The Red House (23 page)

Stepping out of the hospital feels like bobbing to the surface. I’ve got Morgan Davies away from sleeping Fiona’s bedside for a walk.

‘Not far,’ Morgan insists.

‘Of course.’

We cross the main roundabout and set off down one of the roads sticking off like a spoke. Brick houses scroll on either side of us on a seeming loop.

‘About the fire,’ I begin.

‘It doesn’t matter. The houses were going to be razed anyway.’

‘The White House was completely spared. All of your belongings are fine.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Morgan shuffles slowly, looking only down.

I surreptitiously check my phone. The pathologist has confirmed that Rowena was smothered with a pillow, arguably murdered, even if she’d begged for it.

I’ve got to remain impartial. I’ll need to keep away from parts of the case. The skeletons, and Imogen Wright-Llewellyn’s possible arson or possible victimhood, are mine. Erik Keats’ and Rowena’s deaths involve Dora closely and so must belong to Spencer. Now that Morgan’s accused Dora of stealing jewellery, this line of enquiry is Spencer’s, too. But I have a theory of its potential impact on my own investigations.

‘When did your mother start hoarding? Has she done it your whole life?’

Morgan barks out a laugh. ‘How would I know? We’ve always lived in separate houses.’

I say nothing.

Morgan fills the space:

‘The barn – the Red House – was her home. My father and I lived in the White House. Until he died and then … it was just me. When I was little she shared time between the two buildings, but as I grew up she visited me less and less. By the time I was a teenager I literally had the house to myself. I managed it; I cleaned it. Or not,’ she adds wryly. ‘I did stupid things. I had boys over. I had men over.’ She shudders. ‘I’ve worked hard to give Fiona boundaries. You may think limits are cruel. You may think barred windows and a guarded telephone are cruel, but do you know what’s actually cruel? An open front door. I wish I could take back a hundred things I did when I was young. I wish I’d had a real mother, to stop them in the first place. We need to turn around,’ she adds abruptly.

We turn and look. The hospital should seem small, given the distance, but it looms, even from here.

‘Just a little further,’ I nudge.

Morgan accepts the prod and walks on. ‘To answer your question, no. She didn’t always hoard. That happened later, after the coma.’

‘Coma?’

‘She …’ Morgan closes her eyes for a moment, then they spring open with the words: ‘She tried to kill herself once before. She took some kind of medicine from the hospital. She was a midwife, did you know that?’

I nod.

‘I wasn’t living there then. I’d got away from home as soon as my exams were done, went to live with a boyfriend, and then … Well, it was years later. She was found by a neighbour come by to complain about a loose dog. It wasn’t hers, of course, but …’ She shrugs. ‘I have to be grateful. She was my mother, after all.’ She stops walking. I guide her to sit on a low brick wall in front of a perfectly kept rose garden. Morgan leans forward, dropping tears.

‘Do you know why she tried to kill herself then?’ I prompt. I want to be kind, but this isn’t therapy. I need to know. The motivations and timeline here could be explained by inserting the death and burial of the woman and child.

‘She never told me. I never asked. I didn’t want to know. What if it was because of me?’ Morgan wipes her face. ‘Afterwards, I moved back home with her. Me into the White House, she into the Red, of course. Things weren’t the same in the White House as I’d left them. I’m sure it wasn’t Rowena who’d been in there. The neighbours confirmed for me that they’d seen evidence of squatters, but Rowena denied it and there was nothing left behind.
That,’ she says, handing over the answer to the original question, ‘is when she started hoarding.’

She rises, and starts walking back towards Addenbrooke’s. I surrender and follow.

I jump on the word
squatter
, and the date range that this new background provides:
Morgan leaves in 1982; a squatter, perhaps a pregnant woman, moves in; an accidental death; then, Rowena attempts suicide, out of guilt, or horror? Morgan returns in 1986.
That fits Imogen’s story, too, of a sunburnt blonde in the White House sometime during her childhood. I don’t want to cloud my judgement by being too sympathetic towards Rowena, but the staining on the sheets around the bodies does appear to be blood and, the pathologist has determined, suggestive of the fluids of birth. There are no marks of violence on the bones. It’s easily possible that something went unexpectedly wrong. ‘Did your mother have a car?’ I ask. The one thing I can’t figure out is why not get a labouring woman to the hospital.

‘Of course. She had to get to work.’

