‘It’s not that, the info relating to Sarah Kelsey’s operation made Professor Faraday’s job pretty straightforward, or that’s how it looked, anyway. She’s confident the right IDs have been assigned. It was something Benson discovered, when he was examining Barbara, that I thought you’d want to know before it comes out in the briefing.’
‘Go on.’
‘There was very little lung tissue left.’ Alex spoke slowly, letting each word sink in. ‘However, Benson was unable to find any trace of soot – as you know most fire victims actually die from smoke inhalation but there was no evidence of that with Barbara.’ A pause. ‘Kevin, she was dead before the fire broke out.’
Coupland leaned back against the patio door, planted both feet flat on the ground as he tried to make sense of what he was hearing. ‘How?’
‘There was a fracture towards the front of her skull…’
Coupland’s cigarette had worn down to its filter, he sucked on it anyway.
‘Look, I guess you’ll be seeing your sisters today?’
Coupland’s shoulders slumped. Telling his sisters wasn’t something he relished but they needed to know sooner rather than later.
‘Kevin?’
Startled, he looked at his phone. He’d forgotten Alex was on the other end, waiting for a reply. ‘Whatever,’ he said, ending the call.
*
The woman answering the doorbell widened her eyes in mock surprise. ‘Oh my God, look what the cat dragged in. It must be Christmas!’
Coupland forced his mouth into a smile. ‘If it was you’d be three sheets to the wind and at each other’s throats by now.’
‘Hah bloody hah, always the sodding comedian,’ she muttered, shaking her head as she looked him up and down.
‘Just telling it like it is, Sis,’ he said, following her into a tired front room. Scuffed wallpaper and ceilings yellow from chain smoking, it made his place look like a palace. His eldest sister Pat lived two streets away from Coupland, had bought her terrace under the Council’s right to buy scheme but she’d spent no money on the interior. She was a saver, not a spender, one of those people who put their faith in tomorrow, holding down a job she hated so she could enjoy a happy old age.
She lifted a packet of Mayfair from beside the ashtray on the coffee table, took out a cigarette and threw him the pack. Coupland took two out and lit them, handing one to a woman already seated, legs tucked beneath her, who nodded her thanks, studying him as he returned the pack to its former position on the coffee table. High days and holidays. That’s all their get-togethers amounted to these days, but the rituals remained the same. Pat would have no more thought to offer him a coffee than she would have baked him a cake. It wasn’t how they did things. She moved to sit beside a younger woman on the sofa, leaving Coupland to slump into an armchair he’d have to be winched out of later. He regarded his sisters as they sat side by side. You could tell they were siblings, sat in such close proximity they were carbon copies of each other, though with the same wide jaw and heft as Coupland the women had drawn the short straw, as they would never be described as petite. Pat still sported the same Lady Diana haircut cut she’d had from her teens, whereas Val kept hers long and straight, which would be flattering if she didn’t frown so much.
‘So come on then,’ Pat ordered, ‘what was so important you had to get us together like the final scene in an episode of Poirot? Are you going to accuse one of us of murder?’
Coupland took a drag on his cigarette, held it there before exhaling a lungful of smoke into the centre of the room. He shook his head in answer to her questions but still, there was something he needed to know. ‘When was the last time either of you saw Mam?’
The women looked at one another. ‘Seriously?’ Pat asked, her voice tinged with relief. ‘Why the sudden interest? Christ, you had me going for a minute. I thought it was something important.’
Coupland stared at her. ‘This is important.’
Val was already shaking her head. ‘It’s raking over old coals, that’s what it is. Besides, you already know the answer.’
‘Humour me.’
His sisters exchanged glances once more but Pat did as he asked. ‘I’d come round for tea the night before. Mum’d phoned me at work… I thought it was odd, we normally ate together on a Sunday but Mam said she’d got a cheap piece of beef from the butcher and we could have it that night and give the following Sunday a miss. Said it would be nice to put her feet up for once, with it being a day of rest and everything.’
‘Last time we ever had Sunday dinner,’ added Val.
‘But it wasn’t a Sunday,’ Pat corrected her. ‘I’d just explained.’
