The Burden of Doubt (20 page)

‘Dad?’

He shot up into sitting position.

‘It’s OK, I’m not ill or anything. Sorry to wake you so early, but is it all right if I come home for a day or two?’

‘Of course.’ He waited.

‘I’ve broken up with Jasper. It’s difficult.’ Her voice was shaky with feeling, she was on the verge of tears.

He took in a breath. ‘Do you want me to come and fetch you?’

‘Oh God, no! I’ll get the train.’

‘Get a taxi from the station. I’ll pay.’

‘I’ll be fine, Dad. Don’t worry.’

He offered no comment on the latter issue. ‘Are you planning on coming this morning?’

‘Yes. Can you leave a house key for me? I seem to have lost mine.’

‘Naomi! Not again.’

‘Sorry. Just leave a spare somewhere safe where I can find it.’

‘Nowhere outside is safe,’ he said patiently. ‘I’ll leave it buried in the earth by the rose tree nearest the front door.’

‘Cunning,’ she said.

‘So is your average housebreaker.’

‘How’s your current case going?’

‘Could be better.’

‘I think I’ve heard that before,’ she said. ‘And by the way, Cat sends her love.’

He got up and went into the kitchen. As he filled and switched on the kettle, his thoughts were occupied with Naomi, and then
moving on to Cat. And soon after that moving on to the dead Moira Farrell and her half-sister Jayne. It came to him that it would be pretty useful to have the skill of divination and find out just what Jayne Arnold was doing at this moment. He would try to talk to her this morning, get some sort of handle on what game she had been playing. Or maybe it had been nothing like a game.

Sitting in the train, Naomi watched the countryside roll by, the landscape a dull winter-grey, the vegetation sleeping until spring. Being dumped was the same as a physical assault, it made you feel as though you’d been thumped in the stomach. And being dumped by someone whom you were crazy about and at the same time knew was badly flawed, seemed especially desperate and horribly humiliating. He’d simply told her he didn’t love her any more – just like that, no warning. He’d played it very gently and with a degree of pity which had scratched at her nerves. She knew she would cope, she wasn’t a person who thought that love was forever – that was a lesson she’d learned when her mother had been snatched away by an act of fate. Time would go by and her hurting and humiliation would heal. But for now the shock of the break-up was scouring her stomach and churning in her guts. She needed to touch base. She needed her father.

Arriving home, she located the rose tree closest to the front door and found the key to the apartment wrapped in foil tucked close beside the stem at the point where it sank into the earth. There was something about this small success which made her smile. She was still smiling as she turned the key in the lock.

Swift had spent the last hour dealing with Sylvia Farrell’s anxiety regarding the whereabouts of her daughter. She had telephoned him just after nine, her voice shaky with anxiety. ‘Jayne’s not at the flat,’ she told him without preamble. ‘And she’s not answering her mobile.’

‘When did you last see her?’ Swift asked.

‘Yesterday morning. She brought some items she’d got at the delicatessen. She stayed for coffee and left around eleven-thirty.’

‘And when did you last speak to her on the phone?’

There was a pause. ‘Yesterday evening.’

‘Soon after I left your house?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you tell her what we had talked about?’

‘Of course!’

‘Do you know where she was when she took the call?’

‘No. She never bothers with her land line now, always uses her mobile. She could have been at home, I just don’t know.’

Swift considered the new freedoms people had been offered when mobile phones became more or less universal. Husbands and wives could be constantly contactable, and at the same time cheating. Sons and daughters likewise. And so on. Jayne could have been anywhere when Sylvia made her call.

‘Did she give any indication of plans for visiting friends, or travelling?’

‘No. In fact she said she’d be seeing me sometime today. She’d call to let me know what her plans were. What we might do together.’

‘There’s still time for her to do that,’ Swift pointed out.

‘Yes.’ That one syllable was loaded with doubt and anxiety. ‘Can’t you do something about this?’ Her tone had turned to challenge with a dash of reproach, which Swift guessed was related to the verbal exchanges they had had the previous evening.

‘She doesn’t qualify as a missing person. Not yet.’

‘No, I understand.’

‘Keep trying her phone,’ Swift suggested.

‘Yes.’ There was a long pause.

