Mourning the Little Dead Read online

  ‘You coming in?’ she asked.

  ‘Can’t, sorry. Still questioning our so-called suspect.’

  ‘Progress?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ He kissed her goodbye and stood playing with Napoleon’s ears while she searched for her key, but she could tell that he was eager to be gone. Work filling up his mind.

  ‘You’ll be all right?’ he said, but it was more of a statement than a question.

  ‘Sure,’ she told him. She heard him drive away even before she had gone inside.

  Eleven

  The trouble on the Radleigh Estate had escalated overnight and found its focus in the shape of Gary Williams’ flat.

  Broken glass crunched beneath his feet as Alec stepped into the hall. The glass panel in the front door had been smashed and the door itself wrenched off its hinges and kicked to matchwood.

  They hadn’t bothered to thieve, Alec noted, but it was pretty obvious that even before the intruders had done their remodelling, Gary Williams hadn’t owned a whole lot of anything. What little he had, someone had tackled with a baseball bat or slashed with a knife.

  Drawers had been emptied, bed covers shredded, cheap cotton curtains ripped from their hooks and trampled underfoot. The imploded screen of the TV set glared blankly at him from the corner of the room, a handful of CDs jammed into the void.

  SOCO were dusting for prints, adding grey powder to the general mess.

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Plenty, mostly partials.’

  Alec nodded. Turning back towards the door he felt something slide beneath his foot. Glancing down, he saw that his foot rested on a photograph of two small children. They were smiling at the camera. The face of one, a little boy, was smeared with ice cream—he still held the cone in a grubby hand. The girl, a little older and a whole lot neater, had already finished hers with only a smear of raspberry sauce across her cheek as evidence.

  ‘There were others on the bedroom floor,’ the SOCO told him. ‘I picked them up and put them on the bedside cabinet.

  Alec carried the photo through to the bedroom and perched on the edge of the bed while he looked through the rest. The same two children appeared in several more and others too in what looked like a family group. A woman who bore a striking resemblance to the little girl stood hand in hand with Gary Williams. He wore a suit and she was dressed in a pretty frock with flowers in her hair.

  Williams had mentioned no family. When asked if they should contact anyone for him, he had said that there was no one.

  Thoughtfully, Alec slipped the pictures into an evidence bag.

  ‘You there, Alec?’

  ‘In here.’

  Travers leaned on the door surround and surveyed the mess. ‘Did quite a job, didn’t they? What do you have there?’

  Alec handed him the plastic bag. ‘Family photographs, I’d say. He kept stum about that, didn’t he?’

  Dick Travers flicked through the pictures and then handed them back. ‘Divorced?’

  ‘Probably. Explains this place. And the chip on his shoulder, I suppose.’

  ‘Unless the chip came first.’

  ‘Unless,’ Travers agreed. ‘You talked to the neighbours yet?’

  Alec nodded. ‘Next door, a woman called Cathy Walton, she works the twilight shift, saw nothing. Downstairs heard nothing, saw nothing and don’t give a damn either way. And I guess Viccy Elliot speaks for the whole community when she suggests that Gary Williams might not want to come back here.’

  ‘She made a threat?’

  ‘No, Viccy doesn’t make threats, she’s far too smart for that, as I say, she just makes suggestions. SOCO reckon they have prints, but you can bet your sweet life that they turn out to belong to the local kids. Minors only and under tens for preference. Just the odd big brother to make sure they do it right.’

  ‘So. This leaves us where?’

  Alec smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘Do you really want me to answer that?’ he said.

  *

  Naomi had been unable to settle after Alec had left. Unwilling to be alone, she had gone shopping for things she did not really need and afterwards walked with Napoleon on the beach. The tide had just turned, the air fresh and salt-clean and very chill. She had taken off her shoes and dug her toes into the sand as she walked. Her arms were bare. The breeze from the sea raised goose bumps on her left arm while the right heated in the sun on the landward side and even the sound seemed split by land and water. Seabirds and waves dominating the seaward while from the land the sound of voices and cars dominated, mingling with the electronic music of the small arcades dotted the length of the promenade. She had learnt now to judge her position by the changing sounds.

