Requiem Mass (20 page)

Having briefed the Superintendent over the phone, Fenwick joined Cooper in the main school building. The able sergeant was looking jaded.

‘Bad morning?’

‘More harrowing, sir. They’re all very upset, understandably, but I’m on my second of those already.’ He gestured towards an economy-size box of multicoloured tissues.

‘Anything useful?’

‘No, just confirmed what we’d suspected already. She was a popular, quiet, orderly spinster. Her pupils liked her – apparently she made maths fun, if you can believe that. That’s what she taught, by the way, and she was a main-stay of the music department. Did a lot there. But this is a very musical school, long traditions, so they try to look for musical ability in all their teachers – the Head told me.’

‘You’ve interviewed him already?’

‘Yes, briefly, and I’ve mentioned that we may ask him to identify the body if we can’t track down her relatives. He’ll do it if necessary.’

‘Who’re her close friends – anybody here?’

‘The music teacher, Judith Chase, I think. But she’s very upset and has gone home. She wasn’t well anyway.’

‘I still need to talk to her – fix it for this afternoon, would you? And which of the teachers or staff has the initials RJ? There was a phone message they’d taken in her handbag. I want to follow it up.’

‘There’s no RJ, sir.’ Cooper was consulting a computer listing of all staff. ‘There’s an Anne Jeffries, Julia Jones – no Rs. As for Christian names, there’s a Ruby Andrews, Robin Hove, Richard Stevens …’

‘That could be it. It might have been an S. Have you seen him yet?’

‘No. Give us a break, sir. We’re up to the Ps on the staff list and I’ve been fitting in some of her form pupils as well.’

Richard Stevens was a fifty-something gentleman with a receding hairline and small features stamped on to a large, round face. He wiped constantly at a drip from a button nose and was clearly uncomfortable in the presence of the police. He had little to add to their general sum of knowledge until Fenwick asked him about the message.

‘Oh yes. I remember that clearly. It was from Octavia Anderson, our most famous old girl. I taught her, you know – taught them both, in fact, though neither of them took to physics.’

‘Both?’ enquired Fenwick.

‘Well, yes, Katherine Johnstone is, er was, an old girl too. She and Octavia were in the same year. That’s why Octavia agreed to the engagement. She’d never have agreed to appear in our little concert otherwise. But the school was an important stepping stone for her and, fortunately, our date fitted a time she was in the country.’

‘Take me through that again, sir. You’re saying Katherine Johnstone and Octavia Anderson were at school here – when was that?’

‘Twenty or so years ago. The secretary will have the records.’

‘And Octavia Anderson. Am I right in thinking that’s
the
Octavia Anderson, the soprano?’

‘The same. The school’s crowning glory really. Of course, we’ve produced some notable musicians but no one near Octavia’s level of achievement. And she’s agreed to take the soprano part in our anniversary performance in September. We asked her rather late but she’s agreed. It was Katherine who put it to her and the message I took was confirmation. She said she’d sent a letter, agreeing in writing, but wanted to be sure we knew straight away.’

The secretary was all efficiency. She apologised for the fact that the records were still manual but produced the details and dates for Fenwick immediately.

‘Kate joined us in 1975 at eleven and left at eighteen. According to these records Octavia Anderson joined three years later. She was bright so she leapt a year and joined Kate’s class. She won a music scholarship after she got here. She joined us after her musical skills were recognised by a teacher – decent thing to do really, give your star pupil a chance at another school.’

‘Could you produce me class lists for all the years Miss Johnstone was here?’

The secretary smiled lightly at the challenge; she enjoyed any opportunity to prove her efficiency. ‘I’ll get them to your incident room by this evening, Inspector.’

‘Why do you want those, sir?’ Cooper and Fenwick were walking down the long corridor that joined the old and new school buildings.

