AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Patrick nods. ‘This is all she needs, isn’t it?’
‘I’ll talk to her shortly. I’ll let you know how she feels.’
Hal asks a few more questions and Patrick answers them in a monotone. He paints a pretty depressing picture of his life.
‘Tom died in an accident,’ Patrick calls after Hal as he leaves. ‘It was an accident!’
Hal steps out and stands in the deep shade of the porch for a few moments, thinking. Heat comes off the driveway. Solar panels on an outbuilding glint.
He needs to know more about Patrick Young. The man seems to have an identity crisis, lurching from saviour to victim, from aggressive to self-abasing. He has a history of violence – Hal wants to see the details of that – and he needs money. Hal will feel a lot happier if Nicole tells Patrick to leave.
A notification on his phone tells him he has a message from a colleague.
We have a good lead on the card found in Tom Booth’s pocket. ‘Sadie’ works at a massage parlour in Bristol.
He tries to phone his colleague but can’t get through. Jen needs to know about this, too. And about Patrick. Things are moving fast, and he doesn’t want anything to slip through their fingers. He tries phoning Jen, but she doesn’t pick up.
He texts her: CALL ME!
48
THURSDAY
Jen
Jen turns the car into a small village and drives past a row of quaint cottages with thatched roofs and blooming gardens. She passes a village green, neatly mown so the grass is almost glossy, a cricket clubhouse sitting smartly on the edge of it, strung with bunting that’s reflected in the glassy surface of a duck pond. Weeping willow fronds trail the surface of the water. Beyond the pretty centre of the village, the picture-postcard houses dwindle until there are no more thatched cottages in sight.
The outskirts are first dominated by bungalows, clustered in neat cul-de-sacs, but these quickly give way to barely maintained social housing, where some of the front yards have become junk yards. Jen grew up in a place like this. She knows how claustrophobic it can be when your family can’t afford to run a car and the bus only comes twice a day.
She crawls down a street and pulls up outside a small house. Its meanly proportioned door and windows depress her. She gets out of the car and walks to the front door on a drive made from badly poured tarmac, its edges crumbling into tarry rubble. A pocket-sized lawn has become a bed of daisies and dandelions, straining towards the sun.
The doorbell chimes elaborately when she presses it, and a shadow grows behind the reeded glass panel in the door.
‘Hello?’ A female voice. Jen announces herself, holds her badge up to the glass, though who knows whether it can be seen. ‘I’m here to see Melanie Jones,’ she says.
The door opens. ‘I’m Melanie.’ She’s dressed in slippers, polka dot leggings and a loose striped sweater which bags over a protruding stomach, though the rest of her frame is skinny. Most of her hair is dyed raven-black but an inch of roots is the colour of slate.
‘Are you the sister of Kitty Ellis?’
She looks surprised. ‘I am.’
‘Could I ask you a few questions?’
Jen follows her down a short hallway that’s practically impassable because there’s so much clutter, mostly stuffed supermarket plastic bags, heaps of magazines. The compact sitting room is no better. There are two small spaces to sit on sofas set at right angles to one another, though they’re barely recognisable as sofas beneath the junk. A cat sleeps on top of a stacked pile of cardboard boxes, curled tight into a lick of sunshine. The room stinks of dust and there’s a sour undernote that Jen doesn’t want to think too much about, but she suspects it might be something to do with the cat.
‘Anyone else home?’ Jen asks.
‘Just me. My husband died a year ago. Drink?’ Melanie offers and in a fleeting moment of eye contact Jen can see that she doesn’t want to talk about her loss and that she’s embarrassed by the state of her home.
‘No, thanks, I’ve just had a coffee.’ It’s a lie, but she won’t eat or drink anything here, it’s too dirty, and Melanie nods as if she expected that’s what the answer would be, and it suits her.
‘So, Kitty Ellis is your sister?’
Melanie’s eyebrows raise. She glances at Jen. ‘She is. Christened Karen but we all called her Kitty. She married Jack Ellis right out of school. It only lasted a year, but she kept his surname.’
‘We’re trying to establish contact with her so we can ask her a few questions related to an enquiry that we’re pursuing.’
‘What’s she done?’ The words are barked out roughly. Melanie starts to wheeze and Jen wonders if she has a respiratory condition before realising that she’s laughing.
