Текст книги "The Risk of Darkness"
Автор книги: Susan Hill
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 19 страниц)
“Police. If you are inside there and able to hear me, would you please call out? I would like to talk to you.”
He waited. Silence.
“I would like to speak with you. Please tell me who you are.”
The silence was so dense, so absolute, that he almost turned and beckoned to the team to come down and bring the rammer to break down the door. If anyone was inside this bungalow he was surely no longer alive.
The blackbird sang from the lilac tree.
“What do you want?”
The voice was low and came from inches away on the other side of the letter flap.
“I’m DCI Simon Serrailler. I would like to know who is in there, please. Would you open the door so that I can check things are all right?”
“No.”
“In that case, perhaps you’d just tell me your name. If there is anything wrong, I’d like to try and help.”
“There’s nothing.”
“Will you tell me your name?”
There was a pause. Then, “Do you have to shout?”
“If you can hear me, no, I don’t.”
“Come to the window.”
“Which one?”
“At the front. She’s asleep.”
“Who is asleep? Can you tell me who you are and who else is in the house with you? The usual occupant is the Reverend Jane Fitzroy. Can you tell me if she’s in there with you?”
Now, there were footsteps, quietly receding. Serrailler waited. Then, signalling to the team that he had made contact, he walked to the front window. The curtains were drawn and, for a moment, there was no sound, no movement. Then one of the windows was pushed slightly ajar.
“Don’t try and break in.”
“I won’t.”
“Stay where you are.”
“I’m staying here, outside the window. I’m not going to try to enter the house. I’d just like to speak to you. It would be really helpful to know who I’m talking to.”
A pause.
“What did you say your name was?”
“DCI Simon Serrailler.”
“Who got you here?”
“Someone called us to say they had heard screams.”
“She’s fine. I told you. She’s asleep.”
“Who is asleep? Can you just tell me that?’
“She’s OK.”
“And you?”
“Not. Not OK.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Lizzie.”
“Is that Lizzie you have with you?”
“Lizzie is dead.”
“I see. Can you tell me who is with you?”
“Why?”
“I need to know if they’re all right. Is it Miss Fitzroy? Is she all right?”
“She’s all right.”
“Why won’t you tell me your name? I’m Simon, you—”
“I’m not a bloody imbecile, you told me your name once, don’t bloody talk to me like that.”
“I’m trying to get you to tell me your name, that’s all.”
“OK, OK. Max. Max, Max, Max, Max, Max, Max, Max c Shit. MAX.”
“Thanks. Max.”
“Max Jameson.”
He sounded weary for a second. Weary enough to give in? He might have had enough.
“All right, Max c is there any reason why you won’t let me inside there?”
“She’s asleep.”
“Who is?”
“She is. I don’t want to disturb her.”
“Fine. We needn’t. So long as I can make sure she’s all right—you’re both all right—we can let her sleep.”
“She’s fine. Lizzie isn’t, Lizzie’s dead, but she’s fine.”
“Tell me about Lizzie, Max.”
“Lizzie.”
He said the name as if it were strange to him. Experimentally.
“Lizzie,” he said again.
“Yes. Tell me about her. Will you?”
“She’s dead. What’s to tell? She died.”
“Max, I’m sorry.”
“Of course you’re not, you didn’t know her, how could you be?”
“Because you sound distressed.”
“Distressed.”
“Yes.”
He laughed again, a short, dry, hard little laugh. “Fuck it, you don’t know.”
“So tell me.”
But then the man’s hand reached out briefly to close the window. The curtain had scarcely parted.
Serrailler waited. The bungalow was again wrapped in the same, dreadful pall of silence. He stood for ten minutes but there was not the slightest further sound or movement.
He went to the letter box, pushed it open and called out Max Jameson’s name, asked him to reply, to come back and talk. Silence.
He went back up the path through the shrubs and fruit trees.
“Guv?”
He shook his head.
It was going to take a long time. He had assessed the situation incorrectly. He headed into the close. They had thrown a cordon round the area and, outside it, people were gathering to watch, drawn as always and as if by some magic force to a scene of potential calamity.
