by Nicci French
“Did he say “creepy”?”
“I don’t know.” Yvette looked surprised. “Maybe that’s my interpretation. There were drugs, mixed-up relationships.”
“Mixed-up in what way?”
“Everyone sleeping with everyone else, I think. He says that from the moment they met her, there was never any doubt in his mind that it was Hannah. Sedge bent over backwards to consider other possibilities, I gather—but there weren’t any. She was the only real suspect. She was the only person there was evidence against—and there was a lot of it. Blood and DNA and fingerprints and no alibi.”
“She said she went to meet her stepfather, but it was her mother who met her.”
“It wasn’t much of an alibi. There was no record of a phone call from him to her, no one saw her that evening, and her mother certainly didn’t, because she was lying dead in Dulwich. We may not know much but we know that.”
“Did he think the case was solid?”
Yvette looked at Frieda with a stony expression. “He thought the conviction was one hundred percent the right one.”
“But not the case?”
“You don’t know how things work on the ground. He may have cut corners, and that’s not right, I’m not defending it—and God knows I’ve stuck my neck out when I’ve seen officers do that, and I’ve been through shit because of it. I’m just saying that sometimes it’s what happens. Malik was fierce in his defense of Sedge. Sometimes good, honest, idealistic, clever detectives don’t tick all the boxes and fill out all the forms. That’s all.”
“So Ben Sedge cut corners but he got the right person.”
“That’s right. And what Malik asked me—and what I’m asking you—is what the fuck are we doing stirring it up now, all these years later? What if you make enough noise and find enough shit to overturn the conviction, even though she obviously did it? What then? Do you want to take responsibility for having a crazy murderer released because of bureaucratic irregularities?”
Frieda smiled at Yvette. “It’s not often that I’m accused of following rules too rigidly.”
Yvette almost smiled back. Frieda saw the muscles in her face relax. Then she remembered herself. “I’m just saying, you have to think about it,” she muttered.
“I will. Now, let’s go and visit the father.”
Brenda Docherty led them into a high-ceilinged sitting room. She must have been about the same age as her husband, whom Frieda knew to be in his early fifties. She had graying brown hair cut quite short and wore a flecked turtleneck jumper over corduroy trousers. There was a pen tucked behind one ear and glasses hung around her neck on a cord. Her manner was cordial but guarded. Behind her, Frieda saw a dog, rough-haired and floppy-eared, with a beseeching expression in its brown eyes. It looked old. When it saw Frieda it produced a single, experimental bark, then gave up.
“I’ll fetch Seamus. Do you want any coffee?”
“We’ve just had some, thank you.”
“He’ll be with you in a minute.” Brenda Docherty turned in the doorway, visibly hesitating. “He’s not happy about your visit,” she said.
“I’ll be as quick as I can.”
“When I heard you were coming, I took the day off work. I must say, I don’t quite understand why you have to rake it up again, after all these years.”
Frieda felt Yvette’s gaze on her. She didn’t answer, just waited until Brenda left the room, and they heard her voice calling from the bottom of the stairs. Frieda’s eye was caught by a photo on the mantelpiece above the fireplace. She rose to look at it: three people sitting on a hay bale in a stubble field. On the left was Brenda Docherty, slimmer, with her hair long and tied back in a colorful bandanna. On the right was a man Frieda took to be Seamus Docherty. And in the middle sat Rory, leaning into his father, whose arm was round his thin shoulders. Judging by other photos that she had seen of him, Frieda thought it must have been taken not many months before he was killed—probably the autumn of the previous year. He was wearing shorts and a blue T-shirt, and his face was freckled from the sun. He was smiling widely, but still had the anxious look about him that Frieda had noticed in other pictures. She looked at the other photos along the mantelpiece, but there were no others of his previous family. No Rory or Deborah. Of course, no Hannah.
“I don’t know how I can help.”
Seamus Docherty sat in the armchair facing them. He had a quiet voice and a thin face, an air of forced calm. His hair was receding and Frieda could see the bones of his skull, the shape of the sockets round his gray eyes. He looked very different from Aidan Locke, Deborah Docherty’s genial, larger-than-life second husband.
“I know this must be difficult, Mr. Docherty.”
He didn’t speak, just inclined his head slightly.
“I don’t know if you’re aware of the questions that have been raised about the investigation into the three murders.”
“I am not aware.” Was there a touch of irony in his voice? “What kind of questions?”
“Just procedural ones.” This from Yvette, loudly.
“So why has that anything to do with me?”
“I just wanted to ask you a few things,” said Frieda. She leaned forward slightly. “Mainly about Hannah.”
“Hannah.” He repeated the name as though it had a nasty taste.
“Perhaps you could start off by telling me her state of mind at the time of the murders.”
“I can’t say anything that I haven’t already said before.” Frieda waited. “She was angry.” His grimace was almost a smirk, as if he would suddenly burst into laughter. “Obviously.”
“Who was she angry with?”
