The Body of a Woman (12 page)

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Authors: Clare Curzon

BOOK: The Body of a Woman
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‘It was like one of those dimmer switches. Her light didn't go right out, but she wasn't the same. She would laugh less, and her smile never reached her eyes. She'd been so animated before.
‘But she never said she was unhappy. Of course, I'd warned her beforehand not to give up her freedom, her own academic aspirations. You should always be prepared for marriage going sour on you. Not that we knew then of his unsavoury reputation.'
Hadfield beat against the floor with his blackthorn. ‘How he is allowed to work among impressionable young people I'll never understand. I suppose it's overlooked because of his exceptional qualifications. Some people only see what they want to see. And he's well thought of in his speciality.'
‘Which is what precisely?'
Hadfield waved a hand vaguely. ‘Physical Chemistry; Biophysics. These distinctions are all a bit beyond me. That's what he likes, of course: dazzling lesser mortals with his science.'
‘You're speaking of him now in the present tense. Does that mean you have changed your mind? He hasn't done away with himself?'
Hadfield nodded slowly. ‘I have to admit: suicide isn't his line. He'd never see himself sufficiently in the wrong. And whatever he did know he was guilty of, the arrogant bastard would always expect to ride it out.'
Through the open windows there again came the sound of a car engine followed by men's voices. Z left her post and went through the hall to check on it. Not one but two taxis had drawn up by the kerb and the constable on duty was endeavouring to block a double dose of demands for information.
From the first cab the Piggott family spilled out to stare in
amazement at the incident tape and the police presence. Z recalled that they'd left on the previous day in a new-looking white Mercedes; so what had become of that?
The parents seemed aghast, but the prospect of new excitement was bringing the boys out of their subdued state. The zoo visit, like yesterday's trip to Brighton, hadn't proved one of unalloyed pleasure.
Taken up with observing their reactions, Z was slow to remark the smaller man who slid from the second cab and stood staring fiercely at the doorway behind her.
She turned to see that Charles Hadfield had limped out, leaning heavily on his stick. From fifty feet apart the two men confronted each other like stags at rutting.
The defiantly upthrust goatee beard, the gingery hair and pinched features were familiar from a portrait in the study. This newcomer was the missing Professor Knightley, alive and clearly in anything but a co-operative mood.
He advanced on the older man, fists clenched. ‘What the hell are you doing here?' he demanded.
Piggott stared at the two angry men through slitted eyes. His fingers, biting into Madeleine's arm, made her gasp. ‘Who's that?' he demanded.
Her head was bent over her purse, locating her house keys. She screwed round to look. ‘Which one?'
‘The little ginger runt who's just arrived.'
‘That's my new neighbour.'
‘The professor?' He put into it all the scorn he felt for the over-educated. And something else besides.
‘That's right.' Madeleine hooked out the keys and became aware of him paying off the cabbie. That was strange, because he normally turned tail the minute he'd dropped the kids off.
‘You're not coming in again.' It was somewhere between a question and a protest.
‘We have things to settle.' He scowled at the boys. ‘You two clear off down the garden.' He aimed a swipe at Duncan as he passed.
Madeleine looked affronted at the way her husband appeared to be settling back in. He needn't think she was going to offer him coffee. On the other hand her own nerve ends were shrieking for caffeine, and with her hands busily occupied she'd feel less vulnerable.
They went straight through to the kitchen and, relatively secure on her own ground, she opted for frontal attack. ‘I'll be needing more money for the school holidays. There'll be outings and fresh clothes for Dunkie even if I pass his old ones on to Patrick. It costs twice as much as in school term.'
His little currant eyes went meaner. ‘You'll get same as usual. It's more than ample. And if either boy gets a new outfit it'll not be that dickhead Duncan.'
She knew it was hopeless trying to explain how the
younger boy manipulated his brother into the wrong. Jeff would only say you shouldn't let anyone make a fool of you. Yet that's what he was doing. Or else he enjoyed egging Patrick on in his mischief-making. And if she defended Dunkie, Jeff'd start shouting about her turning him into a mummy's boy; why didn't she go ahead and let him do the cooking?
Due to yesterday's lost trainer he'd had a miserable time today breaking in a stiff pair of new shoes. His skin was sensitive and he tended to get blisters. But the trouble had started long before Dunkie acquired his limp. It was when Jeff drew up at Regent's Park with the Merc's wheels half on the pavement.
‘I suppose it's all right to leave the car here?' Madeleine had doubted.
