Gallows View (7 page)

This would be something different. The old folks’ houses all smelled of the past: lavender water, Vicks chest rub, commodes, old dead skin. This time they would be in the classy homes, places with VCRs, fancy music centres, dishwashers, freezers full of whole cows. They could take their time, enjoy it, maybe even do some real damage. After all, they wouldn’t be able to carry everything away. Best stick to the portables: cash, jewellery, silver, gold. He could just imagine Mick and Lenny being stupid enough to try and sell stolen colour tellys and videos at Eastvale market. These days everyone wrote their bloody names and postcodes on everything from microwaves to washing-machines with those ultraviolet pens, and the cops could read them under special lights. He hoped Mick was right about burglar alarms, too. It seemed that people were becoming very security-conscious these days.

He crossed the south side of the deserted market square and walked through the complex of narrow, twisted streets to King Street. Then he cut through Leaview Estate towards Gallows View. The terrace of old cottages stood like a wizened finger pointing west to the Dales.

As he passed the bungalows and crossed Cardigan Drive to the dirt track in front of the cottages, Trevor noticed some activity outside the first house, number two. That was where the old bag, Matlock, lived. He walked by slowly and saw a crowd of people through the open door. There was that hotshot copper from London, Banks, who’d got his picture in the local paper when he’d got the job a few months back; that well-known local thug, Hatchley, who looked a bit unsteady on his pins; and the woman standing in the doorway. What on earth was she doing there? He was sure it was her, the one who lived in the fancy Georgian semis
across The Green from the East Side Estate, the one Mick was always saying he’d like to fuck. Maybe she was a cop, too. You never could tell. He walked into number eight to confront his father once again over homework not done.

Jenny, who had disobeyed Banks’s orders and stood unobserved in the doorway, had never seen a corpse before, and this one looked particularly bad. Its wrinkled bluish-grey face was frozen in a grimace of anger and pain, and pools of dark blood had coagulated under the head on the stone flags of the room. Alice Matlock lay on her back at the foot of a table, on the corner of which, it appeared, she had fractured her skull while falling backwards. These were only appearances, though, Jenny realized, and the battery of experts arriving in dribs and drabs would soon piece together what had really happened.

Despite the horror of the scene, Jenny felt outside it all, taking in the little details as an objective observer. Perhaps, she thought, that was one of the qualities that made her a good psychologist: the ability to stand outside the flux of human emotions and pay careful attention. Outside looking in. Perhaps it also made her not so acceptable as a woman—at least one or two of her lovers had complained that however enjoyable she was in bed and however much fun she was to be with, they felt that they couldn’t really get close to her and were always aware of themselves being studied like subjects in a mysterious experiment. Jenny brushed aside the self-criticism; if she didn’t conform to men’s ideas of what a woman should be—fainting, crying, subjective, irrational, intuitive, sentimental—then bugger them.

The house was oppressive. Not just because of the all-pervading presence of death, but because it was absolutely cluttered with the past. The walls seemed unusually honeycombed with little alcoves, nooks and crannies where painted Easter eggs and silver teaspoons from Rhyll or Morecambe nestled alongside old snuff boxes, delicate china figurines, a ship in a bottle, yellowed birthday cards and
miniatures. The mantelpiece was littered with sepia photographs: family groups, stiff and formal before the camera, four women in nurses’ uniforms standing in front of an old-fashioned army ambulance; and the remaining wall space seemed taken up by framed samplers, and watercolours of wildflowers, birds and butterflies. Jenny shuddered. Her own house, though structurally old, was sparse and modern inside. It would drive her crazy to live in a mausoleum like this.

She watched Banks at work. As she had expected, he was professional and efficient, but he often seemed distracted, and sometimes a look of pain and sadness crossed his features when he leaned against the wall and gazed at the old woman’s body. The photographer popped his flash from every angle. He looked far too young, Jenny thought, to be so matter-of-fact about death. The doctor, one of those older, cigarette-smoking types who pay house calls when you have flu or tonsillitis, busied himself with thermometers, charts and other tools of his trade. Out of decency, Jenny turned away and tried to name the wildflowers depicted on the walls. She felt invisible, standing by the doorway, arms folded across her breasts. Everyone seemed to think she had come with Banks. Nobody even paid her the slightest bit of attention; no one, that is, except the slightly squiffed detective she had seen earlier on her visit to the station, who occasionally cast lecherous glances in her direction. Jenny ignored him and watched the men at work.

