Mark Pearson - Death Row

‘I know.’

Delaney looked up at her. ‘No, you don’t,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He slept with her.’

‘Who?’

‘With my wife, Kate. He told me he’d slept with Sinead.’

‘Oh my God.’ Kate sat back, thoughts suddenly swirling though her mind as she remembered guiltily.

She shouldn’t do it, but, as she sat at her friend’s computer terminal she couldn’t help herself. She typed in the access code that Jane Harrington had, under duress, given her, and typed in DELANEY to pull up his hospital records. She knew enough not to trust anything the staff at the hospital had told her. She wasn’t a relative. In truth, she didn’t even know what she was. Girlfriend didn’t sound at all right. Partner was a bit formal for what they had. Mother of his child, she decided, that was what she was, and that gave her rights.

The first hit came up with Siobhan Delaney.

Not the right to look at confidential medical records, maybe, but the man she loved was recovering from an operation and she wanted to know how bad the damage was. She justified it to herself: she had every right.

Not the right to read his ex-wife’s records, mind, she said to herself again, arguing against what she knew she was going to do. Kate found herself unable to click the screen away and carried on reading it instead. That night had defined Delaney, after all, for the last four years. It had certainly defined their relationship, if such it was. And so, moral qualms delayed if not avoided, Kate read the report.

Everything was much as she knew it to be. His pregnant wife, suffering heavy blood loss, was rushed into theatre. They had performed an emergency C-section. The baby, and subsequently the mother, had both died. The procedures seemed in order, everything apart from the outcome was in order.

Apart from one thing.

Kate read the document again and wished she never had.

Days later, as she held Jack Delaney’s hand and looked down at the gravestones of his wife and son, she realised that she would never tell Jack the terrible truth that she had learned about the boy. That when the baby had been born it had needed blood; the surgical team had checked automatically but Jack Delaney was not a match.

He wasn’t a match because he hadn’t been the father.

*

Kate blinked her eyes, realising that Jack was still talking to her. ‘He told me that the baby she was carrying when she died wasn’t mine, Kate. He told me it was his.’

Kate could feel a flush rising from her neck, burning her cheeks, felt Jack’s stare upon her as the realisation struck him.

‘You knew this, didn’t you?’ he asked, taken aback.

‘Not all of it. I knew about the baby …’

‘How?’

‘When you were shot, Jack. I looked at your records.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

She almost couldn’t bear to look at the disappointment in his eyes. ‘I shouldn’t have known, Jack. I’m sorry. Would it have helped you if I had told you?’

‘I don’t know.’ He shook his head as though it were an impossible question to answer. ‘It might have.’

‘I thought you’d been through enough.’

Delaney looked at her. ‘We shouldn’t have secrets between us, Kate.’

‘It wasn’t my secret, was it, though? It was your wife’s.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I’m sorry, truly I am. I didn’t know what was for the best. But what about you? I sometimes get the feeling there’s things you are not telling me.’

Delaney looked away and sighed. Then he shook his head and immediately regretted it. ‘No. You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.’ He rubbed his bruised hand. ‘I went to punch his face, just once … but I didn’t. I smashed his picture instead of his face, you know. Not so long ago and I would have hurt him, Kate, really hurt him. But I didn’t … and that’s down to you.’

‘No, it’s not.’

‘Yeah, it is,’ he said emphatically. ‘And you and I both know it.’

Kate took his hand and cleaned the crusted blood gently with a wet tissue, then kissed his bruised knuckles tenderly. ‘So who did beat Roger up?’

‘I don’t know, Kate.’ He shrugged. ‘With all that’s going on right now, there’s not a lot I do know.’ Delaney looked up at her, a determined look in his eye. ‘But I reckon it’s way past time we started finding out.’

*

‘Please, if anybody knows anything about where our boy is. Please, I am begging for you to come forward.’

Archie Woods’s mother’s eyes filled with tears. Alongside her, behind the narrow news conference table, her husband shifted uncomfortably. His hand was gripping his wife’s hand tightly, but his eyes were cast down, his face unreadable.

‘Do you want to turn that down, please?’ Bennett asked the serving guy behind the counter, who responded with a casual nod before muting the sound on the small television mounted on the wall behind the curved Formica counter.

Bennett was sitting on a tall red-vinyl-topped stool, drinking a large espresso in a small Italian café right in the heart of Soho. The coffee was strong enough to kick-start a dead elephant but Bennett didn’t even grimace as he took another sip. The café itself was pretty much as it had been in the 1950s when it first opened. Soho was in a constant state of flux. As fashions and social mores changed so did the architecture of the place, both literally and figuratively. But some places weren’t affected: they didn’t seem to age and custom didn’t stale their infinite capacity for inertia year after year. The coffee bar that Bennett was sitting in, The French House not far around the corner on Dean Street, The Coach and Horses. Bennett approved of that. He didn’t like change.

He finished his coffee and looked up and smiled as the person he was waiting to meet walked into the small café.

My God, she was beautiful, he thought. Young, deadly and beautiful. Just like a black-widow spider.

*

The governor of Bayfield prison stood up as Delaney and Detective Inspector Duncton walked into his office.

‘Can I get you some tea, coffee?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Have there been any specific developments apart from what we have seen on the news?’

‘You know as much as we do, governor.’

‘The good news is that Garnier has agreed to see you.’

‘Big of him!’ said Duncton.

The governor shook his head apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, detective — he’s only agreed to talk to Inspector Delaney.’

‘That’s outrageous.’

The governor held his hands out. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

‘You are aware that yesterday we found the body of a child he murdered fifteen years ago and kept on ice as a souvenir?’

‘I do know, yes. But the point is, inspector, that he has already confessed to those murders, been tried and sentenced. Finding the body now makes no difference. We can’t charge him again, can we?’

‘He had an accomplice,’ said Duncton. ‘Somebody who knew where the body was. We know that now and he hasn’t been charged, has he?’

‘Not yet,’ said Delaney pointedly.

‘He’s playing us for fools.’

‘Why don’t you sit down, Robert? Have a cup of tea. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack.’

Duncton was certainly turning an unhealthy shade of red. He sat down and loosened his collar. ‘I’ll be waiting here,’ he snapped at Delaney.

Delaney nodded and turned to the governor. ‘You’ve been through the records and are absolutely sure that the only visitor he has ever had was Maureen Gallagher?’

‘Absolutely positive.’

‘What about mail?’

‘He has never received any mail. He has no living relatives, as far as we know.’