Prey to All

by Cooper, Natasha

  ‘I’m surprised he had it at all with his ulcer. I mean, aren’t all citrus juices pretty acid? Wouldn’t they make the ulcer worse?’

  ‘It was pretty quiet when I was last with him. I don’t know whether juice made it worse. It’s true he never used to eat mustard or anything spicy. But he never said anything about the juice.’

  ‘OK. Fine. What else?’

  ‘Something reasonably soft and easy to eat for lunch: shepherd’s pie, fish pie, stuffed pancakes, fricassee, something bland and soft like that. His teeth weren’t very good. Then a cup of Darjeeling without milk at tea-time and a slice of cake. A glass of sherry at six. Supper of soup or eggs, something light, occasionally a blandish cheese, and then a final, long glass of grapefruit juice with his pills. He couldn’t drink much alcohol and hated the gelatinous sensation of all those capsules he had to take, so he liked something as sharp and distinctive as grapefruit to get them down.’

  ‘I see, thank you.’

  ‘But, as I say, Deb probably didn’t bother with what he liked. She was always trying to make him drink cranberry juice. He hated that, said it made his teeth feel all woolly, but that didn’t stop her forcing it on him.’

  But he never complained about your grapefruit juice tickling up his ulcer. And something as acid as that must have hurt. Did he keep quiet because that came from you and the cranberry from Deb?

  ‘I see. Thank you. I’ll write to her to find out. You’ve been very helpful.’

  Cordelia did not produce any polite comment, merely a short sharp ‘goodbye’ before she put down the phone.

  Trish typed a short note to Deborah, asking for the information about her father’s last meals, printed it, put it in an envelope addressed to the prison and stuffed it into her handbag to drop into the nearest post box. It would be much quicker than getting a visiting order sent and going to ask her in person. Then, at last, Trish picked up the phone and dialled Meg’s number.

  She wasn’t there. Trish mentally filed all the questions about her parents’ past and left a cheery little message of thanks for all Meg’s help with the medical questions. Then she abandoned Deb, Kate, Anna and the whole lot of them, to get down to her real work.

  George phoned her mobile at half past nine to find out where she was and warn her that dinner was in danger of being seriously overcooked. She promised to be home in twenty minutes and walked back across the bridge, facing yet another way in which she was like her father. But, full of anger though she sometimes was, at least she had never hit George – or felt the slightest temptation to do it. And it was a while since she had got drunk. She was her own woman, not a clone of Paddy.

  Chapter 21

  Deb was sitting on the bed in her cell with the door open, reading Trish Maguire’s second letter, and wishing she knew why they needed to know about her father’s meals. Presumably they were hoping for some kind of allergy story, but she hadn’t given him anything he hadn’t always had. She was sure of that. She’d always taken trouble to make sure he had everything he liked. Meals were just about the only thing she’d always been able to get right.

  His taste in food and drink hadn’t changed as often as some of his other requirements. She’d been well used to being yelled at one day for doing what he’d demanded only the day before. That habit had made caring for him almost impossible.

  Deb got up to find a pad and felt-tip to write back to Trish Maguire, wincing as she moved. All her muscles seemed to ache these days, even in her tongue and jaw. She didn’t know why.

  A shadow passed her door. She looked up from the sheet of paper and saw Gill, whose cell was at the far end of the landing. She was the wing boss, more powerful in her own way than the screws. Deb smiled tentatively, despising herself for being a crawler.

  ‘I’ve just heard they’ve got Mand’s pimp,’ Gill said casually.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah. He said he never brought her no smack, but he’d been here the day she OD’d.’

  ‘She sent the pimp a VO?’ Deb was appalled. ‘A man who’d done that to her?’

  Mandy had been so excited at the prospect of her visitor and so happy when she waltzed back into the cell after that last visit that it had never occurred to Deb he might have been the man who had abused her for so long. All Mandy had said was that Spike Hamper was an old friend who came to see her from time to time.

  Since then Deb had assumed that Mandy’s happiness had been anticipation of the hit to come. Now she thought sickly that it must have been the result of the same old game of trying to make your tormentor love you. She knew the rules of that game backwards.

