Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

“Two. Find out where Marshall is, or Ricky Maxwell, as I believe he calls himself nowadays. I want to be sure that when the moment comes we can get to him right away.”

“Three. Make sure Torquay Hospital have arranged for the skeleton to be dispatched to that lab in London where they establish the isotopes of bones. I’m not going to wait for the results before picking up Marshall and hopefully charging him, but it would be good to know for certain more or less how long those remains have been in the water well before we go to court.”

“And four. This investigation is top priority again. Get the team sifting through this lot.” Karen gestured at a dozen or so cardboard boxes piled against the far wall of her office, records of the initial investigation that had been brought out of storage the previous day. The case had never been formally closed, as indeed no unsolved murder case in Great Britain ever is, and virtually each year had added at least some new information, though none of it, so far, ever of much use.

“Tell the guys they’re looking for anything, anything at all that may have been overlooked before and could give us a new lead,” Karen continued. “There might be something that is relevant now, because we’ve found that skeleton, that wasn’t before. And when they’ve finished with this lot there’s plenty more paperwork we haven’t dug out yet, and then there’s bits and bobs on computer, too, that have been added more recently.”

“Consider it done, boss.”

Karen could see that the sergeant was really buzzing. They all were. This was the big one for them. They all wanted to get Marshall so much.

She followed Cooper as he hurried out of her office — he on the way to the incident room, she on the way to the coffee machine.

Back in her office clutching her paper cup of something that certainly had the colour of coffee even if maybe not the flavour, Karen allowed herself to reflect on her own involvement all those years ago. She had been little more than a child when it had all happened. What could she have known really? There were things, though, things that had bugged her for nearly thirty years.

She cast her mind back, trying to sort out her jumbled thoughts.

It was about a month before Clara Marshall disappeared that Karen was sent home from school early because of a power cut. At about 2.30 in the afternoon she had arrived at Laurel House to find the front door locked, which was unusual in mid-afternoon. Puzzled, Karen had rung the doorbell. And she’d had to do so twice more before her mother had finally opened it.

Margaret Meadows had been wearing one of the flimsy floral dressing gowns she specialized in, and nothing else, her daughter had thought. Not even underwear. She looked on edge, and glanced quickly over her shoulder at least twice as she let Karen in.

“You’re ever so early, dear, I wasn’t expecting you yet,” she muttered nervously.

Karen explained what had happened at school, all the while studying her mother curiously. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t work out what. Her mother picked up on it, and presumably felt she needed to explain her attire.

“I–I was about to have a bath, dear,” she said, with a hesitant, slightly apologetic smile.

Karen followed her into the hall, without further comment. She was, however, watchful, just as always. She had never known her mother to take a bath in the middle of the afternoon. Margaret Meadows had a routine, whether she was drinking or not. Once she finally got out of bed, which was usually around mid-morning and sometimes not until midday, she always bathed before putting on her make-up. Karen had never yet known her to face the day ahead without going through that routine.

She was still studying her mother with interest when Richard Marshall came bounding down the stairs, white shirt undone, his jacket, a dark-coloured blazer of some sort, with shiny gold buttons, slung casually over one shoulder, his shock of dark curly hair tousled.

“I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble with that tap, Margaret,” he said obliquely.

“Oh. Uh. Thank you, Richard.”

Karen turned to face her mother. Margaret Meadows had blushed crimson. She bowed her head slightly as if trying to hide her face behind the blonde veil of her hair. Then she looked up and put on a bright smile which was not reflected in her eyes.

“Richard’s been fixing that dripping tap in the bathroom, dear,” she told her daughter, obviously feeling another explanation was called for. “Wasn’t that nice of him?”

Karen may have had to grow up beyond her years, but she still had the directness and simplicity of thought which goes with youth.

“We didn’t have a dripping tap in the bathroom,” she said flatly.

“Of course we did, darling.” This time Margaret Meadows’ smile was indulgent. “You just haven’t noticed. Other things on your mind, I expect.”

Margaret had then turned towards Richard again. “Oh, these young girls,” she said.

It had been Karen’s turn to blush then. She could cheerfully have slapped her mother. Did the woman think she was stupid or something? Didn’t she realize Karen was pretty damned sure she knew exactly what was going on? Why was she trying to make Karen look like a fool?

Richard Marshall pulled on his jacket. He was smirking too, or so it seemed to Karen. Although he had at least had the decency to attempt to fabricate some sort of reason for having been upstairs with her mother, his attitude was that of a man who simply didn’t give a damn.

He hadn’t even bothered to comb his hair, after all, or to finish dressing properly. He looked thoroughly pleased with himself, and he actually reached forward and ruffled Karen’s hair.

“Well, if you can’t enjoy yourself at her age, when can you?” he asked of no one in particular, while beaming at her in a horribly patronizing fashion.

Karen had felt her blush deepening which seriously annoyed her. She remembered how even then his demeanour was that of a man who thought he was invincible, a man who thought he was untouchable. Which was perhaps why he had dared just a short while later to do the dreadful deed she was so sure he was guilty of.

It would never have occurred to Richard Marshall back then that he would get caught out in anything that he did, Karen felt. She hadn’t known then that he had already served time in jail. Had she done so she would merely have been forced to wonder at how little effect it had had on him. She pulled away from him, shaking her whole body as if to rid herself of his touch, and hurried into the kitchen, leaving him and her mother alone in the hall to make their farewells.

It was the only time that Karen ever caught the pair of them together and she had no idea whether or not they had been having a full-blown affair, or if this had been a one-afternoon stand. True to form in the Meadows household the incident was never mentioned again and Karen told nobody about it. Certainly she knew better than to mention it to her father. Neither did she tell the police, and her failure to do that was later to haunt her even though it never even occurred to her at the time.

Whatever the extent of her mother’s relationship with Richard Marshall, Karen was quite sure that something had been going on and, in spite of her youth, equally convinced that she knew what the two of them had been doing the day she came home from school early.

But if she had ever had any doubts at all, these would have been assuaged the day a major missing-persons enquiry was finally launched and Richard Marshall was arrested, almost exactly a year after his family’s disappearance. Karen had been forced to prop her mother up during yet another drinking binge combined with a bout of depression, and Margaret Meadows had made it quite clear that this latest attack of bad nerves, as the family described her condition back then, had been brought about by Richard’s arrest. She had been distraught for days, which even at the time had confused Karen considerably.