might have expected it would be. She didn't pursue the line that opened up, just filed his reaction away for future reference. ‘That leaves only one other possibility, then, doesn't it?' His voice was harsh. ‘How?'
‘She was stabbed before being thrown into the stream. The current apparently took her down to the waterfall pool.'
‘It's always been strong. We used to try rafting there, when we were boys, but we always came to grief long before we ever got as far as the bridge, too many rocks and sharp flints on the stream bed … Stabbed? Oh, God.'
That, at least, had surprised him. It wasn't, Crouch thought, watching him carefully, what he'd expected to hear. ‘Mr Calvert, if you've any reason to think of someone with a motive to have killed her, please say so.'
‘For God's sake, it could have been anyone! The grounds here cover thirty acres, all told, including the gardens and woodland, and not everywhere's barbed-wire fenced, you know, anyone can get in via the woods. Anyway, does there have to be a motive these days? Someone they've let out from the loony-bin, no doubt -'
Crouch interrupted. ‘Random killings are much rarer than you'd think. Most murders occur within the circle of people known to the victim.'
‘What are you suggesting?'
‘Simply that we shall have to question everyone. The family, the people she worked with. All those she might have been in contact with over the last few days, someone
she might have met recently — she worked at the country club, didn't she?'
‘Yes, she did. But she'd only been going in for an occasional few hours lately, because of her ankle and the standing about it involved. They'd asked her if she'd help them out, very busy time of year for them, but she wasn't there yesterday. Anyway, as far as I'm aware, she hadn't met anyone new recently.'
‘New people must come and go all the time, place like the country club.'
‘Not all that many, actually. Too far off the beaten track for that. Most of them are regulars, people she's known ever since she went to work there.'
‘We'll see what they have to say, all the same.'
He shrugged, looking almost bored with the idea. ‘You'd be wasting your time.'
Crouch said, watching him closely, ‘Tell us about you and your wife, Mr Calvert. Did you and she have any problems?'
‘My partner. We weren't married. And what the hell do you mean, problems?'
‘Sorry, I meant were you and Ms Morgan getting on well lately?'
‘Why don't you just call her Bibi?' Chip said wearily. Jonathan wasn't alone in disliking the euphemism. ‘Of course we didn't have any bloody problems! Bibi wasn't the sort to have problems with. Not with anyone. Ask them, anyone will tell you that.'
Somebody that perfect had problems to begin with, thought Crouch. He said, ‘I believe she came to live with you here about two years ago.'
‘So?'
‘And before that?'
Pause. ‘She lived in a village near York.'
‘Near York? Tell me how you met.'
‘What the bloody hell does that matter?' He stared at Crouch, then shrugged. ‘We met when I went up there for a few days' racing. Accommodation's always hard to find
during the season, but I'd been told of this hotel — fair way out of York, nearly half-way back to Leeds to tell the truth, but worth the drive. Country pub that's been tarted up and got itself a good reputation for food. Quiet, but it was OK. It was Bibi's mother's place. Bibi helped run it.'
‘So you met her there and brought her back here to live with you?'
‘Not then. That was years ago — when we first met. It was only when I went back several years later that we -' He broke off and his gaze wandered to a point somewhere above their heads and remained fixed while he presumably fought for control. Only somehow it didn't seem like that. That some inner struggle might indeed be going on was indicated by the concentrated swivelling of his desk chair, ever so slowly in perfect forty-five degree arcs, back and forth, back and forth, but Crouch was beginning to doubt it — it seemed to him the man's mind had detached itself from the proceedings and was off on some other tack. He felt like giving him a prod, waking him to the realization of just how bloody serious the situation was. Clearly, Chip Calvert wasn't a deep thinker, or a quick one, but what the hell? His wife — OK, his partner, then — had just been
offed
! Surely, that ought to have roused him to some protestations of anger, disbelief, any of the usual emotions shown by the nearest and dearest of those who'd been untimely killed. But — nothing. You might almost have said he had expected it.
