by John Harvey
Martina's mother, Gloria, had had Martina when she was just sixteen; there had been three other children since, two boys and a girl.
'Running wild,' Jones said, 'the lot of 'em. It's me as has to keep 'em under control.'
Will thought about the rough weal on the girl's behind, the rope around the grandfather's waist; about other things that might or might not have happened, things the older man might or might not have done.
Martina, it seemed, was forever running off, a habit, a compulsion: sometimes she would go no further than the edge of a nearby field and hide; at others she would lie down in an old farm building, the back of a tractor, an empty oil drum that had rolled on to its side. Most times, not always, she would come back of her own accord. Usually the same day. On this occasion she had been gone since late the previous afternoon.
'You didn't report her missing?' Will asked.
Jones looked back at him as if he were some kind of fool.
'You went looking for her?'
'Of course we did. All on us. Not a bloody sign.'
'She stayed out overnight.'
Jones looked at him evenly. 'Somewhere.'
'You know where that might be?'
'Ask her, why don't you?'
But Martina was not talking, not to her mother or her grandfather, not to the doctor or the nurses, certainly not to Will. Nor, when she arrived, to Helen, either. She lay there, uncomplaining, eyes squinched up tight, as they examined her internally and took swabs from various parts of her body.
She was no longer a virgin. She had had intercourse recently and, apart from some small abrasions, probably the result of her size, there was no evidence to suggest it had been other than consensual. There were faint traces of semen, along with saliva, on the backs of her legs and her chest.
When the grandfather was told, he showed little surprise, but grunted and looked across at the mother. 'The fruit,' he said, 'don't fall far from the tree.'
Will questioned him further, while Helen talked to Gloria, and then, fruitlessly again, Martina. Other members of the family were spoken to while officers made a thorough search of the caravan. Social workers were all over the other children like flies at midsummer.
It was only on the third afternoon, when Helen had all but despaired of Martina saying anything at all, that the girl mentioned Mitchell Roberts' name. Just Mitchell at first.
'Tell Mitchell,' she said. 'Tell him I'm okay. He'll be worried about me, else.'
4
Mitchell Roberts kept a small place up towards Rack Fen: a garage and workshop fashioned largely from breeze-block and corrugated iron, with a single-storey dwelling out back. It was less than a mile from the Joneses' encampment; a similar distance from where Martina had been found.
In one corner of the workshop Roberts kept a small stock of supplies for farmers who stopped by to refuel with diesel or replace a blown tyre: animal feed and fertiliser and galvanised feed scoops. From behind the till he sold cartons of long-life milk and cigarettes, boxes of cereal and chocolate bars well past their sell-by date; cans of Pepsi and 7-Up that were lukewarm because the refrigerator was always on the blink.
Will had asked about Roberts before he and Helen set off, had him checked out on the computer. At first pass, nothing known officially, no record. Seemed he'd taken over the establishment three years earlier, after it had lain in disuse for almost as long. Word was that he knew his way round a John Deere as well as most and could be relied upon in an emergency. In a part of the country where talk for talk's sake wasn't rated highly, he was considered sociable enough; ready if needed to down tools and pass an opinion on the weather—deteriorating—water levels—rising—and the way the price of fuel was shooting through the roof. Hadn't going into Iraq been meant to settle all of that?
What kind of a life he had once the lights were off and the pumps were locked, nobody knew nor cared. Till now.
Will's jacket lay along the rear seat and his shirt was sticking to his back; beside him, Helen had her window wound down and her fingers trailing in the air. The temperature in the car showed twenty-six degrees.
The waxed coat Martina Jones had been wearing was double-wrapped in plastic inside the boot.
Will brought the car to a halt well to the side of the road, nearside wheels in the dirt, and a lone crow hopped a short distance away and continued pecking at something on the ground.
'God!' Helen said, pushing the car door closed and looking round. 'Can you imagine what it must be like? Living out somewhere like this?'
