by Jane Casey
‘So he was always looking for alternatives to what was going on in his life, and that would have included looking for an alternative to me. He wanted reassurance that he was still attractive, even though he was middle-aged. He wanted to be someone’s hero.’
‘And he wasn’t yours,’ Derwent said.
‘Far from it.’ She looked at him, defiant. ‘Someone had to be realistic in this family. We have problems that are not going to go away. Terence thought he could ignore them for ever. He was irresponsible, basically, and it became tiresome to me.’
‘You didn’t have much respect for him, it seems.’
‘Respect has to be earned.’
Derwent looked pained. ‘Did you ever love him?’
‘That is none of your business. That is nothing to do with how he died or why.’ Her anger was white-hot. It came to me that anger was the only emotion I’d really seen from her. Irritating her was interesting but there was a very real possibility she would kick us out if she got cross enough.
‘You might be right,’ I said. ‘We don’t know yet why he died. But it sounds as if he was frustrated with life.’
‘You could say that.’
‘Frustrated enough to be violent?’
Her ice-blue gaze rested on my face for a moment. ‘Violent? No.’
‘Vanessa had a bruise—’
‘She fell over and hit her head.’ Julie’s tone was sharp. ‘Newsflash: teenagers wear ridiculous shoes.’
‘She told us it was Terence who injured her. But she said it was an accident.’
‘That’s a complete lie.’
‘That it was him or that it was an accident?’ Derwent asked.
‘That it was anything to do with Terence. He wasn’t even here.’
‘But you were,’ I said slowly. ‘You saw it happen. How exactly did she fall, Mrs Hammond?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘It would have been Friday, maybe? Thursday, at a stretch. You can’t remember what happened last week?’
She pressed her lips together before she answered me. ‘I can’t recall exactly how she tripped. I was moving past her at the time. She hit her face on the doorframe.’
‘Were you talking to her at the time? Arguing, maybe?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘She wanted you to go to the school science fair next month and you said no.’
‘Is that what she told you?’ She leaned back. ‘That was probably it. I don’t remember exactly. I know I said I couldn’t commit to going to the science fair. Vanessa has never appreciated that someone has to work to pay for all the things she takes for granted. She can’t have everything.’
‘It seems as if you have quite a confrontational relationship with your daughter.’
‘Well, if you’re going to take her word for it.’ She laughed, a brittle sound. ‘Show me the teenager who appreciates her parents and what they’re trying to do for her. Please. I’d like to meet one.’
‘She said you imposed some very strict rules on her regarding her boyfriend.’
‘No, I didn’t. Terence came up with the rules. I wanted to stop her from seeing Jamie altogether, but Terence said she’d be even more determined to spend time with him if we forbade it. I don’t know if he was right about that, but they broke up in the end. Thank God. My biggest fear was that she’d get pregnant. I didn’t want her to throw her life away on a pot-smoking unemployable idiot.’
‘He sounds like a catch,’ Derwent said.
‘He was awful.’ She shuddered. ‘I knew Vanessa was only pretending to be in love with him because she knew it would annoy me, but it was still maddening to have to put up with him being in the house.’
‘We’d like to speak to him. Do you have an address for him? A telephone number?’
‘Both, I think.’ She snatched up her BlackBerry and started tapping on it. ‘Here you go. He lives with his parents, you won’t be surprised to hear. He’s almost twenty, for God’s sake.’ She handed me the phone and I wrote down the details.
I was just handing the phone back to her when a sudden blare of trumpets from upstairs made me jump.
‘Oh, for crying out loud.’ She ran into the hall and yelled up the stairs. ‘Put your headphones back on, Ben. We don’t want to listen to the music too.’
There was no response. Her voice went up a notch in pitch and volume.
‘Don’t make me come up there or there’ll be no more music today. Put your headphones back on now and plug them in or I will take your music away.’
