by Mark Roberts
Bellwood, on a low sofa, looked up and smiled at Mrs Nicholas seated on the high armchair opposite as she folded her arthritic hands in her lap, cleared her throat with a genteel cough and fixed her attention on her.
‘Are you ready?’ asked Mrs Nicholas. ‘If you have any questions could you please save them until the end.’
‘Of course.’
And put your hand up first, thought Rosen, with the faintest yet clearest sensation that their luck was turning.
‘Isobel Swift was the kind of neighbour anyone in their right mind would wish for. Nothing was too much trouble for her. She kept herself to herself but when you needed a helping hand she had an uncanny knack of being there in the right place, at the right time. She was married to Harold and they had one daughter whom they simply doted on, Gwen . . .’ She paused in her delivery and sighed under the weight of memory.
‘I’ll come to that later on. Isobel wasn’t just a woman who had an eye to help those immediately around her, oh no, she had a much broader social conscience than that. After she had Gwen, she found she couldn’t have any more children because something went wrong at the birth. I don’t know the details, we didn’t dwell on such matters in those days, but I suspect she had a hysterectomy. But after she’d had Gwen, Isobel and Harold – he was a lovely man, a true gentleman – decided they were going to foster abandoned children from London orphanages. I kept count. Twelve long-term foster-children . . .’
Rosen made a mental note to pull the Social Services records. Twelve long-term foster-children, and yet Isobel Swift had lain dead and undiscovered in her bed for eighteen months. His focus returned to the old lady.
‘. . . and my goodness, they were so good to those children, so good that the council used to send them short-term emergency cases, so many I couldn’t possibly keep count. Taxis used to roll up at all hours with social workers carrying little bundles of life to Isobel’s door. You know, if a single mum got ill and had to go to hospital or a parent was arrested, it was always the children who suffered.’
Mrs Nicholas took a couple of puffs on an inhaler. Rosen guessed her days, like her weeks, were largely silent and so talking was akin to vigorous exercise.
‘But their suffering was alleviated by Isobel.’ The old lady fell silent, long enough to warrant a question in spite of the retired teacher’s terms and conditions.
‘All those foster-children, Mrs Nicholas, and yet no one ever visited her? Why did she lie undisturbed all that time?’ Rosen asked, as if speaking a thought out loud.
‘It was 1973 or 1974. Everything changed then. Gwen was murdered just before Christmas, on her way home from school in the dark, a dreadful, dreadful time. December, it was 1973, yes. Harold never got over it, of course. He ended up, you know, in a hospital.’ She indicated her left temple. ‘As for Isobel, she changed overnight. The big light inside her went out. She had three foster-children with her at the time, one long term, two short termers. The last time I was over there, January 1974, just after New Year it was, three foster-children were lined up in the kitchen and she was screaming at them, Why couldn’t it have been you? Why are you still alive? Why aren’t you in the ground? The children were crying, hysterical. I tried to calm things down but she turned on me then, and slapped me in the face, called me an interfering – well, I can’t repeat it. They were lovely children. They were forever in and out of here, passing a message for Isobel or seeing if they could earn a little pocket money by doing jobs for me. I even helped the ones that, you know, were a bit slow; I gave them help with their reading.’
Mrs Nicholas leaned forward, staring at a point in space as if eyeballing the past. She came back to Bellwood. ‘I don’t want to speak ill of the dead,’ she said.
‘The truth, however unpleasant, is the truth and must be told.’
‘She sent the children packing back to Social Services. She stopped speaking to all the neighbours. You want to know what happened to all the other foster-children, the ones that had grown up and used to knock on her door with flowers? She wouldn’t answer the door to them. One girl, Susie Armitage, she was eighteen or thereabouts, came over the road to me with some flowers, asked me to mind them, to hand them over to Isobel. Susie broke down on the doorstep. I brought her inside and she showed me this letter that Isobel had sent to her. Poor Susie.’
