Life Sentence (7 page)

Mark compressed his lips till they were white, avoiding Fran’s gaze. She guessed the Chief had said as much and more when Mark was cajoling him into this course of action. Anyone would be embarrassed at being caught out in special pleading, she told herself. As for herself, she objected strongly to having all this rehearsed in the staff canteen: the pros and cons of her appointment should surely have been discussed in the privacy of one or other of their offices.

‘With respect, sir,’ she said, aware as always that the
two words always meant the opposite, ‘though I’d be happy to have a team at my disposal, it was a large and experienced team that failed to find both Elise’s identity and her assailant’s first time round. I think finding the first will lead to the second. And at this stage, sniffing round on my own, an unthreatening middle-aged woman, I might just get the breakthrough we need. Then it’ll be time to bring in the full panoply of policing skills. Nor will I hesitate to do so. Miss Marple I am not.’

Apparently unaware of the edge in her voice, the bright eyes met hers. ‘I can’t ever imagine you sitting quietly by the fire entranced by conversations about the church flowers, Fran. Nor, to be honest, can I imagine you arranging the said flowers, though I’m sure you’d do it admirably. No, when Mark told me that looking after your parents was what you had in mind I told him he couldn’t be serious. Nor can you, Fran. You’re a high-flying career woman. It would be the worst thing in the world for you, and pretty well the worst for your parents.’

‘That’s not how they see it, sir.’ Surely he would realise how he was offending her.

‘My son’s doing
King Lear
as one of his A Level texts at the moment. There’s a bit in there about a child’s duty to its parents. Let’s see:
You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me; I Return those duties back as are right fit, Obey you, love you and most honour you
. Which sounds as if she ought to be devoting herself entirely
to him. But then she adds,
Haply, when I shall wed, That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry Half my love with him, half my care and duty.’

Half of her marvelled at his recall and indeed his delivery, not to mention the fact that in his frantic week he still found time to be a good father. The other half seethed at the bland assumption that he could preach like this. Fran shrugged – he might see it as apologetically; Mark, knowing her so much better, would sense the anger and irony. ‘The trouble is, sir, I never had a lord to take my hand. A husband and a couple of kids would have been the answer,’ she continued ironically. To her parents and her GP alike.

He shook his head. ‘As I told my son, the lord’s hand in marriage can be a metaphor – remember those from your schooldays, Fran? – for a woman’s career. In my experience, you can’t go back, ever.’

She felt like a child with her contradiction. ‘It wouldn’t be going back, sir. It would be to a new town, a new county, a new set of – of occupations,’ she concluded.

‘Let me offer you Shakespeare again. Who is it that goes to pieces in
Othello
when he loses his job – when his occupation’s gone? My own A level this time,’ he added with a totally disarming smile. ‘Which is why I can’t remember the quotation.’ Folding the banana skin neatly in the muesli bowl, he drank his tea in one medicinal-looking draught. ‘Revolting!’

Neither Fran nor Mark bothered to argue.

‘They say it’s good for you,’ he grimaced, ‘mopping up free radicals.’

‘I didn’t know there were still any at large after this Home Secretary’s legislation,’ Fran observed.

She enjoyed the Chief’s expression until she got as far as the ladies’ loo, when yet another flush assailed her.

‘I can’t stay long today, Elise. I wish I could. I fully intended to, in fact, but that male nurse, the bearded one who blows hot and cold so you don’t know where you are with him, he gave me a very funny look as I came in. No, I must be imagining it. Why should anyone look at me? Perhaps he just thought it strange that I should come in before lunch.

‘Perhaps, heaven forbid, he fancies me. That’s the term my students use. I always thought there might be a touch of the DH Lawrence and the latent homosexuality about him. Maybe more than a touch with Michael. Not that he’d experience major difficulties these days, at least in the public arena. I sometimes think our department’s run by the Gay Mafia. And then I realise they’d be very unpleasant people whatever their sexual orientation. Take our union representative, now. When I was passed over for promotion I asked him to accompany me to discuss the business with my head of department. Did he back me? Not one iota! It seems he had his eye on the job for himself. What do you think about that? Not very moral? Quite. The pay off is this. Within a month, a little month; or ere
those shoes were old in which he used to pace the corridors of power, he wangled a job in the media and left without notice. Just like that. All those students untaught and untutored, so long as he could get the job he wanted. The media. Isn’t it amazing how people have forgotten it’s the plural form of the word. I even have students writing about medias, these days, God bless us all. Criteria; phenomena; bacteria: people get those completely confused. Which reminds me, I hope your nursing staff wash their hands. One hears so much about MRSA these days. I always take the precaution of washing mine, both before and after my visit. Now, I really have a very busy day ahead of me, and I absolutely do not wish to be caught up in protracted conversation with Michael. So I shall love you and leave you, if you’ll forgive the cliché. Goodbye, my dear. Remember, it really is essential that you return instanter to your senses.’

