Paternoster (20 page)

‘I got a call … from him,’ Eden said.

There was silence on the line and she thought Miranda had hung up. ‘Watch your back,’ was all she said, then static filled the line.

Eden put down her mobile. Switch on the TV news, Miranda had said. She left her office, locking the door carefully behind her, and trotted along the walkway to the TV repair shop that occupied the unit next to Tony’s sandwich shop. A bell rang as she entered.

‘Hi, Denny, can I borrow a telly, please?’

Denny looked up from behind the counter and pointed a remote control towards a TV fastened to a bracket on the wall.

‘Which channel?’

‘News, please.’ She looked up at the screen as he changed the channel and yanked up the volume.

A familiar figure appeared outside the Court of Appeal. A beefy man with a bald head. A spider’s web tattoo crawled up his neck, incongruous with his suit and crisp shirt. His lawyer spoke for him as a rash of microphones and recorders jostled for position and cameras rattled off photo after photo.

‘This has taken two years to achieve, but at last today we have seen justice,’ the lawyer said. ‘The conviction against my client was always a travesty, and today has been deemed unsafe and overturned. This is a triumph for the British justice system.’

Dave the Nutter scowled at the camera, his face contorted; a pit bull with PMT. He raised his fist high in victory and screamed into the nearest microphone, ‘Justice!’

Eden stared in horror as he waded into the crowd, triumphant and free. Released on a technicality, the voiceover informed her, as the camera panned over the Court of Appeal.

Dave the Nutter, out there, somewhere. He’d always hated her, and now he’d had time to nurse a grudge up to boiling point. Hammond’s threat,
I’ll find you
. He knew where she lived. Now his henchman was out there, free.

The net was closing around her.

‘You all right, Eden? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

Dazed, Eden turned away from the TV screen.

‘Earth to Eden,’ Denny said.

She dragged her mind back. ‘Sorry, Denny, miles away.’ The news changed to a report on the woeful state of the economy.
Plus
ç
a change
. ‘Thanks for the loan of the TV.’

‘My pleasure. That’ll be ten quid.’ She started and he cackled. ‘Got you there, didn’t I? The look on your face.’

She forced a smile. As she reached for the door handle, Denny said, ‘You get that bloke who done your door?’

She swivelled on her heel. ‘What bloke?’

Denny put down the soldering iron. ‘The one with the tin of red paint and the grudge. I was working late, about midnight on Tuesday, and saw him. I ran out and shouted, but he legged it.’ He caught her look and added, ‘I’ve been round a couple of times to tell you, but you’re never in.’

‘You saw him? Did you tell the police?’

Denny laughed hollowly. ‘Couldn’t organise a fart in a curry-eating contest that lot. When my shop was done over, all I got was a crime number for the insurance. Never caught the bastards. Don’t think they even tried.’

‘Would you recognise him if you saw him again?’ Eden asked.

‘Probably. He wasn’t your usual piss-artist, drunk teenager with a can of spray paint. He was middle-aged. Should’ve known better.’ Denny shook his head. ‘And he was wearing the stupidest bobble hat I’ve ever seen. Looked a right plonker.’

Rosalind Mortimer was not pleased to see her. The fussy bow on her blouse quivered with indignation as Eden came in and took a seat in front of the headmistress’s desk.

‘We met before,’ Rosalind said, with a quirk of her lips to indicate the memory wasn’t a pleasant one.

‘Yes, when those skeletons were discovered in the school grounds,’ Eden said, blithely. Little Jimmy had been murdered, Dave the Nutter was out of prison, and Hammond was coming to kill her, so a huffy headmistress in a pussy bow blouse wasn’t going to discompose her one jot.

‘And now another body has been found in the school grounds,’ Eden said.

Rosalind flinched. ‘How do you know about that?’

‘It was on the local news.’ An outside broadcast van was huddled against the school gates when she drove up. No doubt Rosalind was calculating how to minimise the adverse publicity for the school. Eden stared at her for a moment. ‘Did you know the victim?’

Rosalind crossed her legs. She was wearing the naughty librarian shoes again. ‘As it happens, I do know the victim. She was one of our parents.’

‘You saw the body?’

Rosalind swallowed ‘I went to see what was going on.’ She shuddered, too theatrically to be convincing. ‘Horrible. I identified her for the police.’

‘It was Donna Small, wasn’t it?’

‘How do you know?’

Eden sighed. ‘I’m a detective, Mrs Mortimer. Tell me what you know about her.’

Rosalind straightened the green tooled-leather blotter on her desk before she deigned to answer. ‘Her son, Wayne, is a pupil here.’

