Pain of Death (4 page)
Staffe drives through Richmond Deer Park and picks up the river road at Kingston, passing Surbiton with its tree-lined streets of Victorian villas that run down to the Thames. He parks up on the Green at Thames Ditton. The daffodils are out and the schools must have broken up for Easter because mothers sit in clusters, forming rings and watching each other’s children play, cajoling excellence from their offspring. An old boy in a panama makes measured progress, stick in hand. He checks his watch and veers to a bench, knowing the Angel will not be open for another half-hour.
16 The Green – the home of Bridget Lamb, née Kilbride, sister of Kerry Degg – is just how Staffe remembers it: a double-fronted, stuccoed, Georgian residence with a perfectly tended garden and a freshly painted, racing-green front door. He presses the bell. It rings brilliantly in the spring morning.
A man of similar age to Staffe opens the door. He is dressed for retirement, though, with thick brogues and mustard cords, a Bengal shirt and hair oiled with pomade. ‘Mr Lamb?’ he says.
The man nods, looks at him, inquisitively. For a moment, he appears to be taken aback. Beyond, the hallway is tiled, after William Morris. The house is shiny and silent. ‘Inspector? She’s expecting you.’ Lamb shows Staffe into a room at the back of the house. The french windows are open and a woman sits at a table on the patio, a fresh cafetière yet to be plunged and a crystal pillbox piled with Parma violets.
Bridget Lamb wears sunglasses. She has fine, blonde hair in a bob and ruby-painted lips. She looks ten years older than her sister, maybe more. When she speaks, it is a child’s voice. She holds out a hand and Staffe takes it, mindful not to be too firm. Her hand is cold, the grip firm. She says, ‘It’s terrible, what’s happened to Kerry. I would visit, but I don’t want to upset her.’ Her breath is strong and floral from the violets.
‘You don’t get on?’
‘It wouldn’t take a policeman to discover that we are chalk and cheese.’
She plunges the coffee and it takes all her might. Slowly, as if recalling the lines of a poem from prep, Bridget elucidates the ways in which Kerry had made different choices. She makes it sound deliberate, can’t mask her disappointment.
‘I’ve seen her school reports,’ says Staffe. ‘Was there a point when she lost interest?’
‘She was a woman very young. I’m two years older, but Kerry was first to most things. I’ve had analysis.’
Staffe looks back, into the house, then checks the garden out. ‘You don’t have children?’
‘You’re here to talk about Kerry, aren’t you?’
‘Her social workers say she didn’t have the emotional strength to be a mother, but she appears to love the children.’
‘She loved the fathers more.’ Bridget looks away from Staffe as she says it, ashamed, as if she had bitten into something unexpectedly foul.
A device within the house pings.
‘You and your husband …’
‘I must go in now.’
As they pass through the house, a smell of something freshly baked drifts from the kitchen.
Bridget fusses in the kitchen, struggling with the Aga, using oven mitts. Crouched, and with her back to Staffe, Bridget says, softly, ‘I find it upsetting to talk about Kerry.’ She waits for Staffe to come closer. ‘My husband said I should co-operate.’ She lifts a tray onto the top of the oven. It bears two small, golden cottage loaves and Staffe wants to rip into them right now, while they are hot.
‘Your sister is very ill and it is none of my business, but if anything happens – which is quite possible – I would hate to think you had missed an opportunity to see her a last time.’
Bridget gasps, swallowing her own breath and puts a hand to her throat. She shakes her head and steps away, knocking into the open oven door and blinking, her eyes watery. ‘You should go,’ she says. ‘Please go.’
On balance, Staffe decides to comply. But as he gets to his car, Bridget’s husband appears from nowhere, rag in hand. He had been crouched behind his car, supposedly waxing it. ‘You don’t remember, do you, Will? Malcolm Lamb.’
Staffe squints, feigning incredulity. ‘Malcky?’ He remembered him from the minute he clocked Bridget’s married name, put it with the address.
‘I remember your parents. Always very decent to me. Such a terrible shame. Did they ever catch those people?’
Staffe shakes his head, recalling that he hadn’t always been decent to Malcky Lamb. On close examination, he sees how little that shy boy, who now lives in his parents’ house, seems to have changed, and as he drives away, he is transported to the day his own parents died – the aftershock from that Biscay bomb.
*
Josie’s eyes are dark and hollow, her shoulders sag. She stares vaguely at the collected monitors and sacks of liquid that stand beside the confined cot that holds Baby Grace. Tubes and wires feed life through airlocked holes into the incubator.
