Imago

by Celina Grace

  “No reason,” said Kate, rather absently. She was thinking.

  “You can do it if you want. He’s only getting me to do it ‘cos I’m stuck behind a desk at the moment.”

  “I wouldn’t want to deprive you,” said Kate, grinning. “Let me know if you do find anything though, okay?”

  They parted at the entrance to the office, and Kate went to sit down at her desk. The instant her backside made contact with the chair, she sprung up again and hurried back to Anderton’s office. The door was shut, but she knocked anyway and was rewarded with an interrogative ‘Yup?’ from inside.

  “Kate,” said Anderton as she closed the door behind her. He looked surprised. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” she answered. “I just wanted to ask you something.”

  “Uh-huh. What’s that?”

  “Why did you ask Theo to cross-check for similar cases?”

  Anderton sat back in his chair. Slowly, he laced the fingers of both hands behind his neck and rocked back a little.

  “Why do you ask?” he said after a moment.

  Kate smiled.

  “I asked first.”

  Anderton grinned. “There’s no secret. I want to check whether there have been any other cases like this one.”

  “Why?”

  His eyebrows rose. “Why? Why do you think? So we can find the person who did it, of course.”

  Kate shook her head, flustered.

  “I didn’t mean why, I meant—” She stopped herself for a moment. Then she took a deep breath and asked the question she really wanted the answer to.

  “You don’t think this is just a one off, do you, sir? I mean, you think there are going to be more.”

  Anderton took his hands down from behind his neck. He leaned forward, fixing Kate with his stare.

  “Now, why would you say that?” he asked.

  Kate kept her eyes on his but she shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” she said after a moment. “Call it a feeling.”

  Anderton was silent for a moment.

  “You scare me sometimes, Kate,” he said. “I’ll have to hide my thoughts from you from now on, God knows how.”

  Kate smiled.

  “That depends on what they are.”

  She’d meant it to be a light-hearted response, but their eyes locked again, and she was shocked at the sudden rush of heat that went through her. She shifted a little in her chair, her gaze dropping.

  Anderton cleared his throat.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I have a bad feeling about this case. And I can’t say how I know that. Call it a feeling.”

  There was a moment’s silence. Anderton sat back in his seat again.

  “Don’t mention this to the rest of the team, okay? I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. Let’s see how things – pan out.”

  Kate nodded. She had been intently focused on the case, but now her thoughts were swirling around something very different. She stood up and said goodbye, casually, just as if she wasn’t thinking about jumping over the desk to throw herself into Anderton’s arms.

  Back at her desk, she stared blankly at the screen, barely aware of the bustle and activity going on around her. Then she closed her eyes. The intensity of her feelings shocked her. How was she going to keep her mind on the case? She suddenly became aware that Olbeck was stood behind her, repeating himself impatiently for what was obviously not the first time.

  “What?”

  “I said, what did you ask Anderton about?”

  “Nothing,” said Kate. Olbeck gave her an old-fashioned look.

  “Seriously,” she added. “I’ll tell you later.” She made a massive effort to stop thinking pornographic thoughts about her boss and turned her attention back to work. “What are we doing now?”

  “Mandy Renkin’s social worker,” said Olbeck. “I’ve already made an appointment with her. Come on, you can drive, seeing as you’re so keen on it.”

  Barbara Fee was a thin, harassed-looking woman, much wound about with scarves and with fine, flyaway hair messily pinned up in an unsuccessful chignon. Whole hanks of hair kept escaping, and Ms Fee would shove them back in with a distracted air. She received Kate and Olbeck in her chaotic office with the proviso that she ‘really only had twenty minutes’ before her next appointment.

  “We’ll be as quick as we can then,” said Kate. “What can you tell us about Mandy Renkin?”

  Barbara Fee pushed at a slipping hairslide.

  “She was a nice girl,” she said. “Had problems, obviously. Usual story: taken into care at an early age, in and out of the care system, drug problems, teen pregnancy, had her child taken away from her. What else did you want to know?”

  “Was she ever fostered?” asked Kate. “I found a school prize that she must have received when she was about fourteen. She was obviously doing well at school then. That doesn’t really tally with her later…life, shall we say.”

  Barbara Fee was hunting amongst the files of her messy desk.

  “No, you’re right,” she said, rather absently. She found what she was looking for and offered it across the table to Olbeck, who took the thick manila folder. “That’s her file. She was fostered, from the age of ten to the age of fifteen. Settled pretty nicely, actually. The family was one who tended to take on older children and teenagers, very experienced foster carers. Mandy did very well with them.”

  Olbeck was leafing through the file.

  “So, what happened?” he asked. “Why did she go off the rails?”

  Barbara tucked a loose strand of hair behind one ear.

  “Teenage rebellion?” she said. “Unresolved issues with the breakdown of her family unit? She got in with the wrong crowd? Take your pick. You can only do so much for these kids, you know. At some point, you just have to take a step back and realise you’re doing more harm than good.”

  “Could you give us the address of her foster parents?”

