Lost River (28 page)

Once again, Cooper allowed himself to be swept up in the activity, the arrival of the whole caravan in response to his call. The field had been taped off, and a scene-of-crime tent stretched across the dry river bed to the opposite bank, though it was much too late to worry about protecting the remains.

Sergeant Wragg had attended from Ashbourne, and DC Becky Hurst arrived from Edendale, close behind the medical examiner. There was nothing for Cooper to do at the scene now, so he moved himself out of the way.

Only now, when he stood back on the roadway, did Cooper notice the limestone cliff above the swallet hole. Crevices and fissures in the rock had formed the crude outline of a face, like a primitive wall carving. Two eyes, a nose, and a narrow cleft for a smiling mouth.

No, not a wall carving. It was just like a cartoon face, drawn by a child.

The medical examiner brushed dirt off his gloves as he walked back across the field.

‘You’ll need a forensic anthropologist for a specialist opinion,’ he said. ‘The pathologist won’t be too interested in this one. Not enough flesh or soft tissue left on the bones. Well, there wasn’t much there to start with.’

‘Meaning, Doctor?’

‘A neonate. It was a new-born baby. No more than a few hours old, I’d say. Perhaps it was never even alive.’

‘Will we be able to tell that?’

The ME shrugged. ‘Well, a birth is considered live if the child breathes after being born. Since most killings of neonates occur immediately after birth, before the ingestion of food or healing of the umbilical stump, the only method of determining whether a child was born alive is by examination of the lungs.’

‘The lungs?’ said Cooper.

‘A hydrostatic test.’ He stripped off his gloves and gestured with his hands. ‘Basically, you take out the lungs and put them in water. If they sink, we can presume the child was stillborn. If the lungs float, the child was born alive and breathed. A bit like the test for witchcraft, I always think.’

‘What? Oh, yes. If you float, you’re guilty. If you drown, you’re innocent.’

‘That’s it. But obviously, there’s a problem here. The remains are too decayed, from exposure to the air. There are no lungs.’

Cooper turned away. He’d seen and heard enough here.

‘You haven’t asked me how long the remains have been here,’ said the ME. ‘Don’t you usually want to make unreasonable demands for my estimate on the time of death?’

‘I don’t think I need to ask that,’ said Cooper. ‘It would be around two years ago, I imagine.’

The ME raised his eyebrows. ‘A very good guess, DC Cooper.’

‘Acting DS.’

‘I’m sorry. Promotion obviously improves your speculative abilities.’

‘Actually, I’d go a bit further,’ said Cooper. ‘I’d say this child died on the thirtieth of June.’

Cooper was walking slowly back down the trail towards his car when his phone rang. He heard a young woman’s voice.

‘Hello. You gave me your card. At the funeral.’

‘Is that Lauren?’ said Cooper.

‘Yes. How did you know?’

‘It wasn’t too hard to figure out. Where are you?’

‘I’m not sure I want to say.’

‘But you do want to talk to me?’

‘Alex told me you’d been asking questions,’ she said.

‘So you’ve been in touch with Alex?’

‘I emailed him. We keep in contact that way. Then he can delete my messages, so Mum never finds out.’

‘Of course,’ said Cooper. ‘I suppose I ought to have guessed that.’

Cooper watched the activity taking place around the dry river bed.

‘Lauren…’ he said hesitantly.

She seemed to detect a seriousness in the tone of his voice.

‘You’ve found out something, haven’t you?’

‘Yes. I’m near Wetton Mill right now. At the spot where the river goes dry. You know where I mean, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘Lauren, we found the remains.’ He paused to let it sink in. ‘Please, tell me – whose baby was it?’

There was a long silence, and for a while Cooper thought he’d lost her. But he could hear her faintly in the background. She had either put down the phone, or taken it away from her ear so that she didn’t have to hear what he said next. She sounded to be having trouble breathing. He heard a ragged sob, and wondered if she was totally on her own somewhere, with no one to comfort her.

‘Lauren, don’t go. Where are you? I’ll come and meet you anywhere. Lauren?’

‘I’m still here,’ she said.

Cooper could barely hear her, because her words were almost swallowed by her sobbing.

‘It’s all right, Lauren. Everything’s okay. I just need to know –’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The baby was mine.’

Cooper drove through Ashbourne, negotiating another busy market day to reach Church Street, and heading towards some of the oldest buildings in the town – the alms houses, the original grammar school. At least they were made of stone. It made him feel a bit more at home.

