by Vicary, Tim
Sarah watched it go. Then she and Lucy walked briskly down the steps and turned left to Tower Street, their offices, and work.
Chapter Three
WHILE SARAH went back to her office, Terry Bateson collected his colleague, DC Harry Easby, and drove south of York to investigate an incident that had been reported the day before. Easby stopped the car on a bridge over the A64, and the two policemen gazed at the muddy desolation of a building site half a mile ahead. Grimy yellow JCBs toiled like great insects in the mud, while a crane with a wrecking ball casually demolished an abandoned hospital.
‘Looks like progress, sir,’ Harry offered, breaking the oppressive silence between them.
‘Progress?’ Terry grimaced. ‘More like the battle of the Somme, you mean.’
‘That’s how uniform see it,’ Easby nodded. ‘But they pushed the buggers out of their trenches last week, any road. Just look at the hairy sods.’
He nodded towards a wood behind the JCBs. The building site was protected from the wood by an elaborate boundary of eight foot high wire fences, security men and dogs. The fence was festooned with flowers and scraps of paper, and a long whitish banner floated between two tall trees. SAVE OUR TREES, SHOP IN TOWN, it read. The leafy treetops also supported a network of aerial walkways and tree houses, where the eco-warriors lived.
The park-like woodlands that had surrounded the old maternity hospital were being redeveloped for an out-of-town designer shopping centre. Trees planted by Victorians had reached their full, beautiful maturity just in time to become a hindrance to a late twentieth century plan for floodlights, car parks and up-market designer units. The shops would market a style of beauty which would be packaged, bought, worn and replaced every year with something newer, fresher, and more up-to-date. Against this the useless, magnificent trees stood no chance. After all, they made no money and offered nothing but the same, endless, wearisome repetition of natural style - every autumn, every spring the same.
News of the project, however, had spread to the hairy unwashed army of eco-warriors, who had a profound and perverse lack of interest in style, markets and fashion. They came from every hedge, cave, bender and battered caravan in the country. They moved swiftly, with energy, secrecy and determination. The developers’ chain saws were confronted by an army of bloody-minded economic rejects whose main aim, it seemed, was to be seriously injured by the lackeys of global capitalism, and thus become martyrs to the movement. And so the police had become involved, in order to remove the protesters peacefully before one had his arm trimmed off accidentally on purpose. Terry did not envy the Chief Constable his responsibility.
‘Daft buggers!’ said Easby contemptuously. ‘Thousands of jobs, this place’ll bring.’ He drove on, past the village of portacabins where the contractor’s workmen and security guards lived, fenced in with their guard dogs. Terry observed it with distaste.
‘I don’t see why they couldn’t build it in town,’ he mused. ‘You wait, son - in six months this’ll be one vast car park, and another dozen shops in the city centre’ll go out of business. Soon the whole city’ll be boarded up or vandalised.’
‘All the more work for us, then,’ said Harry philosophically, looking ahead for the farm entrance. ‘You sound like one of these tree people, sir.’
‘And you sound like a taxi driver,’ Bateson snapped. ‘Just drive, constable, will you.’
‘Sir.’
Terry regretted the words, but made no effort to call them back. This was happening more and more, he knew - he was becoming impatient, crusty, like all the worst officers he’d known. It was as though his personality was changing. It was attracting wry comments among his colleagues. When he tried to make amends, it just made matters worse. They seemed to fall over themselves offering sympathy. ‘So sorry to hear about your, wife, sir ...is there anything I can do? ... come out for a drink ... terrible thing about your wife ...’
Two years ago it had been so different. Terry had seemed able to square the magic circle - hardworking, successful, ambitious, but also popular with his fellow officers. His aim to get the DCI’s job when Jim Carter retired was supported, he believed, by most of his colleagues.
And then in one night it was all destroyed. Two fifteen year old boys had hot-wired a Jaguar, blasted it up to eighty miles an hour, and smashed it head-on into his wife’s Clio. It had taken four hours to cut Mary’s lifeless body from the wreckage. It would take Terry the rest of his life to cut the image from his mind.