The trumpets blasted on. I heard her swearing as she started to run up the stairs, hitting each step hard. Before she had reached the halfway point the music stopped abruptly. She came back down more slowly. When she walked back into the room she looked upset.
‘Is that your son?’ Derwent asked. ‘I thought he’d be at school.’
‘So did I. He wouldn’t go. His carer was here for an hour this morning, trying to persuade him to leave the house.’ Her mouth was a line. ‘It’s annoying, but sometimes I have to give in. He’s taller than me and much heavier. If I want to make him go somewhere, I need him to cooperate. Even if he doesn’t actively resist us it’s a nightmare trying to make him do something he doesn’t want to do. He used to be normal. It was a car accident when he was three. Now it’s like having a giant baby.’
‘Vanessa told us.’
‘He needs help with everything. Can’t dress himself. Can’t wash himself. It’s too much for me on my own. That’s why he has a carer.’
‘Was Terence good at dealing with Ben?’ I asked.
‘He was determined to treat Ben as if he was normal. He’d take him swimming. He took him to the cinema once but it wasn’t a success.’ She smiled a little, remembering. ‘Mostly he’d just take Ben to the park. They went two or three times a week. Ben likes being outside. It was always a relief to have a break from having him here. He makes so much noise.’
‘Vanessa said he likes to listen to music,’ I said.
‘He seems to find it comforting. I have to bribe him to use his headphones when I’m working here, so I can make phone calls in peace.’
‘Can we talk to him?’ Derwent asked.
Julie went very still. ‘Why?’
‘It’s useful for us to talk to the whole family.’
‘Not Ben.’
‘Why not?’
‘He doesn’t talk. He won’t understand the questions you’re asking.’
Derwent shrugged. ‘So maybe it will be a waste of time. I’d still like to try.’
‘You’ll upset him for no reason.’
‘We’ll try not to.’ Derwent leaned forward. ‘Look, I don’t want to have to come back here and bother you again. But if I don’t get to see Ben now, I’ll have to.’
‘I don’t want you to talk to him. He gets unsettled when he has to deal with strangers.’
‘Please, Mrs Hammond. I have to be able to tell my boss I spoke to everyone. There’s nothing I can do.’
Her phone gave a short, imperious ring. She picked it up and stared at the screen. ‘I should take this.’
Neither Derwent nor I spoke. I was holding my breath.
It rang again.
‘He’s not going to be able to help you,’ she said, her thumb hovering over the screen.
‘We won’t disturb him for long. Upstairs, is it?’ Derwent was up and moving towards the door at speed.
‘Straight ahead at the top of the stairs.’ She answered the call. ‘Hello? Mark. Yes, sorry. Go ahead.’
I caught up with Derwent in the hall.
‘Come on, before she changes her mind or follows us.’
‘I’m right behind you, but don’t go too fast. You’ll scare him. She said he doesn’t like strangers.’
‘I don’t either.’ Derwent took the stairs three at a time and I hurried after him. At the top of the stairs he knocked lightly on the door in front of him, which was not quite closed. There was no sound from inside so he pushed it ope
n.
The boy had his back to us, his head down. He was bent over a large sheet of paper spread out on a desk. There was a row of cups in front of him, each filled with art supplies – pencils, paintbrushes, marker pens and chalks. He wore big noise-cancelling headphones and his body moved in time to the music we couldn’t hear. He was tall, as his mother had said, and bulky. I really didn’t want to surprise him and neither, it seemed, did Derwent. He leaned into the room, staring at the walls which were covered in pictures taped up in neat lines. There was nothing representational, nothing that could give us a clue as to what the boy was thinking. Loops and swirls passed from one picture to the next, a portrait of an empty mind.
Derwent had stepped back to the doorway, silent on the carpet, and now he tapped on the frame. Ben turned around, surprised. Once he was facing us I could see the pale scar on the right side of his head, running into his hair which was too long for me to see if the damage to his skull was still visible from the outside. One eye drooped and his face was as slack as if he was asleep.
