DYING EMBERS an unputdownable psychological thriller full of breathtaking twists

by MARGARET MURPHY

  ‘. . . fairly quiet, really,’ he heard, tuning back into the conversation.

  Lauren was lying, first saying she was on duty because of illness among the staff, now making out that nothing out of the ordinary had happened. It seemed that she didn’t want to talk about his call to the Samaritans. Professionalism, was it? He’d never really believed all that shit about confidentiality — people liked having hold of information — the more shocking the better. They couldn’t wait to pass it on. Look at Agnes, with her spirit guides — it was just a more novel line in street gossip. He gave her the juicy details; she passed them on them to her clients.

  The conversation went back and forth for a couple of minutes. Lauren suggested spraying the acid-damaged car with primer to keep out the rust; Simpson said she’d get around to it. Did Lauren know her theory as to the culprit?

  He heard the gaps, in which the silence was broken only by the clink of Lauren’s spoon against her breakfast bowl. Things were strained between these two. Perhaps they didn’t know each other well. Or they had argued.

  Lauren’s promise not to go to the police bought him some time, but she wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. While they weren’t communicating, he was safe, but they would doubtless talk again, and he knew from past experience that getting the answers you needed was only a matter of asking the right questions with the right inducements.

  23

  The atmosphere in the interview room was charged with emotion. DCI Thomas had called in WPC Dhar to act as witness and chaperone. She was unhappy with the duty and had even wondered aloud why a WDC couldn’t be found. But to her credit, she had done her best to make Mrs Connelly comfortable, bringing her a cup of tea and sitting next to her to make the exchange less formal.

  Mrs Connelly had demanded to speak to DCI Thomas, saying that she had information that would help the investigation. She had spent the first ten minutes complaining that she had not been kept informed. Thomas had taken her through the various stages: their interviews of friends and family; trying to establish Ryan’s last few hours. Privately, he believed that Ryan had not been alone in the warehouse, but he had no proof, and until he did, he could not follow that line of enquiry.

  DCI Thomas had a kind, rumpled face and curly hair, thinning a little, but still black. When he shaved, he saw a tired man he hardly recognized, and he wore an air of sadness about him from having seen too much tragedy in his work. He wished he could shake it off like some of his colleagues did, metamorphosing into husbands and dads and grandfathers, weekend gardeners and DIY hobbyists at the end of the working day, but he’d never acquired the knack.

  He was a tactful, considerate man, and it pained him to have to talk to Mrs Connelly in the drab, functional setting of an interview room, but there was nowhere else that was suitable, his own office being a glass cubicle facing onto the open-plan incident room, where a whiteboard catalogued contacts, details of the death scene and photographs of Ryan’s body.

  Mrs Connelly listened with an intensity that disconcerted him. It was as if she expected him to give out encrypted information which, if only she could decipher it, would unravel the mystery of why her son had died so horribly.

  ‘I can tell you,’ he told Mrs Connelly, ‘that we haven’t closed our minds to any line of enquiry. We will keep this investigation open until we are satisfied as to precisely how your son died.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ she asked. ‘That you haven’t a clue what happened, or you can’t make up your minds?’

  ‘It means we’re continuing with our investigation.’

  ‘Until you’re satisfied.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what about his family? What if we’re not satisfied? What comeback have we got?’

  ‘Why not wait until we’ve completed our enquiries, Mrs Connelly,’ he said, gently. ‘You might find—’

  Mrs Connelly shook her head angrily. ‘You trot out the official line and expect me to run along like a good girl. I want answers, Mr Thomas, not reassurances.’

  ‘We don’t have any answers yet.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ she said, the bitterness and hurt making her voice harsh. ‘The papers think they’ve got the lot. They’ve made up their minds. You know they’re saying my Ryan was a druggy, a waster?’ Her voice rose in her distress. ‘A lad who was respected and loved by everyone who knew him. He spoke out against drugs!’

