Blind to the Bones (62 page)

‘But when it happens, we all hear about it, don't we? It's in the news, in the papers, on the TV. Everybody talks about it.'

‘Sometimes children need to learn about risk. It's part of the process of growing up.'

‘Do you think if I had let Emma take more risks when she was younger, this wouldn't have happened?'

‘Nobody can say that, Mrs Renshaw.'

‘I can't help wondering. I can't help thinking it was my fault. I feel guilty about the silliest things. I keep remembering them at odd moments. Like when I was breast-feeding Emma as a baby.'

Fry looked at Howard, who was staring into space through the window of the Renshaws' sitting room. He was on the leather settee, near the teddy bear, which was staring into space equally vaguely.

‘You feel guilty about breast-feeding, Mrs Renshaw?'

‘No, it was one little incident, when she was teething. It was only a very brief moment, no more than an instinctive physical reaction on my part. But these things can scar a child for life – especially at that age, when they're so impressionable.'

‘I don't understand what you're talking about.'

‘When Emma was teething, she bit my nipple. It was very painful, and it came as a real shock. So of course, I pulled away sharply – because of the pain, you know. It meant that I had rejected her at a crucial moment, when she was suckling, the time that is so important for bonding, for creating love and trust between mother and child that will last a lifetime.'

‘You didn't mean to do it.'

‘No, but you can't explain that to a baby. And Emma recognized that she had been rejected. She cried, and I could see it in her face. After that, if she bit me again when she was suckling, she would start crying straight away, even though I tried to bear the pain and not pull away. She was expecting to be rejected by me. Those early incidents leave a lasting impression that can never be erased. I'm sure Emma has spent the rest of her life expecting to be rejected by her mother. I need her to come home soon, so that I can explain it to her.'

Guilt was a strange, inexplicable thing. At the extreme, it became almost existential, a feeling of guilt for simply being there when others weren't. But guilt was good, in a way. The worst people were those who felt no guilt at all. Guilt could sometimes be what kept people together.

‘It's the first thing I think about when I wake up, and the last thing I think about when I go to bed at night,' said Sarah. ‘It's with me all the time.'

Howard finally stopped fidgeting, got up and walked out of the room. Fry watched him go, but his wife hardly seemed to notice.

Fry knew that the length of time that had passed made it much worse for the Renshaws. A few years ago, the rules for coroners had been changed to prevent the body of a murder victim being kept in cold storage for years on end, awaiting the trial of their killer. The distress caused to the victim's family had been recognized, and the need for closure acknowledged. If Emma's body had been found straight away, it would have been twenty-eight days at the most before the coroner released it for burial, even if no one had been charged with her murder. And then the Renshaws would have been free to bury Emma.

But that hadn't happened. They had been denied that closure; instead they had been allowed a glimmer of hope that they nurtured for two years, like the candle that burned in the Renshaws' window, which Sarah would never allow to go out.

The phone rang in the next room. Fry watched Sarah Renshaw look immediately at the clock, staring at its face as if to imprint on her memory that one second of the day. Fry had seen her do it before, and knew without asking that it was a ritual connected with Emma. Time was being counted down in the Renshaws' lives. Fry felt the days ticking away, too. But perhaps not towards what Sarah Renshaw expected.

‘The one thing we can say is that it brought some feeling into our lives,' said Sarah.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Our marriage had become very cold, you see. There was very little emotion between Howard and I. Whatever is between you at the beginning of a marriage sort of fades away over the years, so that you hardly notice it going. But, when it's gone, you realize one day there's something missing. It's more of a sense of dissatisfaction.'

‘I see.'

‘And when this happened with Emma, it was suddenly different. It made me realize what was missing. After all that time, there was feeling again. There was emotion. And not just mine, I mean, but from Howard, too. I'd forgotten that he was capable of feeling things. But after Emma, he was a different man, the man I remembered marrying. You might not understand how comforting that was. No – more than comforting.'

‘It sounds almost as though you were pleased that your daughter went missing.'

‘No. That would be very shocking,' said Mrs Renshaw.

‘But?'

‘All I'm saying is that the past two years have brought us much closer together. There was a moment in the early days, when the police told us that they hadn't been able to find Emma. I got very upset, more at the idea that they were going to give up and stop looking for her, rather than anything else. The thing I remember most is that Howard put his arm round me and gave me a hug. I don't think he even knew he had done it, it was so natural, without any of the awkwardness I would have expected. But there was so much warmth in it, for me. I suppose that sounds trivial, doesn't it?'

‘A small thing, but I suppose they can mean a lot.'

‘It did in this case. Because it was the first time Howard had touched me for years.'

Fry realized she had been listening to Sarah Renshaw with a growing numbness, as if a protective shell had gradually been forming over her own emotions. She was mentally putting on the body armour, slipping on an invisible bullet-proof vest. A police officer's first priority was her own survival, unharmed. She didn't need to take on even the smallest share of Sarah Renshaw's guilt.

‘You started to have doubts about your husband?'

‘Yes, when the remains were found in the churchyard. Howard seemed to think it was Emma, which was ridiculous. It was then I realized Howard believed she was dead.'

D
iane Fry read through all the Emma Renshaw files again. It was the third time she'd been through them. More than ever, the gaps in the enquiries seemed to stand out. Khadi Gupta had never been interviewed. Perhaps the other students had never mentioned her, because she hadn't been one of their social group. But she had been in the photograph with Emma that the Renshaws had given the police.

