Fragile Cord (25 page)

She’d attended
the local secondary modern; a sixties built building standing
several storeys high, as though the local education authority
equated height with prestige. The site had been demolished several
years ago to make way for the erection of a
community school
, whatever that
was.

An
uncomfortable feeling settled on Alex’s shoulders yet she wasn’t
sure why she felt so ill at ease, she just knew she’d be glad when
her visit was over. There was something unpalatable about places
like this; places that excluded the masses in favour of the
privileged few that didn’t sit well. It was the implicit
superiority of the place, from the grand design of the building to
the impeccable uniform, ways that claimed
we’re better
without ever having to
prove it. In a nutshell she resented the way that not paying for
Ben’s education made her feel inferior, implying that what she was
able to offer him was second best. She shrugged her shoulders,
rationalising she shouldn’t beat herself up over circumstances she
was unable to change.

She’d approached several
mothers dropping off children similar in age to Kyle but had found
it nigh on impossible to get them to wind down their car windows
let alone step out from their warm leather seats. A closer
inspection revealed why – most of the women wore pyjamas beneath
their Barbour jackets – almost a uniform in itself. Alex stifled a
smile.

Not so immaculate after all.

She had better luck indoors,
where a young female teacher in formal attire offered to take her
through to Kyle’s classroom while the rest of the school attended
morning assembly. The woman smiled at Alex kindly.

‘I only wear this first thing
in the morning when the little darlings are dropped off and again
at home time.’ she said conspiratorially, referring to the
knee-length black gown she wore over a mid-calf skirt and white
blouse.

‘Makes the parents feel as
though they’re getting their pound of flesh.’ The tone in her voice
hinted that she thought the whole idea was ridiculous. Alex liked
her immediately.

The woman, who turned out to be
Kyle’s form mistress, introduced herself as Miss Caplan.
Olive-skinned with frizzy hair, she displayed dazzling teeth when
she smiled, although the smile was short-lived when she remembered
the purpose of Alex’s visit.

‘I was so sorry to hear…’ she
began, casting around for the right words, deciding there weren’t
any, ‘…we all were.’

She raised her arms helplessly,
as though addressing a Gospel choir. ‘If only we’d known…..’

A life summed up in four tragic
words.

That was half
the problem, Alex supposed, there was nothing anybody
could
know, no danger
signals they could have responded to. She tried to find something
anyway:

‘What was your impression of
Mrs Kavanagh…of both Kyle’s parents for that matter?’

A pause.

‘They were a nice couple.’ Kyle
form teacher began, ‘Thought the world of Kyle. Both looking
forward to the birth of his little brother or sister….’ Alex
blinked away an image of Benson cutting into the foetus, focussed
instead on the tight curls spiralling out of the teacher’s scalp.
She’d picked up on the woman’s hesitation, wondered if she’d
misread it. She decided to backtrack.

‘How would you have described
Kyle’s mother, Miss Caplan?’

‘Please, call me Adele-’ she
insisted, and then: ‘She liked to keep her own company, hadn’t
fallen in with any of the cliques that quickly emerge in any
school.’ Her arms had dropped back to her sides and she folded one
across her stomach forming a barrier between them, placed her other
hand under her chin as though her head had suddenly become too
heavy for her neck to support.

‘She was quiet, but I wouldn’t
say shy…just choosy about the company she kept I suppose. She got
involved with school life – helped out on trips, that kind of
thing. Joined the PTA, typed up the minutes of the meetings, manned
the stalls at the Christmas Fair – she was always willing to help
out…Everything she did she based around little Kyle, it was clear
she doted on him.’

Alex’s heart seemed to jar at
the words, but she wasn’t about to let her feelings get in the way
of her professional responsibilities. She let the moment pass.

‘Had she been acting strangely
recently, anything strike you as odd?’

