Snap_‘The best crime novel I’ve read in a very long time’ Val McDermid

by Belinda Bauer

  ‘I’ve never left my husband!’ said Catherine. ‘On any day! I never left, and so I never came back! And who’s Detective Chief Inspector Starbridge when he’s at home? I’ve never heard of the man!’

  ‘DCI Stourbridge was the detective in charge of the Eileen Bright murder investigation.’

  The baby turned to cold lead in Catherine’s tummy.

  There was a huge rushing sound in her head, as if her thoughts were a giant wave crashing on to the beach of her brain.

  Eileen Bright. The boy’s mother. The boy’s pregnant mother. The woman he said had been murdered with the knife that had been left next to her bed!

  The knife she’d hidden and Adam had found.

  Or was it the other way around …?

  Jack Bright had fixated on it, and now the fat ugly policeman had too. It was a mistake. A misunderstanding. She knew that, but she couldn’t work out whether what the man was saying was all wrong, or just bits of it.

  Catherine’s head buzzed like a bad radio.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She stood up dizzily, and clutched the corner of the table for support. ‘I think you should come back when Adam’s home.’

  ‘It’s not Adam I want to speak to,’ said Marvel. ‘It’s you.’

  ‘No,’ said Catherine, shaking her head slowly. ‘You need to talk to Adam about this! You need to come back!’

  ‘No, you need to answer my questions, Mrs While. We can do it here or you can come down to the police station and do it there. Anything else will be considered obstructing the course of justice.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere!’ said Catherine, feeling the tide of panic rise inside her. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about and I’m not going anywhere!’

  She tried to barge past him, but he held her arm.

  ‘Go away!’ she cried. ‘Leave me alone!’ She flailed to free herself, slapping his face with the back of her hand, grazing his brow with her engagement ring. He grabbed her arm in an iron grip and twisted her back down into her chair.

  She shrieked.

  ‘How dare you?’ she cried. ‘Let me go! I’ll report you! I’m pregnant! For God’s sake, you moron! Can’t you see I’m fucking pregnant?’

  ‘So what?’ he said. ‘Congratulations on being a mammal.’

  Catherine burst into tears of humiliation and fury. She twisted her head and bit his arm, but he saw her coming and she only tore a hole in his shirtsleeve.

  Then, as if in a parallel dimension, Catherine felt him putting her in handcuffs. As if she were a criminal! Or someone in a soap! Bending her hard over her own giant belly, pulling her hands together behind her back …

  ‘Please don’t,’ she whimpered. ‘You’re hurting my baby!’

  He relented. He let her up and stood over her, panting and red-faced. Her ring had caught him above the eye and he was bleeding. He spoke in breathless snatches.

  ‘Angela While,’ he said. ‘I’m arresting you. For … obstructing the course of justice. And … resisting—’

  ‘I’m not Angela While,’ sobbed Catherine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m Catherine While.’

  She and Marvel looked at each other, fleetingly united by mutual confusion.

  Then he said, ‘Shit,’ and Catherine felt all the blood drain from her face. Her voice shook.

  ‘Who the bloody hell is Angela While?’

  It took Marvel half an hour to get hold of Ralph Stourbridge.

  ‘Wrong Mrs While,’ he announced when he finally did.

  ‘I didn’t know there was more than one.’

  ‘Well, there’s at least two,’ said Marvel. ‘And this one’s fucking furious.’

  JACK FOUND HIS mother.

  She was under the apple tree on the hard shoulder, sitting with her back against the barrier, examining the small bright red fruits as if for worms.

  He stopped his bike at the edge of the shadow it cast across the tarmac.

  A line he could not cross.

  Hi, he said. How are you?

  Wormy, she said, and tossed the apples across the road, where they rolled and bounced like cheeses.

  Don’t get in the car, he said.

  What car? she said, and Merry – who was suddenly next to Jack – said, That car, and a blue car pulled up.

  Merry ran towards it.

  Don’t get in the car! cried Jack, but his mother got up and brushed her hands against the front of her white summer dress, and followed Merry and together they got into the car.

