A Cry in the Night (13 page)

‘What sort of drugs?’

‘He doesn’t have a clue, he’s too thick.’

‘Okay. Well done, that’s good to know.’

‘I thought it would be a lead. But it doesn’t get us any closer to Sarah Downing, does it?’

‘That doesn’t, no.’

The silence on the end of the line was palpable.

‘Alright,’ she finally said. ‘Well, I’d better go find the last two.’

She hung up. Sam placed the phone on a smooth, round rock next to him. He had to wait for Zoe to find Ashley and then they could get moving again. He wondered about Zoe’s discovery – if Sarah already had drugs then she wouldn’t have been down at the lake to score. The dress proved she was down at the lake earlier, probably around the time the children vanished. More than probably. So if she wasn’t there for a score, then why?

He thought about little Arthur and imagined the shock for the two lads when the corpse had floated to the surface. He’d seen the body close up, seen the way it had been scratched and beaten against the lake’s rocky bottom, the bites and nibbles from the fish. But he’d also noticed how alabaster-white Arthur’s skin was, preserved by the icy depths. It had made him into a chilling spectacle.

Why would Sarah Downing murder her own children? There was no motive. Aware of Zoe’s doubts, Sam’s mind was pulled back to the other cases where those women had drowned their little ones for no reason at all.

Blame the witches, that’s what everyone would be saying, he thought as he stared out at the dead-calm waters. The witches had been playing with Arthur, playing with him in the dark, teasing him and twisting him over and over before they began to feed. And finally, bored, they cast him away, spun him back up to the surface. But they remain below, dark shadows, cursed centuries ago by those on land and always hungry for their revenge.

He stared at the woods, at the treetops where they waited for their prey. You would know if they were there by the water that dripped down from the high branches. You’d hear the patter of water from up high. And if you did, you had to run. Run, run and never turn back.

He imagined a group of children, sprinting from the woods, screaming with laughter and fear, spooked by a sudden shower of rain. And he remembered himself, sprinting through a torrential downpour, his eyes stinging. Zoe was shouting at him from the car while the traffic cops tried to hold him back. They stood no chance though and he burst through the cordon, running to the accident, running to his wife. Too late.

She shouldn’t have been there, she should have been far away, miles and miles from this world of violence. He stopped in front of the mangled car, wanting to pull her from the wreckage even though he knew it would do no good. He wanted to howl down the heavens, but his lungs betrayed him and allowed him only a sob before his legs went, and he had to be helped back to the car.

She shouldn’t have been there. It wasn’t her fault. The driver of the truck that hit her had been on the road for over twenty hours, having falsified his logbook in order to make up time and money. He’d fallen asleep at the wheel and his vehicle had veered across the road, ploughing into her car. She never stood a chance.

He should not blame her, but the crash hurled splintering glass and metal into their home and the scar-tissue would not heal. It exposed his fragile grasp of parenthood, it ripped his girls’ confidence to pieces, it turned their home into a hollow, shadow-filled, memory-stalked cavern. It made him pace the streets at night, unable to sleep in the oh-so-big double bed, unable to talk to friends and family about his loss. It made him debase himself. It gave him excuses for his behaviour.

He imagined Andrea, right then and there, rising up from the water as Arthur had done. He pictured her bobbing, lifeless, just under the water’s edge, released by the witches after their playtime. He imagined her eyeless sockets and felt sick.

When he looked away from the water, he was startled to see that Sarah Downing was there. She was also staring out at the lake, her coat wrapped tight around her. She’d just appeared there and his mind, still ragged from the memories of his wife, momentarily imagined that she’d appeared from the water. Sarah showed no sign that she’d seen him, hugging herself tight for warmth. Her face looked peaceful and at that moment he felt a connection, their proximity and their losses binding them together. But then she looked at him and he saw her expression change, becoming closed and guarded. She should have seen him as an ally, as someone who would help her. But the way she turned from him and hurried away made him more and more certain that what he had seen was not grief, but guilt. Whatever Zoe thought, he knew he was right to have primed Ashley and set in motion the inevitable chain of events that would catch Sarah and prove her guilt.

And then his phone rang.