Lauren was waiting for him near the entrance to the churchyard, a dark figure in black clothes that swung as she turned to meet him.

‘The same place that we met before,’ was all she’d said. Of course, here was where her sister Emily had been buried. Perhaps Lauren’s floral tribute still lay here somewhere, too.
Remembering 30th June for ever.

Lauren’s Doc Martens crunched on the gravel as they walked towards the newest gravestones and stood for a moment in front of Emily’s gleaming, pristine memorial.

‘I don’t know how you managed to keep it quiet,’ said Cooper.

She shrugged, feigning indifference now.

‘It wasn’t that difficult. I wore a lot of baggy clothes, so nobody would notice for a while. It helps when nobody expects you to dress in the latest fashions. And, to be honest, I was a bit on the big side then, anyway. I put a lot of weight on when I got to my teens. I think I was stress eating. I hated myself for it, but Mum just kept putting more food in front of me.’

‘It’s her way, I think.’

‘Right. I wouldn’t have got away with it much longer, though. I would have had to go down with some illness or other, even though I was due to leave school about then. But the baby came early. Very early, actually.’

‘Your mother must have known about the baby, Lauren.’

‘Oh, yes. She knows everything, or she thinks she does.’

‘And when the time came?’

‘We had to dispose of it. That’s what Dad told me. He said –’

She looked up from the grave, no longer able to get out the words.

‘He said it was born wrong and it had to die,’ suggested Cooper.

‘How did you know that?’

‘I got it from your brother. I think Alex must have heard it somehow.’

‘Oh, Alex knew was what happening. He was the only person I could tell. Me and Alex, we were really close at one time. It’s funny to think that, I suppose. We’re so different.’

‘He was only eleven, Lauren.’

‘I know. I’m not sure he understood everything.’

‘Did it occur to you what it might do to him?’

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s not your fault.’

Two women entered the churchyard with fresh flowers to place on a grave. Cooper and Lauren moved on to stay out of earshot. They walked down past the front of the church hall and came to a path along the side of the Henmore Brook.

‘You could have got the morning-after pill,’ said Cooper. ‘Didn’t they do that at your school? Or you could have gone to a clinic. To your GP.’

She shook her head. ‘I was terrified people would talk, or they would ask me who the baby’s father was. You don’t know what it’s like in a place like this.’

‘Surely if it was just some boy at your school –’

‘A boy?’ Lauren looked at him and laughed bitterly. ‘You don’t know everything then, do you? You’re not quite as smart as I thought you were.’

Cooper stopped walking. Down here, there was no sound, except for the trickle of the brook, a few birds calling in the yew trees in the churchyard.

Lauren strode on a bit further, then she stopped too. Instead of turning towards him, she stayed with her back to him, her head down, hair falling over her face, the purple streak incongruous against the trees. She seemed to be staring at her boots, as if the pattern of the laces and steel hooks had some significance.

Cooper had a sudden realization of the full horror in that phrase her father had used.
It was born wrong and it bad to die.
There could only be one meaning. Why had he been so stupid? Lauren was right. He really wasn’t all that smart.

The girl looked up at him now, to see if he understood.

‘It didn’t feel like a baby, you know?’ she said. ‘Just some dirty little secret that I had to keep quiet about and hide from the world.’

‘How did it happen?’

‘He came into my room one night. I was really upset about something, you know? But I can’t remember what it was now. Isn’t that stupid? It was something so trivial that I can’t even tell you what it was all about. It seemed so important to me at the time, but now it’s just…a big nothing in my memory. Meaningless, because of what came after.’

‘And your father forced himself on you?’

‘He was trying to comfort me. I think he meant well. At first, anyway. Mum was away that night. Not that she would have been any better. She’s no use in situations like that. She doesn’t like things being out of control. It would have ruined her routine.’

Cooper shook his head in despair. ‘I can’t understand how he would do something like that.’

‘Well, he’d been drinking on the way home from work. Things had started going badly at the store. It must have been
about the time the new supermarket moved into town, and he thought it was all over. He told Mum he thought he was going to have to lay off all his staff, and go on the dole himself, for the first time in his life.’

‘It doesn’t excuse –’

‘Anyway, he was really stressed, you know?’ she said. ‘He didn’t usually drink, so it affected him badly when he did. I don’t think Dad knew what he was doing that night. Honestly, I don’t think he did.’

She must have seen the doubt in his eyes. Cooper suspected she was about to start putting the blame on herself again. That wouldn’t do anyone any good.

