Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  Adam Kelly was a good solid man who had no time at all for anything fanciful. He’d apparently gone to bed early the night before and left his wife to do her fretting alone. Indeed, Kelly doubted that his mother had shared any of her true feelings about the Marshall case with him. She saved that for her only son, he thought wryly.

  He studied her carefully. Her eyes were red and swollen. She looked as if she had almost certainly been crying during the night. He noticed then that there was a brandy glass upside down on the draining board and that the bottle of brandy, normally kept for medicinal use only in their house, stood on the worktop alongside. Kelly was further alarmed. He didn’t suppose for one minute that Angela Kelly had consumed more than a measure or two, but he had never before known his mother to drink spirits at all—except occasionally as part of a hot toddy if she had the flu or a bad cold. It was all getting very worrying. He did hope she was not going to dwell on the Marshall case for much longer. But he already feared that she would.

  Leaving her and his father at the kitchen table he walked into the hall to make a check call to the police station. The policeman who answered the phone was a young man Kelly had been to school with. The first bit of luck he’d had in days, thought Kelly wryly, still mourning the demise of his beloved green suit.

  “No, there’s no plans to bring him in again that I know of,” said PC Joe Willis morosely.

  Kelly was already well aware that almost everybody even remotely involved with this case was affected by it in some way. And it only took a little bit of prompting to make PC Willis considerably more forthcoming.

  “Off the record, Johnny, the old man is tearing his hair out. You daren’t go near him. A woman and two little girls have disappeared off the face of the earth, somehow or other we don’t even get to investigate formally till a year later and the trail’s as cold as a dead man’s willy. And if you ask me, Johnny boy, that’s the way things are going to stay. We’ve fuck-all to go on. The search at the house has produced zilch.”

  “If that bastard Marshall did what we all think he did, if he really murdered his wife and kids, well, you know what, Johnny? He’s got away with it. That’s what I reckon.”

  Kelly put down the receiver glumly. That was the news he had expected but not what he had wanted to hear. Apart from anything else, his dossier on the Marshall affair, so meticulously compiled, was never likely to see the light of day now. Certainly the Torquay Times wouldn’t print such legally dangerous material.

  But this was much more than a story to Kelly. This was a murder that had happened on his doorstep involving people who were very nearly neighbours. The two little girls had been his mother’s pupils. This was a case that had shaken an entire town to the core. It seemed to be all anyone talked about, in the shop, in the pub, on the street.

  The whole of Torquay was under a shadow because of it. The pupils at his mother’s school were tearful and upset, he knew, as they became caught up in all the stories and rumours about what had happened to their little classmates.

  And as for his mother—well, she was the sort of old-fashioned headmistress who felt that all the children in her school were her responsibility. She had made it quite clear how much she blamed herself. Kelly didn’t see that changing, either, and it frightened him.

  Part Two

  Chapter Four

  Twenty-seven years later both Karen Meadows and John Kelly could remember it all so vividly. Twenty-seven years later Richard Marshall remained a free man and his wife and children had never been found—dead or alive.

  The policewoman and the reporter both had different takes on the affair, and had been touched by different aspects of it in different ways. But the disappearance of Clara Marshall and her children, and all that surrounded it, was not something that anyone even remotely involved was likely to forget.

  The worst fears of the people of Torquay back in 1975, and a year later when the police missing-persons enquiry was finally launched, had been realized. The mystery had remained unsolved. The police hadn’t been able to pin anything on Richard Marshall then or since. He’d never been brought to justice for the dreadful crime of which everyone involved had always been convinced he was guilty.

  But now a body had been found at sea, preserved by freak circumstances, at least to the degree of still being recognizable as human remains. And Karen Meadows, as she turned off the seafront onto the Newton Abbot road on her way to the hospital, reflected on how this could change everything. She was tensed up, almost trembling with anticipation, and afraid of even beginning to hope that this discovery in the old sunken Nazi U-boat might lead to justice at last.

  At the junction she badly fumbled a gear change. She really must relax, keep cool. But that was easier said than done. The Marshall case had already had a profound influence on Karen’s life, as it had on Kelly’s and almost everyone’s who had ever been involved in it. For a start she thought, in a perverse kind of way probably, considering the aura of failure that had always surrounded the police investigation into the Marshall affair, that it was the subconscious influence behind her later decision to join the police force. Neither of her parents had ever discussed her future with Karen when she was growing up. Curious perhaps, but nothing much was ever discussed between the three of them as far as she could remember.

  So when a school careers teacher asked her what she wanted to do with her life Karen had been as surprised as the teacher when she heard herself reply: “I want to be a police officer.”

  In that curiously objective way of looking at things that she had developed as a very young child Karen had carefully followed the enquiry which had turned out to be so ill-fated, watching all the goings-on in her street, tuning in to the television news bulletins, reading all the newspaper reports, and listening to local gossip, and she had been intrigued. Rather precociously perhaps for a schoolgirl she had lain in her bed at night going over in her mind how she would handle the investigation. She must already have had ambition too, she reflected. After all, she always imagined herself in charge of things, leading the operation. And she supposed she rather liked the idea of being part of such a team. Perhaps she had seen the police force as some sort of substitute for the kind of family she would so much liked to have belonged to.

