BLIND SPOT - AND TWO OTHERS

THE OXMARKET ASPAL MURDER MYSTERY - EPISODE TWO

3

  My fiancé, Kimberley Ashlyn Gere was curled up with her back to me, her air inches from my nose, the smell of her making me feel almost drunk.  Even though we were engaged we hadn’t officially moved in together, but this was the third night in a row that I had stayed at her flat, and I was getting used to it.  Sharing my space and my body heat.

  I’d wrapped myself around her, content to look at her while she slept.  I watched her breath:  gently in, gently out.  She laid so still, her face expressionless, as if she knew she was being watched and didn’t want to spoil the illusion for me.  She was perhaps even more beautiful asleep than awake, even devoid of the mischievous spark that lit up her eyes.

  The only noise in the room was the sound of her snoring spaniel, Charlie, who slept contentedly beneath the bed. Brushing my lips past her ear, I lifted my head and looked at the morning that was trying to break in through the curtains. It was still raining and the prospect of assisting the police in investigating the death of Faith Roberts in such dreadful weather did not fill me entirely with glee.

  My head sank once more, my lips against her shoulder, and she flickered momentarily before she settled again.  I watched some more, wondering how I had got myself into something I’d never thought I’d be lucky again to experience. Tiny little breaths escaped from between her lips, making the slightest whistle, and I was the only person in the world that could hear it.

  I could feel the comfort and the calm getting the better of me, and I knew I was swimming into a half-sleep, carried away by the warmth of her skin and the smell of her natural perfume.  I wasn’t sleeping, though, I was sure I wasn’t.  Instead, it was fitful serenity; a workable compromise, some kind of sleep mode where I could retain some control.  That was what I told myself as I drifted deeper. 

  The next thing I knew I was being nudged out of my no-sleep by her pert buttocks grinding against me as she stretched, catlike, her smooth skin working against me, a distinct purr rumbling in her throat.  I was suddenly and noticeably awake.

  Kimberley turned, a huge triumphant smile on her face, and pushed me away from her until I was flat on my back.  I was aware of her crawling on all fours towards me from my feet, stalking her prey with confidence. A hand grabbed, stroked me, and owned me.  Her face told me what we both knew, she could do what she wanted.  And she did.

  She sat above me, positioning herself just where she wanted.  I ached for her, but she remained on her knees, an agonizing inch or two above me.  She looked glorious in the half-light, her hair partly over her face, her skin pale in shadow and her figure lean and curvy.  When she’d satisfied herself that I’d suffered enough, she swooped and engulfed me.

  She set the pace and the rhythm. I did my best just to keep up. It was a race, but only Kimberley knew where the winning post.

  The smile on her face told me that she was in charge, she had me.  But the truth was that I couldn’t care less.  If this was subservience, I’d take it.  In the end, I wasn’t sure if she pushed or dragged me over the finishing line, but we crossed together.

  As she collapsed on top of me and we both drifted off on a sea of satisfaction, I took a brief second to look over her shoulder and see the indefinable light leaking through the window.  I couldn’t place the time within a few hours either way or it didn’t matter.  This was sleep I could handle, and I shifted a little for deeper comfort, and drifted, like Kimberley, to sleep.

  A while later, I watched the daylight strengthen on her sleeping face.  Her hair lay tangled round her head and when she woke, even before she opened her eyes, she was smiling.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Morning.”

  She moved towards me in the big bed.

  “What time is it?”

  “Nearly eight.”

  “Good job it’s Saturday,” she commented.

  “I’ve still got to work.”  I said sadly.

  “Like some breakfast?” She offered.

  “I’d love some,” I said. 

  “Take a shower, while I’m getting it ready.”

  I did as I was told and dressed and refreshed walked into the kitchen of her flat to find her busying away preparing breakfast.  I sipped the freshly made percolated coffee and watched her slice the ends off a grapefruit and placed it on one of the cut sides.  Using a small sharp knife, cut off the peel and pith, working her way around the fruit.  Next, she cut the membranes to release the segments and put them in a salad bowl along with any juice that had collected on the board.  She then did the same thing with some oranges.

  She smiled at me as she removed a melon from the refrigerator and cut it in half and scooped out the seeds.  Sliding a knife between the flesh and the skin she chucked out the skin before cutting the melon flesh into small pieces.  She added the melon to the citrus fruits and scattered over some grapes and mint leaves.

