We took the drive out to Pluck’s End to pay our respects to the grieving widow as soon as we could, which wasn’t as soon as we’d have liked. It’s a bugger, this having to pay the bills lark. I’d had a couple of customers booked in for the next day I hadn’t wanted to let down, and Phil had had a case to wrap up. Ironically, it was another missing-person job—one of his meetings from the other day had been about a runaway teenager, who he’d managed to track down in a shelter in Manchester. Cue tearful reunions and promises of better understanding all round. Well, if by all round you mean on the parents’ side. According to Phil, the teen herself had mostly looked pissed off at having been caught.
He reckoned, give it six weeks and she’d be off again. Still, as I reminded him, it’s always good to get repeat business.
Anyhow, we finally set off for Lilah’s house in Pluck’s End on a bright, mild Thursday morning. It was too early for daffs, but crocuses were starting to poke their heads out of the ground and magnolias in front gardens were getting ready to strut their spring stuff.
We were counting on the lady in question not going into work so soon after JP’s death, Phil not wanting to call ahead. Bit of a hangover from his police days, that, I suspected—never give the criminal a chance to make up a story and hide the body. As evidenced by the number of nippers out and about on the streets and playgrounds we passed on the way, it was school half-term holidays this week, which added to our chances of finding her at home with the kids. A calculated risk, but we wanted to take a nose at the crime scene too, so it wouldn’t be a wasted journey whatever.
The canal was out at the far end of Pluck’s End, one of those things you vaguely know are there but never pay much attention to. Unless, I guess, you’re in the market for a handy spot to commit murder. I seemed to remember Cherry saying they’d had a grant from the Lottery fund to tart it up a bit (not that she’d put it quite like that, obviously) but since I didn’t spend a right lot of time in Pluck’s End, I’d never actually seen it.
We parked in a newish-looking car park planted out with spindly trees in plastic tubes. Several other cars were already in occupation. Maybe we weren’t the only ones who fancied a butcher’s at a murder scene. Helpful signs pointed the way down to the canal, where we strolled along the path to the spot where JP had taken his terminal dip. Well, as near as we could get, at any rate. Around thirty feet of canal path each side of where, presumably, they’d dragged poor old Jonny-boy out of the water were still fenced off with police tape. They hadn’t bothered to leave some poor bastard in uniform to guard it, though, unless he’d just nipped behind a tree for a call of nature or a crafty fag, so the forensic team must have already been and done their stuff.
As places to get yourself offed go, Jonny-boy hadn’t chosen a bad one. The canal path had been made into a proper footpath, with benches every so often for the hard-of-standing and periodic notice boards either telling you which birds to look for flying over from the nature reserve on the other side, or reminding any medieval peasants that happened along that livestock could only be grazed on the common between Lammas and Candlemas.
“Candlemas I get—some kind of church candle fest, like the one with the oranges at Christmas—but what the hell’s Lammas?” I wondered idly.
“It’s when they used to slaughter all the spring lambs,” Phil said confidently.
“Oh.” Something about the way he said it made me send him a suspicious frown. “Oi, really?”
He laughed, the git. “God knows. Why don’t you ask Greg, if you’re that bothered?”
“Don’t think Cherry would thank me for ringing him up about work stuff in the middle of their honeymoon. And hey, I knew he was up for promotion, but I didn’t know he’d got the top job already.” I gave Phil a hard stare. “Be good if he had. I might get more respect round here if I was brother-in-law to Him Upstairs.”
“Yeah, but then you’d really have to mind your p’s and q’s when we go round for Sunday lunch.”
“Me? Nothing wrong with my manners. I was brung up proper, thank Greg.”
Phil gave me a look. “If you start screaming ‘Oh Greg’ in the middle of sex, we’re going to have a problem.”
I shuddered. “Cheers—way to give me a mental image of my sis doing just that. Can we change the subject?”
We walked on along the path. Everything was barren now, of course, and instead of grass and flowers, the predominant smell was damp earth with a whiff of diesel, but in a month or two’s time it’d be a lovely place for a stroll. Come summer, with the wild flowers blooming in the meadows and the birds flapping about overhead . . . Yeah, pretty idyllic, I reckoned.
Well, as long as they didn’t make a habit of finding dead bodies in the water, that was. I felt a momentary pang of regret that I’d turned down Cherry’s offer of her house in Pluck’s End at mates’ rates, now she was shacking up with Greg in the holiest of matrimony, but hey, we could still come here anytime. It wasn’t like it was a long drive out from St. Albans. Her daily commute from St. Leonards was going to be twice as far. Me and Phil had bets on as to how long she’d stick it out before chucking Ver Chambers for somewhere more local.
“Don’t suppose it’s worth asking you to give the place a once-over?” Phil asked in a low voice as we reached the tape barring our path.
I gave him a pitying look. “With a canal full of water rushing past?”
Phil raised an eyebrow. “‘Rushing’?”