Adele pursed her lips in
concentration. ‘Not really…I suppose if I had to pick something
then she was perhaps a little quieter over the last week or two –
I’d put it down to tiredness during her last trimester. I didn’t
ask, she wasn’t someone you felt comfortable enquiring after.’

Another pause.

‘What is it Adele?’ Alex
persisted. She didn’t have the time to tip toe around but it was
obvious Kyle’s teacher was troubled about something. She decided to
appeal to her on a personal level, in the hope that it might loosen
her tongue.

‘Look Adele,
if you do know something,
anything
that can help me piece together this horrendous
puzzle I’d appreciate it. I’ve never come across anything like
this…’ she paused, checking Adele was really listening to what she
had to say.

‘How does a
doting parent turn into a killer overnight….?’ She pleaded,
‘I
have
to find
out why. I have a young son, I need to point to a reason that
explains why this happened, to reassure myself I won’t one day wake
up and be a danger to my
own
child.’
Christ,
she had no idea where
that
came from, but somehow, baring
her soul to a stranger seemed to calm nerve endings that had been
jingling ever since she’d taken on the case.

And better still Adele began to
nod.

‘Well…..one thing struck me as
odd I suppose.’ The teacher informed her, unfolding her arms and
letting her neck do some of the work again. She leaned back against
the cool wall of the corridor.

‘Most parents think they’ve given birth
to the next Messiah right?’ She turned to face Alex, looking for
corroboration: ‘You mentioned you’ve got a son, so you’ll know what
I mean?’

Alex inclined her head. She
tried not to picture Ben’s face when she was discussing Kyle,
fearful that tragedy was contagious.

Adele nodded,
satisfied. ‘I only have to compliment one of my pupils on the
slightest achievement and suddenly his parents think they’ve a
child genius on their hands. If he wins the egg and spoon race, the
following week he’ll be despatched to school with running spikes
and a personal coach in tow wielding a stopwatch. If they do well
in a maths test mummy hires a tutor to coach them towards exams
they’re nowhere
near
mature enough to sit.’

Adele studied Alex’s reaction,
saw her cheeks flush at the description of precocious
parenting.

‘Sounds familiar?’ She asked,
smiling.

‘Ye…es,’ Alex
acknowledged. ‘Only I hope to God I’m not as bad as that.’ She
remembered a conversation she’d had with Carl about booking piano
lessons for Ben because he’d been thrilled with a toy organ they’d
bought him the Christmas before. Carl had laughed, hadn’t realised
she was
serious...

‘So it was all
the more surprising really…’ Adele continued, forcing Alex to snap
her attention back to their conversation, ‘…that when I made a
point of speaking to Mrs Kavanagh about her son’s quite obvious
gift, I got a cool reception. She was so disinterested in his
emerging talent that I thought
Sod it, if
she’s not wanting to nurture it then I bloody well
will.’

Her voice caught, and she turned away
for a moment, began walking towards the Infants’ wing.

‘You know, I saw Kyle run over
to his mother on Monday.’

She swallowed hard, as though
admitting a difficult truth. ‘I’d let him keep a piece of work he’d
completed in class. He wanted to show it to her and to be honest I
thought that if that didn’t melt her heart then nothing would.’

She shook her head slowly, as
though trying to fathom the unfathomable. ‘She had a talented son
yet she seemed to treat his gift with shame.’

Another pause.

‘He ran over to her so pleased
with himself, holding up his work, showing her what he’d done.’

A single tear rolled down
Adele’s check leaving a track in her make-up.

‘What did Tracey do?’ Alex asked
softly.

Adele dabbed at the corner of
her eye with a tissue she kept folded inside the sleeve of her
blouse. She blew her nose, leaving a trail of stringy snot above
her lip. Alex glanced away while Adele wiped it off with her index
finger and thumb.

‘She just seemed to freeze…and
then…’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, she gave him this weird
look…as though he was a stranger she was trying to place, like she
was studying him for the first time…I was called away at that
point, another parent wanted to speak to me, and by the time I
returned they had gone.’

