The Dead Lie Down: A Novel Read online

  One last stand, thought Simon. He took a deep breath. ‘Why did it take Ruth Bussey more than two months to come to us with her story, when Seed first told her he’d killed Mary Trelease on the thirteenth of December last year? Why did she have that article with her about Charl . . . about Sergeant Zailer? Why did she and Seed come forward entirely of their own accord, separately but on the same day, offering information while at the same time blatantly withholding information? And why don’t their accounts match? Bussey reckons Seed told her this killing happened years ago, but Seed gave Gibbs the impression that if he went to 15 Megson Crescent, he’d find a fresh body.’

  ‘Recently deceased, not fresh,’ Proust amended. ‘Don’t apply the same terminology to a corpse as you would to a fruit salad.’

  ‘You know what I mean, sir. You read what Trelease said to Gibbs: “Why do you keep asking me if I’m sure nobody’s hurt me? Who? Aidan Seed, this man you keep asking about? If you’re looking for a victim, you’re looking in the wrong place.” That suggests there’s a right place to look for Seed’s victims.’

  ‘Think about it, Waterhouse.’ Proust sounded almost kindly. ‘For Ms Trelease to assume Seed has hurt somebody somewhere is only natural. There’s a detective on her doorstep showing a keen interest in him, asking if she knows him and wanting to check she’s in one piece.’

  ‘Maybe she knows of another victim of Seed’s, somebody else he’s attacked or killed, even if he hasn’t touched her.’ Simon wiped the back of his neck with his hand. He was sweating. ‘What about the question Seed asked me: “The woman you met at 15 Megson Crescent—did you tell her what I’m saying I did?” Did you read that bit?’

  ‘I read all the bits. Top left to bottom right. I know how to read.’

  ‘According to Seed, Mary Trelease is dead—he killed her. What does he care what I told or didn’t tell a supposedly dead woman? Sir, if you met him . . . He’s like a man possessed. He was super-rational, as if by using logic he could persuade me. Kept saying, “If I start with the one thing I know beyond all doubt, which is that I killed Mary Trelease, then I infer that what you’re telling me about her being alive and unharmed can’t be true.” Read it!’ Simon picked up papers from Proust’s desk and dropped them again, looking for the notes he’d brought in with him. He couldn’t find them. He knew Seed’s words by heart, anyway.

  ‘ “The only other explanation is that I killed someone who later came back to life, and who’s the woman you met. Since I don’t believe in the supernatural, I can’t believe in that as a possibility.” Does any of that sound normal or natural to you?’ Simon demanded. ‘Someone’s going to get hurt, sir, if they haven’t already. I’ve got a really bad feeling about it.’

  The Snowman sighed. ‘All right, Waterhouse. You set out to wear me down and you’ve succeeded. Take statements from the whole motley bunch if it makes you happy.’

  Was Simon dreaming? Could it be that easy? Proust made a series of huffing noises and straightened the piles of paper on his desk. Watching him reconsider his position on an issue, however small, was like watching a super-tanker gearing up to change course.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Nancy Beddoes comes first, though.’ There was always going to be a catch. ‘Dull though it is, we have to give priority to the crimes we know exist.’ The inspector looked up. ‘Which means Aidan Seed et al. will have to wait until you’ve completed your grand tour of the UK and all two hundred and seventy-six statements are in.’

  ‘But, sir . . .’

  ‘But sir nothing. Do you own a road atlas?’ Proust reached into the pocket of the jacket that was draped over his chair and pulled out a ten-pound note. ‘Buy one.’ He threw the money at Simon. ‘It’s about time you learned that some maps go over the page.’

  Ruth Bussey’s front door stood wide open. The black VW Passat—the one she’d made her escape in on Friday—wasn’t there, but there was a green Daewoo parked on a grass verge outside the lodge house, so someone was in. Aidan Seed?

  Charlie moved out of the way as two jogging women appeared, chatting as they ran between the bollards at the park gates and up the path, past the lodge. With Ruth’s coat draped over her arm, Charlie walked towards the house. She’d been hoping to have another chat with Ruth, but perhaps it was better this way, since Charlie was also curious to meet Aidan, see what sort of man confesses to a murder that neither he nor anyone else has committed.

