Lonely Hearts: Killing with Kindness takes on a whole new meaning (DI Falle)

by Gwyn GB

  ‘I really appreciate you taking this seriously,’ Rachel says, she’s well aware that lots of other women haven’t got this kind of treatment.

  ‘It’s my job,’ DI Falle smiles back, ‘We need to make sure you’re safe and I’d like to catch whoever it is that’s sending you threats.’

  ‘Maybe I should have taken Gary up on his offer of dinner. He was going to come round but I said no.’ Rachel surprises herself that she finds it so easy to confide in this woman. Maybe it’s her professional concern rather than judgemental sympathy. ‘Gary works with me at the agency,’ she qualifies.

  ‘Yes. Does he often come round?’ DI Falle asks.

  ‘Not often, just sometimes. He’s a nice guy and he likes to get out of his bedsit. He loves to cook but he can’t really do it properly there. I let him take over my kitchen, he’s good.’

  ‘Does he know about the stalker?’

  ‘No, I haven’t told anyone at work.’

  ‘He was Neil’s consultant wasn’t he?’

  Rachel nods.

  ‘Did he know that Neil came round occasionally too?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so. But you know Gary’s gay right? He isn’t interested in me like that.’

  It’s DI Falle’s turn to nod.

  ‘Did you have to come far to get here?’ Rachel asks her. She can’t help it but whoever she talks to she always feels herself slipping into interview mode. It’s force of habit from trying to glean information from the agency clients, to get to know them and find them a good match.

  ‘Shepherds Bush, it’s fine.’

  ‘I’m Sorry. Does your boyfriend mind you working such long hours?’ She can’t help fishing.

  ‘No, he’s a police officer too. So, at what time did you notice that there was someone outside?’

  DI Falle is actually quite easy to talk to. Rachel warms to her, even though she knows that what she’s doing is her job, trying to calm her down and make her feel better. It’s nice to be on the receiving end for a change. It’s always her being the sympathetic ear to the clients at the agency. She’s got used to giving and not expecting back.

  23

  Rachel, March 1994

  When Social Services come to call, her father is out in the yard. He’s taken to wandering aimlessly around the farm whenever he isn’t too drunk to stand. She’ll see him from the window, staring at the empty pens when the cows are out in the fields, as though he’s watching a ghostly herd. Today it means there’s nowhere to hide from their questions and paperwork.

  Rachel sees them walk into the kitchen and she’s an angry terrier, hackles up, barking in defence of her father whose awkward gait and fiery breath tell tales on him.

  They request an audience alone with her father but Rachel stands firm.

  ‘We’re fine. I’m fine. We don’t need your help,’ she tells them, before her father has had the chance to open his mouth.

  There’s two of them. An older woman, thickened waist and shapeless clothes, with an officious air and face that has seen it all before - and much worse. The younger one is fresh and eager, scanning their home, taking in the dust and un-washed floor, the bare necessities and lack of luxury. Following on the heels of her mentor like an attentive gun dog.

  Rachel’s terrier instinct is quick to spot she’s the weaker of the pair.

  ‘Why you staring?’ she attacks, aiming her bites squarely at the younger woman. ‘Mind your own business,’ she says again.

  The older woman calmly defends her colleague, ‘Hello Rachel, we are here to ensure you and your father are managing. You haven’t been to school for several weeks and your dad can get into trouble.’

  Her firm tone makes Rachel’s snipes sound immature and spiteful - even to herself. Her dad can get into trouble? What will they do, take him away, lock him up? Take her away?

  ‘Dad?’ Rachel pleads.

  ‘Mr Hill, I really think it’s in yours and Rachel’s best interests if we sit down and talk things through. Just us.’

  He looks at them and then at Rachel’s pleading face, before reluctantly nodding.

  ‘Rachel you go up to your bedroom for a bit. It will be fine,’ he says, attempting a weak smile.

  Betrayed, Rachel gives a last withering look at the two women and turns, tail between her legs, back to her den of safety.

