The Missing Witness

  The Missing Witness

  Jo Smedley

  © Jo Smedley 2017

  Jo Smedley has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published by Endeavour Press Ltd in 2017.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter One

  I followed Irene up the uneven path, nervous tension tugging at the hairs on the back of my neck and my pulse thumping out a staccato beat in my throat.

  We shouldn’t be here. The striped police tape caught up across the hedge indicated as much.

  “Maybe this is a bad idea,” I said, as she stepped into the shadows ahead of me. “Irene?”

  To one side of me the plants in the borders seemed to be reaching out as if to pull me back, and I hesitated at the edge of the light. We were trespassing, uninvited, unwanted. Breaking the silence that had gripped the house since the day the police first arrived and cordoned it off.

  She turned, the glitter of her eyes the only part of her visible beyond the street lamp’s reach. “Come on. I’ll need that torch.”

  At her urging I stepped forwards into the darkness. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was crossing more than one boundary. The physical one, limited by the orange glow, but also a moral one, limited by my own sense of right and wrong.

  “You remembered your gloves?”

  “Yes.”

  She lowered the hourglass shaped collection canister and placed it on the floor with a dull thud. It was already half full, just like my own. The weight was reassuring in a way, it felt like an extra pull of gravity keeping me grounded. I watched as she slipped something small and thin out of her pocket.

  “What’s that?”

  Looking over her shoulder, I could see something that was the same shape as a credit card, but thicker. It had writing and a picture on it but both were obscured in the semi-darkness. She slid a compartment out from underneath the card revealing a small set of flat metal tools that shone in the light: lock picks.

  “Where on earth did you get that?”

  “eBay.”

  She inserted a couple of the rods into the mortice lock which fastened the old wooden door, moving her hands simultaneously up and down. Inside the door small ticks and rattles accompanied her movements as she worked at the lock. Every sound seemed booming-loud and I cast a furtive glance behind me towards the drive.

  “I suppose you learned how to do this on You Tube?”

  “Yes, but it’s easier without gloves. I should have practised with the gloves on.”

  Irene was one of what they called “the silver surfer generation”, but where everyone else was busy looking up saga holidays and cheap flights to Cyprus, she was busy researching breaking and entering.

  An owl hooted somewhere in the middle of the park behind us and a bat flitted across the light from the streetlamp. We might be in the thick of the town, but nature was all around, and at night the streets became alive with the nocturnal: foxes, hedgehogs, owls, bats, animals which had the world to themselves when the humans retired to bed.

  While she worked I placed my own canister gently on the concrete drive beside its pair. It wobbled and I moved it slightly, shifting the base off a cigarette butt I hadn’t noticed before. Goodness only knows where she’d obtained the half empty tubs. Perhaps they had been swiped from one of her coffee morning pensioners. I wondered if they knew what she was actually doing with them.

  My mind wandered briefly to Lucus back home, cuddled up on the couch with the dog watching re-runs of Chris Barrie’s Massive Machines, and of Lillian, my daughter, curled up in her cot above them. What would he say if he saw me now? Mother turned housebreaker, all within the space of a few weeks.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  She didn’t reply. Instead I heard the door click open.

  *

  We’d met one freezing but unremarkable Tuesday in December.

  I say met, but in all honesty I must have already passed her several times in the street before then. She was old enough to be my mother, dressed very similarly, and while I’m not the least bit ageist there was nothing which marked Irene out to me as someone worth knowing until the day she jumped into the frozen duck pond.

  That isn’t to say she didn’t have a very good reason for jumping in. As I’d discovered since, Irene was never one for taking action unnecessarily, but equally, when action was called for – she was never one to hang back, either.

  The morning I met her, I had taken my daughter to feed the ducks. She was a little young for the experience, but it was forming part of our regular dog walk, and it felt like the “right sort of thing” for a mother to do.

  Being a mother wasn’t quite what I had expected. I’d read the job description in much the same way as I’d skimmed self-assembly furniture instructions. I figured it’d be a breeze after the senior role in the high pressure NHS I’d occupied before. However, instead of naturally blossoming into parenthood, it felt more like I’d completed a lifecycle in reverse: turning myself from a butterfly; able to go where I pleased, achieve what I wanted and do what I liked; into a stay at home caterpillar crawling through a very dull existence that involved nappies, teething, cleaning, cooking, laundry… a treadmill of housewifery boredom that stretched into the future like a dull tarmac road through a deserted landscape, no end in sight.

  I wasn’t suffering with post-natal depression. I was just bored. Mother and toddler groups were all very well, but the average mother seemed to get far more satisfaction out of singing repetitive lullabies then I could believe possible; and when I suggested, God forbid, that we actually ditch the singing and discuss something like...say...a recent book we’d read...the stunned silence in the room had told me all I needed to know.

