Fragile Lives (3 page)

Ursula shrugged. ‘Jill's parents got killed in a car crash. She wants to go and live with her nan but there's a problem of some sort. I think her other nan is saying she should go and live with her and Jill doesn't want to.' She shrugged again. ‘Her and Caroline only really talk to each other. Don't know much about Caroline except she was taken into care five years ago and she's been shuffled round places like this ever since, but she's been here a year now and wants to stay.'

Why would anyone want to stay? George thought. He felt a sudden rising panic that he might feel like that one day. That this place or somewhere like it might be somewhere he actually wanted to be.

The door crashed open. ‘Mind what you're doing,' Cheryl reprimanded, ‘and hurry up you pair or you'll have no time to eat before the bus gets here.'

‘Bus?' George asked eyeing the two newcomers and thinking that he'd have described them as a lot of things but definitely not a pair.

‘Minibus,' Ursula told him. ‘It's kept in a garage down the hill. Jim, he does the gardens and the repairs and stuff and he drives it. Keep away from those two,' she added. ‘Couple of creeps.'

Richard, George remembered. That was the name of the tall one. He'd grunted some sort of reply when George had been introduced the day before. George guessed he was about his age and he didn't remember seeing him at school but he knew the type even without Ursula's warning. Thick, sly and unable to think for themselves, like the kids who used to hang around with Mark Dowling back in Frantham.

‘Does he go to our school?'

‘Used to, got expelled a couple of years ago. He goes to that place for morons. Back on track or whatever it's called.'

George had never heard of it but he figured he'd got the gist.

‘The other one, Brandon Jones.' She pronounced the name grandly. ‘Thinks he's too good for us. He's a right nerd.'

Something in the way she said it caused George to take a closer look, both at Brandon Jones and at Ursula herself. There had been a bitter, angry edge to her tone as though something about Brandon really hurt her, cut through that ‘I can take care of myself' carapace that Ursula had deliberately cultivated to protect herself. Ursula was tough because she had to be, but George didn't for one minute think she liked it any more than he did.

Ursula bit into her toast and the brief silence allowed George time to take another look at Brandon. He was taller than George – everyone was taller than George – but looked about the same age and, now he'd had reason to take notice of him, George figured he'd seen him about the school but he was definitely not in any of the same classes. George was in one of the two ‘middle streams' for most stuff, so Brandon must be either in the top group or in amongst the no-hopers down in the bottom. George's biggest school fear had always been that his grades would slip enough for him to fall into that particular category. He'd never quite made it into the top stream but he'd just about managed to maintain his place in the upper mid.

‘What class are you in?' It was something he didn't know about Ursula either.

‘Mrs Regans'.'

‘Oh.' He might have known Ursula would have been in the stream above him.

‘I hate it.'

George shrugged. He didn't know anyone that actually admitted to liking school.

‘So's Brandon.'

‘Oh.' He figured that might explain something but he wasn't yet sure what.

‘OK,' Cheryl announced. ‘Five minutes. Make sure you check your lists. George, you need to fill yours in. Ursula will show you the board.'

‘Board?' George asked as they scurried out of the kitchen.

‘That thing.' She pointed to a whiteboard at the end of the hall. It was divided into a daily grid and had their names listed down the side. ‘Tells us when we've got to take our games kit and all that rubbish. Like we can't think for ourselves.'

Glancing at the board as he passed, George actually thought it might be quite a good idea to have a daily checklist. He guessed that Ursula might have the kind of encyclopedic memory that meant she never turned up with the wrong thing on the wrong day, but when it came down to remembering what homework
he
had due in or if there was some extra kit
he
needed, he had to write it down. Karen had stuck a list up next to the phone in the hall so he could check the usual stuff and with a pad of Post-it notes close by so he could keep track of anything unusual.

Karen was good at doing all that; the small things their mother could never get her head around.

