by Anna Legat
‘If you like.’ Tara caresses Fritz behind the ear. He stretches and, Gillian could swear, he looks bigger than Tara. There is more substance to the fucking cat than there is to her daughter. Where did that substance go? Which black hole did Tara pour it into? She is a big-boned, tall girl, her shape like her father's. But there is nothing on the bones. Nothing but skin. Gillian can hardly hold back the tears. When did it start? How did she miss it? Was it after Tara came back from her gap year, when she was dumped by that good-for-nothing piece of shit Charlie Outhwaite? She'd taken it hard. He was her first, and he didn’t have the decency to last beyond the three weeks of the holiday. You could call that entire liaison a one-month-stand. Lacking basic human decency... Fuckwit! Or was it later? Last October, when Tara left home to study in Exeter? Was that when she'd stopped eating? Living away from home. Uprooted. Thrown into deep water. Out of her depth...
‘How was Wales?’ Gillian asks, ignoring her first instinct: to talk about food. The detective in her would love to interrogate Tara about that alleged something that she has already eaten. What was it? What time was it? Should we have that verified by the forensics? Should we have your stomach pumped and checked for traces of fucking food? Because I would bet my bottom dollar that we wouldn’t find any!
‘It was great! Really good.’
‘Did you have any cooking facilities?’
Tara gives her a prolonged, suspicious look. She is about to bolt. Any excuse will do. Just as the pizza is about to arrive on a plate. ‘It was a youth hostel. There was a communal kitchen.’
‘Good.’
‘If you say so.’
‘So what did you get up to? In Wales, I mean, not in the kitchen.’
Tara pretends to take the joke in good spirit. ‘Hiking. Lazing in the sun. Drinking – mainly in the kitchen.’
‘Ha! Reminds me when I was young... Well, maybe slightly older than you though. Faster living these days, I guess. And Sasha?’
‘What about her?’
Is she eating like a normal human being? ‘How is she? Overall...’
‘Overall, she’s good. Got a new boyfriend. Rhys.’
‘Oh yeah? And you?’
‘Do you think I’d tell you if I did? So you could run police checks on him!’ Tara laughs. At least, she can still laugh and not fall apart and tumble to the floor in a heap of bones.
Knock on the door. Food.
Gillian watches attentively for every tiny morsel of pizza making it past Tara’s lips. And the morsels are tiny. They are microscopic particles, invisible to the naked eye. It’s a charade, a game of hide and seek. It is more believing than knowing that Tara is actually eating. But Gillian is not a believer. She has to hold herself back from shoving the sodding pizza into Tara with a spade. Her own appetite is gone, which is not like Gillian. Ordinarily, she could eat an elephant, and it wouldn’t touch the sides.
‘...there I saw you behind your boss. He isn’t particularly photogenic, don’t you think? You were quite some improvement. Though I would do something about your hair. It’s got a life of its own. Put it into shape, or maybe just start with combing it in the mornings? I don’t think you knew the camera was on you – you were pulling silly faces.’
‘I was not!’ Gillian almost believed her, but she has her worked out: Tara is doing the talking so she doesn’t have to do the eating. Cunning little devil! ‘Eat while it’s hot. Go on! I’m nearly finished... Should we have a race? The first one past the finish line gets the pudding!’
‘Mother, I’m not eight years old anymore. Stop treating me like a child! I really don’t need that!’
Ha! An adverse reaction to Mother – another ploy to get away from the table. Gillian won’t be caught up in this game. She knows it. She knows every trick in the book. Change of tactics.
‘Shall I tell you about that collision then? While you’re finishing your dinner.’
THE DAY AFTER THE ACCIDENT
Mark is already there when Gillian arrives. She had started the day – or tried to – with Jon Riley in Forensics. Waited forty minutes, inventorising the facts of the case, as she calls it, hoping Jon would shed some light on them. She needed his creative genius, but Jon never turned up. It wasn’t surprising, just annoying. Jon works to his own schedule, which he changes on a whim and without prior notice. Office hours do not apply to him. He can be there at midnight, slumped over his computer and a Chinese takeaway plastic tray; or he can be at home in bed straight after lunch – working equally hard in both locations. He can go AWOL for several days and on the very day when he is due to get the sack, he will stroll in, bringing with him a body of evidence, compelling and complete. But this morning, neither Jon nor his body of evidence were anywhere in sight. Gillian abandoned the wait and went to the station.
