The Facts of Life and Death Read online

  ‘I won’t!’ said Ruby vehemently. ‘I won’t get bored! I’ll be too excited!’

  ‘You’ll whine to come home.’

  ‘I won’t! I won’t whine!’

  ‘Well, we’ll be out really late and what if it’s a school night? Mummy will be cross with us if she finds out.’

  ‘She’ll be at work! And I won’t tell her! I won’t!’

  ‘What if she sneaks in to kiss you goodnight and you’re not there? Then I’ll get it in the ear.’

  That could be a problem. Mummy did come in and kiss her when she got home from work. Sometimes Ruby woke up and grumbled at her.

  Ruby frowned. She felt the approach of crushing disappointment. Mummy was such a spoilsport!

  ‘Can’t we get home before her?’

  Daddy shrugged as he wiped down the sink. ‘We can try’, he said. ‘But maybe there’s some way we could fool her into thinking you’re in bed when you’re really not.’

  Ruby had a flash of inspiration. ‘I’ll put Panda in my bed so he looks like me! I’ll put him under the blankets. Mummy won’t even know I’m gone!’ It was a ruse they’d seen in more than one TV Western – the baddie emptying his gun into the hero as he lay by the campfire, then picking up the bedroll full of rocks that he’d mistaken for a man. Panda was quite big. It would definitely work.

  Daddy laughed. ‘That’s pretty clever, Rubes.’

  ‘Can I come then?’

  He put up his hands in cowboy surrender. ‘You got me, Deputy.’

  Ruby squealed with delight and buried her face in his old blue jersey that smelled of salt and smoke.

  19

  DC CALVIN BRIDGE looked down at Frannie Hatton and thought that she was just his type.

  If she’d been alive, of course – he wasn’t sick.

  Dark-haired, petite, but with nice tits – if you ignored the Y-incision – and with a neatly tended ladygarden.

  He stared at the dead girl’s crotch and thought that Shirley could really take better care down there. She had when they’d first started to go out together three years ago, but nowadays he was lucky if she shaved her legs, let alone her bits. Calvin never mentioned it. But now, seeing Frannie Hatton’s wasted Brazilian made him wonder if maybe things with Shirley weren’t happening a bit quick. He didn’t object in principle to marrying her – just to the speed of it all.

  But how to raise the subject without Shirley mistaking one for the other?

  He couldn’t.

  Could anyone?

  He sighed.

  ‘Hard day, Calvin?’ said DCI King sarcastically.

  ‘Excuse me, Ma’am,’ said Calvin. ‘I was miles away.’

  ‘Well, don’t be,’ said King sharply. ‘Be right here.’

  Calvin blushed. He had a tendency to drift off, and knew he must try to concentrate if he was going to be even slightly impressive.

  ‘Was she sexually assaulted?’ asked King.

  ‘No indication of that,’ said Dr Shortland. He had a manila case file in one hand and a cheese and coleslaw sandwich in the other. Calvin could smell formaldehyde and mayonnaise and there was a piece of cabbage in Dr Shortland’s beard.

  ‘And yet she was naked,’ mused King. Then she bent over Frannie Hatton’s face and pointed at a tiny dark mark on the side of her nose. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Aaah,’ said the pathologist. ‘Watch this!’ He handed King the file, picked up a needle and casually slid it straight through the tiny hole.

  Calvin swallowed sudden sick.

  ‘Stud?’ said King. She handed back the file and bent to have a good look at the hole.

  ‘I assume so,’ said Shortland. ‘It’s not new.’

  Calvin regained his equilibrium. ‘She was wearing a nose ring on Facebook.’

  They both turned to look at him.

  ‘We haven’t found a ring,’ said King. ‘We’ll do another sweep of the scene.’ She turned away and studied the woman’s face again, then asked, ‘She was suffocated?’

  ‘Indeed.’ Dr Shortland took a messy bite of his sandwich. ‘Although she was found face-up, there’s bruising consistent with finger marks on the back of the head and neck, upper arms, shoulders, contusion of the nose and lips, and mud in her teeth, eyes and nostrils.’ He didn’t open the slim folder, because his other hand was full of sandwich, but he waggled it as he spoke – apparently to indicate that what he was telling them was all in there, if they didn’t believe him.

