by Linda Regan
Luck was on his side. She was old enough to be his mother, and made it easy for him to open up. All the same, for the first twenty minutes he was tense and monosyllabic, simply answering her gentle, carefully phrased questions with ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Then she asked if he wanted to talk about the case he was working on, and a floodgate opened. Tears overcame him as he described walking through the children’s dressing room and into the basement, seeing Sophie lying in Michael’s arms, her head hanging back and her white neck open from ear to ear, blood covering her face and arms and soaking into the shiny, white fairy dress.
Then the memory he had been pushing back, of finding his wife and baby Elizabeth lying in their own blood, flew into his mind. He heard himself tell the therapist what a failure he felt, as a detective as well as a husband and a father.
‘I let them down. I wasn’t there to protect them, and I couldn’t even track down the bastards who did that to them.’
‘Were they never caught?’
‘We didn’t come close. They’re still out there somewhere – and not a day passes when I don’t imagine how long it took Diane and Elizabeth to die, and how much pain they had to endure first. And it was all my fault.’
Sobs overcame him again, and he huddled in the chair, shoulders shaking and tears pouring down his face.
‘Tell me why you blame yourself, Paul. When you’re ready. Take your time.’
The therapist’s soft voice had a calming effect. He took the handful of tissues she held out and mopped his face.
‘I stayed late at work that evening. I was always staying late – I was desperate to make a good impression, I wanted a promotion so badly. There was a fight outside the football ground after a match, and I had to write up the statements …’
Over ten years of grief seemed intent on pouring out of him. He told her how he would give anything to change places with them, to have taken the fatal beating himself, to save them from all the pain and fear they endured before they died.
Joan Deamer barely blinked as she listened, only moving once to offer more tissues when his tears began to flow again.
‘Let me ask you something else now,’ she said when the wave of grief began to subside, leaving slight embarrassment in its wake. ‘What are you hoping to get out of these sessions? What would you like to achieve?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Clearly you want to come to terms with your grief and move on. But where do you want to move to? Another relationship, perhaps? It’s been eleven years, after all. Have you had any relationships in that time?’
‘I … I can’t.’
‘Can’t what?’
‘Have a relationship.’
‘You mean you can’t commit yourself to another woman?’
‘Yes, and …’ She waited, and he looked at her helplessly.
‘I’m guessing that since I’m a sex therapist, you’re telling me you can’t have sex.’
He nodded, relieved not to have to spell it out.
‘And is there someone you’d like to have sex with? Is that why you decided to seek my help?’
Banham nodded again. ‘Someone at work. My sergeant, actually. We’ve been good friends for a while, and I asked her out, but then when we … got close … I … I couldn’t. I let her down.’
‘You were impotent?’
There, it was out in the open. He nodded, feeling as if something inside him had been released.
Joan led him gently through his futile attempts to get close to any woman over the past eleven years, and eventually to his feelings for Alison. He had no idea how she did it, but by the end of the hour he was feeling lighter, less trapped and more optimistic than he could remember. Mrs Deamer thanked him for talking to her and suggested he make an appointment for the same time next week.
‘We’ve made some progress,’ she said, ‘but there’s still a long way to go.’
As he stood up to leave, she asked if he had any questions for her.
‘Do you think you can cure me?’ he asked with a rueful smile.
She looked at him from behind her large glasses. ‘I doubt it, but I might be able to help you cure yourself.’
He opened the door and turned to thank her again.
‘We have something in common, you and I,’ she said. ‘I manage to save some of my patients. Not all, but some.’
As Banham walked down the street outside her office, he felt as if he had finally started to crack the heavy carapace that had shielded him from life for so many years. It was a crisp, cold morning and the sun was shining. The mortuary was only a few streets away, and he decided to walk there and pick up the post-mortem report on Sophie Flint before making his way back to the station. On the way he rang Lottie’s house, and Madeleine picked up the phone.
‘Did Fairy Miranda tell you she came to my house, Uncle Paul?’ the little girl asked him excitedly. ‘I put my tooth under the pillow like you said, and when I woke up there was a silver coin.’
