Lois Meade 01: Murder on Monday (EN, 2002) (10 page)

Josie looked at her fearfully. “Nobody you know,” she said.

“Not that bloody Melvyn?”

“No,” Josie lied quickly. “Just a boy from town. Anyway,” she continued, crying so messily now that it was difficult to make out what she was saying. “He never done it.”

“Never done
what!
” said Lois, trying to keep control.

“Oh, you know, Mum. It. Seems he was planning to, but he let me go and I got out. I know a quick way home, through that alley between them old houses…” She petered out, sniffing and wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Lois silently handed her a tissue and sat down at the table opposite her.

“Josie,” she said, calming down and speaking gently, “I think we need to talk. With Dad, and that. You’ve been missing school a lot, haven’t you.” She didn’t wait for a reply. “And all this going around with boys older than you and talking of clubbing and dancing, and being out all hours. You’re still a child, Josie, and our responsibility. Now – ” she added, standing up briskly – “I shall put the kettle on and make a cup of tea, whether you like it or not, because I need one. No more talk until your Dad gets home and you’d better go and wash your face. Go on, up you go.”

Left alone in the kitchen, Lois felt her maternal omnipotence slipping away. Always able to console, to kiss and make it better, to find solutions to all childish problems, now she felt out of her depth. Her little Josie in that disgusting place, with some strange boy who’d nearly taken away her childhood for ever. Thinking back to her own teenage years was no help. She’d just been lucky. Oh, my God, how was she going to find the right words to tell Derek? She made two mugs of tea and sat at the table, waiting for Josie to come down.

“Mum?” Lois looked up, and there was Josie, her face washed and with no make-up, her hair tied back in a ponytail, changed into a white T-shirt and jeans, looking for all the world like the ideal teenager. “Mum,” Josie said again. “Can I say something before Dad gets home?”

Lois nodded. “Drink your tea before it gets cold,” she said.

Josie sat down opposite her, and smiled wanly. “Look, Mum,” she said. “Things have changed a bit since you were young.” Lois began to splutter, but Josie asked if she could please finish what she wanted to say. “Most of the girls in my class have done it and there’s only me and one or two others who haven’t. I’m the odd one out, Mum.”

“At
fourteen?
”’ said Lois incredulously.

“Oh, Mum, where’ve you bin’?” Josie laughed now and choked, trying to drink tea at the same time. Lois said nothing more and sat and listened while Josie brought her up to date. One of her schoolmates, said Josie, had left to have a baby. “She was really pleased,” said Josie. “To get out of school and have somethin’ to love. Didn’t get much at home.”

“Ah, come off it,” said Lois at last. “You’ve been watching too much telly. Somethin’ to love? Love hasn’t anything to do with it, so don’t try that one.”

Josie shrugged. “It ain’t all sex, Mum,” she said wisely. “Some girls just like the cuddling bit. Still – ” she added with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders – “if you’re not even going to try an’ understand…”

“No, no, go on, tell me everything, the whole sordid lot,” said Lois. “I need to know it all when I tell your Dad.”

“Must you?” said Josie.

Lois frowned at her. “What do you mean?” Surely Josie knew that Derek and she had no secrets.

Josie struggled on. “Must you tell Dad? After all, nothing happened. I was dead scared and no bugger is goin’ to get me in there again. No harm done.”

“Don’t swear,” said Lois automatically. She was silent for a minute, and then said, “Well, I suppose we could leave it. Let the heat go out of it. I’ll think about it. Let you know. But for Christ’s sake, Josie, be more sensible in future. Seems you know quite enough to be able to see trouble coming.”

Neither talked for a few minutes, then Josie got to her feet. “Need any help?” she said sweetly. “Ironing, shopping, or anything?”

“Never mind that,” said Lois. “And this clinches that clubbing business, my girl! So don’t even think of it. And as for Melvyn…You don’t fool me all the time, you know. If we hear you’ve been with him anywhere at any time, it’ll be real trouble. And no more missing school. I shall know, Josie, you can be sure of that. Plenty of spies around here, who’d be only too pleased to let me know.”

∗

That night, unable to sleep, Lois woke Derek and told him the whole story. He was so quiet she thought he’d gone back to sleep and hadn’t heard her. But he moved suddenly, put his arms round her and stroked her hair. “You done well, gel,” he said. “Nothing more to be done, for the present. But if we hear of anything else, by God, I’ll skin that bloody Melvyn alive.” Reassured, Lois drifted off to sleep and dreamed that Josie was lying dead in Gloria Hathaway’s cottage, her thumb in her mouth and clutching her old teddy bear.

