John Harvey - Off Minor

Lorraine had been astonished, briefly elated and now was mooching about the kitchen, picking up jars and cartons and putting them back down. Whatever she was feeling, she didn’t understand it. No, she did. The man who’d been arrested had been charged with both crimes. Lorraine didn’t want to remember the details she’d read about Gloria Summers’s body when it had been found, but there was no way she could prevent herself.

The reporter had gone off to file his story, no doubt intent upon getting an exclusive placed in the nationals before Wapping woke up to what was going on. Lorraine had given him a couple of quotes, not as much as he would have liked, but promised that Michael and herself would talk to him again later on. Before that, she would have to wake Michael and tell him the news.

She found the number of the police station and asked for Lynn Kellogg.

“Hello,” the voice said, “DC Kellogg speaking.”

“I thought you were going to let us know,” Lorraine said. “Keep us informed.”

Lynn was quiet; she should have gone round there, never mind what Skelton had said; she should have gone round there first.

“You’ve arrested somebody, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but …”

“It’s the man that killed that other girl, isn’t it?”

“We don’t know that.”

“But that’s what you think?”

“It’s a possibility, yes.”

“Then what does that mean for Emily? What does that mean?”

Lynn’s answer was lost in the fumbled slamming of the receiver. Lorraine’s head smacked forward against the wall and from nowhere great sobs were shaking her as if she were in the grip of a fever. When Michael touched her she jumped, not having heard him on the stairs. “It’s okay,” he said, as she gasped for air against his chest. “Come on, it’s all right.”

“They’ve found her, haven’t they?” he said, as Lorraine finally pushed herself away.

She shook her head, easing wet hair from her mouth and eyes. “They’ve got the man they think killed the other little girl.”

“Oh, God!” breathed Michael. “And they think he killed Emily, too.”

Divine had drawn a blank at the household tip; forensic were still working on the floorboards, the fibers found in the car. Preliminary examination of the tools from Shepperd’s workshop promised nothing, but they were trying again. The solicitor had boned up on his crib to PACE and forced a break at the end of the first two hours.

“Sometimes,” Stephen Shepperd had said, “I take the camera with me when I run. I take pictures, what’s wrong with that?”

“All of little girls?” Resnick had asked.

“They waved at me,” Shepperd said. “They knew who I was. ‘Stephen, take our picture,’ they shouted out. They were all in Joan’s class. There’s nothing wrong in that.”

Joan Shepperd had called ahead to the health center, the tablets that Dr. Hazid had prescribed for her, oh, some time ago now. She would like to pick up a repeat prescription if she could. Some kind of tranquilizer. Dia-, Dia-, Diazepam, yes, that was it. The receptionist checked her name and address: Joan assured her she would be in to collect the prescription before they closed.

It was almost four in the afternoon when Lynn Kellogg knocked on the interview-room door; one look at her face was enough to tell Resnick that something had happened.

“Forensic just rang through, sir,” she said in the corridor. “Nothing from the flooring, but they have got a partial make on the fibers. They’re the same as the ones found with Gloria Summers’s body.”

“That’s positive?”

“You know what it’s like, sir, cagey. Probably fight shy of taking it to court till they’ve done more tests. But it sounds pretty certain.”

“The super know?”

Lynn shook her head.

“Tell him. Tell him I’m going to lean on Shepperd for a confession.”

“Good luck, sir.”

For the first time in a long while, Resnick smiled.

Lorraine and Michael Morrison sat on either side of the table, holding hands. Aside from an ambulance siren heading for the hospital, the only sound was that of children on the pavement, playing.

Shepperd looked significantly older each time the interview was resumed, the tapes timed and set in motion. His abrasive outburst at Resnick on the previous day had been the last time he had seemed to be in any kind of control. Now and then there were still occasional flashes when his voice was raised, as if a particular insinuation had offended him; the rest of the time he answered sullenly, head bowed, declining to look his questioners in the eye.

“How did you get her to come with you?” Resnick asked. “Did you say her teacher was there? Is that what you said?”

Shepperd moved his head slightly; his hands were back between his legs, wrists between his knees.

“Mrs. Shepperd asked me to come and get you, invite you back for tea, is that the way it was?”

In Resnick’s imagination he could see the girl hesitating, uncertain, looking round for her grandmother. Shepperd saying, “Don’t worry about your nan, I’ll come back for her in a minute.” Or, “Your gran is it you’re looking for? That’s where she is. Round our house now.”

Stephen Shepperd glanced up, head angled towards Millington, the sergeant staring back at him with scorn, the way his wife had looked at him earlier. Was that only this morning? It didn’t seem possible it could still be the same day.

“What was the bribe, Stephen? Cream cakes? Ice cream? Don’t tell me it was anything as banal as sweets.”

“Look …”

“Yes?”

“None of this, what you’re saying, none of it ever happened.”

“Stephen,” Resnick said, “I don’t believe there’s anyone in this room who thinks that’s the truth.”

Shepperd’s hands passed across his face. He turned towards his solicitor and his solicitor turned his head away. A man caught out of his depth, back in the Potteries he would be sitting in a seminar on “Bennett and a Sense of Place,” looking forward with anticipation to that evening’s screening of The Card , that wonderful moment at the end when Alec Guinness sees through Glynis Johns’s airs and graces and rushes off to the sincere and simple charms of Petula Clark.

“Of course,” Resnick said, “it’s possible you could have taken her somewhere else first, especially if you used the car, but sooner or later you would have had to have got her into the house. Into the front room. On to the carpet. On to the rug.”

“No. You can’t, you can’t …”

“Prove anything? Stephen, the report from the police lab is on the fax machine right now.”

Shepperd’s head came up slowly, slowly until, for the first time in a long while, he was looking directly into Resnick’s face.

“It wasn’t only photographs we took this morning, you know. There were other things: from the cellar, for instance; from the car.”

“The car?”

“The boot of the car.”

At night, at night it would have had to have been, carrying Gloria’s body, wrapped inside that tartan rug and laying her in the already open boot.

“You’d done a pretty thorough job of cleaning it out, vacuum, I don’t doubt. Even so a few fibers had worked their way into the well of the spare tire.”

Oh, he had Shepperd’s attention now, hanging on his every word.

“Fibers from the rug, Stephen, the tartan rug, red and green.”

“That’s right. That’s right. I thought I’d said. That was how I took it to the dump. In the boot.”

“Eventually, Stephen, I’m quite sure that you did.”

“Eventually? I don’t understand.”

“When we found Gloria’s body, Stephen, in the cold of that railway siding, nestled up in bin liners and plastic, alone there with the rats, we found some other things. Fibers, for instance, red and green, the kind that come from a rug.”