‘That’s great, Maddie. What are you going to do with it?’
‘It’s in my money box. I’m saving up to buy Mary Poppins on a CD.’ She sang the first line of “A Spoonful of Sugar” in a clear, sweet voice, and he heard himself hum along. He and Lottie had taken the children to see the film a couple of weeks before Christmas, and Maddie had been entranced. He ended the call with a promise to visit them later in the week, and made a mental note to buy her the CD himself.
At the mortuary, though, his positive energy started to evaporate, and he regretted the decision to go there. The smell of death, disinfectant and stale flesh was too evocative; his hands began to tremble as he breathed it in.
Heather Draper looked surprised to see him, but if she noticed him shaking she made no comment. She handed him the report and said, ‘This one should be quite straightforward. I gather you’ve already got the murder weapon.’
‘Anything I should know?’
‘There’s no sign of recent intercourse this time.’ She thought for a moment, then continued, ‘Forensics picked up some crumbs on the floor in the basement, didn’t they? Well, her stomach contents contain pizza. She ate it within a couple of hours of death.’
When he arrived at the station the smell of freshly baked fruit cake lingered down the corridor as far as the lift. He followed the aroma to the staff canteen, where an array of metallic balloons bobbed below the ceiling. One proclaimed Happy Birthday; another had a large 30 across it.
Peggy, the motherly canteen manageress, explained, ‘It’s a party for Wendy Roberts. It’s her first day back on the beat.’ She poured coffee for Banham from a large metal pot, and he recalled the incident which had put the young PC in hospital for two months. She had been stabbed in the stomach breaking up a street fight and almost lost her life; the two months had been followed by five more at home recuperating. ‘She was unconscious on her birthday,’ Peggy told him, ‘and uniform are giving her a belated party. It’s a welcome back as well.’
She indicated the collection bowl on the counter for contributions and Banham took a five-pound note out of his wallet. He hardly knew Wendy Roberts, but he was glad she had survived her ordeal. Her attacker was behind bars. His own wife and child hadn’t been so lucky.
He found he could think about it calmly now without the horrifying flashback images flooding his mind. Perhaps this therapy thing had its uses.
The pink heart-shaped balloon bobbed in front of him as he sat down with his coffee and the pathologist’s reports. Diane had never reached thirty; she and Elizabeth had been dead for over a year when his own thirtieth birthday came around, and on that day he had made them a promise that he would find their killer. He had failed them.
He wasn’t going to fail the two dead actresses. All he needed was confirmation from forensics, then he would charge Stephen Coombs with Sophie’s murder. He had nothing yet to help him pin Lucinda’s murder on the man, but there was a nagging feeling in his stomach that he had missed something. He decided to interview Coombs him
self, and push hard for a confession.
He opened the report and heaped sugar into his coffee. Alison had hinted that he should give up sugar for his New Year’s resolution, suggesting that his waistline was expanding, but there were still two days of the old year to go. He actually had no intention of giving it up; he had other resolutions, much more important than the odd spoonful of sugar. This was the year when he would face his dragons and overcome them. He was over the first hurdle; he’d met the therapist and had managed to open up and admit his fears and feelings during the first session. He had left feeling positive, even if it was short-lived. Next time might be better still, and if the improvement continued his sexual problems might even disappear, and he could try to pluck up the courage to ask Alison for another chance.
He sipped the coffee and reread Lucinda’s report. There was brain movement prior to the haemorrhage which killed her, proving the blow to the side of her head was delivered before she fell. Without a doubt, then, the fall was no accident – someone had hit her.
Bruise marks a few days old were found on Lucinda’s cheeks and upper arms. They tied in with the notes in Sophie’s diary about Stephen Coombs’s attack on Lucinda a few days earlier. Stephen’s only response to a question about the bullying was a terse, ‘No comment.’
Sophie’s diary had also recorded that Vincent Mann had hit Lucinda on the day before her death. There were small abrasions above the bruising on her arm, and the skin had been broken. So whoever had gripped her and shaken her wore something sharp – jewellery, perhaps. Michael Hogan, Barbara Denis, Alan McCormack and his wife Maggie all wore watches, but Banham had noticed they took them off before going on stage. The dancers wore strange bracelets in the Sultan of Morocco scene, curled around their bare arms up to their shoulders; they looked distinctly scratchy. Vincent Mann wore a thick gold identity bracelet.
