by Paul Clayton
‘I’ll come with you,’ Cora said.
‘Thank you, Cora,’ said Frankie. ‘Though I’m sure it’s not necessary.’
Now, here in the interview room waiting for someone to show up, Frankie was calmed by the knowledge that Cora was sitting by the front desk. The door opened and WPC Barbara Something, her uniform blouse revealing a bosom of intimidating proportions, stepped into the room. The man who followed her had hair best described as sparse, and a day or two’s stubble. He was shorter than PC Barbara Something and together they had the appearance of the little wooden couple who might pop out of the doors of a weather house.
They sat on the opposite side of the table. WPC Barbara placed a laptop in front of her, which she opened and turned on.
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Webb,’ said the man. ‘I understand that it’s been explained to you that, at this point, you are just helping us with our enquiries.’
Frankie wasn’t sure she liked the sound of the words ‘at this point’.
‘You are not under any suspicion and this is an informal interview which we will not be recording.’ Webb had a marked South London twang. It sounded as if he were trying to be cheerful and yet was not quite achieving it.
‘So, what is it that you want to know?’ asked Frankie. The sick feeling in the pit of her stomach hadn’t disappeared, but they were all treating her perfectly pleasantly. It couldn’t be anything serious – but if it wasn’t, why insist that she come into the police station?
The detective opened the folder of papers on the table in front of him. He kept his head down while reading from it. ‘Let me take you back to Friday the 15th of March. An altercation occurred in the car park of Marshalls’ supermarket.’
Frankie wasn’t sure she wanted to listen any more. ‘I’m not sure what an altercation is, but if you mean did some posh woman decide to drive her bloody car backwards and turn my car into a sheet of tin metal pushed against the supermarket wall, then yes.’
Webb looked up at her. ‘And afterwards you became quite vociferous?’
‘It upset me.’ This couldn’t be the root of the problem, Frankie thought. You weren’t brought into the police station because you’d had a shouting match with a few four-letter words, were you?
The detective looked down at his notes again. WPC Barbara Something was staring at her.
‘Is that it? Is that why I’m here?’ Frankie asked.
The detective took a photograph out of the folder and laid it in front of her. ‘The woman you had the altercation with was a Mrs Susan Steadman. Yesterday afternoon she was found at the bottom of a flight of stairs at Larchwood, the block of flats where she lived.’
Frankie looked at the photograph. She couldn’t tell if it was the same person. The woman in the picture was wearing a similar sort of leisure suit, but the head was at a very funny angle. ‘That’s awful. Obviously. But why am I here? Just because the poor woman fell, it doesn’t mean …’
‘We have reason to believe she didn’t fall.’ Webb nodded at the policewoman.
WPC Barbara spun the laptop around to face Frankie. The screen showed the front of a block of flats, which Frankie recognised as one of the posh ones on the other side of the park. A camera angled down one side of the driveway. The WPC pressed a button and the screen blinked into life. A car moved past the end of the drive, then another, and then after about twenty seconds a figure came into the picture and walked towards the front of the block. As the figure filled the front of the screen, it was easy to see a plum-coloured sweatshirt, blue pants and an orange padded gilet.
The figure looked extraordinarily like Frankie Baxter.
Chapter Nineteen
Cora glanced at the clock above the counter. She’d been sitting there for more than ninety minutes. Comfort wasn’t the foremost priority of the police station lobby, and there was an unusual smell of detergent and despair. The one bench with its stiff wooden seat was making her back ache and, as she suffered, she started to worry. What was keeping Frankie in there for so long? What did the police want to know?
Cora wracked her brains. Nothing that Frankie had done in the supermarket car park was illegal. A silly car crash and an argument which had become somewhat heated, that was all. She was about to ask the desk sergeant what was happening when the door to his left opened and Frankie walked out. She looked a little the worse for wear. Cora could see that she had been crying.
