The House of Women (9 page)

‘
Professor Williams told me he knew your father.’

‘
So did Uncle Ned. I don’t really remember him, and Mama never talks about him.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘According to her, it was one of those tragedies only grownups can understand.’

‘
I should go, Phoebe. Will you be OK if Janet stays until Annie arrives?’

‘
I’ll manage.’ She smiled again. ‘Getting a row is nothing new. Mama says we go round and round in the same circles. Will you be seeing George? He wants to talk to you.’

‘
I thought he was in South Africa with his family.’

‘
Who told you that? They live in Notting Hill. He came back from London yesterday, and he was here first thing this morning ’cos he read about Uncle Ned in the
Daily
Post
. He’s terribly upset.’ She put the cat on the bed, and stood up. ‘His flat’s only round the corner on Baptist Street, so if you wait while I wash my face and comb my hair, I can take you to see him.’

Edith howled as McKenna walked into the kitchen, Phoebe and her cat at his side.

‘I told you to stay in your room!’

‘
Phoebe offered to show me where George lives,’ McKenna said.

‘
You don’t bring him back here, d’you understand? I don’t want him in the house.’

‘
I had no intention, Mrs Harris.’

She muttered, as if to herself.
‘Mina will be back soon.’

‘
I managed to get hold of the eldest girl, sir.’ Janet’s face was putty-coloured. ‘She’s on her way over.’

‘
I’ll see you later, then.’ He frowned. ‘Are you OK?’

‘
A bit of stomach ache. I’m seeing the doctor this evening.’

‘
Good idea.’ He turned to Phoebe, who was watching Janet with undisguised curiosity, and herded her towards the back door, the cat at their heels.

Most of the garden was lawned, overhung with old trees almost sodden with rich summer foliage, which shielded both sides from the neighbours
’ view. Another gravelled path meandered through the lawns, in and out of a cool, dark shrubbery, past a wrought iron bench in the shade of a horse-chestnut tree, and towards the green wooden gate set into an arch in the boundary wall.

‘
I used to sit there with Uncle Ned,’ Phoebe said, as they passed the bench. She sighed. ‘D’you know, I
knew
something awful was going to happen to him!’

‘
How?’

She gestured to the cat.
‘He suddenly started sitting in Uncle Ned’s favourite chair. Cats do that when someone’s going to die.’

The gate creaked as she pulled it open, its bottom edge gouging an arc in the gravel. She trotted across a cinder path, and through an opening in a broken down fence, which gave on to a patch of garden, overgrown with wilting docks and sun-bleached couch grass, which brushed against his trousers.

Phoebe wrinkled her nose. ‘Stinks, doesn’t it? All the local cats use it for a bog, mine included, and it’s dense enough for adders to nest in. Did you know the professor was brought up in South Africa? That’s why he stamps his feet when he walks, to scare off the snakes.’ She surveyed the rank grass and fronding weeds. ‘The landlord says he’s going to fire the grass now it’s dry enough to take.’

‘
I hope he doesn’t. He’ll burn down half the houses as well.’

Opening the door of a ramshackle glazed porch, she said:
‘That wouldn’t upset many people. Mama says these places devalue nice houses like ours.’ She led him through a dark passageway, up three staircases carpeted with cheap brown cord, and to the top floor of the house. ‘The students really get ripped off, you know. George pays an awful lot of rent, and he’s only got one room and a gas ring. He has to share the bathroom. I’d hate that, wouldn’t you?’ She knocked at a door where a painted hardboard panel obscured the original mouldings. ‘Five other students live here. Just imagine how much money the landlord’s making.’

‘
Supply and demand.’ McKenna leaned against the wall, listening for sounds from within, while the cat crouched by his ankles.

Phoebe knocked again, and called:
‘George? It’s Phoebe. Are you in?’

‘
I think he’d have heard us by now.’

‘
Oh, well.’ She turned away reluctantly. ‘At least you know where he hangs out.’ Following him down the stairs, she added: ‘What will you do now? Are you going to see Auntie Gladys?’

‘
Your mother asked me to phone her.’

