by Gwyn GB
19
Rachel, March 1994
Today Rachel’s grief is an angry snarling cat, disdainful of the world and hiding her fear behind claws. Tomorrow it might find her at the bottom of a pit; dark, slippery mud sucking her down. A place where only despair can survive.
The unlucky recipient of her cat’s claws is the Assistant Head from school, Miss Mayhew, who has come searching for her when her persistent non-appearance had been reported and it became clear their home phone isn’t working. In truth, Miss Mayhew had also come because of the school netball team she coaches. They have an important match next weekend and Rachel is a key player.
It’s far from perfect timing. Rachel had been trying to make an omelette, but nothing had gone right. She dropped egg shell in, burnt her wrist on the pan and it ended up more scrambled egg than anything resembling a neat flat omelette. It makes her angry, nothing going right. Then when the burn on her wrist stings and pains, she cries - hot angry tears. To add insult to injury her father just stares at the lunch she has struggled to make and while she eats hers, she watches his going cold, congealing on the plate in front of him.
Ten minutes later Miss Mayhew raps on the front door.
At first, Rachel just freezes. She knows it isn’t George and Reg - they never go to the front door. She waits for her father to respond.
The caller knocks again.
‘Dad?’ she questions.
He looks at her, something flickering in his eyes, but not quite a spark enough to light a response.
Rachel opens the front door to Miss Mayhew, which is both a relief and a panic. Her familiarity, a face from her old life, is comforting; but Rachel also realises she has come to find out why she’s not been at school.
‘Rachel!’ Miss Mayhew exclaims, as though seeing her is the last thing she is expecting. She gives her a wavering smile. ‘Are you OK? Have you been ill?’
Rachel shakes her head. She isn’t sure what to do, but she guesses she should let her in. She steps aside and opens the door wider.
Miss Mayhew takes her cue, stepping over the threshold nervously, a shy cat venturing into a neighbour’s house.
‘How are you?’ Miss Mayhew tries again.
Rachel swallows hard.
‘We missed you at school and netball practice. Your telephone seems to be out of order. We were worried so I thought…’ She has followed Rachel into the sitting room and the sight of her father crumpled in his chair, a half-eaten plate of egg yellow mush on the table beside him, makes her stop. ‘Mr Hill. How are you? I’ve come to see Rachel. She’s missed quite a few days at school.’
Her dad looks at Miss Mayhew. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
Rachel feels his discomfort, sees Miss Mayhew staring and wants her to stop looking at her dad like that. ‘It’s my mum,’ she says to her. ‘My mother died. She was killed in a car crash two weeks ago.’
Her dad looks at Rachel, eyes tearing up and Miss Mayhew’s hand flits to her mouth.
‘Oh my God. I’m so sorry.’ Now it is her turn to feel uncomfortable, imposing on their grief. ‘I, we had no idea.’
Rachel drops her head, she doesn’t want to see the new look on Miss Mayhew’s familiar face.
‘Is there anything we can do?’
Rachel shakes her head. Her dad is staring at the floor.
‘Please if I can help at all…’ her teacher continues, ‘I’ll make sure everyone at school knows. We’ll arrange that you can catch up on what you’ve missed.’
Rachel gives a half smile, more wry than thankful. Miss Mayhew eyes the door.
‘Thank you,’ her dad’s voice makes both of them start and they turn to look at him. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he repeats.
It’s Miss Mayhew’s turn for a half smile, only hers is more sympathy than anything else. She takes her cue. ‘I’d better get going.’ She looks at Rachel, eyebrows angular furrows of concern. ‘You take care and I’ll come back soon. Just let us know when you’re ready to come back to school.’
Rachel is irritated by her sympathy. She’s not sure why, but she is. ‘I don’t care about school,’ she blurts out, because it’s true. She doesn’t. She doesn’t care about anything, her life has been torn apart. There are no boundaries, no roads to follow. She’s adrift on a sea of emotional upheaval with no rock to cling to.
