White Light (6 page)

'Well, Dr Kitchener, that's quite a recording.' I just nodded. Walters fiddled with his pen for a second and then looked me straight in the eye. 'It's going to be a difficult case to prove, especially as your wife... is no longer able to make a statement in person.'

I sat down in the chair opposite. 'But she left a statement on this message.'

'Yes,' he conceded, 'and that's very compelling, but it's not a statement in the legal, criminal justice sense. Also, if anything ever went to trial, she's not available to be cross-examined.' He saw the look on my face and held up a hand to forestall my instant objections. 'Look, I'm not saying that we're not going to do anything, I just want to be clear with you on what is likely to happen, and what isn't.'

I sighed and rubbed my face. I felt like I was standing on the floor of an ocean with the whole weight of the last six weeks bearing down on me like two miles of sea water. 'I think this has a bearing on her accident.' I put my hands flat on the table and looked at the policeman. He stared back, impassive but sympathetic.

'It might,' he conceded, after a pause. Then: 'What I'd like to do, Adam, is to take a copy of this message and all the data surrounding when it was sent and so on, and get my team at Greenland to take a proper look at it.'

'That's good.' I nodded approval. Perhaps these detectives already had evidence against the Hollands, perhaps this would be the missing piece and...

'Adam. Adam!' I realised Walters had continued to speak but I'd tuned out. 'But please don't expect a quick result on this. The analysis of the video will take a while, and then it will be some time before we can get back to you. I'll try and keep you informed but it just won't be soon, I'm sorry.'

The huge weariness that had been building up in me broke like an enormous wave over my head. 'Fine, that's fine.' I had handed it on, I had done my best, I just wanted to lie down somewhere and let everything pass over me.

It was nearly dawn by the time the technical people had rooted around in my laptop and copied the recording and the metadata and all the rest of it. Taking one look at my exhausted face, Walters had suggested that I leave my Ford and had arranged for a squad car to drop me off at my house. I don't remember walking through the door or going upstairs, just falling onto my squeaky bed and everything going black.

CHAPTER FIVE

Sunday, 5 April 2015. 10:11

Another day without Sarah. I woke up late and for a long while I just lay in bed, staring at the wall. Then I hid myself in mindless routines, feeding the cat, eating breakfast, putting clothes into the washing machine, cleaning the house: anything not to think. I couldn't think any more.

The quiet seemed oppressive, so I dug into a box of ruined or abandoned technology and fished out an old walkman from the year dot, cabling it up to my laptop to transfer the tracks from the mix tape onto my iPod. Now I cleaned and tidied to a soundtrack of Louis Armstrong, StereoMCs and Fat Boy Slim.

Eventually, in the late afternoon, I sat down at the kitchen table to do the task that I had started out to do last night – emailing Williamson at CalTech. The tiny amount of focus it took to write a comprehensible message enquiring politely about a job helped me to mentally shake myself, and I pressed Send and sat back, with my mind a little clearer.

I wondered if the Operation Greenland people had seen Sarah's video message already, or whether it would be weeks and stacks of paperwork later before it worked its way to the top of their piles of evidence.

I sat up. Just because it might take the police weeks to look into this didn't mean I couldn't do some digging of my own. I didn’t know the exact date of Helen’s death, as it had been such a painful subject for my wife that I'd never wanted to ask for details, but thinking about it now I realised it must have been between 1983 when the family moved into the house in Summertown and about 1985.

My hands flew over my laptop keyboard and I called up the archive of the local paper, the Oxford Mail. Unfortunately, their online archive only ran back to 1997. I dare say I could have gone to their offices or to the local library to consult paper back issues, but I was basically too impatient for that. Instead, I wondered if the disappearance of an eight year old child would have made the national papers.  To find out, I typed ‘Helen Holland missing’ into Google. Top of the inevitable umpteen thousand hits was the link to an article in The Times, and I clicked on that.

This was more like it: the Times archive was available online from 1785 onwards. I entered my search terms into the box, and was immediately rewarded with a chronological list of articles detailing Helen’s disappearance, the police search and the eventual abandonment of the enquiry. I began to click on the articles in turn.

23 April 1985:  Eight year old vanishes

Police are investigating the disappearance of eight year old Helen Holland from her Oxfordshire home. The child, daughter of financier Richard Holland and his wife Margaret, went missing on Tuesday night during a violent storm. It is thought that she became frightened by the thunder and ran out of an unlocked back door.

