Weep a While Longer Read online

  ‘The drive down from Oxford was vile so we really needed a drink,’ Annie says defensively, as if reading my mind, ‘and we did buy the crisps ourselves.’

  The others laugh uncomfortably so that the lifetime habits of hospitality force me to say, ‘Oh, you’re welcome to the wine. It’s lovely to see you all,’ thus wrecking any possibility of establishing dates, terms of residence or house rules. I do get names, however, though I’m not sure I shall be able to attach them reliably to their owners. There is a Dominic and a Matt and a Lauren and a Kate – nice middle-class names for nice middle-class young people – and I should probably explain to you why they’re here. They are fellow students of Annie’s at Oxford, and the week after next they’re going up to the Edinburgh Festival to perform – on the fringe of The Fringe – a play written by one of them – Matt, I think. It’s a three-hander, I gather, and it’s about love and sex, treachery and trust, life and death, hope and despair and the search for identity – as these things generally are. Annie is taking part in it and she has persuaded our local theatre, the Aphra Behn, to let them put it on next week in their small, sixty-seat studio theatre. There was a meltdown at the theatre about eighteen months ago and the new stage manager is a young woman who was a couple of years ahead of Ellie at school, so Annie has got a foot in the door. I assume they’ll be staying with me till that’s over and they’re heading for Edinburgh.

  I must get Annie on her own and ask what arrangements they’re proposing to make about eating because I’m not going to cook for six every evening, but I sip my glass of wine and they start talking about the play and the problems they need to iron out, and I make some suggestions which they take up with flattering alacrity, and I have another glass of wine and eventually hear myself say, ‘Is pasta all right for supper?’ and I toddle indoors to find the ingredients for pasta con tutto giardino. Annie used to call this my Ma forgot to shop supper, since it involves raiding not so much the garden as the vegetable rack and the fridge for edible vegetables. They don’t need to be in their prime; even the wilting and withered can be put to service when thrown into a good tomato sauce. Annie had better not complain.

  Everyone is very appreciative of supper, in fact; more wine is drunk and everyone helps to clear up in a slapdash sort of way. Then they go off to the sitting room to watch television and I stay behind to restack the dishwasher because nobody knows how to stack someone else’s dishwasher, and then I can hear that they’re watching something with a lot of hysterical studio audience laughter, which I shall hate, so I stay in the kitchen and sit at the table and read the paper until I’m roused by a shout from Annie. She puts her head round the door and says, ‘Murders on the Eastgate estate. On the national news.’

  I follow her into the sitting room in time to see the pictures on the screen: a school photo of a girl and a slightly blurred holiday picture of a young woman. ‘I saw them,’ I say. ‘I saw them this afternoon.’ And then, stupidly, ‘How can they be dead?’

  ‘… Believed to be those of Karen Brody, a part-time student at Marlbury University, and her seven-year-old daughter, Lara,’ I hear, and then the picture changes to one I also recognise. This one is live, though. It’s Detective Sergeant Paula Powell of the Marlbury police, smartly dressed in a crisp shirt and jacket for the telly, saying, ‘This is just the beginning of the police investigation. At this stage we are treating the deaths as unexplained. We don’t know, as yet, whether anyone else was involved.’

  So, with David still away in London, Paula’s in charge. Good luck to her. She’ll want to get a result before he comes back and stamps all over her case. I ought to help. I look at the others, who are all staring at me now, rather than at the screen. ‘I’m going to ring the police,’ I say. ‘She was there this afternoon, at the nursery. With a dog. And a little boy.’ I look at the television screen as though I might conjure up his face too. ‘He’s called Liam. What’s happened to him?’

  4

  Wednesday 18th July

  I Witness

  It wasn’t as easy to get to talk to Paula Powell as I had assumed. I imagined them working through the night on the case, but when I rang the station it turned out that all I could do was leave a message. I made my information sound as important as possible: an eye witness to Karen Brody’s last hours, I said, and I left my name and mobile number. Now I shall just have to wait.

