Two
The morning, washed clean by the storm, was bathed in a brightness that Naomi could feel on her skin as she took hold of Napoleon’s harness and negotiated the three steps down from her front door.
Someone called out a greeting and she turned her head, smiling as she replied and trying to figure out just who it was. Having moved to this house with its high front steps only a couple of months ago, she was still not too familiar with the neighbours, most of whom seemed perfectly nice, but were kept distant by that uncertainty of not knowing whether they should be straightforward in their offers of help or if she might see them as patronizing. Naomi was reminded of her own feelings about the old lady who had lived at the end of her mother’s road. Sometimes, if she saw her out shopping, Naomi used to stop and offer her a lift home, but it had taken a fight with her conscience before she had finally taken the plunge and asked if she’d like a hand, not sure that Mrs Parks would see it as a friendly gesture or an insult to her independence.
There ought to be books of etiquette written, Naomi thought, and she added it to her list of stuff she’d do one day if ever life got so boring she had nothing else.
Napoleon was happy to be up and out, trotting along, matching Naomi’s fast pace, with his tail held high and brushing against her side.
This part of her route was familiar now and she had come to trust the dog enough to walk almost as fast as in her sighted days. Took pride in timing herself until she could reach the end of the road in less that three minutes thirty-five.
Beyond the corner was a different matter. Naomi had deliberately moved to an area she knew well, only about a mile away from her childhood home and one which she could visualize easily. Even so, she was finding it hard to get to grips with matching the world she knew from her internal map with the one in which she had only her own feet and four borrowed ones to guide her.
Beyond the corner of the road, her pace slowed and the dog, sensitive to her mood and to the way she held his harness more tightly, slowed with her.
Since the accident her life had changed at its very foundations, and habits even at the most basic of levels. Instead of shopping weekly—or as her work allowed—at the local supermarket, where she stocked up more often than not on frozen ready meals that could be bunged in the microwave, Naomi now shopped locally in places where she could actually talk to the assistants. Simple things like going into a shop and being able to trust someone to weigh four red apples for you or pick the less ripe bananas had assumed an almost unreal importance. The local shops Napoleon could guide her to, knowing her habits and, Naomi was certain, understanding completely when she told him ‘Bill’s shop’, or ‘post office’ and they usually ended up more or less in the right place. Anything further afield and Naomi still did not have the confidence to go it alone. To catch a bus or go into the centre of town she took a friend or her sister, thankful that Sue was a stay-at-home mum willing to spare her the time.
For someone as independent as Naomi had been, it hurt that she should have to ask for anything. But she was getting used to it. Slowly. And having Napoleon in her life made a difference that she had been totally unprepared for.
Ironically, blindness had been something that Naomi had always dreaded. If anyone had asked her, which sense would she be more scared of losing, then sight would have been it. Short-sighted as a child—seriously short-sighted as a child—Naomi was always the kid in the school photos peering through the regulation pink-framed National Health specs, in those days before it occurred to anyone that free frames didn’t have to look as if that was exactly what they were. Her imperfect vision had always plagued her, and it was a standing joke at home that the first thing Naomi did in the morning was to put on her glasses.
As an adult, Naomi had switched to wearing lenses and discovered for the first time that she actually had rather beautiful dark eyes.
And then, she had joined the police force...and in quiet moments she could still hear DI Joe Jackson telling her, ‘Use your eyes, Naomi. Before you do anything else, stand still and use your eyes.’
This morning she had letters to post. Cards for her two cousins. Twins, just a little younger than herself who had birthdays. She needed salad from the greengrocer’s—where there was always a half-biscuit waiting for Napoleon—and steaks from the butcher two doors down—where there was always another biscuit waiting for Napoleon. When she had been working with the trainer, learning how to handle the dog, she had been reminded again and again that: ‘Poly was a working dog and that treats given by others were a distraction and should be avoided.’ But Napoleon was such an ice-breaker, handsome and glossy black—she could feel the shine on his smooth fur—and with such a puppy-like certainty that the whole world loved him, that people found him hard to resist. Often, they talked to the dog first, but that usually meant they talked to her too and Naomi found herself often pathetically grateful for the odd comments from strangers in a world which too often seemed frightening and isolated. In her sighted days, life had been something to be rushed through. Conversation, more often than not if it wasn’t about business, was simply conducted on the run. These days, like this morning, she found herself relishing the time to spend walking in the autumn sunshine. The time it took to shop and talk and make contact, however unimportant the actual words might be, and though that compensated for nothing, Naomi felt that it was a lesson she should have learnt long ago, while she could still have seen what she was missing.
Finishing with the morning tasks, she walked down to the sea. Napoleon knew where she wanted to go as soon as she paused on the kerb outside the butcher’s shop and he led her eagerly on to the promenade, his nose thrust into the seaward wind. They stood together, the dog’s tail thumping slowly, his bulk pressed reassuringly against her as she stared intently out across the estuary, picturing the scene as it used to be in those growing-up years when she and Helen played on the coarse sand. She listened to the sounds of the ocean, to the late holidaymakers taking advantage of the sunshine and squawking like the seagulls as they ran into the freezing water of the North Sea.
