The art of murder, p.2
The Art of Murder, page 2
Now thoroughly overexcited, both dogs whined to go outside as soon as Phoebe set them down. When she hurriedly opened the back door, she spotted the white gleam of roe deer tails in the darkness, skipping away across the lawn. The diminutive terrier duo gave chase, yapping wildly, all bluster and bravado despite being full-bladdered and hopelessly outpaced. Phoebe felt much the same whenever she took a run with her husband these days.
On the laptop in the kitchen, the girls were still noisily swapping stories. She couldn’t bear to miss out, so she left the dogs to it, knowing they had no hope of catching the deer. They would come back soon enough. They always did.
Except this time, they didn’t.
Half an hour after Phoebe’s call with her daughters ended, there was no sign of them. It was still frostily dark outside, thick patches of fog drifting across from the river.
Phoebe took her vape out with her when she went to look for them, puffing in her own little fog cloud as she shivered on the lawn, calling and whistling until she was hoarse. She shook the treats tin and squeaked their favourite toys. Worry took hold, along with her all-too-familiar murderous anger. The woods around the house were the ultimate doggy adventure playgrounds, and terriers were devils for vanishing on vermin-hunting escapades. She couldn’t shake the image of them trapped in poachers’ snares.
The family pack’s many generations of Jack Russells had all been related, a ratting dynasty spanning the twenty-five years of her marriage. Felix worshipped these little two, both from the last litter of a favourite bitch.
To Phoebe, they were her substitute twins to cuddle and keep her company. The thought of losing either was devastating. Cursing herself, she gathered slip leads and more treats, along with her phone and the only flashlight she could find with working batteries in it. She was seething now, angriest of all with herself for letting them out unsupervised at silly o’clock.
She crunched blindly along the main drive, listening out for barks. Her torchlight bounced back against dense patches of fog. The dawn chorus was starting up, although the sky remained dark, the woods to her right just a black shape. Perfect setting for a murder, she reminded herself with a shiver.
She was still getting to know the lie of the land here, the Dunnett Valley’s wooded combes and chalk downs so different from her familiar dales and moors over which her flapper detective Lady Dee Jekyll had chased dastardly killers in her racy two-seater Bentley, Hermès scarf trailing, trusted companion Mrs Annie Logg by her side.
Since relocating deep into this fold of historic Wexshire a year ago, Phoebe’s fuse had shortened yet further, her plots darkening. Although she’d grown up just a few miles across the Downs, childhood friends had long since drifted away, her parents’ generation dying off, others priced out. The river might appear unchanged as it flowed companionably alongside the North Wessex Canal from the Avon in the west to join the Thames in the east, passing through water meadows fringed with flag irises and dancing with dragonflies. But the pretty towns that flanked it had been rebranded and upscaled.
They now attracted commuters migrating from neighbouring West Berkshire to get more bang for their buck: hip-ennials and gadget gurus, Bitcoin gamblers and gym bunnies. Grand estates had been bought up wholesale by offshore trusts, old farms had become gated barn-conversion communities. In nearby Inkbury, the traditional red phone box from which a teenage Phoebe had once called home to beg a lift after parties in the church hall now housed a defibrillator for anyone who had just checked local house prices.
Phoebe missed Yorkshire with its closeness and no-nonsense toughness. Its fictional 1920s world – in which vicars on bicycles waved at ageing spinsters tending delphiniums – eluded her here. Nostalgic for the Wexshire she remembered from her youth – underage backwater pub crawls in overloaded Minis, snogging and slow dancing to ‘Careless Whisper’ at village hall discos – she’d added a new detective duo to her oeuvre, switching up jazz age gentility for the brazen Wham! years. DI Carrick Lowe and DS Holly Meadowfield were her new best friends, and she was already writing her third novel in the series. Tougher and more street savvy than garrulous Lady Dee and sharp-eyed Annie, they shouted into walkie-talkies and prowled the landscape of her memories in a souped-up Ford Sierra, safe from smartphones and electric cars. Murder victims got brutally ravaged in dark woods just like the ones she was walking alongside.