‘I’ve always felt guilty about it,’ she said. ‘Guilty about everything.’

‘You shouldn’t. What your father did was very wrong. It was rape.’

‘But was it?’

‘Yes, of course it was. You were under age.’

‘Well, it’s got to be partly my fault. I suppose I was lucky it wasn’t worse.’

‘You mustn’t talk like that.’

Lauren’s black eye make-up was running now, streaking her pale cheeks.

‘I did something bad to Alex, though,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I?’

Cooper thought she had, but he couldn’t explain to her quite what. He didn’t really know what had been going on in her brother’s mind.

‘I suppose you told Alex where the baby was buried?’ he said.

‘I took him there, and showed him the place.’

‘What? Oh, Lauren.’

She wiped a sleeve across her face, only making the streaks worse.

‘I had to. It was like a memorial service, just me and him. It was the only way my baby’s death would ever be remembered.’

‘Well, Alex remembers it all right,’ said Cooper grimly.

‘How did he react?’

‘He was a bit strange, you know? He went right down on to the river bed, stood on the exact spot where the water disappeared through the ground. I think he had to do that, to make it real. He was very quiet afterwards. But then, he always was a bit withdrawn.’

‘Was the baby born alive, Lauren?’ asked Cooper.

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes, it does.’

She shrugged hopelessly. ‘Not to me.’

They walked slowly back towards the church, Cooper allowing Lauren to walk a little way ahead. Following her black coat, he felt like a mourner in procession to the grave. When they got back to the gate, she spoke to him again, more composed and reflective now.

‘Some people say Dad looks a bit like Dracula,’ she said.

Cooper nodded. ‘I’ve heard that.’

‘Well, it’s true, in a way. He sucked the blood out of me.’

For a moment, Cooper paused and looked back across the graves, beyond the churchyard and the Henmore Brook.

It was so difficult to understand what went on in families. How had the Nields reconciled themselves to a situation like this? What compromises had they made with each other, what rationalizations had gone on in their minds? As time passed, did they convince themselves that nothing was wrong, that they could all just go on as normal? And all for the sake of keeping the family together.

It was a twisted kind of loyalty, a sense of allegiance that shut out the rest of the world, and rejected concepts of conventional behaviour. Whatever went on in your own home was the reality you had to live. No one else could understand it, so you didn’t tell them.

As he surveyed the view over Ashbourne, Cooper noticed the site of the old Nestlé factory across the brook, now rapidly
becoming a new housing development. In the other direction, towards the town centre, the car park of Sainsbury’s was busy with shoppers.

Cooper wondered if Lodge’s supermarket would stay open without Robert Nield to keep his little family together. Probably not. He’d destroyed one family, and the other would surely follow.

The Nields were at home that afternoon, entirely unaware of what had being going on. Cooper met up with Becky Hurst outside the house off Wyaston Road. This wasn’t a visit he could do on his own. While he waited for her, he gazed down the street at the outline of Thorpe Cloud, where it stood guard over the entrance to Dovedale. The hill was a silent watcher, hardly less valuable as a witness than any other.

‘Okay,’ he said, when Hurst had arrived. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

Robert and Dawn Nield were surprised to see him. But they sensed immediately that something was seriously wrong. It was remarkable that they could do that, in a week when so much had already gone wrong for them.

Cooper explained to them about the remains found on the banks of the River Manifold, and Lauren’s admission that the baby had been hers. He hesitated before going any further. There was always a possibility that Lauren had been lying about the rest of the story.

Cooper looked at Dawn Nield first. She was clutching a tissue in a trembling hand, and her face was flushed. A glaze was spreading in her eyes, like a slow welling of terror.

‘Do you know who the father of that child was, Mrs Nield?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘We never knew. Lauren wouldn’t say.’

‘I see.’

Cooper held her eye for a moment, then looked at Robert Nield.

‘Is that your answer too, sir?’

The briefest of pauses left an uncomfortable silence in the air.

‘Yes.’

But his response had come too slowly. Before he spoke, Nield had met Cooper’s eye briefly, then looked away. It was a fleeting glance, done reluctantly, as if he’d been forced into it. But for that one moment, Nield just had to look into Cooper’s face. He needed to see if Cooper knew the truth.

‘The child, sir. It was yours, wasn’t it?’

Nield ran a hand over his face, as if attempting to restore the colour to his skin, which had suddenly turned grey. His mouth sagged, and for a moment he seemed to have lost the power of speech.

