Slipknot

by Priscilla Masters

Or a vital clue?

  She nodded. ‘It’ll be worth a dinner to have a simple verdict of suicide. By the way,’ she added, ‘how’s the lad that he stabbed?’

  ‘He’s having a bit of a battle. Had some sort of complications. You know what doctors are like – born pessimists and as elusive as a virgin. They’re being cagey but giving out some dark hints such as – ‘not as well as we’d expected’. His parents are spending all their time at the hospital so draw your conclusions from that,’ Alex said.

  ‘C’est la vie et mort.’

  They exchanged a few more pleasantries and Martha climbed into her car. It was as she was letting the clutch out that she wondered what Randall had meant – considering? Not bad – considering? Had he been referring to the Callum Hughes case or something else? Once she had referred to his personal life. She knew he was married. But response to friendly questions had caused him pain so she had buried the subject – permanently.

  She mused the point for a while before turning her mobile phone back on. One message, and a text from Sam. She turned to the text first.

  Hello, Mum. I need to talk 2 u. Can u ring me at 6. How’s Bobby? Hope he’s not catching 2 many mice.

  She read it through and sensed the anxiety that lay behind it. What was wrong?

  Mother-like she was already worrying.

  Next she listened to Jericho Palfreyman’s slow tones informing her that Mrs Shelley Hughes would be at the mortuary at four o’clock to talk to her. Would she please ring him back if that was not going to be convenient and he would re-arrange?

  CHAPTER SIX

  There was no time to ponder her personal problems. When she returned to the office Jericho was sitting at his desk, his eyes bright with curiosity, hand stroking his grizzled hair in a gesture she knew well.

  ‘Afternoon, Jerry,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Gunn.’ He invariably was formal when he was dying to find out some fact or other. He was hopeless at concealing his curiosity. ‘How did the post-mortem go?’ His voice was casual. It didn’t deceive her for a minute.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  His eyes brightened a few more watts. ‘But I thought it was an open and shut case.’ He was probing.

  ‘I’m beginning to think there’s no such thing, Jerry.’

  ‘Really?’

  But she was not going to satisfy his inquisitiveness just yet. Jericho Palfreyman was Shropshire born and bred. And while he had the kindest of hearts and was unfailingly understanding with the bereaved he was also an incurable gossip. One of the first to spread rumours. His eyes sparkled all the brighter when he believed there was a juicy bit of scandal behind a case. Martha’s greatest fear was that one day he would overstep the mark and leak some precious confidence to someone who would, in turn, relay it to the Press. It would be unforgivable. So she was always extra careful what she told him, even knowing that ultimately he had full access to her records.

  ‘But I thought it was a suicide of a youngster in custody. There’s surely no question about that, is there? He was a violent type, wasn’t he? Nearly killed that poor lad, he did.’

  ‘I think there’s a bit more to ‘that poor lad’ than we’ve been led to believe. Maybe we should reserve judgement,’ Martha said crisply. Jericho hesitated, shuffled a few papers, patently waiting for her to fill him in but she stepped towards her office door so he substituted any further comment with a, ‘Coffee, Mrs Gunn?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She closed the door behind her, manoeuvring between the desk and the chair to stand in front of the bay window and stare out. She often did this when she wanted to think about her role. Mark Sullivan had been uneasy about the PM and so was she. As a doctor herself she knew why they were concerned. Perhaps in an old lady the slightest of knocks made their mark but in a thirteen-year-old bruises didn’t just happen and the bruises they had all seen at the post-mortem were the results of blows. The one to Callum’s shin, in particular, had been vicious. Almost certainly the result of a kick. The question was from whom? Of course Sullivan’s explanation could be the right one. They could all have been the result of innocent encounters – a swerve in the transfer van, banging a shin against the side of the bunk. But she didn’t think so. She had learned that each tiny piece of pathology unearthed in a post-mortem was the result of an encounter. Each had a story to tell. They simply hadn’t read the text. Yet.