Inspector Alan Christie, of Oxfordshire Police, said last night: ‘Helen went missing yesterday evening, sometime between being put to bed at half past seven and being checked by her mother at ten thirty. We appeal to anyone driving in the vicinity of Lonsdale Road in Summertown yesterday night who may have seen a small child wandering alone.’ 

24 April 1985:  Police appeal for sightings of missing girl

I scrolled down to the second article and was confronted by a grainy photograph of the remaining members of the Holland family. The quality was terrible and little Sarah was no more than a child-shaped blob with pig tails.  Richard Holland seemed a very sinister figure to me: tall and brooding in a dark suit and mind-boggling sideburns, his hands resting proprietorially on the shoulders of his wife and remaining child. Maggie sported a hairband and a hideous dress, her expression unreadable. The gist of the article was the increasing frustration of the police as their searches and enquiries came to nothing.  Finally there was a note that previous sightings of a small child in the area had now been investigated and found not to have been Helen.

25 April 1985:  Searches continue for vanished child

A shorter article this time, the media seemingly losing interest in the missing child.  Of interest to me, though, was the reproduction of what was clearly a family snapshot, taken during some kind of picnic. Maggie must have been behind the camera as the photo showed just a shirt-sleeved Richard sitting awkwardly on a rug with his two small daughters.  It seemed such a strange time-capsule of a summer afternoon thirty years before. The two girls had been snapped speaking to each other, and I wondered what innocent child's observation of the world they had been sharing. I stared at the photo for a long time, but then scrolled down to the next article.

30 April 1985: Hopes fade for Helen Holland

This made depressingly familiar reading: the search of woods and fields and the dragging of ponds, the house-to-house questioning and the gradual realisation that Helen was not going to be found.  The slant in this article was the interview with Helen and Sarah’s infant school teacher, Mrs Wilson, but all she could add was that the twins were quiet and a bit small for their age. There were no more articles after that.

Lastly, I searched on the BBC archive and to my surprise found a short clip from a national news broadcast. I had a moment to think about how weird it was to be watching a decades-old news report on a small i-Player screen on my laptop, and then it had buffered. The set was a study in brown and orange, and the newsreader’s plummy voice was intoning dispassionately that Helen had been missing now for five days, and that the police search had been scaled down. There followed a shot of quaintly dressed constables beating through the fields and woodland near the house. Then suddenly there was Richard, saturnine and middle class, being interviewed by a reporter and saying all the right things about being terribly worried and Helen please come home. Obviously the rule that whoever does press conferences after murders or disappearances is the killer hadn’t been written in 1985, but he seemed bloody suspicious to me.

I sat back from the laptop screen and stretched my back. Well, that had helped confirm what I’d already presumed, namely that no-one had suspected that Helen's parents were complicit in her murder. I found myself imagining holding a press conference and showing Sarah's video, then accusing Richard and Maggie of running a paedophile ring and killing one of their children. I'd get sued for slander, of course, but I didn't care.

The day had darkened around me whilst I'd been engrossed with the computer, and I got up and walked through the gloomy rooms of the house until I got to my temporary bedroom. I should probably eat, I thought, but before I could push my way through my inertia the phone rang. I clicked off the music from the ghostly mix tape as I answered.

'Adam? It's DI Walters.' He sounded mightily pissed off. 'Have you been speaking with the press?'

'What?'

'The Oxford Mail, Tessa Davies, to be precise. Have you?'

I bridled at this interrogation. 'No, of course I haven't, what's going on?'

There was a sigh at the end of the line, and then his voice came calmer. He's breaking some bad news to me, I immediately thought.

'Sorry, it's just – the paper has got hold of Sarah's video from somewhere...'

Electricity seemed to shoot up my body, and I felt every muscle clench. 'They've seen the video?' I lowered myself carefully into a chair and tightened my fist in my hair. 'They've seen Sarah's video? How is that fucking possible?'

Walters cleared his throat. 'Er – I don't know. I am sorry, it's possible the leak was from the station...'

'
Possible
the leak was from the station? Where else could it be from? I haven't shown the film to anyone!' Images of the video appearing online and being watched by the gawping and the curious shot into my mind. 'This is my bloody wife, for God's sake, how could this happen?'