The marks probably came from Vincent; he had already admitted he had a temper. But would he have wanted to kill her? A man who had given up his own salary to get his lover a job was an unlikely murderer.
It all pointed to Stephen Coombs. And Sophie found out, so he had to kill her too.
He took a sip of his coffee and picked up the other post-mortem report. Sophie’s murder was quite different. Her throat was cut by a knife, six to eight inches long and razor-sharp. That murder was cold and calculated. Penny Starr’s tests on both the knife and the bathing costume had revealed Stephen’s DNA, and shown that the blood on them was Sophie’s. Of course, his costume would be covered in his DNA, and since the knife was wrapped in the costume, Banham reasoned, the DNA would transfer to it.
Some bodily fluid found on Sophie’s face also matched Stephen’s DNA. He could have put a sweaty hand around her face before he cut her throat. Stephen’s explanation was that he had a cold, and sprayed saliva on everyone when he said his lines. But Stephen never stood close to Sophie on stage; in her fairy scenes she stood at the side of the stage talking to the audience.
Banham took out a pen and began to list the evidence he would need to bring Stephen Coombs to trial.
The crumbs on the floor by the footprint in the basement could have fallen from Stephen’s clothes; he had admitted to eating pizza earlier in the day. But so had everyone in the show; they had sent out to Pizza Hut for lunch as they had been rehearsing until five minutes before curtain up.
If forensics proved that the footprint was Stephen’s, he had the bastard; Stephen had said he didn’t go down to the basement.
If the tests on the black costume in the office came up positive with fragments from the stage weight, that was Lucinda accounted for. Sophie was about to make a written statement saying that Stephen hadn’t changed his costume during the UV scene on the night of Lucinda’s murder and that he always changed during that scene – but Sophie was murdered before she could make that statement. This supported the theory that Stephen killed Sophie to silence her because she found out about Lucinda’s murder.
Stephen claimed he had changed as he always did, but he was cold and had wrapped his green dressing gown over the bathing costume. He had also argued that without her glasses, Sophie couldn’t see her hand in front of her face – but her mother said she wore contact lenses.
So many ifs, so many contradictions. He felt as if his head would explode. He gave himself a shake and swallowed the last of his coffee.
At the same moment Alison walked into the canteen. She looked quite different from the previous day. She wore a clinging cream T-shirt over khaki jeans, with ankle-length brown kicker boots and a thick rust-coloured sweater tied around her waist. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, and she had obviously spent some time twisting it into an elaborate braid first; it hung over her shoulder, and the end was decorated with a pretty brown ribbon. She was wearing eye make-up, and shiny red lipstick. She looked stunning, and she smelled gorgeous.
‘Why are you so dressed up?’
‘Do I have to have a reason? I felt like it.’
The black flecks in her eyes were shining. He decided not to pursue the subject; the look that she was giving him said very plainly that it wasn’t his business. In a way it was; he realised that he cared for her, very much. But now wasn’t the time to tell her.
‘I’ve got the PM reports,’ he said briskly.
‘And we’ve got some forensic results.’ She handed him the papers and sat down opposite him.
Banham read the report, rubbing his mouth in concentration. ‘Lucinda’s blood and hair were on the side of the stage weight that rested against the floor and her balaclava was torn. That backs up the evidence of brain movement from the post-mortem. The concrete weight was definitely lifted; she didn’t fall. Without a doubt, Lucinda was murdered. Trouble is, it doesn’t prove Stephen Coombs murdered her.’ He looked at Alison, mesmerised by her reddened mouth. He wanted to kiss it. ‘Check that Penny has got DNA from every person that worked in the show,’ he said quietly. ‘We might have enough to frighten him into a confession.’
‘That isn’t looking likely,’ Alison said warily. ‘Crowther’s getting very wound up with him. Stephen’s refused a solicitor and is answering “No comment” to everything.’
