The Murder of Mrs Chadwick - Chapter One

Caroline
Sep 1
10 min read

Thursday,

7^th October 1976

Jack

Jack Chadwick has been in the police station interview room for more than an hour. He watches the hands on the wall clock count down the passing minutes unbearably slowly. He asks Detective Inspector Holt when he will be able to go home. He needs some air. He needs some sleep.

Call me Elena, she says with a smile. He has never met a woman policeman before. She seems kind and Jack wonders whether she has been trained on when to show compassion, or does it come naturally to her? So far, her smile has never faltered, even on the journey from the house to the police station, when she twisted around in the front seat of the car and told him he would have to stay somewhere else tonight, she continued to smile. She felt sorry for him, he could tell. As he peered out of the back passenger window of the blue and white Ford Cortina, his breath steaming the glass, he wanted to ask her to stop the car. He needed to run back into the house and tell them to be careful. His train set is delicate; some of the pieces are quite expensive. They shouldn’t knock the table, otherwise the signal office will dismantle. He hadn’t had time to glue it properly this afternoon, and the house was so busy. There were people everywhere. But Detective Inspector Holt had interrupted his thoughts. It’s unlikely that the forensic team will be finished this side of midnight, she had said. She could arrange a hotel room, or he could stay at a relative’s house? She posed it as a question, although she knew Jack didn’t have any other family. He had already told her that.

Now, Elena assures him that they are almost finished. Just a few more questions. Jack sighs and leans back in the vinyl armchair, the colour of rust and decay, resting his head on the back cushion.

Elena tells him that his tiredness is probably caused by the trauma. It’s his body’s natural response. But if he wouldn’t mind answering a few more questions, it will help them to catch his mother’s killer. Jack flinches at her choice of language. Killer. His eyebrows come together in a frown. He wants to tell her he can’t take much more. It is almost ten o’clock. He is always in bed by now, and he hasn’t eaten for hours, since he made himself a snack this afternoon, a couple of cream crackers and a slice of cheese. It’s important that he eats regularly, otherwise he has trouble thinking properly.

He tells the inspector he has never seen a dead body before. His mother’s is the first, and she agrees that would be a traumatic experience for any person.

Elena is particularly interested in Jack’s relationship with his mother. Did he love her? Did she love him? Didn’t he find it difficult still living at home when he was, how old? Twenty-nine years? Jack can’t fathom why these questions are important. What relevance do they have? But he assures the inspector that yes, he was very happy, and, no, the thought of leaving home had never occurred to him. They looked after each other, him and his mother. Why would he want to live anywhere else?

Until now. Now, she is gone, and now he doesn’t have anyone to look after, or to look after him.

Jack tells the inspector that he can’t believe she has gone, as he sobs into his hands. She tells him to take his time, and Jack sips more stewed tea from a tired brown mug. He runs his fingers over the chip on the rim and the crack that meanders from the handle down to the bottom. He wants to point it out to the inspector and warn her of the dangers of hot tea. The mug could break at any moment and scald him.

His mother would have told her. His mother would never drink tea from a chipped mug, and she wouldn’t have put up with stewed tea, either. She would have asked for a fresh one. She would have pushed it back across the table with derision and refused to speak until a ‘proper brew’ was made. She liked things to be ‘just so’. Each night, as she dragged her tired feet along the path to their front door, Jack would dash into the kitchen and put the kettle back on the stove. By the time his mother had shrugged off her coat, kicked off her shoes, and hung her handbag on the hook at the bottom of the stairs, the pot of tea was waiting for her, fresh and perfectly brewed. A silent gesture of her son’s enduring devotion.

‘You’re not stewing my tea, are you?’ she would inevitably complain.

‘No, Mum,’ Jack would answer, as she inspected the tea, peering into the pot as though it contained the secret to life itself. ‘It’s just how you like it.’

