Kind of Cruel

by Sophie Hannah

  Was he really going to . . . ? He was. He’d already launched in. Gibbs enjoyed watching Proust’s face as Waterhouse debriefed Amber Hewerdine as if she were a new addition to CID. Crazy. Even if he knew beyond the smallest flicker of a doubt that she’d had no involvement in Katharine Allen’s murder . . . He must have absolute confidence in her innocence, Gibbs realised, or he wouldn’t be doing this. He must have inherited a fortune out of the blue or have a getaway car waiting outside, or he wouldn’t be doing it in front of Proust.

  ‘Until today, we had no leads. Nothing,’ he was saying to Amber. ‘No one saw anything. The forensics led nowhere. We’ve dug around in every corner of her life and we’re none the wiser. All Katharine’s friends, colleagues and acquaintances have either been conclusively eliminated or we can find no reason to think they might have wanted to harm her. She was an ordinary, law-abiding young woman with nothing in her personal or professional life that would point to a reason to kill her. In a situation like that, detectives get desperate – they latch onto anything, anything at all, that seems unusual, rather than admit they’ve come away empty-handed. We latched onto the one detail that raised a question. In Katharine’s living room, we found an imprint of five words on a lined A4 notepad: Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel.’

  ‘An imprint? So not the actual words? Someone had written the words, then torn off the page?’ Quick off the mark, Gibbs conceded. Maybe she should join CID. She could have his job, once Proust had fired him.

  Waterhouse stood up, turned to Gibbs. ‘Got the photos?’ he asked.

  Gibbs found them and slid them across the table.

  Amber stared at them for close to a minute, pushing her hair behind her ears on both sides. If her expression was anything to go by, she seemed to find these pictures more disturbing than the photograph of Katharine Allen’s battered head. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘How did you know . . . did the woman whose notebook I looked at ring the police about me, and then you made the connection?’ Something flashed in her eyes, a mixture of impatience and superiority. ‘You need to talk to her.’

  Gibbs heard the silent part even if no one else did: you bunch of morons. He was going to enjoy this. ‘She’s a police officer,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Charlotte Zailer.’

  ‘Writing those words on assorted pieces of paper and staring at them is our collective new hobby,’ Waterhouse took over. ‘We keep hoping something’ll occur to us. Nothing has. The reason you’re here, and here so quickly, isn’t because you saw those words in Sergeant Zailer’s notebook. It’s because you can’t possibly have seen them, even if you think you did.’

  ‘I saw them,’ Amber insisted. ‘When I broke into her car.’

  ‘Yeah, then you saw them. But you asked Sergeant Zailer if you could have seen the words earlier, at three o’clock. Right?’

  Amber nodded.

  ‘You couldn’t have,’ Waterhouse told her. ‘You probably saw the words “Kind” and “Cruel”, but that was all she’d written at that point. You turning up interrupted her flow. She talked to you briefly, then you went in to see Ginny Saxon. Later, Sergeant Zailer went back to that page in her notebook and finished what she’d started. That’s when she wrote “Kind of Cruel”.’

  Gibbs was expecting Amber to lose her temper – to call Waterhouse a liar, and, by extension, Charlie. He was surprised when she simply nodded.

  ‘I spoke to Ginny Saxon, Amber. She told me that you said those words to her – “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” – and then accused her of having said them first.’

  ‘Which she didn’t,’ Amber said.

  ‘She didn’t?’

  ‘I don’t think so, no. I was convinced she had at the time, because the words meant nothing to me. I didn’t recognise them, so I couldn’t see why I’d have said them. Which won’t make sense to you, unless any of you have ever been hypnotised. Have you?’ She looked at each of them in turn. When her eyes landed on the Snowman, Gibbs thought he knew what she was thinking: that if he had been hypnotised, he ought to go back and demand that the hypnotist reverse the effect.

