Suffer the Children (5 page)

‘And what about you, Will? Who are you seeing?’

‘My life’s too complicated at the moment.’

‘You live alone, Will. It’s the most uncomplicated situation a man could be in. Or is it this stupid quest of yours?’

‘They were your parents, too, Marie.’

‘It was twenty years ago, for God’s sake. Don’t you think they’d want you to move on?’

Staffe wants to tell her he has no choice, that he wants to move on, but he can predict where that conversation would go. ‘I’m trying to do the right thing.’

‘Do the right thing for yourself. Look at Sylvie.’

‘No! Let’s not look at Sylvie. And, anyway, at least I didn’t run away when it happened.’

‘I didn’t run away, I travelled.’

‘You blew your inheritance.’

‘I spent it. I invested it in experiences. You know, Will, sometimes I really don’t understand where you get your values from.’

He thinks about this, which makes him remember his father – always working, occasionally talking about what he was going to do with ‘his time’ when he retired. Would his father be proud of what he does? He’ll never know. Staffe feels lost, gazes at his sister. ‘What would he make of us? How we turned out?’

‘Oh, Will. We have to live for ourselves.’

‘And not the ghosts,’ he says.

She shrugs, looks embarrassed. ‘I’ve never asked you for anything, Will. Harry’s going to school at the end of summer. You know if …’

Staffe wraps an arm around her, pulls her into the crook of his neck and speaks softly. ‘I’d love you to stay. I wish you’d come years ago.’

‘It’s not to stay. We fight like cat and dog, Will. We always have.’

He lifts her sleeve and looks at the other bruise. ‘I know.’ He rocks, gently, holding his baby sister tighter and tighter and trying not to picture what a mess she must be in to accept his help after all these years.

‘Why didn’t you go away?’ she says.

The thought occurs to Staffe that, after all these years, he might be afraid of catching up with Santi Extbatteria.

‘Let’s go and see how Harry is. Maybe I’ll teach him to play poker.’

‘I can see you’re going to be a fine role model.’

As they go, they laugh. She fixes her face and he thinks that perhaps he really should move across town.

Leadengate Station is quieter than Staffe can remember. Every available officer is either out on the knock and search, or phoning down everybody who ever knew Karl Colquhoun. Pennington received the call from the commissioner and had to make a statement to the press.

Staffe makes his way towards the interview suites and hears the raised voices of his DSs: Johnson and Pulford, in the corridor.

‘You should know to take support,’ says Johnson.

‘I didn’t want her to get away.’

‘It’s not my fault you lack experience.’ Johnson sees Staffe and he looks at his shoes.

‘What the hell are you two firing off about?’ Staffe slides the spyhole plate to the main interview room and sees Leanne Colquhoun. He frowns. ‘What if she heard that, you idiots,’ he says in a scolding whisper. He turns to Johnson. ‘What do you know about Colquhoun’s first wife?’ he says to Johnson.

‘Debra Bowker? She’s moved out of the country, to Tenerife.’

‘Get me her number. And find out how long she has been there. I need the dates of all her visits since she left and
double-check
with the airlines.’

Johnson looks daggers at Pulford and Staffe can see that he is gutted to have lost out on this case. He puts a hand on Johnson’s shoulder and ushers him down the corridor, saying as he goes, ‘I know where you’re coming from, Rick. But we’re a DI down anyway at the moment, with Rimmer on the sick. This could be the biggest case we’ll get in years and the press are all over it already. We’ve got to pull together.’

‘Is that why you came back?’ Even though there’s venom in Johnson’s voice, he has dark rings under his eyes. It seems to Staffe his DS should be at home resting.

Staffe looks back at the young Pulford, getting the breaks that Johnson thinks he deserves. ‘If that’s your attitude, you’ll still be a DS when you pick up your pension. If you can’t pitch in as part of a team …’

‘You know damn well I can.’

‘It’s not what I’m seeing just lately.’

‘I thought this was going to be my chance, boss. Never mind.’ Johnson shoots Staffe a resigned look, gives a tired ‘what the hell’ raise of the eyebrows. ‘But it’d be nice if you cut me some slack sometime. Just let me tell the muppet what a tosser he is every now and again.’

Staffe laughs and slaps Johnson on the shoulder, watches his DS make a weary way down the corridor. Johnson turns and calls, ‘I’ll get Bowker’s co-ordinates for you, boss.’

