No Cherubs for Melanie (10 page)

“I believe he is, sir.”

“All I'm saying, Peter, is don't stick your neck out for him. He isn't worth it. A man who can't separate
his personal life from the job is a liability. You know that.”

Bryan gave a noncommittal nod. “He's also a damn good copper who happens to have been through a rough time. That last case nearly got him killed.”

“Don't get sentimental, Chief Inspector, that was nearly a year ago. We're running a police force not a bloody kindergarten.”

“I know that, sir. But we all have problems from time to time.”

“Yeah. And we leave 'em at the door.”

The chief inspector wasn't going to argue and contented himself with mumbling, “We all make mistakes.”

Edwards heard. “Humph. The only time people say that is when they've just made a bloody great balls-up.”

“Are you saying it was a mistake to give Bliss the case?”

Edwards need not have answered, his expression made his feelings clear. “Let me put it this way: it was your idea, so I'll hold you personally responsible if he screws up. If you want to keep him on the case, on your head be it.”

“That's a risk I'm prepared to take, sir.”

“Right, well keep him under control. Give him two weeks at the most, and for God's sake keep him focussed. You know me, Peter, I like to give a man a fair shake.” I know you, thought Bryan, staring at his feet. A pompous toad who'll jump on anyone if it makes you look good. The secretaries know you as well — I've heard them warning newcomers, “Don't bend over in front of Edwards, ‘cos he'll whop a finger up your fanny as soon as look at you.” And how come you drive a filthy great Mercedes and holiday in Fiji? It's a wonder Internal Investigations aren't camped out on your front lawn. Oh… I know you, all right.

“So,” said Edwards, his tone indicating he'd had the last word and the meeting was over. Bryan was half out of the door before he realized he hadn't even started his coffee.

The pavement was still damp from an overnight shower when Samantha answered the front door to her neat, terraced house, half a slice of dry toast sticking out of her mouth.

“Sorry I'm late,” said her father, slipping into the barely furnished hallway. “Busses,” he muttered, without need of further explanation.

She waltzed past him down the short hallway, stepped into her shoes, slid on her coat, and swallowed the toast in a single fluid motion. “I've got to get going,” she called, half out of the front door. “Your stuff's in the attic.” she added sourly, “And don't mess my place up.”

“Would I?” he called, genuinely offended.

She turned. “I've seen your place, remember.”

Bliss ignored the innuendo and pointed a finger at her belly. “Have you told your mother about… ?”

She dismissed the question with an unconcerned, “Not yet,” and quickly changed the subject as she made for her car. “Must dash. I've got an indecent assault at Snaresbrook Magistrates.”

“Prosecuting?” he asked, hopefully.

“Defending,” she replied over her shoulder, knowing how much it would aggravate him.

“Hm,” he grunted, but refused to be drawn.

Swinging a bulky brown briefcase onto the rear seat, she leapt behind the wheel and shouted, “Don't forget to lock up behind you,” as the engine burst into life. She was gone before Bliss could object.

Samantha's whirlwind exit left an uncanny stillness in its wake. Bliss felt Melanie Gordonstone's ghost calling him. He knew she was there, in the attic — it was the reason for his visit — yet suddenly he found himself stalling. What was he scared of? What harm could she do him now? Was she seeking revenge?

The only coffee in Samantha's kitchen — instant decaffeinated — compared favourably with the stuff available in the police canteen, but then, so would used engine oil, he thought. But at least she had fresh milk. He drank two cups before venturing to the loft.

The time-worn buff folder with nibbled edges, creased corners, and faded green treasury tags jumped out at him and he did not need to read the label. He stared blankly at the file; opening it was unnecessary, he already knew every detail, even the stain made by a wayward tea cup in 1983, and he was unable to explain, even to himself, why he had bothered to search it out.

