Tangled Web (4 page)

Davies held up his palms in a gesture of appeasement and apologised. ‘Of course, I’m sorry, I probably put it badly. ‘It’s just that sometimes pregnancy brings about changes in a woman. Unaccountable psychological changes.’

The Palmers looked puzzled.

‘Feelings of resentment are not unknown, even … hatred in some cases,’ said Davies. His eyes never left the Palmers.

‘There has never been a moment when I hated my daughter, Inspector,’ said Lucy flatly.

‘I see,’ said Davies, quietly. ‘So Ann-Marie was born three months ago on December the fourteenth at Caernarfon General?’

‘Yes.’

‘But very badly deformed.’

John Palmer winced and rubbed nervously at his forehead at Davies’s summation. Lucy looked down at the floor, unwilling to have her emotions scrutinised. The words hung in the air like a dark challenge.

‘Our baby is
disabled
, Chief Inspector. She was left without legs after surgical measures necessary to save her life. Now, where is all this leading, may I ask?’ said John Palmer when he’d recovered his composure. The tone of his voice suggested he was struggling to remain civil.

‘No legs,’ said Davies with a slow shake of the head. ‘Poor mite didn’t have much of a future to look forward to.’

‘Nonsense! And what on Earth has our daughter’s future got to do with you investigating her kidnap?’ demanded Palmer.

Davies ignored the question and pressed on. ‘Her deformation was such that you, Mrs Palmer, completely rejected her when she was born, I understand.’

Lucy buried her face in her hands and started sobbing. John put his arm round her and said through gritted teeth, ‘We were both very upset at the time: it came as a complete shock. We had absolutely no warning that anything was amiss with Anne-Marie.’

‘I thought medical science could predict just about everything these days,’ said Davies sourly.

‘Foetal monitoring failed to pick up the problem with her leg bones.’

‘I see, sir.’

‘You can appreciate, I’m sure, that it took us a little time to come to terms with Ann-Marie’s condition, but that’s all we needed … just a little time. I think that would be the case for most people in similar circumstances, don’t you?’

‘All the same, I was given to understand that you refused to have anything to do with your daughter after she was born, Mrs Palmer?’ said Davies. ‘Is that correct? You were quite adamant that you were not going to look after her? In fact, you insisted that the nursing staff take her away. “Get her out of my sight,” were the words you used.’

‘For God’s sake man, why are you doing this to us at a time like this?’ exclaimed John Palmer angrily. ‘I’ve already told you we were both very upset. It was a tremendous shock to both of us. We needed time to come to terms with it.’

‘“It”, Sir’

‘The situation,’ retorted Palmer angrily. ‘How many times must I say it? We were upset. We needed help and we got it.’

‘Go on, sir.’

Palmer took a deep breath as if reluctant to say any more but in the end he continued, ‘The people at the clinic were very understanding and the nurses were kindness itself. Lucy underwent a course of counselling, which did her the world of good, and Professor Thomas put us in touch with a support organisation, which was - and is run by wonderful people. They’re the kind of people who restore your faith in human nature and make you feel quite inadequate by comparison. Professor Thomas also arranged for us to contact parents in the same situation as ourselves so we didn’t feel so alone. We came to terms with our daughter’s condition quite quickly, Chief Inspector: we stopped seeing her as being disabled. She’s now just our Ann-Marie and we love her very much.’

Davies took a few moments to digest what he’d been told then asked, ‘What sort of person would you say has kidnapped your child, sir?’

Palmer became angry. ‘How the hell should I know?’ he exclaimed. ‘That’s your job, isn’t it? Why aren’t you out there trying to find out instead of sitting here on your backside asking us damn fool questions?’

Davies remained impassive and Palmer, unhappy with the ensuing silence, added, ‘It’s usually some sort of woman with a problem, isn’t it? Someone who has lost her own child … something like that.’

‘So you wouldn’t expect a ransom demand then?’

‘A ransom demand?’ exclaimed Palmer. ‘We’re not rich people and nothing about us suggests that we are. No one in their right mind would think of kidnapping our baby for money.’

‘You’re not even a bank manager,’ said Davies.

Palmer looked puzzled.

Davies explained, ‘You’re not in a position to give kidnappers access to other people’s money.’

