Killing a Unicorn Read online

  Hingley, who was a large, placid young man who rarely hurried but had all his chairs at home, arranged to meet her at the house which had previously belonged to Armstrong’s father, and where he had been living, prior to his disappearance. She was waiting for him when he got there, her car parked on the drive of a neat, brick-built semi just off the Leeds-Halifax road, in a street of similarly neat houses. It was a small, well-kept house, and unlike the one next door, which was dirty and neglected, with a number of grubby children playing about and a lopsided For Sale sign stuck in the weeds that comprised the front garden, the garden of number twelve showed signs of recent attention. The grass had been cut and the edges trimmed, though the tubs of busy-lizzies either side of the front door appeared to be dying from lack of water. The path was swept, the windows were polished, the net curtains clean. There was a quick response to Hingley’s ring on the doorbell.

  ‘Come in, sit you down.’ Mrs Brayshaw was knocking seventy but going strong. Short, well-cut grey hair, dark eyes and a rather dried-up tan from over-exposure to the sun on her recent holiday. Neatly dressed in white trousers and a blue overshirt. No flies on her, no airs and graces, a sensible Yorkshire grandmother.

  ‘This is Eric, my husband.’ She introduced a stocky, truculent-looking man with a crest of white hair and a mighty case of sunburn, clearly reluctant to dispense with his holiday garb of shorts and open-necked shirt. He responded with an unsmiling nod and a curt how-do.

  ‘We’ve just been on a lovely Saga holiday to Greece,’ Mrs Brayshaw told Hingley over the cup of coffee that had been ready and waiting. ‘We only got home yesterday, but as soon as I opened the papers this morning, I knew, didn’t I, Eric? “That’ll be our Graham,” I said. “In trouble again.” I knew it were too good to be true, he’d been that quiet, ever since he came out. It weren’t like him.’

  ‘Talkative sort, is he?’

  Eric Brayshaw snorted.

  ‘No, that’s not what I mean, love, he doesn’t go in for chatting much, never did. I meant he never said a word about her, or the little lad neither, so I knew he were brooding about it. He won’t give up, you know, once he’s set his mind on something, never. Stubborn? We’ve seen mules this holiday less obstinate than him! Our Marion spoiled him, and that’s the truth. My own sister, but it has to be said. Mind you, it were something in his nature, in the first place. Born like that, our Graham.’

  ‘Imagines everybody’s agin him, that’s his trouble,’ Eric interposed bluntly. ‘That flamin’ sensitive, you’ve to mind every damn word you say in case you hurt his feelings.’

  His wife nodded agreement. ‘We used to try and tease him out of it when he were a kiddie, but it only made him worse. You couldn’t get mad at him, it were like scolding a wounded puppy … but I don’t want to give you the wrong impression, he were a grand little lad most of the time. It’s just that he couldn’t ever forgive anybody if he thought they’d slighted him. I bet all that time he spent in there — in prison — he were just biding his time until he could get his own back.’ She sighed gustily. ‘It’s a thousand pities it’s all happened, I thought it had all come out right for him when he married her and took that hotel over - just up his street! He did right well on that hotel management course … I’m sorry, I’m talking too much, that’s always been my problem.’

  ‘No, no,’ Hingley said, thanking God for a garrulous witness, steering her back on course. ‘So you think it’s likely him that took the boy away?’

  ‘It’d be a miracle if it was anybody else!’ said Eric. ‘That one never forgets, never forgives.’

  ‘Oh come on, Eric, I’m not saying it’s right, what he did that time, but she led him a right dance, by all accounts, that Bibi.’

  ‘Aye, according to him!’

  ‘When was the last time you saw him?’ asked Hingley.

  ‘Just before we went on holiday. I brought him two or three meals I’d cooked, for his freezer, and a few buns. He liked sweet stuff. I think he waited till we were away, like, before he pushed off.’

  ‘Maybe I’d better take a look around,’ suggested Hingley, having finished his coffee.

