Flowers for the Dead Read online

  She looks at the lipstick. It is a natural shade, and seems a bit dry, but certainly not like it would cause any kind of controversy. She cannot taste anything when she puts it on, so tentatively licks her lips. Ah, there’s the taste. Yes, it was definitely familiar…

  “Condoms,” decides Laura.

  Emily laughs like a gurgling drain. “Well, that shows the difference in our lives. The mother, the housewife and the lover!” As she says it, she points first at herself, then Charlotte, then Laura.

  Laura gives a wan smile then makes her excuses, leaving the two women giggling behind her. On her boss’s orders she starts replenishing the shelves. It’s a nice job; monotonous, mindless, rhythmical, it is totally relaxing, leaving Laura’s mind free to wander.

  One of her favourite things to think about is considering the best way to commit suicide. Not because she actually wants to die, but as something to occupy her mind. For a while she seriously considered it but now she has thought about it so many times that it is no longer weird or disturbing but instead strangely comforting in its familiarity. She goes through the list now while popping French sticks, wholemeal loaves and soft baps into baskets.

  Hanging? Too barbaric and dramatic somehow, besides it would probably hurt. And practically speaking, where would Laura find somewhere strong enough to take the weight? Living in an apartment, she did not have a handy banister to drop from, and knowing her luck if she were to string herself up to the light fitting it would break.

  Drowning? They used to say that it was a very painful way to die but recently Laura has read an article saying that that may not be so, and actually it might be a very pleasant way to go. Something to do with the chemicals in the brain or something. But no, she shudders every time she imagines it. What if the scientists have it wrong and actually it is as horrific as they originally thought. Besides, it would have to be the sea, and it would be cold.

  She picks up some croissants and starts arranging them absent-mindedly, continuing through her list.

  Gassing herself? Her oven is electric.

  Stepping in front of a train or lorry, perhaps? Selfish. Screws up the driver, and ruins everyone’s commute.

  Slashing her wrists, then? No, she has a thing about knives, could not put one near her skin.

  So the only feasible option left is tablets. But even that has nasty connotations. What if she ended up choking on her own vomit rather than drifting gently to a sleep she would never wake from?

  The honest truth is that Laura cannot commit suicide because her mum would kill her. This is the conclusion she always comes to, having gone through the list rejecting each: that her dead mum would not approve one little bit.

  She steps back and looks at the re-stocked shelves. Job done. She heads behind the till for the rest of the day, a vague smile on her face that never reaches her eyes or her heart. Although she may not be dead, she is certainly not living.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ~ Wood Sorrell ~

  Maternal Tenderness

  TWENTY-SIX YEARS AGO

  Ada was reading to Adam again, the tome of Tales of Faerie and Myth open on her coffee table today. She leaned over it, straight-backed, ankles crossed delicately, one arm around her precious grandson, who had been named after her. Her coffee table had a table runner on it that Ada had embroidered herself with mallard ducks flying over a lake.

  Despite the room having three Cambridge-style Chesterfield sofas, in antique oxblood leather, arranged around the coffee table, Ada always preferred to sit on the large matching Queen Anne high-backed wing chair.

  Adam loved that chair. The wings seemed to be trying to fold themselves around him, protecting him. He liked to push his fingers down to the deeply-recessed buttons, and pretend he was programming instructions to make the chair fly he and Granny away; far, far away, to a place where monsters didn’t exist.

  Sometimes when Gran read to him, he nervously fingered the finely crocheted antimacassar that was thrown over the back of the chair. The whole house was covered in examples of Ada’s fine needlework skills, from armrests to cushion covers.

  Granny’s house was like something from a fairy tale. It was big and old, and had lots of interesting nooks and crannies, although it also had the Scary Things – real birds and animals placed into lifelike poses by a taxidermist. Adam did not like them at all, but he loved the rest of the house: all the rooms were interesting shapes, not like the place he lived in back in Colchester. That was a modern box of a home near the army base where his father worked. It was soul-less, cramped despite its three bedrooms; and instead of the rooms being lined with wood, they were simply painted plaster and looked cold for all his mother’s efforts to use garish colours to brighten up the place.

