In Bitter Chill (25 page)

Rachel woke in the building that had been built as a replacement for the old cottage hospital. Her first thought was total blankness. The antiseptic room could have been anywhere and she was alone. She could hear noises coming from outside the room, the sound of clanking, metal hitting metal perhaps, and talking. A man’s voice too low to hear. The door opened and a doctor entered, too hearty for her ears, which had developed a fragility she didn’t recognise.

‘Ah, you’re awake. That’s good. Can you hear me OK?’

‘Too well,’ she said. Her throat felt sore and she reached up to touch it.

‘Sorry. Don’t worry about your throat. There’ll have been some vocal damage but we’re going to run some tests on you later. But you can hear me OK, yes?’

‘Aren’t you going to ask me how many prime ministers you’re holding up?’

He understood that and smiled, his cocky manner slipping into the boyish student he had once been. ‘You probably don’t remember, but you came round in the ambulance. Spoke about the baby you were expecting. The paramedics got enough out of you to let us know there wasn’t any brain damage. We’ll still need to run the tests though?’

‘Baby?’

She had forgotten about her baby. It had been her last conscious thought but not her first waking one. Was it still there?

The doctor looked troubled. ‘The baby’s fine, as far as we know. It’ll be part of the tests. Assuming you were only deprived of oxygen for long enough to pass out, I’m fairly confident the baby will be OK, although it is early days in your pregnancy.’

Rachel laid a hand on her stomach and thought of the life beneath her. Not another victim, surely? Not now. The doctor left and a nurse came in, all busy efficiency. Then a knock and Richard appeared at the door, smiling uncertainly at her.

‘You’re awake again. Do you remember the first time?’

She shook her head.

‘You gave us all a shock. We thought we’d lost you and then you came round and announced you were pregnant.’

‘Sorry.’ Rachel reached for a sip of water and relished its icy coldness against her throat. ‘Only just found out. Well, a few days ago.’

‘I forgive you.’ He smiled at her and reached for her hand. ‘If it’s any consolation, my family are reassuringly normal.’

Rachel started to laugh, silently, so not to hurt her red-raw throat.

‘I’m so sorry, Rachel. My family had a role in all this. I stormed round to see my father last night. I’ve never spoken to him like that before. It shocked us both. But I did get the truth out of him. That Mair had gone to see him after she discovered she had a terminal illness to get advice about your legal position, given that your father was also your half-uncle.’

Rachel made an effort to swallow. ‘And what did he tell Mair to do?’

‘He said to do nothing. It’s always been his default position. If in doubt, maintain the status quo. And to be honest, I would probably have advised the same. None of us could have foreseen the later events. But, without a doubt, your mother knew the whole story.’

He didn’t need to say any more. They were both thinking the same thing. Rachel’s mother had known something that could have helped solve the case in 1978. But she had chosen to remain silent. Secrets and more lies.

‘There’s someone who wants to see you, though.’ Richard disappeared and came back moments later guiding Nancy through the door. He deposited her in the chair beside the bed.

‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’

‘Oh, Nan, not now. I’m not up to this.’

‘Telling that handsome policeman that I’m doolally. Are you trying to ruin my chances?’

Rachel’s eyes filled with tears and her throat constricted. ‘I was trying to protect you.’

‘Everyone’s always tried to protect me. How do you think I feel, finding out that all this mess came about because of me? And you nearly died because no one told me the truth.’

Rachel moved her head on her pillow and held out her arm. ‘They were wrong about you. You were always tougher than you looked. Perhaps you need to forgive your mother like I need to forgive mine.’

The woman sat in the hard chair in the interview room staring at her knuckles. Sadler was opposite her, studying her broad, flat features. Next to him, Connie was shifting in her seat, probably uncomfortable from the stitches that she’d been forced to have in hospital. He hadn’t shown them the puncture mark on his thigh. He’d covered it up with a bandage when he got home, although the red heat of the wound suggested he might end up regretting it.

The woman, Bridget Lander, was feeling the oppression of silence. As Sadler expected, she sought to fill the void and began to speak. ‘When James died, Penny was clearing out some stuff and came across a sock from one of the children that we took in 1978. It must have been Rachel’s, because James had kept it all these years. Something as innocuous as a child’s sock. But he placed it with the newspaper cutting. The one where he first spotted Rachel and her mother at a school fete.’

‘The photograph that first made him want to contact Rachel?’ asked Connie.

The clarification was unwelcome. Bridget stared at her hands and clenched her teeth.

‘He shouldn’t have kept either. But he must have hidden them all these years.’

‘Did Penny say where she’d found them?’ Sadler was curious how something so damning could have been kept hidden all these years.