  ‘So someone held her face-down in mud until she died,’ said King.

  ‘That’s my conclusion.’

  ‘After quite a struggle, from the look of the other bruises.’

  ‘She certainly put up a fight.’

  King bent again to examine Frannie’s face. Under the stark bulbs of the path lab, her skin looked almost translucent. She had a ring in one eyebrow, another in her belly button, and a tattoo cuff around one bicep.

  Calvin pondered whether Frannie Hatton’s death had been an accident, or whether the killer had always known that this was how his obsession was going to end.

  King looked around and then took what appeared to be a long-handled spoon from a row of instruments on a nearby counter, and prised open Frannie Hatton’s lips. The dead girl’s teeth had dark bits between them, like brown spinach.

  ‘Is this mud from the crime scene?’

  Good question, thought Calvin.

  ‘Good question,’ said Shortland. ‘And the answer is, I don’t know.’

  ‘So she could have been killed somewhere else and then dumped.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Shit,’ sighed King, and straightened up.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Shortland.

  Half a minute later, Calvin caught up. Two crime scenes – one unknown. The body wasn’t helping them narrow their options.

  ‘Any idea where the mud in her teeth came from?’

  ‘No.’

  All three of them stood in silent contemplation of the body.

  DCI King sighed. Then she held up the spoon thing. Its bowl was pierced, making it look like a little metal squash racquet. ‘What is this?’

  ‘A gall-stone scoop.’

  ‘Can I keep it?’ she asked.

  Dr Shortland looked a little surprised. ‘If you think it will be useful.’

  ‘Thank you.’ DCI King tucked it into one of the several pockets of the belted Barbour jacket she wore over everything – skirts, dresses, slacks, jeans. She looked good in all of them, Calvin thought, with a very nice bottom for jeans.

  ‘What do you think, Calvin?’

  He blinked. ‘About what, Ma’am?’

  ‘Life, the universe and everything,’ said King so flatly that, for the smallest of seconds, Calvin Bridge almost told her that he didn’t believe in God but that he did hope for an afterlife, and some system of spiritual checks and balances, dependent upon his actions as a corporeal being.

  Then he realized she’d just caught him looking at her arse.

  A phone rang somewhere and Dr Shortland excused himself and the rest of his sandwich.

  ‘Here, help me turn her over,’ said DCI King.

  Calvin looked cautiously at the door through which the pathologist had disappeared.

  ‘Oi,’ said King. ‘I’m the senior investigating officer. If I want to turn the body over, I don’t need a note from my mummy.’

  Calvin blushed and helped turn Frannie over. From the back she looked like a child, and Calvin was sorry he’d ever looked at her front disrespectfully.

  King started to walk around the table, bent a little at the waist so that her eyes were good and close to the corpse. Now and then she stopped and parted Frannie’s hair, or changed her angle of vision. Touched a mark or a mole with a latex finger. Stood and thought.

  ‘What are those?’ she said. Calvin followed her finger to one of Frannie’s waxy white shoulder blades, where there were two small blurred marks, maybe three-quarters of a centimetre long.

  ‘Bruises?’ he said.


  ‘That’s right.’ She checked the map of the body that Dr Shortland had put in the file and read from his notes: ‘Two small curved contusions to right shoulder blade. Possibly caused by contact with a hard, undetermined material immediately ante mortem.’

  There were plentiful bruises down Frannie’s arms, but only a few on her back – one large one on her left shoulder and these two small ones.

  ‘So,’ said Calvin, ‘during the struggle. Or when she was in transit. Maybe little stones or something that were under her back at some stage?’

  ‘Maybe,’ nodded King. ‘And now look at this one.’

  Calvin leaned in to her and peered at the Celtic cuff tattooed around Frannie’s right arm.

  ‘Where?’ he said.

