by Roz Watkins
I walked over to Daniel’s van and peered in. He was slumped in the passenger seat. The needle was still in his arm. I turned away.
One of the uniforms walked over and said, ‘No suggestion anyone else was involved.’
‘We can’t know that,’ I snapped.
I sensed the collective shoulder-shrugging that goes with the death of a drug user. I wanted to say, But he wasn’t what you think. He was functioning. It was for pain relief. He was okay. But that would do a disservice to those others. Those who weren’t functioning. Who weren’t okay. Those whose deaths were somehow regarded as less tragic than other deaths. And besides, this one was a murderer. No sympathy would be lost here.
‘I want us to search these woods,’ I said. ‘In case he’s got Violet hidden nearby.’ I may have been devastatingly wrong about Daniel, but I still hadn’t given up on Violet.
Richard had asked to see me back at the station. I found him in his room, tending to his cacti, clearly in an ebullient mood. Daniel was dead and everyone was happy. It made me want to retch.
He turned to face me, watering can in hand. ‘We have our man then?’ he said.
‘It’s not great news,’ I said. ‘Daniel Twigg was found dead in his van. In woodland about ten miles north of Gritton. It appears that he died of an overdose. We don’t have toxicology back yet, but we know he was on opiate medication for pain relief.’
‘We don’t know if the overdose was accidental or deliberate?’
‘No.’
‘But we have very good evidence that he killed Violet Armstrong and Gary Finchley?’
Everyone had given up on Violet. I said, ‘We don’t know for sure that Violet is dead.’
The toxicology people had said they couldn’t tell if there was any anticoagulant in the blood we’d found. Nobody was interested in my theory that she could still be alive. That someone could have put her blood and hair in the pigs’ trough to make us think she was dead.
‘She’s dead,’ Richard said. ‘We haven’t had a single indication that she’s alive, have we?’
‘No, but I don’t think we’ve got to the bottom of all this. It ties in with what happened in 1999, I’m sure of it. They found bones in the woods, exactly where Anna Finchley said they would be. She was telling the truth. A teenage boy was killed that night and ended up buried in the woods. Gary, Anna, Daniel and Kirsty have been keeping it a secret ever since. Until Gary told Violet. And now Gary and Daniel are dead and Violet’s missing, presumed dead.’
‘Well, that gave Daniel a motive to kill Violet and Gary didn’t it?’
‘I think there’s more to it.’
‘It’s not a Sunday-night drama. It might not all be neatly tied up with a big red bow.’
‘I’m sure Kirsty Nightingale knows more than she’s told us.’
‘I thought she was in a coma.’
‘She is. The doctors are going to let us know the minute she regains consciousness.’
‘We have our killer,’ Richard said. ‘The evidence against Daniel Twigg is overwhelming and we have zero indication that Violet Armstrong is alive, or that Kirsty Nightingale is involved in any way. I think we can wrap this up. The bones in the woods are a separate case. We don’t need to trouble the Nightingale family any further. They have enough to deal with.’
I looked him in the eye and the realisation hit me like a brick. He wanted this finished and he didn’t want us looking at the Nightingales. They were an influential family. They had links with senior people. Richard didn’t want us digging around there when we already had our man.
I didn’t bother to argue. But I wasn’t about to let Violet down.
I pushed open the door to my room, coffee in hand, and was surprised to see Fiona and Craig in the corner by the window. Fiona was leaning against the wall and Craig was looming over her. I heard him tell her, ‘Stop saying I’m cheating on my wife. It’s not true.’
‘Okay.’ I stuck my coffee on my desk. ‘What’s going on and why are you in my room?’
They turned and looked at me with the expressions of dogs caught digging up the flower beds.
‘We’ve all been covering Craig’s fat arse with his wife,’ Fiona snapped. ‘And I’m sick of it.’
Craig spun round to look at her. ‘Shut the fuck up. You don’t know anything about me.’
I sighed and sat down at my desk.
Fiona narrowed her eyes, and I got a sense of the strength that lay under that amenable exterior. ‘I know what I saw,’ she said. ‘I know you lied.’
Craig advanced on me, approaching belly-first. ‘She’s got it all wrong.’
