For a moment Robin didn’t trust herself to speak. ‘Luke sold a picture of me and Samir to the Daily Herald,’ she said finally. Well, the gloves were off now. ‘The one of us together in Stratford. He said you kept it.’
‘He told me.’
‘That he sold it?’
A small nod. ‘Until then, I’d always been glad you dropped it. I liked that picture.’
‘What, even with the boobs?’
‘Well …’
Sodding tears, there was no stopping them. ‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ she said, ‘I’ve got to move my arm, the bar’s cutting off my circulation.’ She let go of her hand and swiped at her eyes.
‘I know he split the two of you up, Robin. You and Samir.’
Robin stared again.
‘He told me.’
‘When?’
‘Today. I was … appalled. And it explained a lot of things for me. A lot. And I’m so sorry. I’m sorry now and I’m sorry I didn’t know so that I could stop it at the time. It almost broke my heart, seeing how much it hurt you.’
Robin remembered the afternoon, Samir’s warmth, his breath in her hair. The sense of loss when he’d moved so abruptly away.
Mad times.
Her mother glanced around and lowered her voice again. ‘What’s going on with the man Lennie hurt?’
‘I don’t know. I asked Samir earlier but he hadn’t heard, either.’
‘Do the police know it was her?’
‘Not yet. Unless they’re not telling me.’ Which was possible. A CCTV team would be watching the footage even as she spoke. They needed to tell someone, it would look better for Lennie later if they did, but Robin couldn’t bring herself to do it, to ruin Len’s life over a stupid, spur-of-the-moment mistake driven by righteous anger, an urge to lash out at someone who was filling the world with hatred, who would hate someone she loved.
‘Mum,’ she said, ‘it’s not just me in the papers.’
A photographer from the Post had got a shot that might well win him prizes. Taken seconds before Taggart raised his arm, it showed him with his megaphone to his lips, surrounded by a bunch of his core nutters, and on the left, brought to the front when they’d turned to face the students, as rage-filled as any of them, Billy Torrence in his balaclava and her brother.
‘He’s on the Post’s website now and I’m sure he’ll be on the front of the paper tomorrow. Also,’ she could hardly bear to say it, ‘the nationals are picking it up; it’s on the Guardian and Times’ sites, too. Maybe they’ll crop it for the actual papers, cut him off the edge, but …’
‘There’s no way of knowing? Or of stopping them using it?’
‘No. Mum, he needs to come forward – it’ll be a point in his favour if he does. Will you ring him – keep ringing until you get him? You’re the only person he’ll listen to.’
When Robin reached home, she had a text from Kev. Just seen the photo – OMG, your bro, outdone himself this time.
Certainly has, she replied.
The dots appeared almost at once, then, Anything I can do? Want me to come over?
She felt a new strain of melancholy wind itself into the already potent swirl. In another world, she thought. Lennie’s in a bit of a mess, she typed instead, needs attention.
Roger that. Here if you need me.
Thanks, Kev. After some consideration, she added an x. Then deleted it again.
‘You’re in with me tonight,’ she told Lennie after they’d said goodbye to her dad. He’d beckoned her into the kitchen while Len was upstairs. ‘She’s really upset, love,’ he’d whispered. ‘Really upset. I’ve never seen her like this, even after … She’s inconsolable.’
‘I think the past couple of days have killed what was left of her innocence,’ she’d said.
When the light went out, Robin moved across the bed and put her arm around her. She was nearly finished by a memory of doing the same when Len had used to come trotting in from her toddler bed at ungodly hours of the morning, pressing the raised anti-slip pads on her footed suit against Robin’s thighs, night-time nappy rustling.
‘Are you going to tell them?’ Len’s voice was low in the dark.
‘No.’
‘Then I will – we have to. They’ll find out from CCTV anyway, you said so.’
‘They might not.’
‘Nice wishful thinking, Mum.’ She sounded angry.
‘There could be blind spots. In our case, the old factory …’
‘That’s not a police station, is it? A working police station.’