  Jericho appeared with the coffee and she sensed his continuing interest in the case. He lingered as he set it on her desk, fussed about finding a drinks mat. And his interest didn’t pall. Right through the rest of the morning he brought her too frequent cups of coffee and at one o’clock a sandwich. A woman called Rose called in daily with a basket of food and Jericho took great delight in selecting Martha’s lunchtime menu.

  Today it was Coronation chicken on soft, brown bread and a chocolate flapjack. Martha suppressed a smile. Jericho only chose anything with chocolate on the days when he decided she was particularly stressed and in for a difficult afternoon.

  What was more, he presented them to her on a white, bone china plate with a meaningful grimace of sympathy. Two more signs that he thought she was having a troublesome day. He usually left the sandwiches in their wrapper.

  ‘Jerry,’ she said slowly, ‘you spoke to Callum’s mother?’

  ‘That I did.’

  ‘What did she sound like?’

  ‘Sort of distant,’ he said, screwing up his face. ‘As though it was all happening to somebody else.’

  It was not what Martha had expected. She swivelled her head round to read Jericho’s face. ‘Not angry?’

  Jericho thought for a moment. ‘No not angry,’ he said slowly. ‘Not angry.’

  ‘Perhaps she’s been prescribed a sedative.’

  Jericho’s pale eyes contemplated her. ‘She didn’t sound groggy,’ he offered.

  He waited for her next question and when she said nothing more made a great, bowing ceremony of leaving the room, closing the door noiselessly behind him.

  Martha chewed slowly on the sandwich. She was lucky that her office was placed in this huge, Victorian house with its tall, bay windows. It lightened the heaviness of her duties. So much concern with death is bound to sometimes feel like a burden. She crossed the room to the window and stared out, picking out landmarks: the green of the Quarry site of the Shrewsbury Flower Show last month, the spire of St Chad’s, the river wrapping around the town. Her office was a little to the south of what had once been known as Scrobbes-byrig (The fortress of Scrob). Shrewsbury is a pretty town, she reflected. She and Martin had felt so fortunate to move here, both of them quickly finding good careers, settling into rural town life. They had been blessed with the twins. All that had seemed fortunate. Too lucky, almost, to last. And so it had proved. Before the twins’ third birthday Martin had had the death sentence of his final illness and then for a time the town had seemed isolated, a long way from their families, lonely – even at times hostile.

  And now?

  She turned back to her desk, to the neat piles of work, the documents waiting to be read, a list of pending telephone calls to be made in Jericho’s neat, copperplate handwriting, her laptop. A recent photograph of the twins at Alton Towers, their glee captured for ever as they rode the crest of the waterfall on the Log Flume, they in the front, eyes wide, Sam’s crooked teeth, Sukey’s blonde hair flying behind her, she and Agnetha, indulgently smiling from the safety of the back seat.

  She looked closer at Sam and felt the familiar clutch of her heart. Liverpool seemed such a long way away.

  She sighed, bent her head and worked steadily for the next hour or so. But it didn’t help that a little after two a second text appeared on her phone from Sam, again asking her to ring him that night. What about, she kept thinking, and felt troubled that he’d again added the enquiry about the dog.

  Something was wrong, she worried, and pictured Callum Hughes. She had witnessed the cruelty of boys more than once herself, watched, a boy being bullie
d, outside Sam’s school, frightened, yet determined to prove his bravado, the final, humiliating collapse into tears while she had stood by, wanting to intervene yet knowing the boy would be open even more to ridicule if she had.

  It had happened in her own school, when she had been eleven years old and two seniors had decided she was laughing at their outlandish, punk hairdos and taken a swipe at her. She considered her son’s isolation in such a boy’s institution. The mother in her wanted to speak to him now. See him now.

  What had caused the bruises on Callum Hughes’s face?

  Her mobile phone pinged again to remind her that she had a message. There is a frustration in secret codes. Sometimes they are too secret. They hint and give you a clue without being specific. They leave you with a half-knowledge which is sometimes worse than ignorance. The half that you don’t know is filled in by the imagination – frequently darker than the truth.

  She closed her eyes to shut out the pain.

  Until she heard voices outside followed by a soft knock on the door.