  “Yes, of course. They’re still fostering for us. Bernard and Adele Watkins.” Barbara Fee handed over a scrap of paper with an address scribbled on it. “Terrible thing to happen to Mandy, but she wouldn’t be the first. They live such dangerous lives, these girls. They’re so vulnerable.”

  “Did you like Mandy?” asked Kate as they were ushered from the office.

  Barbara stared at her.

  “Like her? What do you mean? She was a nice girl, like I said.”

  “No, I meant did you like her?” asked Kate. “As a person?”

  Barbara was rummaging in her bag for her keys. She withdrew a set that had to have had twenty keys on one inadequate key ring and locked her office door.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, vaguely. “Now, I really must go, if you’ll excuse me.”

  They watched her walk away down the long corridor, the cork heels of her Birkenstock sandals slapping loudly against the tiled floor like ironic applause following her exit.

  J’s Diary

  I’ve been thinking a lot about Mother lately. It’s annoying, because I thought I’d successfully managed to forget her, often for whole hours at a time. Oddly, it’s not the old Mother that I think about, the white-haired, bespectacled, bent old lady who shuffled around the house. The weak one, the one who finally found out that a sharp tongue is no real defence. No, it’s the Mother from a time I never knew that I find myself thinking about, the Mother of the photographs from the war and post-war: the dark-haired, slim and pretty Mother in her tea dresses and Victory rolls. The Mother who met my father.

  My father has been a ghost in my life, always. Never physically here but always a shadowy presence in the house. He was never allowed to rest, never allowed to fade away into oblivion, like so many other of the men who never made it home from the war. Mother kept him alive, in her memory, in her conversation, in the photographs that littered the house. I think I was about thirteen when I realised the ratio of pictures of Father to me: one of me to every twenty of him. All of mine were baby pictures – I think th
e oldest one was of me as a three-year-old, dressed in muddy dungarees. In one of baby pictures, I’m sat on the hearth rug, waving a blurred object that I think is a rattle and wearing a blue-striped sailor suit.

  The picture that takes pride of place in the living room is on the mantelpiece in an enormous gilt frame. It’s a sepia-toned shot of my mother and father on their wedding day, 15th July 1940, my father in his uniform, my mother in blue silk. I know she wore blue because she told me – in the picture, her dress is a nothingy-brown colour. They were married two weeks before he was posted overseas, long enough for him to impregnate her with what turned out to be me. He never came back.

  I don’t know why I keep maundering on about the past. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting older myself, and it necessarily preys more on my mind. It’s the future I should be thinking of. The next girl, and the next one after that. If I am going to write about the past, I should write about the second girl and how it turned out to be as wonderful as the first.

  Mother always accused me of being irrational, of having no self-control. She was wrong about that, just as she was about so many things. When I decide on a course of action, I always go through with it. I make my plans and set out my stall; step by careful step, I achieve what I want. When I decided I wanted to repeat what I’d done with the first girl, I spent weeks thinking about it, considering how to do it and get away with it, as I had so cleverly the first time. In some ways, the anticipation made things even better.

  Much as it was convenient, having the tart come to my home, it just wasn’t feasible or practical. For one thing, someone was bound to notice my visitor at some point, and for another, I couldn’t continue to store the bodies at home. The coal hole would only hold one more at most, and there was no way I was going to start digging in the garden. I have never been a gardener, and since Mother died, all I have done is cut the lawn. If I started digging a huge trench in the back flowerbeds, someone would be bound to become suspicious.

  But if I couldn’t bring her here, where could I go? To visit a brothel was out of the question – I would be found out in a matter of minutes. I thought, momentarily, of hiring an anonymous room somewhere using a false name and paying with cash, but that was fraught with danger. I could be so easily traced.

  I have to admit, I was stumped for several days. My predicament made me snappy and irritable, but luckily, people at work and the neighbours I met in the street put my bad temper down to grief over my recent bereavement. It was about the only time Mother was ever of use to me.

  Eventually I decided I would go far away, to a small town with a thriving red light district. I would scope out possible sites where I would not be discovered, where I would be overlooked. Then I would find myself someone suitable, meet her at my chosen spot, and then…

  I need to keep writing about the second girl but for some reason I find myself wanting to write about Mother. If I ever had to talk to someone about Mother – not that I ever would, or did – I think I would find it hard to explain exactly how she used to keep control of me, keep me cowed and shivering like a whipped dog. To this day, I don’t know how she managed it.

  There were only a few beatings, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that there were only a few that I can remember. One particularly painful one sticks in my memory because I remember focusing on the brooch she was wearing at the time. She had many brooches, and this one was in the shape of a butterfly, in a shade that recalled the summer sky at noon: a hard, pitiless blue. As the blows rained down, making my ears ring and my eyes squint down to slits, as I tried to absorb the jolts to my head and shoulders, all I could see was that butterfly shape. I think it was the last thing I remember seeing before I lost consciousness.

  I think that was the last proper beating Mother gave me. I don’t know, but I’m guessing that I was unconscious for a long time, and perhaps she thought she’d done some real damage. Perhaps she’d thought she’d killed me. Knowing her, it wouldn’t have been anticipated grief for her dead child that stopped her doing it again. No, it would be the fact that everyone would find out, that everyone would finally realise the kind of person she really was.

