by Adam Creed
Pulford knows the case could be an opportunity for him, but he quickly chastises himself for wanting to profit from such things, even though he, too, is something of a victim. He realises exactly what they think of him at Leadengate CID: a fast-tracked graduate who’s already a detective sergeant, even though (some say) he knows jack shit and has only taken four years to learn it. He had three years drinking and screwing, playing on his Playstation and watching Countdown while better men, men like Johnson, were getting their hands well and truly dirty, pushing back crime in the city’s sordid corners.
The satnav directs him on to a new-build brownfield estate down by the wide brown river. It’s designed for the aspirationalists, for thirty-somethings busting both balls to try to get ahead. It’s not where you’d expect Leanne Colquhoun’s sister to be. In other words, it’s not Holloway.
Pulford knocks twice, loud, and takes a step back. He looks at the pretty face that appears by the jamb of the door and glances down at the photo. It could be a dolled-up Leanne, he’s not sure.
‘I’m here to …’
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘we were expecting you. Leanne’s upstairs. You’d better come in. Take your shoes off, if you don’t mind.’
Pulford’s heart skips one, two beats. Now he knows she’s here, he might be in schtuck, might also be on to a good thing.
‘She just wanted some time, you know.’ She nods towards the living room and he goes through, wishing he had brought a WPC.
‘I’m Detective Sergeant Pulford.’
‘Karen Donnelly. I’m Leanne’s sister, but you know that, don’t you.’ She sits down, looks out through the sliding, metal-framed patio doors that give on to ten by ten of new-laid decking, a tiny lawn beyond, then medium-brown fencing. ‘She loved him, you know. Always did.’
‘Colquhoun?’ says Pulford, taking out his notebook, scribbling away.
‘She did the worst thing, but she did it for him. It’s a terrible thing, love.’
‘She killed him for his own sake?’
‘She let them take her children away,’ says Karen Donnelly, staring to infinity. ‘Love.’
‘Did she tell you she killed him?’
She fixes a stare on Pulford, lets it burn into him. He flinches and looks away as she tells him, slowly, to ‘Fuck off.’
‘Did Leanne tell you how he died?’
Karen Donnelly shrugs.
‘He can’t have treated her well.’
Karen looks at him as though she might be about to confide but decides against it. She shakes her head.
‘You’ll have to come with me to the station. It’s Leadengate, in the City.’
‘Aha. Fancy crimes.’
‘Nothing fancy about this one,’ says Pulford, stopping himself from giving away any details of the cause of death.
‘I’ve got to pick my children up from school at four. Then I have to make dinner. Then I’ve got to go to work.’ She looks around her home. To Pulford, it seems as though she might resent it, the things she does to pay for it.
‘What about Leanne’s kids? Doesn’t she want to see them?’
‘Children. She’s got children,’ says Karen Donnelly. ‘Goats have kids.’
‘Don’t ask her fuckin’ nothin’,’ says Leanne Colquhoun, coming down the stairs. She looks younger than in the photograph, looks to Pulford as though a burden might have been lifted. ‘We can get my kids on the way. As long as it’s all right with the fuckin’ caseworker. I’d like to see them.’
Pulford looks at Karen who looks at the floor. She looks ashamed.
*******
Staffe parks the knackered old Peugeot in the Kilburn lock-up alongside another vehicle, which is covered in a dirty dust sheet. He closes the heavy steel doors, fixes the padlock and looks up at the back of his house. Built to last by the Victorians. It was a good buy but it’s not home and he thinks he might let it out, might move across to one of his better houses in a better neighbourhood – even though it isn’t long since the scaffolding came down and the skips were towed to landfill. He stops this thought, though, wondering if he is thinking this because of Golding’s threats. Has he suddenly allowed a nineteen-year-old gangster to turn him into a coward? But is it cowardly to lean away from a blow, to swerve a tackle?
There is a light on upstairs – even though it’s daylight, even though he turned everything off. He goes to the fence, presses his face against it, peers through a knothole in the wood. He can see a shadow moving across the dining window.
