China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  Gilbert was watching the street, met them at the door. He looked warily at Hazel – they had a somewhat guarded relationship – which Ash intercepted. ‘Can you wait for five minutes while I find out what’s going on?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Hazel. She went to follow him inside.

  Gilbert Ash was a slender, dark child of ten with an introvert personality and secretive ways. Hazel could see much of his father in him: particularly in his intelligence, which was undeniable, and in the streak of adamantine stubbornness which lay at Ash’s core and much closer to the surface of his son. Looking somewhere around Hazel’s knees he mumbled, ‘It’s family …’

  Surprised and displeased, Ash frowned at him. ‘You don’t tell my friends that they are not welcome in our house,’ he said plainly.

  Gilbert looked up at him, found no comfort there, turned to Hazel. All he said was, ‘Please …’ But it so obviously mattered to him that she nodded.

  ‘It’s time I was heading back. I want to put in a couple more hours before close-of-play. Call me if you need anything,’ she told Ash, and she pulled the door shut behind her.

  Ash turned back to Gilbert, about to demand an explanation, when voices reached him from the sitting room. Not quite an argument; more than a conversation. He immediately recognised Frankie’s, that he knew as well as his sons’, not loud but firm, unyielding. A second later he recognised the other as well, and every vestige of colour fled from his face.

  The sitting-room door opened abruptly and a woman came out. Her hair was no longer short and light brown but shoulder-length and dark red; it altered her appearance dramatically. She’d also put on a little weight in the last two years. Of course, last time he saw her it had suited her purposes to appear drained and careworn.

  ‘Hello, Gabriel,’ said Cathy Ash.

  There were other crimes under investigation in the upstairs offices at Meadowvale Police Station. Hazel spent a couple of hours trawling through security camera footage for a young man in a navy-blue anorak who was making a good living scamming old ladies out of their savings. By the time she was heading home, hopefully for the weekend, she’d come to the conclusion that everyone in Norbold owned at least one navy-blue anorak.

  David Sperrin was waiting for her. ‘Any news?’

  ‘And a good evening to you, too, Mr Sperrin,’ she said coolly, ‘and how was your day?’

  He looked at her uncomprehendingly. ‘What?’

  She sighed. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve so much as got the kettle on, have you?’

  ‘I didn’t know when to expect you.’ This was reasonable enough. ‘Do you want to eat out? I got my wallet back.’

  It was a nice offer – at least, Hazel assumed he was offering to treat her; it might have been an assumption too far – but she was tired. ‘Another day, maybe. I’ve been looking forward to putting my feet up.’

  ‘All right. Then I’ll cook. Oh.’ He looked at the plaster. ‘Er …’

  Hazel barked a little laugh. ‘That’ll have to be another day too. Sit down, I’ll make something in a minute. What do you fancy? You can have anything you like as long as it’s spag bol.’

  Sperrin appeared to give it some thought. ‘Spag bol?’

  ‘Good choice,’ said Hazel.

  She left the kitchen door open, talking to him over her shoulder as she stirred the pans. ‘Did you get your phone too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then call Pete, let him know you’re ready to go home.’

  There was a long pause. Frowning, Hazel was about to ask if he’d heard her; then Sperrin said in a low voice, ‘I’m not.’

  ‘There’s no point waiting for your car – we’ll hold onto that until we’re sure it’s told us everything it can. Which actually doesn’t matter since it’ll be a while before you can drive it anyway. Unless’ – she gave a secret grin – ‘you want to take the train.’

  ‘I’m not going back to Byrfield,’ he growled, ‘until I have some answers.’

  She turned to face him. ‘David, you may not get those answers. Unless you remember enough to make sense of what happened, we may never know any more than we know today. I’m sorry but that’s how it is. Not every puzzle has the solution printed on the back of the box. Sometimes there are no viable lines of inquiry.’

  ‘You’re giving up?’ He sounded startled; more than that, he sounded angry. ‘A girl died!’

  ‘You don’t know that. I know it’s what you think, but you could be wrong.’

