Fragile Cord (5 page)

‘Even so, it wasn’t as busy as
usual, but I suppose the attack would have put people off staying
out.’

Coupland wasn’t so sure; he’d
attended major incidents where onlookers arrived with thermos
flasks in tow. ‘We might be a nation that cry when we’re pissed but
we love a good gawp,’ Coupland sniped, patting his pockets for
change. Osman waved the gesture away, ‘On the house.’ Coupland
nodded his appreciation.

‘How’s the guy doin’
anyway?’

‘Clinging on by his
fingernails.’

Osman paused as though
considering this image. ‘Aren’t we all, Sergeant Coupland?’ He
asked simply. ‘Aren’t we all?’

Coupland slowed outside his
home on the way to the hospital. He wouldn’t pass it on his normal
route but a detour was in order while he agonised about calling in.
Lynn’s shift at the hospital wouldn’t start for another couple of
hours, there’d be time enough for them to talk before Amy came
home, neither of them wanting to expose her to more raised voices.
He pulled up at the kerb and lit a cigarette for courage.

One stupid mistake. That’s all
it had taken to send his marriage into free fall. Not a day had
gone by that he didn’t look in the mirror and cringe. He’d never
meant to hurt Lynn, yet all it had taken was 10 minutes of flirting
and he’d scampered after Adele like a dog with two dicks. Lynn was
convinced that they’d slept together, refused to believe his
protest that it’d been one drunken kiss. Even so, she’d countered,
it was obvious he’d been tempted, that if the opportunity had
presented itself he would’ve happily shagged her. The annoying
thing about Lynn was that she always had a point. If he’d thought
of a good enough excuse to get a pass out for the night he’d have
gone back to Adele’s without a care in the world. And now? Now he
was banged to rights anyway: a wife convinced he’d been unfaithful,
and a mounting resentment that if he was doing the time he might as
well have committed the sodding crime.

He stared up at their bedroom
window as Lynn pulled back the curtains. She looked out onto the
street below, her gaze settling on his car. If she was surprised he
was parked out front, she didn’t show it, her eyes found his and
seemed to lock onto his soul. He’d been about to open the driver’s
door when his phone rang breaking the silence. He was tempted to
leave it, but he’d asked to be kept informed of any change in Ricky
Wilson’s condition. He picked up his mobile and grunted a reluctant
greeting.

The control room operator’s
words sent his heart sinking to the pit of his stomach. He
scribbled the call out details into his pocket book, reading it
back in the vain hope he’d misheard it. He rubbed the inner corners
of his eyes with his thumb and forefinger, already focussing on the
carnage he’d been summoned to. He threw his cigarette out of the
driver’s window and started the ignition, looking once more to
where Lynn had been standing watching him from their bedroom
window.

She was gone.

It used to be said of
certain women – I remember my father saying it – “she’s a good
little home-maker”. But can you
make
a home? Or even make yourself
at home? Isn’t home some place you have as a child, and spend the
rest of your life running from…..?

- As if, Blake Morrison.

The house was set back from the
road, obscured from view by a bank of Leylandii planted years
before the current owners had moved in. Mock Tudor in design, it
had a solid oak front door flanked either side and above by leaded
windows, with an adjacent detached garage. The circular driveway
had space for several vehicles. Today, it accommodated easily the
two private ambulances and squad cars that were parked outside.

A child’s bicycle lay abandoned
at the side of the house. It lay awkwardly on the gravel, silver
racing stripes glinting in the sunlight. As Coupland approached the
front door he noticed that the uniformed constable on the doorstep
looked about twelve years old, making him wonder briefly whether
he’d ever looked so young. Over the years a cautiousness had set
in, an over awareness of the frailty of life – a general acceptance
that he was passing through, that in the grand scheme of things
what he tried to achieve on a daily basis would amount to sod all.
There were positive days of course, days where he knew he made a
difference, but as he walked towards the house of horror as it was
already being dubbed, he found it nigh on impossible to recall any
of them.

