Mourning the Little Dead Page 5

  If the man was innocent then Alec had no wish to screw up his chances in his new job, so he told the duty manager that Gary Williams was needed in connection with a witness statement he had made, something that needed clarification. A few minutes later Alec was interviewing Mr Williams in the manager’s office.

  ‘What’s this about a witness statement? I never made any witness statement.’

  ‘I know that, Mr Williams, but I didn’t think it would go down too well if I told your manager this was in connection with Sarah Clarke.’

  ‘Sarah Clarke’?’ Williams looked blank.

  ‘The little girl who was murdered at Philby a few weeks’ ago. You must know whom I mean, Mr Williams. You were interested enough to attend the reconstruction last night.’

  ‘The what? I don’t know what you’re on about.’

  ‘But you were in Philby last night. Standing on the sea front. You were caught on camera.’

  Williams shook his head.

  ‘Let me remind you,’ Alec told him. ‘Big crowd of people. Police officers swarming like flies. A child from Sarah’s school retracing her last known movements. If you looked hard enough you probably saw Sarah’s mum in amongst the crowd. You could tell it was her because she couldn’t stop crying from the moment it began.’

  ‘I was there last night, yes. I didn’t take much notice though, of what was going on, I mean. No law against going for a pint after work, is there?’

  ‘Hardly your local, is it?’

  ‘I met friends. Friends that live there. That all right with you?’

  ‘And can I have their names, these friends?’

  ‘Why? What’s it to you?’ He stood up suddenly, his hands clenching. ‘It’s that bitch downstairs, isn’t it? Fucking cunt. She’s had it in for me big time.’

  ‘As it happens, this has nothing to do with Mrs Sanders, but since you mention her, maybe she didn’t like the attention you were paying to her daughter. Emma is what? Fourteen, I believe.’

  ‘Way she come on to me she weren’t fourteen.’ He shrugged uncomfortably. ‘Look, I didn’t know the kid’s age. Thought she was a good couple of years older than that. Soon as I found out I sent her packing.’

  ‘Even sixteen would have been a little young for you, I would have thought. What are you, Mr Williams? Thirty.’

  ‘I’m twenty-eight. Not that it’s got fuck all to do with you. Anyway, what’s that got to do with the dead kid out at Philby?’

  ‘You tell me, Mr Williams? Maybe your friends could shed some light.’

  Williams turned towards the door. ‘I ain’t got nothing to say,’ he told Alec. ‘You want to talk to me, fucking well arrest me. I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘I can do that, if it suits you better, Mr Williams, but I hardly think it would give a good impression to your new boss.’

  Williams froze with his hand on the door. Then he seemed to make up his mind. The shoulders squared and he opened the door. ‘I ain’t done nothing,’ he said. ‘Now just leave me alone.’

  Alec let him go. Williams’ attitude was not what he had expected. Most people acted passively, showed concern when the police came to their place of work. They didn’t in general display that much direct aggression and he didn’t relish the thought of taking the man in alone.

  Alec got up and crossed over to the door. Through the glass panel he could see Gary Williams talking to his manager. Alec took the mobile phone from his pocket and called Travers and minutes later a double-crewed car of uniformed officers was on its way to arrest Gary Williams.

  Eight

  ‘Don’t ever lose touch with the past,’ Joe Jackson told her. ‘Don’t cling to it so tightly that you can’t move on, but always keep your finger on the pulse of it. That way, you’ll never forget the lessons learnt. Or the important stuff like the people you shared it with.’

  *

  It was strange to be in Helen’s home once more after so long a gap. Helen’s mother had greeted her at the door, folding Naomi in her arms as she had done all those years ago when Naomi had still been only a child. Mari Jones had always been that kind of a woman, warm and welcoming and overt in her emotions.

  Naomi found herself on the verge of tears.

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve come,’ Mari told her. ‘Especially now.’