  Finally, she cut the remaining orange in half, squeezed out the juice and poured it over the salad, tossing it lightly and then serving it with low-fat natural yoghurt.  Kimberley called it her wakey-wakey breakfast, and it certainly was.

  “What case are you working on at the moment?”  She asked suddenly.

  I gave her a brief outline, and she remained in situ until I had finished.

  “I knew Marcus Dye.”

  “Did you?”

  “We worked briefly together a few years ago before I joined Bio-Preparations.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Quiet, unassuming and definitely not a murderer.”

  “That’s what I’ve got to prove.”

  “I don’t like the idea of you staying away.”

  “I’ve got no choice with this one, darling.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “At the Bellagamba Guest House.”

  Kimberley laughed endlessly and wouldn’t tell me why.

4

  With great distaste, I looked round the room in which I stood.  It was a room of gracious proportions but there its attraction ended.  I drew a suspicious finger along the top of a bookcase and found immediately what I had suspected – dust!  I sat down gingerly on a sofa and its broken springs sagged depressingly under me.  The two faded armchairs were, as I knew, little better.  A large fierce-looking dog growled from his position on the moderately comfortable fourth chair.

  The room was large, and had faded wallpaper and engravings of unpleasant subjects hung crookedly on the walls with one or two good oil paintings.  The chair covers were both faded and dirty, the carpet had holes in it and had never been of a pleasant design.  A good deal of miscellaneous bric-a-brac was scattered haphazardly here and there.  Tables rocked dangerously and one window was open, and no power on earth could, apparently shut it again.  The door, temporarily shut, was not likely to remain so.  The latch did not hold, and with every gust of wind it burst open and whirling gusts of cold eddied round the room.

  Now I knew why Kimberley had laughed at me for so long.

  The door burst open and the wind and Mrs Bellagamba came in together.  She looked round the room, shouted “What?” to someone distantly and went out again.

  Mrs Karen Bellagamba had red hair and an attractively freckled face and since I had arrived was usually in a distracted state of putting things down, or else looking for them.

  I sprang to my feet and shut the door.

  A moment or two later it opened again and Mrs Bellagamba reappeared.  This time she was carrying a plastic bowl and a knife.

  A man’s voice from some way called out:  “Karen, that cat’s been sick again.  What shall I do?”

  “I’m coming darling,” she called.  “Hold everything.”

  She dropped the bowl and the knife and went out again.  I got up again and shut the door, cursing under my breath.

 A car pulled up, and the large dog leaped from the chair and raised its voice to a crescendo of barking.  He jumped on a small table by the window and the table collapsed with a crash.

  The door burst open, the wind surged round the room and the dog rushed out, still barking.  Karen’s voice came, upraised loud and clear.

  “Eric, why the hell did you leave the back door open!  Those bloody hens are in the larder.”

  f*****g hell, I thought angrily, I’m paying two hundred and twenty pounds a week for this s**t!

  Then the door banged to with a crash. Through the window came the loud squawking of irate hens.  Then the door flew open again and Karen Bellagamba came in and fell upon the basin with a cry of joy.

  “Couldn’t remember where I’d left it.  My memory is so bad.  Would you mind if I sliced the beans in here?  The kitchen stinks horrible at the moment.”

  “Fine,” I shrugged, admitting that since my arrival, it had been the first time in twenty-four hours that I’d had any chance of a conversation of more than six seconds long.

  Karen Bellagamba flung herself down in a chair and began slicing beans with frenzied energy and considerable awkwardness.

  “I do hope that everything is to your liking?”

 “Yes,” I said politely.  “It’s a shame you haven’t got anyone else to share the burden of running this place.”

  “I did have,” she exclaimed with a squeal.  “She was brilliant.  Unfortunately, she was murdered.”

  “That would be Faith Roberts?” I said quickly.

  “It was.  God, how I miss her.  I can’t cope.”

  “You got on well then?”

  “She was so reliable.  She came Monday afternoon and Thursday mornings – just like clockwork.  She is like to snoop around a bit, but she was harmless.  Now I have that Stratton woman from up by the golf course.  Five children and a husband.  Naturally, she’s never here.  Either the husband’s ill, or the children are ill.  With Faith, she was never ill. The first time she never turned up, she was dead.”

  The face of Eric Bellagamba appeared at the window.  Karen sprang up, upsetting the beans, and rushed across to the window, which she opened to the fullest extent.

  “Look here,” he displayed a colander full of greenery, “is this enough spinach?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Seems like a bloody load to me.”

