Changelings (23 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Changelings
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Five years is a lot less between a man of twenty-six and a woman of thirty-one. A career woman with the world at her feet, she was beautiful and strong and confident, and she knocked him off his feet.
He knew it was impossible, out of the question. But she didn't, and of the two she was the stronger. And no one had let her in on the secret, and she never suspected the deception that had occurred and the massive consequences it would have for her. Paying her sister her once-a-decade visit, Rosemary found herself in the company of an intelligent, sensitive, good-looking young man, strong and hard-bodied from physical toil, whom she believed to be her sister's stepson Simon Turner, aged twenty-eight, rightful owner of all she surveyed.
It wasn't greed: she had money of her own. But powerful people gravitate together: they see themselves in the mirror of one another and self-love is a great aphrodisiac. She wanted him. Her sister's fury only added to the pleasure of the chase.
‘I tried to warn him,' said Sarah, speaking into her lap. ‘I knew what she was like. I was fond of Rosemary, but her dearest friends would have to admit she was wilful. And – predatory.' She looked up. ‘Isn't that what they say these days? A sexual predator?'
Not in Glencurran they didn't, and not much in Castlemere. But Donovan knew what she meant. He'd
known people like that too; had spent his heart on one. ‘She made the running?'
‘I could have stopped it,' gritted Payne. ‘She didn't rape me. A man with an ounce of character would have walked away.'
‘But you didn't.'
‘Not in time. It only happened once. The next day I told her it had been a mistake, it couldn't happen again. I asked her to leave and she stormed off back to London. But it was already too late.'
‘When did you know?'
‘Thirteen months later,' said Sarah, a bitter edge on her voice. ‘When a red sports car roared into the yard. I was in the kitchen: I looked to see who it was. Rosemary was the last person I was expecting. She took a small suitcase out of the boot and put it on the kitchen step. Then she lifted something off the passenger seat and put it on top of the suitcase. I couldn't make out what it was. It almost looked like a carrycot.'
 
 
It almost looked like a carrycot. Intrigued, Sarah went to the door and opened it, a greeting on her lips with a question right behind. But Rosemary was already stalking across the yard towards the packing sheds. Puzzled, Sarah looked down at the basket on the steps. It was a carrycot, and there was a baby inside.
The man calling himself Simon Turner wasn't in the shed: Jim Vickery directed the angry young woman to his office at the front of the house. Sarah too was looking for her son, to tell him what she'd
found, and he was looking for her to ask what all the noise was about. They came together in the hall.
Rosemary was so angry she was shaking, her face flushed, her eyes ablaze. Apart from a brief detour to her flat she'd come here direct from the London clinic where she'd had the DNA tests done. The ones that showed Elphie's father and her mother shared almost as many genes as siblings do; that explained the baby's strange appearance and erratic development; that proved that Simon Turner was in fact Jonathan Payne. She'd borne her nephew's child.
Looking back she felt so stupid. The signs were there, if she'd thought to look for them. Damn it, she'd even met him under his own name. But he was fifteen years old, she a sophisticated young woman – why should she have remembered him? When she looked at the wedding photos – she wasn't a sentimental woman but she'd always thought she looked good that day and so she'd kept the ones Sarah sent her – it was as plain as day. The two boys didn't even look alike. Simon was dark; Jonathan was fair, like his mother. Like her.
Almost, that was what distressed her most. That she'd been duped. He hadn't come on to her, she'd come on to him, his reluctance only making her the more determined. That was why, when her contraception failed, she was not inclined to tell him. She didn't need his help, and in all honesty he could not be considered responsible for the child.
Or, could not have been had all been well with Elizabeth. But it wasn't. From the moment of her birth there were problems. When the baby failed to thrive
as she should have the doctors raised the possibility of blood testing. Rosemary agreed because she hoped it would help her baby. In the event it didn't – but it did explain her.
