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. She’d opened a bottle of Merlot and was a couple of glasses into it. She felt happier than she’d been for months.
Recently most of her work had been routine, boring. This was different and a challenge, something to pick over when she spent the evening on her own, something other than a gloomy play on Radio 4 to occupy her mind. God, she thought. I’m a sad old bat. She did feel some guilt in taking such a delight in a bonny lad’s death. She liked Julie, thought she couldn’t have done any better by the boy. But none of that stopped her relishing the case, the unusual details of the crime scene. She had few other pleasures in her life. She sat by the open window until it was dark and the wine bottle was almost empty.
The next day she brought her team together and she talked about Luke as if she’d known him.
‘You’ll have met the sort. A bit slow. You’d speak to him and you’d not be sure he’d understood. Say it again and you’d still wonder if he was any the wiser. Not a nasty lad, though. Soft-hearted. Generous. Good with the old folks in the home where his mother works. On the edge of trouble. Not bright enough to get into bother on his own account, but not bright enough either to stay away when his friends dragged him into it. And then only petty stuff. . .
‘Luke witnessed a drowning. Joe has the details and will pass them round. It might be a coincidence of course, but it’s the best lead we have at the moment.’ She paused. ‘The only lead.’
On cue Joe Ashworth played paper monitor, dishing out sheets of A4. Vera wondered suddenly if she treated him too much like teacher’s pet. Did he resent it? Trouble was, he was one of the few members in the team she could trust absolutely to get things right. Perhaps that said more about her than about them.
She continued. ‘The lad who drowned after the scrap on North Shields quayside was Thomas Sharp. One of the Sharps. Notorious family and we’ll all have heard of them. Father is Davy Sharp, at present serving three years in HMP Acklington. There was no prosecution after the accident – it seems generally to be accepted as horseplay which got out of hand. It’s possible of course that none of this is relevant, but ask around. Was Luke involved with people his mother knew nothing about? Is someone trying to send a scary message here?’