Dying for Christmas (32 page)

You’re running out of time, Jessica Gold
, read the message.
I might have to start looking for companionship elsewhere. Hmmm … where should I start?

I was at work when I read that, peering at it on my iPhone screen on my lap under my desk. I slumped forward with my head in my hands.

‘Are you OK, Jessica?’ Joe Tunstall’s freckly face was wearing a freckly expression of concern.

Then I went to the women’s toilets and locked myself in a cubicle and leaned against the thin partition wall and closed my eyes.

And then I clicked my phone on and sent Natalie a message.

Which is how come I’ve ended up here in my pyjama bottoms, Skyping with this woman. I can’t wait until this is all over and she is out of my life.

But first of all I’ve got to get
him
out of my life. And for that I need her.

We’re looking at each other in silence through our little screens when I hear a noise in the background. It sounds like glasses clinking.

‘There’s someone there. I heard them. You’ve got someone with you.’

She denies it.

She’s lying.

* * *

At first glance Francesca Dunbar’s parents do not give the appearance of people staggering under the weight of a huge sadness, but as they speak, the evidence of the double tragedy they’ve endured comes through in small ways. Catherine Dunbar’s smoothly sculpted face, when not animated with a polite smile, caves in on itself, the skin pleating into folds of grief. Her husband, Andrew, can’t quite keep still, his fingers constantly moving, running through his hair or else turning his mobile phone over and over on the meeting room table, until his wife suddenly shoots out a hand and places it over his, trapping it there.

‘Thank you for seeing us, Detective Superintendent.’

Catherine’s voice is soft but steady, in contrast to the rushed, almost breathless way her husband introduced them. Robertson doesn’t tell them he’s cut short a fundraising lunch to be there.

‘I hope you didn’t have to travel too far. I know you don’t live …’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Andrew interrupts. ‘We were in town anyway. Our older daughter, Cesca’s sister, Anna, lives in London with her family.’

‘We just want to know what’s happening with him. Dominic Lacey.’ When she says his name, Catherine’s mouth puckers as if she is sucking on a lemon. ‘Is he going to survive?’

‘And if so, will you charge him?’ Andrew breaks in. ‘And what are you going to charge him with?’

His wife closes her eyes momentarily as if well used to him leaping ahead of himself.

‘I’m afraid we can’t give out very much information at this point.’ Robertson’s wide, honest face wears an expression of sincere apology. ‘All I can tell you is that Dominic Lacey is alive but he has not yet spoken. As yet no charges have been brought, but obviously we are considering the options very carefully.’

While he is speaking, Catherine Dunbar starts rooting around in her smart leather handbag. When she straightens up, her pale face is flushed pink as if she’s been running. Her hair is a perfect blend of ash blonde and silver highlights, so her rosy cheeks appear garish by contrast.

She lays a photograph down on the table in front of them. They are in the small meeting room on the first floor. There’s a blue institutional-type carpet and magnolia walls and even a small kettle on the windowsill, although everyone brings their coffee or tea from the kitchen along the corridor. The Dunbars are on the opposite side of the table from where Robertson sits, flanked by Kim and Martin, so Catherine turns the photo round as she pushes it across.

The picture shows a young woman with dull, straight, shoulder-length brown hair parted on the side and wide-set brown eyes. She has her arms wrapped around a little boy, hardly more than a baby, with a mass of fine blond curls, the type that will darken as he gets older, and distinctive blue eyes. They are both smiling into the camera and if it wasn’t for the deep purple smudges under the woman’s eyes and the sharp angles of her cheekbones, you might think they were a perfectly happy mother and son.

‘Our daughter and grandson,’ Andrew explains. ‘Dominic Lacey murdered them just as surely as if he’d taken out a gun and shot them.’

Kim is finding it hard to look at the photograph. She sees how forcefully the woman is gripping the child, sees the tightness of the smile. She senses her desperation, although how much of her reaction is based on what she knows about the woman’s fate, she can’t be sure. Cesca Lacey, née Dunbar, loved her son so much she was willing to kill him to save him from danger and to kill herself to be with him.

Kim has moved out of her house and left her children behind. What kind of mother does that make her? She tries not to think about that other case of the mother who killed her baby to save it from herself. She thinks she might not be able to bear it.

‘Have you ever met anyone evil, Detective?’ Catherine Dunbar’s pale, sad eyes are fixed on Kim.

‘In the police, we meet a lot of people who’ve done things that might not exactly win them a badge from the Boy Scouts.’ Kim is attempting a light, humorous tone but she is aware of it falling flat. In her mind, she sees Dominic Lacey staring at her from the hospital bed, his eyes two pinpricks of blue.

Catherine looks away and Kim can see she is disappointed. All of a sudden she wishes she could take the flippant answer back and give a different one. But it is too late.

‘Dominic Lacey is evil,’ says Andrew Dunbar, running his hands through his sandy hair. It is starting to recede on top, and Kim wants to tell him to stop playing with it, but of course she doesn’t. ‘There’s no other word for it.’

The Super looks uncomfortable with the turn the conversation is taking. He doesn’t want to be debating moral absolutes with the Dunbars, Kim suspects.

‘Why do you say he killed them?’ he asks now, trying to take control. ‘As I understand it, he was a couple of hundred miles away when it happened.’

By ‘it’ he is referring to Cesca Lacey sedating her baby son with sleeping pills and then smothering him with a pillow before hanging herself from the light fitting on the upstairs landing of a borrowed house. Every time Kim remembers this, her chest tightens painfully. She looks again at Catherine Dunbar. Would she be able to keep on going if something like that happened to Rory or Katy?