A tut. ‘Same difference.’
‘Anyway,’ Pat chided, sending a look in Val’s direction, ‘you won’t have anything to add, you were sulking in your room all evening because you’d fallen out with the lad you were seeing. You came down for your dinner then buggered back upstairs straight after.’ She jerked her head in Coupland’s direction. ‘And soft lad here was playing with his train set.’
‘Scalextric,’ Coupland corrected her.
‘Same difference,’ she sniffed.
It was a repeat of the conversation they’d had over many years. In the early days they had gone over their mother’s last day with them forensically, each time one of them blaming the other: Pat for not being there having left home six months earlier, Val for not pulling her weight at home, and Kevin for being the ‘accident’. ‘Don’t think Mam wanted a third but Dad was desperate for a boy,’ Pat would tell him. Coupland found that hard to believe, unless it was a sparring partner his old man had been looking for.
His voice was low when he spoke next. ‘She never said anything, did she? That night, I mean…’
‘Kevin, we’ve been over it a thousand times, she didn’t say a word, nothing to make us guess what she had planned—’ Pat clocked the look on Coupland’s face before raising her hand to silence the question that was coming from Val. She’d clocked it too. ‘This isn’t a casual enquiry Kevin, is it? Why the urgency, why did you ask to see us both this morning, out of the blue?’
‘You sure she never made contact with either of you? Afterwards, I mean.’
Val had been silent long enough, ‘Christ Almighty Kevin! Don’t you think we’d have told you?’
Coupland studied the cigarette in his hand, wondering if it were possible to slow time down. He didn’t want to be the one to tell them. Didn’t want anyone else to do it either.
‘What is it?’ Pat asked.
Coupland sighed as he pulled out his phone and tapped onto the copies of the photos he’d taken the previous day. The one of Barbara Howe as a young woman, then when she was older, laughing with friends. Him and his bloody Scalextric. He held out his phone to them both, swiping between the first two photos. ‘Is this her?’ he asked, holding his breath as he waited for their reply.
Pat creased her brow in confusion. ‘Of course it’s her, don’t you remember?’
Coupland shrugged. ‘I needed to be sure.’
Pat reached for another cigarette, lit it from the dying embers of the one she was still holding, steeling herself. ‘Tell us how you got the photos, Kevin.’
‘Mam’s dead.’
Val let out a gasp before reaching for Pat who was already moving towards her, arms outstretched.
‘I’m sorry,’ Coupland said, ‘I shouldn’t have told you like that. I— I’m still trying to process it myself.’
‘When?’ Pat asked. ‘How did you find out?’ As the eldest, she’d always been the one to cascade family information; it felt wrong that on this occasion, for something as momentous as this, that Coupland was the one with the answers.
‘She was one of the victims in the fire I was called out to at the weekend, the one at Cedar Falls.’
‘I heard about that on the radio…’ said Val, ‘What was she doing there?’ A pause. ‘Was she a patient?’
Coupland shook his head. ‘She worked there,
’ he answered.
‘How long?’ Pat’s tone was sharp. ‘How long had our mother been working down the road from us without bothering to get in touch?’
‘Well, it’s a bus ride really,’ Val pointed out. ‘Rather than down the road—’
‘—Shut up will you!’ Pat turned on her. ‘That’s not the point and you know it.’
‘She might not have had the money for a bus, so it is bloody relevant.’
‘For Christ’s sake I could have gone and picked her up!’ Coupland said. ‘Or given her money, if she’d needed it.’ Val’s reasonableness was starting to grate on him too. ‘If she’d bothered to get in touch, that is.’
‘How long had she been working there, Kevin?’ Pat persisted, her voice low.
‘A couple of years, she’d been living in the staff quarters.’
‘And before that?’
Coupland shook his head. ‘Temporary jobs in other towns, all hand to mouth work really.’ ‘She’d changed her name,’ he added, as though an afterthought, ‘The home had her down as Barbara Howe.’
‘That’s her maiden name,’ Pat told him.
Val dabbed at her eye with a sleeve. ‘Where did you find the photos?’
