The Redeemed (31 page)

'Then you know more than I do.'

Consulting the notebook, Gleed scratched his sandpaper chin.

'She says you went there every day after school - two o'clock
until half-past five. It must have been your first year.'

Jenny said, 'I have a memory blank. I've virtually no
recollection of what happened between the ages of four and five. I've tried to
remember, but I can't.'

'Really?' Gleed sounded interested. 'What do you mean, you've
tried? In therapy?'

'Yes.'

'Do you mind my asking what you have been undergoing therapy
for?'

'I'm recently divorced. There's been a lot of fallout.'

Gleed nodded. 'And then you started seeing Stephen Painter?'

'He has nothing to do with this.'

'Bit of a pot-head, isn't he? He has a recent conviction.' He
glanced at DC Wesley, who gave an affirmative nod.

Jenny swallowed her anger and answered as calmly as she
could. 'Can you please ask me what you want to know?'

'Your dad was quite the local character, by all accounts.
Businessman. Freemason.'

'That sounds perfectly respectable.'

'The problem with small towns,' Gleed reflected, 'is folks
sometimes get a little too close for their own good. And when your coppers are
drinking pals with a fella they're investigating, things can slip by.'

Jenny took a deep breath, suppressing the rising urge to bolt
from the room. His smell, the heat, the clumsy insinuation was more than she
could bear.

'Mr Gleed, I'm not an idiot. There is no way on God's earth
my father could be made to stand trial. We both know why you've asked me here
and it's got nothing to do with what happened thirty-eight years ago.'

He studied her with patient, puffy eyes. 'The officer who was
in charge of the investigation is very much alive and well, Mrs Cooper. If it
turns out he was - how shall we put it - less than conscientious, then it's his
head on the block, isn't it?'

'And the timing of this investigation is purely coincidental?'

'Perhaps our complainant read your name in the paper. Even
I'd heard of you, and the only paper I ever see is covered in budgie crap.'

Wesley snorted with amusement.

'So it's this retired detective you're investigating?' Jenny
said sceptically.

'His name's Ronald Pope, lives down on the south coast. He
was a young DI back then, same lodge as your dad.'

Ron Pope. The name did have a distant echo. Why
Ron}
It was her mother's voice she heard saying it, casually in
conversation, through the open door of the kitchen in their family home; Jenny
standing somewhere around the corner in the hall, aware of serious adult talk
she didn't understand.

'Ring a bell?'

Jenny shrugged. 'Not particularly,' she lied.

Gleed arched his back a little, lifting his arms a fraction,
giving Jenny a glimpse of the damp pits of his shirt.

'You see, we think you must have spoken to Mr Pope at some
point, or perhaps he spoke to you? The problem is there's no trace of the
files, otherwise we'd have more to go on.'

Jenny shook her head. 'I don't remember.'

Gleed waited a moment, as if expecting her to change her
mind, then nodded to Wesley, who reached into his inside pocket and drew out a
photograph. It was an early colour picture of a man in his thirties with long
brown hair, and a full moustache that dipped, bandit-style, around the sides of
his mouth.

'That's Mr Pope. We dug out his old personnel file.'

The face was distantly familiar. She stared at it, searching
her memory for the reason why. No image came to mind, but there was something
else - a dim recollection of the sharp smell of tobacco smoke on a man's breath
. . . and a deep voice, a smoker's voice.

'I can see it's stirring something,' Gleed said.

'Perhaps.' She shook her head. 'No, I don't think so.'

'Let me tell you what happened, Mrs Cooper, so far as I can.
Your dad was seen hurrying from the house tugging you behind him at about a
quarter to six in the evening. An ambulance arrived ten minutes later. They
found your auntie Penny with your kid cousin lying on the hall floor. She'd
cracked her skull and died of a haemorrhage. Your uncle James turned up in the
middle of all the commotion and took a swing at his wife, had to be pinned down
by a couple of our boys. According to Pope, your auntie's story was that your
dad had already been to pick you up when Katy fell down the stairs. Your dad
backed her up, said she was right as rain when he left with you.'

Jenny said, 'Wasn't any of this discussed at an inquest?'

'We don't know,' Gleed said. 'There's nothing at the
coroner's office but a report from the doctor in A & E pronouncing her dead
on arrival: head injuries consistent with a fall.'

You killed her.
Her father's words rang through her head.
You
keep my secret, I'll keep yours.

'Are you feeling all right, Mrs Cooper? You look a bit
queasy.'

'I'm fine,' Jenny said, but she had no feeling beyond her
wrists, and now sensation was leaving her feet and legs too. It felt like the
beginnings of what she termed her deep panics. There were no tangible thoughts
attached to the building sensation of dread; it emanated from an unreachable
place beyond the realm of words. She had once described the feeling to Dr Allen
as like a seizure of the soul.

'Would you like me to fetch you some coffee, Mrs Cooper?' DC
Wesley asked.

'No thank you,' Jenny whispered. The room was turning to a
blur.

When Gleed spoke it was as if he were addressing her from the
far end of an echoing passageway. 'It could have been an accident, but why not
tell the whole truth?' He leaned insistently across the desk. 'You see, in my
experience there's always something that gives it away, some little clue that
all's not well. Do you know what it is here, Mrs Cooper?'

