‘I took in their notebooks to look at last week. I’ve got that.’
‘If you give them to me, I could take them out to Charter Hall this afternoon.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they’re only upsetting you and I think her parents should have them. And I fancy a cycle out to Lower Shepton, anyway.’
‘You have remembered you’re looking after Freda this afternoon?’
‘No. Why? Where are you going?’
‘I’m seeing Ben Biaggi.’
‘And who’s Ben Biaggi?’
‘He’s the music guy at school. He’s offered to do the music for Twelfth Night. He’s going to show me his synthesiser.’
‘Oh, that’s what he calls it, does he?’ I said, but my quip was lost on Ellie.
‘And don’t tell me it’s not worth it because I’m probably about to be sacked,’ she warned.
‘I wasn’t going to. Can’t you take Freda with you?’
‘No! I can’t concentrate with her around, specially in the mood she’s in today. He’s going to try things out on his synthesiser so I can decide what I want. I need to be able to really listen.’
So Freda is going to have to come with me and having her in tow will blow something of a hole in my cover. I had pictured myself cycling airily up the drive at Charter Hall, explaining my mission to the chap on duty: just out for an afternoon cycle – thought I’d drop these off – Marina’s books – my daughter was her teacher – thought her parents should have them. The copper would then take them indoors and I’d be able to do a bit of rubber necking. Depending on how things went, I might even get a guided tour, the absurd little optimist in my head told me. With Freda, though, this scenario looks improbable. I could cycle her the five miles there in the child seat but then I’ll have no buggy to confine her in when we get there and she’ll be all over the place. So, it’ll have to be the bus, with the buggy, and arriving as granny-with-buggy more or less demolishes the plausibility of my story. I’m not to be stopped now, though. I’m going, come what may.
I hurry us all through lunch and leave the girls to argue over the washing up while I wrestle with Freda. We visit the loo, we gather toys and an emergency drink, we find my bag and phone. I put Marina’s folder and book into a soft tote bag I got as a freebie at a recent conference. ”English – it’s global” the message on it reads, and just to push the point home, the ‘g’s in “English” and “global” are filled in with little worlds. I never use it – I’m more of a fair trade hessian woman really – so I’m happy to donate it. I don’t know if Marina’s things will actually find their way to her parents, but I’m not going to leave them in supermarket plastic, anyway. We’re about to leave when I realise it’s starting to rain, so I fix Freda’s rain cover onto the buggy – a collapsible structure of metal struts covered with thick transparent plastic. From inside it, Freda gazes solemnly out at the world, making goldfish faces. I think this demonstrates an early sense of the absurd and I wonder if she takes after me.
It’s only when we’re settled on the bus and Freda is poring over Miffy Goes to the Zoo that I realise, with a prickling of my spine, that we are retracing Marina’s last ride out to Lower Shepton four days ago. The road we are travelling is obviously Roman – narrow but straight as a die. For the most part it’s without pavements and fallen leaves are beginning to form dark heaps on either side. Ellie said that when the police first started asking questions about Marina’s departure from school on Wednesday afternoon, she had a sudden vision. She saw, in a flash, the bus missed, Marina, desperate to get home to her mother, accepting a lift down the long empty road, then the unimaginable – terror, panic and death. But that wasn’t how it happened, was it? She reached home quite safely, and found death there. I have my own vision: Marina wandering the house, looking for her mother, going upstairs and knocking on her mother’s door, then standing at the top of the stairs, about to go down and look elsewhere. And then the violent shock of a push in the back, the sickening step into space, and oblivion. Perhaps, please God, there was no time for terror and panic.
We turn off the straight road and start to wind our way past big houses, secret behind immaculate hedges, until we hit a triangular village green with a squat, grey, stone church at one end and a smart pub and whitewashed post office facing one another across the hypotenuse. Lower Shepton; picture book village.
We stop outside the shop and get out into the rain. I have no idea where to find Charter Hall: it may be one of the houses we’ve just passed but the impression in my mind is that it’s older than any of those. ‘Chotlit,’ Freda is saying hopefully, homing in on the display in the shop window, so I take this as my cue and we go inside. It’s very upmarket as village shops go: farm eggs, air-freighted vegetables, Belgian chocolates, several types of olive oil, an assortment of tasteful toiletries and a couple of stands of “literary” paperbacks, not to mention a post office counter, a delicatessen counter and large stocks of liquor, What it lacks is the authentic village shop smell – the sad, sour aroma of food that has been there for a very long time. I select a bag of chocolate buttons and move towards the chap at the counter, smiling brightly.
