The Missing Witness

Jo Smedley

© Jo Smedley 2017

Jo Smedley has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2017.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty Two

Chapter Twenty Three

Chapter Twenty Four

Chapter Twenty Five

Chapter Twenty Six

Chapter Twenty Seven

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenty Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty One

Chapter Thirty Two

Chapter Thirty Three

Chapter One

I followed Irene up the uneven path, nervous tension tugging at the hairs on the back of my neck and my pulse thumping out a staccato beat in my throat.

We shouldn’t be here. The striped police tape caught up across the hedge indicated as much.

“Maybe this is a bad idea,” I said, as she stepped into the shadows ahead of me. “Irene?”

To one side of me the plants in the borders seemed to be reaching out as if to pull me back, and I hesitated at the edge of the light. We were trespassing, uninvited, unwanted. Breaking the silence that had gripped the house since the day the police first arrived and cordoned it off.

She turned, the glitter of her eyes the only part of her visible beyond the street lamp’s reach. “Come on. I’ll need that torch.”

At her urging I stepped forwards into the darkness. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was crossing more than one boundary. The physical one, limited by the orange glow, but also a moral one, limited by my own sense of right and wrong.

“You remembered your gloves?”

“Yes.”

She lowered the hourglass shaped collection canister and placed it on the floor with a dull thud. It was already half full, just like my own. The weight was reassuring in a way, it felt like an extra pull of gravity keeping me grounded. I watched as she slipped something small and thin out of her pocket.

“What’s that?”

Looking over her shoulder, I could see something that was the same shape as a credit card, but thicker. It had writing and a picture on it but both were obscured in the semi-darkness. She slid a compartment out from underneath the card revealing a small set of flat metal tools that shone in the light: lock picks.

“Where on earth did you get that?”

“eBay.”

She inserted a couple of the rods into the mortice lock which fastened the old wooden door, moving her hands simultaneously up and down. Inside the door small ticks and rattles accompanied her movements as she worked at the lock. Every sound seemed booming-loud and I cast a furtive glance behind me towards the drive.

“I suppose you learned how to do this on You Tube?”

“Yes, but it’s easier without gloves. I should have practised with the gloves on.”

Irene was one of what they called “the silver surfer generation”, but where everyone else was busy looking up saga holidays and cheap flights to Cyprus, she was busy researching breaking and entering.

An owl hooted somewhere in the middle of the park behind us and a bat flitted across the light from the streetlamp. We might be in the thick of the town, but nature was all around, and at night the streets became alive with the nocturnal: foxes, hedgehogs, owls, bats, animals which had the world to themselves when the humans retired to bed.

While she worked I placed my own canister gently on the concrete drive beside its pair. It wobbled and I moved it slightly, shifting the base off a cigarette butt I hadn’t noticed before. Goodness only knows where she’d obtained the half empty tubs. Perhaps they had been swiped from one of her coffee morning pensioners. I wondered if they knew what she was actually doing with them.

My mind wandered briefly to Lucus back home, cuddled up on the couch with the dog watching re-runs of Chris Barrie’s Massive Machines, and of Lillian, my daughter, curled up in her cot above them. What would he say if he saw me now? Mother turned housebreaker, all within the space of a few weeks.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

She didn’t reply. Instead I heard the door click open.

*

We’d met one freezing but unremarkable Tuesday in December.

I say met, but in all honesty I must have already passed her several times in the street before then. She was old enough to be my mother, dressed very similarly, and while I’m not the least bit ageist there was nothing which marked Irene out to me as someone worth knowing until the day she jumped into the frozen duck pond.

That isn’t to say she didn’t have a very good reason for jumping in. As I’d discovered since, Irene was never one for taking action unnecessarily, but equally, when action was called for – she was never one to hang back, either.

The morning I met her, I had taken my daughter to feed the ducks. She was a little young for the experience, but it was forming part of our regular dog walk, and it felt like the “right sort of thing” for a mother to do.

Being a mother wasn’t quite what I had expected. I’d read the job description in much the same way as I’d skimmed self-assembly furniture instructions. I figured it’d be a breeze after the senior role in the high pressure NHS I’d occupied before. However, instead of naturally blossoming into parenthood, it felt more like I’d completed a lifecycle in reverse: turning myself from a butterfly; able to go where I pleased, achieve what I wanted and do what I liked; into a stay at home caterpillar crawling through a very dull existence that involved nappies, teething, cleaning, cooking, laundry… a treadmill of housewifery boredom that stretched into the future like a dull tarmac road through a deserted landscape, no end in sight.

I wasn’t suffering with post-natal depression. I was just bored. Mother and toddler groups were all very well, but the average mother seemed to get far more satisfaction out of singing repetitive lullabies then I could believe possible; and when I suggested, God forbid, that we actually ditch the singing and discuss something like...say...a recent book we’d read...the stunned silence in the room had told me all I needed to know.

Dog walking was the one part of my day which brought with it some normality. Our border collie Moss had been with us long before Lillian and when out walking it was like I’d got a small portion of my life back. Lillian would often fall asleep at some point in the walk which meant I could think thoughts of my own. If I ignored the pram ahead of me entirely, I could pretend that I would return home to a life of reason and order, change into my uniform and rush off to work, where what I was important and my opinion mattered.

That morning the pond was an ice rink. Ducks and geese were skating all over, using their wings to keep upright when their feet failed them. They were truly ‘ducks out of water’. Their wings extended like a bad fluffy version of Torvill and Dean, slowly spinning around each other in ungainly attempts to remain upright.

Irene must have been standing close by as I slid various pieces of bread across the pond like an expert curler, but I hadn’t noticed her. In fact, I didn’t notice her at all until Max, one of the local chocolate Labradors, rushed past me onto the pond in an attempt to chase the bread.

Now, there’s one thing you need to know about Labradors and that’s how greedy they are. They’ll eat everything they find, from discarded chips to the chip wrappers themselves. I’d often passed Max’s owner in the mornings attempting to prize cartons and sweetie wrappers from his jaws. So when I saw him leaping onto the pond I knew the ducks weren’t in any danger, rather it was the bread I was tossing in their general direction which had attracted his attention.

He leapt onto the ice and began skidding across the frozen water towards the ducks at a velocity which I knew was going to take him right past the bread he was attempting to reach. He clearly realised that too and tried to slam on the brakes, his back legs splaying behind him, claws out, paws wide... and CRACK one minute he was there and the next he was under the water.

“Maaaaaxxxx!” I heard a drawn out call some distance behind me but the dog didn’t surface. The ice had swallowed him up. There was a gap where the heavy gun dog had fallen through but his head simply hadn’t reappeared.

The ice rattled from an impact beneath. Max was under there somewhere, trying to reach the surface, but his trajectory had taken him beneath the ice and away from the hole his descent had made.

There was another icy rattle as his head once again rebounded on the ice.

I didn’t know what to do. I stood there, unable to move, rooted to the spot. Fifteen feet away a dog was stuck under the ice and I simply had no idea how to get to him. I could feel my heart jump in my throat.

“Maaaaaxxxx!” More distant... his owner hadn’t seen the incident. It sounded like they were still walking around the park, sure their pet would catch up in short order.

The ice cracked again, a crunching, grating, reverberating sound and a couple of ducks shifted on the ice, peering down underneath them as if unable to work out why the ground was moving.

It was then, just as I thought I would be the one to bear witness to the drowning of a much loved family pet, that Irene crashed into my life. I don’t know where she came from but suddenly there she was, standing beside me.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“There,” I said, pointing. “Somewhere under those ducks I think.”

That was all she needed to know. She jumped straight onto the pond, fracturing the ice with one loud cracking splosh, and began forcing her way through the ice sheet towards the hole like a human icebreaker.

It can’t have taken her as long to reach the centre of the pond as it felt like it did. Standing on the edge, it was like watching one of those slow motion rescue programs. As I stood there, my heart hammering, I could make out the wheelbarrow squeak of a robin in the tree above, the crunching of the ice as it butted up to the concrete nearest me, the splooshing lap of water on the bank where Irene had broken through, the growl of a motorbike racing around the roundabout at one side of the park, and the argumentative quack of the ducks as Irene approached their territory. Could she reach the dog in time?

She smashed her way into the hole the dog had made and from there, across to the location I’d indicated. Suddenly Max’s steaming head broke the surface of the water, snorting and coughing.

“Maaaaaaaxxxx!” The owner’s holler from still further away sent him swimming back towards shore in the channel Irene had made, and without even a cursory glance behind him to thank his rescuer, the dog leapt out onto the bank, shook freezing water all over me, and the pram and ran off.

I looked out into the pond, at his soaked lifesaver, at Irene.

As I say, we must have passed several times in the street before that day. She looked to be around five foot three or four, not much shorter then me; though it was hard to tell when she was hip deep in water. Her face, red from exertion, contained small pale freckles which dappled across her nose and cheeks. Her nose was European, with a small lump at the mid-point which gave it an almost roman appearance. She had blue/grey eyes, and as the crow’s feet wrinkled around her eyes in a smile her nose also creased and twitched very much like a rabbit. She panted hot puffs of condensing water vapour as she waded back, but she was smiling at her achievement.

“Are you all right?” I held out my hand to help her back onto the bank. Her decisive action was embarrassing. After all, as someone at least half her age surely I should have been the one to have jumped into the water. I could feel my cheeks burning with shame.

“Bloody freezing.” She looked across at the figure striding into the distance on the far side of the pond, the dog running to catch up, his owner oblivious to the near life and death situation that had played out behind.

“Ungrateful hound. You’d have thought he’d have at least stopped to say thank you.” But her nose was wrinkling and her mouth twitching into a wide smile all the same.

“Look at you,” I said, as she stood next to me dripping on the bank, grinning from ear to ear, seemingly oblivious to the cold. “You’re soaking.”

It wouldn’t be long before she was shivering. After all, it was cold enough to have frozen the pond!

“My house is only around the corner.” I said, eager to make up for my lack of heroism. “Come back with me. I’ll find you a change of clothes.”

And that was how it started. Of course it helped that she was a living breathing adult, one without a baby balanced on her knee, that she had an opinion on just about everything, enjoyed reading and that her life didn’t revolve around the best wet wipes to clean up baby vomit. Even so...I hadn’t quite realised what I had let myself in for…

Chapter Two

Standing beside Irene, just inside the door of the house we’d recklessly broken into, it suddenly dawned on me quite how much a change Irene had wrought in my life. Twelve weeks ago I would never have even considered pulling a stunt like this. And now here I was. Standing inside the home of a murder victim mere weeks after the awful tragedy, wearing gloves and a couple of blue plastic overshoes I’d obtained from the pool where we went swimming.

I heard her closing the door behind me and I took off one of my gloves so I could trigger the light on my smart phone.

The back door had opened directly into the kitchen, which wasn’t unusual for this area. I swung the phone, careful to avoid casting any light upwards towards the windows. Irene was certain the house wasn’t being watched, but even so, it paid to be careful.

I tracked the light across the tiled floor. The grout was positively stain free, each tile gleaming. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see exactly, but whatever it was, it wasn’t this. The room was spotless. There was no body, no blood, no broken crockery, no turned over chair, no stereotypical wobbling knife stabbed into the counter. In fact, the kitchen looked like it was prepped for an estate agent’s tour.

When Irene had first asked me to accompany her I had, of course, refused. Not because of any squeamishness, though I have to admit, a small part of me was secretly relieved there was no dead body here to greet us, but because breaking and entering was just not the right thing to do. The problem was, Irene had a way with words, and after a fairly short discussion in which my moral character was called into question and my way of looking at the world had been dissected and found to be wanting, I had somehow been persuaded that as far as moral scruples were concerned, breaking into an empty house was the least of my worries. After all, what if the man the police were looking for was innocent? What then? I was somehow responsible for not only his arrest but also of allowing a guilty murderer to get away and all because I wouldn't agree to hold a torch while Irene picked a lock and walked around an empty house disturbing nobody.

It was clear she had some connection to the wanted man; as for me, until tonight my only connection to the murder had been to provide the use of my dog.

*

The day of the murder my morning routine had been interrupted by Irene’s arrival at my door. She wanted to borrow the dog. Borrow the dog? She hadn't elaborated at the time, but I could tell by the look in her eye something was up.

“What is it?”

“I don't know...yet. That's why I want the dog.”

I thought back at how surprised Irene had been the first time she had joined me on the morning walk. Is it always like this? she had asked, as I paused once again chatting to another dog owner while Moss sniffed at their dog's rear end; the universal doggy greeting. Yes, I had said. Always.

Dog owners talked to each other. It just happened. We didn't know each other's names, just knew each other as ‘Moss's owner’ or ‘Buddy's dad’ but that didn't stop us talking and exchanging local news. Did we know about the burglary at number three? Had we seen the car in the duck pond the other morning? Had we heard the fire engines on Saturday night? For me, this interaction with living breathing adults was what made the dog walks such an oasis of “normal” in the baby-world I now occupied. For Irene this free transaction of information was an exciting route into the world of local news.

It wasn't that Irene was nosy, nor that she was a gossip. She was just interested in relationships. Not the nitty gritty family, who’s divorcing who sort of relationships, but rather the relationships of life. Causes and effects. Why A led to B, how C became involved and what happened to D as a result. If she'd had her life over again I was sure she would have become a detective, but at her age in life, a life in the police just hadn't been readily open to her and what she'd done instead I hadn't yet found out. Irene rarely talked about herself and I was too British to conduct a lengthy personal enquiry.

Irene glanced swiftly around the room. She didn’t seem phased by the scrubbed and empty crime scene.

I wondered if this was how it always was. All evidence of an incident washed away in a matter of days. Life going on after a goodly squirt of cleaning fluid, a bucket and a mop. But if Irene expected this – why on earth had she been so insistent we break in?

The confusion must have shown on my face.

“They don’t leave everything lying around, Ruth,” Irene said. “It’s all photographed, bagged, tagged and taken away. They have forensic cleaners attached to the police who come in and clean everything up. And her mother’s probably been in and tidied up the place as well.”

“Oh.” I said. “So...um...?”

“What are we doing here?”

I nodded. With the body removed, along with all the evidence, surely all the clues had gone.

“I wasn’t interested in the kitchen.”

Irene opened the door into the hall.

“You weren’t ?”

The kitchen was where the murder had happened. The local paper had been most clear on that point. “YOUNG WOMAN STABBED TO DEATH IN KITCHEN" was the headline. The report had gone on to say that the girl, Lesley Cooper, formerly known as Allenby, had been discovered by her post man on Tuesday morning lying in a pool of blood, a knife stabbed through her back. The police were seeking her ex-husband in connection with the murder and were appealing for witnesses.

I daresay, thanks to the dog walk Irene took that first morning, she had discovered all of that long before the report made it to the press. Since then she’d coincided my dog walks to glean as much as she could, having identified which owners knew the most and enquiring innocuously every time we happened to ‘bump into them’. All the contacts were, of course, engineered carefully by Irene who had quizzed me on the various people I met at the different times of day I went out. Between us we managed to map most of their regular timetables, but none of them seemed to notice. Lillian and I were dragged on more dog walks than was our norm while we gathered facts. However, there were limits to the free information exchange and it reached the point where the only winner in the increase in dog walks was Moss.

I stood staring at the table and chairs in the centre of the room, trying to keep my light steady. This was where they had found her. This was where the woman’s blood had spilled all over the floor. I wondered if she was still here. Her spirit lingering...

Suddenly my torchlight beam seemed feeble, as if it could barely penetrate the room, a mere point of light against the heavy darkness of a calculated murder. My feet felt like someone had glued them to the floor. Below my knees everything had gone cold and heavy, like lead.

Why had I let Irene talk me into this? Whichever way you looked at it we shouldn’t be here. My stomach lurched, I felt a rush of nausea. I had let this get out of hand. Been persuaded by her logical arguments. Everything within me rebelled. My hand shook.

“Maybe we should leave.” I said.

“Not yet. I still haven’t seen what I came for. Come on.”

Irene pulled at my shoulders as she stepped past me into the hall releasing me from the leaden grip of the floor.

“Bring the torch.”

We only had to look around. Once we had, we could go.

The hallway sprung with expensive underlay. The cream carpet was unstained. Clearly none of her blood had made it this far. Blood would have never come off this pile. I couldn’t even get milk stains out of the mustard coloured carpet in my dining room – a carpet I was strongly advocating we exchanged for laminate now that Lillian had arrived. This white carpet must have been untouched, either that or the police knew a really good carpet cleaning firm.

If the kitchen had looked ordinary, the hall was even more so. Lesley Cooper had clean tastes. The walls were pale, the hallway uncluttered. A set of stairs led upwards, looping overhead, leaving a dark hole in the hallway which presumably held coats when lived in, but right now just held more lurking shadows. I scurried past and caught up with Irene just as she started up the stairs. Clearly whatever she was looking for wasn’t even near the crime scene in the kitchen.

I followed her up the stairs, wincing at every creek. Every step seemed to shout into the empty hall about our intrusion, a woody yell into the shadows, calling the deceased to come forth and deal with us. I found myself a mere step behind Irene, like a child keeping close to their mother through a dark wood. I knew it was just my imagination. Nothing was here. Ghosts didn’t exist. What I felt was just anxiety, an age old phobia that many people shared; a fright of the darkness, probably inherited from caveman days when wolves and other predators did sneak out of the darkness and grab away children.

A burst of light, tracked through the window like a strobe, right to left. My eyes jarred at two figures standing facing us in the darkness, white faces, large cavernous eyes, and I let out an involuntary squeak before I realised the car headlights had momentarily reflected Irene and myself in a mirror facing the stairs.

Irene reached for my arm. “Jumpy,” she scolded, and together we turned at the top looking down the landing.

The lights from the car reminded me how exposed we both were. Irene was adamant the police were no longer watching the house, but what if someone else was? I lowered the light, away from any windows.

Irene shifted next to me and pointed upwards. “Can you shine the light up there?” I complied, carefully tracking the torch beam up the wall, until it reached the required point, illuminating a wooden hatch set into the ceiling.

“The loft?” I asked.

“Yes.” She started looking around her, using the dim shadows the torchlight on the ceiling had left her with. “There has to be something... ah...,” she pulled a decorative chest over to the banister rail, stepped onto it, grabbed hold of the loft hatch and pulled. It came downwards, bringing with it the edge of a fitted ladder.

“How did you..?”

Irene silenced me with a smile, her wrinkles a rutted field of shadows and relief in the bright LED light. She took hold of my phone and shone it down at the carpet, where two indents were pressed into the pile. The touch points of the loft ladder. She couldn’t possibly have seen them in the dark and I told her as much.

“The place was on sale a couple of years ago.”

“And what has that to do with anything?”

“Don’t you look at houses on the market?”

“Only when I’m looking to move.”

She shrugged. Clearly I was missing out.

“I’ve been in most of the ones around the park and several others... Look, they have to expect to get the odd nosy person when they put the house on the market,” she bristled, before I even put words to my aghast expression.

I mean, yes, I knew it went on, everyone did, but did Irene really make a habit of going into all the houses on the market? Lucus and I had talked about it on the odd occasion we saw an interesting house raise a ‘for sale’ board, but both of us were far too ‘British’ to do something like that. We never haggled in the market, we didn’t jump queues, we didn’t visit property we weren’t planning to buy, we didn’t break into houses…

“Come on.” She pulled the ladder down the rest of the way until its feet rested in the impressions in the carpet and then started to climb. The aluminium crackled underneath her, a metallic clicking groan very different from the wood of the stairs, quieter and yet much louder at the same time. I shone the light around me. No ghost appeared to ward us off.

“I can’t see anything up here without you!” she called out, her voice muffled in the loft space above. “Hurry up.”

Irene hadn’t brought a torch. She said a torch was too obvious. Instead we were reliant on my mobile phone for light. Irene’s phone was an old Nokia brick. Why replace something that isn’t broken? she said. She picked up her text messages, could call people, and left the rest of the new phone capabilities to her laptop. At her age she didn’t need to be in instant communication by email, didn’t do Facebook as none of her friends (apart from me) were on Facebook, and saw no point in twitter. Besides the screens are too small, she admitted. And there’s just no need to pay through the nose for an expensive miniature laptop I can’t see when I’m on a pension. It made sense, but it left me in the role of light bearer.

I dragged myself loft-wards, and held the phone out towards her.

“Here.”

She took it and the blackness rushed in behind me, thick and menacing. I scrambled up the last few rungs and watched as she started sweeping the light around the loft, hmming to herself. As I crested the loft hatch properly she paused the beam so that I could see what had attracted her attention.

Lying alongside one wall was a small camping mattress and sleeping bag, a book, Tilly lamp, some empty biscuit packets and a coffee stained mug.

“She had lodgers?”

“Not exactly.” Irene walked over to the sleeping arrangements for a closer look. There was a pile of clothes at one end, a jumbled heap of dirty washing, and beside it some folded clothing, unworn. She wrinkled her nose as she picked up a cut away milk container using a pencil. She’d clearly watched a lot of detective dramas.

“Home-made urinal,” she muttered. I took her word for it. I didn’t need to look any closer; I could smell it from where I was standing.

Carefully she shone the light along the roof beams, searching and then finding a skylight.

“Here,” she passed the phone back to me. “Keep the beam low, just enough so I can see what I’m doing.”

I did as she said and watched as she flipped open the Velux window and looked out and towards the park. Dust motes picked up by the sudden breeze whirled in front of the torchlight and I felt a new chill as the frosty wind rushed past me. Nodding to herself she shut the window again with a whoosh and click, but the chill remained

“Come on.” She headed back towards me and the ladder.

“Is that it? Is that all we came for? To walk up to the loft and look out of the skylight?”

“I’ll explain once we’re out. No point lingering. The longer we’re here, the more evidence we leave behind that we’ve been.”

“But the gloves? The plastic shoes?”

“Protect against fingerprints and footprints only. Hair, fibre, you can’t account for that… the shorter time we’re here the better.”

“But I thought you said…,”

“They have finished. But there’s still a risk they might come back. After all, if I’ve worked out where he was, they will. At that point they’ll look do another sweep for evidence. Don’t worry,” she said, witnessing my aghast expression. “We’ve taken enough precautions.”

I wondered whether I should have tied my hair back. Loose strand were always falling out. Maybe I should have watched more CSI.

I watched impatiently as she pushed everything back the way it was, taking care that the box she had stood on was returned exactly to the compressed carpet pile which marked its original location. The longer we were here, the greater the chance of being discovered. Silently I cursed her for her pedanticness, I just wanted to go. Another part of me applauded her methodical return of every item to its original location.

We tiptoed back down the stairs, through the kitchen, making sure we closed the door to the hall, and then out through the kitchen door, which she locked behind us with her little lock pick set before we removed our blue shoes and gloves, pocketing them out of sight.

It wasn’t until we were back on the road, and half way back around the darkened park, with the canisters dangling from our hands, that I realised I’d been breathing incredibly shallowly, virtually holding my breath. I sighed and watched as a great cloud billowed out in front of me glowing orange in the misty light.

“Can you tell me what on earth that was all about?” I hissed at her.

“I needed to know.”

“Know what?”

“If he’d been sleeping there.”

“Irene – I’ve just followed you into the home of a murder victim, in the dark, watched you pick the door, risked my... my...,” life was probably a bit strong “...reputation. Is there any chance you could explain more than that?”

“On the drive as we came in. Did you see them? The cigarette butts?”

I had. They were lying alongside the house in a ragged little row of sorts. All used, flattened, dirty. I’d had to move my canister off one. I nodded, then realised she probably hadn’t seen me.

“Yes,” I said.

“They’d come down from the roof.”

“The roof ?”

“They were in line with the down pipe from the roof gutter. We’ve had some rain recently. They must have washed down.”

“You’re telling me you worked out someone was staying in the loft because you saw some cigarette butts on the driveway?”

“No. I’d seen him smoking out the Velux a few weeks ago, before the murder. We go past that house every morning on the dog walk. First time I saw him I assumed he was working up there, but then I saw him a few more times. Slightly more unshaven each time and I thought... hmmm.... I wonder what you’re doing up there.”

“You mean to say you saw the killer in the loft days before the woman was killed?”

“No. He’s not the killer.”

“A strange man in the woman’s home, sleeping rough in the loft and he’s not the killer?”

“No. He’s the husband, well, ex-husband.”

“I thought the police were looking for her ex.”

“They are, that’s why I know they’ve got it wrong.” Her face was inscrutable in the orange street lighting as we plodded our way home, the mist swirling around us. In the distance a fox barked, a high pitched cough which travelled miles in the damp of the evening. My own mind was awash with questions, but I could tell from Irene’s face, they would all have to wait.

Chapter Three

Most people get lost in thought from time to time, but Irene was different. She got absorbed in thought. You couldn’t drag her back out. I had turned to her a few times on the walk home, but had recognised the faraway look on her face and her monosyllabic answers to my questions confirmed what her face already told me. I knew it was hopeless trying to extract any further information from her. She was thinking. Her brain was solely focussed on internal calculations.

I’d seen her manage an entire supermarket shop with her mind on something else before. It was like watching a somnambulist at work, one half of her brain was completely engrossed, but there was a subconscious ‘something’ keeping her body ticking over, performing menial tasks, like adding tins of tomatoes to her basket, while the rest of her brain was performing mental athletics.

She didn’t just think, like you or I would think. She thought with a deep focus, obsessive, intense. It was as if her brain retreated in on itself leaving behind a layer of automation. I imagined it like an onion inside her skull. As if her conscious retreated back through the layers, and only by slicing all the way through would I penetrate down to the person I knew as Irene. Her body was there, the automated hand eye coordination operational, but every now and again her eyes would twitch, like she was in a deep REM sleep.

She walked me to my house and muttered some pleasantries about seeing me the next day, but when I turned to her, her face had been vacant, the smile devoid of the sparkle that was usually there, and she walked off as soon as I closed the front gate and started for the front door. I watched her as she marched purposefully down the pavement, slightly concerned about her ability to cross the roads safely. However when she reached the corner of our street, she looked left and right automatically and struck out once the roads were clear. Even lost in thought, her safety protocols were in place.

I keyed open our own door, grateful I didn’t have to pick it open. You tube videos or not, Irene must have spent hours practising. I doubted lock picking was as easy as she made it look, even with the right tools.

As I pushed open the door a wall of heat flooded out towards me, reminding me just how cold and damp I was.

“That you?” Lucus called out from the living room.

“Yes.” I stepped through and pulled the door back on myself before I could let the cold in… or was it the heat out?

I shouted out my question. Lucus as a science graduate would probably know the answer.

“Both.” He called back. “Convection. In at the bottom, out at the top.”

I shrugged off my coat and went to hang it up. Through the door to the living room I could see some sort of digger style mining thing on the television screen. Lucus appeared fully absorbed which would negate much of the need to furnish any lies about what I had really been up to that evening. Instead I made us both a cup of tea and joined him for the second half of what must have been his third or fourth episode. Machines didn’t interest me, but snuggling up on the sofa and having some time to ourselves was a luxury now that Lillian had joined us. I’d watch anything so long as I wasn’t required to jiggle a baby on one knee at the same time.

The TV screen flickered on Lucus’s eyes, as another great mining thing appeared. They were building some sort of tunnel, there were pipes for concrete, massive metal grid work and men in hard hats standing atop mounds of earth and calling at each other. All I needed to do was watch. Lucus thought I had been out collecting with Irene, an activity quite boring and mundane and befitting his new “stay at home wife”. I didn’t disillusion him. I didn’t like lying, but equally I didn’t want to admit to him exactly what’d I’d been cajoled into either. I knew Lucus would never understand, and in fact, I knew he would have been incredibly angry if he’d realised what I had been up to. He was in a position of authority in the school. Even I could imagine the headlines. Head Teacher’s wife caught breaking and entering. It wasn’t worth thinking about.

And so I said nothing. We drank our tea in companionable and tired silence, the television providing the conversation we were both either too tired or unwilling to supply, and then retired to bed.

Not surprisingly, I tossed and turned throughout that night. Sleep eluding me in much the same way the reason I was needed for the nocturnal house break had. I lay there thinking about the break in. Feeling the pressure of my gloved hands burning into the banister, door knobs, table. Worrying if a strand of my hair had blown loose. Wondering whether the police would return once they worked out where the husband had been hiding and run all their forensic tests a second time. Irene and I had been careful, yes, but the question was, had we been careful enough?

Then there was Lucus. His warm body snuggled under the duvet - totally oblivious to my actions. I could imagine him dreaming contented dreams, a man wholly cocooned within his work-a-day life with his little wifey-at-home who took care of his daughter and put meals on the table. He had nothing to worry about. No cause for concerns. He trusted me. Trusted my honesty. Only his trust was misplaced. I had deceived him.

I’d always been a stickler for honesty and yet this evening I had wilfully and consciously lied to him. It wasn’t even a white lie. I had deliberately not told him what I was up to with Irene. She hadn’t sprung it on me as we’d left. It had been planned. I knew exactly what we were doing. Had Lucus known what I was really up to that evening I knew he would have stopped me going. He had a strong sense of propriety, of boundaries, and of right and wrong. He was a man of morals. What I had done was not in his list of gainful evening occupations. And so I lay awake for hours listening to his steady breathing, inching gradually away from the burn of his righteousness until I finally nodded off into an uneasy sleep on the very edge of the mattress.

Lillian woke around two. I put it down to teething, dosed her up with Calpol, gave her some warm milk to settle her back down again and then lay awake for another hour turning the house-break over in my mind.

Irene seemed sure the ex-husband hadn’t done it. Yet the police were appealing for any information about his location. He must have been their primary suspect. Even on television dramas it was usually the family they looked at first. And as for his sleeping location, it was more than a little unusual, even by Grimsby standards. Most husbands didn’t leave their wives, only to return and sleep rough in the loft of the house they’d just left. There must be some reason he had taken such an unusual step. Possibly financial. But it still begged the question: how had she not noticed him? Surely there must have been signs.

I lay there listening to the creaking of our own house and the gurgling and clicking as the central heating pipes expanded and contracted. Sometimes you could hear what sounded like a ghost walking down the hall, but I knew it was just the neighbours walking on their floor next door. The joists spanned both of our houses and the shared woodwork facilitated the movement of sound between us. I listened to the rattle of the loose fitting sash windows, the groan of wind in the chimney. Maybe I too wouldn’t notice if someone was actually living in our loft. It was so unexpected, so outside the natural order, it wouldn’t occur to me to check.

I must have fallen asleep again eventually, but the morning seemed to arrive before I’d fully shut my eyes. The “bleep bleep bleep” of the radio alarm shrilly announcing Lucus’s start to the day. He switched it off and I groaned.

“Bad night?” he enquired.

“Hmmf,” I rolled over. “Is Lillian awake?”

“Can’t hear her.”

“Then I’ll stay here five minutes.”

Lucus padded off to the shower. It wouldn’t be long before Lillian’s young ears recognised the signs of life in the house. She loved attention and hated to miss out on anything, however mundane.

I listened to Lucus thumping about in the bathroom. He didn’t care if he woke our sleeping dragon. Very shortly he wouldn’t have to be dealing with her, but rather driving off to his significant, high powered job, sorting out budgets, strategic planning, meeting parents, coaching teachers…,

Lillian coughed. I pulled the duvet over my head. Maybe that Calpol dose would keep her asleep a little longer. She coughed again and I heard a musical trill as she batted at her spinning mobile. She gave a little half cry, half giggle, and I heard her rolling and making a grab for the cot sides. There was a shudder, a giggle, another muffled thud and then a firm wooden rattle as got herself standing and yanked the cot sides backwards and forwards.

“Wah!”

I dragged the duvet down and swung out of bed. Maybe the tooth had cut in the last four hours. I could live in hope.

Barely three hours later I had reached the tipping point of the morning. Lillian had lost her patience with life in general. I’d fended off at least one screaming fit, changed three nappies, cleared Shreddies off the walls and endeavoured to pick a sodden rusk out of the carpet pile into which it had been smeared, before giving up, calling through the dog and ignoring the fact dog saliva wasn’t the most hygienic way of cleaning the house.

We’d reached the point where we hated the sight of each other. I just wasn’t entertaining enough and from my point of view neither was she. Which meant only one thing: it was time to go out.

Within minutes of entering the park Irene was at my side, her beige duffle coat pulled tight around her against the cold of the day, a red woollen scarf nestled in against her neck.

I often wondered how she did it. I was rarely in the park long before Irene made an appearance. Either I was extremely predictable, or she lurked. I hadn’t decided yet which was more likely.

I surreptitiously tried to work out how cold she was, but couldn’t decide from looking at her face how long she might have hidden behind a tree. Her appearances were too regular to be random chance… but if she had waited for me to arrive this morning I’d have expected a little more of a blue hue around her lips.

Irene had a few heels of bread with her and so I pulled the buggy up alongside the duck pond, re-enacting the first day we met, but without the ice. Her excuse of crusts made a change from just fetching milk from the Spar, or just walking back from town. Moss gave me one of his looks. Duck feeding took up valuable ball fetching time. I watched him slink away into the bushes, head down, hunched back, a vision of misery. He stole a look at me, resentment written across his face. He dropped his ball next to a hedge and ambled, rather than ran, off to his next vantage point, where he would wait impatiently for me to throw the ball.

I footed the brakes, buggy facing the water. Lillian was too young to grasp the concept of throwing any food away. Everything she held went in her mouth first. Added to that, the ducks were far too wary to come within the two inch radius she could actually hurl the bread, so I threw the bread and Lillian pointed, while Irene kept up a running commentary in baby-talk.

I listened to her. She must have had children herself. She was fluent in age appropriate chatter. The thing was… she never spoke about a family, nor a partner. Not for the first time I wondered what the story was there. We’d known each other so long it had become impolite to ask. I’d tried, early into our friendship, but Irene had brushed off my questions with questions of her own and the longer I knew her, the less I felt I could pry. It was like she’d drawn a screen around herself and her past was hidden beyond that thick heavy curtain. I wondered what lurked there. But right now she was who she allowed me to see, and that much of her I liked. Maybe that was enough. She didn’t know everything about me after all.

We all had things we kept to ourselves; behind every face was a story and there would be few in our lives to whom we bared all. Those that did were close friends, or partners, anything less would have brought with it embarrassment and mortification. Personal exposure merited a level of trust above and beyond regular friendship. I had a few close friends who knew everything about me. Irene was rapidly becoming one of them, but she still didn’t know everything yet. Perhaps I still had to earn Irene’s trust. Maybe helping her in this investigation of hers would bring me into that restricted circle, and if she trusted me, maybe I would let her in on my hidden secrets.

“All gone,” Irene sing-songed as I shook out the bag, scattering the last of the crumbs into the air.

“Bah!” said Lillian and with nothing left to occupy her, she grabbed at her socks, pulled them off and made to hurl them after the bread.

“Oh no you don’t.” I took the socks and pocketed them. I never knew why I bothered really; she seemed to spend all day pulling them off. At home I simply left her barefoot. She wasn’t yet walking outside, we hadn’t invested in shoes. But I could see those days approaching, and I wondered how many shoes we were going to lose when that day came.

Walking away from the pond I picked up the much chewed rubber ball Moss had left by the hedge and with the plastic throwing arm known to Lucus and I as ‘the dog whacker’ (though we never whacked the dog with it) I tossed it over the grass towards the snout I could see sticking out from behind another bush ahead. Moss careened off after it, pleased to be the centre of attention again.

We’d purchased him as a pup from a working farm and although he’d never so much as sniffed a sheep, the instinct to run round a flock was still there. Once the ball was dropped, he ran a full circle, as if around an imaginary flock of sheep, to take up position further down the path in the direction we were walking in, hiding behind a convenient tree or bush as if playing a doggy version of hide and seek. My job was to locate the ball, wait until I could see him and then launch it as far as I could in his direction, at which point he’d speed out of his hiding place and grab it, mid-air if he could.

I collected the ball and returned again to the buggy. Irene was almost pregnant in her conspiracy. The air was thick around us with the unspoken conclusions of last night’s musings. I gave her the opening she was waiting for.

“So?”

She grinned at me. “I’ve found him.”

“Who?”

“The ex-husband.”

“What? Already? Have you told the police?”

“The police? Why would I do that?”

“Er… because they’re looking for him.” The Homer-like doh crept into my voice unbidden. I had a strong sarcastic streak I’d never managed to outgrow. It wasn’t my most endearing feature, as Lucus would happily testify.

Irene sighed and gave me a withering look.

I glared back. I couldn’t believe it didn’t cross her mind at least once that she might have tracked down a potential wife killer. She seemed so convinced the police were wrong and she was right. And that conviction appeared so strong it made her willing to take the risk and protect the man everyone else was looking for.

“Where is he then?”

Irene looked around her, checking for eavesdroppers. The park was mainly empty, just a few mothers with older children in the play area, the odd dog walker and one of the local drunks sitting on one of the benches near the pond with a couple of tinnies, fingerless gloves and a beanie hat that looked as though it had seen much better days. He appeared to be muttering to himself about some injustice; I could hear a running commentary that contained rather a lot of swearing.

Irene made sure we had the dewy grass and the fresh, crisp air all to ourselves and then tipped her head towards the house we had broken into the night before.

“What?” I asked. She tipped her head again.

“Seriously? He’s gone back?”

“No,” she said. “Not back as such. But the house next door is the same construction if you look. He’s in there.”

I looked at the houses. As Irene said, they were a matching pair of semi-detached properties in the Edwardian style. Each house had a mirror image adjoining it and both of them were separated by matching driveways. They were made of the same red brick used in all Grimsby homes but rather than the long thin houses common to many of the older properties, these were stubbier, with two bay windows to each frontage, indicating that each had two reception rooms facing the park. They both had a front porch but it was clear the side entrances were the ones they used as both routes to the front doors were a little more overgrown. Added to all that there was a dip in the low hedge separating the driveways exactly between the two houses back doors, which I thought was likely to be the result of the postman taking an over-the-hedge short cut between the houses to deliver mail over the years.

“Noooo.” I shook my head. It was unbelievable. “He wouldn’t have. Surely not? You think he crept into someone else’s house and repeated the same trick?” She nodded. “How can you tell?

“Same cigarette butts on the drive in line with the drain pipe.”

We were too far away to see such small evidence, but I took her word for it. If she’d seen them, then they were there. Irene wouldn’t lie about something this important. I wondered if that was where she had been this morning, proving her theory while she waited for me to catch up.

“How did he get in?”

“Don’t you have next-door’s keys?”

I rolled my eyes. Not only did I have next-door’s keys, I also had keys for the family on the other side and a friend’s set for their house several miles away. In turn, our own keys were lodged with three sets of neighbours. After all, what good were a spare set of keys, locked inside your own property? Added to the fact we wouldn’t have to break into our own house if we accidentally locked ourselves out, we knew if we were late back for some reason, we could ring round and someone would probably help us out by letting out the dog.

“Surely they’d have noticed they were missing?” I said.

“Who would have?” Irene said. “Does your mother know you’ve got next-door’s keys?”

“No”

“Does anyone?”

“You do.”

“I’m observant. But I wouldn’t necessarily be asked by the police if anything was missing from the house if you were burgled or killed. Besides the keys for the next-door neighbour would be the one thing I probably wouldn’t think to check for – after all, they aren’t yours. Of course, I will now,” she said

“Of course,” I said. “Though I’m not actually planning on being murdered any time soon.”

“I should hope not.”

“But … to move in just next door?”

“He had limited options. It was probably a split second decision.”

“And in the loft?”

“Better the devil you know. Besides, in the loft he wouldn’t be discovered if someone happened to look around the house.

“There’s no one there?”

“Not at the moment. It’s rented.”

“So… what are you going to do?” I asked her. “Tell the police?”

“Not yet. Don’t look at me like that,” she added. “They’d just arrest him.”

Without facing a mirror, I wasn’t sure exactly how I was looking at Irene, but incredulous and gobsmacked were probably close to the top of possible emotions on my face. She thought she’d tracked down the husband, in fact, she knew he was next-door, next - door, in their loft space, and she wasn’t going to tell the police!

“It’s up for let at DDMs. I checked it out this morning.” DDMs were one of the many local estate agents operating in Grimsby, though probably the largest firm if the signs I’d seen all over town were anything to go by. A new one seemed to spring up every day.

“You went round?”

“No. Just looked it up on the internet. I’d not seen any cars in the drive these last few weeks and the curtains haven’t moved. I figured it was probably empty. It is. What I want to know though, is what’s he doing for food?”

“Sorry?”

“He could raid the fridge in his own house, but to remain unseen for so long, either he’s starving or he has an accomplice at a local shop who isn’t reporting him.”

I hadn't even thought about the man’s need to eat. What he may or may not have been consuming while his wife, or rather ex-wife, was lying dead on a mortuary slab hadn’t even crossed my mind. Avoiding him: that had occurred to me. Passing on any useful intelligence to the police: that had certainly registered. But what he’d been eating? I’d not even spared it a first thought, let alone a second.

I wondered if this was what had consumed Irene’s mind the night before. Perhaps she had lain awake, as I had last night, wondering about the simple things in life. For me, the man had been in hiding; for Irene, he had been eating, drinking, sleeping, living somewhere, even smoking. She had thought about every aspect of it, every permutation. I wondered if the police followed the same thinking. If they had, surely they would have found him by now using the same methodology - or perhaps it was just Irene's unique view of life that cleared the smog of detection and brought things into the open. If he’d only moved next door, and hadn’t left the house, it certainly explained the lack of sightings.

“But-”

Irene halted my ‘duty of care’ speech with one of her don’t argue looks. She didn’t want to hear it.

“Look…it won't be long until the police reach the same conclusion, or at least, I hope so."

“And what then?” I asked.

“An arrest probably," Irene shrugged. “Unless we get to him first. He's rolling.”

“What?”

Irene pointed. She hadn't been talking about the murder, but rather the dog. Moss was shrugging about on the grass in clear abandon, all four legs in the air, shoulders rubbing backwards and forwards, screwing himself into the ground.

“Oh no!" I started running towards him. I could see a whole morning of dog washing was ahead of me.

"MOOSSSSS!" I yelled. He ignored me. The whiff overpowering his doggy brain. Fox spraint. Just what I needed to finish off my day. Joy!

Chapter Four

One sniff of Moss in the park had made it quite clear that he was not spending any time inside our property until Operation: Eradicate Smell had taken place. He was either going to have to live in the garden until Lucus came home at night, or I needed an accomplice. So it went without saying I’d co-opted Irene into the task.

“Are you ready?" I shouted through the bathroom door.

Irene had taken up station in the kitchen, the other side of the bathroom door, with Lillian on one hip. I had heard the pair burbling to each other while I swilled down the dog. Irene with her fluent baby chatter and Lillian with accompanying “Bah!”s and “Ah!”s and “Gah!”s.

“You just want me to open the back door and stand guard?" she asked

"Something like that. He'll come out fast!" I warned through the door.

I turned off the shower and grabbed the towel we reserved for dog cleansing from the top of the glass door. It was threadbare but extremely absorbent. I draped it over him and began to rub. I wrinkled my nose as I bent over him. He still smelled, even after specially formulated dog shampoo and copious amounts of water. It crossed my mind to wonder what state the dead woman’s husband would be in by now. Had he showered since he went into hiding, or did he smell a bad as the dog?

If Irene had her way, we'd find out soon enough. She wanted to “relocate” him. Get his side of the story and keep him out of police hands a little longer. What if she was wrong? I had asked her that very same question as I walked behind the dog, my nose screwed up against the smell.

She had just shrugged. “Then it was a crime of passion and we're perfectly safe.”

I didn't share her optimism and it occurred to me perhaps I should phone the police myself, give them the heads up and save Irene from herself. But then... the police would want to know why and how, and who I was to be interested in such things; and all those questions could lead them right back to me, and from me to Lucus, and he would wonder how I'd got involved and then the house break would come out. I wasn’t ready for that either. But more than that. Like Irene, part of me really didn’t want to let go of our involvement just yet either. I was enjoying myself. Relishing the thrill.

“Ready?” I called out.

“Yes, we’re ready for him, aren’t we Lillian?”

“Bah!”

“OK then.”

I threw open the bathroom door. Moss skittered across the laminate and I heard Irene slamming the backdoor behind him as I began to swill down the shower.

“Tea?” Irene called from the kitchen.

“Oooh, yes please,” I opened the door to receive the mug and came out myself.

I looked around. Lillian was busy unpacking her cupboard, the only one we left un-childlocked in the kitchen. It contained Tupperware pots and various plastic whisks and things which Lillian had taken a fancy to. It was a step up from her heuristic play box, a wicker affair filled with small household objects and pine cones. She used to sit quite happily unpacking that box when she’d learned to sit up, but these days, she needed to feel the sense of independent discovery, and pulling apart the kitchen cupboards was her new thing. She pulled out a plastic balloon whisk and started swinging it around above her head. She was still largely uncoordinated and whacked herself more than once in her excitement.

She could come to no harm where she was and seemed content enough with her antics so I left her to it and settled into the window seats with Irene and the mugs of tea.

From the vantage of the window I could look down our garden. Moss was lying in the weak sun on the patio licking the excess water from his coat. He looked up, sensing he had an observer, and gave me a pointed look. Washes were not his thing. He’d gone to all that trouble to get that special cologne and I had ruined his future courting plans, again. How very dare I!

I turned back to my tea. I would let him in later when he’d finished his own grooming.

“Well?” Irene looked at me, her finger running around the rim of the mug as if she was trying to make the china sing. It was a nervous habit. “Are you in?”

I mulled it over. Breaking into another house wasn’t really in my diary for that week. Irene had taken me out of my comfort zone breaking into one. Did I really want to get that involved in someone else’s life, or rather someone else’s death?

“You’re sure it’s safe?”

“I’d bet my life on it.”

I looked at her. “You’re that sure?”

“Yes.”

