Beneath the Ashes

by Jane Isaac

  “I’ve been watching his movements for a while. I heard his truck pass that night, guessed he’d come home from the pub. After about twenty minutes I drove to the farmhouse. His truck was parked outside. The kitchen light was on. I was expecting him to be at home alone.”

  “How did you propose to get him to come with you?”

  “I’d acquired…” She cleared her throat. “A gun, two bullets just in case.”

  “Where did you get it from?”

  Sheila looked down at her clenched hands. “I was given it.”

  “By whom?”

  “I’m not prepared to say.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I made him drive.”

  “I thought you said he was dazed.”

  “He seemed to manage okay.”

  Davies paused a moment. She was accustomed to suspects being evasive, making up stories. But what surprised her about Sheila was that she delivered it with such sincerity. And not an ounce of remorse. “I’ve been looking for him from the moment Alicia died. I swore if he ever came back…”

  “Why the barn?” Davies said.

  Sheila looked up at her. “I didn’t want him to have an easy death. He didn’t deserve that after what he did to Alicia. I wanted him to suffer.”

  “But why call the fire service?”

  “Why not? He would have been dead by then.”

  Davies let the silence linger for a while. Keane’s pen scratched away on the paper beside her. “It must have been difficult to manoeuvre him into the barn,” she said eventually.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re in your early sixties. Do you expect me to believe—”

  Sheila snorted. “I’m stronger than I look.”

  “But you did have help, didn’t you?”

  Sheila’s face hardened.

  “Somebody very close to you helped, didn’t they? Somebody with a vested interest in the suspect, just like you.”

  “I did it on my own. I managed.”

  “Oh, come on. You don’t expect me to believe that he didn’t struggle. At all?” Davies sat forward. “You see we know that the victim was knocked unconscious when he was left at the barn, before the fire was started. And we know your son, Mark, was there with you that night. He helped you lift the victim into the car, take him to the barn.”

  “You can’t prove anything.” Sheila hissed.

  “We already have Mark’s admission. You can’t protect him anymore.”

  There was a deafening silence. “Do you have kids, Detective?” Shelia asked.

  Davies stared at her, said nothing.

  Sheila turned to the side, momentarily lost in her own little world. “My husband wasn’t a good man. Oh, he was lovely in front of my parents, the perfect gentleman, but when we were on our own… He wanted to take what he believed was rightfully his, before I was ready to give it. I fell pregnant, we got married. My parents were old-fashioned. That’s the way it was then.”

  “Can we—”

  “My daughter, Christine, was a daddy’s girl from the moment she was born,” Sheila continued, cutting through the interruption. “Never content unless she was sitting on his knee, beside him on the sofa, watching at the window for him to arrive home. Even through her early teenage years when most girls turned to their mothers…” She shook her head. “Never her. Always her father. And when he left he took her with him. She was fifteen.” Sheila met Davies’ gaze. “I’ll never forget the look on his face. He had his beautiful girl. I rarely saw her after that, he continued to turn her against me, blame me for our separation, until she wouldn’t have anything to do with me. He lavished attention on her. My son, the only other time he’d showed any interest in me, was always pushed aside for that girl.” The chair beside her squeaked as Keane shifted about, but Davies ignored him, willing her to continue.

  “I wasn’t invited to my daughter’s wedding, but I did hear that she moved into his house in Harlestone Village, Northamptonshire after her dad died. Only an hour away from here. I used to drive across there, walk around the village and sit in the churchyard in the hope of seeing her children when they were young. Sad when I think of it. Skulking around behind sunglasses. Not that she ever recognised me when I did catch a glimpse. Alicia got in contact with me, just after her eighteenth birthday. Apparently she traced me online. Tried loads of Bucktons in the Warwickshire area until she found the right one.”

  “How did she contact you?” Davies asked.

