A Death in the Woods Read online

  CHAPTER 5

  KEEPIN’ IT CLASSY

  Tuesday 3 November

  Over the bridge.

  The long curve of Kidbury Road.

  Into the driveway of Harebell House.

  A crack, loud and angry, was followed by the clattering sound of birds dispersing. Such a commonplace rural sound, but shotguns always made Jess tense up. It was one of the few attitudes she shared with the Judge; he abhorred hunting, and always had.

  The gunshot reverberated. In the woods. Against the hills. Through the bowl of the valley. In Jess’s mind, Patricia Smalls – of all people, she thought – had set a loose end dangling with that arch innuendo about the tragedy in Iris’s life. Jess hated loose ends.

  In the house, the smell of lentils promised something healthy for lunch. Jess visualised her stash of Findus Crispy Pancakes and felt better. As she entered the kitchen, a furtive kerfuffle at the back door made her ask, ‘What’re you up to there, Bogna?’

  ‘Nothing isn’t it.’ Bogna shooed something away. Whispered, ‘Go, my darling,’ and a fluffy shape hightailed it across the terrace. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘Always.’ The jostling clouds outside made noon feel like evening. The fluffy something had melted away. The trees, so benign in high summer, looked like the ideal hiding place in November.

  ‘You been at work?’ Bogna laughed heartily, as if she’d made an excellent joke.

  ‘We’ve talked about this. It’s a proper job, even if it is only part time. I’m a lecturer in Medieval History at Bristol University and before you ask again, yes, they pay me.’

  ‘Easy money,’ scoffed Bogna. The kettle was on. The teapot stood ready. She took down Jess’s favourite tea leaves. ‘To chitty chat about old stuff.’ She warmed the pot. ‘Clearing horse poo from Polish stables, girlie, that’s real work. Not pretending to be police lady.’

  ‘It’s consultancy, not pretending to . . .’ Jess gave up. It was easier to surrender to Bogna. ‘You’re fishing, aren’t you? You want gossip about the murder.’

  ‘Talk.’

  ‘First, biscuits.’

  There was a brief stand-off before Bogna produced some custard creams.

  ‘Come here, you little fools.’ Jess was rough with the little blonde rectangles.

  ‘They say gypsy’s son done it,’ said Bogna.

  ‘We don’t say gypsy anymore.’ Jess recalled saying it to Mitch, just yesterday. ‘Abonda’s romany.’ And I like her. The thought came fully formed and unbidden.

  ‘Here comes my Mary,’ said Bogna fondly. There had been Slavic grumbling about ‘More bloody work for me’ when Mary moved in, but now she had a soft spot for the gung-ho girl.

  ‘Jaysus,’ said Mary, by way of hello. ‘I could eat a child’s arse through a chair. Got anything for me, Boggie?’

  Boggie always had something for Mary.

  To Jess, Mary said, ‘I saw you.’ The toolbelt around her waist looked right on Mary, like a Versace accessory. ‘Yesterday. In the market square. Flirting your head off with that Aussie.’

  ‘I wasn’t flirting.’ Jess was still getting acclimatised to the Big Brother scrutiny of small-town life. It was one of the reasons she’d fled in the first place. ‘I don’t flirt.’

  ‘He’d make a nun flirt. The bum on him. Bet he goes like a choo-choo. But, God, the baggage.’

  ‘Baggage?’

  ‘The horde of kids. The dead wife. All too much.’ Mary looked Jess in the eye. ‘So don’t, okay? Remember, Jess Castle, you are not second wife material.’

  ***

  In her room, Elvis crooning, cup of tea cooling, Jess read and re-read an essay. A natural nerd, she couldn’t focus.

  It felt wrong to draw the curtains in the middle of the day, but she did just that. Thor hammered away inside her head. The Norse version of Hell was a wolf’s belly, and the darkening of the year was the wolf loping after the light, putting it out, bite by snapping bite.

  Steady and greedy, like November. Like Norris.

  She knew in her bones it was he who had torn apart a little creature and left its heart on her step.

  Move a muscle, change a thought: Jess dialled Rupert’s number.

  ‘So,’ she said when he picked up. ‘You’re home. Thanks for telling me.’

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ said Rupert, ‘that my mother is outsourcing her job to part-time university lecturers. Hello, Jess.’

  ‘Hellos are so yesterday. I saw you.’

  ‘Where?’ He was almost laughing.

  ‘You were in the Spinning Jenny. At our table.’

