Blind to the Bones

by Stephen Booth

Fry watched Dearden carefully. If anything could break his complacency, Gavin Murfin could. He certainly did it to her every time.

  ‘Some of the blokes on the list were very interesting to talk to,’ said Murfin. ‘This one here, in California – he said he thought my accent was “awesome”. He says I can take my family over and stay at his beach house in Malibu any time I like. That’s brilliant.’

  ‘Er, Detective Sergeant …’ said the solicitor.

  ‘And he was happy to talk about you, Mr Dearden. He knows you very well. What’s this Silicon Valley place? Is it where they make breast implants?’

  ‘Get on with it,’ said Alex Dearden impatiently.

  ‘I told your friend about this bronze bust we found. Lucius Verrus, it is. And do you know, he has something very similar. We had quite a long chat. Next time he comes over, I’m going to show him round Chatsworth House. I just hope he realized I was joking when I said I was the Duke of Devonshire’s nephew.’

  ‘Do we have to put up with this?’ Dearden said to his solicitor. ‘I’ve had enough.’

  Murfin turned over a page. ‘And you’ve been to Japan, too!’ he said. ‘I bet your address book is interesting.’

  The two pouches at the sides of Dearden’s mouth were quivering a little. The angry hamster could be about to make an appearance.

  ‘Do you have any more sensible questions, Sergeant?’ asked the solicitor.

  ‘Yes. I’d like to invite your client to tell us who his associates are in the stolen antiques business.’

  ‘You know we aren’t going to answer questions like that.’

  ‘And where are the antiques kept prior to shipping? They don’t seem to be at your house, Mr Dearden. Where are they?’

  ‘That’s a no comment,’ said the solicitor. ‘Really –’

  ‘And why did you fall out with Neil Granger, Mr Dearden? Did he want a bigger cut? It’s usually money that’s the problem, isn’t it?’

  Dearden began to shake his head vigorously, until the solicitor put a hand on his arm to steady him. Fry remembered the project Dearden was working on at the software company. Technology designed to prevent human error. But Alex Dearden wasn’t a computer; he was as human as anyone else. And sooner or later, he would make an error.

  It had been a bad day for Chief Superintendent Colin Jepson, commander of Derbyshire Constabulary E Division. Edendale had attracted all kinds of people this weekend, and his officers were stretched to the limit dealing with all the crime and disorder that followed crowds of people around like horseflies.

  DI Hitchens and the CID team were almost the only people Jepson could find in the station at West Street. They were still laboriously following up on calls from the public about missing persons who might possibly have turned up in a shallow grave in Withens churchyard, no matter how far from their homes it was, or how recently they had gone missing. Officers were explaining patiently to distraught mothers that it was impossible for somebody who had been missing for only twenty-four hours to have been reduced to a skeleton in that time, no matter how badly they’d been eating recently.

  ‘And then,’ said Chief Superintendent Jepson wearily. ‘And then, after everything else that’s happened to me today, I come back to my own police station, expecting to finally get a bit of peace and quiet in a civilized environment. And I find the reception area full of black and white minstrels.’

  He looked around the room full of officers. Some were smirking, as usual. Others looked blank, having never heard of the Black and White Minstrels because they were born in the age of political correctness.

  ‘Who was responsible for that little idea, I wonder?’ said Jepson. ‘What genius turned the front desk into an audition room for The Al Jolson Story?’

  ‘They’re morris dancers, Chief,’ said DI Hitchens. ‘The town’s full of them.’

  ‘I don’t need telling,’ said the Chief Superintendent, ‘that the town is full of them. The reason I don’t need telling is that my car was stuck in a traffic jam for over an hour on the corner of Clappergate, while eighteen thousand of them paraded past me waving their bells and handkerchiefs. I know there were eighteen thousand, because I counted them. I had plenty of time.’

  Jepson glared from one officer to another, daring somebody to contradict him.

