Chapter 10
Diane had messaged to say she would be late to work that Wednesday morning, having lost a filling.
‘She’s at the dentist. She got the first appointment, and she said she’ll be an hour or so. We’ll just have to put our shoulders to the wheel in the meantime!’ Wilma had said, although, in truth, there was seldom such a crush of customers that the three of them were run off their feet.
At that moment, in fact, there were no customers in the shop at all, and there had been none thus far that morning. It was hard to imagine exactly what wheel their shoulders should be put to.
The two women had had their morning cuppa.
Wilma was in the window, moving individual display items a few inches this way and that, frowning, and then moving them back half an inch.
Wilma had a nervous energy, even when engaged in minor tasks, and her grey-streaked blonde bob swung busily from side to side, brushing her shoulders as it moved.
Julia was going to do a tidy of the little kitchen area in the back room that doubled as a storeroom.
She was looking forward to the task. She planned to arrange the tea things more efficiently.
She had picked out a couple of glass jars with red checked tops from the shelves, thinking she might decant the tea bags and the sugar.
She would give the little fridge a wipe and clear and clean the tiny counter which somehow managed to attract random bits of clutter.
It was the sort of small, manageable task that gave her satisfaction.
‘I’ll be in the back. Just call if you need me,’ said Julia.
As she turned to go, there was the tinkle of the bell above the door. A woman came in carrying a cardboard box. It wasn’t a big box, but it was obviously heavy, judging by the way she carried it, bending slightly at the knees.
‘Let me give you a hand,’ said Julia, coming to her assistance.
‘Thank you,’ the woman puffed. Together they lifted it onto the counter.
‘Some items for the kitchen.’ She spoke with an accent, quite faint, which Julia thought might be Italian or French.
‘Kitchen items are always welcome, thank you,’ said Julia.
This was almost true. Good quality cookware was popular with purchasers, but not bits of elderly Tupperware misshapen by the microwave, of which there seemed to be an endless supply in the kitchen cupboards of Berrywick.
She opened the box to look inside and saw, at the top of the box, a cast iron frying pan, black on the inside and tomato-red on the outside.
‘Oh, that’s very nice, thank you,’ she said.
‘I’m sure someone will be thrilled with that. ’
‘It is not fresh…’ Julia presumed she meant ‘new’… ‘But it is in good condition.’
Now that Julia looked at the woman properly, she noted her stylish appearance.
She was casually dressed in jeans, but they were well cut and perfectly fitted.
Her white shirt was made of a soft, drapey cotton, and she wore a little red and white silk scarf knotted at her neck.
Her hair was cropped short, in a pixie style.
‘I will have some more items to donate soon, I think.’
The doorbell announced the arrival of Diane.
‘Here I am, thorry to leave you in the lurth,’ said Diane, thickly. ‘Injection,’ she added, prodding her lip.
When she spotted the shop’s only customer, her eyes widened in delight. ‘Jacqueline! Fancy theeing you here.’
‘But it is Diane!’ The customer leaned in and kissed the air next to each of Diane’s cheeks.
‘I would have been in touch but I only realithed thith morning that Bathil was your Bathil!’ said Diane. ‘I know you weren’t exactly… But I’m thorry. And how is poor Madeleine?’
‘Thank you. It is a bad situation. We were not good friends, Basil and me, as you know. But it is of course the father of Madeleine.’
Julia could hardly believe the coincidence. This was Jacqueline. Wife number three. Mary’s immediate predecessor. Instead of going back to the kitchen, Julia hung around the counter. She started to slowly unpack the box, trying to pass the time so that she could listen to their conversation.
She took out the cast iron pan, which looked almost new. She might actually buy it herself, she thought, turning it over. Not quite new, there was a tiny chip in the red paint, but still, a good buy.
Diane continued speaking. ‘Yeth, her father ith her father, no matter what. It’th tho thad for her.’ Diane was much more succinct than usual, on account of the injection and her numb lip.
‘Yes, it is sad, but she is a child. She will recover.’ Jacqueline seemed to be a very direct person. Some might say heartless, thought Julia. ‘I will be going now.’
‘Good to thee you.’
‘I will be back, I think. Maybe Madeleine and I will move to France now that her father is gone. I have longed for it since I was a child. I will bring you some more items in some weeks. I wanted to make a start with these ones now.’
