Creed (A Kate Redman Mystery Page 7

  “No. I didn’t even go closer than ten feet. I just had to check – check that it was somebody and not a – well, occasionally the art students like to have a joke. I suppose I thought... I were hoping it were a big piece of sculpture, or something like that.” Dawson grew silent and regarded his hands again. “It weren’t,” he added.

  “What did you do after you found the body?”

  “Called the headmistress and then I called the police. I knew it was nearly opening time and the kids were going to be on site very shortly.”

  Kate asked what time he’d made those calls, more for form’s sake than because she really wanted to know. That sort of information could be easily checked. So too could his claim that he hadn’t touched the body. “How long have you been a caretaker here, Mister Dawson?”

  Dawson looked up at the ceiling, as if thinking. “Must be coming up to eighteen years, now.”

  “What did you do before you started working here?”

  This time Dawson looked at her. “Army,” was all that he said.

  Kate nodded. Should she push for more details? After a moment, she decided not to – this time. She could see why Anderton had wanted Dawson questioned in more detail but there wasn’t really anything to indicate that he was responsible in any way for these deaths, surely? If the forensic evidence showed otherwise, then they could pull him in for a more thorough examination. Sitting back, she decided to go off on a tangent.

  “Have you ever had a suicide here before, Mister Dawson?” She added hastily “I mean, not counting Joshua Widcombe and Kaya Trent.” She wondered whether he knew that that case had actually turned out to be murder-suicide but then realised that of course he couldn’t – Anderton hadn’t had a chance to make a media statement yet. This new death would mean even more press interest... Kate was almost startled to hear Dawson speak, so caught up had she been in her own thoughts.

  “Never. I’ve never known anything like it, not here.” He was silent for a moment and then said rather heavily, “There were a boy who killed himself, a long time ago now, over ten years ago. But that were in his home, not on the grounds. He’d been ill, like, I think, mentally ill. Schizophrenia, or something.”

  “Can you remember his name?” asked Kate, not really hopeful of a positive answer and sure enough, Dawson shook his head, slowly.

  “Danny – Danny something? Maybe. I can’t remember.”

  “Was Doctor Hindmarsh head teacher here then?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It were her predecessor, old Ainwick. Professor Ainwick.”

  Kate wrote all of this down. If something untoward came up at the post mortem, it might be worth getting in touch with this Professor Ainwick but from the sounds of it, that old suicide was unrelated to this one. Kate straightened up a little, putting away her notebook. She thanked John Dawson for his time.

  “We’ll need to take another statement from you, Mister Dawson, and we may need to speak to you again.” Dawson was nodding, looking grim but unsurprised. Kate, turning to put her notebook away in her bag, was suddenly struck with the memory of a famous murder case – of two school girls horribly killed and of the school caretaker who was responsible for the crime. She zipped up her bag, suddenly shaken, and looked back at Dawson, who was just staring into space. Surely there was no comparison... This was suicide – almost certainly suicide, she told herself. She made herself say goodbye to the man as pleasantly as she could but that odd feeling remained as she made her way out to find Anderton.

  The sunshine had gone completely by now, blotted out by a darkening blanket of cloud. Kate set off on the footpath that led towards the woods. As she got closer, she could see the white tent of the SOCO unit through the trees, the usual hustle and bustle as the technicians did their work. A spot of rain fell on her face as she reached the treeline. She could see Anderton up ahead, still conferring with Doctor Hindmarsh, who was wiping her eyes with a tissue. Kate looked around at the encircling trees, leafy sentinels whose branches rustled and leaves whispered. She had to suppress a shudder. English woodland; for something that could be so beautiful, it could be incredibly sinister as well, Kate thought, hugging her arms around her body. She raised a hand in response to Anderton’s wave as she got closer, steeling herself as she stepped back in amongst the trees.

  Chapter Eight

  “Claire Collins,” was all that Anderton said at first, as he pinned the first of several photographs to the office whiteboards. The team pressed forward a little and there was a murmur from soft-hearted Jane as she saw the picture, the slumped shape of the thin girl with the fall of light brown hair.

