Fruitful Bodies (7 page)

In a bundle of clothing at the foot of his bed he found his stuff and rolled a cigarette, sitting in the doorway. A lazy, afternoony warmth clung to the shed; it twisted the smells of never-quite-dry concrete and creosoted wood and burning match, rolling tobacco and banana skin into the air, and in the fly-buzzing, soft leaf-lifting, almost breezeless calm Leech wondered if he might go and sleep for a while. Ivan’s voice telling him to work until his return was receding into the already vanished morning. He sat in the doorway and looked out, swigging at the flat, warm Coke at the bottom of the bottle, sucking on his cigarette, while the scents of earth and cheese on his hands mingled with the smoke. Then, more as a pulse which moved the air than as a sound, he began to sense the whispering, metallic whipping of a distant train. He dropped the bottle and cigarette, hurried down the allotment to the far end, scrambled up the bank and through the hedge, across the brambly stretch of waste ground and up the steep slope of the embankment opposite. The steel noise was now beating from the rails in a quickening, hardening rattle. Leech scrambled upright and stood swaying, his eyes squeezed tight, as the diesel-hot wind lashed across his face, sucking him in, pushing him back, flapping the blue shirt against his chest, and behind his closed eyes he felt the lurching, dark train blot out the daylight as it rocked and whacked along the rails two yards from his feet.

S
ARA TOOK STOCK
. She was sitting on a bar stool opposite her chronically alcoholic house guest plus revolting dog, in love with a divorced, suddenly absent detective, and jealous of a corpse.

Andrew had leapt, with altogether too much zeal, Sara considered, into Detective Chief Inspector mode. Once he had delivered the screaming waitress into fresh air and the care of the pub landlady he had run back in, ordered Sara and Joyce away from the scene and shooed everybody out of the kitchen and into the lounge. There they had been instructed to wait. The sale of any more alcohol had been forbidden, and the bar staff were sullenly serving brackish pub orange juice that tasted of marmalade, and fizzy apple juice, gassy, sugary and innocent of apples. Sara sighed. Andrew obviously expected that they would be stuck here for ages and did not want any sozzled witness statements. Then he had disappeared, telling Sara that he would have to guard the scene until the investigating officers and forensic team arrived. A few minutes later they had turned up with the usual theatrical lights and sirens. At the sound someone had opened the pub’s double doors and Sara had seen through the rectangle of brash white
light that outside the sun shone as brightly as before but that the tables and chairs were being carted away so that police vehicles could park outside. The party was over.

Andrew did not reappear. Sara cast a look towards Joyce, who was rocking gently to and fro, crooning at Pretzel while with both hands she kneaded his ears over and over. Pretzel gazed back at her through wet eyes, the look on his face conveying perhaps deep sympathy, perhaps deep hunger, or perhaps the fervent wish that she would leave his ears alone. It was not clear who was trying to comfort whom, nor how successfully.

The pub furniture was depressingly dark and covered in fake Jacobean tapestry, the ashtrays were bright plastic and the beermats curling. Polystyrene models of ladders and snakes were stuck unconvincingly over the dark wall-paper. The lounge doors had been closed again and now no natural light reached them. The place should have smelled of warm, hoppy beer and plummy spirits, of red wine, wood smoke and roasting meat; instead it almost stung Sara’s nose with the usual mixture of bar disinfectant, frying and fag ash.

At Joyce’s side Sara seethed more with jealousy than anger. It had come at her once again and without warning, that dimension in Andrew’s life that took precedence over anything to do with her. Another stupid corpse had jostled its way to the front and seized all his attention and until the stupid person who killed the stupid corpse was found, she knew she could expect little of his energy or imagination to be directed towards her or her needs. She felt sullenly that she was being elbowed out of her own relationship, and by a dead tourist.

She peered further into the gloom of the lounge, determined
not to care who else was here or what they might think at being detained at the scene of the crime. The mainly young people, mostly men, looked completely, utterly ordinary: ordinary clothes, haircuts, accents and, presumably, drinking habits. They probably also had utterly ordinary tastes, opinions, jobs, homes, and she did not care how lazy it was of her to think so. She yawned. Yet someone, perhaps one of them, or one of the pensioner couples or quartets, or one of the pairs of young girls dressed for sexual combat, might be responsible for strangling the woman in the corridor. But Sara, yawning again, thought not. Most murders were domestic affairs. And unsatisfactorily married people go on holiday too, possibly more often than happy ones. She yawned again, tipped a practically empty bag of peanuts into her mouth and was rewarded with a throatful of gritty salt.

