She steers away, back up the field. She’s mown about half the area Bill asked her to cover. It’s satisfying to see the effect of before and after. The thick stripes are neat and orderly, but the lush green of the unmown section, where bumblebees settle on clover heads, is open and free. The picnickers ignore her, even though they have to pause their conversations at the noisy approach of mower. To them she’s just a gardener in a uniform Halsworth Grange hat, part of the furniture, like the ticket sellers or the room guides in the big house. She turns again, coming down the field with the house behind her, and wonders what it must have been like to live here, before the tourists took over. It would have been a laugh to be lady of the manor. She imagines having a butler to wave the wasps off the wicker picnic basket, bottles of champagne and jellies in the shape of rabbits. She sees herself and Jay, in old-fashioned clothes, sitting on deckchairs that don’t fall apart.
Jay cried more after the night they played at being Mr and Mrs Clutterbuck at the allotments. There were new scars on his hands and sometimes bruises on his neck. She never asked any questions, until one day she did and Jay got angry with her, slapped her across the face. It still makes her skin sting to remember it, even though it was years ago. He was sorry he’d slapped her, so sorry that he decided to tell her the truth. After that, their friendship changed forever.
Something causes her to put the brakes on before the next turn: a change of colour in the rhododendron leaves, a darker green in the low-spreading skirts of the shrubs, marking a space, as if a large animal has crashed clumsily into the undergrowth. Chloe stands up on the footrests, immediately cutting off the power to the engine. The silence is sudden and total. In that moment, the light catches an object glittering in the long grass beyond the fence. On the ground, among the thistles, lies a pink sequined sandal.
She looks at it for a long time before she notices her legs are shaking. She sits back on the seat of the mower and takes the ear defenders off. The sandal is out of her line of sight now, but she can’t wipe it from her memory. Inside the sandal was a slim brown foot with painted toes and an ankle leading to a bare leg, but the rest was hidden in a dark green tent of rhododendron.
Someone is screaming and she thinks they must have seen it too, but when she turns round it’s just the girls at the picnic table, laughing and running round, flapping stupidly at the wasps. Under the bushes, flies are buzzing, rising into the light like fighter pilots, before bombing back in for their next raid. She sits on the mower, wanting it to be a fox, wishing she hadn’t seen a sandal and a leg, but unable to change any of it, any more than she is able to move a single muscle in her body. She is still sitting there when Bill comes striding over the field calling her name.
‘Chloe, pet, you OK? Has it run out of juice?’
She knows he can smell it now because he coughs, chokes on the foulness and swears. He comes to a halt by the mower and looks over the fence. He steps forward, his hand over his mouth and nose, tentatively peering into the bushes and then he stops still.
‘Christ. Christ almighty,’ he whispers. ‘It’s that lass. Christ, Chloe, it’s the one who came to see you. What have you done to her?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Doncaster
No sooner had Lizzie got started on a fingertip search of AK News, than her phone buzzed in her pocket. Fully covered in protective gear, she decided it could wait. She was mapping the trajectory of petrol traces and collecting up sooty glass fragments: clear, green and brown. Window and bottle glass, she guessed, but a quick look under the microscope when she got back to the lab would confirm that. The shelves of alcohol behind the counter had been badly damaged but the newspaper section had come off worst, spirits accelerating the fire had caught the dry paper. Next to the till the lottery stand had melted and bent over, like a Dali clock. A few minutes later her phone buzzed again. She stepped out into the street and peeled off a glove. The fire officer was watching her as she unzipped her white suit. She turned her back on him and pulled the phone out of her trouser pocket.
The voicemail said to drop what she was doing and get to Halsworth Grange, where someone had kindly provided them with a fresh body. Dr Alf Huggins, the pathologist, had a dry sense of humour, but there was an element of honesty in his delight: it was usually easier to gather evidence from a recent death than a crowd attack on a property.
She put in a call to Donald Chaplin to ask him to come and finish off here. He was a gentle, avuncular soul, who might bore the fire officer to death with the chemical properties of the reagents he was using, but he’d do a thorough job while he was at it. She slipped out of her over-suit and shoe covers, bagged them up and left them for Donald to dispose of, in case she caused cross-contamination with the next site. She started the car and cruised past the parade of shops. The name, ‘AK News’, was just visible, but ‘and Convenience Store’ had blistered and peeled into a blackened mess. The broken window was covered with a temporary screen. Most of these shops had heavy toughened glass and it would take more than a bottle to smash through a window like that.
‘Of course,’ she said and put her foot on the brake. She dialled Donald’s number.
‘Sorry to bother you, Don,’ she spoke to his voicemail, ‘but when you get to the scene, can you have a look to see if there’s something in there that shouldn’t be? A mark made by a pole or something else that you’d use to break strong glass?’
Lizzie set her satnav and let the voice of Elvis Presley guide her to Halsworth Grange. The satnav had been a Christmas present from her ex-boyfriend, who’d loaded the programme of celebrity voices and preselected the King. She kept expecting it to say, Elvis has now left the motorway, but it never did. She remembered the framed Elvis print at Sean Denton’s grandmother’s house, that night, a couple of years back, the night she’d realised he fancied her. He’d changed a lot since then, grown up, she thought. She hoped he’d got a nice girlfriend now; he deserved one.
Lizzie didn’t think she would ever be nice girlfriend material. She’d tried to keep things going with Guy, the Doncaster Rovers marketing manager, when she moved to London, but she saw less and less of him and began to see more and more of someone else. The overlap was messy and she wasn’t proud of herself, but life was changing so quickly. She was seconded to a unit in Scotland Yard and briefly believed that this was the beginning of a new life, until she discovered the new boyfriend had a serious coke habit, which could have jeopardised her career. Breaking up with him felt like a physical injury. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t think straight. She was signed off sick and came home to her parents, who fussed and faffed and said: I told you so. Then her dad put the keys of the flat in Regent Square in her hand, put a good word in with his friend, Commander Laine, and suddenly she was a crime scene manager again. As Elvis guided her out through the villages she’d known all her life, an idea began to take shape. She could speak to Laine about Sean’s suspension. He’d listen to her, she was sure, and he could be made to see that it would be madness to lose such a promising young officer. She pulled into the car park of a pub and dialled his number.
The road to Halsworth Grange took her back to a family outing, years ago. Her mother thought it dingy and couldn’t understand why they didn’t do it up, but that was the point. The inside of the house had been left exactly as it was when the last Lady Halsworth died. The cracks in the walls and ceilings were testament to how the family made their money from the coal seam underneath. Her dad told her and her brother, for the hundredth time, that their great-grandfather had mined that very seam and if it hadn’t been for the grammar school they’d be down there still, digging for coal in the darkness.