  Paula Powell and I have a complicated relationship. I quite like her, actually, but I’m sure she fancies David, who is her boss and my part-time lover, semi-partner or half-hearted other half (we are particularly semi-detached at the moment since he has spent the last three months in London as part of some drugs super-team). Paula, no doubt, thinks I’m too old for him, and I think that if he fancied her he would have done something about it and it isn’t me who’s holding him back. So there we are. She took me to hospital once, when I got my fingers and other bits of me burned while helping the police with their inquiries, and she was quite kind, but when we meet on those odd occasions when I’m invited to escort David to some work-related do, she’s pretty chilly. I, of course, am charm itself.

  I’m in my office thinking about coffee time when she rings.

  ‘Gina?’ She sounds cautious.

  ‘Paula!’ I sound delighted.

  ‘I got a message that you wanted to talk to me.’

  ‘Yes. You must be pleased, getting this case. A good time for you, while David’s away.’

  ‘Well, a young woman and a child are dead. Pleased is hardly the word I’d use.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I can feel myself blushing. What made me say something so crass? Or think it, for that matter? ‘Stupid thing to say. Sorry.’

  There is a silence and I’m not sure how to proceed. Eventually she says, ‘Your message said something about being an eye witness.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know, obviously, when they were killed, but I saw them alive and well at about three thirty yesterday.’

  ‘Where was that?’

  So I tell her. I pride myself on my gift for précis so I launch in quite briskly but she stops me when I get to Liam.

  ‘A boy?’ she asks sharply. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course, I’m sure. That’s why she was there.’

  ‘Well, there was no sign of another – never mind. Go on. You said there was an incident?’

  I tell her about the dog attacking the niqab woman and she surprises me by asking, ‘What did the dog look like?’

  ‘The dog? It was one of those squashy-faced things. A bulldog type. You’re surely not worrying about whether the dog was illegal are you, when—’

  She cuts me off. ‘And the woman? What did she look like?’

  ‘As, I said, she was wearing a niqab, so—’

  ‘A niqab? What’s that?’

  ‘It’s Islamic dress. Black. With a face veil.’

  ‘A burqa, you mean, then.’

  ‘Well, technically a niqab is different. It’s a separate face veil that covers everything except the eyes. And there isn’t the grid thing over the—’

  ‘I’m going with burqa. Everyone knows what that is.’

  I say nothing; she says nothing.

  ‘So,’ I say, ‘I assume you’re looking for an ex-partner, aren’t you?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Isn’t that usually who it is when women and their children get killed?’

  ‘Who says they were killed?’

  ‘So it was an accident, then?’

  She gives a short laugh. ‘People don’t generally slit their wrists by accident.’

  I can hear that she regrets them the moment the words slip through her lips. She tries to eat them, but it’s no good. ‘They’re … they’re unexplained deaths. Murder, suicide, accident are all possible. We’re not issuing any details at the moment and it would be very unwise to speculate on—’

  ‘It’s all right, Paula,’ I say. ‘I can be discreet.’

  She rings off.

  *

>   Slit wrists. I walk over to the common room for coffee thinking about this. I feel chastened. A young woman and a child are dead. Of course they are. And I saw yesterday a young mother already so desperate that she was about to kill herself and her child. Should I have known? Did we all blithely turn a blind eye to desperation? I don’t think she looked like a woman on the edge, but when I consider this I realise I don’t know what that does look like. She looked clean and she’d brushed her hair and the little girl looked neat and tidy. She was a bit detached, maybe; I don’t remember seeing her talk to anyone. She didn’t panic, though, when the dog went mad. She looked in control. But then suicide is a kind of taking control, isn’t it? I realise that I don’t know anything about it.

  By chance, my colleague Malcolm is having coffee in the common room and is sitting alone. He usually is sitting alone, in fact, because he’s something of a bore, and I would normally avoid him, but today I take my coffee and go and join him because I have remembered that he volunteers as a Samaritan and should be able to tell me about suicides. I’ve always thought it was interesting, this night job of his. My theory is that he’s a bore because he’s a shy man but thinks he ought to make conversation and has no gift for it; listening he’s probably very good at.

