The Kate Fletcher Series

by Heleyne Hammersley

  ‘Right,’ Caroline breathed close to her ear. ‘Now listen and listen carefully. My sister cannot be buried with that man. I know that you know what he did but you don’t know everything.’ Kate felt the blade tremble against her flesh as Caroline took a deep breath and told her story.

  Chapter 35

  It was the third time in the last few days that Jeanette had been home late. Her dad would go mad – again. He was always accusing her of being off with the lads but she just wanted to hang about with her friends. Julie had got a new radio cassette player and she’d taped the Top 40 so they could sit out in her garden and listen to their favourite songs. And then it had got really late and Jeanette had tried to run home but she’d broken the heel off her shoe and ended up limping slowly back up the street.

  The house was already in darkness as she reached up and took the spare key from its hiding place in one of the hanging baskets that flanked the front door. She eased it into the lock and held her breath. There was no sound as the mechanism slid back and the door opened inwards. She closed it behind her and slid the bolt noiselessly. Now for the stairs. The second one up was loose on the right-hand side so she stepped carefully to the left and then tiptoed up the rest of the flight in silence. Her little sister’s door was ajar and, in the moonlight seeping through the landing window, she could make out a small pale face watching her. Jeanette made a shushing gesture – putting her index finger to her mouth – and her sister smiled,

  The last few steps were the most dangerous. Her parents’ bedroom door was half open, the darkness beyond absolute. Three more steps and she’d reach the safety of her own room. She raised one foot, about to take a step when she spotted a movement. Thrown off balance she almost cried out in alarm. She didn’t see the fist until it smashed into her face.

  Behind her, Jeanette heard her sister’s bedroom door close with a muffled click and then she was falling into nothingness.

  ‘Caroline, get out of bed and help me. Now!’

  Caroline pulled the blankets higher, covering her head, trying to blot out the sounds coming from outside her bedroom door.

  ‘I said now!’

  She didn’t dare disobey. She’d seen the consequences of Jeanette’s disobedience and there was no way that she wanted her father to turn the full force of his anger on her.

  She crept out of bed and opened her door, just a crack at first, hoping that he would have managed without her but he was standing at the top of the stairs glaring at something below him.

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘I need you to help me with your sister.’

  Caroline stepped out onto the landing and followed his gaze. Her sister, Jeanette, was lying in a crumpled heap at the foot of the stairs next to the front door. She wasn’t moving.

  ‘Is she hurt?’ Caroline whispered.

  ‘She’s had a bit of an accident,’ her dad said. ‘I need to move her out of the way. Get the blanket off the top of your wardrobe. It’s in the big suitcase that we took on holiday.’

  Mechanically, Caroline followed his instructions; she pulled her desk chair over to the wardrobe, climbed up and managed to get the case down without overbalancing. She flicked the latches on the case and the lid popped open revealing a threadbare blue blanket which she gathered in her arms and took to her father.

  ‘Now go back into your bedroom,’ he ordered.

  ‘Is she going to be all right?’ Caroline asked. ‘Is she cold?’

  ‘I said go back to bed!’ her father yelled.

  Caroline scuttled back across the landing, closed her bedroom door, and buried herself beneath the covers until morning.

  The next day, Jeanette was gone. Their dad explained that she’d run away after her accident but Caroline knew that he was lying. Jeanette couldn’t have run away because Caroline had seen that one of her legs was broken. It had been twisted at a strange angle the night before, almost as if it had been taken off her body and put on backwards. Caroline’s mum wasn’t feeling well and had decided to stay in bed so Caroline had to get her own breakfast while her dad fixed something in the bathroom. When he’d finished, he’d asked her if she remembered anything about the previous night. She remembered everything and told him so but he said she was wrong. He said that if anybody asked she had to tell them that Jeanette hadn’t come home otherwise her sister would be in a lot of trouble. Caroline couldn’t work out why this would be the case but her dad was a grown-up and he knew best.