She seemed in earnest. I looked through to the kitchen. We’d knocked through the dividing wall between the kitchen and the dining room some time ago. It made it possible to keep a vague eye on Lillian while enjoying the comfort of the window seats. She was busy pushing Tupperware around the kitchen. There didn’t appear to be any pattern to where she was sliding things to and I wondered if it was the noise of the plastic on the laminate that she was achieving. Children thought about things so differently to adults. What would she make of her mother’s involvement in a murder enquiry? Would she find it fun?

I looked at my tea. Lucus and I had very different personalities. I was the optimist, the risk taker; he the pessimist planner. Since Lillian’s arrival I’d taken very much the back seat in daily decisions. I was now the “wife who does”. I fitted finally into the stereotypical mould he had for me in his brain. For once I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing. I hadn’t done anything for myself since Lillian had arrived. I’d taken no risks. Created no problems. Maybe that was why I nodded at Irene. I needed something to challenge me. Last night might have left me sleepless, but it had given my adrenal gland a squeeze and that burst of “fight or flight” hormone was just the thing my body was craving. It had switched me back from “Mother” to “Challenger”. I was someone again. Someone who could tackle the uncertain, could battle the odds, could stand up against injustices, could achieve goals and create positive outcomes. I could “do” again. And I so much needed to be a “doer” rather than a “done to”.

Lillian peered around the end unit and giggled at us. “Peek-a-boo!” I called at her, waggling my fingers. At least she was too young to understand any of the plotting and was unable to report anything back to Lucus.

I looked beyond Irene to the garden again, the Laburnum branches overhanging the back were still devoid of any spring buds. Of all the trees which surrounded us, that one took the longest to recognise spring.

“Four thirty then.”

“Four thirty?” I said. “Lucus won’t be home.”

“Helen will look after her,” Irene offered. Helen was a woman I knew from toddlers. Like me, Helen had no local family and since her husband had left her a few months ago we had established a sort of reciprocal arrangement for those unexpected moments when you simply couldn’t take a baby along. Both of us tried not to tax the arrangement as we didn’t know each other all that well, just well enough. Helen was very anxious about appearing too needy, but she’d had a few solicitors’ appointments recently that were easier to do without her son Thomas in tow, and she probably felt she owed me a few favours. I had been keeping those back for a rainy day, and this was hardly a “Rainy day” moment. I wondered what she would have thought of me if she knew I was dropping off my daughter in order to affect another house break.

“I thought you’d have wanted to do it at night, when no one could see,” I said.

“Once was risky enough. I don’t want to put us in that position again,” Irene said. “This time we can pose as estate agent and viewer. No one will know the difference and no one will think to check. We’ll be hidden in plain sight.”

I thought of Helen’s face, how she would look if I told her what I was really up to, and what lie I would use for this request. It went without saying I wasn’t going to tell her the truth. Smear test at the surgery perhaps? Dentist appointment?

“How long?”

“We’ll be home long before Lucus gets back. Half an hour tops.” Dentist appointment then. They got arranged at short notice occasionally… I could have had a cancellation or something. Could I affect a toothache? Probably. It was something you couldn’t see after all.

“Do you have a suit?”

“A suit? No.” I’d spent much of my working life in uniform. A suit wasn’t a requirement. “Why do I need a suit?”

“Then I’ll play estate agent,” she said. “I’ll meet you at the house at four.” And so saying, she swilled down the last of her tea and rose to leave before I could raise any further objections.

“You’re going?” I asked.

“Lots to do,” she said, gathering her coat. “Can’t sit around here all day chatting. And you’ve got mums and tots haven’t you?”

I glanced at the clock. She was right. Barely ten minutes to go. Not that it was the be all and end all that I attended each week, the health visitors probably wouldn’t even remark on my absence, but it was routine and it broke up an otherwise long day with Lillian. Even if the singing got me down a little.

Chapter Five

Hello Hope, how are you ?

Hello Hope, how are you ?

Hello Hope how are you ?

How are you today ?

The clapping stopped and we all turned expectantly to Lauren, Hope’s mother; who smiled nervously around the circle.

“She’s got a new tooth,” Lauren declared to the room at large. The circle of faces grinned encouragingly.

“How lovely,” Pat the health visitor exclaimed, putting suitable words to our collective encouraging grins. She was in her fifties I judged, no middle aged spread, but not athletic, just comfortably thin. She had short white hair, a round face and wore understated make up. Health visitors had no uniform, but she had clearly selected the smart casual look from the supermarket clerical ranges and in the middle of us mothers, it was obvious she was the one who was employed to be here.

Added to her immaculate appearance, she had obviously won first place in the inane happy expressions competition. She smiled at us all beatifically, adopting teacher mode for us, her class. She had a slightly too high pitched soft carers-voice which was patronising in the extreme. I used to reprimand my staff if they put on voices like that with patients. Just as adults weren’t children because they couldn’t stand up or feed themselves, we weren’t idiots just because we’d had children ourselves. We may all have suffered from baby brain from time to time due to lack of sleep, but we had all reached adulthood and deserved to be spoken to as adults. I wondered if the voice was reserved especially for our group or whether she spoke like that to all her friends. Her tone of voice never varied week to week.

I tried to imagine her at her desk. Did she finish up this mums and tots class and return to bang the desk with her head repeatedly - or did she really enjoy all this as much as she appeared to?

“Isn’t that lovely!” Pat repeated herself for emphasis. We all nodded, yes it was, how delightful!

“A new tooth!” she exclaimed again, just in case we didn’t get it the first time. “How many is that now?”

“Her third,” Lauren beamed in the spotlight, succumbing to the attention.

“How lovely.”

It was. It really was… I looked around the circle of mums, all of them were still smiling. I maintained a grin in order to fit in and repositioned Lillian on my knees so that I could clap properly, my forearms circling her, ensuring she didn’t slip off my legs.

“Ready?”

And with that Pat began the clapping and singing and we started again on the next baby along, April, who was jiggled up and down on her mother’s knees in time to the music, her chubby little fingers gripping her mother’s hands, her bright Mama Joe Bebe clothing marking her out as one of the yummy mummy set in the same way Lillian’s supermarket brand clothing did not.

The tune was along the same lines as “Skip skip skip to my Lou”, which wasn’t the world’s most tuneful song to begin with, and repeated with a room full of twenty mothers it had lost any pep it might otherwise have had by baby number four.

Added to the song, which didn’t change session to session, we met weekly and in my opinion there really was very little excitement in the world of baby-land that required a weekly update report from every single mother in the room. I wondered which part of Maslow’s self-actualisation triangle this circle time achieved for us all. After all, somewhere along the line, a need for this service had been identified by the Health Visiting team and given the strain on NHS resources, this had to achieve something or the budget would never have been allocated.

I groaned inwardly. Was it any wonder mothers got depressed after a baby if this was what they had to contend with! I loved Lillian, don’t get me wrong, but I still had a brain. It needed stimulating. Singing Skip skip skip to my Lou twenty times each week was not stimulation. I wondered, not for the first time, why I actually came, and then I remembered… towards the end of the session there was a five minute cup of tea where we all took it in turns to leave our darlings in each other’s care while we had a cup of tea alone, un-babied, in the other room.

The singing came around to me. I looked up into the room. Should I mention the house break? Dare I spill the beans about the fact Irene and I were about to come face to face with the police’s prime suspect in a matter of hours? I watched them all looking at me expectantly.

“Er… she ate breakfast herself this week.” It was the best I could do. I really should start planning for this a day in advance…

“How delightful,” Pat beamed back as if I was a moron. “It’s really important at this age to encourage finger foods. It gives them more independence.”

“Hmmm,” I agreed, wishing she had seen the state of the dining room. Building firms could use warm baby cereal as glue, it set so hard. I hoped that was enough and I wouldn’t be forced to elaborate further. I may not be planning, but at least I was self-censoring now, more than I managed back when Lillian was five months and crying almost all day and night. Apparently admitting that you felt like whacking your child’s head off a work top was not the correct thing to say in circle time.

Of course, I had no intention of ever harming Lillian; I was just explaining how her incessant wailing was making me feel. I now had a lot of sympathy for parents who lost it and shook their babies. It was amazing what a 10 pound ball of pink screaming baby could do to your sanity over a protracted length of time. Lauren may have achieved three teeth, but I had endured nine already and every precious white protrusion had been preceded by days and days of inconsolable screaming, sleepless nights and temperature swings.

What I needed was a distraction, a stunning distraction. Which was why my days were filled with baby groups. The fact I didn’t really fit into the yummy mummy set was the only snag to an otherwise excellent plan.

It was no surprise really that I had grabbed hold of Irene’s friendship like a lifeline. And now she said she needed me, I wasn’t about to abandon her. The house break had woken me up. I craved more stimulation. Like a druggie I was looking for the next fix.

Chapter Six

The rest of the day seemed to drag and 4.30 took longer to arrive than I could have believed possible. It was like waiting for Christmas as a child. Time seemed to slow down and no matter what I did, the minute hand just didn’t move fast enough.

I decided the use the timer facility on the oven and get a stew on the go for Lucus’s return. The beef and jacket potatoes could cook while I was out with Irene, and to all intents and purposes it would appear as if I’d been at home all afternoon planning the meal like the good wife he chose to believe I was. Pigeon holing someone was all very well, but once assigned that box, it was very easily faked if you needed to maintain appearances.

Lillian played with her cooking set while I rushed around my real one, trying to get everything done before she required mummy-time. Stews didn’t take look to prepare thankfully, and I was cleared up before she’d noticed I’d not joined in with any game.

The afternoon revolved around the usual round of nappy changes, play time and washing, until I could string it out no further and walked down to Helen’s with the usual knapsack of spare nappies, her cuddle rabbit and tippy cups. I knew Helen wouldn’t mind a bit of early company, and so we had a cup of tea while Lillian explored Thomas’s things and got settled.

At the allotted time I made my excuses and left, taking care to walk towards the dentist before doubling back on myself once I was out of line of sight of Helen’s house, just in case she happened to be watching.

I could see Irene waiting in her car as I crossed the park, taking the swiftest route straight through the middle past the wooden café that had changed hands just about every year since the park opened. In truth, I wouldn’t have minded taking it on myself; but coffee shop dreams were a thing of the past now I had Lillian.

I passed the pond and watched the ducks swarming towards a small child in wellingtons with her mother. They were both bundled up in scarves, gloves and hats, feeding the ducks and chatting to each other. I couldn’t wait for Lillian to talk. It was like a whole world was out there for us. Once she was talking, I’d have company. Not very vocabulary rich company, but no longer would I be alone with a baby. We’d reach a milestone and suddenly it would be me and Lillian doing things together. Lillian and me baking, Lillian and me walking the dog. We could chat about things. She wouldn’t be a dumb witness to anything any more. Once she had words, she could learn to do things. She could become my “helper”. I tried to gauge the age of the child. Going on their height, that could be us in one year’s time. One year. So much could change in so little time.

I looked towards the houses on the opposite side. The trees were still bare and through their branches I could see the whole horseshoe of red brick Edwardian homes which surrounded the park. We really did live in an architecturally rich area. Each house was a little different, each house had its distinctive features, even if it was just a different pattern in the apex plasterwork. They didn’t make houses like they used to. I hadn’t seen any modern estate which had built houses on quite such a grand scale. The Edwardians knew how to do it properly. Even the two houses Irene had pointed out as the same had slightly different qualities. The way the shrubs were arranged in the gardens, the colour of the woodwork, even a slight difference in the bay window design and rendering.

I looked down from the houses to the road and Irene’s car. She was seated in the driver’s seat and glanced quickly in my direction but didn’t show any sign of recognition. I had changed, smartened myself up a little, (which I thought was what you did for a house viewing), but was sure I was still recognisable.

She had a clipboard on the steering wheel; I could see that much as I reached the bandstand just 30 or so feet away from her. Still she didn’t make eye contact. This was all very cloak and dagger stuff. I smiled a little at the ridiculousness of it all, and then I firmed up my mouth again. If Irene was taking it seriously, she probably had good reason and that was when I noticed the police car parked at the end of the road.

It didn’t appear to have anything to do with the house we were looking at, but it wasn’t moving. I wondered if Irene wanted to call things off. I paused a little. Waiting. Irene must have seen me out of the corner of her eye, as her fingers came up level with the side window and beckoned me forwards, even though her head never turned to look at me. She was maintaining her estate agent poise, the only give away that she knew me and that we were in this together, was that quick twitch of the fingers, which the police car ahead would never have seen.

I continued forwards and tried to remember what Lucus and I did the last time we viewed a house. I ignored Irene in the car, looked around as if looking for an estate agent, and then walked up the driveway to the house.

I knocked on the door.

Still, Irene didn’t get out of the car.

I waited.

Still no Irene.

I started back down the drive again feeling somewhat ridiculous. I didn’t know what she had planned. Maybe we should have discussed it.

The moment I reached the pavement again, Irene clicked open her car door and, probably just for appearances sake, finished off a conversation on her mobile phone that went something along the lines of I’ll have to go, the client is here. She was quite the actress! I wasn’t sure if I was going to win any Oscars for my own performance.

I gave the police car a glance. They hadn’t moved. Maybe it really did have nothing to do with the murder. I gave it another look. There was no one inside.

“Hello!” Irene extended one hand, face awash with a plastic smile, while the other clutched the clipboard.

She was wearing a very presentable business suit, her hair carefully coiffed to make her look younger than she really was. She could pass for a pre-retiree, with her business blouse and what had to be a ‘push me up’ bra on underneath. I’d never noticed her chest before today and surely by now anything that size would have sagged. Mine were already drooping. I blamed breast feeding.

“Hello.” Her handshake was as firm as I expected it to be. While it was the first time we’d actually shaken hands, hand shaking just wasn’t something you did when you were friends, she just wasn’t the sort to own a limp one. Everything she did was decisive.

“You’re here to see the house?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Follow me.”

I wondered how long we were going to have to maintain this façade as I followed behind her. As it happened, not long. The moment Irene walked up the driveway and turned away from the main road, she dropped her tones and whispered under her breath.

“It’s been there for a good half an hour.” I knew she meant the police car. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the murder, it’s too far up the road. I’ve not seen anyone get out. It could simply be parked up visiting someone else, or stopped for tea.”

“It’s empty,” I said. I wasn’t sure if my eyesight was better than hers for distance, or if I’d just been able to see through the glare on the windscreen because of the oblique angle I was standing at when I paid the police car another glance.

“There you go then,” she said.

“So you want to go ahead?”

“It would look more suspicious now not to.”

She was right. It would. I just hoped the police hadn’t actually met the estate agents who were responsible for the neighbour’s house already. Otherwise Irene was just about to get us both into extremely hot water. Then again, having a police car at the end of the road might come in useful depending on what we found during the house break. If Irene was right and the husband was inside, having back-up so close to the house might not be such a bad thing.

I fingered the phone in my pocket. How fast could I type in the emergency number… could I do it without him realising? Probably not. I had a smart phone. I needed to see the icons and then the numbers on the keypad in order to type. Maybe I should have put the sim into the older button phone I kept for emergencies. Next time I’d think ahead. If indeed there was a next time.

She glanced behind me to make sure we were shielded a little from the park by the angle of the house and the small Leylandi bush which rose from the corner of the front garden.

“Gloves. Overshoes.” Irene prompted. I’d also taken the liberty of tying my hair back this time, just in case

“Hold this.” She passed me the clipboard and extracted the same slim line lock pick set from her pocket. It was easier to see in the daylight but I couldn’t read any of the writing, it was all in Chinese.

“Shouldn’t take long. This one only has a Yale.”

She threaded two of the aluminium strips into the lock and started to jiggle them about. They weren’t how I expected skeleton keys to look, but then few things in the movies were how they were in real life. After a few seconds where her hands levered the small strips up and down in the key hole, she slipped in a third. The idea was to try and find the latches which the key routinely fit into which would turn the entire lock assembly in one go. She’d explained the art to it yesterday as we walked back from the park, - it sounded simple enough, but it was something which clearly needed skill and a lot of practise.

I glanced behind me. I couldn’t see the police car from the door and I hoped, if they were in another house on the park, they couldn’t see us either. In daylight I felt much more exposed than I had at night, and standing there on the doorstep in swimming pool overshoes and gloves I felt a chill run all the way down me from my head to my feet.

The door clicked open. Irene had worked her magic.

“Coming?”

Like the house we’d visited only the day before, we walked directly into the kitchen and I could see immediately from the position of the doors, the rooms in this house were going to be a mirror image of the other one. The doorway leading off to the hall was directly across the tiles, but there was no furniture. The place was empty; uninhabited, and despite the fact the dead body was next door, this one felt more haunted.

It smelled musty. Unlived in. The central heating clearly hadn’t been turned on for a while and the house was damp and cold, despite the slightly warmer air outside. Being empty, no windows had been opened and it had an unaired feel about it. That empty smell you get from unlived-in houses. Like leaf mould, but with a hint of unwashed carpet and stale cigarette smoke. It was a stark contrast to the home of the murder victim next door, which still carried a slight vanilla scent of life. A small part of me knew it was probably nothing more than an active central heating system, an air freshener and recent cleaning, but the two “empty” houses couldn’t have been more dissimilar.

As before, Irene lost no time.

I followed her. The doors to the rooms were all standing open. Each room empty and devoid of character. Just a shell waiting to receive a new family with new decorative ideas and different furniture, keen to apply their own unique stamp and drive out the cold abandon currently occupying the house like a living presence. Only it wasn’t entirely empty, if Irene was right – Lesley Cooper’s ex was upstairs in the loft space.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “If the house is empty, why is he still in the loft?”

“I suppose it’s safer. Up there he can’t be surprised by any estate agents.”

We reached the top of the stairs, where I had frightened myself with a reflection the night before. There was no mirror here, just a blank wall facing us which had a square of dust framing where a pictured used to hang. We turned and Irene pointed towards two indents in the carpet. She raised her eyebrows. See? I nodded. The depressions were in exactly the same place as the two she’d spotted next door.

“Russ?” She shouted up at the loft hatch. I stood there agog, there was no finesse, no sneaking up, she smiled at me. “Trust me”.

“Russ?” She jumped and made a grab for the short loop of rope hanging down from the loft hatch. She missed by about half an inch. She looked at me.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She nodded. “Just do it. Everything will be all right. You’ll see.”

I took her place, and Irene stepped back a little to give me a bit of room. I jumped and, while I’m only an inch and a half taller than Irene, it was enough to give me the edge I needed and I snagged the rope easily. I gave it a pull and the hatch opened towards us, with a familiar loft ladder attached to the door. I gave it a pull to make it unfold and its feet nestled easily into the impressions in the carpet below.

“Russ?” Irene barked again, as if scolding a naughty puppy. We waited. Dust motes caught the light around us as we both stared up into the darkness beyond the hatch. “Russ?!”

“Auntie Rena?” A deep, slightly hoarse voice drifted down from the loft towards us. He sounded surprised, but he was no more surprised than I was.

Auntie Rena? I looked at Irene. Auntie Rena?

“Long story. I’ll tell you later.”

She had never mentioned she knew the ex-husband. I thought back over our conversations. It hadn’t been brought up at all, not even once. I frowned at her. Surely she should have told me of any relationship before we entered the house and started shouting into a loft space. I mean, here was me all a jitter, anxious for our safety, trying to work out how to call the police if we needed to – but she knew him.

“Is that you?” the disembodied voice called down again.

“Yes,” Irene said. “Are you coming down or what?”

I heard footsteps above us as he made his way over to the loft hatch to see for himself. It wasn’t long before a wane, round face appeared at the hatch.

He hadn’t shaven in a number of days and his skin bore smears of soot where he had rubbed at his face. It wasn’t a beard in the true sense of the word; there was no trimming, no shaping. This was more an “old man of the woods” look, only it wasn’t quite long enough even for that. Presumably the stubble had started to grow during his time in his own loft before his wife had been killed, and since then it had morphed into a lichen-like unkempt mess. His hair could have done with a cut too, the fringe drooping into his eyes, the sides tufting out over the tops of his ears. His top was grubby, the collar of his shirt almost browny-yellow with sweat. His face was puckered, pale and sunken, like he hadn’t eaten in a while and had missed out on the sun, which was probably the case. It was doubtful he had been outside since the murder. I wondered idly how long had he intended living in lofts, he couldn’t have a plan when he grabbed the keys and ran next door.

His eyes found mine. “Who’s she?”

He glared at me frostily. I stared back, equally icy.

“Ruth.” Irene didn’t elaborate, and Russ didn’t seem to know how to respond. It wasn’t like we could go through the standard ‘lovely to meet you’ handshake routine. Russ was in a loft, wanted for his wife’s murder, and I was…well, what was I? I had broken into a stranger’s house with Irene, marched up to a loft space that wasn’t mine and demanded to see a man, wanted for murder, who was hiding up there.

“Can you see down the road from the hatch up there?” Irene asked.

“A little. Why?”

“See if that police car has moved off yet.”

The face disappeared and I could hear shuffling above as he shifted position within the loft and walked over to the Velux at the side of the roof. A small smattering of dust dropped from the ceiling in one of the empty bedrooms. The sunlight caught it as it fell, like a small series of sparks dropping in the light.

“I think you owe me an explanation,” I said while Russ was out of earshot. I had walked into this with my eyes open, but Irene had known more. I didn’t like her keeping things from me, at least, not information as significant as this. She knew the suspect the police were after. It meant she wasn’t being objective. She was simply protecting a… a what…a nephew?

“It’s gone,” Russ shouted from the loft, before Irene could reply. “At least, I can’t see one.”

“Come down, then,” Irene told him. “Let’s get you out of here before the police work out the same thing I do. You were stupid to move in here,” she said directly to his face, as he appeared at the hatch. He looked back at her, crestfallen. “What were you thinking?”

“I didn’t,” he admitted. “I just panicked.”

“Panicked because you killed her?” I couldn’t help myself.

“He didn’t kill her,” Irene said. “Tell her.”

“She was dead when I came down that morning.”

“Morning?”

“He would have come down only when he knew she was at work,” Irene said. “Lesley would have been in the house at night so it was safest to move about in the day. Sloppy,” she added, facing him. “Why didn’t you just ask your Auntie Jean for help?”

“I… er… I don’t know.”

“So you snuck down, saw your wife dead and you… what, ran over here?” I wasn’t sure who I was more cross with, Irene or Russ who’d led us into this mess.

“Well I couldn’t report it, could I?” He was petulant. Like a teenager caught smoking behind the school bike sheds. I could see what Irene meant. He was hardly a killer. I could see that myself now, standing face to face with him. “I wasn’t supposed to be living in the house. If they knew I was living in the loft, well… I’d be the obvious suspect.”

“You are the obvious suspect,” I informed him, taking on the role of school caretaker.

He hung his head. “I am?”

I nodded. This was an ill-conceived plan, a cowardly action, and it had led to Irene and me getting into some serious hot water. I wasn’t impressed. In fact, I might have felt better had he looked as if he had some killer potential. I was breaking the law and leaving my child with a friend for…I looked him up and down…someone who would have been a good fit for the part of “expendable numpty” in a Star Trek film. Give him a red uniform and send him off to planet Zog and he’d have been the first to go.

“You’d have been better being honest in the first place,” Irene told him. “Now the whole police force is after you and not the real killer.”

“Do you know who did it?” His tone of voice seemed to indicate he trusted Irene could unravel all the problems he’d made for himself and solve it all in one go. I wondered if he knew something about Irene that I didn’t, or whether he was like this with every intelligent adult with more than half a brain cell.

“Not yet. It’s why we need to move you. I need to find out as much as I can before you hand yourself in.”

“Before I…?”

“You can’t avoid this, Russ. You are innocent, but we need to let due process sort that out.”

“But…?”

“Are you coming?” She took on a bullying tone, “Or do you want the police to find you here?”

Russ slumped, “All right.” His shoulders sagged and sullen teenager was written all over his posture.

I could see why his wife had wanted rid of him. I’d have wanted rid of this drip as well, especially if I was the one holding down a decent job and bringing in a wage while he sat on his flabby back side. I conjured up an image of him slumped on a sofa playing computer games while I went to work each day. Yep. I’d have definitely ditched him. He started to spin himself around to make his way down the ladder, but Irene stopped him.

“Better tidy up after yourself this time,” she told him. “We can’t have you making things too easy for them.”

Russ vanished from the hatch again and I could hear him moving around boxes and shuffling things in the loft, presumably hiding any traces that he had been living rough there for a few days.

We were both staring up at the hatch listening to his movements when she turned to me. “We aren’t related.”

I nodded but stayed quiet. Looking into his eyes I had worked out that much. Irene’s eyes were quick, intelligent. The man she called Russ still had much of the child about him. A boy that had grown up and found himself out of his depth. There was nothing of Irene in him. He called her Auntie though, but I wasn’t about to ask. I was smouldering. I know Irene had said he wasn't a killer, but he'd been in hiding for days. I was expecting at least a little more, oh, I don't know, vested Bruce Willis fighting an injustice, not one of Peter Pan’s Lost Boys being taken to task by Wendy.

“I knew his child minder, Jean.” She continued in hushed tones so our conversation wouldn’t carry into the loft. “She’s kept in touch with the family ever since he was a boy. But she’s bed-ridden now. Unable to get out. She called me the moment she heard the police were looking for him. Asked me to help.”

“So you’re…?”

“Not even a family friend. Russ called me Auntie Rena, because the last time I saw him he was 15 and he called every older person Jean introduced him to Auntie, or Uncle. It was polite back then.”

Lillian wasn’t talking yet. When she did, I might start the whole “Auntie thing” if Irene insisted, but it was a little outdated, and as far as I was concerned so long as Lillian was polite, she only had to call her biological aunties, aunties.

"So...the last time you met him, he was 15,” I said. “What is he... 26 now? 30?" She had assured me this man was harmless, but a lot could change in ten to fifteen years.

"Jean's kept in touch with him over the years. He last called in to see her before they split up. He was devastated. He loved Lesley."

"I'm not surprised,” I said. “She kept him in biscuits by all accounts."

She ignored my sarcasm, but I was working up a full head of steam. She could probably tell from my tone. We hadn’t had a row yet. With friends arguments never seem to come as often, or start in the same way as they do between married couples – but I could feel myself working into a martyred-rage. I had been misinformed. I had been kept in the dark. I had been dragged into something she knew more about than she was letting on. I felt used.

"You done yet?" she called up into the loft space.

"How are we going to get him out?” I asked. My tones were frosty; even I could hear the ice. I was angry, but I was a hedgehog, preferring sarcasm and withdrawal to direct confrontation. I wasn’t one of those types who flew into a rage easily, charged about like a rhino, trampling everything and everyone; rather I smouldered and like a hedgehog, I curled in on myself and displayed my spines, passive aggressive, sullen defeatism, sarcasm, cutting remarks, and the worst of it all, was that I could see myself doing it. I wanted to rage at her. I wanted to jump up and down, demand answers, hit something, curse myself for being so easily dragged in without even questioning why, but I didn’t. I hunkered down, I went quiet, gave her the glare, and willed her to read my eyes, and know what I was thinking.

The police car could still be outside, they might have simply rolled down the road a little, curious as to our visit to the house next door to the one with the left over police tape still stuck on the privet hedge.

"Don't worry about it," she told me, ignoring my mood. "I've got it all worked out.

"You have?"

"The eight foot runs right behind the house,” she reminded me.

An eight-foot was the term given to the alleys in Grimsby. This particular eight-foot ran all the way behind the houses at this side of the park. Most eight-foots just led to a midpoint along the road, with gated access for all the residents around it who used the alleyways to move wheelie bins from the back gardens down to the road on rubbish day, or access hidden garages around the backs of their houses. This eight-foot was unusual in that it linked Bargate Avenue to Weelsby Road directly, and was actually wide enough to fit a vehicle all the way along. I’d explored it once on one of Moss’s walks. It was a good brambling spot in the autumn, which is how I’d discovered it wasn’t the dead end most of them were. There was another like it linking Ludford Street to Farebrother Road to the North of the Park, only that one had a hidden joinery workshop lurking in the middle. I’d gone exploring one day after I’d seen a few vans accessing the road and curiosity had got the better of me.

“I'll pick him up at the church."

"And me?"

"You can just go home. Mission accomplished."

"What?" I couldn't believe that was it. All this cloak and dagger stuff to get here, and I was just going to be dismissed. Used and thrown away.

"You're viewing the house remember? You can't come with me."

I grunted. She was right. Appearances had to be maintained. But still… She had it all worked out, planned. I was merely a prop in the plan. Hardly an essential part, either. And to cap it all off, Russ was…well…very much a damp squib in the whole arrangement.

He crested the hatch again and started his descent. He didn't have anything with him, but the acidic smell of body odour made me step back as if he had a huge rucksack on his back. I pressed as far back against the wall as I could to give him room, and Irene deftly raised the ladder and, with the help of the weighted hinge system, closed the hatch with a little push.

"You can't come out the side door," she told him. "Do you know where the French door keys are?"

"Same fob," he said, dangling a set of keys in front of him. "Neil liked to keep everything together." Neil, I assumed, was the owner of the house. I wondered what he would have thought about Russ sneaking in and living here. Not much I suspect.

We bundled down the stairs, Irene at the front, Russ in the middle, and myself in the far rear, keeping as far back as I could from the smell. I'd never been good with strong aromas, and the sweet sour smell was turning my stomach.

Even though I was still smarting at my rapid dismissal, part of me was exceedingly glad that it wasn't me riding home with him in the car. Irene didn't seem to notice, but I remembered reading somewhere that the sense of smell was one of the first things to deteriorate in old age. Maybe it wasn't as overpowering for her. At least it wasn't yet the height of summer or I may have passed out when the loft hatch opened.

Irene paused in the back living space, which might have been a dining room if a table and chairs had been in the room, but for now was just another empty, slightly musty 8 by 8 space with a pale blue carpet and tea stains sporadically scattered around. A snail trail graced the room near the chimney.

Irene took the keys from Russ and opened the French doors which looked out onto the garden, forcing them back on their aluminium runners to let in the slightly warmer and fresher air, causing a breeze which only succeeded in putting me firmly downwind of Russ. I wrinkled my nose and took another step back.

"Off you go. There's a gate at the back. Go out there, turn left and keep walking until you get to the last privet hedge by the church. Wait there for me."

"Where are you taking me?" he asked.

"Jean's," she said. "And after we've got you cleaned up and fed, and we've had a chat, the station. You're turning yourself in."

"If you say so." He slumped off down the garden meekly, leaving me to wonder what Lesley had seen in the man in the first place. Maybe he was good in bed. He had to have something going for him. I watched his retreating back. I couldn’t see it myself.

He lumbered through the gate at the back of the garden and glanced back at Irene, who waved him on impatiently. Once the police got hold of him surely they’d reach the same conclusion. Russ wasn’t so much a ‘man hunt’ as a ‘mushroom hunt’. He had encountered something he didn’t like and had simply shut himself in the dark.

Chapter Seven

A whole week went by before I saw Irene again. The local news had reported Russ turning himself in three days before and I had half expected Irene to come calling on me that day, but she didn’t. Part of me was itching to know what was going on, the other part was relieved I hadn’t been involved in it any further. What was it they said in the CIA - plausible deniability? I had no idea what was happening. As far as Lucus was concerned I was in no way connected to the dead woman and my sudden interest in the daily paper was just me retaking control of my life and finally venturing out of ‘baby brain land’ back into world of adult current affairs.

The fact Irene stayed away gave me time to brood. I didn’t know why she’d even involved me in her search for the missing husband in the first place. She could have attended to the first house break single handed, and then evicted Russ from the other loft just as easily without my help. The only thing I did was hold a torch and provide the extra half inch to reach that second loft hatch. If she knew Russ wasn’t a killer she didn’t need me to back her up. There was no reason to pull me into the affair at all.

As far as I could see, Irene was the one with the skills, the personal connection, and so far she was the one demonstrating the investigative reasoning needed to work a case like this. After all she had worked out where Russ was hiding overnight. As for me, I felt like I was just blundering in her wake with a toddler on my hip. I must have been more trouble than help to her and yet she had dragged me into it, talked me into it, as if I mattered, as if I had something critical to impart to the whole process. Yet now Russ was in custody Irene was still keeping her distance. I couldn’t understand it.

All sorts of reasons for her absence had presented themselves to me one by one over the course of the week. Perhaps she’d realised she’d pushed at the boundaries of our friendship, testing them to breaking point; or decided involving a new mother in a potentially dangerous situation probably wasn’t such a good idea after all. It might even be that she’d seen the hurt in my face as she dismissed me at the house a week ago. Whatever the reason, she remained out of contact. The first few days I dismissed out of hand, as I realised she probably had her hands full debriefing Russ and persuading him to hand himself in. But since he had turned himself over to police custody I had been expecting to see her, and her continued absence cut more deeply than anything else.

By the time she did show her face in the park I had festered. I had churned through layers and layers of thinking, composting the experience until I was left with only the dry truth of my utter insignificance. I felt like I had been used and then discarded. I was an optional extra, like conditioner in the laundry. As if I had been tried on in much the same way opticians reviewed your sight and tried out different lenses. Better with or without? And I felt, with a week out of contact, she had decided without. So I was both surprised and angry when she appeared at my side. I certainly wasn’t about to let her just sidle alongside me in the park as if nothing had happened.

“Where have you been?” I hissed at her. A full blown row in public was not my style. But I was fully prepared for cutting sarcasm and hissing whispers.

“Busy.” I could see her looking at me. I marched ahead, chin out, pushing the buggy ahead of me like a snow plough, tough and unyielding. I wasn’t going to let her see how hurt I was. I wanted her to see me strong. Tough. I had my daughter to think of. I didn’t need her.

I reached out the dog whacker, cupped the ball and flung it across the grass in one smooth angry movement, but in my haste I’d forgotten to check Moss had been watching and the ball skittered across the grass un-noticed. He would never find it if he hadn’t seen it go. His eyes weren’t his strongest sense. I was sure he worked primarily on movement and sound. Damn. That wasn’t the look I was aiming for.

I parked up the buggy, applied the brakes and marched across the dewy grass to the ball myself and cupped it again. Checking he was watching this time, I threw it. He charged after it like a black and white missile, pink tongue lolling. I stomped back to the buggy.

“What is it?” Irene asked.

“Why?” I said. “Why involve me at all?”

Irene turned to watch Moss deposit the ball on her side of the path near a blossom rich cherry tree. The avenue of cherry trees which lined the inner path were virtually dripping in the delicate pink flowers, huge garlands weighing down the thinner branches, creating decorative pink trees which stood in stark contrast to the empty branches of the other deciduous varieties devoid of spring leaves.

“Shall I?” She took the ball thrower and checking Moss was watching her, tossed it across the grass and made her way back to me. I took it and stored it in the hood once more, mouth tight pressed. I had no idea what I was going to say, or even how to frame it. I wasn’t even one hundred percent sure I knew how I felt.

“Jean died on Tuesday.”

I wasn’t expecting that. An excuse maybe, something she could work into a reason, but a death. No. I hadn’t expected that at all.

“The funeral is next week. She had no family. I’ve been sorting through her things.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it, too. I had been lucky. None of my friends had died so far. No road traffic accidents, no sudden diseases. I suppose at Irene’s age, deaths were more common, but that didn’t make them less tragic. She had been friends with Jean since Russ was 15 at least, and what did that mean…? She’d known Jean longer than Lucus and I had known each other. She could have known Jean’s husband. She might event have been bridesmaid at their wedding. I didn’t know how far their friendship went back. I had no idea how difficult it had been saying goodbye.

“Were you there?” I asked. I could feel my rage melting, the glacial ice defrosting like an arctic thaw. Underneath all my anger, underneath all the hurt, I cared deeply for Irene and I recognised Jean’s death would have hit her hard.

“No. Russ was though. He turned himself in the day after. She went peacefully,” she added. “I’m glad she got the chance to say goodbye and to know he didn’t do it. It would have given her some comfort.”

We walked. I could feel Irene was hurting. She needed a friend right now and I knew instinctively if Jean hadn’t died she would have caught up with me as soon as Russ had turned himself in. I excused her. I forgave her. I didn’t need to say anything, nor did she, but she reached out and touched my arm even so.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d have been in touch earlier it was just–”

“Don’t apologise,” I said. “I understand.”

As we walked in silence Moss suddenly shot out of his hiding place and ran behind us to collect his ball from where he’d deposited it by a tree. We’d both missed his recent hiding place, so wrapped up were we in our own thoughts. He gave me one of his looks as he passed us by. They say animals don’t have feelings, that their faces don’t have any expressions, but rather it’s us, the owners anthropomorphasizing them. I disagree. If dogs could swear, we’d just had an earful.

“What’s happened to him?” I asked, meaning Russ of course.

“Still in custody for now. They have no proof he did it. But then, they have no proof he didn’t, either.”

“Do you think he’ll get sentenced?”

“Hard to say. He was in the house at the time of the murder. He has no alibi. He’s been in hiding since. It doesn’t look good.”

“Did you tell him that?”

“No. I promised Jean we’d get him off.”

I stopped.

Around me the park carried on. Blackbirds flew between the branches making a chip chip chip, chip, chip sound. Blossom hung lazily from the trees, swaying in the gentle breeze, and a squirrel put in an appearance on one of the trunks, scrambled its way down and bounced along the grass to the next tree before Moss gave chase, forcing a rapid change of pace.

“We?” I looked at her. Did she really mean we, or was it more of an inclusive “we’ll get him off” meaning Irene, but including me as I happened to be standing beside her.

“We work well together don’t you think?”

“But I don’t do anything.” Even I heard myself sounding helpless. I so desperately wanted to be included, but I couldn’t help but think I was just going to be dropped again at a convenient moment. Left behind like I had been when we collected Russ. If we were going to do this, I needed to be included. Needed to feel like I was actively participating. I couldn’t just sit on the sidelines providing a cheerleading style support, Go Irene, ra ra ra ! I wanted to be part of the action. I needed to feel useful.

Irene smiled. “You don’t think you do, but you do.” She held my eyes, making sure I was paying attention. “You’re intelligent. You’re fitter than I am, you see things differently –”

“I have a toddler,” I said. I wasn’t the most flexible of people to assist in an investigation. I had commitments that couldn’t be ignored. Not to mention Lucus.

“I have arthritis,” she said. “It’s no excuse. We’ll make do. Trust me. You’ve got a brain, you can reason, think, and you’re invisible, just like me.”

Invisible! Hah. There was a compliment if I ever heard one! But she was right. We were in our prime for undercover work. No one would ever look twice at a young mother or an old age pensioner. The problem was we had no influence either. We had no inroads into the police investigation and I had no idea where we would begin.

I’d been thinking about the murder over the last week. I couldn’t help myself. I was involved, whether Irene wanted me to be or not. I had thought about it almost constantly, my mind reviewing what we’d done, what we’d seen. Behind my eyes, my brain was churning through options and ideas even as I spooned hot Shreddies into Lillian’s birdlike breakfast beak, or vacuumed the house. If Russ hadn’t killed Lesley, then someone else had, the question was who ?

There was no denying I was ready for a change of pace. Irene’s promise may have been foolhardy, but the idea of investigating the murder case ourselves was exciting. More exciting than changing nappies, more exciting then singing silly rhyming songs and congratulating fellow mums on new teeth, more exciting than ensuring the house was clean, tidy and Lucus had his dinner on the table when he came in. I wasn’t cut out for just being a wife and mother. I needed something more.

I looked at her. She smiled back, her nose wrinkling in that way she had. There was a glint in her eye, she knew she had me on board, but she wasn’t going to push it, instead she started feeding me information.

“Russ saw nothing, heard nothing, and as he ran off that same day, and the loft hatch faced the sky, he’s seen nothing since. All he did was brood in that space and get more and more hungry.”

“And more and more smelly,” I said. She flashed me a grin. She had noticed then. That car journey home must have been an odorous one. “Surely he knew something ?”

“I made him give me a list of contacts, people she knew, people he knew, what Lesley did, where I might find the people she knew best, that sort of thing.”

“And?”

“And if we’re going to pursue this we need to go at it systematically, not just chat it through on a walk around the park. When’s her nap?”

“She stopped it, remember?” Lillian’s refusal to sleep like any other toddler infuriated me, all the other mothers at baby group still got a good hour at mid-day. I just hoped it meant Lillian was intelligent or something, because her refusal to sleep was certainly draining my brain cells on a daily basis.

“Right, well, in that case… I’ll clear out my kitchen. She can pull everything out of my kitchen cupboards for a change.”

“Your house?” In all the time we’d known each other I’d never been invited round. It had always been easier for Irene to come to me; at least, that was what I thought at first. But after a while, realising how little I knew about Irene, I had begun to wonder if in fact Irene was as secretive about her house as she was about her past. But now, finally, I was going to see where she lived. It was like we’d reached a threshold, that our casual friendship had drifted across an unseen line and Irene was finally opening up. We were partners now. A detective duo working a case. She would have to be Sherlock, she had the insightful mind, but I was happy to settle for the role of Watson.

I wondered what I’d find at Irene’s. I wondered if there would be any photos, anything on the walls, any letters lying around that might give me a hint to her past. I hoped this was the first step in getting to know my new friend better.

“Are you doing anything now?”

Chapter Eight

It turned out Irene lived no further from the park than I did. The day I walked her home to mine to get her warmed up after her frosty dip into the pond, could easily have been her walking home to her own house. In fact, I probably hadn't done her the favour I had thought, as she was probably nearer than me by a few hundred yards.

She lived on Welhome Avenue, a road which ran parallel to the top end of the U-shaped road around the park. At the lower end, the houses actually shared the back alley behind the People’s Park houses, the alley into which we’d forced Russ the week before.

Just as ours was the first road after the Park Drive turning heading east, Irene’s was the first road after Park Drive if you were heading west. Deciding who was nearer that day might have required a tape measure, but it was very clear why she had willingly come to my house, and it wasn’t just to cultivate a friendship.

As a house, the building was vast. Irene lived in one of the rare semi-detached Edwardian houses. It had single paned windows which were probably protected with listed status, much like our own sashes were. The house had what an estate agent would probably describe as ‘many original features’ which translated into ‘unmodernised’ the moment you opened the door.

That isn't to say it was poorly maintained, far from it. It was clearly well decorated throughout. Irene had an eclectic taste when it came to style, with a tendency towards clutter, something I'd never have guessed. The walls contained numerous paintings; some I thought were probably her own creations given that her front room contained an easel and an unfinished watercolour. The coat rack was full to bursting with coats, hats and strangely a dog lead. She caught me looking at it as she hung up her coat.

“It comes in handy if you aren't around," she said.

It was nice to know I was so easily replaced, but I could see her logic. It was cheaper than actually owning a dog and with all the dogs running free in the park, so long as the dog walker wasn’t as observant as Irene, her imaginary dog could have been any one of them. I wondered how often she’d used the ruse. Probably more than once knowing her. I had a fixed schedule, and other dog walkers would have been available to her at different times. It made sense, but I was a little disappointed she hadn’t told me. She was probably trying to avoid hurting my feelings. As she hid the dog lead with her coat I resolved to be less needy. If we were going to work together, Irene needed to feel she could tell me everything without worrying about what reaction it was going to have on my psyche.

I bundled Lillian out of her buggy and into my arms. Given the clutter I wasn’t sure exactly where I was going to put her down without risking some general avalanche. There were piles of books, piles of newspapers, piles of laundry, and buried under another stack of books I saw the ironing board that laundry was supposed to be being ironed on. My guess was the pile hadn’t seen the light of day in a while. The clothing at the bottom had probably had its creases removed from sheer pressure by now.

I followed her towards the back of the house. The hall still had the original tiles in place, a chequer board of brown and cream, with a border of terracotta rectangles and triangles of the other two colours. The original lincrusta graced the walls, a lovely design of looping stems and flower heads. Our own had nearly all been replaced by wood chip when we moved in. It hadn’t been worth saving the little that remained, and we’d elected to cover up the remaining meters with wood panelling instead.

The radiators on the walls were the old fashioned iron ones; architecturally pleasing, but not particularly efficient when it came to heating such a large property. With all the drafts from the windows and doors, the house would get cold quickly and be difficult to warm up.

There were open fireplaces in all the rooms we passed; the front room, a small box style room. Irene led me past the stairs which curved with a quarter turn landing to the second floor, and into what could have been a dining room if the table wasn’t stacked high with various books. A laptop lurked in one corner, an internet Wi-Fi box flashing rapidly beside it, no doubt the source of all her breaking and entering research and eBay purchases. It looked quite out of place seated where it was. Everything else in the room had a historic feel, not old as such and certainly not antique, just old fashioned. The laptop seemed anachronistic within the space.

Beyond the dining room was the kitchen. Unlike our house, she hadn’t knocked the room through and the kitchen was still separate with a small joining door linking the two.

The house wasn’t exactly warm despite the mildness of the day. Irene would have taken an age to thaw out in her own house on ‘pond day’. The winter pension allowance probably didn’t stretch very far in a home this size with no insulation.

I carried Lillian through the kitchen door and stopped short. Irene had already been busy. The kitchen cupboards, the top ones at least, had been turned into a pseudo incident board, the sort that wouldn't look out of place at the police station, if, that is, the police constructed theirs of post-it notes and lengths of wool stuck on wooden cupboard doors with blue-tack.

"What do you think?" she asked.

I knew she didn't mean the house, so I gave the post-it note incident board a good look. In the middle was Lesley Cooper, the dead woman. In a circle around her, the immediate family: mum, dad, grandparents, Russ. Russ had a big red cross on his note, and I took that to mean he was eliminated from the enquiry. The grandparents, too, had crosses on their notes.

"You've interviewed them?" I indicated the relevant sticky notes.

"No. They're ruled out for other reasons. Too infirm. Whoever wielded the knife had to be strong."

I looked at the two wall units on either side of the central family section, work colleagues filled one, the other contained names of various other connections, a roller derby team she must have been part of, her immediate neighbours, other friends.

