‘Yes. Two. I turned her over and recognised her, of course.’
‘Did she recognise you?’
‘I – I don’t think so.’
‘Why the hesitation?’
Colin Fletcher looked acutely uncomfortable. ‘I shone my medical torch on her eyes. I wanted to see how her pupils reacted. She looked at me and said, “Colin, why did you hit me?”
Marcus Bright broke in, ‘She was obviously quite confused. Didn’t know where she –‘
Scott interrupted. ‘What did you do then?’
‘Then Ellie – Eleanor – her daughter – turned up. She was very upset, obviously. I thought we all needed to get inside. I’d sent Micklejohn to get a stretcher from the sick bay. He turned up with it and Marcus and I carried her through to the school. Marcus had alerted Canon Aylmer to what had happened, and he came to meet us and suggested we brought her in here.’
‘And you called an ambulance?’
‘I examined her again, properly. She’d suffered two head injuries – one, I assume, where the scaffolding hit her and one where she hit the ground. I didn’t think the skull was fractured, but she did seem quite confused and I decided she ought to go to A&E.’
‘You say she was confused. What did she say?’
‘There was something about a DVD,’ Marcus said. ‘At least, I think that’s what she was saying. ‘It’s not in my pocket,’ she kept saying.
‘Something she lost when she fell? Did anyone go and look for it?’
‘Well, no. It didn’t seem important. Her handbag was all right and her wallet was still in it. Her daughter picked that up, with her briefcase, and brought it back.’
‘And the piece of scaffolding?’
‘Was just lying there. We left it where it was.’
‘Why did Eleanor call the police?’
Marcus Bright gave an expansive shrug. ‘You’d have to ask her that.’
‘Did she suggest that you should call us?’
Canon Aylmer, who had been watching in silence from his seat by the fire, said, ‘She did. But there seemed no reason to do so. Mrs Gray wasn’t mugged. Her bag was still there. It was a very unfortunate accident, but luckily Micklejohn stumbled on her very soon after it occurred and medical attention was at hand.’ He smiled at Colin Fletcher.
‘But Eleanor Gray was quite sure her mother had been attacked,’ Scott said. ‘Why did she think that?’
Colin Fletcher glanced at Canon Aylmer, then spoke. ‘It was what Gina was saying,’ he said. ‘I told you she asked me why I hit her. Well, she asked several times why someone hit her.’
‘What did she say exactly?’
‘Just “Someone hit me. Why did someone hit me?”
‘But you didn’t take it seriously?’
‘Excuse me, sir.’ It was Iain Micklejohn who spoke and he was addressing Canon Aylmer. ‘May I say something?’
‘Of course, Micklejohn, if you think it’s relevant.’
‘I do, sir.’ He turned to Scott. ‘I heard someone running. As I was walking towards Dark Entry, I heard someone running along the cloisters on the other side, towards the school. I noticed because it was odd at that time of night and I wondered if it was a boy who’d been out of school without permission and was trying to get back in before lights out. Then finding the lady and so on put it out of my head.’
Scott handed his notebook over to the boy and said, ‘Draw me a sketch of the cloisters and show me where you were and where you heard someone running.’
The boy took the notebook and drew a rapid sketch.
‘And this arrow on the right is the route you took,’ Scott asked, ‘and the one on the left is where you heard someone running?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you,’ Scott said. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’ He looked round at the others. ‘This was just preliminary,’ he said. ‘I shall need to talk to each of you again.’
Walking back to his car, he found that the SOCOs were already in place. ‘Fast work,’ he said to Andy Finnegan, who was standing watching them, stamping his feet against the cold. ‘Anything obvious there?’
‘Yes, guv. Take a look at this.’ He handed Scott a soft, dark object in an evidence bag. Scott looked at it under the SOCOs’ lights.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘A hat. Fur. Russian-type thing. Definitely a man’s, I’d say.’
‘So possibly the attacker’s?’
‘I’d have thought so. Not likely someone just walking through there would have lost a hat and not noticed, is it?’
‘No. Get it into forensics asap in the morning. Should be plenty of DNA on it. Anything else?’
‘Only the piece of scaffolding.’
