Crying Out Loud

FOURTEEN

Diane came over, bringing food: a Moroccan stew. Chickpeas, turnips and dates in a glossy marinade full of garlic and spices.

Diane listened out for Jamie while I got Maddie ready for bed. I have to hang on to this, I told myself. Whatever happens with Ray, I still have Maddie and Diane. Count my blessings. I imagined Chloe Beswick putting her kids to bed, numb and trying to make sense of her brother’s death. And Libby, who had never been able to watch Charlie bathe Rowena, never seen him cradle his daughter or gaze at her. What of Laura, who had denied Ray the knowledge of his second son? Did she hate him? Had he broken her heart when he got entangled with me? And now that he’d found out about the child, what would she do? What would he do?

Diane was as frustrated as I was that Ray hadn’t gone into the details of his meeting with Laura. ‘And now he’s gone running home to mummy,’ she said, scathingly, ‘to avoid talking.’

‘To be fair,’ I pointed my wine glass at her, ‘that had been arranged for a while.’

‘If you have to be fair…’ she complained.

‘Well, I am,’ I insisted. ‘Renowned for it.’ The wine was talking. I’d already had several glasses and if social services had descended on me then I might well have been regarded as unfit to be in charge of a strange infant.

‘She’ll do her nut – Nana Tello,’ I said. ‘Frogmarch them down the aisle. Whisk the baby off for baptism.’

‘Will he tell her?’ Diane asked.

‘Maybe not yet.’ The more I considered it the more it rankled. ‘If he has – before even talking to me properly, well…’

Diane’s look was knowing. ‘You’ll do what exactly?’

I sighed. ‘I don’t know.’

‘And what about Jamie?’

‘Ditto. As far as the kids are concerned, she’s overstayed her welcome. I do realize I can’t let it drift on indefinitely – it’ll make it impossible for me to work apart from anything else – but I’m not prepared to pick up the phone just yet.’ Day six now. I tried to imagine making that call, some child protection worker on the phone listening to me try to justify why I had waited so long to report an abandoned infant. A social worker turning up in a car, taking Jamie. And perhaps the mystery of who that little girl was never answered.

‘I can’t believe her mother’s not rung,’ I said. ‘Not a word. She must be thinking about her, worried sick about her.’

‘Yeah.’ Diane stuck a bowl of grapes in front of me.

‘About work,’ I said, ‘if I get really stuck…’

She groaned and dropped her head in her hands.

‘Only if I can’t find anyone else,’ I rushed to say.

‘It was a one-off,’ she complained. ‘That’s what you said. Anyway, I’m away Monday and Tuesday.’ She grinned with relief.

‘Where?’

‘Dublin. New gallery have given me a room for the glass.’ Before her project on Cuba, Diane had spent time with a glass blower and out of that had created an installation. She used thousands of pieces of smooth, coloured glass to make a pathway and a ‘curtain’ that the viewer walked through. The resulting sound, first the crinkle and crunch of the path, then the resulting chiming of the curtain and the way light spangled from the suspended globes and icicles, was wonderful. We’d gone to the preview at the Lowry in Salford. Most critics had raved but one influential commentator had been less appreciative – ‘a tacky fly-curtain that will appeal to lovers of whimsy and the knick-knack brigade’.

‘He can sit on it and swivel,’ Diane had muttered darkly at the time. But she had complete faith in her work and its value. I envied her that self-belief, that confidence.

Diane listened while I talked about Damien Beswick, and where that left my enquiry. I admitted to her that I wished I’d given him a little more hope at that last meeting.

‘Would that have been misleading?’

‘Yes, I suppose. At the time I was still so unsure.’

‘Hindsight’s a bugger,’ she said succinctly. ‘But now you believe him?’

‘I’d be a fool not to – his dying message to the world,’ I said. ‘It’s such a waste; he wasn’t much more than a kid.’

‘What about the other man’s family, the Carters – they must be all over the place?’

‘They are. And the girlfriend, the one who hired me. Going through all that and then finding that everything they’ve been told, everything they believed about that day is suddenly meaningless. It must feel like it’s happening all over again.’

