When the Dead Cry Out

Chapter One

On a sunny afternoon in June twenty-seven years earlier, Karen Meadows, then a gawky thirteen-year-old, had been on her way home from school. As she approached the little street just off Braddons Hill Road, high above Torquay, where she had lived all her life she broke into an easy long-limbed trot. She was late for tea, again, and likely to be in trouble, again.

It was her own fault that she was in such a hurry. She had no idea why she had lingered so long in the cloakroom gossiping, nor why she had detoured to look at the sea after that. The truth, of course, was that she wasn’t particularly keen on returning home at all. But her head was still at the stage of adolescence where she merely accepted her home life for what it was and she had yet to begin to work out the psychology of her own behaviour. At that moment she just wished she wasn’t so late. She didn’t want another row with her mother.

She quickened her pace as she rounded the final corner of her journey, the trot developing into a full-out run, the school bag which hung from her right shoulder flying out now behind her and banging against her backside as she ran. Her mouth was set in a determined line. She hammered her feet on to the paving stones, pushing her body forward, all her energy focused into the urgency of the moment. She wasn’t looking where she was going at all.

And so it was that she found herself enfolded in the arms of a rather large policeman into whose ample body she had cannoned at full speed.

“Whoa, not so fast,” he said, pushing her gently away. She stood for a moment panting, the remaining breath knocked from her body by the force of the impact with the policeman. As her breath and her wits returned she became aware that the street where she lived looked rather different from usual.

It was lined with a varied assortment of police vehicles. Parkview, the small private hotel next to the big semi-detached Victorian villa where Karen lived with her parents, was cordoned off with yellow tape as was a considerable stretch of the pavement outside and part of the road itself. Men in overalls appeared to be digging up the garden. Just outside the cordoned-off area a young man in a vivid green suit with flared trousers was standing alongside another young man who held a camera which was pointed at Parkview. As Karen tried to take it all in two more men came through the front door of the hotel carrying transparent plastic bags containing what appeared to be bundles of clothes. A hand-drawn sign just behind the policeman Karen had collided with read “Crime Scene. Keep Out.”

Karen realized then that the policeman must be on some kind of sentry duty. Another uniformed officer stood at the far side of the cordoned-off area, within which, she suddenly became aware, lay the entrance and driveway to her home.

Pulling away from the policeman she started to tremble with anxiety. What had happened? Parkview seemed to be at the centre of the activity. And the thought of what that could mean made Karen all the more anxious. Was her mother all right? Karen was just a kid, still at school, but she already knew that it was her place to worry about her mother considerably more than the other way round.

Margaret Meadows was a charismatic, pretty woman with a mercurial mind and, on a good day, a natural facility to lift the moment with her zest for life and her easy laughter. She was also prone to bouts of depression which were both deep and debilitating. But Karen and her father referred only to her mother being bad with her nerves, and no one outside her immediate family knew about this at all as far as Karen was aware — because people like the Meadowses didn’t talk about such things.

Karen loved her mother deeply, absolutely adored her, as did almost everyone who came in contact with Margaret Meadows. There was something quite captivating about her. Maybe it was partly her vulnerability which made her so irresistible. Certainly she was the most emotional of women, which in her case meant not only that she gave more love than most people have in them to give, but also that the emotional demands she made on her only child at such a young age were quite mind-blowing.

Most of the time Karen coped. She had had plenty of practice already. But sometimes she was overwhelmed by the various grown-up pressures which engulfed her. And when she was afraid or overly excited she invariably found it impossible to speak. It wasn’t a stammer. She didn’t stammer. It was more than that. The words just would not come. Karen understood all too well the true meaning of the expression to be struck dumb, and it terrified her. As she grew older she was to incorporate into her veritable armoury of defence mechanisms a strategy for overcoming what had been a real handicap in her youth, and for remaining calm and in control while she did so, or at least appearing to be calm. At thirteen that was not the case.

And so Karen was rendered speechless by the scene which confronted her that day, and by its possible implications. The question she wanted to ask was too big to be put into words. Her face turned red with the effort. The only noise she could manage to get out from between her lips was a kind of strangled moan.

“What is it, girl?” asked the policeman kindly, bending over her and putting a hand on her left shoulder. “Don’t upset yourself.”

Karen just looked at him. Eyes wide.

“That’s not where you live, is it?” he enquired, looking slightly puzzled and gesturing at Parkview.

Karen managed to shake her head. She pointed to the villa next door.

“Ah,” said the policeman. “Well, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about then. Are you going to tell me your name?”

At that instant Karen couldn’t tell him her name. She wasn’t even sure she could remember it, let alone say it. She had to know though, she had to ask the question she dreaded. Eventually she somehow managed to get the words out.

“Mum. M-my mum. Is she all right?”

“Well, I expect so, darling, but you’re going to have to tell me your name or at least her name before I can be sure, aren’t you?”

“M-Margaret Meadows.” Karen spat out the words, using all the willpower she could summon up.

“Ah, Mrs. Meadows. Yes, of course. Laurel House. The trouble’s next door to you, girl. Your mother’s fine. Just fine. A bit upset by all the commotion, but then who wouldn’t be?”

“Can I go in?”

“Yes, ’course you can. Just walk along with me, all right.”

The policeman lifted a line of taping behind him so that he and Karen could duck underneath. Karen, by nature a very observant girl, was beginning to function at least halfway properly again. She noticed that several of her neighbours were watching the proceedings, most of them covertly. Mrs. Stephens on the corner was outside cleaning her windows, but her head was all the time turned towards Parkview. Mr. Johnson, the retired schoolmaster who lived opposite, was washing his car very slowly, a job that his wife normally did. Karen looked up and down the street. The curtains twitched at the Beverleys, but upstairs at Hillden House the bedroom windows were wide open and old Mr. Peabody was leaning right out staring openly at all that was going on.

A grunting noise behind Karen attracted her attention back to the policeman accompanying her, who, having also straightened up on the inner side of the tape barrier, was standing with one arm behind him pressed gingerly into the small of his back.

“Anno Domini,” he muttered. “Don’t ever grow old, darling. That’s my advice to you.”

Karen was interested in neither the policeman’s back trouble nor his age, which in any case seemed to her to be so great that it was quite beyond her comprehension. She peered anxiously up at him as they walked together towards the gateway to Laurel House.

“What’s going on?” she asked eventually, in what she knew was rather a squeaky voice. “What’s happened at Parkview?”

“Nothing to worry about. We’re just making some enquiries, that’s all.”

“But you’re digging up the garden?”

“I think I prefer you when you can’t get your words out, missy.”

The policeman smiled down on her. Normally Karen enjoyed the company of people who were good-humoured and seemed to take things calmly. It wasn’t what she was used to, after all. But on that day she had other things on her mind.

Abruptly she turned her back on the big affable policeman, flung open the wrought-iron gates to her house and ran as fast as she could up the driveway to the front door.

She needn’t have worried about being late for tea. Her mother was always unpredictable. For some weeks now a full high tea had been laid out for Karen’s return from school and Margaret Meadows had given her daughter a lecture on how hurt and offended she was should Karen have been even a few minutes late home. It was the kind of emotional pressure Karen was used to from her mother, and sometimes it had the diverse effect of making her be deliberately and rather perversely late.

But on this day Margaret Meadows had done nothing about tea. Karen’s heart sank. It seemed that her mother was bad with her nerves again. She was sitting morosely at the table in the kitchen, her head bowed, and did not look up as Karen entered the room.

“Are you all right?” Karen asked automatically, although seeing her mother like that really made the question redundant.

Mrs. Meadows made no attempt to respond.

She remained in exactly the same position as Karen walked quietly forward and sat down opposite her at the orange Formica-topped table — a legacy of the mid-sixties, the last time the old house had been decorated or changed in any way. Margaret Meadows still did not look up. Her wispy blonde hair was a mess and had fallen over her face hiding it from view. Karen dropped her shoulders slightly and bent her head to one side so that she could see her mother’s face, or at least most of it. As she had expected, Margaret Meadows’ eyes were red and puffy and her cheeks were damp with tears and smeared with mascara and eyeliner. Her mouth hung open and slack. Lipstick was smudged all around it. Karen knew well enough that her mother, who never rose before she left for school, also never emerged from her bedroom without make-up. Today she would have been considerably better off without it, as it happened, Karen thought.

