Chapter One
In his twenty years of delivering the post on Hall Road in Cromer, Archie Waycombe had never seen the gate left open at number 105. And he’d certainly never seen a cow, seemingly in need of a good milking, walking down the middle of the lane.
Archie turned the wheel sharply and pulled over to the side of the road. Reaching over to the seat next to him in the post van, he picked up his mobile and dialed 999 with his chubby fingers.
“Hello. What is the nature of your emergency?”
“This is Archie Waycombe, the postman for Hall Road. I need you to send a policeman out to number 105. Something doesn’t seem quite right.”
“Hello, Archie. This is Tamsin. What is it exactly that doesn’t seem quite right?”
“Well for one, there’s a cow walking down the middle of the road.”
“Archie, I suggest you hang up and dial 101, our non-emergency number. The police aren’t going to move a cow out from the middle of the road.”
“That’s not all,” said Archie. “The gate’s been left open at 105.”
“Well, that would explain how the cow got out, don’t you think?”
“Listen. I may not be a particularly smart man, but I am telling you this. That gate has never been left open once in all my years of delivering the post. The woman there lives alone and I’m telling you something is off. Is there a crime wave down the pier or something? Just send the bloody police car!” And with that he clicked off his phone and waited.
It took about five minutes for the police to arrive and Archie watched as the car pulled into the gravel drive, stopping short of the gate.
A male officer exited the vehicle and walked toward Archie, who by this time was out of his van and standing with arms crossed.
“Hello. I’m Officer Robert Sullivan. That’s Officer Weild in the car there,” he said with a nod of his head. Archie waved at the female officer sitting on the side of the car closest to him. She had her hair pulled back under her cap and appeared to be in her early twenties. “Weild, there’s some rope in the boot,” yelled Robert. “Can you grab it and tether ole Bessie there to the fence so we’re not scrapping hamburger off the road later?”
He turned back to Archie. “Are you the postal worker who called in the incident?”
Archie fought the urge to be sarcastic, given he was the only fellow on the road with a mail van.
“Yep. That’s me. Archie Waycombe.” He chuckled to himself as he watched the young woman trying to get around to the front end of a cow that was clearly not interested in being corralled.
“Okay then, thank you Mr. Waycombe. We’ll take it from here. We’re going to check everything out. A report will be filed so feel free to stop by the station at some point.” He reached out to shake Archie’s hand.
“But, don’t you want me to come with you? The lady that lives there, Mrs. Leeds …”
“That will not be necessary, sir. Get on with your day. I’m sure you have more letters to deliver.”
“Aye. That I do…well, I guess I’ll be off then,” Archie said, looking a bit confused.
“Weild!” Sullivan yelled. “Who is in charge? You or the cow? Come on, then.”
Robert slid back into the driver’s side of the car and waited on his partner. Once she was back inside the car as well, he proceeded down the driveway. As soon as the car had passed the opening of the gate he stopped again. “Iris, would you mind hopping out and closing the gate? Don’t want anyone else calling this in to the station.”
The female officer did as she was asked and joined her partner for the ride toward the house. The getting in and out of the patrol car barely gave the young woman time to catch her breath. The sounds of her panting mixed with crunch of gravel turning beneath the wheels. One day, she thought, I’ll have a junior partner and I won’t be this bossy.
The morning was warm and bright and the unpaved road was lined with the early wildflowers of spring. It was a long and straight path, ending at a two story wood structure about a kilometer away.
As they drove along, Iris noticed a paddock. A horse swished his tail, with no apparent thought to the open gate before him. To her left, goats sauntered in and out of their pen, crossing the road and then returning to their more familiar surroundings. Once she and Robert were closer to the house, she saw chickens pecking around in the yard. They scattered as the car came to a stop near a side door.
Officer Sullivan got out of the car, stood with hands on hips and surveyed the scene. “Lovely out here, innit?” He sighed, taking in a deep breath of the English air. “Well, let’s go ask the lady why all her animals are out in the road.”
Iris straightened her cap and fell in line behind her partner, following him up some small steps to the door.
