Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  Karen sighed again. Yes, she knew “Dad”. Just a bit. And he was certainly quite resourceful enough to have been able to acquire false birth certificates for his children. Karen concentrated hard on all that she had been told. On the face of it, Jennifer’s story had holes in it you could drive a bus through. There was a great deal that needed to be checked, including the very basic premise that she was indeed Marshall’s daughter—although Karen would somehow have bet a month’s salary that she was. And there were a great deal more questions to be asked, including one that had been festering away in Karen’s brain ever since Jennifer had arrived at the station that morning.

  “Look, if all that you say is true, why on earth should your father, if that’s what he is, care about blackening your mother’s name?” she asked.

  “Because he loved her, of course,” Jennifer Roth replied swiftly. “He loved her in spite of everything. He didn’t want it known that she’d tried to kill her children. He said he’d rather stand trial himself. That it was the last thing he could do for her. Dad was always like that, you know.” The voice went childlike again. “He loved Mummy very much, only she didn’t seem to understand that. She kept getting at him, accusing him of things he didn’t do. But he just carried on loving her, even after she…after she tried to kill his children. Even after he lost us too, even after he was arrested, he was still loyal to her.”

  Karen stared at her. There was no sign at all that Jennifer Roth was being anything other than totally honest and straightforward.

  “How do you know all that?” she asked suddenly.

  “What do you mean, how do I know?” The now-familiar belligerence shone through yet again. “I know because of all that he’s told me and all that I know he’s done over the years. He did everything out of love. That’s the sort of man my father is.”

  Jennifer was positively glowing with pride.

  “You have a very high opinion of him, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I bloody well do,” Jennifer responded aggressively. “He’s remained the same nice, kind, gentle man right through all this, and I don’t know how he’s done it, to tell the truth.”

  “And your sister, Lorraine? Does she share your high opinion of your father?”

  Jennifer shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’ve no idea,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since Daddy gave us both away, and I have absolutely no idea where she might be.”

  “Are you sure she is alive?”

  Jennifer hesitated. “I suppose not. But I’m sure she didn’t die along with my mother, if that’s what you mean. Of course I am. And I’m absolutely certain Daddy didn’t kill her.”

  “You mentioned something about finding your father again?”

  Jennifer Roth nodded. “Yes. I always knew I was adopted, although it turned out it wasn’t a legal thing at all. I suppose it couldn’t be. Not that that made any difference, they were good people, they were good parents. I was brought up in Cheshire, I understand they moved there to start a new life, so that nobody would ask questions about my sudden arrival. We had a lovely home, I had a pony, they sent me to a good school. Looking back I think they were always trying to make things up to me…”

  Jennifer’s voice trailed off.

  “Were good people?” Karen queried swiftly. “What do you mean by that?”

  “They were in their late forties when they took me in. They both died of cancer within a few months of each other about five years ago. They’d kept in touch with Ricky, although I’d not seen him—he thought it was better that way—and I found some letters. Then I tracked him down. I had dreams, you see, I remembered bits of things. I needed somebody to tell me about my past.”

  “So what you are saying happened that day in 1975 is not really your own recollection, it’s what Richard Marshall told you happened, isn’t it, Jennifer?”

  “No,” Jennifer was emphatic. “It’s not. It’s what I remember. I needed something to jog the memories I’d buried, that was all.”

  Karen felt like bursting into tears. She could barely believe what she had heard. She continued to stare at Jennifer Roth. The young woman’s jaw was set at a very determined angle. She seemed disconcertingly sure of herself, and totally sure of the extraordinary story which she was suddenly presenting as fact.

  And there was one undeniable fact. If she did indeed prove to be Richard Marshall’s daughter, then there was at least one murder it had always been believed he was guilty of which had never been committed by anyone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Cooper thought the door to the incident room was going to be torn off its hinges when Karen stormed through, long lanky Tompkins, morose to the point of embalmment, following meekly behind. Cooper had never seen her so angry. And he had a fair idea his behaviour that morning had something to do with it. He also realized that the appearance of Jennifer Roth on the scene was almost certainly what had really upset the detective superintendent. Together with the rest of the team his eyes were riveted on Karen. They all knew that she had just finished interviewing the young woman, and it was pretty darned obvious that the results of the interview had not pleased her at all.

  “Right, let’s have some hush, shall we?” she shouted, quite unnecessarily as the incident room had fallen into nervously expectant silence the moment she had entered.

  “We have big big trouble, boys and girls,” she went on, still speaking much more loudly than she needed to.

  Cooper already knew that there was another gentler softer side to Karen—she had shared it with him during their so brief time together. He also knew that she was a woman who did not like to let her real feelings show. She had plenty of front, as his mother would say, and she knew how to protect it. But the detective superintendent looked as if she had been really thrown by whatever it was that she had learned from her meeting with Jennifer Roth. And, rather typically, her feelings were taking the form of what appeared to be blind fury.

  Her next words made Cooper understand exactly why.

  “Jennifer Roth claims she is Richard Marshall’s daughter—not his fucking lover but his fucking daughter.”

