by Jane Adams
Bringing their drinks, she made her way back to their table.
‘Food’ll be about ten minutes,’ she told him, smiling, a personal smile this time, not her official one. She set their drinks down and reached for his hand. For several minutes they sat in silence, listening to the ebb and flow of conversation around them. Cigarette smoke drifted over, mingling with odd words, phrases, just as troublesome, just as ephemeral.
‘They were talking about Cassie,’ Anna told him.
‘Who?’ His voice was sharp.
‘The men at the bar. Don’t worry. I just said we were passing through, going to Norwich.’
‘I’m not worried,’ he retorted crossly. Then, ‘What were they saying?’
‘Wondering whether she was mixed up in it. If what the papers said was true.’
She didn’t need to elaborate.
‘Her mother wants hanging saying all that,’ Simon muttered angrily. ‘I mean, as if Cassie hasn’t been through enough already.’
‘I never met her mother. Fergus says she’s evil.’
‘Candidate for burning if ever I met one.’
Anna raised her eyebrows. He went on, defensively, ‘You’ve not met her. That woman is warped. Poor kid, whatever she said or did her mother would twist it to mean something else. I don’t wonder her father left them, just a shame he didn’t take Cassie along too. Never thought she’d do a thing like that though. I mean to sell out your own kid like that, just isn’t human somehow.’
Anna sipped her drink slowly, then spoke cautiously. ‘You don’t think she could have anything to do with all this . . . Cassie I mean?’ Simon was glaring at her. ‘Simon, I don’t mean she’d do anything willingly, not to hurt anyone, never mind a child, but, but maybe, bringing her back here to where her cousin disappeared, couldn’t it be all too much for her, make her do things and then forget them? Really forget them, I mean.’
He stared hard at her. ‘I can’t believe you’re saying this, Anna.’ He waited for her denial. It didn’t come. ‘You really think she masterminded the whole thing, do you, managed to be with us on the beach while her mystery accomplice snatched Sara? Managed to play the innocent all the time the world and his wife were searching for her, played the game while Janice Cassidy cried on her shoulder then made some crazy arrangement with this mystery accomplice to produce the child out of nowhere in front of the world’s press?’ He paused then added, ‘Or you think maybe she got that poor woman to do the kidnapping for her, then beat her to death and pretended to find the child?’
He saw the hurt in her eyes, saw tears before she looked swiftly away from him, and felt immediate remorse.
‘Hey, look, love, I’m sorry. I know you didn’t mean it like that.’
She made no answer. Looking closer he realized that she was crying, tears dripping slowly onto the tabletop, splashing into her drink.
‘Hey, Anna.’ He shifted round, dragging his chair to sit beside her, fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief that he knew wouldn’t be there. ‘Look,’ he said, trying to make amends, ‘you’ll make your drink salty. Save it for the food, we might need it then.’
‘Oh, Simon. I don’t mean anything bad about Cassie. I love her too, you know that.’
‘I know, and I’m sorry too. Both been on edge, haven’t we?’
The food arrived then, the landlord’s wife bustling around the table. Simon did his best to be polite, and shield Anna from too much attention. The fact was, he knew exactly how she felt. These last few days trying to function normally when their thoughts were so much elsewhere; this feeling of being both involved and excluded. Then too, Anna hadn’t been very well this week. Some sort of mild bug, probably, or just a reaction to the stress making her slightly sick. He looked more closely at her, a thought suddenly striking at him.
‘What are you drinking?’
She looked up, surprised and, oddly, guilty. ‘Orange juice. Why?’
‘Just orange juice . . . Anna, been a bit slow off the mark again, haven’t I?’
She nodded, slowly. ‘I don’t know for certain yet, but . . .’
‘Then it’s time we did know. Come on, eat up then we’ll get going.’
‘Going where?’
‘First, we find a chemist, got to be one locally big enough to sell one of those pregnancy test things. Then we go to Norwich, to police headquarters or whatever they call it. Find out what they’re doing to Cassie.’
