not manage it of course, and may be done for myself, but I am incidental to the story, a minor figure not worthy of remembrance.
The letter went on this tone, its morbid reflection all manna for the soul undoubtedly, but Grey needed details.
What poor Charlie has to do with it I don’t know, but then there is so much I don’t. Please don’t think the rest of this letter is the answer to your case; though I know I should explain one more thing: You can’t have missed that I alluded back there to having known Stella before she came to the Cedars, back when her name was Mars. You’ll also recall that I haven’t mentioned this fact in our discussions up to now.
Yes, I did know her very vaguely and many years ago; no, I didn’t tell you and I’m not sure why now; and no, I know of nothing that had happened to her in-between; except that when I knew her once she was married and vivacious, and when I knew her again she was neither. She came to the Cedars single, her past undiscussed, and her vitality replaced with a stoicism that even I at times struggled to admire. She had also quite forgotten me.
… I return to my letter after ten minutes spent silent at the table, you breathing peacefully nearby and asking me the question I’d yet to answer for myself: why hadn’t I told you of the past? The answer came in the form of another question: Can you keep a secret so long that you forget that you are holding it, forget what you actually know? That day in the Eighties when she pitched up at the next-door flat I nearly fell over my front doorstep, yet she gave me no more a look than to suggest I help her with the boxes she was carrying. After an hour I invited her into my flat for tea, where she asked me my name, who I was, what I did? I soon learnt she wouldn’t broach such questions asked of herself, also that I was already couching my answers in such a way as to not give away that we’d any common ground. Central to these thoughts, cemented in place by the end of that first day, was the casually devastating realisation that she had evidently played a larger role in my earlier life than I had ever played in hers.
Dunbar, Prove and Mars. They sound like a firm of solicitors. Oddly I mourn none of them, regret none of their ends. You find that strange? The only sadness is the children Stella won’t now help, won’t find the potential of when their teachers are too busy and the Head too wrapped up in Government reports. That school has been a bad one for years, and there’s not one person in town that doesn’t know it. She was the only one not prepared to let a certain number of children slip through her fingers as a bad lot, unhelpable, or be thought to be doing well enough to not to have worry if they couldn’t do even better. I know little enough of these matters bar what Stella taught me: and that is that education is about care, about constant vigilance, about not letting today’s relentless focusing on exam averages and league tables take our eyes for one moment from the children in our stewardship, lest a single one of them slip between the floorboards. It is a brave soul who’ll raise a child in Britain today.
She wasn’t a happy woman, but she did good, she made others happier, and all after having her own life harmed in ways I only guess at. What those in life who find the first excuse to absolve themselves of their own bad behaviours could learn from this woman, who lost whatever inner joy gave her her spark, and yet could still think of others. Perhaps the fact of the hardness she adopted to deal with life made it easier to be cruel to be kind, to push the kids, to demand results no matter how unpopular it might make her. Someone who valued others’ opinion of themselves might step back from making themselves so unloved… I wonder if I’ve ever written a sadder sentence?
You’ll notice I’m drifting into supposition there, for I do not know her story, only piecing the little I do know together. But then look at my immediate situation: I am alone after midnight at a table in the flat of a woman lying drugged in the next room, the Inspector of police in a similar state not ten feet away. I am drinking not enough to get drunk but only to hold my nerve as I contemplate what lies ahead. As such my mental waters are hardly likely to be placid. There is a school of thought suggesting that so repressed is the English gentleman that only when his very life is in danger is he allowed to show emotion. Is that why I now leave to face a murderer, because I need the release?
For those facts that you confirmed to me, I thank you, but it it’s for me to finish this. I failed twice in my duty to protect my friends; now I must put myself at risk if that is what’s required to put that right. And do not feel guilty yourself, Inspector, for remember I have found out for myself where this man lives. You have given nothing away.
Thank you for your help, thank you for being their final friend.
Yours,
Derek Waldron,
The Cedars,
Southney
Grey sat back after digesting that epic, not sure what it told him, only glad that Derek’s plan didn’t seem to have been fulfilled. He had missed his injured correspondent leave in the ambulance, but walked out of the house and caught a medic packing up his fluorescent Volvo,
‘The man you were treating, what were his injuries?’
‘Nothing major, just generally roughed up. He was very disoriented though, and given his age we have to be careful.’
‘”Very disoriented”, thought Grey. Yet his direction of travel had seemed certain enough the night before.
The next half-an-hour was not pleasurable. Cori not available to travel with, he found a space in the backseat of one of the patrol cars scouring the streets for Patrick Mars. This also kept him out of the way of senior officers judging his conduct; although the others in the car were Glass’ people, and would have heard, or heard of, Glass’ broadside in the hall. At least being junior to him, and they being occupied with the search, left him free from criticism for a while.
Not that he wasn’t beating up himself. That he had messed up was obvious, but he hadn’t yet worked out precisely how. There were specific decisions made: taking Ludmila out of the hotel, for one; but she and the other residents of the Cedars had been safest of all last night. What else? Not backing Glass in taking the risk on arresting Mars last evening: that had been a big call; but he would make the same decision again, as not even Glass could not have believed how careless Mars would be in leaving evidence scattered around the house. There was a logical flaw, and that was in not deducing Derek Waldron’s part in all this. Yet who could have predicted how he’d act?
He cursed Superintendent Rose too, for butting into the argument in the hallway before he could issue any defence, and so leave the impression with Glass either that he had no defence or that he needed his boss to defend him. But most of all he hated Glass, who’d singularly messed up his operation and then blamed him for everything.
The half hour was only relieved by a call from Cori, relating the stellar batch of facts: those of Esther finding the letter; of her having a brother, Peter; of her calling him that night and how he might then have called their father.
‘And I think Mars hid in the plants at the end of the corridor,’ she had concluded, ‘That’s how nobody saw him when they went to their rooms at ten o’clock.’
In the backseat of the squad car he by turns lamented his lot and mulled the case over, as Rose requested he do. Up front the radio crackled: Mars was on the Hills estates.
Chapter 26 — Emergency
At the centre of the Hills was a shopping and services precinct build at the same time as the houses and flats around it, and intended as a focal hub. Like many an environment created one-off from a plan (rather than grown up organically like most town centres before the Twentieth Century) there were parts that didn’t work, corners shunned by shoppers, other areas a haven for kids and not easily policeable; there were paved paths unused and grass spaces with diagonal dirt tracks running across them.
At the centre of area was ‘the Shops’, as the locals could only bring themselves to call it: a large square building, the bottom layer of which were storefronts, and above these two further floors windowless from the front and which displayed instead murals of the sort designed by Left-leaning community visionaries in the Seventies and Eighties — here a diverse mix of smiling faces; beside it a huge tree acting as metaphor for — simultaneously — the
