The Woman in the Peacock Patterned Coat

by Jennifer Jones

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And besides,’ he grinned, slipping his hand inside her blouse and gently caressing her breasts, ‘I’d miss these too much.’

  ‘“These” in general, or “these” in particular?’

  ‘Oh, these in particular, absolutely. You know what, let me take you for a champagne breakfast at the Savoy, so we can celebrate your new job in style.’

  ‘That sounds lovely.’ A mischievous look appeared on her face. ‘And there was me thinking you were about to get started on giving me those hundred orgasms!’

  ‘I will … I will. But I can’t do it on an empty stomach!’ He kissed her. ‘What you’re wearing is very pretty, but indulge me, put on your dragonfly dress.’

  She frowned. ‘Well, I would, but … it doesn’t really fit any more. A lot of my dresses don’t. They’re getting too tight, around the bust. I seem to be putting on weight, even with all the walking I’ve been doing.’

  ‘Really?’ He smoothed the fabric of her skirt across her stomach. Suddenly he felt flustered, gazing down at the gentle rise of her tummy, the tiny bump right in the middle. He remembered a conversation he had once had with his sister Celia’s husband, when she was expecting their first child. ‘Honestly, Neil, it’s like walking on eggshells. I can’t say a word, in case she takes it the wrong way. Crying over nothing … and puppies! Those damned ads with puppies in them – I tell you, I’ve had to ban the TV …’

  ‘Janey, are you … are you pregnant?’

  She stared down at his hands. ‘I-I-I-I-I …’

  He wanted to shout for joy, hug her, dance her around the room, but first things first …

  ‘The chemist around the corner will be open. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

  Fifteen minutes later they were gazing in wonder at the positive blue line.

  ‘Oh my God, Janey … you are … Janey … this is … this is …’

  She smiled. ‘Bloody fucking fantastic?’

  ‘It is … it is …’ He grinned. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘No. Don’t tease.’ She wasn’t smiling any more and he felt a sudden stab of doubt. What had Ruth Harrison said? And if one should come sooner? That would be absolutely all right too. For your wife as well? ‘Janey, is it?’

  ‘Yes … yes … I’m just trying to take it in … I’m sure I never missed any pills … So a lot of that nausea … the tiredness …’ She took his hand and placed it on her stomach. ‘A baby … there’s a baby in there, just quietly growing … We’ve made a baby, Neil … aren’t we clever?’

  ‘Yes …’ His voice cracked. ‘Yes, we are.’

  ‘I must be a few months along, if I’m starting to show.’

  ‘Well, we’ll let a doctor work all that out. Right now, let’s get some food into you.’

  ‘Yes. But I suppose I’d better forget about that champagne!’

  Chapter 18

  A week later, Neil walked into the station foyer. He couldn’t stop grinning. He had just come from Janey’s ultrasound, where together they had gazed at the tiny heartbeat, the tiny, tiny arms and legs waving about. The baby was developing perfectly, the doctor had assured them, confirming that Janey was thirteen weeks pregnant.

  A middle-aged woman standing at the counter turned to face him.

  ‘Are you Inspector Hammond?’

  ‘Yes. How can I help you?’ She seemed familiar to him, though he couldn’t think where he might have seen her before.

  She advanced on him. ‘You’re the reason my son is in hospital. Accusing him of something he didn’t do, questioning him for hours upon end, tearing his garden to bits … how dare you? How dare you!’ She launched herself at him, pummelling him in the chest with her fists. ‘How dare you!’

  He caught hold of her hands. ‘Please, calm down …’ At the same moment, Angela Havers dragged her forcibly away from him.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she shrieked. ‘Whoever you are, you’re under arrest, for assaulting a police officer …’

  Neil straightened his jacket, tugged at his shirt sleeves. ‘PC Havers, let her go.’

  ‘But Sir …’

  ‘I said, let her go. Or do you have trouble following a direct order?’

  Angela’s hands dropped. ‘Yes, Sir. I mean no, Sir.’ Her cheeks burned. Aware that everyone in the foyer was looking at her, she mustered what dignity she could, and walked outside.

