1

Will Rees was walking his dog early in the morning when he came across Val in the local park. She was lying in a pool of blood on a footpath, still alive but in a terrible state. He phoned the emergency services immediately and stayed with her until they arrived. There was nothing he could do except reassure her that help was coming. She made a few whimpering and moaning sounds in an attempt to speak as life rapidly drained from her. The only word that Will could clearly hear before she fell silent was “flock”. Within minutes paramedics and police came, but it was too late. Val was dead. The back of her skull had been shattered by repeated blows from a hammer.

2

It was a motiveless murder. Val was a retired nurse in her 70s without an enemy in the world. She had never married or had children and had no surviving relatives. She had no money worth mentioning and for over 20 years had lived alone in a humble little bungalow in a characterless suburb. Pleasant and unremarkable, she was liked in the neighbourhood and led a quiet, uneventful life that revolved around the Methodist chapel, a few friends from her nursing days, her garden and her cat.

The police pulled out all the stops to find the culprit, going through every detail of Val’s life back to her childhood and throwing considerable resources into the murder inquiry for year after year. However, without a shred of forensic evidence, without a single suspect and in the complete absence of any of the usual reasons for murder – money, sex, jealousy, greed, inheritance, revenge, power and so on – the investigation got nowhere. Having explored every conceivable possibility, and despite being aware that the vast majority of murderers were known to the victim, the police could only come to the conclusion that the murder of someone as harmless and non-descript as Val was a one-off random attack by a psychopathic stranger. The case was nominally kept open, but after more than five years had elapsed it was effectively relegated to unsolved status and only superficially re-examined periodically as a tokenistic and perfunctory duty.

3

Over 15 years had passed by when eager young Detective Constable Stacey Evans was the latest to be landed with the annual chore of spending a couple of weeks going through unsolved cases. Speed-reading the mundane details of case after case, something about Val’s murder caught her attention. Partly it was because Stacey’s auntie Olwen was also a nurse who had never hurt anyone, partly it was because of the inexplicable violence of the murder – so extreme Val’s brain tissue was splattered all over the footpath – but mainly it was because Stacey noticed something that the detectives 15 years ago had never investigated: flock, Val’s last word.

What could it mean? A flock of sheep? A flock of birds? A flock of people in a crowd? A flock of devout Christians? Stacey could make no sense of it, so she went back into Val’s past. She visited her bungalow, which had since been sold twice, and she visited her Methodist chapel, which had since closed and been repurposed as a coffee and cake shop; but neither revealed anything. Next, Stacey talked to the few friends of Val who were still alive and again nothing emerged – until Elizabeth, a nursing friend, said in passing that the only other people who even knew Val were her old next-door neighbours in the terraced inner-city street where she had lived before she moved to the bungalow. “I thought of them the other day,” said Elizabeth, “I’d met them a couple of times when they visited Val and by chance I noticed Angela’s funeral notice in the local paper. Apparently John, her husband, is still alive. Perhaps he might know something.”

4

Stacey found Angela and John’s address amid Val’s personal effects and a few day’s later knocked the door in a street of back-to-back Victorian houses. As she waited for an answer she looked at Val’s old home next door and couldn’t help thinking that if she had stayed in these ugly backstreets rather than moving to leafy suburbia Val might still be alive today.

A middle-aged man opened the door. Stacey showed her ID. “I’m sorry to bother you, I’m looking for John Higgins, I believe he lives here,” she said tentatively.
“He’s not here, he’s been living in a care home for over a year now,” replied the man. “I’m Paul Higgins. Dad’s got Alzheimers. My mother died last month and I’m here temporarily sorting things out until the house is sold.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Stacey said with genuine sympathy, “I wonder whether your father would be able to answer a few questions about Val Rowlands who used to live next door,” asked Stacey.
“Oh, I remember auntie Val from when I was a kid,” said Paul, “she was murdered years ago wasn’t she? Have you caught the bastard who did it yet?”
“Inquiries are ongoing is all I can say at the moment,” said Stacey in a neutral tone.
Paul waited to see if Stacey would add anything more before saying “Well, you can try speaking to dad but it’s hard getting any sense out of him most of the time. Sometimes he can have lucid moments though, so there’s no harm trying I suppose.” He gave Stacey the care home address.

5

Before she went to see John Higgins Stacey knocked on the door of Val’s old house, but the curtains were drawn and there was no answer so she drove across town to the care home. John was in his tiny room sitting on an armchair and staring out of the window at an unappealing vista of blocks of flats set amid bleak, litter-strewn patches of trampled ground. Stacey carefully introduced herself and tried to put John at ease with banal small-talk. He was in a world of his own fixated on the view until Stacey, more in desperation than expectation, decided to throw a few words at him.
“What about Val’s flock, then?” she said out of the blue, and John immediately turned away from the window and stared at her, his narrow eyes becoming moist.
“He never liked it. He blamed her. She was only hiding the cracks,” John muttered in a hoarse, slightly panicky tone.
“What didn’t he like? pleaded Stacey in the same hyper-ventilating tone as John.
“The wallpaper of course, her flock wallpaper, drove him mad trying to paint over it.”
“Who John? Who didn’t like Val’s flock wallpaper?”
“Why him who bought the house off her of course. Him next door. That Robert. He’s not got a good word to say about anybody. Still there now complaining about everything to my Angela.” John stopped suddenly and began sobbing uncontrollably. The sobs became wails. A staff member quickly appeared.
“John can get very distraught, DC Evans. I think that’s all he can take. It’s best if you leave now and we settle him down,” said the care assistant. Stacey apologised, thanked John and went. She was elated. She knew she had done what teams of detectives had failed to do for 15 years. She had cracked the case.

6

Stacey Evans got a search warrant the following day and led the search of Robert Moreton’s house. The hammer was found in the garden shed: Stacey matched it immediately to photographs of the wounds on Val’s head. Robert, now a man in his 60s, said nothing as he was led away. In one of the bedrooms Stacey saw the still discernible thick, patterned flock wallpaper that Robert had had such trouble covering in paint 20 years previously when trying in vain to erase Val Rowlands’ dubious tastes in home decor. She realised that the last word Val said would probably have been the last word Robert yelled at her as he slammed the hammer into her head.

7

As Stacey left the house, Paul Higgins came out of next door. He had seen Robert being taken away in handcuffs. “So it was him,” said Paul, “He was a strange bloke, didn’t suffer fools gladly, could be lovely when he was in the right mood, but was so short-tempered and volatile…”

~~~