The Missing Witness Read online

“They don’t leave everything lying around, Ruth,” Irene said. “It’s all photographed, bagged, tagged and taken away. They have forensic cleaners attached to the police who come in and clean everything up. And her mother’s probably been in and tidied up the place as well.”

  “Oh.” I said. “So...um...?”

  “What are we doing here?”

  I nodded. With the body removed, along with all the evidence, surely all the clues had gone.

  “I wasn’t interested in the kitchen.”

  Irene opened the door into the hall.

  “You weren’t ?”

  The kitchen was where the murder had happened. The local paper had been most clear on that point. “YOUNG WOMAN STABBED TO DEATH IN KITCHEN" was the headline. The report had gone on to say that the girl, Lesley Cooper, formerly known as Allenby, had been discovered by her post man on Tuesday morning lying in a pool of blood, a knife stabbed through her back. The police were seeking her ex-husband in connection with the murder and were appealing for witnesses.

  I daresay, thanks to the dog walk Irene took that first morning, she had discovered all of that long before the report made it to the press. Since then she’d coincided my dog walks to glean as much as she could, having identified which owners knew the most and enquiring innocuously every time we happened to ‘bump into them’. All the contacts were, of course, engineered carefully by Irene who had quizzed me on the various people I met at the different times of day I went out. Between us we managed to map most of their regular timetables, but none of them seemed to notice. Lillian and I were dragged on more dog walks than was our norm while we gathered facts. However, there were limits to the free information exchange and it reached the point where the only winner in the increase in dog walks was Moss.

  I stood staring at the table and chairs in the centre of the room, trying to keep my light steady. This was where they had found her. This was where the woman’s blood had spilled all over the floor. I wondered if she was still here. Her spirit lingering...

  Suddenly my torchlight beam seemed feeble, as if it could barely penetrate the room, a mere point of light against the heavy darkness of a calculated murder. My feet felt like someone had glued them to the floor. Below my knees everything had gone cold and heavy, like lead.

  Why had I let Irene talk me into this? Whichever way you looked at it we shouldn’t be here. My stomach lurched, I felt a rush of nausea. I had let this get out of hand. Been persuaded by her logical arguments. Everything within me rebelled. My hand shook.

  “Maybe we should leave.” I said.

  “Not yet. I still haven’t seen what I came for. Come on.”

  Irene pulled at my shoulders as she stepped past me into the hall releasing me from the leaden grip of the floor.

  “Bring the torch.”

  We only had to look around. Once we had, we could go.

  The hallway sprung with expensive underlay. The cream carpet was unstained. Clearly none of her blood had made it this far. Blood would have never come off this pile. I couldn’t even get milk stains out of the mustard coloured carpet in my dining room – a carpet I was strongly advocating we exchanged for laminate now that Lillian had arrived. This white carpet must have been untouched, either that or the police knew a really good carpet cleaning firm.

  If the kitchen had looked ordinary, the hall was even more so. Lesley Cooper had clean tastes. The walls were pale, the hallway uncluttered. A set of stairs led upwards, looping overhead, leaving a dark hole in the hallway which presumably held coats when lived in, but right now just held more lurking shadows. I scurried past and caught up with Irene just as she started up the stairs. Clearly whatever she was looking for wasn’t even near the crime scene in the kitchen.

  I followed her up the stairs, wincing at every creek. Every step seemed to shout into the empty hall about our intrusion, a woody yell into the shadows, calling the deceased to come forth and deal with us. I found myself a mere step behind Irene, like a child keeping close to their mother through a dark wood. I knew it was just my imagination. Nothing was here. Ghosts didn’t exist. What I felt was just anxiety, an age old phobia that many people shared; a fright of the darkness, probably inherited from caveman days when wolves and other predators did sneak out of the darkness and grab away children.

  A burst of light, tracked through the window like a strobe, right to left. My eyes jarred at two figures standing facing us in the darkness, white faces, large cavernous eyes, and I let out an involuntary squeak before I realised the car headlights had momentarily reflected Irene and myself in a mirror facing the stairs.

  Irene reached for my arm. “Jumpy,” she scolded, and together we turned at the top looking down the landing.

  The lights from the car reminded me how exposed we both were. Irene was adamant the police were no longer watching the house, but what if someone else was? I lowered the light, away from any windows.

  Irene shifted next to me and pointed upwards. “Can you shine the light up there?” I complied, carefully tracking the torch beam up the wall, until it reached the required point, illuminating a wooden hatch set into the ceiling.

  “The loft?” I asked.

  “Yes.” She started looking around her, using the dim shadows the torchlight on the ceiling had left her with. “There has to be something... ah...,” she pulled a decorative chest over to the banister rail, stepped onto it, grabbed hold of the loft hatch and pulled. It came downwards, bringing with it the edge of a fitted ladder.

  “How did you..?”

  Irene silenced me with a smile, her wrinkles a rutted field of shadows and relief in the bright LED light. She took hold of my phone and shone it down at the carpet, where two indents were pressed into the pile. The touch points of the loft ladder. She couldn’t possibly have seen them in the dark and I told her as much.

  “The place was on sale a couple of years ago.”

