Echoes of the Past (14 page)

“I’ve
kept you some dinner, Tom if you want it,” Lee said.

“Oh,
you’re an angel,” he said as he loosened his tie and threw it over the back of the chair.

Lee’s
mobile began to ring and she changed direction from the kitchen back to the living room for her bag.

“It’s
in the oven, help yourself,” she threw over her shoulder as she answered the phone.

“Hi,
Lee, it’s, Elsie here, on my way home to night I saw a sign at John Caulder's place. He is having a ladies night this Friday coming. A medium and some card readers and he’s throwing in a finger buffet, so there’ll be food, do you fancy it?”

“Eh,
I …”

“That’s
great, I got you a ticket already, so do you want me to come to you or do you want to just meet there. Did I mention there would be food?”

Lee
smiled. “Yes you did, Else. Ok, but there had better not be anything too unnerving, I’ve had enough of that sort of thing to last a life time.”

“Oh I’m sure it will be just for a laugh, entertainment, nothing more.”

Lee
hung up the phone and smiled at the conversation. She had her reservations, things had been strange around here lately and she did not like it. Maybe a night out was just what she needed.

Tom
was taking a warm plate from the oven and pouring some gravy over the potatoes when Lee joined him. They shared a laugh at Elsie’s evening from beyond the veil as it had been called on the flyer.

“How
did you do today?” asked Lee referring to the case.

“I
spoke with Samantha Caulder. She did not have anything to do with what happened to Angela, but she did mention something about Angela being annoyed at someone. She thought it was a man. And I met P.C South’s girlfriend. She is a wreck. She won’t talk about Coppersfield at all.”

“I’m
not surprised; she did loose her fiancée here.”

“Yes,
well, first thing tomorrow I’m going to chase up Jill Patterson’s next of kin, and I think I will get a copy of the post-mortem for Dave south.”

“Surely,
Tom, you can’t think what happened to P.C South was anything more than a tragic accident?” Lee walked over and eased the kitchen door over a little to stop Jess from hearing too much.

“I
don’t know anything for sure right now, Lee. I just know that there seems to be a lot of coincidences and I don’t do coincidences.”

Lee
could feel a chill settle over her at the implications of what Tom was saying. Coppersfield had been her home all of her life; this was like something out of a book.

After
dinner Tom retreated with his papers into the study at the back of the house. Lee and Jess were talking their way through the
Twilight
saga. Jess had been talking a lot about her mother lately. She seemed to be missing her more and more.

“Your
mother had great awards for the work she did with patients suffering emotional traumas you know.”

“Yes,
I know. We used to have them on the wall back in Edinburgh, but I haven’t seen them since we moved here.”

“Where
are they?” Lee said.

“I
think they’re in Dad’s study. There are a lot of things in there that he hasn’t unpacked yet”

“Would
you like them to be back on display?” Lee asked.

Jess
nodded. She missed seeing her mother’s things around the house since they moved.

“Aunt
Lee? Why don’t you stay tonight, Dad will probably be working until all hours in the study, we could watch TV all night and talk about when mum and you were kids.” For Jess, having Lee there was a little taste of how it used to be. In the mornings, she could smell Lee’s perfume as it floated from the bathroom, in that small window between sleep and wakefulness she could be back in the kitchen in Edinburgh and her mother would be preparing breakfast and packing her lunch for school. For Lee, this was a ‘get out of jail free’ card, she hadn’t felt fully comfortable at her own home since the night Elsie came round and introduced her to the other side.

“I
suppose I could, are you going to go to your own bed tonight?”

Jess
wriggled on the sofa. “I don’t like my room, I prefer it down here.”

“Well,
I for one would much rather go up to bed. There isn’t anything wrong with your room, Jess, you do know that don’t you?”

Jess
paused. “Neither you nor Dad saw the shadow in the corner.”

“Honey,
there wasn’t anything there to see. It was just a bad dream. You were only just waking up from it, you know, your mother had a great imagination. Maybe you are going to take after her, do writing or something.”

“Aunt
Lee, I didn’t imagine it. She’s there all the time, if I can’t see her I can always feel her. I thought it was Olivia, but now I’m not so sure.”

Lee
was beginning to feel uncomfortable with the conversation. She didn’t want to sound patronizing, the way Tom often did when he dismissed Lee’s feelings, nor did she wish to reaffirm what Jess was experiencing and make it so real that Jess wouldn’t go upstairs again.

“Look,
I will go and get changed, and then we can watch some telly. But at some point in the night, I will be going up to bed. You can let me know if you want to do the same. ok?”

Jess
threw her head back and smiled. “You’re a braver woman than I, Aunt Lee.”

With
sleeping arrangements agreed, Lee went to the back of the house and knocked on the study door. Tom was at the desk studying the case notes. He knew there was something staring him in the face; he just could not see what it was.

“Tom,
I’m going to spend the night here, so I’ll get sorted for bed ok.”

“Sure,
that’s fine, Lee.”

“Tom,
do you still have Sara’s things here, her diplomas and her awards?”

Tom
nodded to a pile of boxes in the far corner of the room. A slight shift in atmosphere made Lee tread carefully.

“Jess
was saying how she missed seeing her mum’s things around the house. If you like I could go through the boxes for you and get out some of the pictures and things?”

Tom
pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose and sighed. He knew he would have to unpack them eventually; he had just kept putting it off.

