Death Bed

by Leigh Russell

‘She didn’t lose you,’ Sam reminded her. ‘She gave you away.’

  ‘She was sixteen. People change. Grow up.’

  ‘And if she still doesn’t want to have anything to do with you? How would you feel then?’

  Geraldine shrugged.

  ‘Like you said, at least I’d know. If I hear it from her, then I’ll have to move on. It’s like hearing someone’s been reported missing in action. In a way it’s almost worse than knowing they’re dead, because you can’t get on with your life.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘It’s exactly like that, not knowing if she’s dead to me, as a mother. I don’t know how she’d react to meeting me, and it’s the uncertainty that’s so hard to live with. It doesn’t get any easier, because I can’t shake off the feeling that if I could only meet her, face to face, she’d change her mind about wanting to know me.’

  ‘Even though she’s told the social workers she doesn’t want any contact with you?’

  ‘Yes. But imagine how frightening it might seem to her now, the thought of my confronting her after all these years. I can’t help thinking there’s a chance, if I can only speak to her, tell her I’ve forgiven her, I understand – she’s my mother, Sam - ’

  ‘You have to find her then. You have to ask her.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes. You have a right to know. But don’t forget this feeling you have, that she might welcome you into her life after all this time – well, you could be completely wrong.’

  ‘I just feel there must be something there, some emotional tie.’

  ‘Don’t confuse what you want to find with the actual evidence you’ve got. All the indications are that she doesn’t want to see you. That’s all I’m saying. You don’t want to set yourself up for an even bigger disappointment.’

  ‘Yes, I know what you mean and I’ll be careful.’

  ‘Look, it’s getting late. I don’t know about you, but I’m shattered. Do you fancy a drink?’ Geraldine asked.

  ‘I would, but not tonight. I’m seeing Wanda.’

  As Sam stood up, Geraldine felt a faint hint of envy. It wasn’t that she wanted her relationship with Sam to develop along more personal lines, but she liked Sam and enjoyed her company and she didn’t feel like being alone. Somehow it seemed more difficult than ever to meet people now she was living in London.

  On a whim she phoned her sister, Celia, when she arrived home.

  ‘Are you busy this weekend?’

  ‘Busy? That’s an understatement.’

  Celia reeled off a list of her plans, which included ferrying Chloe around to the shops, horse riding, and a party.

  ‘They’re having a disco,’ she explained. ‘Her friend’s nine years old and she’s having a disco!’

  Geraldine gave a non-committal grunt.

  ‘How about you?’ Celia asked. ‘I suppose you’re up to your ears now, living in London.’

  ‘Yes,’ Geraldine lied.

  ‘Well, you must come and see us again soon,’ Celia replied vaguely. ‘I’ve got to dash, I’m late.’

  ‘Bye,’ Geraldine said, but Celia had already hung up.

  Geraldine resigned herself to an early night. It wouldn’t do her any harm. Before climbing into bed she took the photograph of her mother out of the drawer and placed it carefully beside her bag, so she wouldn’t forget to take it with her in the morning.

  69

  VANISHED WITHOUT TRACE

  On Saturday morning, Geraldine put the photograph of her mother carefully into an envelope and went into the framer’s on her way to work. Having the picture framed seemed the sensible thing to do but her hand trembled as she handed it over. She felt better when the woman behind the counter spoke confidently about framing it with protective glass.

  ‘You’ll be careful, won’t you?’

  ‘Careful?’

  ‘I mean, if you lose it I can’t get a replacement.’

  She didn’t add that she had no other keepsakes from her mother, not even memories, nothing but that one small faded photograph.

  Driving away from the framer’s she felt an overwhelming relief that her mother’s image would no longer be at risk from exposure to daylight. She would be able to look at it without fear of damaging it, display it openly on top of her bedside table instead of hiding it away in the drawer like a guilty secret, her mother’s features preserved for posterity like the characters depicted on the Grecian urn that inspired Keats’ poem she had been reminded of only the other day. She smiled, remembering how she had been intrigued by Keats’ idea when she was at school.

  ‘When old age shalt this generation waste, Thou shalt remain,’ she muttered to herself. And there was something about ‘She cannot fade’. Her mother’s photograph would last forever, like a work of art.

  A scrap of conversation she had heard recently floated into her mind.

  ‘Unlike us, art is eternal.’

  The words troubled her like a vaguely familiar face she couldn’t identify until, with a flash of adrenaline, she realised why they were nagging at her. A protest against the transience of life, they might reveal the strategy of a killer who clung onto his victims’ teeth and bones because they would outlast the living, just as she herself had become obsessed with preserving an image of her mother. It was only a hunch, but she couldn’t shake off the suspicion that she might have stumbled upon the killer’s insane logic.

  She had to discover who had spoken to her about art being eternal. Strictly speaking, all the statements she had taken should have been transcribed and stored on the central computer in the Major Incident Room, but Geraldine had questioned some of the people in her own time and, since Sam had mentioned her reputation for preferring to do everything herself, she had been reluctant to record everything centrally. Sam’s comment had upset her more than she had admitted to herself at the time, and typing up all her notes would reveal how extensive her double-checking had actually been. As a result, she still had copious handwritten jottings in her notebook yet to be entered on the system. If she couldn’t access the expression she was looking for electronically she would have to read through all her notes to discover who had talked to her about art outlasting life.

