Fragile Cord (8 page)

‘How’s it going with those two?’
Coupland inclined his head in the direction of the holding cells
where the girls had been taken.

‘They’re admitting the theft but
nothing else,’ Lewisham replied, ‘I’m handling the younger girl’s
charge, my colleague here,’ he nodded towards the seated man, ‘has
the pleasure of representing her friend.’

He smiled ruefully as he said
this, as though he’d got away with the lesser of two evils. ‘If you
think they had something to do with Wilson’s assault you’ll need to
find the evidence fast, otherwise they’ll walk.’

Coupland mulled over Lewisham’s
words.

‘We’re working on it,’ he
acknowledged, ‘but the truth is no one else is coming forward to
say they saw or heard anything. It was your average boozy weekend
night, the bar was five people deep and leering room only, yet no
one saw a thing. Swinton’s a small enough town, you know as well as
I do that someone’s covering up for the attackers, and to a man,
everyone in that bar that night will have known who did it, even if
they didn’t see it with their own eyes.’

It was true. Carrying out an
assault was seen by many as an act of strength, a demonstration of
power to be bragged about in drinking circles. Someone, somewhere
was wearing this particular badge of honour, and others – many
others by now if past performance was anything to go by - knew who
it was.

‘I appreciate that Kevin, but
you can’t hold the girls on supposition.’ Lewisham countered.

‘No,’ Coupland paused, ‘I
understand that…Look, let me see what we can turn up by the end of
the day, and if that doesn’t pan out then we’ll go back to square
one.’ He turned to go, hesitated; he hadn’t sought Lewisham out
just for an update on the case.

‘Listen, I was going to grab a
coffee before I go over to the hospital to check on Wilson’s
progress. Only I need a decent cup, one that comes in a mug I can
hold without burning my fingers and froth on the top that doesn’t
resemble someone’s spit. Fancy joining me?’

‘We’re going out then?’
Lewisham laughed, and Coupland ached because he knew it was forced,
that humour was part of the armour the bereaved wore to protect
others from becoming entangled in their grief.

Lewisham excused himself from
his colleague and accompanied Coupland back along the bank of
interview rooms, past the CID Room where everyone looked up as they
went by, raising their hands to wave, relieved that Roddy was with
someone, someone else who would ask him how he was doing, if he was
keeping well. They’d ask after him next time, once they’d plucked
up the courage.

‘DCI Curtis was looking for
you.’ The desk sergeant called out as they went by the front desk
and Coupland raised his hand as though holding back the news,

‘You’ve not seen me.’ He shot
back, and the officer nodded, carried on shuffling his papers.

The station was built facing
onto the pedestrianized shopping area of Salford Precinct, sending
out a clear message that law and order was a central part of the
community once more. There may not be a policeman on every street
corner, but each time the residents did their weekly shop the
station building situated between Job Centre Plus and the Marks and
Spencer seconds shop would be a reminder that Greater Manchester
Police considered community relations a priority. As he exited the
building Coupland took a sharp left, ducking into a tea-room across
the vehicle-free street that served proper milky coffee without the
fancy prices the American coffee chains charged for calling it a
latte.

The tea-room was small and clean and
decorated like an elderly person’s front room. There were ornaments
along the windowsill and upon the shelves were pot shire horses.
Oak beams and a bridle attached to the wall gave it a country feel.
The owners had put in net curtains to obscure the view of teenage
mothers congregating in the square to enjoy their mid-morning can
of cheap lager and the hairy arsed plods who drew straws to move
them on, dispersing them anywhere so long as they kept out of sight
when the Top Brass came to visit.

They gave their order to the
waitress and settled into companionable silence as she set about
the coffee machine before bringing two frothy cappuccinos their
way. After a minute or two the time was right to broach the subject
Coupland had been working up to. He cleared his throat as he looked
into the lawyer’s permanently troubled eyes. Lewisham was a
solid-framed man with broad shoulders and a misshapen nose honed
from years on the rugby field. Dark, neatly-trimmed hair framed a
face so sad the skin clung to his jaw as though his facial muscles
had stopped working and he had neither the will nor the motivation
to get them moving again. His eyes were hollow caverns surrounded
by shadows. He looked defeated.