The box, Tom.

“I’ll have a look through the stuff this week and get out some pictures for her.” His voice was low and heavy.

Tom, the box.

“Ok, Jess will be pleased.”

Do it now.

Lee left the study, and she and Jess settled down to tell stories of a time long since past. Tom continued to peruse the case notes.

It
bothered him that one girl was a red head and the rest were blonde. He did not know why this niggled away at him, but none the less, it did.

Tom!

He knew only too well that killers, although they had a preference, they often deviated from what they preferred. Sometimes simply because of what was available. Yet for some reason, the change in hair colour bothered him more than it should.

Every
couple of minutes his eyes would wander from the case to the boxes in the corner of the room. Stretching his arms out and leaning back in the chair he stood up and wandered over to them. A charge of electricity went through the room, Tom, oblivious to this lifted the first box off the pile and carried it over to the desk. The box contained some shorthand personal notes. Observations that Sara had made. Most of her patient files had been kept by the clinic she worked for when they cleared her office. These notes were simply things she had noted herself.

The
other box contained her personal files. Sara had also run a class on creative writing. She kept the files from that class at home. She worked out of the local university at night and some days from the local community centre. She had referred some of her patients from her clinic to various different writing classes. Allowing them to free up their minds and write what ever they choose. It was often therapeutic, although they did not usually come to her class; they often thanked her for recommending this unusual therapy.

Tom
closed the box and retrieved the next one. This one had her diplomas and certificates that Jess wanted to hang on the wall again. The picture that Sara had kept on her desk was of Jess, Tom and herself, smiling happily in the garden of their Edinburgh home. Tom held the picture, capturing that moment again, God, he missed her so much.

He
took the pictures out and laid them aside for Jess. The third box held her books, profiling 101, profiling violent crime, and so on.

Now
these
could
help
him
, he thought.

At
the bottom of the box lay a small silver tape recorder. Sarah used a Dictaphone to take notes when she was working. Tom lifted it out and turned it over in his hand. He had not seen this before. He had not heard Sara’s voice in over five years. His heart began to beat a little faster and his head began to ache.

Hear me, Tom!

Listen to us!

Hear me.

Just for a moment, a rush of excitement went through him at his new discovery, the possibility of hearing her voice after five years, then the thought of feeling that dreadful loss all over again. The fear of going back there began to creep in. He turned the small device over in his hand as he weighed the implications of it. Eventually he leaned over and placed it in the top drawer of his desk.

The
lights in the study began to flicker, then darkness. The shrill screams from the living room told Tom that it was not just his light that had gone out, but the whole house. He fumbled over to the bookcase and retrieved his torch. A sharp beam of light stretched out in front of him.

“Calm
down, it’s just a fuse,” he called in the direction of the screams.

“We’re
in here, Tom.” Came back the forcibly calm yet shrill voice of Lee.

A
dark shadow cut in front of his torch light casting a shape on the wall at the end of the hall way. Tom stopped. “Is that you, Lee?”

“We’re
in the living room, Tom.”

Tom
could feel his neck bristle as he stood there trying to make sense of what he thought he saw. He opened the cupboard door under the stairs and with the flick of a switch; the house was flooded with light once again. He hurried in the direction of the shadow and checked the kitchen, the unused dinning room and the lounge before doubling back to the living room. There was no one there, no one in the house. It was obviously a trick of the light.

“Are
you, girls ok?”

“Hardly!
I hate this place Dad. You don’t listen to me, it’s creepy!”

Tom
walked over to Jess, her eyes like saucers clutching Topaz close to her.

“It’s
all right, Honey,” he said with a slight chuckle. “It’s an old house; it will blow a fuse from time to time. And I do listen to you. The house is not creepy; you just have a very fertile imagination. I hope one day you will put it to good use and write a book, let me live in the lap of luxury.”

Lee,
feeling somewhat shaken by the episode resumed her usual duties of making hot chocolate when things became a bit bizarre. Tom reassured Jess and headed back along the hall to his study.

The
case files on his desk were in disarray. Lying on the floor was a picture of Jill Patterson. Tom bent down to pickup the papers. He sat back in his chair and began to read the notes on Jill. She was only twenty-two when she went missing. Like the rest, she was a pretty, petite, blonde girl. This was the girl for whom neither he nor Danny had been able to contact next of kin. Tom glanced at his watch. It was already 22.15pm. He read on. The girl had gone missing from the Lands End pub in Edinburgh. There was very little information beyond that. Again, the police had considered that she had run away. Tom looked at the contact details again and decided it was not too late to call, after all, they may be pleased to know someone is looking into her disappearance again. He dialled the number expecting to leave what would be another unanswered message.

“Hello.”
The voice of an older woman answered the other end.

“Hello,
my name is Detective Sergeant Tom Hunter; I’m looking to speak with Jane Patterson.”

There
was a pause at the other end. “Speaking.”

Tom
explained that he was looking in to her daughter’s case and would be interested in any information she may have leading up to the time of her disappearance. Again, the woman at the other end of the phone paused.

“I
received your messages, Mr Hunter; I’ve been away and only got home this evening. I do not think I can tell you much. Jill had moved out around a month before she vanished. You know what girls are like at that age, all independent. I had not heard from her for a few weeks. I got a call from her flat mate saying she thought something was wrong, I went to the police and the rest you know.”