by Joel Hames
“It’s OK,” I said. “I’ll listen to you. I promise. We’ll cut out the noise. We’ll deal with the past. We’ll do it together. But not this way.”
She looked up at me, her face wet, and she smiled.
And nodded.
I started the car, pulled out into the traffic, and headed for home.
26: It’ll All Turn Out For The Best
I’D BEEN SPENDING too much time at funerals lately, I realised. It wasn’t an activity likely to lift the spirits. There was something different about this one, something resonant and intense. All funerals are about missed opportunities. This one felt more so.
I hardly knew a soul there, but that sort of thing had never bothered me in the past. The sun shone out of a blue sky while the rest of the country tucked into their Christmas leftovers and wondered when their guests would start to think about going home. And I was in the Cotswolds, at the funeral of a man I’d hardly known, a man it had taken me years to realise I’d hardly known, and feeling like I’d lost a friend.
David Brooks-Powell’s family hailed from a village a few minutes east of Cheltenham. Not a million miles from Elizabeth’s place. I hadn’t known that. There was so much I hadn’t known.
David Brooks-Powell was dead.
There was nothing particularly unusual about the ceremony, or the burial. Melanie Golding stood by the graveside clad in black, and accepted the condolences of the mourners with grace and good will. It’ll all turn out for the best, she’d told me, when we’d first met – almost the first thing she’d said to me. Now we were greeting one another at her husband’s funeral, all forced smiles and swollen eyes. His parents held each other’s hands and nodded at the other mourners, and every now and then, when they thought nobody could see them, they turned to one another and wept, soft, bewildered tears down tired and uncomprehending faces. The minister spoke of David’s career, his family, his love for his wife. Ex-colleagues gathered in little knots and shook their heads in confusion. Rich Hanover stood alone and stared about him as if he didn’t really understand what was going on. I’d been right about that unpredictability and that mutability, but I hadn’t imagined them leading him here. Hanover had surprised me with a calm, reasoned account for Real World News of what had happened in Redbourn, an account that trod a firm path away from sensationalism. He’d surprised me with a well-researched and glowing obituary. He’d surprised me with a message on my phone telling me he’d be coming to the funeral, but not as a journalist. He’d be coming to pay his respects. Now he stood and stared and looked like a man who was only now learning what death really was.
And I stood with Police Constable Vicky Colman, newly expelled from CID, and wondered whether anyone had really known David Brooks-Powell at all.
Colman had called just as we got home, Claire and I, by which time I’d managed to get hold of Maloney and explain. Claire was still crying, but in among the tears that smile showed up from time to time, so I felt we were through the worst of it. But I knew we were the lucky ones. I knew something had happened in Redbourn. I couldn’t get it out of my head, the Bentley coming towards me and the newsreader’s announcement: there have been reports of casualties.
I managed to get Claire into bed and comfortable, with a cup of tea, all using just one hand. The other was pressing the phone to my ear. The reports had been right.
Two dead. One injured. Reports of casualties.
Blennard had shown up at Trawden’s house raging and barely comprehensible. At first Colman had thought he was just drunk and angry, and then he’d let his coat fall open and revealed the antique shotgun he’d brought along with him. After that, she said, things had got a little confused, but one thing was clear: he’d come to kill Trawden.
If only he’d succeeded.
Colman had tried to talk him out of it and Trawden had stood there frozen to the spot, finally confronted with a turn of events he hadn’t foreseen. Eventually Blennard had tired of Colman and pushed her out of the way, raised his weapon, pointed it at his victim. And Brooks-Powell had chosen that moment to intervene, rising from his seat to approach Blennard and telling him this was stupid and there had to be a better way.
He might have been right, but he was too late. Blennard had already pulled the trigger. The lead that made it through Brooks-Powell caused Trawden some damage, but not enough to kill him. Brooks-Powell wasn’t so fortunate. Colman had leapt across the room to Brooks-Powell, realised he was already beyond saving, and looked up in time to see Blennard, gun pointing vertically at his head, blowing his own brains out.
She’d escaped with a few scratches from the debris. Blennard was dead. Trawden was injured – quite severely injured, it turned out, with lacerations to a number of important organs that would keep the surgeons busy for weeks. Trawden was hurt, but being Trawden, he’d left no evidence. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Trawden remained an innocent man, a martyr to an establishment that had tried to destroy him. And now a martyr twice over.
And David Brooks-Powell was dead.
Claire had stayed behind in London. There had been no question of her going to the funeral, because there had been no question of her leaving the house in the ten days since everything had fallen apart.
I kept telling myself it could have been worse. At least she wasn’t in a police cell. At least she hadn’t been sectioned. I’d told Colman what had happened – she had to know, she’d been wondering why I’d left Redbourn in such a hurry and with such fortuitous timing. So she knew all about Claire and the Sig, although I’d kept its provenance to myself. She’d kept a number of details to herself, too, and out of her official report, including my earlier presence at the scene of the shooting. She’d driven Brooks-Powell there herself, that was the story she was telling. Yes, I’d been at Blennard’s, earlier that morning. I’d been at Blennard’s and I’d left, and I was out of the picture. Maloney would say whatever I needed him to say. No doubt Martins would struggle to make sense of it all. I didn’t care.
