“I’ve jobs to finish, and my boss wants to talk about the future.”
“And the kids?”
“After football practice, Freddie's stopping with his pal Benny Gregory and his mum Sandra in Sallow Drive till I collect him. Kayleigh's sleeping over with Emma Dixon in Scrub Lane.
They go riding together over in North Barton."
"Sounds pretty airtight," then he whispered,” but what’s bugging me is Molloy’ s little parting shot.”
“I can handle that, but not Pete Brown.”
*
Tim Fraser’s wave accompanied him down the steps, and when the Saab's roar had faded, she drew both children close, repeating Fraser’s earlier warning, yet sensing all the while Freddie's resistance.
"He’s not our Dad," he broke away to add a football shirt to his crowded bag.
"He'd like to be." Kayleigh smiled knowingly.
"Tim's a good man and you should listen to him."
Rita then got dressed, locked up and delivered them both to their separate activities. Driving away from Freddie’s school, she thought for a moment about Eric Molloy’s vicious message. Also of young Joe, and wondered where they were now.
*
On her way into Coventry, Rita bought
The Sunday Gazette
as usual. It only took seconds to see that all the other Sunday papers were also dominated by news of a savage attack on a pregnant, married mother of two in a Wiltshire village yesterday lunchtime. She sat in her car scanning the truly shocking details, and when the perpetrator’s name came up, given by a verifiable but secret source, the paper slid from her hands. With trembling fingers, she retrieved it to read the rest. How Louis Perelman, a regular cocaine user, wanted by the police in connection with a number of other serious crimes, was probably already on his way to Vienna.
She searched for the reporter’s name, but there was none.
And what was Tim Fraser playing at? He’d had plenty of chances to tell her about all this. Why too, hadn’t he named the other place they mustn’t go?
Just then, her horrible dream of that cottage loomed into view; its black trees and shadowy, stalking figure holding a knife. But once she’d turned the page and seen Kayleigh’s drawing staring her in the face, she knew for sure who Pete Brown really was.
*
Her car suddenly seemed little more than a flimsy shell and, having locked herself in, Rita was about to start the engine, when her mobile rang from inside her bag. Still uptight about leaving the kids and thinking the worst, she was unusually brusque.
“Who’s that?”
"Jesus, Reet, forgotten me already?"
Damn.
"I have, and I don’t use my phone while driving, OK?"
"So, you got wheels?"
"You must’ve seen it while sniffing round Denise."
"I’ve bin in London. Honest to God."
“At Sheerwater Road? Not."
"Missed you all summat rotten."
"You lied to me."
At nine thirty, she was cutting it fine.
"I 'ad to. Couldn't 'ave you and the kids gettin' dragged into stuff."
"Dragged into what? Transline?
Silence.
Maybe he was pulling out and couldn't pay back that loan it had mentioned. Maybe, like everything else, it was all lies. She didn't know who or what to believe any more.
“I need to see you,” he breathed. “Got summat for the kids."
"You can't."
"You're still me wife, and Kayleigh and Freddie are still me kids. 'Sides, I've made a Will and you need to know about it."
Rita blinked. He'd never shown any foresight before. Something was badly wrong. She glanced in her rear view mirror and drove off with the mobile at her ear. Heard a strange, booming noise like a ship’s foghorn.
"How can you be leaving anything to anybody if…?"
"I didn't say I 'adn't got it, did I? I need to set things straight between us. Just in case..."
Rita then picked up another man's voice in the background. Hard, menacing.
"Say Tuesday, then," Frank said quickly. "Nine o’clock. Can’t speak no more…"
But she wasn’t finished. “Kayleigh’s drawings in the papers. Was it you who sent it out? Answer me, Frank?”
But he’d gone.
She tried calling him back to check if he’d heard the latest about Louis Perelman.
No signal.
*
While Tim Fraser and Derek Jarvis were flying south over Hampshire in a Police Twin Squirrel helicopter, Rita took her anger out on a council gritting lorry which had barged in front of her, only to crawl along, hogging the road, dropping chippings in its wake. She hooted as she overtook, whereupon the driver's window opened.
"Wass yer problem, ginger?" He yelled down at her. But how could she tell him, or anyone how she was dreading next Tuesday. Dreading everything, in fact. And that Frank's unwelcome presence in Wort Passage could destroy everything?
64
As Jacquie Harper left yet another ‘moonlight’ shift at Happy Chicks, and trudged along Grave's Way to Mullion Road, the bitter grey morning seeped under her work clothes. All thin, cheap fabrics, and unwashed, but that didn't matter now, for one thing was for certain. Neither they nor she would be going into Happy Chicks again.
The futility of trying to keep solvent impressed itself more strongly with each footstep and, as she glanced back at the factory's entrance where yet another lorry load of luckless birds was waiting for the security barrier to be raised, realized that for her, just like them, there was no way out. But, unlike her botched attempt at Christmas, this time she’d do better.
From inside her coat she removed her usual Sunday paper, bought at work, and spread its crumpled pages on the kitchen table. The full horror of what her cowardice had allowed to happen, lay before her. She was an accessory to yet another murder. The victim barely four months’ old.
TERROR SHATTERS VILLAGE IDYLL
Beneath this was a colour sketch of the addict staring back at her from behind those ridiculous, black-framed glasses. The very same drawing Rita Martin’s daughter had done. She felt weak. Bereaved. He'd taken everything. Her costly baby with the beautiful, brown eyes, the longest lashes, the softest skin and hair so fine it would fly from the brush and float like thistledown around his clever head. The same angel who’d just visited his birth-mother with the missing carving knife, and apparently destined for Vienna. Yes, she’d told DC Jarvis that, just to stop him ferreting around. The least she could have done.