The moment she saw Jonathan, standing astonished in the hallway, she went for him. She went for his face with her nails and for his heart with the rapier of her tongue. Sarah would have intervened but for the precious burden in her arms; and Jonathan himself was too taken aback to respond, even when the blood-red talons scythed at him. He finally recoiled, too late, with shock in his eyes and bloody tracks across his cheekbone.
‘You bastard!' she spat, her fury stoked rather than dampened by the miles she'd driven. ‘You
bastard!
You animal.'
He had his hand to his face, fingers trembling in the slick blood. ‘Rosemary—'
She swiped at him again; this time he backed out of range, stumbling against the hall table. ‘Don't you dare speak to me! Have you any idea what you've done? Have you? You've brought into being a child with no place in the world, a child with no future. Nine months I carried her. For nine months there were things I'd rather have been doing, but I carried her because I owed her that much. I made a mistake, and you can't just walk away. I thought we could make it up to one another after she was born.'
She stabbed the taloned hand towards the cot. ‘See that? That's your daughter. And that, more or less, is how she's going to be for the rest of her life. Bigger, but not a lot brighter. She may not walk. She may not
talk. She may be in nappies all the years of her pointless existence. And you did that to her, and nothing you do now can ever make it right.'
Springing tears mixed with his blood on Jonathan Payne's cheek. ‘I don't understand …'
Rosemary thrust her face into his. ‘She's not right! Do you understand that? She's defective – retarded – mentally and physically handicapped. What's the latest euphemism? – she'll have learning difficulties. Jesus, will she have learning difficulties! Like, which hole in your face does your dinner go in? Somebody's going to be spoon-feeding her when she's twenty-five years old.'
She took a step back. ‘But it isn't going to be me. This is your doing, Jonathan, not mine. You knew it was wrong, that it was dangerous, and you said nothing! You let me believe you were Simon Turner – that you were fair game! You let this happen rather than come clean with me.
‘I don't know what you did to him. I presume he's dead, and that's what was worth concealing at any cost. Well, I hope you still feel that way in ten years' time. I hope you can look at your daughter and still think her suffering was not too great a price to pay.'
And with that she left. Stunned, frozen in the hallway, they heard the car roar and spit gravel, and then she was gone. And the bundle that was Elizabeth, that was going to be Elphie, was still lying in Sarah's arms, squinting up at her.
The child never saw her mother again, except in a photograph. Perhaps it was intuition that drew her to the pretty woman in the sprigged dress, perhaps an
incautious word in front of a child supposedly too slow to understand pointed her in the right direction. Sarah never saw Rosemary again. There were no letters, no cards, not so much as a telephone call.
Jonathan saw her once more. Dr Chapel had found a specialist who seemed to offer Elphie the hope of enhanced development but wanted to speak to her mother first. Jonathan went to London.
He found Rosemary packing her bags. She noted with satisfaction the small scar remaining under his eye before returning to her task. She was going to a new job in Boston, she said. She had hoped never to see him again.
He explained the purpose of his visit.
Rosemary shrugged. ‘Tell him you couldn't find me. Tell him I'm dead. I did my share, Jonathan: everything since then has been your problem. Deal with it.'
Downstairs a taxi honked, and she picked up her bags and left. He neither saw nor heard from her again. The specialist lost interest in the case and Elphie grew as best she could in the love of her family and the solitude of the fen. In the end, she didn't make too bad a job of it.
 
 
‘I don't understand,' said Donovan. It wasn't the only thing, but it was the one bothering him now. ‘Why do you want me to take Elphie away now? What are you afraid of?'
‘Don't you see? – Elphie is living proof of what happened. That I'm not who I claim to be. All those
involved are threatened by her existence. As long as everyone who knew about it lived within a stone's throw of this house there wasn't a problem – no one was going to betray the whole village. Then you came. If you began to suspect any of this, all you needed was a sample of Elphie's blood. All the information is there. If you'd died we'd have been safe, and so would she. Now – I don't know. I don't know if either of you is safe here any longer.'
‘You think—' Donovan heard his voice crack with astonishment and tried again. ‘You think the people here might want to kill her? Might want to kill me?'
