Текст книги "Vows of Silence "
Автор книги: Susan Hill
Жанры:
Криминальные детективы
,сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
“Nice man. Judith’s delightful—quite young. She was his second wife.”
“Making a habit of it, then.”
“Oh shut up. Come on, Si, look at it another way. It might take the pressure off us—not that there’s been a lot.”
“How do you know?—you haven’t been here.”
“Well, has there?”
Simon shrugged again.
“God, I could hit you. You’re behaving like Sam.”
“Drop it, then. I just hated it, Cat. It was c I saw her in the kitchen through the window. It was a bad moment.”
She put her hand on his arm. She knew. Simon and their mother.
His mobile rang.
While Simon was outside where he could get a better signal, Cat went upstairs. Sam was sitting at the small desk in his room reading a comic. Hannah was in bed, asleep, fully clothed. Felix was in his cot looking grubby.
Everything blew up inside her at once and she went into the bedroom, furious that Chris could not organise his children properly, dismissive of his continuing jet lag, but as she reached the door Simon called up the stairs that he had to go.
“Another one,” he shouted.
“What?”
“Another shooting. I’ll ring you.”
The front door slammed. Good, she thought, take his mind off Dad. But then she pulled herself up short. Someone was prob ably dead, and they had still not found the killer of the young woman in Dulles Avenue. There was nothing good about it.
Sam had slithered past her, hoping to prove invisible.
“Sam, if you’ve finished your homework it’s—”
“ Mummy, come here!”
You didn’t ignore anyone who called out like that.
Sam was standing, frozen, in the bathroom doorway, and as she came up behind him he turned to her, his face puckered with fear.
Chris was lying awkwardly. He was banging his head on the floor, his eyes were rolling back and a line of froth was bubbling out between his half-open lips.
Nineteen
The ball cracked into the pins. Four down.
Phil groaned.
“Right, stand back.” Helen bent, swung her arm back. Tried to look as if she knew what she was doing. It was her first visit to a bowling alley and she was enjoying herself but uncertain if her lower back might not be agony the following day. She smiled. So what, so what? She cast a glance sideways at Phil. Yes, she thought, and sent the ball down fast.
“Eight.”
“You have done this before.”
“No, honestly not. Beginner’s luck.”
“Quite.”
“I’m still winning.”
It was the fourth time they had been out in ten days. Luck. Yes, speaking of luck.
“Is that your mobile?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s coming from your bag.”
The phone was playing “Love Changes Everything.”
“God. Elizabeth! She must have reprogrammed it. It used to play ‘Oranges and Lemons.’ But as she dug around, the ringing stopped.
“My turn. Got to do better than eight.”
“Hang on.” Lizzieit read. “I’d better call her back.”
“You won’t get a signal in here. Phone her outside.”
She headed for the exit, and as she got into the air of the forecourt the phone rang again.
“Mum?”
Lizzie. Sounding unlike Lizzie. Sounding ten years old again.
“What’s the matter?”
“Mum c” Her voice came through shuddering breaths.
“Where are you?”
“There’s been a shooting. At the Seven Aces. We were waiting to go in. We’re in the street, everyone’s in the street, they wouldn’t let us leave, there’s police, they won’t let us leave—”
“A shooting?”
“Two girls. It was a hen party going in, they were going into the club, we were in the queue c Mum, I think one of them is dead, they both might be dead c”
“Don’t move. We’re coming.”
“They won’t let us move, the police won’t let us move, there are armed police, God, there are two ambulances—”
“We’re coming, OK?”
The signal died as she ran back through the entrance area to the bowling alley, screaming for Phil.
Mobile ringtones fighting for attention in the narrow street. Sirens.
Simon’s own phone rang as he got out of his car. “Can’t talk. It’s a shooting.”
“Oh God, Chris is on the bathroom floor, he’s having a fit.”
“Sir?” The armed response command came up and Simon cut Cat off.
