Rush of Blood

by Mark Billingham

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘I got down on the floor with him. It was just a natural reaction, I suppose. I got down there and I lifted his head up. I put my hand on the … on the hole in his chest and the blood was bubbling up through my fingers and the next thing I remember was seeing everyone in the doorway and wondering what they were doing there. They were staring and I was saying things, but I don’t know what. It’s stupid … but I can remember feeling bad because I’d woken everybody up. Because of all the mess …’

  The QC nodded and said, ‘Thank you, Mrs Dunning. I know this can’t be easy for you. However, if you’ll bear with me, I do need to take you back to what happened between you and your husband just before the alleged offence. To the argument itself. Do you feel up to that?’

  Sue knew what he wanted. What was coming. She told him she felt fine.

  ‘Earlier on you told the court that your husband had said’ – he read from his notes – ‘he’d supported you no matter how stupid you’d been, no matter what you’d said and what you’d done because he loved you so much. Do you know what he meant by that?’

  Sue looked at him, her breathing growing heavier by the second.

  ‘Mrs Dunning, what was your husband referring to?’

  She said, ‘Our daughter.’ She cleared her throat and said it again.

  ‘Your daughter, Emma?’

  Sue nodded.

  ‘Did your husband want you to talk about Emma?’

  ‘No, he hated it,’ she said.

  ‘Why was that?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Mrs Dunning, you are giving evidence under oath and this is your opportunity to explain things to members of the jury. Now, you made a statement shortly after your arrest during which you talked about your husband’s attitude towards your deceased daughter, Emma. How much it upset him when you talked about her. We have also heard from two different witnesses who have testified that privately you told them all about Emma’s illness and her tragic death from leukaemia. Is this true?’

  Sue nodded.

  ‘Mrs Dunning, you do understand that while you’re telling the truth about what happened that night, about your husband threatening you … the truth about fearing for your life after he had confessed to a double murder, that you must tell the truth about everything? You do see how important that is, don’t you?’

  Sue nodded again, barely perceptibly.

  ‘Good. Thank you.’ Standing behind the table that Crown and defence shared, the QC glanced down at his notes and cleared his throat. His voice dropped a little. ‘Now this will inevitably be extremely painful for you, but can you please tell this court the truth about your daughter Emma?’ He waited, knowing that there would be a reaction in the courtroom. There was an outbreak of low chatter in the public gallery and several of the jurors leaned forward in their seats. ‘Can you tell us about Emma? Mrs Dunning …?’

  Sue closed her eyes. Seconds passed. ‘There was no Emma …’

  ‘Could you speak up, Mrs Dunning?’

  ‘I never had a daughter.’

  The chatter in the gallery grew louder and more than one juror looked stunned. The barrister waited for the noise to die down.

  ‘Did you purchase clothes for her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you put up a swing in the back garden for her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you frame pictures of a girl you cut out of a magazine and hide those pictures away in drawers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you tell us why you did those things?’

  Sue shook her head again, then opened her eyes. ‘We wanted children, both of us did, but it just … never happened.’ Her eyes were fixed on a point just above her counsel’s head; eyes that brimmed and spilled tears down her face as she spoke. ‘We had tests … all the tests, and nobody could find anything wrong, but just … nothing. Ed bottled up all the pain … all the grief, and I thought I’d done the same. Then one day I just woke up and Emma was there.’ She put a hand to her chest. ‘In here. An Emma that had been. I don’t expect anyone to think it makes any sense, but I never even questioned it. Suddenly I was able to get up in the mornings and get through the days, because I had a reason for the grief. It filled me up. I had memories of this girl and they were real, do you understand? Every … detail of her. Things we’d done and places we’d been together. I could hear her laugh and I knew what vegetables she hated and I remembered the pain of watching her slip away in that hospital. I remembered all of it.

