Changelings

by Jo Bannister

  ‘You won’t mind if I check under the sink?’

  ‘Not if it’ll get you to leave.’

  After that he didn’t expect to find the stuff, and he didn’t. She could have disposed of it. But his gut instinct was that he’d jumped to the wrong conclusion; again.

  Standing in the nursery door, Mary Wilson said, ‘I like this mobile. Where did you get it?’

  ‘What?’ snapped Sheila, without taking her eyes off Shapiro.

  ‘The mobile. It’s hand-carved, isn’t it? Those balls-within-balls can’t be made any other way. Did you make it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, I couldn’t either. It’s clever work, that; someone’s a real perfectionist. His father, was it?’

  ‘No,’ Sheila said again, sharper.

  ‘No? Your father, perhaps.’

  ‘My father’s dead. Will you go now?’

  ‘Sheila,’ Wilson said quietly, ‘I don’t believe you bought this. If you got it in a shop – if you could find it in a shop – it would cost a fortune, and I don’t think you have money to waste on decorations. I think somebody made it for Jason. And I can’t imagine why you won’t tell me who.’

  ‘It’s none of your business!’

  Shapiro said, ‘You’re acting as if it is.’

  ‘Who is Jason’s father?’ asked Wilson. It was impertinent but the way Sheila was behaving suggested it was relevant. Still, Shapiro was glad she’d asked and saved him having to.

  ‘I don’t know. All right? – I don’t know. That month, the fun just never stopped. I don’t know who Jason’s father is, and he doesn’t know he has a son. I found the mobile in a second-hand shop, and it cost me three pounds.’

  ‘It’s brand new. It’s new, and beautifully made. Made with love.’

  She couldn’t stop herself. ‘Oh no it wasn’t!’

  Shapiro regarded the girl with a degree of compassion. Whatever was going on here, whatever she was trying to hide, she was in deep trouble; and she knew it, and she didn’t know what to do about it. ‘Sheila, talk to us. I know you’re involved in this somehow. You’re not going to convince me otherwise. Do you know who’s behind the blackmail? Jason’s father – is that who it is? Is that who you’re protecting?’

  ‘He burnt me!’ She thrust out her hands again. ‘He would have burnt Jason! Why would I protect him?’

  ‘Would have?’ echoed Shapiro softly.

  ‘What?’ She didn’t understand.

  ‘Would have. Not “He could have burnt Jason” – he would have. Did he threaten your baby, Miss Crosbie? Is that why you agreed to help him? Why you put your hands in caustic soda and then came to us to complain about it?’

  ‘No.’ Just that: a blanket denial. He’d worn her down. She had no explanations, no alibi, nothing she could say in her own defence. All she could do was deny everything.

  Shapiro sighed. ‘All right, Miss Crosbie. Well, I know you’re lying. I’m not sure what you’re lying about, but I know you’re not being honest with me. I think we need to talk about it, at length and without distractions. Do you have family locally? – if you want to call your mother, we can drop off Jason on the way.’

  ‘No!’

  Her vehemence took them both by surprise. Lots of people have issues with their mothers; lots of people, in defiance of the evidence, doubt their mother’s ability to look after a baby. But it was as if Shapiro had suggested parking Jason on a high window ledge while they talked, and that wasn’t normal. The girl was having to help police with their inquiries, but still she wasn’t as worried for herself as she was for her baby.

  ‘Miss Crosbie,’ said Shapiro, ‘it’s obvious that you’re worried sick about something, and I don’t think it’s me. So either you haven’t done anything I can lock you up for, or someone else is threatening you with something worse than the judicial process. I’m right, aren’t I? You know who’s doing this, and you’re afraid what he’ll do to Jason if you tell me.’ He made her look at him. ‘Miss Crosbie, I can’t help you, and I can’t protect either of you, until I know who it is you’re afraid of.’

  She shook her head, the rats’ tails of her fringe flying. ‘I don’t need any help,’ she said, ‘and I can’t help you. And the only protection Jason needs is me. If you’re going to take me away, you take the responsibility. Take him into care.’

