In the Family

by Christina James

  She shook her head. Her hair was dark and dead straight, cut by her mother into a severe bob with a short fringe. She looked at him directly now, and he saw that there were tears welling up in her light hazel eyes. He put his arm around her shoulder.

  “Nay,” he said. “What is it, child?”

  “There’s a dead bird,” she said. The tears were coursing down her cheeks now.

  “Well, birds do die – like all of us. Where did you find it? Show it to me.”

  She jumped to her feet, her red-and-white gingham dress twirling outwards to expose chubby knees above her rather thickset legs. Sam himself stood up more slowly. She took his hand and led him round the edge of the lawn to the greenhouse. Among a heap of broken flowerpots there lay a large dead crow. It looked as if it had been festering for some time: its underside had been ripped open, perhaps by a fox or by some other wild bird, and its entrails hung out in purplish ropes, alive with white maggots.

  “I want to have a funeral,” she announced.

  He was suddenly concerned. Looking at the bird, he realised that it could not have fallen where it lay by chance. It must have been moved there.

  “Dorothy,” he said. “Tell me the truth. Have you touched it?”

  She stared at him boldly, and for a fraction too long.

  “No, Mr. Sam,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Are you sure? Because it’s important. If you’ve touched it, it could make you ill; and I should have to send you in to your mother to wash your hands in disinfectant and change your clothes.”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t touch it.”

  He kissed her briefly on her forehead.

  “That’s all right, then. Wait here while I fetch a spade – and don’t touch it now.”

  He brought a light spade from the greenhouse, and dug a shallow hole under the yew hedge. Then he lifted the dead crow carefully on to the spade and flipped it into the hole, shovelling the loose earth back on top and tamping it down with his boots.

  “There,” he said. “We have had the funeral. You can put a stone on it to mark the spot if you want to.”

  She nodded, and was walking away from him when she changed her mind, turned and ran back to him, and gave him a hug, clumsily, because he was still carrying the spade. He chuckled.

  “That’s more like my Tirzah,” he said.

  Later her mother called her in to tea. It was scrambled eggs with Marmite toast, normally her favourite, and a meal that she had pleaded for earlier in the day. However, she could eat only a few mouthfuls, and even her cup of tea seemed to rise up in her throat and choke her. Eliza was annoyed.

  “Mrs. Frear gave me those eggs especially for you. If you don’t eat them, you won’t go out again today.”

  She went to the room that they shared and lay down on her bed. She shut her eyes and fell into an uneasy sleep. When she awoke, the daylight was fading and she was vaguely aware that Eliza was in the room preparing for bed. She had changed into her floor-length nightdress and had knelt by the bed to pray. She did not seem to notice that Dorothy had not washed or changed out of her daytime clothes. Dorothy turned over and slept again.

  The next time that she awoke, she could see the dawn breaking outside the window and hear the cowman whistling to the small herd of cows to come down the field to the dairy for milking. She was very hot. She tried to sit up, but she felt terribly weak and slumped sideways against the pillow. Her sore throat raged. She was afraid to wake her mother, but desperate for water. At night, there was always a glass of water on her mother’s bedside table. She swung both legs over the side of the bed and planted her feet firmly on her rag rug. The she tried to stand. She was aware of herself falling, as if into a bright light, and felt her head take a sharp knock against the side of the bed as she fell. She thought that she heard the thud of her own body as it hit the floor.

  She did not know how many hours or days later she gained consciousness. She was barely awake and could only see through a grey blur. Her limbs felt dead and heavy. Her throat was horribly sore and there was a nasty taste in her mouth. Her tongue was furred and felt as though it were blistered. When she breathed, she made a whistling sound and each intake of breath gave a stab of pain to her neck – not the putrid, pervasive soreness of her throat, but a sharper, cleaner pang, as if someone had just twisted a razor there. Through the gummy lids of half-closed eyes, she could make out a figure huddled at the end of the bed, head tied in a triangular scarf. It was her mother, weeping. She drifted back into sleep, hot and uncomfortable.

