A Deadly Thaw (2 page)

Kat was fascinated by the scar on Mark’s face. His right cheek had a narrow perpendicular mark that, in a previous session, he’d revealed was the result of his mother throwing a vegetable knife at him when he was ten. His reflexes hadn’t, at that stage, advanced to the degree they’d reached by the time he left home when he was fifteen. He had ducked the flying blade, which, a doctor later suggested, had prevented it piercing his windpipe. But it sliced through his cheek, which bled with a profusion of crimson that had alarmed his mother so much that she had driven him to the A&E department with a warning to say that he had tripped and fallen onto the sharp edge of the kitchen counter.

At the hospital, a young registrar from the Sudan had played enough childhood games with knives to recognise a blade wound and, after sending Mark’s mother away with a nurse to get a cup of tea ‘for her shock’, had asked him what had happened. Mark, yet to develop the sheen of protection that had served him so well up until six months ago, had told him. The doctor had said nothing, patched him up and wished him good luck.

‘What should I say to her in my reply?’

Kat shifted in her seat. Mothers and sons. It had fascinated the Ancient Greeks, and sometimes she wondered how little had changed. Mark possessed the strength of character to leave when he could, going to stay with an elderly uncle whose fundamental dislike of women had extended to his niece. His financial support of Mark had been as much to do with his distrust of all things female as with a desire to stand up to his niece’s abuse of her son. Yet Mark, at thirty-five, was once more being tormented by his mother.

‘What would you like to say to her? Say out loud what you really want to write in your response.’

It was an old counselling trick. People rarely wrote what they wanted to say in the same way that they rarely said what they wanted to. Therapy was a way to air unspoken grievances. Kat let the silence settle around them.

‘I want to say, “Thanks for nothing for getting in touch. I made my decision to sever all ties with you when I was fifteen. I’ve never regretted it for a moment. So, whatever the reason is for getting in touch with me, thanks for nothing.” That’s what I want to say to her.’

Kat waited, but nothing else came. Mark had returned to that fifteen-year-old self, his arms folded and refusing to look her in the eye. She tried another tack. ‘Do you know why she’s decided to contact you now?’ She watched him shake his head. ‘Do you want to try and guess?’

She glanced at the clock. The hour was nearly up. Mark had dropped the news about his mother’s email in the last fifteen minutes. She had seen his agitation build up in the preceding forty-five, but gentle questioning hadn’t revealed anything until he had suddenly blurted out the reason for his tension. ‘We’re going to have to stop shortly. Are you going to be okay until the next session? We can always meet later in the week if you want.’ Now that the session was coming to an end, Kat allowed herself to relax with her client. Despite his agitation, he was smiling across at her, and she felt like grinning back at him.

‘It’s fine. I like my routine, you know.’

Kat didn’t know. He was her first client who had served in the army. He’d seen action too, in Iraq, although it was his childhood that had sent the demons to him, not those days in the heat of the Middle East. She showed him to the door, but he didn’t leave straight away.

He was standing in front of her. A little uncertain. She felt she should move away from him, give him more space, but she was enjoying his proximity. ‘Is everything okay? I have another client in half an hour.’ She looked up again at the clock. ‘But if there’s something you want to talk about now . . .’ He was shaking his head. ‘Until next time then.’

‘My God, it’s the House of Usher.’

Detective Sergeant Damian Palmer smirked next to Connie but said nothing in response. It was officially his day off. He’d been grumbling the day before about a shopping trip to Sheffield with his wife, Joanne, but as soon as he heard about the body on the local radio, he hotfooted it back to Bampton, and Connie picked him up from the train station.

He didn’t look very happy, but Connie couldn’t tell if it was because of his disturbed leave or the fact he’d missed seeing the body. Probably both. She looked up again at the house, shocked that so dilapidated a building had been able to survive the gentrification of Bampton. It was a huge Victorian edifice, made from limestone probably quarried from the nearby hills and erected in the days when the purpose of your residence was to overwhelm and impress. But creating an imposing home also required money to keep up appearances, and Lena Fisher clearly didn’t have the cash to spend on the façade of the house. Or, if she did, she wasn’t spending it where it was needed.

The house wasn’t in a much better state than Hale’s End Mortuary, and at least that was boarded up. Here was a building being lived in. The stone was solid enough. There wasn’t much that years of neglect could do to limestone. However, the wooden windows were another matter. They were not only rotten, it looked like someone had attempted to repair them with strips of cardboard and tinfoil. Some roof slates had slipped out of their fastenings and were lying in a heap near the rusty wrought-iron gutter. At the top of the building, set into the stone under one of the eaves, was the house’s name, Providence Villa.

