A Nice Place to Die (3 page)

Alice's heart was in her mouth as she watched the young vicar get off his bright blue bike and approach the teenagers.

The older Miller boy, Kevin, said something to him, and suddenly they were no longer a group of kids, they were a pack on the hunt, predatory and menacing. Alice thought, that poor little man, what's he going to do now?

She herself had often known what it felt like to be afraid of other people. It was what happened to shy, scared spinsters like herself who never learned to assert themselves. For her, fear was a way of life. Alice was aware – and then ashamed as she watched what was happening to another vulnerable human being beaten – that she felt a thrill of primitive excitement that had nothing to do with concern for the young vicar. The man was weak and helpless and he was a born victim. Some instinct of self-preservation compelled Alice, herself habitually a victim, to be glad to see someone else suffer for once. There but for the grace of God, she thought. But, she said, he's one of the Lord's own, how can God let this happen?

The vicar was knocked down and the youths set on him.

It never occurred to Alice that she could or should do something to stop the teenagers kicking the poor man to death.

Because she felt helpless to act, she saw herself somehow exonerated from responsibility for what those thugs were doing. She didn't even go to the telephone to dial 999. If she moved, those kids might see her and know that she was there, watching. They could turn on her.

Then Donna Miller drove up and the teenagers fled. The poor young vicar was taken away in an ambulance, like a prop no longer needed on set. Alice thought, he looks badly hurt; he could be dead.

The policewoman who seemed to be in charge was so smart and well-dressed that Alice thought she could be a television presenter. She looked quite out of place in the Millers' rundown front garden. She doesn't look to me like any kind of a serious detective, Alice said to herself.

This police officer gave Donna Miller her card.

Much good that'll do her, Alice thought. Donna will cover for her boys whatever they do. She's their mother, she won't get them into trouble; mothers never do.

There was no point in hoping that Alan, Donna's present partner, would play the heavy father either. He wouldn't dare. All three of the Miller children were Donna's, but by different fathers.

Nor would anyone else in Forester Close get Donna's boys into trouble. The Millers terrorized all the residents in the street. The entire family recognized no laws or social restraint as applying to them. Donna and Alan, a slob who spent most of his waking hours watching pornographic DVDs from the sitting room couch, had abandoned any effort to control Kevin, who was nineteen, or his younger brother, seventeen-year-old Nate. Or Jess, the youngest.

Alice felt a certain sympathy for the daughter. Fifteen-year-old Jess was a sullen, doughy-looking creature with weighty tattooed arms and shoulders. She was apparently addicted to having parts of her sizeable body pierced, so that she looked like an overstuffed sofa held together by safety pins. When the Millers first moved in, Alice took the girl to be a blowsy thirty year old, perhaps Donna's sister, but then she overheard a shouting match about a forthcoming birthday party and realized that Jess was still a child.

The girl brought a bit of lurid colour to Forester Close. Alice took her to represent what passed as yob glamour. She wore glittery blue eye shadow and thick black mascara, and her hair was dyed a fine dark purple. In the street, where she and her brothers hung around for hours at a time, she was always smoking, and swigged constantly from big brown bottles. In the house, when she wasn't sulking, Alice could see her slumped on the sofa in the living room watching the clash of aliens on DVDs. Jess also screamed colourful abuse at her mother, at her brothers Kevin and Nate, at the stepfather Alan, and even at her own young baby which the rest of her family combined to try to force her to care for by ignoring it themselves as long as they could stand it crying. Jess's body language made it clear that she resented this pressure of motherhood. Sometimes she shouted at the older of the two boys, Kevin, that the kid was just as much his as hers and he could look after it himself, she had better things to do. Kevin ignored her. Jess tried to ignore the baby.

Alice was bemused by Jess. The girl was plainly unhappy. She appeared bored out of her mind by everything to do with her family and Forester Close. Living on the housing estate seemed to strike her as little better than being abandoned in a wilderness peopled by primitive apes. Alice sympathized with that. The girl was lost in her own life.

Alice believed that as a fellow female, Jess, too, must live in dread of the yobs in her own family.

