‘So Mackenzie killed him!’ Sean hit the table with his fist and sent the dog running out from underneath. It stood at the door, looking back, one ear raised warily. ‘I knew it.’
‘Slow down. Mackenzie just tidied up the mess. His little business plan was going horribly wrong, so he was on damage limitation.’
‘Then who, or is it whom?’
‘You’re too impatient. You wanted to know how the girl is.’
‘Yes?’
‘Thin, not very fragrant but remarkably well, considering she’d just confessed to manslaughter. Now why don’t you nip out and see what Lizzie’s got for us. She’s been sniffing round that barn for at least half an hour. If you’ll excuse me, I need a piss.’
As Rick disappeared further into the house, followed by the dog. Sean sat still at the table, tracing a pattern in the wood with his finger. The grain was like a contour map, getting steeper and steeper. He kept feeling as if he was almost there, but the hill just kept getting higher. There was a murmur of voices upstairs, a creak of a floorboard but no more answers. He signed and dated his notes, put the notebook in his pocket. But he didn’t get up. He was thinking about Arieta. When they’d travelled on the bus into town, she’d pressed her face up against the window. Nobody must run, nobody should leave.
When Rick came back he was still sitting there.
‘Taneesha McManus,’ Sean said. ‘We’ve been assuming she was an accident. But I bet she wasn’t. I think she was planning to leave Stubbs. We need to talk to her friends.’
Rick laughed. ‘Okay, boss, I’ll get on to it first thing in the morning.’
‘Sorry, way beyond my pay grade, I know.’
‘Don’t worry. Let’s get finished here first. Stubbs has got so much shit coming his way, he won’t know what’s hit him.’
Karen walked towards the drive. The air was cleaner away from the farmyard and she breathed it in slowly. Leaning on the gate, she stared across dark fields, lined with the looming outlines of hedges. Here and there the black skeleton of a tree jutted up, fingers pointing at the moon. She imagined it must be pretty in the summer and suddenly it occurred to her that by next summer all their lives would be completely different. Perhaps this whole farm would belong to someone else and Holly wouldn’t have all this space to play in. Karen would have a holiday with Sophie and Ben, but without Max. Maybe he would have the children and she would be free to do something on her own. The cold metal of the gate worked through her coat to her elbows. It felt like there would be a frost tonight, maybe even snow. Perhaps she would go on a walking holiday to the Pyrenees or one of those charity hikes to Machu Picchu; anywhere warm would do.
She heard the office door open and footsteps behind her on the concrete.
‘Are you all right out here?’ Charlie put his arm round her waist. ‘I won’t be long. Just a few loose ends I need to check with Rick Houghton.’
Karen turned to face him, searching his eyes for information.
‘Karen?’ he said, and she wondered if she’d spoken her thoughts out loud. ‘There’s something you should know. The body in the caravan wasn’t Philip. Arieta Osmani made a statement. She confessed to manslaughter. The man was a client.’
She held her breath. On the way here in the car, and through all the chaos around them since, she’d tried to think how she was going to tell him. Now he was making it easy for her.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know it wasn’t Philip. I’ve spoken to him’.
Charlie didn’t say anything.
‘Arieta left her handbag in my house yesterday morning.’ Karen measured her words, laying each one out carefully for him in the order she’d planned. ‘There was a phone number. I checked on the Internet and the code was Pristina, Kosovo. I dialled the number and the man who answered spoke no English. He put someone on the line to translate. It was my brother.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
She couldn’t make out if he was angry or disappointed in her, or both.
‘I wanted to confront Stacey, but not on my own. That’s why I asked you to come with me. I wanted to know why she’d identified the wrong man.’
‘She lied. People do. Mackenzie had quite a hold on her.’
Karen turned away from him. There was more she needed to say. ‘Phil took Mackenzie’s van and some stock he was supposed to deliver. But he didn’t push the caravan into the quarry. They just panicked and left it where it was.’
‘They?’
‘I don’t know what she told you. But Phil says it was his fault, not hers.’
Charlie didn’t move a muscle. She wondered if this was what it was like being interrogated. It felt like hypnosis. If he didn’t say anything, she knew she would have to fill the silence. She ground her boot into the gritty concrete.
‘He’s coming back, Charlie, he’ll be here by tomorrow. He wanted me to tell you. He thought the man in the caravan was attacking Arieta. She was tied up and this guy was about to hurt her.’ She was surprised at how calm her voice sounded to her own ears. The joy at knowing Phil was alive had altered every other feeling. She had no fear about what would happen next. They’d agreed, she and Phil, that the truth mattered now: nothing else. ‘The man turned on him. I suppose it will all come out in court, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t hear it from me. Phil thumped him, and then - it sounds almost farcical when you think about it - the other guy went for him, but tripped over his own trousers. They were still round his ankles. He fell and hit his nose, full force, on the gas heater. Then he didn’t get up. That was it.’
‘And they ran away and left him?’
‘He was dead, Charlie. Phil wouldn’t have just left someone, I know he wouldn’t.’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘He told me that he tried to use his phone, but Arieta was scared. She stamped on it to break it. They didn’t move the caravan though.’
‘No. I know. The track fragments were from a Range Rover. I think Mackenzie must have reversed it to the edge and then let gravity do the rest. I hope those tyres haven’t melted too much to get a match.’
The door to the farmhouse kitchen slammed and PCSO Denton came into view, heading for the barn.
‘I’ve promised I’ll help Sean Denton trace the Chinese girl’s family.’ Karen said, watching him standing at the barrier of incident tape, speaking to someone inside. ‘He wants to make sure her ashes get sent back home for burial.’