Staffe draws up a chair and sits beside Josie. After a minute or so she holds out a hand. He takes it, puts an arm around her shoulder and draws her to him. She rests her head against his neck and he feels her breathing slow down a little. Shortly after, her body jolts. In her dreams, she must have fallen. He stays with her until Sean Degg arrives. Then, he whispers in her ear, ‘The father has come. You’d better leave him alone with the baby.’
The jolly nurse with the golden hair is with Sean. As Josie blinks from sleep, she says, ‘Can he be trusted?’
Sean says, ‘You’re the one who found her? I can’t ever thank you enough. She is a gift from God. Truly a gift.’
‘You should have done more,’ says Josie.
‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying,’ says Staffe.
Sean says, ‘I can’t believe she is mine. I can’t believe she survived.’
Staffe watches the way Josie looks at Sean, unable, in her stripped-bare state, to see him with anything other than contempt.
Sean kneels beside the cot, his hands clasped together, looking intently at his flesh and blood; there is a zealous strain of contrition in the way he rocks back and forth, saying, over and again, ‘My gift.’
Staffe asks the nurse if someone will be staying with Sean.
‘He
is
the father.’
‘I will send someone. Until then, please keep an eye on him. Every second.’
In reception, Staffe urges Josie to go home. She consents, but says she’ll be in tomorrow – to catch the bastards: ‘That witch Lesley Crawford. I’ll see her burn – if she’s the one who left Grace.’
Pulford arrives, says, ‘I’ve got what you wanted, on Breath of Life.’
Staffe takes it. ‘Now, check up on Bridget Lamb. Bridget Kilbride as was. She lived in Kingston after she left school, then when she married, she moved to Thames Ditton. Look out for any mention of church groups she might be involved with.’
‘This is Kerry Degg’s sister?’
‘Exactly. Now, what’s the latest on Kerry?’
‘No better, sir.’
‘So tell me about Lesley Crawford and Breath of Life.’
‘She lives out in Southfields.’ His sergeant hands Staffe a wad of paper. ‘The internet’s got some stuff on her, but the latest thing, before this, was a letter she wrote about the private member’s bill being brought by a backbencher, a guy called Vernon Short. It’s to reduce the threshold for terminating pregnancies to twenty weeks.’
‘And she’s in favour of this?’
‘You’d think so, but it looks like she’s got it in for this bloke Short. She calls him a collaborator.’
‘I’d better go and see her.’
‘Not a problem. When I spoke to her on the phone, it sounded as though she couldn’t wait.’
Outside, the remnants of the warm day linger. The evening draws in, but people are staying outside and the bars and pavement cafés are effervescent with office workers, drinking and chatting. It is a day to cling on to and as they get into Staffe’s car, he says, ‘Read me that letter of Lesley Crawford’s that the
Guardian
published.’
Pulford taps away at his BlackBerry, begins to read:
‘It remains one of the most incomprehensible crimes of modern Britain, that we expend so much time and energy preserving the rights of all manner of minority groups, that we are immobilised by political correctness and bibles of legislation from Brussels; that we engage in wars in far-flung corners of the globe to protect foreigners against tyranny, and write off billions upon billions of pounds of debt from the so-called developing world, yet on our own doorstep murder is sanctioned every hour of every day. It is time to address the genocide of an Unborn Population and the Rt Hon Vernon Short’s proposed bill simply doesn’t go far enough. In fact, it further legitimises these crimes. This is a question of murder and morality, not simple arithmetic.
‘And she goes on, sir. She seems pretty militant.’
‘Not half. Sounds like a bloody Mitford sister. Should we expect blue stockings and a revolver in her handbag?’
*
In her art deco lounge, Lesley Crawford says, ‘You expected me to be a nutter, did you? Well, you may be right.’ She steps out of her court shoes and leans back into a Macassar ebony chair that looks as if it might be a Paul Kiss. She wafts an arm for Staffe and Pulford to sit.
‘How did you do it? Get into the tunnel, I mean,’ says Staffe, weighing up the room, trying not to concentrate on Lesley Crawford and her slow, confident mannerisms.
‘Whatever makes you think I did?’ Lesley gives them a superior, withering look.
‘What about the letter you sent?’ says Pulford.
Staffe interjects, shooting a chastising, sharp glance at Pulford. ‘Of course,
you
didn’t. The “you” was plural. Your hands are for letter writing, not dirtying on the common business of kidnap and murder.’