‘That would be lovely. Thank you,’ said Wilma, who had emerged from the window area to better hear the conversation between Diane and Jacqueline. ‘Whatever you have would be most welcome, and will help a good cause.’
She waited until Jacqueline had left the shop and then came bustling over to the counter. She looked over her shoulder, as if Jacqueline might have rematerialised. Discovering that she had in fact not, Wilma put her hands on her hips and said dramatically, ‘Well!’
Diane and Julia looked at her expectantly.
‘Well, she’s a cold fish, wouldn’t you say? Her ex-husband, the father of her child, has just died – murdered! – and her response is “She is a child. She will recover”!’
‘People deal with death in different ways,’ said Diane. She was mouthing the words a little less awkwardly, and her lisp was barely noticeable. The injection was wearing off. ‘Maybe she’s being practical. And she is French, after all.’
‘She’s French? I don’t think that explains it.’
Diane tossed her long hair over her shoulder in an irritable way.
Julia envied the dramatic way the hair swished and swung, red-gold and shining.
It helped to be a redhead if you were going to make irritable head tosses.
‘Different culture. And she’s probably in shock.
And besides, they never got on, him and her. ’
‘You seem to know her quite well, Diane,’ said Julia. ‘How do you know each other?’
Diane articulated carefully, ‘Madeleine was at school with my youngest, and Jacqueline and I were class mums. I liked her. She was clever and efficient. No nonsense. That woman did not have an easy time of it. Not when they were married, and not when they divorced. Rumour had it, there was an affair. His affair. And he made the divorce very hard for her. Everything was a competition, and he was going to win. She battled to get the maintenance. I don’t remember the details, but it was ugly.
I can’t think why I didn’t realise it was her Basil sooner – except I suppose that she always used her maiden name. ’
Mary had said that Jacqueline was ‘demanding’ – could it be that she was simply demanding what was due to her and her child?
Julia was still holding the cast iron pan.
She ran her fingers over the rim of the pan, fiddling while she mulled things over.
Goodness, but didn’t Basil Crow leave a lot of disgruntled women in his wake?
Not one of them had a good thing to say about him.
With the exception of Mary, of course, who seemed to be under the impression that the man was goodness personified.
‘I should be getting to work,’ she said, putting the pan back in the box. ‘I’ll pop this in the storeroom and carry on with getting that little kitchen shipshape.’
Julia made her way through to the storeroom, and put the box down in the corner where they kept donations for sorting.
Looking down, she saw that she had been left with a tiny red smear on the skin of her thumb. She picked up the pan. There was the tiniest smudge on the rim, too. Near the chip.
It couldn’t be…
Julia felt her throat tighten with disgust. She rushed to the sink to wash her hands, but stopped without touching the tap.
She reached for a plastic bag from a bundle they kept stashed under the sink.
Moving slowly and carefully, so as not to disturb the red smudge on her thumb or the one on the rim, she picked up the pan and put it in.
Bob Jones, the forensics chap, swabbed her thumb carefully and put the swab onto a slide and into a plastic ziplock bag. It had taken a bit of convincing, but Hayley had finally agreed that an ex-wife of a murder victim, trying to sell a pot smeared with possible blood might be relevant.
‘Do you think it’s blood?’ Julia asked Bob.
‘Can’t say,’ said Bob, who had moved on to the pan and was carefully swabbing the tiny smear on the rim. Whether that was because he didn’t know, or because of some kind of forensic person’s code of secrecy, Julia wasn’t sure.
She did know that she was dying to give her hands a good scrub. The sight of the little red smudge had made her feel quite weak and sick.
‘Can I wash my hands now?’ she asked.
‘Yes, I’m all done with you. You can go and wash up.’ Bob looked up from his labours and proclaimed, ‘Out, damned spot! Out, I say!’
Julia looked at him coldly.
‘Lady Macbeth…’ he said, popping the second swab into its little plastic bag. ‘She’s—’
‘I know,’ Julia cut in, in a tone very close to snappy. Honestly, she had had enough. She didn’t need an earful of Bob’s beloved Shakespeare at this precise moment. ‘You’ll let me know what the red stuff is?’ she asked, getting to her feet.
