Death Scene Read online

  ‘The story is that she was working as a shop girl and was discovered, but I very much doubt that’s how it happened. I imagine she was among all of the other young hopefuls who turn up for auditions. But it seems she was luckier than most. She had a good future ahead of her.’

  ‘Had,’ Mickey said heavily. ‘That gives us another direction to look in, I suppose. Someone from her past? Admittedly it seems unlikely, the girl had been over here for eleven years, give or take, so it’s much more likely to have been someone she had encountered in the last two or three, I would have thought.’

  ‘Perhaps whoever gave her the bracelet,’ Cynthia commented. ‘Perhaps she was not as willing as he thought.’

  ‘Perhaps not. We need to know a great deal more before we can make those sorts of decisions or observations,’ Henry said. ‘We will know more when the post-mortem has been done. We are presently making assumptions about the cause of death and they may be proved wrong.’

  He thanked his sister, and further conversation was interrupted by Albert’s return home. The next hour, while Albert ate his sandwiches and drank his brandy, was taken up with discussions on the achievements of Tich Freeman and his three hundred wickets. Henry, not a particular cricket fan, tuned them out.

  ‘Thank you for your help,’ he told Cynthia. ‘And it’s very good of you to put up with the pair of us, landing ourselves on you at such short notice.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Darling, you never need to give me notice, you know that. Through thick and thin, Henry, and Lord knows we’ve been through both.’

  Henry woke. The house was very quiet and his room seemed very dark. It took him a moment to remember where he was. He slipped his watch off the bedside table and squinted at the face. It was a little after two a.m., so he had slept for nearly three hours, which was better than he’d managed for quite some time.

  Knowing that there was nothing to be gained by lying in bed he put on his borrowed dressing gown and padded back down the stairs and into Albert’s library to find something to read.

  Examining the bookshelves he came across two familiar volumes, albums of photographs from Cynthia’s wedding. It had been an extraordinarily glamorous affair despite it being 1915 and the country being at war. Henry had managed to get a forty-eight hour pass so he could attend – he suspected Albert of pulling strings to make that happen, but he had never asked. He smiled as he took the albums from the shelf and sat down with them on the sofa. Cynthia had been married for almost thirteen years and Albert had been in pursuit of her for almost two years before that.

  ‘I’m taking my guidance from Anne Boleyn,’ she had told Henry, ‘but hopefully without the bloody, beheading bit. She kept Henry the Eighth waiting for years, refusing to become his mistress and settling for nothing less than wife.’

  ‘And you plan to do the same?’

  ‘Absolutely, but I shall just manage matters better post matrimony. Albert is used to the girls in the office giving in to his pestering, and he’s been lucky not to have been caught out and got any of them pregnant. Or if he has, then Mummy and Daddy have paid them off and made them discreetly disappear, I suppose.’

  ‘Cynthia, I believe you are getting cynical.’

  ‘Getting? Henry, my love, I have been cynical for a very long time. Anyway, I prefer to call it realistic.’

  ‘But you love him?’

  ‘I like him. He’s a good friend and he respects me and my abilities. I love him enough to know that I can make a good wife. Henry, I don’t expect more than that. To have a marriage based on friendship, that I can live with.’

  Henry turned the pages of the album, remembering the conversation that had taken place about six months before the wedding. Albert, as predicted, had finally proposed. The wedding had been organized with military precision and Cynthia had continued to organize Albert with the same precision ever since. Albert, if he noticed at all, didn’t seem to object.

  Tucked between the pages were other photographs, and these were rarer. Henry’s father had owned the camera but had seldom used it, at least not to photograph his family. But there was a picture of Henry, Cynthia and their mother, taken, he recalled, a few months before their mother had died. They were standing in the garden with ash trees behind them, marking where the wood began. The woodland had been a refuge for the child Henry, who had learned early that out of sight really was out of mind as far as his father was concerned and that out of mind was where it was safest to be.

