“Did she?” I ask, half hoping that Linda’s chatter might reveal something new. My peace offering to the DI.
“Sue told the police that Eddie had kidnapped her. Showed them the rope marks on her wrists. It was going to go to court and everything. Then out of the blue she withdrew the charges. She’d kept Eddie dangling for weeks, not knowing how long he’d stay banged up. He was so grateful to her after she dropped it that she had him eating out of her hand. He couldn’t do enough for her, bought her presents when it wasn’t her birthday, and flowers every week. I never saw as much as a bunch of dandelions when he was with me. And he agreed to keep his fists off her from then on. They scarpered to Brighton together soon after.”
“Keep his fists off her?” I talk into my glass, trying to sound casual. If I play this right, there’s more information to come.
“He liked it rough. He used to tie her up sometimes. I think she enjoyed it. But she called in the police when he went too far. That got him back in line.”
I swallow a mouthful of sweet squash, my mind racing. Could this be important? Bradshaw and Connors didn’t mention any of it at the briefing. Keep cool, Pippa. “Did he treat you like that, too?” I ask, looking up from my glass.
“There was never any of that kinky stuff with ropes. He used me as a punch bag now and again, not all the time.” Her voice is matter-of-fact, but there’s pain in her eyes.
“What?” Gaby gasps, her sudden animation startling us both.
“I’m sorry, love,” Linda says, landing beside her on the sofa. “I never told anyone that Eddie knocked me about. Not even Carl. I couldn’t talk about it at the time and after Eddie cleared off there didn’t seem any point. I’d only myself to blame anyway.”
“Don’t say that,” Gaby says. “I wish you could have told me.” The hurt expression, which has been building while Linda spoke, gives way to tears.
Linda squeezes the tiny body against her flabby arm. “It was years ago, before I met you. And it wasn’t that bad – nothing like the beating those thugs gave you. It was only when Eddie had a few too many down the pub. Most of the time he’d grab me a bit rough or push me about a bit. The best thing to do was keep out of his way until he sobered up.”
Gaby sniffs. Linda pats her arm. “He managed to kick his foot through the kitchen door once but most times he just stood there, banging and yelling. I’d be by the back door, stuffing myself with biscuits to calm my nerves. That’s how I put on all the weight. I never have managed to lose it again. I should’ve had the guts to leave him.” Her arms pull tighter around Gaby. “Don’t cry on my account. You’ve got enough on your plate.”
“I still wish you’d told me.” Gaby sobs into her shoulder.
“It’s all in the past.” Linda cradles her quivering sister-in-law in her arms for several minutes. Eventually Gaby wipes her eyes, excuses herself for her outburst and heads upstairs for a lie-down.
I’m still holding my breath as I picture Eddie Parry pushing, hurting and controlling. I slip into darkness as my memories come with physical pain and bruises. And with the absolute knowledge that I’m powerless.
“Are you all right, love?” Linda asks.
I peer at her with dizzy eyes. My whirring thoughts come to a screaming halt and I remember where I am. I snap out of the past.
Linda is saying it’s good to see Gaby finally opening the floodgates. “I expect it was the mention of Sue and the rope marks that triggered it. After what she’s been through, I’m surprised she can even get up in the morning.”
“It sounds like you had a tough time, too,” I say, being a police officer once more but thinking of Linda as a victim rather than potential line of enquiry.
“It’s ancient history now. At least I always knew how far Eddie would go. He never hit me in the face and he never murdered anyone. It was nothing compared to what those two monsters did to Gaby … and to Carl.” Her voice cracks.
My turn to move on to the sofa and offer consolation. I place my arm around the older woman’s shoulders. “It’s awful to think that if Carl and Gaby hadn’t left the key in their back door, the intruders wouldn’t have got in so easily. They might have heard them breaking in and had time to escape.”
“Carl left the key in the door?” Linda says and begins to cry. “After all he said to me.” She eases a tissue out of the front pocket of her tight shorts and blows her nose hard. “Before Dean and I got together, Carl was always on at me to leave night lights on and shut windows, and not to keep keys in locks. If he’d practised what he preached, he might still be alive.”
