Frozen Charlotte

by Priscilla Masters

  Talith stood up. ‘Can I have a quick word – outside?’

  She nodded.

  They closed the door behind them.

  ‘Has Mrs Sedgewick any record of mental disturbance?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘She’s never been depressed?’

  ‘Again – no. Not that I know of.’

  ‘Do you know anyone called Poppy?’

  ‘No,’ Mrs Palk responded stiffly. ‘She has a daughter called Rosie. She lives in London. She’s a barrister. She’s going to be very angry about this. Most inconvenient. The publicity, you know.’

  Paul Talith felt as though his head was spinning. Publicity? Inconvenience? Not exactly the words he’d have used.

  ‘Might it be an idea to ask Rosie to come and stay with her mother?’

  Mrs Palk looked awkward. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. They’re not particularly close. I think Rosie will want to distance herself from this. Besides – I did mention that to Alice. She is vehemently opposed to it. She doesn’t want Rosie to know anything about this business.’

  ‘It’s going to be hard keeping it from her,’ Talith ventured.

  ‘Yes, I know, sergeant,’ she said impatiently. ‘But those are her wishes. We can only respect them.’

  Talith heaved a long sigh.

  ‘Look – I have a suggestion. Let me take her to my house. I’ll keep an eye on her. She’ll come to no harm.’

  Talith was frowning. ‘Does she have a son?’

  Acantha Palk gave a smile. ‘She won’t want Gregory around. She adores him. He lives in Turkey anyway. Let her tell him in her own way.’

  ‘What about her husband?’

  Mrs Palk’s face changed as though a storm had blown across it. ‘Aaron Sedgewick is a very exacting man,’ she volunteered. ‘Exacting and probably the most self-absorbed person I have ever met in my entire life. He will only mind about this if it affects him either directly or indirectly.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably on some business trip abroad. Maybe Germany. He goes there quite a lot. If she doesn’t want him to know about this…’ She left the sentence unfinished, hanging in the air.

  ‘He’s going to have to know at some point.’ Talith spoke bluntly. ‘For a start we’re going to have to make a search of the house – if that’s where the body was kept.’

  Acantha shivered. ‘I wouldn’t like to be around when he finds out. He’ll worry it’ll affect his business and he has a hell of a temper too. He can fling things around with the best of them,’ she finished dryly.

  Talith shrugged. ‘She didn’t give you any idea how this dead infant came to be with her?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who the child might be?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Does the name Poppy mean anything to you?’

  Acantha shook her head. ‘Look,’ she said awkwardly, ‘I’m sure this has nothing to do with it but Alice and Aaron quarrelled over Gregory years ago. I don’t think father and son have spoken since. Alice goes over to see him for a few weeks every year. Mother and son have remained close.’

  ‘What did Mr Sedgewick quarrel with his son about?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something silly in all probability. At a guess it would be more to do with Aaron than Gregory. Aaron is a very forceful personality.’

  ‘A control freak?’

  She smiled. ‘If you want to call him that – yes.’ She seemed to want to say more but pressed her lips together tightly, containing whatever she had been tempted to say.

  ‘I don’t want to sound unkind or patronizing,’ she said finally, ‘but Alice is a very ordinary woman, very much in awe, enthralled by her husband’s wealth and status and Aaron drinks this up like nectar. Alice’s world is husband, son, daughter, home – in that order. This is completely strange and out of character. I’ve never known her do anything bizarre like this before. She always seemed nice. Ordinary.’

  Paul Talith was floundering. ‘Her daughter, Rosie, is she exacting too?’

  ‘Oh yes. A chip off the old block all right. She’s a high flyer – a barrister with an eminent firm in London. Alice won’t want any scandal near her.’

  ‘Right,’ Talith said. ‘Well, it’s already been a long night. I’m happy for Mrs Sedgewick to go home under your care.’ He fingered the spot on the top of his head where he was just beginning to go bald. ‘We’re going to need a psychiatric assessment and wait for the result of the post-mortem. And how all this came about I really don’t know.’

