The Other Child (16 page)

‘And that would be?'

‘Your circumstances. That you lodge in this room. Your job, which really can only be called a
job
, and not a
career
. Your car, which threatens to give up the ghost at any moment. You're no longer a student. Why do you live like this?'

‘Maybe I like it.'

‘I don't believe that.'

‘But you don't know.'

‘Then let me rephrase my question,' said Leslie. ‘If your life is fine and dandy, and if Fiona is wrong and it's not the Beckett farm that attracts you to Gwen, then what is it? What do you like about Gwen? Why do you love her?'

‘Why do you love your husband?'

Leslie flinched, and to her annoyance she felt her cheeks were burning. ‘I'm divorced,' she said.

‘Why? What went wrong?'

She slammed down her coffee cup, which she had just put to her lips. Now she had a brown puddle in front of her. ‘That's none of your business,' she said brusquely.

He remained calm. ‘True. And nor is it your business, or Fiona Barnes's, what Gwen and I feel. When people interrogate me I feel just the same as you felt just now at my question. It's nobody's business. And one more thing …' his voice had taken on a dangerous edge, ‘you should let Gwen lead her own life. All of you. Let her finally grow up. Let her make her own decisions. In the worst case: the wrong decisions. The wrong man. Or whatever. But stop trying to make her happy. You're not helping her get over her lack of experience and inability to deal with life – you should all think about that!'

She took a deep breath. ‘You egged me on to be impolite, Mr Tanner.'

‘Yes. So that you finally understand.'

She was angry, but she was not sure what she should be angry about. She felt like he was treating her like a schoolgirl, telling her off, but she also realised that he was right. Fiona and she had meddled in what was not their business. They were treating Gwen like a little girl and Dave like some con artist. It had only caused confusion and unhappiness. Dave had left his own engagement party early, Gwen was sitting at home bawling her eyes out, and Fiona seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth. In all, a pretty crushing set of results for the weekend.

The thought of Fiona brought Leslie back to the really pressing issue. She finished her coffee quickly, leaving just a pile of undissolved sugar and coffee powder at the bottom. She stood up.

‘I didn't want to offend you,' she said, ‘and thanks for the coffee. But now I really have to look for my grandmother. I'm afraid that if she hasn't appeared by this evening, I'll have to inform the police.'

He stood up too.

‘Not a bad idea,' he said. ‘But maybe she's already home now, waiting for you.'

Leslie doubted that somehow. She felt her way down the steep dark stairs. The landlady was standing in the hall at the bottom of the stairs, wiping the frame of a mirror with a cloth. It was obvious that she had tried to hear every word spoken upstairs.

How could Dave put up with her, thought Leslie, and she immediately knew the answer: he could not. He was a deeply unhappy person.

Dave went down to her car with her. Getting in, she said, ‘Do me a favour, would you, and call Gwen? What happened yesterday isn't her fault. Don't take this as further meddling – just a friend's request.'

‘Let's see,' he said vaguely.

Driving off she looked in her rear-view mirror, but he was not watching her. He had turned around immediately and gone back inside. With a little shudder Leslie imagined what a long, quiet Sunday in that wretched room must be like. She would not have wanted to swap places with Tanner.

Fiona's flat was as empty as it had been that morning. There was no sign that anyone had been here in the meantime Leslie felt ravenously hungry. She got a frozen meatloaf out of the freezer and put it in the microwave. Then she called the Beckett farm, to see if there was any news, but Chad told her he had not heard anything.

‘I'll wait until five,' said Leslie. ‘Then I'm calling the police.'

‘Right,' said Chad.

She sat down by the living room window to eat and looked at the sun-drenched bay, the beach full of walkers and of dogs playing crazily, the harbour, the castle above it. After only a few mouthfuls, it felt like her stomach was in a knot, although a few minutes earlier she had thought she would faint for hunger. The growing feeling of foreboding was almost overpowering, and she could only hope that it came from her overwrought state and was unfounded.

Maybe Fiona in her anger had wanted to be awkward, and had taken a room in a hotel, to let them all stew.

