The Pure in Heart (8 page)

‘David! It’s twenty to.’

David Angus stood looking down at the box for as long as he dared, trying to visualise it, trying to work it out. He half closed his eyes.

‘And it’s Giggs, Giggs has it, Giggs has passed it across …’

The crowd was roaring.

‘David!’

He sighed and picked up his school bag. He’d come back to it tonight.

‘You’ve got
ham and cucumber in your sandwiches, don’t forget to eat those and the banana before you eat the cake.’

‘Did you cut the fat off?’

‘I cut the fat off. Do you need money for anything today?’

He thought. Tuesday?

‘No, but I need to take the note back about the history outing.’

‘On the table in front of you.’

His mother was pulling on her jacket. His sister Lucy had already gone, met by two
friends to walk together down to the school bus at the corner of Dunferry Road. She now went to Abbey Grange. David was still at St Francis.

‘I’m in court all day but I’ll be out in time to pick you up. We need to get you some shoes.’

‘Can we go for a milk shake at Tilly’s after?’

‘Afterwards. We’ll see.’

Why did they always say we’ll see first, even when they knew whether it was yes or no?
We’ll see, we’ll see … they couldn’t seem to help saying it.

‘Come on, Doodlebug.’

David picked up his bag.

It wasn’t raining, that was all he noticed. Not raining, not freezing cold. Otherwise morning was morning. His mother got into the car and held open the door. David went forward and bent in. He didn’t mind kissing her here at home, especially when she was actually inside the car. He wouldn’t
have done it outside school.

‘Have a good day, Doodlebug. See you tonight.’

‘See you.’

He waited until she’d edged out of the drive into the road and driven off, then wandered to the gate. His father had gone an hour before. He was always in the hospital by half past seven. David put his bag on the ground and waited, watching for the car. It was the Forbeses’ week. The Forbeses had a dark blue
Citroën Zsara. It wasn’t the best lift, that was when it was the di Roncos’ week and the people carrier with blacked-out windows slowed up beside him. Di Ronco’s father had been in one of the most famous bands of the eighties and had big rings on every finger and tattooed-in sideburns. Di Ronco’s father made them laugh all the way to school and swore four-letter words.

Cars sped past him down
the road. Work. School. Work. School. Work. School. Silver Mondeo. White Audi. Black Ford Focus. Silver Ford Focus. Silver Rover 75. Red Polo. Sick-green Hyundai. Blue Espace. Maroon Ford Ka.

There were more silver cars than any other colour, he’d proved it.

Black Toyota Celica. Silver BMW.

The Forbeses weren’t usually late. Not like the di Roncos. They always were, once by half an hour and
di Ronco’s dad had just breezed into the school whistling and shouting, ‘Don’t start without us!’

He tried to picture Mr Forbes doing that and nearly fell over laughing.

He was still laughing a bit when the car drew up beside him, laughing too much to take in that the colour was wrong and that someone had opened the door and was pushing him roughly inside as the wheels spun hard away from the
kerb.

At the last minute, Simon Serrailler turned the car away from Lafferton and took the route along the bypass for a mile and then off into the country. Before returning to the station, he would go and see Martha who was in her care home again. Once he was back into the action he might not get another chance for days, and he knew that even if Martha did not take in his presence her carers
in the home certainly did and welcomed it. Too many of the other patients had been virtually abandoned by their families, never visited or even sent cards at Christmas and birthdays. He had heard the staff talk about that often enough. He knew which ones had been left. Old Dennis Troughton whose life had begun with cerebral palsy and was ending with Parkinson’s disease. Miss Falconer, huge and inert
and vacant-eyed, with the brain of a baby and the body of a mountainous middle-aged woman. Stephen, who jerked and twitched all the time and had two or three life-threatening fits a week, who was seventeen and whose parents had not seen him since he was a baby. Simon had occasionally vented his anger about them
to Cat, but with her medical detachment she had always agreed with him while putting
forward the other point of view.

