Hidden Depths

‘Sal phoned her first thing. Mary got someone else to cover your shift. She said she sends her love.’

That made Julie stop in her tracks, caused a small landslide as the fine dry sand dribbled past her feet. Mary Lee, who owned the home, wasn’t a sentimental woman. It wasn’t like her to talk of love.

‘Have you told my mam and da?’

‘Last night as soon as I arrived. They wanted to come over. You said you’d rather be on your own for a bit.’

‘Did I?’ Julie tried to remember, but last night was all a blur. Like that time they’d gone on Bev’s hen party and she’d ended up in casualty with alcohol poisoning. That same nightmare sense of unreality, jagged images and flashing shadows.

She walked on and they reached the highest point of the dunes, began to slide down towards the beach. She’d taken off her trainers and had them tied by the laces and slung over her shoulder. Vera was wearing sandals and hadn’t bothered to take them off. In the car she’d put on a huge white floppy hat and dark glasses. ‘The sun doesn’t agree with me,’ she’d said. She looked a bit mad. If Julie had bumped into her in St George’s on the way to visit Luke, she’d have put her down as one of the patients. No question.

They were at the southern end of a long sweep of beach, about four miles long. At the northern end it swung into a narrow promontory where the lighthouse stood, almost lost to view in the haze.

‘It can’t have been easy, living with Luke,’ Vera said.

Julie stopped again. There was that salt breeze that you only ever get by the sea. Three tiny figures right in the distance: two old gadges and a dog running after a ball, just silhouettes because the light was so bright.

‘You think I killed him,’ she said.

‘Did you?’ Because of the hat and the glasses, it was impossible to tell what the detective was thinking.

‘No.’ Then the words, all those words that had been spilling out of her since she’d found the body, dried up. She couldn’t explain that she would never ever have done anything to hurt Luke, that she’d spent the last sixteen years protecting him from the world. She opened her mouth, felt as if she were choking on dry sand. ‘No,’ she said again.

‘Of course you didn’t,’ Vera said. ‘If there was any chance you’d done it, I’d be talking to you in the police station, tape recorder on and your lawyer sitting in. Otherwise the court wouldn’t accept what you’d told me as evidence. But I had to ask. You could have killed him, you see. He’d not long died when you got home. Physically it was a possibility. And usually the murderer is a family member’ She paused and then repeated, ‘I had to ask.’

‘You believe me, then?’

‘I’ve told you I do. You could have killed him. If he’d wound you up and you couldn’t cope any more. But you’d have told us. Besides, you really believed he’d killed himself. When I arrived you thought he’d committed suicide and you were blaming yourself.’

They were walking on the hard sand that the tide had just left behind. Julie rolled up her jeans a couple of turns and let the water cover her feet. The detective couldn’t follow her without getting her sandals wet. She looked out to sea so Vera couldn’t tell she was crying.

‘Someone killed him,’ Vera said. Julie could hardly hear her. Although the sea was too calm for waves there was still the sucking sound when the tide pulled back. ‘Somebody strangled him, then took all his clothes off. Someone ran the bath and lifted him inside and scattered those flowers on the water.’

Julie wasn’t sure if she was supposed to answer, so she said nothing.

‘Did you have the flowers in your house?’ Vera asked.

Julie turned to face her. ‘I never have flowers in the house. Laura has hay fever. They make her eyes stream.’

‘What about the garden?’

‘Are you joking? Nothing grows in our garden. My da comes and cuts the grass for us, but we don’t bother with any plants. There’s only room for the washing line out the back.’

‘So the murderer brought the flowers with him. We’ll say it’s a him just for convenience. Most murderers are men. But we’ll keep an open mind all the same. Why would he bring flowers? Does it mean anything to you?’

Julie shook her head, though something was picking away at her brain, some memory.

‘They brought flowers to the place where Thomas was killed. They threw them onto the river. The people who lived on the estate where his mam stayed. I mean, even people who didn’t know him or knew him and didn’t like him. To say they were sorry, like. To say they understood what a waste it was. Him losing his life because of a few lads horsing about. Luke went too. I bought some daffs for him from Morrisons.’

‘Flowers for remembrance and sorrow,’ Vera said. ‘Universal.’

Julie wasn’t sure what she meant by that.

‘Are you saying whoever murdered Luke was sorry for it?’

‘Maybe.’

‘But if you were sorry – sorry in advance, like, if that’s what the flowers were for – why kill him? It’s not like anyone forced him to break into my house and kill my son.’

‘No one did break in,’ Vera said.

‘What?’

‘There’s no sign of a forced entry. No broken window. Nothing like that. It looks as if Luke let him in. Or Laura.’

‘It will have been Luke,’ Julie said sadly. ‘He’d be taken in by anyone. He’d give to every lad begging on the street if he had the money. Anyone coming to the door with a story, he’d let them in. Laura has more sense.’

‘Did Laura and Luke get on?’

‘What are you saying?’ She was angrier than she’d been when she thought the detective was accusing her of murder. ‘Laura’s a lassie, just fourteen.’

‘There are questions that have to be asked,’ Vera said. ‘You’re not daft. You understand that.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You realize I’ll have to talk to her. She’s not in a fit state yet, but when she’s ready. It’s better that I know how things were between them before I start. Is it possible, for example, that Luke confided in her? If he was worried about anything, would she know?’

‘They weren’t that close,’ Julie said. ‘It wasn’t easy for her having a brother like that. He always got all the attention, didn’t he? I tried to make her feel special too, but he was the one I worried about. It must have been embarrassing for her when she got to the high school. Everyone knew he got into bother. Everyone calling him names. That didn’t mean she’d have wished him any harm.’

‘No,’ Vera said. ‘Of course not.’

Two teenage lads ran down the dunes onto the beach. They were scallies, you could tell just by looking at them, kicking sand at each other and swearing. They were about the same age as Luke, probably bunking off school. Julie pressed her lips together hard to stop herself from wailing.

‘Which taxi did you use from town last night?’ The question came out of the blue. Julie knew Vera was trying to distract her and was grateful.

‘Foxhunters, Whitley Bay. We booked it in advance. The driver dropped Lisa and Jan off first. I was last stop.’ She paused. ‘He’ll confirm my story. I was only in the house minutes before I was banging on Sal’s door. If he went to the end of the road to turn round, he might even have seen me on the doorstep.’

‘I’m more interested in whether he saw someone else in the street. Did you see anyone?’

Julie shook her head.

‘Take a bit of time,’ Vera said. ‘There might be something. See if you can rerun it in your head like a film. Talk me through it. From the taxi pulling up.’

So there on the wide and empty beach, with the gulls screaming over her head and the tide sucking at her feet, Julie shut her eyes and felt the dizziness that had hit her when she first stepped out of the taxi. ‘I was drunk,’ she said. ‘Not fall-in-the-gutter drunk, but not really with it. Everything spinning. You know how it is?’ Because she was sure that Vera had been drunk in her time. She’d be a good person to get drunk with.

‘I know.’ She gave Julie a minute. ‘Did you hear anything unusual?’

‘Nothing at all. I noticed how quiet it was. Usually there’s traffic on the main road through the village. It’s always there so you don’t hear it. Last night there was nothing. Not when I was opening the door’ She frowned.

‘But later? When the door was open?’