Post Mortem (29 page)

‘Thought you might be hungry.'

‘Thanks.' She took a bite but found it difficult to swallow. She put the remains in her jacket pocket.

A field opened out beyond the bridge. The sun was declining and the sheep, shifting around in the field, seemed to almost glow white against the encroaching darkness. Kieran did not walk any further, and in the shelter of the wood, Lizzie thought of the demons that attended her – both the police searching for her and the ballet-dancing girl with the serious face waiting somewhere close for her daddy to come home. Of course Kieran would not risk being seen with her. She imagined him grabbing the lead from a hook in the hall and calling:
Just popping out with the dog
. Then she thought of Farah, flat-chested, waiting for the pathologist's shears.

Kieran said, ‘It's been difficult for you.'

She answered in a kind of wonderment. ‘Difficult?'

‘I'm sorry, Lizzie.' He paused. ‘I'd like to hug you but it seems that's the last thing you want.'

The last thing she would want? She wondered whether he had said this as a kind of trick. She felt suddenly very cold again, and incredibly lonely. She wanted to pull her jacket tightly around her but resisted the impulse.

He said. ‘Where have you been?'

‘St Leonards.'

There was a pause before he spoke again.

‘Have you got a plan?'

She shook her head. ‘Not exactly.' She looked down at the ground and scuffed it with her shoe.

He shifted his weight. There was something impatient in him. He reached into his pocket and took out a battered black Nokia brick. It looked small, lying there flat in his open palm. The back, Lizzie noticed, was held on with a rubber band. She took it in, the fact of the phone made solid.

‘How did you get it?'

‘I got a call from Hadley. He said he was on his way to Portland Tower. He asked me to go to the locker and get the phone. I was angry with him, asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. I'd believed him when he'd told me that a recording wouldn't be a problem because he had never said anything to be ashamed of. Now he was telling me he had Farah's phone in his locker. He said he had just been trying to protect you, and that it had been a bloody stupid mistake.'

Lizzie felt her veneer of reasonableness deserting her.

‘He'd been trying to protect me?'

‘That's what he said, yes.'

Kieran wore the expression of forbearance that Lizzie knew from incidents at work. She had seen him wearing it with unrealistic victims, the mothers of juvenile suspects, officers who weren't up to scratch. Was that what she had become? A difficulty to be managed?

‘Did he say what he had done? Exactly how he'd got the phone?'

‘He was in a hurry when he spoke to me, Lizzie, and then he was dead, so we never did iron out the exact details.'

She looked at the phone. It was scuffed, the numbers worn away through use.

‘Is there anything on it?'

‘Oh yes.' Shaw turned it over in his hands and slid off the back, expertly removing the SIM card with his nail. He turned the phone face up and said, ‘Look, no passcode.'

It blinked into life and he flicked swiftly through the icons, then passed it to Lizzie so that she could listen. There was hissing and crackling in front of distant voices. Then Lizzie heard Hadley distinctly, a ghost materializing on the Sussex Downs.

‘
Yeah, he's . . .
' then nothing clearly, ‘
. . . erm, better . . .
' Inaudible again, a crackling on the recording, ‘
. . . needs to . . .
' The sound of Farah's voice, even fainter,
‘Not . . . No . . .
' A loud rustle against the microphone. Hadley again, ‘
. . . should . . . if you, if you . . .
' And then, faintly, but distinct among the crackle, a single word: ‘
Laden
'.

The recording stopped.

She held the phone close to her ear and pressed play again. She struggled to hear, scrubbing backwards and forward, but got no more than the first time.

Laden
. Just one word. Was that it? Was that all that was on the phone?

The triviality of it angered her, overwhelmed her. She couldn't get past it, couldn't make sense of the desperate thoughts raging through her head.

She sat on the low wall that ran down from the bridge. She turned the phone face up in her palm and shuttled through the photographs stored on it. Shaw sat beside her, watching over her shoulder. There was a picture of a tortoishell kitten with pale green eyes. Some girls in school uniform on a bus. A photo taken in a
mirror of Farah herself, the phone held up in her right hand, long dark hair falling round her shoulders.