‘I’ve met him. He’s not a typical Cheltenham Park pupil.’

‘What do you mean?’ Anger flashed in her eyes.

‘Wayne Small is a scruffy, unprepossessing, smelly oik, and a thick one at that,’ Eden said.

‘I wouldn’t say that …’

‘And you know it,’ Eden interrupted. Rosalind flushed scarlet, though whether it was at being interrupted or because the description of Wayne was apt, she wasn’t sure. ‘Now I know that teenage boys are typically monosyllabic thugs, but not here. He must stick out like a chocolate éclair at a weight watchers’ meeting. So how did he get a place?’

‘His fees are paid.’

‘I’d gathered he wasn’t scholarship material.’

A pulse jerked in Rosalind’s throat.

‘Who pays his fees?’ Eden asked. ‘And don’t say his mother pays them, because we both know her salary as a PA for the council won’t run to the fees here, not even for a non-boarder. So who? His father?’

Rosalind glanced at her and her gaze skittered away again. ‘No, his father isn’t able to afford our fees.’ Eden raised an eyebrow and she added, haughtily, ‘I understand that Wayne’s fees are paid by a benefactor. Someone concerned about his future.’

‘Who’s the benefactor?’

Rosalind shook her head. ‘I can’t say.’

Eden’s voice hardened. ‘Can’t or won’t?’

‘Please.’ A muscle ticked under her eye. ‘Don’t ask any more. I can’t say.’

Interesting. A secret benefactor. Wayne’s biological father? Someone in high places whose reputation would suffer if it came out that he had a bastard child?

Eden shifted in her chair and tried a different line of attack. ‘Donna had an appointment booked here today. What was that about?’

Rosalind relaxed visibly. ‘To discuss Wayne’s progress. He wasn’t the shiniest apple in the fruit bowl when he came to the school, but in the past few months his behaviour has deteriorated. He truants more than he attends, these days.’

‘Why’s that, do you think?’

‘He’s a fifteen-year-old boy out of his depth.’ Rosalind turned candid eyes on her. ‘As you said yourself, he doesn’t really belong here.’

Rosalind stood and paced to the window, tapped on the pane to admonish a group of pupils lurking about, and turned back to Eden. When she spoke, her voice had regained its hauteur. ‘Are we finished? I’m very busy, as you can see.’

Eden could see nothing of the sort. The desk was uncluttered, the phone hadn’t buzzed once, and no one had tried to interrupt them. Rosalind seemed remarkably unbusy for the headmistress of a top public school where three bodies had turned up in as many days.

‘There is something else,’ Eden said, not making any effort to move. ‘Another parent at the school, Paul Nelson, also died this week. Also in suspicious circumstances.’

Rosalind paled. ‘Paul Nelson? Yes, of course, the girls’ mother rang me.’ Her head snapped up. ‘She didn’t say his death was suspicious. He was in hospital for a gastric complaint, she said. I assumed …’

‘You assumed wrong. So why is it, Mrs Mortimer, that two parents from this school have died violently this week?’

Rosalind didn’t answer. Her hands shook as she rearranged the pencil tray on the desk, sorting the pens into ascending order of size.

Eden tried a different line of enquiry. ‘You had a burglary here about eighteen months ago?’

Rosalind glanced up at her, surprised by the change of tack. ‘A valuable painting was taken. A Constable.’

‘Have you got a picture of it?’

‘Somewhere, just a minute.’ She picked up the phone and asked her secretary to bring in a folder. ‘I don’t see what this has got to do with Paul Nelson and Donna Small. Or the skeletons, for that matter.’

Neither do I, thought Eden, but said nothing.

When the file was delivered, Rosalind flicked through it and extracted a photograph. She pressed it down on the desk in front of Eden. It was of a rural idyll, a thatched cottage beside a mill pond the colour of tea, the light golden and slanting on the scene.

‘We took this for insurance purposes,’ she said, ‘after the painting was revalued.’

‘When would that be?’

Rosalind rolled her eyes, thinking. ‘The painting came to the school over forty years ago. It was valued at the time, and then revalued about ten years ago, when we took out separate insurance on it.’

‘And this photo was taken then?’

‘Yes. A valuer came from Sotherby’s and checked the provenance, and took detailed photographs.’

Eden reached in her bag and extracted a notebook. Tucked between the pages was the photo she’d borrowed from Paul’s office, of his daughter standing in front of the painting. That photo was taken a couple of years ago, only a few months before the painting was stolen. She laid the pictures side by side and squinted at them, going over them inch by inch and comparing them with each other.

