Absent Light (18 page)

Later on, she phoned her dad and got a policeman named Dyer. After first clarifying her identity with Wylie, Dyer allowed her father on the line. He sounded more upbeat, more determined. A man used to action, he clearly felt better to have his worst fears taken seriously rather than just being plagued by uncertainties.

Lauren made more coffee and told her all about her life: how she'd come from a big family, mum and dad going strong, brothers and sisters climbing up the ladders of their respective careers, how she'd married young to another police officer, how they'd rowed and divorced four years later – no kids, a godsend. While nodding and grunting, and doing her best to show interest, Helen chafed to be on her own. She wanted to think, to try and make sense of what was happening. She felt vulnerable at the invasion of her privacy, unsettled by being treated as a victim, and hated the fact that it felt as if her relationship, if she could call it that, with Stratton was altered. And there was something else.

She was undeniably at the centre of the drama, yet she felt peculiarly excluded. All these people were buzzing about because of her, and yet, in truth, she was the least important part of the investigation. The focus was on the perpetrator. She suddenly realised that this was how the relatives of victims must feel. It made her feel a bit ashamed that, after years of working for the police, she'd only just cottoned on.

She wondered what the police expected of her and what she expected of them. The best outcome was apprehending Freya
,
proving her involvement, and her subsequent arrest and detention.

That's what made her feel uneasy.

Albion Place, and what it represented, didn't conform to the considered and polished pattern of what went before.

Lauren's cell phone rang. She got up, took the call, and left the room. When she came back, she seemed different but Helen couldn't say how. If pressed, she thought Blazeby seemed held back, not so chatty, less smiley, more like a copper.

Helen waded her way through every soap and home improvement programme on offer. If anyone had asked her about the content, she wouldn't have had a clue. All she could think about was the strangeness of the situation she found herself in. Blackmail, extortion with menaces, violence, however you dressed it up, stuff like this didn't happen to people like her. She was only a humble photographer, doing her best to be ordinary, eschewing the kind of life her parents had wanted for her. Not true, her conscience cut in. You wanted to be a high-flyer, prove yourself, cut a dash, and you didn't care how you did it.

Helen switched to Sky and began to watch the film
Gladiator
. She'd seen it before on the big screen and loved it. A sucker for big moral themes, she found the triumph of the underdog particularly satisfying. One scene in particular stuck in her head. It was the bit where Maximus was taken to the place of execution after the death of Marcus Aurelius. His smart thinking, his insistence on a Roman death – to take his would-be executioners off-guard – and his subsequent escape generally made her spirits soar. Not tonight, she thought morosely.

About ten-thirty, the doorbell rang. Lauren got up and it struck Helen that she'd been expecting it. She listened as Lauren went downstairs, felt the draught as a blast of cold air rushed into the hall and circulated upwards. There was a brief, muffled exchange of voices. Sensing a development, Helen stood with her back to the fireplace. She saw Stratton first, then Blazeby bringing up the rear. Both had serious expressions.

“We found her,” Stratton announced.

“At Albion Place?” Helen said.

Stratton nodded. “Called herself Karen Lake.”

Helen folded her arms in derision. “That her real name or another alias?”

“Not sure yet.” There was a cagey expression in his eyes.

“So what did Miss Lake have to say for herself?”

“Not a lot,” Stratton said. “She's dead.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“D
EAD
?” H
ELEN
'
S EYES WIDENED
.

“Suspected drug overdose. We got there as the ambulance was arriving. Not that it was much use.”

“Right,” she said, sinking into the nearest chair. Yesterday's suspect becomes today's victim. “You're sure it's her?”

Stratton gave a dry laugh. “We're waiting for a positive I.D. but the girls identified her as the same woman in the photographs.”

“You've talked to them?” Adam always maintained that prostitutes were not generally forthcoming with information, stemming from a grave distrust of the police.

“Obviously they were upset, but they were pretty co-operative.”

“And the cause of death was definitely an OD?”

Stratton frowned. His brown eyes hardened. “A syringe was found at the scene.”

“Heroin,” she stated dismally.

“We'll have a clearer idea after the post-mortem. Until then we're treating it as suspicious.”

She supposed she should have felt some satisfaction. She didn't. She felt cheated. She wanted answers and, with the woman dead, they'd be even harder to come by.

“According to the girls she worked with, she was a heavy user,” Stratton said, as if to bolster his argument.