  She takes refuge in her parents’ bedroom where she can be as close to her mother as possible. Reverently she slides open her mother’s drawers, seeking out familiar things to bring her back. Her hairbrush, a brooch. The scarf she wore on the rare evenings they went out. She slips on one of her mother’s rings. It had been her favourite, given by her dad one Christmas day, when life had been full - the future framed by their family happiness. It’s only costume jewellery, a ring of blue glass stones, cut six sided and placed like a flower on a metal mount that looks like brass - but perhaps isn’t. Rachel doesn’t care what it’s made from. They could be real diamonds set in platinum but it wouldn’t be worth any more to her.

  The light catches the stones, throwing round rainbow reflections onto the wall. A myriad of full stops. Her mother will never return to wear their glitzy decoration again. Her life has reached its own full stop.

  The social workers stay for around an hour before Rachel hears the click clack of their heels outside and a car engine roaring into life. She rushes to the window and for a moment she can’t see if there’s somebody in the back. It looks like a head. Have they taken her dad away? Then the car turns out of the yard and she realises it’s just the seat head-rest silhouetted.

  She runs downstairs to find him sitting in his chair, a little pile of leaflets, pamphlets and paperwork on his lap.

  He looks up when she comes in. ‘Sorry love,’ he says. ‘You’re going to have to go back to school.’

  Tears flood her eyes and she runs straight back upstairs to her bedroom again. The prospect of leaving her safe cocoon is quite terrifying.

  She flings herself on to her bed in frustration, catching her hair in her mother’s ring. She holds her hand up, trying to find the sparkles again, moving her hand this way and that - but all she can see now is a dull glow reflected back. Her mother’s light disappearing. Dissipating into the environment. Her brightness fading.

  ‘What’s with you?’

  The question comes at Rachel, a torpedo into her consciousness. As her eyes look up, taking in the row of expectant faces in front of her, she becomes aware of the salty taste on her lips and the dampness of her cheeks.

  Stella Wainwright stands in front of her, an almost amused look on her bratty face. ‘Well? What’s up with you?’

  George Roger’s eyebrows flicker and Nancy Cooper’s mouth narrows.

  ‘My mother’s died,’ Rachel half whispers.

  ‘Liar!’ Stella comes back at her. She has her hands on her hips now. ‘You’re a liar. I saw her in Norwich last week. She was fine.’

  ‘She was killed in a car crash a few weeks ago.’

  Rachel’s voice doesn’t sound like her normal voice. She’s not really sure where the sound comes from, like a TV playing in another room.

  ‘Liar.’

  Stella shoves her spiteful face closer into hers and the audience fizz with anticipation.

  Rachel isn’t sure how the fist flies so straight and fast through the air, but she feels the crunch against her knuckles as Stella Wainwright’s nose buckles under the blow.

  Miss Mayhew drives her home, a journey of adult false cheerfulness and inane chatter. Rachel doesn’t want her to come in, to have her invading their privacy again, but she insists. She’s relieved when they discover her dad is sat at the kitchen table with George and Reg - not slumped in his chair with a bottle. They have the farm books spread open. Records of the herd and the accounts - numbers and words Rachel doesn’t understand.

  Her dad jumps up shocked when Rachel and Miss Mayhew walk through the door.

  ‘Rachel! Are you OK?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she replies and despite herself
, despite all her attempts at braveness, she can’t help but run to him and fling her arms around his waist. Refuge.

  ‘There was a small incident at school,’ Miss Mayhew explains, with loaded words ‘I thought it best that Rachel came home today. Can I have a quick chat?’

  Rachel’s head tingles and a shiver runs down her spine as her father’s hand briefly rubs her head before he pulls away. ‘You wait here a mo,’ he says to her. She wants to cry, but she won’t, not in front of everyone.

  ‘Y’alright missy?’ Reg asks tentatively, trying to appear cheerful. He’s not as good at it as Miss Mayhew. The two men look at each other. An awkward silence falls on them as heated whispers carry from the hallway.

  The front door opens and closes and her dad returns to the kitchen.