They had done a good, quick job on the scene in front of the club. Those who had been queuing were inside the foyer area, the public held back, tapes in place. The ambulances were there, a couple of paramedics inside treating for shock, four or five behind the screens which had been set up.
Simon went through. One body lay on the ground, covered, blood seeping. Another was concealed by the huddle of green-suited figures, drips held up. DOCTOR. Fluorescent yellow letters on green jackets.
“One dead, one badly injured. They were part of a hen party going in together. A couple of the others are inside being treated but they’re not critical. Just shocked. That one is too bad to move.”
“Any ID?”
“Yes. The other girls told us. Dead one was Claire Pescod.”
“Any idea where the shots came from?”
Bronze Command pointed to the buildings opposite the club. “Either somewhere in there, but it’s a semi-derelict building—”
“The old granary.”
“–or next door c offices—top floor unoccupied, no one there at this hour.”
“Night security?”
The armed officer shook his head.
“Any sign of the gunman?”
“I’ve sealed off both buildings and they’re secured. We’ll go in after we’ve completed the exterior check. If he’s in there, he won’t be going far.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Twenty minutes. We’ve been here ten—the second ARV followed straight on.”
“Right. Thanks. I’m going inside. Who else is here?”
“DS Willis, DC Green.”
The paramedics were lifting the injured girl steadily, slowly, drips still held high, crowded round the stretcher.
“DC Green?”
“Sir?” Fiona Green turned from the club doorway.
“Go in the ambulance. Doesn’t look as if she’ll be in any fit state to talk but we need anything you can get. Let me know.”
“Sir.”
“David?” Simon spoke to Sergeant Willis as he went into the foyer of the club. “I need to set up a temporary incident room here. Is there an office?”
“The manager’s already handed his over to us, guv. He’s with the rest of the staff. They’re waiting in the bar.”
“How many uniform have we got?”
“Four outside, two in.”
“That’ll do for now. Right, let’s get on with it.’
Twenty
He was not out of breath. He had walked steadily for a couple of hundred yards. Got into the van, moved off, driven out onto the Bevham Road. Speeded up on the bypass.
Three miles. Turned left. Country road. Drove at forty. Turned right into the old airfield.
Rabbits fled away in the sweep of the headlights. It was a warm night.
Doused the lights. Switched off the engine. Torch. It took a couple of minutes to peel off the panel.
D.F. STOKES. PLUMBING. CENTRAL HEATING. CORGI REGISTERED. 07765 400 119.
He rolled up the plastic and slipped it under one of the corrugated-iron panels of the hangar, between the metal hoop and the struts. Seven struts down. It was completely hidden.
He was back on the road by nine ten. Heading in.
Twenty-one
“Send the ambulance away,” Richard Serrailler said.
“Dad, he needs to go to hospital.”
“You heard what your father said. Send the ambulance away. You heard what I bloody well said. Just do it, why can’t you?”
Cat knew that this was not Chris, equable, cheerful Chris, not the Chris who was her husband but some other man, some irritable stranger leaning back on the sofa with a pillow at his head. But she was hurt in spite of what she knew.
She had telephoned her father and the ambulance, and her father had arrived first, with Judith, who was now upstairs with the children. Chris had come round slowly from his fit and she had managed to help him downstairs. The paramedics had tried to take over but Chris had lost his temper and sworn, and only agreed to sit here under sufferance. He had been going to take a shower, he said, and he planned to continue.
The green-suits stood by, waiting for a decision. Cat got up and beckoned them outside. “I’ll persuade him,” she said, “and then my father and I can bring him in. I’m sorry about this.”
“So long as you can manage, Doc. But you should try to get him to come with us, it’d be safer.”
“I know. But you heard him.”
Their bleeper went for another call and they left. Cat watched the ambulance turn in the driveway. Not wanting to go back into the kitchen, not wanting her medical mind to throw information at her which she wasn’t ready to deal with.
She headed upstairs.
They were on the big bed, Judith and all three children, Felix asleep on his tummy, the other two leaning against her listening to The Fantora Family Files. Hannah had her thumb in her mouth but she pulled it out as Cat appeared.