Aware of her daughter’s scrutiny Margaret Meadows lowered her head even more until her upper body was bent right over and the top of her head was almost touching the table. She was wearing a vibrant pink cardigan over some kind of flimsy floating dress, clothes that seemed totally out of place. But she always dressed like that, a cross between Marilyn Monroe and a Barbie doll, Karen had once heard Mr. Peabody remark in the newsagent’s. Mr. Peabody had a rather acerbic turn of phrase and was invariably as direct in everything he did and said as he was in his blatant appraisal of the police presence around Parkview.

Karen preferred to think about Mr. Peabody, or anyone or anything at all that might be a distraction, rather than thinking too much about the state her mother was in. It was one of her ways of coping. Nonetheless she accepted that, somehow or other, it was her job to deal with this. Her father never took any notice at all. He would return from work in an hour or so and if his wife was still crouched over the kitchen table in tears he would just walk away and leave Karen to it.

Still somewhat distracted, Karen noticed that Margaret Meadows had found a screwed-up paper hankie tucked somewhere into her clothing and, conscious at last perhaps both of her daughter’s presence and of the likelihood of smudged residual make-up, was now scrubbing ineffectively at her face with it. Karen reluctantly prepared to turn her full attention back to her mother. At that moment she would actually much rather have been with Mr. Peabody or the fat policeman or her teachers at school or almost anybody who wasn’t totally neurotic, as she had once also heard Mr. Peabody remark about her mother. It had been the first time Karen had ever heard the word, but she had somehow understood at once that it was just another way of describing her mother’s bad nerves. Although how Mr. Peabody knew anything about all that was a mystery to Karen, given that everything that happened within the somewhat crumbling walls of Laurel House remained a carefully guarded family secret.

Almost at once Karen felt terribly disloyal. Her mother wasn’t bad with her nerves all the time. Her mother could be lovely, the loveliest mother anybody could possibly have. It was just that Margaret Meadows couldn’t always cope, and increasingly often Karen wasn’t sure that she could either. She knew that too much was asked of her too often, but she didn’t know how to put this into words that her mother would understand, and she knew that even if she did it wouldn’t do any good.

Karen continued to study this person she loved who was capable of causing her so much distress without having any idea that she was doing so. A half-empty mug of tea was on the table in front of Margaret Meadows. It looked extremely unappetizing; a film had formed on the top of it so it had surely gone cold. The teapot, in its brown-and-orange-patterned cosy, was alongside.

“Do you want me to freshen that up for you?” asked Karen. She had a habit of repeating the exact expressions she heard uttered around her by people much older than her. Sometimes they sounded rather strange emitting from young teenage lips. But much about Karen belied her youth. She had grown up very fast indeed. She’d had to. That had just been the way things were.

Her mother shook her head, still not looking up. With one hand she began to make a gesture downwards which she then seemed to think better of. Karen sighed again and leaned further sideways so that she could peer beneath the table. It was as she expected. A whisky bottle stood on the floor by Margaret Meadows’ feet. There was just an inch or so of amber liquid left in it.

Karen straightened up and then stretched forward across the table so that her head was close to her mother’s bowed one. She could smell the whisky then, on her mother’s breath and from the mug too, she thought. She couldn’t understand why her mother even bothered to attempt to hide the bottle, but it was something she always did. Karen really had no idea why. She reached under the table, picked up the bottle and put it in her school bag. Out of sight out of mind, she thought to herself.

Aloud she said sternly: “I may be shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but I think you’ve had more than enough of that.”

Her mother did not protest, she rarely did, neither did she respond. She was quite used to being treated like this by her daughter, quite used to her daughter’s rather quaint phraseology and use of old sayings. Not that her mother drank often, Karen reminded herself, well, not very often. And only when she was bad with her nerves. It was just that when she did she was inclined to empty the bottle.

“Look, Mum,” Karen continued. “Why don’t you go upstairs and have a nice lie-down?”

There was still no response. Wearily Karen leaned back in her chair and found her gaze wandering idly around the big kitchen, a huge cavernous room in a huge cavernous house, which had about it none of the coziness traditionally associated with kitchens. In spite of its size there was no big cooking range, just a small gas cooker. A line of orange Formica-finished units ran along one dark-brown painted wall, another unfortunate legacy of the mid-sixties which contrived to make the north-facing room seem particularly dark and drab. The orange-topped table also wasn’t big enough for the kitchen. It was, however, quite big enough for the three people who lived in the oversized Victorian villa.

Some houses have a warm feeling about them which hits you as soon as you enter. Some houses give you the feeling that nothing bad has ever happened in them, that they have by and large been happy houses. Laurel House was just the opposite. When Karen went to bed at night she always pulled the bedclothes right over her head. That way she could pretend she was somewhere else.

She had no idea whether or not her parents had intended to have more children, whether they had planned to fill some of the six bedrooms on the three stories of Laurel House with lodgers, or whether they simply liked the idea of living in a big house. If the latter was the case they had made a mistake quite equal in size to the vast dimensions of their coldly austere home.

Karen knew that her parents had lived in Laurel House ever since their marriage three years before she was born. Yet there was still not enough furniture to half-fill the place and all the rooms were shabby. There was no central heating and in winter the house was freezing. Karen always assumed that her father, who did something or other he never talked about in local government and dressed in the same grey suit for work every day until it wore out when he bought another identical one, just never made enough money to run the house properly. And her mother never worked at all, of course. Margaret Meadows, with her charm and looks, would probably have obtained a job quickly enough had it ever occurred to her to do so. But she was possibly as aware as anybody else that she would never have been capable of holding one down.

One bitter cold winter’s evening when the three of them had been huddled shivering around an inadequate fire in the vast loftily-ceilinged front room with damp stretching in ever-increasing patches on either side of the chimney breast, Karen had asked her parents why they didn’t sell the big old house and buy something smaller which would be easier and cheaper to maintain. Typically, her father, who always had an air of terminal weariness about him, had simply got up from his broken-springed armchair, which twanged every time he shifted himself in futile attempts to find a comfortable position, and walked out of the room. He didn’t glance at either his wife or daughter. With the resilience of the young to all that is inevitable and unalterable Karen had long before accepted that her father had for whatever reason given up caring about anything much, including her and her mother. Colin Meadows, in his mid-forties then, was not an old man, but he gave the impression of being so, and a beaten one at that.

She also accepted that all too often she had to be the strong one in this family. So, squaring her shoulders, she rose to her feet, retrieved a mug from one of the orange Formica cupboards, returned to the table and poured herself a cup of tea out of the teapot. She took one mouthful and instantly spat it back into the mug. It was disgusting. Even the tea from the pot which had been encased in its cosy was stone-cold.

Obliquely Karen wondered then just how long her mother had been sitting at the table like that, emptying her bottle of whisky. And she wanted very much to ask her if this latest attack of bad nerves had in any way been brought on by the goings-on next door at Parkview. But she was afraid to mention anything that might make her mother worse.

“Shall I make a fresh pot?” she enquired instead. “It would do you the world of good, I reckon. Nothing like a nice hot cup of tea to perk you up, is there, Mum?”

At last Margaret Meadows looked up from the table. Her face was pale and pinched beneath the make-up smudges which her inveterate scrubbing with the paper tissue had done little to remove. Her eyes flicked pink and nervous in her daughter’s direction, her lips trembled. Her voice, when she eventually spoke, was flat and low but the words came out clear and unhesitant. She did not sound at all drunk. But then, she never did.

“They’ve taken Richard,” she said. “The police have taken Richard.”

Karen’s heart jumped. She knew who her mother was talking about at once. Their neighbour Richard Marshall, the proprietor of Parkview. Karen did not speak. Instead she sat staring at her mother, taking in the shocked expression in Margaret Meadows’ red-rimmed eyes. Her mother had obviously been knocked sideways by the police action. There were so many questions Karen wanted to ask her, but again she didn’t dare.

