The sense that she was nothing other than a pain in DI James’s arse meant no one was overly concerned with the fact that Maura might be at significant risk. No one except Poole, and he wasn’t sure whether his concern was personal or professional. For that reason he was trying to push thoughts of Maura away until he knew what to do with them. She was still a suspect, though one he thought could be easily eliminated – Maura Lyle had not done all this. News of the fresh blood at the Grange was even making him wonder whether she was a victim of this. No one had seen or heard from her for some time. Too much time in Poole’s opinion. She wasn’t due at work until the Monday, so they were not concerned. There was little contact with her family. Her older sister, Denise, had been dismissive of their enquiries, claiming Maura had estranged herself from her family and was a loner. There were no friends – Richard had alienated those – and her neighbours were indifferent. It seemed no one paid much attention to Maura Lyle.
Gallan had wandered over. ‘What’s up? You look like you lost a pound and found a penny.’
Poole ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. ‘It’s just this bloody case, it’s getting to all of us now.’
Gallan smiled. ‘Well, I have good news…’ He pointed over at Barber’s desk. ‘Come and join us. Progress has been made.’
Barber had come up with a lead from the Yodel delivery man about the Mosses’ cleaner.
The driver didn’t know her name.
Neither did the police, but they did suspect that the unidentified fingerprints at both the Grange and the Mosses’ house were likely to belong to her. They also knew she bore a scar on her face, a burn the man had said. Old and silvery, like shiny paper apparently. The door-to-door contingent had grilled every neighbour, but all they’d found out was that Dr and Mrs Moss were aloof, strange and hid behind their bloody Leylandii and privet as if they had something to hide. Maybe they had employed a cleaner, but no one had ever seen her except the Yodel man. There were a couple of reports of a car coming and going, a car not in keeping with the neighbourhood. No one had bothered to note the registration number, and given that the local residents association had strenuously resisted the installation of CCTV, there would be no record of it. All any of them could establish from the neighbours was that the Mosses were disliked – intensely.
The delivery driver had offered them one more thing: he’d seen the woman elsewhere. Coming in and out of the flats on the White City estate.
Barber was looking quite triumphant until Kelsoe walked in, overheard and offered her usual grim pronouncement on things. ‘Fat lot of good that is. Those flats are scheduled for demolition in a few days. All the residents moved out weeks ago.’
Poole stared at her. ‘Then get me a list from the council that tells me where all of the residents moved to.’
‘They were mostly dropouts and druggies, as I recall. I think some got rehoused at Essen Fields, in the social housing bit. Bet that pissed the developer off, having to move that lot in to get his subsidies.’
‘Just get me the list, and narrow it down to middle-aged couples, single women and people with bloody scars!’ Poole snapped. He didn’t care what Kelsoe thought of the former residents. He just needed to know where they’d all gone.
There were noises outside, giggling, swearing, and the smell of smoke softly mingling with the stench. Maura had yelled, paced the floor and pounded the walls and door until she could pace no more. Her head was hazy from fever and fear and her hands were bruised and bloodied. Smears of red were daubed about the room and she had ripped her nails beyond the quicks by tearing at the locked door and sealed window. Jamie Baxter’s bloated, stinking body hung there like a side of fly-blown meat, taunting her, making her crazy with terror and guilt. She had been locked in with her mistakes. Locked in that room, locked inside her own head.
Her temper was spent and all that remained was despair. She had been left to die. Left to expire in the worst way by a woman she had believed was nothing more than downtrodden and needy. That Mary could have hated her this much had come as a cold and brutal shock. That she had been held responsible for the suicide of Jamie was an idea that weighed heavily on her soul. Mary thought Maura hadn’t cared. She had cared, deeply, she’d just been sick herself. Like Jamie, she’d also been sick of herself.
Trapped in a room, five floors up in an empty building, Maura was beyond trying to make sense of it. She had gone over and over it, from her arrival at the Grange and that moment of dread at the sight of the place, to the moment it had lured her back and she had heard that familiar voice. She had even gone over that split second before the blow, when she had thought she was safe. She had never been safe at the Grange.
Ridiculous to think she was safe with the lumpen, middle-aged woman with the careworn frown and the silvered scar. She had not been safe, none of them had ever been safe – even Mary. That house wanted them all.
All she was left with was the pain in her throbbing hands and the burn of thirst in her throat. The room had shrunk around her. The grey fuzz of light and the long shadows were pressing in, clinging and cloying and sucking at her will to live, feeding off it and growing fat on her despair. This was it – she was going to die. She was already in the company of the dead and would be just as unmourned and unmissed. She’d always known it was going to be like this; she’d just thought it would be in her own bed when she was old. She felt old. Having the life drawn out of you in a place like this made you old; it withered you from the inside.