  NO!

  Sound of car driving off.

  Jack pedalled after it, but he had forgotten how to ride a bicycle and kept wobbling and having to put his foot down, and get the pedal back up to the top, like a small child without a parent to steady him.

  At last he just stopped on the dusty tarmac and watched the blue car disappear around the bend.

  In the back window, Merry held up a single sad hand in goodbye.

  Mama!

  The word on his own lips woke him in the tiny police cell – curled and shivering with sweat. He sat up slowly on the narrow bench and waited for the nightmare to fragment around him. But it took a very long time to fade, and even when he knew he was fully awake, the miserable feeling of failure remained.

  Jack looked up at the little pot of fake flowers on the high sill.

  He needed catching now.

  MARVEL KNOCKED ON Mrs Angela While’s front door in Taunton.

  She turned out to be a slightly older version of the new Mrs While. Same blonde, shoulder-length hair, same blue eyes, same rounded face.

  Different girth.

  ‘Mrs Angela While?’ said Marvel cautiously.

  And when she nodded he said, ‘Detective Chief Inspector Marvel. Can I come in?’

  The house was a mess created by, and divided equally between, a small boy and a large dog.

  ‘This is Robbie,’ said Angela While, as if Marvel gave a shit. ‘And this is Brutus.’

  She was apparently so smitten with both that she gave no indication of noticing his lack of interest in either. She smiled brightly at him and asked how she could help.

  ‘I’ve come about Adam While,’ he said. Then he added, ‘Your husband?’ just to be on the safe side.

  ‘Ex-husband,’ said Angela.

  Marvel felt a tiny bit of equilibrium return to his world.

  ‘Ex-husband,’ he repeated. ‘I just have a few questions about an old case.’

  Her smile switched off. ‘Eileen Bright?’

  A thrill ran through Marvel. A chance remark from him, Ralph Stourbridge musing to a colleague, and suddenly new light might shine on murder.

  It was like magic.

  He struck immediately while Angela While was still off-kilter. ‘I believe that you left your husband the day he was questioned about it. Why was that?’

  She opened her mouth, but didn’t answer immediately.

  Instead she sat down and drew her son to her, and hugged him until he grizzled. The dog came over, concerned, and Angela While put a hand on its head. Marvel thought she looked like an old Victorian painting – one of those that told a story and had an apt title. Waiting for Bad News or The Telegram. Except with Lego bricks strewn about the floor and a TV showing cartoons in the background.

  Then Robbie fought his way out of her arms and went back to his toys, and the dog left her side too, and instead sniffed Marvel’s trouser leg as if he might make it his own.

  ‘Sss,’ said Marvel sharply, and Brutus ambled out of the room. A minute later, Marvel could hear him gulping water in big slow laps.

  Angela While looked up at him with a blank, slow-motion face.

  ‘You left Adam,’ Marvel reminded her. ‘Why?’

  ‘He …’ she said, and then stopped.

  ‘I …’ she started, and then stopped again.

  Third time lucky, thought Marvel impatiently.

  ‘I have no proof,’ she finally got out. ‘Of anything. I want you
to understand that right up front. If I’d had proof I’d have told police at the time, but I didn’t. And I still don’t.’

  So much for the magic, thought Marvel.

  ‘Just tell me what you want to tell me,’ he said. ‘I’m only here to listen.’

  Of course, that wasn’t true at all. Marvel would happily arrest her, and the kid – and the dog too – if he thought it would help his case. But over the years he had found that in these situations there was rarely any call to be honest with people. It was better to tell them exactly what they wanted to hear if he were to stand any chance of hearing what he wanted to hear.

  ‘On the day Eileen Bright disappeared,’ Angela said, ‘we had a fight.’

  ‘What about?’ he said, and lowered himself into a chair without being invited. It seemed the natural thing to do. Angela barely registered the move. Mostly she spoke with her eyes on her son, who was building something unrecognizable, forcing bricks into place with gritted teeth and ham fists instead of fitting them easily together like the smiling children on the box. Marvel wondered if there was something wrong with the Lego, or something wrong with the kid.

