A Game of Proof (7 page)

Just as refusing to have little Simon in her house was the very worst. The thing that ruined him, perhaps. Unless it was Kevin’s genes.

Her mother’s plan was for her to make a complete break with the past. Have Simon adopted, never see Kevin again, go back to school.

The last part of it worked perfectly. Sarah signed up for evening classes to complete her GCSEs and found, suddenly, a voracious hunger for learning. The more she learned the more she wanted to know; the harder she worked the more she wanted to work. It was an escape, a recreation of herself. It was something that gave her control again. It became as necessary to her as breathing. It lasted the rest of her life.

But the pain, the guilt about her baby Simon didn’t leave her. She didn’t want him to be adopted. As the work replaced the Valium she railed at her hard-faced mother for refusing to have the baby back in the house. No, her mother said. Have him adopted. It’ll hurt now but you’ll thank me one day. It’ll turn out best for you both in the end.

One night at the evening class she read the papers explaining adoption and then screwed them up. They’re screwing my mind, she thought. That was when the teacher, Bob, found her crying at her desk half an hour after the class had ended. He took her out for a coffee and three months later they were married.

Bob was everything that Kevin was not - intelligent, well educated, thoughtful, witty, and kind. Where Kevin had been short, cocky and macho, Bob was tall, with a neat beard and glasses, physically weak, gauche and unassertive. Where Kevin had been a ravenous, demanding, insatiable lover Bob was gentle, sensitive, almost shy. He was also idealistic. He was fascinated not by Sarah’s body, as Kevin had been, but by her story. It seemed to him she had lived a whole novel by the age of eighteen. Her hard work and determination to succeed reflected something in himself; her disastrous circumstances challenged him to help her.

If she married him, he would adopt Simon too. It was the right thing to do.

And so it might have been, too, if they hadn’t had Emily.

Not that Emily was a mistake, of course not, Sarah told herself, as she turned her bike onto the quiet country road that led to home. The mistake had been having her so soon after they married. While Bob’s relationship with Simon, his project to demonstrate the benefits of having a teacher for a stepfather, had only just begun. Of course Bob tried to be fair and kind to Simon but his enormous delight at Emily’s birth had been obvious to everyone. Especially to the troubled little boy, who had just come back to live with the mother who had abandoned him, and now had a new baby. And this strange, bearded man who wanted to teach him things.

Perhaps if we’d waited a year, Sarah wondered sadly. Would that have made the difference? Or were the difficulties in his genes? Simon was Kevin’s son; that had become clearer the older he got. But he was hers too - if only he’d wanted to
learn
from her and Bob, instead of defying them as he always had. But now he was nineteen and had left home. He had his own life to lead, his own mistakes to make. There was no more she could do.

Whereas Emily and Bob
were
at home, waiting for her impatiently. Sarah pushed her guilt about Simon into a drawer at the back of her mind, and closed it. For the moment, Emily and Bob were more important. And things were not going particularly well with them, either.

As she approached home Sarah saw Bob’s Volvo parked in the drive. When Sarah had first seen this house three years ago she had thought it entrancing. It was a detached modern house, in half an acre of its own grounds. It had a lawn and a golden Robinia tree in front. But it was the back that was its real glory. The spacious rooms had large picture windows which opened onto a fifty metre lawn which sloped away towards a meadow with grazing cows the far side of a little gate. Beyond the meadow was a footpath and willow trees on the banks of the river, and beyond that again, more meadows and the church of a distant village whose bells they could hear on Sunday mornings. Socially it was as far from Seacroft as you could get.

With Sarah earning fees for the first time and Bob just having become a head teacher they took a deep breath, an enormous loan, and joined the middle classes.

Or at least, Sarah, Bob and Emily did.

Simon hated it from the start. He had been sixteen then, beginning his last year at school. The new house meant long bus journeys, and hassle when he wanted to meet his friends. To him it was the final proof that he meant less to his mother than her own lust for success. Two years later he moved into a small terraced house in town, the deposit paid by Sarah and Bob.

The loss of Simon twitched in Simon’s mind daily, like the nerves from a missing limb. He was the family ghost, the casualty of her conflict with Kevin.

