by John Harvey
'Got what you wanted,' Lambert had said scornfully, seeing Cordon outside the court. 'Much fucking good it'll do you.'
Cordon kept his mouth closed. What he wanted were answers: answers he knew might never come.
When he got back to the flat it was empty—no click of the springer's paws on the floor as it bounded towards the door; Letitia had let herself in and taken the dog for a walk. Everything else was in its place. He poured himself a small Scotch and carried it to the window. The sun off the water took on a metallic sheen.
... unable to determine with any degree of certainty exactly what did occur...
He picked another CD from the shelf, programmed the track he wanted and set it to play. Eric Dolphy soloing, unaccompanied, on bass clarinet.
'God Bless the Child'.
When Letitia turned the key in the lock, Cordon was fast asleep and snoring.
III
22
Summer that year was brilliant and short-lived, a heady cluster of days in which the sun shone from first light to last. The temperature hovered close to twenty-four degrees, the relative humidity was high—pushing up towards the nineties—but the wind was a mere five miles per hour out of the east. Hot and still. A careful listener could have heard the thwack of ball against willow wafting in from the parks.
Walking, as he rarely did, along the banks of the Cam as it wound behind the great colleges, and watching the visitors punt lazily along in the imagined manner of languid undergraduates, Will briefly allowed himself to think that perhaps this was, after all, what a true summer was like.
Cambridge—England—at its best.
Was it, fuck!
A fifteen-year-old boy chased through the city centre by a gang of up to a dozen youths, cornered, kicked and finally stabbed to death, all for the wrong word, the wrong look, for not showing enough respect; another stabbing, in a small town to the east of the county, a jealous attack on a fourteen-year-old girl who had wandered off into the alley behind the youth club with the wrong boy; a domestic dispute which spilled over into the street and resulted in a passer-by who tried to intervene being assaulted with a length of metal pipe.
The abject and the everyday.
That was Will's England.
When the heat broke it was with a sudden storm and lashing winds. In some parts of the county there were warnings of flooding if the rivers broke their banks, in others the possibility of drought, the spectre of standpipes in the streets.
And just when he thought it couldn't get any worse, a body was found between Grantchester and Trumpington, near the edge of Seven Acre Wood. A young man of seventeen had been stripped and beaten and then tied in a cruciform position to the branches of a tree, ribs showing through almost translucent skin; his once white shirt had been fastened around his genitals and was heavily stained with blood. His face and chest had been smeared with shit. His eyes were closed. No movement, no sign of breath.
It was only when the paramedics carefully lowered him on to a stretcher that they realised he was, in fact, still alive.
Somewhere, the Church of St Andrew and St Mary at Grantchester, perhaps, bells began to sound, summoning people to evensong. And was there honey still for tea?
Will, together with the other senior officers in the Major Investigation Team, pooled resources, prioritised, pushed overtime up to and occasionally beyond acceptable limits. He worked long hours, longer than usual, pulled double shifts, returning home irritable and short-tempered, too often letting the children feel the rough side of his tongue without reason, too tired to eat, too tired to explain.
And through all of this, the image of Mitchell Roberts flickered fitfully at the far edge of his vision, like a piece of grit caught in the corner of his eye. CID wasn't as smart as it might have been, Liam Noble had said, landing the ball squarely back in Will's court. There hadn't been the time or resources to concentrate properly on him then, nor were there now. At night he fretted and twisted and turned and when he finally woke, still exhausted, more often than not it was with a throbbing head.
'We can't go on like this,' Lorraine said one morning, shifting Susie from one hip to the other. 'Something's got to change.'
Nothing did.
She took both Jake and Susie to her parents in Saffron Walden. 'Just for a week, Will, a break for all of us. Give you a little space. Ten days at most.'
There were air fresheners in every room and a knitted cover across the toilet seat; ready-to-heat meals from Waitrose on Hill Street. After three days Lorraine came back alone, leaving the children to be spoiled rotten.
She and Will went for dinner at the Old Fire Engine House in Ely, a taxi there and back, celery and stilton soup, beef and shallots braised in port and Guinness and a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Will could only just find room for a portion of old-fashioned sherry trifle.
He opened a second bottle of wine when they got home and they sat out on the porch with the windows open, listening to an old Cowboy Junkies CD of Lorraine's; finally making love right there on the varnished boards, Lorraine's skirt pushed up way past her waist, half-naked the pair of them and only a passing fox disinterestedly looking on.
23
Ruth found the heat oppressive. She took to wearing loose linen dresses and floppy broad-brimmed hats that made her look, she realised somewhat sadly, like a character out of Katherine Mansfield or Virginia Woolf: a mildly eccentric maiden aunt who wandered in and out of the edges of the story, haunted by the memory of some beautiful young man who had gone off to war and not returned. Ruth had this vision of herself drinking sour lemonade and being surrounded by a gaggle of nephews and nieces; pitied and then ignored.
She wrote poetry, Ruth thought, this other version of herself: Georgian poetry in the style of Walter de la Mare or Rupert Brooke. Gardened or kept bees. She rather liked the idea of keeping bees.