We die as we live, something she'd been taught a long time ago. “Any previous drugs offences?”

“Incredibly, no.”

“And she was a prostitute?”

Stratton nodded. “Moved from Essex seven months ago. Usual story, running away from a pimp.”

“And is Albion Place being used as a brothel?”

Stratton shook his head. “No offence has been committed.”

“So they just live together?”

“That's about the size of it.”

“The other girls say anything about her coming into money?”

“They mentioned
some
money. We're following that line of enquiry.”

She gave him a sharp look.
Hello
, she wanted to say,
this is Helen, you don't have to use the jargon with me.

Stratton sat down next to her. “You mentioned tailing Lake before you followed her back to her address.”

“Yes.”

“Where exactly?”

“To a rough bit of Smethwick.”

“Could you take us there, identify it?”

“Probably, but I don't know where Freya, sorry Karen, went. I lost her, or she lost me, and it wasn't the sort of location you hang around in.”

“Was she picking up drugs, do you reckon?”

“Well, it wasn't the kind of place you pick up a loaf of bread,” she said, eyes smiling.

“No,” Stratton agreed with a short laugh.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“Naturally, we'll be talking to her associates, tracing the family.”

And piecing together her history, she thought. “Finding out why her path crossed with mine.”

“If,” Stratton said.

She expressed surprise.

“What we need is hard evidence, Helen, not imaginative ideas.”

It was the nearest he'd come to criticism, she thought. His strict adherence to sticking purely with the facts was so very different to Adam. She ought to be glad. “Any chance you'll recover the money?” she asked speculatively.

He threw her an exasperated look. “Hold up, you're jumping to conclusions again.”

“You don't think it was her, do you?” It was impossible to keep the dejected tone from her voice.

“We don't even know for sure whether your mother was being blackmailed.”

“Why else would she part with over a hundred grand in cash?” She said, dismayed.

“That's what your dad said.”

“Surely, he should know?”

“It's never good to get ahead of the evidence, Helen. People do the strangest things for a host of reasons. Let's say we're keeping an open mind.”

Sleep was fractured. Shivering in the drab winter light, she pulled on a robe, and got out of bed. Her life had suddenly taken on a strange, surreal quality. There were some strong similarities with what happened before, she thought. With crowds of journalists and photographers camped outside her flat, then on the other side of the city, she'd felt that same helpless and frustrating sense of being under siege, if for very different reasons. She'd felt so alone, she remembered. No Adam to cuddle. No job to speak of. No future, it seemed at the time. In haste, she'd fled to Keepers. And there she felt more on her own than ever.

She crept downstairs and made herself a cup of green tea flavoured with raspberry and ginseng. She'd bought it in the throes of a health kick. It tasted of perfumed weeds, but at least she enjoyed the morbid satisfaction that it was doing her good.

She'd once tried to confess some of her feelings to Martin, thought it would make her feel better. Instead it made her feel worse. She felt dirty in the telling. By recounting the story again, rather than absolving her, she'd breathed new life into it, giving it oxygen, feeding it with fresh power. Martin was sympathetic, compassionate and eloquent in her defence. He came up with all sorts of excuses.

“From what you've told me, Adam was a controlling person. The guy seemed to be completely lacking in principles. By contrast, you were naive, infatuated by the man, which allowed him to take advantage of you.”

“I wasn't a teenager, Martin.”

“But you didn't know or understand the importance or significance of what he was telling you,” Martin argued.

A hard lump formed in her throat. “I withheld information.”

“What information?”

She hesitated. “Can't say.”

He looked shocked. “Come on, Helen. You can trust me. I'm not going to think badly of you. I love you.”

“Sorry,” she said, writhing with shame. “I just can't.”

“Look,” he said softly. “At the end of the day, you weren't doing the investigating. It wasn't your job and it wasn't your fault. It couldn't be. You were just a worker-bee.”

Soon afterwards, she remembered with piercing clarity, she told Martin that it was over between them. She'd had little choice; her guilt would always divide them. While part of her felt she'd disclosed too much, the other felt that she'd not explained enough. And that's how it would always be. Devastating though it was, it was kinder to let him go.

