The Redeemed

by M. R. Hall

  Gleed looked up from his notebook with a downturned, bulldog smile.

  'Are you sure you don't want a solicitor, Mrs Cooper?'

  'I thought I was writing a statement, not being interviewed.'

  'No harm in having a little chat first.'

  'Under caution?'

  'If you'd prefer.'

  'Is this an interview or isn't it?' Jenny demanded.

  Gleed settled himself in his chair. Jenny felt his smell at the back of her throat. 'I see it more as an exploratory discussion at the moment, Mrs Cooper. No need for formality for formality's sake.'

  'You say this all started with a retired detective?'

  'That's right. He says it's always niggled at him.'

  'Do I get to see his statement?'

  Gleed gave a saggy smile and shook his head. 'You know that's not how we do things.'

  'What about my cousin? Has he given a statement?'

  'No. As you said, he never even knew he had a sister. But he finds it strange that you never said anything to him.'

  'I didn't know she existed until a few months ago. And I haven't seen Chris in twelve years - his father's funeral.'

  Gleed picked up his notebook. 'Still happy to proceed informally?'

  Jenny was too tense to argue. All she could think about was escaping into the fresh air. 'What would you like to know?'

  'Katy Chilcott, she died on Thursday, 19 October 1972, at her home at 28 Pretoria Road, Weston. She was five years old.'

  'I'll take your word for it,' Jenny said, sounding more agitated than she had intended.

  'You don't remember?'

  'No.'

  'But you were there, Mrs Cooper, in the house. The neighbour opposite saw you leaving with your dad.'

  'Then you know more than I do.'

  Consulting the notebook, Gleed scratched his sandpaper chin.

  'She says you went there every day after school - two o'clock until half-past five. It must have been your first year.'

  Jenny said, 'I have a memory blank. I've virtually no recollection of what happened between the ages of four and five. I've tried to remember, but I can't.'

  'Really?' Gleed sounded interested. 'What do you mean, you've tried? In therapy?'

  'Yes.'

  'Do you mind my asking what you have been undergoing therapy for?'

  'I'm recently divorced. There's been a lot of fallout.'

  Gleed nodded. 'And then you started seeing Stephen Painter?'

  'He has nothing to do with this.'

  'Bit of a pot-head, isn't he? He has a recent conviction.' He glanced at DC Wesley, who gave an affirmative nod.

  Jenny swallowed her anger and answered as calmly as she could. 'Can you please ask me what you want to know?'

  'Your dad was quite the local character, by all accounts. Businessman. Freemason.'

  'That sounds perfectly respectable.'

  'The problem with small towns,' Gleed reflected, 'is folks sometimes get a little too close for their own good. And when your coppers are drinking pals with a fella they're investigating, things can slip by.'

  Jenny took a deep breath, suppressing the rising urge to bolt from the room. His smell, the heat, the clumsy insinuation was more than she could bear.

  'Mr Gleed, I'm not an idiot. There is no way on God's earth my father could be made to stand trial. We both know why you've asked me here and it's got nothing to do with what happened thirty-eight years ago.'

  He studied her with patient, puffy eyes. 'The officer who was in charge of the investigation is very much alive and well, Mrs Cooper. If it turns out he was - how shall we put it - less than conscientious, then it's his head on the block, isn't it?'

  'And the timing of this investigation is purely coincidental?'

  'Perhaps our complainant read your name in the paper. Even I'd heard of you, and the only paper I ever see is covered in budgie crap.'

  Wesley snorted with amusement.

  'So it's this retired detective you're investigating?' Jenny said sceptically.

  'His name's Ronald Pope, lives down on the south coast. He was a young DI back then, same lodge as your dad.'

  Ron Pope. The name did have a distant echo. Why Ron} It was her mother's voice she heard saying it, casually in conversation, through the open door of the kitchen in their family home; Jenny standing somewhere around the corner in the hall, aware of serious adult talk she didn't understand.

  'Ring a bell?'

  Jenny shrugged. 'Not particularly,' she lied.

  Gleed arched his back a little, lifting his arms a fraction, giving Jenny a glimpse of the damp pits of his shirt.