“Is Daddy dead?”
“Has Dad gone in the ambulance?” Cat sat down beside them. “No and no, he’s on the sofa having a glass of water and Grandpa is with him. When he’s feeling up to it, we’ll drive him to the hospital.”
“Why? That’s what the ambulance does, it drives people to hospital.”
“Daddy will be more comfortable in the car.”
“Going in an ambulance is cool.”
“Yes and uncomfortable.”
“I’m happy to hold the fort here,” Judith said.
“Thank God you could come.”
“Yes, thank God you could read to us, you’re a good reader aloud,” Hannah said, wriggling closer to her. “She’ll be able to look after us, we’ll show her where everything is and what we do.”
“And what time you’re supposed to be asleep, which is now.”
“Right,” Judith said. “End of this chapter and then I learn how to put the Deerbon Three to bed.”
“Felix is easy-peasy, you just dump him down.”
“And I put myself to bed so there’s only the baby-waby girl.” Sam dived for cover.
Judith closed the book with a snap. She said nothing but both children went quiet.
Cat slipped out.
Chris was sitting as she had left him, his colour better, his expression mutinous.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “You heard. Now bugger off, the pair of you.”
Twenty-two
“Serrailler?”
“It’s me, I’m at c” But Cat could hear the sirens and voices down the phone. “I’ll talk to you later. I’m at the hospital with Chris.”
“Hold on.” Simon walked a few yards away up the road. “It’s just a scare c some kids letting off fireworks but some woman thought it was a shooting. What’s wrong with Chris?”
“We’re waiting for an MRI scan. I tried to tell you. He had some sort of fit.”
“When? Why?”
“I don’t know. Dad’s here with me.”
“Guv?”
“Got to go. I’ll call you as soon as I’m free. Text me.”
“Yes.”
“Cat? Chin up. It’ll be fine.”
“Will it?”
“Yes. Chris is tough.”
The woman had gone to hospital as a precaution, shocked but unhurt. The rest of the street had calmed down.
In the armed response vehicle they were preparing to leave, after another abortive call-out.
“What isall this?” Clive Rowley said. “As if we didn’t have enough, with a real killer out there. Flaming kids.”
“Didn’t sound like kids. Men, that woman said.”
“She wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Hardly surprising.”
“Probably cap guns. You ever have a cap gun, Clive?”
“No.”
“My dad’s still got his. No caps though. He says they smelled of sulphur c give out quite a crack though.”
“Could have been caps. Could have been fireworks.”
They had scoured the streets but whoever had terrified the woman and whatever had made the gunshot noise had long gone.
“You on training this weekend?”
The ARV was backing.
“Yes. All of Unit 3.”
“Tim?”
“No. Baby should be here by then. I’m off from tomorrow.”
“My back itches,” Clive said.
It itched right in the middle, beneath the body armour and his shirt, driving him mad, but he’d have to wait until they had checked in and been stood down before he could get at it.
“What do you reckon?” he asked Duncan. “Nuts?”
“This lot? More like malicious.”
“I meant the other one. The one earlier this evening. He’s killed three women now.”
“Two. Two dead. Tonight’s was a deer rifle with telescopic, Dulles Avenue was a Glock. Doesn’t have to be any connection.”
“Course there’s a connection. Got to be.”
“Why? Coincidence.”
Clive shook his head. “I don’t buy that. No one’s heard a gunshot in Lafferton for years apart from that bloke who topped himself and then we get three women shot in three days. Got to be a connection.”
“You heard if forensics came up with anything at the old granary?”
“Not a sniff. Not yet. Give it time. I don’t think he was in the granary at all, me, I reckon he fired from the roof of that office block next door.”
“They’ll have to go all over that as well.”
“What makes you say that, Steve? That he was on the roof? They found that rope by the fire escape.”
“He jumped across. Easy enough. From the roof he’d a clear sighting down onto the street.”
