Kate was going to mention it: You must see a difference in the place. Because really there was no comparison to the way it had been before she took over, and he hadn’t been in the house recently, had he? Margaret had never taken visitors to her room. But before she could speak, Malcolm turned and almost ran down the steps to the pavement. It was as if he’d been chased away. He lifted his hand to wave goodbye to her, but didn’t turn round and didn’t stop walking.
Kate shut the door and locked it, then returned to the kitchen. The music was still burbling as if nothing had happened, and she felt for a moment as if the encounter with Malcolm Kerr was the subject of the song. Vera Stanhope had left her business card on the breakfast table when she’d got up to leave. ‘Just in case you remember something that might be useful.’ Kate took it from the dresser and held it between her fingers. And then on impulse she reached for her phone.
‘No matter what it is,’ Vera had said. ‘It’s the trivial things that make the difference.’
Kate felt like a child again. The good girl at the front of the class, wanting the teacher to like her. Eager to please. She told Vera that Malcolm had been at the house and that Margaret had worked for him and his father.
‘I had the feeling,’ Kate said, after Vera had listened patiently to her explanation, ‘that they were more than friends.’
Chapter Eleven
Vera had never been bothered by post-mortems. Dead people couldn’t hurt you; it was the living you should be frightened of. Paul Keating, the pathologist, was from Belfast. He was a religious man, taciturn and dignified, and a great golfing friend of crime-scene manager Billy Wainwright. Vera wondered what the two men could talk about on the course or in the bar after the game. She sometimes thought they would have nothing in common except the dead.
The mortuary was even chillier than usual and she wondered if the electricity had cut out at the hospital overnight too, as it had in the freezing police station, because of the heavy snowfall. The woman lying on the table certainly looked cold. Frozen. Vera wasn’t squeamish, but she wished they would cover her with a blanket.
Keating was talking, recording his first impressions. Vera listened to his words, but she was thinking that Margaret was good for her age: not a lot of spare flesh except for a little fat around the waist, and the woman still had cheekbones to die for. Vera remembered Joe’s admiration of the young Margaret in her wedding photograph and felt a familiar itch of jealousy. She hadn’t been much admired even when she was twenty. Joe obviously liked thin lizzies; his Sal was all skin and bone.
Keating paused for breath and she took the opportunity to ask the question that had been troubling her from the start of the investigation. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘how nobody noticed. A Metro packed with people. She’d have screamed, wouldn’t she? Joe didn’t hear her, but he was at the other end of the carriage. There would have been blood.’
‘No,’ Keating said. ‘There was hardly any blood. Not enough for anyone to notice.’ With the aid of an assistant he rolled Margaret onto her side. ‘She was stabbed by a knife with a very thin blade. Long and thin. She’d have felt it, but more as a discomfort than any real pain. A pin prick. Then, if the subcutaneous fat closed over the wound, there would have been hardly any external bleeding. She’d have died before she or anyone else realized what was happening.’
Vera wondered if that was a good way to die. Just before Christmas on a busy train, surrounded by excited bairns and adults full of beer. She could think of worse ways to go.
‘So he knew what he was doing?’ she said. ‘The murderer, I mean.’
Keating shrugged. ‘Either that or he was lucky.’
‘She was stabbed from behind?’ Vera couldn’t see how that would work. The woman was sitting down. Joe had described in detail how she’d taken the one empty seat in the carriage. So how could she have been stabbed in the back?
‘Definitely from behind.’
He continued to make his report, but Vera was running that image over and over in her head. Margaret, well dressed, stepping from the snowy platform into the train, finding a seat and leaning back against it. Vera created scenarios to explain the knife wound in the back, the sharp blade piercing the cashmere coat. Perhaps Margaret was being followed from Gosforth and was stabbed while she was still standing. But if that was the case, why had the killer waited to make his attack until she was in a crowded train? A dark and quiet suburban street would surely provide a better opportunity. Or perhaps Margaret had turned in her seat to look out of the window as the train pulled into a station and the killer had taken a chance then. In either case the murderer could have left the train at any stop between Gosforth and Partington. They’d assumed that Margaret had been killed close to the final stop, but if death had crept up as unobtrusively as Keating had suggested, that needn’t have been the case.
Keating’s words had been running as a background to her thoughts and she noticed a sudden silence.
‘What is it?’ She was jerked back to the present, to the freezing mortuary and the stink of human waste.
‘Our victim was ill.’ Keating stood for a moment, frowning. ‘Bowel cancer. I found these indications on the liver. The disease had spread from the bowel.’
‘Treatable?’ Vera wasn’t sure how that could possibly be relevant. The woman hadn’t stabbed herself in the back. This hadn’t been a desperate and very public suicide.
‘Perhaps. No sign that it has been, though.’
‘Maybe she’d only just been diagnosed.’ Vera was talking to herself, running through the possibilities. More scenarios. More stories. ‘I’ll need to trace her GP.’ Thinking it was unlikely that Margaret had been visiting an outpatient clinic the afternoon of her death. There were no major hospitals close to Gosforth Metro station.
Outside, the sun was shining, but it was still very cold. Kids had made a slide of the pavement and Vera nearly went arse over tit. She checked her phone, wondering if she’d missed anything important during the post-mortem, and immediately it began to ring. She didn’t recognize the voice at first and it was only a few seconds into the conversation that she realized she was speaking to Kate Dewar. Vera listened as the woman described the arrival at the guest house of Malcolm Kerr.
‘He ran the bird trips out to Coquet Island.’ Vera remembered a thin young man, gauche ashore, but agile on the boat. ‘With his dad.’
Kate was obviously surprised by the interruption. ‘His father died years ago.’
‘And he seemed in a bit of a state?’
‘The way he talked about Margaret,’ Kate said, ‘I had the feeling that they were more than friends.’
Parking the Land Rover in Harbour Street, Vera almost felt as if she were coming home. Kate must have been looking out for her, because the door was opened immediately. ‘You don’t mind if we chat in the kitchen?’ she asked. ‘Only I’ve got baking in the oven.’
Vera followed her down to the basement, pleased that they wouldn’t be sitting in the highly polished lounge, which reminded her, she suddenly realized, of a funeral parlour or an elaborate chapel.
‘He’d been drinking,’ Kate said. ‘Last night, if not this morning. I could smell it on him. Everyone knows he likes a pint in the Coble of an evening, and a couple of cans if he’s working in his shed, but I’ve never known him drunk. Not even when Deborah left.’
She’d switched on the filter coffee machine and the water was dripping through the grounds, filling the kitchen with its smell.
‘Deborah?’
‘His ex-wife.’ Kate opened the oven and pulled out a tray of shortbread. ‘This won’t be as good as Margaret’s.’