  ‘Then prove it!’

  Hazel took a deep breath. ‘Think for a moment what it is you’re asking. You want us to investigate a crime – a murder – that you might be responsible for. Right now there’s no evidence that anyone died. As a friend, I should probably advise you that’s a boat you shouldn’t be rocking.’

  ‘Never mind me,’ he cried, ‘what about her? What about’ – he could do no better than the name they’d settled on – ‘Rose? Whoever killed her, they’re going to get away with it. Someone’s going to get away with murder, and there’ll be no justice for her unless you make it happen! Treat her death as seriously as you would if it was an English girl who died.’

  Hazel frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You said she wasn’t English. That’s something you haven’t told us before. She was a foreigner? A tourist, an overseas student, an immigrant – what?’

  But he didn’t know. The comment had come out of the disorganised bottom drawer of his mental filing cabinet, where memories disrupted by his close encounter with a telescopic handler had become hopelessly entangled with the everyday detritus of recollections that hadn’t been pulled out for decades, that would probably never be wanted again, but couldn’t be thrown out in case they came in useful one day. He dug down into the pile but couldn’t find where the information had come from.

  Hazel tried again. ‘In fact, it doesn’t alter anything. There’s still no evidence that Rose existed anywhere except in your head. And your head just lost a nutting contest with a piece of agricultural machinery.’

  ‘You think I imagined it? I dreamt that a girl died in front of me, closer than I am to you now? That it might have been me who killed her?’

  She refused to be cowed by his furious indignation. ‘I think that’s a possibility, yes. People have imagined stranger things as a result of head injuries.’

  ‘Then why did I jump off the bridge? I didn’t do that because I was concussed – that’s how I got the concussion. What possible reason could I have to jump onto a moving train unless I was on the run from something worse?’

  Suddenly Sperrin fell silent. He wasn’t waiting for her to answer: his focus had turned inwards. Hazel thought for a moment that another memory had surfaced, and was careful not to interrupt; but that wasn’t it. After half a minute he looked up again and his expression had changed. The anger had gone, replaced by a kind of hollow-cheeked comprehension. ‘This is about Jamie, isn’t it?’

  Hazel pretended not to understand. ‘In what way?’

  ‘You think I’m on some kind of a delayed guilt trip. Because I killed my brother, and never paid any penalty for it.’

  ‘David, you were five years old! What kind of penalty do you think you should have paid?’

  ‘I don’t know. But something. Even at five years old, you don’t do something like that – something that monumental – and then just go home and forget about it for thirty years. Not if you’re in any way normal. And you think – the police think – that’s what this is about. Don’t you? That maybe something happened at Myrton, but it could have been anything: a fight, an accident, anything. That it only turned into a mystery because it happened to me, and I’m an unreliable witness.

  ‘My head’s full of unresolved guilt, and sooner or later it was always going to spill out and make a mess on the floor. That’s why nobody’s listening to me – why you’re happy enough to send me home and write off a girl’s murder as a figment of my imagination. You think I’m using some rand
om event to work through my feelings about Jamie. You don’t believe anything I’ve told you is the truth.’

  Seeing the pain racking his battered body and sounding the depths of his eyes, Hazel wished she could deny it. Almost wished she could tell him that DCI Gorman thought he had killed someone. Bizarrely enough, it was what he wanted to hear. The alternative was that he’d lost his grip on reality, and given a straight choice he would rather face the rest of his life as a murderer than a madman.

  She tried an appeal to common sense. ‘David, we can’t take everything we’re told, even in good faith, at face value. There has to be some evidence to support it. People get things wrong, people who’ve suffered head injuries most of all. No one thinks you’re lying about this, but we can’t find anything to corroborate it. Nothing. No body, no witnesses, no missing person report – nothing. That’s pretty unusual. We can’t always make sense of the evidence, but there usually is some. Not this time. And if we can’t find any trace of what you say happened, we have to consider the possibility that you’ve got it wrong. For whatever reason: the concussion, some unresolved feelings about your brother, whatever.’

  ‘Jamie has nothing to do with this!’

