by Roz Watkins
‘Imagine if when you felt suicidal, someone had helped you kill yourself. Because they thought it was justified. But actually it was depression, and you recovered. You’d be dead now.’
Well, that was a hard-hitter. ‘Thanks for that, Hannah. Nice to be reminded.’
‘If you were disabled, everyone would have thought you were justified in wanting to kill yourself but in reality most disabled people have good levels of happiness. Able-bodied people think they’d rather be dead than disabled, just like they think they’d be happy if they were suddenly rich.’
‘I get what you’re saying.’ I sucked the dregs from my coffee cup, wishing it was a gin. ‘Wasn’t there that famous research? Lottery winners and paralysed people ending up with similar happiness levels. Mind you, didn’t they get a hot young female student to interview the young, male paralysis victims? I think that might have affected the outcomes.’
Hannah laughed. I was relieved we were just about keeping this friendly. ‘Would you think about it?’ she said. ‘Whether you want to end up as a poster girl for assisted dying when your best friend’s asking you sincerely not to. There must be ways your gran can have a decent death here.’
*
I arrived home to be greeted by a pile of bills so hefty the door didn’t want to open. Since I’d been paying for Gran’s carer, and saving for Switzerland, things had got a little out of control. I gave the door a firm shove, kicked the bills aside, and walked into the freezing hallway.
I kept my coat on and took my laptop to the kitchen. I was itching to look at the blog posts about me, but decided not to. I knew they’d be unfair and probably incoherent, and what was the point of letting that into my head? I didn’t have a good track-history of coping with that kind of thing. Besides, I needed to put my own troubles aside and research homicidal sleepwalking.
Hamlet bellowed until I gave in and fed him a second supper. I supposed I should eat too. I peered into the fridge, but nothing looked very edible.
I sorted myself out tea and toast.
No wonder it was freezing. The kitchen window wasn’t shut properly. I stood and shoved the ancient wooden casement back into place, trying unsuccessfully to get it to latch. I gave up, stuck the fan heater on, and settled at the table with the laptop.
It seemed there had been around seventy reported cases of people killing in their sleep. Most of them had been taking sleeping pills at the time, and in some of the cases the courts had accepted being asleep as a valid defence to murder. Someone (usually a man) would dream they were being attacked, fight back, and then wake to find they’d killed someone (usually their wife). It seemed just about plausible. In a more bizarre case, a man had driven fourteen miles and killed his mother-in-law, apparently in his sleep. That sounded less plausible.
I’d never sleepwalked, although I’d had the opposite experience – waking up paralysed and terrified, heart pounding, my brain awake but my body not. I had shared a house with a guy who sometimes sleepwalked when he was drunk. Once we’d had to intervene to stop him sleep-peeing in the laundry basket. He’d been amenable and not in the slightest bit violent, but there’d still been something chilling about the whole episode.
I tried to picture Abbie throwing the duvet off her bed in her girly-pink room, walking robotically downstairs, her eyes seeing but her brain unaware, taking the biggest knife from the kitchen, walking back up the stairs and into her parents’ room, and stabbing her father in the neck. Twice. Could she have done that, if she thought her dad was trying to kill her?
9.
I woke in a sweat, heart pounding, fragments of a dream remaining. I’d been in a Victorian house like the Thorntons’, creeping from room to room, sure someone was after me. In the final room I’d entered – a huge bedroom – a person had been hanging from the ceiling.
I lay for a moment, forcing my breath to slow, then reached to switch on the reassuring tones of Radio Derby. I wasn’t giving in to it.
I stumbled out of bed and peered through my tiny leaded window. It was raining again, and windy. The cold rattled around my ancient cottage, through rafters and between floorboards. I dressed quickly, shivering and still feeling spooked from my dream.
Downstairs, Hamlet was in the kitchen welded to his heated pad. I fed him, drunk a huge mug of tea, and set off for work.
Everyone had gathered in the incident room, which was stuffed with information – photos, maps, random bits of paper, whiteboards scrawled with notes and the odd obscenity. The tedious official operation name for the Thornton case had been replaced informally with Operation Sweeney Todd, a fact which I was not supposed to know.