Back downstairs, in Samantha's living room, he dropped the unopened file on the coffee table and scanned through the contents in his mind. He could recall every word with almost the same precision as he could recite the Lord's Prayer or take the Oath in court. There was, he knew, a statement headed ‘Martin Gordonstone, father of deceased,' together with statements from Betty-Ann Gordonstone, née Miller, mother of deceased, Dr. Mohammed Akbar, GP, and Dr. Eugene Finestein, pathologist. There was also another statement, the first one in the file, had he chosen to look. He knew it was there but his mind worked hard to blot it out, to pretend it didn't exist — to pretend it had never existed. It was the statement of twenty-two-year-old Detective Constable David Anthony Bliss.

He escaped to the kitchen, threw open the window, lit a cigarette, and made himself another coffee. It was
no better than the first two, but its preparation filled time and occupied his mind.

The temptation to open the file eventually nagged him back into the room. Melanie's spirit was demanding action; not retribution — it was too late for retribution now, he knew, but not too late to excavate the truth and satisfy the poor girl's soul, not to mention the balm it might apply to his conscience.

The file still lay accusingly on the table despite his prayers that it might have vanished. Tearing his eyes away from it, he deliberately distracted himself by scouting around the room for signs of Samantha's pregnancy. What had changed? Nothing, as far as he could see. The little house looked the same as usual. Like Samantha, he thought: neat, clean, and compact. More books than a junior school, less furniture than a squatter's pad.

“What do you expect to find?” he said to himself and tried casting his mind back to the time that Sarah had been pregnant with Samantha. But he shook his head after a few seconds realizing that the memories had faded beyond recognition and he questioned whether the images of his beautiful young wife he managed to summons were recollections or fantasy. Thoughts of Sarah, still young and still his wife, triggered a flood of emotion and his face started to crumple. “Stop it,” he ordered, and managed to pull himself together.

Perhaps Samantha has bought a book on childbirth, he thought, changing the subject away from Sarah, scanning the bookshelves crammed with legal texts. But there was little room on Samantha's shelves for such trivia as the birth of a baby. What else, he wondered. A pregnancy testing kit in the bathroom, a fridge full of peanut butter, or a cupboard full of Fry's chocolate creams. He searched fruitlessly. No cuddly toys, no photos of herself when she was a baby — nothing.

Maybe it is a false alarm. Damn, he thought, realizing he'd been so preoccupied with his own problems he'd never asked the obvious: Who's the father? He scolded himself for his lack of interest, but noted that she hadn't volunteered the information. She would have told me if she'd wanted me to know, he reasoned. What would she have said if I had asked? Mind your own fucking business, probably, he thought with a smile. Then quite irrationally he became angry. “It
is
my business,” he declared out loud. “A quarter of the poor little sod will have my genes.” The idea tickled him, twenty-five percent of his identity going to make up a new life and marching off into the future.

The thought of a young child dragged him back to the file on the table. There were, he knew, photographs of a child in the file. Death-scene photographs, taken to show the coroner every gory detail of the unfortunate incident. He sat slowly, and picked up the file, picturing every detail of the photographs. They were, he recalled, not at all gruesome. Not like the usual murder pictures. No blood, no faces contorted in agony, no jagged wounds, no severed body parts with protruding bones, no brains and skull fragments splattered all over the front of an express train or patterned across a wall. Just a little girl sleeping peacefully in a hospital cot and the same little figure, naked, sculpted out of polished white marble, as she lay on the mortuary table awaiting the mortician's knife.

He continued to resist the temptation to open the file. There is no point, he thought, defying the power of his own conscience. Why punish yourself again?

You deserve to be punished
, said his conscience, playing Devil's advocate.

“Don't open it.”

Open it
.

“Don't open it.”

Punish yourself
.

“Don't punish yourself anymore.”

Temptation won. He opened the file. The photographs lay on top and he slowly shuffled through them sad nostalgia. The little stone cherub had not aged. One of the photographs was missing, although he could not remember where it had gone. But he was able to conjure it up from memory: the light blue lake dappled with touches of white from a few passing clouds, some trees — bushes really, hawthorn and elder, he recalled — tiny pink splotches of water lilies hiding amongst a raft of greenery, the shadow of a taller tree falling across a patch of water and muddying it with a deep grey tint. And there, in the centre, was a shoe forming a tiny red speck that looked more like a glitch in the film than something tangible in the water.

It was the cameraman, the scenes of crime officer, who spotted it through his lens and called Bliss's attention.