‘If forensics tell us the footprint in the basement is his, we’ve got him,’ Banham said confidently. ‘The likelihood is that Sophie knew who killed Lucinda, and that was the reason she was killed. We know Lucinda’s death wasn’t an accident; we just have to wait for forensics to give us a bit more.’
Banham stood up. ‘Come on, I’ll have a go at Stephen, see if I can get a confession. Sit in with me.’
‘I’m going to go for a bluff,’ he told her as they walked back along the corridor to the interview room. ‘I’m going to tell him that we’ve got the proof that the shoeprint was his.’
‘Good idea,’ Alison nodded. ‘Oh, I meant to say, Isabelle’s finished scanning the pub’s CCTV footage.’
‘And?’
‘It shows Fay going into the pub carrying the cat’s head and Maggie following a little behind. She also has written statements from a barman and a customer, and they tally: a blonde woman dressed all in black followed a young girl into the pub and yelled at Alan. The young girl was carrying a cat’s head. So we’ve released her and Fay.’
‘So Fay wasn’t lying.’
‘No. Maggie was probably trying to protect her. And listen to this: Michael Hogan came to pick up Maggie, Fay and Alan about an hour ago – and he asked for permission to carry on with the show!’
‘What? I don’t believe that man!’
‘Nor do I. He said it’s what Sophie would have wanted. The real reason is money, of course. According to his bank statements he’s up to his ears in debt.’
Banham shrugged. ‘I suppose he can go ahead; forensics have already got all they’re going to. I want the cordons left up, though, and he has to respect them: no access to the understage area or the haunted passage.’
‘I’ll tell him.’ They turned the corner into the corridor that led to the incident
room, and Alison stopped at the vending machine. ‘By the way, did you have sugar in your tea?’
‘Coffee. Yes, I did. It’s not New Year yet.’ He dug in his pocket for coins. ‘What do you want?’
‘Black coffee, but I’ll get it,’ she said fishing around in her purse.
He fed money into the machine for her. ‘Black coffee?’
‘Yes, please. I don’t want an expanded waistline.’
He handed her the plastic cup and she sipped the hot liquid. ‘I’m surprised any of them want to go back to the theatre after what’s happened,’ she said. ‘And how can you have a pantomime without a dame? Stephen Coombs was one of leading players.’
‘Michael will probably do it himself.’
‘Seems wrong somehow. He was so close to Sophie.’
‘I want you to be at the theatre, at least for the first few performances,’ Banham said. ‘Tell them it’s for protection. Keep digging about, see if you can find anything more to nail Stephen. I’ll sort out some uniform back-up. Are you OK with that?’
‘Fine,’ she said, her painted mouth breaking into a smile. ‘As long as I don’t have to go on stage and play the dame.’
Isabelle Walsh was behind her desk in the incident room as Banham and Alison passed through on their way to interview Stephen Coombs. A pile of papers lay beside her computer, and the printer began to chatter out more. ‘Bank statements for Michael Hogan,’ she told Banham. ‘He had overdrafts and loans all over the place. Hardly surprising – he was paying the bills on Sophie Flint’s flat, as well as his own and Maggie McCormack’s.’
‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ Banham said, picking up a pile of mobile phone bills and flicking through them.
‘Lucinda Benson made a call to Stephen Coombs on the morning she died,’ Isabelle told him. ‘And Sophie Flint called him twice, but he said he doesn’t remember.’
‘Interesting.’ Banham turned to Alison. ‘We couldn’t find Stephen’s mobile. Perhaps he’d hidden it.’ He ran his eyes down the two lists in his hand. ‘Lucinda made four calls to Michael Hogan that day, before she had sex with him,’ he said lifting the next page. ‘And she received calls from Vincent Mann and her mother.’ He moved his eyes to the next list of numbers. ‘Sophie rang Michael twice on the day she died. Popular man.’ He screwed an eye up thoughtfully. ‘Sophie received calls from all the cast, and rang Maggie, Barbara and Vincent Mann as well as Stephen – twice. Right, I’m going to interview the fat bastard.’