The air in the room crackled. Two corpses in two days was probably a record for our area, and the second had a few benefits. Usually the cops would hide their enthusiasm about a death – it wasn’t quite appropriate when some poor sod had been knifed in the colon or trussed himself from a tree. But with Harry Gibson, there was blatant lack of concern. I found it unsettling and it made me all the more determined to look into it properly.
Everyone was speaking at once. Is it true the kid killed her father? Are we charging her? Was it something to do with her heart? Was it the drugs?
‘Okay!’ I raised my voice over the din. ‘We have some interesting new leads on Phil Thornton, but we need more evidence.’
Richard butted in. ‘We have to manage the media very carefully. For now, we’re saying nothing about the heart or the drugs. Alright?’
Much earnest nodding, but more Abbie questions from the team. Did she remember her donor’s death? Did she think her father was the donor’s father? Is that why she killed him? What did Dr Gibson know?
I answered as best I could. No, it was highly unlikely Abbie Thornton’s heart had anything to do with her father’s murder. Keep investigating other avenues. No, she did not remember her heart donor’s death. Had they been watching too much Walking Dead?
They eventually simmered down.
‘Don’t assume it was the child,’ I said. ‘Continue to investigate all leads. What about his finances? Wills? Anything there?’
‘He was quite well-off,’ Jai said. ‘Parents both died youngish – nothing suspicious – and left him money. There’s chunks of it in various unsurprising places. But a few weeks ago, he transferred twenty grand from savings into his current account and then withdrew it in cash. Five grand a day over four days.’
‘And I assume we don’t know what he did with it?’
‘No. And there’s no sign of it in the house. Obviously we’re looking into it. The will looks uncontroversial – mostly goes to his wife and into a trust for his daughter. Plus a few charities.’
‘What about the ex-wife’s death?’
‘Clearly a traffic accident. Nothing at all suspicious.’
‘And Abbie’s step sister? Rachel Thornton’s daughter, I mean. What about her death? Anything dodgy?’
‘Nothing in the file. Fell out of a window. Tragic accident. And her father – Rachel Thornton’s first husband – is safely in Vancouver, so I think we can discount him.’
Emily said, ‘We’ve got some more from his phone. Until a month or so ago, lots of texts between Phil Thornton and Karen Jenkins, the work-place affair woman. Not terribly discreet affair-stuff. Then it looks like he ended it. And recently, increasingly desperate texts from Karen saying she needs to talk, and that he mustn’t say anything.’
‘Talk about what?’
‘Not clear. But there was something she didn’t want him to say. Maybe she just didn’t want him blabbing about the affair to her husband.’
‘She had money problems and a drink problem,’ I said. ‘She’s not going to want that affair to come out.’
Jai spun on his chair. A full three-sixty. ‘So she’s still a possible.’
‘Keep an open mind,’ I said. ‘Keep going with the door- to-door, and all the usual victimology. Now let’s talk about Dr Harry Gibson.’
‘It was a straightforward suicide,’ Craig said,
with the authority of the cutter-downer. ‘Nothing to indicate otherwise. And the motivation’s pretty damn obvious.’
‘We’re not making that assumption,’ I said. ‘It’s most likely a suicide but technically, it could have been a murder. Did you notice he was on a chair on castors, and the floor was hard? And he was hanging very low. So, theoretically someone could have drugged his drink, waited for him to pass out, wheeled him over to the edge of the room, tied him to the banister, and pushed the chair out from under him. That would be hard to differentiate from him doing something very similar himself.’
‘It would be pretty unprofessional of us not to look into it properly.’ Fiona glanced at Craig. ‘If he did it to himself, he’d have stood until he passed out, wouldn’t he? So, he’d have fallen further?’
Craig yawned loudly. He didn’t like the Fiona who was emerging as she found her feet, the Fiona who stood up to him.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m hoping the marks on his neck or the analysis from the knot expert, or maybe the scuff marks, will shed some light. And we need to find who started the rumour. There were no official complaints about Gibson.’