For two weeks he had been in despair. His sister had come to care for him and his two daughters. The Police Federation counsellor advised him that grief was natural, and that it was no sin for a man to cry. But Terry had cried already and it didn’t seem to help, it just felt painful and frightened him. So he drank most of a bottle of whisky in one night, and the rest the day after. What happened in between he couldn’t remember, but it made his sister tighten her mouth and his children look afraid. That, more than anything, purged him. After the funeral, where he was ashamed by his pounding headache, he sat down with his two little girls and talked to them quietly about the future.
They wanted to know who would look after them. He said he would, of course. He would leave the police. But to his surprise, this idea seemed to scare them; perhaps because it scared him, too. He knew nothing else, had never wanted to. And so his sister and the counsellor advised him about childcare, and Trude, a young nanny from Norway, entered their home.
She was cheerful and active, eager to help and to please. His girls took to her at once. After a halting expression of sympathy in broken English she didn’t speak much about their mother, but entered enthusiastically into what, to her, were the fascinating foreign details of their everyday English lives. She was a messy but surprisingly good cook, making things like waffles and meatballs and rice porridge which they had never tasted before. She seemed content to be with them, undemanding. Above all she was genuinely interested in children and had no reason to feel sad. When she had been there two days the children went back to school, and the week after that Terry went back to work. Life, of a sort, began again.
But his ambition, his ability to concentrate, were gone. He kept a photo of Mary on his desk and found himself staring at it, silently, for half an hour at a time. So he put it in a drawer and only took it out occasionally, when he was alone. But she was always there, at the front of his mind, while the work seemed an irrelevance, a side issue to be sorted and swiftly forgotten.
He took up running again. He had once been a promising 800 metre runner, not quite fast enough to get into the big time. Now he found that the exercise calmed his body and his mind at the same time. In the evenings he cuddled his little girls and told them bedtime stories as he had done when they were babies. At night they seemed to need him most. They talked about their mother and remembered the good things they had done when she was alive. Sometimes they prayed for her, all three together. But during the days, life had to go on.
Gradually his concentration returned. But he lost all thoughts of promotion. He tried to arrange his hours to be at home after school and at weekends like a normal parent. It was not ideal for a detective but it was the best practical help his colleagues could give him. He was discreetly withdrawn from the front line, to office work and routine enquiries. DCI Carter retired and instead of Terry a sharp, clever southerner, Will Churchill, got the Detective Chief Inspector’s post. At the time, Terry had been so numb, he scarcely cared.
But time passed and the little girls began to forget, as young healthy creatures do. When Terry first saw them laugh and play like other children he resented it. How could they be happy when Mary was dead? But they were happy and they were only little children after all. He watched them gratefully, drawing healing from them. They resumed contact with their friends, and sometimes he came home to find a chaotic houseful of children with the nanny in the middle. The sight cheered him, gave him confidence to take on serious enquiries again.
And so two years had pa
ssed. Life went on, but he was not the same detective he had been before. He cut corners and turned down overtime to be at home with his children. He made mistakes, he forgot things. And worst of all he snapped at people for no reason, as he done with young Harry Easby just now. He had to get a grip on this.
If only he could stop thinking about Mary, seeing her face suddenly when he was looking at something else, remembering the feel of her beside him in bed, the small of her back lithe under the palm of his hand when they danced ...
‘Here we are, sir,’ said Harry Easby, turning onto a farm track. ‘Bank House Farm.’
Sarah didn’t leave her office for another three hours, and when she did, very little about tomorrow’s cross-examination was left to chance. She had prepared her questions and tried to anticipate how Sharon Gilbert might respond. Much of this was logic, based on the written evidence in the prosecution file and Gary’s story; but the rest was intuition, based on her impression of Sharon’s character this afternoon.
She had an advantage here, for she had lived among women like Sharon. She was used to their brash, slightly resentful manner. She understood how they felt patronised by teachers and doctors, cheated by boyfriends and husbands, short-changed by employers and the DSS. She felt sure that Sharon’s assertiveness in court today masked a fear that somehow the police and lawyers were going to betray her again, as the authorities had always done in the past.