What had happened to her youth? A more accurate question might be why she had wasted her youth. It tormented her through the morning, despite the pile of information she’d set herself to absorb.

Fran sat at her new desk, in her new chair, chewing the end of a new pencil in a very old gesture. Things might have been different if she had gone to university when she was eighteen, of course. Then in her twenties she could have been building on her degree, developing her career with sensible stratagems, marrying and having a family. But there hadn’t been enough money. She’d have had a grant in those days, of course, and would certainly have worked during vacations to keep herself. So why wouldn’t there have been enough money? There had been for Hazel, who’d also started an MA but had given up and settled for a teaching qualification. There’d also been plenty of money for Hazel’s first wedding, a far from sober affair, quite unlike her second, to Grant. She remembered – she must have been eighteen, waiting for her A Level results – her father eyeing the growing collection of empty Asti bottles on the hotel terrace,
sighing with relief and saying he was glad that one daughter wasn’t the marrying sort. After all, she wouldn’t get far in the police if she went and fell for some man who wouldn’t understand shift work.

‘You’re both good girls and we’re proud of you both,’ Ma had added, adjusting the brim of her hat and mopping perspiration. Perhaps Ma had been menopausal then, come to think of it. ‘And if you can’t be pretty, like Hazel, at least you can be dignified in that uniform of yours. Look at her, isn’t she a picture?’

And Hazel had been, her colouring brought out by the creamy silk of her wedding gown. The green she’d chosen for her bridesmaids had made them look like candidates for their own funerals, but that was every bride’s prerogative. And no, Fran would never have been a belle. If anything, age had improved her. As a singleton, she’d been able to afford the best cosmetics, the best clothes, the best hair care. Her job required her to keep fit, and pleasure and determination had made her a fearsome badminton player, so her figure would have drawn sidelong glances of envy from many women twenty years her junior. She’d once been hoping – in the words of the silver cliché – to grow old disgracefully.

But now she was to look after her parents.

Had their brainwashing that she was not the marrying sort been intentional? Or simply the natural thing to do thirty years ago, an insurance policy for their old age? Leaning her head against the cold window of her office, Fran couldn’t be sure she could exonerate them.

She pulled herself up. Perhaps they were simply positively reinforcing what she’d already chosen: straight from A Levels she went into the police, never having time to wear the lovely silly Seventies clothes because she was always at work or preparing for the next promotion at work. Her hopes were corroded by the sickening realisation that young women with degrees and none of her experience were readily outpacing her in the promotion race. So she had to abandon the idea of buying her own home to finance herself through university as a mature student. Unlike Fran, who simply had to resign from the force and then reapply, some of her male colleagues, in those dire,
pre-equal
opportunity days, were seconded to similar courses with their fees paid, and full salaries to support them. But even they reported difficulties at university. Whatever the situation might be now for older people returning to study, in those days anyone over
twenty-three
was regarded by the bright young things as a cross between a freak and an agony aunt. Her fellow students would as soon have made a pass at a nun as at this weird temporarily ex-guardian of law and order. And no one dared offer her dope.

No boyfriends, then, at university, and none at work. Most of her mates, as bright as she and as underqualified as she, by and large settled for their slower progress but acquired wives, mortgages, cars in the drive and children.

So there was no temptation to be anything except
head down every evening in her bedroom at her parents’ home. No reason ever to move. Until they pulled the worn carpet from under her feet with the announcement that they’d bought a bungalow down in Teignmouth, having had a very good offer for the house. She hadn’t even known it was on the market. And she wasn’t to worry, there’d be enough left over for her to have a deposit to put down on a house, when she was ready.