All right, what if things got bad quickly? What if she felt she couldn’t safely move the woman herself. She would call an ambulance, wouldn’t she?
‘Did she have phone service?’

‘When?’

I remain purposefully vague, though the timing I’m interested in is just before Rowena’s suicide attempt.

Morgan sighs. ‘We had a phone growing up. When my father died, we stopped paying the bill and eventually they shut it off. There was a debt attached when I restarted the line, can you believe that? Years later.’

‘When you restarted the line after your mother’s coma?’

‘Yes.’ The timing slots into place for her, too. ‘She’s my
mother
,’ she wails. ‘Would it be awful if I tell you that I was jealous? That she let someone else live in the White House? That someone else fitted into my place? Would it be awful if I tell you that I would be relieved to know that she failed them horribly, worse than she failed me? She was a horrible mother. Fiona loved her, but grandmother is a different job. Being a grandmother is about forgiveness and indulgence and filling in with little extras. Mothering is the heavy lifting. Mothering is the daily work. I loved Rowena, and I hated her, because she never loved me the way I needed her to. If you want to accuse her of something, feel free. She supposedly loved Fiona and look what she made her do.’

The hospital is close, just across the road, but we get stuck at the roundabout. Traffic is thick and fast and no one lets us cross.

‘You didn’t tell me that you’d sold the land,’ I say.

Morgan doesn’t flinch. ‘You think it’s my fault that she wanted to die. It’s not. I told you; she’d tried it before. I sold the land to try to stop her. If Rowena were in a proper facility, with proper care, they wouldn’t let her. They’d
make her
live.’

I shiver, even in the warm. ‘You say that like it’s a punishment.’

‘It’s not a punishment,’ Morgan corrects. ‘It’s a responsibility. I didn’t ask to be born. She shouldn’t get to ask to die.’

A text comes through for me. Spencer says that the CSI team has found Dora’s fingerprints on at least one of the empty pill packets, and that the tin box that they were found in matches the description of Rowena’s jewellery
box, minus the velvet bag Morgan Davies had mentioned.
That’s not good for Dora
…

CONFIRMING ARREST OF SUSPECT DK
, Spencer’s left for the end.

Shit
. It’s his case, but what the hell is he thinking? Does he really believe that Dora killed a woman for a bracelet?

‘Tell me about your mother’s jewellery,’ I request, but Morgan has already darted across the road. I put out a hand to slow an oncoming car and force a gap. I bound after Morgan, and catch her on one of the bus shelter islands that act as stepping-stones towards the hospital. I pant, hand on my swollen belly, but I get the words out again: ‘Tell me about your mother’s jewellery. What’s so special? Is it real? Diamonds? Platinum? What?’

‘Some of it’s gold. It’s ordinary gold and costume jewellery, and the garnet ring. She wore it when I was little. People tell me that I can’t possibly remember, but I do. When I was a baby, I played with that bracelet on her arm while she fed me my bottle. I remember two of them clacking against each other.’ Her face is wet, sweat from her hairline and tears on her cheeks.

‘But nothing objectively valuable. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so …’ She swallows.

I have to tread carefully, and stick to my own case. ‘Did Rowena wear her jewellery later in life? After the coma?’

Morgan shakes her head.

‘And that’s when she started hoarding?’
Maybe to bury something, small things, collected from the house after the grave was covered.

Morgan nods. A bus pulls up and hospital visitors and outpatients jostle us.

If someone had squatted in the White House, there would have been belongings: clothes, shoes, accessories, perhaps only noticed after the burial was complete. The kind of things at the core of Rowena’s hoarding, easily mistaken for Rowena’s own outgrown or out-of-fashion possessions. That’s a good way to hide things. She may have felt safer keeping things under her control. ‘There’s a chance that some items belonging to the dead woman and her child might have been in the barn. The fire has destroyed much of what we’d like to see. Fiona spent a lot of time in there. We need to talk to her.’

‘No.’

I expected that. ‘Perhaps
you
remember—’

‘I didn’t spend time in the Red House, Inspector.’

‘Perhaps you’ll recognise which pieces of jewellery were for certain your mother’s and which might have belonged to someone else.’
Someone dead.
Jewellery is the most likely among those items to be unique or identifying. ‘I’d like to find that jewellery.’

‘Ask that girl! She had the bracelet!’ Morgan clutches the bangle on her wrist, and her expression dares me to try to take it from her.

