Imago (7 page)

It’s no wonder, really, that I ended up the kind of person that I am. I learned it all from Mother: how to hide your real identity, how to put on a mask that fools the rest of the world. Only you know, deep inside, who you really are

Chapter Seven

Kate went back to the Mission building the next morning, having rung ahead to check that Claudia was in residence. Margaret Paling was not in the reception booth this time; another woman, also grey-haired, also elderly, peered at Kate’s warrant card suspiciously and let her through the security door to the lounge beyond.

Kate knocked on Claudia’s door. A few moments later, it was flung wide by Claudia, who had a beaming smile on her face – a smile that cooled and died when she saw Kate.

“Good morning,” said Kate, stepping forward across the threshold. “Were you expecting someone?”

Claudia muttered something, a possible negative, but Kate couldn’t quite hear. The room was much larger than Mandy’s, with two single beds against opposite walls, a large wardrobe, chest of drawers and, most significantly, a small girl with a mop of dark hair and large, dark eyes who was sat on the floor surrounded by toys and regarding Kate with a frown.

Kate cursed inwardly. Why hadn’t she realised Claudia’s daughter would be here? It was going to be almost impossible to talk about anything to do with the case in front of a small child. She thought quickly.

“I need to ask you a few more questions about Mandy, Claudia,” she said. “Is there anyone who could look after Madison while we have a talk?”

Claudia shook her head, nervously.

“There’s no one I’d leave her with here,” she said. The little girl got up and pressed herself to the side of her mother, twining her thin little arms around Claudia’s leg.

“No, okay,” said Kate. “Why don’t we all go for a walk? Madison, is there a playground near here you’d like to go to?”

There turned out to be a small patch of recreational ground with a couple of battered swings and a chipped and rusting climbing frame about five minutes’ walk from the Mission. Madison clambered around the structure while her mother watched, and Kate tried to think of the questions she needed to ask. She was distracted by the thought that – given a different choice back in her teens – this could have been 
her
 life, trying to raise a child alone with no money and little support, trapped in a low-paying job if she was lucky and on benefits if she wasn’t. 
This could have been me
.

Kate suddenly and quite fervently knew that she 
had
 made the right choice back when she was seventeen. As hard as it had been at the time and for years afterwards. As hard as it sometimes still was. She’d made the right choice.

She made a massive effort to bring her mind back to the job. Claudia hadn’t noticed her period of silence; she was watching Madison swinging herself back and forth with a proud, tender look on her face.

“Madison’s a lovely little girl,” said Kate, and she was rewarded by Claudia’s pleased smile.

“She’s a little monkey,” said Claudia in the most animated tone Kate had yet heard from her.

“Mandy had a child, didn’t she?”

Claudia’s face clouded.

“Yeah,” she said after a moment. “But he got took off of her by the social. She couldn’t look after him properly. She was doing too many drugs at the time. It broke her heart when he went.”

“I know I’ve asked you this before, Claudia, but are you sure that Mandy didn’t have a boyfriend?”

Claudia still had her eyes fixed on Madison, who was trying to climb the frame of the swing and sliding down again. She shrugged.

“I told you, I dunno. I don’t think so.”

“Would she have told you if she had?”

“She might have. But I don’t think she was seeing anyone. She always said men were bad news.”

Kate nodded.

“How about you, Claudia?”

Startled, Claudia looked at her.

“What d’you mean?”

“Do you have someone? A boyfriend or partner? It must be hard raising a child by yourself.”

Kate was only really making conversation, not really interested in the answer. A rising tide of blood suffused Claudia’s face, and Kate regretted her casual words.

“No,” said Claudia, after a moment. “I don’t have no one.”

Me neither
, agreed Kate silently. 
Me neither
.

*

“I feel like I should be cutting a ribbon or something,” said Anderton, one hand on the door to the renovated room. He flung it open with a flourish. “Ta-da!”

The team crowded in behind him, reacting with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Jane and Kate made appropriate ‘oohs,’ Olbeck, Theo and Rav nodded their cautious assent and Jerry lowered his brows and said something very similar to ‘humph.’

