by James Long
‘The accusations about Luke Sturgess are no longer my main concern, Mrs Palmer, and the pictures I have shown you so far are not nearly as upsetting as the rest of these images, which, strangely enough, I don’t remember Mr Martin showing us at the time of the original investigation.’ Meehan pressed another key, gestured for Mike to look, and the bottom dropped out of his life as the other pictures marched out of the screen, one after another.
‘I thought she had thrown them away.’
‘She being your late wife?’
‘Don’t answer that,’ interrupted Rachel. She was staring at the screen with horror on her face. ‘Inspector Meehan, I would like to suspend the interview to speak to my client.’
‘I thought you might,’ said Meehan. He logged the tape off, stood up, and he and the WPC left the room. Before they closed the door, Detective Sergeant Wilson peered in at Mike with a dark look of triumph.
There was a long silence. Mike had his head in his hands. Rachel continued to stare at the screen.
‘Is there something you want to tell me?’ she asked in the end. ‘Because right now I’m wondering if I’ve been the biggest mug ever. What the hell did you do to that little girl?’
‘No, no,’ said Mike. ‘Not me, not us. Nothing. We did nothing at all. We were just trying to protect her.’
‘Protect her? Look at the pictures, Mike.’ He lifted his head, glanced at the screen for a moment then turned immediately away. ‘I can’t.’
‘Then I’ll tell you what I see,’ she said. ‘First picture: Rosie, black and blue down one side of her face with a swollen eye. Second picture: Rosie with a deep cut across her forehead and fresh bruising. Third picture: Rosie’s thighs with cuts and puncture marks. Fourth picture: well, I don’t even know what that one shows but she doesn’t look like any two-year-old should. She looks like a child from a concentration camp. Fifth picture . . . Do I need to go on?’
‘No, please don’t.’
‘In that case, start talking, Mike. Tell me what the hell you did because my sympathy is running out very, very fast.’
‘I didn’t know they were there.’
‘I don’t give a toss whether you knew they were there or not. Who did it?’
‘She did.’
‘Gally did that? She did that to her own daughter?’
Mike looked at her in astonishment. ‘No, of course not. I don’t mean Gally. Rosie did it. She did it to herself.’
‘Mike, those are pictures of a tiny toddler who has been systematically assaulted. Bruises, cuts. They are horrific. No child that age could do that.’
She stared at him and in the long silence he looked steadily back at her, then he reached out a hand and turned the laptop round so that it kept cycling its accusations at the wall.
‘Well?’
There was a bluebottle in the room, buzzing at the window. A car engine burst into life out in the yard. Tyres squealed and he heard the two-tone siren start as it disappeared up the road. He knew why. He also knew how absurd it seemed in this place of simple facts and accusations and narrow rectitude, and he found he could not call up the energy to defend himself.
‘Rachel. She did. There’s something else you don’t understand. Rosie wasn’t . . .’ but the lawyer was still staring at the laptop.
‘Oh, I’m supposed to believe this is something about Ferney and all the rest of this story, am I?’ He nodded. She muttered something angry. It sounded to him like ‘Bullshit’. Then she drew several long, slow breaths while he watched her in dull despair and gave up hope of explaining.
‘I’ve had faith in you,’ she said eventually, the pain in her voice showing through a fading attempt at professionalism. ‘I think I just lost it.’
The silence stretched and he knew time was running out. Words would not come.
‘I need to think about this,’ she said. ‘I’d better go and talk to them.’ She went outside. Mike heard muffled words in the corridor and a young policeman came and stood by the door.
The lawyer came back with Meehan. She didn’t seem able to meet Mike’s eyes.
‘Mr Martin,’ Meehan said, sitting down, ‘I have to tell you that I am now reopening the investigation into the death of your wife and daughter. I’m not yet in a position to charge you but I wish to interview you again at noon tomorrow. Mrs Palmer has agreed that you will voluntarily surrender your passport to her and that you will not leave your village without notifying her and me.’