  Dog walking was the one part of my day which brought with it some normality. Our border collie Moss had been with us long before Lillian and when out walking it was like I’d got a small portion of my life back. Lillian would often fall asleep at some point in the walk which meant I could think thoughts of my own. If I ignored the pram ahead of me entirely, I could pretend that I would return home to a life of reason and order, change into my uniform and rush off to work, where what I was important and my opinion mattered.

  That morning the pond was an ice rink. Ducks and geese were skating all over, using their wings to keep upright when their feet failed them. They were truly ‘ducks out of water’. Their wings extended like a bad fluffy version of Torvill and Dean, slowly spinning around each other in ungainly attempts to remain upright.

  Irene must have been standing close by as I slid various pieces of bread across the pond like an expert curler, but I hadn’t noticed her. In
fact, I didn’t notice her at all until Max, one of the local chocolate Labradors, rushed past me onto the pond in an attempt to chase the bread.

  Now, there’s one thing you need to know about Labradors and that’s how greedy they are. They’ll eat everything they find, from discarded chips to the chip wrappers themselves. I’d often passed Max’s owner in the mornings attempting to prize cartons and sweetie wrappers from his jaws. So when I saw him leaping onto the pond I knew the ducks weren’t in any danger, rather it was the bread I was tossing in their general direction which had attracted his attention.

  He leapt onto the ice and began skidding across the frozen water towards the ducks at a velocity which I knew was going to take him right past the bread he was attempting to reach. He clearly realised that too and tried to slam on the brakes, his back legs splaying behind him, claws out, paws wide... and CRACK one minute he was there and the next he was under the water.

  “Maaaaaxxxx!” I heard a drawn out call some distance behind me but the dog didn’t surface. The ice had swallowed him up. There was a gap where the heavy gun dog had fallen through but his head simply hadn’t reappeared.

  The ice rattled from an impact beneath. Max was under there somewhere, trying to reach the surface, but his trajectory had taken him beneath the ice and away from the hole his descent had made.

  There was another icy rattle as his head once again rebounded on the ice.

  I didn’t know what to do. I stood there, unable to move, rooted to the spot. Fifteen feet away a dog was stuck under the ice and I simply had no idea how to get to him. I could feel my heart jump in my throat.

  “Maaaaaxxxx!” More distant... his owner hadn’t seen the incident. It sounded like they were still walking around the park, sure their pet would catch up in short order.

  The ice cracked again, a crunching, grating, reverberating sound and a couple of ducks shifted on the ice, peering down underneath them as if unable to work out why the ground was moving.

  It was then, just as I thought I would be the one to bear witness to the drowning of a much loved family pet, that Irene crashed into my life. I don’t know where she came from but suddenly there she was, standing beside me.

  “Where is he?” she asked.

  “There,” I said, pointing. “Somewhere under those ducks I think.”

  That was all she needed to know. She jumped straight onto the pond, fracturing the ice with one loud cracking splosh, and began forcing her way through the ice sheet towards the hole like a human icebreaker.

  It can’t have taken her as long to reach the centre of the pond as it felt like it did. Standing on the edge, it was like watching one of those slow motion rescue programs. As I stood there, my heart hammering, I could make out the wheelbarrow squeak of a robin in the tree above, the crunching of the ice as it butted up to the concrete nearest me, the splooshing lap of water on the bank where Irene had broken through, the growl of a motorbike racing around the roundabout at one side of the park, and the argumentative quack of the ducks as Irene approached their territory. Could she reach the dog in time?

  She smashed her way into the hole the dog had made and from there, across to the location I’d indicated. Suddenly Max’s steaming head broke the surface of the water, snorting and coughing.

  “Maaaaaaaxxxx!” The owner’s holler from still further away sent him swimming back towards shore in the channel Irene had made, and without even a cursory glance behind him to thank his rescuer, the dog leapt out onto the bank, shook freezing water all over me, and the pram and ran off.

  I looked out into the pond, at his soaked lifesaver, at Irene.

  As I say, we must have passed several times in the street before that day. She looked to be around five foot three or four, not much shorter then me; though it was hard to tell when she was hip deep in water. Her face, red from exertion, contained small pale freckles which dappled across her nose and cheeks. Her nose was European, with a small lump at the mid-point which gave it an almost roman appearance. She had blue/grey eyes, and as the crow’s feet wrinkled around her eyes in a smile her nose also creased and twitched very much like a rabbit. She panted hot puffs of condensing water vapour as she waded back, but she was smiling at her achievement.

  “Are you all right?” I held out my hand to help her back onto the bank. Her decisive action was embarrassing. After all, as someone at least half her age surely I should have been the one to have jumped into the water. I could feel my cheeks burning with shame.

