A Species of Revenge (12 page)

Why had she been going into the wood at all?

He stood back, hands in pockets, to get a better view. The Ellington Close houses were all set at angles to the wood, so that only the frosted-glass bathroom windows upstairs overlooked it. Number one had a bedroom window that obliquely looked over the path, but could be discounted, since the occupants were away. Only the upstairs windows at Edwina Lodge overlooked any part of the wood. Nothing could be seen of the path from Simla, the angle of vision was wrong.

Whoever had made the attack had still taken a very big risk of being seen. True, it was breakfast time, a busy hour of the day with everyone intent on their own concerns: preparing to leave for work, getting children ready for school, no time to be interested in what was happening outside. All the same, people must have been about all the time, walking past the end of the pathway, leaving in their cars.

They were making a fingertip search of the wood now, outside the taped area around the body and the delineated access path to where it had lain, looking for the murder weapon. Brambles and nettles grew in profusion at its edges, unidentified fungi grew in the undergrowth and on rotten tree stumps, nasty to the touch. There were still damp, muddy areas, even after weeks of dry weather, and evidence that dogs were irresponsibly let out to exercise here. Garden rubbish – and other things which had no business to be dumped there – had been thrown over the fences of those gardens backing on to the wood. ‘The best of British,' he muttered under his breath as he left, on his way to see Mrs Bailey. It was a long time since that sort of thing had fallen to his lot, thank God.

‘Sir!' It was young WDC Platt, hurrying to intercept him.

Her pretty face was pale, her curls damp with the heat.

‘What is it, Jenny?'

‘We've found the missing cat, sir. It's dead.'

She was looking upset, the way people did over animals, and shocked, evidently thinking, what a place to dump a dead cat, where children played! A hitherto safe area, where they wouldn't now be allowed to play for some time, even when the police were finished with the locus, Mayo guessed. Parents and children alike would, understandably, be wary of this little wood for some time to come.

‘Perhaps you should come and see, sir,' Jenny suggested. He saw there was something more by her face.

Abigail accompanied him as he walked over to where Kite and a group of uniformed men were gathered around a deep tangle of undergrowth, and as she peered down at what was there, he heard her indrawn breath, and understood why when he also looked.

Not just any old cat. A big, sleek tortoiseshell, a handsome animal, plump and healthy-looking, despite its reputed ear trouble. It wasn't going to need the vet now. It appeared to have been stabbed, not once, but many times. It had had its throat cut. He gently touched the animal. The fur was still warm, the body not yet locked in rigor. He turned away, sickened.

‘Poor beast. See we get blood samples.'

‘Sir?'

‘We'll need to establish which is the cat's blood out there, and which came from the girl.'

Jenny looked even more upset, but she pulled herself together quickly. She was turning out to be one of his best officers, proving to be hard-working and methodical, though she sometimes had to have things spelled out for her. She would probably do all right for herself in the Force, in a steady, unspectacular way.

‘We'll have to have another think now about where Patti was killed, won't we?' Abigail, naturally sharper and more intuitive, was saying. If the traces of blood further back along the path weren't hers, she might have been attacked right by where she was found.'

‘Could account for why nobody saw or heard anything of the attack, too. And for the absence of any drag marks on the heels of her shoes or along the path into the wood,' Mayo said, ‘or the unlikely possibility that her killer picked her up and carried her further into here. I suppose he could have dragged her by her feet, but if he did, there'd have been marks on her, on her clothing. And anyone who did this,' he said, jerking his head towards the body of the cat, ‘he'll have blood on him, maybe scratches, unless he wore gloves. I'd guess by the size of it, this puss was a bit of a tiger.'

There was another shout. One of the uniformed constables had found what was almost certainly the weapon.

It was a flat, heavy length of iron, flaking with rust, about eighteen inches long by two inches wide, the sort used to brace the concrete posts between which the wires at the bottom of the gardens in the Close were stretched. Its narrow edge suggested the profile of the weapon used to inflict the wound on the back of Patti's head. Typically, the builders who'd put the fencing up in the first place had simply dumped the surplus material among the nettles and docks in the wood, rather than go to the trouble of carting it away. The killer had made no attempt to hide the piece of iron, perhaps thinking it would be lost among the dozens of similar pieces left lying around, that the blood would be indistinguishable from the rust marks on it, perhaps not thinking at all, only wanting to be rid of it. Only it wasn't, like the rest, half obscured in the encroaching bindweed and nettles, but had landed on a broken piece of the concrete fencing post, staining it with wet blood. Even then, it had needed someone as sharp-eyed as the youngest constable there to notice the stain.

