Bitter Fruits: DI Erica Martin Book 1 (Erica Martin Thriller) (19 page)

Martin walked into a little country pub she had noticed on her drive into the village of Great Whittington. She walked in and leaned against the bar, waiting for the jowly man behind the counter to finish wiping a pint glass with a towel before ambling over to take her order. After he’d done so, she moved to a small table underneath one of the windows. The pub was on the main road which weaved its way through the village, and the sound of the odd passing car filtered in, breaking the otherwise emptiness of the saloon bar. She was the only punter as yet, and so after the landlord had shouted to whoever was in the kitchen out the back with her order, he stood cordially at the bar, continuing to wipe along its top and anything else which came in its path.

‘Holidaying round here, are you?’

She shrugged and took a sip of her drink. ‘Something like that. Looking up some old friends.’

‘Oh yeah? Who are they, then?’

‘The Brabents? Do you know them?’

The landlord nodded. ‘Yup. Live down the road. Haven’t seen them for a while, though, now you come to mention it.’

Martin was silent.

‘Nice family,’ he continued. ‘Not like some of them from the city. Join in with things. Down here for the quiz night a fair bit. And Mike Brabents has played village cricket a few times. Nice chap.’ He paused. ‘Not around, though, now, I don’t think. Were you planning on visiting?’

‘Mmmm,’ she assented. ‘Just driving through and thought I’d look them up.’

The landlord glanced up from his wiping and considered her.

‘Is that right?’ he said after a while, as her sandwich arrived through the kitchen hatch. He walked round the bar and placed it on her table before standing there, looking down at her, winding his tea towel in his hands.

‘I’m ex-army, me,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘So I know a copper when I see one. Why’d do you want to know about the Brabents? Something happened, has it?’

Martin wiped her mouth with a paper napkin and looked closely at the landlord. ‘You may have read about it in the papers. I’m here as part of a murder investigation.’

‘Murder?’ The landlord was nonplussed. ‘Who?’

‘I’m afraid Emily Brabents was murdered at her university.’

The landlord went pale in the face and slumped down into the chair opposite her. ‘Emily? I haven’t seen anything about it. I can’t believe it.’ He stared off into the middle distance, shaking his head. ‘Surely not. How are the parents taking it?’

‘I’m afraid Mrs Brabents has also passed away,’ Martin said gently. ‘It looks as though she couldn’t take the strain of her daughter’s death.’

‘Blimey,’ the landlord said quietly. ‘And you haven’t caught the bloke, then?’ he continued. ‘But hang on …’ He leaned forwards on to the table. ‘You don’t think Mike had anything to do with it, do you?’

‘Why do you ask?’ Martin said.

‘You’re here, aren’t you? And – well, why would you be here if you weren’t investigating someone?’

‘Do you know Michael Brabents well?’ Martin asked.

‘Well, as I said, he used to come down here sometimes. Not all the time, but fairly regular. I played cricket with him a few times. He’d come in with his missus and have a pint. Nothing heavy.’

‘What was his relationship like with his wife? Did they get on?’

The landlord looked up at her, indecision passing
across his face. ‘Well, uh. You know. I don’t know about that.’

‘This is important. Please, Mr … ?’

‘Robbie, I’m Robbie.’

‘It’s important, Robbie. They may well have been a nice family. But all families have their problems, don’t they?’ Martin said. ‘How can you get anyone into trouble if you tell the truth?’

Robbie gave a laugh. ‘Quite easily, if you don’t mind me saying. Me mam always taught me to keep a still tongue in my head.’

Martin waited.

‘Look, I’m not saying anything that no one else will have seen, right? It’s a shame ’cause he was one our best batsmen.’ He glanced down at his cloth and flexed his knuckles, taking a breath. ‘I did see them argue, right? It didn’t seem that bad, but you never can tell, can you? What goes on behind closed doors, I mean. I thought … I thought the wife looked like a wet weekend most times she came in here …’

Martin said nothing. She had that feeling when you accelerate to overtake a car and get into that sweet gear when the speed’s just right and you soar past them, feeling the engine purr.

‘He had a temper on him, that’s for sure.’

‘Did you ever see him lose his temper?’

‘A couple of times. It wasn’t too much, you know.’
He looked at her anxiously. ‘Just after a few jars. One time I saw him push her. The wife, I mean. I had to step in. But, you know, it was Christmas. These things happen.’ The barman’s face turned apologetically red on behalf of either Michael Brabents or mankind, Martin couldn’t tell which.

