Well-Schooled in Murder (6 page)

Her words gave her sudden, unexpected strength. She ran towards the car park.

Simon Allcourt-St. James pulled his old MG next to the police line that had been set up at the entrance to the car park of St. Giles’ Church. Briefly his headlamps shone upon the white face of a young, very gawky police constable who maintained a duty post there. He seemed an unnecessary appurtenance, for although the church did not stand in complete isolation, the houses in the surrounding neighbourhood were not closely situated to it, and no curious crowd had gathered upon the road.

But it was Sunday, St. James recalled. Evensong was due to be celebrated within the hour. Someone would have to be present to turn the faithful away.

Down the narrow lane that led into the car park, he could see an arc of lights where the incidents room had been set up by the police. A stark blue flashing broke into the white illumination there with a steady, pulsating rhythm. Someone had allowed a police car’s light to continue to whirl, disregarded, on its roof.

St. James switched off the MG’s ignition and released the hand grip that operated the clutch. He got out of the car awkwardly, his braced left leg landing at an irritating angle that put him off balance for a moment. The young constable watched him right himself, his face wearing an expression that said he was unsure whether to go to the other man’s assistance or warn him off the grounds. He chose the latter. It was more within his purview.

“Can’t stop here, sir,” he barked. “Police investigation in progress.”

“I know, Constable. I’ve come for my wife. Your DI phoned me. She found the body.”

“You’ll be Mr. St. James, then. Sorry, sir.” The constable unabashedly examined the other man as if this would allow him to verify his identity. “I didn’t recognise you.” When St. James did not make an immediate reply, the young man seemed to feel compelled to continue. “I did see you on the news last week, but you didn’t—”

St. James interrupted. “Of course.” He anticipated the rest of the embarrassed words that halted from the constable’s mouth.
On the news, you didn’t look crippled
. Certainly not. Why ever should he? Standing on the steps of the Old Bailey, submitting to an interview about the recent use of genetic fingerprinting in a court of law, why should he look crippled? The camera was kept on his face. It didn’t make a study of the worst that fate had done to his body.

“Is my wife in the incidents room?” he asked.

The constable waved in the direction of a driveway across the road. “They’ve kept her in the house over there. That’s where she made the call to us.”

St. James nodded his thanks and crossed the road. The house in question stood a short distance behind two wrought-iron gates that hung open from a brick wall. It was a nondescript building with a pantiled roof, a three-car garage, and white curtains—all of identical pattern—at the windows. There was no front garden, only a wide expanse of driveway edging a hillock that, along with the wall, shielded the house from the road. The front door was a single sheet of opaque glass framed in white wood.

When St. James rang the bell, the door was opened by another constable, this one a woman. She directed him to the sitting room at the back of the house, where four people sat on chintz-covered chairs and a sofa surrounding a coffee table.

St. James paused in the doorway. The scene before him was like a tableau consisting of two men and two women who posed in a study of gently probing confrontation. The men wore their police identities like suits of clothes even though neither was in uniform. They leaned forward in their chairs, one with a notebook and the other with a hand extended as if to emphasise some remark. The women sat without speaking or looking at one another, perhaps in the expectation of further questions.

One of the women was a girl of not more than seventeen. She wore a shapeless terry robe stained with chocolate on one of its cuffs and a pair of thick woollen socks that were overlarge and dusty-bottomed. She was small, excessively pallid, and her lips were cracked as if from exposure to harsh wind or sun. She was not unattractive; rather she was sweet-looking in a wispy sort of way. But it was clear that she was unwell. Next to her fleeting prettiness, Deborah was like fire with her mass of flaming hair and ivory skin.

Although St. James had wanted to go to his wife several times during her trip, Deborah had refused his offers to meet her both in Yorkshire and in Bath, so he had not seen her for a month. Instead, he had only spoken to her on the telephone, in conversations that, with the passing weeks, had grown more and more strained and difficult to complete. Each time her hesitant speech revealed to him the extent to which she continued to mourn the child they had lost, but she would not allow him to speak of it to her, saying only, “Please, no,” when he tried. As he saw her now, absorbing her presence as if presence alone could bind her to him once again, he realised that he had never understood until this moment the terrible risk attendant to giving his love to Deborah.

She looked up and saw him. She smiled, but he read the heartache in her eyes. They had never been able to lie to him. “Simon.”

The others looked in his direction and he came into the room, crossed to his wife’s chair, touched her bright hair. He wanted to kiss her, to hold her, to infuse her with strength. But he only said, “You’re all right?”

“Of course. I don’t know why they phoned you at all. I can certainly get back to London on my own.”

“The DI said you weren’t looking very well when he got out here.”

“The shock, I suppose. But I’m well enough now.” Her appearance belied the words. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her clothes hung upon her loosely, testament to the amount of weight she had lost in the last four weeks. Seeing this, St. James felt a prickling of fear.

“Just a minute more, Mrs. St. James, and you can be on your way.” The older policeman, probably a sergeant who’d been assigned the duty of preliminary enquiries, turned his attention to the girl. “Miss Feld,” he said. “Cecilia, if I may?”

The girl nodded, her face chary, as if the request to use her given name were the kind of liberty that led to a trap.

“You’ve been ill, I take it?”

