The Vows of Silence (8 page)

“‘People like that’ don’t have a grand. More to the point, a young woman was murdered and we haven’t
found her killer. You think we should have ignored this?”

She sighed. “Trouble is, everybody gets twitchy. A popgun for God’s sake.”

He decided to leave it. They would all be grumbling for the rest of the shift, not least the AR officers. They all knew that there were likely to be a lot more incidents of the same kind until Melanie Drew’s killer was found because no one was going to be taking chances, anything halfway suspicious would get an overreaction.

He went up to his office. There were new files on his desk and he had to write up his report on the afternoon’s incident. It was twenty past six. The report would take him fifteen minutes or so and the files could wait till tomorrow.

His father had returned from Madeira the previous evening. Simon thought he ought to go over there, offer to take him out for a drink which might lead on to a congenial dinner—in the unlikely event that Richard Serrailler would be feeling mellow in the aftermath of his holiday.

Fourteen

When he was four he had told his Mam he was going to marry her and when she’d stopped laughing and said he couldn’t because she was already taken, he said he’d marry Stephanie then, only his sister had said she hated boys and hated him the most so that had been that, until he’d met Avril when he was fifteen.

He’d pined for Avril Pickering. He’d worked out how long before he could ask her out, then how long before he could get a job and start saving, how long till they could get engaged, how long till he had enough to rent a house and they could be married. He’d put it all down, figures in columns, everything. On paper it had looked all right to him. Fine. Then Avril Pickering had gone out with Tony Fincher. He’d seen them, walking down Port Street holding hands. He’d hated Avril Pickering. Not Tony Fincher, oddly. It wasn’t his fault. It was hers.

He had planned to do something to her, make her regret it, but before he had worked out what it was going to be, it was the summer holidays and when they went back to school in September Avril wasn’t there. The Pickerings had moved away. Scunthorpe, somebody said; London, somebody else. No one really knew.

He had gone out with a few girls after that. Four or five girls. The usual sort of girls. Nothing special. He began to wonder what the fuss was about. He told Stephanie. She laughed. He told Dad, one day when they were shooting. His dad had given him a look and said he’d got something there. What was all the fuss about? Right.

Then he had met Alison, introduced by Stephanie’s fiancé, as he was then. Soon to be husband.

And everything had changed. Alison.

He sat nursing a pint, on his own, remembering, because there was a new girl on the front desk and her name was Alison and it had all clicked into focus again. Vivid. Seeing Alison. Hearing her. Watching her. The tiniest things. He could rerun it like a film going through his head.

Not that he’d ever forgotten. But when something happened, the same name, a little link, it went full on. Colour. Vivid.

He drank the rest of his pint slowly and steadily to slake the anger that always blazed up. Sparks. A breath of wind. A fire, running out of control, and for years nothing would dampen it down.

But then he found it.

Fifteen

Hallam House. It was dark when he approached it down the lane. The lights shone out onto the drive.

Simon stopped. It was still hard. He still hated coming to the house knowing that he would not see his mother, that Meriel would not be pruning or weeding or cutting something back in the garden or else visible in the kitchen or at her desk in the window of the small sitting room. He saw her now. The shape of her head, the way her hair was done, the way she glanced up and her expression when she saw him.

She had not always been there if he had called unannounced. Even though her busy life as a hospital consultant was over and she had stood down from several committees, she was still on the board of this and a trustee of that, often out. But when she was there, she made time for him at once, sat down, listened, caught up with news. Family first, last and always, she had said.

Simon missed her with a strength of sadness that was still raw and painful. He thought about her, had meant to say this or that to her, ask about someone or something.

He looked again at the house. The lights on and welcoming. But his father had never learned the knack of making his family feel especially welcome.

The kitchen curtains were not drawn and as Simon got out of the car, his heart lurched because she was there, he saw her, saw her standing beside the dresser, her arm raised to take something down, saw her as clearly as he saw the two stone urns filled with the white geraniums she had always planted in them, beside the front door.