  I’ve bought myself an almond Danish with my coffee because I can see that Malcolm has a pastry and I wouldn’t want to make him feel greedy. Also, this means that I can have one without having to self-justify with talk of missing breakfast or having no time for lunch. I sit down opposite him and he eyes me warily. It is true that when I do seek him out it is generally to exhort him about something.

  ‘Well, we seem to have lost the sun,’ he says.

  I take a bite of my Danish.

  ‘Lovely yesterday,’ he goes on doggedly. ‘Twenty-three degrees my car registered when I was driving home, but it was only sixteen this morning.’

  Does he prepare these conversational gambits, noting the temperatures so he can weave dialogue around them? I go for a clumsy segue.

  ‘Dismal summer altogether,’ I say, through a mouthful of almond pastry. ‘Depressing. I should think you’re busy at the Samaritans, aren’t you?’

  He looks a bit startled but he rallies. ‘Well, the recession, you know. We’re always pretty busy these days.’

  ‘I suppose you are.’ I take a sip of my coffee. ‘I guess you’ve heard about this young woman on the Eastgate estate?’

  He looks uncomfortable. ‘On the radio this morning,’ he says, taking refuge in a mouthful of cinnamon bun.

  ‘It’s a nasty business, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘What do you think happened?’

  His discomfort deepens. ‘I really don’t know,’ he says, and looks at his watch.

  I know he’s not teaching because my wives and I are the only people doing any learning and teaching this week, so I don’t allow him to escape.

  ‘I suppose,’ I say, ‘that she might have been one of your callers – if it turns out to be suicide, I mean.’

  ‘Gina, I really can’t disc—’

  ‘Of course not. I know you can’t talk about your callers. And it’s all anonymous anyway, isn’t it? So you wouldn’t know if you’d spoken to her, would you?’

  He hesitates. ‘Well, no,’ he says.

  ‘So I was just wondering. I mean, we don’t know, obviously, what happened, and it may be she was killed by an ex-partner, but when women kill themselves and their children, why do they do that? I can see that someone could be desperate enough to kill herself even though she has children, but why take them with her? I mean, I think about Sylvia Plath. Before she gassed herself, she put milk and bread and butter in the children’s room so they would have something to eat when they woke up, and she stuffed towels under the kitchen door so that the gas wouldn’t get out. That I can understand.’

  He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. ‘It’s complicated,’ he says. ‘Mothers who kill themselves often feel that they’re failures as mothers. They’ll say that the children will be better off without them, but if you’re deeply depressed you can’t find solutions – you can’t see your way through a problem, you can’t make arrangements. And if they feel worthless then they can feel that the children are worthless too. Any problems the children have get exaggerated in their minds so that they feel that they’ll be better off dead too. Plath’s case is remarkable but she was a remarkable woman. When you read about her last weeks, all the testimony shows that she was fighting her depression all the time and analysing her own state of mind. The discipline of her suicide, the planning – that’s very rare. And there’s no suggestion that she had been drinking. That’s rare too.’

  I gaze at him in wonder. Who knew that he could be so eloquent? Boring old Malcolm?

  ‘Suicide is an aggressive act too,’ he goes on, ‘so killing the children can be revenge on a partner who has abandoned you. That’s more common in men as a motive, but women do it sometimes. And sometimes mothers are angry with the children – feel oppressed by them and their responsibility for them.’

  ‘I talked about Sylvia Plath but I’ve just remembered, Ted Hughes’ second wife killed their child as well as herself, didn’t she?’

  He nods. ‘So, there you are.’

  ‘It must be so hard to listen to a caller who is in that state,’ I say.

  He puts his glasses back on. ‘It is,’ he says, ‘but at least you’re doing the job you’re there for. We spend a lot of time talking to people who are just a bit sad.’

  ‘But if you’ve got someone on the phone who’s actually talking about killing their children, you have to do something, don’t you? I mean, you’d have to call the police to trace the call and—’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He sighs. ‘If you thought there really were children at risk, then you’d get a colleague to call the director to decide what to do. But, for a start, you can never be sure that someone is telling you the truth. We get a lot of fantasists. When we’re training volunteers we tell them cautionary tales, like the one about the branch that called out air-sea rescue for a guy who said he was about to jump off a cliff, but there was no-one there. People tell you all sorts of things. You have to try and find out what they really want to say.’

