He spotted her now, weaving her way gracefully between baby buggies and fractious children. He raised a hand to attract her attention and was surprised at his own delight when she immediately smiled and then, reaching his table, greeted him with what appeared to be a modicum of genuine warmth.
‘Ivo,’ she said, holding out her hand.
He took it. ‘DI Fisher.’
‘Grace, please.’ She sat down opposite and, glancing from his cup to the queue at the self-service counter, waved away his offer of a beverage.
‘Good choice,’ he said and was rewarded with another smile. Maybe his wish that she’d allow him to be her self-appointed champion wasn’t so utterly ridiculous after all. Nor perhaps his conviction that she’d take seriously what he had to say.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have long,’ she said.
‘I’ll cut to the chase then. Yesterday I had a story all ready to go about the relationship between Fewell and his first victim prior to the shooting.’
Her grey eyes regarded him steadily. ‘Go on.’
‘Someone who knew Fewell and liked him says he was absolutely fine until his ex-wife began dating Mark Kirkby.’ Ivo paused, waiting to see how much of this she was prepared to hear. She gave a tiny nod, so he continued. ‘According to my source, Fewell complained that Kirkby was nasty and mean, victimizing him and doing everything he could to try and take his kids away. Even claimed he’d tried to fit him up in some way.’
‘Fit him up?’
‘Fewell then clammed up, apparently. My source wasn’t sure what he meant.’
‘OK.’
Ivo was content to sit and watch her as she digested everything he’d said. He could happily watch her all day.
‘But you didn’t run the story?’ she asked at last.
‘It was spiked. The bosses wouldn’t have it. Said that monstering a victim who was a good-looking young police officer with a glowing record wouldn’t sell newspapers.’
The tiny cynical curl at the corner of her mouth seemed at odds with her response. ‘It wasn’t Mark Kirkby who killed five people and wounded three others,’ she said.
‘No, but if he tormented Fewell until the poor guy got into such a state – well, it’s not quite as goodies-wear-white-hats and baddies-wear-black as people would like to think, is it?’
‘And what use would it be to vilify Mark Kirkby now?’
Ivo had enjoyed an almost identical conversation on the phone with the editor who’d informed him his story was dead in the water. ‘It might help Russell Fewell’s kids,’ he said, crossing his fingers tightly under the table that she would understand how important this was.
She looked down and ran a finger along the edge of the table before looking back up at him. ‘All the same, you can’t expect us to turn on one of our own.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘And, as my editor reminded me, Mark Kirkby was a member of the Police Federation, which represents 140,000 officers in England and Wales. Plus it controls a war chest out of which it funds libel actions on behalf of officers who are less than enchanted by what newspapers write about them. And has enjoyed an almost unbroken run of successful cases, I might add. Given those odds, and even though you can’t libel the dead, my editor didn’t feel my story had legs.’
From the lift of one delicate eyebrow she didn’t seem to like that any more than he did.
‘So why are we here?’ she asked, and now he detected a genuine warmth in her curiosity.
‘My source doesn’t care about Mark Kirkby,’ Ivo told her. ‘He’s concerned about Fewell’s kids. He knows young Davey. Saw how close he was to his dad.’
‘Ah.’
She looked hurt, and he waited for her to say more, but she just kept looking at him with those lovely grey eyes of hers.
‘You and I both know what it’s like for the families of murderers,’ he urged her. ‘Donna Fewell’s not going to be able to stay in Dunholt. She’ll probably have to change her name. Even then those kids will be stigmatized for the rest of their lives.’
‘They won’t need other people to do that to them,’ she said with a sigh. ‘They’ll do it to themselves.’
Ivo pushed home his advantage. ‘Davey and Ella aren’t to blame. They’re as innocent as everyone else. Their dad did a terrible, terrible thing, but I don’t believe he was evil.’
‘You’ll be a lone voice in the wilderness.’
‘Do you have anything I can use? Something to make my story stack up?’
Ivo watched as she thought about it, thought long enough for him to be certain she had something. But would she share it? Finally she blinked a few times and licked her lips. ‘Tell your source to contact the coroner’s officer. Tell him he can ask to speak at the inquest. Then you can report what he says.’