‘Which won’t have any prints on. You couldn’t handle it without gloves in this temperature. They haven’t found a DVD lying around, I suppose?’
‘A DVD? No. Why?’
‘I’m not sure. Get them to look at that scaffolding against the wall, will you – to see if there’s anywhere a piece could have worked loose.’
‘You think it could have been an accident?’
‘Not really, no. The headmaster would like it to be an accident. Odd, really. If it was an accident, she could sue them. If it’s a crime, they’re off the hook.’
‘A crime attracts more attention. Bad publicity.’
‘I suppose. You get off now. Leave them to it. I’m going up to the hospital to talk to the victim.’
22
THURSDAY 18th NOVEMBER
She hath abjured the sight and company of men
They gave me something to make me sleep last night, so I wake this morning from complete unconsciousness, as though I’m coming up from the depths of the sea. I’m utterly nonplussed at first: the hard, high bed, the white walls, the icy white light filtering through the window blinds are a mystery. How did I come here? Then, piece by piece, the memory of yesterday comes back to me. It comes in freeze frames: Colin’s face looming oddly above me; Ellie weeping in the torchlight; the ambulance men, cheery in their yellow jackets. It comes in sensations: the numbing coldness of the ground beneath me; the piercing light of Colin’s probing torch; the unreality of a stretcher ride through the cloisters; Ellie’s tears dripping warm on my cold face as I lie on some sort of sofa – where?
Anyway, it doesn’t take me long to see that I’m in hospital and to remember how I got here. I must say it was an advantage to go to A&E with a police officer in tow. DS Powell breezed us through and I was scanned and put to bed in a room of my own in no time. (They don’t like police officers hanging around the wards – it unnerves the other patients). I don’t know what time Ellie left, but I do remember her ringing my mother and then passing the phone to me. ‘Virginia,’ my mother said, ’do exactly as you’re told. You can’t be too careful with head injuries. Anything odd – numbness, double vision, severe headache obviously – tell them immediately. I know you. Don’t think you can tough it out.’
I choose to believe that, when translated, her words would equate, roughly, to: “I love you my darling daughter, and I’m really rather worried about you.”
DS Powell hung around asking questions and I told her a bit, but I was really waiting to talk to David. I knew he would come, but I was unprepared for how comforted I would feel by his coming, and how – shamingly – I would weep with relief. I told him the whole DVD story – about the boxes at Charter Hall and the Aphra Behn, about Edmund and the numbers on the backs, and about my DVD going missing. It all sounded so improbable when I came out with it that I thought I was going to have to make a scene to get him to take me seriously, but it turned out that he’d already got a full-scale investigation under way – scene of crime officers scouring Dark Entry for clues and all the rest of it. And he told me what I could have told him – that my DVD was nowhere to be found.
‘We have found a man’s hat, though,’ he said. ‘Do you think your attacker was wearing a hat?’
I got really ratty because I was sick to death of being asked que
stions I couldn’t answer. ‘I DON’T KNOW!’ I yelled. ‘As I told your girlfriend, I didn’t see anything. It was DARK. He was BEHIND ME!’ Then a thought struck me. ‘What sort of hat anyway?’
‘A Russian sort of thing – black fur.’
And then I got hysterical. I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop. ‘My hat,’ I gasped. ‘No, Colin’s… I was wearing… probably saved my life… like a helmet… funny… if he was the one who hit me.’
At this point, a nurse came in, told David off and stuck a needle in my arm, so that was the end of that.
Now, this morning, I’m desperate to go home. I tell anyone who will listen to me that I’m absolutely fine. There’s a block on mobiles in here but I commission the ward phone and ring Gillian in the department office to tell her she’ll need to cancel my morning classes but that I will definitely be in in the afternoon. However, my every enquiry about going home is met by the response that I must wait for the doctor to see me. It happens that the doctor, a harassed houseman of about sixteen, arrives at the same moment as my mother walks into the room.
‘How did you get here?’ I ask ungraciously.
‘Ellie brought me. She’s just parking.’
‘But she should be at school.’