  “And what has that to do with anything?”

  “Don’t you look at houses on the market?”

  “Only when I’m looking to move.”

  She shrugged. Clearly I was missing out.

  “I’ve been in most of the ones around the park and several others... Look, they have to expect to get the odd nosy person when they put the house on the market,” she bristled, before I even put words to my aghast expression.

  I mean, yes, I knew it went on, everyone did, but did Irene really make a habit of going into all the houses on the market? Lucus and I had talked about it on the odd occasion we saw an interesting house raise a ‘for sale’ board, but both of us were far too ‘British’ to do something like that. We never haggled in the market, we didn’t jump queues, we didn’t visit property we weren’t planning to buy, we didn’t break into houses…

  “Come on.” She pulled the ladder down the rest of the way until its feet rested in the impressions in the carpet and then started to climb. The aluminium crackled underneath her, a metallic clicking groan very different from the wood of the stairs, quieter and yet much louder at the same time. I shone the light around me. No ghost appeared to ward us off.

  “I can’t see anything up here without you!” she called out, her voice muffled in the loft space above. “Hurry up.”

  Irene hadn’t brought a torch. She said a torch was too obvious. Instead we were reliant on my mobile phone for light. Irene’s phone was an old Nokia brick. Why replace something that isn’t broken? she said. She picked up her text messages, could call people, and left the rest of the new phone capabilities to her laptop. At her age she didn’t need to be in instant communication by email, didn’t do Facebook as none of her friends (apart from me) were on Facebook, and saw no point in twitter. Besides the screens are too small, she admitted. And there’s just no need to pay through the nose for an expensive miniature laptop I can’t see when I’m on a pension. It made sense, but it left me in the role of light bearer.

  I dragged myself loft-wards, and held the phone out towards her.

  “Here.”

 
; She took it and the blackness rushed in behind me, thick and menacing. I scrambled up the last few rungs and watched as she started sweeping the light around the loft, hmming to herself. As I crested the loft hatch properly she paused the beam so that I could see what had attracted her attention.

  Lying alongside one wall was a small camping mattress and sleeping bag, a book, Tilly lamp, some empty biscuit packets and a coffee stained mug.

  “She had lodgers?”

  “Not exactly.” Irene walked over to the sleeping arrangements for a closer look. There was a pile of clothes at one end, a jumbled heap of dirty washing, and beside it some folded clothing, unworn. She wrinkled her nose as she picked up a cut away milk container using a pencil. She’d clearly watched a lot of detective dramas.

  “Home-made urinal,” she muttered. I took her word for it. I didn’t need to look any closer; I could smell it from where I was standing.

  Carefully she shone the light along the roof beams, searching and then finding a skylight.

  “Here,” she passed the phone back to me. “Keep the beam low, just enough so I can see what I’m doing.”

  I did as she said and watched as she flipped open the Velux window and looked out and towards the park. Dust motes picked up by the sudden breeze whirled in front of the torchlight and I felt a new chill as the frosty wind rushed past me. Nodding to herself she shut the window again with a whoosh and click, but the chill remained

  “Come on.” She headed back towards me and the ladder.

  “Is that it? Is that all we came for? To walk up to the loft and look out of the skylight?”

  “I’ll explain once we’re out. No point lingering. The longer we’re here, the more evidence we leave behind that we’ve been.”

  “But the gloves? The plastic shoes?”

  “Protect against fingerprints and footprints only. Hair, fibre, you can’t account for that… the shorter time we’re here the better.”

  “But I thought you said…,”

  “They have finished. But there’s still a risk they might come back. After all, if I’ve worked out where he was, they will. At that point they’ll look do another sweep for evidence. Don’t worry,” she said, witnessing my aghast expression. “We’ve taken enough precautions.”

  I wondered whether I should have tied my hair back. Loose strand were always falling out. Maybe I should have watched more CSI.

  I watched impatiently as she pushed everything back the way it was, taking care that the box she had stood on was returned exactly to the compressed carpet pile which marked its original location. The longer we were here, the greater the chance of being discovered. Silently I cursed her for her pedanticness, I just wanted to go. Another part of me applauded her methodical return of every item to its original location.

  We tiptoed back down the stairs, through the kitchen, making sure we closed the door to the hall, and then out through the kitchen door, which she locked behind us with her little lock pick set before we removed our blue shoes and gloves, pocketing them out of sight.

  It wasn’t until we were back on the road, and half way back around the darkened park, with the canisters dangling from our hands, that I realised I’d been breathing incredibly shallowly, virtually holding my breath. I sighed and watched as a great cloud billowed out in front of me glowing orange in the misty light.

  “Can you tell me what on earth that was all about?” I hissed at her.

  “I needed to know.”

  “Know what?”

  “If he’d been sleeping there.”

  “Irene – I’ve just followed you into the home of a murder victim, in the dark, watched you pick the door, risked my... my...,” life was probably a bit strong “...reputation. Is there any chance you could explain more than that?”

  “On the drive as we came in. Did you see them? The cigarette butts?”