  Mrs Brayshaw seemed to feel it necessary to apologize in advance for what he might find. ‘Me and my husband’s looked after the place as best we could. Kept it decent like, while he’s been in there, but it wants decorating top to bottom, it’s never been touched since our Marion died — I tried to get him to do it, thought it’d give him something to occupy him till he got another job, but he’d no interest. He just sat there, in front of the telly, didn’t matter what were on, he’d watch it.’

  ‘Teletubbies, Neighbours, Open University, game shows, you name it,’ said Eric disgustedly. ‘All he did, watch telly.’

  ‘Well, what could you expect, being in that place all this time? It’s like you’ve always said, Eric, they get institutionalized, don’t they? Wouldn’t even cook for himself,’ she told Hingley, ‘though he always used to love his food. I brought him some decent meals in every now and then, I couldn’t stand to see him living off all them pizzas and curries.’

  ‘And Joe Soap here went on, daft as a brush, cutting the grass for him like I’d done all the time he was inside, and what’s more, he bloody let me — never raised a finger! Never even stirred hisself to water the tubs, idle sod! You wouldn’t catch me doing that, I tell you, for nobody but Mavis.’

  ‘Well, you couldn’t let the place get into a slum like next door,’ his wife said placatingly — ‘what would folks have thought?’

  ‘What they already think — that we’ll be letting the bloody Pakis in next!’

  ‘Eric!!’

  ‘Bad enough having a jailbird here. I’ve heard that said, an’ all, down at the Red Lion.’

  ‘He’d paid his debt, Eric.’

  Brayshaw’s face had turned from sunburnt to puce, and Hingley hastily stood up, sensing signs of marital dissent, and not anxious to ignite any more of Mr Brayshaw’s smouldering prejudices, but his wife hadn’t finished with Hingley. ‘If it turns out he has killed her — well, we’ll just have to accept it. But I’ll just say this. Taking James like that’s just the sort of thing he would do, but he fair worships that little lad. He wouldn’t harm a hair of his head.’ Suddenly she burst into tears. ‘It’s all my fault — I told him, when I was visiting him once, she’d gone to live down south with that chap that was a witness at the trial.’

  ‘Now then, Mavis. He’d have found out where she was, choose how.’

  ‘That’s right, Mrs Brayshaw. He knew his name, it wouldn’t be hard to find out where he lived.’ She looked relieved and Hingley said, ‘Well, the first priority is finding ’em both, your nephew and the little lad. Let me have a mosey round.’

  The search didn’t take long. The house was shabby, the carpets threadbare, the kitchen units were an old DIY job, circa 1950, that needed replacing, but everywhere was spotless, due, no doubt, to Mrs Brayshaw’s ministrations. He soon returned to the front room.

  ‘I can’t find anything to suggest a child’s been in the house.’

  ‘Oh aye? So that’s what you’ve been looking for, Sherlock, eh? Flamin’ hell,’ said Brayshaw, ‘even I can see he wouldn’t hardly’ve brought him here — he’s not that daft!’

  ‘Maybe you can suggest somewhere else he’s likely to have taken him, then?’ Hingley asked sharply, nettled.

  Husband and wife looked at one another. Some sort of agreement seemed to have taken place in Hingley’s absence. ‘As a matter of fact, there is one place he might likely be,’ Mavis Brayshaw said.

  The congregation at the family service in the church of St Michael and All Angels in Middleton Thorpe on Sunday morning was very nearly as big as even the vicar, whose three-weekly turn it was to preach there, could wish for. Regular churchgoers or not, an unusually satisfactory number of people from the village filled the pews this morning.

  Dr Paul Anderson, who lived in Middleton but whose practice was in Felsborough and who, it just so happened,
was the police medical examiner who first saw Bibi’s body, led the choir with his fine baritone, struggling against the organist, old Roger Capstick, who invariably pitched the hymn tunes too high and too slow. There was just one other man in the choir, a newcomer to the village who worked in computers and had been persuaded to make up the numbers. His voice wasn’t up to much, he was the first to admit, but he was enthusiastic. The rest of the choir were women, mostly middle-aged or elderly. None of the youngsters of the village, boys or girls, could be persuaded into joining, although a fair sprinkling of children had been lugged along to church this morning by their parents, since prayers were to be said for their schoolmate. A television camera crew was hanging about outside, hoping to catch some of the children weeping for Jasie.

