‘I’m under arrest for the murder of my father,’ Caroline said. ‘I confessed and I’m willing to make a statement.’
Her accent was northern, her vowels blunt instruments bludgeoning her words but, beyond that, Kate couldn’t really tell where she was from.
‘Okay,’ Kate said. ‘Then I’ll need to record our conversation.’ She switched on the tape recorder, stated the time and date and the people present, and then opened the file that Raymond had given her.
‘Caroline, you’ve said that you’ll only talk to me? Do we know each other?’ Kate had met a number of people who claimed to have been at school with her, or who knew her as a child, since her return to South Yorkshire, and there were quite a few that she couldn’t remember at all. She usually just nodded politely and noncommittally but this woman was too young to have been in any of her classes at Thorpe Comp. Maybe a friend of her sister, Karen?
‘Not exactly,’ Caroline said. ‘I grew up on the Crosslands Estate, round the corner from where you used to live. My dad still lives… lived… there. I vaguely remember your family. You have a sister, don’t you? And your dad worked at the pit.’
Kate shifted in her seat, uncomfortable with the way the conversation was turning to her past.
‘I’m sorry,’ Caroline said, as if she could sense her discomfort. ‘I read about you in the South Yorkshire Times after the case with the children. Returning hero catches child killer, something like that. I probably got the details from there, but I do remember a few things about you. My best friend from school lived next door to you for a while. Susan Gough? I used to play in her garden sometimes and she was a bit in awe of the ‘big girls’ next door. I just wanted to talk to somebody who I had a connection with. It made sense when I asked for you but I’m not sure it does now. I apologise if I’ve caused you any inconvenience.’
Her tone and vocabulary were as formal as a Victorian school teacher, making Kate wonder again if she had realised the seriousness of her situation.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember her,’ Kate said. ‘Do you want to tell me what happened this morning? Do you want a solicitor present?’
Caroline smiled sadly. ‘I’m not sure that I need one. I just want to make an official statement.’
Kate looked down her notes. ‘You said this morning that you’d killed your father. Is that true?’
Caroline lifted her head and met Kate’s eyes, her expression one of defiance. Kate had been wrong; this woman knew exactly why she was here. She took a deep breath, preparing for her confession but the words, when they came, were almost disappointingly banal. ‘That’s true.’
‘You called for the doctor, allowed your father’s body to be taken away and then confessed to the attending police officer.’
Caroline glanced at the tape recorder and said, ‘Yes,’ clearly and loudly. Kate wondered if she’d watched a lot of police dramas – her behaviour suddenly appeared to be almost scripted.
‘How did you kill your father?’
Caroline sighed, her eyes flicking backwards and forwards as though she was working out where to start. This obviously wasn’t part of a script; she looked genuinely confused and conflicted.
‘My father was diagnosed with stage four liver cancer a couple of months ago. It was aggressive and he was in a lot of pain. It wasn’t treatable so the hospital sent him home to die in familiar surroundings. I’ve been looking after him, feeding him, keeping him clean, and administering his medication. Yesterday he couldn’t get out of bed, the pain was too bad. He… he soiled himself and then lay in it for hours because he couldn’t bear to tell me. I managed to get him cleaned up last night but it was torture for him. He asked me to sit with him for a while afterwards and we had a long talk. He told me that he didn’t want to go on. That he knew he wasn’t going to recover. He was in pain and he wanted it to end. He’d been struggling to take his pain medication, the tablets, so the hospital prescribed Oramorph liquid. We had two bottles in the house, to last two weeks. I kept it in a downstairs cupboard.’
Her sentences were short, clipped, stilted as she broke the events down into smaller portions, possibly so that she didn’t have to confess everything in one go. She picked up her coffee with a trembling hand and took a sip.
‘He… he also had a couple of bottles of Scotch. He’d always liked a drink and whisky was his favourite. He’d not been able to drink since his diagnosis. He asked for a glass of whisky and his morphine. I knew it would probably kill him. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I went downstairs and opened the cupboard.’