  She glanced at her watch. It was dead on four o’clock.

  Jericho held the door open to a slim woman with red hair. She was young, in her thirties, with vivid blue eyes. She wasn’t anything like Martha had imagined.

  ‘Mrs Hughes?’

  The woman nodded with more than a hint of aggression in her manner.

  ‘I’m Martha Gunn, the coroner. I thought it was best that we had a talk.’

  Shelley Hughes didn’t smile. Rather, two lines appeared at either side of her mouth.

  ‘Please. Sit down.’

  Martha motioned towards the two leather armchairs which stood in the centre of the room. Sometimes she would sit behind the desk but this was not one of those occasions. This was a time for informality. Shelley Hughes sat in one, crossed her legs and leaned back, her eyes fixed on Martha.

  ‘Would you like a drink?’

  ‘Water.’ (No ‘please’, Martha noted.)

  Jericho scuttled off and returned in a minute with a tumbler of water. Then, deliberately, he closed the door behind him.

  Martha handed the water to Callum Hughes’s mother and sat opposite her. Shelley Hughes’s eyes were still on her.

  ‘Do you understand what my role is?’

  Shelley Hughes shook her head, sipped her water, set it down on the low table.

  ‘As coroner,’ Martha continued, ‘my role is to investigate deaths which are reported to me – that is – which appear to be violent or unnatural.’

  Something wary entered Shelley Hughes’s face.

  Martha had met the son. Now she searched the mother’s face for some resemblance. And found none.

  Shelley Hughes simply stared back at her, her face marked by a mixture of grief and anger. No not anger. Martha corrected herself. Fury. This woman was furious.

  It was difficult not to typecast relatives before you met them – particularly in cases like this. A juvenile offender, a violent crime, a first arrest, a court appearance, a suicide. Martha had visualised a downtrodden woman, one for whom life had been rough and tough. A single parent – like herself. She had pictured prematurely wrinkled skin, badly dyed, dry hair, jeans, a T-shirt.

  But Shelley Hughes was nothing like that. She was a slight, pretty woman, neatly and sombrely dressed in a dark suit, low-heeled loafers, a white blouse. She had large, appealing eyes. Her hair was dyed a shining, bright red and was straightened, framing her face. The only detail correct in Martha’s mind was the fact that as each minute ticked by Callum Hughes’s mother looked older.

  Martha had also imagined that Shelley Hughes would be foul-mouthed, venting her fury with expletives. She usually found in such circumstances that the relatives were primarily angry. But Shelley Hughes turned red-rimmed eyes on her expectantly and was silent.

  It was Martha who opened up the discussion.

  ‘Tell me about your son,’ she said softly.

  Shelley Hughes looked surprised. ‘You say that like—’ Then she was stuck for words.

  ‘Mrs Hughes,’ Martha said for the second time. ‘My role is not to point fingers but to find out the truth about your son’s death. It is a tragedy, both the circumstances which led up to his detention and subsequently to his death. I am appointed by the Crown to ascertain the truth. That is all.’

  Shelley Hughes opened her mouth to speak. ‘I don’t see…’

  She didn’t understand Martha’s methods. Martha felt it would be better, in these circumstances, to ask an open question, invite comment and let her talk.

  It was one of Martha’s mantras. What greater respect do we owe our dead than to allow their nearest and dearest to speak about them – uninterrupted? Particularly in a sensitive case like this where a youth had been in the charge of another authority. She smiled at Shelley Hughes. Mothers usually enjoy talking about their sons.

  But Shelley was suspicious. ‘What side of him do you want to see? My son the potential murderer or my son the victim?’

  Martha persisted. ‘Just tell me about him. Tell me anything which may or may not have a bearing on the assault and subsequently on his death.’

  Shelley leaned forward then, her control slipping away from her. Tears filled her eyes up, threatened to overflow and spill down her cheeks. She went pale. ‘He was my only boy,’ she said, her voice faltering. ‘I wasn’t married for very long. I only had him. There was just the two of us.’

  ‘Callum’s father?’

  Shelley’s face tightened. ‘His father stuck around for all of the first two years of his life,’ she said. ‘And even then he’d been playing around.’