  Neil took the woman gently by the arm. ‘Please, come with me.’

  He took her to his office. ‘I’m guessing you’re Mrs Taverner, Shaun Taverner’s mother?’ He could see the family resemblance now.

  ‘Well, it’s Mrs Burstall now, but yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Is Shaun all right?’

  ‘Like you care. Not a moment’s trouble he’s ever been in, until that woman started playing her games with him. I’ve always told him, I have, don’t you go messing about on that Internet, talking to people you can’t see, you don’t know what you’re going to get yourself into. But he didn’t listen, did he, and now see where he is.’

  ‘Mrs Burstall, you said that Shaun was in hospital. Is he all right?’

  ‘Like you care,’ she said again. ‘Tried to kill himself, didn’t he? Started his car inside his garage. But Mrs Morrissey next door, she hears it start, and when she looks out the window, she sees the garage all shut up and rings for the ambulance. Then she goes round and the back door’s not locked, she gets him out. He owes his life to her …’ She dissolved into tears. ‘My baby … my baby …’

  He held her. ‘Ssh … ssh … Mrs Burstall, I am so sorry to hear this. This isn’t my case any more, I wasn’t aware of what was happening. All I can say is I am so very sorry.’

  ‘He didn’t do it,’ she sobbed, ‘he didn’t do it.’

  ‘Then he has nothing to fear.’

  He went straight to the hospital. A nurse directed him to Shaun’s bed. Shaun appeared to be asleep but as Neil approached he opened his eyes.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I came to see that you were OK.’

  ‘Like you care.’

  ‘Well, funnily enough I do.’ He smiled. ‘Your mother is very protective towards you, isn’t she? I have the bruises to prove it.’

  ‘Oh my God, she hit you?’

  ‘Mmm hmm.’

  ‘Is she in trouble?’

  ‘No, she’s not. Look, Shaun …’

  ‘They dug up my garden. Years and years of work … they said I’d buried her there, then taken the suitcase back to Wandsworth, threw it away near her home in an attempt at … at …’

  ‘Misdirection?’

  ‘That’s it, yeah.’

  ‘Shaun, I know this will sound trite, but you can start your garden again, make it better than before …’

  ‘I can’t if I’m in jail, can I? When they didn’t find her … her body, they tried a different tack. Now they’re saying we went down to Brighton, got in a fight, and I’ve hidden her body somewhere down there. It’s like a nightmare. A nightmare from which I can’t wake up. When they don’t find her down there, they’ll try something else, I know they will. They’ll keep coming up with a different way that I killed her until they get me to confess.’

  ‘You won’t, though, will you Shaun?’ said Neil in alarm. ‘You won’t confess to something you didn’t do?’

  The young man looked at him. For a moment his face cleared, the terrified expression in his eyes vanished. ‘Then you believe me?’ he said. ‘You believe that I’m innocent?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Neil softly. ‘I do.’

  ‘Then help me. Please. Make it stop. Make them see that I didn’t do it.’

  Neil hesitated, then broke one of the cardinal rules of policing. ‘I will, Shaun. I’ll prove that you’re innocent. I promise you I will. But you have to help me.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I want you to think back over every conversation that you had with Katie, and see if you can remember any places she said that she visited, a
ny names of people she’d got to know. There has to be someone else. Someone at the flats, or that she met on her gardening jobs, or at an Internet café. Did she mention where that was, Shaun? Or those, even – where she would have those chats with you? We know the one she used to send emails to her sister, but the manager says she wasn’t there that often, certainly not a couple of times a week.’

  Shaun was looking confused. ‘What do you mean – Internet cafés? She always gave me the impression she was at home. She’d say things like “I’m curled up in the armchair”, or “I’m sitting in my bed”. Not out and about at Internet cafés. Sometimes we’d talk until eleven o’clock at night.’

