The Betrayal of Trust (33 page)

‘I used to wonder, I used to think … there were always things, only I told myself it was rubbish, and then I stopped wondering, I was ashamed I’d even thought you might be having an affair with someone. I was ashamed! I haven’t
had that thought for years – and I come into my kitchen and hear you saying …
saying
it’s been going on since … hear you telling him. I can’t believe what you said. I can’t believe this …’

Noeline Foster put her hands up to her face and began to take ragged, sobbing breaths.

Simon looked at her husband.

Helpless, embarrassed, flushed with guilt.

‘I’ll leave you to sort this,’ Simon said. ‘But
I want you at Lafferton Police Station at two o’clock this afternoon.’

‘I can’t –’

‘If you’re as much as ten seconds late, I’ll have someone round to arrest you. Do you understand?’

Foster nodded. His wife had sat down but her face was still covered with both hands.

‘I’ll want a full and frank statement, every detail.’

‘I don’t want Elaine brought into this.’

‘I am not,’ Simon said at the
door, ‘interested in your affair. I am not interested in your mistress. I am not interested in how you sort out your marriage. I’m interested in the probable abduction and subsequent murder of Harriet Lowther, about which you are going to make a statement. Two o’clock.’

He did not look back.

THE PRESS OFFICER
had said that
Bevham Gazette
reporter Jed Mulligan was new and bright and would have a fresh take on the Lowther case, which was why Serrailler was now sitting in a coffee bar in the Lanes with a double espresso, waiting to meet him.

‘You want him to focus on this new info,’ Marianne had said, ‘though he’ll have to fill in the background. But the point is, he isn’t
a jaded old hack who’ll just regurgitate his last dozen pieces before going to a liquid lunch.’

‘I thought liquid lunches were a thing of the past.’

‘Not on the
BG
they’re not. But this guy is impressive, he’ll be going places. He’s done some great reporting on the drugs ops.’

Simon groaned.

‘Yes, I know your opinion, but he has and it’s woken people up – not the same old, same old.’

‘Which
is what drugs ops always are?’

‘Meet him. Give him everything you dare. Mulligan’s your man.’

He spotted him as he came through the door. Leather jacket. Jeans. Hair gelled and spiked. Dark glasses. Local reporter masking as a bit-part actor.

‘Jed?’

‘Hi. Green tea, thanks.’

That figured. The guy probably didn’t do wheat or dairy either.

‘So … you’ve got new stuff. I saw the telly. Interesting.’

Jed Mulligan drank his tea, apparently untroubled by its being scalding hot, set down the glass and took out a small recorder.

‘Shoot,’ he said.

Simon smiled. Yes, he thought. But he’s quick, he’s sharp. He’ll get it right. The nationals will pick up on it because he’ll make sure they do, he’ll be on the phone the minute he’s filed his copy. Ambition shows.

Mulligan got it right, the Press
Association picked up his feature-sized article, which came with several photographs, and the nationals ran follow-ups, albeit shorter and without the background details.

He had written the piece cleverly, so that the new information came first and last but was interwoven with older material and background facts so that anyone unfamiliar with the story would get all they needed on the one page.
Everything about Harriet and her disappearance, the subsequent investigations and the finding of the skeletons was there. But what Stephen Foster had come up with the previous day was what readers would notice and, with luck, might remember and think about.

Question. ‘What’s the difference between a Lada and a Jehovah’s Witness
?’

Answer. ‘You can shut the door on a Jehovah’s Witness
.’

So went
the old gag and dozens more like it, about the world’s most laughed-at car. But in spite of that, some people actually owned and drove Ladas. One person in particular. It was a Lada in which 15-year-old Harriet Lowther took a lift on the hot, sunny afternoon of Friday 18 August 1995. That was the day on which she disappeared, and was not seen or heard of until her skeleton was found in a shallow
grave the day after the recent Lafferton storm.

Until yesterday’s dramatic new development, it was thought that Harriet was last seen waiting for the Lafferton bus on Parkside Drive around four o’clock that afternoon. Several witnesses saw the pretty teenager, fair hair in a ponytail, tennis racket in hand, standing at the stop. But
after
the recent television reconstruction and calls to the
police hotline, it is now known that Harriet did not get on the bus.