He rushes round the front of the building and takes out his phone to call for back-up. A closer inspection of the front door shows no sign of forced entry. He puts the phone back in his pocket and is just about to put his key to the door when he hears a scream from inside the house.
It sounds like a woman but he can’t be sure and Staffe stands, frozen. There is another scream, and the low murmur of someone crying. A raised voice – through an open window upstairs. He locked the house down, he’s sure.
Staffe runs down the steps to the lower-ground floor and bounds back up, holding a spade that he keeps in a damp storeroom. He peers through the letter box, sees nothing but can smell recent cigarette smoke. He hasn’t had so much as a drag on a Rothmans in three years.
He puts the key to the door again, hand shaking, and takes a deep breath, steps inside. The noise comes from upstairs and it is definitely a woman.
‘Oh my God. Oh my God,’ she says, as if she is pleading for mercy or for help.
As he goes up the stairs, spade in hand, Staffe hears someone crying and tracks the sounds to the back bedroom, where he had seen the light. He pauses, holds the spade out ahead of him and notices splatterings of blood on the carpet. There is a trail from the bathroom. He kicks open the door to the bedroom, rushes into the room and the howling of the woman within redoubles.
‘What the hell! What the …’
‘Marie?’ he says.
Her hands are covered in blood; horror written right across her face.
Staffe looks at a child, curled on the floor and clutching his blood-smeared head, sobbing. ‘What’s happened. Who did this?’
‘It’s your fault,’ says his sister. ‘It’s your fault, you idiot, Will.’
‘Where did they go? Where are they!’ Staffe is kneeling down by the child, taking him in his arms and saying, ‘Harry, are you all right? Oh, Harry.’
‘Of course he’s all right,’ she says. ‘It’s me that’s cut.’ She holds out her arm to show Staffe. ‘I cut it on that bloody stupid shower screen of yours.’
‘What are you doing here, Marie?’
‘You said I could come any time. You gave me a key.’
‘You could have let me know.’
‘You’re supposed to be on holiday. If you can call it that!’ She looks daggers at him and sits on the edge of the bed, holding her bleeding arm. ‘Oh shut up, Harry. Please!’
Staffe picks up his nephew from the floor and holds him to his chest then sits on the bed next to his sister, wraps an arm around her. Even though one is soaked in blood, the other in tears, he savours the moment, feels the relief course through his veins.
‘It’s nice to see you, Marie.’
‘Oh yeah. Just great,’ she says.
Young Harry is in Staffe’s lounge bemoaning the fact that there is no Nickelodeon to be had from the small-screen TV. The best Staffe has managed is to dig out an old pack of cards and quickly teach him how to play pontoon. And now he has returned to the kitchen to patch up the boy’s mother.
‘You should go to hospital.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ says Marie.
Staffe rolls her sleeve right up and looks at the wound. The glass shower screen cut the inside of her forearm but missed the vein by a centimetre or so. He cleans the cut and applies iodine which makes her flinch and as she scrunches her eyes, he takes a closer look at the fresh bruise higher up on her arm. When she opens her eyes, she catches him and rolls her sleeve down.
‘My bet is there
’s another one on the other arm. Am I right?’
‘Just concentrate on the cut, Will.’
‘I always said he was a bastard.’
‘And your life is just perfect.’
‘You should report him. He’ll do it to someone else.’
‘Why do you always have to fight other people’s battles?’
‘You’re my sister, for God’s sake.’
‘And what about you, Will? Who are you seeing?’
‘My life’s too complicated at the moment.’
‘You live alone, Will. It’s the most uncomplicated situation a man could be in. Or is it this stupid quest of yours?’
‘They were your parents, too, Marie.’
‘It was twenty years ago, for God’s sake. Don’t you think they’d want you to move on?’
Staffe wants to tell her he has no choice, that he wants to move on, but he can predict where that conversation would go. ‘I’m trying to do the right thing.’
‘Do the right thing for yourself. Look at Sylvie.’
‘No! Let’s not look at Sylvie. And, anyway, at least I didn’t run away when it happened.’
‘I didn’t run away, I travelled.’
