A Fatal Verdict (8 page)

‘The Kenya trip, you mean?’ Tracy looked up from her notebook.

‘No, not just that.’ There was a look of tearful triumph on Kathryn Walters’ face. ‘The whole thing was off - her affair, everything! She wasn’t ever going to see David again!’

‘She told you that?’

‘Yes. First thing she said when she walked in the door. She was in floods of tears of course, but she was angry, too. Angry like I hadn’t seen her in years. And it was difficult because I was disappointed for her but also pleased as well. Delighted, in fact. I thought I’ve got my daughter back again at last. We both did, didn’t we?’

Andrew Walters nodded. ‘Yes. It was quite clear that evening that her affair with David was over. That’s why what’s happened today...’ He shook his head despairingly. ‘... seems so strange. Inexplicable, really.’

‘Which day was this, sir?’

‘It would have been Tuesday. May 16th.’

‘So why had the affair come to an end? What was Shelley so angry about?’

Kathryn Walters smiled through her tears. ‘Oh, that’s simple, really. Banal, in fact. She’d called in to see him that morning in his flat - she had a key, you see - and found him in bed with another girl. Naturally there was a row. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, it turns out this girl isn’t just some casual fling, as Shelley thought at first. Oh no. God help the poor girl, she’s the mother of his child!’

‘So there was another girl?’ Terry said. ‘Is that what you’re telling me?’

He was parked in the street outside his house. It was nearly eleven o’clock at night. He could see the lights were off in the girls’ bedroom upstairs. A glow flickered in the front room where Trude was presumably sitting up for him, watching TV. And Tracy, it seemed, was still out in the country somewhere, parked in a layby looking up at the stars while she phoned in her report.

‘That’s it, sir. Another girl with a baby. And he’s the father.’

Terry shook his head in silent disgust. So David Kidd didn’t just break up other people’s families, it seemed, he abandoned his own. The distaste he had felt for the cocky young man during this afternoon’s interview broadened into contempt.

‘Did they give the name of this other girl? The mother of Mr Kidd’s child?’

‘Lindsay, Mrs Walters said. She didn’t know the surname, or where she lives.’

‘Well, no doubt lover boy can tell us. If he remembers he has a family, that is.’ Terry gazed at his own house. Was that a small shadow moving, behind the living room curtain? Surely the girls weren’t still up? He sighed. ‘But I suppose, to be fair to him, that gives Shelley Walters a reason for suicide, doesn’t it? Despair at being dumped by such a promising Lothario.’

‘His parents don’t believe it was suicide, sir. They insist the girl wasn’t like that, at all. They’re convinced that her boyfriend killed her. But there is a problem, nonetheless. The girl had some sort of psychiatric condition. She was on medication for - what do they call it? Bi-polar disorder.’

‘Oh great,’ Terry sighed. ‘So he found out she was a nutter and dumped her. That would drive anyone to suicide.’

‘Could be, sir, yes. But the parents don’t believe it.’

‘No. Well, they wouldn’t, would they?’

For a moment, neither of them said anything. Terry looked up at the window where his own daughters were sleeping peacefully, and tried to imagine how he would feel if either of them ended up as Shelley Walters had today. It didn’t bear thinking about. The rage, the fury her parents must feel - coupled with guilt, perhaps, at not protecting their vulnerable daughter enough. ‘A difficult interview, then, Tracy?’

‘Pretty gruesome, sir, yes. I don’t know how anyone copes with a death like that. I’m afraid I did ... make them a sort of promise, sir.’

‘A promise?’ An alarm bell rang in Terry’s head. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Just that we’ll take their suspicions seriously, sir. I said that if it is a murder, then ... we’ll make sure the bastard’s locked away for good.’

‘Well, obviously.’ Terry relaxed. It was the sort of thing he might have said himself. ‘But you’re not a social worker, Trace, remember that. We just deal with the facts. The post mortem will help. See you at the morgue in the morning.’

The moment he switched off the mobile he wished he hadn’t said it like that. But then, if you focussed too much on feelings you wouldn’t be able to deal with scenes like they’d witnessed this afternoon, or the visit to the mortuary they would both have to make tomorrow. You had to keep your own emotions under control.