  She turned to face the sea, the cacophony of human noise to her back now, her focus on the waves crashing about her feet, sucking back the sand. Napoleon stood close beside her. She could feel as he lowered his head to sniff at the water and heard him snuffle in disgust as it got up his nose. He was never sure about the beach. He liked it when she walked, but standing still was never his idea of fun, especially in this stuff that stuck closely to his paws and caked in his fur. He avoided sitting down, disliking the feel of wet sand on his backside.

  Naomi closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun. Red light flooded her retina, the only colour that remained in Naomi’s universe and she welcomed it.

  ‘Race you down the beach.’

  ‘The sea’s too cold to swim.’

  ‘No it’s not. Just run in fast. Don’t think about it.’

  ‘How can I not think about it? It’s bloody freezing.’

  ‘Don’t say that! Your mam will hear!’

  Helen giggled. ‘She says it.’

  ‘Yeah, but she’s a grown-up. They can do it.’

  Tiny bells jingled as the children ran by. No, not ran by, ran through her memories. She heard them splashing into the cold sea, squealing with delight and shock and daring one another to go further into the waves and in her memories she knew that Mari watched them from the shoreline, glancing up every few minutes from her magazine, her fair hair shaded by a broad brimmed hat and her dress pulled up to let the sun get to her pale, overwintered thighs.

  ‘Oh, Helen,’ Naomi whispered. ‘What would you have been by now?’

  She turned around, listening now to the beachfront noises. Arcade straight ahead, children buying ice cream—‘You want raspberry on that, love?’—smell of candyfloss carried to her from somewhere off to her left. That meant the steps were almost straight ahead. She knew full well that she could trust Napoleon to take her there, but to establish this world plan in her mind’s eye gave her great satisfaction.

  Somewhere, in one of the kitchen drawers, she thought, there was a little tape recorder. In her police days she had used it to make notes to herself. She had a different use for it now. In order to make sense of what had happened to Helen, she needed to commit what she knew to...well at one time she would have sat down with a sheet of paper and made a list. What she knew, what she didn’t know, how she could find out.

  That was not a facility she had just now—she was getting to grips with the Braille alphabet, but it was a slow and unnatural process. So, she would use the tape. Note the things she knew, the things she didn’t, and for the things she needed to find out...well something told her that Harry Jones might be her willing ally in getting to grips with that.

  *

  ‘My wife and kids,’ Gary Williams said. ‘Dead, almost two years ago. That massive pile-up on the motorway.’

  ‘I remember,’ Alec told him. Ironically this was the accident where Naomi had lost her eyesight, and for a while they had doubted she would survive. ‘I’m sorry,’ he added. ‘I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.’

  ‘Yeah, well I should have been driving, you see. But I was late home, again. They went on ahead. Going to visit her mam’s. I said I’d meet them there when I got off work. Sharon, well she wasn’t best pleased, didn’t like motorway driving. Es
pecially not when it was getting dark. I thought, maybe if I’d been there...She and the kids were right in the middle of it. There was nothing left of the car, nothing you could recognize.’

  Alec shook his head. ‘I can’t say about your wife and kids,’ he said, ‘but I was there that night and from what I saw, no one had much of a chance. The dead would have been dead no matter who was driving.’

  Gary Williams said nothing, just held the pictures in his hands, staring at them. ‘Those bastards,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t care about the stuff. Didn’t have much left. I mean, I drank anything I could sell. Lost the house. Lost the lot and I didn’t give a fuck. But the pictures are all I’ve got left of Shar and the kids. All I got left.’

  He looked up suddenly. His tone changing and the old belligerence returning. ‘So. What now? You going to charge me with summat or what?’

