John Eider - Not a Very Nice Woman

You’ll notice I’m drifting into supposition there, for I do not know her story, only piecing the little I do know together. But then look at my immediate situation: I am alone after midnight at a table in the flat of a woman lying drugged in the next room, the Inspector of police in a similar state not ten feet away. I am drinking not enough to get drunk but only to hold my nerve as I contemplate what lies ahead. As such my mental waters are hardly likely to be placid. There is a school of thought suggesting that so repressed is the English gentleman that only when his very life is in danger is he allowed to show emotion. Is that why I now leave to face a murderer, because I need the release?

For those facts that you confirmed to me, I thank you, but it it’s for me to finish this. I failed twice in my duty to protect my friends; now I must put myself at risk if that is what’s required to put that right. And do not feel guilty yourself, Inspector, for remember I have found out for myself where this man lives. You have given nothing away.

Thank you for your help, thank you for being their final friend.

Yours,

Derek Waldron,

The Cedars,

Southney

Grey sat back after digesting that epic, not sure what it told him, only glad that Derek’s plan didn’t seem to have been fulfilled. He had missed his injured correspondent leave in the ambulance, but walked out of the house and caught a medic packing up his fluorescent Volvo,

‘The man you were treating, what were his injuries?’

‘Nothing major, just generally roughed up. He was very disoriented though, and given his age we have to be careful.’

‘”Very disoriented”, thought Grey. Yet his direction of travel had seemed certain enough the night before.

The next half-an-hour was not pleasurable. Cori not available to travel with, he found a space in the backseat of one of the patrol cars scouring the streets for Patrick Mars. This also kept him out of the way of senior officers judging his conduct; although the others in the car were Glass’ people, and would have heard, or heard of, Glass’ broadside in the hall. At least being junior to him, and they being occupied with the search, left him free from criticism for a while.

Not that he wasn’t beating up himself. That he had messed up was obvious, but he hadn’t yet worked out precisely how. There were specific decisions made: taking Ludmila out of the hotel, for one; but she and the other residents of the Cedars had been safest of all last night. What else? Not backing Glass in taking the risk on arresting Mars last evening: that had been a big call; but he would make the same decision again, as not even Glass could not have believed how careless Mars would be in leaving evidence scattered around the house. There was a logical flaw, and that was in not deducing Derek Waldron’s part in all this. Yet who could have predicted how he’d act?

He cursed Superintendent Rose too, for butting into the argument in the hallway before he could issue any defence, and so leave the impression with Glass either that he had no defence or that he needed his boss to defend him. But most of all he hated Glass, who’d singularly messed up his operation and then blamed him for everything.

The half hour was only relieved by a call from Cori, relating the stellar batch of facts: those of Esther finding the letter; of her having a brother, Peter; of her calling him that night and how he might then have called their father.

‘And I think Mars hid in the plants at the end of the corridor,’ she had concluded, ‘That’s how nobody saw him when they went to their rooms at ten o’clock.’

In the backseat of the squad car he by turns lamented his lot and mulled the case over, as Rose requested he do. Up front the radio crackled: Mars was on the Hills estates.

At the centre of the Hills was a shopping and services precinct build at the same time as the houses and flats around it, and intended as a focal hub. Like many an environment created one-off from a plan (rather than grown up organically like most town centres before the Twentieth Century) there were parts that didn’t work, corners shunned by shoppers, other areas a haven for kids and not easily policeable; there were paved paths unused and grass spaces with diagonal dirt tracks running across them.

At the centre of area was ‘the Shops’, as the locals could only bring themselves to call it: a large square building, the bottom layer of which were storefronts, and above these two further floors windowless from the front and which displayed instead murals of the sort designed by Left-leaning community visionaries in the Seventies and Eighties — here a diverse mix of smiling faces; beside it a huge tree acting as metaphor for — simultaneously — the roots of history and the branches of society.

Behind these large pictures were the first-floor storerooms for the shops below them, as well as half-hidden offices for local firms and the cooperative that managed the centre. From past visits to the interior, Grey remembered the open centre of the building on the upper floors and how it brought in more light than you’d imagine, the varying uses that the different spaces above the shops were put to, and the stairs and corridors which linked these spaces; and which if you knew your way, could bring you out onto the roof above the artwork the equivalent of three floors up.

Inspector Glass was already there of course, approaching Grey as he stepped out of the car,

‘You know, when they painted that picture of the faces they missed a lot of people out.’

‘Who do you mean?’ said Grey, scanning the huge mural afresh for something he had missed. He checked the beaming visages, ‘Every nationality imaginable is represented.’

‘But look, every one of them is smiling — what about all the bloody miserable people who have to shop here?’

Grey imagined this was intended as a joke, and so meant Glass was trying to build bridges. Maybe not, but either way Grey was allowed to stay at a scene that, as a purely public-safety episode, was uniform’s domain.

Facing the building’s front was an area of paving, benches and knee-high concrete bowls containing seasonally-replenished flowerbeds. In the ten minutes or so since the alert was raised, within this space had formed a crowd. From his position by the hastily parked squad cars lined behind this open space, Grey scanned the people. He imagine most of them were those already nearby shopping, socialising, drinking coffee or doing whatever among the cluster of shops; or else on their way to or back from the various public amenities nearby: Citizen’s Advice Bureau, Connexions youth unemployment service, the Safe amp; Sound elderly housing maintenance office, SureStart’s nursery service for working mothers, or the town’s two-storey JobCentre Plus next door. These numbers were quickly swelled as word got to those living nearby — for houses and flats directly overlooked the precinct.

Even as the officers stood there more people arrived, and soon there were upwards of two-hundred in that unevenly paved area with the wafting trees either side. To half-hearted efforts at calling the crowd back there was little attention given, the people eager to see what was happening. There was a general sense of no one actually knowing what was going on, only an excitement that something might be occurring, as those who had seen what had actually happened were lost in the crowd. This expectation and uncertainty were shared by the officers, who sometimes paused from issuing orders to look up at the large building themselves.

Grey shared this sense of being witness to something. The day was sunny and this lent the area’s brickwork a joyous redness, the slabs a dusty, careworn feel. This, along with the animation of the people’s faces brought Grey some residual cheer even as he contemplated the nightmare now unfolding on the roof; for it was up there, to the roofline above the murals, that people’s eyes were now training on, though none quite sure what they were seeing… and then they saw it clear.