At Risk (12 page)

She was desperately lonely, but said nothing to her parents, because by then she knew from the tense silences and the slammed doors that they had their own problems. Instead, she began to withdraw into herself. Her schoolwork, once sparkling, deteriorated. She developed mysterious stomach pains which kept her at home but which refused to yield to any kind of treatment—conventional or otherwise.

When she was eleven her parents separated. The separation would conclude with their divorce. On the surface the arrangement was amicable. Her parents walked around with fixed smiles on their faces—smiles which didn’t quite reach their eyes—and made a point of telling her that nothing would change. Both, however, quickly took up with new partners.

Their daughter moved between the two households, but kept herself to herself. The mystery stomach pains persisted, further isolating her from her contemporaries. Her periods failed to materialise. One evening she punched her fist through a frosted glass door and had to be given ten stitches in her hand and wrist by a junior houseman at the Accident and Emergency department of the local hospital.

When she was thirteen, her parents took the decision to send her away to a progressive boarding school in the country which had a reputation for accommodating troubled children. Classroom attendance was optional and there was no organised sport. Instead, pupils were encouraged to undertake free-form art and theatre projects. In her second year her father’s girlfriend sent her a book for her birthday. It sat on her bedside table for a fortnight; it was not the sort of thing which interested her, by and large. One night, however, unable to sleep, she had finally reached for it and begun to read.

L
iz’s mobile rang when she was on the North Circular, sandwiched between a school minibus and a petrol tanker. Her car, a dark blue Audi Quattro, had been bought second-hand with the modest sum of money left to her by her father. It needed cleaning, and the CD player was on the blink, but it ran smoothly and silently, even at her present crawl of ten miles an hour. As she scrabbled for the phone on the seat beside her, one of the boys in the back of the minibus extended his tongue at her like a lascivious dog. Twelve? she wondered. Fourteen? She couldn’t tell children’s ages any more. Had she ever been able to? She picked up.

“It’s me. Where are you?”

She caught her breath. Other boys were at the minibus windows now, gesturing obscenely and laughing. She forced herself to look away. She hated taking calls in the car, and she had asked Mark never—under any circumstances—to call her during work hours.

“Not sure exactly. Why? What is it?”

“We have to talk.”

The boys were in paroxysms now, their faces twisted like demons from a medieval painting. Rain suddenly lanced across the windscreen, blurring their outlines.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“What I’ve always wanted. You. Where are you going?”

“Away for a day or two. How’s Shauna?”

“Fighting fit. I’m talking to her this weekend.”

She switched on the windscreen wipers. The boys had disappeared. “Any particular subject? Or have you just pencilled in a general chat?”

“I’m talking about us, Liz. I’m telling her that I’m in love with you. That I’m leaving her.”

Liz stared ahead of her, appalled, as her future cracked across like mirror glass. This, quite simply, must not happen. There would be a divorce, and she would be named in open court.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, I heard you.” She swung on to the M11. Red brake lights were refracted through the rain.

“And?”

“And what?”

“What do you think?”

“I think it’s just about the worst idea I’ve ever heard.”

“I have to tell her, Liz. It’s only fair.”

Anger was racing through her now, darkening the stream of her thought. “If you tell her, Mark, I promise you, we’re—”

“It’ll be just us, Liz. Just us and the night.”

An idea—the tiny splinter of an idea—flickered across the dark cloud of her fury.

“Say that again.”

“Just us . . . and the night?”

The night. Silence.

“What is it?” he asked.

It was still there, pulsing just beyond her reach. And it was important. “I’ll call you later,” she said.

“Liz, this is . . . I’m talking about ending my marriage here. About leaving Shauna. About our future.”

The night. Silence.
Damn.

“I have to go. I’ll call you.”

“I love you, Liz, OK? But I can’t—”

Two lanes were closed. Flashing arrows were bottlenecking the traffic.
Damn it.
She had to keep hold of this train of thought. Mark would try and ring back. She switched off her phone. It took ten minutes to stop and call Goss.

“Can I just check a couple of details with you?” she asked him. “Like, have you been able to establish an exact time of death?”

“The pathologist reckoned between four fifteen and four forty-five.”

“Were there other people around?”

“A dozen or so drivers sleeping in their cabs.”

“And the shot didn’t wake any of them?”

“Not that we’ve spoken to, no.”

“You saw the round?”

“Yes. Ballistics recovered it.”

“And it was definitely 7.62 calibre?”

“So they say; 7.62 armour-piercing.”

“Case of sledgehammers and walnuts at that range, surely?”

“Well, they’ll certainly be regrouting the wall.”

Liz fell silent, considering this information. The wind buffeted the car. She had no idea where she was.

“Thanks. Be with you in a couple of hours or so.”

“OK. I’ll be in the Memorial Hall at Marsh Creake. That’s the village the dead man lived in. The DS is setting up an incident room there.”

In the event it was almost three hours before she saw the first signpost to Marsh Creake. It stood at the junction of two narrow roads. To either side of her, windblown fields extended to the horizon; above, the wide skies were darkly charged with rain. Small villages, often no more than a handful of farmhouses, were strewn across the panorama, their flint-rendered walls and pantiled roofs visible for miles.

In late summer, Liz guessed, these fields would be a blaze of gold, and the drainage cuts which bisected them would reflect the clear blue of the sky. At this time of year, however, the landscape was a sullen brown; the corn stalks had long been ploughed into the wet soil, and the marsh reeds bristled secretively. You could walk for ever across this countryside and get nowhere.