For a few seconds Margaret Meadows stared bleakly back at her daughter, then she suddenly threw her upper body forward on to the table, knocking over her mug of cold tea, and began to weep noisily and copiously. Her body shook with great heaving sobs. Meanwhile, in that curiously objective way she had developed, her highly observant daughter noticed that her mother’s tears were flowing so abundantly that they were running on to the tabletop and diluting the brown puddle of tea into which Margaret Meadows had lain her head.

Karen knew that there was nothing she could do for the moment. Eventually her mother would stop crying and then Karen would help her back to bed. It was an all-too-familiar routine.

Meanwhile all she could do was carry on as normal. Squaring her small shoulders she stood up, trotted upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, and picked up the various items of clothing, lying around on the bed and floor which obviously needed washing. She then went into her own bedroom and changed out of her school uniform into the jeans and T-shirt she wore around the house, after which she took her soiled school blouse into the big bathroom where the washing machine was plumbed in and loaded it and the dirty washing from her parents’ room into it. It was what she did every evening.

By the time she returned downstairs to the kitchen her mother was no longer sobbing so dramatically. Instead she was sitting upright in her chair again and was once more dabbing ineffectively at her tear-stained face with a tissue. Karen took a cloth from the sink and began to mop up the spilt tea from the table.

It was not the first time she had seen her mother in this kind of state, not by a long chalk. And neither, she knew only too well, would it be last. Often nobody had any idea what brought on her mother’s attacks of bad nerves. On this occasion Karen had little doubt that it had been, as she had suspected from the beginning, the goings-on next door at Parkview.

There was so much Karen did not understand, and yet there were muddled half-formed memories inside her head, like pictures torn haphazardly from an album, which made her feel very frightened and would not go away. As she wiped up the spilt tea Karen stared at her mother. Margaret Meadows did not even seem to notice. Karen wished her mother would talk to her, explain things. But she never ever did. Karen would just have to sort her troubled thoughts out the best way she could, just like always. But sometimes, as she struggled to make sense of the crazy adult world around her, that was very hard to do. All she knew for certain was that she mustn’t tell anyone about her fears. The Meadowses were very private people. And if nothing else, Karen had been brought up to understand and respect privacy. Appearances were all. You didn’t talk about what went on behind your own locked front door. Not to anyone.

Not even when the police were digging up the garden next door. Not even when you had a fair idea what they might be looking for — not even when you were battling with thoughts and images too crazy and terrible even to think about.

Chapter Two

The young man in the green suit, of which he was somewhat misguidedly extremely proud, had watched idly as the tall gangly schoolgirl disappeared inside Laurel House. With one hand he brushed his hair from his eyes. It was 1976, and he sported a thick head of dark hair which, in accordance with the fashion of the time, hung over his collar at the back and flopped over his forehead at the front. He was also misguidedly proud of his hairdo.

The young man’s name was John Kelly. He was a reporter in the last year of his indenture with the local weekly paper, the Torquay Times, and as he surveyed the scene, he reflected that maybe he should be talking to more of the neighbours, but he somehow didn’t want to yet. Charles Peabody, whom Kelly knew because the older man compiled crossword puzzles for his newspaper, had already given him the benefit of his view on the goings-on of the day which had been predictably opinionated and based on little more than pure speculation.

John Kelly preferred to focus all of his energy on Parkview, going over and over in his head what may have happened there.

He removed a cigarette packet from the pocket of his jacket, which he carefully smoothed down as he did so, lit up and then passed the packet to the photographer accompanying him. It looked as though he might be on the biggest story Torquay had ever known, and thanks to a tip from a police contact Kelly was on the scene first, before the national boys or the local evening and morning papers.

Kelly knew the story behind all this police activity better than most. He had written it enough times for the TT, but most of it had ended up on the spike as he supposed he’d known it must. For legal reasons. Now the police had finally taken action all that would change, and what had merely been a ferocious chain of gossip throughout Torquay could, he hoped, finally be printed.

Richard Marshall and his wife Clara had run the Parkview Hotel for several years. They had two small daughters, Lorraine, aged six, and five-year-old Janine. Marshall was a big, handsome, personable man with a quick wit and an easy way with people. He had been well enough liked until a year previously.

Then, suddenly, Clara Marshall and her daughters had disappeared. Their absence caused little comment at first. Marriages broke up all the time, even in the seventies. Most mothers leaving the marital home would want to take their children with them, and Richard Marshall had always had a plausible explanation for everything, as was his wont. The gossip had grown only gradually, gaining momentum, of course, when Marshall had moved another woman into his hotel home with what his neighbours considered to be quite indecent haste. By the time the police finally began to investigate, the level of gossip was such that there could be nobody in Torquay who did not at least suspect some kind of mystery concerning the disappearance of Clara Marshall and her children. And for many suspicion had grown into a horrible sense of certainty about their fate.

Kelly, whose mother was the head teacher of the primary school the Marshall children had attended, was one of those who had come to believe that murder had been committed. Kelly’s own enquiries over the past few months had revealed no sign of Clara or the girls. He was a local paper reporter whose resources and time were both very limited. But he knew that the police had now checked bank, social security and national health records to no avail. Clara Marshall and her daughters appeared to have vanished off the face of the earth. The finger of suspicion pointed firmly at Clara’s husband, Richard. But gossip, conjecture and assumption were not evidence. They did not solve a crime, nor indeed did they even prove that one had been committed.

And one way and another it had been a whole long year before the police had made their move. Now Kelly had been told that the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary was about to launch the biggest missing-persons enquiry the West of England had ever known. Now. A year later, when the trail was surely cold. Kelly took several short fast puffs on his cigarette. He feared that it may already be too late. Too late not only for Clara Marshall and her girls, but too late to prove anything against anybody.

Kelly didn’t like that. The whole thing was a mess. And his mother, whom he adored, was deeply upset by it. She had reasons for feeling that she could have saved the Marshall girls from whatever had happened to them. Kelly thought she was wrong to blame herself in any way. Nonetheless this story was personal to him. If Clara Marshall and her daughters had indeed been murdered, then he wanted their killer brought to justice every bit as much as the police did.

Impatiently he threw his half-smoked cigarette to the ground, and extinguished it with the toe of one shoe.

“C’mon, Micky,” he said to his photographer companion. “I don’t see any more mileage here. We know they’ve taken the bastard to the nick. Let’s take a trip down there, shall we?”

Meanwhile, at Torquay Police Station, Detective Chief Inspector Bill Talbot strode into the interview room wearing a confident expression, which did not reflect his inner feelings at all. This case was already the most frustrating he had experienced in his career.

Squeezed behind the little wooden table in the centre of the small bare room sat Richard Marshall, totally impassive, features in repose, his disconcertingly clear pale-blue eyes alert but giving nothing away. This was far from Talbot’s first confrontation with Marshall. Nonetheless he was once again struck by the man’s immense physical presence. It wasn’t just his size, although Marshall — six foot three or four, and seventeen or eighteen stone, Talbot reckoned — was indeed an extremely big man which was evident even when he was sitting down. His shoulders were huge, stretching the fine fabric of his well-tailored navy-blue blazer. Even his head, with its shock of thick dark-brown curly hair, was big. And his face, although Talbot had to reluctantly accept that Marshall was a good-looking man, was broad and fleshy. He had a big nose, a bulky forehead, and lips so full that although there was nothing remotely effeminate about him, his mouth would almost have been better suited to a woman were it not quite so wide. But it was more than all of that. Marshall had a way of filling a room and dominating those in it. He returned Talbot’s gaze steadily, unflinching, confident. Even if that wasn’t how he felt it was the way he came across. He looked every bit as if he might be about to conduct an interview with the policeman rather than the other way round. The muscles at the back of Talbot’s neck had tightened quite painfully. Indeed, he was aware of every fibre in his body tensing up in anticipation of the task ahead.

Marshall was good, very good. He also had experience of police investigations. He had a criminal record. He had served six months in jail for his part in a time-share scam concerning property in Spain. Marshall had been the front man, and Talbot had no doubt he would have been very good at it too. He was so smooth. A number of people, mostly elderly folk, had lost a lot of money, in some cases their life’s savings, because of that unpleasant little operation. Marshall had also been suspected over the years of being involved in other cons and always seemed to be somehow or other skimming along on the edge of the law. Talbot considered him an unsavoury character in every way. It was, however, a quantum leap from anything the Detective Chief Inspector knew about Richard Marshall to murder. Nonetheless, Talbot firmly believed that Marshall was capable of such a deed and that he also had both the gall and the ability to stand up to the most ferocious of police investigations.

