Hearth and Home
March 11, 2011 at 4:04 pm (Short Stories) (crime, death, detective, fiction, mystery, short story, writing competition)
A crime story for entry in a competition run by the tv company ‘alibi’. This is what came to me. I attempted to do something original but wonder if it’d ended up as a crime story at all. It’s finally been cut to under the 2,500 word limit but I’m a little concerned it’s lost alot in the process. Comments and suggestions welcome!
Hearth and Home
I pulled the car up some distance away as even the few police cars present clogged up the road. Rain pelted on the roof and threw itself in rivulets down the windscreen. I wondered how I’d forgotten the rain. It seemed like it hadn’t stopped since the day I moved back. The nights drew in quicker too, and were darker than I remembered.
“Just…” I stumbled. “Just try not to embarrass me too much, ok?”
Marlowe snorted. “Doesn’t work like that, Jean. I’ve agreed to help, against my better judgement, and you can’t now specify how I go about it.”
I sighed. “Fine. But just remember this is my job, ok? And how we do directly effects what you get out of it.”
“If you can pull that off.”
“Of course I can,” I snapped, telling myself I’d done the right thing and opening the car door. My heels clicked over the slick cobbles. At the glass front doors a sodden, frustrated constable waved us in. I picked out Evans from the men milling around the room and beckoned him over.
“Any progress?” I asked.
“We’ve got an ID. Robert Muncaster. He’s the company owner.”
“Who identified him?”
“His secretary, Miss Jones. She came to the office about twenty minutes ago, said she’d come to catch up on some paperwork.”
“Do you believe her?”
He snorted. “Hardly.”
“Get a statement from her, including her movements in the last few hours. Anything else?”
“The coroner’s just arrived. They want to know when they can move him.”
“Soon,” I said. “I’ve brought someone who I want to have a look at everything before we move further.”
Evans raised an eyebrow. “Who?”
“An…expert,” I fumbled.
“I wouldn’t say I was an expert.” Marlowe appeared at my shoulder, rain dripping from his uncombed hair and eyes blank as they roved the scene. “One strives for perfection of understanding, of course. But I’m beginning to doubt whether that’s possible.”
“This way,” I said quickly, leading Marlowe away. “Stand back, please.” The policemen cleared a space around the body. Marlowe overlooked the scene, either oblivious or uncaring to the men falling into bewildered silence. He was sprawled face-down, blood soaked into the expensive carpet. His head was turned away, thankfully, at an awkward angle. I noticed again the strange way his arms were bent. Marlowe’s eyes swept over everything, the nearby desks, the fire exit, even the pot plants, before coming to rest on the body. I could feel the people around me getting restless, fidgeting. Marlowe knelt, examining closely. One of the men behind me coughed loudly and I turned and led them out of hearing distance.
“Who is the person, Ma’am?” one scoffed.
“A consultant,” I stated simply. “Now come on, what have you found?”
The same man shrugged. “Small-time graphics company. One office here, his bigger office in Manchester. He was well off, by the look of it, and something of a ladies man.”
“Oh yes?”
“He was in divorce proceedings with his second wife, a messy business by all accounts.”
“Jealous fella, got to be,” Evans grunted. “He dipped his nib in one ink jar too many.”
“It wasn’t a man that did this.” Marlowe appeared again. “This is a woman’s killing.”
“A woman couldn’t have done that,” Evans snorted. “Have you seen the state of him?”
“You mean you wish a woman couldn’t have done that,” Marlowe said. “There’s a passion there, but it’s not the passion of a cuckold. A controlled passion: deliberate and judgemental. Feminine. Plus, the first blow came from below, up into his mouth, so obviously from someone shorter than him, and he’s not a tall man.”
“Or someone sitting down,” someone muttered.
“Have you ever tried to kill someone with a poker from a sitting position? Not easy.”
“A poker?” I asked, glancing back at the body.
Marlowe nodded. “There’s soot in the wound in his mouth. She brought it with her and took it away again, I’d say. You wont find it here.”
