Wrong Place

by Michelle Davies

  Leaving Bea for a moment, she scrabbled across the floor to Della, chalk smearing on her trousers and coat. Della’s screams were subsiding to wracking sobs as she dropped to the floor.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, placing her hand gently on Della’s arm. Della looked up at Maggie, wide-eyed and bereft.

  ‘She never left me on purpose,’ she cried. ‘She didn’t walk out. My mum didn’t mean to leave me.’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’

  73

  The decision was taken for Eleanor Bramwell to be questioned at Mansell station, but with DI Green as the lead officer and DS Renshaw second chair. Maggie didn’t mind being kept out of the interview room – she knew her evidence would help convict both Bramwells and she was content with that.

  Renshaw was also surprisingly accepting of the decision to let Green lead and was currently discussing their interview strategy with ACC Bailey as they stood by the roadside at the edge of Barnes Wood. As Maggie hovered close by, she saw Bailey furtively stroke Renshaw’s hand and she allowed herself a grin. So that’s who had answered the phone earlier, the man Renshaw had been reluctant to admit she was dating. That day in the car park, Renshaw must’ve thought Maggie had guessed it was ACC Bailey and that’s why she was flustered. Hotshot indeed.

  Maggie tried to slink away before they saw her but she was too slow.

  ‘Ah, DC Neville,’ said Bailey gruffly as he sprang apart from Renshaw. ‘You dealt with that situation fantastically. It could’ve ended a lot worse if you hadn’t remained so level-headed. I shall be putting you forward for a commendation.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  With a brief glance at Renshaw, he walked away.

  Maggie couldn’t help herself. ‘Really? You and the ACC?’ She winked at Renshaw, who blushed.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Renshaw barked back, but she smiled broadly as she said it. ‘He’s right though: you did a great job. Eleanor had clearly lost the plot.’

  ‘I don’t think her psychosis is down to the hormones she’s been taking. What she did required meticulous forethought, from booking the hotel room to crushing up the pills to drug her husband. Her actions were nowhere near as knee-jerk as Simon Bramwell wants us to believe and whatever either of them protests to the contrary, Eleanor wanted Helen to stay locked up in the mine to keep her out of the picture. I think her sociopathic tendencies surfaced long before she began fertility treatment.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ said Renshaw. ‘Listen, you’ll need to come in tomorrow to write up your statement and for a briefing. I’ll be in too, so I’ll see you then. Well done, Maggie.’ She walked off to rejoin ACC Bailey.

  The sight of them together made Maggie suddenly long for Umpire. She wished they were talking so she could tell him everything that had happened. It was one of the things she had loved most about spending time with him, the way they could spend hours poring over a case together, arguing points and tossing around theories. He would be thrilled for her to receive a commendation, her first.

  Finding it too painful to think about, Maggie said goodbye to Renshaw and navigated her way past the dozen or so vehicles now parked along the grass verge, including the dark blue van belonging to the Forensic Investigation Unit. Chief Crime Scene Examiner Mal Matheson was already hard at work below ground to secure evidence and a forensic anthropologist was on her way from Surrey to help him take care of Helen Cardle.

  Della was waiting above ground while Mal and his team beavered below. She was refusing to leave the scene because she didn’t want to leave her mum. Maggie could find no words adequate enough to comfort her but she had let her know that she would continue to be her FLO throughout the coming months as the trial processes for both Eleanor and Simon Bramwell got underway. Della still didn’t know the full story of how Helen came to be locked up in the chalk mine and it would be Maggie’s job to tell her in the coming days.

  Bea Dennison was also likely to be charged for her involvement in the first four burglaries but right now she was on her way to hospital. The wound to her skull was severe and she’d lost a lot of blood; as she was loaded into the ambulance she had suffered a fit and was unconscious again. Her parents and sister were on their way to meet her at the hospital. The police still didn’t know the identity of her boyfriend.