Marshall had been arrested in connection with the disappearance of his wife and children, but he had yet to be charged. There was not enough evidence for that. In fact there was no evidence at all worth mentioning. Talbot was hoping to God that either Marshall would break, which as it happened the man gave no indication at all of doing, or that some hard evidence would turn up — like a body. And fast, too. Clara Marshall and the girls had been missing for just a week less than a year exactly, and Talbot knew that there was going to be criticism of the police for not acting sooner. In fact there would still have been no operation in place had not Clara Marshall’s partially estranged father finally arrived in the town two weeks earlier in search of his daughter.

The Detective Chief Inspector’s big fear was that even now there was little or nothing to act on and that he was going to have to let Marshall go. Talbot’s divisional commander, Chief Superintendent Raymond Parish, was notoriously cautious when it came to detaining suspects without their having been charged, allegedly because he had been involved in an incident as a young officer when a man had died in custody during what was later ruled by the court to have been an illegal period of detention. In 1976 there was no statutory protocol governing the length of time for which you could lock people up while still trying to finalize a case against them, but there were rules of thumb consistent with the ancient laws of habeas corpus. And DCI Talbot was well aware that Parish would not want to let him keep Marshall without charge for very much more than twenty-four hours. Talbot, who was pretty good at working the system, might be able to stretch that a bit, but he certainly would not be able to detain the man for more than one night without formalizing his arrest.

Doing his best to cast aside all doubts, Talbot sat down next to Detective Sergeant Mike Malone and Detective Constable Janet Parkin. Marshall was alone on the opposite side of the table. He had not even asked for a solicitor.

“Right, switch on then, Mike,” said the DCI briskly, gesturing to the big double tape recorder, with its giant spools, which sat on the table before him. Malone did so and then announced the interview for the record, listing the officers who were present in the small brightly lit room.

“I want to go over it all again, Mr. Marshall, every detail, from the beginning,” said Talbot.

“What, again?” The big man’s response was weary, but it was the weariness of someone dealing with a tiresome irritation rather than that of an anxious suspect.

“Yes, again.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

“Do so again, please.”

Marshall sighed. He raised his eyes so that he was looking at the ceiling rather than at the three police officers before he began to speak. His voice was calm, with that hint of weariness still about it, and his manner patiently tolerant as if he were addressing a rather dim child of whom he was nonetheless quite fond.

“On the last Sunday in June last year my wife told me that she was leaving me. It was not unexpected. We had not been getting on well for some time. I also suspected that she was having an affair.”

“She quite suddenly confirmed my suspicions and said that she was leaving me for another man. He was an Australian over here on an extended visit. He was little more than a backpacker, it seemed. There was no way they could look after the children, she told me. She planned to start another life with her new boyfriend.”

Marshall paused, and stretched out his long arms, hands palm-upwards as if begging for understanding. “There was nothing I could have done even if I’d wanted to. Clara was always a very determined woman.”

There was a pause. “Go on,” prompted Talbot.

“I persuaded a neighbour, Mrs. Meadows next door, to look after the girls. It was June, one of our busiest months. We were full at Parkview. Clara did all the cooking. She abandoned us to total chaos. I didn’t have the time or energy to think about anything except somehow keeping things going, keeping all the balls up in the air. All I did was concentrate on the practicalities. I set about finding somebody to stand in for Clara, while at first trying to provide meals myself. And I didn’t do a very good job of it. I’m no cook. The guests were not very forgiving, either.”

“Then two days later Clara turned up again. She said she couldn’t live without the girls. She begged me to let her take them. With all that was going on I didn’t see how I could look after them, so I agreed that she could have them. You can’t know how much I’ve regretted that since, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I was just taking it all a minute at a time. And she is their mother after all. Fathers aren’t the same, are they?”

Again outstretched arms and this time a sideways inclination of the head asked for understanding. None of the police officers responded. Marshall continued without prompting.

“I have not seen my wife and children since that day. Neither have I heard from them. And that’s all I know.”

“Is it, Mr. Marshall?”

“I’ve told you again and again that it is.”

“Yes. But are you telling the truth?”

Marshall shrugged. “I’m sick of this,” he said. “I’m trying to cooperate. I want this cleared up as much as you do. But you lot don’t seem prepared to listen. You’re as bad as all the local gossips. You’ve made up your own minds about what happened to Clara and the kids and nothing I have to say makes any difference, does it?”

Talbot ignored the question.

“You were having an affair at the time of your wife’s disappearance, Mr. Marshall,” he continued quietly.

“Yes, I was. But only out of a kind of retaliation, really. I loved my wife. I didn’t want to do anything to harm our marriage.”

“Mr. Marshall, you have a reputation as a womanizer. You have been married three times — or very nearly...”

Marshall half-smiled. He actually looked almost pleased with himself. When only in his twenties he had married his second “wife” while still wed to his first. He actually had a conviction for bigamy as well as for fraud. But at his trial he had escaped with only a suspended jail sentence after a doctor had given evidence about the state of stress he was allegedly in and, rather more remarkably, both women had spoken in his defence. Talbot looked the other man up and down appraisingly. Women, in particular, always seemed totally taken in by Richard Marshall, he reflected, for reasons which baffled DCI Talbot.

“We have no cause at all, except your version of things,” Talbot continued, “to believe that your wife was ever involved with anyone else. But you had a string of affairs during your marriage, didn’t you?”

“I wouldn’t call them affairs exactly.”

“All right. You moved Mrs. Esther Hunter into your home just one month after Clara disappeared, did you not?”

“After Clara left.”

“Don’t play word games with me, Marshall. Answer the question.”

“You know I did. You also know why. Her husband found out she’d been seeing me and chucked her out. She just turned up on my doorstep. What was I supposed to do? Send her away? Anyway, I needed help in the hotel. I just couldn’t manage and I couldn’t afford the wages I was paying out.”

“Very gracious, Mr. Marshall.”

The big man smiled again and reached up with one hand to straighten the knot of his tie. It didn’t need straightening. Talbot found his gaze drawn to it. He was pretty sure the striped green-and-red tie was from a rather prestigious guards regiment and that Marshall, although he had been called up for National Service as a younger man, had no right to wear it. Which was typical, of course. Marshall dropped his hand onto the table again and leaned forward until his face was just inches away from Talbot’s. He was almost conspiratorial.

“The truth, Detective Chief Inspector,” he said. “Just the truth.”

Instinctively Talbot pulled away, then mentally kicked himself. “Two days after your children were last seen you were spotted taking your boat out of Torquay Harbour,” he continued resolutely. “You motored around the bay towards Berry Head, then out to deep water, where you seemed to hover for some time.”

“I was fishing. I used to go fishing most evenings when I could get away, and take the children with me whenever I could. They loved it...”

Suddenly there was a catch in Richard Marshall’s voice. It was the first time he had shown any emotion at all.

Talbot did his best to grasp the moment.

“I put it to you that you murdered your wife and children and that you went out in your boat that night in order to dump their bodies at sea.”

Talbot could see Marshall’s body tensing at last. Just as his had done earlier. The other man’s hands, once more clasped before him, were trembling. For a moment Talbot hoped he might be about to break through his composure after all. But no. Marshall was a tough cookie.

You could almost see him physically and mentally taking a hold of himself.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

They came to Laurel House at ten o’clock the following morning, a Saturday, arriving in the middle of a summer thunderstorm, so that they stood in the hallway dripping water from their sodden raincoats all over the threadbare carpet. Karen’s mother was sober, thank God, and no longer in a state of near-hysterics, but she was still in bed, of course, recovering from her excesses of the previous day. Her father was playing golf. It was what he did when he wasn’t working. “At least it gets me out of this damned house,” he would shamelessly announce.

So it was Karen who answered the front door to Detective Sergeant Malone and Detective Constable Parkin, took their wet coats from them and escorted them into the big shabby sitting room. She ran upstairs to get her mother, and once she was sure that a protesting Margaret Meadows was safely installed in the bathroom in order to apply her obligatory layers of make-up, Karen ran downstairs again to make DS Malone and DC Parkin tea while they waited.

