China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  ‘I don’t want a road map. I want an Ordnance Survey, around four miles to the inch, with ancient monuments marked on it.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Hazel. ‘Tomorrow.’

  Hazel could get all the maps she needed off the internet. But before she let Sperrin loose with her laptop, she wanted to check with DCI Gorman that it was a good idea. She couldn’t justify calling him at home: he’d be at his desk soon after eight the next morning. From the hospital, she went to Highfield Road.

  Ash had just put the younger of his two sons to bed, was allowing the elder another half-hour’s television in the sitting room. He himself was in his study, poring over car brochures.

  Hazel let herself in at the back door, gave Patience the lurcher a pat in passing, put on the kettle and made coffee. There was a sign on the study door that said Do Not Disturb Unless Someone Is On Fire. She ignored it.

  ‘How’s the great car hunt coming along?’

  Ash gave her a harassed look. ‘Not well. When did they all get so complicated?’

  ‘During the two decades that the Volvo was in your family. What’s the problem?’

  ‘All these’ – he flicked unhappy fingers at the glossy photos – ‘gadgets! Screens. Cameras. Collision avoidance systems …’

  ‘Avoiding collisions is a bad thing?’

  ‘No, avoiding collisions is the primary algorithm of the master tactical computer, i.e. the driver. I passed a test to prove I was good at avoiding collisions. Why do I need a system to do it as well?’

  ‘It’s not a question of doing it as well,’ she said slyly, ‘it’s a question of doing it better. Gabriel, you’re looking at top-of-the-range models. You might do better looking at what the average eighteen-year-old can afford, not what you can afford.’

  ‘I can’t seem to get what I need – plenty of space, safe, reliable and long-lasting – without also getting all this stuff that I don’t.’ He leaned back from the desk with a gesture of defeat. ‘I’m beginning to wonder if I actually need another car at all.’

  Hazel breathed heavily at him. ‘Of course you need a car. You have a shop, two sons and a dog. Even if you and Patience are willing to walk everywhere, how are you going to collect your stock? On the bus?’

  It wasn’t practical and he knew it. His life was more complex now than when he first returned to Norbold, when he walked Patience, picking up their modest shopping on the way home, and otherwise rarely left the house. He gave it one last try. ‘Frankie’ – Frankie Kelly, his children’s nanny – ‘has got her car, if the boys need to go somewhere. And you—’

  ‘I am a police officer, not a taxi service,’ Hazel finished for him. ‘You need a car. Diego said he’d find one for you. If this is stressing you out, tell him what you need it to do and let him do the rest.’

  ‘I know Diego,’ Ash muttered darkly. ‘He’ll get me something with screens and cameras and computers and things.’

  ‘Then you’ll just have to join the twenty-first century and get used to them, won’t you?’ she said briskly. ‘Now, moving on to something that matters …’

  ‘How was David tonight?’ He sipped his coffee, watching her through the steam.

  ‘He’s taken a hammering, he’s not going to bounce back in a couple of days, but I think he’ll be fine. I’m not sure he’s going to be much help in figuring out what happened to him.’

  ‘Some confusion is to be expected with a head injury. He may be clearer later.’

  ‘Later, whoever did this to him will have had time to cover their tracks.’

  ‘Does he know why he came to Norbold?’

  She shook her head. ‘He doesn’t even remember how he got here.’ She told him about where the Land Rover was found.

  ‘Well, he didn’t walk fifty miles,’ said Ash. ‘Either someone drove him or he caught a bus.’

  ‘It’s pretty much in the sticks,’ said Hazel, ‘I think you could be waiting a long time for a bus. There’s a railway line in the area – we heard a train on the far side of the road somewhere.’

  ‘Was there a station anywhere near?’ But she didn’t know.

  Ash went over to his bookcase, came back with a bound volume of maps of the British Isles. It wasn’t new – it mightn’t have been much younger than the Volvo – but it was comprehensive. He turned to a double-page spread of Bedfordshire. ‘Can you figure out where you were?’

