Off Minor (34 page)

The reporter had gone off to file his story, no doubt intent upon getting an exclusive placed in the nationals before Wapping woke up to what was going on. Lorraine had given him a couple of quotes, not as much as he would have liked, but promised that Michael and herself would talk to him again later on. Before that, she would have to wake Michael and tell him the news.

She found the number of the police station and asked for Lynn Kellogg.

“Hello,” the voice said, “DC Kellogg speaking.”

“I thought you were going to let us know,” Lorraine said. “Keep us informed.”

Lynn was quiet; she should have gone round there, never mind what Skelton had said; she should have gone round there first.

“You’ve arrested somebody, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but …”

“It’s the man that killed that other girl, isn’t it?”

“We don’t know that.”

“But that’s what you think?”

“It’s a possibility, yes.”

“Then what does that mean for Emily? What does that mean?”

Lynn’s answer was lost in the fumbled slamming of the receiver. Lorraine’s head smacked forward against the wall and from nowhere great sobs were shaking her as if she were in the grip of a fever. When Michael touched her she jumped, not having heard him on the stairs. “It’s okay,” he said, as she gasped for air against his chest. “Come on, it’s all right.”

“They’ve found her, haven’t they?” he said, as Lorraine finally pushed herself away.

She shook her head, easing wet hair from her mouth and eyes. “They’ve got the man they think killed the other little girl.”

“Oh, God!” breathed Michael. “And they think he killed Emily, too.”

Divine had drawn a blank at the household tip; forensic were still working on the floorboards, the fibers found in the car. Preliminary examination of the tools from Shepperd’s workshop promised nothing, but they were trying again. The solicitor had boned up on his crib to PACE and forced a break at the end of the first two hours.

“Sometimes,” Stephen Shepperd had said, “I take the camera with me when I run. I take pictures, what’s wrong with that?”

“All of little girls?” Resnick had asked.

“They waved at me,” Shepperd said. “They knew who I was. ‘Stephen, take our picture,’ they shouted out. They were all in Joan’s class. There’s nothing wrong in that.”

Joan Shepperd had called ahead to the health center, the tablets that Dr. Hazid had prescribed for her, oh, some time ago now. She would like to pick up a repeat prescription if she could. Some kind of tranquilizer. Dia—, Dia—, Diazepam, yes, that was it. The receptionist checked her name and address: Joan assured her she would be in to collect the prescription before they closed.

Forty-six

It was almost four in the afternoon when Lynn Kellogg knocked on the interview-room door; one look at her face was enough to tell Resnick that something had happened.

“Forensic just rang through, sir,” she said in the corridor. “Nothing from the flooring, but they have got a partial make on the fibers. They’re the same as the ones found with Gloria Summers’s body.”

“That’s positive?”

“You know what it’s like, sir, cagey. Probably fight shy of taking it to court till they’ve done more tests. But it sounds pretty certain.”

“The super know?”

Lynn shook her head.

“Tell him. Tell him I’m going to lean on Shepperd for a confession.”

“Good luck, sir.”

For the first time in a long while, Resnick smiled.

Lorraine and Michael Morrison sat on either side of the table, holding hands. Aside from an ambulance siren heading for the hospital, the only sound was that of children on the pavement, playing.

Shepperd looked significantly older each time the interview was resumed, the tapes timed and set in motion. His abrasive outburst at Resnick on the previous day had been the last time he had seemed to be in any kind of control. Now and then there were still occasional flashes when his voice was raised, as if a particular insinuation had offended him; the rest of the time he answered sullenly, head bowed, declining to look his questioners in the eye.

“How did you get her to come with you?” Resnick asked. “Did you say her teacher was there? Is that what you said?”

Shepperd moved his head slightly; his hands were back between his legs, wrists between his knees.

“Mrs. Shepperd asked me to come and get you, invite you back for tea, is that the way it was?”

In Resnick’s imagination he could see the girl hesitating, uncertain, looking round for her grandmother. Shepperd saying, “Don’t worry about your nan, I’ll come back for her in a minute.” Or, “Your gran is it you’re looking for? That’s where she is. Round our house now.”

