Weep a While Longer

by Penny Freedman

  ‘We think Jamilleh was attacked because she told us that the person in the niqab was a man, but he must have thought she knew more than that, mustn’t he? Because just knowing he was a man was no good to us. He must have thought that she actually recognised him.’

  ‘She said she didn’t,’ Paula put in. ‘She was sure it was a man but she didn’t know him.’

  ‘But maybe he didn’t know that. And if he thought she’d recognised him just from his eyes, then he must be someone she sees regularly, a friend or neighbour.’

  ‘Well, we’ve always assumed that he comes from the Muslim community,’ Scott said. ‘How else would he have got hold of a niqab? But that doesn’t get us far, and we certainly can’t start interviewing people on the grounds that they’re Muslim men. We need to narrow it down.’

  ‘And we need to think about the kind of life Jamilleh leads,’ Paula said. ‘She’ll spend most of her time with other women and with children, won’t she? So this man would need to be a relative or a neighbour.’

  ‘The place she goes to regularly is the day nursery, isn’t it?’ Darren Floyd said. ‘Suppose this guy is a paedo and she’s seen him hanging around there before? She hasn’t put him together with the man she saw in the niqab thing, but she might at any time.’

  ‘What, hanging about in different disguises, Darren? That’s stretching it a bit, isn’t it?’ Paula asked.

  ‘No, in fact, it’s not, DS Powell. Maybe he was legit – had a child in the nursery, who’s now at school, but he still needs his fix, so he’s finding ways to hang around.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Steve conceded reluctantly, ‘And maybe that’s what Karen knew too. She’d spotted him and he knew it, and he suspected that Lara might tell someone too. Remember there was something in Gina Gray’s statement about Lara laughing when the dog attacked? That always seemed odd but it wouldn’t if Karen had warned Lara that he was a nasty piece of work.’

  ‘It’s a nice, neat solution,’ Scott said, ‘but I’m not sure it’ll wash. If Karen thought there was a paedophile hanging around the nursery, why didn’t other people see him? The staff, too? And why was it such a problem for her to inform us? What kind of moral dilemma could she have had?’

  ‘If he was a relative or a close friend’s husband, or a boyfriend even?’

  ‘None of which Karen seems to have had. No brothers, no close friends, no boyfriends.’

  ‘Suppose he threatened her – or threatened Lara? That could have been why she wanted the Samaritans to pass on the information to us, couldn’t it?’ Paula suggested.

  Scott considered. ‘You’re right. It’s not impossible. We need to find out whether the staff at the nursery have been aware of children being approached by a man. If this guy did no more than hang about you wouldn’t expect him to start killing people who noticed him.’

  ‘Except,’ said Darren Floyd, ‘you know how people are around paedos. Chances are this guy lives on Eastgate. If we’d even spoken to him it would have gone round like the clap. Next thing they’d be stringing him up.’

  ‘Which reminds me,’ Scott said, ‘talking of things going round. How did Jamilleh’s attacker know about her suspicions? The incident with the dog was more than a week ago. He didn’t take action immediately. He took action after she spoke to Paula. He could assume that she hadn’t identified him to Paula because he wasn’t questioned, but he decided she had to be silenced before she said any more. How did he know that she had talked to us? Paula interviewed her at the university and reported to us on Tuesday evening. The other people present at the interview were her friend, Farah, and Gina Gray who sat in to help out if Jamilleh’s grasp of English caused problems. Jamilleh and Farah had managed to keep it quiet until they spoke to Paula, so it seems unlikely that they went home and started blabbing. I would very much like to know whose tongue has been wagging and how far the information has gone.’

