Past Praying For (35 page)

‘
Did you find out anything about the rest of her childhood – what happened after the deaths?’

Robert
shrugged. ‘Not a lot, I think is the answer. She was well-fed, clothed, expensively educated – had everything she could possibly want, except the one thing she needed so desperately: parental love and attention. Then that was followed by a loveless marriage, and her father’s death not long after.

‘
Missy’s our only source, of course, so it’s not totally reliable, but it seems the only affection she had was from McEvoy’s mother. She was formidable but kind, I think, and there’s no doubt that it was after her death that everything started spinning out of control.’

‘
So there are no grandparents. Those poor children; whatever is to become of them? McEvoy isn’t much of a father, by all accounts.’

‘
He’s an absentee father at the moment. He’s off somewhere out on the tiles, apparently: no one knows quite where. I gather it isn’t the first time he’s been “at the Club” or “at a business meeting” until the small hours.’

They
sat on sipping their tea while Robert told Margaret the rest of the story, including Minnie Groak’s share in the responsibility for tonight’s disaster.

‘
It’s the problem of disproportion, isn’t it?’ Margaret said thoughtfully. ‘Strange how often some quite minor thing brings the most hideous consequences in its wake.’

‘
“The little things are infinitely the most important,” if you remember your Holmes,’ Robert quoted, yawned suddenly, and rose.

‘
I’m off to bed. Wake me when Vezey phones. I’m no good to him when it comes to pronouncing on Missy’s state of mind; I’ve been too closely involved in the investigation, so he’ll be getting in a couple of others to regularize the position, now he’s got the information he wants. It should take them most of the morning to get it all tied up and declare that she’s unfit to plead. There’s certainly no doubt in my mind; spectacular, text-book stuff.

‘
So I shall expect to be able to sleep through to the afternoon. It’s your job to convince Jean that I won’t expire from starvation if I miss breakfast and lunch.’

‘
I’ll protect you,’ Margaret promised. ‘Have a good sleep.’

She
washed up his mug then refilled her own and sat down in the old Windsor chair next to the stove, tucking in one of Jean’s patchwork cushions at her back.

She
realized, with a start, that she had forgotten that today was Sunday, and New Year’s Eve. She had reluctantly agreed to cancel the early Eucharist and allowed the diocese to find someone who could take the morning service. But the Watchnight Service was different. She was determined to celebrate that, in the religious sense of the word, if she had to be silent for a week afterwards.

But
for the moment, all she could usefully do was pray. She must pray for the children, pray for their father who would now, surely, find a new way of life. And she must try to pray for that strange hybrid, Missy-Lizzie. It seemed foolishly fanciful, but whenever she tried to hold her – them – in prayer, all she could sense was a spiritual black hole, sucking into itself all hope, all light, all love.

Margaret
was still wrestling with the problem when the telephone rang. It was twenty-five past seven.

***

Missy had been quite happy to go to the police station. She had never been inside one before, and her eyes were bright with interest as they escorted her into the purpose-built multi-storey divisional headquarters.

Inside,
it was well lit with concealed neon lighting and pale grey walls, a lot of smartly-varnished wood and heavy glass. She had stood with the others as they waited by the counter in the foyer, reading with close attention the warning posters about drugs and security and road safety, but viewing with considerable disapproval the unkempt-looking man sitting on one of the benches opposite. He did not seem to be entirely sober, and he had a black eye.

‘
He
smells!
’ Missy said indignantly in her high, clear, carrying voice to the shirt-sleeved policewoman behind the desk, who winced at this childish candour and spoke hastily to Vezey who, with Moon and Smethurst faithfully at his heels, had escorted her here.

‘
Interview room five, sir; that’s vacant now. It might be best if you were to take her through right away.’

The
interview room was small, bare and grey, an environment which should have been neutral but which by the absence of moveable objects suggested at the very least the expectation of violence. The disinfectant they used was pungent, but did not altogether mask another, grosser smell.

The
intrusive eye of a camera poked into the room from one corner of the ceiling, and in the middle was a table joined to the wall and two chairs on each side which were bolted to the floor.

Missy
sat down on the farther side, gesturing graciously to the men that they might be seated. Vezey and Moon took their places opposite her; the other man leaned against the wall by the door.

They
explained to her about the recorder and she eyed it curiously but did not object, sitting tranquilly enough while they set it up with the appropriate identification, and asked her the first question.

She
had decided privately that it would be more fun if they played it like a game. She remembered, dimly, a game she had played a long time ago which was about asking questions, though the details were fuzzy now in her head.

So
she had to make up her own rules. If they asked her something, she would tell the truth, but they had to think of the questions to ask. That would be fair, wouldn’t it? They couldn’t expect her to do it all for them. And her challenge would be to see if she could manage, without cheating, to save up her big surprise for the end.

They
were all very nice and polite, though one of them was impatient. She was a little bit wary of him; she thought he might get angry, and she didn’t like people who got angry and shouted. She really hated people who got angry and shouted. Like horrible Piers.

But
for the moment, it was fine. They listened to her, and even seemed to understand when she explained how difficult it had been, and how clever and careful she had needed to be.

They
didn’t laugh much, though, even when she did – she had laughed a lot when they asked her about the scratches on her face – and she decided they were just a bit stuffy.

They
liked the matches when she brought them out of her pocket, though, and made her put them in a plastic bag. They hadn’t asked about the matches, but that was a little extra she gave them, because they had played so nicely.

