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Much in the way that she needed to squint at Frances through the billowing smoke. She was prodding the fire with the end of a garden hoe, her eyes glinting and flickering with reflected flames, making her look like a reject from the legions of hell. The fire had brought out a demonic glee that made Rachel instinctively shudder despite the heat that rolled across the neglected lawn.
‘Right, that’s going nicely,’ Frances called. ‘Stephen, you come with me and we’ll tackle the outbuildings and, Sidney, you can go with Rachel and make sure there’s nothing of value left inside.’
A brief flicker of panic crossed Steve’s face as he looked at Sid. Sid had quietly confided to Rachel that both men had fallen foul of Frances’s imperious temper over the past few days and it was considered the short straw if one of them had to work alongside her. ‘Come on, chop chop!’ she shouted, clapping her hands as if Steve was a refractory Pekingese.
Rachel watched them go. ‘I suppose we’d better follow orders,’ she said to Sid, preparing herself to go back into the near-naked house.
Free of its clutter, the house was even more cavernous than she remembered, all its strident objections to old age and infirmity amplified by the lack of furnishings. With nothing to soak up the sound and attract the eye, it looked bare and ashamed of itself. Rachel almost felt sorry for it. Nobody loved it, and she couldn’t remember anybody ever having been happy there. As a home its heart had been hollowed out by acrimony and now it was being finished off by arch indifference.
She and Sid ascended the stairs, the bare treads creaking in protest now that they had been stripped of carpet. They checked the bedrooms, finding them damp and empty, until they entered Valerie’s room.
Their mother’s room had always been sacrosanct, an oasis of calm and solitude that Valerie had often retreated to – usually complaining of a headache and clutching a medicinal bottle of sherry. Rachel couldn’t recall ever having been allowed inside, and it surprised her that she’d never thought it strange before that moment.
Now only a few black sacks stood against the wall ready for Sid’s next run to the tip. This first and final ingress into her mother’s secret chamber – the room that had been the inner sanctum, the room that had been the container of Valerie’s personal misery – was a frank disappointment for Rachel.
As a child, she had often spied by squinting through the keyhole like a woebegone urchin, imagining that beyond the locked door lay another realm. The wardrobe in the corner might have been the entrance to another dimension, where Valerie existed differently and found the peace she had so often demanded before shutting the door against the needs of her family. Although, in Rachel’s imagination the White Witch had always had much more of a resemblance to Valerie than had been entirely comfortable. Stella’s books had stirred some lonely and uncomfortable memories.
Though Valerie’s presence still echoed in the hollow room, Rachel could not for the life of her imagine what peace of mind her mother had ever found from lying on the bed staring drunkenly at the blowsy roses scrambling across the wallpaper beneath the dust and cobwebs. Those keyhole-shaped memories had suggested something exotically different from the chilly, mildewed reality she now faced.
The only piece of furniture not yet consigned to the tip, or dispatched to be consumed by the flames of Frances’s blaze, was the wardrobe.
Rachel walked over to it and touched its mirrored door, which opened with an ominous creak. She gave it a wry smile, unsurprised that it wasn’t filled with fur coats and melting snow after all.
‘She said I could have that,’ Sid said, apparently afraid that Rachel might condemn it to the fire. ‘I was saving it for when we finished. That way I can put it on the van and take it straight home.’
The faintest aroma of mothballs belched out as she shut the door. ‘I’ll lock it so it’ll be easier to move. You should hang on to the key. They’re always better when they still have their keys.’ The door was a little warped, and she had to shove it hard to make it fit properly, promptly dislodging the prized key in the process. ‘Bugger!’ she said. The key had bounced on the bare floorboards and hidden itself underneath the wardrobe. On hands and knees, Rachel peered into the murky spider graveyard that lay beneath. ‘I can’t see it. We’ll have to pull the bloody thing out.’
Sid obliged, and together they coaxed it into a reluctant slide across the wooden boards. As Rachel bent to retrieve the key, something prodded at the edges of her awareness. ‘I didn’t know that was there,’ she murmured, standing up and looking at a door that had been hidden from view.
‘Built-in cupboard,’ Sid pronounced knowledgably. ‘What d’you need a wardrobe for if there’s a built-in cupboard?’