  The room had gone very still. David allowed the silence to stretch out before he said, ‘Well, if anyone wants to talk to me they know where to find me. Paula, as soon as we get the warrant, you take Mike with you and go back to the Samaritans. I’m going to talk again to Malcolm Burns and I’ll chase up Rashid Malik on possible sources for this guy’s niqab. Sarah, you’re getting onto The Scrubs about Karen’s visits to Doug Brody and his phone calls. I’ll go and talk to him again tomorrow. You can come with me to The Scrubs, Darren.’ When Darren Floyd looked about to protest, Scott asked, ‘You weren’t expecting the weekend off, were you? When we’ve got a double murder and a serious assault on our hands?’ Without waiting for a reply, he went on, ‘Steve, check out Jamilleh Hamidi’s address and check out her neighbours for anyone known to us. Nothing new on Doug Brody’s associates, I suppose? No? Well keep on it. Sarah, go back to the hospital. See if Jamilleh has anything more to say. Darren, go along to Acorns and find out if they’ve had any concerns about a man hanging around there. And mind your language. Cut out the paedo references. And everyone, the attack on Jamilleh has brought the media down on us again, as you’ll have seen. I made a statement yesterday and now they’ll have to wait until there are further developments. You don’t talk to anyone. Right? And bring me the developments.’

  As they filtered out of the room, Scott looked at his phone. He had had no reply to his text to Gina the previous day. He considered ringing her to make sure that she was all right. He was somewhat ashamed of that text, really: ashamed of the relief he had felt when his call went unanswered, and ashamed of the impersonal tone of the text itself. She was entitled to better than that, of course she was, but this case called for his full attention and he couldn’t be distracted by the need to mend things with her. Mending would need to be done, he knew that, but it would have to wait until they had caught their killer. He couldn’t afford the expenditure of energy that any negotiation with Gina involved. In good form, he relished the duel, the lightning flick of the wrist, the feints, the nifty footwork that was called for, but this case was demanding everything from him. The media were snapping at his heels, hungry for every detail, and would soon turn against him if progress seemed to stall. At the same time, his team was laughably underpowered for this sort of case – and they were distressed by it. They might joke around or play blasé, but he could feel their tension and their frustration at not making faster progress. As for Paula, she was wound up tight enough to break. This was her case, after all; she had seen the bodies; he could see how personal this felt to her. He was doing his best to be tactful and not to sideline her but it was his case now, his failure if they didn’t find the killer soon. They had all been shaken by the attack on Jamilleh Hamidi; another attack like that would be his responsibility.

  It was always too much to hope, of course, that a murder could happen in Marlbury without Gina finding some connection with it, and he had to admit that she had been useful in putting him onto Malcolm Burns and the Iranian women, but the trouble with her was that she had no respect for police work, really. She was quick with her insights, of course, and dogged in her way, when she got her teeth into a case, but she despised the painstaking slog that was ninety-five per cent of police work. And she underestimated the skills of good police officers: intelligence, observation and empathy; the ability to see patterns and cut through the irrelevant; thinking both linear and lateral. The fractious weekends they had spent over the past weeks, when he had been working with the Met, had not been altogether her fault, but they owed a lot to her insistence on regarding his secondment as a sort of sabbatical, as though he was just swanning around New Scotland Yard playing at policing. In fact it had been demanding, stressful and often demoralising. The Met officers he was working with regarded him as a provincial who could not possibly understand the complexity and seriousness of global crime. At any opportunity they would make him feel like a slow-minded rustic, so he had to be twice as well-prepared and twice as focussed as everyone else just to stay in the game. This, combined with a lot of eating out alone in unfriendly London and miserable evenin
gs spent in a B&B, meant that what he wanted at weekends was some peace and quiet and, quite frankly, some TLC. But TLC was not Gina’s strong point, and what she wanted from their weekends, he knew, was fun. The trouble was that Gina’s concept of fun inevitably involved an element of verbal combat and that had too often turned into linguistic sumo wrestling.

  It could be mended, and it would be, once this case was done. In the meantime, he was pretty sure that it was her tongue that had wagged over Paula’s interview with Jamilleh and that annoyed him, as well as making him unwilling to talk to her. She would only prise more information out of him, which she would then feed into the rumour mill. If she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, then she couldn’t blame him for keeping his distance. He put his phone away.

