China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  This was the first time he’d met David Sperrin. All he knew about him came from Hazel, from DS Presley, and from Detective Inspector Norris who investigated following the discovery of the sad little grave down by the Byrfield lake. Twenty minutes ago, when the phone woke him, he’d thought Sperrin was the victim of a vicious assault that could have no possible connection with earlier events in his life. Now he found himself wondering.

  Warmed up and nursing a mug of cocoa, David Sperrin was looking more nearly human again. At least Gorman didn’t feel there was any danger of him turning his toes up in the middle of the interview. And if he was going to retract his confession, he wasn’t ready to do so yet. He was as anxious for Gorman to understand what he had to say as Gorman was; painfully so, he leaned forward through the steam rising from his mug in order to drive his words home.

  The problem was, there weren’t many of them. He hadn’t remembered what had happened – what he had done, what had been done to him. At the end of half an hour, the best Gorman could get from him was a snapshot, a moment in time – a girl who cried out and died in his arms – and an overwhelming tsunami of guilt.

  When Hazel went into the kitchen to make more toast, Gorman followed her. ‘Well, what do you think?’

  The face she turned to him was both worried and confused. ‘Chief, don’t put that on me! I don’t know what to tell you.’

  Gorman shrugged, not altogether sympathetically. ‘You wanted to be a detective: well, this is what detectives do. We make educated guesses. Sometimes our guesses are more educated than others. Then we set out to find evidence to support or contradict them. You know this man and I don’t. I need your best guess as to how much faith we should put in what he says.’

  Hazel hated to speculate in so serious a matter, but the DCI was entitled to her best efforts. She picked her words carefully. ‘I don’t think he’s lying. What he thinks he remembers is freaking him out. Ordinarily he’s a pretty robust character – I’ve never seen him this distressed, and I was at Byrfield when he found out what happened to Jamie.’

  Gorman had not been there, Byrfield was far outside his manor, but he knew the story. ‘He shot his brother dead.’

  Hazel was quick in defence of her friend. ‘That’s not what happened, and you know it. He was a child of five! Their father was stupid enough to leave a loaded shotgun lying on the ground while he attended to Jamie. David did what any five-year-old would have done, what the parent of any five-year-old should have known he’d do, and picked it up.’

  ‘And then put it out of his mind for thirty years.’

  ‘Do you remember everything that happened when you were five?’

  Sometimes Gorman had trouble remembering why he’d gone upstairs. ‘I think if I’d shot someone I’d remember!’

  ‘Really? You don’t think that’s the very thing that your mind wouldn’t want to remember – wouldn’t want to deal with?’

  The DCI sniffed. He was aware that some of these younger officers were on firmer ground when it came to psychology. It had been considered very much an optional extra when he was learning the craft. He was a little surprised that his newest DC had no qualms about reminding him of that.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Then – with your psychologist’s hat on – is there a possibility that what happened to him two days ago stirred those suppressed memories, and what he’s telling us now is a mixture of the old tragedy and the new?’

  Hazel nodded her understanding. ‘A confabulation? Hell’s bells, Chief, that’s one for a real trick-cyclist. You could try talking to Gabriel’s therapist, Laura Fry. I’ve heard the term: she’ll have seen the case studies. She could tell you how likely it is, and if we can trust what he thinks he remembers.’

  ‘But why a girl? Why does he think he killed a girl, when it was actually a ten-year-old boy who died all those years ago?’

  But Hazel didn’t know and couldn’t guess.

  ‘So maybe he did,’ said Detective Chief Inspector Gorman grimly. ‘Maybe what he’s telling us is the truth.’

  ‘What about dogs?’

  Gorman glared at her. ‘What about dogs?’

  ‘If something happened in that field where we found his car – if somebody died there – even though the body’s no longer there, dogs might pick up the scent. Mightn’t they?’

  He didn’t know either. ‘It’s worth a try. I’ll get onto it in the morning. Er’ – glancing at his watch – ‘later in the morning.’

