by Jane Adams
He’d been unable to sleep again, instead he had changed his soaked sheets and forced down several cups of strong coffee. Then he’d taken himself straight in to work and waited for the pathology and forensic reports to come in.
They made interesting reading.
Bill arrived just as he was reaching the end. ‘Tell us anything?’
‘Lots of things I didn’t want to know,’ Croft said wryly.
‘Oh?’ He sat himself down comfortably. ‘Care to give me a summary or do I have to wade through for myself?’
Mike smiled, said he thought he could just about manage to summarize. ‘The clothes the child was wearing — the store labels were still in. Big chain-store as it turns out and it’s a matter of policy to keep design records.’
‘Suzanne Ashmore’s?’
‘That’s taking a leap, Bill. What we do know is that they are contemporary and identical.’ He paused. ‘The mother’s seen them, Suzanne’s mother that is. She confirms that her daughter was dressed, if not in these, then at least in clothing like it.’ He hesitated, glanced up at Bill. ‘The shoes are a different story. It seems that in term-time Suzie Ashmore had to wear indoor shoes at school. Nothing special, just plimsolls or canvas ones like these. Her mother wrote her name in them. But then, you saw the shoes, you know that.’
Bill nodded slowly. ‘Suzie’s name was in the shoes, but on its own . . .’
‘Well, the name, as you saw, had been worn away by wearing them, but Mrs Ashmore is convinced that it’s her writing. What clinches it, maybe, is that Suzie herself wrote her class number in red actually inside the shoe. You probably missed that. The shoe would have to be unlaced before you could see it.’
‘Someone else could have known that.’
‘Devil’s advocate doesn’t suit you, Bill,’ Croft commented. ‘No, what it points to is that someone kept the clothing for all this time, that someone is almost certainly Suzie Ashmore’s abductor, probably more than that.’
‘But what doesn’t make sense is why now? Why does someone commit a crime like this and keep such damning evidence, then wait twenty years to commit another?’ He frowned. ‘The link has to be Cassie Maltham. Her coming back here. Someone knew.’
‘Or Cassie Maltham herself? Or are you discounting her now, Bill?’
‘No, I’m not. I’d be far happier if she had an alibi of some sort, something we could test, but this memory-lapse business . . . too convenient by half if you ask me.’ They fell silent for a moment, trying to make some sense of what they knew, then Mike roused himself ‘OK, let’s take the most extreme position. Cassie Maltham’s some kind of nut who engineered the disappearance of her cousin twenty years ago.’
‘Motive?’
‘God knows. Jealousy. Suzie had everything she wanted. Security, attention, freedom that she certainly didn’t have. Maybe, in some roundabout way, she thought that by getting cousin Suzie out of the picture she could have all of those things.’
‘Sounds a bit far-fetched,’ Bill said, frowning.
‘Like I said, the most extreme case. But, she has guilt feelings that cause her maybe to block out what really happened then. At first she makes up some sort of explanation and the story becomes so real she can’t tell truth from lies any more.’ He looked at Bill, smiled. ‘How am I doing?’
Bill declined to comment. Instead, he pressed the intercom and asked for coffee to be sent in.
Mike continued. ‘Coming back here triggered the original memories, made it harder to hide behind the lies she’d been telling herself—’
‘So she kidnaps another child, drugs her, hides her God alone knows where, then dresses her in Suzie’s clothes that she’s kept hidden dry and freshly aired somewhere just for such an occasion and produces her on cue in front of a dozen astounded witnesses? Just in time to get on the five newscast at eight-fifteen? Come on, Mike. I may think Cassie Maltham’s a bit touched but I can’t swallow that, not even as a wild theory. Think of the organization involved, the planning. Apart from anything else she’d have needed to come down here before this holiday of theirs, find somewhere to hide the kid away, equip herself with whatever Sara Jane was drugged with . . . What was it by the way? Path boys know yet?’
‘Not for certain. They’re convinced it’s plant based and of a group related to the digitoxins. They found traces of alkaloids and Sara was found to have a minor kidney inflammation. Nothing serious but it’s a common side-effect of many alkaloids.’
