Kind of Cruel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Breast cancer,’ Simon corrected.

  ‘Liver cancer.’

  ‘You said breast cancer before.’ Something was badly wrong here. Simon felt a shiver pass through him.

  ‘No, I didn’t. Are you telling me I don’t know what my own mother-in-law died of? It was liver cancer. It was horrendous. Start to finish, it took five years to kill her, and now she’s not suffering any more – good for her – but Neil and I are stuck looking after Quentin and feeling terrible if the thought ever crosses our mind that it would have been so much easier the other way round.’ Jo’s eyes were bright with tears. ‘If Quentin had died first, if Pam had been the one to survive . . .’ She flung out an arm towards the door, pointing. No more shiny smile. ‘You don’t have to live with him every day. You didn’t have to stand by and watch Pam die. I did, so don’t tell me she died of breast cancer, as if you know more about it than I do.’

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘January this year.’

  Simon nodded. He found it interesting that Jo was choosing to present their disagreement as a diagnostic one. Clearly she knew better than he did what illness had killed her mother-in-law, so it made sense for her to pretend that their argument was one she could easily win. In the matter of what she had said earlier in the conversation – whether she had initially said liver cancer, as she claimed, or breast cancer, as Simon remembered – the two of them were evenly matched, each as likely as the other to be right or wrong.

  ‘So you rang your mother twice last night? The second time after you’d heard about the fire?’

  ‘Neil phoned her, immediately after Luke phoned and woke us up. I was in shock, couldn’t think straight, but Neil knew I’d want Mum there, and Sabina. He phoned everyone – Ritchie too, but Ritchie couldn’t come. He’s got a stomach bug.’

  ‘And someone woke Quentin, presumably?’ Amber had said everyone but Kirsty, Ritchie, William and Barney had convened in Jo’s lounge in the early hours of the morning.

  ‘Neil woke his dad, yes.’

  ‘Going back to dinner time . . .’ Simon began.

  ‘Pasta with mozzarella, basil, tomatoes and olive oil,’ Jo snapped. ‘Treacle tart for pudding. How interested can you be in an ordinary family supper, for God’s sake? How’s us talking about my dinner last night going to help you catch any murderers?’

  ‘Were William and Barney there when Amber told everyone about Katharine Allen, and being interviewed by the police?’

  ‘No. They and the girls had left the table. I knew Amber had something important to tell us, so I sent them off to play.’

  Simon nodded, relieved that the family wasn’t so abnormal as to discuss murder at the dinner table in front of children.

  ‘About the DriveTech course . . .’ he started to say.

  ‘We’ve talked about that,’ Jo said in a warning tone. ‘You said you wouldn’t bring it up again.’

  No, I didn’t.

  ‘I need to know that I don’t have to worry about . . . any kind of comeback,’ said Jo. ‘I want you to give me your word.’

  ‘No comeback,’ Simon promised. If he had to, he’d renege on it. For the time being, he was prepared to say whatever worked. He sensed that at any moment, if Jo didn’t like what she heard, she might end the interview.

  He forced a smile. She tried to match it, flattening her mouth into a line.

  ‘One more question, then I’ll be out of your hair,’ he said. ‘You told Amber about Edward Ormston – his daughter Louise, who died?’

  Jo’s face was a blank. ‘Who?’

  ‘Ed from the DriveTech course.’

  ‘Oh.’ Pink spots appeared on her cheeks. ‘Ed, yes. Sorry, I just . . . without the context . . . I told Amber everything. She insisted. Not that either of us ever thought this would happen.’

  ‘You didn’t quite tell her everything,’ said Simon.

  ‘Yes, I did. What didn’t I tell her?’ A clear challenge: name one thing I missed out.

  For the second time today, Simon described the speech made by the woman calling herself Amber: the hypocrisy of a society that overvalues cars but refuses to accept their downside.

  Jo didn’t say anything. She seemed to be still listening, long after Simon had finished. Was she waiting for him to say something else?

  ‘Why didn’t you tell Amber that you said all that?’

  ‘I’m not sure I did say it.’ Jo’s shrug was offhand, as if nothing could matter less to her.

  ‘Ed Ormston’s sure you did. I believe him.’