  ‘Bloody outrageous. They say you’ve got to go back to school and then they don’t look out for you. Good for you girl, I’m glad you bopped that little madam.’

  Relief washes over Rachel and she wants to run to hug him again, but she doesn’t. This is the most animated she’s seen her dad since it happened. He’s pleased with her. If she has her fighting spirit, maybe he will get back some of his.

  The next day Rachel is disappointed to discover she is expected to return to school.

  ‘But dad, isn’t it better that I stay with you?’ she pleads.

  Her dad shakes his head. She is finding it harder to read his expressions now that his stubble has turned into a beard, but nothing can hide his eyes and the sadness in them.

  ‘You have to go love. It’s for the best. Just stand up for yourself and any trouble with the kids go straight and tell the teachers. I’ll meet you off the bus shall I? We can walk back up the lane together.’

  She likes that idea, it will give her something to look forward to.

  At school the other children gather in huddles. Stella Wainwright collects them all around her and they whisper and turn to look. Eventually Rachel learns to ignore them. Lucy Cocker, the previous outcast of their year group, tries to talk to her at break. The prospect of a potential friend, a fellow outcast, encouraging her on. Even Lucy gets infiltrated into the Stella posse - much to her delight. She goes from no friends at the start of the school day to being in a gang by the end of it. She doesn’t care why they’re suddenly being friendly to her, just that she isn’t the one sitting alone in the corner anymore; the one that nobody chooses for their teams or wants to pair up with in class.

  Rachel sits twisting the blue stone flower ring on her finger. She’s not alone, she knows her mother is still with her. She counts down the minutes to the end of the day when she can get the bus home and meet her father.

  The bus is crowded, children are standing, but the seat beside Rachel remains empty. She’s glad she lives further out than most because by the time it’s her stop the bus has almost emptied and she doesn’t have to push past stiff, reluctant bodies.

  Rachel gets off the bus and waits for it to pull away. The fields are dry and it makes her blink as the tyres kick up the dust on the side of the road. As it clears, she sees that no one is standing at the end of their farm drive. She looks up and down the road for her father, in case he’s wandered off a bit looking at something. The road is empty. Disappointment hits her hard as though someone has thrown a bucket of cold water on her soul.

  She wanders across the road slowly. Perhaps he’s a bit late and any second she will see him walking to the end of the drive. Her imagination almost conjures him up like a desert mirage.

  She waits. The minutes tick by. Cars drive past, their passengers staring at her - a lone figure on the roadside.

  She waits. Kicking at the pebbles wedged into the dry earth. Sending the dust up and over her school shoes and socks - until they feel gritty and dusty inside.

  She waits. Then eventually her mother says, ‘I’ll walk with you’, and so she does.

  They walk together up the half mile drive that winds between the fields of cows and the small piece of woodland that makes up their farm estate.

  ‘Told you I’d always be here for you,’ her mother tells her and she smiles down at her.

  When they get home her mother hangs back in the kitchen while Rachel goes searching for her father. He’s easy to find, slumped in his armchair, the bottle of whisky open beside him. Rachel doesn’t wake him. She can see he goes someplace else when he sleeps, his face relaxed. He looks younger, almost content. She’ll leave him to his dreams.

  The whisky is his bridge to her mother.

  24

  Claire, 16th October 2016

  ‘We don’t know for sure if Rachel’s stalker is connected to the murder of Neil Parsons,’ Bob has been listening to Claire’s account of the evening before.

  ‘I know, but she’s frightened. It’s all a little bit too coincidental isn’t it? The flowers, the note.’

  ‘It could just be someone taking advantage of what’s happened, to scare her. Someone with a grudge.’

  ‘Well they’re going to a great deal of trouble and risking getting caught!’

  ‘Yup I know,’ agrees Bob, stretching back in his chair. ‘This case is just so murky right now. I can’t see anything clearly.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ Claire has been dreading telling Bob this, he’s in a bad enough mood already because it’s taking far longer than hoped to track down Michael Stratton in Vietnam. ‘When you were talking to Edward Scott yesterday, the receptionist, Sandra Jennings, she said something. She intimated that Neil’s death wasn’t the only one and when I tried to ask her more she looked worried.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this yesterday?’ Bob sits up straight again.

