by Alice Castle
‘It doesn’t seem right,’ said Beth, her forehead under the heavy fringe a concertina of lines as she thought her position through. ‘This shouldn’t be just about the money, an accounting issue. It’s a moral thing. If someone’s murdered someone, then they should be punished.’
‘I quite agree. That’s why I joined the force, to make the streets safer. Thing is, the streets of Dulwich are going to be pretty safe whatever happens to Jenkins’ murderer. Whoever it was doesn’t seem to be on a mad killing spree.’
‘Well, that’s true,’ said Beth, briefly remembering that horrible moment when she’d thought Janice had been claimed as the next victim. ‘But there have been the burglaries, too – they’ve been pretty scary. And the second one, in my house, seemed a lot more… aggressive, somehow. That’s what they call escalation, isn’t it?’
‘Everyone knows the jargon these days,’ agreed York. ‘And yes, it did seem worse; a nasty attack, and I’m sure it was very upsetting. Don’t get me wrong, I’m going to do everything I can to sort this out and get the person concerned, don’t you worry about that. I just want you to be prepared for the fact that sometimes things don’t have a neat solution, they don’t get wrapped up with pink ribbons. This perpetrator is careful. There have been no fingerprints, no CCTV… There’s not a lot to go on. Ah, I think that’s my sandwich coming.’
Sure enough, the waiter, having thudded about extensively in the back kitchen, now came forth bearing a tray and put down a greasy-looking white bread sandwich, oozing with bright pink bacon, with a single lettuce leaf clinging for dear life to the edge of the plate. It looked as much of an afterthought as the fig leaves drawn by the Victorians on frisky Italian frescoes, but luckily York didn’t seem to feel cheated at all. He didn’t bother to unwrap the knife and fork which had been swaddled in a cheap paper napkin, but grabbed the butty with both hands and sunk his teeth into it. Despite herself, Beth acknowledged a reciprocal pang of hunger. Bacon might be decried as the devil’s work these days, but even served like this the smell was delicious.
To distract herself, she racked her brains for more questions she should be asking York. ‘Any news on the forensics from my burglary? I don’t suppose you got anything from that DNA test, did you? That would be good, solid evidence, wouldn’t it? The CPS couldn’t pretend that wasn’t real.’
York put down the ravaged sandwich and grabbed a squeezy bottle of ketchup from the next table, prising the two layers of bread apart carefully with his knife, before dousing the bacon with a quantity of sauce which even Ben would have deemed generous.
He gave her a level look, which she guessed was another reminder that they might never know the identity of whoever had killed Jenkins and burgled her house. He then picked the whole bacon creation up again and resumed the attack. After a prolonged bout of chewing, he was ready to speak. ‘I don’t suppose you know much about DNA, but it’s difficult to get a match on urine.’
‘You said that at the time, but why would that be?’ she was slightly hesitant to discuss the topic while he was eating so enthusiastically, but she supposed that if he didn’t mind, why should she?
‘The thing is that there aren’t that many of the right type of cells present in human urine. Like I said at the time, you need nucleated cells to analyse DNA. The nucleated cells that are found in urine are typically white blood cells and epithelial cells.’
‘Ok,’ said Beth. For a second, she considered pretending she knew what he was on about, then gave it up. ‘Erm, I’m not sure this means that much to me.’
‘Doesn’t really matter about all that. The main point of interest for us is that while you might not be able to get a proper DNA match from urine, particularly if it’s been lying around for a while or diluted – as it was in the case of the sample from your house – you can tell one thing quite easily.’ York paused for a moment to take another huge bite.
Beth found herself waiting impatiently as he chewed as thoroughly as a child instructed to chomp 30 times before swallowing, then washed everything down with a long draught from his coffee cup, and finally wiped his fingers on his napkin.
‘Yes? What can you tell?’ she asked.
‘You can tell whether the donor, as it were, is male or female. But before you get too excited about that, just think about it. Yes, you’ve ruled out 50 per cent of the population. But you haven’t narrowed it down any further than that. So instead of 60 million people in the UK being possible suspects, you’re just looking at 30 million.’
