Dreams of Fear

by Hilary Bonner

  Her injured cheek was sore. She reached up with one hand. The little cut inflicted by Fergus’ ring was still tacky with her blood. She reached under the pillow for a tissue and held it to her face.

  Being careful only to move her head so that she didn’t disturb him, Jane peered through the half-light at her husband. The moon remained bright outside, shining as strongly as a moon ever can, through the bedroom window. Just as before, before she had again done her best to destroy everything, she could see clearly enough the shape of Felix’s body and the way his chest moved rhythmically up and down as he breathed.

  He had fallen asleep again. How on earth could he sleep, she wondered? Felix always seemed able to sleep, whether or not he had been drinking, whatever was happening in their lives. But there had never been a night like this one before. She would not sleep again that night, she knew that for sure. Sleep was her enemy. She had earlier allowed it to overcome her, and look what had happened. It was a wicked trick of nature that this enemy of hers was one no human being could live without.

  She had to talk to Felix.

  The alarm sounded at six thirty a.m.

  Felix stirred then went back to sleep. She shook him gently awake again. He opened his eyes looking towards her. She watched as he began to remember.

  ‘You have the key to the door,’ she prompted him. ‘You said we should get the twins up together.’

  Felix was not by nature an early riser. However, he reached under his pillow for the key to the bedroom door, then sat up at once and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

  He led the way to the children’s room without speaking to her. With the resilience of childhood, both Joanna and Stevie seemed to have slept through the rest of the night, and they appeared to have woken without any clear recollection of what had happened.

  ‘C’mon you two,’ said Jane, in her cheeriest voice, hoping beyond hope that was how things would remain. ‘Daddy’s going to get you dressed whilst I make breakfast.’

  She glanced at Felix enquiringly.

  ‘I sure am,’ he agreed, his voice even more overtly cheery. ‘Now, where are those school uniforms? I know. We put them in the shed, didn’t we, in case the elves and the goblins and the fairies who live at the bottom of the garden needed them in the night?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Daddy, elves and fairies and goblins don’t go to school,’ said Stevie, sounding very grown up. ‘Everybody knows that.’

  Felix smiled his ‘Daddy’ smile. It stretched from ear to ear and lit up his eyes, so they shone with love. Usually it warmed Jane’s heart and made her feel, even on her darkest days, that all could not be entirely bad with the world. But not this morning.

  She left the room and made her way to the kitchen where she prepared breakfast on auto pilot.

  About half an hour later the twins came running down the stairs and into the kitchen, fully dressed in their school uniforms. Jane had boiled an egg for Felix. But it didn’t look as if he was coming to eat it. However, the twins sat down at the kitchen table and tucked in to their usual fruit and cereals. At first sight everything seemed normal with them. Although Joanna seemed a little quieter than usual.

  ‘Are you all right, baby?’ asked Jane.

  ‘I d-don’t know,’ stumbled Joanna. ‘I think perhaps I had a bad dream in the night. Did I have a very bad dream, Mummy?’

  ‘Oh, darling,’ said Jane. She felt her heart lurch inside her chest.

  ‘Oh, darling, perhaps you did.’

  She hurried around the table to her daughter’s side and wrapped her arms around her, hugging her close.

  At just that moment, Felix, also dressed and ready for the school run, arrived in the kitchen.

  ‘OK kids, if you’ve finished your breakfasts off you go and get your shoes on,’ he instructed at once. ‘I’ll be right with you.’

  His voice was strained. For the first time since the horrors of the night, he looked directly at Jane. His eyes were full of pain. Or might it have been loathing? She realized that for Felix, seeing her clutching Joanna like that must have been all too reminiscent of the scene he had walked into in the early hours.

  ‘I-uh, I was just comforting her—’ Jane began.

  ‘Bit late for that,’ interrupted Felix abruptly, in the same strained tone of voice.

  He glanced behind him, checking, she assumed, to see that the twins had left the room and were safely out of earshot in the hall, where their shoes and outdoor clothes were kept.