The front door was open; being
dusted for prints along with all the other entrances to the
property, although early indications suggested this was just a
formality. Inside, he found himself standing in a large square
hallway, high ceilings for a modern house, black and white tiles on
the floor. Light spilled softly into the hallway from a partly
opened door. Following the light Coupland made his way along the
hall, passing family photos that smiled down at him from every
angle. He found himself in the kitchen, a modern, spacious room
displaying solid white units and granite worktops.

Brightly
coloured magnetic letters spelled out
Kyle, Doctor, Bank,
on a large
fridge freezer beside several photographs: a man and a woman with a
small child at a theme park; the same small child dressed as an elf
during a school play; in another he was blowing out candles on a
train-shaped cake, cheeks puffed out like two rosy apples. A notice
board over the kitchen table had a list of emergency numbers; a
shopping list with Billy Bear ham underlined, and a notice for a
school fair at St. Michael’s in two weeks’ time.

It was a busy kitchen; one
where meals were made from scratch and the gravy didn’t come out of
a jar. A sweet smell of baking hung in the air, a grocery bag lay
half unpacked on top of one of the units. A recipe for lemon
meringue pie lay beside it, the ingredients ticked off one by
one.

Through a doorway leading out
from the kitchen there was a large mud-room containing a washing
machine, dryer, three pairs of Wellington Boots and a pair of
trainers lined neatly in a row. A child’s easel stood in the
corner; beside it a small table held a jar of cloudy water, a
plastic moulded pallet with an assortment of colours squeezed from
tubes of expensive looking paint.

The artist’s pad on the easel
was blank. Coupland looked back at the cloudy water in the jar and
to the paintbrush beside it, streaked with dried paint. Moving
closer he saw that the top sheet from the artist’s pad had been
crudely torn off, tiny fragments of it remained on the uppermost
gummed edge of the pad. A strange feeling came over him as he
stared at the blank sheet of paper trying to imagine what the child
had been painting. He thought at first he was sickening for
something, until it dawned on him he just felt plain sick.

‘Sir?’

Startled, Coupland swung round
to find himself facing Alex. He nodded, trying to assimilate what
he’d been thinking with the reality of the situation.

‘Have you been here long?’

‘No,’ he
replied hesitantly, ‘I just wanted to get a sense of the place,
before……’ he inclined his head towards the floor above, where they
both knew that any sense of how the family was
before
,
would be
wiped out with just once glimpse of the hell awaiting
them.

‘The victim’s name is Kyle
Kavanagh sir,’ Alex informed him.

‘His mother’s name is
Tracey.’

He noticed she
referred to the word
victim
in the singular, yet two bodies were waiting
upstairs.

‘Where’s the husband?’ he
asked.

Alex inclined her head in the
direction of one of the furthest rooms leading off from the
hallway.

‘He’s in the
lounge – sorry, sitting room,
as they call
them around here. There’s a PC with him Sir, and the family GP’s on
his way over.’

‘How is he?’

‘
How do you
expect?
’ She answered hotly, the flush
creeping up her neck giving lie to the calm exterior she’d shown
when she first approached him.

The confidence she’d exuded
earlier at the station had all but evaporated. Instead, he found
himself looking at a hollowed out version of Alex.

‘How long have you been here?’
he asked, searching her face for clues as to what he could expect
to find in the rooms above.

‘Long enough.’ She replied in a
voice that seemed to escape from somewhere inside her, then, more
to herself than to anyone who might have been in the room with her,
‘Long enough…..’

Coupland stared at her,
wondering what she’d seen that had dimmed the light in her
eyes.

‘They’re waiting upstairs for
you….’ Alex urged him, swallowing quickly, concentrating on the
glare of his brightly coloured shirt, ‘….they’re ready to take the
bodies away.’

Coupland’s shoulders sagged as
he made for the door leading back into the kitchen, then paused,
raising his eyebrows briefly at Alex who had made no move to follow
him.

‘I’ll wait down here, Sir, if
it’s alright with you.’

