The Pure in Heart (9 page)

The DCI sat back in his chair. It’s daft, Nathan thought, he looks younger than me, looks about the right age to be starting on the fast-track graduate scheme, not
well up the ladder already. Serrailler’s hair, white blond and disarranged as ever, shone in the light coming from the window behind him. ‘Dishy DCI’ Emma called him. Freya Graffham had thought so and they would have been just right. And then maybe …

Maybe nothing.

‘Bring me up to speed.’

‘Been a bit too quiet.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘Only one thing giving us grief has been this gang … kids,
only they don’t act like kids. I went up to the Eric Anderson last week, saw the head, saw a couple of teachers. They know who it is, pretty much. They’re all no-hopers, they bunk off most of the time and nobody at home gives a toss. It started with small stuff only now it ain’t so small. Now it’s pretty well-organised shoplifting, hanging about in the evenings targeting people walking home from work
and grabbing handbags, mobiles that sort of stuff … then there’s the cars. They’ve started nicking top-of-the-range motors but it ain’t for joyriding, they’re cleverer than that, these motors are vanishing into thin. I reckon they’re in with some much bigger villains.’

‘How old are these kids?’

‘Fourteen, fifteen … last couple of years at school. GCSE supposedly. Ha.’

‘Names?’

‘I’ve got some
but they’re fly – slippery as eels. Learned a lot of stuff from brothers and dads who’ve done time.’

‘OK, let’s target the brothers and dads. Check up on everyone who has been inside, in the last three years … better include those who are still there as well. There’s plenty the kids can learn when they visit. We’ll have a list of prisoners and then follow up children in this age group. I’ll have
a word with uniform about stepping up presence … known times. All that’ll do is move them somewhere else, of course.’

‘We reckon the cars are being moved at night – two, three in the morning.’

‘OK, the names the head teacher gave you … get to some homes, talk to the mothers, see if they’re aware of their kids getting up and going out at two in the morning … or perhaps not even coming in from
the night before.’

‘Guv.’

‘Any other excitements?’

‘The cathedral was broken into one night. Some damage done, nothing taken … some weird graffiti on a couple of the pillars. Seems like some religious thing.’

‘Who handled it?’

‘I went to talk to the Dean … he was very nice. Bit too nice …’

‘Ah, forgiveness, you mean?’

Nathan aimed his paper cup at the waste-paper bin, threw and missed.

‘If there’s nothing else, I’ll get on to this gang of kids. They want slapping down sharpish. It gets on my wick. They have everything handed to them and what do they do?’

‘Everything but decent parenting.’

‘Right. Thanks, guv. You have a good holiday by the way?’

‘Very peaceful. I had to cut it short … one of my family was in hospital.’

‘I’m sorry … everything OK?’

‘Yes. It was my sister
but she’s fine.’

Nathan Coates went out, closing the door, and Simon sat thinking of the buttercup-yellow and white room with the curtains blowing in the breeze and Martha sitting up and making her strange little noises. He might have resented having his holiday cut short but no such feeling entered his mind.

He looked down at the files and paperwork on his desk. Petty crime. Gangs of teenagers.
Small-time drug dealing. Robbery. Car theft. Some fraud and embezzlement. That was what routine CID work was about. The year in which Lafferton had had a psychopathic serial killer in its midst had been a rare one – it would be rare for any force in the country. He went on staring at the files without touching any of them. He loved his work but what was in front of him, the routine stuff which
absorbed most of his time, was not stretching him. He knew that he could
not stay in the relative backwater of his home city for ever unless he wanted to grow moss, but his life in Lafferton, outside work, was everything he wanted. He did not exist only for the CID. Half of him was an artist, the rest of him was brother, uncle, son – in that order.

If he went for promotion to a city force, what
would he lose? And was there not just as much small crime and routine work in any big CID department? More, probably. The idea that promotion to Super in some huge city would mean non-stop excitement, difficult murder cases, story-book detective work, was nonsense and he knew it.

