Requiem

by Celina Grace

  Kate woke then, her eyes clicking open just as if someone had thrown a switch in her brain. She stared up at the barely visible ceiling, looking blankly through the early morning darkness. She could still feel the touch of Elodie’s hand in hers, a fading ghost-memory. Then she sighed out loud. The pieces were falling into place, click, click, click… there were no fireworks this time, no bright flare of comprehension: just a gradual clearing of the fog, the surface of the river becoming transparent so the hidden, drowned things beneath became visible.

  It was six o’clock in the morning; too early to call. Kate got up, showered, dressed and breakfasted, moving quietly so as not to wake the others but jittery with impatience. At quarter to seven, she picked up the phone.

  Anderton answered on the third ring. He sounded as wide awake as she was—perhaps he was an early riser. Or perhaps he’d been waiting for her to call.

  He didn’t say much but listened intently.

  “Where’s the evidence?” was all he said after Kate finished speaking.

  “I need to talk to Sam. It’ll be there, I’m sure of it.”

  “You’re probably right. Meet me at the office and pick up Mark along the way.”

  Before she left, Kate checked on her siblings. Courtney was buried beneath a bunched duvet, one bare foot poking out the side of the bed. Kate gently covered it up again. Jay was crashed on the sofa, one hand beneath his cheek once again. Kate left them a brief note, scrawled two kisses on the end of it and put on her jacket, winding a scarf tightly about her neck. It was bitterly cold, the sky a leaden grey, a promise of snow in the icy air. She closed the front door almost noiselessly behind her.

  She and Olbeck didn’t speak much on the way to the office. She’d explained her theory, and he’d sat silently for a few minutes, his quick mind processing what she’d said.

  “Don’t say anything yet,” Kate said, seeing he was preparing to speak. “Let’s just see what we’ve got before we go any further.”

  “Okay.”

  They went straight to the IT room, which was bustling with activity. Sam was hunched over one of the impounded laptops, clicking the mouse with bleary determination. He looked up as Kate and Olbeck approached. His round face was pallid with exhaustion, dark circles under his eyes echoing the curve of his glasses.

  Kate explained what they wanted as quickly and succinctly as she could. Sam nodded.

  “I’ll bring it up.”

  Anderton was already in his office, pacing back and forth. Kate and Olbeck had only just settled themselves when Sam bustled through the doorway with a bundle of papers in his arms.

  “Is this everything?” asked Kate.

  Sam shook his head. “Not quite. It’s everything we could pull from the first two school iPads, Peter Buckley’s laptop and Graham Lightbody’s home computer. We’re still working on the others.”

  “That’s fine,” said Anderton, crisply. “Well done, Sam. Excellent work.” Sam smiled tiredly and straightened up a little. “Keep at it and let us have it when you do.”

  He waited until the door closed. Then Anderton spread the sheets out across his desk.

  “Cross check against this list,” he said. “We may as well see what we’re dealing with here at the same time.”

  The room filled with the busy feel of intense concentration. Looking at the sheets of paper in her hand, Kate could clearly see the email trails between Peter Buckley and Graham Lightbody’s many email accounts. Swapping passwords for closed forums, sending links to protected sites. How long had the two of them known each other? How had they met? The name Alice cropped up several times. A victim of their sick fantasies? An abused child? Kate could feel her mouth turning down. Then she realised. Alice, as in Alice in Wonderland. Kate remembered reading about the real-life Alice in a magazine article, recalled the rumours and innuendo that circled around the relationship between Lewis Carroll and his seven-year-old muse, Alice Liddell. Kate could recall them now; those weird, provocative photographs of the little girl who’d inspired the classic, taken by the writer of the book. She shuddered.

  It was Olbeck who found what they were looking for. Kate and Anderton noticed it seconds after he did. There was a moment of breathless hush. Olbeck put one finger out, gently, touching it to the name they were looking for. He looked up at the other two.

  “Of course,” Anderton said, softly. “The spider at the centre of the whole rotten web.”

