The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [181]
He fiddled about some more, said something into his radio to Mission Control, then stood up and said: Ambulance’ll be here any minute. Can we have a bit of a word, like, in the kitchen?
I’ll stay with her, I said. You go with him, John. Sick inside, terrified what the paramedic wanted to say. Maybe she’d had a stroke after all. What if she’d broken her hip falling? Old people die from that, don’t they? I clung onto Frannie’s hand. She smiled up at me, then closed her eyes. She’ll be OK. She’s tough. She bounces.
If it weren’t for the trace of blood at the corner of her mouth. The yellow-white fragment on the floor I put my hand on, hard like a piece of grit. When I held it up to the light, it turned out to be a broken tooth.
‘Oh, no,’ I hear John say in the kitchen. ‘No, really. She wouldn’t. She was at work most of the day, then…’
I can’t hear what the paramedic mutters next, but then John says, with utter incredulity in his voice, ‘Where I was? You can’t seriously think…’
I let go Fran’s hand and stand up. ‘What the hell’s going on?’
In the kitchen, the paramedic has his radio in his hand.
‘Look, she must have hit her head on the hall table…’ But he’s shaking his head. Shit. Shit. He couldn’t really be saying that, could he?
Panic chokes off my voice as I stand there staring at them.
And at what they’d both missed, behind them, the glitter on the floor, the back door ajar an inch, and a small ragged circle in the glass next to the handle.
The two police officers, when they finally arrive, fifteen minutes after the ambulance has taken Fran to hospital, are less than thorough. They don’t even bother to fingerprint the back door. John’s steaming by now.
‘Fucksake man, she’s in her eighties. We found her on the floor. Could be a flicking murder inquiry, and you’re acting like it was kids scrumping apples.’ Then he catches sight of my face, and sends me an apologetic look, trying to make out he doesn’t really think she’s in any danger of dying, he’s laying it on thick to get some action out of these two turnips.
‘No need for that sort of language, sir,’ says the one who’s poking his nose round the house. The other one, a woman, is outside, in the police car, talking on the radio. ‘The scene-of-crime officers will be along later to fingerprint, if it turns out to be necessary. Any idea if there’s anything missing?’
‘I’ll take a look,’ I say. ‘He doesn’t live here, he wouldn’t know.’
I can see the wheels turning, the policeman thinking: What kind of a set-up have we here, then? Bit old to be your boyfriend, isn’t he? He gets out a notebook. ‘If you wouldn’t mind checking, Miss…? You do live here, then?’
‘Robinson,’ I say. ‘India Robinson. I’m her granddaughter.’
‘And she is?’
‘Frances Robinson. I haven’t seen her handbag.’
But there it is, on the bed, in Frannie’s downstairs bedroom. Zipped closed. Inside, purse, pension book, building-society passbook, credit cards. I open the purse. Last week’s pension and, by the look of it, the one from the week before too, hardly touched, a fat wad of folded notes.
‘Maybe the intruder was interrupted before he found it,’ says the policeman, following me in from the hallway.
By what, exactly? Wouldn’t a caller have seen her, through the glazed front door, lying in the hallway, and called an ambulance? The policeman is coming to the same conclusion: his mouth pursing, he writes something in his notebook.
‘Drugs,’ I say. ‘Solstice. Lot of strange people wandering about–that’ll be what they were after.’
‘And where did the old lady keep her…drugs?’
‘Frannie,’ I say. ‘Please call her by her name.’ The blood-pressure pills and the gastric reflux medicine, the sum total of Fran’s pharmacopia, are kept in the kitchen cupboard by the kettle. Broken glass from the back door crunches underfoot. The cupboard contains serried ranks of pill packets, neatly lined up, all full.
‘Bathroom?’ asks the policeman, still on my heels. Of course, I recognize him now: he’s Corey’s husband. Only met him once, at the National Trust staff Christmas party, and can’t remember his name. Doubt