  I had. They were lying alongside the house in a ragged little row of sorts. All used, flattened, dirty. I’d had to move my canister off one. I nodded, then realised she probably hadn’t seen me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “They’d come down from the roof.”

  “The roof ?”

  “They were in line with the down pipe from the roof gutter. We’ve had some rain recently. They must have washed down.”

  “You’re telling me you worked out someone was staying in the loft because you saw some cigarette butts on the driveway?”

  “No. I’d seen him smoking out the Velux a few weeks ago, before the murder. We go past that house every morning on the dog walk. First time I saw him I assumed he was working up there, but then I saw him a few more times. Slightly more unshaven each time and I thought... hmmm.... I wonder what you’re doing up there.”

  “You mean to say you saw the killer in the loft days before the woman was killed?”

  “No. He’s not the killer.”

  “A strange man in the woman’s home, sleeping rough in the loft and he’s not the killer?”

  “No. He’s the husband, well, ex-husband.”

  “I thought the police were looking for her ex.”

  “They are, that’s why I know they’ve got it wrong.” Her face was inscrutable in the orange street lighting as we plodded our way home, the mist swirling around us. In the distance a fox barked, a high pitched cough which travelled miles in the damp of the evening. My own mind was awash with questions, but I could tell from Irene’s face, they would all have to wait.

  Chapter Three

  Most people get lost in thought from time to time, but Irene was different. She got absorbed in thought. You couldn’t drag her back out. I had turned to her a few times on the walk home, but had recognised the faraway look on her face and her monosyllabic answers to my questions confirmed what her face already told me. I knew it was hopeless trying to extract any further information from her. She was thinking. Her brain was solely focussed on internal calculations.

  I’d seen her manage an entire supermarket shop with her mind on something else before. It was like watching a somnambulist at work, one half of her brain was completely engrossed, but there was a subconscious ‘something’ keeping her body ticking over, performing menial tasks, like adding tins of tomatoes to her basket, while the rest of her brain was performing mental athletics.

  She didn’t just think, like you or I would think. She thought with a deep focus, obsessive, intense. It was as if her brain retreated in on itself leaving behind a layer of automation. I imagined it like an onion inside her skull. As if her conscious retreated back through the layers, and only by slicing all the way through would I penetrate down to the person I knew as Irene. Her body was there, the automated hand eye coordination operational, but every now and again her eyes would twitch, like she was in a deep REM sleep.

  She walked me to my house and muttered some pleasantries about seeing me the next day, but when I turned to her, her face had been vacant, the smile devoid of the sparkle that was usually there, and she walked off as soon as I closed the front gate and started for the front door. I watched her as she marched purposefully down the pavement, slightly concerned about her ability to cross the roads safely. However when she reached the corner of our street, she looked left and right automatically and struck out once the roads were clear. Even lost in thought, her safety protocols were in place.

  I keyed open our own door, grateful I didn’t have to pick it open. You tube videos or not, Irene must have spent hours practising. I doubted lock picking was as easy as she made it look, even with the right tools.

  As I pushed open the door a wall of heat flooded out towards me, reminding me just how cold and damp I was.

  “That you?” Lucus called out from the living room.

  “Yes.” I stepped through and pulled the door back on myself before I could let the cold in… or was it the heat out?

  I shouted out my question. Lucus as a science graduate would probably know the answer.

  “Both.” He called back. “Convection. In at the bottom, out at
the top.”

  I shrugged off my coat and went to hang it up. Through the door to the living room I could see some sort of digger style mining thing on the television screen. Lucus appeared fully absorbed which would negate much of the need to furnish any lies about what I had really been up to that evening. Instead I made us both a cup of tea and joined him for the second half of what must have been his third or fourth episode. Machines didn’t interest me, but snuggling up on the sofa and having some time to ourselves was a luxury now that Lillian had joined us. I’d watch anything so long as I wasn’t required to jiggle a baby on one knee at the same time.

  The TV screen flickered on Lucus’s eyes, as another great mining thing appeared. They were building some sort of tunnel, there were pipes for concrete, massive metal grid work and men in hard hats standing atop mounds of earth and calling at each other. All I needed to do was watch. Lucus thought I had been out collecting with Irene, an activity quite boring and mundane and befitting his new “stay at home wife”. I didn’t disillusion him. I didn’t like lying, but equally I didn’t want to admit to him exactly what’d I’d been cajoled into either. I knew Lucus would never understand, and in fact, I knew he would have been incredibly angry if he’d realised what I had been up to. He was in a position of authority in the school. Even I could imagine the headlines. Head Teacher’s wife caught breaking and entering. It wasn’t worth thinking about.

  And so I said nothing. We drank our tea in companionable and tired silence, the television providing the conversation we were both either too tired or unwilling to supply, and then retired to bed.

  Not surprisingly, I tossed and turned throughout that night. Sleep eluding me in much the same way the reason I was needed for the nocturnal house break had. I lay there thinking about the break in. Feeling the pressure of my gloved hands burning into the banister, door knobs, table. Worrying if a strand of my hair had blown loose. Wondering whether the police would return once they worked out where the husband had been hiding and run all their forensic tests a second time. Irene and I had been careful, yes, but the question was, had we been careful enough?