The first time any of them got to know that Emma was actually missing was when her employer, Michael Homey, knocked on Cynthia Peeling’s door that Tuesday morning. Mrs. Peeling lived in the bungalow next to Emma’s. She and her husband Rodney thought of themselves as well-to-do (he was sales manager for a successful firm), and had an eighteen-year-old son away at university. Cynthia belonged to that breed of women whose hair becomes blonder as they grow older, whose clothes became more youthful, and who gets away with it because of sheer panache. Michael Homey automatically straightened his jacket when she opened her door to him. Apparently, Emma hadn’t turned up for work the day before, hadn’t telephoned to give an explanation – which she always did if she was ill – and was still absent today.
‘It really isn’t like her,’ Michael Homey said apologetically. ‘That’s why I felt I ought to come round. I know she lives alone and wondered, well, if she’d had an accident. There doesn’t seem to be anyone at home...’
Although Cynthia could hardly claim to know Emma Tizard well, she knew the girl sometimes disappeared for days at a time. Usually, she popped over to ask Cynthia to keep an eye on the bungalow for her, never giving any explanation for her absence, other than a bright remark such as: ‘Time for a change of scenery! Going to recharge my batteries!’ This made Cynthia think of open spaces, sporty pursuits. Emma always looked so healthy. Ms Tizard also gave the impression she was a person who could look after herself more than adequately. Therefore, Cynthia was not that perturbed by Michael Homey’s worrying. She invited him in for coffee and Viennese fingers, in the hope of calming his fears. It was unlike Emma to take off without informing her employers, Cynthia felt, but perhaps the extent of Homey’s concern gave an indication as to why she’d felt the need to disappear for a while. Emma was Michael Homey’s secretary. From his distressed bewilderment, Cynthia guessed Emma must be indispensable to him in more ways than one. He refused to be convinced by Cynthia’s gentle arguments.
‘We should check she isn’t lying unconscious in the house,’ he said. ‘I would never forgive myself if something had happened to her, and I’d done nothing to help.’
Cynthia grudgingly conceded Homey was right. ‘Thank God there are no stairs in the bungalow!’ she exclaimed with a laugh. Michael Homey bared his teeth without humour.
Peering through the spotless windows of Wren’s Nest, they were joined by the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Godleigh from no. 10 and young Mrs. Treen with her toddler, Danny, from Blossoms, no. 15. Everyone tried the windows, which were, of course, all sensibly locked from inside. The bungalow looked immaculate, not a cushion out of place, not a single item of crockery left on the kitchen drainer. In the bedroom, the pale grey duvet was undented and there were no clothes lying around. Admittedly, they couldn’t see into the bathroom, and curtains were drawn over one of the frosted windows. Through the garage door, the red gleam of Emma’s car could be seen.
‘Do you think we should break in?’ Lily Treen suggested.
‘That’s against the law,’ Mr Godleigh said. ‘Perhaps we should call the police.’
‘Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary,’ Cynthia responded hurriedly, visualising Emma’s alarm should she turn up again. She really didn’t feel that Emma was inside but didn’t want to say so, not having any proper foundation for her feelings. ‘There’s bound to be a good reason why she’s not here. She might have caught a train to visit relatives, got a cab to the station. Do you know any of her family, Mr. Homey?’
Michael Homey shook his head. ‘Perhaps Mr. Godleigh is right,’ he said. ‘It’s better to be safe than sorry.’
‘I think we should wait until tomorrow,’ Cynthia insisted, and her tone of voice brooked no argument. ‘Emma is a respectable young woman. I don’t think it’s seemly to have policemen breaking her windows just yet.’
At five past six that evening, a long ring on the doorbell disturbed the Peelings from their salad and quiche. Cynthia opened the door to a rather sinister-looking couple, who turned out to be detectives. They asked if the Peelings had a spare key to Wren’s Nest, as Emma Tizard’s parents thought they might.
Taken aback, Cynthia shook her head. Was anything wrong? Her guts, ahead of the subsequent information, began to churn. She could see two police cars parked at the kerb: uniformed officers were looking in through the windows of the bungalow next door.