‘I know it’s hard,’ Miss Mayhew’s eyebrows furrow deeper, ‘but you might find coming back to school, being with your friends, takes your mind off things.’
That’s when Rachel’s cat claws spring, finding a bravery she didn’t know she possessed, ‘Do you think school will make me forget my mum is dead?’
Miss Mayhew takes a startled breath. ‘No… I’
‘I don’t want to go to school. We are fine. We don’t need your help.’
The Assistant Head teacher looks at the slight 11-year-old girl in front of her, body rigid, jaw clenched and hands in tight fists. ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she says to them both again. She’s no match for a child’s grief. She takes a deep breath and turns, letting herself out the house.
Behind her Rachel watches through the window, eyes glaring, until she sees her drive out of their yard.
The presence of a stranger in his house seems to spur her father into action - only it isn’t positive. An hour after Miss Mayhew has driven her white Mini away, he gets up and goes to their drinks cabinet lifting out a bottle of whisky and a dusty tumbler. He sits down and pours himself a glass, then another. He doesn’t stop until he can’t see to pour, and his legs are unable to lift him from the chair. Then finally, he sleeps.
Rachel can’t bear to watch him so she goes upstairs to her room where she clears some space on top of her chest of drawers. She rummages in the boxes in her wardrobe, a jumble of childhood memories and imagination: plastic toys, broken pens and thrown away make-up containers, ribbons and rotting elastic bands, and an envelope with photographs. Aunt Alice, her dad’s sister, had visited with a friend. It had been a fun week of picnics and trips. Afterwards, the friend, Trudi, had posted Rachel copies of some photos she’d taken.
The envelope is busting with laughter and smiles, and there’s one of Rachel and her mother. She’s standing, her mum’s arm holding her close. Nothing but happiness on their faces which are framed by a sunny Norfolk coastline.
She props the photograph up on the drawers, next to the bottle of Angel and a small ceramic cow her mother had bought her one summer. They sit there, gathering the dust which silently settles on the whole of their house.
The food in the fridge, freezer and cupboards runs out and Rachel is forced to walk a mile to the village shop for supplies. Once the whisky dries up, her father also makes the effort to go, bringing back a mismatch of basic foodstuffs and the occasional bar of chocolate for Rachel. When she eats it the sweet, creamy texture makes her feel guilty. How can she be enjoying something when her mum lies alone, cold, unable to taste life’s pleasures?
Eventually, Rachel plucks up the courage to ask her father about the funeral.
‘Funeral?’ he questions, the very thought seeming an abhorrence. ‘I can’t go to a funeral.’
Rachel’s heart beats faster with distress. She doesn’t want to upset him but she can’t let this alone.
‘Daddy, I want to say goodbye to mummy. Surely…’
‘I can’t say goodbye to her. She’s gone that’s all you need to know.’ His face crumples and spasms.
‘Has she… is she already…’ Rachel asks quietly, afraid of his response but desperate to know where her mother is.
Her father doesn’t answer at first.
‘Please daddy… Can we visit her some time?’
Finally, he answers.
‘I can’t… I’m just not up to arranging a funeral,’ he adds, looking up at her, pleading. ‘You understand, don’t you? We’ll go visit her soon. Just the two of us OK?’
It’s Rachel’s turn to nod. It will have to do. Just the two of them, that will be the signature of her life
from here.
Apart from the odd trip to the shop, when she avoids people as much as she can, Rachel doesn’t interact with the outside world for the next week or so. Reg and George knock on the door every couple of days and she leaves them to talk cows with her father.
In bed at night in the darkness, Rachel thinks about her mother lying alone and cold in her silent grave. No one to say goodbye to her, no one to whisper prayers and last messages of love. She takes to talking to the photograph on the chest of drawers and sometimes she thinks she can even hear her mother reply.
The only constant voice in her life is Elvis. Her father plays the songs over and over. His voice permeating the whole house.
She can hear the years in Elvis’s recordings. They come from another time and place, a great distance from the here and now. Another world, where try as he might, her father does not belong - and neither does Rachel.