Connie would have believed the house to be abandoned if it weren’t for the line of washing hanging to one side. It suggested that the address Lena had given to the Probation Service was the correct one. Although, if appearances were anything to go by, God knows what state she would find the occupant in.

They walked up to the front door. The old brass knocker was strangely comforting in its solidity. Connie noticed with surprise that the face in the rusting metal was a Green Man. He leered out at her from the metal oak leaves. Palmer lifted and dropped the brass ring, and Connie listened to the sound echo around the house. It appeared empty, and she wondered how much furniture was on the other side of the door. She was about to peer through one of the grubby windows when the door opened, and there stood a woman.

Connie had long ago learnt that starting an investigation with a set of assumptions was a sure-fire way of making things more difficult for yourself. People rarely reacted in the way you expected, could look unmarked by the vicissitudes of life and could surprise even the most experienced copper.

But Lena was still a surprise. Given she had served a long stretch inside Styal high-security prison, Connie expected at least a visage of shame and possibly guilt. Instead, the woman standing in the open doorway was looking at her with cool detachment. ‘What have I done now?’

Connie wasn’t surprised. Although people rarely identified her as a copper straight away, her tiny frame and fragile appearance lulling suspects into a false sense of security, there were two of them presenting themselves at this woman’s front door. She reminded herself that here was a woman used to the criminal justice system. ‘I’m Detective Constable Childs, and this is Detective Sergeant Palmer. Can we come in?’

She saw, for the first time, a flash of concern in the woman’s expression. She stood aside to let them into the house. As Connie had suspected, the large hall was bare, with only a small side table filled with a jumble of letters and keys, too meagre for the cavernous space. An effort had been made to brighten the interior. The painted walls might have been stained, and a smell of damp assailed her nostrils, but a bunch of hydrangeas was floating in water on the table, their colourful orbs providing a splash of brightness in the dark hallway.

The woman noticed her looking. ‘You like flowers?’

Connie shrugged. ‘No. Well, yes, of course I like flowers but I particularly like hydrangeas. They remind me of my grandmother. She used to have two large bushes growing in her front garden. I don’t remember them being out in spring though.’

The woman stroked one of the heads. ‘They’re the first blooms of the year. The garden is full of the bushes. The flowers are supposed to symbolise vanity and boastfulness. I can’t see the connection myself.’

Connie looked at the flowers and stifled the urge to touch them too. ‘You are Lena Fisher?’

The woman winced. ‘I’m Lena Gray now. I went back to my maiden name. Come through to the living room. Forget about the bloody flowers.’

The lounge was huge, with picture windows at either end. The one looking out towards the front garden was almost obscured by an oak tree whose branches tapped against the glass. The back window at least gave a partial glimpse of the rear garden but was so dirty that all Connie could see was the ghostly outline of her own reflection in the glass as she stared across the room.

She and Palmer sat on one of the sofas, and Lena took the one opposite them. She had long dark hair, streaked with fine threads of silver, pulled up into a French knot. She wore an old white shirt over a grey T-shirt and jeans ripped at the knees. She looked both untidy and effortlessly chic. Connie glanced down at her scuffed shoes and promised herself a shopping trip as soon as the sales started.

‘Ms Gray. You were released from prison in April last year having served ten and a half years of a life sentence. Is that correct?’ The woman nodded but said nothing. Connie carried on. ‘You were convicted of the murder of your husband, Andrew Fisher, in a trial that took place in March 2005. You agree this is the case?’

Again the woman nodded.

Palmer was silent next to her. Watching them both.

Connie could feel her blood pressure beginning to rise. She took a deep breath. ‘When Andrew Fisher was found dead in September 2004, it was initially thought to have been the result of a heart attack. You positively identified him as being your husband. Is that correct?’

The woman’s expression was unreadable. But still she nodded. Connie had had enough. ‘And at what point did you realise he wasn’t, in fact, your husband?’

Silence.

‘And why didn’t you think to mention it when you were subsequently arrested and tried for his murder?’

The woman’s amused expression had gone.

‘Aren’t you going to say something?’

Lena put her head in her hands. Connie waited, giving her time to compose herself.

There was a scraping noise of metal hitting metal, and then the sound of the front door opening and closing. A woman walked into the room, so resembling Lena that Connie had to look back opposite her to make sure what she was seeing wasn’t an optical illusion caused, perhaps, by the shadowing glass.

