In the Family

by Christina James

  “And Bryony – where was she?”

  “I – don’t know. I don’t remember either seeing her or talking to her.”

  “But she was there? She must have been there, somewhere.”

  “I really don’t know. She could have been out visiting a friend.”

  “Oh, come now, Hedley, that’s hardly likely, is it?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because, my dear sweet disingenuous Hedley with the suddenly very faulty memory, an announcement about the murder had gone out on Radio Lincolnshire, on the four o’clock news. If Bryony had been out visiting someone, she would almost certainly have heard or been told about it after that; but as you know, the police are usually quite – I was going to say sensitive, but circumspect is probably a better word – when it comes to making sure that the relatives of suddenly deceased people don’t get a nasty shock from the wrong quarter. And the Lincolnshire police were no exception, even then. They had rounded up all the members of the family and got them back at Westlode Street before any details were released to the media. Which leaves a few loose ends to be tied up in the story that you tell, as well as the many omissions that you claim not to be able to fill, doesn’t it?”

  I bridle.

  “What exactly are you trying to say?”

  “I’m not trying to say anything, dear boy. I am saying it. What I say is this: that the, by your own admission imperfect, story that you have just told me is actually just a load of fabricated bullshit. Now, would you care to sit quietly and work your way through this?” He hands me his folder of news clippings.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Bryony Atkins had never been registered as a missing person, and Tim was well aware that he would be discouraged by his superiors from spending too much time on trying to trace her, when (they would argue) his main focus should be to track down Kathryn Sheppard’s killer. Police resources were scarce, relatives needed results, there were other crimes that needed solving, etcetera, etcetera. There was only slender evidence to support his theory that Bryony and Kathryn had met similar fates: that Bryony was last heard of at around the same time as Kathryn, that they had known each other, and Dr. Hemingway’s half-articulated suspicions. He would have to find some short-cuts if he was going to pursue this line of enquiry. Rather reluctantly, he picked up his phone and keyed in Ronald Atkins’ number.

  “Mr. Atkins? It is Inspector Yates again. I’m planning to carry out a few routine enquiries about your daughter.”

  “You’re not thinking of digging up the garden again, presumably?”

  Tim laughed reassuringly. “Certainly not. Nothing nearly as dramatic as that. I just want to know which school your daughter attended.”

  “St. Thomas’s C of E Primary School.” Was the man really so obtuse, or was he being deliberately obstructive?

  “That’s helpful,” Tim said smoothly, “but what I’m really interested in is the secondary school that she attended: the school that she was going to when she applied for university.”

  “It was the Girls’ High School, of course. It’s still the only school in this town from which girls go to university.”

  “Of course – you’re right. I should have thought of that. Although she could have taken her ‘A’ levels at an FE college.”

  “Is that all you want to know?”

  “For the time being. Thank you very much for your help.”

  Was it Tim’s imagination, or had Ronald put down the receiver rather precipitately?

  He looked up the number of the school and called it. He introduced himself and asked to speak to the Headmistress, and found himself talking to a bossily efficient secretary.

  “Mr. Cooper is our Headteacher,” she said. “I believe that he is available at the moment. May I ask what it is about?”

  “Just some routine enquiries – about an ex-pupil of the school.”

  “Oh – I see. Just a minute. I’ll ask him if he will speak to you.”

  In a few seconds he had been put through. “Alex Cooper here,” said a bright voice full of energy. “How may I help – Inspector Yates, is it?”

  “Yes,” said Tim. “I’m trying to gather some information about a girl who attended the school about thirty years ago. Her name was Bryony Atkins. Would you still have any records for her?”

  There was a brief silence at the other end of the phone.

  “It’s possible that there are records,” said Alex Cooper slowly, “but if they exist, they won’t be here. The school was rebuilt ten years ago, and we started keeping all our records electronically then. There were files going back from the mid-1990s to the foundation of the school in the twenties, but we no longer had space to store them here. They were taken to County Hall, to be put in the archives there. The intention was certainly to archive them at the time, rather than destroy them, but of course I have no idea whether they have been destroyed since.”

  “Thank you, that is helpful. I will pursue this further as one of my lines of enquiry. I don’t suppose that there is anyone still teaching at the school who was there in the early 1970s, is there? You didn’t by any chance know Bryony Atkins yourself?”

  Alex Cooper laughed. “I was barely out of nappies in 1972, Inspector. I came here as a head of department when the new school was built. I have certainly worked with colleagues who were here in the 1970s, but I’m pretty sure that they have all retired now. There was a little group who had taught here all their lives whom the education authority encouraged to retire together about three years ago. I think that they were the last ones from that period. Apart from Mr. Eggleton, of course.”

  “Who is Mr. Eggleton?”

  “He also used to teach here, but he retired a long time ago. He is still with us in a voluntary capacity, though: he runs the Old Girls’ Association. He is also writing a history of the school.”

  “Would it be possible for me to arrange to meet him?”

  “I should think so. I’ll give him a call, and ring you back. When would you like to come?”

