Suffer the Children (14 page)

Josie comes down the steps.

‘Where are you going?’ he says.

‘Thanks for the meal.’ She reaches up on tiptoes and, with a hand on his chest, kisses the corner of his mouth. ‘Sometimes, you’re a bit too weird for me.’ She closes the gate behind her and wiggles her fingers without turning round. He watches her go round the corner.

Sometimes?
he thinks.

He goes inside to his new home, to his past. He is angry with himself for letting the car get away but happy they are
prepared
to come so close. Then he shivers, but it’s not cold. He can feel the last of the adrenalin seep away and all he’s left with is the certain knowledge that they are coming to him just as fast as he is getting to them. Except they know what they’re looking for.

The jail gives off bad pheromones as you walk up to its
towering
gate.

Staffe and Pulford make their way past HMP Wakefield’s visitor centre and its raggedy queue of young girls dressed to their kind of nines in low-slung hipster tracksuit bottoms that show what they’re wearing underneath. Some of them carry babies on their hips like wise African women. Older women are pulled down by the life their husbands and lovers have chosen. Strange, to be in a men’s jail surrounded by women.

An old-school officer shows them to the room for private visits. He says nothing and Staffe is reminded that he does only half the job. Once the police track a criminal down, it’s over to the business of incarceration, rehabilitation. Every man in this jail will, one day, be released, to perhaps live next door to us or our mothers or our sisters. Staffe ponders what kind of beast we want to be moulded by these beefed-up pale faced prison officers, these textbook psychologists.

The room reeks of stale cigarettes and ingrained sweat. There is one window, way above head height and slightly open. Flies bash themselves against the reinforced glass. The tubular light hums.

A middle-aged man in grey sweats is brought in. This is Nico Kashell and he isn’t cuffed. He looks down at the table, the way people sit in church. The PO sits by the door, lights up a cigarette even though there’s a sign that says ‘No Smoking’, and he reads the
Daily Mirror
.

Kashell is five-seven and ghostly white even though there’s Mediterranean blood running through him. He is spindly under his baggy prison cloth and doesn’t respond when Staffe says, ‘Hello.’

‘The man says hello, shithead,’ says the PO. Without
looking
up.

‘Hello,’ says Kashell, without looking up.

It’s official: most murderers do it just the once, responding to extraordinary circumstances. They don’t steal to feed drug habits or habitually abuse to feed sex habits or beat people up for kicks.

‘Tell me how it happened, Nico. Tell me about that night.’

‘There’s plenty paper tells you that.’

‘How did you get into her flat?’

He shrugs.

‘How did you keep her quiet, or know which bones to break first? Did you know which one would kill her?’

He looks up, briefly, and his big sad, brown eyes are unable to sustain malice. He says, ‘What you here for? I got time to do.’

‘There’s been another, Nico. When you did what you did to Lotte Stensson, was someone else there to help? If there was …’ Staffe looks at the PO, immersed in tabloid
revelations
. He leans towards Kashell. ‘… it could help you. You know what I’m saying?’

‘I don’t see no one else doing my time here.’

‘You confessed. That was the only evidence against you, Nico.’ He wills Kashell to engage in some way but nothing happens, so he nods to Pulford and leans back.

‘It would suit you, I suppose?’ says Pulford. He stands up, goes round the back of Kashell, lets the silence stretch.

‘What’s that?’

‘You doing time in here on your own, taking the punishment to protect your accomplice. And they carry on the good work.’

Kashell weighs Staffe up. He makes a thin smile but his eyes look dead. ‘You’re barking up the wrong tree. Nowhere near understanding.’

‘Understanding what?’ says Pulford.

Kashell says, to Staffe, ‘What a father had to do.’

‘But to kill like that?’

‘It’s what keeps you going, man. Can’t you see that?’ But Kashell looks towards Staffe, straight through him. It is as if he can’t focus, has nothing behind the eyes. For all the world, it seems Nico has lost his own soul.

Staffe nods to Pulford who sits back down. ‘I don’t see that you’ve made your life much better. And your girl has lost you when she needs you most.’

‘I’m punished,’ says Kashell. His eyes are glazed and he sniffs, hard, looks up again. Staffe sees his Adam’s apple move up and down. ‘And you know what? That woman, even the way she got it, it’s nowhere near enough.’

‘You’re not avenged, are you, Nico?’

Kashell’s lip quivers but he doesn’t cry. Feeling sorry for yourself is no way to do your time. He shakes his head. ‘Not nearly, man. Not nearly.’