  ‘I wanted to check it out first, she gave me a name, a Todd Fuller. I pulled the report on his death this morning. It was presumed to be death by natural causes by the officers who found him, therefore it wasn’t processed as a crime scene.’

  ‘Post-mortem?’

  ‘Nothing was found except he’d been drinking.’

  ‘What about the family?’

  ‘No family, well at least no one in the UK, there’s a distant cousin. What if it wasn’t accidental? Sandra intimated there were other clients who had died.’

  ‘So this Todd fellow just pegs it at home, what in bed?’

  ‘Armchair in his lounge.’

  ‘Ok so he slips away all peaceful while having a couple of drinks. Not a violent stabbing then is it?’

  ‘No, but…’

  ‘Unexplained deaths happen. How old was he?’

  ‘Forty-nine.’

  ‘Well, unfortunately I know of people younger than that who have just keeled over. There’s no indication of criminal intent so how can you compare this one with the violent, professional killing of Neil with a hunting knife? Neil’s murder was a well-planned execution, and if you’re intimating that it’s a serial killer, well then they tend to stick to the same method. Right?’

  ‘Yes but what if…’

  ‘Focus DI Falle. Focus is what solves cases, not what ifs and our job is to find the killer of Neil Parsons.’

  ‘Yes Sir.’

  They only ever called each other by their ranks when Bob was pulling his. It always reminds Claire of when her mother would call her by her full name when she was telling her off. It’s clear Bob isn’t going to listen to anything more about Todd and the agency, but there was something in the way Sandra mentioned it yesterday, combined with Rachel’s stalker, that has got her antenna waving. She isn’t going to drop it, not yet, not until she’s looked into it a bit more.

  DS Potter walks up to them both.

  ‘Gary Foster’s in interview three.’

  It’s time to interview Rachel’s colleague. Perhaps Claire can slip in a few questions that might be slightly off piste without irritating Bob too much.

  Gary Foster is moderately good looking in a schoolboy kind of way, slightly overweight, but well-manicured. He’s dressed casually, but she suspects he’s one of those who instinctively knows what goes wi
th what and without trying can look effortlessly smart. He looks perfectly relaxed when they greet him in the interview room. It doesn’t take Claire long to ruin that.

  ‘Neil was a nice guy looking for love,’ Gary tells them, ‘He was one of those good looking hunks who was fed up with one night stands - he wanted to fall in love. There was no edge to him, you know what I mean? He could chat to anyone and get on with them.’

  Claire thinks how everyone always seems to compliment the dead, as though the minute they’re gone some kind of automatic respect comes into play and no one can speak ill of them. She rarely hears bad words said against the recently deceased and yet the air would be blue sometimes if you’d heard them chatting about the victim when they were still alive.

  ‘Did he find anyone special?’ Bob asks him.

  ‘No, unfortunately.’

  ‘Is there a chance he could have been seeing someone else? Someone who wasn’t through the agency?’ Bob pushes.

  ‘I guess, there’s always that chance, but not that he told me. He was still arranging dates.’

  ‘Have there been many deaths among the agency clients?’ Claire asks now, completely ignoring the fact that in her peripheral vision she sees Bob’s head turn and feels his eyes burning into her.

  Gary’s immaculate pose starts to turn a little ragged. He shuffles in his seat and uncrosses his legs.

  ‘Well, I’m not too sure. There have been a few, but nothing like this.’

  ‘A few? How many, Gary?’ Claire pushes now.

  ‘I don’t know the figures, you’ll have to ask Eddie.’ Gary shuffles uneasily again, avoiding her gaze.

  ‘And is it true that the agency has been struggling financially?’ She’s not going to let go now.

  ‘Ummh,’ Gary shakes his head as though he’s trying to think, ‘I’m sorry I’m really not sure.’

  His face is burning. Eyes ranging anywhere but at them.