Stone Cold Red Hot

Chapter seventeen

Next morning there was a message from Roger on the ansaphone at the office. He was eager to know what I’d found out. I wasn’t ready to give him a full report yet. I wanted to talk again to Mrs Clerkenwell. I needed to try and fix as much as I could about the last known movements of Jennifer and something was niggling at me. I was sure there was some significance behind the incident when Jennifer had turned and run from Frances’s. Once I had checked that out I would tackle Mrs Pickering and see if she had anything to say that would disprove my theory. Then I’d go to Roger.

In the meantime the least I could do was give him the bald facts about my research. No baby, no marriage, no death and tell him I was making a few final enquiries to verify everything before I gave him my complete report.

When he answered the phone I proceeded to flatten the hope in his voice.

“Isn’t there anything else you can try?”

“No. I don’t think so. I’m sorry,” I concluded. “Can we meet next Monday perhaps, lunchtime, say twelve-thirty? That’ll give me time to write up all the details for you.”

“So it’s just a dead-end?” He asked.

I closed my eyes at the irony. “It looks that way.”

Mandy Bellows was off sick. When I asked if anyone was covering her work-load I got laughed at. “She should be in next week though.” And until she was, nothing was going to move forward for the Ibrahims.

Mr Poole was dismayed when I called him. “I’m going to have a word with the councillor about this. One person’s off and the whole thing grinds to a stand-still.”

“Hopefully, she’ll be in on Monday and I’ll ring her first thing, tell her to make it a priority. I’ve still got the camera so if anything happens meanwhile let me know.”

“What’s this I hear about your car?”

“It went on Monday, just as I was ready for home and there was no sign of it.”

“How did you get back?”

“I got a taxi.”

“You should have woken me, you could have rung from here.”

“No. I had my mobile. Anyway, how did you hear about it?”

“The Brennans,” he said, “making cracks about it. Took me a while to cotton on.”

“They probably took it but I can’t prove anything.”

“Have they found it yet? They could fingerprint it.”

“No. No word. Besides I’d rather see them lose the tenancies or get bound over to keep the peace than done for nicking my car. Least I’m insured.”

My last call was to Mrs Clerkenwell. I arranged an appointment with her that afternoon.

The hire car was due back but I made use of it to get some shopping from the greengrocers and the small supermarket in Withington. I stocked up on some of the basics and bulky items as I didn’t know how long I’d be without a car and they were awkward to carry on the bike. I left the lot at home and took the car in. I walked back to the office enjoying the colours of the leaves which were brilliant in the sunshine. Frost still edged the foliage in shady corners and covered puddles with sheets of ice.

I had a cup of coffee and then worked solidly on my notes from the Records Office and my summary of the case so far. When I document a job I usually include a section which no-one ever sees where I jot down all the wild, implausible, outrageous notions that I have as to what may have happened. Now and then I hit on something and it’s a useful way for me to see things from another angle. It’s also a good way of getting any pet theories out of my system and of exposing them to the light. Once they are written down I find I can discount some of them. But I was reluctant to go through this process with Jennifer Pickering. There was some superstitious side of me that feared that if I committed my imaginings to paper they might come true. And I wanted to be wrong this time.

I collected my bike from home and cycled up to the baths to do my regular twenty lengths. One of the other swimmers reminded me of Stuart Bowker and I had a fierce impulse to run and hide. A second look told me it wasn’t him. I felt a flutter of embarrassment. I swam away from it. Did I want a relationship? My gut reaction was no. It all seemed too complicated, too much trouble. How could I start something like that without disrupting my life? How would Maddie take it? Did I want to meet Stuart again. Yes. Yes, I did. And the thought brought bubbles to my insides and made me kick my legs harder and spread my arms wider and swim that bit faster.

Mrs Clerkenwell put the dogs out before she let me in. She’d obviously been working; her hair was covered by a scarf and she wore a large calico smock which she removed to reveal the same dark trousers and woolly jumper as on my first visit.

“Any news?” She asked me once we had sat down.

“No, I’m afraid not. But I wanted to ask you about a couple of things, to try and make sense of what other people have told me. I can’t go into details, confidentiality, you see. And the questions may seem a bit strange.”

“I’m intrigued. Fire away.”