‘I’m looking for Charter Hall,’ I say, as I hand over the cash. ‘Can you tell me which way to go?’
Stupid! Stupid! I see instantly that this is a mistake. His mouth tightens and he slams my change into my hand. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I can’t.’
Why didn’t I think? Our friends in the media must have been out here like flies round a turd. Of course he’s not going to give out information. ‘Oh, I’m not from the press or anything,’ I say, even more stupidly. Of course I’m not from the press. Do I look like an ace newsperson, standing here in my anorak with Freda wiping her snotty nose on my sleeve? I look like what I am – a nosey middle-aged woman with nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon than come snooping round a tragedy. Still, I’m reluctant to accept defeat. I seize my ‘English – it’s global’ bag off the back of the buggy and offer it in evidence. I abandon the breezy tone and lower my voice. ‘My daughter was Marina Carson’s form teacher,’ I say. ‘She asked me to return these things of Marina’s to her home. She thought her parents would like to have them.’
He looks pretty unmoved but a woman has emerged from a door behind the counter as I’ve been speaking and she says, ‘Well, that’s thoughtful, isn’t it, Eric? I can’t imagine what they must be feeling. And she was such a lovely girl. Came in here most days, when she got off the bus, for bits and pieces. Such a terrible shame. We’re all stunned.’
This has the feeling of a rehearsed speech, honed by repetition over the past forty-eight hours. ‘I saw Renée Deakin on Friday,’ I say, seizing the moment. ‘She’s obviously very upset. Especially with that business over the phone call. ’
‘Oh, do you know Renée?’ she asks.
‘Oh yes,’ I say in a tone implying years of acquaintance.
‘Well,’ she says, and I see, out of the corner of my eye, a silencing gesture from Eric, but he’s too late: the stopper is out and the words are flowing. ‘You know that call was made from outside here, don’t you? Eric saw the woman who made it, didn’t you, Eric?’
Eric has turned away and is tidying the shelves of cigarettes behind the counter. ‘I saw someone, Linda. We shouldn’t jump to conclusions.’
‘A stranger,’ Linda continues, unperturbed. ‘We know everyone round here, but she was a stranger – young and dark-haired – wearing sunglasses on a cloudy morning. We should have realised.’ She shoots a look at her husband as though by quick thinking he could have averted the tragedy. ‘Do you know your way to Charter Hall?’ she asks. ‘No? It’s quite easy. Follow the road along the side of the green and round the church. Round the back of the church, the road forks. Take the right-hand fork and it’ll take you down towards the river. Charter Hall’s the last house before the bridge.’
I fix up Freda’s goldfish bowl rain cover, pull up my anorak hood and trudge off through the steady r
ain. I find Charter Hall without difficulty, helped by the subtle clues of yellow and white tape across the gates. A uniformed policeman comes to the gates in a studiedly unhurried way to greet me and as I’m waiting for him I glance to my right and notice, down by the bridge, a remarkable car: an old-fashioned, open-topped car that I would associate with the 1930’s except that I was married to a classic car fanatic for several years and I know what this is. This is the kind of car that Andrew always craved; the classic MG that he drives now is but a pale shadow of this, the perfect form of the car. This is a Morgan, handmade in a small factory somewhere in the Midlands, I think. You have to put your name down for one years in advance, like entering a son for Eton, and you need the price of a medium-sized house available to spend on it. Andrew would have sold me and the girls into white slavery if he’d thought we’d fetch enough to buy a Morgan. Two men are sitting in this nonpareil of cars having a heated argument, and I’m surprised that they’re not worried that the rain might be spoiling all that beautiful leather upholstery.
I repeat my farrago about the bag of books to the policeman and he gives me a narrow-eyed look but allows me in. I then tramp up the gravel drive towards the front door, watched impassively by a second policeman, who is guarding the door. As I go, I take in the slightly seedy grandeur of the house, its weathered grey stone and solid square front, its pock-marked Ionic columns flanking a panelled front door. When I get to the door, I do a third performance – I’m sure I’m less convincing each time – and the policeman gives me the narrow-eyed look, just like his colleague’s. Presumably it’s part of the basic training. I imagine a module at Hendon Police College called Facial Expressions as a Tool of Policing. He takes the bag, looks inside it with infinite slowness and says he’ll let Mr Carson have it.
‘Oh, is he here then?’ I ask brightly, but Hendon Police College has prepared him for this too.
