A Darker Shade of Blue

DUE NORTH

Elder hated this: the after-midnight call, the neighbours penned back behind hastily unravelled tape, the video camera’s almost silent whirr; the way, as if reproachful, the uniformed officers failed to meet his eye; and this especially, the bilious taste that fouled his mouth as he stared down at the bed, the way the hands of both children rested near the cover’s edge, as if at peace, their fingers loosely curled.

He had been back close on two years, long enough to view the move north with some regret. Not that north was really what it was. A hundred and twenty miles from London, one hour forty minutes, theoretically, by train. Another country nonetheless.

For weeks he and Joanne had argued it back and forth, reasons for, reasons against, two columns fixed to the refrigerator door. Cut and Dried, the salon where Joanne worked as a stylist, was opening branches in Derby and Nottingham and she could manage either one she chose. Derby was out of the question.

On a visit, Katherine trailing behind them, they had walked along the pedestrianised city centre street: high-end fashion, caffe latte, bacon cobs; Waterstone’s, Ted Baker, Cafe Rouge.

‘You see,’ Joanne said, ‘we could be in London. Chiswick High Road.’

Elder shook his head. It was the bacon cobs that gave it away.

The empty shop unit was just off to one side, secluded and select. ‘Post no Bills’ plastered across the glass frontage, ‘Sold Subject to Contract’ above the door. Joanne would be able to hire the staff, set the tone, everything down to choosing the shade of paint on the walls.

‘You know I want this, don’t you?’ Her hands in his pockets as she pulled him back against the glass.

‘I know.’

‘So?’

He closed his eyes and, slow at first, she kissed him on the mouth.

‘God!’ Katherine exclaimed, whacking her father in the back.

‘What?’

‘Making a bloody exhibition of yourselves, that’s what.’

‘You watch your tongue, young lady,’ Joanne said, stepping clear.

‘Sooner that than watching yours.’

Katherine Elder: eleven going on twenty-four.

‘What say we go and have a coffee?’ Elder said. ‘Then we can have a think.’

Even a casual glance in the estate agent’s window made it clear that for the price of their two-bedroom first-floor flat off Chiswick Lane, they could buy a house in a decent area, something substantial with a garden front and back.

For Katherine, moving up to secondary, a new start in a new school, the perfect time. And Elder…?

He had joined the police as a twenty-year-old in Huddersfield, walked the beat in Leeds; out of uniform, he’d been stationed in Lincolnshire: Lincoln itself, Boston, Skegness. Then, married, the big move to London, this too at Joanne’s behest. Frank Elder a detective sergeant in the Met. Detective inspector when he was forty-five. Moving out he’d keep his rank at least, maybe push up. There were faces he still knew, a name or two. Calls he could make. A week after Joanne took charge of the keys to the new salon, Elder had eased himself behind his desk at the headquarters of the Nottinghamshire Major Crime Unit: a telephone, a PC with a splintered screen, a part-eaten Pork Farms pie mildewing away in one of the drawers.

Now, two years on, the screen had been replaced, the keyboard jammed and lacked the letters R and S; photographs of Joanne and Katherine stood beside his in-tray in small frames. The team he’d been working with on a wages hijack north of Peterborough had just brought in a result and shots of Scotch were being passed around in polystyrene cups.

Elder drank his down, a single swallow, and dialled home. ‘Jo, I’m going to be a bit late.’

A pause in which he visualised her face, a tightening around the mouth, the corners of her eyes. ‘Of course.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s the end of the week, the lads are raring to go, of course you’ll be late.’

‘Look, if you’d rather-’

‘Frank, I’m winding you up. Go and have a drink. Relax. I’ll see you in an hour or so, okay?’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Frank.’

‘All right. All right. I’m going.’

When he arrived home, two hours later, not so much more, Katherine was closeted in her room, listening to music, and Joanne was nowhere to be seen.

Barely pausing to knock, he pushed open his daughter’s door.

‘Dad!’

‘What?’

‘You’re supposed to knock.’

‘I did.’

‘I didn’t hear you.’

Reaching past her, he angled the volume control of the portable stereo down a notch, a half-smile deflecting the complaint that failed to come.

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Out.’

‘Where?’

‘Out.’

