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Authors: Clare Curzon

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BOOK: Last to Leave
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The move into her apartment there was recent enough to bring a comfortable glow at the prospect of relaxing over a chilled jug of crushed lemon, and mooching around in a state of undress with the windows open to a cooling breeze off the river. The early morning's haze had turned by noon into a cloudless heat that built by the hour, making her grateful she'd exchanged city streets for open fields.
Circling the house, she saw a green sports model parked by the open door to her garage, so Max was here. He wasn' t in her flat, which meant he'd be downstairs with Beattie, catching up with gossip on the other residents.
Two of the seven flats were for resale since the double murder
*
in the house the previous winter. Potential buyers had visited and been put off by the crime's bad odour. Other visitors with a taste for scandal had for a while been attracted by the notoriety, roamed the rooms and gazed their morbid fill before going off furnished with a gloating subject for social chat. But by now even that interest had waned.
Only the ground floor flat opposite Beattie's had received a second visit and an offer from a bank manager impressed by the exceptional security arrangements. Z had grown accustomed to the apartment opposite her own remaining empty. Until now the suicide jump from its balcony had outweighed the low price which the estate agent had twice felt obliged to reduce.
Z, untroubled by ghosts, since her work desensitized her to such fancies, welcomed silence across the landing. Now, having showered and changed, she prepared to go down and discover why Max hadn't instantly appeared when her car swept past Beattie's windows.
 
*
A Meeting of Minds.
 
 
As she double-locked her door she paused at the unaccustomed sound of music. An old Eric Clapton recording, surely coming from the unoccupied apartment. And the door stood invitingly ajar.
Closer, she listened for a moment, could detect no movement, then knocked quietly. She heard chair legs slide against woodblock flooring and someone padded in sock soles from the direction of the drawing-room.
‘Hello, my sweet,' Max greeted her, grinning like a monkey. ‘Come in and tell me what you think.'
The room was transformed. Gone were the silks and velvet-swagged drapes, the peachy creams and thick pile carpet. Exposed wood flooring gleamed like pale honey. Here and there the bare walls had been daubed with tester shades of matt paint.
‘You're not serious,' she accused him.
‘It's an idea I had. It came over me gradually, after I suggested to Dr Fenner it would make a better sale if it was brought up to date, with all the flimmery flammery removed.'
‘When did you see Dr Fenner?' she demanded, suspicious.
‘A couple of weeks back. I had a job to do in Cambridge. He dined and wined me in College like a prince.'
‘And you kept it under your hat! You're telling me he gave you carte blanche to take over the redecoration?'
‘And have all the furniture removed. Yes, with a view to considering its potential for myself. I am sometimes allowed to make decisions on my own, you know.'
He was all wide-eyed innocence. ‘I still haven't quite made up my mind. If you've any objections to me as a neighbour, naturally I'll call it off, hoping he likes the alterations.'
She walked past him to sit on one of the wide windowsills. ‘It's unexpected.'
‘You don't have to say straight off …'
‘I thought things were fine the way they were, that's all.' She sounded uncertain. Then, ‘You want to move your toothbrush out, I take it?' It was an attempt to sound unaffected. A dab at weak humour.
‘Oh, I could just about afford a second toothbrush. And the lease will be up on the Pimlico place in September. The truth is I'm not sure I want to go on living in London. But I can't impose on you all the time. Being close neighbours seemed the best way out.'
But not as close as being with her in the same apartment. She seemed to hear warning bells. He was making it sound like building something more permanent between them, but at the same time it was a physical distancing. Wasn't it?
‘I like having you drop in,' she told him.
‘But I need somewhere permanent as well. If I give up in Pimlico, this would suit me well. The Prof isn't asking its full value. A snip, you might say. And who knows, you might get to like seeing me on an almost daily basis. As a run-up to taking me on as a full-time husband.'
She couldn't suppress a smile. ‘Infiltration?' ‘Something like that. I shall go on proposing, of course, if I see any signs of your relenting.'
‘Ah, that reminds me,' she said brightly, glad of a sideways shift of subject. ‘We've been sent a wedding invitation by Paula Musto. It's for next Saturday. Short notice, owing to Angus getting special leave from duty in Kosovo. They're taking a four day honeymoon in Scotland, then he has to go back and finish his commitment out there.'
