Scar Tissue (2 page)

That miserable bugger Marsh more or less booted me out. There was no way I’d let him see how he’d rattled me, any more than I’d ever let coppers see how upset I was. Coppers or anyone else. Whatever the situation I always presented the stiffest of upper lips. I beamed brightly at Messy Mascara. From under her desk, I got a cheery wave; she was also giving Marsh a number of fingers so small even he should have been able to count them. He might have caught her screwing her index finger into her forehead but she managed to convert that into a dab at her eye.

At least the parking warden homing in on the Transit hadn’t seen any of this, so I managed to convince her that I’d been to report a crime and since the police had been so impressed by my news they’d given me a cup of tea, which had held me up. Since she’d not actually done more than prime her pen, she let me off. She looked hot enough to melt: why has no one in authority twigged that blue serge isn’t good news on hot days?

I regretted feeling sorry for the representatives of law and order when another serge-clad figure, albeit in shirtsleeves, hove into view. This one was a police constable with a gleam in his eye that told me that he was going to spend an hour at least checking whether the van deserved its MOT. I knew it did; the garage knew it did. Starting system apart, Paula believed in properly maintained tools, whether as small as a bradawl or as big as a bus. But Paula also believed in
minimalism
when it came to the law and her wheels, so I leapt
inside, praying it’d start first pull. It did. And not a single nasty particle coming from its exhaust, not that I could smell, anyway. Paula’s Pots was an environmentally friendly firm.

I didn’t think anyone would ambush me with a
speed-gun
on the ring-road, but there was a lot of opportunity for an unfriendly traffic cop to accuse you of changing lanes at the wrong place or wrong speed or whatever, so I peeled off as soon as I could, heading for a great oval shopping mall called the Designer Outlet. Much as I was tempted to go and pick up a bargain or two, my conscience and the heat combined to make me pass virtuously by – them and the CCTV cameras I was sure the police would take an unnatural interest in today. No, these days I wasn’t usually this paranoid, but there was something about Marsh that reawakened all my former feelings about the police. I reckon it’s only the middle classes who believe they’re friendly, supportive individuals. Certainly people with my background don’t: we see folk literally getting away with murder because they speak nicely and know the right people. So I turned resolutely from trendy tops and picked my way gently back. It was good to find that, little by little, my pulse rate returned to normal and the only reason my palms were sweating was the heat. At last, after a decorous drive down the motorway, I was happy to park the van in the shade of one of Mr van der Poele’s mighty oaks. Well, it was actually a sycamore, but Trev wasn’t complaining and van der Poele wouldn’t have admitted to anything as vulgar as a sycamore on his patch. Did he have anything as vulgar as a new shallow grave at the bottom of his garden? It didn’t take me long to establish that he hadn’t.

And there I was, back up my ladder at Crabton Manor, seething and two hours adrift on my day’s schedule. Now the sun had shifted round, it was easier to see through the window: no, there was nothing on the bed, not now, but you didn’t need to be a forensic scientist or SOCO or whatever they were called these days to tell that something had once been there. It had lain long enough to make a dinge I thought I could still make out, and even my unscientific eyes had no difficulty seeing where the duvet had drifted on to the floor when someone had relieved it of the corpse’s weight. No, it had definitely been lying on, not under the duvet – in this heat, under a duvet?

In any case, I demanded, how could the police possibly have checked? The ladders had been where I’d left them
padlocked
together – Paula insisted on that: she didn’t want her ladders to be either victims or perpetrators of crime. Even though there was scaffolding climbing the gable ends you needed a twelve-foot ladder to get on to the first stage. Paula had a key to the outhouse that housed a loo, though I’d have been embarrassed to let anyone see, let alone use, so primitive a piece of plumbing with nowhere to wash your hands afterwards. But van der Poele had insisted that she give him advance notice when we needed access to the inside of the house itself to paint the tops and insides of window and doorframes. There’d be someone there to let her in and let her out, he declared. So the police wouldn’t have been able to get hold of keys from Paula. They’d not broken down the door. How had they got in to see that all was well?

