Dead Man's Daughter

by Roz Watkins

  I stood back and took in the room. The lake was visible through patio doors, almost completely still, its surface smooth as marble. A couple of ducks swooped onto it, disrupting the calm and sending ripples across its surface.

  A full ashtray sat on a glass coffee table beside a wine glass and a whisky tumbler. Three empty wine bottles and a whisky bottle lay on the floor, spilling dregs onto an open laptop, which was still blaring music into the room. I peered at the screen, which was hard to see in the light reflecting off the lake outside. Tom and Jerry. Blue Cat Blues. Playing on a loop, the music too loud. The episode where Tom and Jerry kill themselves.

  8.

  ‘Ah, Meg. Are you still here?’

  That was a hard one to answer without resorting to philosophy. I walked a step closer to Richard’s desk and nodded slightly. He looked more stressed than usual, slightly damp and pink-faced. He picked up a cactus, touched it gently, and then drew his finger back sharply. A tiny blob of blood swelled at its end.

  I winced. ‘Are you okay?’

  He wiped his finger on a file. Police files smeared with blood. Very evocative.

  ‘The vultures are flying low overhead,’ he said. ‘And all the professionally-horrified people on social media are working themselves into a lather about Harry Gibson. Why aren’t the incompetent police catching these vile paedophiles? You know the kind of stuff.’

  ‘For God’s sake. The man’s dead, and we don’t even know he abused any children.’

  ‘That won’t bother the angry mob.’ He shook his finger, which had thankfully stopped bleeding. ‘Sit down, if you want.’

  I eyed Richard’s visitor chair and wondered if it was part of a bizarre psychological experiment that he was performing on us. Maybe cacti were involved too. ‘I’ll stand.’

  He nodded. ‘What did you want to talk to me about?’

  ‘I wonder if we should look more closely at him,’ I said. ‘At Harry Gibson.’

  ‘The suicide?’

  I hesitated. Wondered again if I should let this one go. It almost certainly was a suicide, and I had no time to look into another possible murder. ‘On the face of it, it does look very much like a suicide.’

  ‘And he was accused of being a paedophile online. It’s textbook.’

  I couldn’t do it. This man deserved better. ‘I know that. And so would a murderer. We’re supposed to Think Murder aren’t we?’

  Richard sounded weary. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I mean, if you wanted to kill someone and make it look like a suicide, couldn’t you just make accusations on social media?’

  ‘You know the situation. We’re desperately short of detectives. Nobody wants to do the job any more. We can’t justify the resources to look at this in more detail. Craig’s already been on at me to look into any other kids he saw. And homicidal hangings are very rare.’

  ‘But not unheard of. And where did the accusations about him being a paedophile come from? And why now, when we need to talk to him about Abbie Thornton?’

  ‘What are you saying, Meg?’

  ‘I think we should get SOCO in, dust for prints, get the knot expert involved, have a look at the scuff marks around that chair, check if anyone else was there. Not just assume it was a suicide. It’s possible he was involved with some illegal activity as well. Helping patients get their perfectly healthy legs amputated abroad because they didn’t want them.’

  ‘Excuse me? Did I hear you correctly?’

  ‘Yes. He specialised in identity disorders. There are people who don’t feel like their limbs belong to them. They want them amputated. If they’re not helped, they do things like lie on railway tracks.’

  ‘Good heavens. But, Meg, we don’t have the resources. You know the situation. A suspected paedophile hanged himself. It’s straightforward.’

  ‘Can I put the coroner’s report together then?’

  ‘We don’t need someone at your level doing that. Craig can handle it.’

  ‘But what if he was murdered? Craig just thinks of him as a paedo. He doesn’t give a damn about finding out the truth.’

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that about your colleagues, Meg. I thought you’d be happy to get this wrapped up.’

  ‘But don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that Gibson was Abbie Thornton’s psychiatrist? Soon it’s going to be too late to go back and get decent forensics. If it does turn out to be relevant to Phil Thornton, the media will be all over us. We’ll look like incompetent idiots.’

