Lauren had composed herself enough to instruct Franklin to wrack his brains until he came up with a name. After all, this was the second gruesome murder in just a few days, and the same people may be responsible.
Why go to all the trouble that these people had taken, whoever they were, if they weren’t making a point? And to whom were they making this point? Were they sending a message? Don’t mess with us? Passing psychopaths were characters from lurid fiction, not real life, and she was convinced that these murders had a local origin. There were some very evil people out there, and it was her job to catch them.
A small shiver ran down her spine at the very thought, but she had to pull herself together and get on with this, as she would any other murder investigation. She just hoped that Hardy returned to the office in the near future, so that she could take over as SIO.
At that precise moment, Olivia Hardy was with her husband at her son’s bedside. They had suffered a terrible shock the night before when the doctor repeatedly shook Ben to try to get him to breathe. The information about what he might have taken was helpful, but as he lay there in the A&E department with no shoes on, his socks filthy, and his T-shirt not much better, he looked like a homeless orphan. How could they not have seen him getting into this state?
The doctor had told them that if he hadn’t been found when he was, he wouldn’t have survived for much longer, and it was lucky someone had gone into his room. Olivia had been too panic-stricken to ask Hal why he’d gone in there, as it wasn’t something they normally did. Their son was eighteen, and he insisted that his room was his private space which should never be entered by either of his parents. As she waited on the ward, Olivia decided to give it a good turn-out as soon as she could, to make sure there were no more drugs or drug paraphernalia in it. When it was decided that Ben was well enough to be transferred to a side ward for close observation, they finally went home, and slept like the dead until ten o’clock, when they rose, famished. They immediately headed to the kitchen and grabbed a bowl of cereal and a mug of instant coffee each.
Noticing the rinsed cup, plate, and knife on the draining board, Olivia remembered that they’d had an overnight guest. Where was Lauren? The evidence suggested that she’d already got up and gone into work, but she couldn’t be sure – not until she noticed the note on the table under the salt cellar.
There was no time to check in with her, though, as she and Hal needed to get back to the hospital as quickly as possible, to see whether Ben’s condition had improved or deteriorated. A telephone call in advance had only informed them that the patient was ‘comfortable’, which meant precisely nothing. It was just hospital chewing gum to stop things kicking off at the other end of the phone.
When her own mother had been paralysed by a stroke and was a victim to advanced Alzheimer’s disease, Olivia recalled, the nursing staff had always told her aunt, who phoned once a week, that she was fine. Being ‘fine’ or ‘comfortable’ wasn’t the same as being in a condition of recovery, nor even the likelihood of it.
When they arrived they were told that the doctor would speak to them shortly. Ben was in a room of his own, next to the nurses’ station, and it had a glass wall through which he could be constantly watched to make sure that he didn’t relapse into unconsciousness.
When they were given permission to enter the room, their son was in a clean hospital gown and under the top covers, and not in the tramp-like state of dress in which he had arrived. A wave of shame at his earlier appearance washed over Olivia, and she felt tears pricking the back of her eyes – but she could change nothing, and would have to put on a brave face for her son; her baby, once upon a time.
Ben appeared to be asleep, so they sat, one each side of his bed, and watched him for a few minutes, as he breathed easily and regularly. Tears of relief poured unchecked down Hal’s face as he sent up a private prayer of thanksgiving. His mother had raised him as a member of the evangelical church, and, whatever his wife’s scathing comments about it, his faith was still strong.
Olivia got up and bent over to kiss her son’s cheek, then softly stroked his forehead. His eyelids fluttered, and then drew back as he opened his eyes and stared blankly at the ceiling. He said nothing, and Olivia immediately began to worry about brain damage, which had not so far been mentioned.
‘Ben?’ she bent to whisper in his ear, ‘It’s Mum and Dad come to visit you. How are you feeling?’
‘I’m here too, son,’ said Hal in a pleading voice, worried beyond all reason at the blank and unresponsive expression on his son’s face, and the lack of recognition in his eyes.
