Behind Dead Eyes

by Howard Linskey

  Later, when Ian Bradshaw released Callie McQuire without charge, she went straight to the car where Helen was waiting for her. He had not yet found the nerve to tell her about Diane and reasoned it was best to leave this till their investigation was concluded. Ian beckoned Tom over and told him everything he had learned from the girl.

  ‘And the photograph?’ asked Tom.

  ‘Looks genuine,’ said Bradshaw.

  ‘Christ,’ hissed Tom, for even now he half expected it all to be some kind of con, or a case of mistaken identity, ‘it’s definitely Jarvis?’

  Bradshaw nodded.

  ‘Were is it now?’

  Bradshaw patted his chest to show it was safely in his jacket pocket.

  ‘Anything else?’ asked Tom when his instinct told him Bradshaw was holding something back.

  ‘Yeah,’ he told Tom quietly, ‘I’m pretty sure Diane Turner is the burned girl.’

  ‘Oh dear God,’ said Tom and he instinctively turned to look at Callie in the back seat of the car. ‘She doesn’t know? Let’s keep it that way for now. If she finds out …’ He didn’t need to complete his sentence. Both men knew there was no telling what Callie would say or do if she discovered her friend had been murdered.

  ‘Let’s get her away from here,’ said Tom.

  They drove to Tom’s house and went inside.

  ‘Let’s see it then,’ said Tom.

  Helen and Tom stared at the photograph for a long time without comment. There was a single grey line across the middle of the picture where one of the slats on the ventilation grille had obscured Callie’s view but she had done a good job with the camera. The top left-hand corner of the photograph showed the face of a much older man forcing himself upon an underage girl. Her face was pressed downwards and to one side so she was facing the camera in the bottom left-hand corner of the photo. There was no doubt that this was Frank Jarvis and the girl he was raping was Diane Turner. Helen and Tom exchanged looks, both of them deeply affected by the image.

  ‘Callie?’ asked Helen eventually, ‘did Diane show this photograph to Sandra Jarvis?’

  ‘I dunno.’ The denial was automatic, a reflex action Callie always employed to avoid trouble. Perhaps she belatedly realised she was with the only people in the world she could trust, for she opened up then: ‘Yeah, she must have done.’

  ‘What did Sandra say she would do?’ asked Tom. ‘For Diane, I mean.’

  ‘She said she would try and help her,’ said Callie.

  ‘But she didn’t, did she?’ said Tom. ‘Not at first.’

  ‘Did she hell. She went back to uni,’ admitted Callie, ‘but Diane didn’t expect Sandra to help her. How could she?’

  ‘She just wanted to tell someone about it,’ said Helen.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Callie, ‘she told me she felt like she was going to explode if she didn’t tell somebody. She knew Sandra was alright, see, so she could tell her.’

  ‘A few weeks went by,’ said Tom, ‘then Sandra got back in touch with Diane.’

  ‘How’d you know that?’

  Tom didn’t want to admit it was obvious from the timeline. Diane had told Sandra about the abuse during the Christmas holidays; Sandra had gone back to university in January and completely fallen apart. By the end of February, she had decided to do something about it. She was going to confront her father and rescue Diane. It was the only explanation for their joint disappearance.

  ‘How did Sandra get in touch?’ said Tom.

  ‘She came up to the burger bar and bought Diane some chips.’

  ‘Just an old friend from Meadowlands meeting up with the girl she used to help out?’ Callie nodded. ‘So the men in the place didn’t mind,’ Tom said, almost to himself. They probably thought they would get their hands on Sandra too if they let her hang out there, he reasoned. ‘But Sandra had a plan, didn’t she?’

  ‘She knew Diane was going to be sixteen soon. Sandra told her she could leave Meadowlands and she’d arrange it so that no man ever hurt her again.’

  ‘And not long after that Diane left for London.’

  Again Callie nodded. ‘She got away real easy and no one ever went looking for her. Sandra was right. Even Dean didn’t kick off about it, so whatever Sandra did must have worked.’

