Kind of Cruel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘No point me asking where Waterhouse is,’ Gibbs said as they stood at the bar waiting for their pints amid the suits and ties and loud voices.

  ‘There might be,’ Sam told him. ‘Not that I’ve heard from him, but I can guess.’

  ‘Amber Hewerdine?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. I rang her at work this morning.’

  ‘Dark horse, aren’t you?’ Gibbs sounded surprised.

  ‘I’m a DS. I’m supposed to make decisions and act on them.’

  Gibbs looked momentarily confused. ‘So what did she say?’

  ‘Simon rang her first thing, asked to meet up. She gave him the brush-off. That’s not how she put it, but it’s the impression I got – before she gave me the brush-off too.’

  ‘She was happy enough to talk to Waterhouse last night,’ said Gibbs. ‘He had a job persuading her to leave.’

  ‘Too busy at work, too many meetings, it’ll have to wait till tomorrow – that’s what she said.’

  ‘So if Waterhouse isn’t with her, where is he?’

  They picked up their drinks and made their way to the nearest free table. Gibbs pulled over a third chair, from which Sam inferred that he was expecting Sellers to join them. Gibbs was more relaxed in Sellers’ presence than out of it. Sam wasn’t close to either of them – he wasn’t close to anyone at work – but he knew he’d miss his team more than he’d ever enjoyed working with them.

  The Brown Cow had recently been renovated again. The walls were covered in wood panelling, painted a colour Sam’s wife Kate called ‘teal’, while the old wood floor had been replaced with a red, blue and white tartan carpet. The landlord liked to change the look every couple of years, and the current flavour seemed to be trendy Scottish hunting lodge. The only constant was a large oil painting of a brown cow that had been there forever. There would be an outcry if anyone tried to take it down – a genteel, Spilling kind of outcry – and quite right too. Sam had grown fond of the cow, which kept its intelligent eye on you wherever you sat, and had proved over the years to be a good listener. Better than Simon, Sellers or Gibbs. Sometimes, when he was having trouble getting through to his DCs, Sam imagined he was talking to the cow instead and found he was able to express himself more clearly.

  ‘Simon’ll be thinking what you thought,’ he said to Gibbs. ‘How come Amber’s avoiding him suddenly, after being so helpful last night? Was he wrong to trust her and tell her as much as he did?’

  ‘I can answer that,’ Gibbs muttered.

  ‘He’ll want to check her alibi for 2 November. That’s where he is: working his way through everyone who was on that driver awareness course, or as many of them as he can. It won’t be good enough for him to see a tick in a box next to her name. He’ll want to find someone who remembers her face, and can tell him if she was there for the whole day, or if she nipped out for half an hour at any point between eleven and one. Driving time from Rawndesley Road Conference Centre to Kat Allen’s flat can’t be more than five minutes.’

  Sam raised his glass. ‘Να σκάσουν οι εχθροί μας,’ he said, before taking a sip. Gibbs wouldn’t appreciate the irony of the Greek toast, which meant, ‘May our enemies burst with envy’. Sam had no enemies, and as far as he was aware no one had ever envied him.

  ‘The Conference Centre?’ said Gibbs. ‘That’s where the course was?’

  Sam nodded. ‘Amber said there were twenty there, right? Twenty speeding drivers?’

  ‘If you call a couple of miles over the limit speeding, yeah,’ said Gibbs.

  ‘More than enough people to take up Simon’s whole day.’ Sam sighed. ‘He can’t risk coming into work. Someone like me might ask him how he feels about getting fired, puncture his denial. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t turn up tomorrow at nine for the official sacking ceremony.’

  ‘He’ll turn up,’ said Gibbs.

  ‘Will he? I thought he’d ring me when he got my message about Sharon Lendrim. I made a point of withholding most of the story, give him an incentive to get in touch.’ Sam shrugged. ‘I’ve heard nothing from him.’

  ‘Don’t take it personally. Tell me instead, if you can be bothered.’

  Sam was shocked. ‘It’s my job to be bothered.’ A job I soon won’t have.

  ‘Look, we both know what’s going to happen tomorrow morning,’ said Gibbs. ‘To Waterhouse at nine and to me at nine fifteen. I just thought . . .’