She laughed, life suddenly feeling very good, her natural optimism coming to the fore once again. ‘I don’t suppose they’re doing anything to Cassie, but yes, we’ll do both of those things.’ She began to eat, suddenly relieved, then she said, shyly, ‘I’ve been so afraid, you know?’
‘What of? Telling me? No, I don’t want to know if it’s the postman’s . . .’
She laughed. ‘Fool.’ She shook her head. ‘No, not of telling you, at least, sort of that too but that’s just me being daft.’
‘I’ll say it is.’ He paused, looked at her, realizing suddenly that what she wanted to say was somehow, not easy.
‘It’s just that, all this happening, somehow, I keep feeling that the baby is all bound up with it too. I keep thinking that something bad’s going to happen.’ She looked at him, willing him to tell her that it was imagination, that it was quite common for pregnant women to have strange ideas.
‘Try turning it around.’ He spoke quietly. ‘See it as something positive.’
‘What do you mean?’
He shrugged, not sure how to put it into words. ‘I don’t know really. It’s just that so many bad things have happened, you’re almost bound to think only bad things can happen. But there’s no way this can be a bad thing. This baby. Our baby.’ He paused, smiled, repeated the words. ‘Our baby was like as not conceived here. It’s like a promise, a making right somehow, turning something good from all the dark things that have happened.’ He smiled at her, reached for her hand. ‘Hey! You’re crying again!’
‘Sorry.’
‘What for?’ He squeezed her hand warmly. ‘Now, eat. We’ve got a lot to do. We’ve got to find out if you’re telling me the truth or not.’
‘Fool,’ Anna told him once more, but she smiled, feeling better than she had in days.
* * *
‘Mr and Mrs Thomas are here, sir. They want to know about Mrs Maltham.’
Croft glanced up at the officer standing a little uncertainly in the doorway of Flint’s office.
‘Well,’ Flint commented, ‘since they’re here they can save us the trouble of taking the Malthams back to the van. Tell them DI Croft will be down shortly,’ he then turned his attention back to Mike. ‘The search revealed nothing?’
‘No, but then we’d little expectation that it would. Fergus Maltham didn’t object, neither did he take up his right to be there.’
‘Hardly likely to, was he?’ Flint said wryly. ‘Not when you had his wife here.’
‘Quite.’
‘So where does that leave us?’
‘Well, we’ve got the child back.’
‘Though God alone knows how. To say nothing of now having a murder on our hands. So what does this Lucas woman have to say? She willing to use hypnosis is she?’
Having Flint talk about Maria Lucas as this ‘Lucas woman’ seemed dreadfully inappropriate somehow, but Mike said nothing. ‘Yes, she’s agreed. Cassie Maltham’s willing to give it a try. The doctor’s persuaded her she may be hiding something from herself. Something she saw, maybe, that brought back memories of the childhood trauma and she buried it without being aware. Apparently it can happen that way, it can then go on to affect anything connected with that incident. Episodes of amnesia that seem unrelated but in fact have the same trigger.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s foreign ground to me, but if it gives us answers.’
‘Hmm.’ Flint sounded far from convinced. ‘Well, we must be seen to be doing all we can.’ He paused, his mind evidently shifting elsewhere. ‘What do you make of those phone calls?’ he asked, referring
to surprise information from the two women that had earlier reported on the itinerant woman they’d looked for.
‘I’d say they make a kind of sense. Both women saw the itinerant clearly, even spoke to her. If they believe that the picture of Mrs Maltham’s dream woman is a picture of the itinerant we’ve been looking for then I say we should accept it as far as it goes. One thing though, sir, I’d rather we didn’t leak that to the press until after Doctor Lucas’s session with Cassie tomorrow. I’d like to see if she can dig up any link first.’
‘Agreed. We’ll do what we can to keep the hat on until then.’ Flint dropped the ever-present pen down onto the redundant blotter, rubbed his face with his hands and screwed his fists in an almost childlike gesture into tired eyes. ‘Hospital and Path reports aren’t all in yet. The kiddie’s been found and the body isn’t going anywhere. I suggest you make an early day of it.’