Mike followed Rachel out of the police station, trying to keep up with her. She was walking fast, not looking back. As they drove out of the car park, she crunched a gear. ‘Bugger,’ she said. ‘All right, now listen to me. The bad news is that Meehan always thought you were guilty and he’s watched too many cold-case dramas on TV. I don’t think he’s ever had one of his very own. He would just love to reopen this case.’
‘What will he want to know tomorrow?’
‘He’s been looking at the toxicology report. That was what got you off the hook last time, apparently.’
‘Yes.’
‘It showed you were in London when they took whatever it was?’
Mike was silent.
‘Come on,’ said Rachel. ‘Don’t clam up. There’s no time for that.’
‘Yes, that’s what they said. They decided Gally took the stuff no earlier than eight in the morning. I was in London then. People saw me.’
‘Toxicology has come a long way since then. He’s having the findings checked out all over again.’
‘He’s out to get me, isn’t he?’
‘He thinks he’s on to something.’
‘And you’re not sure he’s wrong, are you?’
‘That shouldn’t surprise you, not after those pictures. Now you tell me, Mike. Why did you take those photos?’
‘We were desperate. Gally heard about a healer, somewhere up in the Lakes. We took the pictures because she wanted to see them.’
‘Did you go to a doctor?’
‘No,’ he said after a long time.
‘Meehan will want to know why not.’ He heard a formal distance in her voice.
‘I’d rather be dealing with Meehan than with Wilson,’ he said, ‘but even then—’
‘Meehan’s a lot smarter than Wilson and a good man, I’d say.’
‘I’m glad of that.’
‘You shouldn’t be. A good man on a mission is a lot harder to stop than a bad man with a grudge.’
That was the last thing she said until she pulled up at his gate and he opened the door. He went to find his passport and when he came back, she got out too and they stood there facing each other.
‘I’ve decided,’ she said. ‘What I would really like is to turn time back and not have you tell me anything crazy. I’m going back to my office and I’m going to tell them that I can’t represent you any more for personal reasons. I’ll have them put someone else on it. Then the only advice I can give you is that you don’t tell them what you told me. Don’t say anything that they can’t say to Meehan and his sort. That’s really all I can do for you now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she added in a distorted voice, then she got back into the car and drove away.
CHAPTER 23
Two subdued girls got off the train at Exeter St Davids and walked slowly towards the river. The journey back had been hard, waiting for a bus which turned out to run only on Wednesdays, then trudging all the way to Gillingham. They arrived at the station as dusk fell to find a points failure at Axminster had destroyed their last hope of getting home that night. They had pitched their tent in darkness on a sloping and stony piece of waste ground and were barely talking to each other when they finally arrived.
‘We shouldn’t have left her there,’ said Ali yet again as they climbed the steps to the road.
‘What could we have done? Knocked her out and tied her up?’
As they expected, there was no answer when they rang Jo’s doorbell, so they used the access code which they had seen her punch in so often an
d let themselves into the flat.
‘Fleur won’t mind, will she?’ Lucy asked nervously.
‘Of course she will. She always minds everything. She’ll mind a lot more if we don’t tell her.’
‘But she’s not what you’d call a caring mother, is she?’
‘Frightening comes closer, but she’ll want to know.’
‘I suppose so. When she crashed her car she hired another one, but you can’t hire daughters.’
‘Where do we start?’
‘She’s got that big red diary. I hope she hasn’t taken it.’
They found it on her desk. The word ‘Pecon’ was pencilled in two days earlier with arrows across every page until the next Wednesday.
‘Where’s Pecon?’ asked Lucy.
‘She was going there for a conference.’
They googled it on Jo’s laptop.
‘That’s not good,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s in Brazil.’
