‘Fire chief reckons it was intended to look deliberate,’ Gibbs said. ‘Fire-starter pushed a can of inflammable liquid accelerant through the letterbox.’
‘He might just have been getting rid of it,’ said Sellers.
‘Through the letterbox? Wouldn’t it be more likely he’d drop it outside the—’
‘Progress, I asked for, not squabbling. Anything else?’
‘Amber Hewerdine’s keen to speak to Simon as soon as possible,’ said Sam.
‘I hope you’ve armed her with a stick, Sergeant.’
‘Sir?’
‘So that she can fight off the competition. Do you know what she wants to talk to Waterhouse about?’
‘She wouldn’t say much to me, but—’
‘I can see her point. Why bother? If you had something important to say, would you waste time saying it to you, Sergeant?’
Here we go. ‘Depends who else there was to say it to, sir.’
‘Who else?’ Proust intoned rhetorically, tilting his head back. ‘Who else indeed. I think you’ve hit upon the problem there, Sergeant. There’s no one else, no one of any value. This team is a decaying organism. Sellers, when did you last make a significant contribution to anything, apart from the canteen’s cash-register? DC Gibbs, you’ve chosen the dark side, for reasons too chilling for a sensitive chap like myself to want to speculate about. You’ve joined the ranks of the dead souls. Waterhouse, King of the Dead Souls – the less said about you the better, especially since I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes saying it in a dozen different ways, none of which you heard. And Sergeant Kombothekra, the worst of a bad bunch.’
Sam tried not to show his surprise. The worst. It wasn’t a label he’d ever associated with himself, any more than ‘the best’ was.
‘Let’s revisit some of your best lines, shall we, Sergeant? What did you say or do when Waterhouse took it upon himself to have a suspect brought in for interview without your knowledge or mine? What did you say when you found out he’d shared confidential case information with his wife? Nothing. Not a word. You’re his sergeant. What makes you think you can sit back and leave the disciplining of him to me? Never mind taking the lead, you don’t even speak up in a supportive capacity!’
Sellers was sweating. Sam could feel the heat coming off him.
‘Don’t expect shows of support from any of us,’ Simon said quietly. ‘You won’t get any. Nobody supports you.’
Proust nodded as if he both wanted and had anticipated the response. ‘You’ve all known me long enough to know my strengths and weaknesses,’ he said. ‘You prefer, uncharitably, to dwell on the weaknesses. Of course you do. I’m your DI. Everybody needs a punchbag, and I’m yours. I accept it. Most of the time, I don’t complain. Which is why I don’t expect to hear a word of complaint from any of you now . . .’ – the Snowman shook his index finger at them – ‘. . . because I’m about to demonstrate how fair and flexible I am, and it’s going to clash with your blinkered image of me.’
Sam found it oddly comforting that they’d reached this stage already: the make-sure-not-to-catch-anyone’s-eye stage, during which the inspector sang his own praises. It always followed the how-do-I-hate-you-let-me-count-the-ways stage, and signalled that Proust was at least halfway through his latest horror show.
‘This morning, I was going to initiate disciplinary proceedings against DC Gibbs and DC Waterhouse – proceedings that would have resulted in their immediate suspension and their not quite so immediate but equally certain dismissal. Then I heard about the events of last night, and changed my mind. Waterhouse told us on Tuesday that Amber Hewerdine was of interest to us in connection with Katharine Allen’s murder. Turns out he was right. We know more now than we knew then. I hope I don’t have to spell out for you why we now have three crimes that we need to be thinking about instead of one. Sharon Lendrim’s death and last night’s attack on the Hewerdine house were both arson, Hewerdine and Lendrim were friends, Lendrim’s daughters were in both fire-targeted houses, though removed before the attack from one and not from the other, which is interesting. Amber Hewerdine is linked to Katharine Allen’s murder scene by her certainty that she’s seen the words “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” on a sheet of paper that sounds as if it came from the notepad in Allen’s flat. What do we think about a link or lack of one between Lendrim’s death and Katharine Allen’s?’
