The Cradle in the Grave

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Laurie wrote an article called “The Doctor Who Lied”—it’s somewhere in all this mess. Everything you need to know about Ray Hines is in it.’

  ‘What paper was it in?’

  ‘It hasn’t been published yet. The British Journalism Review are taking it, and the Sunday Times are publishing an abridged version, but both have to wait until Judith Duffy loses her GMC hearing.’

  ‘What if she wins?’

  Tamsin looks at me as if I’ve made the most idiotic suggestion she’s ever heard. ‘Read the article and you’ll see why that’s not going to happen.’ She leaves the office with a parody of Maya’s wave and a ‘Bye, hon’.

  I manage to restrain myself from begging her not to leave me. Once she’s gone, I try and fail to persuade myself to put the cream envelope in the bin without opening it, but I’m too nosey – nosier than I am frightened.

  Don’t be ridiculous. It’s some stupid numbers on a card – only an idiot would be scared of that.

  I tear open the envelope and see the top of what looks like a photograph. I pull it out, and feel a knot start to form in my stomach. It’s a photo of a card with sixteen numbers on it, laid out in four rows of four. Someone’s held the card close to the lens in order for the picture to be taken; there are fingers gripping it on both sides. They could be a man’s or a woman’s; I can’t tell.

  I look for a name or any writing, but there’s nothing.

  I stuff the photograph back into the envelope and put it in my bag. I’d like to throw it away, but if I do that I won’t be able to compare the fingers holding the card to Raffi’s fingers, or anyone else’s.

  Don’t let it wind you up. Whoever’s doing it, that’s exactly what they want.

  I sigh, and stare despondently at the papers on the floor. The envelope has made me feel worse about everything. I haven’t got a hope in hell of making Laurie’s film. I know it; everyone knows it. All these interviews and articles, the medical records, the legal jargon . . . it’s too much. It’ll take me months, if not years, to get on top of it. The idea that all this has become my responsibility makes me feel sick. I have to get out of the room, away from the piles of paper.

  I close the door behind me and head for Maya’s office, half hoping she’ll fire me.

  ‘You’re a dark horse.’ Maya folds her arms and looks me up and down as if searching for further evidence of my shady equestrian qualities.

  ‘I’m really not,’ I say. Then I take a deep breath. ‘Maya, I’m not sure I’m the best person to—’

  ‘Ray Hines rang me a few minutes ago, as I expect you already know.’ Wisps of smoke are rising from her desk. Tamsin’s bottom-drawer theory must be right.

  ‘What . . . what did she want?’ I ask.

  ‘To sing your praises.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘She’s never rung me before, and never returned my calls. Funny that, isn’t it? That she’d call me now. Apparently—though this is news to me—she had reservations about Laurie, ungrateful sloaney toff that she is.’ Maya smiles. It’s the sort of smile a waxwork might reject as being a little on the stiff side. ‘Sorry, Fliss, hon, I don’t mean to take my anger out on you, but, boy, does it make me mad. When I think how hard Laurie worked to get her out, and she has the nerve to say she never thought much of him . . . as if it’s up to her to dish out judgements, as if Laurie’s some jumped-up nobody from nowhere instead of the most garlanded investigative journalist in the country. She said he couldn’t see the wood for the trees, except she’s so stupid, she got it the wrong way round. Her exact words were “He can’t see the trees for the wood”. She’d still be in prison if it wasn’t for him. Has she forgotten that?’

  I give my best all-purpose nod. I want to know exactly what Rachel Hines said about me, but I’m too embarrassed to ask.

  ‘Do you by any chance know where Laurie is?’ says Maya.

  ‘No idea. I’ve been trying all day to get hold of him.’

  ‘He’s bloody well left.’ She sniffs and looks out of the window. ‘You watch – we won’t see him again. He was supposed to be in until Friday.’ She bends down behind her desk. When she reappears, she’s holding a well-stocked glass ashtray in one hand and an unambiguous, entirely visible cigarette in the other. ‘Don’t say a word,’ she tries to joke, but it comes out more like a warning. ‘I don’t normally smoke in the office, but just this once . . .’

  ‘I don’t mind. Passive smoking reminds me of how much I used to enjoy the active version.’ And makes me feel superior to the poor, weak fools who haven’t given up yet, I don’t add.

