‘Oh would you, Ma?’
It appears I would. ‘But I’m just going to find out what the situation is,’ I say. ‘I can’t try to influence Tom – it’s not fair. He has to do what he thinks is best for the school.’
I retrieve the address book from under a pile of stuff in the dining room – I’d forgotten, when I offered it to my mother, that I’d let this room become such a dump – and I go into the kitchen to phone. Tom sounds less than delighted to hear from me and I am placatory. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Tom. You must have had a terrible day. What a tragedy. I’m so sorry.’
‘What exactly can I do for you, Gina?’
‘Well, it’s about Ellie, Tom.’
‘I thought it might be.’
I know what Ellie means about his tone. ‘She’s very upset, of course, and she seems to have got it into her head that you’ve sacked her, or suspended her or something.’
There is a silence.
‘Well I haven’t sacked her,’ he says finally. ‘You know as well as I do that I don’t have the power to sack a teacher on the spot. But I don’t want her in school for the time being, until we see what direction the police investigation is taking.’
‘But Ellie’s not a suspect, is she? They can’t think –‘
‘I can’t second guess what they think, Gina, but Ellie was the only person who knew that Marina was going home. There is a question about responsibility. And duty of care.’
‘Don’t suspend her, Tom, please. She’s just starting out and it’ll look terrible on her record. I know she didn’t follow procedure, but you know she can’t have had anything to do with the girl’s death. She just let her go home because she was so worried about her mother.’
‘So she said. But her mother wasn’t even at home. It may be much more complicated. Ellie knew she was vulnerable. She should have been more careful.’
‘Vulnerable?’
‘She’d reported concerns about her being bullied. All the more reason not to let her out of school at a time when she was supposed to be in our care.’
‘But Marina was worried about her mother, Tom. She told me so.’
‘What do you mean, told you?’
‘I met her yesterday while I was waiting to go out for lunch with Ellie. I had a conversation with her. Have you ever had a conversation with her?’
‘I don’t –‘
‘No, I thought not. Well, I can tell you she certainly is vulnerable, but more because of parents who don’t care about her than because of anything in school, I would say. If we’re talking duty of care, the police ought to be looking there first.’
I can’t try to influence Tom, a mocking voice in my head sneers at me. There is a pause so long that I wonder if he has walked away from the phone. When he speaks, I can hear the dead weariness in his voice. ‘Look, Gina, today’s Thursday. Tell Ellie to stay at home tomorrow. Call it sick leave. Tell her to come in to see me early on Monday morning. I should have more idea of where the police are on this by then.’
He is a nice man and I have taken advantage of his niceness, but I am desperate and unscrupulous. ‘I’d be terribly grateful if you could keep me posted in the meantime, Tom. If the police get in touch.’
He sighs. ‘I really don’t think that would be appropriate, do you? But you know, I assume, that David Scott is heading the investigation. You two know each other, don’t you? If you want the news from the horse’s mouth, I suggest you speak to him.’
As he rings off, I stand with the receiver in my hand for quite a long time. Then I go in search of my mobile. I retrieve from its address book a number which I once knew by heart, and I make the call.
5
THURSDAY 23rd SEPTEMBER
11.15. INTERVIEW TWO: THE FATHER
Hector Carson was one of those men whose physical size and strength seem to be an unfortunate accident. Well over six feet, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a heavy grey beard and longish grey hair, he was the type often described as “a bear of a man”, except that in his case he most resembled an oversized and very battered teddy bear. It was difficult to tell how old he was: the hair and beard put him well into his fifties but his face was surprisingly unlined, his complexion, even today, clear and rosy, though his eyes were dull and red-rimmed and his hair in mad disarray.
‘He’s in his writing room, sir,’ the PC on duty at the front door of Charter Hall had told Scott and Powell. ‘Round the back and follow the path through the garden and you’ll see it.’