  King put her finger on a mark that was easily missed, hidden in the ink. Even now Calvin had spotted it, it was hard to make it out, but it looked similar to those on her shoulder blade, although the edges were a little more distinct.

  ‘They look as though they’ve been made by the same object, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Calvin.

  ‘Curved. Maybe a fingernail?’ King put her hands around Frannie’s bicep – first the left and then the right – and tried several different ways to make her nails fit the bruise, but nothing seemed quite natural.

  ‘This one’s more distinct,’ she mused. ‘Sharper.’

  ‘Because she wasn’t wearing sleeves,’ said Calvin, surprising himself by remembering. ‘Didn’t the witnesses at the Patch & Parrot say she was wearing some top that was all…’ he mimed a big pair of breasts before he could stop himself, then quickly tucked his hands into his armpits and finished the sentence with ‘revealing?’

  But King just gave him a serious look and said, ‘That makes sense.’

  They both looked again at the tiny mark disguised within the indigo design.

  ‘So,’ said King, ‘assuming that this case is connected to, and followed the pattern of, the earlier assaults, these bruises could have been made before she was naked.’

  Calvin nodded eagerly. ‘What would that mean?’

  ‘Who knows?’ said King. ‘But every little helps.’

  DCI King had taken over the driving duties, which Calvin Bridge found refreshing rather than insulting. In his short experience, senior officers loved the idea that they had a driver, rather than a colleague, and rarely dirtied their hands behind the wheel.

  She drove well, too. At Tiverton they came off the dual carriage-way and, to his surprise, King turned away from the link road and chose instead to take the old road to Bideford, which was little more than a lane in some places, and forty miles long.

  Within minutes, Calvin understood why she’d chosen the old road. There wasn’t much traffic, and he could tell she was enjoying the corners. They weren’t breaking the speed limit between the high hedges, but they were testing it, and every now and then, Calvin resisted the temptation to put his hand on the dash. DCI King’s own hands were at ten and two and there was a little frown of concentration on her face, as if she was defying the world to slow her down.

  ‘When we get back,’ she said, ‘I want you to call Professor Mike Crew at the university in Falmouth. He’s in the geology department.’

  Calvin wrote it in his notebook. Mike Crew. Geology. Falmouth.

  ‘He knows all about mud,’ King continued. ‘What it’s made of, where it’s from, how it got there.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Calvin, although he didn’t think so.

  ‘Most boring man on the planet,’ said King. ‘And I’ve known some corkers. But we’ll pick a sample out of Frannie Hatton’s teeth and send it to him. See what he can tell us about where she might have been killed.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

  She glanced at him and said, ‘Always be honest with me, Calvin. Don’t bullshit me or tell me what you think I want to hear.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not a crime to say you don’t know something,’ she went on. ‘You’re a constable in the Devon and Cornwall police, not Stephen bloody Hawking.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

  ‘And if you’ve got a hunch, let me know. Hunches are fine, as long as they’re part and parcel of good police work, not a replacement.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am.’

  ‘Good. Any questions?’

  Actually he did have a question. He wasn’t sure how important it was, but on the basis that he wasn’t Stephen Hawking, he decided to ask it anyway.

  ‘There is one thing, Ma’am,’ he said cautiously. ‘What’s the significance of the gall-stone scoop?’

  DCI King just gave a short laugh, then changed down to a much louder gear.

  Calvin sighed. He’d obviously already missed something critical. He was starting to wonder whether he was really cut out to be a detective.

  Maybe just taking better care of his uniform would have been easier.

  20

  IT WAS COWBOY Night and Mummy and Daddy were both out, and so was the sea. Ruby couldn’t see it from the house because the big limekiln on the beach blocked the view between the cottages, but she knew in her gut that the tide was low. It made her feel calmer to know that it was far away, and not pounding the cliff or surging up the slipway.

  Once, when she was little, a storm had driven water all the way into the square between the cottages. The limekilns had been waist-deep, and she’d held on to Daddy’s trouser leg at the garden gate and watched the sea sigh across the cobbles towards them. She remembered the stink, and the rat that had been washed from its nest in one of the kilns, scuttling frantically about at the water’s new edge, sitting up now and then to stare anxiously out to sea for its lost babies. Daddy had crept up behind it and Ruby had tensed almost unbearably, but the rat hadn’t seemed to care – even when he’d hit it with a spade.

