‘I spilled the bucket. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t worry about that. We’ll clean it up.’
‘I think my arm is broken.’
‘Can you move?’
‘Yeah. I’m cold, that’s all. I can’t stop shivering.’
‘We’ll have you out of there soon, my love. Can you breathe okay?’
‘Yeah. But everything stinks. I spilled the bucket.’
‘All right, Daniel. That’s all right.’ One more chirrup from her radio. She had a murmured conversation with another voice outside. ‘You still there, love?’ she said to me, getting closer. A sliver of her face gaped in at me below the door.
‘Yeah.’
‘My name’s PC Millen. I’m with the Cumbria police. You’re going to be fine now, Daniel, I promise you. We’ll get this open and we’ll see about that arm of yours. You’re going to be all right, I promise you.’
The lock was crowbarred from the latch. The door swung back. The brightness of the afternoon teemed through the farmhouse, into me. And it was PC Millen I saw first, her quick, determined body bounding forwards with a blanket. She wrapped me up and scooped me off the sodden cardboard. I was drenched in my own piss. She didn’t mind. I felt the safety of her uniform against my cheek, its padding and its warmth. The radio crackled by my ear. She didn’t speak, just carried me. I watched her face from underneath. The tension of her jaw. There was a birthmark like a tea-stain just below her hairline. Her strength was extraordinary. The longer she held me, the more I seemed to gain her energy. She was not my mother but, in that moment, she was good enough.
I wasn’t let outside until the hay barn had been sealed off. PC Millen sat me at the bottom of the stairs and waited by the bannister, eyeing my grandma’s paintings. ‘The paramedic’s going to come and check you over in a sec,’ she told me. ‘They’re just finding somewhere for the ambulance. Bit of a traffic jam out there now.’
I nodded.
‘Anyway, it doesn’t look to me as if it’s broken, but my X-ray eyes aren’t working at the minute, so you never know. Hey, that’d be cool, though, wouldn’t it? X-ray eyes. I used to have those X-ray specs when I was your age. Ever have a pair of those?’
I shook my head.
‘We all had them in my day. Used to have to send off for them out the catalogue. They were just paper with a bit of coloured plastic. Rubbish.’
I almost smiled.
‘I suppose if you can bend it a bit, that’s a good sign, anyway . . . I broke my collarbone once and that healed up in a few weeks. Fell off a horse, so it could’ve been worse. Last time I ever rode one, come to think of it . . .’
I knew that all her small talk was to shelter me. She was trying to uphold a semblance of normality, and I was grateful for it. But I needed more than that. When I asked her what had happened to my mother, she tugged a few times at the baluster. ‘I’m not sure about that, love. They haven’t told me anything. We just have to sit and wait here for a minute or two, okay?’ She sniffed and gulped. ‘They’ll want to take you to the hospital. Check you over. They might even put the siren on for you, if we ask.’
I tried to stand, but my legs wouldn’t raise me.
‘Woah, woah, steady on,’ she said, and came to sit beside me. ‘Let’s just wait and see.’
I spoke up: ‘He was going to meet her.’
‘Who?’
‘My dad. Have they found him?’
‘Honestly, Daniel, I’m not clued in with all the details. There’s an investigation going on, that’s all I can tell you. But I’ll ask for you, all right? I’ll ask my sergeant.’
‘He was going to ring her on the mobile and arrange it.’
‘I’ll make sure my sergeant knows that, too.’
‘Couldn’t we just phone her now, though, from here? I’ve got the number in my head. I need to know that she’s all right. I need to know if she’s—’
PC Millen squeezed my knee. ‘Right now, my love, it’s best if we just sit and let the officers do their jobs, okay? Leave it to us for the time being.’