Chip was indeed wandering. He was far away, in a strange country, the country of the mind, one he didn't inhabit any longer than he had to. But the lump of misery which had been inside him ever since they'd first missed Jasie, when he didn't arrive for breakfast as usual, prattling happily away, ready to tuck into his bowl of Coco Pops, was now expanding like a balloon and threatening to choke him. He was mortally afraid he might be going to blub, in front of this gorilla of a detective. Up to now, he'd had no trouble in accepting with his mind that Bibi was dead, perhaps because he'd always subconsciously been
aware that this was likely to happen — but it was only now he felt the reality of it, like an actual, physical pain, somewhere in the region of his breastbone. He felt his blood beating. Perhaps he was going to have a stroke, like his grandfather, Jack Rathbone. ‘She was so beautiful,' he said, out of nowhere.
Above his head, the glances of the two detectives met — a crack at last — but Chip didn't notice.
He was seeing Bibi as he'd first seen her. Dazzlingly fair. Sweet and so — yes, you had to believe it, so innocent, standing behind the hotel desk, a modern angel in a navy suit and white blouse, her name tag, Bianca, on her lapel. Truly an angel. And just as unattainable.
And then another picture superimposed itself — the burnt-out house, the child screaming at the window, the fire brigade. He scraped his chair back and pushed it aside so violently that it went spinning several feet on the polished boards. He strode to the cupboard in the corner and lifted out a bottle of Glenmorangie. He held it up, but both police officers shook their heads. ‘Don't mind if I do, then?' he muttered, pouring a generous portion into a heavy glass whisky tumbler. Sun not over the yardarm by a long chalk, but what the hell?
He went back to the desk and took a deep swig of the spirit, then swung round to the desk and put the glass down carefully. Suddenly, his back to them, he put his head in his hands.
Crouch allowed the man time to pull himself together then said, ‘Would you mind coming to sit over here, sir?'
‘What?' Chip swung round to face them again, his face ravaged.
‘Over here.' Crouch moved to sit on the window seat and indicated Chip take the armchair he'd vacated. It was lower than the window seat, which would give him an advantage over the other man. ‘I can't talk to you when you're on the go like a blasted yo-yo,' he said, forgetting his morning's resolve to be polite. Despite the open window,
the room was hot and he was tired. It wasn't yet much after ten and he'd been up since dawn, he'd already worked five hours, one of them in compulsory attendance at the PM Logie had called for six, and his never very elastic patience was being stretched to its limits. And it was going to be a long day, with most of it still to go.
Chip, to his surprise, obeyed without demur, his show of emotion apparently having spent itself. If Crouch had hoped to shake him out of his lethargy with his brusqueness, he hadn't succeeded. He sank back into the armchair and his shoulders sagged. He fingered the scar on his cheek.
‘Right, then, what is it you haven't been telling us?' Crouch asked suddenly. Chip's head jerked up.
Watch it, Dave! Kate apostrophized silently. She could read the warning signs, the temper flecks in his eyes. (And you watch it, Kate, too. Not your problem, how he conducts his interviews. Oh, but it is, answered a silent voice inside, how could it be other?) And then, as if she'd spoken aloud, Crouch almost visibly took control of his rising anger, his mouth relaxed. He said quietly, ‘If we don't have all the facts, we shan't have much chance of finding out who killed her.'
‘Oh, for God's sake, I know who killed her!'
Crouch stared at him levelly for some time. ‘Perhaps, then, you'd be so good as to share that knowledge with us.'
The heavy-handed sarcasm went unnoticed. ‘It has to be that bloody stalker! The one sending her the threatening letters … as I said, some nutter from the loony-bin.'
‘Well,' said Crouch carefully, ‘and how long has this been going on?'