‘Amber Hewerdine’s the link,’ said Simon. ‘Whoever killed Lendrim killed Allen. We need to find out who knew we’d interviewed Hewerdine in connection with Allen’s murder. Someone who knew decided to warn Hewerdine off helping us, and the warning doubled as a confession. Last night’s arson had a clear message for Hewerdine: “I killed Sharon, I killed Katharine Allen, and I’ll kill you if you don’t keep your mouth shut.”’
‘Possible.’ Proust nodded. ‘There’s another possibility: our arsonist didn’t know anything about Hewerdine talking to us, and has never heard of Katharine Allen. The timing of the attack on Hewerdine’s house is purely coincidental.’
‘I don’t believe that,’ said Simon.
‘I don’t either,’ said the Snowman. ‘Which leaves us with the question of why Katharine Allen was beaten to death with a window pole and not . . .’ He stopped, rubbed his index finger along his upper lip. It looked like a moving pink moustache. ‘Setting fire to a flat would be a different proposition from setting fire to a house. No darkness means no invisibility. Our man might have decided he wouldn’t feel comfortable standing in a well-lit corridor dripping liquid accelerant through the letterbox.’
‘Or he knew he’d be able to talk his way into Kat Allen’s flat, whereas he knew Sharon Lendrim and Amber Hewerdine wouldn’t let him in,’ said Simon.
‘There’s no “he”,’ Gibbs said. ‘Hewerdine killed Lendrim and Kat Allen, and set fire to her own house. Do we know that anything went through the letterbox? Could it have been done from inside? Even if it couldn’t, Hewerdine could have stood outside, poured the stuff into the house, then gone back in, closed the door and set fire to it.’
‘Well, Sergeant Kombothekra? Are you going to answer Gibbs’ question?’
‘All we’ve been told definitely at this stage is arson. I’ll need to ask more specifically if the fire could have been started from inside the house.’
‘You will, won’t you?’ Proust agreed. ‘You’ll also need to rake through everything Ursula Shearer’s got on the Lendrim murder. Identify any gaps. Expect to find plenty. Someone who wasn’t a fireman was wandering around in a fireman’s uniform – where did it come from?’
‘I’m meeting DS Shearer this morning, sir. I’ll ask her to bring me up to speed.’
‘Good. You and she are professional soulmates. I’m sure you’ll get on very well. Waterhouse, I want you—’
‘It could have been a fireman,’ Simon interrupted. ‘We know it wasn’t one from the Culver Valley; that’s all we know. What about neighbouring counties?’
‘Sellers, contact the fire services in Tokyo, Tahiti and Echo Island, which I hear is privately owned by the Disney family. Waterhouse, I want you focusing on Amber Hewerdine and nothing else. If Gibbs is right, you might see your way to—’
‘He isn’t,’ said Simon.
‘—persuading her to confess. That would make all our lives easier.’
‘We can do that by ruling out Amber Hewerdine as a suspect.’
‘Give me one good reason,’ the Snowman snapped.
‘Because she’s obviously innocent,’ said Simon.
All right, confession time. Amber’s right: I lied. There was no row at Little Orchard between the two grandmothers about whether or not baby Barney ought to be given formula milk against his mother’s wishes. I made it up, start to finish. I’ve no idea why I picked that subject for Hilary and Pam’s imaginary argument; I might just as easily have said they bickered about Tony Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. I have no idea whether Jo breast-fed or bottle-fed her children, nor what Sabina’s views on the
subject are, nor Pam’s, nor Hilary’s. The incident was pure invention on my part, so you can scratch it from the record and forget it entirely.
Or can you? I hope you’re both experiencing a certain amount of confusion right now as you struggle to delete this fictional incident from your understanding of what happened at Little Orchard. Something inside you is saying, ‘Hang on, I’m not sure I can forget it all that easily. I’ve been told it happened, after all.’ Even Amber, who was there and knows for certain that it didn’t happen – who protested when I claimed it did – is fighting against a sense that it can’t have come from nowhere; this phantom, this non-event, must have some significance, if only in my mind.
