The Outcast Dead (12 page)

But he had been happy to see the two girls enjoying themselves. When he first met her, Maddie had struck him as dangerously intense and nervous. Within minutes of meeting Rebecca, she was just another incomprehensible female, giggling at videos on YouTube and rolling her eyes whenever he told a joke. So when Rebecca had expressed an interest in the filming, he had volunteered to drive into Norwich. Was it because he had hoped that he would see Ruth Galloway? He doesn’t like to think that he could be so obvious, though, by the look that Michelle gave him, she obviously suspected his motives. It’s just that I feel like a change of scene, he told himself, an afternoon off after a week investigating the most horrible crime imaginable. He’d expected the programme being filmed at the castle to be one of those earnest productions where they dig for five days, find half a pot and then pretend to be happy about it. But when he got there he found Ruth making a programme about a notorious child killer. It’s irrational, he knows (given their history), but he expects Ruth to be somehow above such sordid matters. And then his daughter had come out with all that stuff about Mother Hook. He’d been quite shocked.
He likes to think that he has shielded his daughters from most of the horrors in life. He’d forgotten how much teenage girls like horror.

He’d been amazed at how relaxed Ruth had seemed on the set. She is confident, he knows, when she’s in her professional world, but he’d thought that TV might bring out some of her better-hidden insecurities. But she seemed to treat the camera like an old friend, chatting animatedly about Carbon 14 and all those processes that she has so many times tried, and failed, to explain to him. For one ridiculous minute he had almost felt jealous. But he’s not jealous, he tells himself; he has no right to be. And if Ruth wants to consort with silver-haired American TV stars, that’s her choice. He stops with a jolt at a red light.

‘Dad!’ says Rebecca from the back seat. ‘I was putting on my make-up.’

‘Why do you need make-up when you’re in the car?’

‘Maddie and I thought we might stop off at Lynn. Meet up with some people from school.’

Nelson is about to answer when his mobile rings. He has forgotten to put it on hands free. ‘Can you get that, love?’ he asks Rebecca.

But it’s Maddie who picks up the phone from the foot-well.

‘It’s a text from someone called Clough.’

He shouldn’t let Maddie see the message but he’s too impatient to wait. ‘What does it say?’

‘
Justine T wants 2 talk 2 u. Says she has imp info
. Is that
Justine Thomas?’ asks Maddie. ‘She’s a good friend of mine.’

*

Nelson drops the girls off in the centre of King’s Lynn and drives straight to Chapel Road. Justine had said that she might be collecting Bailey from school. Sure enough, the sweeping drive is empty, and when Nelson rings the doorbell the sound echoes through the house. He looks at his watch. Three-thirty. She should be back soon. He decides to take a quick stroll around the garden. It’s the usual middle-class paradise of decking, terracotta urns and children’s play equipment. There’s a Wendy House that looks like a miniature Tyrolean cottage and a vast climbing frame that probably needed planning permission and a light on the top to warn off low-flying planes. Suddenly a picture flashes into Nelson’s mind, a high-definition memory, so clear as to be almost painful: Scarlet’s brothers playing on a half-finished climbing frame in their wilderness of a garden. That had been a very different creation – reclaimed timber and old tyres – but the intention had doubtless been the same, to provide a safe place for children to play. He thinks of Scarlet’s twin brothers; Maddie said that they were eleven now. They had been playing with Scarlet when she disappeared. Do they still think about her? Do they still run and laugh and climb? Murder has deep roots, he thinks, and casts long shadows. Scarlet’s brothers were only seven when she died but he wonders if they ever played so innocently again.

Justine’s car, a shiny Golf, crunches over the gravel. Nelson goes to meet her. He admires her calm, unflustered movements as she lifts Scooter from his car-seat and unfolds Poppy’s pushchair. Bailey, a tiny figure in a purple blazer, glares at Nelson from under his pudding-basin fringe.

‘Who’s this, Justine?’

Nelson hears the authentic, born-to-command tones under the babyish lisp, an attitude probably fostered by the purple blazer school. Michelle had insisted on sending the girls to private school, a decision he still regrets. He hadn’t wanted his daughters to grow away from him, to rhyme ‘bath’ with ‘hearth’ and to sneer at people who put brown sauce on their chips. But Michelle had wanted to give them the best, ‘a real chance in life’. Is that what his parents want for Bailey? Full-time nanny, pre-prep, Suzuki violin lessons? Ruth will be just as adamant, he knows, though in her case she will be demanding a state school in the most ethnically mixed, socially deprived area she can find in North Norfolk. His opinion won’t count much with her either but, then again, what does he know? He hated school himself.

