But For The Grace: A DC Smith Investigation Page 13
“I know how he feels.”
“There you are, then – you can have some man-time together – mutually assured nostalgia.”
Another smile, and a nod this time to her wit and gentle teasing. She didn’t want him to think that this meeting was just another part of Douglas’s recruitment drive, and so she asked him what he was working on, with all the usual acknowledgements that she didn’t need to know the details. He told her the nature of the case, and talked specifically about the difficulties of dealing with the elderly and infirm. He said that although a crime of some sort had been committed, and although no crime was victimless, this sort of thing could sometimes seem to be a crime without a criminal.
It was a subtle but striking idea, and she asked him to explain – but then the waitress arrived with their coffees and a little plate of complementary biscuits for them to share. Smith was very nice with her, and the girl walked away with a smile on her face, saying they only had to wave to her if they needed anything else.
Marcia pursued the idea when they were alone again – how could a crime have no criminal? It depends, he said, on how one uses the word ‘criminal’. Do we apply it to everyone who breaks any law, however outdated or trivial? In which case, every one of us, every person out there on the square, is a criminal many times in our daily lives. Or do we use the word only for those who break the law for selfish reasons, for gain or to satisfy their individual needs, disregarding the pain that will be caused to others?
He left the question there for her to answer – she was not going to be allowed to be a passive participant in the conversation, and the realization took her by surprise. It was common sense, surely – when we use the word, we use it in the second sense.
“OK, agreed, of course we do. So how should the law treat a person who, at another’s request, usually someone they care for dearly, helps to end a life that is full of physical pain and mental suffering? They seek no material gain, and act, some would argue, most unselfishly in that they are depriving themselves of the company of someone that they love. In what sense is that person a criminal, and how should they be punished?”
She had expected a cup of coffee with a new acquaintance, and perhaps a new friend – she had not expected to find herself wrestling with a moral dilemma under the fixed gaze of a highly experienced detective.
“To be honest, I – I don’t know what to call you! What do I? Was it really alright to call you David when we had dinner at Douglas’s?”
“A bloody plonker would be about right, going on about such stuff when you’ve agreed to come out and… I can only apologise.”
When she laughed and said that he still had not answered her question, he said, “David is fine. Not everyone’s comfortable with initials. I sometimes sound like a character in an American cartoon… DC?”
“Right – David. I need time to think about it. If we meet up again, I promise to have given it serious consideration. I know that’s a bit of a cop-out.”
“Sounds good to me.”
And to me, she thought. He wasn’t boring, after all, and he had taken the trouble to dress well, Saturday casual but smart. The boots under the dark green cord trousers were plain but expensive, and, either by luck or design, they matched perfectly the ageless leather jacket. He waved to the waitress and ordered another latte for her. She came across and poured him more coffee from the pot. When she had done so, he said, “Thank you, Nicole!” and she had blushed and looked down at her own name badge, before trotting away.
Then Marcia asked him if he thought that he was dealing with such a case now, a crime without a criminal – a mercy killing. He thought before answering, longer than he had thought about anything else he had said since they sat down together.
“It’s one possibility. It sounds weird but I’d rather it wasn’t. It’s simpler to have a proper villain and an old-fashioned, selfish motive. The older I get, the more I like simple.”
After that, they talked about the future of accountancy in the digital age.
As he drove home, Smith thought that the weekend-without-any-work idea had begun well, and when he reached his front door, another distraction awaited him. The card had not been pushed all the way through the letter box, and he withdrew it without unlocking the door. The box ‘Left at rear of property’ had been untidily ticked, and so he walked down the side of the house, not knowing what to expect – he had ordered nothing and few things arrived without warning these days.
The padded bag lay on end against the patio door. He picked it up and examined it – a generic post office label, the stamp incomplete and obscure and no return address on the back – why didn’t people bother with that any more? It was book-shaped and book-weighted, and then he remembered.
In the kitchen he took a knife out of the drawer and made a careful slit through the top of the package; then he held it at arm’s length, opened it slightly and looked inside. Old habits, he thought. A hardback book of moderate length, complete with dust-jacket – brand new. He slid it out of the bag and laid it on the work-surface, glancing at the cover before he filled the kettle and took the coffee jug out of the cupboard. Deliberately, he kept his eyes away from the book for some seconds, busying himself with a filter, fetching the ground coffee storage jar from its place in the fridge and placing one of the little cups on its saucer, one of the set that Sheila had always kept ‘for best’.