Payne shrugged. ‘It's a big fen out there, Sergeant Donovan. It's Elphie's playground, but it could easily become her grave. As for you, you're missing already. Your colleagues think you fell off your boat and drowned. A body in the canal would confirm it. Three men and a bucket is all it would take.'
Donovan was having trouble taking it in. But an instinct for survival warned him it really would be that easy. ‘Would you be one of them?'
Payne shook his head. ‘I told you: I want you to get Elphie away from here. Mum, go upstairs and put some things in a bag for her. We're going now, while there's nothing to stop us.'
Dead on cue the kitchen door opened and shut, slow footsteps sounded across the hall floor and the handle of the office door turned. A desiccated hand appeared in the opening, followed by the pickled-walnut face of Dr Chapel.
‘Afternoon, everyone,' he greeted them equably. ‘I said I'd pop round sometime today, and here I am.'
After an hour in the interview room Shapiro emerged rolling his eyes. ‘I know she's involved. I can't for the life of me get her to open up.'
‘Do you want me to try?' asked Liz. Her tone was subdued. Shapiro thought she was thinking about Brian; actually she was embarrassed that she'd talked to Sheila Crosbie, twice, and not realized she was implicated in this.
‘By all means. But I don't think she's waiting to be asked nicely. It's like interrogating a POW: you get name, rank and serial number, and after that she just grits her teeth and sits there. She's not even denying it any more. She isn't saying anything at all.'
‘She's protecting someone.'
‘Yes. She isn't doing herself any good so that has to be it.'
Liz frowned. ‘That was odd about her mother. Not wanting her to have the baby, I mean. I suppose she does live locally?'
Shapiro nodded. ‘In The Jubilee, a few hundred yards from Sheila's flat. I don't understand it either.'
‘Maybe we should try to,' said Liz. ‘I'll go and see the mother. She may be so angry that her daughter
doesn't trust her with her own grandson that she'll let something slip.'
The Jubilee was a strange place, a walled city at the heart of Castlemere. It was built in the closing years of the Victorian period, six streets of the last word in artisan accommodation. Two up and two down, in long terraces separated by cobbles at the front and back-to-back yards behind, the little houses celebrated the end of the war with new inside plumbing, then promptly entered a time bubble. They weren't exactly neglected but they never changed. Even the people were indistinguishable at first sight from their parents.
The Jubilee had a reputation in Castlemere as the place where all the town's ills were fermented. Certainly a good proportion of the households derived at least some of their income from crime or the black economy, but there were decent people in the six streets as well. Nothing Liz was able to pull off the computer, or learn from Sergeant Bolsover who probably knew more, suggested that Margaret Crosbie wasn't one of them. The widow of a dustman who died too young to become a refuse collector, she raised five children in the little house in Coronation Row. All seemed to have made some sort of a go of their lives, with jobs, partners and children of their own. Sheila was the youngest.
Liz knew she was doing Mrs Crosbie no favours by parking in front of the house. Whenever she changed her car The Jubilee knew what she'd got before Brian did. But if she parked on Brick Lane and walked, the same quietly observant eyes would note
where she was going in just the same way. But nobody would throw stones at Mrs Crosbie's windows because she'd had the police round. On the contrary, it might raise her social cachet.
She didn't recognize Liz instantly, the way many of her neighbours would, but even a friendly visit from the police is unlike anything else. Mrs Crosbie didn't need to see Liz's warrant card. Her eyes grew alarmed and she wiped her hands nervously down the front of her apron. ‘What's happened? Is it Sheila? Jason?'
‘In a way,' nodded Liz. ‘May I come in? Sheila's in a bit of trouble. I'm hoping you can help clear things up.'
She could have been more discreet about the precise nature of the trouble Sheila was in. But there was only one crime at the forefront of everyone's mind right now, and the idea that Castlemere's second most senior detective might be working on anything else wouldn't have fooled Mrs Crosbie for long.
‘It's this business with the blackmailer,' Liz said simply. ‘We think Sheila might know who it is.'