  Shapiro stared at her in astonishment. People do occasionally put their own children into care, as a last resort. But Sheila Crosbie would rather have social services look after her baby for the time this was going to take rather than leave him with her own mother? Shapiro had come here suspecting this girl of exaggerating her involvement. He was beginning to think it would be impossible to exaggerate her involvement.

  ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’

  Sheila nodded stubbornly. ‘If I’m not with him, that’s the only place he’ll be safe.’

  ‘From your mother?’

  She eyed him with overt scorn. ‘Of course not from my mother.’

  ‘Then – from his father?’

  Her lips tightened, and she shook her head once more, decisively. ‘I’m saying nothing more. You think I’m lying? Then prove it.’

  Donovan demanded to know where Dr Chapel lived. He believed that Chapel, if asked a direct question, would disdain to lie to him. He remembered the conversation between Simon Turner and the doctor at dinner. He no longer believed they were talking about pest control.

  Sarah wouldn’t tell him. She blocked the kitchen door with her body. He could have moved her aside; but she was a woman old enough to be his mother who’d been good to him. And she was so afraid. He didn’t think she was trying to protect herself from the consequences of what happened eight years ago. She must know that keeping him here would only delay the inevitable. No, what she feared was a still avoidable catastrophe.

  And it wasn’t Donovan she was afraid of. For a bizarre moment he thought she was afraid for him. That was absurd; but the terror in her eyes was certainly for someone else. Someone close to her, someone who mattered a damn sight more than an itinerant policeman who’d been unwise enough to fall ill in the vicinity of East Beckham. Simon or Elphie: no one else had the power to tap her emotions like that.

  He had to remind himself that this was a woman who’d allowed her sister to be hounded to death. She didn’t deserve his sympathy. ‘Sarah,’ he said gruffly, ‘I am going to talk to Chapel. I think he knows what happened here, and I think he’s arrogant enough to tell me. Now, either you can get out of my way or I can move you.’

  Clinging to the door handle behind her back she pleaded with him. ‘Cal, you don’t know what you’re doing! You’re wrong about Rosemary. I swear to God, she came to no harm here.’

  ‘You know that? For a fact?’

  ‘Yes! Listen: if you don’t believe me, ask Simon. Let me call him. Wait till he gets here.’

  ‘Call him how?’

  ‘On his mob – ’ She bit the word off short with a guilty start.

  It was already too late. He’d been pretty sure they’d been preventing him from communicating with the outside world: now he knew. ‘OK. But now: I’m not wasting any more time.’

  ‘He’ll be here in five minutes. God in heaven, Cal, you owe us five minutes!’

  It took four, and Turner arrived knowing what the situation was. There was no need for explanations. So they’d talked about this, discussed what they’d do if they couldn’t keep the truth from him.

  Turner said brusquely, ‘Come into the study. I don’t want anyone walking in on us.’

  He sat down behind his desk; Sarah took the chair by the window. Donovan stayed on his feet. All this was taking its toll on him, he’d have to rest soon, but he thought that if he sat down now he wouldn’t be able to get up again quickly enough if the need arose.

  ‘This is about Rosemary,’ Turner began.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You think she’s dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She isn’t. The last
time I saw her she was in London, packing to leave for Boston. She was in perfect health.’

  ‘I’m supposed to take your word for that.’

  ‘I may be able to contact her. I know the firm she was working for: even if she’s moved on they may have a forwarding address.’

  ‘And it might take some time to find out whether they have or not,’ said Donovan sceptically. ‘When it comes to delaying tactics, this family could play for England.’

  A note of desperation was rising in Turner’s voice. ‘What more can I tell you? You suspect a woman was murdered here. I’ve told you you’re wrong and I’ve offered to prove it: what more do you expect of me?’

  ‘You could prove it back in Castlemere. I dare say my superintendent could get an answer from Boston rather faster than you could.’