He spoke to the Super. Was the situation in hand? More or less. Was it likely to escalate? Hard to tell. He still had no idea why the man was holding whoever it was inside the house, or what he wanted or hoped to achieve. How dangerous was he? Hard to tell.
It was all nebulous, the most frustrating and yet, curiously, potentially the most interesting sort of situation and one which Simon was gripped by and determined to resolve. Who was this man? Who was with him? Who was Lizzie? Was Lizzie dead in there? Did “asleep” mean “dead”? He would tease the truth out, little by little, moving carefully and tactfully. He wanted to know. This was not some crude criminal act of violence, the stupid game of an idiot off his head on crack. It was not so obvious.
It was not obvious at all.
“I think it may take some time but there’s no threat beyond the bungalow, so far as I can tell. He’s isolated himself there, it’s easily surrounded and easily contained.”
“We’ll stay back out of the way then.”
“Yes. I’d like to know if there have been any sudden or violent deaths in the last few weeks with a victim called Lizzie, possibly Lizzie Jameson but I’m not certain, RTAs, suicides c And where is the Reverend Jane Fitzroy? Has she been to work? Anyone seen her?”
“Anything else?”
“Not yet.”
“Has he asked for anything?”
“No. We haven’t got that far c not sure if we will. I’m not sure of anything much but I’m going back down there now. He’s had a few minutes to think.”
How strange, Serrailler thought, this garden, half wild towards the bottom, everything flowering in the sun, birds, insects, sweet smells. How strange. In the middle of it all, there is this small silent stone bungalow and inside c
What?
“Max?” he called quietly. Then he lifted the letter box and raised his voice. “Max? Will you answer me?”
The sun shone on his back as he crouched there, warming him.
Eighteen
She had slept again. How could she have slept? To sleep you have to feel safe and she thought she had never felt less safe in her life. Perhaps, in some strange way, she trusted Max not to harm her simply because he was beside himself with grief and confusion but no longer full of rage.
He had put a blanket over her. She stretched her legs and arms to ease her cramped muscles, then turned. The curtains were still drawn but the sun was behind them, filling the room with a blotted, honey light. And the sun caught something, making it shine. Jane sat up.
There were three knives laid out neatly on the coffee table, two large kitchen knives, and one small new paring knife which she had bought a couple of days before. The sun flashed against the metal.
Max was sitting in a chair beside the window, watching her. “Don’t touch them,” he said.
She felt a lurch of sickness. She had slept, innocently, trustingly, for how long? While he had laid out three knives beside her.
“What c?” Her throat was dry with fear. “What is happening? Why have you c what are the knives doing there?”
He got up and she shrank back into the blanket but he did not come near her, only turned to lift the corner of the curtain very slightly and peer out.
It was only when he turned back that she realised she would have had time to snatch one of the knives.
“Someone was there just now,” he said, his voice normal, pleasantly conversational, “but they seem to have gone.”
“Who?”
He shrugged.
“Max, people will know I’m missing c they’ll be coming down here to look for me. I had a meeting at the hospital, I should have been to sort something out in the Dean’s office c people will c”
“It seems they already have. Don’t worry, they won’t come back.”
“Did you speak to someone?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
He shrugged again.
“I don’t understand what you want. Please, please just tell me what this is about.”
“You know.”
“Lizzie c yes, I do know that, but I don’t see why keeping me here will help you. It can’t bring Lizzie back, you have to accept that. Whatever you do to me can’t change what has happened. I have to say this. Even if you c stab me with one of those, it won’t change what has happened.”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Getting even with God.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“No. But you do.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“None of it makes sense. Death doesn’t. Lizzie being dead doesn’t.”
“So by holding me here you somehow think c what? I’m trying to get to wherever you are but it’s quite hard.”
“You never will. You can’t.”
“How do you feel?”
“What?”
“You’re angry and distressed, I know, but how else? Does your mind feel c are you thinking clearly?”