  It was her personal involvement with the Marshall case which had had the biggest effect on her, however. Throughout her life, as the years had passed and Clara and the children continued to be unheard of while Marshall remained a free man, Karen, a bit like Kelly’s mum back in 1976, never ceased to wonder if it would have made any difference had she told anybody what she had known all that time ago.

  It was too late now anyway, she reflected, managing her next gear change rather more smoothly. She had always felt that her mother held the key to something, although she was not entirely sure what, but any information Margaret Meadows may have kept close to her chest for twenty-eight years was now going to stay there. Karen’s mother had vascular dementia. Her mind which had been so troubled throughout most of her life had now more or less entirely departed. She had been at the Old Manor nursing home just outside Torquay for two years. It was Karen who had had to make the decision to place her there and she had been consumed with guilt ever since. She still felt she should be looking after her mother even though it was quite impossible, even though she had done more than her fair share of looking after Margaret Meadows, even though Margaret herself was at least partly responsible for her own sorry state. The condition from which she suffered, which caused the brain to suffer an oxygen deficiency, had been brought about in part by her excessive drinking habits.

  Whatever the cause, Margaret Meadows would never now be any sort of witness in a murder enquiry, even if she might once have been an important one.

  There was something else, too. Karen couldn’t stop seeing those frightened little faces of the Marshall girls inside her head, just as she had seen them all those years ago. And they had been frightened. Both of them. Very frightened. She had no doubt abo
ut that now, and it still haunted her sometimes. But back in 1975 Karen had been completely unmoved by the little girls’ plight. Almost unaware of it, in a curious, detached, early-teen sort of way. She didn’t entirely blame herself. She had been just a thirteen-year-old kid herself, struggling to survive in a totally dysfunctional family. Yet she couldn’t help wondering still what might have revealed itself if she had shown just a little more concern for, or even interest in, Janine and Lorraine. Or indeed, if her mother or father had done.

  As it was she could recall all too clearly just about her only contribution on what could well have been the last day of their young lives.

  “Shut up or I’ll give you one.”

  Karen winced at the thought. These were deeply disconcerting memories. Sometimes she was not sure that her extreme youth and difficult family circumstances were excuse enough for her behaviour during that tragic last encounter with the Marshall sisters.

  The traffic slowed to a crawl along the Newton Abbot road. Karen lit another cigarette and tried to think about the present, not the past. She knew she was not the only one in the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary who had special reasons for wanting to solve the mystery of the disappearance of Clara Marshall and her children.

  The unsolved case had been a blight on the local force for more than a quarter of a century. It still rankled with many of the older officers and even the very youngest and newest had inherited its burden and were familiar with every sorry detail. The fact that two children were presumed to have been murdered made the case a highly emotive one, all the more so because their own father was the prime suspect.

  Bill Talbot, the Senior Investigating Officer, had always blamed himself, Karen knew that. He had no real reason to, that Karen could see, but like almost everybody who worked on the case he had been driven half-mad with frustration because he believed passionately that Richard Marshall was guilty of a dreadful crime.

  Karen drummed her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. The traffic lights in front of her had changed three times while she had remained virtually stationary. Leaning out over the door and peering around the edge of the windscreen so that she could get a view of the road ahead past the line of vehicles in front of her, she could see that the traffic on the far side of the lights was jammed solid. No wonder nothing was moving. She took another pull of her cigarette and cursed the holiday season. It was August bank holiday week, and half the world seemed to have descended on Torquay. The entire economy of the West of England might rely on the tourist industry, but all it ever seemed to mean to a police officer was more trouble.

  Eventually she arrived at the hospital. She was told that the examination of the remains was just beginning. Hastily she donned the regulation white-paper suit. The fact that this particular body was barely even that made no difference to procedure. It was just as important as ever for there to be no opportunity for a flash lawyer to imply that any kind of contamination had taken place. Nonetheless Karen regarded getting booted and suited as an even greater nuisance than usual. Not so very long ago police observers had been allowed to wear their own clothes without any protective overalls as long as they stood well away from the operating table. Not anymore. She broke into a sweat as she struggled to pull the plastic galoshes on over her chunky trainers. For what seemed like forever she couldn’t get them past the thickly cushioned heels.

  “Amazing bloody performance for a fucking skeleton,” she muttered to herself, succeeding at last with one frantic pull.

  Phil Cooper, Karen’s favourite detective sergeant, was already there, standing alongside the county pathologist Audley Richards, a taciturn character as precise in his work as his small neat moustache. Karen respected Doctor Richards, but had never managed to attain with him the easy bantering relationship which she had enjoyed with his predecessor. And Karen, of course, was impatient. It went with her territory.

  “Is it a man or a woman?” she asked at once, gesturing to the bones on the mortuary table. That was, after all, the so-far unasked question which had been foremost in her mind since Phil had called that morning.

