by Jo Bannister
Shad had come straight from the doctor’s house without taking the time to change. He had his jeans, boots and a tee-shirt in a plastic bag bearing a garden-centre logo.
“Sit down before you start,” said Prufrock, pouring the coffee. “Tell me how it went.”
A curious relationship had developed between these two. Not purely business; not an ersatz father/son thing, for though the old man had raised a thousand boys he had never been a father, and the younger man had never known one; and certainly nothing improper – Arthur Prufrock could honestly say he’d never in his entire career felt an unwise stirring for any of the gilded youths of his acquaintance. Which just left friendship.
With more than forty years between them they weren’t obvious candidates for that either. Neither of them had ever gone to sleep on New Year’s morning sucking a champagne cork and hoping to meet the other. But then friendship is not a poor substitute for love. Less authoritarian, more enduring, it worships at other altars and demands fewer sacrifices. Shad might have daydreamed about Kim Basinger, and Prufrock about Geraldine McEwan, but it’s possible that a few good friends were closer to what each of them needed.
Shad’s heavy brows gathered as he planted his elbows on the kitchen table. “OK, I think. The guy was trying to help – it wasn’t, like, the third degree.” Under his good shirt the broad shoulders shrugged. “But I don’t know if we achieved very much. If Marsh is expecting a PhotoFit of the murderer after this morning, he’s going to be disappointed.”
“It may take longer than that,” agreed Prufrock. “Are you seeing Doctor Cunningham again?”
“Tomorrow,” nodded Shad. “He thinks we should keep at it. Is it OK if I skip Tuesday? I’ll have to make up the time I’m losing.”
“Of course. It’s a matter of priorities, and my hedge is an also-ran beside Superintendent Marsh’s business.”
Shad looked at him slyly over his mug. “Could cut it a lot quicker if it was simpler.”
Prufrock scowled. “I don’t care what you say, I like my peacocks. They’re distinctive. You’re not lopping them off.”
“Distinctive,” echoed Shad, sinking into the comfort of the old argument like a familiar armchair. “Is that another way of saying Eyesore?”
With a murder investigation underway Detective Superintendent
Marsh couldn’t afford to take the weekend off. Because it was Saturday he had an extra hour in bed, and he wasn’t wearing a tie as he drove to the pleasant house in Brindley Road where Jackie Pickering’s producer lived and where Dick Chauncey had got his memorable come-uppance. As he drove he thought.
He saw three broad areas of possibility: that the girl’s death was linked to her work; that it was linked to her private life; or that she was the random victim of someone she’d never met before Wednesday. As her producer, Marta Frank should know what Pickering had been working on in the weeks prior to her death, and whether any of it might have put her in danger.
Ms Frank was a small, dark woman in her late thirties with shrew-sharp eyes and an air of intellectual pragmatism. A career woman; a woman who measured herself, and those around her, in terms of success or failure. A woman, Harry Marsh speculated, who might value ends enough to turn a blind eye to means. A younger woman, looking for advancement from Marta Frank, might feel driven to take risks that would seem unwise in the cold clear light of day.
He wished he’d put a tie on.
Ms Frank showed him into the breakfast room. “If you haven’t eaten, I hope you’ll join me. If you have, at least have a coffee.”
He had eaten, but it was a couple of hours ago now. He helped himself to toast and jam as they talked.
“How long was Miss Pickering with you?”
“Fifteen months.” If the news that one of her staff had been murdered had come as a shock – Marsh hadn’t told her himself, Detective Sergeant Burton had interviewed her in the course of establishing the girl’s movements – Ms Frank seemed to have got over it. She was cool, professional, helpful, and almost totally uninvolved – which took some doing when what they were talking about was the possibility that her employee had died doing her job. “She came straight from university. Media studies. She got a good degree.”
“She came as a researcher?”