There’d been enough too to buy Hazel a car to console her for her broken marriage. No one could ever say they weren’t even-handed.

So her thirties were her rebirth. She became independent at last. She bought her own home, a large, if run-down cottage in a picture postcard village in Kent. Promotions and interesting postings came so fast she was tipped at one time to be the first woman Chief Constable. She was told to apply for a chief superintendent’s post in Durham, but that seemed a long way from Devon, where Pa had just had his first heart attack. To compensate, she had a three-year affair with her Ian, an Open University tutor, a kind and generous man who helped her to her doctorate in criminology and died of a heart attack two days after she had received it. So much for walking hand in hand into the sunset with the love of her life. Not even a child of his to carry. He’d have made a wonderful father, though she was less sure about her own qualifications as a mother. Ruthlessness and impatience with people
slower than oneself didn’t sit well with looking after children. Or with people entering their second childhood.

And so much for a morning’s work, she told herself dourly. It wasn’t like her to moon over the past, certainly not like her to lose her concentration so easily. It would be humiliating to have to report back to Mark that while the chief could be both a good father and brilliant at his job, she was simply a resentful daughter, incapable of doing the easy task he’d delegated to her.

Mark.

What she needed was a brisk walk – not least for her poor bones’ sake, apparently. She preferred to allude to one of her favourite plays and call it stimulating her phagocytes. A walk, then a visit to Elise. So the walk would involve the car.

Stopping in Ashford to pick up a sandwich, she surveyed the drab main street without pleasure. In the days when she’d been rescuing her cottage, the ironmonger’s at the bottom had saved her bacon on more than one occasion, knowing just what she needed when B&Q’s customer service stares had been blank. But these days she hardly ever saw the place, beautifully restored, decorated and furnished to the best of her and her interior designer’s ability though it might be. As she saw the ranks of estate agents massing in readiness she made one firm promise to herself. She wouldn’t sell it. She might rent it out, preferably at an exorbitant rent to city-rich commuters. But of all the things in Kent she
could give up, that must stay hers.

She brushed away the vision of Mark and her having Sunday brunch together in the bright kitchen. There was room for his two grown up sons and their families. It could be idyllic.

Why should he want her anyway, a middle-aged spinster with bulges and grey underwear?

At least she could do something about that. She turned towards Marks and Spencer. But then she thought better of it. No. Apart from the hardware store, Ashford possessed one other specialist shop – a lingerie delight. That was where she’d use her plastic. To meltdown if needs be.

‘Any sightings of our mysterious visitor?’ she asked Penn, smiling as if pleased to see him and assured of her welcome in return.

‘Someone did say he’d popped in the other day, but he’d gone before I could do anything,’ he said, offhand.

Deep breath time.

‘Mr Penn, I know you’ve more work to do than a single pair of hands could possibly achieve. Believe me, I know how intolerable it is to be asked to add yet another task to your day’s list. But this—’

‘Come on, Chief Superintendent, you know she’s not going anywhere fast.’

Why did everyone have to say that?

Although he was in his later thirties, Penn had produced the ‘can’t touch me’ sneer of a kid wrapped
round his tenth can of lager at two in the morning in Maidstone High Street.

She took a step back, to surprise him all the more as she weighed into the attack. ‘It’s not speed, Michael, it’s efficiency. If you can run a ward like this, you must be efficient. And able, and hard-working. So what’s your problem with this? I need to talk to this visitor. Whatever I’m doing, I’ll drop it the moment he appears. But I don’t have radar. I need you to make the call. Or whoever replaces you on the next shift, or the one after that. Do you understand?’

‘I suppose.’ He turned from her, muttering under resentful breath.

She picked up the words, ‘menopausal bitch.’ ‘If you said what I think you said, I could have you up for a disciplinary before you could say
Women’s Ward
. Get me?’

‘So it’s OK for you plods to be racist and sexist but—’

‘I assure you, Mr Penn, in Kent Constabulary, as in every other police area in the country, racism and sexism are stamped on with all the force of official policy. As for ageism, that’s not a matter to be proud of either. Now, do you ring me or not?’