  “Bloody freezing.” She looked across at the figure striding into the distance on the far side of the pond, the dog running to catch up, his owner oblivious to the near life and death situation that had played out behind.

  “Ungrateful hound. You’d have thought he’d have at least stopped to say thank you.” But her nose was wrinkling and her mouth twitching into a wide smile all the same.

  “Look at you,” I said, as she stood next to me dripping on the bank, grinning from ear to ear, seemingly oblivious to the cold. “You’re soaking.”

  It wouldn’t be long before she was shivering. After all, it was cold enough to have frozen the pond!

  “My house is only around the corner.” I said, eager to make up for my lack of heroism. “Come back with me. I’ll find you a change of clothes.”

  And that was how it started. Of course it helped that she was a living breathing adult, one without a baby balanced on her knee, that she had an opinion on just about everything, enjoyed reading and that her life didn’t revolve around the best wet wipes to clean up baby vomit. Even so...I hadn’t quite realised what I had let myself in for…

  Chapter Two

  Standing beside Irene, just inside the door of the house we’d recklessly broken into, it suddenly dawned on me quite how much a change Irene had wrought in my life. Twelve weeks ago I would never have even considered pulling a stunt like this. And now here I was. Standing inside the home of a murder victim mere weeks after the awful tragedy, wearing gloves and a couple of blue plastic overshoes I’d obtained from the pool where we went swimming.

  I heard her closing the door behind me and I took off one of my gloves so I could trigger the light on my smart phone.

  The back door had opened directly into the kitchen, which wasn’t unusual for this area. I swung the phone, careful to avoid casting any light upwards towards the windows. Irene was certain the house wasn’t being watched, but even so, it paid to be careful.

  I tracked the light across the tiled floor. The grout was positively stain free, each tile gleaming. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see exactly, but whatever it was, it wasn’t this. The room was spotless. There was no body, no blood, no broken crockery, no turned over chair, no stereotypical wobbling knife stabbed into the counter. In fact, the kitchen looked like it was prepped for an estate agent’s tour.

  When Irene had first asked me to accompany her I had, of course, refused. Not because of any squeamishness, though I have to admit, a small part of me was secretly relieved there was no dead body here to greet us, but because breaking and entering was just not the right thing to do. The problem was, Irene had a way with words, and after a fairly short discussion in which my moral character was called into question and my way of looking at the world had been dissected and found to be wanting, I had somehow been persuaded that as far as moral scruples were concerned, breaking into an empty house was the least of my worries. After all, what if the man the police were looking for was innocent? What then? I was somehow responsible for not only his arrest but also of allowing a guilty murderer to get away and all because I wouldn't agree to hold a torch while Irene picked a lock and walked around an empty house disturbing nobody.

  It was clear she had some connection to the wanted man; as for me, until tonight my only connection to the murder had been to provide the use of my dog.

  *

  The day of the murder my morning routine had been interrupted by Irene’s arrival at my door. She wanted to borrow the dog. Borrow the dog? She hadn't elab
orated at the time, but I could tell by the look in her eye something was up.

  “What is it?”

  “I don't know...yet. That's why I want the dog.”

  I thought back at how surprised Irene had been the first time she had joined me on the morning walk. Is it always like this? she had asked, as I paused once again chatting to another dog owner while Moss sniffed at their dog's rear end; the universal doggy greeting. Yes, I had said. Always.

  Dog owners talked to each other. It just happened. We didn't know each other's names, just knew each other as ‘Moss's owner’ or ‘Buddy's dad’ but that didn't stop us talking and exchanging local news. Did we know about the burglary at number three? Had we seen the car in the duck pond the other morning? Had we heard the fire engines on Saturday night? For me, this interaction with living breathing adults was what made the dog walks such an oasis of “normal” in the baby-world I now occupied. For Irene this free transaction of information was an exciting route into the world of local news.

  It wasn't that Irene was nosy, nor that she was a gossip. She was just interested in relationships. Not the nitty gritty family, who’s divorcing who sort of relationships, but rather the relationships of life. Causes and effects. Why A led to B, how C became involved and what happened to D as a result. If she'd had her life over again I was sure she would have become a detective, but at her age in life, a life in the police just hadn't been readily open to her and what she'd done instead I hadn't yet found out. Irene rarely talked about herself and I was too British to conduct a lengthy personal enquiry.

  Irene glanced swiftly around the room. She didn’t seem phased by the scrubbed and empty crime scene.

  I wondered if this was how it always was. All evidence of an incident washed away in a matter of days. Life going on after a goodly squirt of cleaning fluid, a bucket and a mop. But if Irene expected this – why on earth had she been so insistent we break in?

  The confusion must have shown on my face.