The Devil's Chair (23 page)

It depended on your point of view, he supposed. Even his reflections thought in a Welsh lilt.

And for some reason his next thought was to do a little snooping. After all – that is what policeman are famous for.

A snoopery of policemen.

I'll just take a peek, he thought, at the guest list of the Long Mynd Hotel for the whole of last year because a silly little idea was worming its way into his brain. More a worm than a snake, then? Silly idea? Was it so silly? They had supposed from the first that the drunken argument, the accident, the missing child, Charity Ignatio being away, they had surmised that it was all coincidence. But what if it wasn't? What if it had all been planned? But already Roberts could see a problem with this. Tracy would hardly have planned her own death, would she, silly? But what if something had been planned but it had all gone wrong? What?

The accident
.

Roberts sat and thought. He had a feeling, silly and inconsequential as his musings might be, that he was stumbling, like a blind man over rocks, over something of significance. What he couldn't say was what, except that he felt warm and good because he believed he was on to something.

DI Alex Randall was pacing his office. He was on a tightrope and he knew it. If he charged Mansfield (and he didn't even know what with) the PACE clock would start ticking.
Tick-tock
and he would have to let him go. Could Mansfield have been involved in the fate of his partner and her daughter? For the life of him Randall couldn't work it out. He had to let him go. It was a painful but necessary step. He carried on pacing his small office for a few more minutes then he gave in, put his jacket on.

He was going home.

H
e couldn't face trying to justify an appointment through Jericho Palfreyman, so he simply turned up. As he'd anticipated Jericho demurred, but seeing the complete lack of compromise on the detective's face, for once he didn't pursue the objection; instead he knocked on Martha's door, stood back and let DI Randall in.

But coming without warning or an appointment was a mistake. It was as though he had walked in on her private self and caught her with her guard down. He was seeing Martha unprepared and it gave him a shock. He instantly realized he'd barged in on her and she wasn't looking too happy as she pored over some sheets on her desk, peering up into the computer screen and frowning.

‘Nursing homes,' she said in explanation, without looking up. It struck him that she was evading his eyes, fixing her gaze on her work and she made no comment on the unexpectedness of his visit. ‘Clusters of deaths.' Then she looked up and he saw her face was sad. ‘I can't look into all of them, Alex,' she said, ‘but there does seem to be one particular nursing home where the life expectancy in there is significantly lower than the others.' Then his presence must have registered and she morphed into the coroner he knew so well, with a bright smile and a happy look. But he had seen beneath the surface and read vulnerability and sadness. Sadness she was so good at disguising. After all, she was widowed. The job was always connected with death. Her children were growing up. Perhaps her life wasn't as full as …

Stop it
, he lectured himself.

She must have caught his expression and half rose from her chair. ‘Alex,' she said, concerned, ‘what is it? I heard something yesterday on the lunchtime news. Have you found her?'

It was like finding a port in a storm. He sank down into the chair; put his hand over his face. ‘Just her blood-stained dressing gown,' he said, his fingers trying to erase the creases from his forehead. ‘We haven't found her or her body.'

‘And you think it was planted there in the last twenty-four hours?'

‘I
know
it was,' he said. ‘There is absolutely no way we would have missed it on our search, quite besides the evidence of the very observant man who found it. He runs the same route every single day and the dressing gown, weighted down with a stone, is bright pink and lay at the bottom of the brook. If you want to know what I think,' he continued, his voice angry, ‘I think it's all a big tease. Someone out there is enjoying themselves playing games.'

‘You think she's dead?'

Reluctantly, Alex Randall nodded. ‘She probably died in the accident or soon after it.'

Martha was still. It had been a terrible case from the start. Could it get any worse?

‘And there is always the chance that she was badly injured in the accident and is dying right now. Martha,' he appealed, ‘what sort of person would do this? Why not give up either the child or her body? What can they possibly hope to
gain
by this concealment? Is she dead and part of some bizarre and horrible ritual?' He wished the phrase did not resonate quite so loudly around his head. He wished that the accident hadn't happened in a place with such a bad and sinister reputation.

