by Lisa Cutts
‘That’s the idea. I’m happy to help out usually only for a day or two because of work, on my days off, something like that.’
Pierre was still holding his mug. She saw him look at it, place it on the table and lean towards her. He looked a little uncomfortable at what he was about to say next. Hazel told herself that whatever it was she wouldn’t be offended.
‘It seems as though everything you do is for someone else,’ he said in what she gauged to be the least judgemental tone he could muster.
‘Not really. I get a lot out of looking after the dogs. I fostered one for a fortnight a while ago and he was a nervous and timid dog when he came to me. By the time he left, he was a lot livelier and cowered less. I really got a kick out of that.’
The waiter appeared with their plates of food, giving Hazel a few more seconds to think before she spoke again, or Pierre asked her anything else. She was keen to come across as level-headed and show herself in a good light, especially so early on in a department she had walked away from once. She couldn’t afford to mess this up.
‘So,’ he said as he sawed into his breakfast, ‘getting back to what we’ve got to do today, do you have a plan any better than knock on the door and say to the parents, “Can we speak to your daughter about the allegation she made against Dean Stillbrook?” ’
Hazel ripped a corner from a piece of brown toast and forced it into the top of her fried egg, watching the yolk run towards the bacon before she said, ‘I do, but it’ll have to wait until I’ve finished. No one likes a cold fry-up.’
Eventually, Hazel pushed her plate to one side and said, ‘With any luck, when we get there, at least one of Monica Lewis’s parents will be home. She should be at school but I think that if we start by speaking to her mum or dad … then once she’s home from school we can go back and chat with her. I’m not …’
Pierre looked up from his plate, last mouthful on his fork. ‘Go on,’ he said before he chewed on the piece of fried bread and mushroom.
Once again, Hazel was torn between saying what she was thinking and testing the waters. She tapped her fingernails on the edge of the table top.
‘I appreciate what you said about Harry, and I don’t disagree with you. My only comment would be that perhaps we should have called the Lewis family and arranged to see Monica at a different time. The reactions of victims of any crime are difficult to predict, none more so than those of an eleven-year-old girl who’s gone through such an ordeal. The element of surprise is all very good in the right circumstances. I’m very worried about freaking this poor kid out.’
He nodded his head at her but something about his expression told her that he wasn’t about to agree.
‘It’s a judgement call, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘If we call and make an appointment and the parents tell Monica, then she may fret for days. If we turn up, we possibly uncover something that we would have otherwise missed.’
‘The classic police damned if you do, damned if you don’t,’ she said. ‘I know what you mean, but I’m all about the bigger picture here. A successful murder investigation is one thing, a traumatized kid messed up for life is quite another.’
‘What was the real reason you left Major Crime?’ asked Pierre.
Hazel didn’t want to answer. She couldn’t avoid the truth forever, though she thought she had done a very good job of dodging the question by talking about Gordon Letchford and their disastrous relationship. It was her safest option, the option that didn’t let on how every day she tortured herself that she hadn’t seen the warning signs and had been too busy to do anything to help before it was too late. Pierre seemed too astute and it would be hard for her to fob him off without appearing rude.
She liked Pierre and wanted to tell him. The enquiry they were about to carry out probably meant he deserved her honesty. Besides, he could always ask around. Someone was bound to tell him eventually. It might as well be her.
She took a deep breath.
‘I worked on the department for about four years. It was the usual mix of euphoria when we sent a murderer down for twenty, twenty-five years and total despair when we didn’t have enough evidence to get the suspect to court or the jury acquitted them. You do your best and ride the highs and try to survive the lows.’
Hazel began to inspect her immaculate fingernails.
‘Sometimes the lows overtake you. I walked into the incident room one morning and was told that there had been a rape overnight. An eighteen-year-old girl – well, I suppose she was a woman although I never saw her as that. She’d had a couple of drinks in town with her friends, had wandered off and been raped at the back of a supermarket, next to some industrial waste-bins.’
By now Hazel felt she should at least look him in the eye as she told the rest of the tale.
‘She was a nice young girl but she wasn’t showing any signs of shock and she didn’t even cry. The police are a cynical bunch and I wasn’t convinced that she was telling the entire truth. I wondered if she’d met some fella during the evening and gone willingly with him to have sex somewhere, and then when her friends found her they’d got the wrong end of the stick and reported it as rape.
‘The investigation started and it was soon obvious from the CCTV that this wasn’t a consensual act. She was staggering along the High Street, tripping up and bumping into the wall. She went to a cash point – her friends later confirmed that’s why she wandered off – but then she walked into an alley which led to the back of the supermarket. I watched the footage of the arsehole as he followed her along the street and then down the alley.’
‘I understand that you felt bad for not believing her at first,’ said Pierre, ‘but you’re right. We are cynical because people lie to us and she wouldn’t be the first person to claim she was raped when she wasn’t.’
He paused when he saw the dark look Hazel gave him from under her fringe before he added, ‘I’ll guess that there’s more to it than that.’
Her reply came in the form of a nod.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ he said after a few more seconds of silence.
