Weep Willow, Weep : A DI Stella Cole Read online

  ‘He could have, what, flown outwards? If the burglar had shoved him hard enough? He did a swan dive and hit the ground without tumbling. Landed on his right cheek, which accounts for the bruise, and died instantly.’

  Yasmin nodded. ‘That’s certainly a possibility. But there’s something else you should look at.’ She looked round and called out to a couple of CSIs. ‘Excuse me, could you turn him back over, please?’

  Stella and Yasmin stood back while the Noddy-suited CSIs bent to lift the corpse, laying it gently on its front.

  ‘Thank you,’ Yasmin said, squatting by the head. She took a biro from her top pocket and lifted a hank of hair. It looked dyed to Stella, the opaque, flat black older men often chose in the misguided belief it would make them appear younger. ‘Look at the marks on the scalp.’

  Stella looked closer at the pale skin beneath the sparse, matted hair. The area Yasmin was indicating bore two deep, bloody trenches. Each was about an inch long and a quarter-inch wide. They were spaced a quarter-inch apart.

  She swivelled round to look back up the stairs. No way had anything there caused such a distinctive pattern of injuries. Must have been the blow delivered by the burglar, then. But what kind of weapon would leave marks like these?

  A home-made cosh of some sort? She pictured a taped-up handle below a double striking surface. Two lengths of steel maybe? Circular cross-section engineering stock? She thought of the tools the guy who maintained her bike used. A heavy spanner might do it. Or a socket driver. They had all kinds of ridges cast or forged into them.

  ‘Tony chases the burglar out of the bedroom and catches him at the top of the stairs,’ she said. ‘The burglar turns, belts him on the back of the head with a weapon of some kind and more or less heaves him out so he flies down without rolling and dies at the bottom. I meant to ask, is his neck broken?’

  Yasmin pursed her lips. ‘Not sure. On a preliminary inspection, I’d say no, but I’ll only know for sure at the post mortem. And before you ask, today’s no good and tomorrow’s not looking great either.’ She gave Stella a wry, tired smile.

  Stella returned to the sitting room. She sat facing the fireplace and closed her eyes, trying to make sense of all that Yasmin had just told her. And then she realised what had been bugging her since she’d interviewed Jean. She reviewed the narrative she constructed of the events leading up to his murder.

  Tony was asleep. Reading between the lines of what Jean had said about using sleeping pills, he’d been deep enough to be snoring. The burglar entered the bedroom from the balcony.

  While rifling through Jean’s jewellery box, he knocked over the picture in its metal frame and the clatter had woken Tony. Startled, he’d looked around and clocked the intruder. He’d leapt out of bed, used the phrase Jean hadn’t cared for and given chase. First stopping to put his dressing gown on. Who did that? Pyjamas, sure. He was already wearing them. But a dressing gown? Really?

  Richard had woken once before Lola came along, convinced there was someone crashing about downstairs. They’d sat stock still in bed listening to the racket. Richard had bounded out of bed, stark naked, grabbed the strictly illegal cricket bat from the corner, and rushed downstairs, yelling at the top of his voice. Only when his laughter echoed up the stairs did Stella join him. She found him in the kitchen, by the open door, grinning sheepishly, the bat still in his hand.

  ‘It was a bloody tomcat,’ he said. ‘I said we should have blocked up that old cat flap.’

  She frowned and made another note. Two oddities and she still hadn’t had her first coffee of the day. Atypical injuries and a victim who dressed for a fight. He’d done well to catch a fleeing burglar.

  The female uniform she’d seen comforting Jean appeared by her side with a steaming mug. ‘Ma’am?’ she said softly.

  ‘Is that what I think it is?’ Stella asked, as she accepted the mug. She inhaled the aroma of some pretty fancy-smelling coffee.

  ‘Thought you might need one.’

  ‘You’re a star. Thank you so much.’

  Feeling the caffeine jacking up her heartrate, she rose from the sofa. There wasn’t anything else she could do here. She returned home for a much-needed shower and some breakfast before going into work, texting Richard before mounting her bike.

  ‘Hi,’ Richard said, as she walked into the kitchen. He was scrambling eggs and she caught the delicious smell of grilling bacon. ‘Want some?’