‘I might have something,’ Zoe said. Her voice sounded tight.

‘What?’

‘There’s a particularly annoying girl called Ashley Deveraux who all of a sudden seems to remember that Sarah Downing was wearing a dress when she saw her at the lake.’

‘A dress?’ Sam said. He wondered if Zoe would see through his fake surprise and was glad of the distance of the telephone.

‘Yeah. So either she’s dippy and unreliable or Sarah was down there twice.’

‘And why change?’

‘That’s what I was wondering.’

‘We should—’

‘I’ve got her with me. I’m going to take her down to the station at Penrith and get a formal statement.’

‘Pick me up on the way will you? I’ll be outside the pub.’

‘Still doesn’t mean Sarah Downing did it.’

He thought of the way Sarah had just looked at him and of the hatred in her eyes. He was about to say something when he realised that Zoe had hung up.

Zoe drove to the pub, found Sam sitting on a small bench outside, and let him take the wheel. He barely acknowledged the girl in the back as they drove to the station in silence. They needed a proper station to do a formal witness statement like this, and Penrith, although twenty-five minutes away, was the closest. Zoe thought the silence was odd, but didn’t say anything until they reached the station. A uniformed officer took the girl to a ‘soft’ interview room (a formal space for victims and the public who were not suspects in a case) and they got a chance to grab a coffee and catch up. She explained what she’d found out.

‘It could be nothing,’ Zoe said. ‘Apparently the dress was virtually falling off her, so maybe she got fed up and changed into something more practical.’

‘How practical would you be when your kids are missing?’ Sam asked.

‘No idea,’ she conceded, adding that the girl was vague
and unreliable. ‘She comes across as a bit of a bitch, to be honest.’

She handed him a cup of coffee. He tried it and winced.

‘God, that’s disgusting.’

‘You’re in the country now, boss.’

He just nodded, and she wondered what went on behind those calm blue eyes of his. She wished she could shut up like he did.

‘You want to run it?’ she asked, to fill the silence.

‘No. You talk to her.’

‘Really? I think she’d respond better to your Alpha Male routine than me. She’s got quite the potty mouth.’

‘You do it,’ was all he said and started walking down the corridor.

She hurried after him and was about to make a joke about getting back to the city and enjoying a flat white, but he was already at the interview room, his face creased in thought. He opened the door and ushered her in before she could say any more.

*

Sam knew that it would be better for the case if Zoe asked the questions, but he also knew it would look odd to have a silent Senior Investigating Officer and, worst of all, he had no idea what Ashley might do. The nerves made him jumpy and he worried that Zoe would notice. He said little in the corridor as he tried to imagine various scenarios and
how he would deal with them, but in the end he decided to brazen it out.

He’d avoided looking at Ashley and only paid attention to her now that she was in front of him. She’d changed since she’d been in his hotel room. Her white attire had been replaced with a baby-blue cashmere top, skinny jeans and cowboy boots. He introduced himself to her and she made him shake her hand. He could tell she was enjoying this game and it scared the hell out of him.

‘How long would you say you were down at the lake before your friends joined you?’ Zoe asked pleasantly. Ashley looked at her with a withering scowl and turned her attention to Sam.

‘Are you just colleagues, you two? Or do you fuck as well?’

‘Please, miss, just answer the question,’ Zoe said. ‘We’ll be through with this soon enough and then you can get back to your homies.’ Her tone was just about friendly.

‘Ten minutes,’ came the sulky reply.

‘Great. And could you describe the dress?’

‘Flowery. Green and red. Pretty. Summer dress. Like you’d wear to a party. But she always dressed a little slutty,’ Ashley replied, her eyes never leaving Sam.

Zoe picked up on this and glanced at him, but he just stared at the table. So she carried on.

Ashley answered her questions with grumbles and moans, and Sam wanted to reach across the desk and grab her, shake
some sense out of her, but he knew that he couldn’t, and he knew that she knew. And he worried that Zoe would wonder why he said nothing. He wouldn’t normally take such shit.

Finally it was over. Her statement had added nothing more – just that she had been at the lake earlier than the others and that, from her vague recollections, Sarah had also been there; twice that day. The first was around the same time that Arthur and Lily Downing had disappeared.