Fran lets herself in through a side door when she arrives at Membery, just in time to see Chip disappearing into his study with the same two detectives who were directing operations last night. They'd said they would very likely want to see her again, and she's steeled herself for another interrogation. She's ready for it, but she hasn't prepared herself for the shock that's waiting for her when she at last finds Alyssa, sitting in Bibi's kitchen with a barely touched plate of toast on the table in front of her.
‘But Jasie wouldn't ever have gone off, on his own, just like that!' she repeats for the umpteenth time, later, after she's prised Alyssa away from Rene Brooker's lamentations, though even as she says it she isn't sure whether that's reassurance or not, imagining the alternatives. It's a large, well-shaped hand she's holding, brown and tough as old shoe leather, the nails filed short, with rough cuticles due to gardening that no amount of hand-cream can soften. What a capable hand, but how cold it is! As if realizing this, Alyssa withdraws it gently before standing up and beginning to pace about again. She seems incapable of sitting still. Somehow, they've found themselves in the hall, which is stuffy, but even so the coolest place in the house to be, apart from the old library, on a day fast becoming hotter than yesterday. Even though the garden's closed, Jane Arrow is over in the office, coping with the activities that go on behind the scenes. Life must go on, her every action says. The police have politely indicated they would prefer the family not to be further involved in the
search for Jasie, but they should make themselves available to answer questions. Jonathan has vented his frustration at this by taking refuge in his inexorable, sustaining practice routine, and Jilly has disappeared to deal with the missing suitcase, then with schedules and bookings, a chore which can't be put off, no matter what. Inspector Crouch and his sergeant are still closeted with Chip.
‘Shouldn't you be at work, Fran?' Alyssa looks at her as though it's only just struck her that this, despite everything, is an ordinary workday for everyone else.
‘Don't worry about that. I rang and told them I wouldn't be in.'
Fran had felt warmed by the immediate support she received from O.S.O.T., the reassurances that all would be taken care of until she felt she could come back into work. She'd told them she would have to look after Jasie, at least temporarily — she couldn't leave that to the two old women, willing as they both were, nor, she felt, to Chip, who was fine with Jasie in a blokeish sort of way, but no good with the routines involved in looking after a child, much less the emotional issues that would have to be faced. ‘You stay until you're sure everything's OK,' Connor had reassured her. ‘We'll cope.'
‘A day or two,' she'd promised. Until things here resumed something like normality — though how that could ever be again, she simply couldn't imagine at that moment. ‘Probably only until Monday. I'll have a word with Kath now, if you'll put me through.'
Kath is nominally her assistant, intelligent, middle-aged and unflappable — nominally, because she is the one who really runs the office. ‘Sure you must stay and see to the little boy,' she said immediately. ‘What's an account with Colgate compared with that?'
Fran had never imagined then, only an hour ago, that Jasie wouldn't be here, at Membery, to be looked after. She once more reassures Alyssa, as she begins worrying again, that he'll be found soon, has to be, there must be some simple explanation.
Yet even as she utters the comforting platitudes, she knows with dull certainty that there'll be no such thing, that Jasie isn't just playing truant, misbehaving, or anything so simple. He's never been a specially disobedient child, usually doing what his mother told him, perhaps sensing, as children do, how she worried about him, and hadn't yet rebelled against this over-protectiveness — apart from refusing to let her hold his hand on the way to school.
He attends the village school. Chip had wanted him put through the system, to be processed in the same way he and his brothers had been, he thought his name should have been put down for Marlborough, but Bibi had held out against it. She preferred to have him under her eye, and the village school has a good reputation. It's small, but it has a ratio of three teachers, plus the headmistress, to about fifty pupils. She used to insist on Jasie being walked or driven there each morning, and met in the afternoon. She couldn't always do this herself because of the shifts she worked at the country club, but someone else has always been there as a stand-in, mostly but not always Humphrey, who looks on Jasie as an honorary grandchild. ‘It's only half a mile,' Chip would say, clamorously backed up by Jasie, ‘he can go himself. Don't namby-pamby the boy.'