‘Did you ever speak to them about it?’

Robbie looked as if he would more likely have swum the Channel.

‘Did the children ever come in here?’

‘The boy never. He’s basically left home. Emily, not much. She came to watch the cricket. She seemed …’ He paused.

‘Seemed, what?’

‘Ah, I don’t know. I don’t know if it was her or him or …’

‘What is it?’ Martin asked patiently. ‘What are you trying to say?’

Robbie coughed and continued to move the cloth over the surface of the table. ‘Ah, I don’t know.’

‘No one’s getting in trouble here unless they are in trouble already.’

‘Well, it just seemed as though the girl and her dad were very close. I wouldn’t have noticed it, said anything about it but I just remember one time …’

‘What is it, Robbie? What do you remember?’

‘He got a century once, Michael. You know, at cricket. It was quite a big deal as we were second in
the league, needed a win. Anyway, we don’t get many centuries on the village green,’ Robbie smiled ruefully. ‘When he came off, he got a round of applause, as you would, you know. He would’ve got a drink on the house. But …’ He looked at Martin, the pub windows rattling as a truck sped past on the road outside. ‘The weird thing was, when he came off the pitch, he ran straight to Emily. Didn’t look at his wife once. Him and Emily went off together, arm in arm as if …’

‘As if?’ Martin prompted.

‘As if they were the couple, not him and his wife.’

The house looked as it had in the photograph. Martin parked her car as near into the hedgerow as she could on a bend on the same side of the road, hoping as she did that no one would zoom around the corner and crash into it. She walked up to the gate and walked through. The air was still and quiet, although she could hear the vague rumblings of a road in the distance. Some kind of bird beeped and shrilled as Martin made her way up the path to the front door. She knocked at it and then turned around, looking back down the path. Nothing. The stillness was ominous. Martin felt sweat trickle down her back as she stood at the door in the last burst of sunlight before the evening would fall. A bee buzzed somewhere nearby.

She walked round the house, looking in the windows as she went. The pause button had been pressed on family life here, presumably when the Brabents had received the call about Emily. At the large kitchen, Martin peered in and could see washing-up sitting in the sink, half-drunk coffee cups on the table. A desk sat by the window in another room, covered in mussed-up papers.

Martin rounded the house and, walking through a gate topped by what looked like the upper half of a wishing well, she came into the garden, the edges of which she had seen in the photograph. A large fenced-in trampoline was at one end of the garden, leaves scattered across its stretched tarpaulin, doubtless unused for some time, given the ages of Emily and her brother. The football net she had noticed in the photo sat next to it on the grass.

Martin’s phone suddenly beeped, the peal of a clanging bell in the still of the garden causing her heart to stop for a second. Calming her breathing, she peered at the message in the glare of the sun and frowned. Looking up from it, she noticed the shed. She remembered it from the picture just as a gust of wind puffed past, and the shed door rolled slowly open.

Martin glanced around and walked quickly across the grass to it. She didn’t have a warrant, Butterworth had scoffed at the prospect of this on the evidence
they had. She wanted to see where the Brabents had lived. Who were they as a family? Was Michael a bully to his wife and children? Why had Rebecca been scared of him? If she went inside, the evidence could be inadmissible, depending on what she could get at interview. But the door was open. It was too much of a temptation with no one around. Martin moved quickly inside the shed.

The shed’s interior was orderly. An old dresser lined its back wall, its shelves filled with spray bottles and pesticides. Garden tools hung neatly from hooks and a lawn mower, its electric lead wrapped tidily up, rested from a large hook to the left of the door. There was a small rug on the floor and a camping stool with a stack of old newspapers at its feet. A sign on the wall read ‘Dad’s Shed’. She ran her fingers along the top of the dresser. No dust. Whoever was in charge of the gardening kept this place spotless. She opened one of the dresser drawers. Seed packets and some old gardening magazines. The next drawer was locked.

Martin rested her hands on the dresser top, considering. She looked up and took one of the tools from the wall. It was a thin metal spade-like thing, the purpose of which Martin had no idea. She jemmied it into the top of the drawer and yanked. It wouldn’t budge. She tried again, hefting her weight against the handle of the metal spade. The noise made in this
effort was an explosion in the stagnant country air. She paused again, looked behind her out of the misty shed window to the garden. Nobody there. She gave herself one last chance and wrenched the spade handle downwards and towards her. The lock splintered, giving way and exposing the inside of the drawer through a small jagged hole where the catch had once been.