  Humphrey stands next to Alyssa, barking out the words of the hymn in the tuneless manner he invariably falls back on, since he can’t hope to reach the high notes and has never been able to carry a tune, anyway. ‘On!-ward! Chris!-tian! So!-oldiers! …’ What was good enough for Rex Harrison as Professor Higgins is good enough for him. When it comes to the responses, he gives the familiar ones he’s learned as a child from the Book of Common Prayer and has continued to use, regardless of whether anyone else is using Rite A or Rite B or any other new-fangled rite. He refuses to shake hands at the Peace. No one around him is unduly surprised by this eccentricity. They’re used to Humphrey.

  Alyssa is amused at his stiff stubbornness, but all the same, she herself can’t help sighing for the loss of the beautiful prose of the old Prayer Book, such a comfort. She can never comprehend why those who are said not to understand it cannot be taught to do so. Despite the loss of the old familiar words, however, she feels comforted by the service, and immensely supported by all the family being here today, though none of her sons are regular attenders any longer. She hasn’t slept properly for two nights, being very troubled in herself by having remembered something which she hasn’t told the police. Is it important enough for them to need to know? Even if it is, she’s not sure whether she’ll tell them. It probably has no significance, she thinks, willing herself to believe it. The hymn creaks to its end and she watches Jane Arrow, in the choir, lead the ‘Amen’ in a high, reedy soprano.

  Jane settles herself back while the vicar mounts the pulpit to begin his sermon. She hopes the Reverend Treece, who is a terrible old windbag, will restrict himself to the prayers said for Jasie and not make mawkish appeals in his sermon. As it is, it’s going to be enough of an ordeal for Alyssa, who looks ready to weep. She notices that Humphrey has closed his eyes, as he usually does during the sermon, and purses her lips, waiting for his head to jerk up to the amusement of all. She’s pleased to see that Chip has turned up, looking resolute. And Jonathan, too — even though she knows this so-called music is hard for him to endure.

  She’s quite right about that. The choir is abysmal, Jonathan is thinking, and no boys in it, but what’s new? He’d been dragooned into swelling the numbers before he went away to school and occasionally after that, when he was home, but even then it had been a painful experience, quite unlike the occasional near-ecstasy of being part of the choir at school, which happened to have a music master who was passionate about boys’ voices and church music generally: his mentor, who had eventually persuaded him to consider seriously the idea of music as a career. He exchanges a wry smile with Jilly It’s not realistic to expect much more than that from a tiny village choir. But he did wish they had a better organist.

  As the vicar begins to speak, he looks at his watch. He has half an hour exactly before he must set off in his mother’s car for London, and his first rehearsal. The vicar has been asking their prayers for Jasie’s safety, and though prayers haven’t featured much in Jonathan’s life lately, he prayed then. For Jasie, and for himself. Perhaps he should have done that long ago. He shuts off the vicar’s words.

  Kate heard the sound of hymn singing coming from the church as she drove past on her way to Membery. A nostalgic sound, inescapably associated with Miss Marple films, where church bells rang for Matins, you could almost smell the roasting beef, and little girls wore their Sunday shoes and straw hats. Alas, this was Middleton Thorpe, similar sort of name but a different story. In St Mary Mead they’d never heard of men in vests washing cars on Sunday mornings to the accompaniment of headbanging music. Large, uncontrolled mongrel dogs didn’t run out into the road and bark at traffic. Neither did godless little boys on roller blades flirt with death almost under the wheels of cars. She narrowly avoided hitting one of them and momentarily regretted she hadn’t when he gave her the old one two.

  By contrast, the gardens at Membery Place were manna to the soul. They were still closed to the public, but she had a key to get in, and was alone to wander quietly along the herbaceous borders and the sunken garden, to smell the roses and climb down among the cascades of rock plants on the escarpment overlooking the valley … Come on, Kate, you’re not here to enjoy yourself!