  ‘No, he hasn’t. But your feelings about him may have. I’m sorry, I don’t know what else to tell you. We have nowhere else to take this investigation. If the situation changes – if we get a lead on who this girl was, or if you remember something else – we’ll follow it up. Without that, I don’t see how we can.’

  Sperrin was staring hotly at her. But perhaps the inevitability of what she was saying sank in, because after a moment he blinked and swallowed. ‘You want me to go back to Byrfield?’

  ‘There’s no point you staying here. If there are any developments, I’ll let you know immediately. I promise.’

  ‘I’ll call Pete.’

  NINE

  Ash took his wife’s elbow and steered her to his study. The sign on the door had never been more pertinent than now.

  ‘Why, Gabriel, how masterful you’ve become!’ Her tone was provocative; her pale blue eyes, the colour of faded denim, mocked him.

  Ash’s jaw was clenched tight: he had to make a positive effort to free it before he could speak. ‘What are you doing here, Cathy?’

  She widened her eyes at him. ‘This is my home!’

  ‘This was never your home. Your home was in London. You turned your back on it; and on me.’

  Cathy declined to argue the point. Perhaps she recognised it was a restrained way of putting it. ‘My sons’ home, then. I’m here to see my sons. Surely you can’t object to that.’

  He gaped at her. ‘Of course I object! You’re a fugitive from the law – you’re going to get yourself arrested. I don’t need the boys to see that. I wouldn’t have thought you’d want it either.’

  She shrugged that off with a negligent gesture. ‘No one knows I’m here. Only you. Are you going to turn me in, Gabriel?’ She smiled at him impishly, as if confident of the answer.

  She had no right to be that confident. Gabriel Ash had good reasons to want to see his wife jailed. Natural justice was one: she’d put him through hell. She was responsible for one death that he knew about – that he’d witnessed – and, to some extent, he wasn’t sure how great an extent, for others. And then, having her behind bars in England rather than out in the wider world would resolve any question as to his sons’ future. He couldn’t imagine a court taking them away from him and returning them to their mother, but a life sentence would put the matter beyond doubt. It ought to simplify his divorce, too. He should, and he knew he should, have been reaching for the phone right now.

  And he didn’t, and he went on not doing. Cathy’s smile was slowly spreading. A lot can change in six years. But Gabriel Ash hadn’t changed that much.

  ‘Well, if you’re not going to turn me in, perhaps you’d make me a cup of coffee.’

  At least he retained enough presence of mind not to do her bidding. That was a one-way street, and it didn’t lead anywhere he wanted to go. ‘I need you to leave.’ His voice was low.

  ‘Gabriel,’ she said reproachfully, ‘I’ve only just got here. I’ve barely said hello to the boys. Who’s the Chinese girl, anyway?’

  ‘Ms Kelly,’ Ash said carefully, ‘is the boys’ nanny and the mainstay of our household. She knows who you are, what you’ve done. And she never promised to love and honour you. Maybe I haven’t the moral courage to turn you in. But she hasn’t an ounce of sentimentality in her: the moment she thinks the boys’ welfare is at stake, she’ll do it for me.’

  Cathy shot him a piercing look. She was inclined to believe that he meant it. ‘I’m no threat to the boys. You know that. What I did, I did for them.’

  Outrage darkened his face and he went to protest. She forestalled him. ‘Maybe not all of it, but at the start. We were abducted, and it was because of the work you were doing. They were deeply dangerous men, and their only interest in me and our sons was to get you off their backs. I made a deal with them to keep us safe. I’m sorry I hurt you, but the boys mattered more. I kept them safe. They’re here now, with you, because I supped with the devil.’

  ‘You shot Stephen Graves! You shot me.’

  ‘Stephen Graves was a criminal. And you’ – she gave a cool shrug – ‘not for the first time, my dear, you got in the way.’

  All of which was true. Ash couldn’t contradict a word of it. But he knew she had been a much more willing participant than a plain statement of the facts suggested. He knew she’d seen a chance to escape from a marriage which bored her and had no compunction about reaping the harvest of her betrayal.

