Thirty
TUESDAY, AUGUST 27, 2019
Elise
Caro Brennan was at the postmortem in Southfold, and for the first time in days, Elise didn’t want to be in her shoes. Or the white wellington boots she’d be slipping over them.
There wasn’t much Elise disliked about the job, but a trip to the mortuary was top of the list. It could make her gag just thinking about it.
Caro loved all that. “It can be beautiful to watch a pathologist at work,” she’d said once—she’d had a few drinks, to be fair. “Stripping back the layers to find the tiniest piece of evidence. Solving the puzzle.”
Elise preferred to read the report afterward. Nice dry words laying it all out in tabulated form. And scent free.
* * *
—
Ronnie called over the courtyard wall when she heard Elise at the bin. “Come round to me—Ted’s gone to a railway reunion. He needs to be with his own kind for a bit. He’s gone very quiet again.”
Ronnie had a wall chart in her kitchen, stuck up over her bucket-list pictures. Instead of white sand and palm trees, she’d printed out a street map of Ebbing and plastered it with bits of paper bearing people’s names. And there were pins with colored wool wound round them to show possible links.
“I see you’ve been busy,” Elise said, following the wool trails with her finger.
“It’s flip chart paper I got in Poundland and knitting remnants from the charity shop,” Ronnie said proudly. “I used Blu Tack so Ted didn’t have a go about it marking his walls. I put the pins in after he left for his saddos’ reunion.”
Elise’s own version of the story so far fitted on two A4 pages folded into her notebook, but Ronnie was never going to give up the chance of a full-on incident room chart.
“Now, what do we know?” she said, and Elise wondered for a second if she’d got a pointer.
“Well—”
“I thought I’d collate the investigation so far and current lines of inquiry. I’ll be good at that.”
“And you’ve got the stationery,” Elise muttered. It’s harmless and it’ll keep her occupied.
“So,” Ronnie said, and produced one of Ted’s garden canes and tapped the chart, “shall we start with Charlie on Friday night?”
* * *
—
Caro rang Elise’s mobile as soon as the PM finished. “I’m on my way over to Ebbing. Can I call in? This is a tricky one.”
“I’ve got to go back to mine,” Elise told Ronnie—she definitely didn’t want Caro to see Ronnie’s charts.
“Can we ask if I can sit in?” her neighbor said as she opened her front door.
Elise didn’t have time to ask the question. Caro was sharing the headlines as she walked in.
“We’re waiting on Aoife’s full report but this wasn’t an accident. He’s got a head injury but it wasn’t caused by a fall.”
She suddenly noticed Ronnie and stopped.
“It’s fine, Caro. Ronnie is like the grave,” Elise said, and looked at her friend, who nodded furiously and pretended to zip her mouth closed.
Caro looked doubtful but Elise pushed on. “He was murdered, then?”
“We don’t know. Aoife says the head injury would probably have killed him but it isn’t clear yet if it was sustained before he died.”
“Really? So what’s the cause of death, then?”
“The certificate says, ‘Cardiac arrhythmia, unspecified due to coronary artery atherosclerosis.’？”
“Right . . . so she’s saying that someone may have bashed him over the head after he had a fatal heart attack?”
“She’s sending the brain to the neuropathology unit for further tests. What we do know is that the body was moved—there’s hypostasis to show he was on his side for some time before being moved.”
“So at least one person was involved?”
“Yes . . . ‘Unexplained’ is as far as the boss will go in the press release. But something horrible happened in that cellar whichever way you look at it.”
“？‘Something wicked this way comes,’？” Ronnie breathed.
“What?” Caro said.
“It’s Agatha Christie—By the Pricking of My Thumbs. The one in the old folks’ home.”
“Anyway,” Caro said, “when you’ve finished your book club meeting . . . Charlie’s clothes are being examined for DNA and fibers to find who’d had contact with him, and the boss . . .” She had the grace to look embarrassed. “Sorry, Elise, but Hugh is the boss on this one. He’s meeting me at the Perry caravan in half an hour— Oh, God, twenty minutes. I’ve got to get a wiggle on.”