I hold her as the soggy tissue fails to stem the flow from her eyes and nose. I long to tell her about Gaby’s new baby. There’ll be tough times ahead but maybe also a ray of sunshine for them both. But it’s not my place. Gaby must tell her in her own time.
Chapter 34
“Are you watching, Pip?” Jamie says in a whisper, but loud enough for the theatre to hear. Eyes wide with excitement, face flushed with recent exertions and T-shirt stained with dried raspberry ripple. “You’re not looking at the ring girl.”
Reluctantly my eyes drift back to the stage. The girl in a silver leotard stretches out her arm, spinning three large metal rings on her wrist while lying on her stomach. The circus show’s always the highlight of the day at Magica for Jamie, but I’d rather be outside, delighting in his unsuccessful attempts at juggling bean bags and walking on stilts.
I watch the girl. Her tiny, childlike body is supremely supple but her face is aged and hard. I think of old films of Soviet gymnasts starved of puberty. The thought of the girl’s selfimposed deprivation in the name of performance makes me squirm. I shift in my seat as she pushes herself off the ground with her free arm, her face fixed in a grimace.
It’s too much for me. “Stay here,” I say. “I’ll get you a candyfloss.”
With relief I emerge from the theatre into bright sunshine and join the long queue for refreshments. It’s going to take a good ten minutes to reach the front. I’ll miss the rest of the hoop girl and most of the fire-eater who usually follows. With a bit of luck it might take even longer to get served depending on who’s behind the kiosk counter. I look down the line. Good, it’s the older, chatty assistant. From the back of the queue, I hear her recounting a childhood memory.
“Mind you, my dad didn’t hit me much as a child. I was the youngest, see. He was fortytwo when I was born so I could run faster.” Her hair’s a brighter shade of orange than any of the lollipops that hang above her kiosk. Even from this distance, I can see her long diamante earrings moving with the same frantic animation as her jaw. “He was quite religious. So when I thought he was getting near the mark, I’d jump up on the window ledge and say, ‘Call yourself a Christian’. That would stop him.”
As the queue slowly moves forward, I become anecdotally acquainted with the woman’s long-suffering father, as well as her poor dead and inappropriately named cat, Lucky; her husband Ken’s prize-winning dahlias; and her own recent bout of flu. “It kept coming and going in my throat. Then Ken got his cold and passed it on. Right at the back of my throat it was, until Ken’s cold put the tin lid on it. I was in bed for a week. I could hardly speak.”
Gradually the line of queuing visitors shuffles forward. Close up, the woman’s curls look brittle, beaten into submission by years of orange dye. When I reach the kiosk, I place the order and feel disappointed as the woman tips the sugar into the pan without a word. I try to get her talking.
“I came here with my parents once as a special treat. I think I remember you from then. Have you been at Magica a long time?”
Works like a charm. “I’ve been here longer than Magica,” she says proudly, “I was here when it was Giovanni’s”.
“The circus?”
“Ahead of his time he was. He stopped using animals long before it was fashionable to care.” She lets out a throaty chuckle.
In full flow, she doesn’t notice that the candyfloss has reached maturity. I try a few
polite gesticulations but soon give up.
“A regular Harry Houdini he was. Then there was his little son. Much better than that lass who’s on today.” She nods her head, causing her earrings to swing in the direction of the theatre. “A body like rubber, could bend himself in half, tie himself in knots. And his three nephews had a human juggling and balancing act. Fit lads they were. That’s £1 please, love.” She continues her monologue on the Giovanni family as I hunt through my bag for cash. “But there was no money in circus. People stopped coming. The son moved to America. Became some sort of yoga guru. Such a waste of talent.” She hands over the outsized pink ball.
Back in the theatre, the fire-eater is swallowing a series of burning torches. Jamie thanks me for the candyfloss and eats it messily with his gaze fixed on the stage. He’s the one good thing to come out of my parents’ divorce and Dad’s remarriage. The precious gift of a brother – a sunny boy who’s somehow avoided inheriting his mother’s nervy petulance and his father’s earnest superiority. In many ways, although there was no genetic connection, Jamie reminds me of my mum, but I know better than to tell her. Jamie is a closed, painful subject for Isabel.