“All right, dawdling past, but it’s still water. It won’t just mess with the vibes, it’ll be the vibes. At least, the only ones I’ll be able to pick up. It’d be like trying to hear a pin drop at a heavy-metal festival.” I shrugged. “Anyhow, if whoever killed him left some evidence here, chances are it was lost, not hidden. You know, dropped hairs, bits of fluff from his T-shirt, stray chunks of DNA. That sort of thing, though God knows how they find it.” I was betting Phil knew how they did it too, but he didn’t enlighten me.
“Forgetting the murder weapon, aren’t you? You’d hide that.”
“Yeah, but would you hide it here? Where you know they’re going to be shipping in a vanload of lads and lasses in hazmat suits to comb over every inch of ground? What if it’s something that’d give you away?”
“What, like a pet rock with your name on it?”
“Don’t be daft. It wasn’t a rock. Too . . . jagged. Could have been a . . . I dunno, a walking stick? Nah, that wouldn’t fit, would it? Or would it?”
We’d discovered (from Dave, strictly on the QT) that Jonny-boy had suffered a blow to the head from that old classic, the blunt instrument, shortly before death. Trouble was, Dave couldn’t tell us whether JP had been hit on the head, then chucked in the canal, or fallen into the water (with or without a helping hand from person or persons unknown) and then hit his head. The most likely suspects in that case were bridges and canal boats, of which there were a few on this stretch, mostly moored down by the town, no doubt with coppers on board taking notes.
The bang on the bonce hadn’t killed our Mr. Parrot directly, but it had almost certainly contributed to his death by drowning—it being notoriously hard to swim whilst unconscious. And the water in the lungs had definitely come from the canal. I’d asked.
A woman strode by us, a matched pair of Westies straining at the lead like a couple of hyperactive cotton wool balls. “Gotta be popular with local dog owners, this place,” I said, nodding at her. “You’d think it’d be a bit risky for a murder.”
A bright-red dog-waste bin a few yards away bore witness to the fact I wasn’t simply letting my imagination run wild, harassing hypothetical sheep and cocking its leg on notional trees. They probably had a bye-law about that sort of thing, round here.
Phil shrugged. In his posh wool coat and cashmere sweater, he’d have looked right at home walking something suitably classy yet macho—a golden retriever, say, or maybe a Great Dane. Me, I could probably just about get away with a Jack Russell. “Come down after dark, you’d be fine. Seen the state of the lighting here?”
I hadn’t, because there wasn’t any. Which, of course, was his point. “Okay, so you wouldn’t get the lady walkers or the old codgers. And I s’pose runners wouldn’t be too keen either—you’d want to know where you were putting your feet. Still, it’s a risk.”
“It’s not overlooked, and the boats aren’t likely to travel by night. Plus, if anyone came along, you’d hear them. Sound carries over water.”
“Cuts both ways, that, though, doesn’t it? Anyone walking along might have heard the splash when Jonny-boy went in, and come running to see if some poor sod had fallen in.”
“Didn’t, though, did they?”
I couldn’t argue with that one. Or, at least, Dave’s comrades in arms hadn’t yet managed to find anyone willing to admit to it. Which probably meant they hadn’t, but there was at least a faint chance they were keeping shtum from embarrassment at having witnessed a murder and failed to stop it—that, or they were worried about getting involved in a suspicious death. After all, if their own purposes for roaming lonely canal paths in the dead of night had been less than innocent . . .
No, in all likelihood, poor old Jonny-boy’s swan song as he did a swan dive had been to an audience of one, i.e. his murderer. Or no one at all, if it had really been an accident, but I wasn’t planning to stake my shirt on those odds. “Why would he even come down here after dark, though? I mean, obviously he must’ve been meeting someone—unless it was an accident—but he was scared of something, we know that, so why not stay somewhere well lit with a shedload of witnesses to discourage foul play?” I blinked. “He must have trusted whoever got him to come down here.”
“Yeah. Or whoever he thought wanted him to come down here. Maybe he didn’t meet up with who he expected.”
“Well, if nothing else, we know Lilah couldn’t have done it,” I said. “Physically, I mean.”
Phil snorted.
“What?” I asked, narked.
“Course she could have done it. She’s not that small. And maybe she got him to sit down and then whacked him on the head. Wouldn’t be that difficult—all she’d have to do was say she was getting a crick in her neck talking to him.” He smirked. “You’ve got to be able to sympathise with her there.”
“Up yours.” I made the appropriate gesture, then shoved my hands in my pockets hurriedly when I realised there was an old dear coming our way with a Yorkie. I hoped she hadn’t noticed, but the quavery “Good morning” she wished us as she passed was a bit on the pointed side.
Phil sniggered. Git.
We headed off after that, stopping again on the way to buy a bunch of flowers for the grieving widow. They had some peonies in the florist’s, but Phil reckoned lilies were traditional. I pointed out the pollen stained like mad and was poisonous to cats, if she had any, not to mention the whole eau-de-death thing lilies have going on. Phil looked at me like I’d gone round the bend at that point, but trust me, I’ve been up close and personal with a dead body or two and it’s not a smell you forget.