  ‘The smell of the place. The clothes I picked out to dress her in afterwards …

  ‘Of course, Ed wanted me to see somebody, to get some help. He thought it was unhealthy … no, worse than that, he said it was “sick”. In the end he just left me to it, because he could see I wasn’t going to stop, because I wasn’t going to say goodbye to her again. I couldn’t do that. He was concerned about me, in the beginning at least, I know that … but sometimes I’d need to talk about her, to share it with him and we’d always end up screaming at one another. So sometimes I’d tell somebody else. I’d talk about Emma to complete strangers when I was shopping or having a coffee or something. They’d say how sorry they were and they’d ask me what she was like, and I felt alive. Like I was worth something.

  ‘I know it’s … I know what it sounds like and I know it’s time to move on, but those years I had with Emma, with Emma’s memory, were … well, I wouldn’t swap them for anything. I’m probably not … explaining it very well, but I felt as though I was a whole person again because of this special girl I’d lost.’ She lowered her head for a few seconds, nodded. ‘This girl I hadn’t really lost.’

  The QC leaned even closer, asked if she would perhaps like a drink of water. Sue raised her head, but managed only a few more words before the sobs took hold completely.

  ‘I felt like a mother …’

  After a nod from the opposing counsel, the judge announced that the court would rise and that questions from the Crown were to commence after an early lunch. He told Sue that she could step down. When he saw that her fingers were still wrapped tightly around the metal rail, he asked an officer of the court to come forward and help her from the witness box.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  There was a good-sized crowd at the bottom of the steps when they emerged. Members of the public jostled for space with newspaper reporters and TV crews, holding up mobile phones to take blurry pictures or shoot video. Some had gathered well in advance of the verdict and were there to show support, while a good many others – passers-by who had spotted the cameras and decided that something important must be happening – simply took the opportunity to stand around or record proceedings.

  You never knew what you might get outside the Old Bailey.

  Several uniformed police officers gathered themselves into an impromptu cordon as Sue Dunning’s solicitor stepped forward to make a statement.

  ‘We are obviously relieved and delighted at today’s verdict,’ he said. ‘At seeing justice done in every sense. Mrs Dunning will not be speaking or taking any questions this afternoon, but she has asked me to say a few words on her behalf …’

  Angie, Barry, Marina and Dave stood close together a few feet behind and to one side. Next to them, Sue’s colleague Graham Foot stood with his arm around Annette Bailey. They had all appeared as witnesses for the defence. They stared at the back of Sue’s head, at the ranks of microphones thrust in her direction and the line of camera vans beyond. They struggled to hear the solicitor’s words above the noise of passing traffic and the constant clicking of camera shutters.

  ‘I am so relieved that this nightmare has finally come to an end. Or at least this part of it, because I don’t expect that living with what has happened, with what my late husband did, is going to be easy …’

  Dave leaned across to Barry. ‘Do you fancy going to get some lunch?’

  ‘What about Sue?’ Angie asked. She saw Sue angle her head slightly, and thinking t
hat she might turn round, she raised a hand to wave. Sue didn’t see her.

  ‘I think she’s probably going to be a bit busy for a while,’ Barry said. ‘I’m up for it though.’

  ‘I’m starving,’ Marina said.

  Angie nodded. ‘Be good to celebrate.’

  ‘Be even better if that murdering prick had been banged up for the rest of his life.’ Dave took Marina’s hand. ‘He got off lightly if you ask me.’

  ‘Yeah, but how much does it cost to keep someone like that in prison though?’ Angie said. ‘PlayStations in their cells, some of them.’

  ‘Right result, I reckon,’ Barry said.

  ‘I wonder what they think.’ Dave nodded across to where Sonia Gold was standing with her husband and son. Their faces were grim as the solicitor continued to read out Sue Dunning’s statement.

  ‘Above all, I want to take this opportunity to pass on my sympathies to the families of the two girls that my late husband murdered. However hard this has been for me, I cannot begin to imagine what they are going through.’

  ‘God, that stuff about the daughter though,’ Angie said. ‘I still can’t get my head around it.’ Then Sue did turn round and Angie caught her eye, then raised her little finger and thumb to her ear and mouthed, ‘Call you later on.’

