Aftermath (35 page)

‘The anger, Janet? Is that what you were going to say?’

Janet shot her a defiant glance. ‘What if I was? Wasn’t I right to feel anger?’

‘I’m not here to judge you. I think I’d have been angry myself, maybe done exactly the same as you. But we’ve got to get this sorted. There’s no way it’ll simply disappear. As I say, the CPS might decide not to press charges. At the worst you’d be looking at excusable homicide, maybe even justifiable. We’re not talking jail time here, Janet. Thing is, though, we can’t hide it and it won’t go away. There’s got to be some action.’ Annie spoke softly and clearly, as if to a frightened child.

‘I hear what you’re saying,’ Janet said. ‘It’s like I’m some sort of sacrificial lamb tossed to the slaughter to appease public opinion.’

‘Not at all.’ Annie stood up. ‘Public opinion is far more likely to be on your side. It’s just procedure that has to be followed. Look, if you want to get in touch with me about anything,
anything
at all before Monday, here’s my card.’ She wrote her home and mobile numbers on the back.

‘Thanks.’ Janet took the card, glanced at it and set it on the coffee table.

‘You know,’ Annie said at the door. ‘I’m not your enemy, Janet. Yes, I’d have to give evidence if it came to court, but I’m not against you.’

Janet gave her a twisted smile. ‘Yeah, I know,’ she said, reaching for the gin again. ‘Life’s a bitch, isn’t it?’

‘Sure is.’ Annie smiled back. ‘Then you die.’

•

‘Claire! It’s so nice to see you again. Come in.’

Claire Toth walked into Maggie’s hall and followed her through to the front room, where she slouched on the sofa.

The first things Maggie noticed about her were how pale she was and that she had cut off all her beautiful long blonde hair. What was left lay jaggedly over her skull in a way that suggested she had cut it herself. She wasn’t wearing her school uniform, but a pair of baggy jeans and a baggy sweatshirt that hid all signs that she was an attractive young woman. She wore no make-up and her face was dotted with acne. Maggie remembered what Dr Simms had said about the possible reactions of Kimberley’s close friends, that some might suppress their sexuality because they thought that would protect them from predators such as Terence Payne. It looked as if Claire was trying to do just that. Maggie wondered if she should comment, but decided not to.

‘Milk and cookies?’ she asked.

Claire shook her head.

‘What is it, sweetheart?’ Maggie asked. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Claire. ‘I can’t sleep. I just keep thinking of her. I just lie awake all night with it going through my head, what must have happened to her, what she must have felt like . . . I can’t bear it. It’s awful.’

‘What do your parents say?’

Claire looked away. ‘I can’t talk to them. I . . . I thought, you know, you might understand better.’

‘Let me get those cookies, anyway. I could do with one myself.’ Maggie fetched two glasses of milk and a plate of chocolate chip cookies from the kitchen and put them down on the coffee table. Claire picked up her milk and sipped at it, then reached out and picked up a cookie.

‘You read about me in the papers, then?’ Maggie said.

Claire nodded.

‘And what did you think?’

‘At first I couldn’t believe it. Not you. Then I realized it could be anybody, that you didn’t have to be poor or stupid to be abused. Then I felt sorry for you.’

‘Well, please don’t do that,’ said Maggie, trying on a smile. ‘I stopped feeling sorry for myself a long time ago, and now I’m just getting on with life. All right?’

‘Okay.’

‘What sort of things do you think about? Do you want to tell me?’

‘How terrible it must have been for Kim, with Mr Payne, you know, doing things to her.
Sex
. The police didn’t say anything to the papers about it, but I
know
he did horrible things to her. I can just picture him there, doing it, hurting her, and Kim so helpless.’

‘It’s no use imagining what it was like, Claire. It won’t do any good.’

‘Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I do it on purpose?’ She shook her head slowly. ‘And I keep going over the details of that night in my mind. How I just said I was staying for a slow dance with Nicky and Kim said that was okay, she’d probably find somebody to walk home with but it wasn’t very far anyway and the road was well lit. I should have known something would happen to her.’

‘You couldn’t know, Claire. How could you possibly know?’

‘I
should
have. We knew about those girls, the ones who’d gone missing. We should have stuck together, been more careful.’

