Slipknot (13 page)

‘I’m glad to see you,’ she said. ‘‘I’ve just had an uncomfortable time with the Gough parents who are angry at everyone – the Health Service, Callum Hughes. They’re spitting blood. And they wanted me to explain how it was that their nice, innocent boy was knifed by this psycho and why won’t I say that at the inquest.’

‘Oh dear.’ Alex lowered his long frame into the armchair. ‘Well – I’ve just come from speaking to Tyrone Smith.’

‘Not sure who I’d prefer to deal with. Not much of a choice really, is it? The Gough family or Smith. What did
he
have to say?’

‘He admits kicking Callum on the shin but,’ He grinned, ‘and I quote
‘I never touched ‘is bleedin’ face.’
He couldn’t say whether when Callum arrived he had or complained for any facial trauma.’

‘I suppose we’d already guessed that.’ She chewed on her lip. ‘You know, Alex.’

They were interrupted. This time it really was Jericho with two cups of coffee. Martha waited until he had closed the door behind him before continuing.

‘I can’t believe that Smith slept through Callum hanging himself. I just can’t.’

‘We-ell’ Randall put his mug down on the table. ‘I think we may have a sort of explanation for that.’

‘Yes?’

‘Smith had been quite troublesome at night. He couldn’t sleep, suffered from nightmares, would repeatedly bang on his door, keeping everyone else awake. He was given sleeping tablets.’

‘You’re joking.’

Alex shook his head. ‘Unfortunately not. They’d been prescribed for him by the prison doctor – a short course.’

‘Which he’d have had trouble stopping,’ Martha said wearily. ‘But you’re right. It does explain something which was making no sense.’

‘Yes. Well it explains Callum’s shin injury but not the bruises on his face and chest. If he’s telling the truth. We need to get this right, Martha, and we’re not there yet.’

‘So where do you go from here?’

‘I suppose I should talk to the two prison officers again.’

‘Good. Once we can explain the injuries to Shelley Hughes’s satisfaction we can complete the inquest. Both inquests. It’ll be better for everyone if Callum is buried soon. Roger Gough too. But I have the feeling that Gough’s parents are going to be very belligerent. I think they’ll keep hunting for someone or something to blame. Someone to sue. I think his inquest will be a long, drawn out affair which will, in turn, keep the story cooking in the Press.’

‘When is Roger Gough’s inquest?’

‘Next week. I’ll have to return a verdict of homicide.’

Martha was rubbing her forehead.

‘You all right?’

‘Yes. My au pair’s got engaged. She’ll be leaving soon, I expect. Which’ll leave me alone with Sukey.’

‘You’re not thinking of having another au pair?’

‘Sukey doesn’t want it. She feels grown up. But this job doesn’t always have regular hours and as you know our house is tucked away on its own. I mean she’s a sensible girl but I would prefer it if someone was there with her.’

Alex nodded but made no comment. He didn’t say that it was a shame about Martin and he didn’t ask her about a relationship.

Instead he said, ‘And how’s Sam getting on?’

Again she felt her brow furrow. ‘I’m not sure. I
think
he’s OK but boys don’t always say, do they? The old roast beef for tea. I’m hungry.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Wilfred Owen,’ she said, ‘writing from the trenches. Hiding his real situation from his mother. That’s boys for you, Alex. Girls are different.’ The statement jogged her memory. ‘By the way, did you read the paper yesterday?’

‘Bits.’

‘Specifically Katie Ashbourne’s statement.’

‘No, what did she say?’

‘More or less what a psycho Callum was and what a nice guy Roger Gough was. Toeing the usual line.’

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Given the circumstances it’s understandable. She was DreadNought’s girlfriend.’

They chatted for a bit longer before Alex stretched his legs out as though the sitting still was giving him cramp. ‘Well –
I’d better move on. I just thought you’d want to know how our enquiries were progressing.’

‘Thanks. What’s next?’

‘Back to the prison officers. As you said, until we’ve got a satisfactory explanation for the other bruises Shelley Hughes is not going to rest. And that means you won’t be able to close the inquest.’

He left.

But when he’d gone Martha started pondering.

She was aware that her sympathies had remained with Callum Hughes. And because of that she felt a compulsion to present him as a victim who had spilled over into violence rather than as the instigator of events.

As for Gough she saw him now as another victim – of his attitudes and prejudices.

