Hurrying across the brightly lit car park, lost in thoughts of Graham, it took a few seconds to realise that someone was calling her, a quiet voice barely heard. She could see him but didn’t turn, hurrying towards her car, wanting to ignore him, to get into her car and drive away as quickly as possible.
But she couldn’t, of course, because she knew the man. Some faces never left her, no matter how many weeks, months and years passed. It had only been a week since she’d seen Bruno Forest, grey with shock when he’d arrived in the station after they’d found his twelve-year-old daughter dumped, naked, in a field several miles from their home. They were lucky, she was alive but so traumatised, so bruised and broken, she was unable to speak.
Bruno was distraught and wracked with guilt because, glued to football on the television, he’d allowed her to walk the five minutes to the local shops alone… five minutes on a straight road with no major roads to cross. It was dark, but there were streetlights and he’d thought she could come to no harm.
Now, his cheeks were sunken, and his eyes looked haunted as if he had seen and heard things no parent should ever have to see or hear. Beth knew better than to ask how Lydia was doing, the long road to a recovery that wasn’t guaranteed was something she knew all too much about. Instead, she asked how he was coping.
‘Is it true?’ he’d asked her, without answering her question, his voice cracking with the effort of keeping himself together.
‘What?’ she’d asked genuinely puzzled, her eyes sliding down to her watch, appalled to see how late it was.
‘That you had someone in for questioning about what happened to my Lydia?’
Beth squeezed her lips shut on the groan that wanted to escape. The station was a damn leaky sieve. How information escaped despite their best efforts to secure it was beyond belief. If she ever found out who the loose-lipped idiot was, she’d… She swallowed, thinking of the lines she frequently crossed doing her job… she’d do nothing. ‘We’ve had quite a few people in for questioning, Mr Forest,’ she said, her voice carefully neutral, ‘but as I told you when you rang yesterday, we’ve no evidence to hold anyone as yet.’ She pasted on a reassuring smile. ‘It’s best we go slowly to ensure a conviction; we don’t want to mess up our chances.’
‘But you know who it is?’ His eyes narrowed as he took a step closer. ‘You do, don’t you?’
She tried to keep knowledge from colouring her expression as she thought about the fifth man they’d interviewed the day before. Arthur Lewis, the slight, balding, myopic man with protruding ears. He was the least likely looking sexual predator she’d ever seen; it was what made him so dreadfully dangerous. He’d served fifteen years for the rape of an eleven-year-old girl when he was twenty. Since his release, he’d been on the register of sex offenders and had been careful to keep his slate clean. Not squeaky clean though. She’d seen the reports about him hanging around schools; each time he’d been caught and warned but had come up with a vaguely acceptable excuse for being in the area. She’d noted there had been nothing in the last year; she didn’t think he’d stopped, she thought he’d just got cleverer.
The day before, he’d been the last person they had brought in for questioning. She’d entered the interview room with her colleague DS Sunita Kadam and had known almost immediately he was their man. There was the smug arrogance on his face and the cold lack of empathy in his eyes when they’d told him about Lydia’s injuries. But although he was the most unprepossessing man she’d ever seen, he wasn’t by any means stupid. There had been no DNA evidence found on Lydia, so there was nothing to match with the DNA they had on record. They questioned him for two hours, trying to shake him, to find some crack in his tale. He didn’t falter, sticking to his simple story of being nowhere near where the girl had gone missing or where she was found. He’d no alibi, having been home alone. But lack of alibi, Beth knew, did not a guilty man make.
By the end of the interview, after two hours of listening to his egotistical, arrogant, self-justifying crap, she had no doubt he’d been responsible. But without a confession, evidence, or proof, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do; they didn’t even have sufficient cause to apply for a warrant to search his house.
He had smiled when they told him he could go, had looked at them with cocky contempt that made her wish, not for the first time, that they lived in an era when she could have taken him into a cell and beat the shit out of him until he begged to confess.
