Absent Light (3 page)

CHAPTER TWO

H
ER MUM AND DAD
came to pick her up the following morning. Both looked pale and worried.

“You sure you should be coming home?” her mum asked anxiously. She was quietly spoken, quiet in every respect. A large-boned woman, she carried little weight because of a fondness for gin in preference to food. Her face, though lined, was softened by expertly applied make-up, giving her a gentle appearance. She had small hooded eyes that nestled like a couple of dark blue sequins. Her tinted ash-blonde hair was thick and curly. Helen looked nothing like her. In appearance, she was her father's daughter.

“I'd rather not stay here,” Helen said, taking the clothes her mother brought with her. It beat her how anyone ever managed to rest in a hospital ward. It was never dark or quiet. There was always a single light shining somewhere, always some drama.

“We could get you upgraded,” her father said authoritatively, fixing his dark brown eyes on her. Well into his sixties, and over a decade older than her mother, he still had a handsome charm. He was tall with an abundance of steel-grey hair that once was raven-coloured. When Helen was growing up, her friends pointed out, much to her embarrassment, that she had a dishy-looking dad.

“I just want to come home,” Helen said, appealing to him.

“But surely, after what's happened to you, darling…” Her mother's voice trailed off, the familiar features contorting with distress, an unusual sight and one that Helen found faintly alarming. She was more used to her mother's smooth self-composure, the maintenance of which stemmed from a rigid system of self-medication. Not one to show depths of emotion, she largely floated through life, more a spectator than a participant. It was strange to see her this connected, Helen thought, watching her mother glance at her father for guidance.

“It was a very nasty attack, Helen. You could easily have drowned.” His voice was steady but his eyes expressed concern.

“But there's nothing more the doctors can do.”

“They can keep you in for observation,” her mother said, darting another anxious look at her husband.

“I've been thoroughly checked over,” Helen smiled reasonably. “No injuries. No lasting trauma. Anyway, they probably need the beds.”

“If you're sure,” her father said, with some reluctance. “It's your decision, Helen.”

She beamed at him. “Won't be a moment,” she said, scurrying off to the nearest lavatory to change.

Her father drove them back in the Jaguar. Helen settled into the pale cream leather, closed her eyes, and listened to her father talking. “You'll need to contact the bank and put a stop on your cards. Lose much cash?”

“About thirty pounds.”

“And you'll need to get the locks changed at the flat. Did you have the keys to the studio with you?”

“No, thank goodness.”

“Tell you what, I'll get Vic to organise a locksmith today then you can have a new set to go back with.”

“Have the police talked to you yet?” her mother half-turned. There was strain in her voice.

“Yes.”

“You've made a statement?” her father interjected.

“Uh-huh.”

“What did they have to say?” her mother pressed.

“Not a lot.”

“Any ideas on the culprit?”

“There's not much to go on,” Helen said. “He'll probably get away with it.”

“He?”

“Most muggers are blokes, Mum.”

Her mother let out a laugh. It sounded like air seeping out of a rubber ring. “Silly me, of course.”

“Probably an addict wanting to feed a habit,” Helen continued, looking out of the window at houses gaudy with Christmas decorations. Children were riding along pavements on newly acquired bikes and skateboards. Adults, eager to shake off the excesses of the recent festivities while preparing for the next, walked briskly in the winter sunshine. She felt strangely detached. She guessed it was a hangover from her previous line of work in Scenes of Crime. Christmas and New Year was awkward territory. Both festivities signalled a rise in the death rate. With so much excess booze and soaring emotions, it wasn't surprising. The obligatory merry-making not only provided the right atmosphere for strangers to talk to each other, but families, too, sometimes at considerable cost.

“You sound remarkably relaxed about what's happened,” her father said, glancing at her in his rear-view mirror.

Helen smiled. She'd always been good at masking her true feelings.

