Chapter Twelve
Twelve
Bob Beattie inhaled on his cigarette as if he was trying to down it all in one go.
“I thought you were giving up,” said Laura.
“That was vaping. I said I was giving up vaping.”
“Oh, well, that’s okay, then.”
They were in the sparsely populated car park of Sheldon Oaks at the rear of the building. A Jaguar, an Audi, a new Mini, their own unmarked Vauxhall Corsa.
“Nice place this,” said Laura. “Sure it costs more than we’ll ever be able to afford.”
“It’s not bad. My mum stays here,” said Bob. “They keep her busy enough.”
Laura turned to him in surprise, the question “How do you afford it?” implied in her look.
“I got a good deal,” said Bob, returning to his cigarette.
An old oak tree at the back of the car park took up much of the sky, its trunk thick, huge branches all winding on their individual journeys, hundreds of years in the making.
Laura tried not to get bothered that she was packing her own sandwiches every morning yet Bob was somehow able to find enough spare cash to send his mother to a place like this.
Laura thought of the old detective who’d tried to stick his beak in at the crime scene.
Geoffrey? How had he ended up with enough cash to retire to a place like this when he’d been on a police salary?
Probably bought his house for a fiver and a bag of potatoes in 1975 and sold it for ten mil last year.
That’s the way it seemed to go in London.
The idea of Laura ever getting on the housing ladder was fanciful.
Giles, the ruddy-cheeked owner, stepped out from behind the fire door. “That’s everybody, I think. Everyone who’s mobile, anyway.”
“Thank you,” said Laura.
“I was thinking,” said Giles. “Do we really need to say that the death was suspicious?”
“It was,” said Bob, deadpan.
“Yes, I appreciate that’s what your line of thinking is but…you’re not a hundred percent certain, are you? Personally I think it was most likely just a fall and, well, this is a group of elderly people. Do we really want to upset them unnecessarily?”
“In my experience it’s always best to be as honest with people as you can be,” said Bob. “I’m sure you agree with that, Giles?”
“Certainly. Yes. Certainly. Up to a point.”
“Good.”
They entered what Giles called “the ballroom,” where the residents had gathered.
At the edge there was a long, shiny modern bar with angular chrome bar stools and gold-framed paintings of Victorian hunting scenes.
The blend of styles didn’t work. Sheldon Oaks didn’t quite know what century it belonged in.
But neither did some of the residents so maybe that was fair enough, thought Laura.
Tyler was finishing off arranging rows of chairs for the old folks.
There was a hum of excited murmurs, like when someone famous comes to speak at a school assembly.
Some of the Sheldon Oaks staff, a couple of chefs, some waiters, a cleaner, were standing at the back of the room.
Bob received a kiss on the cheek from an old lady, his mum presumably, then joined Laura by the wooden stage.
He was red in the face, still not too old to be embarrassed by public affection from his mother.
“All good?” Giles asked the two police officers. They nodded.
Laura noticed Bob nervously digging dirt from underneath his fingernails. “Don’t make any jokes,” she mumbled under her breath.
—
Carol watched Giles step onto the stage and approach the microphone. He looked sweaty.
“Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming together at such short notice. I think I’ll get straight to it. A couple of police officers have very kindly asked to speak to you all today, so I’ll just hand things over to the detective chief inspector.”
Carol sat alone at the back of the hall.
She smiled at Geoffrey, Catherine, and Margaret but kept a respectful distance.
The smiles they gave in return were those thin non-smiles, the type you might send in the general direction of a car when walking over a zebra crossing.
Two of the older residents got close to sitting next to Carol, then spotted her and jumped, turning on their heels as fast as it was possible for octogenarians to do. This was becoming tiresome.
Bob stepped up to the microphone. He looked nervous, Carol thought.
“What’s got loads of balls and screws old ladies?”
The room was silent.
“Bingo…because of the…Sorry. Hello. I’m Detective Chief Inspector Bob Beattie. This is DS Laura Welsh, and don’t worry…she’s not actually Welsh.”
Carol noticed her almost put her head into her hands.
DCI Beattie plowed on. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend anyone. I just thought you might like a little joke. Sorry. Right. As you’ve all no doubt heard, one of your number, Sir Desmond Crisp, died yesterday.”
Sir Desmond Crisp? Not surprising, really, considering the pedigree of many of the other residents, but what had he been knighted for? It occurred to Carol that she’d never asked what Desmond did.