  16

  Friday 27th July

  Relative Values

  Annie is in a foul mood this morning. She comes down early, before any of the others are stirring, and sits and glowers at me while I’m drinking my morning coffee. I know better than to ask outright what the matter is; she will simply yell at me for not having the sensitivity to intuit the nature of her pain. Instead, I pretend obliviousness and try to involve her in the crossword. The glower darkens; torrents threaten. I give in.

  ‘Is there anything particular the matter?’ I venture.

  She slams her mobile across the table at me. ‘Only being woken at seven thirty in the morning by a crap text message,’ she growls.

  ‘Oh, crap text messages,’ I say. ‘I know all about them.’ But she is not interested in my problems.

  ‘Well, look at it,’ she storms.

  I pick up the phone, afraid that this will be her charming, sweet-natured and altogether desirable medical student boyfriend, Jon, finally deciding that she is too much like hard work and declaring his intention to move on, but the message is from Andrew. He is sorry that he can’t get to the play. Family stuff. He is sure she will understand. I immediately feel guilty. This has been prompted by my reminder to Andrew. He had obviously forgotten all about the play. If I’d said nothing, he would have said nothing and Annie might not even have noticed that he hadn’t been to the play. Yes, she would. Of course she would. That he takes an interest in her matters to her and I could kill him for that. The girls got used to Andrew’s lack of interest in them even before I divorced him. We were a contented little trio during their teenage years. We screamed at each other quite a bit, but that didn’t matter; we knew we could rely on each other, and Andrew hardly impinged at all. He had rights, of course; he was supposed to see them every other weekend, but he’s an international lawyer and he was often away, and the girls increasingly had weekend activities – dance and drama classes, hockey matches and birthday sleepovers. The weekend visits dwindled from sporadic to blue moon frequency and no-one, it seemed to me, minded. Then Annie involved Andrew in her plan to study law, he encouraged her to try for his old college at Oxford, she got in and there was a very irritating love-in between the two of them for a few months, until baby Arthur stopped mewling and puking, hauled himself to his feet and became a delightful toddler, followed briskly by baby Hubert, who will, no doubt, be equally delightful soon. Andrew has sons; they are the pride of his heart and Annie has been dumped.

  I push the phone back to Annie. She takes it and rereads the message. Is this to fuel her rage or in the hope of a crumb of comfort? I need to deflect her. I know from experience how this will go otherwise. She will start offloading, beginning with Andrew but then allowing the whirlpool of her discontent to suck in all the other annoyances and injustices of her life while I attempt helpful comments and suggestions, only to find that at the dark, swirling core of this whirlpool one person is to blame for everything, and that, it turns out, is me. I have been there before and I am anxious not to go there again.

  ‘I’m reading Bring up the Bodies,’ I say. ‘I’ll lend it to you when I’ve finished. It explains a lot about fathers and sons.’

  She says, ‘Pa isn’t the King of England. The fate of the country doesn’t depend on his having a son and heir.’

  ‘I know. I’m just saying there’s a thing about men and sons. I don’t think I realised it. I couldn’t see any reason why Andrew shouldn’t be delighted to have you and Ellie, but he wasn’t. I thought he just didn’t like children, but now I think if you and Ellie had been boys we might still be married.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry if we screwed up your life for you.’

  ‘Not at all. You revealed him in his true colours and I have never regretted divorcing him.’ I drain my nearly cold coffee. ‘If Lavender had produced another couple of girls, I don’t think she’d have lasted long,’ I say.

  ‘He’d have had her beheaded, would he?’ she asks, with the morning’s first glimmer of a smile.

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘And this aperçu of yours is supposed to help me how?’

  ‘It’s supposed to tell you that it’s not personal. It’s not a judgement on you. Pa just likes the boys because they’re boys. If anything, I’m the one who should feel it personally. Lavender is so much the opposite of me in every way, I can’t help feeling that definitively-not-Gina was what Andrew was looking for second time around.’

  ‘Well she is fragrant, of course, dear Lavender.’ She fetches a mug and pours herself some coffee.

  ‘She is sweet and soft and fragrant and pliable. And rich, of course.’

