Hilary Bonner

by Braven

  Then when her mother finally surfaced, somewhat to Karen’s annoyance looking perfectly well-groomed and together and behaving quite charmingly, Karen was asked to leave the room. Karen didn’t think that was very fair, and therefore had no compunction whatsoever about putting her ear to the keyhole so that she could listen. It was not the first time Karen had put her ear to a keyhole in that house. Almost always she seemed to hear something she would rather not have heard. And yet again she was afraid of what she might learn. It didn’t stop her, though.

  The woman detective constable seemed to do most of the talking. It was she who asked Margaret Meadows if she had looked after Lorraine and Janine Marshall around the time of Clara’s disappearance.

  “Yes, I did,” replied Karen’s mother. “Richard came to me in a terrible state the night she left him. He said he didn’t know what to do. Begged me to take the girls until he sorted himself out.”

  “And how long were they with you?”

  “Not much more than a day really. It was a Sunday night when he brought them to me. I kept them until the Tuesday morning. Karen took them to school on the Monday…”

  “Karen?”

  “My daughter. She let you in.”

  “But she’s only—”

  Karen’s mother interrupted swiftly. There had been just a note of criticism in the policewoman’s voice. Karen recognized it at once. She was used to it, or something like it, almost every time her mother and father spoke to each other. And her mother was always quick to defend herself if she thought she was being criticized in any way.

  “She’s thirteen. Almost fourteen. All right, she was only twelve then. But she’s always been very grown-up for her age. She’d already babysat for the Marshalls once or twice before…before Clara went away. In any case, I was having one of my bad spells…”

  Karen remembered it well, remembered eating her breakfast that morning while listening to her parents rowing over the Marshall girls. Her mother had made a rare early-morning appearance in the kitchen, but she had been clad only in her dressing gown, had clearly had no intention of getting dressed, and had paid little attention to Janine or Lorraine who had sat white-faced and silent at the table. Lorraine had been tearful, but nobody took much notice, least of all Karen who had spent her childhood accepting family rows and disruptions as the norm, and merely assumed that the Marshall girls would do the same.

  The girls’ primary school had been next door to her grammar school and as she had neared it with her young charges Karen remembered rounding on a still-snivelling Lorraine.

  “Shut up or I’ll give you one,” she’d unsympathetically shouted at the little girl who had immediately shied away from her, lower lip trembling uncontrollably. At the time Karen couldn’t have cared less. She hadn’t wanted to be seen by any of her schoolfriends with wailing little ones in tow. Any curiosity she might have felt about the girls being so unceremoniously dumped at Laurel House, and certainly any compassion for their predicament, had been totally negated by the sheer irritation of having the unwanted responsibility for these two small children thrust upon her.

  Karen pressed her ear closer to the keyhole. Her mother was still talking. “I did pick them up from school in the afternoon. And I really wasn’t well. The last thing I needed was two small children to look after, as well as Karen.”

  Karen screwed up her face and thought hard. When had her mother ever looked after her, she wondered. Probably not at all really since she’d been a baby, and she had gathered that even then it had been her maternal grandmother, now dead, who had done most of the looking-after.

  “But that’s what neighbours are for, isn’t it?” Margaret Meadows continued. She paused then, as if waiting for a reply. When none came she started to speak again.

  “Then early on the Tuesday Richard came round and took them back. He said his mother was on her way from Bournemouth, that she was going to look after Lorraine and Janine until either Clara turned up again or he could make some permanent arrangement to look after them himself.”

  The detective constable’s voice was edgy when she eventually spoke again.

  “So did Clara turn up again?”

  “Yes.” Margaret Meadows paused once more. “Well, he said she did. Months afterwards I asked him if the girls were still with his mother. He said Clara had come back for them.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “No.”

  “So did you believe him?”

