Vera Stanhope 06 - Harbour Street (9 page)

Keating was talking, recording his first impressions. Vera listened to his words, but she was thinking that Margaret was good for her age: not a lot of spare flesh except for a little fat around the waist, and the woman still had cheekbones to die for. Vera remembered Joe’s admiration of the young Margaret in her wedding photograph and felt a familiar itch of jealousy.
She
hadn’t been much admired even when she was twenty. Joe obviously liked thin lizzies; his Sal was all skin and bone.

Keating paused for breath and she took the opportunity to ask the question that had been troubling her from the start of the investigation. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘how nobody noticed. A Metro packed with people. She’d have screamed, wouldn’t she? Joe didn’t hear her, but he was at the other end of the carriage. There would have been blood.’

‘No,’ Keating said. ‘There was hardly any blood. Not enough for anyone to notice.’ With the aid of an assistant he rolled Margaret onto her side. ‘She was stabbed by a knife with a very thin blade. Long and thin. She’d have felt it, but more as a discomfort than any real pain. A pin prick. Then, if the subcutaneous fat closed over the wound, there would have been hardly any external bleeding. She’d have died before she or anyone else realized what was happening.’

Vera wondered if that was a good way to die. Just before Christmas on a busy train, surrounded by excited bairns and adults full of beer. She could think of worse ways to go.

‘So he knew what he was doing?’ she said. ‘The murderer, I mean.’

Keating shrugged. ‘Either that or he was lucky.’

‘She was stabbed from behind?’ Vera couldn’t see how that would work. The woman was sitting down. Joe had described in detail how she’d taken the one empty seat in the carriage. So how could she have been stabbed in the back?

‘Definitely from behind.’

He continued to make his report, but Vera was running that image over and over in her head. Margaret, well dressed, stepping from the snowy platform into the train, finding a seat and leaning back against it. Vera created scenarios to explain the knife wound in the back, the sharp blade piercing the cashmere coat. Perhaps Margaret was being followed from Gosforth and was stabbed while she was still standing. But if that was the case, why had the killer waited to make his attack until she was in a crowded train? A dark and quiet suburban street would surely provide a better opportunity. Or perhaps Margaret had turned in her seat to look out of the window as the train pulled into a station and the killer had taken a chance then. In either case the murderer could have left the train at any stop between Gosforth and Partington. They’d assumed that Margaret had been killed close to the final stop, but if death had crept up as unobtrusively as Keating had suggested, that needn’t have been the case.

Keating’s words had been running as a background to her thoughts and she noticed a sudden silence.

‘What is it?’ She was jerked back to the present, to the freezing mortuary and the stink of human waste.

‘Our victim was ill.’ Keating stood for a moment, frowning. ‘Bowel cancer. I found these indications on the liver. The disease had spread from the bowel.’

‘Treatable?’ Vera wasn’t sure how that could possibly be relevant. The woman hadn’t stabbed herself in the back. This hadn’t been a desperate and very public suicide.

‘Perhaps. No sign that it has been, though.’

‘Maybe she’d only just been diagnosed.’ Vera was talking to herself, running through the possibilities. More scenarios. More stories. ‘I’ll need to trace her GP.’ Thinking it was unlikely that Margaret had been visiting an outpatient clinic the afternoon of her death. There were no major hospitals close to Gosforth Metro station.

Outside, the sun was shining, but it was still very cold. Kids had made a slide of the pavement and Vera nearly went arse over tit. She checked her phone, wondering if she’d missed anything important during the post-mortem, and immediately it began to ring. She didn’t recognize the voice at first and it was only a few seconds into the conversation that she realized she was speaking to Kate Dewar. Vera listened as the woman described the arrival at the guest house of Malcolm Kerr.

‘He ran the bird trips out to Coquet Island.’ Vera remembered a thin young man, gauche ashore, but agile on the boat. ‘With his dad.’

Kate was obviously surprised by the interruption. ‘His father died years ago.’

‘And he seemed in a bit of a state?’

‘The way he talked about Margaret,’ Kate said, ‘I had the feeling that they were more than friends.’

Parking the Land Rover in Harbour Street, Vera almost felt as if she were coming home. Kate must have been looking out for her, because the door was opened immediately. ‘You don’t mind if we chat in the kitchen?’ she asked. ‘Only I’ve got baking in the oven.’