On cue, a fox barked deep within them, sounding like a woman’s death cry. But there was no accompanying sound of dogs barking.
Reaching the point where the drive forked, she hesitated. Ahead of her was the main entrance onto the Newborough-to-Marlbury road, an historic turnpike route, busy by day but darkly silent now, the big metal gates there kept locked between their urn-topped gateposts, the shadow of the Downs looming beyond. To her right, a Tarmac side drive forked away through the woods to Three Bridge Lane, which ran from the main road into Inkbury, crossing the river, railway and canal. There was an old badger sett by the lane entrance to which the terriers had laid siege once or twice on walks, she remembered, marching in its direction.
The pot-holed side drive was tree-vaulted and eerie, and Phoebe kept tripping over the fallen branches that littered it from a recent storm. An owl’s screech startled her, breath hoarsening as she grew puffed out. She must get fitter. Felix put her to shame. She’d take the dogs running with her later, little sods. Serve them right. Her anger spiked again.
She was certain she could hear them now, growling and yelping, panting and grunting.
And listening to the radio.
She slowed.
That wasn’t right.
There was a vehicle parked in the shadows of the secluded lane entrance, the bullish silhouette of an SUV, its engine off. The animal sounds were coming from inside it, thumping followed by a gasp and grunt. The voice coming from the car stereo wasn’t a radio presenter, Phoebe realised, recognising the familiar, modulated timbre with its storyteller pacing. It was an audiobook, the actor narrating it was a cherished household name.
Keeping her torch beam low, she crept closer, noticing the car’s windows were steamed up.
When what appeared to be a naked leg slapped against the rear window before squeaking back down it and out of sight, she dived for cover behind a pheasant feeder.
Was somebody – bodies – having sex inside there?
The familiar tones of a national treasure announced, ‘Chapter Fifteen: The Forbidden Forest,’ which then started with an irate school caretaker marching two pupils to the deputy head’s office.
If they’d been listening to Anaïs Nin, Phoebe might understand it better. Fifty Shades of Grey even. But these people were getting it on to… Harry Potter.
Turning off her torch, she glanced anxiously around in case there were other people here and her side entrance was actually a dogging spot for Hogwarts fetishists, although that seemed unlikely in sub-zero temperatures at five-thirty in the morning.
That’s when she heard the terriers at last, scrapping and snarling amid the badger dens on the tree bank beside the parked SUV, just a few feet from her hiding place.
Inside the car, the cherished narrator was reedily impersonating Professor McGonagall as she announced that she was docking a hundred and fifty points from Gryffindor as punishment for Harry and his friends’ insubordination.
There was a groan from the back seat.
Behind Phoebe, a grunt echoed it. She turned slowly to see a badger, big as a footstool, returning home. Stopping in its tracks, it eyed her crossly.
‘Not now,’ she implored under her breath, glancing once more to its sett where her terriers were spoiling for a fight, and then to the car where kinky back-seat wizard sex was taking place.
Like a drunk on his way home from Wetherspoons, the badger lumbered closer, clearly spoiling for a fight too.
‘I am so sorry,’ Phoebe told it as she shrugged off her coat, ‘but this is honestly for your own good. May Chris Packham forgive me.’
She threw the greatcoat over the badger. A footstool-sized lump beneath it went very still.
Phoebe calculated she had two minutes tops.
In the car, the groans were louder.
At the nearby badger den, the terriers resurfaced to bark at each other.
Phoebe almost fainted as a muntjac deer then shot out from the undergrowth behind her, careering off into the fog.
The lump beneath the greatcoat remained completely immobile, presumably on high alert, as was Phoebe.
A moment later, she heard the car door opening and feet landing on leaf mulch. Footsteps came her way. She crouched low behind the pheasant feeder, instinct telling her now wasn’t the time to broach trespassing or decency laws.
The footsteps paused by the badger bank.
The car door must still be open because the book narration was louder, describing Harry’s quidditch teammates refusing to talk to him.
