Paul had found the whole experience slightly surreal. During the act of making love, it was almost as though he had been able to step out of his own body and stand back and watch. This was not for any prurient sensation but rather with a strange sense of curiosity and analysis. Because this was a unique occasion, he wasn’t sure whether he had enjoyed it or not. His main concern had been to please Matilda, to not let her down again and in the process prove to her, to himself, to the world that he could be a man. To indulge in a normal heterosexual act. It seemed that he had succeeded in mechanical terms at least, much to his surprise and relief. Where this left him now he was not sure, but he had made a step along a new strange road and there were no longer any sign posts.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Frank Sullivan had only just got in from work when there came a knock at the door. Glancing through the sitting room window he saw the two police officers, a man and a woman, and he knew immediately that it was something to do with Mandy. She hadn’t come home the night before and although this wasn’t completely unusual – she occasionally stayed at a school friend’s house – he had sensed that this was not the case on this occasion. Things had been difficult over the last few months since that night. That night he now desperately regretted.
‘Mr Frank Sullivan?’
His stomach tightened into a hard knot at the sight of the two uniformed officers on his doorstep. They were youngsters, not yet over thirty, fresh faced and solemn. The man had an incipient moustache, grown, thought Sullivan, to make him look older. It simply made him look comical.
He nodded dumbly.
‘May we come in, sir?’
Without a word, Sullivan turned on his heel and the policemen, removing their helmets followed him into the front room.
‘Is it Mandy?’ he said, his voice flat and dry. ‘Has she got herself into some kind of trouble?’
The two policemen exchanged embarrassed glances. They were not used to this kind of assignment.
‘I’m afraid we have some bad news, sir,’ said the officer with the moustache and then he gave a little nervous cough as he examined his boots.
The young woman took over, ‘A body was discovered in the Huddersfield canal this morning,’ she said, almost in a whisper. ‘A young girl. We believe it to be your daughter.’
Sullivan shook his head in bewilderment. The words didn’t make sense. ‘In the canal?’
‘Drowned’
‘Drowned? You mean she’s dead?’ he found himself saying, as his legs began to give way and he slumped down into the armchair.
Both police officers nodded, not quite brave enough to give a vocal assertion.
After a brief pause, the WPC continued. ‘We found her handbag in the water near where her… near her …which gave us her identity’.
‘We think she had been drinking and… had fallen in,’ the policeman added.
‘Oh, my God.’ Sullivan hid his face in his hands and his body shook with emotion. He felt like someone had thumped him hard in the stomach and had winded him. He could hardly breathe. His breath escaped in a strangled squeak from his constricted lungs. The two officers stood by awkwardly and waited until he brought his emotions under control. Eventually, he turned his tear-stained face up towards them, a dim light of desperation in his red-rimmed eyes. ‘Are you sure it’s my Mandy?’
‘Well, we’ll need you to make a formal identification, but it seems most likely, sir. I am very sorry,’ said the WPC, reaching out and placing a comforting hand on Sullivan’s shoulder.
Suddenly Sullivan began to shiver. It was though all his blood had turned to ice and a fierce chill had invaded his body. This can’t be happening, surely, his brain suggested. Maybe he was dreaming. The thought evaporated along with all hope as he gazed up at the serious faces of the two officers.
‘What about Mrs Sullivan?’ asked the policeman.
‘There isn’t one,’ replied Sullivan, dragging his sleeve across his face to wipe his tears. ‘I mean she’s gone. Left. Years ago.’
‘Where is she now?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve no idea. Timbuktu for all I know or care. She walked out on us a long time back. She’ll not be interested in what’s happened to Mandy.’ The mention of his daughter’s name brought the horror of the situation back to him and he began to cry again.
‘Drowned,’ he said softly. ‘My little girl drowned.’
Later that day Frank Sullivan identified his daughter in the white tiled, antiseptic smelling morgue. The green sheet was pulled back to reveal the pale bloated face of a young girl, his daughter. He leaned forward to gaze at her features in the harsh light. She looked like a parody of her real self, those wide staring eyes and puffy cheeks. This wasn’t Mandy. It was a wax doll. A pretend Mandy. Tears clouded his vision and he turned away.
The other two people in the room, DS Sandra Morgan and Dr Raymond Simpkins, the senior pathologist, waited patiently for Sullivan to give them confirmation that the body on the slab was indeed his daughter Mandy.
‘Yeah, it’s her,’ he said at last, the words tearing his heart in two, as though they were responsible for her death and not the dark waters of the canal.
‘So sorry for your loss, Mr Sullivan,’ said Sandra stepping forward, ready to lead him away, but Dr Simpkins raised his hand gently to stop them.
‘Did you know that your daughter was pregnant?’
The words were yet another hammer blow to Sullivan’s system and he felt the bile rush into his throat and his body began to crumple.
Sandra flashed an accusative glance at the pathologist. The old goat should have waited before imparting this news. Had he no sensitivity? This was neither the place nor the time to tell the chap that his fifteen year old daughter was up the duff.
‘That can’t be right,’ said Sullivan, shaking his head.
