by Jo Bannister
‘I don’t understand,’ said Donovan. It wasn’t the only thing, but it was the one bothering him now. ‘Why do you want me to take Elphie away now? What are you afraid of?’
‘Don’t you see? – Elphie is living proof of what happened. That I’m not who I claim to be. All those involved are threatened by her existence. As long as everyone who knew about it lived within a stone’s throw of this house there wasn’t a problem – no one was going to betray the whole village. Then you came. If you began to suspect any of this, all you needed was a sample of Elphie’s blood. All the information is there. If you’d died we’d have been safe, and so would she. Now – I don’t know. I don’t know if either of you is safe here any longer.’
‘You think—’ Donovan heard his voice crack with astonishment and tried again. ‘You think the people here might want to kill her? Might want to kill me?’
Payne shrugged. ‘It’s a big fen out there, Sergeant Donovan. It’s Elphie’s playground, but it could easily become her grave. As for you, you’re missing already. Your colleagues think you fell off your boat and drowned. A body in the canal would confirm it. Three men and a bucket is all it would take.’
Donovan was having trouble taking it in. But an instinct for survival warned him it really would be that easy. ‘Would you be one of them?’
Payne shook his head. ‘I told you: I want you to get Elphie away from here. Mum, go upstairs and put some things in a bag for her. We’re going now, while there’s nothing to stop us.’
Dead on cue the kitchen door opened and shut, slow footsteps sounded across the hall floor and the handle of the office door turned. A desiccated hand appeared in the opening, followed by the pickled-walnut face of Dr Chapel.
‘Afternoon, everyone,’ he greeted them equably. ‘I said I’d pop round sometime today, and here I am.’
3
After an hour in the interview room Shapiro emerged rolling his eyes. ‘I know she’s involved. I can’t for the life of me get her to open up.’
‘Do you want me to try?’ asked Liz. Her tone was subdued. Shapiro thought she was thinking about Brian; actually she was embarrassed that she’d talked to Sheila Crosbie, twice, and not realized she was implicated in this.
‘By all means. But I don’t think she’s waiting to be asked nicely. It’s like interrogating a POW: you get name, rank and serial number, and after that she just grits her teeth and sits there. She’s not even denying it any more. She isn’t saying anything at all.’
‘She’s protecting someone.’
‘Yes. She isn’t doing herself any good so that has to be it.’
Liz frowned. ‘That was odd about her mother. Not wanting her to have the baby, I mean. I suppose she does live locally?’
Shapiro nodded. ‘In The Jubilee, a few hundred yards from Sheila’s flat. I don’t understand it either.’
‘Maybe we should try to,’ said Liz. ‘I’ll go and see the mother. She may be so angry that her daughter doesn’t trust her with her own grandson that she’ll let something slip.’
The Jubilee was a strange place, a walled city at the heart of Castlemere. It was built in the closing years of the Victorian period, six streets of the last word in artisan accommodation. Two up and two down, in long terraces separated by cobbles at the front and back-to-back yards behind, the little houses celebrated the end of the war with new inside plumbing, then promptly entered a time bubble. They weren’t exactly neglected but they never changed. Even the people were indistinguishable at first sight from their parents.
The Jubilee had a reputation in Castlemere as the place where all the town’s ills were fermented. Certainly a good proportion of the households derived at least some of their income from crime or the black economy, but there were decent people in the six streets as well. Nothing Liz was able to pull off the computer, or learn from Sergeant Bolsover who probably knew more, suggested that Margaret Crosbie wasn’t one of them. The widow of a dustman who died too young to become a refuse collector, she raised five children in the little house in Coronation Row. All seemed to have made some sort of a go of their lives, with jobs, partners and children of their own. Sheila was the youngest.
Liz knew she was doing Mrs Crosbie no favours by parking in front of the house. Whenever she changed her car The Jubilee knew what she’d got before Brian did. But if she parked on Brick Lane and walked, the same quietly observant eyes would note where she was going in just the same way. But nobody would throw stones at Mrs Crosbie’s windows because she’d had the police round. On the contrary, it might raise her social cachet.