  ‘We can’t carry on like this, Jane,’ he said.

  ‘I know, I’m so sorry, I just don’t know what more to do—’

  He interrupted her again.

  ‘I tell you what we’re going to do in the short term,’ he said. ‘We’re going to move the twins’ beds into the master bedroom. There’s enough space, just about. I will sleep there with them every night. And the door will be locked. You will sleep in the spare room until we have found a solution to this mess. That way at least I will know our children are safe. Do you agree to this?’

  Jane felt a fleeting sharp stab of self-pity. She was being punished for something that was not her fault. The twins might be kept safe, but would she be? On the other hand, she had to admit that last night she had caused her darling Jo considerable distress, mentally if not physically. The little girl had made that clear only a few minutes previously. And who knows what might have happened if Felix hadn’t come running into the twins’ bedroom when he did? Certainly not Jane, that was for sure. She knew very little except that she had no choice but to go along with whatever Felix wished.

  ‘Of course, I agree,’ she replied. ‘But I would never hurt our children. You must know that.’

  ‘We’ve been through that,’ snapped Felix. ‘You are no longer in a position to even say such a thing.’

  She supposed he was right. She certainly could not tell him he was wrong. Maybe, locked in the terrifying grip of the nightmare world inside her own head, she was capable of harming those she loved most in the world. Joanna and Stevie, and even Felix.

  ‘I don’t really know anything anymore,’ Felix continued, as he turned and headed out of the kitchen to join the twins.

  In the doorway he looked back over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry about your face, though,’ he said. ‘I won’t let that happen again, I promise you.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Jane began lamely. ‘I don’t blame you. I blame myself for everything. Can we talk some more, when you get back? Please.’

  ‘You’ve told me all I need to know,’ said Felix.

  His expression softened a little.

  ‘Look, Jane, you must see that none of it is real, don’t you? You must see that.’

  She made no reply.

  Then he was gone. She could hear him out in the hallway, joshing and jesting with Joanna and Stevie as the three of them bustled through the front door.

  This was the family she loved. This was her life, the only life she had ever wanted. She couldn’t bear to think that she might lose it. That, unless she could change, move on from the unthinkable, she would lose it.

  Jane sat down at the kitchen table, lowered her head into her hands, and wept.

  THREE

  And so began the chain of events which led, two weeks and five days later, to little Joanna Ferguson finding her mother hanged in the hallway of the family home.

  A stunned Gerry Barham dialled 999 as soon as his wife told him what she had found at number eleven.

  PCs Phil Lake and Morag Docherty of Devon and Cornwall Police were the first officers on the scene. Phil was a new boy, recently qualified from Hendon. Not only had he not encountered a dead body since joining the police force, he had never actually seen a dead body in the whole of his life.

  But he didn’t want anyone to know that. Least of all Morag Docherty, who was not only one of the most experienced officers at his nick, but was also cool. Real cool.

  Phil tried to look as if this were just another day at the office. N
onetheless he could feel his stomach heaving. He so hoped he could control it. He had heard about police officers throwing up all over crime scenes. That was not how he wanted to start his career.

  In the background he could hear Docherty speaking. She’d stepped forward until she was just a couple of feet or so away from the hanging body, the position of which was such that the dead woman’s face was on the same level as their own.

  Phil gulped.

  ‘They told us suicide, suspected suicide to be precise, which is what anyone would think at first, but you know I’m not entirely sure about this one,’ Docherty remarked thoughtfully. ‘This woman may well have previously been the victim of a violent assault by a third party, regardless of whatever happened tonight. Look at that old bruising on the side of her face. And there’s a freshly healed scar there, too.’

  Phil made himself study the corpse, still hoping that he wouldn’t disgrace himself and foul the scene.

  ‘Yes, so there is,’ he said, trying to sound matter of fact.

  ‘Ummm, and do you see the way her right arm is hanging?’ Docherty enquired.

