China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  ‘I don’t want to do this,’ he said in a low voice.

  Hazel slid back into her seat. After a moment she said quietly, ‘You don’t have to do this. We can leave now and go on to Byrfield.’

  Sperrin glanced at her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him swallow. ‘And never know?’

  Hazel nodded. ‘Whether you do this or not, you may never know. Or we might leave here only to have it all come flooding back. I don’t know what’s the best thing to do, David. We’re here because you wanted to come. We can leave for the same reason.’

  ‘And waste what’s left of your weekend?’

  ‘I’m a public servant, you help pay my wages. You can waste as much of my time as you need to.’

  For a minute he said nothing more, just stayed where he was and stared through the open gate and across the field to the standing stone. ‘I thought,’ he said eventually, ‘it would mean something to me. Coming here, seeing it. I thought … it would mean something.’

  ‘And it doesn’t?’

  He gave a fractional shake of his head. His dark hair was unruly. But then, it always had been. ‘Nothing. I have no recollection of being here.’

  Hazel considered for a long moment. If she chose to take that as the final word, she thought he’d let her turn the car and drive back down the lane, away from Myrton and its enigmatic stone, and never ask to return. She thought that if she made no response, in another minute he’d suggest the same thing himself, and in all likelihood this would be where it ended. Whatever had happened to him, whatever he’d done or seen, would be buried in his mind forever, with only a megalith hewn from the granite bedrock six millennia past to mark the spot; and perhaps that would be best.

  But Hazel was not just a private person. She was not just a friend of this man’s family, someone who knew his tragedy and had hoped the misfortunes of Byrfield could be consigned to the past. As a police officer, she had obligations higher even than friendship. She didn’t know if a crime had been committed, by David Sperrin or anyone else. But if it had – if a girl really had been killed, and the murder tidied away so successfully that the only lingering trace of it was a handful of disjointed memories in an injured brain – here and now was the best chance of getting justice for the victim. This was probably the crime scene, and the man sitting beside her was probably either the perpetrator or a witness. If she turned the car now she would always wonder if, at a seminal moment in her career, she had shirked her duty.

  She said softly, ‘But here – right here – isn’t where it happened. This is where you left the Land Rover. And you never came back.’

  Sperrin never took his eyes off the stone. ‘I walked over to the menhir?’

  ‘According to Sergeant Wilson, who is the oracle in these matters. And then you ran from there to the lane. There, where the gate is.’ She pointed.

  Reluctantly, he shifted his gaze to the far side of the field. ‘Where’s the railway line?’

  ‘Three hundred metres to the right.’

  He said, very slowly, ‘I suppose we should go and look.’

  In a perfect world Hazel would have had him retrace his steps from the car to the stone, from the stone to the gate, from the gate to the bridge. But Sperrin wasn’t up to the trek. He might, with difficulty, have crossed the field, but she wasn’t going to let him climb the gate. She drove back the way they’d come and worked her way round to the lane, the railway line and the bridge. It took ten minutes.

  He got out of the car and looked at the mossy stones, the stone where the moss had been rubbed off, and down to the track below. ‘I jumped down there?’

  ‘That’s what we think, yes.’

  Again the fractional shake of the head, as if he almost didn’t believe it. ‘What the hell was behind me, that that seemed like a good idea?’

  Hazel didn’t know. ‘We could walk back to the gate,’ she suggested. ‘Where the van stopped. If it was a van.’

  There were no signs now of the activity Sergeant Wilson had described on the verge beside the gate. Of course, even four days ago the signs had been unclear to Hazel. She told Sperrin what SOCO had told her. She wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or a bad idea, only that if it triggered a flood of memories it would seem like a good idea.

  Sperrin looked at the standing stone from this different angle. Perhaps it was an archaeologist thing: a Neolithic menhir was more real to him than the death of a half-remembered girl. ‘Nothing,’ he said, disappointed; then again, with the roughness of despair, ‘Nothing.’

