Chapter Sixteen
As usual Boxing Day lived up to its name. I had two call outs during the day. The first was the least difficult of the two; a couple who came together to the Centre. It seemed that their relationship had been getting increasingly confrontational, until exploding spectacularly on Christmas Day
It had started with a fairly innocuous argument as to whether or not they had both done their fair share of the work preparing to entertain their families for Christmas lunch and clearing up afterwards. However, by the end they were both hurling crockery and pans at each other. Once they’d calmed down, they were both sufficiently frightened of what they’d done, that they’d agreed they needed help before it happened again.
I spent an hour or so talking with them, and it was soon obvious that there were a lot of unspoken resentments between them. I fixed them up a first appointment with a relationship counsellor for the following week and wished them luck as they left, hand in hand. They both seemed determined to save and work at their relationship, so I suspected that they’d probably get through it together.
The second case was, sadly, a more typical Christmas one. The lady who came didn’t have any obvious bruising, but was moving very gingerly. She saw the pressures of Christmas combined with large quantities of alcohol as the justification for why her husband had marked the evening by knocking her to the floor and kicking her repeatedly. Mostly she just wanted someone to talk to. I outlined the help and support that we could give her, but she wasn’t really ready to think about that. She remained convinced that it was out of character for her husband to behave like that, and that “it would never happen again”.
I told her that I hoped she was right, and that we were always on hand if she needed us. I watched her go out with a fair degree of trepidation. I wish it were otherwise, but my experience tells me that once the dam has been breached and violence enters the relationship, it usually recurs with increasing regularity.
Going home, I was fairly confident of having a quiet few days workwise. Normally things either come to a head at Christmas, or they plod on until all the emotions and expectations of a New Year cause a crisis. I did wonder how Jennifer’s family were coping, but I was fairly sure that they wouldn’t appreciate any contact from me. The papers seemed to have lost interest in the story, and I was beginning to wonder if her killer would ever be identified.
My mailbox the next morning was unusually full. There were a couple of belated Christmas cards from people that I’d worked with in Bristol, and several letters from banks and loan companies offering me loans and new credit cards at “low interest rates”. Scrooge’s philosophy that Christmas is “harvest time for the money lenders” obviously still holds good. The final thing to emerge from the slot was a plain white envelope, with the words “J.Bailey” written in capitals on the front. It had clearly been pushed through the door by hand, as there was no stamp or address on it.
I was almost back inside my flat as I opened it, and felt my stomach drop away as I recognised the style of print that it was written in. It was clearly letter number two.
Hello Jack
I hope you weren’t thinking that I’d finished with you. If you were, sorry to disappoint you but we’re just getting started.
There are so many things that I despise about you. You are the most pathetic, despicable excuse for a human being. How do you have the nerve to go on living?
I want you to understand that your life is at an end. I am going to crush and destroy you totally. I will see your blood and I will feast on it as I watch you die. But first, you have some things to learn. I want you to appreciate just how futile your feeble little life is.
I know you’re stupid, so I’ll make it simple.
Lesson One. Talking has no power. I think even that stupid bitch of a therapist realised that, once I’d taken her lips and tongue away.
Lesson Two. Only weak fools use religion as a crutch. You pray and whine to your imaginary God, trying to pretend that he’ll make everything alright even for a worthless failure like you.
Answer me this
Where was that God of yours when your face was being pushed hard into a pillow so that no-one could hear your screams?
Religion is just weak-minded insects, being fed lies by hypocrites and charlatans. I’ll prove it to you.
See you soon.
I stood in the doorway to my flat, my hands shaking as I read and re-read the words on the page. I couldn’t imagine anyone who would hate me enough to write like this. Of course, in the job I do you are bound to make a few enemies, but there was just so much venom in what I was holding.
I was so shaken that it was some minutes before it dawned on me that I would have to give the letter to the police. I went into my flat and secured the door behind me.
I really didn’t feel up to another clash with Michael Palmer, so I racked my brains for the name of the woman detective who had been with him at Jennifer’s house. Slowly it came – Laura Smith.
I picked up the telephone and rang the York police station. When it was answered, I asked to be put through to Detective Inspector Laura Smith. Moments later she came on the line.
“DI Smith speaking.”
“Hello, this is Jack Bailey. I’m the person who discovered the body of Jennifer Carter.”
“Yes, I know who you are Mr. Bailey. What can I do for you?” Her tone was business-like rather than warm.
“I’ve just received another anonymous letter. I’m almost certain that it’s from the same person as the last one. Would it be alright for me to come down and give it to you now?”
“I was just on my way out, but I suppose that I could wait here and see you first.”
“Will DI Palmer be there?” I couldn’t stop myself asking.
There was a pause. “As it happens today is his day off. Am I to assume that you’d prefer not to see him?”
“It just means I don’t have to prepare myself to be accused of writing the note myself.” I answered. “I’ll be there within a quarter of an hour.”