‘Good man,’ calls Staffe, watching the dishevelled Johnson go. He and Becky have three young children and he is all done in. Staffe looks back at Pulford, leaning against the wall, young and fresh; tall and thin with his hair cut in trendy mini quiffs. His suit is sharply tailored, no doubt paid for by his mum. Staffe takes a deep breath and goes back towards Pulford.

Staffe will not chastise Pulford for racing off after Leanne Colquhoun. He is pleased that the young pup came back with something to show his sceptics, despite riding roughshod through procedure.

He returns to the interview room, bends down to look through the spyhole at Leanne Colquhoun. She sits calmly on the far side of the desk, the bare bones of an attractive woman – not yet twenty-five, but all gone to seed. She’s got her hair scraped into a severe, high-up ponytail; not enough eye
make-up
and too much lipstick. Her eyes are narrow and hard, her cheekbones high and sharp. The skin of her neck is tight and there are three lines on her forehead that don’t go away when she stops scowling.

Staffe doesn’t fancy her – not for this one, not as a murderer. But almost everyone else in the building does.

He can tell she hasn’t been crying, even though only
twenty-four
hours ago she purportedly returned from her afternoon shift down at Surrey Racing to find her lover lying on her bed, blood soaking the sheets from the accomplished butchery. Just thinking about it now makes Staffe feel sick.

Karl Colquhoun’s heart probably stopped beating from wave after wave of pain – not from the loss of blood from the fine cuts that were applied to the scrotum, but from the eyes. The killers knew what they were doing. They knew they would not be disturbed. There were no noticeable signs of entry, which doesn’t help Leanne’s cause.

A litre of supermarket-brand whisky had been forced upon Colquhoun and he may well have been passing in and out of consciousness before being tied to the bedposts. As well as semen, blood and excrement, the bed sheets showed residues of vomit. Everywhere, naturally, were the prints and DNA of Karl and Leanne Colquhoun. And nobody else.

Staffe ushers Pulford towards him, says, ‘Tell me again, what exactly she said about Karl.’

‘She loves him. Sorry, she
loved
him.’

‘Did she mean it?’

‘She said she didn’t believe it had happened.’

Staffe looks at Leanne again, dragging on a cigarette so her cheeks sink in even further – gaunt like the victim of a Balkan war – and staring with clear grey eyes. You would never guess what she had seen – or done – in her own home so recently. And while the owner of the betting shop swears blind she didn’t leave the office at all that afternoon, Staffe has
discovered
that to be a lie. Leanne Colquhoun had fled the Limekiln scene without her handbag. That is the kind of hurry she was in. In the handbag, there was a receipt for Ibuprofen from the Londis halfway between the Limekiln and Surrey Racing. The receipt was timed at 15.46 and Janine’s best guess for the
likeliest
time of death is 15.00 to 17.00.

‘How come we’re not getting stuck into her, sir?’ says Pulford.

Staffe pulls away from the spyhole. ‘You should know why. She’s entitled to a solicitor.’

‘She was happy enough to talk in the car.’

‘The car you brought her back in without so much as a WPC or a counsellor. She’s a grieving widow. Traumatised.’

‘Traumatised, my arse.’

‘Your arse should be in a sling.’

Pulford leans back against the wall and looks up at the
flickering
fluorescent light. ‘Why did the bookie lie? You think he’s giving her one? She claims to have loved Karl Colquhoun. Loved him so much she couldn’t see her own kids? Yeah, right.’

Staffe taps the spyhole to the metal door. ‘Tell me what you see.’ He watches Pulford peer into the interview room, listens as the young graduate begins his summary verdict.

‘I see a woman who feels no guilt for stopping years of abuse, of herself and her kids, and if you ask me she’s done our job for us.’

‘So now it’s our job to castrate suspects is it?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘And where’s the evidence?’

‘She lied about being in the betting shop. She fled the scene …’

‘… the evidence that Karl Colquhoun interfered with his kids.’

‘You’ve spoken to the caseworker, Carly Kellerman.’

‘There’s no evidence,’ says Staffe. ‘The CPS didn’t have a case.’

‘They took her kids away. That’s a pretty good motive.’

‘She loved him more than her own children. She chose him. How could a woman do that to a man she loved?’