Her voice sounded choked, as
though something was caught in her throat. She’d been in the
vicinity when the call came in, had been one of the first officers
on the scene, when there’d been a flurry of hope that at least the
unborn child could be saved. Coupland paused:

‘Will you be-?’

‘I’ll be fine,
Sir.’ she cut across him, raising a hand to her mouth as though
fearful any noise it made would give her away. She held her other
hand out in his direction, palm outwards, as if to say
back off.
He nodded,
turned and headed back through the kitchen towards the hall,
towards the staircase and the first floor landing.

It was a big house.

Too big now, Coupland
thought.

His feet felt heavy as he
climbed the wide staircase. An uneasy feeling rose in his chest and
it came as no surprise when he heard, moments later; Alex’s
choked-back sobs fill the air.

At the top of the stairs his
feet touched padded carpet. A long, galleried landing led to
several rooms to the east and west of the house. At the front of
the structure, a large central window dominated the wall, letting
in sunlight and providing a spectacular view of the valley across
to Irlam. The forensic team were silently packing away equipment,
each man and woman focussing on a different zone, a different
place, anything other than what they’d actually been working
on.

No one spoke.

Harry Benson, the Senior
Pathologist, made a point of glancing at his watch as Coupland
approached, his disapproving mouth puckered so tightly it resembled
a fully clenched rectum.

‘If I’m keeping you from
something….’ Coupland barked, then stopped short as he caught sight
of the look that flickered across Benson’s brow, the fatigue in his
eyes caused by sheer disillusion. These cases were the hardest to
fathom, the ones where the crime was committed by those meant to
protect. Benson turned to a colleague, issued a series of
instructions before heading towards a room at the rear of the
house, beckoning for Coupland to come too.

The Sergeant swallowed hard in
an attempt to brace himself as he followed Benson into the large
family bathroom, to the oval-shaped bath where Kyle Kavanagh lay
naked and motionless. The boy’s fair hair was plastered to his
scalp; droplets of water were still evident on his face and body.
His fingers and toes were prune-like from being in the water so
long. Coupland was aware of other images coming into view: bottles
of children’s shampoo and bubble bath lay at angles around the
perimeter of the bath. Had they been knocked over during the
scuffle as the child splashed and kicked to stay alive? The shampoo
was one of those that claimed to be gentle on the eyes, Coupland
wondered if it would be as gentle on the lining of the lungs.

A laminated poster of the
planets was blu-tacked to the wall.

Benson pointed to bruises that
were beginning to form on the boy’s shoulders,

‘Where she held him down…..’ he
explained, demonstrating mid-air with the heel of his palm, showing
how the boy’s mother had applied pressure to keep him below the
water’s surface just long enough for him to drown. Coupland sucked
in his breath as his imagination took over. He pictured the
frightened child, wondered if he’d called out for help. He felt a
jolt of terror charge through his body as he imagined the boy’s
feeling of betrayal when he realised what his mother was doing,
still not believing it even as she did it. Loving her anyway.

‘Alex OK?’ Benson asked over
his shoulder as he pointed at barely visible finger marks on the
boy’s upper arms. ‘She’s one the same age, hasn’t she?’

Coupland nodded, grunted a yes
in the direction of the medic’s back. There’d been a hint of a
relationship between the surly pathologist and the DC back when she
was in uniform, might have been serious too, if her son’s father
hadn’t come back on the scene.

‘See here?’

Benson pointed
to the pressure marks on both arms, looked back at Coupland as he
waited for a response. Coupland grunted again, moving his head up
and down vigorously as if to emphasise he
could
see, when in actual fact he
barely glanced towards Benson’s pointed finger. Instead his eyes
kept creeping towards the boy’s peaceful face, a face that earlier
would have shown an eagerness for life, a desperation to learn,
to
live
.
Reluctantly he allowed his gaze to follow the trajectory of
Benson’s pointed finger; saw the abrasions on the boy’s upper arms.
‘Where the father tried pulling him out…….’