Ali clicked through to the next page. ‘No, look at this. PECON, the Property Entrepreneurs Conference, Edgbaston. That’s her sort of stuff. Yes, see? She’s down as a speaker – Fleur Driscoll on “The buy-to-let market: profiting from the downturn”. That was yesterday. Today she’s doing workshops.’
She dialled the number.
A woman’s voice said, ‘Gemini Conference Centre. Can I help you?’
‘I’m trying to get in touch with Mrs Driscoll. She’s speaking at your property conference. Fleur Driscoll?’
‘And you are?’
‘We’re friends of her daughter’s. We’ve got a message for her.’
‘She’ll be in a session right now. Is it urgent?’
‘Um, no—’
Lucy had leaned across with her ear near enough the receiver to hear. ‘Yes it is,’ she said. ‘It’s definitely urgent.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ said Ali. ‘We must talk to her. I didn’t want to worry her too much, that’s all.’
‘Can you give me some idea of what it’s about? We don’t like to disturb the programme.’
‘Well, we’ve been camping with Jo, her daughter, and, um . . . things got a little odd and, I don’t know, she, er . . .’
Lucy grabbed the phone from her. ‘She met a strange guy and she wouldn’t come back with us, so she’s in this village in the middle of nowhere with him and it’s not like her at all.’
‘Okay. Wait. I’ll go and get her at once. Don’t hang up.’
‘Lucy,’ said Ali crossly, ‘I was trying to be careful so we didn’t scare her.’
‘All you said was mumble, mumble, um, er, um. You have to use words, Ali, in the right order.’
A breathless voice at the other end said, ‘Ali? Lucy? Where are you? What’s happened?’
‘Well, go on then,’ hissed Ali as Lucy tried to give her back the phone. ‘Tell her.’
‘We’re in your flat, Fleur,’ said Lucy. ‘We just got back. We let ourselves in. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘Where’s Jo?’
‘She’s just – well, she’s – she wouldn’t come back with us.’
‘From where?’
‘From a village we went to.’
‘What village?’
‘Um . . .’ Now Ali grabbed the phone from Lucy.
‘It’s a place called Pen Selwood, in Somerset, near Wincanton.’
‘What’s she doing there? I told her to stay with you two. Is that where you’re digging?’
‘No, not exactly. She met this boy—’
‘Jo? Jo met a boy? And she wouldn’t come back with you?’
‘She said she’d get in touch with you. She didn’t think you’d be home for a few more days,’
‘When did all this happen?’
‘Yesterday.’
‘She met him yesterday and she wouldn’t come back? Jo?’
‘Yes. We’d camped there. She was pretty odd when we got to the village, then she got up early and went off and we found her with this boy sitting in the woods and she said she’d known him for years.’
‘What’s he called?’
‘Ferney.’
‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘Well, the police called him Luke something.’
‘What police?’
‘These policemen we met in the village. They were looking for him but they wouldn’t say why. Jo said it was okay.’
‘Has she been taking her tablets?’
‘I don’t know about yesterday but she had one the day before,’ said Ali, crossing her fingers though it was technically true.
‘For heaven’s sake. You promised you would make sure she did. Well, I’m not having her rattling round the countryside. I’m leaving here right now and I’m going straight to this place, wherever it is. Let me write it down. How do you spell it?’
Ali told her.
‘Did these policemen give you their names?’
‘No.’
‘Is there anything else you can tell me to help me find her?’
Lucy hissed, ‘The teacher – you’ve forgotten the teacher.’
‘Oh yes, she said you could get messages to her. Hang on. I wrote it down. A teacher called Mike Martin. He lives in a house called Bagstone Farm. It’s nearby. This is the number she gave us.’ She read it out. ‘I tried it on my mobile but it didn’t work.’
‘That’s an old code. It needs a one after the zero. Give me your mobile numbers. Have you got mine? I’m going straight there but I may need to get hold of you. I’m very disappointed in you two.’
When she left Bagstone, Gally climbed the hill to the old stone bench where Ferney was waiting.
‘Did you ask him?’ he said.