A quick phone call to the hospital’s personnel department elicited the fact that Tuesday was Mr Roland-Thomas’ day for the private hospital in Canterbury, so she took herself off there, still pondering about Penn’s moodiness. He must be hell to
work for. My God, what if that was why Mark had pulled her out of her previous work and put her on this, because her colleagues could no longer stomach her occasionally acerbic tongue? But at least it came into its own as she tackled the receptionists guarding Mr Roland-Thomas, his hyphen and his consultant colleagues. Of course all his patients were paying, she smiled dangerously, and entitled to his full attention and their full consultation. Of course they were entitled to be seen promptly. But this was a matter of life and death. Literally. Though she suspected that they might not understand the full force of the words. At least, coupled with her chief superintendent ID, it got her a few minutes of the great man’s time. The receptionist shrank behind the desk and pressed appropriate buttons.

To her surprise, the doctor came to the reception area in person, escorting her back to the office and offering her water from a cooler in the corridor just outside. He let her into his room, seating her opposite him in a way that reminded her of Mark. And the two weren’t dissimilar. Both in their fifties, well-preserved and
well-turned
out: they could have swapped tailors. Probably Roland-Thomas would have coveted Mark’s full head of still-dark hair: he’d lost most of a gingerish crop. He could certainly have emulated Mark’s regular workouts – there was a distinct sag about his midriff.

‘Are you saying, Chief Superintendent, that you can’t read my elegant fist?’ he asked, a smile she could only
describe as jocular spreading his features, as he peered over mandatory half-moon spectacles. She could price those exactly. They were the twins of her last pair, ones her father had sat on last month: chic, elegant, expensive. And insured.

She tapped her notepad in emphasis. ‘I’m not saying that at all. After all, I have a verbatim transcript I can refer to at any time. No, it’s not your gynaecological expertise I need. It’s not the medical technicalities, but your impressions of your patient as a human being, not as a patient. Could you cast your mind back—’

To her fury, she started a flush, one of her deepest ones. As she unbuttoned her jacket, she saw him register it. Let him. It was probably only one amongst a dozen he’d seen that day. To her surprise, however, he jotted on a pad not unlike her own. Touché?

‘—to the first moment you saw her? As if you were telling a man in the street? Patient confidentiality apart, of course.’

‘Not the injuries?’

‘In a few minutes, if we may.’

‘I saw a lady of middle years who’d gone to a great deal of trouble with her appearance that even her dreadful injuries couldn’t conceal. She reminded me of my mother, Chief Superintendent, dolled up, as my father used to say, to the nines.’ He slid into a Welsh accent, then back again. ‘Of course, I never saw her dressed. I was more concerned, too, with stemming bleeding from traumatised tissue.’

‘Of course. You noted all the internal injuries. This was – and I dare say I’ve seen nearly as many PMs as you have – a very vicious attack.’ Many of them with bodies in far worse condition than the average gynaecologist would come across in a lifetime. ‘You speculated that she’d been penetrated with a blunt instrument.’

He made another jotting, looking at her shrewdly. ‘She was raped
after
the head injury. Penile penetration was probably difficult. She was probably assaulted by something like a rubber torch, since there were abrasions consistent with – blah, blah, blah.’ He waved an elegant hand. ‘Anal penetration too. Same instrument.’

‘At least she’d have been unconscious while all this was going on.’

‘Possibly. Probably,’ he conceded. ‘According to my neurological colleagues, she might even have been technically dead at the time.’

She nodded. ‘So we might be looking for one of those monsters who get their kicks by having sex with the dead. Necrophilia, isn’t that what it’s called?’

‘In that case, wouldn’t you have other people with similar penchants on your files?’

‘There was no DNA match on file, I’m afraid. But—’

‘—that doesn’t mean there isn’t now!’ he said. ‘Surely that sort of attack wouldn’t be a one-off.’

‘I couldn’t second you on to my team, could I?’ Fran laughed. ‘Seriously, this was one of our lines of enquiry,
but it’s so far proved entirely fruitless. As have all our other lines, to be honest.’

‘You know they want to discontinue treatment?’

‘That’s why we’re reopening the case. If she dies – officially – it’s a murderer I’m after, Mr
Roland-Thomas
.’

‘I believe if anyone can find him, you will.’ He looked half-amused.

‘Elise has my solemn promise that if it’s humanly possible to bring him to justice, I will. Now, thank you for your time.’ She stood, extending a hand. ‘Your everyday observation was just as useful as your technical information.’