  ‘Well, then . . . Look, I don’t remember, okay?’ Jo rubbed her forehead. ‘Maybe I said something, but it wasn’t that, I wouldn’t have come out with a load of nonsense like that. Ed’s no spring chicken, is he? I had a bit of a rant, yes, but I don’t remember the details.’ She made a dismissive gesture with her hand. ‘I was angry to have to be there, wasting a day, and I went off on one, I suppose. But if Ed thinks that’s what I said, then he misunderstood me.’

  ‘How, exactly?’ Simon asked.

  ‘I don’t know! It was a month ago. Do you remember things you said a month ago?’ Seeing that she’d given Simon pause, Jo pressed her point. ‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘No one does. We remember what other people say, not what we say ourselves.’

  Like I remember you saying breast cancer first. Not liver cancer.

  ‘You weren’t impersonating Amber, then?’ Simon said. ‘Coming out with what you imagined to be her opinions, in her absence and as her stand-in?’

  Jo’s face twisted. ‘You’d be better off asking her about impersonating me. Why do you think she’s so desperate to adopt Dinah and Nonie?’

  ‘For their sake. They want parents,’ Simon repeated what Amber had told him.

  ‘No. No! That’s not what it’s about, not at all. It’s about Amber wanting to be me, like she always has. I’m the mother of two children, so she has to be. It’s sick. She’s sick.’ Jo lunged towards Simon. He backed away, but all she seemed to want to do was peer into his cup. ‘You need more tea,’ she told him in a voice that was nothing like the one she’d been using a few seconds ago. ‘You should have said.’

  ‘I thought you said you cared about Amber,’ Simon reminded her, since she had trouble recalling her own words.

  ‘You think if someone’s sick I shouldn’t care about them? Then you’re as sick as she is, sick in the head. I forgot to ask you if you take sugar. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good.’ She flashed him another shiny smile. ‘Because there’s no sugar in the house.’

  Olivia wiped her eyes and headed for the kitchen. Time to stop crying and make a cup of Lapsang Souchong. And to stop dwelling on what Sam Kombothekra had done wrong, tempting though it was to think about anything other than what she herself was doing wrong, every second of every day. Not that she spent all her waking hours with Chris Gibbs, but even when they weren’t together, like now, her sinful state still applied; there was no shaking it off. Gibbs didn’t seem to care that their relationship was unjustifiable and potentially disastrous for all involved. Whenever Olivia raised the subject, he said infuriating things like, ‘That’s just the way it is. There’s no point wishing it wasn’t.’ He seemed unconcerned about his good or bad person status. Not that Olivia thought in those terms; it was a gross oversimplification.

  She had never before met a man who took a keen interest in her but none in himself. He’d never said he loved her, but he’d told her once that he worshipped her. In isolation, that would be lovely, but Olivia found it disconcerting when she tried to reciprocate by complimenting him, only to have him stare at her, bemused, with a question in his eyes: Who? As if she was talking about someone he’d never met. He refused to put himself under the spotlight of his own thoughts, which, handily for him, meant that he was never able to explain or analyse his behaviour. He regularly referred to the future – a future in which he and Olivia were together, one that didn’t include their respective partners or any children – but w
hen Olivia asked how he thought this state of affairs might come into being, he shrugged, as if that part was nothing to do with him.

  Something had to happen soon to change things, surely? He was about to become a father. How could that not turn everything on its head? Meanwhile, closer to home – at home – the prevailing assumption was that Olivia would shortly marry Dominic Lund, who was sitting in the next room, reading legal papers in front of the TV, unaware that his fiancée had been deceiving him for the past five months. I could make something happen, Olivia thought, but no matter how many times she repeated the idea to herself, she didn’t believe it. She didn’t feel she had either the power or the right to decide what course her life should take. Anything she might do could make things so much worse.

  As a young woman, she had nearly died of an illness that was beyond her control. As it turned out, she’d survived, but other people, not her, had made that happen. Since then, Olivia had been unable to rid herself of the conviction that no action of hers could make any difference to anything. It didn’t matter what she did. She wasn’t a person the world noticed or cared about. Charlie was; Simon was. They only needed to blink and the universe rearranged itself around them. When Charlie had had an ill-advised affair a few years ago, it had been reported in every national newspaper.