Would she do that to me? Leslie wondered.

She knew the answer, because she knew the woman who had raised her only too well. Fiona did not care too much about other people, not even her own granddaughter.

If she felt like disappearing for a bit, she would not worry about the effect it would have on her only relative and on her friends.

6

The gorge on the edge of a pasture up by Staintondale was bathed in a blinding light. The hurriedly erected spotlights lit the scene with a horrific, unsparing clarity. People, police cordons, cars. Somewhere further off sheep were bleating.

Detective Inspector Valerie Almond had been called away from a family party. She hated her job in moments like this. Without any gentle transition, she had been taken from the warm, cheery atmosphere of a living room full of people she loved and saw much too infrequently, and plonked in this dark pasture. Her colleague had picked her up, as she had been out without her car. She was wearing a suit and stiletto heels, not the most suitable attire in which to traipse along a grassy verge towards a cliff. To make things worse, it was dark and a cold wind was blowing inland from the sea.

‘Where's the woman who found her?' she asked.

Sergeant Reek, who was accompanying her, led a figure out from the shadow of a parked car and into the spotlit area. A young woman, Valerie guessed she was not yet twenty-five. She was wearing jeans, wellies and a thick sweater. She looked frighteningly pale and shocked.

‘You are …?' Valerie asked.

‘Paula Foster, Inspector. I live down there on the Trevor farm.' She made a vague gesture downwards into the night. ‘I'm working there for three months, as an intern. I'm studying agriculture.'

‘And what time was it when you came here?' asked Valerie. ‘And why?'

‘Around nine. I wanted to take a look at one of the sheep,' Paula replied.

‘What was the matter with it?'

‘It's had a pus-filled wound on its leg for two days now. I spray the wound in the morning and evening with a disinfecting spray. Normally I'm here around six o'clock.'

‘Why nine today?'

Paula lowered her head. ‘My boyfriend was here,' she said quietly, ‘and somehow … we lost track of the time.'

Valerie did not think that was something she needed to be ashamed of.

‘I understand. And how did you know the sheep would be here? The animals are spread over a massive grazing area.'

‘Yes, but there's a shed over there.' Again she gestured into the impenetrable darkness beyond the cordons. ‘Not far, but you can't see it now. We're keeping the injured sheep in there for now. But today …'

‘Yes?'

Paula Foster was the personification of a bad conscience.

‘When I got here, the door was open. I probably didn't close it properly this morning. I was all excited and rushing, because my boyfriend was coming. And then I saw the sheep was gone.'

‘And so you went looking for it?'

‘Yes. I had a torch with me, and I shone it in wider and wider circles, starting from the shed. And then I heard it. From down there in the gorge.'

She paused. Her lips were trembling lightly. ‘I heard it bleating quietly,' she continued, ‘and knew that it had slipped down the slope and couldn't make it up on its own.'

‘So you climbed down into the gorge,' deduced Valerie.

‘Yes, the slope is pretty steep, but it's only earth and leaves. It wasn't hard to get down.'

‘And then you saw the dead woman.'

Paula went even paler. She had difficulty in continuing. ‘I almost slipped down onto her. I … I was scared to death, Inspector. A dead woman … right at my feet. I was stunned …' She put both her hands to her head. She was obviously still stunned.

Valerie felt for her. A terrible situation: a dark autumn evening, a desolate place, a terribly mutilated corpse at the bottom of a gorge. And a young woman who was only expecting to find a lost sheep. She tried to go on as gently as she could, to give the woman time to gather herself.

‘Did you call the police immediately?'

‘First of all, I climbed back up as fast as I could,' said Paula. ‘I might … I might have been screaming, I'm not sure. Once I got to the top, I wanted to call, but I didn't have reception. It's bad around here. I ran towards the main road, and somewhere there I got a weak connection.'

‘Then you waited for us? Or did you go down again, to look for the sheep?'

‘I went back down,' said Paula. ‘But I couldn't find the sheep. I'm afraid it's gone further up the gorge. Probably I did scream, and it got scared. And now with these lights, and all these people … there's no way it'll come back now. I have to go and find it.'