  ‘I’m glad I came too,’ Naomi told her, surprised at how much she meant it. It had always amazed her that Mari had never put any blame on Naomi for her child’s disappearance. That just wasn’t Mari’s way, though there had been times when the pain of forgiveness had been so great that Naomi would almost have been relieved had it been replaced by the pain of blame.

  ‘Cool dog. Can I stroke him?’

  The voice was young. Eager, but a little bit uncertain. ‘You must be Patrick? Sure you can. His name’s Napoleon.’

  She felt him kneel down beside her in the cramped little hallway and Napoleon reach forward curiously to sniff this stranger before remembering that he was on duty and should behave.

  ‘Take his harness off,’ she told the boy, ‘then he knows it’s play time.’

  ‘Great. He’s brilliant. How long have you had him? How old his he?’

  Naomi started to reply, but Mari was laughing and leading her through to the living room.

  ‘Take him out in the yard, Patrick...If that’s all right,’ she asked Naomi. ‘Harry, you make us all some tea. Nomi, there’s a chair just near the door, it’s a bit cramped, so watch your leg. I’ll sit you on the sofa, if that’s OK, there’s a table next to it for your tea.’

  Naomi allowed herself to be organized, putting out her hand to get her bearings when Mari stopped and gently turned her round. Once seated, Mari took her hand and showed her where the table was. ‘We’ve had a change round in here since your last visit,’ she said. ‘Got a new three-piece. It’s dark blue, like the curtains you used to like so much, though they fell apart long since.’

  Naomi laughed. ‘It sounds different in here,’ she said. ‘Bigger.’

  ‘The book shelves have gone. We moved the whole lot upstairs to the little room, though now Patrick’s here, they’re in the way up there as well. Mac always loved his books, though. I couldn’t just get rid of them.’

  Mac had been Helen’s father. A gentle man, Naomi remembered. Quiet-spoken and with a diffident manner very like Harry’s. He had, as Mari said, loved his books and his pub quizzes and Mastermind on television, the one time in the week when he insisted on control of the programmes. He had died three years before, but Naomi had been in court the day of the funeral and her promise to herself that she would call round and see his widow had gone unkept.

  ‘I wish I’d come before,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Mari, I have missed you all.’

  For the best part of an hour they talked, catching up on news and going over what they already knew about the search.

  ‘A young man from the local station called round,’ Mari told Naomi. ‘He said that they were starting to look for her again. That some new evidence had come up and they thought they might know where she was. I couldn’t believe it. After all this time.

  ‘Then Detective Travers called me and asked if we could talk. He came to see us. Harry had arrived by then—I’d asked him if he could come, just for a little while. You know, it felt so strange. Anyway, this Detective Travers came here and told me that someone had confessed, but he couldn’t tell me who. He asked question after question about what happened. Not just when Helen disappeared, but afterwards, when the police were investigating. That surprised me a bit, Naomi, I thought they’d have had all that on record.’

  ‘They would,’ Naomi confirmed, ‘but it was so long ago the files would all have been archived. Files more than ten years old are stored elsewhere, we just don’t have room for everything at the local nick. It might have taken a day or two to get them sent over and there would have been a lot to sift through.’

  Mari nodded her understanding, then realized that Naomi could not see. ‘That must have been why,’ she
said.

  ‘What kind of things did he want to know?’ Naomi asked her.

  ‘Oh, what kind of things...he asked about Joe Jackson and if he’d been the investigating officer from the start. We talked about what happened the day Helen went...how long it was before anyone realized. I told him the school was really good like that. If the parents didn’t phone in, then the school called the parents to say their kiddie wasn’t there and were they ill. The school called me about half past ten. I came out of work and went straight up there. I couldn’t understand it.’

  Naomi nodded. She remembered as if it were yesterday.

  ‘It was break time, just at the end of break, when you arrived,’ she said. ‘Josie was looking, out of the window and she said, “Look, there’s Helen’s mum.” You were hurrying up the path towards the entrance.’