As I twisted to get a better angle to work at, a simpler explanation occurred to me: that the police had done nothing
at all and were bluffing me, to save themselves hours of tedious paperwork. I wouldn’t have blamed them, but there was no need for Marsh to have been so nasty to me. Maybe I’d give Messy Mascara a bell in the morning to see if he was usually like that or if he’d produced a special performance for me. Maybe it’d be safer not to bother.

I peered down at the tyre tracks crisscrossing the
semicircular
gravel drive in front of the house. Even if they’d been on snow or mud, I couldn’t have made much of them. So I couldn’t have swept back into Ashford police station demanding the head honcho to tell him one of his
subordinates
was a lazy, lying layabout and waving the photographic evidence under his eyes. But maybe I could photograph one thing. Paula insisted that we keep in the van glove-box one of those party cameras you use and throw away. People see big vans involved in road accidents and assume it’s been driven by some testosterone-fuelled youth who’d ploughed it into innocent hapless family cars. Paula reckoned that if we could take photos before the vehicles were moved, we’d always be able to prove we were the innocent parties – which we damn well had better be. Maybe the camera worked like a rabbit’s foot, or maybe we were too scared of Paula’s response if we bent her Trev so much as a thou. out of true. So far, anyway, there’d been no need for the little gizmo.

I nipped down the ladder, retrieved the camera, small enough to tuck into my bib, and swarmed back up again. Just think, out there are thousands of women paying millions of pounds to their local gyms just for the privilege of doing an exercise I get to do for free every day.

I was sure there were all sorts of technical procedures for
photographing through glass, but I’d no idea what they might be. I tried pressing the lens right up to the glass, and holding it well away, straight on, diagonally across. And then I realised that the light was better than it had been all day for this particular bit of fascia board, so I applied my efforts to that.

It usually takes me about twenty minutes to do a section the size I was working on. Because I was on my own, and I didn’t want to take unnecessary risks leaning to the side, I decided to quit after ten minutes to shift the ladder a little. I’d forgotten, as I always did, just how heavy it was. It’d be so easy to let it slip the tiniest bit and put one of the sides through the window. So very easy. And so very tempting. But before I could let my nosiness overcome my professional pride, I found another pair of hands was helping me. Paula’s. And Paula’s hands did not let ladders slip within half a mile of vulnerable glass.

‘Working late,’ she observed, treading on the bottom rung to plant the end firmly in the earth.

Paula didn’t ask questions. She made statements. You had to respond to the statement.

‘There was a little problem earlier,’ I admitted. ‘So I thought I’d put in a bit extra to finish off.’

She waited, unsmiling. Although she’d only be about ten or twelve years older me, mid to late thirties perhaps, she had this nasty habit of making me feel about thirteen again, having sneaked back into school for a bit and then being carpeted by my headteacher for not going more often and staying longer. Perhaps it was Paula’s size: she was about five foot ten and strongly built. She dwarfed me, although I turned in at
five-five and eight and a bit stone. To be fair, Paula had shown more kindness while I’d been with the Pots than the headmistress had the whole time I’d been technically in school. But I wouldn’t push my luck.

‘As a matter of fact, it’s easier now – the sun’s at a better angle.’

‘Quite.’ She still didn’t smile. There was more to come. If not now, later.

I put my foot on the first rung.

‘Client confidentiality, Caffy.’

Honestly, she made us sound like plastic surgeons or bank managers. I took a risk and shot upwards. Perhaps that’d be the sum total of my bollocking. Perhaps it wouldn’t.

To be fair, she didn’t leave me to tidy up on my own, but busied herself down below while I finished my section and rather more than made up the time I’d lost. Lost? Wasted? Used doing what I saw as my duty?

Risking a snub, when I was on terra firma again I asked, ‘Fancy a drink? Down at the Hop Vine?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll meet you there.’ She locked the garage, checking the padlock twice before she was satisfied, and set off in her hatchback.

Forgiven but not quite not forgotten. I, too, gave one last check round, then another, pressing my nose against the windows. There was something wrong somewhere, wasn’t there? Surely? If only it showed.