  ‘Okay, okay, calm down.’

  Was there anything in the world less likely to make you feel calm than being told to calm down? ‘I am calm. I just don’t want us to screw this up.’

  ‘Alright, alright, resistance is futile. Look into it a bit more. To reassure yourself it’s a suicide. And, Meg . . . ’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Remember you’re working with Craig on the Thornton case. And you can’t afford any more off-piste performances, especially with this police brutality thing hanging over us. Not if you want a future here.’

  *

  I realised I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to walk into my house with my head still full of Harry Gibson – his uncanny pose, his bulbous face, his protruding tongue. In quiet moments throughout the day, I’d had a shimmering sense in my peripheral vision of something hanging, but of course when I’d snapped my head round, there’d been nothing there. And I’d imagined hearing the Tom and Jerry suicide music playing in the distance. When I finally managed to get this image out of my head, all I saw was little Abbie Thornton – asleep but with glassy eyes wide open – plunging a knife into her father’s neck.

  I texted my friend Hannah and she replied to say it was fine for me to pop in on my way home. I felt a wave of relief, left the Station and set off for Hannah’s, via a chocolate stop.

  Hannah’s estate on the outskirts of Belper had the open lawns and wide driveways of a Florida retirement complex, sadly without the weather to match. I parked and strode up the ramp to her door, seized with a sudden desperation to get inside. Hannah buzzed me in, and I shoved the door shut behind me and almost collapsed onto her smooth tiles.

  ‘Have you been shot?’ Hannah wheeled herself over. ‘You’re not going to bleed on the limestone, are you?’

  ‘Feels like it. But no.’

  She spun round and whizzed up the wide corridor and into her ludicrously clean and sparkly kitchen. I followed, probably leaving a trail of cat hair behind me.

  I placed my offering of Thorntons chocolates on the table. I realised I’d bought chocolates with the same name as the victim.

  ‘Oh, hurray! I’ll put some coffee on. Sit down.’

  ‘How are you?’ I asked.

  Hannah spun round to fiddle with her espresso machine. ‘Oh, you know. Skint, knackered and on a pointless diet. So same same. And another day dealing with asocial IT dorks, but nothing out of the ordinary.’

  Hannah did an inexplicable computer-related job, manipulating her socially inept colleagues with brutal ease.

  I flopped into one of the leather kitchen chairs and let my head fall back. ‘We had a hanging,’ I said. ‘Can’t tell you too much, but you know I’m not great with hangings.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Not too bad. He was low down – one of the booze and drugs jobs where they wait to pass out. So I’m hoping it won’t send me nuts and trigger my need to check ceilings again.’

  ‘Have you been feeling anxious? You could always have a chat with the counsellor.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I haven’t got time to muck about with that at the moment. I stupidly agreed to take on that murder case.’

  ‘The social worker? I heard it on the news. But I didn’t think that was a hanging.’

  ‘No, the hanging was someone else. I can’t really talk about it. It’s just good to be here and get away from it all, to be honest.’

  ‘Blimey. Two deaths. Who are you mainly working with?’

  I sank lower in th
e chair and grimaced.

  ‘Craig. Oh dear.’ Hannah passed me a coffee and took a delicate sip of hers. ‘How’s your mum?’

  ‘Exhausted from looking after Gran, but okay. She tried to get in touch with Dad, but hasn’t heard back.’

  ‘He hasn’t got back to her even though her mother’s dying?’

  ‘No. He’s probably just busy.’

  ‘When will you stop making excuses for him, Meg? He’s clearly a shit.’

  I opened my mouth. Wasn’t it an unwritten rule that you could call your own dad a shit but not someone else’s?

  ‘What else have you been up to?’ Hannah said, possibly realising she’d crossed a line. ‘That you’re allowed to talk about?’

