by Ann Troup
Ratcliffe sighed, and rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Aaaagh! This bloody case is driving me mad! I’ve just spent god knows how long listening to a complete fairy tale in there!’
‘Don’t worry about it, I’ve read the file. You have enough forensic evidence to see her away for life; she can say what she likes. She’s got no brief, she’s off her rocker, and she doesn’t stand a chance in court.’ Haddon said reassuringly.
‘Yeah, but I still have to find a suspect for the fire and Stella Baxter’s murder.’
‘And you think it’s a little old lady? According to this Delia Jones is 77 years old.’ Haddon said handing Ratcliffe the file.
‘And Harold Shipman was a GP’ Ratcliffe said quietly, fishing his phone out of his pocket to phone Angela and let her off the hook. He figured he’d better start looking for alternative accommodation pretty soon, because she was going to be really pissed off with him after this.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Charlie let Amy and Diana have first dibs on the bathroom, by the time he had had his turn Amy had disappeared into her room to sleep off the long night, and Diana was tidying his kitchen.
‘Feel better?’ she asked, handing him a cup of tea. ‘You look better.’
Physically he felt cleaner, he had had better days with his body, which was shot with accumulated exhaustion. Mentally he felt like he had been abducted by aliens and dropped into some surreal parallel universe.
‘You should get some sleep.’ Diana said.
‘I should do a lot of things.’
He wandered through to the lounge and sat down on the sofa, easing his aching limbs into its softness, and groaned. ‘I should go back soon, see if there’s any progress.’
‘You should get some rest, or you’ll be no good to man nor beast! They’ll phone if there’s any change.’ Diana told him. There was no doubt in her mind that Rachel would recover, there was every concern in her mind about what would happen next. It seemed impossible that Rachel could stay on with Charlie and Amy, resume a life that had barely started, yet it was equally difficult to imagine that she could just go back to London and carry on the life, no, existence, that she had there. Whatever line had been drawn in the past had been overstepped now. There was no going back either way. Diana’s concern was whether any of them were ready for what might come next. ‘What happens when she gets better, what’s next?’
‘If she gets better.’ Charlie said with a degree of resignation that surprised Diana.
‘You don’t think she will?’
‘I don’t think she wants to. Why would she?’
‘For Amy, if nothing else. Maybe even for you’.
Charlie shook his head. ‘I don’t know, I can’t think about it. I thought things might change when she knew the truth, but I just can’t picture a resolution, I can’t see a happy ending. None of us are in control of this anymore; it’s like watching a train crash in slow motion. More and more crap keeps happening, things coming back to haunt us, to haunt her. It’s not done yet. There will be more. How can she find a way out of it, even if she does get better?’ His voice had risen with every sentence, illustrating the escalation of events that had left him feeling utterly hopeless. ‘Please don’t tell me that time heals, and that love conquers all. I’m sure those things are true, but not for us. Time keeps throwing up more and more crap. Time is closing the gaps between events, not widening them. As for love, we might feel it, I feel it, but none of us know how to do it, not one of us knows how to conduct ourselves as loving people. Look at us, we haven’t got a clue!’
Diana couldn’t think of a thing to say. He was right, every time one of them tried to express love and care, it backfired. Their interpretation of the thing was all wrong. They were so busy trying to protect everyone else, save everyone else and sacrifice themselves that they just ended up hurting each other in the worst possible ways. Lies, secrets, death, chaos. Diana was a great believer in the concept that charity began at home. Her interpretation was that one had to take care of oneself first in order to help others. None of these people knew how to be kind to themselves, consequently they were cruel to each other. Charlie was right; none of them had a clue. Even Amy, the most stable of the lot had grown up with the lie of her mother’s death. An untruth formed to protect her by the people who claimed to love her. If that were her example, how would she manage the next steps? On the train journey they had shared, Amy had explained that she was training to be a psychiatric nurse so that she might understand what made people tick, learn to see what they needed in order to be well again. She was looking for a tool kit, one that should have been provided by her family. But they had never had it to pass on. With this in mind, she patted Charlie on the shoulder, ‘Let’s just concentrate on Rachel getting better for the time being’. It was all she had.