Picture this scene, from every TV drama you’ve ever watched: the prosecuting barrister tells the jury, ‘The defendant was heard yelling, “I’m the most dangerous murderer in town and proud of it. Check out my blood-soaked T-shirt!”’ The defence barrister leaps to her feet and says, ‘Objection, Your Honour, that’s hearsay.’ ‘Sustained,’ says the judge. ‘The jury will disregard that last statement.’ Does the jury disregard the statement? Of course not. The opposite happens: the hearsay lodges in the jurors’ minds more powerfully than any other piece of evidence, because it’s been officially banned. By disallowing it, the judge has tapped into an archetype that we are all aware of deep in our bones. What gets banned? Dangerous truths get banned. Banned information must therefore be true information.
My made-up row between Pam and Hilary isn’t anything as respectable as hearsay. It’s a downright lie. As its inventor, I can promise you that it has no relevance whatsoever. The fact that you’re both finding it hard to erase proves that once you turn something into any kind of story – and I laid it on pretty thick with the detail – you make it real, you turn it into an object, albeit a conceptual object. If it’s a lie, then it’s both real and false, which is confusing. This is how lies and liars flourish in the world. We believe them because we would prefer not to be confused.
I wouldn’t normally lie about the life experiences of one of my clients, particularly in the presence of the police. It was unprofessional of me to do so, but Amber is determined to say as little as possible, so my aim was partly to compel her to participate in what we’re trying to achieve here, and partly to try and win her over with the boldness of my impropriety. Simon, you might not know why Amber respects you more than any of your colleagues, but I do, because she’s told me: she admires your willingness to be unprofessional in a good cause. In Amber’s mind, professional behaviour is a crutch for mediocre dullards to lean on. Truly intelligent people realise that hiding behind a professional role will inevitably involve a certain amount of counter-intuitive, inauthentic behaviour, and to get the best results from people, we must be our true selves in their company.
My true self was getting desperate to break the stalemate, and is delighted that we’ve had a breakthrough moment. This is what’s so great about hypnotherapy: nothing can happen and nothing can happen, and you feel as if you’re getting nowhere, and then suddenly a new memory comes up.
I knew Amber would contradict my lie. I also knew she wouldn’t be able to speak authoritatively about what didn’t happen at Little Orchard without remembering what did and remembering it powerfully. Simon, if I asked you to tell me what you did yesterday evening, you might say, ‘I watched TV.’ You’d be on memory autopilot, if you like. You could say those words without the memory being particularly vivid. But if I then challenged you, if I said, ‘No, you didn’t – you went ballroom dancing,’ your truth-seeking instinct would rebel, and your memories, the weapons you would need to argue against me, would assert themselves more strongly: watching the news while drinking a cup of tea, feeling a bit chilly because the heating had gone off an hour before . . .
My lie forced Amber’s memory to get its act together, and now we have more raw data to work with, so let’s look at it. On Christmas Eve, when Neil said he was going to bed, Jo told him she wasn’t coming with him. She stayed downstairs with her mother, sister and brother while Neil, Amber and Luke went upstairs. That much we knew already. The extra detail we can now add is that Jo, Hilary and Ritchie all looked preoccupied. They had something they wanted to discuss, or were in the middle of discussing – something important. It was obvious from all three of their faces that they were keen to be alone so that they could get on with talking about it, whatever it was. Amber might not be able to believe that it’s taken her this long to remember what she now knows to be a key feature of that Christmas-Eve-going-to-bed scene, but I have no trouble believing it. We fail to remember things for a number of reasons: repression, denial and distraction are the most common ones. People often confuse repression with denial, but they’re vastly different from one another: in repression, we genuinely have no idea that something happened. From the point of view of our conscious mind, it’s as if it never happened, until such time as hypnotherapy or something else coaxes our subconscious into cracking open and yielding it up – crude, inaccurate metaphor, but you get the gist. Amber might have seen the piece of paper with ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’ on it at Little Orchard, and repressed the memory.