“Well,” said Anderton. “We’re back in at least, thank God. I said something like this calls for champagne, didn’t I?”

“You definitely said that,” said Olbeck.

“Well, you’ll find I’m a man of my word. We’ll all have a little celebratory drink later.”

This statement was met with a rather more enthusiastic response. The team sat down to their desks and applied themselves to their work with renewed energy. Kate rolled her chair back and forth over the new laminate and spun around a little, taking in the fresh new paint and the new skylights, which brought in the bright mid-summer sun.

She became aware that Theo was waving at her from the other side of the room.

“What’s up?” she asked, making her way over to him.

He beckoned her down to his seated level.

“You know how you asked me about whether I’d found anything that resembled the MO? Similar murder weapon, situation, et cetera et cetera?”

“Yes,” said Kate, alert now. She grabbed a spare chair and sat down next to Theo.

“Well, I’ve found one.”

“Seriously?” Kate bent lower, looking at his computer screen. She lowered her voice. “Have you told Anderton yet?”

“Not yet.”
“But you’re telling me first?”

Theo grinned. “I’m nice like that. Also, you’re subbing me in the run.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yeah, so I owe you. Anyway, look here.” He tapped keys and brought up one of the database screens. “Murder of a prostitute in Brighton. Ingrid Davislova, age twenty-two years. Originally from Poland. She’d only been here a year or so, poor cow.”

Kate read the rest of the details. The victim had been short, slim, dark-haired, and the murder weapon, which hadn’t been found, was estimated to be some sort of serrated kitchen knife.

“This was just under eight months ago.” She ran her eyes over the words and numbers on the screen once more. “It’s good, Theo. It sounds like it could be our guy.”

“I’m going to tell the boss. Give us a hand up, will you?”

Kate helped him up and balanced him while he tucked the crutches under his arms.

“Shall I tell him you know already?” asked Theo, stuffing the papers under one arm and wobbling a little as he attempted to turn around.

Kate shook her head.

“Not yet,” she said. “Not just yet.”

Kate’s task for the afternoon was to interview Mandy Renkin’s foster parents. Adele Watkins opened the front door of the Victorian-terraced house. She was a massive woman, not tall, but very overweight, with a fat, still-pretty face and short, curly grey hair. Clearly unembarrassed by her size, Adele wore loose trousers and a tunic in jewel-bright colours, and her chubby fingers sparkled with rings. Kate warmed to her immediately.

The house was very cluttered, the furniture was battered and the carpets were worn, but there was still an air of homely comfort throughout. A greyhound, as thin as its owner was fat, was curled in a dog basket in the messy kitchen, its sharp, bony muzzle resting on the side of the basket. Liquid brown eyes followed Kate as she walked past to the chair that Adele indicated at the table, and the dog’s whip-like tail thumped. It whimpered softly.

“All right, you old softy,” said Adele, and the dog jumped up immediately and came over to Kate, wiggling its bottom like a Caribbean dancer. Kate, charmed, stroked the head that had been laid in her lap as she listened to Adele talk about Mandy.

“Nice girl, lovely girl. Kind and intelligent. Too intelligent for her own good, I always thought. She had a tragic history. Well, my dear, they all do, to be honest.”

“Have you fostered many children, Mrs Watkins?”

“Seems like hundreds. It’s not, of course, but I’ve been doing this for – oh, twenty years now. I couldn’t have any of my own. That’s what got me started.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Kate, automatically. She pulled the dog’s silky ears gently, and it gave a whimper of pleasure.

“Well, perhaps it was for the best,” said Adele. “I’ve been able to help a lot of children over the years, and if I’d had my own, well who knows whether I would have fostered any? No, I can’t complain. I feel we’ve had a family, Bernard and I. It’s very satisfying to know that you’re able to give a child a stable home. There’s so many kids out there who need one.”

“Barbara Fee said as much. She said Mandy settled here really well.”

“She did. She was a bit younger than the ones we usually have. We made a point of having the teenagers here if they need a place.”

“Why is that?”

Adele pushed a plate of biscuits over to her. “Well, no one else wants them, my dear, you see? Most foster carers, most people who adopt – they want the babies, don’t they? The littlies.”

