by John Harvey
He greeted Henderson, if not like an old friend, then someone with whom he'd shared a drink at the nineteenth hole or possibly sat across from, enjoying a hand of bridge.
Will's hand he shook briskly, his tone businesslike, just this side of affable; a request for ten minutes alone with his client to which Will acceded.
The interview began with Will going through what had previously been established about Henderson's friendship with the Lawsons, continuing with his whereabouts on the evening their daughter had disappeared. All very low key, matter of fact.
Bored, the solicitor examined his nails.
'You like her, the daughter, Beatrice?'
'Yes. Yes, of course.'
'Have fun together, on the boat, messing around?'
'Sometimes, yes. Look, we've been through all this before.'
'And she was okay with that? Enjoyed it? Played along?'
'Yes. Like I told you before, she could get into moods sometimes—I suppose all kids do—and if Andrew or Ruth said anything, she'd only get worse. Sullen didn't come into it. Face like thunder. With me, most times she'd snap out of it, come around. Made her laugh, I suppose.'
'Like you said, bit of horseplay.'
'You said.'
'Even so, that's what it was. Something physical.'
'Not always.'
'Slap and tickle.'
Before Henderson could respond, the solicitor laid a warning hand on his knee. 'I think we could move on from this particular line of questioning, Detective Inspector, don't you?'
'You and Catriona,' Will said, 'you've never had children of your own?'
Henderson shook his head.
'Any special reason?'
'Inspector ...' the solicitor said, beginning to voice an objection.
'Never got round to it, I suppose,' Henderson said. 'Busy lives and then—you look up and it's too late.'
'You like children, though? Young people.'
'Yes, we both do.'
'Enjoy their company.'
'Yes.'
'The pair of you?'
'Yes, I said.'
'In the same way?'
Henderson's mouth opened as if to speak.
'My client can't be expected to answer for his wife,' the solicitor said.
'I'll be happy if he answers for himself.'
'Yes,' Henderson said a moment later, without much conviction. 'In the same way, of course.'
'She shares your taste, then, for eroticism?'
No reply.
'Mr Henderson?'
'Not necessarily, no.'
'She found it offensive, perhaps?'
'Inspector, you can't ...' the solicitor tried, but again his client cut him off.
'Not really, no.'
'But you,' Will said, 'you'd no such qualms?'
'You make it sound as if this was something that happened all the time.'
'Looking at pictures of young girls.'
'Young women.'
'The Dreams of Young Girls, that was one of the books on your shelf.'
'Exactly. One book.'
'Girls not so very much older than Beatrice Lawson.'
'Damn you!' Henderson banged both fists down on the table and scraped back his chair. 'I'll not sit here and listen to your filthy innuendoes. Not another minute more.'
'I think,' the solicitor said, rising easily to his feet, 'this interview seems to be at an end.'
Will let them get almost to the door.
'A shame,' he said. 'I was hoping we'd have time to discuss some of the items we recovered from your hard drive.'
Henderson stopped mid-stride.
'Your solicitor can probably tell you about the work of CEOPs, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre. Several items we found might come into their jurisdiction. Interest them at least. Short sections of video you seem to have downloaded.'
'All right,' Henderson turned back into the room and approached the table.
'Sexy Girls Doing Homework.'
'I said, all right.'
'Putitas de Secondaria. My Spanish is pretty negligible, but I think I can work that one out. More schoolgirl stuff.'
Henderson sat back down, avoiding Will's gaze, head in his hands. Alongside him, his solicitor drew a slow breath, leaned back, and, with a deft tug at his trouser leg, crossed one long leg slowly over the other. It was going to be a longer morning than he'd imagined.
Despite her husband's angry advice, Catriona Henderson had agreed to talk to the police without the presence of a solicitor. Perhaps knowing she was going to be interviewed by a female officer made her feel more at ease; then again, she might have felt she had nothing to hide.
Ellie Chapin had been on the force for three years, a detective for less than eighteen months: still, to some extent, feeling her way. Dark hair worn quite short and parted to one side, with a fringe she was forever brushing away from her eyes, she was in her late twenties and looked younger. To her embarrassment she was occasionally asked for ID when buying drinks at the bar.
An inch or so above medium height, not a scrap of extra fat on her body, she was wiry and deceptively strong. A runner's build. On the track, at five thousand metres, she was regularly pushing to get under sixteen minutes. Cross-country, sloshing through winter rain and mud, she usually finished ahead of the pack. At university, she'd captained the women's athletics team and come close to being selected for the World Student Games.
If Catriona—a big, confident woman with a big voice—thought she was going to get an easy ride, she was mistaken. Other issues aside, Ellie felt she had a point to prove. One of the more experienced male officers sat alongside her, but with instructions not to interrupt unless absolutely necessary. This was strictly her show.
'How would you characterise your husband's relationship with Beatrice Lawson?' Ellie asked.
'I don't know if I would,' Catriona replied.
'Try'.
'I don't know if they had a relationship.'
'They spent time together.'
Catriona shook her head. 'Not really. We all spent time together, the four of us, Ruth and Andrew, Lyle and myself. Two couples. That was the relationship. Sometimes, when it was appropriate, Beatrice was there too. Sometimes not.'