  ‘You make her sound like a cake.’

  ‘So she is. She is like a particularly delicious little cake with pink icing on the top and little sugar flowers. One that you have to handle with care or it will crumble to pieces in your hand.’

  ‘And what are you?’ She is watching me over the rim of her mug and I think she’s smiling.

  ‘Oh, I’m one of those thick, solid slabs of flapjack – terribly worthy, full of fibre and likely to break your teeth if you’re not careful.’

  She lets out a hoot of laughter. ‘You actually are quite a funny woman, you know, Ma.’ She swirls her coffee round. ‘Men, you know – well boys, really – they make jokes all the time. It’s the way they come on to you. Trouble is, they’re mostly not as funny as you.’

  With this, she gets up and leaves, saying as she goes, ‘You know Jon’s arriving this evening, don’t you? I shall be at the theatre. Can you give him some supper?’

  ‘Well, no,’ I call after her. ‘I’ve got the tech for Much Ado. I shan’t be here.’

  ‘Oh well, just leave him something, then. He’s not fussy.’

  Her voice floats down airily from the stairs.

  ‘How’s he going to get in, Annie?’ I ask, going to the foot of the stairs.

  ‘I’ll tell him about the key in the shed,’ she says over her shoulder, and disappears into her room.

  The key in the shed. We have always kept a key in the shed, under an old bird bath which turned rusty but never made it to the tip. We have had it there for years and I have never worried about the insecurity of the arrangement until now, when I’ve been told to be aware. That seemed to be a perfectly useless injunction and I couldn’t see what practical action I could take, but now I see that not having a key to my house available to anyone who takes the trouble to go through the side gate (bolt broken) and look in a few childishly obvious places in my shed might be the sort of thing David had in mind.

  It seems suddenly urgent that I retrieve the key and I run out to the shed – pyjamas, bare feet and all – and lift up the bird bath to find nothing there. I stare stupidly at the empty space, then get down on my knees, regardless of the filthy floor, and grope around helplessly for the key which I feel must be here. I run back indoors and bang on Annie’s bedroom door. She opens it and peers out at me, looking irritated. I can hear music from inside. The other girls are sleeping in her room too, on an old studio couch with broken springs.

  ‘Someone’s taken the key,’ I say. ‘I just went to check.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me. I haven’t used it for years. I don’t live here, remember
?’

  You could have fooled me.

  ‘And it wasn’t me. That’s the point. I always have my key with me. It’s on the same ring as my office key and the one to my bike padlock. That’s what I mean. Someone’s stolen it.’

  She looks at me in puzzlement. ‘So Ellie’s got it,’ she says.

  ‘Ellie hasn’t lived here for eighteen months. Why would she have it?’

  ‘So the last person who used it forgot to put it back and nobody has needed it for ages so we didn’t notice it was gone. Doesn’t matter. I’ll leave my key for Jon.’

  ‘No!’ My voice comes out very sharp and startles her. I take a breath. ‘We’ve had a few break-ins in the road,’ I say. ‘I think we ought to be a bit careful. Why don’t you tell Jon to go to Ellie’s house and get her key?’ ’

  She opens her mouth to argue but I think the agitation she’s picking up from me stops her. She shrugs. ‘OK,’ she says and retreats into the room, closing the door on me.

  I go and shower, taking care with my dirty feet, and dress for a day which involves a morning with Freda, an afternoon with my wives and an evening in the abbey gardens (where I shall, of course, be wearing a farthingale). I offered yesterday to take Freda out this morning because she has had her allotted quota of holiday activities, Nico was still fretful and Ellie was looking fraught. This afternoon I shall go in to teach the wives but I’m not sure how many will be there. I have managed to get news of Jamilleh by the simple expedient of finding her husband’s university email address and contacting him. I got a reply – brief and guarded – yesterday evening, telling me that Jamilleh was improving but would be in hospital until next week. I doubt that Farah will be there, if she has had the be aware warning, and it may be that the others are steering clear of the campus too, if Andrew’s anxiety for Lavender is anything to go by.