Will followed her gaze round the flat, almost bare landscape, the small rise to the west that some optimistic cartographer had labelled the Croft Hills.
'I don't have to imagine,' he said.
Helen shook her head. 'Where you live, it's a metropolis compared to this.'
The man who came towards them from the building was medium-height, with pale sandy hair, wearing a plaid shirt beneath dungarees that had missed more than one turn in the wash. Forties, Will might have thought, mid to late forties, if he hadn't already known Roberts to be fifty-two.
Roberts looked from Will to Helen and carefully back again. 'You must be lost,' he said.
'You think?'
'I know just about everyone lives round here and I in't seen you afore, so 'less you're visitin' someone out by Home Farm or got some burnin' desire to see the Hundred Foot Washes, I'd say, yes, you're lost.'
'Think again,' Will said.
Roberts glanced over his shoulder at nothing. 'You're police then,' he said.
Will held his warrant card out for him to see. 'Mitchell Roberts?' he said.
Roberts nodded. 'Accordin' to the Inland Revenue and a few other interested parties, yes. Most folk call me Mitch.'
'She called you Mitchell,' Helen said.
Roberts blinked. 'She?'
'Tell Mitchell not to worry, that's what she said.'
Roberts took half a pace back, hand reaching down towards his hip.
'Hurt your leg?' Will said.
'Tractor chassis fell on it a while back. Some days it hurts more than most.'
'When you're nervous maybe?' Will suggested.
'Am I nervous?'
'You tell me.'
'I don't ...' He smiled. 'I don't know what this is about. Some woman tellin' me not to worry.'
'Not a woman,' Helen said. 'Not exactly.'
'You said ...'
'More a girl.'
'I don't know any ...'
'Martina.'
'Who?'
'Martina Jones.'
'No, I'm sorry, I...' Raising a hand towards them, Roberts shook his head.
Will snapped the lock on the boot and, taking out the coat, still in its plastic wrapping, carried it towards him, folded over one arm. When he was almost level, he lifted the coat up for him to see.
'Well,' Roberts said, a look of relief spreading across his face. 'Thank heaven for that. Thought I was never going to see that coat again.'
'It's yours?'
'Yes, it's mine. Know that thing anywhere, trussed up or not.'
'You're sure?'
'Sure as I'm standing here.' He smiled. 'Recognise just about every damn mark.'
'Would you care to tell us how it came to be out of your possession?' Will asked.
'Out of my possession? Why, that little girl stole it, that's how.'
A nerve began to beat alongside Will's temple. 'Which little girl is that?'
Roberts looked at him. 'The one you was tellin' me about, I suppose. What'd you say her name was?'
'You don't remember?'
'No, I don't remember.'
'Martina,' Will said quietly. 'Martina Ellis Jones.'
Roberts scuffed the earth with his toe. 'I never knew her name.'
'But you gave her your coat.'
'I never give her no coat, she stole the coat, I told you that.'
'When was this?'
Roberts gave it some thought. 'Must be three, no, four days ago now.'
<
br /> Will and Helen exchanged a quick glance.
'Suppose you tell us,' Helen said, 'exactly how Martina ended up with your coat.'
'You want to come inside?' Roberts said, shuffling a little to one side. 'Get out of this heat. Got some pop in there or I can make a brew.'
Neither Will nor Helen had moved.
Roberts cleared his throat. 'She'd come by here,' he said, 'her and her brothers. Sometimes another girl, too. They'd walk across the fields.' He pointed towards a narrow gap in the low hedge, what might have been the beginnings of a track. 'Gyppos, diddicoys, whatever you like to call 'em.' He spat. 'Sometimes they'd have money, stole from their mother's purse likely as not, buy 'emselves a Pepsi or such. Caught one of the boys stealin' a brace of Mars Bars once and took my boot to his backside. Chased 'em all off. Told 'em if they tried that, any one of 'em again, they could stay clear of my place an' not come back.'