But then Peter Henson, a retired doctor who lived with his wife opposite the Millers at Number Four, dared to complain when he discovered Jess having loud and violent sex with what the doctor called a Neanderthal against his garage wall. And the Miller family turned on him as one to defend their own.

The Hensons, Peter and his wife Jean, became a target for vandalism. The elderly couple could not leave their car outside their house without the windscreen being shattered or the paintwork scored. Every time the Hensons came out of their home, the Millers jeered and swore at them. And Jess was the worst of the lot.

No, Alice said to herself, all the Millers are the same. No one in the street is going to dare to admit to the police that they saw what happened to the young vicar.

Alice had no doubt of this because, watching the residents in secret, she had a more intimate knowledge of her neighbours than they could possibly guess. Although she kept herself to herself, and they were strangers to her, she knew things about these families that they kept secret from each other.

She knew they had one thing in common. They were all afraid of the lurking undercurrent of mindless violence, like the thudding bass beat of Kevin's music, exuded by the Millers.

They, like Alice herself, would try to put the incident of the young vicar's death out of their minds. Alice, like the rest of them, was petrified by what those Miller boys might do to her if she told the police about them. What had happened to the poor vicar was a tragedy but it was something not to be spoken about. Alice understood that. As long as no one knew what she had seen and she herself kept silent about it, she could persuade herself that she hadn't seen anything. There was nothing to be done, after all.

She went into the kitchen to feed big, beautiful Phoebus, a ginger cat which for several months now had taken to coming round to her back door every afternoon. Alice thought of him as her own. She could hear him miaowing in protest because she was late.

Alice thought, it's nearly Christmas,
The Sound of Music
will be on television, and all those other old films with nice children and happy endings. Best not to dwell on the bad things, there's nothing to be gained by it.

THREE

T
he morning after Tim Baker's death, Detective Chief Inspector Rachel Moody sat in her car at the bottom of Forester Close trying to gather her thoughts.

This case particularly distressed her. She was finding it hard to maintain her professional cool. In all her previous experience of murder, the killer was usually driven beyond endurance before he did the deed. He lost control and lashed out. She could understand that, however much she disapproved.

But the savagery of this young vicar's death was new to her. What possible motive could anyone have for such an unprovoked attack? It was almost as though some sicko had done it for fun. And, Rachel told herself, something like that happening at Christmas time makes it even worse.

DCI Moody couldn't get out of her mind the sight of Mrs Tim Baker's terrified white face last night when she and Sergeant Reid broke the news of her husband's death, or the way the poor woman had looked down at the Christmas presents piled under the decorated tree in the living room. ‘But it's not possible, it can't be true, it's Christmas,' Mrs Baker said. And then, with trembling lip, ‘What can I tell the children?'

Now, parked at the bottom of Forester Close before starting to go through the motions of the routine investigation, Rachel Moody looked around her at the bleak street. It was so ordinary; it could be a cul-de-sac on a faceless housing estate almost anywhere at all. Except that Rachel could still see, like a ghost image in a photograph, Tim Baker's broken body lying like litter on the muddy patch of garden outside Number Two.

She asked herself, why am I taking this case so personally? Why can't I see it as just another murder?

She tried to imagine what Forester Close would be like in summer, when the trees lining the pavement were in leaf and the gardens in flower. Quite pleasant, probably, full of dappled shade and the smell of the honeysuckle which covered several of the walls dividing the front gardens of the houses from the street. But in the depth of winter the leafless branches of the trees and the drab colourless gardens gave the street a grim and desolate aspect. The blue and white ribbon of the police cordon outside Number Two was a touch of frivolity in comparison.

There were tears in Inspector Moody's eyes as she thought of the way the young vicar had died. It's no good, she told herself, there is something personal about this case. He was acting on behalf of all of us who want the best for others. He was trying to befriend those bastards who killed him; like a puppy wanting to be loved. And it's Christmas.

She thought, If I can't get someone punished for this, everyone who ever wants to do something positive to make the world a better place might as well give up trying. That's overloading it a bit, but I know what I mean. At least, I think I do.