But Bibi wouldn't hear of it. ‘Apart from anything else, you haven't seen it, it's like Piccadilly Circus down there, especially in the mornings.' Which may be an exaggeration, but everyone knew what she meant. Being a country school, it has a large catchment area, and the mothers, arriving with one minute to spare before school starts, dishevelled and distracted with the morning battle of getting husbands off and the children ready for the school run, park all over the place and don't look where they're going, jockeying for position on the village street in their 4x4s to decant their loads of children before heading home for that blessedly peaceful cup of coffee. ‘Anyway,' she would add, making sure Jasie wasn't listening, ‘it's not
safe for children anywhere, these days. Nobody lets their children go to school alone.'
It made sense and, their eyes meeting, Chip had given in. But everyone else thought he also had a point, she
was
over-protective of the child. It doesn't, however, seem to have done him any harm, as yet. He loves the village school, where his friends call him Jasie, instead of James, a name he'd immediately decided everyone else should adopt.
A sudden memory comes to Fran, of walking to school with him one morning, reaching old Walter Grysdale's house, where he and the black dog with the plumed tail live. As usual, the dog was loose, dashing out to terrify passers-by with his hysterical barking and his bared teeth, dancing around their legs and snapping at their heels. He's all noise, but Fran has always been wary of dogs, especially those of uncertain temper, she's never managed to get over being knocked to the ground by a large one, as a child. Pathetic, really, too sad for words. She can laugh at herself but she's very much ashamed of the weakness and tries to pretend the black dog doesn't scare her.
On that particular day, Jasie must have sensed her shrinking. He took hold of her hand and said, kindly, ‘Don't be frightened, Fran, I'll look after you.' At the memory of that, now, she's in danger of becoming unravelled.
At that moment, Chip and the police officers emerge from his study, and Chip, with a starched face, disappears, accompanied by the young constable, to undergo the ordeal of formally identifying Bibi, and what the woman sergeant presently tells them shocks Fran beyond tears.
She says that a post-mortem has been performed on Bibi and that, without possibility of doubt, she was killed before she was put into the stream. With a sharp instrument, she says, in the jargon of their tribe, police-speak for knife, Fran supposes. She adds that in the circumstances, Jasie's disappearance is being regarded as a cause of major concern, and there are grave fears for the little boy, but
Inspector Crouch has taken over both investigations and they can rest assured no stone will be left unturned. She goes on to say that if any of them can remember anything out of the ordinary that has happened recently, or if they know of anyone with a grudge against Bibi, they should say so.
It's crazy, to think of anyone hating Bibi enough to kill her — hating her at all, in fact. As crazy, for that matter, as to believe that some unknown maniac has been hanging around the garden, waiting his chance to pounce on her, before turning his attentions to Jasie. Fran finds difficulty in taking such a bizarre notion on board, and stares at the policewoman in disbelief. She's a colourless sort of person, but she's reached the rank of sergeant, so presumably there's more to her than meets the eye. Her name's Kate Colville, and she has a mop of frizzy hair, which Fran thinks she really ought to wear in a less unattractive style. Her clothes are nothing to speak of, either. Perhaps she's trying to be anonymous. If so, she's succeeded. But she's being kind to Alyssa, who isn't bearing up over this as well as she normally weathers the
Sturms und Drangs
of life. This last blow has been especially cruel to her: she adores Jasie, encourages him to call her Grandma and spoils him as much as she is allowed. His disappearance, even more than Bibi's death, has simply flattened her. She looks old and worn, and her weather-beaten face is devoid of its usual make-up. The whites of her brown eyes have a jaundiced look. And why is she wearing that terrible dress?
Well, since we're criticizing everyone else's clothes, Fran thinks, I could have done better than these tatty shorts and this old sports shirt of Mark's, myself — though she'd hardly noticed it was his when she snatched it from where it was folded over a chair in the bedroom, only seeing it as short-sleeved and light enough for a hot day. Wearing his clothes is maybe another of those subliminal acts, in this case a need for comfort and reassurance. She still hasn't heard from him, and beneath the surface of all the other
happenings, feelings of anxiety and fury at him for not leaving a contact number are warring inside her.