'She'd be with her babysitter, childminder?'
'I imagine so, I really don't know.'
'But you all went out together on the river, days out, excursions?'
'Sometimes, yes.'
'And on occasions like that, what would you say about your husband and Beatrice? I mean, did they get on?'
'Yes, I suppose so. As much as a fifty-something-year-old man can get on with a ten-year-old.'
'She felt okay with him, then? I mean, not intimidated or anything, the way some girls are?'
'No, I don't think so.'
'Friendly? Relaxed?'
'Yes, if you like. You could call it that.'
'And were you ever aware of your husband behaving towards her in a way you might consider inappropriate?'
'Inappropriate?'
'Yes.'
'Of course not.'
'You're sure?'
'Of course I'm sure.'
'You do know of your husband's interest in young girls?'
'His what?'
'His interest in young girls, photographs and so on ...'
'Photographs, that doesn't mean—' Abruptly, she stopped.
'Doesn't mean what, Mrs Henderson?'
'It doesn't mean that he ... This has nothing to do with Beatrice, nothing at all. They're just pictures, that's all they are. If he takes pleasure in looking at them, so what? It isn't any crime.'
'There are laws.'
'And these are books you can buy in any bookshop.'
'Laws about indecent images of children.'
'Now you're talking nonsense.'
'Am I?'
'Of course you are.'
'I have to ask you, Mrs Henderson, have you seen the images your husband has downloaded from the Inte
rnet?'
'No, of course not.'
'Young girls, not much older than Beatrice. Dancing round in little netball skirts. Showing themselves to the camera. Getting naked in the shower. Touching themselves. Touching each other.'
'Stop it.'
'There's one little film, not much more than a few minutes long. This girl with two grown men ...'
'Stop.'
'At one point, the camera zooms in on her face and you—'
'Stop!' Catriona threw up her arms and flailed at the empty air. 'Stop it, please.'
Ellie glanced at the officer beside her. 'Mrs Henderson,' she said, 'if you'd like to take a break ...'
'Perhaps if ...' Catriona began. 'Perhaps if I could speak to you on your own?'
She looked away. Ellie nodded and, without comment, the officer got to his feet and left the room.
'There now,' Ellie said. 'Just take your own time.'
There were damp patches darkening beneath the arms of Catriona's blouse and Ellie was just beginning to sense the sweat from the other woman's body.
'Would you like some water?' she asked, but Catriona began talking as if she hadn't heard, her voice, unlike before, low and subdued.
'When I first found out ... when I first found out what ... what made him excited, turned him on, we'd been together, married for years, and when he told me, at first I thought it was a joke. And I suppose he tried to make a joke out of it. Asking me if I still had my old school uniform, stuff like that. I remember telling him not to be so stupid, but at the same time seeing that it had made him—just talking about it had made him excited. And then, one day he came home with this adult size girl's gym kit, you know, green PE skirt, white Aertex blouse and little white socks, God knows where he got it from, some fancy-dress shop, I suppose. He asked me to put it on, that night, and got really angry when I said I wouldn't. Really, really angry, so then I did, and after that he kept asking me and asking me and bringing home other things to wear with it, like crotchless panties, and then he started wanting to take photographs, and I saw myself, one evening, there in the mirror, this fat, overweight, middle-aged woman posing on top of the bed in all this stupid gear, bits of flesh sticking out everywhere, and that's when I told him, no, no more. I'm not doing this any more. And the next day I took the uniform and everything and lit a fire and burned it and said, there, that's the end of it.
'I told him it didn't matter what he did, his photographs and magazines and whatever, as long as he kept it to himself. That's why I insisted that room be kept locked. Then I didn't have to think about it. I didn't have to know.
'But I asked him once—we were talking quite honestly, one of those times, quite rare, when you felt you really could—and I asked him if he ever felt tempted—you know, you read about these men going off to Thailand and places, sex tourists, is that what they're called?—I asked him if he ever felt he wanted to go somewhere like that, and he looked at me as if it were the most horrific thing he'd ever heard. Fantasy, he said, that's all it is. Fantasy. I'd cut off my hand before I'd touch a child. That way.'
She waited, holding Ellie's attention. 'If you think Lyle had anything to do with whatever's happened to Beatrice, you're wrong.'
By mid-morning, Henderson's solicitor had had enough. 'My client's given you all the time you could reasonably expect and more. Answered every question fully and fairly. It's quite clear to me you've got nothing to charge him with. As far as the disappearance of that poor girl is concerned, he clearly has no involvement whatsoever.'
'There is the matter of the material on his computer,' Will said.
'Pretty tame as things go these days, don't you think? Boundaries change, Detective Inspector, what's acceptable and what's not. I wonder sometimes, all those free-minded liberals back in the sixties, demonstrating for free speech, Lady Chatterley and all that, what they think about the permissive society now, what it's all come to? Every second or third word out of people's mouths a swear word, children too. And what you hear on the radio, read in the newspaper. All there, nothing barred. The culture we live in, it makes me shudder. But we're its servants, you and I, in different ways. Nothing we could do, even if we chose, to stem the tide. I doubt very much if the CPS would think it in the public interest to prosecute my client for possessing material anyone with a few pounds and an evening to spend can see at his local Odeon, but that decision is not mine.'