  Maya takes a long drag. She’s one of the oddest-looking women I’ve ever seen. In some ways she’s attractive. Her figure’s great, and she’s got big eyes and full lips, but she’s completely missing the chin-neck right-angle that most people have between their faces and their torsos. Maya’s open-plan face/neck area looks like a flesh-coloured balloon that’s been stuffed into the collar of her shirt. She wears her long dark hair in exactly the same style every day: straight at the top and elaborately curled at the bottom, held back by a red Alice band like a Victorian child’s doll.

  ‘Be honest with me, sugar,’ she purrs. ‘Did you ask Ray Hines to ring and talk you up?’

  ‘No.’ No, I fucking didn’t, you cheeky bitch.

  ‘She said she’d spoken to you several times yesterday.’

  ‘She phoned me and said she wanted to talk. I’m going to ring later, set up a meeting.’ I leave out the part about Wendy Whitehead, and, to be on the safe side, the story of last night’s abortive rendezvous. Until I know what any of it means, I’m reluctant to hand it over.

  ‘She’s one step ahead of you.’ Maya picks up a scrap of paper from her desk. ‘Shall I read you your orders? Marchington House, Redlands Lane, Twickenham. She wants you there at nine tomorrow morning. Have you got a car yet?’

  ‘No. I—’

  ‘You passed your fourth driving test, though, right?’

  ‘It was my second, and no, I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh, bad luck. You’ll do it next time. Get a taxi, then. Twickenham by public transport’s impossible – quicker to get to the North Pole. And keep me updated. I want to know what Ray’s so eager to talk to you about.’

  Wendy Whitehead. I hate knowing things that other people don’t know. My heartbeat is picking up speed, like something walking faster and faster, unwilling to admit it wants to start running. Tamsin’s right: Rachel Hines wants to reel me in, and she’s afraid it isn’t working. I didn’t phone her back first thing this morning. It’s mid-afternoon and I still haven’t made contact. So she rings the MD, knowing I’ll have to meet her if the order comes from Maya.

  She’s clever. Too clever to say, ‘He can’t see the trees for the wood’ by mistake.

  ‘Fliss?’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘What I said about nobodies from nowhere . . . I didn’t mean you, even if it sounded like I did.’ Maya flashes me a poor-little-you smile. ‘We all have to start somewhere, don’t we?’

  6

  8/10/09

  ‘How about if I buy the first drink tonight?’ said Chris Gibbs, not seeing why he should have to.

  ‘No.’

  ‘How about I buy all the drinks?’

  ‘Still no,’ said Colin Sellers. They were in an unmarked police pool car, on their way to Bengeo Street. Sellers was driving. Gibbs had his feet up, the soles of his shoes against the door of the glove compartment, safe in the knowledge that it wasn’t his to clean. He’d never have sat like this in his own car; Debbie would go ballistic.

  ‘You’ll do a better job than me,’ he said. ‘You’ve got the patience, the charm. Or is it smarm?’

  ‘Thanks, but no.’

  ‘You mean I haven’t come up with the right incentive yet. Every man has his price.’

  ‘She can’t be that bad.’

  ‘She’s deaf as a fucking door knob. Last time I was hoarse when I came out, from shouting so she could hear me.’

/>   ‘You’re a familiar face. She’s more likely to—’

  ‘You’re better with old ladies than I am.’

  ‘Ladies full stop,’ Sellers quipped. He thought a lot of himself because he had two women on the go, one of whom he was married to and one he wasn’t, though he’d had her so long he might as well be married to her; two women who reluctantly agreed to have sex with him in the vain hope that one day he might be less of a twat than he was now and always had been. Gibbs had only the one: his wife, Debbie.

  ‘Ask her nicely, she might give you a hand-job. Used to be a piano teacher, so she’ll be good with her hands.’

  ‘You’re sick,’ said Sellers. ‘She’s like, what, eighty?’

  ‘Eighty-three. What’s your upper age limit, then? Seventy-five?’

  ‘Pack it in, will you?’

