The Merchant's House (29 page)

‘What was it he did, Elaine?’ Heffernan asked gently, not wanting to break the atmosphere of confidence.

‘He got involved in an incident outside a pub. He was convicted of grievous bodily harm. The police said it was premeditated – a vicious attack, they said. I didn’t even know about it until they looked into his background. I was devastated. It seemed completely out of character for him, honestly. He’s never shown any sign of … It wasn’t fair that we should be made to suffer for something he did when …’

‘So what happened then?’

‘Alan’s mother – she lives in Queenswear, Alan was her only son – she wanted a grandchild almost as much as we wanted to be parents. She knew this doctor, at the Morbay Clinic. We saw him and he examined me and confirmed that I couldn’t have any children, not even by IVF.’

She stopped talking for a minute, gathering her thoughts. Heffernan waited patiently. Then she continued, quietly and calmly. ‘Mary, my mother-in-law, had this girl living downstairs. She’d got a boyfriend, a real no-hoper, always in debt. She kept asking Mary to let her off her rent for a month, that sort of thing. She was working but the boyfriend must have gone through her money, I don’t know how: gambling or drugs, I don’t know.’ She breathed deeply before carrying on. ‘Mary arranged it. I don’t know how, I never asked. She told this girl that if she’d have a baby for us, we’d pay off all her debts and pay her a lump sum too. You’re wrong about the boyfriend being the father. It was all in the agreement. The baby was Alan’s, by artificial insemination. I wouldn’t have liked …’

‘Of course not,’ Stan said puritanically. ‘Go on.’

‘I met the girl. She didn’t seem too bright but I was so grateful to her. I thought it was all going to be perfect. She’d have our baby, we’d pay the money and then we’d never see her again. That’d be it.’

‘So what went wrong?’

She looked up at Heffernan. It was as though he knew. ‘She had the baby in the clinic. She had the best of care, no expense spared. I went in at the same time. I’d pretended to be pregnant at home. I’d even worn one of those corset things like they do on the stage. Nobody was going to know it wasn’t my baby. Dr Downey saw to everything – the birth certificate, everything. I thought when we paid the money over and left the clinic with Jonathon that was it.’ Tears began to well up in her eyes. ‘I never thought we’d see the girl again. She’d done her job and got paid for it. That was going to be it.’

‘But it wasn’t, was it?’

‘The boyfriend was greedy. He found out where we lived and said if we didn’t pay them money every month, he’d say what had happened. We’d never legally adopted Jonathon –
Dr Downey said there was no need. That Chris, he said Jonathon would be taken away from us.’ She began to sob.

‘So you paid up?’

Elaine nodded. ‘What we’d done wasn’t legal. I knew that much. What else could we do?’

‘So what happened when Jonathon went missing?’ Heffernan looked across at Stan, who was listening intently.

‘When he disappeared, I thought he’d wandered off or been abducted or something. It was like a nightmare.’

‘What every mother dreads,’ Stan said quietly.

She turned to him, pleading. ‘I was his mother. She’d had nothing to do with him – she just had him, provided a service. I was his mother. I looked after him; nursed him when he was ill; he loved me. He called me Mummy.’

‘When did you find out he was with Sharon and Chris?’ Heffernan asked before things got too emotional.

‘It was a couple of days later. Chris rang me to say he was with them and he was okay. I rang Mary but she said Sharon had moved out quickly and she didn’t know where they’d gone. We drove round, we looked everywhere … and the police …’

Stan spoke gently. ‘You really should have told us, Elaine.’

‘I know but … I’m sorry. You were very kind. Everyone … I’m sorry.’

‘So when did Sharon and Chris get in touch again?’ Heffernan looked her in the eyes, challenging. Elaine shook her head and started to weep.

‘So this is the place all the complaints have been about,’ Gerry Heffernan commented as Rachel parked the car on the edge of the travellers’ site. ‘It’s a while since I’ve been on the hippie trail to Neston.’

He got out of the car slowly and slammed the door. A barking dog followed them; not an auspicious start. Their progress was watched by a group of dirty-faced children and a young man in a multicoloured woolly hat who sat, whittling a piece of wood, on the steps of an ancient bus. The young man directed them wordlessly to Chris’s caravan and returned to his task with studied concentration.