  Their garden was tiny, too, and he could always hear the children next door playing but never inviting him to join in. Granny’s garden was huge enough for him to lose himself in, and pretend he had lots of friends hiding away in the undergrowth.

  The thought made him cuddle up even closer to Ada; so close that he threatened to come out the other side of her.

  “The prince pulled out his sword and with mighty blows he slashed at the thick vines surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle,” she read, then paused and turned to her precious grandson. “He’s very brave, isn’t he? Are you going to be brave and strong like him when you grow up? Like your daddy?”

  Adam bit his lip and nodded nervously, fingers threading through the holes that patterned the antimacassar. His daddy was very brave; everyone said so. He rescued damsels in distress sometimes, like the heroes in these stories. He was a big important man in the Army’s police, making sure everyone behaved themselves. Catching bad people meant he would have to go away a lot to travel all over the world so that he could find them and lock them up.

  Sometimes Adam found himself worrying that Daddy would lock him up. Adam was a bad boy – he knew, because that’s what Mummy told him all the time. He was a bad, bad boy who no one would ever believe.

  ***

  PRESENT DAY

  Mike cradles the phone between neck and shoulder, frantically looking for something to mop up the ketchup that has just dripped from his sausage sarnie onto his desk.

  “Come on. Reading’s great,” cajoles Simon.

  “Did you phone for anything other than to nag me?” checks Mike. Ah, ha! A fingertip search through one of his drawers has unearthed a tissue.

  As he wipes up the little red puddle, Mike concedes that Simon is right, a change would be good for him. Life in Colchester is so full of Mags, despite two years passing since her death. It still seems impossible for somebody talking about one of them not to mention the other; they came as two halves of a whole to such an extent that people had called them Eminem, as in M and M, Michael and Mags. Never in a million years had he imagined he would become a widower at the tender age of thirty-two.

  However…despite the pain it causes when someone slips up and automatically calls him Eminem, Mike is not ready for it to stop. He does not want to turn his back on that part of his life yet. Neither is he ready to explain that to someone, not even one of his best friends. Instead, he tries to change the subject.

  “What’s the latest on the woman’s murder? Anything?” he asks.

  “I’ve a bad feeling about that one, Columbo,” sighs Simon.

  Mike smiles reflexively at his work nickname – like the television cop, he is easily dismissed by those who judge a book by its cover. Mike often looks crumpled and shambolic; much to her despair he had done even before Mags’s death. He doesn’t mind though, in fact he likes to use it to his advantage because being considered too thick to be a threat gives him free reign to observe. It is also the reason why he has taken to wearing a slightly lived-in mac; the cliché amuses him.

  Putting down his sandwich, along with the ketchup-covered tissue, he gives the conversation his full attention.

  “Operation Blaze is in danger of becoming one of the largest police operations in Berkshir
e Constabulary’s history,” says Simon. “We’ve reviewed over a hundred hours of CCTV footage from the area surrounding the victim’s home, though none cover the scrubland where she died, or the immediate streets running into it.”

  “Typical,” rumbles Mike.

  “Yeah. We’ve made appeals, the family have made appeals. Nothing significant so far, despite thousands of calls coming in.”

  “Got any leads at all?”

  “We’re looking for the driver of a light-coloured Ford Focus. No registration number, of course.”

  Mike picks a tiny crumb from his sandwich and nibbles it reflectively. He does not know what to say. Simon fills the silence.

  “I wish you were here, mate,” he confesses. “You’ve got a good instinct with stuff like this. It’s why I want you on my team, full stop. I’m sure Essex would be gutted to lose you, but their loss would be my gain.”

