Dead Woman's Shoes: 1 (Lexy Lomax Mysteries) (11 page)

Breathing hard, Lexy clambered over the stile, and jumped down.

Then she almost screamed herself.

9

A figure lay flat out on the grass in front of her, blood dribbling from a messy head wound.

“Oh, sh…” Lexy bent reluctantly over the slumped form, with its glassy, lifeless eyes. The piled-up rust-coloured hair was unmistakable, although now it was sadly squashed out of shape, revealing itself to be a wig. The hair that escaped from under it was thin and grey, and the tight blue outfit was creased and disarrayed.

Kinky had finally managed to squeeze backwards through a gap under the stile, when Lexy went bounding back over it again.

“Quick – got to find a phone!”

She pelted down the track, trying to think straight.

Avril Todd dead?
That
wasn’t meant to happen. Avril had come here to meet someone and, instead of sweeping her into the expected passionate embrace, that someone had cracked her head open and then driven off in her car. And Lexy hadn’t even seen them go back over the stile. She frowned. So how…?

But now wasn’t the time. She yanked open the door of her own long-suffering car, ushered in the panting chihuahua and jumped into the driver’s seat.

“You’d better start,” she yelled hysterically. It did, as soon as she remembered to turn the key.

She accelerated up the lane in the direction the Panda had already been pointing. She was bound to come across a farmhouse or cottage soon where she could raise the alarm. A minute later there was very nearly a collision as the Panda whined around a particularly sharp bend. A white estate car coming the other way was forced to swerve into the hedge inches in front of them.

Lexy jerked the handbrake on and wrenched open her door. She raced across to the other driver. “Quickly – can you call the poli…”

The words died on her lips as she watched the tall, pale man unfold himself like an ironing board from the driver’s seat.

DI Bernard Milo’s expression was bleak. “Do you always drive like that?”

“No, of course not!” Lucky he hadn’t seen her earlier. “But there’s been an… an accident and…”

“I’m not surprised. What was it – a shunt?” He scrutinised her car.

“Not a car accident!” Lexy was almost dancing with frustration.

“What, then?”

“Someone’s just been killed. Murdered!”

That concentrated his mind.

“Right. You see it happen?”

“No – I heard her scream, though. And I saw her after…” she faltered.

“Where did it happen?”

“In a field just down there.” Lexy pointed wildly.

“You’d better show me.” DI Milo jumped back into his driving seat. “Take your car and I’ll follow.”

Lexy threw herself back into the Panda and executed a ragged three-point turn that would have failed a driving test. Where the hell had Milo suddenly materialised from? Wasn’t it was bad enough finding Avril Todd stone dead without him popping up like some morbid jack-in-a-box? Why couldn’t it have been a nice, sensible plod?

In fact, Lexy had an overriding urge to floor the accelerator and make a break for it. If she’d been in anything but the Panda she would have done exactly that.

Kinky, gripping the seat cover with splayed claws, eyed her nervously.

“OK, Alexandra, get a grip,” she said aloud, taking deep breaths as the car ground along. “You can deal with this.”

But how, exactly, was she going deal with it? DI Milo was going to find it a mite strange that Lexy had just happened to stumble across a very recently murdered woman in the middle of nowhere. In fact, he might even wonder if she had something to do with it. Lexy went cold at the thought.

She turned distractedly through the five-barred gate.

She’d have to make up some story about why she had been there. The truth would be out of the question, of course. There was no way she was going into explanations about assuming the workload of dead private detectives, to say nothing of her real reason for being in Clopwolde-on-Sea.

She yanked on the handbrake and sat back, panic rising in her chest. Avril was dead, Lexy had no idea why, and nothing useful to tell the police. Except that her husband suspected she was having an affair. Well, Roderick Todd could tell them that himself. Lexy forced herself to breathe slowly. All she needed to say was that she had been driving around and lost her way. There. Simple. She just had to hold her nerve.

But as Lexy began to unwind slightly, she realised with dawning horror that after Roderick Todd had told the police he suspected Avril was having an affair, he would go on to tell them he had hired a private detective called Lexy Lomax to follow her.

“Oh, no,” she moaned, clutching her head. It was all going to come out. She could already see the newspaper story the next day.

