‘I was determined that we wouldn’t fall out that day, and that maybe the deserted cove would work its magic on him, and put him in a good mood for once. How naive I was; and how little foresight I managed to display, when you consider the outcome.’
Carmichael was scribbling like fury, but found a second or two to look at the inspector, and roll his eyes at the prolonged explanation of what had happened; that event still seeming a long way away, buried in this miasma of memories, as it was. Falconer acknowledged his partner’s rolling eyes by pulling a face in reply. Miriam Darling sat with her head down, twisting her fingers together in her lap, lost in the past.
‘So, what actually happened when you got to the beach?’
‘Oh, Mark insisted that we go to the main beach and hire a little boat. He said that would be a much more picturesque way of approaching the cove, and would mean we didn’t have to risk the old steps down from the cliff top.
‘I wasn’t sure, not knowing what the water was like round the slight headland, and disagreed, saying that we could take the utmost care on the steps, and pointed out to him that unknown waters could be dangerous. That was when we had our little row – the one I’d been desperate to avoid – with hordes of witnesses. In the end, I said I didn’t want to go, if Mark insisted on hiring a boat.
‘That was like a red rag to a bull for him, and he took Ben’s hand and stomped off towards the man who rented out the small craft. I just stood by, feeling helpless as usual, but supposing that everything would turn out all right in the end, and thinking Mark might even be in a good mood if he got his own way on this one. If only, just that once, I hadn’t played the part of the compliant wife!
‘And so we set off. It really was a small boat – a wooden one. Do they call those little things ‘clinker-built’? – and Mark, of course, took charge of the oars, being the man of the family. It seemed a perfectly charming way to reach our destination at first, but, as we rounded the headland, the going got more difficult, and Mark started to struggle to keep control of the little boat.
‘When I realised he was in difficulties, I offered to take a turn on one of the oars, so that we could row together, and double our power to fight the current, but he would have none of that. He was always stubborn, and hated to fail at anything. At that point, this was a test of his manhood, in his mind, and he struggled on, but the further we disappeared from sight of the busy beach, the more unruly the sea became.
‘That was when I got really frightened, and told him he ought to turn back, as the sea was getting far too rough. The wind had got up, too, and we were rolling all over the place, with the waves breaking over the boat and swamping us. Ben was crying and I was holding him, trying to comfort him, and telling him that Daddy would soon get us back to the nice beach where he always played.
‘That was the last coherent thought I had. There was a gust of wind, and a particularly large wave engulfed our tiny boat, and it capsized, throwing the three of us, plunging, into the roughness of the sea.
‘There were incredibly strong currents there, and all I could think of was to catch hold of the underside of the boat and scream for help, although I knew my cries would be blown away by the wind. By the time I had a firm hold of it, I looked round, and both Mark and Ben were gone. That’s when I really started screaming. I hadn’t realised how one’s life could be turned upside down in just a couple of seconds, the status quo irretrievably lost, the future completely blank and needing to be rewritten.
‘I was the lucky one. Someone on the top of the headland, looking at the seabirds swirling around the inshore waters, happened to catch sight of my precarious situation, he alerted the coastguard – and I was rescued.’
Miriam paused here, to gather her strength for the end of the tragic tale. ‘Mark’s and Ben’s bodies were washed ashore further along the coastline two days later; and my life effectively ended. I might as well have drowned with them. I feel like I’m already dead and suffering in hell, with all that’s happened since, and now it’s happening all over again.’
‘And all the sorts of things that have occurred here, happened where you used to live?’
‘Live? Huh! Existed, more like. But, yes, I was held in custody in Spain by the police. People remembered, you see, how we’d argued on the beach. My mother’s neighbours remembered how we’d argued at her house – those villas are jerry-built, and the sound-proofing is non-existent. They thought I’d pushed them out of the boat, and that was the reason it capsized. I was cast in the role of a murdering wife and mother.
‘I can’t speak Spanish, and neither can my parents beyond a few words of greeting and ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and I was dazed with my loss, and bewildered as to what was going on around me. It was a complete nightmare. There I was, locked away from the only comfort available to me – my parents – and I didn’t understand a word of what was being said to me.
‘Of course, eventually they brought in an interpreter, but it was a resort mainly for the Spanish themselves, and the interpreter, although she could speak some English, could not understand what I was saying, and seemed to make up her own mind as to what I had told her.’
‘So what set off this toxic gossip, then?’ asked Falconer, still pursuing his fox, but feeling that the further he moved forward the further away he was from his quarry.
‘It started with the Spanish press. It was quiet in the journalistic world, it being holiday time; they seized my tragedy as a terrier seizes a rat, and I made the front page, painted as black as night. Just to add to my misfortunes, there was an English journalist on holiday about fifty kilometres away. He saw the story and descended on my parents and their neighbours like a wolf on the fold.
‘He couldn’t get to see me, but he did trace several people who had been on the beach that day – isn’t it ironic that he spoke the lingo? Of course, he phoned it in, and started the same hare running in the English press. By the time I got back, I was branded as a murderess, and nothing I could say would change that, even though the Spanish police had traced someone on a fishing boat who had actually seen us capsize.