But that didn’t mean he had none. As Terry parked his car in his drive and opened his front door softly, he thought, this is my home, my nest, my place of safety. But how safe is it really? What if Jessica or Esther grows up and dies in the bath of a thug like David Kidd, what would I do? I’d string him up to the nearest lamppost, that’s what I’d do. Whether he killed her with his own hands or just drove her to do it herself, it’s still his fault either way, that’s how I’d feel. I’d want revenge - that’s how her parents probably feel now.

He stood in the hall for a moment, thinking, while his professional mind censored the dreadful images and stored them away in his subconscious. Then he drew a deep breath and opened the door of the living room.

A young fair-haired woman in jeans and teeshirt smiled up at him from the end of the sofa where she sat curled up watching TV. She put a finger to her lips, then pointed down at the tousled head of eight year old Esther asleep on her lap.

‘Oh dear.’ Terry sat down in the armchair and Trude muted the sound with the remote. ‘Was there trouble this evening?’ he asked softly.

‘A little. My fault. I told her a tale about trolls and she saw one in the wardrobe.’

‘I should have been here.’

‘Why? Can you arrest trolls?’ Trude stroked the little girl’s hair gently. ‘She’s very tired. They had a lot of fun at the party.’ 

‘Daddy?’ Esther stirred, and sat up. ‘Good. You’re home.’ She got up off the sofa and tottered across to Terry, trailing a battered leopard in her left hand. ‘Did you catch the burglars?’

‘I did, sweetie. All locked up.’ He lifted the soft, trusting little body onto his knee, remembering the horrors at the hospital and the tough, cocky young thug he had released an hour earlier to go back to his bloodstained flat. ‘Why are you up so late?’

‘There was a troll. In my wardrobe.’

‘It was just a dream, honey. He’s all gone now. Come on, I’ll take you up.’

‘All right.’ The little girl was warm, with that lovely innocent smell of a sleepy child. He picked her up, and she leaned her head trustingly against his shoulder, stroking the back of his head with her free hand as if she was comforting him, not the other way round. He smiled down at Trude, who gave them both a little wave.

‘Up the wooden hill,’ he said, in the quaint English phrase that his grandmother had once used to him. ‘To Bedfordshire.’

10.
 Hamster

The case conference, three months later, was nearly derailed by a hamster.

Terry thought he had everything running smoothly. He had all the evidence, which he had read through carefully last night, neatly arranged in a locked briefcase just inside the front door. His car, which had refused to start twice last week, had come back from the garage with a large bill and a promise of perfect performance. Trude had Jessica and Esther up and dressed for school on time, hair brushed, homework in satchels, lunchboxes packed, socks matching, waffles toasting in the kitchen ...

And then Esther let her hamster out.

It was a new hamster, selected with great care only last week to replace Rufus, the beloved old one which had died suddenly and been buried, with tears and solemn ceremony, under the laurel bush at the end of the garden. Rufus had been old and slow and trusting but the new hamster, Rastus, was the opposite of all these things and when Esther had opened his cage, just for a second to say good morning, he had whizzed up her arm, jumped off her shoulder and vanished behind the sofa. Hence the family panic.

Esther was convinced that the cat would kill him or he would get trapped inside the sofa or run down a mousehole where some monstrous rat with slavering jaws would tear him to shreds and nothing would persuade her to eat her breakfast or even consider going to school until Rastus was caught and safely installed back in his cage. Her elder sister Jessica was equally keen on the hunt but also desperate to get to school early because her class were performing a project about the environment for the school assembly and she had a key speaking role as a dolphin. But Rastus could not be found. Terry upended the sofa and caught sight of him scurrying between Trude’s legs into the kitchen, where he disappeared into the space between the kitchen cupboards and the dishwasher. And time, as Terry was only too aware, was rushing on, as swiftly as the traffic was pouring into York from all the outlying villages to clog up the route into the chambers where he was to lead a police team to present their case to a barrister for the murder trial.

Trude promised to catch the hamster when she had taken the girls to school but Esther, in floods of tears by now, would have none of it. They considered sending Jessica to walk to school on her own while Trude stayed behind with Esther, but there was a main road to cross where a child had been run over and killed by a lorry only last month; so instead Terry promised his younger daughter faithfully that if she would only go to school
NOW
so that Jessica could be a dolphin in the school assembly, he, a senior Detective Inspector leading a murder investigation but more importantly for the moment their father, would not leave the house until Rastus was safely returned to custody.

It was a promise he broke five minutes after the children left the house.