Her mind roamed back to Karen Lake, and the sheer randomness with which life changes or, she thought, the arbitrary fashion in which death comes calling. We're all an angel's breath away from it, she thought. We think we're immune, protected by luck, God, our friends, lovers, or family. Some of us believe that we're smart enough, tough enough to take care of ourselves. But when death comes it doesn't creep up sweet-talking in your ear. It grabs you from behind. She bet the woman had no idea that today would be her last. Most of us are utterly unprepared for it, she thought. In increasingly violent times, with the threat of terrorism, the chance of being caught in someone's else's crossfire, or the risk of running into a psychopath, who knew whether walking up that specific street, waiting at that precise place, getting into a car with that particular man, would signal the end of life? But Karen Lake had died by her own hand, she reminded herself. Only a violence of sorts then.

Excluding the other end of the market, the high-class escorts, with their fragrant-smelling, well-heeled clients, who did it to pay for the children's school fees, prostitution was rarely the type of occupation selected from choice, or as part of a good career move. The vast majority were driven to it because they were running away from demons. Maybe Karen Lake had experienced a life in care. Maybe she'd come from an abusive background. Maybe she'd got into drugs, found someone to supply then found there was a fatal catch in the transaction. The stories varied but the sub-text was the same: loneliness, unhappiness, vulnerability, oppression. And that, she realised, is what she'd recognised in the woman on the one occasion they'd met, the two occasions they'd spoken. That's why she was drawn to her. The vulnerability in the woman's eyes was mirrored in her own.

Which indicated that Karen Lake was not a ruthless blackmailer but simply a pawn in someone else's game.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I
T WAS A COUPLE
of days later. Helen spent the intervening time going through the motions, pretending things were normal, resisting her grappling thoughts. She blitzed the flat, cleaned out cupboards, and junked rubbish. She sorted through her wardrobe and, with the aid of several bin-liners, divided up clothes and belongings for the charity shop down the road. She ironed miscellaneous clothing that had festered in the bottom of the clean laundry basket for several months. She tried not to reflect on her mixed feelings about Stratton. She told herself that she was busy, under pressure, that's why she didn't respond to his calls. In any case, his life was complicated enough. He had children to spend time with. He had a demanding job. He had excess baggage. So did she. She didn't admit that he didn't see things her way, that he was far too nice a guy for her, that she didn't feel worthy.

Every so often Harmon, or both of them together, would pop up with a fresh morsel of information for her to chew over, swallow, and sometimes spit out.

“Has she been formally identified yet?”

Harmon answered. “By the mother, last night.”

Helen suppressed a sigh. “Poor woman.”

“She seemed resigned,” Harmon said. “Always thought Karen would come to a sticky end.”

“Did she say that?” Helen said, appalled.

“Her words exactly.”

Helen pushed the pace wherever possible. If she ever had the misfortune to suffer from an illness that was terminal, she'd be the type who'd want to know what to expect, and how long she had to live. It was in her nature to know. Mostly. It was in her psyche to find out as much as she could about her assailant. She quizzed Stratton mercilessly.

“The girl grew up in Chingford, Essex,” Stratton said in answer to one of her many questions. “Usual pattern: warring spouses, unruly teenager, rows, you know the kind of thing,” Stratton sighed with a dreadful world-weariness. “It appears there was quite a lot of family friction, and she grew up with a history of antisocial behaviour. Karen got chucked out onto the street when her mother found her sleeping with her boyfriend.”

“Her mother's boyfriend?” Helen said, pulling a face.

Stratton nodded grimly.

“When did she get chucked out?”

He glanced at his notes. “Five years ago. She was seventeen. Understandably, there's not been too much in the way of contact since.”

“Was her mother aware of the company she kept?”

“Suspected, but she said she switched off from it.”

Were they also the mother's exact words, she wondered bleakly?

On another occasion, when Stratton and Harmon were about to leave, he asked Harmon to go on ahead and wait for him in the car.

“Does it have to be like this?” Stratton said.

“Like what?” She pretended she didn't know what he was on about.

“As though we don't know each other.”

“I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea,” she said, eyes glancing sideways towards the door.

“What about me?” he said testily. “Have I got the wrong idea?”

She let out a sigh, and slipped her arms around him. He felt resistant. “I'm not good company,” she said gently. “It's the way it has to be for now, sorry.” There was a kind of ghastly echo in the back of her mind. She'd heard the words before,
said
the words before.

“Fine,” he said with a thin smile. “Goodnight then.”