She wonders if her mother has met Elvis in heaven. Would he still be singing up there? Would her mother break from listening to him to look down on them? Does she see the pain her death has caused?
From downstairs, Rachel hears the dining room door being swung open hard, banging the brass door knob into the stone wall. She doesn’t need to hear what’s next to know what her father is doing. She can see him cross the room to the side cabinet where the bottles of spirits are hiding, barely touched for years, only coming out at Christmas and the odd birthday. Now their time has come. One by one they are being hoisted into the light, their bodies wrung dry of liquid before being left abandoned in the sitting room.
Rachel finds them the next morning, spent soldiers in a battle of depression which reaches new depths each day. Sometimes her father sits slumped in his armchair with them, other times he manages to stumble up the stairs to seek the comfort of his marital bed. He won’t wash the sheets. He wants everything the way her mother left it. Their house is cloaked in aspic, the jelly-like state of grief seeping into their existence and slowing down time itself.
Night time is the worst when everyone else is in their homes. In the day she can hear the gurgle of a tractor engine in the fields, the hum of cars in the lane or the chirrup of birds busy with their daily routines. The cows are constant reminders of life, their mooing, their hooves clattering as they walk from field to milking barn and back again. Reg and George carry on as they always have done. Outside in the daytime, it’s as though everything is the same.
At night there is nothing. Nothing but her and her own existence. It’s as though the night throws a dark shroud over their house preventing her from seeing or hearing life going on around them. She finds no purpose in her life but to look after her father and hope he returns to her.
One morning Rachel wakes to the acrid ammonia of urine and damp bedclothes. Her shame is another layer upon her grief. She washes the sheets and duvet cover and scrubs at the mattress, but the yellow stain remains. Her body’s betrayal of what her mind keeps hidden. She takes to sleeping on an old towel, relieved that at least there is no-one but her mother’s smiling photograph to witness her shame.
The morning post is a succession of white. Her father rips them open and tosses their contents into an unruly pile by his chair. Some he doesn’t even do that. The only colour in their morning post box flutter is a single red envelope - a condolence card from Miss Mayhew and the school. ‘So sorry to hear about your loss,’ it says, as though somehow they’ve mislaid her mother. ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with you.’ Rachel wonders where God was when he decided it was OK for her mum’s car to career off the road.
She waits for her dad to tell her to go back to school.
He doesn’t.
20
Claire, 15th October 2016
Claire and Bob leave the rest of the team to carry on sifting through Neil Parsons’ life as they head off to the SoulMates dating agency.
‘We need to know every woman he saw at this agency,’ Bob manages to keep mentoring her even when he’s driving. Claire also knows it’s his way of keeping the momentum going. He’s known for not letting a case slump. ‘Maybe Neil mentioned something to one of his dates, or they witnessed something. Or maybe one of them is jealous or has a jealous ex-lover. But we won’t mention the link with Rachel, not yet, let’s treat her just like the others. Firstly we need to clear it with her that she doesn’t mind her colleagues knowing and secondly I don’t want word getting out to the press about her stalker. It might be totally unconnected.’
‘What about the men at the agency? If we work on the premise that Neil was killed by someone stalking Rachel, then that could mean a jealous man. Maybe there’s a client who is fixated on her and thought Neil was seeing her.’
‘Mmh could be, you’re right, everyone’s a suspect and that includes the staff. Wish I knew why Stratton has done a bunk. It’s like he just doesn’t want to be found - that has to be connected.’
The agency is located in a busy Fulham street and so finding a parking space reduces Bob to swearing - even with their police car status. They finally get there, after he’s nearly arrested a van driver for obstructing a police officer.
The agency entrance is discreet but stylish, at least it was once. Now its style is fading somewhat. It’s bordered by a French cafe and a hair salon that encourages you to create something new and make a fresh you. Claire wonders if the SoulMates clients have tried its potential for a new beginning.