She didn’t recognize Liz instantly, the way many of her neighbours would, but even a friendly visit from the police is unlike anything else. Mrs Crosbie didn’t need to see Liz’s warrant card. Her eyes grew alarmed and she wiped her hands nervously down the front of her apron. ‘What’s happened? Is it Sheila? Jason?’
‘In a way,’ nodded Liz. ‘May I come in? Sheila’s in a bit of trouble. I’m hoping you can help clear things up.’
She could have been more discreet about the precise nature of the trouble Sheila was in. But there was only one crime at the forefront of everyone’s mind right now, and the idea that Castlemere’s second most senior detective might be working on anything else wouldn’t have fooled Mrs Crosbie for long.
‘It’s this business with the blackmailer,’ Liz said simply. ‘We think Sheila might know who it is.’
Mrs Crosbie stared at her in horror. She was a woman of about fifty who spoke with the same fenland accent as Bolsover and Dick Morgan. ‘Sheila? My Sheila?’
‘I don’t know how involved she is. She won’t tell us. She’s obviously protecting someone. But if she won’t talk she’ll end up taking the blame for this.’ This was rather over-egging the pudding, but Liz felt justified by the gravity of the situation.
‘But – Sheila got hurt, thanks to him. Our Jason could have been hurt.’
‘Well, maybe,’ said Liz. ‘The other possibility is that she deliberately dipped her hands in caustic soda.’
‘Why?’ Mrs Crosbie clearly thought she was mad.
It was no more than a possibility, but it made a kind of twisted sense. ‘Because the blackmailer asked her to. Because it was safer for him than having to plant the stuff in the chemist’s. He’d have had to buy it, doctor it and put it back; and he had to do this with a couple of items, and there was the risk that Mr Simpson would remember him. He didn’t want to take that risk. I think he bought the baby lotion, among other things, took them home and added some special ingredients. Caustic soda to the baby lotion, an inedible fungus to some cold remedy. The cold remedy he planted on Simpson’s shelves when no one was looking, but he took the baby lotion round to Sheila’s flat. He also took some soda crystals: he made up a solution with them and had Sheila put her hands in it.’
Put like that it sounded barely plausible. Liz would have forgiven Mrs Crosbie for laughing in her face. But it was too serious for that and both women knew it. Liz wasn’t talking about what she could prove but about what she believed. She was desperately trying to stop a dangerous criminal.
‘You’re saying that Sheila’s helping him.’
‘He may be threatening her. Or Jason; I don’t know.’
‘You think I can tell you who he is?’
‘I hope so. He’s already hurt your daughter. If we don’t stop him he’ll do a lot more damage.’ Liz waited.
‘I don’t know all her friends.’
‘This man isn’t a friend. He has a hold over her: a hold strong enough to make her risk going to prison.’
Margaret Crosbie thought in silence for perhaps half a minute. Then she shook her head. ‘There isn’t anyone she cares that much about.’
‘Really? No one?’
‘Well, maybe two people. But I didn’t do it, and I don’t think Jason did either.’
‘We wondered about Jason’s father.’
Mrs Crosbie raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Go to prison for him? She wouldn’t cr
oss the street for him; she wouldn’t cross the room for him. Far as I know she hasn’t seen him since before Jason was born. I’m sorry, Inspector, but you’ll have to do better than that.’
But Liz shook her head despondently, all out of ideas. All that was left was the secret weapon. ‘Mrs Crosbie, when we took Sheila in for questioning we asked if she wanted to drop the baby off here. She told us to leave him with social services instead. Why do you suppose that was?’
Margaret Crosbie’s cheeks darkened, her eyes flicked down and she caught a ragged breath. Liz had thought that would hit her hard, and it did. And she wasn’t expecting it. It wasn’t that they never saw eye to eye, or they’d had a flaming row. She was hurt and astonished and mortified all at once. She floundered after words. ‘I — I don’t know – it makes no sense. She really said that? But she leaves him here all the time. He’s my grandson, for God’s sake! Why would she give him to social services?’ Tears were audible in her voice; a moment later they were visible on her cheeks.