"It's comprehensive," I said. She smiled, taking the compliment.

"It's not finished yet. I wanted to add some notes on the family history, but I ran out of space. "

That was true, she had. Her bank of wall units wasn't particularly large. The rest of the wall had been left as a splash back for the hob, and a boiler was located on the other side. It was an old one, slightly rusty around the edges, and probably not very fuel efficient.

I looked around. The kitchen was formed of one L shape of units, and a straight, much like our own. Like the rest of the house, the worktops of the kitchen were cluttered. Caddies, jars of jam, honey, piles of cookbooks, tools, artist’s brushes and painting accessories, plants and jars of oddments jostled each other for space along the back of each worktop. Fortunately Lillian was too short to reach any of the exciting piles at the top of the units, which meant of all the rooms in the house, this was probably the most “baby proof”.

"You can put Lillian down in here if you like,” Irene said. “I'll pull the door to and then you know she won't come to any harm."

I undid her snow suit and lowered her to the floor. Seeing a row of floor cupboards she immediately went for the handles and gave them a yank. They were lighter weight then our own and the sharp tug sent her crashing to her bottom.

She glanced up, tears or giggles?

I smiled widely at her as I shrugged off my jacket.

She giggled.

It was great to be able to have total control over a reaction like this. This seeking approval for correct emotional response was new, but it was entertaining in its own way. Lucus hadn't got his head around it yet and called up the "upset lip wobbles" more often than I did. It was a matter of facial expression. I had learned quickly to stop looking shocked or caring. Giggles were easier to deal with than tears. I'd had enough of tears already, giggles were better by far.

She stood up, closed the door and then yanked it open again and fell to her bottom, giggling at Irene.

"New game?" Irene asked, taking my coat from me and resting it among a pile of fruit bowls and newspapers on another work top.

“It's been happening for a few days now. Just keep grinning back. If it hurts badly enough, she'll wail."

She switched on the kettle. "Tea?"

I watched Lillian move to another cupboard.

"She can have free reign, I've moved everything breakable out. I don't have much anyway. Not much of a cook. Hardly worth it for one." She moved through the tea making routine with the ease of a home owner. She knew exactly where her tea bags and cups were. I watched. I may need to know where to get things from eventually. We were friends after all. The chances were I’d be over again, and knowing where her teaspoons and teabags were kept just made life easier. She saw me looking.

“This is exactly why you’re useful,” she said.

“What?”

“You. You observe. You do it without thinking. I bet you know where everything is now.”

I smiled and nodded – caught out.

“This is why I need you.”

“Surely everyone does it.” I said.

“No. They don’t.”

“Well, the lecturers always said the degree could be turned to a variety of jobs following graduation,” I said. “But I don’t think “private investigation” was one of the ones they meant.”

"Maybe it should have been. I've started on the crime scene here," she indicated her upright fridge freezer on the other wall. That too had been decorated with post-it notes, the knife, Lesley's body. The hand was Irene’s, I recognised her scrawl, the distinct lack of letter formation. Each word looked more like a wiggly line between two recognisable letters at either end, a slight undulation in the line up or down indicated a tall letter like an “l” or a tail letter like “p”. It was a miracle I could read it, but then I’d had a lot of practise with consultants and doctors handwriting - once you knew the context, the scrawls were easier to decipher. The most critical facts Irene had written in block capitals which gave me the key points from her interviews with Russ. The scrawls were all related to those block capital headers.

It appeared to contain a lot more information than what we’d gleaned from the newspaper reports.

"But there was nothing there when we visited," I said. "How...?"

"Russ." Irene said. "You don't think I handed him in until he'd drawn me a picture and talked me through it, did you?"

I took another look. Within the centre of a blizzard of notes linked to the middle with string was a free hand drawing of the kitchen as it had been the night of the murder. It wasn’t artistic, if Irene’s watercolours were anything to go by, she hadn’t drawn this view. There was no perspective and few actual straight lines either, but it conveyed the scene adequately enough with a sort of pseudo plan view. Nothing was to scale, that is, unless the knife used to kill Lesley was the same size as the dining chairs, which I doubted.

“She was seated?” I asked, reading through the explanatory notes. From the scrawl it looked as though Russell had found Lesley upright, on a chair next to the table, not on the floor where the newspaper had reported her.

“Russ says yes.”

“A little odd, isn’t it?”

“Yes. If she was sitting then she didn’t open the door to her attacker.”

“Or defend herself in any way. She must have known her attacker to have been so relaxed around them, unless… she wasn’t bound or anything?”

“No. Russ said not. Which means she was totally oblivious to the danger and sitting down when the knife rammed home. He was the one who moved the body. He came down, found her there, first instinct was to go over, see if she was OK. He tried to rouse her and she fell. He didn’t dare put her back.”

“And the police don’t know this?”

“They do now.”

“And these?” I pointed to a series of questions she’d tacked next to the plan.

C - ps ?(Cups)

P -- t -- n of ch --- s ? (Position of chairs)

W -- h --- g up ? (Washing up)

“Russ couldn’t remember.”

“You think she had a visitor?”

“She must have. And if you ask me, whoever it was knew her well and cleaned up after themselves before they left, otherwise the police would have already been looking for another visitor. The thing is, other than the fact Lesley was seated, Russ didn’t remember anything useful. To be honest, he can’t remember much. Too frightened by it all.”

“Why didn’t he just call the police?”

“Because he’s stupid,” Irene said simply. “He always has been I’m afraid. Even Jean said as much.”

“What possessed him to move into the loft in the first place?” I had to know.

“Money,” Irene said, confirming my suspicions. “He couldn’t afford a rental and had been turned down at the council housing office. Single men don’t rank highly on the emergency accommodation lists. It was homelessness or the loft. He picked the loft.”

Lillian grabbed hold of another cupboard door, and realising no one was watching her any more, pulled it open sharply, directly onto her face. She dropped to her bottom again and set up a wail.

I picked her up. Whether she’d meant to or not, she now had a big purple/pink weal down the centre of her face, tears welling at her eyes, lower lip all a quiver. I gave her forehead a rub while Irene rummaged in one of the top cupboards, post it notes rustling as she opened the door. She pulled out a tin.

“Biscuit?” Lillian’s eyes widened as the tin lid came off and she saw a mix of digestives and bourbon creams. The crying came to an abrupt halt and suddenly she was straining over my arms to reach forward for the tin. Irene handed her a digestive. So much for rice cakes. She’d no longer accept the polystyrene biscuit substitutes after today. Still… at least she didn’t know about chocolate yet. That was still a well-kept secret.

“So…,” I said. “What now?”

Chapter Nine

What now was actually a much harder question to answer than it first appeared. Clearly we needed to know more and there were lots of avenues to investigate, but neither of us had any real connection to the family, or to the woman’s friends or work colleagues. There were no natural links we could pursue for information. We were hardly the police. We couldn’t simply walk up to a stranger and interrogate them. Nor could we speak to the police directly to find out what they knew. They were hardly going to explain their investigation to a couple of strange women.

It looked to all intents and purposes like we’d reached a dead end before we even started. We knew it wasn’t Russ. We knew it was likely to be one of her immediate contacts from the position of her body and the fact she hadn’t defended herself against her attacker, but we had no way to enter that inner circle to find out which one.

We pawed through the post it notes. Established we needed to find an avenue in to the different friendship and family groups and then sat there, stumped. How were we going to do that?

It wasn’t until a day later and Irene had received her copy of the Telegraph that an answer arrived.

*

“No. I mean...No. I er... No!”

We were sat facing each other over a table in the coffee shop at Pennells Garden Centre. A couple of older women looked across from their table in the corner. I hadn't meant to be quite so loud.

“We can’t!” I said again once they'd turned back to their own cream tea.

I broke off a piece of my fruit scone and handed it to Lillian, who was gurgling between us on a high chair playing with a lump of cream I had already removed from my own over endowed scone.

“We can't just crash a funeral.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Because it’s... because we didn't know her!”

“The family don't know that.”

I took a sip of my tea, mainly as an excuse to marshal my thoughts. Irene thought so much faster than I did and I was sure she was already two arguments ahead of whatever I was going to say next.

I glanced around the conservatory looking for inspiration. I didn't find any. The potted palms and the stencilled rose names on the brickwork above were no help whatsoever. Assuming of course Percy Thrower was a rose breed. It could have been potatoes for all I knew… but I didn’t see a King Edward up there.

We were one of just five groups partaking of morning tea. I knew the restaurant here was usually packed out, but Irene had arranged to meet me at 9.30. This was too early for most, but already felt mid-afternoon for someone living by Lillian’s timetable.

“Thanks for the tea,” I said, hoping distraction was the best plan.

Irene splotched another dot of cream on the highchair table. So much for ‘don't play with your food’. Smearing cream was Lillian’s favourite activity. It required a bit of cleaning up at the end, but it was worth the peace. She giggled happily to herself. It was a huge improvement on the screaming she had been doing all morning. I passed her another little chunk of scone.

“It might give us the lead we need.” Irene wasn’t giving up.

I thought about it as I blew on my tea. She was right. It could give us access to all those circles of contacts we’d reviewed the day before. But attending a funeral, was I really that serious about solving the case, or would I, like every other curious person, simply be content to read about it in the paper and follow the unfolding drama of the murder enquiry on the local news?

“We promised Russ.”

“You promised Russ.”

In my mind I looked through the post it notes on Irene’s units. We needed to think laterally if we were going to investigate the murder. We couldn’t run an investigation the same way as they did on the television dramas. We didn’t have the authority to interview people, we didn’t have the forensic reports to give us any clues. We had only our wits and what we knew from Russ, and his testimony wasn’t particularly useful. Our best lead was the position of Lesley’s body. Her death at the table meant it had to be someone who knew her. And if it was someone close, then we needed to get into that circle of contacts and much as I hated to admit it, Irene was right. The funeral was our best way of breaking in.

“It's a sign of respect,” she said, seeing me wavering. “I bet Dodger's mum is going.”

Dodger’s mum lived two doors up. We'd walked around the park with her a few times since the incident. She was a taller woman, dark hair, glasses, thin underneath her padded coat, with ruddy features caused by a rash of purple capillaries across both cheeks. She had been a fountain of gossip; most of it, Irene said, had to be sifted carefully for actual facts.

Lesley had lived alone since Russ had left.

That of course we knew to be untrue now, as Russ hadn't so much left as relocated his sleeping arrangements.

Lesley had been complaining of odd noises in the house.

Now that we knew where Russ had been sleeping that was hardly surprising...

Lesley worked in one of the big fish factories on the Pyewipe. (The Pyewipe was the big industrial estate on the outer edges of the town.)

Russ had confirmed the same, even given us the name of the company and her position within the accounts department, but that was it. Like most men he hadn’t really been all that interested in what his wife actually did. Given that Lucus had no idea I had broken into two houses within the last few weeks, it didn’t seem all that surprising Russ had no idea about Lesley’s working day.

Lesley kept herself to herself.

Well, well away from Dodger’s mum at least. Given the amount of gossip we'd heard from the woman I think I would have kept myself to myself, too. We knew from what Russ had told us that she had an active social life, she was even part of a Roller Derby team. She was hardly a loner. She just avoided Dodger’s mum, something I would be doing myself from now on!

Lesley was found by the postman.

He'd always delivered the mail to the side door, the same door we had broken in through, and had arrived to find the door swinging open. He’d looked in and seen her body bloody on the floor, knife sticking out of her back, and assumed the house had been broken into and Lesley stabbed. He'd been in a dreadful state, according to Dodger’s mum, needing a hot sweet tea. Someone else from the post office had been called in to finish his round. There were all sorts of facts she’d found out about the poor man. His children, his hobbies, his biscuit likes and dislikes. He must have regretted agreeing to the supposedly calming mug.

Irene watched me over the rim of her teacup.

I said nothing, but I saw Irene’s face change. She knew she’d won me over. I passed Lillian her beaker cup. She took a few hearty gulps and then tossed it on the floor with a triumphant "Ha!" I looked at her. She smiled. Ha, indeed!

Irene bent down to pick it up. She smiled at Lillian and placed the cup on her table. Lillian threw it down a second time with another “Ha!”

“Just leave it,” I said. “She could do this all morning.” I passed her another lump of scone.

“So you'll come?”

“I never said I'd come.”

“But I need you there.”

“Why?”

She might have convinced me to get involved, but I wanted to hear her reasoning, wanted confirmation that I was indeed valuable, not some throw away resource. It went without saying that one of us should go, but why did we both have to be there? I had Lillian after all.

“Two heads are better than one. We'll see more, hear more between us. You see things, remember?”

“What about Lillian?”

“Bring her. There's nothing like a kid at a funeral to break the ice.”

“You can't be serious.” I bent down to pick up the tippy cup now that Lillian was otherwise engaged.

“They don't last long, and it's only at the crem. And I know you don’t want to tax Helen. Trust me. We'll be in and out in fifteen minutes, max. Just bring her a load of raisins. Pick you up at tomorrow? 11?”

And before I’d even had the chance to straighten up again and return the cup to the table Irene had gone, walked out of the cafe, meeting concluded. Her super-fast exit ensured I couldn't make any more protests, and she already knew I wouldn't turn her down when she arrived at my door the next day. It just saved any long, protracted negotiations. Irene wasn’t one to pander to an ego, even if it belonged to her best friend.

“EEEeeeeeeeeaaaaaaAAAH-!” squealed Lillian, ending with a high pitched delighted hiccup. She pointed across to a guide dog who'd just walked in with his owner. She threw the small nugget of scone I'd only recently passed her in the vague direction of the dog. It landed on my trousers, smearing them with sticky cream. Clearly Lillian had finished, too. It was time to leave.

Chapter Ten

Irene was at the door bang on eleven. I hadn't expected anything less.

“Ready?”

Irene was dressed almost exclusively in black. The best I'd managed was a grey pair of trousers and a dark top. Had we had a recent bereavement in the family I would undoubtedly have owned a suitable ensemble, but our respective families were all relatively healthy. The last funeral Lucus had attended was for a great aunt and being a man, he had simply purchased a black tie to go with one of his work suits. I hadn't yet attended a funeral. My granddad had died before I was deemed old enough to attend one, and as a child I had returned from school the day of his funeral to a houseful of dark clothed adults and a partially cleared buffet, laden with quiche and various finger foods.

While funerals weren't an everyday facet of life for us, for someone Irene's age I supposed they were just another regular life event, much as all the christening dates had been for us. I wondered how many friends and family she'd lost in recent years. I suspected they hadn’t arranged the funeral for her friend Jean yet, which meant today was almost a dress rehearsal without the emotional attachment. I wondered if she’d wear the same outfit that day, or if she had a special one put to one side.

She looked at Lillian. This morning I’d dressed her in a cute little outfit of lilac and purple. It was the nearest to black I could accomplish but at least it was clean. I'd only just wrestled her into it, having let her slob in her baby grow all morning. I hoisted the navy changing bag onto my shoulder, glad that I hadn't succumbed to purchasing the bright coloured modern one I'd seen just a few weeks ago. The strap at the side was still broken and the zip popped if I let it run all the way to the middle, but it did the job and for a funeral it was perfect. Not least because it had various compartments I'd filled with biscuits, raisins and water filled tippy cups.

I strapped Lillian into her car seat and then hoisted that into Irene's car. Lucus had asked me just this morning where we were going. I'd told him a play area. He would never have agreed to me taking Lillian to a funeral. Which meant this was yet another in my growing list of secrets. His easy acceptance of my lies made me wonder how many lies he'd slipped past me.

Maybe it was as Irene said... people see what they expect to see. She was an almost pensioner with a mild manner and a natural gentleness which put people at their ease. She had pleasant laughter lines around her eyes and today her slightly papery skin shone with some sort of moisturiser and her small freckles had given her a slightly suntanned look. She didn’t look the housebreaking, funeral-crashing type.

As we drove towards the crematorium we were passed by an empty hearse going the other way. It reminded me how much on the clock these places were. Fifteen minutes and that was your whack. In and out with as much ceremony as could be squeezed into that time, a quick roll through the curtain and goodbye Auntie Flo.

“It’s better than a grave,” Irene said suddenly, having seen my gaze. “I want to be scattered at sea. I hate gravestones.”

Coming from someone who walked around the cemetery with me on sunny days admiring the statues and remarking on the various comments left on people's headstones, she surprised me.

“Really?”

“Horrible things. They're never maintained and the flowers are left to rot, just like the body underneath. Much better to have nothing left but memories. No reminders. Besides, head stones are expensive.”

I grinned. Typical Irene, always bringing things back to the practical level.

“She'll have a headstone of course. ‘Tragically taken’ I should think.”

There were a number of similar epitaphs in the new section of the cemetery; various young men who’d fallen victim to car accidents, and ‘little angels’ who’d died suddenly in the children’s section. It was always a poignant reminder to me of how lucky I was that Lillian was so well. Regardless of how difficult her teething was, at least she was still screaming. How awful it must have been for those young mothers whose houses had suddenly fallen totally silent. Moss was always on the lead in the new section and we always walked past respectfully; neither of us speaking until we passed the last dangling mobile and teddy statue placed by the plots.

We pulled into the car park. It wasn't full, but there were people dressed in greys and blacks walking both into and out of the driveway leading up to the crematorium.

“We're still a little early I think.” Irene said. “Someone her age, I expect it'll get quite busy. Work colleagues, family, friends, even family friends.”

“And total strangers,” I added. “Will they bring Russ?”

“No. I expect as he’s still the primary suspect in the case he won’t be allowed to pay his respects. Shame. It would have given the lad some closure.”

I hauled Lillian out of the car seat and grabbed the changing bag and suddenly had that terrible sinking feeling. I shouldn’t have let Irene talk me into this. I knew where the crem was in Grimsby, having walked past it on numerous occasions, but I’d not actually thought it through and connected the funeral with the building itself. The word funeral had conjured up images of small cold country churches, tiny congregational gatherings, and despite knowing the circumstances, I suppose I'd just naturally assumed we'd quietly sneak into the back of a church, several pews between us and any grieving family, hidden at the rear in the shadows. Seeing the crem afresh I realised my mistake.

It wasn't a pretty building, it didn't even look vaguely church like. In fact, it looked more like a large council toilet block than anything else. It was red brick, 1950s design, with a flat roof, glass entranceway and a large chimney sticking up at the rear.

Irene knew exactly where we were going and she steered me into a room which looked more like a school hall then a church. It was well lit, high windows casting shafts of light into the room. There were no dark places, no hidden seating. We were going to be very much exposed no matter where we settled.

“Over there,” Irene pointed to the back row nearest the door. “We'll see everyone as they come in.”

Well, everyone else, that was. The room was already half full. I watched Irene studying the faces. There was a group about midway down, mixed ages, mainly women.

“Girls from the office,” she said. “I'll take them.”

On the opposite side were couples, discreet distances between partnerships and the occasional three or foursome.

“Friends of the family. They'll be at the wake. We'll catch them there.”

The rows at front on both sides were clear and I realised there were probably reserved notices on them for the close family. So far none had arrived. They must have been travelling with the hearse in those dark, six-doored cars I'd seen passing the end of our road every day since we moved in.

I rummaged in my bag for the tippy cup and I realised with horror just how loud the rustling sound was in the stillness of the room. Most people were talking in whispers, but just rummaging for the cup had encouraged a good few head turns. An older lady two rows ahead of us grinned at Lillian and she giggled. Her giggle turned a few more heads. Why oh why had I let Irene talk me into this? I unpacked a couple of small animal shaped biscuits and created a little stack beside me. Outside the packet, they could be accessed with minimal noise.

A few more people drifted in and settled themselves behind the work colleagues, and within what seemed like a very short space of time the room filled to capacity.

Suddenly the whispering stopped and an organ I hadn't registered at the front of the building started playing something vaguely classical. It wasn't the funeral dirge I had expected, but it heralded the arrival of the coffin nonetheless.

The pall bearers were all from the funeral parlour. They were similarly attired and each had a look of sombre concentration as they matched steps up the central aisle. Behind them were the family; mother and father, and a couple who were old enough to have been her grandparents. Another middle-aged couple followed behind, perhaps Russ’s parents, it was good of them to turn out, given that the police were currently holding their son, and behind them, a twenty something girl, presumably the sister-in-law. Right behind them was another middle aged couple, perhaps an aunt and uncle. All of them filed into the reserved seating, sitting so close together that there was a full row between the family and the rest of us.

With the coffin lowered gently onto the central pedestal the pall bearers walked to the back of the room, standing with their arms behind their backs while the vicar, or whatever he was, took the short ceremony.

Thankfully it was all over much quicker than I thought; the short eulogy from her mother brought tears to my own eyes, despite the fact I didn't know her. By all accounts she had been a remarkable woman, cut down in her prime, but then, once you were dead, people only ever remembered the good parts.

As the coffin rolled slowly forward through the curtain I said my own short prayer. Not for the family in front of me, but for Lillian. While deaths in childhood were less common now than they used to be, I was faced with the possibility that even if she achieved adulthood, her life might be cruelly snatched from her. I prayed that I wouldn't find myself and Lucus sitting in those front rows like Lesley’s parents; saying goodbye to a daughter who hadn't done anything other than sit down in her own kitchen.

As the family filed past us out of the room to form a reception line of sorts outside, Irene nudged me. She pointed to a knot at the back of the room opposite us.

“Find out who they are,” she whispered.

“What?”

“Just walk over and say how lovely the service was.” And with that she was gone.

I gathered up the remaining stack of biscuits and hefted Lillian onto my hip.

I was just about to cross to my appointed group, probably her Roller Derby team, looking at their shared athletic build, when the older woman from two rows in front accosted me.

“How old is she?” she asked. She was a round lady with a friendly face and I immediately warmed to her.

“Thirteen months.”

"Adorable. She's been very good. You've been very good,” she tickled Lillian. Lillian giggled appreciatively.

“It was a lovely service don't you think?” I used Irene's phrase. This might not have been the contact Irene had elected for me, but it was still someone and she was so much better at the ‘making conversation with total strangers’ thing than I was.

“Yes. Such a tragedy. Did you know her well?”

“No. Not very.”

“She would have loved this little thing.” She tickled Lillian again. “She loved children.”

“She lived nearby,” I offered. “I wanted to... you know... show my respects.” It sounded good, even to my ears. Respectable.

“It was very good of you to come.”

“Are you family?”

“Yes, well, yes and no. Distant I suppose. An adopted aunt you could say. She's been coming to mine for advice for years.” She handed me a card.

“Rose Bloom Spiritual counsellor,” I read.

“Her father died when she was small.” I turned to the door where the man I had assumed to be her father was standing shaking hands.

“Step-father,” Rose offered. “Their relationship was good, but... well... you can't replace your father, can you?”

I looked back at her.

“No,” I said, though I didn't agree. The truth was, I’d quite happily have replaced my own father had my mother found a suitable alternative when I'd been young enough, but she hadn't remarried until I had left university and Steven, though he was lovely, would never be “dad”.

“Have you lost someone close?” she enquired.

“No.”

“I can tell. Your aura is still quite untouched.”

Was it indeed! Deaths weren’t everything, I thought. If only Rose knew what could have “touched my aura”.

“Is this your mum? Hello my dear. I'm Rose Bloom”. She shook Irene's hand before I could protest. “You've a darling granddaughter.”

“Isn't she just,” Irene smiled serenely, yet managed to give me a quick stern look as I opened my mouth to contradict. It was quite a feat of facial expression and I marvelled at how she'd managed to pull it off without Rose noticing.

“Yes...,” Rose continued on, “... her poor mother. Husband and daughter. Such a shame.”

“Hmmm...,” sympathised Irene. “Do you know the family well?”

“Oh, not the living ones, no... but I know her father. He's so disappointed she's joined him so soon. He had such high hopes for her.”

“Spiritualist counsellor,” I proffered the card, thus clearing up the momentary confusion on Irene’s face.

“Oh. Very good.” I hadn’t seen Irene lost for words before, but there was a first time for everything it seemed.

Chapter Eleven

If Lucus would have blanched at us attending a funeral, I dreaded to think what he would have thought of me toting his daughter around the sticky carpeted function room of the small pub which had been chosen by the parents as the most appropriate place to host the wake. Then again, compared to breaking and entering, perhaps this was a lesser evil.

Tagging onto the convoy leaving the crematorium had been Irene’s idea. But I’d lost sight of her almost as soon as we’d arrived, which meant I was now standing in a room crowded full of people I didn’t know, exchanging pleasantries about a woman I had never met.

I shuffled Lillian nervously on my hip, dodging a fist of pulverized cheese sandwich which had clearly not passed the taste test. Blending into the corner simply wasn’t a possibility here. A juke box and gambling machines took up any space not already taken by the stained leather upholstered seating, which itself had already been claimed by the older members of the family, the grandparents and their friends, who were resting their tired legs and intermittently sending their spouses off to the bar for just another glass of Sherry then, love.

One long buffet table took up one wall, it’s surface filled with sausage rolls, quiche, crisps, carrot and cucumber sticks and slightly dry sandwiches with cheese, ham, tuna and egg fillings, all of which had a darkened crust about the edges where the filling had crisped under the warm lighting. Along the other wall stood the bar, and beside that the doors which lead to the toilets. There really was nowhere to stand but the middle of the room and it left me feeling somewhat vulnerable.

Had I realised it was going to be like this I would have asked Irene to drop me at the corner, rather than carrying on with her to the wake. This was no place for a new toddler and, truth be told, while intellectually I liked the idea of solving the murder, when the rubber hit the road, I wasn’t sure I was completely cut out for this type of investigative work. A house break was one thing. The house was empty. There were no interpersonal skills needed. A wake was something entirely different. I needed a cover story, an ability to lie blatantly in full view, and interview skills which could wheedle information out of the unsuspecting without them realising what was happening. I had no training for this type of work. When I worked in the hospital, we’d always had a list of questions we asked, and the authority to ask them. We could ask people, do you live alone? And they would answer without batting an eyelid.

I looked around me again trying not to appear out of place, hunting for Irene among the sea of faces. The walls were dark, with some modern patterned wallpaper which was now all the rage in trendy establishments, but looked wholly out of place here. Leaves and branches snaked across the walls in purple and dark brown, reminding me of the park we had passed on the way here.

The park had looked cool and inviting, but as we drove past it in the convoy Irene’s face had been animated, recounting all she had found out from the work colleagues, and any ideas I might have had about her leaving me and Lillian in the woods and coming back for us later died before they even reached my tongue.

She’d identified a number of possible sources of information she hadn’t managed to speak to at the funeral, and was on a mission to uncover as much as she could before the wake dwindled in number to the point we’d both attract too much attention. She’d apologised briefly in the car as we pulled into the car park. Well, not so much apologised, but indicated that she would need to leave me to fend for myself somewhat. The buffet would be good, she had said. They used the same butcher she did.

I chanced Lillian with a bit of ham from another sandwich; she stuffed it into her mouth and gave me a toothy grin. Clearly she agreed.

“Oh! What a charming girl.” I turned and groaned inside. It was the poor girl’s mother. What on earth could I possibly say?

“They did a lovely job,” I chanced. She smile-frowned back. It was the expression of funerals, a sad smile that somehow seemed to convey grief and acceptance at the same time.

“Did you know Lesley well?”

“I er…,”

“They live nearby.” Thank goodness for Rose with her auras I thought to myself, as her comfortably padded shoulders came into view. I hadn’t seen her sneaking up behind us, but given how quickly Lillian’s head had turned to follow her as she greeted the murdered girl’s mother, I realised she must have been stood behind me making faces at her for some time. Lillian giggled appreciatively as Rose crossed her eyes and puckered her mouth for her benefit.

“It was lovely of you to come.”

Lesley’s mother touched my arm in dismissal and quickly turned to leave. Had I had any hint this had something to do with Rose’s arrival, it was confirmed when Rose reached out to grab her arm.

“Wait.”

She turned back, her face bubbling with undercurrents I could only begin to imagine.

“Rose,” she said. “Now is not the time.” And with that, she walked away.

In truth I wasn’t sure who was more embarrassed, me for witnessing what was clearly a difficult exchange, or Rose who hadn’t seen it coming. She pulled another face at Lillian as if to break the awkwardness.

“It’s a good turn out.”

“Yes,” I said, pleased to be in conversation with someone, even if it was Rose. At least Irene wasn’t here to catch my eye. Despite our age differences we found the same sort of thing funny. ‘Camp entrance,’ ooh I say. ‘Course fishing’ – polite fishing over there. ‘Board meetings’ aren’t they just. And ‘Declarations of interest’ No I’m not interested in the slightest. Irene was NOT the person to be standing next to when someone was going to give you a blow by blow account of your aura. But Rose was behaving herself and keeping to pleasantries, perhaps cowed by the response she had just received moments ago.

Yes, the weather was nice. No, I had not been to the sandpit in Cleethorpes yet. Yes, Lillian was walking, albeit unsteadily. Yes, she was an early developer in that regard. No, she wasn’t yet talking. No, I didn’t know Lesley.

Ah… whoops.

“Why are you here?” Rose asked me pointedly.

“I came with my mother.” I said, the lie came quickly to my lips as Irene dropped into view suddenly from among a throng of sherry waving grey-haired people. I hoped my pained, eyebrow waving expression would usher her across the room fast enough to extricate me from the tricky situation I now found myself in. Fortunately she could read my mind better than Rose, and swam through the steady current of people making their way to the bar with prowess that would have earned her as set of golden fins from a salmon.

“Hello again,” she said as she reached us; “It’s a lovely spread.” And with that innocuous statement she managed to rescue the situation. If it was one thing I’d learned about Irene it was that she could effortlessly insinuate herself into a conversation without ever really giving away anything about herself, and Rose left us very happy, sure in the knowledge that Irene and I were related, though Irene had never confirmed that, and also equally confident that Irene somehow knew Lesley well enough for us to be in the room at all.

*

“So…,” Irene said as I threw myself, exhausted, into the front of her car. “That was all very informative.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” Irene looked at me. I had a cheese sandwich mushed onto one shoulder and I knew there were chewed up carrots somewhere in my hair.

“Sorry,” she said, “but you were invaluable.”

I’d hardly have described myself in that way, but clearly Irene had a different interpretation of my standing around aimlessly in the centre of the room.

“Lillian looked a lot like Lesley as a girl, at least, so her grandmother said. Did you know her real father was missing?”

“I thought Rose said dead.”

“Well… they never found the body. He had to be declared legally dead by the courts. Her mother remarried after that went through. It’s amazing what you can learn, grandma to grandma.”

“But you aren’t my mum.”

“I know… but they didn’t. We look alike, don’t you think?”

I looked again at her face, I didn’t have her freckles, but we shared the same colour eyes and I supposed the shapes of our faces were similar. But then, I was once mistaken as the sister of our next door neighbour because we were running a car boot sale together. So perhaps it was a situational thing rather than based on appearance. People assumed a connection because of the age difference between us and the fact we were friends. It was the logical assumption.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“She had a new boyfriend, at least, so her colleagues thought. She hadn’t said anything as such, but they were sure she was seeing someone.” I could see Irene had gripped a finger tighter to the steering wheel, and expected a list. I wasn’t disappointed.

“Her sister is in Thailand. Couldn’t get back for the funeral, they’re expecting her sometime later this week.” Another finger tightened on the wheel. Irene had a fantastic numerical led memory. Shopping lists were always stored in numerical order in her brain, we’d go shopping for eight things, and until she’d ticked them all off on her fingers we wouldn’t leave the supermarket.

“She had anxiety problems and was on tablets. Something Russ hadn’t been aware of. Possibly started after she threw him out. ”

“If only her doctor had known she hadn’t really been hearing things,” I said.

“Hmmm,” I saw another of her fingers curl in with another point coming.

“She didn’t get along with her supervisor at work.”

“Rose said she always wanted children,” I added. Irene curled another finger.

“She was on the clubbing scene at the weekends. Quite the party animal by all accounts. And she’d changed a lot since she’d ditched Russ apparently.”

“And you think…?”

“Drugs maybe?”

“Drugs? Just because she’d had a new lease on life after ditching a sponging husband? She hardly needed drugs to feel differently.”

“No. I suppose not.”

Irene glanced at me and relaxed her fingers on the steering wheel. Her face was a blank slate. I had no idea what she was thinking behind those steel blue eyes.

“Play area?” she offered, as we turned towards the park again, heading homeward.

“Why not?”

The sun was still out and the air seemed clear and fresh. A big tractor mower was doing its thing, and there was the smell of freshly cut spring grass on the air. The crocuses which were planted in big blocks on the outer edges of the park had faded, and the daffodils were just about to break. I looked across those to the newly refurbished play area. It was still shiny amongst the greenery.

The coffee shop was open I saw, tables and chairs sitting out in the sun. After the cloying atmosphere in the pub I needed a little “blow” outside. I turned around to look at Lillian. She was still awake and staring out of the car window.

“Why not?”

Irene indicated left, the orange light on her dashboard flashing faster than usual, indicating a faulty bulb. She didn’t seem to notice.

I glanced at her. Her fingers may have been relaxed now, but Irene was thinking again, which meant it was likely to be quite a solitary play time.

I wasn’t wrong. I took Lillian around every piece of playground equipment, twice, then Irene and I shared a pot of tea while Lillian munched on a biscuit in a high chair. We didn’t say more than ten words to each other. Irene was back on autopilot, her methodical mind slotting in all the information she had gleaned at the funeral into a coherent mass. I waited. She would drop back out of her internal musings when she was ready, and until then I just had to bide my time.

She picked up her teaspoon and started poking at the tea bag I’d left on top of the pot. There was nothing I hated more than stewed tea and as soon as it reached the appropriate brew, I’d hefted the bag out of the pot and balanced it precariously on the lip of the opening before dropping the lid back down to keep it in place, tidy, but away from the water so it couldn’t add any more tannin to the brew. I didn’t bother at home, but when out, tea cups were never big enough and you invariably had a second cup, by which point your tea was stewed to orange unless you’d taken precautions.

I watched as she worried at the bag, pushing the corners and nudging more and more of the bag towards the lip until plop, it dropped back inside the pot and the lid dropped back into place.

She looked up. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I said, “I’ve already had my second cup. So have you,” I added as I saw a vague flicker of hurt cross her face. I’d actually poured hers at the same time as my own, but she hadn’t noticed. In fact, she’d drunk the entire second cup without noticing.

She opened the tea pot and looked inside. “You’re right. Goodness that went quickly! Home?”

I nodded. We were both ready.

Irene pushed back her chair and waited while I lifted Lillian out of the high chair and into my arms. She looked tired.

“I might just sit in the back and keep her awake,” I said as we walked towards the car.

“Sleepy?”

“I think so. It’s all the fresh air.”

“Mine?”

I looked at my watch. I still had at least three hours to kill before Lucus came home and the whole dinner time, bath time, bed time routine began. Three hours was a long time to kill with a vaguely tired and grumpy Lillian. And I’d missed the Little Readers group at the Child Care Centre thanks to the funeral. It had the potential to be a long, dragging afternoon.

“We can sit down and go over the case.”

“OK then. But I’ll need to be home by four.” A hot meal prepared on time would reduce the chance of questions from Lucus about my day. It was easier to hide lies if you never had to tell them.

Chapter Twelve

“We’ve got to start eliminating people somehow,” I said.

On the post-it note incident boards Irene had crossed off Lesley’s sister, and despite my views to the contrary, there was a small note containing the word drugs? stuck off to one side. Work now had a section of its own, with a special post-it note for “supervisor”. And yet another post it note had “Boyfriend ?” written on it. On the whole we seemed to be opening up avenues for enquiry rather than closing them down. Was this what it was like in the police force? An ever expanding investigation in the early stages until you found the right avenues to pursue? I felt sure the incident boards on the crime dramas I watched were a lot smaller than ours. The suspects were always much more limited. Half of Grimsby seemed to be implicated on Irene’s cupboards.

“We’ve got too many to investigate,” I said. “There has to be some way to whittle it down.”

Russ’s sketch of the crime scene meant we knew the perpetrator had to be someone she knew. Going on that information we had identified all of Lesley’s family, friends, work colleagues and other contacts. The problem was, she knew so many people.

“Means, Motive, Opportunity,” I said. “That’s how they do it in the TV dramas. MMO.”

“We know the means,” Irene said, her finger stabbing at the knife in the crime scene.

“But nothing else. Who had opportunity? What was the motive?”

“We need to start going at this more systematically. We need to start speaking to people. Work out what any motives might be, where people were at the time of the murder, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, but how are we going to do that? We can’t just walk up to total strangers and ask that sort of stuff.”

“No… but…,”

“What?” She had started rummaging under a pile of papers.

“Group Seafood, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Why?” Irene extracted a copy of the Telegraph. It looked well thumbed. I glanced at the date. Three days ago. The murder was no longer front page and instead the paper was displaying a picture of one of the Ward Councillors standing on a patch of scrubland with the Caption: Petition of 15,000 names can’t be ignored. Irene folded the paper. She’d found what she wanted and showed me. Her finger pointed at a small advertisement in the job section.

Purchase Ledger assistant wanted : Group Seafood

“And?”

“You could apply,” she said.

There was an enormous plastic rattle and I looked across at Lillian, who was engaged in pulling a host of Tupperware pots out of one of Irene’s lower cupboards and spreading them over the floor in a little plastic avalanche. She giggled.

“Erm…,” I pointed in her direction. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“You don’t need to go for an interview. Just take a look around.”

“But I know nothing about accounts!”

“You don’t have to. Just pay them a visit as a prospective candidate. Take a look around. People still do that don’t they?”

I wasn’t sure. We had still had prospective candidates visiting the hospital for jobs right up until I left. And I knew it was common practise in teaching as Lucus had done it himself. It gave you a foot in the door at interview if you’d already had a look around, but we both worked in the public sector, not the private sector. I wasn’t sure if people did that in the private sector too.

“Why can’t you go?” I asked.

“Me?” She gestured at her grey hair. “Nice though the compliment is, I don’t think I’d actually pass as employable age any more. Besides… I made a point of speaking to all her colleagues at the funeral. They didn’t meet you; no one will know who you are.”

Suddenly my reticence at the funeral to engage in small talk pleasantries with total strangers seemed foolish. Had I done what she’d asked instead of talking with Rose, I might have been off the hook now.

“But…,”

“I’ll look after Lillian. You’ll only be gone an hour or so. And I’ll put you on my insurance, so you don’t even need to ask Lucus for the car.”

“But I don’t know anything about accounts.” I knew I was repeating myself, but it was the best excuse I had. I didn’t know anything. I had no experience, no jargon, nothing that could even get me past first base when it came to working with numbers. I wasn’t even involved in budgeting within the department. I worked in rehabilitation, getting someone independent in daily living activities like putting on their trousers, not working out how to reconcile cash-flow. I didn’t even know the difference between NET and GROSS, or what the current VAT rate was!

“They’ll assume you do,” said Irene. “Besides, it’s not like you’re actually going to interview. You’re only going to see the department with a view to applying for the job. They’re hardly going to quiz you. It’ll give us a closer look at her work colleagues.”

I looked at her. Sometimes Irene’s logic was unassailable. I knew she was right, but it didn’t make me any more inclined to do what she wanted. Lucus always said I had a stubborn streak. Push me too hard and I would just become immovable. No amount of reasoning would change my mind once I hit that point. Irene obviously knew me well. She backed off.

“We don’t need to decide now. Let’s see if anything else comes up. The closing date isn’t for another week at least.”

We went back to studying the boards. We still had her family, her friends, her Roller Derby team, the possible new boyfriend and the very questionable drugs angle to look into.

Chapter Thirteen

I didn’t often see Irene at the weekend. I wasn’t sure whether this was because she purposely kept her distance, not wanting to intrude on family time, or whether it was because I suddenly became unpredictable in my daily movements.

With Lucus home my routine changed drastically. There were no planned baby groups. The dog walk was at irregular times because we’d sometimes use the car to head off down to the beach or to a woodland walk, and within the weekend we had to fit in the more mundane food shopping and do any DIY maintenance that had cropped up during the week.

While my timetable deregulated at weekends, my early morning routine didn’t. Lillian still woke early and because Lucus had worked all week, childcare duties still fell to me on the weekends. I wondered sometimes how he’d cope as a house husband. Would he go as stir crazy as me?

With Lucus asleep upstairs it meant noise making suddenly had to be kept to a minimum, which meant I had to become even more creative in the mornings to keep her amused in a way that didn’t generate a lot of noise at the same time. Musical toys were kept out of reach, the dining room door was closed to muffle the sound and I developed into the biggest baby game going. We played peek-a-boo, I found new objects to put into her cupboard so there was a change to her favourite activity and sat with her has she unpacked it, making every new item an experience that would keep her going a little longer. I sat her on my knee and ran through all the old favourite rhymes that involved jiggling her as she sat. This the way the ladies ride. Row, row, row your boat. The Grand old Duke of York. It was exhausting in a way the general day to day timetable of busyness was not, and I was always at my worst when Lucus finally made it down the stairs and wondered if I’d made coffee. I didn’t even drink coffee. I resented him at weekends far more than I did at any other time, and had David Tennant called by one Saturday morning with the offer of taking me away from it all, I couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t go.

My brain ticked over while I held up a rabbit and did “pretend play”. Ignoring whether we should or not, how exactly were we going to get into Lesley’s inner circle to establish motive or opportunity? Had she had a baby, I could have insinuated myself into her inner circle of friends really easily by joining the same baby group. As to whether I’d have found out anything useful between choruses of “hello baby how are you” was debatable, but at least I would have been in with the chance. The problem was, Lesley just didn’t socialise in any of the same circles as either of us, and we shared no links, which left us with no easy paths to follow.

I had to hand it to her. Irene’s idea of the interview was inspired, it would at least get us a foot in the door at the office, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to achieve anything other than giving us a flavour of her working environment. We had already established she had been killed by someone close, which meant what we needed to do was find a way into her social life. A way to find out who she knew well enough that may have been in the position to stab her in the back. In my experience, work colleagues rarely called past the house.

I wondered what Lesley would have been doing this time in the morning on Saturdays before she was killed. I glanced at the clock. 8.15am. Probably still in bed. I know I would have been if I’d had no child to contend with.

I added a teddy to the mix.  Lesley wanted children, Rose had said. I felt sure she wouldn’t have at this time in the morning. She’d probably much rather have been in bed, sleeping off a night out with her roller derby buddies.

Roller derby…

I pulled my phone from my back pocket and quickly typed in a search. They must have a website or something. Where did they practise? When?

I fished a biscuit out of the cupboard and handed it to Lillian. It would keep her quiet for a time, while I clicked on a few links. Above me I heard a dull thud and a trickle of water in the pipes. Lucus had just stepped into the shower.

There only appeared to be one roller derby group in Grimsby and Cleethorpes – the Grim Reavers, but the website was out of date by two years. Clearly whoever set that up had either left the group or found themselves too busy to do anything more about it. There was nothing on there about dates, times, anything that might be of use to us.

I tried Facebook. Bingo. Lots of posts and all within the last few weeks. Even a picture of Lesley with an RIP message a few posts down. Yes. This was what I wanted.

I scrolled down, looking for anything familiar. No notices about practises, or try outs, which would have given me a hint about where they played. Here and there in the feed were photos of the team posed against various walls. Nothing that identified the practise area though.

A few more group shots, messages about away matches, and then… bingo. “Fresh Meat - Cleethorpes leisure centre”. I glanced at the date attached to the post. Saturday morning a few months ago – which meant the middle of winter, hardly the right time for a barbecue. I read a little closer. It looked to be a post about try outs. Fresh meat indeed! Did they practise there every Saturday morning? It was worth a call.

I picked up the phone.

“Cleethorpes Leisure Centre.”

“Hello. I, er, I was just calling up to find out about roller derby. Do you have a group that practises with you?”

“Yes. Every week. They’re in 11 am today actually. Did you want me to put you in touch with the coach?”

“No. That’s fine. I er... I was just wondering what time they played. I’m …err…I’m busy most Saturdays.”

“I think they practise one other time in the week – an evening. I could get Mandy to call you if you like? She runs the group?”

“No… I err… that’s fine. Thanks.”

I put down the phone. Saturday morning 11am. I’d been to the leisure centre before when I’d helped with the church youth group. Once you were through the turn-styles you could get right through to the sports halls. Some even had spectator areas you could sit in. I scrolled down through more photos. Yes… those breeze blocks and netting had looked familiar, and look – there was the gap where the spectators could look through. This was exactly what we needed. I called Irene.

“Morning, Ruth.”

“How did you ..?”

“Caller display. Besides. Who else would phone before 9am on a Saturday?”

“Fancy swimming?”

“I, er… what have you got?”

“Roller derby. They meet on a Saturday, 11am, at the Leisure centre. Same time as the public swim.”

“What about Lucus?”

“He hates swimming. I’ll just tell him I’m meeting a mother from baby group. He won’t know. In fact, he’ll probably just be glad I’m leaving him alone in the house to his books for a couple of hours. He works all week you know.” Try as I might I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

“Do you want me to call you back?”

“Yes. Main line. He’s in the shower.”

I put the phone back in its cradle and she rang back instantly. We didn’t chat. Just fixed up the time. If we went at 10.30 I could take Lillian for a short swim, Irene could do a few lengths, and then we could be out just after 11 and sidle around to the spectator area.

“Who was it?” Lucus shouted from upstairs.

“Eve from baby group. Wondered if I’d like to go swimming today.”

“What did you say?”

“Yes. Is that OK? You can stay here if you like…,” I tried to sound nonchalant. I knew what he would do given the choice, and a Saturday with a toddler in Cleethorpes leisure centre was not top of his “to do” list, but there was always the chance.

Lucus didn’t even sound disappointed. Just agreed to the arrangements with a mild look of relief. Not only did he not have to go swimming, something he hated anyway, but he also got out of trying to amuse Lillian for an hour, and he’d have the house to himself the whole time I was away - bliss.