The caravan door was open. Chris was sitting with his
feet up reading a racing paper while Jonathon played with his bricks on the floor. When he saw his visitors, Chris sat up, apprehensive.

‘Hello, Chris. You don’t mind if we come in? You’ve already met DC Tracey, haven’t you?’

Chris’s expression gave nothing away. He gathered the child up protectively and sat him on his knee. The child buried his face in Chris’s sweatshirt.

‘I’ve just been talking to Inspector Jenkins. He’s in charge of the search for that missing kid, Jonathon Berrisford.’

Chris looked wary.

‘Jonathon.’

The child looked round.

‘We’ve had some tests done, Mr Manners. DNA. It seems you’re the kid’s dad after all.’

‘I told you.’ Triumphantly.

‘He does look like the missing kid, though. I was looking at a picture of him just before.’ He paused. ‘But the hair’s wrong, isn’t it? You can really change people’s looks with hair, can’t you? I mean, Jonathon Berrisford’s hair was quite short. Daniel’s is long. Jonathon was blond. Daniel’s dark, isn’t he, Mr Manners?’

Chris nodded warily. This was getting uncomfortable.

‘I had another test done. The officer who took the samples also snipped off a little bit of Daniel’s hair. You don’t usually use hair dye on a kid of that age, do you, Mr Manners?’

Chris hugged the child to him.

‘Hello, Jonathon. Do you like it here?’

The child nodded and grinned at the funny policeman who looked like a great big bear. Then he put his arms around Chris’s neck and clung on.

‘So what happened, Chris? Are you going to tell us here or at the station?’

‘How much do you know?’ he said quietly, stroking his son’s hair.

‘Quite a bit. We know about your debts and how you paid them. About Mrs Hughes …’

‘That cow … she treated us like shit. Like bloody animals, breeding for her precious daughter-in-law. People who’ve got money treat people who haven’t like bloody shit.’

‘Leave the politics out of it, Chris. What happened?’

‘Sharon was to have this baby, for this rich couple. She went to this posh clinic. They gave her this syringe thing with the man’s sperm, told her what to do, but she didn’t. She had some bloody pride. The kid was conceived in the usual way. I was the dad. Right?’ Heffernan nodded. He suspected it had been Chris’s pride rather than Sharon’s that had dictated this arrangement. ‘Anyway, she had the kid and everything was fine. She got paid and it saw off my debts, got the bookies off my back. I told her we could always have more kids when the time was right. She’d forget all about this one.’

‘So what went wrong?’

‘It was all fine while she was carrying this kid for that bloody doctor’s rich friends. She was examined every week, had every test going. But once it had been born, Sharon had done her bit, she was no use any more. Just treated like a bloody farm animal. He never even examined her after the kid was born.’ The child swung down off his father’s knee and returned to his coloured bricks on the floor. ‘She got an infection. She didn’t know for ages, just had a few pains and that. They lasted so long she thought it was normal. We decided to try for a kid of our own but nothing happened. Turned out the infection had buggered up her insides, she couldn’t have any more.’

Rachel, who had been in the background listening, squatted down and began to build a tower for the boy. He grinned at her and added some bricks.

‘So you decided to get your child back?’ Heffernan spoke softly, sympathetically.

‘Yeah. I borrowed this mate’s car and me and Sharon watched the cottage till we got the chance. He’s a great kid, Inspector. We were dead happy. It was like he knew we were his real mum and dad. We had to dye his hair ‘cause there were pictures of him everywhere. He was dead good when we did it. It was sort of a game to him.’ He paused. ‘I was always drifting, gambling, but when I had the kid to look after, and Sharon, it was different. We’d not lived together before: I’d had to work away a lot, stay in digs and all that. But we got on well, the three of us. Sharon’s mum
and dad were killed and she’d not had a family before. It was all working out so well. And my mum knew. She helped out, looking after Danny and that. I don’t think we did anything wrong.’

He looked at Heffernan. There were tears starting to appear in his eyes.