  To Phil’s relief she continued before he was forced to come up with some sort of answer.

  ‘It’s either broken or dislocated at the shoulder, if you ask me.’

  Phil struggled to concentrate and to find something intelligent to say.

  ‘But couldn’t that have happened even if she did throw herself off the landing?’ he queried. ‘I mean she probably swung on the rope when it tightened. Couldn’t her arm have been broken just by smashing against the wall or the bannisters?’

  ‘Ummm,’ murmured Docherty again. ‘You may well be right. But combined with the old bruising and the scar on her cheek … I dunno. Then there’s the matter of the children being alone in the house with their mother, certainly after her death if not before. Would she really hang herself from the bannisters of her own home, with her children there? Also, she has a husband, apparently, but no sign of him. One way and another, quite enough to get my antennae waggling.’

  Phil wished he had antennae and wondered if he would ever develop any, and what it would feel like when they waggled.

  Docherty was still talking.

  ‘Certainly not cut and dried, is it? I don’t think so, anyway. I reckon we’ve at least got a suspicious death on our hands. ‘Course, we won’t know for sure until CSI and pathology have done their stuff.’

  She turned to face Phil.

  ‘Do you want to call it in, or shall I?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, you do it,’ replied Phil.

  With only the hint of a smile Docherty proceeded to do so. Phil fleetingly wished he had volunteered himself for the task, rather than deferring to the more experienced PC, as she had clearly expected him to.

  It remained a good decision however. Docherty was professionally lucid as she reported what they had found at number eleven Estuary Vista Close, and relayed her suspicions that all might not be what it had at first seemed.

  When she ended the call, she turned to Phil.

  ‘They’re going to contact CID and get back to us,’ she said.

  Phil nodded. His eyes were riveted on the dead woman now, with a kind of morbid fascination.

  He and Docherty had been dealing with a domestic in nearby Fremington when control diverted them to Instow, following Gerry Barham’s 999 call.

  So they already knew that Jane Ferguson’s body had been discovered by her six-year-old daughter, Joanna. And that the little girl’s brother, Stevie, had also seen the body hanging dead from a rope; shocking and upsetting for any adult, devastating beyond belief, surely, for children. And children horribly aware that the dead woman was their mother.

  Phil found the very thought profoundly upsetting. He had a much younger half-sister whom he adored, seven-year-old Lillian, from his father’s second marriage, and he could only imagine the terrible effect any such discovery would have on her.

  From what he and Docherty had been told it seemed that both children must somehow have slept through the actual act of suicide, assuming for a moment that is what it was. But they couldn’t be sure. Could they? He wondered what had disturbed the little girl. Had there been some sort of commotion which awakened her? He had no idea how long Jane Ferguson had been dead. Maybe the child heard something at the moment her mother fell from the upper landing. Maybe Jane Ferguson cried out, regretting too late what she had done. Maybe, even, the six-year-old had seen her mother jump. That thought sent a shiver down PC Lake’s spine.

  He made himself continue to consider the scene of the crime. The landing light had been on when he and Docherty arrived. The Barhams may have switched it on. But it was quite likely that the light had been on throughout. Lots of families left at least some sort of night light on when they had young children. Had Joanna Ferguson seen a shadow move outside her bedroom door? Perhaps some trick of the light had led her to see the silhouette of her dead or dying mother.

  Phil Lake had no way of knowing.

  He shuddered and turned away. It was probable that neither he nor anyone else would ever know the effect this terrible sight had had on the little girl. He did know the effect it had had on him. Docherty was still studying the body, in her usual cool way, standing close but being careful to touch nothing. And Phil was trying desperately not to show how totally uncool he felt.

  ‘I don’t think there’s anything to stop us going upstairs and having a shifty round, do you, Constable Lake?’ Docherty enquired with false formality.

  ‘I can’t think of anything at all, PC Docherty,’ replied Phil, in exactly the same tone.

  The two officers were halfway up the stairs when Docherty’s radio bleeped. It was the return call from HQ.