The policeman was silent, his discomfort radiating down the phone line.

'When are they publishing it?' I started to head back downstairs, intent on finding the Oxford Mail website. 'Is it up already?'

'No, fortunately we've been able to get their Editor to delay publication, as it's part of an ongoing police investigation. But it's very likely that they will be contacting you –'

'Shit! They can piss off!'

'Well, you don't need to give them the time of day,' he replied, drily. Then: 'I am sorry that this has happened, Adam, and we will be investigating.'

'Right,' I felt exhausted, crushed, barely registering his final words before ringing off.

I could feel the cursor in my brain blinking at the end of a row, awaiting a further command. I couldn't think of one, instead I just went back to the bed, lay down, and closed my eyes. Poor Sarah! This seemed the final insult, the final trashing of her as an individual. Once that video was made public then there would be no going back: her name would forever be associated with that terrible confession, those tears, that abuse. For as long as the internet existed it would be trawled up, rehashed, commented on by fuckwits around the world, public property.

'I'm sorry, love,' I said into the too-quiet house.

Silence greeted me, filled with the absence of the little sounds of the person who wasn't there any longer. I counted the hours of a long sleepless night.

Monday, 6 April 2015. 10:01

I caught the bus into town, jammed in amongst the commuters and the old ladies going in for a day's shopping. I wasn't thinking about the video, or the newspaper, I wasn't capable of holding the concepts in my mind; they burned and slipped out.

I was relieved to get out and into my own car outside the St. Aldate's police station. By the time I'd driven through some of the city's endless roadworks back to the Physics Building, however, I was hot, hungry and inclined to think that what had happened at the lab on Saturday was just a kind of practical joke. Some bastard had obviously found out my safe combination, blagged the office key from Norman the porter, and then just waited for me to nip to the gents before returning everything. Very funny. I was still shaking my head at the stupidity of all this as I walked into the building. To my joy, Freddy Wright was standing at the reception desk.

'Afternoon, Norman,' I called, ignoring him and heading straight for the stairs. I wasn't surprised when he took a long step across the foyer and intercepted me, one finger jabbing into my chest.

'What did you do it for?' he asked, his face absolutely alight with fury. I stared at him. His eyes were dancing with rage and he seemed on the point of exploding. He couldn't still be angry about the missing 122, surely? He'd get it in the end anyway.

'Eh?' My baffled face only enraged him further. His face went a dark red and then, alarmingly, bone white, in seconds.

'You know it was you, you
shit!
' he squeaked, his usual polished tones forgotten, 'you emailed Professor Collins to say I was faking my results! I was still working on them! You had no right to accuse me of anything!'

A light bulb went off in my head. So Gilbert's little protégé had been cooking the books in his research, and someone had ratted him out to the department's top man. A small smile tweaked the corner of my mouth.

'Oh dear, had a kitten, has he?' I grinned openly now. 'And I bet Uncle Bill's made himself scarce too, yeah?' Wright was almost rigid with anger but he managed a slight nod. No surprise, as soon as the shit was airborne Gilbert would have jumped happily on the plane to Florida to get away as far and as fast as possible. 'Well, too bad, Freddy, but whoever snitched it wasn't me.'

I turned to step past him and had a fleeting sensation of air rushing then a punch crashed into the side of my head and I staggered. As I looked back, bracing for another blow, I saw Norman moving with unexpected speed around the reception desk and grabbing the post doc by his upraised fist.

'Now, then, sir, that'll do,' he said, heaving the taller but paunchier man backwards and then shoving him out of the main door. 'Go off and cool down, sir, or I'll have no choice but to call a Proctor.'

We all stood and stared at each other through the glass, Freddy looking slightly appalled at what he'd done, and me rubbing the back of my head. He gave me one more hard stare and then wheeled away, walking quickly up onto the main road and out of sight.

'You alright, Dr Kitchener?'

'Yeah, I'm ok.' I gave the porter's hand a quick shake. 'Thanks for wading in.'

Norman smiled. 'No problem. Brightens up the afternoon, I must say.'

By the time I got into my lab and went through my usual routine my ear was feeling three times its usual size and was throbbing. I went out to the vending machine (locking the door carefully each way) and got a cold can of coke to hold against my head, which helped a bit.