On a sudden impulse, I switched on my computer, and scanned the letter into it. I saved it and printed off another copy. Then I put the original back into the envelope it had come in, and put it into my coat.
The walk across the river was surprisingly busy. People had clearly had enough of being at home and were either rushing to buy yet more stuff in the sales, or to return all their unwanted Christmas presents. I walked along in the middle of the throng, isolated by the thoughts that raced around in my head.
Inside the police station, I reported to the desk and was shown into an interview room with the promise that DI Smith would be with me shortly.
The room itself was not dissimilar to the ones we use at the centre; a wooden table in the middle of the room, with one orange plastic chair on the near side of the table, and two more chairs on the far side. The most significant difference was the lack of any windows, which gave the room an oppressive, claustrophobic feel.
I sat down in the nearest chair and began to wait. After a few minutes, the door behind me opened again, and Laura Smith came in.
“Sorry to keep you waiting Mr. Bailey,” she said as she sat down opposite me. “Would you like me to get a coffee for you?”
After I had declined, she got down to business. She took a small tape recorder out of her pocket and placed it on the table. “It’s our standard practice to record all interviews. It saves me from having to try and scribble down notes while we are talking. I trust you have no objections?”
Once I’d said that I didn’t, she turned on the machine. “For the benefit of the tape this is a recording of an interview beginning ..” she checked her watch, “at 10.45 am on Thursday December 27th. Present are Mr. Jack Bailey and Detective Inspector Laura Smith.”
She looked directly at me and then began. “Mr. Bailey, you mentioned a note which had been sent to you. Could I see it please?”
I took the envelope out of my coat pocket and offered to hand
it to her. She shook her head.
“Just take the letter out of the envelope and put both of them down on the table please.”
I did as I was instructed, and she opened one of the desk draws and produced a clear plastic bag and a pair of tweezers. While she was doing this, she then spoke to the recorder again. “For the benefit of this recording, Mr. Bailey has produced an envelope and letter which will be sealed in evidence bag number JC142/302 once I have read it.”
Handling the tweezers with amazing dexterity, she opened the note out, and then lifted it up to read. As she read the words that I had pretty much memorised by now, her lips pursed slightly.
“Nasty,” she commented. “It must have been quite a shock to have received it. Can you just go through in detail when and how it came into your possession?”
She listened attentively as I described finding it in my pigeon hole that morning. “Alright,” she said when my brief account had finished. “I’d like to start with some background questions. Explain to me how the mail gets into your letter box.”
“Post in the morning gets put through the letter box on the front door,” I explained. “Whoever gets to it first sorts it all into a wall of pigeon holes.”
“So the letter could have been pushed through the front door at any time last night or early this morning,” DI Smith observed. “Or someone inside the building could have put it directly into your slot, and your other post was then added later. Or a resident could have just dropped it onto the floor, where it would be mixed in with the rest of the post when it arrived.”
“Yes,” I confirmed. “It doesn’t get us very far does it?”
“No,” she agreed. “But it does open up some lines of enquiry. On to the actual content of the letter, if you don’t mind. First of all, can you think of anyone who might have written it to you?”
“Not really,” I answered. “That’s the question that I’ve been asking myself over and over since I got it. In my job, you do make some enemies – people who feel that it’s your fault their wife has left them and so on. This seems too personal for that somehow.”
“Explain what you mean,” she invited.
“Well, clearly whoever wrote it knows about the previous note and about the way Jennifer was killed. I don’t see how that’s possible unless they really are the person who sent the first note to me, and the one who killed her. And if that’s true, then it was important to them that I be the one to find the body. You could almost think that killing Jennifer was a way of striking at me.”
“That would be fairly unlikely,” DI Smith interrupted. “The killing of Jennifer Carter was far too violent for her not to have been the primary target. In any case, I hadn’t appreciated that you and Mrs. Carter were so close.”
“We weren’t,” I said quickly. “She was my counsellor and I valued her friendship, but that’s all there was between us.”
“Let’s leave that to one side for now,” she suggested. “The rest of the letter implies that the writer knows you very well – knows both your life at present and your history. I’m afraid I need to ask you about that.”
“Go on then,” I said, deliberating internally how candid I was going to be with her.
“First of all, the writer seems very agitated by religion. Do I take it from what he says that you are a regular church goer?”
“I couldn’t claim to go regularly,” I confessed. “but I do go from time to time, and I suppose I would describe myself as a Christian.”
“In the course of your work or your personal life, can you remember having a strong disagreement about religion?”
“No,” I answered.
“Is your faith fairly general knowledge among your friends and colleagues?”
I thought about that for a moment. “No it isn’t. I doubt if many of them are even aware that I go to church.”
DI Smith seemed to ponder this answer for a moment. “I’m afraid I need to ask you about another part of the letter. “Where was that God of yours when your face was being pushed hard into a pillow so that no-one could hear your screams?” Are you able to tell me what that’s referring to?”
