establish that he hadn’t.
And there I was, back up my ladder at Crabton Manor, seething and two hours adrift on my day’s schedule. Now the sun had shifted round, it was easier to see through the window: no, there was nothing on the bed, not now, but you didn’t need to be a forensic scientist or SOCO or whatever they were called these days to tell that something had once been there. It had lain long enough to make a dinge I thought I could still make out, and even my unscientific eyes had no difficulty seeing where the duvet had drifted on to the floor when someone had relieved it of the corpse’s weight. No, it had definitely been lying on, not under the duvet – in this heat, under a duvet?
In any case, I demanded, how could the police possibly have checked? The ladders had been where I’d left them padlocked together – Paula insisted on that: she didn’t want her ladders to be either victims or perpetrators of crime. Even though there was scaffolding climbing the gable ends you needed a twelve-foot ladder to get on to the first stage. Paula had a key to the outhouse that housed a loo, though I’d have been embarrassed to let anyone see, let alone use, so primitive a piece of plumbing with nowhere to wash your hands afterwards. But van der Poele had insisted that she give him advance notice when we needed access to the inside of the house itself to paint the tops and insides of window and doorframes. There’d be someone there to let her in and let her out, he declared. So the police wouldn’t have been able to get hold of keys from Paula. They’d not broken down the door. How had they got in to see that all was well?
As I twisted to get a better angle to work at, a simpler explanation occurred to me: that the police had done nothingat all and were bluffing me, to save themselves hours of tedious paperwork. I wouldn’t have blamed them, but there was no need for Marsh to have been so nasty to me. Maybe I’d give Messy Mascara a bell in the morning to see if he was usually like that or if he’d produced a special performance for me. Maybe it’d be safer not to bother.
I peered down at the tyre tracks crisscrossing the semicircular gravel drive in front of the house. Even if they’d been on snow or mud, I couldn’t have made much of them. So I couldn’t have swept back into Ashford police station demanding the head honcho to tell him one of his subordinates was a lazy, lying layabout and waving the photographic evidence under his eyes. But maybe I could photograph one thing. Paula insisted that we keep in the van glove-box one of those party cameras you use and throw away. People see big vans involved in road accidents and assume it’s been driven by some testosterone-fuelled youth who’d ploughed it into innocent hapless family cars. Paula reckoned that if we could take photos before the vehicles were moved, we’d always be able to prove we were the innocent parties – which we damn well had better be. Maybe the camera worked like a rabbit’s foot, or maybe we were too scared of Paula’s response if we bent her Trev so much as a thou. out of true. So far, anyway, there’d been no need for the little gizmo.
I nipped down the ladder, retrieved the camera, small enough to tuck into my bib, and swarmed back up again. Just think, out there are thousands of women paying millions of pounds to their local gyms just for the privilege of doing an exercise I get to do for free every day.
I was sure there were all sorts of technical procedures forphotographing through glass, but I’d no idea what they might be. I tried pressing the lens right up to the glass, and holding it well away, straight on, diagonally across. And then I realised that the light was better than it had been all day for this particular bit of fascia board, so I applied my efforts to that.
It usually takes me about twenty minutes to do a section the size I was working on. Because I was on my own, and I didn’t want to take