Life Sentence (25 page)

Back at her desk, Fran worked as hard as her mother would have wished, if at different tasks. Though Farat Hafeez had the lion’s share, there was still a great deal of paperwork to complete for the Birmingham business, plus an in-tray that threatened to buckle.

Top of the heap was a note from Henson, inviting her to join him and the rest of the team in a drink that evening. To build bridges, to cement bonds, such activities were essential. She ought to be there. But it was one thing to hurtle from your father’s death-bed to work, and quite another to get raucous with your colleagues. Or was it? In any case, she was hardly dressed for letting her hair down, and truth to tell the height of luxury would have bean beans on toast in front of the TV and a candle-lit bath. Which brought Mark into the scenario: would he be invited to the shindig, or was he too senior? In any case, wasn’t it a booze-up for CID, not management? How would he feel about slumming it with a load of half-pissed underlings simply because he was sleeping with one of them?

As a new couple they had so much to work out, and this didn’t seem the moment. She ran tense hands through her unkempt hair – another item on tonight’s list – and found herself crying.

Furious with herself, she scrubbed at her eyes and balled the tissue into the bin, narrowly missing Mark, who had opened the door without knocking.

‘I just don’t know what to do about this,’ she said by way of explanation. She passed him Henson’s note.

Mark looked from her to the note and back again. ‘A simple note thanking him and saying you couldn’t be there because you were down in Devon, I’d have thought.’

‘But I’m not in Devon: I’m here!’

He touched the date at the top of the note. ‘I think you’ll find that was yesterday’s.’ Was he concerned or amused or both?

‘I really am losing it, aren’t I? Oh, Mark, what I’d give for a nice, normal week, one in which one day followed the next in an ordered fashion.’

‘When did you last have one?’

She snorted with sudden laughter. ‘Not since I joined the police! OK, my demands are too great. Just a
fairly
normal week.’

The shuttlecock flew higher and higher: surely it must fall out! But it swooped in just this side of the baseline, and now she was a clear point ahead. The sports hall bulged with spectators. Most were cheering her on,
falling respectfully silent when either player served. But as she prepared herself for the vital point, her father stood up.

‘You’ll have to hurry up, Fran – I can’t wait all day for you.’

‘I’ll catch you up!’ she shouted, serving and – yes! – winning. But as she picked up the trophy, one at least as large and grandiose as the FA Cup, she couldn’t see her father.

She slipped out of bed and padded off to the bathroom. The alarm clock told her it was three, almost to the minute.

‘You’re entitled to three days’ bereavement leave, aren’t you?’ Mark asked, over the muesli.

‘Yes. It depends on what time they can organise the funeral how many days I’ll need.’

‘How do you feel now you’re properly awake?’

‘Am I ever properly awake these days? I know there’s no comparison, Mark, but how did you feel when Tina died?’

He put down his spoon, counting on his fingers. ‘Guilty: for being alive. Angry: at the waste of a life that should have gone on much longer. Terrified: I had to tell the kids. Exhausted: I’d got to the point where I couldn’t physically carry on much longer. Guilty: I was almost relieved it was over. Panicky: I had so much to arrange. Lonely: someone who had been part of my life for so long had left me, taking shared memories with
her. Christ, Fran, what more do you want me to say?’

‘Anything else that will help me. I feel like an Easter egg, you see: strong outside but completely hollow. I ought to feel something more than I do, clearly. Guilt, mostly, because – because I’d stopped loving him. I’d started to see him as a problem, a chore. The case I couldn’t solve, and one I couldn’t pass on to anyone else. But today,’ she said, trying for a smile and pulling herself up straight, ‘it’s time to turn to a case I think we can solve. I want to update Tom on the Birmingham side of the case and find out how he’s got on. It’s weird, Mark: you’d have thought after all this time I was used to sitting listening to reports on crimes, or even reading laboured reports, but I really resent that it was he who tied all the loose ends, not me.’

