Hilary Bonner: When the Dead Cry Out

“Yes,” she said curtly.

“Karen, I’ve got to talk to you—”

“This isn’t a good moment. I am in the middle of a murder investigation.”

“Look, Sarah has said she’ll give me another chance if I apply for a transfer. It’s not what I want, but I’m just terrified of losing the kids—”

Karen interrupted again. “I think it is what you want, actually.”

Something in her voice attracted Tompkins’ attention. She was aware of him briefly shifting his attention from the busy motorway and glancing at her curiously.

“I’m sorry, Karen. Look, it needn’t be permanent. I don’t want to lose you, honestly. But for the moment I think it would be for the best. She’s also said that if I do that she won’t take any action about you.”

“That’s big of her.” The words slipped out. Tompkins looked around again. Like most of his colleagues Tompkins, in spite of his taciturn appearance and manner, was a natural-born gossip. Karen knew that all his inner antennae would be waggling by now.

Cooper was still speaking. “I just don’t know what else to do, it’s all such a mess...”

His voice trailed off.

“That’s absolutely fine,” said Karen. And she ended the call.

Tompkins said nothing, as usual, but Karen had a small bet with herself that he had guessed who was on the end of the phone and was currently speculating colourfully about what might be going on. No doubt the incident would be reported fully back to Torquay nick ASAP.

By the time they reached Kelly’s house Moira had left for night duty at the hospital and the three of them had the place to themselves. Without preamble the reporter produced an audio cassette which he began to play on the big living-room stereo system.

Karen sat on a hard chair by the window. She didn’t feel like making herself comfortable.

Jennifer Roth’s voice filled the room. It was a good sound system. The result was extremely eerie. It was surreal. This was a voice from the dead. A voice Karen remembered so well and already associated with dropping bombshells. But never before a bombshell on this scale.

Kelly stood, leaning against the wall, over by the kitchen door. His head was bowed and he was stroking his forehead with the fingers of one hand. Tompkins perched on the edge of the sofa, hands on his knees, all ears, more alert than Karen had ever seen him before, she thought.

“I just wanted to tell you what happened, John, because I know now, beyond any doubt. I really know. And I’m talking to you like this because I want to put the truth on record,” said Jennifer’s voice on the tape. She was speaking very deliberately.

“Thank you for trusting me,” replied Kelly.

Karen shot him a mildly disgusted look across the room. Kelly had the grace to look ashamed. He had been using his “I’m a nice journalist, you can tell me anything” approach, and Karen was all too familiar with it.

“I have now completed six therapy sessions with the psychiatrist, Dr. Huxtable, who you recommended me to,” continued Jennifer. She was speaking almost without expression, the tone of her voice very flat, her public-school accent less noticeable perhaps than usual.

“I was more inclined to go to him than you may have realized. I’d been having these dreams. I had them as a child. As a very young child. They were never clear. They were shadowy. I had a vision of being in another house, of a lot of shouting and screaming. Of dreadful things happening but I somehow wasn’t sure exactly what. All the while I was being brought up in Cheshire I knew perfectly well that I’d had another life. But I shut everything out because I wanted to escape from the things that happened in my head whenever I tried to sleep. My adoptive mother told me that I was just having nightmares. They were such good people, my new parents, Carol and Michael, they looked after me and loved me and they helped me blot out the past. I have no idea what they knew, more than likely the same story Richard Marshall was to tell me later, after Carol and Michael died.

“>It was then, when I was sorting through all their papers, that I came across letters from my real father. From Richard. He had obviously been keeping in touch with Carol and Michael, wanting to know about me. It was wonderful for me to find that I still had a father, my natural father, and that he had cared about me all these years.

“I wrote to him and he wrote back to me at once. He came to see me in Cheshire and talked to me about it all and explained what had happened when I was five, how our mother had tried to kill us all, he told me what had led him to give me away. And my sister Lorraine, he said. Suddenly it all made sense, the violent dreams, all of it, and I suppose what he told me was what I wanted to hear. Or as near as was possible, anyway, given that my mother was dead and I’d lost my sister. He seemed so kind and gentle and everything he said expressed concern for me.

“I believed him wholeheartedly. And then he told me about this new job he had in Poole and the flat and everything and asked me if I wanted to live with him there. It was like another dream to me, but a good dream for a change. He said the police had never stopped hounding him, that he wanted to protect me from all that, so it was better just to let people think I was his girlfriend.

“We were happy together. He was rebuilding his life, I think, after breaking up with his latest woman. He was honest enough about that side of himself, too. He said he had a weakness for the ladies. He said that had caused all of his troubles. He even told me about his fraud conviction, and he said he’d only done what he’d done then because he’d got into financial trouble when he’d been trying to run two families. I suppose I believed what I wanted to believe. Because I had always wanted something like that, to find my real father or mother again, to get to know them.

“I thought I did know him, too. When he was arrested I believed in him absolutely, and when I came forward after he was convicted I still believed in him. A lot of what the police and the lawyers said, though, about my being disturbed by what had happened to me as a child, did get through to me. Because I knew that none of it was clear, whatever I said, none of my memories were clear. They were all hazy around the edges.

“Then, after my father won his appeal, I began to get the dreams again. The dreams I couldn’t understand. That’s why I thought it might be best to move away from him for a while. I started looking for work elsewhere. I had been an office manager before, and I was rather good at it. I found a new job quite easily and moved here to Hammersmith. I didn’t tell my father about the dreams. I didn’t want to face up to them, I suppose. But they began to get worse and worse.

“So when you told me that my father had confessed more or less, to that crime reporter on the Sun , it really got through to me. And then when you explained about Recovered Memory Syndrome and suggested I see Dr. Huxtable, well, I wanted to do it at once even though I didn’t admit it either to myself or to you, John. I hadn’t talked to any other journalists. I’d never heard of RMS. I don’t read the papers a lot. I just wasn’t aware of it. For the first time in my life I could see how it might be possible to open a window into my past.”

Jennifer paused, and Karen could hear a swallowing sound as if perhaps she was taking a drink of something. When she started to talk again there was a definite catch in that flat well-educated voice.

“Dr. Huxtable just talked to me at first and then put me into hypnotherapy. We started to have results almost at once. I began to remember things in bits. It was like the dreams but this time I knew, just knew, it was what had really happened. I didn’t have any doubts at all.