Colman was out of the picture, too, in her own way. Martins had no interest in Colman’s “theories” on Trawden. She couldn’t prove it, she’d disobeyed direct orders, and her actions had led to the deaths of two civilians. She was lucky, Martins claimed, that she wasn’t being thrown out of the police force entirely. But for their part, CID could do without loose cannons.
And Claire was at home, at the flat. Her parents were looking after her. Her dad had finally shed the bow-tie but couldn’t resist acting like he was the true expert in his daughter’s care, that he knew more than the doctors or his wife or me, that we should all defer to his fucking wisdom. They were staying at a cheap B&B just around the corner, they’d come down the day it had happened, and Mrs Tully hadn’t complained about London once. She was being medicated – Claire, not Mrs Tully, although we’d all made the same weak joke about how we wouldn’t mind some of what Claire was having ourselves, and watched the smiles fade from each other’s faces as we remembered there was nothing funny about any of this. The doctor hadn’t asked for the details, even though I’d had a good story all worked out; I’d just told him about recent events awakening a childhood trauma that made it impossible for her to sleep, and he’d tapped out a prescription for some pills that kept her calm, most of the time, and dozing for at least part of each night. The first three nights I’d woken to find her side of the bed empty, and found her in the living room watching the news with the sound switched off. Each time I’d brought the duvet into the living room and curled up beside her, covering us both, not saying a word, and each time she’d fallen asleep before I had. After the third night, she’d stuck to the bedroom.
She seemed to be improving. That was the other thing I kept telling myself, every time I took myself away from the other mourners to take a look at my phone and see what time it was and work out how long I’d been away from her. She’d been smiling more, engaging in conversation more, showing an interest in other things. She’d asked how Helen Roarkes was doing and I’d
told her just the same, just the same, which was a lie, but I didn’t think she was ready for the truth. Roarkes had called me on Boxing Day with the news. I’d seen his number on the phone and leapt to it, pleased he’d finally relented, and only realised as I was pressing the answer button that there was only one reason he’d be calling me on Boxing Day. I’d apologised, before he had a chance to say anything, and he’d told me to forget about it, that some things were more important than a stupid bloody row.
Helen had died on Christmas morning. Roarkes spoke with his usual stoicism, the way he talked about everything he couldn’t do anything about, but I didn’t think there was anything real about that stoicism. The funeral – another funeral, my life seemed peppered with them – wasn’t for another week, but I’d arranged to pay him a visit in two days’ time. I’d see how stoical he was face to face.
But Claire was improving. We’d reduced her dose on Christmas Eve, and again this morning. Claire was improving.
Colman had taken her demotion well, all things considered. She’d hated Martins and was glad to be out from under her, even if that did mean a return to the more mundane tasks she thought she’d seen the back of.
“I was too young for CID, really. They didn’t take me seriously there. I’ll have another crack at it in a year or two,” she said. She was smiling. There was something believable about that smile, something very different from all those smiles I’d been exposed to over what seemed like half a lifetime of smiles hiding lies and fear and misery and secrets. Some of those secrets had come out. Some of them, I realised, as I saw Melanie Golding nodding away to the “loving husband” part of the eulogy, never would. But Colman’s smile looked real enough to me.
“They won’t know what hit them,” I replied, and tried to smile back. I wasn’t sure I’d managed it, but at least she’d seen the effort.
Lizzy hadn’t made it to the funeral – she was indisposed, she said, and I believed that, too. There was a lot for Lizzy to get her head round. I had the feeling she’d be indisposed for a while. So she’d not come in person, but her poetry had, a verse composed for the occasion, not – mercifully – read to the congregation, but posted to the family and left discreetly among the flowers for those who might want to read it. I hadn’t wanted to read it, but I’d felt obliged. It was an odd piece of work, a banal, almost jaunty rhythm building and then disappearing into a forest of disjointed images. It was clearly personal, and it rang with a strange, unsettling power that had me wondering whether Lizzy Maurier might be a poet after all, and too late to do anything about it. There were references to books and plays, and some of them I recognised, but they weren’t in there just for the hell of it. They were in there to be torn apart. This was Lizzy Maurier saying goodbye to a lifetime of being caged by other people, and finding her own voice at last. This was Lizzy Maurier learning the truth: words alone weren’t enough. Not now.
A woman was heading towards me, as I said my farewells to Colman, who had three days leave and was heading straight from the funeral into Wales for a short break with her latest lover. The woman walking my way was, I thought, in her early thirties. I hadn’t noticed her talking to anyone else at the funeral; perhaps she was as much a stranger as I was. She wore glasses and short, bottle-blonde hair that stood out sharply against her dark suit. I glanced behind, to see if perhaps she was making for someone else, but she stopped in front of me, her face creased into a frown.