‘You didn’t do so badly on the Rebecca case,’ he said.

‘And up in Brum it’ll be young Farat toiling away, pulling all the threads together.’

‘And you think it ought to be you doing everything, and organising the funeral and sorting out your mother’s accommodation. Fran: was what you did ever good enough for your parents?’

She bridled. ‘They’ve always been very supportive. I told you: Pa even bought his first car so he could run me round the country for badminton tournaments. Which is why I dreamt of one last night, I suppose – the very moment he was dying.’

‘What did he say when you won – which I presume was quite often?’

‘Well, he’d often point out ways I could have finished off my opponent more quickly, I suppose.’

‘Exam results?’

‘Well, I wasn’t ever the brightest lamp in the fairy lights.’

‘So how are you now Detective Chief Superintendent Doctor Harman? Fran, your parents seem to me to have set intolerably high hurdles for you to jump, and when you leapt them with ease simply raised them a bit more. Did you hear your Ma this weekend – even yesterday? Before either of us had our coats off she was issuing orders, and complaining about how you carried them out. I don’t expect you to take it aboard at the moment, but one day you might wonder why you’re never satisfied with your performance and trace it back to them. Come on, it’s time we were on the road: you’ve got to hear Tom tell you what you’ve enabled him to do. And I bet if you criticise him, it’ll be so gently he thinks all the improvements are entirely his own work.’

‘Tom,’ she confessed, almost truthfully, ‘I don’t even know what day it is today, what with one thing and another, so you’ll have to talk me through this very, very slowly. Take your time – use that whiteboard if necessary – and tell me everything we need to know to pass on the DPP.’

‘You’re sure, like, you ought to be in today?’

He spoke as if they were equals: she replied in kind. ‘What earthly use would I be down there? I’m not
domesticated, Tom, like my sister, and she’ll be dashing round sorting things out all the more efficiently for my being elsewhere. As for Ma: she’s become an old bat, Tom, like I’ll be in a few years’ time if I don’t watch it – she never stops nagging and giving contradictory orders. So though it looks bad, I shall stay here at my desk until the funeral.’ And come back to it with gusto, she added, under her breath. ‘Fire away.’

‘Right. Marjorie Gray – would you mind if I called her Elise while we’re talking about her, like?’

‘I rather think she might have preferred it.’

‘Elise looked after her parents until their deaths, one three years ago, the other just six months later. She sold or gave away all her possessions, apparently trying to shed her old life and try another for size.’ He looked at her with something like panic in his eyes. ‘Would she have liked it, Fran, or would she have ended up dead lonely?’

She tried to sound bracing, but wasn’t sure if it might not have come across as callous. ‘Hard to tell, isn’t it? But dead lonely’s better than plain dead, anyway.’

He managed a grin to acknowledge her effort. ‘Then she sold her parents’ house, and, since she inherited a tidy packet from them – I checked out their Will, Fran: they left well over four hundred thousand, nearer the half million – she bought a flat in Birmingham. Not where I’d have chosen myself, but there you are.’

‘It’s a lovely flat, Tom, and within walking distance of the city centre and all its amenities.’

‘But
Birmingham
!’ He might have said, ‘Outer Mongolia!’

She raised a mock-minatory finger. ‘Think about St Mary’s Bay.’

He grimaced.
‘A hit! A palpable hit!
As it says in the play.’

She still hadn’t talked to him about Scott, and here he was quoting Shakespeare.