  Cooper felt as if he had been kicked in the gut by a mule. This was an absolutely devastating revelation. He felt Ron Smiley’s eyes burning into his back. It was he and Smiley who had interviewed Jennifer Roth, established her role in Marshall’s life. Or so they had thought. Cooper felt sick. But there was worse to come.

  His senior officer did not even glance at him. Indeed it seemed to Cooper that she quite pointedly avoided doing so. She looked almost everywhere else as, still standing in the middle of the incident room, she briefly related the story Jennifer Roth had told her—how Clara Marshall had tried to kill her daughters, but succeeded only in killing herself, and how Richard Marshall’s only role in the affair had been to prevent the truth being revealed, and to secretly dispose of his wife’s body.

  When she stopped talking the silence in the normally bustling room was all the more pronounced. Nobody moved, let alone spoke. But at least the act of telling the story seemed to have calmed Karen Meadows somewhat. After she had finished she sat down on the edge of the nearest desk and folded her arms.

  Cooper could feel all the blood draining from his head. It was blindingly obvious that this evidence could overturn the whole case against Richard Marshall. He didn’t need to hear what his boss had to say when she spoke again.

  “So if Roth is telling the truth then it would seem there is at least one murder Marshall is not guilty of,” Karen concluded. “Her very existence is a rather strong piece of evidence in Marshall’s favour.”

  There was heavy irony in those last words. She stood up again then, quite abruptly, and rounded on Cooper, pointing at him, arm outstretched. She was no longer shouting. Her voice was calm, but there was ice in it.

  “Which begs the question, Detective Sergeant Cooper, why did we not find out who Jennifer Roth was? You were in charge of checking her out, you were the one who first reported that she was
Marshall’s lover. I want to know how that could have happened. And I want a full and detailed report on my desk before this day is out.”

  “I’ve seen some pretty fine examples of incompetence during my time in the force, Cooper, but this just about takes the biscuit. You have almost certainly made fools of the entire fucking force and you may well be responsible for Richard Marshall having grounds for appeal and almost certainly getting off. I do hope you are proud of yourself.”

  Phil Cooper said nothing. There was nothing to say. He felt his neck and face begin to burn and hoped to God that he wasn’t going to blush, something he hadn’t done since he was a teenager. He knew Karen Meadows was right in everything she said. Absolutely right, and even though he didn’t see how anyone could have spotted the truth beforehand, if there had been a monumental cock-up then he had to take the blame for at least a big chunk of it. The bloody woman had told him she was Marshall’s live-in, for God’s sake. How was he supposed to have known she was his bloody daughter? If, indeed, she was. But Karen wasn’t even waiting to make sure before give him the bollocking of his life, and in public, too.

  Cooper struggled to keep control, but the more he did so the more he could feel the blush developing, spreading from his neck right up his face and to his hairline. He cursed under his breath. He knew that he had turned bright red, which made him feel even more of a prat. Even if the worst-case scenario was proven, he couldn’t believe that Karen Meadows had chosen to speak to him like this in front of everybody. Not after what had gone on between them the night before.

  He winced. He was actually well aware that, professional though Karen was, their nocturnal liaison was almost certainly responsible for the level of anger she had specifically directed at him. Or to be absolutely accurate, he suspected, it would not have been so much what had happened between them in bed, as the way he had behaved that morning.

  Oh, fuck, he thought. He continued to say nothing, but instead attempted to outstare her. Unfortunately that was difficult to do when you knew your face had turned beetroot-red. Karen’s eyes, still blazing with anger, bored into his. Cooper was no match for her in that sort of mood. Within seconds he was somehow forced to drop his gaze and he even bowed his head slightly, all too painfully aware of the sounds of embarrassment emulating from the rest of the team, ranging from nervous coughing to elaborate feet shuffling.

  Karen turned her back on him then, almost as if dismissing him.

  “Right, so let’s get to business and see what we can do to turn this disaster around yet again,” she said.

  “Jennifer Roth has agreed to have a DNA test. That’s the first step, although I have to say I believe her already. I wish I didn’t, but I do. Tompkins—get that organized straight away, will you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  In spite of his distress, Cooper almost managed a smile at that. Tompkins, like all of them, invariably called the superintendent “boss”, and in a very casual way, too. Karen Meadows was not the sort of high-ranking police officer who either expected or required formality. Normally she had an easy authority about her, and commanded respect—even, albeit grudgingly, from the most chauvinistic of coppers—in a friendly although very professional way which did not really have anything to do with deference to her rank. But that morning DC Tompkins, a man of considerable experience after all, was quite understandably taking no chances with his superior officer’s temper. Ma’am was the correct form of address. So ma’am it was.

  Karen spent another two or three minutes directing the rest of her troops. She organized one team to check out the information Jennifer Roth had given her about her upbringing in Cheshire and the couple who had adopted her, legally or not, and another to launch a search for Lorraine Marshall, although she was painfully aware that there was little more to go on concerning Lorraine’s whereabouts than there had been previously. Were both sisters really still alive? Karen had no idea. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to find Lorraine. The safe emergence of a second sister might well make Marshall’s conviction all the more unstable, particularly if Lorraine came up with the same story.

