Secret Sins: A Callie Anson (14 page)

Jane heard a murmur of voices, then a muffled giggle.

So much for separate rooms, then. But what could she do at this point? She could hardly burst in on them and play the outraged parent. That just wasn’t her style, and it would be highly embarrassing for all of them. What if they were…

Oh, God.

Sighing, she continued down the corridor. She opened her bedroom door cautiously, expecting the room to be dark and Brian to be snoring away.

But the lights were on and Brian was sitting up in bed,
reading
a book.

‘Oh,’ said Jane. ‘I thought you’d be asleep by now.’

He put the book aside. ‘I was waiting for you.’

Even in her exhaustion, her heart leapt. Waiting for her. The way he used to do.

‘We haven’t really had a chance to talk today,’ Brian said, patting the bed beside him.

‘Talk? No, we haven’t.’

‘And there’s a lot to talk about.’ He grinned. ‘She’s a cracking girl, isn’t she, Janey?’

‘Oh…yes. Of course.’

If her voice sounded less than enthusiastic, Brian didn’t seem to notice. He went on, ‘Fancy Simon finding a girl like that, and not even telling us. He’s a dark horse, that one. Wanted to surprise us, and he certainly did that!’

‘She seems very nice,’ Jane managed.

‘She’s brilliant,’ enthused Brian. ‘What a great addition to the family!’

Jane sank onto the edge of the bed and began untying her shoes. ‘It’s a little soon to be talking like that,’ she pointed out. ‘He’s only known her five minutes.’

‘But she’s so right for him. You can see it straight away. Sometimes you just
know
. You know?’

She’d known as soon as she met Brian that he was the one for her. But Jane wasn’t about to admit that now. ‘He’s so young. They’re both young. Far too young to think about anything permanent.’

‘Oh, don’t be such an old wet blanket.’ Brian tugged playfully on her ponytail, then said in a thoughtful voice, ‘You know why I think I like her so much?’

‘Why?’

‘Because she reminds me of you, Janey. When you were young.’

Jane closed her eyes; her voice was flat. ‘Does she, indeed.’

‘Callie, I’m so sorry.’

She found that she was gripping the phone and consciously relaxed her hand. ‘I waited for you. All afternoon.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Marco. ‘I kept thinking I’d be able to get away. But…well, it was one thing after another.’

‘You didn’t ring, after you left that message.’ She hadn’t even taken Bella out for a walk, reckoning that he’d be there any minute.

Callie heard him sigh at the other end of the phone. ‘I’d forgotten to put my phone on the charger. It ran out of juice right after I talked to you.’

She bit her tongue to keep back her next retort: doesn’t your family own a phone? She would
not
come over all heavy with him, Callie told herself sternly. It wasn’t like they’d had firm plans for the afternoon. And not like there was anything…firm…between them at all. She was beginning to care for him, far more than she’d ever thought she could care for anyone apart from Adam. Up to this point they’d had an easy sort of relationship: they spent a lot of time together, they enjoyed each other’s company. When he kissed her, it generated enough heat for her to wish, sometimes, that they could just throw caution to the winds and go for it, but so far she’d managed to restrain herself in that area. And in her more rational moments that was fine with her, after what she’d been through with Adam.

They’d never had a row, never had cross words. Now she felt that they were dangerously close. He’d been inconsiderate, and she was being unreasonable. Not good.

After all, he had every right to spend Sunday afternoon with his family. Or any other time, come to that. She had no claim on him.

These thoughts went through her head in a heartbeat. ‘Okay,’ she said.

‘Okay…what?’

She kept her voice neutral. ‘Okay anything.’

‘I’ll see you later, all right? This evening?’

‘I think it’s my turn to cook.’

She must not have sounded very enthusiastic; he came back with another suggestion. ‘No, we’ll go out. My treat. All right?’

‘Yes, all right.’ He must be feeling guilty, she told herself.

‘See you later, then. Sevenish, I hope. Maybe a bit before.’ He rang off.

‘Men!’ Callie threw the phone on the sofa.

Bella looked at her, startled.

‘Honestly, Bella. You can’t trust any of them. They’re all as bad as each other. I don’t know why we women bother. I really, really don’t.’ She sat down and hugged the dog, stroking her floppy ears, murmuring, ‘Take my advice, Bella. Don’t ever get involved with a man. They’re nothing but trouble.’