They had skirted the assorted outhouses behind the house and found themselves only twenty feet or so from water. The River Mar flowed past, shallow and weedy, and a small boat with an outboard motor was moored by a wooden jetty. The shiny little boat was in almost comic contrast to the unkempt garden, the disintegrating jetty and the scabby hulls of two upturned rowing boats lying in the long grass. They had followed the path, which ran parallel to the river, past a rusty climbing frame and a rotting swing, round deserted rabbit hutches and handsome stone urns full of vigorous weeds to an ancient wooden summerhouse, rotten to the point of imminent collapse.
‘Come into my den,’ Hector Carson had invited them, and for once the word seemed truly appropriate. The room had a fetid smell (damp wool, mildew, pipe tobacco and very old sweat, Powell told Scott afterwards) and the appearance of having been filled, layer by layer, from the outside in. Ancient, rotting rugs, ingrained with dirt, lay overlapping on the floor; books obscured the walls – haphazardly on shelves, crammed into stacks of boxes, piled in tottering towers. More books lay in smaller heaps around an old kitchen table in the centre of the room, from which papers flowed in wild abandon. Among them lurked a manual typewriter, its ribbon lying in inky coils beside it. Scott wondered if there was actually any power in the room. There were candles stuck into bottles on the bookshelves and a kettle stood on a camping stove. How was it possible that Carson hadn’t yet set fire to himself?
Their host pulled a heap of rugs off a lumpy studio couch at the end of the room and invited them to sit down, which they did cautiously, settling themselves among the springs. He brought a large leather chair over from the table and sat down opposite them. Then he waited, eyes wide and trusting, like a child’s.
Scott spoke. ‘Let me first express our condolences again, Mr Carson. We understand that this is a very painful time for you and we don’t want to distress you further, but I believe the family liaison officer – PC Shepherd – has told you that we aren’t yet sure whether Marina’s death was simply an accident and we have to establish how it happened and who, if anyone, was responsible. That has meant that we’ve had to ask you to vacate the house for the present. We have to keep it secure for forensic investigations. We’ll try to complete those as soon as possible.’ As Carson continued to gaze at him, he went on, ‘I gather your wife has gone to stay at The County Hotel in Marlbury. Are you planning to join her?’
Carson shook his head. ‘No. We both stayed there last night, but I don’t like hotels. Now I think I shall just stay here.’ He looked round the chaotic room. ‘Your officers did whatever they needed to do in here and they said they wouldn’t need to come back. I’d sooner be at home.’
Scott asked, ‘Can you tell me where you were yesterday afternoon? Were you here?’
Carson shook his shaggy head. ‘I wasn’t, as a matter of fact. I’m working on a new saga, you know, set in a mediaeval monastery, so I work in the abbey library a great deal these days, where the materials for background research are to hand.’
And where there’s warmth and electric light Scott thought.
Paula Powell said, ‘We gathered from Marina’s form teacher that Marina asked to go home early yesterday because she was worried about her mother being left alone. She thought she was still shaken from her fall the day before. Were you worried about leaving her alone?’
Her question seemed to cause him extreme discomfort. He shifted his great bulk, ran ink-stained fingers through his wild hair, spread his hands out
on his lap, as if to study them, and then said, ‘My wife was frightened by her fall, and I should have taken it more seriously. I let her down, I’m afraid, and I let my daughter down.’ Here his voice broke and he blew his nose on a dirty handkerchief, then put it away and looked from one to the other. ‘I feel as if I’m in the middle of a nightmare, you know, and I really don’t know how to explain it all to you. I don’t know how much you’ve heard about the show my wife is in – Amy, it’s called. It’s a historical story – very inaccurately told, of course – about Amy Robsart, who was the wife of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester.’
‘The one who was supposed to be Elizabeth I’s lover?’ Paula Powell asked. ‘Jeremy Irons played him on TV – with Helen Mirren.’
‘There was a lot of rumour to that effect – and rumours that the Queen wanted to marry him. But he was married already, to Amy. And then Amy died under suspicious circumstances and the rumours were that Dudley had had her murdered, or the Queen had, or the two of them had plotted it together.’
‘What were the suspicious circumstances?’ Scott asked.
