Chapter 18 — A Fork in the Road
The lady was removed upstairs to the Inspector’s office, where hot drinks were brought and the doctor was attending; alongside the family liaison officer who seemed to Grey to be almost always at the station in some capacity. Cori and Grey remained downstairs in the empty interview room, nursing bad coffee and feeling the atmosphere that lingered. The room was oddly charged as though the walls remembered what had just happened, the air still reverberating Ludmila’s last words, resonant from her shaking chair.
‘Perhaps I do need to go on more of those courses Rose is forever being pestered to put us on,’ mused Grey. ‘“Interviewing with Sensitivity” or “Fostering Empathy”. Aren’t those the kind of titles?’
‘Maybe,’ answered Cori con-committedly. She didn’t like hearing him talk like this. This was no time for him to lose his nerve, she thought.
‘A situation like that needs more skills than I am blessed with.’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ reflected his Sergeant, who had something of the personal touch herself, ‘Sometimes these courses seem to suggest that if you relax a person and build up a rapport with them that there still wont be a truth that isn’t known one moment and which needs to be made known the next. I’m not sure a simple way of saying something hard isn’t the best way, or that any way would have made it easier for her to bear just now.
‘Anyway, sir, time to get down to business, down to brass tacks.’
‘The broken vase was telling,’ though Grey aloud. ‘He still values some memory of his mother even as he believes she abandoned him.’
‘There’s a conflict there,’ she concurred.
‘And Ludmila was touched in turn by those feelings, trying her best to replace the vase for him, when at other times she was threatening to “burn down his house”.’
As Grey shook his head at this, Cori’s own thoughts though were more practical, she summarising,
‘Mars has no alibi, and has had the freedom all week to come and go, to think and plan, stay up all hours, change and wash his clothes. We know that whether he knew his mother was living at the Cedars or not, he couldn’t bear to speak of her and obviously had a lot of turmoil over his parents.’
Grey thought of Mars’ house as his wife had described it, memories of his parents all around him but it evidently hurting him to talk about them,
‘I wonder,’ she posited, ‘if this freedom — time to brood, and also to get out and about unseen — is a factor in our question “why now?”’
‘It’s possible, but don’t these kind of crimes need a spark, a flaring point? You don’t schedule a killing for the next window in your diary.’
She knew he hadn’t meant that to come out as flippantly as it had done; she countering,
‘But if he’s been desperate to do it for years… What if, once a golden chance arose, he could no longer suppress the urge?
‘You’re forgetting he’s a company man, a boss, free to come in at ten, leave at two, and take a three-hour lunch if he wanted.’
‘But they’re all daytime hours, sir.’
‘But doesn’t his firm handle security? Wouldn’t that be twenty-four hours a day? He could easily explain away a disappearance from home as a visit to one of his sites. It’s a shame we can’t ask Ludmila now if he took many “business trips”.’
Back up to speed, his mind was already again snagging, as was its habit, on certain words, phrases, fragments of conversation,
‘What you said back there: “wash his clothes”.’
‘He’s had all week, sir; he could have put them through the cycle two or three times.’
‘But what if he hasn’t? A wife, cleaners? I doubt he’s lifted a finger to look after himself for years. Maybe it’s ingrained?’
‘You think he’d just leave them for someone else to do, even his clothes from the crime scenes?’
‘I’m a man, Cori, you don’t know how little we try and get away with doing for ourselves. It doesn’t sound that far-fetched to me. And what of those cleaners?’ he added, pursuing his theme. ‘Have they still been coming in to look after him? Would they know his comings and going?’
‘Maybe not that late in the evening, I’d have thought,’ she said, unsure of this whole argument.
‘But they might have noticed if he’s been sleeping in late or taking charge of the washing machine.’
‘Checking any of this involves going back to the house, sir,’ she added as if he didn’t know, but also knowing that one of them had to voice these things. ‘Which we told him we would be anyway, sooner or later.’
‘Well, we’ll see what the Super agrees to.’
After lingering over a meal in the still-open station cafeteria — his first of the day — the Inspector turned round at the table to face the young female officer who had just appeared at his shoulder.
‘Hello sir, a woman’s just called to leave a message for you in reception. She couldn’t stop, but said to give you this; she said that you’d know what it was, and that she’d call you in the morning.’
Thanking her, Grey took the folded piece of paper, which he knew would be from Janice, the social worker. There were just two words on the note: “Patrick Mars”.
Dodging up the stairs toward the offices, he saw his Sergeant waiting to go into Superintendent Rose’s room. His own office occupied by Ludmila Mars and the female officer keeping an eye on her, a nod of the head brought Cori to instead join him in a vacant space he found further along the corridor, and to which he quickly pulled the door to after them; showing her the note in the barely lit space (for it was now early evening) and explaining,
‘This is from Janice, the social worker.’
‘“Patrick Mars”’, read Cori on the note. ‘So he is Esther’s father?’
Grey nodded, ‘Now we know. He did have a first wife: Maisie.’
Cori told it to herself aloud as simply as possible, ‘Esther is Patrick Mars’ daughter. Esther is Stella Dunbar’s granddaughter.’
So strongly had the pair of them been denying the inevitable here, ever since the visit to the Wheelwright’s, that confirmation of the fact hardly felt like news to them: the fact that here were not two broken homes, only one home doubly broken.
‘That would be Esther’s secret then, wouldn’t it?’ Cori mused, as if only for herself, ‘The thing not even her best friend or social worker could help her with, but only a member of her family, her biological family…’
‘The family that Esther’s present circumstances find her entirely divorced from,’ added Grey, ‘she living apart from both mother and father. And how quickly would you want to wait before being able to confirm such a secret fact? You certainly wouldn’t wait till the next scheduled visit to your mother, or even the end of the next school day; especially not an impetuous girl like Esther sounds.’
‘Point for discussion, sir: Is it conceivable that Stella was tutoring Esther without either knowing what they were to the other?’
Grey quickly checked off possibilities, ‘Neither has a name the other would recognise, neither seem ever to have met elsewhere. Stella left Patrick growing up with Samuel when he was seven, and had had no contact with her son…’
‘…or his son’s family…’
‘…since. As for Esther, would her father have told her anything of the mother he considers abandoned him, before himself cutting all ties with his own wife and daughter?’
‘There are two schisms here, aren’t there. Who painful divorces.’
‘And it’s meant that hardly one member of the clan Mars is still in touch with any other.’
‘Esther was about to explode this.’
‘I think she might already have done so.’ He went on, ‘Our questions had been: one, when did Mars learn his mother was in town; and two, why choose that night to kill her?’
‘If he killed her.’
‘We’re surely passed that point now.’
Cori was conceding this fact too.
‘But what if the questions are actually: when did either Stella or Esther learn who the other was; or if Stella