  It needed to be done quickly, but now she could do with help she felt she could hardly ask for it. The detective chief inspector might want to know why she had been questioning people in her own time outside the structure of the investigation, and more importantly, why she’d kept quiet about any information she had gathered. Of course Reg would know she hadn’t deliberately concealed anything from the team, but she had certainly failed to follow procedures strictly. She knew she hadn’t made a very good impression on the DCI and couldn’t afford to risk blotting her copybook again. In any event, in the absence of any information – let alone evidence - Reg was likely to dismiss her idea without a second thought. There was nothing else for it. She would have to conduct the search by herself. It was only a gut feeling, but her instincts had served her well in the past, and she could barely contain her excitement.

  As soon as she arrived in Hendon she set to work. She remembered the words clearly but couldn’t see them anywhere on the system, so she turned to her notebooks. It took her several hours to scan through them but she still didn’t find what she was looking for. As the words referred to art she wondered if she had heard them in one of the galleries off Bond Street. It was a reasonable supposition, so she re-read her notes from that afternoon, trying to reconstruct the conversations from her brief factual notes.

  She was wondering whether to return to Bond Street and retrace her footsteps in hopes of triggering a memory, when a note caught her attention.

  ‘3rd gallery. Owner fits description. Edward Barrington.’

  She recollected the tall, suave owner of a collection of ancient artefacts. They had discussed a poem displayed in his gallery in which the poet set art above life, because art lasts forever.

  ‘Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.’

 
The poet described an image of a lover pursuing a beautiful woman on a Greek urn, the characters unchanged since antiquity, centuries after the artist had vanished without trace.

  While the idea of courteous, cultured Edward Barrington as a vicious killer seemed far-fetched, Geraldine knew from experience how deceptive appearances could be. She needed to find out more about the art gallery proprietor with the soft, educated voice. Her fingers trembled as she keyed in his name and began to search.

  Towards lunch time there was a knock at her door and Sam peered in.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  Sam entered the room and closed the door.

  ‘I asked first,’ she said with a grin. ‘Oh alright, if you’re going to pull rank,’ she went on as Geraldine raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I was on my way to the canteen and wondered if you fancied some lunch. Or we could go out if you prefer?’

  Geraldine shook her head and Sam sat down.

  ‘So, what are you up to then?’

  Briefly Geraldine explained the conversation that had led her to suspect the art gallery owner.

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  Sam shook her head, a puzzled frown on her face.

  ‘This Edward Barrington said something to you about art and you think he’s our killer? Why? Because he has a thing about art outliving the artist?’

  Geraldine nodded.

  ‘Exactly. The killer is keeping parts of his victims – teeth, bones - ’

  ‘We suspect he’s removed their teeth and body parts. We don’t know he’s keeping anything,’ Sam pointed out.

  ‘He’s hanging onto them because he wants something of his victims to last. Everything – everyone – disappears eventually. He wants to save people from oblivion - ’

  ‘By killing them?’

  ‘By preserving something of them. Teeth. Bones. The only parts of us that don’t decay.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Sam said firmly.

  ‘You don’t expect this to be sane, do you?’

  ‘I’m sorry but all this sounds seriously weird. So, what now?’

  ‘I’m going to speak to the DCI. And then I think we should pay Edward Barrington a visit.’

  ‘But even accepting your theory that the killer’s mad, which obviously he is, I still don’t understand why you suspect this Edward Barrington all of a sudden. His name hasn’t come up at briefings. You haven’t even mentioned him before. So he made some random comment to you about poetry and life - ’

  ‘It was more than just a passing comment about art outlasting us when we’re dead. He had Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn on his wall. This is something he thinks about a lot.’

  Sam looked even more baffled.

  ‘It’s a poem about how art is superior to life, because art lasts and life doesn’t,’ Geraldine explained.

  ‘You’re telling me you’ve got a feeling this man might be a killer because he reads poetry? No, I really don’t get it. There may be something weird about people who read poetry, but - ’

  Geraldine interrupted her firmly.

  ‘It’s more than just a feeling, Sam. Edward Barrington’s interested in the idea of some part of us surviving our death. He told me he’s looking for the Grecian Urn that inspired Keats. I don’t suppose he meant that literally.’

  Before Sam could say anything, Geraldine told her she had been looking into Barrington’s background.

  ‘His parents both died in a domestic fire when he was ten.’

  Every trace of his family life had vanished in one night; the entire contents of his home, along with his mother and father. Only ten-year-old Edward Barrington had survived.

  ‘The terrible part of it was that he started the fire himself, trying to light a cigarette. So he was responsible for the tragedy that killed his parents. It seems he ran out of the house in a panic and his parents were trapped inside, probably looking for him. That was the conclusion of the Fire Investigation Team’s report.’