‘He’s a visitor,’ says Justine, brightly but with a faint suggestion of steel. ‘Say hallo, Bailey.’

‘Hallo,’ says the tiny plutocrat.

‘Hallo,’ says Nelson. He considers ruffling the boy’s hair and then decides against it.

‘This way,’ says Justine. Poppy is in her pushchair and Scooter refuses to be put down so Justine balances him on one hip.

‘Shall I hold him?’ offers Nelson.

‘I’m afraid he won’t go to you. I’m OK. I can manage.’

She does, admirably, and within a few minutes they are all seated in the sunny playroom, the children drinking juice and eating raisins. ‘Their parents don’t like them to have cakes.’

‘Do they tell you what to feed them?’

‘Yes,’ says Justine. ‘I’ve got a list and I have to plan my menus for the week. I don’t mind. I like to be organised.’

‘You said you had something to tell me.’

‘Yes.’ To Nelson’s surprise, Justine gets out her mobile, the latest iPhone. New car, state-of-the-art phone, she must be earning a good wage from the toy company owners.

‘I’m still Facebook friends with him,’ she is saying. ‘I kept meaning to unfriend him but I never got round to it.’

Nelson is lost. He knows about Facebook, of course. At one time his daughters were never off it and even Michelle has an account. He can’t see the point of it himself – in his view friends are people you can have a pint with, not names on a screen – but he doesn’t think of it as evil either.

‘What are we talking about?’ he asks.

Justine looks surprised. ‘Bob. Bob Donaldson. I was checking my Facebook page – I don’t go on it that much these days – and I saw this.’

She puts the phone in his hands. He squints at it. Is text getting smaller or does he need glasses? Justine takes a swipe at the screen and the words get bigger. There’s a
picture too, a tiny square of a man holding a baby. ‘Bob Donaldson,’ he reads: ‘June 14th. 2 Massey Avenue, King’s Lynn.’

‘That’s his house.’ says Justine. ‘The house he shared with Liz, I mean. He must have enabled location finder on Facebook. You can add a specific location and the phone knows when you’re there.’

‘June 14th,’ says Nelson. ‘That was the day David died.’

‘Yes,’ says Justine. ‘He said he wasn’t in the house that day but he must have been lying.’

‘What does the message say?’ Nelson holds the phone up to the light.

Bob Donaldson’s status report is brief. ‘
We’ll never be parted again
.’

‘Why didn’t you tell us that Bob was in the house?’

Liz Donaldson looks at him wearily. Nelson thinks that her two days in custody have changed her beyond measure. As a prisoner on remand she is wearing her own clothes but she seems institutionalised just the same, grey-faced and dead-eyed. She stares at Nelson and Judy as if she can hardly be bothered to speak to them.

‘I didn’t know,’ she says.

‘Look, Liz,’ Judy leans forward. ‘We know he was there. Why are you trying to protect him?’

Liz shuts her eyes. ‘I didn’t know. I woke up half way through the afternoon, not really awake, you know, like I was dreaming, and I thought I heard his voice on the baby monitor.’

‘What was he saying?’ asks Judy.

‘He was singing a lullaby to David.’

Judy and Nelson look at each other. ‘Why didn’t you tell us this earlier?’ asks Nelson.

Liz opens her eyes and they are full of tears. ‘Because I
thought I was dreaming. I wanted him to come home so much, to be with me and David, to sing lullabies to his son, I thought I was imagining things. Then, when I woke up, David was dead and everything was over. Everything.’ She starts to cry in earnest, letting the tears fall onto her lap.

‘Liz,’ says Judy. ‘What happened when you last saw Bob. Did you argue? Did you tell him that you wanted him back?’

Liz’s voice is suddenly hard. ‘You might say we argued. I told him that if he divorced me he’d never see David again.’

*

Back at the station, Nelson opens his office door to be met by the welcoming party from hell – Superintendent Whitcliffe and Madge Hudson.

‘What’s this I hear about you arresting the husband?’

Nelson tries to edge past his boss. ‘I’m bringing him in for questioning. I’ve received information that places him at the scene.’

‘What information?’