  Acantha almost smiled. ‘It’s going to take some unravelling, I agree. But not tonight, sergeant. And if it’s any help I would stake everything on the fact that Alice had absolutely nothing to do with the child’s death or the concealment of its body.’

  Both Talith and Roberts resisted the temptation to ask the obvious question: so what was she doing nursing the corpse?

  They watched the two women leave the station with a feeling of unreality. Had these events really happened or had they been one of those inexplicably strange and disturbing dreams?

  THREE

  Sunday January 10th, 8.45 a.m .

  Martha woke feeling troubled and couldn’t understand why for a minute or two. Then she remembered. Last night, Sukey had arrived home at eleven, driven by her friend’s father, as promised. Martha had been just about to go to bed herself when her daughter had ‘rolled in’, in a state that people describe delicately as being, a little ‘the worse for wear’.

  Martha had always subscribed to the idea that youngsters should be treated liberally and make their own rules for ‘responsible drinking’. Goodness – she’d had a hangover or two herself. She’d never made a big thing about alcohol. Sukey and Sam had had sips of wine with meals from around ten years old. Neither had liked the taste so they had reverted to smoothies, fruit juices and Coke so Martha was a little disappointed that this social experiment had patently not succeeded. Cigarettes yes, she had made a thing about those. She’d watched too many friends struggle to stop the habit and read too many post-mortem reports on smokers to believe they were anything but vile, smelly and harmful, but she really had hoped that both Sam and Sukey would develop a mature and sensible attitude to alcohol. Have a drink without necessarily having to get ‘pissed’, ‘ratted’, or any other of the words which were usually accompanied by a giggle or two. So she had watched her daughter stagger up the stairs, clutching at the banister with a feeling of dismay and it was this that was hanging, like a dark cloud, over her this morning, even though she had her family all together under one roof. It was at times like this that she missed Martin most. She wanted – needed – to have someone to talk this over with. She could have done with his common sense and sense of humour. But he had died when the twins were three years old so she had to make the decision herself whether she should play it down, ignore it, or make an issue of it. She lay in bed and couldn’t make up her mind. She frowned at herself. She wasn’t generally so indecisive. If she couldn’t bring up her own daughter properly – well – there was no one else.

  Sukey was coming up to fifteen and Martha sensed she had a few turbulent years ahead. She herself had been a high-spirited teenager but she had had to work so hard to get into medical school that she had had little time for high jinks. She had the sinking feeling that her daughter’s path through the teenage years would be different.

  Lying back in bed she reflected that for once it wasn’t Sam who was the focus of worry and attention. Even allowing for maternal pride she knew her daughter was exceptionally beautiful with a natural, long-legged, fine-skinned radiance. Perhaps when Sam had returned to the Liverpool Football Academy she should spend some ‘quality time’ with Sukey before her daughter slid further along the path of womanhood. Now Agnetha was going they would be together, largely alone in the White House.

  And now she had made her decision. She would ignore last night.

  Sergeant Talith began the day with a p
hone call to Detective Inspector Alex Randall. The phone rang and rang in his house until finally it was picked up and Talith heard his inspector’s voice. ‘Sorry to ring so early, sir.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  But Talith had the feeling it was not all right. Something was wrong. He listened out for background noise and heard none. No wife asking him what was going on, no children, no radio, no television. All was eerily quiet in the Randall household.

  He outlined the drama of last night and Alex listened silently until his sergeant had finished, then advised him. ‘You’d better get a warrant to search her house. Presuming that’s where she found the infant’s body.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I wonder if there’s anything else there. And Talith.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Whatever Mrs Sedgewick says her husband is going to have to know all this as well as the rest of the family. This is bound to get out and make headlines. Better give the house a ring and forewarn him.’

  ‘She says her husband’s abroad on business, sir.’