“Excuse me,” she said, “but are you Sam Williams?”
I nodded and extended my hand.
“Jenny Beech,” she continued, and I took a step back and tried not to let my surprise show.
“Right,” I said, when I’d regained my composure and we’d completed an awkward handshake. “Yes. Of course.”
“I suppose you’re wondering why I came,” she replied. A smile had broken out from under the frown.
I struggled again, for a minute, and then found myself smiling back at her. “Yes. Yes, I am. After what we did to you, David and I. Well, I wouldn’t have thought you’d want anything to do with either of us.”
“He sent me this.” She reached into her handbag and produced a letter – a short, handwritten note on A4 paper. “Together with the biggest bunch of flowers I’ve ever seen.”
She passed the note to me, and I read it, and handed it back. Another nail in the coffin of the David Brooks-Powell I thought I’d known.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m staying at Hancocks. I’m moving team, though. That Rebecca Ashcroft is the worst boss I’ve ever had.”
She laughed, and I joined her, and then she made her excuses and left. She had to be back in the office first thing, she said. She didn’t want to get stuck in the rush hour traffic.
I shook my head, as she walked away, and smiled. The note had been short and to the point, something I was starting to realise had been Brooks-Powell’s style all along.
“Sorry we got you into trouble,” it said. “But you don’t want to work for those bastards anyway. I’ve got enough work to keep an assistant busy. Come and work for me.”
His phone number was on the bottom of the page, next to his signature. He must have arranged for it to be couriered to her on the Sunday morning, before he’d dug out the photo of Akadi and Trawden. Before he’d pounded on Lizzy Maurier’s door and forced the truth out of her. Before we’d learned about Connor. Before he’d smashed up Blennard’s ornaments. Before he’d been driven to Redbourn in the passenger seat of my old Fiat.
Before he’d died.
That crazy dash into London ten days earlier had earned me three points on my licence, which wasn’t exactly welcome, but meant I could still drive, and the route home took me east past Burford. I couldn’t resist the temptation to turn off and try to hunt down one of the old spots I’d visited on the way to Elizabeth’s house. I drove north for twenty minutes, and suddenly there it was.
It was like the last fifteen years had never happened. I stopped the car in a layby that hadn’t changed in all that time, and darted across the road, not that I needed to dart, because traffic was light here, as it always had been. The path was fairly dry, which was good, because I was wearing smart clean black shoes which wouldn’t have coped well with a muddy ascent. I picked my way slowly up and into the trees, and tried to remember what it had been like, what I’d been like, all that time ago.
The parties at Elizabeth’s house, with all those famous names and the food and the drink, the double staircase she’d descend at the appropriate moment like a heroine from Jane Austen, the candles reflecting in the silverware. The intrigue at work, the gossip and the jockeying for the best clients and the most exciting cases. The bitterness when I lost and the excitement when I won. The opportunities. Where I might be living next year and what I might be earning and who I might be dating and what I might do to beat Brooks-Powell.
I reached the top of the hill. The oak, the beech and the willow. The sun disappearing into the west, the hills bathed in that strange and deceptive light, the mist lying in pockets that turned the whole landscape into something part earth, part sea, part sky.
Claire was improving, but I was afraid something had broken inside her. Elizabeth Maurier was dead. Helen Roarkes was dead. David Brooks-Powell was dead.
I reached inside my mind for something to comfort me, something to remind me that there was still some good to come out of all of this, but all I found there was Lizzy Maurier’s poem, and that was little comfort.
I recited it anyway, quietly, muttering the words to the breeze and imagining them taking flight over Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire, and bringing some solace to someone else. All they brought me was sadness and regret.
The shadows of the trees lay like cold fingers on the earth. I shivered and pulled my coat tight around me, and watched the sun sink behind a hill. Then I turned and walked back to the car. Claire’s parents would be in need of a break soon. Looking after her was hard work. But I could do it. I could do it better than anyone else. There
was plenty of hard work to come.
But Claire was improving.
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Also by Joel Hames
DEAD NORTH
Two dead cops and a suspect who won’t talk.
“intelligent, intricately woven" - S.E. Lynes
“It's going to leave me with a thriller hangover for some time.” - John Marrs
“a white-knuckle, breathlessly-paced read that also has heart.” - Louise Beech
“A pacy thriller, rich in voice and with gratifying degree of complexity.” - John Bowen
Once the brightest star in the legal firmament, Sam Williams has hit rock bottom, with barely a client to his name and a short-term cash problem that's looking longer by the minute. So when he's summoned to Manchester to help a friend crack a case involving the murder of two unarmed police officers and a suspect who won't say a word, he jumps at the chance to resurrect his career.
In Manchester he'll struggle against resentful locals, an enigmatic defence lawyer who thinks he's stepping on her toes, beatings, corrupt cops and people who'll do anything to protect their secrets. On its streets, he’ll see people die. But it's in the hills and valleys further north that Sam will face the biggest challenge of all: learning who he really is and facing down the ghosts of his past.