by Danuta Reah
The house was on the main road overlooking Bingham Park. It was a stone house that backed onto the park, its bay window dark, with torn nets, the upper-storey window obscured by a blanket, another house fallen victim to the creeping blight of multiple occupancy. The paint was chipped and peeling, the wood of the window frames starting to crumble at the base. At the back, the land dropped down into the park, down towards the river. The small back garden was below the level of the road, a basement flat opening out onto it.
Simon Walker had rented the basement flat, but the flat itself was empty when Corvin, armed with a warrant, arrived with the search team. ‘I knew he’d be trouble,’ the landlord grumbled as he unlocked the door.
‘How do you mean?’ Corvin asked as they went into the room. Barraclough could smell the damp. She’d lived in enough run-down bed-sits in the earlier days of her career for the smell to take her back to a life of takeaways and cheap red wine, transient passions in front of fumy gas fires – a time of her life she had thoroughly enjoyed and had no desire to revisit.
The landlord considered Corvin’s question suspiciously. ‘He’s a bit of a weirdo,’ he said after a moment.
Barraclough was looking round the room as he spoke. It was not what she had been expecting. Student flats were sordid and messy – everyone knew that. This one was meticulously tidy. More than that, Barraclough thought. The books on the shelves were lined up and carefully arranged according to size. There was a small kitchen separated from the rest of the room by a breakfast bar. The single wall cupboard was filled with tins of sweetcorn, standing in neat rows in piles of three. She looked at the table in the window. Two unopened letters were lined up square with the table edge. On one wall was a sheet of paper filled with complex diagrams forming lozenge-shaped patterns, with letters and numbers attached to the lines. On the other wall, opposite the window, were marks, straight lines, as though something had been carefully lined up there in several rows. Whatever it was had been removed, leaving pieces of tape behind.
She could hear the landlord talking to Corvin as she tried to decipher the images she was seeing. ‘He had this really strange look,’ the man was saying. ‘Like he couldn’t understand a word you said,’ There were leaflets and a free paper on the mat in front of the door, and a carton of milk that had been left on the breakfast bar had gone sour, its smell adding a slight taint to the damp air.
‘OK, let’s get started,’ said Corvin.
Midday Sunday, McCarthy negotiated the one-way system through the city centre in response to an urgent summons from the pathologist. Anne Hays’s office was at the bottom of the long hill that ran down behind the university. It was an undistinguished building among modern industrial blocks, next to the dual carriageway where the tramway ran towards Hillsborough. It was a place where people came and sat in a waiting room to find out the usually unremarkable truths that lay behind the deaths of their loved ones, to collect the certificates that would allow them to bury their dead. McCarthy felt that same frustration he’d felt earlier, of having to be in one place when he wanted to be somewhere else.
A disgruntled security guard, his Sunday disrupted by the events of the night before, was on the door. McCarthy gave him a nod of acknowledgement as he went to the lift and said, ‘Dr Hays is expecting me.’
He pressed the button for the second floor, and when he stepped out of the lift, turned right along the narrow, blue-carpeted corridor. The lights were fluorescent, recessed. The walls looked flimsy, as though they would cave in at a touch. The doors, spaced at regular intervals, were made of simulated wood with windows at the top, which let a vestige of natural light into the corridor.
He found Anne Hays’s office and knocked. He wondered if she would actually say, ‘Come,’ and when she did, he opened the door and went in. She was sitting at her desk, and raised her eyebrows coolly at him as if she held him personally responsible for this latest incumbent of her table. ‘Good morning, Mr McCarthy.’ She was as formal as ever. She must have made an early start, but she was meticulously neat, and as correct as she always was with him – no reflections on the vagaries of teenage girls or the iniquities of the NHS system for his benefit. He wondered why she had asked him to call in, rather than submitting her report through to the investigating team.
She stood up. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got something for you,’ she said. ‘You’d better come and see this.’ She led McCarthy to the lift and they went down to the morgue. ‘We did the post-mortem this morning,’ she said, leading him to one of the fridges where the bodies were stored. ‘We still need all the lab stuff, but I can tell you this now. It wasn’t immediately obvious.’ She unzipped the cover and pulled it back to expose the face.
