Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  She considered that it was very much part of her job to lift their spirits, to help them move on, indeed to drive them forwards. They all had work to do, after all. She just had to make herself forget that she was a human being, too. She reckoned that was the only way she was going to get through what lay ahead.

  There would be an inquest, albeit an informal one, into the whole Marshall affair, and as the senior investigating officer she was the one who would ultimately have to carry the can. Indeed, the chief constable, with whom she had a meeting she was not looking forward to that afternoon, had already made it clear that he wasn’t going to. The morning passed in something of a daze until it was time for her to set off for Exeter HQ. She had to get over that particular hurdle before she could even attempt to look to the future in the way she was already encouraging those around her to do.

  Even though she made absolutely certain that she arrived on time, and had dressed as conservatively as she could manage, Harry Tomlinson indulged in no social niceties at all before launching into an all-out blistering attack. His earlier huffing and puffing reached a crescendo of outrage.

  “All our worst fears have been realized, Detective Superintendent…total waste of the taxpayer’s money…more like a bloody circus than a murder investigation…”

  There was much more of the same, and Karen had little choice but to stand and take it. Anyway, she felt that she deserved it. And in a weird sort of way she felt slightly better for suffering the sackcloth-and-ashes experience of her meeting with Tomlinson. The chief constable did not, in any case, take things beyond personally displaying his severe displeasure. Karen was not formally rebuked and she was also left feeling fairly certain that she would not be the recipient of any disciplinary action. Indeed, there was no reason why she should be. The only flaw in the operation which she had led had been the failure to establish that Jennifer Roth was Marshall’s daughter and not his lover, and logic dictated that most investigations would probably have missed that, based on the information available at the time. However, Karen remembered only too well how she’d rounded on Cooper after Jennifer Roth had revealed her true identity, and her show of temper had not been entirely caused by what she had felt at the time to be his rejection of her. She had been genuinely furious with him, with or without justification, for his part in a potentially disastrous blunder. Now that the feared disaster had happened, Marshall was a free man again, and Karen and her team had been made to look stupid, even if they hadn’t actually been stupid. The chief constable’s response was only a part of it. As senior investigating officer, even with no official reprimand to her name, she knew very well that the mud was going to stick for quite some time.

  Whether or not any one individual was really to blame, it was still a fact that she had presided over just about the biggest and most public failure in the history of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary.

  Karen dealt with it all by trying to put the Marshall case out of her head and getting on with whatever else was on the books. It was a big ask. She never seemed to quite succeed. There were constant reminders, for a start.

  Just over two weeks after the successful appeal, The Sun newspaper carried a major series on the affair: “MY THIRTY-YEAR ORDEAL BY MAN CLEARED OF MURDERING HIS WIFE. HOW THE POLICE NEVER GAVE UP PERSECUTING ME. I WAS INNOCENT BUT THEY WOULDN’T LEAVE ME ALONE.”

  They had bought up Richard Marshall. He was a free man, properly acquitted in a court of law, and there was nothing in any kind of editor’s code to stop them. Karen and everybody she knew in the force was devastated. It was truly sickening stuff. Sean MacDonald called from Edinburgh more than once. He, too, was sickened by the series.

  “This is the final straw,” he said. “It’s like having your face rubbed in the dirt. There must be something else we can do, something else you can do, Karen.”

  “If there is, Mac, then I don’t bloody well know what it is. The CC has more or less said we have to write it off. To let the fuss die down. To be honest, I can’t think of any alternative myself. We are all deeply upset.”

  “She wasn’t your daughter, Karen. I’m just not prepared to let it go. I can’t let it go. Not when we were so close, not when Marshall was actually convicted and sent to jail. To see him walk free after that has been just too much to bear.”

  There was an edge to Sean MacDonald’s voice that Karen didn’t like at all.

  “Mac, you must leave it to us. If it is ever possible to do anything again we’ll jump on him straight away. Right now I just don’t see it, that’s all. But you mustn’t try to interfere. You’ll only cause trouble for yourself, and you don’t deserve more trouble, you really don’t.”

  “Karen, I have left it to the police for nearly thirty years, and it’s got me nowhere. My daughter’s killer is still a free man. Her death has still to be avenged. That’s wrong, Karen, that’s very wrong.”

  “I know it is, Mac.”

  There was nothing else she could say except that. Nothing else she could do except agree, and maybe apologize yet again.

  It was Mac who finished the conversation quite abruptly, and very nearly hung up on her. Karen was left with a distinctly uneasy feeling. She hoped Mac was not going to do anything stupid, not attempt to take the law into his own hands. She didn’t give a damn about Richard Marshall. But if Mac did anything outside the law he’d be sure to be caught. However, he was no criminal, and he was also eighty-three years old, she reassured herself. She was being silly. Mac would not step out of line.

  All day, that first day of the Sun series, she was aware of a certain atmosphere in the station. Officers gathered in clusters, pointing at sections of the story and muttering about it. And away from the whispering groups they all seemed much quieter than usual. There was very little banter going on. Even the air they were breathing seemed heavy with a leaden silence.