“Now, the good thing is that at this point, if you were a younger group of people, I’d now probably have to say something about how counseling is available to anyone who needs it, but I won’t be doing that today because your generation just gets on with things, don’t you?
You beat the Nazis. You’re not going to cry over this. ”
“Most of us were actually born after the war,” said Geoffrey, from the audience.
“Oh? Is that right? Yeah, didn’t think of that. Yeah, I suppose you were. I’m talking bollocks, aren’t I? Shit. Didn’t mean to swear. Fuck!”
“Get to the point, Bob,” said Laura, leaning across from the edge of the stage.
“Sorry. Right. Sorry, I’m really not used to public speaking.
They had a course down the nick but I was off with gout that week.
You’d think gout was gone now. I thought it was from the Victorian times, you know, but nope, you can still get it.
Too much red meat, apparently. Fucking painful. Shit. Sorry.”
“Bob!”
“Should have let you do this, shouldn’t I, Laura?
Problem with women is if you give them an inch, they take a mile.
Am I right, fellas? I cannot stop! Right.
Sorry. Okay.” Bob made a show of composing himself and adopting a professional mode.
“We have reason to believe that Sir Desmond’s death may have been suspicious. ”
There were shocked murmurs from some in the room.
“I know!” said Bob. “But that’s what we’re dealing with so—”
“Was it an illegal immigrant?” asked Agatha, one of the older residents, with a shaky voice.
“What was that, Mum?”
“Was it an illegal immigrant? Usually is.”
“Sorry, that’s my mum there. Agatha. I’m sure you all know her. We’re not going to reveal anything with regards to suspects just now.”
“Ah!” said Agatha. “So it was. I knew it!”
“As I say, well…Actually, I’m just going to nip that one in the bud. We have no reason to believe that it was an illegal immigrant.”
“They’re sneaky!” said Agatha, not letting the matter go.
Bob tried to get things back on track. “Okay. Well, what I wanted to say was this. If anyone has any information at all, if anyone saw anything suspicious—”
“There’s a black man who works in the restaurant,” said Agatha.
“Thank you, Mum. Uh…yep. We’ll, er, we’ll look into that.” Bob shook his head to indicate to the rest of the room that they wouldn’t be looking into that. “I’m going to leave you all one of these.” Bob held up a piece of paper.
“It has DS Welsh’s and my details on it.
And if you have anything, anything at all…
” Bob looked at Agatha. “Well, maybe not anything but, yes,” he turned back to the rest of the room, “do get in touch. We’d be very interested in speaking to you.
That’s everything for now, I think. Thank you for your time. ”
“I have a question.” Carol had her hand raised.
Bob, who had already started to edge off the stage, relieved it was all over, returned to the microphone. “Yes?”
“How should we protect ourselves? You’re saying there’s a murderer about, yes?”
“Uh, I’m saying it’s a possibility. We’ve no reason to suspect they want to harm anybody else.”
“And you’ve no reason to suspect they don’t. I’m told some people like to kill for fun.”
“All right.” Giles hopped onto the stage with a reassuring smile. “You’re all very safe. Don’t worry. Derek will look after us.”
The room looked at Derek, the Sheldon Oaks security guard, who was slouched in a comfy chair by the wall.
Upon hearing his name he jolted himself out of his nap.
He was overweight, had a mop of white hair and thick glasses.
No one had ever seen him move. Derek, thought Carol, might well be the oldest person in the room.
“I have something to say.” Belinda, one of the residents, was wearing big dark sunglasses and a fur coat. She had a kind of cheap glamour, like the mother of a millionaire boxer. “If anybody has been wondering why I’m wearing sunglasses, it’s because I’ve been crying so much.”
“Oh,” said Giles. “Well, thank you, Belinda.”
“Over Desmond. That’s the reason I’ve been crying. Because Desmond is…” She started to wail. “Deeead! Oh, oh, I can’t do this.”
“All right, we’ll just wrap things up there, then,” said Bob.
Belinda stood up and projected her voice, performing to the whole room. “I’d like it to be known that I cannot be the murderer because I loved Desmond and he…oh, oh, this is so painful…he loved me. Why? Why did he have to die? Whyyyyy?”
Inside Carol’s white Reeboks, her toes curled.
Geoffrey stood up. “Hello. DCI Geoffrey Standing. CID. Is yourself aware that one of the residents at Sheldon Oaks is a convicted serial killer?”
Bob Beattie looked to his colleague, and Giles took control of the microphone. “Thank you, Geoffrey. I think the police can deal with things from here on in.”