  Henry studied the picture. He thought about the pictures on Cissie Rowe’s walls and on the little table. For those that could afford it, he reflected, photographs were now a vital part of identity. In some ways they were still status symbols too but a photograph somehow validated and verified existence, relationships, memories that might otherwise give way to imagination. Something Henry loved about photography was the way that it fixed things absolutely in time and context, allowed for no interpretation; it simply recorded.

  The photograph of Cynthia brought to mind another memory. Cynthia had been fifteen years old and he remembered how she had taken off the borrowed black hat and shaken out the long brown hair that she could never keep pinned as neatly as their father required, that always had a mind of its own.

  Henry had been thirteen, and they had just returned from their father’s funeral. Neighbours and the few remaining friends his father had maintained had come together to give this one time respected country doctor a reasonable send-off, but now the two of them were alone and Henry had spent the day when, so custom told him, he should have been recalling his father’s worth wondering what on earth they were to do now.

  The vicar had spoken about the stresses and strains of life bringing about a premature end and of course no one had directly mentioned that the man had drunk himself to death, though some spoke of grief following his wife’s demise.

  The adult Henry reached back in time and recalled that he had looked at his sister in expectation that she would sort things out. Cynthia always sorted things out.

  She had stood for a moment in the narrow hallway and then, hanging the unwanted hat on the wall stand with the comment that she must return it in the morning, she had looked at Henry and said, ‘Well, this will never do, will it?’

  ‘Cynthia?’ He had needed to say no more.

  She had placed her hands on his shoulders and looked intently at him. ‘We will survive, little brother, and we will prosper. I promise you that.’

  ‘How? The landlord says we have to be out by the end of the week because father was so far behind with the rent. We have nowhere to go, Cyn, and no money, and—’

  She shook him gently. Then she pointed to the basket at her feet. Neighbours, not wanting to seem uncharitable, had provisioned the wake and then packed the leftover food for the children to take back with them. Both Cynthia and Henry were wise enough to realize that this was the only help they would be getting locally.

  ‘Right now, we eat. And then we sit down and we make a plan. I already have the outline of such a plan in my head.’ She picked up the basket and strode along the hall to the kitchen, Henry trailing behind.

  As she filled the kettle she said, ‘Tonight we try to get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow I return Mrs Webb’s hat and I speak to the landlord and see if we can get an extension of a few more days. Then we sell everything. Father’s books, Mother’s jewellery and dresses, the furniture, the rugs, the lot. We pay debts that we absolutely have to pay or give a little on account and then we take what is left and we go and find Uncle Derek.’

  ‘Uncle Derek? What use will he be? He didn’t even come to Mother’s funeral.’

  ‘Which gives us an immense amount of ammunition for emotional blackmail, don’t you think? Henry, he’s our only living relative and he has rooms over that bookshop that are never used for anything but storage, so my thought is that he can spare us one. Once we have a roof over our heads, and an address, we can find work. Henry, we need to work and we need to educate ourselves. Between us we
have brains and nerve and we have survived this far without breaking into little pieces. We can get through this.’

  Henry was never quite sure how Cynthia had persuaded the landlord. She had probably shamed him; Cynthia was good at shaming people when she had to. But he had granted them another week and in that time they’d held a series of sales and cleared out everything that their parents had ever owned. Henry knew that they had sold things at a pittance and he recognized the pain in Cynthia’s eyes when their mother’s brooches had been carried off in triumph by a neighbour, but his sister had added a few shillings to the ever-growing purse and looked triumphant for Henry’s benefit and, he realized, for her own.

  Henry closed the album. His prediction had been right and Uncle Derek had been of very little use but he had allowed them to take up lodgings in his attic and that, as Cynthia had said, at least gave them a roof over their heads and an address.

