The Shadows in the Street (43 page)

‘So you haven’t an opinion about his mental state? Could you slow down? This isn’t a blue-light job.’

‘Sorry, ma’am.’ He eased his foot off the pedal and leaned back slightly. ‘This sort of obsessive serial killing is never the work of a sane man, is it? He had a fascination with prostitutes and a loathing of them. He clearly has sexual hang-ups. But he’s a priest, canon residentiary of a cathedral. There’s the split. He probably thought he was doing God’s work or carrying out a sacred plan – ridding the world of harlots. But then things changed – and he discovered he liked killing women, any women. Jesus Christ, I haven’t got my head round it properly but one of them was almost Cat.’

‘Do you think you need to talk to someone?’

‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘I sort myself out. Always have. Thank you.’

‘High horses are difficult to climb down from, Simon.’

He did not reply. He meant what he had said. He sorted himself out. He did not need to talk to the HQ shrink.

The side door of the bungalow was open and a PC stood on guard.

Serrailler halted in the passageway. There was a dreadful silence, the sort of silence he was used to, a silence that over the years he had come to recognise as different from that inside a merely empty house. Early in his police career he had scoffed at one of his first sergeants who had drawn his attention to the silence of death, assuming it was a fading old police superstition. Then he had experienced it for himself.

He went into the rooms one by one – bedroom, bare as a monastic cell; study, orderly, papers neat, books carefully aligned, laptop covered. Sitting room. Bare. Pleasant enough. Bland. This was the house of a man who gave nothing away, whose personality had left no mark.

Kitchen. Clean. Immaculate.

The Chief was at his shoulder. ‘Smell,’ she said.

It was there, faint, but unmistakable, the smell of death and early decomposition.

They found the body of Ruth Webber, pushed into the small broom cupboard, off the kitchen. She had been strangled and her face had cuts and abrasions.

Serrailler looked at it for a long moment. It was impossible to get the other image out of the way, the one that was superimposed on what was in front of him, the image not of Ruth Webber, but of Cat.

Simon was the first to see Stephen Webber, standing opposite the gate that gave onto the Close, ashen, his face crumpled into grief and distress and a terrible sort of bewilderment.

Simon went over to him.

‘What’s happening? Have you heard something … ?’

‘Would you wait just a moment? I’ll be straight back.’

Simon ran back to the bungalow. ‘Ma’am, the Dean is outside wanting news, he hasn’t been told anything. I’ll take him inside, tell him myself. He might want to identify the body, see his wife, but later. I don’t want him anywhere near here. We’ll get the tapes up, he needs to be out of the way while forensics are in and then when they remove the body. Shall I phone your driver, get him to fetch you from here, or will you wait for me?’

‘You go and talk to the poor fellow. I’ll call my car. Thank you, Simon.’

Stephen Webber sobbed, head in his hands, body shaking. Serrailler offered to make him coffee, get him brandy, but in the end simply poured a glass of water, set it beside him and waited. He had been the bearer of bad news often enough and everyone’s reaction was different but he never got used to it or became hardened. He doubted if any of them did.

After a long time, Stephen wiped his eyes, sipped the water, and then began to talk, to pour out everything, about his marriage, about what he now saw as a grave mistake in coming to St Michael’s, about himself and his own perceived inadequacies. But above all about Miles Hurley, a man he had liked, worked with, trusted, relied upon, yet never, he now realised, known at all.

‘It’s the betrayal,’ he said several times, ‘and the fact that he’s a stranger to me. I can’t begin to understand.’

‘I doubt if anyone does.’

‘No. But it is wickedness. A mind like that – he is possessed by some dreadful evil.’

‘Or else deranged. Madness takes some strange forms.’

Webber shook his head.

‘I’ll resign, of course.’

‘Don’t make any decisions immediately.’

‘I have made my decision. It is irrevocable.’

He stood up and put out his hand. ‘Thank you, Simon. One thing – I would like to see Cat. I owe her some sort of explanation – though I have none. I owe it to her not simply to disappear. Would you ask her, if she has five minutes she could spare me in the next week?’

‘I’m sure she will. She’s staying with my father and stepmother for the time being. I’m going there later. I’ll tell her.’

