The Betrayal of Trust (4 page)

He had not been out to Up Starly for a long
time. It was one of the most unspoilt of the villages in the countryside around Lafferton, with a pub, the Oak, which his mother had liked. Meriel Serrailler had not been a natural pubgoer, or indeed someone who had had much time for lunch outings of any kind, but she had occasionally come out here with Simon – and Simon only, never Richard, never any friends. It hadn’t been more than two or three
times a year but he had loved spending the time with her, loved to have her to himself, away from his father’s sarcastic and often disapproving company. Simon had not been since her death. He did not think he would want to again, but as he turned out of the lane into the village, he saw that the pub, on the other side of the green, was a pub no longer. Its signs had gone and what had been the entrance
was now the front door of a private house.

He slowed down. The Oak was now Greenview. A picture came vividly to mind of Meriel, turning round to say something to him over her shoulder as they went in through the pub door. Smiling slightly. She had been wearing a violet-coloured pashmina over her left shoulder. Stylish. Beautiful.

The pub was no longer there, and yet it was still there.

He felt
as if some final link with her had been roughly cut off, a link he had not even realised still existed.

He wound down the window and took a deep breath of the mild, damp air. He was not here to remember his mother fondly, or to think about himself and the past. He was here for the job.

The village was compact, the small houses and cottages spread out around the green and down two lanes leading
off to east and west. There was a close of pebble-dash council houses and behind them a recreation ground with football posts in place.

A woman walking her dog slowed to peer at him. If he had been a potential burglar, she would have remembered everything about him. He stuck his head out of the window and asked for the Old Mill.

‘I’m … not sure.’

She was sure. He pulled his warrant card out
of his inside pocket and flicked it open.

‘Ah, the police. I see. You go down that lane, Binders Lane, to the far end, and it’s on the left. Concealed entrance. I won’t say you can’t miss it because you can.’

She stood watching him until he turned.

How long was it since police had regularly called at the Lowther house? Years. The village must have changed – people had died or moved away, others
had arrived, the pub had closed – but Harriet’s disappearance would not have been forgotten and the arrival of the police, even a solitary detective in an unmarked car, must be of interest. It would be round the village by lunchtime.

The Old Mill was exactly that. The fast-flowing stream ran through the garden and under the house. The water rushed towards the old wheel and paddles before emerging
at the back of the house, which overlooked the wide mill pool. Simon got out of the car and went over. The recent floods had given a great surge to the stream and the noise it made was like the sound of an incoming tide. He wondered if it ever stopped, and how anyone in the house ever slept.

But the main door was on the other side, and as he went round to it, the noise faded to an agreeable,
silky sound. A dark blue Jaguar was parked on the drive. An uneven lawn sloped away from a terrace and a flight of stone steps. The windows
were
closed and, in the upstairs ones, two or three blinds were half down.

He took a couple of deep breaths. It was a long time since he had been the official bringer of bad news but his stomach had the old knot of apprehension. He had been here so often
in his past, as a young constable with the Met and then a uniformed sergeant. You never forgot. They crowded into his mind now. The Jamaican woman in her barricaded tiny ghetto of a flat in a tower block, opening her arms, throwing back her head and letting out a long wail of anguish when he told her about her son who had been stabbed. The Polish family, sitting in white-faced silence, until the grandmother
went to a stoop of holy water placed before a picture of the Virgin and crossed herself with it. The woman with a toddler clutching her leg and a couple of boys, huge-eyed, standing behind her on the stairs, who had told Simon, and loudly enough for them to hear every word, that she was glad her waste-of-space husband was dead, he deserved anything he got, serve him right, we’re better
off without him, and no, I won’t come and identify him, I never want to see him again, and now bugger off. The man who had walked out of the farmhouse kitchen in which he and his wife, Serrailler and a fellow officer had been standing while the news of his murdered daughter was broken, and had shot himself a few minutes later, for them all to hear and Simon to be the first to reach his body.

That had been the last time. Now this. Before, the news he had brought had always been of a recent death. This was very different. Yet he wondered if, essentially, it would be any different at all.