Rachel shrugged. ‘More junk for you to get rid of I expect,’ she said, prising open the cupboard door and cringing as the hinges squealed in protest.
The cupboard was surprisingly empty given the rubbish that had always cluttered the rest of the house. A faint flurry of fetid air wafted into their faces as they peered into its dark recesses. On the lone shelf, there stood a biscuit tin and on the floor stood a metal box. Rachel took down the biscuit tin and levered off the lid. Various bits of paper and old photographs nestled there – mostly showing Frances as a young child. The papers proved to be old school reports, all describing Frances’s attributes in glowing terms.
Rachel couldn’t recall Valerie keeping a record of either her or Stella’s school records – though Frances probably would have burnt them if she had. As Rachel rifled through, it occurred to her that she had never seen a photograph of herself as a child anywhere in the house. Probably because there weren’t any to see.
Under the photographs was a small red book: the type that had a tiny lock. She took it and the photographs and stuffed them into her back pocket. Maybe Frances would want them, maybe not. The rest she put back in the tin and threw the whole thing into one of the black sacks that flanked the room.
Sid grabbed the metal box. ‘Bloody hell, this is heavy. Hey, perhaps we’ve found the family jewels!’ he quipped.
Rachel responded with a sardonic smile. The box was little bigger than a bread bin but looked like it weighed a ton. Sid placed it at Rachel’s feet, grunting with the effort.
‘Want to do the honours?’ he asked.
She shook her head, watching as Sid attempted to release the lid. Though the metal had been galvanised, some substance had affected it, causing rust to scab the edges and eat into the structure. Sid took out a Swiss Army knife and used the screwdriver bit as a lever, giving a satisfied grunt as the orange crust gave way. He lifted the lid, revealing the contents. ‘It’s full of sand,’ he said, puzzled.
‘Sand?’
‘Hang on, there’s something poking out of it.’ He tugged, dislodging a torrent of dry, gritty matter as the object shifted.
It was some kind of parcel, wrapped in dirty cloth. Sid unwound the material, causing more sand and grit to fall and litter the floor as each layer of fabric came away and disintegrated in his hands.
‘What is it?’ Rachel asked, peering over his shoulder at what appeared to be some type of shrivelled, leathery doll.
Sid didn’t speak. His skin had turned a ghastly shade of grey and all Rachel could see as she peered at his stricken face was his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a fishing float as he fought for the words to describe the thing that was now lying on the floor.
***
Frances’s scream was so piercing it rattled the glass in the rotten window frames, buffeting Rachel’s eardrums and snapping Sid out of his shocked stupor as effectively as if it had taken tangible form and slapped him in the face.
Once the sound receded, everything became horribly quiet as if there had been a sudden solar eclipse and the birds had stopped singing in deference to the dark. Time became elastic as seconds extended themselves into blurry, suspended pockets of disbelieving minutes.
Sid’s mobile phone began to ring, the tinny, incongruent tones of ‘My Way’ shattering the silence and stirring him into action. When he finally answered the thing after fumbling for it in every pocket, Rachel could hear Steve’s high-pitched voice. With escalating panic, he told Sid about the scene outside. Rachel doubted that Steve had ever uttered so many words in one hit before. Which was probably why he sounded confused.
She could have sworn she heard him say that they’d found a dead body in the shed.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_f7639ce8-2610-5cc5-8932-70d6769d2c2a)
Rachel didn’t know who to deal with first: the paramedics who had arrived by speeding up the drive, sirens blaring, or the police who were wandering around shouting things into their radios and telling everyone what to do.
Sid still didn’t look a good colour and was being tended to by a pretty detective constable, who had given him a blanket and a cup of tea. Steve wasn’t faring much better. He was standing in the middle of the melee staring at his bloodstained hands like a confused Lady Macbeth. Frances was out cold and was being loaded into the back of an ambulance and all Rachel felt able to do was watch the barely credible scene unfold.
Steve was trying to explain that Frances had taken one look at the contents of the trunk in the shed, had staggered backwards, tripped over a black bag, fallen backwards, and bashed her head with a sickening thud on the edge of the door. Only when he’d dragged her out and put her in the recovery position had he realised that the blood on his hands was coming from a patch of her exposed skull. He had finally lost the plot when he had spotted a piece of hairy scalp dangling neatly from the latch of the shed door. At that point, he had regurgitated his lunch all over Frances’s cashmere sweater.