‘So he's pulled it off at last! There's hope for me yet.'
‘We don't have to act like lemmings,' she said sharply and caught the flicker of some emotion cross Max's face. ‘I'm sorry, sorry, sorry. You know how it is. It's just the idea of marriage, being hobbled; the sameness, the dreariness that must inevitably creep in with familiarity. I don't want that ever to happen to us.'
He stood there considering her, his head tilted to one side. Then with an index finger he pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose in the familiar way. And just then she felt familiar wasn't such a bad thing. Quite endearing, really.
‘You've witnessed too many bad alliances,' he said sombrely. ‘I have too, but I believe we could make something good out of it. However, I see that now's not the right moment to start asking you again. Meanwhile, how do you feel about my taking on this flat? As a half-measure.'
‘You must do as you wish,' she granted ruefully ‘As you said, you're sometimes allowed to make decisions of your own.'
‘But your reaction is part of what I have to take into account.'
Up until then they hadn't touched. Now she rose and went across to him, put her arms round his neck and kissed his cheek. ‘I can't imagine anyone I'd rather have living next door.'
This was his cue for kissing her more thoroughly. From which he finally extricated himself, took a deep breath and demanded in mock-husbandly tones, ‘So, where's me dinner?'
Back in her own apartment, while she dealt with the steaks he'd left in her fridge, and Max dribbled vinaigrette into tossed salad, she explained what had taken her into work on a Sunday.
‘Tomorrow,' she added, ‘DI Salmon's back from leave and the reign of terror will recommence. Meanwhile we're free to make hay or whatever. That's my life. So how was your week?'
Settling to an evening of quiet companionship began to lessen her unease. Nothing appeared to have changed. Max was his normal gently droll self delivering anecdotes of newspaper life in the city, and if the alarm bells still sounded they seemed to have become less urgent and more distant.
She had as good as told him to go ahead with his plans to move in next door. If it meant that her own apartment threatened to become sadly empty, at least it wasn't immediate. He was here now and would be staying on tonight. She switched off all interest in the job to concentrate on the present.
 
DS Beaumont was shrugging on his jacket to take the dog for its evening walk – euphemism for a pint at the local. When the mobile phone buzzed in his pocket he knew in his bones it was work. And of the worse kind, because DI Walter Salmon had flown home from his holiday in Brittany and required his immediate company for a visit to Mrs Kate Dellar.
It could surely have waited for tomorrow. But, on the other hand, it was himself the DI had preferred to call in, and not Z. Any opportunity to get a step ahead of his rival DS had to be seized. So how far had Salmon acquainted himself with the case as it stood? He must have dropped in at the incident room already being set up, and helped himself to such reports as were logged.
Brought that much up-to-date, the DI had phoned Mrs Dellar and made an appointment, catching the lady as she returned home, actually walking in through the door. Wrong-footed, she'd not had the wit to insist that a meeting was inconvenient.
Beaumont returned the basset hound to the kitchen and flung the end of its lead to his son with suitable instructions. Then he walked to the road's end and waited to be picked up by the Great Uncouth himself.
He found Salmon unchanged but for a hectic band of scorched skin across cheeks, nose and throat, which ceased abruptly on his brow where some kind of headgear had been pulled down for protection. Beaumont pondered its likely nature: cricket umpire's panama hat; baseball cap; beret? No, he looked more the old-fashioned knotted-handkerchief type, paddling on the sea's edge with
rolled-up trouser legs and twanging red braces; the sort of belly-bulging, middle-aged man you used to see on saucy postcards, surrounded by fat women and jeering kids. However inappropriate that image, he'd been keen to return a day early to duty.
At Mrs Dellar's cottage, while they waited for her to answer the doorbell, Beaumont sized up the other man. He was big. The width of his shoulders and the short car coat made a cube of him. The head on top was of much the same shape, with gingerish fair hair close-cropped like a Victorian convict's. His large, knobbly features were all squashed into the lower three-eighths of his face, and the coarse-lipped mouth stretched almost the full width of his heavy jaw.