Martin pulled the drawer open and stood for a while, looking down at its contents, thinking carefully. Her thoughts hummed on the periphery of her brain like tinnitus, teasing her until she thought she’d go mad. She was getting Emily, she thought. The puzzle was clearing. It certainly looked as though Michael Brabents had been physically abusing his wife. Did that explain her suicide? Other than the fact that Martin was fairly sure that the journalist Sean Egan had emailed her the video anonymously. She stored that thought. She would need to find out where he’d got a copy of it but she was certain it was him – trying to provoke Emily’s parents into a reaction to their daughter’s behaviour, something to stoke the fires of the potential sexual-bullying scandal surrounding the university since Emily’s death.

Now Kit had left home and Emily was gone, what had Rebecca got left, Martin wondered? A life spent alone with a man who hit her down the pub when he’d had a few too many jars.

But more than that, she thought as she looked down at the drawer. Had Rebecca Brabents known about this? Had she known what her husband had felt about his own daughter? Had she had any inkling or knowledge at all that, at the bottom of her garden, in the shed, was a drawer. And in that secret place were hundreds of photographs of Emily, stuffed out of sight, put there for Michael Brabents’ eyes only.

January was an icy plinth in the academic year. It stood proud, guarding the entrance to what was to come. I felt it as soon as I got off the train at Durham. London had been cold, but here the weather was bitter. The sweet snow of December now seemed girlish, replaced by a brittle hoar frost, the city transformed into a treacherous skating pond.

The first people I saw were a crowd of girls from Joyce; one of them was on my English course. She had been sitting in one of the carriages further up the train and I only recognized her at the ticket barrier as she struggled to heft her bag through the ridiculously small gates. As I made to help her, she flicked her hair in order to glance at me, a smile on her lips. This disappeared when she saw the identity of her gallant aide.

‘Oh, hi,’ she said disappointedly.

‘Hi, there. Good Christmas?’

She smiled a thin smile which failed to reach her eyes. ‘Yes thank you. You?’

‘Great,’ I said positively, dragging this conversation forwards by a sheer force of will. ‘Let me help you with your bag to the taxi.’

‘Oh, it’s fine, seriously. Really, I’m fine.’ She lifted up her bag on to her shoulder and turned her back to me, heading towards the taxi rank to join her friends. ‘See you around,’ she called over her shoulder.

I remained there in her wake, standing alone. My lips were chapped from the cold, and I chewed on them, staring after her.
They were bitches
, I thought.
What absolute bitches
. I swung my rucksack on to my back and followed them out of the station to the line of people waiting in the cold. The dark of our coats against the white of the frost, the smoke of the buildings from the bottom of the hill reminded me of a Lowry painting. I laughed to myself. Those bitches wouldn’t even know who Lowry was.

I did, though. In the midst of all this shit these people kept throwing at me, I knew of myself that I was better than them. My brain was better, it would keep one step ahead of them. I breathed out, clouding the air in front of me. And they didn’t know yet, all the cretins at Joyce and Keats and everywhere else. I hugged it, as a secret to myself. They didn’t know that I had been the victor in the holidays. That Emily and I were closer than ever.

The start of the Epiphany term was sluggish for most people, I thought. Classes plodded on, climbing that interminable curve up to the middle of term when without warning we would find ourselves
hurtling downhill towards the prospect of next term’s exams. Zack and the physics crew were getting overexcited about a firework display planned for the Palace Green in a few weeks’ time. Zack was in charge of The Rockets, the committee responsible for, yes, you’ve guessed it … I refrained from voicing to him my concern that a bunch of geeks should be in charge of setting off explosives in a public place
that they themselves had designed
. But so be it. The university authorities clearly thought it good for morale, and our bedroom thus became a den of balsa wood and some very worrying brownish bottles which I suspected contained a chemical no one in their right mind wanted to sleep next to. As usual, however, I kept my head down and ignored things.