Mark is looking bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. His shirt is crisply ironed, done up to the top button, his tie bristling with colours, his smell fresh from Hugo Boss’ advertising billboard. How does he do it? Sergeant’s exams looming over the horizon, two – or is it now three? – young children, a wife struggling with post-natal depression. What’s her name? If only Gillian could remember that, she would ask after her. But her brain does not store irrelevant information. Niceties depend on good memory for superfluous detail. Gillian has long given up on being nice.
‘We’ve got the last victim,’ Webber is triumphant. ‘Emma Rydal. Husband has just walked in. Has to be her. Never made it to work yesterday. Never made it home. Driving a red Audi cabriolet. Checked with the Forensics – we’ve got the right model. It’s her.’
‘Good!’ Gillian grabs one of the coffees DC Webber is carrying to the interview room.
‘That’s for the husband!’ he protests.
‘What? Did he ask for two coffees?’
‘No! The other one is mine.’
‘Now it’s mine. I need it more than you do.’
*
Ben Rydal is a handsome man in a scruffy sort of way. His hair hasn’t seen a barber for a few months, but it has a pleasing bounce to it and a few natural highlights. He is broad-shouldered and well-toned. His 100% organically-green and earthy T-shirt flows over his rippling six-pack. Everything about him is au naturel. The two-day stubble. The windswept hair. The Calvin Klein body. It almost follows that he should be married to a woman driving an Audi cabriolet. Red.
‘I’m DI Marsh, the investigating officer.’
‘Ben Rydal.’ It is a soft voice, powerless.
Gillian sits opposite him. Webber passes him his coffee.
‘Thank you,’ Rydal says and puts his hands around the paper cup. He doesn’t attempt to drink the coffee – just holds on to it for comfort.
‘I’m very sorry about your wife.’
He nods.
‘It’s not the best of times, but I need to ask you a few questions.’
He nods again.
‘Your wife was on her way to work, I understand? Where was it that she worked?’
‘She’s a bank manager. Emma is –’ he exhales, swallows, moves his hands away from the coffee cup, sliding them back to the edge of the table. ‘She was working at the Newport Street branch in Greyston. She was the manager there. Did everything, really. It’s a small branch, only four staff. Emma dealt with everything – loans, mortgages. She loved her work.’ Talking about it seems to bring him comfort.
‘Are you in the same line of work?’
‘Me? No,’ he smiles, almost apologetically. ‘I’m a botanist. I work at the Botham House arboretum.’
That explains why she drove an Audi cabriolet and he wears two-day stubble and a tattered T-shirt. Gillian marvels at the old saying about the opposites attracting. She wonders how they met but decides that question may be a tad insensitive at this point. Instead, she takes him back to Monday morning, ‘So she left for work... The usual time?’
‘She left at eight. Regular as a clock. I usually leave later.’
‘She never made it to the bank. Did they not try to contact you
to check where she was, what happened?’
‘They may’ve tried, but... Well, I don’t know. It has never happened before. Emma is always on time. Never ill. Would they’ve tried to phone me? I’m not sure they have my number.’ He is obviously trying his best to assist, but is out of his depth. He appears so hapless that Gillian begins to view him with suspicion. Are there men out there so out of touch with the real world? ‘Every workplace would have a next of kin’s contact details, I imagine.’
‘The thing is I’m not really contactable where I work. I’m out most of the time and where I go there is no signal. I think there isn’t. I actually don’t phone people from work.’
‘So no-one’s tried to call your office?’
‘Well, no. I don’t think so.’
‘Okay, that’s perfectly possible.’ Gillian endeavours to look relaxed and reassuring. Deep down her misgivings about Ben Rydal are bubbling under the surface of her enforced calm. ‘So when did it occur to you that your wife had been in the accident?’
