by Tom Bradby
The breeze strengthened, caught the curtain next to her, and Julia glanced out of the window at the tree-tops on the ridge above them. ‘He … had his arm around her. She was crying and he had his arm around her. He told me to get out.’
‘A paternal gesture, or more? To her, I mean.’
‘How could I know?’
‘Where else did you see them together?’
Julia tried to gather her wits. ‘My father and I used to walk a lot on the common together. I don’t know why, particularly, it wasn’t that Mum didn’t like walking, but it was just something we’d always done together. They were … they were the best times. Occasionally, we would play games, as I said. He … I thought he’d always wanted a boy, so I always said I was keen to play the games. Hide and seek, sometimes more advanced, like hunter and hunted. I enjoyed …’
‘Did you?’
She did not respond. She heard a car passing outside. ‘No, but I said I did. I liked the role I fulfilled. I liked the feeling of fulfilment that came with that.’
‘Were you frightened?’
‘Sometimes, but it meant something to me to …’
‘To play that role.’
‘Yes. You probably think it was odd, but it wasn’t. The games were active, that was all.’
‘It made you feel close?’
‘I suppose so, yes.’
‘And presumably it was a pattern. Seeking to please him.’
‘No, you’re sounding like a shrink. There were some things that were straightforward. The dolls’ house. That was on my level. Others that were more … difficult. He was a complex man.’
‘So how did the games change?’
‘Alice came to play. Then Sarah and Alice. We’d all go for a walk together, just the four of us. Alan and my mother would be left here. When the hunted ran, the hunters … there was a feeling … I had the feeling …’
‘The suspicion?’
‘Yes, the suspicion. Sarah and my father were supposed to be looking for us in the wood. I had the suspicion that they might not have been looking that hard. I stopped wanting to play.’
‘That upset your father?’
‘He seemed increasingly preoccupied.’
‘Did Alice feel the same, in terms of her suspicions about your father and her mother?’
Julia shook her head. ‘It was somehow understood, but we never discussed it. She was too young.’
‘A little sister to you?’
‘Yes.’
Professor Malcolm was tapping his knee. He waited a long time, before asking, ‘Julia, why did you go down to the wood that day?’
She looked at her feet. ‘You asked me that before. You asked me that when all this began fifteen years ago. That was the reason I liked you, because you could have been cruel and you weren’t.’
‘Why did you come home and then go down to the common without even changing out of your best shoes? Why did you do that?’
Julia did not respond.
‘Why were you worried when your father was not at home?’
Julia was looking down at her hands.
‘Why did you say earlier that you were not surprised by what happened?’
‘People felt sorry for Alan. They hated Sarah.’
‘Who hated her? Did your mother hate her? Did your father hate her? Was your father angry with Sarah? You said you were not surprised by his death either, in the Falklands. Did you see that as divine retribution for what he’d done?’
Julia fought to control herself.
‘What was it you thought he had done, Julia?’
Her head was down. She was staring at the floor. Fears, anger, flooded her.
‘What—’
‘All right. All right. All right. All right. Is this what you wanted?’ She was on her feet. ‘What do you want me to say? Do you want to know about the humiliation, the shame of what he was doing with that woman? Do you want to know how I wanted her dead? About the fear of what had happened, of what he’d done …’
Professor Malcolm was stony-faced. ‘It’s what you want,’ he said, a long, bony finger stabbing in the direction of her stomach. ‘You’ve got to talk about it. Who can deal silently with such fears of what their own father might have done? The attachment to the good memories before Sarah? You have to know they’re real, don’t you? You’re clinging to them. If he could do this terrible thing, then what kind of man was he before? If he was the one who went down to the common that day with a knife in his hand, if he stabbed Sarah and then chased—’
‘Please!’
‘Then in your mind he’s defined by it. It’s your childhood you’re fighting for and don’t deny that this is what you have always wanted.’
‘I think it is what you want.’ Now it was her turn to point. ‘You had to get me to admit it. That’s your game. Okay, well, here it is. Yes, I thought, perhaps, that my father killed that woman. I did. Yes. I was scared. I’m still scared. I’m terrified. I’ve been white with terror for fifteen years.’
‘And Alice?’
‘Christ!’ She put her head in her hands once more. ‘Yes, Alice, too. He has to have killed her, but I cannot accept that.’
‘I am here to help you,’ he said.
‘No, you’re not. You’re here because your wounded vanity won’t tolerate the notion that you failed.’
Suddenly his expression was fierce. ‘That is the second time you have said that and it is unworthy of you.’
His sincerity punched a hole in her anger. ‘All right, I’m sorry.’ She stared at the floor. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘if I trust you.’
He frowned in confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You have your own agenda. I don’t know precisely what it is …’
‘My agenda is to discover what really happened here.’
‘Or to prove a long dormant theory.’
She could tell she had hurt him. His mouth had become very thin. ‘Julia, I am a lonely old man with drawers full of dead faces, no family to speak of and friends who don’t call much any more. You’re one of the few things in the world I do care for, so give me some credit.’