She leaned towards him, extending her hands across the desk, and Randall continued.

‘The nightmare is not that she's dead but that she's alive, frightened, hurt and in danger, a four-year-old in the hands of a sadist. A sadist who wants to extract the maximum pleasure from it all, a person who is not only callous and sadistic towards a child but also wants the police to be publicly humiliated. And …' The hazel eyes searched hers as you would search for a hand in the dark. She was so tempted to console him, to reach out and stroke his cheek.

Martha exerted an iron resolve. It wasn't going to happen.

She read pain in his eyes. Pain she had seen even before this case had wrapped its chilly fingers around his neck. He was in a truly awful place. Silently, she waited.

Back at the station, Coleman's assiduity was paying off. Now he'd cracked the pattern of computer use he was finding out more and more. Looked at from this different angle it was interesting, intriguing and thoroughly puzzling. Now why on earth would
Tracy
have been searching this particular site set up for people who desperately wanted a family but were unable to conceive?

She must have been a little bit web-wise because all her emails prior to 6 April had been deleted. There was nothing that predated the accident. The whole lot had been scrubbed out.
She'd
covered her tracks
. And that, in itself, was unusual, not to say
very
unusual, not to say strange, not to say thoroughly bloody suspicious. Coleman blinked, his brain working overtime. There was not one single email left in the box that was dated before 6 p.m. on 6 April. Nothing in Draft. Nothing even in Spam or Trash that predated the accident. Tracy had dumped the lot, clever girl. Well, Coleman reasoned, Tracy or Neil had something they wished to bury very deeply. And he was pretty sure it was Tracy.

She had been cute. Everything on email post-dated the accident. He went through them methodically but, like many other people, most were advertising something – tooth whitener, holiday bargains, cruises. Tracy had lived a life of wishful thinking. There were plenty of online shopping sites, some of them for perfumes and fancy goods, others for the big supermarkets. Coleman went through them all and came up with … nothing.

Now then.

Coleman decided that Tracy was either one of those very tidy people who clear up their emails on a daily basis, which he very much doubted or, much more likely, she had something to hide. But she couldn't delete
all
her clues. The first email in the box was for 6.30 p.m. on the evening of Saturday, 6 April, so her deletion had happened sometime on the Saturday evening, before she'd left the house with Daisy. Clue one.

He took a swig of lukewarm coffee and leaned back in his chair. So no emails, only the browsing history. Well, well, well. This was interesting. But what on earth was she doing, looking at these sorts of sites? Coleman scratched his head. This didn't make any sense.

He called up Neil Mansfield. ‘Hello,' he said. ‘It's PC Coleman here. I wonder … You and Tracy only have Daisy, don't you?'

‘Yeah.' Mansfield's answer was suitably truculent and defensive.

‘She didn't have any other children?'

‘Not as far as I know.' Mansfield paused. ‘Mind you,' he said, ‘I'm not sure I ever really knew her. Know what I mean?'

Yes and no, Coleman thought, and pursued his point. ‘She'd never had a child adopted?'

Mansfield sounded bemused. ‘Not as far as I know.'

‘Did you
want
more children?'

‘No.' Mansfield's patience was running out. ‘I'd had enough of her. We were going to be splittin' up, no doubt about it. If she hadn't had the accident we probably wouldn't still be together.' He paused. ‘We'd have split up before the accident if it hadn't been for Daisy.' Another pause. ‘The last thing I'd have wanted is more kids – with her.'

‘But you were fond of Daisy.'

‘Yeah. Daisy was a little darling. Unlike her mother.'

Coleman persisted. ‘But you say you weren't trying for a baby?'

‘No.' Said emphatically.

‘Was
Tracy
trying for a baby?'