Then when her mother finally surfaced, somewhat to Karen’s annoyance looking perfectly well-groomed and together and behaving quite charmingly, Karen was asked to leave the room. Karen didn’t think that was very fair, and therefore had no compunction whatsoever about putting her ear to the keyhole so that she could listen. It was not the first time Karen had put her ear to a keyhole in that house. Almost always she seemed to hear something she would rather not have heard. And yet again she was afraid of what she might learn. It didn’t stop her, though.

The woman detective constable seemed to do most of the talking. It was she who asked Margaret Meadows if she had looked after Lorraine and Janine Marshall around the time of Clara’s disappearance.

“Yes, I did,” replied Karen’s mother. “Richard came to me in a terrible state the night she left him. He said he didn’t know what to do. Begged me to take the girls until he sorted himself out.”

“And how long were they with you?”

“Not much more than a day really. It was a Sunday night when he brought them to me. I kept them until the Tuesday morning. Karen took them to school on the Monday...”

“Karen?”

“My daughter. She let you in.”

“But she’s only—”

Karen’s mother interrupted swiftly. There had been just a note of criticism in the policewoman’s voice. Karen recognized it at once. She was used to it, or something like it, almost every time her mother and father spoke to each other. And her mother was always quick to defend herself if she thought she was being criticized in any way.

“She’s thirteen. Almost fourteen. All right, she was only twelve then. But she’s always been very grown-up for her age. She’d already babysat for the Marshalls once or twice before... before Clara went away. In any case, I was having one of my bad spells...”

Karen remembered it well, remembered eating her breakfast that morning while listening to her parents rowing over the Marshall girls. Her mother had made a rare early-morning appearance in the kitchen, but she had been clad only in her dressing gown, had clearly had no intention of getting dressed, and had paid little attention to Janine or Lorraine who had sat white-faced and silent at the table. Lorraine had been tearful, but nobody took much notice, least of all Karen who had spent her childhood accepting family rows and disruptions as the norm, and merely assumed that the Marshall girls would do the same.

The girls’ primary school had been next door to her grammar school and as she had neared it with her young charges Karen remembered rounding on a still-snivelling Lorraine.

“Shut up or I’ll give you one,” she’d unsympathetically shouted at the little girl who had immediately shied away from her, lower lip trembling uncontrollably. At the time Karen couldn’t have cared less. She hadn’t wanted to be seen by any of her schoolfriends with wailing little ones in tow. Any curiosity she might have felt about the girls being so unceremoniously dumped at Laurel House, and certainly any compassion for their predicament, had been totally negated by the sheer irritation of having the unwanted responsibility for these two small children thrust upon her.

Karen pressed her ear closer to the keyhole. Her mother was still talking. “I did pick them up from school in the afternoon. And I really wasn’t well. The last thing I needed was two small children to look after, as well as Karen.”

Karen screwed up her face and thought hard. When had her mother ever looked after her, she wondered. Probably not at all really since she’d been a baby, and she had gathered that even then it had been her maternal grandmother, now dead, who had done most of the looking-after.

“But that’s what neighbours are for, isn’t it?” Margaret Meadows continued. She paused then, as if waiting for a reply. When none came she started to speak again.

“Then early on the Tuesday Richard came round and took them back. He said his mother was on her way from Bournemouth, that she was going to look after Lorraine and Janine until either Clara turned up again or he could make some permanent arrangement to look after them himself.”

The detective constable’s voice was edgy when she eventually spoke again.

“So did Clara turn up again?”

“Yes.” Margaret Meadows paused once more. “Well, he said she did. Months afterwards I asked him if the girls were still with his mother. He said Clara had come back for them.”

“Did you see her?”

“No.”

“So did you believe him?”

“Yes, of course.” The meaning of the words was clear enough, but Karen could detect the note of uncertainty in her mother’s voice. “Well, yes, I did. But I know other people didn’t. And nobody’s ever seen her since, have they? I thought that was what all this was about?”

The last sentence was also a query.

“Indeed it is, Mrs. Meadows, indeed it is,” replied DC Parkin. “Did you ever meet Richard Marshall’s mother, by the way?”

“No.” Margaret Meadows sounded puzzled, as if she hadn’t thought about that before. “No, I didn’t. I don’t know if anyone did...”

Her voice tailed away. She seemed to be trying to think things through and didn’t like the route along which her thoughts were taking her.

DC Parkin and DS Malone left soon afterwards. Margaret Meadows remained in the sitting room. She was not given to observing life’s social niceties if it didn’t suit her. Karen beat a fast retreat to the top of the stairs allowing the two police officers to let themselves out of the house.

Afterwards she sat on the stairs, nearly at the top where they turned at right angles into the landing. Her mother did not know it, but she had been crouched in exactly the same position — curled up, hugging her legs to her chest — and exactly the same spot on that June Sunday evening the previous year when Richard Marshall had brought his little girls round. In bed earlier than usual because of a bad cold, Karen had been lying uncomfortably awake, sniffing, sneezing and coughing away, when she had heard the doorbell, followed by a voice. At first she wasn’t sure who had arrived, but she made herself concentrate and then realized that this was the voice of their nearest neighbour. She was familiar enough with his voice, and with him too, although hardly at all with his wife who always seemed to be rather overshadowed by her much larger husband. Richard Marshall was a big noisy man who always had plenty to say for himself if you met him in the street or at the shops, but Karen had never heard him sound like this before, so low and urgent. She had somehow known at once that this was no ordinary visit. Indeed, apart from one fateful afternoon, she had never seen Richard Marshall at Laurel House before. And so, her curiosity aroused, she had crept her way from her bedroom along the landing to the staircase in order to find out what was going on. Karen had done a lot of that sort of thing as a child. It was the only way she ever got to find out anything, because nobody ever told her.

From her vantage point she had peered down at the little scene being enacted below. The hall at Laurel House was badly lit and both Richard and her mother were standing in such a way that Karen couldn’t see their faces. Janine and Lorraine were each holding one of their father’s hands. One of them was crying, but Karen was not sure which. She could not see their faces either.

“All right, I’ll do what I can, but at least come in for a moment so that we can talk about it. I can see you’re upset,” she heard her mother say.

“You’re not wrong about that. But I can’t stay. I really can’t. I’ve too much to do.”

He had opened the door then and seemed to be on his way out, pausing only when her mother said: “You haven’t brought any clothes for the girls, Richard, not even any nightclothes.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just not thinking straight. I’ll sort some stuff out for them and bring it round early in the morning. They’ll need their school uniforms, of course, but they can sleep in their T-shirts. They often do, anyway.”

“All right, but how long do you want me to keep them? You know what Karen’s father is like. He’s out now at one of his quiz nights. God knows what he’ll say when he comes home and finds your two here.”

“It won’t be for long, I promise.” Richard’s voice had been wheedling. “Just till I manage to sort something out. A couple of days...”

Karen had sneezed then. She had been trying very hard to stifle it, but had finally been unable to do so.

“Karen, Karen, is that you?” Her mother had turned and leaned forward around the staircase so that even in the poor light Karen could see her upturned face. “Go back to bed, you silly girl, or you’ll never get better. It’s only Richard from next door.”

Karen had scurried off, knowing full well she’d be told no more even if she bothered to ask. But she sensed that there was some kind of crisis. The girls, Janine and Lorraine, had been quiet and withdrawn throughout their brief stay at Laurel House, and Karen was at an age when she was in any case totally disinterested in children younger than herself. She had made a point of ignoring them as much as possible, something she now regretted, being of such an intrinsically nosy nature, because she thought she might have missed the opportunity to learn something. Something important perhaps.

But just the way in which Richard Marshall had delivered his children that night, and the whole sorry little episode, had stuck in Karen’s mind. And so she listened with great interest at the door when the police interviewed her mother, listened while her mother told them about Richard’s visit that night. Told them about looking after the little girls. Listened to hear if she would tell them the rest of it. But she didn’t. Not any of it.

It was quite apparent that the police didn’t know what Karen knew. They couldn’t know, or their whole approach would have been different, Karen felt sure. Her mother’s secret was still safe. Which she supposed was a good thing, although somehow she wasn’t quite sure.

