Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

Lightly Karen ran a finger over the watch within its plastic protector. She remembered the procedure, even though she had no idea exactly how to do it. You had to look between the lugs inside the watch with the hands at the six o’clock position. There was some corrosion naturally, and she doubted the hands would even turn.

The watch had a date indicator on it. Karen squinted at it. It would have been extremely helpful to have been able to tell the date on which that Rolex finally stopped. But the figures had worn, certainly too much to be ascertained with the naked eye.

Karen handed the watch to Phil Cooper and gave instructions to return to shore. On the way she made a phone call on her mobile. Bill Talbot answered swiftly, his tones as clipped and businesslike as ever. Retirement really did not seem to have changed him very much.

“We’ve found a watch on the sunken U-boat, a gold Rolex,” she began without preamble. “You don’t happen to know if Clara Marshall had one, do you?”

The reply came fast. That was Bill Talbot. Karen could hear the excitement in his voice, too. Talbot sensed a breakthrough at last. And Talbot wanted this one desperately, had done for nearly thirty years.

“She did. It was a present from her father. As you know we found almost all of her jewelry, left behind in the house. We asked her father if he could see anything missing, anything distinctive that she might have with her. He told us about this Rolex watch he’d given her. Apparently she never went anywhere without it.”

This was exactly what Karen had wanted to hear, and yet there was an unreality about the whole proceedings. And it was more than that. It was as if Clara Marshall were crying out from the deep, crying out to be heard, to achieve justice at last.

Back at Torquay Police Station Karen immediately picked up the phone in her office to dial Scotland again. This time she completed the call. The man she was trying to reach was Clara Marshall’s father.

She did not even consider sending the Scottish police around to his home, despite the fact that police officers did not normally deliver the kind of news Karen had for Sean MacDonald by telephone. But then the Clara Marshall scenario was rather different from usual.

After all these years Karen knew that MacDonald no longer harboured even the most remote hope that his only daughter was still alive. Karen also knew that the only hope he clung to anymore was for confirmation of her death and perhaps even the possibility of properly burying her remains. Other than that, like her, like Bill Talbot, like so many frustrated men and women, Sean MacDonald just wanted her killer brought to justice.

Karen had got to know him well over the years. Driven by a sense of guilt he could never quite conquer, Sean MacDonald, who had been estranged from his daughter at the time of her disappearance, had visited Torquay twice a year every year for twenty-seven years — once to be there for the anniversary of when she had last been seen at the end of June and once for her birthday. Karen reckoned the visits were a sort of pilgrimage for him, and MacDonald, who never wore his broken heart on his sleeve but instead behaved with dignity and restraint at all times, was much liked and had become accepted in the force. She knew there had been real anger within him, a cold fury which she had actually once witnessed firsthand as a child, albeit from a safe distance, but that this had been tempered over the years by a kind of grim acceptance. Everybody who knew about the case and about him, which was most of them, still treated the now-old man as a very special visitor. Bill Talbot had nurtured him, spent time with him whenever he could. Karen had inherited Mac from her former boss and had continued the relationship. There really had seemed to be little alternative. And indeed, she had come to actively enjoy the company of the elderly Scotsman, particularly when she discovered that he shared her love of antiques and liked nothing better than to lose days hunting through junk shops looking for lost treasures. Karen had even once travelled to Edinburgh to visit one of the city’s antique fairs with Mac. One way and another she was absolutely sure that Clara Marshall’s father would rather hear what news there was from her than from strangers.

She leaned back in her chair and stretched her long legs, waiting for a reply. Eventually she heard Sean MacDonald’s crisply modulated highland tones, but realized at once that she was just listening to an answerphone.

She waited for the bleep, all the while wondering what kind of message she should leave. But suddenly there was a click and the real Sean MacDonald came on the line.

“It’s Karen,” she announced.

“Karen. How are ye, lass?”

“I’m fine, Mac. You?”

“Och, I’m well enough.”

There was a pause. Karen hesitated. It had been reported in the newspapers and on the news that morning that a body had been found off Berry Head and there had already been considerable speculation over the possible identity of the corpse. The Marshall case had always been big media business. But Mac didn’t sound as if he knew anything. She simply felt that he was waiting for her to go on, to tell him whatever it was she had called to tell him, because fond as she was of the Scotsman, it had been some time since they had spoken, and she knew he had sensed that she was not calling him merely to exchange niceties about his well-being.

“You haven’t seen today’s papers then...” she began tentatively.

“No, I’ve been on a fishing trip. Trying to get away from all that...” Mac’s voice trailed off. She could feel his suspense.

“We’ve found some human remains at sea off Berry Head—” she went on.

Mac interrupted her. He was obviously unable to contain himself.

“Is it her?” he blurted out. “Or one of the children? Can it be, after all this time?”

Karen’s voice was gentle when she spoke again.

“It’s impossible to be sure yet,” she said. “There isn’t a lot to go on—”

Karen had chosen her words carefully, but Sean MacDonald was an intelligent man. He knew what she was getting at well enough. He knew there would be damn-all left of someone thrown into the sea nearly thirty years ago. Indeed, the skeleton they had found had, due to having been wrapped up in the way that it was and protected by its unique resting place, been considerably more intact than might reasonably have been expected. Except for its missing head, of course.

As if reading her mind Sean MacDonald cut in.

“Teeth,” he said. “What about dental records? What sort of state are the teeth in?”

“Actually we have yet to find any teeth. The head was the least intact part of the skeleton.”

Well, it was the truth, she was just being a little economical with it. She didn’t feel the necessity to share with Mac at that instant the brutal details, to tell him that the head had disappeared into the depths of the ocean and the bellies of the marine life to which it was home.

“DNA?” MacDonald asked then. Everybody knew about DNA, but they usually didn’t realize that even DNA could not always deliver.

She explained the mitochondrial DNA scenario to him. “No chance of Clara’s maternal grandmother being alive, I don’t suppose?” she ventured.

“She’d be well over a hundred if she were,” replied Mac flatly. “And Clara’s mother was an only child just like Clara. I’m afraid you’re dead right, Karen, we’ve got no one in the female line to make a comparison with.”

“There is something, though,” said Karen. “Our divers found a Rolex watch out at the site. I understand that you gave—”

“Yes,” Mac interrupted straight away. “I gave Clara a gold Rolex for her twenty-first birthday present. She always wore it. Can you tell if it’s hers?”