‘Not that I know of, though I wouldn't have put anything past that conniving little …' Then he remembered. Tracy was dead. ‘Look,' he said suddenly, ‘the inspector's had me up the nick for ages. What is all this about?'

‘I don't know,' Coleman answered honestly. ‘I've been going through the sites that were visited on your computer. A lot of them are to do with women who can't have children.'

‘Well, that wasn't Trace, I can assure you. She got pregnant with Daisy really easily, or so she told me. And she was on the Pill. To be honest she wasn't that maternal. If she'd found out she couldn't have had children her attitude would have been, “Oh, goody, now I don't have to bother with the Pill.”'

Coleman frowned at the screen, trying to make sense between what his ears were hearing and what his eyes were seeing.

‘Look, mate,' Mansfield said into the silence, ‘I don't want to be rude but at the moment I'm a bit tied up trying to organize her funeral, which is proving surprisingly difficult. I had to wait for the coroner to release the body for burial and all of a sudden bloody Tracy's mum and sister seem to want to get involved. Call me cynical but I get the feeling they just want to be part of the media attention. Sad, isn't it? We've had so many arguments – just about a funeral.' He sounded incredulous. ‘But I'm the one who knows what Tracy's wishes were. They don't.'

Coleman was listening with less than half an ear.

‘I know she didn't want no flowers – or so she said – but they seem to want the damned lot. Horse and carriage, half a florist's. I told 'em she didn't want no flowers. She wanted money to go to her chosen charity, not a load of flowers that are dead two days after the funeral.'

And all of a sudden Coleman's ears pricked right up. ‘What was Tracy's charity?'

‘Something about woman who can't have children,' he scoffed. ‘Don't know why she'd be interested in that sort of thing. But sometimes she did have a kind heart,' he conceded.

It wasn't much of a tribute.

S
am was at a match. This time she had not gone with him. He'd had a lift with a Shrewsbury friend who also played for Stoke. It was a lovely day, warm and sunny and very tempting to sit and read in the garden once Martha had finished her chores. She leafed through the paper. It had consigned Daisy Walsh to page four and the fairly predictable headline of:

WHERE IS SHE?

She looked at the now familiar picture. Papers usually stuck with the one image and used it over and over again. She closed her eyes for a moment but could still see the outline of the child, curly hair and small, round chin. Much as she'd tried to push the case to the back of her mind and focus on other things it still lay there, an amorphic unhappiness. She read on.

There had been various spurious sightings from Glasgow to Bournemouth, Anglesey to Norwich, but none had turned out to have any connection with Daisy. One little girl had subsequently turned out to be ten years old and her mother had been affronted at the confusion with a missing four-year-old. There was a note of indignation from mother and daughter. No regrets. She read on, realizing that there was nothing new. The child had simply vanished as though she had followed Alice's fate and fallen down the rabbit hole.

Would they ever know the child's fate or would her story prove to be another Madeline McCann: her fate a subject of endless conjecture with no facts and no explanation? Just stories? Would she be relegated into folklore? A threat to naughty children, that they too could vanish like Daisy Walsh?

She closed the paper, feeling unhappy and anxious in spite of the beautiful and welcome sunshine that beamed in through windows, freshly polished by a vigorous and suddenly extra house-proud Vera, her daily, or more precisely
twice weekly
cleaner.

But Bobby was wagging his tail optimistically and dogs do have to be walked. Maybe her daughter would like to join her so she called up the stairs. ‘Sukey – fancy a walk?'

A face appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘With Bobby?'

‘I thought we'd just go through the woods, towards Haughmond Abbey. It's such a lovely day,' she coaxed, hoping her daughter would join her. She loved her chatter and besides, with these morbid thoughts about Daisy Walsh going round in her head she wanted to keep her own child close, though Sukey was more woman than child and Martha had the feeling she would be able to look after herself.

Other parents have made that same mistake.

Sukey appeared at the top of the stairs, thought for a minute then said, ‘OK. Yeah. Why not? Just wait a minute, Mum. I'll be down.'