Mrs Nicholas produced a piece of folded white paper from the pocket of her cardigan and offered it to Bellwood.
‘What is this, Mrs Nicholas?’
‘Susie asked me to throw it away as she left. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t do it. It’s the letter Isobel sent to Susie.’
Bellwood took the paper and unfolded it.
You are not to visit, telephone, write or communicate with me in any way, shape or form. I wash my hands of you.
Mrs I. Swift
‘Can I hang on to this?’
Mrs Nicholas nodded. ‘That’s why no one called, not even Susie, who was the favourite of them all. The police never caught Gwen’s killer; they seemed to think at the time it was a schoolboy who did it. Some schoolboys were questioned by the police but no one was ever charged with Gwen’s murder. I think that just drove Isobel deeper underground.’
Mrs Nicholas fell silent.
‘Did Gwen have a middle name?’ asked Bellwood.
‘Just Gwen Swift.’
‘You’ve been an enormous help, Mrs Nicholas. Thank you.’ Bellwood handed Mrs Nicholas her card. ‘If anything else occurs to you, please call me straight away on this number.’
‘Make sure you shut the door properly on your way out. This road, you know, is a magnet for murderers.’
In the hall on the way out, Rosen took out his mobile phone and Bellwood closed the front door behind them with a reassuring slam.
On the step, Rosen dialled.
‘Who are you calling?’ she asked.
‘Archives, Gwen Swift’s cold case file,’ replied Rosen.
Walking down the path, Bellwood took out her mobile.
‘Who are you calling?’ asked Rosen.
‘Social Services. We need to track down the foster-children.’
‘I was just about to ask you to do that.’
‘I guessed you would,’ said Bellwood.
Rosen’s phone rang and he waited.
‘I think this is the worst case I’ve ever tackled in my life,’ he said.
The phone kept ringing as the clouds thickened against the sun.
‘Carol?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s good to have you on board.’
She nodded and, turning away from Rosen, could do nothing to stop the brief smile blossoming on her face.
16
It took several phone calls and two and a half hours for Social Services to come up with the list of the twelve long-term foster-children on Isobel Swift’s books. Along with the names, an email arrived with the last known contact details of the twelve and a resolute promise to find the names of the short-term foster-children. Contact details for the twelve went back as far as the mid-1970s and continued up to the early 1980s.
Bellwood looked around the incident room and saw Harrison, staring at his laptop screen, sullen to the marrow, with a pile of printouts from the internet following his search for Alessio Capaneus.
As she began the obligatory task of ringing round the last known numbers, Bellwood watched Harrison make his way to Rosen’s desk to drop off the Capaneus printouts. Harrison hovered there, scanning its surface.
He picked up the one framed picture of Rosen’s wife and smirked at the image. Bellwood watched, resisting the urge to tell Harrison to put it down.
‘Is it true she lost her marbles?’ asked Harrison.
‘Who?’
‘Rosen’s wife. I overheard some talk in the canteen when I first came to this nick.’
Bellwood didn’t want to have the conversation with Harrison but he already had a little information, so she decided to appeal to any semblance of a better nature in him.
‘Nah.’
‘They had a baby; this is going back years. Hannah, they named her. She died of cot death.’
‘Oh.’ He looked completely untouched and Bellwood wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
Harrison passed Bellwood on the way back to his desk. Her face was set, her eyes lowered, her attention locked onto the phone.
‘Tough-looking bitch, that old Mrs Rosen,’ said Harrison. ‘Wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of her in a darkened corner.’
Bellwood said nothing, but committed every word and action to memory.
17
Memory.
Herod sat on the cold stone floor of his basement. The dim blue light gave him the sense that he was hundreds of metres below the surface of the water and the silence that filled his head was like the pressure of a whole ocean bearing down on him.
He surveyed the basement, its doors and fortified walls. If he’d designed it himself, he couldn’t have come up with a more user-friendly suite of rooms.