“Bull…”
“Ok you lot, that’s enough. Marlowe, could you wait in the car please?”
Marlowe drifted out and the other men descended on me, all talking loudly, angrily and at once.
A fortnight later and once again I found myself parked on a cobbled lane in the gloom of a gathering night, rain thudding on the car roof and streaming down the windows, trying to figure out how I’d ended up there. I swallowed against the darkness rising inside me and was shocked and frightened to find myself blinking back tears.
He buzzed me in without speaking over the intercom. I climbed the stairs in darkness, the bulb having gone long ago and never replaced. The smell of dust was heavy in the darkness and I was relieved to reach the door at the top and step through into the orange light of old lampshades. I made my way to the sitting room without looking around me. My nose and peripheral vision told me the only change in the flat since I’d last seen it was that there was…more. More books, more jars, more bones.
There was a fire blazing in the hearth and the air was close and hot. The must of old paper, old fabric and old ash was underlined by a thin needle of rot. Marlowe was hunched at a desk. “Have you managed to get it yet?”
“The killer?”
“No,” he turned round, glasses on the end of his nose, hair wild where he’d been running his hands through it. “Publication rights. I’ve prepared a paper for an American psychology journal.”
“You know you can’t do that until the lawyers are finished wrangling.”
“I may never get it then.”
“For the wrangling to even start we need a killer.”
“You mean you haven’t got it yet?” he snorted, turning back to his desk and picking up his pen.
“No not yet…” I watched him for a moment, his pen scratching away in the silence. “You know who did it, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“How?” I spluttered.
“Come, come. That would be telling. Besides, you must know I know or you wouldn’t be here.”
“I’ve brought you your consultant’s fee, actually,” I said, throwing an envelope on the nearest table.
“I told you I don’t want money. The only thing I want from you is copyright and you haven’t got me that yet.”
“I’ll get it for you. I will. But first we need a killer.”
He turned his chair to face me, crossed his legs and his arms and I suppressed a shiver at the familiar way his black eyes drank me in. “And you just want me to give you the answer?”
“Don’t patronise me, Marlowe,” I felt the heat rising up my spine and flush my cheeks. “I do whatever it takes to solve these cases. I do what works, have done for years.”
“Yes, I know,” he said, infuriatingly calm. “Apparently you couldn’t move in London for your drugs busts, gang arrests, apprehensions of serial killers. So why do you need my help now?”
I drew myself up to my full height, a half head taller than him when in heels, but then let out a breath and put my head in my hands, slumped onto the arm of a chair. I looked into the fire, watching my pride go up the chimney in ashes and smoke. “I thought it would be…easy…the work up here. But somehow I can’t…”
The fire crackled.
“You can’t see the dark side of where you came from.” He said it quietly, but it sent a jolt through me. I couldn’t look at him. “Of course,” he continued, lightly. “When your passion and subject of study is death, where better than to get your teeth into it than somewhere you’ve known your whole life? And I’ve barely scratched the surface…”
“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it.”
He signed, turned away again. “If you hate what I do so much and you’re the big-shot detective Father always wanted you to be, why ask me?” He resumed writing and I couldn’t figure out whether he actually cared if I answer or not. I swallowed hard.
“You’re right.” I said. His pen went silent. “You’re right, Marlowe. This is where we were children. I can’t see people around here the way I saw them in London.”
He turned back, eyes animated. “Yes, it’s interesting isn’t it? Who would have thought when your profession is crime and death, your distance or closeness to the subject could have such a profound effect…” he broke off but stopped him before he could turn back to his notepad.
“Marlowe,” I said, firmly, swallowing the helplessness again, being the older sister. “Marlowe. I need your help.”
His smile was a slow one, triumphant but not as smug as I expected. Amused, even. “Very well, Jean. For old time’s sake.”