  ‘Shall I take Sergeant Wilson again?’ There was an assumption in there that she hoped he wouldn’t notice until he’d already agreed.

  Gorman shook his head. ‘Anything he could see he’ll already have seen. I’ll come myself.’

  Hazel’s heart gave a little skip, because he’d said come instead of go. It might have been careless syntax, but she hoped it meant come with you rather than go instead of you.

  ‘In the meantime,’ he continued, unaware of her mental gymnastics, ‘what are we going to do about him?’ He jerked his head at the living room door.

  Hazel thought for a moment. ‘Unless you want to arrest him, I’m going to throw another duvet over him and hope he’ll get off to sleep.’

  ‘Don’t the hospital want him back?’

  ‘Funnily enough, they didn’t seem too bothered. It almost sounded as if they were glad to be rid of him. They said I could probably look after him as well as they could now.’

  ‘Not if you’re in Bedfordshire you can’t.’

  ‘I’ll ask Gabriel to come round.’

  Perhaps too much time had passed. Perhaps too much rain had fallen – it was falling again as Hazel Best and Dave Gorman huddled against the leeward side of the standing stone for what little shelter it provided. Or it was perfectly possible that the dog supplied by the Bedford division wasn’t picking up any traces of blood because no blood had been spilt there.

  Even when he was insisting on his guilt, Sperrin had been unable to say how he committed the murder he claimed. There had been no blood other than his own, and no gunshot residue, on his clothes. He might conceivably have strangled this unknown girl, though it’s harder than the movies make it look, or suffocated her, or hit her hard enough to break her skull: he could not remember. They had watched him almost literally squeezing his brain to make the memories come, but the how and – perhaps even more puzzling – the why remained elusive.

  The detection dog was a springer spaniel, red and white, a bundle of energy; but eventually the weather and the lack of success sapped even its enthusiasm. Its tail drooped in the rain and Hazel, watching it, swore it looked back at her with an apologetic shrug. The handler threw its ball a couple of times as a reward anyway, and the dog pretended to be pleased, then with an air of shared relief they both got back in their van and drove away.

  ‘So much for that,’ grunted DCI Gorman. He tugged the collar of his coat into his neck and looked out across the field. ‘Tell me again what SOCO said.’

  Hazel consulted her notebook, though she remembered clearly. She pointed. ‘The Land Rover was parked over there. Sergeant Wilson said David – at least, whoever got out of it – walked as far as the stone, and then ran to the far end of the field and climbed over the gate. The lane runs on the far side of that hedge. Something bigger than a car had driven onto the verge and stopped. People got out – he couldn’t say how many, but more than one. Either David drove off with them, or he headed up or down the lane – there were no signs SOCO could follow on the tarmac.’

  ‘I suppose I’d better have a look.’ Gorman sounded as keen as the spaniel had looked.

  They scaled the gate – slick with rain, it was more of an obstacle than it had been the day before – and looked both ways along the lane. There was no traffic.

  Gorman nodded at the little humpback bridge three hundred metres to the right. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That must be the railway line.’ She pulled out the map, sheltering it as best she could from the weather. ‘There.’


  He glanced at the map, back at the bridge. He started to walk towards it. Not sure why, Hazel kept pace with him.

  ‘Useful things, maps,’ the DCI observed conversationally. ‘Sat-nav’s good at what it does too, but it can’t give you an overview of the landscape. This lane, for instance, I can see from the map it runs pretty much south-west to north-east. Which means the railway line runs pretty much …’

  ‘… South-east to north-west,’ Hazel supplied. She waited. When nothing more was forthcoming she said: ‘So?’

  ‘So what direction, approximately, would you say Norbold lies from here?’

  She had no idea. ‘North?’ she hazarded. And then, intuition giving her a glimmer of what was passing through his mind: ‘North-west?’

  Gorman nodded. ‘North-west.’

  They had reached the little bridge. It was only a little bridge because the line below ran through a deep cutting. The stone parapets on either side were old and weather-worn.

  ‘What can you see?’

