The Devil's Chair

by Priscilla Masters

  They walked through the lounge into an equally spacious and tasteful kitchen, cream units lining the walls, topped by black granite. The floor was grey slate. All was neat and tidy, everything put away except one coffee mug in the sink. Optimistically Randall bagged it up, knowing the chances were that the mug would hold Charity Ignatio’s lipstick and DNA, not that of their mystery caller. He moved through to the back door and tried it. It was locked and bolted from the inside. He looked around. There was no sign that the child had ever been here. He could send in the fingerprint and forensic boys but in his heart of hearts he didn’t believe that Daisy Walsh had ever been inside Hope Cottage.

  WPC Shaw watched his movements without comment.

  The two of them explored the rest of the house. The cream carpeted lounge came complete with log burner, shelves of books, mainly on business management, a large flat-screen television and a small sofa with chintzy, loose covers that smelt of fabric conditioner. Upstairs were two bedrooms painted blue, with double beds and built-in wardrobes and a very smart bath/shower room, as sterile, bright and spanking white as an operating theatre. There was no sign of either the missing child or of the intruder who had made the call. It was hard to believe that it had come from here.

  Randall looked around. Apart from the solitary coffee mug there was no sign that anybody lived here. It was soulless, with no personality stamped on its interior either. It struck Randall that Ms Ignatio led a very tidy and ordered life, most of it away from the cottage. Hope Cottage was merely a pied-à-terre, a place where she dropped in from time to time, not a home. Randall found himself a little curious about this anonymous woman and her tenuous connection with his current case. They trooped downstairs and Randall eyed the phone – a cordless device that plugged into a central line. He hit the redial button and found himself apologizing to the emergency services, which told him something useful. No one had used this phone since their mystery caller.

  Their mystery caller who had vanished right back into the silent hills. Well – it was up to him to find him or her.

  EIGHT

  Tuesday, 9 April, 8 a.m.

  The coroner’s office, Shrewsbury.

  Martha had come in early. She hated uncertainties and the fate of this one little girl was exactly that. Uncertain. Come to think of it, she reflected, the fate of the mother was equally uncertain. Life on intensive care was precarious however competent and dedicated the staff. She sat, chewing on the end of her pencil, trying to work out what had happened and why. But it was impossible. No rational explanation seemed to fit. She kept coming back to the mystery caller and it didn’t make sense. What had the caller been doing so early in the morning in such a remote area? Had he or she been there by chance? Why had she or he taken the child? In the end she stopped trying to work it out, gave a deep sigh and bent back over her work, but the questions continued to gnaw at her from the inside out, like a rat inside a cardboard box, trying to escape. At the back of her mind she felt there had to be a reason. A rational explanation, a valid explanation for why all this had happened. Something to replace this void.

  She well understood it when people voiced their relief at a body found, a fate known. It was the only way one could have any chance of closure. She made a face. Closure. She hated the word. It had become a cliché, overused and undervalued but sometimes it was the only appropriate expression.

  But, she mused, Tracy aside, who would have closure in the fate of this one little girl? From what she’d heard so far Daisy’s father had little to do with his daughter. What was the phrase Alex had used? A tenner at Christmas?

  What about grandparents? Perhaps.

  Her job frequently offered up more questions than answers but she always strove towards resolution. She was realistic enough to know that this valued phrase, closure, was not always possible, and she had watched with sadness those relatives and loved ones who left the coroner’s court with bowed shoulders, deepened frown lines and sheer unhappiness that she suspected would never be resolved. It was these cases that stained her mind and bothered her months, even years later. There were times when a solution she knew to be false was proffered and she was tempted to snatch at it. But underneath she knew that it was better to stick to the truth, even though, like coroners up and down the country, she could be lured into white lies:

  No, he/she didn’t suffer.

  Yes, death was instant.

  He/she would have known nothing about it.

  Sometimes it was counterproductive to delve into those last terrifying and painful minutes of violent death.

  And then there were the other white lies, designed to protect the relatives in their part in the tragedy.