  ‘You can’t go back to the Radleigh,’ Alec told him. ‘I’ve someone arranging temporary accommodation—’

  ‘Like fuck I can’t! Look here, I’ve finally got my head together and I’ve started again. I’m not going to be thrown out just because of some stupid wankers who can’t see further than their own noses.’

  ‘If you go back, it could give rise to a public order offence Mr Williams. I can’t allow that.’

  Williams stared at him. ‘But you ain’t charging me with nothing,’ he said flatly.

  ‘There will be no charges brought at this present time.’

  ‘So. Let me get this straight. You come round to my place of work and you single-handedly fuck up my life. Chuck me back to the sharks without a word of apology and then threaten me with some bloody public order charge just because I want to go home.’

  ‘I threatened you with no charge, Mr Williams,’ Alec told him. ‘I’m merely warning you of the consequences, should you—’

  ‘That’s not the way I heard it.’

  ‘You have a complaint,’ Alec said sharply, ‘I’m sure the duty solicitor will be glad to advise you. Maybe, if you’d been a little more reasonable when I came to talk to you, there’d have been no need to bring you in and you wouldn’t find yourself in this mess. Look,’ he continued in a more placating tone, ‘I think you should consider the emergency housing. There’s not a lot to go back to—’

  ‘Emergency housing! Some hostel somewhere full of crack-heads and prossies. No thanks. Just let me out of here. I can take care of me own problems.’

  Great, Alec thought. Just what the Radleigh estate needed. Viccy Elliot and her like would just love finding a few more excuses to sort him out.

  *

  Naomi listened to the evening news. She still used the television news in the evening rather than the radio, preferring the depth of reporting to the rather sketchy illustrations typical of the audio version. A woman reporter was telling the audience about the finding of Helen’s body. She had a young voice and not one that Naomi recognized. She liked it best when she could match a face to the voice. Better still if the journalist was one she knew well enough to visualize what they were wearing. Naomi knew that it was an odd sort of preference, even stranger as she herself had never had a strong interest in fashion, but nowadays she delighted in her imaginings and loved it when she had someone present who could tell her, ‘Oh, she shouldn’t be wearing that colour!’

  The young woman had a regional accent that Naomi could not quite place. It was overlaid with a veneer of BBC English. ‘A man was taken in for questioning,’ she reprised, ‘but at a press conference about an hour ago it was announced that he had been released without charge and there are no further details at the present time.’

  So they had to let him go, Naomi thought to herself. Alec would be disappointed.

  She was sitting in her favourite place, on the sofa in the large bay beside the window. The windows were open to let in the evening breeze and the street below was quiet. The children’s voices rose up to her. Two little girls chatting, their voices light and untroubled on the evening air.

  ‘I think this is the place. Come on, I’ll knock on the door.’ Curious, Naomi leaned towards the window. Their feet shuffled on the pavement and she thought she heard something else. The light ringing of tiny bells.

  Then she almost jumped out of her skin as the knocking came at her own front door.

  Naomi sat quite still, her body rigid and unable to move, then the second knock seemed to break the spell and she pushed to her feet and, with Napoleon at her side, went to open the front door.

  There was no one there.

  She called out, ‘Is there anybody there?’ But there was no answer and no sound either of shuffling feet or of the children, having played a joke, running swiftly away.

  And then she heard the metallic jingling coming from the step where Napoleon was snuffling curiously at something which lay there.

  She bent down, feeling for the dog and then for the object he had found.

  ‘Oh my Lord!’ The object, slightly damp from Napoleon’s curious ministrations, was a metal band. A bracelet, jingling with little bells.

  Twelve

  It was nine thirty on the Radleigh Estate and Gary Williams was attempting to clean up the mess. Several times in the past hour he had been interrupted by someone banging on the door. The first time, he had gone to answer it, but there had been no one there, only the sound of laughter rising up from the stairwell and running feet upon the stairs.

  He had cursed the ‘bloody kids’ he assumed were responsible and then let them take it out on the knocker the next time they’d hammered on the door. He assumed that if he ignored them, they’d eventually tire of the game and clear off.