  “Yes, of course.” The meaning of the words was clear enough, but Karen could detect the note of uncertainty in her mother’s voice. “Well, yes, I did. But I know other people didn’t. And nobody’s ever seen her since, have they? I thought that was what all this was about?”

  The last sentence was also a query.

  “Indeed it is, Mrs. Meadows, indeed it is,” replied DC Parkin. “Did you ever meet Richard Marshall’s mother, by the way?”

  “No.” Margaret Meadows sounded puzzled, as if she hadn’t thought about that before. “No, I didn’t. I don’t know if anyone did…”

  Her voice tailed away. She seemed to be trying to think things through and didn’t like the route along which her thoughts were taking her.

  DC Parkin and DS Malone left soon afterwards. Margaret Meadows remained in the sitting room. She was not given to observing life’s social niceties if it didn’t suit her. Karen beat a fast retreat to the top of the stairs allowing the two police officers to let themselves out of the house.

  Afterwards she sat on the stairs, nearly at the top where they turned at right angles into the landing. Her mother did not know it, but she had been crouched in exactly the same position—curled up, hugging her legs to her chest—and exactly the same spot on that June Sunday evening the previous year when Richard Marshall had brought his little girls round. In bed earlier than usual because of a bad cold, Karen had been lying uncomfortably awake, sniffing, sneezing and coughing away, when she had heard the doorbell, followed by a voice. At first she wasn’t sure who had arrived, but she made herself concentrate and then realized that this was the voice of their nearest neighbour. She was familiar enough with his voice, and with him too, although hardly at all with his wife who always seemed to be rather overshadowed by her much larger husband. Richard Marshall was a big noisy man who always had plenty to say for himself if you met him in the street or at the shops, but Karen had never heard him sound like this before, so low and urgent. She had somehow known at once that this was no ordinary visit. Indeed, apart from one fateful afternoon, she had never seen Richard Marshall at Laurel House before. And so, her curiosity aroused, she had crept her way from her bedroom along the landing to the staircase in order to find out what was going on. Karen had done a lot of that sort of thing as a child. It was the only way she ever got to find out anything, because nobody ever told her.

  From her vantage point she had peered down at the little scene being enacted below. The hall at Laurel House was badly lit and both Richard and her mother were standing in such a way that Karen couldn’t see their faces. Janine and Lorraine were each holding one of their father’s hands. One of them was crying, but Karen was not sure which. She could not see their faces either.

  “All right, I’ll do what I can, but at least come in for a moment so that we can talk about it. I can see you’re upset,” she heard her mother say.

  “You’re not wrong about that. But I can’t stay. I really can’t. I’ve too much to do.”

  He had opened the door then and seemed to be on his way out, pausing only when her mother said: “You haven’t brought any clothes for the girls, Richard, not even any nightclothes.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just not thinking straight. I’ll sort some stuff out for them and bring it round early in the morning. They’ll need their school uniforms, of course, but they can sleep in their T-shirts. They often do, anyway.”

  “All right, but how long do you want me to keep them? You know what Karen’s father is like. He’s out now at one of his quiz nights.
God knows what he’ll say when he comes home and finds your two here.”

  “It won’t be for long, I promise.” Richard’s voice had been wheedling. “Just till I manage to sort something out. A couple of days…”

  Karen had sneezed then. She had been trying very hard to stifle it, but had finally been unable to do so.

  “Karen, Karen, is that you?” Her mother had turned and leaned forward around the staircase so that even in the poor light Karen could see her upturned face. “Go back to bed, you silly girl, or you’ll never get better. It’s only Richard from next door.”

  Karen had scurried off, knowing full well she’d be told no more even if she bothered to ask. But she sensed that there was some kind of crisis. The girls, Janine and Lorraine, had been quiet and withdrawn throughout their brief stay at Laurel House, and Karen was at an age when she was in any case totally disinterested in children younger than herself. She had made a point of ignoring them as much as possible, something she now regretted, being of such an intrinsically nosy nature, because she thought she might have missed the opportunity to learn something. Something important perhaps.