  It seemed only a moment or two later that she was again awake and being raised in the bed. She struggled feebly – it hurt too much to be pulled about – and was reprimanded sharply by her mother’s voice.

  “Be gentle with her, Mrs. Drake,” said someone with kindly authority. “She has a long convalescence in front of her yet – her arms and legs will feel sore and you can expect her to be very lethargic. Now, Dorothy, I need to get you into a sitting position so that I can look at your throat. I’m afraid it will hurt a little – we have had to make an incision and put a little silver tube inside it, because you were finding it hard to breathe.”

  His hands were cool and deft, but when he touched her neck the pain was dreadful. She made no sound, but the tears welled up in her eyes.

  “Good girl,” he said, placing her gently back on the pillow. “I shall leave it in for a few more days,” he added, speaking over his shoulder in a brisker tone. “Then she must come to the cottage hospital to have it removed. It is too risky to try to do it here. Keep her in bed in the meantime.”

  “Yes, Doctor. Thank you,” said her mother reverently. “May she have visitors? I mean just from the house. Mr. Sam is anxious to see her.”

  “If he only stays for a few minutes, and doesn’t overtire her. I don’t think that there can be any risk to him of infection now.”

  Her mother brought him one of the china ewers from their room, and poured out hot water into an enamel bowl. He washed his hands with some ceremony and took the towel of Indian linen from her slowly. He was looking at her intently. Despite the ridiculous scarf, she was looking very handsome. She was not unaware of her good looks.

  “You’re a good mother, Eliza.” he said. “Dorothy, you’re a lucky girl to have so many people care for you. We’ll soon have you running around again.”

  At his praise, her mother bridled with pride. “Say thank-you to the doctor, Dorothy,” she said.

  Dorothy raised her head and managed to croak thank-you as he departed. It hurt her to speak. She felt indignant: it was clear that she should have been the centre of attention during his visit, but already her leading-lady role was being stolen from her by her mother.

  Mr. Sam came in and sat on a chair by the bed. He was carrying a jar containing a little posy of wild flowers.

  “Eh, Tirzah,” he said. “I’ve brought you a bit of the summer, since you can’t go outside. Aye, but you’re a bad lass. You told me that you hadn’t touched yon crow and doctor says you must have. He says that’s probably how you got the diphtheria. Your poor mother has been beside herself with grief. Lord only knows what she’d have done if . . .”

  “Don’t, Father,” her mother cut in, but indulgently – her voice carried none of its habitual harsh edge when she spoke to him. Only she and Mrs. Kitty and his two sons were allowed to call him “Father”. “The child has suffered enough, and she’ll know not to try to deceive us again.” She cast Dorothy a baleful look while Mr. Sam was searching in his sleeve for a handkerchief.

  Chapter Four

  Inspector Tim Yates considered himself to be an ordinary man, of average intelligence for a graduate. He was also happy, and comfortable with himself. He had no hang-ups about his middle-class upbringing, excellent education, sexual proclivities or even his red hair. He was proud of his job, and saw no need to apologise for it. He did not use i
t as an excuse for being moody, gloomy or unduly introspective, and indeed he was none of these things. His ordinary disposition was equable, if not sunny. Nor did he think that his zest for life made him bumptious, unfeeling, loud or overproud of his achievements, or that it had turned him into the sort of male who aggressively proclaims himself to be a ‘regular bloke’.

  Tim was six feet one inch tall, with a (reasonably) athletic physique which he kept (reasonably) in shape by cycling as often as he could. He was not interested in developing a six-pack, abhorred team games and contact sports (though he was good at building teams at work), drank with a moderation that only occasionally crept to excessive levels because he was enjoying himself so much that he had lost count of the units and ate moderately healthy food which was high in vegetable content (though in Tim’s book this included chips).