‘You think he’s guilty?’ she’d asked DS Kadam, who was tidying away the paperwork. Beth didn’t really expect an answer so was surprised when Kadam in her softly spoken, very slightly accented English, said, ‘Oh yes. I watched his eyes carefully when you spoke about Lydia. He quickly disguised it, but I didn’t miss the lick of pleasure that appeared for a millisecond.’
Beth smiled briefly. Her quiet colleague was far more intuitive than she. If Sunita saw it, it had been there. But it wasn’t enough for a warrant to search his house. Without one, they wouldn’t find the proof they needed to put the slimy toad away. They’d keep an eye on him; someday he’d put a foot wrong and they’d catch him.
But that wasn’t going to help poor Lydia and Bruno Forest.
Standing in the car park, Beth saw his distress, the sad eyes and drooping mouth; it was a testament to their failure to get justice for his child and with that weight pushing down her shoulders, she turned to walk away. She’d taken one step when she felt his hand on her arm, bringing her to a halt. It would have been easy to shake it off; there was no strength in the long slim hand or in the bony fingers topped with chewed grubby nails. She would have done without compunction had he not spoken, his words sending a chill down her spine.
‘Lydia won’t get out of her bed; she won’t eat or speak to us.’ His voice cracked, and his fingers tightened their grip on Beth’s arm. ‘She refuses to even look at us, just lies in her darkened room day and night, crying pitiful tears. My wife sits in the kitchen hunched over the table, sobbing helplessly, while I hover between the two with guilt whipping me because I allowed this to happen. We’ve called in counsellors and doctors. The counsellor tried to speak to her, but Lydia screamed and only stopped when she left. The doctor says we need to give her time. Time!’ he said, his voice filled with anguish and despair. ‘She’s fading away in front of our eyes. My darling beautiful Lydia.’
Beth had seen the photograph of the child the parents had given them when she went missing. Pale skin, shining blonde hair, fine delicate features. A pretty girl, she had the right to grow into a beautiful woman. Arthur Lewis might have destroyed that for good.
Bruno’s grief was almost tangible. She contrasted it with Arthur Lewis’ arrogant cruelty and made a decision. With a quick look around, she pulled out a pen and scribbled an address on the back of an old receipt. She put it into Bruno’s hand without a word, and hurried away.
She sat in her car and watched as he walked away with the scrap of paper held tightly in one hand as if he was afraid he might lose it. What would he do with the information she’d given him? Turn vigilante? Get the justice for his child she had failed to get? Remembering the injuries that had been inflicted on Lydia, Beth turned the key in the ignition and hoped that Arthur Lewis got exactly what he deserved.
It wasn’t until she pulled into the last remaining parking space on Fawcett Road that she thought about Graham. He was going to be annoyed; they might even have yet another row, but their rows were usually short, and the make-up sex was unbelievably good. Climbing wearily from the car, she didn’t feel in the mood for either. She did feel a twinge of guilt when she considered all the times she had let him down over the years. He didn’t usually complain, but lately his patience seemed to be fraying ever so slightly at the edges. She’d find a way to make it up to him tonight, she decided, slipping her key into the lock and pushing the front door open.
It was the quiet that struck her. The first thing Graham usually did when he arrived home was to turn on the radio or shove a CD into
the player. She was rarely home before him, and usually opened the door to the strains of whatever music had taken his fancy. He had a thing for Johnny Cash, knew every word of Folsom Prison Blues, and would put on a smoky husky voice and do the worst impersonation of the man she’d ever seen. It never failed to make her smile. ‘Hello,’ she called, shutting the door behind her and dropping the folders she carried onto the bottom stair. She frowned, wondering when she’d get a chance to read them.
Deciding to worry about them later, she felt a chill run through her when she saw no crack of light shining from underneath the doors of either the small front sitting room or the kitchen-diner. ‘Hello,’ she said again, pushing open the first door. The room was not only dark but cold. Grasping the handle of the kitchen door, she hesitated a second before taking a deep breath and turning it. This room too was in darkness but enough light shone through the window from outside to cast a soft glow over the small dining area.
