Kind of Cruel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Choose another metaphor,’ Sam advised.

  ‘Is that what happened?’

  ‘Amber says yes. She says Sharon loved everything about the Four Fountains, loved the comedians on the bill that night . . .’

  ‘I hate comedians,’ said Gibbs. ‘They’re not funny.’

  ‘. . . remembered that no noise from the pub had ever disturbed her or her daughters, even on special licence nights when it was open till 3 a.m., sometimes. Terry Bond told her why she’d never been bothered by noise. When he’d taken over the Four Fountains, he’d installed new double-glazed acoustic glass windows, soundproofed his walls, he didn’t allow any of his punters to go out into the beer garden after 9 p.m., he’d put up signs all over the beer garden saying that anyone who disturbed the peace would get turfed out and barred . . .’

  ‘He wanted Sharon Lendrim on his side.’

  ‘According to Amber Hewerdine, he got her,’ said Sam. ‘She told him to put in another application. This time she’d support him and even speak in his favour at the licensing hearing, as a convert. Bond was delighted, understandably. He gave Sharon a free ticket to the pub’s next comedy night, told her he’d even treat her to a babysitter for the girls, promised to erect a high fence and plant a line of conifers at the bottom of his beer garden, give her house a bit of extra protection.’ Sam realised he’d barely touched his drink. That’d explain the thirst, then. He downed it in two, aware that downing it in one sounded better, even if you were only saying it to yourself. ‘The next comedy night at the Four Fountains was 22 November 2008,’ he said. ‘The night Sharon died. She had a great time, according to Bond. And his teenage daughter, who babysat for Dinah and Nonie. Sharon stayed at the pub until eleven, then went home to bed. Dinah was still up, chatting away to Bond’s daughter. She went to bed when Sharon did, at eleven thirty. Before that, she’d heard the sitter say to Sharon, “You’re back early.” Sharon jokingly replied, “This isn’t early. I’d have liked to stay for the rest, but I’m way too old to stay up all night.” That’s how Dinah knew the pub would still be open, when she and Nonie were running and needed somewhere to go – not because she’s a psychopathic freak-child who hangs around in bars in the early hours.’

  ‘So the girls not wanting to wake the neighbours . . .’ Gibbs began.

  ‘Might have had something to do with hearing countless members of the residents’ association bitching about inconsiderate people who don’t care if they disrupt hard-working taxpayers’ sleep,’ Sam finished his sentence for him.

  ‘So Bond had no motive to torch Sharon’s house,’ said Gibbs.

  ‘Not if what he, his daughter, Dinah Lendrim, Nonie Lendrim and Amber Hewerdine say is true, no,’ Sam agreed. ‘Trouble is, no one else knew about Sharon’s change of heart or her deal with Bond.’

  ‘Five people’s not enough?’

  ‘Normally it would be, if twelve people weren’t saying the opposite: that Terry Bond hated Sharon Lendrim, that she’d never have changed her tune about the extension to the pub’s opening hours, that it must have been a revenge killing contracted by Bond. By the time Sharon was murdered, Bond had put in a fresh application to the council’s licensing department and the residents’ association were swinging into action again to fight it. Amber Hewerdine told Ursula Shearer that Sharon was scared to come clean and tell her Nimby followers she’d switched sides. She’d been putting it off . . . and then she was killed.’

  ‘And it looked as if Bond wanted her out of the way so he’d stand a chance of winning second time round,’ said Gibbs. ‘None of this answers how come Amber Hewerdine’s got Sharon Lendrim’s kids.’

  ‘Sharon made a will naming Amber as guardian in the event of her death. She was anxious that her girls shouldn’t go to Marianne, their grandmother and only living blood relation. Now Amber and Luke are trying to adopt them. Marianne’s dead against it, Ursula Shearer says. Social Services have interviewed her about both of them, Marianne and Amber. They wanted her take on the possible adoption and Marianne’s objections to it, since she knows everyone involved.’

  ‘And?’ Gibbs asked.

  ‘Ursula likes Amber and trusts her,’ said Sam. ‘Thinks she’s brilliant for the girls, her husband Luke too. Though she did say she can be a handful and likes to tell people how to do their jobs. Nothing Ursula can say will convince Amber that Sharon wasn’t murdered by one of the residents’ association members.’