‘Thought they were poisons.’
‘They are, in the right dosages. The lab boys seem to think that whoever administered the drug knew what they were doing.’
‘I don’t know much about this, but I remember reading, or seeing it on telly maybe, that a lot of common plants have some narcotic effects.’
Mike nodded. ‘Lettuce contains a small quantity of digitalis, so do Foxgloves, of course, then there’s belladonna, common bind weed and Jimson weed.’
‘Never heard of that one.’
‘It isn’t native, it’s an escapee from botanical gardens and the like. Ugly-looking, prickly thing. My ex-father-in-law found some growing in his garden and looked it up. I believe it’s only just this side of legal.’
‘Oh, but they can’t tell us any more?’
Mike shook his head. ‘Not yet. The autopsy on the woman’s not a lot of help.’
‘What’s it do? Tell us she was battered to death?’
Mike laughed briefly. ‘Something like that.’ He leaned back in his chair as the coffee arrived. They’d given him a new office chair, an irritating, swivelling affair on castors that resisted all his attempts to lean backward. There was, he thought, something stupidly satisfying in seeing how far back on two legs a chair would lean before striking disaster.
The office door closed and he reached for his coffee. ‘The blow that killed her wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last. She’d been hit across the temples hard enough to stun but didn’t die until her assailant smashed the back of her skull, severing the spinal cord at the same time.’
‘Angle of attack?’ Bill asked, sipping his coffee.
‘That blow, behind, below and upward. Sounds awkward, almost as though the assailant was sitting or crouching on the ground when his victim tried to get up.’
‘His victim.’
‘The force of the blows would indicate considerable strength. Could have been a woman. I’m not wiping that one out, but the pathologist says that the fractures of the limbs came from a single blow each time. If she was stunned, she couldn’t have put up much of a fight . . .’
‘And if she was getting up or trying to when the killing blow was struck she must have still had the use of her legs, which means those injuries were probably caused post-mortem.’
‘Path lab thinks so too.’
‘Hmm, so a man, or possibly a very strong or very angry woman. What does that discount, all children under sixteen and about another ten per cent of the population?’
‘Something like that, though I’d drop the age limit.’ He frowned thoughtfully. ‘Funny thing is, Bill, she doesn’t appear to have put up much of a fight. Nothing under the fingernails.’
‘Can’t scratch with your arms broken.’
Mike stared, appalled that he hadn’t thought of that, appalled also at the chilling image they were discussing so evenly.
‘She must have come from somewhere,’ he said softly. Though if this woman and the female itinerant they had searched for were one and the same, it was possible that no one would have missed her. Only the nuisance factor of an old woman trying to sell clothes-pegs would be gone. Nothing more. It saddened him deeply.
‘Dental records?’ Bill’s quiet voice brought him back to business.
‘Not much sign that she’s had work done.’
‘Her blood group is A, just like about a third of the population and her estimated age late-fifties to early-sixties. Oh, and no children.’
‘Motives for the attack,’ Bill mused. ‘Sexual?’
‘No, not that we can tell. Or, at least, she wasn’t raped, though what went through his mind, of course . . . It crossed my mind it might be revenge, but that doesn’t fit in with the other factors, like her being found at the same time as Sara Jane.’
‘Revenge? You mean, because it was known we were looking for her?’
Mike nodded. ‘Could be someone decided she was guilty, and, as we didn’t seem to be doing too good a job of finding her, decided to do it for us.’
‘I don’t see it. Vigilantes in the middle of rural Norfolk. You watch too much telly.’
‘Yeah, maybe. Like I said, it doesn’t fit with anything else anyway.’
‘And no sign from anything of where Sara Jane was kept?’
Mike shook his head once more. ‘Nothing helpful. Fragments of dried leaves clinging to her shirt and some traces of wet mud on her shorts but the chances are, both came from on the hill. She was sitting on the ground when we found her and it was still pretty damp that morning.’
