James said it again. ‘I’m so sorry, we really didn’t have a clue. Gallan here was just following up on something he thought might lead us somewhere – little did we know you’d already found our killer. It was the story of the missing woman and the child, he thought maybe it would point somewhere. We really didn’t have any idea.’
Finally, Poole was able to speak. ‘Why would you? I didn’t. Please stop apologising.’ He said it through teeth that were as lightly gritted as he could manage. He couldn’t manage much and knew he sounded terse. ‘Besides, at that point we didn’t know she was the killer. We just thought she could help us out with the enquiry.’ The thought of that, after the fact, made him laugh. It emerged as a dry, rasping cynical sound full of weight and hopelessness.
Gallan had been waiting in the hall for him. He might have ended the interview but they hadn’t stopped recording. They’d heard it all, because they’d been waiting for it, they already knew.
He turned to Gallan. ‘The clothes you found in the basement, they were maternity clothes?’
Gallan nodded. ‘I didn’t make much of it at the time, to be honest. It was the hair I remembered, and the tooth. I thought if we could find the woman and the child, we might find answers. I never bargained on this, mate.’ He’d been about to add an apology, his mouth hanging open ready to form the words, but the look on Poole’s face made him suck them back in.
‘So, let me get this straight,’ Poole said. If he went through it for a fourth time, amalgamated what Mary had said with what James and Gallan had discovered, he might just be able to start making sense of it. Just. ‘A pregnant woman and a kid turn up chez Henderson, claiming to be long-lost relatives. Henderson didn’t know his estranged brother had married, but she has a marriage certificate, which he burns in front of her in full pantomime-villain style because he’s shitting himself that the house and the money will be pulled out from underneath him. She’s pregnant, goes into labour and gives birth. They can’t risk her telling anyone in authority about her claim on the house, so they take her kids – no, they give her kids to Mary Baxter to dispose of – and Dr Moss, Harold Shipman’s evil fucking twin, goes full-on Mengele, lobotomises the woman and parks her in hospital to rot under the guise that she’s Henderson’s poor mad wife, who is secretly stashed in the attic because they can’t cope with her either. And they’re not murderers, just money-grabbing, sociopathic snobs happy to mutilate and imprison women to save their faces and their wallets. Have I left anything out?’ The précis of Mary’s tale was delivered on a platter of cynical disbelief, garnished with disgust and seasoned with bile.
James, her eyes wide with worry and her trademark brow rippling with tension, nodded. ‘That’s about the size of it, yes. If Mary Baxter is to be believed.’
Poole pointed to the desk where the report on the tooth that Gallan had found lay. ‘And now you tell me that document says the baby tooth discovered in the cellar belongs to my brother? To Richard? And that it’s an eighty-five per cent match for me?’
James nodded and had the grace to blush, even though none of it was her fault. Gallan shifted in his chair, a movement born of exquisite discomfort. ‘I’m so sorry,’ James said again.
Poole shot her a look of abject fury. If one more person apologised to him that day, he was liable to do some damage. Serious, irrevocable damage. ‘I can’t go back in there, you do know that, don’t you?’
‘Of course, and I don’t expect you to. Besides, it’s no longer appropriate. I hate to boil this down to procedure, but we need that bitch nailed to the floor for this and I don’t want any sodding defence lawyer watching those tapes and seeing anything untoward going on. You’re off the case, officially, and for all the right reasons. I also think you should take some paid leave, as of now.’ It was fighting talk, and though it irked him to be pushed out, he knew James was right and that none of them had a choice. If they were going to secure a conviction against Mary Baxter he’d have to be as far away from her as possible. Somehow he didn’t think it was going to be a problem. Staying away would be the easy part; it was coming to terms with this new knowledge and understanding it that would be hard. It was why he’d needed to go over it so many times. Going back to something already revealed was bearable; facing what came after it was not.
He was aware he was gripping the arms of the chair, white knuckles showing bone where the skin was so taut. ‘I need a fag,’ he said through a jaw so tense he was grinding tooth enamel.
He thought James would let him go outside and was already glancing through the glass-panelled wall of the office and seeing the sea of concerned people who were desperately trying to hide the fact that they were trying to lip-read everything that was being said. Kelsoe was out there, sitting at her desk, pretending to work – she smiled at him, a sympathetic line of lip topped by an expression of pure pity. He couldn’t stand it.
‘Gallan, shut those blinds and open the window. Here…’ she said, opening her drawer and fishing out a small round tin, the kind that usually contained boiled sweets. On this occasion, it contained the remains of several skinny, hand-rolled cigarettes. She passed it to him and shrugged. ‘Needs must when the devil drives and discretion is the better part of getting away with having a sneaky fag in the office.’ She followed it by producing a can of air freshener too and placing it on the desk as if subterfuge and rule-breaking were something she’d distilled down to a fine art.