“Oh yes.”
“Because I don’t see that.”
“No.”
She fell silent. He looked grey and dishevelled, his eyes were dull. There seemed to be a weariness rather than any craziness or rage about him.
God, give me the right words.
But no words came to her. Her mind was a white, shining, empty space.
“What kind of God is yours, Jane?”
Her throat tightened. She did not know.
“The gentle Jesus? The healer? The merciful one? When we went to the service in the chapel and they prayed over Lizzie, they talked about mercy and healing and comfort and grace and she said it helped her but I don’t understand that. How could it have helped her? She got worse and she died. She died a dreadful death, you know. We all have to die. I don’t understand that.”
Do I? Jane thought. Now the space was black and swirling and dangerous, not a peaceful, beautiful emptiness. “I don’t know. I don’t pretend to have all the answers to life and death.”
“Why not?”
“You are too intelligent for this, you must know I can’t pretend to, all I can do is believe. Faith. It’s about faith. And trust.”
“Lizzie trusted.”
“How do you know her trust was misplaced? You don’t know. There are many sorts of healing.”
“Such as?”
“Max, listen c I’m exhausted. I need a shower and something to eat and some fresh air and so do you. We need normality. I can’t think straight. I can’t have this sort of conversation under threat c how can I? I’ll talk to you, I’ll pray with you c anything c but not like this.”
“It was the police.”
“Sorry?”
“A policeman. He talked and then he went away.”
“If the police are here then you’ve got to stop this. You’ve done nothing wrong and I wouldn’t dream of pressing charges against you but you have to let me open the door and walk out.”
“No.”
“They can break in.”
“They’ve gone.”
“No. Maybe they’ve retreated but they won’t have gone. Of course they won’t.”
“No one will break in. I won’t let that happen.”
“You can’t stop it happening. Come on c think.”
He smiled then and his smile chilled her because it did not lighten his face or reach his eyes. Perhaps, she thought suddenly, this is not only about Lizzie. Perhaps he is not simply mad because of her death. Perhaps he ismad. And dangerous. And desperate. Perhaps c
There was a sound at the window. Max leapt out of the chair and went swiftly across to it but did not lift the curtain. He stood listening intently, but when Jane made a movement he turned round so quickly that she froze. He looked at the knives, then at her.
“Max?” A man’s voice from outside. “Please come and speak to me. Are you all right?”
Everything went still and silent for a long time. The sun crept over the small desk, catching the frame of her father’s photograph. A butterfly was spread out in a corner of the white wall, a red admiral, rich and quivering in the warmth.
“Max?”
Please. Please c
“I’m here.”
“Will you open the window?”
He hesitated, then pushed the handle forward a little.
“Thank you. Can you open the curtain?”
“Why?”
“It makes it easier to talk to someone you can see.”
“I can talk.”
A pause.
“Is Jane there?”
Max did not answer.
“Can I speak to Jane?”
“No.”
“Is she all right?”
“Why?”
“Come on, Max, reassure me about her, please. You can see why.”
“Jane’s here.”
“Will you let her come to the window?”
“No.”
“OK. Will you just show me your face?”
“No.”
“How long do you plan on staying there, Max? We don’t even know why c if you tell me what it is you want, maybe I can help you sort it out.”
“Are you God?”
“No.”
“My wife’s dead. Can you sort that out?”
“You know I can’t. I understand your distress, I know what—”
“Do you? What do you bloody know?”
There was a slight pause. Then the man said, “Because I know what it is like when someone you love dies. I’m a human being and I have had that happen to me and I know.”
“Your wife?”
“No, but that needn’t make a difference, need it?”
Max turned to look at Jane.
“No,” she said.
“She says—”
“What was that? I can’t hear you very well, can you come a bit nearer the window?”
“No. She says.”
“Who? Jane?”
Max waited.
“Do you want to talk to anyone?”
“I thought I was.”
“I can get a counsellor, if it’s—”
Max laughed.