L
ois met the postman on her way out next morning, late for the Baers’ and well aware that Evangeline would deliver a well-worded rocket. “Hey!” she called, as she watched him disappearing up her neighbour’s path. “Can I have a word?”

Yes, he knew the lad she meant. He lived in one of the back streets of town, where red-brick terraces had survived from the days when Tresham had been a busy railway junction and industrial town. Yes, he said again, curious now, the family seemed all right, several kids, all boys, quite a bit younger than Melvyn. He’d been on that round for a while, and the mother had always given him cups of tea on cold mornings and a drink and a mince-pie at Christmas. Nice woman, worked hard with all those kids. Never saw the father. Melvyn was the quiet one, he remembered. The others were always yelling and fighting, like kids will, but Melvyn didn’t. Clever at school, if he had the right one, and he was sure he had. Yep, tall and thin, with reddish hair and dark eyes, a bit more about him than most.

“Thanks,” said Lois. “I knew you’d be the one to ask.”

“Your Josie fancy him, then?” said the postman with a grin. Lois pretended not to have heard, and got into her car. It wouldn’t start first time, and by the time she got going, her neighbour’s door had shut firmly behind the postman and the frosty street was quiet.

Evangeline Baer was ready for her. “This is unlike you, Lois,” she said. “I was relying on you being here on time. I have to go over to Ringford to pick up some stuff from a young potter just moved in there. Very nice, it is. Good shapes and glazes.”

What is she on about? thought Lois, and said, “No, it isn’t like me, and I have a good reason for being late. Anyway, you could have gone. I’ve got the key you gave me. And you know I’ll make up the time. Or you can dock my pay.”

“Don’t be silly, Lois,” said Evangeline mildly, and quaked when she saw Lois bridle. Lord knows I can’t do without her, she thought, and said tentatively that she’d be grateful if Lois could do an extra half-hour anyway, with pay, to help her unload the pottery.

“Sorry, can’t do that,” said Lois. “Got a meeting with the police.” That’ll fix her, she said under her breath, and disappeared upstairs.

Lois had arranged to meet Janice Britton and PC Simpson at Janice’s house in Farnden, after she’d finished at the Baers’. She was apprehensive and excited at the same time. Her notebook was half-full of snippets of events and information she had remembered, and she hadn’t yet decided just how much she was going to share with the others. She had to admit she was nervous in case they laughed.

When, however, she knocked at Janice’s door and was ushered in to her small front room to meet Keith Simpson again, she saw their faces and remembered with a jolt that this was not a game. Murder was the worst crime in the book and it was quite likely that someone she knew had done it.

“The difficult thing, in a way,” said Janice, “is that the poor woman had no relatives we can trace. None living, anyway. If she was in trouble – and she most likely was – she’d got nobody to turn to.”

“Except Doctor Rix,” said Lois, without thinking. She was remembering those frequent telephone calls, the out-of-hours consultations in the surgery. “And the vicar, of course, Reverend White,” she added. “Vicars are supposed to help people in trouble, aren’t they? And then there’s her neighbour, Nurse Surfleet. She’s always helping people. Loads of people in this village would’ve helped…” She tailed off, looking at their patient faces.

“If she’d asked,” said Janice, humbly aware that Lois had left her off the list. “From what I knew of her, she kept herself very much to herself. Anti-people, in a lot of ways. Gillian Surfleet tried, and sometimes it was all right and other times she got the bum’s rush. She could be very rude, could Gloria Hathaway.”

“Anyway,” said Keith, sitting up straight, “we’d better do this in some sort of order. Can you make notes, Janice, and I’ll ask Lois some straight questions. We don’t want to ramble about too much…if you don’t mind?” he added quickly, seeing Lois’s face. He was well aware that if the Inspector considered Lois to be potentially useful, he would take on dealings with her himself.

“See what you can get out of the woman,” Cowgill had said. “Let her think we’re sharing information, if she wants to play detective. String her along a bit, but don’t tell her anything.” Keith reflected that he hadn’t got anything of real interest to share anyway, and could not resist a small smile. If DI Cowgill thought he could handle Lois, good luck to him!

“Firstly, how does your week go, Lois?” said Keith, in his best official voice.