  DCI Thomas had children of his own. He knew the worries and pressures of being a parent. He knew the difficulty in keeping them on the right path, and he sympathized with Mrs Connelly. She was a decent woman, trying to bring up her boys according to her moral and religious beliefs. Seventeen years of hard graft, of never taking the easy way out, destroyed in just a couple of weeks by press speculation.

  ‘I know it’s hard to take, Mrs Connelly,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing we can do to stop the press theorizing on the facts.’

  ‘What facts?’ she demanded angrily. ‘You don’t even know how he died.’

  ‘The bod— Ryan,’ he corrected himself. ‘Ryan was very badly burned.’

  She shuddered and he paused for a moment, wondering if he should go on. ‘It’s been difficult to establish the cause of death.’

  A creeping horror of realization showed in her face. ‘You mean . . . Oh, dear God, no! You think Ryan could have been alive when—’ She broke off, clasping a hand to her mouth.

  DCI Thomas spoke gently. ‘Do you need to take a break?’

  ‘Don’t you dare try and slide out of this,’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Connelly,’ he protested, ‘I’m not trying to—’

  ‘Two weeks!’ The exclamation was almost a plea. ‘You’ve done nothing! And now his friend is missing.’

  ‘We’re treating Ryan’s death very seriously,’ he assured her.

  ‘Two weeks,’ she repeated. ‘And you still don’t know what he was doing in that godforsaken place.’ Her face took on a look of anguish, as if she could see in her mind’s eye the crumbling terrace where they had found her son.

  ‘The initial lab reports show that he did have inhalants in his system.’ He was expecting further results through any day, but he didn’t tell her: mothers don’t like to think of their children in terms of body fluids and forensic tests.

  ‘I don’t care what your bloody tests show. My Ryan did not do drugs! You should’ve talked to Frank. He knew. He knew what had happened. But you left it too late, and now he’s gone as well.’

  ‘We are doing everything we can to trace Frank Traynor,’ Thomas said. ‘But if he doesn’t want to be found . . .’

  Mrs Connelly snorted dismissively. ‘You’ll find him, like you found my Ryan, too late to save him. Too late for his poor mother. Too damned late, Inspector!’

  He saw the pain behind her red-hot rage and wished there was something he could say which didn’t sound like a platitude. But he knew there was nothing, so he brought her back to the reason for her visit.

  ‘Mrs Connelly, you said you had information . . . If you have any idea of Frank’s whereabouts—’

  ‘Why d’you think I’m here?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve come to help. Much good it’ll do the poor lad.’

  Thomas glanced at WPC Dhar and saw that she was as puzzled as he.

  ‘He’s in a warehouse. In the east of the city.’ She frowned, evidently trying to remember the details. ‘It’s flooded. There’s a steel door. He’s . . .’ She swallowed, closing her eyes. ‘He’s badly disfigured. She said campfire or bonfire is significant.’

  ‘She?’

  Mrs Connelly opened her eyes and the room swam into focus. DCI Thomas looked tense. ‘What?’ she asked.

  Thomas leaned forward. ‘You said, “She said campfire was significant.”

  ‘Or bonfire,’ Mrs Connelly corrected. ‘She wasn’t sure which.’

  ‘Mrs Connelly, who told you this?’

  She blinked. ‘Miss Hepple,’ she said.

  Mr Thomas jotted down the name. ‘And she is
. . . ?’

  ‘A psychic.’

  He looked up, a question half-formed on his lips.

  ‘She makes contact with the spirit world,’ Mrs Connelly said, as if he hadn’t grasped her meaning.

  Dhar shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘I see,’ Thomas said.

  Mrs Connelly fixed him with a quiet, calm look that said she knew he didn’t believe her, that she had expected it, but it didn’t matter, because she believed. ‘She’s never been wrong, Inspector.’

  ‘We’ll look into it,’ he said.

  She didn’t take her eyes off him. ‘No,’ she said, after a few moments. ‘You won’t. It doesn’t matter to Frank now, he’s beyond hurt and fear. He’s safe in the arms of the Blessed Virgin, but it does matter to his mother. She has a right to know what’s happened to her son.’ She looked away, tears filling her eyes at her own loss. ‘A right to give him a Christian burial.’