The possibility that Emma had been given a lift to the station had been raised, but only in relation to Neil Granger and Alex Dearden, and a couple of other students she had known. There had been no attempt to eliminate the other options. In particular, no one seemed to have raised their eyes from their local area and looked north for the possibilities. No one had checked on Howard Renshaw's movements that day.

Fry thought about the relationship between the Renshaws and their daughter. On Sarah's side, it was characterized by guilt. Anything that happened would be because
she
had done something wrong. At least as regards her daughter. There was nothing that Emma could have done which would not have been Sarah's fault in some way. Sarah had made sure of that, with her memory of rejecting her child at the breast. For heaven's sake. How much self-obsession and brooding had it taken for her to come up with that?

But Howard was more complicated. Or perhaps he was just more opaque. Fry recalled Gavin Murfin's verdict on Howard. He had described him as a man whose brain was ahead of his mouth. Howard never said anything he hadn't thought about first.

The Renshaws had been expecting Emma to arrive home that day. They had waited for her at Glossop railway station. But until then, had both of them been at home all day? No, Howard had said he'd been out on business.

What she'd really like would be to get Howard Renshaw in to make a statement, but without his wife present. Fry had listened to Sarah Renshaw enough.

‘I
t's very sad,' said Ben Cooper later. He had hardly finished following up calls from the public about potential occupants of shallow graves before Fry had raised the subject of the Renshaws. ‘If there were just one of them, it might be different. But the Renshaws are encouraging each other in their fantasies.'

‘Somebody's encouraging Sarah Renshaw, certainly.'

‘What do you mean?' said Cooper. ‘You're thinking of Howard?'

Fry nodded. ‘Yes, Howard.'

‘Do you think he's deliberately encouraging his wife to believe Emma isn't dead?'

‘I can see that she's gone completely off the rails with this obsession. The poor bloody woman has had more than two years of it now. No wonder she doesn't know what's real and what isn't. But as for Howard – don't you think he lays it on a bit thick?'

‘He handles it differently,' said Cooper cautiously.

Fry snorted. ‘Differently? At one time I just thought he was sad and pathetic, like his wife. But that business with the skull was altogether too gothic and stagy. It was like something out of one of those Jacobean tragedies we had to read at school. All overblown melodrama and dead bodies lying around.'

‘John Webster?
The Duchess of Malfi?
'

‘Yeah, that stuff.'

‘“Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle.”'

‘What?'

‘It's a line from the play.'

‘Right.'

Fry let it pass her by, as if English Literature classes had been one more interruption in her progress towards whatever goal she'd had her eye on in those days.

‘But I'll tell you what, Ben,' she said. ‘If it turns out Howard Renshaw killed Emma himself, I'm going to tear him apart with my bare hands.'

‘I think he'd have to be a damn good actor,' said Cooper.

‘OK. I'll present him with an Oscar first – and
then
I'll tear him apart with my bare hands.'

‘Fair enough. But what about Sarah?'

Fry leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling of the CID room as she thought about Sarah.

‘Sarah Renshaw isn't acting,' she said. ‘Sarah Renshaw is gone from the real world.'

‘Yes.'

But Cooper thought he probably had clearer recollections of reading
The Duchess of Malfi
than Fry had. The lines about covering her face had popped into his mind unbidden, thanks to an enthusiastic English teacher and a memorable reading in his sixth-form literature class.

‘But that was her brother,' he said.

‘What?'

‘“Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle.” In
The Duchess of Malfi
it's not her father who kills the duchess. It's her brother.'

But Fry just stared at Cooper as if he, too, were gone from the real world.

‘Diane, I think we should take a look at Trafalgar Terrace,' he said after a moment.

‘Take a look where?'

‘The houses behind where the Oxleys live. There's another terrace of houses there – the same as Waterloo Terrace, but derelict. No one has lived there for years, and the houses are in quite a state. But they're not boarded up, and I'm sure the Oxleys must have access to them.'

‘A great place to hide something?'

‘Definitely.'

‘A great place to hide a body? Or what?'

‘Let's see.'

‘What about a search warrant?'

‘We don't need one. The property belongs to Peak Water. I've already got their permission.'

‘We need it in writing, Ben.'

‘No problem. I'll call Mr Venables, and we can visit him on the way there.'

Cooper folded an Ordnance Survey map over several times until he had a small rectangle showing the area of upper Longdendale he wanted.

‘How do you do that?' said Fry.

‘What?'

‘Never mind. I guess I'm just fated to fold creases the wrong way.'

Cooper shrugged. ‘If you look at the map, you'll see that we can approach Trafalgar Terrace without going past the Oxleys' houses. If we park down on this farm road here, there'll be a couple of fields to cross, and then we might have to climb over a fence or a wall. But we should be out of sight all the way, because there's a thick screen of trees.'

‘OK.'

‘Besides, it's such an ideal time. All of the Oxley men are still here in Edendale, being interviewed for the affray outside the Wheatsheaf. They won't be back in Withens for hours yet. We'll never have a better opportunity to take a look round without being interrupted.'

‘Sounds good. But, Ben …'

‘Yeah?'

‘The least sign of anything interesting, and we pull out and organize a proper search by the specialists.'