‘I’ll get someone to go round to her flat,’ Swift said. ‘Check on the situation.’

‘Oh!’

He could tell she was thinking that that might not be such good news as it sounded.

‘Right. Well, thank you.’ Another pause. ‘I’m really very worried,’ she burst out, and then the line clicked off.

Swift laid his phone on the desk. She was not the only one.

He went into the incident-room and updated the team on Sylvia’s message. Doug and Laura were sent to visit the flat. Finch
was apprised of the latest developments. He took a remarkably sanguine view. ‘She’s probably just off somewhere on a shopping spree,’ he said. ‘Or having her hair done, and whatever else modern young women spend their time and money on.’

Swift did not disagree.

‘We’ve nothing on her, Ed,’ Finch pointed out. ‘Nothing of substance. Nothing to make me think I need to use precious funds to alert the nation’s traffic teams, or have all the ports and trains and airports on alert.’ He made it all sound faintly ridiculous.

Swift made his apologies and slipped away before the superintendent got into full flow about the scarcity of resources and the impossibility of his job.

‘Dad?’ Naomi’s voice sounded odd. Just that one word and its trembling, questioning note made Swift’s mouth go dry.

‘Where are you?’

‘At home.’

‘You had a good journey?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is there a problem?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

Things suddenly fell into place. ‘Someone’s there with you – a woman?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m on my way.’

‘You have to come on your own,’ Naomi said ominously. ‘Please don’t— ’ And then the connection was suddenly dead.

Swift drove through the morning traffic, his mind humming with a myriad of imagined horrors. He didn’t think he was much good at speeding in traffic. He’d been on pursuits plenty of times, but in recent years he’d never been the one at the wheel. Going at fifty miles an hour on busy built-up streets with horizontal sleet pounding the windscreen was no joke.

Would Jayne Arnold hurt Naomi? Why should she do that? Whatever the answers to those questions he needed to call the station and alert them to what was happening. He drew the car to
a halt on double yellow lines and took out his phone. Afterwards, as he nudged the car back into the traffic, he saw the blue and green stripes of a patrol car his rear-view mirror. Further on a second striped car pulled out in front of him. Traffic patrol working in tandem. He ground to a halt and punched the steering wheel with frustration.

A constable got out of the second car and took his time to stroll to Swift’s window. He had his ID already pressed to the glass, but the constable was not for playing ball. He made a lazy gesture of winding with his forefinger. Swift took in a deep breath and pressed the switch to lower the window. ‘DCI Swift,’ he announced crisply.

The constable was not impressed. Swift reminded himself of the deep-rooted antipathy between uniform and plain clothes. Between anyone in the world and Traffic.

‘Fifty miles an hour, sir,’ the constable said with smug satisfaction. ‘In bad weather conditions. Not a very good idea.’

‘I’m in pursuit of a murder suspect,’ Swift said flatly, trying to keep his temper.

‘You were driving like a maniac,’ the constable said. ‘Sir.’

Swift got out of the car. ‘And you’re behaving like a pompous twit.’ His fury was only just held in check.

The constable made a meal out of looking offended. He peered at Swift through narrowed eyes. ‘I hope you haven’t been drinking, sir.’

Swift reached out, grabbed the constable’s jacket and rammed him hard against the car. As the man’s cap tumbled into the grey sleet of the roadside, his partner began to get out of the car.

‘I’m a DCI,’ Swift shouted through the sleet. ‘Just get back in the car.’

The officer speedily did as he was told and Swift turned to his captive who was now beginning to look alarmed. ‘Listen hard, Constable, I’m getting back in my car and going on my way, and if you so much as twitch a muscle to try and stop me, you’ll find yourself back pounding the streets on foot for the rest of your time in the police.’

The constable flinched and nodded.

Swift pulled out into the traffic, pressing his accelerator foot to the floor.

On reaching his apartment he pulled the car to a screeching halt and leapt out. The front door swung back and opened as he placed his key in the latch. Stepping inside he saw the hallway stretching out before him in half darkness.

Any consideration about his own safety in walking in blind was totally outweighed by his fear for Naomi. He tried to reassure himself that Jayne Arnold was unlikely to indulge in random violence. Her killing of Moira had surely been a spur of the moment surge of anger against someone who had been inflicting some sort of mental torture on her. He stood still for a few seconds, conscious of the dead silence around him. He moved forward, sick with apprehension at what he was going to find.