McCarthy waited, wondering when she’d get to the point. He looked down at Ashley Reid, his face congested and swollen, disfigured by bruising and – something else. McCarthy looked more closely, and then back at Anne Hays, wanting now to know what she had to tell him. He had thought she was a young woman. Now she looked older. The light was giving her face that papery fragility of old skin, transparent and delicate. He was afraid for a moment that, if she smiled, her face would crumble and dissipate in the draught from the ventilation fan. He shook his head to clear it. He was tired.
She waited for his reaction before she went on. ‘… They tried their best to resuscitate the boy – nineteen, it’s a crime.’ So far, McCarthy thought, they were in complete agreement. ‘So he was a bit battered by the time I got him. But I’m afraid there’s no doubt.’ Again, McCarthy was struck by the look of academic inquiry on her face, judicious, slightly distanced. ‘Congestion of the face, petechiae, bruising to the neck.’ She showed him, gently manoeuvring the head that lay between them. ‘It would all be concealed by the smoke damage, of course. And, of course, no smoke in the lungs … You can understand how it happened. They got him out of there and went straight into resuscitation. Your first aim in a case like this is to save life.’
It took a moment for McCarthy to realize what she was telling him. Ashley Reid had not died in the fire. He had been dead before the lethal smoke reached him.
The forensic team worked fast. They knew which prints they had to match, and went straight to them. It was no surprise that they had an immediate hit with Ashley Reid’s prints, but the second match they found was less expected. They had no name to go with these, but someone else had left fingerprints in Suzanne Milner’s house, on the passage door, on the stair rail, and on her desk in her attic study. These prints matched with the unknown set found in Shepherd Wheel after Emma Allan’s death.
Brooke called the team together late Sunday afternoon. He was angry, and made little attempt to hide it. They had had three promising lines of inquiry, two of which looked like coming up with their killer – Brooke would have put money on Dennis Allan as the killer of the daughter who was not his daughter, and the woman he thought was his wife’s other child. But Dennis Allan had been in custody when Ashley Reid was killed, was guilty of another crime altogether, and, with his solicitor urgently coaching him, was unlikely to be charged with anything, or anything much. How easily could guilt distort the memory of a man who had found his disturbed wife apparently dead from an overdose after the row they had had, which had precipitated her suicide?
And Ashley Reid? Reid’s death might have, could have cleared the whole thing up for him, though Brooke had never been as hot on Reid as McCarthy had been. The lad’s apparent low intelligence had seemed to count him out as anything more than an accomplice, a puppet manipulated by more intelligent strings. But McCarthy’s latest report suggested that Reid was of average or above average intelligence, more than capable of planning and carrying out the two killings. But not, unfortunately, capable of planning and carrying out his own murder. The evidence was unequivocal. Reid had died of strangulation, manual strangulation. Though the scene had been disturbed by the rescue, it looked as though he had been attacked in the room where he had been sleeping. He’d been subdued by a blow to the head,
and then had the life choked out of him. The fire had apparently been set in an effort to conceal this fact. Despite the initial appearances, the fire had been set and started from inside the house.
‘Whoever it was came along prepared, then?’ Griffith asked. A premeditated attack with Reid’s killer stalking him to Suzanne Milner’s house, equipped for murder and arson.
‘No.’ Brooke indicated part of the fire report. ‘Whoever it was used an accelerant that was already at the scene. Milner had been decorating. There was a bottle of paraffin on the landing. She said so.’ An opportunistic attack? An unintended death?