Bill nodded. Nothing much there. ‘When’s this hypnosis malarkey supposed to be happening?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Eleven o’clock.’
‘Think it will turn anything up?’
Mike shrugged. ‘Who knows? We can but try.’
* * *
Cassie poked at the food Fergus had set in front of her. She’d slept badly and felt exhausted, strung tight, dreading the session with Dr Lucas that lay ahead of her.
She picked up her knife, rubbed irritably at an imagined speck of dirt, tried to eat, just to please Fergus.
Returning to the caravan the night before had seemed like just the continuation of her nightmare. Knowing that the place had been searched, that their things had been touched, pried at and poked into by hands of strangers, increased her sense of violation. It wasn’t fair.
Worse, she and Fergus had argued, tensions having risen so high that Cassie couldn’t help but lash out. She had raged at him for ‘spoiling things’ by insisting that they come back here. Screamed, cried, hurled insults and anything else she could find while Anna and Simon first tried to calm the situation and finally had simply looked on like embarrassed strangers caught up in some tragedy they had no part of.
Finally, she had calmed down enough to simply cry, deep, wrenching, selfish tears, but they had helped and her anger had dissipated enough for her to feel embarrassed and awkward even now.
Fergus said little. Simon and Anna talked, mostly to each other, with a determined brightness that made Cassie want to start screaming all over again. She gave up the pretence of trying to eat, lay down her fork and sat staring at the congealing egg like some mutinous child.
Fergus didn’t even bother to try and cajole her into eating. Childishly, Cassie wanted him to, wanted attention. She flicked at the fork on her plate so that it clinked loudly against the china. No one took any notice so she did it again. Then she sighed, and asked herself just what sort of silly game she was playing.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She spoke softly, as though not wanting to be heard, but the conversation stopped and the attention of all three turned on her.
‘For what?’ Anna asked gently. ‘Look, Cassie, you’re entitled to get mad.’
‘I didn’t just get angry though, did I?’ Somehow, Cassie wasn’t yet ready to purge herself of all the self-pity she was feeling.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Simon told her. ‘Consider it forgotten,’ he continued expansively, irritating Cassie more than ever. She didn’t want gentle, considered answers right now. She didn’t know what she did want but it wasn’t this.
Her thoughts, becoming more and more clouded, more and more self-flagellating, were interrupted by Simon speaking again.
‘We’ve got something to tell you both,’ he said. ‘We would have told you last night, but, well, it didn’t seem like good timing.’
Cassie looked up, paying more attention. It was clear though, from the look of suppressed excitement, that he wasn’t thinking of her now.
‘The fact is, well, we’re pregnant.’
He said it with such a sense of profound satisfaction that even Cassie found herself jolted out of her destructive mood. Fergus, plainly every bit as delighted as Simon, was reaching over to congratulate them both and all three seemed to be talking at once. A jumble of pleasure and speculation and hopefulness.
Cassie watched them and felt suddenly left out, isolated from this ordinary world in which people did things like have babies and plan for the future. Her earlier mood of self-indulgent misery disappeared, to be replaced by something much deeper and more profound. A dreadful fear that this nightmare she was living through would go on for ever. That there would be no end to the persecution her own mind seemed set upon inflicting on her soul. She and Fergus had rarely discussed having a family. There had been this tacit agreement that too many things had to be ironed out before they could take that further and, it seemed to Cassie, final step.
They were looking at her expectantly, wanting to involve her.
‘Cassie?’ Fergus said.
She managed to smile. ‘It’s wonderful,’ she managed, ‘just wonderful.’ Then she burst into tears and rushed from the room.
* * *
Mike had been astounded at how seemingly simple and ordinary the whole procedure had been. Dr Lucas had spent some time alone with Cassie, calming her and talking the process through, then she’d allowed Mike and Fergus back into the room and they had watched as she talked Cassie down through deepening levels of consciousness until she looked, to Mike, to be in some kind of deep sleep.