  Hazel belonged to the sat-nav generation, but map reading was still taught as a valuable skill for police officers. She found Royston and Biggleswade, traced the route she and Sergeant Wilson had travelled from the A1, then stabbed a triumphant finger on a small brown symbol in a part of the map marked with very little else. ‘There’s the standing stone at Myrton.’

  ‘David’s familiar with the place where his car was found?’

  ‘He knew about it, anyway. Because it’s an archaeological site. That doesn’t prove it was him who drove there.’

  ‘No,’ said Ash. ‘Though you’d have to wonder who else would want to, at least in November. I suppose they’ve dusted the car for prints?’

  Hazel nodded. ‘They’re going over it with a fine-tooth comb. So far they haven’t found anything helpful.’ She peered at the map. ‘This must be the road that skirts the far side of the field.’ She pulled out her notebook, jotted down the co-ordinates. ‘I’ll check in the morning, but I can’t see there being a bus service out there. And here’s the railway line.’ She glanced at the scale printed at the bottom of the page. ‘Half a mile away, maybe a little less? Yes, that’s probably about right.’

  Ash was looking over her shoulder. ‘There are no towns or even villages where there might be a station.’

  ‘Not for miles,’ agreed Hazel. ‘If he was there, it seems likely he left in the van.’

  ‘What van?’

  ‘Sergeant Wilson found tracks where something bigger than a car had stopped and people got out. They must have given David a lift. Or kidnapped him.’

  They both considered that for a moment. Neither could think of a reason to kidnap a spiky, smart-mouthed archaeologist.

  ‘Maybe they did give him a lift,’ proposed Hazel, ‘put up with him for ten minutes or so, then pushed him out when he got too lippy.’

  ‘That would be understandable,’ said Ash with a smile, ‘and might explain his injuries, but it wouldn’t explain how he got from there to Norbold. You’re sure he wasn’t coming to see you?’

  ‘I’m not sure of anything. But I’ve no reason to think he was, and he doesn’t think he was either.’ She hesitated then, for so long that Ash thought she’d finished. He got up to take the mugs back to the kitchen. Hazel glanced at him and then away again. ‘Gabriel, last time we talked, I think I was a bit … off-hand. About what you said. About the divorce. I’m sorry. It rather took me by surprise. I just wanted to say, I think you’re doing the right thing. I’m sorry if I seemed uninterested.’

  Ash smiled. For a complex man, he had a singularly warm and simple smile. ‘I think sometimes – worry sometimes – that I expect too much of our friendship. Of you. I drop my issues on you as if you were my mother, sister, wife and therapist all rolled into one. If you feel like throwing them at my head sometimes, it’s no more than I deserve. Do you remember when we met?’

  Hazel blinked. ‘Of course I remember.’ He’d been beaten up in the park by some local tearaways for no better reason than that they thought he wouldn’t fight back. Much of Norbold thought at the time that he was mentally defective. At Meadowvale they called him Rambles With Dogs.

  ‘You were one of the few people I’d met in the previous four years who treated me like a human being instead of either a nuisance or a case study. Who listened to what I said instead of assuming it was nonsense. I don’t think you’ve ever understood how important that was to me. It was as if I’d been a small boat tossing around on some chaotic ocean for four years, and finally an anchor had held.’

  The smile had gone now, leaving him serious – his gaze int
ense, his face with the flayed look it took on when he was in the grip of his memories. ‘Even as I felt the world steady, I was terrified that the chain would break – that what was my lifeline was just part of the job to you, and when it was done you’d move on to something else and I’d never see you again. That the anchor-chain would part, and the ocean would swallow me down.

  ‘And you didn’t. You stayed with me. You were a friend to me, someone I could trust. I didn’t understand then, and I don’t understand now, why you didn’t just shake my hand, wish me well and walk away. Your life would have been so much easier if you had. But mine would have crumbled, and I want you to know there hasn’t been a day between then and now that I haven’t been grateful to you.’

  He managed a slightly broken little chuckle. ‘Off-hand? Hazel, I’ve given you every reason to come after me with a double-barrelled shotgun! I still impose shamelessly on your time and goodwill. However much I tell myself to stop pestering you with the minutiae of my personal life, it’s never long before I catch myself doing it again.