  She nodded then hugged him tightly from behind.

  ‘I love you, Mr Drinkwater.’

  ‘And I love you, Ms Cole.’

  ‘How’s Lola?’

  ‘Fast asleep. Kristina’s on her way. She said she’s been delayed by traffic but she’ll still be here by seven thirty, so we’re all good. How’s your day been so far?’

  She let him go and sat at the table, enjoying watching her husband cook.

  ‘Burglary gone wrong’s the story. A man dead at the bottom of the stairs. Head injury. Possible broken neck. Wife called it in. Said a burglar attacked him after he gave chase.’

  He turned to look at her, pulling his mouth to the right the way he did when he encountered something that piqued his curiosity. ‘And when you say, “the story”, you mean?’

  She sighed. ‘I don’t know. There’s something wrong with the crime scene. Actually there are lots of things wrong with it. Little things. But niggling things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the husband had enough time to put on his dressing gown.’

  ‘Maybe he already had it on. Maybe he was reading in bed when the guy broke in.’

  Stella wrinkled her nose. It was a good point. A lawyerly point. She pushed back, enjoying the opportunity to test her ideas with someone outside the Job.

  ‘Then why did he let him get all the way into the room before chasing him? Surely he’d have shouted and the guy would have reversed out and climbed down to the street.’

  Maybe he dropped off while he was reading. Maybe it was a really engrossing book and the guy was super-quiet.’

  ‘OK, but what about the injuries?

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘The pathologist said they were inconsistent with a fall downstairs.’

  Richard smiled, serving out the eggs onto two plates, and adding sizzling rashers of streaky bacon from the grill pan. He brought both plates over to the table and set one before Stella. ‘Eat.’

  He’d seasoned the eggs with cayenne pepper and cumin. The hit of spice lifted her more effectively than the coffee she’d drunk earlier.

  ‘Explain the injuries,’ she said through a mouthful of salty, smoky bacon.

  ‘I can’t. Or not without a bit more information. But you know as well as I do that real people have a habit of not conforming to the expectations set out in textbooks, legal or medical.’

  She finished her breakfast and went to see Lola. The baby looked up at her with those shining, achingly beautiful blue eyes, and gurgled. Stella gazed at her daughter, smiling, and felt the love in her heart as an almost physical pressure.

  ‘Hey, little Lo,’ she crooned. ‘Mummy has to go to work now. But we’ll play pat-a-cake later, OK? Pat-a-cake?’

  ‘Ba-ba.’

  Stella bent low over the cot and kissed Lola’s cheek, lingering to breathe in the milky, powdery smell of the top of her soft little head.

  On the way out, she stopped at the door to Richard’s home office.

  ‘Hey, I almost forgot, Mr Movie Buff.’

  He turned, smiling. ‘What?’

  ‘You’ll never guess who the wife is.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jean Muggeridge.’

  He frowned. She waited. She could see the machinery whirring inside his skull. There! A quick frown and then a smile as the tumblers clicked into place and the locked door of his encyclopaedic memory for films popped open.

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  She grinned. ‘I am.’

  ‘Deanna Del Rey?’

  ‘In the flesh.
Of which there’s quite a lot more than when she got the Oscar for Lie to Me, My Darling.’

  His eyes widened. ‘Wait. Did you see it? Was it there?’

  ‘Of course it was there! Where else would it be?’

  ‘My God, that’s amazing, Stel. What’s she like?’

  ‘Tell you tonight. Gotta go. I’ve a murder to solve.’

  She kissed him full on the lips, and left, laughingly avoiding his clumsy grab for her waist.

  Half an hour later, she was behind her desk at Paddington Green, reviewing the forensics evidence the CSIs had collected.

  Rather than supplying answers, it mainly supplied questions. Like, how had the burglar managed to enter the property, rifle through the jewellery box, grapple with and attack the husband, flee downstairs and leave through the front door without leaving a single trace of himself in the process. Like all good detectives, Stella had memorised and often repeated to herself the forensic science mantra known as Locard’s Exchange Principle. Every contact leaves a trace.