The paramedics had no answers for me either. They checked my vitals and my injuries and asked if I felt strong enough to walk to the ambulance, and I said no. But they deflected all my questions (‘Oh, I’m only qualified to put your sling on, sunshine. I can’t help you with that, I’m sorry’) and deferred to the constabulary (‘The police are taking care of it, I’m sure’). I was helped into a wheelchair and pushed along the hallway, out of the front door, along the gravelled path between the outbuildings. The dogs were dead in the yard with their tongues hanging out, wallet-size number-plates laid at their feet. I was taken right past them. Uniformed police were busy taping up the animal sheds. Others in blue coveralls were heading for the hay barn with enormous cameras. Bald men in shirts glanced down at me as I wheeled past. The driveway was empty, but a line of marked cars formed a cordon at the gate, lights pulsing blue. Beyond them, the ambulance. ‘I’m going to leave you with the medics for a minute, Daniel,’ said PC Millen. ‘But I’ll follow in the car, okay? Let me see what I can find out for you, love. I’ll do my best.’ She stroked my shoulder and went off towards the other uniforms.
The next time I would see her was an hour later, in the hospital. She came into my cubicle, trailing in the footsteps of a slender man with glasses. He had his blazer slung over his shoulder, hooked to his forefinger like a schoolboy showing up for an obligatory detention. He took a seat at the end of my bed and introduced himself as Detective Chief inspector Barber from the Cumbria Constabulary. ‘But you can call me Graham,’ he said, smiling. ‘And PC Millen you already know.’ He smiled at her, too. ‘Why don’t you sit down as well, Daisy? Makes me nervous when folk stand over me.’
As she went and got herself a chair, she motioned at my cast. ‘How long did they say you’ve got to keep that on for?’
‘Six weeks,’ I said.
‘Ah, that’s not too bad.’ She winked at me. ‘You can still ride horses then.’
Barber watched her settle into the chair. He crossed his gangly legs and rubbed his shin. ‘So,’ he said, engaging my eyes. ‘So.’ Then it seemed as if his confidence escaped him. He gave an inward cough. ‘Okay, I should start by saying that I’m the Senior Investigating Officer on your father’s case—that means I’m the one they’ve put in charge of sussing out this mess. And so far there are lots of things we know and a lot more things we don’t, and to be honest with you, Daniel—is it Daniel, or d’you like Dan better?’
I shrugged.
‘To be honest with you, Dan, the things we know are quite upsetting, and hard to understand, so I’m really going to need your help with all the rest.’ He looked away, considering my cubicle, the bedframe, the melamine furniture, anything but me. ‘I spoke to the doctors. Seems you got a bit dehydrated and obviously you’ve chipped your elbow, but no major damage done. We’re all so relieved about that. You had a lot of people worried. I think your grandma’s on her way up now. And we’d really like to get you discharged and home as quickly as we can. But PC Millen seems to think—’ He paused, looking down at her shoes. His eyes glassed over. ‘PC Millen tells me you’ve been asking where your mum is, and I—’ He exhaled. His fingers reached under his lenses. ‘I’m sorry, Dan. In the police, we’re trained for things like this, but it’s hard to keep all your emotions under wraps sometimes—forgive me. It’s the worst part of my job.’ He wiped his glasses with his handkerchief, slotted them back on his nose. PC Millen was shaking her head at him, pursing her lips. ‘Anyway, I’d better tell you that your mum and dad were found in Audlem late last night. That’s a fair few miles south of here, in Cheshire. A cleaner at the nursing home phoned 999. He’d seen them in the field over the road, you see, and heard some noises. He reckons half past ten, or thereabouts. And when the local officers arrived, well, I’m afraid they found two bodies in that field. I’m very sad to have to tell you this, Dan—your mum and dad are gone, son. They were both found dead. I really am so sorry.’ An
d he went silent, as though giving me a moment to wail out all my anguish in a single flume, but nothing came. It wasn’t that I hadn’t processed what he’d told me—I’d known the moment he sat down. I think it was because I wanted to possess the pain and isolate it, hold it deep within me so that it wouldn’t spread to other people. Maybe I could smother it before it multiplied. ‘Dan, are you okay, love?’ said PC Millen. ‘Do you understand what’s happened?’ I should’ve let it out, right then, but I didn’t.
