Blind Fury (32 page)

“It was a few hundred . . .” She had tears spilling down her cheeks as she choked out, “All right, it was about a grand, in mostly ten- and twenty-pound notes.” She was still lying, because it had been two thousand pounds, but she was too scared to admit the amount.

“Thank you for that information, Emerald. As I said to you, I just needed you to be honest with me.”

“Will I get booked?”

“I shouldn’t think so. But it won’t really be me who decides,” Anna walked to the front door. “It’s all about us trying to find out who killed your friend. We believe Margaret might have been blackmailing someone, and that is the reason why she had so much money.”

“Shit. I’m sorry, but I swear on my kids’ lives, I dunno nothing about anything like that.”

Anna passed her card over, saying that if Emerald should think of anything else that might be of help, she was to contact Anna on her direct line. Emerald’s hand was on the front door, ready to open it, as Anna said there was one more thing that bothered her. Emerald slapped the door with the flat of her hand. “Bloody hell, now what?”

“It’s just you said Maggie left her suitcase with you and that you had no contact with her apart from the one phone call, and you mentioned she left a message.”

“Right, yeah. It was her, wantin’ to stay.”

“You have stated that was the last time you had anything to do with her, that you never saw her again, and then you found out she was dead.”

“Right. I read about it in the papers.”

“If what you have told us is the truth, the last time Maggie stayed with you is when the blinds were repaired. That was a long time ago, so you kept her suitcase here for many months.”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t believe you. If it had contained clothes and money, why didn’t she come back for it? Unless you did see her again after that phone call, which you maintain was the last time you spoke to her.”

Emerald kicked at the front door, swearing, and Anna stepped well back.

“You think I don’t fuckin’ feel about it, ’cause I do! I mean, she was a right pain in the arse, but I can’t be blamed for what happened to her. It’s got nothin’ to do with me, and I was about the only friend she bloody had, so that’s why I’ve said nuffink.”

“Nothing about what, exactly?”

Emerald sighed, leaning her back against the front door. “I was just coming back from work, and she turned up. She wanted to stay and said she could give me a few quid. She didn’t want to go into a hostel, as people were nicking stuff off her.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe two months before she was murdered. She had her case with her, and she’d been drinking, so there was no way I’d let her in with the kids. It was a Saturday, like today, and they were at home.”

Anna said nothing, waiting as Emerald gave another long, shuddering sigh.

“I told her she could leave her case with me, but that was it. She got a bit stroppy but then handed it to me.”

“How did she look?”

“Same as always. Well, not exactly. She didn’t look like she’d been workin’, know what I mean? And she’d had her hair bleached. Anyway, she said she’d be back for it in a couple of days. She also said—and this got me pissed off—that it was locked and she’d know if I’d opened it. Bloody nerve, I thought, considering how much I’d done for her.”

“Was she carrying anything else?”

“She had a big holdall bag. Never left that with me. She walked off and . . .” Emerald paused. “She turned and gave me a wave and was smiling. To be honest, I did feel bad, but then I shut the door. I put her case into the box room, and I swear on me kids’ lives I never opened it. Well, I knew she had some hard-nut friends, like. Remember I told you they duffed up a geezer that tipped her out of his truck, so I left it alone. I even waited after she died in case someone or other contacted me about it. When nothin’ happened, I pried the lock off it and said nuffink to nobody about it.”

“Thank you, Emerald.”

Anna added the new details from Emerald to the incident board and wrote that a priority should be tracing the foster parents of Margaret Potts’s children. She then went to ask Mike if it was possible for her to leave before lunch, as she had a prior commitment.

“Not like you, Travis,” he said, sounding surprised by her request. He also pointed out that she had not worked weekends for some time.

“It’s quite important,” she persevered, “and it’s not as if we’re inundated.”

“Tell me something I don’t know. Okay, permission granted. Family thing, is it?”

“Yes,” she lied.

Anna drove up to see Ken, arriving early Saturday night. He was on duty until eleven but had left a key with his neighbor. He would have to work Sunday but said he would try and swing it that they had at least part of the day together. She was tired out after the long drive and had gone to bed, waking when he got in beside her. He kissed her and then flopped back onto his pillow.