‘You know we can do DNA tests, Mr Nield.’

‘Tests?’

‘On the remains. We can match your DNA to establish parentage.’

In fact, Cooper wasn’t entirely sure that anything usable still existed. The flesh had gone from the bones, had decomposed and fallen away, been carried away by scavenging animals, or deteriorated with exposure to the weather. There might just possibly have been something under the body that could produce a result in the lab. A fragment of skin that had been preserved from the air. And that was presuming a SOCO found it, examined the leaf litter carefully enough when the bones had been lifted. The bones themselves might yield a DNA result, of course – if anyone thought the tests were worthwhile.

Yes, it might be a long shot. But Robert Nield wasn’t to know the odds.

‘Were you the father, Mr Nield?’

Nield lowered his head. ‘You know already.’

‘How could you do that?’

‘I don’t know.’

Cooper flinched as a great sob was ripped from Dawn Nield. Her face was contorted beyond recognition. She might be repressed, might feel the need to be in control. But that control was failing her now. He could see her whole façade cracking, as the false world she’d constructed around herself began to crumble.

‘It wrecked our family,’ she said. ‘Lauren left us after…after the baby died.’

‘And it resulted in the death of Emily, too,’ said Cooper. ‘You do realize that?’

‘What? That was an accident.’

Cooper recalled what Rachel Murchison had told him. His own stress caused by the experience of the child’s death in the river, and being helpless to save her. Short-term adverse reactions to anything his brain associated with the traumatic event. In this case, water.

‘It’s perfectly common. It should pass in time.’

‘Does it always pass?’

‘Well, not always. If left unacknowledged and untreated, it can develop into full-blown PTSD, and the effects of that can last for years. Occasionally, serious psychological disturbances may result from traumatic experiences in the past. But that’s quite rare.’

‘Would it be more common in a child?’

‘Oh, yes. Certainly.’

‘The truth is,’ said Cooper, ‘that only one person saw Emily die. And he was the one person who no one ever asked for his account of the incident. There was no point in putting him through it, was there? Everyone thought there were
enough witnesses, even though not a single one of them saw what actually happened. As usual, Alex wasn’t needed.’

‘Alex?’

‘And the worst thing is, I was there,’ said Cooper. ‘I was there myself. But I didn’t see it.’

‘Didn’t see what?’ asked Dawn. Her voice was distant, distorted, ghostly – the sound of a woman withdrawing from reality. Cooper knew he wouldn’t get much else from her now.

‘It was Alex who pushed his sister down in the water, hit her head on the stone and drowned her. No one saw that, did they? Except you, Mr Nield. You pulled him out of the river. That was how you got wet.’

‘Is Alex so disturbed?’

‘Yes, I think so. The memory of the river pushed him over the edge. He needs help very badly.’

Nield hung his head. His shoulders had dropped, and his whole body was bent like a man who had fallen in on himself, his internal organs collapsed, his heart torn away.

‘Why couldn’t he talk to us?’ asked Dawn.

Cooper lowered his eyes. ‘That’s not for us to answer, Mrs Nield.’

And suddenly she was out of her seat and standing in front of him, her body swaying dangerously, her arms flying so violently that Cooper ducked back out of the way. Her face had passed from flushed red to deathly white, and her chest heaved with enormous, painful breaths. An awful, indistinguishable noise came from her throat, as if an animal was trapped in the room.

Shocked, Cooper stood uncertain what to do. The whole room seemed frozen, Robert Nield gaping from his chair, Becky Hurst giving a startled intake of breath behind him.

Then Mrs Nield staggered, and Cooper stepped forward to prevent her falling. And that broke the spell. Hurst moved in and helped him steady the woman and get her back into her seat.

‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it?’ whispered Dawn as she began to recover.

‘No. Why should you feel that way?’

‘Because I failed,’ she said. ‘I failed Emily. I’ve failed all my children.’

Cooper felt guilty at his inability to call up the degree of sympathy she was asking for. Somehow, Dawn Nield had made it all seem to be about her. The tragedy hadn’t happened to Emily, but to her mother.

‘Why didn’t we see that Alex wasn’t coping?’

‘I think we did,’ said Nield. ‘But he shut himself away with it, and we thought it would pass.’

Cooper turned away from Mrs Nield to face him again.

‘It doesn’t pass unless it’s dealt with,’ he said. ‘He needed someone to talk to.’

‘We couldn’t take him to a doctor. If he got referred to a councillor or therapist, it would have come out what upset him so much.’