He leaned back and regarded me and I attempted to once again force my brain along it’s usually familiar tracks of logic. “His death really doesn’t leave anyone better off. The company remains in his family’s name but still in charge of the directors. It was was successful but not big enough to have an real rivals. He was generous financially to his mother and sister who live nearby. He was something of a womaniser but all jealous partners or husbands have cast-iron alibis and…don’t seem the type. Oh, and all fire and hearth utensils of all his immediate circle have come up cleaner than whistles.”
“So?”
“So, he was an arrogant man it seems, but not a bad one. There is no obvious reason for someone to do this to him, and in such a brutal way.”
“Stands to reason then that there must be an un-obvious reason, then.”
“Like what?”
“I assume you’re not going to give me your year’s wages, Jean, so I’m not going to do your job for you.”
An almost physical effort stopped me from snapping. He never responded to anger. He saw it as weakness. I breathed the anger away and surveyed him calmly, waiting. Eventually, he sighed and rubbed his eyes, like he was dealing with a dense pupil. “Ok, think on this: in London you don’t have to dig very far to get to the bottom. Someone will tell you something if you ask or threaten enough. It’s a different game up here. An older game. Old families, old blood, old values. Old silences.”
“We’ve already ruled out all his adulterous affairs.”
“I never mentioned adultery. He’s been doing that for years and no punishment, hasn’t he? He had many women in his life but few who cared enough about him to care what he was. She knew where he would be, she didn’t try and hide the crime. She wanted him found, she wanted his punishment known. And the way he was lying…”
I felt understanding tickling at the edges of my comprehension but still couldn’t force the answer.
“The killer turned him over, turned his face into the carpet. She didn’t want to see it. IT shamed her. He obviously went too far, did something else, something so terrible and so private that no one you’ve talked to knows about it, or would talk about it if they did.”
His eyes burned like the fire, but darker. We sat looking at each other for some time, the only noise the snapping of the flames. I didn’t want to ask but the whispered question came out all the same…
“How do you know?”
“How do I know something your team of detectives and you with your degrees and your training couldn’t figure out?”
I nodded.
He smiled and I can see all his teeth. “It’s all in the death. Death reveals all.”
I didn’t sleep. I knew the answer, I just didn’t want to know it. Marlowe grinned about it but I wasn’t sure how long it would be before I felt like smiling again.
Evans was only too happy, if a little confused, to drive over to the Muncaster family home and pick up Robert’s sister, the part-time model, and her pleasant, soft-spoken mother, retired history lecturer, the following morning. He was even more confused when I sent a forensic officer with him to collect all the metal tools in the house for a closer examination.
They waited over an hour to be interviewed because I wanted a psychiatrist present and Mrs. Muncaster politely insisted on waiting for her lawyer and both were travelling from Manchester. I interviewed them separately. Lucy, his sister, was a bad liar without her mother. There were tears in her eyes and voice and she didn’t look up from the table. The psychiatrist confirmed my suspicions in private after.
Mrs. Muncaster was short, well-dressed, with a soft voice but stiffened as the questions progressed. She asked me if I knew what her family name meant in this community. I explained calmly that I had grown up here and understood perfectly.
“A long and proud family history,” she murmured, almost to herself, when we’d been going back and forth for almost two hours. “To end like that.”
My instincts buzzed. She’d left an opening. “Lucy’s pregnant.” I said simply, and she nodded, no tears but her eyes were distant and full of pain. “You killed him.” I said it calmly, with no trace of judgement and saw her respond to the tone in kind.
“I’d warned him. I’d reasoned with him. And with her. But she was always the weaker of the two. It was his sin, ultimately.”
“I would like to retire to confer with my client,” the lawyer said smoothly. His lack of response I found more disturbing than the revelations themselves.
I wrote to Marlowe once I was settled again in London. The Muncaster’s lawyer had written out terms for his publication. I got no reply but I didn’t expect one. I sipped strong coffee, staring out the window of my flat into the London rain, wetter but lighter than that of the North West. I was happy it was now at the other end of a motorway, where it could stay in a dream of rolling hills and yellow stone, history and hearth smoke mingled in with it, but with Marlowe safely hidden away in a dark corner that I could pretend never existed.
