‘Soon. The flat is nearly ready. I’ve just been painting the second bedroom, actually. As soon as I get it set up, you can come and stay.’
‘It’s been ages,’ I mutter into the phone.
‘I know. But I’m trying, Sarah. You have to be patient.’
‘I have been patient,’ I say. ‘I’m tired of being patient.’ I give the skirting board another vicious kick and some paint flakes off it. ‘Dad, I have to go.’
‘Oh, OK.’ He sounds surprised, a little deflated. ‘Have you got plans?’
‘No. I just don’t really have anything else to say to you.’ It feels good to be mean to him. It feels like what he deserves.
There’s a little pause. ‘Right, then.’
‘Bye,’ I say, and I put the phone down quickly, so I can’t hear him reply.
When I turn around, Mum is still standing there, her arms folded, a half-smile on her face. I can tell that she is pleased with me, and I feel glad for a second, before the guilt kicks in, and the resentment. I don’t even care what she thinks.
As I go into the living room and flop back down on the sofa, I wish that I’d been nicer to Dad on the phone, but it’s too late now. He’s gone.
THEY LEFT ME
sitting in the interview room for quite some time. Grange returned to collect Cooper, but didn’t speak to me. A female officer in uniform slipped in and stood by the door in silence, apparently oblivious to my presence. I followed her example, staring into space instead with my arms folded around my knees. I expected that they would take me back to the cells eventually. I had the distinct impression that the interview was over.
When the door opened again, I was surprised to see Vickers standing there. He got rid of the uniformed officer with a jerk of his head and came in himself, pulling Cooper’s chair around from the other side of the table so that he could sit facing me, without having the table in the way. He eased himself into the chair slowly, as if his back was aching, and sighed before he spoke.
‘How are you doing?’
I gave him a one-shouldered shrug.
How do you think?
‘You’ll be glad to hear that we’ve been talking to young Paul Keane at the hospital, and he’s categorically denied that you were involved in a conspiracy. He’s corroborated everything you’ve been telling us. For the time being, no other evidence of your involvement coming to light, I’m satisfied that you weren’t in fact connected with the plot to abuse or murder Jennifer Shepherd.’
It wasn’t a ringing endorsement of my innocence, but I took it for what it was: an apology of sorts and reassurance that they weren’t going to interrogate me any further.
‘You won’t find any more evidence. I told you, I wasn’t involved.’
‘So it seems,’ Vickers said, clasping his hands in front of him and examining his knuckles as if they were a source of some fascination to him. He didn’t say anything else, and I wondered what he was waiting for.
‘May I go?’
‘Mmm. Well, of course you can, if you want. I’d understand that, if you wanted to go home. You’re probably tired, and a bit upset.’
‘Just a bit,’ I said drily.
‘Yes. Well. I’d understand, as I say, if you wanted to head off.’
There was a little pause. I knew he wanted something else. I wondered if it would be too rude to say no before I heard what it was. ‘But?’
‘But – well, when I say that we’ve been talking to Paul, we haven’t been getting very far.’ He rubbed his neck with one wrinkled hand. I knew he was playing up the tired-old-man thing to gain my sympathy, and waited for him to get to the point, unmoved.
‘The thing is, he won’t tell us much, Sarah. All that we’ve been able to get him to say is that you weren’t involved. He’s been no comment this, no comment that – we couldn’t even get him to confirm his name and age at first. It was only when we started to ask him about you
that
he talked. You made a big impression on him. He said you were kind to him.’
I felt tremendously sorry for Paul. All I had done was talk to him – treat him as a fellow human being. How could that have made such a big impression on him that he’d break his silence to defend me? It must have taken great courage. Bad as it had been for me to be locked up, then interviewed – interrogated – at least I was an adult and had some idea of my rights. And I knew I was innocent.
‘You shouldn’t be interviewing him at all. Of course I’m grateful to him for confirming what I’ve been telling you. But he is a child. He’s immensely vulnerable. He’s just tried to kill himself, for God’s sake. And if you’re right about the part he played in Jenny’s abuse – and I’m not saying you are; you were wrong about me, after all – I imagine he’s desperately ashamed to have been found out.’