A short, paltry excuse for a man in a dreadful suit lingered behind her in the doorway. ‘If we need to speak to you again, Mrs Baxter, we’ll be in touch. In the meantime, please don’t do anything silly.’ He closed the door.
Cora knew this was the moment to give her new friend the biggest and warmest of hugs that she could manage. She enveloped Frankie in her arms, trying her hardest to relax.
‘Can we get out of here?’ said Frankie.
Cora held open one of the double doors of the police station and they stepped out onto the High Road. ‘I could call an Uber if you want,’ she said. ‘Nice cup of tea at home?’
‘Let’s walk. I’ve got something to tell you.’
They linked arms and set off towards the park in a companionable silence. Cora bided her time, waiting for Frankie to tell her what had happened. A little way into the park, they reached a bench. The metal plaque told them it was ‘Dedicated to Ivan Russell’.
Frankie sat down and Cora joined her. For a moment they stared at the swans on the lake. A slight breeze rustled the leaves and the air was warmer than forecast. A beam of sunlight caught Cora’s face and she unbuttoned the top of her coat.
Frankie took a deep breath. ‘I did something very silly.’
Cora waited. She knew all about silence; there had been so much of it in her life.
‘Please don’t tell the kids.’ Frankie turned to her ‘Do you remember the day I met you in the café? The day that I’d had the letter from the insurance company?’
Cora smiled. ‘Yes. Two lattes and a lot of calming down.’
‘After I left, I didn’t go straight home. I was still angry. I knew the insurance company had made the decision, but I couldn’t believe that woman, Mrs Steadman, would want to let them get away with it. I thought she might feel guilty about what she’d done.’
‘You didn’t see her?’ Cora’s expression tightened.
‘I went round there. I had the address from the police incident form. She wasn’t having any of it. “If that’s what the insurance company decided, then that’s what they are paying. That’s what I have insurance for, my dear,” she said. Stuck-up bitch.’
Cora looked puzzled. ‘But why did the police want to question you?’
‘They found her later that afternoon. Someone had pushed her down the stairs. The CCTV on the block of flats caught me walking up the drive and I’m pretty sure they think I had something to do with it.’
Cora looked out across the lake. Two swans were fighting over a piece of bread, elegant and violent in their struggle. ‘And did you?’ she asked.
Chapter Twenty
Even as a tiny child, Lottie knew that her parents loved her. She saw how much her mum and dad wanted her. They’d always wished for a baby daughter but, as they told her, ‘God never allowed us to have a child of our own. God told us we must look after someone else’s little girl.’ So that is what they had done.
Joan and Harry Morgan were a normal couple in everything except their childlessness: a modest house, a respectable job for Harry and a busy social life for Joan. Yet no matter how much they tried to fill the house with the joyous sound of children, they were unsuccessful. Then Lottie came along – or Charlotte, as they preferred to call her. They became her parents when she was six months old. Now their domestic life was complete and their hearts fulfilled.
Joan was forty-three when the little bundle of joy arrived, and she wasted no time in ensuring Charlotte had everything she
could desire. Harry tried to be strict but Joan constantly undermined him; he resigned himself to the fact that Charlotte was Joan’s darling.
Lottie was extremely quick to learn she could get whatever she wanted. As a baby, that meant ferocious yelling or squealing, and as a small child she mastered outbursts of ever-increasing originality. She knew how to stamp; she knew how to flail her arms. She learned how to punch her mother’s thighs at the perfect level to turn irritation into injury and leave Joan with little bruises.
Joan never said anything to Harry. She knew Charlotte didn’t mean it. ‘Charlotte’s had a tough start in life,’ she thought. ‘It’s my job, through God, to help Charlotte in every way.’
Lottie had a room at the top of the house, a picture-perfect palace of a bedroom for a precocious little princess. Dolls, books, toys, and most of all, cuddly animals. Lottie loved every kind of animal. She had a moose in a Mountie uniform, which Harry had brought all the way back from a business trip to Canada. She had a large duck with orange feet and white staring eyes, which had once held an oversized Easter egg. She had a purple dragon and a spotted green furry snake. She had several penguins and, most importantly, she had an enormous floppy-eared cuddly black-and-brown dog called Harrison.