Craig sighed. ‘Doesn’t mean he wasn’t a paedo. Abbie screamed her guts out with him when he hypnotised her. And look how the Catholic church covered up what they did.’
‘I’m not denying that. But I don’t want us to make any assumptions. SOCO are taking a look round the house and we’re still waiting on his bloods. I want us to look at CCTV as well – did anyone visit him that evening?’
‘There’s ways to his house that avoid CCTV,’ Fiona said. ‘I sometimes think it would be easier if we worked in a city.’
‘Oh, it’s not,’ I said, remembering my experiences in Manchester. ‘Look at what we’ve got. And he had an unusual speciality in his psychiatry practice. He helped people with a disorder that makes them feel parts of their body don’t belong to them. Sometimes they want to chop a limb off . . . ’
General mutterings of disbelief around the room.
I raised my voice. ‘At least one man went to India to get it done. It’s not legal. Was Gibson mixed up in anything dodgy? Check it out. And he has a sister and his parents are still alive. So, we need to talk to them. Fiona, can you sort that?’
Fiona said, ‘Yes,’ simultaneously with Craig saying, ‘It’s a waste of time.’
‘Craig,’ I said. ‘This man deserves our time as much as anyone else. We don’t know it was a suicide, we don’t know he was a paedophile, and we don’t know it was unconnected to Phil Thornton.’
‘I’m more worried about the kids he abused,’ Craig said. ‘Who’s looking out for them?’
‘We’re all worried about children, Craig.’ I projected my voice over the rumble. ‘Doing a decent job finding out what happened to this poor man doesn’t mean we’re not worried about children.’
‘But if he did abuse her,’ Jai said. ‘Could that have triggered her violence towards her father?’
*
Jai strode into my room a couple of hours later. ‘Enjoying working with the lumphead?’
‘God, how did he make it to sergeant?’
Jai plonked himself on the side of my desk. ‘Plenty of senior people think like he does, you know. Not like you newfangled, namby-pamby, politically correct wimmin who picked up dodgy, modern ideas in Manchester. But yes, he’s an idiot. I’ve told him he would never have got the inspector gig anyway, so there’s no point resenting you.’
‘I’m sure that was a huge step forward for amicable relations. Thanks so much, Jai. He’ll hate me a whole lot less after that. And Richard’s being weird with me at the moment as well. One minute he’s nicey-nicey, the next he’s being a bugger. He hasn’t worked out what I’m doing next week, has he?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. That would have registered on the Richter scale.’ Jai twisted round, scrunching paperwork underneath him. ‘But I think Craig might have told him you pushed Rachel Thornton on that first day.’
‘What? He wasn’t even there! He turned up after the bloody woman punched me.’
‘I know. Hopefully, Richard will ignore him. It’s best you pay no attention to it. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘No, I’d rather know.’ I felt so out of my depth with the Craig situation, unsure what his agenda was, baffled by his wife’s comments, depressed that he seemed to dislike me so much. I sighed. ‘Okay. Let’s forget it for now. You’d better get your bottom off my filing system.’
‘Is that what you call it? I’ve seen more filing in my recycling bin.’ He shifted slightly to avoid my files and suddenly looked serious. ‘But are you alright? With that hanging yesterday, on top of your gran and everything?’
The siren went off inside me. Panic, panic, don’t appear vulnerable. Show no weakness. I was fully aware of how ridiculous this was with Jai. He wasn’t one of the macho morons who’d use any tiny chink in my armour against me. But old habits die hard. ‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘Of course you are.’ Jai grimaced. ‘But it’s not going to be easy with your gran next week.’
I still couldn’t picture us getting Gran on a plane and all the way to Switzerland. It was hard enough getting her down the hall and into the kitchen. I’d worked it all out in military detail, but had avoided picturing the brutal reality of what it would be like. And I’d been putting Hannah out of my mind too. Was she going to loathe me if I still took Gran, after she’d asked me to reconsider?
‘I know,’ I said. ‘But for God’s sake, don’t tell anyone about it.’
Jai seemed to accept that the Dignitas trip was best for Gran, but I suspected he had some deep-rooted religious doubts bubbling under the surface, despite having supposedly flung all that off with his turban.
