‘My, someone’s looking glum!’
Jill had been too wrapped up in her thoughts to spot Ella.
‘I was miles away.’
‘So what are you up to?’ Ella fell into step with her.
‘Taking raffle tickets back to you,’ Jill told her drily. ‘Raffle tickets that are in the coat that’s hanging up at my cottage.’
‘Ah, a senior moment.’ Ella grinned at that. ‘Don’t worry, I have them all the time.’
‘I’ll drop them in this evening,’ Jill promised.
‘No need. I’ll walk back with you and collect them if you like.’
They walked on, chatting about this and that, and Jill’s spirits lifted. Ella’s good company always cheered her.
‘I need to collect Jack’s tickets,’ Ella said as they neared The Terrace. ‘Are you in a rush, Jill, or can you spare five minutes?’
‘It’s fine by me, although he’s probably at Hannah’s. I met up with Gordon and he said he’d escaped for a bit of air while Jack was with Hannah.’
They walked up the path to Jack’s house, and Ella, without hesitating, walked round to the back door. She hammered on that, and shouted, ‘Are you in there, Jack?’
There was no response.
‘He might be in his shed.’ Ella strode off down the path. ‘The old fool practically lives in there.’
Jill followed her and, sure enough, Jack was in his shed. Ella yanking the door open must have startled him, but he didn’t seem bothered.
He was sitting in a wooden chair. Well-worn and with a slatted back, the chair looked to be older than Jack. It had pride of place in his garden shed and, from it, he would be able to see the long, tidy length of his garden and the house.
‘My,’ he said, ‘I don’t often entertain visitors in here.’
‘It’s just as well.’ Ella pointed at several cobwebs and pulled a face. ‘Look at the state of the place.’ She tutted. ‘I well remember Mary saying you’d live in here given the choice.’
‘Why not? This chair is the most comfortable one in the village.’
Outside, to the left of the shed, was an incinerator from which a thin wisp of smoke curled skywards.
‘Have you been having a bonfire?’ Ella asked, wrinkling her nose at the smell.
‘I have.’
‘Old love letters?’ Ella teased.
‘It wouldn’t matter if it were. You can burn stuff but memories—and truth—remain.’
Ella nudged Jill and winked. ‘You didn’t know Jack was a philosopher, did you?’
‘Away with you, woman,’ Jack said irritably.
Reluctantly, it seemed to Jill, he left the comfort of his shed and stepped outside.
‘You’ll be here for those raffle tickets,’ he guessed. ‘They’re in the kitchen.’
His dog trotted by his side as they walked up the path to the house and, a few minutes later, Ella was putting the ticket stubs in her pocket and they were on their way again.
‘Him and his shed,’ Ella said, shaking her head.
‘How long has he lived there, Ella?’
‘He was born in that house. What is he now? My, he must be seventy-eight.’
‘He looks good on it.’
‘He does,’ Ella agreed. ‘I think it was in 1952 that he married Mary. Around that time anyway. Shortly after that, their son, James was born. They wanted more children, Mary did especially, but it wasn’t to be.’
Ella thought for a moment.
‘We were good friends, me and Mary. You would have liked her. It’s hard to believe that twenty years have passed since she died. Cancer,’ she added grimly.
Ella, who had lost her beloved Tom to cancer, hated the disease with a passion.
‘I remember when James married Emily,’ she went on, her frown clearing. ‘Mary was beside herself when they went to live in Manchester. “Good God, woman,” Jack used to say, “Manchester’s not the other side of the world, is it?” It might as well have been for Mary. But they had the phone put in and, besides, James and Emily were only in Manchester a few years before they moved back to the village. And they had three children—Hannah, Adam and young Luke.’ She laughed at herself. ‘Hark at me. Young Luke is twenty-eight now.’
Just like Jack, Ella and her husband spent their lives in Kelton Bridge. Ella, fascinated by the history of the area, knew all there was to know about the place.
‘It was Hannah who claimed Jack’s heart, though,’ she murmured. ‘He’d always longed for a daughter, not that he would have admitted as much, but Mary always knew that, and I suppose Hannah filled an empty space in his heart. And, of course, Hannah worships him.’
‘He must be so upset for her and Gordon,’ Jill said.
‘Dreadfully. Far more than he’ll let on. But he and Archie will set the world to rights over a couple of pints. Archie will help him get life into perspective.’
