Twisted

Chapter 37

DI Reid was in the canteen having breakfast when DC Timothy Wey joined him.

‘I’ve just taken details for a new misper case, guv. Young lass in care that’s run away again. Work’s a bit slow now we are all off the Amy Fulford investigation.’

‘We were only ever temporary staff,’ Reid said. He loathed discussing the investigation, so said nothing to encourage Wey, who continued regardless between mouthfuls of toast and marmalade.

‘I know Marcus Fulford was a bit of a jack-the-lad with the hookers and girlfriends, but he seemed like a genuine bloke and was really cut up about his daughter going missing. If he was guilty, okay, he was a bloody deviant, but also one hell of an actor, because I would never have put him in the frame.’

‘It’s over and done with, Takeaway, so let it rest,’ Reid said, draining his coffee and eager to leave it there.

‘Well it won’t be until they find her body. If he did kill her then her whereabouts have gone to the grave with him.’

Reid made his excuses to get back to his desk, but the mention of the Fulford investigation made him unsettled all morning. At lunchtime, not wanting to get into any further discussions on the case, he decided to go out for a breath of fresh air. He bought a Starbucks Americano and a chicken wrap before heading down past Twickenham Bridge and took a leisurely stroll along the towpath. He was sitting on a bench watching some rowers go by and the youngsters feeding ducks with their parents when he saw Deirdre Standing walking along the towpath. She looked well and was wearing a pink cardigan and pretty floral summer dress.

‘Hey there, how are you?’ she asked, having spotted him too.

‘Fine and you?’ He thought she looked more relaxed than when they had last seen each other.

‘I have taken a sabbatical from Victim Support. After the pressures of the Fulford case I’m not sure it’s the right work for me, and besides I wanted to spend more time with my girls.’

‘I think it affected all of us in one way or another,’ he said as he sipped at his coffee.

She asked if he had heard how Lena Fulford was, and he said that he had only spoken to her once and she seemed to want to get on with her life in her own way.

‘What about Miss Jordan?’

‘Not spoken to her.’

‘I didn’t like her very much.’

Reid smiled. ‘She was the one who suggested I take Amy’s journal to Professor Cornwall. She’s quite formidable, always goes on about patient confidentiality, yet still says things she shouldn’t.’

‘Yes, she did with me as well,’ Deirdre agreed, smiling ruefully, ‘and I thought it unprofessional when she told me things about Mrs Fulford. Once she started she couldn’t stop talking – patient confidentiality went right out the window – but I have to admit it helped me to understand some of Lena’s behaviour.’

Reid was paying more attention to the children who were now backing off from a hissing swan. While he didn’t want to appear rude, he definitely didn’t want to get drawn into going over old ground. ‘Well you did a good job under difficult circumstances and I for one appreciated your help. Anyway, I’d best be getting on.’ Easing himself to his feet he placed his empty coffee cup in the bin next to the bench.

‘Life must have been much more difficult for Lena, having been abused for all those years,’ Deirdre observed.

‘Well Marcus Fulford was not a very pleasant man.’

‘No, I’m talking about her father. His face was scribbled over or blacked out with a felt tip pen in her old family photo albums.’

This was new and surprising to Reid. ‘Where were those albums? I never saw them.’

‘In the drawing room in one of the bookcases; they were near or next to a big book with lots of little tabs and notes in it.’ She paused for a second, thinking. ‘The book was called The Encyclopaedia of Mushrooms.’

At once he sat back down on the bench, blinking rapidly while absorbing the information and its importance to the investigation. ‘Did it belong to Mrs Fulford or to Amy?’

‘Oh, it was Lena’s, as it had a sticker in the front with her name and that of some kind of research project.’

A knot was tightening in his stomach, as he said it was good to see her and thanked her again for her work on the investigation.

‘Are you working on anything interesting at the moment?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m back running the mispers office now and the usual run-of-the-mill cases.’

‘It was very nice to see you, DI Reid.’

‘Nice to see you too.’

Reid returned to the station, buzzing with a sense of urgency. Back in his office he went over everything that Deirdre had told him, before driving over to the murder incident room, where he asked for the files on the Fulford case. It was shortly after three o’clock when he returned to his flat and began re-reading the copy of the journal.

At first he skimmed through it, often turning back one page or another. He jotted down notes, all the while becoming more and more aware that throughout the journal there was no reference to it being written by Amy. The word ‘enemies’ was frequently used, and the repeated listing of everyone intended to be ‘got rid of’ and their so-called crimes, but there was never an ‘I’ or ‘me’. It was always initials, and the constant changes of handwriting added to the confusion, where a different alter took over.

Reid thought back to the first time he’d learnt about the journal. Lena had clutched it to her chest and said that she was very reluctant to release it because the contents were very private, and she had even explained that some of the pages referred to herself and her husband and did not show either of them in a good light.

Clearly included in it were details of Marcus Fulford’s behaviour, his promiscuity and sexual perversions, his prostitutes and girlfriends. The murder team had also discovered his bisexuality and intimate friendship with Simon Boatly.

What was slowly beginning to surface in Reid’s mind was his suspicion that the journal was not written by Amy at all, but her mother. He recalled Lena showing him the birthday card and the wish list of gifts, the neat looped handwriting in the schoolbooks and diaries, but as far as he could see little of the handwriting in the journal matched the known samples of Amy’s. He wondered how much Lena had helped Amy learn to write when she was younger and whether this had in some way created a slight similarity, but he was also aware that different alters would write in different styles.

He knew it was going to be difficult to prove, and without being given any official clearance to investigate further he needed to uncover more evidence on his own. He had now established that Lena Fulford, through her University studies, would have knowledge of deadly mushrooms, but he needed more than the possession of the Encyclopaedia to implicate her and prove his theory that it was she herself who had written the journal – and been the one who had poisoned the victims.

All his previous unanswered questions that he had put aside now began to haunt him again, and above all he knew he needed to prove that Amy was of perfectly sound mind and therefore not the real author of the journal. He started to work out a list of people he needed to re-interview and one name he ringed as being of prime interest was Miss Josephine Polka.

By now it was after eleven and pointless to try and arrange anything, so he went to bed, determined that the following day he would, with or without permission, begin his own investigation. His present case could easily be handled by DS Lane or DC Wey.

He knew with dreadful certainty that if he was correct, then the enemies still alive – Agnes Moors, her daughter Natalie, Serena Newman and Miss Polka – would be in the most terrible danger.