A voice from the doorway broke into their anxious thoughts. ‘Don’t be worried. We lightly sedated him because he got a bit confrontational when he came round, and we thought it would do him good to sleep it off some more. He’ll be fine by this afternoon, if you want to visit him again then. He’ll probably be a bit more rational by then, with a little extra time for his brain to recover.’
Turning round they saw what they presumed was a doctor in the doorway to the room. He looked so young they half-expected him to have a plastic stethoscope and a Ladybird book of symptoms sticking out of his pocket. ‘I’m the SHO on your son’s case. He had a very close shave, and we’ve lined up a psychiatrist to have a word with him when he’s fully conscious again, to make sure that he didn’t intend to take his own life.’
‘What?’ Olivia was shocked almost into speechlessness.
‘He’d never do that! He doesn’t have any responsibilities or cares. He still lives at home,’ countered Hal.
‘You’d be surprised at what kids worry about, and his life probably isn’t the open book that you think it is. Young people can get into all kinds of messes, then be too scared or frightened to talk to their parents about it. Is he a regular drug user?’
‘Of course he’s not,’ stated Olivia, now shocked into indignation.
‘And just how do you know that?’ the SHO continued. It was beginning to feel more like an interrogation. ‘Does he spend every evening and night at home? Is he around all the time at the weekends? Kids can get up to all sorts of dangerous stuff that their parents couldn’t even imagine.’
After a short interval of silence, Olivia was honest enough to admit that since he had started at college, Ben was often away all night and hardly ever spent an evening or weekend at home – and, even when he did, he shut himself into his bedroom, which he had forbidden them to enter.
‘Have you ever caught him either in possession of or taking drugs?’
‘I caught him once quite recently smoking a spliff in his bedroom and I was absolutely furious, mainly because of how it could affect my position professionally, and I just didn’t think he’d be that stupid after all I’ve told him about the addicts I’ve had to deal with.’
‘Maybe that’s why he’s hidden the majority of what he does from you, he’s conscious of your job. He probably feels very hemmed in, and taking drugs might be more a way of rebelling than anything else.’
‘When we get home we’re going through his room to see what else he’s got hidden away in there. I can’t go through this again. We shouldn’t need to watch him as if he were a toddler again.’
‘We can always arrange psychological help for him if it seems appropriate,’ said the SHO. ‘Anyway, I think we should leave the discussion of what has happened, and how to deal with it, until this afternoon, so that your son can join in.’
As one, the parents stood up to leave the room, their son gently snoring in the bed, and left the hospital in silence. Once in the car park, Olivia and Hal turned to one another.
‘Psychiatrist?’
‘Suicide?’
They avoided starting a conversation until they had driven home. This needed some time to sink in. Had they really neglected him so much that he had got into drugs just to be noticed? All sorts of sources of guilty possibility swirled round Olivia’s head as they headed back to Littleton-on-Sea, which was about ten miles away.
Back in their cottage, Hal made coffee on automatic pilot. Olivia, despite her anxiety about her son, felt it necessary to check in with Lauren to let her know what was happening and to find out what was going on in the murder investigation. She was dismayed to learn of the new murder.
‘I’ve got it covered, boss,’ said Lauren, although she felt less than comfortable being the SIO, ‘you do what you need to do before coming back.’
‘I feel so guilty leaving you alone,’ said Olivia, ‘but thanks for the breathing space. Do you have all the necessary support you need for now?’
‘Yes, and Lenny Franklin thinks he may know the victim, so that will be followed up later. See you when you’re ready.’
Olivia put the phone down, thinking yet again how difficult it could be to balance work with family. It seemed like she was always walking a fine line between the two.
She cut some sandwiches in absolute silence. Only when the plates were in the sink and the cups refilled did she and Hal begin to talk about how they could have found themselves in the middle of such an unbelievable situation.