“We’re going swimming!” I told Lillian with a grin, holding her in front of me. “Come on… let’s get our stuff together.”

Chapter Fourteen

We rendezvoused in the car park outside the leisure centre. The weather was nondescript. It wasn’t clear, it wasn’t cloudy, it wasn’t raining, but it wasn’t bright sunshine either. Lincolnshire had a lot of these non-descript days in the spring.

Ahead of the car park was the endless stretch of beach that was the Cleethorpes coast. The sand never truly dried out when tide went out, and today the sky was reflected by the wet sand creating mirages and merging the horizon in the distance to a blue/brown haze. In the distance I could see both Bull and Haile Sand Forts, left over relics from the World Wars, two sentries guarding the Humber.

A sharp breeze was whipping along the seafront today, picking up the scent of salt and seaweed. My hair blew about my face wildly as I opened the car door to extract Lillian from the back seat. Irene’s car was already parked a little further along the concrete sea defence wall, and she got out as she saw me and walked over carrying a small swimming bag. I shouldered my own changing bag and much larger carrier which contained Lillian’s water wings, swim nappy, both our towels and swimming costumes.

“I think the flume is working today,” Irene said. “She’d probably enjoy that. I think you can go down together.”

I didn't question how she knew. Over the sound of the wind in my ears I could just make out the rattle of water in the outside pipes.

We paid up, went through the turn-styles, had our swim and then rendezvoused back in the changing area like any other family group would do.

Toting our swimming bags we exited the pool changing room, and I put Lillian down and encouraged her to go for a walk further into the facilities with us following happily in her wake. It wasn’t unusual for family groups to meander through the facilities after a swim. Children were, after all, quite curious creatures and if there was anything going on further into the building, be it a game of squash, badminton, football, or indeed a roller derby practise session, we would not seem too out of place. We both had wet hair, we’d clearly been swimming, and we had a curious toddler with us as the perfect excuse.

I opened the double doors into the main part of the sports facilities and followed Lillian through. I could hear a lot of noise further into the building and it wasn’t long before we stumbled into a gaggle of men and women in roller-skates and protective pads. There was no obvious equipment visible, and I wondered what it was exactly they were practising each week. In my head I’d imagined hockey sticks and pucks or something, but clearly there wasn’t anything like that needed in for roller derby. They all wore crash helmets and protective knee and elbow pads, and of the people in the hall already, it was clear that roller-skating around and around the hall was the mainstay of the game. I watched as one group of girls teamed up to prevent another skating past them. All three jinking left or right to prevent the girl behind getting ahead. I wondered how they all stayed upright. If it had been me looking behind so regularly I’d have been in a tangle of limbs on the floor already.

I picked Lillian up so she could watch and Irene and I took up position on the nearest spectator wall. Clearly there was both more and less to the sport than I imagined. I wasn’t sure if they were playing or just practising, but there appeared to be two teams. Red and blue bibs marked the different groups and it reminded me very much of my teenage P.E. lessons, except for the fact our hockey lessons were a lot more sedate by comparison. This sport looked positively dangerous. Every now and then, with no seeming reason to it that I could fathom, someone in the middle blew a whistle and the groups slowed to a halt. I tried to work out the pattern.

One of the non-players sidled up to Lillian and gave her a little tickle under the chin.

“Fancy your chances when you get older do you?” she smiled at her. She had pink hair and a nose ring, but a friendly face. I placed her round about thirty, she wasn’t thin, but wasn’t what I’d describe as plump either. She had the natural padding of someone in middle age. She might have kids of her own back home. She talked to Lillian as if she’d been through that phase. Not too babyish but with a natural pitch that was very much aimed at a youngster without being coochy-coo.

“We’ve been swimming,” I said, by way of explanation for us being there at all. “What’re you doing?”

“It’s roller derby,” she said. That much we both knew of course, but I had to say something to get her talking.

“Is this just a practise?” Irene asked.

“Well, yes and no. We’ve split into teams and we’re playing each other at the moment. We did techniques earlier – we’re just putting it all into practise now.”

The whistle blew again and a big gaggle of girls started racing around the track, leaving two at the back, still stationary.

“What’re they doing?” Irene asked. She appeared genuinely interested. So was I. This was new to me. A sport that wasn’t taught in school. I had no idea what was going on within the hall, but it was clear there were some rules to it.

“They’re the jammers. They’ve got to get past the rest of the group to score.” The whistle blew again. “Here they go now.”

I watched as the two girls took off chasing the others ahead of them on the track. They skated with a purpose, knees bent. I could see the muscles in their legs pumping the skates behind them, as they gained rapidly on the other girls.

“How do they score?”

“By getting past the rest of the group. It’s a little hard to explain. Easier to watch. Those two girls are the Jammers at the back,” she said. “They’ve got to get through the group and then lap them. They score on the next go round. The more of the opposing team they pass, the more they score.”

“I see,” said Irene. I was glad she did, as I still hadn’t a clue what was going on. But then, we weren’t here to learn how to play. I watched as the two jammers caught up to the rest of the group and with dodges and faints tried to get past the other girls. The speed they were all going, the sport must be prone to injuries. I wondered how many broken bones the team saw each year.

“How often do you practise?” I asked.

“Every Saturday morning and the league teams have another on Wednesday Night.”

“I’m guessing you’re in one of the league teams?” Irene asked. The girl we were speaking to had on a “Grim Reaver” t-shirt, and compared to the motley attire of the girls currently on the sports hall floor with mismatching t-shirts, knee pads, helmets and elbow pads, this girl looked much more colour co-ordinated. All her various pads and helmet were a matching black, just like the other girls chatting in the spectator area.

“I am now,” the girl confirmed. “Came in mid-season.”

“Congratulations,” Irene said. “I’m guessing you must have scored better than one of the other girls or something in practise did you?”

“Well, sort of.” She looked a little embarrassed. “Usually its injury that gets you into the league mid-season, but one of our team was… well… you might have read about it in the news. Lesley Cooper?”

“Oh,” said Irene, feigning shock and surprise. She pulled it all off with the ease of a professional actor, and I wondered if she’d ever been involved in any amateur dramatics. She gave away nothing. No one watching her reaction would have believed we had come here precisely because of that information. Her face was exactly what you’d expect from a curious granny hearing some sad news. “Terrible wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” our Lesley substitute confirmed. “We were all out that night, you know, having a get together. We assumed she’d had another row with her ex or something and was tied up at home. None of us thought she’d… well… we didn’t know anything about it until it was in the paper.”

“Oh dear,” Irene said, hiding her excitement well. I looked ahead into the sports hall, trying to keep my face as blank as I possibly could. We’d just ruled out the entire Roller Derby team. If they were all out together, then they were all each other’s alibis. “Was she the only one who didn’t come then?”

I winced. Even I thought I sounded too obvious. Surely she wonder why I had asked such a strange question. It wasn’t the natural thing to say after being told about a murder. But the girl didn’t seem to notice. And confirmed exactly that. Lesley had been the only person who didn’t show up. Which meant her entire roller derby group was in the clear. I could visualise the big cross on the post it note already.

Irene asked a few more conversational questions, just to keep things natural, and then announced that we ought to take Lillian home for lunch and we left. None the wiser about how you actually played roller derby, but several suspects lighter in our murder enquiry.

Chapter Fifteen

“Well...,” Irene tapped at her fridge after I’d made my phone call to book the prospective visit. “We’ll know more about her office tomorrow, and that’s the roller derby team ruled out in toto. But what about the others?”

Over the weekend I had wondered briefly if I should have picked up Sherlock Holmes rather than my current Sci-Fi novel, but then I realised, murder mystery fiction was just that, fiction, and if the novelist had set up the story, then it wasn’t true detection at all, but a step by step process to baffle the reader and make the detective look intelligent when the solution arose. Real life was nothing like that and I’d be fooling myself thinking otherwise. We were not going to solve Lesley’s murder by examining the clay on someone’s boot, nor by setting a team of vagabond children off to hunt for clues. We’d solve the crime by applying ourselves to a detailed investigation of the facts as we knew them.

We were hampered in our own investigation by the lack of access to crime scene data, which the police had in their possession, but we had the information given to us by Russ and that would have to suffice. Fingerprints were only useful if you had a clue whose fingers to compare them to. Anything else the police had found would have had a similar problem. A hair, a fibre, a trace of footprint or dirt, could only tell them so much, they would still need to shortlist all of Lesley’s contacts to the people most likely to have committed the act before any of this evidence could create a cohesive case.

I stared at the fridge which held the crime scene Russ had sketched out. Aside from its homespun look, our incident boards probably didn’t look much different to the ones at the police station, assuming of course they weren’t still trying to make a case against Russ.

“I’m not sure her workplace is going to tell us anything useful,” I said. “Remember where he found her. If my work colleagues had come calling, I’d have been up and about, not sitting down. We’d either all be in the lounge together drinking tea, or I’d have been making them a cuppa in the kitchen. I wouldn’t be sitting down while they walked behind me to grab a knife.”

“But what if she had a close friend on the team?” Irene asked

“Close friend… yep. Okay, I can see me sat down while you made tea behind me. Mind you, I wouldn’t expect you to be knifing me in the back, either.”

“No,” Irene said. “But then… that’s the sort of person we’re looking for. Someone she knew well enough to walk around behind her in her own kitchen and someone who’d think nothing of knifing her in the back.”

“Well, I’m there tomorrow. I’ll see what I can find out,” I said. “But I think we’re looking in the wrong place.” I passed Lillian back the wooden spoon she just handed me. Irene had put together her own ‘heuristic box’. She’d seen mine at home and had assembled one for Lillian to play with at her house now that we were spending more time there reviewing the case.

“Wasn’t her sister due back from Thailand sometime soon?” I ventured. “I remember something about that from the wake.”

“Yes. You’re right.”

“Not that she’d have done it, but she might know who she was close to.” I said.

Irene sighed and looked thoughtfully at the boards. Her sister presented the same problem as everyone else that we’d reviewed on the cupboard post-it note system. There was just no obvious way to break into the family circle at all, and it went without saying that the family was our best avenue for information and, if the crime statistics were true, the most likely location of our killer, too. What we needed was a lucky break.

Irene started rearranging the post-it notes again. Moving them all off to one side in long columns.

“Let’s start again. What we know.”

“Lesley Cooper was killed sometime overnight on the night of the 3rd.” She put up a new post it note with Lesley’s name on it, a small cross and the date.

“We know it was someone close to her, who was familiar enough to her that she’d let them walk behind her in the kitchen without turning around.”

I hmmmed in agreement. This was exactly where we’d got to just an hour ago.

“We know it wasn’t Russ.” She picked up Russ’s post it note and moved it over to another cupboard. She then scrawled “ELIMINATED” in big capitals on another note and stuck that to the same cupboard. I could see what she was doing now, and picked up the post it note with ‘Roller derby team’ written on it and stuck that beside Russ’s note on the cupboard door. Irene added ‘Grandparents’ to the same door. And I moved ‘Sister’ alongside it. That left ‘Mother’ and ‘Stepfather’ on the other cupboard, still not eliminated. I looked at Lillian. I couldn’t ever imagine wanting to kill my own child. But then, we didn’t have any conclusive proof either way.

‘New boyfriend?’ was placed back onto the suspect cupboard. We still had no idea if he existed and if he did who he might be.

I picked up ‘Drugs?’ and moved it to the eliminated board. Irene looked at me, eyebrow raised.

“If she had a drug dealer connection, she’d hardly have left them to make their own tea, or let them walk behind her,” I said. “So if she was doing drugs, they were being provided by someone she knew well, in which case we already have them on the list.”

“Okay.” Irene conceded the note and it stayed on the new eliminated board. We worked through the rest of the notes. The suspect board was definitely dwindling; there were just a couple of girl’s names on there that Russ had provided, but unhelpfully no descriptions, telephone numbers or addresses. They were Lesley’s friends. Neither Irene nor I were particularly surprised Russ didn’t know more about them. Lucus knew virtually nothing about Irene after all. The only other names up there now were the parents and her spiritual counsellor Rose Bloom.

I tapped at the post-it note containing her name. “What do you think?” I asked. “She’s one avenue of enquiry we haven’t tried yet.”

“Do you think she’ll see us coming?” Irene reached for the business card stuck with tape to another cupboard.

*

We pulled up outside Rose’s business premises.

Like the card, her small corner office on Brereton Avenue sported a sign which read “By appointment only”. A request that amused both of us for obvious reasons.

I’d never noticed the building before. It was unimposing and not particularly well maintained. The paint was flaking outside, and the sign above the door was clearly hand painted, possibly by Rose or a member of her family. It was a standard corner unit which would have been a small corner shop one day but had been converted into business office style premises as the large supermarkets had taken over and put most of the independent grocery shops out of business.

There were vertical blinds in all the windows of a type that were common in most offices, and the windows and doors had all been recently double glazed, giving the building a strange half business, half domestic look. The door was of the same construction as you’d find in any home, right down to the plastic architrave moulding and frosted fleur-de-lis in the window. I wondered if she owned or rented the space.

Most houses in Grimsby were narrow and long and although it was a corner plot I was fully expecting the office would follow the same pattern – one room at the front with a trail of other rooms behind it. However I was surprised when we entered the office to find it was simply a square box. There was a door in one side labelled “toilet” and in one corner of the room, a sink and coffee making facilities. Quite clearly this one room was “it”. No wonder she needed the blinds! Anyone calling in for a reading would have been very exposed without them. It was laid out much like a surgery and had a very clinical feel, if you ignored the odd crystal lurking on the shelving.

Rose was waiting for us as we entered, sitting in one corner of the room with a small table and chair which constituted her office. I wondered if she kept notes on all her visitors. She stood up as we walked in and gave Lillian, who was in my arms, a kooky wave and grin which sent her burrowing into my chest, only to peek out again and provide a toothy grin in return. Rose had a friend there, even if Irene and I were entirely sceptical about the whole thing.

“Hello again,” Rose beamed. “I knew when I handed you my card I’d see you both again soon.”

I tried desperately not to catch Irene’s eye and looked instead around the walls at the various posters about crystals and health, Reiki, and bizarrely a poster about saving money on your energy bills. Clearly selling utilities was another string to Rose’s bow but given that she was selling people a total fiction, I guessed selling energy services was easier. After all, that was something more tangible than a green aura or a voice from the dead.

“Thank you for seeing me at short notice,” Irene said, while I scanned the walls.

“Not at all. I could see at the funeral there was something bothering you. Take a seat.” She gestured to the modern leather mastermind-style chair in the middle of the room. “You can sit over there if you like.” She pointed me to another couple of waiting room style chairs against one of the walls. There was a box of toys in the corner and I went over to investigate them with Lillian, while Rose seated herself at a therapeutic angle to Irene; not facing her directly, but off centre.

We had decided Irene would take the lead on this one. She was by far the better actress and as we Lillian with us, some sort of therapy session just wouldn’t have been possible for me.

Irene sat uncomfortably on the edge of the leather chair. I wasn’t sure if that was part of the act, or if she was genuinely uncomfortable. I knew I would have been.

I found Lillian a quiet touchy feely book, one of those “That’s not my…” books which were all the rage. It was a simple idea that had taken off and made someone a fortune. Lucus and I were always talking about how good it would be to find a niche like that and generate an income. It would mean I wouldn’t have to go back to work, something neither of us wanted, but which we knew was inevitable if we were to keep our heads above water financially. We’d looked at a few options after Lillian was born and I’d even packed light bulbs for a mail order firm for a short time piecemeal until that particular job dried up. I had until Lillian started school to find something suitable for me to do from home. If not, then it was back into the hospital and all the unsocial hours that would entail. I wondered briefly how much income Rose generated, but then immediately discounted it. It just wasn’t in my nature to run a quack enterprise.

“You’ll be more comfortable if you sit back,” Rose said. “You need to relax a little. You’re very anxious at the moment and it’s masking everything else.”

Irene hadn’t said exactly what her plan was for the visit. She’d kept it very vague, both with me and with Rose when she called to make the appointment. So I had no idea what she intended. She planned to “wing it”. I watched her sit back in the chair and compose herself. She looked more relaxed, but if I wasn’t mistaken her brain was incredibly active behind those grey/blue eyes of hers.

“You can close your eyes if it helps,” said Rose.

Irene did so, and I turned to page two of the book and got Lillian to feel a nose that was too bumpy, an incredibly silly concept for a toddler.

“So…,” said Rose in a quieter, soothing voice. “Tell me about what’s bothering you.”

“It’s the funeral,” said Irene. “I just felt terribly cold, as if something was just, well, not quite right. Like she wasn’t settled.”

I looked at her. I wasn’t sure what I had expected her to discuss in her treatment session, but this wasn’t it. Then again, what a perfect way to get Rose to tell us what she knew!

“Hmmm, I know what you mean,” Rose nodded, unseen by Irene behind her closed eyelids. “You are probably sensitive to the other side. It’s not unusual for someone who’s sensitive to feel something for the first time when something like this has happened. Murders aren’t common. It’s rare for us to attend a funeral of an unhappy spirit. And you are right. She isn’t settled. Nor was her father.”

“Do you think I felt him too?” Irene asked innocently. “Was he that older presence I felt?” Where was she dredging all this nonsense from? Wherever it was, Rose was lapping it up.

“Yes. Quite probably. Her father has been visiting her for some time.”

“I see.”

Rose was silent for some time and I thought she was reviewing Irene’s aura or something, but then her tone changed. “Why are you here Mrs Franks?”

Irene opened her eyes, sensing the stern rebuke in Rose’s voice.

“I can tell when I’m being played. Why did you come?”

“You know the family.” Irene studied her face and then sat forwards in her chair. Clearly she’d decided to come clean. “You mentioned her father at the funeral. We wanted to know what you know.”

“Why?”

“Russ didn’t kill Lesley,” Irene said. “We want to find out who did.”

“I see. And you don’t think the police will do that?”

“They’re looking in all the wrong places.”

“How do you know?”

“Russ is still in custody,” Irene said simply. “Have you met him?”

“No. Lesley consulted me here. I don’t do house calls.” Mentally I ticked her off the suspect list. I was sure Irene was doing the same. If Rose didn’t do house calls, then she couldn’t have killed Lesley, but she knew things about the family we didn’t. She was our best lead.

“Have the police interviewed you?”

“No. Why would they?”

“Exactly.” Irene looked at me, as if to underline once again that we were better placed to solve the murder enquiry than they were, despite our lack of connections. We were thinking outside of the box.

“Why were you seeing Lesley?”

“Client confidentiality.” Rose sat back. “I really can’t say.”

“She’s dead,” Irene said.

“I know. But revealing her secrets won’t bring her back, and besides, you don’t have to live with her. I do.” Rose looked pointedly around the room as if Lesley was with us in spirit. I shuddered involuntarily, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.

“Can you tell us anything without breaking her… trust?” Irene asked.

“Like what?”

“Something from the public record maybe that we don’t know. Her father. What happened there?”

“He disappeared. It was a long time ago. He wasn’t declared legally dead until ‘97, but I knew long before that. No one believed me. Her mother is very closed off. Lesley, Lesley was the open one.”

“Lesley always thought something had happened to him. She always…,” Rose stopped, she looked around her, her face changing, falling somehow, adjusting into something non-Rose. I felt my skin prickle. I really was suggestible… Rose looked pointedly at me as if sensing the weakness.

“Dark. Cold. Wet. Heavy.” The four adjectives dropped out of her mouth like a damp thuds. Like the final closing of a weighty book. Four final words from the great beyond.

Rose watched me watching her and then noticeably brightened and adopted a more conversational pitch. “That’s what she always said. ‘Dark, cold, wet, heavy’. It was quite unnerving. She was more aware than I was sometimes.”

“You counselled her?” Irene didn’t seem as disturbed by Rose’s pronouncements. Rose looked around and then nodded as if receiving approval from an unseen source.

“Not so much counselling as support. She wanted to be hypnotised. Said she wanted to regress, regress back to her childhood to the last time she saw her dad. See if she could uncover any clues.”

“Did she?”

“Not when we were together. But I gave her one of these.” She handed Irene a dark polished stone. “It helps with self-hypnosis. Lesley was working on it in her own time. Without me.”

“I see.” Irene turned the smooth pebble over in her hand. There was nothing remarkable about it and it certainly wasn’t going to tell us what happened to Lesley. She handed it back to Rose with a controlled reverence. Rose took it and carefully placed it back inside its padded cardboard box like it held some hidden powers.

“And were the family happy? Can you tell me that much?”

“They seemed so,” Rose nodded. “Her mother remarried soon after Lesley’s father was declared dead. She’d been living with Pete, that’s Lesley’s stepfather, a while before then, but, well, you can’t really divorce a dead man, can you? Lesley always got along well with Pete. He came into their lives quite young. Made a home with them. He was their dad in all but genes. They were a close family.”

“You wanted to speak to her mother at the funeral?” I prompted. “She brushed you off.”

“That was nothing.” Rose coloured a little. “Bad timing, that’s all. I should have known better. Gill doesn’t believe in, well,” she gestured around the room, “this. Thought I was upsetting Lesley. Didn’t want any word from the other side. Doesn’t believe there is an other side to have word from.”

“And did you?” Irene asked. “Have word from Lesley I mean?”

Rose looked at the floor, and I could see her brow furrow, trying to decide whether to tell us something. Perhaps something of use, perhaps not. Given that it was from the “other side” I doubted it would be very useful to the investigation, but perhaps Irene was just pandering to her, hoping to find out something of use.

Rose looked up. “No. No, I didn’t.” Her watery stare dared Irene to challenge her. I was surprised Irene didn’t, as it was clear even to me that Rose was lying, but maybe Irene thought it better not to push it. Maybe a “word from the beyond” which itself was unsubstantiated except through Rose was hardly worth challenging her for.

Chapter Sixteen

It may have seemed like we had left Rose’s with no answers, but Irene was elated.

“Two murders,” Irene said as I got into the front seat of the car. “Not one… two. There’s a connection. There has to be.”

“Two murders?”

“The father. Now the daughter.” Irene started the car. “They’re connected. Have to be. And Rose is lying.”

“That much I worked out,” I said. “But about what? And he’s missing, presumed dead,” I corrected.

“No. He’s dead.” Irene pulled out into the road. “Lesley must have seen something when she was younger. It’s what she was trying to remember.” She waved a hand at me, warding off the objections she could see were coming. “Ignore the mumbo jumbo rubbish a moment. What do we know? One – Lesley believed her father was dead, why else would you consult a spiritualist? Two – she wanted to be hypnotised, because she thought she knew something, something she couldn’t bring into her conscious mind, but something important about her father’s disappearance. Three – Rose knows something. Perhaps Lesley told her something THIS side of the grave. She’s frightened. Rose, that is.” Irene added, just in case I was in any doubt.

“Frightened of what?”

“I’m guessing frightened of the same thing happening to her. If Lesley found something out, then maybe Rose is worried the same person who killed Lesley will come after her.”

“But we don’t know who killed Lesley,” I said.

“No.”

“So what now?”

“I guess we just have to start trying to piece together the other murder as well. There’ll be an overlap somewhere. Has to be.”

She drove off, weaving in and out of the parked cars on both sides of the road. She’d bought Rose’s story completely. I was less convinced. There was nothing to indicate the father had been murdered other than Rose’s pronouncements. While they might have made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end within her room, outside, in the car, away from the enclosing walls of her office, her utterances seemed silly. She could have made them up for all we knew. Overplaying her role in Lesley’s murder, somehow keen to link herself to it to lend credence to her spiritualist practises.

She wasn’t what I thought of as a spiritualist. There were no obvious signs of séances. Her office was far too exposed on the corner to be gathering people around a table and saying is there anybody there who’d like to speak to anybody here sort of stuff. Instead she seemed to be pulling in a variety of alternative therapies, reiki, crystals, spiritual counselling and utility selling, the last just confirming to me her own mistrust of her “true calling”. If her other practises were genuinely bringing healing to others there would have been no need to sell utilities ,too. There would have been a stampede of bereaved, ill and infirm people at her door. As it was, her diary was empty. I’d seen that much when I’d walked in and glanced across at her desk.

As far as I was concerned Rose was a dead end. The only useful information she had provided was that Lesley’s father had vanished, missing and presumed dead. But people vanished all the time. You only had to be on social media for a week to see how many people disappeared from various locations in the UK every day. Few were ever found. If Lesley’s dad had walked out on the family, he could well be living somewhere else in the UK or abroad. He could have had a mental breakdown. He might even have thrown himself off the Humber bridge, which was a well-known jumping spot locally for a coastal area with no natural cliffs.

He might be dead. I could concede that much. But we were still a long way off proving that he’d been murdered, and as to whether Lesley had seen anything, well, we were even further away from understanding what she saw, if anything. I felt it was time to get our investigation on more stable footing.

The visit to her office was tomorrow. Maybe I could establish something there that would persuade Irene away from this new angle.

Chapter Seventeen

I glanced at my watch again. I still had fifteen minutes to go. Fifteen minutes was far too early to walk into any appointment. I cursed my overly cautious time keeping and tried to relax in the driver’s seat of Irene’s car as best I could. Her back rest was far straighter than I was used to, but I didn’t want to adjust her seat too much while I was driving her car. It was her car after all, and I was only borrowing it just this once.

I wriggled about trying to get comfortable and my movements made the air freshener hanging from her rear view mirror sway from side to side. I wasn’t sure which scent it was supposed to be, but all car fresheners smelled the same; an overly pungent fragrance of “new car plastic”. We didn’t have one in our car. The smell made me feel nauseous on long journeys.

The car park was full around me, but everyone was working and I only had myself for company. Straightening my skirt I attempted to calm myself with some deep breathing.

I rubbed my sweaty palms on my skirt; I knew it had to be done, and I knew it had to be me, but I could feel the tips of my fingers going numb. I kept reminding myself this wasn’t an interview – I was just looking around. They might not even ask me any questions. At least… I hoped not. I pulled down the drivers sun screen so I could check my face in the flip up mirror.

My mascara’d eyes looked back at me. They can’t tell. I told myself in the mirror. You’re just another in a long list of candidates.

I checked my lips, the gloss was holding. It was the first time I’d put make up on since Lillian’s arrival. We just didn’t go anywhere that needed a “face” these days and I wasn’t one of those women who used it every day. Working in the hospital make up had been banned, which meant I only used it on special occasions, and there had been very few of them since Lillian’s birth.

I flipped the mirror closed again. It didn’t matter how bad an impression I made. I didn’t want the job. What I needed to do was take a look around the office, see if I could work out where Lesley had sat, who she was closest to, what the staff thought about her murder, if such an opportunity arose.

I glanced down at my watch, took a deep breath, grabbed my handbag, and swung out of the car. The sun was bright and warm. It would have been easier to scuttle into the building under the cover of rain. With full sun I felt ridiculously exposed.

I smoothed down the skirt, tugged at my blazer, swung the handbag over my shoulder and marched towards the main door and the big “Group Seafood” sign. I felt my stomach flip over and swallowed hard, trying to rid the bile from back of my throat. There was no going back now.

The foyer was wide with pictures of various staff members, news cuttings and press photography arranged around the walls. I smiled at the receptionist behind the welcome desk. There was a glassy open plan feel to the building. With the beech work top, magnolia walls and standard reception chairs, I could have been entering an airport lobby. The only give away was the fact that the pictures were all photographs of fish in various states of meal-readiness. I’d never seen such a decoratively tempting shot of fish fingers in my life!

The carefully manicured girl behind the desk looked up as I walked towards her.

“Hello?” She said, in both greeting and enquiry. She looked younger than me, but then, everyone looked younger than me these days. Twenty-somethings looked like they were still in school, and as for teenagers… well… it was hard to believe that some of the waitresses I’d seen recently didn’t have a curfew of 8pm imposed on them. This girl, Marie Shipley her badge said, looked like she’d only recently left school and wouldn’t have been out of place in MacDonald’s with a few stars on her happy-to-help-you badge. Her face was well made up with a dash of liquid eye liner to extend her lash line into something vaguely oriental.

I smiled back, hoping my mouth wasn’t too dry for me to talk.

“Are you here about the job?” she asked. Clearly I was easy to spot; overly presented, anxious, clutching a handbag like a life belt in a storm. She had probably seen a few candidates by now.

I nodded and smiled, I didn’t quite trust my dry throat to many any appropriate noises of greeting right now.

“Take a seat over there, please.” She gestured to the empty waiting area. I wandered over and took a seat. Fraud. The seat seemed to hiss as I sat down. I glanced around me trying not to look too apprehensive. I wondered if I would have been more or less nervous if I was applying for the post.

Sitting there I could feel myself breaking out into a new sweat. What would they do if they discovered I had no intention of ever actually applying for the position, that I had no actual qualifications for the job advertised; if they found out I was here spying?

I glanced up at the door. It wasn’t too late. I could leave again. Claim I felt ill or feign an important call. After all we’d already ruled out her workmates. At least I know I had. Maybe Irene still thought there was someone at her work who knew her well enough to sneak around behind her in the kitchen with that knife… maybe she was right. I thought back to the cupboards, saw the post it notes flutter in my mind’s eye. Other than the family, we had no other real suspects. Which meant we needed to find some new suspects, a motive, or some new facts soon or our investigation was dead in the water.

Irene was back at the house looking to see what she could find out about Lesley’s father’s disappearance on the internet. I wasn’t sure she would find anything. The internet only really started around the time of his disappearance, newspapers wouldn’t have been digital back then, and I didn’t think the local telegraph would have taken the time to start archiving all their old papers on the internet. Perhaps the library had the old style microfiche of past papers. It could be somewhere to look next.

I looked around the waiting room, breathing deeply, trying to still my nerves. The company had helpfully placed some photo boards of the staff employed within the building on the walls in the waiting area. The people were all bunched into groups, smiling; typical corporate shots. I stood up again and started looking through the staff groups for the ones we wanted. Marie glanced up; I paced a little and smiled at her. “Sore back” I said. Rubbing my hand into the hollow of my spine. She smiled and then looked back down again at her desk. I wondered what a girl like her did on reception all day. Was there a glossy magazine stuffed somewhere under the desk where visitors couldn’t see?

I looked back at the photos. It was there, middle right. The title “Accounts Department” was written underneath and the photo proudly sported faces of everyone within the organisation including Lesley. I recognised her face from the local papers. The board hadn’t been updated since her death. Without individual photos I suppose it would have been hard to have adjusted them all. I wondered if they took a new photo each year, or whether the photos were all very much out of date and didn’t reflect current staffing.

I took my mobile phone out of my bag and made a show of looking as if I was checking Facebook. When Marie glanced away I swiped across to the camera and fired off a few shots. We could use the composite as a way of identifying the individuals within the department.

Just as I lowered the phone I heard the sliding doors swish open and a young lady came in I thought I recognised. She paused at the reception desk and I could just make out some friendly chit chat, the tones carrying rather than the words. Clearly the two girls knew each other. Smiling, the woman turned towards me and made her way over. I smiled at her, my eyes scanning her face. Familiar. Where did I know her from?

“Hello!” She stuck out her hand. I grabbed it and shook, aiming for a firm and hopefully not too sweaty handshake. “I didn’t know you did accounts too. Janice.” She clarified. “I have Nicholas.” Ah… baby group. I should have known.

“Sorry – I didn’t recognise you all smarted up!” I said. Out of context I should have added. Janice was one of the ‘I love this shit’ camp. Trilling Hello Joe how are you? with the rest of them. She loved baby talk. Which at least meant I had something to talk about that wasn’t job related. It might just get me through.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

“Oh. Fine. Can’t believe I’m back at work really. He’ll be walking soon. I’ve told him he’s got to wait until I get home.” She giggled to herself. We both knew full well that he’d do it when he wanted to whether she was there or not. It must have been a huge emotional pull for her, she loved being a mum much more than I did and even I didn’t want to miss the milestones.

“Marie says you’re here about the job. There’s a few candidates,” Janice confided, as if she was giving me the inside track, mother to mother.

“Are you showing me around?” That would have been very useful. We could have talked baby and avoided any accountancy topics at all.

“No. Phil’s doing that. I just thought I’d pop over and say hi. I’ll probably see you as you get shown around, but the vacancy isn’t in my department.”

“It’s a big department then,” I said, hoping that was the right sort of thing to say.

“Yes. Two offices, purchasing and invoicing are separate.”

“You didn’t know…,” I pointed vaguely at the picture which included Lesley. Janice followed my finger.

“Lesley? Yes. Terrible wasn’t it. Did you read about it in the papers? Awful. She was really well liked at the office. Her dad used to work here too.”

“Her father?”

“Yes. The older staff remember him. They’ve been talking about it since, well, since Lesley, you know. ” Janice suddenly looked uncomfortable, as if she’d said more than she’d meant to. Did she know Lesley’s father had disappeared? She looked as if she knew something. There was a shiftiness about the eyes, they kept looking behind me as if she was trying to slip out of the conversation.

“Hmmm” I said, trying to appear less interested than I really was. I didn’t want her to completely clam up, and now that I knew where I knew her from, I might be able to chat to her about things again, away from work. She was the first real break in the investigation we’d had. I didn’t want to push her too hard before Irene and I had had time to think it through.

“Are you coming to baby talk this week?” I said, wondering if it was a coincidence that Lesley had come to work at the same place as her father. Irene didn’t believe in coincidences. Even I had to admit it was rather odd. Especially as he must have died long before he could pull any strings to get her employed here. Maybe there was a family connection to the firm we didn’t know about, a director somewhere in the family line.

“I’m not sure,” said Janice. “We’re still ironing out my working pattern and I’m not – oh there’s Phil now.” Janice indicated a smart suited woman heading in our direction, clacking across the linoleum on shiny heels. Phil, short for Philippa, it seemed.

She looked every ounce the professional - hair scraped back into a tight pony tail, a little masculine in appearance, understated eyes, full red lips. A professional woman in a man’s world. Had the name change been motivated by the glass ceiling that still existed in the business environment, or had she grown up a tom boy?

“Enjoy the tour,” Janice said, and smiled warmly as Phil closed on my position, teeth bared in a wide smile, hand striking out ahead of her.

“Philippa Marston. You must be Lesley.” I grabbed at her proffered hand, almost wincing at the tight masculine grip. It felt like a test. The bones of my hand slid against each other inside the grip of her fingers. She probably worked out. I could imagine this woman on a treadmill in Lycra each morning before work, pony tail swinging behind her as she ran.

“Yes,” I said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“I’ll leave you to it,” Janice said, smiling and backing away. I watched her leave. Janice was round and pink and comfortable compared to the stick thin, all-business Phil. I felt like I was being abandoned to a shark.

“How long have you been working in accounts?” Phil asked. It was supposed to be a friendly starter question, but it felt like I’d instantly been placed under a hot spotlight, under interrogation like a candidate in mastermind, only my specialist subject was something I knew absolutely nothing about.

I looked at her, my smile fixed, and hoped she wouldn’t be able to tell a lie this early on. Irene had rehearsed a few small talk pleasantries with me, the problem was, if the questions were going to go beyond those few getting to know you style openers I would really be fudging things.

“Not long, I’m afraid. I fell pregnant within the first three months of my first contract.” Irene and I had decided to hide my lies in semi-truths. They would be easier to palate.

“First and last,” I added. Employers never liked to employ a baby machine.

“Where were you?”

“Intellect in Lancaster,” I lied, barefaced. Irene suggested we pick a firm she would never have heard of and claim I’d recently moved across. I didn’t have a Grimsby accent and it was very feasible I could have been a recent incomer. When we were setting up my back story I had been fairly sure I didn’t know anyone who worked at Group Seafood. Janice was unexpected, but then she didn’t know that much about me anyway. I didn’t know very much about any of the baby group contacts other than the age of their child, how many teeth they had, when they started solid food, what week they decide to roll, crawl, walk…

Philippa nodded at my lie, clearly happy with the response.

“Let me show you around.” She held out her right arm and gestured towards the double doors beyond the reception desk, which I had just seen the fluffy warm Janice disappear through with a little thumbs up and a wink for me.

I walked beside her in silence. I wasn’t sure I wanted to attempt any conversation. The more I said, the more likely I was going to trip myself up.

We passed Marie on the front desk, who gave us both a smile. Phil was her boss after all. It paid to be extra polite.

Beyond the double doors the floor shifted from washable linoleum to carpet tiles but remained as brightly lit and magnolia. The fish dish theme pictures continued down the hall past various beech doors with reinforced glass windows. Behind each door I could see an office of men and women hard at work behind matching desks. It was clearly a new office complex. The furniture and telephones all coordinated. The last department I’d worked in had a miss-match of chairs and desks, evidence of a slowly growing NHS department on a limited budget which took what it could get from various other departments who were downsizing. Everyone would have loved these matching offices. Everything looked so industrious and yet so clean and tidy, even if the desks were awash with paperwork.

We went through another set of fire doors and down another identical corridor, before branching right and entering a large room filled with desks.

“This is where you’d be working,” Phil said. “This is purchasing.” A few staff looked up and smiled. There were a couple of empty desks. I recognised a few girls from the funeral, but Irene was extremely doubtful they would have recognised me.

“People don’t look at people the same way you do, Ruth,” she’d said. “They just don’t. Trust me. Besides, your hair is up and you’ve got make up on, they won’t recognise you; added camouflage.”

I had always been good with faces. Names not so much, but faces were my thing. We could rarely watch a drama on the television without me turning to Lucus at some point and saying Where do we know him from? Thank goodness someone had invented IMDb. These days a quick tap on the mobile phone and I had the answer within minutes and could settle down and watch the television without thinking about it anymore. The perks of modern life.

Frustratingly there wasn’t an IMDb for the rest of society. My internal software still kicked in when I met strangers, and without an ap to identify people I spent the rest of the day trying to work out where I’d met someone before. I remembered chatting to a lady for nearly thirty minutes in a coffee shop once, greeting her like we were old friends, chatting over recent family developments, what we were both doing now, and it was only when she left I realised she’d simply been our check out assistant in the local supermarket for a few weeks in a row. We didn’t actually know each other at all.

“Someone should invent an IMDb for people.” I told Irene. “ You could store people by several categories, how you met them, hair colour, length, name of spouse, where they worked …,” Irene had just laughed and said the only users of that ap would be her and me - everyone else probably wouldn’t even notice they’d met someone before.

I glanced at the faces. Irene had spoken to all of the office girls at the funeral, and while I recognised most of them there was one here that didn’t look familiar. Perhaps she’d been on annual leave, or was back at the office holding the fort while the others waved the company flag. I tried to remember if she’d been in the photo in the foyer. I couldn’t be sure. I’d need to check when I got back to the car.

They all looked at me, and a few smiled. Probably assessing whether I would be a friend or foe should I get the job in a few weeks.

“Come on,” Phil broke the deadlock. “I’ll give you the whistle stop tour of the rest of the building. I’m not sure how big your last place of work was, but we’ve got a huge team just in accounts. We’ve a massive export team, too.”

I let myself be ushered out of the purchasing section and true to her word, began a whistle stop tour of the rest of the building. We dipped our heads in and out of different open plan office spaces, saw various members of the management team, and took a look into the rest area, checked out the tea and coffee making facilities and locker room before she finally slowed down as we approached a large gallery wall.

“This is where the firm started out.” Her finger rested on a small grainy black and white photograph of a staffing group taken somewhere near the docks. I recognised some of the ice conveyors (now derelict on the quayside) in the background of the photo. True to old staffing photos, this one was taken outside to make the most of the natural light, and everyone was formally arranged on chairs, or standing to give the same tiered approach that school photos used to have. I scanned the faces. One of these could have been Lesley’s father.

The wall appeared to track the progress of the group over the last fifty years, and it moved from black and white photos to colour photos, with the fashions changing as the board progressed. Towards the right of the wall was the current staffing, a large photo, posed as an aerial shot with all of the staff arranged to make up a fish shape. Very artistic, but very difficult to actually see the faces as they were all so distant. It must have been taken from a building window or hi-jack platform. But the images between that first black and white shot and the last fish posed one were closer, so much so we could see the faces.

“Isn’t it funny how the fashion’s change,” I said, mainly to cover my reason for staring so intently into the groups of faces on the board. “You don’t seem to have much of a staff turnover.” I added, as I noticed the same faces cropping up in several photos.

“We’re quite proud of our staff retention actually. We lose the odd few each year, promotions, pregnancy, that sort of thing, but most stay with us. There are a lot of staff incentives and the pay is comparable with the other firms in the area.”

I spotted Lesley in one photo near the far right. And tracking back, found a man’s face that looked very similar, could that be her father?

“Are there still a lot of the original team here then?”

Phil laughed. “No. Some of these photos are from the early 50s when the fishing boom hit Grimsby. Most of those people have long since died. There’s a core team that’ve been here a while though. It was originally a family firm, and the family still have a seat on the board, though they’re not so much hands-on now.”

Phil reached across and pointed out a face standing right next to the one I was interested in. “That’s Donald Ramsden there. He’s the grandson of one of the founders. He’s still on the board now. A little grey around the edges, but still going strong.”

“And who’re these either side of him?” I asked as innocently as I could.

“Ah, that’s Geoff Allenby,” She pointed to the face that looked so similar to Lesley. “And the other there is Len Crossley. Len’s still with us, still managing Finance. Well, Finance Director I should say. He took over from Geoff when he - when he left,” she finished abruptly.

I looked up at her and realised I’d probably pushed her as far as I could. Her eyes were cold now, calculating, weighing me up. I wondered if I’d shown too much interest. She was meant to be interviewing me after all, not the other way around.

“So… that’s it. Tour over,” she said. “I’ll look forward to receiving your application.”

She struck out her hand again and I held my own as best I could.

“Thank you for showing me around.”

“I’ll see you through the door. It’s got a security latch.”

Just like my own faithful border collie she was going to escort me off the premises. There would be no time to snap a photo of the board. I turned and followed her retreating back. Geoff Allenby, Len Crossley, both of them in finance.

Len Crossley, Len Crossley, Len Crossley, I repeated the name to myself, hoping to hold it there until I could get outside and write it down in the notebook inside by handbag.

I wondered if the firm was hiding something; whether Lesley thought so too, and if that was why she’d applied to work here. Perhaps she wondered if the firm had anything to do with her father’s disappearance.

I traced my steps back past Marie on the desk and out into the car park. The cool breeze was welcome after the warm air conditioning of the office and I left my jacket loose around me, letting the wind push through my blouse, cooling me off.

Len Crossley, Geoff Allenby, I repeated to myself as I let myself back into Irene’s car. I fell into the seat, slammed the door behind me, and reached into my handbag in one fluid movement to write down the names before they slipped my mind, and then added the names Janice and Nicholas, too. Finally we had the break we were looking for.

Chapter Eighteen

“Oh, I didn’t find out much,” Irene said as we discussed the interview and her internet research over a cup of tea. She had a twinkle in her eye, and as she had insisted on feeding back first, I knew she’d found something, even though she was attempting badly to underplay it.

There was a loud crash behind me, and I turned and saw Lillian had tipped out her plastic food. She had tired of Irene’s cupboards and I had returned from Group Seafood to find her in Irene’s arms, little legs gripped either side of her waist, biscuit in hand. The cupboards had lost their interest and they’d been “nursery rhyming” for a while.

We’d returned to my place for feedback so Lillian could ransack her various play boxes and be among her familiar toys which might give us a little longer to talk. The plastic food was her current favourite. She could post it inside her various hamper-lid style boxes and gnaw on it when her teeth were playing up. And it was safer than matches, which for some reason I found Lucus explaining to her the night before. Why he thought showing her fire on sticks was a good idea I didn’t know. Must be a male thing.

I turned back to Irene.  “There was a short court report the day he was declared dead,” she said. “It went into some of the history of the case. The last time he was seen, the circumstances of his disappearance. It was all a little vague and about what I’d expect. But…,” she said, “It did say he worked at Group Seafood, as Finance Director.”

She’d stolen my thunder. Typical.

“So I looked up Group Seafood, and other than the promotional editorials in the Telegraph there wasn’t anything of note about the firm. So I went onto Companies House.”

“Companies House?”

“It’s where all the companies have to file their annual returns. All limited companies anyway. Group Seafood is limited, so their annual returns were on there. You can find out all sorts if you know where to look. Anyway, there was steady growth in the company looking at the filed accounts, except the year Geoff Allenby went missing. That year the returns looked a little low. I plotted them out, see?”

Irene brought out a hastily sketched graph. There had been a steady climb in the returns except one, which Irene had circled.

“Couldn’t that be expansion or something? They’ve moved premises through the years. Maybe they just invested back in the company that year, or changed offices, hired more staff?”

“Perhaps.” Irene folded up the piece of paper, which I had every reason to suspect would end up on our incident board, and pocketed it.

“Were there any reports of embezzling?” I asked. Something that big would surely have featured in some sort of newspaper report.

“No.”

“And there’s no way to find that out?”

“Not without auditing the accounts or having someone on the inside who can find out. But it’s a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“You think someone at Group Seafood killed him because he was embezzling from the company?”

“No… I think that’s highly unlikely. You’d normally just report that to the police or something. No, it’s more likely HE found out what someone else was doing.”

“Len Crossley’s the man to look at then,” I said, pleased at the eyebrow raise that prompted from my co-conspirator. “He became finance director after Lesley’s father disappeared.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“What else did you find out?”

“Nothing much.” I said. And unlike Irene, I meant it. “But I did bump into Janice, from baby group,” I added. “She works there.”

“Could be useful. Do you still see her?”

“I think so. She’s part time, and they’re still working out her hours. She used to be pretty regular, but she’s not so much now,” I said, trying to remember how often I’d seen her at group over the last few weeks. “We don’t really have anything in common.”

“Really?” Irene looked at Lillian.

“You haven’t met her,” I said. “She’s a yummy mummy.” I pulled a face, just in case the distaste in my voice hadn’t been apparent. Irene laughed.

“Another cup?” I asked.

