The Dead of Winter Read online

  THE DEAD OF WINTER

  NICOLA UPSON

  For all the readers, librarians and booksellers who love this series. Happy Christmas.

  MAP OF THE ISLAND

  MAP OF THE CASTLE

  ‘Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?’

  Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map of the island

  Map of the castle

  Epigraph

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 1920

  EIGHTEEN CHRISTMASES LATER

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  CHRISTMAS EVE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  CHRISTMAS DAY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  CHRISTMAS DAY, 1920

  It was the day that stripped the joy from Christmas, or so he thought afterwards – everything a parody of what it should have been. The snow was dirty and trampled underfoot, the children frightened and cold, and even the robin – perched on a dustbin in the street – refused to sing, complicit in the horror that awaited him inside the house. And then there was her face, of course. For years to come, he would never be able to hear the carol that he was once so fond of without remembering the expression in her eyes, such a stark reminder of how little comfort and joy there really was in the world.

  A crowd had already gathered outside by the time he arrived, a young detective sergeant, newly promoted and keen to make his mark. The house was in Notting Dale, a rookery of overcrowded streets and run-down buildings, and although the snow had covered some of the area’s shortcomings, it was still a wretched part of the city – one grim, monotonous row after another, untouched by any sort of spirit, seasonal or otherwise. He parked his car at the end of the street where Mollie Naylor and her children had lived, and walked over to the group of neighbours, all silently waiting for something to happen. Pushing his way through the onlookers, he could feel the hostility closing in on him, as cold on his face as the harsh December air. Somewhere over to his left, a man’s voice muttered a sarcastic happy Christmas.

  A uniformed constable stood by the front door, his face as white as a sheet, and Penrose guessed that he was the local bobby whose misfortune it had been to pass by. ‘Who found them?’ he asked, after the briefest of introductions.

  ‘The next-door neighbour, sir. His wife heard a bit of shouting last night, but she didn’t do anything about it because she was on her own with the baby, and anyway, she didn’t want to get involved. Then this morning there was no sign of the children. She couldn’t hear a peep out of them through the walls and she thought that was strange, bearing in mind the pandemonium going on in her own house. You know how kids are at Christmas.’ He stopped suddenly, as if he had said something inappropriate, and Penrose guessed that the tragedy of what lay upstairs had struck him again, more forcefully than ever. ‘Anyway, she sent her husband round to check. The back door was unlocked and he soon found them, although he says he didn’t go any further than the first room. I believe him, too. You wouldn’t, if you didn’t have to.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Back at home, sir. Sick as a dog, he looked. Said he wanted to hug his kids. I’ve told him you’ll need a word.’

  ‘And no one else has been in?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, only me. I thought I was going to have a bit of trouble keeping people out once word got round, but no one’s tried anything.’

  ‘That’s about the only thing left to them, I suppose – respect.’

  ‘Or fear, sir.’ Penrose looked at him sharply, and he shrugged. ‘That’s what it feels like to me. A woman who could do that to her children …’

  ‘It’s a bit early to be making assumptions like that, Constable, no matter how likely it looks. Did you know the family?’

  ‘No, sir. Not before today.’

  But everyone would know them now, Penrose thought. He thanked the PC and walked past him into the house, closing the door behind him. There was an absolute silence inside, eerie and unsettling, and although he had reproached the constable for saying more than he should have, Penrose knew exactly what he meant. It wasn’t respect that he had detected in the people who knew Mollie Naylor, and it wasn’t even a familiar antagonism towards the police; it was horror, in its purest form – a superstition of sorts, as if they could be tainted by the grief if they got too close to it, or perhaps simply a reluctant realisation that violence could be dragged from any human heart if the circumstances were bad enough. The stillness was oppressive, and Penrose had to force himself to move further into the room and shake off a feeling of dread. He shivered, knowing that the cold creeping through his bones was something more than the weather and the desperate state of the house had conspired to create.

  There was just one room downstairs, a kitchen parlour containing bits of old furniture that had seen better days. The plaster was falling off the ceiling in places, and paper peeled from walls so damp that it was a wonder anyone had bothered to put it up in the first place. A piece of string had been hung from corner to corner to dry the washing, and the floorboards were rotten here and there, where water had repeatedly dripped onto them. Patches of mould gave the house a musty air, mixed with something metallic and sickening that was both out of place here and horribly familiar. At least the cold was good for something, he thought bitterly; the stench of death in summer would have been intolerable. As it was, the tiny, well-worn clothes still hanging near the hearth were unbearably poignant, and he had to turn away.

  The general state of neglect was only to be expected: rents were so low after the war, and housing in such short supply, that landlords had no incentive to carry out even the most basic of repairs. Yet he couldn’t help noticing how clean the room was. There was a standing joke among his colleagues that a dark blue uniform would invariably be turned brown by any visit to a slum building, but so far the house was as cared for as the fabric of the building would allow, and this small, defiant hint of pride made the sign above the fireplace – ‘God Bless Our Home’ – something more than a bad joke.