I wanted to leave them to their stupid row. To go and see what Bex knew and find out more about Kirsty. I had a very bad feeling about Kirsty. I didn’t know how it related to Violet and I couldn’t justify any of it to Richard, but even though I’d been wrong about my dad and Daniel, my hunches had a pretty good track record. I was determined to pursue this one.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You need to explain now or drop this forever, because we’re all sick to death of it.’
‘I don’t like to see women being cheated on.’ Fiona crossed her arms.
Craig lurched forward and slammed his hand on my desk. ‘I’m not fucking cheating on my wife.’
My ex had been like this, and to some extent, so had my dad. Those moments of almost-violence. Not touching me but using his physicality, so it was virtually impossible not to shrink in on myself – to grow smaller and take up less space. I wasn’t putting up with it from Craig. ‘Get your hand off my desk and sit down in that chair,’ I said.
Craig angrily did as he was told. I half-hoped this would be the day my guest chair finally collapsed, but it held firm.
Fiona shifted round so she could look at Craig.
I felt like teacher.
‘Just tell her,’ Craig said. ‘And then I’ll explain how nosy cows can be wrong.’
‘I was in Sheffield and I saw him leaving this woman’s house,’ Fiona said. ‘But when I asked him what he was doing, he lied about it. And he’s obviously been lying to his wife, saying he got that injury on his face at work. So now we don’t know what to say to her. Do you like being beaten up by prostitutes, Craig? Is that it?’
Craig sighed. ‘She’s a counsellor, Fiona. I’ve been seeing her about some stuff I’ve had going on. Stuff I didn’t want to discuss with my wife. I didn’t particularly want to discuss my personal problems with you either. Happy now?’
‘Not really,’ Fiona said. ‘Why didn’t you want to tell your wife? She’s worried about you.’
‘That’s my business.’
‘But, Craig,’ I said. ‘She does have a habit of involving us.’
He rolled his eyes. ‘I know. I’ve spoken to her about that. It won’t happen again.’
50
Bex pulled open the door. ‘Oh. Hello.’
‘How are you?’ I said.
‘Oh, you know. Recovering from nearly dying in a fire. My daughter and two friends from childhood are dead, and my sister’s in a coma. I’ve had better weeks, to be perfectly honest.’
So she’d heard Daniel was dead. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Could I come in a moment?’
She took a step back. ‘Of course. Dad’s driven up to the far pig barn.’
She led me into the kitchen and we sat at the table. The heat in there was oppressive, and Bex looked like all the life had been kicked out of her. Her hands were bandaged. ‘Did you get checked over at the hospital?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘I’m fine. Lungs okay. Fingers and hands will mend. But was it really Daniel? Did he kill Violet and Gary?’
My phone rang. I hesitated. It was Fiona. ‘I’d better take this,’ I said, and picked up.
‘We’ve got some results back on that barn fire,’ Fiona said. ‘Apparently there are some concerns.’
‘What kind of concerns?’
‘That it might have been started deliberately. It’s not clear cut. There are no traces of acce
lerant, but they want to talk to Kirsty about why there was so much straw around. The origin was the wildfire, which had spread to the woods nearby. But there was effectively a trail of straw from the woods to the barn. The fire bloke said he thought the insurance assessor would be pretty interested in that. It was an old barn, and it could be quite convenient that it’s burnt down. The barn and all the livestock are well insured, apparently.’
‘Well, he can’t talk to Kirsty right now. She’s in a coma.’ I mouthed an apology to Bex, and walked out into the hallway, shoving the door shut behind me with a foot. I lowered my voice. ‘So we might be talking arson?’
‘Possibly. They have concerns. And, Meg, there’s another thing. Someone had listened to the message that Bex left on Kirsty’s landline, saying she was in the barn.’
‘What? Who listened?’
‘Kirsty was the only one home.’
‘Oh God.’ I paused and then whispered, ‘If it’s arson and Kirsty was the only one around, and she knew Bex was in the barn …’ I took myself further down the hallway, further from Bex.
