Authors: Elizabeth Corley
‘It’s all right. I’m all right. Don’t worry.’
‘It was a very, very brave thing that you did. You’re lucky to be alive.’ He walked beside her to the open ambulance doors. The paramedics had applied an emergency dressing to the deep wound in her upper left arm but he could still see the tip of the bolt sticking out through her jacket. She had been lucky; it had missed the main brachial artery by millimetres.
‘I’ll stop in at the hospital later. Take care.’
He walked back towards the cathedral. Inside, witnesses had been arranged into orderly groups and there was the characteristic low buzz that came from organised mass interviews. Octavia was nowhere to be seen. To his right he could see them taking a stretcher up the twisting stairs of the triforium to retrieve the body of the dead constable. He was momentarily overcome by guilt, appalled at the thought of facing another widow or mother at another service funeral. The operation had come close to embarrassingly public failure. Well, the ACC was the one who would have to do the explaining.
There was nothing he could do in the cathedral except commiserate with the ACC and Blite, which would be an insensitive and stupid thing to do. The questions and recriminations would start soon enough. A policeman was dead, two others injured, and the suspect killed – all in front of hundreds of traumatised witnesses. He was hugely relieved that the operation had not been his, and then cursed himself for ever by acknowledging that if it had been, perhaps they would all be alive and uninjured right now.
Outside, the sky was on fire in the west as the sun finally set. Glowing embers flickered across dying vapour trails as the sun sank into deep ash-grey banks of cloud on the horizon. Flares of crimson, red and orange ripped through the black thunderheads into the dome of a royal-blue sky above. Within minutes the colours died leaving a flat, two-dimensional canvas, across which a strong wind was already dragging grubby fingers to blur all traces of the sunset performance.
Requiem aeternam dona eis,
Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Rest and peace for ever, grant them rest and peace eternal,
And light for evermore shine down upon them, Lord Our God.
The enquiry into operation Knight Capture – as the efforts to catch Rowland in the aftermath of the London bombing had been named – was indeed bloody. There was a full internal inquiry and the press, relishing every moment of it, hounded police and investigators relentlessly. Fenwick was ordered to resume his sick leave immediately and banned from both Division and HQ until certified fit to return. He was interviewed at home early on and then again at regular intervals over the following weeks.
They pushed him hard on the details of the operation, almost begging him to criticise the ACC and DI Blite, but Fenwick held his silence. In the seemingly endless wait for the first interview he had gone over and over again in his mind the two questions that plagued him: if he had been in charge would things have been different? And if asked, how critical should he be of the officers who were in charge? The answers to both were intertwined.
If he had been left in charge the threat at the cathedral would have been taken far more seriously right from the beginning and every single person, bag, box and instrument would have been searched without exception. There would have been more men on the triforium and the credentials and identities of every person would have been checked and double-checked. And Rowland would still be alive. He wouldn’t have relied on what he realised now was secret support from the MOD; he would have put his faith in his own men.
And therein lay the criticisms he could have levied at the ACC and Blite. They had both been cocky, overconfident and, in his opinion, foolishly reliant on the specialists ‘helpfully’ provided by the Ministry. The extra police resources arrived far too late to be useful and the whole operation had been overcomplicated. But Fenwick decided to say none of this to the investigators as they conducted their post-mortem.
They never once asked him how and why he had made the connections between the murders, Carol Truman, Octavia Anderson and Victor Rowland. When he’d started to explain, assuming that they were curious to know all about Rowland’s obsessive love for his young cousin and ever-consuming rage over her death, they brushed his words to one side. He was still unclear why Rowland had suddenly started out on a murderous rampage. The letter from his uncle had triggered it somehow but exactly why remained a mystery. But he was so used to the randomness of mental illness and its bizarre, tragic consequences, that the break in his chain of understanding didn’t trouble him over much.
With the investigators, he stuck to the facts, never lied and limited his opinion to a point at which they once accused him of deliberately obstructing their inquiries. They clearly had a problem placing him in the order of events and were reluctant to exonerate him entirely.
An awkward compromise was achieved when they included a general criticism in their report of the decision to use ‘unofficial advisers’ with the consequence that their activities ‘introduced additional areas of complexity to an operation that was already overengineered’.
The ACC was not, in the final report, censured, although there were times during the inquiry when it had appeared inevitable that he would be. In the end, the involvement of the military was held to blame by the police and the ACC’s role in involving them obscured. Too many people wanted the ACC’s career to flourish for too many different reasons and he survived. Although it was clear that he would have to work hard to recreate his image, the ACC was quietly relieved by the outcome.
Consequently, there was little odour to pass on and down to Fenwick.
The pinboard opposite Fenwick’s desk had been emptied, its contents stacked in neat piles on a side table for sorting. Wearily he sat down to resume the task, his mind engaged elsewhere. Nightingale was making a good recovery. She was going to carry a nasty scar for the rest of her life but it looked as if there would be no permanent serious disability. Cooper had left for his annual leave; two weeks in Florida at his wife’s insistence.
Fenwick hadn’t seen Octavia since the night at the cathedral. He knew that she had cancelled the start of her tour on doctor’s orders but other than that it was as if she had dropped out of his life. Everybody was treating the case as closed bar the recriminations. Even Fenwick had forgotten Rowland’s dying instructions. His enforced home leave, the guilt that wouldn’t leave him and the tension of walking the tight-rope of the inquiry had driven everything else about the case from his mind. He had retreated into the simple pleasures of his children’s company and the reassuring chores of his home and garden.
Anne, the ever-efficient secretary, bustled in with a depressingly thick bundle of post, and a mug of excellent fresh coffee extracted with much patience and persuasion from the antiquated machine by her desk.