  And then there was the tree – a scrawny, grudging specimen of which Scrooge might have approved, but a tree nonetheless, decorated with love. Penrose walked over to look more closely at the stars and angels fashioned from bits of old material, at the cotton-wool snowman that hung from the top branch, the type of toy that had been so popular when he was a boy. He knelt down to see what was underneath – six presents of varying shapes, all wrapped in newspaper – and couldn’t remember ever having seen something so pathetically out of place. What could possibly have happened in just a matter of hours to change this family’s fate so dramatically?

  There were two envelopes laid neatly on what passed for a kitchen table, perhaps containing the answer to his question, but first he needed to see the tragedy for himself. He climbed the dark, narrow staircase which led directly to the smaller of two bedrooms, and located the first bodies before he had reached the top step. Not even his imagination – fed by the brutality of war and his job – could have anticipated the horror of what he saw. Two little girls – twins, of around seven or ei
ght – were tucked up in bed, their fair hair entangled on the pillow as they lay close together. Penrose could almost have believed they were sleeping quietly in each other’s arms were it not for the stain of livid red on their bedclothes. His hand shook as he pulled back the blood-stiffened sheet, but he forced himself to examine the wounds on their throats; the cuts were deep, with the windpipe and jugular veins almost severed in each case. Penrose could only pray that the work had been done too swiftly for the realisation of what was happening to sink in. Anything else was unthinkable. The girls were clothed in matching nightdresses and their likeness made a mirror image of their deaths: pale faces showing the first signs of discolouration, eyes closed to the horror of what had happened. As far as he could see, there were no bruises or other marks on their skin to suggest long-term abuse, and he wondered again what had brought them to this.

  Gently he replaced the sheet, noting the chalkboard above the bed on which the days of December had been struck through one by one; what had begun in a flurry of excitement at the approach of Christmas had ended in a mocking countdown to their deaths. Sickened already, he turned to the room next door. It was ridiculous to consider the privacy of a woman’s bedroom in a situation like this, but still he hesitated on the threshold, hampered by a reluctance to intrude and a selfish desire simply to turn and run. An infant boy with a shock of blond hair had been thrown across the bed, his throat also slashed through, and a woman lay dead with her head resting on her son’s body. In the corner of the room, a drawer on the floor functioned as a crib, and Penrose could just make out a tiny hand amid the grey blanket. The air was tainted with the smell of blood, the grief in the room just as palpable, as he stepped carefully across the floor, avoiding the blotches on the boards. The blade of a white-handled knife was still deeply embedded in the right-hand side of Mollie Naylor’s neck. Her eyes were open, glazed over now, with brownish triangles starting to appear on either side of the pupils. Penrose searched them for an explanation, but found nothing more than his own assumptions, worn-out clichés of how her life might have brought about her death. Outside, in the narrow alleyway that ran between this terrace and the next, someone oblivious to the misery was whistling ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’, and Penrose was struck by how suddenly the normal, uplifting conventions of the day had become the aberration; there was no possibility of rest here, and he wished with all his heart that he had never come.

  He couldn’t face the crib. Down below, he heard someone else enter the house and brushed the tears from his face before going downstairs. His superior was looking through the envelopes on the table, and a police photographer stood by the front door, waiting to go up. Penrose nodded to him, then joined Inspector Cornish on the other side of the room. ‘Looks like she planned it,’ Cornish said.

  ‘Did she leave a note?’

  ‘No, but she’d made sure her affairs were in order, such as they are. Give the woman her due – she didn’t want to die in debt.’ He handed the envelopes over, meeting Penrose’s eye for the first time. ‘It’s obviously as bad as they said, then. You look bloody awful.’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it, sir.’

  ‘And there’s nothing to suggest anyone else was involved?’

  ‘Not as far as I can see.’

  The first envelope was labelled ‘Mr Taylor’s rent’ and contained a modest amount of money. The second was addressed to the Railway Benevolent Fund, and Penrose read the brief note inside: ‘Dear Sir, please accept this letter as confirmation that I do not require any more help from this institution.’ The handwriting was neat and fluent, something which Penrose found as surprising as the sentiment. ‘Do we know anything about her circumstances?’ he asked.

  ‘She was a widow, according to one of the neighbours. Her husband died a few months before the youngest child was born – killed in a railway accident, hence the help she’d been getting. They say she kept herself to herself, but she loved her kids. If I had a shilling for every time I’ve heard that …’

  There was a cynical note in his voice, but Penrose looked again at the parcels under the tree. ‘How many children did she have?’ he asked.

  Cornish shrugged. ‘How many are up there?’

  ‘Four, but there are six presents, so there might be a child missing. Two if she didn’t buy anything for herself.’