He had recognized the two children immediately, their separate photographs showing them smiling, happy, alive. Presumably the parents would have agreed to that – he hoped so. The background was an image of a path ascending a steep, grass-covered slope, looking upwards, the top third of the scene occupied by blue sky. Across that was the title - ‘They Went Up The Hill’ - and beneath that was a strap-line in smaller print: ‘The Westcott Murders’. The writer’s name ran across the bottom of the cover – Joanne Evison. Smith glanced briefly at the spine before putting the book down again; it was from a reputable publisher. When the coffee was ready, he took the copy of The Times he had bought in town along with the book and sat on the sofa. Whenever the weather was good enough he preferred the conservatory but it was grey and cold again, and the garden was empty of colour.
The book lay on the little antique mahogany table - a wedding present from her father’s shop - for over an hour before he looked at it again, though if pressed he would have admitted that it was there at the back of his mind. In the paper he read the home news, the letters page - still mostly about Europe and ‘our porous borders’ - glanced over the cricket report from India and read about the changes proposed to England’s Amateur Boxing Association. Even the crossword received some desultory attention before he finally put the paper aside and contemplated the book on the table.
There were several reasons why he did not want to read it. A weekend-without-work surely included not reading about work, even if it had been done by someone else. Also, he harboured deep suspicions about ‘true-life’ crime writing, and about the motives of people who undertook it. The Andretti case had not been spared the treatment, and although he had been told that the investigation hadn’t been heavily criticized, he had not broken his vow that he would never read that book himself. Years ago he had read an account of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation, and he had been disgusted by the writer’s smug dismissal of the detectives’ methods – how easy it was in hindsight for someone who had never seen a murder victim to mock the work of those who had to confront them in their daily lives and again in their nightmares. And then there was the impact on the families and friends – how much of that was taken into account when publishing executives discussed target market penetration?
After the title page there was a dedication: ‘For Michael and Angie, and for their families, without whose support I could not and would not have written this book.’ He turned to the back fly-leaf then but there was no photograph of Joanne Evison, only a short biography. A psychology graduate of Cambridge University, she had joined the Metropolitan Police as a for
ensic profiling officer. After rising to the rank of inspector, she had left to pursue a second career as a writer and a consultant. There were no dates but Smith’s rough and ready calculation told him it must have been a fairly rapid rise, and she was already the author of three books about well-known police investigations.
He went back to the dedication. The ‘would not’ impressed him, if it was true. Having decided that he would not read this, did it impress him enough to make him change his mind?
It was a little after eleven o’clock that night when he completed it. Many of the details of the case he had recalled as soon as he began to read; they had lain closer to the surface than he had realized, in the shallow grave of his memory - another occupational hazard, no doubt. Michael Fielding and Angie Barrett, unrelated, two children from the same Devonshire village, murdered on the same hillside above that village within a matter of months. The same perpetrator, the same methodical strangulation and a complete absence of sexual interference – that alone made it almost unique, never mind the different genders of the victims. All the strange trivia of a murder investigation was there, as it must be, but what struck Smith most of all was the quality of the writing. It was clear, concise, thorough but at the same time it did not lack the humanity that was missing from so many other sensationalised accounts. The parents had been spoken to, and were sometimes quoted, at length – in that alone, Jo Evison must have had their full consent to write as she had. The detective superintendent leading the investigation had been given extensive opportunities to explain why she took the decisions that she did, and to defend herself against the usual charges that the second murder could have been avoided if only x, y and z had been done. The press response itself was analysed in depth in a chapter of its own; there were trenchant criticisms of it and Smith noted that the headlines used when the case became a national one – ‘The Jack and Jill Murders’ – had not been used by Evison for her book. He could imagine the editors pressuring her to do so in some form or another.
During a break in reading he had gone back to the envelope but there was no sign of a compliments slip, and neither was there anything written inside the cover. Only when he reached the last page had a hand-written note fluttered down onto his lap. It said, ‘I hope you made it this far. If so, perhaps we can talk. My number is probably still on your phone. Sadly, I do have a website, and you could email from there if you prefer, Jo.’
During his absence, and while it was switched off, Windows had decided to update itself – he could never make out how it did that. He waited patiently, watching the percentage bar creep to one hundred, and then he had to restart the whole thing anyway. It could have waited until the morning but his curiosity had got the better of him.
There was one photograph on the website – not a professional portrait but the upper two thirds of her on a beach somewhere, looking into the camera, the wind lifting her hair, blowing a single tress across her face. Light-coloured hair, it must be blonde, or was when the image was taken, which could, of course, have been years ago. In the picture she was probably in her thirties, late thirties, wearing an anorak and jeans, the jacket zipped up against the cold, a serious, intelligent-looking face with its chin resting on the high collar.
The biography added little to what he had read in the book. ‘A first class degree’ – people couldn’t resist letting you know that, but fair enough if it was from Cambridge University proper and not some backstreet private college with a new notice-board. He wondered how many Oxbridge graduates joined the police these days, and decided it was probably more than it used to be, what with the devaluation of all degrees. And there was Waters, too, with his degree – first class – in history. How on earth had plodders like himself managed to make a go of it, eh? But then, A levels in his time probably equated to a lot of the degrees today.