As the fire-eater consumes ever-larger quantities of flames, my head chases a thought I can’t catch. When he takes his final bow, I applaud with the twenty or so other people in the audience and then groan when I see the stagehands wheel out a large black box for the hapless magician we saw last time we came. Jamie loved him, of course. He became genuinely concerned when the man had to ask for assistance to free himself from handcuffs after his escape trick went “wrong”. His inane commentary was in the kind of slow patronizing voice that some adults reserve for small children. When the act starts, my eyes follow the magician’s antics but my mind keeps returning to the candyfloss seller and I can’t work out why.
“Look, Pip, he’s stuck again. They’ll have to help him like last time.” Jamie bounces in his seat.
Pulling at the handcuffs, the man trips grandly and begins rolling back and forth across the stage. If it’s anything like before, this part of the performance will go on for several painful minutes. The desire to make my own escape becomes overwhelming. Now seems a good time for another candyfloss.
“Another one? I don’t think Mummy would like it.”
“I’m sure Mummy wouldn’t mind,” I lie. “Stay here I’ll be right back.”
It’s a good fifteen minutes before I return to the theatre. I hold the candyfloss aloft like a trophy yet I don’t feel triumphant. My second chat with the candyfloss seller has troubled me. I’m a jumble of disjointed thoughts, but that’s preferable to what will happen if I join them together. My eyes adjust to the gloom as I ease into my seat but it’s the wrong row. Jamie isn’t there. I stand up and look to the rows in front and behind. He isn’t anywhere.
Chapter 35
“Jamie,” I call out.
A loud “shush” hits back from across the darkened room.
Blood pounding in my cheeks, I run to the exit and find a block of switches on the wall. The first two don’t do anything. I hit the third and fourth. A row of fluorescent tubes illuminates the front of the stage.
“What the flaming hell?” the magician says, abandoning his children’s TV presenter patter.
The last four switches light the room. I run back down the aisle, looking left and right, and bending down to see under the seats. “Has anyone seen the young boy I was sitting with?”
“Who the hell are you?” the magician bellows.
“Police,” I fumble for my ID card with one hand, still holding the stupid candyfloss in the other. “Has anyone seen an eight-year-old boy wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and trainers?”
“That description covers half the kids who come in here,” the voice on the stage hisses.
I search the faces of the audience. Most stare at me blankly or shake their heads. My heart races. Jamie isn’t here and no one can remember him. I dash for the exit.
“Turn the bloody lights off before you go,” the voice shouts on the stage.
I hesitate by the block of switches and stab at two of them before running outside. People everywhere, milling about by the different attractions. Jamie is now a needle in several haystacks. There’s no sign of him in the refreshment queue. I consider asking the candyfloss seller, but she’s engaged in another reminiscence and not easy to interrupt. I’ll lose even more time.
Jamie must have got bored and gone back to the pogo sticks. The only logical explanation. I race to the circus skills area where families are grappling with stilts and Rollerblades. I dart among them, holding the candyfloss up like a tour guide’s umbrella. A beacon for straggling tourists and, please God, for lost boys. My head fills with every missing persons enquiry I’ve ever been involved in – the painstaking and fruitless house-to-house, the tear-stained relatives on the evening news, the unhappy endings … All my anxious enquiries meet with embarrassed shaking of heads. One man, carrying a toddler on his shoulders, suggests I try the Punch and Judy show that’s started on the grass behind the theatre.
I run round the building and meet a sea of faces all looking in the direction of a blue and white puppet tent. Heads of tussled hair, mucky T-shirts and grass-stained knees move in and out of focus, all so like Jamie and yet so alien at the same time.
