by Kate Medina
‘I know. But even so, if heads roll, if a head needs to roll, it should be mine.’
‘We’ll see.’ He gave her a slightly sick-looking smile. ‘We have Allan Parker in custody, so we have Denise Lewin’s murderer, at least.’
He had too much pride, Jessie knew, to pass the buck on to anyone else, even if she was happy to bear it. It was one of the things – one of the many things – that she admired about him.
‘It’s a moot point anyway. He won’t get away.’ Fumbling in his suit pocket, he extracted a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. ‘Clean living is overrated,’ he muttered, catching her look. The lighter’s flame leapt behind his hand, the stream of smoke that replaced its firefly glow swirling into the night sky. ‘Remember that discussion we had about sociopaths and psychopaths?’ he continued, after a moment.
‘Yes.’
‘Robbie Parker is a sociopath.’
‘He’s not a sociopath.’
‘Isn’t he? The bullying — he didn’t fit in.’
‘You’d be bullied if you looked like he does. If you were as kind and gentle as he is.’
Marilyn almost choked on his next drag. ‘Kind and gentle. Are you insane?’
Probably. She shook her head. ‘This isn’t a chicken-and-egg question, Marilyn. The bullying made Robbie who he was, made him dysfunctional. First off, he was abandoned by the one person in his life who is supposed to love him unconditionally, his mother, and then he was ferociously bullied for the whole of his childhood. Bullying is never the victim’s fault, Marilyn, and there is no excuse for it.’
She stared hard at the shadow puppet show playing out across Workman’s pale linen curtains, knowing that Marilyn would be eyeballing her, an incredulous expression on his face. But she had no intention of letting him see the hurt and anger in her eyes, the deep-down, long-since-buried self-hatred that meeting Robbie had caused to resurface. The electric suit hummed, searing her skin, despite the chill wind cutting across the surrounding fields.
‘He murdered four people in the most gruesome way possible and two of the people he murdered – the women, the wives – were innocent. His father murdered a third woman, poor bloody Denise Lewin, to frame himself for the murders his son had committed because he had no idea that Robbie was already framing him by stamping all over every crime scene in his trainers. The women’s only crime was to marry wankers and if every woman who married a wanker was murdered, we’d be tripping over dead bodies with every step.’ He took a long drag, huffed out a cloud of smoke. ‘Have I missed anything out?’
‘No, I think you’ve pretty much nailed it,’ Jessie said, without enthusiasm. Her rational mind concurred with everything that Marilyn was saying. But her unconscious mind? Her emotional mind? She would never admit it out loud, but a maverick part of her wanted Robbie to escape. To win. ‘Allan Parker is still saying that he’s guilty for all five murders, isn’t he?’ she murmured. ‘Claiming responsibility.’
‘He clearly blames himself for Robbie’s actions and is still trying to protect him.’
‘Is he? Or is he trying to find redemption?’
‘Revenge isn’t worthy, Jessie. It might be very human, but it’s not worthy.’
Jessie shook her head. ‘It wasn’t about revenge. For Robbie it was about karma – delivering karma. He believed that he was born disfigured and had to endure a childhood defined by bullying as karma for his father’s role in bullying and ultimately killing that boy … Sam … twenty-five years ago, and that it was also his responsibility to deliver that karma to the others involved.’
Cut the head off the snake. Bullies are snakes. Take off the head and the body dies.
Sam hadn’t been able to do that for himself. Hadn’t had the strength, the opportunity. And because of that, he had been driven to his death. How many other children had died or had their lives destroyed by bullying since Sam? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? A million? A million lost souls?
‘Bullying is never OK.’ She wasn’t sure, until she sensed Marilyn look across again, whether she’d said it out loud or only thought it. ‘There is never an excuse. Never. Not ever.’
‘Did you not see them?’ His voice was incredulous. ‘Were you not there? Hugo and Claudine Fuller? Daniel and Eleanor Whitehead?’
‘You know I was there.’
‘And?’