“Listen, my mum has asked if you’d like to go over tomorrow. You don’t have to, but as I’m on duty, I just wondered . . .”

She leaned up on her elbow and said that she’d love to see his parents again.

“Honestly, you don’t have to.”

“I want to. Didn’t you say it was their wedding anniversary? Maybe you could come by later?”

“I love you,” he said, giving her a hug.

Anna arrived at Ken’s parents’ with a large bouquet of flowers, and Mrs. Hudson hurried her into the kitchen. As she put the flowers into a vase, she explained that she’d been baking an anniversary cake and had to finish the icing but didn’t want her husband, Roy, to see it.

“I’m going to get him to clean that car of yours, which will keep him outside. He’s down at the store, getting a nice bottle of wine for dinner and . . .” The front doorbell rang. “That’s him, never has his keys. I won’t be a minute. Actually, no, you’d better come out, or he’ll want to come in and say hello.”

Roy Hudson was wearing overalls and Wellington boots, ready to wash and polish his own car, which was parked alongside Anna’s Mini. Anna said that he didn’t really need to wash hers.

“I always obey orders, love, and the wife’s keeping me out of the way ’cause she’s probably baking up a cake or something, so you go on back inside.”

He gave her a smile almost identical to Ken’s, which left her with no choice but to return to the kitchen. She watched, fascinated, as Mrs. Hudson prepared the marzipan and wrapped it around the layered sponge cake; then she was shown how to mix the icing and prepare the cones for the decoration.

“I’ll show you how to make little roses. We’ll need the white icing to dry nice and hard so the colors don’t run, and if you’d like to practice, you can use the breadboard.”

Mrs. Hudson was extremely patient and encouraging as Anna managed to make awful clumps of pink icing over the board. After a number of attempts, she managed a rather good small rose with petals.

“That’s ever so good, dear. Now you can put them on the cake.”

“No, no, I don’t think so. I don’t want to ruin it.”

“You won’t. I’ll mix up a blue and a green for the writing, but I’m not putting on how many years we’ve been married, there’s not enough room.” She laughed.

To spend half an afternoon icing a cake and then having toasted cheese sandwiches with Roy and Brenda was a lovely experience. She was asked a lot of questions about her own parents but not, thankfully, about her work. She was so relaxed that she didn’t think about it until she was sitting drinking tea with Brenda, who was surrounded by all the photographs of her foster children.

“Did the parents of the children you cared for pay regular visits?”

“Some did, but to be honest, most of them only made promises. The hard part for me was when they didn’t turn up. I’d get the children all bathed and dressed smartly, and they’d sit at the front window waiting. Time and time again, the promises were broken, and they would be so disappointed, and then we’d have tantrums and tears.”

“Did the parents send birthday cards and gifts?”

Brenda shrugged. “Often when they first came to me, we’d get phone calls and cards, but inevitably, they would peter out. Roy and I would try and make up for it—you know, by having special parties and cakes.”

“What about money?”

“Well, the Social Services obviously paid for us to do the fostering, and they didn’t really like us to take money off the children’s parents. Most were single parents; sometimes if money was sent, we’d put it into a savings account for the child. We’d never touch it ourselves.” Brenda poured herself another cup of tea. “Why do you ask?”

Anna gave a brief outline of a victim’s children being fostered but didn’t go into details about Margaret Potts.

“Were her children abused?” Brenda asked.

“I honestly don’t know; they could have been. It seems, as far as I know, that it was almost a relief for their mother to have them taken away, as her husband was violent to her and a drunkard.”

“We used to get a lot of poor mites that had been half-starved, never mind thrashed, but you know . . .” Brenda hesitated.

“Go on, please.”

“I always looked on my charges like a garden. It may sound silly, but you can take a run-down, bedraggled garden, and with tender loving care, you can make everything come alive. Now, sometimes, no matter how hard you work, the weeds take over and strangle the nice orderly flower beds. Or you can get a bed of nettles spring up, and they’re the worst—they’re always hard to keep from growing back. We had some, and no matter what we did, we couldn’t stop them stinging and doing the worst damage. I believe the worst kind is when a child has never known affection, has been ignored and never touched or kissed or cuddled. They were the hardest to deal with, because they couldn’t trust being loved.”