Clive Rowley shrugged and twisted about, trying to get at the itch and not succeeding as the vehicle swayed round a corner. False alarms were going to happen until everything settled down. Women thinking they’d heard gunshots, kids messing about—inevitable. Frustrating.
But there were two good days coming up—training days were always good. They reminded you what it was all about, what you were there for, what might happen and how you dealt with it. They kept you up to the mark, sharpened you. This time round they were training on the old airfield. Best of all. “Kids,” his sister said, “you’re like a load of bloody kids, running round playing goodies and baddies.”
He was off tomorrow. He might go up there. See her, see her kids. He hadn’t been for a couple of weeks. Let her wind him up about being a big kid himself. The van pulled up outside the station. Clive was the first out. Couldn’t wait to get processed and then strip to sort out his flaming itch.
Twenty-three
“You know too much,” Richard Serrailler said, “inevitably.”
The radiography waiting area was empty, quiet for the night. The plastic tiles had been mopped and a bright yellow V-board planted in the middle. DANGER OF SLIPPING. WET FLOOR.
“I know what people mean,” Cat said, “when they say they can’t stand the smell of hospitals. You don’t notice it when you work inside one all day but when you come in like this, it’s unbearable.”
“Listerine,” Richard said. He was standing, looking at a poster about tuberculosis.
“I wish I didn’t know anything. Right now, I wish I was waiting for a neurologist to come and tell me good news and I wish I was able to hang on to it.”
“You can do that.”
“Can I?”
He went on reading.
“I rang Simon,” said Cat.
“I hope Simon is busy catching people who shoot young women dead.”
“Dad c”
Anyone else would have helped her out, turned, smiled, made some gesture, but her father was not like that. She had something to say so he waited to hear what it was. He was not unkind, not unfeeling, as Si believed, he was rational. “Simon was a bit surprised to meet Judith. But don’t hold it against him. He wasn’t expecting it and he misses Ma more than any of us.”
“How can you be the judge of that?”
“Sorry. But you know.”
“And you? What do you feel?” Now he did turn to look at her.
“I miss Ma, of course I do, I miss her now, I wish she was here now more than anything.”
“I meant what do you feel about Judith?”
Cat looked at her father. I have never understood you, she thought, never known what makes you tick. None of us has—almost certainly Ma never did but she found a way of living with you, and I have always felt that you and I had a good relationship in spite of it. Simon is the only one who does not, cannot and probably will not. Yet at this moment you might as well be a rather unsympathetic stranger.
“I like Judith,” she said. It sounded lame but exhaustion and anxiety hit her like a fist in her gut so that she felt suddenly faint.
Richard did not speak, he simply walked away, out of the waiting area and down the corridor.
Cat thought nothing. She was beyond thought. And perhaps it was easier to be here alone.
He returned with a plastic cup of coffee and handed it to her. “Difficult,” he said. “I know it’s difficult.”
Cat sipped. It was black and sweet.
They had not talked in the car: Richard had driven and Cat had sat in the back with Chris, who had grumbled for a short time that he had no reason to be going to hospital and had then fallen completely silent until they arrived. He had remained silent, not meeting her eye, responding curtly to the immediate questions, nodding agreement to the scan.
“He knows,” she said now. “He knows the score as well as we do.”
“He knows the options but it is always harder to make objective judgements about oneself.”
The door of the scanning suite opened. How could she have sent so many patients here and never had any real idea of what it was like for them to go inside, and for their families to wait out here, wait for the news, wait for someone in a white coat to start talking to them in language they did not know, give them news they could not interpret? Not yet. Not here.
She stood up. The registrar was a young woman.
“Shall we talk here or do you want to come into the office?”
“Is my husband c?”
“He’s going onto the ward. I need to admit him at least for the rest of tonight and Dr Ling will see him tomorrow, if you’re happy with that?”
Christina Ling. Consultant neurologist.
“May I see the scans?”
“Yes of course. Dr Serrailler?”