  ‘So you don’t owe me any apologies. Not about this, not about anything; not now, not ever. When I told you about filing for divorce, I wasn’t looking for either applause or sympathy. It just seemed like something you ought to know. Now you do. Since it seems it’ll be years before there’s anything more to report, feel free to put the information on the longest of long fingers.’

  For a moment Hazel wasn’t sure how she ought to respond. She didn’t think he was waiting for a response; she could just have nodded, said goodnight and gone home. But he deserved better than that. His wringing honesty called for more than polite evasion.

  Finding the right words can be hard. But words aren’t the only response worth making. She stood up and put her arms round him – given his habitual stoop, she was nearly as tall as he was – and hugged him. ‘I’m sorry your marriage didn’t work out,’ she murmured. ‘I know it mattered to you.’

  Which, as far as Ash was concerned, were as close to the right words as made any difference.

  Railway Street, where Hazel lived, was a double row of dark brick terrace houses close to the centre of Norbold. It was impossible to know now if the bricks were dark when the houses were built for his workers by some Victorian factory owner, or if they’d acquired their patina from close association with the steam trains that rushed his produce to every corner of the country and the globe. It was a mile away, and a world away, from Highfield Road. The first houses in Highfield Road had been built for factory managers, solicitors, bookkeepers and the like, far enough into what was then open countryside to avoid the pall of smoke that gave much of the Midlands the soubriquet of the Black Country.

  Now, in a Norbold that was largely post-industrial, Railway Street could fairly be described as cheap and cheerful. Its two-up, two-down houses, each separated from the street by no more than a step and from the ginnel at the back by a yard or postage-stamp garden, were ideal as either starter or finisher homes, so most of the residents were either young singles or older people whose reduced needs they met perfectly.

  Hazel could have afforded something rather smarter by now. But she’d grown fond of the little house; it was big enough to put a friend up if the need arose but still small enough to make minimal demands on her housekeeping skills, and she liked the neighbours. They put up with her working shifts and coming in at odd hours, and she put up with Mrs Burden’s Alec singing Gilbert & Sullivan on his way home from the pub at chucking-out time.

  And at first, drifting comfortably between sleep and wakefulness in the bigger bedroom at the front of her house, she thought it was Alec Burden who was creating the commotion she gradually became aware of. Someone was calling out – not very loudly, but loud enough for the wrong side of midnight. She heard a couple of sash windows run up, and tired and grumpy householders asking if the author of the disturbance knew what time it was. Finally she heard an alarm go off as someone stumbled against a car, and sighing she supposed she’d have to do something about it. She was halfway into her clothes before she recognised the car alarm as her own.

  That focused her mind wonderfully. A few seconds later she flung her front door open, ready to give someone an earful, and the man on her doorstep with one hand raised to knock fell into her arms.

  For a moment she wasn’t sure if he was drunk, or attacking her, or both. Her training kicked in automatically, and she had his face to the wall and his arm twisted up behind his back before either of them knew it. In his ear she growled the traditional policeman’s greeting: ‘All right, then, what’s all this about?’

  ‘Hazel?’

  She didn’t recognise his voice, weak and breathy as it was, but a kind of cosmic inevitability told her who it had to be. She turned him round to confirm it, and David Sperrin slid out of her hands and down the wall until he was sitting on her hall floor. ‘David? What are you doing here?’

  He looked terrible: white and exhausted, his eyes vast and unfocused, his face drawn in lines as intractable as scars. ‘I told you,’ he moaned, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No – here, at my house. Why aren’t you in hospital?’

  ‘I needed to see you …’

  ‘It’s two o’clock in the morning!’ she exclaimed. ‘Couldn’t it have waited a few more hours?’

  ‘No. It couldn’t.’ His eyes found hers, and it was not merely exhaustion hollowing their depths but grinding unhappiness.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asked, all her impatience vanished. Then, before he could answer, she knew. ‘You’ve remembered something. What?’