Had what she had seen been so gruesome, so much – too much – that it had blunted her emotions? A baptism of fire so unreal that, deep down, she still couldn’t believe it had been real?
‘Those men and Allan Parker killed. They tortured another child and his dog for many many years and then drove him to his death.’
‘It’s not classified as murder. It’s manslaughter at the most, if that.’
She spun around to face him. ‘Well it should have been, should be, classified as murder. Because when children drive another child to suicide due to bullying, they are wholly responsible for that death.’
‘People get away with heinous crimes every day, Jessie, and the law is an ass. But the fact remains that Robbie Parker is a mass murderer and it is my job – our jobs, given that you are working for Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes – to bring him to justice.’
Jessie didn’t answer for a few long moments. ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured eventually. ‘For the outburst. It was unprofessional.’ But even as she said it, that maverick part of her was still with Robbie, wherever he was now, hoping, slightly hoping, that he got to win just this one time.
88
There was a pale shape at the end of the jetty by the lifeboat shed, an immobile disc that glowed luminously in the moonlight. Jessie approached slowly, her arms wrapped tightly across her chest, as much from apprehension as to stave off the biting wind that tore down the hood of her puffa jacket and whipped her hair around her head. The gnarled wooden planks creaked beneath her feet with each step, and with the weight of water swelling against the jetty’s pilings.
Should she have told Marilyn that she was coming here? Probably. But at the moment, she felt as if she owed Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes nothing. They had cut her out of the final part of the investigation – Your work is done – so it felt like quid pro quo. And her intuition might be wrong anyway. Robbie might be taking cover in an outhouse somewhere up on the Downs, be concealing himself in thick woods, or he might have returned to Paws for Thought to live out the final few moments of freedom with his pack. She was no Baba Vanga, after all.
She had left Marilyn outside Workman’s house, using the after-effects of Robbie’s stun-gun attack, which lingered in the burns on her chest and in the thumping headache that refused to subside, as an excuse for leaving. There had been no need for her to stay anyway, watching impotently as the police search played out.
‘I’ll let you know when we catch him,’ Marilyn had said.
When not if.
She had nodded. ‘Please do.’ Hadn’t been able to bring herself to add, ‘Good luck.’
Also, she’d had a strong sense that Robbie would have planned every detail of these murders from beginning to end, that he would never allow himself to be caught.
The pale, luminous disc was a mask, Jessie realized, when she reached it. A dog’s mask. Robbie’s mask. And underneath, she saw, when she slid the sleeve of her puffa jacket over her hand, ducked down and moved the mask to one side, an iPhone. She pressed her index finger on the home button and the screen lit up. Not Robbie’s face staring back at her, but a picture she recognized: a little black and white Jack-Russell-type dog hiding underneath an upturned fishing boat. Hiding from Hugo Fuller. From Simon Lewin. From Daniel Whitehead. And from Allan Parker.
Slipping the mobile into her pocket, she stood and leant over the worn metal railing, looking out to sea. Only a relentless procession of black waves rolling towards her, their tops whipped into a milky froth by the wind. And further out, scattered pinpricks of red, green and white lights, the navigation lights of fishing boats and of the container ships that ploughed t
hrough the Solent day and night.
Was Robbie out there too? All the way out there on the horizon, his body dragged that far by the current? Or had he duped them all again? As much as she believed that he would never allow himself to be caught, she had an equally strong, disquieting sense that nothing he had experienced in the first fifteen years of his life would make him think that the next sixty-five were worth sticking around for.
‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, not quite knowing who she was saying it to.
Robbie, certainly. But them too. The people he had killed – the women at least. Perhaps if Workman had asked her a few months ago, she would have been able to save him. Save him, and save them.
Or perhaps not.
Perhaps, he was already too far gone by then. Too damaged. Too broken.
Bullying is never OK. There is never an excuse.
Leaning over the railing, she opened her hand and let the mask fall.
‘Goodbye, Robbie,’ she murmured. ‘Wherever you’re going, go safely.’