In Lafferton he got out a fair bit. In fact, if he spent the next two hours cracking through the files in front of
him he might go with Nathan to the Sir Eric Anderson Comprehensive and then round the housing estates where the problem kids came from. Apart from anything else, he would learn a lot. These were Nathan’s own places, the disadvantaged background from which he had struggled so hard to escape. If anyone knew what made the teenage gangs tick it was Sergeant Nathan Coates.

He opened the top folder
and began to read.

What are you doing? Where’s Mr Forbes? … It was Mr Forbes. I don’t know you. I don’t want to be in this car.

Please may you stop and let me out now, please.

No one said it would be someone else. Are we going to my school?

This isn’t the way to my school. I go to St Francis.

Where are we going?

I don’t know you. I don’t want to be in this car.

Please may we stop now? I don’t want to
go with you.

Why don’t you talk? Why don’t you say anything?

Someone will have seen you in my road, there’s always someone looking out of a window or walking there, they will know this isn’t the car I go in. They’ll soon tell my father.

You shouldn’t drive like this, it’s too fast. I
don’t like going so fast. Please may you stop this car now? I’ll walk back, it’d be OK.

Why did you pull me
into your car?

When we stop at a traffic light I’ll just get out.

This isn’t anywhere near my school. I don’t know where we are. Where are you taking me? Please may we stop? Please don’t take me any further.

What do you want me to go with you for?

Why don’t you say anything to me?

Why are we going this way? I’m not allowed to go here.

Please may we stop. I won’t tell anyone, I can say I
forgot it was Mr Forbes, or I ran away … yes, that’s it, if you like, if I say I ran away. Then it will be me who gets into trouble. You wouldn’t get into trouble. I won’t say anything about you. I can’t anyway, can I, I don’t know your name and I wouldn’t say about the car. They wouldn’t know then. Why won’t you do that?

Please.

Please do that. I don’t want to go with you.

Please. I don’t
like going with you in this car.

Please.

Please.

What was it exactly? ‘Never has spring seemed so springlike, never has blossomed bloomed like this.’ And who had said it?

Karin McCafferty stood in the car park of Bevham General Hospital and looked at the grey sky – a miraculous, soft, gull’s wing grey – and felt the east wind cool and sweet on her face. There was a small bare tree beside her car, and a short run of stumpy hawthorn hedge.
She stared in amazement at the texture of the tree’s bark and at the colours of it. So many shadings of brown and charcoal, silver and mossy green. The hawthorn was like an intricate pencil scribble.

Ten minutes ago she had been sitting and waiting, dry-mouthed, in front of her pleasant, redheaded Irish oncologist, who read from the notes and reports in front of her, looked up, placed the sheets
neatly together and closed the folder. And then she had smiled. ‘You’re fine, Karin,’ she had said. ‘Clean as a whistle. No new cancer cells and nothing left of the old ones.’

She could never get used to it, never take those words for granted nor fail to feel as if the whole world was ablaze with glory as she came out of the hospital buildings into the daylight and fresh air. But one thing she
would also never do was gloat to her doctor, because she had disagreed with her and rejected her orthodox treatment in favour of natural therapies. They had had a short sharp fight, Karin had stood her ground, the oncologist had done some very straight talking and then agreed to continue seeing her and monitoring her progress. In return, Karin had agreed that if the cancer returned, she would look
again seriously at the medical options. But so far it had not returned.

Following her own regime of alternative treatment had not been an easy option. It was time-consuming, expensive and lonely and Karin had been dealt a terrifying blow when the acupuncturist who had treated her had been revealed as a psychopathic serial murderer. But now, as she stared at a sparrow hopping about in the dust,
delighting in the sheen on its wings and the brightness in its eyes, the horrors of the previous year were in another life. She was well. She had no need to return to the hospital for another half-year. She was well!

‘Dennis Potter,’ she said aloud. She had loved
The Singing Detective
. Dennis Potter had not been lucky. Cancer had killed him, but not before he had spoken of the beauty of what
he had known was his final spring. ‘Never was blossom blossomier.’

Karin dialled Cat Deerbon’s number on her mobile but it was on answer. She left a quick and jubilant message, and set off for home, the CD of Eva Cassidy touching her to tears as she drove – Eva Cassidy who had fallen into the darkness of death from the cancer Karin had vanquished.