Lottie knew full well that one day she would have a real dog and she would call him Harrison too. Every birthday and every Christmas she asked the same question: ‘Can I have a puppy, Daddy?’
Harry would tell her that she wasn’t old enough.
‘Can I have a puppy, Mummy?’
Joan told her she would have to grow up a little more to be able to look after a puppy.
‘I want a puppy, Mummy. Want a puppy, Mummy. I want one, Mummy.’
Lottie knew that if she asked enough times, Joan would say yes. Joan knew she couldn’t do anything without Harry’s approval. Harry was adamant they were not having a dog.
‘I want a puppy, Mummy. Want a puppy, Mummy. Want a puppy.’ The words echoed and rolled around in Joan’s head, pushing a migraine behind her eyes as her daughter’s words smacked into her face. She grabbed the side of the kitchen table to steady herself for a moment then, taking a deep breath, she reached out and took Charlotte’s hand and led her up the stairs to her bedroom.
She opened the door and yanked Charlotte into the room. ‘You have lots of animals, my little darling. Now play with them,’ she shrieked at Lottie, who jerked back onto the bed in surprise.
Joan walked out of the bedroom. Then, doing something she had never done before, she locked the bedroom door. She could hear the cries and wails of her daughter but the further down the stairs she went, the quieter they became. Sitting in the living room with the lights out and the curtains drawn, she was able to find a kind of peace.
As the years went on, although Harry didn’t know it, the locked bedroom became an answer to more and more of Charlotte’s incessant requests. Lottie knew Harry was strict and there was no point in complaining to him. She learnt how to judge her yelling and stamping, how to fine tune her tantrums so that her mother almost always reached for her. Then she escaped. But, when it became too much, Joan would grab her by the wrist, drag her up the stairs, throw her into the bedroom and lock the door.
If Joan then had to work in the kitchen, the room below her daughter’s bedroom where she could still hear the noise, she turned up the radio. How well Steve Wright in the Afternoon covered the anguished yells.
Things became less troublesome when Lottie went to school. She was liked by her school friends because she seemed to have everything. That gave Joan a new justification for giving Charlotte what she demanded. ‘She needs it for school, darling,’ she would tell Harry, and Harry would make certain that Joan had the money. Things improved so much that, on Lottie’s tenth birthday, Harry relented and they bought her a puppy.
Lottie raced home from school every evening to be with the puppy. Harry had bought it from somebody he’d met in the pub, a Labrador-setter cross. It was as much of a match for the colours of Charlotte’s toy dog Harrison as he could find. Yet Lottie called the puppy Brandy, because Harry liked drinking brandy and she liked the colour of it in the decanter on the sideboard.
Lottie loved the puppy with all her heart. At home she spent all the hours she could with him. Then one night Lottie came home from school to find an empty house, except for Brandy. She didn’t know where her mother was and she felt alone and lost. She sat in her bedroom and hugged her puppy.
It was three hours before Harry came home. He sat on her bed and held her hand. ‘They had to take Mummy into the hospital this afternoon.’
After this, things changed. Harry wasn’t good at cooking and cleaning; Harry was good at spreadsheets and telling people what to do. Harry’s sister, Muriel, moved into the house to look after Lottie. Muriel didn’t have any children of her own. She was a thin, pinched woman with a beak of a nose, several moles and ill-permed hair. She lived in a strange mix of flared skirts and T-shirts and spent most of the day in plimsolls, which made her look like an ageing cheerleader. Muriel smoked, something Harry would never allow in the house, so she sat in the back garden to light a cigarette. Sometimes, to Lottie’s amazement, Muriel sat in the front garden at the top of the path where all the neighbours could see her smoking. Muriel’s cooking consisted of cans and packets. Lottie didn’t like it, but she knew that Mummy was very poorly and she didn’t want to complain.
