Betrayal of Trust

by Susan Hill

  ‘I saw that I was fulfilling a need. Not a very frequent need but a need all the same.’

  Not an answer.

  ‘How much will it cost?’

  ‘You pay my expenses. The travel. Hotel for two nights.’

  One single ticket. One single night in the hotel. The other, two nights and a return ticket.

  ‘And five thousand pounds.’

  As she said it, there was a voice in the hall. Penny had a key though she usually rang the bell too.

  ‘Oh, there you are. Jury sent home so I thought I’d call in.’

  Penny. Smart as usual. Dark work suit but with a vivid red and purple stole over one shoulder. Hair immaculate as ever.

  ‘This is – Hazel, Hazel Smith. My daughter Penny.’

  Penny summed up people in a single long stare but Hazel Smith was not put out.

  ‘I’ll make some fresh tea.’

  ‘I’ll do it – you stay there, Mother.’

  But Hazel Smith was standing, bag in hand. Decisive.

  ‘No, I must be somewhere else. Thank you so much, Jocelyn, let’s be in touch.’

  She might have been an official of some sort, a social worker, a woman from the council offices. It was in her manner.

  ‘What’s your case?’ Jocelyn asked when Penny returned.

  Penny leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes briefly. ‘Nasty – woman cheating a very charming, confused old man out of his savings, getting him to make a new will in her favour … would probably have gone on to poison him if a family member hadn’t been sharp. Don’t you let yourself be chatted up by some stranger at a taxi rank, Mother.’

  ‘Is that what happened?’

  ‘Yes, but it was very carefully planned. She’s an evil woman – done it before.’

  ‘Are you defending her?’

  ‘I am. For my sins. I hate it. Who was that? I didn’t take to her either.’

  ‘Just someone I met – she’s moving into the street – bit further down.’

  Penny opened her eyes. ‘Really?’

  Jocelyn burst into tears.

  Her daughter had never been a hugger, even as a child. She disliked contact, kept her physical distance even from close friends, and Jocelyn was used to that, so she did not expect arms around her, she expected what she got. Penny went into the kitchen, made a pot of fresh tea and brought it out to the conservatory, by which time the tears were over.

  ‘You’d better tell me the truth, hadn’t you?’ she said.

  It didn’t take long. When she had finished, Penny was silent for a moment, watching her mother pick up the teacup and hold it, with both hands. Jocelyn had no idea what she was thinking or what she would say, was only sure that her daughter would be angry and that she couldn’t cope with anger. She was usually an emotionally robust person – probably Penny got more from her than she cared to admit – but the illness itself, as well as the stress of trying to do as she wished to see it to a conclusion, seemed to have left her vulnerable.

  ‘I’d better move back home,’ Penny said.

  ‘No, absolutely not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you don’t want to. Of course you don’t – why would you? And I would resent your doing it out of a sense of duty and so would you. Because we would fall out within the hour. Because it isn’t necessary.’

  ‘It soon will be.’

  ‘No.’

  Penny sighed. ‘You heard what I said, Mother. Quite apart from doing something which is morally wrong and also illegal, that woman is very unpleasant and I think you know it as well as I do. She gave me the creeps.’

  ‘Only with hindsight.’

  ‘Look me in the eyes and tell me you would be happy to travel to the planned place of your own death with her for company. You can’t do it.’

  No, she could not. Hazel Smith’s face came to her, bland, expressionless. ‘And five thousand pounds,’ she heard. She thought she had found her pleasant. Sympathetic. Someone who understood. There seemed no limit to self-deception.

  ‘You’re right, of course you are. But it doesn’t change my mind. I know what I want and I know what I can face and what I can’t. This illness – being trapped inside my own body, being wide awake and knowing everything that’s going on, everything that is going to happen to me, being unable to prevent it and unable to get out of it … that’s what I can’t face.’

  ‘And yet you can face travelling to this clinic.’ Penny shook her head.

  ‘Yes. I can.’

  ‘Have you ever thought of me in all this?’

