Authors: Lindsay Ashford
‘Yes,’ she replied, glad of the chance to take things slowly. ‘There should be a bottle already open in the fridge.’
Later she slid into bed and waited for him to emerge from the bathroom. She was more relaxed in body but still troubled in mind. Sex with Jonathan had always been fantastic, something she had looked forward to. So why had she recoiled when he touched her? She couldn’t explain the way it had made her feel but she knew it had felt wrong; uncomfortable. The only analogy she could come up with was that of a caterpillar spinning a cocoon. It was as if she was retreating into some inner part of herself, building a protective case that had not yet had enough time to harden off.
Turning onto her stomach she buried her face in the pillow. She wanted to want Jonathan but something had definitely changed. She wasn’t sure exactly what, though
she knew it had something to do with Dominic Wilde. How could someone she’d spent so little time with have such a powerful impact on her? Why couldn’t she get him out of her head?
Jonathan wandered in and she twisted her head round to see that he had a towel tucked decorously round his waist. ‘Have you got any of that coconut oil?’ he asked.
‘Er… yes, I think so. Why?’
‘I thought you might like a massage.’ He sank down onto the bed beside her, stroking her shoulder.
‘Okay. Thanks.’ She turned her face back to the pillow, knowing there would probably have been more warmth in her voice if she’d been addressing some white-coated stranger in a health spa. Perhaps a massage would do the trick, though; make her feel how she was supposed to feel. Her body tightened as he splashed the oil onto her back. She tried to relax as he began to knead her shoulders. Then she felt the weight of him as he leaned across her to flick off the light. She was glad of the darkness. It made what followed easier. She might have fooled him, but she wasn’t fooling herself: in her head she was making love to someone else.
Delva was in the newsroom early the next morning. The need for caffeine was overpowering. She headed for the broom cupboard that passed as a kitchen for her first fix of the day. The aroma wafting down the corridor towards her suggested that someone was even more eager than herself. As she pushed the door open she caught a sudden movement. What had appeared at first glance to be one person now became two. It was Tim and Natalie, two of the researchers, and they were obviously a lot closer than she had realised.
‘Good morning!’ She grinned at their reddening faces. ‘Nice to see you taking our corporate bonding policy so seriously!’
Tim, who towered over the petite Natalie, gave Delva a rueful smile. ‘It may not look like it, but we were actually discussing some serious issues – work-related, that is.’
‘Oh, really?’ Delva looked enquiringly at him. ‘Anything I should know about?’
‘Not sure yet.’ He leaned one long arm on the worktop, raising the other to adjust the brown ponytail that hung down his back. Delva noticed a small silver Celtic knot stud in his left ear. For an ex-cop, she thought, you’re rebelling
big-time.
‘So there might be something then?’ She looked at Natalie, whose cheeks were still glowing. ‘Is this to do with your visit to the prison yesterday?’
‘Well, yes, it is,’ Natalie frowned.
‘You saw him then? I’ve forgotten his name – Dominic
something, wasn’t it?’
‘Dominic Wilde,’ she nodded.
‘What did he say?’
‘Very little, really,’ Natalie shrugged. ‘He was good as far as information about prison conditions went; in fact he was extremely articulate. But I couldn’t get a squeak out of him about Carl Kelly.’ She glanced at Tim. ‘We were just saying, weren’t we, does that mean he really knows nothing or is he just trying to cover something up?’
‘Hmm,’ Delva reached for the kettle and switched it on. ‘What was your gut instinct?’
‘Well, he was surprisingly charming and urbane – for a prisoner, I mean. He was very upfront about why he was a lifer: he told me all about the murder he’d committed.’ Her eyes darted towards Tim again. ‘The victim was a policeman – he killed him during a robbery that went wrong. But he seemed genuinely remorseful.’ She hesitated. ‘So at one level he seemed absolutely convincing, but when I mentioned Carl Kelly he changed completely. He said he knew him, but not particularly well. I got the distinct impression he was lying, or at least holding something back.’
‘Well, I don’t think you should give up on him just yet.’ Delva reached up to the cupboard, past the communal jar of instant coffee to her personal supply of
Rombouts
filters. ‘I wouldn’t have expected him to be all that forthcoming on your first visit. Maybe he’ll loosen up a bit next time.’ She balanced the plastic holder on top of her mug and poured in the steaming water. ‘There is something we can do in the meantime, though,’ she said, breathing in the heady scent now rising from the filter. She described the discovery of the newspaper fragment at the post-mortem on the baby; of her theory about a link between Carl Kelly’s victim and the release of the Birmingham Six. By the time she had finished they were both staring at her, open-mouthed. ‘What we
need to do,’ she continued, looking at Natalie, ‘is to find out whether Moses Smith had any links with the Serious Crime Squad.’ She saw a look of uncertainty in the girl’s eyes. ‘You know about them, do you? The things they were accused of?’
