The Darkest Evening

by Cleeves, Ann

‘I don’t know.’ Holly ploughed on: ‘But I wonder if the place she painted could be real. A real cottage. If Lorna needed somewhere to hide from the world . . .’ She paused. ‘And then she seems to have been very low recently, anxious. That would chime with the title. “The Darkest Evening”.’

  Now, Vera could tell, Holly was anxious, scared she looked stupid, or pretentious, or both. The lass cared far too much what other people thought. ‘I assume you took a photo. Let’s have a look. Kirkhill’s my patch. I might recognize it.’

  Of course, there wasn’t just one photo, there were several, all turned into images that could be linked to Holly’s computer and projected onto a screen. Vera could see why Holly might at first have thought that Lorna had imagined the place. There was something idealized about it, even when it had been painted as dark and brooding. The poem caught the essence of it. She shook her head. ‘Sorry, Hol, it doesn’t mean anything to me. Can you send it across? I’ve got a contact, a former Wildlife Liaison Officer. If it’s anywhere local to Kirkhill, he’ll recognize it.’

  Holly nodded, relieved.

  ‘Anyone else?’ Vera scanned the room.

  There was a brief silence before Joe asked, ‘Did the CSIs find a diary in Lorna’s house? The hospital psychologist said she kept one and she’d talked about turning her experiences into a book or a blog.’

  Vera looked at Billy Cartwright. ‘Your lot come across anything like that?’

  ‘Sorry.’ Cartwright paused. ‘No laptop either, which is a bit strange for a lass of that age. Especially if she was thinking about doing some sort of blog. And no phone.’

  Vera thought about that. ‘Are we saying she had them with her in the car and they were taken after she was killed? Or did someone go into her house and nick them?’

  ‘It could have happened,’ Billy said, ‘but they’d have to have gone in early the morning after she died. It took us a while to get there because most of the team were tied up at Brockburn.’ A pause. ‘They’d have needed a key, though. The place was locked when we got there.’

  ‘Someone worried about what she might go public with, perhaps?’ Vera looked out into the room. The team were tired and edgy. Instead of an immediate result, or even a possible prime suspect, after two days they had nothing but more questions. And an elderly woman’s disappearance.

  ‘Fingerprints?’

  ‘Four different individuals, beside Lorna. Nothing that matches anyone on the database.’

  Vera nodded. ‘One will be her mam, another Constance maybe.’ She looked out into the room. ‘You’ll have heard that Constance Browne is missing. She’s still not home and not answering her phone, so it’s unlikely she’s just been to town for a day’s shopping. I’ve been asking around the village. Constance helps out at the village school once a week. Tomorrow afternoon is their Christmas show and she’s supposed to be there. If she’s not, we start worrying big style. There was no sign of a break-in or violence at the house. So, either something freaked her out and she’s in hiding, or she’s responsible for Lorna’s death and she’s run away.’

  There was no response. They were all exhausted.

  ‘Get home,’ she said. ‘Have some rest. You’ve got your actions for tomorrow. Charlie, let’s chase that DNA analysis. It might not be relevant. I can’t see that the Brockburn bunch would have any financial gain from Lorna’s death even if they were related.’

  They got to their feet as soon as she stopped talking, but she stood at the front of the emptying room, lost in space and time. Her mind had suddenly jumped back to her youth. Visits to Kimmerston library had provided welcome escape from home on Saturdays and during school holidays. As a teenager, Vera had loved reading traditional detective novels. Hector had thrown that back at her when she’d joined the police as a cadet. She could still remember the sneer in his voice and wondered now if there had been something else there too. A fear of being left alone? Or a fear of his daughter passing on information about his squalid criminality?

  It won’t be like Agatha Christie, you know. It won’t be all country houses, vicars, butlers and wills.