Every evening after work, Harry went to the hospital and stayed with Joan for several hours before getting home for a plate of something out of a can that Muriel put on the kitchen table. Lottie saw how her father looked: his skin was grey, his eyes had lost their shine and he seldom spoke. He looked like a silhouette, as if he had walked out of the wedding photograph on the windowsill and left only blackness. He was so worried that he didn’t see Lottie sneak Brandy into her bedroom each evening and let him sleep on the bed.
A few weeks later, Brandy became ill. The dog curled up in a corner of Lottie’s bedroom and started to shiver. He whimpered and, no matter how she tried, she couldn’t encourage him out into the garden. He’d grown bigger now and the ten year old girl could hardly lift him. She carried and half-dragged him into the open air each day when she returned from school in the hope that he would recover. Lovingly, she filled his water bowl and stroked him and gave him all the love she had inside her. She didn’t tell Harry.
One night a few days later, after a silent evening meal, Muriel went down the road to the pub. ‘Just to get out of your hair for a while, Harry.’
Harry sat facing his daughter. ‘You know Mummy is very ill in hospital, Charlotte,’ he began. Lottie nodded. ‘Tomorrow the surgeons are going to operate on Mummy. The very top doctors.’
‘What’s operate, Daddy?’ said Lottie.
Harry thought for a moment. ‘It’s where the doctors open up your insides with very special knives. They look at whatever is wrong and they make it better. Then they sew you up again and help you get better. Then Mummy can come home to us.’
Lottie went to bed and dreamed of men opening Mummy up with their knives to make her better.
Harry came back to the house after a long day at the hospital. He pushed open the door; everything was quiet. He walked through into the kitchen. There was no sign of Muriel or Lottie. A pan was simmering away on the stove and there was a scribbled note on the kitchen table. Had to go out. Sorry. Stew in the pan. Back tomorrow if I can.
Harry lifted the pan lid. The stew had started to scorch the sides. He turned off the hob and removed the pan. As he did, he looked out of the kitchen window. He could see Lottie in the garden, kneeling down, bending over something.
As he was putting plates on the table and getting the cutlery for dinner, he noticed something was missing: there was an empty space next to the bread bin. His heart jumped and he dropped the plate he was carrying, which smashed onto the floor.
He pushed open the back
door and stopped at the top of the steps down to the garden. Lottie was kneeling in the middle of the lawn, a white bathroom towel in front of her. Next to it was the missing knife block from the kitchen, and on it was Brandy.
The dog lay sliced open and pinned to the towel by three kitchen knives and a cake fork.
‘I’m making him better, Daddy.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘I can see the sea,’ yelled Henry, bouncing up and down on the back seat of the car and creating considerable discomfort for Jonny on one side and Shannon on the other. She’d been trying to sleep so as not to have to engage with anyone.
In the passenger seat, Cora turned her head and smiled at him. ‘Do you like the sea, Henry? Are you going to go for a swim?’
‘He’s going to go for a paddle and he’s going to be careful. Aren’t you Henry?’ Frankie’s hands gripped the steering wheel and she focused on the thickening traffic as they drove into Brighton.
The seaside trip was Cora’s suggestion. After Frankie’s renewed protestations of innocence regarding Susan Steadman, Cora had walked back with her to the flat. As soon as they stepped in through the door, the kids wanted to know why the police had taken their mum away. Even Shannon seemed interested, while Jonny asked rather probing questions. ‘Did they interrogate you Mum? Was it recorded? What were they asking you about?’
Henry was much more concerned with his mother’s welfare. ‘Are you okay, Mum? They didn’t hurt you, did they?’
Frankie pulled him to her. ‘No, they didn’t. And it’s all a bit of a mistake. Something unfortunate happened and I was on a closed-circuit television camera near to where it took place. It’s all a misunderstanding.’ Henry tightened his hold round her waist and she kissed the top of his head.