  ‘Then Sandra disappeared too,’ said Tom. ‘What do you think happened to her, Callie?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  Tom could have pressed Callie further but she knew far less about Sandra’s disappearance than he did. Why upset the girl by telling her the truth: that Diane Turner was dead, her face sickeningly disfigured so that her secret would die with her. If Diane Turner really was the burned girl, they now knew the reason she was killed – but not who did it. Frank Jarvis was the reason behind Diane’s death, but was he capable of such savagery on his own? Did Sandra Jarvis suffer the same fate, Tom wondered and could her own father really be responsible for it if she had?

  They needed a babysitter for Callie and Bradshaw figured it ought to be a woman, so he asked DC Malone to stay with her at Tom’s house. He could have asked Helen but she had no power to prevent Callie from running off and she had every right to be there. They drove out to confront Councillor Frank Jarvis together, with Bradshaw at the wheel, Helen and Tom in the back seat. They all agreed it was better this way. He wouldn’t know they were coming, and if Bradshaw dragged him in for questioning at the station, he’d be on his guard or he’d simply clam up and demand a lawyer without telling them anything.

  ‘He might give something away,’ said Bradshaw, ‘if we can rattle him.’

  ‘Oh we’ll do that alright,’ said Tom.

  As Bradshaw drove, nobody said anything for a while. They were still trying to accept what they had learned. Whatever any of them had expected to find, it could never have been as devastating as the truth.

  Helen was trying to comprehend what it must have been like to be Sandra Jarvis, a young, good-hearted woman willing to stay up all night and listen to a damaged girl and offer her comfort. Then she had been shown a photograph of her dad raping an underage girl in her care. Helen wondered how she had been able to hold it together, without blurting out that it was her own father who was abusing Diane. Her entire world must have tumbled down around her.

  Tom spoke then. ‘I understand why Sandra Jarvis confronted her father. She must have threatened to expose him or tried to convince him to hand himself in. I can imagine him denying everything and her not buying it because she’d seen the photograph; all of that I can visualise … just …’ he said, ‘but I still can’t comprehend a world in which a man would kill his own daughter to cover this up …’

  ‘I know,’ said Bradshaw. ‘I keep going over the exact same thing. Jarvis killing his own little girl? It seems impossible.’

  ‘Fred West did,’ said Helen, for the infamous serial killer had recently hanged himself while on remand.

  ‘But West was a maniac,’ said Bradshaw, ‘he murdered twelve people. West enjoyed killing. This is different. We’re talking here about a man murdering his daughter to protect his name.’

  ‘It goes against everything,’ said Tom, ‘it goes against nature. As a father, wouldn’t he be more likely to kill himself than his own little girl?’

  ‘But surely she can’t be alive somewhere,’ reasoned Helen, ‘after all this time?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe she just ran off to get away from all of this and she’s working behind a bar somewhere in Ibiza.’

  ‘And maybe I’m mistaken and Diane really is alive and scratching a living in London somewhere,’ said Bradshaw, ‘but we both know that isn’t true.’

  ‘So who murdered Diane Turner?’ said Tom. ‘Did Jarvis do that too?’

  ‘Why would he hire you,’ asked Helen suddenly, ‘to look for Sandra, if she was already dead and he did it?’

  ‘I keep thinking about that, and there is only one explanation. I never thought for one minute that the grieving father so desperate to find his daughter could ever be responsible f
or her death,’ said Tom, ‘and that’s exactly how he wanted it. No one suspected him: not the police, the press or any of us. Frank Jarvis came up with the perfect mask for his actions, a campaign to find the missing woman he already knew was gone,’ he shook his head, ‘and I was taken in by it, just like everybody else. What an idiot.’

  ‘That is so cold,’ Helen shook her head in disbelief, ‘if he killed her.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t do it himself; maybe someone else did it but she died because Diane told her secret to Sandra. That much I am certain of. It’s too big a coincidence.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Bradshaw, ‘so now let’s sweat the bastard.’

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  They drove quickly and Bradshaw explained why he was breaking every speed limit along the way: ‘He could run. They do sometimes if they are fenced in. He might even have run already.’

  ‘Why would he run?’ asked Helen. ‘He doesn’t know we are on to him.’