“I am not an experienced interpreter of MRI pictures,” Richard said.
“Come with me all the same,” Cat said. She did not need her father for emotional support, she would not ask for his shoulder, she needed to draw on his detachment, his professionalism, his ability to rationalise, even with his own family. It was a sort of strength.
The screen glowed neon blue, the strange, impersonal image like an illustration in a textbook.
Cat stared. The cross section—the slice, the layers of this image inside the bony cavity—was the inside of her husband’s brain, Chris, the father of her children, Dr Chris, the man she loved and had been with for fourteen years. Chris. Chris’s brain.
Dr Louise Parker, the badge read in black letters on pale blue plastic. Neurological Senior Registrar.
She was leaning forward, pointing at the screen with the cursor.
Richard Serrailler cleared his throat.
“Yes,” Cat said. “I see it.”
It was always the way. You knew, but you pretended you did not; you feared the worst, not because you were a pessimist but because you knew the medical facts. It was your job.
She had known.
“The lesion is here,” Dr Parker said, highlighting the shadowed area. “It’s already quite large. He must have had symptoms, but they can grow pretty rapidly as you know. The pressure just reached a point where it triggered off some electrical activity, causing him to fit. It would explain the mood changes—personality changes.”
“Yes,” Cat said.
“Has he complained of headaches?”
“He has, but he didn’t imply they were severe—I put it down to the stress of packing up and travelling. Jet lag. He’s been very tired—I should have realised. I should have known it wasn’t prolonged jet lag.”
“Easy to miss. He says he’s vomited a couple of times in the last few days.”
“He didn’t tell me. Why didn’t he say anything?” She looked at her father but could not read his expression because there was none. He might not have heard the conversation.
Chris’s brain. She looked at the shadowed portion, trying to assess exactly where the tumour lay in relation to the rest, to assess the prognosis, to behave as if she were a doctor and this were a patient’s scan. To behave like her father.
“It doesn’t look good,” she said at last.
“No. Dr Ling will look at it first thing tomorrow and talk to you about the options.”
“May I see Chris?” I am a helpless relative, she thought. Everything has changed.
“Of course. I’ll take you along. Dr Serrailler?”
“I’ll wait in the car. No point in crowding him.”
*
Chris was in a side ward. The lights were dimmed. Three other beds, one with a prone figure, one humped over. One with the curtains drawn. Murmured voices. Drip stands. Cat felt a swell of fear.
He was propped up on a pillow rest. Hospital gown.
“I’ll go and see if someone can find him pyjamas,” the registrar said.
Hospital pyjamas.
But he was Chris. He looked no different. Somehow she had expected him to have changed.
He looked at her. Looked away.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” She hadn’t meant to accuse. “You must have known it wasn’t just jet lag.”
“I used to have migraines—in my teens. I thought they’d come back.”
She put her hand on his.
“Seen the scan?”
“Yes. MRI diagnosis is for the experts. You’ll see the neurologist in the morning.”
“Where are the children?”
“With Judith.”
“Who’s Judith?”
“Dad’s friend. You’ve had a sedative, don’t worry.”
Chris was silent. Drowsing? Thinking?
She moved to get up but he turned his hand quickly, pinning her own down. Cat leaned over and stroked his forehead. “I’ll come in early.”
“If it’s a grade-four I want you to give me a morphine overdose. Promise me.”
“Don’t try and diagnose yourself.”
“ Promise me, Cat.”
She was silent. She could not promise. She could not begin to think of what it would mean if he was right. But he wasn’t right.
“A glioma. Anything above a grade two. Please.”
“Try to sleep. But you know there are plenty of other brain tumours. Don’t leap straight to the worst. Don’t think about it any more tonight.” For God’s sake, she thought, how stupid. How stupid, stupid, stupid. Don’t think about it any more. As if.
She leaned over to kiss him.
Chris turned his face away.
