Skeleton Plot Page 7

  Not many women wore hats nowadays, and still fewer donned them to come into a police station. This one was scarcely more than a beret, but John Lambert realized suddenly that the woman had made an attempt to present herself at her best to come here. The action was mistaken, but there was something very touching about it. He said gently, ‘How can I help you, Mrs Grimshaw?’

  ‘You can give me closure. You can confirm for me that this was my girl. That this was my daughter.’

  The accent was unexpectedly educated. That was prejudice, Lambert realized. Why should you expect that someone down at heel and life-battered would be uneducated? Police experience, he supposed. The majority of people who were questioned here, who peopled the nation’s prisons, hadn’t had much education, nor had they enjoyed an even chance in life. But the police function was to see that the laws of the land were observed, not to campaign for social reform. And this woman might be no more than a crank; that possibility was far more important than any speculation about her background or her position in the community. ‘What reason have you to think that this dead woman might have been your daughter, Mrs Grimshaw?’

  ‘I know it. I feel it in my bones.’

  He thought of those other bones, the ones he had seen being patiently assembled on the plastic sheet at the edge of the Jacksons’ garden, and he flinched at the thought of what lay ahead for this suffering woman. ‘What is your daughter’s name, Mrs Grimshaw?’ Always speak in the present tense, until you are sure of the corpse’s identity. That was the rule. Those bones on the plastic sheet might yet have no connection with this woman. Her daughter might be living and breathing, in a different county or a different country.

  ‘I’m Anne. Or Annie. I’d prefer that you call me that. And my daughter was Julie.’ She was using the past tense against his use of the present; it was the reverse of the usual situation.

  ‘All right, Annie. I realize that this must be very stressful for you. When did you last see Julie?’

  ‘Twenty-two years ago. Twenty-two years and seven weeks, come tomorrow.’ She smiled sadly in recognition of her accuracy.

  ‘We don’t think this girl has been in the ground for quite as long as that. Around twenty years, the experts think.’

  It was meant as a comfort, a suggestion that this might not be her daughter after all. But Annie Grimshaw merely nodded her acceptance. ‘That’s right. I hadn’t seen Julie for around two years before she disappeared completely. I’d had occasional messages from her, every month or so; enough to let us know that she was still alive. Then they stopped.’

  ‘She went missing?’

  ‘That’s right. We registered her as a missing person. Mispers, you call them, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Her details would have been entered on to the police computer, along with those of the thousands of other people who disappear from their homes each year.’

  ‘Very little chance of locating her unless she chose to turn up herself. She was an adult and could leave home if she pleased to do that. That’s what they told us, and that’s how it proved.’ She spoke without apparent resentment. Perhaps the years had dulled her reactions, and with them her capacity for fury at the system’s apparent indifference to human tragedy.

  Lambert said gently, ‘Who is “we”, Annie?’

  ‘My husband and I.’ She looked suddenly surprised, as if she had shocked herself with an unexpected and quite inappropriate joke. ‘That sounds like the Queen, doesn’t it? “My husband and I.” I was speaking of Paul, who used to be my husband. We aren’t together any more. We split up ten years ago. Apparently it often happens, when you lose a child in the way we lost Julie.’ She spoke like one observing someone else, as if the heartbreak had left her dry and barren long ago now.

  Lambert glanced at Ruth David and gave her the tiniest of nods. She registered the signal: she should press on into this vanished tragedy, to try to ascertain whether it had any relevance to the case on which they were engaged. His DS said, ‘Where were you living when Julie left you, Annie?’

  ‘In Birmingham. In Solihull. That’s where we lived, in those days.’

  ‘And why do you think Julie might have ended up down here? It’s almost a hundred miles away, isn’t it?’ Her voice was gentle, persuasive, understanding. Intensely feminine, a contrast to Lambert’s equally sympathetic but much deeper tones.

  ‘She was in a squat, in Gloucester. There for a year, we think. She’d been in other places, before that. It took us a long time to trace her, and by the time we found out, she’d disappeared again. Moved on, we thought. But now we know that she hadn’t. Not this time. She’d …’ The words ran out, just as she was convinced her daughter’s life had run out at this point. They thought she might break down and weep, but the sharp agony of grief had died long ago, and the tears did not come.

  ‘You think she was dead? That she’d been killed by person or persons unknown and buried where she was found last week?’ Ruth David spoke as softly as she could, but there was no way of disguising the stark questions she had to ask and the pictures they evoked.

  ‘Yes. I didn’t know someone had killed her. Not until I heard the announcement on the radio and it said that foul play was suspected. But it makes sense. She was living in squats and she was on drugs. I don’t know if she was an addict because she’d ceased all communication with us by then. But you meet odd people in squats, don’t you? The attempts to make contact all came from us and they – they weren’t successful.’

  DS David said, ‘We don’t know that your daughter is dead, Annie. This may be a different girl entirely.’ But she was catching conviction from the insistence of the shattered woman in front of her. The skeleton had been a drug user; they knew that. And she had been killed at around the time when a desperate couple had lost all contact with their vanished daughter.