“Ill?” The girl seemed oblivious of the fact that her choice of clothing at six o’clock in the evening was hardly apt to suggest anything other than ill health. “I…no, I’m not ill. I’ve not been ill. Perhaps a bit of flu, but not ill. Not really.”

“Then we can take you one last time through everything,” the policeman said. “Just to make certain we’ve the facts straight and proper?” He phrased it as a question, but no one thought it was anything other than an indication of what would happen next.

Cecilia’s overall appearance suggested that going through another round of parry and thrust with the police was the last thing she could bear at the moment. She looked sapped and worn. She crossed her arms in front of her, and lowered her head to examine them as if she were surprised by their presence. Her right hand began to move on her left elbow: up, down, and around in what could have been mistaken for a caress.

“I don’t think I can be any more helpful than I’ve been already.” She attempted patience, but the effort sounded strained. “The house is well off the road. You can see that for yourself. I didn’t hear a thing. I’ve not heard a thing for days. And I’ve certainly not seen anything. Not anything suspicious. Not anything to suggest a little boy…a little boy…” She stumbled on the words. Her hand stopped its caress of her elbow for a moment. Then it resumed.

The second policeman wrote laboriously with the stub of a pencil. If he had taken all this down earlier in the evening, he was not giving any sign of having heard it before.

“You understand why we need to ask you this, though,” the sergeant said. “Your house is closest to the church. If anyone had the opportunity to see or hear the killer’s movements, it would have been you. Or your parents. You say they’re not here at the moment?”

“They’re my foster parents,” the girl corrected. “Mr. and Mrs. Streader. They’re in London. They’ll be back sometime this evening.”

“Were they here this weekend? On Friday and Saturday?”

The girl glanced towards the fireplace and the overmantel, on which a set of photographs were displayed. Three of them were of young adults, perhaps grown children of the Streaders’. “They went into London yesterday morning. They’re spending the weekend helping their daughter settle into her new flat.”

“Here alone quite a bit, are you, then?”

“No more than I like to be, Sergeant,” she responded. It was a strangely adult reply, spoken not so much with assurance as with a listless acceptance of an immutable fact.

The despondency in her answer prompted St. James to question the girl’s presence in this place. It was comfortable enough and bore the appointments one would expect in a home deemed lived-in rather than fashionable. Good furniture filled the room; a nubby wool carpet covered the floor; watercolours decorated the wall; a stone fireplace held a basket of silk flowers arranged with more enthusiasm than artistic technique. There was a large television with a video recorder on a shelf beneath it. Plenty of books and magazines lay about, offering to occupy one’s idle time. But by her own admission the girl was an outsider, even if the mantel photographs had not identified her as such, and the emptiness with which she spoke suggested that she was an outsider everywhere else as well.

“But you can hear noise from the road, can’t you?” the sergeant insisted. “Even as we sit here, cars go by. One can tell.”

They all listened for a demonstration of this fact. As if on cue, a lorry rumbled past.

“It’s not something one remembers, is it?” the girl replied. “Cars go by on streets all the time.”

The sergeant smiled. “Indeed they do.”

“You seem to be suggesting that a car was involved. But how can you know that? You’ve said this boy’s body was in the field behind the church. It seems to me that it could have got there several other ways, none of which I would have noticed even if I—or the Streaders or any of our neighbours—had been sitting on the verge the weekend through.”

“Several other ways?” the sergeant said amiably, his interest aroused by this admission of knowledge.

The girl replied, “Through the back field itself by means of the farm. Through Gray’s field, for that matter, next to the church.”

“Did you notice anything to indicate that, Mrs. St. James?” the sergeant asked.

“I?” Deborah looked flustered. “No. But I didn’t look for anything. I wasn’t thinking. I’d come to photograph the graveyard and I was preoccupied. All I remember is the body. And the position. As if he’d been dumped like a sack of flour.”

“Yes. Dumped.” The sergeant examined his hands. He said nothing more. Someone’s stomach growled loudly, and although the other policeman did not raise his head, he looked abashed. As if the sound had reminded him of where they were and what they were doing and how long they’d been at it, the sergeant got to his feet. The others did likewise.

“We’ll have statements for the both of you to sign tomorrow,” the sergeant said to the women. He nodded and left them. His companion followed. In a moment, the front door closed.

St. James turned to his wife and could see Deborah’s reluctance to leave Cecilia alone, as if the past hour had drawn them together in some obscure way.

“I…Thank you,” Deborah said to her. She reached impulsively for the girl’s hand, but Cecilia jerked away in a reflex reaction. She looked instantly apologetic. Deborah spoke again. “I’ve caused you no end of trouble by coming to use your phone, it seems.”

“We’re the closest house,” Cecilia replied. “We’d be questioned anyway. As will most of the neighbours, I dare say. You had nothing to do with it.”

“Quite. Yes. Well, thank you at any rate. Perhaps now you can get a bit of rest.”

St. James saw the girl swallow. Her arms cradled her body. “Rest,” she repeated, as if the idea were entirely new to her.

They left the house, crossed the driveway, and made for the road. St. James did not fail to notice that his wife walked more than a yard away from him. Her long hair shielded her face from his view. He sought something to say. For the first time in their marriage, he felt cut off from her. It was as if the month of her absence had created an unbreachable barrier between them.

“Deborah. My love.” His words stopped her by the wrought-iron gate. He saw her reach out and grasp one of its bars. “You must stop trying to bear everything alone.”