After he left, she went upstairs with a heavy heart. She really didn't understand herself any more.

It was three days before they told her what they'd found. She felt stunned, not simply because of what it meant but because they must have known from the start, she thought. It would have been found by the SOCOs.

“You sure it's the right ticket?”

“We traced it to a pawn shop in Kidderminster,” Harmon said.

Oh God, Helen thought. It was where her mother had spent her formative years.

“And the porcelain was there?”

“Yeah,” Stratton said.

Helen covered her face with her hands. It made perfect sense. She should have given it more consideration before. Only a woman would appreciate its worth. She thought of her poor mother spending a lifetime trying to escape her past and this bitch, Karen Lake, comes along, forcing her to revisit it. She could only imagine her mother's turmoil.

“Let me get this straight,” Helen said wearily, dropping her hands, “you found the ticket under the mattress?” She knew that once everyone involved gave the all-clear to move the body, and the undertakers had performed their task, SOCOs would have examined the headboard for signs of pressure marks – a give-away in sexual killings – and every piece of bedding for DNA.

Stratton nodded. Helen let out a high-pitched laugh. “You mean she was thinking of going back some day to reclaim it?”

Stratton gave an embarrassed shrug. “Who knows what she was thinking?”

Helen rubbed her temples. “You said the girls mentioned some money.”

“Karen boasted that she'd come into funds and that there was plenty more where it came from.”

“Right,” Helen said, recognising that Stratton was right and she was wrong; the woman really had worked alone. “Does my dad know all this?”

“D.C. Wylie and Detective Chief Inspector Dukes are with him now,” Stratton said.

Helen gave a knowing smile. With the police, it always came down to pecking orders.

They asked her to go back to the mean streets. They were trying to track down whether Karen Lake had picked up her fatal fix there. Harmon was driving, Stratton watching. It was a bright day though it did little to soften the edge of incipient menace. Helen didn't feel as if she were much use. Every face, every corner, every steel door looked the same. Funnily enough, she felt more under threat in the police car than when she'd walked alone.

“The heroin she was sold was a of a very high purity. It would have felled even the most seasoned addict,” Stratton said.

Which means there'll be more deaths, Helen thought grimly. “You going to alert the media?”

“Depends on whether it's a one-off.”

“You're saying she was unlucky?”

“Pardon the pun, but you know the score. Heroin's like playing with fire,” Stratton said. “Sometimes the gear's dodgy and people get scorched.”

Helen gave a depressed sigh and looked out of the window. The sky was livid with stripes of red and blue, like the ribs of a beaten child, she thought.

“I'm sorry, this really is no good,” she said.

“All right,” Stratton said, signalling for Harmon to take her home.

When she worked for the police, she hated weekends on call. People inflicted the most terrible butchery on each other during the hours between Friday night and Monday morning. It was as if, without the constraints of work, the lid came off all civilised behaviour. She was thinking this as she drove to pick up her dad for lunch. She was thinking a lot about the past.

Afterwards she intended to see Gran. It had been several weeks since she'd last been and, although she knew she wouldn't be missed, she hated to think of her grandmother all alone without any visitors. Like the routine of going to the swimming-pool, she also found some solace in the weekly visit. When the business with Jacks blew up in her face, Helen had gone on an almost daily basis. Gran had just moved into Roselea. Her memory wasn't as bad as it was now, though she was clearly disorientated and upset by the move. Helen didn't begrudge the time spent with her. She was glad to have something and someone else to focus on.

She could have moved right away and started life somewhere else, but, as an only child, she felt a certain responsibility to be within easy reach of her parents. She also believed that it was easier to disappear in the city than in the country. In the country, people let you settle in, then popped round with the village newsletter, asked you to join some committee, Neighbourhood Watch, God forbid, or take part in the local village fete and, before you knew you it, you were being pumped for information with questions you didn't want to answer.

With the pressure off, she'd fully expected to be able to mourn her mother's death, but she felt stalled, stuck, it seemed, in that early first stage of shock and disbelief. In fact, she felt nothing at all, as if closed down inside, a knack she'd developed for blocking out and dealing with distressing crime scenes. Others, outside the police, she recalled, thought she was callous. Her mother certainly alluded to it on more than one occasion. The truth was that, without finding a device to filter it out, you couldn't stay sane.