  The police arrived later that day. They asked her dad a lot of questions about when he’d last seen Jeanette and then they asked her and she told them her dad’s lie. Her mum stayed in bed through it all.

  There were a lot of visits from the police after that. Her dad kept telling them the same story and her mum kept saying that she’d not been very well and didn’t know anything about where Jeanette might have gone. Caroline knew that her mum was poorly because she kept holding her tummy and her face was a funny colour as if she’d been sunbathing but just on one side.

  Jeanette didn’t come home.

  After the visits from the police had finished, Caroline’s dad decided that he would make the garden nice for her mum, to make her feel better. He dug new flowerbeds and then made a clear space in one corner for a greenhouse. Caroline wished that he’d finished working in the bathroom first because there was a bad smell that her dad said was the drains and that he’d fix it when he’d finished outside.

  The greenhouse arrived on the back of a lorry. It was like a pile of empty window frames. Her dad put it together and it looked like the climbing frame in the park. When she said this to her dad though, he shouted at her and told her that she’d better not try climbing on it. He worked every day, putting in panes of glass and sealing them with putty that had a funny smell like Sunday dinners and bleach mixed together. Eventually all that was left to do was the floor which he was going to cover with concrete.

  It was a hot night and Caroline woke up thirsty. There was a plastic beaker on the bathroom sink that she could use if she needed a drink after everybody had gone to bed but she lay awake trying not to think about water. She didn’t want to go in the bathroom because the smell was really bad and she was worried that it might have soaked into the plastic of her cup and would make the water taste bad. Eventually she knew that she wouldn’t get back to sleep without a drink so she got out of bed and opened her bedroom door. The light on the landing was on and there were noises coming from the bathroom. She slowly pushed open the door and saw her dad squatting on the floor. He’d taken the panel off the side of the bath and was dragging something out from behind it.

  Caroline watched as he wrestled with a large package, finally pulling it free. She couldn’t quite see what it was. There was something wrapped up in the plastic. Something brightly coloured. It wasn’t until her father stood up, allowing the light to fall on the whole of the object that Caroline realised what she was looking at.

  She screamed as she recognised the face of her sister pressed against the plastic.

  Her father grabbed her and slapped her hard across the face, twice, but she couldn’t stop sobbing. She kept trying to ask him what had happened but she couldn’t get the words out between her sobs.

  ‘Get back to bed and keep your trap shut!’ her dad yelled at her but she couldn’t, wouldn’t, leave her sister. When she managed to gasp the words out her dad laughed like a villain in a film and told her that she might as well help him then.

  He sent her down to the greenhouse in her pyjamas and told her to make sure that the hole he’d dug was deep enough. She followed his instructions as though she was in a dream even though she didn’t know what he meant by ‘deep enough’ and she was standing in the greenhouse when he arrived carrying the bundle of her dead sister in his arms. She watched in silence as he placed Jeanette’s body in the hole in the greenhouse floor and then covered her with soil.

  ‘Right,’ he said when the hole was filled in. ‘You can help with the cement.’

  He tipped up a
bucketful of grey slop out on top of the soil and showed her how to level it with a length of wood, leaving her to complete the task while he went outside to mix more cement. It felt like hours before the floor was finally finished. He’d put in a wooden bench over where Jeanette was buried and cemented the feet into the floor and Caroline had to kneel down to smooth around the edges.

  ‘Get that last bit done,’ he told Caroline. ‘Then get back to bed and never tell anybody what you’ve done. If you do, the police will lock me up and they’ll lock you up for helping me. You’ll never see your mum again.’

  Caroline had to pass the wooden block across the cement three times before she managed to erase the tracks of her tears where they’d spilled over her sister’s body. As one final small act of rebellion, or remembrance, she’d found a nail and written Jeanette’s initials as small as she could in the corner of the greenhouse floor where her dad might never find them. Jeanette might not have a proper grave but at least Caroline had marked where she was buried.