‘So,’ I said. ‘Did I hear Emily had come back with some stuff from Harry Gibson’s laptop?’
‘Yes. They can’t find any actual child sex images. I mean, this is only an initial look, but assuming he’s not massively techie, he doesn’t have porn on his laptop. However . . . ’ Jai jumped up from my desk and started pacing up and down by the window.
‘For God’s sake, Jai, sit down. My chair won’t eat you. It’s not like Richard’s.’
Jai walked back and perched himself unwillingly on my spare chair, knees crossed, one leg bouncing. ‘He was googling about whether it was wrong to look at virtual child pornography, or simulated child pornography. You know, where they use cartoon characters or adults made to look younger or weird shit like that.’
I sighed. ‘Oh God, he was a paedophile. Maybe Craig’s right for once.’
‘There wasn’t any actual pornography on the laptop.’
‘So, he was exploring whether this other stuff was morally wrong or not. He could have been looking into it for a patient.’
‘He’s also been on websites for these so-called virtuous paedophiles.’ Jai uncrossed his legs and fiddled with the chair, raising it higher, then lowering it again. ‘They admit they’re attracted to kids but they swear to do nothing about it.’
‘I’ve seen. What a horrible predicament. People think paedophiles automatically abuse children, but of course they don’t. If Harry Gibson was attracted to kids, the poor sod could have actually been working really hard not to offend.’
‘We’ve had no complaints about him,’ Jai said.
‘And you know what it’s like these days – pretty much anyone who casts an askew glance at a kid is going to get a complaint at some point. But his profession bothers me. Why put yourself in that position?’
‘We don’t know he’s innocent. He could have another computer. No smoke without fire.’
‘Jai, would you stop trying to break that chair. You know I won’t get another one, with all the cuts.’ I folded my arms. ‘And maybe there is no smoke without fire. But who started the fire? It might not be Gibson. And why did they start a fire? Someone started posting about him, for some reason.’
‘He could have groped a kid or something, couldn’t h
e? And the parents didn’t want to go to the hassle of reporting it. So they stuck it online to alert others. I know it’s cowardly, but it does happen.’
‘Who was the first person to post?’
Jai wrinkled his nose. ‘Ah, well, that’s proving more difficult. We’re bringing in some people who fanned the flames, but the techies can’t locate Patient Zero right now. Do you really think he was murdered?’
That was too many metaphors. ‘I admit it looks like a suicide.’
‘Homicidal hangings are extremely rare.’
‘Everyone keeps saying that. Maybe they only seem rare because we don’t look for them.’
‘SOCO should pick up some evidence if there was anyone with him.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It just seems a bit of a coincidence. He was treating Abbie Thornton and now she’s in the frame for murder. We get told bizarre stories about her heart. We need this man to tell us what was going on, and then he turns up dead. And if Gibson was a vile child abuser, why would he have been searching about the ethics of that simulated stuff?’
A voice came from the doorway. ‘I’ve heard it all now.’
Craig.
‘Defending paedophiles.’ His lip curled. ‘I’m sure it’s totally fine for them to work with children. What’s the problem?’
I wanted to scream at him. You bastard! Why did you lie to Richard about me? But I took a breath and held myself in. ‘Thanks for your contribution, Craig. We’re not saying it was okay, but we’re trying not to jump to conclusions. Even if he was attracted to children, it doesn’t mean he was an abuser. He might have had feelings but not acted on them.’
Craig marched over and stood too close to Jai. ‘Yeah. Right. And Abbie was terrified for no reason at all.’
I could smell Craig’s cheap aftershave. ‘She might have been terrified because he was trying to deal with her nightmares, and – ’
‘Don’t bother, Meg.’ Jai turned away from Craig. ‘You’re wasting your time with him.’
I wasn’t ready to give up, springing to the defence of paedophiles in my desire to argue with Craig. ‘We don’t know he was abusive. Assuming he is – that’s like saying all heterosexual men are rapists. Or like those morons who say they wouldn’t want a gay doctor.’