‘I was harassed in my home by journalists. I started receiving anonymous threatening letters and silent phone calls, just like now. My car had paint-stripper thrown over it, people I’d known all my life, shunned me in the street. Some of them even spat at me, and one joker poured weedkiller over my front lawn one night, to spell out ‘murderer’. That’s when I knew what it was to be in hell.
‘I took all the precautions I could to get away from it all. I moved to a rented property fifty miles away, adopting my maiden name, dying my hair and having it cut really short. I changed the way I dressed, and started not wearing make-up – anything so that I was not connected to what had befallen my family on that dreadful holiday.
‘Eventually I moved here, and I seemed to have made a really solid start on a new and normal life. Carole Winter next door befriended me and introduced me to a host of people and organisations where I was made to feel really welcome. I’d applied to join the WI, I’d been invited to join a book club, I’d met the ladies of the church, the choir and the library, and Carole, who is a keen gardener, was helping me plan my little plot out at the back. Sundays were fun. We used to go to the service together, then go off in my car and stroll round the garden centres, looking for bulbs, seeds and plants that would be suitable for what had become my new hobby: gardening.
‘Then, one day, she just ‘cut’ me: ‘blanked’ me as if she had never met me before. I found I was persona non grata wherever I went, and then it just started all over again. I don’t know who made the connection, or why they passed it on, but I’m right back to square one, and now there’s nowhere else to go,’ she concluded on a mournful note.
‘You have been through the mill, haven’t you? Let me think a while and see what I can come up with. Do you work outside the home at all?’
‘Yes. I work for a bank – Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.’
‘And has the
re been any trouble there?’
‘Not so far, but I commute, and mix with a totally different set of people there. It’s the only part of my life with some sanity left in it, the only place where I get treated like a normal human being. I’m not giving that up,’ she stated in a firmer voice.
‘OK. For now,’ Falconer replied, ‘what I can do is have a patrol car pass your house when you’re at home, to make sure there’s no physical attack on you, and put one of the uniformed constables to patrol this area, giving us a man on the ground.
‘In the meantime you’re going to have to consider changing your identity completely, perhaps disappear into the anonymity of a large city. Market Darley’s fairly small, and people are nosier about their neighbours than they are in the sprawling confusion of a city.’
‘I see your point,’ she agreed. ‘I do exactly as I planned before, but become the needle in a much bigger haystack.’
‘Spot on! Now, I’ll give you my card, and I’ll write my home number on the back, so that you can get hold of me anytime. I hate bullying, especially the cowardly, anonymous kind, and when it’s completely unfounded, it really gets my goat,’ the inspector growled with great sincerity. ‘There it is. Any time, day or night! And I mean that! I don’t live far away – in fact I’m closer to you than I am to the police station, and I can be here in a few minutes, and alert the boys in blue on my way.
‘In the meantime, may I suggest that when you are here you keep away from the windows. I know you’ve got net curtains and I don’t want to frighten you, but I also don’t want you to make yourself an unwitting target for some nutter.’
‘Thank you for taking me so seriously,’ she murmured, as she saw them out of the front door, opening it only wide enough to allow them to squeeze through it, and they heard her lock and bolt it again, as she had when they arrived.
Chapter Five
Tuesday 21st September
Falconer’s home phone rang shrilly at just after half-past six that morning, rousing him from a light doze in which he dreamt of a woman he had glimpsed, briefly but devastatingly, earlier that year. She had skin the colour of ebony and was, in his opinion, the most beautiful woman he had ever set eyes on.
Things were going well in the dream, and they were sipping cocktails at some function or other, when the trilling of the telephone began to break up the conviviality of the occasion. As if a herald of the bad news that was to come in his dream, his old Nanny Vogel approached the bar, stopped by his side, and gave him her cruel and knowing smile, while the attractive woman, Dr Dubois, turned into a pillar of smoke and began to disperse.
Arriving suddenly to full wakefulness, he felt both cheated and disturbed as he reached for the handset beside his bed, answering it with an uncharacteristically blunt ‘Yes?’
‘Is that you, Inspector Falconer,’ a distressed and tearful voice enquired. ‘Only things have got worse.’
Recognising Miriam Darling’s voice immediately, he pulled himself together, to treat her with a more professional attitude, even if he was in his pyjamas and lying in bed. These things mattered! ‘What’s happened now?’ he asked her gently, hoping she hadn’t been injured.
‘I got a brick through my front window yesterday – well, during the night, actually – but as the curtains were drawn, it didn’t really do any damage, but when I opened the door to take in the milk this morning, someone had sprayed ‘killer’ on my front door in black paint. I simply don’t know what to do. Please help me, Inspector. I’m at my wits’ end.’
‘I’ll get an officer over to take samples of the paint, and he’ll take away the brick as evidence, although there’s little likelihood it will offer anything useful as to who threw it. I’ll get that organised, and I’ll be with you in less than an hour to take another statement. I’ll also arrange for a female PC to be billeted with you, as I seem to remember that you don’t work on a Tuesday.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Inspector. I shall feel a lot safer for seeing you again, and a PC in the house will be a great relief. At least I’ll have a witness to anything else that happens, and an ally, if I need physical help.’ She sounded calmer already, and Falconer was pleased with his idea of having a PC in residence. If the officer herself made her presence known, maybe it would act as a deterrent.
