Stealth (8 page)

The house, one of a terrace in a quiet side street, was obviously still a crime scene, traffic cones preventing the general public from parking their cars across the entrance, incident tape around railings and lamp posts creating a cordoned-off area. This meant that our movements would probably be limited within the house whether people were working in the rooms or not. We discovered that they were, with a constable standing outside, the DI having undertaken to carry on providing that kind of backup while scenes of crime personnel were still on the premises.

It was a Victorian house on three floors if one counted the attics, and as one might expect from the late owner's neat handwriting, the windows sparkled and the dark blue paintwork of the front door was immaculately clean. There were beds of pink and pale blue and white striped pansies bordered by a Lilliputian-height box hedge on each side of the short path to the front door.

We showed our IDs and went in. The hall was light, bright and quite lofty, the staircase wide and carpeted in a shade of deep cream. I did not really want to look at the area at the bottom of the stairs as I knew that was where the body had been found. But I did, and stood there for a moment, very sad.

A man in a white anti-contamination suit bustled forward to tell us that we could only look into the rooms from the hallways on the ground and first floors, and grudgingly added that work in the loft rooms had been completed and also outside in the back garden. Oh, and the kitchen. He actually finished by saying that he would rather we were not there at all.

‘When are you likely to finish?' Patrick asked him.

‘I've absolutely no idea,' was the cold response before he turned on his heel and went from sight.

Patrick raised a meaningful eyebrow in my direction and we commenced our now curtailed tour of the house by immediately ascending the stairs as, if Miss Smythe had indeed been thrown down them, that was where she and the killer had been just prior to that.

‘OK,' Patrick said, pausing. ‘What happened here?'

There was nothing to see, and despite the Met's findings that there were signs of disturbance in almost every room there was none on this spacious landing, no damage to anything, not even to some delicate small bone china figures of animals on a nearby half-moon table. I made no comment but jotted down details in my notebook.

Patrick said, ‘We know from the Met's report that he – I'm sure it was a he – broke in through the back door, which we can take a look at in a moment. Was Miss Smythe hard of hearing? Do we know?'

‘We don't,' I said.

‘Please make a note and remind me to ask the niece if I forget. We must talk to her today if possible. At what time, roughly, was she killed?' Answering the question himself, he went on: ‘The pathologist reckoned she had been dead for between twelve and eighteen hours when the niece found her at three thirty that afternoon. One doesn't have to be very clever to arrive at the conclusion that she had been killed late the previous evening and before she went to bed as the body was fully clothed. I don't reckon he could have been in the house for more than ten minutes, almost certainly a pro.'

Slowly, trying to take in as much detail as possible, we moved on. The report indicated that the murder victim's bedroom was at the back of the house, a detail we already knew from her letters. Incident tape was secured across the doorway. The room was plainer than I would have expected: the walls ivory white, just two or three small pictures that appeared to be reproductions of religious paintings and a larger one of birds, a cornflower-blue carpet with toning curtains and bedspread in a muted floral pattern. The bedcovers had been neatly turned down at one corner but that was where what must have been normality ended, for all the drawers under the bed and those of a nearby chest had been pulled open, the clothing inside them scattered over the carpet, as were the contents of a fitted wardrobe.

‘Obviously, she had been about to get ready for bed,' Patrick said under his breath. ‘We must find out from her niece at what time that might have been.'

The two other bedrooms on this floor had been similarly dealt with but the general impression was of someone who had run from room to room flinging things around but not pausing to search for something to steal. In the bathroom, all the towels were on the floor. Why do this other than to try to give the general impression that the house had been ransacked by a burglar?

Almost listlessly, I gazed into the rooms, unable even to start answering any of the myriad questions in my mind. Then we went up the slightly narrower staircase to the attic. This consisted of three smallish rooms, once presumably servants quarters, which were jam-packed with furniture, packing cases, and every kind of lumber imaginable.

‘This must be all her parents' stuff,' I said. ‘And she couldn't bear to dispose of it or throw any of it away.'

‘I'm not surprised chummy downstairs said they'd finished up here,' Patrick commented wryly. ‘They just took one look at it and bolted. But to be fair, everything's covered in dust and it doesn't look as though it's been disturbed for years.' He went into the room nearest to us which contained an ancient brass bedstead stacked high with cardboard and wooden boxes. A very dusty teddy bear gazed down sadly from the top of the pile and I longed to take it home to be loved by the children.

‘He didn't come up here,' Patrick was muttering. ‘And if he did, he took one look and realized it was not much more than a load of second-hand furniture.'

I went into the adjacent room and made my way, gingerly, through lots of cobwebs, between several old bicycles and a hallstand and looked out of the tiny window. The rear garden was fairly narrow, as was to be expected, and charming, the oak tree about two thirds of the way down dominating it. Either Miss Smythe or a previous resident had used it to full advantage, creating a woodland garden with a couple of paths meandering between shade-loving shrubs and groundcover plants. At the bottom of the garden there was obviously access to a rear lane as I could glimpse a gravel parking area through the emerging foliage of the oak.

‘The remains of the tree house are still there,' I called. ‘Perhaps she intended to have it repaired or rebuilt.'

We returned to the ground floor. The kitchen was large, very clean and sparsely fitted out with basic and surprisingly cheap equipment but for a top-of-the-range microwave cooker.

Patrick was looking at the broken lock on the rear door, situated in a little lobby off the kitchen, examining it minutely with a magnifying glass. It was old fashioned with a fairly large key and still in the locked position, the screws on the striking plate, the section fixed to the doorframe, having been forced out by what one could only imagine as someone having put their shoulder to the door from outside. This plate, with its screws, which looked rusty, was now on the floor. Bolts top and bottom on the door for added security had not been put across and I could imagine Miss Smythe leaving those until just before she went to bed.