  ‘What I do need telling, though, is why someone took a fancy to bringing a few of them back to the station. Surely the whole point of morris dancers having bells on their trousers is so that we can hear them coming and avoid them?’

  ‘The ones sitting in reception are waiting for their friends,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Oh, of course. We’ve invited some in to give them a guided tour of the station. How silly of me not to have thought of that. Does this mean I’m going to find them jingling around in the comms room and combing their beards in the gents? I know we’re trying to increase our representation of ethnic minorities in E Division. But I have to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that I absolutely draw the line at recruiting morris dancers. Those blacked-up faces aren’t going to fool the Commission for Racial Equality, you know.’

  ‘Actually, they’re waiting for the ones we have in the cells,’ said Hitchens.

  ‘Ah. And they’re occupying our custody suite for what purpose exactly, Inspector?’

  ‘Identification and interview, following arrest on suspicion of affray.’

  ‘Affray? You do realize that when they beat each other with sticks, they’re doing it for fun. It turns some people on, or so I’m told.’

  ‘Yes, Chief.’

  ‘Anyway, don’t we have football supporters for that sort of thing? If we need to get the performance results up for violent crime, couldn’t we have pulled in a few more Stoke City fans? They might not be pretty, but at least they don’t jingle.’

  At the lack of response, the Chief Superintendent started to go a bit red in the face, and his voice rose in volume.

  ‘And tell the rat to take his mask off. I won’t have giant rats sitting around in my police station.’

  ‘He says he gets out of character if he takes his head off,’ said Hitchens.

  Jepson stared at Hitchens. The DI stared back unflinchingly, but it was impossible to tell whether he was serious, or whether he was taking the mickey.

  ‘If he gets an identity crisis, we’ll arrange for him to see a counsellor,’ said Jepson.

  Diane Fry looked at Howard Renshaw with barely restrained annoyance. Exactly what it would take to puncture the bubble of fantasy the Renshaws lived in, she didn’t know.

  ‘I wanted to tell you I’m sorry,’ he was saying. ‘I realize that I misled you by my behaviour in the churchyard, and I apologize for that. It must have put you and your colleagues to a lot of trouble. But it was a very emotional moment, you see. I’m sure you understand. Particularly for my wife –’

  ‘But you already knew the remains weren’t those of your daughter, didn’t you, sir? You knew that it couldn’t be Emma.’

  ‘Well, looking back now, I suppose it should have been obvious to us that it couldn’t have been Emma. I mean, how would she have ended up in Withens, let alone in the churchyard? It wasn’t logical. But that’s hindsight speaking. We weren’t thinking logically at the time. We were both upset.’

  ‘But maybe you didn’t actually need hindsight.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You didn’t really believe the remains were those of your daughter.’

  Howard hesitated slightly.

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Sarah. ‘I knew it couldn’t be Emma. She’s still alive, isn’t she?’

  ‘We don’t know that, Mrs Renshaw.’

  ‘All this time, Howard hasn’t been believing, he’s just been pretending. Emma hasn’t had his belief, only mine. If she dies now, it will be my fault. I’m all she has left.’

  Howard shifted uneasily in his chair, but Sarah didn’t look at him. There was no exchange of meaningful glances today.

  ‘For two years, I’ve thought it was somethi
ng I did that made Emma go away,’ said Sarah. ‘I thought that if I weren’t here she would come back. Then Emma would be able to get on with her life. Looking back now, it seems very silly.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t call it that.’

  ‘I never even liked her playing outside when she was a child. I always imagined the worst – that she would be abducted and murdered. You hear of it happening such a lot. I worried all the time when Emma was out of my sight, so I kept her where I could keep an eye on her. But at the same time, I felt guilty at not giving her any freedom. It was dangerous enough for children then. But it’s worse now, isn’t it?’

  ‘Statistically, no,’ said Fry. ‘There are no more children being abducted or killed by strangers than there were in the 1980s.’