  Anderton added two more photographs, of the body once cut down from the noose and laid on the leaf mould of the forest floor, and one of the girl from the college yearbook: this last a cruel contrast. In the yearbook photograph, the girl’s fine-boned face and pale, freckled skin stood out in horrible juxtaposition to the one next to it.

  “Claire Collins,” repeated Anderton. “Another sixth form pupil – student, I suppose I should say – at the Abbeyford School of Art and Drama. Found hanging from a self-tied noose in the woodlands surrounding the college yesterday. On the face of it, it looks like a classic suicide.”

  The unspoken ‘but’ hung in the air. After a moment, Kate said it for them all. “But?”

  Anderton half-smiled. “There’s not really a ‘but’, Kate. It’s just...” He fell silent for a moment, regarding the first picture, frowning. “It’s more of a feeling...” He trailed off again. The team waited patiently and eventually he spoke. “I just hope to God it’s not a suicide cluster.”

  “A what?” asked Theo, beating Kate to it.

  “Look it up,” Anderton said. “But essentially, it’s a form of group hysteria that manifests in multiple suicides and suicide attempts within the same small group of people.”

  “And you think this might be happening here?” Rav asked, sounding fascinated.

  “Rav, I don’t know. Just call it a feeling that – oh, I don’t know. I just don’t think we’ve heard the last of this, as it were.”

  The room was silent. They all regarded the photographs, looking at the horror that had been found in that beautiful setting.

  Anderton seemed to rouse himself. “Now, where to, from here? The PM is today – who’s going to do that?”

  “I will,” Kate said, surprising herself. But she realised she wanted to be the first to know with certainty if there was anything more to this than a suicide, as there had been with Kaya Trent and Joshua Widcombe. She looked at the first photograph, of poor Claire hanging by her neck from the tree branch. Was it possible that someone had done this to her? Would it have been physically possible? She remembered her feeling of unease around John Dawson. Perhaps not; perhaps she was being overly dramatic... But she wanted to be sure.

  “Okay, thanks,” Anderton was saying. “Report back to me when you get back. Theo, Rav, can you check CCTV footage from the campus from last night? I doubt you’ll get anything, but it’s worth a look. Unfortunately, it rained pretty heavily last night, so no doubt the SOCOs have had a job trying to get the forensics. You never know, though. Okay, that’ll do for now. Fliss, Jane, you’ve got your other cases to work on. Anyone got anything to add? No? Right, we’ll reconvene later.”

  As Kate gathered her things together in preparation for her journey to the pathology labs, she heard the sound of a text message arriving on her mobile phone. It was from Tin, suggesting a dinner date for that night. Kate hesitated, wanting to go but not yet sure whether work commitments would enable her to. In the end, she texted him Maybe, would love to but will have to confirm later xx.

  In the car, she thought about her relationship with Tin. Was it really going anywhere? They barely saw one another, so great were the demands of their respective jobs. Perhaps that was why they got on well; they never had the chance to fall out. Kate smiled a little to herself, happy to try and be flippant about it. She thought of her birthday coming up in May and the smil
e fell from her face. Thirty five. That was the age all the newspapers shouted about, the age when your fertility fell off a cliff, when you had to start really trying for a baby if you wanted one.

  Mentally, Kate tried to scoff; she tried to brush those ridiculous headlines aside. But something remained, something that made her dread running into Doctor Telling and her bump. You have no idea whether you’re even fertile, anyway. Trouble was, she did know that – or at least she had been, way back in the past. Kate blinked, memories ambushing her once more. She parked the car and got out, slamming the door and pressing the ‘lock’ button on her key fob with more force than was strictly necessary.

  As it turned out, it was Doctor Gatkiss who was performing the post mortem, for which Kate was grateful. He was a silent worker, only murmuring the odd comment here and there. Kate sat on the chair in the corner of the room, watching and trying not to wince as Claire Collins’ young body was investigated. Doctor Gatkiss was gentle, but still, the things he had to do were brutal.