  It was a game from hell. You couldn’t win except by walking away. And you couldn’t do that because then you’d lose hope.

  ‘Anyway,’ Gill was saying, looking at Deb as though she’d grown green whiskers, ‘I heard today that they turned his place over and found a bag of the same stuff Mandy took.’

  Deb got up so fast she had to hold on to the wall to keep from falling over. Through the swinging in her head, she heard Gill’s voice: ‘Cut with paracetamol, like.’ Gill shrugged. ‘That must be why the screws’ve stopped harassing you now.’

  Deb leaned back against the wall, her head tipped back, staring at the vaulted brick ceiling. It was painted the horrible colour of her father’s false teeth. She couldn’t think why she was crying again. Not now. Unless it was just relief. She tried to make her mind work, to thank Gill for the news, but all she could do was cry. Again. It was nearly as bad as the day she’d humiliated herself in front of those police officers. Even though her head was right back, she couldn’t stop the tears flooding down her face.

  She felt a rough towel against her cheeks and a gentle hand on her head, straightening it. ‘It’s OK, love. Let it out. ’S not your fault Mand died. We knew that all along. And the screws know it now. They prob’ly won’t tell you – or say sorry for what they did to you – but they know.’

  Deb let herself fall forward against Gill’s shoulder and felt more comfort in the tight, wholly sexless hug than she’d had since her mother picked her up the time she fell off her bike and skinned both knees and her chin, and Cordelia had laughed.

  ‘It’s OK, love. Let it out.’

  After a bit, Gill stood her upright, gave her back the towel and said she was going to make some tea and why didn’t Deb finish her letter then come and join the rest of them?

  Deb nodded damply and wrote a quick list of everything she could remember giving her father to eat or drink during her stay and put it in an envelope addressed to Trish Maguire. Then she went out to be with other people again.

  They were much kinder to her than usual and even talked about what they’d done to land them in prison, and why. For the first time Deb started to tell them about her father, then found she couldn’t stop, even though she’d been banging on for what felt like hours.

  ‘So I had to face the fact that not only would I never be good enough for him, but that I actually brought on this beastly skin condition,’ she said at one moment, closing her eyes, as though that could quench the memory of his face, his pain, his loathing. ‘And the ulcer.’

  ‘What?’ The question came from Gill, as so often articulating what the rest of them wanted to say but couldn’t or wouldn’t.

  ‘He nearly always had an attack when I was there. Never with my sister and hardly ever with my mother. It was only me that brought it on. I just had to cross the threshold and straight away he’d have come up in these awful bumps.’

  But did he hate you because of that or did it happen because he hated you? she asked herself, forgetting the other women. Their faces turned into a pinkish blur in front of her. She could hear their voices, but not as clearly as the ones in her head:

  ‘What is it about you that makes the people you love despise and hate you?’

  ‘You were never good enough for Dad or for Malcolm, were you? Why couldn’t you face that, instead of trying to make them change when they couldn’t bear to have you any
where near them?’

  And then came the accusations:

  ‘You ruined their lives and Kate’s and Adam’s, too. You should never have married Adam. You only did it to give Kate a father when Malcolm threw you out. You cheated Adam. You never loved him. You gave him the twins and Millie to make up for that, and you’ve never loved them properly either. You spent your whole married life dreaming of Malcolm, and Dad. Neither of them ever did love you and now they never will. You’ll never be good enough. And you’ll never be loved. You’re not lovable. That’s really why you’re here. That’s why you’re in prison and you’ll never be let out. You don’t deserve to have a proper life.’

  Something moved in the pink fog in front of Deb and caught her attention. She saw that the other women were staring at her, but they could have been on the other side of a glass wall. She was cut off from them as well as everyone else. All the warmth she’d felt earlier had gone. The nightmares were back, jostling for space like maggots on a rotting body. More and more of them all the time.