Emma Tizard was dead, the detectives explained. Her body had been discovered by children playing truant from school. It appeared she’d been brutally murdered, horribly mutilated as if with mindless fury.
If the police found any evidence in Wren’s Nest, they presumably removed it from the property. As the last panda car pulled away, the two plain-clothed detectives came back to interview the Peelings. Cynthia was feeling utterly sick, guilty for not having suspected something was wrong after all, and confused as to why her instincts hadn’t alerted her. She’d felt so sure Emma had been all right.
‘Did Miss Tizard tell you what she was planning to do over the weekend?’
Cynthia shook her head. ‘No. She never told me things like that. We weren’t that close.’
The male detective made a swift note on his pad.
The body had been found still clutching a handbag. The authorities had had no difficulty discovering who Emma was.
‘And you never met any of her friends?’
Cynthia uttered a brittle laugh. She was still deeply shocked. ‘No, no. It seems quite odd now when I think about it, but none of us in Cherrytree Lane know much about Emma at all.’
‘So you don’t know what kind of interests she had?’ The female detective seemed to conceal an unpleasant implication in the words.
‘Art,’ Cynthia said, ‘History too. She borrowed books from me once, well, from my son. Ancient history.’
‘She never mentioned anything a little more... unusual?’
‘What kind of unusual?’ Cynthia didn’t like the tone of the question.
The female detective shrugged. ‘Well, anything to do with the occult.’
Cynthia had to laugh. ‘What? Emma? Certainly not. She was a very down-to-earth person. What are you trying to say?’
The male detective cleared his throat. ‘Certain items in the house suggest she had an interest in that sort of thing. Books and so on...’
‘She must have used them for her art,’ Cynthia said lamely. She could think of no other explanation. Emma had been such a nice, ordinary girl.
The detectives wanted to know when Emma had last been seen. Cynthia couldn’t clearly remember, but thought it was before the weekend. ‘She used to paint and draw a lot. Sometimes we’d never see her at weekends. That was quite normal. She used to work then, you see. She worked very hard.’ Cynthia felt tears come to her eyes, remembering the watercolour that hung above her bed, a haunting scene, painted by Emma, depicting La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Soft Emma, gentle Emma, a quiet, artistic soul.
‘And there was never any mention of the time she lived in the city?’ The female detective’s voice had taken on a softer note, as she registered Cynthia’s distress.
Cynthia shook her head. ‘No.’
‘It may just be a coincidence,’ the male detective said, carefully re-capping his pen, ‘but the young lady Miss Tizard used to share a flat with in London disappeared under strange circumstances too. Unfortunately no trace of her was ever found. Are you completely sure Miss Tizard never mentioned this to you?’
‘Quite, quite sure.’ Cynthia collected herself, straightened her spine. ‘How dreadful. Do you suppose the same person...?’ She shuddered eloquently, pressing a handkerchief to her lips.
The female detective shrugged. ‘It was several years ago. Perhaps, as my colleague said, a coincidence.’
Numbed and troubled by this ghastly and previously inexperienced unpleasantness in their lives, the inhabitants of Cherrytree Lane were sleeping badly. Those who were not shy of confessing it spoke of disturbing dreams in which the figure of Emma Tizard, unfamiliar in i
ts disarray and horrible mien, took centre stage.
‘It’s only natural that it should affect us like this after what the police said to me about Emma having peculiar interests,’ Cynthia Peeling said to a particularly distraught Lily Treen on Thursday morning. ‘It’s just our imaginations running a bit wild.’
Lily nodded, although her face was still troubled. ‘But Cynthia, in the dream, Emma swore at me! Not just little words, but real swearing. It was revolting. She was half naked, her hair all hanging round her face in rags and swearing. She called me names and laughed.’
Cynthia Peeling put a comforting hand on Lily’s shoulder, mouthing platitudes, while neglecting to mention the dream she’d experienced herself, in which she had witnessed a coarse and brazen Emma Tizard violently making love with Mr. Peeling. To make it worse, Cynthia had enjoyed the dream. Her waking self found sex rather ridiculous and unnecessarily messy. Rodney Peeling had been puzzled by the peculiar looks his wife had given him over breakfast on Thursday morning.