‘Claire, listen to me: it’s
not
your fault. And I know this sounds harsh, but if anyone should have been more careful, perhaps it’s Kimberley. You can’t be blamed for dancing with a boy. If she was concerned, then she should have made sure she had someone to walk home with her and not gone off alone.’

‘Maybe she didn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Maybe Mr Payne gave her a lift.’

‘You told the police you didn’t see him. You didn’t, did you?’

‘No. But he
could
have been waiting outside, couldn’t he?’

‘I suppose so,’ Maggie admitted.

‘I hate him. I’m glad he’s dead. And I hate Nicky Gallagher. I hate all men.’

Maggie didn’t know what to say to that. She could tell Claire that she’d get over it in time, but a fat lot of good that would do. The best thing she could do, she decided, was have a talk with Mrs Toth and see if they could persuade Claire to go for counselling before things got worse. At least she seemed to
want
to talk about her thoughts and feelings, which was a good start.

‘Was she conscious all the time he was doing stuff with her?’ Claire asked. ‘I mean, was she
aware
of him doing it to her?’

‘Claire, stop it.’ But Maggie was spared further debate by the phone. She listened, frowning, said a few words and then turned back to Claire, who managed to pull herself out of her absorption with Kimberley’s ordeal for a moment and ask her who it was.

‘It was the local television station,’ Maggie said, wondering if she sounded as stunned as she felt.

A flicker of interest. ‘What did they want?’

‘They want me to go on the news show tonight.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said yes,’ said Maggie, as if she couldn’t quite believe it herself.

‘Cool,’ said Claire, squeezing out a tiny smile.

•

There are many English seaside resorts that look as if they have seen better days. Withernsea looked as if it had never seen any good days at all. The sun was shining over the rest of the island, but you wouldn’t know it at Withernsea. A vicious, cold rain slanted in from the iron sky, and waves from a North Sea the colour of stained underwear churned up dirty sand and pebbles on the beach. Set back from the front was a strip of gift shops, amusement arcades and bingo halls, their bright coloured lights garish and lurid in the gloomy afternoon, the bingo caller’s amplified ‘Number nine, doctor’s orders!’ pathetic as it sounded along the deserted promenade.

The whole thing reminded Banks of long ago childhood holidays at Great Yarmouth, Blackpool or Scarborough. July or August days when it seemed to rain nonstop for two weeks, and all he could do was wander the amusement arcades losing pennies in the one-armed bandits and watching the mechanical claw drop the shiny cigarette lighter just before it reached the winner’s chute. He had never played bingo, but had often watched the hard-faced peroxide women sit there game after game chain-smoking and staring down at the little numbers on their cards.

On better days, and when he reached his teens, Banks would spend his time searching through the second-hand bookshops for the old Pan books of horror stories or steamy bestsellers such as
The Carpetbaggers
and
Peyton Place
. When he was thirteen or fourteen, feeling way too grownup to be on holiday with his parents, he would wander off alone for the day, hanging around in coffee bars and browsing through the latest singles in Woolworths or a local record shop. Sometimes he would meet a girl in the same predicament, and he had had his first adolescent kisses and tentative gropings on these holidays.

Banks parked by the seafront and, without even stopping for a look at the water, hurried to the house directly across from him, where retired DI George Woodward now ran his B & B. The ‘Vacancies’ sign swung in the wind and creaked like a shutter on a haunted house. By the time Banks rang the front doorbell he was cold and soaked to the skin.

George Woodward was a dapper man with grey hair, bristly moustache and the watchful eyes of an ex-copper. There was also an aura of the hangdog about him, most noticeable as he looked over Banks’s shoulder at the weather and shook his head slowly. ‘I did suggest Torquay,’ he said, ‘but the wife’s mother lives here in Withernsea.’ He ushered Banks in. ‘Ah, well, it’s not that bad. You’ve just come on a miserable day, that’s all. Early in the season, too. You should see it when the sun’s shining and the place is full. A different world altogether.’

Banks wondered on which day of the year that momentous event occurred, but he kept silent. No point antagonizing George Woodward.

They were in a large room with a bay window and several tables, clearly the breakfast room where the lucky guests hurried down for their bacon and eggs every morning. The tables were laid out with white linen, but there were no knives and forks, and Banks wondered if the Woodwards had any guests at all at the moment. Without offering tea or anything stronger, George Woodward sat at one of the tables and bade Banks sit opposite.