‘Mummy.’ Maddie stood in the doorway, her wrists and ankles sticking out of her pyjamas, shoulders hunched. Her face was white. ‘I had a scary dream.’

‘Come on.’ I got to my feet and went to her. ‘Let’s get you back to bed.’

‘I’ll get going,’ Diane said. ‘See myself out.’

‘Have fun in Dublin.’

‘I will, and let me know… anything… everything.’

‘Know what?’ Maddie yawned as we went upstairs.

‘Oh, nothing special. So what was this dream?’ She didn’t need to hear about any of the uncertainty swilling round in my life. Not until things were clearer and I was surer where we were heading. If Ray and I were over. And what would happen to Maddie and me.

I lay awake most of that night, any chance of sleep ambushed by Jamie, who woke each time I drifted off. My mind was chewing over my worries. I wasn’t the only person to miss signs of Damien’s fragility but I longed to make reparation. Eventually I persuaded myself that the best thing I could do for Chloe, and in Damien’s memory, was to actively support her attempts to clear his name. By extension anything I could find that helped the police catch the real culprit would also help Libby and the Carters.

I’m the sort of person who copes with anxiety by doing something. Problem solving. If I could focus on my investigation, work hard, it would help and give me the hope that I could achieve results and make things better. With that in mind, I set out to make good use of Sunday by combining business and pleasure. I loaded the car with baby supplies, packed Maddie and Jamie in and drove out to Thornsby to visit the site where Charlie had lost his life. I’d no expectation of entering the property – presumably it would have been sold on, the floor ripped up and replaced or professionally cleaned. There might be people living there, or perhaps it was still a holiday home for someone. Would they know the history? Would any of them get a funny feeling about the house, sense a cold spot near the door or a peculiar anxiety in the dark?

I remembered Damien’s comment about the ghost in the prison. John Ellis, the hangman who’d slit his own throat. Was Damien with him now? A shadow swinging on a creaking rope in the dark end of the night. Another lost soul.

‘Where are we going?’ Maddie piped up, stopping my stupid fancies. Blame it on lack of sleep.

‘For a walk in the country.’

‘Will we see lambs?’

‘I think it’s a bit late for lambs, they’re born in the spring. But there’s a children’s farm.’

‘What, with children in?!’ She was astounded and then saw the joke. We both laughed.

‘For children. We’ll walk a bit then go to the farm. It might be feeding time.’

In the bottom of the valley, where Damien got off the bus, the road ran parallel to the river. We drove past the service station on the left and the pub advertising home-cooked food. From there I could see beyond the turn off to the bus shelter on the opposite side of the road, where Damien had been chucked off. I turned right at that junction to take the hill up to the cottage. The hamlet was pretty – maybe two dozen properties in all, clinging to the valley sides. Half of them looked to have grown out of the land, built low to the ground, the stone dark and weathered with age, the windows tiny – no doubt to avoid the punitive window taxes at the time. Somewhere like this must have been a working village, digging clay or lead or quarrying. The newer houses were bigger in scale: the same limestone but raw, glowing pale grey. They boasted picture windows, veluxes on the roofs and off-road parking.

I stopped my car partway up the hill, behind a vehicle on the left before the bend where the road twisted to the right. This was where Damien had passed two stationary cars and cased them for valuables. A Mondeo and a Volvo. The car in front of me now was a Volvo. I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck. It could be the same one. I used my camcorder to capture a shot of it and took in the locale as well.

‘What are you filming?’ Maddie smelt a rat.

‘This and that. We’ll take some of you at the farm, too.’

Jamie was awake but content and kicked her legs in excitement as I fastened her seat into the buggy chassis. The previous day’s fog had lifted and we had mellow autumn sunshine. Out here there was much more birdsong, the twittering of wrens and tits and finches pierced by the raucous calls of rooks patrolling two sycamores at the end of one of the gardens.

Damien had tried the cars, looked to see if there was anything worth stealing, then crossed over. I retraced his steps. As he rounded the corner he met a man coming down the hill. Pushing the buggy up the gradient, I tried to imagine the lane at night. There were some street lights, so it wouldn’t have been in complete darkness. The man had been heading down the hill. Where to? The man had crossed the road after he passed Damien, which was the wrong direction for the pub and the service station. Was he heading for one of the houses on that side of the road, or one of the cars? Or the bus stop?