  ‘And I looked up, and saw you,’ Mari continued. ‘And then I knew...I knew for certain something was wrong. I’d thought at first that you and Helen...that you and Helen had bunked off together. When I saw you standing, looking out of the window like that and I saw your face, then I knew—’ her voice trembled and Naomi could hear the tears in it—‘I knew even then that I’d lost her. That Helen was gone.’

  Naomi was not sure who had suggested they walk that path, the way of Helen’s final journey, but there seemed to be a consensus that they should. She let Patrick take Napoleon on the lead and she held Harry’s arm. She could hear the boy and dog crashing through the bushes on the waste ground.

  ‘Come out of the mud, Pat,’ Harry complained. ‘You’re going to ruin your shoes.’

  ‘They’re my old ones, Dad,’ Patrick shouted back. He sounded quite a way off and Naomi could hear him calling to Napoleon. She could almost feel the dog enjoying the freedom of running. In the distance, she could hear the voices of children drifting over from the schoolyard. Their squeals and yells carried on the light breeze.

  She stopped still, trying to use the sound to get her bearings. ‘Which way is the church?’ she asked.

  ‘Um, just over there,’ Harry told her. ‘Oh, sorry,’ he took her shoulders and turned her around. ‘Directly in front of you now.’

  ‘Right, so the allotments are over that way and the little gap where we cut through to school was somewhere—’ she raised her hand and pointed off to her left—‘somewhere over there.’

  Harry took her hand and moved it slightly. ‘There,’ he said.

  Naomi nodded. In her mind’s eye she reviewed the scene. The waste land had once also been allotments but had been sold off for redevelopment which had never taken place. It was a hillocky, hollowed place, with the remnants of old gardens visible in the straggling brambles and the fruit trees and odd stands of self-seeded flowers. In summer it had been a place to play and make dens, but in winter it was left to the rabbits and foxes and the odd trail-biker, shattering the peace until the police were called.

  The waste ground was almost surrounded by terraced streets and the rear view of the houses and their garden walls had been a familiar one. Mothers would shout for their children to come back, leaning over the garden walls and cupping their hands to make the sound carry. A Victorian church, red brick and sternly proper, filled the gap between the end of Helen’s street and the iron foundry, derelict now and also earmarked for redevelopment that never happened. Beyond that was the doctor’s surgery, the trees of the back garden tall enough to mark the boundary and the local shop with the maisonette above. A girl in Naomi’s class had lived there. It had a fire escape running down the back of the building, the top of which could just be seen.

  Then the allotments that remained and the path across the wasteland took a dog-leg into a copse and Helen knew from childhood experience that the view of anyone entering the copse was then blocked, even in winter, by the density of trees.

  To the best of anyone’s knowledge, this was where Helen had disappeared.

  ‘Take me to the trees,’ she told Harry.

  ‘I brought him here,’ Mari told her. ‘That Inspector Travers. Showed him where Helen waited on the corner and then we walked the route. I told him it was hardly changed.’

  Helen took a deep breath. ‘If I’d met her that morning,’ she said. ‘If I’d just—’

  ‘Then like as not they’d he looking for you, too,’ Mari told her harshly. She reached out and took Naomi’s hand. Her fingers were plump and soft, the wedding band tight on a finger which had once been girlish and slender. ‘A man that could take Helen like that could have taken both of you, and one child gone is more than enough for anyone or anywhere.’

  She squeezed Naomi’s hand and the younger woman returned the gesture, but the old feelings had returned and were choking her. Blame me, please, she wanted to say. I’d almost rather you could hate me, at least...at least...But she couldn’t think of an at least. It was her own failure that she could not face, Naomi knew that. Her own self-hatred that ate her and if Mari had added to that, in truth she didn’t know if she could have gone on living.

  ‘Who did confess?’ Mari was wondering. ‘I mean, surely they have to say sooner or later.’

  ‘Alec says they want to wait until they find her,’ Naomi said. ‘If they released the name and it turned out to be some kind of fabrication, it would be really hard to retract, especially once the media got hold of it.’

  ‘I suppose so. But, Nomi, who would fabricate anything like that?’

  ‘I don’t know, but people do. Every murder case has people confessing who couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the case.’