  “By phone at first. I’ll never forget the day I met her. She didn’t look anything like Christine, apart from the brown corkscrew curls. She was small, petite, with soft brown eyes and a pretty face. And there was a sensitivity about her that she certainly didn’t get from her mother. It was awkward at first. She came armed with a million questions – why her mother and I didn’t see each other, why I hadn’t tried to find her, what had happened between us. In fact, it was my son that really brought us together. Her uncle. He was here, the second time she visited. They were so similar, shared an interest in animals. He brought his terrier over and they really hit it off. After that she’d drive across to see us in Warwickshire every month or so. None of us mentioned her parents. Our relationship was new, fragile, and we didn’t want to sour it. I did ask once about her sister, but she didn’t want to talk about her. We used to have horses sometimes, in the field across the road, and she’d always go across and see them. I think that’s what she wanted to do really, work with horses. She was on a gap year, supposedly looking at university courses.” Sheila’s face darkened. “We didn’t see her after the incident. In fact, we didn’t know anything about it until a while afterwards. She cancelled. Twice. Ignored my texts. Mark was distraught. He’s never married, saw her almost as a daughter. Then one day she turned up, out of the blue, and told me what had happened. It was awful.” Her eyes flooded with tears. “She sat at my kitchen table and shivered the whole time. She was like an empty shell, every ounce of life sucked from her.”

  Sheila swiped a tear from her cheek. “We helped her, as much as we could, to prepare for the trial. Of course, we couldn’t be there. I sent messages every day, little texts to let her know we were thinking of her. He was in custody. I thought the trial was a formality. I followed it online.” She closed her eyes. “When the not guilty verdict came out, I was floored. I couldn’t believe it.

  “We didn’t see her for a while after that, about four months, I think. Mark was frantic, we both were, but in a way I guessed she needed some time. Her family were around her. When she did come she looked ill, ghost-like. That was the last time we saw her. I never heard about the suicide until…” Her face hardened. “So you see, I had to do something? None of us expect to bury our children, but our grandchildren? It’s inconceivable. Mark wanted to hunt him down, there and then, tear him apart. But it was only the shock talking. What good would that do?

  “I’m not sure exactly when I changed my mind,” she continued. “As time passed by, I couldn’t bear the idea of him out there, laughing, living, while Alicia was… It ate away at me, but I wanted to plan it out, make him suffer. Just like we had. Just like Alicia did. So I decided to find out as much as I could about him. I researched his name online, found out where he’d lived; went to visit his mother, although she refused to see me. I copied all the photos I could find of him from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram onto my hard drive and spent hours looking through them. I went to Northampton, sat outside cafés to see if I could spot him, watched his movements online. He still had the audacity to drink in the same pub!” She looked up, incredulous. “I was getting close to him. Then suddenly, almost overnight, everything stopped. No more social media. I went across to Northampton, visited the pub, asked after him. And that’s when I heard he’d gone away. Abroad somewhere, that’s all they knew.

  “Part of me was relieved, the other side distraught. What if he attacked another innocent girl, one as sweet and young as our Alicia? I couldn’t bear the idea he would ruin some
one else’s life. As much as I tried to move on, it sat there, niggling away at the back of my mind. He’d ruined her life, wrecked those of her family and friends, yet he was free to do it all again. I even joined a support group of other women in similar situations. Thought it might help my son, although he wouldn’t go. They were really nice. It helped for a while.”

  “When did you find out he was back?” Davies asked.

  Sheila met her gaze for a split second. “I remember the first day I spotted him. I was driving back from Stratford town on the A46. It was like déjà vu, even though I’d never seen him in person before, I’d studied so many pictures of him. I remember coming home, searching through them, convincing myself that I must be wrong. A few weeks later I saw him climbing out of a tractor outside the entrance to Upton Grange. He was with another man. I heard him speak and straight away the accent drove into me. Alicia said he had a Northamptonian accent, he dragged some of his words. I wasn’t really sure what she meant until I heard it. I remember driving up to the farmhouse to see Janine, pretending I was out of milk, to find out more about him. She was happy to talk to me, told me he’d joined them over a year ago, was surprised I hadn’t seen him before. It was her who told me his name was Evan Baker. Then she mentioned he’d been abroad.

