Grave Doubts (41 page)

‘It’s a mistake. It wasn’t me.’ He said the words to enable her to agree with him.

‘Of course. I know that.’ Her voice was a dull monotone.

In that moment she fascinated him. He started at her mousy blond hair, escaping from the inevitable ponytail, at the freckles and weak blue eyes. Despite her skinny body and blunt features she wasn’t ugly. She could have found herself a man. Why had she chosen to commit herself to him and why, even now, could she pretend to believe in him? It was a brand of loyalty that suggested stupidity not courage, but whatever lies she told herself were fine by him. He didn’t care. A couple more days at most and she would cease to be useful. The thought made him smile.

‘What?’

‘What what?’

‘What were you thinking?’

He was sitting next to her in the front seat, the view out of the windscreen helped his claustrophobia and his window was fully open, making him feel less trapped.

‘What do you want to know?’ His voice held a hint of warning.

She frowned obviously worried about how she could continue without upsetting him.

‘It was a strange look, that’s all.’

He laughed and bent over to kiss her with a lust that took them both by surprise. It was many years since her body had held any attraction for him but the thought of killing her had an aphrodisiac quality. He thrust his hand between her thighs and she clamped her legs tight on it. This behaviour was not like him. It almost amounted to foreplay, something he never bothered with.

Without saying anything she pulled into the kerb and switched off the engine.

‘We’re here.’

He withdrew his hand, gave her his sexiest ‘I fancy you’ smile, which he doubted she had ever seen before and picked up his stick. Because he was smart he remembered to limp favouring the ankle he had injured the previous day, although it hurt far less now.

Inside their bedroom at the B&B he put the television on and fucked her before she had time to unpack. It was surprisingly satisfying. Afterwards she stroked the un-bandaged side of his face.

‘It’s been years since you treated me like that.’ But instead of being grateful she asked a dumbassed question. ‘Why?’

He could hardly say, ‘because I was fantasising about killing you, you stupid bitch’, so he just smiled mysteriously.

‘Go and tell that landlady woman I’ll have my dinner in here on a tray. You can go and join the others but make sure you’re back in here by nine o’clock.’

When she left the room he burnt Griffiths’ letters unread and flushed the ash away. As the black flecks disappeared he experienced a rush of exhilaration. He had killed the girl and escaped against incredible odds. His optimism returned; they wouldn’t find him now, not with his ability to change his appearance and blend in. He was within days of closing this chapter of his life and starting over again. With his intelligence, good looks and charm, it would be a piece of cake.

The unpredictability of the weather prevented Nightingale’s days from sliding into complete tedium. If it hadn’t been for the promise she had made her dead half-sister she would have left the farm, but she was now committed to finding the grave. She had started the search in a mood of confidence that gave way to determination within a day as she worked methodically, scythe in hand, leaving behind a trail of chopped vegetation that was slowly turning to hay.

Lulu might have denied the baby she thought was hers a Christian burial for whatever reasons held sway in her New Age mind but she didn’t believe that her mother would have left the burial unmarked. In twenty eight years, that marker might have rotted or weathered to anonymity but she had to believe that something would remain.

At the pace she was searching, Nightingale calculated that it would take her at least thirty days to cover the area. On the ninth morning of her search she woke early, ate an enormous breakfast and stepped outdoors into the steaming kitchen garden. It was only seven o’clock but the sun was warm and the humidity high. She was wearing shorts but her shirt was long-sleeved to protect her arms from the briars and nettles that would fight back even as she cut them down.

She decided to try a different strategy today and focus on likely areas. ‘Likely’ meant places that might have appealed to her mother. She studied the background in pictures her aunt had taken of Lulu and identified a distinctive stand of rowan trees where she would start that morning. If that proved unproductive there was a stream with curious flat boulders that she should be able to find again.

Sometime around noon – she no longer bothered to wear a watch, but the shadows were at their shortest – Nightingale flopped down in the shade of an aging rowan. The morning had been as unproductive as the previous eight but at least she’d had the advantage of working in shade. She ate her lunch slowly, savouring the sharp saltiness of the cheese and the sweetness of the tomatoes. Her litre bottle of water was empty so she sucked moisture from some red fruits gratefully, her back resting against the warm tree trunk.

She must have dozed. The shadows were longer than they should have been when she moved and her shoulder muscles stiff. With a small groan she stood up and decided to clear the area around the stream next. It took her a while to find where the rivulet rose in the hills behind the farm but as soon as she reached the area her hopes rose. There was a feeling of tranquility in this place, a sense that the world stopped outside the circle of mixed holly, rowan and alder that guarded the river’s rising. A stone slab, ancient and covered with moss lay to one side of the water, resting level on supporting rocks. She imagined ancient Britons performing rites on it before casting offerings of food to the river goddess. The water was cold and clean tasting and she drank deeply.