Cross-legged on the bed, fair hair splashed across her eyes, Katherine flipped closed the book in which she had been writing with a practised sigh.

‘You want something to eat?’ Elder asked.

A quick shake of the head. ‘I already ate.’

He found a slice of pizza in the fridge and set it in the microwave to reheat, opened a can of Heineken, switched on the TV. When Joanne arrived back, close to midnight, he was asleep in the armchair, unfinished pizza on the floor close by. Stooping, she kissed him lightly and he woke.

‘You see,’ Joanne said, ‘it works.’

‘What does?’

‘You turned into a frog.’

Elder smiled and she kissed him again; he didn’t ask her where she’d been.

Neither was quite in bed when the mobile suddenly rang.

‘Mine or yours?’

Joanne angled her head. ‘Yours.’

Elder was still listening, asking questions, as he started reaching for his clothes.

Fourteen miles north of the city, Mansfield was a small industrial town with an unemployment rate above average, a reputation for casual violence and a soccer team just keeping its head above water in Division Three of the Nationwide. Elder lowered the car window a crack, broke into a fresh pack of extra-strong mints and tried not to think about what he would find.

He missed the turning first and had to double back, a cul-de-sac built into a new estate, just shy of the road to Edwinstowe and Ollerton. An ambulance snug between two police cars, lights in the windows of all the houses, the periodic yammering of radios. At number seventeen all of the curtains were drawn closed. A child’s scooter lay discarded on the lawn. Elder pulled on the protective coveralls he kept ready in the boot, nodded to the young officer in uniform on guard outside and showed his ID just in case. On the stairs, one of the Scene of Crime team, whey-faced, stepped aside to let him pass. The smell of blood and something else, like ripe pomegranate on the air.

The children were in the smallest bedroom, two boys, six and four, pyjamed arms outstretched; the pillow with which they had been smothered lay bunched on the floor. Elder noticed bruising near the base of the older boy’s throat, twin purpling marks the size of thumbs; he wondered who had closed their eyes.

‘We were right to call you in?’

For a big man, Saxon moved lightly; only a slight nasal heaviness to his breathing had alerted Elder to his presence in the room.

‘I thought, you know, better now than later.’

Elder nodded. Gerry Saxon was a sergeant based in the town, Mansfield born and bred. The two of them had crossed paths before, swapped yarns and the occasional pint; stood once at the Town ground, side by side, as sleet swept near horizontally goalwards, grim in the face of a nil-nil draw with Chesterfield. Elder thought Saxon thorough, bigoted, not as slow-witted as he would have you believe.

‘Where’s the mother?’ Elder asked.

Lorna Atkin was jammed between the dressing table and the wall, as if she had been trying to burrow away from the pain. One slash of a blade had sliced deep across her back, opening her from shoulder to hip. Her nightdress, once white, was matted here and there to her body with stiffening blood. Her throat had been cut.

The police surgeon…?’

‘Downstairs,’ Saxon said. ‘Few preliminaries, nothing more. Didn’t like to move her till your say-so.’

Elder nodded again. So much anger: so much hate. He looked from the bed to the door, at the collision of bottles and jars across the dressing-table top, the trajectory of blood along the walls. As if she had made a dash for it and been dragged back, attacked. Trying to protect her children or herself?

‘The weapon?’

‘Kitchen knife. Least that’s what I reckon. Downstairs in the sink.’

‘Washed clean?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’

There were footsteps on the landing outside and then Maureen Prior’s face in the doorway, eyes widening as she took in the scene; one slow intake of breath and she stepped into the room.

‘Gerry, you know DS Prior. Maureen, Gerry Saxon.’

‘Good to see you again, Gerry.’ She scarcely took her eyes from the body. The corpse.

‘Maureen, check with Scene of Crime. Make sure they’ve documented everything we might need. Let’s tie that up before we let the surgeon get to work. You’ll liaise with Gerry here about interviewing the neighbours, house to house.’

‘Right.’

‘You’ll want to see the garage next,’ Saxon said.

There were two entrances, one from the utility room alongside the kitchen, the other from the drive. Despite the latter being open, the residue of carbon monoxide had yet to fully clear. Paul Atkin slumped forward over the driver’s wheel, one eye fast against the windscreen’s curve, his skin sacking grey.