Charlie gave her a weak smile, and drank his tea. His jaw ached where he’d been gritting it for so long. All he wanted to do was get in his van and drive, anywhere, somewhere, as long as it wasn’t here. Knowing that Rachel was in London, that she had left of her own accord, that she didn’t want him, had been far more bearable than this. Now the damage had been done and he only had two options, watch her die in that hospital bed, or watch her live and struggle on. He wasn’t sure which would be more painful, but he did know which would hurt for the longest.
Instinct demanded that he find someone to blame, and his mind erred toward his mother. She was so certain that she was doing the right thing, always had been. He supposed it was because she’d had a tough life, had had to survive the hard way. She was a hard woman, she had corners and you knew all about it if you ran into one of them. He couldn’t remember his father, had never known him, but there were early memories of his mother, indistinct, fleeting, that suggested a softer woman than the one he knew. Memories of a time when she even looked different, when she had laughed sometimes, smelled nice, felt soft. He couldn’t picture her back then, but he knew she was nothing like the tough, determined, single-minded woman he’d grown up with.
Delia Jones didn’t believe in harping on about the past, you just put it behind you and carried on. You didn’t talk about it, you didn’t dwell on it, you just kept moving forward. No, he couldn’t blame her, she had done her best. She’d put up with Valerie Porter for years just to put food on the table, she had been loyal to that woman through thick and thin. Surely, that had to count for something, for some strength of character to be admired. He wished he had inherited her fortitude, however misguided it might have been. That way he might have been able to put the blame at her door, and let himself off the hook.
He should have taken her advice all those years ago and kept well away from Rachel, kept well away from all of them. That was the only thing he could blame his mother for, binding their lives too closely with the Porters. The rest had been his fault. All his.
Diana was right. Perhaps they should just focus on whether or not Rachel would pull through. Move forward, don’t dwell, he told himself.
Delia Jones however was busy breaking her own code. It wasn’t so much that she was dwelling on the past; it was more that the past, was dwelling in her head. Normally things just unfolded in a logical orderly manner. All her actions were dictated by events as they unfolded, she carried them out and moved on. But something had changed, things had started to unravel, the past and the future were colliding unpleasantly in her mind, creating disorder and confusion. It felt like as soon as one disaster was cleared up, another was about to happen. Given that everything she had ever done had been so carefully planned, she couldn’t understand what was going wrong.
Obviously when Valerie died, someone would find Roy in the shed, she had planned for that. France’s hair and an earring were in his hand, they had been there for a long time. If that failed, if the evidence had been destroyed by time, she had made sure that the blame would fall on Stella. It had been a lot of hard work over the years to make Stella pay for her part in things; it had taken time and patience to derail her sani
ty to the extent where no one would give her credibility. It had been a slow drip method, but it had worked. The woman was as mad as a box of frogs. But for some reason, and Delia couldn’t fathom why, it had gone wrong, Stella had fought back.
Delia had been surprised that the police had let Stella go so quickly. What she hadn’t anticipated was that Stella would go back to the house, that she would scrawl all over the walls and tell everyone everything. It had only been chance that Delia had found her there at all. She had gone to The Limes to look for Valerie’s diary. It had been obvious that Frances had already looked, and had probably burned it, but Delia needed to be sure. With Frances banging her head and ending up in hospital, she hadn’t had chance to check whether it had been found and destroyed. When she got to the house, Stella was there, scribbling over the walls like some demented child doing lines on a blackboard. It had been a split second decision to kill her, and a split second more to make the decision to burn the house down. If the book was there, it would go up with the house, and with a bit of luck Stella would go with it. Frances had used petrol to light the bonfire, there had been plenty left in the shed, plus turpentine, and meths, old newspapers, and rags. Delia had used the lot, spreading them all round the house to make sure it all burned well.