‘Nice one, Kevin,' commented Kite to the young PC, who flushed and tried to look nonchalant.

Dexter, summoned to look at it, pulled down his mouth. ‘Don't expect we'll get any prints from that rough surface, even if he didn't wear gloves, but we'll collect some blood and so on from it, all right. And there'll be some of this muck and rust in the wound.' He indicated the flaking surface of the rust-scabbed and soil-encrusted iron bar as he bagged it in a polythene evidence bag and labelled it.

‘Do your best, Dave.'

Mayo was at last able to leave them to it and went, with Abigail, to seek out Mrs Bailey at number sixteen, while Kite went three doors down to take a statement from the man who'd found Patti's body.

The tortoiseshell cat's name was Nero, and the Lawleys had obviously been devoted to it. The news of how it had been killed devastated Trevor Lawley. ‘God, that's sick!'

‘Yeah. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?' Kite agreed.

‘I mean, you hear about folk doing these sort of things to animals but you never think ... hell, how am I going to tell the wife? Much less the kids!'

His Black Country accent came out strongly. He was a smallish man, thin and nervy, dressed in a dark-blue-and-red checked workshirt and jeans, and in his distress over his cat he seemed almost to have forgotten why he was being interviewed.

‘Just my rotten luck, ain't it?' he moaned, when Kite managed to bring him back to finding Patti Ryman's body. ‘I tell you straight, I rue the day we ever come here. It was only a council flat we had but we'd have been better stopping there. One thing after another it's been since the day we moved in. First the wife loses her job, then I'm made redundant, we haven't a snowball in hell's chance of paying the mortgage and no hope of selling the bloody house, neither. We don't need this! If anything'll put the kibosh on selling it, this will!'

With all these troubles, it was perhaps understandable that Lawley was morbidly self-obsessed with his ill fortune, and Kite schooled himself not to remind him too tersely that life wouldn't be fun for Patti Ryman any more, either, or her mother. ‘Mr Lawley, just tell me what happened this morning,' he said shortly, making a mental note to ask whether the Lawleys had quarrelled with anyone who might have taken their revenge through the cat, though Lawley was quite likely to be as paranoiac about that as everything else, to see himself surrounded by enemies. They were doing another quick round of the Close, anyway, after discovery of the cat, and in a close-knit community such as this, with everyone aware of everyone else's business, any quarrels between neighbours would soon come to light.

Kite's tone, if not the words, had got through to Lawley, making him pause in the airing of his grievances, gnawing his lip. ‘Sorry. Just got to the stage where I can't take much more, know what I mean? It's a shame about the little wench.'

‘How well did you know her?'

It wasn't a question to keep him calm. ‘What do you mean, how well did I know her? Here, you're not thinking I had anything to do with it? Bloody hell, I only knew her through her bringing the papers!'

Trevor Lawley had been the one to find her, he might also have been the last one to see her alive. Why Patti Ryman had died was as yet a mystery, and there was no reason to believe Lawley had anything to do with it but there was every reason why he should, like anyone else, be subjected to questioning, and Kite told him so. He doubted whether Lawley even heard him.

‘Look, she was a nice enough kid as far as I could tell, and I'm sorry this had to happen to her. Why, she used to stop and have a word with Nero of a morning,' he said, as if the cat had been a human being and their niceness to him was the criterion by which Lawley judged every other human being. ‘He'd taken to sitting on top of the fence post by the path, and she'd stop for a minute or two and he'd let her stroke him under his chin, where he liked it – he wouldn't have let anybody do that, I can tell you! He was sixteen,' he said, back with his preoccupations. ‘That's a good age for a cat, but he could've lived for years. He shouldn't have died like that! Just let me get hold of the bastard what did it! What sort of sicko could do that to a poor, defenceless animal?'

Kite had had enough of this. He said sharply, ‘Patti Ryman was sixteen, too. Shall we keep to the point, Mr Lawley?'

