Saturday Requiem (4 page)

The files weren’t files but boxes. Jude led her upstairs, past a closed door, and into a small room made even smaller by the bed at the end, covered with a brightly patterned quilt and with a hot-water bottle on the pillow. The only other furniture was the table and chair. There was an Anglepoise lamp on the table and under it were four boxes full of papers.

Jude switched on the lamp and pulled the boxes out. ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘Plenty to keep you busy.’

‘Yes.’

‘Coffee?’

‘I’d like that.’

‘There’s this Scandinavian place down the road that does amazing cardamom and cinnamon buns. I’m addicted. Do you want one?’

‘Just coffee.’

‘Your loss. Next time, perhaps.’

Frieda took a layer of papers from the first box and put it on the table. She took out her notebook and pen and put them beside the papers. Then she sat down and started to read. She read for six hours. She read through the three coffees that Jude brought her, and through the smoked salmon on rye bread. The stormy day outside darkened towards evening, rumbling with far-off thunder.

The papers were almost all photocopies and some were hard to decipher. They were in no particular order. Frieda spent the first half-hour sorting them into categories:
forensic reports, phone bills, police interviews, witness statements, court transcripts, psychological assessments and photographs.

She wanted to be as chronological as possible so she started with the police statements. Late on Saturday, 19 May, just before midnight, the police station had received an anonymous call, later traced to a nearby phone box, reporting the sound of a disturbance at 54 Oakley Road. Frieda checked the address on a map she carried in her bag. It was down in Dulwich, foreign territory to her, deep in south London. The police had arrived at twelve twenty on Sunday morning: DCI Sedge, who was at the station finishing up a report on a hit-and-run, and at the same time, in a patrol car, Constables Malik Gordon and Jane Farthing. The photographer and the forensic team had arrived a few minutes later. Signs of the disturbance were immediately visible through the front window: furniture was scattered, chairs lying on their sides. Sedge had knocked on the front door, and when there was no reply, they’d forced an entry. There they had discovered three bodies: Hannah’s stepfather, Aidan Locke, fifty-three; her mother, Deborah Docherty, forty-seven; and her younger brother, Rory, aged thirteen. Deborah and Aidan were in their bedroom, but he was fully dressed and she was in her nightclothes. All three had been beaten to death with a claw hammer. Aidan was lying on his stomach, the other two on their backs. The hammer, wiped clean, was on the living-room floor. Hannah Docherty, aged eighteen, had identified the three bodies before they were taken to the morgue.

At first the assumption had been that it was a burglary gone terribly wrong. But later in the day Hannah had come into the picture as a suspect and then the case against her had seemed clear-cut and irrefutable. Frieda found a
handwritten page of notes about Hannah: dysfunctional, reports of drug-taking from family and friends, anti-social behaviour, contact with police, warnings but no actual charges brought. She had quarrelled violently and publicly with her parents just weeks previously and moved out of the house to live in a squat. A few days before their death they had cut off her allowance. Her attempt at an alibi – that she had gone to meet her stepfather but he had never arrived and, in fact, it was her mother, Deborah, who had turned up – seemed nonsensical and was quickly proved to be impossible. The coroner’s report showed that Deborah Docherty was already dead by the time Hannah claimed to have met her. Clothes belonging to her were found stuffed into a bag in a bin further along the street, covered with the blood of her murdered family. When interviewed by the police, she didn’t confess, but became first hysterical and then catatonic.

Frieda turned to the forensic reports. Occasionally she made notes in her pad: that there was blood everywhere, not just in the bedrooms, but downstairs as well. That there was no sign of forced entry. That Deborah Docherty had been more savagely attacked than either her husband or child. That the hammer was so effectively wiped clean that it provided no evidence. That there was an apparent difference in the time between Aidan Locke’s murder and that of Deborah and Rory. What had happened in that gap?

One piece of paper was a printed itemization of what was found on the bodies. Rory Docherty: pyjamas,
Lord of the Rings
motif. Aidan Locke: Karrimor suede walking boots, hooped blue and white socks, blue denim trousers, blue-and-white-checked shirt, watch (brown leather strap), frameless spectacles. Deborah Docherty: green-patterned nightgown, gold-coloured necklace with locket. The sparseness had its own sombre poetry.