‘That would be for the detective inspector to decide, but I imagine so,’ Bob said. ‘Thanks for coming in.’
When Julia left the bathroom, drying her hands vigorously with a paper towel, she found DI Hayley Gibson coming up the corridor towards her, from the direction of the reception. ‘All okay?’ the detective asked. ‘Bob got his sample?’
‘All okay, if you consider possibly being covered in blood or worse…’ she had only this minute thought of the ‘worse’, and it made her feel doubly ill. ‘If you consider being contaminated by bodily fluids from a potential murder weapon okay.’
Hayley took her arm and steered her into a small meeting room. ‘I’m sorry, Julia. This must be horrible for you.’
‘It is,’ said Julia, tears building infuriatingly. ‘It is horrible. It’s bad enough that I found the man, and now… his blood…’
‘Now, you are getting ahead of yourself, Julia. We don’t know if it’s his blood.
Or even if it is blood at all. Frankly, I doubt it.
I’m not even going to speak to the ex-wife about it until we have determined whether it’s blood.
And if it’s human. And even then, she might have cut herself peeling the potatoes.
As far as I’m concerned, the likelihood of this pan being the murder weapon is extremely slim. ’
Julia didn’t answer. She was just too tired. A tear that had been wobbling on her lower lid slipped out and trailed wetly down her cheek.
‘Ah, Julia, I know this whole situation has been upsetting for you,’ said Hayley. ‘Leave things to me. You need to go home and have a lie-down. I’ll get Walter to drive you. It’ll all seem better after a rest.’
Julia sniffed, and wiped her tears on her sleeve. Feeling somewhat more composed, she said firmly, ‘As long as you’ve got Tabitha in your sights, I can’t rest!’
Hayley sighed. ‘Julia, she’s not “in my sights”.
Obviously I don’t think Tabitha killed a man in a parking dispute.
I’m not persecuting her, or trying to get charges to stick.
I am merely following the orders of my superior officer, Superintendent Lance Frederick, who is new to the role and eager to dot every i and cross every t and tick every box and leave no stone unturned.
And who insists that he wants her to stay put.
So, I have asked her to stick around, briefly, and not leave the country, while I exclude her categorically from the suspect list.’
‘But Tabitha has—’
‘I know about the wedding.’ Hayley looked almost as tired as Julia felt. ‘I know about Luanne’s daughter, and Ghana, and the shopping, and the dress, and the Terry’s Chocolate Oranges. I know that Tabitha is very concerned about the timing.’
Hayley ran both hands through her hair in a gesture of frustration that Julia had seen many times. ‘I want Tabitha to go to that wedding. Please believe me when I tell you that I’m working very hard to get the answers I need to make that happen.’
As tired and worried as Julia was herself, she could see that Hayley was under strain.
‘I know this is stressful for you with the new boss and everything. And I know you care about Tabitha,’ said Julia. ‘I’m sorry you are in a difficult position.’
‘Thank you,’ said Hayley, leaning back in her chair. ‘I appreciate you saying that.’
They sat quietly for a moment. Julia spoke into the silence.
‘You must be very busy. He wasn’t a popular fellow. The ex-wives alone…’
‘We are considering all possibilities. We’re looking into the wives, I promise you,’ Hayley said. ‘And as you know, there are a number of them.’
‘Four. Honestly, I don’t know why people insist on getting married again and again when they’re so obviously bad at it,’ said Julia. ‘Luckily for you, one of them is in Argentina, so at least that’s one less angry wife to worry about.’
It wasn’t a great joke, but it was enough to break the tension between them.
‘Huh, you’d think that might be the case,’ said Hayley bitterly. ‘But I have to phone Sofia, too, because of the boxes and the stones and the ticks and crosses and all that coming from on high.’
She pointed to the ceiling, as if Superintendent Lance Frederick might be perched on the roof.
‘I haven’t actually spoken to her yet, with the time difference, and being rather busy. And yeah, not a priority right now, what with all the other wives and neighbours and sundry people who didn’t like Basil Crow and are actually in the same country.’
Julia stood up, feeling a bit stronger, finally.
‘Well, good luck with everything, Hayley. You’ll let me know about the blood?’
‘I’ll let you know.’