A fear that Sarah was determined to bring true.
The softer part of Sarah felt sorry for Sharon. Not just because of the rape - of course she deserved sympathy for that - but because of what she was. Sarah could so easily have ended up like that herself. But she had chosen not to. And for that very reason, a much stronger part of Sarah despised Sharon. The part of Sarah that had made that choice didn’t believe in luck or genes or social excuses. She believed if you worked, you could succeed. As she had done.
One by one the other barristers, the clerk and the secretaries called out their goodbyes and left the office. By seven thirty, Sarah looked up and saw that only Savendra had his light on across the corridor. His door was open; she could see him in his shirtsleeves and red braces, making detailed notes at his desk. She yawned, and stretched her arms over her head with her fingers linked, easing the joints in her stiff neck and spine. Savendra looked up and smiled.
‘Finished already?’
‘Yup.’ She crossed the corridor, leaning on his door frame curiously. ‘What’s your brief?’
‘Mass poisoning.’
‘What, you? Advocate for the Borgias?’
‘Hardly. My client’s a farmer who let his slurry pit overflow into a village borehole. Diarrhoea and vomiting all round.’
‘Charming. Still, you know what they say, don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Where there’s muck there’s brass. A case like that should make you stinking rich.’ She ducked as he flung a paper clip at her. ‘I’m off home.’
She crossed the corridor to her own room, leaving her door slightly ajar, just to tease Savvy who knew what happened next. She kicked off her court shoes and took off her jacket, hanging it neatly on a hanger behind the door. Then she stepped out of her skirt. Savendra whistled softly. Sarah strolled across her room, took a black leather jacket from a hook on the wall, pirouetted as she put it on, and blew him a kiss. Then she sat on the edge of her desk and pulled on some black leather trousers, smiling as they creaked around her. Finally she pulled on some heavy black boots, locked her door, and waved to Savvy as she went downstairs.
Her office was on the fourth floor of an old Victorian building in Tower Street, a stone’s throw from the courts. The barristers had chambers on the top floors; the solicitors, where Lucy worked, were downstairs. The building had lots of disadvantages - the narrow stairs, the small rooms, the fire risk - but one good part of it from Sarah’s point of view was the servant’s passage leading to a small back yard, where the Victorians had once had a loo and a coal shed. Now the lawyers had transformed it. There was an array of potted plants, some expensive wrought iron garden furniture; and in the coal shed were two gleaming motorcycles.
One - the larger - belonged to Savendra; the other, a jet black Kawasaki 500, was Sarah’s. She regarded it with a mixture of amusement and excessive, secret pride. She had bought it first as a solution to the problems of traffic and parking, but it meant far more to her than that now.
It was a joy she only shared with Savendra, when they compared, with sparkling eyes, the beauty of the machines and their accessories. She had grown to love everything about the Kawasaki - the shining black paintwork and gleaming chrome; the smooth responsive purr of the engine and the bike’s sensitivity to the slightest shift of her weight in the saddle; the sensuous creak of leather; the glorious freedom of weaving through traffic and accelerating to speeds that, though perfectly legal, seemed to her risky in the extreme. She loved the style of it too - black helmet, black leather clothes, black bike - and the way it marked her out, made her at once anonymous and different, her own person, not like the rest.
Not like a wife or a mother. Like a free spirit, like no one at all.
It was something, perhaps, to do with her desire to become a barrister in the first place. A free spirit who was faster than others, who played to win. A similar instinct, no doubt, had led Julian Lloyd-Davies QC to drive a black Jaguar with LAW 2 on the numberplate. Sarah couldn’t afford that - in fact her bike was cheaper than a small car - but it marked her out as someone to be taken notice of, someone not to mess with. And that was how she wanted to be. Not a victim ever again, but a person who made things happen.
Whose life belonged to herself.