‘There’s such a thing as patient confidentiality. A reputable therapist wouldn’t pass on information like that.’

Nield shook his head. ‘We couldn’t take the risk.’

‘So you sacrificed your son’s psychological health,’ said Cooper. ‘And, ultimately, the life of your youngest daughter.’

‘It all started with good intentions. From a moment of weakness.’

‘Weakness? How could you do that to your daughter? Lauren would have been fifteen at the time.’

‘It was a mistake,’ said Nield.

‘A mistake?’

Cooper had heard enough.

‘Robert Nield, I’m arresting you. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence…’

Cooper put Robert Nield in the car, and asked Becky Hurst to stay at the house until help arrived. Mrs Nield needed a doctor, and Social Services would have to be involved with Alex.

‘I think I understand him, though,’ said Nield, as they drove back through Ashbourne.

‘Really?’

‘He’s very like me when I was his age. When I was about twelve, I had a Swiss Army knife I was very proud of. I used to play with it all the time, opening and closing the blades. One day, while I was watching TV, I slashed the leather sofa I was sitting on. It was just because the blade was in my hand, and that was what it was made for.’ Nield smiled sadly. ‘My father didn’t accept that explanation. I got a good smacking for it.’

‘I don’t see the connection,’ said Cooper.

‘Have you never done something for no particular reason? Just found that you’d destroyed an object without even thinking about it? Let me tell you, it’s as if your hands act on their own, while your mind is somewhere else entirely. There’s no question of intention – that doesn’t come into it. It’s a sort of…physical unreasoning.’

‘You make it sound as if it was nothing more than tearing up a sweet wrapper.’

‘There are impulses we can’t control.’

‘But this isn’t an object we’re talking about. It’s a person.’

‘The principle is the same.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘It takes a bit of imagination to understand.’

Cooper shook his head. ‘We all have impulses. But we don’t always act on them. Maybe when they happen, it’s because our mind allows them to.’

‘Still, it’s a shame that Alex lied to us.’

‘He didn’t want to lie. He wanted to tell the truth. But there was no one who could be bothered to listen to him.’

‘I can’t really blame him for lying,’ said Nield, as if he hadn’t heard. ‘Teenagers lie to their parents all the time. It’s a miracle if they tell us the truth now and then. The only view we get of what’s going on in their heads is the impression we have from the outside, and what they tell us. The truth can be something completely different.’

Cooper knew that was probably true. But Alex was only putting into practice some of the things he’d learned from his father.

‘But he isn’t mad, you know.’

‘I said “disturbed”.’

‘You don’t have to be mad to do something horrible. Malice is natural to the human soul – just as natural as kindness. Being bad is part of being alive.’

Cooper didn’t want this conversation. He tried not answering, hoping it would shut Nield up. It didn’t work.

‘It’s true what I said, though,’ said Nield. ‘No one thinks of the consequences of that moment.’

‘Are you speaking about the conception of Lauren’s child now?’ asked Cooper. ‘Or the killing of your daughter Emily?’

The question Cooper asked himself now was, what would happen to Alex? The boy was thirteen years old. At one time, Alex Nield would have fallen into a legal grey area, where children aged between ten and fourteen were presumed not to know the difference between right and wrong. In those days, they could only be convicted if the prosecution proved they were aware what they were doing was seriously wrong. Under the age of ten, children weren’t considered to have reached an age where they could be held responsible for their crimes at all.

Now, though, the law had changed. At thirteen, Alex Nield was considered fully responsible for his actions, in the same way as any adult. He couldn’t vote until he was eighteen, and he couldn’t legally have sex until he was sixteen. But at the
age of thirteen he was well within the age of criminal responsibility. The law would say that he knew perfectly well what he was doing.

Yes, Alex might be exactly like his father was at the same age. It was ironic, then, that if Robert Nield had committed a serious crime when he was thirteen, he might have escaped prosecution. But this was the twenty-first century. Alex would have no such luck.

Cooper recalled the four psychological types identified in that study of online gamers. Achievers, Explorers, and Socializers. And what was the name of the fourth group?

Oh yes, that was it. The Killers.

A call came in from Becky Hurst, still in Ashbourne.

‘Social Services have arrived,’ she said.

‘Good. Where is Alex? Still in his room, I suppose? He’ll be on his computer, oblivious to everything.’

‘No,’ said Hurst. ‘That’s the bad news. We can’t find him. Alex has disappeared.’