‘No one,’ Helen murmured.
‘I mean, if the man you love makes himself unavailable in some way, it’s just human nature to find love elsewhere, isn’t it?’
Helen met her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose it is.’
Berenice sat in her car in a layby on the dual carriageway. The rain poured down, blurring the headlights of the oncoming cars. It was late, she realized, and she was hungry.
On the seat next to her, sat Tobias’s box. Virginia had softened, somehow, had even offered her something to eat, which Berenice had declined. When she’d asked Virginia, and Tobias, if she could keep the box for a few days, they’d agreed, ‘As long as you look after it, and don’t do any of the experiments, promise…’ he’d said. She’d promised. Now it was all there, in her car, apart from the photo of Jacob, which Virginia had placed on her mantelpiece, ‘Where it belongs,’ she’d said.
The other photo was tucked amongst the objects, the plastic animals, a toy yellow tractor, she saw now.
I am going crazy, she thought. What made me ask to take this stuff away?
It’s madness. Like mentioning Danny, I’ve never done that, never in all my years in the job…
She was about to start the engine again, when her phone rang.
‘Mary – wassup?’
‘DNA matching. At last. There’s a match between Clem Voake and Moffatt’s SOC. And the path labs say that Hendrickson has significant toxicity, probably sedatives.’
‘Oh.’
‘I thought you’d like to know. I’m just leaving the office, though the Chief has put me on earlies from tomorrow, with Kevin, it’ll be hell, it’s all right for you. Or, maybe, it isn’t. Anyway, proper evidence, at last, the Chief’s delighted.’
‘I can imagine.’
Mary was silent for a moment. ‘Sorry. Guess I said the wrong thing.’
‘It’s cool.’
‘It is?’
‘Sure. See you around.’
Mary sounded uncertain. ‘OK. See you soon.’
Berenice put her phone back in her bag.
Evidence, she thought. Every case I’ve been on, there’s been evidence. There’s been imaging, forensics, fingerprints, witness statements. And here I am, getting caught up in a weird old book, a muddle of local history; the grief of a bereaved mother.
She glanced at Tobias’s collection on the seat beside her. She thought about Virginia, iron-willed, deflecting anything that would harm Tobias. She’d looked so like my mother. Weary, steadfast, determined…
Perhaps that’s why I’d talked about my brother. Letting down my guard…
At her door, as she’d said goodbye, Virginia had half-shaken her hand, a brief touch of her fingertips.
Berenice started her car engine. She thought about a tailored raincoat, a toss of pale hair, smart court shoes.
She turned off on the road back into town. She remembered there was a pizza in the freezer. A boring, cheese and tomato thing, but there were some olives in the fridge, and she’d stop off at the corner shop and see if he had a drinkable red.
‘I guess we should go,’ Elizabeth said.
Helen sighed.
‘Dinners to cook for husbands…’
Helen nodded.
‘You don’t have children,’ Elizabeth said.
‘No. We – we tried. We lost one… miscarriage, you know… Since then…’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.’ She fiddled with some loose candlewax.
‘You don’t either?’ Helen said.
Elizabeth looked up. ‘What? Oh, children. No. Not part of my plan. I saw what it did to my mother.’
‘Your mother?’
‘She was depressive. It killed her in the end. Or, rather, she killed herself.’
The silence held them for a moment.
‘I was twelve. Raised a Catholic. Everyone told me she was in Heaven,’ she went on. ‘But I knew they were lying. So, I made a few decisions. No God, no motherhood. No fairy tales. It worked very well, until… all this.’ She shivered. ‘We’d better go. We’ll either die of cold or hunger at this rate.’
Helen gathered her coat around her. ‘Amelia’s child,’ she began.
‘Grace,’ Elizabeth said.
‘Do you know what happened?’