‘All right, mate? We just wanted to say hello. We’re police officers, like your dad.’
There was no flicker of recognition or understanding on the teenager’s face. His eyes slid past mine to focus on the corner of the room, where they stayed.
Derwent tried again. ‘Is it all right if we have a word with you? Not for long.’
Ben turned his back on us. He sat down at his desk and put the headphones back on, with decision. He picked up the pencils again and took out a new sheet of paper.
‘No chance,’ I whispered to Derwent.
‘Worth a try.’
I turned to go back downstairs but Derwent hissed at me to wait, working his way around the landing to open every door and scan every room. It was habit, and I knew he’d probably done the same thing when he’d helped me move back to my parents’ house a couple of years earlier. He didn’t even know what he was looking for and I couldn’t tell from his expression if he’d found anything when he turned back to follow me downstairs.
Julie had finished her phone call. She was walking into the hall as we came down the stairs.
‘I told you.’
‘Yes, you did,’ Derwent said.
‘Has Ben been upset about anything lately?’ I asked. ‘Before his father died?’
‘It’s hard to tell with him.’
‘And we’ll never know, is that right?’
Derwent turned round to look at me, surprised at the tone I’d used. I could feel myself losing my grip on my temper, and I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t actually want to.
‘You know, your daughter lied to us this morning. She told us that it was your husband who caused the injury to her face, although she said it was an accident. She told us it was because he was too busy to come to the school. I think Vanessa blamed him to protect you from getting in trouble with the likes of us.’
Julie blushed, which didn’t suit her. ‘It was an accident.’
‘Accidents happen,’ I said. ‘But so does child abuse.’
She flinched. ‘That’s not how it was.’
‘Maybe not. Maybe I’m right and that’s exactly how it was. Things go on behind closed doors that no one would ever imagine.’ I took a step closer to her. ‘But your doors aren’t closed any more. You don’t have the luxury of privacy. We’ll find out everything you think you can hide, one way or another.’
‘Is that a threat?’
‘It’s a warning. You have a think about what you haven’t told us – any doubts, any suspicions, anything that made you wonder what was going on with your husband. When you’re ready to tell us the truth, give us a call.’
I left her in the hall and went out to the car, past the young police officer who was yawning and trying to hide it. I had to wait until Derwent unlocked the car door, which he was typically slow to do. It did nothing for my temper.
When Derwent had sauntered down the drive and slowly, fussily inserted himself into the car, he turned to raise his eyebrows at me. ‘Time of the month, Kerrigan?’
‘She deserved that.’
‘And you’re not regretting it already.’
‘A tiny bit,’ I admitted. ‘I just couldn’t keep it back.’
‘Don’t feel bad. You were right. I was about to say the same thing to her.’ He leaned a few inches closer. ‘I like it when you get all ferocious, though. I might start letting you be the bad cop for a change.’
I gave him a withering look. ‘If you don’t get back to your side of the car, you’re going to see ferocious up close.’
‘Kerrigan.’ It was a warning in three syllables, and I knew why immediately.
‘You’re going to see ferocious up close, sir.’
‘That’s better.’
Derwent was grinning to himself as he drove away.
Chapter 11
‘These places are all the same.’
It was only my third visit to a gun club but from what I had seen, Derwent was right. We had spent the previous two days asking questions at the gun clubs nearest Richmond Park, and had come up with nothing much. This time, we were genuinely in the middle of nowhere. We had driven up an unpaved road into featureless Surrey woodland, beyond the commuter-belt town of Leatherhead. It was a wealthy area, popular with the bankers and stockbrokers who filled the trains to the City every morning. White Valley Shooting Club didn’t look all that luxurious, it had to be said, but the cars parked in front of the single-storey clubhouse were mostly new. The building itself was painted cream. It was festooned with security lights, alarm equipment and warning notices about trespassers, none of which was exactly surprising given that there was an armoury on the premises.
There were plenty of free spaces in the car park but Derwent drove past them so he could park his Subaru in a crosshatched area close to the building.