  Ruby rolled on to her side on the spider rug.

  Her chest hurt. It could be cancer or something, but Mummy still didn’t care because of the letter from the headmistress.

  Daddy wouldn’t make her go to school.

  ‘I wouldn’t make you go,’ he’d said. ‘But women always stick together. Like your Mum and Miss Bossybritches.’

  ‘Miss Bryant’, Ruby had giggled, and Daddy had winked. ‘That’s what I said.’

  She rolled back on to her elbows and sighed down at Pony & Rider. Despite the big, exciting headline PLAITING MADE EASY! the article made plaiting look incredibly difficult. Ruby had triple-checked the numbered photos, but there still seemed to be one missing. One minute the pony’s mane was all tufts and fingers and dangling thread, and the next it was a perfect little hair rosette, with all the ends tucked in. Instead of reassuring her, the article had only increased Ruby’s anxiety that when the time came, she would be found wanting in the plaits department.

  Somebody knocked at the front door, and Ruby’s head snapped up.

  Mummy and Daddy had keys. They never knocked. Nobody ever knocked because strangers never came to Limeburn – not even Jehovah’s Witnesses.

  A pedlar had passed through once.

  A goose walked over Ruby’s grave.

  She tiptoed carefully across the room. She pressed her ear against the door. There was a knock right on it, and she squeaked in surprise.

  ‘Ruby?’

  She stared at the door. The person who was knocking knew her name. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

  ‘Ruby?’

  ‘Yes?’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s me.’

  She frowned. ‘Adam?’

  ‘I have something for you.’ he said. ‘Open the door.’

  Ruby hesitated. She wasn’t supposed to let anyone into the house when her parents weren’t there. But they didn’t mean Adam, she was sure. And he had something for her. So she fumbled the key into the lock and let him in, along with a faceful of rain.

  Adam was wearing the same red hoodie he’d lent her that day in the haunted house.

  ‘All right?�
�� he said.

  ‘Hi.’

  They stood and looked at each other for a moment.

  ‘You OK?’ he said. He seemed nervous.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. Ruby was nervous too. She didn’t know why. They talked all the time when they were up on the swing or in the haunted house. She didn’t know why this was different, but it was. Maybe because it was night and she was alone, and because Adam had never been in her house before, and this seemed like a strange time to start.

  ‘It’s raining really hard.’

  ‘I know.’

  Adam looked around the room and Ruby was acutely aware of its every shortcoming – the old stained sofa, the threadbare carpet, the dark patch of damp in the corner of the ceiling. Adam’s house was fresh and clean, and had one chair so old and precious that no one was allowed to sit on it.

  ‘Your house smells of fish,’ said Adam.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Daddy catches them in the Gut.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Sometimes he sells them to the hotel,’ she continued, just to fill the air. ‘They’re worth loads but he only gets ten pounds.’

  ‘That’s bad business,’ said Adam sagely. ‘He should speak to my dad. He knows how to make money for people. That’s what he does.’

  ‘That’s a really good job,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but he’s away a lot.’

  Ruby already knew that. Mr Braund was a tall, well-fed man who wore suits and drove up and down to London every week, in a different car each year.

  There was a longish silence.

  ‘Do you want a custard cream?’ Ruby said.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ruby, then she asked, ‘What have you got for me then?’

  ‘Oh. Yeah.’ Adam handed her a smallish packet wrapped in blue tissue paper. He kept his other hand in his jeans pocket, as if he didn’t care.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Open it,’ he shrugged, ‘and find out.’

  Ruby parted the tissue cautiously. Inside was a little plastic donkey. It was covered with grey flock, with beige around its eyes and muzzle, and hitched to a small wooden sledge that had Clovelly painted on the side.

  Ruby felt a wave of something so warm and special flood through her that she almost cried.