We compromised on white roses. I couldn’t help thinking choosing flowers for the wedding was going to be a total bugger if we couldn’t even agree what they smelled like.
Lilah’s place turned out to be only a hop, skip, and a jump away from my sister’s house. Funny to think of them being neighbours, although they wouldn’t be for much longer. Cherry would be moving into the Old Deanery in St. Leonards with the Middle-Aged Canon as soon as they got back from honeymoon. If they hadn’t fallen off a mountain or been eaten by a wild haggis, of course. Still, I couldn’t see Lilah and Sis leaning over their respective garden gates to have a natter about recipes and/or the latest local scandal in any case. Sis liked to pretend she was above such things as gossip, and Lilah hadn’t struck me as any more of the domestic-goddess type than Cherry was.
The house was big, but chalet style, with loads of floor space downstairs but the bedrooms all no doubt with low, sloping ceilings. Although I supposed that wouldn’t be a problem for the lady of the house.
She opened the door to us herself, sporting a dark-grey wrap dress that hugged all her curves and managed to make her look both dignified and hot stuff. Objectively speaking, obviously. Her makeup was perfect—freshly applied to hide dark shadows and swollen eyes? I couldn’t tell at a glance, and staring her in the face would have seemed rude.
Not that that stopped Lilah, who gave us a wide-eyed once-over that only ended when Phil held out the roses.
“We wanted to offer our condolences.” He had the tone of voice just right: solemn, sincere and ever-so-slightly detached. It said Sorry for your loss with the merest hint of Don’t even think of blaming us for his untimely demise.
She blinked and took the flowers with a sad smile. “Tom, Phil, that’s so sweet of you. Come in.”
We wiped our boots—that is, I wiped my boots, and Phil wiped his posh loafers—on her thick coir doormat. It was printed with the words, Touch me, I want to be dirty, and I wondered if it scared off the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Then again, I was pretty sure Lilah could hold her own against all comers.
“I’m really sorry about what happened,” I said guiltily.
“Oi, none of that. You only did what I asked you to. But come on, come in and have a cuppa.”
She led us to a bright, airy kitchen, rather than her living room which I glimpsed through an open door. With some women I’ve had the dubious pleasure of calling on, this would be their none-too-subtle way of letting you know you’re not good enough, clean enough, or important enough to risk wearing out and/or marking up the soft furnishings. Coming from someone like Lilah, though, an invite to the kitchen was probably a vote of confidence—her saying We’re all mates here, no standing on ceremony.
Or, of course, she’d picked up some posh habits along with the posh house and lifestyle. But I wasn’t betting on it, especially after seeing that doormat.
Me and Phil each pulled up a chair at a gleaming chrome-and-glass table set at one end of the kitchen while Lilah hopped onto a step stool by the sink to fill the kettle.
Glass doors opened onto the garden—or would, if it wasn’t still a bit too nippy—which had a wide decking area up against the house and a built-in brick barbecue. The garden itself was well cared for. There were none of the tatty corners I had at mine, where I’d been meaning to do something about cutting stuff back but had then run out of summer. I wondered who looked after it. Lilah? Unlikely, given the pristine state of her manicure. Jonny-boy? More likely she paid someone to come round and see to it.
There were no playhouses, trampolines, or abandoned tricycles, despite what she’d said about her kids missing their stepdad. The fridge was free of brightly coloured modern artworks only a mum could love, too. How old were her kids? In their teens, maybe? That’d explain the lack of sight or sound of them—they’d be either out somewhere doing whatever young people did now that Pokémon was old hat again or holed up in their bedrooms with their headphones on, watching anime porn or moaning on about how unfair life was to their mates on Snapchat. At least, going by what I’d been told by the long-suffering Mrs. K. only yesterday as I fixed the kitchen tap her eldest had got a bit heavy-handed with.
Mind you, Lilah’s kids actually had something to moan about.
“Tea?” Lilah asked, waving a posh earthenware mug in my face.
The kettle had boiled already? Time to start paying attention, Paretski. “Cheers, love. Milk, no sugar, ta.”
“Phil?”
“Same, please.”
She made herself one too—black today—and plonked a big biscuit tin on the table before climbing onto a free chair. “Help yourselves, go on. I ain’t eaten a thing since I heard about my poor boy, but no need for anyone else to go hungry.”
It’d been a few days, and she didn’t look in any danger of keeling over, so I took that with a pinch of salt. Phil passed on the biscuits. I had a peek in the tin and snagged myself a bourbon cream.
“We’re sorry for your loss, Mrs. Parrot,” Phil said formally.
“Call me Lilah. Didn’t I tell you to call me Lilah? Mrs. Parrot just makes me sad. Less than two years we was married, you know?” She sighed and took a sip of her tea.
I followed suit and scalded my mouth. And my tea had milk in it. Lilah must have lips of steel.
“It must be an added strain to have the police suspect foul play,” Phil went on. “Have you got any idea who might have wanted to harm your husband?”
“Oh, I know who done it, all right. Like I told the coppers.”