Scent of Death

‘Oh, it’s you!’ she exclaimed. Her dark skirt and ruffled blouse were protected by a smart frilled apron; she wore sparkling ear-rings and a matching necklace. Her hair was elaborately arranged, her face carefully made up. She came out on to the step and glanced sharply up and down the street. ‘I thought it was another reporter.’

‘Have they been pestering you?’ Lambert asked.

She shrugged. ‘It was him they wanted, of course.’ She jerked her head towards No. 34. ‘But he wouldn’t speak to them, he wouldn’t even answer the door. I told them they were wasting their time. He’s an obstinate man, I said, you can ring his bell till you’re blue in the face but if he’s made up his mind not to come out, then come out he will not. They took some pictures of the shop.’ She smiled fleetingly and touched her hair. ‘They took a picture of me as well, standing here in the doorway, looking over at the shop. It’ll be in all the papers. They asked me a lot of questions about Arnold and the girls, about the family in general. Of course I’m very well placed to answer. No one round here knows more about the Mowbrays and the Lockyears than I do.’

She frowned suddenly. ‘What was it you were wanting? I’m up to the eyes just now. I’ve got my sister-in-law and her husband, and their son and his wife and family, coming over to tea in half an hour. They’ve been on the phone already this morning, wanting to know all about this dreadful business. I’ve had half the neighbourhood phoning or calling round, asking me what I know.’ She spoke with a mixture of pride and irritation. ‘All of a sudden I’m the most popular woman in the street.’ She gave a little jerk of her head. ‘Oh well – you’d better come inside. I can get on while I’m talking to you, better than standing out here doing nothing.’

He followed her into the house. She stood watching with a hawklike gaze to see that he wiped his feet properly before she allowed him to set foot on her hall carpet, brilliantly patterned in crimson and beige, a design of huge cabbage roses that made the tiny hall look even smaller.

‘My husband’s over at my sister-in-law’s now,’ she threw at him over her shoulder as she led the way into the kitchen, recently modernized, furnished with expensive-looking units, the latest model electric cooker. ‘He’s taking a look at their car, it’s been playing them up. Never happy unless he’s getting his hands dirty, my husband, even on a Bank Holiday.’ She waved a hand. ‘He’s done all this himself.’

A large table in the centre of the kitchen was covered with plates, dishes and basins holding food in various stages of preparation: the remains of a cold turkey, a highly decorated trifle, a packet of sliced bread, a lettuce in a plastic bag, tomatoes, cucumber, hard-boiled eggs, beetroot, tins of peaches, fruit salad, cream. Whatever else awaited her in-laws, it wouldn’t appear to be death from starvation.

‘I gather you used to help out next door,’ Lambert said. ‘Until old Mr Lockyear died.’

‘That’s right.’ She began to cut delicate slices of turkey breast. ‘Mr Lockyear came round here to ask me, he made a special favour of it. I wouldn’t have done it for anyone else. And it was handy, being next door. I never had any trouble from either of the girls. They were always well behaved, quiet girls, nicely brought up. I got on well with the old man too, he was very straight, very considerate. He was well liked round here, well respected.’

She glanced up at Lambert. ‘His second wife was a very nice-looking woman. The chap she was married to before, he was a decent enough fellow, a commercial artist, worked for himself. They never had two pennies to rub together, they just struggled along. He had poor health, something wrong with his kidneys. He was in and out of hospital the last few years before he died. She had to give piano lessons to keep going. They lived near here, a few streets away, she always got her meat at Lockyear’s.’

She turned her attention to buttering slices of bread. ‘She had a hard time of it after her husband died. Joanne was only two or three years old. But she always kept the two girls very neat and clean.’

‘Were you surprised when she married Lockyear?’ Lambert asked.

‘I was and I wasn’t,’ she said with a judicial purse of her lips. Lambert, who had subsisted all day on small and infrequent snacks, couldn’t prevent his gaze from resting on the pale, succulent slices of turkey. She turned her head suddenly and caught his yearning eye. ‘Hungry, are you?’ Without waiting for an answer she picked up a couple of slices on the point of the carving knife and deposited them between slices of bread. She thrust the sandwich at him. ‘Help yourself to mustard and pickle.’ Lambert began to eat with gratitude and energy.