Nelson sits at his desk, trying to take control. Madge smiles as if she sees through this obvious bit of body language. Addressing himself to Whitcliffe, Nelson explains about the Facebook message. He’s sure the superintendent has an account, complete with pictures of himself relaxing under palm trees or whatever he does in his spare time.

‘Who’s bringing him in?’ asks Whitcliffe.

‘DS Clough and DS Heathfield.’

‘They should be able to handle things.’

‘I think so. He’s hardly an intimidating type, physically at least.’

‘I always thought the husband was a possible suspect,’ says Madge.

‘In that case,’ says Nelson, ‘it’s a pity you didn’t mention it before.’

‘That’s not how it works,’ says Madge. ‘You know that.’

No? thinks Nelson. How does it work then? But Whitcliffe is regarding Madge with the trusting gaze of a volunteer about to be sawn in half by a stage magician.

‘Family annihilators often act out of a perverted desire to protect,’ she is saying. ‘They convince themselves that their children would rather be dead than face a future without them. Typically, these actions are triggered by divorce or some other family trauma.’

‘Don’t family annihilators usually wipe out the whole family?’ asks Nelson.

‘Who knows if Bob has struck before? You said yourself that the deaths of Samuel and Isaac could be suspicious.’

‘Why would he kill the older boys? He wasn’t in danger of losing them.’

‘How do you know? Maybe this isn’t the first time that Liz has threatened him with losing custody.’

She has a point, though Nelson isn’t about to admit it.

‘Did the wife confirm that he was in the house?’ asks Whitcliffe.

‘She says she heard his voice on the baby monitor but she thought she was dreaming.’

‘That’s very plausible,’ says Madge. ‘She would have been almost in a fugue state, disassociated, wandering between waking and sleeping.’

Nelson thinks of something Ruth once told him about marshland. Because it’s neither land nor sea, but something in between, prehistoric man had thought that it was a sacred place, a liminal zone, half way between life and death. This is why bodies and treasure are often found buried in marshes, to mark that boundary. Was Liz stuck in her own liminal zone, dazed from sadness and lack of sleep, unable to distinguish between dreams and reality? He thinks too of Judy’s first diagnosis, that Liz was suffering from some sort of post traumatic stress syndrome. Sometimes Judy can be very astute.

‘What were the exact words of the Facebook message?’ asks Whitcliffe.

‘We’ll never be parted again.’

‘That fits,’ says Madge. ‘Bob will have convinced himself that David would only be truly his if he was dead.’

‘If that’s what he was thinking, why didn’t he kill himself too?’ asks Nelson. ‘That would be more logical.’

Madge smiles pityingly. ‘We’re not talking about logic here DCI Nelson, we’re talking about psychosis.’

But Nelson knows that there’s usually logic, even if it’s of a warped nature, in every crime. That bothers him. But the fact remains that Bob lied about his whereabouts. That’s never a good sign. His phone rings.

‘Nelson.’

‘Boss, it’s Clough. Bob’s done a runner. Scarpered just before we got here. His girlfriend’s having hysterics.’

Running away. That’s not a good sign either.

*

Ruth drives home, tired but still on a high. She has delivered several pieces direct to camera and Dani said that she had ‘a certain presence’ which, according to Aslan the researcher, was the highest possible praise. Corinna, baulked of horrific chilling drama, stormed off in a huff, and Frank said on camera that he thought Mother Hook may have been innocent. It had all been very exciting. Phil was inclined to be sulky at first about Ruth’s sudden rise to prominence but he had cheered up when he was filmed talking about the latest DNA technology. Even Shona had managed to get in on the act, standing in the trench in a very unacademic-looking leather mini skirt.

But now she’s exhausted. She picks Kate up from Sandra’s and starts the last weary leg of the journey. She goes cross-country, past picturesque villages too remote to be on the tourist trail. The sun is low over the flat fields, and as she gets nearer the coast she sees the seagulls circling, their feathers turning pink as they head towards the sea. She is fed up with driving, though, and is it her imagination or has the car developed a new and sinister rattle? She hopes that it wasn’t the result of the collision. Frank has said that he will pay for any repairs but she dreads having to go to the garage and face the whole ‘what’s the problem darling? do you know where the engine is?’ farce.
She doesn’t know anything about cars but she doesn’t think that’s because she’s a woman. Max, for example, once spent two months putting unleaded in a diesel car.