  ‘That’s not likely this time though, is it?’ Harry argued. ‘I mean, surely they wouldn’t start digging on Lansdowne Road without good reason?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m guessing that there must have been something in the confession that tallied with the case notes. Something that wasn’t generally known. I don’t think they started digging until several days after they’d been given the confession. Travers would have had time to check at least the basic case notes by then, verify whatever it was.’

  Patrick and Napoleon thundered up behind them. ‘We’re at the trees, aren’t we?’ Naomi enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ Harry confirmed.

  Naomi let go of his arm and reached out, taking a few hesitant steps forward. The bark of the closest tree was damp beneath her fingers and grainy with moss and lichen. The ground was wet and soft here, her feet slid and Harry’s hand was suddenly clenched around her elbow.

  ‘I’m all right.’ She moved away again. The trees seemed to close in around her and she lifted her face to gaze upwards with unseeing eyes into the leafless canopy and beyond to the bright blue sky. She could feel the heat filtered through the leaves, shifting across her face as the canopy shielded and then broke, the sunlight dappled on her skin.

  ‘Is this where it happened?’ Patrick sounded awed.

  ‘Somewhere here. We’re not far from the road and we’re out of sight of the houses. She was seen, running into the trees, then she disappeared.’

  ‘How big is the wood?’

  ‘Not very. It’s long and narrow and runs parallel with the road. It always seemed bigger because the trees are so close together and in summer the undergrowth is dense. You have to push your way through the nettles and brambles, but in the centre there’s a clear space, not big but almost circular. Helen loved it there. She called it our secret place and we must have come here nearly every day in the summer.’

  ‘Cool,’ Patrick said.

  Naomi smiled. It must be hard for him, she reflected, caught up in this episode of family history. The ghost of Helen haunting the life of another generation.

  ‘Can we see it? Your and Helen’s secret place?’

  ‘If we can get through.’

  ‘I think I’ll go back, if you don’t mind,’ Mari said.

  ‘Oh, Mari, I’m sorry. I’m not thinking, am I?’

  Mari squeezed her hand. ‘It’s all right, love, but I’ve not even walked around here if I could help it, not in years
. Then I brought that detective here and now you, but I don’t think I can go into the wood. Not today.’

  ‘Will you be all right? Harry, you go back with your mum. Patrick can look after me.’

  She could feel the boy shift uncertainly and imagined him looking at his father with a mix of eagerness and apprehension.

  ‘I’ll be fine on my own,’ Mari objected, but Harry had apparently made up his mind.

  ‘I’ll make some tea for when you get back,’ he said. ‘Patrick, you keep hold of Naomi’s arm.’

  The boy nodded. He slid a nervous hand through Naomi’s arm and took a deep breath. ‘Which way do we go?’ he said.

  It was harder to get through the undergrowth than Naomi recalled, but then she had been much smaller then and could more easily slip through. Walking side by side with Patrick holding her arm proved to be impossible and in the end he had taken her hand, moving slightly ahead of her and telling her where to put her feet. As they moved on, his confidence grew and their trek became a game. ‘Right foot forward about six inches then you can put your hand on the tree trunk while I shift the bramble. Hey, we should have brought the wood axe from the shed. Now, you can come forward a long pace, here, give me your hand again.’

  Napoleon nosed against her leg and pushed through ahead of her.

  ‘We could always get down and crawl,’ Naomi said. ‘Napoleon seems to be moving fast enough.’

  ‘Yeah, but he doesn’t mind the nettles! Watch your hand on that blackberry bush. It’s got fruit on it. We’ll have to come back when they’re ready.’

  ‘We’ll come back, but you can pick the fruit,’ she said. ‘I’ll just help you eat it.’

  Patrick laughed, then, ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘We’re there, Naomi.’ He took her hand again and led her into the centre of the clearing. ‘Cool.’

  He let go of her and she could feel him moving across the bright circle. ‘Is it OK to sit down?’ she asked him. ‘No thistles or anything?’