  Gibbs spluttered as his beer went down the wrong way. ‘The puritans?’

  ‘It’s rubbish, Ursula says. The Nimbys have all been alibied. Amber knows it, but she’s sticking with her theory. Every so often she rings Ursula and tries again to persuade her: someone killed Sharon to blacken Terry Bond’s reputation. Maybe no one could prove Bond was behind it, but suspicion’s a powerful force. It might have been enough to ensure the licensing committee turned down any request Bond made for an extension in the future. If that was Sharon’s killer’s aim, it worked in a way. When Bond heard Sharon had been murdered, he was devastated and withdrew his application immediately. He agreed with Amber’s theory – the only person who did – and blamed himself: decided it was his application to the council that had caused all the trouble. You can imagine how he’d have tortured himself.’

  Sam had been able to tell, listening to her story, that Ursula Shearer felt sorry for Bond. It had prompted him to ask her if Bond was still landlord of the Four Fountains. He told Gibbs the answer. ‘The pub never hosted another comedy event after the night Sharon died. In 2009, Bond and his daughter moved away. They live in Cornwall now.’

  ‘We shouldn’t be here,’ said Gibbs. ‘We should be checking Ursula Shearer’s case notes on Sharon Lendrim against ours on Kat Allen, see if they’ve got any more in common than we know about.’

  ‘Ursula’s copying everything and sending it over,’ said Sam. ‘My prediction is that, aside from Amber Hewerdine, there’ll be no overlap.’

  ‘You’re already wrong,’ Gibbs told him. ‘Both are unsolvable. We can’t find anyone who disliked Katharine Allen, never mind wanted her dead. Two years after the event, no one’s banged up for Sharon Lendrim’s murder, DS Shearer’s satisfied it wasn’t Terry Bond or any of the puritans. Has she got unprovable theories, suspects no shit’ll stick to? Anyone she’s got a dodgy feeling about?’

  He was right. Sam hadn’t thought of it, and he should have. Simon would have.

  ‘She’s got no one in the frame at all, has she?’ said Gibbs. ‘Neither have we, for Katharine Allen.’

  Sam nodded. It didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  Yes, it does. There’s never nothing. Never. Except now, when there’s nothing twice.

  The only time you found nothing in a victim’s life to explain their murder was when it was a stranger sex attack. Neither Sharon Lendrim nor Kat Allen had been interfered with sexually.

  ‘Two murders with no loose ends trailing from what we can see,’ Gibbs went on. ‘In both cases, there’s no solution that makes sense, but there’s nothing that doesn’t make sense either. A murderer who wanted to kill two people without anyone being able to guess why, in either case. Someone whose brain takes nothing and turns it into something, maybe. To everyone else, the reason for killing would appear irrational or nonexistent.’

  Sam had to admit it was a valid point. Some motives made sense across the board, and were out there in the world for all to see, like a very public row between a landlord and a residents’ association; others were written on the world in invisible ink, existing only in the embargoed stories their owners repeated endlessly to themselves but never to anyone else. Unless Sam had misunderstood, Gibbs had in mind a killer who would only kill if he were sure there was no chance of the reason being suspected by anybody.

  He or she. Someone private, tidy, careful.

  Sam knew what Gibbs was going to say before he said it.

  ‘Amber Hewerdine killed them both. Don’t ask me to prove it – I haven’t got time. I’m getting sacked tomor
row, remember?’

  ‘I wish I could be more helpful,’ Edward Ormston said to Simon, adjusting his glasses and the angle of the photograph in his hand. The two of them sat side by side on tall stools pulled up to the breakfast bar in Ormston’s kitchen in Combingham, drinking tea. Simon was trying not to be distracted by the sight of Ormston’s Wellington-boot-clad wife playing with two red setter dogs in the back garden. Dogs needed to be walked regularly, Simon knew that, but he’d never seen anyone cavort with them in the way this woman was, laughing and leaping around. When he left, would Ormston bang on the window and yell, ‘Pack it in, will you? You look like a fucking idiot!’ Unlikely; he seemed a kind man with a gentle voice and no hard edges, which made him an alien being as far as Simon was concerned.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ said Ormston. ‘I couldn’t tell you if she was there or not. I don’t remember anyone’s face from the course. If you think you’re not going to see people again, you don’t bother to file away their images for future reference, do you? I don’t, anyway. They were nineteen strangers, twenty if you count the teacher. I beg your pardon, the facilitator.’ Ormston smiled. ‘Everyone seems to be a facilitator of something or other nowadays, don’t they? There were no facilitators when I was your age.’