“Strange,” Richard said as they turned out of the hospital car park. “The symptoms are contradictory. The epileptic fit and the drowsiness indicate a brain stem tumour whereas the mood changes are consistent with one in the frontal lobe. Glioma, would you say? Has he had eye problems? There’s certainly no ataxia that I could see.”
Cat struggled to reply. The car seemed to be airborne, streaming ahead down the bypass. Her father had always been a careful, safe and very fast driver. Her mind was a swirling mass of images and nothing would stay still.
“What did Chris have to say?”
She meant to reply that he had been sedated and not very communicative. She said, “He made me promise that if it was a grade-four I would give him an overdose.”
“Ah. Interesting.”
“ Interesting?”
He did not reply.
“For heaven’s sake, there are dozens of possibilities, aren’t there? It could be benign, in which case it might be amenable to surgery and he’ll make a full recovery. It could be amenable to radiotherapy. It may not even be a tumour. An MRI is hard to read, you said so yourself.”
“Not that hard.”
“My God, you are a comforter. I’m struggling here, Dad. I need you to help me.”
“Of course I’ll help you. What on earth do you expect?”
“You sound so clinical.”
“I’m a clinician. So are you. Just because I’m talking like a medic doesn’t mean I am without any feeling. I’m extremely sorry for Chris. It is not a road I would wish anyone to have to travel.”
“How can someone ask his wife to kill him?”
“He spoke only of one particular circumstance.”
“In any circumstance.”
“Easily. I would do the same.”
“Never ask me.”
“Martha,” Richard said now, as they stopped for a set of red lights, “would have asked for it, if she’d been able to. I see that now.”
“Martha?”
“As it was, your mother had to take the burden on herself. At the time, I was horrified. I was blinded by grief to the truth, which was that it was the right thing to do. I was unable to think rationally—to see reason. Your mother had to see it for me.”
The lights changed and a motorcyclist roared across their path as Richard accelerated. He braked and swerved and the bike vanished into the darkness in a trail of exhaust smoke. They turned right. They were on the country road. Three miles or so from Cat’s home.
“What is the statistic for the deaths of young men on motor bicycles?”
“I want you to stop. I need you to tell me what you mean.”
“No need to stop. It was perfectly clear.”
“No, it was not perfectly clear.”
“Don’t shout at me, Catherine.”
“I don’t understand what you just said. About Mum and Martha. You have to tell me.”
She looked at him as he drove. His narrow face was set in a neutral, calm expression as he watched the road. I do not know this man, Cat thought, but I do understand why Simon feels as he does.
“I would probably never have told you. But now you know. Your mother gave Martha an injection of potassium. She could not bear to see her existence continue in that way. She told me and I agreed to say nothing to anyone else. Until now I’ve kept that promise. But as the subject arose again it seemed appropriate to tell you. I presume you agree we should keep this between ourselves?”
Twenty-four
It was very late. Judith sat in the Deerbons’ friendly kitchen and thought about the day her husband had died.
She had been making notes for a case conference about a child they thought they would have to take into care. There had been a cat then too, huge and grey with scarred ears. Gasper, named by David. Fifteen years before. A scrap of pathetic fluff found in a puddle by her daily help and brought to them in a duffel bag. Now David was in the Congo saving lives, Vivien in Edinburgh doing her vet training and Gasper was spreadeagled in a patch of late sunshine on the kitchen table beside her, one paw occasionally reaching out to scratch half-heartedly at her file. Don had gone fishing, leaving at dawn. He never woke her. She had come downstairs just after seven but he had been long gone to his favourite stretch of the Test.
The Deerbon cat, Mephisto, was on the chair opposite her, a tight, neat ball, paws tucked away.
She remembered making a pot of tea and looking at the clock to work out when to put the casserole in, thinking about her case, worrying about it as she always did. Taking a child from its parents was never easy, she never felt other than anxious about it, that was why she had been reading the case notes again.
She remembered the child’s name. Campbell Wild.
Don should have been home by eight. There had been the sound of the car a little after seven. Good, she had thought, I can go for an early bath and Don can peel the potatoes after he’s sorted out his fish. Assuming there are fish.