  As she walked around the side of the FIU’s van, Maggie was almost sent flying by a patrol car screeching to a halt. Ready to swear at the driver for his haphazard parking, she stopped in her tracks when the back passenger door opened and Alex leapt out. He looked angry and upset until his eyes lit upon Della, who was being led by a paramedic towards an ambulance. Suddenly his face softened and his eyes filled with tears as he ran over and hugged his girlfriend.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he cried.

  ‘I’m not hurt,’ Della reassured him.

  As he held her tight, Alex told her over and over again that he loved her.

  Maggie’s throat clenched with emotion as she watched them. Alex might not be her idea of a great partner but he was Della’s. Maybe, she told herself, some relationships are worth fighting for.

  Before she could talk herself out of it, she pulled her phone from her pocket and called Umpire’s number. She wasn’t expecting him to answer – not simply because it was gone midnight but because she thought he probably wouldn’t want to. She was readying herself to leave a voicemail message when his voice was suddenly in her ear.

  ‘Maggie, are you okay? I’ve just heard about the Bramwell arrest.’

  ‘I’m fine. I . . . I wanted—’ She stopped. What did she want to say to him?

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Barnes Woods. We’re wrapping up here and then I’ll be going home.’

  They both fell silent. Maggie began to feel foolish for ringing.

  ‘I should go,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t. Wait.’ He seemed as unsure of what to say as she did. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry for what?’

  ‘Ignoring your messages. For not talking to you when you tried to talk to me. For coming round to your flat uninvited and behaving like an idiot. I overstepped the mark.’

  Suddenly she knew what to say. She turned away from Della and Alex and the officers and paramedics milling around them so she couldn’t be overheard.

  ‘If I’m so bloody amazing like you said I am, why aren’t we together?’

  The line went so quiet that for one horrible, drawn-out moment she thought he’d hung up on her.

  ‘I slept with Gill on Monday evening after the Rosie Kinnock sentencing, when I went back to hers so I could have breakfast with the kids. I was drunk and pissed off with you for shouting at me, and it just happened. The next morning I felt so bad it seemed easier to keep my distance than to have to tell you what I did.’

  Maggie was almost giddy with relief.

  ‘I don’t care, Will. I don’t care you slept with your ex-wife. I thought you and . . . well, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It was a one-off, I swear. Both Gill and I agreed the next day it was a mistake. Nothing’s changed: we’re still divorcing.’

  ‘It’s okay. You and I, we aren’t even a couple.’

  He paused. ‘Yet?’

  ‘I want to give it a go. But do you?’

  She held her breath, expecting him to hesitate, but he answered immediately.

  ‘I’m getting in my car. I’ll be in Mansell in half an hour.’

  Maggie could almost hear him grinning down the phone and laughed.

  ‘I wish, but you can’t come to mine tonight. I’ve got Lou and the kids staying.’

  In a rush she told him about the fire, omitting the part about Lou not being there when it started.

  ‘Tomorrow then.’

  ‘Actually, I know this great hotel in Mansell. The manager, Mr Kendrick, might give us a deal . . .’

  ‘I’ll bring my toothbrush,’ Umpire growled wolfishly.

  She laughed again, then remembered something. ‘That saying you told me, t
he one about a wise man getting more use from his enemies? Where did you hear that?’

  Umpire thought for a moment. ‘I think it was on some leadership seminar at HQ, with ACC Bailey. Why do you ask?’

  Maggie smiled. ‘No reason.’

  A minute or so later they hung up, after agreeing he would come to Mansell the next day, once she’d been into work to write up her statements. Not even the fresh deluge of rain that had begun to fall could dampen her spirits now.

  74

  Caroline Dennison knew she should be worried – panicked even – but as she stared down at her eldest daughter’s unconscious form, to her distress she found her overriding emotion was that of shame: deep, unrelenting, all-consuming shame.

  How had it come to this? In a matter of a few hours her evening had spiralled from drinking wine with her husband in front of the TV to sitting in the paediatric ward at Stoke Mandeville hospital while the police waited to question their injured daughter about her involvement in a series of burglaries across their hometown, during which elderly women had been terrorized.