Another sip of coffee.
‘I didn’t think I could do it, though. I thought about mixing the whisky with the morphine and giving him the glass but I just couldn’t. I paced around for a bit and then I heard a shout from upstairs. I ran up and he’d wet himself and was crying; I don’t know if it was the pain or the humiliation. That was when I decided. I cleaned him up again, got him into some dry pyjamas and went back downstairs. I took him a glass, the whisky and the Oramorph and left them on his bedside table. I knew, if he was determined enough, that he could mix it himself. Then I left him.’ Her breath hitched as she tried to stifle a sob of anguish.
‘What did you do?’ Kate asked. ‘Did you leave the house?’
‘Yes. I went for a drive. I didn’t want to be there if… when he did it.’
‘What time was this?’
‘I don’t know. Probably sometime around eight. I just drove. I couldn’t tell you where I went.’
‘Just in Thorpe?’
‘No. I remember driving past the crematorium in Doncaster. It registered with me because I suddenly realised that I had a funeral to plan.’
Caroline took a shuddering breath that turned into a sob. ‘I went back home and got straight into bed. I set my alarm for six, earlier than usual and slept like a baby. I don’t know if it was the relief or sheer exhaustion.’
‘You didn’t check on your father when you got home?’ Kate asked.
‘No. I think a part of me didn’t want to know. I went into his room this morning and he was dead. He looked peaceful. I sat with him for a few minutes then called the ambulance. I wasn’t sure what to do so I thought an ambulance would be the best idea. A police officer turned up as well and then a doctor.’
Kate looked down at the statement from the PCSO who had attended the scene. It corroborated what Caroline was saying.
‘And you handed yourself in?’
‘There wasn’t much point in doing anything else. I left him alone with the means to take his own life. He couldn’t have managed the stairs to get the drink and the drug himself. It was my fault. I killed him. It’ll all come out at an inquest. If there’s a post mortem it will confirm the drugs and drink in his system and my fingerprints will be on the glass.’
She sat back and placed her palms flat on the table in front of her, suggesting that she thought the conversation was over.
‘Why did you wait until the body was on the way to the hospital before you confessed?’ Kate asked. It didn’t quite make sense. A police officer had attended the scene. Why not confess then? Why confess at all?
Caroline studied Kate for a few seconds as though weighing up exactly how to construct an answer. She didn’t seem to have expected this question. ‘I didn’t want to turn his house into a crime scene. It was his home.’
‘But, surely you know that the police will have to investigate your claim? They’ll already have access to the house and they’ll check that any evidence corroborates your story.'
Caroline looked startled, her eyes widened and her nostrils flared. ‘They’ll be in the house? Now?’
Kate nodded. She wasn’t sure whether this was the case but she knew that the house would have been cordoned off until a forensic examination had been completed.
‘But why?’ Caroline asked. ‘I’ve told you what happened.’
‘As I said, they need to make sure that the forensic evidence backs up your story. You could be covering for
somebody else, you could have killed your father in a different way, or you could simply be lying about the whole thing.’
‘Why would I do that?’ Caroline asked, frowning. ‘Who wants to be charged with murder? I only handed myself in because if anybody decided that a post mortem was necessary it would look bad if I’d not spoken out. It would have been pretty obvious that he couldn’t have got downstairs by himself which would have implicated me straight away.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Kate said. ‘People do strange things to get our attention.’
‘At least he’s not there. That’s what I wanted. I needed him to be out of the way before I told anybody what had happened. I know it sounds a bit daft but I didn’t want him to see me get arrested.’
‘It’s not daft,’ Kate said kindly. She could see that the self-contained woman that had been sitting in front of her at the start of the interview was beginning to unravel. The story made sense and Kate wasn’t getting the feeling that Caroline was hiding something despite her slightly odd demeanour. It felt like a good time to give them both a break. She stated the time for the recording, terminated the interview and went to find Raymond who, she suspected, had probably watched at least part of the conversation.
