Elder nodded. Gerry Saxon was a sergeant based in the town, Mansfield born and bred. The two of them had crossed paths before, swapped yarns and the occasional pint; stood once at the Town ground, side by side, as sleet swept near horizontally goalwards, grim in the face of a nil-nil draw with Chesterfield. Elder thought Saxon thorough, bigoted, not as slow-witted as he would have you believe.
‘Where’s the mother?’ Elder asked.
Lorna Atkin was jammed between the dressing table and the wall, as if she had been trying to burrow away from the pain. One slash of a blade had sliced deep across her back, opening her from shoulder to hip. Her nightdress, once white, was matted here and there to her body with stiffening blood. Her throat had been cut.
The police surgeon…?’
‘Downstairs,’ Saxon said. ‘Few preliminaries, nothing more. Didn’t like to move her till your say-so.’
Elder nodded again. So much anger: so much hate. He looked from the bed to the door, at the collision of bottles and jars across the dressing-table top, the trajectory of blood along the walls. As if she had made a dash for it and been dragged back, attacked. Trying to protect her children or herself?
‘The weapon?’
‘Kitchen knife. Least that’s what I reckon. Downstairs in the sink.’
‘Washed clean?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice.’
There were footsteps on the landing outside and then Maureen Prior’s face in the doorway, eyes widening as she took in the scene; one slow intake of breath and she stepped into the room.
‘Gerry, you know DS Prior. Maureen, Gerry Saxon.’
‘Good to see you again, Gerry.’ She scarcely took her eyes from the body. The corpse.
‘Maureen, check with Scene of Crime. Make sure they’ve documented everything we might need. Let’s tie that up before we let the surgeon get to work. You’ll liaise with Gerry here about interviewing the neighbours, house to house.’
‘Right.’
‘You’ll want to see the garage next,’ Saxon said.
There were two entrances, one from the utility room alongside the kitchen, the other from the drive. Despite the latter being open, the residue of carbon monoxide had yet to fully clear. Paul Atkin slumped forward over the driver’s wheel, one eye fast against the windscreen’s curve, his skin sacking grey.
Elder walked twice slowly around the car and went out to where Saxon stood in the rear garden, smoking a cigarette.
‘Any sign of a note?’
Saxon shook his head.
‘A note would have been nice. Neat at least.’
‘Only tell you what you know already.’
‘What’s that then, Gerry?’
‘Bastard topped his family, then himself. Obvious.’
‘But why?’
Saxon laughed. ‘That’s what you clever bastards are going to find out.’ He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last and as he did Elder noticed Saxon’s hands had a decided shake. Probably the night air was colder than he’d thought.
There was no note that came to hand, but something else instead. Traced with Atkin’s finger on the inside of the misting glass and captured there by Scene of Crime, the first wavering letters of a name — ‘CONN’ and then what might have been an ‘I’ trailing weakly down towards the window’s edge.
Mid-afternoon the following day, Elder was driving with Maureen Prior out towards the small industrial estate where Atkin had worked, head of sales for Pleasure Blinds. Prefabricated units that had still to lose their shine, neat beds of flowering shrubs, no sign of smoke in sight. Sherwood Business Park.
If someone married’s going over the side, chances are it’s with someone from where they work. One of Frank Elder’s rules of thumb, rarely disproved.
Some few years back, close to ten it would be now, his wife Joanne had an affair with her boss. Six months it had gone on, no more, before Elder had found out. The reasons not so very difficult to see. They had just arrived in London, uprooted themselves, and Joanne was high on the speed of it, the noise, the buzz. Since having Katherine, she and Elder had made love less and less; she felt unattractive, oddly sexless, over the hill at thirty-three. And then there had been Martyn Miles, all flash and if not Armani, Hugo Boss; drinks in the penthouse bar of this hotel or that, meals at Bertorelli’s or Quo Vadis.
Elder had his fifteen minutes of crazy, smashed a few things around the house, confronted Miles outside the mews apartment where he lived and restrained himself from punching his smug and sneering face more than just the once.
Together, he and Joanne had talked it through, worked it out; she had carried on at the salon. ‘I need to see him every day and know I don’t want him any more. Not turn my back and never know for sure.’
Elder had told Maureen all of this one day: one night, actually; a long drive down the motorway from Fife, the road surface slick with rain, headlights flicking by. She had listened and said very little, a couple of comments only. Maureen with a core of moral judgement clear and unyielding as the Taliban. Neither of them had ever referred to it again.
Elder slowed the car and turned through the gates of the estate; Pleasure Blinds was the fourth building on the right.
‘Constance Seymour’ read the sign on the door. ‘Personnel’.
As soon as she saw them, her face crumpled inwards like a paper bag. Spectacles slipped, lopsided, down on to the desk. Maureen fished a Kleenex from her bag; Elder fetched water from the cooler in a cone-shaped cup. Connie blew her nose, dabbed at her eyes. She was somewhere in her thirties, Elder thought, what might once have been called homely, plain. Sloped shoulders, buttoned blouse, court shoes. Elder could imagine her with her mother, in town Saturdays shopping arm in arm, the two of them increasingly alike.
The eyes that looked at him now were tinged with violet, palest blue. She would have listened to Atkin like that, intense and sympathetic, pained. Whose hand would have reached out first, who would first have comforted whom?
Maureen came to the end of her expressions of condolence, regret.
‘You were having an affair with him,’ she said. ‘Paul Atkin. A relationship.’
Connie sniffed and said yes.
‘And this relationship, how long…’
‘A year. More. Thirteen months.’
‘It was serious, then?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Her expression slightly puzzled, somewhat hurt. What else could it have been?
‘Mr Atkin, was there… was there any suggestion that he might leave his wife?’
‘Oh, no. No. The children, you see. He loved the children more than anything.’
Maureen glanced across, remembering the faces, the pillow, the bed. Killed with kindness: the proverb eddied up in Elder’s mind.
‘Have you any idea why he might want to harm them?’ Elder asked.
‘No,’ she gasped, moments ahead of the wash of tears. ‘Unless… unless…’
Joanne was in the living room, feet tucked beneath her, watching TV. Katherine was staying overnight at a friend’s. On screen, a bevy of smartly dressed and foul-mouthed young things were dissecting the sex lives of their friends. A laughter track gave hints which Joanne, for the most part, ignored.
‘Any good?’ Elder asked.
‘Crap.’
‘I’m just going out for a stroll.’
‘Okay.’
‘Shan’t be long.’
Glancing towards the door, Joanne smiled and puckered her lips into the shape of a kiss.