  The shame burned harder, filling Caroline’s throat with bile. This wasn’t her family. This wasn’t what they did. They didn’t lie, they didn’t break the law and they didn’t hurt innocent people. The police said Bea had admitted to carrying out the burglaries, but Caroline didn’t believe it. There was no way her child had brought violence and cruelty into the homes of those poor women. It had to be a mistake.

  Medicated against the pain, Bea hovered somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness, that no man’s land of dreamless rest. The fit she’d had in the ambulance was hopefully a one-off, the doctors told them. Her injury was serious, but not life-threatening. Time would heal it.

  Caroline glanced over her shoulder to the far corner of the cubicle where Esme was curled up asleep in an armchair that had seen better days. A nurse had crept in a few minutes earlier with a spare blanket and had cast Caroline a look of sympathy she hadn’t welcomed as she draped it over her youngest daughter. It was for sweet, considerate Esme that Caroline felt the most outrage. How could they even begin to explain to her what Bea stood accused of? Esme idolized her sister and would be devastated to think that others viewed her as some kind of criminal.

  As soon as Bea woke up they could get to the bottom of what happened. She’d already put them through so much with her illness – it was unthinkable that she would put them through the anguish of something like this as well. The boy the police had asked them about, this accomplice of Bea’s they were trying to trace, he was to blame for it all. He had to be.

  Caroline heard footsteps behind her and turned to see her husband approaching.

  ‘Can you come outside for a minute?’ he whispered. ‘There’s a detective here who wants to talk to us.’

  She concurred, rising quickly to her feet. In the corridor the detective introduced himself as DC Nathan Thomas and said he was stationed in Mansell, with CID. Caroline was struck by how young he was; he looked more like a university undergraduate than a seasoned police officer.

  ‘I’m here to collect Beatrice’s phone. It wasn’t with the rest of her clothing,’ he said.

  The nurses who’d attended to Bea in A&E had bagged her clothes and taken them away to give to the police. Caroline cringed at the memory.

  ‘I also want to ask you a few questions about Beatrice,’ the officer added.

  ‘Bea. We call her Bea,’ said Chris, like that made a difference. ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Do you know anything, any little detail, about this boyfriend of hers? We know Bea wasn’t acting alone and we need to find him.’

  ‘Do you honestly think we would be standing here if we knew who he was?’ Caroline flared up. ‘If we’d known she was seeing someone and all this was going on, don’t you think we’d have put a stop to it?’

  ‘Caroline, please,’ said Chris pleadingly. ‘Don’t make this worse.’

  ‘Worse? How can this get any worse?’ she said shrilly. ‘Our daughter has been accused of something so horrible I can’t even begin to get my head round it.’

  ‘Mrs Dennison, I need you to stay calm,’ said the officer firmly.

  Caroline took a deep breath to quell the screaming fit that was building just below the surface, waiting for a signal to blow.

  ‘I’ll get her phone for you,’ Chris told the detective. ‘One of the ambulance crew who brought her in gave it to me when it fell out of her pocket.’

  He scuttled off, leaving Caroline and DC Thomas in an awkward tête-à-tête.

  ‘What will happen to her?’ she asked him.

  The detective frowned. ‘I wouldn’t want to speculate. The outcome can depend on lots of things: evidence, expert reports, that kind of thing. Don’t worry, your daughter will be given the opportunity to present her side.’

  Caroline felt the ground shift beneath her feet. This couldn’t be happening to them. They were a nice family. Things like this didn’t happen to people like them.

  Chris returned, clutching Bea’s phone.

  ‘You were lucky to have installed the GPS tracker,’ DC Thomas remarked, holding out a clear plastic bag for Chris to drop it into. ‘It was helpful for us, knowing she’d been in Frobisher Road.’

  ‘We haven’t accessed the app for about a year until tonight,’ said Chris. ‘We installed it when Bea first got the phone, but then she got ill . . .’ He hesitated and looked to his wife for encouragement to continue. She nodded.

  ‘Bea is a recovering bulimic. Part of her treatment has been working to re-establish trust between her and us, so we don’t feel like we have to watch her every move to make sure she’s eating properly and she doesn’t feel like she’s being spied on. We haven’t accessed the app because of that.’