Rather than slash at the ferns and grasses she pushed them back, reluctant to spoil the lush greenness with ugly scars. It didn’t take long to find the marker of black granite, polished smooth. Into it had been carved, with exquisite tenderness, a doe and faun. The baby deer was standing in the shelter of its mother’s legs, resting its weight against their protecting warmth. Its big eyes stared out as if fear of the world would keep it forever in the protection of its dam. But it was the mother’s face that brought a lump to Nightingale’s throat. The eyes, more human than animal, the mouth down-turned, the face dark with grief.

She cleared the grasses away from the stone carefully and then picked off the moss that had grown in the carvings. When it was clean, she sat back and noticed lettering beneath the animals:
For my dear Louise, with love forever
. Seeing her own name brought back the shock of discovery. Nightingale hadn’t been able to hold onto her hatred of Amelia, although she had tried, because it had taken two to prosecute this deception. Seeing the grave she acknowledged for the first time the enormity of her father’s actions. He had robbed a woman he had supposedly loved of her child, inflicting terrible grief on her in order to ease his own loss.

Nightingale wanted to be able to cry for her dead sister and to say a prayer for her but neither the tears nor the words would come. It was as if it she was staring at her own grave while an impostor lived within her skin. Would her true mother ever be able to love this daughter of deception or had that opportunity gone forever?

A long time later she made her way back to the farm where, to her shame, she ate an enormous tea and fell straight asleep when she went to bed.

Noise of heavy rain woke her, a determined shower she sensed would stop before long. Wide awake, she decided to get up and plod down the kitchen stairs to make tea, avoiding the rotten treads in the flight to the hall that she still hadn’t repaired. They were dangerous but that was one of many jobs she would leave behind undone when she left the farm.

Now that she had found her half-sister’s grave her world had changed. For the first time her life was beginning to make sense. She knew who she was and the reason for her previous sense of dislocation from the real world. Now it was time to decide what she should become. The only certainty was that she couldn’t live here for ever. She wasn’t a recluse like her aunt, nor did she want to become one.

The farm would always be her retreat, a safe place in a treacherous world, but it could never be her home. She had to be
doing
something, that was her nature; she couldn’t just
be.
So that meant…what?

She sipped her tea and prised the scab off her most painful memory. There was always Harlden. She could go back, to her flat, to her job and her friends. If she was to stay with the police – and that was the only job for which she had any sense of vocation – then it would be in a place of her choosing. Until the Griffiths case she had been making good progress towards her inspector’s exams and her operational track record was excellent.

It would mean seeing Andrew Fenwick, of course. The thought brought with it the usual sinking feeling of sadness. Although relationships developed all the time between people in the Force she knew it wasn’t his way. The blurring of private and public lives would repel him even if there had been mutual attraction in the first place. She wondered, for perhaps the thousandth time, whether she should tell him of her feelings just in case he was harbouring his own but the thought of their mutual embarrassment deterred her. They were of a type she and Andrew; private, self-contained respecters of personal space. To confront him would be a gross invasion of privacy from which their relationship could never recover. It was a Victorian-era thought, in keeping with the decor of the kitchen, but it was also the truth.

She finished her tea and rinsed the mug, aware that she had come to a decision in the time it had taken her to drink it. As the newly reborn Louise Nightingale there were many open questions in her mind but only one certainty: she wanted her old life back.

It was time to go into Clovelly and brave that awful man in the Internet café, check and send Emails; find a path back. Then she would go to the church, take some holy water to consecrate her baby sister’s grave before starting the laborious process of packing up the house.

Nightingale arrived at the harbour in time to see some of the fishing boats return, ready to swap their piscine catch for a human load, children of all ages keen to snare mackerel on spinning metal lures.

The sun lit up the sea in slow motion as it rose above the surrounding hills. For a magical half-hour, Nightingale imagined the village as it had been when first built in the sixteenth century, the product of one man’s vision and thousands of days of manual labour. The perfect safe harbour on the dangerous north coast of Devon, it had prospered accordingly. It was peaceful this early in the morning, the silence broken only by hungry cries of the gulls and occasional shouts from the fishermen, timeless noises that emphasised the essence of the setting.

The newsagent opened first, then a harbour-front café, ready to provide breakfast for those unwilling to make their own. She had eaten before setting out but was hungry again, so she bought
The Times
and went into the café for a bacon sandwich and cup of tea. It was the first newspaper she had bothered reading since her flight from Harlden.

On the front page there was the usual blend of non-news typical of August reporting. A record rainfall in the west of Scotland warranted a picture of a man in a canoe navigating a sign that pointed to the town centre. Criticism of the Foreign Secretary’s lack of reaction to a rebellion in central Africa while he holidayed in Portugal dominated the centre pages, and speculation about Prince William’s love life added variety.