‘You’ve got a point there,’ Vickers said, trying to look shame-faced. The apparent unease did not sit well with what I knew of him – he was pure steel underneath – and I stared him down, refusing to respond.
Vickers crossed one skinny leg over the other and spent some time smoothing the material of his trousers over the uppermost kneecap. Eventually he looked up at me. ‘I don’t think it’s fair to ask you to help us, Sarah, given what we’ve put you through, but I’m in a difficult situation. We’ve got no chance to build a good relationship with the boy. There’s no trust there at all. He’s had no support from any reliable adult for a good many years, so he doesn’t respond very well to us or to his old teachers, and there’s no other
family
. We had a social worker sitting in, and I know they do good work, but this one was about as much use as a piece of damp string to a man with diarrhoea, if you’ll pardon the expression. I’m going to have to appeal to your good nature, and your desire to see justice done.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Come to the hospital with me. Now.’ Vickers had dropped the quavery old-man voice and I noticed again how penetrating his cold blue eyes could be. ‘He trusts you. He likes you. We’ve asked him if he’d talk to anyone and yours was the only name that got a good reaction. He thinks you’re some sort of angel.’
‘I don’t believe this,’ I said, struggling to take it in. ‘How can you go from accusing me of murder one minute to asking me for help the next?’
‘We had grounds to suspect your involvement in some aspect of the crime,’ Vickers said reprovingly. ‘Following our investigation, we are now satisfied that you weren’t involved. But arresting you was the correct course of action, legally, and it has cleared your name.’
‘So I should be grateful?’ I was shaking with anger.
‘I didn’t say that.’ Vickers softened slightly. ‘I know it was hard, Sarah. And if I had any alternative, I’d let you go home and recover from this in your own time. But I don’t have a lot of choice. I need to know what Paul knows, and I don’t have time to waste making friends with him. I’ve got Jennifer Shepherd’s parents on the phone asking if there’s any news, I’ve got the press asking all sorts of questions, I’m trying to coordinate the manhunt for Daniel Keane under huge pressure from the bosses and all I need
is
to be able to say to all of them: yes, we’re on the right track. We might not have him yet, but it’s only a matter of time, and he’s definitely the one we’re after.’
‘I don’t want to be part of this,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I don’t want to be involved in badgering that poor child for information that will incriminate his brother.’
‘Please, Sarah. You know what it’s like – not knowing. For the sake of the parents, won’t you help us?’
That was it. He’d got me. Vickers always found the right angle in the end. I might not want to help the police, but I hadn’t the heart to make the Shepherds wait for the truth.
To give him his due, the inspector managed to avoid sounding triumphant as he led me out of the interview room and down the corridor towards the front of the police station. He prattled on about the rooms we were passing – ‘and that’s where we spoke to you, you’ll remember, the night that Jennifer’s body was found, that’s my office in there’. I tuned most of it out, smarting from the looks I was receiving from Vickers’ colleagues. It was evidently taking a while for the news of my release to filter through. Barely disguised hostility seemed to be the common reaction as Vickers ushered me down the hall.
We came into the reception area of the police station, the part that was open to the public, to discover a one-man riot in progress. Vickers and I stopped as one, side by side, stunned. A tall, broad-shouldered man was struggling with two uniformed PCs and a woman. The woman was clinging to his arm for dear life, and as he tried to
shake
her off she turned her head and I recognised Valerie. The man was shouting at the top of his voice, spitting invective at the civilian receptionist. She looked petrified behind her scratched and yellowed plexiglass screen, and I didn’t blame her. The man’s anger was colossal. I had recognised him too, with a chill. Michael Shepherd was at the very limits of his self-control and it was impossible to predict what he might do. And if he knew that I had been arrested – if he knew that the police had suspected me of anything at all to do with his daughter’s death – then I absolutely didn’t want to be in a room with him, surrounded by police or not.
‘I want to speak to the inspector, and I want to speak to him
now
!’ he demanded, his voice raw with sharp-cornered rage.
‘If you’d just calm down for a second—’ Valerie puffed and I reflected that those words, and the exact manner in which she delivered them, were likely to provoke the precisely opposite effect.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Shepherd barked. ‘What the fuck do you know?’