She parked her bike in the garage, and walked into the dining room. Bob was in his shirt sleeves, eating baked beans and reading the paper. Emily was nowhere to be seen

‘Hi!’ she said. ‘Anything for me?’

‘Beans in the warmer,’ Bob answered, frowning. ‘You’ve got ten minutes.’

‘Why ten minutes?’

‘Emily’s concert. She’s got to be there by eight fifteen. Or have you forgotten?’

‘Oh Christ!’ She went into the hall and began to peel off her boots and leather trousers. The trousers snagged in her tights, pulling them half down too, and as she struggled, bent over, Emily came down the stairs.

‘Mum! For God’s sake!’

‘Hello, Em. I’m sorry I’m ...’

‘We’ve got to go! I’m late! And nobody wants to see your bum!’

The tone of mingled exasperation and pure disgust in Emily’s voice made it quite clear to Sarah that the girl saw nothing attractive or funny about her mother’s nether regions. Emily herself had clearly taken pains with her appearance - hair neatly brushed, eye-liner, blusher and lipstick generously applied. The only drawback was the anxious, petulant frown on her face.

Sarah extracted her leg from the trousers, hoisted up her tights, and smiled encouragingly. ‘You look really nice, Em ...’

‘Well, make sure
you
do. We’ve got to go
now
, mum!’

‘Five minutes.’ Sarah hurried upstairs, changed, brushed her hair quickly, and gulped four mouthfuls of dried baked beans before Bob and Emily hustled her into the Volvo.

‘You forgot, didn’t you?’ said Bob, reversing the car. ‘Again!’

Sarah sighed. ‘It’s an important case and I’m cross-examining tomorrow. Anyway ...’

‘Stop!’ Emily screamed from the back. ‘Dad, go back - I’ve forgotten my music!’

‘For heaven’s sake ...’

‘Why on earth they have a concert the week before their GCSEs I cannot understand,’ Bob said, as Emily dashed back into the house. ‘The poor child’s in a bad enough state as it is.’

‘She’s a clever girl. She’ll manage.’

‘How would you know?’ Bob snapped. ‘You never see her. She was in a dreadful state when I got home - tears, books and papers all over the place!’

‘She did well enough in the mocks.’

‘Yes, well.’ Bob fell silent as Emily ran down the drive, got in, slammed the door, and shouted
‘drive!’
in a voice whose nerves contrasted severely with the cool appearance she had presented on the stairs.

Sarah said nothing. Clearly they were both too wound up to accept comfort from her anyway. Despite what Bob said, Emily was a conscientious student who had got mostly As and Bs in her mock GCSEs a few months ago. If her work ethic lacked the intensity and rigid self-discipline of her mother’s, that was because her life was so much easier. Emily had a comfortable home, loving parents, no babies to look after ...

Sarah remembered how phenomenally organized she’d had to be in those early years of her marriage to Bob. He’d had a full teaching job and she, with a toddler and a baby to care for, had begun studying two A levels. But it had always been worth it. As she began studying at a higher level, she felt as if wires in her head that had fused together with rust were being cleaned and pulled apart and tuned. It became a pleasure that she couldn’t do without.

When she got an A in both subjects her addiction was confirmed. Simon was six by then and Emily three. She began an Open University degree, getting up at five each morning to study. She even protected her desk from the prying hands of children by fencing herself in with a playpen. The sight of their mother in there with her books became such a common family sight that the first time little Emily saw a monkey in a cage at the zoo she proudly informed everyone that it was ‘studying.’

But to Sarah her studies opened up such vistas of freedom that it was those outside who were in prison. She learned to inhabit two worlds - one in which she cooked, cleaned, and cared for the children, and the other in which she studied and passed exams - always with the highest grades so that she could move on to the next stage. After the OU degree she read law at the university of Leeds, and then spent a year at the Middle Temple in London, coming home only at weekends on the train. By then Simon had been fourteen, Emily ten, and her constant study was a fact of family life. And finally it had paid off. She got a pupillage and then a place in chambers as a barrister.

And so she had climbed to the top of her ladder, only to find another stretching away above - the ladder to becoming a QC and eventually, perhaps, a judge. And the case of Gary Harker was one of the first squalid, slippery rungs.