Jill hoped so.
They carried on to Jill’s cottage and she handed over those raffle ticket stubs.
And then it was too late to waste yet more time on a plumber. She needed to be on the road.
HMP Styal was as depressing, noisy, cheerless and smelly as ever. Jill tried to block out the background din and concentrate on the woman sitting opposite her.
‘I hear you’ve been upset, Claire.’
Jill had been told that, while watching television with several other inmates last night, Claire had ‘gone berserk’.
She’d upended a table and thrown one of the metal-legged chairs at the set. She was quiet now, but possibly only because, once again, she’d spent the night sedated.
‘Was it something you saw on the television?’ Jill asked.
Claire gazed back at her, her expression more vacant than ever. She was still hungover from the medication they’d given her.
What else could it have been? According to one inmate, Claire had been laughing with her and then, suddenly, she had thrown that chair.
‘I often feel like throwing things at the telly,’ Jill went on. ‘Sometimes, for me, it’s when I’m watching the news and I hear that the government have come up with yet another madcap idea. More often than not, though, it’s when my horses lose.’
Claire managed a small smile at that.
HMP Styal was even more smelly than usual. ‘What was on the lunch menu today?’ Jill asked, pulling a face.
Claire, finally, managed a real smile. ‘It doesn’t matter. Whatever you pick, it all smells the same.’
‘That bad, eh?’
‘Disgusting,’ Claire said, nodding.
They could talk about the weather, the food, music and suchlike all day but Claire wouldn’t, or couldn’t, talk about anything on a deeper level.
According to that inmate, there had been nothing more interesting than the local news on the television when Claire had hurled a chair at the set. The girl had been adamant that nothing distressing or even thought-provoking had been shown. Jill would watch a recording of it for herself. There must have been something shown to produce such a dramatic reaction.
‘A man from my village, Kelton Bridge, was murdered last Wednesday,’ Jill said. ‘I suppose you saw that on the news?’
It was the only thing she could think of that would have been on last night’s news bulletin.
‘Yes. Some American, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Someone clearly took a dislike to him. It’s very sad for his family. It’s always those left behind who suffer, isn’t it?’
‘Sometimes. But he won’t be suffering, will he?’
‘I don’t suppose he will. Not that he was suffering before,’ Jill pointed out. ‘It seems as if he had the perfect life. A beautiful wife, two clever sons, a lovely home in a village, plenty of money—a happy life.’
‘The beautiful wife and clever sons will be able to bury him. That’s all people care about, isn’t it?’
‘Not all,’ Jill said, ‘but yes, it helps if you can bury your loved ones. It brings closure. It allows you to move on. People like to visit the grave and feel close to those who are gone.’ She paused. ‘Wouldn’t you like to visit Daisy’s grave?’
‘What grave?’
‘You laid her to rest somewhere, Claire.’
‘Did I?’
‘Wouldn’t you like to visit the spot? Yes, I’m sure you would.’
Claire just smiled at that.
‘You’re very lucky if you don’t need to visit Daisy’s resting place.’ Jill leaned back in her seat, watching every expression that flitted across Claire’s face. ‘You’ve been lucky all along, though, haven’t you? You were able to say goodbye to her. Her dad didn’t have that chance, did he?’
‘I didn’t say goodbye to her. And what does he care? He never cared about her like I did.’
She meant he didn’t love her as much, but Claire couldn’t say the word love. It was alien to her.
‘Maybe not, but he did love her in his own way. Can’t you tell him where she is, Claire? Would it really be so awful if he could go and say goodbye to her?’
Claire’s lips tightened into a thin line.
‘What do we have to do to find her, Claire? Dig up the whole country? Because we will find her, you know.’
She smirked at that.
‘Of course, it wouldn’t be the whole country,’ Jill said casually. ‘You won’t have left her alone in a cold, dark building and you won’t have left her in a stretch of icy water. She’ll be somewhere peaceful. Somewhere beautiful. In death, you’ll have given her beauty. You couldn’t do that in life, could you, Claire?’
‘You don’t have a clue, do you?’ Claire scoffed.
She was right about that.
‘Then tell me,’ Jill said urgently. ‘Explain it to me, Claire.’
There was a long silence and Jill, breath suspended, thought that Claire might actually be thinking about telling her where she’d buried her daughter.
‘I thought I could tell you,’ she said finally, ‘but I don’t want him going near her. He’ll never touch her again.’
