A Wreath for my Sister

by Priscilla Masters

  For the rest of her life she would remember the shock on Matthew Levin’s face.

  With a shaking hand he put his glass down on the table and without looking at her he walked out.

  She stood for a moment staring after him, then she opened a drawer in the table, found a cigarette. And for the first time in eight years she set a match to it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  She didn’t sleep at all that night but lay anxiously tossing and turning.

  For the first few hours all her turmoil was provoked by Matthew. She had always been so sure he loved her, right from their first, frenzied lovemaking. Even now she didn’t doubt it, but she hadn’t realized his love for Eloise was stronger. Stupidly she had concentrated on his wife while discounting his daughter, but it was the daughter who would prove the insurmountable obstacle, not Jane.

  But if the first half of the night was occupied by visions of Matthew, during the second half he was replaced by Sharon Priest.

  Images wandered in and out of her mind. It was only now that she was realizing what a complex character Sharon had been, bent on survival, on having a good time yet struggling with her three children, using anything to earn money, by cleaning and, now, surrogacy.

  She had been both streetwise and naive, clever and yet stupid, used and yet manipulative. She had written the advert, that pathetic, silly attempt to find happiness, excitement, romance and sparkle. An attempt to realize illusions.

  Prince Charming had answered.

  Stuart.

  The whole thing would have been funny – Stuart turning up as the man of her dreams, only for her to find she’d already had an affair with him. That image was replaced by the black high heels, glass slippers, Sharon, shivering at the pub, not wanting to wear a coat that clashed with her best dress. But unable to afford anything more suitable.

  So she had shivered. Sharon must have been excited as she waited in the pub. And then who had turned up? Someone she must secretly have laughed about. The trousers left hanging out of the window seemed so ridiculous. Passers-by must have seen them and laughed. Finnigan had known how to parade his wife’s infidelity. And any romantic illusions Sharon might have nursed must quickly have been dispelled by the trousers, waving half-mast.

  After her initial fear of Finnigan had evaporated how she must have laughed at the memory of Stuart pedalling furiously away from the scene. Even Joanna could laugh at the thought of a naked man on a bicycle. Cyclists are sexy?

  So when Stuart had turned up at the Quiet Woman that night Sharon must have been disappointed. Weeks of build-up for nothing.

  Instead of the Don Juan, Don Quixote had turned up, yet, according to the barmaid, she had gone willingly.

  Joanna shivered. It was in these dark, quiet moments that the brutality of rape and murder hit home. It had been an ugly way to die. Ugly and brutal.

  Joanna got up then, with the feeling that these last few thoughts had contained the answer.

  She would not sleep again until the killer was identified, so she threw on a towelling robe and padded downstairs to make coffee and switch on the central heating.

  Reluctantly she pulled her little-used Peugeot 205 out of the garage and drove to the station.

  The desk officer watched her walk in sympathetically.

  ‘No sleep, Inspector Piercy?’

  Almost in a dream, she shook her head and asked him to give Korpanski an early call.

  He arrived half an hour later, puffy-eyed and cross. To compensate for the unearthly hour she went to the coffee machine.

  ‘OK,’ he yawned. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I think we can work it out,’ she said.

  He was still yawning and downing the coffee. ‘Come on, then, share the good news. And by the way, how are the prisoners this morning?’

  ‘About to go home.’

  He sat up. ‘What? Both of them?’

  She nodded.

  He took a deep gulp of coffee. ‘Go on, I can tell you’re dying to say something.’

  Her hand was on the scattered letters. ‘We’ve never checked out Finnigan’s alibi, have we?’

  ‘We didn’t need to. She wouldn’t have got in the car with him.’

  ‘She might have if she was cold.’

  She waited for Mike to absorb this last sentence before ploughing on. ‘We’re all agreed it was a vicious, brutal crime. And we know he is a brutal, vicious man with a hatred for women. We also know he is a rapist, although no charges have ever been brought.’

  Mike looked troubled. ‘We don’t know he’s a murderer, Joanna.’

  ‘He’s more likely than the other two we’ve had banged up overnight.’

  ‘What about the Macclesfield girl?’

  ‘He really did answer her advert,’ she said. ‘But it was Stuart Thorr who answered Sharon’s. The answer’s here, Mike. The letters were written by two different people. Finnigan’s are blunt, obvious, misspelt. Stuart’s were – well, let’s just say they were two opposite personalities. Stacey was murdered by the man she had gone out with that night, but Sharon’s date turned out to be someone she found almost ridiculous – Thorr. Reluctantly she goes along with him, disappointed, but halfway to his house he makes a suggestion which she finds so crazy she actually gets out of the car and starts to walk back to Leek. But it’s snowing and she’s wearing the thinnest of dresses. So when Finnigan happens along, although she knows from experience that he’s dangerous, she gets in the car with him. It’s the last choice she is able to make and it’s the wrong one. It was the very chance he’d hoped for, the one woman he hated most. He rapes and garrots her before dumping her body up on the moor.’