Pulling her mobile from her pocket, she dialled Marilyn’s number.
89
By tacit agreement they spoke about nothing substantial on the drive from Frimley Park Hospital to the pub. In lieu of the dinner they had missed out on last night, Jessie had booked lunch, dithering about where to go, not knowing what the MRI and other tests had revealed, what mood Callan would be in, or if he would yet have made a decision about his future. She had finally plumped for the safe option and booked their favourite table by the fire, in their favourite pub, close to home in the Surrey Hills.
In truth, she felt beyond exhausted herself, heavy and sluggish in mind and body, as if she was hefting a sack of rocks around in her brain and on each shoulder. She’d had no sleep last night – another night of no sleep – and had spent half the night at the lifeboat station in Selsey with Marilyn. Half an hour after she’d called him, he’d arrived with the cavalry – two vanloads of uniforms to comb the beach, a police helicopter and two RNLI B-class rigid inflatable lifeboats to comb the water. She had waited for them on the beach, crouching in the shelter of an upturned fishing boat, staring out to sea, her body deadening with immobility and cold. Paying her quiet respects to Robbie before all hell broke loose. He deserved that, at least, for how he had lived the first fourteen years of his life, if not for the last year.
She had debated coming up with some bullshit excuse to explain why she’d driven out to Selsey on her own, why she’d lied to Marilyn about heading home nursing her cracked skull. But, in the end, she decided that she didn’t care enough to lie, that her duplicity was fair payback for him cutting her out of Allan Parker’s arrest, whatever the hell DCI Janet bloody Backastowe had thought, said or commanded.
The day was dull and cold, ponderous grey clouds hanging so low in the sky that she felt as if she stood on tiptoes and reached up, her fingertips would be swallowed in dense grey candyfloss. By the time she reached Frimley Park, it was raining, fat globs splattering the windscreen. She parked Callan’s car as close as she could get to the hospital, then she and Lupo dashed through the rain to the entrance where they found Callan skulking under the awning outside like some degenerate teenager. He grinned when he saw them, ducked down and hugged Lupo.
‘He looks good,’ he said, straightening and wrapping his arms around her. ‘You look good too.’
Jessie rolled her eyes. ‘Is this what I’m going to have to get used to? Playing second fiddle to a huge, hairy lump of a creature?’
‘Less of that – I shaved this morning.’
‘Ha bloody ha.’ She grinned. He seemed happier than when she had left him yesterday evening, as if a weight had been lifted. Was it too much to hope that he’d had good news? She didn’t want to ask yet, risk breaking the heady spell of the moment. They sprinted back to the car, holding hands, towing Lupo behind them.
‘No need to ask why you brought my car and not yours,’ Callan said, catching sight of the forest of white hairs on his back seat.
‘He’s blowing his coat.’ Jessie suppressed a smile. ‘Anyway, the hairs just add to the general ambience created by the crisp packets, chocolate bar wrappers and empty Coke cans.’
‘So … how are you?’ they both asked, in unison, when they were settled in the pub next to the fire.
Jessie shook her head. ‘You first.’
‘No – you.’ Callan reached for her hand. ‘Marilyn phoned me a while ago.’
She frowned. ‘At the hospital? Why?’
‘He’s worried about you. He thought you might need some … how did he put it … emotional support.’
‘What the fuck? He quite happily cut me out of the arrest and interviews with Allan Parker and then he decides that I need emotional support.’
‘Don’t be too harsh on Marilyn. He genuinely cares about you. And the case was a fait accompli anyway, or at least they thought it was, until you showed them otherwise.’
‘Found out otherwise is a more accurate way of putting it.’ The fingers of her free hand unconsciously found the two burns on her chest from Robbie Parker’s stun gun. ‘I don’t actually care now, anyway. Last night, it seemed so important to be involved every step of the way and I was furious with Marilyn. And then I found out the truth and none of the small stuff mattered any more.’ She paused. ‘You know that Robbie Parker killed himself, then, obviously. One of the lifeboats found his body.’