‘Who? Peter?’
‘It’s hours since the grub came and you can still smell it, can’t you?’ Claire said vaguely.
Jill didn’t give a damn about the smell. She was intrigued by Claire’s last statement.
Never touch her again
. What the devil did she mean by that?
‘Tell me about Peter and Daisy,’ Jill pleaded.
‘What’s there to tell?’
‘He loved Daisy, didn’t he? He wouldn’t have harmed her.’
‘Peter? He’d have belted her when he got the drink in him. Just like he belted me.’
Jill was going round in ever-decreasing circles. She’d talked and talked, yet she was no further forward. She knew that Claire had loved her daughter like she’d never loved anything in her sad life before. Jill assumed that, by killing Daisy, Claire thought she had saved her from the only life she was capable of giving her.
Jill didn’t like assuming anything. She liked to approach every case with an open mind but, with Claire, all she was doing was relying on psychiatric reports. Worse still, she couldn’t even get close to understanding Claire. Try as she might, she couldn’t see Claire as a woman capable of killing her own daughter.
‘I thought about you and Daisy this morning,’ she said casually. ‘I walked into Bacup and up through Stubbylee Park. I even had a go on the swing.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘I bet Daisy loved it there, didn’t she? You know the paddling pool? They’ve filled that in. It’s a shame, isn’t it? Health and safety, I suppose. They must have worried that a child would drown. Sometimes I think this country is health and safety mad, don’t you?’
‘If you say so.’
‘It wasn’t used very often, though,’ she went on, ‘so I don’t suppose people will miss it. The dogs might. Whenever I’ve been there in the past, dogs have been splashing around in it or having a drink.’ She paused. ‘The council are doing a lot of work round there at the moment. They must have money to burn. If it stands still, dig it up, seems to be their motto.’
Claire didn’t look unduly worried at the prospect of an unsuspecting council worker stumbling across a child’s body.
‘They’re digging up by Lee Quarry, too,’ Jill went on. ‘They’ve put mountain bike trails in. It’s proving very popular.’
No reaction.
‘How did you get along with Peter’s parents, Claire?’
These days, the couple couldn’t find a good word to say about Claire but that wasn’t surprising. ‘Hanging’s too bloody good for her!’ they’d chanted in unison.
‘I only saw them twice,’ Claire said. ‘They didn’t want much to do with Peter or me. They thought Peter had gone mad when he married me.’ The idea seemed to amuse her. ‘Perhaps he had.’
‘Didn’t they see much of Daisy?’
‘No.’
Much more of this and Jill would admit defeat.
Yet there was something here that intrigued her. Something wrong, something she couldn’t pinpoint.
Claire had walked into the local police station very early one morning clutching a pillow and an empty bottle. She claimed she had given Daisy a few Diazepam tablets to swallow before suffocating her and disposing of her body. She had adamantly refused to say how or where.
‘You never learned to drive, did you, Claire?’
‘No. Why should I?’
Because it would make it easier to move a body around. Without a car, just how did she move Daisy’s body? She must have moved it because a massive police search of the house and vicinity hadn’t revealed anything …
‘No reason. Given the traffic chaos I endured coming here today, I can’t say I blame you.’
Claire smirked at her. ‘You’re not doing very well, are you?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’re no closer to finding out where Daisy is.’
Unless Jill was mistaken, that was the first time Claire had uttered her daughter’s name.
She was right though; Jill wasn’t doing very well.
‘I can’t do it on my own,’ she pointed out. ‘I need your help, Claire. If you’re not prepared to help me, I’ll never do very well, will I?’
‘Perhaps next time,’ Claire murmured.
And perhaps not.
‘OK.’ Jill looked at her watch. ‘I’ve got another half an hour,’ she said, ‘so we can talk about anything you like. Unless you’d rather be on your own,’ she added.
Claire shrugged as if it didn’t matter one way or another, but Jill knew it did. These sessions were a lifeline to her, simply because they broke up her long, empty days.
‘Right,’ Jill said, taking that as agreement to talk about something. ‘Pick a subject.’
Claire smiled. ‘Funerals.’
‘OK,’ Jill said thoughtfully. ‘I want to be cremated. I can’t bear to spend my days underground being eaten by worms. And I want a single spray of white flowers on my coffin from someone who loves me. That’s all, just a single spray. What about you?’