“Who wasn’t she angry with? She was angry with her mother. That above all. She’d always had a difficult relationship with Debs. Deborah.” Frieda saw him flush as he corrected himself. “She was angry with her stepfather. She was angry with her teachers. I think, or thought, she was angry with her boyfriend, though she never told me anything about that. She was angry with her friends. She was angry with politicians. She was angry with journalists. She was angry with people in business. She was angry with anyone who was rich—which takes us back to her mother and stepfather, I guess.”
“Was she angry with her brother?”
Seamus Docherty gave a small grunt and twisted his face away from them. He passed a hand—long-fingered and delicate—across the back of his head, as if checking the hair was still there. “Rory. I don’t know. I didn’t think so. But—” He stopped talking. They heard a radio playing from somewhere in the house.
“And you?” asked Frieda. “Was she angry with you?”
“Yes.”
“Very?”
“Yes.”
“And with your new wife?”
“Yes. Poor Brenda.”
“Was she so angry with all these people that she was murderous?”
Seamus Docherty stared at Frieda. She saw his jaw muscles tighten. “Clearly, I didn’t think so at the time or I would have done something.”
“Why was she so angry?”
“Do you have children?”
“No,” said Frieda.
“No,” said Yvette. Her voice was still too loud.
“She was a teenager. A clever, difficult, prickly, tempestuous teenager.” At these words, Frieda thought of Chloë. “Her parents were separated, God help us both. She was very devoted, almost clingy when she was little. Very protective of me.” He blinked fiercely. “When I left, she took it hard. It was a difficult age. She was just approaching her teens. I tried to see her regularly but Deborah and Aidan made that quite difficult. Her boyfriend at the end was bad news. She mixed with drug addicts and loafers. She read books telling her the world was a bad place. And one day she—” He stopped, swallowed so that they could see his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “You know what she did.”
“So it makes a kind of sense to you?” asked Frieda.
“Of course it doesn’t make sense. We thought it was a phase, something
lots of teenagers go through, except she just did it more wholeheartedly because she was a wholehearted kind of person, always had been. Then she killed my son.” He gave a dry cough and repeated, “My son.”
“What did you feel when you discovered that you had inherited everything?” asked Yvette, into the silence.
He turned his gray eyes to her. “I don’t know what to say to that,” he answered, after a pause. “My son was dead. My ex-wife was dead. My daughter was a murderer and locked away in a hospital for the criminally insane. Everywhere I turned there were journalists asking me what it was like to be the father of a monster. Asking me how she’d become like that, what we’d done to her as parents or what we hadn’t done. What I got out of it hardly seemed relevant. Not when it was set against what I’d lost.”
“It was a lot of money,” said Yvette.
He regarded her stonily. “I felt—Well, it was unsettling. We were divorced. The money was to go to the children, and then to their children.”
“What was your own financial situation at the time?” Yvette asked.
“I don’t understand why you’re asking these questions.”
“Because someone cut corners,” said Yvette. She darted a bright, hostile glance at Frieda. “And now we have to go through certain things again.”
“I’m sure you know all of this already. I wasn’t well off. They were. Deborah’s money came from Aidan. He was the high-flying businessman.”
“But now you’re well off.” Yvette looked around the large room.
“Better off.”
“As a matter of interest, can you tell us how much the estate was worth?”
“I don’t see why it’s a matter of interest, so I’d prefer not to. If you don’t mind.”
“I understand,” continued Yvette, the color high in her cheeks, “that you collected some things from the house while the investigation was still in progress.”
Frieda watched the two of them. She realized Yvette, in spite of her distrust and her reluctance, had been doing her homework.
“Did I?” asked Seamus Docherty.
“Yes.”
“I might have done.”
“Why?”
“Because they were mine.”
“What were they?”
“I can’t remember.” He pinched the top of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Brenda said I was too soft-hearted, a bit of a pushover—not that she’s much better. A pair of fools, that’s us—that’s why I married her. She’s kind. We make each other safe. What was I saying?”
“What you took from the house.”
“Yes. When Deborah and I separated, I didn’t insist on taking things that were mine—well, because mostly they weren’t mine, they were ours, and I didn’t want to make a fuss, but there were a few things. Some books, a picture, a box of photos, stuff like that. So I went and got them. Or some of them, anyway.”
“There were papers too,” said Frieda.
“My solicitor was asking questions about the accounts so I thought it best just to gather everything up and give it to him.”
“In the middle of the investigation?”
“They weren’t relevant. Just bit and pieces. I told them that when they came to retrieve them. Anyway, there was nothing useful there, nothing about legacies or anything, and I chucked everything away. I couldn’t bear to keep it all. Kids’ reports. Stories they’d written. I didn’t want to read them . . . You can’t imagine what it felt like seeing them. Rory’s back-to-front handwriting. Pictures. Photos—you know, happy families.” He glared at them both. “Old letters. Even a few from me to her, from the old days. I thought I wanted them but it turned out I didn’t. I couldn’t keep them in the house.”
“So you threw everything away?”
“Pretty much. Not the teapot or the picture. Almost everything else. Sometimes now I wish I hadn’t. The garbage men must have come early the next morning because when the police arrived it had already gone.”