As she drove into the village of Marsh Creake the fields became the outlying greens of a golf course. No one actually seemed to be playing but a few hardy souls were gathered outside a small clubhouse roofed in green-painted corrugated iron. She continued past rain-swept bunkers of pale sand on one side of the road and 1960s villas on the other, and found herself facing the sea. The tide was out, and beyond a low sea wall an uneven expanse of grey-green mudflat lay exposed. Narrow wind-ruffled channels snaked through this, their banks dimpled with worm casts. A hundred yards out a regiment of wading birds patrolled the incoming tide, stabbing delicately with their beaks.

Looking eastwards, Liz’s curiosity was pricked by a wooded promontory and the roof of a grand-looking Georgian house. Was that the headland she had seen on the map? Surely that had been to the west of Marsh Creake. She decided to drive up there and make certain.

Two minutes later she came to a halt. To her right, the road was bordered by the outlying parts of the golf course. To her left, at the point opposite which the golf course became reeded marshland, a balconied and weatherboarded building announced itself as the Marsh Creake sailing club.

Like the golf clubhouse, this was on a miniature scale, and overlooked an inlet through the mudflats which provided anchorage for a dozen shallow-draughted craft. Liz listened to the faint clatter of the wind at their masts. It would be next to impossible to bring a cargo ashore here at night. Marker buoys lay at the end of muddy ropes at the side of the inlet to mark the channel at high tide, but without using torches or showing lights there would be a serious risk of grounding. This was not Eastman’s headland.

Beyond the clubhouse was the Georgian building she had seen. Creake Manor, it called itself, and very imposing it looked. On the gravelled drive in front of it a blonde woman was sitting in the driver’s seat of a metallic-green Cherokee jeep, talking on a mobile phone and, as far as Liz could see, thumbing through a magazine. The car’s engine, meanwhile, was quietly turning over, blowing fumes into a hydrangea bush.

As Liz drew up outside the gates the woman looked over. Enquiringly, at first, and then with mild irritation. Returning her a vacant sightseer’s smile, Liz drove away. The grounds, which were enclosed by a high wall, seemed to continue for some distance. Large trees—ilexes, oaks, a beech—rose above the rendered brickwork.

Creake Manor, Liz discovered, was the last house in the village, and neither it nor the sailing club looked remotely suited to any kind of smuggling. Returning to the T-junction on the sea front, Liz nosed the Audi into the main body of the village.

While this had a spare, old-fashioned charm, it didn’t have the bijou look of a place which had expelled all its local inhabitants and replaced them with rich weekenders from London. Essentially, Marsh Creake consisted of a handful of houses strung unevenly along the coast road. There was a garage with three pumps and an oily-floored workshop, and next to it the Trafalgar pub, whose leaded lights and brick-and-beam exterior suggested that it had been built in the years immediately following the Second World War. Alongside the pub stood a gabled village hall through whose windows stacked chairs were visible. Continuing westwards along the sea front, Liz discovered the village stores and a ship’s chandler and souvenir shop which appeared to have closed for the winter. Behind these were several streets of red-brick houses and a low council block.

A turn in the road and a stand of elderly pines masked the village’s westernmost building. Headland Hall was a grey, rather charmless Victorian sprawl whose Gothic turrets and lancets suggested a hotel or town hall rather than a private home. On the seaward side of the house, dimly visible through the surrounding trees, a long walled garden reached out over the exposed salt marshes. The house was less elegant than Creake Manor, half a mile to the west, and the grounds less lavishly maintained. But there was a symmetry to the two establishments, enclosing the village like bookends as they did, and perhaps an implicit rivalry. Both unquestionably spoke of money and influence. Was Headland Hall where “twenty, plus a special” had been brought ashore? Liz wondered. It was certainly not impossible.

A three-point turn and a couple of minutes later she was back in the centre of the village. Parking the Audi on the sea front, she stepped out into a stiff east wind, causing a line of herring gulls to lift from the back of a concrete bench and wheel complainingly away.

The words
In Memoriam
were inscribed above the entrance to the village hall. Inside, it had the cold, slightly damp feel of a building that was not in regular use. Much of the space was taken up with stacked piles of canvas-backed chairs. At one end was a small stage, whose curtain hung half open to reveal a dusty upright piano. At the other a laptop computer and a printer had been set up on a trestle table. In front of the trestle table a female constable and a male plain-clothes officer were setting up a VCR and a monitor on an extension cable.

As Liz looked around, a wiry ginger-haired man in a waxed jacket stepped enquiringly towards her. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Steve Goss.”

“That’s me. You must be . . .”

“Liz Carlyle. We spoke.”

“We did indeed.” He glanced at the rain-spattered window. “Welcome to Norfolk!”

They exchanged smiles and shook hands. He was about forty-five, Liz guessed.

“The DS is still winding things up at the transport café where the shooting took place, but the photographer’s just e-mailed us the pictures. Why don’t I take you through them, and then we can wander up to the pub for a sandwich and a chat and defrost a bit?”

“Suits me,” said Liz. She nodded to the police personnel, who watched her warily and without expression. Stepping over a trail of electronic cables, she followed Goss to the trestle table. The Special Branch officer pulled up one of the canvas-backed chairs for her, sat himself in another, and flicked his fingers over the laptop’s touchpad.

“OK, Gunter, Raymond . . . here we are.”

Columns of thumbnail images flickered into view.

“I’ll just give you the key shots,” murmured Goss. “Or we’ll be here all day.”

Liz nodded. “That’s fine. I can always check back if there’s anything I need to see again.”

The first image that Goss enlarged was a wide shot of the vehicle park. Along the far boundary of this muddied expanse the heavy goods vehicles crouched like sullen prehistoric beasts, their wet tarpaulins shining. To the left was a low prefabricated building with a sign reading
Fairmile Café.
Strip lights shone dimly inside it, and the coloured loops of Christmas decorations were visible. To the right stood a concrete toilet block, beyond which a line of policemen in fluorescent yellow foul-weather jackets were conducting a ground search.