All that my fixation on the details ever gave me was an understanding of how many things can never be undone. There was a point in my late teens when I obsessed about the inquest, scrutinised the transcript from the coroner’s court in search of consolation. At this time, I felt some lingering resentment towards my grandparents for not letting me attend the hearing—they had cheated me of something, I believed, though I couldn’t quite say what. Closure, maybe. The opportunity to hear my father exposed for what he was: a man of cruelty without mitigation. So I requested all the paperwork that I could access. I went back to consider the summation of the evidence the police submitted (two separate counties had jurisdiction on the case but the inquest was convened in Cumbria—more bodies equalled greater responsibility). I went through all the in-court testimonies and written statements, including my own—the words seemed to belong to someone else, paraphrased in procedure-speak, an adult register I didn’t recognise—and the accounts of other witnesses were just as difficult to read. Declan Palmer had a lot to say about my father’s ‘uncontracted’ role on The Artifex and the cause of his dismissal from the crew, much of it misleading; Kelly, our waitress at the Little Chef, confirmed where he’d acquired the ashtray; the two security guards from Yorkshire Television explained my father’s strange behaviour and the revocation of his access card; his ‘affair’ with Chloe was revealed by her best friend; the cleaner from the nursing home told of the gunshots and the cries he’d heard and the strange car that was parked on Vicarage Lane. And there were several others. I thought that if I focused on the where, when, how of everything, I might gain some comprehension of the why. But the more I read, the more I realised: a person’s actions can’t be quantified by facts alone.
My mother’s body, for example, was discovered 3.7 metres from my father’s body. He walked her to the centre of the field at gunpoint, made her kneel, and shot her in the forehead (why?). Then he took a few strides backwards (why?), kneeled down and shot himself below the chin. He’d still been close enough for the forensics team to notice splinters of his cheekbone in the mincemeat of her facial tissue. Neither were identified from pictures in the usual way: my mother was distinguished by her dental records, my father from his fingerprints. West Midlands Police had matched them with an ante-mortem sample they’d obtained when he was twenty, after he’d been taken into custody for affray (why?) in Coventry city centre in November, 1979—the only time he’d ever been arrested in his life. Truths like these are what you learn from inquests. There is no comfort to be gained from them.
It’s the closed-circuit camera footage that I’ll never find a way to blank out. I was shown the video on the fourth day of the police investigation. DCI Barber drove four hours to my grandparents’ house in Bradenham to play it for me. He brought PC Millen with him, knowing—calculating, you might say—that her supportive presence would make me more amenable to talking. I was too destroyed to speak to anyone at that stage, but I’d taken a particular objection to the Family Liaison that had been assigned to us, a quiet male officer called Dudgeon, because he dressed in the same half-hearted manner as my father: always a shirt beneath a crew-neck with cord trousers. His presence in the house felt like a constant obstacle to forgetting.
My grandmother showed the inspector and the constable into the front room and made them tea in the fine china. There was some preliminary chat about my grandpa’s health and general prognosis while everybody sipped Earl Grey and took a biscuit from the tin. My grandmother explained that I had barely said a word to anyone since I’d been home. (She used that word, ‘home’, as if it were a label she could unpeel and re-stick to anything she wished.) She was staying strong for my benefit, she said, but I recognised the weary vacillation in her voice.
Soon, the inspector rose and asked where he might find the television and the video recorder. He stood at the cabinet and told me what I should expect to see: pictures from the car park cameras at Sandbach Services, black and white, no sound. ‘It might be very difficult to watch. I’m sorry. But it’s necessary.’ There was a delay while he fixed the tracking. ‘I don’t want to say much else about it,’ he told us, picture wobbling on the TV behind him, ‘I just want you to let me know if there’s something I’m missing.’
‘If this gets too hard, Dan, you just say so, and we’ll stop,’ said PC Millen.
I nodded.
The video started. A line of grey crackled mid-screen. At first, all I could see were two rows of parking bays. Then I noticed the roof rack of the Volvo near the right edge of the frame, its rear end towards the camera. There was an awful stillness to those first few seconds. I watched them, feeling powerless.