  “Would this afternoon be too short notice?”

  “I don’t know. I can ask.”

  It took Alex Cooper less than five minutes to return Tim’s call. “He says he is free this afternoon. He’ll be happy to meet you for tea, here at the school, if you would like to come at about 3.30 p.m. To tell you the truth, he likes nothing better than having an excuse to turn up here. The school has just about been his whole life and he’s like a fish out of water when he’s not doing something connected with it. His name is George, by the way.”

  George Eggleton turned out to be a large, untidy man with rheumy eyes and the dropped-down jowls of a bulldog. He was dressed in a green checked sports jacket and grey flannels, and wore tortoiseshell spectacles perched on the end of his nose. Tim thought that he had probably been dressed much like this for the whole of the four decades that he had worked at the school. From his appearance, his age was indeterminable, but he must have been in his seventies. He was already ensconced in the ‘Headteacher’s’ office when Tim arrived, occupying the only easy chair. After introductions, the bossy secretary brought in tea. Alex Cooper, who was dapper and wiry with a shock of dark curly hair, declined when he was offered some, saying that he had other things to attend to, and excused himself.

  George fixed his bulldog eyes on Tim, who saw intelligence twinkling there, despite their wateriness.

  “Mr. Cooper tells me that you are interested in Bryony Atkins.”

  “That is correct. Do you remember her?”

  “Of course I remember her: anyone who had been at the school when she was there would have remembered her, after the murder case. She was the girl whose mother killed her grandmother. But I assume that you are aware of this?”

  “Yes I am. But what I’m more interested in at the moment is whether you have any recollections of Bryony. What was she like? W
hat were her interests? Was there anything unusual about her?”

  “You mean anything that made her stand out as the daughter of a killer?” George Eggleton’s eyes twinkled again.

  “Just any memories that you may have would be helpful.”

  George sat back in his seat and sipped at his tea, which had been served in the kind of sea-green thick-rimmed cups that Tim remembered from parents’ evenings during his own school days.

  “Of course I have some memories, though how helpful they might be I’m not sure. English and History were my subjects, and I taught her both during her time at the school. She wasn’t outstanding at either, though she was always in the ‘A’ stream. But she was very good at Art. I used to produce the school plays, you know, and she always helped with designing and making the sets. She was good at that, too. Just a little bit shy, I seem to remember, and not good at taking criticism if anyone ventured any – but that is quite normal for girls of that age, or indeed people of any age, don’t you think?”

  “I agree. So there was nothing out of the ordinary about her?”

  “No, nothing. Her brother, though – he was a different matter. Of course, he did not attend this school: he went to the Boys’ Grammar School. There was none of that nonsense of sharing lessons in the sixth form that we have now. But he would come to wait for her sometimes when we were working on the sets. I thought that he was a very peculiar young man indeed.”

  “In what way?”

  “He came to meet Bryony, but his attention was always focused on the other girls. I don’t just mean that he fancied them – in fact, I don’t think that he did. He seemed to be fixated with girls who were Bryony’s friends. Not in a nice way, either. He would give them some very ugly looks. I really didn’t like him, but I did not have sufficient reason to ask him to wait outside for her; for a start, I supposed I could have been imagining things. It was slightly odd for a brother to want to wait around for his sister at all, or so I thought. But then we’re all odd in one way or another, aren’t we?” He beamed at Tim, who almost forgot to return the smile because he was busy following a new train of thought.

  “Mr. Eggleton, do you remember the Kathryn Sheppard case? She was a young woman of twenty-four who disappeared at around the same time that Bryony Atkins left school.”

  “I do remember it vaguely – they never found her, did they? Her disappearance didn’t make such an impression on me as the Atkins murder, because she wasn’t a pupil here. In fact, I don’t think that originally she was a local girl at all.”

  “You’re right, she wasn’t. But she did go out with Hedley Atkins for a while. Then she met another man on a train, and broke it off with Hedley. But their relationship had been over for some time when she disappeared.”

  George Eggleton appeared to be losing interest. “Poor girl,” he said. “I wonder what became of her? And what became of Bryony, for that matter, Inspector? Did she get into some kind of trouble? Is that why you are here?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  It was 4 p.m. on St. Valentine’s Day and, as Tim looked out of the grimy window of the briefing room at Spalding Police Station, he noticed with satisfaction that the evenings were beginning to draw out at last. It would be light for at least another hour. He had just finished giving his team a briefing, or rather he had led their regular information-sharing session, backed up as usual by Juliet’s painstaking work. Nothing of any great significance had been brought to light since the last meeting. There was a report from Andy Carstairs on what had been found during the excavations of the garden at Westlode Street, which was, precisely, nothing, unless you counted the long-buried skeletons of three dray horses. Ricky McFadyen was working with Crimewatch to rebroadcast the reconstruction of Kathryn Sheppard’s last movements which had been filmed fifteen years earlier, with ‘new evidence’ – though there was precious little of that, except the details of the discovery of her skeleton and the decision to release the information that she had taken the Friday of the last week that she had been seen alive as holiday. Tim himself had tried and failed to interview Hedley Atkins again. He’d been told by Hedley’s boss that he was taking a week’s holiday in Scotland. It was a nuisance, but they didn’t have sufficient evidence to take steps to trace Hedley and either demand his early return or travel to Scotland to interview him. They would have to wait until his holiday was over.