  When she eventually returned to her office Karen slammed the door shut behind her with almost the same kind of force she had earlier exhibited in the incident room.

  “Oh, fuck,” she muttered to herself, unwittingly echoing Cooper’s response.

  She knew she had been right to reprimand Cooper. It may or may not have been his fault and it probably wasn’t. He had nonetheless been responsible for a key part of the investigation, and his failure to come up with absolutely vital information could now have disastrous repercussions. However, she also knew that the way she had gone about it had been all wrong. She had rebuked him publicly and in a very personal manner, and she was honest enough with herself to be well aware of what had triggered off her extreme anger with the detective sergeant—and it was something nobody but her could take responsibility for.

  She had jumped into bed with a married junior officer regardless of the consequences—consequences Cooper had already made all too clear. His manner towards her that morning left her in little doubt that he wanted nothing more to do with her, and that he already regretted what had passed between them. She was quite sure that their working relationship would never be the same again. That friendly easy camaraderie was lost forever. She had blown something good and replaced it with an out-and-out mess.

  Typical, she thought. And what a day to choose. This was an all-round disaster day.

  Heaving a big sigh she picked up the phone to inform the chief constable of all that had happened. For several seconds she sat with the receiver in her hand before ultimately forcing herself to dial the number of the Exeter HQ. Harry Tomlinson was going to be delighted, and he did not disappoint her.

  The chief constable’s reaction, although predictable, was more extreme than anything Karen had yet encountered in her dealings with him. He went through the roof. Previously he had always niggled, been sarcastic, been pompously self-righteous, huffed and puffed a bit. But Karen had never known him really lose his temper before. It wasn’t Tomlinson’s style. And being on the receiving end was not a pleasant experience at all.

  “If there’s ever been a sloppier example of policing than this, then I’ve never heard of it, Detective Superintendent,” he stormed.

  Karen winced. For once she could not find fault with the CC’s judgment and she had no answer for him. She had said much the same to Cooper, after all. The only problem was that she was the senior investigating officer and the buck stopped with her. Which Harry Tomlinson went on to point out.

  “Be sure of one thing, Superintendent, if heads are going to roll over this mess, mine will not be among them.”

  “Absolutely, sir,” said Karen. She would always have expected the CC to offer up any of his officers as a sacrifice in order to save his own skin. But on this occasion she could not entirely blame him.

  By the time she left for home that night she felt utterly beaten. And she was quite convinced that the worst was still to come.

  The wait for the DNA tests seemed like forever even though it was only six days. When they eventually came through everybody’s worst fears were realized. The tests proved positive DNA matches for Jennifer Roth both with Richard Marshall and with samples taken from the skeleton recovered from the sea, the skeleton which had been proven beyond all reasonable doubt to be the remains of Clara Marshall. This time the mitochondrial DNA, evident only in the female line, extracted from her bones was able to do its job, even though it unfortunately confirmed the result Karen had been dreading. Jennifer Roth was the daughter of Richard and Clara Marshall, just as she claimed. The solicitor she had employed, for whose services she would, to Karen’s further annoyance, almost certainly get legal aid, immediately filed an application to the Criminal Case Review Board for the right to take Richard Marshall’s case to the Court of Appeal in London.

  Karen felt a sense of impending doom. She really didn’t see how she and her team
were going to wriggle their way out of this one. Any halfway decent lawyer would now be able to tie the prosecution case in knots. It was true that Marshall had never been charged with murdering his children, that the only charge against him had been for killing his wife, but nonetheless the disappearance of all three members of his family without trace had been fundamental to the prosecution’s success. And now one of the daughters presumed killed along with her mother had turned up, not only alive and well, but singing the praises of her father and prepared to give evidence in support of his innocence.

  Jennifer Roth’s whole story of her unorthodox adoption and the death of her adoptive parents checked out. A false birth certificate had indeed been obtained for her—no doubt by the ever-devious Marshall, Karen reckoned, just as Jennifer had suggested, but she knew she would never be able to prove that either—and Jennifer Roth’s doting substitute parents had painstakingly built a new identity for her around it. No trace of Lorraine Marshall was found and Richard Marshall refused to give any information on her alleged adoption on the grounds that he did not want the completely new life he believed his elder daughter to have to be upset in any way.

  Karen was convinced that Jennifer’s evidence was at least highly suspect. She believed that the young woman was severely disturbed, but Jennifer Roth had no history of any mental illness, and although Karen would have loved to have been able to make her see a criminal psychiatrist she had no way of forcing her to do so and, naturally, Jennifer turned down the suggestion that she might like to seek psychiatric guidance in view of her traumatic childhood experiences and the effect they may have had on her.

  It was all an absolute disaster. And to make matters worse, as soon as news of the appeal, on the grounds of new evidence, broke, the press were on to it like a kennel full of terriers, sniffing and nipping their way to yet another series of splash headlines on the Marshall case.