An ambulance, two police cars, the body still on the ground, dead on impact presumably. A young male police officer was carefully outlining the corpse in chalk.
“Jesus, you’re not meant to be taking his inside leg. Just stick a circle round the poor bastard,” said a plainclothes officer, who was about fifty and looked like a smoker. He turned to see Carol, who was waiting patiently beside him, and switched from copper mode to dealing-with-a-little-old-lady mode. “Oh, hello there. Are you the lady who saw him fall?”
“Yes, that was me,” said Carol. “He didn’t fall. He was pushed. I heard footsteps.”
“Oh, is that right, is it? I see. I’m really sorry, madam, but can I ask you to hang around for a moment? We’ll want to talk to you. Do sit down, of course.”
He spoke in that way that people often do to older people: slower, louder, more pronounced, like they’re talking to a toddler. Carol might understand it if she were ninety-five and wearing a nappy, being spoon-fed in a chair, not knowing what her own name was. But she wasn’t ninety-five: She was seventy-five and she was doing absolutely fine, thank you very much. A sit-down did sound like a good idea, though.
Carol parked herself on a nearby wooden bench. Assorted residents stood in clusters, chatting, craning their old necks for a better view. Giles, the owner, buzzed around the paramedics, anxiously trying to hurry things along to no avail. Tyler, the young gardener, was sitting on a mower, watching, rolling himself a cigarette and mumbling to Derek, the security guard, who had failed to prevent the only interesting incident to occur in his eight years on the job. Jill, the cleaner, edged out of the entrance and into the daylight. Jim, the gentleman who liked to sing in the bar, looked like he’d been headed for the lawn, croquet mallet in hand, but had stopped when he’d seen the drama. Belinda, dressed like the home’s femme fatale in red lipstick and high heels—Jesus, it was barely afternoon yet—stared intently. Elisa was crying. Considering the demographics, surely residents died all the time? Not like this, Carol supposed. Normal folk weren’t used to seeing a skull cracked open like an egg, its yolk all over the paving stones.
Carol looked up to the building’s flat roof, where the body had presumably come from. He had to have been pushed. Those rapid footsteps above. The murderer’s, surely.
“Is there anything I can help you with, gents?” Geoffrey was excitedly bounding over to the action.
“Stand back, please!”
“It’s all right, copper. I’m one of you. DCI Geoffrey Standing, retired. I’ve been out of the game for a while so some of my methods may be a little out of date, but I’m sure I can help. Nothing changes really, does it? I take it you’ve already faxed the particulars over to all the local stations?”
“Thank you, sir.” It was the senior plainclothes officer, heading Geoffrey off before he got to the body. “You can help me by standing back.”
“Very good. That’s exactly what you should be doing. Protect the crime scene. Like I say, though, I’m from the Met. What are we looking at? Suicide?”
“Really, sir. I need you to step away.”
“Excellent.” Geoffrey gave a chef’s kiss before his shoulders slumped and he headed back toward Catherine and Margaret, dejected. He looked like a little boy who’d been told he couldn’t join in with the bigger boys’ game.
Carol was aware that the attention of many spectators was not on the body and the drama that surrounded it but on her. Everywhere she looked, glances were being flung in her direction. It dawned on her that in the minds of the people who knew her past, she was a suspect. How terriblyobviousof them, she thought. Have a little imagination. Someone gets killed, and the automatic assumption is that the known killer did it. If Jamie Oliver walks past a spaghetti carbonara, does that mean he cooked it?
If she were honest with herself, she could see the logic.Hadshe done it? It was possible, she supposed, that she had blackedout and, like some war veteran who finds himself transported to the battles of the past, murdered the man in a manic frenzy. To the best of her knowledge, she’d never done that before.
No. Surely not.
Not everyone was glancing at Carol. She noticed concern on the faces of the police around the body. Why? He was dead already. Dead is dead. What was there to be concerned about?
“Stand back, please.”
“Yes, excuse me.” Carol had returned. She needed a closer look at that corpse. Soon they’d all be gone, and an opportunity would have passed. “They said they’d want to speak to me. Do you happen to know when that might be? OnlyTipping Pointwill be starting on ITV soon and I haven’t missed an episode since it started.”
Playing up to the role of little old lady helped sometimes. A PC gave her a gentle smile. “Just a moment. I’ll ask for you.”
Carol could see her baking friends gawping at her. Just hours after her past had been discovered, here she was at the center of a murder scene.
A younger female police officer, in a plain black suit, was talking to the older cop, whose face had turned from professional to grim. Something wasn’t right. The body was on its side. A leg, broken at the hip, pointed in the wrong direction. The forehead had a circular imprint on it, like it had been hit by something round. Could Carol make out his face? Short white hair. The men here all had short white hair. With the police in deep conversation, Carol shuffled toward the corpse, leaning in, squinting.
“Lady. I need you to step back for me, please.”
The paramedics swooped in, covering the corpse with a sheet and stretchering it into the ambulance.
But Carol had her answer, not that she understood where all the fuss was coming from. She’d managed to figure out that the body belonged to Desmond from the baking group.
Poor Desmond.
But what had got the police so excited? What was so special about Desmond?
Seven
Young people weremaking their way from the tube station to the Heath, tote bags on their shoulders, stuffed with towels and sun cream and books they wouldn’t get around to reading. Nice day for it. Inside the police car, DS Laura Welsh wished she was one of them.