  As well as the red hair – which to be more accurate was a resonant shade of auburn – Tim had eyes the colour of clear jade and a fair but not effeminate complexion. His hands were slender and delicate, and gave away his sensitivity. On the other hand, his feet were massive, and his friends joked that it was because of them that he had been born to be a ‘Plod’.

  When he had graduated Tim had chosen a career in the police force purely because he thought it would be interesting. He had not agonised over the decision, nor had he made it, unlike so many of his colleagues, because he had been thwarted in his first choice of occupation. He went into policing with his eyes open and was under no illusions about how frustrating, harrowing or tedious it could be on occasion, nor about the intrusions and interruptions that it would cause in his personal life.

  If there was one area in which Tim showed himself to be a little too idealistic and starry-eyed, it was in the parallel fascination which he felt for the probing of and general study of the criminal mind. There was more than a little of the psychologist manqué within him. This created in him a tendency to project elaborate motives and sophisticated thought processes upon the most brutal and basic of thugs. Fortunately for his own credibility, the early fulfilment of his ambition to lead a murder squad had meant that this outlook had not led him into professional blunder. To his own satisfaction at least, he had proved that all but the most straightforward of murderers – and these tended also to be the most violent – had suffered some trauma in their past which had forged kinks and flaws in their psyches, or exhibited the symptoms of one or more of the recognised classifiable psychological disorders. That the more cynical and hard-bitten old-stagers among his colleagues sometimes observed that the criminal in question was taking him for a ride seldom abashed him. He believed that this in itself was a symptom of deviant behaviour. The trick lay in spotting the deviance.

  Tim’s greatest leisure pursuits were cycling and literature. He devoured books of all kinds, especially works on modern history, current affairs and fiction. Although he read modern ‘literary’ authors, his favourite genre was undoubtedly crime fiction. He maintained an affectionate regard for the creations of many post-war crime writers, whilst at the same time considering that the portrayals of their mostly tortured policeman protagonists were more far-fetched than the extravagant plots in which they usually found themselves.

  Tim had met Katrin when he was attending a crime statistics seminar at a police college. It was an event that he had signed up for with reluctance, pushed into it by his boss, Superintendant Thornton, who had said that he needed to have an overview of criminal patterns in order to be a good copper. In principle, he knew that this was correct, and he was the last person to denigrate putting a bit of cerebral gloss on police work. But he had envisaged that in practice this would mean spending a whole day in the company of mostly middle-aged men, being lectured to by another middle-aged man on trends of criminal activity in certain geographical regions, government targets for the apprehending of various types of criminal and how police forces were or were not meeting them, and, more abstrusely and yawningly boring (he knew because he had had to attend lectures on it while he was training), lots of econometrics charts tracing the relationship of national prosperity – or the lack of it – to rises and falls in criminal behaviour.

  When he arrived to register for the seminar, the police college itself had been a pleasant surprise. He had imagined a grim Gothic building made of red brick, perhaps a former Victorian workhouse or ‘place of correction’. He had attended other courses in buildings like the latter; he did not doubt that they had been chosen by the organisers of the training programmes to prove how serious their schemes of work were, and how earnest their students; and to dispel any suspicions that the latter were being treated to a ‘jolly’, by making the surroundings as gloomy and uncomfortable as possible. Some seminars even took place in Methodist centres where the sale of alcohol was forbidden. However, Bagden Hall – despite its unpromising name – had turned out to be an elegant neo-Palladian mansion with a double sweep leading to its porticoed doors. It proved also to have a marbled hall when eventually he had entered to register himself. The lecture rooms, all leading off a kind of minstrels’ gallery on the first floor, were airy and spacious, and fitted with sophisticated media suites for the presentations. The bedrooms were equally luxurious – his own had a four-poster bed with tester – and a peek into the dining-room revealed tables gleaming with damask cloths and lead crystal glasses. There was also a small bar. He thought perhaps that he would be able to stand two days in this place very well indeed.