‘She had them pinned up in her room.’ He showed them the one with him in it. ‘This was beside them.’
‘No surprise there,’ Pat grumbled. ‘You always were the bloody favourite.’
‘I thought I was the accident.’
Pat didn’t reply. It was Val who spoke next, touching on the issue they’d always avoided. ‘She looked out for you, never let Dad raise his hand to you, even when you were a little shite.’
So, the beatings had been about making up for lost time then. It was no secret that the old man had a temper, that their mother suffered the brunt of it. What they never discussed was the violence, as though keeping quiet about it made it less real. The girls weren’t to know how things stepped up when they moved out. No point them hearing it now.
‘Were there any photos of us?’ asked Val. Coupland glanced at Pat before answering, ‘I didn’t get the chance to have a proper look. Her belongings have been taken away as evidence.’ ‘Evidence for what?’ Coupland swallowed. ‘Murder. The thing is…’
Chapter Twelve
It was a judgement call. The amount of information you released in one go to the victim’s loved ones. ‘We did everything we could…’ was a doctor’s stock in trade which readied the recipient for the blow to come, whereas in his line of work there was no crutch to lean on. There was simply no way to soft soap that a loved one had been murdered. Coupland dug deep into his reservoir of platitudes to find something to mitigate his sisters’ pain. ‘The blow to the head meant she was dead before the flames engulfed her.’ Deciding, in the circumstances, to say nothing.
That their mother had died in a fire was bad enough. That she’d been murdered… his sisters were struggling with the concept. Coupland found himself mentally running through the checklist he’d used countless times but the words stuck in his throat. Was there someone he could call? He already knew the answer to that. Pat’s husband was a porter at the children’s hospital, Val’s latest fella would be waving goodbye to his wife and kids before turning up to the office they shared as payroll clerks for a chain of garages. He asked anyway. ‘Do you want me to call Jim and Gary?’
Val looked to Pat to answer for them both. ‘I think we need time to work this out for ourselves first,’ she said.
Coupland nodded.
‘Does Dad know?’
‘Not yet.’
‘I’ll tell him,’ Pat said, asserting her position as the eldest. Already she was striding into the hall to get her coat.
‘No, I have to do it; Mum’s murder is part of an ongoing investigation.’
‘Christ, you don’t think Dad can help you with any of that, surely?’
‘No, but he may have information that would help.’
‘You mean something that he kept from us?’
Coupland looked at her. ‘Would that surprise you?’
‘He’s not devious, Kevin.’
In Coupland’s experience bullies were just that. Manipulative, patient, cruel for the sake of it.
‘Mum leaving like that devastated him.’
Not enough, he found himself thinking.
‘I didn’t think you’d be allowed to get involved, with it being our mam and everything. I mean…’ her voice tailed off as his gaze fell on her.
‘It’s not that easy to reassign cases,’ he said, ‘we no longer have the resources.’
Pat hadn’t yet stood down. She lingered in front of the coat rack defiantly. ‘When will you go and see him?’
Coupland blew out his cheeks; decided honesty was the best policy. ‘I might wait until tomorrow, not like one more day will make a difference.’
Pat thought about this. ‘I suppose it gives us a chance to get our heads around it. You’ll let me know when you’ve been, so I can go round afterwards?’
‘We both can,’ Val called from the hallway.
Coupland nodded. ‘If that’s what you want.’
Satisfied, Pat padded back to the living room where she slumped into her seat. She ran her fingers through her hair, sighed as she thought of something. ‘He’s going a bit deaf, Kevin, it takes him a while to answer the door.’
Coupland nodded, ‘I’ll wait,’ he said.
‘I wonder how he’ll take it?’ Val asked.
Coupland shrugged. ‘Like we have, I would imagine, sad, but not entirely sure why. Like when someone famous dies and even if you couldn’t stand them you start playing their songs or watching their interviews on TV.’
‘It’s hardly the same, Kevin, we all remember her.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
‘Did she still look like our Mam, Kevin?’ Val asked. ‘Despite everything?’