* * *

Keepers was a large six-bedroomed country house in rural Staffordshire, some seventeen miles from Birmingham, and had been the family home for the past twenty years. It was her father's reward for building up a massively successful print business in the centre of Birmingham. A forward-thinker, Jack Powers had taken full advantage of the leaps forward in computer technology, and set up a dedicated design studio over a print works housing the latest state-of-the art equipment. Although not a graphic designer himself – his background was in engineering – he'd cherry-picked a select team of computer nerds so that all print material could be designed and reproduced in-house. With a regular source of business from like-minded captains of Midlands industry, the company went from strength to strength. Within ten years, Jack Powers's talent for assembling the right people, his basic business acumen and entrepreneurial spirit turned what was a good idea into an extremely lucrative enterprise. At the age of sixty, he sold up, making a fat profit.

Helen felt a familiar flood of memories as her father drove up the long and winding drive. After such a frightening experience, roots and family mattered more than ever.

As soon as she got home, she phoned the bank and made the necessary arrangements. Afterwards, she went straight to bed. She felt unspeakably tired and was happy for her mother to assume a caring role. It was what her mother did best. Operating as if on auto-helm, she glided through the house, dealing with things calmly, giving quiet orders, noiselessly tidying, wordlessly organising, all her actions efficient and designed to anaesthetise from life's pains and tribulations.

The house was spotless. Even the furnishings were guaranteed to soothe. Nothing too vibrant. Her mother was the queen of pastel. Peach and apricot in the downstairs rooms. Upstairs, soft lilacs and greens. But, underneath her mother's smooth exterior, Helen sensed there lurked a nervy personality, a woman with seriously screwed-up emotional wiring. As her mother enquired whether she wanted more pillows, more newspapers to read, more this and more that, Helen knew that her mother was stealthily helping herself to more drink.

“I'll be fine, and Mum,” Helen said.

“Yes, dear?”

“Try not to worry.”

Her mother flashed a fragile smile and closed the door. Although she was glad to be in safe and familiar surroundings, Helen also felt a measure of relief to be alone. She wasn't quite sure when she'd realised that her mother had a drink problem because it had gone on for so long and was concealed under the guise of conviviality. She'd grown up to the sound of ice chinking at midday, to her mother's occasional bouts of forgetfulness, of her slurred speech in the evening, and her need for absolute quiet in the morning. She'd also grown used to making excuses for her, for pretending that her mother's capacity for booze was not outside the norm. Her mother didn't conform to the stereotypical drunk; she was careful with her appearance, always fragrant, never foul-mouthed or aggressive, rarely maudlin. When she hit the bottle, it was as if she became out of synch with life, inhabiting a shadowy, lonely world where she couldn't be reached. The funny thing was her mother intermittently enjoyed good patches where she hardly seemed to drink at all. Then there were times when she drank a lot but appeared to tolerate it well. On other occasions, she drank and became confused very quickly. It all seemed quite random. And, in the rare moments, when her mother was completely sober, Helen came to realise that, at heart, her mother was fundamentally a decent person, not warm and easy to be around exactly, but fair-minded and predictable. With these poignant periods of remission, there came a sense of dread because Helen knew that it was only a matter of time before the dark side took over.

She slept fitfully most of the day. Shock, she guessed. Her mother brought her soup, tucked her up in extra blankets, gave her a hot-water bottle, ensured she had tissues, newspapers and a radio. Apart from the time she'd suffered from glandular fever, she'd never felt so cosseted. She neither read nor listened. Sometimes she stared at a round penny of light on the ceiling. Sometimes she lay, flexing her legs, examining all her working parts, checking that she was really alive. She thought about phoning Ed and Jen but didn't have the energy. Around three in the afternoon, she got up and took a hot bath, soaping and scrubbing herself with vigour to rid herself of the lurking smell of canal on her skin. Her dark, close-cropped hair meant she could wash and dry it in record-time.