‘I don’t know, to be honest. Gut feel maybe. Or perhaps I’m running out of ideas for the present day. So far, let’s face it, we’ve found nothing that hints at motive. There may be a crazed would-be lover – I’m going to ask the music teacher when I see her – but we’ve found no evidence of a secret life at her house. It might be random, as you said last night, but I don’t think so. There was definite premeditation – no fingerprints or traces, which implies gloves and protective clothing, all that suggests planning. So I’m in search of a motive and if I can’t find one in the present I’ll go back into the past as far as I need to. Let’s face it, the only unusual thing about her so far is that she was at school with an opera star and has been in recent contact with her about this concert. Do you know what it is, by the way?’

‘Haven’t a clue sir, but I can find out.’

They were walking along row after row of long school photographs arranged in date order. Cooper stopped abruptly and pointed at one of them.

‘Look, this is a year both Anderson and Johnstone should be in the picture.’ He scanned the lines of faces – serious, smiling, the inevitable tongue sticking out in the cross-legged front row of juniors. ‘Can’t see her, though.’

‘No, neither can I. I doubt we’d recognise her anyway. But I know that face from somewhere – I can’t think where.’ Fenwick pointed to a pretty blonde head in the third row. Tiny though her face was in the long picture she caught the eye with her direct gaze and inviting half-smile.

‘I bet she broke some hearts,’ said Cooper. ‘What a looker. Never mind, she’ll be married with several kids by now.’

‘Yes, but why do I think I know her? It’s infuriating.’

‘Stop thinking and maybe it’ll come back.’

* * *

Fenwick just had time to visit Katherine Johnstone’s house before a briefing from the door-to-door teams. As he walked in, the first thing he noticed was that the letters had been removed from the mat and stacked neatly on the half-table. Cursing the person who had interfered he picked them up and looked through them idly.

A muddy gas reminder, a postcard from her parents that had taken four days to arrive, the message smudged by rain, a special offer that looked to come from a clothes catalogue and a personal letter, postmarked in London the day before she died. He noticed that the envelope had been opened and the contents were missing. She had obviously stopped to take the one interesting item with her and had left the others for her return.

He walked into the empty lounge. It already felt dead. Fenwick had noticed this before in the houses of the dead or bereaved. There was an indescribable sense of loss that made the rooms feel hollow, not just empty. No one entering this room could have expected to hear a voice from the kitchen, or footsteps on the stairs, the creak of a floorboard above.

As Fenwick walked around the house he wasn’t sure why he was there. Another DS and WDC Nightingale had done a thorough search. He was known in the local force for following hunches – always backing them up it was true with ruthlessly detailed police work. Guesswork smacked of a divine providence he simply did not believe in. He did believe, though, that his unconscious assimilated seemingly random bits of information, forming them into hypotheses that sprung spontaneously into his mind. He hadn’t yet been proved wrong, not totally, which in part explained his excellent case record. Occasionally, he would have to adjust the direction of his intuition as further facts emerged but always there would be a link to the original ‘guess’.

His track record created more room for him than for some of his peers, allowing him to indulge in complex and costly work. He always had to fight but eventually the Superintendent would find a few more men; politically it was always expedient to back a winner.

In this case, though, it wasn’t resources he lacked. Fenwick’s inspiration was letting him down. Eighteen hours into it he could already feel the case growing cold about him, yet he had been sure the previous evening that they had been close, very close, to the murderer. Despite the statements so far to the contrary he had expected someone to have seen the man. The extensive house-to-house – targeted to be finished within twenty-four hours – was costly in manpower but it was driven by his certainty of there being an eyewitness somewhere.

As he walked into the kitchen he instinctively checked that the muddy mark was still there. It was, but as he walked through the other rooms he increasingly felt he was wasting his time. A beam of sunlight through a rain-spattered window made him realise there was a break in the clouds after days of rain and he noticed for the first time the glorious display in the back garden.

His wife had been a keen gardener and now that she was gone he was confronted each time he went home by neglected borders and weedy paths. Begrudgingly he had started to weed and tidy up, a habit that had become compulsive during her final decline. True, the children didn’t mind. Bess would play happily anywhere and Chris didn’t play at all any more. Thinking of his young son brought a constriction around his heart. He wondered what the child was doing right now and guiltily thought about the lack of progress they had made with a diagnosis over the past month. Even he admitted now that there was something wrong but nobody could tell him what. He caught his breath sharply as he thought again of Monique and her decline.