Poole smiled, the hint of it breaking at the corners of his mouth and creeping across his lips until it was a full-blown smirk, which had the effect of making James relax her face too. Conversely, Gallan exhaled as if he’d been holding that single breath in his body for an hour. Poole watched as the man visibly sagged with relief.
‘Feel free to remove yourself from the vicinity for the duration, Detective Constable. I have no desire to force you to witness a crime taking place, or to sully your lungs,’ James said, eyeing the DC and speaking with her tongue firmly in her cheek.
‘Don’t be daft, boss – I’ve been here since well before the smoking ban. If my lungs are screwed, they’re screwed. Besides, I don’t fancy running the gauntlet out there,’ Gallan said, nodding to the office that lay beyond the blinds he’d just closed.
‘Why do you think we’re staying in here?’ James quipped as she produced a skinny roll-up from the drawer and proceeded to light it.
Poole lit his own cigarette and inhaled. He was beyond caring about the fact that he ought to give up and get civilised at that point. That was the trouble with addiction. The first thing you craved was the worst thing for you.
All three of them sat quietly for a few moments, watching the smoke make pungent and languid curls in the air, before it found itself discreetly fanned out of the window by Gallan. He was using a case file for the job, which was another thing that induced a wry smile from Poole.
‘Richard died from a drink and drug OD in the cells downstairs, as you well know,’ he said, surprising himself with the statement – it had been terse and aimed at James, who’d long been forcing him to face that demon.
Before that moment he’d been determined not to talk about it but the smoke seemed to have loosened his tongue. ‘We weren’t close. To be honest he was a complete idiot, which is why you have his DNA on file – I’ll bet he spent more hours in a day in this place than I do.’ He gave a small laugh and saw it reflected in the wry smiles of his colleagues. ‘We didn’t grow up together. I think the first foster home had us both, but they couldn’t handle him. He was only young but he had problems even then. Not surprising when you think about what we’ve just been told. Anyway, he went one way, I went the other. I didn’t even really remember I had a brother until my twenties when I got curious and tried to find out why I’d been dumped as a baby. You don’t think that stuff’s going to bother you, but it does, and it needles at you. My wife at the time pushed me to do it and I thought I had nothing to lose.’
He paused, leaned forward and stubbed out the cigarette in the tin. ‘I managed to track Richard down to a hostel. Usual set-up: rank, squalid, full of arseholes and dimwits and people who should have been in hospital. I wasn’t impressed with him and he wasn’t impressed with me – he seriously objected to my being a pig.’ He let the word hang there for a moment. They’d all heard it way more frequently than they should, but the insult never lost its edge, much as they laughed at the idiots who used it. ‘But, as usual, he was happy to take money off me – it always cracks me up how people like him can have an opinion without a principle to back it up.’ He followed the words with another cynical little laugh and shook his head at the irony of it. ‘So for twenty quid and a bottle of Scotch I got what I’d gone for – anything he knew about where we’d come from. He didn’t know much; just that some woman had found us at a bus station and contacted Social Services. We both ended up being called Poole and now I think I might know why. Mary Baxter was the one who “found” us and she gave her name as Grace. I’m guessing someone at Social Services must have been a Bronte fan and lumbered us with the name. It didn’t say that in any of the files I managed to get hold of, so I never made any connection until she stymied me in there.’
It wasn’t strictly true; he’d been thinking about the character of Grace Poole since finding Jane Henderson’s corpse at the Grange. He couldn’t say body; she’d been too far gone for that, definitely a corpse, at that still fleshy, decaying stage between body and cadaver. He’d been thinking about Grace Poole, the drunken, feckless keeper of the madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. He’d never once connected his own name with the Grace who Richard had talked about. Her name was the only thing the terrified, abandoned little boy had remembered, and the only thing the addled, boozed-up, drug-sodden wreckage of a man had been able to retrieve. Grace with the scary face, who had given him sweets and told him not to cry or she’d give him something to cry about. Nothing else, no parents, no place, no people. Just Grace the face. Well, she’d certainly given Poole plenty to cry about, but he wasn’t going to go there if he could help it. Not now anyway, not in front of Gallan and James.
‘Anyway, I sort of kept an eye on him after that, and if he ended up on the wrong end of us I’d always get a phone call from a custody desk somewhere. He despised what I did, but thought he could use it when it suited. He could never grasp that I upheld the law and couldn’t bend it for the sake of convenience.’ Unlike some, he thought – people like the Hendersons, who didn’t just bend the law, but made it into an abstract , unrecognisable mutation. ‘He was good for a while, met a decent woman, seemed to sort himself out until he fucked that up too. Then one day I finally got the phone call telling me he’d died. He didn’t do street drugs, but he abused alcohol and prescription drugs. He choked to death on his own vomit. Accidental death.’ He glanced at Gallan. ‘That’s why you never see me with anything stronger than an orange juice, and why I became a detective – so I didn’t have to deal with drunken twats in the cells every day.’