He locked all the doors and windows so that there was no way the hamster could leave, then he scribbled a note for Trude explaining what he had done, snatched up his briefcase and hurried out to his car, which God be thanked for small mercies, started first time. Then he drove carefully the long way around the estate to avoid any possibility of being seen from the school, before emerging onto the Hull Road and getting stuck in exactly the traffic jam he had planned to avoid.

It was on occasions like this that he thought, more than ever, that he realized how much he, and the children, depended on Trude. Since Mary’s death she had brought sanity and stability back into their home again, almost - but not quite - like a wife. He could trust her and share crises like this hamster business with her just as he once would have done with Mary. Probably tonight when the children were tucked up in bed and Rastus - please God - was back in his cage, they would have a whisky together and laugh over it. But there would be a catch in Terry’s laughter, a necessary reserve as between any widower of forty and a young nanny of twenty three. One day he knew, she would leave, to go back to Norway with her boyfriend, Odd. And how would he cope then? It was a future that Terry dreaded.

Another thing he dreaded was the appearance of his boss, Will Churchill, at the barristers’ chambers this morning. There was no real need for Churchill to come to this conference at all, but he had made a point of it nonetheless. And when Terry finally arrived, hot and flustered after a frustrating search for a parking space, there was Churchill, just as he had feared, standing outside on the pavement with the rest of the team, looking ostentatiously at his watch.

‘Afternoon, Terence,’ the Detective Chief Inspector said, making a point of using Terry’s full name, which he hated. ‘Glad you managed to fit us in.’ He glanced at the two others, hoping for appreciation of his joke, and was rewarded, to Terry’s disgust, with an embarrassed, complicitous grin from DS Mike Carter. DS Tracy Litherland, however, met her boss’s sally with a straight wooden face, as though sarcasm was something she didn’t get. For all his efforts, Will Churchill had yet to win the loyalty of the team he had taken charge of a year ago; but the less successful he was, it seemed to Terry, the harder he tried. And the main focus of Churchill’s efforts was to undermine Terry, who, together with Sarah Newby
,
the barrister they were here to meet, had undermined him so badly in the past.

Mumbling some excuse about traffic, Terry followed his younger boss into the chambers, where the clerk showed them into a conference room on the first floor. Here they were welcomed by the CPS solicitor, Mark Wrass, a tall hearty jovial pinstriped man with oversized hands and feet which, if he had had more co-ordination, might have belonged to a farmer or rugby player. As it was, Terry had several times seen him knock a glass of water all over the table or sweep the papers to the floor with gestures of earnest, clumsy enthusiasm. Terry prudently seated himself at the opposite end of the table.

As he did so the door opened and Sarah Newby came in. She looked very different here, to the relaxed hostess at her garden party. A slender woman in her mid thirties with dark shoulder length hair and hazel eyes, she wore a black trouser suit with a thin gold chain round her neck under the collar of a white embroidered blouse. The men rose politely and she went round the table, shaking hands with each in turn. For Terry her smile was warm, the pressure of her hand firm; for Churchill it was merely civil, a brief acknowledgement of ancient enmity. There was a history to this meeting. It was less than year since Will Churchill had arrested this woman’s son on a charge of murder; a charge which from which she had successfully defended him in court. Sarah Newby had savaged Will Churchill in the witness box, accusing him of bullying, witness intimidation and incompetence, but Churchill had stood up to her forcefully and Sarah had been convinced, until the moment when the jury came in with their verdict, that she had lost the case and this man had put her son away for life. However smooth her complexion and polite her smile today, no one in the room doubted that the wound of what had so nearly happened was still tender under her skin.

As it must be under Churchill’s too, Terry, thought. For in the end, Sarah Newby had beaten him and he had been publicly humiliated in his first major case since he had joined the York force; a humiliation that ran even deeper when Terry had uncovered evidence that Churchill had been pursuing the wrong man. For an ambitious young officer like Churchill, hoping to spend three or four years at most in his present post before rising to higher things, the acquittal of Sarah’s son had been a major setback, a blemish on his CV; for Sarah, it had been a dagger pointed at the heart of her family and her career.

So Terry watched with more than normal curiosity as she seated herself at the head of the table, a few feet from the man she must detest above all others.

‘Gentlemen, DS Litherland,’ she began coolly, nodding at Tracy on Terry’s right hand. ‘I’ve read the file which Mr Wrass gave me, and, as usual, there are a number of questions to be settled before we decide whether to proceed, which is why we are all here. As I’m due in court this afternoon, I suggest we get down to business straight away.’