He stood and his exit was furious, the door hissing shut behind him.
After he had gone, Julia was immediately overcome with remorse. To avoid looking at all the pictures on the wall above the bed she turned to face the desk and the alcove.
The confession of her suspicions had brought unexpected relief. It was impossible that her father could have done such a thing. Completely impossible.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as he came back in. ‘I’m really sorry.’ She groped for some other explanation. He sat and stared at her, forcing her to drop her eyes. He was a ruthless inquisitor and yet she knew he was gentle with her. She had seen the way he destroyed the ill-prepared, arrogant or lazy in tutorials. ‘In the last three years,’ she explained, ‘I’ve just ceased to view truth as an objective thing.’
‘If your father was in any way involved, can knowledge of his guilt be worse than this suspicion?’
Julia didn’t think it was likely to prove that simple, but perhaps he was making it appear so. Could he really be acting in her interests alone? She thought of her assistants in Beijing and the way they said she never trusted anyone with anything. Is that what she was like?
He pointed to the sheaf of paper on the desk. ‘You’ve read the soft porn she wrote, now let’s go back to the appointments diary. If there were meetings with “M”, perhaps Mitchell Havilland, your father, and perhaps not, what does “wts” stand for when written next to M?’
‘Wizened tree stump. A meeting-place on the common.’
‘R?’
‘I’m not sure. Ridge, maybe.’
‘It’s a curious read, the soft porn, I think. Doesn’t read like fiction.’
Julia picked up the papers again. She didn’t really want to touch them. It was getting darker in here now that the sun was on the other side of the valley, but neither of them had moved to turn
on any lights. She tried to think. ‘It’s obviously some kind of ad hoc diary,’ she said.
Professor Malcolm leant back, twiddling his reading-glasses. He got up and looked at the photograph of Sarah on the wall, resting one knee on the bed. ‘Most people who write diaries,’ he said, ‘do so because they want to be liked. It may be an honest portrait, but there is the maximum possible justification for everything they’ve done. That’s what makes them so dull, often. But this woman is crying out to be disliked. She’s shouting to be condemned.’ He shook his head. ‘No pleasant reference to anyone, really, not even herself. A portrait of a selfish woman.’
‘Don’t diaries always make us feel selfish?’ Julia countered. ‘Perhaps they aren’t written to be read. And anyway, she probably never intended this to be a complete picture. It’s just what she felt like writing down, not a cogent summary of her state of mind.’
‘Were the Fords rich?’
‘Sarah was – from her parents. It was her house, really.’
‘Your father must have been, what, twenty years older than Sarah?’
‘A bit less. He was very young for his post.’
‘So your father was about forty. Your mother was about thirty-two. Alan was thirty. Sarah was about thirty-two.’
Julia nodded. She had never considered her mother and Sarah to be the same age.
‘Wasn’t it odd having two people of such different rank as neighbours, especially since the Ford house is bigger than your own?’
‘It was Sarah’s decision. She’d always had the money. She made the choices and she didn’t like being an army wife. If they were going to live in this area near to the base, then I guess it must have been her call. Knowing her, she probably did it deliberately. And, anyway, my father didn’t bother about that kind of thing. He was nervous about money – Mum was always telling me how worried he was and how there was never any money to do anything, but I don’t think he was interested in it as such.’
Professor Malcolm turned back and stood behind his chair. ‘Here’s what we have to do. You need to go back and try to establish an accurate picture of Sarah’s life. Go through everything that might lead us to things that have been overlooked. Her bank records, for example. Was there any issue about money? You need to see if we can get the phone bills for the month – no, let’s say three months – before her death. Whom was she calling and with what frequency?’ He moved to the box and pulled out yet another brown A4 envelope. ‘This is her address book, or a photocopy of it. Unfortunately, but inevitably, it is alphabetical, with no hint as to who any of these people are, or the closeness of her relations with them. You’ll just have to work through it. Of course, we could short-circuit much of this by talking to those closest to her, like her husband, but I think, for the time being, we should avoid that. Anyway, we’re agreed that that is … difficult for you. We need to establish a basic picture of who this woman was, from the widest possible number of sources. There are people in the village who were not in the immediate circle but who would have had a reasonable idea of what was going on – the sisters in the post office, to take one example. Who did they think she was having an affair with? Was it more than one person? Was it all just fantasies in her own mind?’
‘Shouldn’t we at least inform Alan Ford what we are doing?’
He was shaking his head vigorously, and she nodded, implicitly acknowledging that sentimentality could have no place.
Professor Malcolm disappeared down the corridor to the toilet yet again. Julia sat looking at the telephone on the desk. Was that what she was supposed to do, sit here and call people? She picked up, then replaced the receiver. The note on the phone indicated that 9 brought an outside line and Julia assumed the police would be paying for the calls.
She thought about what she was being asked to do and it made her feel better. This was the first time she had been tasked with piecing together the life of a dead person, but it was not dissimilar to what she had done in Ireland, Russia and China. There, she had been required to get to know living individuals without ever speaking to them or anyone who knew them, and it was surprising what you could discover by reading people’s mail, checking what library books they took out, or what clothes they wore. That was how the value and psychological state of a potential agent were assessed. Mistakes could be, and sometimes were, fatal. Sarah was going to receive the same rough hand as any potential recruit, dead or not.