  The big window that had faced out on to the school field was broken, smashed from the inside by, he supposed, the same person who had wielded the baseball bat and smashed his television. He had seen the glass still strewn across the path when he had come back. No one had bothered to clean it up yet, any more than they had troubled to come and replace his window. It had been boarded up and a message said that the workmen would be round in the next few days. He wasn’t about to hold his breath; broken windows on the Radleigh Estate didn’t come as high priority on anybody’s list.

  The room was dark, illuminated only by an inadequate table lamp, rescued from the chaos in the bedroom, which the vandals had failed to smash.

  When the knock on the door came again, Gary ignored it, taking note only when the knock came once more. Irritated now, Gary decided it was time to give whoever a real piece of his mind. He crept to the door and flung it wide. But it wasn’t kids this time. His next-door neighbour stood outside his door, glancing nervously around.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Oh!’ She had jumped back, startled when he had wrenched open the door. ‘I just wondered,’ she said, ‘if there was anything I could do?’

  ‘Thanks. But I think they’ve already done it all.’

  ‘Well, if you feel like that...’ She turned away and prepared to go back inside her own flat.

  Gary watched her go, her shoulders set defensively, and suddenly realized that he didn’t want to he alone. He needed company, any company.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. Come inside before someone sees you.’

  ‘Like who?’ she asked. ‘Only you and me living on this landing.’ But she stepped quickly over his threshold, glancing back over her shoulder towards the stairwell as though afraid the kids who had tormented him might be hiding in the shadows.

  ‘God, what a mess.’

  ‘Thanks. I thought I was getting somewhere.’

  She smiled. It made her almost pretty, though her eyes were sad and anxious. ‘You could do with some light in here.’

  ‘They even smashed the lightbulbs. Meant to do the job right.’

  ‘I’ve got some. I mean, back in the flat...shall I?’

  ‘Thanks. I’d be grateful. Leave the door on the latch. And, I don’t mean to be cheeky, but any chance of you bringing a kettle and a couple of mugs? I’m dying for a cupp
a.’

  The kids knocked twice more but then gave up and Gary figured that it must be getting too late even for kids in the Radleigh to be wandering about. Cathy Walton helped him to clear away the rest of the mess and they drank tea and talked about how they had come to live on the Radleigh Estate.

  ‘You must miss them so much,’ she said when he showed the pictures of his wife and kids. ‘Me, I’ve never been married. I looked after my parents. My dad was sick and Mum couldn’t cope. Eventually, he died and she became really...her mind seemed to go. I mean, it’s not that she’s even that old, but eventually, I just couldn’t deal with it. The doctor said I should have her put in a home. I didn’t want to, but she didn’t even know me any more. Anything I said or did...anyway. The care home cost, she owned her own house and I had to put it on the market. One thing led to another and I ended up here.’

  She frowned. ‘You think there’ll be more trouble tonight? I mean, there are police everywhere, but I don’t suppose that will last, will it?’

  He shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I appreciate this, you know, but I might not be the best person to hang around with. You know why the police took me in?’

  ‘The little girl that was killed. Yeah. I know, but I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Why not? You don’t know me from Adam.’

  She shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know...I just don’t believe it. I mean, you’re not the type, are you?’

  ‘Not the type,’ he repeated thoughtfully. ‘Is there one? The police think I might be.’ He sat down in the slashed seat of the old armchair and took the pictures from his pocket. They were still in the evidence bag, Alec having slipped them back inside before he let Gary Williams leave.

  ‘I lost my kids,’ he said. ‘You think I could take someone else’s kid away?’

  *

  Alec and Dick Travers were in Superintendent Phillips’ office reviewing the day. Whichever way you looked at it no one could say it had been a successful one. They knew now where Helen’s body had been buried, but that only complicated matters in that they now had to open a second murder inquiry instead of dealing with what was still a technical missing person.