Now it was my turn to hesitate. In the end, I decided that refusing to answer truthfully was only going to make them more likely to suspect me.
“I was seeing Jennifer Carter to help me work through the after effects of having been sexually abused as a child. I understood the letter to be challenging me about that, and asking how it was possible to believe in God given my childhood experiences.”
“Thank you for being so frank with me,” she said, her face a little softer. “Again I have to ask, was that something that many people would have known about?”
“No-one knew about it apart from myself and Jennifer,” I admitted.
“And the abuser presumably,” she commented.
“He’s dead,” I said with finality. “He has been dead for a very long time.”
“Then have you managed to come up with a theory to explain how the writer of this letter does apparently know so much about you?”
There was only one explanation that made any sense to me at all. “Detective Inspector Palmer informed me that you had not been able to find my file at Jennifer’s house. The only thing I can think is that whoever wrote the letter has the file and is using it.”
I was sure that a frown had flickered across Laura’s face at the start of my answer, but it was gone in an instant. Her gentle questioning continued.
“Was your faith something that you had often discussed with Mrs. Carter?”
“Fairly often,” I answered. “A big part of the work she did with me was in trying to help me focus on the positive things in my life. My going to church occasionally was a part of that; trying to look at things in a wider perspective if you like.”
“So it is possible that whoever had the file would know about it,” she mused. “And the two of you would have talked about the abuse at length.”
“Yes.”
“This phrase “your face being pushed hard into a pillow so that no-one could hear your screams”. Was that a phrase that might have been written in your file?”
“I don’t think so,” I said thoughtfully. “I’m probably going to convince you that I’m completely mad but I’d better try and explain to you. Until three years ago, I had no conscious memory of the abuse. The jargon would say that I had buried the memories. They still had an impact on me in certain aspects of my behaviour, but if you’d asked me to account for the cause I wouldn’t have been able to.”
Her expression was somewhat sceptical, which didn’t surprise me. Over the last few years I had read extensively about repressed memory. I was all too well aware of the phenomena of false memory syndrome, where dubious therapists helped their patients to “remember” incidents of abuse and cruelty which, in reality, had never happened.
On my worst days, I sometimes accused myself of being a victim – of making up my own history to give myself an excuse for all the things about me that I so disliked. Standing against these self-doubts were the facts that my memories had surfaced independently before I began to visit Jennifer, and that during a minor operation the doctor had once discovered internal scarring and questioned me about it. At the time, I had been rendered totally dumfounded by the question.
“When the memories began to return, they didn’t come clearly,” I continued. “Even now, the memories are there but they’re still quite vague. Jennifer Carter knew that not remembering fully was something that bothered me. The image of a child’s face in a pillow while they’re being abused may be an accurate one, but it’s far too specific a picture for Jennifer to have written down about me.”
“So it’s not a phrase that you would ever have used.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Maybe the writer just read about my inability to remember fully and came up with such a graphic image to try and shock or upset me.”
“It’s possible,” DI Smith said, but she still sounded unconvinced. “I
just want to go back over something you said earlier. You mentioned that DI Palmer had told you that Mrs. Carter’s file on you hadn’t been found. We weren’t aware of that fact until long after you had left the house.”
I was surprised by this question. “He came to my flat the next day and interviewed me,” I explained. “He made it very clear that he believed that I had killed her and that he intended to prove it.”
I was looking directly into her eyes as I said this and caught a momentary look of surprise in her eyes. There was something else there that was harder to identify. If I’d had to give it a name, I would have said that for a split second Laura Smith looked afraid.
“You didn’t know, did you?” I pressed her. “He didn’t tell you that he’d been to speak to me.”
Her face had regained its composure. “I’m sure that Detective Inspector Palmer has written up his visit to you, and that a record of it is in the case file,” she said firmly. “I must have just failed to read it. I’m sorry I asked you such a foolish question.”
I wasn’t convinced that she was telling me the truth. However, the last thing I needed at the moment was to turn the other investigating officer against me, so I bit my tongue. There was silence as she carefully used the tweezers to put the letter and its envelope into the evidence bag.
“I’ll get this analysed for fingerprints,” she said. “We have your prints on file, but we’ll probably have to come and speak to the other residents of the building to try and get a clearer picture of how the letter got into your slot. Thanks for your time and openness.”
She reached across and turned the tape machine off, and then we both stood up. Before I could turn to leave the room, she added something else.
“Be careful, Mr. Bailey. As the statement we gave to the press said, whoever is doing this is clearly very disturbed, and extremely dangerous. If they have chosen you for some reason as their target, you are in real danger. I would urge you to take every sensible precaution, and to keep alert. If you see anything that you consider suspicious, phone me at once. And obviously, if you receive any more notes, bring them in immediately.”
Shaping the Ripples Page 12