‘They always know,’ his army friend Harry had once said. He had several times been to the homes of men killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. ‘They know the minute they open the door to you – no,
before that, the minute they see your shadow through the glass. They always know.’

Simon rang the bell of the Old Mill, wondering if Sir John Lowther would see him and know.

But it was a middle-aged woman who opened the door. The housekeeper. He gave his name and stepped into a large, rather
dark
hall. There was an empty feel about the house, as if it were somehow hollow inside. It smelled of
polished furniture and cleanliness.

He only waited a moment.

‘Simon – how nice to see you … but I hope nothing is wrong with your sister?’

‘My …?’

‘Cat – we’ve a hospice trustees meeting at two o’clock. Is she all right?’

‘Ah … yes, thank you, Cat’s fine. I’m sure she’ll be there.’

‘That’s a relief. I have a lot of time for Dr Deerbon. Please, follow me.’

He was a tall man, stooped, with
thinning grey hair and anxious, deep-set eyes.

He led the way into his study, a long room overlooking the side of the garden away from the mill. The desk was set about with papers in neatly ordered piles, an open laptop, a small Georgian clock.

‘Can I offer you a cup of coffee? Mrs Mangan will be making some for me any moment.’

He was oblivious to the reason for Serrailler’s visit. They did
not always know.

‘Thank you.’ Sitting down with coffee might help.

He watched Lowther leave the room and, as he did so, caught sight of two photographs on the bureau. One was of a pretty woman with hair coiled up behind her head, marked eyebrows, a pleasing smile. The other, next to it, was of a young girl of fourteen or fifteen, with the same eyebrows, a high forehead, smiling slightly but
with her lips firmly together. Because, Simon thought, she was self-conscious about the brace on her teeth.

Sir John came back, talking about coffee as he did so, but although Simon had looked away he had not done so quite quickly enough. Lowther followed his gaze. And then, as he glanced between the photograph of his daughter and Simon, he knew – the split second
when
he knew was clear on his
face. It was as if a curtain had dropped down over his welcoming expression, replacing it with a terrible blankness and he seemed to go not pale, but grey, the lines around his mouth and at the
corners
of his eyes deepened, the flesh sagged. A brisk man in his early seventies had been replaced by an old one.

‘You’ve found something,’ he said.

‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’

Lowther sat down slowly in
the desk chair. For a moment he stared ahead of him, but then straightened his back and turned. As he did so, the door opened on the housekeeper bringing their coffee, so that they had to wait until she had set it down, though as she did so, Simon saw her glance at Lowther with a flash of concern. But she said nothing.

‘Tell me, please.’

The coffee pot and cups stood untouched on the desk between
them.

Simon told him. Lowther did not interrupt, and did not look at him, but at a point somewhere above the fireplace. It was quickly said and then there was silence.

Simon poured coffee for them both. Handed Lowther his. He took it, but did not speak until he had drunk half the cup quickly. Then he said, ‘I’m grateful to you for speaking directly, Simon. For telling the full story.’

‘There
is never any point in not doing so.’

‘No. I won’t ask if you are absolutely certain because you have indicated that you are and you would not be here –’

‘I have to be guided by the pathologist. He has no doubts at all.’

For a second, Lowther’s face crumpled, and as he bent his head, Simon thought he was going to cry. He always felt helpless in the face of other people’s tears. But, instead,
the man walked across to the bureau and looked not at Harriet’s photograph but at that of his wife.

‘I never thought I would thank God that Eve died. But at this moment I do.’

‘I understand you.’

‘She could not have borne this.’

‘But the not knowing …’

Lowther turned to face him. ‘Yes. It was terrible. Unthinkable. After several years one lives with it but hope never quite fades and … well.
One lives with it. She lived with it. She hoped. I
always
knew deep down that something like this would happen. I don’t think my own hope was alive after – what? – a year, perhaps less. But Eve hoped. This would have killed her.’

Serrailler drank his coffee. It was best to let Lowther talk.

‘Is there any chance you’ll find out more, do you suppose, or is that hopeless too?’