Not a pretty sight, but the man himself didn't appear to hold that opinion. He had, in fact, a mighty conceit of himself.
He hadn't given any hint of his immediate intentions. Perhaps it was his idea of a charm offensive, familiarising himself with the main players before the game got properly under way, and impressing bystanders with his being in control of the case.
It might not come amiss to warn him. ‘The lady's very upset, sir,' Beaumont ventured, deliberately avoiding the term ‘guv' which was reserved for the absent Angus Mott. ‘She seems the sensitive sort.'
Salmon's eyes flicked sideways to put him in his place. ‘All the better to gauge her reactions,' he said shortly. Like Little Red Riding-hood's wolf, Beaumont noted, and was visited by a second unflattering image of his senior officer, in a granny's flannelette nightie, peering over the bedclothes.
The door opened. Kate Dellar stood there, white and strained. ‘Is there any news?' she asked anxiously.
There was no attempt to lead her indoors, to soften the blow.
‘I have to report that a body has been found, ma'am',
Salmon announced baldly. ‘At the scene of the fire. A post-mortem is to be carried out tomorrow and we can tell you more then. '
It took a moment for it to reach her. Beaumont had time to step forward and catch her as she swayed.
Refreshed by Sunday's family outing, Superintendent Mike Yeadings had returned home to find three messages on his answerphone. The first assured him that his DI, Walter Salmon, was returning for the Larchmoor Place case and would attend the post-mortem on a body found at the scene of the fire. The second was from DS Zyczynski, bringing him up to date on the findings and giving the time of next day's post-mortem as 10am. The third produced Professor Littlejohn himself, cheerfully complaining about his long weekend being curtailed.
‘I can't get a decent fly on my rod but you have to drag me back by the short and curlies, eh?'
In view of the pathologist's increasingly bald pate Yeadings found this barely apt, and smiled at the man's deviousness. He hadn't missed the weather news about torrential rain in North Wales giving rise to flash floods. Under the circumstances it wasn't surprising if Littlejohn had, so to speak, found better fish to fry nearer home.
It appeared that matters were satisfactorily in hand for the next day.
 
On Monday Kate Dellar awoke in her own bed to the sound of light rain. After last night's appalling news she had felt emotionally wrung out. Walls and ceiling threatened to close in, crushing from her the ability to breathe. When the two detectives had left she leaned, stifled, by her open bedroom window and tried to suck in the last of the day's used air. The tablets she'd taken – twice the normal dose – did nothing to help, only made her less able to cope. When eventually she stumbled to her bed she had left the house exposed, doors unlocked and casements gaping. And now, while it continued to rain, there seemed no point in doing anything about it. She supposed she would mop
up the water later. If it ran down and damaged the wallpaper – too bad.
She experienced no sudden shock of memory returning. It had been with her all night, blackly threaded in and out of fantastic dreams, situations where she had been lost, or searching for others lost, always devastated and alone. The twins had appeared fleetingly on the edge of her vision, as young children oddly diminished in size, running handin-hand into a dark tunnel or between close-packed, twisted trees where she couldn't follow, paralyzed with horror.
Now, with the menace of a new day, she wearily supposed habit would make her get up, shower, dress. Then what?
Wait, perhaps, for the next blow to fall: for the last of her family to be taken from her.
It wasn't as if she could
do
anything. Nor had she the energy to try. Fighting demands in her head all night, for the moment she was incapable of more than staring up at the shadowed ceiling.
Above the patter of raindrops against glass she was aware of tyres hissing on wet tarmac as the morning rush-hour built. Then a new sound emerged, a bruising thud of heavy plastic against metal, followed by a torrent of tinkling.
Monday: so lorries had come to empty the bottle banks, a row of sturdy green containers with gaping mouths, labelled
clear, green, green
and
brown,
in which local residents posted their empties for recycling.
At least the sound had human implications. Despite her torpor she made it to the window, rested her elbows on the wet sill and leaned out. Rain fell cool and soft on her hair and forehead. Through the sparse branches of her neighbour's young pear tree she glimpsed the bulky lifting device in the public car park. As she watched, the mechanical arm swivelled, angled, and gently lowered the first of the green containers to the ground. The grab released it, groped for the next container, slowly raised it several feet,
tipped it and delivered a further shower of glass into the open rear of the transporter. This second load sounded different, less shattered, as though the green glass, mostly wine bottles and usually more robust than the clear shards, had poured out whole.