  ‘I don’t think it would be wise to upset Mrs Traynor with ideas like—’

  She puffed air between her lips. ‘It’s not for me to tell her,’ she said. ‘That’s your job. Find him. Find the poor boy’s body, then tell his mother — explain to her why he had to die.’

  The chief inspector took a breath. ‘It’s possible Frank is living rough, here or in London.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ She watched him in that strange, intense way for a second or two longer, then she gathered up her handbag and stood. ‘I hope you’ll be able to live with yourself when you’re proved wrong.’

  24

  Geri dumped her briefcase and an armful of books in the hall and hung up her coat. It was Monday, the last week of half-term, and Year Nine lessons five and six had proved hard work: Valentine’s Day was guaranteed to create tensions. The girls giggled and the boys pretended to ignore them. Notes were passed across the classroom. Geri had confiscated a couple, but she hadn’t caught them all, and the swing from high spirits to bad temper among some of the children had sapped her.

  She trudged down to the kitchen, with the intention of making coffee while she made up her mind if she could be bothered to cook something for dinner. The light was on. Nick sat at the table, reading the evening newspaper.

  ‘Oh,’ Geri said. Nick had been avoiding her since the previous Wednesday, almost a week of sleeping on the sofa in the sitting room, waiting until she had left for work before getting up. He was invariably out before she got home, so Geri had assumed he must be on the two-ten shift.

  ‘I’m on twelve-hour nights this week,’ Nick said, as if answering a question. ‘I’ll have to be out by half-six.’

  Geri said, ‘Oh,’ again, then, aware that Nick was making an effort and that she wasn’t meeting him halfway, she added, ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘We could have an omelette, if you fancy.’ He got up, folding the paper carefully.

  ‘Sure.’ Geri stepped towards the fridge.

  ‘No.’ He guided her to a chair. ‘I’ll do it.’

  She watched as he chopped and fried onions and peppers, whisked eggs, grated cheese and buttered bread. He took care over it — the closest Nick would ever come to making an apology for having deliberately ruined their previous dinner together. His culinary repertoire was limited, but what he did, he did well. He had even mixed a green salad which he placed on the table with a flourish as they sat down to eat.

  ‘I’ll sort out the damage to your car when I’ve finished this stint of nights.’ He muttered this with his back turned to her, but it was the first time he had referred to the acid attack on her car, and this, too, was a tacit admission that he could have behaved better the night it happened.

  Geri felt a flood of emotion she couldn’t quite understand; relief, but also hurt and resentment that it had taken him so long. She had spent the intervening days nervous each time she answered the doorbell or turned a corner. At night, she left school always in the company of one or two others, and she would have cried off youth-club duty on Thursday had it not been for Joe offering to pick her up and drop her off afterwards.

  Her conversation with Nick was not easy or fluid, but it came as a huge relief to have one source of tension removed from the household, and Geri made an effort to be friendly. Relations with Lauren were still strained, though, and that troubled her.

  She got up from the table with a sigh, and Nick caught her hand. ‘We’ll work it out,’ he said, which made Geri feel even worse: while Nick was doing his best to repair some of the damage caused by the rows and silences of the past two weeks, she was worrying about what Lauren thought of her.

  * * *

  Nick took the bus to work. The horticultural research station where he worked was only a couple of miles out of the city centre, but the urban sprawl extended mainly southwards and he was heading north, so the built-up areas thinned rapidly, and with it the traffic.

  Soon, all that was visible beyond the ghost of his own reflection was the string of orange lights along the road as it twisted up and out of the city. Sleet spattered the bus, sticking for a second or two, then melting in viscous streaks down the windows.

  When they first met, he and Geri had been special. He had fascinated her — she admired his refusal to conform, his unpredictability. When had it started, this decline? They had been close; he understood her, took care of her when her mother died, protected her from shocks, from anything — anyone — who might harm her.