The car bounced along the track towards a solid, brick built farmhouse. Cows watched them from a field on their right, and a black and white collie streaked towards them. As the two policemen got out, the collie danced around them, barking hysterically. Terry put out his hand to it, to no effect. It danced away and growled ferociously at Harry Easby.
‘Come on boy. Where’s your missus?’
‘I’m over here!’ They looked up and saw a sturdy woman in gumboots and a torn, muddy coat coming towards them. She had iron grey hair and a brown, crinkled face.
Terry showed his badge. ‘Mrs Steersby? I’m Detective Inspector Bateson and this is DC Easby.’
‘’bout time too.’ The woman held out her hand and Terry shook it. Her grip was strong, the hand redolent of cow dung. Seeing that they were not enemies the dog leapt up too, planting two muddy paws on the trousers of his suit.
‘Get down, Flash, you daft bugger! Away now!’ The woman shoved the dog aside and glanced scornfully at Terry’s efforts to brush himself clean. ‘It’s only mud, it’ll dry. D’you want to see Helen, then?’
‘If she’s home from school, yes.’ Terry took an incident report out of his pocket. ‘Your daughter was frightened by a man two nights ago, Mrs Steersby. Is that right?’
‘’course it’s right.’ The woman turned her back, cupped her hands round her mouth, and in a voice loud enough to be heard in Lancashire yelled: ‘Helen! Come here now!’
Terry saw a girl riding a pony on the far side of a field. She popped the pony over a line of jumps and cantered towards them, pulling up in a flurry of mud.
‘What d’you want, mum?’
‘It’s the police to see you!’
‘Again?’ The girl looked bemused. ‘But they came yesterday.’
‘These are different. Inspector Bateson - top brass Sherlock Holmes feller - so you’d best answer his questions. That pony’s done enough for today, anyhow.’
‘Okay. But I’ve got to cool him down first.’
‘Right. Ten minutes then. I’ll put kettle on.’
Terry watched as the girl walked the pony quietly around the field, and pondered what he knew of her story so far. Someone had tried to attack her while she was riding alone in the woods. A man in a black tracksuit and woolly hat, similar to his image of the man who had mur
dered Maria Clayton, and assaulted Karen Whitaker. That was why he was here now.
It disturbed him. It couldn’t be Gary Harker this time, unless Group 4 had taken to letting their rapists out for a run in the woods on the way back to Hull. So what was it? Coincidence? Copycat? Or false alarm?
Terry watched as she unsaddled her pony. She was a pretty girl in a grubby blouse and jodhpurs. How old was she? Fourteen, the report had said.
So if there had been an attack, what sort of pervert were they dealing with? A child abductor, a paedophile - or just a common lecher who fancied young girls in tight trousers? Or a monster the girl had made up? That was why he had come, to hear it from her own words.
In the farm living room, the four of them sat in faded brown armchairs grouped round an open fireplace. Terry smiled at Helen. ‘You told Constable Watson that you were riding in the woods at about half past seven when a man came up to you. Can you remember what he was wearing, Helen?’
‘A black sort of tracksuit thingy, trainers, and a black woolly hat.’
Not a hood, then. ‘So you could see his face, could you?’
‘Yes.’ She nodded, looking thoughtful, a little apprehensive perhaps.
‘And you have no idea who he was?’
‘No. I’ve never seen him before. And I do meet people quite often in those woods. I ride there most days.’
‘How old was he?’
‘I don’t know. Thirty, perhaps.’
‘I see. So what exactly happened when you met him?’
‘Well, I was just walking down the track on Toby at the time, and I saw him jogging towards me. Then he put his hand on my bridle and said something, like ...’
She hesitated and looked down, and Terry saw tears in her eyes. Not such a big girl after all then. She had been frightened.
‘He said, “that’s a nice pony, darling,” something like that, and asked me how old Toby was. So I told him, and he said was he nice to ride, and I said he was brilliant but a bit lazy sometimes, and then he said could he have a ride. So I said no and he said, “oh come on,” something like that, and put his arm round my waist trying to pull me off, so then ...’