Ms Frank gave him a tight smile. “She came as a gopher. The streets are paved with people with good degrees in media studies; it’s enough to get you an interview. Everybody starts at the bottom. But Jackie got the hang of things pretty quickly. She got the first assistant researcher’s post that came up, and did it well enough to be made up to researcher in the last round of promotions. She had a good career ahead of her.”
“She worked exclusively for you – for the Dick Chauncey programme?”
Ms Frank’s smile grew tighter. “Well, for You’ve Been Had anyway. It’s only the Dick Chauncey programme as long as we pay him to front it.”
Marsh raised an eyebrow. “It sounds as if there’s some doubt about that.”
She gave a minimalist shrug. “There’s always some doubt about it. It’s a matter for contractual negotiation. Anchormen get the idea they are the show and that they can hold you to ransom. But the truth is, anyone who can read an Autocue can do the job. What matters is the ideas. A good researcher contributes more to the show than the front man.”
“Had there been some friction? Between Chauncey and Miss Pickering, for instance?”
“There’s always friction,” said Ms Frank, “between everyone and everyone else. TV production runs on coffee and angst. I wasn’t aware of any particular friction between Dick and Jackie. I doubt he’d condescend to acknowledge her existence.” She blinked. “You’re not thinking – Dick and Jackie? Good grief, man, not in this life. Front men don’t go for researchers, they go for weather girls. Researchers look for a basic minimum of intelligence: they go for cameramen.”
Marsh was finding this insight into the real-politik of programme-making fascinating. It was too soon to know if any of it would be helpful. “Any particular cameraman?”
Ms Frank shook her head. “If she had a boyfriend, it was no one from work. Maybe there was no one. She was an attractive girl, bright and good-looking, but she always struck me as a bit of a loner. A lot of girls – and it’s the girls more than the men – want to get their careers on line before they start thinking about personal commitment.”
“Could she still have been seeing someone from university? Which university anyway?”
“Nottingham. I suppose it’s possible, but she never brought anyone to the office bashes. Unless you count Debbie.”
“Debbie?”
“A friend from the media course. I don’t remember her other name. Jackie wanted me to give her a job, said she needed to get her life on track. I don’t know why, she looked perfectly normal to me. Jackie brought her to the Christmas party and on the summer outing; mostly as a form of subtle blackmail, I think.” She seemed amused rather than resentful.
“And did you give her the job?”
Ms Frank shook her head again. “There were always better candidates. A nice enough girl, but she hadn’t Jackie’s personality or self-confidence. And sometimes those are the only things that get you through the day in this job.”
Marsh nodded, still just absorbing information. “So Jackie was good at her job. What’s the routine? Did she take her assignments from you?”
“For the most part. A good researcher will also originate ideas but the choice of a subject is mine. We discuss how we’ll tackle it, work out a plan of campaign, then somebody tells Dick. Next time we talk about it he thinks it was his idea.”
“So Jackie wouldn’t have been harassing – sorry, researching – anybody without your knowledge?”
She flicked a cool smile at his slip of the tongue. “Unlikely. You can’t rule it out completely – for a researcher to make producer she has to initiate enough good ideas to make an impression, so she could have been sounding somebody out, trying to decide if they’d make a
good show or not. But long before she got pushy enough to annoy somebody, I’d have to know. And I don’t think the target she was currently researching is very promising murderer material.”
“No? You might be surprised. In the right circumstances almost anybody can commit murder.”
“A seventy-six-year-old grandmother with forty-four foster children to her credit?”
“Ah. Maybe not.”
Doctor Andrew Cunningham and Shad Lucas didn’t stop for the weekend either. They met again on Saturday morning, and on Sunday morning.
On Sunday afternoon Superintendent Marsh walked up to Doctor Cunningham’s house on The Brink. They’d been neighbours since the psychiatrist took a post at the prestigious Fellowes Hall Clinic the previous year. The Cunninghams lived on top of the wooded escarpment, the Marshes further down the slope. They shared the same local: The Bear in Foxford. During rush hour they shared the same traffic jams.
Marsh wasn’t sure how much cooperation he could expect in the current circumstances. But he got a cordial welcome.
