and a ring through the right nostril. It was almost as if they were trying to look like sisters. But where the girl had a studded belt and jeans cut low enough to reveal bony hips, the mother
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had a smooth roll of fat. The daughter was fashionably pale, but her mother was tanned - though it was the sort of tan gained in a cubicle on the High Street at thirty-nine pence a minute.
‘It can bring you closer,’ they said, almost together. The father had nothing to say. His ashes were in the brass urn they allowed Cooper to sign for.
His last visit was to the Devonshire Estate again, where Maureen Connolly told him that her sister had stolen their mother’s ashes.
‘She had no right to take them. They belonged to me. Good riddance to her, I say. She was always a tart, anyway. My only consolation is that she’ll be suffering for it, wherever she is.’
‘She’s dead?’
‘No, not her. Last I heard, she was living on some council estate in Derby with four snotty kids by two different blokes both of them in prison. One or the other will do for her when he comes out, unless she drinks herself to death first.’ ‘When did you last see her?’
‘See her? Not for almost a year. Oh, she rang me a few weeks ago. Wanting money, naturally. She must have been down to the last dregs, or she wouldn’t have bothered with me. Desperation, that was. I never doubted it, no matter what she said.’
Mrs Connolly pressed her lips together in an expression of satisfaction. It wouldn’t do to smile, of course. It wasn’t nice to be seen enjoying someone else’s misfortune. But her face came as close to a smile as was permissible.
‘I don’t suppose you have an address?’ said Cooper.
‘I didn’t ask her for it - why should I? Besides, she’s probably moved by now. Persuaded the council to give her a different house somewhere, hoping she can’t be found. Some hopes.’
‘Well, I can see there’s no love lost between you and your
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sister,’ said Cooper, ignoring the look of derision on her face
at his understatement. ‘But aren’t you at all concerned about
what might happen to her children?’ ‘Why? They’re nothing to do with me.’ ‘They’re your nephews and nieces.’ Mrs Connolly snorted. ‘Nephews and nieces?’ She leaned closer, her face communicating a mixture of
disgust and triumph.
‘Two of them,’ she said, ‘are black. Almost.’
Cooper was sweating by the time he got back into his car. The effort of remaining polite and sympathetic in Maureen Connolly’s house had been almost intolerable. Now he felt more depressed than he had in any of the places where death had been all around him. The professional morbidity of the funeral parlour, the intellectual prurience of Freddy Robertson, the cremated remains as an interior-design feature. None of them had seemed so negative, or so tragic, as the things that people could do to each other in life.
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16
‘Of course, while we were all feeling sorry for Geoff Birley, what he didn’t bother telling us was that Sandra had been threatening to leave him for some time,’ Fry said in the DI’s office. ‘He says he didn’t believe she meant it, that she would never really leave him.’
‘He was fooling himself, then,’ said Hitchens. Fry shook her head. ‘Actually, no. Sandra agrees with him. She says she wasn’t planning to leave her husband at all, just to stay away for a night or two to teach him a lesson. In fact, she was planning to phone him today. The Birleys might have been back together by tonight.’
‘But what about Ian Todd? He’s Sandra’s lover, surely?’ ‘There’s certainly more to the relationship than being just good friends, as they’d like us to believe,’ said Fry. ‘Todd wants Sandra to leave her husband and stay with him permanently. But, as for her, well…’ Fry shook her head. ‘Who are we to try to understand other people’s relationships? A lot of us don’t understand our own.’
‘So the business in the car park - what was that all about?’
‘Sandra had arranged to meet Ian Todd in the pub after
work, before they went back to his place in Darton Street.
But she was kept late at the office by a meeting that overran.
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Naturally, Todd thought she’d changed her mind. He couldn’t get hold of Sandra on her mobile, because she had it turned off while she was in the meeting. So he went to the car park to see if he could catch her on her way home. When he found Sandra’s Skoda on Level 8, he decided to wait for her. And by then, he was out of contact because there was no mobile signal on his network inside that multistorey.’
‘Why didn’t he wait by Sandra’s car?’ said Hitchens. ‘That would have been the logical thing to do.’
‘He said he didn’t want to give her a chance to get away,’ said Fry. ‘So he waited by the lift. He felt sure she’d come up that way, and he wanted her to see him as soon as the doors opened.’
‘He doesn’t know Sandra quite as well as her husband does, then.’
‘No.’ ‘I suppose it all fits. But it’s a pain in the neck that people can’t sort their lives out without giving us all this trouble.’
‘It’s not sorted out quite yet. Mr Todd is seriously pissed off at this moment.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Hitchens. ‘Not only has he been used as a pawn in a row between the Birleys, but he’s been pulled in and questioned by us on suspicion of a serious crime that he didn’t commit.’
Fry remembered the snatch of CCTV footage from the camera in New Street, the two figures walking towards Ian Todd’s car. She recalled a brief struggle, a woman apparently trying to break free from the grasp of a man much bigger and stronger than she was.
‘It won’t do him any harm,’ she said.
Fry had been away from the DFs office for only a few minutes when Hitchens threw open the door again and shouted for her. When she went back in, he was on the phone. He talked to her while holding the phone to his ear.
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‘What’s happened, sir?’