He held out his hand.
'The girl, Inspector, I hope you find her. And alive.'
54
Helen was surprised at how quickly the first part of the journey passed. She read a little, fetched an indifferent coffee from the buffet and later a somewhat less indifferent tea, gazed out of the window, read a little more. The train was pulling into Bristol Temple Meads almost before she'd realised. The next section, on towards Exeter and Plymouth, took them through increasingly attractive countryside, steeply undulating hills with pockets of woodland in between, the leaves turning all shades of orange and brown.
At Plymouth there was a stop to change crew which allowed passengers time to stretch their legs on the platform, time, in Helen's case, for a cigarette. She was just climbing back on to the train when she glimpsed, several carriages down, someone who looked enough like Declan Morrison to raise goose bumps on her arms. Declan following her down to Cornwall in what? Some ill-considered cockamamie attempt to get her to change her mind? In the weeks since she had told him it was over between them, he had tried waylaying her at work, sent emails, phoned; once, very late, and very much the worse for drink, he had turned up at her flat at two in the morning, brandishing protestations of love and the last bouquet of tired flowers from the petrol station down the road, and she had been tempted, sorely tempted, but had finally stood firm.
'All right, all right,' he had said, dumping the flowers outside her door and wandering off, grudgingly, home to his wife and kids.
But men like Declan Morrison, Helen knew, never really meant 'all right'; never conceded defeat, the chapter closed, until they had another woman secure in their sights.
She sat with those thoughts long enough for the train to have traversed the bridge high across the Tamar and swung left, following the curve of coast towards St Germans; at which point she got up from her seat and walked back through carriages, prepared to face it out.
Of course, it was not Declan Morrison, nor anyone, at close sight, who looked very like him; enough of a resemblance, perhaps, to explain why at first glance she had made the mistake—the build, the set of the shoulders, the shape of the head, even the slow spread of a smile when he realised he was the subject of her gaze.
With scarcely a pause, Helen moved on towards the buffet car and something to sustain her for the remainder of the journey, her relief undercut by the realisation that to have jumped to the conclusion meant she had not yet swept Morrison from her mind.
A little unfinished business yet.
Back in her seat, she picked up her book again and tried to read—a novel one of her friends had recommended—but her concentration had gone. Instead, as the train, slower now, shuttled between one small West Country station and another, she found herself thinking back to the summer, Paul and Linda Carey and Terrence Markham and the slow, dawning impossibility of fulfilment, happiness; two people dead and a child orphaned, young Carl growing up in his grandparents' house without ever, perhaps, really understanding why.
'Oh, Christ!' she said out loud, slamming her book shut and startling the passengers opposite.
It's hopeless, isn't it, she thought, finding any kind of happiness with someone else, anything that lasts. Most of her fellow officers were separated or divorced, already on to their second marriages some of them and eyeing up the third; even her girlfriends, the ones she met each month for a drink and a good old natter and a Greek or Turkish meal, most of them were single through choice or circumstance, still licking their wounds, some of them, from their last encounter.
Amongst most of the people she knew, only Will an
d Lorraine seemed to be hanging in there, holding it all together, waving the flag for marriage, kids, a home, a life. While other men of Will's age and rank were going over the side like rats from a sinking ship, taking any comfort they could find, Will, damn him, didn't show the least inclination to play away from home.
He'd look—she'd seen him casting the odd appraising glance in young Ellie Chapin's direction when she'd first joined CID—but having looked, he'd happily set the thought aside. And when Helen herself flirted with him, as she did, sometimes outrageously, he would play along, safe in the knowledge that a game is what it was and words and looks, for him, were never deeds.
Sometimes, Helen thought, she almost hated him for his—what was it?—steadfastness, she thought that might be the word.
Looking up, she saw that they were pulling into Truro; time to go and rinse her face, refresh her make-up, return her thoughts to the job in hand.
She felt an unexpected tug of pleasure as the train passed the causeway out to St Michael's Mount, the sun glancing off the tops of the waves dipping in towards the shore, and then they were slowing into the station at Penzance and she was collecting up her things and descending on to the platform amongst the returning locals and the late holidaymakers and there, beyond the barrier, tall, angular and unsmiling, was the man she was to meet.
Cordon held out a hand for her to shake, reaching for her bag with the other. His hand was warm and rough. 'Welcome to Cornwall.' A hint of a smile now, just in the eyes. 'Brought some decent weather with you, I see.' There was enough of a burr in his voice to suggest Cornish born and bred.
'You want to go to your hotel first, get that settled?'
'I'd like a drink.'
They walked along past the harbour car park and up some steps on to a partly cobbled road, Helen pausing once to light a cigarette. Cordon finally stopped outside a small, flat-fronted pub and, transferring Helen's bag to his other hand, pushed open the door. Once inside, he indicated a low-ceilinged side room, empty save for some unwashed glasses and a marmalade cat that jumped soundlessly down from one of the chairs and slunk reproachfully away.