‘And you sound like a taxi driver,’ Bateson snapped. ‘Just drive, constable, will you.’
‘Sir.’
Terry regretted the words, but made no effort to call them back. This was happening more and more, he knew — he was becoming impatient, crusty, like all the worst officers he’d known. It was as though his personality was changing. It was attracting wry comments among his colleagues. When he tried to make amends, it just made matters worse. They seemed to fall over themselves offering sympathy. ‘So sorry to hear about your, wife, sir …is there anything I can do? … come out for a drink … terrible thing about your wife …’
Two years ago it had been so different. Terry had seemed able to square the magic circle — hardworking, successful, ambitious, but also popular with his fellow officers. His aim to get the DCI’s job when Jim Carter retired was supported, he believed, by most of his colleagues.
And then in one night it was all destroyed. Two fifteen year old boys had hot-wired a Jaguar, blasted it up to eighty miles an hour, and smashed it head-on into his wife’s Clio. It had taken four hours to cut Mary’s lifeless body from the wreckage. It would take Terry the rest of his life to cut the image from his mind.
For two weeks he had been in despair. His sister had come to care for him and his two daughters. The Police Federation counsellor advised him that grief was natural, and that it was no sin for a man to cry. But Terry had cried already and it didn’t seem to help, it just felt painful and frightened him. So he drank most of a bottle of whisky in one night, and the rest the day after. What happened in between he couldn’t remember, but it made his sister tighten her mouth and his children look afraid. That, more than anything, purged him. After the funeral, where he was ashamed by his pounding headache, he sat down with his two little girls and talked to them quietly about the future.
They wanted to know who would look after them. He said he would, of course. He would leave the police. But to his surprise, this idea seemed to scare them; perhaps because it scared him, too. He knew nothing else, had never wanted to. And so his sister and the counsellor advised him about childcare, and Trude, a young nanny from Norway, entered their home.
She was cheerful and active, eager to help and to please. His girls took to her at once. After a halting expression of sympathy in broken English she didn’t speak much about their mother, but entered enthusiastically into what, to her, were the fascinating foreign details of their everyday English lives. She was a messy but surprisingly good cook, making things like waffles and meatballs and rice porridge which they had never tasted before. She seemed content to be with them, undemanding. Above all she was genuinely interested in children and had no reason to feel sad. When she had been there two days the children went back to school, and the week after that Terry went back to work. Life, of a sort, began again.
But his ambition, his ability to concentrate, were gone. He kept a photo of Mary on his desk and found himself staring at it, silently, for half an hour at a time. So he put it in a drawer and only took it out occasionally, when he was alone. But she was always there, at the front of his mind, while the work seemed an irrelevance, a side issue to be sorted and swiftly forgotten.
He took up running again. He had once been a promising 800 metre runner, not quite fast enough to get into the big time. Now he found that the exercise calmed his body and his mind at the same time. In the evenings he cuddled his little girls and told them bedtime stories as he had done when they were babies. At night they seemed to need him most. They talked about their mother and remembered the good things they had done when she was alive. Sometimes they prayed for her, all three together. But during the days, life had to go on.
Gradually his concentration returned. But he lost all thoughts of promotion. He tried to arrange his hours to be at home after school and at weekends like a normal parent. It was not ideal for a detective but it was the best practical help his colleagues could give him. He was discreetly withdrawn from the front line, to office work and routine enquiries. DCI Carter retired and instead of Terry a sharp, clever southerner, Will Churchill, got the Detective Chief Inspector’s post. At the time, Terry had been so numb, he scarcely cared.
But time passed and the little girls began to forget, as young healthy creatures do. When Terry first saw them laugh and play like other children he resented it. How could they be happy when Mary was dead? But they were happy and they were only little children after all. He watched them gratefully, drawing healing from them. They resumed contact with their friends, and sometimes he came home to find a chaotic houseful of children with the nanny in the middle. The sight cheered him, gave him confidence to take on serious enquiries again.
And so two years had passed. Life went on, but he was not the same detective he had been before. He cut corners and turned down overtime to be at home with his children. He made mistakes, he forgot things. And worst of all he snapped at people for no reason, as he done with young Harry Easby just now. He had to get a grip on this.
If only he could stop thinking about Mary, seeing her face suddenly when he was looking at something else, remembering the feel of her beside him in bed, the small of her back lithe under the palm of his hand when they danced …
‘Here we are, sir,’ said Harry Easby, turning onto a farm track. ‘Bank House Farm.’
Sarah didn’t leave her office for another three hours, and when she did, very little about tomorrow’s cross-examination was left to chance. She had prepared her questions and tried to anticipate how Sharon Gilbert might respond. Much of this was logic, based on the written evidence in the prosecution file and Gary’s story; but the rest was intuition, based on her impression of Sharon’s character this afternoon.
She had an advantage here, for she had lived among women like Sharon. She was used to their brash, slightly resentful manner. She understood how they felt patronised by teachers and doctors, cheated by boyfriends and husbands, short-changed by employers and the DSS. She felt sure that Sharon’s assertiveness in court today masked a fear that somehow the police and lawyers were going to betray her again, as the authorities had always done in the past.
A fear that Sarah was determined to bring true.
The softer part of Sarah felt sorry for Sharon. Not just because of the rape — of course she deserved sympathy for that — but because of what she was. Sarah could so easily have ended up like that herself. But she had chosen not to. And for that very reason, a much stronger part of Sarah despised Sharon. The part of Sarah that had made that choice didn’t believe in luck or genes or social excuses. She believed if you worked, you could succeed. As she had done.
One by one the other barristers, the clerk and the secretaries called out their goodbyes and left the office. By seven thirty, Sarah looked up and saw that only Savendra had his light on across the corridor. His door was open; she could see him in his shirtsleeves and red braces, making detailed notes at his desk. She yawned, and stretched her arms over her head with her fingers linked, easing the joints in her stiff neck and spine. Savendra looked up and smiled.
‘Finished already?’
‘Yup.’ She crossed the corridor, leaning on his door frame curiously. ‘What’s your brief?’
‘Mass poisoning.’
‘What, you? Advocate for the Borgias?’
‘Hardly. My client’s a farmer who let his slurry pit overflow into a village borehole. Diarrhoea and vomiting all round.’
‘Charming. Still, you know what they say, don’t you?’
‘What?’
‘Where there’s muck there’s brass. A case like that should make you stinking rich.’ She ducked as he flung a paper clip at her. ‘I’m off home.’