  ‘But when it happens, we all hear about it, don’t we? It’s in the news, in the papers, on the TV. Everybody talks about it.’

  ‘Sometimes children need to learn about risk. It’s part of the process of growing up.’

  ‘Do you think if I had let Emma take more risks when she was younger, this wouldn’t have happened?’

  ‘Nobody can say that, Mrs Renshaw.’

  ‘I can’t help wondering. I can’t help thinking it was my fault. I feel guilty about the silliest things. I keep remembering them at odd moments. Like when I was breast-feeding Emma as a baby.’

  Fry looked at Howard, who was staring into space through the window of the Renshaws’ sitting room. He was on the leather settee, near the teddy bear, which was staring into space equally vaguely.

  ‘You feel guilty about breast-feeding, Mrs Renshaw?’

  ‘No, it was one little incident, when she was teething. It was only a very brief moment, no more than an instinctive physical reaction on my part. But these things can scar a child for life – especially at that age, when they’re so impressionable.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’

  ‘When Emma was teething, she bit my nipple. It was very painful, and it came as a real shock. So of course, I pulled away sharply – because of the pain, you know. It meant that I had rejected her at a crucial moment, when she was suckling, the time that is so important for bonding, for creating love and trust between mother and child that will last a lifetime.’

  ‘You didn’t mean to do it.’

  ‘No, but you can’t explain that to a baby. And Emma recognized that she had been rejected. She cried, and I could see it in her face. After that, if she bit me again when she was suckling, she would start crying straight away, even though I tried to bear the pain and not pull away. She was expecting to be rejected by me. Those early incidents leave a lasting impression that can never be erased. I’m sure Emma has spent the rest of her life expecting to be rejected by her mother. I need her to come home soon, so that I can explain it to her.’

  Guilt was a strange, inexplicable thing. At the extreme, it became almost existential, a feeling of guilt for simply being there when others weren’t. But guilt was good, in a way. The worst people were those who felt no guilt at all. Guilt could sometimes be what kept people together.

  ‘It’s the first thing I think about when I wake up, and the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s with me all the time.’

  Howard finally stopped fidgeting, got up and walked out of the room. Fry watched him go, but his wife hardly seemed to notice.

  Fry knew that the length of time that had passed made it much worse for the Renshaws. A few years ago, the rules for coroners had been changed to prevent the body of a murder victim being kept in cold storage for years on end, awaiting the trial of their killer. The distress caused to the victim’s family had been recognized, and the need for closure acknowledged. If Emma’s body had been found straight away, it would have been twenty-eight days at the most before the coroner released it for burial, even if no one had been charged with her murder. And then the Renshaws would have been free to bury Emma.

  But that hadn’t happened. They had been denied that closure; instead they had been allowed a glimmer of hope that they nurtured for two years, like the candle that burned in the Renshaws’ window, which Sarah would never allow to go out.

  The phone rang in the next room. Fry watched Sarah Renshaw look immediately at the clock, staring at its face as if to imprint on her memory that one second of the day. Fry had seen her do it before, and knew without asking that it was a ritual connected with Emma. Time was being counted down in the Renshaws’ lives. Fry felt the days ticking away, too. But perhaps not towards what Sarah Renshaw expected.

  ‘The one thing we can say is that it brought some feeling into our lives,’ said Sarah.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Our marriage had become very cold, you see. There was very little emotion between Howard and I. Whatever is between you at the beginning of a marriage sort of fades away over the years, so that you hardly notice it going. But, when it’s gone, you realize one day there’s something missing. It’s more of a sense of dissatisfaction.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And when this happened with Emma, it was suddenly different. It made me realize what was missing. After all that time, there was feeling again. There was emotion. And not just mine, I mean, but from Howard, too. I’d forgotten that he was capable of feeling things. But after Emma, he was a different man, the man I remembered marrying. You might not understand how comforting that was. No – more than comforting.’

  ‘It sounds almost as though you were pleased that your daughter went missing.’