When they had got to the bottom of it, there would probably have to be alterations to both their schedules, with a bit more active parenting involved. Then again, the boy was eighteen. If he’d gone away to college and lived in halls, would this still have happened, or was it a symptom of feeling trapped, living with his parents?
When the scenario on the sands had been wrapped up and the body taken away to the rapidly filling mortuary, Lenny Franklin headed back to the station as quick as he could, eager to speak to Monty Fairbanks, the archivist. He was the fount of all local knowledge, even more so than Lenny himself, and he felt that if he described the victim to Monty, he’d be presented with a name straight away.
If he had recognised him, Monty would be sure to, and the small tattoo of a spider’s web on the victim’s neck was a useful identifying feature. He just hoped Monty was on duty.
He was, and after a brief description of build, approximate height, hair colour, and the additional information of the tattoo, Monty immediately came up with a name. ‘Doug Green! Yeo Close, up on the council estate. Been a bit of a jack-the-lad for years, but never got himself into really hot water. I’ve got him in my card index system.
‘Yes, I know it’s all supposed to go on computer, but I do like to keep the old cards up to date. So helpful, if you can’t be bothered to turn on the blasted machine, and then wait for the valve to warm up; then there’s the password to remember. No, I rely on my old cards when I want a name quickly, but I can pull his computer record up for you, Lenny. He’s never been convicted of anything, but he’s managed to wriggle out of quite a few charges over the years.’
The promise was no sooner made than accomplished, and it wasn’t long before Lenny found himself looking at a mugshot of the man discovered murdered on the beach earlier that day.
‘I’ll pass his details on to one of the female officers to see if they’d break the news to his family. I gather he has one?’
‘Wife, and three kids all getting to an age where they’ve started to tangle with us, but nothing much at the moment – they’ve restricted their activities to shoplifting sweeties and breaking the windows of unoccupied houses.’
‘I think I’ll ask Teri Friend. She’s good with empathising and looking after weeping women. Me, I just freeze and can’t say a word.’
‘Me too,’ agreed Monty, who hated strong emotions, and was very happy safely ensconced in his lair of records. He was still in the process of adding some of the earlier ones to the hated computer, while doggedly maintaining his own paper system.
Lenny left him to his routine record updating and went off in search of Teri Friend. She might feel that breaking bad news was rather beneath her level of experience in the job, but experience gave you tact and taught you the best way to tackle difficult and sensitive jobs like this one.
From the vestibule, before the door closed properly, he heard Teri’s voice saying, ‘Not another racial minority case? My Asian roots don’t qualify me as an authority on racial matters, you know.’
‘That’s not the case, love,’ answered Lenny. ‘Just something a bit sensitive: telling a woman her husband’s been murdered in a very unusual and cruel way.’
Over her time in the job Teri had got used to older officers like Lenny addressing her as ‘love’, and she had no real objection unless there was a senior officer lurking in the background. She smiled at him and said, ‘Thanks a bleedin’ bunch, Lenny, that makes me the bad news budgie again. Give me the address and the details, and I’ll get it over with before I rebel and insist that you do it for once.’
‘Hold on there, love. I’d never be able to be as good as you are at doing this sort of thing, and you know it.’
‘Oh, don’t I, and in spades!’
CHAPTER SIX
Olivia and Hal went back into the hospital about three o’clock. There’d have to be some open and honest talking when Ben came home, to get to the bottom of why this incident had occurred in the first place. She would never erase the memory of a medic shaking her son’s inert body and shouting, ‘Breathe!’
In the car on the drive over, Olivia had asked her husband why he’d suddenly decided to go into the bedroom. It turned out that Hal had gone into the upstairs bathroom and seen that somebody had taken a crap on the carpet, having completely missed the bowl of the lavatory. He had known that it was either Ben or his friend who had done such a filthy thing, and had marched straight to the horse’s mouth (or, rather, its arse) to demand an explanation. He had found the friend gone and Ben barely conscious.