‘She was late from work, but that happens sometimes. She can be an hour or so late on occasions when the cash doesn’t balance or she has a late appointment. I didn’t worry at first.’
‘What time did you get home?’
‘Half five.’
‘And she wasn’t there?’
‘She wouldn’t have been. She comes home quarter to six – six o’clock.’
‘And when she didn’t?’
‘I didn’t panic at first. There could be an explanation. You don’t exactly expect the worst...’
‘No, of course not. So you waited?’
‘I watched the news.’
‘There was a lot of talk on the news about the collision, I imagine?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact there was.’
‘And then, as the time went on and your wife wasn’t home –’
‘I was beginning... I was putting two and two together – it takes time to dawn on you, your brain refuses to register things. It took a while before I tried her on her mobile.’
‘When was that?’
‘I don’t know. About eight.’
‘And then? Did you try to contact anyone else? Friends of hers? The hospital? The police?’
‘No. I thought she’d come home. Any minute, I thought... I didn’t want to believe... I don’t know... I thought, if I called the police or the hospital, they’d tell me Emma was dead... I wanted to put it off.’
‘Put what off?’
‘Finding out. I knew it anyway. I knew, you see... Emma was such a reckless driver. I always knew.’
*
‘What do you make of him?’ Webber is at last indulging in his own cup of coffee. His large frame towers over Gillian’s pixie stature. ‘Too good to be true?’
‘Maybe.’
‘And he doesn’t drive. Doesn’t own a car. He cycled here. The guy is odd.’
‘That doesn’t mean he has somehow sabotaged his wife’s car to cause a pile-up and kill several motorists. That would be a bit extreme, even for a cyclist.’
‘Do you buy his explanation? Do you really? He waited overnight before coming forward. His wife doesn’t come from work and what does he do? He watches the news and goes to bed. Has a good night’s sleep. Cycles at his leisure to his local CID in the morning – no rush – to verify she’s indeed rather dead! I couldn’t do that! If something happened to Kate, I’d be beside myself. I’d have to do something.’
‘Perhaps it was the fear. You know, unable to face the inevitable?’
‘That’s what he says,’ Mark shakes his head. He is a husband and a family man. Ben Rydal doesn’t ring true with him.
‘You don’t believe him?’
‘I don’t know what to make of him.’
‘He couldn’t have planned it. It was an accident.’
‘Accidents can be helped.’
Gillian agrees. She needs to speak to Jon Riley, find out what the reconstruction has brought to light and what his take on it is. ‘Phone the Forensics, Mark. See what they’ve got on the Audi. We may be onto something.’
Though he was still responsible for paying the mortgage on 12B Sparrow Rise, Luke Orwin had moved out of his family home six months ago and stayed for a while with his parents. Then he moved out again and rented a maisonette flat on the outskirts of Greyston. The owner, a corpulent little man well into his retirement, who wishes to be called Mister Prost, is taking Gillian and Webber up to the flat. He is quite keen to show the police around, and exceedingly chatty.
‘Do you know I never trusted the man. Too many tattoos! I told my wife he was bad news, but then he paid his rent, plus the two months’ deposit, so who was I to argue? We’re pensioners. We need every penny we can make. The attic stood empty. Wife tells me to call it a maisonette because, you see, that’s what it is called in professional terms. It’s very private. You can go up there through the side door and we’re none the wiser in the front of the house if someone’s up there or not. And he was quiet as a mouse, Orwin was. Except those tattoos. They got me worried when I first saw them. All over his arms like shoe polish. I had my suspicions. Both of us did. We thought he was into, you know, children like. So now you say he’s dead and I can’t help thinking it had something to do with that. It did, didn’t it?’
When Gillian doesn’t answer, Mister Prost draws his own conclusion, ‘The world is full of perverts. Never used to be like that.’