Karen remained there for several minutes, resting her chin on her knees, silent, unmoving. She felt more than a bit wobbly.

Eventually her mother wandered aimlessly out of the sitting room. Her eyes were blank. Karen could not read any expression in them. This was not unusual. Margaret Meadows invariably retreated into a world of her own whenever threatened by anything she might regard as remotely unpleasant or even merely unwelcome. She drifted towards the kitchen, apparently not noticing her daughter on the staircase.

Karen watched her mother’s retreating back. She wanted so much to talk to her, yet again to ask her the questions she was bursting to ask. But her mother would never talk to her about anything that mattered, so she certainly wouldn’t discuss this. She expected her daughter to behave like an adult, but only treated her like one when it suited her.

This infuriated Karen. One minute it seemed to be assumed that she knew about everything that had been going on. The next moment she was expected to forget that she knew anything at all.

But Karen knew all right. And how she wished that she didn’t.

She tightened her grip around her legs and buried her whole face in her knees. She wanted a family like everybody else she knew seemed to have. She wanted a mother. A proper mother. Not this beautiful drifting creature who blew hot and cold with the wind. This woman who was sometimes a friend, sometimes a big sister, sometimes someone from another planet, and certainly never the kind of mother Karen longed for.

She was, however, all that Karen had. And Karen would never do anything to hurt her. Anything that might lead to losing her. Karen would never ever tell.

Talbot had kept Richard Marshall in custody overnight. And once more, shortly after Malone and Parkin reported back, he decided to conduct another interview with Marshall himself.

“Margaret Meadows says you told her that your mother was coming to pick up your girls. But your mother says you never even asked her to do so and she did not know that they and Clara had disappeared until several months after they were last seen.”

Marshall didn’t miss a beat. A night in a police cell had not shaken him one jot. But then, Talbot had not really expected it to.

“I told Margaret that I was going to ask my mother to come to pick up the girls, not that I had already asked her,” he responded quickly. “I’d managed to get help in the hotel, though at a tremendous price. I was therefore at least able to look after them until I could get my mother down here and so I went next door to get them. But then Clara came back and asked for them before I even got round to calling my mother.”

“You never told Mrs. Meadows any of that.”

“Why would I? I told nobody anything more than I had to. I was emotionally drained by it all. My wife had walked out on me. My family had broken up. I didn’t want to talk about it. I barely knew Margaret Meadows...”

“You knew her well enough to dump your children on her.”

“I was desperate.”

“So did she never ask you about them afterwards?”

“I don’t remember. I didn’t see her often.”

“She says you just told her that Clara had come back for them.”

“Perhaps I did then. It was the truth, after all. But I never said any more than I had to. I didn’t see it was any of her business or anybody else’s.”

“It is now, Mr. Marshall, it’s the business both of the police and of the public. Make no mistake about it.”

Marshall shrugged.

“And what about your mother? Why didn’t you tell her straight away that your wife and children had left you? Isn’t it rather curious that you failed to tell your own mother?”

Marshall shrugged again. “I can be a bit of an ostrich,” he said. “I think I was hoping Clara would come back, bring the girls back. I’ve been hoping that all this time in spite of everything.”

He looked directly, challengingly, at Talbot. “In spite of what you think, that’s the truth, too.”

He paused as if waiting for Talbot to respond. When the DCI showed absolutely no signs of doing so he sighed and continued.

“The fewer people I told the less real it all seemed. Anyway, my mother and I have never been close...”

“Who are you close to, Mr. Marshall?”

Marshall looked blank.

Talbot persisted. He was beginning to think his only hope was to break Richard Marshall although he knew that was a big big ask.

“Were you close to your children?”

“Of course. I love my kids. I still love my kids.”

There was a note of aggression in Marshall’s voice then.

“At best you let them go very very easily then, didn’t you? I wouldn’t let my kids go that easily. No way.”

It was Talbot’s turn to pause, to wait for a response, and Marshall’s not to make one.

“At worst you killed them.”

Marshall still didn’t respond. Talbot got up from the table and walked to the little window.

He had his back to Marshall when he spoke again.

“What was it like?” he asked conversationally.

“What was what like?”

“Killing your own children, of course.”

Again Marshall didn’t miss a beat. He continued to sound calm and to speak in a manner of overly deliberate patience, even though such an horrific scenario had been put to him.

“I didn’t kill my children. My wife returned and took them away with her. Find my wife and you will find Lorraine and Janine.”

Talbot took a deep breath and persisted. He could think of no better plan. He walked across to Richard Marshall and leaned over so that his mouth was close to the other man’s ear. When he spoke again his voice was little more than a whisper.

“How did you kill them, Richard?”

There was no reply.

“Did you strangle them? Did you suffocate them with a pillow? Which one did you murder first? What did you see in their little faces? Were they afraid? Did one of them see you kill the other? Perhaps you hit them over the head with something? Perhaps you used a knife on them? Was there blood? Did you watch your daughters’ lifeblood pour out of them? What did you do with their little bodies? I think you wrapped them up and took them out in your boat and dumped them, along with their mother, probably. That’s what I think. Why don’t you tell me, Richard, why don’t you tell me how you murdered your own daughters?”

Talbot fired the questions one after the other. Rat-a-tat-tat. Like bullets from a gun. His voice grew louder as he proceeded. He became aware of Malone and Parkin, who were also present yet again, fidgeting with discomfort. He didn’t care. He was going for broke.

But Richard Marshall did not flinch. Neither did he speak. He remained absolutely still, staring stonily ahead, his eyes more blank than ever.

“Suspect refuses to answer,” barked Talbot at the tape recorder, as he sat down once again opposite Marshall and drew in a big intake of breath.

“Right,” he said, speaking very quietly again. “Let’s change direction a bit here and look at the facts. We have removed a large amount of clothing from your house which belonged to your wife and children. Indeed very little of their clothing, if any, seemed to have been taken. Your wife also left some valuable jewelry behind. How do you explain that?”

“Clara left with one suitcase. I have no idea what she took or what she left behind. She took all she wanted, I suppose. Presumably she didn’t want her jewelry. I had given her almost all of it and that could have been the reason she didn’t want it. When she came back for the children she did take another couple of bags of things with her. More than likely they’d already grown out of most of the stuff that she left.”

The man was perfectly controlled. Talbot’s earlier aggressive line of questioning did not seem to have rattled him at all.

“Extremely plausible, Mr. Marshall,” said the DCI.

Marshall raised his eyebrows and leaned back in his chair, still appearing to be quite composed. “The truth very often is, Detective Chief Inspector,” he replied laconically. “Very often indeed.”

Chapter Three

Nobody in Torquay Police Station noticed, but the rain was pouring down outside throughout Bill Talbot’s second long interview session with Richard Marshall. John Kelly and photographer Micky Lomas, standing morosely on the pavement, were getting a good soaking. It really was a filthy day for the time of year, and their vigil had already been a long one.

Apart from hurried calls of nature, taken in turn, usually combined with dashes to the sandwich shop up the road, they had left the station for only a few hours, in order to grab some much-needed sleep, since taking up their position there the previous day.

Kelly checked his watch, wiping the raindrops off the face in order to do so. It was just past 9.30 P. M. Other journalists had come and gone during the course of the day, but none were there now. After all, they had no idea when, or even if, Marshall would step outside the station again. Nor did they even know for certain that Marshall was still inside.

There were all sorts of other lines of enquiry the various news teams on the case could convince their desks that they should be on, lines of enquiry which did not necessarily involve getting soaked to the skin. Kelly glanced at the sky. The weather was so dreadful that day had turned into dark night rather early for the time of year. All he could see was blackness, certainly no sign of any stars or a moon, which indicated that the leaden cloud which had hung over Torquay since before dawn that morning was still solid above. Certainly the rain, which had subsided into light drizzle for a couple of hours around lunchtime and cleared totally for just an hour or so in the early afternoon, now seemed heavier than ever.

But the young Kelly was already showing signs of the tenacity which would later lead him to the top of his profession in Fleet Street. He was determined to stand his ground. If Marshall was charged neither he nor anyone else would get anything other than a brief official statement from the police. But if he was not charged, then Kelly was determined to give himself every opportunity of being the first journalist to confront him. Already John Kelly did not give up easily. Not on any story as big as this one, and certainly not on this one. Not with his mother to contend with at home, he didn’t.