Liz winced. It would have been worth distressing her if it had got them anywhere; but it hadn’t. ‘Don’t be upset, Mrs Crosbie. There will be a reason, if we can just work it out. And it won’t be anything to do with you. It’ll be to do with what she’s got herself into.’
They’d moved into the living room. Mrs Crosbie sank into her easy chair, waved her visitor to the sofa.
‘All right,’ Liz said at length; ‘all right. Sheila’s afraid of something, and she’s protecting someone. But the only people she cares that much about are you and Jason. So what if she acted as she did in order to protect you and Jason? She isn’t helping the blackmailer from choice – she’s afraid of what he might do to her family. Is there anyone she’s that afraid of?’
Mrs Crosbie was thinking too. ‘Tell me something. When social services took our Jason, where did they take him to?’
Liz hazarded a guess. ‘There’s a big children’s home on Cambridge Road. Dunstan House. It might have been there.’
Margaret Crosbie nodded slowly. ‘A big place. Lots of staff?’
‘Yes. What—?’ Then she saw what difference that made. ‘She’s afraid of someone abducting him?’
‘Maybe. Maybe that’s what Social Services could offer that I can’t. Staff, security locks, closed circuit TV Here there’s just me, and if someone was determined enough to get in I couldn’t stop him.’
‘The blackmailer? All right, he’s a vicious, dangerous man, I wouldn’t want him near any baby of mine either.’ Liz was thinking aloud. ‘Sheila knows him – she knows him well enough to be afraid of him. She helped him because he threatened to hurt Jason if she didn’t.
‘She did what he told her, we seemed to believe her story, she thought she’d got away with it. When we picked her up, shocked as she was, the thing that worried her most was that the man behind all this would find out. He’d blame her for letting him down. He can’t get at her while she’s in custody, but he could get at Jason. And if the baby was here when he caught up with him, you could be hurt as well.
‘So she sent him to Dunstan House. She thought they could protect him. If Jason can’t be with her, he’s safer there than anywhere else. She wasn’t doubting your ability to look after him, Mrs Crosbie. She was doing her best to look after both of you.’
Relief made the woman’s voice shake. ‘But – who—? How would my Sheila know somebody like that?’
‘There’s a mobile over Jason’s cot. Somebody hand-carved it for him. Sheila put it up, but she didn’t seem too pleased with it. We wondered if it was made by Jason’s father.’
‘The psycho?’
Liz breathed lightly. ‘You call him The Psycho?’
‘It’s what she calls him. She wouldn’t tell me his name. She said she never wanted to hear it again.’
‘I mean – Sheila had a relationship with a man you both think of as a psychopath, and you didn’t think to tell me?’
Dr Chapel remained in the doorway. His eyes went from one to the next of them, cooling as they travelled. Finally he said, ‘You’ve told him, haven’t you?’ His voice crackled like ice. ‘You stupid, stupid people.’
It was telling, Donovan thought, that neither of them objected to being the butt of his insults in their own home. It wasn’t just the courtesy due to an old man, or even to a doctor. They were afraid of him. Events had conspired to invest this little man with far too much power in the lives of those around him. It was something else that could only have happened in a hamlet so small it looked like a fly speck on the map. The twentieth century had barely impinged on East Beckham at all.
Jonathan Payne gazed down at the buttons on his shirt front. ‘Some of it he guessed,’ he murmured. ‘The rest … He thought we murdered Rosemary. It seemed better to tell him the truth.’
‘Oh it did, did it?’ Chapel shut the door behind him with a soft but very definite click. ‘And you thought you were qualified to make that judgement.’
Payne’s head came up and he seemed about to rebel against his diminutive oppressor. But the moment passed and his eyes dropped again. ‘No one is more involved in this than I am.’
‘That’s true,’ agreed Chapel, the creaky voice still managing to carry an edge. ‘It’ll be a great comfort to those of us who get ten years to hear that you got twelve.’ He turned to Sarah. ‘Did you even wonder what’ll happen to Elphie when everyone she knows is in prison?’
