Frozen Music (13 page)

Behind us, standing in the doorway with a tray, Debbie emitted a warning sound from the back of her throat. Debbie the watchdog, I thought. ‘Why don't we talk about the book?' she said, as she placed the coffee tray in front of us on the table. ‘If you've read Karen's book most of your questions will already have been answered. But if Karen can clarify…' Her mouth stretched into a brisk smile, like a rubber band being pulled, then as quickly it had sprung back again into its former tight-lipped expression.

‘The photographer will be arriving in about half an hour,' I said, glancing at my watch. ‘So we have plenty of time.'

‘I'll show you the letters,' Karen sighed. ‘You wouldn't believe the letters I've been sent, thousands of them. Still get them. Especially since that telly interview. The postman sometimes has to make a special delivery just to here.' She shrugged and stifled a sound much like a giggle. ‘And to think there were whole weeks when I didn't get a thing other than that awful junk mail. Not even bills.'

Next she showed me the children's bedroom. ‘It's just like they left it.'

I stood on the threshold gazing into the room, trying to get the sense of the three little boys who had lived there once and who were gone now, dead at an age when most of us haven't even started properly to live. A bunk bed stood against one wall, made up with brightly coloured duvet covers. The top one was red and black with a pattern of aeroplanes and the bottom one had football players in yellow and green. A single bed stood against the opposite wall. This duvet cover had blue air balloons on it and was thrown back as if the bed's occupant had only just got up. Toys lay scattered across the brown carpet, cars, Lego, some
Star Wars
figures. A poster of Oasis was Blu-Tacked to the wall above the desk.

‘Just as they left it,' Karen said, her voice quiet. ‘The top bunk was Gareth's and the bottom one was Shaun's. Andrew slept there.' She pointed at the single bed.

‘Did Andrew continue to sleep here after his brothers' deaths?'

Karen closed the door gently behind her. ‘Oh yes,' she said. ‘It was
a comfort to him, and to Shaun before he…' Her voice faltered. Debbie, who had followed us upstairs, put a comforting arm round her as she shot me a mean look.

‘I'm sorry,' I mouthed.

‘There's something odd about this whole thing,' I told Chloe the next day. ‘I'd like to go back again. See if I can talk to her without the minder.'

Karen's book became a best-seller. I called her, having copied her number down from the phone in her house.

‘Debbie doesn't like me talking to the press without her there,' Karen confided to me over the phone. ‘But she's away with another client now, touring if you like. I said to her, “What if I need you?” I said. No, I can't agree with that. I need to tell my story, to help other people who are suffering.'

‘Quite right,' I mumbled. ‘So true.'

This time Karen herself opened the door. I hardly recognised her. Gone was the frizzy bleached perm, replaced by a glossy helmet of red hair. Gone, too, were the leggings and the white cardigan. Today she was wearing a sharp suit with padded shoulders and a short skirt showing off surprisingly shapely legs. Spotting my gaze she smiled that coy little smile of hers. ‘It's my publishers. They smartened me up now I'm a best-seller. I have to say I was a bit of an old frump before.'

We sat once more in the neat little sitting-room with its one shelf of books, its pale water-colour prints hung too high, the small teak dining-table at the far end by the west-facing window. ‘I might be going to America,' Karen said as she poured us a cup of tea. ‘On tour.' She handed me a Rich Tea biscuit. ‘Whoever would have thought? Me who's never been anywhere, apart from that trip to EuroDisney, that is. I always wanted to travel, when I was young like, but then you marry, have kids.' She shrugged. ‘Things change.'

‘Where do you get your strength from? The enormity of your tragedy would have left most people broken, yet you seem to have got your life back together in a remarkable way.'

‘I am strong.' Karen nodded, each strand of shiny red hair remaining in place, rendered immobile by everything modern haircare could
throw at it. ‘But most of my strength has come from others.' Her voice rose to an almost evangelical pitch. ‘The many thousands of hands that have reached out to mine, the many voices ringing out in comfort. You know.' Her voice lowered a note. ‘Passers-by recognise me in the street and come forward to touch my hand. It's been said that I should consider going into Healing.'