Vera followed her down to the basement, pleased that they wouldn’t be sitting in the highly polished lounge, which reminded her, she suddenly realized, of a funeral parlour or an elaborate chapel.

‘He’d been drinking,’ Kate said. ‘Last night, if not this morning. I could smell it on him. Everyone knows he likes a pint in the Coble of an evening, and a couple of cans if he’s working in his shed, but I’ve never known him drunk. Not even when Deborah left.’

She’d switched on the filter coffee machine and the water was dripping through the grounds, filling the kitchen with its smell.

‘Deborah?’

‘His ex-wife.’ Kate opened the oven and pulled out a tray of shortbread. ‘This won’t be as good as Margaret’s.’

‘Maybe you won’t have to bother with baking, if you hit the big time with the music again.’ Vera squinted across at her. She couldn’t understand what was going on with this music thing. Was it just a dream, encouraged by Stuart Booth, or were there concrete plans?

‘Aye’, Kate said. ‘Maybe. Though I’ll not hold my breath. It’s a precarious business. Stuart’s not one for wild dreams, either.’ She smiled, though, and Vera thought that secretly she was excited by the whole package – the music and the man.

‘When did Malcolm and Deborah separate?’ There was nothing Vera liked better than this talk about the personalities on the edge of a murder. Gossip, but legitimate because it was work.

‘Five years ago? Something like that. Deborah had invested in Malcolm’s business and he was forced to buy her out. They had a nice house up the coast at Warkworth at one time, but he had to sell it to pay her off. He lives in a poky little ex-council place in Percy Street now.’

‘Is that in Mardle?’

‘Yes.’ Kate poured the coffee. ‘Just behind the church.’

‘Did you ever know that Malcolm and Margaret were close?’ Vera eyed up the shortbread, but it seemed that Kate was going to leave it to cool.

‘No, but I didn’t know Margaret had worked for him at one time, either. In the office, he said. It must have been before we moved here.’ She paused. ‘Margaret never mentioned it and Malcolm doesn’t have an office now, just that eyesore of a shed.’

There was a moment of silence and then Vera asked, ‘Do you have a health centre in Mardle?’

The question came out of the blue, and Kate obviously thought she was mad. ‘Yes, just over the Metro line towards town. A new place close to the high school.’

‘Handy.’ Vera drank the coffee. ‘Is that where Margaret’s GP was based?’

Kate thought for a moment. ‘I don’t know. Isn’t that weird? We lived in the same house for all those years and I don’t know where she went to the doctor. Perhaps because she was never ill. I suggested that she have a flu jab once. Everyone in the town was going down with it. But she wouldn’t. She said she’d never liked needles.’

‘Had she seemed herself in the last few days?’

This time the response was quicker. ‘Actually, not really. Not as sharp. She was a bit preoccupied, wandering around in a kind of a daze. I asked her if anything was the matter, but she said she just had a few things to sort out.’

That obsessive privacy again. All those secrets. Oh, Margaret Krukowski, what did you have to hide?

Outside, there was an odd milky light. Thin cloud obscured the sun and Vera thought she could smell snow. She decided that as soon as it started, she’d head for home. She needed a night in her own bed and a chance to think things through. Her neighbours would have cleared the track by now and would make sure she got out in the morning. It was lunchtime. There were school kids queuing up at the chip shop, some only in their uniform sweatshirts, seeming not to feel the cold. She thought she caught a glimpse of Chloe Dewar with some boy, but she couldn’t be certain. Teenage girls all looked alike to her.

Kerr’s boatyard was surrounded by tall spiked railings, and you got into it through double wooden gates. Trawling back through her memory, Vera thought they’d met the men here, that night she’d gone with Hector on his raid of roseate terns’ eggs. Then they’d gone to the harbour and into a boat. Not the tripper boat, the
Lucy-May
, but a small boat with a powerful outboard. She tried to picture some sort of office, but nothing came. The gate’s padlock was open, but the gate had sunk on its hinges now and she had to lift and push it against the snow to get inside. There was no immediate sign of Kerr, but a track through the snow led to a shed made of planks and corrugated iron, and that was where she found him. It had one small window, so grubby that it was hard to see inside, but she made out a shape slumped in a battered armchair and she tapped on the glass. There was no movement and for a moment her imagination ran wild. Another murder. Or a suicide. Plenty of tools to stab a woman with, in a place like this. And knives to slash your wrists with, if the guilt got too much.