‘I understand,' said Valerie. She turned to Sergeant Reek. ‘Reek, can you climb down there with Miss Foster and help her to find the sheep? I don't want her wandering around on her own.'

Reek's face expressed anything but enthusiasm, but he did not dare contradict her. He and Paula were about to start clambering down, when Valerie thought of one more thing.

‘Miss Foster, you said you come here in the morning and evening. So you were in the shed this morning?'

Paula stopped. ‘Yes, around six o'clock.'

‘And you didn't notice anything? Something different from usual … Maybe the animal was agitated, something like that?'

‘No. Everything was just the same as always. It was still dark, of course. Even if someone had been around' – she swallowed, as the unpleasant idea dawned on her – ‘then I wouldn't have seen them.'

‘Right. Sergeant Reek will take down your details. We'll have to talk to you again.' With that Valerie ended the conversation and started down into the gorge herself, a risky undertaking with her completely unsuitable footwear, and she cursed more than once. At the bottom she found the doctor. He had been squatting down by the body of the woman. It lay deep in the leaves. He straightened up.

‘Compelling conclusions, Doctor?' asked Valerie.

‘Nothing which would really help,' said the doctor. ‘Female corpse, between seventy-five and eighty-five years old. She was beaten to death with, I think, a stone at least as big as a fist, with which she was hit more or less at random on her temples and the back of her head, at least twelve times. She must have fallen unconscious quickly, but the perpetrator didn't stop working her over. I'm assuming she died of a brain haemorrhage.'

‘Time of death?'

‘Roughly fourteen hours ago, so around eight this morning. Before that she lay unconscious for at least eight hours. From what I've been able to ascertain so far, she wasn't yet dead when her murderer left her. The post-mortem will tell us more, but I would guess that the crime was committed between ten p.m. and midnight.'

‘Anything thrown up by forensics? Where she was found – is it the scene of the crime?'

‘From what I gather, she was attacked up at the top of the gorge. Then she rolled down here. The perpetrator apparently didn't follow her down.'

Valerie chewed on her lower lip.

‘At first sight, there seems to be a certain similarity to Amy Mills's case.'

The doctor had been thinking about this too. ‘Both were battered to death, although in different ways. Amy Mills's head was rammed again and again into a wall, while this woman's skull was smashed in with a rock. In both cases great brutality and strength were used. But major differences are also blatantly obvious …'

Valerie knew what he was about to say. ‘The extreme difference in the victims' ages. And then of course the scenes of the crime.'

‘It's not unusual for a perpetrator to be lurking in a particularly empty part of a city for a possible victim,' said the doctor. ‘But who hangs around on a godforsaken dale expecting someone to come along?'

Valerie thought about it. Of course, someone might have been waiting for Paula Foster. She was not much older than Amy Mills, and she often came here. If she was meant to be the actual victim, then the old woman's murder happened by accident. She was at the wrong place at the wrong time and literally ran into the waiting killer. But then there was the question of why the perpetrator would have been waiting for Paula here at night. And what was an old lady doing at night on a narrow, unlit farm footpath between a gorge and a field, almost a mile from the main road, when she was – as far as Valerie could see – well dressed, even dressed for a special occasion? What was she looking for?

Or was she the intended victim from the start? Had the perpetrator brought her here and then set about executing her?

A young policeman approached. He held a handbag in his plastic-gloved hands.

‘It got caught in a tree on the slope,' he said. ‘It's probably the victim's bag. According to her cards, diary and what have you, the owner is a Fiona Barnes, neé Swales, born on 29th July 1929 in London. Resident in Scarborough. There's a photo which seems to be of the victim.'

‘Fiona Barnes,' repeated Valerie. ‘Seventy-nine years old.' She thought of the young Amy Mills. Was there any connection?

‘And one more thing,' said the enthusiastic young officer. He was new, trying to make a name for himself. ‘I phoned the station in Scarborough. Around 17:20 this afternoon a Fiona Barnes was reported missing. By her granddaughter.'