  ‘You made enough of a fuss when I first brought the subject up. I had to. But you don’t have motor neurone disease.’

  ‘No.’

  There was silence. They looked at the garden because they could not look at one another. I will miss this, Jocelyn thought suddenly. I will miss sitting here, maybe more than I will miss anything. Her heart lurched.

  ‘Have you told me everything?’

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘No more secrets – no more people about to crawl from the woodwork?’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t speak to me as if I were five years old.’

  ‘It’s how you speak to me.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A lot of the time.’

  Was that true?

  ‘Then I’m sorry.’

  ‘Will you think about what I said?’

  ‘I have. Penny, we couldn’t live together at the best of times and these will not be the best.’

  ‘All right. But don’t ask me to go to the death clinic with you.’

  The death clinic.

  ‘I asked. You said no. I understand why. Leave it.’

  ‘No more women?’

  Jocelyn laughed. ‘No. For a very short time I thought I rather liked her.’

  Penny shuddered.

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Actually, yes, I do. Have you been to the new bookshop in the Lanes?’

  ‘Meant to. Haven’t had time.’

  ‘Will you be in court tomorrow?’

  ‘I won’t know that until tonight. Possibly not.’

  ‘If you aren’t, let’s go to the new bookshop, then have an early lunch?’

  Penny opened her mouth to say something and thought better of it.

  ‘Oh, I know, I know. But I shall need a couple of books at least, for the journey.’

  Yes, she thought. Because strangely, in spite of it all, she knew that she would go. She knew. And so did Penny.

  Twenty-three

  ‘MORNING, GUV.’

  Serrailler nodded. He was not in the best of tempers.

  ‘Seen the press?’

  The papers were laid out on the CID-room table.

  DO YOU RECOGNISE THIS GIRL?

  Police today issued a computer-generated image of this young woman, created from her skull. The skeleton was found in a shallow grave in an area just outside Lafferton, close to where the body subsequently identified as that of local girl Harriet Lowther was found.

  Pathologist Dr Gordon Lyman said, ‘Obviously this is not the same as a true photograph but these new computer images do create a remarkably good likeness to the person whose remains have been scanned and then carefully built up in our new systems. This is state-of-the-art stuff – I have been working with colleagues in London and we are confident of having produced a very good image of the young woman whose remains we found. She is likely to have been between 18 and 23 at the time of her death and possibly of Eastern European extraction. It is quite a distinctive bone structure.’

  Two of the tabloids had picked it up, one on the front page. There was nothing in the broadsheets. He didn’t hold out much hope of anyone coming forward to identify a young woman who appeared to have come from nowhere and had not been reported missing. But it bugged him. Why was she buried here if she had no connection with the area? If she had a connection, why had no one reported her disappearance? Or could it simply be a million to
one chance that her remains had been found near to Harriet Lowther’s?

  ‘Of course it wasn’t,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Guv?’

  ‘Talking to myself. I just feel I’m missing something that’s right under my nose.’

  He went from the CID room to his office. This was the worst, this floundering around in the half-dark, trying to piece together bits of information from sixteen years before.

  A couple of hours later, he was buoyant again. The BBC woman had been, listened, made a lot of notes, and was confident that they had a programme.

  ‘It’s news and we want to do it as soon as we can. People find cold cases fascinating – someone will have their memory jogged, or their conscience pricked, you see. Nothing like television for making it spring to life. Newspapers can’t touch us.’

  ‘Isn’t it a fairly major undertaking – reconstructing the scene from quite a few years back? I know it isn’t half a century but things have still moved on.’

  ‘We’ve got all sorts of tricks up our sleeve, don’t worry. And there’s a lot more to the programme than that.’

  Simon left her with the press officer, who would take her on an initial recce.

  He went down to the CID room where part of the wall screen showed the face of the unknown girl, and as he walked through the door and it confronted him, Serrailler was struck by what the pathologist had said about her possible origins. Yes. Not an English face, not Celtic either. Eastern European. He was reminded of some of the faces you saw in Lafferton now, mainly Polish, sometimes Czech or Romanian. But those were all recent immigrants, come to work here in the last few years. There had been hardly any when Harriet and presumably this young woman had disappeared.