‘I’m afraid it is. She was three months gone. Presumably there was a boyfriend on the scene,’ said Simpkins.
Sullivan wanted to scream. He couldn’t bear the pain, the despair, the guilt. He staggered a few steps forward and looked as he was about to faint.
Sandra Morgan stepped forward and grabbed his arm firmly, steadying him. ‘Let’s get you somewhere you can have a sit down with a nice cup of tea.’
Fifteen minutes later Sullivan was seated in a cubbyhole of an office with a mug of tea and smoking a much needed cigarette. Opposite him with a case folder on her knee was DS Morgan.
‘I am sorry that you had to find out about your daughter’s pregnancy in such a fashion. I could see from your reaction that you had no idea about it.’
‘No. Nothing.’
‘She had a boyfriend?’
Sullivan shook his head. ‘No. Nobody.’
Sandra pursed her lips. ‘Well, sorry to be blunt about this, but there must have been somebody.’
Sullivan eliminated that statement from his consciousness as soon as it had been uttered.
‘Are they sure? Could there be some mistake? She was a good girl.’
Sandra was tempted to observe that it was usually the good girls who get caught out. The bad girls are savvy and use protection. But she was aware that imparting this piece of wisdom at this time would be rather insensitive and certainly would not help matters. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quietly. ‘There is no mistake.’
Sullivan gave a weary shrug of the shoulders. ‘Well, I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I have no idea who the father is,’ he lied.
‘There is one other point I wish to raise with you Mr Sullivan,’ said Sandra.
Sullivan tensed again. What now? What bloody now?
‘I am sorry to have to mention this, but it is important that I do. You appreciate that we have to take into consideration all kinds of possibilities in this matter. Here we have a young girl, under age, three months pregnant and with, as you now tell us, no regular boyfriend. It could be that in despair, Mandy may have committed suicide.’
‘No.’ The word emerged as an elongated moan a
nd Sullivan slumped back in his chair.
‘However painful it is for you to accept this scenario, I am afraid it is a realistic one. To find oneself pregnant at that age with no father of the child on the scene is traumatic to say the least. She was three months into the pregnancy and obviously she had not confided in you, her dad. She was probably too scared to. She had been drinking – a considerable amount of alcohol had been found in her system. The effect of the drink may well have clouded her reasoning. All these aspects could easily lead to her taking her own life. In her situation it may have seemed the only option.’
Sullivan slumped back in his chair, gently shaking his head. Not only was he lost for words but he was also lost for emotion. The dramatic and gut wrenching events of the last few hours had finally exhausted his emotional reserves. He was just a husk, all passion spent.
As dusk fell that day, Frank Sullivan sat on the sofa in the gloom of his sitting room nursing a bottle of whisky. The only illumination to counteract the thickening evening shadows was the glow of the gas fire which hissed seductively at him from the tiled hearth. He felt wretched – wretched on so many counts that he could not fully isolate them. They were all bunched together in one coagulated tight ball of misery. He had lost his daughter and she may well have killed herself because of what he had done to her. One of God’s greatest sins: incest. And it seemed that he had fathered a child by his own child. And he was, therefore, responsible for its death also. He was dammed: a walk over hot coals to purgatory was his. What had made him do it? What had made him desire his own daughter. Lust? Loneliness? Alcohol-fuelled depravity? All those things and more.
The simple truth that kept returning to his brain like a red hot branding iron was that he was an evil man. He had to accept that fact that he must suffer. He had to if there was any chance of some kind of redemption in this life. God knew what he was like. God would have seen his terrible transgression: spilling seed inside his own flesh. God was now punishing him. And he had to accept it. He took another large swig of whisky straight from the bottle, its glass neck clinking hard against his teeth. How was he going to cope with life now? With the guilt? That dark indelible blemish on his soul. One thing was for sure, the bottle was not helping. It was nearly empty and he felt far from drunk. The alcohol had neither eased his pain nor helped to eradicate the guilt. How could it? Booze cannot change the truth. In a violent gesture, he cast the bottle aside, the remaining liquid splashing onto the carpet. Curling up into a foetal ball on the sofa, clasping his arms over his head, he groaned and sobbed, praying that sleep would overtake him and provide some respite from his physical and mental agony.
CHAPTER
NINE
Paul had not seen Matilda for almost a week. The various duties of their respective careers had meant that meeting up often proved difficult. There had been a few telephone conversations and then an evening drink had been arranged at the last minute at the Nag’s Head, a pleasant hostelry a couple of miles from town. Paul had missed her company. She was one of the few people with whom he felt totally relaxed. Perhaps, he thought on reflection, she was the only person who came into this demanding category. She rarely asked him about work and when she did it was only in vague general terms and never applied any pressure about their personal relationship. They just enjoyed each other’s company, savouring the respite from the demands of their jobs. But this evening she seemed reserved, lacking her usual sparkle. The thought crossed his mind that maybe she was having second thoughts about their relationship.
‘Everything OK?’ he asked in as casual a fashion as possible.
She nodded. ‘It’s been a bit of a tough week.’