Unable to find the old Penguin paperback of The Garden Party she had once owned, she sought out Katherine Mansfield on the shelves of the library where she worked. But tales of so many lives truncated and unfulfilled made her ill. After a short while, she moved on to Virginia Woolf instead, but in her current state of mind this was scarcely an improvement. Mrs Dalloway driving herself to exhaustion in achieving what was, in truth, mundane—the perfect dinner party, which knives, which glasses, who would sit where; Mrs Ramsay struggling to catch moments of time like fireflies that could be kept in a jar then taken down and examined, as if the meaning of life might then be revealed.
We perished, each alone.
Little wonder that Woolf had filled her pockets with stones and walked out into the waters of the River Ouse.
Each alone...
Ruth felt she understood.
There had been times, after Heather had died, when taking her own life had seemed to Ruth the only way to survive. That blackness that would finally absolve you of all pain.
She had always thought of herself, in the most basic of ways, as Christian; believing not just in the tenets of the religion, but the existence, somewhere, of a God. A God to whom, in emergency, one prayed.
Ruth had prayed.
Prayed for a miracle.
Prayed—God help her—for Kelly to be the one who had died and not Heather.
In the end she had stopped. Not in believing in the possibility of another, spiritual world; nor believing there was no life after death. What she ceased to believe was that there was anything she could do to interfere, to influence or intercede.
Wait. Remain open. That was all.
She was good at waiting, Ruth decided. What else was there to do? She had waited and, through the efforts of her friends and none of her own, Andrew had come along and with him the chance of renewed happiness, companionship, a relationship that, while it had neither the highs nor lows of her marriage to Simon, offered stability and a measure of understanding. She still went to the cinema with Catriona and sometimes Lyle or Andrew or both would join them; she caught the train up to London for the occasional exhibition; she
ventured downriver on Lyle's boat. Once in a while, at Andrew's suggestion, they would play bridge, the four of them, but Ruth, never good at cards, found working out in whose hand the remaining trumps lay a near impossibility.
'Never mind,' Andrew would sigh, after they had gone three or four off for the umpteenth time. 'It's only a game.'
She had stopped painting after Heather died and when she tried again—a new set of oils to spur her on—all she could achieve were the dullest of still lifes. An attempt to free herself up and paint something more abstract, in the style of the Joan Mitchell canvases she had seen in Paris, ended in disaster. A morass of unconnected squiggly lines that lacked reason or rhyme.
So she shopped, cooked, ran Beatrice here and there, checked her homework, washed and ironed her clothes, tried to keep her temper whenever her daughter flew off the handle for no apparent reason or got into one of her impenetrable moods. She listened dutifully as Andrew complained about some new directive from on high: more tests, fewer tests, sex education for the under-nines.
That was her life now—perfect yet becalmed.
She would persevere with her diploma course in library management and by the summer of the coming year she should be able to stop working at the arts and craft shop and get a job in the library full time. That was something, surely? Something to look forward to. There were hundreds of people—thousands—so much worse off than herself.
She was sitting one evening, alone, just dark enough to switch on the standard lamp, a book open in her lap, the new Rose Tremain, a glass of white wine on the small table by her side. Beatrice was already in bed, Andrew out at a governors' meeting—'Don't wait up, you know what these things are like. It'll probably go on for hours.'
Suddenly she set down the book and went across to the chest at the far side of the room and retrieved an album from the bottom shelf, where it lay beneath some linen napkins and a set of table mats Andrew's sister had given them and that they'd never used.
Inside the album were photographs that had been taken, mostly by Simon, years before, the years after Heather was born. Each new stage documented closely, as if preserving it in time. Back in those days Simon had rarely had the camera out of his hand.
Ruth sat back in her chair and began to turn the pages. Heather in a buggy at Alexandra Palace, a quadrant of north London spread out behind her. Heather on the swings, one hand pointing at the camera, the other clinging on for dear life.
'I always liked that one,' the voice said from over Ruth's shoulder.
'Yes,' Ruth said, only a little startled. 'Me too.'
'Where is it? Highgate Woods? I can't remember.'
'I think so.'
'Daddy's pushing me. Look, you can just see his hand.'
'Oh, yes.' Ruth had failed to notice.
The breath was warm on her cheek, the back of her neck, just above the collar of her blouse.
She turned another page but Heather was no longer there. Just the image, postcard size in Kodachrome: a small child with a glass-eyed bear. The air in the room was cold, as if a door somewhere had been left open.
'Oh, Heather,' Ruth said and closed her eyes.
She didn't open them again until she heard the sound of Andrew's key in the front door lock.
24
Summer moved on. On his drive into work that morning, Will had noticed some of the trees already beginning to shed their leaves. It promised to be a quieter day than usual, things ticking down. The number of outstanding cases was coming under control.
That illusion lasted till mid-afternoon, the call to emergency services being logged at 16.17. The caller's voice was high and shrill and difficult to understand; five years old, he was having to stand on tiptoe to reach the telephone where it was fixed to the wall.