‘I know that I don’t,’ she said. ‘We found him, we arrested him and we took him to court. It turned out that the jury didn’t believe her either. He’d picked a victim who didn’t present very well in court, and unfortunately, he came across very well. He had no previous convictions, a job, a girlfriend, he said it had been consensual sex despite her injuries, and twelve men and women chosen at random believed him.’
‘That’s still not your fault,’ said Pierre.
‘I don’t think that any of it was, up until the point my broken victim left court, insisted that she was all right, despite being completely humiliated by an obnoxious defence barrister, went home and took an overdose. She was dead before the ambulance got her to hospital.’
It was probably the first time that Hazel had unburdened herself of the sorrowful story and not cried. She knew that it wasn’t because she was hardening to it, merely that this was a public place and not the sanctuary of a counsellor’s office.
‘That a young girl killed herself is something I’ll have to live with. I know that I’m not directly responsible for her death. I did everything that I could to help her. I even told her that court wasn’t like the kind of carry-on you see on the television with pompous barristers shouting and hollering and judges failing to intervene. That’s exactly what happened when we got there. I couldn’t believe it. Isn’t this all supposed to be about the victim? It’s a fucking disgrace.’
‘I’ve seen similar happen myself,’ said Pierre quietly. ‘If it was a friend or relative of yours, what would you tell them?’
Hazel sat for a moment, staring into space past Pierre. ‘I don’t really know. I suppose that I’d say speak to the police, they’ll believe you, they’ll help you. I’d definitely leave out the bit where I tell them that, once they get to court, the defence are likely to degrade them all over again. After all, the only other option is that they never tell a soul. And w
ho can live with that?’
Chapter 44
As DC Gabrielle Royston stood at the combined photocopier and printer in the stationery cupboard, she concentrated on putting her pin number onto the screen to get her documents to print. She let out a sigh at the futility of yet another task she had to perform time and time again to save the force money. She knew it wouldn’t bother her so much if over a million pounds hadn’t been spent on PR during the last year. She wasn’t exactly sure that the police required PR, and certainly not over a million pounds’ worth of it. It wasn’t as though the public had an alternative, but it was another of life’s mysteries that she knew she shouldn’t dwell on. She had more pressing matters to worry about.
A noise behind her over the whirring of the printer as it came to life made her glance round, scowl still attached to her face.
‘Soph,’ she said as she turned to her colleague. ‘I won’t be long if you need to copy something. I’m waiting on a PNC print but it’s about twenty pages in total.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Sophia as she leaned against the door frame. ‘I wondered if you needed any help. Tom and I are waiting for a couple of people to call us back and for some stuff from intel, so if you’ve got anything urgent, I can come out with you for an hour or so.’
Gabrielle recognized the gesture for what it was but hesitated to take up the offer. She didn’t think for one minute that Sophia really could spare anywhere in the region of sixty minutes from the work she had stacking up. Whilst she stood contemplating whether she should accept, she watched Sophia’s eyes narrow so minutely that it was unlikely that she was aware of it. The way she seemed to force her mouth to relax gave her an unhappy face. If that hadn’t been enough in itself, the tensing of her shoulders as she pushed herself away from the frame was confirmation that Gabrielle’s hesitation had snapped the olive branch in two.
The last thing she needed at that moment was anyone trying to get to know her a little better, asking about her personal life, wanting to be her friend. This raced through her mind as she cobbled together a brush-off that wouldn’t be offensive.
She gained a little time by reaching for the papers churning out of the printer, redirecting her attention to Sophia and arranging what she hoped resembled a smile.
‘Thanks so much, but I’m on top of my work at the moment. I was about to make a round of teas though. Can I get you one?’
‘That would be great,’ said Sophia. ‘I’ll meet you in the kitchen with my mug.’
Papers in hand, Gabrielle made her way back to the incident room, Sophia in front of her almost at a gallop.
One of the things she had learned during her career was that police officers rarely turned down a cup of tea, and if all else failed, doughnuts usually did the trick.
She tucked her paperwork under her arm, got her phone out of her pocket and set a reminder to call in at the baker’s later that day.
Chapter 45
No sooner were Ian Hocking’s eyes open than he started to regret the amount he had drunk the previous night. His alcohol consumption was something he thought about every morning as he awoke, plus on many occasions throughout the day. Lately though, he would be the first to admit, to himself at least, that the all-consuming thought was his sister and her children. He himself had never met the right woman and doubted he ever would, so all his efforts, energy and love when it came to having a family of his own were diverted in their direction.
As he turned over in bed, pushing his face against the pillowcase that should have been changed and washed two weeks ago along with the rest of the bedding, he felt the familiar anger that not only had his niece and nephew been denied a father as they grew up, but their mother had chosen a sex offender as her boyfriend.
Ian loved his sister and had tried to look out for her without smothering her with his affection, so it was almost a relief when his friend Dave Lyle first clamped eyes on her and told him that he was besotted with her and would one day marry her.
He smiled to himself when he thought back to the image of Dave’s chubby spotty teenage face, a couple of lonely hairs sprouting out of his chin, as his friend looked over at him on their walk home from school and said, ‘Your sister’s easy on the eye. What do you reckon of me marrying her and being your brother-in-law?’