  Was that why Olivia was practising making people angry? To prove to herself that she could have an impact?

  Dom appeared in the kitchen behind her, empty wine glass in hand. ‘Are you going to tell me what you’re crying about?’ he said.

  ‘I’m not any more.’

  ‘Adjust the tense,’ he said impatiently.

  ‘Someone shouted at me when all I was doing was trying to help them,’ Olivia told him.

  Dom smirked as he reached for the wine bottle on the kitchen table. ‘Hardly surprising. I’ve seen you try and help people.’

  ‘Let me ask you something.’

  ‘I’m busy, Liv.’ Under his breath, he muttered, ‘. . . knew it was a mistake to come in here.’

  ‘It won’t take long. Please?’ He wasn’t the ideal audience, but he was the only one she had. Gibbs was the person she wanted to impress with her theory, but she’d ruined it by going to Sam first, not certain enough of the brilliance of her contribution to share it with Gibbs before she’d had feedback from an expert. And now that she would rather eat a bucket of toenails than tell Sam anything ever again, it meant she couldn’t talk to Gibbs about it either. If he thought her hypothesis was strong enough, he’d share it with his team. Of course he would; how could he not? And if Sam looked into it and it turned out to be a dead end, it would only confirm his view of Olivia as a melodramatic idiot.

  I could test it myself, she thought. No one needs to know. Unless I turn out to be right.

  ‘What daft plot are you hatching?’ Dom asked, twirling a strand of her hair round his finger.

  ‘Why would someone who acted in three films as a child give up acting as an adult?’ Olivia asked him.

  ‘No money in acting for most people.’

  ‘Right. So you do the sensible thing, become a primary school teacher.’

  ‘Fuck all money in teaching,’ Dom said.

  ‘Acting’s still your first love. You wouldn’t forget all about it.’

  ‘What are we talking about?’ Dom asked between mouthfuls of red wine. His lips were stained burgundy. He had the most stainable lips of anyone Liv had ever known. Would anyone else notice that about him and appreciate how cute it was, if . . . No, she couldn’t even think it. Leaving Dom was out of the question.

  ‘Not all child actors are going to grow up loving acting,’ he said. ‘If their parents are pushy, they might grow to hate it. “Fuck off, Mum, I don’t want to be in Lassie 23: Return of the Stinking Mutt. Can’t I go to school like all my mates, be a normal kid?”’

  Olivia hadn’t thought of that.

  ‘Then you’d get the ones who think they could have been contenders,’ Dom went on, warming to the theme. ‘The ones who pretend the day job’s just paying the bills until they’re spotted by Steven Spielberg.’

  ‘What about the sane ones?’ Olivia said. ‘Not screwed up by pushy parents, or still holding out for Hollywood. The ones who know they’re not star material, and who enjoy their day jobs, but . . . let’s say they teach in a primary school . . .’

  Dom frowned. ‘Who is this ex-actor primary school teacher?’

  ‘She was murdered.’ Olivia knew he would assume any insider information came from Charlie.

  ‘In Spilling? Then she’s Simon Waterhouse’s problem, not yours.’

  ‘A primary school teacher who’d once been an actress would be keen on promoting drama within the school.’ Liv tried not to cringe as she spoke her theory aloud. ‘Wouldn’t she? She might, that’s all I’m saying. If she enjoyed acting when she was a kid, she might think it’d be fun for her pupils. And . . . where there’s drama, there are costumes. If Kat Allen was the only teacher at her school who had ever been in films, perhaps she was in charge of drama at the school.’ Perhaps she got hold of a fireman’s costume and wore it to set fire to Sharon Lendrim’s house. ‘Maybe she arranged theatre trips for the kids she taught. Maybe she hired minibuses and took them to see pantos.’

  ‘Not knowing what you’re talking about, it’s hard for me to get excited about that possibility.’ Dom yawned.

  ‘Theatres have wardrobe departments. She might have taken a group of them, shown them around, asked the wardrobe manager if the kids could try on the costumes, maybe borrow some.’ Seeing Dom’s face, Liv groaned. ‘I just can’t believe that being a child actor didn’t have some kind of . . . lasting effect. Look, I’m making it sound more implausible and complicated, the more I say. Let’s keep it simple, the chain of connections: acting, costumes, fireman costume.’