‘His lawyer was there. I had to wait for her to go.’
‘And?’
‘Yes, I asked him. I said could we come and stay and he said, “Will that be one bed or two?”’
‘That’s all right then.’
‘No, of course it isn’t. There were tears in his eyes.’ She hunched up. ‘It’s terrible. I can’t ask him again.’
He stood up. ‘I’ll go and talk to him.’
‘Don’t. She’s taking him back to see the police. They still want you to call them. This is their number.’
‘You met her?’
‘She found me in the garden, then she tested us to see if we were telling the truth.’
‘He should never have talked to her.’
‘Ferney, you told him to.’
‘Don’t get caught up with him. Not again.’
‘He’s a kind man. Don’t be unkind. I put him where he is.’
‘Till death did you part. That was the promise you made and death did part you.’
She looked at him and they both knew that was not a simple matter. ‘Let’s go back to the barn,’ she said, but when they climbed the gate, they saw the doors were wide open and there was a tractor inside, with a pair of overalled legs sticking out from under it and the noise of a spanner turning a screeching nut. Ferney looked at the sky. ‘We’ve got five hours of daylight, maybe six. We have a right to be in our proper place. I’ll talk to him again.’
She was on the edge of tears as they walked back to the hilltop. He put his arms round her and felt that slight, disturbing resistance before she moulded herself to him. ‘I hate to see you like this. It shouldn’t be so hard.’
‘I feel so guilty and I don’t know what’s happening to me. I need to know exactly what I did and why. I should be able to remember, shouldn’t I?’
‘It will come. Don’t let it get in the way. Do you know how long it’s been since we were last here together, properly together? I mean at the right age, just the two of us?’
She shook her head.
‘I lost you years before the war,’ he said. ‘Nineteen thirty-three. You went missing, gone, just like that. I didn’t get you back until you arrived with him in tow – that man.’
‘Mike,’ she said. ‘You can at least call him Mike. What happened to me?’
‘You were done away with,
then the next time went all wrong somehow. We never quite got to the bottom of where you were.’
She looked at him as if she didn’t quite have the courage to ask and he didn’t want to tell her what he knew. ‘I didn’t get you back properly until now,’ he said. ‘Nearly eighty years apart, you and me who fit together like one.’
‘It’s lonely being away.’
‘I promise you there is nothing so lonely as being here by yourself. That’s why it’s us that matters.’
‘But it’s not just us this time, is it? It’s got so complicated.’
‘Let’s pretend it isn’t. Come on, we’ll go and see some more of our old places.’ As evening approached, they walked back to the hilltop, feeling a chill creep into the air.
‘I expect he’s back,’ said Ferney. ‘I’m going down there. I can make him see he’s got to let us be there.’
‘Let’s both go.’
‘No. I won’t be able to say it the way I need to.’
‘You will be kind?’
‘As kind as I can be.’
As Ferney approached Bagstone, he saw an unfamiliar car parked by the gate and could hear a woman’s voice, raised in anger. He climbed the bank that ran along the road and slipped into the bushes.
Upset by Rachel’s departure, Mike was carving into the brambles around the yard with a freshly sharpened scythe. A silver BMW stopped by the gate and a woman got out. She looked at him and called, ‘Is this Bagstone Farm?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Are you Michael Martin?’
‘Yes again,’ he said. ‘Are you from Whitson Saunders?’ He hadn’t expected Rachel to send a replacement so quickly and he found himself resenting this woman’s presence. She looked polished, self-assured, with expensive hair.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not from anybody. I’m looking for my daughter and I wonder if you might know where she is.’ Her voice was harsh.
‘Your daughter?’
‘My daughter, Jo. For some reason she’s given her friends your name.’
‘Jo?’
‘Yes. Jo Driscoll. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’
Of course, he thought. She must mean Gally.
‘Oh, I see,’ he said. ‘Don’t stand in the road. Come on in.’