“It must have been difficult.”

“It was, but the rewards always made everything worthwhile. I had a little tigress once, she’d bite and kick and was very destructive, and I was run ragged by her, as she also made the other children unsettled. Just when I was wondering if I’d taken on too much, she came into the kitchen. I knew she was behind me, and I was wondering if she was going to sidle up and kick me on the ankles, but she wound her skinny little arms around me and asked if she could call me Mummy.”

Roy appeared in the doorway, looking grubby but minus his Wellington boots. “Oh, she’s not going on about her garden theory, is she?”

Brenda laughed and offered him a cup of tea. “He’s a one to talk. He first started saying that I was out of my mind taking on one, never mind a whole houseful of them, but it was him that went and bought a caravan so we could take the kids to the seaside.”

Roy sat down with his tea as Brenda opened a drawer, taking out one of her photo albums.

“Not the albums, Brenda love, she’s been shown them.”

“I wanted her to see the ones with you on the beach, Roy, with all the children by the caravan.”

Anna crossed to her, smiling and saying, “I want to see the photographs, I really do.”

“I’m going to have a bath and leave you both to it.”

Roy walked out and Brenda sat down, searching through the album, but suddenly gasped, “I’ve got to put the leg of lamb in the oven! Here, dear, you look through them.”

Brenda carried out the tea tray, and Anna sat on the sofa with the albums. There were lots of holiday snaps, with caravan, without caravan, and with various children on a donkey ride. They seemed to be all ages, and what was touching about them all was the joy on their faces. Anna went to replace the album, and stacked in the drawer in no particular order were loose family photographs. She couldn’t resist looking through them, seeing Ken at different ages with his parents and Lizzie, and with a good-looking younger boy whom she presumed was his brother, Robin. He was, as she’d been told, handsome and darker-haired, like his mother, with a fine chiseled face and dark brooding eyes unlike either parents’.

She was about to replace them when she saw a picture of Ken with his arm resting around the shoulders of a tall man of a similar age. They were smiling into the camera. Ken was wearing a tracksuit, while the other man wore what appeared to be some kind of uniform; dark trousers and a jacket with something on the lapels. He was also holding the leash of a full-grown German shepherd.

Anna felt chilled, recalling Pete’s words when he phoned her from the forensic lab to discuss the blue blanket found wrapped around Dorota Pelagia. It had dog hairs over it, and he said he thought they were possibly from a German shepherd. She wanted to shove the photograph back into the drawer and forget she’d seen it. Was it a coincidence? Then Langton’s mantra entered her mind—
there are no coincidences
—and she jumped when Mrs. Hudson walked into the room.

“I’m sorry, did I startle you, dear? I’ve put it on low heat to cook it really slowly.”

Anna licked her lips, which felt dry. “Brenda, who is this in the photograph with Ken?” She passed it over.

Brenda sighed heavily. “Ah, it was terrible. I don’t think Ken ever got over it. That other lad is Jack, and the dog was called Rex: he worshipped it. Jack was a dog handler at the prisons, and it was through him that Ken became interested in doing the same work—you know, before he goes back to studying again. Has he told you he wants to qualify to work with special needs teenagers?”

“Yes, yes, he did mention it. What happened?”

Brenda still held the photo in her hand as she sat on the sofa. “Rex was Jack’s guard dog; Jack had had him since he was a puppy—you know, they take them home to get them familiar with their trainer or handler, I think they call them, and I’ve never come across an animal that was not only so obedient but so clever. He’d dribble a football around, and his eyes used to follow Jack, because he doted on him. I know he could be ferocious, that’s what he was trained for—Jack only had to click his fingers for that dog to sense what he wanted him to do.”

“What happened? You said Ken found it hard to get over something?”

Brenda sighed again. “Jack used to have a van with a dog cage in the back, but Rex was never locked in, since he was so well behaved. Maybe we’ll never know how it happened, but they were on the M6 when a ten-ton lorry jackknifed across the central divide. There was a head-on collision. Rex had somehow sensed it, because he’d moved from the cage to shield Jack, and he took the full impact.”