Her mind flicked back to the CCTV footage of Callum’s last encounter with the two prison warders and the terror she had sensed in the boy even through the poor quality, grainy images. Superimposed on that was the testimony of Adam Farthing who had known both boys. He had painted a graphic enough portrait of Callum, bookish and thoughtful, and Gough, lashing out with his fists while enjoying both fear and accolade from his schoolmates.

Even the nickname Callum had dreamed up for Gough, the fear of nothing, the
DreadNought
warship and the picture that the name had conjured up, all had added to the myth of Roger Gough and made him bigger, tougher, more invincible than he was.

Two teenage boys were dead and nothing would change. The school would continue teaching, boys and girls would
still be bullied. There would still be weak and strong, the one taking cruel advantage of the other. There would always be stupid and intelligent. And so on.

It still happened at the school where murdered and victim had attended?

She sat back and struggled with her conscience. Sometimes her role as coroner was not quite enough. These were the times when she did a little probing for herself – as Martha
Rees
. Was this a case for Martha Rees to observe? Was this a time when Martha
Rees
should hang around outside a school and see what was going on?

It was always a temptation with her.

But a coroner’s work is a strict job, which walks along narrow alleyways dictated by the government. They enquire – no more than that – into who has died, when they died and how they met their death. It is not a complicated remit though to the surviving family it is an important one. But sometimes – only sometimes – it is not enough. It does not really
explain
a death. Sequences of events lead up to untimely deaths. Not nature but something within the victim’s life or even in the perpetrator’s. The two lives collide. And mayhem results. It was her job to unravel the truth. And sometimes being a coroner, sitting behind a desk, does not colour in the picture enough to hold a satisfactory inquest.

Martha sat still for only a minute before making up her mind. She wanted not the black and white picture but the full Technicolor effect. And that would not come from sitting here. She stood up.

The door opened.

Jericho with a huge bunch of long stemmed, red roses.

She stared at him. Completely confused.

‘These just arrived,’ he said. ‘By van.’

There is something about red roses. They mean love and romance. Or gratitude. But they always mean
something
. They never mean
nothing
. She took the flowers from him, only aware of a dry, sour taste in her mouth. She had done nothing to deserve these roses. She did not know who would send her red roses when it wasn’t her birthday. She knew that these beautiful blooms did not mean love or gratitude. They were not emblems of a birthday or anniversary. They were reminders.

‘There’s a card with them. Open it.’

Jericho had a soft voice with a Shropshire burr which was spurring her on. She took the white envelope in her fingers.

Martha Gunn
. That was all. Martha Gunn.
Her
name. The flowers were meant for
her
.

She opened the envelope, pulled out the white card.

These are for you
, it read in the florist’s hand.
This is your message, Martha
.

She stared at it and knew an old friend was back.

Last year she had been sent messages, records, small, tiny clues, hints that someone was trying to communicate with her. But like a Martian landing or a deaf and dumb person signing to her, Martha could not understand it.

She picked up the telephone.

This had gone far enough.

Alex listened to her confused ramblings for a full ten minutes without interrupting. He heard about the scratched record which had been left at her door, the strange, intrusive whispering, the bunches of flowers – even the dead animals abandoned on the doorstep which she had initially blamed on Bobby – until Mark Sullivan had pointed out the ligature tied tightly round the mouse’s neck. She tried to leave out all the ‘weird feelings’ before realising that this was a part of it too. She was not an imaginative woman.

Alex sat, concentrating hard, his entire body still, his fingers interwoven, his thin face set in a deep frown. ‘I don’t like the sound of this at all.’

‘You take it seriously then?’

He nodded then tried to lighten his tone, the contradiction still making his eyes heavy and anxious.

‘Not got a secret admirer, Martha?’

She tried to laugh. ‘No.’

‘I’m sure you have.’

‘Alex,’ she appealed. ‘I don’t want chivalry from you. I’m consulting you as a policeman. I’m worried. Truly I’m worried. Someone is sending me messages that I can’t read. I don’t know what they’re saying or why they’re saying it. I
don’t understand but it feels like a threat. My job brings me into contact with all sorts of strange people undergoing what can be a very stressful experience. I don’t like mysteries, Alex. I live alone, in a relatively isolated house with my daughter and an au pair who is about to leave. Help me. Please.’