‘Not really. They said the child died. There were rumours of a grave, out on the marshes, there’s a ruined church, Neil took me to see it once. St. Bruin’s I think it’s called. I remember the name, because in all the lists of Saints I was supposed to remember as a child, I’d never heard of that one…’ She gave a brief smile. ‘It explains the tone of her writings, don’t you think? Amelia?’
‘It does?’
Elizabeth gathered her coat around her. ‘Her rage. Such a terrible loss, and there’s her husband taking refuge in his work. Not listening to her. You would be angry, wouldn’t you?’
Helen watched the candle flames flickering in the draught. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I would.’
‘It’s getting colder.’ Elizabeth looked out at the night. ‘Creepy place, this. Probably haunted.’
‘Ghosts,’ Helen said. ‘Liam said there’d been sightings at the lab…’
‘You know Liam?’
‘Oh,’ Helen said, ‘Just a bit. Through Tobias, you know…’
‘Yes, of course. He’s a nice man. A great help to Tobias.’ Her face shadowed. ‘Yes, people have talked of ghosts. Even Iain…’ Her voice faltered. ‘That poor, poor man. All of them… I really don’t know how we’re going to carry on…’ Her gaze went to the darkened windows. ‘Neil said that people always thought this land was cursed. He said, all the crops would fail, and they’d blame the salt from the marshes, or say it was too wet. Yet all the fields round about always thrived…’ She wrapped her scarf round her neck. ‘We should go.’
Helen buttoned her coat. ‘And what shall we do about Lisa?’
‘I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to take that red hair band to the police. First thing tomorrow.’
‘And Tazer?’
‘I’ll take her too,’ Elizabeth said. ‘If she’ll come with me.’
They made their way back towards the caravan. The half-moon was low and bright in the clear cold sky. Tazer trotted next to Elizabeth, glancing back at the house from time to time.
‘I’ve got my car,’ Helen began, but Elizabeth indicated her own, parked some distance away. It shone in the darkness, sleek and luxurious.
Elizabeth looked at the caravan, its darkened windows, its tattered curtains. ‘I have a very bad feeling,’ she said. ‘Very bad.’
‘Well, you’ve been through terrible things…’
Elizabeth shook her head. ‘No, worse than that. Even worse. The shadow of the past, that house…’ She shuddered. ‘Amelia’s pain, the land being cursed… The hate mail notes talked about a second tunnel, and how the first was the true tunnel…’ She gave a thin smile. ‘All those years ago, I promised my child-self, to deal with the rational, with what we can prove, and here I am caught up in a terror of the supernatural…’ Her eyes welled with tears. ‘Well, I’ll go to the police. I’ll tell them all I can. I’ll try not to talk about ghosts.’
‘Perhaps they’ve seen it too.’
Elizabeth nodded. ‘Perhaps they have. They can get their forensic people on to it.’
Helen smiled. Elizabeth reached out, and again, they shook hands. Then there were two car doors opened, two engines starting, two sets of headlights cutting through the frosty night.
Chad glanced at the clock that sat on his desk. It was time to go home, he thought.
He stared at his computer screen, scrolled through the text for Sunday’s sermon.
This is no good, he thought. What I want to talk about is Sin. Danger. A murderer in our midst. Three men having died at the hands of someone else. I should address this, I should face this head on, this problem of evil. But this…
He scanned the words in front of him.
Clichés, he th
ought. Empty words of hope, that there might be meaning in it all, that out of the terrible actions of a human being we might still find reason to believe in our redemption.
And anyway, he thought, exiting the document, switching off his machine, I haven’t really nailed the argument. I’m circling something just beyond my reach.
He locked up his office, switched off all the lights.
Outside it was dark and chilly, and he buttoned up his coat. The lights on the sea front were blurred by mist. The streets were deserted.
Evil, and danger. He wondered whether to be more afraid.
A distant siren sounded through the damp air. He thought about the police, that nice woman and her team, out and about.
