Soul Seeker (26 page)

Tom hesitated. From outside but at some distance, there came the faint sound of a child's laugh. Somersby said at once, ‘Go and check what's happening outside. Now.'

The imperative tone was enough to make Tom obey at once. Sheldon waited in the shed, looking through the window. About three minutes of quiet passed before there arose, clear and high, a child's scream.

FORTY-SIX

L
ancefield looked around the room, trying to focus. Why the hell was she there? Not just why was she in that room at that time, but why was she not elsewhere, mourning as she should, perhaps comforting her father. Except that there was no comfort to be given or had. She appreciated fully for the first time that she had been so wrong all these years; she had been so aware of gradually losing her mother that she had missed the fact that it was only the illness that had allowed her to keep – albeit in a distorted, loveless way – her father. Now that tenuous, desiccated link was gone, and with it the bonds to her father were gone completely. All future contact would be loveless; worse, in fact, because it would be lovelessness tinged with mutual and self-loathing, each of them aware that they were equally responsible for the impasse, yet each ready to blame the other completely.

She felt ashamed, more than bereaved, and wanted to run from this, yet couldn't. It hampered every thought she had; she knew that she was not functioning properly, yet could not help it; the last thing she would do is take compassionate leave. The next before last thing she would do would be to tell Chief Inspector Beverley Wharton of her personal problems and ask for forgiveness.

Fisher had been looking through the rest of the house. ‘No sign of forced entry.'

The cottage was cramped and overfilled. It smelled fusty and old, unchanged for perhaps decades. There was an inordinate amount of furniture, not surprising, she supposed, considering Dominic Trelawney had been a joiner; the small dining table was exceptionally beautiful. It wasn't a neat house, though, and he had clearly been sleeping downstairs on the sagging, worn settee for some weeks or months, with consequent disruption and untidiness; the bed had been made, but badly. She looked out of the front-room windows, through old, warped glass and through smeared grime. The cottage was on the side of the steep Stroud escarpment, looking across to larger, more luxurious abodes. They were too far away to have seen anything.

‘Call on the neighbours. Find out when they last saw him and if they saw anyone suspicious come to call.'

Fisher disappeared and Lancefield managed to energise herself enough to begin looking for something that might help in the investigation. After forty minutes, she had found very little. Most of the expected paperwork she found in the sideboard – cheque book, pensions statement, bank statements, hospital appointment card, television licence, old-style driving licence – and none of it told her anything. In the kitchen was the beginning of a shopping list and a calendar. There was nothing on it that she could see was relevant – no mysterious meetings with ‘Q' or unexplained sums of money written in the margins – but she decided to take it back to the station anyway, if only to cover her backside when Beverley Wharton demanded to see it. Behind it was last year's calendar and this dropped to the floor. She bent to pick it up. It had fluttered open and she was looking at the February before last. The initials ‘AA' were written in for Tuesday of every week. Beside each was written ‘St Mark's'.

For a moment she became excited – who was AA? – but this quickly subsided. Alcoholics Anonymous, of course. They would meet in a church hall. She checked and found the entries stopped after October and there were none in the present year's calendar. So he had stopped going probably when he found out he had cancer; she couldn't blame him. She began to riffle through cupboards, discovering four empty whisky bottles. She grunted softly, then went to the old-fashioned pantry at the back of the kitchen, moved some tins of soup and fruit and found three full bottles of whisky, all of which made her smile.

Antonia had had a migraine for most of the day, one that made it hard for her to think. She was delighted that Josh and Harriet had been out of the house for the day – Josh out playing with Darren, Harriet spending a few days on holiday with a school friend in Scotland – thus allowing her some respite. Andrew had been in London at the Royal Society of Medicine (‘my club' as he liked to call it), attending a symposium on new advances in gerontology. Had she not felt so unwell, she would have really enjoyed the day, treasuring the chance to garden, to rest, to read and to listen to her beloved Radio Four; as it was, all she could do was lie there in a darkened room and feel blessed relief that she was not being pestered every ten minutes.

Andrew arrived home at twenty past seven to find his wife of thirty-seven years asleep. Unaware of her travails, he made his usual bustle as he came in, calling out for her and slamming doors, just as he had been doing for all of their married life, just as he was always being told off for doing. He was pouring himself a glass of red wine when she came into the kitchen. He looked up, his face changing from an expression of smiling welcome to one of surprise. ‘Antonia? You look awful.'

She took the compliment with fortitude. ‘Good. Because that's how I feel.' She sat down at the table heavily, waving away his offer of wine. ‘Have you had a good day?'

‘Very interesting. Quite astonishing the progress they're making in ageing. Did you know, they now believe that it isn't at all genetic. There are no genes directly involved in ageing, it's really all just wear and tear . . .' He paused. ‘But that doesn't matter; what's up with you?'

‘Migraine. It came on not long after you left this morning.'

‘You poor old thing. At least you haven't had the children to contend with.'

She sighed. ‘No, no. It's been nice and peaceful.'

He looked around. ‘Where is Josh?'

‘He spent the day with Darren.'

He looked at his watch. ‘Still? Isn't it a bit late for him to be out?'

‘Don't worry, Anthony. He's spending the night at Darren's. He's perfectly alright.'