  Cooper appeared to be sunk most deeply of all into grim despair. She spotted him in the corner of the canteen at lunchtime, sitting with his head in his hands. A copy of the Sun was open on the table in front of him.

  “Can I join you?” she asked.

  His face lit up at the sight of her—that was how it was between them—but then swiftly fell again.

  She sat down opposite him, only narrowly resisting touching his hand. She was vaguely aware of a number of pairs of eyes fixed on them and a bit of whispering going on. Station gossip had been inevitable, of course, but she reckoned there was little doubt that word was getting around, and it was doing so considerably quicker than she had expected, even in a police station. Their body language was partly to blame, she thought, firmly clasping her hands together in full view on the table before her. Whatever the reason, she suspected that the vast majority of officers at Torquay nick already at least suspected that there was something going on between her and Cooper. It was not a comfortable situation.

  She ignored the buzz of interest which her sitting with him had provoked, and so did he. She considered it likely, however, that Cooper was so preoccupied he did not even notice.

  “You look happy,” she said. It was an inane remark. All the more so because she knew exactly what was troubling him.

  “Ecstatic,” he said.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Phil,” she said quietly.

  He grunted. “That’s not what you said before.”

  “No, well, I had a hidden agenda, didn’t I? I was pissed off with you. You were right, though, right when you told me that nobody else would have picked up on who Jennifer Roth really was either. And even if we had known, well, we would have been forewarned I suppose, and maybe we wouldn’t have gone ahead with the original prosecution. But there is no way we could have done anything more about securing a conviction, not up against her evidence.”

  Cooper looked grey and drawn. There was no sign of that face-splitting grin she so adored.

  “That’s all right for you to say, boss. I messed up, whatever way you look at it. It was my responsibility. I was supposed to be checking Jennif
er Roth out, and what a balls-up I made of it. I still can’t get my head around it, that’s the trouble. And then you read crap like this…”

  He gestured at the Sun spread out before him. She noticed that his hand was shaking. His frustration suddenly got the better of him. He picked the paper up, screwed it into a ball and threw it across the room against the nearest wall. Everybody in the canteen turned to look. Cooper seemed oblivious.

  “It’s the last straw, boss,” he said, unconsciously echoing Mac’s words. “Nothing’s changed. There can’t be anybody who doubts that Marshall killed Clara and his elder daughter, can there? And God knows what he’s done to Janine’s head, or Jennifer, or whatever she calls herself now. What has she gone through, what’s he done to her, for God’s sake? She believes the bloody man’s innocent, she really does, I’m sure of it. How can that be? She and her sister were about the same age as my kids when it happened…”

  Cooper paused, shot her an anxious look. After that second time they spent together, when he told Karen that he had always been faithful to his wife, they had never discussed her again, and neither did he ever talk about his children. It was part of a kind of unspoken deal between them.

  “It’s all right, Phil,” she said.

  He half-nodded. “Well, I think of them, I think of something like that happening to them, of one of them being killed, of the other one being screwed up somehow, screwed up for life. That’s what happened to Jennifer, there’s no doubt about that. And when I watch my kids playing or eating their tea or something, I get this vision.…I just can’t bear it…”

  Phil looked down abruptly. “I’m sorry, I guess I’m a bit wound up about everything right now.”

  That was an understatement, thought Karen. She studied him anxiously. She knew how torn apart he was. She knew he didn’t know what to do, and that his personal dilemma was adding greatly to the stress he was experiencing at work. She also knew that what there was between them was just as important to him as it was to her. She did not doubt that for one moment. They were both in a state of turmoil, but she actually thought his was probably worse than hers.

  It was so obvious that his personal feelings were all mixed up with his feelings of failure over Richard Marshall. He really was deeply upset. It hurt her to see him like this. She wanted to reach out and take him in her arms. She almost always wanted to do that. But in this instance more than ever. She could not, however, do so in the police canteen. Not if she wished to survive. She compromised by reaching out under the table with one hand and squeezing his knee.

  “I do understand, Phil,” she said.

  He managed a wan smile. “I know you do, Karen,” he said quietly. The use of her Christian name, something he usually avoided at work, further indicating just how troubled he was. “But even that doesn’t always help.”

  She could see the pain in his eyes, and it made her feel terribly sad.

  He looked over his shoulder then and glanced around the room, as if checking out, a little late, she thought, whether anyone was listening to their conversation. Then he spoke in a whisper.

  “Can I come round this evening?”

  She nodded. She couldn’t say no, and he knew it. That was the way it had been since the night of Marshall’s appeal, and that was the way it would continue. Phil Cooper, the man who didn’t cheat on his wife, had become rather good at it, it seemed to Karen.

  Most days he seemed to find an excuse to spend at least some time with her. She had given him a key to her flat. If they weren’t able to be together at night, she became accustomed to being woken by him early in the morning when he had sneaked away from home to come to her. More usually, he would spend at least a couple of hours with her, often more, after work. Occasionally he would stay for the whole night. Karen had no idea what he told his wife, but she accepted totally that he was experiencing genuine anguish. There was absolutely no question of her not believing that. And so was she.