  Eventually, the last stitch was inserted, the body sponged down and the dark green sheet pulled up over the empty face. Gatkiss turned to Kate. “There’s nothing here to indicate anything other than a classic suicide by hanging.”

  Kate was inexplicably relieved. “Had she taken any drugs, or anything like that?”

  “You’ll have to wait for the toxicology tests to be sure, but I wouldn’t have thought so. There wasn’t any alcohol in the stomach contents.”

  Kate nodded. “Fine, thanks. Anything else I should know about?”

  Doctor Gatkiss looked serious. “Yes, actually. She has several bruises to the inside of her thighs and her genitals show some signs of healed lacerations.”

  “Really?” Kate was startled. “Are you saying she’d been raped?”

  “No, I can’t say that for certain. All I can say is that at some point in the past, she’d had sexual intercourse, quite forceful sexual intercourse. Whether that was consensual or not is impossible to say.”

  “Right,” Kate muttered, thinking. They would have to investigate that. Had Claire had a boyfriend?

  She thanked the pathologist, enquired after Doctor Telling to be told that she was well and said her goodbyes. Driving away, she’d quite forgotten her gloomy thoughts of the journey there. Had Claire been raped? Or did she just have a penchant for energetic sex? Kate thought of the girlish face on the mortuary table, the body that had barely seemed to be belong to an adult woman. Claire had been older than she’d appeared, eighteen years rather than the sixteen that Kate had thought her. Kate drove back to the station, thinking hard.

  As she parked the car she realised how late in the day it was. The car park was fairly empty and the light was draining from the sky. A fine drizzle was falling from the darkening clouds overhead. Kate pulled her coat tighter about herself, shivering as she hurried towards the office.

  Theo was just turning off his computer as she walked in. Rav and Jane had already left but Fliss was still hunched over her keyboard, tapping away.

  “The boss still here?” asked Kate.

  “Yup,” said Theo, pulling on his coat. “Can’t stop – got a hot date.”

  “So what’s new?” asked Kate with a grin, but she gave him a slap on the back as he passed her. Fliss didn’t look up from her computer, intent on her work. Kate hesitated, wondering whether or not to say something, but what was there to say? Keep up the good work. How patronising was that? She threw her jacket onto her chair and made her way to Anderton’s office.

  “So, what’s the medical consensus?” asked Anderton as she sat down in her usual chair opposite his desk.

  Kate told him. “Nothing other than suicide but there’s a possibility that she may have been raped.”

  Anderton’s eyebrows went up. “I see. Well, the interviews with her family and friends might shed some light on that.” He paused for a moment, rubbing his chin. “Might give us a motive, if that’s the case, poor girl.”

  “Mmm.” Kate agreed with him but didn’t know what else she could say.

  Anderton pushed his chair back from the desk. “Well, that’s me done for the day.” He looked at Kate as if considering something. “What about you? Fancy a quick one?”

  “A drink?”

  Anderton guffawed. “Of course, a drink. What do you take me for?” Kate fought not to blush. Why had she said a stupid thing like that? “Come on, I’m buying.”

  They went to the usual pub, The King’s Head, two streets away and known throughout the station as ‘The Coppers’ Arms’. It was not unusual to hear the more seasoned officers refer to it as ‘The Arms’, which always caused some confusion amongst the new recruits. Unusually, there were no other police officers there that evening as Kate and Anderton stepped through the doorway. You could normally be sure of at least one or two people that you knew to drink with.

  “Lemonade?” Anderton asked, fumbling for his wallet.

  “No, I’ll have a glass of red wine, thanks.” Kate knew this would raise his eyebrows, and it did. “I just feel like one, tonight.”

  He made no comment but gave their order. Drinks in hand, they made their way to the back of the pub, in the usual corner table by the side of the fire. One saving grace of the pub was that it had a real wood-burning stove at the back, and Kate was grateful for it this chilly evening.

  They talked about the case for some minutes, although it was more a recap of what they already knew. Anderton told Kate about the press conference he’d held to announce the outcome of the Trent/Widcombe case. “Have you seen the headlines? Bloody painful for poor Kaya’s mother.”