  Sometimes, she wondered why she’d joined the police, and when she had to work on Sundays was one of those times. Though to be truthful, she didn’t have to be here. She’d been yo-yoing between here and Felsborough ever since Thursday evening and ought to have been glad of a respite.

  She sat on the top one of three sun-warmed stone steps leading down into the rose garden and sipped from the bottle of mineral water she had in her bag. As the cool water gurgled down her throat, she flicked back through her notebook. She was convinced that she’d registered something at the beginning of the enquiry which had lodged in her mind, something that would help to build up a picture of Bibi Morgan’s last hours, but she couldn’t catch it. She was a meticulous note-taker and she quickly found the place where she’d underlined the time of that telephone call Bibi had made to Francine Calvert at her office — around half-past two, as far as Fran could remember - which seemed like a starting point for the sequence of events leading up to Bibi’s death.

  No one else who had been questioned had reported anything unusual about that day. Apparently, Bibi had spent most of the afternoon in the garden in a deck chair under the cedar on the front lawn, reading and resting her weak ankle. Jasie had been playing that afternoon at the home of a friend, where the main attraction was a junior trampoline the other boy had been given for his birthday. He’d been given his tea and then brought home by his friend’s mother. Kate turned to what she’d written down when she’d interviewed this woman.

  ‘I told her Jasie would need to go straight into the bath,’ Mel Barrington had recalled, laughing. But she’d added that if the noise they’d been making was any indication, they’d tired themselves out — he shouldn’t need any rocking to sleep that night.

  ‘It was brill, Tom and me kept jumping from the tramp into the paddling pool and we got soaked!’ Jasie had said. ‘But I had my trunks on, so it was OK. Thank you for having me, Mrs Barrington.’

  ‘I told her he could have stayed longer, you know. But he’d told me his mother had said he had to be home by five, and she said that was right, that was what she’d told him.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she said why?’

  ‘No, and I didn’t ask. Whenever he came to play with my kids, she always made clear the exact time he had to be home — she either picked him up herself or I brought him back. She was very protective of Jasie, you know. But that’s no bad thing, these days, is it?’

  ‘Absolutely not, Mrs Barrington. You can’t be too careful.’

  So that was five o’clock, when they’d last been seen together. An apparently uneventful afternoon. Yet Fran reported that she’d sounded frantic when they’d spoken. Had something happened — apart from the onset of a headache — between then and the time she’d asked Gary Brooker to deliver the note — which was half-past five, according to Kate’s notes?

  Kate had gone after Gary when he’d scarpered so fast out of the greenhouse on seeing her yesterday and, following the girl Becky’s instructions, found him outside a potting shed, just starting to s
weep up glass from one of its broken windows and shovelling it into a wheelbarrow. He’d looked shifty, and avoided her eyes, but even he had been able to see there was no longer any way he could avoid her.

  He towered above her, and she didn’t want to give him that advantage. She looked around for somewhere to sit, but could only see the brick edge of a cold frame with its lid up. She perched on it and indicated the space next to her. He ignored the invitation but chose a similar perch on the frame opposite, leaving the brick path between them.

  Kate riffled through her notes to remind herself of what she’d written down then.

  It had been like pulling teeth, but at last she got Gary to admit that at half-past five, Bibi had come through the gate from the private garden, caught him just as he was about to go home, and asked him if he wouldn’t mind doing something for her and delivering a note she’d written to young Mrs Calvert at The Watersplash.

  ‘So you took the note down to The Watersplash as a favour for Ms Morgan. What did you think of her, Gary?’

  He’d flushed a dull, unattractive red. ‘She warn’t bad,’ he mumbled, not raising his eyes from the path. He had his elbows on his knees, his head supported in his hands, which still wore the thick, protective gloves he’d been using while he prised out the last pieces of glass from the window. ‘She was OK, I suppose. Didn’t have all that much to do with her, though.’

  ‘OK, so that was half-past five. How long did it take you to ride down there?’