A few more seconds.
A scratch across the screen.
And there he is.
The dire grey image of my father climbs out of the car and comes to lean against the boot, one heel on the tow bar. He waits for half a minute with his fists stuffed in his jacket, doing nothing. No sign of his bandages. A complete change of clothes. The sure-footedness of him is haunting, so much worse on film. And, soon enough, he spots her. He waves as if she’s just a taxi with its light on somewhere out of shot. She breezes in, a grainy ghost in slacks and blouse. Her work attire. She rushes at him, motioning, motioning. He pats the air—Calm down, Kathleen. They stand a yard apart in argument. She shouts right in his face. Two bystanders turn to look, amused. She prods my father’s chest. He stands, impassive. She’s trying to see beyond him now, into the back windows. She kicks his shins. He doesn’t move. She strikes his chest four times. The bystanders lurk, top right. He steps aside for her. She clocks the empty car: where am I? Her arms go up: Where is he, Fran? What’ve you done with him? He leans against the bumper. The Wintermans are out. She slaps the tin away. The bystanders edge closer. Maybe they’ll protect her. He isn’t moving. She shouts at him and walks away. Her face towards the camera for the first time, burnished by the streetlamps, changed. Where is she going? Out of sight for now. He lets her go. Waits. Keeps waiting. A little longer. Then a dark hole opens in his face and shuts. He’s calling after her. Two more gawkers creep inside the frame: fat heads, bare arms. She returns to him, motioning, motioning. What did he say? Her mood has changed. She’s cowed. They’re back within a yard of one another. His palm lands on her shoulder. She shrugs it off. He tries again. She shrugs it off. They face each other. Seconds pass. A minute. Then a sudden move: his hand goes to his pocket. A Stanley knife, a soaking rag, an ashtray. No—what is that? Something harmless pinched between his fingers. The camera barely picks it up. She snatches it. She holds it to the sky. What is it? Paper? The streetlights white it out. She smothers it inside her fist. Her body sags. And then they’re done. He passes her the car keys. She’s contemplating something now, but what? He goes to the passenger side, taps his watch. She goes to the driver’s side, gets in behind the wheel. It almost looks cordial. The disappointed bystanders have seen enough. An entertaining tiff. All over now. The car reverses out. An easy arc. The headlights beam. And off they go. To the edge of the frame, then further. Further. Until there’s nothing left of them except these final motions captive in the tape.
‘That’s it. That’s all we have.’ Barber pushed eject. The video whined out of the machine.
I said nothing. My grandmother said nothing. My grandpa in his chair said nothing.
‘We’ve been trying to identify those witnesses, but nobody’s come forward yet. That’s making things more difficult.’ The inspector slipped the tape into its sleeve and sighed. ‘We’
ve cross-checked every number plate of every car in the vicinity and spoken to the owners of those vehicles. Nobody saw anything.’ He went back to his seat, refilled his teacup from the pot. The clink of his spoon against the saucer felt impertinent somehow. Was he only here to remind us all how dead she was?
Eventually, my grandmother leaned forward. ‘I really wish you hadn’t talked me into that.’
‘I didn’t want to have to play it, I assure you, Mrs Jarrett. But, as you know, I’m trying to make this case as watertight as it can be.’
‘What exactly are we meant to say?’
‘Nothing. You’re not meant to say anything. It’s just a discrepancy in the chain of events, and I hoped that Daniel would be able to offer me some insight.’ The inspector stared at me.
‘How d’you mean, discrepancy?’ My grandmother said.
Barber scratched his forehead with his thumbnail. ‘Well, you saw it. She got into the car of her own free will. At least, that’s what it looks like. We expected there’d be evidence of some coercion. You know, a weapon of some kind. That would fit with the previous . . . Well, that would fit with how he treated all the others.’
‘Why does it matter?’
‘Because the court will need to take this video into account. And it makes his actions look more questionable.’
A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better Page 22