Chapter 3
Hollis and Cooper were back from the canal when Kate finally managed to extricate herself from Raymond’s office. Her instinct had been right; he had watched part of the interview and he’d been baffled by Caroline Lambert’s poise and her matter-of-fact statement. He’d even suggested that her sob, part way through, had been for effect, trying to appear more upset than she really was but Kate didn’t share his cynicism. He wanted to let Lambert stew in the interview room for a while and advised Kate to take somebody with her when she went back.
‘Any news on your unidentified body?’ she asked Cooper, who blushed at the direct question.
‘She’s not my…’
‘I know,’ Kate said. ‘Did anything else turn up after I’d left?’
‘Divers found her other boot,’ Hollis offered, pulling up a chair and sitting down in front of his computer. She could tell that he didn’t think it was significant. ‘It was at the bottom of the lock. They pulled out a few other bits of stuff that got bagged and tagged. We’ll know more when Kailisa’s finished with her. Still no ID, though. What about your mystery woman?’ He swiped his ID card and his long fingers flew across the keyboard as he logged on.
Kate gave a detailed account of Caroline Lambert’s story, including Raymond’s thoughts about her composure and lack of emotion. She wasn’t convinced that the woman was as cold as the DCI was suggesting.
‘Could be shock,’ Hollis suggested, supporting Kate’s own theory.
‘Could just be a hard-faced bitch,’ said a voice from behind one of the computer monitors. O’Connor raised his head, thick beard barely disguising his grin. ‘Bet the dad’s rich and she’s done it for the inheritance.’
‘Hardly an original thought, O’Connor,’ Kate fired back at the DS. ‘But why not wait? He was dying anyway.’
‘Tons of debt? Loan sharks threatening her? There’s a lot of people owe a lot of money to some really dodgy characters.’
‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ she said, dismissing O’Connor. He could always see a link to South Yorkshire’s seedy underbelly of illegal loans, deals and trafficking even in a case like this. He was good at ingratiating himself with people lower down the pecking order in gangs and using them to get dirt on the people at the top. Raymond thought the sun shone out of O’Connor, and his collar of the leader of an illegal smuggling and distribution network the previous summer had added to his kudos. Kate wasn’t convinced, though. She thought his methods and his contacts were bordering on unprofessional and she didn’t especially enjoy working with him.
‘A poxy ex-council house doesn’t seem worth killing somebody for,’ Hollis said. ‘It probably wouldn’t sell for much more than about eighty grand.’
‘Let’s go and have a look,’ Kate said. ‘Forensics should still be there. I wouldn’t mind having a look round to see if Caroline Lambert’s story adds up.’
Kate hadn’t visited the Crosslands Estate since the summer. Now, in the grip of an icy winter her memories were a series of overlapping images. Events of the previous year bruised her mind with their immediacy as she scanned the old quarry site where she’d been called to view the body of a seven-year-old girl, and Kate shivered involuntarily as she caught sight of the chimney of the school’s old boiler house, stark on the skyline like a thumb raised in confirmation of her survival.
Her hand went automatically to the ghost of the wound in her side, an instinctive testing that she had healed and that the scar was just a memory.
Hollis looked across at her as he changed gear. ‘You okay?’
‘Fine,’ Kate said, taking a deep breath. ‘First time back here since last summer, that’s all.’
‘Same for me,’ Hollis said, reminding Kate that she wasn’t the only one with a scar. He’d also suffered at the hands of a killer, even if his own scars weren’t physical.
The privet hedges were still green in defiance of the recent frosts but the other trees on the estate were skeletal. The pavements looked dried out as if the winter cold had sapped moisture from the cement, and the roads were covered with swathes of orange-brown salt that the council scattered to prevent accidents. Kate remembered that, when she’d been a child sliding on the snow in these streets, the ‘grit-lorry’ had been an open-backed truck with two men with shovels on the back. They scattered salt across the roads using only muscle power and, if they saw that the kids had made a slide, they gritted that as well, despite the wails of protest. It didn’t snow much anymore, though; the grit was more a precaution than a necessity.