‘Thank you.’ The Dean looked around him as if puzzled, uncertain where he was or why, and not knowing what he should do next. ‘Thank you,’ he said again.

‘Do you have someone you want me to ring? Family? Someone to come and stay with you?’

‘I have a sister.’ He smiled suddenly. ‘But please don’t trouble – I’ll ring her.’

As they walked to the door, Stephen Webber said, as an afterthought, ‘Geraldine – my sister – never liked Ruth, you know. From the beginning. It was – a sadness. People didn’t understand her, you see, and they didn’t always find her easy. But I loved her. I realise it now. And that is the secret, you know.’

He watched from the door as Simon walked slowly to his car, past the forensics van and cars which had already taken over that side of the road, where the crime-scene tapes were in place, cordoning off the gate and the path that led to Miles Hurley’s bungalow.

Sixty-seven

‘Darling, you don’t have to go home until you’re good and ready, you know that.’

Cat and Judith were sitting in the conservatory with coffee. The late-autumn sun was bright on the garden and through the windows, though outside it was cold after the first frost of the year.

‘I ought to go back.’

Judith sighed. ‘I sometimes think the words that have caused most harm and unhappiness to the human race are “should” and “ought”.’

‘You’ve been fantastic and being here has given me time to steady myself again. The children have loved it, needless to say, but they have to get back to a proper routine.’

‘Yes, I can see that. Well, up to you, of course. You do have to face the house and what happened there. There isn’t any need to hurry it, but once you’ve done it, you’ll have pulled the sting.’

‘Yes.’

‘I hear the Dean’s resigned.’

‘And most of me feels extremely glad about that. Perhaps now they’ll make a sensible appointment – he was never going to be the right man for St Michael’s. But I feel so desperately sorry for him. I can’t think where he’ll go or what he will do.’

‘On the other hand, perhaps he woke people up just a little and that’s never a bad thing.’

‘Oh, undoubtedly. The words baby and bathwater applied but he had some fresh ideas which we needed. The new visitors’ centre, his plans for reaching out to the students – not just sitting there smugly waiting for everyone to come to us.’

‘The Magdalene Group?’

Cat shuddered. ‘There does need to be something – the problem isn’t going to go away.’

‘If you think … well, it’s something I feel I’d like to be involved in if I could be useful.’

‘You could be extremely useful … thank you. I’ll hold you to it.’

‘When we get back from the States.’

Cat lowered her coffee and looked at Judith with alarm. Judith looked steadily back.

‘We are going,’ she said. ‘Your father so wants to do it and at his age you can’t so easily say “maybe in five years”. I owe it to him, you know. He needs me to himself for a while.’

Cat swallowed her panic. She’d had Judith to help her cope in the aftermath of Chris’s death, and now, with the trauma of Miles Hurley’s attack, she had come to rely on her, she had done so much with and for the children …

‘Yes,’ she said at last, ‘he does. And I have two feet. Time I stood on them again.’

‘It’s only six months, darling, and you’ll have Simon.’

‘I also have my diploma course, a job and three children. But one thing I did wonder about and that’s taking a lodger – maybe a medical student or a junior doctor from Bevham General? What do you think? Heaven knows we have enough room. It’s either that or an au pair which I don’t really need and I’m not sure I want.’

Cat looked across the garden, put to bed for the winter but with the last few blooms on the climbing iceberg rose catching the sun, and had a sudden vision of her mother, gardening trousers and apron with the pockets full of twine and plant ties, secateurs in hand, hair pinned up. The garden meant Meriel. Judith did what had to be done but she was not the gardener her mother had been. Cat felt her eyes fill with tears, as they seemed to do easily at the moment, as always when she looked at Sam.

Judith was quiet. I love her, Cat thought, and she is absolutely right for my father. But of course it’s different.

‘Simon will miss you,’ she said. ‘You, as in you.’

Judith shook her head. ‘No, he won’t. But it’s all right between us now and I can’t tell you how good that feels.’

‘It pleases Dad too.’

Judith laughed. ‘I think you may be right.’

‘Simon’s taking Sam walking in the Brecon Beacons next weekend. I want him to make sure Sam is really all right with all this – he still hasn’t said much to me.’