  “It’ll be about a teaspoonful when it’s cooked.  Don’t you know by now what spinach is like?”

  “Oh bollocks!”

  “Have you got the fish out of the freezer yet?”

  “Well, you’d better go and do that now, otherwise that won’t be thawed out in time.”

  “What about the spinach?”

  “I’ll get that.”  She leaped through the window, and husband and wife moved away together.

  I crossed the room and closed the window as nearly as I could. The voice of Eric Bellagamba came to me borne on the wind.

  “Who is the new guest, Karen?  Looks a bit dodgy to me.  Bloody London accent. What’s his name?”

  “John Handful, I think he said.”

  “I have seen him somewhere.”  He said.  “Better get the money out of him, quick.”

  The voices died away.

  I picked up the beans from the floor where they scattered far and wide.  Just as I had finished, Karen Bellagamba came in again through the door.

  I presented them to her politely.  “There you go.”

  “Thank you.”

  I went past her and shut the door.

  “Sorry, I’m always leaving doors open.”

  “I’ve noticed.”  I joked.

  “That bloody door never shuts.  This house is practically falling to pieces. Eric’s Mum and Dad lived here, and they weren’t well off, and they never tried to renovate the place.  And then when we came home from Tuscany to live here, we couldn’t afford to do anything either. It’s fun for the children in the holidays, though, lots of room to run wild in, and the garden and everything.  Having paying guests here just enables us to keep going.”

  “Am I your only guest here at the moment?”

  “There’s lady upstairs.  It has been here a few days now.  Never comes out of her room. Eats in there.  Doing some sort of research.”  She paused for a moment before resuming in a slightly artificial voice.  “I wonder if you’d mind paying the first week’s rent in advance.  I take it you are staying for a week?”

  “Perhaps longer.”  I took out my wallet and handed over the cash.

  Karen Bellagamba gathered the money up with avidity.  “My husband says he recognizes you from somewhere.”

  “I’m a private detective,” I said slowly.  “I was on the television and in the local newspapers last year after I had solved a high-profile case.”

  “So, what brings you to Oxmarket Aspal?”

  “I am investigating the murder of Faith Roberts.”

  “Ouch,” she said.  “I’ve cut my hand.”

  She raised a finger and inspected it.  Then she stared at me.

  “Are you serious?”  She said.  “They arrested that Marcus Dye.  He’s been tried and convicted and everything.”

  “He didn’t do it.”

  Karen Bellagamba’s attention diverted from me to the bowl in her lap. “I’m bleeding all over the beans. Not too good as we’ve got them for dinner.  Still, it won’t matter because they’ll go into boiling water.”

  “I forgot to tell you,” I said quickly, “I won’t be here for dinner.”

5

  “I don’t know, I’m certain.”  Sarah Young said.

  She had said that three times already.  Her natural distrust of private detectives was not easily overcome.

  “It’s been a nightmare,” she went on.  “With Auntie Faith being murdered and the police and all that.  Stomping around everywhere, ferreting about and asking questions.  With the neighbours nosing about.  I didn’t think at first we’d ever here the end of it.  And my mother-in-law has been the b***h from hell about it.  Nothing like that ever happened in her family, she kept on saying.  What about my poor aunt?”

  “And supposing that Marcus Dye is innocent after all?”

  “That’s rubbish,” she snapped.  “He’s as guilty as sin.  I never did like the look of him.  But Aunt Faith said he was very obliging and gave her no trouble.  Well, she knows better now, doesn’t she?”

  I looked thoughtfully at her.  She was a big, plump woman with a healthy colour and a good-humoured mouth.  The small house as neat and clean and a faint appetizing smell came from the direction of the kitchen.

  DI Silver had gone into the financial background of Mr and Mrs Young and had found no motive there for murder, and the Detective Inspector was a very thorough man.

  I sighed, and persevered with my task, which was the breaking down of Sarah Young’s suspicion of private detectives.  I led the conversation away from the murder and focused on the victim of it.  I asked questions about her aunt, her health and her habits, her preferences in food and drink, her politics, her late husband, her attitude to life, to s*x, to sin, to religion, to children, to animals.

  Whether any of this irrelevant matter would be of use, I had no idea.  I was looking through a haystack to find a needle.  But, incidentally, I was learning something about Sarah Louise Young.

