Ann Cleeves - The Sleeping and the Dead

‘Just a tonic,’ he said.

She’d been married, it seemed, but it hadn’t worked out. He had the impression that she’d got rid of a husband who hadn’t lived up to her expectations, re-assumed her maiden name, and carried on as if he’d never existed. There had never been any children but she’d done well financially out of the divorce. All this he gathered in the first few minutes. They sat, without ceremony at the kitchen table and he was reminded of his conversation with Stella Randle. Another kitchen. Two women of a certain age, but remarkably different.

‘What’s all this about, Inspector?’ Her hair was rinsed auburn and cut short. Her make-up was still intact. Despite the difference in their ages, despite the fact that she wasn’t at all the sort of woman he usually went for, he found himself attracted to her.

‘Theo Randle.’

‘Oh? Usually when the police come to see me it’s because one of the fathers has been suspected of abuse. Or the mums have been shifting stolen property on our premises. Or some little vandal has set fire to the place again.’

‘It is about a fire I want to talk to you.’

‘Is it true that the body you found in Cranford Water was Theo?’

‘Yes. He’d changed his name before he died but it was Theo.’

‘Poor boy.’ She went to the freezer to fetch ice for their drinks. ‘You’d have thought he started out with every advantage. Compared with the children I work with now. But he didn’t. He didn’t stand a chance of a normal life.’

‘Why?’

‘Before I arrived at Snowberry he’d been left almost to his own devices. Crispin went to pieces after Maria died. Kept up a show for the constituents but he was hitting the bottle even then. Theo was minded by a series of women whose main job was to keep the house clean. He got whatever he wanted so long as he left them in peace. And it was much the same when Crispin was there. I suppose things were better when he started school but it was a snotty little prep place and I think it must have been pretty bleak. Theo must have been well screwed up even before Crispin married Stella.’

‘Did he resent his stepmother?’

‘No. Quite the opposite. He worshipped her. She took time to listen to him, read him stories, played with him. She wasn’t much more than a girl herself – a bit giggly and silly – but she made a real effort to get on with him. I met her first when she was pregnant. We were about the same age but she made me feel about a hundred and one. She treated the whole thing as a game. As if having a baby was all about parties and presents. She’d been totally sheltered. Mummy and Daddy were friends of Crispin’s. She’d done boarding school, a year’s finishing in Switzerland. The job as Crispin’s secretary was to give her something to do with her time before marriage and of course she didn’t have to look very far for a husband. It was hardly surprising that she went to pieces when Emily was born. Her depression was a nightmare for everyone at Snowberry but especially Theo. He thought he’d found someone who cared about him. Then suddenly she didn’t care about anyone. She couldn’t. The doctors Crispin got in didn’t help. They just pumped her full of drugs. I tried to spend as much time as I could with Theo, but I couldn’t replace her and I was pretty busy with Emily.’

‘Did you keep in touch with him when he went away to school?’

‘I didn’t keep in touch with any of them. Crispin made it quite clear my role in the family was over when Emily died. The day after the fire he gave me a month’s wages in lieu of notice and he sent me away.’

‘Tell me about the fire.’

She swirled the remaining gin in her glass. ‘I’d been out. It didn’t happen often. Snowberry was miles from anywhere. The only entertainment was the pub and those days a woman didn’t go out drinking on her own. One of the lads on the estate asked me to go to the pictures in town. He had a car. That was the only reason I went and I made sure I wasn’t late back. The nursery was at the back of the house and I couldn’t see the fire from the front. The first thing I did was check on Emily but I couldn’t get near her room. You wouldn’t believe the heat and the smoke. Sometimes I wake up at night and I can still taste it. Theo was asleep but I managed to get him out. Crispin and Stella were still up. They’d both been drinking and they hadn’t noticed a thing.’

‘Was anyone else there?’

‘Not in the house itself. There was a couple who looked after the place, but they lived in a cottage at the end of the drive. They didn’t know anything until the fire engines woke them up.’

‘Are you sure it was an accident?’

‘You think the fire’s related to Theo’s murder?’

He shrugged. ‘I hope I’ve got an open mind.’

‘Stella wouldn’t hurt a fly, even in her maddest moments. Crispin had a fearsome temper. I can imagine him lashing out at Stella, but he loved the baby. And even if the fire was his fault, why kill Theo after all that time?’

And what, Porteus thought, could any of this have to do with Melanie Gillespie?

Porteous had made an appointment to see Melanie’s psychiatrist. Walking from the car park to the day hospital, all glass and concrete like the superstore next door, he tried to walk in her footsteps, see it through her eyes. On the step by the entrance, a young couple stared blankly into space, smoking cheap smuggled cigarettes. In the waiting-room a middle-aged man with wild hair paced backwards and forwards talking to himself about God. Sitting on one of the orange plastic chairs in the corridor a plump woman in a neat, grey raincoat sobbed discreetly into a handkerchief. What would Melanie have made of them? Would she have considered herself different and sat apart? Would she have visited the place alone, her parents too busy to be there? He found it hard to imagine Melanie here at all. He thought Richard Gillespie would have arranged somewhere private, an exclusive clinic where discretion would be guaranteed, the sort of health farm where customers were force fed instead of starved.

The receptionist on the main desk gave him a brief smile of recognition, but when he showed her his warrant card she shook her head. A sort of apology for mistaking him for one of the patients. The waiting-room was unusually busy. The hospital tried to see patients on time. If they were kept hanging around some lost their nerve and walked out. Others turned nasty. Porteous had a sudden qualm of conscience about taking up the doctor’s time.

‘Mr Porteous, the doctor will see you now.’

They watched him, aware he was jumping the queue, but too apathetic or too cowed to comment. The nurse started walking with him.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I know the way.’

He followed the corridor with its jolly posters promoting healthy eating and adverts for self-help groups, until he came to the door. He stopped outside, feeling for a moment the old anxiety, the breaker of rules outside the head teacher’s study, then he knocked lightly and went in.

Collier was a red-headed Scot with freckles and blue eyes. He ran marathons and looked horribly fit.

‘Peter. You’re looking very well.’

Despite himself he felt pleased. Collier had always been honest. If he looked lousy he’d have said so. This meant he must be doing OK.

‘I’m not here for me. Didn’t they say?’

‘Yeah. There’s a note somewhere.’ He scrabbled through a pile of scrap paper. Porteous would have loved the opportunity to go through the desk, to reduce it to a series of neat piles. ‘And I had a phone call,’ the psychiatrist continued. ‘From Mr Gillespie.’ He lay back in his chair. ‘What you might call a warning shot across my bows.’