by Susan Hill
‘Picked it up in the gutter.’
‘Work, does it?’
‘Never tried. Takes pictures though. I was playing around with it and something went flash bang wallop. Took a picture of them shelves there. They come out all right.’
Simon scrolled down, working out the way the unfamiliar mobile worked quickly enough, scrolling down through the digital pictures Nobby had taken, which turned out to be bits of wall, stretches of icy grass, an upside-down tree, the back end of a cat, a parked car, a run of fencing. They were mainly taken after dark and either vivid in the flash or too dim.
He went on scrolling. Pictures of women shopping in the Lanes. Women loading car boots with groceries at the supermarket. Random men, walking. More dark shots. And then a bungalow. Another. A doorway. Dark. Dark. A van. A car, too out of focus.
Elinor Sanders, walking up the path of her bungalow. A removal van outside it. Her open front door. The bungalow lit by a flash, curtains drawn.
‘I’m going to have to take this in, Nobby.’
‘What for? You won’t find anything indecent on there, I don’t do indecent.’
‘I know. You took quite a few pics up at Duchess of Cornwall Close, though. We might find something useful on those.’
‘Help yourself, only I want it back.’
‘You’ll get it back but I can’t promise when.’
‘And I want a receipt.’ He lit his cigarette.
Simon did not carry evidence bags these days but he poked about until he found a couple of plastic food bags on a shelf. They seemed unused, though they’d probably be contaminated with something or other, like everything in Nobby’s shack.
‘Thanks, Nobby. Thanks for the tea. And remember what I said. Keep out of our hair for a bit.’
‘You’re all right, Mr Serrailler. Sure you don’t want to try a roll-up?’
‘Dead sure. And you watch lighted matches and cigs in this tinderbox. Don’t want you carried out with your lungs full of smoke.’
‘How long have I lived here? How long have I smoked these?’
‘Too long. Cheers, Nobby.’
‘And don’t send those twelve-year-olds in their panda cars down here again neither.’
‘Behave yourself and I won’t.’
At first, when I woke up I used to be confused, just for a second or two. Who am I? I couldn’t work it out. I’m not him any more? No. I’m him then. Right. Never going to be him again. Right. It got better. I never do it now. I didn’t. I do. Shit.
I’ve started again. And I’m glad I have because I realised that I didn’t want to lose touch with him. Because that meant losing touch with me. The born one. Not the invented one.
When I look in the mirror now, though, I’m not surprised any more. Not surprised I’ve got a shaved head, not surprised it’s contacts not glasses. Always hated wearing glasses so that’s been a good thing. Not surprised by the moustache.
The contact lenses are brown. Ordinary, muddy sort of brown. Whereas Alan Keyes’s eyes are blue.
Surprising how quickly it didn’t matter what I looked like. Funny that. It’s what’s inside my head. That’s where it was harder. But I thought I’d got it. Well, I had. I could reel off all the new stuff. Turned out I’m a good learner. That’s why I could do the plumbing course. And I could tell you ‘my’ schoolmates and neighbours and names of my sister’s kids. The sister I haven’t got. I mean, I have. But I haven’t.
In the end, though, I missed him and I wanted him back. I wanted to be him again, and it was never going to happen and that was what started doing my head in.
Then it came to me. What I had to do.
And it worked. When I walked out that night, quietly up the hill and into that dark little street, when I went up to her bungalow, as soon as I did all that, I knew it had worked. I was him. I hadn’t lost who I was after all.
I’m still him.
And I can be him again any time I want. I know what I have to do.
Only thing was, I never meant it to happen again so fast. I never wanted to do that second one. What sort of monster do you think I am?
But I was worrying that she’d seen something, seen me, even a glimpse, even in the dark, even across the grass, so I had to do it. I’d no choice, had I? Just in case.
Maybe she didn’t see me. Maybe I imagined it.
But I couldn’t take that risk, could I?
Forty-three
‘AH, CAT. DO come in.’
