The Pure in Heart (24 page)

She stepped aside and turned to Simon. ‘No need
for you to stay, it’ll be better if I just blend in for a bit. I’ll see you before I go.’

He left. The Chief was already talking to Nathan, going over the marker notes for the day on the white board. The room was settling back to work, and he noticed that there was a more focused air about everyone; people were sitting straight not slumped in their seats, someone had opened a window, the
phones
were ringing and being answered crisply. The Chief had revived their spirits and their enthusiasm in a few words. It was the shot in the arm that had been needed.

He went back to his room feeling a fresh charge of energy himself. He took out a sheet of paper, asked for all but urgent calls to be turned away, and began to look at the case again from the beginning, making a flow chart from the
time the boy had gone to bed the night before his disappearance, and adding side lists of notes as they occurred to him. He worked fast, his imagination alert, seeing the boy in his mind’s eye, following him, and then looking at the case from someone else’s point of view … that of an abductor.

It was forty minutes before Paula Devenish came back. By then, he had filled three sheets with careful
notes.

‘Simon, I have to get back, but I’m up to speed with what everyone is doing. I’m impressed. It’s an efficient and well coordinated inquiry.’

‘Thank you.’

‘They were a bit down but that’s always the way. They’re a good team. And don’t forget what I said about your career. I could use you to head up something I want to develop over the next year or so. Don’t get too comfortable, Simon.’

He escorted her to her car and watched it sweep off.

Was he too comfortable? He had never thought so but if he was then why not? It suited him here.
He wondered how ambitious he still was. But two women had ruffled him within a few days. He did not object to the Chief’s questioning him about his future – she had his best interests at heart and he also knew that she thought highly of him and he
was not about to underestimate the value of that. Diana was different. He did not want to think about her at all.

He stood in the chill breeze for a few moments before returning, taking the stairs at a run and ringing for Nathan Coates as soon as he got back to his room. They had to move. If David Angus was dead then his abductor and murderer would now be working himself up to taking another
child.

‘I can’t see,’ Meriel said, ‘I need you to tell me. You’ll choose the right thing and set it in the perfect spot … you’re so good at it.’

Karin stood beside her. In the two years since she had redesigned and planted Meriel’s garden, everything had begun to mature, so that it looked less raw and new. Shrubs were filling out, bulbs had spread so that the small beds at the side of the
steps leading up to the terrace were thick with iris reticulata and miniature narcissi. By June the wide borders at the far end would be coming into their own, the climbing roses fuller.

Meriel had asked Karin to lunch. It was the day after Martha’s sad little funeral at the crematorium in the cold and grey. Now, the sun was shining. Meriel wanted to plant a tree in Martha’s memory but she seemed
not to know what kind or where it should go. She simply stared vaguely out at the garden.

She looks drawn, Karin had thought, suddenly old. Frail even. There was something about her eyes, too, an anxious look which Karin had never noticed before.

‘You do think it’s the right thing to do?’ She turned now, needing confirmation and reassurance.

‘Of course I do, it’s perfect. I was wondering about
a winter flowering cherry; they have those delicate pink blossoms on bare branches when there’s almost nothing else and you often get a flowering twice, in November and again in late January. They’re easy, they look wonderful in snow, they give a pretty dappled shade during the summer.’

‘I knew you’d think of the right thing and you have. But where?’

‘You want to see it … to have it stand out
from everything else …’

‘There?’ Meriel pointed vaguely. ‘Oh, but you choose, you decide.’

‘It’s your garden,’ Karin said gently, ‘she was your daughter. I don’t want to take over on this one.’

‘I’ll only get it wrong.’

‘Of course you won’t.’ Karin stepped down off the terrace on to the grass and stood looking all around her. There was no warmth in the sun. She needed the scarf she had tied
twice round her neck. Meriel stood above her watching, tall and straight-backed, her legs long in black jeans. How many women of her age could wear black jeans to such effect? Karin wondered.

‘What about there … in the middle of the side lawn against the dark background? You’d see it from the kitchen, from the drawing room and from
your bedroom. It wouldn’t grow too big for that space.’