  ‘Look, why don’t I tell you what I think happened to me this afternoon?’ Amber suggested, closing her eyes again. She sounded weary. ‘See if you can make any more sense of it than I can. I went to Ginny Saxon for help with my insomnia. She went through this . . . I don’t know, she said all this stuff which was meant to hypnotise me. It wasn’t much different from a relaxation mantra, as far as I could tell. She asked me to tell her about a memory, any memory. I rejected the first one that came to mind because . . . well, it doesn’t matter why, I just rejected it. My mind was on that: not wanting to say the first thing that had occurred to me, but wondering if I ought to, and if not, what should I do instead? While all this was whirling around in my mind, I just . . . heard myself say it: “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel”. I thought, “Hey? Where the hell did that come from? What does it mean?” Ginny asked me to repeat it, so I did, and I must have . . . I suppose I convinced myself she must have said it first because . . . well, I’ve told you why. Because it meant nothing to me.’

  ‘Go on,’ Waterhouse said.

  ‘I’m not sure if I was hypnotised, but I was . . . different from how I usually am. Something weird had happened to me. My mind was kind of trapped inside itself, on overdrive. I had no sense of perspective. I accused Ginny of lying, left in a rage, and walked into Sergeant Zailer. As soon as I saw her, I thought, “Oh, my God.” I remembered the notebook, that I’d seen her writing in it, and suddenly my certainty that Ginny had said those words just vanished and I seemed to . . . know that I’d seen them in Sergeant Zailer’s notebook. I asked her about it, she denied it . . .’

  ‘And you decided to settle the matter once and for all by helping yourself to the contents of her car,’ said Proust.

  ‘I didn’t steal anything,’ Amber snapped at him. Her tone and the speed with which she turned back to Waterhouse and Gibbs made it clear that she regarded the Snowman as by far the least important person in the room. In spite of himself, Gibbs was starting to like her.

  He could still see her as a killer, though. That hadn’t changed.

  ‘I haven’t told you the strangest part.’ Amber looked worried. ‘While I was talking to Sergeant Zailer, outside Ginny’s house, I had this weird sense of . . .’ She broke off, frustrated. ‘It’s hard to describe.’

  ‘Try,’ Waterhouse urged.

  ‘Like a split in my mind, as if I had two minds, both seeming to know contradictory things.’

  Proust let out a sigh that lingered in the room long after it had ceased to be audible.

  ‘Part of me knew I’d seen those words in Sergeant Zailer’s notebook. I had. I remembered seeing them. Another part of me could see this really clear image of . . .’

  ‘What? Image of what?’

  ‘She can’t answer the perishing question while you’re still asking it, Waterhouse.’

  ‘Of a page torn off that notepad.’ Amber pointed at the photographs. ‘An A4 sheet, with blue lines and a pink line separating the margin – like that. With “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” written on it, exactly like that imprint, like a list. Same capitalisation, even: all the “K”s and “C”s upper case. Except it wasn’t an imprint, it was the words themselves, in black ink. I could see it in my mind, clearly. And I knew it couldn’t be Sergeant Zailer’s notebook, because that was much smaller than A4, but I also knew I’d seen the words in her notebook.’ She stopped. ‘I realise there are contradictions in what I’m saying, but I can’t help that. There were, and are, contradictions in my head. Part of me still thinks Ginny Saxon put the words in my mouth.’

  Gibbs and Waterhouse exchanged a look.

  ‘I’ve never been inside any of the flats in the Corn Exchange building. I didn’t know Katharine Allen.’ Amber looked up at Waterhouse. ‘What does “Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” mean? Do you know?’

  ‘No idea,’ Waterhouse said through gritted teeth. Gibbs knew he saw it as an admission of his
own failure, that after a month he still didn’t know.

  ‘Not “Cruel to be Kind”,’ said Amber.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gibbs asked.

  ‘That’s the obvious phrase that the words “kind” and “cruel” bring to mind. Cruel to be kind means something, but “Kind of Cruel”? What’s that?’

  ‘I think we’ve established that none of us knows what it means,’ said Proust. ‘Before we delve any further into the dark art of hypnosis or the splitting of minds, shall we cover the basics? Where were you on Tuesday 2 November, between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.?’

  Even unsettled as she now was, Amber was quick. She was already flicking through her diary. ‘I can’t remember, but I’ll have been at work if it was a Tuesday. I’ll be able to tell you in a— Oh.’ She slammed the diary shut, as if she’d seen something unpleasant in it.