When the woman on the switchboard finally pieced together enough of what he was saying and had established his address—the boy reciting it by rote, good boy, well taught—she told him, as calmly as she could, to stay right where he was, not touch anything, not anything at all, and someone would be there right away to help.
The first ambulance was at the scene within seven minutes, the first police cars inside twelve; Will himself arrived just as the area surrounding the house was being cordoned off, officers in protective clothing beginning to go about their tasks.
The house was detached, thirty, perhaps forty years old, part of a small, once more prosperous estate, with a pebble-dash front that was looking tired and starting to fade. A child's tricycle lay on the gravel path leading towards the front door. Two tubs of geraniums, scarlet and white, stood either side of shallow steps, with matching hanging baskets above, fuchsia and lobelia curling haphazardly down. The door to the side garage was closed.
An officer came out of the house as Will approached and from the look on his face, Will knew what he was about to see inside was not good. The first stuttering line of blood splashed out across the parquet floor and up on to the wall beside the now open door. There was more blood in random patches on the stairs and the adjacent wall, and, clear on the banister rail, a bloodied hand mark where it had been gripped tight.
From another room, Will could hear the sound of a child's inconsolable sobbing, a breathless litany that rose and broke but never stopped.
The woman's body was on the first landing, arms and legs splayed wide where she had finally fallen, the pale green of her summer dress darkened here and there with blood. There were a number of smaller wounds along the insides of her arms—defence wounds, Will thought—and her throat had been savagely cut.
The rooms on the upper floors were empty, the beds neatly, carefully made. In the boy's room, the books were shelved, the toys stacked and put away. His dressing gown was folded, with his pyjamas, across one end of his narrow bed.
They found the man in the garage, hanging. A length of plastic-coated wire had been looped over a central beam and secured. The drop just high enough once the stool had been kicked away. There was blood on his hands and blood on his face and in his hair and blood on the rope where he had knotted it and pulled it tight. Also bloodied, a broad-bladed kitchen knife lay on the concrete floor, the kind of knife used for carving Sunday joints, roast leg of beef or lamb, loin of pork, boned and rolled.
What happened here? Will asked himself. A man attacks his wife in a frenzy, kills her and then himself. Jealous rage, is that what this was? His mind was starting to spin. She was leaving him? Having an affair? Leaving him and threatening to take with her their son, their only child, born when she was what? In her mid-thirties? Neither of them in the flush of youth.
A crime of passion, then.
Will thought back to the woman's face, drained of all colour, plain: passion spent.
Paul and Linda Carey, forty-one and thirty-nine years old.
Ordinary people, ordinary lives.
It would be another day before the results of the autopsy revealed Paul Carey's stomach to contain a quantity of partly digested sleeping pills, sedative-hypnotic barbiturates, Seconal and Nembutal evenly mixed.
Will spoke to Paul Carey's father, Michael, when he came down from Northumberland to identify the body.
Michael Carey was a few months shy of seventy, straight-backed, square-shouldered, with a full head of greying hair. Born into farming, he had turned his back on the land at seventeen, joined the army as a junior cadet and worked his way up to the rank of major. On retirement, he had bought a plot of land in southern Spain, where, with only limited assistance, he and his wife had built a villa, which Paul and his wife had infrequently visited on holiday. Then, when his own wife had died suddenly, following a stroke, at sixty-three, Carey had sold up in Spain, returned home and bought a pair of old farm labourers' cottages a few miles from where he had been born; these he was in the process of renovating and knocking into one. The farm his family had owned for four generations, and on which he had been raised, had been sold to a property developer and now housed upwards of fifty stone-clad three- and four-bedroom dwellings for commu
ter families from Newcastle upon Tyne.
'She never took to us, you know, Linda,' Carey said. 'Oh, she was polite, like. Very proper. Ps and Qs, you know what I mean? But no warmth. No ...' He made his hand into a fist and tapped it against his chest, above his heart. 'Nothing there. Not for me, at least.'
They were walking past the bowling green on Christ's Pieces, teams of men and women nattily got up in white, skips standing at the head, cajoling and calling advice, signalling the woods to within inches of their target.
'I asked her once, came right out with it, and, to do her credit, she didn't shirk. "It's you," she said, "you and Paul. The way you are with him. As if he can never do anything right. Never be good enough. Not for you. And he resents it, I know he does, but he hasn't got the guts to say. And that's your fault, too."'
He shook his head and, although they were walking more slowly now, his breathing accelerated.
'I remember once we were on holiday when Paul was just a lad, Scotland it would have been, the west coast. Talisker perhaps, Struan, somewhere round there. Someone had made a rope swing over this piece of water, one side of the rocks to the other, and all these lads were taking it in turns to swing across. Calling and hollering, you can imagine. Great fun they were having. The shout that went up whenever one of them loosed hold and took a tumble down into the water.'
He stopped and looked at Will evenly, weighing up whether to continue or let it be.