‘Well, sort of,’ she said. ‘I know about the Birmingham Six thing…’ she tailed off, obviously unwilling to show her ignorance. Delva sighed. No reason why she should know, really. She would have only been about three when the squad was disbanded.
‘They were accused of getting a whole raft of convictions through false confessions,’ Delva explained. ‘And according to their victims, they went in for torture. Plastic bagging was one of their favourite techniques, allegedly.’
‘Plastic bagging?’ Natalie looked from Delva to Tim, who turned away and stared at the floor.
‘It’s a way of forcing suspects to sign confessions without actually marking them,’ Delva nodded. ‘You put a plastic bag over their head until they’re on the point of suffocating.’ Delva watched the colour drain from Natalie’s face. ‘They also made up the statements they got people to sign. But this new forensic technique – the ESDA test – was developed just before the Birmingham Six appeal. It proved the confessions had been fabricated. The problem was, despite all that evidence, only a handful of the squad were ever prosecuted. Anyway,’ she said, topping up the water in the filter, ‘Moses Smith wouldn’t have been old enough to be in the force himself but his father might have been. Can you go on the internet for me? Get hold of his birth certificate?’
‘Well, yes, of course I can,’ Natalie nodded, ‘but with a name like Smith…’
‘I know,’ Delva replied, ‘but it’s not just going to give you a name – it should give the father’s occupation as well.’ She turned to Tim. ‘You were in the West Midlands force,
weren’t you? Can you get me names of all the guys in the Serious Crime Squad at the time the Birmingham Six went down?’
He blinked at her before replying. ‘Well, I’ll do my best but it’s still a very touchy issue for the force, you know.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘There are people out there who are keen to keep all that dead and buried.’
Delva held his gaze, wondering how much he already knew but wasn’t prepared to let on. ‘You’re just going to have to tread carefully, then, aren’t you?’ Grabbing her coffee, she tossed the filter into the bin. ‘Keep me in the loop,’ she said as she squeezed past them on her way to the door.
Megan was barely conscious when Jonathan said goodbye. She was in the shower, washing away the traces of him when the phone rang. By the time she got to it, it had stopped. Cursing, she dialled 1471. The number she got was Jonathan’s mobile. She replaced the receiver, relieved that she hadn’t had to speak to him. She was still cross with him for wrecking her weekend. If he’d told her in advance about his need to see his daughter she could have arranged something else, like a trip to Wales to see her sister and the kids, which she’d been promising for ages. But it was too late now; too short notice for Ceri, who didn’t like surprise visitors.
She was fed up with the way Jonathan just expected her to drop everything if he happened to be around. But it wasn’t just that. She was angry with herself, too. For letting him stay last night when her heart wasn’t in it. She would call him – but it wouldn’t be today.
She padded down the stairs in her dressing gown and slippers to make coffee. She was halfway down when she noticed a pink envelope lying on the doormat. She headed
towards it, puzzled. It was too early for the postman. And she was sure there’d been nothing there when she let herself in last night. She would have noticed something as bright as that.
When she bent down to pick it up she noticed that the envelope had landed face up. There was no address and no stamp. Just her first name in large, curlicued letters with a small heart drawn where the stamp should have been. Perhaps it had fallen off the bouquet of flowers Jonathan had given her last night? It didn’t look like his writing, though. She ripped the flap and pulled out a card that looked expensive and handmade. It had a red appliqué heart on a black background with gold thread sewn into the edges. Inside was a message that looked as if it had been written with the kind of gold rollerball pen she sometimes bought for doing her Christmas cards:
‘Missed you today. Can’t bear it when you’re not around. Can I take you for lunch sometime?’
Her heart sank as she saw the signature: Nathan. And three kisses.
Oh bloody hell, Nathan, what are you playing at, you silly boy!
She hissed the words at the letterbox, wondering when he’d pushed the card through the door. She realised with a sudden shock that he could be standing out there now, waiting for her to come out. Turning away she bounded up the stairs to the spare room, which overlooked the street. Edging along the wall she peered round the curtains, taking care not to show herself. There was no one there. She didn’t know if Nathan MacNamara owned a car, but if he did he wasn’t lying in wait inside it. She had a clear view of all the cars parked alongside the pavement as far as the end of the terrace and all of them were empty. Still, she thought, it wasn’t good that he knew where she lived. She wondered how he’d found out, short of following her home. She was going to have to put a stop to this. What had started out as
something mildly irritating was turning into something quite inappropriate. Nathan was going to have to be told in no uncertain terms that his degree was on the line unless he backed off.
