Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

“We have big big trouble, boys and girls,” she went on, still speaking much more loudly than she needed to.

Cooper already knew that there was another gentler softer side to Karen — she had shared it with him during their so brief time together. He also knew that she was a woman who did not like to let her real feelings show. She had plenty of front, as his mother would say, and she knew how to protect it. But the detective superintendent looked as if she had been really thrown by whatever it was that she had learned from her meeting with Jennifer Roth. And, rather typically, her feelings were taking the form of what appeared to be blind fury.

Her next words made Cooper understand exactly why.

“Jennifer Roth claims she is Richard Marshall’s daughter — not his fucking lover but his fucking daughter.”

Cooper felt as if he had been kicked in the gut by a mule. This was an absolutely devastating revelation. He felt Ron Smiley’s eyes burning into his back. It was he and Smiley who had interviewed Jennifer Roth, established her role in Marshall’s life. Or so they had thought. Cooper felt sick. But there was worse to come.

His senior officer did not even glance at him. Indeed it seemed to Cooper that she quite pointedly avoided doing so. She looked almost everywhere else as, still standing in the middle of the incident room, she briefly related the story Jennifer Roth had told her — how Clara Marshall had tried to kill her daughters, but succeeded only in killing herself, and how Richard Marshall’s only role in the affair had been to prevent the truth being revealed, and to secretly dispose of his wife’s body.

When she stopped talking the silence in the normally bustling room was all the more pronounced. Nobody moved, let alone spoke. But at least the act of telling the story seemed to have calmed Karen Meadows somewhat. After she had finished she sat down on the edge of the nearest desk and folded her arms.

Cooper could feel all the blood draining from his head. It was blindingly obvious that this evidence could overturn the whole case against Richard Marshall. He didn’t need to hear what his boss had to say when she spoke again.

“So if Roth is telling the truth then it would seem there is at least one murder Marshall is not guilty of,” Karen concluded. “Her very existence is a rather strong piece of evidence in Marshall’s favour.”

There was heavy irony in those last words. She stood up again then, quite abruptly, and rounded on Cooper, pointing at him, arm outstretched. She was no longer shouting. Her voice was calm, but there was ice in it.

“Which begs the question, Detective Sergeant Cooper, why did we not find out who Jennifer Roth was? You were in charge of checking her out, you were the one who first reported that she was Marshall’s lover. I want to know how that could have happened. And I want a full and detailed report on my desk before this day is out.”

“I’ve seen some pretty fine examples of incompetence during my time in the force, Cooper, but this just about takes the biscuit. You have almost certainly made fools of the entire fucking force and you may well be responsible for Richard Marshall having grounds for appeal and almost certainly getting off. I do hope you are proud of yourself.”

Phil Cooper said nothing. There was nothing to say. He felt his neck and face begin to burn and hoped to God that he wasn’t going to blush, something he hadn’t done since he was a teenager. He knew Karen Meadows was right in everything she said. Absolutely right, and even though he didn’t see how anyone could have spotted the truth beforehand, if there had been a monumental cock-up then he had to take the blame for at least a big chunk of it. The bloody woman had told him she was Marshall’s live-in, for God’s sake. How was he supposed to have known she was his bloody daughter? If, indeed, she was. But Karen wasn’t even waiting to make sure before give him the bollocking of his life, and in public, too.

Cooper struggled to keep control, but the more he did so the more he could feel the blush developing, spreading from his neck right up his face and to his hairline. He cursed under his breath. He knew that he had turned bright red, which made him feel even more of a prat. Even if the worst-case scenario was proven, he couldn’t believe that Karen Meadows had chosen to speak to him like this in front of everybody. Not after what had gone on between them the night before.

He winced. He was actually well aware that, professional though Karen was, their nocturnal liaison was almost certainly responsible for the level of anger she had specifically directed at him. Or to be absolutely accurate, he suspected, it would not have been so much what had happened between them in bed, as the way he had behaved that morning.

Oh, fuck, he thought. He continued to say nothing, but instead attempted to outstare her. Unfortunately that was difficult to do when you knew your face had turned beetroot-red. Karen’s eyes, still blazing with anger, bored into his. Cooper was no match for her in that sort of mood. Within seconds he was somehow forced to drop his gaze and he even bowed his head slightly, all too painfully aware of the sounds of embarrassment emulating from the rest of the team, ranging from nervous coughing to elaborate feet shuffling.

Karen turned her back on him then, almost as if dismissing him.

“Right, so let’s get to business and see what we can do to turn this disaster around yet again,” she said.

“Jennifer Roth has agreed to have a DNA test. That’s the first step, although I have to say I believe her already. I wish I didn’t, but I do. Tompkins — get that organized straight away, will you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In spite of his distress, Cooper almost managed a smile at that. Tompkins, like all of them, invariably called the superintendent “boss”, and in a very casual way, too. Karen Meadows was not the sort of high-ranking police officer who either expected or required formality. Normally she had an easy authority about her, and commanded respect — even, albeit grudgingly, from the most chauvinistic of coppers — in a friendly although very professional way which did not really have anything to do with deference to her rank. But that morning DC Tompkins, a man of considerable experience after all, was quite understandably taking no chances with his superior officer’s temper. Ma’am was the correct form of address. So ma’am it was.

Karen spent another two or three minutes directing the rest of her troops. She organized one team to check out the information Jennifer Roth had given her about her upbringing in Cheshire and the couple who had adopted her, legally or not, and another to launch a search for Lorraine Marshall, although she was painfully aware that there was little more to go on concerning Lorraine’s whereabouts than there had been previously. Were both sisters really still alive? Karen had no idea. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to find Lorraine. The safe emergence of a second sister might well make Marshall’s conviction all the more unstable, particularly if Lorraine came up with the same story.

When she eventually returned to her office Karen slammed the door shut behind her with almost the same kind of force she had earlier exhibited in the incident room.

“Oh, fuck,” she muttered to herself, unwittingly echoing Cooper’s response.

She knew she had been right to reprimand Cooper. It may or may not have been his fault and it probably wasn’t. He had nonetheless been responsible for a key part of the investigation, and his failure to come up with absolutely vital information could now have disastrous repercussions. However, she also knew that the way she had gone about it had been all wrong. She had rebuked him publicly and in a very personal manner, and she was honest enough with herself to be well aware of what had triggered off her extreme anger with the detective sergeant — and it was something nobody but her could take responsibility for.