  ‘“All right, love, wipe yourself, your taxi’s here. It’s four in the morning, love, pay for yourself.”’ Gibbs’ impression of Sellers was as unpopular with its inspiration and target as it was popular with everyone else at the nick. Over the years, the Yorkshire accent had become considerably more pronounced than Sellers’ real one, and quite a bit of heavy breathing had been added. Gibbs was considering a few more minor modifications, but he was worried about straying too far from the subtlety of the original. ‘ “All right, love, you roll over there into the wet spot, cover it up with your big fat arse.” If you want me to stop, you know what you have to do.’

  A few seconds of silence, then Sellers said, ‘Sorry, was that last bit you? I thought you were still being me.’

  Gibbs chuckled. ‘“If you want me to stop, you know what you have to do”? You’d really say that, to an eighty-three-year-old grandmother?’ He shook his head in mock disgust.

  ‘Let’s both do both,’ said Sellers. He always caved in eventually. A couple more minutes and he’d be offering to interview both Beryl Murie and Stella White on his own while Gibbs had the afternoon off. It was like the end of a game of chess: Gibbs could see all the moves that lay ahead, all the way to check-mate.

  ‘So you’re willing to do Murie?’ he said.

  ‘With you, yeah.’

  ‘Why do I have to be there?’ said Gibbs indignantly. ‘You take Murie, I’ll take Stella White – a straight swap. That way we don’t waste time. Unless you can’t trust yourself alone with Grandma Murie.’

  ‘If I say yes, will you shut the fuck up?’ said Sellers.

  ‘Done.’ Gibbs grinned and held out his hand for Sellers to shake.

  ‘I’m driving, dickhead.’ Sellers shook his head. ‘And we’re wasting time however we do it. We’ve already taken statements from Murie and White.’

  ‘They’re all we’ve got. We need to push them for what they didn’t think of the first time.’

  ‘There’s only one reason we’re back here,’ said Sellers. ‘We’ve got nowhere else to go. Everyone close to Helen Yardley’s got a solid alibi, none of them tested positive for gunpowder residue. We’re looking for a stranger, to us and to her – every detective’s worst nightmare. A killer with no link to his victim, some no-mark who saw her face on TV once too often and decided she was the one – someone we’ve no chance of finding. Proust knows it, he just won’t admit it yet.’

  Gibbs said nothing. He agreed with Simon Waterhouse: it wasn’t as simple as someone close to the victim versus stranger murder, not in the case of a woman like Helen Yardley. Someone could have killed her because of what she stood for, someone who stood for the opposite. The way Gibbs saw it, Helen Yardley’s murder convictions had started a war. She’d been killed by the other side, the child protection control freaks who assume parents want to kill their kids unless someone can prove otherwise. Gibbs kept this insight to himself because he didn’t think he deserved the credit for it; as with all his best ideas, Simon Waterhouse had planted the seed. Gibbs’ admiration for Waterhouse was his most closely guarded secret.

  ‘He’s really lost it this time.’ Sellers was still talking about the Snowman. ‘Telling us we aren’t allowed to say or even think Helen Yardley might have been guilty. I wasn’t thinking that – were you? If her conviction was unsafe, it was unsafe. But now he’s put the idea into all our heads by telling us it’s forbidden, and all of a sudden everyone’s thinking, “Hang on a minute – what if there is no smoke without fire?”, exactly what he’s saying we mustn’t think. All that does is make us think it’s what he thinks we’re going to think, which makes us ask ourselves why. Perhaps there’s some reason we ought to be thinking it.’

  ‘Everyone’s thinking it,’ said Gibbs. ‘They have been from the start, they just haven’t been saying it because they’re not sure where anyone else stands. No one wants to be the first to say, “Oh, come on, course she did it – sod the court of appeal.” Would you want to stand up and say that, when she’s been shot in the head and we’re all breaking our bollocks to find her killer?’

  Sellers turned to look at him. The car swerved. ‘You think she killed her babies?’

  Gibbs resented having to explain. If Sellers had been listening . . . ‘I can see what you’re all thinking because I’m the only one not thinking it. What that Duffy woman said – it’s crap.’

  ‘Duffy who?’

  ‘That doctor. When the prosecutor asked her if it was possible that Morgan and Rowan Yardley were both SIDS deaths, she said it was so unlikely, it bordered on impossible. SIDS is crib death – Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, where the death’s natural but no reason can be found.’

  ‘I know that much,’ Sellers muttered.