  In their final year, anything had seemed possible — until the results were posted and he lost his chance of a job at ICI. He’d been awarded an ordinary degree. He had never been ordinary in his life! She had tried to comfort him, but how could she with her 2:1 honours?

  He had seen something new in her eyes in the weeks that followed. He was no longer exceptional, wild, unconventional. He was ordinary.

  He had seen that look each time he had taken a new job: meat packer; security guard, petrol station clerk, tele-sales rep — horticultural research technician? Perhaps not then. He thought perhaps he had seen something else in her eyes then, which was why he had stuck this job for so much longer than any of the others. What had he seen? A faint glimmer of hope in her eyes, perhaps.

  But he sensed that change had come too late. She was distant, vague; he felt as if he was constantly intruding on her thoughts.

  We’ll work it out, he had said, and she had looked at him as if to say, ‘Work what out?’

  They had gone too far, he and Geri; they wouldn’t come out of this together.

  * * *

  Geri worked until 8 p.m. Lauren still hadn’t come home, and the silence in the house oppressed her. She found herself listening to every creak and groan of the old place, imagining bumps and footfalls and softly closing doors.

  ‘Sod it!’ she muttered, marking the last book on the pile, then went upstairs and got changed into jeans and a sweater. She would go for a brisk walk, maybe try to find Adèle — see if she’d had any word on Frank.

  She walked fast, blinking against the keen wind blowing sleet into her face, using the exercise to put distance between her and the empty house, loud with accusing silence. But she was also trying to escape the clamouring voices in her head: Frank, missing, lonely, afraid, each passing day making her more anxious for his safety; Lauren, evasive, withdrawn; her own confused feelings about Nick — at least he had broken his silence, but could they really work it out, as he’d said?

  Dread settled like a solid mass in the pit of her stomach. It had been two years since their relationship had been on an even keel.

  She stopped, breathless and freezing. When she had finally admitted to herself that her mother was dying, she had experienced a terrible ambivalence: desperately wanting and needing her, while yearning for her release. Although she couldn’t admit it to herself at the time, nor for months and years after, she had begun gently breaking the bonds between them, quietly taking her leave of her mother long before her physical death.

  Hadn’t she begun this same distancing process with Nick over the past few
months? Nick had sensed it too. Otherwise, why had he made sporadic attempts at romance: the cosy meals for two; candlelight and flowers? She pushed the thought away. She could not think about life without Nick — not now, not in the middle of all this.

  Instead, she looked about her and took in her surroundings. She had skirted the edge of town and ended up on the east side; it would be pointless going back into the city centre at this hour — Adèle rarely worked past seven o’clock and it was now eight fifteen. She was five minutes’ walk from the youth club; there was still time to talk to a few people. If she could just get the kids to talk.

  Two of the younger girls hurried over, smiling when they saw Geri. They wanted to show off their glitter nail polish and tell her about the valentine cards they had received. Valentine’s Day! Usually, Nick bought her flowers and sent her the biggest, tackiest card he could find. So that was why he’d had a sudden change of heart — guilt had driven him to making the small concession of rousing himself from his sulk and cooking her an omelette.

  It was an unkind thought, but Nick had put her through the silent treatment for six days, and although she didn’t want to prolong the argument, she couldn’t simply forget what she had gone through this last week.

  ‘Well, look what the wind blew in,’ Joe said. ‘We don’t often see you on a Monday, Miss Simpson.’ He always used her surname when kids were close by — children often had difficulty making the distinction between the rules at school and the informality of the youth club, so it was easier to stick with her formal title. He grinned over at Geri and she returned the smile, grateful, almost, for the friendly contact. S Club 7 were blasting out “Bring It All Back” with unrelenting cheerfulness on the jukebox.

  ‘I . . . was just passing,’ she said, feeling suddenly awkward.

  ‘Well, you’re very welcome.’

  His North-East accent added warmth to his words, and Geri felt tears prick at the back of her eyes. Ridiculous! she told herself. Stop this!