  She could think of explanations. He climbed the exterior of the house using his hands, so no tool marks in the stonework. He wore a cap, mask and gloves. And a nylon shell-suit that wouldn’t shed fibres. Smooth-soled shoes that wouldn’t leave prints. But they sounded contrived, even to her.

  Running out of explanations, she went to see her boss, Detective Superintendent Adam Collier. They called him The Model behind his back. Partly owing to his saturnine good looks, all brooding, heavy forehead and dark eyes, but also for his pernickety dress-sense, which included sharply tailored suits, crisp white shirts and ties knotted just so.

  She knocked and entered his office. He looked up from a report he was annotating with a red pen.

  ‘Stella. What can I do for you?’ he asked with a smile. ‘Please, sit.’

  She took the proffered chair.

  ‘I caught a murder early this morning, sir.’

  His smiled widened. ‘It’s Adam, remember? We don’t stand on ceremony at Paddington Green.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s just, it looks like an open and shut case. Burglar assaults householder. Householder falls downstairs. Dead at the scene. Wife the only witness.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But there’s something off about it. I’ve been trying to make all the pieces fit and they just won’t.’

  ‘So, go back to first principles. What do we know about murder? The basics?’

  ‘Ninety nine times out of a hundred, if it’s a domestic scene, look at the spouse first. The weird ones are rarer than unicorn poo.’

  ‘And therefore?’

  ‘And therefore I should look at the wife.’

  ‘Motives next.’

  ‘Abusive partner. Sexual jealousy. Money trouble.’

  ‘Did you pick up an abused-wife vibe?’

  ‘No. If anything I thought she was going to drown me in her tears.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘They live in a nice mews house in Kensington. Fancy car outside. Lots of real-looking bling in her jewellery box.’

  ‘Then, and forgive the accent, but cherchez la femme.’

  Stella left his office thinking, was it really that simple to solve a murder? You just looked at the basics and followed your copper’s training? She had to admit, it had worked pretty well for her so far. She went to find her DS and bagwoman, Frankie O’Meara.

  ‘Can you start putting together a profile of the dead man? I want to know if he was a player. He was her second husband so see if you can dig up previous marriages or relationships.’

  Frankie nodded. ‘If he was seeing someone on the side, that could be a motive for murder,’ she said, in her soft Belfast accent.

  By the end of the day, Stella was no further along. She’d been in court for half the afternoon and Frankie was still working on the victimology. She left the CID office at just before seven.

  With a sense of frustration, magnified by the gloomy atmosphere of the underground carpark, she thumbed the Triumph’s starter button and rode the big bike carefully up the ramp and out onto the Edgware Road.

  Closing the front door behind her, she dropped her keys into a little wooden bowl on a shelf and called out.

  ‘Anybody home?’

  ‘Shh,’ Richard hissed from the top of the stairs. ‘I just got Lola down.’

  He padded down the stairs in stockinged feet and kissed her as he reached the ground floor.

  ‘How is she?’ Stella asked, looking longingly up the stairs.

  ‘She’s fine. A bit scratchy at tea time, but we managed.’

  Stella tiptoed up and looked in on her sleeping daughter. Felt it again like a physical force, the surge of love that engulfed her as she stared down at her daughter’s sleeping form.

  ‘Night, night, little Lo,’ she whispered. Then she tiptoed out again.

  ‘Thank God I have a husband who can work from home,’ she said when she reached the kitchen. ‘I mean, Kristina’s great but at least with you able to get home early she’s not actually being raised by her nanny.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Richard said, leading her into the sitting room. ‘We’re doing all right, our little family. I’ve got a surprise for you.’

  ‘Oh, really? Will I like it?’

  She did. On the wooden breadboard, he’d set out a pizza, sliced into narrow wedges, and a bowl of green olives. Richard poured Chianti into two glasses and handed one to Stella.

  ‘Now, sit back and relax. Because it’s film night.’

  Stella grabbed a slice of pizza and bit off the point, chewing hungrily.

  ‘And what’s on the programme tonight, maestro?’