‘Your post, Chief Inspector. There’s a report from forensics in here, the usual internal circulars and memos and a great stack of papers from some legal firm in London; they’ve been screened.’
Fenwick picked up the forensic report with mild curiosity. It was an analysis of the contents of Rowland’s pockets which had been given very low priority and he hadn’t chased it. At the back there were photographs and a full transcript of the missing pages from Katherine Johnstone’s diary that Rowland had kept in his wallet. He decided that he deserved a few minutes off to enjoy his coffee and, with the intention of creating a mild diversion, he started to read the transcription.
… June 19th … so Frost told her off a real strip. I escaped! THANK GOD!! That’s all I needed. Tomorrow we are off to sunny Dorset – the famous five on the trail again, with Les as Timmy the dog, of course, to follow us everywhere. Saw J. at the bus stop. I’m sure he smiled at me. S. was with me. I think he was jealous.
… June 22nd … Octavia came round. I’m off school. Police
again
. I can’t do this.
… June 27th … I haven’t written anything for days. I don’t know if I can now but I’ve got to try. I have to let this all out
somewhere
, and, God knows, I can’t tell anyone. Carol’s dead. There, I’ve said it. Lovely, lovely Carol is dead. It’s so unfair. Why
her
of all people?? She was so good. She never hurt anyone, she was so kind. Now she’s gone and I never had a chance to tell her how special she was, how much she meant to me, to all of us.
The writing became more tiny and cramped as she squeezed her thoughts onto the small page in margins and corners.
God, if you’re listening, I hate you right now and I don’t know how to cope with that either. It was an accident. It must have been but I can’t see how it happened. One minute they were together – Octavia and Carol – I saw them; the next Carol was gone. The police are coming round tomorrow – Mummy said there was no way they could talk to me again today. But I still don’t know what to say.
… June 28th … God I don’t hate you any more but I need your help. I don’t know what to do. Octavia’s lying. I don’t know why she is but I’m caught up in it now. She doesn’t want them to know – says it would be misunderstood. But
I
don’t understand and Leslie’s lying too. We could all simply have told the truth – the police could’ve worked it out, they’re not stupid. I’ve got a stinking cold but at least it means I’m not going to school tomorrow. S. came round. It was nice of him but it didn’t help.
… July 2nd … I have decided to write here what really happened. I must say it somewhere and going to the police now after all this time is impossible. Anyway ‘the truth is all relative’ as Octavia would say, and what Leslie saw could be taken so wrong. For the record, this is my account of what happened before Carol died.
It was all normal until we were heading back to the coach in the afternoon. I was running ahead with the others. I’ve got long legs, I run better than them – Leslie was tagging along as always. Then she realised she’d lost her bracelet, the silver one that was a birthday present. She decided to go back along the path to try and find it. Leslie says she was going along in a sort of crouch. When she got to the top of the rise, she could see Carol and Octavia coming down the other side. She waved to them but they didn’t see her. They seemed to be arguing – Carol kept running ahead and Octavia kept pulling her back, grabbing her by the arm. Leslie wasn’t sure what to do so she walked down the path slowly – looking at each side among the bushes in case the bracelet had flown off as she ran.
As she got to the bottom of the slope, Leslie could hear raised voices. Carol was saying, ‘Leave me alone, just leave me alone.’ She could hear Octavia shouting at her, something like, ‘You can’t, you can’t – it’s mine!’ It was embarrassing when she told me she’d been eavesdropping, the whole thing. She decided to head back to the bus – it was really late anyway. As she turned to go she heard them arguing still. Carol was saying something like, ‘Let go, let me go. Don’t be so stupid.’ She might have been crying. Octavia sounded really angry, she was sort of like snarling and shouting at Carol, swearing at her, telling her she wouldn’t let her ruin her life, not now she’d come that far. Leslie wondered if she should go back, Octavia isn’t someone to argue with – and Carol sounded really upset. But she didn’t. She just sort of stayed where she was. Perhaps if she’d gone back things would’ve been
different but Octavia says not, that this sort of guilt is natural.
Leslie was still trying to work out what to do when there was a horrible noise – not a scream just an awful barking cry. She says it sounded like an animal being hurt. She started down the path at a run but then heard Octavia laughing, proper laughter, and there were footsteps on the path. She started running as fast as she could to be out of sight before they came up. Leslie says she thought it was all right. She honestly thought Carol was there, that they’d made up. But she wasn’t of course. And she might have still been alive as I was running back to the coach – Octavia says she was – I’ll never know.
I can’t sleep at night. I’m ill. I think I may even be mad. Octavia’s been wonderful. So calm and gentle. She’s explained it all, said Leslie’s not to blame, neither am I; there was nothing she or anyone could’ve done. Octavia has come round every day begging me not to blame her, not to blame myself. But I don’t understand the laugh. When I mention it, she just looks at me as if I’m mad, says Leslie was imagining things. She heard it, though, I know she did. I just can’t work out why Octavia was laughing.
Fenwick could remember every detail of the chalk bowl from which Carol Truman had fallen to her death. How the ledges fell away in tiers ready to break the most violent of falls. He recalled the debate they had had, their assumption that Carol had been climbing down as a prank when she had slipped and fallen to her death.
Anderson’s statement was clear in his memory – she had been nowhere near Carol, she had said. It was lies. She had been with her friend seconds before her death, had left her on her own and had returned to the coach party with ready lies. Why?
He rehearsed again his thinking of the four alternative ways by which Carol had come to die: accident; suicide; murder by a
stranger; murder by someone she had known. The more he’d learnt of Carol the more he’d suspected accident, before he had read Katherine’s diary. Suicide was a possibility; Leslie had heard her crying but that appeared to be in argument not despair. And everyone spoke of her promise and her new plans.