Irene nodded and I popped the kettle back on and then gave her the blow by blow account of my tour of the office, showing her the photos I’d managed to snatch on my phone, and describing the timeline photo montage to her I had seen at the end of my visit.

“So this Phil woman said that the firm was still family owned?”

“Yes. Only they just have a presence on the board now. Most of it is run by directors by all accounts. It was a Ramsden, I think.” I said. “Donald… Douglas… David…,”

“Easily found out,” Irene said. “It’ll be on Companies House somewhere I’m sure.”

“So where does this leave us?” I asked. “We know Geoff Allenby has disappeared. We know he and Lesley both worked in the same firm. But it’s Lesley’s murder we’re trying to solve,” I reminded her,“not Geoff’s. That is by any definition a cold case,” I said, borrowing parlance from TV. “And we don’t have the police resources we need to investigate something like that.”

“No. But we’ve seen the connection.” Irene dunked a bourbon in her tea. I would have to start giving up on biscuits soon. I had lost all the pregnancy weight through breastfeeding, but that was all over with now and my clothes were beginning to get tight again. This would have to be the last packet. If there weren’t any in the house, I couldn’t eat them. I took another. Just to reduce the supply and therefore hasten the date there were no longer any biscuits available.

“Seeing the connection could be enough. It might mean the same killer. In which case we’re looking for someone older, not younger.”

“Equally there might not be any connection,” I reminded her. “It could be a coincidence.”

“And Lesley working in the same firm as her father?”

“That too,” I said, playing devil’s advocate. “She might just have a head for numbers. Things like that run in families and it’s a big firm, they’ve got lots of staff. So lots of vacancies come up.”

Irene shook her head disbelievingly. “No.”

“It doesn’t hurt keeping an open mind.” But I could see Irene had already connected the two murders. Somehow or other they were both part of the same puzzle, but as to what that puzzle looked like when completed neither of us knew.

“I think John mentioned he was collecting for the British Heart Foundation this month.”

“Sorry?”

“Neighbours. We need to get to know the neighbours. Find out how long they’ve lived there, what they’ve seen? Money just doesn’t vanish,” Irene said. “Money gets spent. Who had it? Where did it go? We need to find out. Do you have a telephone book?”

“I think so… somewhere.” Since the age of mobile phones and the internet, I’d not looked in a phone book for years. I was pretty sure they still arrived and if they did, and if Lucus had put it somewhere, it was sure to be in one of his many piles, probably one of the piles in the only in-built cupboard the house had arrived with. It was one of the many original features we had fallen in love with. I’d spent days stripping it back to bare wood and restoring it to its original glory.

I flipped the hook which held the second door closed, and started riffling. I usually went through Lucus’s piles once every six months and often found a mix of junk mail, bank statements, important letters and credit card offers. It was always a mystery why he kept some things and threw out others. We’d even had one instance where he’d taken cash back at the supermarket, pocketed the receipt and thrown away the notes.

Underneath all the paperwork, important or otherwise, I located what Irene wanted. The telephone directory.

“Is anyone even in it these days?” I asked, handing it over.

I watched Irene flipping through the directory. “Crossley… Crossley… there are two Ls, but he could be under his wife’s initial. It depends on who does the bills I suppose.”

I saw her running a finger down the list, counting.

“There’s only fifteen in total. We should be able to get around them all in a day. Which leaves us with -” She turned back to the front of the directory. “Al, Al, Al…no… she’s remarried, hasn’t she?” Irene looked up. “Not Allenby anymore.”

“No.” And Lesley’s surname was Cooper, that being Russ’s surname, so that didn’t help. I put my hands to my face thinking and looked up to find Lillian covering her eyes. She peeped. I smiled. I hadn’t meant to initiate peek-a-boo, but she’d taken the gesture as a game. I returned my hands to my face and purposely covered my eyes again, and then… peek-a-boo…, I opened them both wide like flaps either side of my face and smiled broadly. Irene smiled at me. Lillian squatted down behind her plastic kitchen.

“Where’s she gone?” Irene asked.

“I don’t know.”

I wasn’t sure how much Lillian understood in terms of our language, but she was good at picking up on the tones in our voices. It would have been a fascinating study if we could actually know for certain what children understood at this age.

“Maybe she’s disappeared?” I looked at Irene watching, waiting for Lillian to spring up, the telephone directory momentarily forgotten. She must have experience with children of her own, she must have… but there weren’t any photographs of family in her house, at least, not downstairs.

“I can’t see her. Can you?” We winked at each other.

“I wonder where she could have gone?”

“Maybe we should send out a search party?” Another shared look, and then we both turned to the kitchen, where Lillian was quite visible. I loved the way children thought just because they couldn’t see you, you couldn’t see them. It was definitely one of their more redeeming features. That naivety. Why could other people see you, if you couldn’t see them? It was perfectly logical in many ways.

We didn’t have to wait much longer. That pause was what she was waiting for. With comic timing, counted down by our repeated questions, Lillian sprang up, grinning from ear to ear.

“Oh! There she is!” We shouted in unison, and were rewarded with an even wider toothy grin. Irene was a natural. She must have had some first-hand experience.

The problem with children of course, was that once they got your attention, they wanted to keep it. So we had to run through the whole procedure another five times before her jump up finally sent her toppling over the kitchen, and being a cheaper version of the better known brands, picked up in the supermarket for £19.99 instead of Mothercare for £79.99, it didn’t hold her weight and the kitchen went crashing forwards, taking Lillian with it. I picked her up before she could let out an ear piercing wail and did my best to calm her down before it dawned on her what had happened.

“Maybe we should pick this up tomorrow,” Irene said. “I’ll go back through the clippings at home, see if I can find mention of her mother’s new surname, and I’ll call John. See if he wants a little help with his collections.”

I nodded. If there was one thing I had learned from this amateur investigation, it was that I was never going to look at a charity collection person in the same way again.

Chapter Nineteen

We hadn’t actually fixed up when and where we were going to meet, but I wasn’t surprised when Irene joined me on the morning dog walk.

“You look tired.”

“Early start,” I said, nodding at the toddler now asleep in her buggy. What I wouldn’t have given right then to dash back home and get 20 minutes Nanna nap myself, but I knew the minute the buggy stopped moving Lillian would wake up.

I had taken a slightly different route around the park, forgoing my usual figure of eight walk. With the arrival of spring the crows had started nesting again in one of the large ash trees, which meant the parent birds attacked anything they deemed a threat walking underneath. I had gotten away fairly lightly so far, but the owner of a sandy coloured Alsatian-cross had needed to beat off a few attacks with a stick and so I was missing out a certain section of the path and cutting across the green to avoid that particular tree.

Irene had caught up with me mid-way through the changed route. The buggy bounced and rattled in front of me, Lillian’s little head wobbling from one side to another.

“Got them.” She held up a carrier bag as she walked towards me. It was weighted at the bottom by a pair of collection canisters, their curved egg cup shapes bulging through the plastic bag. “Are you free this afternoon?”

I looked at her and raised my eyebrows in a “What’d’ you think” look. She smiled. She knew perfectly well I was. What else did I have to do apart from tangle with Lillian, wash, iron, clean the house, mow the lawn, or get a meal on the table for Lucus returning home? Before we started on the investigation I had begun calling him at lunch time to find out what time he was likely to arrive home, so I could time the meal to perfection. I had felt myself losing it. Slipping slowly into an attempt at “Mrs Beaton domestic goddess,” but without the servants needed to beat two dozen eggs for two hours. Mind you, even with the servants she had died young. Housewifery clearly wasn’t good for you.

“Good. We’ll leave after lunch. I’ve worked out the route. We’ll need the buggy, of course, and if you wanted, you could bring Moss, but I think we’ll have a better chance of chatting to people without him.”

“What’s the plan?” I asked her.

“Oh, we’re just collecting for the British Heart Foundation. A few doors either side of the target house should do it. I think we can do most of the addresses today. And tomorrow we can try the Mother’s.”

“Have you found out her name?”

“She was listed in the original newspaper article about Lesley’s murder. Gill Rand. Rand’s a more common name, but her husband also got a mention, Pete. So I’ve narrowed it down to Ps and Gs. Eight houses total. I don’t think we’ll get to them today, though. Not before Lucus comes home. And you’ll need to get his meal cooked of course…,” she smiled at me. She knew exactly what my issue was. “See you at one.”

And with that she loped off ahead of me at her speed walking pace. She was going somewhere. She never ambled at the best of times, but if she had to be somewhere, her pace quickened to a level much faster than I could keep up with, with a dog and pushchair.

“Where are you going?” I called after her.

“Library,” she said, over her shoulder. “Just realised my books were due back yesterday. Don’t want to get a fine!” And she was gone, behind one of the many shrub borders that skirted the figure of eight path. By the time I’d crossed the grass and was in a position to see the path to town, she’d already made it up to the fork and had gone behind another set of shrubs.

I shook my head. One minute we were plotting an investigation into a murder, possibly two, and the next, we were both continuing with our normal lives, she with her library books, and me with my baby minding. Maybe she needed this as much as me. Perhaps being a pensioner was boring her as much as being a mother was boring me. We were both out to pasture. Just different pastures. I would eventually clear my cul-de-sac of parenting and return to a more normal work-life balance, but for Irene her cul-de-sac of retirement was more like a dead end. One day it would just be over. There was no return to anything. She’d passed her useful point. Society had decided she had nothing more to contribute. All she had left were her hobbies, and trying to eke out her pension each week.

I thought back to the funeral. Pete and Gill Rand, Mother and step-father, the grandparents, friends, family, work colleagues. Then those missing; the sister Lou still in Thailand, home soon, the missing father, Geoff Allenby, who’d never returned, and Russell Cooper, the incarcerated husband. The family was already in pieces, scattered pieces at that. Lesley dead, Lou in Thailand, Geoff missing, presumed dead. Just what exactly was going on?

I cupped Moss’s ball and threw it ahead of me, watching as Moss’s passage into the grass changed the glittering white dew, to a track of green wetness. He reached the ball and started the biting routine he did; making sure it was definitely dead. Then, just to ensure there was no life left in the ball at all, and that it wasn’t going to run away again, he dropped it and went through the biting thing again; squeezing the ball between his teeth and juggling it forwards and backwards in his mouth, causing a hissing bubbling squoosh squoosh squoosh sound, as saliva got into every available pore in the foam rubber. It was disgusting. The ball was disgusting. It was one of the main reasons we used the dog whacker to throw it. Once he’d finished with it, the ball was hot, slimy and dripping. Not something you’d want to pick up with your bare hands.

Geoff’s disappearance might have nothing to do with Lesley’s murder, or they might have been very much connected. The only way to find out was to investigate both, and if Irene was right, if money was involved, then finding the houses was critical. While neighbours rarely spent much time with each other anymore, and whatever was behind closed doors tended to stay there, money was obvious. How many parties, how much building work, the condition of the property… neighbours noticed things like that.

We’d had two sets of neighbours already in the relatively short time we’d lived in our house. We were outgoing sorts and had got to know both, inviting them round for dinner and in turn getting invited back to their houses. At the moment we had two families either side of us, which would be great for Lillian as she grew up, and also great for the noise levels in our house at night. They’d both been through that baby stage. They knew the screaming was short lived. There would be no complaints.

If we could find the right house and the right neighbours I knew we could find out what we needed to know, depending of course, on how good Irene was at getting them into a conversation.

Chapter Twenty

“Where on earth did you get that?” I asked her – pointing to a white dog collar she now sported at the top of a blue clerical shirt. “Isn’t impersonating a vicar illegal?”

“It is, but it’s going to give us a little more sway at the doors.” She was shameless. Sometimes I felt impressed, other times I felt frightened at the lengths she’d go to. “Besides its only illegal if you aren’t a vicar.”

“You’re a vicar?” I asked, incredulous.

“No. Used to be a lay reader though, so it’s almost the same thing.”

“A lay reader? Do they wear dog collars?”

“No. But the last female vicar we had at the church went through a phase when her washing machine broke down and this ended up in my ironing pile one week and, well…,”

She didn’t finish the sentence. I’d seen Irene’s ironing pile. I’d even offered to take some of it home. I was one of those unusual people who enjoyed ironing. It gave me an excuse to watch the television. I wasn’t one to sit idle, and having a set of shirts to work through gave me permission and time to watch a film in the evenings. She’d refused so far and after my initial offer, the pile had reduced, but recently I’d noticed it inching once again towards the ceiling. I could only assume Irene had a lot more clothes than me, as she never seemed to be short of something to wear.

I sighed. Nothing phased Irene and I knew she wasn’t about to be stopped once she had an idea. Clearly she thought people would be more comfortable chatting to a vicar. She was probably right, and oddly, she looked comfortable in the shirt. She could have been a vicar.

“So what’s the plan then?”

“First off, we identify the house we want, check it’s not vacant or anything. Then we hit the houses left and right and a few doors either way, taking in the target house as we go.”

“And if there’s no one in, at the target house?”

“Then we just hit houses left and right until we can find someone who confirms it’s the one we’re after.”

“And what do you want me to do?”

“Just stand there with Lillian and the collection canister. That’s all. But… you’ve seen the photos. You know the face of the man we’re looking for. Just let me know if we find him.”

I may have seen the photo, but I wasn’t sure that was going to help us, unless he was actually at home. Knowing the face only helped us if we actually saw the face after all, and if he was still financial director, the chances were Len Crossley would be at work.

*

The drive to the first house on the list was uneventful, but it was clear from the street as soon as we arrived this wouldn’t be the house of a financial director, unless he was living way below his means.

Some addresses Irene had automatically ruled out based on their location within Grimsby. We knew for instance, it was unlikely a financial director would live anywhere on the Grange or Nunsthorpe Estates. While council houses might well be a thing of the past, those council house style estates were unlikely to hide a Financial Director. Other roads in Grimsby and Cleethorpes weren’t so easy to rule out. In areas where neither Irene nor I were familiar, it was only by driving to the street address we could be sure.

This road wasn’t ex-council housing, but it didn’t have the right air to it at all. There were no front gardens, the facades were a mix of pebble dash, brick and harling. The windows were a miss mash of original bays, double glazed bays, and in one case, the bay had been removed entirely and turned into a garage. He wouldn’t be living here. We drove off without even pulling over to check.

The next address was in New Waltham in one of the modern estates, and gave off a much more likely air. We got out. I bundled Lillian into her buggy and we set off.

Irene had insisted we park around the corner from the target house. Tradecraft she called it. We didn’t want to look as if we were only targeting one house after all. A car on the road would make it too obvious. So we parked up and went into the cul-de-sac on foot. We were looking for number 15, and looking at the numbering, it was clear this was one of the roads which went around in a loop rather than the traditional odds and evens style placement for the house numbers. We counted around. Fifteen would be on the opposite side of the road. We crossed over and started towards it.

It was a bright day. The gardens sported a mix of spring flowers, and a heady scent of hyacinth washed down the road. The pungent smell took me right back to my childhood so fast, it was as if a wormhole had just opened up ahead of me. I could visualise the brown and orange table cloth, the white pottery pot containing the bulbs, the wooden writing bureau, magnolia wood chip walls, red carpet, and that grip in my chest which had been present throughout my childhood.

Things hadn’t been easy at home back then. My father only needed a hairline trigger to set him off. We spent our days slinking around, saying very little, trying to make ourselves as small as we could, so as not to spark off anything that could lead to a bruise on my mother’s face, or another hole in the kitchen door.

Spring for me back home meant we could get out of the house much more easily; spending time on the streets, meandering in and out of shops, playing in the fields around the back of the house, or ambling along the bank of the river which had washed in a loop around the town. In theory my brother and I were banned from spending time near the river. It was fast flowing and dangerous, but it was no more dangerous than our father. So we stayed out of sight and out of mind.

I shuddered.

“Are you OK?” Irene asked. The shadow of memories must have crossed my face.

“Yes. I’m fine. Just thinking.” I hadn’t told Irene about how things were at home. I rarely spoke of it to anyone. Lucus knew. He knew more about me than anyone. But we were married. There were few secrets between us. Just two house break ins, a gate crashed funeral, a tour of an office for a job I had no intention of applying for…

We walked on, the interrupting memories distancing themselves once again as my nose became accustomed to the heady aroma. By the time we reached the first house, I was back to normal. The past forgotten.

Number 14. A well-kept garden. Carefully weeded borders and scalloped edging to the lawn which was so flat you could have played croquet on it. The developers here must have laid the lawns when the houses were built. Everyone had a square in front of their homes. Every one was flat and most were carefully maintained, though rectangular, rather than scalloped like this one.

There were primulas in the borders, a few evergreen low cropped perennials, and a couple of those plants that looked like they’d been touched by frost all year round. I was no gardener. I didn’t know their common names, let alone the Latin ones. I just knew I didn’t like them. They were old people’s plants and so it was no surprise to me when the door bell was answered by an old woman.

I say old, but in truth she was probably not much older than Irene. She had a stooped back, white hair which framed her wrinkled face like a halo, and one of those puckered, dry-lipped mouths which always reminded me of George’s Grandmother from the Roald Dahl books. However she had a friendly smile and on spotting Lillian, a twinkle danced into her eyes.

“Is she allowed a lolly?” she asked me.

“Not really,” I said, trying not to sound too disapproving. I’d already succumbed to biscuits, I wasn’t about to start on boiled sweets. “She’s still a little young.”

“Oh. That’s a shame. Never mind. When you’re older, sweetie.”

“Bah!” exclaimed Lillian in her friendliest tones, and kicked her feet in the buggy, in that up down, up down way children her age had. Two legs together, moving in synchrony. I wasn’t sure I could do that myself now. At least, not with the range of movement Lillian had. The old woman smiled back.

“How can I help?” she asked.

“Oh, we’re collecting for the British Heart Foundation.” Irene rattled her tin. “Do you have any spare change? Coppers is great. Sooner it’s full, sooner we can stop,” she joked.

“Let me see what I can do.” The old woman shuffled off into the house.

“I feel wrong, taking money from old people,” I whispered to Irene.

“It is going to charity.” Irene whispered back. “We aren’t keeping it. John collects for the British Heart Foundation every year. If it’s any consolation, he’s worse on his pins than she is, so we’re doing him a favour.”

The old woman returned, proffering a handful of loose change. “Will this do?”

“That’s wonderful,” Irene cooed. “Thank you so much. It’s lovely to find someone in this time of the day. Do a lot of people round here work full time?”

The old lady straightened up a little and looked around the close. I’m sure it wasn’t my imagination, but I could visibly see her swell. Someone had asked her about something she knew and I could tell she was looking forward to providing an answer.

“Oh, yes. Quite a lot of these are owned by young families now. Most people my age have moved on.”

“I see. Oh dear. We might be wasting our time, Ruth,” Irene looked at me. I tried to look crestfallen; I guessed that was the look she was wanting.

“Next door should be in.” She pointed to the house we had on our target list. “Roger’s lived here about the same length of time as me. We’re both looking to move on. It’s the stairs you see. Not good for my arthritis…,”

I didn’t really listen as Irene and the old lady continued the conversation. It wasn’t relevant; the man next door was called Roger, not Len. Instead I knelt down by Lillian and tried to pull her socks back on. As games went, sock slinging was a good one. Had there been an Olympic sport for it, Lillian might have done quite well. I fiddled with her stubby little feet and her stubby little socks while Irene tried to extricate herself from a discussion on tomatoes and then one about hydrangeas, which, I guessed from the various looks down the lawn, were the two biggish bushes on the front. Eventually Irene offered to pray for her knees and we shuffled off back down the driveway.

“If they’re all like that, this could take longer than I was hoping,” Irene whispered. She waved at the lady on the doorstep.

“Kill me when I get THAT old will you?” she hissed through gritted teeth.

I laughed. “You probably ARE that old Irene. You just feel young.”

“Oi!” She dug me in the ribs. I laughed again and we walked towards the next house in the cul-de-sac.

“Let’s hope Roger isn’t in,” Irene said as we walked up the path. “Then we have an excuse to leave early.”

We got to the door. Irene paused, looking behind her. The other lady was still at her doorstep.

“He’s a little deaf,” she called out. “You might need to knock loudly.”

So much for that idea… with an audience, we would have to canvas every building on the street.

*

Lillian was on her second box of raisins by the time we pulled up in the next cul-de-sac, this time in Old Waltham. It was a small T-shaped road with a string of 1950s brick houses.

The bricks were the old rusty coloured ones, giving the dead end road a real dark appearance. There was an occasional extension appended to the standard three up three down house, and a couple of Velux windows that indicated a loft development, but there was nothing garish. Everything was in keeping with the area. The lawns, in general, well-tended. The flower beds were much more mature than the houses we had just visited, there were even a few hydrangea bushes, if indeed those light green leafy structures were what the old lady had been discussing with Irene.

The scent of hyacinth was missing, but there was a hint of freshly mown grass, and if I wasn’t mistaken, horse manure, where someone had been digging traditional natural fertiliser into their flower beds. They’d be popular in the summer as the dung heated up and released all the trapped horsey scent.

One house had an arch of yellow blossoms. A shrub of some kind they had trained over the doorway and on the step of that house sat two young girls, carefully picking off the flowers within reach. Given a few hours, they’d have cleared every blossom up to waist height, but they were enjoying themselves and the two mothers in the garden sharing a cup of tea and catching the weak spring sun didn’t seem concerned. Their children were quietly occupied, happy and outside. What did it matter if they were deflowering the shrub?

We were looking for house number seven and unlike the previous road, these houses followed the traditional odds and evens system, and house number seven was close to the end of the road, a door away from the girls.

Irene walked up to the fence.

“Hello,” she called. “We’re collecting for the British Heart Foundation. Could you help by sparing a few coins? Loose change is fine. Every little helps as they say.” Irene grinned broadly. Nobody could resist her. The two women didn’t either. The visiting mother riffled through her handbag, the other mother tripped inside to check out their loose change pot.

“How old?” I asked, pointing at the two girls.

“Three and a bit.” The young mother grinned back. “I remember that age,” she said, looking at Lillian.

“Does it get better?” I asked.

“It changes,” she said. “The baby bits go, but you get new problems. Tantrums and stuff. It’s just as hard, but in a different way. And the talking… oh the incessant talking…. Girl?” She pointed at Lillian who was in fairly neutral colours today.

“Yes.”

“You have it all to look forward to.” She rolled her eyes knowingly, and dropped a few coppers into Irene’s proffered tin.

The other woman came back and dropped a five pound note into the canister.

“Oooh, thank you,” said Irene as if she really meant it, and that this collection was the real reason for us roaming the streets.

“My gran died of heart problems last year,” she said by way of explanation.

“It seems like a lovely area,” Irene said, looking around.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” the home owner said. “It’s not bad actually, just the odd bad egg. Her at number four is a bit of an odd ball, and number seven two doors up has a massive motorbike that sets off all the car alarms down here at two in the morning. And music? Blimey, you can tell when he’s got his friends round for the evening. I’ve complained to the council a few times about it. They don’t do anything. But… well… you know what it’s like with kids.”

I did indeed.

Irene gave me a look, which indicated she thought it was doubtful our man was at number seven. Len Crossley clearly didn’t strike her as a loud music playing motorbike rider. We said goodbye and for the sake of appearances did the rest of the road, collecting a fair amount of loose shrapnel from the local residents, who for the most part, were in, rather than out. Clearly the older houses attracted a very different clientele. Number seven was empty, but there were also two doorbells on the back door, which meant they were flats. Neither name in the clear strip in the doorbells was Crossley.

Strike two.

*

The third road we pulled up outside was in Holton Le Clay, a commuter village just outside Grimsby. Again it was a fairly modern housing estate, but nothing overtly ostentatious. It must have been built sometime in the 90s, as it had that air of uniformity about it.

The crescent was populated with a mix of semi and fully detached houses and bungalows. Some had been extended; some had loft or dormer conversions. There were grass lawns at the front of every house with borders and shrubs and from what I could tell mature gardens extended behind each one as well. Each house had a driveway and most had a garage or at least a car port. The brickwork was that limestone effect brickwork. Not the red brick typical to Grimsby, nor the more orangey brickwork of the modern estates.

Irene and I exchanged looks as we parked up. If we were going to find Len from the telephone directory entries, this looked like the right road. It shouted “rich middle class” loudly and proudly, two houses had caravans parked in the driveways, and one even had a motorboat on a trailer. Oh yes, if we were going to find a financial director with his hand in the till, then this would be the place.

We started counting down the numbers, odds and evens on this road, and were a little disappointed to find it wasn’t the one with the boat in the drive. Well, I was, Irene didn’t seem too perturbed, even when we realised that of all of the houses on the estate, the one we were looking for was the least adjusted of them all.

“Perhaps he has a villa in Spain?” she suggested.

We walked up to number eight; the house next door to the target property and the one which also sported the yacht.

Irene rang the doorbell, and we waited to see if anyone was home.

The glass wasn’t frosted as such, but had those leafy patterns in the glass which made it opaque. I could just make out the approach of a figure through the clear spots in the design, something black blocking the light. The door opened, revealing an attractive man sporting an apron. He looked about as gay as you could get, which was to say, lithe, attractive and very easy on the eye.

“Hello?”

Irene gave him the usual collection patter and he raked through a pot near the door for a wallet, out of which he tipped all his loose change and dropped it into Irene’s canister.

“Lived here long?” Irene asked.

“A few years,” he grinned back disarmingly. Gay… why were the good men always gay?

“That your boat?”

“Ben’s. It’s needing a bit of repair work on the back.” He pointed to a cracked piece of fibreglass. “We’re taking it in this weekend.”

“I bet you’re popular in the summer,” Irene quipped. Ben’s other half smiled. “Do you take the neighbours out?”

“Nah. Most folks keep to themselves around here. Don’t actually think they like us both living here, you know, husband and husband.” His choice of words was deliberate. He was edging for a response. I nudged Irene. She’d clearly forgotten her dog collar. She smiled, seemingly oblivious.

“What, even next door? I’m sure you’re both charming neighbours.”

“Len? Oh, he’s a bit homophobic. The wife’s OK though. We chat to her over the garden fence now and again.”

“Everyone seems to have had a lot of work done on their houses around here.” Irene had picked up on the name, and I could see she was trying to continue the conversation, find out as much as she could.

“Yeah. Most have. It’s cheaper to extend than move isn’t that what they say? Ben’s talking of a loft conversion. Wants to put an office up there.”

“Have you been round any of the other’s just to see what sort of space is created?”

“Nah. Like I say, everyone tends to keep to themselves. You can’t really just go around knocking on doors and asking for a look-see.”

He had a point, but it didn’t stop Irene knocking on people’s doors, or indeed breaking into their houses with a set of lock picks for a look-see when the mood took her. But then, she wasn’t a typical person, as I’d found out.

“So… extend or move, or, I suppose swan off on long foreign holidays if you have the money? I always wanted to travel.”

“We get away a fair bit.” Ben’s partner smiled.

“And next door?”

“No. Got kids at uni still I think. All the money goes on them I expect. Bloody expensive there now. Tuition fees, accommodation... gave up after a year.” How did he not realise Irene was probing him? He was giving away so much detail, and seemingly without realising. This must have been how con-artists worked. Irene had clearly missed her calling.

“What do you do now?” Irene asked, continuing the patter.

“Oh, Tescos shelf stacking at the moment. I do evenings mainly, we catch up over dinner. Hence,” he gestured to the pinny.

“You’re the cook. How lovely,” Irene smiled. “Well, I better let you get back to your catering. Thank you for the change.” She smiled again, and lofted the canister in thanks which was, by now, quite heavy, after our street treading.

Irene’s gentle probing had given us what we wanted to know. Len had children at uni, so that explained where some of his director’s salary was going. By the look of his house he wasn’t particularly well off; comfortably so, but not rolling in cash; and unless he had a vast off shore savings pot for retirement, the chances were he wasn’t embezzling from the company either. Which was good as it closed one line of enquiry, but bad, as it closed the only line of enquiry we had!

Irene didn’t say anything until Ben’s husband had closed the door behind us and we’d walked past the boat and along the concrete driveway back onto the pavement.

“Looks like we’ve found him,” she said.

We both looked at the house next door. There were no cars in the driveway and no signs of life. The lawn could have done with a trim and was sporting a few daisies. It wasn’t as bad as my lawn, which was large enough now to sport dandelion flowers, but it was still higher than the average we had seen so far on our travels. Otherwise the house was in remarkable shape. Had I been house hunting, I would have agreeably noticed the health of the facia boards, the downpipes and guttering, which were all in good condition, lacked moss and weeds, and didn’t have any noticeable leaks. The tiles were all intact, the windows double glazed, and there were no failed panes. The lawn, while long, was well kept and edged, unlike my own lawn, where the grass always managed to go to seed where I couldn’t easily run the mower. The flower beds were without weeds and their daffodils, which had clearly flowered early and died back, had been tied into little neat knots of leaves.

We walked down the driveway to the side door which served as the front door, the same as Lesley’s house despite the huge differences in age and style between the two properties. There was a door bell. Irene pushed it. Lillian giggled to herself in the buggy and pointed at the back garden. I followed her gaze into a garden replete with spinning wind catchers and various garden ornaments. Money but no taste, I thought to myself.

We waited. Irene pushed the bell again. We waited some more. Irene peered in through the letter box.

“Irene!” I hissed.

“What? Is anyone watching?”

I turned around and looked behind me. “No.”

“Good.”

She walked around the side of the house into the back garden.

“Bah! Bah!” shouted Lillian, rocking the buggy, keen for us to do the same so she could explore the shiny things. I rolled it forwards, just to the edge of the wall. Irene was already peering into the windows.

“Forty-two inch telly,” she announced. “New suite. Well, relatively new. Probably last seasons. They aren’t spending any money they shouldn’t have at home.”

“No,” I agreed. Even though we didn’t have a 42 inch television or a new suite, we knew plenty of people who had, and none of them, as far as I was aware, were embezzling money. “Shall we go?”

Irene walked back towards me.

“No taste,” she said, taking in the garden with a sweeping gesture. “Looks like the cemetery on a good day.”

It did at that. What the need was to litter graves with garden ornaments I didn’t know. But the new section of the cemetery was full of them. Wind catchers, spinners, and wind chimes all giving the dead a voice they’d probably have loathed in life.

We headed back to the car.

“Is that it then?” I asked.

“Now we know where they live, we’ll have to pop back in another guise.”

“Another guise?”

“They aren’t ruled out just because they’ve got no taste and they aren’t obviously flaunting their money.” Her tone was that of a teacher reprimanding her pupil. “There’s off shore accounts to consider. Holidays. Who knows what people spend money on when they’ve got it. Not everyone spends it in the same way.”

“I suppose.” I heard myself adopting ‘sullen teenager’ in response to her teacher tones.

“First though, we need to find Mr and Mrs Rand.”

Chapter Twenty One

Mr and Mrs Rand were somewhat easier to locate.

“I think we’ve found the money,” I said.

The house was extended, the loft converted. There had been new pine cladding and new rendering to the outside of the property which had all been painted a pale antique green. It looked very modern, which was a shame, as it was, underneath, still a standard Grimsby 1950s home, with two big front bay windows, and a standard box-shape rooms-above-rooms layout, providing of course you ignored the extension, or rather extensions, which encompassed a big conservatory style room on one side, and a garage with room on top on the other.

The houses either side of the one we were staring at were standard construction. In other words, rust coloured bricks, curved storm porches which had been sealed with an addition of a front door, probably sometime in the 90s. The Rand’s house had a new proper porch built onto the front, clad again in pine. I say proper porch, but on closer inspection this one had the modern twist of a glass roof, rather than a standard tile construction. Had the house been in extensive grounds of its own it would have looked quite delightful, but smack in the middle of a housing estate, where all the houses looked the same, this modern rendition of the standard house looked nothing short of an eyesore.

“Don’t judge too soon.” Irene chided me. “There could be something else going on.”

“What?” I asked.

“Look.” I followed Irene’s point to a white transit van parked in the driveway emblazoned with the words RAND CONSTRUCTION. The stepfather was a builder then. Perhaps that explained things. Maybe this was supposed to be an advert for his services. Mind you, even at cost price, materials were still expensive for a renewal project like the one I was staring at.

“First things first,” Irene said, and turned into the neighbouring driveway. This house too had had an extension I noted. Only this one was brick, and in keeping with the property, barely noticeable. In fact, considering the house next door, this extension was quite understated and tasteful.

She rang the doorbell.

It was a standard buzzer noise, nothing quite as dramatic as when doorbells first started to come in and played all manner of tunes. There was some part of me that missed the 80s doorbells which chimed “Yankee Doodle” or “Big Ben” when you pressed them. There was another bigger part of me that was grateful we’d all moved on as a nation.

Within a few minutes a shadow appeared at the door and I could hear the woman behind murmuring to someone further into the house in a tone of voice that indicated it was probably either a little one, or a very old person. I’d noticed many people adopted the same tone with dotty elderly relatives – inappropriately I might add with my NHS hat on.

The door opened, revealing a blond haired woman. Her age was hard to calculate. I was bad at guessing ages at the best of times, but she looked in her mid to late fifties if I had to make a guess. A little too much mascara, a crease of moisturiser in the wrinkles, where the skin had puckered back up and the cream hadn’t fully dissolved in. Her hair was up in a messy folded back ponytail, spraying out behind her in a fan of peroxide white. Her roots were darker, her eyebrows plucked to within an inch of becoming pencilled back in. And oddly she looked a little familiar. Oh, for a Whats - is - name .

“Hello,” Irene smiled winningly. “I was wondering if you’d mind making a donation towards the British Heart Foundation?” She held up the collection canister to illustrate her request. I smiled politely. After nearly 20 houses canvassed in this way I was beginning to feel very much like a spare part. A girl with a buggy accompanying a collection lady for a sympathy vote.

Her face was really familiar. I tried not to stare.

Just as the woman looked about to reply, I heard a soft padding noise on the other side of the door, and then a chubby fingered hand reached around the bottom edge and pulled the door inwards. A little face peered around. A very familiar little face.

“Careful, Nicholas,” chided the woman. Nicholas… Janice… this must be her mother, or sister maybe… she looked a little young.

“Is that Janice’s Nicholas?” I asked, smiling, as the boy and my daughter exchanged toothy grins and points. Irene looked at me. It was unlike me to interrupt the doorstep patter.

“Yes. Do you know each other?”

“Baby group at St Hugh’s,” I said smiling. “She’s not been for a few weeks though.”

“She’s just gone back to work.” The woman informed me, not realising I already knew. “So I’m on childcare. I’m her mum,” she added.

“Oh… you don’t look old enough to be a grandmother!” I exclaimed in my best “how to win friends and influence people” voice. Irene raised her eyebrows at me. I’d learned from the best after all. Besides, this woman didn’t look old enough to be Janice’s mother, she really didn’t. There were thirty years between me and my mother; there must have been barely 20 between this woman and Janice. Either that, or I was just an old mother, and Janice was a lot younger than I thought.

“I started young,” she responded, smiling.

“He’s walking then!” I said, bending down to Nicholas’s level. He grinned back at me.

“Yes. Started just the other day. Janice was off work, thankfully. She was so worried about missing it. How old?” she asked, bending down to Lillian’s buggy. Irene stepped back. For once she was the spare part.

“Thirteen months,” I said. “She’ll be talking soon I hope.”

“Thirteen months… time flies doesn’t it? I remember when Nicholas was born. I was there. Her other half doesn’t do hospitals. I was the birth partner.”

“That’s where I’ve seen you before!” I exclaimed. “You were with Janice at the prenatal classes.”

“Yes. I thought I knew the face.” We smiled at each other. Then Janice’s mum turned to Irene. “Sorry. Baby talk. Did you, I mean, I’m sure Nicholas would love a bit of company. Have you time for a coffee? Or are you on a timer for the… what are you collecting for again?”

“British Heart Foundation,” said Irene. “And no, we aren’t on a timer. And actually I’d love a sit down. We’ve been traipsing around the streets for a while.”

It was a white lie. We’d been around the streets certainly, but 7 houses canvassed for money this morning was hardly an exhausting undertaking. We’d had more time in the car driving from street A to street B.

“I’m Fiona,” she shook Irene’s hand.

“Irene,” Irene shook back.

“Ruth,” I added, as we weren’t in shaking distance. She smiled back. With introductions made Fiona stepped back and swung open the door to let us into the house.

I hoisted Lillian out of her buggy and plonked her on her feet just inside the door. The two children giggled at each other and then stumpily ran off into the house, Fiona in pursuit.

“Just lift the buggy inside the door,” she called over her shoulder.

Irene looked at me. “What luck!” she whispered.

“I know,” I whispered back and then called after Fiona. “Watch your cupboards! She loves cupboards.”

There was a loud crash of plastic from inside what I took to be the living room the children had just run into, followed by a couple of happy “Uh oh!” sounds.

“Don’t worry!” Fiona called. “It’s just plastic food. Tea or coffee?”

“Tea, please.” I rolled the buggy onto the plastic sheeting just inside the door, which clearly was there to protect a very nice beige carpet from things like buggy wheels. Another buggy was folded up against the wall. It was a sporty city model. A three wheeler, low footprint style which I’d been eyeing up enviously in town. My own was more a “three wheel 4x4 country model” which had a massive footprint, but was excellent for dog walking. As a town buggy however it was useless. It had the turning circle of a snow plough and did about as much damage as one running between the rails in Mothercare, sending little two-piece outfits scattering to either side.

“Tea, too,” Irene called out, as we closed the front door behind us. We gave each other a look. This really was a spot of luck. We wouldn’t have to carefully interrogate Fiona on the doorstep; instead we could take our time extracting information over a leisurely cup of tea. Lillian was occupied in a house full of toys and I could legitimately tell Lucus I’d spent some time with a woman from baby group. It was win/win.

I dropped onto the sofa in the living room and watched as Fiona brought through a couple of steaming mugs of tea. Nicholas and Lillian were busy playing next to each other. Not together as such, children this age rarely did, but companionably looking at things side by side.

Nicholas had found something with a wheel and was happily rolling it backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, watching with animation as the wheels turned round and round.

“He likes the buggy best,” Fiona said, watching me watching him. “He’ll sit for hours just pushing it forwards and backwards in the hall. It’s a boy thing.”

“You have boys?” Irene asked, sipping at the hot tea. She had an asbestos mouth. She could consume hot liquids in a matter of seconds. I blew on mine and watched as the steam rose. It was way too hot yet.

“One of each. Janice is the youngest. Paul is older by two years. He’s working over in Doncaster now for Nisa.”

“Married?”

“Girlfriend, but as good as. He should marry her really, it would make things easier for the kids.”

Irene looked out of the window. From our position on the sofa we could just see the white van parked in the drive way next door.

“I can’t believe that house,” Irene said, by way of an opening gambit.

“I know!” Fiona leaned towards us. “It must have cost a small fortune. But they aren’t short of a bob. Not since the life insurance paid out.”

It was a conversational bread crumb. She wasn’t a gossip…. no… nothing like that. But if we asked, well, she’d have to tell us, on the quiet. I’d seen this sort of behaviour before, from Irene usually. She was the master of bread crumbing, giving you just enough information that you had to ask the obvious question. A breadcrumb was there to pique interest, to make you want to know more. It worked, obviously, as we were here to find out as much as we could, and the fact we had a willing volunteer was just going to make our goals so much easier.

“Life insurance?” I asked, providing the appropriate response. My question was rewarded with a conspiratorial face and a shuffle towards us on the chair. She was going to let us in on the secret…the goss.

“She lost her husband. And when I say lost, I mean lost. Just up and vanished one day. No one knows what happened to him. Of course, they couldn’t do anything until he was legally declared dead. But the insurance must have paid out. Something paid for all that work.”

“Are they still doing work on it now?” Irene said innocently. “I see they’ve a van out front.”

“Oh, no. She remarried. That’s her new man’s van. They met when he started my extension.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Well, her other half had been missing a good year by that point. No sign of him. She’d given up looking. We all thought he was dead. They never found a body, but then, they don’t always. Left her bringing up two kids he did. Real hard it was for her, too. And then, Pete comes along. Right Jack the Lad he was. Well. Something started between those two while I was out working. Came back one day and found her passing him tea over the fence and they were getting on like a house on fire. Pleased for her I was. He seemed like a nice bloke. He is actually. Well, it took him nearly 16 weeks to build my little extension, and after that, they just kept seeing each other. I got invited to the wedding. Right nice bash it was. They had to wait until the legal declaration came through first of course.”

“Of course,” Irene and I had been nodding, shaking our heads at the appropriate moments, and mirroring her posture all the way through Fiona’s story. Just like I’d been shown at university. So far we’d not been told anything of use, but the door was well and truly open. It just needed another little shove. I waited to see what tack Irene would take first.

“What do you think happened to him then?”

“Oh… I don’t know. Bill across the way thinks he probably jumped off the Humber Bridge. It happens.”

“What do you think?”

“Well... They weren’t a happy couple. Always arguing. I just thought he’d finally had enough. Police said he took a case full of clothes, passport, wallet. If you ask me he’s living somewhere else. New name, new life.”

“So all this building work…,”

“Oh, that all happened a few years ago. Like I said, we all think it must have been the life insurance. Seven years isn’t it? Or something like that for them to be declared dead? He must have had a fairly good policy. He was a Finance Director at one of the seafood places up on the Pyewipe. They certainly weren’t short of a bob or two. Them two girls went all over when they were young. Cyprus, Spain, Disneyworld. Made us quite jealous. Janice never got to go anywhere like that. We were lucky if we made Butlins most years.”

Lucus and I would be lucky if we just managed it to Butlins as well, but I didn’t add anything. I’d already had a cautionary look from Irene. She knew we weren’t terrifically well off. People always assumed teachers were well paid. They probably were when compared to minimum wage earners, but while we were comfortably off, we certainly weren’t rolling in it, and the luxuries of a cleaner, and regular cases from the wine club, had been put to an end when I left work. The fact that the idea of Butlins would have broken Lucus out into a cold sweat, meant we wouldn’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. Weekend city breaks taking in art galleries and museums and small babies didn’t exactly go hand in hand.

“And what did the kids make of the builder then?” Irene asked, slurping on the cooling tea. “Bit of a come down from financial director…,”

“Oh, they loved him. He used to throw them around like he did the bricks. Swinging them round and round the garden. You’d never have guessed they weren’t related, well, except for the eldest. Lesley always looked like her dad really, but Lou, she could have been Pete’s daughter they looked so alike. It all happened so long ago. They probably can’t even remember their real father.”

“It’s nice when things work out that way,” Irene said, taking a big gulp now. I looked down at my own cup. It was just at the point I could start sipping it if I was careful.

I looked at Irene as Fiona sat back in her chair again. She fidgeted and looked vaguely uncomfortable, as if she had more to say but didn’t know if she should, and remained silent. Perhaps a murder was taking gossip too far, even for her, but we needed to know what she knew and I couldn’t wait for her conscience.

“Janice told me she worked with the girl that was murdered the other week,” I said, as if this was a new conversation, nothing connected to anything we’d talked about already.

Irene caught my eye. Well done.

“She did? Oh yes, yes. They do work at the same place. I forgot that. Different departments. Janice has been quite upset by it all. Actually, we all are. Lesley lived just next door. Well, she used to.”

“The same Lesley?” Irene asked, clarifying.

“Yes. The same. When you said, “It’s nice the way things work out,” well… I didn’t know what to say. It’s really quite awful. I mean… first the husband, now the daughter. The family are in shock. Janice was too when I told her. They were really close when they were growing up.”

“Oh, dear. That’s awful,” Irene asked, leaning forwards again in her chair: “Have they caught the killer?”

“Well. They’ve arrested her ex-husband,” Fiona said.

“Did you go to the funeral?” Irene asked. We both knew she hadn’t been there though. Her face wasn’t one of the “funeral faces.”

“No. Janice had an appointment she couldn’t cancel that day. I was looking after this little lad, and you can’t really take children to funerals can you?”

I looked pointedly at Irene, and watched as she shook her head agreement… no you can’t … I rolled my eyes.

“I felt bad not going, but Janice needed me, and family have to come first.” She looked over at Nicholas - he was rolling a plastic orange around on the floor next to him. “Gill’s holding things together as best she can. But… well… you can see it’s really cut her deep. Lou’s back now though. She’s been away, Portugal or Australia or somewhere.”

Thailand I thought to myself, but didn’t say anything.

“Takes a while, getting over something like that,” I said.

“Mmmm,” Irene frowned. “How awful though. I guess we better not go calling there.”

“Oh, no. Don’t. I suppose you don’t know what’s behind doors do you when you do collections like this? Still, forewarned is forearmed, and at least I’ve saved them any upset. Not that they’d have said anything, or that you’d have upset them I’m sure, but, well, you don’t want strangers calling at a time like this, do you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Here,” Fiona got up. “I’ll go and look out a few pennies, and something for the kids. Is she OK with biscuits?”

“Not chocolate ones,” I said, smiling. “Unless you don’t value your furniture.” Like the carpet the sofas were pale. This looked the sort of house where Nicholas would be banned from any messy play. Janice would be happy doing that at home I was sure. She looked the sort to enjoy potato printing and glitter glue.

“What do you think?” I asked Irene, at a whisper. “Sounds like he had the money. Do you think he just did a bunk?”

“I don’t know,” Irene whispered back, equally conscious of Fiona in the kitchen. “We probably won’t know.”

Fiona came back through, two biscuits for the children and two spouted cups. Lillian reached for one.

“Taaaa,” Fiona requested. Lillian looked at her. “Taaaa.” She handed the cup across and then repeated the same with Nicholas. I caught Irene’s eyes and we shared a look. If there was one thing I couldn’t stand about Grimsby it was the “Ta” thing all the mother’s insisted on with small children. Why not teach them to say Thank you? What was it with Ta? Given that neither child was of talking age yet and we hadn’t had a definable word from them, you might as well start as you meant to go on… Thank you was what we used at home.

I watched as Lillian juggled beaker and biscuit with a delighted look. She loved the independence of finger foods and biscuits were definitely now her favourite.

