Shaping the Ripples (15 page)

Inside the police station, I reported to the desk and was shown into an interview room with the promise that DI Smith would be with me shortly.

The room itself was not dissimilar to the ones we use at the centre; a wooden table in the middle of the room, with one orange plastic chair on the near side of the table, and two more chairs on the far side. The most significant difference was the lack of any windows, which gave the room an oppressive, claustrophobic feel.

I sat down in the nearest chair and began to wait. After a few minutes, the door behind me opened again, and Laura Smith came in.

“Sorry to keep you waiting Mr. Bailey,” she said as she sat down opposite me. “Would you like me to get a coffee for you?”

After I had declined, she got down to business. She took a small tape recorder out of her pocket and placed it on the table. “It’s our standard practice to record all interviews. It saves me from having to try and scribble down notes while we are talking. I trust you have no objections?”

Once I’d said that I didn’t, she turned on the machine. “For the benefit of the tape this is a recording of an interview beginning ..” she checked her watch, “at 10.45 am on Thursday December 27th. Present are Mr. Jack Bailey and Detective Inspector Laura Smith.”

She looked directly at me and then began. “Mr. Bailey, you mentioned a note which had been sent to you. Could I see it please?”

I took the envelope out of my coat pocket and offered to hand it to her. She shook her head.

“Just take the letter out of the envelope and put both of them down on the table please.”

I did as I was instructed, and she opened one of the desk draws and produced a clear plastic bag and a pair of tweezers. While she was doing this, she then spoke to the recorder again. “For the benefit of this recording, Mr. Bailey has produced an envelope and letter which will be sealed in evidence bag number JC142/302 once I have read it.”

Handling the tweezers with amazing dexterity, she opened the note out, and then lifted it up to read. As she read the words that I had pretty much memorised by now, her lips pursed slightly.

“Nasty,” she commented. “It must have been quite a shock to have received it. Can you just go through in detail when and how it came into your possession?”

She listened attentively as I described finding it in my pigeon hole that morning. “Alright,” she said when my brief account had finished. “I’d like to start with some background questions. Explain to me how the mail gets into your letter box.”

“Post in the morning gets put through the letter box on the front door,” I explained. “Whoever gets to it first sorts it all into a wall of pigeon holes.”

“So the letter could have been pushed through the front door at any time last night or early this morning,” DI Smith observed. “Or someone inside the building could have put it directly into your slot, and your other post was then added later. Or a resident could have just dropped it onto the floor, where it would be mixed in with the rest of the post when it arrived.”

“Yes,” I confirmed. “It doesn’t get us very far does it?”

“No,” she agreed. “But it does open up some lines of enquiry. On to the actual content of the letter, if you don’t mind. First of all, can you think of anyone who might have written it to you?”

“Not really,” I answered. “That’s the question that I’ve been asking myself over and over since I got it. In my job, you do make some enemies – people who feel that it’s your fault their wife has left them and so on. This seems too personal for that somehow.”

“Explain what you mean,” she invited.

“Well, clearly whoever wrote it knows about the previous note and about the way Jennifer was killed. I don’t see how that’s possible unless they really are the person who sent the first note to me, and the one who killed her. And if that’s true, then it was important to them that I be the one to find the body. You could almost think that killing Jennifer was a way of striking at me.”

“That would be fairly unlikely,” DI Smith interrupted. “The killing of Jennifer Carter was far too violent for her not to have been the primary target. In any case, I hadn’t appreciated that you and Mrs. Carter were so close.”

“We weren’t,” I said quickly. “She was my counsellor and I valued her friendship, but that’s all there was between us.”

“Let’s leave that to one side for now,” she suggested. “The rest of the letter implies that the writer knows you very well – knows both your life at present and your history. I’m afraid I need to ask you about that.”

“Go on then,” I said, deliberating internally how candid I was going to be with her.

“First of all, the writer seems very agitated by religion. Do I take it from what he says that you are a regular church goer?”

