Requiem Mass (24 page)

‘Yes. Will Nanny talk to me then?’

‘No someone else will. Someone nice.’

Silence.

‘Bess, you still there?’

‘Yes.’

Pause. ‘Good girl. Now say to that person your name, your age, your address and say – wait a minute.’ Breathe, blow out, short breath, pause.

‘Say we need a doctor – your mummy needs a doctor, quickly. Can you do that? Repeat it to me.’

His daughter’s confident voice repeated his words with barely a stumble, reciting them like a difficult lesson.

‘Good girl, now do it.’

‘Do it?’ Pause.

‘Use the phone. Do exactly as you said but use the phone.’

Beyond the drumming that was starting in his ears, he could hear her perfect, tiny voice and the click of the receiver being replaced.

‘Done it, Daddy. A nice man said they were on their way.’

Fenwick didn’t look up from the faint rise and fall of his wife’s chest, now roughly covered by his own dressing gown after a desperate dash to the bedroom. She had been so cold.

‘Very good. Good girl. Now go and wait with your brother downstairs.’

‘He’s not here, Daddy.’

‘What …?’

Fenwick looked up in frustration, straight into the eyes of his four-year-old son. The child was crouched motionless on the half-landing immediately below him, eyes fixed on his father’s face. Fenwick struggled for calm and a normal voice.

‘Christopher, you’re in a draught there. Go downstairs and wait with your sister like a good boy.’

‘No, I want to be with my mummy!’ The reply was a ringing aggressive shout that brought Bess running.

‘I’ll stay with him, Daddy, don’t worry. He’ll be all right if I’m here.’

In the days and weeks that followed while his mother was moved from a life-support machine, to intensive care and finally to a long-stay ward, Christopher clung to his sister obsessively. At
the time Fenwick had been glad. It was all he could do to hold himself together and make decisions on his wife’s care without the preoccupation of children. His mother had come down and he made sure that he spent time with them every night but it was Bess who came for the cuddle and Christopher who sat next to her stroking her nightie constantly.

It became clear that his wife would never recover – well, not never, because the doctors refused to administer the relief of that certainty. Rather, they used phrases such as ‘highly unlikely’. There had been some brain damage but they could not be certain of the degree. Monique didn’t respond to any tests. It was as if she had withdrawn completely behind a wall, whether of disability or of her own making it was impossible to say. Whatever, she made no attempt to come out.

Eventually, she was moved to a long-term-care institution, over fifty miles away. At first Fenwick visited every other day, then as late winter turned the weather foul, once a week. He tried contacting her relatives in France, even travelling to the town she had come from, but could find no one. Eventually, following an inspiration born out of years of detective work, he went to the local mental hospital for the district and there found his father-in-law, senile at sixty-two. The doctors explained, although he hardly needed to be told, that there was a history of mental instability in the family.

He was furious with Monique at first, could not forgive her for the deceit and half-truths, but he was not a vindictive man. The anger wore itself out and he finally settled down to fortnightly trips that he’d maintained for the five months since.

Now there was glaring evidence that his son was seriously ill. Through the long interminable night his mind patrolled a Möbius strip of argument – starting out positively with the thought that this was the inevitable reaction of a sensitive child to his mother’s illness, then sliding along to the dread that he had inherited her mental instability, before coming back around to the starting point again. At five o’clock in the morning, abandoning all thought of sleep, he rose, put on a tracksuit and
went out for a run. It had been months since he had last taken his usual exercise and after five short miles he was sweating and breathless with exertion. He was not fit. Too many snack lunches and late dinners, and not enough exercise were unforgiving to a man of his age.

He made himself a healthy breakfast of fruit, wholemeal toast and decaffeinated coffee, feeling better mentally for the exercise despite the aches and pains he knew would be waiting for him the next day. His right knee already throbbed ominously. He showered and dressed, read the newspapers from cover to cover and felt ready for the day – whatever it held. His determination to beat any problem was fully restored.