‘I’ll let him have the bag, madam. Was there anything else?’
I wish I felt more winsome. I want to be charming, but I’ve never felt less so, standing here with my anorak hood up and the rain trickling off my nose. I resort to Freda. ‘Ducks, Freda,’ I say.
‘Quack, quack,’ she cries, performance perfect.
‘I promised her we could go to the river and look for ducks,’ I tell the narrow-eyed policeman confidingly, ‘but it’s hard to get down to the river round here. Do you think we could just nip round the back for a moment?’
He looks at Freda, who dimples up and looks shy in a perfect parody of little-girliness. ‘Three minutes,’ he says, ‘and then I’m sending a squad car after you.’
We set off at speed round the side of the house. I feel honour bound to find the river, and we give it a quick look and donate a few chocolate buttons to a pair of moorhens before I turn to survey the back of the house. There is no grandeur here, even of the seedy variety. What confronts me is a jumble of run-down outhouses, originally stables or a coach house I assume vaguely. The closeness to the river makes me think of Toad Hall, but it’s not spruce enough; it’s more like Mariana’s moated grange. To my left, a door is hanging open – an invitation to entry in my book.
I push the buggy inside and find myself in what were clearly stables – four stone stalls side by side. There is no horse and no smell of horse. Instead, what I find is that each stall is stacked with neatly piled cardboard boxes. Since the box on the top of one pile is open , its flaps hanging down, I take this as another invitation and stand on tiptoe to reach for the contents. What meets my hand is a sharp-edged plastic box, which reveals itself to be a DVD case. Inside, the legend superimposed on a vibrantly pink Tudor rose declares this to be a recording of Amy – “Now a West End Smash Hit”. I dig into the box again and come out with an identical box. I look down the row of stalls and calculate that if all these boxes have the same contents there must be hundreds of these DVDs here. Why? What are they doing here? You’d expect these to be being sold in the foyer of the Duchess of York’s theatre alongside souvenir programmes and t-shirts. I didn’t see them yesterday, but then The Duchess of York’s is one of those theatres where the plebs in the balcony go in through a separate entrance and don’t get a sniff of the main foyer. But why are these stacked here? Is Glenys Summers planning to send them out as Christmas presents to friends and admirers? That presupposes a fairly monstrous vanity, doesn’t it?
I turn over the case in my hand and find a large “4” stamped on the back and the message, “Recorded live at the Aphra Behn Theatre, Marlbury with the original cast starring Glenys Summers”. So, the show had a pre-London try-out in Marlbury. I never noticed it but then, as Eve says, popular culture passes me by. I guess these were produced in Marlbury in an excess of enthusiasm on the part of the theatre management and that The Duchess of York’s now wants nothing to do with them. So here they sit, remaindered, a sad comment on the transience of theatrical glory.
I put the DVDs back and I’m reflecting on this and wondering what other clutter from the Aphra Behn has been off-loaded into these outhouses as I push the buggy back out and the sky falls in on us. At least, that’s what seems to be happening. I sense a movement above my head and I close my eyes and duck. There is a thud and then Freda starts screaming. I open my eyes to see Freda’s rain cover lying buckled and twisted on the ground and Freda herself still in the buggy, screaming in terror. I snatch her up, hugging her to me, running my hands over her, feeling for broken bones, for blood, and all the time my mind is repeating the mantra, if she can scream, it can’t be too bad. Miraculously, I find neither broken bones nor blood and Freda starts to quieten in my arms. It is only then that I turn round and see the woman who is standing in the entrance to the stables.
She is small, slight and very pale, and her blonde hair is flattened to her head by the rain; her hands are clenched round a heavy garden spade. It is Glenys Summers, of course. Up till now, the bit of my brain that was free to wonder what hit us has assumed that something fell from the roof. Now I realise that we’ve been attacked. ‘What the fuck,’ I say, ‘do you think you’re doing?’
‘I might ask you the same question.’
And that would be a question I’d have some difficulty answering, so I keep on the offensive. ‘You could have killed her with that thing,’ I shout.
‘Well fortunately, I didn’t.’
She’s remarkably composed, I’ll give her that, and her voice has that high, clear, child-like quality that I remember from twenty years ago. She tosses down the spade and says, ‘I’d have thought you’d realise that we’d be on the lookout for intruders, after all we’ve been through. What are you – a journalist?’
I aim for being equally composed. ‘No,’ I say coldly, ‘I’m not a journalist. I came here on an errand for my daughter. She was your daughter’s teacher. I brought some books she thought you’d like to have. I gave them to the policeman at the front door.’