‘There's nothing to say we shouldn't.' Nevertheless her uncertainty reminded Piggott of the car's value and its recent purchase. It would be a blow if some marauding kids fancied it for joy-riding. A customer last week had had his brand new Porsche wrapped around a lamppost after a police chase.
‘I'll just shove it in over there.' Piggott opted for safety by reversing the Mercedes into the forecourt of a sizeable block of flats with the name Flambard Court above the impressive doorway.
The zoo part of the day went fairly smoothly, irritation being mainly avoided by the party splitting into three. Madeleine found a shady spot and some magazines to keep her entertained, while Jeffrey mooched off to appreciate the mandrills' coarser activities. The boys stayed mainly together, Duncan circulating in his normal amiable haze while Patrick, having tired of banging on the bars outside the big cats' enclosure and having been repulsed by a spitting camel, experimented with pieces of discarded sandwich and various animal droppings as ammo in his spud gun. This kept him out of worse mischief until a keeper observed him firing near the penguin pond and he was compelled to beat a hasty retreat.
They reassembled for lunch, which wasn't a bad meal and left them, at least temporarily, glazed and less antagonistic. By 3pm Jeffrey considered his duty done and rounded up the others for the journey home. It was then that he found the Mercedes was no longer parked in the forecourt of Flambard Court.
A tight-lipped approach to the duty porter brought him out to observe the empty parking place. The man allowed the heated flow of complaint to wash over him with the air of one accustomed to being misunderstood, before pointing out the notice warning: vehicles not displaying the Flambard permit were likely to be wheel-clamped and removed.
‘But it's Sunday,' Piggott roared.
‘Yes,' the man agreed mildly. ‘We get a lot of it on Sundays.' Piggott wasn't going to lose face in front of the others by chasing up where the car had been taken. He had minions for that, and tomorrow was another day.
They straggled along the pavement to a bus stop and waited in surly silence. Decanted twenty minutes later at Baker Street Underground station, Jeffrey felt the last of his patience snap and he hailed a passing taxi.
By the time he had its passenger door open wasn't Madeleine, stupid cow, queuing for train tickets. The boys were even further ahead.
‘C'mon, dithers,'Patrick shouted, standing by the down-escalator. Duncan hopped obediently on. He'd been carried five or six stairs down when Patrick's crowing laughter reached him. He spun round and stared up at his exasperated mother, and his redfaced father gesticulating towards something outside.
His heel twisted painfully as he turned. He lost balance, falling against a fat man trying to pass alongside. Both went staggering for a yard or two, grabbing at the moving handrail. At the foot of the stairs the man held him at arm's length, bitingly sarcastic.
Duncan tore himself free and made for the up-escalator.
When he arrived at ground level his mother hauled him off like a two-year-old.
In Baker Street the cab driver was fuming and a traffic block building. As Duncan made to get in the cab Jeffrey reached out and struck at him with the back of one hand. Duncan felt the slash of his signet ring and warm blood start running down his cheek.
‘Bloody imbecile!' his father roared. ‘You've been nothing but a fucking disaster all weekend!'
And a disaster it had been for everyone, Madeleine agreed now as with shaking hands she started filling the kettle. And Jeff hadn't really taken notice of her demand for holiday cash. There was something else eating at him.
‘This professor.' You couldn't miss the contemptuous pause before the title. ‘What did you say his name was?'
‘Knight, I think. No, Knightley. They delivered his post here by accident once, so I saw it. We've never actually met.'
‘Knightley.' Nearly another bloody title. You could see the little shit thought he was God's gift to the universe. A small man. They often behaved like that. Pompous little squirt. Well, it wouldn't take much to puncture his balloon. And with the police on his doorstep it could be that trouble was catching up already.
‘Why the interest?' Madeleine asked with suspicion.
‘What's he to you?”
‘Nothing. Less than nothing. Just thought I'd seen him somewhere before.'
‘Not in your shop. He'd hardly be the betting sort.'
Piggott gave a throaty chuckle. ‘That's what you think, eh? And you're an expert on the punters! He's on the books. Clever he may be, but he can't pick a horse. Too bloody high-and-mighty to come in himself after the first time. Runs a Special Account. Uses the pseudonym Vector, whatever that means.'
He swung himself into a chair at the formica-topped table. ‘So what else, family has he?'
‘I told you once before but you never listened. They've two kids. The boy's left school and the girl's fifteen or sixteen. You'd best ask Duncan, since it seems he's been in there.'