Incongruously, all Rachel could think of was that it was a good thing Frances had been unconscious at the time; she could be a bit obsessive about things like that.
Apparently spotting Rachel’s bemused demeanour, the DC left Sid and gently led her into the kitchen. ‘You’ve had a bit of a shock, love. Let’s get you a cup of tea,’ she said, her voice soft as she took Rachel’s trembling hand. Rachel never drank tea, but accepted a cup anyway, and sat there in the tired kitchen staring into the tea’s murky depths as if scrying for an improved view of her world.
***
The last time DC Angie Watson had set foot in a house like this had been ten years before when her history teacher had dragged a group of them around some National Trust pile. Angie had found the whole thing so stultifying that she couldn’t even remember the name of the place now, but she did remember that it had been a lot like this, only bigger and much, much cleaner.
The only nod towards the twentieth century in The Limes was the kettle she had used to make the tea. Everything else in the room was straight out of a museum. Angie’s taste in kitchens and furniture leaned more towards IKEA than Antiques Roadshow and she looked around the room with barely disguised distaste. No wonder these people always appeared to have money – by the looks of it they never bloody spent any.
She had recently taken out a ten grand bank loan and had used every penny of it to have a new kitchen put in, and if the look of this one was anything to go by, it would be money well spent. There was no way that she would ever stand at an old stone sink doing the washing up and dumping it on a wooden draining board, not when some genius had invented the dishwasher.
Finished with critiquing the kitchen, she turned her attention to the woman at the table, who was trying to read her own tea leaves without realising she had to drink the stuff first. Other than giving her name as Rachel Porter and her date of birth, she hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived and had just stood there, staring at everyone as if she was a bit vacant.
When they’d got the call Angie hadn’t expected to find herself babysitting a spaced-out, scruffy forty-year-old woman who didn’t know what to do with a cup of tea other than stare at it. It was hardly the cutting edge of crime fighting and for her first foray as a fully-fledged DC she found herself frankly disappointed. This case had all the flavour of Murder, She Wrote rather than Criminal Minds. Not quite what Angie had had in mind when she’d joined the team.
God, she hoped she didn’t end up looking like Rachel Porter by the time she was forty: no make-up, shapeless clothes, and hair that hadn’t seen the good edge of a pair of scissors for God knows how long. It was a nice colour though – brown, the shade of conkers. Those split ends needed to go, she thought, absently running a hand through her own straightened and highlighted hair. She might get the shit jobs, but at least she could look smart while she did them.
Rachel was skinny, as if she hadn’t had a decent meal in years, which always made women look haggard and drawn in Angie’s opinion. This observation made her feel better about her own propensity to gain weight by merely thinking about food. It might at least save her from looking a wreck in years to come. Christ, that was a shallow thought – she was on a case and thinking about the size of her arse in comparison to another woman’s. She straightened up and tried to look professional.
She supposed that she ought to try to get Rachel talking, but considering that Ratcliffe would be in here any minute, there didn’t seem a lot of point. Might as well leave it to the boss to sort out. It was hardly as if she was going to crack the case in five minutes flat. Besides, looking at the state of Rachel Porter, the only thing she looked like she was capable of murdering was a good meal.
As if on cue, DS Ratcliffe strode into the kitchen and sat down on a kitchen chair. Angie pretended not to notice his blush as the chair groaned under his weight. He was well built, her boss. He smiled at Rachel and introduced himself. ‘Miss Porter, I’m Detective Sergeant Mike Ratcliffe. Would you like a fresh one of those?’ He looked hopefully at Angie whilst nodding towards the kettle.
Rachel shook her head. ‘It’s gone cold.’
‘I know. Would you like another?’ To his obvious disappointment, she shook her head again. He sighed as Angie set the kettle down and shot him a smug look. ‘Your sister should be fine. We’ve contacted her husband and he’ll meet her at the hospital. I’m sorry you weren’t able to go with her, but we do need you to answer some questions.’
Rachel nodded at him then turned her gaze back to her tea. If Angie didn’t know better, she’d have sworn the woman was stoned.
‘Do you know how we can contact your other sister, Stella?’
Rachel shrugged. ‘She’s gone. She should be here; Stella’s always been here.’