Mike rose. ‘Yes, sir.’ Early? He was hardly doing short time, though compared to the fourteen- or fifteen-hour stretches, minimum, he’d been putting in, he supposed it qualified. He’d arranged to meet Bill and Tynan later anyway.
He took his leave of Flint, and went down to his office to collect the latest batch of telephone calls the case had generated. There were two more callers connecting the woman drawn from Cassie’s dream with an ‘old tramp’ as one called her, ‘a gypsy’ another said. Both sightings were within a ten-mile radius of the village. There were two ‘psychics’ proclaiming that they had messages from the woman in the picture; messages from beyond the grave. ‘More right than they know,’ Mike muttered to himself. Others, more innocent, from people who thought they’d seen something relevant and a couple telling of legends, smugglers’ tunnels leading from the cliffs inland to Tan’s hill and the local church.
Mike dropped the messages back on his desk, and made his way down to the station office. To his surprise, Maria Lucas was there, perched contentedly on one of the desks, drinking coffee and chatting to the duty officer.
‘Doctor Lucas, I thought you’d be long gone. The Malthams, have they left with their friends?’
‘They did.’ She still sounded somewhat irritated. Then she smiled, ‘I wanted a word before you left. Got a minute?’
He nodded. ‘Look I was just leaving . . .’
‘Then we’ll talk over dinner, if it’s not too early for you?’
Mike gave her a surprised look. Her direct, confident manner took him aback, made him feel like some inept schoolboy, a feeling not helped by seeing the duty officer smirking at him. He held the door for her, watching appreciatively as she slid off the desk and picked up her coat and bag.
‘Thank you. A gentleman as well.’
He winced at the sarcasm, then scowled at the loud guffaw of the duty sergeant and shut the door, firmly.
‘Are you always this forthright?’ he asked.
She raised her eyebrows in exaggerated surprise. ‘Detective Inspector Croft, I’m asking you to discuss business with me over dinner, not book a double room at the local hotel. Now let’s go to my car.’
He paused with his hand on the car door handle. ‘There’s something I have to clear up before we go anywhere,’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘Don’t worry about it. Cassie tells me you’ve been very understanding under the circumstances. Believe me, she wants this sorted as much as you do. If there’s a chance she’s guilty of something then the sooner we know the sooner she can be helped.’
‘And if I ask you questions about her?’
‘I’ll answer what I can. We’ve agreed that, Inspector Croft.’
‘Mike.’
‘Mike. It’s hard to explain what it’s like for someone like Cassie. She thought she was getting better, living a so-called normal life. Then something like this comes along and the rug is well and truly pulled from under her feet. Now, she could take it one of two ways. She could either opt out in some way, maybe even full retreat, she’s done it before. Or she could take the option she’s chosen this time. Face whatever comes and deal with it. It’s a very courageous stance to take. A year ago, I don’t think she’d have had any choices. She’d have just overloaded and sunk back again into some form of psychosis. She’s come a long way. I want to make sure she’s vindicated. You understand that?’
He nodded. ‘Essentially we want the same thing. To get to the bottom of what has affected Cassie so badly.’
‘Right,’ she acknowledged. ‘Now let’s go eat.’
* * *
Mike drove the winding route to Tynan’s cottage feeling more relaxed than he had done in months. As it happened, they had discussed almost everything but the ‘Cassie dilemma’ as Maria called it. They had agreed on almost nothing, argued vociferously and laughed too loudly. Mike felt that a whole lifetime of grief and mourning had begun to lift. Not that it was a lifetime, of course, he thought. Just that sometimes it felt that way.
He’d left her at her hotel and walked back to his car.
She’d called after him that she’d enjoyed the evening, that they must do it again.
‘Do you mean that?’ he’d asked her, ‘or are you just being polite.’
She’d grinned at him, then laughed aloud. ‘I’m never just polite.’