He looked away quickly, terrified. How could his dead mother be there?

And when he looked again of course she was not.

“Simon? Have I missed a message from you? I don’t remember your saying you were coming.”

“I wasn’t far. Thought I’d drop by and see if you enjoyed your holiday.”

“I did indeed.”

As he followed his father into the kitchen, Simon caught a glimpse of her again, her back to him. Only the way she had done her hair was new. Meriel had always worn her hair upswept. Elegant. She had always been elegant. Even in old gardening clothes, elegant.

Meriel was dead. Meriel had been dead for—

“Hello.”

She turned round.

Her hair was quite different and she was far younger. But she was tall, like his mother, and with the same way of speaking. Odd.

“I don’t think you’ve met. Judith Connolly: my son Simon.” Richard paused and his voice took on its usual faint edge of sarcasm. “Detective Chief Superintendent Serrailler. He’s a policeman.”

“I know,” she said. Smiling. Coming over to him. She held out her hand. “Hello, Simon. I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

There was a smell of cooking. Something simmered on the stove. Since his mother’s death, the kitchen had lost some of its warmth and the small touches that had made it special. There had always been flowers and flowering plants on the window ledges; there had been notes pinned to a cork board, reminders about meetings written in Meriel’s striking italic hand and bright blue ink; there had been a row of musical scores on a shelf next to the cookery books, and photographs of them all as children next to new ones of Cat’s sons and daughter, stuck up everywhere. But the plants had died and never been replaced, the music had gone to Cat; some of the photographs had fallen down or curled at the edges. The notice board was bare. Simon hated going into the kitchen. It was the one room where he missed his mother beyond bearing.

Now he noticed some scarlet geraniums on the ledge, neat in their pots with saucers beneath. There was an unopened bottle of wine on the table. Glasses.

Who was this?

“I take it you’ve seen your sister,” Richard said.

“Of course. They’re back and fully functioning. It’s brilliant.”

“I’ll telephone Catherine tomorrow.”

“Don’t you think you should drive out there, Richard, not just telephone? They’ll be longing to see you.”

Simon looked from the woman to his father and back again. Richard said, “Oh, I doubt that.” But he was smiling.

“Will you stay for supper, Simon? I’ve made a chicken pie that will feed half a dozen. I always cook too much.”

Who was this? What was she doing, cooking in his mother’s kitchen, inviting him to supper, telling his father where he should go, who he should see? Who was this?

She handed him the bottle of wine. “Would you open this?” Smiling. She had a warm smile.

She was—what—late forties? Tall. Light brown hair with some careful, fairer streaks. Straight. Very well cut. Pink shirt. Necklace of large almond-shaped stones. Large mouth. Slightly crooked nose. Who was this?

His father said, “Should we eat in here or shall I lay the table in the dining room?”

“It’s so comfortable in here. Simon, do stay. We don’t have any holiday snaps to bore you with.”

Holiday?

His father was avoiding his eye.

Simon picked up the bottle and went to the drawer for the corkscrew but she had it in her hand. Held it out to him.

Her look said, Don’t ask now. Later. He will tell you later. I will see to it.

He took the corkscrew. She smiled.

Tall. But not like his mother. Not his mother.

In his mother’s place. In her house. Her kitchen. Cooking in her kitchen. Not his mother.

He wrenched the cork hard out of the bottle.

Sixteen

The evening air smelled of bonfires. Cat Deerbon walked towards the east door of the cathedral in the gathering dusk and the woodsmoke drifting on the air was nostalgic of childhood, school satchels, her first year as a junior doctor, running across to the hospital from her room to answer a bleep when the groundsmen were burning the leaves. And her mother in the garden at Hallam House, tall and elegant in jeans in her mid-seventies, pushing the debris of the summer borders into the glowing heart of a small, neat and well-controlled bonfire.

Cat stood for a second catching her breath at the vividness of the memory, wishing she could go there now, make a mug of tea, chat, catch up.

