Her most urgent port of call was the Cedars, where amid the busyness of a morning’s routine Rachel Sowton seemed more detached than usual. Had Cori not heard from the station of what had happened here last night, she may have put the Duty Manager’s mood down to recent events catching up with her, maybe even a touch of shock. Even so such disconnectedness was a bad sign, the starting point for all manner of coping strategies that would lead her only to further isolation: drinking, prescription drugs, pessimistic thoughts.
‘Sergeant,’ the woman looked up from the duties she was performing automatically. ‘You’ve news on Derek?’ (She had already been told of the fracas at the Mars house.)
‘Sorry, no. I haven’t been back to the station. He’ll be at the hospital by now.’
‘Yes, I must call them.’
‘Look, do you have five minutes?’
At the top of the stairs, Rachel flicked the switch light as requested. Cori walked along the windowed corridor she had only seen in daylight, looking up to the bulbs above her head, their glow barely visible in the morning sun. Outside the first flat she came to and then outside Stella’s each bulb glowed like a golden chrysalis, throbbing in her light-adjusted eye and leaving coloured splodges; but outside the third flat, the one guarded by foliage, the bulb was a lifeless iris, dust-peppered and silver-grey.
‘Did you know this end bulb was out?’ called Cori.
‘It has been for months, but then there’s been no reason to change it.’
‘Thank you for your help. You can switch them off now.’
‘I’ll go and make that call.’
Only Stella and one other tenant had used this stretch of corridor in recent months, Cori realised as she stood there alone, and so would have grown used to the odd sight of creepers and leaves casting shadows across that far end at night. She walked into the botanical zone, brushing greenery aside and being careful not to tread on a frond or the long thin creepers that came off the cheeseplants.
For no good reason she tried again the flat door there that she knew to be locked, and looked through the frosted glass to see the interior that she couldn’t quite make out. She turned back to face along the corridor, her view half obscured, and thought of what it might be like here at night. She realised that someone with the required patience could have stayed half-hid here for hours, Stella and the other tenant probably not even casting a glance this way to catch a shadowed face in the moonlight.
Standing there Cori shivered, feeling something running through her as she inhabited the space that she now guessed had been occupied on Monday night by the killer. Not moving her feet, she looked down and all around for any sign, a clue, confirmation that Esther had not been imagining things. As she stood there the stem of a leaf brushed the back of her left hand, and without thinking she took it, her fingers running up and down its tactile fibres; unthinking, that was, until she felt a deep gouge interrupting the natural pattern. She looked at what she was holding and saw in the stem a series of deep indentations the shape of large fingernails, pushed in repeatedly and carving out little canoe-shaped gullies around which the fibres had since turned brown.
Her mind turned suddenly to Mars in interview, his gardener’s nails dirtied underneath. Still standing in the same spot, as if to move would be to lose her inspiration, she called the station and from there asked to be put through to the Coroner’s Office; and there to the doctor conducting the autopsy, who answered,
‘Ah, hello Sergeant. Your report is being written now.’ (These things were never ready as quickly as in the TV shows.)
‘Thank you, but I just needed to know one little thing. I’m not sure how to put this, but around the wound on Stella’s neck, was there anything green?’
‘Plant matter? Yes, the tiniest traces: on the bruised skin and in the cuts caused by the nails.’
God these people were good, she thought,
‘And is it possible to match that if I gave you the actual plant?’
‘Chlorophyll’s very similar plant to plant, but there might be something in the actual fibres. We can have a look for you.’
Forensics would already have checked the corridor outside Stella’s flat of course, but wouldn’t have thought of needing samples of the plants. Someone would be with her within the half-hour. Cori only had to pray Patrick Mars hadn’t scrubbed his nails in the meantime.
Chapter 25 — A Letter from Derek
It was only after both Glass and Rose were gone, after strolling through the rooms of the Mars house to gather his thoughts, that Grey remembered that the letter left by Derek Waldron was still in his pocket, he not having had a chance to open it in that morning’s rush. He tore the envelope quickly and read a well-presented hand-written letter of the sort you rarely saw any more. It began,
Inspector Rase,
Apologies first of all for drugging you. As I write at Rachel’s table you sleep soundly feet away. I trust the effects will have worn off by morning, by which time I may not be here to explain myself; hence why I write now.
I have to do it, you appreciate that. What that man has done is not for the law to have him answer to, it’s for Stella’s friend, Charlie’s friend, to put right (though I feel an unlikely avenger).
You were their friend too, their last friend, the one who got to know them best. You’ve learnt about their being on the Council (I noticed your slip just now, though Rachel didn’t pick up on it) and you also found Stella’s lost family, and the mad-headed son.
Perhaps I ought to have written “damaged” son, for isn’t that how we look at them now, criminals, murderers, as being victims themselves? Yet it doesn’t seem to help us, does it? Doesn’t bring down the crime rate, doesn’t help us reach these broken souls before they hurt our friends. But I digress…
A bit of slight of hand that earlier, if you don’t mind my saying: your asking Rachel to put up the wife of her friends’ killer; but seeing her here and your telling us she couldn’t go home confirmed my intent. You see, I quite quickly made three — I hope — fairly reasonable deductions: one, that the lady you brought here tonight was escaping a man; two, that for the Inspector himself to be worrying about her wellbeing in the middle of a murder case meant that that man was somehow involved; and three, that if she couldn’t go home then the man was still at their house.
I’m afraid what other facts I possess are gleaned through base theft and eavesdropping. You see I’ve been listening in to the radios of the men and women who’ve been posted here these recent days: to their instructions, directions, place names, road names. What can I say? I have a genuine curiosity. I heard an hour ago, standing with tonight’s Constable as I took him a drink, that there were officers at Mansard Lane. All I needed then was the house number, and that I have just found on letters and bills in Ludmila’s bag.
I found something else too: Ludmila’s surname — Mars — and from somewhere in another life I remembered it as Stella’s. This oddly seals things, confirms my deductions, and makes Stella’s killer her son? Another deduction, but he can only be. This makes my task no easier.
Not that I can go back from this point — I dread to think what crime I’ve committed doing what I have to an officer on duty. Had I not found the address in Ludmila’s bag I suppose I would be out now listening for your panda cars or watching the streets for activity; but as it is I know precisely where I must go, and so have time to try and write this properly.
And so I sit here writing this, unable to sleep but neither able to move yet: I can’t do anything until it’s light and there’re people on the pavements. I cannot say my plan will succeed, but know it won’t require much luck to do so. It will only take as long as watching for the house number, skipping up his drive, letting myself in, and getting one lucky blow before your watchers have me pinned or he gets one lucky counter-blow.
(You’ll have noticed another confession there: yes, I have Ludmila’s keys. I didn’t even need to slip her a Mickey Finn from Rachel’s cabinet, she was already spark out.)
Does he rise early, the man? I’ve no way of knowing. If not then I’ll have to rush to find him in bed before your men are upon me, not that he deserves to die in such comfort. Once he is dead then there will be a kind of closure about it all, a finality, an arc played out among the heavens and returned to earth to meet it’s concluding point. The saga of Dunbar, Prove and Mars will be over, the three of them dead, none left to kill or be killed. I may
