The Facts of Life and Death (10 page)

Now Miss Sharpe stood at the staffroom window with a cup in one hand, a saucer in the other, and felt a wave of melancholy wash over her.

The thought of some poor woman lying in that lay-by – maybe for days – undiscovered in the rain, had disturbed her deeply.

Without a face or a name for the victim, it could be anyone.

With a hitch in her chest, she almost felt that it could be
her.

After all, who would miss her? Who would call the school and let them know she hadn’t come home the night before? She had only moved here three months ago; she didn’t have a husband or a boyfriend. Her father was across the other side of the country and her colleagues were friendly, but only as far as the car park. Her badminton partner at the club was a sixty-year-old man called Edward, whose dentures had once fallen out during an exuberant rally, and who only ever spoke to her to shout things like ‘Mine!’ and ‘Down at the net!’ He might miss her drop shot, but he wouldn’t miss
her.

Only Harvey would miss her if she disappeared – and then only when the Bugsy Supreme ran out.

A loud wooden squeal interrupted her thoughts. Behind her, Dave Marshall was making his usual noise. He was the PE teacher, and so used to shifting the gym equipment around the school hall that he couldn’t even sit down for a cup of tea without a great scraping of furniture. He was the only male member of staff, and treated everyone – even the headmistress – like girlish underlings.

Now – without even turning her head – Miss Sharpe could tell he was picking up the
Gazette.
Flapping it open like a tarp in a typhoon.

It took him a nanosecond to form an opinion.

‘Silly cow,’ he pronounced, expecting to be listened to, as always.

Usually Miss Sharpe wouldn’t indulge his masculine nonsense, but today she was rattled by death, so she turned a cool eye on him. ‘Excuse me?’

He held up the newspaper for her to see. ‘Hitchhiking. What does she expect?’

A couple of the other teachers tittered nervously. Not Miss Sharpe. If Miss Sharpe ever caught herself tittering, she’d give herself a good smack.

‘I imagine,’ she said icily, ‘that she expected someone to pick her up and drop her off closer to home.’

Marshall gave a snort of laughter.

‘Why, what would
you
expect?’ she demanded.

‘What I expect and what
she
can expect are not the same thing,’ he smiled.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m a man,’ he pointed out, in case she hadn’t noticed his lack of deodorant. ‘Everyone knows women shouldn’t hitch.’

Miss Sharpe knew that too, but she still bristled like a hog.

‘That’s as good as saying she deserved to get murdered. I suppose women shouldn’t wear short skirts either? Or show off their ankles.’

Marshall snorted again. ‘Don’t get your knickers in a twist, Emily Pankhurst.’

‘Emmeline,’ she snapped.

‘Christ, I’m only joking,’ he said – then raised his brows and rolled his eyes meaningfully.

Miss Sharpe was
this close
to tipping her tea over his big stupid head. She knew that look. Her father used to do it too – more and more after her mother had died. It was a look that said she was acting irrationally, but that he wasn’t going to argue with her because acting irrationally was what women
did
, and that sanity would only be wasted on her.

Miss Sharpe controlled her urges, and turned her back on Dave Marshall.

She wasn’t being irrational. A young woman – just like her – had been murdered and dumped in a lay-by like a fast-food wrapper, and a grown man thought she had it coming.

Wasn’t that reason enough to be angry?

THE WOMAN WHOSE
face Donald Moon had found under his size-ten boot turned out to be Frannie Hatton, a twenty-two-year-old addict-slash-barmaid, who had been reported missing after failing to show up for a shift at the Patch & Parrot in Bideford.

And the police – who hadn’t been that interested in a missing junkie – were
very
interested in a dead one …

Detective Constable Calvin Bridge checked the rear-view mirror to make sure he looked like a policeman.

Because he never felt like one.