‘The child would have died,’ she says. ‘The organisation had no choice.’
‘How long did you have her down there in the tunnel?’
‘How long does a child have to live in this world before you are stopped from killing it?’
‘I’m not here to talk politics, Ms Crawford.’
‘I’m a miss. And I’m talking about murder, not politics. Murder is police work, isn’t it, Inspector?’ She leans forward, elbows on her knees, chin raised and resting on a single, extended index finger.
‘Whoever delivered the baby had a reasonable knowledge. And they knew how to clean up a crime scene.’
‘This was an act of kindness, not crime.’
‘So I’ll need a list of all your members.’
‘There is no such thing.’
‘Your church will be a good place to start. And a thorough search here, of course.’
‘You can’t do that.’ Crawford looks directly at Staffe and smirks.
He slowly pulls an envelope from the inside pocket of his jacket. ‘This is a warrant, to search these premises. You could give me the list of your members, to save time. And to avoid any mess.’
Lesley Crawford stands, takes a mobile phone off the mantel, and says into it, ‘You can come through, Jasper.’
Staffe watches her intently as she sits back down, untroubled. Together, they look at the door as it opens. A tall, elegant man enters, wearing a finely tailored suit with a
high-collared
, open-neck shirt. He is about as smooth as the legal profession gets.
‘Inspector, this is …’
‘Yes, I know. Jasper Renwick. Come on, Sergeant, we’re going,’ says Staffe.
‘Don’t you want to search my home?’
Staffe approaches Crawford. In heels, she would be almost as tall as him. He hisses, ‘I will nail you for this. The law is a sword, not a shield.’
‘What murderous metaphors you choose, Mr Wagstaffe. I’ll see you in court – if you wish to waste police time.’
On the way out, Staffe notices how many books Lesley Crawford has, in cases lining the hallway, all the way to the kitchen at the back of the house, and he wonders what madnesses people might become capable of when they spend their lives drowning in words.
As they drive away, he says, ‘She wants front pages out of this. Well, she’ll get nothing from us.’
‘Jasper Renwick, he’s quite famous, isn’t he?’
‘He’s a prick who’d do anything to get on television.’
‘But he’s good.’
‘We won’t give him the chance. He wants us to go after Breath of Life. So we won’t.’
Pulford says, ‘Because it’s the individual we need to get.’
‘Exactly. Breath of Life just collates the publicity. We can’t put an organisation, a letterheading, in the dock. It’s not even a charity.’
Staffe’s telephone rings. The screen says ‘Josie.’
He answers and, immediately, Staffe can tell she is upset. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Kerry Degg has been taken into theatre. Twenty minutes ago.’
Staffe knows that Lesley Crawford wouldn’t bat an eye, would quite possibly draw her thin lips into a smile.
*
Kerry’s face is all he can see of her as a surgeon works intently. From the look on the nurses’ faces, Staffe concludes it is a forlorn matter.
A man in a suit, masked and gloved, sidles to Staffe, says, ‘The prospects are poor.’
Staffe looks at Kerry, focuses on her eyes, hoping they will flicker, might impart some clue. He will find the killer, anyway. Won’t he? It seems to him that something moves. And her lips – they seem to have parted. He thinks it the slightest semblance of a smile.
A high-pitched, electronic whine comes from beside the anaesthetist. He moves into action, putting an oxygen feed over Kerry’s face, and Staffe closes his eyes. The man in the suit says something that Staffe doesn’t hear. He feels something leave the room, pictures Lori Dos Passos beguiling her audience with movement and voice, flesh and life.
The press are having a field day with the Kerry Degg story. Baby Grace is in a critical but stable condition. Sean, by her bedside, has been staring transfixed at his daughter ever since the nurses told him that his wife had passed away. He shed not a single tear, which made Staffe think that, if Sean did crack, he would break altogether.
The red-tops have somehow acquired a picture of Sean by Grace’s bed, but the editors haven’t dared to come down one way or the other on the subject of Lesley Crawford: devil or do-gooder. It doesn’t help her cause that, despite the fact that she is the signatory for Breath of Life, she looks so calm and assured; nor that she is a childless spinster; nor that Jasper Renwick, smoothest of all the slippery lawyers in London town, has kept the law from her door.