  Annie Grimshaw said, ‘This is Julie that you’ve found. I’ve hoped for long enough that she will come back to me. She isn’t going to do that. I want closure.’

  It was her repetition of that phrase which made Ruth David say, ‘Have you had counselling, Annie?’

  A nod and a wry, raw smile. ‘I’ve had counselling. Two or three times, over the years. How can they comfort anyone who’s lost an adult child, unless they’ve lost one themselves? Even now, I wouldn’t know what to say to anyone else who was going through it. I felt sorry for the last woman who was sent to see me. I ended up saying the things she wanted to hear, so that she could think she’d been useful to me.’

  ‘Would you be willing to give us a DNA sample? It’s quite a simple procedure and it would enable us to—’

  ‘Yes. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. I want this over as quickly as possible.’

  Lambert left David to take the saliva sample and went out quickly to consult with DI Rushton. The DI confirmed that routine DNA samples had already been taken from the remains retrieved from Brenton Park. This was done automatically and quickly, not just to provide samples for comparison and eventual identification, but to confirm that only one body had been put in that ground near the edge of the farm twenty years ago.

  They brought Annie Grimshaw a mug of strong police tea; they wanted to make it heavily sugared, as convention dictated it should be, but Mrs Grimshaw refused all sweeteners and grimaced a little at the strength of her steaming drink. Ruth tried hard to make conversation with her, but she responded only with monosyllables and eventually asked to be left alone. They left her in an interview room, the only place where they could ensure privacy. She sat alone in that claustrophobic box, sipping her tea as she contemplated the blank green wall and what her life had come to.

  Meanwhile, the forensic girl in the lab had been working frantically on the samples and came up with a match. It was Lambert who took this finding back to the desperate woman in the slightly ridiculous hat. Ruth David went with him, wanting to put her arm round Annie Grimshaw but knowing that police protocol dictated that there should be no physical contact.

  Mrs Grimshaw looke
d up at them, reading what she had always known was the truth in their faces. ‘It’s Julie, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m very sorry to have to tell you that it seems it is, Mrs Grimshaw. We have a match between the samples.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry, Mr Lambert. I knew it from the moment I heard the news on the radio. It will give me closure.’ She repeated the phrase as if she had fallen upon some mantra which offered her consolation.

  Lambert hoped indeed that it would. He couldn’t think of what he could say to her now. He knew he mustn’t offer counselling, and any of the other services seemed inappropriate or inadequate. He said, ‘How did you get here today? I’m sure we can arrange transport to take you—’

  ‘A friend brought me. She’s gone to visit her daughter. I’m to ring her when I’ve finished here.’ She fumbled in her bag, produced a mobile phone and stared at it as if seeing it for the first time. ‘They’re good, these things, aren’t they? Very useful on occasions like this.’

  ‘Very useful, yes.’

  He hoped she was going to leave them quickly, and felt a coward because of that hope. She half-rose, then sank back on to her seat in front of the square table. ‘Can I see her?’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea, Annie. Not in these circumstances.’

  The old, jaded face set as stubbornly as a child’s. ‘I want to see her. I’m entitled, aren’t I?’

  ‘Entitled, perhaps, Annie, but believe me, this isn’t a good idea. Your daughter’s remains have been in the ground for a long time, for twenty years or more. This isn’t the daughter you remember, with flesh and blood and a smile on her face. You’d be much better to—’

  ‘I want to see her, all the same. I need to see her.’

  ‘She isn’t here, Mrs Grimshaw.’ It was ridiculous, but he needed to say it: the woman was behaving as though those bones were in the next room.

  ‘Of course she isn’t. And it doesn’t have to be today. But I need to see her. I don’t need anyone else with me and I won’t do any screaming and shouting. But I need to see her and say goodbye to her.’

  It was two days before she saw the skull and the bones which went with it. They could dress up a normal corpse and make it look better, sometimes amazingly better. But they couldn’t do anything with a skeleton. All along the line, people tried to persuade Mrs Grimshaw that she should not do this. But she was persistent and implacable, and in the end she had her way. And after a first sharp gasp, she was still and calm. She spent two minutes in contemplation of all that remained of her daughter Julie.

  Annie Grimshaw had her closure.

  Michael Wallington studied himself for a moment in front of the full-length mirror in the bedroom. The blue suit had been a good choice, he decided. It had been Debbie’s choice rather than his; he always went for colours which were a little too bright. But this suit set off his dark hair and blue eyes rather well. The tie worked, too. A lighter blue, with widely spaced small diamonds of red. Discreet but not dull against his immaculate white shirt. Marks and Spencer, that was, and new for the occasion.

  He presented himself for his wife’s inspection, happy because he knew that she would approve. He was lucky to have Debbie, as he told himself at least once a week. She dextrously transferred the clean handkerchief from his top pocket to his side one. ‘Too showy for tonight,’ she explained. ‘And much too conventional for a man who has made himself Chief Education Officer at forty-six.’