  Nevertheless, his first day there had been pretty soporific. As he had predicted to himself, most of those attending were over forty, and most of the lecturers closer to sixty than fifty. They had presented graphs and pie charts until his mind blanked and he felt himself drifting into sleep. The final presentation of that first day was even on statistics about statistics: the lecturer, who was not a police officer, but an economist from a local university, had droned on about how much the crime statistics influenced police work and the economy in general. As if, thought Tim, the average copper – or even the exceptional ones privileged to attend this seminar – were motivated by such considerations. He began to dread dinner and the evening which stretched ahead, despite the luxurious room, and even more the prospect of another full day of the same sort of stuff tomorrow. He told himself sternly not to relieve his ennui by having too much to drink. He knew that a day sitting through more presentations – and, even worse, taking part in group exercises – would be the more excruciating if accompanied by a hangover. Taking heed of his own words of wisdom, he resolved not to join his fellow delegates in the bar before dinner, but to retire to his room for an hour to make some phone calls and check e-mails.

  He had just resisted the blandishments of the red-faced man with greasy silver hair who had been sitting next to him all afternoon to accompany him for a drink – no great temptation there – and was crossing the reception area to take the lift to his room, when the main door opened and a dark-haired young woman struggled in with a huge shocking pink suitcase. Appraising her upwards from her shapely legs to her neat figure, glossy dark hair and beautiful grey eyes, Tim felt his chivalrous instincts kicking in quite precipitately. He noticed that the man and woman who had been stationed at the reception desk when he had himself arrived had disappeared. Perhaps they were not expecting any more arrivals so late in the day. At any rate, it was clear that the offer of help with luggage which he had himself received would not be available to the young woman, which was very satisfactory from his point of view.

  “Can I help you with that?” he had asked.

  She had not answered him, but had dropped the heavy case, which she had been lugging along by means of a sort of rigid strap – the suitcase was fitted with two tiny wheels which were obviously inadequate when the case was full – and lifted her hands with the palms towards him, at the same time raising both eyebrows and turning down her mouth in mock helplessness and anguish. Tim had been fascinated: it was the sort of expression he had seen illustrated in pictures o
f nineteenth century pierrots, but he had never actually witnessed anyone replicating it in life. He took his hands out of his pockets and sauntered over to her as casually as he could, holding out his right hand when he reached her.

  “Tim Yates,” he said. The fingers that grasped his were long and slender, and very cold. Close up, her skin was flawless, and pale olive in colour.

  “Katrin Schuster,” she said. “Could you possibly carry this for me over to the reception desk? The wheels on it are quite useless, and it keeps on tipping over.” She was wearing a black silk blouse with a cream-coloured scarf, which looked as if it might also be of silk, wound round her neck and a pencil skirt, with a short fake fur jacket which was obviously not keeping her warm. Her shoes, stilettos with, he guessed, four-inch heels, were totally impractical. He noted this last point with approval. He saw plenty of women wearing ‘sensible’ shoes every day of the week.

  “Of course,” he said, taking the case by the handle, and lifting it with more difficulty than he had expected – what had she got in there? “But reception seems to have packed up for the day. Perhaps you’d care to sit down,” – he gestured at two giant Chesterfield sofas which had been placed at right angles to each other between the door and the receptionists’ desks – “while I go and find somebody. I’ve been here all day, so I stand a better chance than you do of spotting someone who might be able to help,” he added quickly, worried in case she thought he was patronising her.

  She didn’t seem at all perturbed by the suggestion. “Thank you,” she said, obediently doing as he said. She crossed one leg gracefully over the other and rummaged in her bag, before stopping suddenly.

  “Damn!” she said. “I’ve just remembered that I gave up smoking last week. Pity. This is just the sort of day on which you need a cigarette. I don’t suppose that you . . . ?”