Whoever it was who had strangled Ashley Reid, it wasn’t Suzanne Milner. She was lucky to be alive. Someone had locked her in the downstairs room and nearly killed her as well. Her story was clear and consistent, but there were gaps. Barraclough knew – they all knew – she wasn’t telling all of the truth. She claimed that Reid had come to her house that evening. She admitted that she had gone looking for him, but said that Reid had arrived independently. The evidence from the house suggested otherwise. Though a great deal of it had been destroyed by the fire and the damage done in extinguishing it, and in the attempts to rescue Ashley Reid, there was still enough to cast serious doubts on Suzanne’s version of events. She claimed that Reid had never been inside the house before that night, and had only been in the downstairs rooms, the bathroom and the small bedroom. But Reid’s fingerprints were in other places, particularly in the attic room that Suzanne Milner apparently used as a study. McCarthy was outlining their findings now, talking about fresh prints, overlaid prints – evidence of much more than a single night would account for.
Barraclough pulled her attention back to the briefing. ‘So was she harbouring him all this time?’ Brooke said.
McCarthy seemed uncharacteristically indecisive. He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. She says she wasn’t.’
‘Why would she harbour someone like Reid?’ That was Liam Martin. It was a good point, Barraclough thought. Corvin made a crude suggestion that brought the relief of laughter. McCarthy’s face set in cold, unforgiving lines.
Barraclough thought that she had never seen him so angry. They had interviewed Suzanne as soon as she left the hospital – against medical advice – just over an hour ago. Barraclough had felt sorry for her. She looked shocked and ill – as well she might – and had seemed to find it hard to concentrate. She kept saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ as if she couldn’t understand the questions she was being asked. She seemed bewildered by the evidence and retreated into confused silence.
For the first time in the years she had known him, Barraclough saw McCarthy lose it. As Suzanne repeated for the third time that Ashley Reid had never been in her house apart from that one night, he’d slammed his fist down on the desk and shouted, ‘Exactly how stupid do you think I am, Suzanne?’
She had shaken her head, looking shocked and exhausted. McCarthy had said something about a break and slammed out of the room, leaving Barraclough to sort out the formalities. He’d sent Corvin in to complete the interview.
Thinking about this now, Barraclough remembered the scene at the hospital earlier that afternoon, when she had gone with McCarthy to talk to Suzanne, before the evidence from the house had come through. The nurse had said with some sharpness, ‘She’s not being very reasonable, but we can’t force her to stay. Try and talk some sense into her,’ and they had found Suzanne pulling on a torn and smoke-stained jumper, trying to collect her possessions together. McCarthy had told Barraclough to wait outside the cubicle, but she’d been able to see and hear most of what went on. Suzanne had tried to push past him, fighting him as he stopped her, saying, ‘I’ve got to talk to him! I didn’t listen! He tried to tell me and I didn’t listen!’
McCarthy had grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her until she’d shut up and looked at him, seen in his face the news he had to tell her. Then he hadn’t said anything, had just put his arms round her, and all he’d said was, ‘Suzanne, it’s all right, it’s all right.’
But it wasn’t, Barraclough thought now, watching him in the incident room. Something wasn’t all right with McCarthy at all.
The numbing effects of shock wore off as Sunday evening faded into Sunday night. Suzanne didn’t know what to do. Her house was still being examined by police, by scene-of-crime investigators. She couldn’t have faced going there anyway. Jane was due back with Lucy later that night. She had a spare key to Jane’s, and now she was sitting in Jane’s back room on the edge of the reclining chair, in the middle of Lucy’s toys and drawings, watching the evening sky over the roofs of the houses. Lucy’s one-eared teddy bear was tucked in a corner of the chair, and Suzanne picked it up, turning it round and round in her hands as she watched the evening star slowly become visible in the fading light.
Her mind kept replaying images of the past twenty-four hours. She thought about Ashley pushing her back onto the chair, the sudden flaring up of passion, its sudden end. She thought about the way he’d smiled at her as he’d closed the door behind him. She thought about Steve at the hospital, when she’d read the news – or the confirmation – of Ashley’s death in his face. She thought about his face at the police station later, his anger, the things he said, the way he wouldn’t believe her.
She saw feet moving stealthily up a flight of stairs, stairs where the walls were stripped bare, heard soft footsteps moving across a carpeted floor. She could see a door in the darkness, the letter box opening, rags dropping through, the flames beginning to blister the paint, finding the bin-liner full of paper she’d left behind the door, the plastic dripping and melting, the flames roaring up. She could see Ashley’s face, white on the pillow, framed by thick, dark hair, see his hand dangling off the side of the bed, still, cold, as the smoke crept and twisted its way across the room.
