by LJ Ross
A home.
“Apparently, the Watsons had lived in that house for nearly forty years,” Ryan said, recalling the case summary as they made their way along Penshaw Lane towards the old village centre. “It’s devastating, but the Fire Investigator hasn’t found any of the usual evidence of fire-setting, or arson. At the moment, all we’ve got is the pathology.”
“Maybe we’ll have a bit more to work with, once we’ve had a chat with Joan,” Phillips said, as they passed a couple of pubs and veered right, along a back road towards the edge of the village. “It’s a hard knock, losing your husband and your home, all in one go.”
Ryan thought of Anna again, and nodded.
“Doesn’t bear thinking about,” he murmured, slowing his pace as they came up alongside a tired-looking bungalow whose window frames were in dire need of re-painting. Parked on the short driveway was an old Volkswagen Beetle that had seen better days, and a black cat was stretched out next to its back wheel, shading itself from the sun.
“This is the place.”
They passed the postman on the way up the short pathway to the front door, and exchanged pleasantries.
“Sometimes they know a bit about the people they deliver to,” Phillips shrugged. “Pity he’s new to the area.”
“They can’t all be gossip merchants,” Ryan said, and rang the doorbell.
With a force of habit, both men stood up straight, arranged their faces into expressions of unthreatening neutrality, and retrieved their warrant cards ready for inspection.
“Yes?”
The woman who came to the door was somewhere around Phillips’ age, in her mid to late fifties, with a mop of corkscrew curls cut artfully into a sweep around her face and dyed an improbable shade of red.
“We’d like to speak to Mrs Joan Watson, please.”
“If you’re from the papers, you can bugger off,” she said, tartly. “She’s been through enough heartache, without you vultures picking at her.”
“We’re not from the papers, Councillor Emerson,” Ryan said, having recognised her from the image on her website. “My name is Detective Chief Inspector Ryan, and this is my colleague, Detective Sergeant Phillips. We’re from Northumbria CID.”
She peered at his warrant card, and seemed to relax a bit.
“Sorry about that,” she said, stepping aside so they could enter the narrow hallway. “Not an awful lot happens around here, so, when it does, people can be a bit nosey. Did Gordon send you across?”
They knew she was referring to the Assistant Chief Commissioner, and it was a sticky question.
“We investigate all cases where the cause of death is not clear,” Ryan replied, smooth as you like.
Sally gave him an appreciative look, and bent down to retrieve the stack of mail the postman had pushed through the letterbox.
“I see. Well, chief inspector, my mother is very unwell and still recovering. I’d rather she wasn’t tired out or upset in any way.”
“Of course, we understand,” Ryan said. “We’re very sorry for the loss to your family. We just want to ascertain the facts, and to understand the timeline of events on Friday morning.”
Sally gave a weary shrug.
“It’s hit us all pretty hard,” she said. “Come through to the living room, and I’ll see if she’s up to it. This is my brother’s house,” she explained. “Simon’s at work at the moment, but we’re taking it in shifts to look after her. I was able to be here today.”
“That’s what family’s for,” Phillips said, with a smile. “Does your brother work around here?”
“Ah, yes, not far. Simon’s one of the managers at the jobcentre in Sunderland,” she explained, and led them into the living room.
It was a spartan affair, with a small PVC-leather sofa that had been torn at some stage, judging from the heavy-duty duct tape wound tightly across one arm. Net curtains blocked some of the sunlight but could not quite prevent it from illuminating the lack of personal mementos aside from a couple of dog-eared paperbacks strewn across a rickety coffee table.
“This is my husband, Mike,” she said, as a man rose awkwardly from the sofa with an uncomfortable squeak of flesh. “They’re from the police,” she told him.
His eyebrows shot into his receding hairline, but he held out a friendly hand.
“Pleased t’ meet you,” he said, looking between them with open curiosity. “I thought the police had finished taking statements.”
“We like to be thorough,” Ryan said, and nodded as Sally excused herself to go and see if her mother was up to giving another one.
“I understand you and your wife live elsewhere?” Phillips began, in his easy way.
“Aye, we bought a place over in Shotley Bridge,” he said, describing a scenic country town over the border in County Durham. We have a flat in Sunderland,” he added quickly, presumably worried that they would question his wife’s choice not to live permanently in the borough she represented.
“Very nice,” Phillips replied. “Are you from Penshaw originally?”
“Born and raised,” Mike replied. “Sally and I went to school together.”
“Childhood sweethearts, eh?”
Emerson gave a half-hearted smile, and was saved from any further comment when his wife re-entered the room.
“Mum says she’s happy to talk to you,” Sally said. “Do you mind if I sit in?”
They heard the squeak of Mike Emerson’s legs against the PVC-leather as they left the room.
CHAPTER 9
Bobby Singh considered himself a very forgiving person.
As a youngster, when the kids at school had made fun of the colour of his skin, he hadn’t lashed out in anger.
Oh, no.
He’d learned that the most effective way to enact retribution was to find a person’s weakness, and exploit it accordingly. Depending on the gravity of the offence, he was always willing to consider mitigating circumstances and commute the sentence, accordingly.