Not said much, she thought, but he had not let her out of his sight since, he had come into her room every night and climbed into her bed silently, had rushed to find her the moment he got in from school and brought his homework to whichever room she was in so that he could do it with her beside him, had been reluctant to go anywhere with anyone else, and if he did, could not wait to be back. He needed someone to talk to without fuss until he had cleared everything, feelings, anxieties, confessions, problems, and a healing could begin. Cat knew that she was not the right person. Simon would be.

‘I wonder if I’ll ever again be able to think of Miles Hurley as one thinks of a normal human being? I’m supposed to forgive him but I can’t … I think I can forgive what he did to me – after all, he didn’t succeed in killing me, I’m here, I’m fine, unharmed. But Sam … he’ll never forget that, he’ll have the memory of those few moments of terror for the rest of his life. Hurley murdered four women and left one for dead. He was evil, he was a liar and a deceiver and “he hid his evil in the robe of righteousness”. He’s ruined Stephen Webber’s life and totally betrayed Stephen’s trust and friendship … what good is there to say?’

Judith was silent.

The sun moved round, slanting through the bare branches of the old walnut tree onto the grass.

‘What can I do?’ Cat asked in sudden distress.

After a pause, Judith said, ‘I think all you can do is wrap it up in a metaphorical bundle and lay it down.’

‘But where?’

‘Are you going to Ruth Webber’s funeral at St Michael’s?’

‘Oh yes. I must.’

‘So, maybe you could lay it down there?’

‘Yes,’ Cat said. ‘Maybe.’

‘I’m going to make a lamb casserole.’ Judith got up.

‘I’ll come and do the vegetables.’

Ordinary things, Cat thought gratefully. Washing up the coffee cups. Making a lamb stew. Chopping vegetables. Ordinary life. That’s what saves us.

‘By the way.’ Judith looked at her with a smile. ‘Simon rang. He said he might go back to Taransay. In the early spring.’

‘For another holiday?’

‘Not quite. Apparently he’s had an invitation to a wedding.’

Sixty-eight

Stephen Webber could not even find the telephone because of the packing cases, boxes, suitcases, detritus. Even the table he’d been using in the temporary house, instead of his own desk, had already gone to storage. The telephone was on the floor behind a pile of books for the charity shop. He lifted the receiver on about the twentieth ring.

‘Stephen Webber.’

‘Good afternoon. This is James Penman.’

The name meant something. Nothing. Yes.

‘Solicitor. My office is on the other side of the Close.’

Something. A shadow fell.

‘I wonder if I might come across? I need to have a word with you about something.’

‘Something?’

‘Not for the telephone. I can be with you in a couple of minutes.’

So it wasn’t yet over. Even now, even the week he moved out, moved away. Not over. Why wasn’t it over?

‘The house is in chaos.’

‘You’re packing up, yes, I know. But I think it better if I come to you, all the same.’

A couple of minutes, as he had said.

Miles Hurley’s solicitor.

‘The kitchen is the only clear room downstairs. Sorry.’

‘Fine. How sad that you didn’t even get a chance to move into the new Deanery and enjoy some time there.’

Stephen said nothing. Spooned coffee into the pot. He had only spoken to James Penman once, a formal word, meeting by chance in the Close. There had not seemed reason for anything more.

He had nothing to say to him about Miles.

He stood waiting for the water to boil. The kitchen was filled with thin sunlight.

‘As you will know, Miles Hurley has the services of a barrister, and he has asked me to see you.’

Stephen set the coffee and milk on the table. He could think of nothing that either lawyer might have to say to him. Nothing he had to say to them. To anyone.

James Penman had a pale face, shadow of a beard. An intelligent face. He looked steadily over the top of his coffee cup at Stephen.

‘I know what your response may well be,’ he said. ‘It would probably be my own response. But I am obliged to put this to you, and ask you at least to consider it.’

Stephen had a sudden flash of memory, back to the last time Ruth had left the house, the last time he had spoken to her, the last night. She had gone out into the Close and met Miles Hurley.

He took a gulp of coffee. It was hot. His tongue smarted. He had not learned how to divert his mind, how to let the flashes come like pictures in a film but simply not to look at them, as a child closes its eyes before a frightening image.

‘Miles Hurley has asked to see you.’