  ‘Have you come across BIID? Body Identity Integrity Disorder?’ I was feeling a tiny bit spiteful after the shit-dad comment, and I knew this subject would annoy Hannah. People who had perfectly good legs wanting rid of them.

  She shoved her cup down. ‘The people who want their legs chopped off?’

  ‘Sounds about right.’

  ‘Yes. I have. Some of them go on the disability forums. What I wouldn’t give to be able to walk, and they want their legs chopped off. And I read about a woman who blinded herself with sulphuric acid.’

  ‘She wanted to be blind?’

  ‘Apparently.’

  ‘Jesus, that must be most people’s worst fear. I can’t get my head round that.’

  ‘Me neither. You couldn’t make it up.’

  ‘It’s got to be an incredibly powerful thing though, hasn’t it? To want to do that. I mean, especially in the society we live in, so obsessed with physical perfection. To go against it all to that extent. When most people are so far the other way – banging on about how fat they are the whole time and desperately removing perfectly innocent body hair. Don’t you think it’s interesting?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ She sighed. ‘It kind of bothers me though. And it ends up being about resources too. That woman who’s now blind, don’t tell me she doesn’t need some help. I mean, I need some help and you know how independent I am, being an obsessive exerciser with muscles like Arnie, and having been like it since birth, as they say.’

  ‘I see what you mean. If there’s a limited pot.’

  ‘There’s a very bloody limited pot, Meg. You’re lucky if you don’t have to piss yourself on a train these days, since the bastard Tories have been in charge. It’s not as easy for us to just hang on as it is for you. And a lot of people have catheters and . . . take my word for it – it’s not easy.’

  It struck me again how little insight I had into the brutal realities of Hannah’s life with spina bifida, no matter how hard I tried. She did upper body exercises for hours each day, just so she had the strength to do things like get in and out of her car, or go to bed. Things I took completely for granted. Over the years, she’d shown me diagrams of her spine; told me about her pain, the problems with her feet, the details of her paralysis. I was the one she came to her when her parents couldn’t handle it, when they were overcome with folic-acid-related guilt. But I knew I still didn’t fully get it.

  ‘Oh, don’t give me that look,’ she said. ‘I manage. And there’s plenty worse off than me. But you know some people already resent the amount that’s spent on ramps and toilets and stuff. Imagine if they thought we’d done it to ourselves? I do try to have some sympathy with them wanting to lose limbs or whatever, because I suppose they can’t help the way they feel but . . . well, I don’t get it.’

  ‘Is it so shocking because it goes against cultural norms?’

  ‘Jesus, Meg, I prefer you on gin and tonic. Have you OD’d on caffeine or something?’

  ‘I was thinking . . . foot-binding went on for thousands of years. That crippled people, but it was socially acceptable. And what about corsets, or to a lesser extent, what about stupid shoes nowadays?’

  ‘Yeah, when you’ve got nerve damage in your feet like I have, you don’t muck about with high heels, that’s for sure. Why don’t people value what they’ve got?’

  I was on a roll. It was such a relief not to be thinking about Abbie or Harry Gibson. ‘Yeah. And breast enlargements, and always being on a frigging diet so they’re knackered and grumpy the whole time . . . All these things disable people to an extent.’

  ‘But if someone wants to chop one little leg off, all hell breaks loose.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I know it’s not quite as extreme. But foot-binding was.’

  ‘Funny that the culturally acceptable stuff all seems to be done to women. But . . . ’ She raised her hand. ‘I do not want to start you on a rant about that. So, stop right there.’

  I smiled. ‘Okay, okay. I’m saying nothing.’

  Hannah looked into her coffee mug and swirled the dregs around. ‘I just wondered – are you still taking your gran to Switzerland next week?’ There was a tightness to her voice.

  I hesitated. This was not a good subject for us. ‘She’s got end-stage stomach cancer,’ I said. ‘It’s not going to get any better for her. What’s the point in torturing her?’

  ‘It’s not always that simple.’