‘You blew your inheritance.’
‘I spent it. I invested it in experiences. You know, Will, sometimes I really don’t understand where you get your values from.’
He thinks about this, which makes him remember his father – always working, occasionally talking about what he was going to do with ‘his time’ when he retired. Would his father be proud of what he does? He’ll never know. Staffe feels lost, gazes at his sister. ‘What would he make of us? How we turned out?’
‘Oh, Will. We have to live for ourselves.’
‘And not the ghosts,’ he says.
She shrugs, looks embarrassed. ‘I’ve never asked you for anything, Will. Harry’s going to school at the end of summer. You know if …’
Staffe wraps an arm around her, pulls her into the crook of his neck and speaks softly. ‘I’d love you to stay. I wish you’d come years ago.’
‘It’s not to stay. We fight like cat and dog, Will. We always have.’
He lifts her sleeve and looks at the other bruise. ‘I know.’ He rocks, gently, holding his baby sister tighter and tighter and trying not to picture what a mess she must be in to accept his help after all these years.
‘Why didn’t you go away?’ she says.
The thought occurs to Staffe that, after all these years, he might be afraid of catching up with Santi Extbatteria.
‘Let’s go and see how Harry is. Maybe I’ll teach him to play poker.’
‘I can see you’re going to be a fine role model.’
As they go, they laugh. She fixes her face and he thinks that perhaps he really should move across town.
*******
Leadengate Station is quieter than Staffe can remember. Every available officer is either out on the knock and search, or phoning down everybody who ever knew Karl Colquhoun. Pennington received the call from the commissioner and had to make a statement to the press.
Staffe makes his way towards the interview suites and hears the raised voices of his DSs: Johnson and Pulford, in the corridor.
‘You should know to take support,’ says Johnson.
‘I didn’t want her to get away.’
‘It’s not my fault you lack experience.’ Johnson sees Staffe and he looks at his shoes.
‘What the hell are you two firing off about?’ Staffe slides the spyhole plate to the main interview room and sees Leanne Colquhoun. He frowns. ‘What if she heard that, you idiots,’ he says in a scolding whisper. He turns to Johnson. ‘What do you know about Colquhoun’s first wife?’ he says to Johnson.
‘Debra Bowker? She’s moved out of the country, to Tenerife.’
‘Get me her number. And find out how long she has been there. I need the dates of all her visits since she left and double-check with the airlines.’
Johnson looks daggers at Pulford and Staffe can see that he is gutted to have lost out on this case. He puts a hand on Johnson’s shoulder and ushers him down the corridor, saying as he goes, ‘I know where you’re coming from, Rick. But we’re a DI down anyway at the moment, with Rimmer on the sick. This could be the biggest case we’ll get in years and the press are all over it already. We’ve got to pull together.’
‘Is that why you came back?’ Even though there’s venom in Johnson’s voice, he has dark rings under his eyes. It seems to Staffe his DS should be at home resting.
Staffe looks back at the young Pulford, getting the breaks that Johnson thinks he deserves. ‘If that’s your attitude, you’ll still be a DS when you pick up your pension. If you can’t pitch in as part of a team …’
‘You know damn well I can.’
‘It’s not what I’m seeing just lately.’
‘I thought this was going to be my chance, boss. Never mind.’ Johnson shoots Staffe a resigned look, gives a tired ‘what the hell’ raise of the eyebrows. ‘But it’d be nice if you cut me some slack sometime. Just let me tell the muppet what a tosser he is every now and again.’
Staffe laughs and slaps Johnson on the shoulder, watches his DS make a weary way down the corridor. Johnson turns and calls, ‘I’ll get Bowker’s co-ordinates for you, boss.’
‘Good man,’ calls Staffe, watching the dishevelled Johnson go. He and Becky have three young children and he is all done in. Staffe looks back at Pulford, leaning against the wall, young and fresh; tall and thin with his hair cut in trendy mini quiffs. His suit is sharply tailored, no doubt paid for by his mum. Staffe takes a deep breath and goes back towards Pulford.