  This case was like that, though. The vicar was female these days and there might not be a butler, unless Dorothy counted as an updated version, but there was a country house. And there might be a will. Was it possible that, when Crispin had seen how Lorna was struggling with anorexia, he’d changed his will to leave something to her? Not the house, perhaps, because as Vera understood it, that had already passed to Juliet, but some income from the tenant farms or some savings. If that was the case, what might have happened to the will? Vera imagined a scenario like a scene from one of the books she’d escaped into as a teenager: Harriet coming across it before it could reach a solicitor and throwing it onto the fire. Vera smiled at the image, but she thought Harriet would be ruthless enough to do it. And perhaps Lorna had found out and was about to reveal all through her diary made public.

  ‘Boss? What would you like from us?’ Joe was bringing her back to the present. He and Holly were the only people left in the room.

  ‘Eh, I’m sorry, you two. I’m having a senior moment. Or a flight of fancy. Hol, you talk to Josh Heslop. Away from Kirkhill, though. Why don’t you get him to show you his exhibition here in Kimmerston? Get his trust. You’re more on his wavelength than the rest of us. Nearer in age too! We’ve already ruled him out of Lorna’s murder. He could just have killed Connie – he rushed into the art class at the last minute this morning – but I can’t see two monsters roaming around the village. I don’t see him as a suspect, but I do think he knows more about Lorna than he’s letting on. See if he knows the significance of that cottage.’

  Holly nodded. She seemed happy enough. Vera thought she was getting the hang of working with the woman. It didn’t take more than a little bit of praise and recognition to keep her sweet. Vera didn’t usually have the time or the energy to massage egos, but perhaps with Holly Jackman it was worth the effort.

  ‘Joe, you’re off to talk to that midwife, Olivia. I have high hopes of that interview.’

  She waved them away then, and sat alone in the empty room, thinking again of Thomas, no mother and no father as far as the rest of the world was concerned. It seemed to her then that the child, present at Lorna’s abduction, their only real witness, was at the centre of the case. The adults wheeled around him like planets round the sun.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  JOE HAD ARRANGED TO TALK TO the midwife Olivia Best after she’d come off shift in the morning. ‘I can’t sleep as soon as I get home anyway,’ she’d said when he’d phoned the day before. ‘I need to wind down a bit. If you get to the house about eight-forty-five, my daughter will have left for school and we’ll be able to talk.’

  That meant he was around to see his kids off to school too and to give Sal a bit of a lie-in and a cup of tea in bed. Build up all the Brownie points he’d need if this case dragged on into the Christmas school holidays. Or if he had to miss the middle lad’s nativity play.

  Olivia had changed out of her uniform and was sitting at the kitchen table, looking as knackered as you would if you’d been pulling out babies all night. The house was on the same executive estate as the one where he and Sal lived and the interior felt much the same too. The furniture could have come from the same online company, though Sal would have cleared all the mucky plates into the dishwasher if she was expecting company. He thought he’d seen the midwife a few times in the school playground. She nodded as if she recognized him too. ‘You’re Sal’s bloke.’ No answer needed.

  She pushed the pot and a mug towards him. ‘Milk’s in the fridge.’

  He helped himself. He could tell how much effort it would take for her to get to her feet.

  ‘Lorna Falstone,’ he said.

  ‘I hadn’t heard about it. It’s been a crazy few weeks. I couldn’t believe it when you told me.’

  ‘You saw her the day before she died?’

  ‘Aye. Poor, poor lass.’

  ‘How did you
know her?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘I know confidentiality’s important,’ he said. ‘I won’t ask for the names of the other group members, unless there’s someone she was especially close to, someone she might have confided in.’

  Still it seemed she couldn’t bring herself to speak.

  ‘Have you suffered from an eating disorder yourself?’ He realized how difficult this was for her. It wasn’t just exhaustion that was preventing her from speaking. ‘You know I won’t tell anyone. Not Sal or any of the other mams.’

  ‘I have,’ she said. ‘So has everyone in the group.’ A pause. She stared at him over the rim of her mug. ‘Some of us had been close to death but we found our way out of it. And after Lorna had done so well – she was strong enough to give birth to a child and not everyone who’s recovered from anorexia manages to get pregnant. Then to be killed like that. It’s heartbreaking.’ She was almost in tears.

  ‘Lorna phoned you the Thursday before she died.’