  But just the way in which Richard Marshall had delivered his children that night, and the whole sorry little episode, had stuck in Karen’s mind. And so she listened with great interest at the door when the police interviewed her mother, listened while her mother told them about Richard’s visit that night. Told them about looking after the little girls. Listened to hear if she would tell them the rest of it. But she didn’t. Not any of it.

  It was quite apparent that the police didn’t know what Karen knew. They couldn’t know, or their whole approach would have been different, Karen felt sure. Her mother’s secret was still safe. Which she supposed was a good thing, although somehow she wasn’t quite sure.

  Karen remained there for several minutes, resting her chin on her knees, silent, unmoving. She felt more than a bit wobbly.

  Eventually her mother wandered aimlessly out of the sitting room. Her eyes were blank. Karen could not read any expression in them. This was not unusual. Margaret Meadows invariably retreated into a world of her own whenever threatened by anything she might regard as remotely unpleasant or even merely unwelcome. She drifted towards the kitchen, apparently not noticing her daughter on the staircase.

  Karen watched her mother’s retreating back. She wanted so much to talk to her, yet again to ask her the questions she was bursting to ask. But her mother would never talk to her about anything that mattered, so she certainly wouldn’t discuss this. She expected her daughter to behave like an adult, but only treated her like one when it suited her.

  This infuriated Karen. One minute it seemed to be assumed that she knew about everything that had been going on. The next moment she was expected to forget that she knew anything at all.

  But Karen knew all right. And how she wished that she didn’t.

  She tightened her grip around her legs and buried her whole face in her knees. She wanted a family like everybody else she knew seemed to have. She wanted a mother. A proper mother. Not this beautiful drifting creature who blew hot and cold with the wind. This woman who was sometimes a friend, sometimes a big sister, sometimes someone from another planet, and certainly never the kind of mother Karen longed for.

  She was, however, all that Karen had. And Karen would never do anything to hurt her. Anything that might lead to losing her. Karen would never ever tell.

  Talbot had kept Richard Marshall in custody overnight. And once more, shortly after Malone and Parkin reported back, he decided to conduct another interview with Marshall himself.

  “Margaret Meadows says you told her that your mother was coming to pick up your girls. But your mother says you never even asked her to do so and she did not know that they and Clara had disappeared until several months after they were last seen.”

  Marshall didn’t miss a beat. A night in a police cell had not shaken him one jot. But then, Talbot had not really expected it to.

  “I told Margaret that I was going to ask my mother to come to pick up the girls, not that I had already asked her,” he responded quickly. “I’d managed to get help in the hotel, though at a tremendous price. I was therefore at least able to look after them until I could get my mother down here and so I went next door to get them. But then Clara came back and asked for them before I even got round to calling my mother.”

  “You never told Mrs. Meadows any of that.”

  “Why would I? I told nobody anything more than I had to. I was emotionally drained by it all. My wife had walked out on me. My family had broken up. I didn’t want to talk about it. I barely knew Margaret Meadows…”

  “You knew her well enough to dump your children on her.”

  “I was desperate.”

  “So did she never ask you about them afterwards?”

  “I don’t remember. I didn’t see her often.”

  “She says you just told her that Clara had come back for them.”

  “Perhaps I did then. It was the truth, after all. But I never said any more than I had to. I didn’t see it was any of her business or anybody else’s.”

  “It is now, Mr. Marshall, it’s the business both of the police and of the public. Make no mistake about it.”

  Marshall shrugged.

  “And what about your mother? Why didn’t you tell her straight away that your wife and children had left you? Isn’t it rather curious that you failed to tell your own mother?”

  Marshall shrugged again. “I can be a bit of an ostrich,” he said. “I think I was hoping Clara would come back, bring the girls back. I’ve been hoping that all this time in spite of everything.”