Instead, she was seen walking slowly away from the stop after the bus had left. As she walked she glanced over her shoulder a couple of times, until she spotted the car she was looking for. It slowed beside her and stopped, and Harriet got in. Then it drove on.

The car was a blue or possibly green Lada. The model was probably
a Lada Samara.

Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler, of Lafferton Police, who is now heading up the investigation said: ‘This new information from a member of the public gives us an absolutely vital breakthrough in the Lowther case. No one has come forward until now to say that not only did Harriet Lowther categorically not get onto the Lafferton bus she had apparently been waiting
for, but that a car picked her up.

‘Unfortunately, our informant did not see the driver of the Lada and cannot give us any description, but it is clear that Harriet was not abducted. She got into this car of her own volition and by the report of her glancing over her shoulder down the road she was obviously expecting its arrival. Perhaps the bus stop had been the arranged meeting place but when
the car did not arrive on time, she started to walk slowly on, sure that it would soon pick her up. Was this a prearranged lift into Lafferton? If so, did she arrive there? Or was she expecting to be taken somewhere else?

‘One thing is certain. Lada cars were not that common by 1995. Their heyday, such as it was, had been five or ten years earlier. So anyone who knows of a Lada, a blue or possibly
green Lada Samara, which belonged to a neighbour, someone in their family, a friend, may well remember it clearly.’

The DCS continued: ‘I can’t stress strongly enough how significant this new piece of information is. It’s a real breakthrough and I’m very hopeful that we will get more, which
will
lead us to the person who killed Harriet Lowther and subsequently buried her body.’

Mulligan had
also interviewed Sir John Lowther and obtained a couple of emotional quotes, and ended the piece with an appeal to

the people of Lafferton and its surrounding villages who have longed for a resolution to this terrible tragedy, to think, think, think back. If you lived here when teenage Harriet, with all her life ahead of her, vanished, think hard. Did you know anyone or live near anyone or work
with anyone who owned a Lada Samara? Did you perhaps see one regularly parked in a street near you? Or in a lock-up garage next to yours? If you did, please call the special hotline. You could be the person with the key to finding Harriet’s killer. Don’t let them get away with it any longer.

Simon went down to the communications room.

‘Anything?’

The girl manning the hotline pushed her headphones
aside. ‘Every other car on the roads of Lafferton in 1995 was a blue or green Lada.’

‘Of course.’

‘There are a couple might be useful.’

‘Ping them up, will you? But listen … if in doubt, it’s import ant, OK?’

‘What, even “my Uncle Ron had a Lada done out of flowers for his funeral – he didn’t actually own a Lada, he just loved the jokes”?’

‘Go on then.’

‘What do you call a Lada with a sunroof?’

Simon went out of the door, almost closed it, then glanced back and said, ‘A skip.’

‘WE’VE TIME TO
grab a coffee before we do the last three, Moll. I’ll go over their notes but, if you want to say anything about what you’ve seen so far, now’s the time.’

There was a warming plate and a jug of fresh coffee in the small staffroom.

‘And decent biscuits.’ Cat pushed the plate towards Molly. ‘Small perks of working in here. Relatives are so generous – you’d pile on pounds
if you ate all the chocolates and cakes and biscuits people bring in. Help yourself.’

Molly sat at the table looking thoughtful. Cat recognised the signs. Seeing half a dozen terminal patients, one after another, two of them quite young, was a shock and there was no way of preparing any student or junior doctor for it, they had to plunge in and cope. The important thing was that they had a vent
for their feelings afterwards.

‘So … thoughts?’

‘I’m just – impressed. It’s so different, isn’t it? Everything, everything’s different.’

‘But what most of all?’

‘Time. You know what a ward round is like in the General – one two one two, good morning, this is Mr Smith, being prepped for a lung operation later this morning, stats are as follows, treatment has been this, how are you feeling,
Mr Smith, fine, fine, nothing to worry about, right, ladies and gentleman, on we go, keep up, keep up.’

Cat laughed. ‘Nothing changes.’

‘Here, you sit down, you listen, you answer their questions properly. The nurses do the same. You tell them about this or that treatment option, how they might feel tomorrow … you just … yes. It’s that one word, isn’t it? Time.’