Staffe will not chastise Pulford for racing off after Leanne Colquhoun. He is pleased that the young pup came back with something to show his sceptics, despite riding roughshod through procedure.
He returns to the interview room, bends down to look through the spyhole at Leanne Colquhoun. She sits calmly on the far side of the desk, the bare bones of an attractive woman – not yet twenty-five, but all gone to seed. She’s got her hair scraped into a severe, high-up ponytail; not enough eye make-up and too much lipstick. Her eyes are narrow and hard, her cheekbones high and sharp. The skin of her neck is tight and there are three lines on her forehead that don’t go away when she stops scowling.
Staffe doesn’t fancy her – not for this one, not as a murderer. But almost everyone else in the building does.
He can tell she hasn’t been crying, even though only twenty-four hours ago she purportedly returned from her afternoon shift down at Surrey Racing to find her lover lying on her bed, blood soaking the sheets from the accomplished butchery. Just thinking about it now makes Staffe feel sick.
Karl Colquhoun’s heart probably stopped beating from wave after wave of pain – not from the loss of blood from the fine cuts that were applied to the scrotum, but from the eyes. The killers knew what they were doing. They knew they would not be disturbed. There were no noticeable signs of entry, which doesn’t help Leanne’s cause.
A litre of supermarket-brand whisky had been forced upon Colquhoun and he may well have been passing in and out of consciousness before being tied to the bedposts. As well as semen, blood and excrement, the bed sheets showed residues of vomit. Everywhere, naturally, were the prints and DNA of Karl and Leanne Colquhoun. And nobody else.
Staffe ushers Pulford towards him, says, ‘Tell me again, what exactly she said about Karl.’
‘She loves him. Sorry, she loved him.’
‘Did she mean it?’
‘She said she didn’t believe it had happened.’
Staffe looks at Leanne again, dragging on a cigarette so her cheeks sink in even further – gaunt like the victim of a Balkan war – and staring with clear grey eyes. You would never guess what she had seen – or done – in her own home so recently. And while the owner of the betting shop swears blind she didn’t leave the office at all that afternoon, Staffe has discovered that to be a lie. Leanne Colquhoun had
fled the Limekiln scene without her handbag. That is the kind of hurry she was in. In the handbag, there was a receipt for Ibuprofen from the Londis halfway between the Limekiln and Surrey Racing. The receipt was timed at 15.46 and Janine’s best guess for the likeliest time of death is 15.00 to 17.00.
‘How come we’re not getting stuck into her, sir?’ says Pulford.
Staffe pulls away from the spyhole. ‘You should know why. She’s entitled to a solicitor.’
‘She was happy enough to talk in the car.’
‘The car you brought her back in without so much as a WPC or a counsellor. She’s a grieving widow. Traumatised.’
‘Traumatised, my arse.’
‘Your arse should be in a sling.’
Pulford leans back against the wall and looks up at the flickering fluorescent light. ‘Why did the bookie lie? You think he’s giving her one? She claims to have loved Karl Colquhoun. Loved him so much she couldn’t see her own kids? Yeah, right.’
Staffe taps the spyhole to the metal door. ‘Tell me what you see.’ He watches Pulford peer into the interview room, listens as the young graduate begins his summary verdict.
‘I see a woman who feels no guilt for stopping years of abuse, of herself and her kids, and if you ask me she’s done our job for us.’
‘So now it’s our job to castrate suspects is it?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘And where’s the evidence?’
‘She lied about being in the betting shop. She fled the scene …’
‘… the evidence that Karl Colquhoun interfered with his kids.’
‘You’ve spoken to the caseworker, Carly Kellerman.’
‘There’s no evidence,’ says Staffe. ‘The CPS didn’t have a case.’
‘They took her kids away. That’s a pretty good motive.’
‘She loved him more than her own children. She chose him. How could a woman do that to a man she loved?’
‘She’d hate herself, wouldn’t she? She’d want to make amends.’
Staffe sighs, tries to make sense of everything he knows about Leanne Colquhoun: wife, mother. ‘And even if he was messing with her kids, in this country we don’t chop their bollocks off.’