The estate agent who’d sold it to him had been reluctant to fill him in on the background to the basement. But the property had been growing stale on the books and so he had decided to spice things up with a little house history.
‘Mr Graham, the farmer who lived here, was in the RAF during World War II. He was an observer when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He never got over it. He’d seen what a little bomb could do at first hand. Actions have consequences. He believed he was going to be paid back. Hence the underground bunker.’
The squalor of the living space above the basement had been in stark contrast to the minimalist perfection below. It was the perfect house. A basement with three rooms. He had asked the estate agent about the door in the basement wall. There was no mention of it in the particulars, or in his sales pitch. The agent had shrugged, opening the half-door to reveal a gouge of darkness.
‘It’s a tunnel. It’s well constructed and it leads to a manhole in the farmyard. Built by Mr Graham in case the radiated survivors out there got down here.’
He had stuck his head into the mouth of the tunnel, breathing in the damp, stale air.
Herod had offered the asking price there and then.
He blitzed the house with two tranches of ten thousand pounds. One pot of money went to a gang of Serbian builders who ripped the place to shreds and restored it to a structurally sound, plastered skeleton. The second pot went to an overfed interior designer who – on his instruction – made the whole place neutral in fixtures, fittings and decor. And with a third pot of five thousand pounds he bought a flotation tank and paid a plumber to install the tank in the basement, along with the oxygen pump. A plumber who insisted on talking about his recent wedding and who, without asking first, had showed a photograph of his bride.
But all that seemed long ago.
The time for the fifth unbirthing was drawing near.
18
It didn’t take long for the foster-child trail to go cold on Bellwood.
She managed to trace a Jean White to Perth in Australia where she had moved with her husband and two children. There was a temporary address in Perth but no phone number.
Bellwood replaced the receiver and, as she did so, the phone rang.
‘Is that you, Carol?’
It took her a second to work out who the caller was.
‘Mrs Nicholas, how are you?’
‘I’ve got your card here, that card you gave me, remember?’
‘Yes, of course . . .’
‘But you’ve been engaged an awfully long time: I had to use ringback in the end and that’s expensive, but this is important so never mind.’
The old lady went from virtual jabbering to utterly silent in a solitary beat.
‘Is there something you’ve recalled?’ probed Bellwood.
‘No.’
Bellwood could hear another voice. There was someone in the room with Mrs Nicholas.
‘Are you alone, Mrs Nicholas?’
‘No. Her name’s not Armitage any more because she got married. She’s Mrs Cooper now, aren’t you, Susie?’ In the background, someone replied in the affirmative. ‘Carol, guess who I’ve got here? In the very chair in which you were sitting?’
‘I don’t know.’ Bellwood played along and made a fist of delight beneath her desk. Hope danced on the horizon.
‘I’ve been trying to call you all day but your line’s been busy.’
‘I do apologize for that, Mrs Nicholas.’ Playing to the old lady’s sense of theatre, she asked, ‘Who are you sitting with, Mrs Nicholas?’
‘Susie, Isobel’s favourite. Would you like to meet her?’
‘I’ll be there in half an hour. Please can I speak to her now, briefly?’
Seconds passed.
‘Hello?’ Susie Cooper sounded anxious and upset. ‘I’ve never spoken to a police officer before, regarding, you know, an investigation into murder.’
‘Susie, my name’s Carol, DS Carol Bellwood. Can you wait where you are? You have nothing to worry about, but I would like to speak with you.’
Susie agreed and Bellwood grabbed her coat, anxious to get there quickly in case Susie changed her mind about talking.
19
‘As soon as I read about . . .’ Susie struggled for the next words.
‘Your old foster-mother,’ said Mrs Nicholas. ‘That’s who she was.’
‘Yes. I had to come back. All that time, lying dead, no one calling.’
‘Don’t blame yourself, Susie. She sent you away, after she changed.’