  ‘All the same, you must want to do something, surely? I can’t—’

  ‘You would make a terrible Samaritan,’ he says.

  I am astonished. Malcolm has never said anything this personal to me in the ten years we have worked together. And even as I open my mouth to protest I know that what he says is completely true: Samaritans listen rather than talk; they are non-judgemental and they don’t tell people what to do. On all counts I would be hopeless. I have to laugh.

  ‘Really?’ I ask. ‘When I’m so lovely?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says.

  ‘The thing is, Malcolm,’ I say, swallowing the last of my coffee, ‘I saw Karen Brody here yesterday.’

  ‘What?’ He looks around as though her new ghost might be lurking somewhere among the tasteful furnishings of the common room. ‘Here?’

  ‘Well, here as in the university nursery. She was collecting her son and she looked – you know – fine. Clean clothes, clean hair, had obviously walked here with a dog. And her daughter looked clean and tidy too. The only odd thing, I suppose, is that she wasn’t at the concert the children did, especially when—’

  ‘It’s a danger sign,’ he says, interrupting my flow.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘When someone seems to be pulling out of a depression. If someone starts clearing up, sorting things out, making plans. Sylvia Plath’s friends thought she was getting better because she was making plans for the future.’

  ‘Why? Why is it a danger sign?’

  ‘Because when you’re deeply depressed you don’t even have the energy to kill yourself. A bit of energy is dangerous. It may just give you enough drive to do it.’

  *

  I walk back to my off
ice by the scenic route – that is to say via Acorns. I would like to go into the garden and try to recreate yesterday’s scene, but the gate is locked and the fence is too high to see over, so I stand outside and consider the walk Karen Brody made to and from the Eastgate estate, presumably via her daughter’s school. You would need energy for that, with a dog as well, and a tired four-year-old to urge along on the homeward journey. As I’m standing around thinking about this, I hear voices in the garden, and then the gate opens and Paula Powell emerges. Good. Following up on what I told her.

  ‘Hi!’ I say, with a friendly little wave.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks with an unfriendly scowl.

  ‘Just heading back to my office,’ I say, breezily.

  ‘Where from? The Student Union?’ she asks, sarcastically.

  She heads for her car; I fall into step beside her.

  ‘Anything useful?’ I ask.

  She says nothing.

  ‘Well, good luck with it,’ I say brightly as she opens her car door.

  ‘The boy’s not hers,’ she says before she gets in and revs away.

  5

  18.07.12: 11.30

  Next of Kin

  Gritting her teeth, Paula Powell sped out of the car park. Taking a deep breath, she said to Sarah Shepherd, sitting beside her, ‘Don’t on any account give that woman any information whatsoever. She’ll wheedle it out of you if she possibly can so clam shut. I don’t want her anywhere near this. What are those addresses again?’

  Sarah glanced down at the two addresses written on the pad lying in her lap. One was for Karen Brody’s father, a widower; the other was for Leanne Thomas. ‘One in Albert Road,’ she said. ‘That’s the father. And one on the estate. Kendal Way. That’s Karen Brody’s sister, Leanne Thomas.’

  Paula ran over the information Steve Boxer had pulled off the computer that morning: Douglas – or Doug – Brody, Karen’s husband, had been known to the police in Liverpool since he hit puberty; he had been in and out of prison and now he was serving an eight-year term for armed robbery. Karen Brody had grown up in Marlbury, had gone to college in Liverpool and settled there, and then had come back, with her daughter, eighteen months previously when her husband had gone to prison. She had just recently moved into a house on the Eastgate estate, where her sister, Leanne, also lived. Liam was Leanne’s son, which explained why he wasn’t another victim. Liam’s mother suffered from depression, the woman at Acorns had told Paula, and his aunt, Karen, often brought him to nursery and picked him up. So Liam had been dropped safely at home yesterday, Paula assumed, before Karen and Lara went home. And found an intruder waiting for them?