She began thinking about the case in the car and resumed, guiltily, during the school concert. She had no ear for music and although she was proud that Emily had passed so many flute exams she couldn’t concentrate on it for long. Tomorrow’s questions began to replay themselves in her mind, and she imagined the responses Sharon would make. There were a couple of awkward points, she realised, which she would have to work on when she got home.

Emily stood up to play the flute solo she had been practising, and her mother smiled encouragingly. But Emily wondered, not for the first time, whether the mind behind her mother’s smile was really concentrating on her at all.

Chapter Five

A
T BREAKFAST that morning Terry’s youngest daughter Esther let her pet hamster out of its cage, and by the time Terry had retrieved it from behind the sofa the rush hour traffic was gridlocked across the city, so that he was late for the team meeting which he was due to lead. When he arrived at the incident room his new boss, DCI Will Churchill, was striding back and forth at the head of his new troops, some of whom were looking distinctly resentful.

‘And when it comes to police work, what I’m looking for is
commitment,
’ he barked in his sharp Essex accent. ‘That’s what will finally nail the killer of Maria Clayton and the rapist who attacked Karen Whitaker.’ He waved at the photographs, maps, and articles about the
Hooded Rapist
displayed around then incident room walls. ‘I may be new here, but that has its own advantages. An outsider can often see more clearly.’

And annoy people more deeply, Terry thought bitterly. Before Mary died, I was in line for this job. And it would have been enough for me, I didn’t want to rise higher. But Churchill, a man ten years younger and six inches shorter than himself, had been fast-tracked within the service from the moment he joined. He would be with them for a few years, no more, trampling on everyone in this room as he scrambled to the next rung of the ladder. Seeing Terry sliding into a back seat he broke off his tirade.

‘Ah, DI Bateson, I presume. Good of you to join us. Forgive me, I have used the general’s absence from his post for a little pep talk. One serious crime solved, two more to go. Or three, if your visit to the farm girl proved anything yesterday.’

Terry signed, registering the implied criticism, and rose from his back seat.

‘Shall I brief the team about it now, sir?’

‘Of course, old son, you carry on.’

Churchill parked himself in a front seat to judge the performance of his second in command, and began picking his teeth with a match.

Terry looked around the room, feeling grateful for the moral support he detected in several faces. Unlike Churchill he knew these people, he had worked with them for years. Briefly, he outlined what he learned at the Steersby farm yesterday. All of them knew the details of the Clayton and Whitaker cases; most still believed, with Terry, that Gary Harker was the likeliest suspect for both. But clearly, he could have had nothing to do with this Steersby girl.

‘Most likely, then, it’s a copycat,’ he concluded. ‘But no hood this time, so at least we’ll get a photofit. In the meantime,’ he said, staring straight at Churchill as he spoke, ‘I know the amount of dedicated police work that has gone into the these investigations, and today we have our chief suspect up in court, thanks to the efforts of this team. But he’s only facing one charge. If Gary Harker is convicted this week - as we all hope and expect he will be - we need to go over the Clayton evidence especially with a fine-tooth comb. He’s still not ruled out of that. And if someone else attacked Whitaker then we need to find that person too. It’s our job to ensure that  the women of York can sleep easy in their beds once again. Thank you. That’s all.’

As the meeting broke up Churchill approached Terry. ‘You’re still set on this Harker for the
Hooded Rapist
, than, Terence?’

Terry winced. Terence was his christian name but he hated anyone to use it. To him it sounded like some cheap gangster, not himself at all. Terry was uncertain if Churchill knew, or cared, much about the tragedy that had shattered his personal life; but he certainly did know which version of his name he preferred to be called by, because Terry had told him, several times. The man was persisting in this
Terence
business deliberately, to get under his skin. He decided to ignore it.

‘I’ve known Gary a long time, sir. He’s moved from petty theft to assault, GBH and rape over a period of ten years. He has exactly the profile we’re looking for.’

‘Yes, but the DNA in the Whitaker case wasn’t his, was it, old son? So until we have positive evidence to the contrary, I suggest you assume that Harker didn’t murder Clayton or attack this schoolgirl either, and get out there looking for the man who did.’ He paused. ‘Any reason why Harker won’t be convicted?’