  He looked directly, challengingly, at Talbot. “In spite of what you think, that’s the truth, too.”

  He paused as if waiting for Talbot to respond. When the DCI showed absolutely no signs of doing so he sighed and continued.

  “The fewer people I told the less real it all seemed. Anyway, my mother and I have never been close…”

  “Who are you close to, Mr. Marshall?”

  Marshall looked blank.

  Talbot persisted. He was beginning to think his only hope was to break Richard Marshall although he knew that was a big big ask.

  “Were you close to your children?”

  “Of course. I love my kids. I still love my kids.”

  There was a note of aggression in Marshall’s voice then.

  “At best you let them go very very easily then, didn’t you? I wouldn’t let my kids go that easily. No way.”

  It was Talbot’s turn to pause, to wait for a response, and Marshall’s not to make one.

  “At worst you killed them.”

  Marshall still didn’t respond. Talbot got up from the table and walked to the little window.

  He had his back to Marshall when he spoke again.

  “What was it like?” he asked conversationally.

  “What was what like?”

  “Killing your own children, of course.”

  Again Marshall didn’t miss a beat. He continued to sound calm and to speak in a manner of overly deliberate patience, even though such an horrific scenario had been put to him.

  “I didn’t kill my children. My wife returned and took them away with her. Find my wife and you will find Lorraine and Janine.”

  Talbot took a deep breath and persisted. He could think of no better plan. He walked across to Richard Marshall and leaned over so that his mouth was close to the other man’s ear. When he spoke again his voice was little more than a whisper.

  “How did you kill them, Richard?”

  There was no reply.

  “Did you strangle them? Did you suffocate them with a pillow? Which one did you murder first? What did you see in their little faces? Were they afraid? Did one of them see you kill the other? Perhaps you hit them over the head with something? Perhaps you used a knife on them? Was there blood? Did you watch your daughters’ lifeblood pour out of them? What did you do with their little bodies
? I think you wrapped them up and took them out in your boat and dumped them, along with their mother, probably. That’s what I think. Why don’t you tell me, Richard, why don’t you tell me how you murdered your own daughters?”

  Talbot fired the questions one after the other. Rat-a-tat-tat. Like bullets from a gun. His voice grew louder as he proceeded. He became aware of Malone and Parkin, who were also present yet again, fidgeting with discomfort. He didn’t care. He was going for broke.

  But Richard Marshall did not flinch. Neither did he speak. He remained absolutely still, staring stonily ahead, his eyes more blank than ever.

  “Suspect refuses to answer,” barked Talbot at the tape recorder, as he sat down once again opposite Marshall and drew in a big intake of breath.

  “Right,” he said, speaking very quietly again. “Let’s change direction a bit here and look at the facts. We have removed a large amount of clothing from your house which belonged to your wife and children. Indeed very little of their clothing, if any, seemed to have been taken. Your wife also left some valuable jewelry behind. How do you explain that?”

  “Clara left with one suitcase. I have no idea what she took or what she left behind. She took all she wanted, I suppose. Presumably she didn’t want her jewelry. I had given her almost all of it and that could have been the reason she didn’t want it. When she came back for the children she did take another couple of bags of things with her. More than likely they’d already grown out of most of the stuff that she left.”

  The man was perfectly controlled. Talbot’s earlier aggressive line of questioning did not seem to have rattled him at all.

  “Extremely plausible, Mr. Marshall,” said the DCI.

  Marshall raised his eyebrows and leaned back in his chair, still appearing to be quite composed. “The truth very often is, Detective Chief Inspector,” he replied laconically. “Very often indeed.”

  Chapter Three

  Nobody in Torquay Police Station noticed, but the rain was pouring down outside throughout Bill Talbot’s second long interview session with Richard Marshall. John Kelly and photographer Micky Lomas, standing morosely on the pavement, were getting a good soaking. It really was a filthy day for the time of year, and their vigil had already been a long one.