Page three focused on home news, the murder three days before of an eighteen year old girl in her own home and the search for her suspected killer. It was depressing but it had a curious effect on Nightingale. Instead of reading the story and passing on, she viewed the reporting as so much evidence, to be filtered and assessed. It was a daring crime that reeked of obsession; the word psychopath formed in her mind.

With a muttered ‘I’ll be back’ she went out and bought a
Telegraph
and
Daily Mail
. Ignoring the rest of the news she focused on the murder story in both papers. The
Telegraph
quoted extensively from the senior officer in charge and also from a superintendent from the Met who said that there could be links between this and attacks in Wales and London.

He mentioned a man that the police were keen to question David Smith (27); the public were advised that he could be dangerous and not to approach him under any circumstances. There was an e-fit that she studied carefully, automatically committing the face to memory. From the way in which the police briefing had been reported, she could tell that they had strong evidence to connect Smith to the attack but were only sharing some of it publicly.

The café was starting to fill up so she ordered more tea in order to buy her right to the table while she read the reporting in the
Mail
. As she had expected, there was considerably more human interest. She read the description of Ginny’s brief life with sadness and blinked away tears at the quotes from her grief-stricken parents. There was more coverage of the press conference including a picture.

She recognised Fenwick’s face at once and almost choked on her tea. He wasn’t quoted in the piece and she couldn’t work out why he was associated with the case. Had he moved to the Met in her absence? Nightingale stared at his image for a long time. Seeing his face wasn’t as difficult as she had anticipated it would be. He looked stern, just as she remembered him at work. It reminded her that he was a police officer first and a man second. No, she corrected herself, he was a father first.

She left the newspapers in the café, a gift for future patrons, and climbed the hill to the cyber café, leaning into the incline, gripping the cobbles hard through her trainers. The café was empty apart from the thin, hungry looking man behind the counter whom she ignored.

The sight of her in-box brought a familiar tug of concern. In addition to a new Email from her brother, there were more messages from Harlden and one from Fenwick. Ignoring the others, she opened his first.

DEAR NIGHTINGALE (SORRY BUT THE NAME SUITS YOU),

WE ARE ALL TRYING TO FIND YOU. WE (I) HAVE VERY SERIOUS CONCERNS FOR YOUR SAFETY. I CAN’T GO INTO DETAILS IN AN EMAIL BUT TRUST ME WHEN I SAY THAT IT IS REALLY
REALLY
URGENT YOU CALL US. I THINK WG’S ACCOMPLICE HAS TAKEN UP WHERE WG LEFT OFF.

THERE IS A REAL POSSIBILITY THAT YOU COULD BE A TARGET.
PLEASE TAKE THIS RISK SERIOUSLY AND CALL ME
.

SINCERELY, ANDREW FENWICK.

‘Bad news?’ The man behind the counter had been watching her.

‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘You looked upset.’

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

But she was far from fine. She thought of the morning’s papers, with speculation of links between the girl’s murder and other crimes, and of Fenwick’s presence at the press conference. If David Smith was linked to Griffiths it could explain why.

‘Is there a phone I can use?’

‘Not here, but there’s a call box on the harbour.’

Nightingale logged off, other Emails forgotten, cursing the fact that her phone battery was dead and that she lived in a fourteenth century ruin without electricity. She found the phone box, dialled the number for Harlden from memory and asked to be put through to DCI Fenwick. Anne’s voice was instantly recognisable.

‘I’m sorry. The Chief Inspector is away from Harlden. Can anyone else help you?’

‘It’s Louise Nightingale. I believe he’s been trying to reach me?’

‘Oh Louise! What a relief. We’ve been worried sick about you. Are you all right, dear?’

Nightingale tensed. The prying was starting already.

‘I’m fine. Never better. I’ll try his mobile.’

‘Are you sure I can’t transfer you to anyone else here?’

‘No. Don’t bother. If you could just give me his mobile number, please?’

She broke the connection and took a deep breath before dialling. The call went straight through to an answering service, so she left a brief message, including her mobile number. Now all she had to do was find somewhere to re-charge her phone. There was an old coaching inn towards the top of the hill. If she ordered another coffee, they might just let her re-charge her phone while she drank it. The waitress was happy to oblige. Nightingale sipped her coffee and tried to think through the implications of the message she had received;
an accomplice… continuing where Griffiths left off…you may be a target.

On the final point at least, Fenwick had to be wrong. She was hidden away where nobody could find her. If anything, this news meant that she should delay her return to Harlden, though she was perversely reluctant to do so, having made up her mind that it was time to leave the farm.

On her way back she stopped at the church to collect water from the font. It felt sacrilegious, this unauthorised taking of something so holy, but she hoped God would understand and forgive her. She took the water to the spring where she found she could pray at last and did so before sprinkling the water over the stone. She watched in silence as the drops pooled and then evaporated. When the last one had dried she sighed and rose to her feet.