Robin pressed her eyes shut, glad Len couldn’t see her. No lies to Lennie. But lies for Lennie, evidently that was okay, and about her. Nice moral example, Mum.
‘Just wait,’ she said. ‘Please, Len.’
It took half an hour but, eventually, physical and emotional exhaustion overtook Lennie’s panic and Robin heard her breathing slow.
Her own panic wasn’t so easily quashed; she saw two o’clock, then half past. What was she going to do? She couldn’t throw her daughter to the wolves, she couldn’t, but at the same time, a man was in hospital tonight, unconscious.
But maybe matters would be taken out of her hands. Uncle Luke. He was there. When the police caught up with him, he’d be desperate. If he gave Lennie up, could he avoid prison or reduce his sentence? Maybe, if they’d drawn a blank on the stone-thrower otherwise; if, by some miracle, they hadn’t got it on CCTV. Would Luke ruin Lennie to save himself? Yes, she knew he would: he’d sold her to the Herald for four hundred pounds – he’d threatened to dob her in for trying to help him.
And if anyone found out she’d known and kept quiet, it would be game over for her police career. Even Samir couldn’t get her out of that.
Stomach aching, she searched for mental comfort and found the memory of him in his office again. She inhaled through her nose and tried to imagine his scent. Just tonight, she rationalized; tomorrow she’d get things under control, jam it all safely back down.
Chapter Thirty-nine
She woke to find Lennie gone. She pelted down the landing but she wasn’t in her own room or the bathroom. Had she run away? Gone to turn herself in? Heart in her throat, Robin thundered downstairs where she found her sitting at the kitchen table, staring unblinking at a mug of cold tea. ‘Everything’s changed,’ she said. ‘Nothing will ever be the same.’
Robin slumped into the chair next to her, heart thudding. ‘We’ll deal with it, Len.’ She wanted to promise but she couldn’t. ‘Why don’t you stay at home today? I’ll see if Grandpa’s around, if you can …’
‘No,’ she said, vehement. ‘I’m going to school, I have to. What am I going to do all day, otherwise? Sit here wondering if I’ve killed someone?’
As she approached the station, Robin’s dread magnified. Her own force was actively seeking her brother and, even if they didn’t know it yet, her daughter, too.
Only Samir knew her relationship to the snarling bigot on the Guardian’s front page today but everyone in the station knew Lennie had stayed with Shaun Palmer and wanted to tell Robin what a great kid she was – Webster put his head round the door, Leena and Tim, Rhona. She thanked them all, feeling sick.
Samir knocked shortly before ten, and closed the door. ‘Any sign of him?’
She shook her head then glanced through the internal window: nobody seemed to be watching. ‘Samir, what you said last week about him poleaxing my career – compared to this, the drink-driving thing’s nothing.’
He frowned. ‘But the situation’s totally different: you haven’t intervened for him.’ It wasn’t quite a statement.
‘No, of course not.’
She felt an urge to tell him about Lennie but she couldn’t make him complicit. ‘By association, I meant, that’s all. Him being involved with those people, almost certainly going to prison …’ Last night, she’d remembered Kilmartin yelling about her being splashed across the news with the son of a convicted criminal, best friend to a woman who only escaped criminal charge
s herself by being murdered first. Now this.
‘The Herald will crucify me.’
‘You are not your brother, Robin.’ Samir glanced at the window, too. ‘Look, you’ll get hell from Kilmartin, we probably both will, but we’ll handle it, okay?’
Robin was torn between gratitude and grief at the knowledge that if what she wasn’t telling him came out, they wouldn’t. ‘Thanks.’
‘In the meantime, I came to give you a bit of good news. Shaun Palmer’s guv’nor’s just rung and it sounds like the surgery was a success. The blood’s flowing well to the leg this morning, so as long as that stays the case, he’ll make a full recovery.’
‘Thank God.’ Though he’d survived, the question had remained whether they’d been able to repair the artery well enough to save his leg. ‘When I had my hands on him, I really didn’t know if he could make it,’ she said. ‘Do they have a suspect?’
