Hilary Bonner: When the Dead Cry Out

Grateful thanks are due to:

Police Diving Supervisor DC Brian Bolt, and Detective Sergeant Pat Pitts of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary; Detective Sergeant (retired) Frank Waghorn; all at Rolex UK; and Home Office Pathologist Doctor Huw White for their expert advice without which this book could not have been completed; and Kirsty Fowkes, whose editorial input was also invaluable.

The morning began much the same as any other for Karen Meadows. It was a typical summer’s day on the English Riviera. Sky grey, the air warm and damp.

As usual the recently promoted detective superintendent breakfasted alone, apart from her cat, in her apartment overlooking the sea. She had lived there, a mile or so from the centre of Torquay, for nine years. Her brain was full of work because that was pretty much all she let it be full of. Her heart was full of nothing much because that was how she liked it — or at least that was how she told herself she liked it. Her eyes no longer took in the view across the bay which was glorious in even the dullest of weather.

Breakfast took the form of three mugs of strong tea, dash of milk, no sugar, consumed on the run as Karen never seemed to have time to do anything properly in the mornings, and two menthol cigarettes. She kidded herself that the peppermint taste made them healthier than the other kind. Not that she wasted a lot of time worrying about her health. She was too busy to allow any such preoccupation, and there was nobody else it mattered much to, she reflected bitterly. She showered and dressed in between smoking and drinking her tea.

Karen Meadows had always had good taste in everything except, on one or two unfortunate occasions, men. Her home was very stylish, simply decorated in shades of cream and pale greys and blues, and furnished almost entirely with antiques of a standard considerably higher than might be expected of a woman whose sole income was her police salary, which was down to her off-duty passion for browsing junk shops and antiques fairs and auctions. Unfortunately her housekeeping skills did not match her talent as either an antiques collector or an interior decorator. Sighing at her own inadequacies she sifted through the teetering pile of clothes at the foot of her bed beneath which a pretty little Victorian nursing chair, worthy of far better treatment, was totally buried. Karen had no idea how anyone as organized and in control as she knew she was in her work could be so disorganized and untidy at home. It was her constant dream that one day she would wake up and find that she had become effortlessly tidy and ordered overnight.

Meanwhile she was forced to delve through the debris on the chair, and then to search her overstuffed wardrobe, much of the contents of which had fallen onto the floor, in order to somehow unearth a pair of baggy cream trousers that were barely creased at all, a denim waistcoat and a beige linen jacket which was actually supposed to look crumpled, the main reason she had bought it in the first place. She found one of the grey satin designer trainers she had decided were the only shoes that would possibly do that day underneath the bed, and the other, for reasons which defied her, on the worktop in the kitchen. She fed Sophie the cat on the remains of last night’s old Marks & Spencer’s chicken because she had run out of tinned cat food, located her various keys with the customary difficulty, then gulped down the last mouthful of her final mug of tea, some of which she slurped on to her jacket thus necessitating a panic-stricken dash to the bathroom for an emergency mopping-up operation.

Yet, miraculously, when she ultimately emerged from her flat she looked as good as she almost always contrived to and considerably younger than her forty-one years. Her glossy dark hair, cut into a geometric bob, framed a good strong-boned face, albeit one which had a tendency, no doubt accentuated by her job, to look severe. And the clothes she wore, as ever casual and giving the impression of being thrown together — even though every day she agonized over her appearance, rather tragically she thought, and not without difficulty considering the problems she invariably had finding anything at all — suited her well and added to the impression of youthfulness that she had about her.

Certainly the way she looked totally belied the chaos which had, as usual, engulfed the start of her day. And as she headed for the lift, an ancient convoluted contraption which managed to provide at least a hint of real or imagined danger almost every time she used it, Karen looked confident and in control, though admittedly not a bit like most people’s idea of a policewoman.

She flashed a big smile and paused to speak to an elderly woman neighbour who was taking out a plastic bag of rubbish.

“When you’ve finished, Ethel, give my place a going-over, will you?” she remarked cheerily.

“For you, darling, anything,” replied the old lady. “I’m expensive though. You’d never be able to afford me, not in your job.”

“You never know, Ethel. Perhaps I’ll join the villains instead of trying to catch ’em.”

“May as well, dear. They’ll probably make you a peer then, like that Jeffrey Archer.”

Karen could still hear Ethel chuckling as she stepped into the elevator, closing the latticed-iron outer gates behind her. Briefly she leaned against the ornately mirrored walls of the inner cage and closed her eyes for just a few seconds. She felt tired. Terribly tired.

It was the same every morning. And it never used to be like this. Karen was a natural high flier, capable, in charge of herself, personable, warm, funny. That was her image, that was the personality she put across and had lived up to throughout her life. She liked the way the world perceived her. She liked the way people reacted when she walked into a room. She didn’t want that perception to change because without it she was convinced she would be lost.

She didn’t want the world to know that she was plagued with self-doubt, that what went on inside her head was as far removed from the image she put across as was the chaotic way she lived from the way she would like to live. That would never do. Karen’s state of mind was a very private thing. She never spoke of her dementia-ridden mother in a nursing home whom she increasingly saw less and less. In any case the guilt, justified or not, was abiding and nothing anybody said could ever help. She never spoke of the regrets she felt that she had not married and had a family and that she had probably now reached an age where that was no longer likely to happen. She never let on that she had ever wanted a child. Nobody who knew her would ever have suspected that Karen Meadows was anything other than a happy, successful, fulfilled woman. The police force had made her believe that to show any other side of herself would be seen only as weakness. And that would never do. Karen refused to give away anything about her true self. She believed that if she ever allowed her contained outer shell to crack open even a little she would fall straight through it flat onto her face.

So inside the lift she pushed herself upright again, pressed the ground-floor button, and shook her head quite ferociously in order both to clear it and to deny the troubled thoughts it contained. The temperamental old lift shuddered into action, incomprehensibly bouncing an inch or two upwards before lurching dramatically downwards in such a jerky fashion that Karen was forced to lean against one of its walls again to ensure that she didn’t lose her footing.