  Turner hesitated. Donovan showed his teeth in a feral smile. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘No, listen will you?’ insisted Turner. ‘Make this official and you’re going to destroy my family; and for nothing. Nobody hurt Rosemary. Unless you count me.’ He forced a grim chuckle. ‘I wasn’t the man she took me for. But she left here because she wanted to. Rosemary always did what she wanted.’

  ‘You’re doing it too,’ said Donovan. Turner looked puzzled. ‘Talking about her in the past tense.’

  ‘These are past events we’re talking about! It’s more than six years since I saw Rosemary last, eight since Mum did. She went out of our lives, by her own choice. And she chose not to keep in touch.’

  ‘Not even with her daughter?’

  ‘Elphie’s my daughter,’ he said softly, obscurely.

  ‘I know.’ Donovan frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What’s wrong with Elphie,’ Tuner said quietly, ‘it’s my fault. Not Rosemary’s; not even just bad luck. It could have been avoided. It happened because I wasn’t honest with her. She never forgave me for that. I think she thought leaving Elphie with me was … not exactly a punishment, perhaps just deserts.’

  ‘How the hell can you be responsible for something like that?’

  ‘Please – just take my word for it.’

  ‘I can’t!’

  ‘If you don’t, you’re going to destroy us all.’

  Donovan shook his head crisply. ‘Then you have a big problem, because nothing that’s happened so far makes me willing to take your word for anything. You’ve lied to me from the moment I woke up. You didn’t move my boat out of your way, you moved it to keep me here. You say you took it to Posset but that isn’t true either: you didn’t want anybody to know I was here and George Jackson was bound to ask. And what about my dog? You said he was all right, that he was being cared for; but if Tara isn’t at the Posset Inn you didn’t leave him with George. What’s happened to him?

  ‘You cut off the phone. You didn’t want me calling George, and you certainly didn’t want me calling my nick. That car I heard in the yard last night – that was someone looking for me, wasn’t it? Nobody round here uses a car, you live too close to one another. Somebody came here looking for me, and you sent them away. You told them you hadn’t seen me.

  ‘And now all at once you don’t want to keep me here any more, you want me to go – and you still haven’t told me why! If I’m wrong about your sister,’ he demanded of Sarah, ‘what is it you’re so desperate to hide?’

  Turner and his stepmother traded a fast glance. For a split second it seemed they wavered on the precipice of the truth; but then Simon looked down and saw the rocks. His voice was thick. ‘We saved your life, Sergeant Donovan. You owe us something for that. I’ll tell you what it is. I’ll get the Land Rover and drive you out of here right now. I can drop you at Posset, I can take you to the Sinkhole engine house: you can call for transport from either of them, you’ll be in Castlemere within the hour. What you do after that is your decision. If you want to come back here with sirens and flashing lights there’s nothing I can do to stop you.’

  Obviously there was something he hadn’t yet said, the hook beneath the bait. ‘But … ?’ Donovan prompted heavily.

  Simon Turner looked like a man forced to choose which arm to have ripped off. His round face was not designed for deceit, and he was no better at hiding the pain of this than the fact that he’d been lying for the last three days. ‘I want you to take my daughter with you.’

  Sarah lurched to her feet, a hand flying to her mouth, a cry of ‘No!’ torn from her as if by torture. They hadn’t discussed this. Was this what she saw and dreaded when she looked in Donovan’s face: the breaking of her family?

  Simon came round the desk and grasped her wrists in both his hands. ‘I have to. Don’t you understand? – I have to. She isn’t safe here any more.’

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Donovan, confusion turning to anger because everything they said, everything they did, far from helping him to understand only compounded the mystery further. ‘Why is Elphie in danger? Whatever happened, it wasn’t her fault. She’s a child: when Rosemary – left – she was only a baby …’

  And that was it. He saw it in their faces. He wasn’t sure what he’d found, but he knew it was the answer. The dominoes were all standing there, ready to fall: he just needed to set the first one in motion. He backed up a pace or two. Elphie: she was only a baby when all this started. And it was Simon’s fault she wasn’t like other people’s babies …

  The photograph. The Turners’ wedding photograph: he knew what was wrong with it. Glencurran folk were great marriers: he’d seen enough wedding snaps in his time to know what they should look like. His aunties, the last repository on Irish soil of the Donovan family history, practically papered the front room with them. And they all looked the same: bride and bridegroom arm in arm, his family grouped on one side, hers on the other.