‘When was the last time you saw her?’
‘October nineteenth 1996.’
‘That’s both very precise and a very long time ago. I’m told that your mother recently died. Did you see your sister at the funeral?’
‘No, I haven’t seen either of them since ’96. I didn’t go to the funeral.’
‘Why not?’
Rachel showed surprise at the boldness of his question. ‘We had a row; I was excommunicated from the family. It happens. I don’t even know what I’m doing here now to be honest. I should have stuck to my guns and stayed away.’
‘Why are you here now?’ Ratcliffe asked. Angie thought it odd and a little mercenary to ignore the funeral but turn up to pick over the family bones. It was more than obvious they’d been clearing the house. Maybe this would turn out to be more interesting than she’d first thought.
‘Frances asked me to help sort out the house. I wanted to see it again, see if it was as awful as I remembered.’ She paused and looked around. ‘It is.’
Angie had to agree with that. The house was oppressive and gloomy, not exactly a place anyone would want to call home.
Ratcliffe wanted to know why they had all fallen out.
‘Money. Always money isn’t it? My aunt died – she left me her flat and some money. My mother and Frances thought I should share and share alike. I didn’t want to, so we fell out.’
Her answer had been too trite, too neat for Angie’s liking. She hoped her boss would pursue it. ‘What about Stella? What did she think?’ Ratcliffe asked.
‘I can’t recall her being given the chance to say what she thought,’ Rachel replied. ‘Does any of this have anything to do with the fact that dead bodies seem to be popping up all over the place?’
Ratcliffe leaned back in the chair. Angie heard it moan again as the weak joints adjusted to the shift in weight. She could see him thinking and wondered if he shared her thoughts. Her guess would be that Rachel had been a kid when someone had murdered an adult and a baby, covered them in sand, and hidden them away. Still, that didn’t quite explain Rachel’s flippant and detached response to the situation. ‘Yes, about that,’ Ratcliffe said, tapping the table with the tips of his fingers. ‘The bodies. Do you know who they are?’
Rachel wasn’t looking too good; her face was ashen and a slick of sweat was making her forehead shine like oiled alabaster. Angie watched with mounting concern as the frail woman put her head in her hands and said, ‘I don’t know,’ in a voice that was almost slurring. It looked as if she was physically trying to swallow down the distress and confusion of what was happening. Angie had never seen someone turn so grey so quickly. Without warning, Rachel’s eyes rolled back and she slid off the chair onto the floor where she began to jerk and twitch like a thing possessed.
No one had been expecting that.
‘Get Ferris in here now!’ Ratcliffe yelled. A sound that sent Angie scurrying for the door.
Angie knew Julia Ferris as a woman more accustomed to dealing with dead bodies than live ones at that stage of her medical career, but she was still a doctor and immediately recognised that Rachel was having an epileptic seizure.
‘She’s having a seizure,’ she said with her usual cool detachment. ‘Given that she’s wearing a MedicAlert bracelet, I suspect she suffers from epilepsy.’
‘Aren’t you going to do anything?’ Angie asked, worried that they’d be sued for negligence if Rachel was injured. They already had one damaged Porter sister on their hands.
‘Other than move that chair so she doesn’t smash her face on it, no. She’ll be out of it in a minute or two. Just let her settle and give her some water. She’ll probably be a bit sleepy too, so let her rest if she needs to. You can check with her whether she carries medication and has taken any today. Now, does anybody mind if I get back to the dead guys now?’ Ferris said peevishly. Angie knew she would have to get garbed up in another paper suit to go back to the crime scenes, and she’d have been pissed off too in Ferris’s shoes.
Angie was a little shocked by the doctor’s nonchalance but Ratcliffe just appeared relieved that Rachel wasn’t having a stroke or a heart attack. So far, they had two dead bodies, one witness in hospital, a potential suspect (who was fuck knows where), and a second witness who was writhing on the floor like a demented snake.
Just as Angie’s anxiety was beginning to rise again, the rigors torturing Rachel’s thin body started to lessen and slowly she stopped jerking and grew progressively limp. ‘Get her some water will you?’ Ratcliffe asked as he bent down to help Rachel sit up. ‘You had me worried for a minute or two,’ he said, helping her into a sitting position. Angie watched as Rachel fought to compose herself, shame spreading across her features in the same way that urine had spread across her trousers during the fit. Angie couldn’t help but feel for the woman.