Then she had gone to the flat, hadn’t thought it through, hadn’t been thorough, hadn’t taken a key, had panicked and tried to do the job too quickly. Not that it mattered, nothing in the flat would point back, but it would have been better if it looked like Stella had done it. It had all happened in the wrong order. That was the problem when you were under stress. Delia didn’t do stress, didn’t make split second decisions, never had, but something had gone wrong. She had been thinking about it for days, trying to track things back to the point where it had all started to fall apart. Everything linked to Rachel coming back. If she hadn’t come back, if Charlie hadn’t seen her, if Amy hadn’t found out, everything would have panned out fine. Delia didn’t do panic, didn’t react wrong, but she had that night, when she’d seen the loss of Charlie and Amy because of Rachel. Her talent for thinking on her feet had lapsed, she had told Charlie the truth, or a version of the truth, and she couldn’t believe she had laid herself open like that. Everything had collapsed so fast, and the words were out of her mouth before she realised. Stupidly she had sent him running!
Only after he had gone had she realised that Rachel might tell a different story, might tell him that it was Delia who had told her he was her father, not Valerie. This was the problem when lies strayed too far from the truth. She had to tell Rachel that Frances was her mother for two reasons. First Rachel would never have believed Charlie would sleep with Stella, and second Rachel and Frances hated each other, they weren’t likely to talk. Rachel had already turned her back on Valerie and Frances; she might not have felt so strongly if she’d known that Stella was her real mother. But that hadn’t been the point, her mind was mixing it up again, getting confused. Rachel had been about to take Charlie and the baby away, move them to London, away from home, away from Delia. That couldn’t happen. Rachel had to go.
It was easy to kill people who wouldn’t be missed, like Roy, like Barrington, like Molly Kerr. Rachel would have been missed, there would have been trouble. It had been a risk, but it had paid off. A calculated gamble that Rachel, meek and pathetic, wouldn’t question what she was being told. A low self-esteem was a powerful thing in Delia’s experience. A useful tool when you wanted to convince a girl she only had a ring on her finger because a man felt guilty about an unplanned baby.
The more she went over it the less sense it made. Everything was disjointed. She couldn’t remember the logic of it all anymore. It used to fit. Everything had fitted perfectly, now it didn’t. Pieces were missing, things had gone wrong. If Rachel hadn’t come back, if Rachel had done the sensible thing and topped herself like anyone else would in her shoes. In sheer anger and frustration, she swept her arm across the mantle and sent its contents flying.
Charlie tapped softly on Amy’s door and waited for her to tell him to come in. Despite a few hours of sleep she still looked tired, dark circles shaded her eyes, ‘We’re going back to the hospital, do you want to come?’ He asked.
She shook her head, ‘No thanks, I’ll come later. I thought I would call in and see Nan, she must be wondering what the hell is going on.’
‘OK, I’ll ring you if anything happens. Take it easy though, you look rough.’ As usual, he meant well, but it had come out wrong.
‘Thanks Dad! If anyone else had said that, they’d have got a smack in the mouth. I’ll see you later.’ She said, glancing at her face in the mirror, he was right, she did look rough. She looked like her mother. The tiredness of the past few days had been so great, that when she got out of the shower, she hadn’t bothered to dry her hair, had just wrapped herself in a towel and dropped like a stone onto the bed, she hadn’t woken until Charlie knocked on the door. Her hair had dried wavy, just like Rachel’s. If they were to stand next to each other like this, natural, no make- up, they could have been sisters. Weird, Amy thought.
Angela tried Ratcliffe’s number yet again, still no answer. The stupid git had switched his phone off! She left yet another message and ended the call with a sigh. How was she supposed to help solve this thing if she was stuck at a hospital minding an unconscious woman! And, for that matter, why exactly was she minding Rachel? Clearly Ratcliffe knew something she didn’t, and the fact that he was pushing her out of the loop was making her really, really angry.
Frustrated, she returned to the ward and resumed her vigil by Rachel’s bed, and watched the hypnotic movement of the respirator as it forced oxygen in and out of the woman’s failing lungs. ‘What’s so special about you then, that you deserve a babysitter, eh?’ she asked the inanimate woman quietly. ‘Know something you haven’t told us, is that it?’ All she got in response was the dull thunk of the machine. Angela knew she shouldn’t be there, she should be following up on the information Edie and her mother had given her, working out the links between Delia Jones and Valerie Porter. More to the point, working out the link between Delia and Charlie.