  Angela While lowered her voice, looked meaningfully at her son and said, ‘I was pregnant.’

  Marvel shivered the way he always did when things that had seemed unconnected suddenly matched.

  Angela While had been pregnant; Eileen Bright had been pregnant; the new Mrs While was pregnant. It must be important. He needed to know how …

  ‘And Adam got it into his head that I’d cheated on him. I mean, it was ridiculous. There was no chance the baby wasn’t his. No chance. He knew that! But he went crazy. I mean, like, bonkers.’ She half laughed at how bonkers he’d gone, but it was a nervous, mirthless sound.

  ‘Did he ever hit you?’

  ‘Only once.’ She touched her cheek, remembering the exact spot, however many years later. ‘He always had a temper. He didn’t snap often, but when he did, you knew about it.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Marvel.

  ‘We’d had lunch with some friends in the Feathers, and someone had made a joke – just a stupid joke about the baby looking like the milkman. You know that thing people say. Just silliness. But Adam wouldn’t let it go. When we got home he went on and on about it and got more and more angry, and then I got angry too and then he slapped me, and I slapped him back and told him to get out, and he did …’

  ‘How long was he gone?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Hours? And when he came back it was with flowers and chocolates and a ridiculous gift for the baby – some light-up sword thing from Star Wars or Star Trek. And he wasn’t even born yet!’

  ‘Was Adam behaving strangely at all when he came home?’

  ‘Nope,’ she sighed. ‘Just full of sorrys and I-love-yous.’

  She paused, then shrugged.

  ‘We made up and carried on, and when I heard on the news a while later that Eileen Bright’s body had been found, I didn’t make any connection. I only really paid any attention because she’d been pregnant too, you know? Horrible.’

  She shivered and rubbed her arms.

  ‘So why did you leave?’

  Angela screwed up her face as if trying to settle on one thing. Finally she said, ‘Well, he had a knife …’

  Marvel got prickles up the back of his neck. ‘What kind of knife?’

  ‘Like a fancy penknife. But bigger. It cost a lot of money, apparently.’

  ‘Was it like this one?’ Marvel showed her the photo of the murder weapon.

  ‘Yeah, like that. I couldn’t say if it was exactly like that because I don’t give a shit about knives, but it was very similar with that pearly handle. He was always fiddling with it and sharpening it and cleaning it. You know what men are like about their things – no offence. It drove me nuts! But anyway, in the time before I left him, I noticed: suddenly he doesn’t have the knife any more.’

  ‘You mean after Eileen Bright was murdered?’

  ‘Around that time. I can’t be sure – that’s why I say I don’t have any proof of anything, you see? I can’t remember the exact timings and I never paid enough attention to the knife to know for sure … I just started to notice he’s not pampering the knife like a bloody baby, and when I asked if he’d lost it, he said no, it was upstairs, but – trust me – if that knife was in the house, it was in his pocket. So I thought he must have lost it and just didn’t want to tell me because apparently it had cost so much. Not that I cared. Adam had a good job, and we never went short, and it’s not my money, is it?’

  ‘No,’ agreed Marvel.

  She went on: ‘So anyway, that was that, and I didn’t think any more about it until he called me a few days later and told me he was being questioned by the police, and I was like, What the hell? I had no idea what could be wrong. Literally. He told me all he’d done was stop on the motorway for a pee and I thought, is that even a crime? I mean, everyone’s had a pee by the side of the road, haven’t they? But then he said it was near where Eileen Bright’s body had been found … and … it all sort of … came together for me. You know – him hitting me that time, the jealousy and the fight over the baby, the missing knife, him being picked up in the same place her body was found …’

  Her voice became sing-song as she went through the list. Then she sighed and fixed Marvel with a steady gaze. ‘I didn’t even wait for him to come home. I packed a few things and went to my mum’s. He kept calling, kept begging, but I wouldn’t see him. Then a few weeks later he comes to her house waving that bloody knife, saying he’s found it – like that made any difference! Because it wasn’t really about the knife. It was over, because in my heart I felt—’

  She stopped again.