The police could not solve the mystery of Emma’s death. During the next week, television reconstructions of Emma’s supposed last movements, and flashes of telephone numbers which people could contact to give information only served to remind Cynthia of the grotesque horror of her neighbour’s murder. She hardly dared turned the television on. The tabloid press found out about the occult angle, and lurid headlines suggested the dead girl’s involvement in Satanism, inferring she had been the victim of a ritual killing. Cynthia’s heart felt tight with pain; she sympathised with Emma’s parents. How dreadful for them to read such rubbish. She herself knew it to be untrue, and considered writing to the press about it, but Rodney advised her against it. You never know what might result from such action. The Peelings could be cited as devil-worshippers, too. Reluctantly, Cynthia agreed with her husband, and the letters in Emma’s defence remained unwritten. Everyone on the estate who had known Emma agreed that the occult stories were rubbish. Cynthia took as much comfort as she could from that.
‘She was arty,’ said Lily Treen over coffee one morning. ‘She might have had a few odd things in the house. Arty people are like that. My sister-in-law has crystals and funny little statues around the place. She’s an arty type too.’
‘But Emma wasn’t a peculiar sort of person, she was normal, Cynthia said. ‘She just liked to paint and draw in her spare time.’
Lily nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, I know, I know, but artists sometimes think peculiar things are, well, artistic.’
The day of the funeral dawned unexpectedly dull and overcast, after a week of sunshine. A sizeable group of Willowdale Farm residents gathered in cars around Wren’s Nest to escort the funeral cortege to the crematorium.
Emma’s mother and father, who introduced themselves as Ruby and Steven, had arrived the night before. Ruby Tizard was a frumpy sparrow of a creature who wore grandmotherly hats and who, Cynthia suspected, was probably younger than herself. The Peelings had kindly offered them accommodation for the night, because Mrs. Tizard was obviously too upset to spend it in her dead daughter’s bed, the only one available in Wren’s Nest. The Tizards were strangely reluctant to enter the bungalow at all. Cynthia supposed that was because of their grief, and was sorry she couldn’t offer them more comfort. She’d had to admit she and Rodney hadn’t really known Emma very well, although they’d both liked her very much, and found her a pleasant, polite person. Michael Homey had probably known Emma better than they had. Cynthia wondered whether she should comment on the newspaper stories, and make it clear how wrong they were, but decided it was too soon to broach such an intimate subject. Perhaps later.
To make things worse, the funeral, which should have been a dignified occasion, was fraught with minor mishaps and irritations. The minister whom the Tizards had especially wanted to lead the service at the crematorium, being a close friend of the family, telephoned at the last minute to tell them a train had been de-railed on the route south, holding up his own indefinitely. It was too late to reach them any other way. A quick replacement from the local church proved unsatisfactory, since the man knew nothing of Emma, save what he’d read in the papers, which didn’t give him much scope for a moving, personal sermon. As he swayed before the congregation, singing the praises of a girl he’d never met, the lights in the chapel flickered, threatening a total failure that never quite happened, while the public address system, which should have carried his voice to the farthest ear, spluttered and buzzed, reducing the earnest tones to a wobbling fart.
Halfway through the service, Lily Treen’s young son began to scream inexplicably. When Lily took him into the hall outside, he threw up with gusto onto the marble tiles. Everybody must have heard. Mrs. Tizard began to cry. Afterwards, when questioned and consequently disbelieved, the child gabbled incoherently about a nasty lady who had put out her tongue at him. From what the adults could gather, the tongue had been black.
Back at Cherrytree Lane, the Peelings hosted a wake for Emma. Lily Treen stood sipping white wine with her back to the lounge window, her subdued son clinging morosely to her skirt. Every now and then, she felt compelled to turn round and look out. Wren’s Nest regarded her silently, emptily, almost with scorn. She remembered her dreams and shuddered.