‘I think you’re a tosser,’ had been his reply. ‘She’s only thirteen. Just because we’ve got to read Romeo and Juliet for English, it doesn’t mean that you have to get married when you’re still at school. Besides, the football season starts soon and you’ll be too busy to plan a wedding.’
Right at that particular moment, Ian wasn’t sure where the years between walking home from school with the occasional trip to the sweet shop for a can of Coke or to McDonald’s for a milkshake and the present-day adult mess of his life had gone.
None of it was supposed to be this way. He had planned to get a great job, meet a beautiful woman – though after six years without having sex he had stopped pretending she’d be a lingerie model – and his life would have been complete. He hadn’t wanted fame, fortune and his own yacht but a home and family. Most importantly of all, he had wanted to be happy.
If he couldn’t have a home and family, he was at least pleased when his sister Millie got them. He had been genuinely fond of her husband Clive and they had shared many a pint and a laugh together. He had even told him of Dave’s adoration of Millie.
The power of the memory was too much for Ian and he turned himself over suddenly in bed, wrapped within his stale duvet cover. Head thrown back against the pillow and arm across his face, he couldn’t stop his mind playing back to him the conversation they had shared. He wanted to block it out as he had wanted to on so many previous occasions, but it was still no good.
‘I know Dave’s crazy about her,’ said Clive as he downed his lager. ‘What bloke wouldn’t be? She’s beautiful, kind and sweet. Almost an innocence about her.’
Ian was able to picture the ten-pound note Clive pulled out of his wallet and waved at the barmaid, a tall, slim brunette, who clearly had a queue of customers vying for her attention. Like most people, she couldn’t help being drawn to Clive, ignoring the other waiting punters and smiling as she took his empty glass and refilled it.
With a shake of his head, Ian had turned his back to the bar and taken a pull on his drink. Clive really seemed to have everything to make his life complete and if he hadn’t have been such a thoroughly decent person, it would have been annoying. All Ian had ever wanted was a shot at a life like his brother-in-law’s. That was of course before it all went tragically wrong.
One morning, Clive left for work and didn’t come home. That was the hideous part of life that no one could ever avoid. The hand of fate had decided one particular morning that Clive would get into his car and drive his usual route to work, except on this day a lorry would jackknife, career across the central reservation and hit Clive’s car head on, killing him instantly.
The thought of such a waste of human life, sweeping everything in its wake, was enough to cause tears to form in the corners of Ian’s eyes. He rubbed them away, not wanting to begin another day wallowing in self-pity. It was, after all, a much bigger loss to his sister and her children, but Ian couldn’t help but feel devastated at the thought of what Millie and the children went through every day. If they suffered, he suffered.
It was something he always kept bottled up, as he realized that people might misinterpret his feelings and think that it was only for his own sake that he mourned the loss of his friend and brother-in-law. He had once or twice been out drinking with Clive and attracted the attention of beautiful and interesting women. He was no fool: he understood that it was Clive who radiated charm and warmth; he merely happened to be in his company. The conversations always began the same way with Clive introducing his very single brother-in-law and telling everyone that he was happily married to Ian’s sister.
Ian missed his drinking partner and confidant, and whilst there was nothing he could do to br
ing him back from the dead, what he could do was look after Millie and her children.
It was something he had always done, although he had got out of the habit of concerning himself with her quite so much once she met Clive.
That was the fundamental flaw in Ian’s personality – he didn’t know where to draw the line and back off. That was usually the problem of those with an obsessive personality.
He knew that he couldn’t lie in bed all day, especially as the smell of the sheets had started to make his hangover worse. He uncurled himself from the duvet, gathered the bedclothes and made his way with them to the washing machine.
Whilst he got himself ready for the walk to his sister’s house, he allowed himself the luxury of a whole new torment by wondering how Millie was coping after her world had been turned upside down once again by the monster that went by the name of Albert Woodville.
Chapter 46
‘Here goes then,’ said Pierre as Hazel brought the car to a stop outside a semi-detached house in a busy road, cars passing by every few seconds. ‘It doesn’t look like the worst part of Sussex.’
‘It looks OK,’ said Hazel as she ran an eye over the street.
Pierre thought about asking her if she was feeling all right, but stopped himself when he glanced over and recognized the look of a hardened detective who wasn’t about to go to pieces, was just going to get the job done.
They walked to the front door, Pierre stepping to the side to allow Hazel to knock. He watched her from the corner of his eye as she straightened her blouse, smoothed her jacket down and shook her hair back from her eyes. Then she gave a short, sharp knock, let out a sigh that Pierre assumed he wasn’t supposed to hear, and waited.
A short, petite, middle-aged woman opened the door to them, surprise registering on her face at the sight of two people on her property on a Monday morning who were either door-to-door salespeople or police officers.
‘Morning, Mrs Lewis,’ began Hazel. ‘Nothing to worry about. I’m DC Hamilton and this is DC Rainer. We’d like to speak to you about Monica, please.’