Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

James Cromby-White paused.

“So? Can we go ahead? Can I charge him?” Karen was champing at the bit.

The chief prosecutor looked directly at her. “Karen, do not think for a moment that I want Marshall to continue to get away with this terrible crime we all believe he is guilty of, any more than you do. But as you know, my foremost concern with almost any case is twofold. I have to weigh up the chances of success and then consider whether or not it is in the public interest.”

“In this case it has to be in the public interest to prosecute Marshall. It is reasonable to assume we are never going to have a stronger case, and we do not want a treble murderer cocking a snoot at the law-enforcement agencies of this country, we really don’t. But, and I must stress this, prosecuting Richard Marshall on what we’ve got will be risky. Just like Harry, although I do think we should go ahead, I really would prefer it if we could strengthen the case considerably.”

“I would like to charge Marshall today,” said Karen flatly. “Apart from anything else, there is just a chance that if he is actually charged after all this time we might get something out of him at last. Perhaps he might be shocked into giving something away.”

Karen didn’t actually think that was very likely. But on that particular morning, when she felt so near and yet somehow so far from finally bringing Marshall to justice, she was prepared to say almost anything in order to get her way. There was a pause which seemed like forever to her. Eventually James Cromby-White hauled himself out of his chair rather more efficiently than Karen would have thought possible, and walked over to the window. When he spoke again he had his back to both Karen and Tomlinson, and he did not turn round.

“Charge him,” he instructed briskly. “But don’t stop working on it, aye? We’ll need everything we can dig out on this one. You should have your team checking out every possible angle again and again and again. OK?”

“Absolutely OK,” said Karen, grinning at his not-inconsiderable rear view. Obese though he was, she could cheerfully have given the chief prosecutor a big sloppy kiss.

On the way back to Torquay Karen felt almost exultant. She knew it was ridiculous. There was still a long way to go. But at least the first hurdle had been safely manoeuvred. She called Phil Cooper to give him the news and asked him to pass it on to the rest of the team.

“But tell ’em to keep up the pressure, Phil,” she said. “This case is far from watertight, as you know. Keep on interviewing that bastard Marshall. Harry Tomlinson says everybody has a breaking point. Let’s hope he’s right.”

“He probably is, boss,” said Cooper. “But we’re not allowed to torture our suspects, are we?”

Karen chuckled. The man always had that effect on her, the ability to lighten the moment and to make her laugh. That was what had driven her into such dangerous areas the night before, and she somehow felt she couldn’t finish the conversation without referring to that.

“How did you feel first thing, Phil?” she asked.

“Bloody awful, boss,” he replied. “How ’bout you?”

“Terrible. And I was late for the CC because of it.” Briefly she told the sergeant the story of how she had forgotten that she had left her car at the station.

“Well, you got the right result nonetheless, boss,” said Cooper.

“Thank God, and for once old fatso himself deserves a thank-you, too,” Karen replied.

“See you soon then, boss.”

“Uh, yes.”

But something else had been weighing on Karen’s mind. She decided that this was her opportunity to deal with it.

“I’ll be another hour or so though, Phil,” she continued. “Something I’ve got to do on the way. Then as soon as I get back we’ll charge the bastard.”

She swung the car through the porticoed entrance of the Old Manor nursing home, and was immediately overwhelmed by her usual reluctance to proceed any further. It was not just guilt and distress which stopped her visiting her mother more often. Nor was it really pressure of work, although that was what she used as an excuse.

Karen had an almost pathological sense of foreboding about seeing Margaret Meadows in such a place. On more than one occasion she had driven to the Old Manor, sat in her car outside for as long as thirty or forty minutes, and then just driven away, totally unable to make herself go inside.

On this occasion, however, she had an extra incentive to carry through her intentions and pay her mother a visit — all the old questions that were still bugging her, so many of which she felt her mother could have the answer to inside her poor lost head.

Karen parked to one side of the gravelled driveway, refusing, just for once, to dwell on her mother’s sorry condition. She forced herself to approach the big front doors, locked as always, and rang the bell. They couldn’t leave the doors open because some of the residents wandered, or so they said. Karen hated the place, hated herself for leaving her mother there, and hated herself for neglecting her while she was there.

Margaret Meadows was only seventy-two years old, very young to be suffering from severe dementia. But the illness had started to develop in her mid-sixties and she had now been at the Old Manor for two and a half years.

She was in the big day room, surrounded by other residents in a similar state, all of whom seemed unable to do anything with their lives anymore, other than to stare endlessly into the middle distance with blank unseeing eyes. Margaret Meadows was sitting in her wheelchair, slumped forward over one steel armrest. Karen felt another stab of guilt. She always seemed to be like that when she visited, rather than in the comfortable electronically-reclining armchair Karen had bought her. The staff invariably told her that she had either just been put in the wheelchair or was just about to be lifted out of it. Karen did not feel she was in a position to argue. She had complied with strangers in order to look after her own mother. She had in effect washed her hands of this sometimes so charming, always so vulnerable, woman whom she knew, whatever else, had always loved her.

Therefore she did not consider herself able to question much of the treatment her mother received. Or maybe that was a cop-out, too. Karen wasn’t sure. Margaret Meadows had lost the ability to walk, for no apparent reason really, but in the way that people suffering from dementia are inclined to — Karen knew that it was as if they forgot to walk as well as forgetting so much else — and the various regulations covering what nursing staff could and could not do in their daily work sometimes had rather cruel results. Karen supposed that she understood why they could not be expected to manually lift her mother around, even though Margaret Meadows was so small and slight, but she hated the thought of her being lifted in and out of her bed and her chair by a mechanical hoist. The last time she had visited, Margaret had had an angry black bruise on her forehead. The staff had explained that she had knocked her head while fighting with the hoist.

The very thought of it made a little bit of Karen shrivel up and die.

She braced herself, leaned forward and touched her mother’s arm. Margaret Meadows did not move. She had never been a big woman, but it seemed to Karen that she had shrunk considerably since she’d been in the Old Manor. Karen stroked her hair. It was still soft and pretty and, with the help of a hairdresser, retained much of its natural pale gold colour. Karen’s mother had always been fussy about her appearance, except when she was into a heavy drinking bout, of course, and Karen paid for her to have her hair done twice a week. Such a small thing, when she knew there was so much else that she should do but didn’t.