Elder walked twice slowly around the car and went out to where Saxon stood in the rear garden, smoking a cigarette.

‘Any sign of a note?’

Saxon shook his head.

‘A note would have been nice. Neat at least.’

‘Only tell you what you know already.’

‘What’s that then, Gerry?’

‘Bastard topped his family, then himself. Obvious.’

‘But why?’

Saxon laughed. ‘That’s what you clever bastards are going to find out.’ He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last and as he did Elder noticed Saxon’s hands had a decided shake. Probably the night air was colder than he’d thought.

There was no note that came to hand, but something else instead. Traced with Atkin’s finger on the inside of the misting glass and captured there by Scene of Crime, the first wavering letters of a name — ‘CONN’ and then what might have been an ‘I’ trailing weakly down towards the window’s edge.

Mid-afternoon the following day, Elder was driving with Maureen Prior out towards the small industrial estate where Atkin had worked, head of sales for Pleasure Blinds. Prefabricated units that had still to lose their shine, neat beds of flowering shrubs, no sign of smoke in sight. Sherwood Business Park.

If someone married’s going over the side, chances are it’s with someone from where they work. One of Frank Elder’s rules of thumb, rarely disproved.

Some few years back, close to ten it would be now, his wife Joanne had an affair with her boss. Six months it had gone on, no more, before Elder had found out. The reasons not so very difficult to see. They had just arrived in London, uprooted themselves, and Joanne was high on the speed of it, the noise, the buzz. Since having Katherine, she and Elder had made love less and less; she felt unattractive, oddly sexless, over the hill at thirty-three. And then there had been Martyn Miles, all flash and if not Armani, Hugo Boss; drinks in the penthouse bar of this hotel or that, meals at Bertorelli’s or Quo Vadis.

Elder had his fifteen minutes of crazy, smashed a few things around the house, confronted Miles outside the mews apartment where he lived and restrained himself from punching his smug and sneering face more than just the once.

Together, he and Joanne had talked it through, worked it out; she had carried on at the salon. ‘I need to see him every day and know I don’t want him any more. Not turn my back and never know for sure.’

Elder had told Maureen all of this one day: one night, actually; a long drive down the motorway from Fife, the road surface slick with rain, headlights flicking by. She had listened and said very little, a couple of comments only. Maureen with a core of moral judgement clear and unyielding as the Taliban. Neither of them had ever referred to it again.

Elder slowed the car and turned through the gates of the estate; Pleasure Blinds was the fourth building on the right.

‘Constance Seymour’ read the sign on the door. ‘Personnel’.

As soon as she saw them, her face crumpled inwards like a paper bag. Spectacles slipped, lopsided, down on to the desk. Maureen fished a Kleenex from her bag; Elder fetched water from the cooler in a cone-shaped cup. Connie blew her nose, dabbed at her eyes. She was somewhere in her thirties, Elder thought, what might once have been called homely, plain. Sloped shoulders, buttoned blouse, court shoes. Elder could imagine her with her mother, in town Saturdays shopping arm in arm, the two of them increasingly alike.

The eyes that looked at him now were tinged with violet, palest blue. She would have listened to Atkin like that, intense and sympathetic, pained. Whose hand would have reached out first, who would first have comforted whom?

Maureen came to the end of her expressions of condolence, regret.

‘You were having an affair with him,’ she said. ‘Paul Atkin. A relationship.’

Connie sniffed and said yes.

‘And this relationship, how long…’

‘A year. More. Thirteen months.’

‘It was serious, then?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Her expression slightly puzzled, somewhat hurt. What else could it have been?

‘Mr Atkin, was there… was there any suggestion that he might leave his wife?’

‘Oh, no. No. The children, you see. He loved the children more than anything.’

Maureen glanced across, remembering the faces, the pillow, the bed. Killed with kindness: the proverb eddied up in Elder’s mind.

‘Have you any idea why he might want to harm them?’ Elder asked.

‘No,’ she gasped, moments ahead of the wash of tears. ‘Unless… unless…’

Joanne was in the living room, feet tucked beneath her, watching TV. Katherine was staying overnight at a friend’s. On screen, a bevy of smartly dressed and foul-mouthed young things were dissecting the sex lives of their friends. A laughter track gave hints which Joanne, for the most part, ignored.