‘I looked at the house-to-house again,’ Fiona said. ‘There was a woman who remembered Kirsty having problems as a child. Behaviour problems. She saw a psychiatrist. But nobody talked about it because she was Tony Nightingale’s daughter, and he’s like the country gent round here. The landowner. It was a throwaway comment, but it totally made my ears prick.’
‘What kind of behaviour problems?’ I already had my suspicions.
‘It’s not very clear. Even now you can see people don’t want to talk about it.’
It was a thing I’d noticed in some Derbyshire villages. A deference to the land-owning classes. As if the fact that your great-grandfather made a load of money exploiting peasants somehow made you more worthy. I remembered Gary’s wife, Mandy, saying Tony Nightingale had given money to the abattoir. She’d put it down to him wanting to keep everything nice in the village. But what if there was more to it than that? Was Tony paying a price for the villagers’ silence about his daughter?
I wasn’t surprised Kirsty had had behaviour problems as a child. I’d sensed something off with her from the start. The question was how these ‘behavioural problems’ manifested now.
‘Thanks, Fiona. Can you make sure we’ve got a good police presence at the hospital with Kirsty, in case she comes round.’
I ended the call and walked back to the kitchen. Bex was sitting at the table staring into space. She jumped when I came in.
‘What’s going on?’
In my mind’s eye, I saw Kirsty’s coldness when watching her barn burn, her attitude to her daughter and her sister, Gwen Twigg’s fear. I replayed the comments from people in the village about her. She could easily have killed Daniel by doctoring his painkillers, since she supplied them, but there was absolutely no evidence linking her to Gary’s death – or Violet’s, assuming she was dead.
‘Bex,’ I said. ‘Have you ever had any concerns about your sister’s behaviour?’
‘My sister? Not really.’
‘Did your dad ever have concerns? We’ve been told he took her to see a psychiatrist when she was a child.’
Bex frowned and shifted away from me. ‘No. But if it’s Dad, he’d have kept records. Follow me.’
She led me down a panelled corridor and into a musty-smelling study. The walls were lined with books – mainly leather-bound with gold lettering on their spines.
‘Dad’s meticulous,’ Bex said. ‘Everything filed away in alphabetically arranged square-cut folders. If Kirsty went to a psychiatrist, he’ll have a file. And I know where to find the key to his filing cabinet. I saw when I spent that summer here.’
Bex walked across the room to an antique bureau, pulled out a false base from an inner compartment and fished out a key. She leaned over and unlocked an ugly modern filing cabinet. ‘Bingo.’
She opened the top drawer and flipped through some files. ‘God, here’s one on me.’ She fished out a slim beige file and opened it. ‘Letters. From Aunt Janet.’
Bex put the file on a leather-topped desk by the window and read from one of the letters. ‘Doing well. Better to keep her away from her sister. What the hell …’
‘Your aunt’s talking about keeping you away from your sister?’ I said.
Bex turned to me and frowned. ‘I heard her on the phone once saying that. I thought they wanted to keep Kirsty away from me. I always thought I was the bad one.’
She shoved the file down and rummaged again in the cabinet. Found another file. It was stuffed so full, she struggled to wrench it out with her bandaged hands. ‘Ow. This file’s huge.’
I suspected this was like with medical records: a fat file was not a good sign.
Bex sank onto the floor, put the file down and allowed the papers to spill out. I sat next to her, shifting my dodgy ankle to get comfy.
Words caught my eye on one of the papers: Callous and unemotional (CU). Non-responsive to punishment. Therapy likely to be ineffective.
I caught sight of movement at the window but when I looked up, there was no one there.
Bex said, ‘But Kirsty was always the golden girl.’ She rummaged through the papers. ‘My God, all these letters from psychiatrists. What was the matter with her?’
We scrabbled around in the paperwork for a few minutes and then Bex grabbed her phone and tapped a few keys.
She looked up at me, her face drained of blood. ‘I’ve just googled it.’
A thudding noise came from outside. A car door banging shut.
‘Shit, it’s Dad.’ Bex jumped up, hurriedly put the files back together, and stuffed them into the cabinet. ‘Come to the kitchen.’