  They made their way to Anderton’s car. As they passed the door that led to the cells, Kate remembered Vertz and asked about him.

  “Released on bail,” said Anderton, stepping quickly from stair to stair. “He’ll be up for possession, intent to supply and a few other things I can think to throw at him, but we couldn’t hold him on the murder charge.”

  “No, I know,” said Kate. “So, he’s free then?”

  Anderton had reached the car. He held the back door open for her, courteously.

  “For now,” he said. “Why? What’s the problem?”

  Kate hesitated. Until that moment, she hadn’t thought that there was a problem. Now, she was conscious of a faint, creeping sense of unease.

  “Nothing,” she said, after a second’s thought. She ducked into the car and clipped on her belt. “There’s no problem.”

  “He was assessed by the Psych Team,” said Anderton, starting the car. “They clearly didn’t think he was too much of a risk to himself.”

  “Yes, I know.” Kate saw Olbeck turning round in his seat to catch her eye. He didn’t have to say anything—one glance was enough. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Olbeck turned back in his seat to face the front. Anderton glanced at him and caught Kate’s eye in the mirror. He didn’t say anything, but he pushed down on the accelerator with just a little more pressure.

  They didn’t say anything else for the duration of the drive. At one point, they passed the river, sparkling in the weak winter sunshine. How cold it must have been for Mike Deedham, jumping in to save Elodie, who was then far beyond saving. When could she have been saved? Why hadn’t anyone helped her, when it hadn’t been too late?

  Kate found she had her eyes shut. She opened them to see the car pulling into the driveway of their destination. The trees were bare, skeletal now: rustling heaps of dead leaves piled against the banks. Anderton was slowing the car. Kate stared at the house before them, willing it to look normal, untouched, unchanged from when she’d last seen it. She spotted the half-open door straight away, but what with the noise of the car and the crunch of its wheels over the gravel, the three officers didn’t hear the screaming until the engine was switched off.

  They were out of the car in seconds and running towards the open door, Anderton in the lead. He kicked the partly open door open and as they stampeded into the hallway, the screaming became much louder, as if they’d been listening to it underwater and had just cleared the surface. Kate saw a bloodied hand print on the cream paint of the hallway wall, smeared but still recognisable. Drips of blood made a gory trail along the corridor. Then they were in the room with the screaming woman.

  Genevieve Duncan was crouched in a foetal position in the armchair where Kate had seen her sitting before, where she’d pulled and picked at the arms. She had her hands up to her face in a characteristic gesture, her open mouth a black, vibrating hole beneath her clenched fingers. The body of Mr Duncan lay on the living room carpet. Because of the pattern of the carpet, the blood stains surrounding him were not immediately obvious, but when Kate saw the damage done to his head and face, she felt like screaming herself.

  They found Nathan Vertz in the garden, sitting slackly on the steps that led down to the lawn. He was staring into space, his bloodstained hands hanging loosely at his sides. He didn’t try to run or evade arrest. Kate had the impression, as Anderton cautioned him and Olbeck snapped the cuffs around his spattered wrists, that he was somewhere far away, a refugee in a distant land, hiding inside an inner landscape where, perhaps, he’d found some measure of blank a
nd noiseless peace.

  Chapter Twenty One

  The woman in front of them sat tensely, sometimes clasping her hands together in front of her, sometimes holding each elbow, hugging her body protectively. Her face, the template for Elodie’s golden looks, was rigid; the jawline was sharp, the cheekbones showing bluishly through the skin. Kate wondered whether Genevieve Duncan ever relaxed, if she ever sat in a loose, unstructured way. Well, even if she had once, she would probably never do so again.

  As reserved as the woman’s posture was, the same could not be said of her voice. She was talking in an endless, brittle monotone, floods of words—all the words, Kate sensed, that she had wanted to say for years but could, or would, not.