‘Any good?’ Elder asked.

‘Crap.’

‘I’m just going out for a stroll.’

‘Okay.’

‘Shan’t be long.’

Glancing towards the door, Joanne smiled and puckered her lips into the shape of a kiss.

Arms swinging lightly by his sides, Elder cut through a swathe of tree-lined residential streets on to the main road; for a moment he was distracted by the lights of the pub, orange and warm, but instead walked on, away from the city centre and then left to where the houses were smaller than his own and huddled together, the first part of a circular walk that would take him, an hour or so later, back home.

Behind the curtains of most front rooms, TV sets flickered and glowed; muffled voices rose and fell; the low rumble of a sampled bass line reverberated from the windows of a passing Ford. Haphazardly, dogs barked. A child cried. On the corner, a group of black youths wearing ripped-off Tommy Hilfiger eyed him with suspicion and disdain.

Elder pictured Gerry Saxon leaning up against a darkened tree, his hands trembling a little as he smoked a cigarette. Almost a year now since he had given up himself, Elder fumbled in his pocket for another mint.

He knew the pattern of incidents similar to that at the Atkins house: the man — almost always it was the man — who could find no other way to cope; debt or unrequited love or some religious mania, voices that whispered, unrelenting, inside his head. Unable or unwilling to leave his family behind, feeling it his duty to protect them from whatever loomed, he took their lives and then his own. What differed here was the intensity of the attack upon the wife, that single fierce and slashing blow, delivered after death. Anger at himself for what he had done? At her, for giving cause?

A cat, tortoiseshell, ran two-thirds of the way across the road, froze, then scuttled back.

‘She was seeing someone, wasn’t she?’ Connie Seymour had said, voice parched with her own grief. ‘Lorna. His wife, Lorna. Paul was terrified she was going to leave him, take his kids.’

No matter how many times he and Maureen had asked, Connie had failed to give them a name. ‘He wouldn’t tell me. Just wouldn’t tell. Oh, he knew all right, Paul knew. But he wouldn’t say. As if he was, you know, as if he was ashamed.’

Maureen had got Willie Bell sifting through the house-to-house reports already; tomorrow Matt Dowland and Salim Shukla would start knocking on doors again. For Karen Holbrook the task of contacting Lorna Atkin’s family and friends. Elder would go back to the house and take Maureen with him.

Why? That’s what you clever bastards are going to find out.

Joanne was in the bathroom when he got back, smoothing cream into her skin. When he touched her arm, she jumped.

‘Your hands, they’re like ice.’

‘I’m sorry.’

The moment passed.

In bed, eyes closed, Elder listened to the fall of footsteps on the opposite side of the street, the window shifting uncertainly inside its frame. Joanne read for ten minutes before switching out the light.

They found a diary, letters, nothing of real use. In a box file shelved between two albums of photographs, Maureen turned up a mishmash of guarantees and customer instructions, invoices and bills.

‘Mobile phones,’ she called into the next room. ‘We’ve had those checked.’

‘Yes,’ Elder said, walking through. ‘He had some kind of BT cell phone leased by his work, she was with — who was it? — One to One.’

‘Right.’ Maureen held up a piece of paper. ‘Well, it looks as if she might have had a second phone, separate account.’

‘Think you can charm some details out of them, recent calls especially?’

‘No. But I can impress on them the serious nature of the situation.’

‘You sure you want to do this alone?’ Maureen said.

They were parked in a lay-by on the road north from the city, arable land to their left shading into a small copse of trees. Lapwings rose sharply in the middle distance, black and white like an Escher print.

‘Yes. I think so.’

‘You don’t want…?’

‘No,’ Elder said. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Maureen nodded and got back into her car and he stood there, watching her drive away, rehearsing his first words inside his head.

It was a square brick-built house in a street full of square brick-built houses, the front of this one covered in white pebbledash that had long since taken on several shades of grey. Once council, Elder assumed, now privately owned. A Vauxhall Astra parked outside. Roses in need of pruning. Patchy grass. Close against the kitchen window, a damson tree that looked as if it rarely yielded fruit.

He rattled the knocker and for good measure rang the bell.

No hesitation in the opening of the door, no delay.