Both Susie and Mrs Nicholas looked directly at Bellwood.
‘My parents didn’t abandon me. I want you to know that. They didn’t not want me. Dad died and Mum had health problems, you know, with her nerves.’
Bellwood felt a welling-up of compassion for the woman in her fifties who spoke of her parents with the defensiveness and uncertainty of a twelve-year-old girl.
‘I believe you were the “head girl” in Mrs Swift’s house.’
‘I was, yes. What’s this police business you want me for?’
‘Maybe you could help me. I need to know the whereabouts of the other foster-children.’
Susie was quiet, blank faced, and Bellwood feared she was about to dismiss the idea because she, too, was in the dark.
‘Then you’ve come to the right place. I’m in touch with nine of the twelve. I’ll talk to them. I know they’ll help if they can.’
She reeled off a list of names and, as Bellwood ticked off those in her notepad, she found it strange how the sound of words could make a taste like butter on her tongue.
‘I know that Jean went down under in the early nineties,’ said Bellwood. ‘But what about John Price?’
‘Johnny died in the Falklands War.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. There’s one last name then. Paul Dwyer?’
‘Poor little Paul. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing now but I pray to God for him each day. He was the baby.’
‘Did he die?’
‘No!’ Susie looked uncomfortable, began to shift in her seat. ‘It was worse than that. On his seventh birthday, on his party day, the doorbell rang, just as he was blowing out the candles and making a wish. Some wish.’
‘A fate worse than death, Susie?’ prompted Mrs. Nicholas.
‘Almost. He’d been with Isobel since he was just days old.’
‘Who rang the doorbell that day?’
‘His real mother. She called to collect him, to take him back.’
‘And that was a fate worse than death?’ Bellwood asked.
‘My foster-mother tried to fight it but it was no good. He didn’t come back, Paul. It was the last we saw of him.’
Bellwood held back, giving Susie room to elaborate.
‘That’s about all I can think of for now.’ she concluded.
> Bellwood thanked her for the information and wanted nothing more than to jump up from her seat, call Rosen and hit the HOLMES laptop. Instead, she stayed where she was, and counted to thirty to avoid the appearance of indecent haste. As she sat there, she stripped the years away from Susie’s face. It wasn’t definite but Bellwood would have wagered a month’s salary on her observation.
Susie Cooper was the girl in the gold locket.
20
Baxter didn’t announce his intention of attending the five o’clock team briefing, and his silence, when Rosen passed him on his way to address the troops, was loaded. Rosen guessed Baxter was going to hit him with details of the peer review of the case. The peer review was a useful tool when used fairly; it was an extra set of eyes in the dense thickets of casework, but it would be applied by Baxter to humiliate Rosen while giving himself distance in a high-profile case where progress was slow and painful.
‘Oh, David . . .’ said Baxter, making him stop and have to turn back. ‘One of the deputy CCs, Hargreaves, made a good point this morning. He was a beat bobby in West Yorkshire back in the eighties. He hasn’t known an atmosphere like this since the West Yorkshire Constabulary made a balls-up of the Peter Sutcliffe debacle. Funny how history repeats itself, huh?’
Rosen didn’t respond. He made his way to the head of the room and called for silence. Registering the faces of those present, he noted the absence of Bellwood.
‘Mrs Isobel Swift, the body in 24 Brantwood Road, has been confirmed as a murder victim, eighteen months previously. Is this murder linked to the abduction next door? I’m pretty certain that it is. I’m pursuing a line of enquiry at the moment that should confirm this in more concrete terms, but there is a degree of competence at work in the murder of Mrs Swift that’s reflected in the Herod killings. More on that as things develop.
‘Second up, we’ve had a fairly speculative offer of help from a Roman Catholic priest, Father Sebastian, an expert social anthropologist. It could be something, it may be nothing, but that’s a very fresh item and we’re still ascertaining the authenticity of the volunteer.’
