Three Little Maids (2 page)

‘I’m sorry, there is no mistake. With your permission, sir; Constable Sherwood find the kitchen and make some tea for Mr and Mrs Carey.’

‘Yes, serge.’

The young policewoman hurried out of the room and Turner took out his notebook and biro. ‘Can you tell me what time your daughter left the house last evening, Mr Carey?’

‘After the evening meal, about seven, I think, Sergeant. Mrs Carey can tell you, she gave her the bus fare into the Old town. Can you not leave all this till later? As you can see my wife is distressed.’

‘Sorry, sir. I shall have to ask you to identify your daughter. You understand it has to be done?’

‘I’m well aware of that, Sergeant Turner.’

‘And we will need to ask you both some questions later, sir. When it is convenient.’

The young policewoman came back into the room with the tea
. ‘Tea, Mrs Carey? Milk and sugar?’

Paula Carey lifted her tear stained face and took a cup from the policewoman with a shaking hand, helped herself to the sugar and
murmured; ‘Thank you.’

‘Can you tell us the name and address of the friend Angela that intended to spend the night with, please, sir?’

Carey took a cup of tea from the policewoman. It rattled slightly in his grasp, and sat down heavily on the long sofa. ‘She said… she was staying over with Stacey Flitch, a school friend. She disobeyed our wishes.’ Carey shook his head and groaned heavily. ‘I’m afraid that her mother has always been much too easy on the girl.’

‘Joseph!’ Paula Carey upset her cup in the saucer, spilling the tea onto the thick rush green carpet. ‘Please
... don’t say that!’

‘Thank you, Mrs Carey, Mr Carey.
We would like you, Mr Carey, to formally identify your daughter as soon as possible. Constable Sherwood will stay here with your wife until you return.’

Carey stood up. ‘
I can come along with you now, Sergeant Turner.’

It hadn’t begun to sink in yet that he might be arranging his daughter’s funeral before long. But when it did his grief would be terrible, Turner thought as Carey accompanied him out to the car.

*

The girl lay in the small quiet room beside the mortuary. Her long hair shining silver under the bright ceiling light smelt faintly of perfume. Turner wondered how he would feel if he were put into that position as Carey came slowly through the door into the room to look down on the bruised, battered face of his daughter. Well used he might be to dealing with death daily. This was different. A more discerning eye could read the bluish skin tones and red spots as
tell-tale signs marking strangulation as a cause of her death.

Silent for a second or
so, he studied his daughter’s face. Carey nodded, cleared his throat and said; ‘Yes - Sergeant. This is Angela Carey, my daughter.’

He allowed himself to be led out of the room and to be taken back home to his wife in the police car. The trauma of his child’s death making him oblivious of the events to come.

He remained silent throughout the return journey.

When he came back into the living
-room to re-join his wife and young son, he shook his head slowly. ‘I will have to delegate full responsibility for the Baines’ funeral, I think, to Philip Sharman, my dear.’

His wife nodded slowly, the tears welling up again in her eyes and the woman officer handed her another tissue. Gordon, their eleven-year old son in pants and sweatshirt sat next to his mother,
looking bewildered. His face anxious and tear stained, he twisted the damp handkerchief between his hands into a tight knot.

‘Phone in to the station, Sherwood. Do all you can to help Mr and Mrs Carey,’ Turner said when she followed him to the door. ‘It’s not easy but do the best you can.’

‘Okay, will do. Good luck. I hope the team can get onto some good leads today.’

‘I hope so too. We’re going to need it.’

She looked over her shoulder. ‘It seems to me that Angela was not as innocent as they thought, serge. I think her brother knows more than he’s telling.’

2

Viviane finished her second cup of coffee in her kitchen and pondered still over the reason for Jon Kent taking off so early. He was recently seconded to Harcombe and, obviously, wanted to give of his best. Bill, her husband, she knew would have been the same. In the Met he’d put everything he’d got into being a good cop and his reward had been a massive heart attack at the age of forty three, six years ago now, leaving her alone as a young widow at thirty nine, and a single parent to two teenagers.