He took her grin as encouragement to continue. ‘Anyway, she decides to buy a new car, and falls into the clutches of one Dean Roberts who persuades her to splash out on a Lotus. He’s a really nice guy, Fran – you know, you’d get chatting to him in a pub, and before you know it you’ve told him your life story. And Elise does just that. She tells him everything: how she’s given up her life down here and is going to start a brand new life in Birmingham, where she knows no one. She hates her St Mary’s Bay life so much she’s shedding it like a snake its skin, and converting everything into cash. Now, nice as he appears, Dean is actually a career criminal, involved with car theft. He steals top-of-the-range models to order. Usually he gets duplicate keys made of the cars he sells so they can be stolen from people’s drives. But this time he doesn’t know where she’s going, so he does something else. I’ve checked the records of the emergency calls on the day of the assault. Two people called in to say they’d seen an accident on the B2067, and indeed, officers reported tyre tracks that suggest a vehicle ended up on the grass verge. But
Roberts admits the accident was faked, so that Elise would get out of her car to see what she could do to help, only to be whacked on the head and left on the verge for dead. He said he only meant to knock her out, but claims that she must have a thin skull.’

‘So it’s her fault that he basically killed her!’

‘Quite. They load her Lotus into a horsebox and drive off.’

‘The sexual assault?’

‘Now, he didn’t have a problem with killing her but the assault really revolted him. He denies it on his mother’s grave. And his DNA confirms he’s innocent. But he’s fingered a mate, who’s now living in Spain. We’ve contacted Interpol for help here. But I think he knew about it, one way or another, because he swears he felt so guilty he went straight for a while. Eventually he ran out of money and his bosses were putting pressure on him – the people he stole the cars for, not those at the showroom, who had no idea what was going on. His bosses also got him hooked on cocaine, he says, though he was very vague about that, and he ended up couriering for them. Drugs and people. He says he’s only had contact with scrotes pretty low down the food chain, never the boss. But he thinks she’s a woman.’

‘Which is where I come in. We found the new Marjorie Gray, complete with documents for a whole series of Marjorie Grays. The people-trafficking seems to have been even more profitable than the car theft. So it’s not just poor Elise’s life they’ve destroyed: it’s those
of a lot of poor young women, raped and buggered and misused as only humans can hurt their fellow humans. Between us, we’ve unearthed a lot of nasty people, Tom.’

‘But we’ll put them behind bars, Fran – don’t forget that. It’s not just rooting out evil: it’s helping the courts punish it.’ As if inspired, he sprang to his feet. ‘I’ll get on to any dotting i’s and crossing t’s now, if you’ll excuse me: the sooner this lot satisfies the DPP the happier I shall be. What about you?’

Fran got up too, stretching so that her back cracked. ‘I’d better get on to the hospital authorities and tell them we’ve nailed Elise’s murderer. Then they can set about the case that should put the poor woman finally out of her misery.’

He was looking at her as if unsure how she’d take his next words.

‘Go on: spit it out.’

‘That Alan Pitt. Will you tell him? Because he really cared for her, didn’t he? And for you, actually. He told Sergeant Simpson that he’s left a pair of concert tickets for you in his house and would you be allowed to take advantage of them? Talk about weird, Fran. That man should be in hospital, not jail.’

‘Let’s hope the courts take that view,’ she said quietly.

‘It seems really strange, seeing you in here, in the chapel of rest, looking just like you did in your bed on the ward all those months. But now I know you’re dead, quite dead. That’s why my psychiatrist got permission for me to come and say one last goodbye. Yes, I have a psychiatrist now, because they decided I wasn’t bad but mad and put me not in prison but in hospital. No, you won’t place the allusion – I wonder if you ever would have done. I doubt it: they tell me they’ve found out more and more about you. Once you had your own little business, running a shop specialising in wools and embroidery silks, but of course, people lost interest in old-fashioned crafts and skills, and you had to sell up and work in a variety of other people’s shops. You must have hated it. And then your parents grew old and ill, and you became their carer. Because it was your job, you didn’t get much in the way of respite care for them. Every day must have seemed like the last, only worse, because you knew they would only deteriorate. Their deaths must have come as a huge release! Selling up everything, and giving away what you couldn’t sell – did you hate your life that much? I suppose you must have
done. It must have been as if your own possessions were tainted so that you couldn’t love them any more. I wonder how I shall feel when I live in my own home again. It won’t be the one I’ve lived in for years. Like you, I’ve got to start again. The bungalow’s sold, and all my books and china boxed up and in store. Oh, the local vigilantes of course – the fear was that they’d decided I was a paedophile and needed rougher justice than the courts could mete out.