Iris had been on the force for five months and, as is the custom, younger officers are paired with their more seasoned counterparts. Robert Sullivan had been a patrol officer for fifteen years. He liked the job and he especially liked the job in Cromer, where crime usually consisted of a domestic dispute or a rambunctious group of teenagers having their fun. He had never aspired to rise in the ranks, content with leaving the work behind at shift’s end and going home to his wife and four children. Iris Weild had wanted to be a police officer for as long as she could remember. Her grandfather was on the force and as a child she loved hearing his stories, wearing his cap and helping him polish his medals and shoes. She had gone to University, studied Psychology and applied to the force right after graduation. It was her dream to rise to the rank of Detective Inspector or perhaps even DCI.
The senior officer knocked at the door and waited. When there was no answer, he tried the handle and found it opened with ease.
“Hello,” he called. “This is the police. Is there anyone in the home?” Again, silence.
He nodded at Iris and continued through the door, and entered a large bright room. It was an open space with no division between the living room area and the kitchen. There were flowers on a side table next to a slipcovered couch and sunlight streamed through large windows overlooking a garden. Everything appeared neat and clean to the eye … no gathering of dust.
“What’s that smell?” Sullivan asked.
Iris turned her head and sniffed the air. “Not sure,” she said, “but smells a bit like cinnamon, I think.”
She glanced toward the counter and saw a pie with a latticework crust. Something white caught her eye and she walked in the direction of the kitchen for a better look. Next to the pie was a small sheet of paper. In a delicate hand was written, “For whomever finds me.”
Iris furrowed her brow and thought how odd this seemed.
“Sullivan. Come over here. I don’t think this is good.”
The other officer walked over to join her and read the note. “What does this mean then? You think she’s missing? Kidnapped?” he paused. “Dead?”
“Sounds more like dead, eh? I mean you don’t usually know you’re going to go missing, do you and it’s not likely a kidnapper is going to let you take the time to roll out a crust and leave a note.”
Sullivan scratched his chin and nodded his head in agreement.
They both turned and headed toward the back of the room, each side of which was flanked by an open doorway.
“I’ll take the left side, you take the right,” said Sullivan.
They went through the openings and gasped in unison as they exited on the other side into a wide hallway.
Iris had seen a dead body in movies and on a trip to the morgue during her training. Her few months on the force had been filled with traffic stops and driving around, keeping an eye out for mischief-makers. Given its proximity to the sea, Cromer was a big tourist town and usually a row at the pub was as serious as the police work got. What she was looking at now, well, this was something else all together.
A slight woman in a blue dressing gown, peppered with small flowers, hung from a rope tied to the top of the banister that flanked a flight of stairs. Her head was slumped forward and her blonde hair covered her face. Unlike when you see someone who has died from hanging in a film, this woman’s feet were not dangling in the air but rather were brushing the ground. A miscalculation in the length of the rope, wondered Iris?
“Sullivan,” she whispered, her hand going to her mouth. “My god. How badly must you want to die when all you had to do to live was to put your feet down?”
He shook his head slowly. “And who the hell bakes a pie and then goes and offs themself?”
Rigor mortis did not seem to have set in and there was no smell of decomposition, so Officer Weild deduced the woman had hung herself that morning. She noticed a small brown journal at the woman’s feet, opened, its spine outward and the pages facedown. Iris took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and pulled them on before reaching to pick it up.
She turned it over and glanced at the open page, at the near halfway point of the book. In the same handwriting as the note on the counter were these few words.
“My name is Alison Leeds and for two weeks I am another man’s wife.
There is no piece of paper binding us together. There are no rings.
He works in the garden and watches soccer. I bake pies and write in this journal. We drink wine and go to the cinema and we make love until we fall asleep with exhaustion.
It is a lie I tell myself, but it is the truest fourteen days of my year.”
********
Cromer, in Norfolk on the eastern coast of England, is not a large town.