I was, in actual fact, going through something of my own personal epiphany at that time. We had started looking at the Irish writers in class. I was battling with Joyce, falling in love with Yeats and hating Beckett. If you want to know the truth, my main reason for hating Beckett was that a comprehension of his work remained as distant to me as the Moroccan sands. But it was more than that. I taped a picture of him in his black polo neck jumper above my desk. His long face with the blue eyes, quiff of striped grey hair, crags in his face meandering like the sides of a vase being pulled slowly out of a potter’s wheel. He was a
lesson to me, Beckett. He talked of non-knowing, the subtraction of things.

I knew this was wrong. I didn’t like it. I was positive that it was only through knowledge that we could own things, that we could possess them. I couldn’t let things slip away like that, let them go as leaves floating down the green waters of the weir. Every time I thought about this, I would get hot in the face. I would strap my trainers on hurriedly and run down the banks of it, checking constantly with my eyes that things were just as they should be, that nothing had stolen away.

The first time I saw Emily that term, I was, once again, out running. She was part of my second epiphany. She was dawdling along the path of the riverbank, halos of breath resting in her hair before disappearing into the winter sky. I pulled up short in front of her, but she side-stepped me, unseeing. After a cold stab of disappointment, I saw she had her headphones in so I patted her on her elbow. She looked up, startled, and then smiled. A rush of warmth entered the iciness suffusing my body at that. I knew I wasn’t as alone any more.

‘Hi, Emily,’ I said heavily, catching my breath.

‘Running again.’

I nodded, wiping the sweat off my forehead with my wrist. ‘How are you? Annabel says your dad drove you up.’

I fell in beside her, and we carried on, ambling along the riverbank. A heron swooped down next to us and landed on the muddy slope to the water, but I barely noticed it. I shivered slightly as the sweat began to freeze on my bare arms. It was another glacial day.

‘Yes. He wanted to make up for the fighting in the holidays, I guess.’ She shrugged. ‘It was fine. He turned around and drove straight back.’ She looked up at me. ‘How are you, anyway? How’s things at Nightingale?’

‘Oh, you know. Same. Working. Not doing much else.’ I looked about me, albeit I was completely unaware of my surroundings as we walked. ‘So …’ I floundered a little bit then. How to approach it? ‘Have you seen Nick since you’ve been back?’

‘It’s only been a couple of days,’ she said. Did I discern a melancholy in that remark? She seemed to brighten then, though. ‘I love this weather, don’t you? It’s so fresh, galvanizing really!’

‘Yes, I suppose so.’ I thought she sounded fake, cheerleading her way through her life. I thought for a moment and found a topic she’d be interested in: ‘Are you going to Sixes on Friday?’

Emily wrapped her arms around herself and nodded. ‘’Sposed to. Annabel wants to go. I guess Nick and that lot will be there. I don’t know …’

‘Don’t know what?’

‘I don’t know if I want to do it any more. After I saw you in the holidays …’ She looked up and smiled at me again. ‘I just feel like last term was a bit of a nightmare, you know? Maybe I should just put it all behind me, start again afresh.’ She laughed ironically. ‘Actually do some work?’

I stared at her as we walked. Emily tottered somewhat on a patch of icy leaf mulch and reached out for my arm, which I gave to her. I needed to think about this. Emily starting afresh was not something I had considered. An Emily without Nick. Without Annabel. Available to be my friend without any of the trappings of the rest of the bollocks. I stopped and turned her to face me.

‘Yes, Emily! That’s exactly what you need to do. Start anew. Ignore them all, leave them to it. We can work together. I can help you.’ I could feel the earnestness of my face reaching epic proportions. I tried to rein it in. ‘Tell you what. How about we both go to Sixes on Friday? You come with me. We’ll have a few drinks, nothing crazy. Then you can have a good time and you’re not dependent on them. You can leave when you want and just go home.’ What I was saying was,
Look, I’m fun too! We can have fun together! I’m not just about boring old work and slog. I can let my hair down like the best of them. But I also know when to stop – I’m good like that!

Emily looked disconcerted, but – I knew her so
well – I could see the peaks of her deepest worries lurch across her face. She was scared that maybe I was now her only friend. ‘All right,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Let’s do it.’ We’d reached Prebends Bridge by that stage. I will always remember her standing at the end of it, framed by the stone archway that marked the beginning of the climb up the Bailey to Joyce. She had a pink beret on, one side of which covered her left ear. Her cheeks were rosy from the walk, and she wore big white mittens. She looked like a child. She seemed to cling on to me then with her eyes. I saw it. I was her anchor. She waved and ran in the other direction to me, up the slope to where the vultures awaited her.