gentle but firm instructions until there was something approaching quiet.
“They get half an hour with a video after lunch,” she said. “So that’s about as long as we’ve got.”
Holland threw his overcoat across a kitchen chair. “That’ll be plenty, Shireen.”
The conversation was not without interruption- punctuated by high-pitched chatter, cartoonish music, and the occasional bout of tears from the next room-but Shireen Collins spoke openly enough. It was obvious that at some point she’d felt a great deal for Ian Hadingham. But it was equally clear that she’d moved on. From their marriage, and from his death…
“Ian was always a waste of space unless he was in a uniform,” she said. “When he’d come home on leave or whatever, he’d just sit about feeling sorry for himself. He’d ignore me and he’d ignore the kids most of the time, and to be honest, after a couple of weeks, I couldn’t wait for him to get back to his bloody regiment. God, that sounds awful, doesn’t it?”
“Have you been talking to my girlfriend?” Holland said.
Collins laughed. She tried to explain how it had felt; how she’d once felt jealous of the bond he’d so clearly shared with his pals in the regiment. How she’d resented it, and fought for her husband’s attention, and then, in the end, how she’d simply given up competing.
“What happened after Ian came back from the Gulf?” Holland asked.
Collins laughed again, but rather more sadly this time. “I’m not sure how much of him did come back,” she said. “It was like he was somewhere else in his head and it wasn’t a place where I was welcome. Actually, I’m not sure it was a place I’d’ve liked very much. I know they all went through a lot out there.”
Holland stared straight at Collins. He did not want to catch Stone’s eye; he knew Stone would be thinking the same thing he was: You have no bloody idea…
“He left the army pretty soon after he came home,” Collins said. “It was all right for a while, for a year or so, and we even talked about having more kids, but something told me not to. That we’d’ve been doing it for the wrong reasons.”
“What did Ian do,” Holland asked, “after he left the army?”
“All sorts of things, but none of them for very long, you know? He worked in warehouses, did some security work, tried to retrain as an electrical engineer, but he couldn’t hold down a job. Had a bit of a problem with authority. It’d be fine for a few months, then he’d blow it. He was fired more than once for threatening people.” She opened her mouth to say something else, then changed her mind. “His head was basically messed up afterward.”
Stone nodded his understanding. “So he moved out, right?”
“Right. We decided to separate a few years on from that. He moved out and eventually I got this place. He never went far away, like-he wanted to stay close to the kids and that-but he moved around.”
“He got a flat?”
“Lots of different flats. He didn’t seem to like staying put too long; plus, he kept falling behind with his rent and getting chucked out of places.”
“How did he react when you met somebody else?” Holland asked. “It can’t have been very easy…”
There was a yell from next door. Collins stood to look in on the children, but sat down again quickly enough. “Ian wasn’t exactly thrilled and he had a bit of a problem with Owen.” She pointed toward her young children. “Owen’s their dad. Things got a bit ugly and Ian was a big bloke. He was handy, you know? So we got the police involved and we decided against actually getting married, and it was fine after that. It was fine for me and Owen, I mean, but things went downhill for Ian pretty quickly.”
“Downhill?” Stone said.
“He started dossing down all over the place. Sleeping on people’s floors and in shitty bedsits or whatever. Like he’d stopped caring, basically. He was drinking a lot and pissing off all his mates. Not that he had many left by then…”
“Did he see any of his old mates from the army?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Any of the lads on his tank crew, maybe?”
“He never talked about it,” she said. “I wouldn’t know if he had, but to be honest I’d stopped really listening to him, you know? He went funny the last few years. He talked a lot of rubbish. Before he died he came round to tell me that he was going to turn it all round. Banging on about how he was going to look after me and the kids, how he was going to see us all right. I never told Owen any of that, by the way. He’d’ve gone mental.”
Holland couldn’t resist a glance at Stone this time. “Did he say how he was going to turn it round? Was he talking about money?”
“Yeah, I think so, but he always had some stupid scheme or other on the go. He was always on about getting himself sorted again. Silly bastard…”
“Tell us about when Ian died, Shireen?”
A boy came to the hatch and asked for a drink.
Shireen smiled; told Holland and Stone about her ex-husband’s death as she mixed orange squash. “It was booze and pills,” she said. “He emptied a couple of bottles of both in some pissy little room just round the corner from here. They didn’t find him for a week because the poor sod had nobody to miss him by then.”
“They never found a note, did they?”
“No…”
“You never thought it was odd that Ian killed himself?” Stone said. “Bearing in mind what he’d said about turning his life around and all that.”
She looked at them, unblinking, and Holland thought he could see the unasked question in her confused expression. He thought it said a lot about how Shireen Collins was getting on with her life that she hadn’t really asked them why, a year after her ex-husband had died, they wanted to talk to her about him. He also thought that if Hadingham was as big, as handy, as she’d said he was, then it couldn’t have been easy for whoever had killed him to have forced those tablets down his throat. Mind you, if Hadingham had been pissed before it happened…
Suddenly there were other children demanding drinks and attention and it was clear that half an hour had been a generous estimate.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe you could come back…”
They’d taken a cab from the station. Stone asked if there was a number they could call or somewhere they could pick up a taxi. She gave them directions to a minicab office five minutes’ walk away.
Holland started pulling on his coat. “Do you mind me asking what you did with all Ian’s things?”
“All the stuff he’d left here had gone long before he died,” she said. “I gave the clothes and a few of his old CDs to a charity shop. A lot of it just went in the rubbish, to be honest.”
“Were there any videotapes?” Stone asked.
She seemed slightly thrown by the question. “We had… blank tapes for recording stuff on. We still use them, I think, for taping the football or Corrie or whatever…”
“What about the things Ian took with him when he left?”
“No, they gave me everything that was in the room where they found him; all his personal belongings.”
“You don’t remember a videotape?”
She suddenly looked embarrassed. She lowered her voice, and tried to look Stone in the eye, but couldn’t quite manage it. “D’you mean like porno?”
Handing Stone his jacket, Holland turned to her. “It doesn’t matter, really. It’s nothing…”
It was dry outside, but from the look of the sky it was no more than a lull, so they did their best to make the five-minute walk in much faster time.
“She’s going to find out what he did eventually,” Stone said.
Holland shook his head. “It’s not up to us.”
“I don’t think she’ll be that devastated somehow…”
“Maybe she will. On her kids’ behalf.”
“Right. I suppose it’s going to piss on their old man’s memory somewhat. Blow the whole war-hero thing.”
“Just a bit…”
“We’re bang on about the fucking blackmail, though. That’s for definite. Hadingham as good as told her he