She made notes, too, on the obvious inadequacies in the way the case had been handled, though she assumed Jock Keegan had already done this, and more thoroughly than she ever could. They had never established – or even tried to establish – where the hammer had come from and there was no evidence that Hannah owned such a tool. The crime scene seemed to have been carelessly handled. There was a memo from an officer noting that Deborah’s first husband, Seamus Docherty, who had inherited their house and everything in it, had come to take away several bags of possessions. The memo called for this matter to be pursued but Frieda found no further mention of it.

Frieda made a note about the treatment of Hannah in the investigation. She had been made to identify the three bodies, in situ, she had been shown photographs and taken through the scene. ‘To observe her reaction,’ Sedge had written in his report.

Next she leafed through multiple statements from people who had known Aidan Locke and the Dochertys, trying to get an idea of what this family had been like. Locke: well known in the neighbourhood, entrepreneur, fingers in lots of pies, obviously wealthy, raised money for charity, a Santa in the local primary school, marathon runner, squash player, amateur dramatics. People talked of him in exclamations. Oh, Aidan! What energy! Adored his wife! Never stopped! Frieda felt tired even reading about him, and slightly relieved not to have known him.

Deborah Docherty was more private. She had been an accountant, part-time once she’d had children. Quiet, self-contained, organized, competent, someone to trust. Her first marriage had broken up when Hannah was twelve and Rory seven, and she had married Aidan the following year. Her second marriage had by all accounts been successful.
She was clever, sometimes fierce, and protective of her children – perhaps too protective. Friends spoke of her distress over Hannah’s chaotic state.

There was less information on the brother, thirteen-year-old Rory: some friends but not that many, ups and downs at school. Hannah had seemed very fond of him, despite the age gap.

There was a lot of material on Hannah. Frieda read through it all: statements from her teachers, saying she had been an academically bright, diligent student until she was about thirteen (around the time of her mother’s marriage to her stepfather Aidan), and by fifteen she was troubled – bad discipline, bad friends. Her GCSE results had been disappointing and then she had more or less dropped out of school, though she had still been entered for A levels, which she had been due to sit just days after the murders had taken place. In March, she had left home and for the next six weeks had slept in a squat. Friends and ex-friends had been interviewed and a picture emerged of someone who was going off the rails. Of course, by this time she was the main suspect for the murder of her family. Had this affected people’s narratives? Frieda wrote down names in her notebook. There had been a boyfriend; she wrote him down too. A psychiatrist had found Hannah to be dysfunctional, self-destructive, largely unresponsive.

She laid down her pad and shut her eyes. Hannah reminded her of someone. Yes. She reminded her of herself at that age. She had the irrational feeling that she should have been there, thirteen years ago, to rescue her.

She opened her eyes again and wrote a question in her notebook: ‘Why was she ever allowed to stand trial?’

Then she turned her attention to the court transcripts. These she just leafed through: there was too much for one
sitting. She only looked closely at Hannah’s evidence, what there was of it: she had been able to answer few of the defence’s questions and none of the prosecution’s. She had stuck to her inadequate alibi, repeating over and over again that she had gone to meet her stepfather but he had never arrived, although her mother later had (the prosecution had been derisive, asking why there was no corroboration of that phone call from her parents’ phone records, and pointing out that her mother couldn’t have been her alibi since she was in her house miles away being murdered). Apart from that, as far as Frieda could tell, she had stammered out broken phrases and mostly wept. Frieda couldn’t begin to understand why her lawyers had allowed her to give evidence. She imagined Hannah, just eighteen, standing in the dock and crying and crying while men and women in wigs asked her questions that made no sense to her.

The last batch that Frieda looked at was the photographs. She had been putting them off, but now she lifted them onto the table, face down, and started to turn them, one by one. There were photographs of the house from the outside, and then of each of the family before the tragedy. Aidan was burly, bearded, smiling, exuding bonhomie even in a picture. Deborah was slim, perhaps even thin, with short dark hair and a guarded expression. Rory looked younger than thirteen – in the photo the police had chosen to represent him, he was small and pale, with a mop of pale red hair and a freckled, slightly anxious face. And Hannah – at first, Frieda could barely tell that the woman she had met in the hospital was the same person as this young creature. Hannah then had been tall and she looked sturdy and strong, but her dark hair was lustrous, her face glowed with health, her teeth were white, her clothes bright and stylish. She was smiling. Then
there was one of Hannah just after she was charged, a headshot in which she had already started to become the woman Frieda had seen: her eyes were bloodshot, her hair a tangle, and on her face such an expression of bewilderment and fear that Frieda almost looked away, it felt so intimate.