“Thank you, Giles, but I am the police,” said Geoffrey.
He pointed to Carol. “Carol Quinn. Over there. Served thirty-five years for seven murders. Her MO—which, as you’ll know already, Officers, but just for everyone else in the room, is a phrase that we police use that stands for ‘modus operandi’—her MO was murder, simply for the pleasure in it.
In layman’s terms, Carol Quinn is a psychopath.
I suggest you bring her in for questioning. ”
Carol wanted desperately to defend herself but worried that any sign of a temper might serve only to affirm Geoffrey. “I’m not a psychopath,” she said, too quietly for anyone to hear.
“I have a question.”
Carol turned to see a chef, a handsome man in his thirties, with slicked-back black hair and an Italian accent, his hand up.
“Uh, yes?” said Bob Beattie, clearly impatient to leave.
“If the police won’t lock Miss Carol up now, maybe we can do it here. Lock her in her room, yes?”
“I don’t recommend…”
Giles interrupted Beattie. “We won’t be doing that. Everyone is equal in the Sheldon Oaks family.”
Now the cleaner spoke up. “Why’s she here anyway? I should talk to the union. This can’t be right. Where does it say in the contract that we have to clean up after murderers?”
“Maybe,” Norma, a tiny ninety-something-year-old lady in a wheelchair, spoke up, “we should check if any of Carol’s bodily fluids were found on the body. Isn’t that usually how they do it on Forensic Files?”
Bob returned to the microphone. “We will, of course, be looking into any possible leads. In the meantime, I suggest that you are all, uh, vigilant, and I’m sure that, uh”—he looked to the barely alive security guard—“Derek will take care of you all.”
As the stage cleared, Carol had the sense that the atmosphere had turned from moderate excitement to all-out fear, and she was the cause.
—
Bob and Laura were walking slowly back to the Corsa. As far as Bob was concerned, they were done for the day. Leyton Orient were playing at home that night. He had time for a couple of pints before kickoff. Needed them.
“You know Carol Quinn?” asked Laura.
“Know of her. Before my time. I’m not that old.”
“Shouldn’t we be questioning her now?”
“Let’s do the autopsy first, shall we? Would be handy to have something to throw at her.”
“What if she kills someone else?” said Laura.
“We’ll just have to cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“You worked with Des Crisp, right?” asked Laura.
“Not with him, really. I was still a baby bill when he left. Knew him a bit.”
“What was he like?”
“Oooof,” exhaled Bob.
“Are the rumors true?”
“Trust me, Laura, you don’t want to know.”
Laura got into the car and waited for Bob to get in at the passenger side.
“What if I do? What if I do want to know?” she said as Bob strained with the effort of sitting down and shut his door.
Bob threw his cigarette out of the window and popped some nicotine gum into his mouth. “He was scum. And now we’ve got to clean up his mess.”
Laura growled. “Now we’ve got to clean up his mess.”
“What?”
“Never heard that one out loud before.” She went into the character of “grizzled old cop.” “He was scum, kid. Scum. And now we’ve got to clean up his mess.”
Bob laughed. Playing along, he attempted a New York accent. “Now we gotta clean up his mess.”
“I got enough mess of my own. Now I gotta clean up this punk’s mess too?”
They went silent, each deciding the joke had run its course.
“Maybe he did just fall off,” said Laura.
“Wouldn’t that be lovely?”
—
Carol stayed in her chair, stewing, while the other residents shuffled out.
She’d tried to blend in, just to be another person, and she’d failed.
As a child, she’d never really felt like one of the other children.
At thirteen she’d moved schools and seen it as a chance to restyle herself as a “normal girl,” wearing what they wore, talking how they talked, but it hadn’t worked. Kids can tell.
Now it had happened again. All because she was a murderer.
All that finger-pointing, all those accusations: It had hurt.
Maybe she should embrace the role, stop pretending, be who she was.
She’d never killed a whole roomful of people at once.
Just a few minutes before, when all the eyes had been on her, if there had been a button that could have extinguished the lot of them, melted them, turned them into nothing more than puddles on the floor, would she have pressed it? Tempting.
While it was on her mind, Carol took her phone from her handbag and googled “Sir Desmond Crisp.” She immediately saw a picture of him in uniform that looked about thirty years old. He appeared harder, steelier, more cynical. Not like the cuddly, retired Desmond she’d known.
Below the picture was a caption: Sir Desmond Crisp. Former head of the Metropolitan Police.
She smiled at the absurdity of it. Trust her to go to a retirement home packed with ex-police.