Judge Gerald Hanbury lived in one of Lafferton’s oldest houses, tucked away behind a high wall near the cathedral. Few people knew a house was there at all. A plain door in the wall had a single bell with an electronic eye beside it, set into the brick. Cat had rung and there had been a slight sound. She pushed the wooden door and it opened.
Ahead was a handsome Queen Anne mansion at the end of a gravel path, with two rectangles of perfect lawn on either side of it. The house was in Pevsner. ‘One of the finest examples of this style of perfectly proportioned town house in the country. Fault cannot be found with its design or its execution.’
Gerald Hanbury had been a High Court judge until the previous year, a man much respected for his coolness, his intelligence, balance and fairness, and feared for the way he came down on anyone not entirely respectful of the traditions and solemnities of the law. He was generous to counsel, never bullied juniors, was never patronising to witnesses and never tolerant of careless policemen. But there was a touch of distance, an austereness about him, which kept some people at arm’s length. They mistook it for disapproval and severity but Cat had soon discovered that neither was the case. John Lowther had been a very different chair of trustees of Imogen House, much warmer, but he had lacked the necessary degree of ruthlessness when required to take unpopular decisions. Lowther had resigned because he felt guilty that he had introduced Leo Fison as head of a new fund-raising sub-committee, though he had been supported by the entire body of Trustees, not one of whom had laid a speck of blame on him later, for Fison or what he had done. But John Lowther was a man of conscience and he had decided his own position was untenable.
Hanbury was altogether steelier and Cat had felt great distress over the decision to close Imogen House to inpatients. She had also felt downgraded and devalued, in spite of reassurances.
Now, Hanbury had asked her to have a drink, talk to him. She liked him, in spite of it all, and she knew that he had precious little alternative to the draconian measures he had had to take. If he had not moved fast, the financial situation had been bad enough to have precipitated complete closure.
Judge Hanbury had been widowed as a relatively young man and his wife had left him with two small sons. He had brought them up himself, lovingly but in a slightly austere way, and married again much later in life, a formidable fellow judge in her fifties, previously single. Judge Nancy Cutler was the scourge of incompetent barristers, muddled witnesses and any form of disorder in her court, but famous for her generosity to women defendants and plaintiffs, especially those treated harshly by police or press, and in particular those brave enough to stand up against rapists and brutal partners.
Cat had met her a couple of times at formal occasions. She and Hanbury made an elegant and distinguished couple.
It was Nancy who opened the door now.
I am a confident woman, Cat thought. Yes, on the whole that is true. I have a good medical degree, I have been a practising hospital doctor and GP, I am clinical director of a hospice, I have three children, I run a house, I have been up against a number of terrible situations and come through. I dress quite well, I take care with my appearance. But faced with this sort of woman, my self-confidence drains out through the soles of my feet and I stand here feeling a mess, stumbling over my words, more or less as I might if I were up before this woman on a charge.
‘Dr Deerbon, how nice to see you.’
She was tall with a good figure but was not over-thin. Her hair was held up in a chignon with two combs, her make-up was discreet but a
pplied as if by a professional. She wore a taupe dress and jacket which had not been bought on the high street. And her smile was warm and genuine. Why had she waited until her fifties to marry? Career? Presumably.
But there was, Cat thought, a shadow of something about her face, an anxiety or a wariness. Then it was gone, and she was leading Cat into the surprisingly informal and homely sitting room, where a large ginger cat sat on a linen-covered sofa and opened its topaz eyes briefly and haughtily before recurling itself back to sleep.
‘My husband’s just taking a phone call. Can I get you a gin, a Martini, a glass of wine?’
Cat asked for wine. A bottle of chilled Sancerre appeared with the judge who came in briskly, apologising, and then, like many men who have no small talk, embarking on the reason Cat had come, the subject of the hospice.