Mrs Crosbie stared at her in horror. She was a woman of about fifty who spoke with the same fenland accent as Bolsover and Dick Morgan. ‘Sheila? My Sheila?'
‘I don't know how involved she is. She won't tell us. She's obviously protecting someone. But if she won't talk she'll end up taking the blame for this.' This was rather over-egging the pudding, but Liz felt justified by the gravity of the situation.
‘But – Sheila got hurt, thanks to him. Our Jason could have been hurt.'
‘Well, maybe,' said Liz. ‘The other possibility is that she deliberately dipped her hands in caustic soda.'
‘
Why?
' Mrs Crosbie clearly thought she was mad.
It was no more than a possibility, but it made a kind of twisted sense. ‘Because the blackmailer asked her to. Because it was safer for him than having to plant the stuff in the chemist's. He'd have had to buy it, doctor it and put it back; and he had to do this with a couple of items, and there was the risk that Mr Simpson would remember him. He didn't want to take that risk. I think he bought the baby lotion, among other things, took them home and added some special ingredients. Caustic soda to the baby lotion, an inedible fungus to some cold remedy. The cold remedy he planted on Simpson's shelves when no one was looking, but he took the baby lotion round to Sheila's flat. He also took some soda crystals: he made up a solution with them and had Sheila put her hands in it.'
Put like that it sounded barely plausible. Liz would have forgiven Mrs Crosbie for laughing in her face. But it was too serious for that and both women knew it. Liz wasn't talking about what she could prove but about what she believed. She was desperately trying to stop a dangerous criminal.
‘You're saying that Sheila's helping him.'
‘He may be threatening her. Or Jason; I don't know.'
‘You think I can tell you who he is?'
‘I hope so. He's already hurt your daughter. If we don't stop him he'll do a lot more damage.' Liz waited.
‘I don't know all her friends.'
‘This man isn't a friend. He has a hold over her: a hold strong enough to make her risk going to prison.'
Margaret Crosbie thought in silence for perhaps half a minute. Then she shook her head. ‘There isn't anyone she cares that much about.'
‘Really? No one?'
‘Well, maybe two people. But I didn't do it, and I don't think Jason did either.'
‘We wondered about Jason's father.'
Mrs Crosbie raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Go to prison for him? She wouldn't cross the street for him; she wouldn't cross the room for him. Far as I know she hasn't seen him since before Jason was born. I'm sorry, Inspector, but you'll have to do better than that.'
But Liz shook her head despondently, all out of ideas. All that was left was the secret weapon. ‘Mrs Crosbie, when we took Sheila in for questioning we asked if she wanted to drop the baby off here. She told us to leave him with social services instead. Why do you suppose that was?'
Margaret Crosbie's cheeks darkened, her eyes flicked down and she caught a ragged breath. Liz had thought that would hit her hard, and it did. And she wasn't expecting it. It wasn't that they never saw eye to eye, or they'd had a flaming row. She was hurt and astonished and mortified all at once. She floundered after words. ‘I — I don't know – it makes no sense. She really said that? But she leaves him here all the time. He's my grandson, for God's sake! Why would she give him to social services?' Tears were audible in her voice; a moment later they were visible on her cheeks.
Liz winced. It would have been worth distressing her if it had got them anywhere; but it hadn't. ‘Don't be upset, Mrs Crosbie. There will be a reason, if we can just work it out. And it won't be anything to do with you. It'll be to do with what she's got herself into.'
They'd moved into the living room. Mrs Crosbie sank into her easy chair, waved her visitor to the sofa.
‘All right,' Liz said at length; ‘all right. Sheila's afraid of something, and she's protecting someone. But the only people she cares that much about are you and Jason. So what if she acted as she did in order to protect you and Jason? She isn't helping the blackmailer from choice – she's afraid of what he might do to her family. Is there anyone she's that afraid of?'
Mrs Crosbie was thinking too. ‘Tell me something. When social services took our Jason, where did they take him to?'
Liz hazarded a guess. ‘There's a big children's home on Cambridge Road. Dunstan House. It might have been there.'