“OK, then just tell me, if you know, why you are in there and why you are keeping Jane there? Can you tell me? There has to be a reason. Intelligent people don’t do this sort of thing at random. What is it you want? Max, we will help you as much as we can but none of us can bring your wife back to life. Not Jane. Not me. No one. You know that really, don’t you?”
“God can.”
“Do you believe that?”
“No.”
“Who does? Does Jane?”
“I don’t know c no. No. Ought she to?”
“I doubt it. Have you had any sleep?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“You can’t think clearly if you’re exhausted. Why don’t you come out and we can get you home to sleep c things are going to seem a whole lot worse the longer you stay there.”
“Nothing could be worse.”
“I think you realise that you are making them worse, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me look at you.”
“Why?”
“Helps me to talk to you. Might help you to talk to me if we saw one another.” Max did not make any move.
“Do you have enough to eat?”
“We ate something.”
“Is there food in the house? Milk, tea c all of that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can get anything brought down to you if you tell me why you’re there. Help me out here, Max c I can’t understand what’s going on. Just help me.”
Max closed the window.
Jane was sitting hunched up on the sofa, her eyes down. He stared at her. He had thought that she was like Lizzie but now he saw that she was not. She was younger. Smaller. Hair and eyes differently coloured, skin paler. Different. She wore clothes Lizzie would not have worn. She was not like Lizzie. Not Lizzie. He sat down beside her on the sofa and she shrank back from him.
“Lizzie,” he said.
“No.”
“I want to tell you.”
“What?” She sounded tired. Her voice was flat. She didn’t want to listen to him.
“That I have no reason at all to live. That Lizzie was everything and now there is nothing. No point. No reason. Everything I had was Lizzie, everything I did. For Lizzie. About Lizzie. Me. I was about Lizzie. So what is there?”
“Everything. Everything else in the world out there c What would Lizzie want you to do?”
“I hate it when people assume things about the dead. ‘It’s what she would have wanted c’ How do they fucking know? Unless it’s something they talked about, they don’t know. It’s a way of them doing what they want to do with a clear conscience.”
“Sometimes. Yes. Oh yes. We don’t want to cancel the party so we say—”
“‘—It’s what she would have wanted,’” they said together. Max smiled.
“I didn’t know Lizzie. If it had been her c if you had died, would she have turned her back on life?”
“God, no. Lizzie was life. Until c life and Lizzie were interchangeable.”
“So?”
“I’m not Lizzie. I never much cared for life, you know. Then there was Lizzie. I cared for her. Not much else.”
“What a waste.”
“Lizzie’s death is a waste.”
“If that is true—and I don’t know if it is or not—it doesn’t give you the right to throw the rest of life, your life, away. There is everything else c surely you owe it to her to take it with both hands.”
“It fits you, doesn’t it, that bloody collar?”
“Max, I need to go to the bathroom.”
“OK.” He got up.
“I’m very, very tired. Can’t you just stop this, can’t you just go? Please. Just go. No one’s going to do anything to you.”
“Go to the bathroom.”
Her legs were aching, her head felt light. She could no longer think in any sort of logical order. Random ideas came and went. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream.
She went into the bathroom and locked the door. She rinsed her face and held her hands under the cold tap. Prayed, though she was past doing more than committing herself to God. And Max. She remembered to pray for Max.
At least she was being held in her own home. She could eat, drink, pass water like this, wash, sleep. She was unharmed. If she still felt like this, how must it be for people held in terrible surroundings—in the dark, in the cold, under threat, without food, in their own excrement, for days, weeks, months? How must that be?
She rinsed her face again, drank some water. Ran her hands over her hair. Came out.
Max grabbed her and span her round, his arm across her throat. Outside she could hear voices. He dragged her into the sitting room and across to the window, pulled back the curtain with one arm while holding her with the other. Jane caught a glimpse of a man’s face on the other side. Then she realised that Max had one of the knives and was holding it near to her face. It caught the sunlight. She closed her eyes and prayed in desperation, sweat running down the back of her neck.