  DC Thomas’s brow knitted as he cradled the phone in both hands.

  ‘But the app’s still been running on Bea’s phone this whole time?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, we didn’t uninstall it, just in case,’ said Chris.

  Through the plastic bag DC Thomas managed to scroll through the icons on the home page of Bea’s phone until he found the app.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Caroline, curiosity quelling her distress for a moment.

  ‘I want to see if the app has a history, so we can see any locations Bea’s visited regularly.’ And put her at the scene of every break-in, thought Caroline sourly.

  ‘I imagine it’s mostly school or home,’ said Chris.

  ‘Here we go,’ said DC Thomas. ‘It looks like there’s at least a month’s data saved.’ He thumbed down the screen. ‘There’s an address that keeps cropping up: Colby Road. According to this, Bea was there all day on Tuesday.’

  ‘She wasn’t at school?’ said Chris, shocked.

  ‘Do you know anyone who lives on Colby Road?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Caroline blurted out. ‘Isn’t that one of those roads with those awful high-rise blocks of flats? It’s a horrible area.’

  DC Thomas appeared unimpressed by her critique and Chris shot her a glare.

  ‘Do you think that’s where he lives, the person who got Bea involved in all this?’ her husband asked the officer.

  ‘We’ll look into it,’ said DC Thomas.

  ‘If I could get my hands on him . . .’ Chris snarled.

  ‘Mr Dennison, if you want to help your daughter you’ll leave it to us,’ DC Thomas warned. ‘This is a police matter now.’

  They lingered in the corridor as the officer departed. He was on his phone before he reached the exit. Straining to listen, Caroline heard him ask for an address to be checked: Flat 2, 43 Colby Road. Whoever lived there was about to get an unscheduled visit; Caroline hoped it was as unpleasant for them as this evening had been for her.

  ‘Once Bea’s awake, she can set them straight,’ she said resolutely. ‘The burglaries . . .’ she winced as she said it. ‘They weren’t her idea. This person, this boyfriend, he made her do them – he must’ve threatened her or worse. She’s a good kid, there’
s no way she would have willingly gone along with it.’

  There was a sudden interruption, a nurse calling their names. Caroline and Chris rushed back into the ward. ‘Your daughter’s awake,’ the nurse told them. ‘You sit with her while I fetch the doctor.’

  Caroline reached the bedside first. Her eyes locked on Bea’s as she took her daughter’s hand in hers.

  ‘Mum, I’m so sorry . . . Please forgive me.’

  75

  Maggie crept up the stairs to her flat, mindfully avoiding the steps she knew creaked the loudest. She’d driven Alex and Della back to his place and it was now nearly 3 a.m. Yet when she let herself into her flat, she was taken aback to see that all the lights were still on.

  She went to hang her coat up and stopped. The rest of the hooks were empty. Where were the kids’ jackets? She looked up and down the hall, as though they might suddenly materialize. The pile of small shoes and boots that had accumulated by the front mat had also vanished.

  Her pulse quickening, Maggie went into the lounge. Her duvet was folded up on the sofa as she expected to find it, pillow balanced on top, but the toys that had earlier littered the carpet were gone. Perhaps her mum had tidied up, she reasoned, yet she could see no sign of them tucked away. She started to sense that something wasn’t quite right: the flat felt too empty, too quiet.

  The two bedrooms were off a small hallway on the other side of the lounge. She opened the door to the spare bedroom first to check on the boys, just by a crack so as not to disturb them. But when she saw the double bed was empty she flung it wide open in alarm. Where the hell were they?

  She took less caution opening the door to her own bedroom, pushing it fully open. Her bed was empty too and all the baby paraphernalia her dad had picked up at the supermarket for Mae had also gone.

  Maggie shot back into the living room and grabbed her phone from her handbag. Maybe Lou and the kids had gone to the Premier Inn with her parents? But why wouldn’t they text or call her to let her know? Was it something to do with the fire? Her anxiety growing, she called Lou’s phone but it went straight to voicemail. Next she tried her mum. After a few moments Jeanette answered. She sounded sleepy at first but then her voice hardened.