‘I’m a science teacher for God’s sake; I earn twenty-two thousand pounds a year. I’ve got a fifty-thousand-pound mortgage and a bank loan for a three-year-old car.’

‘And you, Mrs Palmer?’

‘I was a teacher too until I gave up work after the birth of my daughter. I taught modern studies.’

Davies smiled. ‘Didn’t have that in my schooldays. Still, I don’t suppose it involves earning large sums of money.’

‘Of course not,’ snapped Lucy.

‘So, as you said, Mr Palmer, no one in their right mind would want to kidnap your daughter …’

‘For money,’ added Palmer.

‘What about any other reason?’

‘What are you getting at now?’ John Palmer was reaching the end of his tether.

‘She
is
badly disabled’

‘So what? Why are we discussing the feasibility of it all when our daughter already
has
been kidnapped? She’s been gone three days and we are climbing the walls with worry.’

‘Indeed sir,’ said Davies slowly and deliberately.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Davies screwed up his face as if wrestling with some conundrum. ‘You see, sir, I have a problem with all of this,’ he said. ‘No disrespect, but for the life of me I can’t understand why anyone would want to steal a deformed infant.’

‘How dare you!’ stormed Lucy.

Davies looked surprised. ‘I simply meant that she would be readily identifiable wherever she was taken, Mrs Palmer.’

‘For God’s sake, man, why are you persisting with this? The motivation doesn’t matter. Someone
has
taken Anne-Marie -
now will you please do something about getting her back?’

Davies looked down at his feet for a few moments before saying, ‘I fear that may not be possible, sir.’

An awful silence fell on the room before Palmer asked in quiet trepidation, ‘What do you mean, not possible?’

Davies looked him straight in the eye and said with sudden, chilling coldness, ‘Because I think she’s already dead, sir and I think that you and your wife are responsible for her death. I think you found the prospect of bringing up a severely handicapped child just too much and took matters into your own hands. You came up with your own solution to the problem.’

‘This is outrageous!’ exclaimed John Palmer in a barely audible whisper. Lucy’s eyes opened wide in disbelief at what Davies had said. She tried to find words but none came out. She was dumbstruck with horror.

Davies brought out a folded document from his inside pocket and announced, ‘I have here a warrant to search your house and its environs.’ He turned to DS Walters and nodded; the sergeant got up and left the room. The following silence only lasted for a few moments before Walters opened the front door and the sound of voices filled the hall as instructions were given to a police search team.

The words, ‘no stone unturned’ seemed to detach themselves from the general clamour to drift into the room and break the spell.

John Palmer got to his feet. ‘Crazy, crazy, crazy,’ he complained as he started to pace up and down and make gestures of hopelessness with his hands. Lucy maintained a steady sad gaze into the middle distance as if the last few minutes had been too much for her and her brain was refusing to acknowledge what was going on around her. The policewoman who had been detailed to look after her since Anne-Marie’s disappearance had come back into the room at Davies’s request but her attitude had changed; she remained standing and at a discreet distance.

Outside the sound of a heavy engine starting up made Palmer stop pacing and go over to look out of the window. A yellow JCB digger stood at the entrance to the short drive leading up to their house; its driver was talking to two policemen. Palmer turned questioningly to Davies. ‘What the hell?’

‘The garden too,’ said Davies without emotion.

Palmer’s eyes were tortured pools of disbelief as the digger lurched forward, its huge wheels cracking several of the concrete slabs where he hadn’t used enough bedding sand when he’d laid them during the previous summer. It made its way round the side of the house, lowering its shovel as it went and filling the air with blue exhaust fumes.

Time passed slowly as John and Lucy Palmer huddled together on the couch in their own private hell while strangers ransacked their house and destroyed their garden. Words had ceased to be of any use; they sat in disbelieving silence even as junior officers started to come into the room and make their reports to Davies.

‘Nothing upstairs, sir.’

‘Loft clear, sir.’

‘Nothing in the cellar, sir.’

The continual series of negatives gradually got through to John Palmer. After the third he found the confidence to look at Davies with ill-disguised contempt and said, ‘Now will you get your damned circus out of our house and leave us alone?’