Elena asks Jack where he was all afternoon. Jack tells her he was at home, as usual, except for the time he went to the corner shop. He has already explained this to the officer who attended at the house, how he had returned from the shop and dropped the cigarettes his mother had asked him to buy on the floor when he fell to his knees to check whether his mother was still breathing. He is pretty sure that she wasn’t. She was a strange colour and very still. He admits he had moved her, in order to check. He apologises, saying he knows he shouldn’t have done. The police officer, the one in uniform who came to the house, told him that you shouldn’t disturb a crime scene. But at the time, he didn’t know, and he wasn’t thinking straight. It was such a shock, he says, to find his mother on the floor like that.

Jack watches Elena whisper something into the ear of her colleague, who promptly leaves the room. No doubt they will be checking his story about the corner shop. Jack is sure the woman behind the counter can vouch for the fact that he has been in there. Less than two hours ago. It feels like a lifetime ago.

‘She’s off to Spain in a couple of weeks, Angela and that live-in boyfriend of hers,’ his mother had told him earlier. They were in the kitchen, standing near the stove. She had taken her cup of tea from Jack with one hand and picked up the saucepan lid with the other. ‘What’s in there?’

‘It’s potato hash,’ he replied. ‘We had some corned beef that needed using up.’

Mrs Chadwick dropped the lid onto the saucepan. ‘You stupid boy. I was going to have that on my sandwich tomorrow. What am I going to have now?’ Without waiting for a response, she marched into the living room, tea splashing from her cup onto the saucer with each pound of her heavy feet. ‘You’ve over-filled it again, stupid boy. Here.’ Jack followed her into the living room, taking the tea from her outstretched hand. ‘Tip a bit down the sink.’

Jack did as he was told, while wondering how many times a day she called him a stupid boy. He returned the cup to her when she was settled on the sofa, and pushed the footstool towards her legs. He lifted one of her legs, and then the other leg, onto the footstool. He plumped a cushion and placed it under the arm holding the cup, and then stood back waiting for her to tell him that she was comfortable.

‘Whereabouts in Spain?’ he asked. Knowing that his mother loved to talk about the people she cleaned for, he thought a chat about Angela Bennett’s future travels would snap her out of this grouchy mood.

Last week, his mother had arrived home with tales of the exciting and exotic food Angela had bought from the new grocers in Wellington – they called it a delicatessen - avocado pears all the way from Mexico, kiwi fruit, prawns, and oil made from olives in Italy that his mother had the pleasure of putting away for her, as Angela had chatted excitedly about what meal she was planning to make for her dinner party, and the show she was going to watch at the theatre next month in Manchester. His mother had enjoyed listening, stealing away little snippets as though they were golden coins to pay for future opportunities to gossip.

But Angela now seems to be out of favour and her planned trip had touched a nerve, for some reason, and had made her angry.

‘I didn’t ask,’ she said. ‘She wanted me to, but I told myself, no, I’m not pandering to her.’

‘Quite right,’ agreed Jack. He hoped that he was saying the right thing. Agreeing with his mother was his usual appeasing course of action.

‘She stood leaning against the worktop, getting in my way when she could see me trying to clean the kitchen, flicking through her magazine, pointing out this, that, and the bloody other that she wants to buy. Her wardrobe is already fit to bursting. I thought to myself, you don’t need a new outfit for every day, do you? I don’t care how many stars the hotel has got. You’re just showing off, telling me you want to buy all them things just to make a point. She was doing it to annoy me. As per usual.’

His mother continued to complain about Angela. Jack tried to keep listening. He didn’t think Angela was a particularly annoying person, but maybe she was sometimes. He simply agreed with his mother. The sooner he could pacify her, the sooner they could begin to enjoy their evening together.

‘You know where she was off to yesterday afternoon?’ his mother had asked. Jack shook his head. ‘Having lunch in Wellington, again. There’s something going on there. She’s probably got another man stashed away somewhere, you mark my words. She had painted her nails bright red. You know that kind of woman has red nails, don’t you?’ His mother held out her hand and inspected her own short nails, at the end of dry, cracked fingers. ‘What are you looking at?’ she shouted.

‘Nothing, Mum,’ said Jack.

‘We can’t all be born a princess, you know. Some of us can’t afford to put nail varnish on, just for it to chip the next day. We have to work for a living.’