‘Yes, they’ve got it on CCTV, they’re about to release the name.’
‘How about the other one, the skinhead?’ Careful, careful.
‘He came round last night, apparently, but beyond that, I don’t know. He was out for hours and the longer you’re unconscious with a head injury … They’re doing tests.’
Intense relief – he was alive – followed immediately by a new terror: brain damage.
Samir was watching her carefully. There was no way the emotional rollercoaster hadn’t shown on her face, and he knew her. After a couple of seconds, he asked, ‘How are you getting on with Brother Phil? Any news this morning?’
‘Not yet. You’d think they’d just dematerialized, the three of them, when they left Salvador. But we’ll find them, I’ve got everyone on …’ Another rap on the door; she bodily jumped.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ Varan said, looking between them as if he were breaking something up, ‘but there’s a woman downstairs who says she needs to talk to you, guv.’
‘Me?’ asked Robin.
‘She won’t talk to anyone else. She says it’s urgent.’
The woman sat at the end of the row of plastic chairs, back straight, head up, a pair of polished black court shoes with a sensible inch-and-a-half heel pressed together on the tiled floor. Her navy skirt and pale blue blouse were ironed, a trench coat draped neatly across her lap. A lawyer, Robin wondered, or a paralegal? Was she about to be served a subpoena?
At the sound of the door, the woman’s head whipped round. She was in her late fifties, her hair a slightly yellow blonde, probably close to what it had once been naturally. She stood, putting her feet together again quickly, hanging the trench coat over her arm like a butler’s towel. No sign of any paperwork, though.
Robin extended a hand. ‘DCI Lyons. How can I help?’
‘Can we talk privately?’ She darted her eyes at the desk staff and the four or five other people waiting.
‘May I ask what it’s about?’
‘I’d really prefer not to talk here.’ Her pale eyes were full of entreaty.
Robin took her to the room where she and Malia had spoken to Jonathan Quinton ten days earlier, and she sat in the same spot, looking even jumpier than he had. Robin waited while she appeared to gather herself. After about half a minute, she took a deep breath and met her eye. ‘My name’s Ann Birch,’ she said, ‘and you’re looking for my son.’
‘Your son?’
‘For the murder of Lara Meikle.’
Robin looked at her. Yes, she was agitated, but nothing suggested she wasn’t in full possession of her faculties. ‘What’s your son’s name, Ann, and why do you think that?’
She looked sick. ‘Jeremy Birch. I went round to his flat last week and I smelled bleach. Strong bleach. I found his kitchen knife soaking in a bucket behind the U-bend of the sink.’ Her body seemed to deflate, as if the information had been taking up space inside her and she could no longer hold her shape. She gave a single hard sob and her eyes filled with tears.
‘How did your son know Lara?’ Robin asked carefully. ‘Or did he know her?’
She frowned as if Robin were being obtuse. ‘Of course. Why would he … if …?’ She wiped her cheeks with her hands, one then the other. ‘They met at the end of last year, October or November, at a conference in London. Insurance – he’s a broker, she was there with her boss. Jeremy was smitten – I knew he’d met someone as soon as he got back. I teased him till he told me.’
Robin couldn’t imagine this buttoned-up woman with her trench coat and sensible shoes teasing anyone but it occurred to her that the clothes were protective, a suit of armour she’d put on to come here. To do this.
‘He’s in Birmingham?’
‘Yes. His flat’s in Aston.’
‘Did they see each other again, after the conference? Here?’
‘A lot – two or three times a week for months. Until March. Then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, she broke it off with him.’
‘Did your son know she had a boyfriend? Well, a partner, really.’
‘Oh, he knew,’ she said bitterly. ‘She told him from the start. She told him she was in a relationship that was going nowhere, she was just waiting for the right time to end it without causing the other man more pain than she had to. She said they’d be together properly, out in the open, as soon as she did it, but there was always a reason why she couldn’t, one thing after another: he’s feeling down, his dad’s in hospital, it was her work, her nursing applications.’
‘November till March – four months? Five.’