‘She said she found it taped to the underside of a wardrobe drawer. It may have been there since they moved into the house in the mid-eighties. She turned the drawer upside down to tip the contents into a bin bag after his heart attack. And there it was. An envelope containing the photograph and a sock.’

And Penny realised the significance of the two items, even if the conclusion was wrong.

‘She thought the sock belonged to Sophie Jenkins,’ said Sadler.

Bridget nodded without looking up. ‘Because it was Sophie that was still missing, she assumed that the sock belonged to her.’

‘But first she wanted to find out why her husband would have an item of clothing from a missing girl.’

For a moment, Bridget faltered. ‘She wasn’t stupid, Penny. She knew that James was no paedophile, certainly no killer, but she remembered that neither girl had a father. So she assumed that James must have been involved in one of their lives in some way.’

‘So she went to look at the records of Bampton cottage hospital, but they only go up to 1968,’ said Connie. ‘Instead, she came away with something else. In the records she discovered that James, who had never made a secret of being adopted, was the son of Nancy Price.’

‘Because she assumed the sock must have been from Sophie,’ continued Sadler, ‘she arranged a meeting with Yvonne Jenkins to give it her. That’s what the waiter saw being passed between the two women at the meeting.’

‘And it was the act that brought it all back and precipitated Yvonne Jenkins’s suicide,’ finished Connie.

She looked up at them now. ‘That’s not my fault. Penny should have left well alone. Not least for the memory of her husband.’

‘She was trying to make amends,’ said Connie, shifting in her seat. ‘Penny Lander would have been devastated by the thought that her husband had been involved in the kidnapping of two children from the school where she was a teacher. Was it Yvonne who told Penny who Nancy Price was?’

Bridget looked down at the table. ‘I don’t think so. Penny had been looking at the family tree on Rachel Jones’s website and I think she made the connection that it was Rachel who was the relation of Nancy Price, not Sophie.’

‘By which time it was too late for Yvonne Jenkins.’

Sadler shot Connie a look. ‘But Penny still needed to talk to you. Because she knew that whatever James Lander had done, there must have been another woman involved. And she immediately thought of you.’

‘I went round to see her. On foot. I told her to calm down but she was threatening to go to the police with what she knew. Said it was my fault that woman had killed herself.’

‘So you decided to kill her,’ said Sadler. ‘Why?’

Now it was Connie who was looking at him. It was a question that needed to be out in the open. Because, if he was right, this woman hadn’t killed to protect her own reputation.

And she was desperate to tell them. ‘We didn’t have a great childhood, James and I. Nowadays I’ve heard it’s actually quite difficult to adopt children. It wasn’t like that when we were younger. Childless parents had the pick of babies. And they weren’t always great parents. In our case, it was our father. He was violent. Not towards us, but to our mother. And we stood together, James and me. We looked out for each other.’

‘I can see that.’ Sadler’s voice was calm. ‘But why kill Penny?’

‘Because our family survived all that. And James made a success of his life and so did I. And Penny wanted to blow everything apart. What about Justine? Wasn’t she entitled to remember the wonderful father James was?’

‘Penny wouldn’t have forgotten about her daughter. She must have thought it was more important that the truth came out,’ said Sadler. More than anyone in this case, it was Penny who Sadler felt the most empathy for. Penny who had weighed the cost to herself and decided to reveal a long-buried secret.

Connie stirred beside him. ‘How did you manage to get her to Truscott Fields? Wasn’t she scared of you at all?’

Bridget Lander refused to meet their gaze. ‘I offered to show her where we’d buried Sophie.’

‘And she went? Just like that?’ Connie was disbelieving and rightly so, thought Sadler. Penny Lander had confided to a neighbour that she was scared of someone. Almost certainly Bridget Lander. And yet she had gone to a wood in the evening with a woman whom she knew was capable of kidnapping two girls and then hiding the proof of her involvement.

Bridget Lander looked sadly at the floor. ‘We went in her car. I was sorry to have to kill her. I always admired Penny. But sometimes you don’t get to choose.’

‘Choose? You don’t get to choose what?’ Sadler leaned forward.

She looked up at him. ‘The end.’

His men arrived just after dawn, shuffling their heavy boot-clad feet against the cold with polystyrene cups of tea warming their hands. Desultory chat, muted laughter and a few asthmatic coughs against the cold morning. Then the work started. First the long traipse into the woods, the route already marked out with yellow flags taped to trees to mark the way. Silence then, until they reached a spot. A space where the trees refused to grow or perhaps had once and could no longer. He stood to one side, his presence making a few of the men anxious. Procedure not being followed.