  ‘But she didn’t have any Internet connection at the flat.’ Could it simply be that telling Shaun she was in an Internet café didn’t fit in with the image she was trying to create? ‘OK, Shaun, that’s given me something to think about. I’ll let you rest now. But if you come up with anything else, anything at all, I don’t care how little or how stupid you think it might be, just get straight in touch, OK?’ He could see a young woman approaching the bed, a huge bouquet of flowers in her hand, and stepped aside with a smile. ‘It looks like you have another visitor.’

  Shaun looked past him in surprise. ‘Tamsin! What are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, Shaun, you gave me such a fright. Are you OK?’ She leaned forward and kissed him full upon the mouth.

  ***

  Janey was sitting on the couch, taking up some of her skirts, thinking about the phone call she had had from Marina that morning. Frances had given birth to a baby girl, who they had called Anne Louise. Marina had been in raptures. ‘Oh, Janey, she’s so tiny. So tiny, and perfect, and beautiful. Every time I look at her I fall more and more in love. You and Neil have to come and meet her, as soon as Frances is settled back in at home.’ Janey hadn’t mentioned her own news, but now she thought about how, early next March, she would be experiencing this joy for herself. But first she had to get through the birth … The doctor had told her there was a high likelihood of her having a caesarean.

  A knock on the door brought her out of her reverie. She looked through the peephole, then opened it in surprise.

  ‘Eric.’ She stood aside to let him in. He walked to the middle of the room then turned to face her, rocking awkwardly on his feet.

  ‘Um … sit down. Please.’

  She sat down facing him. ‘Are you here by yourself?’

  ‘Yes. I came down on the train. How are you, Janey?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ But she couldn’t bear the idea of making polite chit-chat until he got to the point, so she said,

  ‘Are you here to plead with me to give Neil up? Because I won’t. He’s my life. And besides … we’re having a baby.’

  His eyes flew to her stomach. ‘How many weeks?’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Then you were … when you came …’

  ‘Yes, but we didn’t know then.’

  ‘You know, Denise has been giving me grief ever since you left that afternoon. And then – last weekend – Celia’s fortieth birthday … we always have the whole family together to celebrate milestones, and with Neil not there … Janey, will you talk with me, honestly, answer all my questions?’

  She studied his face for a few moments. ‘All right, Eric. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Your mother – she killed herself in prison, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I went into foster care. Two families.’

  ‘And you had a happy childhood?’

  ‘Nurture versus nature, you mean? The first home was happy enough.’

  ‘And the second?’

  She looked down into her lap. ‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘No, I wasn’t happy there. They … weren’t very nice to me. But – you know – I finished school, went to university, I got my life going the way I wanted it to.’

  ‘Were you abused?’

  ‘Eric, please …’

  He looked at her grimly for a moment. ‘All right. Does Neil know everything?’

  ‘Yes. You know, when I started going out with men, I knew instinctively not to tell them anything, that even if they didn’t think I was mad, they’d think I was damaged, a liability, someone to steer clear of. But Neil … I told him everything about me when we still barely knew each other, when there was no thought of us becoming a couple because we were both married to other people. He didn’t say, “What a freak show you are,” he told me I was the bravest, strongest person he had ever met. And he fell in love with me. He knows my deepest, darkest secrets, and yet he loves me. He’s never judged me according to my past, according to who my mother was, he’s always accepted me as he found me, as I am. Eric, every day your son deals with crazed drug addicts, sociopaths, psychopathic rapists and murderers, can’t you have faith in his judgment, his perception?’

  There were tears in Eric’s eyes, she knew he was wavering. But still he asked,

  ‘What is that scar on your wrist? I noticed it when we were gardening.’

  ‘When I was raped I was still with Dan, my first husband. Naturally I turned to him for comfort and help but he rejected me. He told me I’d asked for it, he told me that was all I was fit for, it was all that men wanted from me, to have sex with me. He told me he’d never loved me, that no man could ever love me.’

  ‘My God! How could somebody be so cruel!’

