Juliet allowed another heavy minute to go by.
“Mrs. Sheppard, I do apologise for this, particularly as I know that you have helped the police with enquiries about Kathryn’s disappearance on two previous occasions, but would you mind answering some questions?”
“Not if it makes you feel that you’re doing your job better. You won’t catch him, though, will you?”
“Catch who, Mrs. Sheppard?”
“The man who killed her. You won’t catch him now.”
“We don’t have proof that she was murdered, or, if she was murdered, that the killer was a man. The pathologist has been unable to establish the cause of death.”
“You don’t have proof that she was murdered! What was she doing there by the side of the road, then? Tossed away like an empty crisp packet!” Her voice had risen almost to a shriek.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sheppard, that was insensitive of me. Of course, there is every likelihood that she was murdered. Do you have any particular reason for thinking that she was murdered by a man?”
Mrs. Sheppard shrugged. Her eyes were dull again.
“I’m just guessing: but what woman would want to kill a young girl?”
Juliet did not answer. She knew from experience that this type of speculation could be dangerous, for the police as well as the victim’s family: it could lead to their making false assumptions which would actually hinder their investigation.
“As I said, I know you’ve answered questions like this before, but can you tell me exactly when you began to be worried about Kathryn? You said that she wasn’t living here when she disappeared, so how long before you reported her missing did you last see her?”
“She was living in a flat in Little London. It wasn’t a very nice flat: it was on the ground floor of one of those big Victorian mansion houses. The other flats were nice, but the ground floor was really half in the basement and it was damp and dark. I don’t know why she wanted to live there, really. Originally she moved into the flat with a friend – Angela Jackson, someone she had known from school – but Angela didn’t stay long. I think she went to live with her boyfriend. I thought that Kathryn might want her boyfriend to move in with her, but it didn’t happen. In fact, she had two boyfriends during the time that she lived there, but neither of them moved in.”
“Hedley Atkins and Charles Heward?”
“Yes. But she didn’t go out with Hedley for long. I was pleased about that. He was a very strange young man. Of course, it turned out that it was no wonder he was strange, living in a household like that. But we didn’t know anything about it at the time. Kathryn went to his house several times, and she said nothing about it being strange, either, except that she didn’t like the old lady.”
“You mean Hedley’s mother?”
“No, his grandmother. Apparently she was a real old bitch – so Kathryn said. I never met her. Frank and I weren’t invited to meet them; the relationship never got that far.”
“By his grandmother, you mean Doris Atkins?”
“I suppose so, although Kathryn never mentioned her by name. Of course I remember the name because of what happened afterwards. It was splashed all over the newspapers for weeks. That’s when the details of how weird that house was came out as well.”
“Kathryn’s next boyfriend – Charles Heward – did you meet him as well?”
“Yes, she brought him here on several occasions. Frank didn’t like him – Frank didn’t get on with that type of person.” Mrs. Sheppard sniffed, and looked as if she were in agreement with her late husband. “But he didn’t let Kathryn see it – she was his daughter, after all, and Charles was a much better choice than Hedley – or so we thought. Kathryn was absolutely head-over-heels with Charles, anyway. Nothing that we could have said could have dented her good opinion of him. We would just have ended up causing some kind of rift, which was the last thing that we wanted.”
“You know that the police held Charles as a suspect for a short time?”
“Yes. We thought that was very strange, trying to pin a murder on someone when there was no body. Frank in particular was annoyed, because, as I’ve said, he never really believed that Kathryn was dead – or he wouldn’t let himself believe it. Charles came to see us after the police released him. He said that he was really sorry about her disappearance, and asked if there was anything he could do. I must say that I had my doubts about him after that.”
“What sort of doubts?”
Mrs. Sheppard shrugged again. “Nothing I can put my finger on. It was just that he didn’t seem upset enough. After all, Kathryn was still his girlfriend – she wasn’t his ‘ex’, like with Hedley. But it was almost as if Charles was already getting on with the next phase of his life, that coming to see us was part of the clearing-up process to give him a new start. And it did make me wonder if getting our approval was part of this as well, that perhaps he was throwing the police off the scent by courting us in this way. And in time I did begin to think that it may have been him, after all.”
“You mean that you suspected that Charles Heward might be Kathryn’s killer?”
“Yes. There was just something about his behaviour that didn’t ring true: that and the fact that I could think of absolutely no-one else who might have wanted to harm Kathryn. But maybe I was just overwrought after she disappeared. That was what Frank thought, anyway. He didn’t think that Charles could have killed her, even though he didn’t like the man. But of course he never got as far as believing that anyone could have killed her.”
“Do you ever hear from Charles now?”
“ No. He sent Christmas cards for a couple of years and then stopped. My guess was that he had got married. If that was so and he was innocent, I certainly didn’t begrudge him it. Better than living the kind of half-life that Frank and I had here.”
“So, to go back to when Kathryn disappeared: she was living in the flat in Little London and going out with Charles, but not living with him. I think that Kathryn was reported as a missing person on a Monday?”