‘That’s likely to be months away.’
She spoke carefully. ‘Unless you can show that Mark Kirkby misused his official powers, it’s not a police matter.’
Ivo wondered if this was a hint. ‘Did he?’ he asked.
She looked a little flustered. ‘No.’
Ivo didn’t entirely believe her denial and guessed from the tiny frown that creased her forehead that she didn’t either. But then she shook her head in dismissal of whatever idea had occurred to her. ‘No,’ she repeated more firmly. ‘He didn’t. There’s no evidence whatsoever to suggest that.’
Ivo was surprised at how bitterly disappointed he was. He must be getting old and gullible, but he’d simply never doubted that the Ice Maiden would feel as strongly about championing the underdog as he did. Seemed he was wrong.
‘I have to go.’ She pushed back her chair yet made no move to stand up. ‘Your source?’ she asked. ‘Is he reliable?’
‘Solid gold. He’s known Fewell since he was a teenager. Knew his dad too.’
She nodded slowly, considering what to say, then took a deep breath and leaned forward across the table towards him. ‘What will also come out at the inquest – and absolutely not before,’ she added with heavy emphasis, ‘is that although Fewell left no suicide note, he did leave out on deliberate display the court summons for a drink-driving charge. It related to an incident outside Colchester when he was initially pulled over because of a broken rear light. It was his birthday.’ She paused to push back the hair that had fallen across her cheek. ‘The arresting officer was at school with Mark Kirkby. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest that it’s more than a coincidence, but it may not have looked that way to Fewell. And it may help his kids to know that, to understand one of the building-blocks in their dad’s fixation.’
Ivo grinned with relief: he had not misjudged her! ‘Thank you!’
She nodded, unsmiling. ‘Goodbye. And good luck.’ Almost impetuously, it seemed to him, Grace held out her hand to him again. As he held it for a moment he suddenly became aware of a middle-aged couple at a nearby table looking at them with idle speculation. What did they make of this overweight over-the-hill specimen gazing with such adoration at a clear-skinned, bright-eyed young woman dressed in an elegant fitted dark business suit and pale-blue shirt? Not lovers, certainly. Father and daughter was the best he could hope for. What the hell, he’d be more than happy to settle for that.
12
Robyn laid the surplus eggs in their corrugated cardboard tray in the passenger seat footwell of her mother’s Suzuki four-by-four, ready to be dropped off at the farm shop. The owner, who liked a Sunday morning chat with her regular customers, had called to say she’d be open as usual. It had rained in the night, and most of the snow had melted, leaving icy puddles and an uninviting mist of grey drizzle. Robyn stood for a moment watching her mother’s four-by-four as it set off along the rutted track leading up to the line of high hedges that hid the road. It had to pull up onto the muddy verge to allow a silver Volkswagen saloon to slide carefully past. Leonard was inside the house, so Robyn wrapped her arms around herself to keep warm and waited for the silver car to draw up outside the workshop. A balding, overweight man in an ill-fit
ting grey suit got out and made no secret of taking a good look around.
‘Morning!’ he called. ‘I’m looking for Leonard Ingold. Is he about?’
‘He’s indoors. Let me fetch him.’
Assuming the man was a client, Robyn left him standing outside. Clients never came into the house. Leonard was obviously not expecting a visitor, but he left what he was doing and went out to greet him. Robyn went to the sink to wash her hands after handling the eggs and idly watched out of the kitchen window as Leonard and the man shook hands.
They seemed to know one another. They walked together over to the workshop, where the visitor waited for Leonard to unlock the door to the reception area, the only room where customers were permitted. He didn’t look like a sportsman: he wasn’t dressed in jeans or corduroys, with a tweed or waxed jacket, like the wildfowlers and other shooters who came – usually by appointment – to have guns cleaned and repaired or, more often, to buy the specialist ammunition that Leonard made and supplied for deer-stalking. A perfectly balanced bullet for a sporting rifle could make all the difference, and her dad’s reputation brought sportsmen here from far and wide. Occasionally someone in a suit would come before or after work to drop off a valuable gun or antique weapon for alteration or restoration, but men like that drove much more expensive cars, and, besides, this guy was unlikely to be on his way to work two days after Christmas. Robyn thought he looked more like a supplier of some kind or a burglar-alarm salesman.