  “It was always about her,” said Mrs Duncan. Her hands pressed together once more. “I was always second-best, always. Even with my first husband, Elodie’s father… The way he used to fawn over her was just sickening. After she was born, he barely gave me a second glance. Perhaps that would have changed, I don’t know… He killed himself, you know, oh, not deliberately, but he drank too much and smashed himself up in his car. Elodie was only five. It was difficult, just the two of us. Two females in one house. That was something my mother always said to me: a house isn’t big enough for two women, and she certainly made sure that was true in ours—”

  Kate sat opposite from her, keeping as neutral a face as she could. Anderton and Olbeck were also in the room, sat slightly back from the table. The duty solicitor, a care-worn, grey-haired woman in her fifties sat next to Genevieve.

  “Then I met Tom. I thought he was the answer to my prayers, a nice, handsome, well-off man willing to take on another man’s daughter. I was so happy when he proposed.” Mrs Duncan gave a laugh that was half sob. “And it was all to do with Elodie. She was all he wanted. Do you know what it’s like to have your husband reject you for your own daughter? Do you have any comprehension of how humiliating that was? It was never about me. It was all about her.”

  Kate could see Olbeck struggle not to show the distaste this woman’s self-pitying rant was engendering. She had no such qualms herself.

  “Your husband was sexually abusing your daughter, Mrs Duncan,” she said, making no attempt to hide the disgust in her voice. She wondered whether Anderton would pull her up. He remained silent.

  Mrs Duncan looked at her with scorn.

  “She encouraged him,” she said, and this time, Olbeck did make a sound, a smothered exclamation of outrage. “She must have encouraged him.”

  “She was eight years old when they met,” said Kate. “How can you say that?”

  Mrs Duncan seemed not to hear her. She was staring at her hands knotted together on her lap, at the wedding ring on her finger that gleamed under the harsh strip lights.

  “He used to read her bedtime stories,” she said, apropos of nothing. Kate remembered the childish books by Elodie’s bed and inwardly shuddered. Was that when the abuse had started? Was Elodie’s bedroom so far away from her parents’ room because she was trying to get away—or was it that her stepfather had given her that room to be sure of not being overheard?

  “Did you daughter tell you she was being abused?” Kate asked. “Did she try to tell you? Did she ask you for help?” She could feel her own hands clenching into fists under cover of the table. She remembered her own mother’s reaction to Courtney’s plea. “Did you even listen? Or did you tell her she was making it all up?”

  “Kate…” said Anderton, and Kate subsided, choking down her anger.

  There was silence for a moment. Genevieve Duncan continued to regard her hands as if they fascinated her. Perhaps, thought Kate, they did, considering what they had done.

  Anderton spoke quietly.

  “Here’s what I think happened on that night, Mrs Duncan. Perhaps you’ll tell me if I’m right or wrong.”

  Mrs Duncan gave no indication that she’d heard him. Anderton pressed on regardless. “Elodie got home late that night. She’d quarrelled with Vertz, nothing major, just the normal kind of lovers’ tiff that happens now and again. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t go home with him. If only she had, she might still be alive.”

  Kate was watching Genevieve Duncan’s face keenly. At Anderton’s last remark, it contracted very slightly, a bare flicker of the muscles that was quickly controlled. How tightly had this woman kept her emotions over the years? Kate thought of a spring, wound tighter and tighter…until one day, it snaps.

  Anderton went on speaking.

  “Your husband went to her room, as he was wont to do. Was it every night, Genevieve? Did he ever leave her alone?”

  Mrs Duncan said nothing, but a tide of red suffused her face. Was it embarrassment—or fury?

  “I think you heard him leave your bed,” said Anderton, watching her closely. “You followed him up to Elodie’s room. I don’t think it was what you saw that compelled you to act. After all, I don’t believe for one second you didn’t know your daughter was being abused, night after night. No, that wasn’t what made you snap. That wasn’t what made you do it.”

  He stopped speaking for a moment. Some sort of titanic struggle was going on under the skin of Genevieve Duncan’s face; years of suppression and denial were being beaten back by the tides of anger.