At
last, one of the men got up to go. He was the older man with spectacles; she liked him. He had asked her lots of interesting questions about herself and about Dumbo and seemed to listen properly to the answers. She had never had the chance to talk to anyone about the things she thought and the feelings she had, and she was sorry to see him go.

Then
a little later, someone came in and whispered something to the other man, the impatient one, who said a very rude word and rushed out. And someone else brought her and the young man who was left a cup of tea.

But
they still hadn’t asked about her surprise. She giggled out loud. Perhaps she would have to tell them about it herself, after all.

***

Piers McEvoy’s body was lying on the rug in front of what had been the hearth. The ceiling of the bedroom above had collapsed as the fire burned through the ends of the joists and the bedstead of antique brass – Paula’s bed – had fallen through, landing oddly in protection of the body like a parody of an ancient flat tombstone.

It
was still dark. The interior, once they got the beam of the arc lights trained through the gaping window cavity, was a hell of fallen beams, plaster and rubble. But they were lucky in that Piers’s leather chair had burned through to its framework, and a probing torch almost immediately picked out beneath it the sole of a foot clad in a heavy brogue. They were lucky, too, that the body beneath its curious canopy was not going to prove charred beyond immediate recognition.

The
sergeant was less sure how lucky he was going to feel once Vezey got there. He had, after all, informed the man authoritatively that McEvoy was out on an amorous adventure when all his daughter had said was that he was at a club which everyone knew closed hours before. If anyone could prove the man was alive – drunk, perhaps, and then overcome by smoke – while they stood outside and made no attempt to get him out, he could kiss his police pension goodbye.

Vezey
was certainly in a towering rage when he arrived, a rage which was the more alarming for being tautly controlled. His face was white, his jaw rigid, and a muscle was twitching in his cheek, but he said absolutely nothing in response to the sergeant’s anxious explanations, shouldering him aside to swing over the window sill on to the sodden embers that formed a thick spongy layer on the floor of the ravaged room.

‘
Be careful, sir,’ the hovering fire chief cautioned. ‘These beams are smouldering still, and the fog’s lifting; if we get a gust of wind they could go up again in a moment.’

Vezey
gave no sign of having heard him. Ducking under one beam and stepping over the end of another he reached the back of the skeletal chair. The bed, its water-saturated mattress and covers scorched but not burned away, concealed most of the body from him, but by crouching and craning his neck and flicking on his powerful torch he gained a foreshortened view from the feet in their brogues, up the scorched cavalry twill trousers as far as the edge of the cashmere sports jacket.

The
fingers of the right hand, the arm and the part of the shoulder protruding from below the hanging covers on one side, had not escaped the fire, and he averted his eyes. Years of criminal investigation had cured him of excessive squeamishness, but the detail was the job of the scene-of-crime unit and he never chose to dwell needlessly upon horrors. He had registered the stench of charred flesh when he came in, but the olfactory characteristic which means that any smell is blunted after a few minutes was a mercy for which he had frequently been grateful.

From
what he could tell in this position, it looked as if McEvoy was lying on his front, his right arm at least in a position which suggested that he had fallen forward on to his face.

Squatting
back on his haunches, Vezey frowned. He lowered his torch for a moment; the waiting shadows dipped and gathered once more in the gruesome cavern beneath the bedstead.

The
instinctive feel for something not quite right, which is the shrewd detective’s greatest talent, gripped him now as he scanned again such details as he could see without disturbing anything.

In
policework it was not uncommon to have to deal with the victims of fire. Often they were drunk; sometimes they were drunk and incapable, and these you found still sitting in the chair where the fatal stupor had transfixed them. If they were sober enough to move at all, there would be obvious signs of some attempt at escape, like poor Tom so pathetically trapped by the unyielding garage doors. Even under the effects of extremely toxic fumes, Margaret Moon had made it to the threshold of her bedroom.

But
not McEvoy. McEvoy, it seemed, had stood up and immediately pitched forward on to the hearthrug. That was strange.

He
forgot his anger now in concentration. The itch to understand all mysteries might, without charity, be as nothing, but it was most surely the core of his professional being. That, rather than a grand and abstract passion for justice – whatever that might be – was why the abuse, the violence and the squalor did not send him hunting for a desk job. This was what it was all about.

Oblivious
to the watchful fire chief and the sergeant, still murmuring nervously behind him, he leaned forward as far as he could. Beneath the man’s body was a Persian rug – a Qashgai, beautiful and valuable – burned around the edges, blackened and stained with water. It was hard to tell in this unreliable light, but surely that deeper stain, which seemed to have seeped out round the fallen body, was neither water nor soot?

Ignoring
the fire chief’s protests, he climbed round to the other side, penetrating deeper into the ruins of the study. He was conscious of the heat still lingering there; automatically he loosened the collar of his shirt. But he gained the vantage point he wanted at the farther end of the bed.

It
was darker here, of course, away from the lights directed in at the window. But when he pointed his torch under the head of the bed, he saw what he was looking for.

Piers
McEvoy’s head was turned to one side, his left hand and arm flung up in reflection of the position of his right. His face was drained of colour, greyish-pale, and the upper part of his jacket, his shirt and his tie were so saturated with blood that there was no longer any pattern to be seen. From the side of his neck protruded a skewer; a long, thick barbecue skewer with a handle like a Spanish sword’s at the end.