But it did seem now as if something was happening. Three uniformed police officers, accompanied by another man whom Sara recognised, recoiling, as Detective Sergeant Bridger, had entered the room. Two of them set themselves up at the bar with notebooks, and one by one the pub customers were called up and questioned. Nobody was kept for more than a couple of minutes, so Sara guessed that they were being asked only for their names and addresses, possibly also when they had arrived at the pub or visited the loo. One or two of the young men seemed to find the proceedings funny or embarrassing, turning to their friends, grinning or making faces, but most seemed to take their cue from the police officers who went about their job with undertakerly seriousness. Gradually the numbers in the place dwindled.

While this was going on Bridger and a female police
officer had installed themselves at an empty table. Sara watched as the landlord and landlady, with much head-shaking, were questioned in turn. The screaming waitress now seemed calmer but no more forthcoming, judging by the fifteen minutes it took Bridger to be appraised of all she knew. The WPO was now approaching their table.

Joyce glanced up from Pretzel’s ears, looking old and frightened.

‘I’m going to stay with my friend while you speak to her,’ Sara blurted. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’ The WPO glanced back at DS Bridger. ‘Should be,’ she said. As an afterthought she added softly, ‘Just insist, if you have to.’

But she didn’t. Bridger gave Sara a cold but respectful smile which told her that while she was no more popular with him than she had ever been, he now knew her to be his boss’s—what? This little problem was one that she sometimes scratched at. Girlfriend? She was a woman of thirty-nine. Lover? Such a private thing should not be paraded by a public label. Partner? She wasn’t, not properly, nor did she like the business implication. Companion? The pensioners’ choice, suggesting days out to factory shops and evenings in.

‘Miss Selkirk is a close personal friend of DCI Poole,’ Bridger informed the WPO. Friend, pronounced ‘furrend’ to convey extra friendliness. As if it mattered now. Sara thought of Andrew and his desertion with a sudden wave of irritation.

‘Now, Miss Cruikshank, I understand that after ordering lunch’—Bridger was checking some notes, presumably information from Andrew—‘you left your seat outside at approximately a quarter past one in order to go
to the toilet. Would you please tell me exactly what you did when you got there?’

Joyce blinked a few times and her lips wriggled like two worms trying to free themselves of each other. ‘I didn’t go to the toilet. I went to the lavatory. And it’s none of your business what a lady does in the lavatory,’ she said. Sara drew in her bottom lip and looked at her hands. She had better not laugh, but God bless Joyce and Kelvinside.

‘I mean, of course,’ Bridger said wearily, ‘after you’d used the toilet. Assuming you went straight to the ladies and er … used the facilities. What happened then?’

‘I washed my hands, of course,’ Joyce said primly. ‘And then I tidied my hair and left the
lavatory.’
She patted her head in emphasis and Sara looked at her, knowing this to be a lie. The hair had obviously not been touched that day and looked more as if it had been ploughed than tidied.

‘And then?’

‘Those doors—there were doors in the corridor, going down the wall. She fell straight out, she fell
right out on top of me.’
Joyce looked round the table with indignant eyes, trying to enlist sympathy. ‘The door must have been left open. Half open, anyway.’ She seemed on the brink of complaining to the management.

‘Did you see anyone else, either in the ladies’ toilet or in the corridor outside?’

‘No. Just me.’

‘Really? Nobody at all? It’s a busy day for the pub, after all. And there were a lot of people outside on the street who could have been using the toilets.’

‘There wasn’t anybody else. I was minding my own business. I don’t go round looking at people in the lavatory, I’d like you to know.’

‘And you say you think the cupboard door may have been open. What do you mean by that? Try to remember—when you came out and saw the doors, were they open or closed?’

‘Did you not hear me? She fell straight out on top of me. So they must have been open. Or maybe half open. I think they may have been open, I’m not sure.’

‘Were the doors open or closed when you went past them on the way in?’

‘They were closed.’

‘You’re sure of that? They were definitely closed?’