  Anderton spoke again.

  “The baby,” he said softly, and Mrs Duncan made some sort of noise, a half-choked cry, as if she’d just been struck.

  “The baby,” repeated Anderton, relentlessly. “You heard Elodie tell her stepfather she was pregnant. You immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was your husband’s baby. And that was the tipping point.”

  “She said it was his,” gasped Genevieve Duncan. “She told him! She was evil, she was sick…it would have been an abomination…”

  “Elodie was wrong,” said Anderton. “It was Vertz’s baby.”

  Mrs Duncan was shaking. She looked at Anderton through reddened eyes.

  “You killed your daughter,” said Anderton, in a deceptively gentle voice. “You and your husband, aghast at what you’d done, realised that you couldn’t confess. The scandal would be catastrophic, especially for you, who’d spent so many years in denial of the reality of your family’s situation. How could you be brave enough to own up to what you’d done? That admitting your actions would mean everything coming out in the open, everyone knowing the grim truth. What did you do with Vertz’s letters to Elodie, Genevieve? Did you burn them?” He paused for breath. “Was it because you couldn’t bear to see yet another man loving your daughter? The daughter who, in your eyes, had taken all the love that was meant for you?”

  Kate was watching Genevieve’s face closely. She could see the change of expression, the eyes filming over a little, the metaphorical shutters coming down. The habit of denial was just too strong.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said in a choked voice. “I think you want to drive me mad.”

  “Why put her body in the river, Genevieve? Why do that?”

  The woman opposite was silent. Then she laughed a laugh that was not quite sane.

  “Ophelia,” was all she said.

  Kate went cold. She realised that Jay’s painting had been involved, yet not in the way she’d thought. Had Elodie showed her parents the painting? Had they wanted to incriminate Jay, to find a credible suspect? She actually shuddered. Then she realised that it was more than that. Elodie wasn’t Ophelia, was she? Ophelia was sat in this interview room, clasping her hands together: a woman driven mad by the cruelty of a man who couldn’t, who wouldn’t love her.

  There was a long moment of silence.

  Genevieve Duncan sat up a little straighter. She seemed to gain a little bit of control over herself.

  “I wasn’t in my right mind that night,” she said. She looked Anderton full in the face. “No, that was it. She’d driven me mad by her behaviour. She wasn’t—she was so—sick, so damaged. It was a kindness. I wasn’t in my right mind. No, I wasn’t in my right mind.”

 
; That was the last thing she said. She withdrew into herself then, staring at her hands, twisting her wedding ring about her thin finger. Nothing that Anderton or Kate or Olbeck could say shook her into talking again. After twenty fruitless minutes, they gave up and Anderton rang for an officer to escort her to the cells.

  There was silence for a moment after Mrs Duncan was taken away. Then Anderton sprang up from his chair.

  “Come on,” he said. “Debrief time.”

  When they were all gathered in the incident room, Anderton took up his usual position, pacing back and forth before the whiteboards. He had something in his hand, some thin slip of paper. As he reached Elodie’s school photograph, he took what was in his hand and pinned it up on the board next to Elodie’s image. It was a photograph of Nathan Vertz as a little boy. Kate recognised it as a publicity shot from the first Butterkins film.

  Anderton tapped each photograph.

  “Two children,” he said. “Two abused children. That was their connection, that’s what underpinned their relationship. Do you remember what Vertz said? Anyone?”

  Olbeck raised his hand. “He said, ‘She knew what it was like.’ Something like that, anyway.”

  Anderton nodded.

  “Nathan Vertz entered show business at any extremely young age. He was a little boy, vulnerable and unprotected. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you that predators can be found in any sphere—anywhere where children can be found.”

  Kate nodded, thinking of the crisis currently engulfing the BBC. Vertz had named his abuser, but had the accused been the only one to hurt him? She thought of a little blonde boy, a vulnerable child, the parents who should have protected him too interested in chasing fame and fortune to defend their son. She felt a little sick.