  ‘It’s not tomorrow yet,’ said Sam, feeling panicky. ‘It’s still today, and you still work for me.’

  ‘All right, no need to pull rank.’

  Sam laughed. ‘Most DSs pull rank several times a day, every day. If I’d done it more often, maybe we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.’ Gibbs stared at him for a few seconds, then turned back to his pint.

  What do you expect him to say? Don’t blame yourself, there’s nothing you could have done? Of course Sam wanted to tell Gibbs about Sharon Lendrim’s murder; of all the conversations they might have today, it promised to be the easiest.

  ‘All I know at this stage is what DS Ursula Shearer from Rawndesley’s told me. Sharon Lendrim lived in Rawndesley, on Monson Street. She was a single mum with two kids, worked at the hospital as a diabetic dietician.’

  ‘Kids have the same father?’ Gibbs asked.

  ‘No one knows, but there were no dads in the picture at any point. Sharon’s mother Marianne told the police she was sure Sharon had used a sperm bank, or a donation from a gay friend – to spite her, because she knew Marianne would be against both. According to DS Shearer, spite’s the only reasonable reaction to Marianne Lendrim.’

  ‘Did they alibi her?’ Gibbs asked.

  ‘They did. She was in Venice staying in a friend’s apartment on 22 November 2008, so whoever poured petrol through Sharon’s letterbox at ten past one in the morning and chucked a match in after it, it can’t have been Marianne.’

  Gibbs frowned. ‘That’s what happened?’

  ‘Sharon was asleep in bed, died from the fumes.’

  ‘What about her daughters?’

  ‘This is the interesting part. As soon as the blaze took hold, neighbours noticed it and called it in. When the fire service arrived, they found Sharon dead inside the house and the girls’ beds empty. They’d been expecting to find the two sisters the neighbours had told them lived in the house, a five-year-old and a six-year-old.’

  ‘In Venice with Wicked Grandma?’ Gibbs guessed.

  ‘No,’ said Sam. ‘Nothing so normal. While their mother was dying alone at home, Dinah and Nonie Lendrim were at the pub.’

  Charlie was keeping a list of all the ways in which her quality of life was blighted by her sister Olivia’s affair with Chris Gibbs. Sometimes she forgot what number she was up to. The new addition that had just occurred to her – that she’d been unable to suggest she and Liv meet in the Brown Cow, her favourite pub in the world, in case Gibbs was in there – was either number twenty-six or twenty-seven.

  Charlie could have gone upmarket with her choice of an alternative meeting place, or picked somewhere in the same league as the Brown Cow, but she’d plumped instead for the Web & Grub, a small, smelly internet café overlooking the Winstanley Estate that shared its premises with a minicab firm and served no hot food. The sum total of today’s bounty was five sandwiches standing in a forlorn line on the counter between the till and the home-made cardboard tip box: two tuna mayo and three cheese ploughmans, all in triangular plastic packets. Hot drinks were served in Styrofoam cups; for those who preferred something cold, there were bottles of water and cartons of orange juice and Ribena in a large humming fridge, the glass door of which was covered with greasy finger smears and half-peeled-off stickers. On the phone, Olivia hadn’t said a word about the choice of venue, which was how Charlie knew she’d taken the point: it was her fault that they were missing out on the Brown Cow’s spinach and asparagus crepe, its chorizo and red lentil casserole, its Sausage Alsacienne.

  No booze at the Web & Grub
either. A pint of strong lager would have helped Charlie get through this meeting, her and Liv’s first in months. Did she have time to nip to the offie next door, buy a can and drink it before Liv arrived?

  Too late; here she was. As she walked over, she waved frantically and tearfully, as if from a rapidly departing ocean liner. The joyful expression on her face hardened something in Charlie. In her sister’s shoes, if their roles had been reversed, Charlie would have taken Liv’s forgiveness as an insult, found it more offensive than the months of silence.

  Who the fuck are you to forgive me, when I did nothing wrong in the first place?

  Charlie wondered how she could still be so angry, when the voice in her head was manifestly on Olivia’s side. She’d said nothing on the phone about forgiveness, deliberately. All she’d done was ask if she and Liv could meet.