Wine bottles. She visualized again rank on rank of shelving in the Larchmoor Place cellars, as she'd first been shown them years ago. Old Frederick, Michael's father and dead for fifteen years, had fancied himself a wine connoisseur. He'd put claret down to mature as an investment. She wondered how much of his treasure remained –
had
remained until this disastrous fire. Maybe a considerable amount. Carlton hadn't been unusually self-indulgent, and seldom brought up the best stuff for such entertaining as he and Claudia went in for.
If green bottles were so much more robust, maybe some of the Dellar collection, close-packed and horizontal in their sturdy shelving, could even now have survived the upper storeys' collapse. Or would they be long gone, sold on by Claudia like the best of the library, to cover expenses in her and Carlton's final years?
Kate wondered if that possibility had occurred to Robert, so enraged by being denied his grandfather's books or some share of their value. And had Matthew, his father, been secretly a party to any liquidating of family assets? Perhaps Claudia had allowed him to take a cut.
Kate moved away from the window, leaving the rain still pattering in. For a brief moment she had resented that Michael's portion as third brother could be overlooked and her little family deprived. But how trivial, to be considering vintage wine's survival, when a precious life has been taken! In any case the heat would have made it undrinkable.
Her present reality overwhelmed her. She had no one, unless Eddie miraculously pulled through. And if not, what use had she for anything else?
She reached for the phone, dialled the hospital and waited
while someone responsible was called to answer her demands.
Sister informed her there had been no change. Eddie remained in a deep coma.
It meant there was still hope, of a kind. Jess was another matter. Today they would be holding a post-mortem. Kate refused to let her mind travel so far into the blackness.
 
Yeadings, having first stopped off at Kidlington to pick up and read the PR office's digest for the day, was an hour late reaching the mortuary. Littlejohn was in mid-flow, dictating his progress into a mike clipped to the front of his green plastic apron. The others had gathered and were uneasily waiting as he sliced, sawed, removed, then handed wrinkled organs over to steel bowls for the necessary weighing. There was a new mortuary assistant, small, male and Asian. Possibly Burmese.
Harsh overhead lighting, thrown back by white walls and gleaming steel, united with the heavy, airless smell of death insufficiently masked by disinfectant, producing for Yeadings the customary unease below his belt. This was by no means a normal dissection, the cadaver less resembling a human form than some charred and twisted tree trunk. The limbs, barely recognizable, were distorted and shrivelled. It was doubtful whether even Littlejohn would manage a reasonable assessment of the body's original size and general appearance.
Since the facial damage was so severe that no next of kin would be viewing the body, Littlejohn had reached the clenched teeth by removing both jaws. This meant peeling back skin from the lower face to reach and detach the masseter and temporalis muscles at the mandible, then sawing through at nose base level towards the joint before the ear. This he had skillfully achieved once photography and radiography of the area was completed.
Yeadings was conscious of DI Salmon's hard stare from across the room, but declined to make any excuse for his
presence. Admittedly there was no need for him, since the DI was accompanied by the coroner's officer and one of the team's detective sergeants but, because he would ultimately carry the can for how the investigation progressed, Yeadings was taking no chances. Salmon had yet to prove himself adequate.
Z‘presence indicated that she was the one who'd covered yesterday's excavations on the spot. Salmon might otherwise have consigned his female DS to less front-line business – not to spare her feelings, but from gender prejudice. The man had the sensitivity of a wild boar. And this morning, Yeadings considered, he looked not unlike one, add the odd whisker here and there.
Littlejohn had paused in his work to look up. ‘Good to see you, Mike,' he growled expansively. ‘More the merrier. Must press on, though. Young Z's been taking notes if you want to catch up. Take a look. You might be quite surprised.'
Yeadings walked across and took the notebook Z offered. He scanned the first shorthand page, made out the usual description of circumstances and site of the finding. The body's external measurements noted must be of purely academic interest owing to the exceptional heat distortion, and pretty useless in this case. Nevertheless they had been scrupulously noted because minor changes would certainly occur later during protracted refrigeration.