“Can I ask you about your ex-wife?” asked Frieda.
“What about her?”
“What kind of terms were you on with her?”
Suddenly he looked more wary. “We didn’t have much to do with each other. She lived in her world and I lived in mine.”
“But you had two children. Did you talk about Hannah and her problems?”
“Not really. Deborah gave me instructions sometimes—she was always very good at that, very certain she knew best.”
“How else would you describe her?”
“Who, Debs?” This time he didn’t correct the name.
“Yes.”
Seamus Docherty stood up and went to the window. With his back to them, he said, “She was clever, stubborn, a woman of few words but with deep feelings. She spoke her mind. You’d want her on your side. She was determined, organized, ambitious for her children. And for me, once,” he added.
“Until you left her,” said Yvette.
He turned. “We left each other.” His voice was soft, uninflected. Frieda couldn’t tell if he was angry or sad.
“Was it because you’d found someone else?” Yvette persevered.
“There was no ill will.”
“Easy for you to say that.” Yvette looked surprised at what she had said, and her face flushed.
Seamus Docherty looked away again, back out of the window where the rain fell. “No one can understand a marriage from the outside. There were good times once, and then they weren’t good any longer. It was painful, distressing, too prolonged. We both let the other down. Now she’s dead and nothing can be changed.”
“She left you, didn’t she?” said Frieda, suddenly certain. “Not the other way round.”
Seamus Docherty slowly turned to face her. “Have you ever been divorced?”
“I’ve never been married.”
“No children, no marriage, no divorce. You’ve had a sheltered life.” Frieda didn’t say anything. “There’s always mess when a marriage ends—never believe anyone who tells you different.”
“So she had an affair with Aidan, who was richer and more successful than you,” said Frieda. “And she left you. Did you feel bitter?”
“I’m not saying that’s what happened. And, no, I didn’t feel bitter.”
“Or angry?” asked Yvette. “You must have been furiously angry and humiliated.”
“No.”
“Did Hannah know it was her mother who had ended the marriage? Is that why she was so angry with her?”
“I haven’t said that it was. You’re making assumptions. I don’t know what Hannah knew or thought or decided. She usually knew everything that was going on. She wasn’t someone you could hide things from. She was always on the look-out, always listening in to conversations, picking up secrets. Little Pig with Big Ears—that’s what we used to call her when she was small.”
“You talk about her in the past tense,” said Frieda, softly.
“Because she is in the past for me. She killed my son.”
“She’s still your daughter.”
“I have no daughter. I have no children.”
“You’ve never visited her?”
“I went once, just to look her in the face. She’s a monster.”
“She’s still a human being.”
“Easy for you to say that. Easy for you to stand there and talk about what happened. I try not to think about the past.”
“She’s all alone. You’re the only person she has.”
“She doesn’t have me. I’ll never see her again. She’s dead to me.”
“I’m going to find out how much the estate was worth,” said Yvette, as they walked back down the street toward the Overground station.
“Good.”
“Though it’s a wild goose chase.” She snapped her umbrella open. “And, also, you want to know about Hannah’s life before the murders.”
“Yes?”
“There’s a woman who’s made herself the Hannah Docherty expert. Look on Google. It’s
her life’s work. She’s completely obsessed. She’ll know things about Hannah that even Hannah never knew.”
“What’s her name?”
“She’s called Erin Brack.”
“She thinks Hannah’s innocent?”
“I don’t know. But, innocent or guilty, she thinks she’s a freedom fighter.”
FOURTEEN
Maria Dreyfus arrived late. Her coat was wrongly buttoned and her dark hair was scraped back in an asymmetrical bun. “Sorry,” she said.
“That’s all right.”
“I was going to say it was the public transport, but it wasn’t.”
Frieda smiled. “Then I’m glad you didn’t say it.”
“It was me. I didn’t know whether to come. I had a row with my husband. He thinks I should snap out of it.”
“Is that what he said?”
“Not quite. He said that sometimes talking cures make things worse, not better—that dwelling on what’s wrong can make it seem more real, more solid. Suffering becomes who you are. If that makes sense.”
“It does.”
“I’m not saying I agree.”
“It would be fine if you did. Because, of course, it’s something that therapists have to consider carefully. But you aren’t here to embrace your suffering. You’re here to work out why you’re feeling the way that you do, and by understanding it you may be able to have some power over it.”
“He also said I should go back to work and maybe think about taking up some form of exercise. Running, he suggested.”
“Right.”
“And he was angry because we haven’t had sex for weeks. Months, actually.”
“How did that make you feel?”
“Guilty. But then angry too. Very. Like a gale howling through me. I felt like punching him. It was like he was telling me to be a good wife: good at work, good in bed. Compliant. Of course that’s unfair. He only wants to help. Or mostly he only wants to help. He’s a bit aggrieved too. I probably should start running and having sex and working and behaving like a normal person. Whatever that means. It’s just—” She stopped and passed both her hands over her face.