  Geraldine stopped speaking and the two women sat in silence thinking about the child so violently orphaned, struggling to cope with intolerable guilt. Geraldine pictured the small boy suffering unbearable loss, desperate to cling on to whatever he could of his parents, to prevent them vanishing altogether; the child grown into a man with a macabre collection of human remains, steadfastly resisting the reality of death.

  ‘Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.’

  ‘Poor kid,’ Sam commented at last. ‘So you really think he could be killing people to keep mementos of them after they die?’

  ‘Something like that. Perhaps he doesn’t even intend to kill them,’ Geraldine said slowly. ‘But he lost his mother and father, and now he’s looking for a way to hold on to something that won’t disappear like they did.’

  ‘No, I don’t buy it.’

  Sam shook her head.

  ‘I thought I did, but I don’t. Not as a motive for murder. It’s too weird.’

  ‘Well, we’re going to check it out whatever you think, so we might as well get on with it. We’re wasting time here.’

  Geraldine stood up.

  She was surprised that Reg Milton seemed more receptive to her theory than Sam had been.

  ‘It does no harm to follow it up,’ he agreed. ‘Although it will probably turn out to be another false trail.’

  Registering grey circles under his eyes and an unhealthy pallor on his face, Geraldine felt a flicker of sympathy for her senior officer.

  70

  FOREBODING

  Geraldine was aware that her intuition about the gallery owner, Edward Barrington, might be wide of the mark but she couldn’t suppress her excitement as Sam drove them along the Holloway Road and up Highgate Hill. It was possible they were about to come face to face with the man responsible for the deaths of Jessica Palmer and Donna Henry. She gazed out of the window at shops flashing past, and thought about the two dead women. Jessica Palmer had probably never walked along the High Street but Donna Henry might have shopped in Highgate or gone there to meet friends for lunch in one of the many cafes.

  When they reached the corner of Highgate West Hill they turned off the main road, approached a pub on their left and slowed down alongside a small green, a church spire visible on the far side.

  ‘This should be it,’ Sam muttered.

  She braked sharply and turned right up the gentle slope of a narrow road screened from the green by trees. They drew in opposite a row of large terraced houses that looked like authentic seventeenth century Queen Anne buildings. The row of properties was fenced off from the roadway by high black metal railings, apart from the final one to their right which stood slightly apart from the rest of the houses, the ground floor completely concealed behind a tall brick wall with heavy wooden double gates wide enough to let a car through.

  Looking at Edward Barrington’s house Sam seemed to tune into Geraldine’s sense of foreboding.

  ‘Shall I call for back-up?’

  ‘We’re only going to question him,’ Geraldine reminded her. ‘Let’s check it out first.’

  As they approached the dark gates Geraldine’s gut feeling of suspicion returned and she felt an almost unbearable sense of urgency. It was possible they were standing outside the murderer’s home right now, only a wooden gate and a brick wall separating them from another victim chained to a filthy bed, another life at risk. They might already be too late to save her.

  Peering through a gap between the gates, Geraldine could see a parking space in front of a square brick garage. There was a large window on the first floor of the house and immediately above that a skylight. The right side of the house was covered in ivy and tall shrubs screened it from the property next door. Sam tried a narrow wooden door to the left of the gates and it creaked open so they went in, crossed in front of the garage and rang the bell. They waited a moment then tried again. Sam rapped briskly on the door with her knuckles but no one came to open it.

  While Sam wen
t to check the garage door Geraldine followed a narrow passageway which led round the back of the house. A window on the corner rattled when she nudged it but she couldn’t wrench it open. She went back to see how her sergeant was getting on and as she walked across the front of the house noticed something glinting on the ground beside the path. She crouched down and saw a shiny black evening bag with a broken golden chain hanging from it, half concealed in the bushes.

  ‘What do you make of this?’ she called out in a low voice. Sam hurried over pulling on her gloves and bent down to pick up the bag, holding the chain delicately between a finger and thumb. Geraldine watched as she snapped the clasp open and together they examined its contents: a mirror, a silver make-up bag with lip gloss and mascara, a comb, a key ring attached to a Yale door key and a tiny pink fluffy mouse, a wallet containing around thirty pounds in cash, debit and credit cards and an Oyster travelcard in a black plastic holder. Sam drew out the credit card and turned it around.

  ‘It belongs to someone called Victoria Benning,’ she read aloud.

  Sam looked up and saw her own alarm reflected back at her from Geraldine’s eyes.

  ‘Isn’t that the name of the woman reported missing a couple of days ago?’

  Geraldine nodded, almost breathless with her growing sense of unease.

  ‘Yes. Come on, there’s no time to hang about. I saw a window round the back.’

  She led the way, Sam’s feet pounding along the path behind her. Reaching the window at the corner of the house, Geraldine turned to Sam.

  ‘Let’s do this.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  For answer Geraldine bent down and picked up a large stone which she hurled at the window. The glass shattered. She nodded at Sam who knocked out a jagged shard before reaching in to open the window while Geraldine pulled out her phone to call the station.

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait until back-up arrives?’ Sam asked when Geraldine had finished speaking.

  Geraldine shook her head.

  ‘We may already be too late - ’

  She didn’t finish the thought aloud.