  Had she had a brainstorm that night and fed him pills she shouldn’t have and put his head in a bag then forgotten all about it? Could she have been sleepwalking and done it then? Could her subconscious have imagined the whole elaborate story of the false teeth and made her believe it? Was she mad? And evil like Cordelia had said? And unlovable? Unlovable and in hell.

  ‘Sarge?’

  Caroline Lyalt looked up to see Steve Owler peering round the edge of her door. He looked indecently cheerful, still wearing his tight black jeans but this time with a dark purple T-shirt. The colour made her feel hotter than ever. Steve’s face was glistening, but hers was positively dripping. She wondered if the Met would ever be able to afford air-conditioning in all their local stations.

  ‘Steve. Well done spotting the Crackenfield connection. I should have had more faith in your intuitions. Have you traced the daughter yet?’

  ‘Not yet, but the parents will tell us where she is, and we know how to get to them. That’s not what I came for.’

  ‘No?’ Caroline rubbed her hands over her eyes, feeling them smart, and realised she was copying one of Femur’s most familiar gestures. She hoped he wasn’t in some bar somewhere, drinking himself stupid.

  ‘Your mate in IR Two phoned and asked me to say they think they’ve got the gun that was used on Chaze. Ballistics are reasonably sure the bullets were fired from it.’

  Her eyes already felt less bad. ‘Great. Where did they find it?’

  ‘A skip in Brixton. A woman saw it poking out of some rubbish and for a miracle called it in. Inspector Smart phoned while you were busy just now and asked me to let you know.’

  ‘The first ray of light.’

  ‘Apart from Spike Hamper.’

  ‘Yeah, but he was a dead end. Still, we’d better see the Crackenfields before the end of the day. You found them, so you can come with me.’

  He looked disappointed. Caroline suppressed a smile. The idea of talking to some law-abiding OAPs in Pimlico wasn’t going to be half as exciting as chasing illegal guns in Brixton. But there was no way he’d be invited to join the IR II team, and it would do him good to see some tedious, dogged, necessary police work. Clip his wings a bit.

  ‘Did you have any luck with Adam Gibbert’s alibi?’ she asked, making him look even gloomier.

  ‘Yeah. The neighbours were round there having a meal with him. He’d been going to go to their house, but he couldn’t get a babysitter, and the eldest daughter was away in London on a school trip to the theatre, so he asked the friends to come to him. They brought the food with them and reheated it in his kitchen.’ He grinned suddenly.

  ‘Something amusing you, Steve?’

  ‘You should have heard the neighbour on the state of Gibbert’s kitchen. Said she really pitied that oldest girl, Kate, having to do all the cooking there.’

  ‘Kate, yes.’ Caroline felt her headache tightening. ‘Are there any fingerprints on the gun they’ve found in Brixton?’

  ‘Some. None identified yet.’

  ‘OK. I’ve got to finish this, but be ready to come with me to the Crackenfields’ in half an hour. OK?’

  She was still working when she heard Femur’s voice outside the office. He sounded less pathetic than he had for days. Caroline pushed away her notes and went out to tell him about the gun. He already knew, clearly having his own snout in the IR II team.

  ‘There’s very little doubt it’s the one used to kill Chaze, but it doesn’t get them much further. They need a name, a face, or a useful set of prints, and it hasn’t produced those. Is there anything new in the reports of the house-to-house or CCTV?’

  ‘Nothing, Guv. But I’m about to go round to these people, the Crackenfields, to talk to them about Chaze and his relationship with their daughter and find out if he knew their son, who died the other day. I was going to take Steve Owler, but it’d be great if you could come with me. You’d spot a lot more than him – or me.’

  ‘Flattery, Sergeant. Flattery.’

  Her smile widened at the sight and sound of his obvious cheerfulness. She wondered if he’d had news of Sue or was just psyched up by the discovery of the gun.

  ‘I’ll come, but don’t build too much on them. Didn’t you tell me it’s thirty years since Chaze went out with the daughter? The reasons for this killing aren’t going to be found that far back. Come on, Cally.’