  Mike winces. His chief will not be impressed if he transfers. DCI Jane Goddard is tiny, but mighty scary when she wants to be. She doesn’t rant and rave, she gives people a glare that can freeze flesh at a hundred paces.

  “What’s solid that you’ve got so far?” he asks. “Did the post mortem throw up anything interesting? Background checks find anything unusual about the victim, Julie, wasn’t it?”

  “Julie Clayton, right. Bark fragments were found on her skin, so Doc Holliday’s initial supposition, that the killer incapacitated her first by hitting her with a branch to the throat, was correct. The girl would have been in a lot of distress after an injury like that, but Doc reckons she was finished off quick and clean. Killer knew exactly the right place to apply pressure to cause a venous obstruction. She’d have been dead in twenty seconds or so.”

  He hadn’t wanted to prolong her suffering then. Interesting.

  “She’s running along, listening to her music, in her own little world when, wham!” Mike muses, tugging at his beard gently, a habit of his when pondering. “An efficient but brutal way to stop someone, I suppose. Then the finesse of killing her not by traditional strangulation but by cutting off the blood and air supply to her brain with a little pressure to the jugular vein… Takes skill and knowledge.”

  “It’s the efficiency that’s worrying me,” admits Simon. “And he cut away the entire area round her lips, and took the flesh away; that’s why her face was such a bloody mess. Sam reckons the cuts show no hesitation. So he’s quick, confident…yet he takes the time to muck about posing the body and putting flowers on her.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a first kill, does it?” Mike tugs on his beard a bit harder. If this person has killed before, chances are high he will do it again.

  “Seriously, Mike, I could do with someone with your instincts on this,” urges Simon. “Look at the way you realised that gang grooming kids was being headed by a woman, not a bloke.”

  “Yeah, well,” Mike grunts, embarrassed. He did not like to think of that case from a couple of months back; anything to do with kids is always hard for him. From the start he had felt something was different about the way the paedophile ring was being run though, and his idea of it being a woman had provided the breakthrough needed to find the culprits and shut it down. “Anyway, mate, I’d best get going. Do some work I’m paid for,” he says briskly.

  They say their farewells, and when Mike gets off the phone he looks sadly at his stone-cold sausage sandwich. It does not look very appealing now that the bits of fat have congealed, but he rips a bite from it anyway.

  ***

  It is August but the weather does not seem to realise. It is bucketing it down with rain, the sky Armageddon grey, car headlights on despite it only being 5pm. Adam is driving home when he spots her trudging along in the pouring rain. He is sitting in his car, wipers going at full tilt as he waits in the queue of traffic that has built up because the road is now partially flooded by a huge puddle that comes two-thirds of the way up cars’ tyres.

  She is waiting by the side of the road just before the massive puddle, looking like a child who has borrowed her mother’s clothes for a dressing up session. The waterproof coat she wears hangs down to her knees, almost swamping her, the little cape effect round the shoulders making it look even wider, and her even shorter. She is clearly tiny, built like a fairy at around five feet one inch and small-boned. The hood is pulled down as far as it will go, masking most of her face, but he can see her lips. They are full, lush, as bee-stung as Angelina Jolie’s.

  As Adam watches, he sees her lift her head in anticipation as a car slows. She steps forward, assuming a position as if she were at the start of a race. But the car is only slowing to go through the water past her, not to let her cross before it over the road, as she had thought.

  Adam leans his right elbow on the side, hand only lightly resting on the steering wheel as he watches with interest. Her shoulders visibly slump as she realises the truth, that she will have to stand in the rain waiting for the traffic to die before she stands a chance of getting across the road. The rain seems to hammer her posture down and down until she looks utterly beaten and bedraggled, a delicate flower crushed by the weight of the weather.

  Poor little thing, she needs someone to look after her. To protect her.

  He slows his car to a stop. It takes her a second to realise, then finally she looks up. Her face lights with a huge smile, making Adam’s stomach clench and his heart float.

  “Thank you!” she calls, raising an arm as she sprints in front of his car.