Her train of thought was suddenly broken as Sergeant Reid opened the passenger door of the car and got in. Thanks to her they had arrived too early to start their house to house interviews. She invariably did arrive too early. Resigned, Jack Reid had volunteered to go to the café near the supermarket to buy takeaway coffee and sandwiches to eat in the car to pass the time. Nothing was to be gained by starting on door-to-door enquiries while people were still in bed.

Flustered, DCI Moody put up a hand to brush away tears that might come. She didn't want to be seen as soft. Not long promoted to Detective Chief Inspector, Rachel Moody had only recently transferred to Avon and Somerset police from Eastbourne, and she was having a hard time of it earning her male colleagues' respect. But Sergeant Reid didn't look at her. He was trying to take the sandwiches out of their plastic containers.

‘What time is it?' Rachel Moody asked.

She knew the answer. She had only just checked her watch. It was 7.30 a.m.

‘We'd better give it another half hour or so,' Jack Reid said.

The voice of experience, Rachel thought, and felt that she had made herself ridiculous. He thinks I'm neurotic, she said to herself, he's wishing he didn't work for a hysterical woman who was only promoted above him as a gesture to equal opportunities.

But then Reid said, ‘Here, I wasn't sure how you like your coffee so if I guessed wrong and you take sugar, you can have mine.'

He didn't sound as though he was holding a grudge.

‘No, no sugar, thanks,' she said. ‘God, I'm starving.'

He handed her the sandwich he had released from its packaging.

She wondered if she was wrong about Jack Reid. Perhaps he didn't have the resentments and prejudices she was ascribing to him.

They were silent while they ate bacon sandwiches, both thinking of the young vicar and his bereft family.

‘You never get used to it,' Jack Reid said suddenly, ‘not something like that.'

So he did see me crying, Rachel thought, and was surprised at his sensitivity.

‘I suppose I wouldn't want to get used to it,' Rachel said. ‘It would be terrible to get to the stage where you take something like that for granted.'

‘It makes me think how my wife and kids would feel if it were me,' Reid said. ‘Sandy's given up trying to make me get out of the force and do something else, but at times like this I feel guilty about what I put her through.'

‘We don't get many like this,' Rachel said. ‘This is different.'

She asked herself, why would anyone suddenly want to kill a man like that young vicar here? He looked so harmless, what could possibly have triggered the violence and rage involved in his killing. The motive wasn't even robbery. There was still thirty pounds in notes in the wallet found in his breast pocket at the morgue.

The crime had seemed even more inexplicable once Sergeant Reid identified the body. Personal papers in the dead man's pockets revealed that the victim was the local vicar, a married man with two young children who had only moved to Old Catcombe, his first parish, six months before.

‘What in God's name was a man like that doing in a place like this?' Rachel Moody asked.

‘It beggars belief,' Jack Reid said. ‘Can you credit that a man can be killed practically in the street in broad daylight and no one saw anything?'

‘So you tried talking to the neighbours?'

Reid couldn't disguise his frustration. ‘We tried, but no one was in,' he said. ‘At least, they weren't answering their doors. So much for Christian principles and good Samaritans and all that guff.'

‘Don't let it get to you,' Rachel Moody said. ‘We've got to treat this like any other murder. Whoever killed Tim Baker murdered the man, not the vicar.'

‘I wonder,' Sergeant Reid said. ‘Where was his dog collar? The killer might be a freak who hates Christmas, or someone who has it in for religion.'

Rachel Moody remembered the giant Christmas tree she had seen yesterday evening as Sergeant Reid drove slowly through Old Catcombe looking for the vicarage. Where the bereaved Mrs Baker's decorations had seemed pathetic, the sight of that other radiant symbol of love and joy at the heart of the historic village had given Rachel a warm festive glow. It was the season of goodwill and this tree on the village green, covered in coloured lights, gave a real feeling of community. There was a placard beside the tree announcing that everyone was invited to an open air carol concert on Christmas Eve.