  Hazel waited a little longer, just in case; but finally she had to concede that the long shot had, in defiance of every narrative convention, failed to hit its target. She sighed. ‘Well, we gave it our best try. Let’s get out of here. See if Pete’s cooked enough lunch for four …’

  That was when she realised Sperrin was no longer with her: not in person and not in spirit. She glanced round. He’d fallen half a dozen steps behind and was now rooted to the crumbling edge of the tarmac lane, eyes great with shock, staring at the vacancy where Sergeant Wilson had envisaged a vehicle.

  ‘David?’

  He blinked rapidly; and though he turned his white face towards her, his gaze stayed fixed where it was. ‘There was … a van. You told me that, didn’t you?’

  Hazel nodded. ‘I did.’

  ‘I know you did. I didn’t remember it then. Now I do.’

  Well, perhaps, thought Hazel doubtfully. ‘What colour was it?’

  ‘Grey,’ he said after a moment. His voice was hollow, breathy. ‘Or off-white, or maybe cream. Light-coloured, anyway. With … something on the side.’

  ‘A badge, a logo? A name?’ Miracles do occasionally happen.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe. And … people. They must have got out of it. There.’ He pointed an unsteady finger at the verge.

  Hazel felt her interest quickening. He could still be piecing together things she’d told him and things that Gorman had said. But she thought Sperrin believed he was remembering. ‘What were they doing?’ He hadn’t run across a muddy field because he saw some people standing around on a grass verge.

  ‘I don’t know. Arguing? There was this girl. She was afraid, but she was angry too. The men were shouting at her. No, one of them was – there were two of them. She shouted back.’

  Increasingly Hazel believed that he was remembering real events. ‘What did she say?’ She kept her voice quiet, encouraging. The last thing she wanted to do now was derail his train of thought.

  But the wisps of memory slipped through his fingers.

  ‘It’s all right, don’t worry about the gaps. We’ll fill them in later. What happened next?’

  ‘She saw me. She started to run towards me.’

  He had the heel of his good hand pressed against his forehead, trying to force the memories to coalesce. But it was as if the snapshots had been taken from an album and dropped on the floor, and some of them were in the wrong order and some of them had got kicked under the sofa. Reassembling them was taking all the strength he had.

  ‘I must have climbed the gate, because then I was in the lane and she was still running towards me. She had her hands stretched out.’ Unconsciously he echoed the gesture, reaching out with his good arm and his broken one. ‘She was asking for help. She was afraid, and she thought I could help her.’

  ‘In English?’

  He had to think about that. ‘It must have been, or I wouldn’t have understood her.’

  ‘So why do you think she was a foreigner?’

  He didn’t know. Hazel waited, but Sperrin just shook his head helplessly. At length she said softly, ‘And then?’

  ‘And then they shot her,’ said David Sperrin. His voice was hollow. ‘The man from the van. He shot her in the back. The force of it threw her into my arms. She died in my arms, Hazel, and I didn’t even know her name.’

  ‘Her name was Rose. Wasn’t it?’

  He thought about that, shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. There was no time f
or her to tell me. I don’t know who she was, or what she was doing there, or who killed her or why. But oh, Hazel’ – finally he looked at her, and she was at first startled and then touched by the relief mingled with the excoriating grief in his eyes – ‘they shot her in the back. She died in my arms, but I didn’t kill her.’

  ‘No,’ said Hazel; and then added, and it was only the snowiest of white lies, ‘I never for a moment thought you did.’

  She went to steer him back to the car. Still he hesitated, looking up and down the lane. ‘And then I ran.’

  ‘Of course you ran!’ exclaimed Hazel. ‘People were shooting guns at you. What else were you going to do – stay and remonstrate with them?’

  ‘But what if she wasn’t dead?’ Sperrin had escaped one nightmare only to stumble into another. ‘I can’t know that she was – there wasn’t time to make sure. I dropped her and ran. What if I left her to them? What if I was her only prospect of help, and I let them have her?’