Tynan let him in to the familiar cottage, waved him through to the living room and followed shortly after with the tea. Bill was already sprawled comfortably, eyes half closed, in one of the ageing chintz-covered armchairs.
‘Evening, Mike.’
Croft lowered himself gingerly into what was fast becoming his chair, the one with the rockers that misbehaved at the slightest wrong move.
‘Pleasant meal?’ Bill opened his eyes, looked sideways at Mike, who snorted in amusement.
‘News certainly gets around. I take it you called at the office?’
Tynan handed him his tea.
‘How’s Sara?’ Mike asked them.
‘In a lot better shape than her mum and dad,’ Tynan told him. ‘They’re keeping her in overnight but she’s well enough to be starving and demanding chocolate. Shaky of course, but taking it all remarkably well.’
He sounded concerned about that, Mike thought. ‘It’s probably going to catch up with her later, once the excitement dies down.’
Bill nodded. ‘That’s what the doctors are saying. You know the Cassidys would like to go away for a few days. I’ve told them there would be no objections?’
Mike shook his head. ‘None. If the child’s told us all she can there’s no need for them to stay around needlessly. You’ve made sure they leave a contact address though?’
‘Sure, going to Mrs C’s mum’s. The address and number’s in the records.’
Mike sipped his tea, slowly. ‘She remembered anything more?’
Bill shook his head. ‘Nothing. The report I sent over earlier is about it really. The kid has no idea of what happened in the last five days. She remembers someone calling her name, went up the path and then began to climb the hill, then, nothing, apart from hearing a woman’s voice, but she’s no idea of what was said or even of how often or when she heard it. She said it was like being half-asleep.’
‘All of the time?’ Mike asked. ‘No, that doesn’t make sense. She didn’t starve for those five days, she must have eaten, must have drunk and no one goes five days without pissing. She remembers nothing like that?’
Tynan shook his head. ‘Nothing definite. The hospital’s been looking at the drugs angle. There are traces of something which could be narcotic. They don’t have the specialist knowledge here so they’ve sent samples off to the poisons unit, see what they turn up, but it could be a day or two longer.’
‘When are we likely to have the path reports on the body?’
‘Tomorrow, with luck. They’re giving it priority.’ Bill nodded thoughtfully. ‘Never seen such a bloody mess. It was as though someone set out to break every bone in the woman’s body.’
‘Not the face though,’ Mike said. It was something that had struck him at the time. The body h
ad been beaten so badly that in places it resembled butcher’s meat; yet the face was virtually untouched, superficial bruising at the temples, but nothing more. It was as though whoever killed her was determined that she be identifiable still. It made about as much sense as anything else did.
‘They hazarded yet how long she’s been dead?’ Tynan asked.
Mike shrugged. ‘No time at all. They’re not willing to commit until the autopsy’s complete, but she was still warm when we got there.’ He frowned angrily. ‘We could have been not a hundred yards away when it happened.’
‘So,’ Tynan enquired, ‘why didn’t you hear anything? Didn’t she cry out?’
‘Who knows, but the hill itself would muffle sound, and if she was hit on the head first . . . I noticed bruising on the right temple, almost the only mark on the face though.’
Mike paused, went off on a different tack. ‘You say the child’s been eating?’
Bill nodded. ‘Yes, ravenous. The doctors don’t think she’s been given much, a little milk maybe.’ He paused, added by way of explanation, ‘She threw up all over the consultant.’ He smiled, vaguely approving and went on, ‘If she was drugged I suppose it would have suppressed her appetite as well as making her hard to feed.’
‘Near impossible, I’d have thought, though I suppose there would be times when the sedation was lighter and she’d have been able to swallow.’
‘So,’ Mike said, ‘the drugs could have suppressed her appetite?’
‘But not emptied her bladder for her,’ Bill added.
Mike gave him a wry look. ‘I figure these things probably don’t wait for a convenient moment. If the girl was drugged, she’d simply have wet herself.’
‘In which case, someone changed her clothes only a little while before she was found.’
‘Oh?’ Mike enquired.