“That’s right. Her father and I had called her several times over the course of the weekend, and we couldn’t get a reply. We had a key to the flat, so Frank went round on Monday morning – early, before she would have set off for work – to check that she was all right. He said that he had knocked and got no answer, so he let himself in. She didn’t mind us going in: we’d done it before. She wasn’t there, but all her things were: her uniform for the bank was hanging up, and her handbag was lying on the table. He thought that she might have gone out for a run – she was keen on keeping fit – so he sat down and waited. She didn’t come back, so he was still waiting at the time she would have started work. He called the bank and they said that she hadn’t turned up for work, although she didn’t have the day booked as holiday. It turned out that she hadn’t been there on the previous Friday, either, though she had left them a message saying that something had come up unexpectedly and that she would like to take the day as leave. All of this was quite unlike Kathryn: letting people down, keeping them guessing in this way. The police asked us to keep it secret that she had taken the day off on the Friday. It wasn’t reported in the papers.”
“She had been at work as usual on the Thursday?”
“I believe so.”
“Did you or Frank see Kathryn or hear from her at all over the course of the preceding Friday or the weekend?”
“No.”
“What about Charles?”
“Why would we have heard from him without Kathryn?”
“She could have been ill or upset about something. He could have called to tell you.”
“No. Nothing like that happened.”
“When did you last see Kathryn?”
“The Monday before. She called in to drop off some information about bank cards that Frank had asked her for. She stopped for a cup of tea.”
�
��Did she seem quite normal?”
“Yes, though I wasn’t expecting her not to be. She was a sunny girl, Kathryn. Not often moody. But if there had been something troubling her and I had looked for it, I might have been able to tell. We were very close. The three of us, Frank as well. People always said what a close family we were.”
Mrs. Sheppard seemed near to tears again. Juliet realised that she was unlikely to learn more about Kathryn on this occasion. She knew that she had pushed Mrs. Sheppard far enough already, given that the ostensible purpose of her visit had been to advise her of her daughter’s death, not to interrogate her. She finished her tea and stood up.
“Thank you very much indeed, Mrs. Sheppard. Please allow me to say how sorry I am for your loss. I won’t trouble you further today, but I promise to keep in touch with you as our investigation proceeds and I hope that you will let me contact you again if we think that you can give us any further help. Would you like me to request a visit from a bereavement counsellor?”
She understood but still flinched from the scornful look which distorted the woman’s face.
Chapter Thirteen
“Are you there, darling?” It is Peter, tapping too discreetly on the glass panel of the flat door, as he always does before he enters. When I was still living on my own I had found it a charming gesture of good manners, but now I sense that there is something insolent about it: almost as if he were saying, “I know I’m here on sufferance; I know that the place is still yours, and I will observe all due decorum in order to spare your feelings (even though I am your superior), to prevent your taking offence.” I have loved Peter from the start for his poshness, but sometimes my infatuation with it helps me to understand very clearly that what I feel for Peter is a masochistic kind of love. As far as Peter is concerned, I will always be his slightly grubby little working class friend.
“Of course I’m here,” I say tersely. And of course Peter knows I am here. It is six-thirty in the evening, for one thing, and I am always home from work by five. The door has been left unlocked, for another – and we are both fastidious about security. Neither of us would have gone out without remembering to lock up.
“Good, good,” says Peter brightly, entering the room. “I’ve brought you some flowers.” With a flourish, he presents me with a bunch of hothouse blooms. They are quite exotic, the sort of flowers you see in contract displays in banks and offices. They include lilies and some of those peculiar half-thistle, half-flower things with green heads.
“Thank you,” I say. I put them down on the coffee table.
“You aren’t cross with me, darling, are you?” Peter darts me one of his lightning sideways looks. “Because if you are it would be very disappointing.” He sits down opposite me, and looks at me in a rather strange, too-intense way. I think I have picked up a hint of menace in his tone. I could be mistaken, because the next moment he is his usual mercurial self, and launches into, first, an expression of empathy and, second, one of his anecdotes.
“I can see that you have had a disagreeable day. Poor you! It must be so hard to have to keep on grinding away in that drab little office day after day.” He holds up his hand as I open my mouth to retaliate: it will not be the first argument we have had about the relative merits of my ‘grubbing’ for a living, as Peter is pleased to call it, while he lives on Daddy’s legacy and Mummy’s handouts, as befit his talents and refined personality.
“No, No! Please stop there. I assure you that I have no wish to provoke. I apologise if what I have just said has irritated you. It was meant merely as a prelude to my offering to prepare supper this evening. But first there is something that I simply have to tell you.” He smiles conspiratorially. “Guess who I met when I was out today?”
I sigh. “I couldn’t begin to guess,” I say. “For a start, I have no idea where you go on your daytime forays. For another thing, I know virtually none of your friends and acquaintances.”
“Jillian!” says Peter, ignoring all of this. “I bumped into my sister Jillian. Now, what do you think of that?”
