and the claustrophobic cells beneath, that there was a quite different world immediately outside. In front of Sarah tourists queued up to visit the Castle Museum and the Norman castle, Clifford’s Tower. Tourists and children carrying balloons and ice cream glanced up idly at the statue of Justice above the court. For a moment Sarah stood on the court steps, breathing in the soft breeze and luxuriating in the warmth like a cat.
But the machinery of justice ignored the weather. Below Sarah the prison van waited, its tiny cells with square blackened windows designed to ensure that neither Gary nor any of the other prisoners had even the smallest sensation of freedom between York and their remand cells in Hull.
Sarah watched it go. Then she and Lucy walked briskly down the steps and turned left to Tower Street, their offices, and work.
Chapter Three
While Sarah went back to her office, Terry Bateson collected his colleague, DC Harry Easby, and drove south of York to investigate an incident that had been reported the day before. Easby stopped the car on a bridge over the A64, and the two policemen gazed at the muddy desolation of a building site half a mile ahead. Grimy yellow JCBs toiled like great insects in the mud, while a crane with a wrecking ball casually demolished an abandoned hospital.
‘Looks like progress, sir,’ Harry offered, breaking the oppressive silence between them.
‘Progress?’ Terry grimaced. ‘More like the battle of the Somme, you mean.’
‘That’s how uniform see it,’ Easby nodded. ‘But they pushed the buggers out of their trenches last week, any road. Just look at the hairy sods.’
He nodded towards a wood behind the JCBs. The building site was protected from the wood by an elaborate boundary of eight foot high wire fences, security men and dogs. The fence was festooned with flowers and scraps of paper, and a long whitish banner floated between two tall trees. SAVE OUR TREES, SHOP IN TOWN, it read. The leafy treetops also supported a network of aerial walkways and tree houses, where the eco-warriors lived.
The park-like woodlands that had surrounded the old maternity hospital were being redeveloped for an out- of-town designer shopping centre. Trees planted by Victorians had reached their full, beautiful maturity just in time to become a hindrance to a late twentieth century plan for floodlights, car parks and up-market designer units. The shops would market a style of beauty which would be packaged, bought, worn and replaced every year with something newer, fresher, and more up-to-date. Against this the useless, magnificent trees stood no chance. After all, they made no money and offered nothing but the same, endless, wearisome repetition of natural style — every autumn, every spring the same.
News of the project, however, had spread to the hairy unwashed army of eco-warriors, who had a profound and perverse lack of interest in style, markets and fashion. They came from every hedge, cave, bender and battered caravan in the country. They moved swiftly, with energy, secrecy and determination. The developers’ chain saws were confronted by an army of bloody-minded economic rejects whose main aim, it seemed, was to be seriously injured by the lackeys of global capitalism, and thus become martyrs to the movement. And so the police had become involved, in order to remove the protesters peacefully before one had his arm trimmed off accidentally on purpose. Terry did not envy the Chief Constable his responsibility.
‘Daft buggers!’ said Easby contemptuously. ‘Thousands of jobs, this place’ll bring.’ He drove on, past the village of portacabins where the contractor’s workmen and security guards lived, fenced in with their guard dogs. Terry observed it with distaste.
‘I don’t see why they couldn’t build it in town,’ he mused. ‘You wait, son — in six months this’ll be one vast car park, and another dozen shops in the city centre’ll go out of business. Soon the whole city’ll be boarded up or vandalised.’
‘All the more work for us, then,’ said Harry philosophically, looking ahead for the farm entrance. ‘You sound like one of these tree people, sir.’
‘And you sound like a taxi driver,’ Bateson snapped. ‘Just drive, constable, will you.’
‘Sir.’
Terry regretted the words, but made no effort to call them back. This was happening more and more, he knew — he was becoming impatient, crusty, like all the worst officers he’d known. It was as though his personality was changing. It was attracting wry comments among his colleagues. When he tried to make amends, it just made matters worse. They seemed to fall over themselves offering sympathy. ‘So sorry to hear about your, wife, sir …is there anything I can do? … come out for a drink … terrible thing about your wife …’
Two years ago it had been so different. Terry had seemed able to square the magic circle — hardworking, successful, ambitious, but also popular with his fellow officers. His aim to get the DCI’s job when Jim Carter retired was supported, he believed, by most of his colleagues.
And then in one night it was all destroyed. Two fifteen year old boys had hot-wired a Jaguar, blasted it up to eighty miles an hour, and smashed it head-on into his wife’s Clio. It had taken four hours to cut Mary’s lifeless body from the wreckage. It would take Terry the rest of his life to cut the image from his mind.
For two weeks he had been in despair. His sister had come to care for him and his two daughters. The Police Federation counsellor advised him that grief was natural, and that it was no sin for a man to cry. But Terry had cried already and it didn’t seem to help, it just felt painful and frightened him. So he drank most of a bottle of whisky in one night, and the rest the day after. What happened in between he couldn’t remember, but it made his sister tighten her mouth and his children look afraid. That, more than anything, purged him. After the funeral, where he was ashamed by his pounding headache, he sat down with his two little girls and talked to them quietly about the future.
They wanted to know who would look after them. He said
She was cheerful and active, eager to help and to please. His girls took to her at once. After a halting expression of sympathy in broken English she didn’t speak much about their mother, but entered enthusiastically into what, to her, were the fascinating foreign details of their everyday English lives. She was a messy but surprisingly good cook, making things like waffles and meatballs and rice porridge which they had never tasted before. She seemed content to be with them, undemanding. Above all she was genuinely interested in children and had no reason to feel sad. When she had been there two days the children went back to school, and the week after that Terry went back to work. Life, of a sort, began again.
But his ambition, his ability to concentrate, were gone. He kept a photo of Mary on his desk and found himself staring at it, silently, for half an hour at a time. So he put it in a drawer and only took it out occasionally, when he was alone. But she was always there, at the front of his mind, while the work seemed an irrelevance, a side issue to be sorted and swiftly forgotten.
He took up running again. He had once been a promising 800 metre runner, not quite fast enough to get into the big time. Now he found that the exercise calmed his body and his mind at the same time. In the evenings he cuddled his little girls and told them bedtime stories as he had done when they were babies. At night they seemed to need him most. They talked about their mother and remembered the good things they had done when she was alive. Sometimes they prayed for her, all three together. But during the days, life had to go on.
Gradually his concentration returned. But he lost all thoughts of promotion. He tried to arrange his hours to be at home after school and at weekends like a normal parent. It was not ideal for a detective but it was the best practical help his colleagues could give him. He was discreetly withdrawn from the front line, to office work and routine enquiries. DCI Carter retired and instead of Terry a sharp, clever southerner, Will Churchill, got the Detective Chief Inspector’s post. At the time, Terry had been so numb, he scarcely cared.
But time passed and the little girls began to forget, as young healthy creatures do. When Terry first saw them laugh and play like other children he resented it. How could they be happy when Mary was dead? But they