‘I know how much you’ve put into Imogen House,’ he said, after the glasses were filled, ‘and I know how you prized the excellence of our inpatient wards. But it’s only because we’ve taken this big step that we can survive. None of which helps you, I know. You’ve lost half a job, you don’t altogether approve of the day-care-only model – and you deserve an apology.’
He had an imposing presence and he still spoke as if he had the full attention of a court. His voice was strong, measured and with the slightest hint of Edinburgh Scots. He wore a pale yellow cashmere sweater over a dark blue open-necked shirt, with dark blue cord trousers. A touch of the dandy, Cat thought.
‘Tell me what you feel now. Tell me if you think you can work happily in the new set-up, eventually at least.’
Cat told him. Nancy Cutler had gone out, but returned now and sat quietly listening and looking at Cat with complete attention. Her Honour Judge Cutler. And after an hour and two large glasses of wine, Cat felt that everything she had said had been taken on board and understood. She had the full confidence of the chair of trustees, which meant the whole board, and Hanbury had suggested she take some days out to visit other day-care hospices, to study how they worked in practice and see if Lafferton could not only learn from them but bring something new and some real improvements to the model.
‘We would pay,’ he said, ‘that goes without saying. These would be legitimate expenses – visits like that can only boost our profile, and I think they’d be of real interest to you.’
‘I agree. But I wouldn’t want my expenses. They’d be small and in our present precarious situation it would be wrong. Thank you for the suggestion though. I’ll start making some arrangements.’
He also approved of her plan to do a PhD.
‘When I retire,’ Nancy said, to a short laugh from her husband, ‘I’m going to forget all about the law and take another degree altogether.’
‘What in?’
‘Medieval palaeography. I want to spend days and days with eleventh-century manuscripts.’
That follows, Cat thought as she left. A structured, disciplined study in which detail mattered, and also a rather rarefied one, completely detached from everyday life.
They were a compatible pair, complementing one another, and who doubtless enjoyed enriching and mainly intellectual conversations at dinner. There was obviously friendliness and affection between them and they seemed completely in tune. But love?
It was seven forty. Silke, the sweet German au pair she now shared with another family, was at the farmhouse, getting supper and doing bedtime with Felix. Since Molly left, Silke had become a reliable alternative.
Cat had parked in front of Simon’s building and walked round to the Hanburys’. Now, as she bent her head against the biting wind that was whipping down Cathedral Close, she saw that the lights were on in his flat. His car was parked next to her own but there was no other, which probably meant no Rachel, though she sent him a text all the same.
In? Am outside but no prob if busy.
Reply came back In. Cooking. Come up.
‘I’ve been living off bananas and cheese sarnies for too long. Sick of it.’
Cat looked into the heavy pan full of beef, vegetables, thick gravy, watched him pour a glass of red wine into it and stir it round. Her brother’s cooking was spasmodic, consisted of about four dishes, was never based on any recipe and never failed.
‘Stay?’
‘Love to. I’ll text Silke.’
‘Good, because I need to talk to you.’
They sat at one end of the long elm table, with candles and a bottle of burgundy, and thick fresh bread to dip into the casserole. Opposite Cat on the white wall, lit carefully in the way Simon always planned his picture lighting, was the drawing of their mother he had done just before she died. It was in a distressed heavy gold frame which might have drowned out the pencil and charcoal lines but somehow did nothing of the sort. Every time she saw it, Cat was hit both by its beauty and by the way he had caught Meriel’s warmth, the generosity of heart that had always been coupled with a slight austerity of expression. It also caught her innate toughness of character.
‘Leave that to me in your will?’
Simon smiled. ‘I wouldn’t let it go anywhere else.’ He cut the crusty bread and handed a slice to her on the point of the knife. ‘Hannah,’ he said. ‘Have you talked to her?’
Cat put her fork down, a faint nausea rising together with the memory of the night she had learned where her daughter had been found and what might have happened to her if she had not been.