‘She was found dead – at the bottom of the stairs – at her home in Cumnor.’ Carson looked at him. ‘Now, do you begin to see?’
‘See what, exactly?’ Scott asked. He had some inkling of where this was going but he wasn’t willing to tell Carson’s story for him. Carson sighed, a mild, weary sigh of disappointment.
‘You must see that it’s rather extraordinary in the circumstances – all these falls. When my wife had her fall – whenever it was – Tuesday, was it? – she was convinced, you see, that someone had put something on the stairs to make her slip. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it and I blame myself now for not taking it more seriously, but it seemed so – improbable, you know, and my wife does tend to…’ He petered out. ‘Well, she’s an actress,’ he finished lamely.
‘Did you look to see if there was anything on the stairs?’
‘I did, and there was a smear of something, perhaps. I thought maybe some butter from my wife’s breakfast tray. The stairs are uncarpeted, of course – but you’ll have seen that when you – when you were here yesterday. They’re beautiful oak, three hundred years old. It would be a sin to carpet them.’
‘But they are quite uneven, aren’t they?’ Paula Powell commented. ‘It would be quite easy to slip.’
He looked at her vaguely, pursuing some private thought. ‘Do you know,’ he asked, ‘how Amy Robsart came to be alone at Cumnor Place on the day she died?’
‘No?’
‘Her husband was away at court in London and she had given all her servants the day off, to go to a fair in Oxford. She insisted that they went, which gave support to those who wanted to argue that she’d committed suicide.’
‘I don’t quite see where –‘
‘Bear with me, please. Now, we don’t have a large domestic staff here at Charter Hall – but we have a very reliable cleaning lady – well housekeeper, really – Mrs Deakin – who comes in several days a week. I’m not sure which days exactly, but yesterday was one of her days. Yesterday morning, she had a phone call from my wife – or so she thought – giving her the day off. The caller, whoever she was, suggested that she might like to take advantage of her day off to go to the Wednesday market in Marlbury, as she didn’t usually get the chance.’
‘Are you saying the call wasn’t from your wife?’ Scott asked.
‘It was not, but it was from someone well acquainted with our domestic arrangements and familiar enough with my wife’s voice to imitate it.’
‘Your wife’s an actress, Mr Carson,’ Paula Powell objected. ‘A lot of people have heard it. And it’s unusual. It wouldn’t be very difficult to imitate.’
Scott intervened. ‘How did you learn that Mrs Deakin had had this call?’
‘From my wife. When Mrs Deakin didn’t turn up for work, my wife rang her. Mrs Deakin was terribly apologetic, apparently, and explained that she’d had this call.’
‘Do you know if the caller gave any reason why she didn’t want Mrs Deakin to come that day?’
‘Yes, I believe she said she had a heavy cold, on top of her broken ankle, and she was intending to sleep for most of the day, so she didn’t want to be disturbed by vacuuming and the like.’
‘And the heavy cold would explain why her voice might have sounded different. Clever,’ Paula Powell said.
Scott said, ‘My scene-of-crime officers found no sign of an attempted burglary. There was no break-in but, as you know, we found the kitchen door unlocked yesterday afternoon.’
‘Yes, yes. We are rather slack about locking up out here, I’m afraid. And Glenys was anxious to catch her train, you know.’
‘My officers found no sign that anyone had been going through the house for things to steal, but I shall be asking you later to look round the house to see if there is anything missing. We need to establish whether Marina interrupted an attempted burglary.’
Carson stared at him in alarm, running a frantic hand through his hair
‘I understand that it will be difficult for you to go back into the house,’ Scott said gently, ‘but –‘
‘No, no,’ Carson interrupted. ‘Well – it will be difficult of course, but the problem is I don’t notice things, you know. I’m not sure if I could tell you if anything was missing. My wife might – or Mrs Deakin would be better. Mrs Deakin knows where everything belongs.’
‘We’ll talk to her,’ Scott said. ‘She lives in Willow Close. That’s in the village, is it?’