'And did they?' Will asked.
'What?'
'Come back?'
'After a spell.'
'Martina,' Helen said, 'did she ever come here on her own?'
Roberts swallowed and wiped a hand across his mouth. 'Once in a while.' Given the temperature, the way the perspiration was running freely down his face was no surprise.
'Like the day she went away with your coat?'
'Yes. Like that.'
'Tell us what happened that day,' Will said.
Roberts blinked the sweat away from his eyes. 'Nothin' to tell. I'd been working on this trailer best part of the afternoon, went back to the house to wash up and there she was.'
'At the house?'
'No. Sitting up in there on the counter, bold as you like, eatin' a Twix. I remember sayin' to her, I hope you're goin' to pay for that.'
'And did she?'
'Oh, yes.'
'She had money?'
'How else was she goin' to pay?'
Will looked at him. 'You took her back into the house?'
'Why would I do that?'
'Maybe to get the coat?'
Roberts shook his head. 'That coat always hung from a peg right in there.' He pointed through the open workshop door. 'I can show you if you'd like.'
'Later,' Will said.
'Why did you give her the coat?' Helen asked.
'I didn't give her the damned thing. I told you. She took it while my back was turned an' run off with it, that's what happened.'
'Now why would she do that?'
'How should I know? Her kind, see something they can lay their hands on an' it's gone.'
'Her kind?'
'You know what I mean.'
'Hot, wasn't it, four days ago?' Will said, more conversational than anything else.
'I dare say.'
'Hot like this?'
'Just about.'
'Yet she took your coat, this heavy adult coat, where was the point in that?'
'Like I said, if it ain't nailed down ...'
'Come on,' Helen said, fixing him with her eyes. 'You can do better than that.'
'I don't see what you mean.'
'You don't see what I mean? When that girl was found, running, running scared, half out of her wits, your coat aside, she was naked as the day she was born. Not a stitch on, not a stitch.'
'I don't know 'bout that.'
'You don't think that's why she took your coat? To cover herself. After what had happened.'
Roberts pressed his hand harder against his leg.
'What did you do with her clothes?'Will asked. 'Burn them? Make a bonfire somewhere? Or are they still back in the house?'
'Look,' Roberts said, 'I don't know why ...'
'Souvenirs,' Helen said, 'isn't that what you call them? Isn't that what you like? Your kind?'
Something sprang to life in Roberts' eyes. 'Fuck you!' he said. 'You bitch! Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!'
'Mitchell Roberts,' Will said, 'I am arresting you ...'
Helen had been right. They found Martina's cotton underpants, torn at one corner and badly stained, pushed down towards the rear of the box chest that served to hold Roberts' own clothes. Martina herself, unsurprisingly, was all over the place in what she said. One minute Mitchell hadn't touched her, hadn't laid a hand on her; another, he had forced her to do things, threatened to report her to the police for stealing if she didn't agree. Mitchell loved her; she loved him, she really did. She hated him for hurting her. It wasn't Mitchell who'd done those things to her at all, it was someone in a red car who'd stopped to give her a lift home. It was her grandfather. Really, it was.
They'd been looking at him, of course, the grandfather. Questions, evidence, intimate samples, DNA. The broken skin and the bruising to his granddaughter's buttocks, Samuel Jones readily pleaded guilty to. Discipline, that's what she'd needed. Too little too late, and that's the truth. Jones staring back at Will with all-too-clear eyes, as if daring him to disagree. Daring him to ask why she'd spent nights sleeping in the back of a straw-strewn trailer instead of the comfort of her own bed; why she'd trekked across open fields and skirted drainage ditches to Mitchell Roberts' home, not once but several times.
In the end there was nothing to suggest that Jones had abused his granddaughter sexually; he had simply, to Will's mind, driven her into the arms of someone who would do that for him.
'You can't blame him,' Helen said. 'Jones. Not for what someone else did.'
'Can't I?' Will said.