  It was inevitable/unavoidable. There was nothing you or anyone else could have done to prevent it. This, too, was not always strictly true. An argument avoided, a drink not poured, an apology or a different action would have stopped the event. And she knew it. She usually hoped they did not.

  There was no thought or malice behind it. Psychopaths don’t have thoughts and they are incapable of feeling malice, so this, at least, was true in some circumstances.

  He didn’t mean to kill him/her. It was an accident. The wrong place at the wrong time. Or the right place at the right time?

  And for Martha, the most difficult of all. I’m sure God didn’t plan for your baby to be born with this defect. It was not a punishment to you, his parents. How do you explain that one, Coroner?

  With great difficulty.

  The trite untruths could spill out like a waterfall tumbling over a cliff edge. So easy, so tempting – and often so untrue. But that last one about God always caught her out. There weren’t always any explanations to make things easier or kinder and on those occasions she simply felt inadequate.

  Martha sighed. Being a redhead with strong Celtic blood, she wanted certainty in black and white. She disliked being manoeuvred into an open verdict. She would look across the coroner’s court at the family and read the disappointment – the chagrin and the sadness that her failure to bring closure had left. This was what she was left with – the family, always the family, and the detritus of the dead.

  So far, apart from Alex’s one visit, she was not involved in the Church Stretton case and it was quite possible that she never would be. If Tracy recovered and the child was found alive she would have no role; no cause to meet any of the players in this particular play. But if Daisy’s body was found or Tracy Walsh died in hospital events would move straight into her jurisdiction and she wanted to be prepared to meet them. As a doctor she was well aware that even if Tracy survived there was no guarantee she would make a full recovery. And even if she did recover, it was likely that she would remember nothing of that night. Tracy would have to be very lucky indeed to make a full recovery and from the little Martha knew about the injured woman she would guess that Tracy Walsh was not blessed with good luck. Martha leaned forward in her chair. These were troubling thoughts. She reached out. Jericho had brought in an early edition of the Shropshire Star. And, having no real facts to brief the public, the newspaper headlines had fallen into cliché: a missing child, a young mother ‘bravely fighting for life’. As Martha crossed to the window and watched the sun rise over the town, she gave a wry smile. There were two words trotted out by the press at intervals as regular as an artificial Christmas tree in December. The first was a verb. ‘Fighting.’ If only they had seen people in intensive care they would drop the phrase and never use it again. There was no fight, just pod-people, lying still, not moving, dependant on the staff for every single one of their bodily functions, including – and most importantly – breathing.

  The other word that made her wince was the adjective ‘brave’. She had forbidden it when applied to Martin because the word was so terribly inappropriate. The correct word was not brave but desperate. As desperate as the man who clings to a life raft after a shipwreck or a cliff face after a slip. People are desperate to live. Anyone who knows that to let go is certain death is desperat
e not brave because there is no choice. To let go is to die. To fall into a place none of us is really sure of – not Catholic or Jew, Muslim or Buddhist, and certainly not Christians. None of us really knows what will happen after death because, whatever the fake medium might say, no one has ever come back to tell us – not really. Not convincingly. And the moment of death itself? There is no guarantee that death will be kind or gentle. We do not ‘go gentle into that good night’ for death is not good but a painful, terrible struggle using every muscle and bone, sinew and fibre in the attempt to survive. To outwit the Grim Reaper and buy five more minutes.

  Martha turned away from the window, disturbed now by the memory of Martin’s final days. She closed her eyes to blot them out but they were still there, implanted behind her eyelids, his unhappy groans ringing in her ears, not because of a physical pain – which can be easily controlled with Midazolam or opiates – but for the mental torment when he considered the fact that he would not be around for those two beautiful children for very much longer. But the thing she squeezed her eyes most tightly against was his apology for abandoning her. The phrase had cut her like a knife.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  She returned to her desk. There was no point in drowning herself in memories. She had work to do, a future to live. And … The thought put a smile on her face. There was Sam and Sukey, a pair of children emerging as very interesting adults.