When she felt something cold being pressed up against her cheek, she closed her eyes in horror.
It sneezed.
It was a terrier’s muddy nose, followed by a big kiss of tongue. Another bustled in on her other side with a gleeful yap.
The footsteps slowed. There was a rustling sound, like a plastic bag.
With pricked ears and inquisitive barks, both dogs bounded off to investigate before she could get the slip leads out. There followed more shrill barking and some urgent bag rustling from the human trespasser, before the footsteps crunched into action again, whoever it was moving around at speed. There was a frantic snapping of twigs and then the sound of earth scattering.
Hearing running feet approaching once more, Phoebe stooped low in case the dogs had given her hiding place away. But they clomped straight past.
In the car, the cherished actor’s description of the scene in which Harry overhears Quirrell snivelling in his classroom was quietened as the door slammed again. The engine started, tyres cracking against stones and brash.
Phoebe leant her forehead against the feeder with relief, waiting for the car to turn back out onto the lane.
Cold was gnawing into her bones without her coat on. Remembering the poor badger, she looked round.
Both badger and greatcoat were gone.
It was light enough to make out more details around her now, and she could see the mossy banks and tunnel entrances of the old sett amongst the tree roots, two small white terrier rumps once again poking out of it, excavating frantically. One unearthed something that scrunched and crackled. A newly buried bin bag. It was rejected after a cursory sniff.
More familiar anger blindsided Phoebe like a cosh, and for a moment all she could see was red. Not content with shagging in her driveway, the Harry Potter lovers had dumped their rubbish!
She charged out of her hiding place to the lane entrance and shouted at the retreating tail-lights, ‘Yes, get out of here! Bloody townies! Go and have sex and litter somewhere else. And leave the little wizard out of it. Fly-tipping perverts!’
There was a bright red glow as brake lights joined rear lights as the car slowed to a near halt further along Three Bridge Lane. Phoebe could still faintly hear the narrator starting the scene in which Harry and his friends are led into the dark woods for their terrifying late-night detention.
For a moment, anger turned to trepidation. Stepping back into the shadows, she braced herself for the white of a reverse light. She reached for her phone in her pocket, then remembered it was still in the house, only her vape and a dog toy to hand.
But the car set off again, vanishing into the frosty fog.
The terriers were now sitting obediently side by side and watching her with interest.
‘No Bonios for a week!’ she told them, looping on their slip leads and snatching up the bin bag they’d excavated.
It was only when Phoebe finally stomped back into the cobbled courtyard to deposit it in one of the big outside refuge containers that she realised she’d at least done one of the things the girls had asked. She’d got out of the house.
Things were looking up. She might even have a matcha tea later and go for that run.
Talking to people could prove harder.
3
JUNO
Juno dragged the metal clasp to meet its partner, breathing in and pressing her spine back into Seat 39K. She was not going to ask for the seatbelt extension. No way, even if that meant not breathing from JFK to London Heathrow.
Click!
She beamed at the passenger beside her, half of a sleek male couple, with surplus webbing lolling like blue tongues from seatbelts clasped around their narrow young hips. The man smiled briefly back, not seeing her, returning to his leather-cased e-reader. Juno eyed the screen, unable to make out the tiny print but guessing at something vintage and worthy: Christopher Isherwood maybe, or Toni Morrison.
‘I love a good book, don’t you?’ She patted the battered paperback on her lap for reassurance, now on its third reading. Nothing beat a razor-sharp crime with a high body-count for reassurance that packing up one’s entire life for a fresh start on the other side of the Atlantic was cosily low risk.
Her neighbour glanced obligingly at its cover, giving a downturned smile. ‘Dorothy De’Ath is some soubriquet.’
‘Sensational storyteller.’ Juno stroked the embossed title, cracked Art Deco capitals above an illustration in the style of Erté.
‘Blood On Her Hands,’ her neighbour read out, raising a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Not a romance, I’m guessing?’
‘Her real name’s Phoebe Fredericks,’ Juno told him, opening it to the title page. ‘We all call her Freddy.’ The author’s small, spiky signature lay beneath a personal message:
Juno – you’re the funniest mother I know! Love you to death.