  Don’t tell her she’s lost weight and looks fantastic. She’ll know you know why that is. Might as well write ‘CHRIS GIBBS’ in capitals on the table between you.

  Liv sat down, clutching her strange cow-skin handbag to her chest like body armour. Its stiff handles obstructed Charlie’s view of her face. Their curved shape brought bridges to mind: building them, burning them.

  ‘This feels so weird. I thought I might never see you again. Did you think that too?’ Liv gabbled. ‘No, course you didn’t. You knew you could talk to me whenever you wanted to. God, I’m actually shaking! For some reason this feels like a clandestine meeting. Must be the unsalubrious surroundings. Not that I’m complaining,’ she added quickly, holding up both hands in a gesture of surrender, as if Charlie was aiming a gun at her heart.

  Don’t say, ‘If you want to talk about unsalubrious . . .’

  ‘I’d have met you anywhere. I’d have met you in a caravan.’ Eyes wide, Liv stared at Charlie, gripping the handles of her bag with both hands. She shuddered.

  Charlie nodded to indicate she’d got the message: Liv was desperate to make peace. She’d once told Charlie she hated caravans so much that even the word made her feel sick; she tried to avoid hearing it or saying it. At first Charlie had thought this was an affectation – she’d been on the same family holidays as Liv every year, in their parents’ mobile home, and suffered no adverse effects – but her sister’s consistency over decades had made her think again. As phobias went, it was a bizarre one. Charlie wondered what Ginny Saxon would have to say about it.

  ‘Do you want to get something to eat?’ she asked Liv.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I don’t think I’m hungry.’

  ‘Me neither. So let’s have lunch with no food.’ Liv giggled. ‘Like in Dallas. Remember how they used to sit down to enormous delicious meals, then have a huge row and all storm off?’

  Don’t tell her she’s way too obvious, shamelessly invoking happy childhood memories. So you both loved Dallas; so what?

  ‘I don’t mean we’re going to have a huge row. Of course we aren’t.’ Liv looked terrified. ‘I’m so pleased to see you, I wouldn’t fall out with you even if you . . .’

  Asked you to swear that you’ve shared bodily fluids with Chris Gibbs for the last time?

  ‘I can’t think of anything.’ Liv shrugged. ‘My mind’s gone blank. I’m too scared of you. You’d better do the talking.’ The hands went up again. ‘Not that I’m saying you’re scary. Shit, now I sound passive aggressive, like I’m saying one thing when I mean another. I’m honestly not.’

  ‘I’ve been seeing a hypnotherapist,’ Charlie announced. It was easier to come out with it while Liv was wittering. Except she wasn’t any more, which meant that the rest of what Charlie had to say, the follow-through, had the pressure of attentive silence to contend with. ‘Well, I’ve seen her once, but I’ll probably go again. It’s for my smoking. To help me give up. It seems to work for loads of people, so I thought I’d try it. It’s no big deal, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it, except . . .’

  ‘You wanted an excuse to get in touch with me?’ Liv suggested hopefully.

  Charlie inhaled, held the air in her lungs for as long as she could, imagined it was nicotine. ‘Turns out I picked the wrong woman to go to for help,’ she said eventually. ‘I don’t want to get into the details, but it seems there’s a connection, or possible connection, between my . . .’ Charlie couldn’t bring herself to say ‘therapist’. ‘Between this hypnotist woman and a case Simon’s on at the moment.’ Hypnotist, therapist – Charlie wasn’t sure which sounded worse.

  ‘Which case?’ said Liv. ‘Not Kat Allen?’

  All the necessary defences shot up within seconds. No effort was required; Charlie barely felt a thing. She was getting better at this. Her soul, after years of practice, was accustomed to adopting the brace position.

  Of course, Liv would know all about Katharine Allen’s murder, via Gibbs. Kat. As if she’d known her all her life. Liv being Liv, she saw no reason to keep quiet; why not ram home her invasion of Charlie’s world instead? People deflected attention from their own crippling selfishness in a variety of ways, Charlie had noticed. Liv’s way was to hide behind a mask of naïve childlike enthusiasm.