Kelly’s dossier on Marshall was burning a hole in his notebook. Kelly was a local boy and he had homed in on the gossip right at the beginning, spurred on of course by the peripheral involvement of his mother, as head teacher of the Marshall girls’ primary school. Angela Kelly had known the two little girls well and had been extremely fond of them. She had known Clara Marshall too, and Richard, although a little less well, before all the fuss began. She was that sort of teacher. She made it her business to know about the children in her care and their families. Kelly’s mother had been involved from the start. And Kelly’s mother had taken the Marshall business very very personally. Which was why it was so personal to Kelly, too.

Kelly hunched his inadequate raincoat, a shower-proof job which had been leaking all day, around his shoulders and looked down at his watch again. If Marshall was inside, which he was somehow quite certain he was — he was sure the man hadn’t been released yet and he didn’t think the police would have taken him anywhere else — and if there was not enough evidence to charge him, which Kelly’s police contacts had already indicated to him was likely, they would not be able to keep him much longer.

Kelly was aware of Micky Lomas shuffling his feet disconsolately next to him. He knew he was more or less blackmailing the photographer into staying, because Micky didn’t dare leave as long as Kelly was prepared to keep up the vigil, in case Kelly got words and he had to confess to no picture. Micky had not uttered a word of dissent, but left Kelly in no doubt that he was extremely fed up.

The reporter deliberately did not look at Micky. Maybe another smoke would put the snapper in a better mood. Kelly slipped a hand inside his coat pocket and fished out his cigarettes. The packet was sodden. He opened it carefully and passed it to Micky who took out a cigarette which promptly disintegrated in his fingers. The cigarettes were sodden, too. Micky impatiently tossed the one in his hand onto the ground and stood on it rather aggressively.

“Sorry,” muttered Kelly.

Micky just grunted, and from inside his state-of-the-art, thoroughly waterproof jacket, complete with hood, withdrew a dry packet of cigarettes which he threw at Kelly who, to his relief, caught it smartly while wondering what Micky’s reaction would have been had he dropped the cigarettes onto the wet pavement. Well, Micky might feel hard done by, but at least he was wearing proper heavy-weather gear, Kelly reflected as he lit up. Photographers always did and reporters never did. Kelly had no idea why, and made a mental note to pay Millets a visit as soon as his next paycheck came through. He glanced sideways. Micky was also wearing waterproof trousers and thick-soled boots. Kelly’s own feet were clad in inadequate city shoes as ever, and from about the knees down, the trousers of his green suit, of which he had been so proud only the day before, were wet through.

Kelly didn’t have gloves either. And, summer or not, the thorough drenching he had now received meant that he was very cold indeed. He cupped his hands over his cigarette, wondering if the faint glow might warm his chilled fingers just a little.

And as he did so the doors of the police station opened and out stepped Richard Marshall. He was quite alone.

Kelly snatched his cigarette from his mouth and threw it on the ground. By his side Micky Lomas leapt into action with admirable swiftness. The young photographer moved smoothly forward, raising his camera to his eye as he did so, and had rattled off several frames of Marshall before the older man had time to blink.

It was Kelly’s turn then.

“Have you been released, Mr. Marshall?” he called out. “Can you tell us what is happening, please?”

Marshall, whose attention had been focused on the flash of the camera exploding before him, swung on his heel and turned to face Kelly. It was impossible in the half-light outside the station to read the expression in his eyes. His body language said shock and aggression. His fists were tightly clenched and his head jutted towards Kelly.

Involuntarily the reporter took a step backwards.

Then he watched Marshall relax, unclench his fists and slide one hand into his pocket.

“Yes. I’ve been released,” Marshall replied quietly. “The police have no grounds to hold me, no grounds whatsoever.”

“So you are not going to be charged?”

“What with?” asked Marshall.

He stepped forward then, catching the full effect of the lights outside the station, and Kelly could momentarily see the big jowly face quite well. Marshall was smiling, his eyes crinkled at the edges. His voice was ironic, his expression friendly.

Like Bill Talbot inside the station earlier Kelly decided to go for broke.

“With the murder of your wife and children,” he said bluntly.

Marshall’s eyes stopped crinkling, but the smile did not slip. Kelly had heard that he was a cool customer, and he was now learning just how cool.

“I have nothing more to say to you, young man,” he said.

Then a taxi pulled up by the curb giving Kelly’s trousers a further soaking as it did so, and Marshall, his eyes crinkling again with what appeared to be genuine amusement, swung away from him and walked towards it.

“Mr. Marshall, please,” continued Kelly, gallantly ignoring his latest misfortune. “My readers want to hear your side of the story.”

Marshall turned again.

“No, they don’t,” he said mildly. “They want to see me crucified.”

Kelly persisted. “They just want to know what happened, that’s all.”

“So do I, young man, so do I,” said Marshall obliquely.

“Look, would you do a proper interview with me? In-depth. Something to put the record straight once and for all.”

Marshall managed a small hollow laugh. “Dream on, young man, putting the record straight on this one is something that’s never going to happen.”

It was a totally ambiguous remark. Kelly studied the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary’s prime suspect carefully. Marshall was just so controlled for someone who may have murdered his entire family and spent a whole day and night and part of the previous day either locked up in a police cell or being questioned repeatedly. He had also been, by and large, perfectly pleasant in his manner, not at all what you might expect. Or at least, not what you might expect unless you knew the kind of spell he was capable of putting on people, particularly women.

A few weeks earlier Kelly had sought out Marshall’s latest mistress, Esther Hunter, the woman he had moved so quickly into Parkview, at the hairdressing salon she ran down by the harbour.

He remembered vividly how she had reacted when he had asked her if she was aware of what people were saying about her man and if it worried her at all.

“Of course I’m aware,” she had responded sharply. “How could I not be? And no, I’m not worried about any of it because it’s all a pack of wicked lies. Clara has gone off to live a new life and that’s all Richard and I want to do. That and be left alone. Now get off my premises.”

Esther Hunter, Kelly felt, was a nice enough woman, kindly, and quite beyond reproach before her involvement with Marshall. Kelly believed absolutely that she did not accept for one moment that her lover could possibly have murdered his family. She was simply besotted with him.

The reporter watched in silence as Richard Marshall opened the door of the taxi. He lowered himself into the back seat and then, with the door still open, addressed Kelly again.

“I don’t actually want to talk to anyone about any of this anymore,” he said as mildly as before. “Not you, not the police either. In fact I’ve seen enough of the police over the last few days to last a lifetime. Hence the taxi home. There was no way I was going in a police car, even though they did offer.”

He smiled wryly. It was a measured appeal for sympathy and understanding. Kelly had none of either for this man whom he honestly believed to be some sort of monster. He was, however, impressed by the way Marshall handled himself. No wonder the police had got nowhere, he thought to himself, as he watched the taxi splash its way up the road. And in that moment he had a dreadful feeling that they never would.

It was past midnight before Kelly made it home. To Micky Lomas’s further annoyance the reporter had insisted on following Marshall back to the Parkview Hotel and taking up a vigil in the street outside. To be honest Kelly had not expected any kind of result. Rather childishly perhaps, he admitted to himself, he had just wanted Marshall to know that he was there. Waiting and watching. But after standing in the rain for another two hours or so, even Kelly had had enough.

As he opened the front door to his house his mother hurried into the hallway from the sitting room.

“Still up?” he enquired.

“I wanted to know what has happened,” she said. Kelly was not surprised. He knew how much the Marshall affair was playing on his mother’s mind.

“They’ve let him go,” replied Kelly shortly.

“Oh my God,” said Angela Kelly. “Oh my God.”

She backed away from her son, still staring at him but not really seeing him, he thought, and retreated into the sitting room again.

He stood for a moment, dripping water onto the hall carpet, before shrugging out of his sodden raincoat which he draped over the hall-stand. His precious green suit, he feared, was ruined. He looked down at it sorrowfully. Then he took off the jacket, peeled off the trousers which stuck damply to his legs as he did so, and arranged them also on the hall-stand, forlornly hoping that they might dry without too much damage.