  ‘What?’ Waterhouse heard her surprise and pounced on it.

  ‘I was going to say I’ll be able to tell you in a minute what meetings I had, if any, but it turns out I wasn’t at work.’ She sighed. ‘I was on one of those driver awareness courses you lot seem to like so much. You know – someone goes two miles an hour over the speed limit at night when no one’s around, and next thing they know they have to waste a day of their life listening to a boring windbag setting stupid puzzles: if Driver A falls asleep and stalls on the motorway, and Driver B behind him crashes into him and dies, who is responsible for Driver B’s death?’

  ‘You didn’t have to go on the course,’ said Proust. ‘You could have taken a fine and points on your licence instead. What you can’t do is break the law and get away with it. I’m sorry if that annoys you. Gibbs, give her something to write on and with. Write down where the course was, please. Will someone be able to confirm that you attended?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Amber. ‘We were asked to bring our driving licences for ID, so it’ll be recorded on some form somewhere that I was there, but I’m not sure anyone’ll actually remember me. I can’t remember any faces, not this long afterwards.’

  ‘What do you remember about the day?’ Waterhouse asked.

  ‘It was mind-numbingly dull. Full of arse-lickers promising to change their driving habits as of that moment.’ Seeing that he’d been hoping for more, Amber said, ‘You want me to tell you something that proves I was there and not killing Katharine Allen? Something memorable?’

  Gibbs watched her internal struggle with interest. She didn’t want to tell them, whatever it was. Would she succeed in forcing herself?

  ‘There was a man there called Ed, in his late sixties. I don’t remember any of the others’ names, only his. When the windbag guy in charge asked us if any of us had personal experience of a traffic accident – us or someone we knew – about five people put their hands up. There were twenty of us altogether. Windbag asked for details. Most weren’t serious. Ed’s was. He told us that his daughter had been killed in a car crash in the early seventies, and that he’d been driving when it happened. It was pretty awful. No one knew what to say. I think he said it was before there were seatbelts in the backs of cars, but I’m not sure. His daughter wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, anyway, whether one was there or not. Ed collided with a driver who came out of nowhere and his daughter went headfirst through the windscreen and was killed. Louise – I think that was her name. Or Lucy. No, I think it was Louise.’

  ‘Louise or Lucy,’ Proust summarised impatiently. ‘Let’s wrap this up. DC Gibbs, would you arrange transport home for the various parts of Ms Hewerdine’s mind and their warring hypotheses?’

  Gibbs’ nod was a lie. He wouldn’t, because he didn’t need to. Anticipating that Proust would want Amber Hewerdine sent home prematurely because he wasn’t the one who’d given the order for her to be brought in, Waterhouse had arranged for Charlie to be waiting in her car in the car park to offer a lift and continue the interview more informally. Would the Snowman see her on his way out of the building and work it out?

  Did it matter? Gibbs and Waterhouse would both be getting their marching orders anyway.

  As if he’d read Gibbs’ mind, Proust said, ‘Waterhouse, I’ll see you in my office at nine o’clock on Thursday morning – I’m not in tomorrow. I’ll see you at nine fifteen, Gibbs.’

  ‘What’s wrong with now, sir?’ said Gibbs, keen to have it over and done with.

  ‘I’m tired now. Thursday, nine fifteen, after I’ve seen Waterhouse at nine. That clear enough for you, second time round? Should I issue you both with brightly coloured rubber wristbands, like they do at public swimming pools?’

  The Snowman left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  ‘I’m going to have nightmares about that man,’ Amber Hewerdine said.

  One way to approach a mystery is to try to solve it. If that doesn’t work, another fruitful approach is to look and see if there’s a second, more fathomable mystery hiding behind the mystery you can’t solve. Often there is, and that’s your way in.

  Anything aiming to achieve invisibility hides behind the visible. We can go even further and say that invisible things hide behind their own visible equivalents, because they provide the most effective cover. Let me prove the point using an absurd analogy: you might move your bread bin and expect to see breadcrumbs on the pantry shelf behind it, but you wouldn’t move it and expect to see another bread bin behind it.