  ‘Proof?’ Mike asked.

  ‘Eventually, a blood sample,’ she said. ‘But before that we can look over his flat.’

  Finnigan was lying on his back snoring when they broke down the door. Joanna took fiendish delight in shaking him awake and cautioning him while he complained he had a full bladder. She was only sorry the caution wasn’t longer.

  The SOCOs had a field day. Newspaper clippings, practically the entire personal column, some with rings around, some, ominously, with red ticks and underlinings ... But it was in the car that they found the more specific evidence, Sharon’s hair, a few thin, red threads, some minute traces of blood. And neatly stacked in the boot under the spare wheel, almost like firewood, were pieces of broom handle, sawn into lengths roughly a foot long, together with some coils of cycle brake cable wire. Joanna counted them. There were eight. She had never felt more relieved to catch a killer and as she watched the police surgeon draw a syringe full of blood from Finnigan’s arm she felt sudden elation. Not for the world would she do any other job.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Leaving Stuart to Mike’s tender mercies, she derived some pleasure from being the one to release Haworth. Looking a bit more dishevelled than he had the night before, he needed a shave and his teeth cleaning. He slumped in the chair and scowled at her.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m delighted to inform you that you’re free to go.’

  He stared at her, then rasped his hands over his chin. ‘You have a suspect?’

  Joanna nodded. It was the first time it had hit her that there must have been a relationship between Sharon Priest and Haworth. Maybe he had even been fond of her.

  ‘Inspector,’ he said. ‘I want you to know I am sorry about what happened to Sharon. But the fact remains that I am the little boy’s father. I am prepared to take a blood test to prove the point and my wife and I want custody. And by the way, Inspector.’ Some of the old haughtiness was creeping back into Haworth’s voice. ‘Perhaps you’ll tell Mrs Priest that there is a law against trying to obtain money by extortion.’ The news didn’t surprise her. Doreen had some of her daughter’s talent for irregular ways of making money.

  ‘Do you want to press charges?’

  ‘I want her to leave me alone,’ he said, ‘and stop spreading gossip.’

  ‘Will you tell him?
’ she asked curiously.

  ‘You mean about his parentage?’ Haworth stared ahead. ‘To be honest, I don’t know. We might say he was adopted and leave out the details, but it would mean moving away from this town. People here have very long memories.’

  It was a phrase Colclough repeated when she was summoned to his office half an hour later.

  He began with the case and a scrutiny of the prosecuting evidence, and she could tell from the happy wobble of his jowl that he was content. ‘Has he confessed to both murders?’

  She shook her head. ‘He’s confessed to nothing. Not Stacey Farmer, not Sharon Priest and not Deborah Pelham either.’

  ‘You’re still convinced she’s one of his victims?’

  ‘I’m not sure, sir.’

  He nodded. Then his face changed as he moved on to her personal life.

  ‘I’ve mentioned this before, Piercy,’ he said. ‘Keep your nose clean. However, in this particular instance I can’t see you’re to blame. I have been in contact with Mrs Levin and pointed out the areas of the law which she could be contravening.’

  He looked up. ‘That’s all, Piercy, for now.’

  She left feeling furious with him for the paternalistic, interfering attitude and yet, like a domineering, bossy father, maybe, just maybe, he had her best interests at heart.

  It was the next day and Joanna was sitting in the office, working with Mike, when the door opened. She looked up. A thin young woman, dressed in faded jeans, was staring at her.

  For a few seconds the room was silent.

  Even Mike said nothing. It was as though all three were dumb. And Joanna did not want to be the one to break the silence.

  Finally the girl spoke in a cracked, hard voice. ‘Which one of you’s Piercy?’ she asked.

  Joanna blinked. ‘Me,’ she said quietly and the girl sank down on to one of the chairs.

  ‘You’ve been looking for me.’

  ‘I have?’

  The girl nodded.

  It was Mike who recovered first. ‘Well, who the hell are you, love?’ he asked.

  The girl swivelled round in her chair, shaking her head. ‘Don’t you recognize me?’

  They stared at her, then shook their heads.

  ‘The so-called good-time girl?’ She sounded angry. ‘You’ve been hanging around my dad ... pretending to know something about me.’