Anyway, she didn’t really care who he was or what he wanted. Even her mum, the authorized ‘servant’ listed on Leonard’s firearms dealer’s licence who did all the meticulous bookkeeping, generally left the men – for it was nearly always men – to talk in private. However much Nicola respected her husband’s craftsmanship, she said she found endless discussions on the intricacies of shooting boring, and Robyn didn’t disagree.
Robyn wasn’t really interested in anything today. She felt as if she were waiting to pack up ready for some huge journey, or to move house, or something. Not that she ever had moved. She was trying not to think about Angie, yet the sense of crushing weight and impending catastrophe remained, along with a strange sort of guilt over whether she was feeling what she was supposed to be feeling. She’d spoken to two of her school friends on the phone this morning, and they’d said pretty much the same thing. In a way it had helped, but she also wished she hadn’t spoken to them, because afterwards none of them had known what else to say to one another. It felt wrong to start chatting about normal stuff, like whether Sally would still hold her New Year’s Eve party, or about the start of term the following week, as if life could simply flow onwards again as before. Yet what else were they to do? Angie was not going to be at the party, not going to be in class when term started, would never be there to chat on the phone again, and yet the rest of them had to carry on as if nothing had happened.
Robyn felt she ought to do some revision, but knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate. She regretted now that she hadn’t gone with her mum to deliver the eggs and pick up some more feed for the hens; small practical tasks seemed to take away some of the flu-like feeling that weighed her down. She looked around the kitchen: plenty of little jobs she could usefully get on with here.
When Leonard came into the kitchen half an hour later, she was absorbed in scraping limescale off the old mismatched saucers beneath the haphazard collection of potted plants along the windowsill, and finding solace in replacing dullness with shine.
‘Fancy a walk, Birdie?’ he asked.
‘Two seconds,’ she said. ‘Just want to finish this.’
Leonard called to Martha and Bounder. They had already been out this morning and came reluctantly from the fireside, stretching and yawning and wagging their tails in an amiable demonstration of obedience. Robyn neatly lined up the geraniums, cyclamen and Christmas cacti along the freshly wiped windowsill and stood back to admire her handiwork, looking to her father for approval, but he was at the back door, pulling on his coat and shooing out the dogs. She grabbed her own jacket and joined him outside.
‘Down to the creek?’ From beside the door he picked up a bulging cloth bag tied firmly with knotted string. He held it up. ‘A batch of casings I reckon are counterfeit. Chinese, probably. One or two of them split when I was loading, and I don’t want them finding their way to some idiot who thinks it’s OK to take a chance. Best drop them where they won’t be found.’
Robyn nodded. She knew that, while gun parts had to be strictly accounted for, her dad occasionally disposed of worn-out tools and other bits and pieces by weighing them down with a stone or old brick and sinking them deep in the river mud. She’d heard him joke that he liked to imagine he was leaving a nice puzzle for some future archaeologist to find and interpret.
They set off together across the grass. The drizzle had cleared, and there was nothing she liked better than to be out with her dad. Not that they necessarily talked much, other than to call the dogs, and usually she enjoyed his silent presence, loved sharing the details that caught his attention – an unusual migratory bird, the way the wavelets scudded against the wind, the first purple flowers appearing on the sea lavender. Today though she craved distraction, wanted a bit of idle chat.
‘Who was that guy?’ she asked.
‘I know him from the wildfowling club,’ said Leonard. ‘Wanted advice about security and stuff.’
He sounded bored, so Robyn did not pursue it. Instead she settled into the familiar rhythm of his footsteps as they skirted the low-lying fields and reached the grassy ridge of the sea wall, where they could look out across the pools and lagoons of the salt marsh. In between the interconnected islands of khaki-coloured seablite, some still bearing patches of snow, the water was a startlingly intense blue. She looked up at the sky, pleased to see tiny patches of matching blue emerging from behind the cloud cover. A strong wind blew in from the distant North Sea, and she stuck her hands in her pockets and turned to walk into it, knowing without being told that they would be heading along the sea wall to the spot where a winding route led – if you knew where you were going and had done it before – down the other side and out across a linked zigzag of muddy islets to a part of the main creek a little way further out.