‘All in good time, sir,’ replied Davies automatically and without emotion.

A few minutes later a police constable, wearing dark blue overalls and Wellington boots entered the room with scant regard for the carpets he was trailing mud over. ‘Can I have a word sir?’

Davies left the room and was gone for fully ten minutes. When he returned he stood directly in front of the Palmers and announced, ‘It’s over: we’ve found her.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! How can you have? You’re lying,’ said John Palmer springing to his feet.

Lucy Palmer suddenly screamed and made a headlong dash to the door, bursting out of the room past the startled constable who made a late grab for her but missed.

‘Stop her!’ cried Davies but she ran round the back of the house to where canvas screens were now being erected around an excavated section of the garden about twenty metres back from the house. Two police officers stepped forward to restrain her but not before she got a good look at what lay in the shallow pit. There was a moment when all of them seemed to freeze like a tableau before Lucy let out a scream that tore at the nerves of all present. She collapsed unconscious on to the wet grass at the feet of the officers.

Davies and John Palmer reached the scene and it was Palmer’s turn to see what lay there. He was left to stare down at the tiny little legless corpse lying in the mud between the Wellington boots of the officer who had dropped down into the hole to reach it. He shook his head slowly as if unwilling to believe what he was seeing. His eyes didn’t blink and he seemed oblivious to everything around him, even his wife’s unconscious condition, leaving her welfare entirely to the policewoman who was kneeling beside her, loosening her clothing and trying to bring her round.

Palmer didn’t appear to hear the murmured angry comments of the police search team as he moved closer to the edge of the hole and squatted down on his haunches. Davies warned his officers off with a glance. When he judged the time to be right he asked the policewoman if Lucy Palmer was going to be fit to caution in the near future.

John Palmer interrupted her reply. ‘No,’ he said, turning to look at Davies directly. ‘Leave Lucy out of this, she had nothing to do with it. It was me, I did it. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t cope any longer.’

As two police officers took hold of his arms John Palmer looked down into the grave and said sadly, ‘I’m so sorry, my darling.’

Lucy Palmer was still unconscious as he was led away.

‘Well, what d’you make of that?’ Davies asked his sergeant as they drove back to the station.

‘Bloody unsatisfying,’ Walters replied.

‘You’re kidding - we’ve just cleared up a murder.’

‘But it’s just a mess, isn’t it sir. I mean it’s not like catching a real murderer, is it?’

‘Isn’t it? That’s how the law will see it.’

‘I suppose. Maybe that’s why it feels, like I said, unsatisfying. I feel for them, don’t you? All their prayers were answered; they were so happy and then it all went wrong The baby is born like that and it all ends in tragedy for everybody.’

‘Mark my words, we’re in for an emotional sports day over this one,’ said Davies. ‘The Bible-thumpers, the disabled lobby, the euthanasia mob, they’re all going to start shouting the odds but let’s look on the bright side, boyo, we’ve just cleared up a kidnapping and solved a murder. Not bad for a day’s work, wouldn’t you say?’

THREE

Gordon was called out on Saturday afternoon to a local shop where a middle-aged woman had collapsed on the floor. She had already come round by the time he got there, although it had taken him less than five minutes to sprint up from his own flat near the harbour. He was out of breath from the climb up the steep flight of steps to Main Street – something that caused even the woman herself to smile. She was still sitting on the floor but had been propped up with her back against the counter. One of the shop assistants knelt beside her holding a glass of water in readiness while a small group of onlookers stood in a huddle at a discrete distance.

‘I just came over all faint, Doctor,’ said the woman whom Gordon recognised as Ida Marsh, who did cleaning work in the village. The Palmers were one of the families she cleaned for.

‘Now then, Mrs Marsh, tell me what happened exactly.’

‘I think it must have been the fumes, Doctor. They were making me feel light-headed while I was working.’

‘What fumes?’

‘I was cleaning out the spare bedroom in the place I do on Saturday mornings along in Aberlyn when I came over all queer, like. Maybe it’s because the windows are never open in that house - it’s empty most of the time, but there was a funny smell in the room; made me feel quite sick it did while I was working there. I told the gentleman about it, like, and he apologised - said it was the paint stripper he’d been using on an old chest of drawers.’