Fenwick was clear what he would do. He would allow himself the pleasure of waking his daughter and giving her an early breakfast in bed and a story. Then, a change of plan, he would get to the office early, read any new reports and reread the old ones. He could have Cooper targeted on follow-up actions and be home shortly after nine o’clock on schedule to take his son and mother to the specialist clinic. After that, he would have to take things one step at a time, but at least he would be in control.

Cooper had been anticipating a good Monday morning. He would get in early, review the reports, direct the work for the day and then have time to spend testing his pet theory. Instead, he found that Fenwick had beaten him to it. There was a list of tasks that would take him two days to sort out. The only good news was that one of them added direct support to the private opinion that he was developing on the case.

Fenwick turned up at the incident room shortly after two, clipped and unapproachable. The team was relieved to see, however, that he was fully in command of himself and others. No one asked about the unexplained absence.

‘Right, results, Sergeant. Where are they?’

‘I’ll take you through them, sir. One, you were right, the semen sample taken from the body was twelve to eighteen hours old, which means that the killer brought it with him to the
scene and obviously pre-planned the whole event, even securing a sample from someone else.

‘Which means he could be homosexual, or a voyeur, spying on couples in Friday Street and Pixt Lane. I’ve detailed PC Miller to make enquiries tonight and again on Wednesday to catch the regulars – see if they saw anything.’

Fenwick could hardly have been said to smile but the muscles in his jaw definitely relaxed and twitched.

‘No matches of either samples against PNC either, sir, and no real leads on known offenders. We’ve sent details off to be checked against the AFR but the fingerprint sample was too small to get sufficient points of comparison to match to the PNC.

‘The report on the empty envelope found at Johnstone’s house just confirmed what we already knew. It was sent by Anderson; it had her fingerprints on it and the paper and ink match. They sent handwriting samples to a graphologist who has confirmed that the envelope was written by the same person who wrote out the entries in the sample of the address book you gave them.’

‘And the tyre mark from the back of the envelope?’

‘Ah yes. You were right on both counts. It matched the cycle-tracks at the scene and in the back garden, which means that the intruder at the house wheeled the bike over it when he entered. Also, as you suspected, if you look at the photograph taken of the post on the mat after we had arrived, there is no consistent pattern of tracks – they’re all jumbled up which means that her post had been moved between the time he entered on the bike and when SOCO and the photographer arrived.’

‘Forensics have got the whole lot now, to see if we can recreate the complete track – and check nothing else is missing?’ Cooper nodded. ‘Good, what else?’

‘The detailed report on the scene has just arrived. You wanted to check whether she had been held still as she died. Well, she had. There are spurts of blood on the walls and ceilings consistent with a single wound severing her main veins and arteries. The direction of the splash marks is consistent and there was substantial pooling around the body with no signs of
dragging to the position in which she died.

‘The blood found at the foot of the stairs is consistent with a heavily bloodstained person standing in one spot, perhaps while changing their clothes. It’s hard to say for sure.’

‘There’s no way this was unpremeditated or random, is there? We’re up against someone who planned this meticulously, with or without an accomplice. It’s time to take stock and focus. We’ve got too many unfinished lines of inquiry.’

Cooper hesitated before he made his next comment. They were sitting in the small screened-off cubicle where Fenwick had his desk, to one end of the incident room. The screens were only six feet high and all their conversation could be heard by the team in the room. Now he had to discuss something far more delicate, and he knew he and Fenwick would not see eye to eye. Fenwick made it worse by asking the question he was dreading.

‘What about your reread of all the reports? Did you find anything significant that we had missed?’

Cooper’s last chance to lie, but he was an honest man: ‘Yes, but it’s probably nothing. As you said, we’ve already got too much to worry about.’

‘Well, it’s either worth mentioning or it’s not, make up your mind!’

Cooper passed him a copy of the report on Johnstone’s house, with a small yellow Post-it note stuck to one page, pointing to an entry in a long index of items that had been analysed:
One page of A5 feint-ruled paper from a diary. Page dated May 16th, 1979.

‘So?’