She was taking her dad to The Crown, a pub with a decent restaurant, a couple of miles down the road from Keepers. In truth, she didn't like going to the house much even though it was full of shared memories. Although the police had been unable to find any further evidence of Lake's involvement with her mother, the family home felt peculiarly tainted.

Her father was making a real effort to be cheerful. Throughout a lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, accompanied by a bottle of claret, he was almost chatty.

“I've been thinking,” he said.

Such a mild-mannered remark, she thought, and yet so ominous. She smiled and inclined her head.

“Ever thought of starting up your own studio?”

“I've often thought about it,” she said, “but not seriously.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“I couldn't afford it.” She also didn't think Ray would be very pleased.

“I don't mean in Birmingham. I was thinking Stafford would be an ideal location.”

She gave him a shrewd look. She knew what was coming next.

“Until you get on your feet, you could always stay at Keepers.”

“Mmm,” she said. She loved her father dearly but she didn't want to fill the space her mother had so recently vacated. It wouldn't be good for either of them.

“I could help with the finance.”

“It's not that, Dad.”

He put his old and crinkly hand over hers. “Will you, at least, think about it?”

What could she say? It was lovely to see him this hopeful, this focused. It would give him the kind of interest he craved. She didn't want to hurt him. Not yet.

They were onto the sweet course before she dared to raise the question that niggled most. “Why do you think that woman picked on Mum, and not you?”

“I've really no idea. I've often thought about it but nothing makes much sense.”

“And why did Mum keep it to herself?” It was hard to keep the critical note at bay.

He expelled a sigh. “I've asked myself the same question.”

Helen gave him a straight look. “You shared everything.”

Her father flinched, indicating that her belief was not entirely true. “Your mother had her problems,” he said delicately. “She was a very private woman. She used to have what I called a busy interior life. I daresay she had her reasons, and I tried not to let it bother me. Didn't always succeed,” he said, looking guilty.

“But she was being threatened, Dad. Why didn't she confide in you?”

“Because she was afraid. It's the only explanation I can come up with.” He flashed a sudden smile. “The threat wasn't to her – the money didn't matter a damn – it was to you. That's why she couldn't say anything. She was too afraid of losing you.”

“Oh,” Helen said, her eyes misting with tears.

Well-lit, cheery, with no unpleasant smells and a decor heavy on primary colours, Roselea resembled a well-run children's nursery. Helen looked at her gran who, at eighty years of age, was holding a doll to her shrunken chest. In the end they all became like little boys and girls, she thought.

When Gran initially showed symptoms of not being well, Helen's mother was the first to play it down. She maintained that all old people were forgetful. But not all old people put their clothes in the fridge, hoard bottles of bitter lemon and go walkabout at three in the morning, Helen had pointed out at the time. When it got to the stage where her gran could get lost inside her own modest home, Helen's mother eventually, and reluctantly, gave in. Gran was moved into residential care. For the first couple of times, Helen and her mother went together, her mother spending the entire time standing up, eager to keep the visits as short as possible. Then the excuses piled up. Her mother was too busy, too tired, too upset. Helen was told by a nurse that it was more common than you'd think for families to fade from the scene. By all accounts her gran had been a lousy mother so it wasn't such a surprise that, in the final analysis, her mum severed all ties. How could she nurture someone who'd failed to nurture her, Helen told herself, but she couldn't help thinking that, because of her mother's attitude to Gran, there would never be any kind of resolution, that it would haunt her mum forever. As things turned out, she never needed to worry.

Careful not to creep up on her and startle her, Helen tapped on the open door and walked into the room. Her gran struggled to her feet. She was wearing a faded skirt and sweater, and a purple cardigan with all the buttons done up wrong. She wore thick navy socks, and trainers on her feet. Her iron-grey hair was swept back off her wrinkled face by a sparkly slide.

“The place is in such a mess,” her gran fretted, looking around her neat and tidy room, “my daughter's a lazy girl.”

“That's all right, Gran,” Helen said calmly, trying to enter into the spirit of it.

Gran gave her a puzzled look. “No dear, I'm not your grandmother. My little girl isn't old enough to have babies.”

Helen gave her an embarrassed smile and sat down. Gran viewed her with some suspicion. “Who are you?”

“I'm Helen. Look, I've brought you some picture books,” she said, patting the seat next to her. She always came well equipped. It was the key to distracting her grandmother from some potentially awkward questions.