  She’d got as far as the small porch when a tall, thin man wearing a yellow fluorescent jacket over a grey suit darted out of the house, nearly banging into her. He had a wispy beard, glasses with large lenses. Charlie thought he looked exactly as a goat would, if animals were people. There was a flare of recognition in his eyes when he saw her. ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘You know who I am?’ Stupid question. Who in Spilling didn’t know? It was a small town and Charlie was its most famous fuck-up.

  ‘I know that coat,’ he said, looking down at it to avoid meeting Charlie’s eye. ‘Ruth picked a bad time to lose it with the boiler packing in. It breaks down every three months on average, and Muggins here has to spend a day twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the engineers. Never be a landlord, that’d be my advice to you.’

  ‘You’re not Aidan, then,’ said Charlie.

  The goat extended his hand. ‘Malcolm Fenton, Area Manager for Parks and Landscapes. I’ll take that off you if you like.’

  Charlie hesitated. If she gave the coat to Fenton, she’d lose her opportunity to talk to Ruth again. Mainly she wanted to ask about the newspaper article. What was Ruth’s interest in her? She was about to tell Fenton she’d catch Ruth at work when she saw that she’d lost his attention. ‘On time for once,’ he said, looking over her shoulder. ‘Excuse me.’ Charlie turned and watched him trot down the porch steps. Beyond the park gates, prevented from entering by the two black bollards, was a white van with the words ‘Winchelsea Combi Boilers’ painted in blue on its side.

  Fenton pulled a large bunch of keys out of his pocket, unlocked something at the top of one of the bollards and lowered it into the ground. Behind the van’s greasy windscreen, one of the men from Winchelsea Combi Boilers chewed gum with a ferocity that made Charlie wonder if it wasn’t gum at all but an organ torn from its rightful owner’s body.

  She glanced at the lodge’s open door, started to edge towards it. ‘Sorry,’ Fenton shouted after her. ‘I’d rather you didn’t go in. I know you’re a policewoman, but all the same.’ He looked apologetic. Policewoman—did people still say that? ‘If you leave the coat with me, I’ll see Ruth gets it.’

  ‘The door’s wide open,’ Charlie pointed out. ‘The boiler repairmen are going in, presumably.’

  ‘They practically live here,’ said Fenton irritably. ‘I don’t mean to be ungracious, but Ruth’s a private person. I know for a fact she wouldn’t want me to let a stranger into her home.’ He sighed. ‘This is a little awkward. I mean, clearly Ruth’s made herself known to you if you’ve got her coat, but . . .’ He looked away quickly, annoyed with himself for saying too much. ‘She didn’t tell me she was going to make contact with you, or to expect you, so I’m afraid I can’t let you in.’

  Fenton’s choice of words made Charlie feel uneasy. Had Ruth confided in him about Aidan’s bizarre confession? No, it didn’t fit. Made herself known to you. That implied Ruth was someone the police might either want or need to know about, that there was a pre-existing connection of some sort between them. Charlie couldn’t understand it.

  ‘Do you know a Mary Trelease?’ she asked.

  No adverse reaction to the name. Fenton considered it, then shook his head.

  ‘Is that CCTV?’ Charlie was looking at the lodge’s roof. She’d spotted another camera on the other side of the porch, above a ground-floor window. Was that why there were leaves clinging to the house’s every surface, for camouflage? ‘When were the cameras put in?’

  ‘Why do you want to know that?’ asked Fenton.

  Charlie substituted
a smile for an answer.

  ‘The park had an infestation of teenage thugs a while back. Ruth suggested installing CCTV. The council thought it was a good idea.’ His tone was defensive.

  ‘When you say Ruth’s a private person . . .?’ Charlie began.

  ‘I don’t like the slant of your questions. Ruth’s a perfectly ordinary woman and an excellent tenant. She takes her responsibilities seriously, that’s all. Hers is a service tenancy.’ Fenton sighed, as if he’d been tricked into saying more than he wanted to. ‘The lodge tenant, in exchange for a much-reduced rent, is supposed to be of assistance in the park when necessary, particularly in emergencies and out of hours. If someone falls down and breaks their leg on the path, Ruth would be expected to get involved—she’s got a list of emergency numbers, but she’d be the first point of contact.’