Also in the midst of this routine, robotic activity sat Ethel Carstairs, who had discovered the body. Though trembling and white with shock as she sipped the brandy a police constable had brought her from Alice’s medicinal bottle in the kitchen, she had regained enough control to talk to Banks.

“Alice was supposed to call on me this evening,” said Ethel in a weak, shaky voice. “She always comes on Sundays and Tuesdays. We play rummy. She’s not on the phone, so when she didn’t come there wasn’t much I could do. As time went on I got worried, then I decided to walk over and see if she was all right. She was eighty-seven just last week, Inspector. I bought her that sugar bowl broken on the floor there.”

It looked as if someone had pulled all the drawers out of the old
oak sideboard, and a pretty, rose-patterned sugar bowl lay in several places on the flags.

“She always did have a sweet tooth, despite what the doctor told her,” Ethel went on, pausing to wipe her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief.

“Is this exactly how you found her?” Banks asked gently.

“Yes. I didn’t touch a thing. I watch a lot of telly, Inspector. I know about fingerprints and all that. I just stood in the doorway there, saw her and all the mess and went to the box on the corner of Cardigan Drive and phoned the police.”

Banks nodded. “Good, you did exactly the right thing. What about the door?”

“What?”

“The door. You must have touched it to get in.”

“Oh yes, silly of me. I’m sorry but I did have to open the door. I must have smudged all the prints.”

Banks smiled over at Vic Manson, who was busy dusting the furniture with aluminium powder. “Don’t worry, Mrs Carstairs,” Manson assured her. “Whoever it was probably wore gloves. The criminals watch a lot of telly these days, too. We have to look, though, just in case.”

“The door,” Banks went on. “Was it ajar, open, locked?”

“It was just open. I knocked first, then when I got no answer, I tried the handle and it just opened.”

“There’s no sign of forced entry, sir,” added Detective Constable Richmond, who had been examining the doorframe beside Jenny. “Whoever it was, she must have let them in.”

Hatchley came down from his search of the upper rooms. He wasn’t irredeemably drunk, only about two sheets to the wind, and like most professionals, he could snap back into gear in a crisis. “It’s been gone over pretty thoroughly,” he said to Banks. “Wardrobe, drawers, laundry chest, the lot.”

“Do you know if Mrs Matlock owned anything of value, Mrs Carstairs?” Banks asked.

“It’s Miss Matlock, Inspector. Alice was a spinster. She never married.”

“So she has no immediate family?”

“Nobody. She outlived them all.”

“Did she own anything valuable?”

“Not really what you’d call valuable, Inspector. Not to anyone else, that is. There was some silverware—she kept that in the sideboard cupboard, bottom shelf.” The cupboard door gaped open and there was no sign of cutlery among the bric-à-brac scattered on the flags. “But her most valuable possessions were these.” Ethel gestured towards the knick-knacks and photographs that filled the room. “Her memories.”

“What about money? Did she keep much cash in the house?”

“She used to keep a bit around, just for emergencies. She usually kept it in the bottom drawer of her dressing table.”

“How much did she have there, as a rule?”

“Oh, not much. About fifty pounds or so.”

Banks glanced at Hatchley, who shook his head. “It’s a mess up there,” he said. “If there was any money, it’s gone now.”

“Do you think our man, or men, knew where to look?”

“Not by the looks of it,” Hatchley answered. “They searched everywhere. Same pattern as the other break-ins.”

“Yes,” Banks said quietly, almost to himself. “The victims always let them in. You’d think older people would be more careful these days.”

“Prosopagnosia,” announced Jenny, who had been listening carefully to all this.

“Pardon?” Banks said, seeming as surprised to see her there as she was by the sound of her own voice. The others looked around, too. With an angry glance, Banks introduced her: “Dr Fuller. She’s helping us with a case.” Everyone smiled or nodded and went back to work. “Can you explain it, then?” Banks asked.