‘Absolutely not.
The case has been formally reopened and I am the senior investigating officer. I’ll get a small team together and we’ll start from the beginning – but now we have rather more to help us.’

‘Harriet’s skeleton. Yes. We can hardly call it a body. I presume she won’t be able to rest in peace for some time?’

‘I hope it won’t be too long. You need that. I’ll press the pathologist to find out everything
he can and see if we can have her handed over for a funeral – and burial.’

‘Thank you, Simon.’ He shook his head vigorously as if to shake off water after a shower.

‘I must get back,’ Simon said. ‘And get on. I’m sure it’s what you want me to do. We can provide a family liaison officer, someone from uniform – they’d come and stay here, listen to you, support you in whatever way …’ He trailed
off.

‘I think not. Thank you.’

‘I had to ask.’

‘But perhaps – you yourself would keep me informed if there is any progress?’

‘Of course. It goes without saying.’

‘I have a meeting of the hospice trust this afternoon …’

‘You’d like me to cancel it for you? I’ll ring my sister.’

‘No, no, naturally I will go. Life cannot stop. I will not let this – this person – this – I will not let them
do any more.’ Lowther clenched his fists briefly. But his eyes showed already that he had accepted the truth. Shock was there, and grief, and there would be more of the same to leave their mark. ‘I wonder though – will they know? When will people find out?’

‘I have a press conference later today. We’ve kept the media away from it until now, but I must tell them, otherwise there will just be wild
rumour and speculation.’

‘Do you think reporters will come here?’

‘Almost certainly. But you don’t have to see them and you have absolutely no obligation to comment. If you do want to say anything you can issue a statement through our press office. Or if you feel you want to be interviewed, let them guide you on that too … some papers would be fine, others not so fine.’

‘I would prefer not.’

‘I’ll tell the press office – and if anyone comes here, just turn them away.’

‘Thank you. Thank you for coming, Simon.’ He hesitated. How little it takes, Serrailler thought, to etch fresh lines onto a man’s face, to add a hundred years. But it was not ‘little’, this news that he had had to bring Lowther. ‘I think,’ he said now, ‘that before long this will prove to be a relief. Sixteen years
is a long time to wait and not to know. Anything is better than that. At least, I hope it is.’

Simon put a hand on Lowther’s arm. Perhaps it was the last straw. He could not tell. But as he walked to his car he saw the man turn away, unable to hold back his tears.

‘JUST LIFT UP
your right arm, will you?’

Jocelyn did so.

‘And the left. Fine. Now, stretch both arms out and rest them on my desk, hands spread.’ Cat looked carefully. Turned Jocelyn’s hands over one by one, and back. Touched her forefinger to the knuckles. The joints were not swollen or reddened.

‘Where is it most painful? Hands? Knees?’

‘No, no, my knees are fine.’

‘Have you had any
mobility problems at all? Going upstairs?’

‘I can do that.’

‘Walking – stretching and bending?’

Jocelyn hesitated. Cat Deerbon was being so thorough, so careful, but she didn’t know how much was relevant, whether to bother about …

She said, ‘I – this is going to sound weird.’

‘No, go on.’

‘I sometimes feel as if I’m walking a bit sideways … or even shuffling. I sometimes feel – it’s as if
I’m drunk. But I almost never drink. I had a gin the other night, at a friend’s house. I can’t remember the time before that. Glass of wine at Sunday lunch? Really.’

Cat smiled. ‘Don’t worry. Can you just walk over to the door and back again? Slowly.’

Jocelyn got up. Walked there. Walked back.

‘Again. Do you mind?’

She did not.

‘Tell me what happened with the radio knob. Here – try this.’
Cat held out a small tablet bottle. ‘No childproof top, you just twist it.’

Jocelyn took it. She knew what she wanted to do, was trying to do, but her hand wouldn’t cooperate.

Cat watched. ‘Does it hurt when you try to do that?’

‘No. My hand just doesn’t work.’

Cat asked about her general health.

‘I get tired. But I’m seventy-three. I’m bound to get tired, aren’t I? I remember my mother being
tired when she had arthritis.’