  Hazel looked around anxiously, wondering what she’d missed. Surely to God he hadn’t spotted a body that had been here all along? ‘Er – nothing …?’

  ‘Of course you can,’ said Gorman impatiently. ‘Tell me what you can see. Everything that you can see.’

  ‘Well – the lane. It narrows a bit where it passes over the bridge. Underneath is the railway line. There’s nothing on it at the moment, but it is in current use – a train passed when I was here with Sergeant Wilson, and anyway there’s no grass growing between the sleepers.’ She raised her gaze. ‘Fields on both sides, as far as the eye can see. Hedges and trees. I can see some sheep …’

  ‘Closer,’ said Gorman.

  ‘Closer? What, on the bridge? I can see … oh.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the DCI, with a kind of contained smugness.

  Immediately adjacent to where they were standing, in the middle of the bridge, for perhaps half a metre the stones of the northern parapet looked different to those on either side. The rain shone more slickly on them. Hazel frowned and bent nearer. They were shinier because they were cleaner. Years of accumulated grit and leaf mould and bird shit had been brushed away, recently enough that the difference was still noticeable. ‘Someone was sitting here,’ she said.

  Gorman gave a disappointed sigh. ‘You reckon? Fishing, perhaps?’

  Hazel felt his disapproval like a hangnail: uncomfortable and impossible to ignore. ‘No, probably not.’ Her eyes widened abruptly. ‘You think someone went over here, onto the line? David’s girl? Dear God – you don’t think he pushed her?’

  Gorman looked a little taken aback. ‘Well, anything’s possible. But no, that’s not what I was thinking.

  ‘Look at what we have evidence for. The Land Rover was parked on the far side of the field, and someone walked across to the standing stone. David Sperrin is an archaeologist. Then he ran from the stone to the gate and went over it onto the lane. Another vehicle stopped nearby and people got out. Someone was on the parapet of this bridge within the last few days, and the line underneath heads off towards Norbold. And Sperrin was found in Siding Street, which runs – the clue’s in the name – along the back of the train yard.’

  ‘Then …’ Hazel was trying to follow his logic. ‘He came to look at the standing stone. The rain must have stopped for a while, because he left his coat in the car. While he was in the field the other vehicle, probably a van, stopped here in the lane. What David saw next made him run in that direction. To help someone? To intervene in what was happening? If he was the one who’d done something wrong, wouldn’t he have run back to his car, to get away?’

  ‘Good,’ said Gorman. ‘And then?’

  ‘The girl – the one he thinks he killed – maybe it was her who went off the bridge. Jumped – suicide. Maybe that’s why he feels so guilty, because he couldn’t reach her in time to stop her.’

  ‘Again, it’s possible. But it wasn’t her who turned up in Norbold, was it?’

  ‘No,’ said Hazel thoughtfully. ‘So … David saw something he wasn’t meant to. The people in that other vehicle thought they were miles from anywhere and there wouldn’t be anyone around. And that mattered because they were doing something they really didn’t want witnesses to. Something that resulted in a girl’s death. Not suicide but murder. When they realised David had seen them, they grabbed him. That’s when he got beaten up.’

  She caught the faint murmur of disagreement, amended her scenario accordingly. ‘No – the beating he took, he couldn’t have got away from them afterwards. So … he took off up the lane, and found himself trapped on this bridge. Maybe they’d split up and cut him off; maybe they’d gone back for their van so it was only a matter of time before they ran him down.

  ‘However it was, he was desperate enough to try anything. When a train came up the track he climbed onto the parapet and dropped down onto it. It was more of a fall than he was expecting – that’s how he got hurt – but the train carried him away towards Norbold and safety. Hours later, with the train now in the yard, he managed to stagger out into Siding Street before collapsing.’

  ‘And that,’ said DCI Gorman with some satisfaction, ‘is what we in the trade call a working hypothesis.’

  SEVEN

  The first thing they did was get the Norbold dispatcher to check what trains had come up from Bedfordshire three days earlier and then spent the night parked up in his yard. He quickly narrowed the possibilities down to a goods train heading north from London with a mixed freight of timber and agricultural machinery.