  ‘Well – maybe he is. Best find out before you break in, though I presume Mrs Sedgewick has a key to her own house so you won’t need to batter the door down.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Keep me informed, Talith. Let me know if there are any developments and I’ll speak to Martha in the morning and interview Mrs Sedgewick myself.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Talith put the phone down and wondered. There was usually some camaraderie between officers – Christmas parties, social occasions. He knew most of his colleagues’ spouses, even a few of their children. But Alex Randall? He was married. He mentioned a wife sometimes, in a vague sort of way. But he’d never met her; neither had anybody else from the Monkmoor station. There were no invitations to barbecues or family parties. No one he knew had ever been to Inspector Randall’s home and he never talked about children, so presumably there were none.

  Strange.

  Sam was full of football talk as she prepared the breakfast and though Martha was happy to hear him chatting away she wished that for just ten minutes a day Sam would talk about something else. Instead of that he was always either on the phone, talking to his old friends about Life in The Club, or sitting in the kitchen, telling her about people she did not know or incidents she did not understand, at least, not with an insider’s understanding. She realized with dismay that the inevitable had happened. He had grown away from her, into another world and she felt a pang as she watched him. Had it been the wrong decision to allow him to move to Liverpool? But, she argued, he had wanted it so very much. She and Martin had decided that they didn’t want to lose their children to boarding school, but surely this was different? Had he not taken up the chance to attend the Liverpool Football Academy it would have passed him by – and with that the chance at least to become a professional player. She shouldn’t be a selfish mother, keeping her son at her side and deny him such an opportunity – but oh, this was hard. She watched his eager, freckled face as he talked on the phone to some pal or other. ‘Yeah but did you see the tackle in the second half?’

  There was talking on the other end and Sam interrupted hotly. ‘It was a foul. Definitely.’

  She resisted the temptation to ruffle his spiky red hair which appeared to be getting redder by the day. He could thank his mother for that, she thought, touching her own copper curls with regret. All her life she had wanted black hair. The blacker the better. Raven locks. Silky curls. She dreamed about having black hair.

  She sighed. It wasn’t going to happen even if she could have persuaded Vernon Grubb, her hairdresser, to conspire with her.

  Back to Sam. She had known one or two widows who had needed to keep a hold over their sons as some sort of perverted substitute for their dead husbands, but it was not her way. She boiled the kettle to brew a cafetière, surreptitiously watching him with a smile on her face. His top incisors still crossed. He still had his freckles and the angry-looking hair which he complained acted as a beacon on the football pitch. Not only because of the bright colour but because it stuck up all over the place in spite of the gel which he plastered on it. He still had the same jerky way of talking as he hung up the phone and proceeded to try and educate her in the finer points of the game and for the n th time explain the offside rules and the point of the intense training. ‘See, Mum, you just have to do weights and things to get your strength up and keep your tendons supple or you get injured and that’s bad news.’

  She turned around. ‘Is it a fault of the training then that you have this problem?’

  ‘Well, yes and no,’ Sam said seriously. ‘I kind of meant to kick one way and hadn’t quite decided how to play the ball. My mind went one way and my knee the other. See?’

  ‘Ye-es.’

  ‘Then we have to so some really weird exercises, stretching and things, a bit like ballet and they’re supposed to help too.’

  She took the box of eggs out of the fridge and wondered how long it would be before Sukey and Agnetha appeared. Her son was hungry.

  ‘How long are you going to wait for, Mum?’

  ‘Have a bowl of cereal to start,’ she said. ‘I thought it’d be nice if we had breakfast all together this morning. It’s not often we can do this, Sam.’

  Her son grunted and helped himself to some Shredded Wheat, still keeping up the running sports commentary. ‘Half the trouble is, Mum, that if you miss a ball, a really important ball, people don’t forgive you. They keep on and on about it and reputation’s important. This is a very important time for me. Michael Owen was not much older than me when he played in the World Cup. The clubs are starting to pounce on guys my age.’ He didn’t even realize that she was only listening with half an ear. ‘Paul Driscoll – well – he’s been transferred to Stoke. He’ll be playing full games next season. Fantastic.’ She noticed that his eyes were shining and his crooked grin was stretched wide as he polished off the bowl of cereal. What she failed to notice was the surreptitious glance he aimed in her direction.