“So…,” said Irene. “Which bit is your extension?”

“Sorry?”

“You said next door met while you were building an extension. What did you have done?”

“Oh. Nothing as fancy as their place,” Fiona smiled. “We just had the kitchen extended. These houses were all built with really small galley style kitchens at the end of the house. Nearly everyone on the street has had some form of work done on their houses now I think. Everyone wants a bigger kitchen. Some people have knocked into the house, making it a dining kitchen space, but most have added a little bit on one side, just to take it out a little. Building regs are a nightmare round here though.”

“Oh?”

“Two metre foundation. Two metre? I watched Pete digging. The rest of the house doesn’t go below one! I tell you, if there was an earthquake, the only thing standing of my house will be the extension.”

We laughed along with her. Irene looked at me. What had she spotted? I couldn’t tell.

“Did you get a recommendation for Pete then, originally?”

“Yes. Bill over the way there had some work done the year before. He said Pete was really good.”

Irene made a show of swigging down the dregs in her tea cup, though I knew from experience she must have finished her tea ages ago. She picked up the collection canister. “We really should be getting on Ruth.”

I looked at my cup. It was still half full. Typical.

Chapter Twenty Two

The person we had been told was Bill was out, and we didn’t call in on the Rand family. Although we’d already broken into two houses, gate crashed a funeral, and she was currently posing as a vicar, apparently harassing a grieving family for money was unethical. Besides we’d just promised Fiona we wouldn’t be calling, so to do so would have been a breach of trust.

Instead we’d returned to Irene’s, put on the kettle and for once I was being allowed to drink a full cup of tea at a temperature I could manage. It had also been stewed properly. Something non-tea drinkers, which Fiona clearly was, didn’t do. Teabags in cups just didn’t work for me at all. The flavour was distinctively different, scalding, tart, heavy and unrounded. Rather than hot, full and developed. Not that I was a tea snob, but if you were making tea, you needed a teapot.

Lillian was tucking into yet another biscuit surrounded by various plastic pots and saucepans she’d emptied out of Irene’s cupboards. I felt bad, in a way that only first time mothers must do, about her nutritional intake. Two biscuits in one day… what would the health visitor say about her sugar levels. I’d have to remember to ply her with pasta spirals and fresh vegetables later.

“So what do you think?”

“I don’t know.” We’d been through this nearly five times already and I was still no nearer an answer. The house was extensively renovated and it must have cost a fortune.

“I suppose he could have been siphoning money into another account to be able to disappear,” I said, reaching for another biscuit myself. I caught Irene watching me. “I’ll burn it off later on the dog walk,” I told her. “Besides, if you were trying to help me with my diet, you wouldn’t have put the tin down in front of me.”

She closed the lid and moved it through to the kitchen. I saw Lillian watching her. Like me, she’d remember where the biscuit tin was kept in this house. Like mother, like daughter. She was an observer, too. Satisfied on the location of the tin, she returned to her pans. Irene handed her a wooden spoon. Lillian looked at it.

“For the pots,” she told her. “Look.” She bent down, turned over all the saucepans, and then carefully took hold of the little hand holding the wooden spoon and showed her how to use it to drum on the upturned pots.

Irene returned to me. Lillian lacked the power to create a truly horrific noise, so the gentle tap tap, was hardly going to ruin our conversation and it would keep Lillian happy a little longer.

“So,” said Irene again, retaking her seat.

“I don’t know, and I don’t see how we can check either. We aren’t the police. We can’t just take a look at their bank account. Besides, surely if they’d reported him missing, then the police would have traced the money, found out who it was with.”

“Cash withdrawals are hard to chase,” Irene reminded me. “The fact they’ve never found him… I’m going to go with Fiona. I think he’s dead.”

“You thought he was dead anyway,” I told her. “Alive or dead, it sounds like the life insurance paid out anyway.”

“Yes. Hence the building work.”

“So… did they have too much money before? Or are you going to agree with me now that the dip in the filed returns you’ve found was just expanding business premises or something?”

“I’m not closing any doors yet.”

“I think we’ve got too many open,” I told her. “We were supposed to be investigating Lesley’s death, getting Russ off the hook, now we’re looking at something which happened years ago. I think we need to get back on target.”

“What would you suggest?”

“I don’t know.” I stood up again and walked into the ‘kitchen incident room’. Irene followed me. Our boards hadn’t changed much in the last few days. The key suspects were still the family. ‘Boyfriend’ still had a question mark above him, did he or didn’t he exist… we still didn’t know. ‘Drugs?’ had gone back up, I noticed, despite me taking it off.

“You’re sure Russ didn’t do it?” I asked her. “The police still have him in custody.”

“Positive.”

“But if there was a boyfriend… then he’s still the prime suspect. And he was in the house at the time.”

“I know. That’s why the police still have him.”

I frowned. We’d been over this a few times. Her next retort in the argument was usually you’ve met him to which I would have to agree… he didn’t seem like murdering material. Too thick. Too passive. Too frightened. But who knew what he would be like when riled? In the heat of the moment could he have done it before he realised, then panicked?

Irene reached for the telephone directory and started flicking through.

“What?”

“I’ve figured out how we can get a little further into the circle,” she said. “I’ve always fancied a conservatory out the back.”

Chapter Twenty Three

Lucus had to leave the house even earlier than usual the next day, and with no Lucus to timetable our morning, Lillian and I were ready for a dog walk much earlier than normal.

Knowing Irene was unlikely to be joining me due to the early departure, I decided to head for the cemetery. The walk was a little longer and on a day like today, where it was fair but a little windy, the trees surrounding the cemetery provided a perfect windbreak. Given I’d consumed a few extra biscuits the day before the longer walk certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Moss was excited by the change in routine and Lillian too remained awake longer than normal, helped no end by a string of “nee naas” that whizzed past on the main road heading for some accident or other. Our house was located mid-point between the fire station and the hospital, so “nee naas” weren’t all that uncommon. Lillian had seen plenty, but at her age, every one was a novelty and I’d got used to pointing out everything.

Look Lillian, a fire engine.

Look Lillian, an ambulance.

And on the walk into town, I’d purposely rush to a set of closed barriers for: Look Lillian, a train!

Once into the cemetery properly, the quiet descended and the uneven paths led to a gentle rocking of the buggy which invariably sent Lillian off to sleep. So it was just me, the dog and the ball, which I sent whizzing across the head stones in the old section.

The smaller paths around the old section were flanked by hand-carved head stones and graves featuring statues of angels as well as some significant monuments, obelisks and anchors. Whole families were buried beneath and the graves were widely dispersed, with many additional names engraved on both the main head stone and the low granite walls which marked off the boundaries of each plot.

There were very few visitors to the old section and I always felt happy to let Moss run off his lead. Technically, it was a “dogs on leads” area throughout, but we weren’t bothering anyone, so I took the risk.

Crossing the main entrance road, we then circled around an area where the big headstones had been collected ahead of disposal at some point in the future. These must have been moved from their original plots sometime in the past and were now all bunched up together. There were never any flowers in this section. Whoever owned these graves had long since forgotten who their relatives were. Like Irene said, they were just monuments to forgotten people. At the time of their manufacture, the person they had represented was clearly very well loved. The head stones here were nearly all above my head height, but despite the size of their memorials, no one remembered them anymore.

Walking along another avenue of trees we then came to the World War One section, which was maintained by the war graves commission, and from that we headed into an area of widely dispersed graves, which were only intermittently visited. Some plots here still had family who knew those buried underneath and were well tended, others sat untended year on year. Some headstones had been so neglected they had become unsafe and the cemetery staff had lain them on the grass.

As we continued down the west fence we gradually walked towards the newer section of the cemetery, and I put Moss back on his lead.

I always faced a choice now. To circle back on myself, leaving the same way we had come, or to head out through the crematorium entrance and create a circular walk. I was somewhat famed for my preference for circular routes, but without Irene here to tease me, I decided to head towards the crematorium.

I turned into the entrance, which was right next to the garden of remembrance, and glanced to my left. No one here was forgotten. Each plaque had its own set of flowers and as usual there were a few people there tending to the plaques and ensuring the water and the flowers were fresh.

It was a very small area, ashes taking up much less space than full coffins, and compared to the vast expanses between head stones in the old section, this somehow seemed like a cheap man’s memory, though I knew from Irene just a small plot here would set the bereaved back several hundred. Funerals weren’t cheap. A fact I found disgusting as, like eating, it was something all of us would do eventually. Surely the fact you’d just lost a family member was hard enough without having to find over two thousand pounds to dispose of their body through a funeral director.

I suppose in that respect, Gill Allenby had saved herself a packet when her first husband simply vanished. Yes, it might have been difficult to lose him and tragic to have no body, but at least she hadn’t the expense of the funeral as well.

Irene said it would be a few weeks before the family set up any sort of memorial for Lesley. Headstones and plaques took time. But just after the funeral, people visited the flowers in the gardens of the crematorium instead, and after those were cleared away there was only a gap of a few weeks while the head stone or plaque was arranged. Lesley’s ashes would have already been picked up by now she assured me. Unless there was a backlog of bodies (her words not mine) the ashes were usually available for collection after 2-3 days. So I wasn’t expecting to see anyone at the crematorium as I walked through. Which was why, when I passed a young woman chasing after a tissue which had blown out of her hand, I simply stopped, grabbed it and passed it over to her without thinking.

“Thanks,” she said. “Wind caught it.”

Her eyes were red rimmed. She’d been standing looking at a vast array of wilting flowers which had been moved to one side of the path. They were browning around the edges now and the cards were a little weather worn, but it was still possible to see Lesley’s name amongst the messages.

“You ok?” I asked.

“Yes. I thought I’d be fine. It’s just… I wasn’t here for the funeral.”

I looked at her. It must be. The face was a little familiar and like Fiona said, she looked more like her mother. It had to be the sister, back from Thailand.

Where was Irene when I needed her? What should I ask? Should I ask anything? What was the right thing to say?

“Oh...,” I managed. “There’s a lot.” She knew I meant the flowers.

“Hmmm.”

“It’s never easy,” I said. It seemed like the right thing to say. I’d not lost a sister or indeed anyone close. But if I had… I was sure it wouldn’t be easy. “She must have been well loved.”

“She was.” The woman tried a lopsided smile.

I stood there. I really couldn’t think of anything else to say that wasn’t intrusive or just plain rude. She was grieving after all. Now wasn’t a good time. I’d met her and maybe that would have to be enough. Just as I’d decided to leave, a young man walked up.

“Sorry, Lou,” he said. “I got stuck behind a caravan on Peaks Parkway.”

The woman turned to him and he folded her into a hug. I looked at his face. We didn’t know him. Lou had a boyfriend, or just a friend, a local male anyway. Yet another one for the incident board.

I kicked up the foot break I’d automatically applied when I’d stopped to hand back the tissue and carried on down the drive leading to the main road.

“Did you come, Joe?” she asked him, as I moved away.

“No. I wasn’t back from Uni. Dad didn’t tell me until I got back last weekend.”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

They held hands. Boyfriend then, I guessed, and not a suspect as, like Lou, he was out of the area when Lesley was killed.

I continued home. Irene had fixed up a quote for an unwanted conservatory later that day, so I planned to spend the afternoon at her house. Later this morning it was swimming. I glanced at my watch. I still had a good hour until we had to turn out with the swimming costumes again.

I cast my mind back over what was lurking about in the freezer. I just had time to sort out a casserole if I sped up a little. Lucus was getting a little fed up of my recent meal offerings.  These last few days with Irene had been fairly intensive and I’d resorted to our post uni days of ‘baked bean curry’ and ‘Tuna pasta’. He was used to slightly higher calibre food these days and if I was to continue with the investigation and not arouse too much suspicion, I really needed to start using the cooker’s timer facility and ensure he had something more than a one pan wonder.

Chapter Twenty Four

Pete Rand came himself to quote for Irene’s conservatory. I recognised him from the funeral, though he didn’t recognise either of us. Men were much less interested in people as a rule. Another woman might have noticed our threesome, due to the ages involved. Even if they hadn’t recognised the actual faces; something about our group would have rung a bell.

Lucus was the same. My whats - is - name would have been incredibly helpful for him. Before he’d recognise he’d met someone before, I’d have to provide him with an entire plotted history of where we’d met them, who they’d been with at the time, what we’d all been doing, as well as a physical description of them, and anything funny we might have discussed between us after the fact. Conversely he could remember exhibits in museums we had visited over the years and exactly which city or service station we’d eaten a particular food. We were clearly wired very differently.

Irene showed him where she wanted the imaginary conservatory while I made three cups of tea, one with milk and two sugars.

“It won’t be easy,” he was telling Irene as I came through with the mugs. “Building regs around here want 2 metre footings. It’s the clay.”

Grimsby was a massive clay area. The whole town was built on mud. Foundations on most of the old houses only went down a few feet at best, but building regulations now required a lot more. Fiona said she had experienced the same thing when her house extension was done all those years ago.

“Just for a conservatory?” Irene could have won an Oscar. She was taking on the role of “incredulous pensioner” at the moment.

“’fraid so. Thanks,” he added as I handed him the mug of tea.

“Who recommended me?” he asked.

“Fiona. Lives next door to you I think.”

“Ah. Fiona Mason. Yes. I did her conservatory ages ago. Lovely woman.”

“She’s got a grandson the same age as Lillian.” Again I was stunned how she’d created the impression we were a family unit without actually saying we were. Pete looked across at Lillian, who was busy bashing a wooden spoon on all the cupboard units, taking the pans idea Irene had shown her the other day into a whole other new concept. She’d already hit me twice just to see what sound my shins made. So far they made an “ OW !” sound.

“She said you’d had a loss recently. I’m so sorry,” Irene said.

“Yes. Our daughter,” Pete confirmed. I liked the way he said “our daughter”. Not stepdaughter, not Gill’s daughter. Clearly, like Fiona said, he’d become the father in every sense of the word. I warmed to him immediately.

“Horrible,” he said, and he put so much emotion into that one word, it was obvious it was. “There’s nothing can describe it. It was just such a shock. For everyone.”

“They have a man for it,” she said.

“Yes. Ex-husband. Apparently he was staying in the loft! The loft! It’s unbelievable! The police said he’d been staying there for a few weeks. Funny thing is, she’d been saying she thought she heard noises. We all thought… well… it doesn’t matter now.”

“In the loft?!” Irene managed to sound incredulous. “Who would do that?”

“He would, apparently. His family came to the funeral. It was nice of them. But… well… awkward to say the least.”

“I can’t believe you’re back at work so fast,” Irene said.

“Self-employed. You’ve just got to pick yourself up and crack on. There’s no government handouts for compassionate leave.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“I’m trying to be home as much as I can. Sending the men out on jobs, but I’ve got to keep quotes coming through, lining work up. Lou’s home at the moment, so I’m doing as much as I can while she’s there. Other daughter,” he added, as Irene silently questioned him with her eyebrows.

“Fiona said you met while you were building her extension.”

“Yes,” Pete took a swig of his tea.

“So. Solid walls, or glass?”

“Oh, glass as much as possible surely, or it’s not a conservatory.”

“Well, you say that, but sometimes it’s the extra room people want, not the conservatory as such. We’ve built some with solid rooves too – but you need planning permission for those usually. Your typical glass conservatory thing you can do without normally. Just need building regs.”

“And two metre foundations.”

“Yes”

“I was thinking glass, so let’s go for glass.”

“Heating?”

“Oh, I hadn’t thought. Yes, I suppose so.”

“Electric or central? We might be able to tap it off - ” he looked towards Irene’s old fashion radiators. “Then again, maybe electric might be better.”

“I’m just looking for a ball park idea initially,” Irene said. “About 8 foot by 8 foot, electric heating and sockets, French doors into the garden, glass, but with a brick wall up until about,” she looked at Lillian, “small child height. Best not to have something too breakable at bashing range,” she said as Lillian continued to bash her wooden spoon on the cooker, making a metallic tink tink noise.

“Fair enough. I’ll have the quote back to you in the post early doors next week.”

“Brilliant.”

“Good cuppa,” he said, handing the mug back to me.

I smiled. I liked him. He didn’t look at all like a murder. Irene showed him to the front door, while I washed up the cups.

“I like him,” I said, as she came back.

“He was lying.”

“Lying? What about?”

“Did you see the way he put the cup between us when I asked him about meeting Gill?”

“He was drinking,” I chided. “At some point he was going to have to put it to his mouth.”

“Yes. But he changed the subject as well directly after I asked about when he met Gill.”

“You had asked him to come and quote for a conservatory.”

“Yes… but if you ask me they didn’t meet during Fiona’s extension.”

“Whether he did or didn’t, does it matter?”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But what if they’d been having an affair?”

“With two young children in the house?” I asked incredulously.

“It’s not beyond the bounds,” she said.

And I thought about Lucus out at work all day, just as Geoff would have been. And me at home having not met Irene, bored out of my brains, looking for a distraction. We had visitors to the house. The postman… the courier… a neighbour. There were possibilities if I had been so inclined. But what would I have done with Lillian while we were… well… for want of a better word: at it? She didn’t sleep in the day. If she was a little older maybe I could have accommodated a physical relationship a little easier, left her in front of CBeebies or with Helen. But by then she’d have been talking. That would have made things more difficult. I couldn’t see it. But then… people did… I knew they did.

Maybe they had met before. Pete had built the other neighbour’s extension too. A romance could have blossomed just as easily over the other fence, away from Fiona’s prying eyes. There were opportunities. I could concede that much at least.

“Ok… so, assuming they had met before, that doesn’t mean anything does it? He doesn’t look like a murderer. Doesn’t sound like a murderer.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” Irene scolded me.

“Yes… but we took Russ at face value.”

“That’s different.”

“How, exactly?”

“We had Jean as a character reference.”

“We have Fiona as a character reference for Pete,” I reminded her. “I don’t think it’s him.”

“What about the husband?”

“What about him?”

“What if he killed her first husband?”

“I don’t see it.” I flipped the switch on the kettle again.

“I saw Lou and her boyfriend in the cemetery earlier,” I said as Irene lapsed into contemplative silence.

“He was away at uni at the time Lesley was killed. So like Lou, an alibi.” I rinsed through Pete’s mug and tipped out the dregs in Irene’s. She always left a little bit in the bottom. Said it made for easier washing up. It seemed to. Her cups weren’t as tea-stained in the base as my own were, but why that little dreg made the difference I didn’t know.

Irene looked up. “Any idea who he was?”

“Joe she called him. Student I’d say, going by his clothes.”

Irene took a pen to a post it note and added it to the eliminated board with a “x”. We now knew the whereabouts of her sister and her sister’s boyfriend, and both were ruled out.

“I think we’re stalled,” I said, looking at the board over her shoulder while the kettle boiled. “We don’t know who killed Geoff, or even if he is dead, we don’t know who was with Lesley when she was murdered. We don’t know about the money, or even if there is any missing from the business. We don’t know anything. Maybe the police will just release Russ?”

“No… they might not have any evidence to say he did it, but they’ve enough to convict him on motive and opportunity. Means was the kitchen knife, he could easily have obtained that. He’s their primary suspect and the obvious suspect.”

There was nothing more to say. So far the board was empty of alternatives.

“You’re absolutely sur-?"

“Don’t even say it,” Irene chided. “There’s an answer here. There has to be.”

Chapter Twenty Five

I turned up at Toddler Talk the next day still looking for that answer. Lillian was in my arms as usual, but my mind was focussed entirely elsewhere. I had turned into Irene. My eyes were open, but they weren’t seeing anything. I was mulling over the people we’d met to date, the roller derby team who all had an alibi, the gay neighbour next door to Len, Rose Bloom, Phil at the office, Pete and Gill Rand, Lou and Joe, Russ. Any one of them might be the murderer, or it could be none of them, and it might be someone we hadn’t met yet. There were dots still to connect in our picture. Something we still needed to put together to create a whole.

We sang around the room and I maintained the cheerful clapping and smiling as each mother extolled their child’s latest activities. I even managed to come up with something suitably droll for Lillian as my turn came around without even batting an eye lid. I’d become adept at banalities.

I played with her amongst the toys for the allotted time and then sidled through to the tea and coffee area without breaking my chain of thought.

It wasn’t until a woman actually waved her hand in front of my eyes that I realised I was being spoken to. I turned.

“Sorry. I’m a little distracted. Not a lot of sleep,” I lied. I was getting good at that. I faced the hand owner. Fiona!

“Hello!” I said in what I hoped was a suitably cheerful and friendly manner – this was after all our best lead.

“Nicholas seemed happy playing so I left him with Nina.” Nina was one of the other yummy mummies. “It’s my first time. I was really pleased to see a familiar face. I feel a lot older than everyone else.” She was, but only by about five years by my reckoning. Sheila at the group was a mature mother. Gary, her son, was a much longed for IVF outcome.

“How’s Janice doing?” I asked, aiming for sociable.

“Great. And actually she wondered if you fancied going out? She’s arranging it with a few of the other mums in the group who’ve gone back to work. She thought it’d be nice to get everyone together.”

I tried not to grimace. The idea was horrific. We had nothing in common apart from our children. There really was no one here I had met who I would willingly spend any time with outside of baby group. The group was simply a means to an end. I was only here to occupy Lillian. The idea of socialising with any of these “designer baby” women was frightening.

I was about to make some sort of excuse when I realised Irene would be aghast if I turned down the chance to further the relationship. Janice’s mum was the nearest thing we had to a witness in the disappearance of Geoff, and in every real sense she was the only link we had to the family of Lesley and any chance of working out who killed her and getting Russ released.

I nodded and smiled. “That’d be lovely,” I lied, and then had a brainwave. “Only, I’m really not that confident in big groups.” I hoped that was enough of a lead for her…,

“Oh, neither am I,” she smiled. “This was a big thing for me coming out today. Janice is the outgoing one in the family.”

“I don’t really feel like I know anyone all that well,” I said. And I was being honest there. I didn’t know anyone all that well, though by choice rather than accident. “I don’t even really know Janice all that well,” I added, just to ensure she got the hint. She did.

“I know… why don’t you come over one afternoon when Janice is off work? You and your mother and Lillian of course.”

Mother Irene again. Of course! “Yes, that’d be lovely.” I smiled at her over my cooling tea, hoping she couldn’t see that she’d just been manoeuvred into offering exactly what Irene would have wanted.

“How about this Thursday? You and Janice can plan where you’re going then. I think she has everyone’s number.”

I could well believe that. Janice struck me as the organised efficient type, though clearly she hadn’t got mine. I wasn’t part of the “in-set” or at least, I hadn’t been until I turned up at her place of work and then at her mother’s. Now I was very much on the notice board of “my type of people”. I was target numero uno. But then, she was mine currently so perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing.

*

After the group was over I walked through the park to Irene’s house and told her about our appointment.

“Good,” she said. “We need another break. It’s hard this, getting to speak to people without having an official reason. It’d be easier if we were the police.”

“Yes. But we aren’t.”

“Who’s to say we aren’t?”

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. You impersonating a vicar was bad enough. I am not impersonating a police officer. We could get into serious trouble for that. Besides,” I hoisted Lillian. “She’s a bit of a giveaway.”

Irene frowned at me and shrugged. I was right. She knew I was right. She looked up at the incident cupboards.

“There’s only one person who knows what we’re up to who might be able to shed some more light on the situation,” Irene said. “Rose.”

She lifted down the post it note. “Fancy a trip out?”

*

We arrived just in time to find Rose and Gill Rand in an argument on the street outside her office. We pulled up on the opposite side of the road and Irene ran down her window so we could catch as much of what was being said as possible. Neither woman had seen us; they were both so focussed on each other.

Rose was clearly upset. Tears were streaming down her face and she looked like a wobbling blancmange.

Their words didn’t carry too well inside our car but we strained to hear as much as we could. It didn’t help that both of them weren’t articulating too well. Gill because she was clearly furious and Rose because she was barely able to stop her lips wobbling.

“…believe you told…what right did you have to say …lies, all lies… and to think she … you’re a charlatan. They should CLOSE YOU DOWN.”

“…did what I had… they asked…never lied...”

“QUACK! I should never have… it’s your fault… “

“What do you think they’re arguing about?” I asked Irene quietly, both of us straining to catch a little more.

“I think Rose went to the police.”

“And they believed her?”

“I’m not sure, but they clearly followed up a line of enquiry – and Gill knew where it had come from.”

“YOU THINK SHE NEVER SPOKE TO ME?”

Rose was cowering in her doorway, one hand on the door handle, when the slap came. SMACK straight across her face. She looked shocked, startled in the same way a bunny in the headlights watches their fate approaching.

“That won’t look good on the police record,” Irene said, smirking. She was enjoying this.

“DON’T YOU EVER… EVER…,” before another assault could come, Rose had slipped inside her door, her large frame squeezing through an incredibly small gap in much the same way an octopus can suddenly change shape and move through a pipe at speed. She was gone before Gill could say or do anything more.

Lesley’s mother stood staring at the door and then she looked around her. Unfortunately for Rose there was a loose brick lying on the pavement from the house next door, whose front wall had crumbled. She picked it up and hurled it at the double glazing and was rewarded with a shattering crack. She then marched back to her car, got in, revved the engine and sped off, taking her frustrations out on the road. I was glad we were parked up. I hoped she didn’t cause an accident on her way home.

The blinds twitched in the window as Rose peered outside. Then the door opened a crack, then fully, and finally Rose was on the pavement eying up the damage and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Irene waited a moment, watching her, and then opened her car door and stepped out. I followed.

“Are you all right?” Irene asked her. Walking up from one side. “I saw what happened. Did you want me to call the police?”

“No. No… this was probably my fault. I shouldn’t have – oh. It’s you.” She changed her tone as she turned and faced her Samaritan. She didn’t look pleased to see us at all.

“What do you want?”

“Why was Mrs Rand angry?” Irene asked, not missing a beat. Rose knew what we were up to; she knew why we wanted to know. For once, there was no pretence. No subterfuge. Irene could be direct and she was.

“None of your business.”

“You told the police.”

“And look where it got me.” She fingered the crack in the glazing. The brick had fractured the front pane, the rear one looked intact, but it was a sealed unit, the whole thing would have to come out.

“Will your insurance cover that?” I asked gently.

“Hope so.” She looked ready to burst into tears again. I rooted in my pocket. Since having Lillian I usually carried a packet of tissues and I was sure I had one that hadn’t already been used somewhere in there. I was right. I handed it to her. She shook out the folds and blew her nose.

“Thanks.”

“Why don’t I make you a hot sweet tea?” Irene suggested, placing a hand on Rose’s ample shoulder.

All the colour had drained from her face and she was beginning to look a little faint. I didn’t fancy our chances of being able to lift her from the pavement. She must have weighed double what Irene and I weighed put together. Reading people’s auras was quite clearly a sedentary occupation involving regular consumption of confectionary. Not that I was one to point the finger. My spare tyre, originally racer bicycle sized, was heading more towards mountain bike width, and if I didn’t cut back soon, I could see me with a motorbike tyre.

Rose nodded slowly. All fight gone. We led her back into her office and I put Lillian down as soon as the door closed safely behind us, sending her off to root in the toy box in the corner.

Irene headed over to the kettle on the side unit and Rose collapsed into a chair. If I’d had to have picked a word for her, it would have been stunned. She either didn’t know what she’d said to upset Gill so much or she had no idea the police would have taken her information directly to Gill and prompted the attack. I watched as her hands developed a tremble, which travelled up her arms into her shoulders. She looked at me helplessly and burst into tears again.

I knelt down by her chair. It was instinctive, something I’d have done with a relative of a patient. Being close without being intimidating. I looked into her face.

“Are you OK?” I asked. I touched her nearest hand. Stifling the tremble. I let my hand rest. She looked at me.

“What did you say?”

“I didn’t tell you. I should have never said anything to the police. But I thought,” her breath caught, I waited. “I thought it was the right thing to do. Lesley was murdered. I…” She blew her nose. Behind us I heard the kettle click off and Irene measuring out the water into the mugs. It was a reassuring noise. A homely noise. The filling of mugs, the regular chink of the metal spoon on the china, round and round, round and round.

Irene walked over. She’d located a biscuit tin and a chocolate digestive was perched on top of one of the mugs, teetering on the edge.

“I’ve added some sugar,” she said, handing Rose the single mug in her left hand. Rose took it without a word. Either she took sugar, or she realised Irene thought she needed it. Hot sweet tea for shock. Everyone knew that, didn’t they?

Now that her left hand was free of the mug, Irene took the biscuit from the edge of the mug in her right hand and offered that to Rose, too. Rose took it. Irene handed me one of the remaining mugs, no biscuit. I looked at the colour inside the mug and immediately knew Rose lacked a tea pot. I wouldn’t be drinking all of it. It looked far too strong.

Irene gestured to the other chair, the “patient” chair, and I sat as directed. She pulled over the coffee table and perched on that, making us into a triangular configuration.

She watched and waited as Rose drank and ate her biscuit. The colour slowly coming back into her face.

Lillian acted as a focus for us all. Happily burbling to herself and emptying out the toy box and then putting everything back in again. Thud, crash, thud, crash. One toy after another joining the rest in an ungainly heap. They wouldn’t all fit when she’d finished. I could tell that already. Without some neat adult stacking, those toys were never going to squeeze back into the confines of the box. I watched as she stacked items higher and higher until they started falling back out as fast as she put them in.

“Try again,” I told her. “Start over.” I mimed tipping out the box again, and Lillian copied my gesture and the toys all went careening across the floor. “Biggest first,” I said, knowing she was still too young to understand. But as a mother I had to try. Lillian just started again, haphazardly stacking. Happy and occupied. I turned back around to Irene and Rose. Rose was nearing her normal colour.

“Better?” Irene asked.

Rose nodded. “It’s my own fault.” She looked into her mug, clearly unsure if she should say any more. We waited. She didn’t say any more. I looked at Irene and shrugged.

“What did you tell them?” Irene asked, much more gently than she had outside. Using a tone like a mother reassuring a young child. Rose looked at her, bottom lip quivering slightly.

“I told them Lesley had seen something. Something when she was younger.”

“How much younger?”

“About the time Geoff vanished.”

“She told you?”

Rose nodded.

“What?”

“I told the police she’d seen a woman moving his body, burying it in the garden.”

“Did she say that?”

“Not in as many words.”

“But you told the police anyway?”

“What she said… they’d just have discounted it. It was nothing. But it was something. She knew it was something. I knew it was something. She said it wasn’t clear enough. She was going to think about it. Try on her own.”

“What did she tell you she saw?”

“Shapes. A giant, a cocoon. Lines in the ground. Shapes in the moonlight. Trees. It was all darkness, shapes, descriptive. She was young. She didn’t know what she saw at the time. This regression stuff, it’s reliant on your ability to interpret what you see, what you remember. She was so young when she saw it. Too young really to know what she saw.”

“So you filled in the gaps?”

“It would have been shadows. The view of a child through a window. Something wrapped up maybe?”

“A body.” Irene said. “You thought Gill had killed her husband?”

“Everyone thought it,” Rose said. “They weren’t happy. He was… well…,”

“How long have you known the family?”

“I am family,” Rose said. “Geoff was my cousin. We all knew what he was like. He’d been like it as a child. A bully. This -” Rose rolled up one of her sleeves and showed us a small circular scar on her forearm. “He did this. Said I was fat. Said I wouldn’t feel it. The fat would act as insulation.” She rolled her sleeve back down. “I felt it. I always felt it. ” I guessed she didn’t just mean the physical pain. Trauma can take two forms. I knew from experience.

“Why now? Why report it now?”

“Twenty years ago. The police don’t look at domestic violence the way they do now. She had two small children. Children who relied on her. None of us wanted to think she’d done it. But none of us would have blamed her. He was mean. Nasty. He deserved it. Her children didn’t.”

“So why now?” I asked. “Why mention it now?”

“Lesley.” Irene said before Rose could reply. “Lesley didn’t deserve to die.”

I looked at Rose. She nodded.

“You really think Gill killed her own daughter?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“But why wasn’t Gill arrested at the time?” I asked.

“No body.” Irene interrupted. “No body, no murder case. He was a missing person.”

I looked at Rose. She nodded.

“But the police didn’t take your information seriously?”

“No. It seems they went back to Gill. Asked about Lesley’s relationship with me. Whether Lesley had a history of mental illness. They weren’t going to reopen Geoff’s case.”

“But you think Lesley saw him being buried?”

“I know she did. She always had a memory like a steel trap. Even as a girl. Some kids remember everything.”

“Traumatic events, things of significance,” Irene said.

“How old would she have been?”

“Three and a half.”

“Three and a half?” I asked.

What did I remember from three and a half? I thought back to my earliest memories… Chocolates in a shoe box in a kitchen cupboard, lining up for our treat of the day. A wall frieze around a shared bedroom. My favourite donkey toy being given away. A goldfish I had won from a fair. How old would I have been? Younger than five. We’d moved before my fifth birthday. All these memories were from a much older house.

I didn’t remember my brother as a baby, but I could remember playing with him when he was toddling, that would make me four. And then there was the wasp sting. The wasp sting in a kitchen that was very unlike the one which housed the shoe box chocolates and wall frieze. I must have been much, much younger. I touched my upper arm. I could remembered the sting vividly. But it was images. I wasn’t sure I could have drawn the kitchen. But if I was hypnotised, perhaps I could have remembered more. Those memories could still be there, hidden, buried underneath new memories.

“It was very brave,” Irene told her. “To go to the police after all this time. You really think she did it?”

“Who else could it have been?”

Who else indeed? I looked at Irene. She had that thoughtful cog-turning look.

Chapter Twenty Six

“But the police?” I said. “Surely we should tell them.”

“Rose already has,” Irene reminded me. “They’ve already eliminated Gill, otherwise why didn’t they follow up the lead any further? She must have an alibi for that night.”

“How about the night Geoff disappeared?”

“Probably the same alibi.”

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Pete.”

“You really think Pete and Gill were together a whole year before?”

“Stands to reason. He was digging up the other neighbour’s grounds the year before. They’d have met then.”

“But she would have been married then.”

“Unhappily.”

We looked at each other. Lillian filled in the silence by dragging a vase down from the sideboard using the table runner we both assumed was out of reach. It smashed, sending water and flowers everywhere. She immediately started screaming.

“Sorry,” I shouted to Irene over the din.

“Didn’t like the arrangement anyway.” I looked to the half-finished watercolour on one side of the room. She’d already paint-sketched in much of the still life but was still a significant way off completion, with patches of white showing through, and the colours still quite muted in comparison to her other work.

“It was just to help me think. There’s something about painting. Concentrating on the shape, the form, of something else that frees the mind, unlocks the compartments and lets everything out to play. It’s like taking your mind off the hook. You should try it.”

I looked around the room at her other paintings. She’d had many of them framed, but there were at least an equal number still on their painting boards leaning up against walls, positioned behind furniture where Lillian couldn’t knock them down. Irene was good. The last time I’d attempted painting I’d been in secondary school.

“Painting isn’t really my thing.”

“What is your thing then?” Irene asked, arms full of watery stems. She’d gone for the flowers first I’d noted. Not the china shards. Perhaps she intended to rearrange them in order to finish the painting. The flowers, that was. The china was in such small bits I doubted superglue would work.

She opened up one of her dressers and found a large jug. She dropped all the stems in, filled it with water and left it on the kitchen work top, definitely out of reach, and then went to work on the china pieces. Lillian had done a thorough job. I hoped it wasn’t valuable.

“B and M 99p,” she said, mindreading over her shoulder. “She can pay me back out of her pocket money when she’s sixteen. Don’t worry about it.”

Irene collected up the scrap china and darted looks around the room, checking for any other bits that could have escaped notice. There were none.

“You can put her down again now,” she told me. “I’ll leave the water there. She can play with it for a bit.”

It was a hard floor; tiled. It was the reason the vase had broken into so many pieces. Lillian had knocked loads flying in our house, but so far we’d only had a few breakages thanks to the carpets.

I lowered her to the floor, wiping at the snot which was now dangling down from her nose in a gooey sticky mess. Her face was dark red, her eyes puffy from the crying, and her lips were quavering. She looked to Irene, who smiled.

“It’s all right, Lillian. You’ve done me a favour. It was a dreadful composition.”

Lillian looked back to me for affirmation. I smiled back and told her she could go and investigate the water. Which she did.

Had this happened in our house, Lucus would have a) hit the roof and b) tidied up the water before allowing me to let Lillian loose. His obsessive cleanliness would have permitted nothing less. Irene was much more relaxed, and this sudden addition of water to the day was seen as an opportunity, not a disaster. I allowed myself to slump back in the chair. There was something infinitely relaxing about Irene.

“So…?”

“So what?”

“I’m still waiting to hear what you do to unwind. You don’t paint. You must do something.”

I looked at her. I couldn’t even remember what it was like to have free time. Baby free days seemed so long ago.

She waited, and then realising I wasn’t going to answer, she changed the subject.

“So… Gill and Pete were having an affair,” she said. “He was her alibi for the time Geoff disappeared.”

“But if she was with him, then surely Geoff was minding the children?”

“You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you? When did you say we had that coffee with Fiona?”

“Thursday afternoon.”

She glanced at her watch. “Two days,” she said. I chuckled.

“What?”

“You looked at your watch,” I said. “I said Thursday and you looked at your watch.”

“Habit,” she smirked. “I used to have one with a date.”

“What’s the time?” I asked.

“I don’t actually know.”

Chapter Twenty Seven

It turned out two days was far too long to wait for our investigation to continue. Irene called by my house on Wednesday with another idea.

“I thought you’d already ruled him out?”

“He probably is. But it’s still a lead we’ve not actually met yet.”

“He’ll be working in the day.”

“Yes, I know. That’s why I thought we’d go this evening.”

I frowned. That meant lying to Lucus again.

“Are you sure you need me?”

“Yes. It’s not good enough to feed back. You need to be there too. I might miss something. Something important.”

It turned out she was right.

*

The door to Len Crossley’s place in Holton-le-clay was opened by a young man I’d seen before. I recognised his unique university look and his brilliant blue eyes. Lou’s boyfriend. He didn’t seem to recognise me, but then I had no buggy, wasn’t wearing an old dog-walking jacket and didn’t have a baby or a dog in tow. In fact I was looking quite smart. Not interview smart, but going out smart, certainly suitable for the role in which Irene had cast me this evening. That of research assistant.

The smart casual look had been a compromise. Had I gone out with Irene looking business-like Lucus would have surely smelled a rat. And so I’d opted for dark trousers and a blouse style top. The story this time had been a WI meeting. I was to be Irene’s guest. Lucus had laughed himself silly at the notion. WI? You? At your age? Do you even know any of the words to Jerusalem?

“There’s a mix of ages there,” I said, defending the group I had no intention of going to. The irony was not lost on me. “They’re not just a bunch of old grannies crocheting things. They do charity work and get in all sorts of interesting speakers.”

Lucus looked at me. “If you say so. How long until you enter the baking competition?”

“No time soon,” I told him. “This is just a one off. Irene thought I’d enjoy the speaker.”

“Who is it?”

“Er… a local author, Kerry… something…used to work in the library, now writes books for a living.”

“Oh well. Whatever floats your boat. I’ve got some “mighty machines” to watch.”

I wasn’t sure who was going to have more fun. Me at an imaginary WI meeting, or Lucus with his geeky boys TV.

I’d gone out as arranged and Irene and I had jumped into her car and driven around to Len Crossley’s house. She’d ditched the dog collar in favour of a clipboard and smart, business-style suit. She even had a leaflet with her which explained she worked for a legitimate research company and an ID card with her picture on it. I decided not to ask. Either she had borrowed these from a legitimate research company worker or this was another of her carefully orchestrated scams. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know which. In all the weeks I’d known Irene, she’d not mentioned being part of a research bureau once.

“Irene Franks,” she told the young man at the door. “I work for Family Fortunes; you might have seen it on TV?” The young man I knew as Joe nodded.

“Every week we survey different households in the UK to get our survey reports on questions in the quiz, and we’re currently surveying this area. Do you have time to answer some questions?”

Joe smiled broadly. Who wouldn’t have done? It was a chance to be connected to television in some small way. A chance to feel famous. Even Lucus and I would have bitten the hand off anyone who’d come to our door with such a story. We loved family fortunes. The old buzzer sound “uh uh” was a familiar refrain in our house when one of us made a silly mistake. I’d always wondered where they’d done their survey and this ploy of Irene’s made perfect sense. Anyone who knew the show would know the questions weren’t going to be intrusive, it was an obvious invite in, and sheer genius. I tried not to look too impressed. Irene caught my eye as Joe turned around and yelled into the house, and winked.

I listened as Joe explained in yells who was at the door, and then heard the muffled shout responses back from what I knew to be the living room from our brief exploration the week before. I heard footsteps approaching and Mrs Crossley appeared in her slippers, a curious smile stretching across her face.

She was late middle aged. Much older than I was, much younger than Irene. If I described her as jowly it would have been doing her a disservice, but age and weight loss had caused her cheeks to slip a little and there was only so much “tightening moisturiser” could do. She’d obviously been a much larger woman at some point in her life. While she wasn’t exactly a size 12 now, she had clearly lost a significant amount of weight in recent years. Whether by ill health or design I didn’t know and wouldn’t have dared ask. Sadly, the biggest problem with vast weight loss was that it left your skin hanging a little and she was baggy now in all the wrong places. Even so – she looked healthy for her age and had a warm glow about her that made her look incredibly mumsy.

“Family fortunes?” she said. Irene nodded. “How long will it take?”

“Not long,” Irene told her. “We just have a list of 50 questions or so that we need your knee jerk responses too – most people enjoy it actually. It takes around 30 minutes.”

I knew Mrs Crossley was already interested. I could tell by the red tint spreading across her cheeks and the sparkle in her eyes. This would be something to tell her work colleagues tomorrow, assuming she did work. A bit of excitement in an otherwise hum drum life.

Irene had clearly thought this through. The goal was to get into the house and into small talk. This “survey says” research would guarantee us access to the house, and once inside, well… Irene could ask anything she wanted. If someone had come to my door claiming to be from Family Fortunes I would have let them in, too. Maybe I was too trusting, but it would have been fun to have had to give answers to some questions and find our answers on the hit TV show as part of the “survey says” results. I knew Lucus would have enjoyed the experience, too.

“Come in then. Would you like a coffee while you work, or have you had one in every house so far?”

“Oh, a tea would be lovely,” Irene told her. “You’re the first person who’s offered this evening, and we’re both gasping.”

“Ooooh... Let me get the kettle on then. Joe – show them into the lounge.”

We walked through the hallway into the living room. It seemed odd seeing it from this side of the glass. The television didn’t look so big from the inside. The furniture a little more worn than it had appeared from outside, too. It was still a level more opulent than our shabby living room with the small TV we’d purchased at uni together. But it didn’t look “embezzling-executive”.

Joe slumped down into what was probably his usual chair, throwing his legs up over one of the arm rests in a typical relaxed student pose. He attempted to look non-plussed by our mission, but it was clear he was just as interested as his mother. Game shows were uni hits. I’d wasted many mornings myself in front of Supermarket Sweep.

“So… uh… are you local then?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Irene. “I do research for a number of different companies, the Family Fortunes one is the most fun though. Ruth here is learning the ropes. She’s going to take over from me when I give up.”

He smiled at me. Did he recognise me? But no. There was not even a vague hint of recognition on his face.

“How did you get into it?”

“Oh you can apply for research positions on-line,” Irene told him. “They’re always looking for researchers in different areas. The pay isn’t great, but you can fit it around other things, like studies. Are you on leave from uni?”

“Yes,” he said. “How d’you guess?”

“I have a friend with children about your age. They’re just back now. Where are you studying?”

“Leeds.”

“Not too far then. Girlfriend? I bet you have. Good looker like you.” I marvelled at how Irene could play-act the “granny” role so well. Sometimes I didn’t know which was the act: the Irene I saw or the one she showed everyone else.

He smiled and nodded.

“Missing her already I bet.” I wasn’t sure who was more embarrassed. Me or him. I kept quiet. Irene didn’t know how he was connected to Lesley’s family. I did. She still thought we were here to find out about Geoff. But suddenly I wondered whether Lou had been Joe’s first choice.

I tried to gauge his age. Lesley had been in her mid-twenties. Lou was the younger sister. How much younger? Two years? Three? Four?

If Joe had fallen for Lesley first, then maybe Lou was choice number two. He might have resented Lesley’s marriage to Russ. He could have been a jealous spurned lover – or perhaps his love was unrequited and that had given him an urge for revenge.

If only I could indicate the relationship to Irene somehow. She’d know what to say. I tried and failed to catch her eye.

Mrs Crossley walked back in with a tea tray complete with tea pot and milk jug. The tea tray made it all seem very formal. Then again, maybe this was how you entertained guests when your husband was a Financial Director of a big firm.

“Thank you,” Irene gushed.

“Milk?”

“Yes – we both take milk. No sugar for either of us. Is it just you and your son home?”

“At the moment. Len’s due back any minute. Did you want him too?”

“Oh… it’s not necessary. It’s just sometimes quicker, you know, if we can interview everyone in a household. Saves me visiting another couple of houses. And you’re all over 18. So I could have ticked off three surveys at once.” Irene tried not to let her disappointment show.

“Two is great though,” I added, as Mrs Crossley’s face drooped a little. Clearly she was keen to get on, and perhaps finish the interview off before Len got home in order to spring the news on him over dinner later. I could imagine the excitement.

“First off, can I take both your full names and a contact number in case the TV studio wants to follow this up? You know, just to check we HAVE interviewed 100 people and we haven’t just sat in our houses making up the responses.”

“I’m Hilary Crossley, and this is Joe. Joseph if you want his full name. You are taking part aren’t you Joe?”

“Yeah, why not.” Joe tried his best to sound complacent about it.

“Phone number?”

“01472 873021”

“Home owners?”