  She was, of course, well aware that one day they would have to confront the reality of their situation. Fate would probably play a part, she thought. It often did in these situations. Meanwhile she was happy to be an ostrich. Well, happy was something of an exaggeration. But there were only two alternatives. One was that they should stop seeing each other, and the other was that Cooper would take the initiative and tell his wife. The first was definitely not an option, and she somehow suspected that it never would be. As for the second, well—although their present situation was far from ideal, she accepted that quite probably neither of them was ready for that second option yet. Apart from anything else, in love as she was, Karen was also aware of the implications on her career if this professionally dangerous relationship blew up in their faces. And her career was all there had been in her life for a very long time. She did not take lightly any threat to what she had achieved through sheer hard work and determination. Her recent promotion to detective superintendent had very nearly not happened because a previous case she had led had threatened to go catastrophically wrong. Now already she was facing another tricky time in the job, and she knew darned well that she was lucky not to have found herself in much bigger trouble.

  Politics, as executed by Tomlinson, a master politician if nothing else, had been her saviour, she suspected. The chief constable and those who pulled his strings at Westminster, had, she reckoned, decided that to take matters further, and certainly to delve into any kind of witch-hunt concerning blame in the Marshall affair, would serve merely to draw further attention to it and cause more mayhem than already existed.

  Karen was, however, almost certainly in a more vulnerable position than she had ever been before.

  John Kelly, too, found himself more upset than he had expected to be by Marshall’s release. It bugged him. It really bugged him. He didn’t like to think about the reasons why this case mattered so much to him. Kelly had allowed himself to be brought down both by events around him and by his own behaviour often enough in the past.

  Like Karen Meadows, he forced himself to put on a brave front. He made himself concentrate on other aspects of his life—his work with the Argus, his son Nick, Moira, the woman he lived with who was always so patient with him—rather than dwelling on a situation he could do nothing about.

  However, just over three weeks after the Sun’s serialization of Richard Marshall’s story, Kelly made one of his increasingly rare trips to London for a farewell party for the newspaper’s veteran crime correspondent, Jimmy Finch.

  Kelly enjoyed his occasional forays back into a world he had long ago left, but this time he had an ulterior motive. Finch’s swan song had been to mastermind the Marshall buy-up. Kelly wanted to talk to him about it. He couldn’t resist the opportunity. The case was on Kelly’s mind all the time, however much he tried to deny it. He knew that Finch would have spent a lot of time with Richard Marshall and, knowing the reporter’s habits, he would almost undoubtedly have gone drinking with him.

  The party was held at a wine bar not far from the Sun’s Wapping offices and just around the corner from the Tower Hotel where Kelly booked himself in for the night. There was a good turnout, mostly other journalists, but also quite an impressive cross-section of police contacts, not to mention a villain or two. Finch was old school, the reporter’s reporter who also managed to walk the tightrope in his speciality, thus maintaining the trust of his connections on either side of the law while at the same time somehow or other managing to keep his extremely demanding tabloid editor happy. He was a popular man, big, brash and genial, his lifestyle evident in both his girth and his flushed features.

  Jimmy Finch, already showing the signs of having had a considerable amount to drink, greeted Kelly, his equal in height but certainly not in bulk, with an enthusiastic bear hug, and led him straight to the bar.

  Kelly found that there were more old friends at the bash than he might have expected, and enjoyed the evening in spite of not being able to drink himself. He did not, however, forget his hidden agenda.

  Qu
ite deliberately he waited until the early hours of the following morning before contriving to get himself involved in a conversation with the by then extremely well oiled Finch about the Marshall buy-up. The other man had a selection of the usual kind of tales, ranging from the machinations of extracting every jot of the story from Marshall to how the opposition were shaken off, and naturally Jimmy Finch was the hero of every one.

  Kelly gave him his full attention, chuckling appreciatively in all the right places, before asking casually: “So what do you think then, Finchy, did he do it or not?”

  “Completely innocent, old boy,” replied the veteran crime man. “As told to the Currant Bun, and you’d never doubt Britain’s greatest newspaper, would you?”

  Kelly grinned. “There speaks one of the few men in Fleet Street to work to full retirement age and be looking forward to a hefty News International pension,” he said.

  “Dead right, Johnno.” Finch was on the whisky now. His diction remained surprisingly clear—he was, after all, well practised in the arts of coping with copious quantities of alcohol—but his flushed features had turned almost purple. Although the temperature in the air-conditioned wine bar was still pleasant enough there was a film of sweat on his forehead and cheeks. He was breathing heavily. Kelly wondered obliquely how long Finch would actually live to enjoy his generous pension. And as he gently returned the other man to the question he so wanted to hear answered, he reflected that there were some advantages to not drinking, like having a brain still in working order at the end of a night like this one, for a start. Kelly’s history of alcoholism had nearly destroyed him twice, and he was absolutely sure that he wouldn’t survive a third time. It was actually plain blind fear that kept him sober while all around him drank. He ordered himself a Diet Coke and Jimmy Finch another large whisky without asking him whether he wanted it, lining the glass up on the bar alongside the two already waiting there. Flattery, Kelly thought, might be the answer.