She must think I’m mad, he thought, going on about God, questioning whether the universe has any meaning at all, when there’s a real killer at large.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end…
Perhaps that’s what I should have said. That God is constantly bringing the universe into being, and allowing it to go out of being. Which means we, as mere humans, have an illusion of a continuum. It might even explain cold dark matter, and the fact that we’re in a matter dominated universe rather than there being symmetry between matter and anti-matter, as that physicist was trying to explain to me…
Is that really what I think? More to the point, he thought, as he walked up the hill towards the vicarage, is that the right viewpoint for a clergyman to express in an interview with the police?
A nice woman, that Berenice, he thought. He’d felt scrutinized by her, but not in an unpleasant way.
Even when he’d mentioned Helen, he’d felt she was weighing him up, as if she was going to say, what sort of marriage is that then?
A good question.
There was something about the way Helen was last night, standing there by the stove making an omelette. Something about the way she’d turned to him, a distance, as if she was elsewhere…
What sort of marriage is that, then?
A fractured marriage. One with gaping great holes, like thin ice on a lake, around which we circle, hapless, incapable.
Perhaps it can’t heal. Perhaps it’s too late. Perhaps when that physicist appeared in our lives it was already too late, that blasted physicist, I could kill him…
Her car was in the drive. He walked up to the house, round to the side door. Even now, he thought, I could just walk into the kitchen, she’ll be sitting at the table, I can see the lights on, the steamed up windows…
I could just walk in and say it. I could say, ‘I’m thinking of killing that physicist, shooting probably, cleanest way after all, can’t be too difficult to get hold of a gun in these parts…’
I could say, ‘You’re having an affair, aren’t you?’
His hand on the door.
She looked up, sitting at the table in the light, warm kitchen.
Their eyes met.
He walked in, shook the rain off his shoes, took off his coat. He heard himself begin to speak, heard himself suggest that they could have a Chinese take-away as it’s a Friday night, watched her breathe again, watched as the gaps in the ice seemed to widen.
There is always, he thought, the risk of falling in and freezing to death.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Finn Brady walked along the beach, dragging a huge lump of driftwood behind him. It left a trail in the sand, next to the light prints of his trainers.
It was a wet morning, but he barely noticed the driving rain, almost horizontal in the wind, the white foam of the waves.
What am I going to do, he thought.
I ain’t going to leave her. If her bad-ass father has done something…
I’ve got to do something.
I thought Tom would help. Went up his yard last night, and there he is telling me he ain’t allowed near Hank’s Tower, Feds will pick him up if they see him there…
He paused, looked out to sea. The waves were high, brown-churned.
Tom went on about the flood they said would happen. He said that’s what these deaths are, ’cos there was an old tunnel and the second tunnel was cursed or something…
I thought he’d help me, Tobias. And all he did was sit there with his jars and his mixtures, and his step-Mum saying he’s not allowed out and certainly not to help that Voake girl…
Finn set off again, dragging the driftwood behind him.
To Gabriel, it seemed that two things were happening at once. One was a shriek, rippling out of the windows of the house, shaking the walls. The other was a hammering at the door of the laboratory –
‘Mr Voake, please Sir, please come quickly, the doctor wants you – ’
The shrieking continued from somewhere in the house. The door flew open. The maid was standing there, and behind her, Doctor Knox.
He was grey-faced, silent. ‘Gabriel,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’
Gabriel faced him. ‘It’s over?’
‘She’s dead.’
‘Amelia?’
‘Grace.’ The tone was questioning. ‘Your daughter, Gabriel. The fever has claimed her.’
‘But – ’
The green light from the machine seemed to glow darker, seemed to fill the space around him. He tried to speak, to say, it cannot be, Grace is my salvation, Grace is the order imposed on disorder, Grace is the reason that emerges from chaos, she’s the goodness that has come from bad…
‘No,’ he said.
‘Your wife needs you,’ the doctor said, and then Gabriel realized.
‘That noise… Amelia – that weeping…?’
‘Please go to her, Sir.’ Alice touched his sleeve. He stood, unmoving, until Doctor Knox took his arm, steered him out of the laboratory, into the house.