  ‘That he’d killed her?’ said Marvel.

  ‘Oh no!’ Angela frowned at him, then lowered her voice to a bare whisper. ‘But I felt that he was capable of killing.’ She stroked her son’s hair and shrugged. ‘And that was enough.’

  Marvel nodded. He closed his notebook and got up.

  But Angela While didn’t look up. Just carried on touching the boy. Raining love down on him through every fleeting fingertip, the way only a parent can.

  And as only a child can, Robbie ignored her, and carried on jamming mismatched Lego bricks on to each other.

  ‘Look!’ he said, holding up a chunk of coloured rubble.

  ‘That’s wonderful, sweetheart,’ she said with a dazzling smile.

  Marvel didn’t know how mothers did it.

  ‘Does Adam see his son?’

  Angela shook her head and lowered her voice. ‘No. And I don’t want him to. I called him when Robbie was born. I mean, he’s got rights, hasn’t he? But he said he wasn’t interested—’ She gave a bitter laugh and blew her nose into a tissue she took from the sleeve of her jumper. ‘Said he was going to start over again and do it better next time.’

  ‘Do what better?’ said Marvel.

  ‘Who knows?’ she sighed. ‘I’m just glad he’s not doing it with us.’

  MARVEL DIDN’T GET back to Tiverton until the sun had fallen behind the hills of Exmoor.

  After seeing Angela While, he had called Ralph Stourbridge and briefed him on the day’s events. He didn’t tell him everything, of course. For one thing, he left out the bit about restraining and cuffing the wrong woman – the wrong pregnant woman.

  Also calling her a mammal. It wasn’t an official sexist insult, obviously. Not like bitch or cow. But Marvel would nonetheless have been very reluctant to hear it repeated in front of a disciplinary tribunal – which is absolutely where it could have ended up if Catherine While hadn’t caught his brow with her engagement ring, in a back-handed stroke of good fortune.

  He’d made sure she understood that she was very lucky that he was prepared to overlook her assault on a police officer while resisting arrest. But she hadn’t seemed to be interested in pursuing a complaint about their little tussle. Apparently she’d been so distraught at discovering that her husba
nd wasn’t a virgin in a glass box before he’d met her that she’d just wanted Marvel out of the house so that she could weep and plot.

  Or whatever it was that a woman did who felt herself scorned.

  Either way, Marvel had to admit that he’d had a very close shave. Not his closest, obviously – a man like him, who took risks and lived by his instincts, was sure to have a few near misses throughout his career, and this was just one more – but it would certainly be something to regale his mates with down the pub. If he ever found a decent pub in this sheep-laden shithole.

  Or some mates.

  What the hell. He didn’t care! A close shave always made him feel alive in a way usually only achieved by a near-death experience. Nothing made his heart pound like a precipice sidestepped, a bullet dodged, or the end of an affair.

  He shook a cigarette out of the packet and stuck it between his lips, loving the dirty chemical taste of the filter. He didn’t have a match, but for now that was enough.

  His car bumped over the kerb outside the police station and came to a halt on the pavement. There was no car park at the station, and he really didn’t have time to park at the supermarket and walk past the benches like everybody else.

  He looked at his watch. It was still light, thanks to summer, and the air was still warm, the sky still blue. Marvel flinched as a sheep baaed somewhere worryingly close. He turned off the engine and just sat – his brain bulging with a million permutations.

  Investigating a murder was like doing a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. The constant fingertip-feeling and testing and turning. The picking up and the putting down and the picking up again.

  The trying to make things fit.

  Marvel felt closer right now to seeing the picture on the box than Ralph Stourbridge had ever been.

  And further away too, because that picture had been drawn for him by a liar. A serial thief who’d assumed he’d found the knife that had killed his mother in a house he was burgling.

  Marvel snorted. That might be the biggest and best coincidence he’d encountered in his twenty-two years in homicide. Or it could be the twisted imaginings of a disturbed delinquent.