  ‘The table in the window, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. Well. Our . . . Yeah.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that’s outrageous behaviour on your behalf, Rumpole.’

  ‘You’re so fucking cheeky, Jess.’

  ‘I’ve been calling you. You didn’t get back to me.’ Jess heard how needy, how girlish, that sounded, and shrank. ‘Look, doesn’t matter. Fancy a coffee? We could catch up.’

  Rupert sighed. He sounded tired. ‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘I have clients. Edinburgh’s tough. Jack’s drafted a proposal I have to read before I go back up.’

  All these public schoolboys with their public schoolboy names.

  ‘Why not recite the document to me in the Spinning Jenny? I’m sure it’s fascinating.’

  He didn’t respond. She heard office noises and the faint thrum of his breath. His breath smelled of gum and coffee, she knew. ‘Rumpole? You still there?’

  ‘Sorry.’ He was back with her. ‘I’m leafing through this case before meeting my client later. What were you saying?’

  ‘Nothing, I . . .’ She changed her mind. ‘I was just about to make you an offer no man could refuse.’

  ***

  He didn’t refuse.

  Jess’s step was light – as light as DMs can be – as she ran downstairs. She stopped at the front door and backed away. Just in case there was another little gift. She ran to the back door. ‘Outta the way, Moose,’ she said.

  On the terrace, blocking her way, was a skull. Not human. A mammal. Biggish. Scraps of flesh clung to it.

  Jess’s scream brought Bogna.

  ‘Hmm. Probably badger,’ she said. Then, ‘Pick it up, silly girl! Throw away.’

  Jess, unwilling to lose face, stooped down. When she gingerly took up the skull, a glob of squirming maggots fell to the flagstones.

  ***

  The car clacked – Morris Minors really do clack – past Blackdown Woods, Aunt Iris at Jess’s side.

  ‘You know I loathe surprises.’ Aunt Iris was not really her aunt. Jess had never bothered to pin down the correct title for the widow of her father’s cousin. Iris was older than the Judge in years, very much younger in outlook. She was soignée, with nuclear charm.

  Beautiful, too, in a white on white way, the hair and the skin contradicted by the blue of her canny eyes. ‘Where are we lunching? I have a fondness for Eddie’s chops.’

  You used to mix cocktails for your husband on Mount Kenya.

  ‘Nearly there, Iris.’

  ‘This is the Partway Road.’ Iris pursed her lips. ‘There’s nothing on Partway Road.’

  ‘It’s fun to be in charge of you for once. See how you like being bossed around.’

  ‘Darling, as it’s you, I don’t mind one bit.’

  Never usually a favourite, Jess basked in Iris’s berserk bias. She thought of Patricia Smalls’s advice to look in on her ‘dear old auntie’. I’ll enjoy telling the lady mayoress that when I called, Iris was dancing in a vintage Balenciaga kaftan. ‘Something occurred to me, Iris.’

  ‘Hmm?’ Iris’s air of distraction had been cultivated during her youth when insouciance was fashionable.

  ‘I have no memories, not one, of David.’

  Iris gave her another ‘Hmm’. Her son, David, had only briefly been Lord Kidbury before his death in a hunting accident at the age of twenty-eight. ‘You were,’ she said, ‘only three when he passed.’


  ‘Would we have got on?’

  ‘I dare say.’

  ‘Do you think he’d have liked me? Was he—’

  ‘How can one know? Are we there yet, Jess?’

  ‘That’s what Baydrian always says.’ The Morris coughed to a halt. ‘And we are there. Or here, rather.’

  Iris stared. ‘You can’t be serious, child?’

  ***

  At a table adorned with a red and white checked wipe-clean tablecloth, sat a quartet.

  Jess. Iris. Mary. Rupert. The offer he couldn’t refuse was a Jolly Cook burger.

  ‘Takes me back to being a kid,’ said Rupert. ‘I used to love it here.’

  ‘Iris is a Jolly Cook virgin,’ said Jess.

  ‘I had hoped to remain virgo intacta forever.’ Iris suspiciously cut into her Big Cook Burger with a knife and fork.

  ‘There’re some similarities between Jolly Cook and your gaff, Iris.’ Mary picked up a spoon. ‘Youse both have cutlery with your crest on.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’ Iris studied her knife. It bore the famous trademark drawing of a chubby chef. Her own silverware back at Kidbury Manor bore the family crest, dating from their ennoblement in 1727. She chewed. ‘It’s rather moreish,’ she said, with surprise.