I spent a fruitless hour or so looking again at the 122 data. It really didn't make any sense. The readings blipped out at the low magnetic fields with such completeness that if I didn't know any better I'd think that the whole sample had been removed from the array. Between Levi in Boston and me here in Oxford we'd now tested the mineral right across the spectrum and the periods of absence, for want of a better description, were always proportionate to the strength of the field used. But neither of us had any more of an idea of why.

I sat back and scowled at the computer. Something was nagging me about this but I just couldn't put my finger on it. And more pressingly, none of these results were going to be good enough to scotch Gilbert's plan of taking me off the research team – whether my place now went to Freddy or to a new favourite.

Just to annoy me further, my phone rang.  I dug it out of my pocket and found it was innocently stating ‘Richard and Maggie calling…’  After a long second I pushed the button and raised it to my ear.

‘Adam, darling?’ breathed Maggie.  ‘Are you there?’

‘I’m here,’  I could imagine her standing in her magazine-picture kitchen, that look of fake interest on her face. I wondered whether her mood was going to be sugar or poison and found that I didn’t really care. A loud buzzing filled my ears and it took a moment to realise that it was the sound of my own blood pounding through my veins. I had to hold on to my temper, I didn't want to tip Rose and Fred off to the police investigation that – I hoped – was now in progress.

‘How are you?’ She was good, I had to admit, her voice vibrated with concern.  ‘We’ve been trying to reach you for weeks.’  I didn’t reply that I had trashed the answering machine after one of their calls.  ‘Richard and I were wondering if you’d be free to come to dinner sometime soon,’  I absolutely could not think of any reply to that.  ‘So, er, what do you think?’

‘Um, I’m really busy in the lab at the moment,’ I said, lamely, trying to not let my head explode with fury at the thought of stepping into that house ever again. ‘I’ll have to get back to you when things are less frantic.’

‘It’s just that Richard needs to talk to you about Sarah’s estate.’  There was an edge to that polished voice now, and I wondered what she was frightened about.

‘What?’ Was she actually able to bring this up? Did even Maggie have the nerve to start discussing the house where her daughters were abused and one of them probably murdered?

Maggie, however, was ploughing on. 'Her estate, her property, you know?'

I took a deep breath, and felt my hand clench on the phone. 'Sorry, Maggie, I don't know what you're talking about.'

There was a slight hesitation at the end of the line, and I got the impression that Maggie was conferring, hand held across the mouthpiece of the handset.

'Sarah owned a house in Headington, darling. It was left to her and... to her sister by an aunt.' She paused. 'I am afraid that might be a bit of a shock to you, Adam, that she never told you.'

My anger coalesced into something much worse, much colder. 'She did tell me,' I said, 'just before
she died.'

That silenced Maggie for a few seconds, but then she carried on with:

'It's been let out for years and Richard has been managing it. He’d like to carry on with that arrangement.  Is that alright with you, dear?’

I think my face actually curled up in snarl. ‘No,’  I took a deep breath and carried on more calmly, ‘I'm going to sell it and donate it to Homes For All.’ I admit, my entire motivation was to be as obstructive as possible, but it was a good idea nonetheless.

‘To what?’

‘The charity Sarah worked for.’ You stupid murdering cow, I thought.

There was a very long pause.  I was just about to check to see if the phone had dropped the signal when a deeper voice came over the line.

‘Adam?  Richard.’  I stood up and started pacing. I had been right. The bitch must have had the phone on the speaker, him standing at her elbow. ‘It would be a very bad idea to sell the property at this time, the market isn’t very robust at present.’

‘Oh, really? I thought the papers are saying that it’s on the up just now.’

‘That’s a very naïve interpretation,’ his voice was compelling, persuasive, ‘it would be a much better investment for Sarah’s charity if we left the house as a rental for now. Perhaps you could use some of the income to help with the renovations...’

‘Until when, do you think?’

‘Well, property is a long-term investment, Adam.  This is something you probably don’t know much about, so best leave it with me as Sarah’s financial manager.’

I wouldn’t leave him a fucking postage stamp. ‘No, I’ve already spoken to Katie at the charity, she’s expecting the money as soon as it can be realised,’ I lied.  ‘So I’ll be speaking with my solicitor and the estate agents today. Got to go.’