Having plastered herself in her mother's Chanel body lotion, she dragged on a robe and went to a wardrobe in one of the guest bedrooms. She still kept some clothes and make-up at home. She didn't know why she did it. It wasn't exactly a safety net because, wary of being tagged an only child of wealthy parents, she was fiercely self-reliant. To prove the point, she'd moved out when she was seventeen in a dramatic bid to find both personal and financial independence. It proved harder than she thought.

Just for a moment, she allowed herself to remember the thrill of landing her first proper job with the police as a trainee Scenes of Crime officer. The job title varied from force to force – sometimes they were called crime scene examiners, and the Metropolitan Police tended to have their own cutting-edge labels and jargon – but the work was basically the same. She was primarily an evidence-gatherer. Again, while some forces still employed dedicated Scenes of Crime photographers, she trained and worked with constabularies where it was expected for her to cover any and every aspect of the job.

With a smile, she reminisced over her initial month based at Brierley Hill, working with experienced officers. It had been a baptism of fire but she knew from the outset that this was what she wanted to do, something real and important at last. Then there had been the nine weeks training at Harperley Hall, County Durham, followed by a posting of two years as part of a development programme. After that, she transferred to Birmingham where she stayed for seven years. The smile faded as she remembered Adam Roscoe, detective inspector, her married lover, the man who for six years had dominated her life, had been her dark obsession. One of those charismatic, deeply ambitious men you come across maybe once in a lifetime, their very first meeting took place soon after her appointment to Thornhill Road. She'd been called out to a drive-by shooting resulting in a fatal road accident.

Jesus, she thought, surveying the scene. It was dark, belting down with rain, and there were swarms of vehicles: police, ambulance and fire services. Two dead black men, the passenger with a caved in head from a gunshot wound, lay slumped in the wreckage of their top-of-the-range Mercedes, the bonnet of which was buried deep in the entrails of a Ford Escort. While firemen were using cutting gear to free the unfortunate female driver of the Escort, Helen was charged with securing the scene and taking photographs.

“Can you hurry it up?” a young detective constable snapped at her from the sidelines.

“Doing my best,” she called back. “Not easy competing with the flashing lights from all these vehicles.”

“I'm not interested in excuses. Either you can do the job, or you can't.”

She said nothing. Biting her lip, she tried to work out how she could time her shot so that it wasn't over-exposed.

“I hate these fucking black on black killings,” the D.C. continued to carp. She wondered how he could be so sure that's what it was.

“Come on, for Chrissakes,” he cursed, “how long you going to stand there before you take the shot?” He took several steps towards her.

“Stay right there,” she barked, straightening up.

“What?”

“You come any further and you're going to contaminate a crime scene.”

“Who the hell…”

“You heard what she said, Davies. Shift your size tens. And, while you're about it, make sure everyone else keeps a respectful distance.”

Helen turned, saw the man who'd spoken, saw his remarkable face, the sleek clean-shaven features, dangerous-looking eyes, the blackness of his hair. There was something else about him, something off-centre, she thought. He wasn't conventionally good-looking, but he was immensely attractive. Slim and tall, he wore a dark leather jacket. He winked at her.

“D.I. Roscoe,” he said to Helen. “I don't care for people getting in the way of progress – not when it's my investigation.”

She smiled awkwardly. “Thank you.”

“No, thank
you
,” he said. “I've a lot of respect for SOCOS.”

Then he was gone. No great fanfares. No celestial choirs. But, from that moment, she was hooked.

She shook her head in an effort to obliterate the memory. The image of Rose Buchanan's lifeless body, however, was not so easily erased. Neither was Warren Jacks, Rose's killer. Helen remembered him, all right. Good-looking and charming, he was also a pathological liar, rapist, and police informer,
Adam's
informer.

Helen stood for a moment, willing herself to be calm. In the end, she'd done the best she could. She'd turned against her lover, exposed an injustice, cut herself loose, and joined Raymond Seatt's Photographic Agency as a portrait photographer. Had she been turned down on that initial interview with the police, her life would be quite different, she thought, cowering inside, picking out a pair of smart pale denim hipsters with a slight flare, a thick white sweater and a pair of pointy tan leather boots.