  ‘That’s all the delicious E numbers,’ said Jess.

  ‘The milkshakes,’ said Rupert, ‘taste as if they’d milked plastic cows.’

  ‘That’s why I like them.’ Jess’s straw made an obscene noise in the bottom of her plastic cup.

  ‘We’ve caught this place just in time,’ said Rupert. He was boyish rather than lawyerish as he wiped ketchup from his mouth with a cheap paper napkin. ‘They begin refurbishment tomorrow. There’ll be spirulina smoothies on the menu, and the upholstery won’t stick to you in hot weather.’ He looked wistful.

  ‘Hard to believe they’re going ahead with that,’ said Jess. ‘Not when there’s been an unsolved murder in one of their branches. Nic Lasco must be furious with the murderer, ruining his big campaign.’

  ‘He drops into the Druid’s Head,’ said Mary. ‘Looking down his nose at me bar snacks. He’s slumming it with the Jolly Cooks; there’s no way a food snob like him would approve of their food. Bogna’s cracked about him, but I wouldn’t have him gift-wrapped.’ Mary’s Dublin accent doubled or tripled the effect of her critique. ‘Sure, he’s no juice in him. If you peeked in his Y-fronts he’d be all smooth, like a Ken doll.’

  Jess wasn’t listening; two people at a corner table had caught her eye.

  ‘D’you remember,’ said Rupert, bringing Jess back to them, ‘the day your mum made Stephen and me bring you to a Jolly Cook?’ Rupert and Jess’s brother had been inseparable at school. ‘You were only about eight. We were horrified at having to drag a girl out with us.’

  ‘You sure that happened?’ said Jess.

  ‘Typical.’ Rupert slapped down the scratchy napkin. ‘You do remember.’

  ‘Why do people say that?’ laughed Jess. ‘If I don’t, I don’t.’

  ‘It wasn’t this Jolly Cook. It was larger. Think it’s closed down now. You ordered the biggest burger and threw it up all over my jeans.’

  ‘Keepin’ it classy,’ said Mary. ‘Even as an eight-year-old.’

  ‘That’s my Jess,’ said Iris. She had never told Jess off. Not once. Even during the teenage years, when Jess had skulked around in goth make-up denouncing the family for its bourgeois privilege, Iris had agreed, saying, ‘Quite right, darling, we’re the most appalling leeches.’

  ‘You must remember.’ Rupert wouldn’t let it go. ‘Your mum was livid ‘cos we all ended up at Richleigh A&E. Stephen and I clambered up onto a flat roof at the back of the diner. You were so titchy, we didn’t realise you’d climb up after us. You always wanted to be in the thick of it.’ He stopped. Smiled. . ‘We were whirling round, like the idiots we were, and Stephen knocked you clean off the roof. It was only a short drop but, God, we were terrified. You had concussion. You really don’t remember?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Jess was staring at the corner table. Wondering what Abonda was discussing so animatedly with the scrawny woman opposite.

  Rupert’s sigh, although small, spoke volumes.

  ‘Did I tell you our news?’ Iris seldom spoke above a murmur; it gave her conversation the feeling of secrets being shared. ‘We have an angel at the manor.’

  ‘Angel? Have you gone all new age on us, Aunty dear?’

  ‘It’s a finance term. A silent partner. An investor who doesn’t meddle.’

  Jess didn’t understand the ins and outs of Kidbury Manor’s modern incarnation as a tourist attraction. Iris’s grandson moaned good-naturedly about being ‘broke’, a claim that jarred with the enormous house, and the grounds that went on and on, and the bloody title. ‘How much has this angel given you?’ She put a hand to her mouth. ‘Christ. Was that rude?’

  ‘Very. Two million.’

  ‘Shit! Sorry.’

  ‘Do stop apologising, darling. It’s dull.’

  Mary asked, ‘Who is this idiot?’

  ‘An idiot who values his privacy.’

  ‘Come on, spill.’ Jess held up a plastic knife with menace.

  ‘You know how good I am at keeping secrets, Jess. I’ve kept enough of yours.’

  A look passed between them. A look that said, The Judge will never know about the day you stole one of his cigars and vomited all over your classmates in primary school.

  There was also the little matter of Jess’s college fees. When she rebelled against parental pressure to go into the law, the Judge had refused to pay for her to study history. A mysterious benefactor had emerged. Jess had always assumed it was her mother; she’d recently realised it wasn’t.