‘I’ll make some enquiries. Is that OK?’

‘Yes. Please. Thank you.’

As he left he put an awkward hand on her shoulder. ‘Think back into your past, Martha. The clue will be there somewhere. Consider anyone you’ve had bad dealings with. Especially if they appeared strange. If you do have any ideas who this might be get back to me. All right?’

‘Yes.’

She felt happier having off-loaded her problem but still fidgety and tense. She sat and pondered over her past cases. There had been tragedy aplenty. Drownings and murders, terrible accidents and suffering. She had seen relatives scream at the verdict or cry or simply sit in the inquest, frozen in their seats. And then there were the suicides. Which brought her straight back to her most recent case, the deaths of the two teenagers. She felt she wanted to do something herself to set the record straight. It is, after all, she argued to herself, part of the duty of a coroner.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. Schools came out at four. If she hurried home she could change and be outside the school gates as the children came out. Maybe there she could pick up on something.

On her way out she thrust the flowers at a startled Jericho. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Take these home for Mrs Palfreyman.’

He looked astonished and pushed them away from him as
though they scalded him. ‘I can’t do that. She’ll think I’m having an extramarital.’

‘Give them to her anyway.’

‘She’ll be very suspicious,’ he said. ‘Don’t you like flowers?’

‘Allergies,’ she replied, and as she backed the car out of the drive she thought what a stupid thing to say that had been. She almost
always
had flowers on her desk. Roses, freesias, daffodils, hyacinths – depending on the season. But she found the sight of the long-stemmed, expensive roses threatening. She knew full well what they were a warning. A beacon. A lighthouse luring her towards rocks. Beautiful as they were they were alerting her to the fact that
he
was out there, with her in his sights. She couldn’t have taken them home for them to invade her private life. And neither did she want them insinuating their not-so-subtle message from her desk.

No – let Mrs Palfreyman have the pleasure of them.

She smiled to herself. Jericho would soon talk his way out of any suspicion. She had never met a more inventive man when it came to stories. Many was the time she’d listened to him relating some incident and hardly recognised it for the embellishment.

She was home in less than fifteen minutes and changed into her blonde wig, big shades, dark tan make-up and a slash of vivid lipstick. Faded jeans, cowboy boots and a brown leather jacket completed the picture. She grinned at herself in the mirror and reflected how easy it was for a woman to alter her appearance completely.

No one would have known her.

She parked a little way from the school and wandered slowly towards it. One or two youngsters were already
trickling through the gates – a little early.

She picked Katie Ashbourne out easily. Partly because the papers had been filled with pictures of her, partly because she was tall and also because of the cluster of admirers surrounding her. She had waist-length straight, brown hair. Her school skirt was halfway up her thighs and she had a rucksack tucked underneath her arm.

The girl gave Martha a cool, arrogant stare. Martha smiled back at her.

‘You Press?’ the girl asked.

‘No. Why?’

‘Oh.’ The girl looked crestfallen; but she soon recovered. ‘Only that I’ve been plagued by them.’ She tossed her hair and tilted her face upwards, nose in the air. ‘My boyfriend got murdered, see. The Press have been hounding me. In fact they’ve offered me thousands to tell my story but I don’t know. Is it right? Is it wrong? Why shouldn’t I anyway? I’m going to need money some day and the story’ll pass, like any other.’

She was a child of her time. Streetwise, cool, confident and well read in the ways of her world.

Martha shed her coroner prejudices to assume the persona of Martha Rees, swaggering private eye. ‘Exactly. I agree. Mind you – I’d be careful what I say to the Press – or even to anyone.’ Even her voice sounded different, cocky and brash with a nasal Thames twang.

‘Dead people can’t sue.’ The girl tossed her lovely hair away from her face again. The movement rippled it down her back.

She had wary dark eyes and an olive complexion and was more than averagely attractive. Martha wondered if she and
Gough would have stuck together. She doubted it.

‘I suppose you’re Katie Ashbourne then, are you?’

The girl chewed some gum which must have been parked in the side of her cheek. ‘Yeah. It was my boyfriend who was killed. Roger Gough. DreadNought, we all called him.’

Martha adjusted her shades to peep over them. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Dead nice bloke. Killed by a psycho, he was. Funny thing is we never realised Hughes was a psycho. Roger weren’t frightened of him none. But then – that were Roger. Brave.’