Like a finicky housewife, the other man bent to straighten the fringe on the hearth rug, perhaps aware he'd gone over the top in his lament for his cat, more likely just out of a habit of obedience. The house was soulless and unimaginative, so immaculately clean and tidy, without a book or a magazine or a child's toy in sight, that it was hard to imagine any family life existing in it, much less any pet being allowed to form part of the household. Perhaps it only looked like this because it had to stand in permanent readiness for inspection by any possible client who might suddenly appear on the horizon. More likely Mrs Lawley was one of those obsessive housewives who have a personal vendetta against anything likely to harbour dust and germs.

Either way, Kite began to feel sorry for him. He thought of his own untidy, sometimes chaotic household, centred around two noisy, pre-teenage boys, and his cheerful, always on the go, slightly zany wife, Sheila, and was suddenly, thankfully, happy.

‘So, to recap. You went looking for your cat and entered the wood at half past eight, when you saw the body of a young girl you recognized as Patti Ryman?'

‘Well, I didn't know her last name. I only knew her as Patti.'

‘Did you touch her?'

"Course I didn't touch her! I rushed home and dialled 999, for God's sake, for the ambulance.' He stopped. ‘I think I knew she had to be dead, though, the way she was lying there – her clothes, know what I mean ... Was she raped?'

When Kite didn't answer, he added, with unexpected sharpness, ‘If you're looking for perverts, mate, you want to look at that bloke at number seven, not me. Can't keep his eyes off of the kids!'

At the door, Kite remembered he hadn't asked about the pen.

‘A what?' Lawley said, when he'd described it. ‘A bloody pen, that price?' He jerked his thumb towards the For Sale sign. ‘You have to be joking!'

At least, thought Kite as he left, he'd succeeded in bringing some amusement into Lawley's day.

The bay window at number seven gave Stanley Loates an oblique view of the police activity in the Close. Despite the uncomfortable racing of his heart, he watched their comings and goings compulsively, his jaws masticating one lump of treacle toffee after another from the paper bag in his pocket, telling himself repeatedly that he'd nothing to fear. He'd already been questioned twice – once about the girl, and then that young woman detective constable with the curly hair had come back about the cat. He'd told her that he'd seen nothing of Patti the paper girl that morning. She'd seen how surprised he was about the cat, and he was sure she'd believed him on both counts. She'd been very polite, thanked him and told him not to bother getting up out of his chair to see her to the door, sir, as though he was an old man.

Stanley wasn't old – nearly fifty, but that was young these days – a fattish, flabby man whose shirt and ill-fitting, baggy-bottomed trousers never met neatly, an unprepossessing man with sweaty palms and thinning, fairish hair. He lived with his mother, who was old and senile and ought by rights to be in a home, where she could be looked after properly, anyone said so. But to all such advice Stanley turned a deaf ear. She was his mother, he'd never let her be put away, he told them. He was a good son.

Maybe a few gullible souls were fooled by this, but not anyone who knew the two of them.

The truth was that the council-owned homes were full, with long waiting lists, and though Hilda Loates had enough funds in the bank to pay the costs of a private one, Stanley had no intention of wasting what was left of his inheritance. She'd sold his father's run-down business (thus depriving Stanley of the only job he'd ever had) and the old house in Grover Street, for what little they would fetch, having taken it into her head to buy this house as an investment, telling him with a cackle he could always sell it at a fat profit when she was gone. That was five years ago. She hadn't gone yet and you couldn't give these houses away now.

All this, however, was only partly why he didn't trouble himself about finding another job, but stayed at home and cared for her. The truth was, Stanley didn't dare to suggest such a thing as a home to his mother, for he was still terrified of her, as he had been all his life. His brain told him it was quite impossible that she, a weak old woman, could take him, a grown man, by the shoulders and shove him into the dark cupboard under the stairs as she used to when he was a child, but his mind didn't believe it. She was capable of anything. She'd be able to rise from the dead, he was sure. She'd always had a vicious tongue, and though what she said nowadays, after her stroke, was mostly rubbish, she was aware of everything that went on, and she could talk intelligibly if she wanted to. The reason she didn't, very often, was that she knew her gobbledegook speech made life more difficult for him. So he gritted his teeth and carried on. He was prepared to do whatever he had to do for her. Whatever. He knew she couldn't last that much longer and after that – bingo! Life would begin, at last, for Stanley Derrington Loates.