‘And then you thought you’d have a snoop around, I suppose?’
‘And then I brought Freda here to see the river, and,’ I say in a moment of inspiration, ‘we came in here because we thought there might be a horse.’
‘Which there isn’t,’ she says, looking at me with her very light blue eyes.
‘Which there isn’t.’
A hint of pink comes into her pale face. ‘I suppose I overreacted,’ she says, ‘but I heard you moving around and I was terrified. I simply snatched up the nearest thing to hand to protect myself. I’m sorry if I gave the little girl a fright.’
‘And I’m sorry for your loss,’ I say, and the formulaic words feel strange on my tongue.
She puts up a restraining hand, as if to ward off sympathy, and then says, ‘I’m sorry not to be able to offer the little one a drink or anything, but I’m afraid I’m barred from my own house at the moment.’ She stops and then smiles very sweetly. ‘It’s fortunate,’ she says, ‘that I don’t have a very good aim.’
‘Good enough,’ I comment, looking at the ruined rain cover. ‘I’ll just leave thi
s here, I think. It’s no use now.’ I take my anorak off and tuck it round Freda. I leave without farewells.
On the homeward journey I devote myself to keeping Freda happy. Or perhaps I’m keeping myself happy. I don’t want to let go of her. I need her on my lap and in my arms: I need to feel her little heart beating and the soft snuffle of her breath against my neck. When we get home, the house is empty, so we have a bath together, which Freda loves, and then we eat boiled eggs and toast soldiers in the kitchen in our dressing gowns, and I tell myself repeatedly that there is no harm done. Will I tell Ellie what has happened? I’m not sure I can, not yet anyway. I put Freda in danger and I‘m horribly ashamed.
When Freda is in bed, I sit down with pen and paper because, despite my fright, there are things I saw and heard this afternoon that interest me and I need to get them fixed. In random order, my questions are as follows:
What kind of criminal relies on a public phone box to make a call?
There were tyre marks along the grass verge at the side of the drive. Why, when the drive is wide enough for two cars to pass?
The policeman said he would make sure Mr Carson got the bag of books. Where was he?
Why Mr and not Mrs Carson, if he knew Glenys was there?
If she’s nervous about being around Charter Hall, why was she there?
Who uses the motor boat that was moored at the jetty?
Who owns that Morgan?
David Scott will know the answers to some of these questions, but I haven’t worked out how to prise the information out of him. I’m just pondering this when my mobile rings and I check the caller ID.
‘David,’ I say, ‘I was just thinking about you.’
12
SUNDAY 26th SEPTEMBER
19.30. TWO PHONE CALLS
Sundays: what was the point of them? Once you’d done a supermarket trip and a session at the gym, work was the only real option, but you couldn’t get on with it because no-one was there: no-one in forensics, no Steve on the computer, no-one to sit in on interviews. So, when he had idled away as much of the morning as he could bear to, Scott had gone into the station and trawled minutely through the interview transcripts and witness statements in the Carson case. Preliminary forensics found no DNA at the murder scene other than the expected: the parents’, the doctor’s, Renée Deakin’s. Whoever killed Marina Carson took care to wear protective clothing. If you were looking for inconsistencies, he supposed there was one here. The killer, or killers, had been meticulous in their preparations: they had studied the pattern of life at Charter Hall, identified their point of access, thought about DNA evidence, prepared the ground with the hoax phone call, but the call itself, from a phone box, screamed amateurs. Even the smallest of small-time villains knew how to buy a mobile with a fake address and ditch it once it had served its purpose. The phone box business had been risky and no-one would have done it unless it was the only way they knew of calling anonymously. He needed to widen the pool of suspects. There was no-one here, among this lot whose statements he had in front of him, who looked like a villain. OK, so the Carsons were less than perfect parents but that didn’t make them murderers and besides they both had cast iron alibis; Renée Deakin could, in theory, have been the dark woman in the phone box, but none of her neighbours had seen her go out that morning and the postmaster would surely have recognised her; the understudy had got a major career break out of Glenys’s accident and Marina’s death but she hadn’t killed Marina and he was prepared to bet that her alibi for Wednesday morning would stack up; Ellie Gray had bent the rules a bit in sending the girl home, but even Paula acknowledged there was nothing to link her to the death, which reminded him that he’d promised Gina he’d phone Tom Urquhart about Ellie.
All the Daughters Page 11