  ‘Yes. Early in the morning. I’d been working nights then too and I’d only just come off shift. She was in such a state I couldn’t work out what the problem was over the phone. She said she’d tried to phone Joanne, the psychologist at Halstead House, but there’d been no answer. She sounded so desperate that I offered to go to Kirkhill, but she didn’t want to meet there. She said she needed to get away from the place for a bit, so she’d get the bus into Kimmerston and come here.’

  ‘She didn’t say she’d borrow her friend’s car and drive over?’ Joe thought that was strange. The bus to Kimmerston might be quicker than the one into Newcastle but it would still take longer than the car.

  ‘No. She said then she’d have to explain where she was going and anyway, she didn’t want to trouble Connie with any more of her problems. She’d bothered the poor woman enough. This was a decision she’d have to make on her own.’

  ‘So, she had a decision to make?’ This was useful, Joe thought. If Lorna was close enough to Olivia to have explained that she was friendly with Miss Browne, perhaps she’d confided the name of her child’s father to her too. It seemed that Connie had known more about Lorna and Thomas than she’d let on to Vera.

  ‘Yes.’ Still there was no real explanation. Joe sat quietly. Let the midwife tell the story in her own time. ‘It was mid-morning before Lorna got here. She’d had to drop Thomas with Connie and then wait for the bus. I was shattered. It had been a hard night – on the ward we’d come close to losing a baby – and all I wanted was my bed. But other members of the fellowship had been there for me when I needed them, so I hadn’t felt I could turn her away. That’s how it works. There’s an obligation. She was calmer by the time she got here. She said she was sorry for making such a fuss. She’d overreacted. Things would be okay.’

  ‘She must have told you why she’d been in such a state, though?’ Joe couldn’t imagine that Lorna would have left her toddler and made the trek to Kimmerston without a good reason.

  ‘Not really, and only indirectly. It was something to do with Thomas’s father.’

  ‘Do you know who the father was?’ In his head, Joe was muttering a prayer to the God of his childhood, to the God of his lay preacher grandfather.

  Olivia shook her head. ‘No, that was always a complete mystery. One of Lorna’s big secrets. I knew she was besotted with the guy, but she’d never really talked about him. Not in any detail, even at the beginning when she first told me. Just the things we all say when we’re first in love – that he was gentle, supportive, that he’d make a perfect father.’ A pause. ‘Something must have happened between the frantic early phone call and Lorna turning up on my doorstep. When she got here, she’d stopped panicking. It was almost as if she was more worried about me than I was about her. I found myself talking about the shit night I’d had and the stress of being stretched too thin, and no time to care properly for my women.’

  ‘She didn’t give any indication of what was worrying her?’ This was one of the most frustrating interviews Joe had ever conducted.

  ‘She said she’d been having problems with Thomas’s dad. He was being a rat and freaking her out big style. I assumed he was ducking out of his responsibilities, that he’d decided he wanted nothing more to do with her and Thomas. That was the impression she gave. I think she must have become dependent on him, since setting up home on her own.’

  ‘But Lorna wasn’t so anxious when she arrived here later that Thursday morning?’

  ‘No, she said she’d talked him round. It was all okay after all. She thought she must have taken a couple of his comments out of context.’ Olivia looked up. ‘I think he was stringing her along and she was believing what she wanted to believe. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Even if we know in our hearts that our lover doesn’t care any more, that they’ve moved on, we’re so desperate to be with them that we persuade ourselves that they’re telling the truth. But most of us grow out of that stuff. I thought she was still infatuated and I told her so.’

  ‘What happened then? How did you leave it?’

  Olivia didn’t answer immediately. ‘Perhaps I hadn’t been very tactful. It certainly wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She said I didn’t have a clue what was going on, I didn’t know the man and I didn’t know what she had to lose.’ The midwife hesitated again. ‘You have to understand that I was shattered, dealing with my own shit. I wasn’t even concentrating properly on what she was saying. I’m not proud of what I said next.’

  Again, Joe said nothing and waited for her to go on.