Margaret Crosbie nodded slowly. ‘A big place. Lots of staff?'
‘Yes. What—?' Then she saw what difference that made. ‘She's afraid of someone abducting him?'
‘Maybe. Maybe that's what Social Services could offer that I can't. Staff, security locks, closed circuit TV Here there's just me, and if someone was determined enough to get in I couldn't stop him.'
‘The blackmailer? All right, he's a vicious, dangerous man, I wouldn't want him near any baby of
mine either.' Liz was thinking aloud. ‘Sheila knows him – she knows him well enough to be afraid of him. She helped him because he threatened to hurt Jason if she didn't.
‘She did what he told her, we seemed to believe her story, she thought she'd got away with it. When we picked her up, shocked as she was, the thing that worried her most was that the man behind all this would find out. He'd blame her for letting him down. He can't get at her while she's in custody, but he could get at Jason. And if the baby was here when he caught up with him, you could be hurt as well.
‘So she sent him to Dunstan House. She thought they could protect him. If Jason can't be with her, he's safer there than anywhere else. She wasn't doubting your ability to look after him, Mrs Crosbie. She was doing her best to look after both of you.'
Relief made the woman's voice shake. ‘But – who—? How would my Sheila know somebody like that?'
‘There's a mobile over Jason's cot. Somebody hand-carved it for him. Sheila put it up, but she didn't seem too pleased with it. We wondered if it was made by Jason's father.'
‘The psycho?'
Liz breathed lightly. ‘You call him The Psycho?'
‘It's what she calls him. She wouldn't tell me his name. She said she never wanted to hear it again.'
‘I mean – Sheila had a relationship with a man you both think of as a psychopath, and you didn't think to tell me?'
 
 
Dr Chapel remained in the doorway. His eyes went from one to the next of them, cooling as they travelled. Finally he said, ‘You've told him, haven't you?' His voice crackled like ice. ‘You stupid, stupid people.'
It was telling, Donovan thought, that neither of them objected to being the butt of his insults in their own home. It wasn't just the courtesy due to an old man, or even to a doctor. They were afraid of him. Events had conspired to invest this little man with far too much power in the lives of those around him. It was something else that could only have happened in a hamlet so small it looked like a fly speck on the map. The twentieth century had barely impinged on East Beckham at all.
Jonathan Payne gazed down at the buttons on his shirt front. ‘Some of it he guessed,' he murmured. ‘The rest … He thought we murdered Rosemary. It seemed better to tell him the truth.'
‘Oh it did, did it?' Chapel shut the door behind him with a soft but very definite click. ‘And you thought you were qualified to make that judgement.'
Payne's head came up and he seemed about to rebel against his diminutive oppressor. But the moment passed and his eyes dropped again. ‘No one is more involved in this than I am.'
‘That's true,' agreed Chapel, the creaky voice still managing to carry an edge. ‘It'll be a great comfort to those of us who get ten years to hear that you got twelve.' He turned to Sarah. ‘Did you even wonder what'll happen to Elphie when everyone she knows is in prison?'
That was designed to hurt and it did. Sarah Turner caught her breath in half a sob.
Donovan had no mandate to defend these people, but he did resent the way this vindictive little man was allowed to browbeat those around him. ‘I can't begin to guess what a court will make of all this,' he said, ‘I've never come across the like before. But I know one thing. If Elphie needs looking after, she'll get it. You have my word.'
The old man laughed out loud. ‘
Your
word? Oh well, that's all right then, isn't it? She's going to lose her father, her grandmother and her home, but she's got the word of some mick detective that she'll be fine. I can't see her losing much sleep now.'
Finally Donovan understood why Payne wanted to get his daughter away from East Beckham. This man, this old and vicious man, this man he owed his life to, would do whatever was necessary to protect East Beckham's secret. He would punish anyone who challenged him, trample anyone who stood in his way, destroy without compunction anyone who posed a threat to his authority. Elphie? He wasn't concerned for the child. He'd use her when he needed leverage against the Turners, wash his hands of her as soon as it was expedient to do so.

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