‘Make yourself a cup of coffee,’ she said. ‘Don’t bother with any for me, I haven’t got the time.’ She resumed her swift buttering. ‘She certainly wasn’t the type I’d have bet money on if I’d ever thought of old Lockyear marrying again, but afterwards, when I came to think about it, I could see it was really a very suitable match for both of them. She never had any more financial worries. He gave her a comfortable home – she’d been living in rented rooms. And he was very good to the two girls, he treated them as if they were his own.’

She paused and stared at the opposite wall. ‘He worshipped the ground that woman walked on, anyone could see that from the way he looked at her.’

Lambert stood by the window drinking his coffee, looking out at the back yard, transformed with coloured paving slabs and a roofed-in area for sitting out, bright with tubs of forsythia and flowering currant. A white plaster figure of a cupid held aloft an urn planted with trailing variegated ivy. ‘I never go into the shop now,’ Mrs Snape said. ‘Not after the way Arnold behaved towards me after his Dad died.’

She took the lettuce over to the sink and began to wash it. ‘He could hardly wait till his Dad was cold before he told me I wouldn’t be wanted any more.’ She gave a resentful jerk of her head. ‘He didn’t mince his words either. He more or less implied I’d been leading the life of Riley for the last few years, a nice cushy job, getting paid for doing damn-all.’

She shook the lettuce vigorously in a wire basket; drops of water flew about the kitchen. ‘I didn’t demean myself by arguing with him. I just gathered up my bits and pieces and walked out. I’ve never set foot inside the place from that day to this.’ She glanced at Lambert. ‘I had no quarrel with the girls. I always spoke to them if I saw them in the street, but that was as far as it went.’

She arranged the lettuce in a glass bowl and began to slice tomatoes and cucumber. ‘It’s certainly no hardship not to buy my meat there any more. I can buy it cheaper and better trimmed at any of the supermarkets in town. The business has gone right down since old Lockyear died. He had some first-class contracts with local hotels and restaurants, one or two school kitchens. He had a man with a van delivering full-time, used to go out round the local villages three times a week. All that’s finished now, it’s just Arnold and an apprentice lad.’

She cracked the shells of the hard-boiled eggs and stripped them swiftly and cleanly, sliced them neatly on a little aluminium gadget. ‘No, Arnold isn’t the butcher his father was, nor the businessman. He hasn’t the manner either, he never has two words to say, not in the way of friendly chat while he’s serving you. He’s downright surly sometimes.’ She disposed the egg slices in an artistic pattern over the salad. ‘I don’t know if he’ll have the face to open the shop tomorrow, but if he does there won’t be many from round here that’ll go in. By next weekend he’ll be standing behind his counter twiddling his thumbs.’

She set about opening the various tins. ‘He never got on with those two poor girls. He never liked them, he was always jealous of them. He couldn’t see why he should have to be responsible for them after his father died. He always wanted them to clear off out of the way, and the sooner the better. He kept his mouth shut while his father was alive, of course, but I could see well enough what was going on inside his head. It didn’t take a mind-reader to do that.’

She took a tin of little homemade cakes from a shelf and set them out on a platter, handing Lambert a couple as an afterthought. ‘Arnold drove those two girls out of the house – or as good as, whatever he likes to tell you now.’

‘Would you have expected Joanne to phone him while she was away?’ Lambert asked. ‘To let him know how she was getting on?’

She shook her head at once, with decision. ‘No, not her. The less he knew about anything they were doing, the better those girls were pleased, that was always the way it was.’ She gave him a shrewd glance. ‘I’ll tell you something, though: the last thing in the world Arnold would have wanted would be for Joanne to find Helen and talk her into coming back home.’

‘Have you spoken to Arnold since all this came out?’

‘No, I have not, nor intend to.’

‘Have any of the neighbours been to see him?’

‘Not they. What could they say to him?’

‘Has he any relatives round here?’

‘Not that I ever heard of.’

‘Is he in the house now?’

‘I expect so, I haven’t seen him go out. And in any case, where would he go? He’s never been one for the pub.’ She paused. ‘I suppose he could be down at his allotment, but I doubt it. He wouldn’t want the other men watching him, talking behind his back.’ She glanced up at the clock and uttered a sharp exclamation.