‘I’ll be with you as soon as I can, Ms Darling, and I’ll get on the phone straight after this call and set the wheels in motion for a SOCO officer and a PC to be dispatched.’
As soon as he ended the call, he rang the station with a cheery, ‘Hello, Bob. How’s tricks?’ only to find that Bob Bryant – Bob Bryant – had taken a day’s leave, and he was talking to PC Barry Sugden, more usually to be found booking in ‘guests’ in the custody suite.
‘Sorry about that,’ he apologised, ‘only it always is Bob Bryant, so I simply wasn’t prepared to find someone else answering the phone.’
‘Don’t apologise, sir – everyone else has said the same thing. I’ve just told them that, as one of the Immortals, Bob sometimes has to report to the planet Zog on what he has discovered in his current role, and then he’ll get his transfer to another location round about the year 2073. Nobody’s questioned my answer yet, but for your personal information, he’s going to have a tooth out, and wants to slink back home and suffer in peace, but don’t tell anyone else. The new boys, in particular, will be devastated, if they find out the reason for his day away from the station is such a mundane affair.’
Falconer knew only too well the web of bantering fantasy that existed between the younger members of the uniformed branch about the ever-present desk sergeant who, it was rumoured by these junior members of the force, had been there from the beginning of time, and would remain there, as an Immortal, until the end of the universe.
‘Look, Barry, I need someone to come out to scout for evidence at the site of what I can only describe as a ‘hate crime’, and I need a PC – get me Starr if you can – to join me here.’ After a little more explanation and giving the address, he hung up and got ready as speedily as he could, to visit Miriam Darling again. He could only imagine her distress and fear, and wanted to do what he could to reassure her as quickly as possible.
He arrived there less than half an hour after her distress call. When the door was opened by an even smaller crack than it had been on his last visit, he looked straight at her face, and, on gaining admittance, saw that she was already petrified with the escalation of events. He sat with her, giving what comfort he could, until PC Starr arrived and distracted her by asking to show the policewoman where everything was in the kitchen, so that she should be familiar with everything she needed to make tea, coffee and sandwiches.
Falconer left the two of them in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors. Miriam seemed distracted enough to carry out this simple task; evidently feeling more confident now she had someone with her for the day.
Back at the station, he found that no activity in the immediate vicinity of the address had been reported by either foot patrol or passing patrol cars, and cudgelled his brain at how to get at the root of this spiteful behaviour. The neighbours were an obvious starting point, but he felt that they would be better left until Miriam went to work tomorrow, so that they would have had time to cool off, after being questioned, before she returned home from work.
Falconer got another early reveille the next morning – this time at 6.10, and from the familiar but unusually muffled voice of Bob Bryant; he must still have cotton wool in his mouth after his extraction the day before. Without preamble, the sergeant went straight into his story. ‘One of yours, I believe, Harry. A Ms Darling. Been receiving hate mail, nasty phone calls and a brick through the window.’
When Falconer confirmed that this was his baby, the sergeant continued, ‘Well, she’s had another faceless visitor. Apparently she came down this morning at half-past five because she couldn’t sleep, and decided a cup of tea would be a good thing. She hadn’t had any more phone calls and was feeling quite cheerful
, she said, when she started off down the stairs.
‘That was when she smelled it. Someone had inserted a substantial amount of dog-shit through her letterbox, and then thrown the accompanying note, to land it clear of the first offering.’
‘Nasty!’ was the inspector’s only comment.
‘Quite!’ countered the desk sergeant. ‘But the note was much worse. It informed her that the next time it would be petrol-soaked rags, and that the author of the note always carried a box of matches or a lighter, so that he was never short of a flame. He then ended it by referring to her as a murdering bitch who wasn’t going to get away with it, even if the law couldn’t touch her.’
‘I’m on my way, Bob, see if I can catch her before she leaves for work. Have we got anywhere we could use as a safe house for her at short notice? It would only be until she can find something to rent well away from here.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ Bob assured him, and ended the call.
Miriam Darling was getting ready to leave for work when Falconer arrived, no longer shaking and crying, but showing a cold, hard side to her character that he had not seen before.
Allowing him a brief fifteen minutes, the most she could, to keep herself on schedule for catching her usual train, she sat down with him in the living room and listened to his suggestion about her moving temporarily to a safe house. Once she had chosen somewhere else to live, if she so desired, he could inform the local police station of her background, and get them to keep a discreet eye on her.
‘I don’t think that will be necessary, Inspector, although I’m very grateful for what you’ve done for me, but I think it’s time for me to plough my own furrow now, don’t you?’
He left her home that day more puzzled than reassured, and feeling that she was being blasé about the escalating danger to her, but there was nothing he could do about it. He could only provide the help and protection that he thought she needed if she was willing to accept it, and she’d been unbelievably distant when she’d spoken to him; almost as if she’d been a different person.
Brief Cases Box Set Page 14