My mother gives me that special look of contained exasperation that I’ve been getting from her for nearly fifty years. Then she has a medical conversation with the doctor. They pay no attention to me – I am, after all, only the patient. I catch mention of “cerebral compression”, “asymmetry” and “cerebro-spinal fluid”, but it seems I don’t have any of those because, in the end, the doctor says I can go as long as I “take it easy” and “follow medical advice.”
Ellie arrives with some clothes for me, which is fortunate as it turns out that my others have been taken away for forensic examination. There is a level of unreality about all this which I can’t quite cope with. On the one hand, I’m quite sure that I was deliberately mugged last night; on the other, I can’t really believe that I’m the centre of a serious criminal investigation.
Anyway, I get dressed, feeling much more wobbly than I expected to, and I totter out on Ellie’s arm. Back home, I put up the feeblest of resistance to being sent back to bed and Ellie leaves me with a tray of tea and toast and marmite, the paper and the morning post, promising to be back straight after school. My mother, who hasn’t slept much, I suspect, goes off for a rest, telling me to call if I need anything.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I say. ‘The last thing we need is you falling down the stairs.’
Left alone, I survey what Ellie has left for me. I eat the toast and marmite and drink the tea but I can’t summon the energy to open the post, and The Guardian seems to demand more concentration than I can manage. Defeated, I ring Gillian again to say that I won’t, after all, be in this afternoon, and then I sleep.
I wake alert and rattled, disentangling myself from jagged dreams in which I’m being interrogated under dazzling lights. The lights, I realise, are the bright square of window, outside which the snow is falling once again. I lie watching it fall, and let my whirling thoughts, as if by sympathetic magic, drift and settle. I start with the last words I spoke before I went to sleep, The last thing we need is you falling down the stairs. The words eddy and settle into the absolute conviction that my mugging and Marina Carson’s murder are somehow linked. And the link is the DVDs. I don’t know how it works but it does, somehow. The other link, of course, is blows to the head. Marina was hit with a golf club; I was hit by a piece of scaffolding, apparently. And I was nearly hit before. Glenys Summers tried to hit me with a spade. Three attacks, all with weapons that happened to be to hand. An attacker who doesn’t come armed. But it’s not one attacker, is it? Glenys Summers was in London when Marina died, and she was in London again last night, I assume, on stage, in front of thousands of people (though I should suggest to David that he checks up on that.)
So that doesn’t work. I struggle to sit up and I reach for my bag on the floor beside me. I root around and find an old envelope and a pen. Then I write:
Where was GS last night?
Other suspects
Neil Cunningham (on the spot)
Colin Fletcher (why there?)
Edmund Carson (DVD)
Neil Cunningham is on the list because he’s always been on the list as far as Marina’s murder is concerned – largely because he has free access to Charter Hall and I don’t like him – and because he could so easily have followed me last night. Could he have known I had the DVD? Could he have spied on me? Could there be CCTV in Alex Driver’s office? Then Colin. I’m fond of Colin and I love Eve, but I have to add Colin, whether I like it or not, because I’ve never been satisfied with his story about what he was doing the afternoon Marina was killed, and because it just seems too odd that he was ostensibly visiting a sick boy at eight-thirty in the evening, and because I remember there was something odd about his face when he was bending over me with his torch out there in Dark Entry. And Edmund? Well, he’s the real suspect, isn’t he? If I was mugged for the DVD, he’s the one who knew I had it and who didn’t want me to have it. Motive and opportunity, and he’d have walked through the cloisters in the past few days, so he knew the means was to hand. But he’s just a boy, and David’s sure he couldn’t have killed his sister, and what could possibly be on that damned DVD that was worth nearly killing me for?
Enough. This is getting me nowhere. I put the envelope and the pen back in my bag. Distraction. I need to think about something else. I put on my glasses and I pick up The Guardian. And then I see it. Not the whole thing – that’s going to take a while longer – but I know what’s on the DVDs and I see, dimly, how Marina fits in. That’s the bit I’d left out of the equation, and I’m sure the police have too. My friend Hannah, half way across the world, had the key to it, though. I feel sick and sweaty and what I mostly want to do is to shut this half-knowledge away in a box, to say feebly that I’m not strong enough to think about this now and to take a couple of the sleeping pills the hospital gave me to put myself into a dreamless sleep. The part of me that doesn’t want to do that, however, the reckless, stubborn, stupid part, has me swinging myself out of bed to totter on my marshmallow legs into Annie’s room, where my computer has a temporary home. There I boot up and trawl back through screeds of e-mails in my in-box, noting in a detached sort of way that my hand on the mouse is as shaky as an old drunk’s. I find Hannah’s answer to my query about Marina. Why would a child’s VRQ and reading scores go backwards? I asked, and she came up with several possibilities, but it is point two that rivets me as it sits on the screen in front of me:
2) An emotional trauma could have set her back too, but you would expect her to make up lost ground eventually (unless the trauma is on-going, of course).