“I couldn’t claim to go regularly,” I confessed. “but I do go from time to time, and I suppose I would describe myself as a Christian.”

“In the course of your work or your personal life, can you remember having a strong disagreement about religion?”

“No,” I answered.

“Is your faith fairly general knowledge among your friends and colleagues?”

I thought about that for a moment. “No it isn’t. I doubt if many of them are even aware that I go to church.”

DI Smith seemed to ponder this answer for a moment. “I’m afraid I need to ask you about another part of the letter. “
Where was that God of yours when your face was being pushed hard into a pillow so that no-one could hear your screams?”
Are you able to tell me what that’s referring to?”

Now it was my turn to hesitate. In the end, I decided that refusing to answer truthfully was only going to make them more likely to suspect me.

“I was seeing Jennifer Carter to help me work through the after effects of having been sexually abused as a child. I understood the letter to be challenging me about that, and asking how it was possible to believe in God given my childhood experiences.”

“Thank you for being so frank with me,” she said, her face a little softer. “Again I have to ask, was that something that many people would have known about?”

“No-one knew about it apart from myself and Jennifer,” I admitted.

“And the abuser presumably,” she commented.

“He’s dead,” I said with finality. “He has been dead for a very long time.”

“Then have you managed to come up with a theory to explain how the writer of this letter does apparently know so much about you?”

There was only one explanation that made any sense to me at all. “Detective Inspector Palmer informed me that you had not been able to find my file at Jennifer’s house. The only thing I can think is that whoever wrote the letter has the file and is using it.”

I was sure that a frown had flickered across Laura’s face at the start of my answer, but it was gone in an instant. Her gentle questioning continued.

“Was your faith something that you had often discussed with Mrs. Carter?”

“Fairly often,” I answered. “A big part of the work she did with me was in trying to help me focus on the positive things in my life. My going to church occasionally was a part of that; trying to look at things in a wider perspective if you like.”

“So it is possible that whoever had the file would know about it,” she mused. “And the two of you would have talked about the abuse at length.”

“Yes.”

“This phrase “your face being pushed hard into a pillow so that no-one could hear your screams”. Was that a phrase that might have been written in your file?”

“I don’t think so,” I said thoughtfully. “I’m probably going to convince you that I’m completely mad but I’d better try and explain to you. Until three years ago, I had no conscious memory of the abuse. The jargon would say that I had buried the memories. They still had an impact on me in certain aspects of my behaviour, but if you’d asked me to account for the cause I wouldn’t have been able to.”

Her expression was somewhat sceptical, which didn’t surprise me. Over the last few years I had read extensively about repressed memory. I was all too well aware of the phenomena of false memory syndrome, where dubious therapists helped their patients to “remember” incidents of abuse and cruelty which, in reality, had never happened.

On my worst days, I sometimes accused myself of being a victim – of making up my own history to give myself an excuse for all the things about me that I so disliked. Standing against these self-doubts were the facts that my memories had surfaced independently before I began to visit Jennifer, and that during a minor operation the doctor had once discovered internal scarring and questioned me about it. At the time, I had been rendered totally dumfounded by the question.

“When the memories began to return, they didn’t come clearly,” I continued. “Even now, the memories are there but they’re still quite vague. Jennifer Carter knew that not remembering fully was something that bothered me. The image of a child’s face in a pillow while they’re being abused may be an accurate one, but it’s far too specific a picture for Jennifer to have written down about me.”

“So it’s not a phrase that you would ever have used.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Maybe the writer just read about my inability to remember fully and came up with such a graphic image to try and shock or upset me.”

“It’s possible,” DI Smith said, but she still sounded unconvinced. “I just want to go back over something you said earlier. You mentioned that DI Palmer had told you that Mrs. Carter’s file on you hadn’t been found. We weren’t aware of that fact until long after you had left the house.”

I was surprised by this question. “He came to my flat the next day and interviewed me,” I explained. “He made it very clear that he believed that I had killed her and that he intended to prove it.”