‘Yes, definitely,’ Joyce said. ‘They … well …’ She had sensed a trap, too late.

‘You see, if you’re quite sure they were closed on the way in—obviously you could see them clearly—how is it you’re not sure if they were closed on your way out?’

Joyce shrugged. ‘It’s no business of mine, what the doors were doing is nothing to me. I just …’

‘If the lady fell out on top of you, you’re saying, I think, that she must have been propped upright in the cupboard with her weight against the inside of the door? Which must have been closed, mustn’t it, otherwise our lady wouldn’t have been inside the cupboard at all, she’d have been on the floor in the corridor, wouldn’t she?’

Joyce said nothing.

‘Which suggests to me, Miss Cruikshank, that you must have opened the cupboard yourself. Is that what happened?’

Joyce was shaking her head vehemently. ‘No, I didn’t open any cupboard. I don’t think I did … it’s not what I …’ She turned to Sara. ‘Can we go home now, dear? Pretzel wants to go home.’

‘Look, she’s had a bad shock,’ Sara said. ‘You can’t go on with this.’

‘What would I be opening a cupboard for? It’s not my cupboard.’

‘Will you please tell me why you opened the cupboard, Miss Cruikshank?’

‘I … wasn’t just … I don’t do that kind of thing … I wouldn’t …’

‘Look, what’s the point of this?’ Sara demanded. ‘How dare you put her through this? Can’t you understand what it must be like to have a corpse fall on top of you out of a cupboard?’

Joyce had covered her face with her hands. She gave a quiet wail, which Pretzel answered with a protective bark. He scrambled to his feet and took up a wriggling guard in front of her knees, dancing up and down on his splayed front feet and growling softly. Bridger sighed. This would have to be followed up later at the station, with any luck when Poole’s ‘close personal friend’, aka his bit of fanny, and the fucking dog weren’t around.

‘Yes, thank you, Miss Selkirk, I think I can,’ he said. ‘If Miss Cruikshank doesn’t wish to continue, we can speak to her another time. But we shall need to interview her again.’ He had deliberately omitted to say, ‘as a witness’, but this seemed to satisfy Selkirk, who was leaning back with her arms folded. God, she was so bloody superior, all big eyes and no tits. ‘And I understand that Miss Cruikshank is staying with you, isn’t she? Well, we’ll call and arrange for her to talk to someone at the station, assuming you have no objection. Now, if I may detain you for another few minutes, perhaps we can go on to what
you saw when you came down the corridor. Assuming your dog doesn’t mind?’

Pretzel slithered back down to the floor and rested his chin on Joyce’s foot. Ten minutes later, Bridger dismissed Joyce and Sara generously, after hearing Sara’s account of finding the dead woman and Joyce in the corridor. He even managed a smile as he watched them make their way, with the bandy-legged dog, back out into the sunshine. Selkirk wouldn’t be looking so superior much longer. He would crack the old soak’s pathetic story about the corpse falling on top of her out of the cupboard, because Bridger’s instincts were telling him something quite different. Cruikshank was a down-and-out with a drink habit, and the Jean Brodie accent and the presence of Selkirk didn’t alter that. She’d opened that door, all right. But she had been opening it to stuff the corpse in. Because, coming across an easy touch in the toilet, a Jap woman even smaller and weaker than she was, she’d gone after that expensive camera, maybe the wallet, too. That black stinking handbag was big enough to stash them. In all likelihood the Jap had left her stuff on the side of the basin when she was washing her hands or looking in the mirror, people never learned. Anyway, she had presumably seen Cruikshank trying to lift the stuff and put up a struggle, more of a struggle than Cruikshank had bargained for. Perhaps she hadn’t meant to kill her, but after she had, she’d tried to hide her in the cupboard. If she’d managed it, the body wouldn’t have been discovered for hours. It was risky, but less risky than leaving her in the toilet. They’d just ordered lunch, hadn’t they, so she was going to be stuck there for a while and unless she hid it the body would be discovered within minutes, while she was
still there. And she had already been in the toilet too long to rush out pretending she’d just found her dead. If she’d been lucky she could have got her into the cupboard in a few seconds, but then the waitress had appeared and spoiled that little plan.

Bridger beamed with such sudden amiability at WPC Frayling that she looked over her shoulder expecting to see someone else. She had never seen him so pleased.