‘You’ll recall that we found diaries for 1973 onwards but that there were no diaries for years 1977–1981; this is a page from a 1979 diary. It must have fallen out at some stage. It doesn’t change anything. I thought she’d thrown them away – perhaps they fell to bits.’

‘Perhaps. But it’s equally likely that the intruder took it. We already know this was premeditated – which means the murderer had a motive. He took the risk of going to her house
and searching it – there must be a reason. It wasn’t burglary so perhaps he was looking for something. All that we know is missing so far is a letter from Octavia Anderson and this diary which happens to be for a year when Anderson and Johnstone were at school together.’

‘But it doesn’t say anything, sir, just drivel. I can’t see the connection and the case is already too complicated, like you said.’ Cooper was uncomfortably aware of the silence beyond the screens.

‘So far we can find no clues in her work or private life. No secret relationships, love affairs, dark secrets – nothing. It was either random, but the planning speaks against it, or there is something we’ve failed to discover, or it has something to do with her past. We need to find out what.’

‘With respect, sir,’ Fenwick’s jaw tightened visibly as he listened with hard-won patience to his sergeant, ‘there is another explanation. He might have preplanned it but she could still be a random victim; he stalked her for a few days perhaps, became fixated, but that’s all.’

‘And the connection with Anderson? Why did the killer take the letter, Cooper?’

‘We’ve known weirder mementoes.’

‘Unlikely – why should he have opened it? Anyway, if you’re right, what line of inquiry do you intend to pursue? What are you going to give this eager team to do?’ A wide sweep of his hand took in the incident room and the small group of officers trying hard not to look as if they were listening to every word.

‘Good point, sir,’ Cooper lowered his voice, ‘but we’ll come under pressure soon on team size anyway.’

‘Exactly; so make the most of them now and get on with it.’

DC Nightingale was a freshman detective and used to receiving the monotonous, grinding chores that fell to trainees everywhere. Hers was the unenviable task of tracking down the current whereabouts of the ‘class of 1980’, as Fenwick’s latest bee in the bonnet had been christened. So far she had traced
nine, lost one to Australian emigration, another two to Canada, and had the distressing experience of talking to a long-bereaved mother who had lost her eighteen-year-old in a car accident almost twenty years previously, but had still sobbed down the phone recounting her daughter’s contemporaries’ names and what had become of them. She had revealed an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of ‘her Anita’s’ friends gleaned from an obsessive following of marriages and births in the local paper – a vicarious sharing of the life her daughter never knew.

It had saved Detective Constable Nightingale many hours’ work but she’d still felt like a grave robber and had eventually cut the woman off with a promise to get back to her once they had followed up on the names given.

She looked at the nine names she had left:

Judith Richards – Canada

Amanda (Mandy) Lovell – Canada

Carol Truman – Australia

Leslie Bannister (now Smith, husband Brian)

Angela Barnet (now Jones (lives locally still) a very good friend of Anita’s)

Wendi (with an i) Compton (now Russell, husband James with two 11-year-olds)

Judith Plaistow – unmarried

Mary Smith (now Heath – husband Andrew or Albert)

Deborah Waite (now Fearnside – husband Derek)

A Jones and a Smith in so short a list seemed more than unfair, so Nightingale decided to make a start on the other UK names – tracing telephone numbers, addresses, trying to arrange interviews.

Mary Heath’s telephone rang unanswered. It was four o’clock, school run time, but the unmarried constable did not appreciate that. She was young and, though engaged, totally unaware of the commitments that followed marriage and family. Instead, she focused with customary single-mindedness on the job before her. No matter how tedious or unpromising she always
completed the work she was given with a focused determination that could strike others, including her fiancé, as selfishly ruthless. But it was one of the characteristics that had already singled her out for the curious attention of her superiors and she was incapable of giving less than one hundred per cent to her work. Wendi Russell’s answerphone obligingly took a message. As did Deborah Fearnside’s – a man’s voice abruptly asking the caller to leave details. There was no trace of a Judith or J. Plaistow in the local directory and no less than 35 Joneses and 26 B. Smiths.