‘That's good,' I said. ‘People not being shy of you, I mean. So often you hear bereaved men or women complain that friends cross the street to avoid having to confront what happened. It's as if loss were contagious, they say.'

Karen nodded again. ‘But it's different with me; they know me from the telly, the newspapers too. You're not the first person to write about me.'

‘Oh, I'm well aware of that.' I smiled at her.

‘I'm giving out the prizes at the darts comp at our local, Saturday. Last year they had that old boy from
Coronation Street
, what's his name…'

‘Call me a cold-hearted hard-headed bitch,' I said to Audrey as I perched on her bed that evening, ‘but the woman does revel in all the attention given her. She'll be on
Good Morning
next week.'

‘I would never call you a
bitch
, darling.' Audrey turned down the volume on the television. ‘Such an ugly word. Anyway, I blame the Americans. All that talk of being famous. All these people prepared to humiliate themselves and their families the moment a television camera is pointed in their direction. In my day the distinction was made between fame and infamy – in fact, it was the all-important distinction – but not these days. All that matters now is to get your face on that screen. Apparently that makes you Somebody. And your lot, Esther, are as much to blame as anyone. As for that little Dempster woman, I can't help feeling that losing all your family one by one like that in totally different circumstances smacks of the most awful carelessness. Carelessness can be a terrible thing.' She passed me a doughnut from the plate of mixed ones: chocolate-covered ones, cinnamon, jam, ones with icing. I took a cinnamon one and bit into it. It was soft and slightly warm. I looked around the bedroom. ‘Don't tell me you've got an oven in here?'

‘Microwave.' She pointed to a shelf by her wardrobe. ‘They're a frightfully good idea. Anyway, I still think there's something fishy about the whole thing.'

‘If there were something suspicious about those deaths, you would think the police would have done something about it by now?'

Audrey shrugged her plump shoulders. ‘I suppose.'

‘She'll sue,' Chloe, my boss, said when she had finished reading my feature on Karen. ‘I'm not sure what it is you're saying exactly, but you are saying something. Something libellous, I should think. You know me, I'm not one to be soft where work is concerned, but don't you think that poor woman has suffered enough?'

‘That's what I'm not so sure about,' I said.

A couple of the papers that previously had written pieces full of tears and sympathy about Karen's Tragic Story, began to turn. WHY GRIEF SHOULD BE A PRIVATE MATTER read the headline of one article, by a well-known woman columnist. It was full of talk of the good old virtues of suffering in silence. Smiling while your heart is breaking. Keeping up a brave face; rolling up your sleeves and battening down the hatches. It was made clear that Karen Dempster lacked these qualities in spades. Then there were the neighbours who appeared suddenly, like embarrassing memories, and told of Karen's fondness for nights out with the girls, and of family rows and smacks around the head.

Little Gareth was always running away from home. It had only been a matter of time before he ran under a truck, in that good neighbour's humble opinion. Little Shaun was locked out all night once when he failed to return home before his parents went to bed. And little Andrew spent most of his time throwing stones at crows and stamping on baby birds. Oh dear!

Next the police reopened the investigation into the death of the Dempster children and their father. Karen went on television telling about the hate mail she was receiving and revealing that she was two months pregnant by a family friend. ‘People have said it's too soon,' she sobbed. ‘But I say to them, what do they know? I've suffered enough and now it's time I thought about me and my life. I mean if you don't look out for yourself, who should you look out for? What
business is it of anyone's anyway? What am I? Public property or something?'

A couple of days later it was revealed that Karen had spent the previous night in custody. While she was away, someone set fire to her house and the same neighbours who had championed her as a modern-day tragic heroine didn't call the fire brigade until it was too late to save anything from the burnt wreckage.

Two weeks after that Karen Dempster was arrested for the murder of her husband and of two of their three children.

It was the attention
, her sister Mandy pronounced.
I'm not saying that Karen did any of it, or anything, but she had always missed out on attention and when little Gareth died she got it, lots of it. I was always the pretty one and Mum and Dad just worshipped my two little girls, but with Gareth dead, it was Karen and her other two lads who were the centre of attention. I think she just missed it all when the months went by and life got back to normal. She'd always wanted to be famous had Karen, and with the boys dead and her husband and all, she was
.