‘The thing is, I’d talk to her but I think that now the dust has settled maybe it ought to come from someone else. What you’ve said will have been mixed up with all your own emotion about it. What I might say would be some of the same, and also like “Uncle Simon the copper, boring on”. She still might not take me quite seriously enough.’
‘Who else is there? I wouldn’t want to ask Judith or Dad at the moment . . .’
Simon shook his head and poured another glass of wine. Cat put her hand over her own glass.
‘Steph,’ he said, ‘Ben Vanek’s wife. If I took Hannah into the station and got Steph to sit with her in one of the interview rooms we use for sensitive cases – meaning, there’s a sofa and a pot plant – it would really get home. Steph’s good, she’d hit the right note, make her understand what could have happened and stress how serious it could have been. But she wouldn’t terrify her or make her feel as if she was some sort of young offender.’
‘God, poor Hanny.’
‘I know. But it might have been much poorer Hanny. I still can’t believe I was the one to drive by and that I actually turned my head and saw her. I could just as easily have roared off on the green light.’
Cat shivered. Since Hannah had run away she had shivered involuntarily quite often, even woke in the night shivering.
‘I’ll fix it up and you can bring her in – maybe one afternoon after school?’
‘All right. Thanks. One thing though . . . the best person to try and get Sam to see the error of his ways really is you. I can’t get through to him, Si, and I sometimes just don’t recognise him. I can put up with him being grouchy and monosyllabic, and I know how to snap him out of it, usually anyway. But he is being downright vile to Hannah. That’s the reason she left that night. God, think about it. A twelve-year-old doesn’t want to come back home but stands in the middle of town on her own on a bitterly cold night, frightened and distressed, because her fourteen-year-old brother is bullying her so badly. I feel as if I’m living out one of those awful stories in the tabloids when social services get brought in.’
‘Something’s going on and it’s not just adolescence. It can’t be.’
‘So find out what it is. And bring him up short, Si. This mustn’t ever happen again.’
‘The problem is I’m not sure when. The best thing would be if the weekend stays quiet. I can just drop in casually and take him out for an hour or so.’
‘He’s got a match on Saturday afternoon and it’s an away so he won’t be back till after seven.’
‘Sunday morning then, all other things being equal.
’
‘Right . . . How’s Rachel?’
Her brother looked up, and at once she saw his expression blank as he pulled down the old, invisible portcullis.
‘Fine.’
‘I guess the job doesn’t give you much time with her either at the moment.’
‘No. Want some more of this?’
Cat shook her head. ‘I’ll have to get back after a quick coffee. Silke doesn’t stay overnight.’
Simon got up. Cat removed the plates. The coffee was made. They sat on the white sofa in his beautiful long sitting room, perfectly amicably, yet a hundred miles apart.
‘Have you got any further forward with these killings?’
‘A bit. Got some files to go through here.’ He pointed to the pile on the table.
‘It’s looking as if we just might have a breakthrough, which God knows we need.’
Cat finished her coffee. ‘I’ll leave you to it.’
Five minutes later she was driving out of the close. Rachel’s name had not been mentioned again.
Forty-four
AFTER CAT HAD gone Simon cleared the table, poured himself another black coffee and opened the large file Nathan had brought. He also opened his laptop and slid in the CD.
He knew what was coming but, in general, a detective is well used to seeing unpleasant sights, and he went through the photos carefully, examining each one in detail.
The images of three elderly women, dead in Yorkshire, could have come from the crime scenes at Duchess of Cornwall Close. The way the bodies, all of them wearing nightdresses, one a woollen cardigan on top, had been posed sitting in front of mirrors, the way they had been strangled, the yellow-and-green electrical flex . . . the women were different, but everything else was startlingly the same. He clicked through more photographs, close-ups, pictures of beds, doors, windows, wardrobes, dressing tables, mirrors, then of the women’s faces, necks, hands. And feet. Bare feet with freshly clipped toenails. He looked quickly through exterior shots of a complex of sheltered flats and bungalows, older than those in Lafferton but not dissimilar in layout or type.