George felt tears pricking at his eyes and busied himself with fastening his backpack so that Ursula wouldn't see. He wasn't sure if the threatened tears were because of his mum or missing Karen or just because he was feeling generally sorry for himself or a mixture of the whole bloody mess, but whatever it was it hurt. Hurt almost more than he could bear.

‘All ready then?' Cheryl sang out. ‘See you all tonight.' She held the door and they trooped out into the chill, damp morning air and climbed aboard the dark-blue minibus.

‘When does she go off duty?' George wondered out loud. Cheryl had been there when he arrived, still at Hill House late last night and here she was again.

‘Oh, she's on a three-day stopover.' Ursula was disinterested. ‘Then she's off for two and back on again. She's not married or anything so she doesn't need to go home. I suppose she gets an extra allowance for anti-social hours or something.' She sniffed as though disapproving. ‘Come on, we'll sit here.'

And so George found himself sitting next to this small, skinny blonde girl and staring past her out of the window at countryside and sea half obscured by drizzle, half glad, half dreading the return to school.

‘Just had an interesting call,' DS Frank Baker told Mac as he walked into the lobby of the police station that morning. ‘We've got ourselves a dead body.'

‘I told him, bodies usually are dead,' PC Andy Nevins said. ‘It's tautological, that is.' He ducked away, out of Frank's reach.

‘Not always, lad. The body in question might be a living, breathing celebration of God's creative urges. It would still be a body.'

‘And
is
this one dead?' Mac asked.

‘Ah, well
this
one is. Been dead a little while, I reckon, and as it happens the experts would back me up.'

He sounded happier, Mac thought, than one should usually be on receiving news of a corpse. ‘Parker,' Mac guessed.

‘Don't know for sure,' Frank confessed, ‘but it seems likely to me.'

Mac nodded. George's father had gone into the water just less than three weeks before. As he was beginning to find out, it could take time before tide and current combined to bring any lost thing back into the shore. ‘Where?' he asked.

Sergeant Baker handed him a slip of paper. ‘Directions. You're expected. Take you about twenty minutes to get there.'

‘Who found the body?'

‘Dog walkers,' Frank told him. ‘There's a little bit of a cove, beach is only accessible for a few hours at low tide. They went down there this morning and found our friend.'

‘Lucky them,' Mac muttered as he made his way out through the back way to collect his car. He wondered vaguely just what proportion of bodies was found by dog walkers and, more gingerly, speculated on what state the body might be in. It was hard, though, to summon any sympathy for this dead body; George's father had been a brute, violent to the very last. Mac decided he would have to go up and tell George about it before he heard about the find on the news. He wondered how George would cope with yet another bit of grim news. True, he'd spent half his life running away from the man, but Mac couldn't think that yet another funeral was likely to improve the quality of the boy's life. Would he even want to go? If he did then Mac would ask Rina to go along as well; Rina would be better than Mac at knowing what to do or say for the best.

Mac wriggled his car out of the tiny space behind the police station and set out along the coast road. According to Frank's directions he'd have to turn off after about two miles on to one of those single-track lanes that looked as though they were just farm tracks but which might actually go on for the best part of a mile before ending abruptly on a cliff top or link unexpectedly with two or three others of their ilk. Locals drove these tiny tracks like Mac might have driven a motorway. Mac himself was far more cautious, knowing he'd be the one to have to practise his reversing skills should he meet a tractor coming up the other way. He still wasn't local enough to have won the right not to have to back up.

‘Right, this looks like my turn.' He picked the instructions off the passenger seat and paused to scrutinize them again before committing. ‘Two stone gateposts; no gate.' He swung the car in the best arc he could manage on the too-narrow lane and eased between the posts, just clipping the wing mirror on the passenger side. It shuddered, but, to his relief, remained attached. He'd lost the first only three days after his arrival and the second two weeks after that. Rob DeBarr up at the local garage had taken to joking that he should get a smaller car.