‘We’ll come back, Nico. Next time, you can tell us exactly what you did that night, hey? Is there anything we can do for you, in the meantime?’

‘Bring back Lotte Stensson?’

‘So you can do it again?’

He shakes his head. ‘No, man. You just don’t get it, do you?’

‘You can leave us, Sergeant,’ says Staffe.

Pulford stands, befuddled, and Staffe waits patiently to have Kashell to himself, bar the smoking PO. He lowers his voice to barely a whisper. ‘I know how you feel, Nico. Really I do.’

‘How can you?’

‘Trust me. Does a part of you wish you hadn’t done it? Do you sometimes wish you had gone the other way – tried to forgive her?’

Nico plays with his fingers, as though he has invisible worry beads.

‘It’s a design fault,’ says Staffe, ‘that the anger comes first, the pity later. It’s too late for some, isn’t it, Nico?’

‘How do you know this?’

‘Somebody murdered my parents.’

‘And have you caught up with them?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I pray I can forgive them.’

‘I hope your prayers find their answer, Inspector.’ 

On the journey up the A1 to Middlesbrough, Staffe says, ‘I’m not convinced Kashell could do that to Stensson.’

‘You think they’re copying him? Maybe it’s someone who’s done time with Kashell and been released.’

Staffe looks across to Pulford and smiles. ‘Call the station. Get them to liaise with prison probation and check everyone who’s been released from Wakefield in the last three months and living in London. And add a filter – anyone who shared a wing with Kashell. And make sure they weren’t banged up again by the time Karl Colquhoun was killed.’

‘There is a problem, though, sir. How would they know to go for Colquhoun or Montefiore? They were never prosecuted.’

‘We need to find out why – exactly why – the CPS didn’t push Lotte Stensson’s prosecution,’ says Staffe.

‘She was a classroom assistant. It’s bad for the government.’

‘I don’t buy that. But if that is the case, we need to dig it out.’ Staffe pulls the Peugeot out into the fast lane, turning his thoughts to Linda Watkins and what kind of a basket case they are about to uncover in Middlesbrough.

He wonders whether, had Linda Watkins got hold of Montefiore and fashioned the most grizzly of tortures, she would have been at all placated by such revenge. Or would she be left wanting some other resolution – just like Nico Kashell.

Staffe’s phone rings, shows
Pennington
.

‘You sitting down, Staffe?’

‘You could say that.’

‘We’ve received another photograph,’ says Pennington. ‘Montefiore. Just as he’s going down on to the wood.’

‘Jesus! And the message? Is there a message?’

‘It says, “Road Safety: is that all you’re good for? Look left, look right. Look ahead, look back.” I want you here as soon as, Staffe. Sooner!’

‘Sir? Sir? I think my battery … Can you hear …?’ And Staffe hangs up. Always hang up when you’re speaking,
someone
once told him. It might even have been Pennington. He turns his phone off and replays the words of the latest message – the reference to an impotent police force reduced to
hoodwinking
motorists. He wishes he was better at crosswords, the way his father had been.

If only you could go back in time.

Go back
, he thinks.
Look left, look right. Look ahead, look back
. Is he being told to look back – at Kashell? Is he being told to look all round? He checks his mirrors, sees a speed camera flashing. 

Linda Watkins has unblemished, alabaster skin and a thick tousle of shiny dark hair, expensively cut. She is tall and slim, elegant in a dark-grey, woollen trouser suit with a short, tailored jacket and hipster trousers. You’d never guess that she had a daughter on the game or had settled for a man who watches cable TV all day on the Villiers estate.

She speaks in measured, calm tones. ‘If truth be known, I am surprised it has taken you this long to check up on me, not that I have done anything illegal, of course. Even in this day and age, I’m sure a woman is still entitled to leave her husband.’

Staffe picks up on her finely crafted sentences. ‘And your daughter,’ he says.

‘You have probably come with your own conclusions as to what sort of person that makes me. I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

She stands to one side and shows Staffe and Pulford into the front sitting room of her Edwardian semi. It has stripped floors and waxed doors with porcelain handles and finger plates. The walls are cream and there is a display of dried flowers in the fireplace. Staffe can’t see a stereo but he can hear a jazz ballad being sung somewhere. Peggy Lee, he thinks.
Black Coffee
.

Pulford raises his eyebrows at Staffe when Linda goes out of the room. Staffe mooches around the living room. Watercolours hang: Mediterranean harbours, Swiss villages and English dales, but no photographs. Not a sign of Sally Watkins.