‘It’s a luxury in a general
hospital. It’s an essential here. It’s perhaps the most important part of the palliative care process because if we spend enough time we can help them towards peace of mind. A lot of the treatment isn’t physical, though that’s vital – especially pain and symptom relief – it’s mental, it’s emotional. And that takes time. I can change the dose on a syringe pump in twenty seconds. I can spend an hour
before I get a patient to admit they’re terrified of choking to death or of dying when no one is with them.’

‘Pain control isn’t difficult, is it?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. Sometimes it’s straightforward – people respond well and we can keep them quite comfortable. But what about intractable bone pain? What about intracranial pressure? Not so easy. Pain isn’t obsolete yet unfortunately.’

‘Nausea.
So many people in a general hospital are nauseous for one reason or another, but somehow it’s regarded as nothing much, no one hurries to sort it out.’

‘I know, but anyone who has ever had morning sickness will tell you what kind of priority it ought to have.’

‘Chemo?’

‘Almost always makes people sick, but there’s no need for them to suffer it, we’ve got a whole cabinet of anti-nausea drugs.
You can’t give anything to pregnant women but you sure can to cancer patients.’

‘There’s something else I noticed. Listen, I know you’re a Christian and all that and I really don’t think I am, I’m not anything, I just couldn’t reconcile any sort of God with the stuff I’m seeing most days. But … I don’t know why but there’s something in this place … I suppose it’s calm and peace but it’s more
than that … It’s something spiritual and I don’t do spiritual.’

‘But you do. Obviously. You’ve just said so.’

‘No. I absolutely don’t.’

‘Molly, I’m not trying to convert you or convince you. I understand what you mean, that’s all. I’ve never been into a hospice which didn’t have this sense of – tranquillity, you could call it. Spiritual is the right word, whatever you happen to believe.’

They finished their coffees companionably and went back to the ward to see the last three patients. C ward had already been closed and mothballed.

‘Mrs Mary Stalker,’ Cat said, outside the door. ‘She’s eighty-nine and has one of those long, slow-growing cancers of old age. She’s been in and out of here half a dozen times in the last year for pain relief and general care – she lives with her daughter
who is seventy herself and not very fit, so the respite times are important for them both. But I’m not sure if Mary will ever go home again. She’s been pretty sick this week.’

‘Where is the cancer?’

‘Everywhere now – started in the bowel, but they didn’t want to start chopping her about and she’s done quite well without any treatment to speak of. We just kept an eye on it and it only started
to spread quite recently.’

Mrs Stalker was propped up on two pillows, her eyes closed. Her skin was yellow-tinged and there was almost no flesh left on her, but when she heard the sound of the door she opened her eyes and they glittered like black beads in the skull. Her wisps of white hair had been combed and arranged across her head by one of the volunteers, her nightdress was set off with
a pink lace bed jacket.

‘I hoped I wasn’t going to miss seeing you,’ she said to Cat, ‘by dying before you got round to me. Now who’s this?’

‘This is Molly. She’s shadowing me today to learn how we work here. If you’d rather see me on my own, Molly won’t mind going outside.’

‘It’s all the same to me, Doctor, bring them all in, we’ll have a party.’ She scrutinised Molly carefully. ‘You look
a bit young to be a doctor. You look a bit young to be out by yourself, come to that.’

‘I’m not quite qualified yet – I take my final exams next month.’

‘I hope you pass them, my dear. You won’t look any older if you do though.’

‘How’s the pain in your back, Mary? It was troublesome the other day and I changed your medication around a bit. Did it help?’

Mary Stalker made a face. ‘So-so, but
what I do to it is a lot better than any of your drips and tablets.’

‘Whatever do you do?’ Molly asked, glancing at Cat.

‘I give it a good talking-to. By the time I’ve finished it skulks off into a corner.’

‘Are you eating and drinking much?’

‘No. Don’t see the point. A fat corpse isn’t any use to anyone.’

‘Mary …’

‘Am I shocking you?’

Molly looked embarrassed.

‘Listen, my dear, when you’ve
been a doctor a few years and you’ve seen a lot of old worn-out coats like me, you’ll understand a bit better. I’m dying. I know it, Dr Deerbon knows it, they all know it. So now you know it. I’m dying and I don’t mind, I’ve had a very good innings. The only problem is I’m not dying fast enough. I’ve been in here expecting never to come out I don’t know how many times – how many times is it,
Dr Deerbon?’