  Audley Richards peered at her over his half-moon spectacles. With his thinning grey hair and aquiline nose, he looked more the part than any other doctor she had ever encountered.

  “Patience, Detective Superintendent, patience,” he murmured. “I will be giving you my full report in due course.”

  Karen clasped her hands behind her back, forcing herself not to rise to the bait. Sometimes she thought the pathologist deliberately set out to irritate her.

  “C’mon, Audley,” she said. “You can tell me that straight away. That skeleton is in pretty darned good nick, considering. I reckon you knew its sex after one glance.”

  Richards smiled without humour. “The shape of the hips indicates that these are the remains of a woman, and although the extra rib is not intact you can still see the start of it quite clearly.”

  Karen felt a dryness in her mouth. This was the most important news of all. Had the skeleton been a man, or had it not been possible from its condition to immediately ascertain its sex, then the assumption she had already jumped to might have had to be dismissed after all. Or at least put on hold. As it was, the medical confirmation that these were the remains of a woman led instantly to her next question.

  “So how long has the skeleton been in the sea?” she asked.

  Audley Richards sighed dramatically. He glowered at her over his glasses.

  “I’m a pathologist, not a psychic. I do not have a crystal ball,” he instructed. “Months or even years rather than days—but that’s as far as I’m going to be able to go. For anything more accurate than that you’ll need to establish the isotopes of these bones, and that’s a job for the experts in forensics.”

  Karen had known that would probably be the answer. She was also aware that this was a new technique, as far as she knew conducted by only one forensic laboratory in London, and a technique which was still regarded as experimental and was certainly not at all precise. It would also take several weeks after the skeleton was delivered for any results at all to be achieved.

  Audley Richards had turned his back on her in a rather determined way and seemed engrossed in his examination. She gave in then, standing in silence for another fifteen minutes or so, until he had finished. It seemed like much longer than that before he turned to her.

  “Right,” he said. “We have here the skeleton of a youngish woman. Height, five foot four or five. No signs of any deterioration through age. From her bone formation I would estimate that she could be anything between twenty years old and forty. But these remains do not tell us a great deal more than that.”

  Karen felt her heart thumping very loudly inside her chest. Audley Richards was not in the habit of giving anything away until he was absolutely sure of his facts, and on this occasion it seemed he did not have much to give. But the skeleton lying on the mortician’s table before them could be Clara Marshall, it really could.

  “Any idea how she may have died?”

  Knowing Audley Richards as well as she did, Karen didn’t really expect a meaningful reply to that either. Not yet, anyway. And she was right.

  The pathologist shook his head. “There are no signs of any damage to the remaining bones. No new fractures. No old fractures, either, come to that. In view of the circumstances in which she was found it is almost certain that she was murdered, but exactly how I have no idea, and from the condition of this skeleton alone I do not see that changing.”

  He pointed to the upper part of the skeleton. “As you can see the head is missing. It looks as if the tarpaulin disintegrated quite early on around that area of the body for some reason. Most of the neck bones are missing too. I couldn’t even tell if she had been strangled. To be honest, Karen, I don’t think we are going to learn a lot more from these remains.”

  “So there are no immediate means of identification at all?”

  “No. We don’t have a head, so we don’t have teeth to chec
k with dental records. No old fractures, so checking with medical records won’t help either. It will almost certainly be possible to extract DNA from the bones, of course, but you’ll also need DNA from a close relative to compare it with. Catch-22 in a situation like this when you have a mystery corpse which might date back a bit.”

  It was Karen’s turn to smile grimly then.

  “I think I might know exactly where to find that relative, actually,” she said.

  “You have a crystal ball now, Superintendent, do you?” enquired Richards loftily.

  “For once, I don’t think I’m going to need one,” Karen replied.

  “Well, don’t forget that the DNA you get from bones is not the stuff you take as samples for police records. It’s mitochondrial DNA. And mtDNA only passes directly down the female line. So you would have to have DNA samples available from this victim’s mother or grandmother, or from any children she might have.”

  Karen mentally kicked herself as she and Phil Cooper left the hospital building together. Like most police officers she had never quite got to grips with all the various idiosyncrasies of DNA. And the possible victim’s relative she had had in mind was not in the direct female line. Indeed not female at all. So that was the end of that avenue, she thought.

  She glanced at Cooper. He was in somewhat better shape than she had on several occasions seen him following an autopsy. Karen had learned to harden her heart and soul concerning post-mortem examinations. She never flinched, whatever gory business was being conducted on the mortician’s table. Phil Cooper was often unable to conceal how much the proceedings affected him. The burly rugby-playing policeman was known to be a bit of a softy and he had a very human side when it came to watching corpses being carved into and dismembered.

  But this autopsy had not been like that. The dead body was just a pile of decaying old bones. There was no emotion to cloud the judgment of the two police officers. No nasty retching feelings in the stomach to control. Nothing to stand in the way of an analytical assessment of the known facts, of solid methodical policing, in fact. Except of course the legacy of the past, thought Karen.