‘Yes, it’ll be on the new estate. It’s all Willow and Ash and Sycamore down there.’ He spoke with the gentle disdain of a man who couldn’t understand why everyone didn’t choose to live in a three-hundred-year-old house.
‘Even if nothing is missing,’ Paula Powell said, ‘it could be that Marina interrupted them before they had a chance to take anything. Or that they were looking for something in particular. Do you have anything of special value in the house, Mr Carson?’
‘Nothing. We sold a good deal, for my wife’s medical treatment, you know. We have things that are precious to us, of course – my wife’s Emmy award, for example, but nothing worth stealing, I think.’
‘Are you sure that the call to Mrs Deakin mentioned your wife’s injured ankle?’ Paula Powell asked.
‘I think so, yes. It worried my wife – that the caller seemed to know everything that was going on here.’
Scott stood up and Powell joined him. ‘Thank you, Mr Carson,’ he said. ‘You’ve been very helpful. We will need to talk to you again, but that’s all for the moment.’
They moved towards the door, and Paula Powell asked, ‘Did Marina have a mobile phone, Mr Carson? We haven’t come across one among her things.’
Hector Carson frowned in puzzlement for a moment and then said, ‘Oh no. She had no need of one. My wife has one, for emergencies – coming back late from London and so on – but not the rest of us.’
‘Right. And had Marina behaved at all oddly in recent days? Did she seem worried or frightened at all in the past few days or weeks?’
He looked surprised and a little frightened, Scott thought. ‘Behaved oddly? I don’t think – she was always very quiet, you know – very biddable. And I didn’t see her much, really – always working – you know how it is with a new project. Frightened? What would she have been frightened of?’
Scott could feel Powell beside him suppressing a snort of fury. She ignored the question as rhetorical and merely said, ‘Our WPC Shepherd will be available for as long as she’s needed, Mr Carson. Do talk to her if you feel it will help.’
‘Yes. Thank you,’ he said, and his face was as blank as a mask.
6
THURSDAY 23rd SEPTEMBER
13.00. INTERVIEW THREE: THE MOTHER
Scott and Powell walked back towards the house in silence at first, each mulling over possibilities. There was something strange about this set-up, Scott thought. You never forgot the violent deaths of chi
ldren and he couldn’t remember one where the parents hadn’t clung together. Even divorced parents hung on to each other like drowning swimmers. Later they might be pulled apart, by guilt, by blame or just by the intrinsic loneliness of grief, but for the first forty-eight hours, at least, they couldn’t be prised apart.
‘What did you think of him?’ he asked.
‘He’s away with the fairies, isn’t he?’ Powell said dismissively. ‘Useless father and useless husband, I’d say. Why isn’t he with his wife, instead of lurking down there in all that mess.’ The last word came out as a hiss.
‘That was more or less what I was thinking. To be fair, it’s difficult for them, not being able to be in the house, but you would expect them to want to be together. I wonder how she’s coping.’
‘I guess she’ll be our next port of call, won’t she?’ she asked.
‘We’ll just call in at the house first and see how the SOCOs are doing. And then, Paula, why don’t you go and see Renée Deakin, since she lives here in the village, and I’ll go on into Marlbury. The family liaison officer can sit in on my interview with Mrs Carson. I assume she’s with her.’
As they rounded the corner of the house, Scott thought about the SOCOs at their work. It was a difficult crime scene, Scott knew: a preliminary tour of the place the previous evening had shown him a jumble of rooms, large and small, all sparsely furnished but crammed with a clutter of miscellaneous objects from broken rocking horses to collections of butterflies. There were cellars and attics, nooks and crannies, cupboards and pantries. It had obviously been a handsome house but there were signs of decay everywhere: brown rings of damp on ceilings, flaking rot in window frames, peeling wallpaper and sagging furniture. He thought Mrs Deakin must be working heroically to prevent the place from sinking into chaos.
The moment they stepped into the house, he sensed that there had been a development in the search. The SOCOs were going quietly about their work but there was a vibrating excitement in the air. The officer in charge approached him.
All the Daughters Page 5