They are walking up a narrow footpath to the back of the house. They enter a small utility room which has been converted into a kitchenette. Carpeted steps lead upstairs to the flat. It is a minuscule attic space with ceilings sloping right onto your head, forcing a taller person to walk around bent in half. Dated lounge furniture – rejects from Mister Prost’s own lounge, going back some thirty years – looks like it is about to disintegrate. But there are many photos on the sideboard, in cheap cardboard frames, all picturing little girls of about the same age of three to four years old. Gillian recognises one of those girls. It is the girl from 12B Sparrow Rise, the one who played with teddy bears on the stairs – Imogen. The other two bear some similarities to Imogen. They are seen mainly together, playing, smiling and posing for the camera with cuddly toys.
Mister Prost points to the pictures. He says, ‘That’s what I mean – the flat full of images of children. Paedophile, right? Or I’m Queen of Sheba!’
‘They look like your average family snapshots,’ Webber points out, feeling a little defensive for some reason. Lately he has developed the white-heterosexual-man-victim syndrome prevalent amongst the thirty-something straight white male 'minority'.
‘Ah, but that’s not all! Let me show you something, in the bedroom. When I clapped my eyes on that for the first time, the alarm bells went off. I knew straight away who we were dealing with here.’ Mr Prost beckons them towards a door that stands ajar due to the pile of random clothing that has been casually hung on top of it.
Behind the door is a box room with a narrow skylight, and wedged against the wall is the pinkest single bed ever seen, with a frilled canopy and large carriage wheels painted on the side. There is a bundled-up sleeping bag and a bath towel on the bed, accompanied by what looks like a Winnie-the-Pooh bear with a price tag still hanging from its ear. Mr Prost puts one hand on his hip and scratches the back of his head with his other hand.
‘That’s what I mean, see? What grown man would have something like that in his house unless he was into that sort of thing? Disgraceful, if you ask me. We were going to give him notice, naturally. Can’t have such atrocities under my roof, not in a million years... but it had to be done properly. I couldn’t go to the police because the first thing you’d ask would be what I was doing in his bedroom, snooping around, which is the wrong question to ask, but that’s what police do nowadays: ask all the wrong questions. And secondly – my wife reckons – suspicion would fall on us. So we thought to give him notice and be rid of him once and for all.’
‘We’ll take it from h
ere, Mr Prost,’ Gillian tells him, failing to rise to the provocation.
*
When the old man is gone, they go through the content of a small wardrobe where they find nothing of interest. Back in the lounge they discover an empty vodka bottle and half a dozen empty beer cans tucked behind a settee. Webber opens letters which litter the floor under a small glass table. Gillian picks the framed photographs from the sideboard, one by one, and examines the angelic smiling faces. In one of the photos she finds a man. It must be Luke Orwin if the inky-blue sleeves of tattoos on his arms are anything to go by. He is holding the two unfamiliar girls, one on each knee. He is smiling. It is the round and open face of a happy man; short crop of fair hair, sunburned or flushed skin and a cheeky grin. He definitely doesn’t look forty-two. He looks young, well under thirty.
Webber is going through Orwin’s correspondence. ‘His bank account doesn’t look healthy. Two thousand pounds in the red, interest creeping up. Whoa! Take a look at this! A final demand from Wiggle-Room Lenders. Bloody hell, seven hundred forty-two pound eighty pence on the original loan of one hundred. Bloodsuckers!’
Gillian’s mobile rings. It is Jon. ‘I hear you’ve been looking for me. I feel flattered. We can make it a dinner date, I have an opening in my diary.’ Poor Jon is tireless in his search for a life partner. Anything will do, a hole in a fence could be an option he wouldn’t say no to, but he is failing to attract any interest from the opposite sex. Gillian sympathises with him, but not as far as to throw all caution to the wind. He would really have to do something about his personal hygiene, lose a couple of stone and shave off the Chinese whiskers. And grow up by at least twenty years.
‘Anything you can give me about the head-on? Have they examined the vehicles? I need something to go on. Particularly interested in the roadworthiness of the Audi –’
‘Whoa! Hold your horses! Still getting my head around the scene.’
‘Can you hurry up?’
‘Good things cannot be rushed. I’m beginning to form a picture of what may have happened, but – to be honest with you – it’s doing my head in. You won’t like it.’