Denial’s different: it’s more like having a stain on your shirt sleeve that upsets you. You pull your jumper over it so that it doesn’t show and almost but not quite forget that it’s there. Distraction is when you don’t remember something you otherwise would because your attention is elsewhere; something else is in sharp focus in the foreground, causing you to neglect the background. Perhaps Amber saw the words ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’ at Little Orchard but doesn’t remember having seen them because they were the least noticeable part of a particular scene. If so, there’s every reason to be hopeful. If she can suddenly remember Jo, Hilary and Ritchie having been secretive and preoccupied on Christmas Eve, she may yet remember any number of crucial details.
Amber didn’t remember the strained, conspiratorial atmosphere between Jo, her mother and her brother until now because of a distraction: the stand-out feature of the episode was Neil’s reaction to Jo’s failure to go upstairs with him. He was disappointed, confused, irritated, and he let it show. Amber noticed because it was so unusual: generally, no one openly expresses dissatisfaction with Jo’s behaviour. Jo cannot be questioned, challenged, criticised at all; everyone is scared of her, and rightly so.
The secret behind the secret. There is something badly wrong with Jo, something no one in the family knows about, not even Jo herself.
7
Thursday 2 December 2010
Charlie Zailer is looking at her watch when I arrive. There’s an unopened can of 7UP on the table in front of her. Given where we are – a dingy internet café called Web & Grub, full of taxi-drivers, greasy surfaces and smudgy grey handwritten price labels – I wonder if she chose it for its air-tight container, as a health precaution. ‘This won’t take long,’ I tell her.
She looks embarrassed. ‘Take as long as you want.’ She gestures for me to sit. I don’t want to. I’m too full of nervous energy. ‘Simon told me what happened last night,’ she says. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Did you see anything?’ I’m not the one who needs to be answering questions.
‘No. If I had, I’d have told Simon. I saw nothing.’
She looks like someone who did not set fire to my house. I never thought she did, so there’s no mental adjustment to make.
‘I was the only person on the street when I posted that envelope. Did the fire destroy it?’
‘No. I was awake. When I heard the fire, I was upstairs reading the notes.’
‘You heard the fire?’
I nod. It bothers me that I can’t describe the sound, apart from inaccurately.
‘How long after?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe three quarters of an hour. I’d skimmed through the Katharine Allen notes twice before I went to look, but I don’t know how long the fire had being going before I noticed it. Whoever did it could have got there ten minutes after you l
eft.’
‘Or before I arrived. If you were going to set fire to a house, would you do it straight away, soon as you got there? Or would you take your time, get your bearings first?’
‘I’d get it over with and get myself out of there as quickly as I could.’ I can see that she disagrees with me. ‘You’d linger?’
‘I’d want to familiarise myself with my surroundings. Unless I already knew them by heart.’
My legs shake. I lean my hands on the table to steady myself.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ she says.
Why don’t I? Why am I kidding myself that I can nip in here, grab an easy answer and run to the police station with it, waving it in the air like a football scarf? Yes, when I was outside your house last night, I saw a man who looked as if he might be called Neil loitering in the bushes with a box of matches in his hand. She was never going to say that; I was stupid to hope she would.
My suspecting Neil makes no sense, not even to me. When I think about him in isolation, I know that he’d never set fire to anything, especially not a house with two children in it. It’s only when I think about Jo that I start to wonder about Neil. Jo wouldn’t do her dirty work herself if she didn’t have to.
‘Whoever started the fire could have been there when I was,’ Charlie says. ‘Could have watched me post that envelope through your letterbox.’
‘Maybe you saw something you don’t remember seeing,’ I say, aware of how unlike myself I sound. If I had photographs of Jo and Neil on me now, would I show them to her, hoping to jog her memory? I like to think I wouldn’t.
I wish I still had the luxury of being able to laugh at the idea of recovering buried memories.
First thing this morning I phoned Ginny Saxon and booked myself in for tomorrow, ten until one: three hours, without a break. Two hundred and ten pounds, plus the seventy I owe her from Tuesday’s aborted session. She was resistant to the idea of spending more than an hour with me, until I explained that the urgency had more to do with murder and arson and less to do with me being a spoiled brat who can’t manage on her hour-a-week ration like everyone else.
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