Linda comes back in, saying, ‘Am I what you expected?’ She sets down a tray, hands coffee across.

‘Preconceptions are difficult to resist,’ says Staffe. ‘It’s good for us to have it reaffirmed, once in a while – that everything is not what it seems.’

She hitches her trousers up at the knee, the way a man would, and sits on the edge of the wingback chair, leans
forward
with her forearms on her knees, slightly apart. ‘What did you expect? Peroxide? Bad skin? Split ends and leggings?’

‘I’m not talking about appearances, Mrs Watkins.’ As he says the name, Linda flinches. ‘My mistake. I assumed you had kept your daughter’s surname.’

‘The surname is my husband’s.’

‘And Sally’s too, of course.’

‘She’s not in trouble, is she?’

‘You know what she’s doing, don’t you, Linda?’

She looks out of the window, keeps her head held high.

‘It’s none of my business, of course,’ says Staffe.

‘Except it is, Inspector Wagstaffe.’ She looks at him. ‘It’s illegal. Or are you too busy with your speed traps?’

The hairs on Staffe’s hands prickle. He thinks of the latest photograph and its caption.

‘I had a female officer speak with her, about safety. Precautions.’

‘So she has been in trouble? It’s an awfully long way for you to come, Inspector.’

Staffe tries to see beneath the surface. He tries to imagine a younger Linda somehow getting knocked up by a young Tyrone. Then doing all the right things and having it thrown back in her face.

She stares out of the window as if she is trying to muster more strength, then says, ‘Sally has only got one life and she has to make the most of it. I couldn’t teach her that. You know we can only ever be truly responsible for the life we lead ourselves. We have to do right by ourselves. I learned too late.’

To rescue at least one life from this mess, it’s almost enough to make Staffe ashamed to be human. ‘Could you ever forgive Guy Montefiore, Linda?’

‘Has he had his dirty middle-class fingers in the pants of some other poor estate girl? Is it finally time the bastard got what was coming to him?’

‘I’m going to have to ask you where you were on Tuesday – between ten p.m. and six the next morning.’

She gets up and takes a diary from a reproduction writing desk in the alcove by the window. She opens it up and hands it to Staffe. ‘There. I had dinner at Leoni’s on the Tuesday night in Newcastle and I got the 7.40 train on Wednesday morning down to Leeds for a ten o’clock meeting. The telephone
numbers
are there. If that would make you feel as though you are doing your job.’

‘It would,’ says Staffe, making a note of the numbers.

As Staffe and Pulford leave, Linda says, ‘You probably think I’m a bad person, but you know if I had stayed, I would have been buried alive. They’d have come for me in fifty years or so and put me in a box and nobody would ever have known I had been there.’ 

Josie gasps as she takes the photograph from Janine: the frozen look of horror on Montefiore’s face. His mouth is bound with gauze and his eyes are wide and wild – two streaks of mascara running from the corner of his eyes. But she knows it’s not mascara. His silent screams so loud the pain transformed itself into bursting vessels of blood. They say that pain is simply fear leaving the body. In Montefiore’s case it is leaving through the most unlikely conduit.

The caption at the bottom of the top photograph says
Road Safety: is that all you’re good for? Look left, look right. Look ahead, look back.
Janine’s notes are attached to the
photograph
, as are blown-up sections of parts of the image.

‘The image is digital, probably captured from a video stream.’ Janine rests her bottom on the edge of Josie’s desk, plays with her hair. She looks Josie up and down, says, ‘The pixelation is inferior to a silver image and it would have been impossible to capture the moment …’

‘The moment it went into him, you mean,’ says Josie. She studies Janine, narrows her eyes and makes a thin smile.

‘The wood wasn’t chamfered. It intruded between 55 and 60 millimetres. I’ve extrapolated from a CAD model of the room and the measurements from the wood to the walls and ceiling, that he was still falling. There’s no blurring.’

‘It’s a funny angle,’ says Josie.

‘The camera was pointing upwards, probably propped up on a chair or coffee table.’

‘So it could have been done by a single person.’

‘There was no alien DNA or prints at the scene.’

‘Just like Colquhoun.’

‘You’re with Staffe, then?’ says Janine.

Josie’s mouth falls open. ‘What …?’

‘His theory, I mean. The quality of the print is identical to the photograph we received of Karl Colquhoun. It is printed on identical paper.’