  ‘Dean will have called Frank Jarvis the moment I took Callie away. Jarvis knows I’ve been asked to help Tom locate his daughter so I doubt he’ll believe the story about the shoplifting gang, do you?’

  ‘I’m not convinced he’ll run,’ said Tom. ‘It will be the word of one respectable pillar of the local community against a teenager who has been in trouble with the police for most of her young life.’

  ‘There’s the photograph,’ Bradshaw reminded him.

  ‘But he doesn’t know we’ve got that. If he knew about the photograph, wouldn’t he have found it before now?’

  ‘Maybe.’ But he still overtook the car in front of him at speed. ‘Let’s not leave it to chance. The one thing I have learned is that nobody really knows for sure what anyone will do under pressure.’

  Their thoughts turned to Annie Bell then, and no one contradicted Bradshaw.

  They were thankful for fine weather and light traffic, which combined to make their journey to Newcastle an easy one. Bradshaw didn’t even bother to park outside Frank Jarvis’s house, he simply halted the car in the middle of the road and the three of them got out. The detective banged on the door.

  Frank’s wife answered. ‘Is he in, Mrs Jarvis?’ asked Tom.

  ‘No.’ Her head lolled slightly as she took in each of them sluggishly.

  ‘Then would you mind telling us where he is?’ Bradshaw didn’t try to disguise his impatience with her.

  She looked at Tom then. ‘Where do you think he is?’

  They had to leave Bradshaw’s car outside the Methodist chapel and trek on foot up to the allotments. Bradshaw had a strong premonition he wouldn’t be there. He was convinced Frank Jarvis knew everything they had been doing and he’d fled, so he would never have to face them or the truth. Bradshaw was mentally preparing himself for the manhunt that would follow Frank Jarvis’s disappearance, then they rounded a corner and there the man was, sitting on a bench as if all was well in the world.

  ‘What’s this?’ asked Jarvis, his suspicions immediately aroused by the presence of all three of them. Maybe Dean had not been able to get hold of the politician to warn him if he had been here for a while. No one answered, just continued to walk towards him.

  Bradshaw wordlessly handed him the envelope. Jarvis looked at him expecting an explanation, but when he received none he opened it. He slid the photograph out, looked at it for a second and his eyes widened in shock. The photo fell to the floor.

  ‘It’s all over, Frank,’ Bradshaw told him. ‘We know everything.’

  ‘That’s not me,’ Jarvis managed, but the shock of seeing himself in such a damning photograph, whose existence he clearly wasn’t aware of, was affecting his ability to lie with any credibility.

  ‘How many of those girls have you raped over the years, Frank?’ asked Tom.

  ‘No,’ gasped Jarvis then he contradicted his claim of mistaken identity, jabbing a stubby finger at the photo: ‘That’s a fake, is that.’

  ‘We have a credible witness who says otherwise,’ Bradshaw explained as Jarvis continued his panicked denials, ‘someone who can confirm you have been going to Meadowlands and abusing those girls for a long time.’

  ‘Dean is a liar!’ shouted Jarvis.

  ‘Is he?’ asked Bradshaw. ‘One of my colleagues is on the way to arrest him right now. Something tells me he is likely to fold under questioning. I wouldn’t want to rely on a man like Dean to back me up. He’ll sell you straight down the river.’

  If possible, Jarvis looked even more panicked. ‘I haven’t done anything. This is blackmail! Someone is trying to ruin me! Who took this picture? Can’t you see it’s a fake?’

  They let him ramble on then and the denials kept coming, interspersed with wild accusations. He was not a child rapist, he didn’t know anything about any girls at Meadowlands, this was blackmail, someone was trying to destroy him. Every time he came out with another flustered rebuttal, Bradshaw met it with a cold, hard question. How could he explain the photograph? Why would anyone wish to destroy a man who had already stepped down? What really happened to his daughter? Who killed Diane Turner?

  Tom took a step back and left the two men to argue it out. He knew Jarvis was never going to confess and they were still no closer to understanding what really happened to his daughter. All the while Bradshaw was talking, Tom Carney remained quiet, even as Councillor Jarvis’s denials grew ever more desperate.