Jenny shook her head.

'There are two things, in point of fact. Firstly, I'm told
your dad was a notorious shagger, and secondly my retired detective friend says
your cousin had no knickers on. Just a skirt and blouse. He noticed when they
lifted her onto the stretcher, but apparently no one ever said a word about it.'

He was lying, he had to be, but Jenny's heart was pounding so
hard she could scarcely breathe.
My right arm is
heavy,
she repeated to herself,
relax, relax,
fighting to
draw back from the brink of a full-blown attack.

'I won't pull my punches, Mrs Cooper, I can see you're
anxious for me to get to the point: did he ever muck about with you, your dad?'

'No,' Jenny whispered.

'You don't seem very sure.'

'It's not that. It can't be.'

'No knickers. Head injury. Running from the house . . .
You've got to admit it's worth more than a few minutes of my time.'

'Why don't you speak to Pope?'

'Oh, we will,' Gleed said. 'We most certainly will.'

'Would you excuse me — '

Jenny got up from her chair, her legs threatening to buckle
beneath her. Wesley reached out a hand to steady her. She pushed it away and
made for the door, wrenching it open and plunging into the corridor. She heard
Gleed call out from behind her, 'You can't hide for ever, Mrs Cooper . . .'

She made it down the four flights of stairs and out of the side
door onto the pavement. She leaned back against the concrete wall for a long
moment, sucking in the cool air, filling her lungs slowly to the count of ten
the way she had learned with Dr Travis. Inch by inch the feeling returned to
her limbs. She glanced back at the door, expecting Gleed or Wesley to come
after her, but neither appeared. She focused on her car parked across the main
road from the station, and made her way unsteadily towards it.

She waited for a gap in the traffic. Stepping out from the
kerb, something caught the corner of her eye. She turned to see a figure in the
driver's seat of a blue car parked to her left aiming a camera lens at her. He
got the startled, head- on shot he was after, then tossed the camera aside and
swept out of the space, passing behind her as she reached the far side. Jenny
spun round to get a look at him, but he was gone.

The car had looked too smart for a reporter's; she couldn't
tell the make, but it had seemed sleek and fast. She collapsed behind the wheel
of her Golf and tried to get her panicked thoughts in order as she groped for a
pill. Would Gleed have tipped off the press? No. There was nothing in it for
him. He was just doing what he'd been asked: to rattle her. More than that: to
scare her. Damn! She wrenched at the lid of the Temazepam bottle with wooden
fingers and scattered tablets across her lap. She grabbed one and swallowed
while she scooped the others up greedily like an addict.

She lay back in her seat, eyes closed, waiting for the drug
to work, too jittery to drive. And then it came to her: if Turnbull's lawyers
had somehow put Gleed up to this, what else might they have done? Alan Jacobs
had killed himself before she had decided to hold the inquest, but not Freddy
Reardon. He had died the night before he was due to give evidence.

How would that work? She tried to reason it through: Freddy
knew something about Eva that the Mission Church or Decency didn't want known,
perhaps something to do with Jacobs? Jacobs was in a mess, seeking truth and
struggling with his sexuality. She recalled the witness at his inquest, Mary
Richards, Jacobs's fellow enquirer. Jenny pictured her in the witness box, her
earnest expression as she ignored the glowering Father Dermody to breach
Jacobs's confidence. His words filtered back to her exactly as the witness had
spoken them:
'I've become involved with some people I shouldn't have. I
thought they were helping me but now I don't know. I don't know what's going
on. I feel as if I don't know who I am any more.' I remember the look of
despair on his face,
Mary Richards had said.
I tried to get
him to say some more but he wouldn't.

Who were the people helping him? Perhaps Eva was one; if he
had confided in anyone it was likely to have been her. Freddy? Others at the
church?
I don't know what's going
on ...
I don't know
who I am any more.
The words of a man who thought he was being taken in one
direction only to find he was being led in another. Mary Richards had said he
told her this about three weeks before he died. That would have been the first
week of June; Eva had been killed almost exactly a month earlier.

She felt the Temazepam starting to work; a warm, slightly
giddy sensation like the first drink of the evening. It took the edge off her
nerves but caused her to stumble as she groped for connections: the police
claimed Alan Jacobs's hard drive had been wiped accidentally. Could it have
held evidence relating to Eva, or was she letting herself drift into paranoia?

For a reason she couldn't fully explain, Jenny still believed
that Ceri Jacobs was as ignorant of the truth as she claimed to be. The widow
had never struck her as a secretive or knowing woman, but rather absorbed in
her role as a mother at the expense of intimacy with her husband. And she had
been far too disapproving for Jenny to imagine Jacobs sharing his confusion
with her. No, his comfort would have been with strangers. But Eileen Reardon,
Freddy's mother, was different. Broken down as she was, she had lived and suffered.
Jenny could see that her physical addictions and attraction to strange
philosophies were her insulation from a reality she would otherwise be unable
to bear.

But even through the alcoholic fog, she would surely have
seen something.