  Sarah did not really know very much about her aunt.  It had been a family tie, honoured as such, but without intimacy.  Now and again, once a month or so, she and her husband Michael had gone over on a Sunday to have midday dinner with Aunt Faith, and more rarely she come over to see them.  They had exchanged presents at Christmas.  They’d known that Aunt Faith had a little something put by, and that they’d get it when she died.

  “But that’s not to say we were needing it,” Sarah Young explained with rising colour.  “We’ve got savings, and we made sure that Aunt Faith got a good send off.”

  Aunt Faith had been fond of reading and loved Strictly Come Dancing on the television. She didn’t like dogs, they messed up a place, but she used to have a cat – a ginger.  It strayed away, and she hadn’t had one since, but the woman at the post office had been going to give her a kitten.  Kept her house very neat and didn’t like litter.  She made a nice little living out of her cleaning, especially from the Brooks-Nunn’s. Rolling in money they are.  Tried to get Aunt Faith to come more days in the week, but she wouldn’t disappoint her other clients because she’d gone to them before she went to the Brooks-Nunn’s, and it wouldn’t have been right.

  I mentioned the Bellagamba’s.

  Oh yes, Aunt Faith went to her – two days a week.  They’d come back from Italy and Mrs Bellagamba didn’t know a thing about the house.  They tried to market-garden, but they didn’t know anything about that, either.  When the children and grandchildren stayed the house was just pandemonium.  But Mrs Bellagamba was a nice lady and Aunt Faith liked her.

  So, the portrait grew.  Faith Roberts liked to read, loved ballroom dancing on the telly, cleaned houses, liked cats and didn’t like dogs.  She liked children, but not very much.  She kept herself to herself.

 She attended church on a Sunday, but didn’t take part in any church activities.  Sometimes, but rarely, she went to the cinema in Oxmarket. She could be judgemental and one occasion had given up working for an artist and his so-called wife when she had discovered they weren’t married.  She loved the local newspaper the Oxmarket Mercury, and she liked the old magazines when her clients gave them to her.  She wasn’t interested in politics but voted Conservative like her husband had always done.  Never spent much on clothes but when she did they were always of top quality.  She had an old computer but hardly ever used it, never used the internet and didn’t possess a mobile phone.

  Faith Roberts was, in fact, very much the Faith Roberts I had imagined her to be and her niece, Sarah Young, was the Sarah Young of Detective Inspector Paul Silver’s notes.

  Before I left, Michael Young came home for his lunch.  A small, shrewd man, and definitely less easy to be sure about than his wife.  There was a faint nervousness in his manner.  He showed fewer signs of suspicion and hostility than his wife and that I reflected was very faintly out of character.  Why should Michael Young be anxious to placate a private detective who was a stranger until an hour ago?  The reason could only be that I had brought with me a letter of confirmation of my identity from Detective Inspector Paul Silver of the Suffolk Constabulary.

  So, Michael Young was anxious to impress the local police? Was it that he couldn’t afford, as his wife could, to be critical of them?

  A man, perhaps with an uneasy conscience. Why was that conscience uneasy?  There could be many reasons-none of them with Faith Roberts’ death. Or was it that, somehow or another the cinema alibi had been cleverly faked, and that it was Michael Young who had knocked on the door of the cottage, had been admitted by Aunt Faith and who had struck down the unsuspecting woman.  He could have pulled out the drawers and ransacked the rooms to give the appearance of robbery, he might have hid the money outside to incriminate Marcus Dye because the money that was in the ISA was what he was after.  Twenty thousand pounds coming to his wife which, for some reason unknown, he badly needed.  The weapon, I remembered, had never been found.  Why had that not also been left on the scene of the crime?  Any moron knew enough to wear gloves or rub off fingerprints. CSI and television programmes like that had made sure of that.  Why then had the weapon, which must be a heavy one with a sharp edge, been removed?  Was it because it could easily be identified as belonging in the Young’s house?  Was that same weapon washed and cleaned, here in the house now?  Something perhaps a little unusual . . .  a little out of the ordinary, easily identified.  The police had hunted for it, but not found it.  They had searched woods and dragged ponds.  There was nothing missing from Faith Roberts kitchen and nobody could say that Marcus Dye had had anything of that kind in his possession.  They had never traced any purchase of any such implement to him.  A small but negative point in his favour.  Ignored in the weight of other evidence.  But still a point. . .

  I cast a swift glance round the rather overcrowded little sitting-room in which I was sitting.

  Was the weapon here, somewhere, in this house? Was that why Michael Young was so uneasy and conciliatory?

  I did not know.  I did not really think so.  But I was not confident. . .