‘Could we stop this bloody bear nonsense, sir?’ she replied, annoyance surfacing at his prolonged joke.
‘Can’t “bear” it any longer, eh?’ he smirked. ‘Bit grizzly now, bi-polar even?’ He laughed uproariously at his own wit, and Alice could not help smiling, amused at his amusement.
‘OK, OK, so what exactly is the problem, dear, Bambi… Rudolph… Dum…’ his voice tailed off, unable to think of any other names to sustain the gag.
‘Well, asking Mrs Christie about her husband’s whereabouts. She’ll surely want to know why we’re interested in them?’
‘No problem. I’ll handle it, just leave it all to me. Man o’ the world stuff.’
Subtlety, Alice knew, did not form part of Eric Manson’s social repertoire, and as she walked behind him past a car with a disabled sticker towards a front door with a cement ramp, she stopped, a thought having crossed her mind. Meanwhile, the Inspector peered through the open front door, and when Alice caught up with him, it was to be greeted by a woman, past middle age, seated in a wheelchair.
In her sitting room Manson attempted to begin his interview but, being well acquainted with his ways, Alice could tell that he was feeling uneasy, and thus likely to flounder and cause needless offence.
‘Mrs Christie…’ he paused. ‘We simply need to ask you a few questions about your husband’s whereabouts on the ninth of January.’
‘Really!’ the woman said, surprised. ‘Well, I’ll help you if I can.’
‘Now, can you tell me where he was on the ninth of January between about 8.00 p.m. and 11.00 p.m.’
‘That would be a Tuesday, eh?’
‘Aha, yes.’
‘He’d be here with me. He has three sets of double French on Mondays, so Tuesday evenings are always devoted to marking. He does it in here, beside me. Nice to have company, as he’s out all day, you see.’
‘Sure about that, that he was here with you all evening?’
‘Yes. He made us our tea at six, he brings home salmon on Tuesdays, then he did the homework. He always does on Tuesdays. I’d have noticed if he hadn’t. Why do you need to know where he was then anyway?’
‘Er…’ Eric Manson hesitated, ‘to help us with our enquiries – a murder enquiry.’
‘A murder!’ the woman repeated, excitement enlivening her voice. ‘Whose?’
Instead of stopping the conversation and redirecting it, Manson seemed to feel compelled to answer.
‘Em… an Isobel Wilson. Just… eh… a woman in Edinburgh.’
‘The prostitute! You mean the prostitute! I read all about it in the Evening News. What’s Eddie to do with her, exactly?’
The Inspector swallowed, now looking rather pale, clearly in difficulty with the line of questioning but, apparently, unable to extricate himself from it. He threw Alice a pleading look.
‘Nothing,’ she cut in, ‘he’s nothing whatsoever to do with her – with it. He was here with you, after all. But, you see, we have to check up on the movements of anyone living nearby. Proximity, in itself, to the scene… we have to exclude neighbours and so on. Get assistance from anyone, really.’
‘But why do you need to know where he was, then?’
‘Routine enquiry,’ she lied, stonewalling the woman for her own sake. ‘Purely routine, Mrs Christie.’
6
Miss Spinnell peeped timidly from behind her half-opened door, loosened the final chain and came out onto the landing. Quill, attached to an over-long lead, trailed behind her, wagging his tail slowly in appreciation of Alice’s arrival. The old lady’s head was down, her shoulders drooped, and, in some mysterious way, the dog seemed to have absorbed her desolate mood, showing little of the characteristic elation he normally displayed at the handover. A fleshless hand was extended and Alice took the lead from it, looking into Miss Spinnell’s face and noticing that the huge orbs of her eyes were now red-rimmed, swollen with recent tears. She seemed so pathetic, so small and dejected that the policewoman longed to put an arm around her shoulders to comfort her, but resisted the impulse. She knew that physical contact, never mind the familiarity it implied, was considered unwelcome and, in all probability, unpleasant. Any kind of human touch was anathema to the old woman, something to be endured and, in itself, a test of her good manners.
Miss Spinnell handling a dog, however, was quite different. On countless occasions Alice had surprised her neighbour cuddling the animal, kissing his soft muzzle or cradling his head in her lap. Even now, she was absent-mindedly squeezing Quill’s ear, easing it through her fingers. Between caresses she spoke: ‘Today… Ali… Alice, is my birthday.’ But her leaden tone suggested that the occasion was not one of celebration but of mourning instead, just another milestone on the way to dusty death.
‘How splendid… I must get you something. Is there anything that you would particularly like, Miss Spinnell?’
‘Yes,’ her neighbour replied forlornly, ‘A new self.’
‘What’s wrong with the old one?’ Alice asked brightly, unsure where the conversation was leading.
‘I don’t know… and that may, possibly, be part of the problem.’
Sodding, sodding Alzheimer’s, Alice thought. A fiend so skilled in cruelty as to leave odd, disturbing flashes of insight, but enough only to compound the anxiety it brought with it.
‘How about…’ she racked her brain for inspiration, ‘some… chocolates?’ A favourite treat, she knew, remembering the time her assistance had been required to catch imagined pilferers, supposedly bloated on Milk Tray and Black Magic. In fact, Quill himself had been the culprit, canine teeth shredding the cardboard packaging, but the marks attributed, by his devoted admirer, to the long nails of the criminal classes.
‘No.’
‘What about a book then, poetry if you like?’ She could still see, in her mind’s eye, the Poetry Society Medal collecting cobwebs on the shelf.
‘I do not like poetry any more. Stop guessing. I can tell you exactly what I want.’
‘Yes?’
‘My sister. I would like my sister.’
Alice discovered that Miss Spinnell had lost touch with her sibling well over fifty years earlier. She asked for any details that might assist with the search, and was surprised to find herself escorted into the old lady’s drawing room. A visit to the Holy of Holies was an unexpected privilege. On the floor by the bow window lay an assortment of unwashed soup plates, packets of cornflakes, half-empty tins of beans, Oxo cubes and a heap of dog biscuits. Evidently, the area was Quill’s kitchen-cum-dining room. The carpet was strewn with single, unmatched pop socks and, crossing it, Alice inadvertently stood on a wet sponge.
Once she was seated on the sofa, Miss Spinnell returned from a search in a chest of drawers, weighed down by an old photograph album. Inadvertently, she flopped down next to Alice, their thighs momentarily touching. Springing up instantly, she removed herself to the far end of the sofa and placed the open book between them. After much fumbling, a crooked finger was pointed at a black and white image.
‘Annabelle,’ she said, ‘my older sister… em… eight years older than me.’
‘And on this birthday, Miss Spinnell, if you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?’ Alice asked gently. A suitably oblique enquiry, surely.
‘Eighty… ninety, that sort of figure or thereabouts,’ the old lady said, before, seeing what Alice was getting at, she added crossly, ‘She is alive, you know. If not kicking.’
‘Excellent,’ Alice replied, ‘you’ve been in some sort of contact recently?’
‘Of course not! If I had I wouldn’t need you. No. But she is here, on this earth. I’ve been along to the Scarlet Lodge, you appreciate.’
‘The Scarlet Lodge?’ Alice enquired, bemused.
‘Our spiritualist meeting place, dear. I attempted to make contact and failed. So she cannot be in their world… the spirit world, I mean.’