  ‘David, don’t torture yourself,’ she said insistently. ‘You did all you could to help her, and when it was too late for that you tried to save yourself. You have nothing to reproach yourself for. In all probability you’re right: she did die in your arms. So her last thought was that someone was trying to help her. That’s got to be worth something.’

  She got him back in the car. If she’d parked any further away he wouldn’t have made it. But there was no longer any question in her mind of taking him back to his brother. When she reached the main road she turned north, towards Norbold.

  ELEVEN

  Hazel drove directly to Railway Street, shovelled Sperrin into the armchair in the living room, then called Gorman from the kitchen. She told him what had transpired. ‘I should probably have taken him straight to Meadowvale. He just seemed so shattered, I wasn’t sure I could keep him on his feet long enough. Will you come here and talk to him?’

  ‘No,’ said Dave Gorman slowly. Hazel couldn’t see his expression, but she could tell from his voice that there was something else going through his mind. ‘No, I’ll meet you at the hospital.’

  Hazel blinked. ‘I didn’t mean literally shattered. He’s just tired: it’s all caught up with him. It was a long drive for someone not long out of his sick-bed. But I don’t think he needs to be back in hospital.’

  ‘I’m not thinking of Sperrin,’ said Gorman distantly. Then, relenting: ‘All right, we don’t need him collapsing in the corridor. Let him put his feet up for a couple of hours and I’ll see you there at three o’clock.’

  ‘There where? It’s a big hospital. A&E? Intensive Care?’

  ‘The morgue,’ said Gorman.

  So Hazel had some idea what to expect. Sperrin didn’t. Hazel just told him they were meeting the DCI at Norbold Infirmary, and no, she didn’t know why; and she parked hard against the back wall by the unmarked door and took him the shortest way. A late lunch and a rest had restored some of David Sperrin’s colour. But Hazel wasn’t sure that, even if she managed to get him to the morgue without incident, they’d let her take him out again.

  Gorman was already there, waiting in the corridor. ‘I understand you had an interesting morning.’

  He might not have spoken. Sperrin had spotted the sign on the door. His brow creased. ‘This is the morgue.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Gorman. ‘There’s something I want you to look at.’

  For almost a week now David Sperrin’s brain had been working at less than peak efficiency. But no great leap of intuition was required. ‘You’ve found her?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  They went through to the anteroom, a space furnished with just a few chairs and no windows. Gorman tapped the glass panel in front of them, and someone pulled back the curtain.

  Hazel had seen people faint in this room, had caught them as they fell. Ordinarily she would not have thought Sperrin the fainting kind, but after the week he’d had it was hard to be sure. She stuck close, just in case.

  In retrospect she realised that was naive. Archaeologists confront death every day. Death is how they make their living: dead civilisations, dead people. Every time David Sperrin scrubbed his fingernails, he probably washed traces of dead people down the plughole. Death per se held no fears for him, and not much mystery.

  This was different. This slim, golden-skinned girl, the white sheet turned back to her long throat, her glossy black hair tidied by a mortuary attendant who couldn’t do much to ease the pain of those who came here but did what he could, was as far removed as could be imagined from the fragments of bone left in a rectangle of earth undisturbed for hundreds of years. Only a few days ago she was a living soul. Someone’s daughter; perhaps someone’s wife. Breath stirred in her breast; a beating heart sped blood to flush the translucent flesh; thoughts and feelings and powerful emotions animated the expressionless face. She felt love, and fear – certainly fear – and hope and anger. She died a long way from home, a long way from those she cared for, and whatever her story had been, whatever her dreams, she had deserved better than to be here, stared at by strangers.

  ‘That’s her,’ said David Sperrin. There was no emotion in his voice.

  Gorman wanted chapter and verse. ‘The girl you knew as Rose?’

  Sperrin shook his head. ‘I never knew her name. But that’s her. That’s the girl who died in my arms. Shot in the back, yes?’

  Gorman nodded.

  ‘I didn’t do that.’

  After a moment Gorman said, ‘No, I don’t think you did.’