We jumped up, raced to the kitchen and threw ourselves down at the table. A shadow appeared at the door. Tony Nightingale pushed it open and came into the room. He smelled of pig. ‘Oh, hello there,’ he said. ‘Terrible about Daniel. Do you have news on the investigation?’
‘It’s ongoing,’ I said. ‘We’ll keep you informed.’
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Coffee,’ Bex said. ‘I need coffee. And put some whisky in it.’
‘Yes, coffee would be great, thanks,’ I said.
‘Go into the drawing room,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll bring it through.’
I followed Bex down the hallway into a large room lined with portraits of judgemental old men, and stuffed with antique and no doubt priceless furniture. I sat on a small sofa which had clearly been designed for scrawny Victorians who saw sitting down as a moral weakness. Bex sat on a second sofa by a bay window. A beam of sunlight made a bright, shimmery lozenge on the parquet floor. I felt a glimmer of hope that I hadn’t been wrong about Daniel after all. Maybe it had never been him. Maybe he’d been framed.
Tony appeared a few minutes later, handed us the drinks, and headed for the door.
‘Hang on!’ When Bex raised her voice, I could hear the croak in it from shouting and breathing smoke. ‘Dad, hang on. We need to talk.’
‘Oh dear, that sounds ominous.’ He came back into the room and sat on a wing-back chair.
‘What’s the matter with Kirsty?’ Bex said.
‘You know what’s the matter with her – she’s lying in a coma in the hospital.’
Bex sighed. ‘Have you been honest with me about anything, Dad? In my whole life?’
Tony was very still, looking at Bex through narrowed eyes. ‘Honest about what?’ I felt like an intruder. This was a drama playing out between Bex and her father. But I needed to know. What if Kirsty was behind everything and Daniel had just been a pawn? I sipped my coffee. He’d put whisky in mine too, which was welcome.
‘About Kirsty,’ Bex said. ‘A massive file full of letters from psychiatrists – and I know nothing. So what the hell’s the matter with her?’
‘Why are you doing this, Bex? Your sister is fighting for her life.’
‘Because I want the truth! What’s wrong with her that you never told me?’
‘She
’s fine now. She’s grown out of it. She had some problems as a child, that’s all.’
‘What problems?’
‘I dealt with it. She’s fine.’
‘It says she had callous and unemotional traits. It doesn’t sound fine. It sounds decidedly not-fine to me.’
‘It sounds worse than it was,’ Tony said. ‘Our family have always been unemotional. That’s why we’ve been so successful in business. You can’t succeed in this world if you spend your whole time worrying about other people. You can’t breed pigs for a living if you’re over-emotional. The over-emotional children are the worst. Daniel was one of those. And now look what he’s done. Killed Violet and Gary.’
‘I never knew Daniel was difficult.’
‘You weren’t here.’
Bex gulped the last of her drink and slammed the cup onto the antique table next to her. ‘No! Because you sent me away! You didn’t want me.’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘So what was it like, Dad?’
‘Kirsty was slower to develop empathy than most children. She didn’t respond well to punishment. But I know now that punishment’s not a good way to change behaviour. She forced me to realise that. To find a better way.’
‘For God’s sake, Dad, I’m a dog trainer. I know punishment’s not a good way to change behaviour.’
‘Yes. Well, Kirsty is why I got interested in that kind of behaviour modification in the first place.’ He wiped his forehead. ‘If you treat these children the right way, they turn out fine. That’s what happened with Kirsty.’
‘These children?’
‘Children with …’ He touched his mouth as if he didn’t like saying the words. ‘Callous and unemotional traits. They find it challenging to think long-term, and they don’t respond well to punishment, but they can learn how to behave well in order to get what they want. If you reward good behaviour, it becomes a habit. Like flushing the lavatory. Even using the lavatory – children don’t toilet-train themselves. You know all this from your dog training. A dog trained with positive reinforcement becomes a good citizen. The good habits become ingrained. The dog doesn’t avoid chasing the cat out of any moral imperative or because it’s suddenly developed empathy for the cat. It does it because that behaviour has been rewarded so many times it becomes a habit. It’s the same with these children. When they’re well brought up, they often end up very successful in politics or business. As your sister is, in fact. It’s only if they’re brought up in a toxic environment that they become …’
