Hidden Depths

‘A car started up in the street.’

‘Could it have been the taxi, turning round?’

‘No. This was the ignition being switched on, the engine revving. It’s a different sound, isn’t it, from a car that’s already running?’

‘Quite different,’ Vera said.

‘It must have been parked down the street, near the junction with the road into town. That’s the direction the sound came from.’

‘So you’d have passed it in the taxi on your way in?’

‘Must have done.’

‘Don’t suppose you noticed it? A strange car? Not belonging to one of the usual residents?’ Her voice was so studied and casual that Julie knew it was important.

‘Nah,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have done.’ But she shut her eyes again and concentrated. They’d come over the humped-back bridge and she’d leaned forward to tell the driver to slow down because they were nearly there. There’s a nasty right-hand turn just on the corner And at the same time she was pulling her purse out of her bag, so there wouldn’t be that embarrassing last-minute fumble for payment. Lisa and Jan had already given her more than their share so she knew she had the cash. There’d been nothing coming in the opposite direction and the taxi driver had pulled into her street without having to stop. And there had been a car. Almost on the corner. Parked outside the bungalow where Mr Grey lived. She’d wondered about that because Mr Grey hadn’t driven since he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and everyone knew his only son lived in Australia. She remembered because she’d wondered if the car might belong to the doctor, if there was some emergency. And she’d looked to see if there were any lights on, thinking of the gossip she could pass on to Sal. But the house had been dark. And anyway it had been a small car. Not the sort a doctor would drive.

All this she told Vera.

‘I don’t know what make it was.’

‘Never mind, pet. It gives us something to work on. One of your neighbours might have seen it.’

The scally boys were throwing a football around, bouncing it hard in the wet sand, so muddy spray flew all over their clothes. Their mothers will kill them, Julie thought.

‘Home,’ Vera said. ‘Are you ready?’

Julie almost said she never wanted to go home.

‘Laura will be awake. She’ll be needing you.’ Vera stamped away towards the sand hills, leaving Julie no option but to follow.

Arriving back in the street, it was as if she was seeing it for the first time. Part of her was still on the beach with the sound of the gulls and all that space. Hard to think of this as home. A cul-de-sac ending in reclaimed farmland. Once there’d been the slag heap from the pit, but now there were fields all the way to the coast. Old folks’ bungalows on one side of the street, each with a ramp to the pavement and a hand rail. A row of semis on the other, council once but all privately owned now. Julie thought: Would this still have happened if we lived somewhere else?

Vera asked her to point out the exact place where she’d seen the car the night before. She tried her best but her heart wasn’t in it. All the time she was thinking of things she might have done to avoid the loss of her son. She could have moved, or not gone out with the girls, or had Luke put into a special school, a boarding school where he’d have been properly looked after.

Vera pulled up carefully right outside the house. There was still a policeman on the doorstep, but Julie knew that Luke had gone.

Chapter Six

When Vera arrived home that evening, there was a buzzard sailing over her house. The rounded wings were tilted to catch the thermals and the last of the sun caught it, so it shone like polished wood, carved in a totem. The buzzards were only just returning to this part of Northumberland. Common in the west of the county, the keepers here had shot them to buggery, stamped on eggs, put out poisoned bait. Vera knew there was a keeper on a neighbouring estate with murdering tendencies. Let him try, she thought. Just let him try.

Inside, the house was stuffy and untidy. She’d not been home for twenty-four hours. She opened windows, picked up mucky clothes from the bedroom floor and shoved them in the washer in the lean-to. Then she wondered if there might be anything in the freezer worth eating. Since the death of her father Vera had lived alone and knew she always would now. There was no point considering whether she could have survived a relationship. There had been someone once who’d kept her awake at nights dreaming, but nothing had come of it. It was too late now for regrets. Which didn’t stop her, late at night, with a whisky in her hand.

She took a beer from the fridge, flipped off the top with an opener and drank it straight from the bottle. Even when she hadn’t bothered to buy in food there was always booze in the old station master’s house. She drank too much. Too regularly at least. Emotionally dependent, she told herself. Not addicted. She carried the beer with her back to the lean-to and ferreted in the chest freezer. Her father had stored the animals and birds for his taxidermy in there; she could do with a smaller freezer now. In the bottom she found a plastic tub of venison stew. The venison had been donated by the same keeper who hated raptors, but she’d accepted it without a qualm. Here in the hills you had to keep up a pretence of liking your neighbours. You never knew when you’d need a tow out of a ditch on a snowy day. She’d spent a wet Sunday afternoon cooking the venison, using lots of root vegetables to keep it moist, bay leaves from the garden and red wine. She’d thought it had all been eaten and finding a portion gave her a brief moment of joy, an uncomplicated pleasure of the kind you rarely experienced as an adult.

All the time she was stamping around the house, she had the Armstrong case at the back of her mind. Like an actor, she was feeling her way into the characters, living them. She already had a sense of Luke Armstrong. Julie’s words had brought him alive for her, and anyway she’d met boys like him before. Mostly she’d bumped into them in police cells or Young Offender Institutions. The system had failed them, as it would have failed Luke without a mother like Julie to fight on his behalf. Luke had been a boy who had struggled. Everything had been difficult for him – school, relationships and the boring stuff of everyday life. He would have seen the world through a fog of misunderstanding. He hadn’t ever quite made sense of it. He would have been an easy boy to manipulate. A few kind words, the prospect of a simple treat and he would have welcomed a stranger as a saviour. Vera could have understood if he had died in a pub brawl. She imagined him wound up and wound up and then lashing out with the frustration of a toddler. Even a street shooting would have made some sort of sense. He would betray without meaning to and a death like that could be a scrappy mistake or a message to others.

But this murder made no sense at all. The way Luke had been lovingly laid out in the bath, with perfumed oils and flowers, almost implied respect. It made Vera, who was more imaginative than her appearance suggested, think of sacrifice. A beautiful child. Ritual and reverence. And then there was surely a literary reference. O level English had been a long time ago, but the image was a striking one. Ophelia’s suicide. And how many of Luke’s scally friends and contacts had read Hamlet?

She had no idea yet what Laura was like. Her mother said she was bright and gobby. Was it credible that the girl had slept through the whole thing? The strangling, the bath being run. Had the murderer even known she was there?

Vera tried to imagine what might have happened. Someone was standing on the doorstep with a bunch of flowers. Did Luke let him in? Did he know him? Then what? The Crime Scene Investigators hadn’t been prepared to commit themselves as to where the murder had taken place. At the bottom of the stairs? If that was the case, had Luke been carried up to the bathroom? Vera couldn’t picture it. It didn’t make sense. So perhaps the murderer had asked Luke to let him use the bathroom and Luke had shown him upstairs. Then the murder must have taken place in the room next to Laura’s. Vera shivered slightly, imagining the girl still asleep while the boy was dying so close to her.

She ate her meal on a tray, sitting by an open window. Her immediate neighbours were ageing hippies in search of the good life. They had a smallholding, a couple of goats, one cow for milking, half a dozen hens, a small flock of rare-breed sheep. They had no use for pesticides, despised agri-business and their hay meadow was overgrown with weeds. Vera could smell the hay. There was a flock of twites feeding off the seed heads.