The morning traffic had eased by the time he was on the bypass and once he left it and drove towards Harnfield he saw few other cars. The fields were empty, trees still bare. He went through two villages which were deserted, dormitories now for Lafferton and Bevham. Neither had a shop or a school, only one had a pub. Few people actually worked on the land or in
the villages themselves any more. Harnfield was much larger, with both a primary and a comprehensive school and some clumps of new housing. It also had a business park. People were about. Harnfield was not specially attractive but it had a community and a sense of life.

Simon turned left down the narrow lane leading to Ivy Lodge.

‘I didn’t know if we’d get her back.’ Shirley, Martha’s carer
for the day, went ahead of him along the brightly painted corridor. ‘She was so poorly.’

‘I know. They fetched me back from Italy.’

‘But she rallies every time, I suppose we ought to be used to it. She’s so strong.’ Shirley paused at the open door of Martha’s room. ‘Whatever anyone says, she must get enough out of life to want to keep going, you know.’

Simon smiled. He liked Shirley, with her
slight squint and the gap between her front teeth. One or two of the other carers gave the impression that the
end of the shift couldn’t come soon enough and that they did the minimum merely to keep his sister clean, comfortable and fed. Shirley talked to her and spoke of her as an individual whom she knew and liked even though she could find her wearing. He knew it was rare and he was grateful.

Martha’s room was bright, with buttercup-yellow walls and white-painted furniture, a room for a child; it always cheered Simon as he went in.

His sister was propped up in bed. Her hair had been freshly brushed and tied back and there was colour in her cheeks and a brightness in her eyes. She sat looking towards the light coming in through the windows and watching the breeze shift the yellow and
green curtains about.

‘Hello, darling. You look so much better!’ He walked in and took her hand. It was soft, the skin like satin; even the bones seemed soft as the hand lay inert between his own. ‘I came over when they said you were back from the hospital and I bet you’re glad. All those tubes and machines meant I couldn’t see you properly.’

Shirley tucked in the bedclothes at the end of Martha’s
bed, and closed the door of the wardrobe. ‘I’ll see you later, sweetheart,’ she said to Martha, waved and went out.

The room was peaceful. Martha was peaceful. She would lie here like this until someone came to turn her, to clean her, change her, give her physiotherapy, move her into a chair, feed her, hold her drinking cup; she was as dependent as a baby,
unable to do the smallest thing, for
herself or for anyone else.

She smelled of soap and clean sheets. There was never any other smell on her, never anything sour or dirty in the air of her room. Her care couldn’t be faulted.

But he had often wondered how much difference it might have made to her if she had been sitting like this at home, in the middle of the family comings and goings, the stimulus of different people talking and
working and being busy around her, children coming in, Cat’s children, their friends, animals on her lap. She had never known a normal life. He wished he could have given it to her.

Martha gave a little murmur, half a moan, half a sigh, half a laugh … it was impossible to tell. Her hand moved.

‘What is it? Have you seen something?’

The little noise again. He looked at her face. It registered
nothing at all yet he knew she was trying to communicate with him.

He gave her a drink from the spouted plastic cup on the table and she sipped it, but whether it had been what she had wanted he couldn’t know.

‘Little Martha,’ he said, ‘I’m so glad you’re better.’

He stayed for twenty more minutes, holding her hand, telling her about the squirrel he had seen in the fir tree behind the car park,
knowing that it meant nothing to her and yet sure that she liked to hear his voice.

When he left, her eyes were closing. She was like a baby, soothed into sleep by the softly blowing, bright curtains.

In the hall, he met Shirley. ‘She seems fine,’ he said. ‘She’s asleep now.’

‘She’d better make the most of it then, we’re going to do her bed and then she has to have her chest pummelled otherwise
it’ll be pneumonia again. Thanks for coming. I should think Dr Serrailler will be in later.’

The squirrel raced up the long trunk of the Scots pine tree as he approached his car but stopped halfway and peered down at him with feverish little eyes.

DCI Serrailler turned out of the drive and headed for Lafferton Police Station and work. If absence made the heart grow fonder, death did the same.
He had no need to take the route through the Old Town side streets to get to the station, though it cut off a couple of sets of slow traffic lights, but as he approached he knew that he had wanted to drive down the road in which Freya Graffham had lived.