Shaw interrupted her thoughts. ‘You feel guilty? Responsible?'

Lizzie nodded without looking up.

‘Well there's no reason for it. The girl made her choices. So did Hadley.'

Silence.

Then Lizzie said, ‘He says Laden on the tape.'

‘Yes. Hardly a racist tirade, is it?'

‘It was enough to have got him into trouble.'

‘And do you think that's right?'

Lizzie didn't answer.

‘Lizzie, do you think it's right that after twenty-seven years of service, Hadley could be dismissed just for calling Farah's dad Bin Laden?'

Lizzie raised herself slightly to slip the phone into her front pocket. She didn't want to answer, but Shaw was clearly waiting.

‘He knew the score,' she said. ‘He shouldn't have said it. He wasn't protecting me when he took the phone; he was protecting himself.'

‘If that makes you feel better.'

Lizzie got up and walked away, stopping at the edge of the field. ‘It doesn't make me feel better, Kieran. Nothing does.'

Shaw had stayed sitting. The dog came over and nuzzled into his hand. He stroked its head.

‘Lizzie, you are thinking the worst of Hadley because you're upset, but I believed him when he said he took the phone to protect you. I think if it wasn't for you, he would have just ridden it out . . .'

‘And is that supposed to make me feel better?'

‘No, I'm not trying to make you feel better right now.' The dog was pushing itself into Shaw's leg and he shoved it away impatiently. ‘After all, you hardly helped matters, did you?'

‘What do you mean by that?'

‘After Farah's little threat, you would barely speak to Hadley. Do you understand what that meant to him? Hadley
liked
you, Lizzie; he thought you had the makings of a good cop. He felt bad, ashamed even, because you'd backed him. He knew how much you would sweat and stress if Farah produced her pathetic recording. I think that's why he took the phone.'

Lizzie picked up a piece of wood and began to strip the bark from it.

After a pause Shaw said, ‘Well, I'll always believe that, but the truth is, neither of us will ever know what he was thinking.'

Lizzie considered his words. ‘He probably said more than Bin Laden. He probably thought the phone had captured everything he said, and that's why he was so anxious to have it. But it didn't record everything, because Farah had it hidden in her pocket.'

Kieran sighed. ‘OK, if you want. It was a torrent of racial abuse. Is that what you remember of Hadley?'

Lizzie shrugged.

‘You don't remember Hadley?' Kieran insisted. ‘Can you really not trust your memory of him? He wasn't a racist, you know that. He was simply from the street and he talked like the street. You know how he got people to see sense. A bit of pressure here, a joke, sometimes an idle threat. Nothing he said ever really meant much to him. It was all about getting people to do the right thing. It didn't mean anything to Farah either. Whatever Hadley said, it was just coinage as far as she was concerned – a way to protect her father.'

Lizzie snapped angrily, ‘Well clearly it went further than that for her in the end. She must have been pretty desperate to do what she did.'

‘Or mad.'

‘No, not mad,' she insisted. ‘Hadley crossed a line, you must see that.'

‘Of course I do . . .'

‘He took a phone by force from a vulnerable teenager. That's why she's dead. Not because he called her dad Bin Laden.'

‘The whole thing's a mess, yes. Of course it is.'

Lizzie's emotions were too much for her. She clenched her teeth together and resumed stripping the branch. The bark was wet and flaked away, leaving the wood beneath white as bone.

The Labrador was rooting around in the undergrowth. Kieran walked impatiently over to her. The dog had got hold of something disgusting and was biting at it, rolling her neck. Kieran pulled her out by the collar and dragged her down to the stream. He pushed her muzzle and neck into the water.

As Lizzie watched, it was as if she sensed newly how absurdly she had fallen in love with him. Head over heels: all the clichés. She thought of the warmth and weight of his body, the turn of his hip against her, the winding rose tattoo on his arm.

Kieran let the dog go and stepped back while the Labrador shook herself dry. He looked up towards Lizzie.