  ‘Her name’s Amber Hewerdine,’ said Simon. ‘She works for the city council, in the Licensing department. She’s got a husband called Luke who’s a stonemason, and two kids.’ Thinking of the message Sam had left on his voicemail, Simon added, ‘They’re not her kids – she’s their legal guardian, since their mum died. Amber and Luke want to adopt them, but they haven’t yet.’

  ‘How awful – the death of their mother, I mean. Sorry, I don’t quite understand . . .’ Ormston was too polite to ask outright why Simon was telling him a stranger’s life story.

  ‘I was wondering if any of those details might jog your memory. Her family situation’s unusual . . . Obviously none of it’s ringing any bells.’ Simon tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice. Ormston was the last person on his list to try; all the other people on Amber Hewerdine’s DriveTech course he’d either interviewed in person or over the phone, or abandoned as being uncontactable, for the time being at least. Nobody he’d spoken to remembered Amber’s face, though all had stressed this didn’t mean she wasn’t there. Too much time had passed; they had all seen and forgotten many faces since 2 November. Simon had left Ormston till last, figuring he was the ‘Ed’ Amber had mentioned, the one who had survived the car smash that had killed his daughter. Louise or Lucy. There was a framed photograph on the kitchen wall of a blonde-haired toddler. Was that her?

  ‘We didn’t exchange names or personal details,’ Ormston said. ‘There was very little chat of any kind, even during the breaks. People kept their heads down, communicated with the outside world via their mobile phones. None of us really wanted to be there. We were all mildly embarrassed and wanted to get it over with and get out of there as quickly as we could.’

  ‘Amber remembered you. She called you “Ed”.’

  ‘Ah. I think I can explain that. Perhaps I can help you a little after all.’ He smiled. ‘You see, the facilitator asked me my name, in front of the group. I’m Ed to anybody that knows me – never Edward – so that was what I said. Everyone in the room heard me say it. I’d have preferred it if he hadn’t drawn attention to me by asking for my name and no one else’s, but I didn’t hold it against him. I understood why he’d done it. It was his rather clumsy way of trying to relate to me as a human being, once his relating to me as a course participant had landed him in what he felt was an awkward situation. And to be fair, I’d already drawn attention to myself.’

  ‘You’d told the group about your daughter dying,’ Simon said.

  Ormston’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You know about that?’

  ‘Amber mentioned it.’

  ‘Bless her,’ said Ormston.

  Simon wondered if he was religious. Then he wondered why he’d never heard his own devoutly Catholic parents bless anybody. He had always assumed they excelled at being godly, though they were incompetent in every other area of life; perhaps he’d been wrong and they were rubbish even at being religious. That, Simon realised, would leave them with no redeeming features. It was a depressing thought.

  ‘Is that your daughter?’ He gestured towards the framed picture on the wall.

  ‘Yes. Louise. Isn’t she beautiful?’

  ‘It must be unbearable to lose a child.’

  ‘Nothing is unbearable,’ said Ormston, staring at the photograph. ‘That I can promise you. We bear everything. What choice do we have?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with my case, but . . . why did you tell them? On the course, about Louise’s death. You could have kept quiet. No one would have known.’

  Ormston nodded. ‘I considered it. I thought that very thing to myself: there’s no need to tell them. Then I thought, why shouldn’t I tell them? It was the true answer to a question I’d been asked. I wouldn’t have volunteered it, had we not been asked specifically if any of us had personal experience of a traffic accident, but I didn’t see why I should go to the trouble of concealing it, either.’

  Simon understood completely; it was how he’d felt when Charlie had told him about meeting Amber Hewerdine outside Ginny Saxon’s clinic and begged him to waste time making up unnecessary lies. ‘Telling the truth might not be the best thing for the people having to hear it,’ he said, ‘but it’s usually the best thing for the teller.’