“Monday, Rixes; Tuesday, Barratts; Wednesday, Nurse Surfleet; Thursday, the vicar, Peter White; and Friday the Baers. Three hours at each, starting at 9 o’clock.”

“Excellent,” said Keith, and Janice’s pen moved rapidly across her notebook. “All the facts, and in good order. If only all witnesses were as orderly.”

“I’m not a witness,” said Lois flatly. “I didn’t see who killed Gloria Hathaway. I wasn’t even at that meeting. Not for the likes of me, you know. Open Minds is for those with minds, and cleaners don’t have minds.”

“Come off it, Lois,” said Keith reprovingly. “That kind of comment is of no use to a police enquiry. Just stick to answering my questions with the facts.”

“Oh, shut up!” said Lois, losing patience. “I agreed to come here to exchange some information, and that’s what we’ll do.” Janice Britton nodded vigorously, smiling sympathetically. Lois continued firmly, “So what have you got so far? Not a lot, is my guess.”

Keith put down his papers and Janice her notebook, and all three relaxed. Keith started again. “We’ve taken statements from every woman who was at the meeting, and corroborating statements from their families; times they set off, came back, whether they went on their own to the meeting, or joined up with friends, that sort of thing. Nothing untoward there.”

“The speaker that night was an old woman, wasn’t she?” said Lois. Keith then assured her that they had followed her up and she’d been there in front of twenty pairs of eyes, whilst in the next room poor Gloria had met her terrified end.

“Didn’t they hear anything?” Janice asked this obvious question, because it seemed strange that in a roomful of women listening politely to a quiet-voiced, elderly Land Girl, no sounds of alarm or struggle had been heard.

Keith shook his head. “Some of them said there was the usual rumble from the urn. Seems it’s an ancient old crate of a thing, difficult to control. They get it up to boiling, then leave it on low until they make the tea. But it goes on rumbling and bubbling, so they say. Fills the kitchen with steam.”

“What?” said Lois, looking up sharply.

“
What
what?” said Keith, startled.

“What’s that you said about the steam?”

“Fills the kitchen, they said. Especially on cold nights. Nothing remarkable about that, is there, Lois?” Keith was dangerously near his patronising tone again, and Lois frowned.

“Nothin’ at all,” she said. “Except she wouldn’t’ve seen him – or her – coming, would she. Not if the steam was thick.”

“Ah,” said Keith. Janice began jotting in her notebook again.

“So who else’ve you talked to, apart from the women and their families?” Lois was beginning to feel much more confident. She saw that already she knew a lot more than they did, all in all. Not much they could add, she suspected, but it was worth going on with it for a bit.

Keith felt uncomfortable. Tables seemed to have been turned on him in some way, and he answered Lois reluctantly. “We are taking a list of village residents one by one,” he said. “Street by street. Amazing what turns up, with patient investigation.”

“Meanwhile,” said Janice treacherously, “the murderer may well have been busy covering his tracks.”

“Could be in Australia by now,” said Lois, and burst out laughing. “Oh, come on, Keith,” she added. “Anything juicy emerged yet?”

“Well,” he answered huffily, racking his brains for something Lois would consider juicy. “It may be nothing to do with the murder, but one of the neighbours saw someone walking up the footpath that goes behind Miss Hathaway’s and Nurse Surfleet’s cottages, but just assumed it was one of the women going to Open Minds.”

“Where does the footpath end up?” said Lois. “I know it goes along the back of the gardens.”

“At the village hall,” said Keith, and shifted a little in his seat. “But it doesn’t have any lighting, so the neighbour couldn’t say who it was.”

“Well,” said Lois. “It might be interesting, or, as you say, it could just be one of the Open Minds women…though wouldn’t they think twice about going along there in the pitch dark?”

They had a cup of coffee then, and Keith asked Lois several times if she had noticed anything odd going on in the houses she cleaned, or had overheard any worrying conversations. But Lois side-stepped his questions, revealing nothing of much use.

Finally Keith rose. “Well, better be getting back to the station,” he said, “I must report back to DI Cowgill. Anyway, thank you, Lois,” he said. “You have been most helpful.” He wasn’t quite sure about this, particularly when it actually came down to anything new he could tell the Inspector.

She glared at him. “Oh, I dunno. None of us knows who did it, do they? Could’ve been Dr Rix, or Prof Godwin…or then again, the Reverend…or Mr Baer…or even Nurse Surfleet, when you think how strong she has to be in her job…”