‘Well, he’s never seeing that lad again. He’s obviously trouble, although I thought he was so well-spoken, and he had a good address,’ commented Olivia.
‘A nice accent and good address are no indication of character though, are they, Liv? If his mother’s place is stuffed with Valium and old-fashioned sleeping pills there must be something wrong in the household,’ countered Hal.
‘We have sleeping pills in our medicine cabinet,’ Olivia rounded on him.
‘We do indeed, but they were left by your mother on her last visit to us before she fell off her perch. They’re probably wildly out of date, and work more by luck than efficacy.’
‘We could send him over to visit your parents?’
‘You’ve got to be joking. The last thing we need is for him to be left to his own devices on an island that isn’t unknown for its supply of marijuana.’
‘God, I didn’t even think of that. Well, we’ll have to do something.’
‘Not until we’ve talked it over with him. Remember, we’ve got to start treating him as an adult if he wants to be viewed as one.’
Ben was awake and gave them a weak smile when he saw them come through the doorway of his room. ‘I kinda screwed up badly, didn’t I?’ he asked weakly.
Olivia immediately rushed to his bed, unable to contain her sobbing, and threw her arms round him, just grateful to see that he didn’t seem to be suffering from any long-term damage after his close brush with death.
Hal walked over more slowly, tears of gratitude rolling down his cheeks. Olivia moved away slightly, and Hal took Ben’s light brown face in his large dark brown hands. He leaned over and kissed his son’s forehead with a tenderness that belied his size. ‘My son,’ was all he said, repeating it several times before he took his palms from the boy’s cheeks.
DS Groves had had more than enough to distract her mind from her chaotic and catastrophic domestic situation that day, and when she could delay going home no longer, she packed up, put on her fiercest expression of determination, and headed for Home Farm Barn. Things couldn’t be allowed to fall into any pattern other than one of her own devising.
Although her hands shook on the steering wheel as she drove, she found that when she approached the front door, she was icily calm. Fortunately her key still let her in, and she went into the house calling out to Kenneth so that they could talk thi
s situation out. She had phoned her solicitor that afternoon and asked him to start divorce proceedings, and she knew exactly what she wanted, domestically.
Kenneth looked a bit grey about the gills and sheepish without the wine inside him and the bravado of the night before with which it had imbued him, and Gerda looked half triumphant, half scared.
Gathering her courage, like scattered troops, Lauren glared as fiercely as she could and said, ‘Right! This needs sorting, and it needs sorting now. You, Kenneth’ – she pointed at him – ‘are hardly ever here, so I suggest that you move into the granny annexe while you are. That will keep me where I need to be for contacts from work and postage et cetera, and when the children are here, it’s easy access for you.
‘I shall live in the main house. And you’ – she pointed to Gerda – ‘can get out of here. Pack your bags and bugger off. I know you’ll understand that expression because your English is so very good.’
At this point she was interrupted by Kenneth. ‘Gerda’s going nowhere,’ he announced. ‘I’ll bow to your wish to move into the annexe, but Gerda comes with me, and when I go away again she’ll be coming with me too. You haven’t fired her; she simply doesn’t work for you anymore. She and I will be living together.’
‘Well, you’d better not try to get the house or the children,’ said Lauren anxiously. ‘I’ve already spoken to my solicitor and explained the situation to him, asking him to initiate divorce proceedings on the grounds of your infidelity.’
‘That’s fine by me, Lauren, as long as I get access to my children. When we,’ – he indicated Gerda, who had slunk up to his side – ‘have some of our own, however, I may need to seek to have the house sold to be divided equally between us. I shall need a family home for any future children.’
Lauren was speechless with a mixture of disbelief and shock. Had Kenneth really thought this far ahead? Had he been planning for this to happen for a long time already? Fetching the key for the door to the little apartment that lay beyond the walls of the utility room, she handed it to her now estranged husband and marched into the sitting room to read her latest eBook, for she certainly didn’t want to be around when Kenneth and his harlot packed and they moved next door together.
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