“Look,” he was shouting, “see? I told you what would happen if you tried to get in. Look.”
But there were only seconds in which the man on the other side of the window and the others some way behind him could see them both, before Max dropped the curtain again. A moment later, he took his arm from her neck and threw the knife into the hearth.
Jane’s legs buckled and she half fell on to the sofa. Max was kneeling on the floor, his face buried in the seat of the upright chair, sobbing.
If she had not been so paralysed with fear and shock that she could not speak, she might have taken the chance to get up and make a dash for the door to get out before he could reach her. But she could do nothing. She just sat, shaking, the breath hurting her chest as she tried to take it in, her heart hammering, the sound of it pulsing through her ears, her head.
They stayed like that for a long time, then the room quietened and the two of them seemed to be in a strange state of suspension and of calm, as if they were sharing something intangible, unutterable, but acutely real and of importance.
After a while, they heard the voice again.
“Max? Can you hear me? Just let me know you can, then tell me you are both all right.”
Max lifted his head slowly. “Tell him,” he said, as if he had run a marathon and could barely catch his breath. “Get up, go to the window.”
Jane hesitated.
“I won’t touch you, Jane.”
Trust, she thought, this is about trust, and I think I have lost mine.
She moved. Stood. Max did not look at her. She walked unsteadily to the window and pulled the curtain back. Outside, a tall man with very fair hair was looking at her.
She nodded.
“Good,” the man said. “OK?”
She did not know.
“Max?” the man called.
But Max sat, looking at the floor, his breathing strange, rasping as if he were asthmatic.
“Jane, can you come to the front door?”
Max still did not look at her.
“Or else, I can come in there. Max, which do you want? Jane to come out here or me to come inside?”
Max shook his head from side to side. Did not speak. Did not look up. He was trapped in his own tight, terrified circle, far out of their reach.
Jane went over to the door. Waited. Into the hall. There, she stopped. She felt as if she should rescue him but to do that she would have to bring Lizzie back to life. There was no way out.
“Jane?”
“The door is locked. He took the key.”
“Wait there.”
She waited. Max stayed in the sitting room, still and silent, head bent forward.
It took a couple of minutes. There was such quietness that she could hear the blackbird in the bush outside. Then footsteps running down the path and the heavy crash of cracking, splintering wood.
The man with the fair hair came through the broken door towards her.
A couple of hours later, she had been discharged from hospital, shaken but unhurt. She did not see Max Jameson.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, in the police car driving through Lafferton streets, so calm, so normal in the late-afternoon sun. “I’d like to go home. I have to see people c see to the door, I c”
“We’ll get that secured, love. You’ve got to make a statement, get him charged.”
“No.”
There were two policemen, one in uniform, driving, a detective beside him. Ginger hair. Cheerful. Ugly.
“I don’t want to charge him. There’s nothing to charge him with.”
“Aw, come on, Reverend, he took you by force and kept you under duress, threatened to slit your throat c course there is. There’s stuff a yard long to put on the sheet. It’s assault, it’s c”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Listen, you can’t take it in yet—”
“I can take it in. I have. Thanks. He is out of his mind with grief. His wife died. He doesn’t know what to do or where to turn, he is angry c There’s nothing to charge him with. I was just c a focus for it all. He didn’t hurt me.”
“Right, tell me he didn’t terrify you and all.” He smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “But all the same.”
The DS shook his head. “If it’d been my wife he’d taken I’d have bloody slaughtered him.”
“But he needs help. Someone to talk to. Not a cell and a charge of assault.”
“Tell you what, no offence, but there’s such a thing as being too forgiving, you know, too Christian. I reckon there is.”
Jane leaned back. She was exhausted. She felt hollow inside, as if there were no blood running through her veins or bones holding her together. She did not go on arguing. She hadn’t the energy.
As the car pulled up in the close, Rhona Dow, the Precentor’s wife, came out of her door.
“Jane, my dear girl. I’m so relieved to see you. What an appalling thing to happen. Now, you’re staying with us, of course.”
