Off Minor

Forty-six

It was almost four in the afternoon when Lynn Kellogg knocked on the interview-room door; one look at her face was enough to tell Resnick that something had happened.

“Forensic just rang through, sir,” she said in the corridor. “Nothing from the flooring, but they have got a partial make on the fibers. They’re the same as the ones found with Gloria Summers’s body.”

“That’s positive?”

“You know what it’s like, sir, cagey. Probably fight shy of taking it to court till they’ve done more tests. But it sounds pretty certain.”

“The super know?”

Lynn shook her head.

“Tell him. Tell him I’m going to lean on Shepperd for a confession.”

“Good luck, sir.”

For the first time in a long while, Resnick smiled.

Lorraine and Michael Morrison sat on either side of the table, holding hands. Aside from an ambulance siren heading for the hospital, the only sound was that of children on the pavement, playing.

Shepperd looked significantly older each time the interview was resumed, the tapes timed and set in motion. His abrasive outburst at Resnick on the previous day had been the last time he had seemed to be in any kind of control. Now and then there were still occasional flashes when his voice was raised, as if a particular insinuation had offended him; the rest of the time he answered sullenly, head bowed, declining to look his questioners in the eye.

“How did you get her to come with you?” Resnick asked. “Did you say her teacher was there? Is that what you said?”

Shepperd moved his head slightly; his hands were back between his legs, wrists between his knees.

“Mrs. Shepperd asked me to come and get you, invite you back for tea, is that the way it was?”

In Resnick’s imagination he could see the girl hesitating, uncertain, looking round for her grandmother. Shepperd saying, “Don’t worry about your nan, I’ll come back for her in a minute.” Or, “Your gran is it you’re looking for? That’s where she is. Round our house now.”

Stephen Shepperd glanced up, head angled towards Millington, the sergeant staring back at him with scorn, the way his wife had looked at him earlier. Was that only this morning? It didn’t seem possible it could still be the same day.

“What was the bribe, Stephen? Cream cakes? Ice cream? Don’t tell me it was anything as banal as sweets.”

“Look …”

“Yes?”

“None of this, what you’re saying, none of it ever happened.”

“Stephen,” Resnick said, “I don’t believe there’s anyone in this room who thinks that’s the truth.”

Shepperd’s hands passed across his face. He turned towards his solicitor and his solicitor turned his head away. A man caught out of his depth, back in the Potteries he would be sitting in a seminar on “Bennett and a Sense of Place,” looking forward with anticipation to that evening’s screening of The Card, that wonderful moment at the end when Alec Guinness sees through Glynis Johns’s airs and graces and rushes off to the sincere and simple charms of Petula Clark.

“Of course,” Resnick said, “it’s possible you could have taken her somewhere else first, especially if you used the car, but sooner or later you would have had to have got her into the house. Into the front room. On to the carpet. On to the rug.”

“No. You can’t, you can’t …”

“Prove anything? Stephen, the report from the police lab is on the fax machine right now.”

Shepperd’s head came up slowly, slowly until, for the first time in a long while, he was looking directly into Resnick’s face.

“It wasn’t only photographs we took this morning, you know. There were other things: from the cellar, for instance; from the car.”

“The car?”

“The boot of the car.”

At night, at night it would have had to have been, carrying Gloria’s body, wrapped inside that tartan rug and laying her in the already open boot.

“You’d done a pretty thorough job of cleaning it out, vacuum, I don’t doubt. Even so a few fibers had worked their way into the well of the spare tire.”

Oh, he had Shepperd’s attention now, hanging on his every word.

“Fibers from the rug, Stephen, the tartan rug, red and green.”

“That’s right. That’s right. I thought I’d said. That was how I took it to the dump. In the boot.”

“Eventually, Stephen, I’m quite sure that you did.”

“Eventually? I don’t understand.”

“When we found Gloria’s body, Stephen, in the cold of that railway siding, nestled up in bin liners and plastic, alone there with the rats, we found some other things. Fibers, for instance, red and green, the kind that come from a rug.”

If the nerve beating beside Shepperd’s head accelerated any more, it might burst through the skin.

“Just a few, Stephen, only a very few, but still enough to make comparisons. Lucky for us that she struggled, Gloria, when you were doing whatever it was you did to her, lucky that she fought and tried to get away …”

“Don’t!”

“Otherwise we might never have found those scrapings …”

“Please don’t!”

“Trapped beneath her nails, pressed flat against the skin.”

“No! No, no, oh, God, oh, God, no, no, please, no. No.” Shepperd pushed himself back from the table, twisted sideways on his chair, threw himself at his solicitor, clinging to his arms as his words degenerated into a broken succession of cries and moans.

Frightened, embarrassed, the solicitor seemed to be pushing Shepperd away with one hand, holding on to him with the other. Over Shepperd’s shoulder, his expression appealed to Resnick for assistance.

“Graham,” Resnick said.

Millington went round the table and tapped Shepperd on the shoulder, careful to treat him gently now, any hint of physical coercion to be avoided at all costs.

Only when Shepperd was upright in his chair, his clothing set to rights, his breathing back to almost normal, did Resnick, sitting opposite him, softly say, “Wouldn’t you like to tell us about it, Stephen? Don’t you think you’d feel better if you could do that?”

And Stephen Shepperd horrified Resnick by grabbing at his hand and clutching it tight, his voice as quiet as Resnick’s own. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”