The Lives She Left Behind (30 page)

‘As you know, Mr Martin, you were originally arrested on suspicion of downloading indecent images of minors. The investigating officers removed a computer and a large box of photographs
from your house. We have now examined both of those. We have copied some of the images on the hard drive of that computer to this laptop to facilitate this interview.’ Meehan pressed a button
on the laptop.

‘For the purposes of the tape,’ he said, ‘I am now showing Mr Martin images MM thirteen to nineteen copied from the hard drive of the Dell desktop computer removed from his
house.’

He turned the screen to face Mike and Rachel and a slide show of images cycled before their eyes. Mike laughed in recognition.

‘You find these funny, do you?’ Meehan asked.

‘They’re torture instruments,’ said Mike.

‘And that’s funny?’

‘Only when the police think a history teacher shouldn’t have them on his computer. They’re medieval. I was teaching my class about life in the fourteenth century – the
Hundred Years War.’

‘So if we were to ask your head of department, Mr Martin, he would confirm that this was part of the course, would he?’

‘Well, my present head of department has only been in the post for six months. His predecessor would have but I’m afraid she had a stroke. She’s in a home now.’

Rachel held up a hand to silence Mike and stepped in. ‘I don’t think it would take very much to justify a history teacher having historical images on his computer, do you?’

Meehan shrugged. ‘Maybe. For the tape, I will now show Mr Martin twelve more images scanned from photographs in the box removed from his house. These are numbered MM one to MM twelve in
our record.’

Both Rachel and Mike stiffened a little at his tone. It was clear that what went before had been a sideshow. This was the main event. Mike looked at the first picture. His vision misted over as
his eyes filled with involuntary tears. He wiped them, glared at the policeman and then looked back at the screen because he could not do anything else. Gally in the bath at Bagstone, Gally holding
tiny Rosie up out of the water, both of them laughing.

‘Can you identify the subjects for us, Mr Martin?’ asked Meehan.

‘That’s my wife and daughter,’ said Mike.

‘Mr Meehan, you should know that both Mr Martin’s wife and his daughter died,’ broke in Rachel. ‘I don’t feel this is suitable for your—’

‘I know they did, Mrs Palmer,’ replied Meehan. ‘Mr Martin may have forgotten, but I was one of the investigating officers at the time,’ and Mike did suddenly remember a
quiet young man with a dogged politeness about him. He looked at Meehan and nodded almost as if meeting an old friend.

‘In that case, why are you showing my client pictures which are personal to him and very upsetting and can have nothing whatsoever to do with the accusations made against him?’

‘The accusations about Luke Sturgess are no longer my main concern, Mrs Palmer, and the pictures I have shown you so far are not nearly as upsetting as the rest of these images, which,
strangely enough, I don’t remember Mr Martin showing us at the time of the original investigation.’ Meehan pressed another key, gestured for Mike to look, and the bottom dropped out of
his life as the other pictures marched out of the screen, one after another.

‘I thought she had thrown them away.’

‘She being your late wife?’

‘Don’t answer that,’ interrupted Rachel. She was staring at the screen with horror on her face. ‘Inspector Meehan, I would like to suspend the interview to speak to my
client.’

‘I thought you might,’ said Meehan. He logged the tape off, stood up, and he and the WPC left the room. Before they closed the door, Detective Sergeant Wilson peered in at Mike with
a dark look of triumph.

There was a long silence. Mike had his head in his hands. Rachel continued to stare at the screen.

‘Is there something you want to tell me?’ she asked in the end. ‘Because right now I’m wondering if I’ve been the biggest mug ever. What the hell did you do to that
little girl?’

‘No, no,’ said Mike. ‘Not me, not us. Nothing. We did nothing at all. We were just trying to protect her.’

‘Protect her? Look at the pictures, Mike.’ He lifted his head, glanced at the screen for a moment then turned immediately away. ‘I can’t.’

‘Then I’ll tell you what I see,’ she said. ‘First picture: Rosie, black and blue down one side of her face with a swollen eye. Second picture: Rosie with a deep cut
across her forehead and fresh bruising. Third picture: Rosie’s thighs with cuts and puncture marks. Fourth picture: well, I don’t even know what that one shows but she doesn’t
look like any two-year-old should. She looks like a child from a concentration camp. Fifth picture . . . Do I need to go on?’