Her breath caught and she shut her eyes in dismay as a pang of regret hit her. The table was set for dinner, wine glasses, flowers and the burnt-out remnant of a candle showing how much trouble he’d gone to. Promise me, you’ll be home on time, he’d said. And she’d forgotten all about him, and her promise.
She checked her watch. Nine. Three hours late. With a groan, she switched on the kitchen light. On a small side table, a bottle of champagne listed drunkenly in a basin filled with melting ice. A slightly overdone roast chicken sat on the counter. She lifted the lids from the pots and groaned out loud when she saw he’d done all her favourites. He’d even gone to the trouble of making a white sauce. Dropping the lids, she returned to the hall.
The silence was unnerving. ‘Graham?’ she called, and stood to listen for a reply that didn’t come. She supposed she deserved the silent treatment, but it wasn’t like him, he believed in saying what he felt, getting things out in the open. It was one of the many things she loved about him. Gathering her folders from the bottom stair, she reconsidered her earlier idea to read them in bed and dropped them onto the sitting-room sofa before heading slowly up the stairs.
When they’d moved into the small terraced house a few years before, it had a tiny galley kitchen, a downstairs bathroom and three small bedrooms upstairs. As money became available, they’d altered it by installing a bathroom in the smallest of the three bedrooms, extending the kitchen into the old bathroom, and finally, knocking down walls between the other two bedrooms and changing the layout to give them one large bedroom and a tiny spare bedroom used mostly as an office and for extra storage space.
Beth opened the door into their bedroom, words of apology on her tongue. She expected to find Graham splayed across the bed with an irritated hard-done-by expression on his handsome face. But the bed was undisturbed. Puzzled, she turned, crossed the small landing and opened the door into the spare room. But it too was empty.
A sense of dread overcame her and she rushed back into their bedroom, flicking on the light, spinning around as if, for a brief moment, she hoped he was hiding out of sight, ready to pounce on her and complain about her lateness. And then, with widening eyes, she noticed the wardrobe door hanging ajar and the bottom two drawers of a chest unit sitting open. His side of the wardrobe, and his drawers. They were all empty.
There was no note; there didn’t have to be, his actions had made his intentions clear enough. He’d left her.
Feeling suddenly weak, she collapsed onto the bed. When they’d met, both had been working all hours; her in the police, him trying to build up his personal training business. They’d made the most of the time they had together, dreaming of the day when it would be easier, when it wouldn’t always be pressure to succeed and constant unrelenting stress.
Success had come at the same time for both of them five years earlier, but whereas Graham’s success allowed him to work fewer hours, her promotion to detective inspector resulted in increased responsibility, pressure from both up and down the ranks, longer, pitiless hours and brain-curdling stress.
Graham had struggled with what he considered the unreasonable demands of her new position when, time after time, she had to let him down. There were cancelled dinner plans and cinema visits; they were late for parties and, once, when they’d arrived after the curtain call of a play he’d been desperate to see, they weren’t allowed in until the end of the first act.
She explained, every time, how it had been impossible to walk away from a devastated stricken woman who’d been sexually abused, and he’d listen to her, sympathise and seem to understand. And afterward, when they’d made up, as they always did, he’d look at her with his big brown eyes and say she had to make room in her life for him and he was giving her one more chance. So many one more chances. It had become almost a joke between them. At least it had to her, maybe it had never been funny to him.
Now, looking at the empty wardrobe and drawers, and hearing the silence, it didn’t seem remotely amusing to her either.
8
Beth pulled her mobile from her pocket and checked for messages. There were some, but none from Graham. Shoving it back into her pocket, she headed downstairs. The smell of food in the kitchen made her stomach lurch. She made a mug of tea and, with it cupped between her hands, she went into the small front room and gazed out the window. Streetlights cast an eerie glow over the dark narrow road.