I thought back to Frances’s account of her last time with Jennifer. That moment when Jennifer had become so distressed. “OK. From your garden you can see a fair bit of the house behind and vice-versa.”

She bobbed up to refresh her memory. “Yes.”

“If you were out in the garden you’d have a clear view of the upstairs but not of the ground floor, because of the wall?”

“That’s right. If you wanted to see into their garden or their kitchen or whatever you’d have to be upstairs here.”

“Or on the wall.”

“Erm…yes.” She smiled enjoying the game we were playing.

“Now, suppose someone was on the wall at the bottom of the Pickerings garden. They’d have a good view across here but they wouldn’t see much of the Pickering’s or of the house on the other side.”

“The Kennedy’s,” she said.

“Yes, with the trees along the bottom and the big hedge down the side.”

“Hedge!” she snorted. “They’re a liability, those things, grow like Triffids. I said to Mr Kennedy when they planted them that they’d be up and down ladders trimming them every five minutes.”

My neck prickled. “They weren’t there when the Shuttles had the house?”

“Oh, no. They just had an ordinary fence and the sycamores at the end so they weren’t overlooked from the back anyway, not like I am.”

I walked over to the French windows and looked out.

She carried on talking. “Those things must be eight foot high. You could have seen over before.”

Bingo! I pictured Jennifer astride the wall, her father and Mrs Shuttle seen from her vantage point. “But the shed would have blocked the view.”

“Well, that wasn’t always there either. Frank put that up.”

I looked at her. “When?” My mouth was dry.

She screwed up her face. “Let’s see. It must have been before he got ill, he did it all himself. Yes, it was. I remember they thought that had brought on the angina, too much for him. So that must have been…” she calculated.

I knew what was coming.

“…in the autumn, 1976. The ground was like concrete.”

The blood in my veins stopped moving.

“He’d had a bed there, perennials, a lovely show but that heat killed them. I think he gave up. Decided to call it quits. It’s a merciless spot there, there’s never any shade. He might have got away with roses,” she shrugged, returned from her reverie. “That any help?”

“Yes.” Now I could explain how Jennifer, atop the dividing wall, had discovered her father’s adultery. What she glimpsed sent her scrambling in the other direction, appalled and inarticulate. What she saw had triggered the confrontation that followed.

And now I knew where Jennifer was. I tried to swallow, my throat was tight and a twist of panic played in my stomach.

“I know it’s a long time ago,” I said, “but can you remember any disturbances from next door, early autumn 1976, just before Jennifer left home? Any rows, raised voices, that sort of thing?”

“No. I’ve not got that sort of recall. I know I’m good on names but dates, when things happen…” she shook her head.

“You said before that you heard raised voices sometimes?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t say when, exactly. And it wasn’t that often. The walls here are quite thick, and I was out and about a lot with the business. I mean, they did have words now and then, I’d hear it if I was in the garden and they’d left the window open but there’s no particular time I recall.”

“And you would hear Mr Pickering shouting or Jennifer?”

“Yes. He had a temper and Jennifer, well at that age they are prone to flare up, aren’t they?”

“Thanks,” I finished the interview.

“I’ll be awake all night wondering what’s behind these questions,” her eyes twinkled.

Me too. I tried to act normally while I bade farewell to Mrs Clerkenwell and not to let my eyes ricochet wildly about like my thoughts were.

My hands were trembling as I unlocked my bike. I had an overwhelming urge to run away, as though I was the guilty one. Knowing what I did made me feel dirty. What was I going to do about it? The police? They’d show me the door straightaway, surely. Everything I had was circumstantial. There were no eye-witnesses to any wrong doing. There was no shred of evidence that anything untoward had befallen Jennifer Pickering – I didn’t think an abandoned troll would count for much. She was missing, that’s all. A statistic.

I was sure though, gut sure, that Jennifer had never left home. Her body lay in the garden, under the shed that her father had built around her, a mausoleum for a murder. Soon his breaking heart and guilty conscience had made him sick and driven him to despair and death. She had lain there and festered, a macabre secret that would never have been uncovered had Roger not longed to see his sister again.