Take this morning. This morning, any
real
policeman would have been happy. Here he was, driving Detective Chief Inspector Kirsty King to Old Town to speak to Frannie Hatton’s mother. It was quite the coup for a young constable with only six months in plainclothes under his belt; DCI King was an impressive woman and right now everybody was trying to impress her back, because there was a promotion in the offing. Detective Sergeant Franklin had taken early retirement due to ill health. And that thing about filling up his wife’s car with police petrol. Anyway, it was quite possible that now he had gone, a couple of people at Bideford would move up a rung of the ladder without much effort – which had been Calvin’s preferred method of advancement ever since kindergarten.

He’d only applied for plainclothes because keeping his uniform clean and pressed and shiny had been an awful lot of work.

So driving DCI King around on a murder investigation was a feather in his cap, even if it was really only because he had known Frannie personally, though marginally. She’d been a few years behind him at school, and light years ahead of him at everything else.

Calvin Bridge knew he should be on cloud nine.

So why did he feel like a man in a wool suit on a hot day?

The car behind theirs tooted and DCI King looked up from the pathology report on her lap and said, ‘Green light.’

‘Sorry,’ said Calvin, and raised his hand in apology before pulling away, barely fast enough to keep up with his frantic windscreen wipers.

All up Meddon Street he gave himself a good talking to.
Don’t be so bloody ungrateful, Calvin. You’re young and solvent and you’ve got your health. Look at Frannie Hatton! Dead in a ditch! You think she wouldn’t change places with you? Pull yourself together!

Calvin always heard his mother’s voice in his head when he was giving himself a good talking to, because she always knew best.

Just like his girlfriend, Shirley.

Shirley wore the pants in their relationship. Calvin didn’t mind; he was too lazy to wear the pants. Shirley was a stolid, no-nonsense girl who, at twenty-nine, was five years his senior – and she was used to having things her own way.

Calvin was happy to have things her way too.

Most of the time.

But this weekend she’d taken pants-wearing to a whole new level.

She’d caught him off-guard while he was watching Formula 1 at her flat. Cuddled up to him on the sofa just as the red lights went out and said, ‘Why don’t we get married?’

‘Hmm?’ Hamilton was on pole but Vettel darted up the inside and the two of them went into the first turn a bare inch from each other at 180mph. Bloody brilliant.

‘Why don’t we get married?’ she’d said again.

Calvin had had to think fast. If he’d said no – or even hesitated – there’d have been a row or a terrible silence, and he’d have had to leave her flat and drive to his flat, which would have meant missing twenty critical laps. Thirty if he got stuck behind a tractor.

So he’d said, ‘Good idea,’ and hoped that would be noncommittal enough to take the pressure off until the end of the race at the very least.

Instead Shirley had gone into an uncharacteristic frenzy of squealing and kissing his ear and calling her mother and each of her sisters in turn, then her mother again.

Apparently he’d proposed.

Calvin had felt a bit uneasy at first, but by lap thirty-two he was getting used to the idea. Why
not
marry Shirley? He might as well. They’d been going out for three years and they got along fine. He loved her, he supposed, although he had nothing much to gauge it by.

Shirley was big boned, but she was clean, self-financing and happy to sleep with him, all of which Calvin liked in a woman. They never rowed because he always gave in, and whatever it was she wanted to do usually turned out to be pleasant enough. They went out three times a week to the pub or the pictures, and they had sex once a week, either in bed or on his leather sofa – but never on her corduroy one, because it was harder to get clean.

Anyway, by the time Vettel took the chequered flag, Calvin had decided that marriage would probably just be more of the same but without all the hassle on Valentine’s Day. Last year he’d bought Shirley a cheese grater and they hadn’t had sex for a fortnight – even after he’d shown her the receipt! It wasn’t
any
old cheese grater – it was one endorsed by her favourite TV chef and had cost a ridiculous sum for a piece of metal with holes in it.

Marriage had suddenly seemed like the simpler option, and Calvin almost wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

‘You’ve gone past it,’ said DCI King.

‘Huh?’

‘You’ve gone past it,’ she said, tapping the window. ‘It’s back there.’

Calvin said, ‘Sorry, Ma’am,’ and started looking for a place to do a U-turn.