Hadn’t he been lenient with Vinny Bracken, when he’d learned that the fatso’s mum had cancer?
He’d only taken one of his ears, and not both as he’d originally planned.
Practically a saint.
But he’d learned, very early on, that whilst violence was effective, emotional duress was even more so. Find their blind spot, find the person they loved more than themselves, and you were onto a winner. He’d seen every kind of hard man—and woman, come to that—and every one of them would have you believe they were a lone wolf, someone who didn’t give two shits about anybody but themselves.
Tough. Uncompromising.
But, scratch under the surface a bit, and there was always some old nana who’d taken them to the park when they were a kid. Sometimes, it was animals. He’d never forget the time he’d seen a grown man and paid assassin cry his bleedin’ eyes out because somebody broke his dog’s legs.
Pathetic.
It paid to know a person’s pressure points, to know exactly what made them tick, because violence was only part of the story. The rest came from the fear of violence; their own mind making up the shortfall and inevitably conjuring up much worse scenarios than even he might imagine.
Then again, he’d always been very imaginative.
For instance, he was presently occupied in a particularly vivid daydream, one which would result in the ultra-violent death of the two coppers sitting inside a supposedly unmarked vehicle at the end of his street. They were waiting for him to do something, or go somewhere but, when he did, all they would see is a man going about his legitimate business.
Singh had known they were coming, of course; he’d known since the phone call he’d received earlier that day, and had taken the appropriate steps to be prepared. He knew that one of the mugs in the car was on his bankroll, but the other wasn’t ripe for turning, so it was as well to make sure that everything appeared above board.
But he wasn’t really angry with the jokers in the black Mazda.
No, his ange
r was directed at another person, one who should have known better than to try to cross him. Apparently, the first lesson hadn’t been hard enough.
It was time to continue their education.
* * *
While Bobby Singh planned his next move, Ryan and Phillips were admitted into Joan Watson’s bedroom. There, they found a frail woman propped against a mountain of pillows, with a large bandage covering one side of her face and hair, and more bandages on her hands and arms. The rest of her body was tucked beneath a lacy bedspread and the room held a faint odour of antiseptic and floral perfume.
“Mrs Watson? Thank you for agreeing to see us,” Ryan said. It was a cosy space, so he skirted carefully around the edge of the bed to make the introductions.
“I’ll find a chair,” Sally said, distractedly.
“Don’t trouble yourself,” Ryan replied. “We’re fine standing.”
“You boys are from the police?” Joan asked. “Sally said that you’d come from CID?”
Her voice sounded slightly slurred, and Ryan looked at her daughter with a question in his eyes.
“It’s the medication they’ve got her on,” Sally explained. “She gets a bit sleepy.”
Ryan nodded, and turned back.
“We’re very sorry for your loss, Mrs Watson.”
“Thank you,” she said, closing eyes which felt heavy all of a sudden. “Alan was…”
Her breathing hitched, as she battled fresh tears.
“Oh, Mum…” Sally reached across to squeeze her mother’s hand.
“Can I—can I have some water?”
“Of course.” Sally made a quick apology and hurried from the room. “I’ll make some tea, too.”
Once she had left, Joan turned to the pair of them with myopic eyes.
“I didn’t want to say, not in front of Sally—he was her Da’, after all…”
“Didn’t want to say what, Joan?” Ryan asked.
“I didn’t want to say that, really, it came as a bit of a relief.”
“Alan’s death?”
She nodded miserably, and a tear rolled down her bandaged cheek.
“I would never have divorced him,” she said quietly. “Never in a million years. Not so long as I could remember how Alan used to be…rather than the man he became.”
“How d’ you mean, pet?” Phillips asked, forgetting the formalities.
“I knew him my whole life,” Joan explained, pausing for a moment as they heard the kettle beginning to boil in the kitchen down the hall. “Alan was tall and good-looking, just like you.”
She winked at Ryan, and Phillips barely held back a snort. It didn’t matter whether the lass was eighteen or eighty, they were drawn like moths to the flame.
Just as well he liked the bloke so much.
“Anyhow, I loved him since I was twelve years old,” Joan said. “By the time we were sixteen, we were courting, and he started work down the mine, so we could save up to get married.”
Ryan smiled.
“He was hard-working, and he had his principles,” she continued, remembering the man she had married on her twentieth birthday. “He worked hard and loved me and the children.”
“But?” Ryan prompted, when she fell silent.
“The strike changed him,” she said softly. “He was Deputy Chairman of the Mineworker’s Union Lodge in Penshaw. He was a proud man, and not afraid to stand up and be heard. When they decided to strike, he did more than his share. We did our bit, too, setting up cafes and all that. Our Sally even got on the train by herself and went down south to pick up the money from the central Union to keep the families going. Scared to death, she was, of somebody stealing it, but it was all there when she came back. Even Mike…well, he tried his best. But, after that day when Tommy Coke got on the bus…”
Ryan had read about the buses the government had laid on, to entice striking miners to go back to work.
“There was a full-scale riot,” Phillips said, in a distant voice.