He could see that he was in the right place. A huddle of people clad in a mix of white overalls or fluorescent jackets stood out against an increasingly angry sky, the angle of the parked vehicles indicated the steepness of the slope high on the cliff top. Mac bumped his way down the track and then across sodden grass. The line of the footpath had been trodden into the mud, leading back towards Frantham and on in the direction of Bridport. A slit cut in the cliff pointed the way down.

‘Morning, Inspector.' A quick smile from one of the white-suited figures lifted Mac's spirits as he recognized her. It would be very good, he thought, to meet the blue-eyed Miriam Hastings in a venue other than over dead bodies.

‘Mac, come on down, as they say.'

Mac turned, surprised by the second familiar voice. ‘Didn't think this was your patch?'

DI Kendal smiled. ‘Not sure that it is. It's often a bit of a moot point when you get out into the boondocks but since we've both got an interest in Edward Parker I guess we can sort out the niceties of jurisdiction later.' He led the way. A narrow path had been cut or worn into the crumbling face of the cliff and there was evidence that there had once been a handrail. Now, Mac thought, it was a route only fit for the average mountain goat. ‘How are they going to get the body out?'

‘We've got the coastguard giving us a hand. Helicopter. It was either that or strap him to a gurney and haul him up and no one really fancied that. We've only got about another hour before the tide comes in so the 'copter's due any time.'

‘Should be interesting to see,' Mac commented. He was shocked at how calm he felt. The last deaths he had attended he had felt very differently. He recalled with vivid embarrassment that he had nearly thrown up when viewing Mrs Freer's body. The old lady had been battered to death and the blooded fragility of her corpse had shattered any control he might previously have had. He'd handled it though, but again, when Mark Dowling had been found he had been challenged and found wanting. Less wanting, for sure, but …

Maybe there was a diminishing return: reaction weighed against perception of guilt. Mark Dowling had been a murderer, taking the old woman's life so casually and so easily that perhaps some part of Mac's psyche decided he was only worth so much shock; some tiny percentage of a reaction. Maybe that was why he felt so calm now. Parker senior had been a violent and brutish man and Mac could not think of a single reason to grieve his passing.

‘Who found him?'

‘Retired Brigadier and his wife out walking their dogs. The wife was a bit shaken up so I had them taken home. They're expecting us later. SOCO have done almost all they can here but we wanted to wait for you before we bagged and moved.'

‘Thanks,' Mac said. It helped, seeing an intact scene. However good the crime-scene pictures or the documentary information, it never quite matched that first impression.

The body had been wedged between rocks at the foot of the cliff. Battered by tide and stones and eaten by whatever opportunistic creatures fancied an easy meal, it was still identifiably human but beyond that it was hard to say. Shredded remnants of what looked like blue jeans and a striped shirt still clung to the body. Mac tried to recall what Edward Parker had been wearing. Where were the shoes and coat? Had they been dragged off as the body scraped over the rocks?

‘Reckon it's him?' Kendal asked. ‘Looks to be the right height and build. Have to be dental records for identification, I reckon. Doesn't look to be much left of the fingers.' He shrugged. ‘The sea isn't gentle with the dead.'

Mac nodded. They both glanced up at the sound of a helicopter. ‘This is his ride. How will they land?'

‘Oh, they won't, just send a winch man down. Best get out of the way so he can be bagged up.'

Mac nodded and the two of them retreated to the other end of the narrow cove and watched as the body was eased out of its wedged position and a body bag was laid out ready to receive it. The photographer stepped forward to take the pictures of the back of the body as it was turned and to record anything lying beneath. There was a sudden pause in activity. And a shout from the photographer.

‘Better come and take a look.'

Curious, Mac and Kendal hurried over.

‘Back of the head,' the CSI indicated.

‘Bloody hell. Looks like an entry wound. That isn't right.'

‘Shot? If he was shot, then it isn't Parker. What about an exit wound?'

They laid him back down and Miriam gently probed what was left of his forehead. ‘Hard to tell,' she said. ‘There's so much damage, it isn't possible to identify what might be an exit wound and what might have been caused by time and tide.'