  Something in Hannah’s tone irritated me. Possibly because she’d briefly become involved with a group of nutty Christians the year before, and I was worried some of her arguments were coming from them. I respected her views as someone with a disability. But using selected quotes from a two-thousand-year-old piece of fiction to force desperate people to stay alive – well, that pissed me off.

  ‘Come on, Hannah. I’m always tip-toeing around you on this one,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t got the energy today. I’ve had a hard week and a shit day. You’ve got the ultimate trump card so I always end up backing off, but it doesn’t mean I can’t have an opinion. Gran’s in a worse state than either of us can possibly imagine.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Hannah still wouldn’t look at me. ‘I know you’ve had a bad day. We don’t have to discuss it today, but . . . ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t disagree with how you feel about your gran, honestly.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Because of you being in the police, and that case last year, the press are going to be on to you, Meg, You won’t avoid it. There’ll be loads of publicity. Did you know Life Line have been blogging about you?’

  Oh joy. The nutty Christians. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I must still be on their email list, and they sent me a link to some blog posts about you taking your gran to Dignitas.’

  ‘Oh fabulous. That’s all I need. Thank goodness Richard’s so clueless about the internet. How the hell do they know about Gran?’

  ‘I don’t know. But they aren’t very nice about you. They even talked about you discovering your sister when she hanged herself.’

  I sighed. ‘Oh God, I know how they found out about that. Remember the girl from that case last year. She did an interview. Really nice about me, saying I saved her life, but she told the press about Carrie.’

  ‘Ungrateful cow.’

  ‘No, honestly, Hannah. It’s fine. She didn’t realise I hadn’t told anyone. I should have asked her not to share it.’

  ‘It was pretty naïve of her. You’re a detective – you don’t want all and sundry stalkers and psychopaths out there knowing your business.’

  ‘She’s only fifteen – she didn’t realise, and they’re all oversharers, aren’t they, modern kids? Their brains permanently wired into the net.’

  ‘Well the group must have picked up on that and somehow they’ve found out about you taking your gran, and they’re blogging about you.’

  ‘Jesus. What else have they said?’

  ‘They were on about you taking your gran to Dignitas, and they didn’t exactly put a positive slant on it. Talked about people disposing of elderly relatives because they’d become inconvenient. And then they got personal about you. One of them even claimed you were responsible for Carrie’s death. They mentioned she had cancer but then they said she committed
suicide because you’d bullied her.’

  ‘Bullied her? I was ten years old, and she was fifteen. And she was dying of bloody cancer!’

  ‘Sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘No, it’s better to know.’

  ‘I suppose so. Bear in mind that the press are going to find out about your Dignitas trip. You’re going to end up getting tons of publicity.’

  I felt a fluttering in my stomach. Panic about being exposed. A sinking heaviness that anyone would be so horrible about me, even though I told myself I didn’t care what they thought. ‘I’ll just have to cope, won’t I?’

  ‘But you know how I feel about this. You’ll end up speaking out everywhere in favour of assisted dying. And it’s getting worse with all the cuts. You just have to believe me – if they brought in an assisted suicide law, it would be bad for disabled people.’

  ‘They’re not going to change the law, Hannah. No chance. We’ve got a government full of God-botherers. And Gran’s dying. It’s not a disability issue for her.’

  ‘I know this doesn’t apply to your gran, but it applies to lots of other people. The reasons they give for ending their lives mostly aren’t about unbearable suffering – they’re about dignity and loss of autonomy. Those are disability issues. We should be helping people live full lives, not helping them die. It perpetuates this idea that our lives aren’t worth living. That it’s not “dignified” – whatever that even means – to need help.’

  ‘I get what you’re saying, Hannah. I just want to make sure Gran doesn’t suffer too much at the end. If I end up having to talk to the press, I won’t talk about it as a general issue. I’ll only talk about Gran, okay?’ I so wanted this conversation to end. I’d already tortured myself enough about this decision.