  ‘Right then,’ he heard her say. ‘Of course, I understand. OK, yes. We’ll just tape everything up and stand guard until they arrive then. Over.’

  The disappointment was clear in Docherty’s voice. She switched off her radio with an irritated flick of one finger.

  ‘We must do nothing except protect the crime scene, if that’s what it is, and wait,’ she muttered. ‘The new head of CID is sending in some crack team from outside division, and God knows how long they’ll take to arrive. Seems this is considered too hot a potato for a couple of lowly plods like you and me, Phil. Apparently HQ have just realized who we have hanging here before us. The daughter-in-law of the mayor of Bideford, no less.’

  Phil looked blank.

  ‘You don’t really get local politics yet, do you?’ Docherty continued.

  Phil shook his head.

  ‘You soon will in this neck of the woods,’ said Docherty, in a resigned sort of way.

  FOUR

  Detective Inspector David Vogel was in bed and asleep at his home on the outskirts of Bristol when he got the call from Detective Superintendent Reg Hemmings, his immediate superior in the Major Crime Investigations Team of Avon and Somerset Police.

  ‘You and Saslow have been co-opted over to the Devon and Cornwall,’ said Hemmings without prevarication. ‘Woman found hanged in her home. At first sight looks like a suicide, but they’re now considering treating it as a suspicious death, and one they’d rather have someone from outside handling. Plus, they’re chronically short of personnel at the moment, even more than the rest of us apparently.’

  ‘W-what? When? Where?’

  The monosyllables were all Vogel could manage. He had propped himself up on one elbow to answer his mobile, and not even put a light on yet. But the electric clock on the bedside table – an old-fashioned radio alarm clock, Vogel was that sort of man – had illuminated hands. It was just after three a.m. He groaned silently.

  Hemmings started to speak again.

  ‘I’ve just told you what,’ he said. ‘Right now. And you have to go to a little seaside resort called Instow.’

  ‘Instow?’ Vogel repeated. He was very nearly in shock. Where the hell was Instow anyway?

  Hemmings was ahead of him.

  ‘The North
Devon coast,’ he said.

  Vogel’s West Country geography was still pretty shaky, but he had a fair idea he could get to London more quickly from Bristol than to almost anywhere on the North Devon coast.

  ‘How far away is that?’ he asked.

  ‘About two hours’ drive if you’re lucky,’ Hemmings replied. ‘So just get on with it, will you.’

  ‘What?’ queried Vogel again. ‘But I’ve got a lot on, boss. There’s that historic abuse case for a start. We’re beginning to untangle a right can of worms there—’

  ‘Look Vogel, do you really think I like this any more than you do?’ interrupted Hemmings. ‘This was chief constable to chief constable. None of us have any choice.’

  ‘It’s another police force,’ Vogel continued. ‘What is it exactly that makes their need greater than ours, anyway?’

  ‘Vogel, do you always have to argue?’ responded Hemmings. ‘The D and C covers the largest geographical police area in England, extending over 180 miles from the county borders with Dorset and Somerset, right down to the tip of Cornwall and beyond. Would you believe its territory even includes the Isles of Scilly?’

  ‘I believe everything you tell me, boss,’ said Vogel, who was beginning to clear his head but wasn’t entirely sure that he wanted to.

  ‘I should bloody well think so,’ countered Hemmings. ‘Right well, the D and C’s Major Crimes Team is stretched to breaking point at the moment, an ongoing double murder enquiry in Penzance and that missing child in Dorset that’s all over the press. So we’re helping out, Vogel, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘All right,’ muttered Vogel resignedly. ‘Do I not even get a proper briefing?’

  ‘I’ll email you all that I have. Full name and address of the deceased obviously. And the preliminary report from the two uniforms who were first on the scene. They were the ones who alerted the brass to the fact that this might not be the domestic tragedy it first seemed.’

  ‘All right,’ said Vogel again. ‘I’ll call Saslow then. Get her to come and pick me up on the way—’