Littlejohn was now examining the state of the teeth. To Yeadings' lay mind they sounded nothing out of the ordinary: a few small fillings, a single eyetooth capped; no denture. Salmon shouldn't need reminding that a match with the missing girl's dental record would be necessary to ensure identification. Requiring the mother to view the body was quite out of the question.
‘We'll be going for DNA,' the pathologist murmured.
That did startle the superintendent. Surely no need for that added expense if the teeth had sufficient work done for her dentist to recognize them. So maybe they hadn't.
‘Well, it'd be nice to find out who it is we've got here, eh?' Littlejohn remarked with a fierce grin. ‘And why the funeral pyre.'
Yeadings assumed that the pathologist had so recently arrived back that he hadn't caught up with all the information available on the Larchmoor Place survivors. But ‘pyre?' he questioned. Wasn't that an unnecessary touch of macabre imagination?
‘Pyre,' Littlejohn repeated. ‘Oh, very much so. Our deceased friend here got the full Maid of Orleans treatment. I'm sending off parts of the underside to the chemi lab for analysis together with samples of the vinyl kitchen floor. They appear to have – er, much in common. Melded, in fact.'
It was unusual for him to be so mealy-mouthed. Yeadings saw clearly enough what the man meant. ‘So it's definitely not a natural or accidental death?'
The pathologist straightened stiffly, rubbing at his lower back. ‘Nothing natural or accidental about the cremation of a human body. But we'll need a great deal more time and exploration to determine whether the victim was alive when the fire began. Or, if dead, from what cause. You haven't brought me an easy one this time, Mike. In fact it's quite a teaser.' He sounded delighted.
Yeadings didn't want half the team hanging about for hours. Zyczynski had done her bit yesterday, witnessed the body's retrieval, ensured continuity. DI Salmon could manage from this point on his own.
‘Right, Z, you can knock off here. I'll see you back at the incident room. Bring your notes. We can leave this with the DI now he's back.'
‘Sir.'
He observed Salmon's slack mouth tighten to match a black stare. ‘Let me know when you've finished here,' Yeadings added mildly.
‘Going, Mike?' Littlejohn paused, scalpel raised. ‘You're going to miss all the fun bits.' He grinned fiendishly. ‘My
best regards to Nan and the kiddos.' Then he plunged back into the charred flesh. Yeadings and Z withdrew. Salmon turned sourly away from the exploration.
 
At a few minutes before eleven Kate Dellar heard a car draw up outside the house and waited in trepidation for the doorbell to ring. She lived in a quiet road. By 9am most mornings the traffic flow outside had stopped. It wasn't a kerbside people chose to park by. Few tradesmen called because most of the neighbours commuted daily to London.
Even expecting the bell, she started as it shrilled. No, she told herself. Nothing more. I can't take it.
But she moved into the hall and tried to make out who stood beyond the glass panel of the front door. The head's outline was irregular. It looked like a woman's. Then it turned in profile and Kate recognized the knob of dark hair low on the neck. Marion Paige. An envoy from the family?
The letterbox flapped and the visitor peered through. ‘Kate? I know you're there. It's Marion. Please let me in.'
Back in the shadows Kate stayed still, uncertain. Of them all this woman had been the only one to offer help. She could hardly turn her away. She moved forward into the light, let herself be seen as she opened up. But still she couldn't speak.
‘Kate,' the other one repeated. ‘You look like a ghost. Have you eaten?'
‘I – I …'
‘Come on. I'll make you something. You shouldn't be here alone. I hoped you'd ring or send for one of us. Haven't you any neighbours who could come in?'
She bustled past, slid off her jacket and hung it on the newel post, then almost pushed Kate towards the kitchen with scooping motions of her hands. ‘You'll feel better once you've got something inside you.'
Just like I used to do with the children, Kate thought; when they couldn't face school. She let herself be propelled
towards the breakfast bar. A stool was pulled out and her elbow held firmly while she allowed herself to be seated. I shall be sick, she warned herself, at just the smell of food.
BOOK: Last to Leave
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