  “I raced home, googled Evan Baker. Nothing of any significance came up in the Stratford area. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, that I was going mad.

  “It was the next time I saw him, a month or so later, that I really knew. He was closing a gate to a cattle field and the furtive way he looked at me, those shifty eyes. It had to be him.

  “I could hardly believe he was working locally. He wouldn’t have known about my relationship to Alicia. I was estranged from her mother so we’d never met. I bet he thought he was safely away from the prying eyes of her Northampton family, where people might recognise him. The world’s a small place, isn’t it?”

  Davies ignored the question. “What did you do next?”

  “I watched him for a while. It’s not easy on these quiet country roads, I had to be careful. He seemed to spend a lot of time at the barn, so I thought that’s where he should die.” Sheila looked directly at Davies. “He raped my granddaughter, took away her life. He deserved to die.”

  “He was acquitted.” Davies said.

  “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty.”

  “What about his girlfriend?”

  “I felt sorry for her at first. In some ways I thought I’d done her a favour, she could have been his next victim. Just like Alicia. But when she gave that newspaper interview, talking about him as if he was some kind of saint who’d been wronged, I couldn’t let her get away with that.”

  “So you went to her flat.”

  Sheila nodded.

  “What about her friend?”

  “I didn’t ask him to come by.”

  “A police inspector was injured, trying to save them.”

  “I did what I had to do. For Alicia,” Sheila replied. “Just wish I’d had the guts to join her when I had the chance.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Jackman reached his arm out to the bedside table. He felt the dressing on his tricep catch the end of the wood and winced. Extending the arm again, he grasped his watch and pulled it. 10.30am. Monday 17th August. Right now he should be sitting in front of an interview panel, facing grilling questions on his ability to manage, his views on current policing policy, his ideas for taking the organisation forward. Instead he was laid up in a hospital bed. He clenched his teeth. All that preparation, for nothing.

  He checked his messages – one from Celia saying she’d arrived, another from Carmela wishing him the best of luck for his interview, sent yesterday. She obviously hadn’t heard about the fire.

  Jackman remembered very little of the last twenty-four hours. His last recollection was of flames around his right arm, a burning sensation, falling to his knees. Nancy. He’d gone into the building to rescue Nancy. He recalled her limp body. Had he been too late?

  He remembered the visit to London, the revelation of the support group. Maybe he should have sent a team straight around to check on Nancy. Maybe he shouldn’t have waited to check out the links. If he’d done that, if the police had arrived minutes earlier…

  The door opened and a nurse wandered in, a smile lighting up her face as she made eye contact. “Lovely to see you’re awake,” she said, exposing a row of perfectly white teeth.

  Jackman pulled himself to a seated position. “How long have I been here?” His voice was husky when he spoke, his mouth dry.

  “You don’t remember? You were brought in last night, with a man and a woman. Nasty burn to the top of your arm and smoke inhalation, but you’ll be fine.”

  “What about the others?” He was sitting up now, staring at her anxiously.

  “The man, Ryan, has been moved to the burns unit. He’s stable now.”

  A flashback: emerging from the flat. The weight of the body he was carrying pulling him down. Heat. He couldn’t see anything through the smoke…

  Jackman felt something wrap around his good arm, snapping him back to the present. The nurse pressed a button, checked her watch.

  Jackman coughed. His throat was raw. “What about the woman?”

  “I’m not sure, to be honest.” She was only half listening, watching the monitor in front of her. “Blood pressure’s fine,” she said. The Velcro made a loud ripping noise as she removed it from his arm.

  “Could you find out for me?” Jackman asked. “It’s important. Her name is Nancy Faraday.”

  “Nancy,” she repeated. “Okay, I’ll go and ask.”