It being Friday, she was working in the Central
library, instead of touring the Sussex countryside on the mobile van, dispensing books to the housebound and those readers in the scattered outlying villages. And it promised to be another warm working day in town.

She’d cooked a full breakfast for Simon, now packing his case upstairs, and her clock said it was ten am. Meanwhile she had to get a move on. She was driving Simon to the railway station and going in to work at ten thirty, an hour later than usual. The library opened at half nine, and Friday being one of their busiest days, she couldn’t afford to take more time off

She called up the stairs, ‘Hurry up, can’t you? I’ll be late and you’ll miss the train.’

‘Okay, mum.’

Her eighteen-year old son was spending the weekend with his sister, Jill, a second year medical student in London. In two months’ time Simon was embarking on a police career like his father. Her daughter took after their grandfather, Doctor Terence Pilbeam, who had been a Police Doctor.

Viviane was glad that she’d finally decided to have someone else living in the old red brick, creeper covered four storey house in Lower Park road overlooking the Victoria Park. She’d worried over it for quite some time after she inherited the house from her Great-Aunt Ida along with Beazy, her large Main Coon cat. Her aunt had been a retired headmistress of a local private girls’ school.

Realising that her children from now on would be spending more time away from her, Viviane knew that pretty soon she would feel like a solitary dried pea rattling around in a tin can in the empty house. Her aunt, no doubt, felt the same. She had established the self-contained top apartment some years ago, and rented it to a fellow teacher.

Viviane had let it to DI
. Kent only recently when they’d met up unexpectedly on the pier three weeks ago and shared old times with him. She hoped she wouldn’t regret this as, inevitably, it might stir up old memories and would be forced to fight the sadness creeping back all over again.

She grimaced back fiercely in the small hand mirror by the kitchen sink at the rash of freckles on her small nose, freshened up her coral pink lipstick and raked a comb through the thick crop of short russet red curls. And prayed that her small blue mini wasn’t held up by the
build-up of early morning traffic into the busy town centre.

She didn’t have much time after that in the library to think about Jon Kent’s early outing. The counter work kept her busy as usual till her weekly regulars, the Wilberforce sisters came in. They were two elderly ladies, Thora and Alice, who were unlike in appearance and had very different tastes in reading. Thora, whom Viviane, judged to be the eldest, was the tallest. Lean and bony, her pale blue eyes were gimlet sharp and her wide smile produced a row of large protruding tombstone teeth and she wore her cream straw boater jauntily on her pepper and salt frizzed hair. She read romance avidly, whereas quietly speaking Alice with her small bird like features, bright conker brown eyes, read nothing but crime fiction.

‘Good morning, Mrs Gordon,’ they chimed together over the library counter.

‘Good morning, ladies.’

‘It’s a lovely day out. Just the weather we want for the Carnival next week. Let’s hope it lasts awhile longer, my dear,’ Thora said placing her books down carefully in a neat pile in front of Viviane. ‘We must make the most of it.’

‘Yes, it is gorgeous,’ Viviane agreed, sorting out the dates ready for the computer. ‘Perfect if it continues for the Carnival week.’

‘Have you heard the news yet, about the dead body found on the cliff top, Mrs Gordon? They believe that it was a young girl’s,’ Alice said in a sepulchral whisper over the counter. ‘I wonder if she’s anyone we know?’

Viviane felt an icy chill freeze down her spine despite the sunny warmth in the library. ‘What body, Miss Wilberforce?’

The sisters exchanged conspiratorially glances. Thora nodded and continued for her sister. ‘Fred Hill, the hotel porter, told us all about it when he brought in our morning newspapers. His sister’s boy, Jimmy Barty, Fred said came across the body on the cliff top while on the way to work in the Fish Market. He’s still at school to get his A levels and it has shaken him up dreadfully.’

‘Poor boy,’ Alice said. ‘One can only hope he can forget what he saw, Mrs Gordon.’