He found himself pushed into the nursery. Amelia’s wailing had settled to a quiet sobbing. She was kneeling on the floor, her arms around their daughter. He could see the child’s curls, the folds of her nightdress.
‘Tell me it’s not true,’ he said.
She looked up. Her expression was vacant, as if she could barely see him.
‘Amelia…’ he tried.
She began to sob again, bent over the body of their child. He knelt down beside her. Grace looked oddly limp, the fabric of her nightdress lying in strange twisted folds.
‘No, no, no…’ Amelia cried, her mouth buried in her daughter’s curls.
His wife. His daughter. This was to be the future. This light, this cleanliness, these golden curls, leaving behind the chaos and the bleeding, the screams of pain, the choking mustard smog. There was to be order, and rays of energy, the experiment that would control chaos, that would channel the light at the heart of things, that would keep the darkness at bay.
But now all is revealed. There is no escape. The truth lies in the darkness and the chaos. When they led me, limping and resistant, out of that ditch, I left the truth behind, in the broken body of the man I loved.
Amelia had stopped weeping. She raised her eyes to his. He saw, in her odd expression of polite restraint, a gap too wide to breach, the beam broken, the particles too weak to jump across.
‘It is too late,’ she said.
‘But – ’ He put out a hand, touched her arm.
She shook her head. ‘Grace is dead. It is too late.’
Elizabeth drove fast. Tazer shuffled and whiffled in the back seat. ‘Soon be there,’ she cooed at her. ‘We’ll get a nice police officer to look after you.’ Although he probably won’t give you best beef steak like you had for dinner last night, she thought to herself. ‘And then you’ll be reunited with your mistress,’ she added. That was the most important thing, she thought, glancing at the red hair band on the seat next to her.
‘No dogs, Madam,’ the duty sergeant said.
‘But - ’
He gestured to a tattered notice on the wall behind the reception desk.
‘This dog is evidence. The missing girl, daughter of the main suspect in the physics case…’
She spoke loudly, and people turned to look.
‘Ah. Well, in that case, Ma’am…’
He left his post, went through a security door and came back a minute later with a tall, suited man with slicked back grey hair and an unfriendly expression.
‘Stuart Coles.’ He offered her a hand, unsmiling, then ushered her into a tiny, windowless room.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What’s all this about?’ He glanced at the dog, who was sitting close to Elizabeth’s knees. The dog eyed him.
‘The missing girl’s dog?’ He placed his phone on the desk in front of him.
She nodded. She placed the hair band on the desk. ‘We found both at the caravan where she lives.’
‘We?’
‘Her ballet teacher. We were looking for her.’
He glanced at his mobile.
‘Is Berenice here?’ she said. ‘DI Killick?’
His gaze seemed more distant. ‘She’s on another case,’ he said. He looked at the hairband. ‘Did you do that? Wrap it up like that?’
‘I thought it was best – contamination, you know…’
He gave a small smile. ‘Sure. Well…’ He put his phone in his jacket pocket. ‘Hand them both in at the desk.’
‘The dog as well? But do you - ?’
‘Sure. We’ll look after him.’
‘Her,’ she said.
Tazer trotted at her ankles as she went back down the corridor. The duty sergeant at the desk had changed, a woman now. She barely looked up.
‘I’ve been told to hand in this dog - ’
‘We don’t take lost dogs.’
‘But - ’
She had straggling blonde hair. She peered at Elizabeth.
‘I was told you’d - ’
‘Don’t like dogs, me.’
‘No.’ Elizabeth tightened her grip on the lead. ‘I can see that.’
She opened the car door, and Tazer jumped happily back in. More muddy footprints, Elizabeth thought. ‘Just don’t expect more steak, OK?’
Tazer wagged her tail.
‘We’ll wait for DI Killick,’ Elizabeth said to her.
Dying to Know (A Detective Inspector Berenice Killick Mystery) Page 23