And so it begins to fit. I make it back to bed and I call David. ‘David,’ I say, ‘can you come and see me?’
‘Gina? Are you all right? Are you still in hospital?’
‘No. I’m home. I think I understand why I was mugged, David. I think I know why Marina was killed. But it’s complicated and I don’t understand it all. Can you come round?’
‘Gina, are you sure you’re not –’
‘David, my head is perfectly clear. I know what I know.’
‘I’m just about to go into a meeting. I’ll come round straight after that?’
‘How long?’
‘An hour or so. Try and rest.’
Easier said than done. I feel hot and shivery, as though I’m running a temperature, and I have a moment of self-doubt. Could I be feeling so preternaturally lucid because I’m actually delirious? I do the things you’re supposed to do to calm down, taking deep breaths and visualising mountain streams, but I lack conviction. I can’t calm down till I’ve talked to David. I picture him walking into the room and then I’m horrified at the thought of what he’ll find. I am, I realise, hot, smelly and unkempt. And when was the last time I cleaned my teeth?
I throw
back the duvet and climb out of bed again, heading for the bathroom, where I look in the mirror and find a mad woman looking back at me, her hair wild; bruising discolouring one side her face; her cheeks feverish, scarlet circles, and above them, her bloodshot eyes staring at me in crazed alarm.
‘You have to get a grip,’ I say aloud to my wild alter ego.
I clean my teeth; I wash, I press a cold, wet flannel to my cheeks; I comb anti-frizz lotion into my hair; I clean my teeth again; I dump my sweaty pyjamas in the laundry basket; I return to my room and put on a nightdress – not glamorous but cool, at least. The bed has grown cool in my absence, too, and I crawl back into it gratefully, switch on Radio 4 and compose myself to wait.
It’s a classic Radio 4 programme: some foreign correspondent reporting from a place I’ve never heard of. I’ve begun to get mildly interested in it when I realise that, behind the radio voice I can hear movement downstairs. My mother, presumably. I turn the radio off so I can hear if she starts to mount the stairs and can rush out and stop her. But it’s not her step. It’s a man’s step, firm and purposeful. David already? Has he cried off his meeting? Did I not hear the doorbell? Has my mother let him in? The feet start up the stairs. ‘David?’ I call tentatively. There’s no answer but the feet keep coming. The door opens and Colin Fletcher comes into the room.
I scream. It’s only a small scream – somewhere between a gasp and a squeak, really – but Colin knows it was a scream. ‘Sorry if I startled you,’ he says. ‘Eve asked me to bring you some flowers.’
I look for the flowers, but his hands are empty. ‘I didn’t hear the bell,’ I say, my voice claggy in my throat. ‘Did my mother let you in?’
‘No.’ He’s looking shifty. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you so I went round the back. I could see through the French windows that she was asleep, so I tried the kitchen door and it wasn’t locked. I left the flowers there and I just wanted to see how you are.’
He comes into the room and stands at the foot of the bed, looking at me. I look back and I am convinced that he has come to kill me. I don’t believe his story about the back door being unlocked. I’m not neurotic about security but I don’t leave doors unlocked. He’s got in, just as he got into Charter Hall, and he’s going to finish off what he failed to finish off when he hit me yesterday. I eye the distance between the bed and the door. Could I distract him and then make a dash for the bathroom and lock myself in? No chance, not in my present state. My knees would collapse under me. David. I’ll ring David. My hand goes to the phone by the bed. ‘Excuse me, Colin,’ I say, and my voice sounds clogged with catarrh again. ‘I just need to make a phone c –’
All the Daughters Page 20