It was no good. York’s note of caution sailed right over Beth’s head. She was hugely excited at this potential breakthrough. If the answer was what she thought it was going to be, it would tie in nicely with the little brainwave she’d had earlier, after receiving Lou’s text.
She leant forward and asked breathlessly, ‘Really? Which was it in the case of my burglar?’
***
It had been one of the most productive days she’d spent since the murder, thought Beth later. And if she’d spent quite a chunk of the day outside her office, and pretty much all of the day doing things that had very little to do with the archives – or any of her freelance work either – she felt a little less guilty now that she knew what her predecessor had been up to on the premises, at least once a month. However much she might be neglecting her duties, at least Beth was not the ringleader of a clandestine gambling ring.
She was going to be looking with new eyes at Sam Radley, the Maths head with his wacky ties, and Geoff Henderson, the sinewy Physics guy with the raw red wrists. They had apparently been in the poker group, along with the French teacher Louise Godfrey and the Bursar. She didn’t know which of these last two names surprised her the most. She supposed it was rather sexist to assume that poker was a game only played by men – she knew that some of the best players in the world were women. Victoria Coren, a columnist she rather admired on the Sunday paper The Observer, was a demon poker player who’d won millions of dollars and still managed to be funny, beautiful, and a new mother to boot. But still. The French teacher looked so (appropriately) soignee. It was quite mind-boggling to imagine her sitting with the frankly unappealing male members of the little club, all focusing on fleecing each other.
On the other hand, Beth could imagine the Bursar richly enjoying intimidating the group with bluff after bluff. Though, surely he would have felt the company itself was beneath him. And she was astonished that he hadn’t tired, very rapidly, of being bested by Jenkins.
People were endlessly surprising. And the biggest surprise of all was that Jenkins had been so good at poker. Well, she supposed, he had to have been doing something with his time. He had been in charge of the archives and that, quite demonstrably, had not been holding his attention of late – if it had ever been a priority. He must have whiled away the time before and after games honing his poker skills. There were no books on poker or gambling in evidence in the office, but then that wasn’t the only way to get information. There was so much gambling online these days. Beth would not now be at all surprised to hear that his browsing history showed that poker sites took up most of his energy while on Wyatt’s premises, once he had vaulted the school’s firewalls.
Though she had done absolutely no archive work today, she decided that 3.15 was not the time to make a start. She made a quick call to Katie to beg another favour, making a mental note that she was going to owe her friend a child-free holiday in the Caribbean and several gallons of decent coffee by the time this mess was over. Then she scooted over to the Junior School gates.
Beth would be the first to admit that her plan was heavily flawed. She had not the slightest idea what Jenkins’ daughter even looked like, or whether she would be picking her little girl up herself. She didn’t even have the faintest idea how she proposed to get into conversation with the woman, anyway. She was much more used to keeping herself carefully below the parapet than to be striking up leading conversations with total strangers. But needs must.
York might be happy to l
et this case peter out into oblivion, but she was determined to sort things out. She couldn’t live the rest of her life wondering which of her dear Dulwich neighbours had broken into her house and brought havoc so close to her son. Nor could she stand to see Jenkins’ death unavenged. He might have been a horror, but he had still been a human being – and an archivist. She felt a twinge of solidarity with the man, shyster, perv, and timewaster though he might have been.
Beth was soon standing with a little gaggle of mothers outside the Junior gates, busily pretending she’d known them all since Reception Class. Some looked at her, a little puzzled, as though trying to place her, but she was hoping most would assume she was a working mother with a temporary staffing crisis, who wasn’t a regular at pick-up. If she just acted as though she belonged here, she was hoping she’d be able to wheedle her way into the gang. All right, it wasn’t something that had worked out particularly well at the school gates she legitimately had to attend on Ben’s behalf. But maybe they were just a tough crowd at the Village Primary. And she had never had a real reason to try and ingratiate herself before. This time, she certainly did. And as it happened, she knew enough about early years schooling to blend in pretty seamlessly.