There was a lot of discussion after that, about the part the media had played in the Dempster murders, sensationalising personal tragedy and crime, endowing fame on people like Karen Dempster and turning death and disaster into nothing more than a spectator sport.

‘You have no cause to hang your head in shame,' Chloe said to me. ‘You helped expose the woman.'

‘So I did something right on my way down the road to media hell,' I said.

‘Don't be so bloody melodramatic,' Chloe said.

THE
CHRONICLE
POINTS FINGER THAT LEADS TO ARREST, my paper boasted and I got a pat on the back and lots of free drinks bought for me at the pub by colleagues.

The day before Bertil's sixty-eighth birthday, Linus went shopping. Not for a present for his father – he had got that a long time before – but for Ivar. This was to be Ivar's first occasion with the whole family since he was a baby and Linus had promised him some new party clothes. It was lunchtime. Linus often wandered round the galleries
and shops in his break. He seldom bought anything, but he loved looking and as a result he knew just about every shop in town. To his wife's embarrassment he was able to join in a conversation about women's fashion keenly and with as much authority as he would speak on the subjects of art and books. Lotten's thin lips would set in an ever firmer line as Linus discussed the best place to buy knitwear or the wonderful new shop in Kungspassagen which sells scarves to die for. ‘I don't want to seem sexist or anything,' she said. ‘But it gets a bit embarrassing having one's husband being one of the girls with quite such ease.' Lotten said that she believed that the New Man thing was dead and buried, and that men and women should be true to their gender specifics. At this, Linus looked confused and said he was just doing what came naturally to him.

This particular lunchtime he was strolling happily along the pedestrian walkway that led to Erik & Anna, still after thirty years the best childrens wear shop in town. He wanted to get Ivar something special. Uncle Gerald and Cousin Kerstin had not seen him for years. He and Lotten had brought Ivar to the rambling old house on the island the summer after he was born. Lotten had agreed reluctantly to them joining the rest of the Stendal family for the annual summer break, but the visit had not been a success. It had ended prematurely with Lotten storming off towards the ferry, the baby in a sling around her neck.

‘Whatever is the matter?' Linus had asked, as he caught up with her in the car parked on the other side, as she had surely meant him to do.

‘Do you want a list?' Lotten glared at him. Actually, Linus did not, but he knew he was going to get one anyway. ‘For a start, I can't stand the way there's always so many of you,' Lotten said. ‘And always so noisy; arguing and bickering…'

‘Discussing. I think it would be fair to say we were discussing,' Linus interjected.

‘Oh, you would, would you? Well, to my untrained ear it sounds mightily like arguing. But that's just part of it… that dreadful Ulla.'

‘I've always been rather fond of Ulla. She's a brave old thing in her own way. I know she can be a bit annoying…'

‘She's frightful and you know it. And that bloody seagull she keeps, it's as vicious and smelly as she is.'

‘I never noticed that Ulla smelt.'

‘Well she does, of fish mostly, fish and peppermints. Yuk! And Olivia, perfect, condescending Olivia.'

‘Oh, come on now; Olivia has been nothing but kind and welcoming, and she dotes on Ivar.'

‘Olivia is condescending and interfering, and I wish she'd leave Ivar alone, always babbling away to him in English.'

Linus had tried to remain patient. ‘I thought we'd agreed that he should be brought up bilingual and that it was a wonderful opportunity.'

‘Yeah, all right.' Lotten had sounded grudging. ‘But she just can't stop interfering. And as for Gerald. He farts, don't say you haven't noticed? He just keeps doing it. And you all pretend that nothing has happened with that silly singing. I mean it, I can't stand it another minute, any of it.'

The long and the short of it was, Linus thought sadly as he walked into the shop, that Ivar had not been back on the island since and Linus had been able to go on just the shortest of visits. Lotten wanted nothing much to do with his family and as a result, Ivar too was kept at a distance. They saw Bertil and Olivia, of course, but even that was made as difficult as possible.