‘I have another photograph here, Detective Superintendent.’

Catherine has withdrawn a different picture from her bag which she now places in front of them, side by side with the other one. It shows a much younger Cesca standing on a beach, steeped in sunshine, her hair bleached with strands of blonde, her skin the colour of honey. She is wearing a bright pink sarong wrapped around under her arms and tied loosely at the neck and is striking a deliberate pose with her hands on her hips. Her smile cracks her face wide open. She isn’t beautiful, not like Natalie, but she has something about her. Life.

Next to it, the Cesca in the other photograph looks ten, twenty years older, as if all the exuberance and vitality of the earlier woman has been sucked right out.

‘This photograph was taken the summer before she met Dominic Lacey. Just three years before the first one I showed you,’ says Catherine. ‘Does that surprise you? Cesca had a difficult adolescence. She was terribly shy and found friendships hard to negotiate, but when she went to university all that changed and by the time she was in her early twenties she was starting to come into her own. She had started a job working for a friend of ours who runs a publishing company. Cesca was an assistant in the publicity department. She loved it. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to see her happy at last. You don’t have children, do you, Detective?’

For one sickening moment, Kim thinks she is addressing her but it is Martin she is talking to.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Not yet.’

Kim is surprised. As far as she knows Martin has never had a relationship that lasted longer than a few weeks. ‘I don’t do commitment,’ he’d once boasted to her. But he sounds almost wistful now with that ‘not yet’, as if it’s something he’s aspiring to.

‘I thought not,’ Mrs Dunbar resumes. ‘You won’t understand then how heart-wrenching it is to see your children suffer. But as I say, she’d turned a corner.’

‘And then she met
him
.’ Andrew Dunbar can’t resist jumping in, moving the conversation back to Lacey.

‘How did they meet, Mr Dunbar?’ asks Robertson.

‘He was clearing out an office on a different floor of the building where the publishing company is based. You know that’s what he does – buying up stuff from businesses that have gone bankrupt. Vulture. She was standing outside with a couple of girls from work who smoke. She was keeping them company. He came up and chatted to them and then Cesca went inside. We believe one of the other girls must have let slip that she had money, because after that he pursued her relentlessly. She wasn’t used to that kind of attention. She was completely bowled over.’

‘Please understand’ – Catherine reaches out across the table and rests her hand briefly on Kim’s – ‘it’s not that we’re underselling our daughter. To us she was the most beautiful girl in the world. But a man like that, who is interested only in appearances – in making everyone else envy him – wouldn’t have looked at Cesca twice if she hadn’t been wealthy.’

‘What did you think of him, when you first met him?’ Kim asks her.

‘I thought he was incredibly charming, incredibly good-looking. But there was a sense in which he was almost
too
charming, do you know what I mean? It was like it was all on the surface of him – something he wore, not something he was.’

Andrew grunts. ‘I didn’t like him from the start.’

Kim wonders if it is a male trait, this insistence that he wasn’t taken in, even if in the end that might mean shouldering more blame for not preventing what happened.

‘How quickly did you realize he was a … something was amiss?’ Martin ventures. Robertson’s presence is tempering his usual bullishness.

‘For the first six months or so, everything was fine. I’ve never seen Cesca so happy,’ says Catherine. ‘But as soon as they got engaged, things began to change. He took control over planning the wedding. Whatever Cesca suggested, he’d very subtly criticize it and if she tried to insist, he’d withdraw until she gave in. She forgave him everything. She said it was just because he wanted the wedding to be so perfect for her. That’s what men like that do, they make their failings into someone else’s responsibility.’

‘And after the wedding?’

Kim is aware of the Super, sitting to her left, glancing fleetingly at the clock on the wall of the room as he moves the conversation on.

‘Everything changed. Cesca became even quieter, more reserved.’

‘And she kept cancelling arrangements,’ Andrew says. ‘We’d invite them up for the weekend and either she was always too busy, or they’d accept and then at the last minute there’d be some reason they couldn’t come.’

‘We bought them a sweet little cottage in Kentish Town as a wedding present,’ his wife continues. ‘They chose it themselves but apparently as soon as they moved in Dominic wasn’t happy with it. He said the proportions were all wrong. The rooms were too small apparently. They made him depressed.’

Kim knows that sweet little cottages in Kentish Town go for well over a million quid.

‘When Cesca got pregnant with Sammy, things improved for a while. She came up to stay on her own a couple of times and seemed almost like her old self. And after Sammy was born she just glowed. She loved that little boy so much. We all did.’ Catherine Dunbar’s voice cracks on that last sentence.

Even with Robertson between them, Kim senses Martin’s discomfort. He doesn’t deal well with women’s emotions.

‘But things rapidly deteriorated again. There was always an excuse for why we couldn’t come to stay, and even if we stayed with Cesca’s sister, Anna, Cesca mostly wouldn’t let us come round. Sammy was sleeping, Sammy had a bug. Then one night, Anna rang us, very upset. She’d been so worried because Cesca kept putting her off, so she’d called round unexpectedly. Cesca didn’t want to let her in, but relented in the end. She had a cut over one of her eyes. She said she’d walked into the corner of a kitchen cupboard. Anna says she was so quiet she was practically a zombie.’

‘Didn’t your older daughter confront Cesca about what was going on?’ Martin asked.

‘Of course. But the fact is, she was besotted by him. A couple of times she left him and came up to us to stay with Sammy but all he had to do was call her and say he was sorry and tell her she was the love of his life and she’d go back to him.’

‘When he started the affair with that
other woman
, Cesca was beside herself.’