‘No, please don’t.’

‘In that case, start talking, Mike. Tell me what the hell you did because my sympathy is running out very, very fast.’

‘I didn’t know they were there.’

‘I don’t give a toss whether you knew they were there or not. Who did it?’

‘She did.’

‘Gally did that? She did that to her own daughter?’

Mike looked at her in astonishment. ‘No, of course not. I don’t mean Gally. Rosie did it. She did it to herself.’

‘Mike, those are pictures of a tiny toddler who has been systematically assaulted. Bruises, cuts. They are horrific. No child that age could do that.’

She stared at him and in the long silence he looked steadily back at her, then he reached out a hand and turned the laptop round so that it kept cycling its accusations at the wall.

‘Well?’

There was a bluebottle in the room, buzzing at the window. A car engine burst into life out in the yard. Tyres squealed and he heard the two-tone siren start as it disappeared up the road. He
knew why. He also knew how absurd it seemed in this place of simple facts and accusations and narrow rectitude, and he found he could not call up the energy to defend himself.

‘Rachel. She did. There’s something else you don’t understand. Rosie wasn’t . . .’ but the lawyer was still staring at the laptop.

‘Oh, I’m supposed to believe this is something about Ferney and all the rest of this story, am I?’ He nodded. She muttered something angry. It sounded to him like
‘Bullshit’. Then she drew several long, slow breaths while he watched her in dull despair and gave up hope of explaining.

‘I’ve had faith in you,’ she said eventually, the pain in her voice showing through a fading attempt at professionalism. ‘I think I just lost it.’

The silence stretched and he knew time was running out. Words would not come.

‘I need to think about this,’ she said. ‘I’d better go and talk to them.’ She went outside. Mike heard muffled words in the corridor and a young policeman came and
stood by the door.

The lawyer came back with Meehan. She didn’t seem able to meet Mike’s eyes.

‘Mr Martin,’ Meehan said, sitting down, ‘I have to tell you that I am now reopening the investigation into the death of your wife and daughter. I’m not yet in a position
to charge you but I wish to interview you again at noon tomorrow. Mrs Palmer has agreed that you will voluntarily surrender your passport to her and that you will not leave your village without
notifying her and me.’

Mike followed Rachel out of the police station, trying to keep up with her. She was walking fast, not looking back. As they drove out of the car park, she crunched a gear. ‘Bugger,’
she said. ‘All right, now listen to me. The bad news is that Meehan always thought you were guilty and he’s watched too many cold-case dramas on TV. I don’t think he’s ever
had one of his very own. He would just love to reopen this case.’

‘What will he want to know tomorrow?’

‘He’s been looking at the toxicology report. That was what got you off the hook last time, apparently.’

‘Yes.’

‘It showed you were in London when they took whatever it was?’

Mike was silent.

‘Come on,’ said Rachel. ‘Don’t clam up. There’s no time for that.’

‘Yes, that’s what they said. They decided Gally took the stuff no earlier than eight in the morning. I was in London then. People saw me.’

‘Toxicology has come a long way since then. He’s having the findings checked out all over again.’

‘He’s out to get me, isn’t he?’

‘He thinks he’s on to something.’

‘And you’re not sure he’s wrong, are you?’

‘That shouldn’t surprise you, not after those pictures. Now you tell me, Mike. Why did you take those photos?’

‘We were desperate. Gally heard about a healer, somewhere up in the Lakes. We took the pictures because she wanted to see them.’

‘Did you go to a doctor?’

‘No,’ he said after a long time.

‘Meehan will want to know why not.’ He heard a formal distance in her voice.

‘I’d rather be dealing with Meehan than with Wilson,’ he said, ‘but even then—’

‘Meehan’s a lot smarter than Wilson and a good man, I’d say.’

‘I’m glad of that.’

‘You shouldn’t be. A good man on a mission is a lot harder to stop than a bad man with a grudge.’

That was the last thing she said until she pulled up at his gate and he opened the door. He went to find his passport and when he came back, she got out too and they stood there facing each
other.

‘I’ve decided,’ she said. ‘What I would really like is to turn time back and not have you tell me anything crazy. I’m going back to my office and I’m going to
tell them that I can’t represent you any more for personal reasons. I’ll have them put someone else on it. Then the only advice I can give you is that you don’t tell them what you
told me. Don’t say anything that they can’t say to Meehan and his sort. That’s really all I can do for you now.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she added in a distorted voice, then she got back into the car and drove away.