If what Edie had told her was true, there was no way that Charlie could be Delia’s son, so who was he and how did he fit into the picture? Decisively she stood, sod this, there was no way she was hanging around in a hospital for nothing. Ratcliffe could bawl her out later if he wanted, besides, there were plenty of staff in the ICU, so it was hardly likely that anything would happen to Rachel anytime soon. Angela decided that it was worth the risk, and left. To her relief, as soon as she switched her phone on, there was a message from Ratcliffe telling her she was free to leave. She headed back to the station only to find that Ratcliffe had buggered off to get his car sorted and had left Haddon to fill her in on the interview with Frances.
Angela sat at her desk and mulled over what she had just been told, yes it sounded like a complete fantasy, clearly designed to divert attention away from Frances. But Angela already had suspicions about Delia, and decided a little more checking wouldn’t go amiss. She fired up her computer, found the screen she needed and typed in the name Barrington Jones.
‘What’s so special about you?’
Rachel heard the question, but couldn’t for the life of her work out where it was coming from. She seemed to be in a waiting room, dressed in a hospital gown. There was some reason she was there, but she couldn’t remember it. Though the room she was in was bare to the point of starkness, it was strangely peaceful, and she felt, if she really wanted to, that she could just go to sleep there and be peaceful forever. It sounded so nice, so tempting. Somewhere outside the room, there was noise and activity, but she didn’t really need to worry about it, it didn’t have anything to do with her, she was just waiting. However, the question that had floated through the air bothered her. There was nothing special about her, nothing at all. No point to her existence in fact. But she guessed whoever had asked the question already knew that, was being rhetorical. What w
as it she was waiting for?
Amy reached her grandmother’s house and was surprised to find that she couldn’t get in. Strange that Delia hadn’t mentioned that she was going out, nevertheless with a confident shrug she lifted up the garden gnome that hid the spare key and let herself in. The kitchen was a mess, the crockery from breakfast still languishing on the table, the fridge wide open, the milk on its side slowly dripping onto the floor. Someone had ripped open a box of teabags and had just let them spill all over the floor and loose sugar glittered the worktops like early morning frost. Amy had never seen Delia’s house in such a state, and it made her panic. ‘Nan!’ She called, running through to the next room expecting to find her grandmother collapsed somewhere with a broken hip or something. The mess in the lounge was even worse than the kitchen. Broken china and glass lay everywhere, like someone had taken a baseball bat to all the ornaments and swept them from their shelves in a fit of violence. Drawers lay open, the contents spilling on the floor, and the cushions on the sofa had been slashed, their foamy innards disgorged. Adrenaline coursed through Amy’s body and she surged through the rest of the house, convinced that she would find Delia beaten and bloody somewhere. The house was empty, Delia nowhere to be found amongst the ravaged rooms.
Frantic with fear, Amy dialled 999, sure that the house had been burgled. Nan would go ape shit, all her things were trashed. God knows how Amy would tell her. She waited, agitated while she was put through to the incident room. The calm female voice on the end of the phone wanted to know if anything had been taken. It was such a mess that Amy found it hard to tell. However, the obvious things were still there, the TV was present, though it had been tipped over, and Delia’s jewellery was scattered all over the bedroom. It didn’t look like anything had been stolen at all. Just wrecked. The woman wanted to know if there were any signs of forced entry, but Amy had had to use a key to get in and all the windows were shut and unbroken. She was advised to go and sit with a neighbour until the police turned up, but she didn’t fancy tea and questions from anyone just then. She just wanted to find Delia and call her dad. Charlie’s phone cut straight to the answer service, meaning he was at the hospital and had switched it off. When she tried Delia’s phone she heard it ringing from somewhere under the debris in the sitting room. She had the sudden overwhelming urge to sit down and cry, she had no idea what on earth she should do.