  And then the penny dropped.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Joanna said softly.

  The girl dropped her face into her hands. ‘To hell,’ she said. ‘To hell.’

  ‘You left your son?’

  ‘I had to,’ the girl said fiercely. ‘Don’t you see? I was a rotten mum. It was better for him that I left him. And the longer I’d left him the harder it would be to ever return. Sebastian wouldn’t know me,’ she said.

  ‘And for you, Deborah? What’s best for you?’

  The girl’s tears were flowing freely now.

  Mike was scowling. ‘Well, where have you been?’ he demanded. ‘What have you been doing? How have you lived?’

  Deborah Pelham turned to face him. ‘You wouldn’t believe me,’ she said.

  ‘Try me.’

  But she gave a cynical shrug and turned her attention back to Joanna. ‘Well, I’m back now,’ she said. ‘So you can call off your bloodhounds.’

  And Joanna found that she didn’t want the answer to any of Mike’s questions. She met Deborah Pelham’s eyes and nodded. ‘Your father will be pleased to see you,’ she said.

  Deborah Pelham gave an ugly laugh. ‘You really think so?’ she said. ‘He that was lost is found?’ She glared at Joanna. ‘You think he’ll kill the fatted calf? No way,’ she said. ‘No way.’ Her face looked old, ugly and twisted.

  ‘He wanted to bury me,’ she said. ‘He wanted you to find my body, not some tired old whore who abandoned her son. Understand? I will be nothing but an embarrassment to him.’

  She stood up stiffly, turned and walked out of the room.

  Four days later Finnigan was finally charged with the two murders.

  On the following day Joanna was sitting in her office with Mike, trying to anticipate the defence so that they could safely lob the anticipated manslaughter plea straight out of the window, together with the plea of insanity.

  ‘It’ll be a case of diminished responsibility,’ Mike was arguing.

  ‘No chance.’

  ‘Keep your hair on, Joanna,’ he said. ‘I was only saying what the plea will be.’

  ‘I’ll work to convince the CPS,’ she said. ‘Finnigan was sane when he killed. A cold, calculating killer without pity for his victims who would have carried on and on until he was stopped.’ The chilling vision of the neat pile of sawn-up broomsticks remained imprinted on her mind, each one representing another victim, another police investigation, another cluster of grieving relatives.

  Mike was rolling a pencil between his fingers. ‘I’ll tell you something that puzzles me, Jo.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She was disappointed when she saw it was Thorr who had turned up. Who do you think she hoped it would be?’

  ‘I think Haworth,’ she said decisively. ‘He must have seemed personable to her, polite, wealthy. Compared with Finnigan and Agnew, he must have seemed wonderful.’

  He gave her a sideways glance. And what about Thorr?’

  She flushed.

  Mike was laughing at her.

  She couldn’t resist a telephone call to the children’s ward to ask how Eloise Levin was. A bright, cheery nurse answered. ‘Eloise? Oh, she’s fine. Her father’s with her at the moment. She’ll probably go home later on today.’ There was a pause before she asked, ‘Who shall I say phoned?’

  Joanna was stuck, but the nurse supplied the answer. ‘I’ll just say a friend,’ she said.

  Joanna replaced the receiver.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was four weeks later on a golden day, almost at the end of October, and Joanna was laying the circlet of flowers on the mound of earth, still unmarked by a headstone.

  She didn’t hear the woman approach but when she looked up she saw Doreen Priest, holding October and William by the hand.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Mrs Priest demanded. ‘She wasn’t your friend. She wasn’t your sister. You didn’t even know her. She was just another murder victim to you.’

  Joanna opened her mouth to speak. But she couldn’t find the right words. There wasn’t a platitude that existed to fill the silence. Even the two children were quiet, watching her through round eyes, their hands clutching their grandmother’s.

  Doreen Priest flicked the wreath aside contemptuously and replaced it with a small bunch, tied with pink florist’s ribbon.

  ‘There’s your mother,’ she said to the children. ‘She’s under there. So there’s no use you keep askin’ for her. She’s gone. She won’t be back. There’s no use your cryin’ for her. Understand?’

  The two children nodded.

  She gave Joanna a hard look. ‘He’s had Ryan,’ she said. ‘He were ’is dad anyhow. I’ll mind these two. They’ve no real dad. I’ll bring them up,’ she said. ‘So no harm’s done.’

  ‘And will your mourn your sister?

  Will you lay a wreath on her grave?’

  No, Joanna thought. The answer was an emphatic no.

  She would not mourn but continue with her own life and her own work....

  So she left the graveyard and drove back to the station. For now there was work to be done.

 

 

 

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