  He cannot help himself; in the light of her smile he finds himself beaming back and lifting a hand. Just as she reaches the pavement on the other side, he decides. This is it, this is The One. It has been six months since he killed Julie, and he is so lonely.

  The front door of the house she is beside is suddenly flung open. A silhouette of a man fills the space against the hallway light. He waves, calling a name Adam does not catch. The woman keeps on running, straight into the man’s arms. He hugs her, laughing, pulling her tight against him despite the fact she is sodden. A passionate kiss on the lips and he pulls her inside as she drips onto the parquet flooring, her smile even brighter now. It pierces Adam’s heart like a scalpel.

  She has someone already. Someone who will love her and look after her. Of course.

  That is all Adam longs for. True love. It isn’t much to ask for, is it?

  ***

  TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

  Everyone around him was dancing around and singing. Adam knew what he was supposed to do, the teachers had practised it with the class again and again, and he had done his bit perfectly then. But now people were looking at him and he felt completely blank.

  He stood frozen in place in the middle of the stage. More people were looking at him. He twisted the hem of his jumper around his fingers trying to think, think, think.

  Everyone was staring.

  Suddenly there was his mum, hurrying forward from the crowd of parents below him. She stepped onto the little stage and took his hand, and he felt a rush of relief at seeing her, so familiar. Now she was here to take charge the six-year-old did not have to think.

  “Come on, Adam, it’s okay. It doesn’t matter,” she smiled with those red, red lips of hers. “Come and sit on my lap and we’ll watch the rest of it together.”

  He clung to her, burying his face into her hip as she made kind cooing noises and led him into the audience. Lifted him onto her lap, and he twisted to wrap his arms around her, hiding his face in her neck now. To soothe him she stroked his hair, so dark brown that in the lowered light it looked black.

  “Oh, it’s such a shame,” offered another parent, Mrs Guest, smiling at the little boy. “They get so nervous, don’t they!”

  “Adam certainly does. But your little Lottie seems to be enjoying herself; she’s doing a wonderful job as Mary.”

  “She’s a proper little performer,” Mrs Guest replied, pride evident in her voice.

  “Oh yes, she speaks so clearly. I heard her singing at the carol concert the othe
r day, too – a lovely voice, and so young! You must be very proud.”

  Mrs Guest smiled amiably. Then silence. This was the way it always was around Adam’s mummy, he had noticed. She intimidated people. He thought perhaps it was because she was so pretty. Her glossy blonde hair was in a sharp, sleek bob that was long enough to fall below the chin, very blunt cut, with a fringe straight across too. It looked harsh but suited her, and went with the smart red lipstick she liked to wear: she loved strong colours and bold geometric shapes.

  She adjusted her peacock blue top as the silence stretched on. “Your eldest is in the church choir, isn’t he? Good voices must run in your family,” she smiled, trying again.

  Sara always remembered thoughtful details about people. She volunteered to take part in things too, from fundraising baking sessions to story reading at the school once a month. No matter what she did, though, Adam’s mother did not make friends. Mrs Guest was clearly not going to be the exception to the rule.

  Adam stayed quiet too. He sat on Sara’s lap, staring straight ahead like a marionette rather than a real live boy, only moving once the nativity play was over and the applause had faded.

  “Come on,” said Sara, holding out her hand. The boy clung to it gladly, as if all his dreams had come true.

  “Say goodbye,” she added. Adam smiled and opened his mouth. “Come on, speak up,” Sara encouraged.

  Adam’s eyes grew large as he realised both his mother and Mrs Guest were staring at him, waiting. His mouth gaped.

  “Bye,” he squeaked.

  “Can you say it a little louder? We didn’t quite hear that,” his mum said.

  He did. Eventually.

  “Bye bye, Adam,” Mrs Guest smiled. She watched them for a moment as they disappeared outside and crossed the road. It was starting to rain, and she noticed Sara stop to pull her own hood up before seeing to her son.