It was all Jane could do not to sit down on the path and cry.
Nineteen
The windows of the farmhouse were open and every so often the sound of the Deerbon children’s laughter came out, as if someone were blowing little bubbles of it from a clay pipe. They had spent the afternoon in the paddling pool or under the garden hose, and were now having their baths.
Cat and Simon had two deckchairs, and a bottle of champagne between them on the plastic table. Chris was in and out of the kitchen, making supper.
It was Cat and Simon’s birthday.
“Ivo’s as well,” Cat had said early that morning.
“Happy birthday, Ivo.”
But they were unlikely to hear from the other Serrailler triplet, who ignored birthdays, as he ignored most of the usual markers of normal life.
The early-evening sun was still hot.
“Did you put on sunscreen?”
Simon’s white-blond hair went with a skin that was burned readily.
He waved his hand.
“Well, don’t come running to me in the middle of the night when your face is on fire.”
“OK, I’ll wake Chris.”
It was good, he thought. His favourite place in the world. Dinner being prepared. No need to watch how many glasses of wine he drank, as he would sleep here.
In the field opposite, the ghost-grey pony pressed itself up against the high hawthorn hedge for shade. One end of the paddock had been fenced off for a chicken run, a wooden coop; a dozen ruddy brown hens were pecking about on the grass.
Cat was looking across at them now. “Dear God.”
“You’ll love it. All those good fresh eggs.”
“All that mucking out and the carnage when the fox gets in after I’ve forgotten to shut them up.”
The chickens were her birthday present from Sam, Hannah and Felix, kept a gleeful secret, until six that morning when they had led her, blindfold, into the field.
“A hen-run indicates permanence. You can’t take chickens to Australia.”
“No, there is that to thank God for.”
“You couldn’t leave here. How could you?” Simon reached for the bottle and topped up their glasses. “Here’s to the end of quite a week.”
“God, I still can’t get my head round that. It’s a man’s crime. She’s a man.”
“Sort of, yes. Looked like a boy. We thought it was a bloke in the car the whole time.”
“What is she like? What?I keep thinking about David Angus.”
“Oh so did I. On that ledge next to her, I was supposed to save her life and I thought about David Angus. And Scott Merriman. And Amy Sudden. And God knows, maybe others. I looked at her hair and her hands and her feet, and that is what I thought about. Those children.”
“You’ll get a commendation.”
“Like hell.”
“Are you going up there to charge her?”
“Interview. No evidence for us to charge yet. North Riding have got it open and shut on the little girl but there’s a long way to go on the rest. We’ll get her as well though, and when we do I want to be there. I want to nail her to the bloody floor.”
Cat looked across at him. She had rarely heard him sound so angry. There was something in him that was new, a bitterness, an edge he had either only recently acquired, or managed to conceal until now. She had always thought she knew him as well as she knew herself—certainly better than she knew Chris, who was still capable of startling and wrong-footing her.
Simon caught her eye. “It got to you too,” he said. “Don’t pretend.”
“Yes. David Angus—that got to me. Every time I looked at Sam. It never left me, all day, every day. And it still hasn’t quite sunk in that the person who abducted and murdered these children—children like Sam—is a woman. I’m a woman. I have no take on it at all. I’d have said it would never happen.”
“Most people would agree with you.”
“I wonder if we’re changing. Women. Girls are behaving like boys. They have male aggressions and male attitudes, they are drinking like men, they even fight as readily as men, sometimes more so.”
“Every Saturday night in Bevham city centre.”
“I’ve been trying to teach Hannah to be feisty, to have opinions and stand up for them, to think independently c maybe I’m doing the wrong thing altogether.”
“I wouldn’t worry. She’s got a very girly pink bedroom.”
“When I was training, I was one of three women among seventeen men in my year. If Hannah went into medicine, she would find it the other way round.”
“Would that be a problem?”
“No, of course not. But it demands a big change in attitude. Men’s attitude, principally.”