  He turned on the TV and picked up the remote. Moments later, the familiar Sky Movies logo appeared. Richard clicked through the menu from Home to Classics. Before she had time to see which film he’d selected, the screen filled with a black and white spinning globe upon which were superimposed the words Universal International. As a jolly brass fanfare filled the room, Richard turned to her and smiled.

  The studio logo faded to be replaced with a starkly lit brunette whom Stella recognised. Deanna Del Rey, looking utterly gorgeous in a belted trench coat and, by the look of it, not much else. Her dark eyes were wide with terror and she was whimpering. She was standing on a deserted road and waving her hands as the sound of an oncoming car grew louder. The headlights turned her face white, throwing her long dark hair into stark contrast. A horn sounded: angry, insistent. She jumped aside as a low-slung sports car entered the frame, swerving round her and disappearing into the night.

  The title credits rolled up from the bottom of the screen.

  SAM HAMMER’S

  LIE TO ME, MY DARLING

  Smiling, Stella took another slice of pizza, then snuggled into Richard’s side to watch. She strove mightily to stay awake. But as the wine hit her stomach, the fatigue hit her harder. The early start, coupled with the almost unbroken procession of sleepless nights since Lola had come along were taking their toll. She dozed, half-listening to the stilted dialogue as the torrid drama unfolded.

  She woke from a dream in which a long, low sports car was bearing down on her out of the dark, its horn blaring. ‘What?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Look, it’s Deanna’s big scene,’ Richard said. ‘She’s just discovered her boyfriend’s body after the mob had him killed.’

  Stella rubbed her eyes and sat up straight, pushing forward so her bottom was perched on the edge of the sofa. Deanna’s eyes were streaked where her mascara had run and she was crying. No, crying was altogether an insignificant word for what she was doing. She was bawling. A tired-looking cop with a gut distending his shirt and a pistol on his belt stood over her, notebook in hand, looking as though he’d rather be anywhere but there.

  ‘I’m sorry, miss. He’s dead,’ the cop said woodenly.

  ‘No!’ she wailed. ‘Our hearts were bound by a silken thread. We were meant to be together for all eternity. Now he’s gone! Murdered!’

  Stella felt her pulse jerk.
‘Pause it. Pause it!” she shouted.

  ‘OK, OK, I’m pausing it, Richard said jabbing the remote at the screen. ‘But be quiet, you’ll wake Lola.’

  ‘Sorry. Can you rewind it, please? Just to where the detective comes in.’

  The fat cop waddled backwards jerkily, slamming the door behind him. The screen flickered, then he re-entered walking at a normal speed this time, crossing the room to stand in front of the tear-streaked Denna Del Rey. Who repeated the same line. As, of course, she would, since it was the same scene in the same film. Which Stella realised she’d seen one more time that day.

  ‘Seen enough?’ Richard asked as the two actors continued emoting on one hand and looking bored on the other.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She was known for it, the crying I mean,’ Richard said. ‘My mum loves her films. She says nobody turned on the waterworks like Deanna Del Rey. Know what Variety called her?’

  ‘Surprise me.’

  ‘Hollywood’s Weeping Willow. It’s probably why they gave her the Oscar.’

  Stella nodded distractedly. She was thinking about the crime scene. And one item, in particular. She stood up.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Work. There’s something I need to do.’

  ‘Really? You only just got in and there’s only ten minutes left to go.’

  ‘Sorry, love. I’ll be back later.’

  Stella dismounted outside the mews house. She nodded to the uniform on duty. The poor man looked half-frozen. She handed him the takeaway coffee she’d bought at the Starbucks on the corner of the street. It had survived the short trundle down the street balanced on her tank in a cardboard tray designed for four.

  ‘Thank you, Ma’am,’ he said.

  Stella gave him her collar number and went inside. She switched on the sitting room light and went over to the mantelpiece. There was Oscar, standing proud on his wooden plinth. Stella turned to look through the sitting room door at the foot of the stairs where Tony had lain after his fall. But fall from where?

  Not the top. Yasmin had made it pretty clear it couldn’t have happened that way. Even Stella couldn’t swallow her own alternative scenario to explain the lack of injuries. No way could a burglar of any stature hit or push a man so hard he literally flew out over the stairs, not hitting anything until he met the hall floor. She shook her head. What burglar?