And then there had been the sound not of his key in the door but of the bell. Ringing, ringing.
He had managed to struggle to the bank before falling onto it, face down, as the pain of the coronary hit him, and had lain there half the day before a couple had come by, walking their Labradors.
It had been her husband’s registrar, who had turned up one Sunday morning a month later and simply told her that he was going to drive her there and that perhaps she might want to pick some flowers to take with her. He had been the week before, he said, on a recce. Knew where to go, found the spot. He had been gentle and firm, a nice boy with a strangely domed forehead, rimless spectacles. When they reached the exact place on the riverbank, he had gone away and left her alone for about twenty minutes. Afterwards, they had gone to eat a steak in a nearby pub. He had sussed that out in advance too.
Mephisto stirred and yawned and burrowed more deeply back into sleep and then there were the lights of the car swinging into the drive.
But it was Simon who came into the kitchen, and then stood looking at her, glancing around then back at her again, and she saw that his initial surprise and disapproval had been quickly shuttered. His expression blanked to nothing.
“What happened?”
Seeing him, tall and pushing his white-blond hair off his face in a gesture she recognised even in this short time, she felt intensely sorry for him. She saw not a man of nearly forty and a senior police officer but a boy.
“Simon, I’m sorry—first you find me in the kitchen at Hallam House and now here. I know what it looks like.”
“Oh. What does it look like?”
Children react like this, Judith thought, remembering how David had been the same. The best way was to carry on as normal and let them come round. Or not. She filled him in.
“The children have been fine. They’re all asleep now. Can I make you tea or something?”
“I’ll do it. I’ll make coffee. You?”
“Thanks. Yes, I would like some.”
He opened cupboards, took out the cafetière, set the kettle to boil, all with his back to her. She stayed on the sofa, stroking the cat. Waiting. There was no point in saying more and making things worse. He minded. She had been in his mother’s place, and now she was here.
“Are you on duty?” It seemed all right to ask.
“Yes. Everyone is on alert at the moment.”
“The shooting, yes. Has there been another?”
“Yes. One girl shot dead, another hurt. And a false alarm. The town’s wired up with it. Every time someone coughs in a quiet street we get an emergency call.”
“All women. All young. And shot. For what? Dear God.”
She watched him pour the boiling water on the coffee grounds. There was something about the way he bent over, the set of his head, that made her feel for him even more. Richard had every right to be seeing her. She had every right to see him. But that would not be the way it seemed to Simon. He set the coffee down. “Budge,” he said, shifting Mephisto. The cat turned, rearranged himself into the small space between Simon’s leg and the chair arm and closed his eyes again.
I shouldn’t be here, Judith thought. I am an unwelcome intruder. She felt, as she had often felt as a widow, ill at ease and out of place in the midst of someone else’s family, another person’s home. It was the loneliest and the bleakest of feelings.
Twenty-five
There were six of them round the table. The Chief Constable, Chief Superintendent Gilligan, Armed Response Gold Command, a DCS from Bevham and Serrailler with one of the DIs from the Lafferton force. Simon had already done a briefing that morning. The wounded girl had died during the night without regaining consciousness. The team was out on house-to-house, questioning everyone who had been in and around the Seven Acesclub, visiting the workplaces of the murdered young women. It was the usual routine, painstaking police work which might lead somewhere.
The Chief was grim-faced.
“Simon, are you a hundred per cent sure there is no connection between these young women killed outside the nightclub and the one c” she glanced at her papers “c Melanie Drew, murdered at her flat?”
“No. Of course I’m not sure. How can I be? But at this stage the only connection we’ve made is that they were all at the Sir Eric Anderson school. The nightclub girls were best friends. Melanie Drew was older. We’re still talking to people and we’re still checking everything—churches, sports places, societies they might have joined, even pubs and restaurants they could all have frequented. We’ve checked out Melanie’s husband and Claire Pescod’s fiancé but found no link at all.”
