John Eider - Not a Very Nice Woman

‘Oh, earlier, before she caught the coach.’

‘Before she went back to the Cedars on the night?’

‘I… really don’t know.’

Janice gave Cori a warning look, both knowing this was no place for such an interrogation, but she only had one question left and couldn’t leave without knowing the answer,

‘Maisie, is Peter still in touch with Patrick?’

‘Not that I know of.’

Cori struggled for the right words, ‘But is it possible that in such a situation as this, after hearing his sister so upset, he might call his father directly to ask for answers where Esther might be wary of doing so?’

‘It’s possible. He’s headstrong is my Peter, but honest with it. Don’t tar him with his family’s brush. He may be a Mars, but not all their men are devils.’

‘He kept his father’s name?’

‘As I say, he was never really a part of Esther and I’s project to start a new life: he was already keen to do his own thing. I think he feels the burden of his family’s history as much as anyone… Love! How long have you been standing there? You shouldn’t be listening to this.’

The women all turned to see Esther in the hallway, easily in earshot.

‘There’s something I need to tell you, Sergeant. It’s important.’

Janice, duty-bound, intervened; but like her mother Esther would not be held back,

‘Sergeant, when I went back that evening, there was someone else there.’

Cori wanted to speak, but the girl continued before she could get a word out,

‘You need to know this, to catch him. After I read the letter I knew I had to go back to Stella to ask her: ask her how she had been Mrs Mars, how she had bought the painting. I couldn’t ask anyone else, I had to ask her. So I went back. It was dark by then, I’d spent hours thinking about what to do.’

Maisie rushed up to Esther and held her, smoothing her hair as she did so,

‘You don’t have to say any of this now.’

‘No, Mum. I want to. The stairway was empty — I think everyone was watching TV — so I went up, and walked along to her door, but…’

‘Yes?’ asked Cori, curiosity getting the better of her.

‘Well, I’d never been there at night and it scared me, those plants at the end of the corridor, their shadows. And… there was someone in them, in the shadow, standing there… I couldn’t go any nearer. I didn’t go to her room, I turned around and ran off. I left her there; I left her there to be killed.’

Maisie clutched her daughter hard as she dissolved into tears; Cori intoning,

‘I must find the Inspector, I must relay this to him.’

Janice darted up close to the Sergeant, a fellow professional issuing their opinion in compassionate whispers,

‘The state Esther was in that night we can’t say what she saw. That statement we just heard wouldn’t stand in court.’

Cori placed a hand on Janice’s shoulder, ‘I sincerely hope she doesn’t have to be within a hundred miles of the place.’

‘Have you ever heard a story like it, Sergeant? And I don’t think either mother or daughter have begun to fully accept what this all leads to.’

These were Janice’s last words to Cori, and stayed with her as she left the Social Services building, Cori remembering that Ludmila Mars had been coming to that same realisation as Maisie the night before, the realisation of their having married a man who could strangle his own mother to death.

Her most urgent port of call was the Cedars, where amid the busyness of a morning’s routine Rachel Sowton seemed more detached than usual. Had Cori not heard from the station of what had happened here last night, she may have put the Duty Manager’s mood down to recent events catching up with her, maybe even a touch of shock. Even so such disconnectedness was a bad sign, the starting point for all manner of coping strategies that would lead her only to further isolation: drinking, prescription drugs, pessimistic thoughts.

‘Sergeant,’ the woman looked up from the duties she was performing automatically. ‘You’ve news on Derek?’ (She had already been told of the fracas at the Mars house.)

‘Sorry, no. I haven’t been back to the station. He’ll be at the hospital by now.’

‘Yes, I must call them.’

‘Look, do you have five minutes?’

At the top of the stairs, Rachel flicked the switch light as requested. Cori walked along the windowed corridor she had only seen in daylight, looking up to the bulbs above her head, their glow barely visible in the morning sun. Outside the first flat she came to and then outside Stella’s each bulb glowed like a golden chrysalis, throbbing in her light-adjusted eye and leaving coloured splodges; but outside the third flat, the one guarded by foliage, the bulb was a lifeless iris, dust-peppered and silver-grey.

‘Did you know this end bulb was out?’ called Cori.

‘It has been for months, but then there’s been no reason to change it.’

‘Thank you for your help. You can switch them off now.’

‘I’ll go and make that call.’

Only Stella and one other tenant had used this stretch of corridor in recent months, Cori realised as she stood there alone, and so would have grown used to the odd sight of creepers and leaves casting shadows across that far end at night. She walked into the botanical zone, brushing greenery aside and being careful not to tread on a frond or the long thin creepers that came off the cheeseplants.

For no good reason she tried again the flat door there that she knew to be locked, and looked through the frosted glass to see the interior that she couldn’t quite make out. She turned back to face along the corridor, her view half obscured, and thought of what it might be like here at night. She realised that someone with the required patience could have stayed half-hid here for hours, Stella and the other tenant probably not even casting a glance this way to catch a shadowed face in the moonlight.

Standing there Cori shivered, feeling something running through her as she inhabited the space that she now guessed had been occupied on Monday night by the killer. Not moving her feet, she looked down and all around for any sign, a clue, confirmation that Esther had not been imagining things. As she stood there the stem of a leaf brushed the back of her left hand, and without thinking she took it, her fingers running up and down its tactile fibres; unthinking, that was, until she felt a deep gouge interrupting the natural pattern. She looked at what she was holding and saw in the stem a series of deep indentations the shape of large fingernails, pushed in repeatedly and carving out little canoe-shaped gullies around which the fibres had since turned brown.

Her mind turned suddenly to Mars in interview, his gardener’s nails dirtied underneath. Still standing in the same spot, as if to move would be to lose her inspiration, she called the station and from there asked to be put through to the Coroner’s Office; and there to the doctor conducting the autopsy, who answered,

‘Ah, hello Sergeant. Your report is being written now.’ (These things were never ready as quickly as in the TV shows.)

‘Thank you, but I just needed to know one little thing. I’m not sure how to put this, but around the wound on Stella’s neck, was there anything green?’

‘Plant matter? Yes, the tiniest traces: on the bruised skin and in the cuts caused by the nails.’

God these people were good, she thought,

‘And is it possible to match that if I gave you the actual plant?’

‘Chlorophyll’s very similar plant to plant, but there might be something in the actual fibres. We can have a look for you.’

Forensics would already have checked the corridor outside Stella’s flat of course, but wouldn’t have thought of needing samples of the plants. Someone would be with her within the half-hour. Cori only had to pray Patrick Mars hadn’t scrubbed his nails in the meantime.