If he lived here, how come he hadn’t been identified by the police? All the houses would have been visited, people asked to help. Damien had heard a car start as he approached the cottage. He’d frozen, listening in case it came his way but it had gone off down the hill. Driven by that man? I should have asked him if both cars had still been there when he fled down the hill after finding Charlie’s body, or had either of them gone? Too late, now. I’d never know.

The road straightened out again and there was the driveway on the right, at an incline and at the top, the side door and window of the cottage. It had been sited so the front, the longer aspect looked out across the valley to the hills on the other side of the road. There was no car around, no sign of anyone about. The place did look lived in; there were some pots of cyclamens beside the door. A sign at the bottom of the drive read To Let and gave a local agency phone number.

I pulled the buggy halfway up the drive then put the brake on and told Maddie to wait there a moment.

‘Why?’

‘I just want a quick look up here. I’ll only be a minute.’

‘Why, though? ’Cos it’s for rent? Are we moving?’

How does she do that, I thought? Pick up on undercurrents, on anxieties of mine, hone in on them. ‘No, it’s just a work thing. Now wait there.’

I filmed the approach and walked up the short drive to where it levelled out some four yards from the building. That fit with Damien’s description of the car parked just by the door. He’d come outside, feeling sick and stopped by the car. He’d heard the ticking, felt the warmth of the bonnet. The only explanation for that was that the car had been used recently. So Charlie had not been here very long when his attacker struck.

The man Damien passed – Nick Dryden or whoever – was perhaps waiting for Charlie. Charlie gets back, opens the cottage, the man kills Charlie, walks down the hill to his own car and drives away, narrowly missing being interrupted or caught red-handed by Damien looking for easy pickings.

Around the front of the house was a patio and seating area by large centrally placed French doors. There might have been barn doors there once. Gauzy curtains obscured any glimpses of the interior. The view was lovely, immediately below the road dipped in and out of sight, as did the river, and beyond the hills climbed up to meet the sky. The hillsides were stitched with dry stone walls and farm buildings dotted here and there. I could hear sheep bleating from afar. It reminded me of Geoff Sinclair’s place.

‘Can I help you?’

I started, cold sweat prickling under my arms as a man appeared from the far end of the house. His face was wary, he was middle-aged, casually dressed and held a pair of hedging shears in one hand.

‘I wanted to have a look at the cottage,’ I fudged my answer.

He looked at my camcorder. ‘I see. You a reporter?’

‘Mummy?’ Maddie piped up, out of sight.

‘Wait there a minute.’

‘I am!’ She was getting fed up.

He looked confused. I moved towards the road, where I could see the children, inviting the man to follow. ‘I’m investigating the conviction of Damien Beswick.’ I waited for recognition. And got it: a small nod. ‘Are you local?’ I asked.

‘Just down the road,’ he gestured. ‘I keep an eye on the place. You’re not with the police?’

‘Private, working for the family.’ After a fashion. I passed him my card. ‘The Volvo – is that yours?’

‘Yes, why?’ He frowned.

‘You always park it there?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘It was there, the night of the incident?’ I chose the blander word.

‘I already told the police,’ he said.

‘Do you remember another car, parked next to yours? A Mondeo?’

‘No, people come and go. I can’t see the road from my study.’

‘Do any of your neighbours own a Mondeo?’

‘No.’ He shook his head.

‘Can we go now?’ Maddie yelled.

‘Just coming.’ I thought about the man coming down the hill. ‘Do you get people hill-walking up here?’

‘It’s a popular spot,’ he acknowledged.

‘Are there footpaths up that way?’ I signalled up the hill.

‘No, that’s private land this side, no access. All the trails are across the other side of the valley.’ He jerked his head towards the view I’d admired.

So whoever Damien had passed had not been out fell-walking.

‘They thought it was the girlfriend,’ he said. ‘Maybe they were right all along.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I told him.

After all, she was the one who’d hired me in the first place.

When I studied the Land Ranger map I’d bought at the service station in the valley, I could see that there weren’t any properties higher up the hill than Charlie’s cottage: it was on the very edge of the hamlet. The residential area was very compact; perhaps there were by-laws to prevent development outside the village centre.