‘Yes.
Thank you.’ She seemed anxious to get the decision out of the way, to have the tree chosen, bought, planted and then to move on.

Karin was puzzled. She had no idea what Meriel’s feelings had been about Martha’s life or now her death. Yesterday at the crematorium she had been dry-eyed, moved a little stiffly, once touched Simon’s arm before moving quickly away to the waiting cars. She had been
grave. Nothing more.

It had been Richard Serrailler who had wept, discreetly but for some time, he who had read a poem over his daughter’s coffin and barely been able to finish. Afterwards he had not joined the others or looked at the flowers laid on the grass but walked quickly away into the memorial garden at the side of the chapel. Chris Deerbon had made to go after him but Simon had shaken
his head.

There had been so few there – three people from Ivy Lodge, Karin, Chris on his own as Cat was only just home with the baby. Karin had looked at Meriel again and again. Something had happened to her. She had been a woman still in middle age and now she had moved forward into the first stage of being old.

‘Do come inside, the wind is too cold to stand about here. I want to talk to you
about the hospice exhibition.’

Karin followed her. From the study at the end of the corridor she heard the faint patter of a keyboard.
Richard Serrailler still wrote medical papers and co-edited an online journal in ophthalmology.

Meriel put a fresh filter paper in the coffee percolator and a bag of peppermint tea into a mug for Karin, who was still strictly following the anti-cancer diet. Karin
sat at the kitchen table looking at the plans for the hospice extension.

‘Do you feel it,’ Meriel asked abruptly, setting down the cups, ‘not having children?’

Karin was taken aback. Since Mike had left her, she had been on an emotional seesaw; half of her was grateful that, after years of struggling to conceive, they had not managed to have children after all – children who would now be torn
apart by his actions. But some of the time she believed that children might have meant Mike would never have met the woman in New York, not have left home …

‘Yes and no … probably more no than yes, just now. But when I go to see Cat and little Felix I daresay it will be a very strong yes.’

‘It is the hardest. Losing your child, having your child die before you die. It’s the wrong way round and
you feel guilty. You’ve failed, you see. You should protect them from death and you have failed. I had no idea that I would feel like this about Martha … Perhaps I feel it more than I would have done with one of the others … she was so vulnerable. She was innocent and helpless and vulnerable.’

She sipped her coffee. Karin noticed the pale smudges under her eyes, as if someone had scored thumbprints
there.

‘Medical advances mean we are so much less accepting of death. And we have to accept it. All of us.’

‘I don’t think I accept it, or I wouldn’t have spent the last year fighting so hard against the prospect of it.’

‘No. But you would have been dying before your time. Did Martha? When was
her
time to die? At birth probably. Before birth. People bewail miscarriages but they are almost always
right. Almost always.’ She stared across the kitchen, not out of the window but simply into space.

Karin reached out to pull the plans towards her. ‘What time would you like me to come to the hall on Saturday?’ She wanted to break the atmosphere, to have the usual Meriel back, full of energy, organising, arranging and in charge, not this sad and rather defeated woman. Karin felt like a child
whose seemingly invincible parent has suddenly demonstrated a weakness.

‘Yes,’ Meriel looked vaguely at the papers in front of her. ‘Well, we open at ten. There’s the model to set up and the display boards … we can’t have the hall the night before unfortunately, it’s in use.’

‘Half past eight?’

‘Could you bear it?’

‘Oh yes, I get up pretty early. Are there people lined up to do refreshments
or do you want me to help with those too?’

A door opened and closed and they heard footsteps along the passage.

‘Oh no, goodness, there are plenty of cake bakers and coffee servers … no, I need you with me. We must talk to everyone who comes in, persuade them how badly this day-care unit is needed. I aim to have promises and interest enough by the end of Saturday to feel confident that we can
go ahead. God knows there’s plenty of money in Lafferton, we just have to dig for it. Have you seen the model? I never think plans and drawings give a proper impression of any building, but the model makes it come alive.’ She leaned over the table. ‘Karin, it is so important … we have got to make this happen!’