  'You see, we think you must have spoken to Mr Pope at some point, or perhaps he spoke to you? The problem is there's no trace of the files, otherwise we'd have more to go on.'

  Jenny shook her head. 'I don't remember.'

  Gleed waited a moment, as if expecting her to change her mind, then nodded to Wesley, who reached into his inside pocket and drew out a photograph. It was an early colour picture of a man in his thirties with long brown hair, and a full moustache that dipped, bandit-style, around the sides of his mouth.

  'That's Mr Pope. We dug out his old personnel file.'

  The face was distantly familiar. She stared at it, searching her memory for the reason why. No image came to mind, but there was something else - a dim recollection of the sharp smell of tobacco smoke on a man's breath . . . and a deep voice, a smoker's voice.

  'I can see it's stirring something,' Gleed said.

  'Perhaps.' She shook her head. 'No, I don't think so.'

  'Let me tell you what happened, Mrs Cooper, so far as I can. Your dad was seen hurrying from the house tugging you behind him at about a quarter to six in the evening. An ambulance arrived ten minutes later. They found your auntie Penny with your kid cousin lying on the hall floor. She'd cracked her skull and died of a haemorrhage. Your uncle James turned up in the middle of all the commotion and took a swing at his wife, had to be pinned down by a couple of our boys. According to Pope, your auntie's story was that your dad had already been to pick you up when Katy fell down the stairs. Your dad backed her up, said she was right as rain when he left with you.'

  Jenny said, 'Wasn't any of this discussed at an inquest?'

  'We don't know,' Gleed said. 'There's nothing at the coroner's office but a report from the doctor in A & E pronouncing her dead on arrival: head injuries consistent with a fall.'

  You killed her. Her father's words rang through her head. You keep my secret, I'll keep yours.

  'Are you feeling all right, Mrs Cooper? You look a bit queasy.'

  'I'm fine,' Jenny said, but she had no feeling beyond her wrists, and now sensation was leaving her feet and legs too. It felt like the beginnings of what she termed her deep panics. There were no tangible thoughts attached to the building sensation of dread; it emanated from an unreachable place beyond the realm of words. She had once described the feeling to Dr Allen as like a seizure of the soul.

  'Would you like me to fetch you some coffee, Mrs Cooper?' DC Wesley asked.

  'No thank you,' Jenny whispered. The room was turning to a blur.

  When Gleed spoke it was as if he were addressing her from the far end of an echoing passageway. 'It could have been an accident, but why not tell the whole truth?' He leaned insistently across the desk. 'You see, in my experience there's always something that gives it away, some little clue that all's not well. Do you know what it is here, Mrs Cooper?'

  Jenny shook her head.

  'There are two things, in point of fact. Firstly, I'm told your dad was a notorious shagger, and secondly my retired detective friend says your cousin had no knickers on. Just a skirt and blouse. He noticed when they lifted her onto the stretcher, but apparently no one ever said a word about it.'

  He was lying, he had to be, but Jenny's heart was pounding so hard she could scarcely breathe. My right arm is heavy, she repeated to herself, relax, relax, fighting to draw back from the brink of a full-blown a
ttack.

  'I won't pull my punches, Mrs Cooper, I can see you're anxious for me to get to the point: did he ever muck about with you, your dad?'

  'No,' Jenny whispered.

  'You don't seem very sure.'

  'It's not that. It can't be.'

  'No knickers. Head injury. Running from the house . . . You've got to admit it's worth more than a few minutes of my time.'

  'Why don't you speak to Pope?'

  'Oh, we will,' Gleed said. 'We most certainly will.'

  'Would you excuse me — '

  Jenny got up from her chair, her legs threatening to buckle beneath her. Wesley reached out a hand to steady her. She pushed it away and made for the door, wrenching it open and plunging into the corridor. She heard Gleed call out from behind her, 'You can't hide for ever, Mrs Cooper . . .'