“Did she have her shoes on?”

He hadn't noticed, he had been so wrapped up in his frantic efforts to breathe life into her.

A phone call to the emergency room soon answered the query. “Yes, one of her shoes was missing, the left one.”

She must have kicked it off when she was struggling in the water, they had decided. He remembered the semisubmerged shoe vividly. Wading out to retrieve it with his trousers rolled knee high. A red sandal, Clark's, size…? He'd forgotten the size and tortured his brain for a full half minute before deciding it was immaterial.

Although he had forgotten the shoe size he remembered the ambulanceman, a gentle giant of a man who tenderly scooped the little body off the grassy bank with hands as big as shovels and swung her onto the stretcher.
Bliss still had his lips affixed to hers as the man carried the stretcher to the waiting ambulance, he was still blowing, still breathing movement into her chest, and his tears still trickled onto her tiny cheeks. Within moments a plastic oxygen mask had replaced his mouth and the ambulance drove away, a mechanical respirator now pumping air into the lifeless lungs, the little chest heaving futilely, mocking life. Her tiny heart no longer even trying to beat. Each future page of her life's passport now stamped with a single word, “Dead”

And under the photographs in the file lay
the
statement. His statement. The statement headed, “This statement of David Anthony Bliss, consisting of two pages, each signed by me, is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and I make it knowing that if it is tendered in evidence I shall be liable to prosecution if I have wilfully stated in it anything which I know to be false or do not believe to be true.”

He didn't read the statement, he had no need, but the final paragraph leapt off the page accusingly. “I believe that Melanie Ann Gordonstone, aged 6 years, wandered away from the house and accidentally fell into the lake while her parents, Martin and Betty-Ann Gordonstone, were otherwise engaged.” Those words, those exact words, had reverberated confidently around the Coroner's Court twenty years earlier, in the clear calm voice of the young policeman standing in the witness box. And the voice of the coroner, an older, gravelly voice filled with quiet authority and a lifetime's experience, invited him to confirm the statement so there should be no doubt in anyone's mind. “Is that your honest belief, Officer?”

“It is, Sir,” Bliss had replied.

“Thank you, Officer. No further questions.”

He had faltered leaving the witness box and looked at the faces in the sparsely peopled room: the
stoic face of Martin Gordonstone; the dishevelled face of his wife, a poor crumpled figure who had snivelled throughout the twenty minutes of the proceedings and had been excused from giving evidence by the coroner on the basis that she had no material facts to offer; the impassive face of a reporter from the local paper who'd seen it all before. He'd seen the sad faces, heard the sorry stories and the guilt-ridden excuses: “I only left her for a minute, I don't know how it could have happened.” It happens, he thought, all too often it happens. And, at the back of the courtroom, Bliss spied a huddle of grieving relatives awaiting the next inquest, an inquest into the death of a ninety-three-year-old victim of road accident.

There was no sign of Margaret. No twelve-year-old weeping tears for her little sister. In fact, as far as anybody in the courtroom was concerned, Margaret might never have existed. Gordonstone had hardly mentioned his surviving daughter as he recounted his well-rehearsed story. Bliss, in his evidence, though not in his statement, had carefully avoided making reference to Margaret; he had no wish to explain why he hadn't interviewed her. Everybody, it seemed, had avoided mentioning Margaret.

With no further witnesses to be called, the grey-haired coroner removed his half-spectacles and, doing his best to inject as much sympathy as he could into his voice, pronounced that Melanie Ann Gordonstone had been the victim of a tragic accidental death. But he'd seen it all before, as well.

“We thought it would be too upsetting for Margaret to attend,” explained Gordonstone loudly in the foyer outside, after the verdict had been handed down. It seemed a reasonable assertion at the time; it was only later that Bliss wondered about the true meaning of the statement.
Would it have been too upsetting for Margaret, or would it have been too upsetting for her father if she had used the opportunity to blurt out that he had killed her sister? And, Bliss thought, why had Gordonstone found it necessary to make such a loud and public declaration about Margaret's absence? Isn't it usually the guilty who most vociferously protest their innocence?