‘It’s going to be strange going back to school,’ she said.
‘But you’re happy there?’
She heard strain in his voice and realized with a pang that, though he had barely met Angie, he must feel for her parents and be experiencing that wing-tip brush of another father’s loss. She tucked her arm into his.
‘You know how brilliant it’s been in the sixth form. The teachers are right behind us, and the girls are fine. But Angie was special. Just so lovely. And she understood all this.’ Robyn swept her free arm out towards the water. ‘Not everyone understands why I love it here, why I’d rather have this than endless shopping and parties.’ A moment of clear recognition of the finality of death hit her, and she breathed in sharply. ‘I’ll miss her.’
‘It’s been a shock,’ said Leonard. ‘But you’re young. You have plenty to look forward to.’
She understood her dad’s pragmatism. It wasn’t dismissive; quite the opposite, it stemmed from a deep and instinctive desire to shield her from unhappiness.
‘I know,’ she said, giving his arm a squeeze. ‘And I do.’ Ahead of them the low sun broke through the cloud, its light picking out the white sailing boats anchored over on the far shore of the estuary. ‘But it makes me feel really selfish. I mean, Angie’s not going to have any of that. Her parents will never see her go to uni, have a career, have kids. Yet none of that stuff feels real. If I’m honest, all I really feel sad about is how much I’m going to miss her, how she won’t be there, sitting next to me in the biology class next week.’
‘That’s not selfish, Birdie,’ said Leonard. ‘It’s a compliment to her memory.’ He let go of her arm as they reached the vestigial path – a line of worn and flattened grass – which meandered across the salt mars
h towards the channel of deep fast-flowing water, and turned his head to speak over his shoulder. ‘When my father died, I don’t remember thinking about anyone else at all.’
Robyn held her breath. She knew that her grandfather had died when Leonard was six years old, and he seldom spoke of his childhood, making this a rare moment of intimacy.
‘It was years before it even occurred to me that my mother might have felt the same as me. And I certainly never considered all the things in life that my father had missed out on. All I cared about was that I hated us being left alone, hated my mother not being the same, because she was worrying about everything all the time. I hated it. That was my grief.’
‘But you were so little,’ she said, taking his hand to scramble down the steep side of the sea wall.
‘I know Angie was your friend, but you mustn’t let this business get you down. You’ve got your exams this year. Then you’ll be off to university. No one in my family has ever got a degree. You’ve a whole lifetime of opportunity in front of you. And we’ll do all we can, financially. You know that, don’t you?’
‘I do know I’m not alone, Dad.’ She gave him a smile, trying not to cry. ‘Thank you.’
Leonard nodded gruffly and then turned to lead the way, the heavy cloth bag swinging by his side.
13
Ruth Woods, the family liaison officer, opened the door when Grace rang. Grace had called half an hour earlier and explained that, if possible, she wanted Donna Fewell’s permission to speak to Davey alone.
When Grace had got into her car in the superstore car park after meeting Ivo Sweatman, she was shaking with anger at the thought of Mark Kirkby and very probably his oldest friend Curtis Mullins conspiring to persecute Davey and Ella’s father for no apparent reason other than that Mark fancied taking over Russell Fewell’s family. Grace knew that some of her rage stemmed from her own demons; the image she was building of Mark Kirkby as a bully who loved the uniform because it gave him licence to swagger and throw his weight about reminded her uncomfortably of her ex-husband. But she was also aware of how the intolerable and terrifying helplessness that resulted from such bullying could drive someone essentially compliant and unassertive right over the edge. As Fewell, alone outside, witnessed his kids sitting down to Christmas dinner with his oppressor, had it been merely the work of minutes, seconds even, to progress from the red mist of wronged victim to mass murderer?
Shot Through the Heart: DI Grace Fisher 2 Page 7