else could understand it, so you didn’t tell them.
As he surveyed the view over Ashbourne, Cooper noticed the site of the old Nestle factory across the brook, now rapidly becoming a new housing development. In the other direction, towards the town centre, the car park of Sainsbury’s was busy with shoppers.
Cooper wondered if Lodge’s supermarket would stay open without Robert Nield to keep his little family together. Probably not. He’d destroyed one family, and the other would surely follow.
30
The Nields were at home that afternoon, entirely unaware of what had being going on. Cooper met up with Becky Hurst outside the house off Wyaston Road. This wasn’t a visit he could do on his own. While he waited for her, he gazed down the street at the outline of Thorpe Cloud, where it stood guard over the entrance to Dovedale. The hill was a silent watcher, hardly less valuable as a witness than any other.
‘Okay,’ he said, when Hurst had arrived. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Robert and Dawn Nield were surprised to see him. But they sensed immediately that something was seriously wrong. It was remarkable that they could do that, in a week when so much had already gone wrong for them.
Cooper explained to them about the remains found on the banks of the River Manifold, and Lauren’s admission that the baby had been hers. He hesitated before going any further. There was always a possibility that Lauren had been lying about the rest of the story.
Cooper looked at Dawn Nield first. She was clutching a tissue in a trembling hand, and her face was flushed. A glaze was spreading in her eyes, like a slow welling of terror.
‘Do you know who the father of that child was, Mrs Nield?’ he asked.
She shook her head. ‘We never knew. Lauren wouldn’t say.’
‘I see.’
Cooper held her eye for a moment, then looked at Robert Nield.
‘Is that your answer too, sir?’
The briefest of pauses left an uncomfortable silence in the air.
‘Yes.’
But his response had come too slowly. Before he spoke, Nield had met Cooper’s eye briefly, then looked away. It was a fleeting glance, done reluctantly, as if he’d been forced into it. But for that one moment, Nield just had to look into Cooper’s face. He needed to see if Cooper knew the truth.
‘The child, sir. It was yours, wasn’t it?’
Nield ran a hand over his face, as if attempting to restore the colour to his skin, which had suddenly turned grey. His mouth sagged, and for a moment he seemed to have lost the power of speech.
‘You know we can do DNA tests, Mr Nield.’
‘Tests?’
‘On the remains. We can match your DNA to establish parentage.’
In fact, Cooper wasn’t entirely sure that anything usable still existed. The flesh had gone from the bones, had decomposed and fallen away, been carried away by scavenging animals, or deteriorated with exposure to the weather. There might just possibly have been something under the body that could produce a result in the lab. A fragment of skin that had been preserved from the air. And that was presuming a SOCO found it, examined the leaf litter carefully enough when the bones had been lifted. The bones themselves might yield a DNA result, of course — if anyone thought the tests were worthwhile.
Yes, it might be a long shot. But Robert Nield wasn’t to know the odds.
‘Were you the father, Mr Nield?’
Nield lowered his head. ‘You know already.’
‘How could you do that?’
‘I don’t know.’
Cooper flinched as a great sob was ripped from Dawn Nield. Her face was contorted beyond recognition. She might be repressed, might feel the need to be in control. But that control was failing her now. He could see her whole facade cracking, as the false world she’d constructed around herself began to crumble.
‘It wrecked our family,’ she said. ‘Lauren left us after…after the baby died.’
‘And it resulted in the death of Emily, too,’ said Cooper. ‘You do realize that?’
‘What? That was an accident.’
Cooper recalled what Rachel Murchison had told him. His own stress caused by the experience of the child’s death in the river, and being helpless to save her. Short-term adverse reactions to anything his brain associated with the traumatic event. In this case, water.
‘It’s perfectly common. It should pass in time.’
‘Does it always pass?’
‘Well, not always. If left unacknowledged and untreated, it can develop into full-blown PTSD, and the effects of that can last for years. Occasionally, serious psychological disturbances may result from traumatic experiences in the past. But that’s quite rare.’
‘Would it be more common in a child?’
‘Oh, yes. Certainly.’
‘The truth is,’ said Cooper, ‘that only one person saw Emily die. And he was the one person who no one ever asked for his account of the incident. There was no point in putting him through it, was there? Everyone thought there were enough witnesses, even though not a single one of them saw what actually happened. As usual, Alex wasn’t needed.’
‘Alex?’
‘And the worst thing is, I was there,’ said Cooper. ‘I was there myself. But I didn’t see it.’
‘Didn’t see what?’ asked Dawn. Her voice was distant, distorted, ghostly — the sound of a woman withdrawing from reality. Cooper knew he wouldn’t get much else from her now.
‘It was Alex who pushed his sister down in the water, hit her head on the stone and drowned her. No one saw that, did they? Except you, Mr Nield. You pulled him out of the river. That was how you got wet.’
‘Is Alex so disturbed?’
‘Yes, I think so. The memory of the river pushed him over the edge. He needs help very badly.’
Nield hung his head. His shoulders had dropped, and his whole body was bent like a man who had fallen in on himself, his internal organs collapsed, his heart torn away.
‘Why couldn’t he talk to us?’ asked Dawn.
Cooper lowered his eyes. ‘That’s not for us to answer, Mrs Nield.’
And suddenly she was out of her seat and standing in front of him, her body swaying dangerously, her arms flying so violently that Cooper ducked back out of the way. Her face had passed from flushed red to deathly white, and her chest heaved with enormous, painful breaths. An awful, indistinguishable noise came from her throat, as if an animal was trapped in the room.
Shocked, Cooper stood uncertain what to do. The whole room seemed frozen, Robert Nield gaping from his chair, Becky Hurst giving a startled intake of breath behind him.
Then Mrs Nield staggered, and Cooper stepped forward to prevent her falling. And that broke the spell. Hurst moved in and helped him steady the woman and get her back into her seat.
‘It’s all my fault, isn’t it?’ whispered Dawn as she began to recover.
‘No. Why should you feel that way?’
‘Because I failed,’ she said. ‘I failed Emily. I’ve failed all my children.’
Cooper felt guilty at his inability to call up the degree of sympathy she was asking for. Somehow, Dawn Nield had made it all seem to be about her. The tragedy hadn’t happened to Emily, but to her mother.
‘Why didn’t we see that Alex wasn’t coping?’
‘I think we did,’ said Nield. ‘But he shut himself away with it, and we thought it would pass.’
Cooper turned away from Mrs Nield to face him again.