I went into the garden where an almost overwhelming sadness came over me as I wandered along the winding paths. It had been designed with great skill so that you could never see all of it from anywhere. This made it seem much larger than it was and there were almost concealed, and delightful, surprises: a wrought-iron table and two chairs by a tiny pool, a miniature statue, another corner to go around and explore, little mysteries. Rosemary Smythe would never see it again.

The oak tree stood in the only large open space, the lawn, some of which was taken up with the planks and smashed larger sections of the fallen tree house. It had been a much more substantial structure than my limited view of it from upstairs had led me to believe and I tried to piece together what it must have looked like. Some, if not most, of the fixing struts were still in the tree.

‘I think you should take a look at this,' I told Patrick when he joined me moments later. ‘This was a solid, well-built thing and it doesn't appear to be rotten.'

He waded in among the shattered woodwork. Grass was growing through it and I wondered why it had not been cleared away.

‘No, there is a certain amount of rotten wood,' he concluded a few minutes later after I had explored the end of the garden. ‘Do you think you could climb up and take a look at what's left up there?' He pointed skywards.

‘Patrick, I've
never
been any good at climbing trees,' I protested.

‘You can stand on my shoulders whereas I can't stand on yours,' he reasoned winningly. ‘Then it's easy to get on that lower branch. After that it's a piece of cake.'

He is quite good at catching me, drunk or sober, after all.

‘They might see me from next door – it isn't in full leaf yet.'

‘We'll have to risk it.'

‘My life is in your hands,' I told him grimly. ‘Literally.'

He cupped his hands and I stepped into them, finding myself elevated – I always forget how strong he is – so I could put my other foot on to one shoulder and was then steadied so I could sit sideways on and then astride the branch. I was at least wearing the right kind of flat shoes but would still have to be careful on the mossy bark. Luckily there were plenty of upper branches to hang on to.

‘That's fine,' I was encouraged. ‘Now make your way to the centre where the tree house was secured around the main trunk. Mind your head.'

He had not mentioned the bit about having to climb at least another ten feet higher. But the tree was old and there were holes and fissures and the stumps of sawn-off branches so it was easy to use these almost like a ladder. I only clouted my head the once. Then I arrived in an area which, from up here, looked like the arms of a candelabra, a perfect place upon which to put a platform for a tree house. Except that . . .

‘But why did the platform fall down?' I called, but quietly.

‘Quite.'

I could see into the garden next door through the partly opened leaves and wondered if the tree's natural growth might now obscure what Miss Smythe had been able to observe without hindrance when it was not in full leaf. Moving carefully and keeping low I examined the remaining struts that were fastened to the tree. They were very substantial, the job done properly, not just nailed on, and with regard to the health of the tree, but all those I could easily reach had been sawn almost all the way through. Still speaking quietly I passed on this information to Patrick below.

‘They would almost certainly marry up with some of the fairly heavy chunks of wood down here that are partly buried by the other stuff so I can't see the ends,' Patrick said. ‘But some of the other timbers must have also been cut before they finally broke, including what were probably the horizontal supports of the platform. It must all have come down like a pack of cards.' He began to walk away. ‘You can come down now.'

I maintained a dignified silence and he chuckled and came back to help me. My descent was a lot less dignified but finally, and accompanied by rather a lot of moss and dead twigs, I landed. And, yes, he steadied me when I tripped on something and almost fell.

There was a thoughtful silence as we went back towards the house. We had moved some of the wood to have a look at the corresponding partly sawn-through ends and then gone down to the end of the garden where there were parking spaces for two cars on a gravel area. There were double gates, locked, that must lead out into an access road of some kind. We would have to look at that as well.

‘Do we have a key for these?' I asked, indicating the gates.

There were four on the ring, a couple of modern-looking ones, presumably for the front door, a large old-fashioned one that we already knew fitted the lock on the back door and another that was smaller. It fitted and turned, answering my question.

Quietly Patrick slid across the bolts top and bottom and opened the gate. We went out and found ourselves in a lane, a picturesque little by-way to the rear of the terrace. Like Miss Smythe's, some of the houses had gates, others no barrier at all, giving views down the gardens, used in some cases as car and wheelie-bin parks and little else. We, of course, were really interested in Hereward Trent's property next door and had been careful not to openly stare at the house from the front.

High wrought-iron gates, fitted with electronic locks, and railings with spikes on top fenced off his car parking space and just beyond it was an equally high wooden fence. We could see nothing of the house beyond except the roof and chimney pots. Then I caught sight of a security camera fixed to the trunk of a tree.

‘This is the kind of place that brings out the worst in me,' Patrick said in a low voice.

‘You mean you yearn to fashion a man-sized cat-flap in the fence, break in and leave the greasy remains of a takeaway on the dining-room table.'

‘Something like that.'

‘They'd tried to kill her before, hadn't they?'

‘Well, someone did. I'm staggered that the poor old lady only broke her leg.'

He went back and gave the exterior of the gates to Miss Smythe's garden, which were over six feet in height, the same careful scrutiny as he had the back door.

‘There are no scrape marks, which one might expect if someone climbed over here quite recently,' I said.

‘No. But if he was fit, and careful, he might not have made any. Or access was gained from the garden next door.' He locked the gate again. ‘It won't hurt to leave it unbolted. We might need to pay a quiet visit one night.'

The address of the niece, Mrs Grant, had been in the case file and we found ourselves outside a tiny cottage, one of a row, very close to the parish church. The woman who answered the door looked at us as though she had been expecting someone else and was now extremely disappointed. We showed her our IDs and Patrick introduced us, adding to her depression.

‘May we come in for a few moments?' he went on to ask.