  Chapter 36

  Kate could feel Caroline’s breath against her neck as she told her story, her words becoming almost inaudible as she described how she’d tried to mark her sister’s grave.

  The knife point had slipped and was resting against Kate’s collarbone; she could feel it clearly through her coat, sense its coldness and purpose. She struggled against her rising panic – images from the previous summer, of a different knife and a different attacker, threatening to overwhelm her.

  ‘I still don’t understand why I’m here,’ she said to Caroline, forcing herself to stay calm; hoping not to antagonise her captor too much until she could work out a way to get free from the loosening grip. ‘I get that your dad was a complete bastard who killed your sister and screwed you up but what’s the point of all this?’

  She felt Caroline sigh against her.

  ‘I’m so fucking tired. I had a plan but it’s going wrong, coming unravelled. I wanted to be able to walk away, to start again but you won’t let me do that, will you? You’re going to hound me every day. I thought I might be able to get you to stop the funeral, if I could talk to you, explain everything, but I know that’s not going to happen. If I let you go you’ll just ring your work and somebody will come and get me. So now I’m in another mess and the only way out is to get rid of you. I don’t want to. I don’t want to hurt anybody else but I can’t seem to stop what I’ve started. It’s his fault. I can feel his poison in me, flowing through my veins. I wouldn’t have been like this if it hadn’t been for Dennis. I could have been happy; I could have had a life.

  ‘I just needed somebody to know what he was like. What it was like for us after we buried Jeanette. My mum didn’t know the details but I’m sure she guessed. She never used the greenhouse and she had no interest in the flowerbeds that he put in. And I was terrified for years. Terrified of him. Of his fists and his feet. Terrified that somebody would find out what we’d done and I’d be put in jail. He’d torment me with it, you know. He’d say that there was a police car on the street or that they were on the phone. He enjoyed making me afraid; enjoyed the power that he had over me. I was a complete mess until I did my GCSEs.’

  ‘What changed then?’ Kate asked, trying to keep the woman talking. If she stopped then Kate knew that she was as good as dead.

  ‘I saw a way out. I knew that if I was clever enough I could go to university. My grades were excellent so I put in another two years’ hard work and got my A Levels.’

  As she listened, Kate saw something on the towpath. Lights. Probably a quarter of a mile away, bobbing up and down and definitely heading in the direction of the lock. Somebody was coming towards them. She made a play of trying to struggle free, shifting position on the wooden arm of the lock gate, angling herself so that Caroline wouldn’t be able to see the lights if she wanted to keep hold of Kate’s arm.

  ‘Just. Sit. Still.’ Caroline said, twisting round with her, away from the direction of the lights.

  ‘What about your mum?’ Kate asked, breathing heavily from her exertions; buying time.

  ‘What about her?’ Caroline asked.

  ‘Did she really kill herself?’

  Another heavy sigh. ‘Yes. I know she did because I got her the sleeping tablets. I told the receptionist at the doctors that I’d lost her last prescription and they believed me and gave me another one. We wanted to make sure that she did it right. It was what she wanted and I helped her. I couldn’t do it until I was eighteen – we knew that the chemist wouldn’t give me the drugs if I was underage. She couldn’t live with him any longer. He made her life a misery and nobody knew except me. Everybody on the estate thought he was a fantastic husband and father; that he looked after us both when Jeanette disappeared. He didn’t – he terrorised us.’

  Was her mother’s death another murder? Kate couldn’t quite work out the legality, her brain was too preoccupied with trying to keep Caroline’s attention away from the lights, but Kate knew that Caroline could be held culpable for providing the drugs.

  Where was the person with the light? Surely they should have reached the lock by now. She desperately wanted to turn round, to see who was approaching, and to yell for help, but the knife blade forced her to be still.

  ‘So that’s three people you’ve killed,’ Kate said.