This was the old Meriel Serrailler back, enthusiastic and determined, her face alight.
Karin relaxed. The right order of things was restored after all.

The door opened and Richard Serrailler stalked across the kitchen.

‘Coffee hot?’

‘I made it five minutes ago.’

‘Good.’ He opened the cupboard and took out a cup and saucer. Then, as he was about to pour his coffee, turned to Karin. ‘It was good of you to come yesterday. Please know how much it was appreciated.’

Karin stammered
a reply. Richard Serrailler had barely spoken to her before, and never without appearing curt. How strange death was that it should not only shatter people and change things for ever, but bring different people out of the ones you thought you knew. Even this death of a child-woman
whom no one had ever really known had changed things, hurt Meriel enough to age her and reveal her vulnerability and
softened her husband to the point where he acknowledged Karin’s presence at the funeral with real gratitude, for all the formal way he had expressed it.

‘I was glad I could be there,’ she said. He nodded, and went out without further comment.

‘The model has to be placed so that it’s the first thing people see and then they’ll be drawn straight to it,’ Meriel said.

Her husband might never have
been in the room.

Sam Deerbon was in the porch of the farmhouse, his small figure lit by the overhead lantern, as Simon drove up. As he opened the car door, his nephew ran up and stood in the way.

‘Have you found David Angus yet?’

Simon looked at the little boy’s earnest face with its strangely upward-sprouting hair and his mother’s eyes.

‘You haven’t found him, have you? Are you looking hard enough?
A lot of people at school say you aren’t looking properly. A lot of boys at school say he’s dead but I don’t think he is, I think a gang has got him somewhere, in a loft or in a cave and they’ll ask for money to let him go. It’s called a ransom demand.’

‘It is, yes. But what makes you think that might have happened to David?’

‘Well, I should think his dad’s quite rich. Well, a bit rich anyway.
He could pay a ransom, couldn’t he?’

‘That would depend.’

‘Why?’

‘On all sorts of things.’

‘Like on how much money the gang wanted?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Not millions and billions, I don’t mean, but he could pay quite a lot I should think, wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know. Sam, can we go inside please.’

Sam hesitated then slowly opened the door wider. ‘Don’t forget to lock it. People steal cars from
places in broad daylight, you know.’

‘Thanks for reminding me.’ Simon zapped the remote button and the doors clunked shut.

‘Good,’ Sam said. ‘Rivers’s mother’s car got stolen from their garage and it was even locked with a warning alarm set but they got in and stole it.’

‘Where does Rivers live?’

‘Yoxley Crescent. I should think they would have kidnapped Rivers, his father has a mega big factory,
they’d pay loads and loads.’

‘I don’t think anyone should be kidnapping anyone at all, do you?’

‘Not really, but if people needed money to buy food for their children they might.’

‘I think that’s what’s called a false argument. Robin Hood, you know?’

Sam looked puzzled.

‘Never mind.’

Simon stepped into the kitchen and wanted to freeze the moment. He was tired and irritable and cold. The
kitchen was warm and smelled of baked potatoes and a bottle of red wine stood on the worktop. Beside it sat the huge ginger cat Mephisto,
his tail curled round his body, green eyes blinking at Simon. In a corner of the sofa, Cat was curled up in old tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, which was lifted for her to give the breast to Felix, who was pressed close to her, one hand curled to touch Cat’s
pale skin with its blue veins running towards the nipple.

‘What a picture.’

‘Fat woman with infant.’

‘Maternal, not fat.’

‘Thanks, bro, just what I need.’

Sam had wormed his way into the crook of her arm and was trying to get as close to her as the baby was. Simon raised an eyebrow but Cat shook her head.

‘You could open that bottle now. God knows when Chris will be back, the locum’s called
in sick again. I don’t know how much longer he can cope with this.’

‘No good?’

‘OK … when she’s there. Patients don’t like her much, she’s too sharp – tells everyone to stop smoking, lose a couple of stone and go to the gym before they’ve got in through the door and hasn’t been known to prescribe an antibiotic in her entire career. Tough cookie. But then always ringing in that
she’s
not well.’