‘Are you still in debt, Chris?’

‘I’ve got my weaknesses. I’d always bet on anything, even when I was a kid. I tried to give it up when we got Danny back, but when Sharon went …’

‘What happened to Sharon?’

‘I don’t know. That’s the honest truth. I just thought she’d been attacked by some maniac. She was going on about making everything right, sorting things out with the Berrisfords. I’d rung them to say Danny was okay but she said she wanted to make everything right, legal. I told her not to be so daft. They might ask for the money back and there was no way …’

‘So you killed her to stop her …’

‘No. I didn’t bloody kill her. You can get that right out of your heads. I didn’t kill her. I was with those mates up in Tavistock. I did a job up there. You’ve checked already. Danny had gone to his gran’s for a few days. She wanted to see him. Sharon was on her own in the flat. Why should I want to kill her? Danny needed a mum.’

‘So you were away and you don’t know whether she set up some sort of meeting with the Berrisfords?’

‘I told her not to, to leave well alone. But I suppose she might have done it off her own bat. She did have this thing about letting them down and trying to make it okay.’

‘Which one was she in touch with? Mr Berrisford? Mrs Berrisford? Mrs Hughes? Who would she contact?’

‘I’ve no idea. As far as I know she didn’t contact any of them. I just said she might have done. Danny can stay with me, can’t he? I don’t know what I’d do without him now.’ He reached down and stroked the child’s hair.

Gerry Heffernan was going soft, just like Stan. There was nothing more he would have liked at that moment than to say yes to Chris’s question. The man clearly loved his son, unconventional though the arrangement was.

‘We’ll have to ask you to come down to the station, make a statement.’ Chris nodded, resigned. ‘You can bring Daniel, or leave him with your friends if you’d prefer. It shouldn’t take long. You’ll get straight home afterwards.’

Chris went over to Donna and Sludge’s caravan to ask if they could look after the child for an hour or so, then they went straight back to Tradmouth. When he got back to the station, Heffernan had an important question to ask Stan Jenkins. He practically ran up to Stan’s office, probably not advisable for a man of his age and build. He didn’t bother with any greeting. He just had one thing to ask.

‘Was Alan Berrisford down here at the time of the murder?’

‘Do you know, Gerry, now I think of it, I believe he was. He went back up north the day after. Why? Do you think …’

Wesley was going through statements when Chris Manners was brought in. Rachel came and told him about the latest developments.

‘So you reckon he’s in the clear?’ he asked.

‘All his alibis check out. He’s a gambler and a bit of a villain on a minor scale but that doesn’t mean he killed Sharon. The boss thinks it’d be worth checking the Berrisfords’ alibis. They would have felt strongly enough about what had happened to do something about it.’

‘What’s happening now?’

‘He’s making a statement – about the clinic and how him and Sharon got the kid back. By the way, did you know Alan Berrisford’s got a conviction for GBH? I’ve looked up the file. Vicious knife attack outside a pub in Morbay when he was about twenty. Lay in wait for this other bloke, apparently – quarrel over a girl. Got four months.’

Wesley raised his eyebrows. ‘Is he down here at the moment?’

‘No. Back up north.’

Wesley didn’t fancy another trip to Manchester.

‘Rachel, do you remember anyone called Boscople? I’m sure I’ve heard the name somewhere but …’

Rachel shook her head. ‘Name seems familiar. Ask the
boss.’ She turned to go but hesitated at the door. ‘It does ring a bell. I think it’s one of the people we interviewed when Sharon’s body was found. But don’t take my word for it.’

When she left, Wesley dug deeper into his files. Then he found it. PC Johnson had interviewed a Bill Boscople, one of the workers on Cissy Hutchins’s farm, to see if he’d seen anything suspicious – which he hadn’t, as he’d been working in another part of the farm at the time. The interview, confirming nothing, had been recorded and forgotten. There was a note on the file that said Boscople had also been interviewed because he was working in the fields near by at the time of Jonathon Berrisford’s disappearance. There was an address, presumably a tied cottage at Hutchins Farm. Wesley wrote it down.