Rachel took the water and drank it down quickly. ‘Sorry, that one seemed to come out of nowhere,’ she said. ‘Haven’t had a fit in ages.’
‘Are you OK? Do you need anything? Can I get your medication?’ Angie asked, her heart rate only just beginning to settle back to its normal pace after the drama. She passed Rachel the blanket that had slipped off when she fell, hoping to at least help her preserve some dignity in front of Ratcliffe. She might have encouraged the poor woman to go and change, but the house was practically empty and it was clear there weren’t any clean clothes lying around. Angie watched as Rachel wrapped the blanket around herself.
‘More water please – took my dose this morning,’ she said, still looking disorientated. Having drunk the second glass straight down, she explained that she suffered from epilepsy and had since she was a child. Though usually well controlled, the fits could be brought on by stress. ‘I think you would agree that my day has been stressful,’ she said to them both with a feeble laugh.
‘Just a bit. Look, if you need to take a break we can pick this up later,’ Ratcliffe said, genuine concern showing on his face.
‘No, I’m fine. I’ll be fine,’ she insisted. ‘I want to get this over with as soon as possible and get back to my room please.’
Ratcliffe looked as doubtful about that as Angie felt, but decided to press on. He helped Rachel back onto the chair and motioned to Angie to put the kettle on. ‘When your sister saw what was in the trunk in the shed, she called out before she fell. The young man out there said that she called out the name “Roy”. Does that mean anything to you?’
Kettle in hand, Angie watched as Rachel blinked at him for a moment whilst she absorbed his words.
‘Roy? Roy was Stella’s husband. Are you saying that’s him in the shed?’ she asked, screwing her eyes up in an attitude of dazed disbelief. ‘Roy walked out on Stella thirty years ago, just upped and left, said he was going out to buy cigarettes and never came back. It can’t be him.’ She screwed her face up in what might be disbelief. With the state of her it was hard to tell. ‘I’m sorry, but I think I’m having another one,’ she mumbled before she went down again.
***
It was no good. By the time Rachel came out of the second fit, she was so exhausted they would have been hard pressed to get her name out of her in any sensible form. The only reasonable thing they could do was get someone to drive her to the hotel she was staying at and call it a day.
The only useful information they’d gained from the whole interview was gleaned from Rachel’s parting words as she walked wearily out of the door. ‘By the way, if the body in the shed has a gold tooth, a canine, then it is Roy.’
***
Julia Ferris was in the yard discussing the logistics of moving the trunk complete with sand and body with the Crime Scene guys when Ratcliffe and Angie approached her. ‘Does our victim have a gold tooth?’ he asked.
‘Yeah, a canine – why?’
‘’Cos I think I know who he is, and given that his wife is missing, I think I can make a conservative guess at who killed him. The deceased may well be one Roy Baxter, husband of the eldest Porter girl.’
‘Stella,’ Angie added for clarity.
Ferris frowned. ‘Doesn’t mean she killed him, if it is him, which I admit is likely but we don’t actually know yet. What about the baby? Any ideas?’
‘Not a clue, yet. Anyway, what’s with the sand? I don’t get it.’
Ferris stripped off the latex gloves she had been wearing and wiped a powdery hand across her forehead. ‘Whoever did this to them attempted a rudimentary form of mummification by the looks of it. It’s sharp sand, the kind builders use, so it contains salt. Salt absorbs the moisture that bodies release as they decompose. It’s also a good preservative. Whoever did this didn’t do a bad job – the bodies are in pretty good nick.’
Angie suppressed a shudder. ‘But why mummify them? Why not just dig a hole and bury them?’
Ferris shrugged. ‘Could be anything: keeping them as trophies à la serial killer maybe, or couldn’t be bothered to dig the hole. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to tip sand in a box than it is to dig a grave deep enough to bury a body without risking being seen – or the body being dug up by a curious dog or an overenthusiastic gardener. Dunno – you tell me? There’s one thing: mummified bodies don’t smell so bad. It’s why they don’t decay. They don’t attract flies and bugs and so don’t betray their presence so easily.’
Ratcliffe nodded thoughtfully. ‘Gruesome though, implies a lot of thought. How long do you think they’ve been there?’