Stephen Shepperd glanced up, head angled towards Millington, the sergeant staring back at him with scorn, the way his wife had looked at him earlier. Was that only this morning? It didn’t seem possible it could still be the same day.

“What was the bribe, Stephen? Cream cakes? Ice cream? Don’t tell me it was anything as banal as sweets.”

“Look …”

“Yes?”

“None of this, what you’re saying, none of it ever happened.”

“Stephen,” Resnick said, “I don’t believe there’s anyone in this room who thinks that’s the truth.”

Shepperd’s hands passed across his face. He turned towards his solicitor and his solicitor turned his head away. A man caught out of his depth, back in the Potteries he would be sitting in a seminar on “Bennett and a Sense of Place,” looking forward with anticipation to that evening’s screening of
The Card
, that wonderful moment at the end when Alec Guinness sees through Glynis Johns’s airs and graces and rushes off to the sincere and simple charms of Petula Clark.

“Of course,” Resnick said, “it’s possible you could have taken her somewhere else first, especially if you used the car, but sooner or later you would have had to have got her into the house. Into the front room. On to the carpet. On to the rug.”

“No. You can’t, you can’t …”

“Prove anything? Stephen, the report from the police lab is on the fax machine right now.”

Shepperd’s head came up slowly, slowly until, for the first time in a long while, he was looking directly into Resnick’s face.

“It wasn’t only photographs we took this morning, you know. There were other things: from the cellar, for instance; from the car.”

“The car?”

“The boot of the car.”

At night, at night it would have had to have been, carrying Gloria’s body, wrapped inside that tartan rug and laying her in the already open boot.

“You’d done a pretty thorough job of cleaning it out, vacuum, I don’t doubt. Even so a few fibers had worked their way into the well of the spare tire.”

Oh, he had Shepperd’s attention now, hanging on his every word.

“Fibers from the rug, Stephen, the tartan rug, red and green.”

“That’s right. That’s right. I thought I’d said. That was how I took it to the dump. In the boot.”

“Eventually, Stephen, I’m quite sure that you did.”

“Eventually? I don’t understand.”

“When we found Gloria’s body, Stephen, in the cold of that railway siding, nestled up in bin liners and plastic, alone there with the rats, we found some other things. Fibers, for instance, red and green, the kind that come from a rug.”

If the nerve beating beside Shepperd’s head accelerated any more, it might burst through the skin.

“Just a few, Stephen, only a very few, but still enough to make comparisons. Lucky for us that she struggled, Gloria, when you were doing whatever it was you did to her, lucky that she fought and tried to get away …”

“Don’t!”

“Otherwise we might never have found those scrapings …”

“Please don’t!”

“Trapped beneath her nails, pressed flat against the skin.”

“No! No, no, oh, God, oh, God, no, no, please, no. No.” Shepperd pushed himself back from the table, twisted sideways on his chair, threw himself at his solicitor, clinging to his arms as his words degenerated into a broken succession of cries and moans.

Frightened, embarrassed, the solicitor seemed to be pushing Shepperd away with one hand, holding on to him with the other. Over Shepperd’s shoulder, his expression appealed to Resnick for assistance.

“Graham,” Resnick said.

Millington went round the table and tapped Shepperd on the shoulder, careful to treat him gently now, any hint of physical coercion to be avoided at all costs.

Only when Shepperd was upright in his chair, his clothing set to rights, his breathing back to almost normal, did Resnick, sitting opposite him, softly say, “Wouldn’t you like to tell us about it, Stephen? Don’t you think you’d feel better if you could do that?”

And Stephen Shepperd horrified Resnick by grabbing at his hand and clutching it tight, his voice as quiet as Resnick’s own. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

Forty-seven

“Fuckin’ ’ell, Ray! You gone to sleep in there or what?”

“Got the tweezers out again. Trying to find his prick.”

“Come on, Raymond, give us all a break. It is sodding Saturday night.”

Back in his room, Raymond eased himself into his black jeans, tucked down the tail of his shirt before zipping up his fly. Front of the shirt unbuttoned, he took the deodorant from the end of the bed and sprayed again under his arms. Money in his back pocket, keys. Before leaving he tugged at the front of his shirt so that it was hung loosely over his waist. Like someone who can’t stop themselves touching their tongue to a painful tooth, he pressed the ends of his fingers close against his nose. Nothing would get rid of the faint ripeness of fresh blood, raw meat.