An analysis of both the bite marks and traces of semen on Martina's body left Mitchell Roberts' defence with nowhere profitable to go. Concerned, however, as to how Martina might stand up if she were called to give evidence in court, the prosecution accepted two guilty pleas of indecent assault and one of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under thirteen, and Roberts was sentenced to five years' imprisonment.
Since which time, by Will's estimation, he had served a little over half. Less than enough. Will would have been happy if once they'd locked him up they'd thrown away the key.
5
She hadn't thought she would ever marry again, not after the divorce. A divorce Simon had tried to talk her out of at first, keen to prove he understood what she was going through, what she was thinking. Surely this was the time when they needed to stick together most, for mutual help, support? Lacking close family—his parents having both died when they were comparatively young and his only brother long settled in South Africa—and enjoying no more than cursory relationships with his colleagues, without Ruth, Simon had been in danger of floundering. His forthright exterior in danger of falling apart.
But Ruth had surprised herself—and Simon, she was sure—by sticking to her guns, and once he saw there would be no altering her mind, no going back, he had, to give him credit, been more thoughtful than she might have expected, conciliatory even, and, in the event, being awarded her decree nisi had been like having a tooth removed under anaesthetic, no more troubling than that. You walked in and only minutes later, or so it seemed, you walked out, admittedly with your tongue unable, for now, to stop touching the place where, for years, that particular tooth had been. Searching for a twinge of pain that was not really there.
She'd told her parents about Andrew first, driving up to spend a weekend with them in Cumbria; her father barely looking up from whatever he was repotting in the conservatory, merely nodding acceptance as if it were what he'd been expecting all along; her mother leaning forward in her chair and taking both of Ruth's hands in hers: 'If you're sure, you're really sure ...'
Friends from work, the ones she considered close enough to tell, had shown not much more surprise than her father; had thought it what she needed, someone to help her refocus her life, someone new. Even those few friends she and Simon had shared, when they heard, for the most part agreed she was making the right decision.
Even when she had finally plucked up the courage to tell Simon himself that she'd met somebody else, he'd been more reasonable than she'd had any right to expect. Oh, not straight away, of course, not immediately—bu
t once he'd got over the initial surprise.
They had met in a café near the Angel, not so far from the local government offices where Simon worked. Ruth had phoned him just two days before: she was coming down to London to do a bit of shopping, maybe they could meet for a coffee or something? Making it all seem as casual as she could.
'Of course,' he'd said. 'How about the afternoon? Shall we say three? Three-fifteen? I'm supposed to have a meeting but I can always shunt it around.'
And when she'd asked was he sure, not wanting to make a mess of his day, having cold feet if the truth were told, he'd laughed her down.
'Come on, Ruthie, always time for you, you know that. Besides, it's been a long time. If I don't see you soon I shall forget what you look like.'
Ruthie: how she hated it when he called her that.
At first glance, Simon had scarcely changed at all. Still neat inside his soft grey suit. But he was thin, she noticed, thinner than before, his cheekbones more prominent, and there were worry lines around his eyes.
What was he now? Forty-two? Forty-three? When she had looked at herself in the mirror that morning she'd seen a woman who, in a kind light, might just pass for forty-five. She was thirty-eight.
'Sorry to keep you waiting,' Simon said.
Ruth gave a quick smile to show that it was perfectly all right.
She had felt only a little awkward sitting there, in that busy interior, surrounded by people who were mostly younger and more casually, more fashionably dressed than herself. Men and women pecking away at their laptops or having brightly animated conversations in several languages, voices raised above the intermittent shrill of the coffee machine and the rhythmic jousting of world music through the speakers.
'Another coffee?'
'No, thanks. I'm fine.'
He smiled and turned in the direction of the counter, returning minutes later with a small flat white.
'Decaf now in the afternoons, I'm afraid. Get too hyper otherwise. Start throwing things around the office.'
'I doubt that.'