  ‘Couldn’t agree more,’ said Ormston. ‘And do you want to know something that hardly anyone knows?’

  Simon imagined what he would say next, in an ideal world: Do you want to know who murdered Kat Allen? What the words ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’ mean?

  ‘When you do what’s best for you, you always end up astonished to discover that it’s best for everyone else too. Not many people realise that; I didn’t for a long time. We all imagine that if we’re upfront about what we want and need, we’ll meet with resistance and end up having to fight our corner, maybe a fight we can’t win. In fact, it’s forcing ourselves to do what we imagine will be best for others that leads to trouble and conflict.’

  Simon wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t feel able to disagree, when Ormston had so recently agreed with him. All he knew was that his mind felt lighter since he’d decided that being straightforward and direct was best for him – better, even, than having a job, or else he wouldn’t have risked it.

  ‘Hold on a second,’ said Ormston, narrowing his eyes to a squint. ‘Amber. Do you know, I think there was an Amber. Yes.’ He nodded. ‘The facilitator asked how many of us were amber gamblers at traffic lights. I’m fairly sure one woman said something about her name being Amber. I think she was the one who gave the big speech. She had a cut-glass voice, I seem to remember, like a royal. And . . . an unusual turn of phrase. There was a general exchange of raised eyebrows when she started to speak.’

  Simon frowned. Amber Hewerdine’s accent was pure Culver Valley. ‘What speech?’ he asked.

  ‘About road deaths being unavoidable in the modern world, and if we really wanted people not to die on our roads we should scrap cars altogether. I’m paraphrasing – she put it more colourfully and eccentrically than that. Since no one wanted to abolish cars, she said, we should all stop complaining.’ Ormston chuckled. ‘Everyone seemed terribly worried I’d be upset, but I wasn’t. There was something satisfyingly death-defying about her point of view. She was against speed cameras and driver awareness courses, against speed bumps, against twenty-mile-an-hour zones. No one should base their driver behaviour on fear and worst-case-scenario thinking, she said. Whenever you get into a car, you might die, so you might as well accept it and drive happily, as fast as you like, free of fear and guilt. I think that was her philosophy.’

  Ormston glanced out of the window. In the garden, his wife had calmed down, even if the two dogs hadn’t; she was throwing sticks for them to fetch and return to her. ‘I can
’t say I agreed with her that more deaths was a price worth paying for more freedom, but I admired her nerve,’ he said.

  ‘Could this woman have absented herself from the course at any point during the day?’ Simon asked.

  Ormston shook his head. ‘We were all there for the duration. Even the lunch break, we all stayed in the room, apart from people nipping to the loo.’

  ‘Is this her – Amber, the woman who made the speech?’ Simon passed Ormston another photograph. This one came from the Rawndesley Evening News. Amber stood between two city councillors, smiling. The caption read, ‘Council Officials Welcome Introduction of Cumulative Impact Zone in East Rawndesley’.

  ‘You remember so much of what she said. Are you sure you don’t remember her face?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Ormston. ‘I’m sorry, but you wouldn’t want me to pretend, would you? I don’t recognise that face at all.’

  So. The answer is ‘the key’, and the answer is the key. I’m not repeating myself. I’m saying that the answer ‘the key’ is the key. We can view each new answer as a key to a locked door barring our way. Sometimes we open one locked door and find ourselves standing in front of another, which means that we need to hunt for the next key. Often we find ourselves coming up against door after door after door. When that happens, as I suspect it will here, it’s both a bad sign and a good sign: our journey is likely to be considerably more frustrating, but, if we can get past the obstacles that block our path, the prize could be substantial. It stands to reason: the more precious the object, the greater the protection.

  Why did Amber ransack Little Orchard from top to bottom? Because she was looking for the key to the locked room, as she’s just told us. She thinks she also told us why she was looking for the key, what happened when she found it, and what that proves. In case that one sketchy story didn’t offer enough proof of her conclusion to satisfy us, and knowing, on one level, that her determination to utter as few words as possible is as unhelpful to her as it is to us, she backed it up with several subsidiary stories, all equally sketchy and pared down to essentials – all, as she sees it, providing further proof.