  The three of them walked for quarter of a mile through the busy yard to where four flats of farm equipment had been uncoupled. They were still there, at the top end of the shunting yard: a confused nightmare of growling, lumbering machinery and unfenced rails to the police officers, a scene as familiar as his back garden to the dispatcher. It never occurred to him to point out where the visitors should avoid putting their feet. He assumed everyone with a brain would know.

  The four trucks were about as far from the station buildings as it was possible to be and still be in Norbold. Hazel was fairly sure they’d passed her house a hundred metres back, which meant Siding Street was on the far side of the black brick wall. The wall had once been continuous, but time had taken its toll and now there were a number of gaps blocked, more or less effectively, with corrugated-iron sheeting.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ asked the dispatcher.

  Gorman began to tell him, but before he could finish a sentence Hazel said, ‘This.’ They looked round and she was on top of one of the flats, leaning over the chained machinery.

  Dave Gorman was a strong man but he hadn’t Hazel’s agility and he was out of breath by the time he joined her. He looked where she was pointing.

  It came in the category of a minor miracle. The rain that had belaboured Norbold for days should have washed away any blood. But the strong north-easterly wind had created pockets of shelter under the heavy equipment, and dried blood was still plain to see in two places, one tucked away among the machinery, one down the side of the bogey.

  When they do this in the movies, it’s always an enclosed carriage with a roof to jump onto, and the hero never falls off. It was a lot further down to where a couple of telescopic handlers were chained onto the truck and there was no open space between them to aim for. Sperrin had landed in the tangle of machinery, and the wonder was not that he’d injured himself but that he’d ever got up again.

  But he had, and maybe it was hours later and maybe he was still barely conscious, but somehow he’d extricated himself from the load and dropped down onto the tracks, leaving a smear of blood down the sheltered side of the wagon. Thirty metres away they found, marked by a snaggle of wool the same colour as the sweater he’d been wearing, where he’d crawled under the curled-back corner of a sheet of corrugated iron. Soon after that he’d gone down and stayed down, and taking a short-cut back to Meadowvale PC Budgen had found him in the closing minutes of his night shift.r />
  ‘That’s how he got hurt?’ asked Hazel. ‘A fall, not a beating?’

  ‘I’m not a forensic medical examiner,’ Gorman pointed out, ‘but that would be my guess. We couldn’t figure out what he’d been hit with. Nobody thought of a train.’

  ‘How scared would you have to be to take a risk like that?’

  ‘Shitless,’ said Gorman judiciously. ‘You wouldn’t do it to avoid a black eye, or even a good kicking. He must have known, when he went off that bridge, there was a good chance he was going to die. The only reason you’d do that is if you knew you’d die for sure if you didn’t.’

  ‘If you knew that the people chasing you had killed someone already,’ suggested Hazel. In her voice was a kind of thrill that was part adrenalin and partly the hope that David Sperrin hadn’t after all done what he believed he’d done. ‘Maybe that’s what he saw. He didn’t kill this girl he talks about. He saw her killed.’

  ‘Unless, of course …’ Struck by a sudden impulse of charity, Gorman didn’t finish the sentence. He was finding it hard to remember who he was talking to: a detective constable on his team, or a friend of the man who might be a witness but still might be a killer.

  Hazel watched him, puzzled, until understanding came. Her heart, which had been rising as they elaborated on their theory, sank again. She finished the sentence for him. ‘Unless he did in fact kill this girl, and that’s why people were chasing him. He jumped off the bridge rather than face a life sentence for murder.’

  ‘Look,’ Gorman said with a cumbrous attempt at kindness, ‘we’re not going to know who did what to whom until Sperrin is able to tell us. We haven’t got an allegation against him, or a missing person report, or a body. The dog couldn’t find any evidence to give credence to what Sperrin thinks he remembers. All we have right now is an isolated memory of a girl, his fear that he may have harmed her, and the possibility that something scared him enough to make him jump off a bridge onto a moving train.