Two subdued girls got off the train at Exeter St Davids and walked slowly towards the river. The journey back had been hard, waiting for a bus which turned out to run only on
Wednesdays, then trudging all the way to Gillingham. They arrived at the station as dusk fell to find a points failure at Axminster had destroyed their last hope of getting home that night. They
had pitched their tent in darkness on a sloping and stony piece of waste ground and were barely talking to each other when they finally arrived.

‘We shouldn’t have left her there,’ said Ali yet again as they climbed the steps to the road.

‘What could we have done? Knocked her out and tied her up?’

As they expected, there was no answer when they rang Jo’s doorbell, so they used the access code which they had seen her punch in so often and let themselves into the flat.

‘Fleur won’t mind, will she?’ Lucy asked nervously.

‘Of course she will. She always minds everything. She’ll mind a lot more if we don’t tell her.’

‘But she’s not what you’d call a caring mother, is she?’

‘Frightening comes closer, but she’ll want to know.’

‘I suppose so. When she crashed her car she hired another one, but you can’t hire daughters.’

‘Where do we start?’

‘She’s got that big red diary. I hope she hasn’t taken it.’

They found it on her desk. The word ‘Pecon’ was pencilled in two days earlier with arrows across every page until the next Wednesday.

‘Where’s Pecon?’ asked Lucy.

‘She was going there for a conference.’

They googled it on Jo’s laptop.

‘That’s not good,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s in Brazil.’

Ali clicked through to the next page. ‘No, look at this. PECON, the Property Entrepreneurs Conference, Edgbaston. That’s her sort of stuff. Yes, see? She’s down as a speaker
– Fleur Driscoll on “The buy-to-let market: profiting from the downturn”. That was yesterday. Today she’s doing workshops.’

She dialled the number.

A woman’s voice said, ‘Gemini Conference Centre. Can I help you?’

‘I’m trying to get in touch with Mrs Driscoll. She’s speaking at your property conference. Fleur Driscoll?’

‘And you are?’

‘We’re friends of her daughter’s. We’ve got a message for her.’

‘She’ll be in a session right now. Is it urgent?’

‘Um, no—’

Lucy had leaned across with her ear near enough the receiver to hear. ‘Yes it is,’ she said. ‘It’s definitely urgent.’

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ said Ali. ‘We must talk to her. I didn’t want to worry her too much, that’s all.’

‘Can you give me some idea of what it’s about? We don’t like to disturb the programme.’

‘Well, we’ve been camping with Jo, her daughter, and, um . . . things got a little odd and, I don’t know, she, er . . .’

Lucy grabbed the phone from her. ‘She met a strange guy and she wouldn’t come back with us, so she’s in this village in the middle of nowhere with him and it’s not like
her at all.’

‘Okay. Wait. I’ll go and get her at once. Don’t hang up.’

‘Lucy,’ said Ali crossly, ‘I was trying to be careful so we didn’t scare her.’

‘All you said was mumble, mumble, um, er, um. You have to use words, Ali, in the right order.’

A breathless voice at the other end said, ‘Ali? Lucy? Where are you? What’s happened?’

‘Well, go on then,’ hissed Ali as Lucy tried to give her back the phone. ‘Tell her.’

‘We’re in your flat, Fleur,’ said Lucy. ‘We just got back. We let ourselves in. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Where’s Jo?’

‘She’s just – well, she’s – she wouldn’t come back with us.’

‘From where?’

‘From a village we went to.’

‘What village?’

‘Um . . .’ Now Ali grabbed the phone from Lucy.

‘It’s a place called Pen Selwood, in Somerset, near Wincanton.’

‘What’s she doing there? I told her to stay with you two. Is that where you’re digging?’

‘No, not exactly. She met this boy—’

‘Jo? Jo met a boy? And she wouldn’t come back with you?’

‘She said she’d get in touch with you. She didn’t think you’d be home for a few more days,’

‘When did all this happen?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘She met him
yesterday
and she wouldn’t come back? Jo?’

‘Yes. We’d camped there. She was pretty odd when we got to the village, then she got up early and went off and we found her with this boy sitting in the woods and she said
she’d known him for years.’