Mysterious Death of Clopwolde Woman

A resident of the Suffolk village of Clopwolde-on-Sea was found dead in a nearby field yesterday evening. No arrest has yet been made in connection with the incident , but in a bizarre twist, Alexandra Warwick-Holmes, 29, wife of TV’s former ‘Mr Heirloom’, Gerard Warwick-Holmes, admitted to having followed Mrs Avril Todd to the place of her murder while masquerading as a private detective. Mrs Warwick-Holmes, sporting a tattoo, ripped denims and a short crop, claimed to be ‘taking some time out’ from her marriage, and appears to be living in a ramshackle holiday cabin near the idyllic Suffolk seaside resort.

Gerard would be there like a shot.

At least he wouldn’t get his money back, Lexy thought grimly, because the police would already have confiscated that when they searched Otter’s End. After arresting her on suspicion of murder.

She forced herself to think for a minute. OK. There might be one very slim, very minute chance of wriggling out of this unscathed.

“Right, whatever I say, you back me up, pal,” she muttered to Kinky.

But the chihuahua was staring beyond Lexy.

“Everything all right?” said a hollow voice, right in her ear.

Lexy jumped violently. She hadn’t even realised she’d pulled up opposite the stile and stopped.

DI Milo was stooping beside her open window.

“Yeah, course. Just sorting out my…” She swallowed hard. She’d almost said ‘alibi’. That would have been a good start.

She got out quickly, forcing the policeman to move out of the way.

A sweet smell of wild honeysuckle lingered on the damp evening breeze, as if to dilute the grisly reality of what lay ahead.

“So where’s the body?”

“In that field.” Lexy pointed uncertainly. It all looked different now dusk was falling.

He tackled the stile, stepping over it nimbly, on long, stork-like legs. Lexy followed more slowly, bizarrely expecting Avril Todd to be gone. Perhaps she had imagined the whole thing. It certainly felt like a dream. If only.

Milo had stopped short. He flipped open his phone. “Ambulance required urgently,” he intoned. “Location – country lane to Nudging, just off the A12 on the Lowestoft side of Clopwolde. Up a farm track on the right, about a quarter of a mile along the lane. Middle-aged IC one woman with a head injury.”

“Might be a bit late for an ambulance,” Lexy mumbled.

But the detective was back on the phone, making an abrupt call for police assistance. “Yes – it’s DI Milo,” he snapped. “Haven’t forgotten me already, have you, PC Spencer?” He flicked a button and shoved the phone back into his top pocket. It rang again immediately.

He checked it and cancelled the call, then took a pair of blue latex gloves from his pocket, snapped them and pulled them on. Turning to Lexy he said, “You arrived just after this happened, did you?” As he spoke he shrugged his arms out of his jacket, and dropped it on the ground.

“Yeah.” Lexy wondered what he was doing.

“Did you see the attacker?” DI Milo was rolling up his sleeves.

“No. By the time I got here, he was driving off in the car that she must have got out of a couple of minutes earlier.” She indicated Avril, trying to avoid looking at her head.

“Get the registration?”

Lexy told him. He put out a rapid call.

“How do you know it was a man driving?”

“Just assumed.”

The policeman crouched over the dead woman, pulling something out of his shirt pocket. “What were you doing here, anyway?”

Here we go. Lexy took a deep breath. “I’d been driving around, lost my way. I saw the Volvo parked up this track. I just nipped up here to ask the way back to Clopwolde. I heard shouting and a scream as I walked up the track, then I saw the Volvo disappear in a cloud of dust.” She paused. “I wasn’t sure what to do at first, then I checked in the field.”

“And you don’t know this woman?” He turned, gave her a significant look.

“No.” Well, she didn’t
know
her.

DI Milo nodded grimly.

That was the first hurdle cleared.

“Right. I’m going to try resuscitation.”

Lexy, still high on relief, thought the policeman was joking. But he had actually started the routine, alternatively pumping Avril’s ample chest, then breathing through a filter into her slackened mouth.

She watched him, dumbfounded. It was blindingly obvious that Avril Todd had checked out. At least fifteen minutes had passed since Lexy found her, and she wasn’t exactly a picture of health then.