That was designed to hurt and it did. Sarah Turner caught her breath in half a sob.
Donovan had no mandate to defend these people, but he did resent the way this vindictive little man was allowed to browbeat those around him. ‘I can’t begin to guess what a court will make of all this,’ he said, ‘I’ve never come across the like before. But I know one thing. If Elphie needs looking after, she’ll get it. You have my word.’
The old man laughed out loud. ‘Your word? Oh well, that’s all right then, isn’t it? She’s going to lose her father, her grandmother and her home, but she’s got the word of some mick detective that she’ll be fine. I can’t see her losing much sleep now.’
Finally Donovan understood why Payne wanted to get his daughter away from East Beckham. This man, this old and vicious man, this man he owed his life to, would do whatever was necessary to protect East Beckham’s secret. He would punish anyone who challenged him, trample anyone who stood in his way, destroy without compunction anyone who posed a threat to his authority. Elphie? He wasn’t concerned for the child. He’d use her when he needed leverage against the Turners, wash his hands of her as soon as it was expedient to do so.
In all his years at the heart of East Beckham society he’d accreted to himself a power that went far beyond the respect earned by his service here. People had learned to turn to him, then to defer to him; they’d sought his opinions, ended up doing his bidding. It was the only explanation for his presence in this room right now. Any of them, Sarah included, could have shouldered him aside. He was still telling them what to do because he knew that if they defied him he had the support of the entire village to whip them back into line.
Donovan stood up and, deliberately turning his back on the doctor, spoke quietly to Sarah. ‘If Elphie’s ready, I think we’ll leave now.’
Chapel vented a loud cackle, as if he’d made a joke. ‘Leave? You think you’re leaving here? You think that now you know what the people here have lied about for fourteen years you can just walk out, start the wheels of justice in motion and never mind who gets crushed? You’re only alive because of us. Because of me.’
‘And I’m suitably grateful,’ spat Donovan, rounding on him. ‘In fact, I’m so grateful I can’t wait to get back to town and tell everyone what a fine and noble example of the medical profession they’ve got themselves out here.’
‘Sarcasm,’ the old man observed acidly, ‘is the lowest form of wit.’
Donovan shook his head in disgust and reached for the door. Chapel stayed where he was, blocking his way. It was plain that what he wanted, what
he really wanted, was for Donovan to knock him down. But Cal Donovan only looked like a violent man. He wasn’t one, and he never had been. He struggled with the quick temper of his Celtic forebears, but he was much more likely to say something he’d regret later than to do something. Except in self-defence he hadn’t hit anyone since he was about fifteen years old, and he wasn’t going to start with a geriatric thug. He reached out and moved the doctor aside. Then he opened the door and went into the hall.
‘Elphie? Come down now. Get your coat – we’re going for a drive.’
But Chapel wasn’t finished. His voice lifted in bitter accusation behind Donovan’s back. ‘If you go through that door you’ll regret it. You have my word on that. There may be a way round this. Let’s talk. Before anyone else gets hurt.’
Elphie came down the stairs, wide-eyed, one arm in the sleeve of her red coat, one foot in its green welly. She sat on the bottom tread to pull on the other. ‘We never go for a drive!’ she announced breathlessly.
‘Be a treat, then, won’t it?’ Donovan would have liked to take her by the hand and lead her out of the house and out of this place without any further delay. But he was waiting for his chauffeur, and Payne was still trying to edge through the door without Chapel noticing.
Donovan took a deep breath, tried to explain it simply. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. A crime was committed here: I have to report it, I don’t have any choice. I don’t know what’ll happen next. Maybe it won’t be that bad. You lied to the Coroner, and you stole Simon Turner’s inheritance. But if his legitimate heirs haven’t come calling on him in the last fourteen years maybe there was no one. The court will take that into account. You could be looking at – I don’t know – a short sentence, maybe even a suspended sentence.
‘I don’t know what’ll happen to the Mill. You’re not allowed to profit from a crime so I don’t see how anyone here could keep it. I don’t know who’d be next in line. Hire yourself a good lawyer, see what he can work out for you.’