Somewhere off to her left, where she figured the breakwater ought to be, she heard two girls, squealing and calling out to one another as they braved the cold. One of them was called Helen.
Alec arrived just after seven and Naomi busied herself with cooking while he buzzed around her trying to be helpful, but just getting in the way.
‘So tell me.’
‘Not a lot to tell. Have you been listening to the news?’
‘Have I listened to the news? You joking? I’ve been waiting for every damned bulletin.’ She turned around. ‘You’re not telling me you don’t know any more than that?’
‘Not a lot, Nomi. OK, I went to Lansdowne Road. There was a garden there once, now it looks like a map of the Somme. Oh, and they no longer have a living-room floor. By tomorrow, they’ll need a hard hat just to be allowed through the front door. But so far, nothing. Not a sign.’
‘The killer couldn’t have lived there, could he? I mean, they were still building it.’
‘That’s right and there’s now a whole street full of worried neighbours wondering if our man could have got the address wrong. After all, one half-built house is going to look pretty much like the next. There won’t have been proper addresses, only plot numbers back then.’
‘I guess so,’ she shrugged, frustrated. ‘But that’s it? Still no names. No rumours?’
‘Like I said yesterday, plenty of rumours. Quite a few names too, but even now they’re admitting most are long shots, you know, lists of known sex offenders. Anyone who fits the basic profile. They’ve pulled the case records from when Helen first disappeared and got the civilian staff sifting through them for names of those interviewed at the time, but if you remember no one seemed to stand out even then.’
‘There were three suspects,’ Naomi recalled. ‘Three men taken for questioning, but they were all released without charge, or at least, no charges to do with Helen.’
‘That’s right,’ Alec confirmed. ‘Russell Gibbs was one. Started life as a twocker, stole cars till he graduated to the odd burglary and was pulled in on the Helen Jones inquiry because of an alleged sexual assault on a thirteen-year-old girl.’
‘Yeah, but he’s long dead, isn’t he? Someone knifed him, if I remember right.’
‘Well done, Sherlock. Always said DI Blake had the memory of half a dozen elephants. Two years after Helen disappeared, he got the wrong side of a drug deal, so unless he’s got a very inefficient solicitor, he’s out of the frame.’
‘Solicitor?’
‘Oh, didn’t I say? The confession was given to the daughter by the solicitor as per the father’s wishes. Sealed envelope job with instructions it was to be handed over after the reading of the will or something.’
‘Right, so she opens it thinking it’s some personal message from dead daddy and discovers he was a child killer.’
‘Now you’re jumping the gun. We still don’t know if “daddy” made the confession himself or implicated a third party.’
‘True. I guess.’
‘OK, suspect number two. Eric Kennedy. Remember him too, Sherlock?’
Naomi grinned. ‘Here, take a look will you, see if the steaks are done?’
‘Sure. How do you like yours these days? Medium rare, wasn’t it?’
‘Anyway it comes. The one thing I don’t do so well is get the timing right.’
‘Hmm. Looks dead anyway. Think it’ll do. OK, where were we? Suspect number two.’
‘Mr Eric Kennedy, arrested for indecency. He exposed himself to a couple of kids in the local park. Far as I know it was a one-off. Kennedy, if I’ve got this right, had learning difficulties or something. Joe reckoned he was never much of a suspect anyway.’
‘Ah, the famous DI Joe Jackson. A legend in his own lunchtime.’
Naomi shook her head. ‘I never did understand why you two didn’t get along.’
He shrugged. He was standing close enough for her to feel it. ‘Can’t get along with everyone. But no, he was right, there wasn’t much of a case against the Kennedy boy.’
‘Suspect number three,’ Naomi continued. She reached for the salad dressing reflecting on how much easier it was to talk about Helen when she removed her involvement to this pseudo-professional level. ‘Ian Holmes,’ she said, giving the dressing a final mix before drizzling it carefully over the bowl of torn leaves. ‘Here, could you put this on the table for me?’
‘Napoleon is begging,’ Alec informed her. ‘Can I give him something?’
‘Food,’ Naomi told him firmly. ‘Not chocolate, not whatever scraps you have wrapped up in that napkin in your pocket. At least, not until he’s had something proper.’
‘She’s got wise to us, old man,’ Alec told the dog. ‘His food still under the sink, is it?’
He rummaged about in the cupboard, Napoleon in tow. Naomi said, ‘Ian Holmes, he was number one for a while. He’d got previous for enticement and a minor sexual assault. Though he always swore the girl was willing and just kicked up after her parents found out, though that didn’t alter the fact that she was under age. He didn’t have an alibi for the time Helen went missing and his employers said he hadn’t turned up for work that morning.’ She sighed. ‘Not enough of anything to pin it on him though. The best they had was circumstantial. I heard he left the area six months or so after.’
‘We’ve checked him out. Jailed for rape five years after Helen. In and out of Her Majesty’s Pleasure ever since. Still very much alive though, so he’s not our dead man with the daughter.’
‘That doesn’t rule him out, does it? If the confession only implicated someone else, I mean.’ She sighed, aware that none of this moved them any further on. ‘I don’t know, Alec, where does that leave us?’