  By the time Albert had encountered Cynthia she was twenty-seven and had been working as personal secretary to his father, having worked her way up from the post room. Albert’s father, himself having come from trade and begun with very little, appreciated Cynthia’s enterprise. When Albert declared that he was going to marry his father’s secretary it caused a few ripples of shock but Cynthia completed her transformation to fine lady with skill and aplomb and by the time the pair had been married for six months, society seemed to have forgotten her origins as it had forgotten and forgiven her father-in-law’s. Except in the eyes of the old, aristocratic families, money had a way of bestowing class, Henry thought, and even they were bowing to the inevitable and marrying selectively into the families of the newly wealthy.

  He placed the album back on the shelf and found himself a novel to occupy the rest of the night. On the way across the hall a small sound attracted his attention. The door leading down to the kitchen opened and Mickey Hitchens, shoes in one hand and the murder bag in the other, tiptoed out.

  ‘Mickey?’

  ‘Trying not to wake the house,’ Mickey said. He lifted up the bag he held. ‘I borrowed the rear scullery to process the photographs of the scene. I couldn’t start until everyone was in bed so I grabbed a couple of hours’ sleep and went down just after midnight. Now I plan to get a couple of hours more. I’ve rigged a line above the sink and borrowed pegs, left the prints drying. I’ll get down there before the scullery maid in the morning, otherwise I think the poor girl will get a nasty shock.’

  ‘I hope you’ve left a sign on the door to keep curiosity out,’ Henry said.

  ‘I’ve left a sign but I doubt curiosity will take any notice. If they see what they shouldn’t see that’s their problem. Now I’m off to bed and you should be too.’

  Henry nodded, though he doubted he’d get more sleep that night. It was now a little after three a.m.

  He returned to his room and lay down intending to read by the light of the bedside lamp, but to his surprise the next thing he knew was the morning light streaming in through a tiny gap in the curtains and a tray being placed on the chair by his bedside with tea and breakfast.

  THREE

  Jimmy Cottee was an early riser, always had been. He liked to stand on the steps outside the railway carriage that he’d lived in for the past five years and look out across the water, watch the sun sparkle on the ripples and the darkness lift.

  Jimmy Cottee knew he was a romantic – Cissie was always telling him so, anyway – but he could never quite break himself of the habit.

  This morning he was awake when he heard the footsteps on the shingle, puzzled when he became aware of the heavy tread on his step. He set his cup down on the table and got up from his seat. Was standing when they burst through his door, but a second later lying on his back staring up at the ceiling, a man’s boot heavy on his chest.

  ‘Where is it? We know she gave it to you.’

  ‘It? Who? Where is what?’ Jimmy’s brain couldn’t comprehend what the man was asking him. He understood only that two others stood close by and that they meant to do him harm.

  ‘I don’t have anything. Look about you, please. You can see I don’t have nothing.’

  The boot lifted from his chest and Jimmy knew a brief moment of relief before the foot was drawn back and then the heavy boot launched with full force into his side.

  They dragged him to his feet and then slammed him into a chair. A face leered, close to his own. Hot breath that stank of tobacco. ‘Where did you put it? We know she gave it to you.’

  ‘Gave what to me? Who? I don’t understand.’

  Jimmy Cottee was not a big man. He was neither tall nor solid and when the man grabbed him again and swung him from the chair, hurling him against the wall, Jimmy could do nothing to defend himself. He struck out once, felt his nails rake across skin, heard a grunt that was part pain but mostly anger, felt the hand around his throat and the life ebbing from him.

  Someone spoke and the hand released its grip.

  ‘Now, where is it?’ the voice was asking him again and Jimmy, breath knocked from his body, throat tight as though the hand still pressed against his windpipe, could hardly get the words out.

  ‘What? Don’t know.’

  So they beat him again.

  Jimmy Cottee was regaining consciousness when they put the rope around his neck. He was thrashing in panic as they threw the rope around a bracket in the carriage ceiling. He still had no idea why he was about to die.

  Henry stretched, enjoying the moment. It was almost seven and he had slept for another three hours since encountering Mickey on the stairs. More sleep than he’d had in weeks. Perhaps this bout of insomnia was not going to be so bad after all.