  Sukey appeared just before ten o’clock, yawning and pushing her white-blonde hair out of her eyes. ‘Morning, Mum. Morning, Sam.’ To Martha’s relief she looked relatively normal.

  ‘Did you have a nice time last night?’ Though she’d tried to keep the edge out of her voice Martha could hear the censorious tone all too clearly.

  Sukey gave a deep sigh. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘It was all right.’

  ‘You don’t sound very sure.’

  Sukey gave her a smile, turned to the fridge, poured out some apple juice and took a deep swig. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I find the whole thing a bit boring. I mean you can’t talk or anything. The music’s too loud.’

  ‘You’re very young to have reached this cynical point,’ Martha said, deciding that her decision to say nothing about alcohol had been the right one. Sukey wouldn’t be the first or last person to drink too much because she had, in fact, found the evening unsatisfactory. She’d done the same herself, particularly in the early months just after Martin had died when social occasions had been really tough, friends awkward, not knowing what to say and she’d hated being introduced as a ‘widow’. She hated the word.

  ‘I know I’m cynical, Mum.’ Sukey gave another deep sigh, took a second swig out of her glass and Martha sensed her daughter wanted to talk.

  She waited.

  ‘What was it like when you met Dad?’

  ‘It was at a party – at someone’s house.’ Martha smiled to herself. ‘The music was really loud. Blasted our eardrums out. We spent a few minutes screaming at each other, unable to make out a single word then we went outside, although it was pouring with rain. We just found an old brolly in the hall and stood under it. We talked and talked and talked.’

  She closed her eyes, remembering the rain splashing off the edge of the umbrella, the wetness of the driveway, the sound of water everywhere, the eagerness in both their voices because they had both known they had met someone on the same plane.
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  Sukey’s eyes were bright. ‘I wish he was still around, Mum. I wish I could remember him.’

  Martha nodded. Sam was looking across. ‘Me too,’ he said gruffly. ‘I wonder what he’d think of me being a footballer.’

  Although Martha couldn’t know she gave the right answer, the one Sam needed to hear. ‘He’d have been very proud of you.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Sukey said dreamily, ‘I think I can remember things, a snatch of a laugh or fingers tickling me.’ She closed her eyes as though struggling to conjure up these faint and elusive memories. ‘I so wish I had a dad.’

  Martha stood back from the Aga. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I just have to concentrate on being very glad that I have you,’ she said. ‘Both of you because it’s all I have of your father.’ She smiled at Sam. ‘You’re so like him, you know, in many ways. You look like him. Apart from…’

  ‘The hair,’ Sam said, smiling at her. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  Sukey was quiet for a moment, too motionless not to be forming some other thought. ‘Mu-um’, she said at last, ‘does it always happen that the guys you fancy don’t fancy you?’

  Martha laughed. ‘Mostly. In my experience anyway.’

  ‘Did you fancy Dad right away?’

  She needed to be truthful. ‘Not at first, no. He wasn’t the most handsome of men. It was later, when I talked to him, that I realized what a very nice, kind and intelligent person he was. That was when-’

  ‘So he fancied you first.’

  She nodded. ‘He said he thought I looked different.’ She smiled. ‘He said later on that he’d been right.’

  She laughed then realized Sukey was watching her, needing something from her. ‘Darling,’ she said to her daughter, ‘you’re very young. You will meet people you think you love and find out you were wrong and you’ll meet people who don’t initially attract you but interest you and quite often they turn out to be the really good things in your life. Now then,’ she said, wiping her hands down her apron, ‘enough chatter. It’s time to get the breakfast on.’