  ‘Only in a small town. Only because I worked hard and kept my nose clean.’ He spoke the words he had spoken many times before, enunciating them now to his wife as though rehearsing them for a more important occasion. But you didn’t really make your way like that. You did work hard, and you were as able as the rest, though perhaps with a greater grasp of the possibilities of certain situations. But the really important thing was to have a greater degree of ruthlessness than the rest.

  Debbie, sweet, innocent Debbie, was still preparing him for the evening to come. She was still preoccupied with the handkerchief she had removed from its flamboyant display in his breast pocket. ‘You mustn’t look like a man who is trying to draw attention to himself. You don’t need to do that any more.’

  ‘No. I shall be cruising among parents tonight. Trying to give them the impression that their kids – sorry, children – are in the best possible school with the best possible teachers making the best possible progress in the best of all possible worlds. Whereas in fact their little darlings—’

  ‘Forget the facts. Always forget the facts when you can’t do anything about them. You told me that.’

  ‘Did I? What a fount of wisdom I am! That must be why I got the job. That and my ability to sell myself as a local education Messiah possessed of all the answers.’

  ‘You really do have most of the answers Mike. You’re nothing like as cynical as you present yourself.’

  But he didn’t present himself like that at all, and he knew it. Not to the public. He mouthed all the correct and conventional education maxims, even when they were quite different from last year’s magic formulas. When he’d begun his personal education odyssey, older education gurus were still talking about integrating the children of immigrants into the English way of life. Nowadays you had to be enthusiastically multi-cultural; the safe thing was to be a zealot for variety. Variety in dress, in religion, in cultural inheritance. Well, so be it. No use swimming against the tide, or against any other of the clichés which passed for enlightened thinking.

  Michael Wallington, Chief Education Officer, must be at the forefront of progress.

  He was greeted as a VIP at the parents’ evening at the comprehensive which was the most important school in his largely rural area of responsibility. He was becoming used to this status now and he found it rather enjoyable. People deferred unthinkingly to your ideas, where they would once have argued. He pretended to find that frustrating, but it was really rather pleasant and undemanding. He found that the ‘undemanding’ was increasingly to his taste. There were enough problems in his office each day, with the economies imposed upon him by the idiocies of local councillors, without looking for them elsewhere.

  He gave a brisk opening address to the group of parents impatiently waiting to quiz the teachers who were lined up behind him: the headmaster, his deputy head and the senior teaching staff. They were all in this together, he told everyone. They were steering young people on the ship of education through the rough waters of teenagedom and into the even rougher and more challenging waters of adolescence. Teachers needed their support and understanding. (It always paid to keep in with the staff whom you directed and appointed and occasionally disciplined. You needed them on your side. The poor sods who slaved at the chalk face were the foundation of all this.)

  His audience applauded dutifully – some of them, Michael thought, even enthusiastically. Those would be the naive and enthusiastic parents who were attending one of these sessions for the first time. There were probably even one or two young teachers here who believed in his dynamism and in the creed he advocated. That wouldn’t last long: experience in education brought cynicism, in his view. His own was a healthy cynicism, of course, the kind which asked questions to ensure that ratepayers and governments got value for money from the funds they poured in.

  Some of the teachers developed a scepticism which questioned everything and achieved nothing. It would be better for all if these people left the profession and ceased to damage the young with their defeatist philosophy. Michael Wallington expressed that view forcefully in other places, such as council committees, where teachers or their union representatives were not present. His contributions there maintained his reputation for honesty and realism and ensured that he would go far. Local greybeards nodded in agreement, whilst he smiled modestly and shrugged his elegantly suited shoulders, in that gesture which acknowledged that whatever would be would be.

  When the initial speeches of welcome were over, he circulated and smiled among the parents and teachers. He
was delighted to hear one parent say how gratifying it was to see the Chief Education Officer here and taking an interest on an occasion like this, and to see others nodding their sage affirmation of that view. He spoke to the deputy head, a fifty-five-year-old woman with whom he had started his teaching career in a much smaller school, a professional for whom he retained a lasting respect. She was conscientious, efficient and absolutely honest. She was in fact the kind of practitioner who made him feel a little shabby as he played the system and made his way towards the top. Yet he told himself that he would make life better and more rewarding for teachers like Barbara Moss, once he had satisfied his ambition and was in control of a large authority.

  Barbara retained an affection for the man whom she had assisted through the trials of his probationary year as a new teacher. Tonight she took him on one side and they discussed how they might rid themselves of a particularly lazy and inefficient teacher. ‘He’s letting down his colleagues,’ Barbara said. ‘They’re the ones who have to cover for him every time he calls in sick when he isn’t sick at all.’

  ‘You know the problem,’ said Michael. ‘You’ve been around a lot longer than I have, Barbara. Unless this fellow touches little boys or the dinner money, it’s very difficult to get rid of him.’

  She nodded a reluctant agreement. ‘And meanwhile the school’s reputation and the children he deals with suffer. It’s the kids who lose out at the end of all this. We can’t give him examination classes, which means that the younger children he gets are missing out on the groundwork they should be building. And the unions spring into action to defend anyone who’s a member, irrespective of their efficiency. They mouth off about standards and then defend people like him who don’t have them.’