As it turned out, it wasn’t nearly as hard as she had feared to break into the conversation. Everyone was loudly discussing the Year 2 spelling test, which apparently had been impossible, despite the best efforts of this bunch of tiger mothers.
‘Can you believe it, they had the word ‘apprentice’? What’s the good of that? It’s not like any of them are going to be apprentices,’ said one angry mother, to vigorous nods from the group.
‘Oh, Ellen was fine with apprentice,’ said another, a tad smugly.
Beth’s ears pricked up. Could this be Ellen Fitch’s mum? Trouble was, it wasn’t an unusual name. In Ben’s class at the Primary alone, there were two Ellens, an Eleanor, and an Ella for good measure.
Meanwhile, the woman continued, ‘I did think we might get stuck on ‘apprehension’. Well, it’s that little bit longer, isn’t it? But we just did the ‘look, cover, write, check’ once – and she got it first time.’
There were one or two polite smiles, but Beth sensed a distinct lack of warmth towards this mother from the rest of the crew. That would fit in with what she knew of Dr Jenkins and his wife. Though they both had jobs right in the centre of the Dulwich community, and could have commanded affection and respect, they just didn’t. Neither was likeable.
Beth took a chance and approached the woman. ‘Mrs Fitch?’ she said, tentatively.
‘Yes?’ said the woman, with marked coolness. This wasn’t the way one mother would normally approach another at the gates; it was too formal.
‘Beth Haldane, I work for Wyatt’s. Can I have a quick word?’ said Beth, gesturing to a quiet spot under a tree in the playground.
‘Oh, of course,’ said Mrs Fitch, a little reluctantly. ‘But my daughter will be out in five minutes and I have to rush her to ballet…’
Of course, you do, thought Beth. The end of school was only the start of a Dulwich child’s activities. All round the gates, the mothers were poised to ferry their little ones off to Kumon maths, clarinet lessons, judo, art classes, or just plain therapy.
‘This won’t take a moment,’ she said, all professional reassurance. Once Beth had detached her prey from the herd a little, she was momentarily stumped. How on earth was she going to broach this?
Luckily, Mrs Fitch took the initiative. ‘Look, if it’s about my father again, and the effect it might be having on Ellen…’
‘Yes? Yes,’ said Beth gratefully, glad to have been offered such a lifeline into exactly the topic she wanted to talk about.
‘The thing is, she was shocked to start with, and yes, I did give her a couple of quiet days at home just to rest, but,’ said Mrs Fitch, lowering her voice and leaning in to Beth conspiratorially, ‘it’s just not going to bother her at all, long term. We weren’t close.’
‘You weren’t?’ Beth wasn’t sure where this was going, but it was fascinating. She just wanted to keep the woman talking for as long as possible.
‘Not at all. I rarely saw my father, only when I had to.’ Mrs Fitch’s face was shuttered as she said this.
‘Really? You were estranged?’ Beth asked.
‘You can call it that if you like,’ said Mrs Fitch with heavy irony. ‘I’m not sure I’d say I was estranged myself, but I would definitely say that my father was strange. Very strange.’ Their eyes locked.
Suddenly, with horrible clarity, Beth understood something – something ghastly – without any words being said. But she had to check, just to make sure she wasn’t jumping to terrible, unsubstantiated conclusions. As York had warned her, accusing Jenkins of blackmail was slander. The crime she was now beginning to suspect him of was infinitely worse.
‘Your father was quite… old fashioned in his attitude to women. A little… chauvinistic, shall we say?’
Rachel Fitch laughed mirthlessly. ‘That’s one way to describe it,’ she said. Again, what she wasn’t saying seemed to speak volumes. ‘What business is any of this of yours, anyway?’
‘I was the one who found the body,’ said Beth quietly.