  ‘No. That would be very shocking,’ said Mrs Renshaw.

  ‘But?’

  ‘All I’m saying is that the past two years have brought us much closer together. There was a moment in the early days, when the police told us that they hadn’t been able to find Emma. I got very upset, more at the idea that they were going to give up and stop looking for her, rather than anything else. The thing I remember most is that Howard put his arm round me and gave me a hug. I don’t think he even knew he had done it, it was so natural, without any of the awkwardness I would have expected. But there was so much warmth in it, for me. I suppose that sounds trivial, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A small thing, but I suppose they can mean a lot.’

  ‘It did in this case. Because it was the first time Howard had touched me for years.’

  Fry realized she had been listening to Sarah Renshaw with a growing numbness, as if a protective shell had gradually been forming over her own emotions. She was mentally putting on the body armour, slipping on an invisible bullet-proof vest. A police officer’s first priority was her own survival, unharmed. She didn’t need to take on even the smallest share of Sarah Renshaw’s guilt.

  ‘You started to have doubts about your husband?’

  ‘Yes, when the remains were found in the churchyard. Howard seemed to think it was Emma, which was ridiculous. It was then I realized Howard believed she was dead.’

  36

  Diane Fry read through all the Emma Renshaw files again. It was the third time she’d been through them. More than ever, the gaps in the enquiries seemed to stand out. Khadi Gupta had never been interviewed. Perhaps the other students had never mentioned her, because she hadn’t been one of their social group. But she had been in the photograph with Emma that the Renshaws had given the police.

  The possibility that Emma had been given a lift to the station had been raised, but only in relation to Neil Granger and Alex Dearden, and a couple of other students she had known. There had been no attempt to eliminate the other options. In particular, no one seemed to have raised their eyes from their local area and looked north for the possibilities. No one had checked on Howard Renshaw’s movements that day.

  Fry thought about the relationship between the Renshaws and their daughter. On Sarah’s side, it was characterized by guilt. Anything that happened would be because she had done something wrong. At least as regards her daughter. There was nothing that Emma could have done which would not have b
een Sarah’s fault in some way. Sarah had made sure of that, with her memory of rejecting her child at the breast. For heaven’s sake. How much self-obsession and brooding had it taken for her to come up with that?

  But Howard was more complicated. Or perhaps he was just more opaque. Fry recalled Gavin Murfin’s verdict on Howard. He had described him as a man whose brain was ahead of his mouth. Howard never said anything he hadn’t thought about first.

  The Renshaws had been expecting Emma to arrive home that day. They had waited for her at Glossop railway station. But until then, had both of them been at home all day? No, Howard had said he’d been out on business.

  What she’d really like would be to get Howard Renshaw in to make a statement, but without his wife present. Fry had listened to Sarah Renshaw enough.

  ‘It’s very sad,’ said Ben Cooper later. He had hardly finished following up calls from the public about potential occupants of shallow graves before Fry had raised the subject of the Renshaws. ‘If there were just one of them, it might be different. But the Renshaws are encouraging each other in their fantasies.’

  ‘Somebody’s encouraging Sarah Renshaw, certainly.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Cooper. ‘You’re thinking of Howard?’

  Fry nodded. ‘Yes, Howard.’

  ‘Do you think he’s deliberately encouraging his wife to believe Emma isn’t dead?’

  ‘I can see that she’s gone completely off the rails with this obsession. The poor bloody woman has had more than two years of it now. No wonder she doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t. But as for Howard – don’t you think he lays it on a bit thick?’

  ‘He handles it differently,’ said Cooper cautiously.

  Fry snorted. ‘Differently? At one time I just thought he was sad and pathetic, like his wife. But that business with the skull was altogether too gothic and stagy. It was like something out of one of those Jacobean tragedies we had to read at school. All overblown melodrama and dead bodies lying around.’

  ‘John Webster? The Duchess of Malfi?’

  ‘Yeah, that stuff.’

  ‘“Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle.”’