He’d prepared a list of questions he needed answers to, much to Maria Lucas’s amusement. ‘It doesn’t work quite like that, you know,’ she’d told him. ‘She’s not some medium getting messages from your Great-Aunt Maud. We’re trying to unlock the memories in Cassie’s subconscious not invoke some mystic oracle.’
‘Well, just try,’ he’d said, smiling at her, trying to recreate some of the easy intimacy they’d shared the night before. Maria Lucas was having none of it. This was business.
Cassie was speaking now, responding to Maria Lucas’s instructions, describing that morning on the Greenway when Sara Jane had been found. She proceeded in a low, almost conversational tone, to explain how she had slipped away from Fergus while he was talking to the constable on duty. There was no mystery that time, they’d simply been too busy, one arguing, one giving official responses, to take any notice of her.
‘Why was it so important you go to Tan’s hill right then?’ Maria Lucas asked her.
‘I heard her calling to me.’
‘Who, Cassie, who did you hear?’
‘I heard Suzie. She was on the hill and she was calling to me.’
Dr Lucas exchanged a swift glance with Mike. She’d heard about the other morning, when Mike had found Cassie wandering and claiming to have heard Suzie calling.
Fergus was watching his wife intently. He looked strained, aged. Cassie was speaking again.
‘I climbed the hill, but she wasn’t there. I called out to her, but she didn’t answer me, then I heard someone crying.’
Dr Lucas stopped her. ‘Was it Suzie?’
‘No. Not Suzie. A child crying. Not very loud. I thought she sounded hurt. I went to look.’
‘Where did you look, Cassie?’
‘I looked in the hidey hole.’
‘The what!’ Mike had been told to stay quiet, but he couldn’t help himself.
Dr Lucas glared at him.
‘Sorry,’ he mouthed. ‘Ask her.’
She gave him an impatient look. ‘What hidey hole, Cassie?’
‘In the hedges, near the bottom of the hill. I thought I couldn’t get through, it was all overgrown, all brambles, but when I pushed they just seemed to fall apart. I reached in and she took my hand. I remember telling her it was all right and pulling the brambles apart with my other hand. It was hard to get back up the hill. I thought I heard someone calling me again, but it didn’t matt
er then. I’d found Sara. That’s why Suzie kept calling me, you see. To find Sara.’
‘And you climbed back up the hill again? Cassie, can you answer me, sweetheart?’ The doctor waited for a moment, then she gently clasped Cassie’s hand, looked at Mike. ‘I think that’s all we’re going to get. I’ve been through these sessions before, get so far, then she seems to just shut down.’
‘But we’re getting somewhere!’ Mike protested angrily. ‘This, this hidey hole. Ask her where it is.’
Maria Lucas shook her head. ‘No more,’ she said softly, then as though to placate him. ‘Ask her when she comes out of it. She may well remember parts consciously now, but like a dream. A bit fragmented.’
Mike sighed in exasperation, knowing there was nothing he could do. ‘All right, all right. But I’ll talk to her straight away.’
He could see Fergus preparing to argue. ‘You can stay, Mr Maltham. This isn’t a formal interview.’ He could see that Fergus Maltham was far from happy with any of this but ignored him, turning instead to watch Dr Lucas ease Cassie gently from the hypnotic state, seeing her breathing deepen and her slow movements and relaxed expression, as though she’d just woken from deep sleep. ‘How are you feeling’ Maria Lucas asked.
Cassie appeared to consider for a moment, then she nodded. ‘Better,’ she said. ‘Easier.’
‘Good. You remember what you told me?’
Cassie frowned. Mike desperately resisted the temptation to prompt her, guide her memory into the paths he wanted it to follow.
‘Some things. It’s a bit hazy. There was a bramble patch.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘Or is that just my subconscious telling me I’ve been too prickly to get near lately?’ She was looking at Fergus as she said this, asking forgiveness for the way she’d behaved earlier. Mike saw Fergus’s expression soften, his eyes crinkle at her as his mouth twitched at the corners. Impatience getting the better of him, he spoke more sharply than he’d intended.
‘The bramble patch, Cassie. What else do you remember about it?’