“Come on through, Harry. I’m doing a bit of paperwork in the study. Let’s open a bottle of June’s elderflower wine.”
Psychiatrists come in two colour schemes: rubicund and grey. Cunningham was one of the latter. He wore grey suits for work; today he wore a grey cashmere cardigan and flannels. Even his hair had gone prematurely grey. It was cut ruthlessly short, as if to emphasise the general spareness of the man.
Marsh had a study in the space under his stairs. Cunningham’s was a deep room running from the front of his house to the back, lined with books at one end and with prints at the other. There was no couch. Presumably there was another room for consultations, smaller and more intimate, where he saw Shad Lucas.
Over the elderflower wine Marsh framed a cautious approach. “I’ll try to avoid giving you any kind of professional dilemma, Andrew. Lucas agreed to see you in the hope that you could jog his memory as to what happened on Wednesday night. He told me he was willing for us to discuss any progress you made. I’m hoping he told you the same thing.”
To his relief, Cunningham nodded. “That’s the situation as I understand it. Confidentiality isn’t an issue – unless at some later date he wants to make it one. But I don’t expect he will. If something comes back that he’d rather you didn’t know, he just won’t tell me. He may stop coming altogether.”
“But for now we can talk about your sessions with him?”
“Certainly. It’s what he wants. He sees it as taking some of the pressure off him.”
“He feels to be under pressure then.”
“Of course he does – he’s the only person you know of who was at the scene of a murder! It hit him hard. You know about his history, I suppose.”
Marsh nodded. “He located the graves of a number of children hidden in the Clee Hills. Forensic examination of the bodies provided the evidence on which the killer was convicted.”
“And he was how old at this point?”
Marsh knew damn well that he knew. “He was seventeen. Andrew, don’t twist my heartstrings over this, it wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t even my force. I know it was tough on him. It was still the right decision. Free, the man would have gone on to abduct, abuse and murder God knows how many other children.”
Cunningham conceded a half-apologetic smile. “I don’t mean to criticise. I just want you to understand that what happened on Wednesday didn’t occur in isolation in Shad Lucas’s mind. It linked up with those events eight years ago and forged an iron conviction that the world’s a deadly place. For everyone, but more for him. He feels other people’s pain as well as his own.”
Harry Marsh regarded the psychiatrist dubiously. “You believe that? He’s not just … imaginative? You’re convinced he is genuinely psychic?”
“I don’t know,” said Cunningham precisely, “any more than I’ve been told. I’m no better equipped to judge his story than you are. But the fact remains, he found those children after conventional methods involving dogs, technical support and massive quantities of manpower had failed. Since someone else was convicted I presume there’s no question that Lucas put them there, which leaves two options. Either he was in league with the killer, or something extraordinary goes on inside his head. Until I have some reason to think otherwise I’m inclined to accept his description of what it is. Just because I’ve no experience of it doesn’t mean it can’t exist.”
“You haven’t come across it before?”
“No. There is a body of writing on psychic subjects, but I’m not sure anyone claims to understand it. Mostly you fall back on the Sherlock Holmes method: if you’ve ruled out natural phenomena, trickery and misinterpretation, whatever remains must be the truth. Even if it’s telepathy; even if it’s clairvoyance. Even if it’s a gardener dowsing for dead babies.”
Harry Marsh sipped his wine. “The amnesia has something to do with that?”
Cunningham shrugged. “I can’t cut open his head to see what’s happening inside, I have to guess. But yes, I think so. It was a bad time for him. He was very young, not well educated, without much family support. His conscience made him do it but it hurt. If he’d broken down at the time he’d have been looked after and the issues could have been dealt with. Instead he hauled himself together and got on with his life.
“But unresolved feelings don’t go away, they just fester. Eight years later, after he thought he was safe, the hags reached out of the darkness for him again. The safety was an illusion. He’s never going to be safe anywhere, not as long as he has that… faculty in his head. I think the amnesia may be him trying to seal it up where it can’t do him any more harm.”