FORTY-SEVEN

‘I heard you were after missing wives and daughters. Thought you might be interested.' DCI Smillie lived up to his name, but then he was always living up to it; he smiled perpetually, his facial muscles seemingly paralysed; even when the rest of his face desperately wanted to frown, his mouth refused to come out and play, staying petulantly in its chosen position, deaf to all entreaty. His voice was stuck in one mode too but, unfortunately, it was one of whining condescension, of mockery and Schadenfreude. He was not the most popular of men, which had driven him further into this caricature of satisfaction, one guaranteed to irritate all within quite a wide radius. He had only been working in the station for five months, but already he had engendered a vigorous hatred in Beverley's heart. She looked at the report he had handed her as he said, ‘434/B refers to her daughter, Evangeline.'

Beverley found herself fighting all sorts of emotions: extreme dislike of the pompous uniformed Smillie, elation that here was another potential lead, exasperation and extreme annoyance that Lancefield had apparently missed this. ‘What enquiries have been made?'

‘We've taken statements, as you can see. We've also talked to the daughter's school. She's well known for truanting, so they weren't too bothered that she was missing.'

She scanned the statements. They were brief and, as so often, almost indecipherable. The concatenation of police constables who were functionally illiterate, witnesses who were functionally stupid and a photocopier that was functionally decrepit made reading such documents an arduous exercise in deduction and guesswork. She asked, ‘Is there any hint that the ex did something?'

‘Not a chance. He's an HGV driver, just got back from Estonia. Called in to see his daughter as soon as he got back.'

‘And nobody saw anything suspicious?'

‘Nope. But then, it's Whaddon, isn't it?' Which was code for nobody ever saw anything of use to the police in Whaddon.

She looked at the photographs. They were definitely of the two people found at the Cotswold Water Park, although the partner would have to identify them. ‘Thanks,' she said, unfortunately finding as she did so that she had just run out of sincerity.

Smillie smiled. ‘Surprised your guys didn't spot it.'

‘So am I.'

‘Perhaps a team talk . . .?'

‘Perhaps.'

He turned and walked away, and she was careful not to let him hear as she murmured, ‘Cunt.'

She waited until he was safely out of earshot before calling Fisher and Lancefield. She commanded them to close the door, then chucked the report on to the desk for them to see. Lancefield picked it up and Beverley let her scan through it. When she looked up, Beverley saw a strange mix of surprise and ennui in her inspector's eyes. She said calmly, ‘DCI Smillie has just brought me that. Why didn't either of you?'

Fisher looked across at Lancefield, his mouth open, his eyes betraying fear, as if he could see the train lights coming at the far end of the tunnel and he had his foot trapped. He was well aware that standard operating procedure in the police force was to pass the bomb down the ranks until it exploded in the hands of the most junior officer; as it happened, he need not have worried. Lancefield said only, ‘I'm sorry, Chief . . .' She sounded tired, almost absent, certainly unable to appreciate the shit she was wandering into. In his incredulity at such an unexpected reprieve, he looked at Beverley. She was staring at Lancefield, her face unreadable. Without taking her eyes from her, she said to him in what the romantic might have considered a biblical way, ‘Go, Fisher.'

He left, mightily relieved.

Beverley leaned back in her chair. Her incandescence had dimmed, replaced by perplexity. ‘Your mind isn't on the case, inspector.' Lancefield didn't react. ‘Care to explain why?'

Lancefield took her time focusing on her superior. When she spoke, it was hesitantly, yet without fear; there was something of relief, indeed. ‘I watched my mother die two nights ago.' But before Beverley could register her shock at this news, she continued, ‘I sat there all through the night, holding her hand, listening to her ramblings, getting more and more tired, more and more depressed, and more and more uncertain. She lapsed into a coma, yet was still alive, still occasionally moaning and muttering. Would you believe it, she laughed once!' With unconscious irony, Lancefield laughed, and it was a thing of bitterness. ‘I hadn't heard her laugh in years . . .'

Beverley tried to intervene, to show some of the contrition she was experiencing, but Lancefield wasn't even aware that she was in the room. ‘And I began to understand what this killer wants. I started to comprehend him . . .' She frowned in puzzlement. ‘He wants to see some sign of the soul, and as I sat with my mother, I found I wanted to as well; after so many years of mental disintegration, I had come to consider her little more than an animal, a not-human thing, and I supposed I came to consider that she didn't have a soul anymore. Then, over the course of that night, I recalled the web postings and I wondered if I would be lucky enough to catch sight of something wondrous, something that would prove that my mother
was
still endowed with a soul, that she was still my mother and not a demented animal . . .'

Beverley didn't know what to say. This was not going at all as she had imagined it would; Lancefield had gone far off script and she found herself unsure of which lines to say. Eventually she asked gently and hesitantly, ‘And were you lucky?'

Lancefield considered the question for a long moment, then shook her head. ‘No. There was nothing.' She sounded devastated as much by this as by the death. She sat down abruptly and trailed off, but it was only to take a breath before looking up at Beverley and saying simply, ‘I'm afraid. Very afraid.'

Beverley asked softly, ‘What of?'

Lancefield looked up at once. ‘Of ghosts,' she said with scarcely any sound at all.

FORTY-EIGHT

E
isenmenger sat in the small study of his flat, the sun dying behind him so that darkness was rising to meet him, to enfold him and to welcome him; he did not mind, indeed his subconscious found pleasure in the thought of dissolution, in becoming indistinguishable from his environment, in ceasing to have a separate identity. His mind was full of thoughts, though all were chaotic, disconnected and sociopathic, seeming to shun contact both with him and with each other; nothing was coherent in his head; there was no smooth flow of thought, just a turbulent mental activity that was completely without direction. In his hand his mobile phone was clenched loosely, might almost have been about to drop to the orange-red of the rug beneath his feet. It was the phone on which he had just spoken to Charlie, the one that had given him the news that she thought that she could no longer continue their relationship.