For a second night, Yolanda Fish had slept on her makeshift bed in Rachel Norton’s nursery. Ordinarily she would have gone home by now, but for Yolanda this was not an ordinary case. She felt an exceptional protectiveness towards Rachel, largely because of the baby yet also because the young woman seemed so very alone. No one had come to the house to comfort her or look after her; no one had even phoned, apart from that one mysterious and abortive phone call. And Rachel showed no inclination to ring other people. It bothered Yolanda; there was
something unnatural about being so isolated. In the early hours, awake and waiting for sounds from the next room, she vowed to herself to broach the subject with Rachel.

As soon as she heard Rachel stirring, going to the loo, she went downstairs and made tea. She took it straight back up, tapping on the bedroom door with her free hand.

‘Come in,’ Rachel said, and Yolanda complied.

Rachel was sitting up in bed, looking flushed and almost feverish.

‘Are you all right, lovie?’ Going to her quickly, her old
training
and instincts coming to the fore, Yolanda put the back of her hand against Rachel’s forehead.

‘Yes. Fine.’ She took the cup of tea. ‘Thanks.’

Yolanda sat on the end of the bed and watched as Rachel sipped at the tea.

‘If there’s anyone you’d like to notify,’ she said, ‘I’d be happy to make the phone calls for you. If you don’t want to do it yourself.’

Rachel looked at her over the rim of the mug and shook her head. ‘No. There isn’t anyone.’

‘What about your parents?’

‘I told you,’ said Rachel. ‘They’re on holiday.’

That seemed a very weak excuse to Yolanda: if something like that had happened to her—if Eli had died in any sort of
circumstances
, natural or suspicious—she was positive that her parents would have dropped everything and come to be with her. No matter where they were, or what shape they were in themselves. ‘I’m sure they’d want to know,’ she said. ‘At least you could give them the option to come back if they wanted to.’

Now Rachel looked down into the mug, not meeting Yolanda’s eyes. ‘If you must know,’ she said, ‘I haven’t spoken to my parents in years. I just said they were on holiday because that sounded better.’

‘You haven’t spoken to them in
years
?’

Rachel’s lip trembled. ‘My dad…well, he was what I suppose you’d call abusive. He hit me…a lot. When I was a kid. He’d
come home from the pub, all tanked up, and he’d knock me about. And Mum…she didn’t want to know. I tried to tell her, but she didn’t want to know.’

‘Oh, lovie!’

‘As soon as I could, I left home. Came to London. Got a job, met Trevor. End of story.
Now
do you understand why I don’t want to contact them? Or my sister?’

Yolanda was appalled, but it did explain a great deal. ‘Oh, you poor thing.’

Rachel shrugged. ‘A long time ago. Water under the bridge. Besides,’ she added matter-of-factly, ‘it’s been in the papers, hasn’t it? Everyone will know by now.’

The papers! Yolanda hadn’t thought to check the Sunday papers. Not that they would have had much in them: the body had only been found on Saturday, and the Sunday papers had early deadlines. Today might be a different story. And she supposed that they needed to be braced for enquiries from the press.

Not that this was a spectacularly interesting murder, from the media’s point of view. Or the police’s, either: the indications were that it was just a sordid mugging gone wrong.

Of course, Yolanda belatedly recalled, the press was big on that sort of thing at the moment. Yob culture, hoodies: they were on their high horse about the societal ills made manifest in the proliferation of street crime by young scofflaws with time on their hands, lack of parental supervision, and no moral fibre. Perhaps they would fasten on this as the latest evidence of a youth-centred society gone mad. Yolanda happened to agree with them, but that was beside the point. She had better be prepared.

In the meantime, she was determined to persevere with Rachel, to get her out of her isolation somehow. ‘What about the girls you used to work with?’ she suggested. ‘Don’t you keep up with any of them?’

Rachel shrugged. ‘Not really. I’m not part of their world any more.’ Her voice sounded wistful. ‘The City seems a long way off.’

‘Do you miss it? Working with other people, I mean?’
‘A bit,’ she admitted. ‘It can feel kind of lonely.’

‘One of the down-sides of self-employment, from what I’ve heard.’ Yolanda couldn’t even imagine how boring it would be, shut up in your own house all day. No one to talk to but your husband. She loved Eli, but she couldn’t comprehend living like that.