Piggott spun to his feet, opened the back door and roared for his elder son. Duncan wandered in from the terrace, a split grass stem between his two thumbs. He blew on it to produce an ear-splitting shriek. Jeff cuffed him into the house, closing the door again for privacy. At the garden's far end he'd glimpsed Patrick perched high in the old pear tree, binoculars trained on the garden next door. Well, at least one of the kids was awake.
As he might have guessed, Duncan could tell him nothing. Just that the Knightley's house was ‘nice' inside, not modern, and Chloe was ‘all right really'. He'd met her mother too. She'd been washing china in the conservatory and had asked him about school.
‘The girl goes to a private school. Fancy uniform with a purple blazer,' Madeleine put in, adding some body to the skeletal information. She couldn't think why Jeff was interested at this point. He hadn't been when she told him what a helluva lot the house was sold for. He'd simply said that some people had more money than sense, and that anyway all she knew was the asking price: it could have changed hands for a lot less.
But Sally Ellis who sold it said the new people hadn't quibbled. They'd paid in full, for fear of being gazumped. So then Sally wished they'd slapped another ten thousand on, except that admittedly there were a number of repairs to be done, one or two of them structural.
Patrick slid in from the garden, his face puckish with gossip ready to spill.
‘There's been a right barney going on next door,' he said happily. ‘But then a big man made them all sit down and I couldn't hear anything. But he was giving them a real pi-jaw.'
‘The white-haired one with the stick?' Piggott asked sharply.
‘No, another one. I think he was a plain-clothes policeman. He had a woman with him, with a notebook.'
‘So it's not just a traffic inquiry. I wondered why that copper was on duty outside. Maybe they've been burgled.' Piggott eyed his son with suspicion. ‘You making this up? How could you see all this from the tree?'
‘Some I could. But there's a big knot-hole in the fence by their conservatory. You can see right through into their lounge from that.'
‘Patrick, it's not nice, spying on people,' Madeleine limply scolded. ‘That's how trouble can start between neighbours.'
‘Maybe they've started enough for themselves,' said her husband with a smirk. He pulled his mobile phone from a pocket.
Patrick watched enviously as he rang one of his minders to come and pick him up. The man's name was Walter Pimm, a weasely man whose party piece was making his knuckles crack. He shared a flat with a massive bloke called Big Ben. Dad called them his heavies and made it sound like a joke.
Patrick wondered what chance he'd have if he asked for a mobile himself for his next birthday in October.
If Piggott had stayed on ten minutes after Pimm whisked him off he could have watched yet another car pull up at the neighbouring house and a tall, fair-haired man whom he knew as DI Angus Mott arrive to take Professor Knightley away for questioning. It was done without fuss and the three remaining Piggotts were unaware of it, being inelegantly draped around the kitchen, feasting on chilled lemon squash with cheese'n onion crisps and defrosted doughnuts.
 
Superintendent Yeadings was glad enough to extract himself from the Knightleys' troubles and - even on a Sunday - return to check on a deskload of other serious crimes. He left Z behind to await experts who would take apart the sealed bedroom. It wasn't an obvious scene of crime, but at this juncture you couldn't be certain. Leila had been kept tied up
somewhere before her body was dumped in Shotters Wood, and that was only half a mile away. Carpets in all the rooms would also be combed for fibres to match the microscopic threads already at the lab.
He was relieved that Mott had taken over the investigation. It was his call-out anyway, possibly the last case Angus would handle before the threat of tenure caught up with him. Already he'd run over his five-year stint as DI. The coming change would mean welcome promotion for him, but it meant the team's break-up.
Angus was a good detective, with a decent record for putting together a convincing case. He'd chafe at being returned to uniform and removed by rank from the sharp end of investigation. Yeadings couldn't see him taking kindly to admin or hobnobbing with community leaders. Maybe his good looks and law degree would even get him shoved into
PR.
But with the Knightley case it was less on account of Angus and more for himself that he was conscious of a strain easing. Because of the victim. It was nothing new to come upon a body of some person he'd known alive, but here there was a difference. This wasn't someone with a criminal record, a hard-nosed loan shark who squeezed his debtors beyond endurance or a sleaze-bag running a string of prostitutes, or even an upmarket lady-of-the-night herself - for all that this victim's get-up had given that first impression.
It seemed now, from the opinion of those who surely must know, that she was an ordinary, well-meaning housewife with family commitments and a respectable part-time job. Which put her in the running to be one of those random victims that stalkers or indiscriminate killers happen upon.
Horror enough. But what made it more poignant to him was how he'd met her in the context of his family life, at a moment when he was feeling bad about letting Sally down. While they conversed he had known she recognised him in his police capacity, and had almost acted upon it.

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