Less than 5 square kilometers and with about 8,000 residents, it is best known for its surfing and fishing. The people there are not prone to die of other than natural causes. When Patrol Officer Sullivan called in an apparent suicide to the control room, it didn’t take long for Duty Sgt. Mark Hughes to arrive at the Leeds residence. Hughes was known around the station for being a man of few words, tough but fair and accustomed to having things done a certain way. Although he stood only five foot nine in height, when he walked in, he physically commanded a room.
He rubbed his chin and without saying a word, surveyed the main room before Robert and Iris led him to the back of the house.
“Odd that, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing at the hanging woman’s feet.
“Yep. We thought the same thing. That was a lady determined to die,” said Officer Sullivan.
“Hmmm,” Hughes mused.
“Let’s cut her down, Sullivan,” said the Duty Sgt., as he pulled a folded knife from his pocket.
Hughes climbed the stairs and Robert cradled the woman’s body, waiting for the release to come with the cutting of the rope.
Iris stood with her back to the wall and watched as Robert placed Alison on the ground, holding the back of her head until he could lay it down gently. She swallowed hard at the uncharacteristic show of compassion by her partner.
For the first time she could see the woman’s face. Iris would guess her age to be mid to late thirties.
The rope was tight around her neck and she had turned a pale blue, but even so, Iris could tell she was a beautiful woman. The macabre color aside, she appeared to be sleeping; her eyes closed and framed by long lashes, her thick lips curled in the subtlest of smiles.
“Here, Sullivan,” said Hughes, by this time down from the landing. “Take my knife and cut the rope from her neck.”
Next, the Duty Sgt. turned his attention to Iris.
“What’s that, then?” he asked pointing at the clear plastic bag she held in her hand.
“Oh,” said Iris, surprised by the sudden question. “It’s a book we found at the scene. Appears to be a diary of sorts.”
“Well, make sure it gets logged in as evidence at the station. I’d have to say this seems pretty cut and dry, the feet thing aside. I don’t see any signs of foul play or a struggle. Even so, give the diary a read, Weild. See if there’s anything there that speaks to her state of mind and what not. Possible next of kin.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Weild?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Radio dispatch and have them send over an undertaker.”
In his twenty years of delivering the post on Hall Road in Cromer, Archie Waycombe had never seen the gate left open at number 105. And he’d certainly never seen a cow, seemingly in need of a good milking, walking down the middle of the lane.
Archie turned the wheel sharply and pulled over to the side of the road. Reaching over to the seat next to him in the post van, he picked up his mobile and dialed 999 with his chubby fingers.
“Hello. What is the nature of your emergency?”
“This is Archie Waycombe, the postman for Hall Road. I need you to send a policeman out to number 105. Something doesn’t seem quite right.”
“Hello, Archie. This is Tamsin. What is it exactly that doesn’t seem quite right?”
“Well for one, there’s a cow walking down the middle of the road.”
“Archie, I suggest you hang up and dial 101, our non-emergency number. The police aren’t going to move a cow out from the middle of the road.”
“That’s not all,” said Archie. “The gate’s been left open at 105.”
“Well, that would explain how the cow got out, don’t you think?”
“Listen. I may not be a particularly smart man, but I am telling you this. That gate has never been left open once in all my years of delivering the post. The woman there lives alone and I’m telling you something is off. Is there a crime wave down the pier or something? Just send the bloody police car!” And with that he clicked off his phone and waited.
It took about five minutes for the police to arrive and Archie watched as the car pulled into the gravel drive, stopping short of the gate.
A male officer exited the vehicle and walked toward Archie, who by this time was out of his van and standing with arms crossed.
“Hello. I’m Officer Robert Sullivan. That’s Officer Weild in the car there,” he said with a nod of his head. Archie waved at the female officer sitting on the side of the car closest to him. She had her hair pulled back under her cap and appeared to be in her early twenties. “Weild, there’s some rope in the boot,” yelled Robert. “Can you grab it and tether ole Bessie there to the fence so we’re not scrapping hamburger off the road later?”
He turned back to Archie. “Are you the postal worker who called in the incident?”
Archie fought the urge to be sarcastic, given he was the only fellow on the road with a mail van.