‘She’d hate herself, wouldn’t she? She’d want to make amends.’

Staffe sighs, tries to make sense of everything he knows about Leanne Colquhoun: wife, mother. ‘And even if he was messing with her kids, in this country we don’t chop their
bollocks
off.’

‘We leave it for somebody else to do, then we punish the wrong person.’

‘We collect evidence and build the best case for the Crown. This is a civilised country. We don’t always get the guilty man, but when we don’t it’s so we don’t fill our jails with the
innocent
.’

‘If he wasn’t messing with her kids, why’d she do it?’

‘Who says she did?’

‘If she didn’t, who did?’

‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’

The door from reception clatters open and Staffe recognises who it is straight away – slightly fatter than last time they met and a little looser in the jowl.

Stanley Buchanan and Staffe started their careers on
opposite
sides of the same coin and at the same time. Buchanan looks jaded and gives a tut-tut shake of the head. Maybe it’s dealing more with the guilty than the innocent all your life and trying to treat the two the same that drives poor Stanley to drink. Time was, Staffe and Stanley had that in common, too.

‘The complaints are on file already, DI Wagstaffe, but I may as well tell you what I’ve told DCI Pennington.’ He sits down next to Leanne Colquhoun and taps her twice on the shoulder. ‘We’ll have you out of here in two shakes of a lambkin’s tail. Don’t you worry, Leanne.’ Staffe thinks this must be a good day for Stanley, maybe just the couple of large ones down the Old Doctor Butler’s Head. ‘This is a bereaved woman, a woman of impeccable standing without so much as a caution to her name. What possessed you to allow a young sergeant to press-gang this poor woman without a female officer or a counsellor in sight?’

‘Very good, Stanley,’ says Staffe.

‘You can call me Mr Buchanan.’

‘I didn’t force my way in,’ says Pulford.

‘That’s enough, Sergeant,’ says Staffe.

‘She fled the murder scene. She could have been trying to …’

‘I said enough!’

Staffe turns to Leanne. ‘Why didn’t you call the police?’

She stares straight past him, says, ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’

‘You could tell us why you lied about being in the bookies all afternoon,’ says Pulford.

She looks up at Pulford, gives him a patronising smile. ‘I want to see my kids.’

Buchanan says, ‘There are three witnesses who say my client was only out of her place of work for ten minutes.’

‘You can see the children soon, Leanne,’ says Staffe. ‘They’re in the Phoenix Suite with the caseworker.’

Staffe pulls up a chair so he’s sitting within a couple of feet of her. He waits for her to look at him and shoots Pulford a look to keep quiet.

Eventually, Leanne does look up at Staffe and he smiles with his eyes. He thinks he can see a softening in the hard creases of her face and he tunes into his softest voice, puts his forearm on the desk and leans ever so slightly forward. She looks away, then straight back at him when he says, ‘I’d like you to tell me about when they took your children away. Is it the way it looks on the file? I just want to see it the way you see it. That’s all. Then you can go.’

‘Home?’

‘We’ll see.’ He shoots the look at Pulford again. This is his case and he’s not settling for the obvious.

‘You don’t have to answer that, Leanne. It’s irrelevant,’ says Buchanan.

She looks back at Staffe, makes the slightest of smiles, like faint parentheses at the corners of her mouth. ‘He’s got a
history
, Karl. Least that’s what they say.’ Leanne talks about Karl Colquhoun as if he’s still around, not lying blue-grey on a slab nearby with his belly and chest butterflied for autopsy.

Staffe listens as much to how she’s talking as to what she says. ‘And they said he was …?’

Leanne Colquhoun nods. Staffe can see she’s fighting back the tears. Is it pride? Is it because if she cries, it’s an acceptance he is dead?

‘Do you believe them? Do you think he did that to his other children?’

‘I’ll swear on my life he never touched a hair on
my
kids’ heads.’

‘And would you swear on his life too?’

She looks at Staffe, says, ‘I love him. I love him so much.’ And the face goes soft. ‘Where does a woman like me find love in this world?’ The creases in her forehead go smooth and she smiles. Her eyes are glassy and the tears come. And come.

The Phoenix Suite, a newly built specialist unit for holding
victims
of sexual offences, is just five minutes down the road from Leadengate Station and as Staffe approaches it, the Barbican shimmers in the summer heat.