‘So, how are you Roddy?’
Coupland began.

Lewisham didn’t take sugar but
stirred his coffee anyway before scooping the froth onto his
teaspoon and licking it off. He set the spoon back down on the
table with a clatter and sighed.

‘Jesus Kevin, why spoil a
perfectly good moment?’ he answered in such a tone Coupland wished
he could take his question back.

‘It’s not mandatory to ask you
know,’ Lewisham continued, ‘you won’t be failing in your duty as a
mate if you just want to come out and have a coffee and not follow
it up with a dissection into my pitiful existence.’

A range of emotions flashed
across Lewisham’s face as he spoke: sadness, bitterness, anger, all
rolled into a defensive layer that protected him from the outside
world.

‘I’m doing just fine.’ He summed
up half-heartedly.

‘Bollocks.’

They glared at
each other for a moment, until Lewisham shrugged. ‘O.K.’ he said,
blowing out his cheeks, ‘you sure you want to hear? Only it’s not
exactly
It’s a Wonderful
Life
…….’

Unblinking, Lewisham laid bare
his emotions like they were exhibits in a trial determining his
level of sorrow.

‘I wake up every morning as
though I’m coming round from some terrible nightmare, that the last
two years have been a cruel dream that bears no resemblance to
reality. I cherish that moment, because it’s those few minutes of
misplaced hope that give me the strength to face the rest of the
day.’ He paused, picked up his coffee cup, blew across the top of
it before taking a sip.

‘I walk across the landing to Siobhan’s
room, which my psychiatrist tells me to keep closed so that I’m not
drawn into remembering her. He thinks it’s time that I “picked up
the threads of my life”. Ha!’ His laugh was sharp and rasping, like
a smoker’s cough. A bitter look flashed across his face and his
mouth twisted as he spoke, ‘he talks about threads when the reality
is there isn’t even a micro fibre of my life left. Not as I knew
it. To lose your wife to cancer is unlucky, to have some mad
bastard throttle the life out of your only child is twisting the
knife a bit eh?’

Coupland could only nod in
response. Whenever he was with Lewisham, the man’s grief weighed so
heavily on his shoulders that he was struck dumb by his own
inadequacy, incapable of uttering any sort of useful platitude. He
hoped that listening helped, that even if he had nothing useful to
say just sitting there and nodding would ease his friend’s burden,
if only for a while.

‘So, I go into her room,’ Lewisham
continued, ‘after all, it’s my fucking house, and if I want to go
in there I will. And for a while the world is alright again. Her
makeup and jewellery is still scattered across the dressing table,
her school uniform hangs over the back of a chair. It’s all as she
left it……she had no reason to tidy it away did she?’ his voice
cracked, ‘…….she thought she was coming back.’

How could either of them have
known that everything she did that day would be for the last
time?

Coupland looked away, not
because he was embarrassed by his friend’s emotion, but fearful
that his own, unchecked, would get the better of him and discourage
Lewisham from opening up any further.

‘There are so many memories in
that room. It’s like………..it’s like she’s still in there. Can you
imagine how that feels?’

Coupland was not a
superstitious man, but he pushed any thought of Amy from his mind.
To place his living breathing whirlwind in the same freeze frame as
Roddy’s daughter might tempt fate, and the thought of anything
happening to her made his throat constrict.

He could feel Lewisham watching
him, searching his face for understanding - acceptance, rather than
rejection - of what he’d just said.

He gave the tiniest nod.

‘And then I leave her room to go
downstairs,’ Roddy continued, ‘but the house is so quiet……so I turn
on the T.V. and the remote control is exactly where I left it the
night before, not halfway down the back of the chair or kicked
under the table and it hits me like a fist that she’s gone.’

He paused, as
though mulling over what he was going to say next, deciding to say
it anyway. ‘I want to see her again so badly, Kevin, but the only
way I can be with her is if I leave
this
world behind.’