  Hazel had warned him once that Cathy might persuade a jury she did it all under duress, that she was not a villain but a victim. This, he understood with a shock of foreboding, was how she would do it. If he forced her to defend herself in court, she could win. He could lose his sons to her. Again.

  Then too, there was still a part of him that didn’t want to see her brought down. That … didn’t care for her exactly, it was too late for that, but retained a nostalgia for what they had once had together. Or possibly, what he’d thought they had. He had promised to love and honour, and absurdly enough that promise had stood and still stood between him and any number of things he could have done. One of them concerned Hazel. He knew now, as perhaps she had always known, that he’d never managed to commit to Hazel because Cathy had always come between them. Not because there was any comparison between his feelings about the two women – the faithful friend who’d saved his life, his soul and his sanity, and the wife who’d sold him to his enemies – but because he’d given an undertaking. Forsaking all others, he’d said, and he was a man of his word. It wasn’t a source of any particular pride to him, least of all now; it was just who he was. If he could have been someone else, he would have been.

  He said, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Apart from coffee?’ She eyed him, weighing him up. ‘I told you, I want to see my sons. I haven’t seen them for two years.’

  ‘I didn’t see them for four.’

  From somewhere, incredibly, the faded denim eyes conjured a little hurt. ‘I have apologised for that, Gabriel. I found myself on a pathway that left me very little choice. Surely it’s time to forgive and forget.’

  Ash stared at her in disbelief. ‘Cathy – why would you even think that’s possible?’

  She raised a shapely eyebrow. ‘I hoped we could behave like grown-ups, if only for the sake of the boys. It can’t be very nice for them, having their father wishing their mother was dead.’

  ‘I have never said that!’ exclaimed Ash, appalled. ‘Not to them. Not in my innermost thoughts. I have never wished you harm. I just want you to leave us alone. To go back to where you came from, and get on with your life, and not contact me or them again.’ Then he remembered. ‘Except …’

  ‘Except?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘My solicitors have been trying to find you. I’m filing for a divorce. You
could make it easier, on all of us, if you’re prepared to.’

  ‘Hm.’ She sounded more thoughtful than either surprised or angry. ‘So you want me to consent to ending our marriage, then to disappear, and never see or hear from my sons again, and never know if they’re well or if they’re happy. Tell me: just how does that differ from wishing I was dead?’

  Gabriel Ash was an intelligent and articulate man, but he’d never been a master of the sharp retort, the pithy put-down. He was still trying to formulate a reply when Cathy, bored, turned away. ‘Still got this old thing, then.’ She was looking at the china cabinet.

  It took Ash a few seconds to change tack. ‘It was my mother’s.’

  ‘Yes, it was, wasn’t it,’ she said flatly. She turned the tiny key, opened the door and took out one of the exhibits. You’d have to say they were exhibits because they weren’t useful for anything but gathering dust. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen china roses since the last time I was here.’

  ‘She used to collect them. Auctions, antique shops, charity shops, jumble sales. No box of contents was safe if she thought there might be a china rose lurking at the bottom.’

  ‘Why?’

  Ash shrugged. ‘She thought they were beautiful. She liked the fact that they did absolutely nothing but please the eye. And she admired the skill that went into making them.’

  Cathy nodded slowly, turning the pretty thing in her hands, studying it. ‘Hours of work,’ she agreed. ‘Probably years of learning how to do it: bent double over a workbench, ruining your back and your eyesight. And after all that, it’s so fragile. One slip, and all you’re left with is sherds of porcelain all over your floor. After that, there isn’t enough skill in the world to make it whole again. Makes you wonder if there isn’t some kind of moral in there, doesn’t it?’

  For a sickening moment, Ash thought she was going to show him what she meant, and his stomach turned over. Not because the trinket meant much to him, or even because it had meant more to his mother, but because an act so crass would demonstrate – if any further demonstration was necessary – how little was left of the woman he’d loved. A cheap gesture of that kind would have been entirely alien to her once.