  That’s why it is always wise, where difficult human situations are concerned, to look for the motive behind the motive, the guilt behind the guilt, the lie behind the lie, the secret behind the secret, the duty behind the duty – you can substitute any number of loaded abstract nouns and the formula will still work.

  And bear this in mind too: a mystery that’s impossible to crack, like Little Orchard, can afford to be visible. Unless Jo and Neil break their silence on the matter, which seems unlikely, no one will ever find out what happened that night. It is impossible to guess; all speculative scenarios seem equally improbable – which of course is the same as saying that all seem equally feasible. But what about a mystery that would be relatively easy to solve, if people knew of its existence, because there are only a handful of possible answers? That mystery is more vulnerable. It is a poor defenceless creature whose only hope of survival is to go unnoticed until all the relevant people have stopped caring.

  Most organisms are desperate to survive in their present forms. Why should mysteries be any different? Yes – the more I think about that idea, the more I like it. Let’s come back to it later.

  Is it wishful thinking to assume that people will stop caring? Not at all. The hunger to know doesn’t last forever. It’s rather like a piece of elastic – our solution-seeking impulse stretches and stretches, and then suddenly, stretched too far, it snaps and loses all tension. This can happen remarkably quickly, unless certain conditions apply: if the stakes are incredibly high, if there is injustice involved, if finding or not finding a solution affects our status in the eyes of the world or in our own eyes, or – probably the most significant factor when it comes to extending the human solution-seeking impulse – if we think there is a chance that we will find out; if we can see an investigative way forward, for example.

  I hope I’ve said enough by now to bring the mystery behind the mystery of Little Orchard into focus.

  No?

  Why is Amber the only person still obsessing, years later, about what Jo and Neil were so determined to hide? Why does she still care? That’s the true mystery behind the mystery of Little Orchard.

  The stakes are not high: Jo and Neil and their two boys returned unharmed. They have been, or have seemed, fine ever since.

  Does Amber believe she will find out the truth one day? On the contrary: it makes her angry to think that will never happen. And that’s another clue: people get angry when their status is threatened, when they feel they have been downgraded, or treated unfairly. But where is the unfairness?

  Does Amber believe that someone else knows, someone less important than her, less deserving of the i
nformation? Or is there another reason why she feels she has a right to be told this very private thing that Jo clearly wants to keep to herself? Is she simply nosey and spoilt, heedless of boundaries?

  Could it be that Jo owes her a secret?

  3

  Tuesday 30 November 2010

  I am in Sergeant Zailer’s car. Again. By invitation, this time. She has been asked to drive me home, and I can’t understand why. If I were in charge of the investigation into Katharine Allen’s murder, I’d have kept us there in that horrible yellow room until we made some progress.

  I’d have stayed up all night if necessary, listening as I fast-forwarded verbally through my entire life – everywhere I’ve ever been, everyone I’ve ever met – in the hope of homing in on the moment that contained my sighting of that piece of paper.

  Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel.

  Wherever I saw it, it can’t have been in a vacuum. I must have seen it somewhere, so why isn’t that somewhere part of the memory? If my mind could only connect the image of that lined page to a background or setting, surely then everything would click into place. I’d be able to make a link between the physical surroundings and a person, or people.

  I’d know who murdered Katharine Allen.

  No. I wouldn’t. Even if the page I saw was the same one that was torn from the pad in her flat, there’s no reason to think it had anything to do with her death.

  I screw my eyes shut, try to see the sheet of paper lying on a table or a desk, sticking out of an envelope file, Blu-Tacked to a fridge, Sellotaped to a wall. It’s no use; none of those backdrops fits – or, rather, none fits better or worse than any of the others. The page hangs in blackness in my memory, unanchored.

  ‘Stop trying,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘According to you-know-who, trying to remember is counterproductive. Just let whatever wants to rise to the surface come, and if nothing comes, that’s fine.’

  ‘Ginny Saxon? She said that to you?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Her light tone doesn’t fool me; she wishes I didn’t know that she went to a hypnotherapist for help, even though she knows I did too.