‘Left here,’ she said to Hollis as they approached the short row of shops that served the estate. They’d changed almost beyond recognition, Kate noted, as Hollis turned into a wide street and parked the car outside the address that Kate had been given. The off-licence cum sweetshop of her childhood was a Chinese takeaway and the greengrocer’s had been knocked through into what had been a wool and fabric shop to create a mini-supermarket. The bus shelter at the end of the row was a modern Perspex one, not the concrete structure she remembered. The graffiti looked much the same, though.
The house they were visiting looked like most of the others on the estate. Red brick with white uPVC windows and a tidy garden. Unlike the ones to either side which had lost most of their front gardens and hedges to block-paved drives to accommodate a family car, Dennis Lambert’s house still retained a privet hedge and a functioning gate. Two vans and a liveried police car were parked outside neighbouring houses, and Kate was almost certain she could feel the faint breeze of curtains twitching as she pushed open the gate and climbed the short flight of steps to the front door.
She pressed the bell and stepped back. An overall-clad figure opened the door and Kate was surprised to see another member of her team blocking her way.
‘Barratt? I thought you’d taken a couple of days’ leave.’
He stepped outside and pulled down his hood, running his hand through his thinning fair hair. ‘Swapped it. I was in the office when the call came in about this case so I legged it over here.’
Typical of the DC, Kate thought. He was keen but had a bit of a tendency to go rogue if she didn’t keep him in check by giving him very specific instructions. She could imagine him dashing out of the office before any other members of the team could come in and stake a claim. She would have put money on Raymond having no idea where Barratt was or what he was up to.
‘You didn’t think to let me know you were on duty? That you were here?’
He hung his head like a scolded puppy. ‘I rang through but you were in an interview. Left a message for the DCI but I don’t know if he’ll have got it.’
It sounded like an excuse but it was perfectly plausible. Kate had been in an interview and Raymond wasn’t always the easiest person to com
municate with. Kate didn’t envy anybody on the switchboard trying to tell him anything that he deemed to be irrelevant or unimportant.
‘What’s going on in there?’ she asked, nodding towards the front door.
‘SOCOs have finished doing their thing. I think everybody’s getting ready to leave.’
‘Any sign of violence, a struggle?’
Barratt shook his head. ‘Bedroom smells a bit unpleasant but that’s probably to be expected, the state the old bloke was in. Otherwise nothing unusual.’
They were interrupted by the door opening. Two members of the forensics team pushed past, carrying heavy steel cases of equipment. They were followed by another member of their team laden with evidence bags.
Kate flashed her warrant card. ‘Okay to go inside?’
The female colleague looked her up and down as though she were assessing Kate’s suitability for an exclusive club. ‘Should be. We’re done. Wear shoe covers, though,’ she said, gesturing towards a cardboard box next to the door.
Kate followed her instruction and stepped into the dimly lit hallway. It wasn’t quite four o’clock but the days had only just started to get longer and there wasn’t much light coming through the narrow windows at the top and bottom of the stairs.
‘Barratt!’ Kate called. ‘Walk me through it.’
The DC pushed past Hollis who had remained in the doorway and, eager to show off what he knew, he started babbling. ‘Kitchen’s through there. Living room…’
‘I know the layout of these houses,’ Kate said. ‘What happened where?’
Chastened, Barratt tried again. ‘The father was in the main bedroom, at the front of the house. It looks like the daughter was sleeping in the back room. There were lots of her clothes and stuff scattered about.’
Kate climbed the stairs slowly, picturing the location of the upstairs rooms. She followed the landing round to the front bedroom and stood in the doorway surveying the scene. There was a musty smell cut through with the faint, acrid tang of urine. The dark wood wardrobe and chest of drawers were closed and the carpet was worn and dusty, making the whole room seem neglected. The bed was unmade, a cheap wooden frame with a sagging, stained mattress. The pillows and duvet were missing, obviously removed by the forensics team.
The Kate Fletcher Series Page 25