  The inspector nodded, chafing his hands against the cold. ‘Good thinking, Penrose. Go and find out, and get a statement from the bloke next door. I’d better have a look upstairs.’

  The crowd outside was growing steadily, and there were bound to be one or two news reporters sniffing round by now, so Penrose decided to use the back entrance. Each house had its own small yard and the snow here was deep and untouched, a refreshing contrast to the compacted mess of slush and dirt to which the street had been reduced. If they had been looking for signs of an intruder, another heavy snowfall in the early hours would have foiled them; as it was, Penrose was grateful to step out into something clean and invigorating, into something natural. He stood in the middle of the yard, hoping that the shock of the cold might dull his other senses, but the memory of what he had seen continued to haunt him in vivid detail, and the more he tried to blot out the images, the more relentless they became. Further down the road, the bells of St Clement’s church began to ring.

  Afterwards, he could never quite be sure why he paused as he opened the back gate, whether it was a noise that made him turn and walk over to the brick-built coal bunker, or simply an instinct that the missing children – if there were missing children – wouldn’t stray far from home. He brushed the snow from the top and lifted the wooden cover, and two dirty, tear-streaked faces stared back at him – a boy of about fourteen and a girl, younger, but not by much – who gripped her brother’s hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ the boy said, entirely unprompted, and just for a second Penrose thought that he was making a confession. ‘Ma was so angry. I was too late to save the others.’

  EIGHTEEN CHRISTMASES LATER

  1

  The older she got, the more it seemed to Josephine that the only possible way to enjoy Christmas was to avoid it altogether. Every January, she promised herself that she would do things differently the following year – fewer presents, cards sent only to the people she actually liked, food that at least one person in the house might eat – but by the time December arrived, the pressure of expectation had begun its slow tyranny. The pile of winter books that for some reason she thought she would have time to read sat untouched by the fire, ready to be returned to the shelf; the hall table was covered in lists, a perpetual reminder of everything she still had to do before she went away. The Christmas-loving Germans had a lot to answer for, she thought as she picked up her gloves, and that was before anyone even mentioned the war.

  It was easier to appreciate the festive spirit outside in the streets, where the responsibility for creating it wasn’t hers. The landscape around Inverness always looked beautiful at this time of year, but a prolonged spell of seasonal weather had given the town a timeless magic which would have graced any greetings card, and she took a circuitous route from Crown Cottage to enjoy it. The air was exhilarating, and she pulled her fur tighter around her as she walked slowly down the hill. There was no preamble to a Scottish winter, she thought; the cold began fiercely and bitterly, just as it meant to go on, scarring the landscape and leaving everything bleak and exposed. South of the border, the seasons changed gradually, almost apologetically, but here she couldn’t remember a single December that hadn’t announced itself with a flourish.

  Christmas was less than a week away and the shops in Queensgate were busy, but the atmosphere was one of unhurried contentment, and she browsed for a while before heading for the post office. There was a long queue at the counter, and she cursed the friend in Suffolk whose card she had forgotten until an envelope with an Ipswich postmark landed smugly on the mat that morning. She took her place in line, and soon found herself standing awkwardly between the woman who ran her
local paper shop and one of her father’s Castle Street tenants, whose name she couldn’t remember. ‘Are you at home for Christmas, Miss Tey?’ the newsagent asked, when there was nothing more to say about the weather.

  If there were half a dozen words more likely to stir guilt in the human heart, Josephine had yet to hear them. ‘Not this year,’ she said, conscious that the same answer would have applied to last Christmas and the Christmas before that. ‘I’m going to stay with a friend in Cornwall.’

  ‘My, that’s a long way to travel! You don’t do things by halves, do you? Would that be the same friend you went to America with last year?’

  ‘No, a different friend. I have more than one.’

  ‘Of course you do. You must bring them all home to meet us one of these days. So your father …’

  ‘Will be staying here, yes. My sisters are both coming up for the holidays.’ Josephine looked at her watch, surprised by how long she had been out. ‘In fact, Moire should be here by now. We thought it would be nice to spend a few days together before I have to leave.’ A summons from the counter saved her from any further conversation, and she bought her stamps and headed for home. Her brother-in-law’s car was standing in the driveway, its back seat piled with parcels, and she opened the front door onto a hallway which was scarcely recognisable as the one she had left an hour earlier. Rather than take her cases up to her room, Moire had begun to unpack at the bottom of the stairs, much to the frustration of the daily woman. The floor was littered with clothes, shoes and cosmetics. ‘Have the January sales started early?’ Josephine asked wryly. ‘This could give the ground floor of Benzie’s a run for its money.’

  Moire laughed and got up to give her older sister a hug. ‘You’ve run out of sherry,’ she said by way of greeting. ‘We bought you a bottle but I wrapped it in one of Donald’s pullovers to stop it getting broken, and now I can’t remember which bag it was in.’