  ‘I know. I don’t need you to remind me. But I want you to know that Maddie was unavoidable. I think at first I was trying to frighten her into keeping quiet. But I could see that it wouldn’t work so there was no other way. I was… oh, I don’t really know what I was doing. I just needed time to get away. And I am sorry about her. But not Dennis. He got what was coming to him.’

  ‘And I’m to be number four? Is that the plan? What’s the point? If you kill me there’ll be others coming after you. My colleagues know that you’re alive. They’ll find you eventually.’

  ‘They already have,’ said a voice from the darkness. ‘Put the knife down, Caroline.’

  Kate struggled again but Caroline tightened her grip and raised the knife until it was next to Kate’s right eye.

  ‘It’s no good,’ said another voice, this one from behind her. ‘We’ve got you surrounded. You can’t walk away from this. Let her go.’

  Kate tensed, puzzled. She recognised Cooper’s voice but the second, another woman, was a stranger. Kate could make out one dark figure near the lock but she couldn’t see anybody else. Was Cooper a bloody ventriloquist? A sudden flash of light lit up Sam’s face as she put her phone to her ear.

  ‘I’m calling for backup, Caroline. Let Kate go. This is over.’

  ‘I don’t… I can’t. I didn’t want this. I just want it to be done with.’ Her grip tightened and she wrapped her forearm around Kate’s neck.

  ‘Don’t,’ Kate said quietly. ‘Just let go and it’s over. Dennis is dead. We found Jeanette. Let it go, Caroline. There’s nowhere left to run.’

  After a few seconds of holding her breath, desperate for her words to have resonated somewhere in Caroline’s warped psyche, Kate felt the woman behind her loosen her grip; the pressure from the blade was gone. She turned herself round quickly, grabbed Caroline’s hand and twisted her wrist until she dropped the knife. She sagged against Kate, the fight gone. Gently, Kate eased her down onto the wooden lock gate, kicking the knife away from her feet as she sat down next to her.

  ‘It is done, Caroline. We found Jeanette. Dennis is gone. It’s over.’

  Sam walked towards them, her head torch switched back on, spearing Caroline Lambert on the beam of light like a butterfly pinned to a board. The change in the woman shocked Kate as she saw her properly for the first time since Caroline had grabbed her in the car. The blonde hair was dyed dark brown and the understated make-up had been replaced by bold colours and red slashes of lipstick. Kate might not have recognised her if she’d passed her in the street.

  ‘I’m sorry about Maddie,’ Caroline said as though she was apologising for treading on Kate’s toe or knocking her drink over. ‘I ju
st didn’t know what else to do. She wanted us to go to the police and for me to admit that I’d been blackmailing her. Obviously I couldn’t do that. It wasn’t part of the plan. It was her or me, I suppose, and my need for survival turned out to be the strongest.’

  Kate remembered the sodden body that they’d removed from the same spot a few short weeks earlier and the boy who’d sobbed at his mother’s funeral. Suddenly the compassion that she’d felt for this pathetic figure dissipated like morning fog in a hot sun. She didn’t deserve sympathy. She’d killed an innocent, vulnerable woman and whatever had happened to her in her past didn’t excuse that.

  Kate took a deep breath. ‘Caroline Lambert, I’m arresting you on suspicion of murder. You don’t have to say anything but…’

  Epilogue

  Cooper grinned as she passed Kate a white envelope.

  ‘What’s this?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Wedding invitation,’ Sam said, blushing.

  ‘You and Abbie?’

  Cooper nodded.

  ‘Congratulations. I’m glad you’ve worked things out,’ Kate said, wondering what Nick’s reaction would be if she asked him to be her date to a lesbian wedding. Only one way to find out, she decided. It would be a good test. They’d already been out twice; once for drinks and once for dinner. He was an interesting man and he wasn’t pushy, allowing Kate to take her time to get to know him. The more she knew, the more she found that she liked him.

  ‘We’d worked things out before that night,’ Cooper was explaining. ‘We’re only going to live on the boat in the summer.’