He lit up another cigarette because the next bit was going to be harder. ‘So, here we are. I’m the second son, and he’s the missing kid, and our mother…’ He trailed off, unable to say it. Unable to put into words the picture he had in his mind of the wan, ethereal wisp of a woman who he’d last seen whispering to herself and clinging to the walls of a small room in a psychiatric hospital. Food down her nightgown, knots in her hair and spittle clinging to the soft lines of her slack mouth. He’d been repulsed by her, there was no other way of putting it. He’d been repulsed by the woman who’d given birth to him and had paid for her own and her children’s existence by having her faculties removed by a man so motivated by depraved greed and status that he would stop at nothing. Moss wouldn’t even stop at allowing disabled children to die in pain and misery, or locking women into rooms where they had nothing but grief and insanity to keep them company, or ripping children away from their mother and stealing her mind. Had Moss not hung himself, Poole would gladly have tied the rope, put it around the man’s neck and lynched him. Gladly. Moss was worse than a murderer. At least Mary Baxter’s victims weren’t still suffering, despite how much they might deserve to. ‘I don’t even know her name,’ he said. ‘I thought she was Jane Henderson.’
Gallan flapped at the smoke with his file. ‘Her name was Clodagh. It was written inside the suitcase. We’re looking into any records that might remain, but if she fled Rhodesia during the troubles there we might not be able to find much. We’ll do our best, though.’
Poole supposed he ought to appreciate it, but it was hard to muster anything other than anger or shock. He was swinging between the two like the pendulum of an overwound clock. ‘Sounds Irish,’ he said. It was all he could think of.
‘How come we didn’t find passports for her and Richard? I mean, why destroy those yet keep the case with her clothes?’ James said.
‘You’re too young boss, that’s your trouble,’ Gallan said with a grin. ‘Back then women and kids didn’t need their own passports. She travelled on her husband’s. Chances are their names are on his. We found it, but it’s water-damaged and faded. We’ve sent it down to the lab, but it’s a bit low on their agenda at the moment, to be honest.’
‘Seriously? And much as I appreciate the compliment, whether you intended it or not Gallan, I am forty-two years old. Old, not young, and I didn’t know that about passports,’ James said.
Gallan blushed ‘The only thing we could make out without further examination was an embassy stamp, dated April 1979.’
‘The birth certificate I have, which was the one Social Services issued, has my birthday down as 5th May 1979. Apparently I was a very young baby when I was first fostered, so I suppose that would fit. Christ, I don’t even know my own real birthday!’ Poole said, feeling the anger beginning to writhe and rise again.
James glanced at the clock. They’d been in there for two hours, Poole noted as he followed her gaze. He’d survived two hours of this new knowledge without turning into a jabbering wreck. Calm, he suspected, might not remain his status when he was forced to leave the relative safety of James’s office. And that moment was looming fast.
‘Guys, shit as this is, I need to get on – we’ve now got her in custody, which means the clock is ticking. Even with an extension from the brass we can’t hold her for ever, and we need a clean account from her. She knows she’s changed the game and she’s asking for a solicitor now – delaying tactics, I suspect – but either way, given we didn’t bring her in as a suspect, I need her interviewed with a whole new agenda, pertinent to the few things we did already know. So, Poole, I’m officially sending you home on a week’s paid leave, to be reviewed before your return. Gallan, no such luck, you’re with me.’
Everybody stood and Poole braced himself to run the gauntlet of the office, wondering if he could get through without having to see a single sympathetic smile.
‘Before we go, any news on Maura Lyle?’ he said.
James blinked, her reaction telling him she had news, but had refrained from sharing it while he’d been having his identity crisis. ‘Yes, there’s been no change. I’m sorry to say it, but it doesn’t look like she’s going to make it.’
He hoped he wasn’t betraying his feelings too obviously, even though he knew his posture and expression must have looked akin to the spring in an overwound clock. James had dismissed Maura as an aggravating bystander and hadn’t taken her disappearance seriously, and he’d followed her orders and done the same. On top of everything else he didn’t want to share the guilt of that with his boss if Maura was going to die because of their inaction. He wanted that firmly pinned on Mary Baxter.
James was watching his face and reading his mind, and her frown was back. ‘Go home, Poole. Just go home.’
It seemed like a very good idea.
Do I know right from wrong? Of course I do. But if you can’t beat them you join them and it’s the worst defence in the world. Why did we all do what we did? Because we could. No one cared, no one wanted us – no one questioned us. They just kept their distance from the weird folk in the big house with their odd habits and private ways. Madness reigns behind closed doors.
I am dulled by overuse and I am tired. With my rotten face, my crap childhood and my sob story I am a cliché, a big fat walking one, but by God, the rest of you are coming down with me. Want to cast that first stone? Go ahead. Take your aim. I’m ready.
I had the last laugh today. And I’m going to have the next one too.