‘It was Trevor’s idea,’ Rachel said. ‘He didn’t
need
other people, see. I was enough for him—that’s what he always said. As long as he had me, he didn’t need anyone else.’ She looked down into her tea.

‘But that’s not very healthy, lovie,’ Yolanda pointed out, trying not to sound critical of Trevor. ‘Maybe it worked for him, but…’

‘He didn’t like me going out on my own, either,’ Rachel blurted, almost involuntarily. ‘Didn’t think it was safe—that’s what he said. Especially with the baby on the way.’ She gulped. ‘He was…very protective of me.’

And now she was alone, defenceless. Yolanda wanted to hug her. Yet something started to niggle, deep down. Rachel seemed to need to believe, and to make them—the police—believe, that Trevor had been a saint, and their marriage perfect. But Yolanda knew, from a lifetime of experience, that no marriage was perfect. Even the ones that worked had their grey areas, the murky bits which only the two people involved knew about—and
sometimes
those grey areas remained unacknowledged, unexplored. What was the truth of this one, beneath the surface?

Neville Stewart was perpetually behind on his paperwork. It wasn’t that he was disorganised: it just didn’t interest him. Once a case was over, he had no desire to tie up the loose ends. He just wanted to get on to the next thing, the next challenge.

But papers didn’t file themselves, and information didn’t appear on the computer of its own accord.

So Neville always had a huge backlog of work waiting for him on his desk. He knew it was a failing, and every so often he
tackled
it, spurred by the burden of guilt or sometimes by boredom.
At times it provided an excuse for avoiding something even less interesting to him than the dry bones of dead old cases.

This was one of those times. He had not been gripped, as he’d hoped to be gripped, by the death of Trevor Norton. Random, opportunistic crimes like this one appeared to be were not the sort of thing to get him excited. They were solved—if they were solved at all—by forensic work in the lab, by hard slog on the part of an army of PCs, or sometimes by sheer luck. There was nothing there for a detective with flair and imagination, and that was how he liked to think of himself.

Trevor Norton was no longer alive—no longer running, no longer working at his computer, no longer awaiting the birth of his first child—because he’d been sporting an iPod. Full stop. Cut and dried. No human emotions involved except greed and covetousness. No tangle of motives to be teased out, no complex web of alibis.

The postmortem hadn’t turned up anything immediate. Samples had been sent off, of course, but it would be a while before any results were available. According to the coroner, the inquest wouldn’t be opened for another day or two. The computer boffins would take their time in retrieving the data from Trevor Norton’s hard drive, and it could take days for all of the relevant CCTV footage to be reviewed. House-to-house enquiries were being carried out, round the Nortons’ home and all along the route to the place where the body had been found: routine enquiries, unlikely—in Neville’s opinion—to turn up anything. He’d left it to Sid Cowley to organise that, and to get on with anything else that could be done at the moment in the Norton case. Which was not much.

He, on the other hand, was dealing with his paper monster. The pile on the end of his desk had grown so large that it was unstable, threatening to slide onto the floor. At the moment there was a kind of geological logic to the piles, like layers of ancient rock which told a story. If the papers ever got out of order, though, he’d be a dead man. It was time for desperate measures.

And it was, as always, a trip down memory lane. An
alternative
to something even more boring.

He picked up a witness statement form and glanced at it. Willow Tree: the name stopped him in his tracks. It brought back a conversation about names, a conversation in which he’d been tempted to reveal his problematical history with his own name. Willow Tree had been given her name by eco-warrior parents seemingly oblivious to the ridicule it would bring upon her. How could parents do that to a kid?

He conjured up a picture of her. An unconventional young woman, to say the least: carrot-coloured hair gelled into spikes, heavy kohl make-up, a ring through one nostril, and iridescent green fingernails. Underneath it all, though, she was probably a pretty girl. And she’d been a joy as a witness—concise, articulate, co-operative. Intelligent. She’d been upset but not hysterical. He had liked Willow Tree.

And now, thought Neville, now that the case was over…

There was no reason why he should not see Willow Tree on a social basis. No reason at all.

She’d given him a mobile number; it was right there on the form. ‘You can reach me on this number any time,’ he
remembered
her saying.