There were no lights on in the living-room. But in the gloom of a cloudy winter day he could see the scene with perfect clarity. Naomi, sitting in a straight-backed dining chair, trussed up like a dead bird, her eyes wide open with helplessness and fear. Jayne Arnold standing behind her, holding a pair of surgical scissors, their elongated points pressing into the skin of Naomi’s throat.

‘Hello, Dad,’ Naomi said, raising a small but heroic smile.

‘Hello,’ He raised a smile back.

Jayne watched him with the still concentration of a cat.

‘Jayne?’ He offered her a welcome. He saw an evil demon of light in her eyes and understood that she was probably more mad than bad. His mind hurtled through what was to come; the endless questions to be asked, the gnarled cluster of motivation and psychiatric disturbance to be painstakingly unravelled. But now, there was this horrifying impasse to resolve.

‘You seem to know quite a lot about me and my daughter,’ he remarked, keeping his voice low and calm.

She neither confirmed nor contradicted him.

‘If you used a private investigator they must have been very discreet.’

Jayne waited for a few seconds and then said, ‘They’ve been watching you since you were assigned to Moira’s case.’

‘I see.’ He kept quite still, kept his voice steady and soft. ‘What is it you want, Jayne?’ He gestured towards his daughter and then to her captor, to the whole grotesque tableau which Jayne had created. ‘What is the point of this?’

Jayne drew in long breath and held it before she spoke. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet, Detective Chief Inspector Swift?’

‘Worked what out, Jayne?’

‘What this is all about.’

‘I talked to your mother yesterday evening,’ he said, forcing his brain to work, move on from his initial theories, expand and develop them. And keep Jayne talking.

‘Yes, she told me. I thought you were on to me.’ The irises of her eyes swivelled. ‘Maybe I was wrong. But most of the clues were there.’

‘Put the scissors down, Jayne,’ he said, ‘and then we can talk.’

Jayne smiled at him in regretful disbelief. ‘As if.’ The point of the scissors pressed a little harder on Naomi’s skin.

‘You’re hurting me, Jayne,’ Naomi said.

Jayne relaxed the tension on the scissor points, just a fraction. ‘I’m sorry. You’re not the one I want to hurt,’ she said.

‘Who do you want to hurt?’ Swift asked.

‘You,’ she said. ‘Just at this moment, it’s you I want to hurt. And the most effective way to do it, is to threaten your child.’

He was working things out. He came back at her without hesitation. ‘Because the idea of a child is the most important thing in the world for you, isn’t it, Jayne? The child you can’t have.’

She listened and then she rounded on him. ‘Christ! You’re just like all the doctors and do-gooders – the GPs and the gynaecologists and the shrinks. You deal in ideas and motives and prognoses. You’re all so sweetly understanding and dripping with sympathy. You all pity me for being barren. And in your hearts you despise me. You look down on me because you think I’m only half a woman.’

‘Barren,’ said Naomi. ‘That’s a good old-fashioned word.’

Jayne made a slight adjustment to the points of the scissors. ‘Don’t get clever with me, Naomi. You won’t get round me that way.’

‘Jayne,’ Swift said, ‘just tell me what you want, and we’ll try to work something out.’

‘What I want! What I
want
!’ Her eyes flamed with rage. ‘I want a baby. I want a baby of my own. A baby that has been conceived inside me, grown inside me, kicked inside me, made me blow up like a huge balloon. Made my breasts heavy and sore with milk.’ She was screaming now, her face blotchy and livid as though she had been drinking. ‘But I can never have that. Never, never, never!’

Naomi flinched. Swift saw her mouth frame the words, Oh, God. He tried to pull his gaze away from Jayne’s fingers, holding the shiny steel, poising it to pierce Naomi’s skin. For him at that moment Jayne was as lethal and unpredictable as a cobra.

It was vital to keep her talking. ‘If you can’t have a child of your own, there are children to adopt,’ he said quietly, aiming to develop a dialogue on the only subject he guessed would appeal to her. But it was also a subject burning into her emotions, making her unstable and irrational. Talking to Jayne about babies and children was playing with live explosive.