The first clink of a spade hitting rock amongst the compacted ground. Sometimes they spun a coin for the first turn of the sod. An old tradition started amongst gravediggers, and why not? Ritual aligning with nature. But perhaps, here, they found the practice too flippant and had decided against it. They carried on in silence. No chance of getting a mechanical digger in through the dense trees.

They stopped and Llewellyn moved forward to assess their work. Not strictly his job. No deeper, he decided. Wider only. They spread out and carried on. He once more stood to one side. He should have been in his office. There was a personnel meeting taking place without him, to talk about cuts to the policing service. He should have been there. Arguing for the constables he still needed to solve the mundane cases that make up policing in Derbyshire in the twenty-first century. Cycle thefts, burglary, minor drug use, too much drink. But life wasn’t made up of the mundane, was it? It comprised the things that go deep under the skin and which won’t go away.

‘Sir?’ He looked at the white-clad man who was beckoning him forward like a wraith. Llewellyn suddenly felt old. Too much had happened over the intervening years for him to confront what he was about to see. He walked forward and looked down. A long fawn-coloured bone lay on top of the dark soil.

‘Femur,’ said the man next to him. ‘There are others there too. It’ll take some time.’ The unspoken question lay in the air between them.

‘I’ll stay.’

Back in his office, Sadler heard Connie’s mobile ring. She took the call and then walked in to see him. ‘They’ve found her. Where we marked, more or less. We were slightly out but, anyway, they found her.’

‘Did you speak to Llewellyn?’

‘He made the call. He sounded fine.’ Connie answered the unasked question. ‘The bones are going to Doctor Shields now. He’s going to look at them today. His choice. He wanted to do it. Shall I join him?’

‘Good idea. He misses you, I think. He didn’t look happy 
last time 
when I said that you wouldn’t be attending the PM.’

Connie looked pleased. But there was clearly something on her mind. ‘It feels like an ending. Finding the bones, I mean. I feel like we’ve brought about a resolution of sorts.’

Sadler stood up and walked across to the window. It had started sleeting again. Spring was just round the corner but the weather hadn’t eased up yet. The diggers had got to the woods in time. Even if the snow hadn’t penetrated the forest, the returning ice would have made their job harder.

‘I think we’ve done everything we could have. As for a resolution, I’m not so sure about that.’

‘But we found out what happened, didn’t we?’

Sadler thought about Justine Lander. Whose mother had been murdered by her aunt. And whose father had been partly responsible for the death of a young girl. As usual, Connie had that uncanny knack of reading his thoughts.

‘You think Justine Lander would have preferred to leave things alone? Well, it sounds like her mother was prepared to lay open all the family secrets in the pursuit of the truth.’

Sadler felt exhausted. ‘I think teachers, when they’re good ones, are a little like us, Connie. We feel protective towards those we’re supposed to look after. Penny had taught children all her life. Her outrage at events would have overridden any sense of family.’

‘As opposed to Bridget Lander.’

‘Bridget has a distorted view of family, which I can’t even bring myself to fathom. I wouldn’t try to do so, either. Go along to the PM and let me know how you get on.’

‘Of course. But we know what we need to know, don’t we?’

Sadler turned and stared out of the window. ‘I think we do.’

As she was walking out of Sadler’s office, Connie’s phone rang and without looking she answered it.

‘Connie, it’s Nick.’

She felt herself flushing. ‘Look, I can’t answer any questions about the case, there’s a press conference scheduled for—’

‘I know. I’d be a pretty crap journalist if I didn’t know the time of the press conference.’

Connie walked over to her car and slid into the driver’s seat. ‘You did me a massive favour, digging out the details of Yvonne’s meeting with Penny. But I gave you enough for a better story than your competitors, didn’t I?’

‘Can you hear me whingeing? I’m happy; the news editor is happy. Look, I wasn’t calling about that. I was just wondering if you fancied going for a drink, you know, after the conference. I won’t ask you about the case, I promise.’

Thank God he couldn’t see her face, thought Connie.
It must resemble a boiled beetroot at the moment
.

‘I’m not sure. I mean, we’ve managed to keep our collaboration quiet so far. What will the other reporters think if they see us having a drink together tonight?’

‘Don’t worry about them. They’ve seen it all before. It’s your colleagues I’m more worried about. The tall one, Sadler. I don’t want to get on the wrong side of him.’

‘As long as it’s somewhere away from the station, I should be fine. I don’t want to be the star of the latest gossip.’

‘What about the bar of my hotel?’ he suggested. ‘I’m staying in the Wilton tonight but most of the other journos will be heading back to London after the press conference.’

The Wilton Hotel, where it had all started. There was a kind of symmetry to the venue.

‘Sure. Why not.’