Footsteps sound on the oak floorboards of the passage from the rear of the house, the measured steps of a man who plants his feet firmly on the ground in every sense, heavy footsteps for such a thin man. ‘Humphrey!' declares Alyssa, springing up, quite transformed. Fran, too, feels an enormous relief.
 
 
Outside in the grounds, a policeman gives a shout. He's found a child's shoe, but on closer inspection, the excitement dies down. It can't be one Jasie had been wearing. For one thing, it's too small, but more importantly, it has clearly been there for months, if not years. The leather is rotting and the upper parting from the sole.
 
 
Down at the mortuary in Felsborough, a policeman draws back the sheet that covers the face of a female corpse and asks Chip Calvert if this is Bianca Morgan. He looks down at the pale, bluish white oval, and the hair, once shining gilt and now stiff and dried like straw. She looks, not asleep, but as though she's no longer there, and she's no longer beautiful.
‘Yes,' he says and licks his lips. ‘That was her.'
 
 
Humphrey Oliver came in through the door, and he and Alyssa met in the middle of the long hall. He muttered something unintelligible, red-faced, looking as though he would like to embrace her but wouldn't, since there were strangers in the room and this would offend his sense of propriety, but Alyssa had no such inhibitions. He submitted to her embrace and planted a chaste kiss on her forehead from his great height. They'd had a sweet, old-fashioned romance going ever since Conrad succumbed to the bottle, but anything more than that was never openly
acknowledged, especially by Humphrey, who would have felt a fool admitting such a thing at their age. He wouldn't agree to their living together in his house at the far end of Middleton Thorpe unless they were married, and this Alyssa had so far refused to go along with, saying more or less jokingly that her experience of one marriage hadn't led her to seek another. Nonsense, of course. Humphrey loved her with all his heart and would have put himself on the rack rather than see her harmed, or even upset, in any way.
He'd carved himself a little niche, here at Membery, rather like Jane Arrow, in a way, except that he didn't insist on being indispensable, as she did. All the same, he helped a good deal, in an unobtrusive way. He enjoyed outwitting the house's ancient heating system, and also spent a lot of time in the gardens, supervising the ordering of supplies and so on, a task Alyssa found boring, but he kept himself pretty much out of the way, otherwise. He was always welcome in the house at any time, though he was rarely seen there unless invited, except on Thursdays. This was when he went along to the out-of-town hypermarket and stocked up with groceries, covering the distances around the aisles at speed with his long stride, negotiating the tots who were being a pest with their miniature shopping trolleys while their mums gossiped and blocked access to the shelves. ‘Excuse me, madam,' he would say politely, touching the brim of his tweed hat, and they would part like the Red Sea, leaving him to consult his list and stack things in an orderly manner into his trolley, checking the prices and buying everything at best value, all in record time. ‘Nothing to it!' he averred when he got back, unpacking tea and detergent and three boxes of cornflakes for the price of two, stowing it all away tidily into the kitchen cupboards. He'd once been a quantity surveyor, and commodities and logistics were child's play to him.
For such a self-effacing man, he was like the Rock of Gibraltar here at Membery, and the oppressive gloom lifted visibly with his arrival. ‘Oh, Humph, such a tale to
tell!' cried Alyssa, her eyes brimming, leading him to the settle. Fran disappeared to make coffee for everyone and when she came back he'd been told everything.

Other books

P.S. I Loathe You by Lisi Harrison
Trader's World by Charles Sheffield
Heritage by Judy Nunn
Look at me: by Jennifer Egan
The Weather by Caighlan Smith
The Rembrandt Secret by Alex Connor
Next to Me by AnnaLisa Grant
The Sea Star by Nash, Jean