They left Ashley in the room, promising to return in a few minutes to drive her home. After they’d stepped outside, he felt Zoe pat him warmly on the shoulder.

‘Well done for keeping your cool in there, skip. I wanted to slap the silly cow.’

Sam shrugged as best he could.

‘We need to find the dress,’ he said gruffly, and felt cross with himself for not faking a laugh.

‘You think she’ll still have it?’

‘Depends on whether or not it’s incriminating. We should hunt for it anyway,’ he said. ‘You did well in there,’ he added, trying to soften his tone.

He saw the pleasure that this gave her and felt winded by his own deceit.

In the car, again, no one said much. Sam drove and would glance occasionally at the girl in the back seat. And whenever he did, he found that she was staring right back at him.

*

The cops returned to Sam’s room and his heart lurched as they entered and he saw the unmade bed; dirty sheets twisted and ruffled. He could almost see the imprint of the girl’s body upon them. He feared that they stank of sex.

‘How come they didn’t make your bed?’ Zoe asked casually. ‘I’m sure they did mine.’

Sam hurriedly straightened the sheets and dragged a cover over them. Zoe sat on the edge of the bed and kicked off her shoes.

‘My feet pong,’ she laughed.

Sam tried to bury his unease with questions about the case. Ashley’s information felt like a breakthrough, but, as with Bud’s revelations, it offered little concrete evidence. And Zoe was still unconvinced about Sarah.

‘Does Mr Downing know about Sarah being down at the lake?’ she asked.

‘That’s what we need to find out. He said that Sarah is pretty drunk by eight most evenings. I say we wait till she’s conked out and then go talk to him. Get him alone.’

Zoe nodded. As she thought about this she ran her hand over the bed cover absent-mindedly.

‘She was odd, that girl, the witness,’ she said.

‘How come?’ His stomach spun as he waited for her reply.

‘She remembered it pretty damn clearly. All of a sudden.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Maybe she was primed. Set up.’

‘By who?’

‘By anyone who doesn’t like Sarah Downing. Like all the men there.’

‘You don’t believe the girl’s statement?’

‘I don’t know. I think I do. I just don’t like being played and the way I found her.’

And with that she looked at him and he could feel the accusation that he was hiding things. He knew, for Zoe, that this was unforgivable.

‘Shall we go question her again?’ he offered, and prayed she wouldn’t expose the bluff.

She considered this for a moment, then blinked and the tension vanished. ‘No,’ she said, then sniffed her shoe again and then chucked it at him. He caught it and threw it back at her, as he knew she wanted. One of the boys.

‘So, we kick back for a bit?’ she asked. ‘And then take him apart.’

He nodded and she left him with a soldier’s salute.

Sam wondered about the water. He imagined the little girl in the bath and the boy drowned by his own mother in the swimming pool. He imagined little Arthur floating in the icy-calm lake, all alone. And he wondered whether Sarah Downing would herself fall into that strange, emotionless, blissful haze that had affected the other women. Maybe it was a disease of some sort, a virus that would strike at any time.

He remembered Andrea’s cold body, lifeless on the tarmac, soaked by the rain, and then he thought again about Ashley’s cool stare in the car mirror.

Outside, the sun battled with tumbling clouds above the austere fells. Sam tried to find some solace in their beauty.

Zoe went back to her room, sat on the bed, untied and then retied her shoes, and stared at her perfectly pleasant and inoffensive surroundings. She lasted another thirty seconds before she changed into her running gear and headed downstairs. Bernie at the bar gave her some brief directions with the understated warning that
it can get a little steep up there, pet
, and with that, off she went.

The run through the village was fine. An old man gawped at her Lycra but said nothing and soon she was out in the fields, following the footpaths’ signs – up, up and further up. Her lungs burned and legs ached but she loved feeling like this. When she was younger, she’d been a keen athlete and had competed at a high level – four hundred metres was her preferred distance. She used to break the opposition. A set of injuries had stopped her going further, but she still had the same hunger and desire when she ran. She pushed hard against the slope, exorcising the
frustrations that swamped her. No bloody hill was going to defeat her.