  ‘Any calls?’ He pointed to the screen.

  ‘Usual “she lives next door”, or “I think I remember someone like that just after the war”.’

  ‘And “they come over here, taking our jobs”.’

  ‘Someone rang to say that?’

  ‘Always do.’

  ‘But we haven’t said anything about where she came from – mainly because we don’t know.’ Simon paced down the room and stared at the screen. ‘We don’t know. So do they? Did you log these?’ He turned on his heel and looked at the DC – the room was full today, everybody writing up endless notes about the drugs op, presumably.

  ‘I didn’t log the nutters, never do. I mean, the call’s logged but …’ His voice trailed off, seeing Serrailler’s face.

  ‘Then get those numbers from the log and call them back. Ask some questions. Find out why they said what they said. If they recognise a foreign face then why do they? It isn’t screamingly obvious.’

  ‘Guv.’

  ‘And get on with it.’

  ‘Right, only we’ve –’

  ‘I said get on with it. Never mind the bloody drugs op, there’ll be pushers on the Dulcie estate and down the underpass next week and next year until the end of time. This girl was murdered by someone. Somewhere, she has a family. Somewhere, someone doesn’t know what’s happened to her, to their daughter or their girlfriend. She has as much right to our time, as much right to everybody’s effort to find her killer, as much right to justice and then to rest in peace, as every bloody drug pusher out there. Just for once, forget them. I want this one sorting. Now pick up the bloody phones.’

  He was in his car on the way to the Old Mill ten minutes later. He was going alone and he was going unannounced, taking his chance on John Lowther’s being in. This was quite different from the morning when he had had to break the news. Lowther must not have time to prepare, and he himself had to step back and be both more formal and more neutral – no instinctive show of sympathy, though no aggressiveness either. It wouldn’t be easy but it was the kind of interview he got little chance to do these days and the kind he always preferred. He was trying to keep an open mind, but it was difficult. He had read the files. He had seen the man’s reaction on hearing about Harriet’s body and would have bet any money on his innocence. But the interview had to be got right – and got out of the way.

  As he turned into the drive, he saw Lowther standing with the gardener beside an ash tree. One of its large lower branches was split. The gardener carried a chainsaw; Lowther was wearing cords and an old leather jerkin. He looked at the car with surprise and then with a marked tightening of his expression. Simon noted it but that was all. In his experience, people who had received appalling news were tensed forever afterwards to expect more.

  ‘Simon?’

  ‘Morning, Sir John.’

  ‘Still clearing in the aftermath of the storm, as you see. I hope this is the last. I take it we should go inside?’

  ‘If you don’t mind.’

  There was the sound of vacuuming. Lowther led him into the study.

  ‘You have some news?’

  ‘In a sense, yes.’

  ‘But no arrest?’

  ‘No. I do have something to tell you and I also have some questions.’

  ‘I see. I apologise – may I offer you coffee?’

  ‘Not for me, thank you.’

  Lowther sat down at his desk. He looked different, Simon thought, as he took the chair opposite him, his face had had time to register the shock and the renewed grief; there was the familiar sunken, sad look about his eyes, and the lines at the side of his mouth had deepened. How they change us, he thought, change us and age us, how they leave their mark, these terrible things.

  He said, ‘Firstly, let me explain about a forthcoming television programme.’

  Lowther listened without interrupting as Simon gave him the details.

  ‘I don’t have a transmission date yet but it will be soon and you’re under no obligation to watch it.’

  ‘Of course I shall watch. How could I not?’

  ‘It will be difficult and painful.’

  ‘You think I’m not used to that, Chief Superintendent?’

  ‘Of course. But people sometimes underestimate the impact of a reconstruction – someone once described it to me as like being hit repeatedly in the face.’

  ‘Will you need my involvement?’