  ‘Because that’s what he was. A cruel and bullying man. He was just lashing out, but what he didn’t know was, he was right, none of my other boyfriends had ever really loved me either. And so I believed him. I looked into a future empty of love, and I couldn’t live in that future, so I slashed my wrists. But Neil found me in time … and the rest, as they say, is history.’ She paused. ‘Brian was right that day, I was letting my rapist win, letting him live inside my head, causing me to creep through the days, my life half-choked with fear. But not any more. Every day I’m confronting my demons, pushing them back into the shadows. Every day the fear diminishes a little more. I will be that strong, brave person again, that Neil fell in love with. And I want so much for you and him to be reconciled. And if it means I have to go through a psychological assessment, then I will.’

  ‘No … I don’t … I don’t want that any more. I’m a sentimental old bugger who just wants his family back together …’ He held out his arms to her. ‘I’m sorry, Janey … I’m sorry …’

  They hugged each other tight. Then Janey drew back, kissed him on the cheek. ‘Come on, Eric … let me make us a cup of tea.’

  She was just about to clear the tea things away when the front door crashed open and Neil stormed in. He threw his jacket towards the couch, but missed, so that it went slithering across the floor.

  Janey looked at him in surprise. ‘Neil?’

  ‘I’ve had it with this job! Innocent young men hounded until they try to take their own life, gung ho officers arresting people just for being upset …’ He collapsed into a chair. ‘And I’ve just told a terrible lie. I told the Super you were feeling ill so I had to come home and look after you …’ He heard the toilet flush, noticed the empty cups. ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, you’ve got company. One of the neighbours?’

  ‘Neil, it’s your father.’

  ‘My father? What’s he doing here?’ As he started to get to his feet, she said, ‘It’s all right, Neil. We’ve made up. Everything’s all right.’

  Eric came into the room. ‘I heard all that,’ he said to Neil. ‘The whole block probably heard all that. If you’ve got a problem with how things are done then get back to work and lead by example. I didn’t raise you to go skiving off when things got too much.’

  ‘I’m not a little boy any more, Dad, you can’t …’ Neil broke off. The two men started laughing. ‘Oh, Dad … Dad …’ As they embraced, Janey quietly made herself scarce.

  When Eric had left to catch his train, and Neil had taken himself back to the station, Janey sat for a while deep in thou
ght. There was to be a gala reception, Neil had told her, to celebrate the station’s sixtieth anniversary. As the second in command it was imperative that he attend, and it would be really lovely if she felt up to going along with him. It would be the moment, he warned her, when a lot of his fellow officers realised they were together. Of more immediate concern to her, though, was that she would need something appropriate to wear. She could go out and buy something, or … she went to her wardrobe, pushed all the clothes aside until she found a black garment carrier, which she took out and laid on the bed. Inside was a pale apricot dress, a silky sheath with elbow length sleeves. She lovingly stroked the soft fabric. ‘Yes,’ she said out loud. ‘Yes … I can.’

  Chapter 19

  ‘Penny for them, Angela.’

  Tony Pavel took a seat opposite Angela in the staff canteen, where she sat staring at her cup of tea, long since gone cold.

  She looked up. It was obvious she had been crying. ‘How dare he?’ she said. ‘How dare he humiliate me like that?’

  He studied her for a moment. ‘You know, the Guv’nor is a decent and fair man. If he’s ever harsh with you, you know you’ve fucked up, and you, Angela, fucked up big time.’

  ‘She was assaulting him!’

  ‘And he’s a DCI, don’t you think he can handle things himself? She wasn’t a criminal, she was a distraught mother whose son had nearly died …’

  ‘A son who’s a murderer.’

  ‘That hasn’t been proved yet. And does a mother stop loving her son because he’s done something terrible? She needed compassion, not handcuffs, and when you learn to tell the difference, to strike that balance …’ he paused, ‘when you learn to think with your brain, not with what’s inside your knickers, then you’ll be a good cop.’

  ‘And what exactly do you mean by that?’

  ‘Oh come on, Angela! Would you have jumped in quite so quick if it was Steve Kendall getting a thumping? The whole station knows you want to do the DCI. But he’s never going to see you as anything but a police officer. The sooner you accept that, and move on, the happier everyone will be, including, I think, yourself. There’s plenty of other good looking blokes in this nick, blokes that are single, and closer to you in age.’