  ‘Most of the private people I know wouldn’t live in a public park,’ said Charlie, guessing that Fenton had been surprised by Ruth’s suggestion of installing surveillance cameras, or else why the guarded reaction? Had it been a suggestion or a request, a plea? What was it about his model tenant that Fenton was withholding out of loyalty?

  His resistance was like bellows to a fire. Charlie was tempted to run up the steps and into Blantyre Lodge after the men from Winchelsea Combi Boilers. How much of Ruth Bussey’s home would she be able to see before Fenton dragged her out? Mad people’s houses had a distinctive look about them; you knew instantly. She sighed. That way lay an official complaint, which was all she needed. She slipped the article from the Rawndesley and Spilling Telegraph out of the coat’s pocket and put it in her bag.

  ‘Put that back,’ Fenton snapped. Oh, he knew Charlie’s history all right, and she knew his type. He wouldn’t have dared take that tone with the police under normal circumstances. Only with an officer he knew had been disgraced and nearly fired.

  She’d changed her mind about giving him the coat. ‘I don’t feel comfortable about leaving this with a stranger,’ she said. ‘Ask Ruth to make contact with me again if she wants it back.’

  After Blantyre Park, Charlie told herself she was going straight to work to get on with the chore that had been hanging over her for the past fortnight: drafting Counsellor Vesey’s survey and accompanying letter. She told herself again and again, but no matter how many times she repeated the instruction, her brain defied her, and she found herself driving out to the Winstanley estate. She’d had enough of hearing second-hand reports; she wanted to meet the still-alive Mary Trelease, see if she was frightened, as Gibbs had claimed, or if there was anything about her that might frighten someone else.

  Like Aidan Seed. Charlie frowned at the idea. It would be a strange reaction to fear, pretending you’d killed somebody. Unless you can’t bear the thought that they exist. So you pretend they don’t any more, and you cast yourself in the role of killer because it makes you feel brave instead of like their victim . . . Charlie smirked at her silly theory. It was impossible to speculate, that was what made this different from every other situation she’d dealt with since joining the police. Different, and harder to stop thinking about. Usually she could come up with some sort of hypothesis to use as a starting point, however wrong it turned out to be. Not now. She could think of literally nothing that would explain the behaviour of Ruth Bussey and Aidan Seed—even a rampant shared insanity didn’t seem to fit the bill. It made her feel stupid, which she hated.

  At the cul-de-sac end of Megson Crescent, three young boys with shaved heads were doing wheelies on their bikes. When Charlie got out of her car and they saw her uniform, they disappeared so fast that she couldn’t help thinking of the scene in the film E.T., where the kids pedal so hard they take off into the sky.

  She locked her car. Loud, aggressive music was coming from one of the houses at the far end of the road, near where the boys had been. She supposed she’d better try and track them down to whichever house they’d holed up in, encourage them to make their way to school. Not that their teachers would thank her for it.

  As she walked along the cul-de-sac, she counted off the odd numbers. Five and seven each had a boarded-up window. In a first-floor window at number nine, she saw parts of small faces before the curtains were yanked shut. She knew that if she rang the doorbell, she’d get no answer.

  Higher priority than the boys was getting that music turned down. As she got closer to the house it was coming from, she felt the pavement shake under her feet. She couldn’t believe it when she saw the number on the door: fifteen. The thumping noise was coming from Mary Trelease’s house. Ruth Bussey had said Mary Trelease was around forty, so what was she doing listening to . . .? Charlie dismissed the ridiculous thought, embarrassed by it. What were forty-year-olds supposed to listen to? James Galway, with the volume turned down extra-low so as not to wake the cat?

  She’ll never hear the doorbell, thought Charlie, pressing it anyway. She stood back and stared at the house. Like the others on the street, it was an ugly red-brick semi with an entirely flat faμade, no bay windows to give it character. Weeds grew between the broken flagstones that led to the front door. By the side of the house, next to a drain, was a scalloped lead pot with a small dead tree in it. Charlie touched one of the branches. It crumbled between her finger and thumb.

