When the lid came open, Cooper winced at the smell that rose towards him. Something wrapped in a Somerfield’s supermarket carrier bag rolled around in the bottom as he tipped the kin. Half an inch of dark liquid moved with it, gathering into a corner and revealing all sorts of dried debris stuck to the bottom. Cooper looked back at the house, wondering whether to call Fry down from upstairs. But instead he removed his woollen gloves and put them in his right pocket. From the left, he took a packet which contained a different pair of gloves. Latex and sterile. With a stretch, he managed to reach down into the whcelie bin and hooked a couple of ringers through the handles of the carrier bag. The handles had been tied together to seal the bag, tightly enough for it to take him more than a few seconds to get them open.
Despite the smell, he was smiling by the time he could sec what was inside the bag.
Cooper re-entered the house and went upstairs to rind Uianc Fry. There was only one bedroom and a bathroom on the first floor. Although Marie had a double bed, there were pillows on only one side.
‘Anything?’ said Frv.
y 6 y
‘A few days ago, Marie Tennent roasted a leg of lamb, but never ate any of it,’ he said. ‘I’d say she left it in the fridge until it started going off, then chucked it in the bin. It could mean something/
‘Like what?’ said Fry.
‘You don’t normally cook an entire leg of lamb for yourself when you live on your own. Or so I imagine.
‘Right. You think she might have been expecting a visitor who never came?’
‘It seems the bins are emptied here on a Monday normally. The collections were out of routine at the New Year, but they should have been back to normal this week. The lamb was the only thing in the bin. That means she threw it out after the binmen came on Monday at the earliest/
139
‘How on earth have you found out when the binmcn come?’
‘They left a note.’
Cooper stood on the tiny landing, watching Fry move around the bedroom. He felt a slight draught, and looked up.
‘There’s a trap door over the landing,’ he said. ‘There must be a loft.’
‘Can you reach it with this chair?’
Cooper managed to get the trap door open by standing on the chair. Fry handed him a small torch, and he was able to heave himself up on his elbows enough to sec that the loft was tiny —
&
barely more than a crawl space beneath the rafters, with a layer of ancient insulation nibbled into holes by burrowing mice. He shone the torch into all the corners. Nothing.
o
He climbed down and took the chair back into the bedroom. Fry had just pulled out a picture that had been stored under the bed. It was wrapped in an old sheet and covered in dust.
‘There’s no babv in this house anyway,’ she said.
‘Thank God for that. Now all we need to do is find out who she left it with.’
‘Yeah.’
Cooper watched her unwrap the picture she had found.
‘It’s a print of Chatsworth House,’ he said, recognizing the distant view over parkland to a vast, white Palladian facade. It was the home of the Duke of Devonshire and one of the area’s biggest tourist attractions.
‘Very picturesque. But she obviously didn’t like it.’
Cooper took it and turned it over. ‘It was bought at the souvenir shop at Chatsworth itself,’ he said.
‘Not recently, though, by the looks of it.’
‘No, but I wonder if she bought it herself, or whether it was a gift. Chatsworth is only a few miles away. She might have been there for a day out.’
‘Ah. With the anonymous boyfriend, you mean.’
‘It’s the sort of thing you might buv someone as a gift, as a memento of a day together.’
‘Is it?’
‘If you were that way inclined.’
‘How much would it cost, do you think?’
140
‘A print this si/.c? It could have been thirty or forty pounds, I suppose.’
‘We can soon check.’
‘Interesting,’ said Cooper. ‘Apart from the usual household items, that print must be one of her most valuable possessions.’
The wardrobe had mostly trousers and jeans, sweaters and long skirts. A pair of child’s sandals was in the bottom, but they surely wouldn’t have fitted Marie’s baby for a couple of years vet. A black evening dress was still on a hanger from the dry cleaners.
‘Bathroom?’ said Cooper.
The bathroom cabinet contained toothbrush and toothpaste, floss, mouthwash, a bottle of migraine tablets and a foil sheet of contraceptive pills, with half the blisters still full.
‘The pills are an old prescription,’ said Fry. ‘Well past their use-by date.’
‘More than nine months past?’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s her own baby she was looking after.’