‘It’s about Alderthorpe, is it, then?’

‘Yes.’ Banks had spoken with Jenny Fuller on his mobile on his way out to Withernsea and learned what Elizabeth Bell, the social worker, had to say. Now he was after the policeman’s perspective.

‘I always thought that would come back to haunt us one day.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Damage like that. It doesn’t go away. It festers.’

‘I suppose you’ve got a point.’ Like Jenny had with Elizabeth Bell, Banks decided he had to trust George Woodward. ‘I’m here about Lucy Payne,’ he said, watching Woodward’s expression. ‘Linda Godwin, as was. But that’s between you and me for the moment.’

Woodward paled and whistled between his teeth. ‘My God, I’d never have believed it. Linda Godwin?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I saw her picture in the paper, but I didn’t recognize her. The poor lass.’

‘Not any more.’

‘Surely you can’t think she had anything to do with those girls?’

‘We don’t know what to think. That’s the problem. She’s claiming loss of memory. There’s some circumstantial evidence, but not much. You know the sort of thing I mean.’

‘What’s your instinct?’

‘That she’s more involved than she’s saying. Whether she’s an accessory or not, I don’t know.’

‘You realize she was only a twelve-year-old girl when I met her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Twelve going on forty, the responsibility she had.’

‘Responsibility?’ Jenny had said something about Lucy taking care of the younger children; he wondered if this was what Woodward meant.

‘Yes. She was the eldest. For Christ’s sake, man, she had a ten-year-old brother who was being regularly buggered by his father and uncle and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. They were doing it to
her
, too. Can you even
begin
to imagine how all that made her feel?’

Banks admitted he couldn’t. ‘Mind if I smoke?’ he asked.

‘I’ll get you an ashtray. You’re lucky Mary’s over at her mother’s.’ He winked. ‘She’d never allow it.’ Woodward produced a heavy glass ashtray from the cupboard by the door and surprised Banks by pulling a crumpled packet of Embassy Regal from the shirt pocket under his beige V-neck sweater. He then went on to surprise him even further by suggesting a wee dram. ‘Nowt fancy, mind. Just Bell’s.’

‘Bell’s would be fine,’ said Banks. He’d have just the one, as he had a long drive home. The first sip, after they clinked glasses, tasted wonderful. It was everything to do with the cold rain lashing at the bay windows.

‘Did you get to know Lucy at all?’ he asked.

Woodward sipped his Bell’s neat and grimaced. ‘Barely spoke to her. Or any of the kids, for that matter. We left them to the social workers. We’d enough on our hands with the parents.’

‘Can you tell me how it went down?’

Woodward ran his hand over his hair, then took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘Good Lord, this is going back a bit,’ he said.

‘Whatever you can remember.’

‘Oh, I remember everything as if it was yesterday. That’s the problem.’

Banks tapped some ash from his cigarette and waited for George Woodward to focus his memory on the one day he would probably sooner forget.

‘It was pitch black when we went in,’ Woodward began. ‘And cold as a witch’s tit. The eleventh of February, it was. 1990. There was me and Baz – Barry Stevens, my DS – in one car. The bloody heater didn’t work properly, I remember, and we were almost blue with cold when we got to Alderthorpe. All the puddles were frozen. There were about three more cars and a van, for the social workers to isolate the kids, like. We were working off a tip from one of the local schoolteachers who’d got suspicious about some of the truancies, the way the kids looked and behaved and, especially, the disappearance of Kathleen Murray.’

‘She’s the one who was killed, right?’

‘That’s right. Anyway, there were a couple of lights on in the houses when we got there, and we marched straight up and bashed our way in – we had a warrant – and that was when we . . . we saw it.’ He was silent for a moment, staring somewhere beyond Banks, beyond the bay window, beyond even the North Sea. Then he took another nip of whisky, coughed and went on. ‘Of course, we didn’t know who was who at first. The two households were mixed up and nobody knew who’d fathered who anyway.’

‘What did you find?’

‘Most of them were asleep until we bashed the doors in. They had a vicious dog, took a chunk out of Baz as we went in. Then we found Oliver Murray and Pamela Godwin – brother and sister – in a bed with one of the Godwin girls: Laura.’