‘Hello, Gerry,’ Elder said. ‘Late shift?’

‘You know,’ Saxon said. ‘You’d’ve checked.’ And when Elder made no further remark, added, ‘You’d best come in.’

It was tea or instant coffee and Elder didn’t really want either, but he said tea would be fine, one sugar, and sat, mug cradled in both hands, in the middle of the cluttered living room while Saxon smoked and avoided looking him squarely in the eye.

‘She phoned you, Gerry. Four days ago. The day before she was murdered. Phoned you when you were on duty. Twice.’

‘She was upset, wasn’t she? In a real state. Frightened.’

‘Frightened?’

‘He’d found out about us, seen us. The week before.’

Saxon shook his head. ‘It was stupid, so fucking half-arsed stupid. All the times we… all the times we saw one another, we never took no chances. She’d come here, afternoons, or else we’d meet up miles away, Sheffield or Grantham, and then this one bloody Saturday she said let’s go into Nottingham, look round the shops. He was supposed to be off taking the kids to Clumber Park and there we are coming out of the Broad Marsh Centre on to Lister Gate and they’re smack in front of us, him with the little kid on his shoulders and the other one holding his hand.’

Saxon swallowed down some tea and lit another cigarette.

‘Course, we tried to pass it off, but you could see he wasn’t having any. Ordered her to go home with them there and then and of course when they did there was all merry hell to pay. Ended up with him asking her if she intended leaving him and her saying yes, first chance she got.’ Saxon paused. ‘You’ll take the kids, he said, over my dead body.’

‘She didn’t leave?’

‘No.’

‘Nor try to?’

Saxon shook his head. ‘He seemed to calm down after the first couple of days. Lorna, she thought he might be going to get over it. Thought, you know, if we lay low for a spell, things’d get back to normal, we could start up again.’

‘But that’s not what happened?’ Elder said.

‘What happened was, this idea of her taking the kids, he couldn’t get it out of his head. Stupid, really. I mean, I could’ve told him, a right non-starter.’ Saxon looked around. ‘You imagine what it’d be like, two lads in here. Someone else’s kids. Place is mess enough as it is. Anyway…’ Leaning forward now, elbows on his knees. ‘… you know what it’s like, the kind of life we lead. The hours and all the rest of it. How many couples you know, one or both of them in the force, children, how many d’you know make it work?’

Elder’s tea was lukewarm, tannin thick in his mouth. ‘The last time she phoned you, you said she was frightened. Had he threatened her or what?’

‘No. I don’t think so. Not in as many words. It was more him coming out with all this guff. Next time we’re in the car I’ll drive us all into the back of a lorry. Stuff like that.’

‘And you didn’t think to do anything?’

‘Such as what?’

‘Going round, trying to get him to talk, listen to reason; suggesting she take the boys away for a few days, grandparents, somewhere like that?’

‘No,’ Saxon said. ‘I kept well out of it. Thought it best.’

‘And now?’

‘What do you mean, and now?’

‘You still think it was for the best?’

The mug cracked across in Saxon’s hand and tea spilled with blood towards the floor.

‘Who the fuck?’ he said, on his feet now, both men on their feet, Saxon on his feet and backing Elder towards the door. ‘Who the fuck you think you are, coming in here like you’re some judge and fucking jury, some tinpot fucking god. Think you’re fucking perfect? That what you think, you pompous sack of shit? I mean, what the fuck are you here for anyway? You here to question me? Arrest me? What? There was some fucking crime here? I committed some fucking crime?’

He had Elder backed up against the wall, close alongside the door, the sweat off his skin so rank that Elder almost gagged.

‘Crime, Gerry?’ Elder said. ‘How much d’you want? Three murders, four deaths. Two boys, four and six. Not that you’ll be losing much sleep over them. I mean, they were just a nuisance, an irrelevance. Someone to mess up this shit heap of a home.’

‘Fuck you!’ Saxon punched the wall, close by Elder’s head.

‘And Lorna, well, you probably think that’s a shame, but let’s face it, you’ll soon find someone else’s wife to fuck.’

‘You bastard!’ Saxon hissed. ‘You miserable, sanctimonious bastard!’