Mrs. Tizard, who hadn’t eaten properly for days, drank far too much and became inconsolable. So much so that Cynthia Peeling felt obliged to call out her family doctor to give the poor woman a sedative.
‘But she hadn’t finished, hadn’t finished!’ Mrs. Tizard raved deliriously to anyone who would listen as she was led to the guest-room.
In fact, Rodney Peeling considered, as he surveyed his guests, everybody seemed to be drinking too much. Faces were flushed, voices raucous. One or two petty arguments seemed to be in progress. Perhaps he should tactfully try to start nudging people home. He could hear Michael Homey telling the Godleighs how he had secretly been in love with Emma since she had come to work for him two years ago and that her salary had been disproportionately high because of this. ‘Not many secretaries could afford a house like that,’ he said, miserably, flapping an arm in the direction of Wren’s Nest.
The following morning, Cynthia Peeling offered to accompany the Tizards over to Wren’s Nest to look over Emma’s belongings, so they could decide what they wanted to keep once the police had finished with everything.
Cynthia thought this was the most forlorn and depressing of post mortem tasks. Mrs. Tizard was still not quite with it, and the Peelings had already whispered to each other about how things were likely to go from bad to worse with her. They did not envy Mr. Tizard. Not surprisingly, his wife had taken his daughter’s death very hard and Cynthia thought Ruby Tizard a more than commonly weak woman.
The police hadn’t come up with anything yet either. Nobody appeared to have seen Emma since she had left work on the Friday evening before her death. She must have come home because her car was in the garage, but after that...? A couple of Willowdale Farm people thought they had seen lights on in the bungalow during the evening, but no one could be sure. As for a motive for murder, none could be found at all. Emma did not appear to have close friends, but she certainly had no enemies either – at least none that her acquaintances knew about. ‘Some maniac must have done it,’ the estate residents decided and waited perversely for news of more killings in the media.
Mr. Tizard opened the front door of Wren’s Nest and the three of them shuffled inside. Cynthia Peeling thought of how this was only the third time she had ever set foot in the place. True, Emma had often popped over to share a quick coffee with her neighbour, especially in the summer, but reciprocal invitations had been non-existent. It certainly couldn’t be because Emma was ashamed of her home. The walls were papered in the most modern, expensive prints that money could buy and the furnishings bore the stamp of a top interior design house. Always a loner, Cynthia Peeling thought. Perhaps a sad girl, really.
‘What a peculiar smell!’ Mr. Tizard exclaimed as he went into the lounge.
Cynthia Peeling followed him and sniffed.
‘What is it?’ queried Emma’s mother querulously from the hall
‘Nothing alarming!’ Cynthia was conscious of her voice being too loud and jolly. ‘Some kind of perfume. A bit stale, that’s all. The windows have been closed.’
The smell was strange. It caught at the back of the throat, half pleasant, half noxious. Cynthia thought that, in abundance, it would probably cause a headache. Had Emma Tizard been burning incense of some kind? There was an oriental muskiness to the smell. Cynthia firmly dismissed a rising sense of unease.
‘She was such a tidy girl,’ Mrs. Tizard said, standing pathetically in the doorway, holding her handbag in front of her. The place didn’t look lived in. No ornaments, no books, no magazines, no sense at all of occupation.
It looks like a show home, Cynthia thought. She examined the gleaming hi-fi system and television. It appeared they had never been used.
‘I don’t think she lived in this room much,’ Cynthia said. The place could be sold as it stood. What items were there could hardly be termed personal effects. Neither was there any evidence of eccentric interests. Moving close together, the three of them advanced into the dining room. Here, the same clinical tidiness prevailed. In a drawer, Mr. Tizard discovered a stainless steel cutlery set still wrapped in plastic.
‘Emma didn’t entertain much, it seems,’ he said.
‘No, she never brought friends home, not that we saw,’ Cynthia Peeling said. ‘I understood she liked to work at her painting the whole time she was off work.’ She eased herself past the Tizards and quickly passed through the dove grey and pale lemon kitchen that bristled with factory-new appliances. ‘Perhaps we’ll find more sense of her in her workroom.’