‘This isn’t a space.’
‘It is now.’ He slapped the Police notice on the dashboard.
‘You could at least straighten up.’ I popped open my door and checked. ‘Your wheels are over the line. Half the car is in a disabled space.’
‘Crips shouldn’t be allowed to shoot.’
‘Oh God,’ I murmured, knowing there was nothing I could say to prevent him from going on.
‘They’re all depressed and angry. Why the fuck would you want to arm them?’
‘That is a massive generalisation. There are lots of physically challenged people who have come to terms with their situation or never had a problem with it in the first place. They have just as much right to learn to shoot as you do.’
‘They’re physically incapacitated. There’s no point in teaching them to shoot. They’d be fuck all use in a war. Unless you stacked up their wheelchairs and used them as a barricade.’
‘I want to stay in the car,’ I said in a small voice.
‘Come on.’ He hopped out and stretched. It was, presumably, why he’d left plenty of space between himself and the car next to him.
I got out and frowned at him across the roof of the car. ‘I really don’t want to go in there with you.’
‘Imagine what I’ll get up to if I don’t have your restraining influence on me.’
I shut my car door. ‘And you’ve convinced me.’
We had phoned ahead to make an appointment to speak with the club’s manager. He was waiting in the hall when we walked through the doors, his hands clasped in front of his crotch as if he was facing a penalty kick. He was wearing a blazer and a striped tie that probably marked him out as a member of some regiment or club or other, though I couldn’t begin to guess which one. He was in his mid-fifties, with sparse reddish hair and a scattering of broken veins across his cheeks and nose.
‘Andrew Hardy. You’re very welcome to White Valley Shooting Club, although of course we would prefer you to be here in happier circumstances.’ He had a heavy way of speaking, pausing often as if he was considering the implications of what he was saying all the time.
Derwent nodded, im
patient. ‘Not much call for us to turn up when the circumstances are happy.’
‘No, I imagine not. Would you like to have a look around the facilities? We’ve made considerable investment in the club in the last two years and I think it really compares very favourably to any others in the greater London area.’ He brightened as he talked about the club, more comfortable once he was launched on his usual spiel to visitors. ‘We’re fully wheelchair-accessible now, with the ramp. You may have noticed it – I saw you parked very close to it.’
I sensed that Derwent was about to snap and hurried to get in first. ‘We’d love to see the facilities but we need you to tell us about your current membership first.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the possibility that the killer we are looking for is a member.’
Hardy looked appalled, as if he hadn’t even considered that, or thought about what we would want to know from him. ‘You’d need to come into the office.’
‘That’s fine,’ I said.
There was a moment where I thought Hardy was going to refuse to cooperate. Then his shoulders sagged and he led us to an empty reception desk, where there was a clipboard with a sign-in sheet.
‘Both of you need to sign this. Everyone who enters the club building has to sign in.’
We did as we were told, then followed Hardy through a door marked ‘PRIVATE’. His office was a glorified cubbyhole with an elderly computer squatting on the desk and two upright chairs squeezed in for visitors. We inserted ourselves and Hardy shut the door, looking up and down the corridor first for eavesdroppers.
‘I doubt I’ll be able to help you.’ He sat down and pinched the creases on the front of his trousers, running his fingers along them over and over again. ‘Our membership is exclusive. We really don’t have the kind of people here who would do the things you’re implying.’
‘We’re not implying anything,’ Derwent said. ‘We have a dead police officer killed by someone who has experience and skill in shooting. We are starting by drawing up a list of people who possess those skills and the equipment to carry out such a shooting. What kind of guns do you shoot here?’
‘Rifles mainly – .22 target rifles and sporting rifles. We also have some members who shoot muzzle-loading pistols and air weapons of various sorts. Some clubs do clay-pigeon shooting and crossbow shooting and so forth but we don’t.’ The curl of his lip showed me what he thought of that sort of diversification.