‘She strung him along. She might have cared about not hurting David Pearse but she didn’t give a toss how much she hurt my son.’
‘He had feelings for her?’
‘He loved her. That’s why he put up with it, being the second string. My son’s thirty-four, he wanted to settle down, start a family. Not all men want to play the field – Jeremy’s always been a homebody. A sweet man. He wanted a house, a wife, children – Sunday lunches, old-fashioned holidays at the seaside, Christmas with the in-laws. A family. And he thought Lara was the one.’ More tears, slipping silently down her cheeks like Lennie’s in the car when she’d heard about Austin.
‘That’s why he couldn’t accept her ending it,’ Ann Birch said. ‘He thought she’d felt the same, that she was a kind person, simply too gentle to hurt the other man.’
‘What do you mean, he “couldn’t accept” it?’
She swiped at her face. ‘I told him to let it go, move on, but he wouldn’t. “If something’s worth having,” he said, “you have to fight for it.”’
Despite knowing already how the story ended, Robin felt a chill run down her arms. ‘And did he? Fight?’
‘He tried to persuade her, yes. He phoned her and texted, told her he loved her. That feelings like this came along once in a lifetime – that, for him, she was it.’
‘He told you all this?’
‘He confided in me, yes. He was in pain, I’m his mother.’
‘How did Lara take it, what he was telling her?’
‘She answered his calls for a while – good of her – but then, in April, she cut him off. When he rang her number, it was dead. At first he thought something was wrong, that she’d had an accident, so he called her at the office.’ The woman drew herself up. ‘She told him that if he ever did that again, she’d call the police.’
‘Ann,’ Robin trod carefully, ‘how would you describe your son’s mental state at this point?’
She hesitated, searching for the right word. ‘Fragile,’ she said. ‘Vulnerable.’
‘Do you think Lara might have thought he was harassing her?’
‘I’m sure she would.’
Again the bitterness, the loathing for this woman who had brought her son to this. Even though she was dead, Robin thought; even though he’d killed her.
‘And then,’ Ann Birch said, ‘three weeks ago, he found out she’d moved in with him. Pearce.’
‘How did he find out?’
‘He followed her. He knew where she worked and he
used to follow her.’
Which could explain, Robin thought, how he’d known where Lara was the night she died – she’d gone straight out from work, hadn’t she? He could have followed her from there and kept tabs on her all evening, while she was having sausages and mash with Cat Rainsford, the drink afterwards. He could have seen her refuse a taxi and known where she’d be heading when she started walking. How long it would take her to get there.
‘Did Lara know he’d been following her?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
Because if she had, she hadn’t told anyone, even Cat. But if she’d wanted to make a go of things with David Pearce, as it seemed she had, then that could make sense. It would be uncomfortable forever, having someone who knew you’d cheated on your partner and, if they breathed a word, or accidentally slipped up, it could blow your whole relationship sky-high.
‘Ann,’ she said, ‘if you’re right – and I agree, it sounds likely – why are you only coming forward now? You said you went round to his flat last week – which day?’
‘Thursday.’
‘It’s Wednesday – that’s six days ago.’
She looked Robin in the eye. ‘Do you have children?’
‘One.’
‘Then you know why.’ Her look was a challenge. ‘He’s the person I love most in the world.’ She put her face in her hands and wept, desolate.
You know why.
She waited until Ann Birch had regained a degree of control before asking her again what had finally made her come forward.
‘I saw it on the news,’ the woman said, ‘your Chief Constable talking about that Indian man who was killed.’
‘Assistant Chief Constable. Kilmartin.’
‘He asked people to come forward so the other man – the dead man—’
‘Dhanesh Gupta.’
‘To clear his name. For his father’s sake.’
One-nil to the patriarchy, Robin thought. Days’ worth of appeals on social media and the papers and her own appearances on Midlands Today and in the end, it was Kilmartin and his shiny brass buttons that sealed the deal.
‘His son’s dead, killed by someone wanting revenge for the death of the woman that my son killed. When I heard that, I knew. I knew I had to say something.’
Risk of Harm Page 33