No need to mention Phoebe’s sister-in-law, a mutual chum, had dictated the dedication. To Juno’s knowledge, the writer had never seen her perform stand-up; it was years since their paths had crossed in person. That was about to change.
‘Neat.’ The man admired it.
His companion leaned across to look at the book too. ‘So you’re a friend of Dorothy’s?’
Juno beamed, cherishing the in-joke, no matter that she was straight and Freddy was formidably coupled.
‘Meeting up this week. She’s married to a gorgeous, hellraising film producer,’ she divulged, wishing she didn’t always have such a burning urge to name-drop, or to lust after poor Felix. ‘They live in a huge pile near the village where my mother’s downsizing. It’s idyllic round there. They have a charmed life,’ she sighed. ‘Freddy was the original nineties party girl. She used to hang out with Britpoppers and artists in Soho House, clubbed at Herbal, summered in Ibiza, wrote a magazine column and chick lit when it was new and edgy. She had her finger firmly on the pulse. We both did back then. I’m Juno Mulligan, by the way.’
The couple introduced themselves, newly married East Coast twenty-somethings, both medical researchers, embarking on a European tour. ‘So you’re a writer too, Juno?’
‘I blog mostly, and I have a podcast: Mother Love. It was my stage name when I did comedy. You might have heard of it?’
They hadn’t. Not many under-thirties had. Or many over-thirties, in truth. ‘Mother as in Goose, Hubbard and Teresa of Calcutta!’ she’d once greeted her audiences before her stand-up career gave way to sitting down in front of a Mac.
‘There were spin-offs,’ she told them. ‘Mother Love is Cooking, Mother Love is Reading, Mother Loves Teenagers, Mother Loves her Empty Nest. I was an early adopter.’ And an over-sharer, she chided herself. Always too eager to entertain, to be seen.
Her travelling companions offered matching glazed smiles, one saying, ‘Adopting a child must be so rewarding.’
‘Adopter of blogging,’ she corrected cheerfully. ‘Our son Eric inherited my pigeon toes and his father’s red hair. He’s about your age. Stayed on in England after Oxford to work at GCHQ.’ Another boast trumpeted out before she could stop it.
‘Wow. Are you allowed to tell us that?’
‘Eric’s the one who signed the Official Secrets Act, not me. He always wanted to be James Bond. Inherited that trait too.’
‘From you or his dad?’
‘From his Granny Glenn.’ She smiled fondly. ‘Although between you and me, my mother’s only in it for the Martinis and darling Eric’s more of a Q.’ No need to add that he had just got himself into a spot of hot water lately. That would be over-sharing. Instead she said, ‘I’m Moneypenny to the core, by the way. Flattery will get you nowhere, but don’t stop trying.’
Now that she had their attention, Juno was eager to ask them about themselves. Her flying companions were more than happy to share stories about their romance, describing the research work into America’s opiate addiction that had brought them together, and the love of indie gaming that had sparked attraction. Weekends in New England, Broadway shows and five-diamond dinner dates followed, a shared apartment in Astoria, proposal under the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, wedding at Belvedere Castle, honeymoon in Puerto Rico.
Lapping it up vicariously, Juno knew she was going to miss this freewheeling American openness.
When she’d first arrived in New York in the early noughties, brimming with her own new love, bouncy, chatty Juno had made a lot of fast friends, sociability being as innate as playing to a crowd. She’d always loved collecting people and their stories.
Twenty years later, it was getting harder to be noticed, rarer to be confided in, but she still relished the challenge.
By the time they were midway across the Atlantic, the trio were firm friends. No longer a non-player character in the couple’s new adventure, Juno was its first comedy sidekick instead, someone they’d try to save first if the plane went down.
‘We’re jet-set, my darlings,’ she raised her cup, ‘footloose and duty-free. I’ve got so many airmiles it’s a terminal condition.’ It was far from her finest material, but they flattered her with a burst of laughter. She loved American generosity.