  Tom felt they were still missing something. Each time he tried to visualise Sandra’s murder at the hands of her own father the whole scenario seemed to break down in his mind. There were cases of a man killing his own daughter but these were incredibly rare and always seemed to involve the father’s loss of control over his offspring, where a man was unable to accept that his child was an actual person, with the freedom to make her own choices – but Frank Jarvis had made a point of instilling independence in his daughter and encouraging her to question authority. Sandra’s school career, her tutorials at university, her work with damaged children all spoke of an independent young woman free from the shackles of her parents. Of course if she had confronted her father about Diane Turner and her knowledge of the photograph, it would have been a shock. Flustered by her accusations he might have snapped and … what? Murdered his own flesh and blood?

  That was what Tom kept coming back to. The one, simple phrase that reverberated with him and contradicted everything else: Sandra was Frank Jarvis’ flesh and blood. It was beyond dispute that not many men could bring themselves to kill their own daughter. Their first reaction would be to protect a daughter beyond all sense of personal safety. Tom was going round in circles. Jarvis had an evil secret; his daughter had discovered this and confronted him then Jarvis snapped and … once again the train of thought broke down. How could he have done it to his own flesh and blood?

  That thought triggered a memory, something Tom had been puzzled by at the time so he had stored it away in a recess of his mind. Until now, when all of a sudden it broke free and he finally understood.

  He could picture her now. The mad old lady, Frank Jarvis’s mother-in-law, sitting in her armchair with that sly look on her half-senile face as she told Tom, ‘That one, she’s a little cuckoo.’ Jarvis’s wife had snapped at her to shut up. Tom had not understood her then. He thought she was questioning the sanity of her own grandchild – but no. He finally realised what she meant and the mist began to clear.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he said aloud and because this was the first time he had spoken in a while, both men stopped and turned to listen. Tom looked Jarvis in the eye then said, ‘She’s not yours.’ He spoke the words quietly but they landed on Jarvis like a blow.

  ‘What?’ asked Jarvis as if Tom had said something ridiculous, but his voice wavered and it was enough to give him away.

  ‘Sandra is not your daughter,’ and Tom shook his head at his own foolishness, ‘even the dates add up. All this time, I thought that affair years ago was you cheating on your missus but it was the other way around, wasn’t it? Sandra wasn’t the happy o
utcome of you patching up your marriage. She wasn’t born prematurely. She was the product of your wife’s affair, not yours.’

  ‘That’s a damned lie!’

  ‘Is it? We’ll ask your wife then shall we?’ and Frank Jarvis opened his mouth to protest but he couldn’t think of any response. ‘That’s why she drinks, isn’t it? I don’t mean she feels guilty because she slept with another man and had a daughter by him. That’s a common enough tale. Every extended family has at least one cuckoo, as your mum-in-law eloquently put it. I thought she meant your daughter was mentally unstable, but what the batty old dear was really trying to say was that Sandra had been planted in the nest by someone else. So who was he, Jarvis?’

  But Jarvis had run out of words all of a sudden. He shuffled towards the bench and seemed to slump into it.

  ‘It will be simple enough to fill in the blanks. We’ll just ask your wife. I’m pretty sure she’ll be very forthcoming once we tell her you’re the prime suspect in her daughter’s murder.’

  ‘Shut up!’ yelled the politician and he got to his feet angrily then. ‘I did good by her! I stood by my wife when many a man wouldn’t have! Christ almighty, she made me look like a fool!’

  ‘No, she didn’t,’ Tom told him, ‘but she would have if you’d kicked her out. You couldn’t get a divorce back then if you wanted to succeed in politics, and you knew it. You had to keep your family together at all costs. You didn’t stand by her; you convinced her to stand by you and give your marriage another shot. The price you paid was a daughter who wasn’t your own.’

  ‘I brought that girl up! I treated her like my own daughter. I turned a blind eye to everything my wife had done.’

  ‘But you didn’t care about that, did you, Frank? You weren’t too bothered when she went elsewhere for what you couldn’t give her,’ and Tom shook his head. ‘What was she: seventeen or eighteen when you started walking out with her? She was already too old. You’re only interested if they’re very young and you enjoy it a lot more if they struggle. Christ, your wife must have been so lonely.’