“I had no idea that you had a sister, Peter,” I say. “Now that you tell me that you do, I don’t understand why your having met her by accident was such a big deal. It’s a small town, after all.”
“Oh, yes, but you see, she doesn’t live here. No, no. She lives in Birkenhead, close to Mummy. I don’t think that she has ever been to Spalding before. So you see, she must have had a reason.”
“Well, I assume that the reason must have been to see you. But if she came all the way from Birkenhead, I don’t understand why she didn’t tell you that she was coming. You might have been out, after all. In fact, you were out when you saw her.”
“Oh, but you don’t know Jillian. She understands me very well. She knows that I am a creature of habit; and also that I would avoid meeting her if I could. Not that I detest her or anything coarse like that, you understand. It’s just that she takes a very superior moral stance where I am concerned; and she certainly frightens Mummy off whenever I ask the old girl for some money. So Jillian will have known that the chances of actually meeting me if we had prearranged it would have been very slender, because I would either have put her off, or more probably allowed her to come and then done a bunk for the day. I take my hat off to her for the tactic that she employed instead, which I guess was to follow me from the flat and then appear as if by accident when I was a safe distance away from it.”
“This all sounds very paranoid to me. Did you ask her how she happened to be there?”
“Of course not. I simply took her to buy some tea. You don’t understand sisters: you are in the fortunate position of not having had one. Jillian taught me all that I need to know about girls, especially that boys are infinitely to be preferred.” I only recall much later that Peter gives me one of his sidelong looks as he says this. The superciliousness of his comment annoys me so much that I make a bad mistake. To this day I regret it. It sets in train a catastrophic sequence of events that might otherwise have been avoided.
“I know more about sisters than you think. I grew up with one.”
Peter scrutinises me with his black button eyes.
“Really? You are a dark horse. What is her name?”
“Bryony.” I swallow hard. One of the many beauties of my relationship with Peter is that he knows nothing of my family history – or so I believe. Now I know that it will take all of my strength and ingenuity to prevent him from poking and probing until he has wormed it all out of me.
“Bryony? What a ghastly name! What could your mother have been thinking of?”
“For Christ’s sake, Peter, give it a rest, will you? For that matter, I don’t think that Jillian’s such a wonderful name, either.”
“Well,” says Peter, steepling his fingers, “I am in complete agreement with you there. But my view is coloured by association, no doubt. Where is Bryony, anyway? I presume that she lives away somewhere. Otherwise she would have called or telephoned on some occasion when I’ve been here, I’m sure. Does she live abroad?”
Something inside me snaps. I scream at Peter for the next five minutes. I don’t know exactly what I am saying. It is as if I have lost consciousness and fallen into a bloody sea of anger. Gradually I find myself surfacing again and Peter’s face emerges out of the red blur. I see that he is shocked, but also that something very important has happened. I realise immediately that I have probably told him other things that I will come to regret, apart from the fact of Bryony’s having existed. Of course, I know with a sinking heart what they are likely to be about: myself and Tirzah.
Peter has been holding his hand up against the side of his face, as if to shield it. Now, as the vituperative torrent of words that I have dredged up from my subconscious slowly falters, he allows it to drop and pats my knee.
“Goodness me,” he says, and I can detect no sarcasm now. “I have often congratulated myself upon my perspicacity
at spotting from the start that you are a very interesting person. However, I could never have fathomed exactly how interesting. What a pedigree! It knocks Daddy’s business dealings, which I have always suspected were a little shady, into a cocked hat. I really should love to meet your mother.”
I do not ask Peter exactly what I have revealed to him, and in fact I am never to find out. Looking back later, I am convinced that even though this must have been be the occasion on which I revealed details about my mother’s crime, Peter has known about Tirzah all along, though I doubt if he could have done his research diligently enough to have discovered Bryony as well. Actually, I have come to believe that Peter made his first overtures of friendship to me because of Tirzah.
“Anyway,” he says airily, “to return to Jillian – a safer topic for us, even if I do regard her as a dangerously loose cannon per se. I should tell you that my sister is quite a little bitch. She seems to have spent her entire life scheming to make sure that I get as little from the parental pot of gold as possible. Mummy would be a darling without her. Mummy always appreciated me when I was small.”
I am exhausted by my outburst. I am also feeling a little bit sick. It takes all of my strength to maintain the interest in Peter’s own affairs that – especially after such a lapse – courtesy demands. I close my eyes and grip the arms of my chair.
“What did she want?”
“She wanted to talk about Mummy’s money. I’m afraid that I skirted the subject and insisted that we talk about other things. Not that I’m not interested in it, as you know. In fact, one could say that it is my passion – next to you, of course, darling. But I will not have Jillian creeping up on me and trying to bounce me into new situations before I have had time to think about them. So I only allowed her to get so far. It would appear that she has a plan for putting Mummy permanently into the nursing home where she goes when Jillian wants a rest and selling the house. I have no objection to either of those things; but when Jillian started talking about what should happen to the money after the nursing home fees have been deducted, I shut her up.”
In the Family Page 9