On the other side, the terraced houses were a mirror image of the row she lived in; she could see the house directly opposite, lights showing in some of the windows, the flicker of a TV screen, the occasional figure moving across a brightly lit room, neighbours going about their normal everyday lives. Not a mirror image of her house where everything had changed. A wave of terror washed over her. Was this emptiness going to be her new normal? She was so good at sorting out the broken lives of others, why couldn’t she do it for herself?
Restless, she took her tea and went back to the dining room. She pulled out the chair and sat at the table he’d set with such care. A bunch of yellow freesias was set into a small glass vase. She picked it up, held it close, taking in their sweet scent. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d bought her flowers; it made these all the more special, all the more heart breaking. If she’d been the crying type, she’d have sobbed. Instead, she held a hand over her trembling mouth and wondered if this were the end.
After so many years together, she couldn’t imagine her life without him. She’d thought, despite their problems, that he felt the same. Was there someone else? He was such a handsome man: shaggy blond hair, gorgeous eyes and a fit athletic body he insisted was the best advert for his personal training business. She took out her mobile again. Still nothing from him. Should she send him a message? Her fingers hovered over the keys. What could she say that she hadn’t said a hundred times before, even when she didn’t mean it but said it to end an argument? Sorry. She guessed it no longer had any meaning, but she couldn’t think of another suitable word. Tapping it out, she added several xs, sent it, and then stared at the phone for several minutes willing him to reply. When he didn’t, when it stayed stubbornly quiet, she threw it onto the table.
She was damned if she was going to sit there pining, not when she had work crying out to be done. Back in the sitting room, she sat on the sofa, and picked up the first of the folders she’d brought home.
Minutes later, she was lost in her job, all worries about Graham temporarily forgotten. The notes she’d written made for the inevitable sad read. The woman… girl… had been groomed and raped by a man she met on the internet. How many times would Beth have to read the same story? She rubbed tired eyes and turned to the next page. This victim was unusually observant; it had made Beth’s job easier, made the case against the defendant almost solid. But she was too good an officer to make the mistake of being cocky. She’d make sure the case was watertight before handing it over to the Crown Prosecution Service in the morning – too often she’d seen them throw out cases for lack of evidence.
She moved on to the next file, the
case she’d been involved with that afternoon. She’d spent the last few hours in the nearest specialist centre for victims of rape and sexual assault. Usually, she’d have been able to hand the fourteen-year-old victim into the care of a Sexual Offence Investigative Technique officer but there had been a problem in one of the other centres and two of the SOIT officers had been temporarily reassigned over there, leaving her office short.
It didn’t make any difference to the case. Beth, as the Officer in the Case, had equivalent training. It just required her to stretch herself even further than she usually did. It also meant, of course, that she couldn’t get away until the victim’s statement was taken and the examination done. Then she’d sat with the victim and her shocked parents, explaining what would happen next, and advising them of the help that was available. The whole process wasn’t something you could rush.
Somewhere in the crazy afternoon, she should have rung Graham to let him know, but there just hadn’t been a minute free. She refused to acknowledge the tiny voice that said she hadn’t given him a second’s thought the whole day.
She checked over the notes she’d written. Tomorrow, she’d update the computer at the station. Dropping the bundle of files onto the floor, she swung her legs up and rested her head on the arm of the sofa. Truth was, every day in her job was crazy busy. Every morning, she checked the briefing slide provided by the Jigsaw team who managed registered sex and violent offenders; every day there were new people to watch out for so that no matter where she was, or what she was doing, her eyes were constantly checking out the faces of the men and women around her.
Graham had found it amusing at first. Less so in the last couple of years. And the previous week, when they were out for dinner, he’d been unusually irritable. ‘Can’t you, please, stop checking out people,’ he’d growled.
‘Sorry. Hadn’t even realised I was doing it,’ she said, thinking her confession would make it easier between them.
The Three Women Page 5