  She made it down the four flights of stairs and out of the side door onto the pavement. She leaned back against the concrete wall for a long moment, sucking in the cool air, filling her lungs slowly to the count of ten the way she had learned with Dr Travis. Inch by inch the feeling returned to her limbs. She glanced back at the door, expecting Gleed or Wesley to come after her, but neither appeared. She focused on her car parked across the main road from the station, and made her way unsteadily towards it.

  She waited for a gap in the traffic. Stepping out from the kerb, something caught the corner of her eye. She turned to see a figure in the driver's seat of a blue car parked to her left aiming a camera lens at her. He got the startled, head- on shot he was after, then tossed the camera aside and swept out of the space, passing behind her as she reached the far side. Jenny spun round to get a look at him, but he was gone.

  The car had looked too smart for a reporter's; she couldn't tell the make, but it had seemed sleek and fast. She collapsed behind the wheel of her Golf and tried to get her panicked thoughts in order as she groped for a pill. Would Gleed have tipped off the press? No. There was nothing in it for him. He was just doing what he'd been asked: to rattle her. More than that: to scare her. Damn! She wrenched at the lid of the Temazepam bottle with wooden fingers and scattered tablets across her lap. She grabbed one and swallowed while she scooped the others up greedily like an addict.

  She lay back in her seat, eyes closed, waiting for the drug to work, too jittery to drive. And then it came to her: if Turnbull's lawyers had somehow put Gleed up to this, what else might they have done? Alan Jacobs had killed himself before she had decided to hold the inquest, but not Freddy Reardon. He had died the night before he was due to give evidence.

  How would that work? She tried to reason it through: Freddy knew something about Eva that the Mission Church or Decency didn't want known, perhaps something to do with Jacobs? Jacobs was in a mess, seeking truth and struggling with his sexuality. She recalled the witness at his inquest, Mary Richards, Jacobs's fellow enquirer. Jenny pictured her in the witness box, her earnest expression as she ignored the glowering Father Dermody to breach Jacobs's confidence. His words filtered back to her exactly as the witness had spoken them: 'I've become involved with some people I shouldn't have. I thought they were helping me but now I don't know. I don't know what's going on. I feel as if I don't know who I am any more.' I remember the look of despair on his face, Mary Richards had said. I tried to get him to say some more but he wouldn't.

  Who were the people helping him? Perhaps Eva was one; if he had confided in anyone it was likely to have been her. Freddy? Others at the church? I don't know what's going on ... I don't know who I am any more. The words of a man who thought he was being taken in one direction only to find he was being led in another. Mary Richards had said he told her this about three weeks before he died. That would have been the first week of June; Eva had been killed almost exactly a month earlier.

  She felt the Temazepam starting to work; a warm, slightly giddy sensation like the first drink of the evening. It took the edge off her nerves but caused her to stumble as she groped for connections: the police claimed Alan Jacobs's hard drive had been wiped accidentally. Could it have held evidence relating to Eva, or was she letting herself drift into paranoia?

  For a reason she couldn't fully explain, Jenny still believed that Ceri Jacobs was as ignorant of the truth as she claimed to be. The widow had never struck her as a secretive or knowing woman, but rather absorbed in her role as a mother at the expense of intimacy with her husband. And she had been far too disapproving for Jenny to imagine Jacobs sharing his confusion with her. No, his comfort would have been with strangers. But Eileen Reardon, Freddy's mother, was different. Broken down as she was, she had lived and suffered. Jenny could see that her physical addictions and attraction to strange philosophies were her insulation from a reality she would otherwise be unable to bear.

  But even through the alcoholic fog, she would surely have seen something.

  The flowers, now dead, remained on the floor of the landing collecting other scraps of litter to them, forming the beginnings of a mini rubbish heap.

  The doorbell refused to ring so Jenny called through the letterbox into the dark hallway. 'Mrs Reardon? It's Jenny Cooper. I need to talk to you.'

  No response.

  'Please, Mrs Reardon. Just a few minutes, then I promise I'll leave you alone.'

  Silence.

  Jenny straightened up and cast a glance at the group of teenagers who had appeared at the end of the hall. Two boys with T-shirts stuffed in their jeans pockets were strutting bare-chested in front of the others, but at the same time letting her know they were there, and that it might be fun to scare her.