Next came a recent snap of Tina Crabtree, still too glamorous, and next, her husband Ronan Crabtree in a business suit, plus an unexpected head shot of Graham Lodge. Seeing this made her catch her breath again. She'd loved him once, when they'd both been at Bristol University together. And even now, despite everything, she felt a brief yearning for those motorbike trips abroad. Their Barcelona honeymoon, theatre visits, tennis until dark. All this before knowing she could never conceive. Before he'd looked elsewhere.
Her teary eyes scanned the whole gruesome story, while inwardly that hedgehog's nose which Louis had unravelled on his seventh birthday, came to mind. As did the painted scar on his stomach. The violated duvet. Nausea welled up and she only just reached the kitchen sink in time.
She retched until her ribs ached and had just rinsed out her mouth when the doorbell rang, followed by men's voices and more ringing of the bell. Bailiffs her first thought, until she peeped through the narrow gap in the front room's curtains.
Not again....
This time, three unfamiliar uniformed police stood by the door, and one began shouting through the unrepaired letterbox for her to open up.
*
After yet another inquisition, a fruitless search for any photographs of Louis, and threats of imminent police custody was over, the six footsteps receded down the path. Jacquie took the hall phone off the hook and sat down with her Happy Chicks free tea entitlement card. With an unsteady hand, she began writing on the back.
Sunday 19th Jan 2014
I’ve forgotten the time…
Dear Graham,
You never replied, so there's nothing left for me to say, except I'm sorry you've been questioned by the police and your private life made so public. My misplaced loyalty to your son has now ended. He’s on his own. I suspect he may be heading for Vienna and something unlawful. I know for a fact at this moment he’s on a ferry near St Malo. In the meantime, have a care for yourself. After all, to his disturbed mind it wasn't just Tina who was willing to give him up when he was born. I also send my deep sorrow to Mrs Martin and to my own dead mother whom I've also badly let down.
Jacquie.
PS I’d made a Will in Louis' favour after Dave left Meadow Hill. What little remains of my assets is now to go to MENCAP, and my solicitors - Miller & Bright in Hook Street, Coventry have the amended, signed and witnessed document.
*
No lights, just a dank morning beyond the windows making the house seem even darker than outside as she propped the card up against an empty milk carton on the kitchen table. Then came the familiar thirteen steps of worn stair carpet, the scuffed bedroom door and the smell of all her days in Mullion Road trapped between that room's four damp walls.
Amongst old nightdresses and a heart-shaped hot water bottle, she soon found what she'd been saving up for ever since that last summer at Meadow Hill. Two hundred round, pink pills like those sweets which made up necklaces she'd worn as a child. Dissolving on the tongue in sharp bursts of happiness.
"Don't gobble them all at once, mind," Doris Harper had warned her only child, but her voice faded as Jacquie unscrewed the first container and tipped its contents into her cupped hand. "They'll make you fat."
These were different.
She'd had long hair then, she remembered. Down to her waist and the envy of her classmates. Slim too. It was the move to Meadow Hill which had made her plump; made her cut that same hair through which Dave had once run his fingers in their long-ago days of making love.
Dave...
She opened her mouth and crammed in the pink mountain followed by another from the second container. Then another, and another. All without drawing breath, chewing, swallowing as if her life depended on it. As if this was the breaking of some terrible fast. Forty days and forty nights, Louis would have doubtless informed her.
Except her ordeal had seemed longer than that. Much longer…
65
11.15 hours Central European Time, with freezing fog shrouding the north French coast making the sea around St Malo indistinguishable from the sky, as the third helicopter deposited Tim Fraser and Derek Jarvis on the St Christopher’s empty top deck. From here, they were due at the briefing room where DS Mike Burrows and his team from Portsmouth were waiting. Furious, like Swindon CID and Peter Deakins, that the Little Bidding story was everywhere, with Louis Perelman named as the wanted perp.
Fraser thrust his folded Sunday paper into his jacket pocket and led Jarvis towards the War Zone. Although pre-occupied with what lay ahead, he was relieved that Barry Taylor of
The Sunday Gazette
was still proving a loyal friend. But for how long?
*
Their chopper's departure had woken Louis up. He’d slept for way too long and could hardly move. His hands were blue, all fingers rigid, and when he yawned, his lips threatened to split apart. Finally, in agony, he hauled his aching bones up to the lifeboat's rim and peered out at the new day. That invisible chopper was moving away. His passport still hidden in his chafing arse.
The leather jacket felt stiff as wood, his chinos like iced skin. The thin, black loafers even worse. So no way he could he hang about outside. His watch still showed 10.30 a.m. GMT, but his fingers were too numb to wind it on an hour. He'd try Dekker again, find some grub and, in a change of plan, hide somewhere else.
He slipped over the lifeboat's side, wondering at the strange silence.
The ferry wasn't moving.
Jesus
.
Just then, two guys wearing donkey jackets and identical black woollen hats over their ears, pushed their way into his space. Although the taller, younger man stared at him and seemed about to speak, he managed to skirt past them and soon make himself scarce.
Before joining the breakfast queue in the larger
Moulin Rouge
self-service cafeteria, he phoned Dekker's number, but there was still no reply, nor could he leave a Facebook message. Both accounts had mysteriously been cancelled. What the Hell was going on in Vienna? And more immediately, what if he was recognised here?
So far he'd not spotted any of the pigs dropped on board, but they could be disguised in plain clothes. He briefly wondered what that diddler Molloy had done with his discarded uniform.