The statements given by Julia’s parents were still on the table, so she glanced over them, then walked to her jacket, which was on the edge of the bed, and slipped them into the pocket.
When Professor Malcolm came back, he took a diary from inside his jacket and looked up a telephone number. ‘There are some phone records there, I think, and probably the bank ones, but if you need anything else, call Detective Constable Baker on this number.’
As he said it Julia wrote it down on the side of one of the brown envelopes on the desk in front of her.
‘I’ve asked her,’ he went on, ‘to provide us with a catch-all letter on headed paper saying that we are conducting an official review of the case and should be given all necessary assistance. She can send it round.’
Julia was again impressed, if not surprised, by the influence he was able to exert.
‘Baker does crime liaison. If there is anything else you need in terms of documentation, you may have to get a court order. She can arrange that. I’m supposed to be speaking at a symposium in Bournemouth this weekend but I’ll cancel it.’ He closed the diary and replaced it in his pocket. ‘I hate Bournemouth,’ he said, with feeling.
Julia looked through the box to see what records he had kept. She could not find any bank statements or financial details, and the only phone records were those for the Ford number in the week before Sarah’s death. She pulled these out, turning the pages until the day of the murders. Four calls had been made from the Ford home that morning and she recognized two of the numbers instantly: one call had been made to her own home and one to the Rouses. The other two were not Cranbrooke numbers.
Julia began to work backwards away from that Sunday, but no discernible, meaningful pattern emerged. There were calls to her home, some to the Rouses and the de la Rues, but no number came up so frequently as to appear suspicious or out of the ordinary.
She flicked through the address book. Julia hated people listening to her telephone conversations, even those related to work, and she had no wish to have him sit and listen to her, but she needn’t have worried. Professor Malcolm fell asleep sitting on the bed, his head resting on his chest, the corner of an A4 envelope gripped between thumb and forefinger.
She listened to his breathing as she called DC Baker at Cranbrooke CID, who was friendly and helpful. She said she had done the letter and would get someone to drop it round. Baker said she doubted they had kept the bank records but would look. If not, it would take time and, as a result of the Data Protection Act, would definitely need a court order. Julia asked for the phone records for the Fords stretching back further than the week prior to Sarah’s death as well as those for her own home, covering a similar period. She was looking at the photographs on the wall to her right and, after a moment’s hesitation, she added a request for the telephone records of the Rouses, the de la Rues, Mrs Pascoe, and Michael Haydoch.
Julia was well acquainted with the Data Protection Act and the ways of getting round it, or the incidences when it was best ignored. But this was not the time to suggest any of them.
She reached for the photocopy of the appointments diary in the hope that there would be a record she had missed of ‘frequently used phone numbers’, but there wasn’t, so she returned to the address book, resigned to having to do this the hard way. She concluded that the real thing would have looked very different: it would have had many pieces of loose paper jammed into the front and back. As it was, it was more like a Filofax. In the Notes section at the beginning there was a design for a new kitchen, complete with cupboard measurements and colour sc
hemes. The paint was to have been ‘Mandarin Blue – Sanderson’. Julia was moved anew by Sarah’s fate. There was something pathetic about studying someone’s plans for the future fifteen years after they were dead. It gave Sarah a humanity Julia had never permitted her in life.
The kitchen designs went on for more than a page – there were three or four, though Julia could not see much difference between them. Beyond that, there was a page headed ‘Alice’, which listed numbers for a playgroup, Dr Simon in Cranbrooke, health visitor, the Cranbrooke hospital and finally East Welham Primary School and Mrs Simpson.
West Welham did not have a school, so East Welham was the nearest.
There was a page headed ‘Birthdays’, which listed only those of Alice and Alan – strange that Sarah had felt the need to make a note of those – and then the heading was ‘Personal Expenses’ but the page beneath was blank. The following section had a series of figures written down – generally small ones – but Julia couldn’t work out whether they had any meaning. At the bottom, Sarah had written, ‘Lloyds, Cranbrooke, Mr Tyler’.
If the page headed ‘Personal Expenses’ was blank, the last three in the section were full of numbers. There was a summary at the top, which listed a figure for ‘Outgoings’, broken down into mortgage, rates, water, electricity. There was an ‘Incoming’ figure, too, but it was smaller. On the next page there was a list on the left-hand side of specific expenses, with corresponding figures on the right, including ‘Alan’s birthday’, probably a present, which had cost only ten pounds – not much even in 1982. Other sums corresponded to supermarket shopping, clothes, Cynthia’s wedding, Peter’s wedding, Joanna’s present, B&B and a deposit for Cranbrooke prep school. There were no references to anything unusual, certainly no listing for a present for M. It occurred to her that Alan might have used this address book, too. Certainly, most of the men she knew in relationships were not good at keeping a track of even their own friends’ telephone numbers and addresses.