Ann Cleeves - The Sleeping and the Dead

Hannah didn’t answer. She was thinking of Michael, sitting on the shore here at Cranford Water, so bewitched by a bonfire that he couldn’t take his eyes off it.

‘Then Arthur had a tricky moment,’ Porteous said. ‘Theo wanted to confess. Perhaps it was the Brices. Being surrounded by all that religion. Perhaps he kept getting flashbacks of Emily in her cot. He’d never been allowed to admit the truth of the memories. He phoned Arthur, telling him what he intended to do. Very self-righteous. Very dramatic.’

Oh yes, he’d have been that, Hannah thought.

‘At first Alec was sent to sort him out. I don’t think he was ever told the complete story but he knew the reputation of Redwood was at stake and he’d have done pretty well anything to protect that.’

‘Did he have a blue car?’

‘Why?’

‘I saw him. He came looking for Michael here one night.’

‘Poor Alec,’ Porteous said. ‘All those rumours about his nephew and he was just a lonely, middle-aged man who got on better with children than adults. He persuaded the boy to keep quiet, but in the end Theo couldn’t let it go and Alec was sent back.’

‘The weekend of Macbeth ?’

‘Yes. He realized immediately it wouldn’t work and Arthur came up himself. He and Theo met on the Sunday evening after the performance of Macbeth , the day after the party, here on the shore. It was late at night. Theo must have had the dagger with him. The prop from Macbeth . We’ll never know if he intended any harm with it or if he’d kept it as a souvenir. He was a disturbed young man and he’d already tried to kill twice. There was an argument. Arthur says Theo got wild and angry and started to wave the dagger about. They had a scrap and Theo was killed. Hard to believe it was self-defence when the boy was stabbed in the back. And considering how cool and efficient Arthur was in dealing with the death. He weighed down Theo’s body and threw it in the lake. Then he phoned the Brices and said that Theo was in the middle of some sort of crisis and had decided to go back to his father. Of course they believed him. Why wouldn’t they? Theo had been their gift from God, only theirs on loan. Presumably Alec was given a similar story.

‘And that’s how it would have stayed if it hadn’t been for global warming and a drought and a canoeist called Helen Blake, who found the body.’

‘I don’t understand where Melanie comes in.’

‘Melanie was at Redwood too, briefly.’

‘For her anorexia?’

‘No,’ Porteous said. ‘It was history repeating itself. She killed a baby. A little girl called Emma. She was babysitting. The baby wouldn’t stop crying, she got frustrated. She smothered it with a pillow. It was put down as a cot death. She confessed too. To Richard Gillespie. I couldn’t accept the coincidence. Two babies dying. Richard was a public figure like Crispin Randle, but I don’t think he was considering himself when he shipped Mel off to Redwood. He couldn’t put her through a trial. There’d been all the publicity about the killers of the little boy in Liverpool. Even after her death he didn’t want it to come out that she was a murderer. When he was young he’d worked as a solicitor for Randle. Apparently Randle got drunk one day and let slip about Theo and Redwood…’

‘… so Melanie got shipped out there too.’

‘Yes,’ Porteous said. ‘For a price. No wonder the girl was so screwed up.’

‘Why did Arthur kill her?’

‘Melanie was bright,’ Porteous said. ‘She knew what was happening to her. She was nearly fifteen when she killed Emma Leese, not a child like Theo. She was confused and mixed up and she wanted someone to blame. She knew Arthur was working locally. Rosie had talked about her mother’s new friend at Stavely. She tracked him down, phoned him a couple of times at the prison. You can imagine the sort of thing. “You really screwed me up. How could you do that to me?” Wanting sympathy, someone to take her seriously. Arthur got jumpy and went to the Prom to try to talk to her. He knew Rosie worked there, thought it would be somewhere Mel would hang out.

‘Mel might have let it go but she saw the photo of Theo on the local news in the pub on her way to the airport. She recognized him. Redwood was plastered with pictures of the kids who’d stayed there. The coincidence freaked her out. And she couldn’t understand why Arthur didn’t go to the police about the Redwood connection. Later that week the press reports were still talking about the mysterious boy with no past. She phoned him again and said that if he didn’t tell the police Michael had been at Redwood, she would. He must have been frantic but he still thought he could reason with her. He couldn’t get to her at home. She was so disturbed by then that her parents almost had her under house arrest. So he became more devious. He even followed Rosie and Joe home from the Prom one night, hoping they might lead him to Mel. At last he found her in the Rainbow’s End. He persuaded her there was a reasonable explanation for keeping quiet about Theo. If she went back with him he’d tell her all about it. But whatever story he’d dreamed up she wouldn’t accept it. She was hysterical…’

‘And he killed her.’

‘In his cottage.’ Porteous hesitated, seemed to make up his mind to continue. ‘The next night he took her body to the cemetery at Millhaven. He knew you’d been there. You were already a suspect and he wanted to implicate you.’

She sat in silence for a moment wondering how she could have been so foolish, so easily taken in. ‘What about Rosie?’ she asked. ‘She can’t have known anything about all that.’

‘Rosie suspected him.’

‘How could she?’

‘Arthur got to know a nasty little boy inside, thought he might be useful.’

‘Hunter.’ Marty knew, she thought. Or guessed. It was impossible to keep secrets in prison. He’d wanted her to know too.

‘Hunter went to see Frank at the pub and persuaded him it wouldn’t be a good idea to remember the man who’d been looking for Mel. We thought Frank was uncooperative because he didn’t like the police, but it was more than that. Rosie got an accurate description out of him.’

‘Arthur.’

Porteous nodded. ‘Later Frank had second thoughts and told Hunter what he’d done.’

‘And Arthur told Hunter to kill her?’

Porteous didn’t answer directly. ‘Hunter recognized the name. Got greedy.’

‘How did you work it all out?’ In time to save my daughter .

‘Dr Cornish had saved a book from Redwood. It was a record of all the kids she’d worked with, but Arthur’s name was in the staff register at the back. I missed it first time. And his car was seen close to Alec Reeves’s house on the night he was murdered. By then Arthur was panicking, desperate to throw suspicion elsewhere. Like Mel, Alec was starting to ask questions…’

There was a silence. ‘Rosie’s tough,’ Porteous said. ‘Brave. She’ll be OK.’

Perhaps, Hannah thought. But will I? She looked out over the flat water to the hills on the opposite bank. In a few weeks her reckless daughter would be away to university. She’d live on her own and Hannah wouldn’t know where she was or what she was doing. Hannah would retreat to the safety of the prison with its rules and its walls, but Rosie would dance and shimmy through the strange town in the south and there’d be nothing Hannah could do to protect her.

As Peter Porteous filled her glass his hand touched hers. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘She’ll be OK.’

Yes, Hannah thought. Of course we will. Both of us.

Ann Cleeves lives in West Yorkshire with her husband and their two daughters. As a member of the ‘Murder Squad’, she works with other Northern writers to promote crime fiction.