Mrs Hatton lived in a run-down terrace with a cracked-concrete front garden. Calvin reckoned she couldn’t be more than fifty, but she looked seventy. She wore a long porridge-coloured cardigan and maroon carpet slippers. One of her big toes was showing through at the end.

He made the tea. There was no milk but he pressed on bravely. Tea was vital to the investigation. People told you things over a cup of tea that they wouldn’t under torture.

The tiny kitchen smelled of drains, and the mugs were chipped and charity-shop random. RGB Building Supplies, the Little Mermaid and a Smurf. Obviously he would have the RGB mug, but he dithered over the allocation of the other two. Neither seemed appropriate to either a senior investigating officer or a bereaved mother.

He put them all on a tray to let Fate decide.

‘She was crying,’ said Mrs Hatton flatly, as Calvin came in with the mugs. ‘She kept saying goodbye and I love you.’

‘And this was on the phone?’ said DCI King.

Mrs Hatton nodded and took the Smurf.

‘Was Frannie alone when she called you?’

‘There was a man’s voice.’

Kelly Bradley and Katie Squire popped into Calvin’s head. It was inevitable. Most police work in these little country towns was as uncomplicated as Calvin had hoped it would be – and often revolved around the three Ds – drink, drugs and debt. So two women forced to strip naked and phone home was a bit different and was sure to stick in the mind – even
his
mind, which could be like a Teflon butterfly unless it was about sport.

DCI King reached over the Little Mermaid and took his RGB mug. ‘Was it Mark?’ she asked.

Mark Spade was Frannie’s boyfriend. They already had him in custody and were making him cry. Mostly because he couldn’t get his next fix.

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Hatton. ‘The reception was very bad. And I’m a bit deaf.’

‘You couldn’t see anyone?’

‘It was on the phone.’

‘You don’t have a smartphone?’ said Calvin.

‘What’s that?’

DCI King raised her eyebrows at him. Calvin looked around the dingy front room with its dirty carpet, its glued-together china ornaments and its smell of wet dog, and realized how silly the question had been. Mrs Hatton only just had a television set – a big old thing in a wooden case, like something out of the ark.
Like
an ark.

He should probably just shut up.

‘Could I possibly see your phone, Mrs Hatton?’

Mrs Hatton handed King the oldest of Nokias and King handed it to Calvin.

‘Find her call, will you?’

Calvin had never seen a phone as big as this one; it was like a brick in a plastic case. It had an
aerial
. He ran through the received-calls menu, but Mrs Hatton apparently didn’t know how to assign names to each contact.

With some fiddling, and with a break for Mrs Hatton to find her glasses – which were around her neck on a chain all along – Calvin identified Frannie’s number.

‘There are two calls here from her,’ he said. ‘Right after each other.’

‘I didn’t get another call. Didn’t answer it, anyway.’

‘Why not?’ said King.

The grey-faced woman shrugged at the wall over the mantelpiece, where a square of clean wallpaper spoke of an absent painting. Or maybe a mirror.

‘Did Frannie say anything else?’ King asked.

‘She said he was going to kill her.’

DCI tilted her head and said, ‘Pardon me?’

Mrs Hatton cleared her throat. ‘She said he was going to kill her.’

There was a pregnant silence before King asked, ‘Did you call the police?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Hatton, and sighed as though she’d forgotten to pick up washing powder at the shops.

Calvin felt cold. Frannie Hatton had called her mother and said she was about to be murdered, and her mother hadn’t called the police. Hadn’t even picked up the phone to her second call. And had only mentioned it now as an afterthought! Calvin didn’t have kids of his own – didn’t really
want
kids of his own – but even to him that sounded just . . .
wrong.

He looked around the room with new eyes. What had to happen that a young girl who’d started out right here in this little house had ended up dead in a lay-by – her last desperate plea ignored by her own mother? Did Mrs Hatton have a personality disorder? A habit of her own? A boyfriend who hadn’t been able to keep his dirty hands to himself?