Coupland knew he’d have to tread carefully; a lie told in kindness could still backfire. If he reassured her too much she’d be demanding to see the body. What was left of it. Coupland blew out a breath. ‘Not really.’ He tried not to think of the blackened torso on the mortuary cutting table, the piece of bone in Benson’s hand. ‘Better not to dwell on it,’ he added, trying hard to follow his own advice, but failing miserably.
*
He decided the walk would do him good. Clear his head, shake off the mugginess that had descended since he’d discovered his photograph pinned up in Barbara Howe’s room. Besides, he’d run out of cigarettes; he could call into his local newsagents, assuming they hadn’t barred him. His smoke rate doubled when he was with his sisters. No sooner had one of them finished a cigarette than they were lighting up another, handing their pack around like Nigella handed round canapés at Christmas. His GP, who’d long since given up on getting him to quit, had started on at him recently about exercise. Said he should get one of those gadgets that measured how far he walked. ‘Aim for 10,000 steps a day,’ he’d said without a trace of humour. He should join forces with Superintendent Curtis, Coupland reckoned. With all that shoe leather being expended Salford’s crime solving stats would be top of the division’s leader board in no time.
The wind had got up, skittering litter across the pavement. Coupland’s jacket blew open, there was a chill in the air but he was oblivious, his mind working overtime. He’d have to let Alex know he’d broken the news. Despite what he’d claimed to his sisters he would be taken off the case, though with any luck his replacement would let him watch from the sidelines, might even throw him a bone if he promised not to get under their feet.
There was no queue in the newsagents this time, no gawpers giving him the evil eye. The owner’s wife was behind the counter; without prompting she reached for Coupland’s Silk Cut before he had to ask, teamed it with his chewing gum. She was usually a chatty woman, would start a conversation about anything if it saved her from stapling invoices into the inside covers of the pile of newspapers waiting to be delivered. Yet this morning she counted out his
change in silence, her gaze shifting to the tabloid on the counter top. Angelica Heyworth’s piece had made front page once more. There, in all his glory, was a photo of Coupland, cigarette in hand, glowering at the camera from the top of the station’s fire escape steps. The caption beneath it went straight for the jugular. ‘I head butted him,’ Assault cop confesses all.
‘I-I don’t believe everything I read,’ the woman stated somewhat nervously, catching the scowl forming on his face. ‘There’s so much fake news these days it’s hard to know who to trust.’
Coupland shrugged. ‘Welcome to my world,’ he said, stuffing the change she handed him into the plastic charity box beside the till, even though it included a handful of pound coins. She might not blame him for assaulting a human trafficking paedophile; if he baulked at supporting the local greyhound sanctuary she’d think he was a complete twat.
*
Coupland clamped his lips round his cigarette in readiness to light up as he left the shop, nodding to folk as they called in for their papers, receiving a nod in return. Fishing in his pockets for his lighter, he collided with a young man coming from the opposite direction. ‘Watch it!’ he said, not looking up.
He was ten feet or so away when he heard the boy shout: ‘Oi!’ Coupland carried on walking. ‘Oi!’ the lad repeated, ‘Are yer deaf, piggy? I’m talking to you.’
Coupland stopped, returning the unlit cigarette to its packet in a bid to buy time. Eyes narrowing he turned in the boy’s direction. It was the coat hanger smile he recognised, that and the scab on the boy’s forehead that reminded him where he’d seen him last. Fresh from the custody suite where he’d headbutted seven bells out of his cell door.
‘You got the all clear at the hospital then?’ Coupland observed, ‘No lasting damage, I hope?’
The boy widened his shoulders as though mimicking an ape, pushed his feet wide apart. ‘You makin’ fun o’ me?’ His face grew dark as he gave Coupland the beady eye. The boy was thin like a reed. His mates, watching from the precinct wall, weren’t much bigger. These wannabee gangsters needed a change of career, either that or build some muscle. A smart mouth only got you so far, used unwisely it could bring attention from all the wrong people, and Coupland wasn’t thinking of the police. Many of the gangs in Salford were headed up by men Coupland’s age or older; there was a hierarchy within them like in any corporate firm, a pecking order to be respected. Young bucks had to be skilled at something or be well connected to be tolerated, and he doubted this kid was either.
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