Callan nodded. ‘Marilyn told me.’
‘I’m so angry with myself that I didn’t work it out.’
‘It wasn’t obvious.’
‘No, but I should have been able to work out why Lupo was left outside Eunice Hargreaves’ cottage. Robbie knew her from Age UK’s lunch club, must have heard her talking about her insomnia. That was why he chose her cottage, because he knew she’d see Lupo almost immediately.’ She gave a wry smile. ‘It was nothing to do with the handy lamp post outside her gate. Taking Lupo to safety, risking getting caught because of it, showed a naivety that didn’t gel with the murderer being a ruthless adult … anyone ruthless in fact.’
‘I’m not sure Marilyn, or the people Robbie Parker murdered, would agree with your diagnosis that he was lacking in ruthlessness.’
Jessie lifted her shoulders. ‘Bullying destroys lives, Callan, and Robbie is … was an example of that. If he hadn’t been so severely mentally damaged by bullying, he wouldn’t have killed. It may be a harsh truth, but it’s still a truth.’
‘You liked him, didn’t you?’
‘I’m not excusing what he did, but, yes, I did like him and I did sympathize with him. Sympathize and empathize with him.’ She held Callan’s hand, looking off over his shoulder, feeling too vulnerable suddenly to meet his eye. ‘Anyway, enough of Robbie Parker. It’s your turn to talk.’
Callan ruffled Lupo’s head with his free hand.
‘And given that you’re patting your living comfort blanket, I assume that the news isn’t great,’ Jessie said, chewing her lip.
Callan shook his head. ‘Actually, it’s not as bad as I expected. The bullet has moved and created swelling in my brain, which is why my epilepsy has worsened. But it hasn’t moved as much as my neurologist thought it might have done. On balance, he decided that it’s better to wait, see how it goes, rather than operating now.’
Jessie’s eyes hung closed for a brief moment. Thank God.
‘But I am going to resign my commission.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Why so soon?’
‘Because there’s no point in delaying. I’ve made up my mind and, to be fair, I don’t have a choice. I’ve been living on borrowed time since I came back from Afghanistan. I can’t keep lying to people I’ve worked with for years, people who trust me, because at some point I’ll have an epileptic fit at work and I can’t control when that happens. I might put my colleagues in danger and it’s not fair to do that.’
‘Can’t you stay in the military police and get a—’ She was about to say,
an admin job, but she knew that he never would. Asking Callan to be happy with an admin job would be like sending Lupo to live in the Sahara Desert. ‘What are you going to do then?’
He ruffled Lupo’s head again. ‘Hang out with my main man and think about what to do next.’
‘Well hopefully Marilyn won’t come knocking for a while and I can just see my private clinical patients and hang out with both my main men too.’
Callan rolled his eyes. ‘I wouldn’t bet on that, if I were you.’
Jessie smiled back sweetly. ‘Lucky I’m not a betting woman then, isn’t it?’
Acknowledgements
It is always hard to know where to start with acknowledgements as the list of people who have helped me, both with this novel and with my entire writing career, is long and humbling.
Thanks to my amazing agent, Will Francis, who is incredibly and enduringly supportive, and to the rest of the wonderful team at Janklow and Nesbit (UK).
I am indebted to Julia Wisdom, my Publisher at HarperCollins, for being such a great champion for the Dr Jessie Flynn crime thriller series and for her patience, enthusiasm and insight. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Finn Cotton, my original Assistant Editor, who has moved on to pastures new within HarperCollins, though I am delighted to have the opportunity to work with Sophie Churcher, his exceptionally capable and enthusiastic replacement. Massive thanks also to publicity guru Felicity Denham, Rhian McKay who has an unrivalled eye for detail, and the rest of the fabulous team at HarperCollins. It is a privilege to work with you all and a dream that I never thought would become reality.
I am lucky to be part of the Killer Women group of female crime writers who are a hugely encouraging and fun writing community.