‘
That was yesterday. Haven’t you done it yet?’

‘
There’s nothing to tell her at the moment.’

‘
You’re just supposed to talk to her.’

Stopping at the foot of the last staircase, McKenna looked at the girl who hovered on the bottom tread, and wondered why he found nothing objectionable in her directness.

‘I wasn’t being rude,’ she said.

‘
I know.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll call her later, if I have time.’

‘
What will we do with Uncle Ned’s things?’

‘
Nothing for now.’

As he walked from the gloom of the passage into the searing heat, she touched his arm gently.
‘How did he die? Did it hurt him? D’you think he was very frightened?’

‘
He died very quickly, Phoebe.’

She followed him to the gate in the wall.
‘But he must’ve known.’

He waited until she and her shadow were through the gate, then pushed it shut, deepening the arc in the gravel.
‘I suspect we all know when the time comes.’

She walked beside him, scuffing her feet, while the cat disappeared into the shrubbery.
‘Dying must be the strangest thing. You can’t imagine it, can you? I can sort of imagine being born, and even being inside Mama, though I can’t imagine where I was before then.’

‘
Maybe the same place you’ll be when you’re dead.’

‘
Uncle Ned said there’s another plane, where souls wait around for a new body, like everything’s made up of layers, but you can only see one at a time.’ She frowned. ‘He’ll know now, won’t he?’

‘
He will.’

‘
I wouldn’t be scared if he came back and haunted us, you know.’ She smiled again. ‘If he does, I’ll ask him what happened.’

Edith and Janet had vacated the kitchen, and he found them back in the sitting room, each side of the ornate fireplace. Phoebe remained outside, trying to cajole the cat to play with a length of string.

‘Did you find him, sir?’ Janet asked.

‘
He wasn’t in.’ Turning to Edith, he said: ‘If he calls, would you ask him to get in touch with me?’

‘
I told him not to bother us.’ Edith wrung her hands. ‘I can’t stand much more of this!’

Tempted to ask
‘much more of what?’, McKenna bit his tongue. Standing by the door, he wondered if she had shared more than a house with her distant relative, and how much she had ingested of the churned up silt from the common gene pool, then realized she was just in fear, of what was probably her first excursion into mischief when she tampered with the body, and of her middle daughter. Perhaps she and Phoebe were hostages, he thought, in a conflict Mina had created for sport or for spite, or to make some small point which had become, like most flashpoints, the more remote and obscured as more blood was spilled.

5

Anchored by a sellotape dispenser amid the litter of files and pieces of paper on his desk in the temporary office was a message slip recording a call from the mortuary.

‘
The lab faxed some preliminary findings,’ the pathologist announced, when McKenna telephoned him. ‘Edward Jones ingested tetracycline, but there were no capsules or tablets at any stage of breakdown, so we must assume he took the drug in its powder form, probably from a split capsule.’

‘
No possibility of complete digestion?’

‘
He was blitzed as soon as it touched his system.’

‘
I’d better talk to Gabriel Ansoni.’

‘
I’ve already done that. The allergic reaction which raised the alarm last year was caused either by tetracycline or ibuprofen, or one potentiating the other, so both were listed on this missing SOS bracelet as potentially lethal. More to the point, Gabriel’s the Harrises’s family doctor, and he hasn’t prescribed antibiotics of any kind in the last two and a half years.’ The pathologist paused, and McKenna could hear the tap-tap of a computer keyboard. ‘Mrs Harris is near as dammit to being a tranquillizer addict, and the one called Minerva — did you ever hear such a ridiculous name? — she’s on the pill.’ The keys tapped again. ‘The girl’s also had scripts for new generation anti-depressants. Misery runs a bit in that family, doesn’t it?’

‘
It usually does.’ McKenna lit a cigarette. ‘Run in families. What else was in Ned’s stomach?’