I’m about to retrace my steps when I register a hand waving. A cross-legged Jamie grinning in the back row. My relief turns to anger. I beckon him. Jamie, unused to seeing a stern expression on his sister’s face, duly obliges. As he picks his way through the rows of other children, I rehearse my words in my mind. I don’t recall the last time I was cross with him and I’m sure how to handle it. However, the decision on what to say is taken from me.
A starchy voice says, “So you’ve come to look for him at last, have you?”
I spin round into my stepmother, her face like thunder.
“Joanne, where did you spring from?”
“Never mind that. You left Jamie on his own. Anything could have happened to him.”
Unable to look her in the eye, I hang my head. “I was only gone for a few minutes. I could see the door from the queue.”
“But you didn’t see him leave, did you?” Joanne says, dark reproach hammered into every word.
“But Mum, you made us creep out when she wasn’t looking,” Jamie says when he reaches us.
Joanne colours but continues to claim the moral high ground. “He was free to roam all over the place before you even realized he was missing. I’ll have to think twice before letting you bring him here again. And you let him have candyfloss.” She points at the stick that I’m still holding.
“This is for me.” I sink my teeth into the sickly fibre.
“From the state of him, I’d say he’s already had his helping and look at his T-shirt. Ice cream is a nightmare to wash out. Not to mention the E numbers. He’ll be high as a kite tonight and I’ll get no peace. It’s all right for you. You don’t have to get him to bed.”
I scrub my teeth, removing every trace of the sugary red stain. I scoop a couple of palmfuls of water over the toothpaste blobs on my top but don’t care. What a difference a week makes. Don’t give a damn if I’m covered in toothpaste. Past trying to create a good impression with my clothes, or with anything else. I’ve been relieved of duties twice in as many days. First at work and then with Jamie. I’m beginning to see the similarities between DI Bagley and Joanne. Both bossy, demanding and with an unerring knack of making everything seem like my fault. Bagley didn’t instruct me to apprehend a murder suspect at the church. Johnson took me with him to talk to a minor witness. And Joanne didn’t agree to let me take Jamie to Magica. She forced me into it. It turns out that Joanne found a free voucher in one of the parenting magazines she always reads but never applies. Typical Joanne to get me to pay for Jamie’s ticket and then come later with her free ticket and take over.
Surely it was just as irresponsible to encourage Jamie to sneak out of the theatre past me as i
t was for me to leave him alone in the first place. And why shouldn’t I buy him an ice cream? I never have trouble getting him to bed on the Saturday nights he stays over.
But I’m fogging my mind with trivia to stave off other, darker thoughts. Suddenly, they come crowding into my head and I can only think of Carl Brock’s murder.
I shudder at the far-reaching power of a single act. One turn of the knife and there’s a widow, a fatherless unborn child, a brotherless sister, a teacherless classroom. One drug deal puts a boy into rehab, a mother in despair and a father in hiding. One botched arrest bruises a constable’s face and a sergeant’s ego. But which is the cruellest act? Who is the greatest victim?
When I’ve finally accepted my own answers, I’ll have to present them to Bagley. At best the DI will laugh, at worst … who knows. I could keep quiet. I’ve no evidence and only a hazy idea of the motive. But I stayed quiet yesterday and a vital witness got away. I know the danger of silence. I joined the police to get victims heard, justice done. I have to trust my instincts whatever the personal cost. And the cost to others.
Chapter 36
After a deep breath, I prepare to run the gauntlet. I force my head up high as I stalk along the corridor past the CID office. I don’t look through the glass panelling but am aware of movement inside. My new colleagues will be staring, faces fixed in open derision.
An angry shove to the double doors at the end of the corridor. One door bangs against the wall and adds another chip to its shabby paintwork. I hesitate as I look beyond the stairwell to the senior officers’ corridor. Just after 9 a.m. Perhaps the DI won’t be in yet. Of course she’ll be there, like any self-respecting Rottweiler with a keen work ethic.
Time to march right in, but my carefully rehearsed speech deserts me. Can’t remember a single one of the well-chosen words which would tell Bagley not only that I intend to stay in CID but also what I now know about the case. Coward. I walk into the general office. Might as well fight the warm-up match first.
The Good Teacher Page 19