Sara came out of the shop wearing low heels, black skirt inches over the knee; underneath her coat Raymond caught the gleam of a white blouse. Tonight they’d be like twins.

He waited in the doorway across the broad swathe of pedestrianized street; Sara chattering to two of the other girls, one with a cigarette already in her hand, the other lighting up as she spoke. Just when Raymond was starting to get restless, scuffing his feet, the other pair turned and walked off towards the city, arm in arm. Sara waited a couple of moments, only acknowledging Raymond when he stepped out of the doorway and began, hands in pockets, to walk towards her.

“What’s up?” he asked.

“Nothing. Why?”

Raymond sniffed and shrugged. They stood close, facing in opposite directions, movement on either side of them, groups of youths walking up from the station, in by train from the suburbs, the surrounding towns. Saturday night.

“What you want to do then?” Raymond said.

“I don’t know, do I?”

A few more moments of silent indecision. No more than fifteen, a lad, jostled by his mates, bumped into Raymond and Raymond whirled round, angry, “Watch where you’re fucking going.” The boy backing away, laughing it off, “Sorry, mate. Sorry.” Fear in his eyes. His friends gathering him up and sweeping him away.

“Raymond, what’d you do that for? It was only an accident.”

“Not going to let him push me around for nothing,” Raymond said. “Bastard! He wants to fucking watch out.”

“What is he like, this boy?” Sara’s mum had said. “You haven’t told us much about him.”

“You hungry?” Raymond said.

Sara was looking over towards HMV, the posters for the new George Michael album in the window; maybe she’d get that before the end of the week if her money held out. “No,” she said, “not really.”

“Come on, then,” Raymond, starting to move away, “might as well get a drink.”

The ground floor of the restaurant was small and already quite crowded, the waiters either asking newcomers if they minded sitting upstairs or if they would like to try again in an hour, an hour and a half. Patel and Alison were in the corner, behind the door, next to two couples who had greeted the owner familiarly and proceeded to talk loudly through their meal, spraying advice on the relative hotness of the curries and details about their planned winter holiday round all and sundry.

“I’ve embarrassed you, haven’t I?” Alison grinned, spooning lime pickle on to a piece of popadum.

Patel shook his head. “You? No, I don’t see how.”

The grin broadened. “Wearing this.”

This was a low-cut chenille top beneath which it was impossible to disguise the fact that she’d elected not to wear a bra. The top was the color of cream, worn over raspberry culottes in cotton velour. Patel was wearing dark gray trousers, brown leather shoes, shirt and tie under a burgundy jacket. He was trying not to stare each time Alison leaned forward towards the pickle jar.

“Not at all,” he said.

Alison laughed, not unkindly. “The girls at work said you’d take one look and run a mile. Either that or put me under arrest for offending public decency.”

Patel’s turn to smile: by the standards of a normal city Saturday she was quite conservatively dressed.

“You have arrested someone, haven’t you? It was on the news.”

“For the murder of the little girl, yes, that’s right.”

“I thought there were two,” Alison said. “Two girls.”

The waiter squeezed his way between the tables with their portions of chicken tikka, shami kebab.

“So far, I think he’s only been charged with the first murder. I don’t know about the second.”

“But he did do it?”

Patel nodded thanks to the waiter and realized that their noisy neighbors at the next table had fallen quiet to listen.

“I don’t know,” Patel said. “I haven’t really been that involved. Look at all the chicken tikka you’ve got, you’ll never be able to finish your main course.”

Stephen Sheppard lay on a plain, thin mattress in the police cell, a continuous period of eight hours’ rest, free from questioning, travel or any interruption. Whenever the duty officer looked through the door, Sheppard was a moving tangle beneath his blanket, the shal-lowness of broken sleep.

“Remorse, then, Charlie, that what you’d say he was feeling?”

Resnick sighed. Since his first waking thoughts about the Shepperds’ new carpet, he had been functioning for close on sixteen hours. “Oh, yes, remorse by the bucketload. Even then not above trying to twist the blame.”