  A domino teetered and fell. He called her Mum. But this boy was in his mid-teens when his father remarried: why didn’t he call her Sarah?

  He was standing beside her in the photo, a happy smile on his young face, looking forward to the future. A new home, more money than perhaps they’d been used to, the chance to join a man he liked in a business that interested him.

  But the other boy, dark and wary at the bridegroom’s side, had as much to lose as his stepbrother had to gain. He was going to have to share his home and his father with strangers, and he was pretty sure he’d have to share his inheritance with them too. Alienated, disenfranchised, he packed his bags and hit the road as soon as he was old enough.

  Looking up, hollow-eyed, Donovan couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been. Damn it, they even looked alike – the same fair hair and light eyes, the same open expression. Call himself a detective? – a child could have seen the family likeness in all three of them. In fact, a child had. Sarah Turner, her sister Rosemary – and her son Jonathan.

  ‘Now I understand,’ he breathed. ‘It wasn’t Rosemary who died, was it? It was Simon.’

  2

  The man Donovan had known as Simon Turner exchanged a fast, desperate glance with the woman who was – now – so obviously his mother. Clearly it was in the minds of both of them to deny that too, to maintain the deceit until the DNA results turned an inspired guess into a scientific fact.

  Donovan panted at them in frustration. He’d known a lot of criminals in his life – sometimes he seemed to know no one else – and a number of murderers. The Turners — for lack of a better term – didn’t fit any pattern he was familiar with. It wasn’t just that they’d been kind to him, they seemed genuinely decent people. Except that at some point in the last twenty years a young man had died and been supplanted, in every particular of his life, by his stepbrother. Everyone in this village must know it, and none of them had done anything about it.

  ‘I don’t believe you people!’ he spat. ‘You move into this man’s home, you accept his protection and his generosity – and when he dies you murder his son so you can keep control of his business! The poor bloody kid might well have looked sour at the wedding. He must have had the second sight.’

&n
bsp; Sarah reached for his sleeve. Tears were streaming down her face: he wasn’t sure whom she was crying for. ‘Cal, I promise you, it wasn’t like that. It was an accident …’

  Jonathan threw up a broad hand in despair, but after that there was no point in lying further. They could tell him the truth or they could tell him nothing, but there was no longer any mileage in claiming that Elphie’s father was Simon Turner.

  Elphie …

  Donovan sucked in a sharp breath. ‘That’s why Elphie’s how she is. Rosemary thought you were Robert’s son. But you aren’t, you’re Sarah’s – Elphie’s the product of an affair with your aunt! Jesus!’ he said then. ‘It was only an affair? You didn’t actually marry her?’

  Jonathan shut his eyes. Then he shook his head. ‘No. Even my stupidity knew some bounds. It was hardly even an affair – not much more than a one-night stand. But as you say, there were consequences.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’ Then, remembering what it was they were talking about, he added, ‘You do not have to say anything. But I must caution you that if—’

  Jonathan cut him off with a wave of the hand. ‘I know my rights. And if you’re expecting a confession to murder you’re going to be disappointed. But I will tell you what happened. Only, to understand, you have to go back twenty years. To when Mum and Robert were married.’

  The day at the church was filled with such promise. Two lonely people had found one another and the auspices were good. Sarah said it was love, and the beam on the man in the picture said she could well have been right.

  More than that, two teenage boys who had been managing on one parent each would now have a full set as well as built-in companionship; and the business with which a widower had struggled alone would benefit from new hands and fresh ideas.

  And for six years the portents were justified. The marriage was happy, the business throve. Sarah’s son Jonathan flourished under the tutelage of his stepfather and at eighteen went off to horticultural college in France. The plan was that when he qualified he could assume more and more responsibility for The Flower Mill until Robert was ready to retire and install him as manager.