“Yep. That’s me. Archie Waycombe.” He chuckled to himself as he watched the young woman trying to get around to the front end of a cow that was clearly not interested in being corralled.
“Okay then, thank you Mr. Waycombe. We’ll take it from here. We’re going to check everything out. A report will be filed so feel free to stop by the station at some point.” He reached out to shake Archie’s hand.
“But, don’t you want me to come with you? The lady that lives there, Mrs. Leeds …”
“That will not be necessary, sir. Get on with your day. I’m sure you have more letters to deliver.”
“Aye. That I do…well, I guess I’ll be off then,” Archie said, looking a bit confused.
“Weild!” Sullivan yelled. “Who is in charge? You or the cow? Come on, then.”
Robert slid back into the driver’s side of the car and waited on his partner. Once she was back inside the car as well, he proceeded down the driveway. As soon as the car had passed the opening of the gate he stopped again. “Iris, would you mind hopping out and closing the gate? Don’t want anyone else calling this in to the station.”
The female officer did as she was asked and joined her partner for the ride toward the house. The getting in and out of the patrol car barely gave the young woman time to catch her breath. The sounds of her panting mixed with crunch of gravel turning beneath the wheels. One day, she thought, I’ll have a junior partner and I won’t be this bossy.
The morning was warm and bright and the unpaved road was lined with the early wildflowers of spring. It was a long and straight path, ending at a two story wood structure about a kilometer away.
As they drove along, Iris noticed a paddock. A horse swished his tail, with no apparent thought to the open gate before him. To her left, goats sauntered in and out of their pen, crossing the road and then returning to their more familiar surroundings. Once she and Robert were closer to the house, she saw chickens pecking around in the yard. They scattered as the car came to a stop near a side door.
Officer Sullivan got out of the car, stood with hands on hips and surveyed the scene. “Lovely out here, innit?” He sighed, taking in a deep breath of the English air. “Well, let’s go ask the lady why all her animals are out in the road.”
Iris straightened her cap and fell in line behind her partner, following him up some small steps to the door.
Iris had been on the force for five months and, as is the custom, younger officers are paired with their more seasoned counterparts. Robert Sullivan had been a patrol officer for fifteen years. He liked the job and he especially liked the job in Cromer, where crime usually consisted of a domestic dispute or a rambunctious group of teenagers having their fun. He had never aspired to rise in the ranks, content with leaving the work behind at shift’s end and going home to his wife and four children. Iris Weild had wanted to be a police officer for as long as she could remember. Her grandfather was on the force and as a child she loved hearing his stories, wearing his cap and helping him polish his medals and shoes. She had gone to University, studied Psychology and applied to the force right after graduation. It was her dream to rise to the rank of Detective Inspector or perhaps even DCI.
The senior officer knocked at the door and waited. When there was no answer, he tried the handle and found it opened with ease.
“Hello,” he called. “This is the police. Is there anyone in the home?” Again, silence.
He nodded at Iris and continued through the door, and entered a large bright room. It was an open space with no division between the living room area and the kitchen. There were flowers on a side table next to a slipcovered couch and sunlight streamed through large windows overlooking a garden. Everything appeared neat and clean to the eye … no gathering of dust.
“What’s that smell?” Sullivan asked.
Iris turned her head and sniffed the air. “Not sure,” she said, “but smells a bit like cinnamon, I think.”
She glanced toward the counter and saw a pie with a latticework crust. Something white caught her eye and she walked in the direction of the kitchen for a better look. Next to the pie was a small sheet of paper. In a delicate hand was written, “For whomever finds me.”
Iris furrowed her brow and thought how odd this seemed.
“Sullivan. Come over here. I don’t think this is good.”
The other officer walked over to join her and read the note. “What does this mean then? You think she’s missing? Kidnapped?” he paused. “Dead?”
“Sounds more like dead, eh? I mean you don’t usually know you’re going to go missing, do you and it’s not likely a kidnapper is going to let you take the time to roll out a crust and leave a note.”
Sullivan scratched his chin and nodded his head in agreement.
They both turned and headed toward the back of the room, each side of which was flanked by an open doorway.