The
News
dared to say, in its editorial, that no matter what you think of Vernon Short’s upcoming private member’s bill, the saving of one life – if you accept that is what it was at the time of Kerry Degg’s abduction – can never justify the taking of another. Conversely, though expressed with the lightest of touches, the
Post
said that an innocent was saved and that nobody could ever call Kerry Degg innocent. They carry a picture of her two children with their foster parents, John and Sheila Archibald. The children smile into camera with gap teeth. The foster parents look glum.
The broadsheets focused on the story’s gothic unusualness. Any political analysis was even-handed. Certainly, Vernon Short was transformed from a backbench nobody to a daring crusader. Some church leaders hailed him as a potential future Home Secretary, or even Prime Minister.
Pulford shakes a newspaper, angrily. ‘Breath of Life and Vernon Short are both getting exactly what they want.’
‘I’m going to see Nick Absolom,’ says Staffe.
‘At the
News?
I thought you loathed him.’
‘And then I’m going to pay Vernon Short a visit.’
*
Vernon Short is perfectly happy to tell Staffe about his upcoming private member’s bill. He repeats his statement of regret, to Staffe, as if his every word will be committed to history. He says that everything that is incumbent upon us as a responsible nation should be achieved through discourse and legislation, not direct action. What happened to Kerry Degg was reprehensible. However, let Baby Grace be a shining testament to the value we should assign to life; the virtue of his bill is illuminated by this sorry tale.
‘Save the speech, Mr Short. It’s wasted on me,’ says Staffe. ‘I’m not here to cast a vote. What do you know of Lesley Crawford?’
Vernon’s smile shallows, in the finest degree. ‘We both believe in the rights of our unborn population. Our methods are different, of course.’
‘In what respect?’
‘I wouldn’t ever …’ Vernon stops himself and presses the intercom on his telephone, asks his secretary to make some coffee and bring through biscuits.
‘You wouldn’t ever …?’
‘I really don’t know anything about Lesley.’
‘You clearly think she is capable of murdering somebody, to further her ambitions.’
‘I said no such thing. You should be careful what conclusions you draw, Inspector.’
‘Lesley’s press statement and Kerry Degg’s baby daughter have lengthened your day in the sun.’
‘I don’t care for your tone.’
‘The pollsters reckon so. A few days ago, nobody had even heard about your bill. It was doomed. A backbench flirtation.’
‘It is good law. The argument will speak for itself.’ The door opens and Short’s secretary comes in with a tray. Short stands and hitches his trousers, motions with the slightest dip of his head for the secretary to take the coffee and biscuits back where they came from, which she does. ‘I have another appointment.’
‘No point in good laws if they’re not enforced, Mr Short. Now, tell me what the Home Secretary makes of your bill.’
‘It is common knowledge that she is publicly against it. We are a broad church and Cathy is pretty much on the centre left.’
‘Political suicide for you, then, I’d say.’
‘There comes a time when you have to stand up for what is right.’
‘The government doesn’t want this debate, does it? Especially Cathy Killick.’
‘The government embraces debate, especially the Home Secretary.’
‘You can amend your bill. You can change it any time in the next week.’
‘Short regards Staffe with renewed suspicion. ‘You’ve done your homework. But I do not intend to.’
‘You “do not intend to”. You could have said, “I will not.” But you didn’t.’
‘I do not intend to.’
‘You’re a career backbencher, eh, Vernon? Not even the sniff of a junior ministry, and you’re what? In your fifties? These young guns with their spin-doctoring ways tearing past you. It would crown your career, wouldn’t it, if you were to be offered something. Stepping into the old man’s shoes at last.’
‘You have quite an imagination. You should exercise some restraint, Inspector.’
‘When did you take up the cause of the “unborn population” as you call it?’ Staffe takes out a single sheet of A4. From it, he begins to read a list of bills that Vernon Short has voted for and against – provided courtesy of Nick Absolom, of the
News
.
When he is done, Staffe says, ‘Hardly a coherent pattern of voting behaviour; not the actions of a moral crusader.’
‘I judge each case on its merits. You have to take voting into its wider context. You are being a little naïve.’
‘You have always gone where the Whip blew you. Until now.’ Staffe places the sheet of A4 on Vernon Short’s desk. ‘And you, Mr Short, are the naïve one, if you think I won’t find out exactly what you do from now on – and what you have been up to, all the way back to the sixth of January.’
‘The sixth?’
‘Ask Lesley Crawford. Ask Sean Degg. Ask the baby when she grows up and can answer you. Because I’ll have to answer to her, when she asks who murdered her mother.’