Kate flinched, unable to help herself. When would that ever stop hurting? She coughed, keeping her face as blank as she could.

Adele didn’t seem to have noticed her momentary wince. She was looking out the kitchen window at a garden filled with a trampoline, a rusting swing and several bikes leaning up against the wall of a shed.

“Mandy had been in and out of care homes since she was five. She was desperate for a real home, somewhere where she could feel like she was in a family.”

“Did she have any contact with her birth family at all?”

“No. No she didn’t. Her mother was a chronic alcoholic. She’s dead now, poor woman. I think she actually had Mandy put up for adoption, though. I mean, rather than Mandy being removed from her care.”

Kate was careful to keep her voice steady when she asked the next question.

“How old was Mandy when that happened?”

Adele ran chubby fingers through her grey curls.

“I’m not sure, my dear, to be honest. It was such a long time ago now. I think she was two – two, maybe three?”

“And Mandy went into care? She wasn’t adopted?”

“No, unfortunately not. No, they couldn’t find a placement for her.”

Kate scratched at the dog’s ears, and it whined again with pleasure.

“That’s sad,” she murmured.

“Yes,” said Adele, briefly. “It’s amazing that she was as bright and as – well – normal as she could be by the time she came to us. Still, it took its toll though, those years in care. Yes, it took its toll.”

“So Mandy came to you when she was ten?”

Adele nodded. “She settled immediately. Did well at school, made friends. We even thought she might go onto university.”

“So what happened?”

Adele Watkins sighed. She eased her bulk a little in the slightly too-small kitchen chair.

“Oh, my dear,” she said. “I could tell you that it was her boyfriend’s fault. That would be the obvious explanation.”

“Would this be Mike Fenton you’re talking about?”

“Mike, yes – that was his name.” Adele fell silent for a moment. Then she heaved herself off of her chair and went over to the kitchen dresser, crammed with crockery, cookery books, plastic toys, a child’s sock, an empty beer bottle, a blackening banana and other assorted household detritus. From the chaos she extracted a small, framed photograph and handed it to Kate.

Kate looked at the picture. A teenage girl, bright-faced and smiling, dressed in her school uniform, with a slightly crooked fringe and freckles. Kate thought of that copy of 
Great Expectations
 in Mandy’s room, the inscription on the flyer. Then she saw Mandy’s dead face on Doctor Telling’s examination table. She felt her fingers clench on the wooden frame.

“She was lovely,” she said in a low voice.

Adele sat down again, heavily.

“She was. It’s not—”

For a moment, her voice cracked. She turned her head sharply away from Kate to look again out of the window as if the view of the suburban garden fascinated her.

“It’s not fair,” said Adele after a moment. She cleared her throat. “Life’s not fair though, is it, my dear?”

Kate said nothing but handed her back the picture, gently. Adele took it and propped it up against the vase of flowers that stood in the middle of the kitchen table.

“So, Mike Fenton is the one you blame?” asked Kate.

Adele looked at her with a gentle smile.

“No, I said that would be the obvious explanation. He was the one who introduced her to drugs after all. But no, I don’t really blame him. Mandy made her own choices. She just made bad ones because she was missing something, you see.”

“Missing something?”

Adele picked up the photograph again, regarding the bright, pretty face of the young girl trapped within the frame.

“I don’t think you can conceive of the damage it does to a child when she has the kind of upbringing – or lack of it – that Mandy had,” she explained. “When your mother doesn’t want you – when you know your mother didn’t want you – when you’re rejected from that early an age, there’s a part of you that doesn’t ever recover. I think, somewhere deep down, you’re always aware of the 
lack
, you know. There’s always a part of you that’s missing.”

There was a long moment of silence. Adele looked up at Kate.

“I’m sorry, my dear, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” said Kate with a clenched and frozen smile. “Thank you for seeing me, Mrs Watkins. You’ve been very helpful.”

Adele looked a little surprised but heaved herself to her feet.

“Any time, my dear. I hope I’ve been of some help.”

“Very much so,” said Kate. She shook hands on the doorstep and handed over her card. “Thank you very much.”