  She stepped back out on to the road and looked up at the top windows. None of the curtains were open. All were as thin as handkerchiefs, she noticed, and they’d been hung badly, so they didn’t fall straight. Some had holes in them where the fabric had decayed, been torn or burned. This was far from being the sort of house Charlie would have expected an artist to live in. She struggled to bring to mind the few facts she knew about art or artists. Vincent Van Gogh had been dirt poor. Olivia had made Charlie watch a docu-drama about him once. Admittedly, he probably wouldn’t have given a toss about the state of his curtains.

  ‘They can’t have called you already. I’ve only been gone five minutes.’ An angry, skinny woman with deeply ingrained wrinkles around her eyes, nose and mouth appeared beside Charlie. It looked almost as if someone had scored down the middle of her face with a Stanley knife, so pronounced were the lines. She had a caramel-coloured birthmark, the one Aidan Seed had described to Simon, and was wearing a black duffle-coat, black trousers, white trainers and a purple woolly hat that looked as if it had a lot of hair stuffed into it. Her ears, Charlie noticed, were tiny, the lobes almost non-existent—again, as Aidan had described. In her gloved hands the woman—Mary Trelease—held a packet of Marlboro reds, a red plastic lighter and what looked like a small green box.

  ‘They?’ Charlie asked. On first appearance, there was nothing sinister about Trelease. She dressed like someone who didn’t give a damn what she looked like. Charlie had been through similar phases.

  ‘The neighbours. I’ll turn it down, all right? Give me a chance.’ She sprinted off round the side of the house. Charlie followed her. It was hard to avoid hearing the song that was blasting out, the word ‘survivor’ being repeated again and again. It was a more stringent and hysterical than usual variation on the theme of he-done-me-wrong-but-I’m-still-strong. It was the sort of song Charlie would write if she could write songs, full of posturing and bravado.

  After a few seconds the music stopped, though its imprint still pulsed in Charlie’s brain. She took the open kitchen door as an invitation, and was about to go inside when Mary startled her by jumping down from the doorstep on to the narrow path that adjoined the house. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Satisfied?’ She eyed Charlie contemptuously, shifting her negligible weight from one trainered foot to the other, still holding the cigarettes, lighter and green container, which Charlie now saw was a box of Twinings Peppermint tea.

  ‘Are you Mary Trelease?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was the song?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘The song you’ve just turned off. What’s it called?’ Some people were willing to answer harmless questions; others weren’t. Charlie wanted to know which category Mary Trele
ase belonged to before she asked her about Aidan Seed and Ruth Bussey.

  ‘Is this some kind of joke? Look, if the petty arseholes at number twelve have—’

  ‘I’m not here about the music,’ said Charlie. ‘Though while we’re on the subject, that volume’s unacceptable at any time of day. Why leave it on so loud if you’re going out?’

  Mary opened her packet of cigarettes, put one in her mouth and lit it. She didn’t offer one to Charlie. ‘If you’re not here about the music, I can guess what you are here about.’

  Her voice was at odds with her surroundings. Charlie hadn’t been able to hear it properly for as long as the music had been playing. What was someone who spoke like a member of the royal family doing on the Winstanley estate? Why hadn’t Simon mentioned her accent? ‘My name’s Sergeant Zailer, Charlie Zailer. I’m part of the community policing team for this area.’

  ‘Zailer? The same Sergeant Zailer who was all over the news a couple of years back?’ Mary’s brown eyes were wide, avid.

  Charlie nodded, struggling to contain her discomfort. Most people weren’t quite so open about it. Most people shuffled and looked away, as Malcolm Fenton had, and their awkwardness made her forget, for a second, her own pain and humiliation. I should have resigned two years ago, she thought. All her allies, the people who had told her she’d done nothing wrong and advised her to brazen it out, had done her a disservice. For two years, Charlie had felt as if she’d been in hiding in public; if there was a trickier professional situation to be in, she couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  ‘Community policing,’ said Mary, smiling vaguely. ‘Does that mean they demoted you?’

  ‘I transferred. By choice.’

  ‘It was just after I moved to Spilling when it was in the papers, ’ said Mary. ‘Made me wonder what sort of area I’d moved to, but I don’t think there have been any policing scandals since, have there?’ She smiled. ‘You’re a one-off.’ Seeing Charlie flustered and at a loss, she added, ‘Don’t worry, it makes no odds to me. You’ll have had your reasons, no doubt.’