“You know boss, w-what happened... you know, what happened between you and me...and everything...” Cooper seemed unable to get the words out. Whether this was caused by embarrassment or alcohol, Karen did not know.
“Don’t worry about that either, Phil. I was beginning to think you weren’t aware that anything had happened at all, and that’s probably the best way to keep it. I’m sure you’ve been quite right to do so.”
Phil’s alcoholic flush began to turn into a proper blush then. Karen hadn’t realized until recently that Cooper was inclined to blush when he was embarrassed, much as she did. The first time she had seen it had been, of course, when she admonished him on the day that Jennifer Roth had revealed her true identity.
The DS moved closer to her, looking anxiously around to make sure nobody else was listening. Even though she had been drinking heavily since she entered the bar, she was quite overwhelmed by the sour smell of beer and whisky on his breath.
“Look, Karen, I’m really really sorry—” he began in little more than a whisper.
“So am I,” she interrupted, but he wasn’t to be put off.
“Look, Karen, I just couldn’t carry on with it. I’m married, it’s my wife, you see, and the kids, and you’re the governor, it’s all too much—”
“Really, Phil.” Karen treated him to her most withering look. “And that’s all new, is it?”
“Sorry, boss?”
Cooper was obviously not at his quickest on the uptake. The alcohol had thoroughly dumbed him down, it seemed.
“I mean, your situation is new, is it? You have only acquired a wife and family since you spent half the night fucking me, have you? Because quite obviously you wouldn’t have done so had you already been a husband and father, would you?”
Cooper’s blush deepened. He had turned bright red right into the collar of his shirt now, and he seemed to be looking around the room even more frantically to reassure himself that nobody was listening.
Karen slammed her drink down on the bar and left, aware of even more curious glances as she headed for the door, but well past caring. She had to get out. She didn’t trust herself to stay. Not with several large whiskies inside her.
The next day she went to visit her mother again at the Old Manor nursing home. She hadn’t been for weeks. The effort required to make herself do so became increasingly greater. Sometimes she wondered if her visits helped anyone.
Unusually, Margaret Meadows was sitting in an armchair looking relaxed and comfortable, which made Karen feel marginally less guilty. But only marginally. Her greeting to Karen was the same as ever. And nonetheless gut-wrenching for its familiarity.
“Have you come to take me home?” she asked.
“Not until later,” replied Karen. The same lies. The same bending of the truth. The same desire to run and run. To go anywhere in the world, to never ever have to put herself through this again. She didn’t run, of course. Instead she sat down next to her mother and took hold of her hand, stroking it. Margaret Meadows, apparently forgetting her request to go home, smiled at her daughter and promptly fell asleep, her head lolling forwards onto her chest. Karen resisted the urge to try to rest it on a cushion. Such ministrations invariably merely left her mother distressed.
So she just sat there quietly holding her mother’s hand and tried to think happy thoughts which, in that nursing home, and with both her personal and professional lives causing her distress, was pretty difficult.
After a few minutes her mother snapped awake, quick as a flash, in that way she had a habit of doing.
“He wasn’t going to stay with that hairdresser woman, you know,” she said suddenly. “It was me he cared about. Always.”
“What, darling?” Karen was startled. Was her mother really saying what she thought she might be?
“But there were scratches,” she went on, spitting the words out as if they were something she wanted to get rid of.
“What scratches, darling?” Karen asked.
“Scratches,” repeated her mother. “His face had scratches.”
“Whose face?”
“Him, him.” Her mother sounded impatient. With the finger of one hand she tapped the copy of the Daily Mirror which lay open in her lap. Karen still paid for her to have a daily paper, even though it was a very long time since she had seen Margaret Meadows respond in any way to a newspaper, let alone attempt to read one. The displayed page carried a picture of Richard Marshall.
“I didn’t tell, though. I couldn’t tell. Not on him. I loved him.”
Karen felt as if she had been pole-axed. She had more than once over the years tried to ask her mother about her part in the tragic events of all those years ago. It had never got her anywhere. And in recent years she did not think that her mother even knew what she was talking about.
“Richard Marshall had scratches on his face?” she enquired softly.
“I’ve just told you, scratches.” And with that Margaret Meadows raised her right hand to her face and stroked both cheeks as if showing where the scratches had been.
Karen made herself study her mother dispassionately. At that instant Margaret Meadows seemed perfectly alert and lucid.
“Was that the night he came to see you, the night he brought the little girls around?” Karen asked, remembering vividly all over again her own half-view of the proceedings from the top of the landing.
“What?”
Karen looked deeply into her mother’s eyes, trying to decipher what lay within her confused head.
“Was that the night he came to see you, brought the little girls around?” She repeated the question in as calm a fashion as possible.
“Who?”
“Richard Marshall?”
“Who?”
Karen squeezed her hand more tightly. Margaret Meadows’ eyes had acquired the frightened bewildered look her daughter knew so well, the look that indicated that she didn’t understand what she was being asked, that she didn’t understand anything very much and remembered even less.
Karen tried one more time.
“You remember Richard Marshall,” she prompted, pointing at the photograph of him in the newspaper still lying open on her mother’s lap. “You looked after his children when his wife disappeared.”
And you had an affair with him, too, she thought obliquely. An affair neither you nor I ever told anyone about. And apparently, even after he moved Esther Hunter into Parkview, you carried on believing in him, carried on covering up for him.
Her mother glanced down briefly at the paper, then screwed up her features into an expression of pure anguish. “Richard who?” she asked, her brow creased into a deep frown.
“It’s all right, darling,” muttered Karen. “It’s all right. Just forget it.”
She knew, however, that her mother already had forgotten it. If Margaret Meadows had been as lucid as Karen thought for just a few seconds, then she was no longer so. She was quite sure that her mother had been telling her that Marshall’s face had been scratched that fateful night. Quite sure. But the moment had passed.
That, and anything else she might know, was once more locked inside Margaret Meadows’ troubled head.
And the one thing her daughter was certain of was that nothing would be gained by passing on the half-delivered message to anyone else. Not now. It was far too late. Margaret Meadows could never be a witness. She could not even give a statement. The best thing that Karen could do, for her own sake as well as her mother’s, she knew, was to keep quiet. Just as she had for nearly three decades.
Richard Marshall was given leave to appeal and his case came up at the Court of Appeal in London’s Strand three months later. Karen accompanied Sean MacDonald, just as she had done at the trial. She felt that she could do no other. However, she had few doubts about the eventual outcome, she could really see little alternative to Marshall being released. The appeal proceedings were every bit as much of an ordeal for her and for Mac as she had expected.