The cathedral was still and almost empty at the end of the day. Two vergers were changing the candles in the great holders on the high altar. Someone was
brushing the floor at the far end of the chancel with a rhythmic scritch-scratch of bristle on stone.

There was no service. Cat had had to drop in a letter to the New Song School and she always took the chance to sit in the cathedral for a few moments when she could, centring herself, reflecting, bringing some of her patients and their problems with her to leave in the peace and holiness of the building. She had only just returned to the practice. There were new patients, old ones returning with new problems, nothing dramatic yet. Her energies were going into opposing some changes, learning to work with others, battling the system. Chris, still not fully recovered from a lengthy jet lag, was refusing to argue, refusing to compromise, unusually irritable. But she was determined to win on one front, determined to do some nights on call, seeing her own patients when they needed her most. It would all settle down.

She closed her eyes. Her mother was there again, rekindling the bonfire with a handful of sticks and weeds.

“What would you do, Ma?” And the voice replied, “What your professional conscience dictates, of course—tempered by common sense. And don’t call me Ma!”

Cat smiled. Footsteps down the aisle beside her pew. She looked up and nodded to the verger. The smell of guttering candle wax reached her as it wove its ghostly way down the nave. She bowed her head, prayed for a few moments, then left, pausing as always to look up at the glory of the fan-vaulted roof, the stone angels on the tops of the columns blowing their gilded trumpets.

She had missed a lot of things during their time in Australia and this cathedral perhaps the most.

As she walked out into the warm evening, her phone beeped for a text message from the surgery.

Urgent ring Imogen Hse re Karin M.

Karin McCafferty. The last time she had spoken to Cat was before Australia, but she had sent a couple of emails. She was fine, she had said, still fine, scans all clear, two years after her diagnosis, the oncologist at Bevham General was “surprised but delighted.” “Dare say that goes for you too!” Karin had ended.

Karin had refused all forms of orthodox treatment for a late-diagnosed and aggressive breast cancer and had embarked, against Cat’s best advice, on a journey through all things holistic, naturalistic, alternative—both familiar and what Chris called “wacky.” Karin’s husband had left her to live with another woman in New York, but her business as a garden designer and horticulturalist had flourished and so had she. Against the odds and the medical advice, she had got well and stayed well.

Chris called it a statistical aberration, Karin called it a triumph. Cat had been both delighted—and furious. She had found it hard to talk about—and had replied only briefly to Karin’s last email.

Now she stared at the message on her phone.

She went back to the car, texting as she walked. A message to Chris that she was going to the hospice,
Get curry out freezer
.

How strongly did a doctor want to be proved right
when being right meant a patient’s terminal illness and death? How much had Cat wished for Karin to be both wrong, totally and utterly and profoundly wrong, and yet cured? What would her mother have said? She desperately needed to know, but Meriel’s image was no longer vivid in her mind. Meriel had faded. She was leaving her to sort this one out by herself. “You don’t need me,” she heard her say.

Oh God but I do, Cat thought, as she stood, afraid to drive to the hospice, not wanting to find out what was happening to Karin, smelling the last faint smoke from the burning of the leaves.

Imogen House. There was change here too. The new wing was complete, the old senior sister had retired, a couple of other nurses Cat had known well had moved on, new ones had arrived. But Lois on the reception desk for evenings was still there and greeted Cat with a look of pleasure and a warm hug. It was Lois who was the first face of the hospice when patients arrived at night and were apprehensive as well as desperately ill. Lois who welcomed relatives who were afraid and in distress, Lois who made every one of them feel at home, in safe and loving hands, Lois who was cheerful and positive but never too chirpy, Lois who remembered every name and who absorbed what she could of the anxiety and dread.

“Karin McCafferty?” Cat said.

“Came in last week. She’s been refusing to see anyone at all, but this afternoon she asked if you were back.”

“How is she?”

Lois shook her head. “Be prepared. But it’s more than her physical state, which is actually better now they’ve sorted out her pain control. She seems very angry. I’d say very bitter. No one can get through to her. Maybe you’ll have some luck.”