‘
Tea, milk, lamb, bread and butter, tomato, and a minute trace of honey, and as he died around mid-afternoon, that was doubtless his lunch. In theory, the tetracycline could have been put in the milk, but unless there was a huge amount, adding hot tea would substantially reduce its potency. There was also enough nitrazepam to suggest he took a sleeping tablet the night before he died, but no trace of antihistamine, and that’s about it for now,’ the pathologist said, ‘so in my considered opinion, which I won’t voice at the inquest, whenever that is, and bearing in mind the marks on his chest, I’d say you can rule out suicide and accidental death.’

McKenna sighed.
‘What about the tissue under his nails? All his own, or not?’

‘
Don’t know yet. Have you found out who tidied him up
post
mortem
?
’

‘
Edith Harris.’

‘
So apart from her, how many suspects have you got?’

‘
She’s insisting Ned didn’t have an enemy in the world.’

‘
Yes, but she’s a tranxhead, so you’d be a fool to believe a word she says.’

*

Diana Bradshaw’s office was empty. McKenna fidgeted by the open door, intensely irritated, both by her absence, and by her failure to advise him of it, and was returning to his own billet when he heard footsteps behind him.

‘
Were you looking for me?’

He turned.
‘Yes, ma’am. New information from pathology about Edward Jones makes suicide or accident extremely remote.’

She stood with her hands behind her back, head tilted.
‘So?’

‘
So I want Rowlands and Dewi Prys to assist a murder investigation.’

‘
I’ll think about it.’ Walking into her office, she closed the door firmly.

*

Phoebe answered the telephone. ‘Annie’s here, so your policewoman’s gone. Mama’s lying down and we’re baking a cake for tea.’ Before he could respond, she said: ‘Will you be coming again?’

‘
Yes. I’ll need to come again.’

‘
You can meet Annie, then. She and Bethan are staying until things get back to some sort of normal.’

As he put the telephone in its cradle, thinking Annie Harris and her child could well have a long and unpleasant sojourn, Diana Bradshaw swept into the room, and sat down. Watching her, he recalled Sigmund Freud
’s description of women as a dark continent, and, not for the first time, feared it was his lot to wander blindly through, bereft of navigational aids.

‘
Why have you suddenly decided Edward Jones was murdered?’ she asked.

‘
The facts rule out the alternatives.’

He related the pathologist
’s information, and she pursed her mouth, frowning. ‘Those facts are equally consistent with suicide.’

‘
So how did he come by the tetracycline?’

‘
He could have asked someone for it, of course!’

‘
Perhaps so,’ McKenna conceded. ‘Nonetheless, we must act on the presumption of unlawful killing.’

‘
I suppose so, but for the time being, you must make do with Janet, because I don’t want to pull the others off the vehicle investigation.’ She rose. ‘Let me know in a couple of days how you’re getting on.’

*

‘We’ll need a plan of campaign, then,’ Janet said, answering McKenna’s summons to his office. Smiling, she added: ‘Dewi won’t be pleased. He’s hoping for another chance to see the lovely Minerva.’

‘
Whose habits, according to Phoebe, are much less attractive than her appearance, and I don’t think it’s entirely sour grapes on her part.’

Janet looked through his notes on the discussion with the pathologist.
‘I’m not surprised Edith needs tranquillizers. She’s probably driven herself up the wall.’

‘
Long term use of psychotropic drugs creates unstable moods and behaviour,’ McKenna said. ‘I wonder why Mina’s had them. A girl of her age shouldn’t need happy pills.’

‘
She’s her mother’s daughter,’ Janet commented, ‘so there’s an inherited disposition towards popping pills at every opportunity, especially if they’re the latest fashion.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘Maybe I should get some, then I wouldn’t care about being pregnant.’

‘
You can’t be sure you are. Were you sick this morning?’

‘
I waited for ages, but nothing happened. I’ve got a griping stomach ache instead, so tomorrow, I expect there’ll be another new experience. It’s like an alien invasion.’ She made a neat pile of the papers. ‘Do we start formal interviews right away?’

‘
When we’ve established who was where on Friday, but I want to examine Ned’s room first. I’ll get forensics to meet us there.’

‘
It’s a mess, sir. Not dirty, but just full of things, as if he’s kept everything he ever had, including every piece of paper.’