She felt cold, even though it had been a warm day, and the evening was still pleasant and mild. She twisted the knob on the gas fire for warmth, and heard the pop as the flame caught. Flames licking up the door, catching the paper, flames and smoke filling the stairway – it wasn’t fire that killed him! She stood up and looked for something to distract her.
Lucy’s drawings. She looked at the familiar pictures. Me and my sisters in the park. The Ash Man’s brother in the park. There was one she hadn’t seen before. Unlike Lucy’s other pictures, it was all in black – no colour. She looked at the caption. The Ash Man. Had Lucy drawn this new one after Emma’s death, after that day in the park? Was it some kind of therapy? The Ash Man: the person from her fantasy that had helped to fix the idea of Ashley’s involvement in Steve’s mind.
Her attempt at distraction had come round in a full circle. She felt the weight of it fall on her again. Then she heard a key in the lock, heard Lucy’s voice animated and excited, ‘… and all fire engines and …’ and Jane’s voice, calm and gentle, calling, ‘Suzanne? Suzanne? I just heard, I saw Mrs Varney …’ and then Jane was there, and she drew Suzanne into her soft embrace, and the shadows retreated, for a while.
Something had woken Lucy up. She sat up in. bed. The monsters had been chasing her, in the park, in a place with dark tunnels, and Tamby was saying, sadly, Be careful, little Luce. Be very, very careful. But she was at home in bed. She was safe. The curtains moved in the draught. No peacock feather by her bed, watching out for her. Tamby. Maybe Tamby was keeping her safe. She listened, made him say Like a mouse in her head, but there was no one there.
They’d been to London, her and her mum, and her daddy had gone too. London was big and noisy and dusty, and they kept going down, down with crowds of people pushing her and shoving her and there were tunnels with trains that came screaming out, and she was quite frightened. Be very careful! she said to Tamby in her mind, but he wasn’t there. She’d clung onto her daddy’s hand and he’d said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Luce,’ and pulled his hand free and she was lost. And the train came roaring out of the tunnel and she screamed and then Mum was there and it was all right, and her daddy
came back through the crowd holding a newspaper.
When they were coming home, a robber had stolen Mum’s bag, and her daddy had said, ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ and her mum had said, ‘Hush,’ because she could see that Lucy was listening, and then she’d said, ‘It’s only a bag.’ Lucy was pissed off with her daddy.
Now they were home again and she was glad. It was quiet and green at home and her daddy wasn’t cross all the time. He wasn’t cross at home, and he brought her presents. Sometimes. Lucy turned over and tried to get comfortable. Her bed felt all wrong. Suzanne was staying with them. Something bad had happened when they were in London. Suzanne had had a fire. Her house had nearly burnt down. There had been fire engines and sirens and things. Lucy would have liked seeing that. ‘Was Michael there?’ she’d asked Suzanne, jealously. Michael would boast if he’d been in a fire engine. ‘No,’ Suzanne had said, and her voice was all flat and funny. ‘Michael wasn’t there.’ And then she’d started crying and Mum had put her arms round Suzanne like she was a little girl.
She needed to go to the toilet. She used to say pee like Mum did, but Mrs Varney said it was vulgar. That was a good word. Lucy liked that word. Vulgar. She climbed out of bed. The house was quiet and dark. She tiptoed along the corridor to the bathroom. She peered over the banister down the stairs, but it was dark and still down there as well. Mum must be in bed. And Dad must be in bed? She didn’t know if her daddy was there or not. Suzanne was sleeping in the front room. Lucy had helped make a bed on the settee. She went along the corridor, past the attic stairs.
The door up to the attic was open, and the stairs vanished up into darkness. Mum said that Lucy could have the room in the attic for her own one day, but Lucy didn’t want it. It was dark up there and smelt of dust and old things. A draught blew the smell into her face, and went away again.