‘A girl’s body. She was murdered?’ Viviane said temporarily lost for words.

‘Oh, yes. We believe so. The full details will be released later
, I dare say, by the police.’ Alice said finding another book in her shopper to put on the counter. ‘I want to renew this one, Mrs Gordon, please.’

The two elderly ladies, who were permanent boarders in a seaside hotel, were a fount of local information and gossip. Viviane usually listened to their small talk with some amusement and only half her mind switched on. This news didn’t make pleasant listening but it was intriguing just the same. It was like a 100-watt bulb had just lit up in her head. She’d been a policeman’s wife for seventeen years and she’d missed listening to Bill’s daily accounts. Although he kept bits from her that he thought she shouldn’t know.

‘Has she been identified yet? Does anyone know who she is? Is she a local?’

‘We don’t know any more than what Fred told us.’ Alice shook her head regretfully and the bunch of shining artificial red cherries bounced on the small pale green straw hat that perched on the white hair fluffed up like a dandelion clock around her small pink face. ‘I wonder if it was an assault or murder?’ her voice sank down again to a whisper. ‘You can never tell can you with so many holiday makers in town at the moment.’

‘It could be a suicide, or an accident I suppose,’ Thora said also in a low hushed voice. ‘These silly young girls do such foolish things, don’t they?’ She sighed heavily. ‘They can take ‘morning after’ pills on demand. Then there are pills they can buy in discos. Hard drugs, you know? They can be so dangerous.’

‘It could be a sexual assault that went wrong, dear,’ Alice said picking up her basket. ‘Perhaps her drink was doped... And she was taken there by someone last
night?’

‘If she was so young she wouldn’t be served with a drink in a pub.’ Viviane intervened. ‘I would have thought that she knew and trusted her date to go there late at night with them.’

Thora nodded solemnly. ‘Everyone knows that the cliff path near Lovers Leap is dangerous, especially at night. Everyone local that is - -’

‘Perhaps she was a girl staying on holiday here. Perhaps in the Caravan camp. It’s not so good for the publicity and tourist business but I’m sure that the police are dealing with it efficiently. Someone will come forward soon to identify her soon. Don’t worry, ladies.’ Viviane assured them with a smile that belied the unease that she was feeling at that moment.

The sisters wandered off together down to the fiction shelves. Sometimes, Alice took a fancy to reading true crimes from the non-fiction. She often chatted about them in depth to Viviane; how she thought that she’d met Heath, the lady killer, in London just after the Second War and mentioned often how her father, Colonel Willard Wilberforce, had been present at the Nuremberg trials for war criminals.

The two sisters seemed inseparable. They were, Viviane suspected, living on a tight, fixed income in the White Rock
Hotel. Thora watching over Alice with such loving care, Viviane didn’t like to think what would happen to the one left behind when the inevitable happened.

Viviane snapped out quickly though from her blue reverie when Esmeralda Randall came in briskly through the swing doors like a sharp North East wind, five minutes later, and filled the library with her sweetly cloying scent of Patchouli and Ashes of Roses. A peacock blue silk turban swathed her fizz of hennaed red hair, and her long beaky nose, sallow skin and deep set sloe black eyes were sharply complimented by the vivid slash of cardinal red lipstick on her generous mouth.

This morning, long strings of heavy amber beads clinked and chinked around her thin neck, and her ankle length blue silk dress blazed with the brilliant parlours of the red and orange poppies printed on it. Once seen never forgotten was true in Esmeralda’s case. She read the Tarot cards in a brightly painted booth on the pier next to the candy floss stall and was Viviane’s aunt’s oldest friend.

‘Good morning, Esmeralda, the Mary Higgins Clark’s novel you reserved has just come in.’ Esmeralda shared the same taste in books as Alice Wilberforce and took out mainly suspense and crime fiction.

‘Thank you, Viviane. I felt sure that it was here waiting for me and it will save you a phone call, won’t it, dear. And by the way, I’m not living in my flat at present. I’m having gas central heating put in at last before the winter sets in and the rooms decorated too.’