‘What’s going on?’

Lena stood up but didn’t move away from the sofa. ‘These are . . . detectives.’

As the other woman approached, Connie could see that the resemblance between the two women was superficial. They both had long dark hair and thin-limbed bodies, but whereas Lena Gray was calm self-containment, this new woman had a restless energy which, Connie thought, she was making an attempt to suppress.

The similarity hadn’t gone unnoticed by Palmer. He was looking at the two women with a puzzled frown on his face.

‘I’m Kat Gray. Lena’s sister.’

Sadler hadn’t mentioned anything about a sister. Perhaps she hadn’t been around at the time of the killing.

She walked over to Lena’s sofa and sat down next to her. Two pairs of pale-blue eyes fixed on Connie, and she was suddenly aware of an undercurrent of strength emitting from these two women. She leaned forward. ‘So, Lena. I was asking you at what point you realised that the man you identified as your husband in 2004 wasn’t in fact Andrew Fisher.’

That shocked the new woman. ‘What?’ She swivelled around to look at her sister, who was still staring at Connie. ‘What’s she taking about, Lena?’

Lena shook her head, and Connie, for a moment, let the silence settle over the dusty living room.

‘In 2004, you positively identified a body found in your bedroom as your husband, Andrew. However, given that you had been married to him for five years and that the injuries that the dead man had sustained had not particularly affected his facial features, you must surely have realised that the man you were identifying was not your husband.’

Kat was pale with shock. Her sister, wary. ‘What makes you so certain that the man I identified wasn’t my husband?’

Connie looked at the two sisters. ‘Because earlier today the body of a man was found which we believe to be that of Andrew Fisher. So the question I’m putting to you, Ms Gray, is who did you kill on the nineteenth of September 2004?’

After the police had gone, Kat went into the kitchen and put the kettle on the hob. She hunted around for matches and finally located them under a damp tea towel on the kitchen counter. It was useless to complain to Lena. Especially now they had more important things to discuss. Nothing could be forced into the open. Ever since she was a teenager, Lena had responded only to words of encouragement and enticement. Any criticism, implied or otherwise, would be met with withdrawal and distance.

As the kettle spluttered to life, Kat thought back to the other time when the police had come to the house. She hadn’t been living here then. She’d taught English abroad for most of the 1990s, returning in 1998 to retrain as a therapist. She’d used her savings to rent a modern loft in the old textile mill at Litton. Although housed in a Victorian building, it was aeons away from the draughty wreck that this place had become.

Then, one day in 2004, she had a call to say that her brother-in-law was dead, and she’d gone back to her childhood home to support her sister. And she had. At least for a short time. But then the police had come to arrest Lena, and, after that fateful visit, Kat had never, really, ever left. Because Lena had gone with them. No denials, no protestations of innocence. The same through the trial. Pleaded guilty and had done nothing to help herself. It had been left to the solicitor to try to present any mitigating circumstances.

Kat’s phone pinged, and she picked it up to look at the message. It was from Mark Astley. ‘Thanks for the support today.’ Her heart jumped. Of course he had her mobile number. She’d given it to him during the first session in case either of them needed to change their appointment times. She’d never said that it was okay for him to contact her otherwise, and certainly not via text message.

She thought about replying. Something neutral and innocuous but encouraging. Professional but a reply all the same. Discretion got the better of her, and she deleted the message.

After pouring the hot water into the teapot, she put everything on a tray and carried it through to the living room. Lena hadn’t moved. Kat carefully placed the tray on the table and sat opposite her, taking the seat where the detectives had been. ‘Is it true?’

Lena turned to look out of the far window. ‘I can’t tell you.’

Kat could feel her face turning red. ‘What do you mean you can’t tell me? What can’t you tell me?’

Lena stood up and walked towards the window. ‘Don’t ask, because I can’t tell you.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’

Still facing away, her sister spoke to the window. ‘Does it matter? I’m not able to say.’

Kat looked at the brewing tea and felt the urge to pick up the pot and hurl it at her sister. She willed herself to stay calm. ‘Can you at least tell me if the man you identified in 2004 was actually Andrew?’

‘No.’

‘No what?’ Kat was shouting, the frustrations of the day suddenly to the fore. ‘No, you can’t tell me, or no, it wasn’t Andrew?’

Lena remained silent.

‘Aren’t you going to say something?’

Finally, Lena turned to her sister. ‘Not everything can be told. You, of all people, should know that.’