  Her face hardened. She’d known it, had her face rubbed in it. The late nights, the scent of cheap perfume, the excuses, the excuses, the excuses… Sometimes she’d thought he was nothing but excuses. There was no quiet, polite, attentive man who had seemed genuinely to love her. She must have imagined it all. Because once married he had changed, to a man who looked everywhere for female company but within his own four walls. So why had he married her? Perhaps he had loved her once. Who knew? Not her. She had no idea except that she had been deceived and deluded and that there had been no father/son bond.

  Shelley wiped her finger across her cheek and looked across at Martha. ‘Callum wasn’t very well for the first few months,’ she said. ‘He was sickly. Maybe it was that that put his Dad off him. You know,’ she said brightly, ‘men like to think of their sons as being strong and…’ Her voice tailed off.

  Yes, Martha thought, men did like to think of their sons as being strong. She winced. Oh, how Martin would have revelled in Sam’s success.

  Shelley Hughes continued. ‘Callum had asthma. They told me later it was a milk allergy. He screamed a lot.’ She blinked and more tears were squeezed out of her eyes.

  This was an understatement. Her tiny son had screamed and wheezed his way precariously towards his first birthday. For the first year she and the tiny, sickly infant had virtually lived at the doctor’s surgery. Callum had been on permanent antibiotics and syrups, which had, in turn, ruined his teeth, staining them and rotting them simultaneously. Another mark to single him out as someone different, someone separate. Someone not like the others. She turned her attention back to the room.

  ‘I don’t know how to say this, Mrs Gunn. It sounds unsympathetic but, Callum, he was sort of born to be picked on.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘DreadNought, Roger – the boy that Callum stabbed. He’d been picking on him for a couple of years – ever since Call was about eleven. He’d throw his schoolbag in the road, jostle him, jeer if he got an answer right in class.’ Her gaze wavered towards the window. ‘It just went on and on. He never stopped. I didn’t know what to do to help. If I’d have said something it would have made everything worse.’

  ‘Was there no one you could speak to?’

  Shelley shook her head. ‘I did say something to one of the teachers but he wanted to make it official and I…I was so afraid of making things worse. Dr
eadNought was a big, popular boy.’

  ‘I understand,’ Martha said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘DreadNought.’ She must have picked up something in Martha’s gaze. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m afraid Roger Gough is – quite poorly,’ Martha said.

  Shelley stared back at her uncomprehending. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It seems he’s picked up an infection in the hospital. They’re trying to make his lung re-inflate but he’s in Intensive Care and they’re worried about him.’

  The two women stared at each other. Shelley spoke first, her face white and shocked. ‘If Call…’ She swallowed, ‘if Call had lived are you saying he might be up for murder? Is it that bad?’

  ‘I’m not in charge of Roger Gough’s care,’ Martha said. ‘But I do know it was a serious injury. And with infection…’ She let the sentence hang. Incomplete – unsatisfactory – like the entire case. Pointless and futile. All because a boy had picked on another boy and the victim had suddenly turned tables to become villain. She felt a sudden hot wash of anger. Why had nothing been done?

  Shelley simply stared at her.

  ‘I’m not investigating the assault on Roger Gough,’ Martha said, ‘but your son’s death. Why did he assault Roger Gough on that particular day? Was there anything special about it?’

  Shelley Hughes shook her head. ‘It was always going to build up to something. Callum was getting to the point when he’d had enough. He was like a volcano ready to blow. I could sense it. He’d go out of the door, his face red and angry and take these clomping big steps. I knew one day he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. He’d just lash out – whatever the consequences. And I think it just happened to be that day. Chance.’

  ‘Did you know he’d bought a knife?’

  Shelley shook her head. ‘I’d have stopped him.’

  ‘So you thought it would be a fight?’

  Shelley nodded, her hair swinging.

  Martha drew in a deep breath. ‘Let’s go through what happened on Tuesday night, shall we?’

  ‘The police came and told me Call had been involved in something. I thought at first he’d been beaten up by DreadNought.’