  Kate nodded, wincing a little inside. She knew that case was closed now, and that she needed to leave it behind, but it was hard, knowing the emotional devastation that had been caused. Was it worse to know that your daughter was a murderer or that she’d been so unhappy that she’d killed herself? Of course it would be worse, Kate chided herself. She pulled herself back to the present, realising with faint surprise that their glasses were already almost empty.

  “My round,” she said, standing up. As she was waiting at the bar, a text came through on her phone from Tin. With a guilty start, she realised she’d completely forgotten about their tentative date. She opened her mouth to halt the order for her second glass of wine and then closed it again. Slowly, she tapped out a response, telling Tin that she was working late and couldn’t make it. Sorry, maybe tomorrow xx. Well, I am working, she told herself defensively, knowing that that was pretty much stretching the truth until it broke.

  She sat back down again with their drinks, wondering what she was doing. She’d sat at this pub table with Anderton many times before, so why did this particular time feel different? She realised, with a shock, that she had deliberately sat herself a little closer to him than she had when they first arrived. The first mouthful of her second glass of wine seemed to go straight to her head. Or was it Anderton himself who was making her dizzy? She realised that the latent attraction she’d felt, and thought she’d successfully conquered, was trying its hardest to make itself known again. Don’t drink any more, said one half of her brain – the moral, sensible side. Who cares? said the other half – the reckless, selfish side.

  Anderton himself seemed oblivious, but for some reason, they were talking about relationships, a more intimate topic than they normally covered. Anderton was telling Kate ruefully about the collapse of his relationship with the blonde lawyer – so they had broken up – and was asking about Tin.

  “He’s fine,” said Kate, strangely reluctant to say more.

  “Wedding bells?” Anderton asked, rather archly.

  For some reason, Kate felt cross. “No idea,” she said, shortly.

  “Well, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.” Kate took a moody sip of her drink. “I don’t know why every bloke thinks women are so desperate to get married. What do women get out of marriage? The chance to do all the housework, all the childcare and earn h
alf the money as well. All the statistics show that it’s good for men, not women.”

  “Well, maybe,” Anderton said. “I suppose all I’m saying is – well, don’t end up like me.”

  “Like you?”

  “Yes. Married to the job. It’ll get you in the end.”

  Kate blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t know. It’s just – I got married young, and had kids fairly young, and I just worked every damn day for the whole of their childhood and now it almost feels as if I don’t know them. Or they don’t know me, which is probably more accurate. Judy – that’s my ex-wife – she’d had enough after fifteen years. Probably fair enough. Ran off with her tennis coach in the end.”

  Kate choked back a laugh. “Sorry. It’s not funny.”

  “Oh, I can laugh about it now,” Anderton said, half-smiling. “Just let me be a lesson to you, that’s all.”

  “I’ll take all you can teach me,” Kate said. She meant it to sound wry and funny but as soon as the words were out, she realised how they could be construed. Their eyes met and Kate was suddenly breathless, feeling a leap of the desire that she thought she’d crushed out of herself years ago. In the same moment, she felt the warm pressure of his leg against hers under the table.

  “Kate,” Anderton said, leaning forward. Kate held her breath. Was he going to kiss her?

  “Hi, guys!”

  The moment shattered at the sound of Fliss’s voice. Kate looked up, blinking at her colleague, who was standing by the table with Sergeant Bill Osbourne by her side.

  “Drinks?” said Bill. Anderton was already getting up to shake his hand.

  Kate sat back in her seat, trying to smile. She was furious at Fliss, at Anderton and at herself. What was she playing at? Don’t go there again. You have a bloody boyfriend, for God’s sake. How many more relationships are you going to throw away, Kate? She tipped the last of her wine into her mouth and put the glass back on the table with finality. The number ‘thirty five’ was reverberating around her head. She muttered something about having to head home and said goodbye, noting the look of surprise and – yes, it was disappointment on Anderton’s face. Don’t go there, she told herself again, as she made her way to the door. On the way home, she debated sending a text to Tin saying that she was now free and did he want to meet up, but decided against it. The mood she was in, it was probably safer to go home.