I suggest, ‘Dora said that Fiona gave it to her. If Fiona used to play with the jewellery, maybe we should ask her where it is.’

‘No! No more. I told you.’

‘All right, may we ask an officer to search Fiona’s room?’ We haven’t searched the White House yet. We’ve trodden carefully, wary of a grieving woman’s rights.

‘You think I’m awful,’ Morgan says, chin high. ‘They all do. Fiona, too. It costs something to be a mother.
You’ll find out. Everyone sees what I deny her, but they hardly notice what I spare her. I never have sex in the house, never. I save it for business trips, or …’ She declines to elaborate. ‘I never bring it home. She deserves to be a child. She deserves to be sheltered. Dora was a fine friend when they were small, but … puberty does something to these girls. Dora couldn’t be trusted any more, she proved that. I’m not flailing for vengeance; I truly believe that she abetted my daughter’s horrific actions, and for that she should be punished. But only for what she’s done. If she’s innocent …’ She wipes her wet forehead. ‘I have nothing to hide. Search the whole damn house. Feel free to burn it to the ground when you’re through.’

As we approach the revolving doors, I thumb-type that message to the CSI team on site:
SEARCH THE WHITE HOUSE. THE GIRL’S ROOM. JEWELLERY
.

Morgan’s phone beeps, growing louder as she fumbles for it at the bottom of her bag. She retrieves it, looks at the message, gasps, and staggers back.

My hand shoots out to steady her. ‘Mrs Davies?’

‘It’s Dr Sengupta. They’ve found a donor. They’re prepping Fiona for surgery.’

I have to jog to keep up with her. In the lift, Morgan bounces impatiently, everything too slow. On the ward, we rush the ritual anointing of hands with antibacterial gel, and find the doctor. He requires signatures. He’s beaming.

‘The donor shall remain anonymous, but I can assure you that she’s an excellent match. There are no guarantees; Fiona’s health is already compromised and any surgery has risks. But we have hope, Mrs Davies.’

She nods. She scribbles signatures. Fiona is taken away.

Morgan sits in the chair beside Fiona’s empty bed, staring at the space where Fiona had been.

‘I want to know,’ she says. ‘I want to know who they’re putting into her body.’

I pull a second chair from the corner, scraping it along the floor join her. I sit. ‘Does it matter?’

‘I wanted to be the one! It should have been me. But I don’t match. I’ve never matched. I gave birth to her, but we’ve never been alike, not in any way.’

‘When Dan and I think about baby names,’ I say, carefully, ‘It’s easy when I imagine a girl. When I mentally sort through boy names, it feels strange to confront just how much this isn’t going to be a little me. Well, it isn’t going to be a little me either way, but when imagining a little girl it’s easier to pretend that it might be.’

I steel myself for a caustic reply, but the mother-to-mother tone has done its work.

Morgan confides, ‘The doctor asked me to get in touch with Fiona’s father, to see if he could be a donor. I had to admit that I don’t know who he is. All I know about the man comes from looking at Fiona and spotting the differences from my family’s genes. She has Rowena’s stubborn chin, and my long body. Her nose, though, and her pale, wispy hair … those must be from him.’ Her voice gets tight and sarcastic: ‘You’re a detective; can you find me the man with that nose and that hair? Who fucked a drunk woman in Brighton in the summer of ’96?’

I keep my expression neutral. 1996 is too late to be connected with the skeletons. But if alcohol had been a general problem, that could be relevant.

‘Was there always a lot of drinking?’

‘Yes. Then. Not any more, not for years. I pulled my life together for her. We lived together in the same house,’ she says, her pride in this banal normality emphasising the strangeness of her childhood. Her satisfaction lasts only a moment. ‘I hate looking at her and knowing that this other, irrelevant person is part of her. And now there will be another one, this donor. It makes me sick.’

‘Maybe,’ I suggest, gently, ‘Maybe it’s not Rowena’s chin on Fiona’s face, just Fiona’s chin. Maybe it’s not that man’s hair on Fiona’s head, but Fiona’s hair. Maybe not your body. Maybe just hers.’

Morgan says nothing, but she nods. I get up quietly. It’s late afternoon now, the sun no longer high. I miss Dan. I hate hospitals. Most people are in here because they have to be; I can go home. The closer I get to the exit the faster I walk.