The agency doorway leads to a flight of stairs with what was once expensive carpet throughout.
‘Places like this must surely be struggling nowadays, what with all the online dating,’ muses Claire.
‘Big business though - all this stuff,’ says Bob, waving his hand at the gallery of happy smiling wedding photographs that line the staircase they’re climbing. ‘Everyone wants somebody don’t they?’
Claire leaves that question hanging. Jack springs back into her mind and it’s reminded her she still hasn’t heard from him. She also wonders what Bob’s ‘someone’ consists of. Is he happy with his wife? How can he be when he never talks about her. Although, if she thinks about it, Claire hasn’t exactly been that verbose about Jack either. How many people end up staying in relationships just to prevent loneliness stalking their lives?
The office reception has plush leather couches and a top of the range coffee machine which Bob immediately helps himself to. Behind the desk is a petite woman with black hair pulled back from her face and tied in one of those figure of eight styles at the back of her head. Claire admires the hairdo. She can never figure out how to do it herself and how it can possibly stay there all day. It’s certainly not a practical look in her line of work.
‘Can I help you?’ the figure of eight head asks.
‘Yes, DI Claire Falle and DCI Robert Walsh. We’re here to see Edward Scott.’
‘Of course, no problem, please take a seat and I’ll let him know you’re here.’
If Claire wasn’t mistaken there was a slight flicker in the woman’s face when she had told her who they were. Either that or her lack of sleep is making her over-sensitive. She turns and heads back to Bob who is lounging on one of the sofas. In front of him is a glass coffee table on which sits a jug of water with lemon pieces floating on the surface. Claire pours herself a glass - trying to avoid a lump of lemon sploshing into her water and splashing her - maybe the caffeine in her bloodstream is making her jittery.
‘You could get bloody paranoid coming in here with all these smiling couples, it’s like something from one of those mass weddings that Moonie cult holds.’ Bob is flicking through a large album containing more photographs similar to the ones they’ve just seen on the stairs.
‘Yeah but I wonder how many of them are still together,’ Claire cynically whispers with a smirk, just as the agency owner appears out of a door in front of them.
Edward Scott is a large man in many ways. Tall at six foot three, he is well built and clearly has an appetite that is more than healthy. His ebullient character immediately bursts into the room
with him, dominating the space.
By the time Claire and Bob have walked from reception to his office, they know Edward Scott prefers to be called Eddie, that he set up the agency in the early nineties with his wife - who no longer works there because they discovered all day and all night with each other can be a little too much. She now runs a wedding planning business from home instead. They have also been informed that the dating industry is worth around two billion pounds globally and that he loves his job.
It’s not until they’ve all sat down that he seems to stop to draw breath. Claire suspects that he’s just one of those people who are naturally chatty, but wonders if nerves are also coming into play.
Bob spots the breath and immediately jumps in.
‘Mr Scott, as I explained on the phone we’re here investigating the death of one of your clients, Mr Neil Parsons,’ he begins.
‘Terrible, terrible,’ Eddie shakes his head.
Bob continues, ‘Did you know Neil well?’
Eddie looks a little shocked.
‘Me? No. I never actually met him. Don’t have much to do with the clients nowadays, to be honest, I leave that to my team. I’m the back room guy.’
‘Would it be possible to have a list of all the women Neil saw through the agency, please?’
‘That’s confidential client information that is,’ Eddie jumps in fast.
‘I understand client confidentiality, but we are investigating a murder, Mr Scott. The murderer could possibly be connected to this agency, but we’re not going to be able to say if they are or, just as importantly for you, if they’re not, until we’ve looked into it. One of the dates might also have witnessed something that has a direct bearing on our case. I assure you that we will be completely discreet when conducting our enquiries.’
Eddie’s face is stony.
‘I could arrange for a warrant if you’d prefer,’ Bob adds. Claire knows he’s bluffing on this one. At the moment they’d have a tough job persuading the powers to be that a search warrant at a dating agency is connected enough to their case to be needed. It’s a well-used tactic that still works.