In the fur-grey bowels of the stinking bedroom Maura gave up, lay down on the floor and waited for the grey to turn to black and the black to turn to nothing.
Eli Jones and Luke Felton had been watching the old bat come and go for days. There had been lean pickings in the other flats, nothing but empty cans and dirty needles left behind. But Luke was convinced they’d find better stuff in Mad Mary’s. If Eli was honest he was a bit scared of Scarface and her bat-shit crazy son, but it didn’t wash to admit that kind of shit to Luke. The old hag was the last to leave, the last to move out, and that in itself was weird – who the fuck wanted to hang around in that shithole longer than they had to? Everyone else had shipped out weeks ago. It had been kind of fun watching the guy from the council repeatedly knock on the door and try to talk to her through the letterbox. Much good it had done him. Mad Mary never spoke to anyone she didn’t want to.
But she’d done something really strange that day. She’d dropped the flat keys down a drain and walked away. Luke had tried to get into the flat loads of times when she was out, Eli playing lookout on the landing, but he’d never managed it – much to Eli’s relief. Coming face to face with the son was not high on his agenda of fun encounters.
Luke was adamant he’d not seen anything decent come out of the flat, like a telly or computer – there had been nothing but a few carrier bags she’d hung on the handles of her bike. Luke said it stood to reason there must be decent stuff still inside. Besides, it would be like a rite of passage getting in there and getting out in one piece.
It had taken Luke an hour with a bent coat hanger and stiff arm to hook the keys out of the sludge, but once he’d got them he’d been determined to use them.
Eli knew he’d run out of excuses. If he didn’t go in there and prove himself, Luke was going to tell everyone he was a complete twat. He’d be hung out to dry among their mates. ‘What about the nut job?’ he’d said.
Luke had called him a pussy.
Pussy or not, Eli hadn’t been the one who’d gagged on the smell. He had been the one who’d spotted the handbag sitting on the living-room floor in among the stinking shit.
He’d also been the one who’d heard the banging and shouting and had almost crapped himself.
Luke had been the one who lit the fire and yelled “leg it” and Eli hadn’t needed much prompting. They’d run like twats, emptied the handbag of money, taken the mobile phone and dumped everything else on the allotments. Luke had said £35 and a decent smartphone wasn’t a bad haul. He knew someone who could unlock and clean the phone and it would be worth a few quid to someone. Eli had been chuffed too, but he couldn’t get the thought of all that banging out of his mind. It was hard to have a conscience when Luke Felton was your best mate, though.
Anyway, the flat wouldn’t burn. They never did for long – too bloody damp and full of asbestos. The stupid thing was he’d had to go back and see. Nicking stuff was one thing, killing people was another. There hadn’t been any banging or shouting when he’d gone back in, just a big black smouldering patch of shitty carpet. Eli had pissed on it for good measure, shut the door behind him and dropped the keys back exactly where they’d found them. Whoever was in that flat was Mad Mary’s problem, not his. That’s what he told himself anyway, until his conscience start to prick him in the middle of the night.
At ten to five Derek Alton checked his watch, shook his head and figured he’d better get home for his tea before the wife fed it to the cat, or the bin – the missus wasn’t fussy when she was on one. He carefully locked his shed with the hefty padlock that had been designed and bought to keep the local scrotes out. Derek valued his gardening tools, but he valued his secret stash of homemade parsnip wine more. This year’s was a good batch and he’d be damned if he wanted it thrown down the necks of the local “yoof” without a second thought. With a sigh he surveyed his allotment. It was a good job half the kids in the area were averse to veg, otherwise that would have been scavenged too. It had been vandalised often enough. Still, the allotment was an escape if nothing else and he got to have a bit of a tipple without the wife being any the wiser. Small mercies were worth a bit of gratitude in Derek’s mind.
He spotted the purse first, open, empty of money and nestling among the carrot fronds. The bag had been thrown on his rhubarb, crushing the tender stems and pissing him off no end. He grabbed it up, a scowl creasing his face, which softened into a look of puzzlement as a feather fell out. Long, dark and inky blue-black in the afternoon light. There were three more inside, along with keys, receipts and the usual junk women carried. What was the obsession with lip balm? His wife always carried a ton of the stuff. Like she was going to be kissing anybody – she’d certainly rationed her affections with him. Derek shrugged, put the feather in the bag with the purse, and decided to drop it into the police station on his way home. Some poor cow would be glad to have it back, even if she had lost her valuables to the local shitbags. He hoped they hadn’t mugged her, that they hadn’t progressed to that, but you just never knew what people were capable of these days – what with murders on the doorstep and more of them on the news every night. It didn’t bear thinking about. But neither did the wrath of his wife or the prospect of yet another dried-up, reheated meal.