*
Josie carries the drinks into the room where Sean Degg sits beside his daughter’s incubated cot. A dark-haired nurse had sat with him but leaves as soon as Josie returns.
She hands Sean his black tea and sips from her own machine-made mocha. ‘You were going to tell me how you and Kerry met. She was much younger, right?’
Sean sips his black tea, pops a pill into his mouth. Soon, he looks relaxed and he talks, low, almost to himself. ‘Kerry was sixteen when we met. I was booking gigs. I had a couple of clients but I never made much money. Too soft, I suppose.’
‘You met her at a gig?’
Sean stands and looks down on his baby, her eyes closed and her skin still pale. He mumbles, ‘She was adopted. Never even knew her dad. And when Kerry was six or seven, her new father was killed in a crash. I tried to get Kerry to see someone about it, but she wouldn’t.’
‘What about her sister, Bridget?’ says Josie. ‘Maybe you should go and see her. It might help both of you.’
‘Kerry wouldn’t want that.’
Josie knew the answer to her next question, asked it anyway. ‘Have you seen Kerry – since she … passed away?’
‘She wouldn’t want that.’
‘And what about you?’
‘The first time she performed for me was an open mike up at the Angel. She could make herself anything on that stage. I saw it from the first look, the first sound of her. I saw it.’ He is transfixed by the motionless baby. He looks at Josie, then quickly away, as if afraid of her response. ‘Do you believe them, when they say Grace’s chances are good?’
Josie reaches out with her hand and Sean takes it. He grips Josie hard. Together, they sip from their drinks.
*
Staffe settles into his nook in the Hand and Shears, drinks lustily from his pint of spiced-up tomato juice. He eyes up the Adnams.
April catches him at it from behind the bar and throws a tea towel over her shoulder, laughs, ‘I don’t know why you deny yourself, not when Dick’s beer is so good.’
‘Some of us have work to do,’ he says.
‘Oh, dear. Someone’s in for it, then.’
‘Hopefully,’ he thinks, breaking open the early evening edition of the
News
. He scans the front page and sees no outcome from his earlier conversation with Nick Absolom. Flicking through, he spots it on page seven, a two-column piece.
He has another draught of the Virgin Mary and takes in a cube of ice, sucks on it as he reads.
New developments in the Baby Grace case suggest that police are looking beyond the claims that members of the Breath of Life Group are responsible for the kidnapping of Grace’s mother, Kerry Degg. No official statement has been made by City Police, but we have cause to believe that the claim, by Lesley Crawford, a member of Breath of Life, that Kerry was kidnapped by their members, is simply a smokescreen.
The upcoming private members bill, presented by backbencher Vernon Short, has gained a dramatic surge in support following the saving of Baby Grace.
Our reporters attempted to seek clarification that Vernon Short condemned the actions of Breath of Life, but the MP was unavailable for comment. After four days, and even in the light of the death of Kerry Degg, no arrests have been made in relation to what the organisation calls ‘Assisted Childbearing’.
Carole Aimes, spokesperson for CHOICE, an organisation fiercely opposed to Short’s bill, reiterated that Lesley Crawford should be arrested. Aimes condemned as irresponsible any possibility that City Police were treating Breath of Life claims lightly.
The condition of Baby Grace remains critical but stable and her plight has served as a rallying call for religious groups throughout the country who represent the interests of ‘The Unborn Population’.
Staffe rereads the piece and folds the paper back down. Lesley Crawford will have to make the next move if she wants the world to believe that Breath of Life were behind the Kerry Degg murder.
He finishes his tomato juice to within two thick fingers of the bottom of the glass and catches the attention of April, mimes the pulling of a pint. She laughs out loud and wags a finger at him, then pulls his Adnams.
He texts Pulford to get back down to Southfields, to monitor the comings and goings of everybody who visits Lesley Crawford. Under no circumstances is he to be seen, though. It is imperative that she believes the police are looking elsewhere for Kerry Degg’s killer.
The narrow doors to the snug swing open and Josie comes in, takes his pint from April and sits alongside Staffe.
‘You talked to Sean?’ he says.
Josie picks up the glass of tomato juice, finishes it and says, ‘Hmm. He let something slip. Said Kerry was adopted. Her new dad died when she was young. And he told me how they met. I don’t see that Sean could have taken Kerry down into that tunnel.’
Staffe puts down his pint, untouched, says, ‘Adopted? Bridget didn’t say anything about that.’