  Banana Splits arrived. Jess felt something close to lust.

  ‘C’mon, Jess, spill.’ Mary’s mouth was full of aerosol cream. ‘Who bumped off Denis Heap? Was it a psycho? Or a love triangle? Or did somebody’s hand slip and nail him to the table?’

  The Kidbury Echo had a lot to answer for. Eden hadn’t wanted the general public to know every blood-soaked detail.

  ‘Shush!’ Jess glanced neurotically at Abonda, who was still absorbed in conversation with her companion. ‘The prime suspect’s mum is sitting right over there. Don’t look.’

  Mary looked.

  ‘I said don’t look!’

  ‘Whenever anybody says don’t look, you can bet your sweet bippy there’s something worth looking at,’ said Mary. Still looking.

  ‘That’s the dreadful Norris creature’s mother, isn’t it?’ Iris was more discreet. ‘Do they really think he murdered Mr Heap? He was a dreadful florist, but he didn’t deserve to die so horribly.’

  ‘What have they got on Norris?’ Rupert didn’t know he had cream on the end of his nose. Nobody told him.

  ‘I can’t divulge—’

  ‘Don’t say divulge.’ Mary threw a mayonnaise sachet at Jess. ‘Plain English please. For example, “I enjoy being a pretend policeperson but I choose not to give my mates fucking excellent goss.”’

  ‘Norris has form,’ said Rupert.

  Is he rescuing me from being put on the spot? Jess decided against that theory; lately, Rupert’s white steed was in the stable. Possibly it had been humanely put down.

  Mary listened, outraged. ‘You mean he only got four years for rape? How?’

  ‘Remember this is law, Mary. Not necessarily justice.’ Rupert outlined some indigestible truths. ‘The starting point for rape is four years. It was a horrible attack, but there were no mitigating factors. I don’t want to get too graphic, but Norris didn’t take photos, or have a sexually transmitted disease, for example.’ Rupert put his hand on Jess’s arm. ‘Your dad did his best with the case presented to him and put it on record that he was sceptical about parole. Most prisoners are eligible for release halfway through their sentence.’ He ploughed through the women’s scorn for the system. ‘Not Norris. He served the full term.’

  ‘It’s not enough.’ Mary was agitated. �
��They should string him up by his ball bag.’

  Iris agreed. ‘Very appropriate and laudably simple.’ She side-eyed Mary. ‘If done right.’

  Jess toyed with telling them about the heart and the rotting skull. She had no evidence that Norris was responsible. She kept her hunch to herself. For now.

  ‘Keep your voices down, ladies,’ said Rupert. ‘Abonda over there has a reputation. If she hears us she might curse us, like Barbara Singleton.’

  Iris, who had looked at her Banana Split from all angles, decided against it and pushed away her dish. ‘Barbara was a friend of your mother, Jess. Harriet was there the night Abonda prophesied her blindness.’

  ‘And?’ Jess, one Doc Marten in science, the other in superstition, was agog.

  ‘And the poor thing went blind.’ Iris widened her eyes. ‘Remarkable.’

  ‘A real live gypsy!’ breathed Mary.

  ‘Romany,’ said Jess.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Mary. ‘I might buy a spell off her. Get her to boil up an eye of newt and toe of frog. Anything to bring a decent man into town. No offence, Rupe.’

  ‘I’m way beyond being offended by you, Mary.’ Rupert turned to Jess and she knew what was coming. ‘Don’t get too involved, will you? It’s dangerous.’

  ‘It’s exciting,’ she parried. ‘And they need me.’ She silently dared him to dispute that, and he didn’t. ‘You’re repeating what you said in the summer, Rupert, and I helped solve those murders.’

  ‘You almost got yourself killed in the process. And me.’

  ‘What’s a near-drowning amongst friends?’ Jess’s light tone didn’t do justice to how she’d felt watching Rupert face down in the water.

  ‘But,’ he began.

  ‘Rupert, it’s none of your business.’

  Jess sensed Mary’s disapproval. And she saw how Rupert sat back, as if defeated. She would have snatched it back if she could, but it was the truth. Until one of them made a definitive move, she and Rupert were just friends. Nothing more.

  Iris stood. Rupert stood too; he’d been brought up that way. Iris said, ‘Shall we pay our compliments to the Jolly Cook and leave?’

  Lingering, Jess left a tip by her glass. She watched Rupert and Iris spar at the till over who would pay the bill.