‘Oh. You want to talk about it?’
She flashed him a wry smile. ‘Shop talk. That’s the last thing you want to hear over a quiet drink.’
‘Ah, but it’s not my shop, so there’s no problem. Come on, let’s be hearing all about it.’
Matilda took a sip of wine before replying. ‘One of our students died last week and it was her funeral today. I went along to represent the school. It was a pretty harrowing experience.’
‘I’m sure. How did she die?’
‘Well, she drowned. It could have been suicide. It was in the local paper.’
‘Oh, I think I know the case. Some of the officers at HQ dealt with it. Not my department. I gather she fell into the canal. Had too much to drink. I didn’t realise she was one of your students. I didn’t make the connection. What sort of girl was she?’
Matilda shrugged. ‘I had very little contact with her. She seemed very ordinary, I suppose. A bit quiet. Average in her studies, I gather. She hadn’t really made her stamp on life yet. Now she never will. Just fifteen. What a waste.’
Paul had heard on the grapevine that the case was likely one of suicide. Apparently the girl was pregnant and, he had learned from colleagues, that there was no clue as to who the father was. But he was not about to pass on this information now and depress Matilda further.
‘Grim affair, was it?’ He asked and regretted it straight away. Any funeral of a fifteen year old was bound to be grim.
‘Depressing in the extreme. There were very few mourners: some neighbours, a small group of her school friends, her father and me.’
‘No mother?’
‘I gather she departed the scene years ago. No one seems to know where she is. The girl lived with her father. He was in quite a state.’
‘Understandable.’
Matilda nodded. ‘He was howling like a baby through most of the ceremony and there was no one there to comfort him, except the priest. He was particularly caring with the poor soul. One can only guess how one tries to face life after such a tragedy.’
Snow gazed at Matilda, her pretty face shaded with sadness, empathising with this father at the loss of his young daughter. He, who in his profession, was no stranger to tragedy, brutality, violence and sudden loss of life, was hardened to the effects of such personal dramas – he couldn’t do his job effectively if he was otherwise – but for Matilda such bleak intrusions, however much on the periphery of her ordered world, must be very upsetting. He reached over the table at took her hand and squeezed it gently. He did not trust himself to say anything in case he plumbed the depths of awful, clumsy platitudes.
The squeeze of his hand brought a softening of the frown on Matilda’s forehead and her lips folded into the ghost of a smile.
‘I must say,’ she said at length, ‘events like this do tend to shake my faith a little.’
This was one of many subjects that Snow and she had not touched upon. To him it was a dangerous area for he had strong views which he knew would be at odds with Matilda’s. He was an agnostic, cynical and scathing about the idea of there being a benevolent god. Here was a case in point. Why should any omnipotent being with miraculous powers allow this young girl to drown, to lose her young life and that of her child before she had tasted the fruits of existence, fulfilled her potential and, all right, if you insist, atoned for her sins?
Matilda, on the other hand, as headmistress of a Catholic School, was a full convert to that particular doctrine. How staunch a Catholic she was, he could only surmise. They had not discussed religion but Paul reasoned that one does not reach high status in such an institution without being a strong advocate of the Catholic creed. And yet she had never really mentioned her beliefs or feelings on the matter to him and he had certainly kept his lip buttoned on his views.
‘That’s understandable. There is nothing worse than a child’s death,’ he said, attempting as neutral a response as possible.
‘Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of the heavens,’ she said softly. ‘I suppose poor Mandy has now been allowed entry into the kingdom.’
She and her bastard baby? Not a chance, thought Snow bitterly, while he nodded his head gentle vague agreement. ‘How about another drink, eh?’ he said.
That night, Matilda Shawcross was unable to slee
p. The image of that poor man, Mandy Sullivan’s father, kept coming back to her in the darkness. He was ghastly pale, unshaven and unkempt as though he hadn’t done anything to himself since he had heard the news of his daughter’s death. He could barely stand in church and just hung his head in despair during the two hymns. What added to the tragedy was that there was no one there for him: no friend, close relative, no one to stand by him and hold his hand and whisper words of solace in his ear. He was totally isolated in his grief. His only support was the priest, who comforted him and at times became his physical crutch. After the burial ceremony, Matilda saw the cleric shepherding the man back towards the vestry.
Matilda had not encountered the father before. He had never turned up for parents’ evenings and before Mandy’s death she had known nothing of the girl’s background and this made her feel guilty. As headmistress she should be aware of the lives of all those in her care, especially those in rather difficult circumstances. Obviously a young girl, emotionally vulnerable as she had proved to be, living with alone with her father who had shown little interest in her education, needed more consideration and attention than the school had given her. And that was her responsibility. Her failing. She was the headmistress after all – the mother superior. With her intervention, closer attention to the girl’s situation maybe she wouldn’t have ended up …
The thought shocked Matilda and sent an icy ripple down her spine. She turned on her side under the covers and began to pray. To pray for forgiveness and guidance.
CHAPTER
TEN
Blood Rites: A Detective Inspector Paul Snow thriller Page 5