  ‘Fireman costume?’

  ‘It’s complicated.’ She couldn’t be bothered to explain.

  Dom turned away. ‘Whatever you’re doing, you don’t need me for it,’ he said, taking his wine back to the lounge.

  Olivia knew she was getting carried away – something she did better than anyone of her acquaintance, even Simon Waterhouse – but this idea would drive her mad if she didn’t attend to it. One phone call, that was all it would take. Or, if she was lucky and not a hundred miles wide of the mark, a series of phone calls. And some acting.

  She’d do it first thing tomorrow.

  Having satisfied himself that Ritchie Baker was too inert to do anything as labour-intensive as attempt to kill anybody, Sam asked the question Simon had sent by text message less than a minute ago, preceded by the word ‘URGENT’ in capitals. ‘What did Pam Utting die of?’

  ‘Liver cancer. Well, it started in her liver. They caught it early, thought they’d got it all, then it came back, spread everywhere. Look, do you mind if we don’t talk about death and disease?’ Ritchie laid a hand on his stomach. ‘I feel really rough. I spent half of last night and most of today on the bog.’

  Sam didn’t doubt it. The flat stank. Opening some windows would have helped, but it was hardly the kind of thing a visitor could suggest. And it was cold outside – snowing. Sam was doing his best not to breathe through his nose, and sounding bunged up as a result. If Ritchie asked, he would pretend he had a cold, but Ritchie wasn’t going to ask. Apparently happy to answer questions, he had so far contributed none of his own to the conversation. The ideal interviewee. Except that Ritchie’s tame passivity was oddly contagious, and set the tone, somehow. If Sam wasn’t careful, their dialogue would peter out into a companionable droopy-eyed silence.

  The flat was bachelor-pad shabby and then some. Everything Sam could see that was made of any kind of material was creased or scrunched into ridges – the tea-towel hanging from the hook on the door, the duvet and bed sheet, Ritchie’s scattered clothes – mainly black T-shirts with Celtic symbols on them and black jeans; a bath towel on the floor, the thin, bunched-up rugs that looked to have been dropped at random, their o
nce-white fringes twisted into uneven grey clumps. A brightly coloured felt wall-hanging – children dancing around a well – was wrinkled, and hung at a funny angle instead of flat against the wall.

  Apart from the bathroom, which Sam had no desire to inspect, Ritchie Baker lived in this one big rectangular room. Everything was here: sink, hob and kitchen units lined up beneath the windows, a bedroom corner clumsily marked out by two wardrobes at right angles to one another, an alcove with a computer in it that Sam could imagine Ritchie’s landlord describing as a study area. At the other end of the room, a circle of armless chairs tried their best to ring-fence as much lounge as they could get away with. Sitting down anywhere but on Ritchie’s bed beside Ritchie would have meant disturbing the arrangement of chairs, so Sam had opted to stand.

  He wrote ‘liver cancer’ in his notebook. Would that be enough detail for Simon? Assume not. ‘Thought they caught, hadn’t, spread everywhere,’ Sam added.

  At one time, it would have bothered him that he didn’t know who Pam Utting was, or why he was asking about her. Utting was the surname of Amber Hewerdine’s husband, Luke, so presumably Pam was a relative of some kind. Luke’s mother, perhaps. How, if at all, did she fit into the Kat Allen investigation? How did Ritchie Baker fit in, and his sister Johannah? All Sam knew was that he’d been working the murder of a young woman, and now suddenly he had connected murders and attempted murders coming at him from all sides. He was struggling to see them as leads in his original case, though Simon was adamant that was what they were. Sam felt distanced from Kat Allen’s death by too much time and too many people; it couldn’t be a good thing.

  ‘I might have lied before without meaning to,’ Ritchie said matter-of-factly, as if he didn’t mind either way. ‘Someone might be able to confirm I was here all last night: the woman in the flat below. If you’re lucky, she might have been kept awake by me flushing the loo every half hour. I think her bed’s directly underneath my bathroom.’

  ‘If you’re lucky, you mean.’ Now that Ritchie had mentioned her, Sam would have to follow up on it. Excuse me, madam, can you verify that your upstairs neighbour spent most of last night emptying his bowels?