But his hands fell back down to his sides and slowly he backed away and gazed down at the floor and when he did that, without hurrying, Elder let himself out of the house and walked towards his car.

He and Joanne were sitting at either end of the settee, Elder with a glass of Jameson in his hand, the bottle nearby on the floor; Joanne was drinking the white Rioja they had started with dinner. The remains of their take-away Chinese was on the table next door. Katherine had long since retreated to her room.

‘What will happen?’ Joanne asked. It was a while since either of them had spoken.

‘To Saxon?’

‘Um.’

‘A bollocking from on high. Some kind of official reprimand. He might lose his stripes and get pushed into going round schools sweet-talking kids into being honest citizens.’ Elder shook his head. ‘Maybe nothing at all. I don’t know. Except that it was all a bloody mess.’

He sighed and tipped a little more whiskey into his glass and Joanne sipped at her wine. It was late but neither of them wanted to make the first move towards bed.

‘Christ, Jo! Those people. Sometimes I wonder if everyone out there isn’t doing it in secret. Fucking one another silly.’

He was looking at Joanne as he spoke and there was a moment, a second, in which he knew what she was going to say before she spoke.

‘I’ve been seeing him again. Martyn. I’m sorry, Frank, I-’

‘Seeing him?’

‘Yes, I-’

‘Sleeping with him?’

‘Yes. Frank, I’m sorry, I-’

‘How long?’

‘Frank-’

‘How long have you been seeing him?’

‘Frank, please…’

Elder’s whiskey spilled across the back of his hand, the tops of his thighs. ‘How fucking long?’

‘Oh, Frank… Frank…’ Joanne in tears now, her breath uneven, her face wiped clear of colour. ‘We never really stopped.’

Instead of hitting her, he hurled his glass against the wall.

‘Tell me,’ Elder said.

Joanne foraged for a tissue and dragged it across her face. ‘He’s

… he’s got a place… up here, in the Park. At first it was just, you know, the odd time, if we’d been working late, something special. I mean, Martyn, he wasn’t usually here, he was down in London, but when

… Oh, Frank, I wanted to tell you, I even thought you knew, I thought you must…’

She held out a hand and when Elder made no move to take it, let it fall.

‘Frank…’

He moved quickly, up from the settee, and she flinched and turned her face away. She heard, not saw him leave the room, the house, the home.

It wasn’t difficult to find out where Martyn Miles lived when he was in the city, a top-floor flat in a seventies apartment block off Tattershall Drive. Not difficult to slip the lock, even though stepping across the threshold set off the alarm. ‘It’s okay,’ he explained to an anxious neighbour, ‘I’ll handle it. Police.’ And showed his ID.

He had been half-hoping Miles would be there but he was not. Instead, he searched the place for signs of what? Joanne’s presence? Tokens of love? In the built-in wardrobe, he recognised some of her clothes: a dove-grey suit, a blouse, a pair of high-heeled shoes; in the bathroom, a bottle of her perfume, a diaphragm.

Going back into the bedroom, he tore the covers from the bed, ripped at the sheets until they were little more than winding cloths, heaved the mattress to the floor and, yanking free the wooden slats on which it had rested, broke them, each and every one, against the wall, across his knee.

Back in the centre of the city, he booked into a hotel, paid over the odds for a bottle of Jameson and finally fell asleep, fully clothed, with the contents two-thirds gone. At work next day, he barked at anyone who as much as glanced in his direction. Maureen left a bottle of aspirin on his desk and steered well clear. When he got home that evening, Joanne had packed and gone. Frank — I think we both need some time and space. He tore the note into smaller and smaller pieces till they filtered through his hands.

Katherine was in her room and she turned off the stereo when he came in.

Holding her, kissing her hair the way he didn’t think he’d done for years, his body shook.

‘I love you, Kate,’ he said.

Lifting her head she looked at him with a sad little smile. ‘I know, but that doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘What do you mean? Of course it does.’

‘No. It’s Mum. You should have loved her more.’

Two weeks later, Joanne back home with Katherine, and Elder in a rented room, he knocked on the door of the Detective Superintendent’s office, walked in and set his warrant card down on the desk, his letter of resignation alongside.

‘Take your time, Frank,’ the Superintendent said. ‘Think it over.’

‘I have,’ Elder said.