“Prosopagnosia? It’s the inability to recognize faces. People sometimes get it after brain damage, but it’s most common in senility.”

“I don’t quite see the connection.”

“Alice wasn’t senile, young lady,” Ethel Carstairs cut in, “but it’s true that she was beginning to forget little, day-to-day things, and the past was much closer to her.”

Jenny nodded. “I didn’t mean to be insulting, Mrs Carstairs. I just meant it’s part of the aging process. It happens to us all, sooner or later.” She turned back to Banks. “Most of us, when we see a face,
compare it with our files of known faces. We either recognize it or we don’t, all in about a split second. With prosopagnosia, the observer can see all the components of the face but can’t assemble the whole to check against memory files. It makes elderly people vulnerable to strangers, that’s why I mentioned it.”

“You mean she might have thought she recognized whoever it was?” Banks asked.

“Or thought she
should
have and not wanted to be rude. That’s the most common problem. If you’re a kind, polite person, you’ll want to avoid giving offence, so you’ll pretend you know who it is. It’s like when you forget the name of an acquaintance and find ways of avoiding having to say it, only this must be much worse.”

Dr Glendenning packed up his battered brown bag, lit a cigarette—strictly forbidden at the scene of a crime, but generally overlooked in his case—and shambled over to Banks and Jenny. “Dead about twenty-four hours,” he said out of the corner of his mouth in a nicotine-ravaged voice with a strong trace of Edinburgh in it. “Cause of death, fractured skull, most likely inflicted by that table edge there.”

“Can you tell if she was pushed?”

“Looks like it. One or two bruises on the upper arms and shoulders. That’s just preliminary, though. Can’t tell you more till after the autopsy. But unless the old dear was poisoned, too, I shouldn’t imagine there’ll be much more to tell. You can get her to the morgue now. There’ll be a coroner’s inquest, of course,” he said, and walked out.

Everybody had finished. Manson had plenty of fingerprints to play with, most of them probably Alice Matlock’s, and the other two Scene-of-Crime boys had envelopes filled with hairs, fragments of clothing and blood scrapings.

“You can go now, Mrs Carstairs,” Banks said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d drop by the station in the morning and give a formal statement.” He called Detective Constable Richmond to drive Ethel home and instructed him also to pick her up in the morning and take her statement.

“Right, then. I’m off home, too,” Banks said in a tired voice. “It’s up to you now, Sergeant. See there’s someone posted here all night. Deal with the ambulance. And you might as well start talking to the neighbours.
They’ll still be up. Curiosity’s a great cause of insomnia. Do Gallows View and the six end bungalows over the street here. The rest can wait till tomorrow. Remember, the doctor puts the time of death at about twenty-four hours ago—let’s say between ten o’clock and midnight last night. Find out if anyone saw or heard anything. Okay?”

Hatchley nodded glumly. Then his expression brightened when he saw Richmond leading Ethel Carstairs outside. “Don’t be long, lad,” he said, baring his yellow teeth in what passed for a smile. “I’ve got work for you to do.”

Banks and Jenny left. She was surprised that he didn’t vent his anger at her disobedience, but they broke the silence in the car only to arrange another meeting to work on the profile later in the week, then she dropped him off and drove home, unable to get the image of Alice Matlock’s body out of her mind.

Detective Constable Philip Richmond was almost as pleased with his recent promotion to the CID as he was with his new moustache: the latter made him look older, more distinguished, and the former, more important, successful. He had worn the uniform, driven the Panda cars and walked the beat in Eastvale for as long as he cared to, and he had an intimate knowledge of every alley, snicket and back-street in the town: every lover’s lane, every villain’s hangout and every pub where visiting squaddies from Catterick camp were likely to cut up a bit rough at closing time.

He also knew Gallows View, the cottages at the far western edge of the town. Developers had petitioned for their demolition, especially when Leaview Estate was under construction, but the council, under pressure from the Parks and Monuments Commission, had reluctantly decided that they could stay. There were, after all, only five cottages, and two of those, at the western end of the street, had been knocked together into a shop and living quarters. Richmond had often bought gob-stoppers, Tizer and lucky-bags there as a lad, later graduating to cigarettes, which the owner would often trade him for his mother’s coupons giving threepence off Tide or Stardrops.