They weren’t the same.

Eden’s mobile rang as she drove away from the school. The ringtone was still on the factory setting, though occasionally she toyed with the idea of changing it to the
Mission Impossible
theme tune.

She pulled into the side, anxious not to be driving if the phone call was Miranda, or worse, Hammond. She didn’t recognise the number, but it had a Cheltenham code that sent a gust of relief through her. Not Hammond, not Miranda.

‘Hello, Eden Grey,’ she said.

A breathy, distressed voice, the words clacking against each other. ‘It’s my daughter. She’s gone missing and they won’t take me seriously. Oh, it’s Mrs Portman, Susan Portman, and my daughter’s called Chelsea. She’s not come home and they won’t listen, say she’s old enough, but I’m worried sick …’

‘All right, Mrs Portman,’ Eden said, sliding her notebook and pen out of her bag. ‘Can you start at the beginning for me?’

Gulping, Mrs Portman told her that her eighteen-year-old daughter, Chelsea, hadn’t returned home the night before. She’d waited until nine that morning and then called the police.

‘They say they have to leave it twenty-four hours, that she’ll just turn up, but it’s not like her.’ The voice cracked. ‘They keep saying she’s eighteen and she can do what she wants.’

‘How can I help?’

‘You’re a private detective. Please find my daughter.’

Susan Portman lived in a neat bay-fronted bungalow in a tree-lined road. A gravel drive led to a narrow garage with shabby wooden doors in need of repainting, and a soggy circle of grass dotted with snowdrops made up the front garden.

The front door opened before Eden had a chance to ring the bell. Mrs Portman was in her late forties, and leaned heavily on a walking frame to support herself. She was dressed in jeans and a saggy brown sweater, and her hair was combed back from her face and tucked behind her ears.

‘Eden Grey? Come in. Tea, coffee?’

‘That’d be lovely. Let me give you a hand.’

The kitchen was neat pale oak with red canisters labelled ‘tea’, ‘sugar’, ‘cake’, in case you forgot the contents. Susan busied around finding cups and teabags, her hands shaking, her walking frame clunking on the tiled floor. She talked constantly, disjointed sentences interrupted by little flurries of crying.

‘She went out last night with her friends. She was supposed to be back by eleven, especially on a school night, but she didn’t come back,’ Susan said. ‘I sat up waiting for her, all night. I couldn’t go to bed: I couldn’t lock and bolt the door, knowing she was still out. And I couldn’t leave it, could I?’

She turned desperate eyes to Eden, who asked, ‘And was there any phone call? Text message at all?’

Susan shook her head. ‘Nothing. It’s not like her. She’d tell me if she was going to be late.’

‘What about her friends?’

Susan pulled a scratty tissue from her sleeve and blew her nose. ‘They said she wasn’t out with them at all. Apparently they don’t hang around together any more,’ she said. ‘I don’t know who she saw last night. I’ve been ringing and ringing her mobile, but it’s switched off. I’ve left I don’t know how many messages.’

Susan leaned against the sink, filling the kettle until it overflowed, staring at it as though she’d never seen it before in her life. Eden gently prised it from her hands and took over.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Mrs Portman?’ she said. She helped Susan reverse into a kitchen chair, and held her arm while she lowered herself into the seat. ‘Can I ask you why you need the walking frame?’

‘Arthritis,’ Susan said. ‘You always think old people get it, don’t you, but I was diagnosed in my twenties.’

Eden’s gaze dropped to Susan’s ankles where they jutted beneath her trousers. Knobbly and deformed, they looked like melted blobs of toffee, and her feet twisted sideways.

‘When did you last eat, Mrs Portman?’

‘I’m not hungry.’ Eden continued to hold her gaze until she confessed, ‘Dinner last night. I just can’t manage anything.’

It was after three in the afternoon. No wonder she was shaky. The house was cold, too.

‘You’re no good to Chelsea like this,’ Eden said. ‘Mind if I look in your fridge?’

The fridge confirmed what she suspected: that Susan was the sort of mother who cared what her daughter ate, the sort who never let her go out without a solid meal inside her, who cried at the thought of kids going to school without breakfast. The fridge contained salmon steaks, salad, low fat yoghurt, ham, a bag of salad leaves, and an expensive bar of high-cocoa chocolate that was evidently being savoured chunk by chunk. Eden admired her restraint: she’d have gobbled the lot in one go. She knocked together a sandwich and persuaded Susan to talk generally about Chelsea while she ate.