“I’m not sure Ed Sleightholme fits your new pattern c she’s thirty-eight. A loner. I don’t know what makes her tick but I doubt if it has anything to do with the new social order.”
“What has it to do with?”
“You tell me.”
“I’m not a shrink.”
“Don’t have to be. Think back c not long ago, you got to know a psychopath quite well c saw how he operated.”
Cat shook her head. “Don’t.” She would not have that dark shadow fall across the sunlit afternoon.
“OK, but the point is, a psychopathic killer is a psychopathic killer c a loner, without the ability to form normal relationships, a fantasist, someone without a conscience, someone whose guiding principle is self-gratification, at any cost. I think it’s a strangely sexless condition.”
“Can’t be. There’d be equal numbers of men and women psychopathic killers and there aren’t. I couldn’t name half a dozen women who have killed in that way.”
Simon was silent, twisting the stem of his glass round and round between his fingers. “What about a woman taking someone hostage c or holding them under threat?” he asked after a moment.
“It’s been done c guerrillas c women soldiers. You get female religious militants, female suicide bombers.”
He shook his head. “I don’t mean in war.”
“I can see it in some extreme domestic situation c marital crisis. Someone pushed to the edge. It’s very unusual though, isn’t it?”
“Uniform see a bit of it. Introduce booze and drugs and it escalates.”
“What made you bring up domestic hostages?”
“Yesterday.”
“Yes. I heard on the church grapevine. You don’t expect stray lunatics to wander into English cathedrals.”
“Not sure he is a lunatic. His wife died. He wanted revenge on God, and Jane Fitzroy was the next best thing. She’s too Christian by half. Not pressing charges out of some sort of misplaced charitableness.”
“Well, if he’s in distress—”
“So are a lot of people.”
“Not sure I like the new tough-talking DCI.”
“Get used to him.”
Cat looked sideways at her brother. Then she laughed. “Presumably your chap’s being referred?”
“No one to refer. He disappeared. We’d no reason to hold him.”
“I wonder if Jane’s registered with us. Wonder if he is, come to that. Local?”
“Yep. Those yuppie conversions near the canal.”
“Max Jameson! Oh my God, I should have realised. His wife died c Lizzie. Beautiful, lovely Lizzie Jameson. She had variant CJD. First case I’ve had and I hope it’s the last. I need to see him.”
“Why?”
“I’m his doctor, Si c what’s eating you?”
“You’re too conscientious, that’s what. If he needs you he’ll make an appointment.”
Cat snorted. “Finish the bottle,” she said, making for the house. “Might have a mellowing effect.”
Twenty
The metal grille slid back. The eyes gleamed through. She shrank back but they saw her. They saw her wherever she was in the cell. She had tried lying flat on the floor. They saw her. They came every fifteen minutes. Grille open. Eyes. The eyes swivelled. Focused. Saw her. Stared for twenty seconds. The grille closed again.
She knew what they were waiting for. Hoping for? Make their life easier, wouldn’t it? Only she wasn’t a quitter and killing yourself was quitting. Besides, there wasn’t any way. No sheets. Nothing sharp. Nothing to swallow. The window was right up near to the ceiling. Bars on that too. She couldn’t tell if it was day or night.
She thought a lot about Kyra. They used to make pancakes. Buns. Paper dolls in a row cut out of an old gas bill. She’d never touch Kyra. Kyra was outside the loop. She’d planned to take Kyra to the sea. A caravan. They’d have had a great time, and her mother would have been glad to see the back of her for a week.
She thought a lot about Kyra.
Otherwise she tried not to think of anything. She did word games in her head. Mental arithmetic. She was good at that. She had a smart brain. Wired up right, a teacher had said once. She did spelling backwards, very fast.
But when she slept she lost control and then she was back on the cliff ledge and the sea was waiting for her, leaping up now and then to try and get her, a tiger at the bars of a cage. It was green, like bile. The policeman on the ledge tried to push her into the water and in her dream she fought him, bit into his wrists until she drew blood, and then shoved him spinning down and down. He had made her mad, bloody superior git.