  ‘Simon had to be upfront at work about my connection with this . . . woman – Ginny, she’s called – and I didn’t want you hearing about it from anyone else.’

  It wasn’t as hard as she’d feared it might be to parrot Simon’s words as if she believed them herself. Olivia didn’t need to know that Charlie loathed Simon at the moment, or that her loathing of him did nothing to diminish her love for him, which made her resent him even more.

  He hadn’t needed to humiliate her by taking her notebook into work, where anyone who wanted to, including Gibbs, would be able to read her undignified, unsendable letters to Olivia. Charlie had begged him, in tears, to tear out and take in only the relevant page, the Kind of Cruel page. When that failed, she shifted the focus of her begging: couldn’t he see sense and spend five minutes or half an hour, or however long it took, constructing, with Charlie’s help, an acceptable lie that would allow him to tell his team everything they needed to know without endangering his job?

  No, he couldn’t. Or, rather, he wouldn’t. ‘I’m sick of things being complicated,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some new information. Other people need to know it. I shouldn’t have to start second-guessing, planning, scheming, worrying how to protect my job, myself or anyone else. All that’s a waste of my energy. If anyone doesn’t like the truth, that’s their problem. Sometimes I don’t like it either, but there’s no point pretending we don’t all have to live with it.’

  Charlie was better than most at facing the truth – she figured she must be, or else why did she feel miserable so much of the time? – but she’d have liked, if at all possible, to keep certain truths private: her visit to a hypnotherapist, the emotional letters she’d written in the naïve belief that no one but her would ever see them. Frantic, she’d blurted out a series of desperate suggestions she hadn’t had time to think through: Simon could give her a chance to talk to Ginny Saxon again, persuade her to ring the police, say nothing about Charlie, but claim to be worried by something sinister a client had said under hypnosis. A bit far-fetched, perhaps, but Charlie thought she could have persuaded Ginny to go along with it, in the interests of client confidentiality and helping to progress a murder case.

  Simon hadn’t been willing to discuss it. ‘I’m going in, I’m taking the notebook, I’m telling it straight – that’s what I’m doing. Other people can tie themselves in knots if they want to, sack me if they want to, tell themselves I don’t give a shit about their feelings if they want to. None of that’s down to me.’

  Later, it had occurred to Charlie that her plan wouldn’t have worked anyway. If Sam or Gibbs or Sellers had interviewed Amber Hewerdine, they would soon have found out about Ginny Saxon’s other client, the smoker with the notebook.

  ‘You invited me here to tell me you’re having hypnotherapy?’ said Liv. ‘Not because you’ve missed me, or you want to put the past behind us and go back to how
things were, or . . .’ She stopped, looked down at the table. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to put words into your mouth.’

  Charlie was busy trying to stop them spilling out.

  Don’t say you’d love to go back to the way things were before she fell into bed with Gibbs.

  Don’t point out that the past is somewhat larger than the unpleasant experiences she’d like to leave behind, that it also includes things she’s eager to hang on to – one in particular that she’s keen to have spill over into the present.

  Don’t demand to know how she has the gall to use language – words with fixed meanings – in such a dishonest, self-serving way.

  Charlie thought about Amber Hewerdine, her intolerance of anything that had even the faintest whiff of bullshit about it. Ginny Saxon must have had the afternoon from hell yesterday, with first Amber and then Charlie to contend with; surely most people who went to her for help were more gullible and asked fewer tricky questions.

  Are you wishing Amber Hewerdine was your sister, a woman you’ve met twice and barely know? Pathetic.

  ‘I’m happy to talk to you about whatever you want,’ Liv said. ‘I just . . . assumed we were going to talk about me and Chris, that’s all.’

  ‘If you want to talk about Gibbs in the way you’d talk about any other boyfriend – your other boyfriend, for example – that’s fine by me. If you’d rather not mention him, also fine. What we’re not going to discuss, ever, is the rights and wrongs of anything – whether or not you’ve fucked me over, whether I’ve overreacted . . .’

  ‘The contentious stuff,’ Liv summarised.

  Charlie nodded.

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Problem?’

  Liv sighed. ‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it? How can we sort anything out if we don’t—’