‘Of course,’ she said as if she’d known all along. Fooling no one. ‘What’s he up to now?’
‘He went away to university. Liverpool. Did a social work course. Moved back to the north east last summer. Guess what he’s doing now?’ He looked at them, savouring the moment, before answering his own question. ‘He’s a psychiatric social worker at St George’s. The hospital where Luke Armstrong was treated.’
‘Did he work with Luke?’ Vera wasn’t in the mood for games.
‘I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him.’
‘Don’t. Not until I’ve had a chat to Julie. We don’t want to frighten him away.’
Why hadn’t Joe told her this as soon as he’d found out? She felt like demanding an explanation. But this wasn’t the place. Not in front of the others. He’s getting complacent, she thought. Cocky. He thinks he can take me for granted.
Perhaps he sensed her anger, because he became apologetic. ‘I spoke to his mum only just now. Just before the meeting.’
I take him for granted too, she thought. Think of him as family, expect more of him than I should.
‘Samuel Parr’s wife committed suicide,’ she said. ‘I want the background, how she died. Charlie, can you look into that?’
He nodded and scribbled a note on a scrap of paper.
‘Anything from the lighthouse? Anyone remember seeing a murderer with the body of a young woman under their arm?’ She knew it wasn’t funny, but it was getting to her. The nerve of the killer. The cheek of him.
‘Nothing useful yet. Someone said Northumbria Water were working there for an hour. I’ll check if their guys saw anything.’
‘Well,’ she said brightly. ‘We’ve all got a lot to get on with…’
Charlie cleared his throat again. The ball of phlegm seemed constantly stuck in his gullet. ‘There is something else. Probably nothing.’
‘Spit it out, Charlie!’ Thinking, as soon as the words came out:
‘I found this in the middle of all the papers we got from the search team,’ he said. ‘And I thought, with the flowers, like, it might be important.’
He held it in a clear plastic bag. A piece of cream card, A6 size, and, stuck to it, a pressed flower. Yellow, delicate. Some sort of vetch? Vera thought. There’d been a craze for pressing flowers when she was a kid. One of the teachers had started them off. You stuck the flower between blotting paper and weighed it down with heavy books – there’d been plenty of those in Vera’s house – but she’d never much seen the point. Clearing out the house after Hector had died she’d come across one of her attempts among the pages of one of his field guides. A primrose, picked, pressed, then forgotten for more than thirty years. It had gone onto the bonfire with the rest of the crap.
‘Anything written on the back?’
Charlie turned over the plastic bag. XXX in black ink. A row of kisses. It could have been a card made by a child for a mother. But this was something different, Vera thought. A love token?
‘Was it in an envelope?’
‘No, just like this.’
‘No chance of DNA, then.’
‘It suggests Peter Calvert, doesn’t it?’ Joe Ash-worth said tentatively.
‘Maybe.’ She found it hard to imagine the arrogant lecturer taking the time and effort to make the card. Wouldn’t it be just the sort of thing he’d sneer at? ‘Perhaps Lily did it herself, but never got the time to send it. Or it could have been preparation for something she was planning to do with the kids in her class. Get it to forensics. They might give us something on the glue.’
She was still sitting at the table after the rest of them had gone. She poured the last of the coffee from the Thermos jug, took her time over drinking it. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling that someone was playing with her. She was a piece in an elaborate board game. Real murders weren’t like this. They were brutal and mucky. Unplanned usually, always ugly. She tried to remember Julie Armstrong, staring at the telly in the front room at Seaton, Dennis Marsh hiding in his greenhouse; tried to persuade herself that she wasn’t enjoying every minute.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The doctor had given Julie tablets to help her sleep. Every night she thought they weren’t going to work, then sleep came in an instant. It was like being smashed over the head, a sudden unconsciousness. For the first time, that morning she remembered dreaming. She woke abruptly as she always did with the pills. It was early morning. She could tell by the noise of the birds and because there was no traffic in the street. The curtains were thin and the light came through them; it was sunny again.
Her first waking thought was of Luke, as it had been every morning since he’d died. The picture of him lying in the bath, the heavy scent, the condensation running down the mirror over the sink. But she was immediately aware too that he hadn’t been the subject of her dream. It had been a sexy dream, the sort of daydream she’d conjured up after Geoff had left, when she’d thought she’d never have sex with a man again. In this dream, she and Gary were walking along a beach at night. There was a heavy moon just above the horizon, the sound of waves. The sort of thing you’d read in a cheesy magazine, one of those mags for old ladies which her mam took on coach trips. But then the dream shifted and they were in the dunes, making love. She remembered the weight of him on top of her, the sand rubbing against her back and her shoulders, his tongue in her mouth. Now it was like the memory of a real event, not a dream at all. Lying in bed she put her right hand on her left breast and believed it still felt tender, as if it had been pressed and squeezed. She started to move her hand down over her stomach and between her legs, then stopped herself. There was a shock of guilt. What was she doing? How could she even consider sex at a time like this? What sort of mother had she been? She should have sent Gary away the day before. What had possessed her to let him into the house?
She looked at the alarm clock by her bed. Nearly six o’clock. She zapped the remote and the portable TV on the chest of drawers came to life. She dozed, watching the moving pictures, not listening to the words, until her mother came in with a cup of tea and a pile of post. She could tell there were more cards. All her friends sending messages of support, telling her how sorry they were. She knew what they’d be like. Pictures of crosses and churches and lilies. She hadn’t been in a church since they’d had Laura baptized, wondered what it was about dying that brought out the religion in everyone. She hadn’t been able to face opening the mail and added the new envelopes to the mound of unopened post by the bed.
All morning she struggled to banish thoughts of Gary. Her mother seemed to sense she was more unsettled today and tried to distract her. Or perhaps she thought Julie had had enough moping around and it was time she pulled herself together. She wasn’t given to sentiment and was easily irritated. She got Julie up for breakfast, then set her to making a packed lunch for Laura to take to school. When the girl was out of the house and Julie was still sitting at the kitchen table, staring into space, she brought the bundle of letters and cards down from the bedroom.
‘These need answering, Julie. You can’t just ignore them. That’d be rude.’
Julie had been wondering where Gary was today. She had his number, hadn’t she? She could phone him. She had this fantasy that he would come and collect her, take her to work with him. There’d be a dark room, flashing lights and a rock band. Really loud music which would blow away all the other thoughts from her head. The thumping of a bass which she’d feel vibrating through her body. Then the guilt hit her again and, as a sort of penance, she sat as her mother told her, a mug of milky coffee at her elbow, and began opening the cards.
When the doorbell rang, she felt her pulse racing. Gary had come back. Her mother was upstairs making the beds but she shouted down, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get it.’ And Julie stayed where she was and made herself breathe slowly, telling herself over and over again that it was wrong to be thinking about a man at a time like this. Then she heard Vera Stanhope’s voice, loud enough that you’d believe the whole street could hear, and she felt like bursting into tears.
Vera came into the kitchen and sat beside her. ‘Sorry to interrupt again, pet. Just a few more questions.’