He ran upstairs, pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans and returned downstairs to join his mother. She glanced towards him as he walked into the sitting room, failing, it seemed, to notice that he had changed his clothes already, just as minutes earlier she had failed to notice that he was wet through. All of which was out of character for Angela Kelly.

She was sitting in the old leather armchair by the window.

“Make us a cup of tea, John, will you?” she asked.

Obediently he went to the kitchen and returned with two steaming mugs. His mother wrapped her hands around her drink, nursing it as if she were cold and it were warming her.

“It’s my fault, John,” she suddenly blurted out.

Kelly had already heard that from her. It was worse now, of course. Now that Marshall had been released.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Mum,” he responded.

“I’m not being ridiculous, John. Lorraine Marshall told me her father had killed her mother. She actually told me, and I did nothing about it. Absolutely nothing.”

“That’s not true. She didn’t tell you that. And you didn’t ‘do nothing’ about it.”

“I may as well have done.” Angela Kelly put down her mug of tea on the table by her side, quite uninterested in drinking it, apparently, even though she had asked for it. Kelly noticed then that the previous year’s school photograph was also on that little table. It should have been hanging on the wall in the hall with the others. His mother had obviously been sitting looking at the picture until he arrived home. The Marshall sisters were side by side, sitting cross-legged in the front row. Kelly knew exactly which they were. His mother had pointed them out to him often enough. Two pretty girls, both with dark-brown hair and pale blue eyes like their father, smiling for the camera, just as they had been told to do, no doubt. They looked almost doll-like in their grey and maroon school uniforms. Kelly felt his mother’s eyes following his gaze.

“Can you imagine that any father could kill two innocent little children like that?” his mother asked, her voice high-pitched, almost as if she were on the verge of hysteria.

“No, Mum, I can’t,” he said. “Neither could anyone else, and neither could you. You shouldn’t blame yourself and you don’t even know for certain that you have any reason to do so.”

“Oh, but I do, John. I do blame myself. And I do know. Really I do. Sometimes at night, I dream, sometimes it’s so vivid it’s actually like I can see him attacking Clara and those poor dear girls.”

The words came tumbling out. Sighing, Kelly prepared himself to listen yet again to the same old story. His mother had been torturing herself over the past few months, and this had reached crisis point in the previous few days, since the police had finally decided to launch a missing persons enquiry and had eventually arrested Richard Marshall.

“I just don’t understand why I didn’t go to the police at the time,” she said. “I’ll never forgive myself. I could have saved those two little girls.”

“Look, I keep telling you, we still don’t even know for certain that they’re dead,” protested Kelly.

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” responded his mother.

Kelly slumped back in his chair. She was almost certainly right, of course. And the girls’ mother was almost certainly dead, too. Kelly had never met Clara Marshall or her daughters. He knew them only through his own mother who, although apparently more distressed by the fate of the children, also always talked fondly and regretfully of Clara Marshall whom she described as a quiet but warmly attractive young woman, totally devoted to her little girls.

He said nothing more. After a bit his mother spoke again. Her eyes were very bright.

“She told me her father had murdered her mother, and I did nothing about it,” she repeated.

Kelly fished in his pockets for cigarettes, then remembered that he didn’t have any. The packet which had drowned within the folds of his inadequate raincoat had been his last. This really was turning out to be a bad day, he thought.

“Look, Mum,” he began patiently, beginning the diatribe of reassurance that he had already uttered many times. “Lorraine Marshall told you in school that her father had ‘got rid’ of her mother. You said that she was upset, but if parents are having marriage difficulties of course their children are upset. You had absolutely no reason to suspect murder, for Christ’s sake. And you did do something. You went round to see Richard Marshall that evening.”

Angela Kelly grunted in a derisory fashion. “Yes, I did, didn’t I? And he spun me this yarn about how Clara had run away with an Aussie backpacker and how his heart was broken, and I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Then when the children didn’t come to school the next day and he called to say their mother had taken them away with her, I swallowed that too.”

“He’s an operator, Mum. Richard Marshall has a history of conning people. You may be a head teacher, but you’re not infallible, you know. And anyway, when you realized there could be something seriously wrong you went straight to the police...”

“Yes, six months after the children disappeared. Six whole months after. And even then only when all the gossip started. I should have thought it through. I should have done something about it at the time. I shouldn’t have been taken in by the dreadful man.”

“Look, the police interviewed Marshall then, didn’t they, and he convinced them too. He is very plausible.”

But Bill Talbot also had regrets, Kelly knew that. Bill Talbot wished he had listened to the likes of Angela Kelly much earlier. Talbot was well aware that the investigation had taken far too long to get going, but until Clara Marshall’s father had stepped in, the police had really had nothing more than gossip and hearsay to go on.

The reporter reflected on all that for a moment, until he was interrupted by his mother’s voice again.

“It’s worse than that, John, and you know it,” she said, going off on a now-familiar tangent. “I told Marshall what Lorraine had said in school. I told him that she had said that her father had got rid of her mother. I honestly believe that he went and got the girls from Mrs. Meadows the next day and killed them because of what I’d told him. I believe that absolutely and nothing will ever make me change my mind.”

Kelly didn’t bother to reply. He finished his tea and went to bed. He had no idea at all how to help his mother. Indeed, he didn’t think anybody could help his mother. She blamed herself, and that was that.

In the morning Angela Kelly made no further mention of the previous night’s conversation as she served breakfast to her husband, also a schoolteacher, and to her son.

Adam Kelly was a good solid man who had no time at all for anything fanciful. He’d apparently gone to bed early the night before and left his wife to do her fretting alone. Indeed, Kelly doubted that his mother had shared any of her true feelings about the Marshall case with him. She saved that for her only son, he thought wryly.

He studied her carefully. Her eyes were red and swollen. She looked as if she had almost certainly been crying during the night. He noticed then that there was a brandy glass upside down on the draining board and that the bottle of brandy, normally kept for medicinal use only in their house, stood on the worktop alongside. Kelly was further alarmed. He didn’t suppose for one minute that Angela Kelly had consumed more than a measure or two, but he had never before known his mother to drink spirits at all — except occasionally as part of a hot toddy if she had the flu or a bad cold. It was all getting very worrying. He did hope she was not going to dwell on the Marshall case for much longer. But he already feared that she would.

Leaving her and his father at the kitchen table he walked into the hall to make a check call to the police station. The policeman who answered the phone was a young man Kelly had been to school with. The first bit of luck he’d had in days, thought Kelly wryly, still mourning the demise of his beloved green suit.

“No, there’s no plans to bring him in again that I know of,” said PC Joe Willis morosely.

Kelly was already well aware that almost everybody even remotely involved with this case was affected by it in some way. And it only took a little bit of prompting to make PC Willis considerably more forthcoming.

“Off the record, Johnny, the old man is tearing his hair out. You daren’t go near him. A woman and two little girls have disappeared off the face of the earth, somehow or other we don’t even get to investigate formally till a year later and the trail’s as cold as a dead man’s willy. And if you ask me, Johnny boy, that’s the way things are going to stay. We’ve fuck-all to go on. The search at the house has produced zilch.”

“If that bastard Marshall did what we all think he did, if he really murdered his wife and kids, well, you know what, Johnny? He’s got away with it. That’s what I reckon.”

Kelly put down the receiver glumly. That was the news he had expected but not what he had wanted to hear. Apart from anything else, his dossier on the Marshall affair, so meticulously compiled, was never likely to see the light of day now. Certainly the Torquay Times wouldn’t print such legally dangerous material.

But this was much more than a story to Kelly. This was a murder that had happened on his doorstep involving people who were very nearly neighbours. The two little girls had been his mother’s pupils. This was a case that had shaken an entire town to the core. It seemed to be all anyone talked about, in the shop, in the pub, on the street.

The whole of Torquay was under a shadow because of it. The pupils at his mother’s school were tearful and upset, he knew, as they became caught up in all the stories and rumours about what had happened to their little classmates.

And as for his mother — well, she was the sort of old-fashioned headmistress who felt that all the children in her school were her responsibility. She had made it quite clear how much she blamed herself. Kelly didn’t see that changing, either, and it frightened him.