‘Us?’
‘Yes,’ Naomi told him. ‘Us.’
It’s not my case,’ he said.
‘And it’s certainly not mine. That what you’re saying?’
She felt him smile, the warmth of it in his voice. ‘I wouldn’t dare. No, where that leaves us is no further on than they were twenty-odd years ago.’
Three
The media circus had blockaded the entrance to Lansdowne Road. Local residents had taken refuge behind their net curtains and those who did have to venture forth had learnt to keep their platitudes to hand. ‘Oh, it’s a real shock...Nothing like that happens round here.’
The blockade parted reluctantly for the police car as it nosed its way through. Men and women, waving microphones or with cameras at the ready, bent to peer inside, but the lone, uniformed officer was too insignificant to warrant much of their attention. They watched him park his car at the head of the cul de sac and go inside the house. One or two shouted questions at his back. No one expected answers. There was a press call due that afternoon, most of them, old hands at the waiting game, knew they would have to wait until then.
A man stood across the road from them. He stood in shadow, half-hidden in the entrance of someone’s drive, their privet hedge giving him the cover he wanted. He had been watching for about an hour, half expecting someone to come out of the house and ask his business, though it had become clear to him that there was no one home and he was screened from the neighbours by their own high hedge.
He had his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his raincoat and wore a dark grey suit beneath. He wore it comfortably, as though it were his everyday dress, the tie pushed right up to cover the top button of his shirt, the knot tied just so, and a white handkerchief protruding slightly from his breast pocket. It was an old-fashioned look, but it fitted him well as though he had been wearing it for years.
He was not a young man, neither was he old, though the prematurely greying hair and lined face added ten years to his forty-one. His eyes were pale. Grey-blue and watery in the unexpectedly strong wind. Hard to believe that the weather had been so unseasonably hot only the day before.
He shuffled his feet as though uncomfortable or undecided and glanced down at the polished toes of his black, lace-up shoes as though they would provide him with the answer to his unspoken question. Should he stay or should he go? Should he step out across the road and through the wall of journalists? Walk past nonchalantly, as though he had a right to be there and they had no right to question it? Have his ‘no comment’ ready on the tip of his tongue?
He wanted more than anything to be able to walk up that street, to pause outside the door of number forty-three and make certain that they had it right. That this really was the place where she had lain this past two decades and more.
But he knew he couldn’t do it. A lifetime of invisibility had ingrained the habit so strongly that he would as soon strip naked and run down the beach as take that walk.
As he had done several times that hour he slipped the picture from his pocket and looked at it. It was crumpled with carrying and, to protect it, he had enshrined it in a little wallet of plastic and black leather. It showed two children, girls of twelve years old. They were both in their best dresses and laughing, neither looking at the camera, simply absorbed in some personal joke that one of them had told. In front of them on the table was a birthday cake, candles lit and ready to be blown out.
It was the last known picture to have been taken of Helen Jones.
Four
‘It’s not a bad thing to cry. Sometimes it’s the only way of getting your feelings out.’
His voice was soft and very gentle. She had never heard him raise his voice, not even in anger. Joe was always so even-tempered. So reliable, not like most of the adults she knew, who could blow at what seemed like the slightest provocation.
‘I know,’ she told him, ‘but Mam keeps saying that it’s been months now and I shouldn’t keep walking round here with a long face making everyone else feel bad. She says they feel bad enough already.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ Joe told her gently. ‘You know, Naomi, I’ve always thought it very arrogant of people whe
n they say, oh look, you must have grieved enough by now. But they do have a point as well. Do you honestly think that Helen would want you to go on like this, tearing yourself to shreds, refusing to see your other friends, not going to school? Oh yes, I know about that.’
‘She asked you to talk to Me, huh?’
‘That’s right, she did. Your Mum’s worried about you, and from what I’ve seen today, she’s every right to be.’
Naomi said nothing, she looked away from Joe Jackson, biting her lip in disappointment. She had been so sure that when he called by that morning it had been a spontaneous thing. A real desire to see how she was doing. As a friend, not as her mother’s messenger.
They had walked almost a mile along the canal towpath, down between the disused factories and out towards the open fields below the weir and the old mill.
‘I thought you cared about me,’ she said, her voice petulant and angry.
‘I do care, Naomi. I really do and so do your mum and dad.’
‘Oh sure. All they care about is I’m making it uncomfortable for them. They just want things back to normal.’ She whirled around and grabbed Joe’s lapels, clung on tight and shouted into his face. ‘Don’t they know it’s never going to be normal. Helen’s not here any more. Helen’s not here and I am.’
‘And you are,’ Joe confirmed with slow emphasis. ‘And so am I, Naomi, whenever you need me. Whenever, night or day.’
*
DI Alec Friedman was officially off duty as was his colleague DCI Travers. It was early on the Friday evening and the pair of them were out on Philby beach, walking the scene ready for a reconstruction that would take place later that night.
Sarah Clarke had gone missing at around eight thirty on a summer evening seven weeks before. She lived only a street away from the sea front. A sea front lined with guesthouses and pubs and fish and chip shops.
Mourning the Little Dead Page 2