‘Didn’t you realise that the Hughes boy was a psycho?’

‘Nah. But they’re good at hidin’ it, aren’t they, psychos?’

Martha Rees shrugged. ‘Why did Hughes pick on your boyfriend? Was it over you?’

‘Not exactly. Well.’ The hair rippled down her back again. ‘Sort of. There was always a bit of trouble between Wilfred and DreadNought.’

Martha frowned. ‘Wilfred?’

‘After Wilfred Owen, the poet. That’s what we used to call him on account of him likin’ poetry and stuff.’

‘Oh. I didn’t know.’

‘Well he did. Used to sit and read the stuff. Anyway,’ she tossed her head again and took a long open-mouthed chew at her gum, ‘Hughes had a sort of thing about me. Used to fancy me somethin’ rotten. He flashed at me once,’ she said defiantly. ‘And DreadNought. Well, let’s just say he didn’t like other people goin’ for me. But DreadNought was safe.’ She smiled. ‘I didn’t fancy the little bleeder. I wouldn’t have gone off with him.’ She grinned. ‘If there’d been me and Wilfred on a desert island surrounded by a shark-infested sea I’d have swum. That’s what I thought of him. He was a creep.’

Martha nodded and grimaced back. The description was graphic enough to paint the picture of a lonely, isolated boy picked on by his schoolmates, ridiculed for all that he found interesting. The portrait depressed her.

She turned around to scan the crowd of children streaming out of the school gates. ‘Which one is Chelsea Arnold?’

Katie Ashbourne didn’t like the attention shifting away from her. ‘You don’t want to speak to her.’

Martha lowered her shades back over her eyes. She knew it gave her a mysterious look and Katie Ashbourne fell for it. ‘Oh. Well, that’s her,’ she said, pointing towards a small girl scurrying out of the side gate.

Martha walked along the pavement, turning in and bumping into the girl. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Goodness.’ Even she was impressed by the surprise she managed to inject into her tone. ‘It’s Chelsea, isn’t it?’

The girl looked up and Martha had an impression of a twitching, brown-eyed, little mouse.

‘Surely you know me, Chelsea? I’m a friend of your mother’s dear.’

Martha was taking a gamble. If there is anyone a teenage girl does not remember it is the friends of her mother’s. The women her mother drones on and on about whose names and faces all blur into one.

The girl fell for it. ‘Oh yes,’ she lied. ‘I remember you.’

Martha took another gamble. ‘We’re the ones who went to live in Spain, dear.’

Chelsea Arnold’s face cleared and Martha knew she had struck lucky.

‘I’m sure I read about you in the paper the other day,’ Martha continued. ‘Weren’t you saying something about – now what was it? Oh yes. There was some trouble at the school, wasn’t there? Didn’t a friend of yours get hurt?’

Chelsea looked around her but there was no one within earshot. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A friend of mine died. He was stabbed and he died in hospital.’

‘Was he a close friend, dear?’

Chelsea nodded but no pain crossed her face.

‘And what about the boy who did it?’

This time the girl looked truly upset. ‘He killed himself,’ she said quietly, ‘in Stoke Heath.’

So Martha had her answer. ‘Dear, dear,’ she said. ‘How awful. And was he a friend of yours too?’

The girl looked at her, tears making her eyes very bright.

Martha plunged on. ‘And didn’t your mother say something about an accident? Your wrist – wasn’t it?’

The girl stared at her, round-eyed. Then without a word she turned and scuttled off.

Martha watched her go feeling sorry for her. She was very young to have had such tragedy so very near her. And now she was being forced to toe the party line or she would be ostracised.

We are judged by the people we mix with.

In the car she removed the blonde wig, ruffled up her own hair and smiled at herself in the mirror. It had been a successful foray.

But she was still missing something.

She decided to call in Simon Boyd’s on the way home. The transformation of Martin’s study was just beginning to take
shape and colour in her mind. The walls painted with satin ivory emulsion and the windows hung with the same coloured curtains decorated with the darkest of huge red flowers. She was starting to see it. She would have the floorboards cleaned and sanded, buy some new furniture. She was looking over the bolts of material when she suddenly felt unaccountably disloyal and instead of seeing the rolls of material she saw Martin’s face, looking at her and seeming unbearably sad.

She left the shop and drove home, her mind in turmoil.