In the days following Siobhan’s murder
Roddy had overdosed on the medication he’d been prescribed to help
him cope. On release from hospital he was transferred to a
psychiatric unit in Cheadle. At first he’d been kept on suicide
watch, but after a while, either because the doctors felt they
could trust him or that they couldn’t protect him forever, they let
him go.

‘Does it not get any easier?’ Coupland
ventured, guessing the answer.

‘During the day I’ll
be doing something completely inconsequential and I’ll be reminded
of her…….only now I find myself forgetting how she looked or how
her voice sounded, as though my mind is somehow relegating her to
the past before I’m ready…… and I feel guilty and frightened that
one day I’ll forget her altogether. I mean…….I know I should let
her go, that she isn’t in this world any more, but she’s in
my
world, and that
should count for something, right?’

Coupland faltered. He was out of his
depth and conscious that for the last twenty minutes he’d done
nothing other than imitate a nodding dog. He knew about pain but
none of the antidotes – apart from the alcoholic kind, and in the
long run that brought a completely different kind of pain. At least
Lewisham had taken a leave of absence, returning to the legal
practice on a part-time basis.

The theft charge at the wine bar in
Swinton was the first case Lewisham had handled at Salford Precinct
since he’d come back to work. Returning to the scene where his
daughter had met her killer had been an unconscionable milestone,
but he’d done it, and Coupland took this as a sign that he was on
the road to surviving Siobhan’s death, that her killer hadn’t
claimed Roddy as a victim too.

If he’d been a demonstrative man he’d
have reached out to comfort him, place a well-meaning hand on his
arm or shoulder, but he’d grown up a regular recipient of his
father’s belt leaving him unsure how to interact physically with
another man. He cleared his throat and pulled back his chair,
calling out for the bill in a voice so abrupt the waitress and
Lewisham looked at him strangely.

The first thing that struck Alex when
she returned home that evening was the noise. The chaotic babble
that marked out a family home. Carl was in the front room,
engrossed in an action film where Matt Damon saves the planet, the
sound of gunshot and TV explosions spilling out into the hallway.
In the kitchen the washing machine spin cycle competed with the
tumble dryer’s hum providing a soundtrack to their lives she’d been
completely unaware of. Upstairs Ben’s voice could be heard calling
down for a drink.

An appetising aroma wafting through
from the kitchen told her Carl had cooked them something special
and she found herself contrasting her home to Tracey
Kavanagh’s:

The silence.

The smell of pain and sorrow.

‘Hey, I didn’t hear you get back.’

Carl appeared in the doorway making her
jump. He wandered over lazily and planted a kiss on her cheek
before going over to the sink to pour Ben a beaker of water.

‘I’ve only just got back.’ she replied
stiffly, trying not to picture Angus Kavanagh returning home to a
house of slaughter. Carl held the plastic tumbler out to her.

‘Do you want to take this up to His
Nibs?’

She shook her head.

‘I’ll get a shower before I look in on
him,’ she answered.

The case had left her feeling
contaminated; Tracey Kavanagh’s perfume had permeated her clothing
while she’d held her close to breath air into her lungs. She could
still taste the woman’s saliva in her mouth. ‘Need to get changed.’
She muttered to no one in particular.

Alex inclined her head in the direction
of the stairs. ‘How’s he been?’

‘
He’s
been great,’ Carl began, ‘which
was more than can be said for the client I went to see.’ He pulled
a face, made a circle out of his thumb and forefinger on his right
hand, moved it back and forth in a gesture that implied his client
liked to amuse himself in private on a regular basis.

Alex smiled in sympathy.

‘You know Ally,’ Carl continued, ‘you
wouldn’t believe the bloody day I’ve had…’

His voice trailed away as she climbed
the stairs, unfastening the buttons on her suit before shrugging
her clothes onto the bedroom floor. In the bathroom she made
straight for the shower, standing beneath the bullets of water as
they kneaded her scalp, easing away the tension. She closed her
eyes, breathed in lavender soapsuds, leaned back against the cool
tiled wall until the water began to run cold.