“Well, I am. Joe’s renting at uni.”

“Occupation?”

“Nurse.”

“And student.” Irene scribbled. “What are you studying?”

“He’s going to be a vet. This time anyway.”

“Mum.”

“Second time round. Not cheap sending a kid to uni. We’ve forked out twice. He’s in his third year now, again .”

Second course? Possibly older than I thought in that case.

“There was no work as a history graduate,” Joe complained. “At least as a vet I’ll be able to qualify for a job. Besides, I like animals. Don’t know why I didn’t do it the first time around.”

“Nor me,” Hilary said, grimacing at us. If they had been embezzling, paying Joe through uni twice shouldn’t have been a big issue.

Irene busily completed both forms, and then handed me a clipboard with Joe’s questionnaire clipped to it. She kept the other one for herself. I glanced down at the list and wondered where she’d collected all the questions.

“Ready?” Irene asked.

Hilary nodded eagerly. I wasn’t sure who was going to have more fun for the next thirty minutes, her or me.

“It’s really important you don’t overhear each other’s answers,” Irene said. “So what I’m going to do is ask Ruth here to take Joe somewhere else to run through the list with him. Is that OK?”

“You can go in the kitchen,” Hilary told us, settling herself into her own chair. Joe managed to slump to a stand. It was quite a feat. It was like he poured himself into an upright position without utilising any spine. He then slouched off and I followed in his wake to the kitchen.

The kitchen was in the modern shaker style. The popular natural wooden cupboard look which was in vogue when Lucus and I renewed our kitchen was out these days, and the lime washed Scandinavian look was ‘in’. Which meant the kitchen had been renewed fairly recently; probably within the last year. There was still an absence of limescale around the taps.

The kitchen had a breakfast bar as well as a dining table, but it was to the breakfast bar that Joe veered. He was tall. Taller than I’d remembered from the cemetery. Then again, the driveway had been on a slope and in the open air height could be deceptive. Inside was another story. He must have been two to three inches taller than Lucus, making him a full six foot or thereabouts.

Joe slumped on his perch like an old parrot. I took up the other stool, much more conscious of my posture.

Irene hadn’t realised, but of the two individuals we were supposedly interviewing for the TV show, I had the more valuable witness. The question was… what should I ask him? I wasn’t as clever as Irene at throwing in asides to get me from A to B and the information I wanted.

Instead I looked down at the list of questions in my lap.

Something about my hesitation must have shone through as Joe suddenly said, “First time?”

“Er… yes. How did you guess?”

“You looked a bit, well, lost.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” I said. “Everyone has to start somewhere.”

Joe nodded. “Well I won’t bite. Ask away. And it’s just the one response you need isn’t it?”

“First knee jerk response. All the answers then get collated and if necessary categorised, so face and head might end up as “head”, or knee, shin, thigh, might all end up as “leg” depending on the question.” In fact I had no idea whether that was the case but I knew it just had to sound plausible. Credibility was what I was aiming for, and plausible explanations should do that.

“So…Something we get from the sun?”

“Sunburn.”

“Something you do while you soak in the bath?”

“Wash”

“A sport that uses a net?”

“Badminton.”

“Something you do when you’re frightened?”

“Shake.”

“Somewhere you’d say goodbye.”

“Funeral.”

“Oh… that’s an unusual response,” I said, wondering if Irene had purposely seeded some relevant questions into the mix. “Have you lost someone recently?”

“Mmmm,” Joe nodded. “Old-girlfriend.”

“Oh dear,” I said. “I am sorry.” So he had dated Lesley. I made a mental note.

“What were they expecting?” Joe asked. “Do you have a list of expected answers?”

“No, not really. You’re just the first person I’ve heard say funeral. Most people say airport, train station, that sort of thing. Your other ones are typical. But we always need a few unusual ones or there would only be three answers on the survey board, not five. But don’t purposefully think up odd ones, will you? It skews the survey results and if they find someone has answered a majority of the questions differently to everyone else, the survey is automatically discounted.”

“It is?”

“Yes,” I nodded. Again I had no idea, but it sounded plausible, and I wanted him to give me honest responses. Not throw the survey on purpose, which was the sort of thing a uni student would do, even a second-time-arounder.

“Something you close your eyes to do”

“Sleep.”

“Something that’s black and white”

“Crime.” I looked at him. “A penguin,” he said. “Go for a penguin. I’m just thinking out loud.”

“Thinking out loud?”

“She was murdered.”

“Who was?”

“The ex-girlfriend.”

“Oh…A reason people undress.”

“To have sex.” I wouldn’t have expected any other response from a red-blooded male at his age.

“Something that is soft.”

“My girlfriend’s hair. The new one. Not the old one,” he clarified.

“A word used in weather reports.”

“Rainy.”

“Are you going to be able to read all that afterwards?” He asked, glancing at my scrawls. I didn’t have the neatest hand. Then again, in the NHS I wasn’t the only one, the consultants were generally illegible. I could at least read what I’d written. Most of the time.

“Yes,” I said. “Someone you lie to.”

“Girlfriend.” He grinned. “Not all the time.”

“Old or new one?”

“The new one.”

“I take it you weren’t going out with the old one when she, uh, died,” I asked, trying to sound as conversational as I could.

“No. No. We’d been split for ages. She married someone else years ago. Actually, I’m going out with her sister at the moment, which sounds a little odd I know, but, well, it’s complicated.”

“It does sound complicated,” I said, trying not to sound too eager for bits of gossip, but trying to leave it open ended so he could elaborate if he wanted to.

“There’s been loads of girls between Lesley and Lou. Lou’s very recent,” he added. “We only got serious at Christmas.”

So… he and Lou were a recent thing. I wondered where Lou’s Thailand trip fitted into it all. She might be on holiday, working abroad or on a year out. How old was she compared to Lesley? Where they two years apart? Three years? More? Had she seen what Lesley had seen? Did she remember it?

“Something you do in bed.”

“Sleep,” he smirked. I didn’t pursue.

“Something you save up for.”

“Holidays.”

“And here was me thinking you’d say ‘wedding’,” I joked.

“Wedding? Me? Goodness. Not yet. Still early days.” Not that serious then.

“Something parents do to punish their children.”

“Spank.” Not exactly a politically correct question for a quiz show I thought. I wondered where Irene had come up with some of the ideas and what responses, if any, she was trying to illicit. I heard laughter from the living room. I wondered which question they had reached and whether Irene had got further along than I had.

“Something red.”

“A beetroot”

Len came home when Joe and I were five questions off finishing. I rattled through them as quickly as I could while keeping half an ear on Hilary, who was explaining who we were and what we were doing. I arrived in the hallway to find Hilary and Len facing each other, Irene out of sight in the living room. Len looked exhausted.

He had thin features, and what I would have described as a stereotypical accountant look. He was tall, not as tall as Joe, but easily Lucus’s height. He had a full head of white hair, glasses, and a slight frame. His suit was well cut and dark grey, the jacket was slung over his arm along with his tie, which had pink and grey stripes, very financial. Lucus never took his tie off until he got home, he was fastidious that way, but clearly Len was one of those who doffed his tie the moment he got out of work and into the car.

Hilary was animated, smiling, clearly excited by the questionnaire. Len smiled at her; it would have been hard not to given her enthusiasm.

“How many more have we got to do?” She called out to Irene.

“Another ten I think.” Irene had remained in the living room judging by the volume, giving the distinct impression she wouldn’t be leaving until we were done.

“Joe and I have just finished,” I said.

“Join them in the kitchen,” Hilary told her husband. “Joe – make your father a cup of coffee and then come through. We should be done by then. I want to hear your answers. I can do that, can’t I?” she called through to Irene.

“Yes,” Irene called back.

Hilary scuttled back into the living room, leaving Len, Joe and I together, uncomfortably jostling around each other. I headed back into the kitchen and stood back, allowing Len free access to his own house and his own kitchen, feeling very much the interloper.

Joe put the kettle on while Len dropped his briefcase on the table and arranged his jacket and tie over the chair.

“Busy day?”

“Yeah. Board meeting after hours.”

Something about his tone of voice told me it was more “bored” than board. Joe rattled around in the kitchen and presented his father with a coffee.

“Did you want another?” he asked.

“No. I’m fine thanks.”

“So. You’re here from the TV Company?”

“No. Not quite. We work for a research bureau. The TV contract is just one of the ones that we do.”

“Oh. Which one?”

I hesitated. Irene hadn’t said. I wasn’t sure I knew any.

“TBR,” I said, making up an acronym on the spot. It seemed to satisfy him. I just hoped Irene wouldn’t contradict me later.

He slurped on his coffee. Another asbestos mouth. Was it just me who couldn’t drink things immediately?

It was uncomfortable standing facing each other in the kitchen. With just Joe and me there had been questions to work through. Now we were in a holding pattern. Strangers. Unsure of any common ground on which to base a discussion. Joe and Len couldn’t discuss the regular family things as I was there, and I couldn’t ask the questions we really wanted answers to as it would tip our hand. I plumped for a middle ground. Small talk.

“Where do you work?”

“Group Seafood. It’s up on the Pyewipe.”

“He’s one of the bosses,” Joe said cheekily. “So don’t say anything bad.”

“I won’t,” I smiled. “Is that the one that makes all the fish fingers?” I knew it was, as I’d seen all the glossy photos in the foyer, but he didn’t know that.

“That’s the one.”

“Joe tells me he’s studying to be a vet now.”

“Yes. Second time around. You wouldn’t know he was a mature student, though.” He ruffled Joe’s hair. Clearly they were a close, hands-on family, happy to show affection to each other. Lucus and I were a little more standoffish, we held hands in public, but that was as far as it went. No one would ever see us cuddling into each other outside the home.

I suppose I just didn’t trust outward expressions of love, but then, we all had our preferred love languages. Words were also cheap in my eyes. For me deeds were the way to demonstrate love. Which was probably why I had embraced being a stay at home housewife full on, and although I was loathing it, I wasn’t going to quit. That was how I showed Lucus I loved him. I was going to bring up Lillian, his daughter, to the best of my abilities. Being there for all her milestones and keeping up with the cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping and slowly losing my mind... but it was all born of love.

“What is it this term? More dissection?” Len asked.

“It’s the way we learn,” Joe told him, and I guessed from the tone of voice they were using this was a running joke in the family. “At least it’s not real bodies,” Joe pulled a face at me, “like mum had to do.”

We’d not been required to work with cadavers at university. It was optional. I’d opted out. I didn’t think I’d survive the smell, let alone cutting into real people, even if they had been preserved. I was terribly squeamish when it came to that sort of thing.

Medical training would have helped when it came to wanting someone dead. Surely it would help knowing exactly where to stab? Then again… it wasn’t rocket science to kill someone. I could have made a fair guess if I stabbed someone through the heart, or sliced their throat, they’d be dead. I shuddered involuntarily thinking about it.

“We’re finished!” Hilary shouted from the living room. “You can come in now!” She was elated. You could tell by her voice she’d thoroughly enjoyed herself. I just hoped Irene had found out what she wanted to know. I wasn’t sure I’d discovered anything very useful. Though Joe was certainly in the frame now. I wondered if that knife in her back was just him practising some of his dissection skills.

Chapter Twenty Eight

We didn’t find out anything more from Len. He was tired and Hilary was far too excited to let him get a word in edgewise.

“Something that turns from green to yellow.”

“A banana.”

“I said that! I said that too! What did you say Joe?”

Every one of the fifty questions was dissected and discussed and laughed over. After forty five minutes I felt sorry for Len. He was clearly tired, hungry and disinterested.

Thanks to Hilary’s perpetual banter, Irene hadn’t been able to create any leading questions and the interview folded as it might have done had we really been working for a research bureau.

We thanked them all and headed back to the car. We said nothing to each other until we’d got inside and shut both doors.

“That was painful,” I said.

“Yes,” she put the car into gear. “I really don’t think they’re suspects though.”

“Len and Hilary might not be, but Joe… he’s dating Lou,” I said.

“Lou? Lesley’s Lou?”

“Yep. I recognised him instantly. We’d met at the cemetery remember?”

“He didn’t remember you?”

“Not a chance. No baby. No dog. No buggy.”

“And men don’t look at faces.”

“They don’t?”

“Not as a general rule,” she grinned. Unconsciously I tugged at a bra strap.

“So… Joe…?” Irene said.

“Studying to be a vet. Knows a thing or two about anatomy, handy for a knife wielder. Mature student. Dated Lesley at school, started dating Lou at Christmas,” I summarised.

“Hmmm.” Irene swung the car onto the A16 heading for home. Holton-le-clay wasn’t far out of Grimsby, and shared the same DN postcode, but it was far enough to be covered under Lincolnshire council, and not North East Lincs. There was a short stretch of green belt between Holton-le-clay and the nearest true Grimsby suburb of New Waltham. The road was straight. A leftover from the time when the railway lines travelled all the way south to Louth and beyond to Skegness.

“We’ll be back in five minutes,” she said. “Look on the back seat. White carrier.”

I leaned over and pulled the white carrier bag into the front.

“Take a look.”

I opened it up. Inside was a book.

“Take a look in the front.”

I did. She’d signed it. To Ruth, I hope you enjoy the book, Kerry .

“Is this, I mean, you didn’t sign it did you?”

“Me? No. Kerry’s a neighbour of a friend. It was easy enough to arrange. It’s teen fiction. A quick read. You might enjoy it.”

“Thanks,” I said. As a general rule I didn’t like people picking books for me. I preferred to peruse the spines myself. Pick up a book, check the cover. Yes… I know you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I always did. Read the first few pages, read the last few pages, read a section in the middle. You could get a good feel for a book that way. Enough to work out if you’d enjoy reading it. Lucus had a nasty habit of buying me short stories, which I loathed. Just as soon as you got into it, the story was over. I had a preference for sci-fi as a rule, but I liked the touch. It would look like I’d met the author.

“What does she look like? “

“Look like?”

“You know… if Lucus asks me to describe her.”

“Picture’s on the inside back cover.”

I looked. Black and white, but I could guess at dark hair, maybe black. Glasses. She looked friendly. Young. Not much older than me. I wondered what her own story was. If I’d been to the WI group, I probably would have found out.

I folded the bag around the book and held it on my lap. Getting a book published felt like such an achievement. More than I had managed. This Kerry had left a mark on the world. This was something that she could look back on and say “This was me.”

I wondered if I should take up writing. It wasn’t like I didn’t have the time now. But what would I write about? Babies weren’t exactly thrilling.

I stared out of the window at the host of daffodils lining the road which were being spotlighted in the headlights. The oft quoted lines from Wordsworth filled my head. Even though I could hardly be said to be wandering at sixty miles an hour, nor was I feeling lonely or cloudlike, there was still a host of golden daffodils. I wondered if they turned to face the sun like sunflowers. If so, did they turn back to where they expected the sun to rise in the morning overnight, or did they turn at the first rays?

“What?” Irene asked. “You look puzzled.”

I asked her about the habits of the flowers. She laughed. “I have no idea. We could do a stake out with donuts and watch if you like?”

It was my turn to laugh. “Somehow I don’t think Lucus is quite ready for me to spend a night away from Lillian just yet.”

“It would do you good. Get you some perspective.”

“You think I’m lacking perspective?”

“Not really. I just meant… you do an awful lot in that house. It wouldn’t do him harm to have some responsibility now and again.”

I didn’t comment. It wasn’t the sort of observation that warranted one. We carried on in silence.

When I got in it would only be a short time before we both drifted to bed. There would be some conversation, nothing heavy; some TV perhaps. Things would be different at Irene’s. For a start she was going home to an empty house and could please herself, but I expected her to spend a good thirty minutes or more contemplating the investigation boards, possibly adding on the details I’d discovered tonight, rearrange things, and seeing if she could make any new connections.

I wondered how close our boards were to the official ones the police held. Whether Russ was still their primary suspect, and if the evidence was all being made to fit that premise.

The police would have different information to us; fingerprints, splatter patterns, the coroner’s report. It would have been useful to know what they knew. Or maybe it was that reliance on physical evidence that was stalling their investigation. Russ’s prints were everywhere. That may have confirmed something that hadn’t actually happened. Their physical evidence may well have hidden the true facts of that case. Then again, it might be we who were barking up the wrong tree.

Irene pulled up outside our house, the golden variegated leaves of our privet hedge glowing in the headlights.

I looked to Irene, hands clutching the book which explained tonight’s absence.

“We’re nearly there,” Irene said. “You won’t have to keep this up for much longer.”

“How do you know?”

“Things are dropping into place. Trust me.”

I wasn’t so sure. Everything we’d found out so far just seemed to add a new layer to the case, not make it any clearer.

“Come to mine for lunch. We can go over things before we go round to Fiona’s.”

“OK.” I opened the door and stepped out into the cold of the evening. Cars were still zipping by the end of our road, but the night had brought with it a dampening silence. A thick calm that seemed to work like soundproofing and distanced our road from every other road in Grimsby.

I closed the car door behind me and Irene pulled away, her indicator flashing in the dark, declaring her intention to head right towards her own street.

I stood outside for a moment, clutching the book, breathing in the night air. The hustle and bustle of the day was over. Even the birds were at rest. All was at peace.

“Waaaaa!” I looked towards our house. It seemed like Lillian had resolved the need for me to compound any lies. If she was awake, then any discussion of my evening out would be smothered in Lucus’s description of his disrupted evening in.

I smiled and keyed the door. For once, a restless evening was a relief. I wouldn’t need to flesh out any lies. The book would be enough. Lucus would just be relieved I was home. Mummy hugs were so much more effective in getting Lillian back down. He just didn’t have the rocking down right.

Chapter Twenty Nine

Considering the bad night Lillian had had, molars this time I thought, I hadn’t slept too badly.

Of course, being tired all the time helped. I hadn’t had an undisturbed night’s sleep since I was six months pregnant. With regular nocturnal visits to the nursery after Lillian was born, I’d developed the knack of virtually instant sleep. Once my head hit the pillow I was out within seconds. It annoyed the hell out of Lucus, who would lie there listening to me breathing as sleep eluded him.

Lillian woke up at her usual early time and over breakfast I took the chance to look in her mouth.

Lucus walked through, suited up, tie on, carrying his coffee. He looked every bit the professional teacher. No one would know he had a young family at home. He was tidy, smart and focussed.

“It’s started.” I told him. “The skin’s broken on her lower left.”

“Was that the reason for last night?”

“Seems so.”

“How much sleep did you get?”

I totted it up quickly. “About four hours I think in total. I ended up bathing her down about two.”

He yawned. “Oh… how was last night?” he asked.

“Good,” I said. “I got a book. Signed.” I added. “It’s over there on the side.” It was still wrapped up in the carrier Irene had handed it to me in last night. He wandered over, opened it up and took a look. He pulled a face. It wasn’t his sort of book.

“You’re going to read this?”

“It would be rude not to.”

“She signed it for you,” he said, flipping open the front cover.

“Yes.”

“That’s nice.” He put the book down again. He’d never read it. Teen fiction wasn’t his thing. Had it been a novel about a submarine, aircraft carrier or spy it might have stood a better chance. I was a more eclectic reader. During my waking hours in the last few months, I’d worked through a fair collection of his techno thrillers, as well as sci-fi and fantasy novels. They had the advantage of being long. Lillian used to take an hour to feed overnight; having a good book had been essential.

“Busy day?” he asked.

“Oh… seeing Irene in the morning and then we’ve been invited around for coffee to one of the mum’s houses.”

“That sounds good.” He wasn’t really paying attention. I knew it by his tone. His brain was on “work things”. Important things. Significant things. Who was on what rota, where the kids were in the grading system, what he was going to do after first break, lunch break, what meetings were in his diary. I was deposited in the “home life” box, packed and slotted into the shelving structure in his mind that compartmentalised me away from all the strategic, important, planning stuff. I was me now. I was exactly what he saw. Ruth the mother. Ruth the housewife. Ruth the homemaker. Ruth the career-less. Ruth the dull.

I smiled to myself. How little he really knew me now. Just a few weeks ago I used to think of myself as mother, housewife, homemaker, career-less and yes, dull. No longer. Because of Irene I was Ruth the investigator. Ruth the crime solver. Ruth the sleuth. My smile turned into a grin.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just pulling a face at Lillian.”

Explaining I’d just rhymed Ruth and sleuth in my head would have required an explanation I wasn’t prepared to give.

He leant over and kissed Lillian, holding his tie out of her sticky reach, and then did the same to me.

“See you tonight.”

“What time?”

“About five thirty I should think.”

“I’ll get dinner ready for then.”

He smiled. Everything was right with the world. He: Man; earner of money, provider for family. Me: Woman; keeper of house, raiser of babies. Food on the table at 5:30.

I watched him leave, heard the door snick to. I looked at Lillian.

“Ruth the Sleuth and Lillian the…,” I ran through the alphabet in my head.

“Lillian worth a billion.” She grinned back at me. She was. Even without the sleuthing, even if my life sometimes felt worthless, she was the reason I had given up work, she was my purpose in life right now. I could have my work-life back in five years or so if I wanted when she went to school. Five years wasn’t much to give out of a likely eighty after all.

I undid the clips and lifted her out of the high chair. I could never harm this little thing. No matter what she did I couldn’t imagine being driven to kill her, even in twenty years’ time.

I’d been mulling over all we’d found out these last few days. Joe seemed so unlikely. He seemed content with Lou. A boy who wanted to save animals was hardly going to be the type to kill an ex-girlfriend. Besides, she’d been married for years. Surely if he was jealous he’d have made his move long ago.

So if not Joe, that left us back with the parents. If Pete had been Gill’s alibi all those years ago, then perhaps he was providing one again. Then again if Gill was the killer, this time could Pete be covering for her without realising?

When he’d visited to quote for Irene’s conservatory, his love and his grief had seemed so genuine. It seemed impossible that he had killed his stepdaughter. As for his wife, she seemed the colder of the two. Her reaction at the funeral was calm, collected. Her anger outside Rose’s place furious. I could easily imagine her orchestrating Geoff’s disappearance all those years ago, she only needed a valid motive. But killing a child was a different psychology all together. I wasn’t sure it was possible, even with the cold woman I had met so far. To a child, everyone was a giant. So who was it Lesley had seen burying the body? Had there been a familiarity in the shadowy form she witnessed that night?

Then there was the timing of it all. If Lesley was only three, that would make Lou younger, maybe even Lillian’s age. Geoff wouldn’t have gone out and left the children alone. No parent did that. Someone would have been in the house. They had to be. There had to be another witness in this case. Someone we hadn’t spoken to – someone who could provide the links we needed in our chain of evidence.

I walked off up the stairs carrying my precious billion. Fiona might know. She was next door when Geoff went missing. Things were different twenty years ago, people paid more attention to their neighbours, what everyone was up to back then. Yes, I may have been painting history with a rose tinted brush, but maybe, just maybe, Fiona knew what they did with the children that night.

Irene was right. The murder must start way back with Geoff’s disappearance. It had to. There was no other explanation for Lesley’s murder. We’d ruled out every other suspect we’d found, even Russ.

Chapter Thirty

After a morning looking at the boards and tossing ideas around Irene and I were agreed. The police were wrong to eliminate Gill and Pete so readily. Something had happened all those years ago to Geoff. Something had happened recently to Lesley as her memories came back. She’d seen something. Something important.

We pulled up outside Fiona’s house. Irene had decided to drop the dog collar.

“Off duty,” she said. “Besides, it will just make everyone feel uncomfortable.” Me included, I didn’t add.

She wasn’t going to drop the mother routine though. It was useful to have that perceived connection she said. Fiona thought of her as an equal, a grandmother. It made conversation easier. There was a common ground on which to build. The fact that the common ground was quicksand was neither here nor there.

We had a plan of action. I would get to know Janice, leaving Fiona and Irene free to talk. We would be the baby minders, nothing new in that, and Fiona and Irene would be free to chat over the gossip in the street.

The temperatures were on the increase and I’d dressed Lillian warmly, but didn’t bother with the snow suit. Instead I tried on the shoes we had bought her the weekend before. They were deep purple, the only colour that wasn’t pink and had butterflies stitched into the leather. They were so small. Size 2 or something silly. Tiny little chunky things with plastic soles that made Lillian stamp rather than walk. We didn’t use them inside the house, but now that we had them, they were required footwear when we went out.

As we reached the house, I lowered Lillian to the floor. This was a new experience for her, walking outside. She held my hand tightly, and I stooped to accommodate her grip. She stamped wildly on the pavement, excited. She was outside. There was no buggy. She giggled and I smiled. While the nights might be tough and mothering wasn’t the joy everyone always said it was, it was at times like this I was glad I hadn’t gone back to work. I could catch and remember all these little moments. Janice would be missing them all.

I directed her towards Fiona’s front door and we took the step in enormous, giant- like strides, with me holding both her arms and giving her the extra lift she needed.

Irene leaned past me and rang the doorbell, while I kept Lillian away from a lovely potted fuchsia which was easy pickings on the door step.

“Hi!” Janice gushed, as she opened the door. “You must be Ruth’s mum. I’m Janice. Come in, come in.”

We bundled inside and Janice closed the door behind us, all smiles and yummy mummy-ness. Gone was the smart business persona. This was the Janice I knew from group. The I’m-so-thrilled-to-meet-you Janice. The isn’t-the-singing-wonderful Janice. Her smile was enormous, sparkling and genuine; her eyes bright, her hair immaculately straight and blond. She sported a designer top, probably mail order, to match her son’s pristine outfits. She wasn’t the supermarket or charity shop special type.

“Nicholas is outside. We got a sand table last weekend. He loves it. Do you want to play with sand, Lillian?” I winced internally. Janice was one of those who had a special “baby voice” a smoochy-coochy-kins way of talking that grated on me. Lillian may be a child, but I didn’t adjust my voice pattern to speak to her. Well, maybe I did, but not to that extent, and I’d certainly never use it on another mother’s child. Nicholas was probably spoilt rotten; guilt for leaving him at home and returning to work.

Guilt was probably the biggest emotion you felt as a mother. You didn’t have to go looking for it, it came naturally. Guilt if you couldn’t breastfeed. Guilt if you weaned earlier than the six months now stipulated by the government. Guilt if you didn’t watch your child intently 24/7 and they happened to fall over and crack open their head on a newel post (she still had a scar through her eyebrow from that incident). Guilt on the days you felt like leaving the buggy with your inconsolable infant parked outside “lost and found” and running away. Guilt you weren’t the perfect mother.

The truth was, no mother was perfect. We all learned by trial and error. Some just gave off that swan-like air of calm while their feet paddled like mad underneath. Me? I’d not even learned that swan-like calm. I was just paddling furiously and felt like everyone could see it.

We followed Janice through the house to the patio doors. Fiona was already in the kitchen preparing the tea tray.

“Hello!” she said as we came in. “Hello darlin’.” She smiled at Lillian who stomped off across her tiled floor towards the open door and Nicholas outside. Darlin’ was a Grimsby term. I’d got used to it now. Everyone was darlin’ here. Not pronounced in the Hollywood style “Darlink” but with a drawn out “ah” and a missing “g”. Daaahlin. It wasn’t meant to be condescending.

“Tea OK?” Fiona asked, as I followed Lillian outside.

She took the patio step backwards, carefully on all fours. I didn’t have to tell her. It was what she did on our own back step. The raised edge of the uPVC made it harder for her than it was usually, but she managed, after a few glances at her toes.

“Sounds great.”

“I’ll bring it outside to you.”

I murmured my thanks, and headed outside to pretend to be a yummy mummy with her daughter while we watched our two children playing side by side in the garden.

The garden was everything I expected it to be: immaculately weeded flower beds, properly edged lawns, mature shrubs, shaded corners, sun trap pressure washed patio, white plastic patio furniture without a trace of green mossy mould. There was a chest high wall all the way around the garden, just as there was in my own.

Grimsby must have had a plethora of bricks in its building heyday. Nearly all the gardens were walled. Back in East Sussex where I had grown up, our garden borders were just chain link fences. You could see most of the way through the gardens down the line of houses in either direction. Things had probably moved on now and I expect if I went back and visited my own childhood home I’d see a line of fence panels in the back garden making it more private. We loved our privacy these days. The idea of someone hanging out their washing three doors up and seeing you half naked on a sun bed in your back garden was horrific. Even in Grimsby people had been topping their chest high walls with short fences just to avoid that casual look over.

Nicholas was dressed in an outfit that would have been appropriate for a wedding in our house. A matching dungaree and shirt set with a coordinated neckerchief bib, which was Janice’s concession to his constant dribbling.

The sand and water table was half full of both. Nicholas was not old enough really to make the most of the toys she’d also purchased with it, but was happy enough picking up handfuls of sand and splashing in the water. Lillian reached the table and looked inside, grinning. I couldn’t help but think she looked like Godzilla approaching a city. She reached out, picked up the plastic rake Janice had left in the sand, and immediately whacked Nicholas with it.

I was too late. I should have realised what was going to happen before she’d even got there. I started apologising instantly; scolding Lillian as Nicholas let out a wail of agony. She hadn’t hit him all that hard, it would have been shock more than anything else, but it was still embarrassing.

Janice ran over to Nicholas and drew him into a hug. This was a great start to the play date. She looked over at me and I apologised again, but Janice just laughed.

“Kids eh?”

I laughed back; utterly relieved she wasn’t one of the “precious” mothers.

“It was just an accident,” Janice said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“She’s got a few wooden spoons and things at home,” I explained. “She tends to swing them around and hit things with them.”

“Did you make up one of those heuristic play boxes?”

“Yes. It’s still her favourite.”

“Nicolas was only ever interested in cars. I tried, but egg boxes and scouring pads don’t have wheels,” she said. I smiled. We might actually get along.

“Are you enjoying being back at work?”

“Yes. I shouldn’t say that really, should I?” She gave me a sideways smile. “Don’t get me wrong. I love being a mother. But it’s nice to be doing something as well.” Maybe she was more normal than I thought. “Besides, we need the money. Mum can sit for Nicholas while I’m out, so I don’t have nursery to pay. Are you going back?”

“None of my family are local,” I told her. “By the time we covered nursery fees, I’d only be bringing home £100 a month. It didn’t seem worth it. It was a stressful job. £100 a month for the amount of pressure… we both decided I’d be better of staying off until the kids reached school age.”

“Kids?” Janice picked up on the unintentional pleural instantly. “You’re planning another?”

The thing was, I’d always planned for two. Children didn’t come as single entities. I was one of two, Lucus one of three.

The decision to have Lillian had been based soundly on logic. We were the right age. Lillian had been planned for. We had waited until we’d finished renovating and decorating the house and had a big holiday. It was a joint decision. It was rational. We had looked at my age, decided if we were going to start a family, we should start before I reached 30 to lower the associated risks, and if we were going to have two, then 27 was the right time to begin. Our decision had been very, for want of a better word, clinical.

The contrast in the drive for the second baby had surprised me. It was being led entirely by hormones, my hormones. I wanted another child. My body ached to be pregnant again. It was animalistic. It was driven by something much deeper, something I had very little control over and as a result I knew I would win the argument. I would have another. Whether I did it with Lucus’s full consent, or whether I simply made a few simple mistakes with pill taking and forced it by accident. Baby number two would arrive and if I had any say in the matter, it would be conceived within the year.

I nodded in response. “I must be crazy I know… but I want another.”

“Nicholas will be it,” Janice said. “I had such a difficult pregnancy. The doctor’s said the next one could kill me.”

“Really?” I said. The biggest one-upmanship conversations in baby group had always been about pregnancy and birth. If there’s one thing I learned about being a mother – everyone wants to talk about their own experiences of giving birth. I’d listened to loads of tales, but I wasn’t sure I’d heard Janice’s yet. I knew it would keep her talking a while, so I gave her the lead in she wanted, and while she talked, we watched the children play. I only needed to add the occasional wince and “Ooo” and she was away.

I glanced up now and again into the kitchen. Irene and Fiona seemed in full flow. The cup of tea entirely forgotten. I wondered what they were talking about. Whether Irene had got Fiona into discussing what we needed to know, namely who had the children while Geoff disappeared.

Janice was still mid flow into her experiences with ventouse, the saga of the dwindling heartbeat, her mother as birthing partner because Sean couldn’t cope with hospitals, the student doctor, a mistake with the gas and air, when a familiar face peaked over the wall: Lou.

“Hello Janice! Is this Nicholas? Goodness he’s grown! I’ve not seen him in a few months and look at him! He’s walking and everything!”

“Just! How was Thailand?” Janice called back.

“Oh, great. They have the most fantastic people, and the architecture is amazing, and…oh! Hello!” She smiled at me. “Didn’t I bump into you at the crem?”

“Yes,” I said. “I caught your tissue.” I smiled. Joe didn’t remember me, but clearly Lou did. Women looked at the faces. We’d reacted to each other. The face had gone in.

“I thought I recognised you. I live next door. Well, I don’t now, but I did. It’s just Mum and Pete now. Look at him standing!” she gushed to Janice’s clear delight.

Lou obviously loved children as much as Lesley was supposed to have done.

“We grew up together,” Janice told me, proud mother smile stretched across her face. “Lou’s almost family.”

“Come on over!” She called to her. “Mum’s got a cuppa on. Though I think we’ve missed out on the first brew. Come and tell me all about Thailand.”

The head ducked back over the wall and I could hear rustling as Lou walked around the fence and towards the front of the house. Very shortly there was a squeak from a side gate and Lou walked into the back garden.

She was wearing a pair of skinny jeans. The sort I never even fitted into even before I had Lillian. For lack of a better description, she was all stick and hair today. She had a tight top on, tucked into her jeans, which just went to emphasise how petite her little waist actually was. Joe would be able to stretch his arms right round it and meet himself at the shoulders again. Adding to my jealousy was her non-fake tan, which I hadn’t noticed before due to her crying. Her face had been redder and tear streaked the last time we had met. Altogether she was a picture of health and vitality. I dreaded to think what sort of impression I was making on her.

She crouched down next to Nicholas, who in typical baby fashion totally ignored her. He was currently more interested in throwing sand onto the patio.

“Wow, Janice. He’s so like his dad.”

I looked at Nicholas. Having never met Mr Janice, I had always thought Nicholas looked a lot like her. He did have several features the same. But Lou clearly knew Janice’s other half to spot the similarities.

“Lou? Lou! Is that you hopped over wall?” Fiona called out from the kitchen.

Lou straightened up. “Walked round, Auntie Fi. Couldn’t hop over in these.” She stroked her jeans. I wouldn’t be able to walk or squat in them let alone jump, but Lou had seemed to manage the first two activities fine.

Fiona came out, Irene in her wake. She waggled her eyebrows at me. Waggle good? Waggle bad? It was hard to tell. I gave up trying. If I was here on a baby group play date, whether Irene had finished her interrogations, or still had a way to go, it was irrelevant. We would be here for a good hour yet. Besides I hadn’t had my promised cup of tea yet.

Fiona and Lou hugged like old friends.

“I’ll pop the kettle on dahlin’. We’re about due another brew.”

Janice coughed. “Erm… We haven’t even had a first one yet mum.”

“Oh… did I not? I’m sure I did… yes, it’s sitting there on the kitchen table.”

“And we are?”

“Outside. Yeah yeah. I remember what looking after babies is like. I’ll make you another.”

Fiona wandered back inside, but Irene stayed with us.

“So you’re Lou from next door?”

“Yes.”

“Fiona has been telling me all about you. I’m so sorry about your sister.”

Lou pulled that frown that we’d seen so often. The I’m-really-sad-about-it, but I’m not going to show you, instead you’ll get this turned down I’m-coping-with-it face. The one that says, ‘frown’ in much the same way text messages say ‘lol’ when all you’re really doing is smirking.

I’d seen Lou when she was grieving. I knew this face really meant ‘We aren’t talking about that. If we don’t talk about it, I don’t break.’

“Are you cousins then?” I asked, trying a different subject. Irene’s comment had cut the conversation dead and she didn’t appear to have any recovery plan, which was unlike her. I wasn’t sure whether this was her “in character” or just a mistake on her part. It was hard to tell the difference.

“No,” Janice giggled. “Lou just calls mum Auntie because we’ve lived next door for years. Mum used to sit for the girls when Gill went out and they were always in and out when we were younger. Paul and Lou are nearly the same age. Lou’s the older sister I never had.”

She walked over and gave Lou a ‘best friend’ hug, a stand alongside you shoulder squeeze. Lou looked grateful for the contact. The talk of Lesley had clearly upskittled her brave face. She looked on the verge of tears. Janice had probably noticed too, as she abruptly changed the subject.

“So then. Tell us all about Thailand. What’s it like? Meet any hunky men?”

“I’m still with Joe.”

“Only because you’ve not found that hunky water sports instructor yet. Come on… you’ll dump him the minute you can upgrade. He’s lovely and all, but he’s not exactly Thailand.”

Janice really was a girlie girl. You could tell from the way she spoke to Lou that there was a whole girlie camaraderie there. Something I’d never experienced with any of my female friends. I didn’t do ‘Girlie chats’. They weren’t my thing at all. The whole gossip, boys, fashion, beauty thing had passed me by entirely. I just lacked interest. I was more into current affairs, DIY, catering supplies (don’t even get me started on Lakeland Plastics) and cooking. Truth be told, I probably did fit better with the WI set than the nightclubbing girls, but I loved dancing too – it was Lucus that had two left feet.

I listened to Lou and Janice chat. They seemed to know each other backwards. It was lovely seeing such a close relationship and in a way, in Janice, Lou was being reminded she still had a sister. Lesley might have gone, but Janice, friendship thicker than blood, was still just over the wall.

Fiona came outside with a tea tray and sat down with us. She handed each of us a mug.

“Found yours at the back of the cupboard,” she said, as she handed one to Lou. The mug boasted a picture of a dog poo. Lou smiled as it was passed over.

“Lou rhymes with poo,” she said. “I remember this one.”

“You can blame Paul for that,” Fiona said, explaining the joke to us newbies. “Paul’s my eldest. Janice’s brother.”

“He’s in Doncaster now,” Janice said. “Three children of his own. THREE! Can you believe it?” She raised her eyebrows at me. I couldn’t. Three? Lucus was struggling with the concept of number two.

“I think they’ll go for four,” Fiona said.

“Why stop there? Once you’ve had to buy a people carrier, you might as well fill it up. And Alison always said she wanted a big family.”

Janice and Fiona laughed together and we all joined in. It was lovely to see the freedom and openness of their mother and daughter relationship. My own mother was hundreds of miles away. When we got together, it was like speed catch up, we didn’t stop talking. We were close too, but in a totally different way. There was a deep, deep bond between us, and it was forged on our life experiences, some shared trials that we had held each other through. We knew each other, we knew everything about each other, and there wasn’t a topic we skirted around, but we saw each other so infrequently that we didn’t have time for this jokey family time with friends. Our time together was almost too precious to share.

I’m sure there were lots of other families like ours. The turn of the century had seen the explosion of the family units; everyone travelled now, few people stayed near home, whole generations were split up. Grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren all living in different locations in the UK, or even abroad. Fiona and Janice were the exception. Even her elder brother Paul lived away.

Irene looked at me pointedly. I raised my eyebrows. What ?

Irene tapped her ring finger.

Who ? I mouthed.

I followed her eye jerk to Fiona and shrugged. I had no idea. Janice was married, or at least, in a long term relationship. No. Married. I could see the rings from here. But Fiona had her hands between her legs at the moment and I couldn’t see. Not that it would have helped. Fiona hadn’t spoken of her husband. So either she was widowed, married or divorced. The absence of rings didn’t necessarily prove anything either way.

“I suppose you and your husband get down as often as you can?” Irene asked. Clearly deciding to take the matter into her own hands.

“Yes. We try. But Colin still works shifts at the port so we don’t get away all that often.”

Married then. Good on her. So many of my parent’s generation were divorced, it was nice to see some marriages still made it.

I slurped on my tea and sat back on the patio furniture as Lillian and Nicholas made their way over to us. She held up her hands and I picked her up, but she wasn’t after a cuddle. Instead, she was craning to see what was on the table with the tea things.

“She knows. Look at her. She knows,” Fiona said. “I’ll go and get you both a biscuit and a cup of juice.”

She set off for the kitchen, and Nicholas followed after her like a dog. Lillian started jiffling so I let her down to follow after Nicholas and the woman who provided biscuits. The pair were rewarded with two spouted cups and a rich tea each as they crested the door. Fiona cupped both their heads and steered them both back towards us, chuckling.

“Barely a year old the pair of them and they’ve already worked out where the biscuits come from.”

Lillian was faster than Nicholas, having been on her feet a good few months earlier. She came careering back along the path in excitement and not entirely unexpectedly, fell over with a big clatter. The cup went one way, the biscuit fractured in three and Lillian cracked her head off the stone effect concrete, resulting in an immediate wail.

I leapt up even as Fiona reached her and scooped her into her arms.

“There, there,” Fiona said, holding her close, but Lillian was already reaching out for me. When the chips were down, mummy was the best. Biscuits could come from anyone, but hurts could only be healed by mother.

I took her into my arms and rubbed at her head. She’d walloped it quite hard and a red bruise was already showing on her forehead. She was often bumping and scraping herself. This wasn’t the worst accident.

“I’ll get her a cold cloth,” Fiona said, walking back inside.

Nicholas started to cry behind me and I span around. He was fine. Just reacting to Lillian and the sudden changes of direction. He looked lost, bereft.

Janice called him over to her, but when that didn’t work, she got up and picked him up in a big “Whoosh” – a method which immediately stopped his crying and turned his frown to a grin.

“You’re fine aren’t you? Silly little thing. Do you want to go to Auntie Lou?”

Lou held out her arms, but he didn’t want to go, so in the end Janice sat back down with Nicholas on her lap. “Silly thing.”

Fiona came back out with a damp cloth and I held it to Lillian’s head. At home I’d never have bothered. I didn’t hold with the whole “cold compress” thing. At baby group damp paper towels were issued for any bump or scrape. The miracle healing properties of damp paper towels were entirely lost on me. If everything could be fixed so easily, surely the NHS would simply issue them as part of triage in A&E?

Lillian snuggled her hot snotty face into my neck and I could feel it getting sticky with mucus. This surely was what motherly love was all about… the willingness to get utterly covered in bodily fluids without flinching.

I rocked her in my chair and eventually she stopped sobbing and started to look around her again. The first thing she spotted of course was Nicholas and his biscuit. She reached out her hand in grasping motion.

“Uh! Uh!”

“I’ll go and get her another one,” Fiona stood up.

“I’ll come with you. I need to… uh… use the bathroom.” It was easier than explaining I had a string of sticky ooze running down the inside of my top that was making my skin crawl.

“Second on the right,” she said as we entered through the patio doors.

I took Lillian with me. No one expected anything less. Janice must have been to the toilet balancing Nicholas on her lap more than once. Multi-tasking even extended to bathroom activities when you had a child. Babies couldn’t be left alone for one second once they started moving, and as she’d just taken a tumble, there was no way she was going to let me out of her sight with strangers in a strange house.

The carpet up the stairs was as plush as the one inside the door. Not surprising really as it was the same carpet that extended up the stairs and into the upstairs hall. The underlay was obviously of better quality than our own. It felt like I was walking on sponges.

I counted the doors and entered the right one. The bathroom suite was fresh and clean, the taps sparkled. The suite was the new modern style, smooth curved edges on either end of the bath, with a tap in the middle. I was immediately envious. The whole bathroom oozed luxury. Whatever Colin did, he must be paid quite well at the Port. Probably not your general labourer.

I turned on the taps, grabbed some toilet roll and started dabbing at the worst of the goop running down the inside of my top while Lillian explored the area under my watchful gaze, just in case there was something toxic within reach. Even the toilet roll was plush. Some sort of quilted affair. Not the shop’s own brand basics we used at home.

“All done,” I sang-songed to Lillian, and we made our way back down the stairs. Fiona met us in the hall with another biscuit which she proffered to Lillian, who all but fell out of my arms in her attempt to grab it.

“Is that Paul?” I asked. Looking at a young family photo in the hallway. The blond teenager was definitely Janice; the older boy must have been Paul by elimination. He had Fiona’s eyes, but that was about it. Janice on the other hand took after her father completely. It was funny the way genetics passed down like that. Lillian looked like Lucus in so many ways. Same round face. Same way of looking at things. She had his fair skin and hairline, but the eyes were mine, sparkling blue. I hoped she had the best of both of us.

“Yes. I think he was about nineteen there.”

“Quite the looker,” I said. I could voice appreciation now I was married and with a baby. It wouldn’t be taken the wrong way. I was a mother too – the fact Paul was probably around my age didn’t matter anymore. He had a long term girlfriend, I was married. This was a mother talk. Our relative age difference didn’t matter now. I was praising her offspring, mother to mother.

“Yes. He always was a heart breaker.”

“I bet. Your eyes.”

“Yes. Everyone says that. Colin is happy enough owning up to the rest though.”

I was sure he was, but there must have been some second generation genetics involved. He probably took after one of the grandparents. I saw quite a bit of my brother in Lillian, the way she smiled, the way she went at things. My brother’s personality was definitely hidden in there somewhere. Sadly, Michael had pushed a lot of my buttons growing up, and I had a horrible feeling Lillian was going to do the same. Time would tell.

We went back out to the garden. Lou was busy recounting some story from Thailand and Irene and Janice were both listening with smiles on their faces. I lowered Lillian back to the ground and joined the circle.

I hoped Irene had found out what she needed to in that first forty minutes with Fiona in the kitchen, because it seemed her best laid plans had been hijacked by the arrival of Lesley’s sister, and given her reluctance to discuss her sister right now, I doubted we would find out anything more.

Chapter Thirty One

The next day we were back in Irene’s kitchen staring at the boards. To all intents and purposes nothing had changed with our suspect list since those first few days of our investigation. Our top suspects were still the same and we still had no way of eliminating or proving it was any of them.