‘Hadley wasn't a saint, of course he wasn't . . . But he was a decent copper who did a lot of good in his twenty-seven years. He made a terrible mistake, yes, and he's paid a terrible price.'

Kieran squatted down and rinsed his hands in the water upstream, then dried them on a large cotton handkerchief he took from his pocket. Lizzie could think of nothing to say. Kieran walked towards her. He stood opposite her.

‘If the world wasn't so bloody crazy, absolutely none of this would have happened. And the girl was mad, utterly mad. You must see that. She took the boy. She killed Hadley, for God's sake.'

Lizzie shook her head. ‘No, no. She didn't kill him . . .' She could feel an intense pain in her throat.

Kieran held his hands out to her. She wanted to resist him but she also wanted his comfort. Then he was hugging her to him. His hands were cold from the stream water. She felt them icy on her
neck. Her cheek was against his chest. She inhaled the country smell of the waxed fabric.

‘I don't know how to live with it,' she said quietly.

He stroked her hair.

‘Darling.' There was a pause. She felt his voice reverberating through his jacket. ‘You did OK, Lizzie. You got the child away from the edge. We all fucked up, but you did save the child.'

He pushed her away gently, holding her at arm's length and studying her. He smiled briefly. ‘You look bloody ridiculous in those clothes. And that hair, Christ! You look like you should be protesting against the G8.'

She laughed in spite of herself. ‘Yes, I know.'

His face fell quickly into a more solemn cast. ‘Do you know what, Lizzie, the only really important question now is whether you are going to allow yourself to survive.'

Lizzie looked away.

‘What are you going to do?'

There was that question, and Lizzie found herself once again wary.

‘I don't know.'

‘You'll be interviewed by the DSI.'

‘Yes.'

‘What are you going to say?'

She opened her hands as if to show there was nothing in them.

He said, ‘I hope you won't be landing yourself in it. Hadley would be cross if you did, you know that. If you learn only one thing from him, then let it be this: never give the bastards anything.'

She stepped backwards. Had none of them really done anything wrong? Nothing that mattered, anyway?

‘No, I won't be landing myself in it.' And then, after a pause, ‘Or you.'

He exhaled. ‘I'm sorry?'

She couldn't stop herself.

‘Your actions don't look so great, do they? You were my inspector. I looked to you for guidance. You never told me to simply tell the truth. You didn't tell me plain and simple not to write the statement.'

‘No, I didn't tell you not to write the statement. You're right. But I did tell you to be
sure
, to be absolutely sure before you backed Hadley, and you didn't do that. You never clarified with him what he said. You still don't know exactly what he said, even now. You just went ahead and wrote the statement. It was your mistake and your bad decision, not mine.'

Lizzie felt angry tears welling up and she choked them down.

‘Well that advice might look fine to you, but how do you think it would look to the outside world?'

He stepped towards her, suddenly livid. She was startled by his anger and she backed away from him, but he had grabbed her upper arms. It hurt. She would have bruises.

‘The outside world,' he said. ‘What is the outside world?'

Holding her with his left hand, he put his right in her jeans pocket and took the phone. She twisted away from him and he let her go. She saw his hand closed firmly around the phone, and then he placed it in his jacket pocket.

She didn't know what to do with herself. She hadn't planned this and she didn't know what to say. The earth was muddy. Her breath frosted. She couldn't see the phone any more. Kieran's hands were in his pockets, as if he had to keep them there to stop himself striking her.

‘For you,' he said. ‘I went to search for the phone to protect you. Don't you see that? From the start I only thought of you. The one thing I could do when something terrible had happened was to make sure it didn't get any worse. I put myself on offer and I've been interviewed by the DSI. They interviewed me under caution,
for Chrissakes. I didn't need to do that for you. It was always
your
problem, Lizzie, never mine.'

Lizzie felt like she was suffocating. She drew breath in convulsions and then realized she was actually sobbing.

Kieran raised his voice. ‘You're not a child, so please stop acting like one. If they'd found the phone, do you think you would have been the woman who was prepared to risk everything to save a little boy's life, or would you have been the bent copper who lied in a statement?'