‘But I was mad, they said, not bad. They said it was post-traumatic stress disorder, that the balance of my mind had been disturbed by finding you in the state you were and failing to save you – indeed, perpetuating your suffering by trying to resuscitate you. I’ve had hours of therapy, and enough drugs to make me rattle if you shook me, so in my head I know I’m not responsible for what happened to you. In my heart – that’s another matter. But I have to agree with them, or they’ll probably section me.

‘So it’s not my fault, what happened to you. But what about that child? Whatever they say, what I did to that Rebecca was plain wicked. She may remember nothing of her ordeal, and of course, I never touched her, but she had three months of cold turkey coming off the drugs I’d foisted on her. It was all so easy: I simply moved a workman’s shelter, those red and white little tents, from one place and put it in another. MacDonald’s was so crowded no one noticed me sitting at Rebecca’s table. Oh, I’d met her through the Internet, in one of those chat rooms. Her parents wouldn’t let her have a computer of her own, so she
simply used a friend’s. Music, that was what we spoke about. Anyway, I put the stuff in her orange juice, and waited till I could see her getting woozy, and simply left her too it. As she came out, swaying a bit, I helped her sit down in the shelter, and then brought my car round and popped her in. It’s always chaotic in Ashford on market day, with those huge white vans of the traders obstructing the CCTV cameras. They’ve tightened things up now.

‘I wonder if Frances has been to visit you. She wouldn’t talk to you as she has to me. Oh, yes, she’s been to see me in hospital several times, just as if we were friends. No, she’s not interrogating me, nothing like that. She tells me about her everyday life, and I tell her what little there is to tell of mine. She didn’t take up my offer of tickets for the Brodsky Quartet – legal problems, she said. But she did go, and she said they hadn’t lost any of their brilliance and energy. She herself seems to have a new lease of life, now she’s not hurtling around the country. Yes, her father died: it was all quite sudden in the end. She thought that would make her life more complicated, but it seems there was some sort of reconciliation between her mother and her elder sister, with the result, would you believe, that her mother’s gone to live in the Hebrides or somewhere. She did say, but I’m sure one of these damned pills is wreaking havoc with my memory. It doesn’t matter anyway, does it? Anyway, as Frances herself said, it solved her dilemma for her, rather than her having to make the decision.
Dea ex machina,
I said, and I must say I was surprised that she not only knew the term but also understood why I’d
changed it. She has to retire from her present post soon, but seems resigned to that: she says you can get too old. But I doubt if she’ll be unemployed, should she want work: at least two universities want her, and the Home Office is head hunting her too. And there’s some body that looks into miscarriages of justice. I should think she’d be most at home in that.

‘Any dreams I had of courting her have evaporated, I fear. Not just because of what I did, either, she assures me of that. She’s in what looks a very sound relationship with another officer, very senior. No, no wedding bells yet. But there’s something about the way her face changes when she speaks of him, and she wears this lovely ring. Victorian, I should say.

‘Now, is there anything else? Of course! They’ve found both the men who – who did this to you. The man who cracked your skull and the man who raped you so terribly. Life sentences, I’m glad to say. They tried, unsuccessfully, to have their sentences reduced by turning Queen’s Evidence and shopping their bosses – an unsavoury group by anyone’s standards. They’re looking at long sentences and deportation – see how police lingo has affected my own vocabulary!

‘Ah, Elise – it’s no good, I simply can’t think of you as Marjorie Gray! – it’s time for me to say goodbye. I shall be allowed to come to the funeral, of course, but I wanted one last word with you alone. So, goodbye, my dear: I wouldn’t have had this happen for the world.’