She went quickly through the photos of evidence that had been collected and often bagged up: fingerprints, the blood splatters downstairs, the heavy claw hammer, the clothes belonging to Hannah that had been discovered a few houses down – a dress with a floral pattern and a cardigan, covered with her family’s blood … Without warning, they became photos of the crime scene. The main bedroom: photo after photo from every angle and in close-up of Aidan and Deborah. Quickly she put them aside and found herself looking at a photo of Rory. He was wearing his
Lord of the Rings
pyjamas. One arm was flung out. He was lying face downwards so she didn’t see his face, but she stared at the defenceless nape of his neck, with one little mole on it, his curled fingers and the small feet. At his skull, shattered, caved in.

She got up, went downstairs and stood in front of Levin, Keegan and Jude.

‘You were right,’ she said to Keegan. ‘I’m just a therapist.’ She turned to Levin. ‘I can’t do this any more.’

She sat in front of Thelma Scott, her therapist whom she saw only when she felt wrong, dislocated, unsure of what she was thinking. She put her hands on the armrests of her chair and looked into the old, clever face. A colleague had once said that Thelma looked like a frog but Frieda loved the way she looked, battered and calm and alert.

‘I said I wasn’t going to do this again,’ she said. ‘The
problem is that I made a deal. This man, Levin, did something for me and now I have to do something for him.’

‘Is it something wrong?’

‘I don’t know. Not so far.’

‘But you don’t want to?’

‘Chloë says I’m like the burned child who loves the fire.’

‘What do
you
say?’

‘I say that I don’t know. I have a feeling of dread.’

‘And you’ve told these people you won’t do it any more?’

‘Yes.’

‘So?’

‘I feel that I’m abandoning Hannah Docherty.’

‘Frieda,’ said Thelma, her voice stern. ‘You’re not God. Beware the rescue impulse.’

In spite of the rain and the wind, and the darkness that came rolling in over London, Frieda walked home from Thelma’s house. She made herself a mug of tea and then she had a bath in the beautiful tub that Josef had installed for her. He was from the Ukraine and his English was still limited; he communicated through actions rather than words. She stayed in there a long time. She had meant to go round to her friend Sasha’s that evening. Sasha was on her conscience – she was always on her conscience, since the previous year when events in her personal life had been the trigger for a crime whose reverberations Frieda and all her friends still felt – but she rang and rearranged to go the following day instead. She lit the fire and sat beside it with scrambled egg on toast, looking into the flames, hearing them crackle, hearing the wind outside. Then she played through a game of chess and went up to bed.

But she couldn’t sleep. There were thoughts that pursued her, half-thoughts, faces in the darkness. At last she got up
again and dressed and went out into the night. The rain had stopped but there were puddles everywhere, glinting under the streetlamps. Occasional cars passed. Frieda turned off down a small street. She was not thinking where she was going, but her feet were leading her along crooked byways towards the river. At first, she tried pushing away the impressions that were crowding in on her, but when she reached the road that covered the hidden Fleet River, she let them come to her.

What she had seen today in all the files was mad, but it wasn’t mad in the right way: it wasn’t a madness that made sense to her. It was both chaotic and organized. There was Hannah’s risible alibi. There was a savage attack – but the bodies were all in their beds. Wouldn’t at least one of the three have tried to run or fight, especially since the killer had waited between Aidan’s death, and Deborah and Rory’s? And Aidan was fully dressed, even wearing his shoes. So, presumably, his body must have been put on the bed next to his wife’s by his killer. But that didn’t fit with the apparent uncontrolled rage of the murders. There was the attempt to hide Hannah’s clothes that were covered with blood. Why had they been put in such an obvious place, where the police were bound to find them? The prosecution lawyer had asked it as a rhetorical question in his summing-up and he had answered it. Because she was in a disordered state after killing her family. But was that right? She was ordered enough to try to hide her clothes but not ordered enough to hide them well.