  Sam was signed up for Stoke City now and he loved it, never tiring of saying that it was a football club that was ‘going places’, even when they had a run of losses. He had a couple of ‘really good mates’ on the team and got on well with the ‘current manager’. He was happier living at home with his mother and sister and had adopted a different attitude to the game. He’d stopped castigating himself when he missed an opportunity or made a bad pass. And when he did well and scored he’d learnt to take that on the chin too, uttering a self-deprecating grunt, coming home, wolfing down his tea and talking about things other than football. Martha smiled. She was pleased with the way he was developing into an adult. And the main thing? He was happy. And that was all that mattered to her.

  And Sukey? She had started her training as an actress, found a new poise and had developed a way of listening, a sort of inner calm. She had an air of concentration, a habit of listening much more carefully to what others were saying.

  Yes, she was proud of her seventeen-year-old twins.

  They never stopped startling her, Martha thought, smiling. She could never have predicted that those two noisy babies would somehow turn into these two wonderful people. Parents love their children, or at least most do, but Martha was realizing how much she liked them too.

  She turned away from the window and returned to her desk.

  Neil Mansfield was nervous about entering the intensive care unit in spite of the fact that the nurses were kind and quite thoughtful. They’d put him in the relatives’ waiting room where a Spanish doctor had come in, sat down and explained to him that Tracy’s injuries were severe and that there was every chance that she would not recover. Neil had had a panic attack and started breathing fast. Did they mean she was going to die? Or was he going to be expected to be a carer for a horribly injured, perhaps brain-dead Tracy? Hell. No! he screamed inwardly.

  All the time the doctor was speaking a nurse in pale blue scrubs was standing in the doorway, a witness to his words. Mansfield looked up at her once or twice. He had the feeling she wanted to say something but was taking her cue from the doctor, her glance bouncing between them, gauging his reaction. At the back of his mind he kept wondering what it was she wanted to say. Her lips even parted twice in readiness for words and she leaned forward but nothing came out so Neil was left wondering. The doctor took no notice of her at all but continued speaking, saying that the next two or three days were critical and that, possibly, some tough decisions might need to be made. When he spoke these words both doctor and nurse eyed him very intently and then each other but gave Neil no clue as to what the phrase tough decisions meant. They paused, giving him a cue to ask what they meant by the phrase but Neil said nothing. The truth was he didn’t dare ask. He searched one face and then the other but found no clue there either. He only knew that the nurse in scrubs approved of the phrase because her body relaxed. Her arms unfolded and she gave a ghost of a smile in his direction.

  He realized that the doctor had said what she had wanted him to say. He asked Neil if he needed anything clarifying then stood up abruptly. The interview was at an end. He clapped a hand on Neil’s shoulder. ‘Would you like to see her now?’

  Mansfield wasn’t sure whether he did want to see her or not. He had a conflict of emotions. Part of him wanted to see her just to wring her bloody neck. Silly cow. She’d brought this on herself. Why hadn’t she listened to him? Piss drunk, argumentative and then go driving up the Burway? With Daisy? He wanted to shake her awake and ask her himself. Where the hell is Daisy? What have you done with your own daughter? Why did you take her with you? If your intention was to self-destruct why didn’t you leave the child in bed, safe and warm and alive? I would have looked after her, Trace. I’m not even her bloody father but I’d have taken better care of her than you.