While at the service station, I’d also made a point of looking for CCTV cameras. There was one covering the forecourt and the shop, and another facing the exit and the road towards Sheffield and the bus shelter where Damien had got high before looking for something to steal. The police must have examined the tapes from these: it was standard procedure nowadays. So what had they found?

Maddie hung over the farm gates, cooing at various animals in turn from kid goats to Vietnamese pot bellied pigs, and Jamie stared at everything with fascinated incomprehension.

My thoughts returned to Charlie’s death. In particular to the car, cooling outside his house. The car had been driven recently. Or could the engine have been going for some other reason? Some DIY task of Charlie’s? Pumping up an airbed, or shining headlights on some job? Jump leads? Had someone broken down, or pretended to? Lured Charlie to give them a hand? Always helping people out, Libby had said, nothing too much trouble. Then what? My mind stalled. The door had been unlocked, the house in gloom. There was no sign of a break-in.

I kept returning to the conclusion that the murderer must have struck as soon as Charlie reached the cottage. Charlie had opened up but hadn’t had time to turn the lights on, when he was attacked. Or, as Sinclair suggested, the killer had switched the lights off before shutting the door and hiding the dreadful crime. All this just minutes before Damien tried the door.

It was time to feed one of the calves. A volunteer asked who would like to have a go. Maddie’s arm shot up and she gave a little jump. She went second, after a boy who giggled all the way through. The brown calf smelt of warm hair and hay and milk. Its limpid eyes, fuzzy pink nose and big teeth entranced the children. Maddie stuck the teat in its mouth and clutched the bottle with both hands as the animal tugged at it. This triggered some recognition in Jamie, who began to mewl. After the train fiasco, I was better prepared and warmed her feed with boiled water from a flask.

While Maddie continued to help feed the calf and advise those children coming after her on technique, I pulled the buggy round to the edge of a stall where a huge sow lay panting on the straw, and I punched in Geoff Sinclair’s number.

‘Can I come and see you again?’ I asked him. ‘I’d really appreciate it. Today, if possible.’

‘I’m going to be out,’ he said.

‘When you get back then – whenever’s convenient.’

There was a long pause. He was going to turn me away. I needed to talk to him; I needed information only the police would have. I stared at the sow, her belly shuddering with her breaths, her mucky trotters and large snout.

‘After four,’ he consented. I let out my breath.

I sat with Jamie by the duck pond. She studied my face as she fed, her eyes swinging from mine to my mouth and back again. What was she thinking? Where was her mother this soft, Sunday afternoon? I smiled at Jamie and she smiled back, losing her grip on the teat momentarily. She fed swiftly and when I raised her to wind her, one of her hands gripped my ear.

‘You’re a lovely girl,’ I told her and she gave a ripe burp in reply.

There was no sign of Ray or Tom when we got home. Abi Dobson was free to babysit and came over in time for me to drive out to Geoff Sinclair’s for four. I was tired before I set out; I’d been tired all day and had to open the car window to let the cold air refresh my senses and counteract the fatigue.

He took an age to open the door, making me think that rather than bother a sick man, the sooner I could talk to someone else involved with the police case the better. At least I hoped so. Police officers come in all shapes and sizes, from the nit-picking and officious to the generous and cooperative. Some resent private investigators; others hope to make a second career in that line. Luck of the draw.

Sinclair didn’t offer me tea this time, just a seat. I looked out to where the sun was blazing over the moorland, washing the shreds of cloud with vermillion and cherry and for a split second wondered about somewhere like this for Maddie and me if we had to move, then dismissed it instantly as a passing folly. Neither of us would cope with the isolation, the distance from facilities, the need to make an effort with all the locals. Maddie would miss school and all her friends. And I’d miss mine. Working would be harder as most of my jobs are in the city; I’d spend half my life in the car.

I laid out my thoughts to Geoff Sinclair: ‘If we accept that Damien told me the truth, as far as he could remember, then it suggests that Charlie was attacked soon after he reached the cottage, and shortly before Damien found him. The lights were off and the door unlocked. And Charlie’s car was still warm when Damien came out of the cottage.’