Charlie didn’t reply. He put his arm round her shoulder and pulled her towards him. He kissed her on the head and let her go.
‘I’m a police officer, Karen, you need to tell me everything you know.’
She turned away from the barn and faced him. Phil’s voice on the phone was still fresh in her mind.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘He left from the ferry terminal in Hull. He waited until the last minute for the girl. She said she had to check on a friend, but she never came.’
Karen could imagine Phil, sitting in the van, queuing to get on the boat, edging forward minute-by-minute, getting closer to the point where he couldn’t go back. He did what Arieta told him to do if she didn’t make it. Keep going. Carry on. Go south. He followed her instructions to the letter. Found her country. Her city. Her apartment. Found her father, an alcoholic when she left, now a reformed, remarried man, devoutly attending the mosque and preparing for his country’s independence. Karen pictured the man and the woman in the newspaper, solid middle-aged people, either side of her brother. He said he’d sold the van to the girl’s cousin, who carried his building tools in it. Tools to build the new Kosovo. He went into the city with Mr and Mrs Osmani, where young men danced on the roofs of cars and automatic gunfire filled the air.
‘Do you remember the photo in the paper, Charlie? The giant yellow letters in the square on the night of the dec
laration that spelled out newborn? It really was Phil. He got to Kosovo. He was there for the celebrations.’
He told her on the phone that they had danced all night and gone home to the small apartment. They waited for Arieta to come, but she didn’t and he knew he couldn’t stay forever.
‘He said when he heard my voice it was a relief. He knew it was over.’
Charlie sighed. ‘Why didn’t he call you before, or call your dad, just to let you know he was safe?’
‘He thought we were better off thinking he was dead than thinking he was a killer. He got close to taking his own life, but he couldn’t do it. He’s going to hand himself in as soon as he lands.’ She reached up and put her hands on Charlie’s shoulders. Their faces were close enough to kiss, but he wasn’t meeting her eyes. ‘I’m sorry, Charlie. I should have phoned you last night, when I knew. Does this change things between us?’
‘I don’t know. It depends.’
There was a streak of dirt on his cheek. She wanted to wipe it off but she hesitated.
‘Are you going home to your husband?’ he said.
‘That’s over.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘It was over a long time ago.’
She broke away first and thought he was about to say something else, when she noticed some movement in the doorway of the barn. The young woman from the forensic team was carrying something, wrapped in thin plastic. Charlie seemed to snap back into police mode as he strode across to see what she’d got. The other detective, Rick Houghton, was coming from the farmhouse. They all seemed to forget Karen and although she hung back, she was close enough to see that the bundle of plastic contained a yellow and black car number plate. Houghton got into one of the police cars and a few moments later jumped out again.
‘Got it!’ he shouted. ‘Registered to a printing company in Somerset. Must be a sales rep. Doesn’t ring any bells with me, so I don’t reckon it went national as a missing person. Either he was way off his route or no one cared enough to go looking.’
Or maybe, Karen thought, they’d been looking all this time, but just in the wrong place.
Summer
Marvin was pulling Ben along the river path, while Holly ran after him, calling to him that it was her turn to hold the lead. Sophie walked behind them, listening to her music. York was full of families enjoying the heatwave. Karen felt Charlie’s hand in hers and thought how like a perfect family they must look. If only that woman on the bicycle knew, or that man, throwing bread to the ducks. The children ran up on to the Millennium Bridge and Charlie sneaked a kiss on Karen’s ear.
‘Where does the river go?’ Ben called to her. She let go of Charlie’s hand.
‘To the sea.’
‘But before that?’
‘Well,’ she was on the bridge now, helping him up on to the wooden bench which ran the length of the curved arch, ‘it goes down to Goole and it joins another river called the Humber, which becomes a big wide estuary and then it goes past Hull and out into the open sea.’
‘Hull,’ said Holly, leaning her forehead against the metal meshwork. ‘It starts with a haitch. Like Holly. That’s where we went to see my Daddy.’
Karen waited to see if she said any more. The social worker said it was good to get her to talk about it, not to pretend. The front of HMP Hull didn’t offer much scope for pretending. The hard Victorian stone screamed jail as soon as they got out of the taxi.
‘It was supposed to be heaven,’ Holly said, more to Ben than anyone else, ‘but someone was silly and got it wrong. It was Hull.’
Ben nodded sagely, watching a pleasure boat nosing its way under the bridge. ‘They must have got mixed up with their haitches.’
They walked back through the park so the children could go to the playground. Sophie found a school friend and they swung together on the swings, laughing. Karen and Charlie sat on the grass with Marvin and watched Ben and Holly climbing up a rope structure shaped like a spider’s web.
‘She’s a tough little thing, isn’t she?’ Charlie said, looking at Holly.
‘Gets that from her mum.’
‘I was going to say she takes after her beautiful aunt.’ He plucked a piece of grass and tickled her wrist.
‘You’re so cheesy!’ She pulled her hand away but he caught it and held on.
‘Can I stay tonight?’ he said.
She thought about the state of the house. She’d given up on housework. The bookcases were full of gaps where Max had taken his books away. Over the fireplace a ghost frame of dirt marked the place where he’d removed a picture she’d never liked. On the mantelpiece there were two visiting orders with a Home Office crest, one for Stacey, one for Phil and a postcard of Taunton Castle from the real victim’s elderly mother, thanking her for her sympathy. She and Max had argued over the photograph of their baby, Cara, but in the end, he left it for her. She thought it might look nice in a new frame. Maybe she’d paint the wall and hang something else up there, a landscape would be good, with plenty of wide-open space.
To Catch a Rabbit Page 27