Hilary Bonner - When the Dead Cry Out

He was on her then. Every bit as urgent as before. Once again he was not as she had expected as a lover, even though she didn’t know quite what she had expected, or even if she had expected anything. He ripped at her clothing and at his own. He had a way of crawling all over her, or that was how it seemed.

His mind, as well as his body, seemed to enter hers. She felt the shudder again, a kind of internal and quite uncontrollable shake starting somewhere in the abdomen and stretching both ways at once, down to her toes and up to her head.

She asked him again if he felt it, and he said that he did. Cried out that he did, and that he was loving every moment of it.

When the first time was over they instinctively followed the same routine as before. They went to bed, once again having to remove a prostrate Sophie who hissed angrily at Cooper, no doubt seeing him merely as an unwelcome intrusion, and lay close and tight together before making love again. Whatever they did, whether it was just lying together or making love, they seemed to fit so well. Everything fitted so well. They didn’t talk much. Perhaps they had said it all, perhaps they didn’t dare say more. Karen wasn’t sure. She knew this was earth-shattering. She knew it wasn’t just that flush of first lust. She really knew that, was absolutely sure of it. And after they had finally finished she fell asleep in his arms. It felt wonderful. Sleep engulfed her with a kind of sweet ease that was entirely new to her.

She woke with a start when she felt him ease away from her, unfold his arms, try to slide out of bed unnoticed. She noticed, of course. It was impossible for her not to. She felt as if she were joined to him at the hip. If he twitched, if he hiccupped, if he sneezed, if he stubbed his toe, she would know. And she certainly knew that he was planning to leave her.

She watched him dress, smooth down his hair, pull on his trousers and his shoes, button his shirt, fasten his tie around his neck. Then he came to her and sat on the edge of the bed.

“I’m so sorry I have to go,” he murmured.

“I know. I’ve heard it all before.”

He winced. “This is different, Karen. This really is different.”

“I know,” she said. And she did know, too. It didn’t help, though, not at that moment. He was going to go just when she needed him most.

He leaned forward then, kissed her fringe, and her eyelids, and her nose, her chin and her lips and said, like before: “I’m putting you to sleep now.”

He almost succeeded, too. She watched him leave the room through half-closed eyes. She was nearly asleep. Then, when she heard the front door slam in the distance, she seemed to be slammed into full wakefulness again.

It had been quite a day. The horrible experience of being in court and seeing Richard Marshall freed, and then the extraordinary thing that had happened between her and Phil Cooper — and it was extraordinary, she had no doubt about that — overwhelmed her.

She rolled onto her front, buried her face in the pillows, and sobbed her heart out.

The following day reality hit even harder. Karen never liked mornings very much. This was one of the hardest mornings of her life. Knowing what was ahead of her made it even more difficult than usual to drag herself out of bed. Sophie, who had returned to her favoured corner of the duvet as soon as Cooper had departed, yawned luxuriously. Karen was too preoccupied even to give the cat her usual morning stroke.

She peered at herself unenthusiastically in the bathroom mirror and splashed cold water repeatedly on her swollen eyes. Karen’s face did not recover quickly from tears, which was one of the reasons she tried to avoid them.

The events of the previous day had been monumental. And as she brushed her teeth with only a poor attempt at energy she realized that she was unsure exactly what had had the most devastating effect on her, Richard Marshall walking free or Phil Cooper confessing his love.

She felt rather as if both her head and her heart belonged to someone else, and someone else she didn’t know, at that. Her elderly neighbour Ethel was putting her rubbish in the chute again when she left for work.

“And how’s my favourite policewoman this morning?” Ethel enquired cheerily.

“Fine, thanks,” replied Karen absently, not at all inclined towards banter for once, as she walked slowly towards the lift, head down, lost in her own thoughts, but nonetheless aware of Ethel’s curious eyes following her.

When she arrived at Torquay Police Station it took a monumental effort of will for her to put on her usual act. She made herself stride into the station with her head held high, to appear self-confident and in control. And just like getting out of bed in the first place that morning, it was as hard as she had ever known it to be. Every officer she encountered that morning looked subdued.

She considered that it was very much part of her job to lift their spirits, to help them move on, indeed to drive them forwards. They all had work to do, after all. She just had to make herself forget that she was a human being, too. She reckoned that was the only way she was going to get through what lay ahead.

There would be an inquest, albeit an informal one, into the whole Marshall affair, and as the senior investigating officer she was the one who would ultimately have to carry the can. Indeed, the chief constable, with whom she had a meeting she was not looking forward to that afternoon, had already made it clear that he wasn’t going to. The morning passed in something of a daze until it was time for her to set off for Exeter HQ. She had to get over that particular hurdle before she could even attempt to look to the future in the way she was already encouraging those around her to do.

Even though she made absolutely certain that she arrived on time, and had dressed as conservatively as she could manage, Harry Tomlinson indulged in no social niceties at all before launching into an all-out blistering attack. His earlier huffing and puffing reached a crescendo of outrage.

“All our worst fears have been realized, Detective Superintendent... total waste of the taxpayer’s money... more like a bloody circus than a murder investigation...”

There was much more of the same, and Karen had little choice but to stand and take it. Anyway, she felt that she deserved it. And in a weird sort of way she felt slightly better for suffering the sackcloth-and-ashes experience of her meeting with Tomlinson. The chief constable did not, in any case, take things beyond personally displaying his severe displeasure. Karen was not formally rebuked and she was also left feeling fairly certain that she would not be the recipient of any disciplinary action. Indeed, there was no reason why she should be. The only flaw in the operation which she had led had been the failure to establish that Jennifer Roth was Marshall’s daughter and not his lover, and logic dictated that most investigations would probably have missed that, based on the information available at the time. However, Karen remembered only too well how she’d rounded on Cooper after Jennifer Roth had revealed her true identity, and her show of temper had not been entirely caused by what she had felt at the time to be his rejection of her. She had been genuinely furious with him, with or without justification, for his part in a potentially disastrous blunder. Now that the feared disaster had happened, Marshall was a free man again, and Karen and her team had been made to look stupid, even if they hadn’t actually been stupid. The chief constable’s response was only a part of it. As senior investigating officer, even with no official reprimand to her name, she knew very well that the mud was going to stick for quite some time.