  She leaned down to the letterbox one last time.

  'Eileen, if you don't answer the door I'll have to assume you're in some kind of trouble. I'll need to call someone to open it. I don't think you'd want that.' She waited for a reply. None came. 'OK, Eileen, I'm going to have to call for help. I'd wait here but I'm not sure how safe it's going to be.'

  Jenny took out her phone and dialled directories to get the number for the housing association. She'd try to get the door unlocked before she called in the police.

  She was being connected to the tenants' welfare officer when she heard a click. She turned to see the door had opened an inch, but there was no sign of Eileen. She pocketed her phone and nudged the door open.

  'Mrs Reardon?'

  She heard movement. Eileen emerged from the sitting room dressed in a tatty purple dressing gown worn over crumpled pyjamas. Her eyes were lined with broken veins. She looked as if she had been drinking.

  'You can't go in there, it's a mess,' she said, as thick in the throat as a morning-after drunk. She opened a door to Jenny's left and shuffled in.

  Jenny followed her into the filthy kitchen, which smelled of burnt fat and festering rubbish. The only place to sit was at a small table stacked with unopened mail and old newspapers. Jenny pulled out a chair while Eileen lit a cigarette from the gas ring.

  'What do you want?' she said, leaning back against the stove.

  'To understand what was going on in Freddy's mind.'

  'You tell me.' Eileen sucked in sharply.

  'I can't. That's why I'm asking his mother.'

  Eileen's eyes flicked towards her as she blew out a thin stream of smoke.

  'He was part of you,' Jenny pressed. 'You knew what made him break down that time he ended up in the Conway Unit.'

  Eileen looked away, studying a spot on the grimy tiles.

  'I've got a seventeen-year-old son who refuses to live under the same roof as me. I know what it's like to feel you've failed at the one job you're not allowed to . . .' Jenny paused, a catch in her voice. Jesus. 'You needed help with him, but I'm wondering if he didn't always get the right kind. You're the only one who'd know. Deep down a mother knows most things. Am I right?'

  Eileen took another lungful of smoke, unable to look at Jenny any more.

  'I'm guessing that part of the reason he was unhappy was that there was no dad around. I mean, you had a partner, but Freddy didn't know where he fitt
ed in. I picture him as a sensitive child who wasn't finding himself, but who had become so angry and hostile that you couldn't reach him . . .'

  Jenny felt something between them change. Eileen reached up with the back of her hand and wiped her eye.

  'Kids like that either lash out or break, sometimes both. Is that what happened to Freddy?'

  'He was hearing voices,' Eileen said quietly. 'The doctors called it psychosis, but to him they were real. He thought they were evil spirits.'

  'Were they telling him to hurt himself?'

  Eileen nodded, still looking the other way.

  'What did you think?'

  'I don't know.' Her voice sank to a whisper. 'I just ... I just wanted him to get well.'

  'The senior nurse there, Alan Jacobs, did Freddy talk about him?'

  'He liked him. He said he was the only one who'd listen and understand.'

  'About the spirits?'

  'Yes . . .'

  'And the doctors told him that was nonsense, that the voices were just parts of his brain misfiring?'

  Eileen nodded.

  'Is that when Freddy got interested in religion?'

  'That's when it began.'

  'With Alan Jacobs? Did he talk to Freddy about the Mission Church?'

  Eileen pushed a hand through her lank hair. 'He might have done, but it started with a black guy from the church who came in to talk to them about how he'd been a criminal, then got saved. I remember Freddy going on and on about him. He thought he was the best thing since sliced bread.'

  'You mean Lennox Strong?'

  Eileen met Jenny's eyes. 'That's the one. When he got out, Freddy took himself off to that church on the Sunday. He wanted me to come, but I couldn't. . .' Tears ran down her face but Eileen didn't sob.

  'He came home saying he'd been cured and flushed all his pills down the bloody toilet. I was scared stiff for him, but damn me if he wasn't like a completely different kid. There was Jesus this and Jesus that, but no pills or booze or drugs . . . I didn't know what I'd done to deserve it. I thought we'd seen a bloody miracle.'