I hadn’t noticed Vickers moving, but suddenly he was standing to one side of the little group. At the sight of him Shepherd gave a great sigh and stopped struggling.
‘There’s no need for an argument, Mr Shepherd. Sorry I wasn’t available before. I’ve been tied up, I’m afraid.’
‘They said on the news that someone had been arrested. Is that true?’ The words came out of Michael Shepherd in a rush.
‘We’re pursuing a definite line of enquiry.’
I flinched as Shepherd’s fist crashed down on the counter in front of him.
‘That’s what you keep saying, but you don’t tell me anything. I don’t know what’s going on. I just don’t – I don’t …’
Shepherd was shaking his head, bewildered, anger turning to confusion and despair. Vickers couldn’t resist a glance in my direction. I could see he was pleased I had seen Jenny’s father in that state. He had realised it would persuade me – as nothing else could – to carry out what he needed me to do. I hated him for it, but he was right.
Vickers hadn’t calculated how quickly Michael Shepherd would recover, and how alert he was to what was going on around him. Noticing that he’d lost Vickers’ attention for a second, he whipped around to see what the policeman was looking at. I shrank back as his coal-black eyes found me and his brows drew together.
‘You,’ he said, on a ragged breath, and started towards me. ‘You’re in this, aren’t you? You’re the one they’ve arrested.’
The two uniformed officers ran to intercept him at Vickers’ panicky command and dragged him to a stop a couple of feet away from me. I held my ground and Michael Shepherd’s gaze. The heat of it was scorching.
‘I was just about to tell you about Miss Finch,’ Vickers said, catching up and inserting himself between us in an act that was unlikely to be effective, should Michael Shepherd break free. I appreciated his chivalry, all the same. ‘We’re satisfied that she played no part in the murder of your daughter, Mr Shepherd. In fact, she has been helping
us
to find out more about what happened to Jenny before she died, and she is continuing to provide us with every assistance.’
Shepherd’s eyes still bored into mine and I knew he would kill me if he had the chance, believing that I had harmed his daughter.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked harshly.
‘Positive. She had nothing to do with the abuse of your daughter, and nothing to do with her death.’ Vickers was sounding a lot more certain about that than he had in the interrogation room earlier, but he needed to convince Shepherd, and quickly.
What he said made Shepherd turn his head, but it didn’t calm him – quite the opposite. ‘The
abuse?
’
Just for a second, a flicker of uncertainty passed across Vickers’ lined face. ‘You were told about that, I believe. DC Wade spoke to you and your wife about it this afternoon.’
‘She told us lies,’ Michael Shepherd hissed. ‘It’s not true. None of it is true. If you tell anyone, I’ll sue.’
Vickers put his hand out and patted the air vaguely, as if that might soothe the man in front of him. ‘I know it’s hard to take in, but you needed to know what happened. We think the – er, molestation – led directly to Jennifer’s death, Mr Shepherd. It is true, sadly, and there is plenty of evidence of it that we are going to use in prosecuting those responsible. That means that some of it will be in the public domain and there’s no way we can keep it out of the media. Now, we aren’t planning to make the images and videos public, I can assure you of that, but some of
them
will be shown in court and they will be reported on, but not in any detail.’
‘Images,’ Michael Shepherd repeated, not seeming to take in what Vickers was saying. He turned back to me. ‘Have you seen them? Have you seen my Jenny?’
I didn’t have to speak or even nod for him to know that I had. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t wanted to look, that I would do my best to forget what I had seen, if I ever could, but before I could speak he whipped back to Vickers.
‘You told her? You showed her? How many other people have seen these images? Everyone, I suppose. All laughing and joking about them. Mocking my daughter. My little girl, and she’s nothing but a slag to you, is she? A little whore who deserved what she got.’ His face was working, his chin quivering. Valerie volunteered a ‘hush now’ that was ignored.
‘Everyone’s going to know. Everyone’s going to know about it and there’s nothing I can do.’ He fell to his knees and raised his hands to his face as raw sobs tore their way out of him. The rest of us stood around in silent horror, mesmerised by the big man’s total collapse.