  ‘More than thirty, Guv. You may be right, but it can’t be coincidence. With a name like that? And with her brother dying too? We can’t ignore it. They live only three streets away from his house. It won’t take long. We have to follow it up, even if it does look like leading to another sodding dead end.’

  ‘OK. Give me time for a leak first.’

  ‘And a sandwich? I don’t suppose you had any lunch.’

  ‘You’re as bad as Owler.’

  ‘No one’s as bad as Owler. Where he puts it all, I’ll never know. I’ll tell him he’s been let off, and I’ll meet you at the canteen in fifteen minutes,’ she said, dismissing her boss.

  He raised a finger to his forehead in a mixture of salute and insult and went off to obey.

  They walked round to the Crackenfields’ because there was no point getting out one of the cars, only to have to trail round finding somewhere to park. Their route took them past Chaze’s house.

  Femur thought again about Laura Chaze and her lack of misery. He knew colleagues who’d have had her in the interview room for that alone, interrogating her about hitmen and how to hire them.

  He still thought she could have done it, even though no one had come up with any evidence. She was rich enough, and ruthless enough. But she could have thrown him out and divorced him, so what would have been the point of the hit? And she hadn’t capitalised on the death, which she might well have done. Being in PR, she must have been tempted: the suffering heroine, tearfully appealing on TV for information about her beloved husband’s killers. But no, she’d refused to do that, even when their press officers had wanted her to. Said it wasn’t dignified and she didn’t think it ever did any good anyway.

  She was right there. Information tended to flood in, but it didn’t often help. In fact, usually the police had a suspect all along, sometimes even the person making the appeal. It could be a handy way of keeping the suspect confident of his safety while the police collected the evidence that would convict him.

  ‘Here we are, Guv.’ Caroline had stopped outside a tall, thin house, which had seen better days. Unlike the clean paint of the Chazes’ building, this one was chipped and grimy.

  The elderly woman who opened the door was anything but grimy: a tall, elegant creature in a linen suit that was almost the colour of her blue-grey hair.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, as Caroline shook out her warrant card, introduced the two of them and said she was looking for Mrs Crackenfield.

  The woman sagged a little. ‘I am Margaret Crackenfield, but surely there isn’t any more you want. We’ve had the inquest; the child isn�
��t our son’s, we’ve answered all your questions. Surely we can be left alone now.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ Caroline said quickly, ‘but we haven’t come about your son’s death.’

  Mrs Crackenfield looked as though she was about to faint. After a second, she recovered herself and stood away from the door, saying, ‘Oh? You’d better come in, then. My husband’s not here just now. Did you want him? Or just me? Is it something about the car?’

  ‘You would be fine.’ Caroline was smiling in a way that would make anyone trust her, Femur thought.

  Mrs Crackenfield led the way into a pleasant enough sitting room on the right of the front door. The decoration was shabby, but it had a sort of country-house kind of charm: all chintz and polished wood. The real thing, too. A house like this made you see the point of the style.

  Mrs Crackenfield invited them both to sit down, but she didn’t offer them anything to drink.

  ‘We came,’ said Caroline after checking that Femur didn’t want to begin, ‘to ask you about Malcolm Chaze.’

  Mrs Crackenfield raised a trembling hand to her forehead. ‘Poor man. It was dreadful, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You did know him then?’

  She shrugged her slender shoulders, making the linen jacket bunch up around her ears. There were tiny pearls in the large lobes, looking incongruous and out of place.

  ‘Not nowadays. He’d become so awfully important. But I remember him well enough as a schoolboy.’

  ‘We understand that he had a relationship with your daughter.’

  Mrs Crackenfield looked puzzled. ‘Only a trivial boy-and-girl affair.’ She shook her head, frowning. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, Sergeant Lyalt, not an affair in the current sense of the word. They were seventeen or eighteen. It was one Christmas holiday, they’d go to the cinema together or to dances held by some of our friends. Malcolm didn’t know many people – our sort of people – so it was nice for him, and Georgie was glad enough of a guaranteed partner. She was at the age and stage when the idea of dances was rather daunting. She wasn’t as pretty then as she became later. Even a little dumpy.’