He had not been in love with her – or at least not while she was alive – though he had found her attractive, she had intrigued him and he had
enjoyed her company. Her feelings for him had been fairly clear on the evening they had gone out to an impromptu dinner at his favourite Italian restaurant, not from anything she had said – she had been far too cautious for that – but from the way she had looked at him.

But things had not gone on. Freya Graffham had been murdered. Killed in her own house. The house Simon was approaching now.
It was a small Victorian artisan’s cottage in a row of others set among a grid of twelve similar streets known as the Apostles because they were near the cathedral. He had not been inside until after Freya’s murder. He had no memories of it which were not dreadful ones. The front door had been painted. It had been maroon. Now it was smart navy blue. There were new roman blinds half down at the windows.
The gate had gone. Simon stopped on the opposite side of the road. No one was about. He did not understand why he was here. But as he drove away a leaden feeling settled in his stomach and the day ahead was soured.

‘Good morning, Sergeant.’

DS Nathan Coates looked over his shoulder and steadied the hand he was using to hold two paper cups of coffee piled on top of each other as the DCI went
past him and on up the stairs.

‘Guv? I thought you weren’t back till tomorrow.’

‘Change of plan.’

The door swung to behind Serrailler.

Nathan shifted the cups slightly. He was smiling. Nine times out of ten he smiled when the DCI or anyone else called him Sergeant. It was over six months since he had stopped being Acting and become an official DS but he was still not used to it, still had
to check that someone wasn’t winding him
up. He had wanted the job and not wanted it because it had meant stepping into Freya Graffham’s shoes.

And the DCI had known all the right buttons to press.

‘You came from the other side of the tracks, Nathan. You might just as easily have gone the way of half your schoolmates and how many years would you have served by now, courtesy of Her Majesty’s
Prisons? You took the other route, and don’t tell me it was easy. Do they still respect you round your way? I doubt it. They don’t go for coppers much on the Dulcie estate, especially when the copper is one of their own. You now stand for everything you ought to be against, and you are exactly the sort of policeman we want. The police force ought to mirror the society it polices and it almost never
does, which is why it’s so important you stay in it and keep climbing the ladder. You’re young, you’re bright, you work your socks off and DS Graffham had a very high opinion of you. What do you think she’d say if you chicken out now?’

‘That’s below the belt, guv.’

‘Sometimes you have to punch there. Come on, Nathan, see straight. It hit you. It hit all of us. It was a bloody awful thing to
happen. I never thought we’d see a serial killer in a place like Lafferton … drugs, muggings, rapes, burglaries, robberies, whatever, it’s all on the increase, even in a nice small respectable English cathedral town. But multiple murder? We might be able to get our heads round a
shooting in the course of an operation … a raid … a panic … a dead policeman. We could have coped with that, but not
Freya’s murder. And you were the first there, you dealt with it all and you blame yourself, don’t think I’m not aware of it. You’ve no need to but you do and you probably always will. It’s none of it a reason for you giving up your career. It’s a good reason for you to stay. Are you hearing me?’

Nathan was, though it had taken him another couple of weeks to admit it. He and Emma had been married
quietly in the side chapel of the cathedral, with the DCI as his best man, before he had finally committed himself to remaining in the force. It had been much longer before he had agreed to go for promotion to sergeant. But he was a sergeant now and the excitement of it, the pride, the sense of achievement, woke with him every morning. Serrailler had been spot on. No one from his background had
ever made it to Lafferton CID before, let alone to sergeant. He didn’t intend his climb up the career ladder only to stop here.

He pushed the swing door open with his shoulder and went on towards the CID room but, as he passed, the DCI called out. The door to his room was open.

‘That for me?’ Serrailler held out his hand.

‘Course it is.’

‘Thank you.’

He took the paper cup of cappuccino which
Nathan had fetched not from the vending machine
at the end of the corridor but from the new corner café in the next street, run by a Cypriot couple and kept going mostly by policemen.

‘DC Dell will just have to go out for his own.’