‘Oh.’ That took the wind out of Rachel’s sails, but she soon rallied. ‘Well, if I’d killed him, I’d have stabbed him right through the heart and then danced on his lifeless corpse,’ she said with chilling vehemence. ‘Then kicked him around a bit for good measure.’
‘Well, he was stabbed…’ said Beth. ‘But all that? You must have hated him. Why?’ Beth had a very good idea, but she wanted to be sure.
Rachel Fitch, exasperated, stressed by the wait for her child, and longing to be rid of this irritating woman, suddenly let rip.
‘Why did I hate him? Why was I sad when I heard he’d been killed, but only because I hadn’t had the bravery to kill him myself? Because he was a child-abusing pervert, that’s why. He made my life a misery, until I managed to get out. He turned my mother into a zombie, and ruined her life, too, but that’s her lookout.’
At that moment, a stream of children burst through the Junior School doors, among them a little girl with shiny hair the colour of a bright new penny, who bounced straight up to Rachel Fitch and flung her arms around her. The woman’s face softened as she enfolded her daughter and kissed the top of her head. Then she glared across the girl at Beth.
‘Now, if you’ve quite finished cross-questioning me about that man, let me just assure you that my daughter won’t miss him. Any more than I will.’
With that, Rachel Fitch turned on her heel and stalked off, with her daughter’s little hand firmly clasped in hers. In her high-heeled boots, in tight white jeans, an outsize expensive bag on her arm and a child in a coveted Endowment Schools uniform at her side, she looked the epitome of the carefree Dulwich mum.
They turned the corner to find their car – inevitably, an enormous 4x4 cruiser that looked as though it would be more at home trekking across the desert, and Beth saw Rachel’s face, which was now alight with pleasure and laughter as she bent to hear a story from her little daughter’s day. Whatever sadness and horror lurked in her childhood, it was clear that Rachel Fitch had started a new chapter with her own child, and was doing her best to slam the door on the past.
But how far would she go to make sure that her future, and that of her little girl, was secure? That was the question that Beth was left asking. Though Rachel Fitch had said her only regret was not having killed her father herself, surely that was hyperbole? Could any child really mean that about a parent? It went against nature. But then, thought Beth heavily, so did child abuse.
She wasn’t at all surprised to hear that Dr Jenkins had had one last secret which had finally been revealed. To an extent, his very public letching – which she herself had only had brief experience of, but others had told her was habitual behaviour – was quite a good front for an abuser. By seeming to demean all women, he deflected attention from the far worse
crime of attacking his own child. The man truly had been a monster.
She’d had a momentary burst of admiration for him when she’d heard how brilliant he was at poker. It was something she’d never played, but it involved not only high levels of numeracy but also the ability to ‘read’ your fellow players – an unusual skillset. She knew plenty of people who were good at one side or other of this equation, but very few who were masters of both.
But then, abusers were highly manipulative people. To keep a dark secret locked within a family for years was no easy matter. Convincing the innocent that they were guilty, the suspicious that they were deluded, and – perhaps most difficult of all – convincing oneself that the crime you were committing was somehow justified, asked for or deserved, required a level of evil sophistry that Beth marvelled at, despite herself. Poor Rachel Fitch. Poor Mrs Jenkins. And no wonder, again, that Dr Jenkins himself had so little time to spare for his actual job. He was as burdened with extracurricular activities as any Dulwich child, Beth thought with a shiver.
The wonder, as always in these cases, was that he had got away with it, and for so long. Dulwich was such a small place, everyone knew everybody and secrets had a way of worming their way to the light. Well, this was no exception. But it had taken many years to burst out.
Though the sun was bright, Beth couldn’t stop shivering. She wrapped her cardigan more securely around her, and then wrapped both arms around that. Darting a look at the handful of mothers left waiting, whose children must be dawdling somewhere inside, Beth pondered her next move.
Chapter Fifteen
There was only one thing for it. She would have to pay another call on Mrs Jenkins. If anyone knew what the true situation was, it was her. She might be quite frightening, and pretty much away with the fairies, but she was going to be Beth’s best source of information.