Sinclair frowned at that.

‘Damien felt ill,’ I elaborated. ‘He went to steady himself on the car. The metal was hot.’

Sinclair shrugged. ‘A shock like that, the nausea, makes you sweat, that’s all.’

‘But he didn’t just feel it, he heard it, too: the clicking of the bodywork cooling. It only came back to him when we talked. And it is such a specific, bizarre detail I’m certain it’s a genuine memory. That time of year, it would take, what, ten minutes to cool off? Did you have an estimate for the time of death?’

He made a sound, an exasperated snort. ‘I really don’t think it’s my place-’

‘Please, if you can still remember?’ It was a challenge of sorts as well as a plea. I reckoned he would pride himself on knowing the details of his last case. Probably older ones, too. He struck me as a conscientious man.

He was quiet for a moment, then: ‘The pathologist estimated that Charlie died sometime in the four hours preceding discovery by Libby Hill at six, though time of death is only ever an approximation. We had the last sighting from Heather Carter and Valerie Mayhew at four fifteen. It would take a further fifteen to twenty minutes to reach the cottage depending on the traffic. So that gave us a time frame of an hour and a half, between four thirty and six.’

‘Damien got there at four forty. He just missed the killer.’

‘Or he was the killer,’ Sinclair said. Wasn’t he convinced by Damien’s last words?

‘You don’t believe the suicide note?’

He shrugged and gave me a baleful look.

‘Damien passed two parked cars going up the hill to the cottage,’ I persisted. ‘He passed a man who was coming down, then he heard an engine start soon after. One of the cars, a Volvo, belongs to a resident. The other was a Mondeo; no one in the street owns one.’

There was a subtle shift in Sinclair’s expression, a flare of interest in his bright blue eyes. Hard to read. Did he think I was on to something? ‘I think the man Damien passed got in that car and drove away,’ I said. ‘There aren’t any houses further up; there are no paths or tourist attractions. Where had he been? I think that was the killer and it could have been Nick Dryden. What about CCTV?’ I said. ‘The cameras at the service station on the main road, those might show Charlie’s car, if anyone was following him, or anyone driving away from the village around then.’

‘Wasn’t working,’ he said flatly.

‘What?!’

‘Broken. The one that covers the shop was the only one working. We didn’t get anything from it.’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake.’ The one thing that might have given credence to my theories and it didn’t exist.

‘Did you speak to Nick Dryden?’ Sinclair asked me.

‘Not yet.’ I recalled the silent call, the threat of it. ‘Last summer he was wanted for fraud by the Spanish authorities. He disappeared. He’s still on the run. He could be back here. Heather says he continued to make abusive calls. But there haven’t been any since Charlie’s death.’

‘Maybe the man has a shred of decency. Look, you’re pointing the finger at Nick Dryden. Last time you thought it could have been road rage,’ Sinclair pointed out. Another of my wild speculations that had gone belly up. ‘But Damien Beswick is still the best fit for the evidence.’

Resentment burst inside me: I was tired and getting hungry and I still had to drive home and sit up half the night with an abandoned baby and find out if I still had a lover. And Sinclair thought I was useless.

‘You don’t seem very interested in finding out who did kill Charlie Carter,’ I said sharply, ‘or are you clinging to the original conviction?’

His round eyes glittered with anger and when he spoke his words were tight. ‘You know nothing about me but I’ll tell you this: Damien Beswick was dealt with above board and by the book. He confessed to a crime and all the evidence we recovered supported that confession. If justice has not been done, he bears the responsibility. No one else.’ His gaunt face trembled as he finished.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t intend to offend you but that lad deserves to have his name cleared and the real killer should be found and tried. I’m not making things up, I’m just trying to find an explanation for new evidence. I need to pass this information on to the police; someone has to take it seriously.’

There was a pause. ‘I’ll make a couple of calls,’ he said. ‘Get you a name.’

‘Thanks.’

Our parting was stiff, still taut with anger on both sides. I understood it must have been hard for him, seeing the case he’d worked so hard on crumble, have me spouting my pet theories. It would be hard for the other officers and those who would review their work. A job well done gone rancid.