Joan nodded, and another tear rolled down her face.
“It was awful. Like nothing we’d ever seen. The police—” She stopped herself, looking between their faces with mild embarrassment. “You two seem like nice lads, but it doesn’t change how I remember that day. The police with their truncheons, and their riot shields, they treated us like the enemy. They knew the men would rise up, but it was as if they wanted it to happen.”
Joan closed her eyes against a sudden jolt of pain that had nothing to do with burned skin.
“Later, after the mine closed, people started asking questions. They wondered how the police always seemed to know where the picket lines would be. Every morning, there’d be four or five police cars waiting for the flying picket, to break them up before they even started.”
Phillips could remember, only too well.
“Well, Alan was one of the most senior in these parts, and somebody started a vicious rumour that it must have been him feeding information to the police, maybe even the government.”
She shook her head, to clear away the bad memories.
“Alan would never have done something so underhand; it just wasn’t in his nature,” she said, tiredly. “But the rumours wouldn’t stop. People even had a name for this…this mole, or spy, or whatever you want to call them. They called them ‘The Worm’.”
“Like the Lambton Worm,” Phillips said, and Joan nodded.
Ryan looked between them in confusion.
“Who or what is the Lambton Worm?” he asked.
“It’s a kind of legend around these parts,” Phillips replied. “John Lambton was heir to the Lambton Estate, and a wealthy landowner. The story goes that, as a boy, he went fishing one day in the River Wear, and pulled out a tiny worm. Thinking it looked a bit funny, Lambton chucked it down a well and forgot all about it. Years later, he joined the Crusades, and the worm grew bigger and bigger until it escaped from the well and coiled itself around a hill—”
“Penshaw Hill?” Ryan guessed.
“Exactly. The worm carried on terrorising local villages and killing the livestock on Lambton’s estate. Brave knights tried to kill it, but nobody succeeded until John returned and slayed the worm in the River Wear.”
Ryan had always thought one of the best things about his adoptive home was its folklore, myths and legends. At home, Anna would often tell him some of the Pagan legends she wrote about as a local historian.
“So, essentially, the worm grows fat off the land while Lambton’s back is turned,” Ryan said, and turned back to Joan.
“I think I understand why your husband would have been so insulted by the accusation.”
“At one time, I thought he might…I thought he might have killed himself. He was out of a job and most of his friends and neighbours thought he’d betrayed them. I’ll never forgive the person who started that rumour; it made Alan angry and bitter and, when he couldn’t find a way to prove they were wrong, he picked up the bottle. It was a slow journey, after that.”
“Do you think there’s anybody who may still hold a grudge, or believe that he was The Worm?”
Joan didn’t have time to answer before her daughter came bustling in with a tea tray.
“Sorry it took so long, I couldn’t find where Simon keeps his tea bags.”
“Thanks, love,” Joan said, and smiled when her daughter leaned down to kiss her forehead. “You’ve been a tower of strength, these past few days. Your Da’ would have been proud.”
Sally gave a watery smile as she handed out cups of tea.
“I was telling these boys about how he…well, he changed a bit, over the years.”
“He was a drunk, you mean.”
“Sally…”
“Well, it’s the truth,” her daughter said, turning to the two detectives. “I’m sad that he died the way he did, of course I am. But he was an alcoholic, and gave my mother a difficult life.”
“It was all the things they said,” Joan protested. “Anybody would have been devastated, afte
r all he’d done to fight for miners’ rights.”
Sally sighed and sank down on the edge of the bed.
“I know, Mum. I remember everything he did, to try to help.”
“He just became obsessive,” Joan said. “Every day, he’d try and think about what happened during those months in the strike, to see if he’d missed something…some important detail.”
She shook her head, sadly.
“Did he keep any papers, Mrs Watson?”
“Yes, but they’ll have gone up in the fire,” she said. “Alan wasn’t one for computers, really.”
Ryan nodded, and then turned to the brief statement Joan had already given to the first responding officer, the previous Friday.
“Tell me, Mrs Watson, how did you find Alan when you went into the living room?”
“Lying there, on the sofa,” she said, in a choked voice. “There was fire all around…on the carpet, and creeping up the sides of the sofa. It was burning my feet—”
“Was he lying face-up or face-down, Joan?”
Ryan deliberately kept his voice professional, to focus her mind on the facts rather than on the horror of what those facts meant.
“He was…he was face-up,” she remembered. “One of his arms was hanging down, and it was burning. I could smell it…”
“And, was there anything covering his face, Joan?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I-I’m sorry, I hardly remember. The floor was on fire, and I didn’t have any shoes on. I just ran across and grabbed both of his arms, then heaved him across the floor as fast as I could. I knew…I knew he was dead, but I had to try. I had to try.”
She let out a sob, and Sally silently dabbed at the tears, flashing a warning glance at the two detectives.
“I think that’s enough for one day,” she said, and Ryan nodded.
“Just one last question, Mrs Watson, if you can manage it. Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt Alan?”
Joan raised her hand as if to touch her face, then remembered the bandages and set it down again.