  He’d gone to a lot of trouble to find her. He hadn’t known where she lived: he’d asked people until he’d found someone to direct him. He’d hauled himself out of his hospital bed, broken wrist, cracked ribs and all, and forced his battered body to carry him into town, in order to tell her what he’d remembered. And now he was here, collapsed on her hall lino, he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

  ‘David? What did you remember?’

  ‘The menhir,’ he managed at last. ‘At Myrton. I was there.’

  ‘Yes?’ He’d woken her at two in the morning for this?

  ‘There was a girl.’

  That sounded more promising. ‘Yes?’ she said again, encouragingly.

  Remembering had brought him no comfort, no peace. ‘Hazel – I think I killed her.’

  SIX

  For this, she woke DCI Gorman as well.

  Sleep-fuddled as he was, as soon as he understood what she was saying he knew two things, both of them important. That Hazel had put duty ahead of her friend’s best interests, without using the lateness of the hour as an excuse to defer the decision. And that she’d called him instead of Gabriel Ash.

  Always with the best of intentions, Hazel had raised so many eyebrows and prompted so many questions about her suitability for a police career that she’d finally been seconded to CID almost in desperation, to see if Gorman could tame her excesses. This gave him reason to believe it had been a good call.

  The small glow of satisfaction encouraged a certain flexibility in him. They might well end the questioning in Interview Room 1 at Meadowvale, but he was dealing with a sick, confused and probably frightened man, and until he was reasonably confident that a crime had indeed been committed he could justify beginning it in Hazel’s living room. Plus, if he took Sperrin to the police station now, the custody officer – otherwise known as the Prince of PACE – would make threatening noises about having him warranted fit by the police surgeon.

  Gorman clambered reluctantly out of the warm cave created by his duvet and pulled his clothes on. After a moment he pulled them back off, removed his pyjamas and tried again.

  Despite her anxiety to know more, Hazel refrained from quizzing Sperrin until the DCI could join them. Instead she made him comfortable on the living-room sofa with the duvet still warm from her bed about his chilled body, and lit the fire, and made cocoa and toast. Then she called the hospital to let them know where he w
as.

  Some of it was displacement activity. Sperrin hadn’t come here for a midnight feast: he’d come to make confession. But Hazel needed time to figure out where that left her. Clearly, if he’d committed a crime – any crime, but murder above all – she was a police officer before she was his friend. But had he? Over the past few years, men with concussion had told her that she was beautiful, that their landlady was trying to poison them, and that messages beamed from Venus were responsible for contraflow systems on the M1. Apart from the landlady story – Mrs Pond’s chilli con carne was notoriously unreliable – she hadn’t believed them. Without corroborating evidence, why should she believe Sperrin?

  Whatever had happened to him had jangled his brain and disrupted his memory, at least temporarily. Why should she assume that this first attempt at reassembling the jigsaw would give an accurate picture? It was clear to her that he believed what he was saying, but that proved nothing. He could have dreamed it. He could have confused real events in a way that totally altered their meaning. He could conceivably be recounting a film he’d watched the night before he went to Myrton. If he lacked the mental competency to drive a car or operate heavy machinery, and she didn’t need to be a doctor to make that call, he certainly wasn’t fit to confess to murder.

  She couldn’t ignore what he’d said, and she hadn’t ignored it. That was a long way from saying she believed it. She knew David Sperrin. Not as well as his brother, perhaps, but well enough that what he’d said made no sense. He wasn’t a violent man. He was a clever man, with the arrogance of clever men: he would have disdained to sink to violence when sharpening his wit on someone’s soul was so much more satisfying and you couldn’t be jailed for it.

  She heard Gorman’s car in the silent street and met him at the door. ‘He’s in here.’

  They talked for half an hour. It wasn’t the classic police interview of question and answer, of subtle traps laid to catch incautious lies. Gorman was aware that he was tap-dancing on the edge of professional integrity here. If Sperrin had done what he said he’d done, and later changed his mind about confessing, counsel for the defence would wipe the floor with the DCI. But before he set the legal juggernaut rolling, he wanted to form his own opinion of the man and the story he had to tell.