The website had links to her books. He clicked on the other two and was able to look inside the digital versions, the things that he sometimes saw people reading on their mini pads or whatever they were called. The same style of writing, respectful, factual, unbiased, and then he read some of the reviews that people had posted; all complimentary, nothing below four stars out of five, and it was clear that a couple of these were by readers who were in, or who had once been in, the job. The books were not cheap compared to some of the ‘you might also like’ ones but it was obvious that plenty of people still bought them. When he looked under ‘Contact me’ he found the email address, and another one for her publisher, but no reference to Facebook or another social network. That was interesting. Even Smith had realized the usefulness of these recently when you were first taking a look at someone, but if she was on such a network Joanne Evison was not publicising it here.
When he shut down the computer, it was almost midnight. He turned out the light and then looked out of the curtained window. All quiet on Old Street. The road was dry and on the parked cars there was a sheen of frost. Away from the streetlight that half-illuminated his own small front garden, the night had a bluish tint – somewhere above there must be a moon in the clear sky. As he watched, waiting for tiredness, a cat leapt up out of the shadows and sat on the low brick wall between his garden and the next. Only its silhouette was visible in the moonlight. It was still there when he finally closed the curtains.
Even on a Sunday he was up by seven o’clock. If asked, he would blame his days in the army but he had not enjoyed lying in bed even as a teenager. By seven thirty he was back from the newsagent’s with a copy of the Sunday Telegraph, one of the two newspapers that he read every week; the new Asian owners had stopped asking now if he would prefer to have the Sunday paper delivered. He liked the short walk, even on mornings like this one when every breath clouded the air and one could feel the pavement slipping away, however carefully one walked.
Two rounds of toast, the French coffee for Sunday mornings, and switch the heating on again so that he could sit in the conservatory. After a glance at the headlines, he lowered the paper and thought again about Joanne Evison’s book, upstairs on his table. No need for a quick decision on that, no need at all, but it surprised him that there was a decision to be made. He would leave it for a few days and then look at the book again, try to imagine his name in the text instead of Detective Superintendent whoever-she-was. And then there was the question of the families of the murdered girls – how was that all sorted out? The thought left him cold for a moment – perhaps there wasn’t really any decision to be made, after all.
One consequence of such a busy Saturday was that his weekly shopping had not been done. He would go to the supermarket after breakfast and a proper read of the paper, and then see what the afternoon might bring. The thought repeated itself and with it came a little, rueful smile – probably not too many surprises, David. He opened his mobile then and found a message from Marcia Williams – ‘Thanks for the coffee. Really enjoyed our chat. Do it again?’ Followed by an ‘X’. Blimey. Then he looked at the time and date and realized that it had arrived yesterday afternoon. How had he missed it? And what was she thinking now? He found ‘Reply’, and then fumbled with his first few letters, writing ‘Tanks’ twice as if he was reporting on a military advance. A white lie was the only realistic option, and so he texted that his phone had been left on silent because… Well, just left on silent. Perhaps she would imagine he had been on a delicate investigation.
He had thought that the supermarket would be less busy late on a Sunday morning than early on a Saturday but if anything it was worse. What sort of lives do these people lead? But it’s the new religion, shopping, and here he was, paying homage, part of the crowd that was annoying others judging by the gloomy looks on the faces around him. Some, he noticed, had Christmas things in the trolleys, buying up discounted items ready for next year – he could not imagine planning that far ahead now. Once upon a time he had done so, and it had been a strength; now it seemed futile, and only at work did he still make the lists and flow charts that once gave order to his whole existence.
Smith stepped back to the corner of the aisle so that he was half-hidden and watched them. They were talking quietly to each other, smiling, suppressing laughter, especially Rita Sanchez – they were oblivious of the customers who passed by them. If anyone noticed, any of those customers, what did they see? Two women, friends, out shopping together, one advising the other on which eye shadow to buy. That wasn’t what Smith saw. He saw two people in love, two happy, unconcerned people with nothing on their consciences. All week the police had been in their offices and all over their work, and they were not worried. It might be complacency but Smith’s instincts told him otherwise. They had been on his list, albeit low down. Now he was certain that he could cross them off it altogether.
Chapter Twelve
“Well, I’m sorry to ask this, Mrs Bradley, but had your mother ever indicated to you that she might at some point want to take her own life?”
On the drive over, he and Alison Reeve had agreed an approach; as she had already met them and had been sympathetic when she told them about the unexpected test results, she would continue in that role. Smith, whom they had not met, would ask the difficult questions.