“I can’t see any other way around it,” Irene said, swinging her now empty mug around. “We’re just going to HAVE to question Gill directly.”

“Surely we should go to the police?”

“The police? With what? We don’t know anything. Fiona was minding the children the night Geoff disappeared. Gill was out, probably with Pete. Geoff was out. Colin was working. No one saw anything. The only person who saw anything was Lesley and she’s dead.”

I understood her frustration. But turning up at the door of the person we were convinced was a murderer and asking her outright to confess didn’t seem like a sensible plan either.

“Gill was out with Pete when Lesley was killed. At least, that’s what they’ve told the police.”

“That’s what we THINK they’ve told the police,” I corrected. “We don’t know for sure.”

“No, but that seems sensible.”

“So what do you propose exactly? Just turning up and going all “Miss Marple” on them? I don’t think it’ll wash. You aren’t going to trick them into a confession. If they’ve kept Geoff’s death hidden so long they’re hardly going to admit to it now.”

“Perhaps not. But the fact is, Gill is the only person we haven’t spoken to, and she’s a key suspect.”

“Probably the only one we have left,” I added. The only other person was Russ, but while he may have killed Lesley, he would only have been around two years old when Geoff disappeared, so could hardly be held liable for that one.

“You are SURE he’s dead. Not just hiding?” If Geoff was still alive and well he was a suspect. He could have turned up to reacquaint himself with his offspring and didn’t like the reaction he’d prompted. “People vanish for years you know.”

“I know. But it’s very rare that these vanished people turn back up again. Missing cases are rarely solved and when they are, it’s usually by the appearance of a dead body.”

“So why don’t we find the body?”

She looked at me. It was something we hadn’t tried yet. But it wasn’t like we could go around digging holes in people’s lawns! We had no reason to dig up Gill and Pete’s grounds and there was no reasonable excuse I could think of for doing it either. Pete was a builder. He’d probably see right through any ruse Irene could concoct. Besides, they’d surely smell a rat if two women and a baby turned up to dig up a lawn looking for a cable.

It turned out digging up the lawn wasn’t Irene’s plan. Instead we all bundled out of the car outside Fiona’s house yet again and knocked on the door.

She answered fairly quickly, Nicholas in her arms.

“Oh! Hello again!” If she was concerned we were being a nuisance there was no evidence of it on her face.

“I know this is a little awkward,” Irene said. “But I noticed Lou’s family had a Philadelphus in the back garden. I love mock orange and wondered if you think they’d mind if I took a few cuttings, to see if I could get it to grow?”

She sounded so casual about it. The fact we’d spent an hour pawing through horticultural gardening books in her house trying to a) remember what we’d seen over the fence and b) work out what they were called, was never hinted at. She sounded quite the horticultural specialist.

“Oh. I know the one you mean,” Fiona smiled. “Yes, I’ve been trying to get a cutting to grow for ages. I just can’t get it to take. What do you use?”

I looked to Irene. What was she going to say?

“Oh, just the usual. Rooting powder. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. But if you take enough cuttings, you improve your chances, and my garden’s really sheltered.”

Oh, it was. Mainly because it was overgrown with weeds. Irene had more weeds in her garden than I did, and I thought mine was bad. She claimed she liked blackberries and was supporting the wildlife. I thought it far more likely that she simply hated gardening and did the bare minimum possible. Though for some reason her “wilderness garden” as she called it, looked much better than my cultivated one. Typical.

“Just go round and ask. I’m sure they won’t mind. They’re both in I think. Gill’s not gone back to work yet. She’s on compassionate leave still.”

“Oh… do you think they’ll mind?” Irene asked, mock concerned.

“No. It’ll take her mind off things, and it’s not like you’re total strangers. You know Lou after all. Just knock. Say I sent you round.”

It was amazing the difference a few weeks made. We weren’t strangers any more, collecting money for charity, but family friends. We had a right now to intrude on their neighbour’s grief.

“Thanks!” Irene smiled. “I do love the smell of a Philadelphus in the summer. I’ve been after one for a while.”

We said goodbye and tootled off down the pavement towards the house.

Pete was out. The van wasn’t in the drive. It had been the first thing Irene had checked on pulling up. The last thing we needed was Pete home. That would be one too many coincidences to explain. I hoped Joe wasn’t calling in on his girlfriend either, otherwise that could have been awkward too, but Irene hadn’t thought that a concern. If we go early enough he probably won’t be out of bed. He’s a student remember?

The front garden had been bricked over in a herring bone pattern. There were just a few carefully tended semi-circular beds containing shrubs around the edges of the outer walls. It all looked neat. Not like my rag tag front patch which lurked behind the high privet hedge. Too thin to landscape, too deep to do anything decorative.

Close up, the house, while modernised, didn’t look as out of place as it had from a distance. Everything had its place. The render was smooth, and the front paving gave it an almost Mediterranean feel, or if not Mediterranean, then certainly modern. The exposed bleached woodwork added to the effect and I could appreciate the glass roof on the porch from this distance. It shed some lovely natural light inside the front of the house, and I could see the clean pastel shades extended into the property. The hallway an off white, clean surface with inserted shelving and clutter free lines.

While I’d never live in a house like it, I could appreciate the aesthetics, part of me looked forward to seeing inside the property to see how they’d adapted the rest. Had they knocked through rooms to create more open plan spaces?

Irene pressed the door bell and it lit up repeatedly, demonstrating that something had happened internally, even though we couldn’t actually hear the bell. It must have rung towards the back of the house, as very soon I could see the stick-thin shape of Lou approaching the front door. She opened it.

“Hello again,” she smiled. Uncertain. It was a little odd, after all, people she’d met only next door the other day turning up out of the blue on her doorstep.

Irene gave her the patter about the shrub and she called back into the house to Gill to explain what we wanted. Gill stuck her head out of one of the back rooms.

She looked calm, but in a restrained way, the way you know there’s lots bubbling away under the surface, but it had all been papered over. Her face gave the impression of a thin sheet of plaster. One that covered the cracks, but that was easily fractured and broken if anything shifted underneath.

Gone was the business like face of the woman at the funeral, or the outraged woman at Rose’s place. In its place was a cliff face mid-erosion. I wondered if she’d recognise me. I hadn’t thought about it before, but we’d had that conversation… would she remember, or was the day a blur to her? Her eyes took in Irene. They rolled over me, and then jarred at Lillian. Unthinkingly I’d dressed Lillian in her lilac outfit. The same outfit she’d worn to the funeral.

“Have we met?” she asked.

“No, no I don’t think so,” Irene cut in before I could say anything. “You might have seen us next door. Ruth knows Janice from baby group.”

“Oh… that could be it,” she said. But her eyes hadn’t left Lillian. They narrowed a little. “Your little girl just looks so familiar.”

I shuffled Lillian around onto my other hip, momentarily hiding her face. “All babies look the same when they’re younger, don’t you think?” I said, continuing with Irene’s cover.

“I suppose.” She turned to Lou.

“They wondered if they could take a cutting or two from one of our shrubs,” she explained. “The one out the back, the…” She turned to Irene.

“Philadelphus. It’s the mock orange blossom; white flowers, smells nice in the summer?”

Gill smiled. “Yes. Feel free. You take them through, Lou.”

“I’m really sorry,” Irene said as we passed Gill. “Fiona told me what happened. Must be quite a shock.”

“It is,” Gill said. “But everything carries on doesn’t it?” She sounded so defeated. For a woman we thought had killed her daughter, she was certainly giving a good impression of grief. I wondered if we had it right. So far the only person who’d seemed more concerned about himself than Lesley was Russ. And I wondered, not for the first time, if we had this all wrong. Perhaps Gill had been in denial at the funeral. That was a stage in grief. If so, then that impression of a self-controlled, fully in charge of herself mother, had given way to someone who was clearly in inner turmoil.

We followed Lou into the garden, and Irene brought a pair of secateurs out of her handbag, along with a little freezer bag to put the cuttings in. When she came up with a ruse, she went the full way. She started taking cuttings. She looked very proficient, examining the bush for knots in the twigs as she trimmed, peeling off the odd leaf here and there. I wouldn’t have known she wasn’t a gardener.

As she trimmed she talked.

“I suppose the house wasn’t always like this.”

“No. It’s been extended a bit.”

“I bet you have a lovely view out of your bedroom window.”

“Yes. I’ve got a lovely view out the back. Mum’s got the other one.”

“How many bedrooms does it have now?

“The same. Just three, the box room is just a bit bigger now.” I listened and watched the conversation unfold, keeping Lillian in sight as she poddled around on the grass grasping clumsily at daisies. Lou had no idea she was being pumped for information.

“I suppose you and your sister didn’t have to share a room growing up then.”

“No. Lesley had the one at the front, the biggest one it was back then, before the extension. She liked the street lights at night. She was always a little scared of the dark.”

I looked at Irene. If Lesley had seen a body being carried and buried at night, it wouldn’t have been in their own back garden. I could tell by her face she’d had the same thought.

“There. That’s it. I don’t suppose I could be cheeky and have a walk around while I’m here, just to see what else you’ve got?”

“No. That’s fine. Lillian looks like she’s enjoying exploring anyway.”

And she did. Lillian had widened her activities and was now peering into bushes on the other side of the garden. I recognised a fuchsia, which was about the only shrub I could name because of the recognisable ballerina style flowers that dangled from it.

Irene headed off to the flower border on the other side of the garden. She kept glancing surreptitiously up at the house, as did I. Trying not to make it too obvious we were checking where all the other windows were. Working out the angles. What view each one had.

There was just one at the side of the house. But it was small and looked like it was either a landing window or a bathroom one. I tried to think where the stairs were. Yes. It could be the landing window. The box design of the house would lend itself to an upper landing window. It was the elongated houses like the one I lived in that lacked any windows in the hall. I had to remember this was originally the same size as Fiona’s house. In her house there had been a window on the landing, just outside the bathroom where the stairs started. That must be what that window was.

There were no other windows along this side, which meant whatever room Lesley slept in the windows were all at the front, overlooking the houses of the cul-de-sac. Whichever garden the body was buried in, it wasn’t their own.

“Oh! Do you mind if I take a cutting from this one?” Irene asked, secateurs out.

“No. Go right ahead.”

Irene started snipping. I had no idea what the shrub was and I would have bet a tenner she didn’t either. It was just another excuse to stop and talk.

So…,” she said. “You and Lesley and Janice were good friends growing up I guess.” I couldn’t see where she was going, but there would be a reason for the new tack in the conversation.

“Yes. All four of us hung around together when we were young.”

“Four?”

“Paul, too. Janice’s older brother.”

“Oh yes. I’d forgotten about him,” Irene smiled. Had she really, or was it another ruse to keep Lou talking? “The one in Cambridge with the people carrier. Did you ever try signalling between the houses at night? I can remember doing it with a friend when I was younger.”

Lou smiled. “No. None of our windows faced the right way. We tried. But we just couldn’t see each other. Not without almost falling out of the window anyway. Lesley’s room was on the wrong side. We’d have been all right if we’d been signalling the Johnsons. That’s the other side. Well, it was the other side. Bill and Jean Bradley are in there now. Mr and Mrs Johnson left a while back.”

“Nice couple?”

“Bill and Jean? Yeah. All right. Bit old really for that house. The Johnsons’s extended it. They wanted a big family I think. Then it all went wrong. They left in the end. Downsized. Too much of a reminder.”

“Oh. What a shame. What did they have done?”

“Knocked out the whole back end. Major extension. A bit like what mum did with this place I suppose. Pete did both. It was him that had the idea to do this place, only he did ours better he says.”

I smiled. Of course he did. What workman didn’t improve things second time around.

“He worked on that place for nearly a year. The whole interior was knocked about as well. They moved out while he did it. Mum didn’t. We stayed in this place while the work was going on. Mess? You should have seen it! I thought she was going to kill Pete some nights!”

“I can imagine,” I said. “When they did our kitchen it took 12 weeks and that was bad enough. I can’t imagine what it would be like taking down the whole back end of the house.”

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Lou said. “Unless you can afford to move out that is, in which case, why not just buy a different house!”

I laughed along with her. She really did have an infectious laugh. I could see why she and Janice got along so well. Even when grieving Lou was a joy to be around.

“What is it you’re doing out in Thailand?” I asked. Curious. No one had actually brought it up while we were round at Fiona’s place.

“Environmental work.”

“Save the rain forest stuff?”

“No. Environmental studies. The impact of the dam projects upriver on the ecology downriver. It’s not that thrilling. But it looks great on the C.V., even if it’s not so great on the bank account. But the experience. Hell. The experience is worth every penny.”

She grinned wildly and her eyes sparkled, and then they dimmed again and a shadow crossed her face. I knew what she was thinking. Lesley would have loved to hear all about it. She would have come home and chatted to her sister about everything. And the only reason she was here at all, now, was because Lesley had gone.

“How long until you go back?” I asked.

“Another five days. I’m hoping Mum will be OK by then. Well, not OK, but, well, not like she is. Fiona’ll look in. But, it’s hit her hard. Harder than losing Dad.

“Do you remember that?” I asked.

“Not really. I was too young. I can’t even remember what he looked like. I’ve seen the photos, so I know, but I don’t know, if you know what I mean, not really. Pete’s been the only dad I’ve known. Lesley remembered him more, but she was only three when he disappeared. She had snippets, memories of things they’d done together. Him piggy-backing her along the beach. Him and mum arguing. He wasn’t… well, apparently he wasn’t a nice man, let’s put it that way. Mum says we’re better off without him.” She looked at me, hoping I’d understand without her having to explain things.

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know. Mum thought he’d just left her, left us. Run off with another woman. She said there was someone else. Well, she thought there was someone else, anyway. We’ll never know I suppose. Lesley always said he was dead. I’ve always wondered. There’s always that sense of… I don’t know. Did he really hate us that much? He’s never been in touch. All these years, nothing. I think I’d rather think he was dead. It would make me feel better about it. Does that sound really horrid?”

“No,” I said. “No it doesn’t.”

I understood exactly what she meant. It was much easier thinking your father had died loving you, than knowing he was alive and well and didn’t want anything to do with you. I was on that other side of the fence and there was nothing crueller.

“And no one ever saw anything?”

“No. No one.”

Irene was watching us. Freezer bag full of cuttings. Lou turned to her.

“All done,” she said, smiling. Holding the bag up to show the cuttings.

Realising that was our cue to leave I scooped up Lillian from where she was playing at the birdbath, splashing water everywhere, and we all headed towards the back door where we’d come in.

Gill was still out of sight, presumably in the living room, so Lou escorted us through the house to the front door. Without realising we’d done it, we’d all walked through in silence. Respecting the grief that was so potent within the house.

As we neared the door I spotted a picture of the girls in happier days. They were standing with Janice and Paul, in a “friends forever” style pose, each hugging the shoulders of the person next to them. They looked to be in the back garden of the house, the photo was clearly taken in summer as they were all in shorts and t-shirts, suntanned and warm. Paul looked a little younger than he had in the photo at Fiona’s, so I guessed late teens, possibly before Lesley left for University.

“Happier times,” Lou said, following my gaze. “Seems so long ago now. Back then we thought we could do anything. We had all the time in the world.”

“Who’s that?” Irene asked, pointing at Paul. She’d not seen the same photo I had at Fiona’s. “An old boyfriend?”

“No,” Lou smiled. “That’s Paul from next door. Janice’s brother. Mum always thought he was sweet on me, but we never went out. He was like the younger brother we never had. I would never have dated him. I knew too much about him. When you’ve seen someone burp the national anthem, you never really look at them in the same way again.”

I laughed. It felt wrong, in the quiet of the house, but I couldn’t help myself. I had a brother. I knew exactly what she meant. Only boys could attempt something so disgusting and call it a party piece.

Irene was looking at the photo intently. I wondered what she’d seen that I hadn’t. I checked the photo again. They all looked happy. There was no obvious strain within the group. Paul wasn’t looking at Lesley in any odd way. They were separated physically by Lou who stood between them in the photo, and while their arms were linked, to form the group photo pose, there was no out of place emotion on their faces or any unusual body language. They were just kids.

“How much older is Paul?” Irene asked.

“Oh, he’s younger than me actually, but only by about fourteen months. He was taller than all of us by the time he was thirteen. Lesley was the eldest, not that you’d know it in this photo.”

Irene smiled. “Well… I guess we must be off.” She took hold of Lou’s hand, squeezed it. “Look after your mum won’t you. It’s difficult going through something like this. No parent should have to bury their child.”

This outpouring of heartfelt emotion was unusual from Irene and it left me surprised. Especially given that we thought Gill was the killer. Lou smiled thinly at her.

“I am,” she said.

I walked outside with Lillian in my arms and followed Irene across the herringbone brickwork. Neither of us looked back. I heard the door close behind us and turned to Irene.

“What?”

“We’ve been idiots,” Irene said. “We’ve been looking in the wrong place the whole time.”

Chapter Thirty Two

Knowing where the body was was only half of the problem. We still had no idea who had put it there and there was certainly no way the police were going to destroy the rear end of a neighbour’s house to recover a body just on the say so of two women. I wondered how easy it would be to trace the previous owners of the house. Perhaps they could shed some insight on Pete and Gill’s relationship at that time. They might even have noticed something unusual when they popped back to check on the progress of their extension.

I headed for the car expecting a debrief back in Irene’s kitchen but she stopped midway there. I turned to her. Her face was unreadable.

“What?”

“I think I need a wee.”

It was the first time Irene had ever suggested she might have a bladder problem. I’d seen all the adverts on TV about leaking issues in older age, but in all the time I’d known her she’d never been caught short.

“I may just need to call in on Fiona,” she said. I followed her to Fiona’s front door, embarrassed on her behalf.

The door was opened before we’d even rung the bell. She must have been watching us from the window. Lillian and I spent a lot of time at windows and we’d surprised the postman now and again by opening the door before he reached it. When Lillian was at her worst it was my only contact with another human being during the day. A lifeline of normality. Even if it was just junk mail I received.

“How’d you get on?” she asked. Nicholas was holding onto her legs, needy.

“Great,” Irene said. “I’ve got enough cuttings I think.” She lofted one of her cutting bags. “Only, well, this is rather embarrassing… but is there any chance I can use your loo?”

“Of course. Come in, come in. Have you got time for a brew? I was just about to put the kettle on.”

“We have, haven’t we Ruth? Lillian doesn’t need a nap or lunch or anything just yet, does she?”

“No. We’ve got time. Only – I feel a bit like we’re imposing,” I said. “We were only here yesterday.” Irene shot me a look and I realised suddenly there was more going on here than a weak bladder. The bladder was an excuse, not the cause of the visit. I couldn’t believe how naïve I still was to Irene’s ruses.

“Don’t worry about it,” Fiona said. She’d missed our non-verbal interplay. “It’s good for Nicholas to have some company. He’s a little grizzly today. I’m not sure what’s up with him. Teeth probably.”

Teeth were blamed for everything at this age. Dribbling, temperatures, bad moods, poor sleep.

“Upstairs?” Irene asked. It had been me who went last time.

“Yes. You can’t miss it. Second on the right.”

Irene headed upstairs, leaving me to wonder what she was really up to while I settled Lillian down in the living room. As expected Nicholas ignored her arrival completely until she went over to take a look at the cars he was playing with. Realising the competition, he grabbed the cars in his chubby fists, yowled and ran off stumpily to find his gran. Lillian ran after him. She giggled as she chased him and I couldn’t help but grin when Fiona came in and was immediately accosted by her grandson, who wrapped himself around her knees. Had he been capable of speech I’m sure he would have been shouting “Save me! Save me!”

She stooped down and explained the situation calmly; the tones of her voice conveying what words could not to someone his age.

“She only wants to play, Nicholas.” She told him as he burst into tears. He really was in a bad mood today. Given his red cheeks I thought Fiona’s assessment of teeth was probably the right one.

Nicholas glared at Lillian, snuggling himself into Fiona as much as he could, his fingers tightly grasping the cars. “I know,” she said, “Why don’t I hold onto these two for a while? Put them safe up here.”

“Newest toy,” she told me, as she placed them up on the mantelpiece out of both children’s reach. “Quite obsessed. I only got them for him yesterday evening.”

I smiled at her. Lillian didn’t allow anyone else to play with her whisk. But explaining that to someone who didn’t know about her heuristic play box, would have required more effort than I was presently inclined to give. The sofa was comfortable, Lillian was happy, and I’d had an early start this morning. I could feel myself relaxing already.

I heard the kettle click off in the kitchen and Fiona left the room, heading back to make the tea. Irene was taking her time upstairs which convinced me my assessment was right. She wasn’t just using the facilities. I listened out for footsteps but if she was prowling and prying upstairs, I couldn’t hear her moving about. I wondered what she was looking for now.

Fiona returned with the tea things and a thick Victoria sponge cake.

“Been baking.”

“Wow,” I said. “That looks delicious.”

If there was one thing I liked more than biscuits it was cake. This one looked light and airy. It had jam in the middle and was dusted liberally with icing sugar. A sharp knife rested beside it ready for action, though if the look of the sponge was anything to go by, it would slice easily.

While we waited for Irene, I filled the room with small talk, asking about Janice, whether she’d be at baby group this week, what progress Nicholas was making with walking… We were chatting quite pleasantly about her daughter’s work-life balance when Fiona suddenly went quiet. Soft on her feet, Irene had returned and was standing behind me, a presence over my shoulder. I turned to face her. She had something with her. Something large and rectangular. She handed it to me.

I looked. It was the photo of Fiona, Janice, Paul and Colin, the same family photo I’d looked at the day before.

“Did it fall down?” I asked innocently.

“No. Look at it,” Irene said. “Take a good look. This is your son Paul, isn’t it?” Irene said to Fiona, pointing.

“Yes,” Fiona said, but she looked anxious. Irene’s words and actions had unnerved her in some way.

I looked. Nothing had changed in the faces since I’d seen them yesterday and yet Fiona was clearly anxious, as if Irene had discovered something. I looked hard across all the faces, Janice and Fiona were so similar. Paul and Colin so different. If anything Paul looked more like… I looked at Irene, suddenly understanding. She nodded at me. Like the dead body, we had been looking for our suspects in the wrong place.

“He must have been born after he disappeared,” Irene said. “The youngest of Geoff Allenby’s children.”

I looked from Irene to Fiona, Fiona to Irene, and I watched as the initial shock of discovery disappeared from Fiona’s face, replaced by a mask so rehearsed it was almost indistinguishable from the Fiona I knew. Paul was proof of her marital infidelity but from the look on her face, there was more to it than that.

“Did he know you were pregnant?” Irene asked him.

“Yes. But none of this matters now, does it? He’s gone. The affair was over the day he left.”

“But he didn’t go away though, did he?” said Irene.

Fiona said nothing. She had been tricked into revealing this much and she wasn’t going to fall into the same trap twice.

“You weren’t booked to sit for the girls that night were you?” Irene said. “You went round to see Geoff. You knew Gill was out and you went round to see him.” It was a supposition on her part, but Fiona didn’t refute it.

Her face was blank, but her eyes betrayed her, flickering between us nervously and I knew then, just as Irene had known instinctively, that we had found our killer. The Fiona I knew, the happy carefree grandmother, had been replaced by a much darker personality. This one had all the defences, all the skills with subterfuge and misdirection. The Fiona I knew might still be there, but she was hidden, cocooned away, protected by this other self.

The surfacing of this new personality made perfect sense to me. I knew from experience how difficult it was living a double life. Irene’s investigation had been hard enough to keep hidden from Lucus, without needing to hide something far more sinister like a murder. Fiona had created an alibi and had been maintaining her lies under the pressure of a police enquiry for years. It was as if there were two different people in one body. The fluffy grandmother I knew and deceptive murderer I didn’t. I wondered if perhaps all killers were like this. In all the programs I’d watched, all the magazine articles I’d read, serial killers lived entirely normal lives, unsuspected by anyone until they finally slipped up. Their utter ‘normalness’ was how they got away with the murders for so long.

“Did Lesley know Paul was her brother?” I asked.

“Did your husband know?” Irene said, keeping the pressure on.

“No. Nobody did. And I’d prefer to keep it that way if you don’t mind.” She made to grab at the photo, but Irene held it firm.

“I’m sure the police would find it most interesting,” she said. “It puts you squarely in the frame for Geoff’s murder.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“That’s not what Lesley thought. She told Rose she’d seen you.” She hadn’t of course, but Fiona didn’t know what we’d heard from Rose.

“Rose? You mean her busy-body good-for-nothing spiritual advisor? You should never listen to a word she says. The police never have.”

“But they’d listen to me,” Irene said. “You buried him in next door’s foundations didn’t you? They can soon check. An anonymous phone call ought to do it.” She reached for her phone.

I could see what Irene was trying to do. She was pushing her. Trying to force a confession. But between us and Fiona were Lillian and Nicholas.

I watched Fiona’s eyes glancing between us. Then saw her eyes light on the knife. I was too slow. She grabbed it.

“Wait!”

I watched the knife glinting in the sunlight from the window. We knew she had form. This wasn’t an idle threat.

We watched her, waiting to see what she was going to do. The room was strangely silent, as if the entire world was paused. There were no sounds of traffic, no birds outside. The two toddlers looked up, unsure what to make of the sudden stillness of the adults within the room. They’d noticed the change in atmosphere. Even at their age they were sensitive to the undercurrents of strong emotion present. I willed Lillian to stumble towards me, but she stayed where she was, just out of reach.

Irene hadn’t thought about the kids. She might have jumped intuitively to the right answer, but her timing couldn’t have been worse. We should have gone home, considered the next action, left Lillian safely with Lucus, not run headlong with her into this confrontation.

“Don’t call them. Not just yet. Not ‘til you’ve heard my side of the story”

We waited. Watching her. Irene lowered the phone, giving her the time she asked for.

“I didn’t kill him,” she said.

“I don’t believe you,” Irene said. “All this time you’ve maintain Geoff ran away. And all this time you knew exactly where he was. Who does that? Who buries a man and says nothing?”

“It’s not as simple as that.”

“Really? Then tell us,” Irene said. “Tell us how you came to bury a man you didn’t kill.”

“I didn’t do it! I didn’t do anything. You must believe me! It was an accident. He just died.”

“Then why did you say he ran away? Why the pretence? Why not just call an ambulance.”

“I don’t know. I… I guess I panicked.”

“Panicked?” I said. I wasn’t sure I believed her. Burying a body took time. She’d lied to the police, concocted a story. Panicking people called ambulances. There was much more to it than she was letting on.

Irene looked out of the window towards the house opposite. The one we now knew contained the body in the foundations. A body Fiona had put there.

“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You hid the body. What innocent person hides a body? Come on Ruth. We should go. Telephone the police.”

“No!” Fiona shouted. Brandishing the knife, a look of sheer rage on her face. “No! You don’t understand. I had no choice. You can’t go to the police. You can’t. I’d lose everything. And it was all an accident. ” She backed us towards the sofa.

Lillian’s eyes darted between us all, frightened by the body language and the raised voices. I smiled at her, willing her to come to me. I watched as her lip wobbled and slowly reached out my hand, one eye on Fiona, the other on my daughter. Finally she ran over and I pulled her to me in a reassuring hug. Nicholas seemed eager to do the same, but he hung back from Fiona. Like me he could see there was something different about her, and it was clear he wasn’t sure what to do.

We waited. The silence pregnant around us. Fiona glared at us. Her face hard, bitter. All these years she’d hidden this aspect of herself, locked it away, and now two strangers had prised it out, pulled this darkness into the open. Her freedom was in the balance. I wasn’t sure what she would do, but I saw Irene nod imperceptibly. She would sacrifice herself for me and Lillian. She would take that knife if it came to it. Fiona couldn’t get us both, Irene would let me escape.

Suddenly Nicholas burst into tears, his plaintive whine breaking through to the grandma underneath. Fiona reached out one of her hands.

“Come to Grandma,” she wheedled, the knife still in one hand separating us from escape. “Everything will be all right.” But I could see from Nicholas’s face he didn’t believe her. Like us, he’d seen the wolf and the Grandma skin didn’t fool him anymore. He stayed where he was, watching the knife she held ahead of her threateningly.

I held onto Lillian tightly and watched as his face slowly crumbled, falling into terror. He was scared. While he didn’t understand the words, he heard the tone, he saw the body language. Ignoring the still outstretched arm of his Grandma and her coaxing calls he sat down. His face a picture of despair. He knew nobody in the room. He was alone. His wails filled the silence.

“Then tell us,” Irene said, her voice calming, taking on the tones of a counsellor; gentle, reassuring. “Tell us what happened.”

Unable to bear his cries any longer, Fiona stepped towards Nicholas, sweeping him up into her arms one handed. She tucked his head in close to her chest, and the sudden comfort of a familiar smell, the scent of his grandma up close, did what his eyes failed to do. Comforted, he snuggled into her shoulders, his terrified screams soothing down to sobs and snuffles.

She struggled to juggle both the toddler and the knife in her arms, wanting to sooth him, yet unwilling to let go of her only bargaining chip.

“He wasn’t happy,” Fiona said, watching us both. “She made him terribly unhappy.”

Maybe she’d done the maths, worked out as I had, that she couldn’t get us both. We were two against one, one of us would be able to get away to tell the tale. Maybe instead she could persuade us not to tell anyone else. Convince us it was an accident. If only she could make us hear the whole story.

“We were supposed to be going away,” she said. “That day, that evening. I waited. I waited in the car for him on the road. But he never came.”

We listened. We had no choice. Fiona still stood between us and the way out, and while I wasn’t sure Fiona could do anything with Nicholas in her arms, I wasn’t prepared to risk Lillian until it was absolutely necessary.

“I called at his house. Gill was out. She’d left him with the children. He said he couldn’t go. But I knew he didn’t just mean that night. He meant ever. I don’t know what happened. It was all so fast…,”

“He rejected you,” Irene said.

“Yes.”

“And you killed him.”

“No. No. It wasn’t like that.” She started to rock Nicholas, side to side, side to side, just as any other parent would, soothing him. “I knew what everyone said about Gill and him. I’d seen the bruises, but I hadn’t believed it. I believed him. He said she was mentally ill. That she was manipulative. That she did things to herself. But it wasn’t like that at all. We argued. He - hurt me. Held me against the wall.”

Whatever happened that night it was clear Fiona believed this version of events. Truth was evident in her eyes. Whether she’d convinced even herself after all this time about what had happened, we could never be sure. The only other witness to events was dead. The survivors always had a monopoly on history.

“He had his hands around me, pressing, hissing at my face,” Fiona told us. “Telling me I meant nothing. I couldn’t breathe. I pushed him away, that was all, just pushed him away. But he fell, hit his head on the radiator valve. It must have caught him at the wrong angle; a freak accident. But that was it. That was all that happened. I knew he’d gone. I could tell. He just lay there. Didn’t move.”

“But why didn’t you call an ambulance?” I said.

“He’d already gone,” she said. “There was no point. And there was…,”

“Colin,” Irene said, finishing her sentence. “Colin didn’t know about the affair, did he?” Fiona shook her head. “You had a baby on the way. And a husband who’d take care of you so long as he never found out.”

Fiona nodded. “That’s it. That’s it exactly.” Her voice was a half sob. We understood. I could see the knife hand lowering imperceptibly. Perhaps she’d be OK. Perhaps we’d agree with her decisions. But she’d forgotten about Lesley. Forgotten where this path of deceit had led her.

“So you buried him,” I said. Leading the confession towards its conclusion.

“Pete had a big trench dug ready for the foundations. I’d been over there only that morning, checking on the place. I had the key while the Johnsons were away. I’d seen the pit. I knew I didn’t need to do much, just dig it a little deeper, and then cover the body with soil. The concrete was arriving the next day. He’d be gone for good. No one would know.”

“No one but you,” I said. “And Lesley.”

Fiona looked down at the knife and I watched as tears of frustration rolled down her cheek. We’d trapped her. We knew she’d disposed of Geoff, and here she was threatening us with a knife, a knife like the one which had killed the only other witness to the incident.

“I didn’t know she was awake,” Fiona said. “I thought both girls were asleep upstairs. I checked in on them when I’d finished. Decided to stay at the house until Gill came back. Told Gill Geoff had asked me to look after them. That he’d had an emergency or something and gone out.”

“She didn’t report him missing until the next day,” Irene said. “By that point you’d already disposed of his wallet and a suitcase of clothes you’d taken the night before.”

“What happened?” I asked. “Did Lesley suddenly remember everything?”

“I knew she’d been seeing someone. Gill told me. She was worried about her. Said there was something bothering her. That she thought it had something to do with Geoff’s disappearance.”

“So you called in?” Irene prompted. “Just for a chat.”

The penny dropped. Now I knew how Irene had slotted in the last puzzle piece. We always said it had to be a close friend or family member. Fiona was just that. Lou called her “Auntie” the day we first saw them together. If Lesley would have been comfortable with anyone in her kitchen, it would have been Fiona.

“I hadn’t meant to,” Fiona said. Excusing herself. “I didn’t go there planning to do it. You must believe me.”

I did. I believed she didn’t intentionally set out that evening to kill her, but yet she still had. I waited. Waited for Fiona to furnish me with an explanation I could believe. She had murdered her surrogate niece, stabbing her in the back. There had to be a reason. Had to be something I could understand. Murder was surely a rational act. There had to be a logical reason for her actions, a reason for a normal individual to just flip. There had to be. Or my world was suddenly full of more dangers than I had previously recognised.

“She didn’t remember it all. Didn’t know what she’d seen,” Fiona said. “She was too young. But I knew given time she’d piece things together. She was always the bright one. Just like her father. So like her father. I don’t know what happened. I was worried. Worried about Janice, Paul, Nicholas. I didn’t want things to change. I didn’t want them to know what I’d done. I didn’t want them to find out. Didn’t want their world to turn upside down. I couldn’t bare the look on their faces; knowing.”

“And Lesley, Lesley was the one who threatened all that. The only one. Just one person. She told me all about it. Told me what she remembered, how she remembered it. It was like I was reliving it all, all over again. You don’t know what it’s like, to be unmasked and yet unseen. It was only a matter of time. And only one person. She looked so like him. So like her father. I saw the knife on the side and… it was all over before I knew what had happened. You must believe me. I didn’t know what I was doing. It just happened.”

“So you killed her,” Irene said. “Stabbed her in the back and then washed up your tea things and let yourself out like nothing had happened?”

I felt the weight of Lillian in my arms. I couldn’t imagine resorting to murder to protect her, and yet I knew I would. Intrinsically that maternal instinct was built in to defend, to protect our offspring against wolves, lions. Somewhere in my psyche lurked a killer, and yet I had to believe it wasn’t that easy.

“It wasn’t easy,” Fiona said, as if reading my mind. “I cried for her. Wept. She was like a daughter. But she wasn’t family.”

I turned to Irene. We had our confession. I didn’t know what our next move would be. Irene stayed still. Impassive, as if waiting for something more.

“I didn’t mean to,” Fiona repeated. “You must believe me.” She dropped the knife. Realising at last that her best defence was to throw herself on our mercy.

Mental trauma, a sudden lapse of judgement. I somehow knew these would be her lawyer’s claims in court. A mental breakdown. They would plead guilty and hope for a lenient sentence. But she had never called that ambulance. She had never given Lesley the choice. I hoped the jury would see what we had.

A woman scorned is a terrible thing; a mother trapped – worse.

Movement outside the window caught my eye and I saw a police car, blue lights flashing, pulling up outside. Two officers got out and headed for the door.

“I called them while I was upstairs,” Irene said. “I thought we might need them.”

I nodded. We very nearly had. I kicked the knife away from Fiona’s feet, across to the skirting board.

“I think you should call Janice,” Irene told Fiona. “Nicholas is going to need someone to look after him.”

I watched as Fiona was led to the police car and helped into the back seat, her eyes red from crying and her hair in disarray. Janice was standing next to me, Nicholas in her arms, pudgy hands clutching a biscuit.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Janice didn’t respond. Whatever friendship we had started to form was over. She’d never forgive me for this one. Her mother may have been a murderer, but I was the guilty one. Me and Irene. We’d befriended her under false pretences. We’d exposed her mother. We’d ruined her nuclear family. Nothing would ever be the same.

As the car pulled away she turned and stepped back into the house, closing the door behind her quietly but with an air of finality.

I looked to Irene.

“Home?”

Chapter Thirty Three

“So…” Inspector Laing looked between us expectantly. “You just thought you’d blunder in?”

He was in his late thirties, if my age estimate was about right, tall, slim built, unshaven, though to be honest, that designer stubble look was in these days. He had blue eyes, the beginnings of crow’s feet at the corners, and a kind smile which, judging by the lines, was a familiar landmark on his face.

He watched me over his coffee mug as I bounced Lillian on my knees. He took coffee, not tea; milk, no sugar. It appeared Irene had met him before, as she seemed to know his preference without even asking. Equally, he seemed to know his way around her house and had settled himself onto the sofa after moving around various books and painting accessories to accommodate his bottom as if he was a regular guest.

We’d arranged to meet at her house rather than dropping into the police station. Irene thought it would be easier given the circumstances. I thought she meant Lillian. It turned out Lillian was only part of the reason.

I sipped at my own tea. Waiting for Irene to respond. I knew she would. Russ had been released and the real killer arrested and charged and all because of what we had done. A double homicide. Two cases, nearly 20 years apart, but finally they had the killer behind bars. It would make the local news when it broke, but we had decided to keep a very low profile. The credit would go to the police. We would stay out of the media.

“We didn’t exactly blunder,” Irene said. Inspector Laing might want to admonish us for our behaviour, but the fact of the matter was, we’d solved the case and apprehended the one responsible without police support. She wasn’t going to take any nonsense.

“It could have been very different and you know it,” he said.

I remembered the knife and wondered what might have happened to us both had the toddlers not been present, distracting and grounding Fiona in the here and now.

“I called you the moment I knew,” Irene said.

“And yet you still waded in. You didn’t wait.”

“Well.” It was a statement, a conclusion, not a preliminary to a longer explanation. I looked at Irene. Something about this wasn’t quite what I expected. It was hardly an interview and somehow it all seemed much more familiar than how I assumed a formal reprimand would go.

“And you dragged someone else into it this time.” This time ? I looked back to Irene, her face was unrepentant and gave no clues as to how often she had interfered with police business. “You really should have known better than to risk, I’m sorry, what’s your name?”

“Ruth,” I said. I couldn’t understand the way the conversation was evolving. There was something too – familiar about it. All too familiar.

“To risk Ruth and her child in one of your escapades. I’ve told you before about this. The force view this sort of thing very badly, and, well, you aren’t exactly doing my career any good.”

“I would think apprehending the wrong suspect wasn’t good for your career either Giles, at least this way –”

“Mother!”

She stopped. They glared at each other. I looked between them, first at Irene, then at Inspector Laing. Franks. Laing. Different surnames. But if she was mother to a police officer it explained her interest, her uncanny procedural knowledge. In fact it explained a lot of things. And yet, she hadn’t told me. Their relationship was both warm and frosty at the same time, but they knew things about each other I was still unaware of. I felt foolish, embarrassed, as if I was caught in the middle of a family row. I was about to say something, anything, when Irene broke the deadlock.

“Biscuit?” He leaned over and took one from the tin. “What will happen now?”

“She’ll stand trial. Though I would say it’s fairly certain she’ll go to prison. She’ll be tried out of area of course.”

“Standard procedure,” Irene said, turning to me. “Too many people know too much about the case locally. She wouldn’t have a fair trial here.”

Although I still wasn’t sure whether I was here as an audience, an accomplice or a witness, I could see she was trying to include me in their conversation as more than a mere observer. Out of area meant Fiona would probably be tried in Hull, maybe even Lincoln or Leeds. One thing was certain. She was going to miss out on her grandchildren growing up, the very thing she wanted to avoid. Some small part of me felt sorry for her, she had lost the very thing she had been trying to protect. But she was a murderer. She’d killed Lesley in cold blood; walked around behind the woman who treated her as an aunt and knifed her in the back.

By the time Janice had come for Nicholas, Fiona had already provided the same confession she had given us at knife point to Inspector Laing, and with the secret finally out in the open, she had spilled the story again to her daughter; tears pouring down her face. The cost had been calculated. She knew she would lose both her daughter and her grandson, her marriage, her home. Her life as she knew it was over. Her family would never love her with the same free abandon again. Always there would be that thought, that nagging suspicion behind their eyes, would she kill again? They would ever fully grasp why she did what she did. She had rationalised it, but she herself wasn’t rational when she made the decision. No one would ever fully understand. A simple decision, a moment’s madness, but there was no going back.

“You do understand that what you did could be construed as ‘hampering a police investigation’?” His tones were softer. An attempt at a compromise.

“I made Russ turn himself in.”

“Only after you’d debriefed him first.” He looked across at the crime boards still on her kitchen cupboards.

Irene winked at me behind him. See ? I glared back. Winking was all very well, but she had lied to me. No, not lied, I corrected myself, just been somewhat sparing with the facts.

Irene had been adamant we wouldn’t be in any trouble today. We’d helped the police. They’d made the arrest. There was only professional pride at stake, she said, and they’d get over that soon enough. Of course, she hadn’t mentioned her son was the investigating officer. He looked back at me. There was little of Irene in him. I wondered at their family connection, but right now I didn’t want to appear a total mug so I wasn’t about to ask. He might have his professional pride, but I had my own to consider. If we’d apprehended a murderer, I should have at least worked out Irene’s relationship to the police.

“What I don’t understand is how you got as far as you did.”

“We’re women,” Irene said, “Chatting is what we do.”

Her son looked between us and I just smiled weakly. Irene was taking the lead on this one. A full confession wasn’t required.

“Russ gave us the starting point. The same starting point he’d given you. We just took the investigation along a different route. You forget Giles, we didn’t see the body. We had no preconceived ideas. And I knew Russ. I knew he wasn’t capable.”

“Maybe, but it’s not always obvious.” He was right. I’d never have named Fiona as a killer. Not right up to the point she had revealed her darker self, took hold of the knife and threatened us. Murderers weren’t always easy to spot.

“You still haven’t told me how you found him, nor how you persuaded him to hand himself in.”

“No.”

He glared at her over his coffee mug and then caved in. “Very well. You can keep your secrets.” He probably knew as well as I did that you couldn’t force information out of Irene, but I could hear rather than see a wagging finger. It twitched in his hand. Perhaps he felt wagging a finger at his mother was a step too far. “But I want this to be the last time. I’ve told you before they view this sort of amateur stuff very seriously at the station. It’s dangerous. This isn’t television. You could have been hurt.”

Irene looked contrite, but I could see something in her eye her son missed. Maybe he wasn’t as observant as he believed. Or else he didn’t know his mother as well as I did. I wondered if the family connection make it easier to mislead. Janice had never discovered Fiona’s secrets. Lucus had never asked me about my other life.

He finished off his coffee and placed the mug back on the table.

“Just so long as we understand each other,” he said.

“We do.”

“In that case, I’ll be off. No more amateur detective work.” He stood up. “You too.” He told me.

I nodded. Dead bodies were few and far between. It was highly unlikely I’d get involved in anything of this nature again. Promising something that would never happen was easy.

Irene showed him to the door and I was party to a brief normal family conversation about what was happening that weekend, and whether Irene was free for Sunday Lunch, before we all stood waving him off from the front door.

I turned to Irene as he got into the car. “You should have said.”

“I – um…,” She looked at me, and realising I needed a full explanation she said, “He’s my son-in-law. Was, no, is, well, it’s complicated.”

She closed the door behind her and we walked back into the house. From a drawer in one of the sideboard units she pulled out a picture frame. It contained an old wedding photo showing a much younger version of the man I’d just met in full police uniform, and beside him a bride in a blancmange style dress, the type that was popular in the 90s.

“He doesn’t like it on display any more. Not now he’s remarried. But I can’t quite make myself put it away in the loft.”

“You had a daughter?” I asked.

“Emma would have been about your age now. She might even have had…,” her voice trailed off, looking at Lillian. “Giles is a good lad. Keeps an eye on me. Remarried. Has kids of his own now. They always say blood is thicker than water, but I’ve not found that. I think its family that’s thicker than blood. And your family is who you make them.”

There was nothing I could say. After all we’d been through together, all we’d seen, and yet there was this pain, cutting deep into my friend, one she hadn’t let me see until now. I didn’t know how long ago she had lost Emma, nor what had happened, and I desperately wanted to understand, but watching Irene I knew instinctively now was not the time to ask any questions. There was pain in her eyes. It might have been years ago, it must have been, given that he had remarried and had children, but it was her daughter all the same.

I looked at her, unable to find the right words. She just nodded. Words were unnecessary. My look had conveyed enough.

“I suppose I better get off,” I said, and started to dress Lillian for her buggy. Grief was hard to live with, and rather than pushing, I thought it better Irene revealed it in her own time, in her own way. She touched my arm as I straightened up.

“Thank you for not asking,” she said.

I wondered if I reminded her of Emma. We didn’t look alike, but maybe we shared some mannerisms. Even if we weren’t alike in any way, I was surely a reminder of the daughter she had lost. Maybe that was why she never mentioned Giles. To do so would have forced her to tell me about Emma, and maybe she just wasn’t ready to have that conversation.

“I’ll tell you about it one day. I’m just… well… I’m just not ready yet.”

“OK,” I said. I knew she would keep that promise when she was ready. “Give my regards to Russ when he comes later.”

“You won’t wait? I know he’d want to thank you in person too.”

“No. Just give him my regards. I really need to be home when Lucus gets back tonight.” She nodded. She knew I had decided to break the news to Lucus. I wasn’t sure how I was going to explain all that I’d been up to, but there had to be a way that would downplay my involvement and yet provide some semblance of truth. Maybe I should take some hints from Irene’s behaviour and only reveal what was absolutely essential.

“Good luck,” Irene said as I pushed the buggy down her front door step and out into the spring air.

“Thanks.” I said. “I think I’ll need it.”

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