‘
Somewhere, over the rainbow
…’

Karin slowed
down at a junction to let a lorry driver turn out in front of her.

Mike’s car was in the drive. But Mike was supposed to be in Ireland on business and not due home for another couple of days.

Karin sailed into the house humming. ‘Mike? Where are you?’

His voice came from upstairs. ‘Here.’

She ran up. She loved her house. She loved the white-painted curving banister and the turquoise-blue bowl
on the ledge of the landing window. She loved the slice of light that fell through the open door of the bedroom on to the kelim runner. She loved the faint smell of citrus coming from the half-open bathroom door.

‘Hi. I’ve got good news … the best.’ She went on in and her humming turned into a song as she walked up to Mike to hug him. He was standing beside the wardrobe and two suitcases were
open, one on the bed, the second on the floor.

‘Hey … what’s this? You look as if you’re packing. Not turfing out the dirty washing.’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not going away again? Not straight off?’

‘Yes.’

He had his back to her and was running his hand through a tie hanger, detaching one, riffling through, taking another.

‘Where to this time?’

He did not reply.

‘Mike? And didn’t you hear me say
– it was good news …’

There was a silence. He still did not turn round. Something in the stillness of the room and the nature of the silence made Karin’s stomach clench.

‘What’s wrong?’

In the end, he looked round slowly, though not at her immediately, but at the suitcase, into which he laid a shirt. Then he straightened up. A big man. Greying thatch of hair. A big nose. Handsome, she thought,
still handsome.

‘I thought you might not be coming back till later. I thought you’d probably go over to Cat’s.’

‘And? I mean yes, I might have but her phone was on answer – she was probably resting. Her baby’s due in a minute.’

‘I’d forgotten.’

‘Why did it matter what time I got home?’

He was jingling some coins in his pocket, still not looking at her.

Then he said, ‘Will you make some tea?’

‘OK.’

‘I have to talk to you.’

Then the silence again. The awful, deafening silence.

She ran out of the bedroom.

It was after seven when she rang Cat again, after Mike had gone. Karin felt as beaten and bruised and shocked as if she had been told her cancer had returned and was advanced and inoperable, as hurt as she had ever been in her life. Not a great deal had been said considering it
had taken three hours and Mike had walked out on their marriage to cross the Atlantic to a woman ten years older than she was herself. They had sat looking at one another and then not looking, drunk tea and then whisky; she had said a little, cried, stopped crying and fallen silent. Then he had gone. How could that have taken so long?

‘Cat Deerbon.’

‘Cat …’

‘Karin … what news?’

Karin opened
her mouth to speak, to tell Cat that she had neither cancer nor a husband, but no words would come from her mouth, only a strange wailing, angry noise which, as she heard it, Karin thought was being made by someone else, some woman who had nothing to do with her at all, a woman she did not know.

‘Just come here,’ Cat said, ‘whatever it is.’

‘I can’t …’

‘Yes you can, you get in the car and you
drive. See you in half an hour.’

She did not know how, but she arrived at the farmhouse safely. Cat looked at her hard for a moment then went to the fridge and took out a bottle of wine.

‘I’m off it but you certainly need it.’

‘No, it’ll make me cry.’

‘Fine. Cry.’ She handed over a large glass. ‘The children are upstairs, Chris isn’t back yet but there’s a chicken pie and you’re welcome
to stay. You never know, I might go into labour in the night and leave you in charge, and heaven help you. Let’s go into the sitting room, I lit a fire.’

Cat looked tired and uncomfortable but in every other way unchanged – capable, cheerful, firm, the perfect friend, it always seemed to Karin, as well as the perfect GP.

‘So … you saw the doc. Was it that?’

‘No. I’m clear. No sign.’

‘So …’

‘So Mike’s left.’

‘Left as in – left you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve never said a word, I didn’t know there were any problems between you two.’

‘Jesus, Cat, do you think I did? I was on such a high … you’ve no idea what it feels like … when the scan’s clear, when the blood tests are OK, when they tell you so … it’s like … literally like having a reprieve in the condemned cell. The world is so good … then
there he was packing his stuff.’