  ‘I told her not to be a drama queen. I told her if she wanted to keep the relationship secret, that was up to her, but she couldn’t expect me to help if I didn’t know all the details. She got up and stormed off.’

  There was a moment of silence before Olivia continued. ‘I went to the door and called after her. I offered her a lift back to Kirkhill. Goodness knows when the next bus would be. She shouted back that she didn’t need a lift. Her bloke had arranged to pick her up in Kimmerston.’

  ‘By her bloke she meant the father of her child?’

  ‘Aye, well, that was what I took her to mean.’ Olivia looked up at him again. ‘I didn’t know whether that was true or whether she just wanted to prove to me that he was a good man, that he’d put himself out for her.’

  Outside, a young woman walked past the window, with a baby in a buggy. She waved in at Olivia, who lifted a hand in return.

  ‘I was too tired to care by then. I told myself she was an adult and she should be allowed to make her own mistakes. I couldn’t be responsible for her. I had my own stuff to worry about.’ She put her head in her hands. It was as if it were too heavy to be supported by her neck. ‘If I’d been more careful how I spoke to her, if I’d listened, properly listened, she might still be alive.’

  Joe wasn’t sure how to answer that. He didn’t think easy words would help her. ‘Until we find Lorna’s killer, we can’t know why she died. There seemed to be a lot going on in her life.’ He thought he should end the interview; the midwife needed to sleep. It wasn’t fair to keep her talking. He’d always thought his work carried huge responsibilities but he couldn’t imagine what her working life might be like. Still, Lorna was dead and they were no closer to finding her killer. ‘There’s nothing else you can think of that might help identify her boyfriend? Might she have spoken to anyone else in the group?’

  Olivia shook her head. ‘There was always something reserved about her. She never properly engaged emotionally. I had the impression she didn’t really get on with her parents, with her father at least. She said something like: I never really knew him.’

  ‘She liked her teacher though. Connie Browne.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Olivia smiled. ‘She thought Connie was brilliant. She never judges and you always know where you are with her. That was what she said.’

  ‘So, a kind of surrogate mother, do you think?’

  ‘No.’ Olivia paused for a moment. ‘More like an aunt or an older cou
sin. There wasn’t that responsibility or obligation you feel for a parent.’

  Joe nodded, waited for a beat. ‘Constance is missing. Of course, we’re checking with her friends, but Lorna didn’t mention if she was planning to go away over Christmas?’

  Olivia shook her head.

  ‘Did you ever meet her?’

  ‘Yeah, a couple of times. Before my daughter started school in September, Lorna and I would get together occasionally. Have a coffee, either in Kimmerston or Kirkhill. There’s a lovely park there, right by the river. Once or twice Connie was there. It seemed a bit weird that Lorna didn’t have friends of her own age, but Connie seemed cool.’ A pause. ‘She knew, like everyone, in Kirkhill. I suppose she’d taught most of them, knew their secrets.’

  Joe nodded and got to his feet.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been more help.’ She looked up and there was a moment of confession. ‘My bloke left three weeks ago. I’m only just holding it together. That’s why I’m so wrecked – it’s not just that we’re manic at work.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘He found someone younger who works in an office. Nine to five. Always there to cook his tea.’ She shook her head, a refusal to feel sorry for herself. She stood too and showed Joe to the door.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  HOLLY ALSO SPENT THE MORNING IN Kimmerston. She’d phoned the Heslops’ farm the evening before, a call to their landline. Vera had given the number to her: ‘Use this. Mobile reception is crap anywhere near the forest.’

  A middle-aged woman had answered. She sounded harassed, as if she was in the middle of something important, but her voice was pleasant enough. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could I speak to Josh, please?’

  ‘Who’s speaking?’ Classic mother, nosy about her adult child’s calls. Holly wondered why Josh had moved back after years of freedom in Newcastle. Had the place really pulled him home as his friends had suggested? Or was the pull purely financial?

  ‘Holly Jackman.’ No need for her to know anything else, that she was part of the investigative team, though Holly wouldn’t put it past her to eavesdrop. Her mother wouldn’t be able to resist.