  It’s no wonder, really, that I ended up the kind of person that I am. I learned it all from Mother: how to hide your real identity, how to put on a mask that fools the rest of the world. Only you know, deep inside, who you really are

  Chapter Seven

  Kate went back to the Mission building the next morning, having rung ahead to check that Claudia was in residence. Margaret Paling was not in the reception booth this time; another woman, also grey-haired, also elderly, peered at Kate’s warrant card suspiciously and let her through the security door to the lounge beyond.

  Kate knocked on Claudia’s door. A few moments later, it was flung wide by Claudia, who had a beaming smile on her face – a smile that cooled and died when she saw Kate.

  “Good morning,” said Kate, stepping forward across the threshold. “Were you expecting someone?”

  Claudia muttered something, a possible negative, but Kate couldn’t quite hear. The room was much larger than Mandy’s, with two single beds against opposite walls, a large wardrobe, chest of drawers and, most significantly, a small girl with a mop of dark hair and large, dark eyes who was sat on the floor surrounded by toys and regarding Kate with a frown.

  Kate cursed inwardly. Why hadn’t she realised Claudia’s daughter would be here? It was going to be almost impossible to talk about anything to do with the case in front of a small child. She thought quickly.

  “I need to ask you a few more questions about Mandy, Claudia,” she said. “Is there anyone who could look after Madison while we have a talk?”

  Claudia shook her head, nervously.

  “There’s no one I’d leave her with here,” she said. The little girl got up and pressed herself to the side of her mother, twining her thin little arms around Claudia’s leg.

  “No, okay,” said Kate. “Why don’t we all go for a walk? Madison, is there a playground near here you’d like to go to?”

  There turned out to be a small patch of recreational ground with a couple of battered swings and a chipped and rusting climbing frame about five minutes’ walk from the Mission. Madison clambered around the structure while her mother watched, and Kate tried to think of the questions she needed to ask. She was distracted by the thought that – given a different choice back in her teens – this could have been her life, trying to raise a child alone with no money and little support, trapped in a low-paying job if she was lucky and on benefits if she wasn’t. This could have been me.

  Kate suddenly and quite fervently knew that she had made the right choice back when she was seventeen. As hard as it had been at the time and for years afterwards. As hard as it sometimes still was. She’d made the right choice.

  She made a massive effort to bring her mind back to the job. Claudia hadn’t noticed her period of silence; she was watching Madison swinging herself back and forth with a proud, tender look on her face.

  “Madison’s a lovely little girl,” said Kate, and she was rewarded by Claudia’s pleased smile.

  “She’s a little monkey,” said Claudia in the most animated tone Kate had yet heard from her.

  “Mandy had a child, didn’t she?”

  Claudia’s face clouded.

  “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “But he got took off of her by the social. She couldn’t look after him properly. She was doing too many drugs at the time. It broke her heart when he went.”

  “I know I’ve asked you this before, Claudia, but are you sure that Mandy didn’t have a boyfriend?”

  Claudia still had her eyes fixed on Madison, who was trying to climb the frame of the swing and sliding down again. She shrugged.

  “I told you, I dunno. I don’t think so.”

  “Would she have told you if she had?”

  “She might have. But I don’t think she was seeing anyone. She always said men were bad news.”

  Kate nodded.<
br />
  “How about you, Claudia?”

  Startled, Claudia looked at her.

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Do you have someone? A boyfriend or partner? It must be hard raising a child by yourself.”

  Kate was only really making conversation, not really interested in the answer. A rising tide of blood suffused Claudia’s face, and Kate regretted her casual words.

  “No,” said Claudia, after a moment. “I don’t have no one.”

  Me neither, agreed Kate silently. Me neither.

  *

  “I feel like I should be cutting a ribbon or something,” said Anderton, one hand on the door to the renovated room. He flung it open with a flourish. “Ta-da!”

  The team crowded in behind him, reacting with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Jane and Kate made appropriate ‘oohs,’ Olbeck, Theo and Rav nodded their cautious assent and Jerry lowered his brows and said something very similar to ‘humph.’

  “Well,” said Anderton. “We’re back in at least, thank God. I said something like this calls for champagne, didn’t I?”

  “You definitely said that,” said Olbeck.

  “Well, you’ll find I’m a man of my word. We’ll all have a little celebratory drink later.”

  This statement was met with a rather more enthusiastic response. The team sat down to their desks and applied themselves to their work with renewed energy. Kate rolled her chair back and forth over the new laminate and spun around a little, taking in the fresh new paint and the new skylights, which brought in the bright mid-summer sun.

  She became aware that Theo was waving at her from the other side of the room.

  “What’s up?” she asked, making her way over to him.

  He beckoned her down to his seated level.

  “You know how you asked me about whether I’d found anything that resembled the MO? Similar murder weapon, situation, et cetera et cetera?”

  “Yes,” said Kate, alert now. She grabbed a spare chair and sat down next to Theo.