To my amazement – she was usually slow getting to the bar – Paula had set up the drinks on one of the Hop Vine’s outside tables, the one furthest, as it happened, from the
children’s play area. She even smiled as I straddled the bench.

‘I didn’t think you’d be able to wait for your Bishop’s Finger,’ she said, toasting me with her glass, which held her usual tipple, red wine. She claimed this had medicinal qualities.

I raised my glass and drank deep. The beer was just the right temperature.

‘The trouble is,’ she said, ‘that mud-stirring sometimes means the stirrer gets splashed.’ If she’d had spectacles she’d have looked over them, meaningfully.

She didn’t need to. She was referring to my past, wasn’t she?

‘The police came to you and told you to shut me up.’ I could make statements, too.

‘They came for the house keys, originally,’ she conceded. ‘And then started talking about you and wondering whether I was employing the right sort of person. You were very brave not to change your name, Caffy.’ She sounded as if she meant it.

‘Or naïve. But then, who’d have thought I’d be doing
anything
that’d make the police want to look me up on their computer? I’m only painting up that ladder, you know.’

‘Quite. And what interests me is that they knew all about you when they came to see me. Funny they should bother when you’d have thought they might be more interested in looking for this body of yours.’

‘There was a body, Paula. Honestly. You don’t imagine things like that, do you?’

‘Tell me about it.’

I drew a little picture with my index finger in the pollen dust on the table. ‘He’d be about your height, I’d say.’

‘About five foot ten, then.’

‘And built, as we used to say in Brum, like a brick sh –’

I bit back the expression. OK, it was the Bishop’s Finger talking. Paula allowed her smooth brow to crumple in a wince. She had a broad forehead like the women in those paintings of Dutch living rooms, and an expression that was slow to change. Her eyes narrowed slightly in a further warning as she said, ‘So it’d be hard work getting him off the bed and out of the house. Assuming that out of the house is where he’s gone.’

‘Rigor mortis,’ I put in, eager to divert her from my vulgarity. ‘Got to consider rigor mortis, too. Heavy and stiff: really tricky to shift. Plus he had some huge, chunky rings: big as knuckle-dusters. They might damage the wallpaper or paintwork.’

Paula nodded reflectively. ‘Though I can hardly see van der Poele asking us to do any touching in.’

I hung my head. If the manor were as scruffy inside as it was outside, there’d have been rich pickings for Paula’s Pots. Indoor work was better than outdoor, especially in the winter. As far as I knew, however, we were booked up nearly eight months in advance, thanks largely to Paula’s meticulous working methods. And someone like van der Poele would no doubt be bringing in fancy London-based interior decorators. Not that Paula didn’t have an interior decorator on her team. But Les Sprigg, cut it how you would, didn’t sound remotely glamorous, and he worked not from a design studio, but from the back room of his flat.

I sank the last of my half-pint. We only ever had one drink, unless the whole team of us were gathering together and we’d draw straws to see who got to collect and return everyone at the end of the evening. ‘Best be off then.’

‘Eventually,’ she nodded. She was fossicking in her
dungarees
pockets. At last she came up with a couple of keys on a ring, and a slip of paper. ‘I thought we might try these out first.’

‘In that case,’ I said, digging in my own dungarees, ‘we might try this again.’

‘Van der Poele’s agent slipped them to me,’ Paula explained, releasing two locks on the back door. She’d made us strip off our dirty clothes, donning the sort of paper overalls that wouldn’t have been out of place at an official crime scene but which she used when she’d got fine restoration work to do. And the overshoes might not have been forensically clean, but were brilliant when padding over valuable carpets to price jobs. ‘He thought it’d be a terrible pain to be here every time we wanted to open a window. But he swore me to absolute secrecy. Seems the Boss Man likes people to jump when he tells them to, regardless of what other jobs he’s also told them to do.’

‘Is this how the police got in?’

‘After we’d both told them we didn’t have any?’ Slipping on disposable gloves, she locked up behind her, a procedure I wasn’t entirely happy with, I must say. When I’ve been in a tight spot, I’ve always liked at least one way out.

‘What if –’ I began.

‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘Well, are you coming or not?’