She knocked on the glass again, this time more fiercely, and Kerr stirred in his chair, then got to his feet. Before he had the chance to come out to her, she opened the door and went inside.

It felt suddenly very warm. There was a tiny wood-burning stove in the corner and the place smelled of smoke and sweat. He’d drunk too much and slept too little. She recognized the signs.

‘Who the fuck are you?’

‘Vera Stanhope,’ she said. She didn’t mind the question. She could be like a bear with a sore head too with a hangover. ‘Detective Inspector.’

‘Stanhope.’ He repeated the name as if he recognized it.

‘Aye, I think you knew my dad.’ She thought Hector must have worked with this man over a number of years. Kerr wouldn’t remember the name after just one outing. Where else had he taken Hector in his rubber dinghy? What other eggs had they stolen together?

‘My God, you’re Hector’s daughter.’ The man spluttered, halfway between a cough and a chuckle. ‘A cop. He’ll be turning in his grave!’

Vera shifted a pile of old boat magazines from a stool and sat down. ‘Margaret Krukowski,’ she said.

He sank back in his chair and stared ahead of him. ‘What about her?’

‘She used to work for you?’

‘That was a long time ago.’ He was wary now, determined to give nothing away. Vera wondered what else he had to hide from the police, besides the raids out to the island nature reserve. Dodgy tax and VAT returns almost certainly. Black fish? Smuggled fags and booze?

‘I’m only interested in the murder,’ she said. ‘Anything you can tell me about Margaret will help.’

‘She worked for us years ago, about the time that I knew your father. The business was better then. We still took trippers out to the island, but there was fishing too. And charters. We had a proper little office in the yard then, a kind of wooden Portakabin. Margaret was hardly more than a kid. A posh kid, looking for work. My dad took her on because he thought she’d sound good on the phone. Classy.’

‘Was she married?’ Vera asked.

He hesitated. ‘I never knew much about her private life.’

‘Hey, Malcolm man, who’re you kidding here? A bonny thing like that. You a young man in your prime. You’d have remembered if she was single or not.’

He looked up and glared at her.

‘I told you,’ Vera said. ‘I’m only interested in finding out who killed her. Seems to me you might have an interest in that too.’

‘I think she might have been married.’ He paused. ‘Some foreign seaman. It didn’t last long. I think she only did it to spite her folks.’

‘Did he knock her about?’ Vera put the question as if it were the most natural one in the world.

‘What makes you think that?’ The same anger and the same suspicion.

‘According to the priest, she volunteers in a hostel for homeless women. I wondered if there might be a connection. That’s what my job’s all about – making connections.’

‘Nah,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t think he hit her. Margaret loved the bones of him. She was young and daft, and he was all good looks and romantic gestures. They were happy enough, I think, until he got bored with having no money and ran off with someone else.’

‘Did you fancy your chances with her when he went away?’ Vera looked beyond Kerr to the small window. A few snowflakes melted on the glass and slid towards the frame.

He shook his head. ‘She’d never have gone for a local lad when she was thinking she might get Pawel back.’

‘That was his name?’

‘Aye.’ Reluctantly Kerr spelled it out.

‘When did you last see her?’

He hesitated. ‘Yesterday morning. She was on Harbour Street, walking towards the bus stop on the corner.’

‘Did you speak to her?’ Vera thought this was like drawing teeth.

‘Only to say hello. I passed her in the street. I was coming here. I had a charter booked for one of Mrs Dewar’s guests.’

‘Who would want to go out on the water in weather like this?’

For the first time he gave a real smile. ‘A mad professor. They call him Mike Craggs. He works at the university as a marine biologist. He’s researching water temperature, and I take him out to the island for a couple of hours every fortnight. I think he samples the mainland coast too.’

‘What time were you back in the harbour?’

Kerr shrugged. ‘Late afternoon. The weather forecast was bad and the Prof. wanted to get home. It hadn’t started snowing then, but it was almost dark.’

‘And what did you do after that?’ Vera kept her voice patient. This was a conversation, not an interrogation.