“I’ll take the left side, you take the right,” said Sullivan.
They went through the openings and gasped in unison as they exited on the other side into a wide hallway.
Iris had seen a dead body in movies and on a trip to the morgue during her training. Her few months on the force had been filled with traffic stops and driving around, keeping an eye out for mischief-makers. Given its proximity to the sea, Cromer was a big tourist town and usually a row at the pub was as serious as the police work got. What she was looking at now, well, this was something else all together.
A slight woman in a blue dressing gown, peppered with small flowers, hung from a rope tied to the top of the banister that flanked a flight of stairs. Her head was slumped forward and her blonde hair covered her face. Unlike when you see someone who has died from hanging in a film, this woman’s feet were not dangling in the air but rather were brushing the ground. A miscalculation in the length of the rope, wondered Iris?
“Sullivan,” she whispered, her hand going to her mouth. “My god. How badly must you want to die when all you had to do to live was to put your feet down?”
He shook his head slowly. “And who the hell bakes a pie and then goes and offs themself?”
Rigor mortis did not seem to have set in and there was no smell of decomposition, so Officer Weild deduced the woman had hung herself that morning. She noticed a small brown journal at the woman’s feet, opened, its spine outward and the pages facedown. Iris took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket and pulled them on before reaching to pick it up.
She turned it over and glanced at the open page, at the near halfway point of the book. In the same handwriting as the note on the counter were these few words.
“My name is Alison Leeds and for two weeks I am another man’s wife.
There is no piece of paper binding us together. There are no rings.
He works in the garden and watches soccer. I bake pies and write in this journal. We drink wine and go to the cinema and we make love until we fall asleep with exhaustion.
It is a lie I tell myself, but it is the truest fourteen days of my year.”
********
Cromer, in Norfolk on the eastern coast of England, is not a large town.
Less than 5 square kilometers and with about 8,000 residents, it is best known for its surfing and fishing. The people there are not prone to die of other than natural causes. When Patrol Officer Sullivan called in an apparent suicide to the control room, it didn’t take long for Duty Sgt. Mark Hughes to arrive at the Leeds residence. Hughes was known around the station for being a man of few words, tough but fair and accustomed to having things done a certain way. Although he stood only five foot nine in height, when he walked in, he physically commanded a room.
He rubbed his chin and without saying a word, surveyed the main room before Robert and Iris led him to the back of the house.
“Odd that, isn’t it?” he asked, pointing at the hanging woman’s feet.
“Yep. We thought the same thing. That was a lady determined to die,” said Officer Sullivan.
“Hmmm,” Hughes mused.
“Let’s cut her down, Sullivan,” said the Duty Sgt., as he pulled a folded knife from his pocket.
Hughes climbed the stairs and Robert cradled the woman’s body, waiting for the release to come with the cutting of the rope.
Iris stood with her back to the wall and watched as Robert placed Alison on the ground, holding the back of her head until he could lay it down gently. She swallowed hard at the uncharacteristic show of compassion by her partner.
For the first time she could see the woman’s face. Iris would guess her age to be mid to late thirties.
The rope was tight around her neck and she had turned a pale blue, but even so, Iris could tell she was a beautiful woman. The macabre color aside, she appeared to be sleeping; her eyes closed and framed by long lashes, her thick lips curled in the subtlest of smiles.
“Here, Sullivan,” said Hughes, by this time down from the landing. “Take my knife and cut the rope from her neck.”
Next, the Duty Sgt. turned his attention to Iris.
“What’s that, then?” he asked pointing at the clear plastic bag she held in her hand.
“Oh,” said Iris, surprised by the sudden question. “It’s a book we found at the scene. Appears to be a diary of sorts.”
“Well, make sure it gets logged in as evidence at the station. I’d have to say this seems pretty cut and dry, the feet thing aside. I don’t see any signs of foul play or a struggle. Even so, give the diary a read, Weild. See if there’s anything there that speaks to her state of mind and what not. Possible next of kin.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And Weild?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Radio dispatch and have them send over an undertaker.”