  Sperrin glanced sideways at the file he was holding. On the cover, in black felt-tip pen, was written: Doe, Rose – Chinese? He looked up at Gorman sharply, as if suspecting him of something discreditable. ‘And she wasn’t Chinese.’

  The DCI considered the dead girl beyond the glass. ‘She looks Chinese.’

  ‘She looks oriental,’ said Sperrin, with some asperity. ‘Do a DNA test. There are as many oriental races as there are European ones. She wasn’t Chinese, and she didn’t like people thinking that she was.’

  ‘David,’ said Hazel quietly, ‘how do you know that?’

  How indeed? For a moment he didn’t know. It was one of the snapshots that had been kicked under the sofa. But then, stretching full length on the metaphorical carpet, he managed to reach it with a metaphorical fingertip and pulled it out. ‘She said so. No – she shouted it.’

  ‘She ran towards you, shouted “I’m not Chinese”, and somebody shot her?’

  He would have elaborated if he could. He couldn’t; at least not yet. ‘I think so. Pretty much.’

  ‘In English?’ prompted Gorman.

  ‘Must have been,’ said Sperrin, ‘I don’t speak Vietnamese.’

  ‘But she did?’

  Again, he’d pulled out new information without realising it. He marshalled the scraps of memory like someone blowing the dust off treasures. Like an archaeologist. His brow furrowed with the effort, he said, ‘Yes. That’s what she said. “I’m not Chinese, I’m from Vietnam.”’

  ‘If she was shouting in English,’ said Gorman, ‘that’s because she could speak English and whoever she was shouting at couldn’t speak Vietnamese.’

  That made sense. Sperrin nodded cautiously.

  ‘The men who got out of the van. What can you tell me about them?’

  Sperrin considered, then shook his head. ‘Nothing. I think there were two of them, but I don’t remember anything about them. I was looking at her.’

  ‘Someone produced a gun and you didn’t look at him?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ gritted David Sperrin.

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know, Mr Sperrin,’ said Gorman, his tone critical.

  ‘Yeah?’ Sperrin’s chin rose pugnaciously. ‘Well, there’s a fair bit you don’t know either, Detective Chief Inspector. And my excuse is better than yours.’

  Gorman didn’t deign to answer that. He turned to Hazel. ‘Take him home. Maybe another night’s sleep will help – his manners if not his memory. Is he sta
ying with you?’

  Hazel rolled her eyes. ‘Looks like it, for now.’

  ‘Drop him off, then, and meet me back at Meadowvale. You and I need to talk.’

  It wasn’t until she’d left Sperrin at Railway Street and was turning into the car park behind the police station that Hazel had her What is wrong with this picture? moment.

  Not so much built as cast in concrete, Meadowvale was part of the 1970s redevelopment of Norbold town centre. An overly optimistic town council had thought to improve on the no-nonsense Victorian street names like Railway Street and Siding Street, but found it easier to gentrify the street signs than the town’s essential character, which remained one of weary pragmatism relieved by a resilient strand of self-mocking humour.

  Hazel didn’t so much park as abandon her car by the back steps, racing up them two at a time, thinking with a kind of thrill that she might be able to tell Dave Gorman something he hadn’t already figured out for himself.

  But he had. He’d left his door open, waved her inside as soon as she reached the upstairs corridor. ‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me what she’s doing in our morgue instead of one somewhere in Bedfordshire?’

  ‘Er …’ Hazel was both taken aback and disappointed. ‘That’s exactly what I was going to ask you. Where was she found?’

  ‘You’re going to love this,’ growled Gorman. ‘Some anglers pulled her out of the Clover Hill dam.’

  Hazel stared. ‘But that’s …’

  ‘… Our back yard. I know.’

  It was also, and both of them knew this too, where Hazel’s last car had met its end and for fourteen hours it was feared that Hazel had too. Neither of them referred to the fact. But it added piquancy to their discussion.

  ‘But … she was killed fifty miles away!’

  ‘Nearer forty to the dam, but yes. It’s a long way to cart a dead body, even in a van.’