I stabbed the hang-up button and then very deliberately smashed my phone into pieces on the bench. Bits of smartphone flew in all directions and it was only when a bit pinged off my array of electromagnets and associated measuring equipment that I stopped. My hands shaking, I sat down and waited until my blood stopped pounding, until I could breathe properly, and then swept up the bits and dumped them into a box on my desk, shoving the sim card into my pocket.

That fucking tossing man, I raged to myself. Just expecting to carry on with his perversions as if nothing had happened, as if Sarah hadn't remembered everything, as if she hadn't died... I vaguely remember rushing out of the office. I think Dave tried to speak to me in the corridor but I pushed past him and ran to my car. I had to go to the place Sarah had gone on the last night she was alive; I couldn't think why I hadn't done this before, why I hadn't driven over there last night.

I don't think my brain engaged at all on the drive across Oxford, I just found myself sitting in the car at the curb in a perfectly ordinary Headington street, staring at the perfectly ordinary 1930s semi-detached house opposite. White pebbledash on the walls, black front door, UPVC windows – all completely normal and respectable. The street was just a normal and respectable Headington street, filled with identikit houses, half with skips or scaffolding outside denoting homeowners busy capitalising on Oxford's crazy housing market. The only incongruous note was a spray of cubed windscreen glass which fanned across the road and clustered, glittering, in the gutter.

I wiped my face and found my hand was shaking. The huge adrenalin surge that had carried me over here was now flat-lining, leaving me blank and nauseous, a man-shaped piece of nothing. What the hell was I doing here, anyway? Did I really expect to see anything other than a normal house? Richard and Maggie had owned it for over 30 years and the fact that I'd never seen it in the news, surrounded by crime scene tape, meant that no-one must know what went on in there.

As I hesitated, the front door opened and to my surprise a uniformed policeman stepped out. My heart seemed to leap in my chest: this was it! Walters had made good on his promise and the police were investigating! Before I knew what I was doing I'd jumped out the car and was jogging across the road. The constable's gaze snapped round to me and he changed his stance, hand drifting down to the tazer clipped to his belt. That stopped me in my tracks.

'Hi,' I called, lamely, walking much more sedately in his direction.

'Help you, sir?' he asked, blank-faced, still in his repel-all-attackers pose.

'Are you investigating this house, officer?' He frowned slightly, so I plunged on, 'I mean, I reported to DI Walters that I had – er – suspicions about what went on here and...'

'What's your name, please, sir?' The man's hand released the grip of his tazer and instead pinched the radio attached to the lapel of his stab-vest. '232 to control,' he spoke into it. 'Your name?'

'Adam Kitchener,' I said, starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable in the policeman's unflinching gaze. I felt his eyes roaming over my face as if committing it to memory. 'I've been speaking to Detective Sergeant Nick Walters about...'

'There was a break-in at this address yesterday, sir,' he interrupted, 'do you know anything about that?'

There was a long moment of silence as I tried to make sense of this question. Why was he here just for a break-in? I thought police didn't attend those any more. And why on earth would he think I knew anything about it? Do burglars turn up again once they've got away?

I started to feel simultaneously stupid and nervous, stood on the pavement, looking at this robot. The sounds of a north Oxford afternoon – a bus idling, people calling to each other, a distant ice cream van – lapped at the edges of my consciousness. Still the policeman said nothing. Finally, his radio crackled and a voice asked: '232, this is control, over.'

'Standby,' he told it, then to me said the imperious single word, 'well?'

I felt the blood rush into my face as I fought down a surge of irritation. This prick had come to investigate a poxy
break-in
, when Walters knew this was the house where Sarah had been abused, and Helen likely murdered?

'No, of course not.' I said as calmly as possible. 'But this house is being investigated by DI Walters and the Greenland team –'

'Then you've no business here, sir, move along.'

I stared at him, incredulous. 'You're not even going to –'

'Move along, sir.' He took a half step towards me, the implied threat as clear as if he'd back-handed me across the face.

'Fine.' I bit the inside of my mouth to stop myself adding something pithy that would probably have got me arrested, and turned to march back across the road to the car. As I got into the driver's seat I heard the police radio crackle again as he clicked it, and he said clearly, '232 to control, no problem here, just
a nutter.'