  Sue gave a small nod and turned back towards the reporters again.

  *

  Jenny Quinlan had mixed feelings. She was as pleased as anyone else that Sue Dunning had been acquitted, but this was not her case. Connected, but not hers. Jeff Gardner had made a point of thanking her, as had the SIO on the Samantha Gold investigation, but she still felt as though Ed Dunning’s death had robbed her of the kudos that should rightfully have been hers. She’d been moaning about it the night before while she and Steph had put away two large pizzas and a bottle and a half of wine. Steph had told her she was being stupid, that she was the one who had drawn all the attention to Ed Dunning in the first place and hadn’t she been the one who had found out what had really happened to Annette Bailey? That was important stuff, wasn’t it? I mean, surely all the work she had done would be noticed.

  Jenny could only hope her friend was right.

  She looked across to where Jeff Gardner was drinking takeaway coffee and talking quietly to Steve Barstow from the Homicide Command. Barstow didn’t look too disappointed with the outcome, despite the failure to secure a conviction. It was hard to read Gardner though. He seemed a bit … bemused by the whole thing.

  She smiled when he glanced in her direction, wondered how long he was planning on staying in London.

  Steph was right, of course she was. Whichever way you looked at it, it had to be a feather in her cap, didn’t it? There had certainly been talk in the pub about fast-tracking her up to DC, plenty of banter and backslapping from Adam Simmons and the rest.

  She’d gone back to making them coffee anyway, just in case.

  ‘… and I hope that you’ll understand my need for some privacy at this time. To come to terms with everything that’s happened and to try and rebuild my life.’

  Jeff Gardner stepped away from the English detective and reached into his jacket for his phone. God, it was every bit as cold as his wife had said it would be. He couldn’t wait to get back to the sunshine and the ocean. Back to courtrooms where they didn’t wear those stupid wigs …

  He thought about calling Patti Lee Wilson to give her the news, then decided it could wait until later. When he got home would be fine. She would probably pick it up on CNN or something anyway, if she was tuned in.

  There was movement on the steps below him, as the solicitor tried to move Sue Dunning towards a waiting car, as police tried to keep the scrum of reporters at bay, despite the solicitor’s insistence that no questions were going to get answered.

  Sue Dunning was pale and still looked as if she wasn’t quite sure where she was. He was grateful for all her help in putting the final pieces together for him on the Amber-Marie killing, but having heard what had been said in court, he was still shocked at the way she had spoken about her daughter in that interview room in Holloway.

  What had he said to her? Something about not being a psychiatrist. He hoped to God she was able to find a good one.

  He watched her now as she suddenly stopped a few feet from her car and stared across its roof at a BMW parked on the opposite side of the road. Gardner craned his neck to see who was sitting at the wheel, but couldn’t make him out. Her solicitor laid a hand on the small of her back and, after a few more seconds, they both climbed into the car, which quickly pulled away from the kerb and out into the traffic.

  ‘It’s all about children, isn’t it?’ Sue Dunning had asked him.

  She’d been in hell a lot longer than he’d thought.

  As the crowd dispersed and a few reporters lingered to talk to senior detectives, Gardner saw that Jenny Quinlan was on her way over. He smiled as she approached and when she was next to him, he said, ‘You did well in there.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No, really. Nice job.’

  Quinlan shrugged like it was no big deal, but Gardner knew it was the first time she had given evidence in court. She’d seemed confident and calm as she’d read excerpts from her interviews with Edward Dunning and with others. When she was questioned by the defence, some of the comments made about Dunning by Angie Finnegan and Marina Green had clearly resonated with the jury.

  ‘Not that it did any good,’ she said. ‘I mean we didn’t win.’

  ‘One of those cases,’ Gardner said. ‘Not sure anyone won. We all get those occasionally, right?’

  ‘Right,’ she said. Once again trying to sound like the seasoned pro she so clearly wanted to be. ‘So, when are you heading home?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘All set for a last night on the razzle then?’