What would I tell him? I reeled away from the prospect and the bike lurched unsteadily. Before I told anything to a soul I had to talk to Mrs Pickering again and confront her with the lies she had told. She must have known, she must have done. It was she who said Jennifer had gone to Keele and later dropped out. She must have helped him hide the body, hide the truth from Roger. No wonder the garden had gone to rack and ruin. Could either of them have stepped outside without recalling what was buried there? Had any of them ever used the shed? Had Roger played in it as a den? I had a wave of revulsion. How could she sleep at night?

My concentration was shot when I got home. I went to make a cup of tea but forgot to switch the kettle on; it helps the water to boil if you include electricity in the equation. When I got that sorted I found myself making two cups one after the other.

I tried to piece together the correct sequence of events. Jennifer had seen her father and Mrs Shuttle from the wall. She’d run off. Later she had spoken to Lisa and called her father a hypocrite. Had she told her mother? Or maybe she had threatened her father with her knowledge first or tried to make a trade-off; I’ll keep quiet if you support me and my baby; I’m pregnant you see. There was no deal made. Jennifer was silenced. Jennifer disappeared.

I checked the number and dialled the Bradford number.

“Hello, can I speak to Mrs Shuttle please? It’s Mrs Kenny from Italian.”

She came on the line her voice taut with suspicion. “What is it?”

“Just one question, when Frank Pickering told you it was over, that Jennifer had found out, did he say whether Jennifer had told Barbara or whether he had to?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s important.”

“I think,” she lowered her voice, “I think he just said that Barbara knew and when I asked him how, he said Jennifer had found out.”

“But not that Jennifer had told her?”

“It’s a long time ago.”

“So after he broke it off how did you feel when you next saw Jennifer?”

“I didn’t see her again, she’d gone off to university”

Thank you.

I drank my tea too quickly, scalding my throat. I was late for school. I couldn’t find my keys anywhere. I checked my pockets, the table, the shelf, the worktops. They’d gone. In the end I decided I would have to leave the door on the latch, I set the snib, went out and pulled it to behind me. My keys were there, dangling from the lock.

Ray mistook my preoccupation with work for an extended sulk. He’s the sulky one usually, I’m more apt to lay the cards on the table or just lose my temper. He matched my silence with his own but I barely registered until Tom piped up. “Why’s everybody all grumpy?”

“I’m not,” Maddie said.

“Just tired,” Ray lied.

“I’m thinking about work,” I said, “and that’s making me grumpy.”

“Think about something happy, then,” Maddie suggested.

“I’ll try.”

“Think about Christmas presents.”

“And sweets.”

I cleared the table as the two of them invented outrageous wish lists based on all the television adverts they’d been watching.

Ray called Digger and they went off for walkies.

I had other creatures to attend to. “Maddie, Tom, we need to check your hair.”

They groaned in unison.

It was a regular palaver. I smothered their hair with conditioner then combed it through several times with a nit comb.

Time was we’d had to use a range of chemical treatments that filled the room with fumes and made our eyes water, but Manchester lice had become immune and the authorities feared we were in danger of poisoning our children; like sheep that were dipped too often they might end up twitching and collapsing, nerves and immune systems shot at, hence the conditioner and comb.

I found nothing on Tom.

“Don’t tell me, Mummy,” Maddie instructed me as she bent over the basin so I kept it to myself, tapped the two adult-size beasties into the sink and rinsed them away. I then applied herbal shampoo designed to deter lice to each scalp and put them in the bath for quarter of an hour while the lotion did its stuff. My head itched. I would do myself later.

While Ray was out I rehearsed what I would say when he got back. By the time I’d washed up, tidied the kitchen and swept the floor I was word perfect.

I heard the door open then Digger ambled into the kitchen followed by Ray. I didn’t even give him time to take his jacket off.

“I think we should have a talk, Ray. Can we fix a time?”

He sighed theatrically. “If this is all about yesterday…” he began.

“It’s not just that, there are other things and I’d rather we discussed them when we’ve got time to do it properly. One evening perhaps?”

“I can’t do this weekend,” he said quickly.

“Next week sometime, Monday, Tuesday?”

“Tuesday.”

“After they’re in bed.”

He nodded and wandered out. I let go of the tea-towel that I’d been gripping so firmly and rubbed at the cramp in my hand.