“Can you get through it?”
“I can’t,” said Cunningham firmly. “Shad probably could, if he wanted to.”
“But he doesn’t?”
“He’s afraid. He wants to help. At a conscious level he wants to know what happened as much as you do. At a subconscious level he’s afraid of letting the genie out of the bottle when he doesn’t know if he can squeeze it back in.”
“Can you help him?”
Andrew Cunningham smiled. “That’s my job – helping people to understand what’s going on in their own minds. I can’t force him to remember, and I wouldn’t if I could. But I can make it easier for him. I can reassure him, I can show him how to proceed. But, in the end, it comes down to him being prepared to confront that genie.”
“Are you seeing him again tomorrow?”
“Every day, for as long as it takes.”
Marsh chewed on his lip. “Andrew, there isn’t time for this to expand into an intellectual exercise. He isn’t coming here for the good of his soul; he’s coming because he may hold the key to a murder inquiry. I need answers. I need them soon.”
“I understand that, Harry,” said Cunningham patiently. “But you have to understand that I too have professional commitments. Everyone who comes to me does it for the good of his soul. I won’t sacrifice Shad’s needs to yours, worthy as they may be. He wants to help you, I want to help you, but not at any cost. You can’t build your case on the wreckage of another human being.”
Marsh stiffened. “Then I’ll simply remind you that the longer this goes on, the greater the likelihood that Jackie Pickering’s murderer will escape detection and, if he has a mind to, will kill again. I don’t mean to hold that over you, Andrew. It’s just, if we have to weigh one thing against another, that’s a hefty piece of kit.”
Cunningham considered. “I suppose I could speed things up a bit.”
Chapter Nine
First thing on Monday morning Dan Sale wanted to see Rosie. Rosie came in keen to hear the latest from Alex, but Alex was on the phone so she went to quiz Matt instead. But on the way up to his office she met him on the way down. “Did you get Dan ‘s message? He wants to see us both, soonest.” So she had to put her personal curiosity on hold until they’d found out what was bothering the editor.
Essentially, Sale was concerned ab
out what always and only ever concerned him: his newspaper. He was worried there could be aspects to the Pickering affair that might reflect on the Skipley Chronicle.
Rosie frowned. “Run that by me again, slowly.”
Sale breathed heavily, radiating patience under strain. “Pickering was a researcher for Dick Chauncey’s programme. Chauncey wanted revenge for you humiliating him. When Pickering was found, the only person known to have been in the immediate vicinity was a friend of yours. Rosie, are we absolutely sure this is a coincidence?”
Her mind staggered as if he’d cannoned into it. She was scarcely able to believe he was suggesting what it sounded like. It took her a moment to find a voice. “You’re saying … Shad killed Jackie Pickering?”
“Of course I’m not,” Sale retorted roughly. “I don’t know. All I know is how it looks. I suppose what I’m after is your assurance that he didn’t – and now I come to say that out loud,” he went on, his voice softening ruefully, “of course you can’t give me any such thing. You don’t know what happened behind the station. Lucas himself doesn’t know. Then, using your experience of him and your best judgement, do you think there’s a serious danger that he may have done?”
“Of course not!” Rosie exclaimed indignantly. “Dan, Shad’s not a thug! He’s got something going on in his head that most of us haven’t got, and sometimes it scares him and sometimes it makes him difficult, but there’s no earthly reason it should make him a murderer! He isn’t violent. I’d trust Shad Lucas with my life.”
“I’d trust him with your life,” agreed Sale. “But it’s not your life we’re talking about: it’s that of a young woman who may have tried to use him in a particularly underhand and hurtful way. To get at you, or because he’d be a good catch for a freak show. She was young, pretty, intelligent and a lot more worldly than him. If she befriended him – hell, let’s use the right word: if she seduced him – and then he found out she wasn’t even after his body so much as to make a quick buck out of him, are you still sure he couldn’t become violent? Just for a moment – just long enough to stab her?”