I was looking directly into her eyes as I said this and caught a momentary look of surprise in her eyes. There was something else there that was harder to identify. If I’d had to give it a name, I would have said that for a split second Laura Smith looked afraid.

“You didn’t know, did you?” I pressed her. “He didn’t tell you that he’d been to speak to me.”

Her face had regained its composure. “I’m sure that Detective Inspector Palmer has written up his visit to you, and that a record of it is in the case file,” she said firmly. “I must have just failed to read it. I’m sorry I asked you such a foolish question.”

I wasn’t convinced that she was telling me the truth. However, the last thing I needed at the moment was to turn the other investigating officer against me, so I bit my tongue. There was silence as she carefully used the tweezers to put the letter and its envelope into the evidence bag.

“I’ll get this analysed for fingerprints,” she said. “We have your prints on file, but we’ll probably have to come and speak to the other residents of the building to try and get a clearer picture of how the letter got into your slot. Thanks for your time and openness.”

She reached across and turned the tape machine off, and then we both stood up. Before I could turn to leave the room, she added something else.

“Be careful, Mr. Bailey. As the statement we gave to the press said, whoever is doing this is clearly very disturbed, and extremely dangerous. If they have chosen you for some reason as their target, you are in real danger. I would urge you to take every sensible precaution, and to keep alert. If you see anything that you consider suspicious, phone me at once. And obviously, if you receive any more notes, bring them in immediately.”

I thanked her for her concern, and walked out. It was a great relief when I was back in my flat. With her final words still ringing in my ears, I locked and bolted the front door behind me. I think that it was the first time in three years that I found myself wishing I didn’t live alone.

Chapter Seventeen

After a fitful night, it would have been understating things to say that my emotions were churning when I got up. This was partly due to the confusion and unease which yesterday’s letter had produced, but probably more at the prospect of seeing Liz again.

Liz and I had been married for just under eight years, and had gone out together for nearly three years before that. She also had the dubious honour of being my first proper girlfriend.

We’d met at a party of a mutual friend. I was at college in Bristol and Liz was in the year below me, studying English. I noticed her as soon as I got to the party – I always said later that you would have had to be blind not to notice her as she was far and away the most beautiful girl there. It wasn’t just her beauty that attracted me though; she had a strange quality of sadness about her.

It was some time before I learned that this sadness had its roots in her home life. When things got bad between us, Liz would sometimes turn on me and say accusingly “You only married me because you felt sorry for me.” It wasn’t true – I couldn’t have helped but be drawn by her beauty and lovely personality – although it probably was true that it was the thing that gave me the confidence to approach her instead of seeing her as out of my league.

Before long, we had discovered that we had a lot in common. We both loved films and books and travelling, and we laughed a lot together. I knew within months that this was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. I think it took me a bit longer to convince her, but I got there in the end. Our wedding day was probably the happiest of my life so far.

We settled in Bristol. I was working as a social worker, and Liz worked part time as a librarian while she was working on her doctoral thesis. The first year was wonderful, but then slowly it all started to change.

Somehow we got ourselves into a damaging cycle of behaviour. I hated any arguments and was desperate for Liz to be happy. When she was, everything was great. But, of course, life is never completely smooth. Once she’d finished her Phd. she hoped to move into a job for a publishing company, or lecturing in English literature, but neither worked out. Two years after qualifying, she was still stuck working part time at the library and feeling increasingly unvalued and fed up.

At the same time, something was steadily corroding our relationship. It was me. Sensing that Liz wasn’t happy, I tried frantically to cheer her up. Since I couldn’t solve the real problem, I was determined to make life with me so perfect that it would make up for everything else. Liz felt swamped by my constant attention and questions about how she was feeling. Instead of helping, all I succeeded in doing was making her feel more and more irritated. Of course, this meant she was even more unhappy, which in turn meant I became ever more desperate to make everything alright.