They had travelled the length
of the school along a central corridor lined with senior school
artwork and photographs of different year groups, the only constant
on the changing roll call was the row of staff seated in front of
each photo, older and fatter as the years went by. At five years’
service Miss Caplan was still considered a newcomer, she explained
with a wry smile, and Alex had been about to say something similar,
that the police force probably wasn’t so different in that respect,
when Adele led her into Kyle’s classroom and pointed out a drawing
that sent every one of Alex’s senses reeling.

‘I reckon he was abandoned when
he was a kid, there’s a whole load of pent up anger going on down
there.’

‘I’d heard he wanted to be a
butcher but that wasn’t upmarket enough for his Cheshire set
family.’

‘Maybe its attention
seeking.’

They watched the first incision
as the blade sliced through flesh from chest to navel.

He had their attention now.

Coupland stood
beside Turnbull in the observation gallery in the hospital
mortuary. The room overlooked the operating table where several
feet below them Harry Benson conducted the post mortem on Ricky
Wilson. It was a fairly routine procedure; the cause of death was
peritonitis, which had set in following the knife wound that had
ruptured Wilson’s bowel. Benson was topping and tailing –
literally
– the victim
to establish any facts that might help identify the weapon used, or
the assailant.

The advantage of the observation
gallery was that it gave them a bird’s eye view of the procedure
without the background ambiance of sloshing sounds and the smell,
which Benson had warned would be particularly ripe given the
infection that had set in. He communicated with them via a
microphone positioned above his head. The officers watched as he
stood back to allow a technician to take photographs of the
repaired entry wound and damage to the bowel, which would be used
for evidence if the case went to trial.

Coupland was aware that most
people thought pathologists were macabre, harbouring a zest for the
dead that bordered on ghoulish, that they’d chosen this path
because of their inability to connect with living patients, yet he
knew that was far from the truth. If anything, Benson’s bedside
manner was better than most of his peers whose patients still had a
pulse. He could be sanctimonious at times, but he was respectful of
the dead and the part that they’d played in the lives of others and
importantly, Coupland trusted his judgement.

Benson smiled at the banter
wafting down from the gallery above, the gentle mickey-taking the
detectives used to distract themselves from the bloodthirsty
procedure. He understood it was a coping mechanism, nothing more.
‘You plods are all the bloody same,’ he observed good naturedly,
‘full of wise-cracks to mask the sound of your bowels
twitching.’

What he said was true, Coupland
conceded. He could handle the violence; it was the aftermath he
found disturbing. The blood splatters and clots; the punctures and
leaks; the brain fluid and shit.

A murder was
like a relay race, Coupland reasoned as he watched Benson take
measurements of Wilson’s knife wound before placing his finger into
the bowel to feel where the surgeon had carried out his futile
repair. A few minutes more and he’d be able to inform them as to
the
How
; it was
up to them to take that information and establish the
Who
.

Benson leaned into the
microphone and addressed his audience: ‘A single sharp edged blade
caused the penetrating wound.’

Coupland nodded impatiently,
this much he knew. The pathologist held up a bloody mass of organs
as though he was about to make a pagan sacrifice. ‘I can tell you
that the weapon penetrated Wilson’s abdomen at an upward angle with
such force that it sliced open his bowel,’

The organ was tubular without
beginning or end, Coupland thought it looked like a bloodied eel.
Benson pointed to an area that to the untrained eye looked no
different from the rest.

‘As I said,
the weapon sliced open his bowel, stopping only when the knife hilt
came into contact with the surface of his skin.’ Benson smiled
smugly,
that
had
shut the buggers up.

‘From the
measurements I’ve taken,’ he spoke directly to Turnbull, ‘I
can
tell you that the
blade used matches the length and width of your standard kitchen
chopping knife.’ He dropped the organs back into the body’s cavity,
nodded to his assistant that he could begin stitching Wilson back
together.