  Following Tim’s earlier praise, Juliet seemed to have got hung up on the textiles stuff again. He realised that she had taken her researches to the point where they could no longer produce anything useful: the problem was that although it might be possible to identify the actual roll of cloth from which a garment had been cut and therefore establish its exact date of manufacture, it was quite impossible to ascertain how long it had belonged to its owner, or indeed whether there had been more than one owner. The same went for the ring and the plastic Indian. He didn’t like to discourage her, but tomorrow he would have to tell her not to spend any more time on such minutiae.

  The whole team had now read the substantial police files on Dorothy Atkins’ arrest and trial, as well as the slenderer ones covering Kathryn Sheppard’s disappearance. He had encouraged them to do this, but he knew that there was a risk that they would find spurious links as well as real ones. He himself believed that the two murders of Doris Atkins and Kathryn Sheppard were linked in some way, but he continued to be sceptical about the nature of the link. He believed that it had yet to be proved that Dorothy had killed Doris and he was almost certain that she had not killed Kathryn. However, he was aware that his own brief account of his and Juliet’s visit to the nursing-home did not cast Dorothy in a sympathetic light.

  After the team had gone their separate ways, he had remained standing in front of the glass information panels for a while, contemplating Juliet’s neat blue felt-tip handwriting and wondering if there really were any useful clues amongst all this welter of detail, or whether they were just collecting some elaborate and very expensive red herrings which would take them no further at all towards establishing the circumstances of Kathryn Sheppard’s death.

  There was a knock at the door, and one of the administrative staff came in. “There is a call for you, Inspector,” she said. “It has come through on your direct line. Do you want me to transfer it to this room?”

  It took him a while to register what he was saying. “Oh – no thank you – Sheila? – I will take it in my office.” Immediately he knew about it, he had a feeling about this call. He even wondered if the caller might be Tirzah. He had deliberately ignored her since the meeting at the nursing home three days before, neither calling her nor asking for permission to see her again, hoping that his apparent indifference would precipitate the sort of productive anger that Mrs. Meredith had been talking about. He had been told that Tirzah hated to be slighted. For this reason he took his time now, ambling into his office and seating himself comfortably in his swivel chair before he picked up the receiver.

  “This is Inspector Yates speaking.”

  The voice that replied was female, quietly modulated but obviously troubled. Not Tirzah, he knew that in an instant.

  “Oh, hello, Inspector, this is Margaret Meredith. I thought you should know. Dorothy Atkins died earlier this afternoon.”

  “Died!” he exclaimed. “But how? She wasn’t ill, was she?”

  “Not as far as we know, Inspector, and as well as we can tell before we get the results of the autopsy, it wasn’t suicide either. She seems simply to have slipped away.”

  “Indeed,” said Tim, raising one eyebrow. She could not see this, of course, but it was clear that she caught his tone.

  “Tirzah wasn’t the suicidal type, Inspector. She may have driven other people to contemplate ending their lives, but she got too much enjoyment out of hers. Not necessarily innocent enjoyment, but I hardly need to tell you that.”

  “How did she die? Did she collapse? Was she already in
bed?”

  “Neither of those. In fact, she was sitting in the chair in the day room, where you last saw her. She fell out of the chair on to the floor. She was sitting with Irene – one of our more challenged guests – and according to Irene, she suddenly keeled over. The sister on duty heard a bump as she fell. We called our usual doctor, of course, but he said that she had been dead for some minutes when he arrived. He thought that her death had been instant. A massive heart attack, in all probability.”

  “Did Irene tell you anything else? Had she been talking to Tirzah?”

  “Apparently she had. Tirzah went and sat with her and struck up a conversation. This was not unusual – I think I told you that sometimes she would befriend the guests, particularly the more confused ones; rarely the ones that were still mentally agile, for some reason. Irene can’t remember much of what she said – I wouldn’t expect her to be able to – but Natalia, one of the ward orderlies, overheard some of it. According to her, Tirzah was describing Doris Atkins’ death.”

  “But you told me that that was a strictly taboo subject. You said never to question her about it.”

  “I did say that and I would give the same advice again, even now. I have seen several people approach Tirzah with the aim of finding out exactly how Doris died, and each time she has reacted either with near-hysteria or a stony silence. I don’t think that she was simulating the hysteria, either. Something about Doris’s death really freaked her out.”

  “That’s hardly surprising, is it? Many women – many men, for that matter – may contemplate murdering their mothers-in-law, but few actually do it. Even a hard-bitten woman like Tirzah must have had difficulty in facing up to the fact that she was a killer.”

  “If you say so, Inspector.” He remembered that she had used the same phrase once before. It was her way of telling him that she did not doubt that he was wrong.