She would have loved this garden and so, obviously, had Katherine Johnstone. Impulsively he went outside and sat on a drying bench, set due south against the wall. The smell of wild thyme and lavender as he brushed by relaxed him and he recognised immediately that this had been a special place for her.

A movement against his leg startled him. He looked down into the suspicious yellow eyes of an old ginger tom who, with the uncanny instinct of cats everywhere, had identified Fenwick
as a cat hater and therefore someone to be rewarded with special attention. He reached down gently to push it away and was rewarded by a flash of claws that caught his fingers. Cursing, he sucked at the small drops of blood and realised at once how the murderer had come to leave his own marks on the carpet in the bedroom. The rubber must have come from the finger of his glove. There
was
more for him to learn here, he had just been looking too hard for the obvious. Determinedly more relaxed he returned to the house and set himself to amble with an open mind.

After fifteen minutes he gave up. It was nearly midday and he had to get back to the incident room. No further thoughts had struck him. Returning to the hall, he had the door open before he realised the obvious message that had been staring him in the face since he arrived. Where was the letter, the one he assumed she had opened before going to work? It wasn’t on her when she died. She could have left it at the school but was that likely?

The more he thought about it, the more he realised the potential significance; the SOCO photos confirmed that the post had been on the mat when they had arrived yesterday, apparently undisturbed (he would need to check the photographs for a record of where the empty envelope had been). If the post had arrived after she’d left, and assuming she hadn’t returned home for lunch (unlikely given the weather yesterday), it could only mean that someone else, probably the murderer, had taken the letter.
If
he had done, why and how had he attached any significance to it? The envelope was distinctive, the handwriting an angled black calligraphy. It had a first-class stamp and London franking mark, a dirty brown smudge ran across the front diagonally. There was nothing on the reverse and yet something about it may have made a murderer stop, open it and take the contents. Perhaps it was from the murderer himself or someone that could identify him. This might be the break they needed.

First he would need to prove with reasonable probability that the murderer had taken the letter, then he could set out to
discover who had written it. He placed the empty envelope gently into an evidence wallet and left.

Fenwick knew the moment he walked into the incident room, that something had happened. The buzz and expectation on his arrival were unmistakable.

‘Right let’s have it – and get straight to the meat, please, I’ll have the detail later.’ The young detective constable assigned to boost the numbers in the team looked to Cooper for the nod and, getting it, stood to deliver her report. Nerves and pride of achievement struggled for supremacy on her face.

‘Yes, sir. This morning at 10.05 I interviewed a Miss Sandy Jones, a shop assistant at Handishopper—’

‘Which is where?’

‘On the junction of Copse Lane and Farm View, sir. Miss Jones advised me that Miss Johnstone is, er, was a regular customer stopping by on her way home from school. On the night in question—’

‘I’m not a judge, Constable, get on with it.’

Unnecessarily cruel, thought Cooper, with quickening interest. He’s impatient, which means he’s on to something himself.

‘Last night Jones was expecting Johnstone to stop by to pick up some cat food. The later it got the more worried she was. She kept on looking out of the window. There were very few people going by because of the weather. At about six o’clock – she can’t be more precise – she saw a cyclist going west along Copse Lane. She thinks it was a man; he was wearing a bright yellow cycling cape and hood – it was the colour that made her notice him.

‘When I interviewed the occupants of number 20 Hedgefield, they also remembered a man in a yellow rain cape on a bike cycling up and down the road. They said it looked as if he was searching for an address. If they saw the same man, it’s the only person we’ve found so far who’s appeared more than once on the route.’

‘Well done, Constable. And you can add a third sighting.’
Fenwick looked at the assembled team ruefully. ‘I passed a cyclist wearing a yellow cape coming back down Elm Drive as I drove to the house. ‘We need to find out where the cyclist went. He may be local, if we’re lucky. Any ideas, anyone?’