  ‘That’s not my call. We supply information, the producer makes the decisions and the programme. It’s possible they will want to talk to you and that could be on camera. But if they do, it’s entirely up to you as to whether you agree or not.’

  ‘Would it help if I did?’

  ‘It’s impossible to say but it can never do any harm.’

  ‘You will give them my details?’

  Serrailler nodded.

  ‘And you say you have some questions?’ Lowther looked at him steadily.

  ‘Yes. I need to go back over your original statement after you reported Harriet missing. There are one or two things I’d like to clarify.’

  There was a pause. Lowther did not drop his gaze. At this moment, Simon had to be polite but unapologetic, steady, un embarrassed. He also had to remember with every word he spoke that he was questioning a man whose only daughter had disappeared for sixteen years and whose skeleton had just been found and whose wife had died of a cancer possibly caused and undoubtedly exacerbated by grief, distress, despair.

  ‘Am I being questioned or interrogated?’

  ‘Questioned.’

  ‘Am I obliged to answer your questions, Simon?’

  ‘No, but it would be better if you did. And it would help us. I’m reinterviewing as many people as possible – this isn’t personal. If you would like to have your solicitor present …’

  ‘I would not.’

  Lowther got up and went to look out of the window.

  Am I now on the other side? Simon wondered. He treated me as a friend, for all I was bringing terrible news. He can no longer do that.

  He will expect me to ask about that day, to go over it in the minutest possible detail, to account for his movements from the moment he woke.

  Instead, Simon said, ‘What kind of girl was Harriet?’

  Lowther turned ro
und. ‘What …?’

  ‘What was she like? Describe her until I feel as if I’d known her.’

  There was a long silence. Lowther sat down. Simon watched his expression change, become both thoughtful and tender as he pictured his daughter more clearly, bringing her to the forefront of his mind, looking at her, hearing her voice, smelling her even, feeling as near as he could to her. It would be extremely painful and also, in an odd way, though briefly, comforting and sustaining.

  She would be returned to him for these few moments, closer and more vivid than perhaps for years.

  ‘Quiet,’ he said at last. ‘She was a quiet girl. Always very calm. You didn’t hear her come into a room. She played a lot of music – I mean, records, tapes, all that sort of thing, and played it herself, too – but it never seemed to be intrusive. She had a quiet voice. So did her mother. But … I’m not sure that gives the right impression – she wasn’t shy or particularly self-effacing. It was just an inner quietness that came through to you – if you can understand that.’

  Simon nodded.

  ‘She had a … a very slow, delightful smile … it altered her face. Lit it up. But you didn’t see it all the time – she was … thoughtful, I suppose. And then suddenly, she would smile. Even as a very small child it was like that.’

  Simon waited. Interrupting, pressing another question, even encouraging – he knew he must do none of that. He just waited.

  ‘She was fairly bright – but not anything out of the ordinary. She was about to do her GCSEs and she had perfectly decent predictions – some Bs, an A or two if she was very lucky. She worked hard and that was what would get her the right results. Not one of the high-flyers. She liked sports – tennis, running – she was a very fast sprinter – netball. She was a cricket fan too. Knew as much about the countyside as I did. We sometimes went to cricket together. She was quite – self-contained, somehow. She had friends of course, they came here, she went to their houses – but if she was alone she was perfectly happy. She never seemed to be on the telephone to them half the night – I heard other parents complain about that – but … she liked her friends. She liked her school. But she had a – an inner life, I think. Does that sound ridiculous for a girl of her age? I think she’d had it since she was small. I used to come in late and go up to her bedroom to say goodnight – it might be nine or ten o’clock – and I’d find her just lying there, eyes open … thinking perhaps … perfectly content. She was … you see, I remember nothing … nothing bad about her, nothing … would you expect this? I suppose so. It’s perhaps … she was never noisy, not rude, never needed to be reprimanded – I don’t want to make her out as some sort of angel … we just rarely had to do more than have … you know, a word … never needed to punish her. She just got quietly on with her life … her ordinary days.’ He put his hands to his face.