  ‘I’ve got an early flight.’

  ‘You sure?’ She rocked from foot to foot, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her jacket. ‘I know some good pubs. Happy to show you the town.’

  ‘It’s an early flight,’ he said.

  ‘You could always sleep through it.’

  ‘Probably not a good idea.’

  She looked away for a second, then turned back and nodded towards the phone in Gardner’s hand. ‘I’ll let you make your call then,’ she said.

  Gardner watched her move away, then looked down at his phone and began to dial. Thinking about it, a last night out in the city might not be such a terrible idea. It wouldn’t take him long to pack, after all. Maybe he could find an old-fashioned English pub whose name he would not be able to remember on the flight home and it was always better to drink with somebody else. He looked across at Jenny Quinlan standing alone, then remembered who he was calling and decided that he should probably do the sensible thing and ask Barstow.

  Yeah, he seemed like a good guy.

  When Michelle answered the phone, Gardner told her about the ‘Not Guilty’ verdict. She said she was pleased and that their daughter was missing him. She asked him when he was coming home.

  ‘First flight out tomorrow,’ he told her. ‘You can tell her I’ll be back for talking tiger time …’

  SIXTY-FIVE

  And Marina Green was supposed to be the actress.

  I was amazed, I still am, at how well it went. There’d been tears when they were needed and each sob, every catch of the breath and agonised pause had done its job brilliantly. To be honest, it wasn’t actually very hard because I was sad that Ed had died. It might sound strange, but I missed him and I knew that adjusting to life on my own was not going to be easy. And I did think all those things they’d said he’d done were appalling. I mean, looked at objectively, how could you think anything else? Of course they were terrible.

  Except it wasn’t him who had done those things, was it?

  I was staggered by the size of the crowd afterwards. Well-wishers, gawpers, whatever. Standing there listening to my solicitor making his speech, delivering my words with just th
e right amount of compassion and sincerity, I couldn’t help thinking how many more people there were on those courtroom steps than had bothered to show up at poor old Ed’s funeral. Just a few members of his family – none of whom had ever liked me much, as it happens – and a couple of morons from the tennis club. Not a bumper turnout, but what can you expect?

  I half expected a queue to spit on his coffin.

  It all started with that first, stupid lie of his and the ironic thing is that I was actually angry about it at the time. He’d panicked, worried that the cops over there would find out about his record at home, that he might get held up. As it was, that paved the way for everything. One stupid little lie, saying he was with me when the poor sod had actually slept the afternoon away in our cabin. I gave him the second lie of course, when I told Quinlan he’d dropped me off at the mall. He was grateful at the time, like I was backing him up somehow, like I was getting him out of a hole or something when all I was really doing was putting him right in the frame. Ed, the man with a previous arrest for rape, alone in the car and driving around just when Amber-Marie Wilson was snatched off the street in Siesta Village.

  And the police here were happy enough to believe I’d gone along with that first lie because he’d made me do it.

  Did he threaten you?

  Were you scared?

  It’s OK, Mrs Dunning … we understand.

  Which all fitted in perfectly with the witness statements, thank you very much. Ed wearing the trousers and being a ‘bit of a bully’ … God bless you for that, Marina and Angie. The fact is, I’ve never done anything he or anyone else told me unless I wanted to. Yes, in the bedroom perhaps, but I happen to have … preferences in that department that have got nothing to do with this, so no need to dwell on that, is there?

  Lies and luck then, like I’ve said before, and plenty of the latter.

  The seven of spades, that was another bit of luck! Being downstairs that night meant I was nice and close to the kitchen, handy for the knives. Don’t get me wrong, I would have found a way to do it if we’d been upstairs in the spare room. A lamp or a shoe or something. The knife was way better though, and it did make the whole self-defence thing a damn sight more credible. I’m not sure I could have convinced the thickest copper in the world that I was just trying to defend myself if I’d had to batter him to death with one of my high heels.