She dressed hurriedly, gulped down a quick coffee and took a banana from the fruit bowl to eat when she got to the office. She wondered if Nathan’s card had arrived before Jonathan had left the house. If it had, he would have been bound to notice it. What would he have made of it? Perhaps he had picked it up and laid it down face up to indicate that he had seen it. She could just imagine him putting two and two together and making five. Was that why he’d phoned her earlier?
As she drove to work she forced those questions out of her mind, concentrating instead on the new line of inquiry Jonathan had suggested. She wondered how she could persuade DS Willis to go for an exhumation. He had made it crystal clear that he was in charge and he was going to handle things in his own way, without any interference from her. She reminded herself that she shouldn’t really be playing detective at all. That she was allowing Carl Kelly’s death to hijack the time she was supposed to be spending on research into prison suicides. She knew she should be devoting more hours to analysing spreadsheets; to comparing national statistics with local ones. But at this moment that seemed less important than getting to the truth of what had happened at Balsall Gate. She had no faith whatsoever in Willis’ ability. It seemed the only way to get the police to take this case seriously was for her to prove that Kelly’s death was murder. Then Willis would be replaced by a more senior and – hopefully – a more able officer.
She scanned the lobby as she pushed open the glass doors of the Psychology building. No sign of Nathan. She did the same thing when she stepped out of the lift, glancing down
the corridor before she made her way to her office. She would deal with him later. First she must tackle the sergeant.
‘DS Willis.’ He was the only man she knew who could make his own name sound like a grumble. When she announced herself he interrupted her mid-sentence. ‘No news. No one’s come forward. Okay?’ His tone was dismissive.
‘Well, no, actually,’ she replied, her voice as polite as she could make it. She was well aware that if she was going to win him over she was going to have to be less confrontational than she’d been thus far. ‘There’s something else that might throw a bit of light on things.’ She told him about the possibility of extracting DNA from the baby’s teeth and made the case for the exhumation of Moses Smith.
‘Let’s get this straight,’ he said, with an air of weary resignation, ‘You want me to get a body dug up on the
off-chance
that its DNA might match that baby’s?’
‘Yes, I do,’ she replied, forcing her lips into a smile in an effort not to snap back at him, ‘because at the moment there’s nothing else to go on.’
‘Have you any idea of the amount of red tape involved in getting a body exhumed? It’s a hell of a lot of work for what’s actually a very minor offence. I mean, even if we find the mother, chances are it’ll never go to court.’
‘But it’s not about that, is it?’ she persisted. ‘I’m not after nailing some poor woman for concealing her dead child; I’m looking for hard evidence to track down Carl Kelly’s killer.’
His response was icily polite. ‘May I remind you that at this stage we have no reason to treat that incident as a murder inquiry?’
‘Oh, have there been other cases of strychnine poisoning then? I hadn’t heard.’ She was being disingenuous, but she wasn’t going to let him off the hook.
‘Er… Well, no. Not as yet. We’re waiting for developments
on that front, though.’
‘I see. But how long are you prepared to wait? Another week? A month? I’m just worried that if there’s any possibility of it being murder, the trail is going to go cold.’ There was silence at the other end of the line. She tried another tack: ‘Of course, the other problem is that the TV people are running out of patience.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, they’ve been onto me already this morning,’ she lied. ‘Apparently some anonymous source at the prison leaked the results of the toxicology report. That makes it a much bigger story and they want to take it forward. I think what they’re planning is to ask for a live interview with you – probably they’ll make out it’s just a catch-up on the appeal for information about the baby – then they’ll slip in the big question when you’re off your guard: they’ll ask you
why
you’re not treating Kelly’s death as a murder inquiry.’
She heard what sounded like a groan at the other end of the line and she fisted the air, knowing she’d rattled him. ‘If I was you I’d get in there first; show that you’re being proactive. What have you got to lose by getting Moses Smith’s body exhumed?’ It shouldn’t take more than half an hour of paperwork, and it’ll get the media off your back.’
‘Okay.’ His tone was grudging but it had lost that aggressive edge. ‘But do me a favour will you? Get onto that TV woman and tell her no interviews until we get it okayed by the magistrate. Tell her I’ll put out a press release – I don’t want them bugging me over the weekend.’
‘Consider it done,’ Megan replied, baring her teeth at the receiver in a parody of a smile.
No sooner had she put the phone down than it rang again.
‘Meg, it’s Dom.’ The sound of his voice quickened her pulse. ‘Sorry, I only just got your message. Meg – you still
there?’
‘Yes.’ The images flashing through her mind flustered her; images of last night, when she’d conjured Dom’s face as Jonathan made love to her. ‘I… er…’ She cleared her throat; tried to sound businesslike: ‘It was about Carl’s girlfriend.’