‘We can go to Spain,’ Jack had said to his mother. He wanted to distract her attention away from her fingernails, to calm the storm of anger. ‘One day, when I get a job, we can go away. You’d like Spain, wouldn’t you?’

‘Who’s going to employ you? Look at the state of you. When was the last time you put on a clean shirt?’ said his mother.

Jack, perched on the edge of the sofa next to his mother, looked down at his shirt. ‘This was clean on this morning,’ he said, pulling it away from his body and inspecting it.

‘Liar! Stop lying to me!’ his mother shrieked. She pushed him away from her and lifted the cushion under her arm. ‘And where did you put my library book?’

‘I don’t know, Mum,’ said Jack. He jumped up, lifting the rest of the cushions in turn. ‘It’s not here. I don’t…’

‘I’ll find it myself, you stupid boy,’ she shouted. ‘Get out of my way.’ She batted him away with the back of her hand.

‘I can’t think when you shout, Mum.’ Jack put his hands over his ears and scrunched his eyes closed.

‘I’m not shouting,’ she had said. She was. ‘Now, go and check on that potato hash. You’re not burning it, are you?’

‘No, Mum,’ said Jack. He lowered his arms and trundled off to the kitchen. Why did his mum have to ruin his mood? Every day was the same. Every day she grumbled and moaned and picked at him, as though it was his fault that she was miserable. All he did was try to make her life as comfortable as possible. He cleaned the house, cooked her food, and washed all the clothes. The only thing he didn’t do was work. But one day he would. One day he would get a job that would pay enough to take them on holiday. Maybe to Spain. Maybe somewhere else. Anywhere she wanted to go.

The inspector is still looking at him. She asks him again to recount his afternoon. She tells him to take his time. She has already asked him so many questions, one after the other. How many more can there be? He wants to go home. The walls of the police station interview room, the colour of weathered bricks, are giving him a headache.

He doesn’t want to admit that he and his mother had a falling out. It doesn’t seem right now, besmirching her memory. Not now she isn’t here to tell her side of the story. He bites his bottom lip. He doesn’t want to tell the police that his mother was grumpy every day and that her face wore a persistent deep frown. Jack can’t remember the last time he saw her smile.

Elena asks Jack if he is ready to continue. Jack’s eyes flick once more to the wall clock. Is this almost over?

Angela

Angela Bennett’s blood-red Porsche 911 skids around the corner into Southgate Drive and comes to a sudden stop under the shelter of a large oak tree. The old roots push their way through the concrete flags of the narrow residential pavement where two of the Porsche’s wheels now rest. The last of the autumn leaves, bending under the pressure of the recent rainfall, plummet down onto the roof of the car.

Through the windscreen, Angela watches the police activity at number eight, Miriam Chadwick’s house. Blue flashes from the parked police car at the bottom of the footpath spin around the dimly lit cul-de-sac, mixing with the amber light from the open front door as it spills out onto the front step. An officious-looking uniformed policeman, chin held high, back straight, stands guard, feet hip distance apart, ready to glare at any inquisitive neighbour who dares to peer out from behind half-drawn curtains.

A sharp siren wail introduces another police vehicle as it pulls into the cul-de-sac and stops across the road from the first one. She watches two police officers jump out and hurry to Mrs Chadwick’s house. A middle-aged plain-clothes policeman appears at the front door, hands thrust into the pocket of his trousers. He steps onto the path, where he waits for his colleagues to approach him. Angela recognises Detective Sergeant Miller. She would know his bald head and protruding stomach anywhere. She knows all of the detectives from Wellington Police Station. There isn’t a single one who hasn’t given her house or shop a visit at one time or another. Angela watches them talk. Presumably, DS Miller is giving the newcomers a synopsis of the events, as far as they know. The new arrivals nod as they listen, their heads bobbing up and down. Eventually, they follow the detective to the front door, before wading into the house.

Angela reverses her car out of the cul-de-sac and drives off. If she was religious, she would pray that DS Miller has not spotted her car.

This book is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are entirely a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.