‘I’ll get along out of your way,’ Lambert said. ‘You don’t happen to know of any special friends either of the girls may have had locally?’

‘They certainly neither of them ever had any boyfriends,’ she said at once. ‘Arnold would never have allowed them to bring a boy home. Not that either of them was ever interested in boys, from anything I could see.’ She flashed him an upward glance. ‘More interested in getting away from here altogether, putting some distance between themselves and their precious stepbrother.’ She pondered. ‘I can’t remember any special friend of Helen’s, but there was a girl Joanne used to pal about with. Michelle Kershaw, number eleven Chadcote Road. It isn’t five minutes’ walk from here.’

She came to the door and gave him directions. Lambert could see the curtains move at the windows of more than one house in the terrace opposite. He turned his head and glanced at the butcher’s shop next door. He had a vision of Lockyear inside, alone, sitting in silence in the kitchen or lying upstairs on his bed, staring up at the ceiling.

Mrs Snape followed his glance. ‘He’s got what he wanted now all right,’ she said with an edge of malice. ‘He’s got the whole place to himself at last. I only hope he’s satisfied.’

The houses that faced each other across Chadcote Road were smaller and older than those in Thirlstane Street, the brickwork crumbling, the paintwork faded, a general air of seediness.

Lambert’s ring at the door of No. 11 was answered after a minute or two by a flustered-looking, middle-aged woman. ‘What is it?’ she demanded, already half turned away again, back to whatever she had been snatched from.

Lambert disclosed his identity and the nature of his inquiry. Conflicting expressions flitted across her face. She was clearly torn between a strong desire to pump him for every drop of information and the equally powerful necessity to return to what she had been doing.

‘You’d better come in,’ she flung at him half angrily after a few moments. He stepped inside and she banged the door shut. The house smelled of perfumed bath salts – expensive French bath salts, if Lambert’s nose was any judge.

‘I warn you,’ Mrs Kershaw added, ‘Michelle can’t stop long gabbing, she’s on her way out. She’s got this young man calling for her at half past, he’s taking her home to supper. It’s the first time he’s asked her, she’s only known him a few weeks.’ She looked earnestly up at him in the narrow hall. ‘He lives out on Jubilee Drive’ – as if the name must strike awed respect into all who heard it. She saw that it meant nothing to him. ‘Those lovely new houses,’ she added. She made a gesture indicating expansiveness, conditions very different from Chadcote Road. ‘She can’t keep his parents waiting, they must see she knows what’s what.’

A door opened along the hall and a girl’s head appeared, covered in blue plastic rollers swathed in a film of white chiffon. She looked very like what her mother must have been twenty-five years ago; her frowning expression showed what she would look like herself in another quarter of a century. ‘It’s nearly twenty to,’ she said to her mother loudly, with accusation. She barely glanced at Lambert.

‘It’s this gentleman,’ her mother told her, in a tone now markedly placatory. ‘He’s from the police. Come to ask some questions about Joanne Mowbray.’

‘I didn’t know her all that well,’ Michelle said at once. She came out into the hall. She wore a nylon petticoat richly flounced with lace; her bare legs were thrust into fluffy mules. She had a tiny waist, a beautiful bosom, neat and rounded. Lambert strove to raise his eyes to the level of her glowering countenance.

‘I won’t keep you long,’ he promised.

‘You’d better come on in.’ Mrs Kershaw led the way along the hall. ‘I can finish your dress while we talk,’ she added to Michelle. Lambert followed them into a small, crowded living-room. A table in the centre of the room held a sewing-machine. Mrs Kershaw picked up a sleeveless dress of beautiful flowered silk and slipped it over Michelle’s head. She knelt down and began to pin up the hem. ‘Don’t make it too long,’ Michelle warned.

‘I understand you were a friend of Joanne’s,’ Lambert said.

Michelle pulled down the corners of her mouth. Before she could speak her mother put in, ‘They were never really friends, and she hardly knew Helen at all. She never went to the house, not in recent years.’

‘Joanne sat next to me at school,’ Michelle told him. ‘We used to walk home together. That was all.’

‘They never went out together,’ Mrs Kershaw added. ‘No one could say they were at all close.’