  Retrieving his breakfast tray, Henry realized that Cynthia had also had one of the scrapbooks she had mentioned sent up to him. She had marked a page with a slip of paper and while he ate breakfast and drank his morning tea Henry examined the pictures of Cissie Rowe. He knew that she was twenty-eight but she looked much younger in these images and he wondered if they had been taken recently or if they had simply been styled to flatter. Someone had once told him that photographers smeared a tiny amount of Vaseline on their lenses to create a softer focus on their subject. Henry sometimes wished you could do that with real life. Real life was all knees and elbows, far too sharp, prodding and intrusive.

  He thought about his sister’s children. It had always seemed to Henry that it was the most extreme expression of optimism that anyone should choose to have children though, he supposed, Cynthia’s would be protected from the worst shocks that life had to offer. Or at least he hoped so.

  He washed and dressed and took himself downstairs. His sergeant, he was told, was collecting his photographs and his sister had already gone out.

  ‘Mrs Garrett-Smyth enjoys an early walk along the promenade when the household is in residence down here,’ he was told. Henry decided that he would follow.

  The morning air was fresh, the wind coming in off the sea and whipping the waves into froth as they hit the pebble beach. He spotted Cynthia leaning against the railing of the promenade, her coat collar pulled up and her shoulders hunched. When he reached her Henry noticed that her cheeks were flushed and reddened by the morning chill and her eyes were bright. She smiled at him. ‘And how are you this morning? Did you sleep?’

  The question was never Did you sleep well?

  ‘I woke and went downstairs for a while, made use of Albert’s library. I found the old photograph albums of your wedding.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘So no doubt you saw the other pictures as well. I’d almost forgotten I still had them. They were packed away in an old box. I remembered how you didn’t like to see them, so I tucked them out of sight.’

  ‘I was glad to see them,’ Henry said. ‘We have come a long way since then, Cynthia. You especially have.’

  ‘That,’ she agreed, ‘is certainly true.’ She stepped back from the promenade rail and looked down at the fur-trimmed coat and the Cuban-heeled shoes she was wearing. ‘Look at me, Henry. Did
you ever see the like?’

  ‘Our father would have been scandalized,’ Henry agreed. ‘He was a great believer in women knowing their place, and you have certainly stepped out of yours. I’m glad of that, Cynthia. And you seem to be happy?’

  ‘I’m content,’ she said. ‘And you know, Henry, I’ve come to realize that in many ways contentment is a better emotion to feel. It is more consistent, more reliable. I am married to a man I like, and even love in my own way. If you are looking for me to be passionate about my husband then you are looking at the wrong woman.’

  ‘And is there another woman? One who is passionate?’

  ‘Not recently, I am happy to say. There have been two or three and I never expected otherwise. He is a rich man and there are many pretty women in the world. Whenever his preoccupations become obvious, then I remind him of his obligations and he steps back into line. Compared to the way some husbands behave, Henry, I have no complaints. Albert is my friend and he respects me as an equal in terms of intellect and thought. He listens to me and he is a very good father.’

  ‘Cynthia …’

  Smiling, she touched a finger to his lips. ‘Henry, I was never one for romantic love. My life has always been ruled by practicality, you know that. And I love my children and I have to say, darling, that in general I love my life. I am desperately aware of my good fortune. Henry, I have freedom to act, to make my own decisions, to become involved in my husband’s business in a way that he values. I would not trade that for schoolgirl romance, I promise you.’

  She slipped her arm through his and they strolled slowly back to the house. Her car was out at the front and Mickey was waiting in the hall. Time to leave.

  ‘I may not see you tonight; we are going up to town to the theatre and will probably stay over. But the servants know you’ll be returning and meals will be prepared, and you know that you are both very welcome.’

  She kissed her brother gently on the cheek and shook Mickey Hitchens’ hand and then went on up the stairs, unfastening her coat as she went. Like Cissie Rowe’s, Henry thought, Cynthia’s clothes were hung and put away as soon as she took them off.