Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

“You’re an optimist, Karen Meadows, or rather, you’re pretending to be. I don’t think you really are inside. I’ve learned enough about the CPS over the years. They’ll never want to go ahead on that one, and as far as the chances of trying him again for murder, well, even if the law does change you’ll need substantial new evidence, and what on earth is going to be turned up now, after all this time? We had an extraordinary piece of luck with this, with the divers finding her body and the watch and all that. It still wasn’t enough, was it? And do you know, if it wasn’t for DNA, I would believe that Marshall had invented the whole scenario, persuaded Jennifer Roth to make up a story and give evidence on his behalf. I really would. He’s capable of it. Well capable.”

“I know how you feel.” As she said it Karen realized the words were a mistake.

“Do you?” snapped Mac, his anger, she felt, directed at her for the very first time. “No, Karen, you don’t know how I feel. None of you do. I have lived with the loss of my daughter and the knowledge that the bastard who killed her has remained a free man for the last twenty-eight years. Out there enjoying his life when he’d taken my Clara’s life away from her. Now, just as I thought he had been brought to justice at last, just as I thought that at least I could say farewell to my daughter in peace, in the knowledge that her death had been avenged, now I have to live with the knowledge that Richard Marshall is going to be a free man again thanks entirely to the evidence of a young woman I have to accept is my granddaughter, the granddaughter I thought he had also killed. No, Karen, you have no idea how I feel. Not even you.”

“I’m sorry,” Karen began, feeling more inadequate than ever. She wasn’t quite sure what she could possibly say next but in any case she was interrupted by the hubbub behind her. Richard Marshall and the young woman she had been forced to believe was his daughter had walked out of the court. The press, having totally lost interest in Karen once she had made it clear she wasn’t saying anything, were all around them like flies around a honey pot. A couple of dozen motor drives whirred — the Nikon choir was in full mechanical voice — and a group of reporters, written press and broadcasting, were yelling their questions.

Marshall’s lawyer stepped forward and raised a hand for silence. “My client has a brief statement to make,” he announced.

Then a beaming Richard Marshall, holding a smiling Jennifer by the hand, began to speak.

“This is a great day for me and for British justice,” he proclaimed. “I have been hounded by the police for three decades. Wherever I went to try to escape from them, they followed me. They have never stopped persecuting me because of a crime I did not commit. I have always proclaimed my innocence, through everything, but nobody ever believed me.”

“It took the courage of my beautiful daughter...” He paused then, turned to Jennifer, hugged her demonstratively and kissed her on the cheek, at which point she kissed him back and clung on to him like the little girl Karen thought she so often resembled.

“It took the courage of my beautiful daughter for my innocence to be finally and irrevocably proven in this courtroom today.”

Karen turned away then. She couldn’t bear to watch what she felt was a carefully stage-managed little scene. She found it quite nauseating.

Hurriedly she hailed a taxi to take her to Paddington Station. She had had enough. She just wanted to go home and hide. But as the taxi pulled away she was vaguely aware of DS Cooper, who had this time been called as a witness to give evidence concerning his enquiries into Jennifer Roth, running across the pavement.

“Boss!” he yelled. “Hey, boss, hang on a minute...”

“Just drive on,” she instructed the cabbie, who being a London taxi driver of many years’ experience had not, in any case, hesitated. She didn’t want to talk to anybody. There really was nothing to say. She had rarely felt so totally and utterly desolate. And she wanted to talk to Phil Cooper less than anyone else.

He phoned her on her mobile just as she arrived home.

“Boss, I just wanted to say how bloody sorry I am.”

Not again, thought Karen. She wanted to scream. Arguably the most important case she had ever dealt with had fallen apart. Richard Marshall was free again. She was not in a good mood. In fact, she was in a foul mood. Apart from anything else, she reckoned that if anyone should shoulder more than their fair share of blame, it should be her, not Phil Cooper. She wasn’t telling him that, though. Her personal feelings continued to overshadow her professionalism in her dealings with the detective sergeant. Their brief time together had meant too much to her, far too much. But she wasn’t telling him that either.

Instead she railed at him, as had become something of a habit, almost a way of getting rid of her frustrations. In as much as anything could.

“What the fuck are you after, Phil? Absolution?”

“No, boss. Look, it’s not that. I know I fucked up, but I think anybody would have done. There were no clues, honestly.”

“We’ve been over that. Over and over. Save it, Phil, I’m not interested.”

There was a brief pause. Then when he spoke again Cooper was no longer apologetic verging on servile. Instead he sounded cold and determined.

“Where are you, boss?” he asked.

The question took her so much by surprise that she answered it.

“I’ve just arrived home. Why?” she asked, adding almost as an afterthought: “And what the fuck’s it got to do with you where I am, anyway?”

“Because I’ve bloody well had enough of this,” Cooper snapped. “I’ve driven back and I’ve just got to Torquay. I’m coming around to see you right now, whether you like it or not. I’m ten minutes behind you.”

And with that the line went dead.

“Oh, fuck,” muttered Karen. She was too weary for this, she really was. She knew somehow that Phil Cooper did not really want to see her to talk about the case, in spite of how important it was to both of them. No, Cooper had another agenda. And, just like before in the pub, when he had said he was sorry, she had not been at all sure what he was apologizing for. His professional or his personal conduct. It was all so confused, somehow.

Karen went into the kitchen, rummaged in the fridge for an open tin of cat food and fed a loudly meowing Sophie who had been demanding sustenance ever since her mistress had come through the front door. Then she switched on the kettle and put a tea bag in a mug. A cup of tea would have to do. She badly wanted an extremely strong drink, but didn’t dare have one. Her brain was in too much of a whirl.

The doorbell rang little more than five minutes later. Either Cooper had been a lot closer than he’d let on, she thought, or he’d driven like a madman.

She was still holding her mug of tea in one hand when she opened the front door to him. He looked flushed and angry. He didn’t wait for her to ask him in. Instead he pushed his way past her.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s get a few things straight here, shall we? I’m as thoroughly pissed off as anybody is about this case going pear-shaped — but there’s no way I carry the whole fucking can. And you don’t think that either, otherwise you’d have me on a report.”

He was pacing the room, shouting at her. In spite of herself she was almost amused. He was so angry and so determined. Very macho, she thought obliquely. She’d never seen him like this before. It was a bit of a revelation. Nonetheless, she kept the act up.

“Would I?” she enquired laconically.