  Jackman massaged his temples. He could see Nancy’s pleading eyes in the incident room on Thursday, feel her frail body flopped over his arms.

  The door pulled open and the young nurse’s face appeared. “Nancy has been transferred to a ward,” she said. “Some minor burns to her legs, knocks and bruises, but she is going to be fine.” She smiled again at the clear relief in his face. “We’re a bit short of ward beds at the moment, I’m afraid. As soon as one becomes available we’ll get you transferred too. Shouldn’t be too much longer. Your colleague’s been here nearly all morning. She’s gone now, but I promised to call her when you woke up. Is that okay?”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll ring her myself.” He plastered a smile on his face and waited for her to retreat.

  Jackman sat there for a moment, listening to his own breaths. Thank goodness Nancy was alive. A huge weight lifted from his torso. He swung his feet around, hung them off the edge of the bed and stood. He only wavered slightly. Good start. If he was still in A&E, it wasn’t too far to the exit and there were bound to be taxis nearby. There were always taxis at hospitals. The last thing he wanted to do was to wait around to be put in a ward filled with patients.

  ***

  Nancy pushed open the door and froze. Ryan’s eyes were closed, his left arm and leg wrapped in bandages and elevated. An intravenous drip fed a clear liquid into his right arm. Low breaths of a ventilator filled the room. She could feel the air seeping out of her lungs as she scanned his body, gripping on to the edge of life.

  Her eyes eventually locked with Margaret’s, Ryan’s mother, who was seated at his bedside. His father, John, stood behind her, resting a soothing hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry.” Nancy said to her. The inadequacy of her brittle words stuck in her throat.

  Margaret shook her head. “It’s not your fault.”

  Nancy had known Ryan’s parents for almost six years, since she and Ryan had met in secondary school, two young kids going out together. Margaret had ferried them to the cinema in the early days, dropped them in town, at the swimming pool, invited Nancy into their home. She was a young mother, only late thirties herself, although she’d aged ten years over the past twenty-four hours and today she looked pallid and drawn as her saddened eyes stared at her only son.

  The last thing Nancy remembered was Ryan’s shocked face in the
doorway of the flat, watching him stagger forward, collapse beside the armchair where he’d laid awkwardly. The old woman lighting the match.

  It should have been her, lying here, like this.

  When Nancy had woken up in hospital, Detective Russell had come to see her and explained that her colleague had rescued her, how he’d gone back in for Ryan. The fire had taken a hold by then. The flames had caught them. For Ryan, this meant second-degree burns to his left arm and leg. He was unconscious; his body went into shock on arrival at the hospital.

  A tear dripped off the edge of her chin.

  “Come on, love. He’s going to be okay,” Margaret said. “They’re just keeping him in an induced coma while they control the pain.”

  Nancy nodded gratefully, unable to speak. Her eyes flitted back to the bed. A thought struck her. Ryan was left-handed. The burns affected the left side of his body. It was going to take him a long time to recover from this, to be able to go back to work, drive, function like he had before. And there would be scars…

  A nurse entered the room. “I’m sorry, but we can only have two people in here at once,” she said. Her tone was soft, accustomed to dealing with tearful relatives and families in difficult circumstances.

  “I’ll—” Ryan’s father moved towards the door.

  “No, don’t please.” Nancy stepped back. “I’ll come back later.”

  The walls closed in on Nancy as she wandered down to the waiting area. Everything was a blur. She didn’t know how this had happened. She’d thought she was safe.

  She grabbed a tissue from the box on the table, dabbed at her eyes as she recalled the woman’s story. Her granddaughter had died. Committed suicide. Because of the rape charge. Nancy worked her way through the past three months, searching for clues, little signs that might indicate a violent tendency. She had immediately assumed Evan to be wrongly accused, but perhaps it was more a case of wrongly acquitted.

  The door opened and Karen and Becca entered. Becca rushed to her side.