Lexy suddenly felt her legs bend under her like hot candles, and she slumped down on the stile, trying to breathe evenly. If she wasn’t careful she’d have DI Milo trying to resuscitate her next. At least reinforcements were on the way. She wouldn’t be alone with him any more.

“Come on!” he shouted at the corpse. “Wake up!”

Lexy squirmed. The whole bizarre situation, the mad car chase, the unexpected scream, the murdered body, the policeman desperately trying to pump life back into it, all ran in front of her eyes like a film on a loop.

“Stop it,” she burst out. “Can’t you see she’s dead?”

Milo ignored her. Lexy berated herself furiously. He was trying to save a woman’s life, albeit a futile act. It was what she should have done the moment she found the body. The problem was that even then Avril Todd had looked utterly dead. Some instinct had told Lexy that the blow on the head must have killed her instantly. Lexy shivered. The question was – why? And by whom? Who had been waiting for Avril in the field?

Was it lover boy? Perhaps they’d had some kind of an argument, almost immediately after they had met. Lexy remembered Avril’s voice, rather shrill and faint, but unmistakably hers. She looked back over the stile and down the path where she’d been walking when she’d heard the scream, trying to calculate the distance through the yellowish dusk.

What had Avril shouted?
I don’t understand…what’s happening? Are you mad?

Lexy frowned. Was her lover trying to break it off? That would be the obvious conclusion, but somehow Avril’s response didn’t fit. W…what the hell is that? sounded more like she was just plain confused. Lexy rubbed her chin.

DI Milo, meanwhile, had fallen back on his heels, breathing heavily, his head bowed. He’d finally given up. Avril’s head had flopped untidily back. Lexy felt a pitiable urge to go and straighten her wig.

She leant down to stroke Kinky, who was sitting at her heels. His bright eyes met hers through the dusk.

She heard DI Milo call his control, cancel the ambulance and request the police surgeon instead. When she looked over at him again he was going through Avril’s jacket. He pulled out a white plastic card and squinted at it through the fading light. In a moment he was back on his mobile again.

“…found a library card on the deceased – from the photo it identifies the woman as Mrs Avril Geraldine Todd of 4 Windmill Hill, Clopwolde-on-Sea. There may be a husband or children – would you please send a DC to that address to make initial contact. Get whoever it is to call me when they arrive. And put me through to SOCO…”

Lexy tuned out the rest of the call. Alarm had enveloped her again. She hadn’t been expecting Avril Todd to be identified so soon. That wasn’t good. As she was only too well aware, there wouldn’t be anyone at home when the police called at the Todds’ address because Roderick was at his old boys’ reunion in Lincoln. Probably on his second or third pint by now. But he might have his wife in the back of his mind, wondering how the surveillance was going.

What on earth was he going to say when he found out? Would he break down? He had, after all, seemed fond of his straying wife. Lexy hoped that they’d managed to say goodbye to each other before he’d left.

She sat on the stile, her heart banging in her chest.

DI Milo was hunched down beside the dead woman again, staring intently at the ugly wound on her head, using a small torch to illuminate it in the fading light. Lexy wondered how he could get so close without throwing up.

“Did you touch anything?” he barked, looking over at her.

“Of course not,” said Lexy, witheringly. She hadn’t been watching
The Bill
every week since 1990 for nothing.

He stood up and walked around the body, staring through the gloom, then went over to the hedge and prowled along it to the far corner of the field before slowly returning.

“There’s a gap in this hedge,” he said. “Did you notice it?”

“No – funnily enough I didn’t,” she snapped. “I saw a dead body and ran for help, like any normal person would.”

He ignored this. “Looks like someone has recently gone through it.”

Lexy was suddenly alert. “That’s why I didn’t see anybody climb over the stile after the murder. Whoever did it must have dodged through the hole in the fence and straight into Avril’s car.”

“Convinced she was dead, were you, when you found her?”

“Yeah. As a dodo. I could tell.”

“Expert, are you?”

“No, but…”

“Ever seen a dead body?”

“Not until now.”

In the distance, sirens were wailing.

“Did you hear what was being shouted as you approached the field?”

Lexy told him.

The detective retrieved his jacket, shook it and put it on, then began scribbling in his notebook, holding it up to the fading daylight to see.