  But another part of him was desperate to see her, to get some answers about himself. He was left wondering why he had ever got himself ensnared in this sticky web of infidelity and ultimate destruction. He wanted an explanation of why he had allowed his life to glug down a sinkhole. Lucy Stanstead wasn’t going to provide either an explanation or a solution but maybe Tracy would. He trotted behind the doctor until they reached the keypad door that led into the unit. He peeped through the window and felt reluctant to enter. Part of him was very, very frightened. What would she look like? They’d said she had facial injuries. Did that mean scars? Would she look like Frankenstein? Would he faint when he saw her? He was frowning as he followed the nurse to one of the beds. He had a feeling that there was something dark behind all this, some grey shadow that blocked out light. There was something he sensed but did not understand. He wasn’t sure he ever would do or wanted to. It was like lifting a drain cover. You knew there was something deeply unpleasant, something murky underneath it. And so you hesitate, thinking of all the reasons why it is better not to lift it. And yet you know that in the end you will put your fingers into the holes and you will heave the thing up and similarly you will peer down that black, slimy hole. And inhale as you do so. Neil Mansfield knew that one day he would lift the drain cover on the events of the last two days.

  The nurse let him approach the bedside alone, watching him with a wary glance.

  Mansfield looked down at his girlfriend.

  He didn’t recognize her at first, except for her hair. Long and blonde, with fashionable dark roots, and spread over the pillow like some old painting he’d seen in the art gallery in London in another life – a happier one when Joshy had been doing a project in school on painters and had begged him to take him to a London art gallery. Mansfield squeezed his eyes tight shut against the memory. The regrets were like lemon juice in his eyes, sharply stinging and making him blink. He focused on the person in the bed. Apart from the lovely hair (bleached and streaked by a very competent and expensive hairdresser) nothing else about Tracy was recognizable. There was nothing to tell him that this person really was Tracy. Maybe this was all a mistake and that was why little Daisy was missing. It was the wrong person, the wrong car. He half turned to ask the nurse whether she was absolutely sure this was Tracy Walsh. He scanned the rest of the unit. Surely there had been a mistake? This couldn’t be Tracy. Then he saw the name, clearly written on a whiteboard behind the bed in unmistakably large letters, scrawled in thick black felt-tip pen: TRACY WALSH, and underneath her date of birth: 21/4/1980. Correct. The date gave him a jolt. It would soon be her birthday and he hadn’t bought her a present. He snorted and glanced back at the thing in the bed. Like she was going to notice? What the hell did you buy someone in this situation? A weekend in the Co
tswolds? A scary driving experience? Yeah, right.

  But the name over the bed had confirmed that it was her. She had a tube sticking out of her mouth which was connected to a machine that rose and fell to make her breathe. It was so rhythmic and precise that Mansfield found himself matching the machine’s respirations, breathing in unison with her. In – hold – out. In – hold – out. Their chests rose and fell together, as one.

  Tracy was connected to lots of machines. A drip was putting drops of clear fluid into a vein in her arm. In – hold – out. In – hold – out.

  And so the rhythm grew, like an orchestra when the instruments join in the solo performer. The screen at the side of her bed joined in too with patterns he recognized as displaying her heartbeat.

  Mansfield looked up and watched the monitor. He felt hollow in the pit of his stomach, as though half his organs had been replaced with a void. The nurse was still watching him encouragingly. ‘Speak to her,’ she urged. ‘She may well be able to hear you.’

  So he spoke, and tried to sound normal. ‘Hello, Trace,’ he said.

  He felt stupid talking to this thing in the bed. The doctor was adjusting one of the machines but his dark brown eyes were resting on him, a faint question still unasked. Mansfield felt even more uncomfortable. The doctor was expecting him to do or say something and he didn’t have a clue what.

  He felt panicked and mumbled something about needing to go to the toilet. The nurse offered to show him the way. She even waited outside until he’d finished, which embarrassed him. He’d hardly needed to go really. He’d had to squeeze out a couple of drops. It had been simply an avoidance tactic and a not very clever one at that. He blushed as he came out. But she didn’t. She was a very pale girl – almost looked anaemic, as though she needed a hearty, meaty meal. But surely her colleagues would have picked up on that here in the hospital? She had lovely skin, though – a proper porcelain complexion, but unfortunately her eyes were sloping, which made her look a bit sneaky and sly. He would have liked to ask her about the phrase tough decisions but like before he was afraid of the answer, sure it would involve something deeply unpleasant. And so he left the drain cover firmly in place.