Priscilla Masters: Frozen Charlotte

Sergeant Talith began the day with a phone call to Detective Inspector Alex Randall. The phone rang and rang in his house until finally it was picked up and Talith heard his inspector’s voice. ‘Sorry to ring so early, sir.’

‘That’s all right.’

But Talith had the feeling it was not all right. Something was wrong. He listened out for background noise and heard none. No wife asking him what was going on, no children, no radio, no television. All was eerily quiet in the Randall household.

He outlined the drama of last night and Alex listened silently until his sergeant had finished, then advised him. ‘You’d better get a warrant to search her house. Presuming that’s where she found the infant’s body.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I wonder if there’s anything else there. And Talith.’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Whatever Mrs Sedgewick says her husband is going to have to know all this as well as the rest of the family. This is bound to get out and make headlines. Better give the house a ring and forewarn him.’

‘She says her husband’s abroad on business, sir.’

‘Well – maybe he is. Best find out before you break in, though I presume Mrs Sedgewick has a key to her own house so you won’t need to batter the door down.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Keep me informed, Talith. Let me know if there are any developments and I’ll speak to Martha in the morning and interview Mrs Sedgewick myself.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Talith put the phone down and wondered. There was usually some camaraderie between officers – Christmas parties, social occasions. He knew most of his colleagues’ spouses, even a few of their children. But Alex Randall? He was married. He mentioned a wife sometimes, in a vague sort of way. But he’d never met her; neither had anybody else from the Monkmoor station. There were no invitations to barbecues or family parties. No one he knew had ever been to Inspector Randall’s home and he never talked about children, so presumably there were none.

Strange.

Sam was full of football talk as she prepared the breakfast and though Martha was happy to hear him chatting away she wished that for just ten minutes a day Sam would talk about something else. Instead of that he was always either on the phone, talking to his old friends about Life in The Club, or sitting in the kitchen, telling her about people she did not know or incidents she did not understand, at least, not with an insider’s understanding. She realized with dismay that the inevitable had happened. He had grown away from her, into another world and she felt a pang as she watched him. Had it been the wrong decision to allow him to move to Liverpool? But, she argued, he had wanted it so very much. She and Martin had decided that they didn’t want to lose their children to boarding school, but surely this was different? Had he not taken up the chance to attend the Liverpool Football Academy it would have passed him by – and with that the chance at least to become a professional player. She shouldn’t be a selfish mother, keeping her son at her side and deny him such an opportunity – but oh, this was hard. She watched his eager, freckled face as he talked on the phone to some pal or other. ‘Yeah but did you see the tackle in the second half?’

There was talking on the other end and Sam interrupted hotly. ‘It was a foul. Definitely.’

She resisted the temptation to ruffle his spiky red hair which appeared to be getting redder by the day. He could thank his mother for that, she thought, touching her own copper curls with regret. All her life she had wanted black hair. The blacker the better. Raven locks. Silky curls. She dreamed about having black hair.

She sighed. It wasn’t going to happen even if she could have persuaded Vernon Grubb, her hairdresser, to conspire with her.

Back to Sam. She had known one or two widows who had needed to keep a hold over their sons as some sort of perverted substitute for their dead husbands, but it was not her way. She boiled the kettle to brew a cafetière, surreptitiously watching him with a smile on her face. His top incisors still crossed. He still had his freckles and the angry-looking hair which he complained acted as a beacon on the football pitch. Not only because of the bright colour but because it stuck up all over the place in spite of the gel which he plastered on it. He still had the same jerky way of talking as he hung up the phone and proceeded to try and educate her in the finer points of the game and for the n th time explain the offside rules and the point of the intense training. ‘See, Mum, you just have to do weights and things to get your strength up and keep your tendons supple or you get injured and that’s bad news.’

She turned around. ‘Is it a fault of the training then that you have this problem?’

‘Well, yes and no,’ Sam said seriously. ‘I kind of meant to kick one way and hadn’t quite decided how to play the ball. My mind went one way and my knee the other. See?’

‘Ye-es.’

‘Then we have to so some really weird exercises, stretching and things, a bit like ballet and they’re supposed to help too.’

She took the box of eggs out of the fridge and wondered how long it would be before Sukey and Agnetha appeared. Her son was hungry.

‘How long are you going to wait for, Mum?’

‘Have a bowl of cereal to start,’ she said. ‘I thought it’d be nice if we had breakfast all together this morning. It’s not often we can do this, Sam.’

Her son grunted and helped himself to some Shredded Wheat, still keeping up the running sports commentary. ‘Half the trouble is, Mum, that if you miss a ball, a really important ball, people don’t forgive you. They keep on and on about it and reputation’s important. This is a very important time for me. Michael Owen was not much older than me when he played in the World Cup. The clubs are starting to pounce on guys my age.’ He didn’t even realize that she was only listening with half an ear. ‘Paul Driscoll – well – he’s been transferred to Stoke. He’ll be playing full games next season. Fantastic.’ She noticed that his eyes were shining and his crooked grin was stretched wide as he polished off the bowl of cereal. What she failed to notice was the surreptitious glance he aimed in her direction.

Sukey appeared just before ten o’clock, yawning and pushing her white-blonde hair out of her eyes. ‘Morning, Mum. Morning, Sam.’ To Martha’s relief she looked relatively normal.

‘Did you have a nice time last night?’ Though she’d tried to keep the edge out of her voice Martha could hear the censorious tone all too clearly.

Sukey gave a deep sigh. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘It was all right.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

Sukey gave her a smile, turned to the fridge, poured out some apple juice and took a deep swig. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I find the whole thing a bit boring. I mean you can’t talk or anything. The music’s too loud.’

‘You’re very young to have reached this cynical point,’ Martha said, deciding that her decision to say nothing about alcohol had been the right one. Sukey wouldn’t be the first or last person to drink too much because she had, in fact, found the evening unsatisfactory. She’d done the same herself, particularly in the early months just after Martin had died when social occasions had been really tough, friends awkward, not knowing what to say and she’d hated being introduced as a ‘widow’. She hated the word.

‘I know I’m cynical, Mum.’ Sukey gave another deep sigh, took a second swig out of her glass and Martha sensed her daughter wanted to talk.

She waited.

‘What was it like when you met Dad?’

‘It was at a party – at someone’s house.’ Martha smiled to herself. ‘The music was really loud. Blasted our eardrums out. We spent a few minutes screaming at each other, unable to make out a single word then we went outside, although it was pouring with rain. We just found an old brolly in the hall and stood under it. We talked and talked and talked.’