  ‘That was the quote: “so unlikely, it borders on impossible”. She said it was overwhelmingly likely that there was an underlying cause, and that the cause was forensic, not medical. In other words, Helen Yardley murdered her babies. When the defence called her on it and asked if, in spite of what she’d said, it was possible for SIDS to strike two children from the same family, same household, she had to say yes, it was possible. But that wasn’t the part that impressed the jury—eleven out of twelve of them, anyway. They only heard the “so unlikely, it borders on impossible” part. Turns out there’s no statistical basis for that, it was just her talking shit—that’s why she’s up before the GMC next month for misconduct.’

  ‘You’re well informed.’

  Gibbs was about to say, ‘So should you be, so should everyone working the Yardley murder,’ when he realised he would be quoting Waterhouse word for word. ‘I reckon Helen Yardley would have walked if it hadn’t been for Duffy,’ he said. ‘All the papers at the time printed the “so unlikely, it borders on impossible” quote. That’s what springs to most people’s minds when they hear the name Helen Yardley, never mind the successful appeal or Duffy being done for misconduct. And that’s just regular people. Cops are even worse – we’re programmed to imagine everyone on our radar’s guilty and getting away with it: no smoke without fire, whatever legal technicalities might have got Helen Yardley out. I only know different because of Debbie’s experience.’

  ‘Your Debbie?’

  Would he bother mentioning someone else’s Debbie? What did he know about Debbies that weren’t his? Sellers was an idiot. Gibbs wished he hadn’t said anything now; at the same time, he was looking forward to flipping his trump card. This was his own original material, nothing to do with Waterhouse. ‘She’s had eleven miscarriages in the last three years, all at ten weeks. She can’t get past that point, no matter what she does. She’s tried aspirin, yoga, healthy eating, giving up work and lying on the sofa all day – you name it, she’s done it. We’ve had all the tests, seen every doctor and every specialist, and no one can tell us anything. Can’t find any problems, that’s what they all say.’ Gibbs shrugged. ‘Doesn’t mean nothing’s wrong, though, does it? Obviously something is. Any doctor worth shit’ll tell you medicine’s always going to throw up mysteries no one can solve. How many miscarriages has Stacey had?’

  ‘None,’ said Sellers. ‘How come you’ve never . . .?’

  ‘Th
ere you go – all the medical proof you need, and proof that Duffy’s a cunt. If one woman can miscarry eleven pregnancies and another miscarry none, it stands to reason that one woman might lose two or even more babies to crib death, and others not lose any. Doesn’t make it murder, any more than Debbie murdered all the foetuses she lost. Hardly takes a brain of Britain to work out that some medical issues might be there in one family and not in another, like big noses or a tendency to get varicose veins. Like having a microscopic dick’s a problem in your family and not in mine.’

  ‘Apparently there’s a rare genetic condition that only affects men with dark curly hair and the initials CG,’ Sellers said with a straight face. ‘When they look at their own penises, their vision distorts and they see them as five times the size they really are. Sufferers also tend to have a problem with body odour.’

  They’d arrived at Bengeo Street. It was a horseshoe-shaped cul-de-sac of 1950s red-brick semis with small front gardens, token patches of green. Many of the houses had extensions built on to their sides. It gave the street an overcrowded look, as if the buildings had over-eaten and were straining to fit into their plots. The Yardleys’ house was one of the few on the street that hadn’t been extended; no need, with no kids to fill it up, thought Gibbs. It was still cordoned off by police tape. Paul Yardley was staying with his parents, for which Gibbs was grateful. Dealing with Yardley was a nightmare. You’d tell him there was no news and he’d stand there and look at you as if he didn’t recognise your answer and was waiting for the real one.

  Gibbs looked at his watch: half past four. Stella White’s red Renault Clio was parked outside number 16, which meant she was back from picking up her son from school. Sellers had rung Beryl Murie’s bell and looked as taken aback as Gibbs had been two days ago to get, by way of a response, a wordless electronic version of How Much is That Doggy in the Window? that was audible across the street. ‘Forgot to warn you about the deaf doorbell,’ Gibbs called out.

  Stella White opened her front door as he approached. She was holding a child’s muddy football boots, a blue plastic alien toy and a toast crust. Her jeans and V-necked jumper hung off her thin frame, and there were dark circles under her eyes. If this was what life with children did to you, maybe he and Debbie were the lucky ones.