Little Fingers! (33 page)

* *
*

I have had
three appalling shocks today. They are to be expected when, like
me, you investigate the ugliest corners of our existence, yet I
have never, ever, had a day like this.

I am reeling.
Rather, I was reeling. I am now lying on my back on these cold
tiles, my head resting on my pinched hands, the knuckles frozen and
bruised against the floor, gazing intently at the ceiling,
examining the cracks, the chips, the paint slopped over the plastic
of the light fitting, the caked dust of the bulb hanging there.
Hanging there.

Julia was
found in her cell this morning, hanging there. Her throat was
strangled blue and raw, her face bloated over its sharp structure.
For the size of her personality, her frame was surprisingly slight
as it hung like a pepper from a bush.

My darling
Julia, did either of us deserve this? You were so special to me,
and I think that you were fond of me too behind your teasing,
mocking ways. You had such a blighted life, hurt, battered, angry,
crazed. I suppose that it was an inevitable end, and maybe better
than the alternative - many long years of imprisonment.

They took your
body away for an autopsy four hours ago. I have rarely seen any
personally sadder sight.

And the
repercussions! A woman dowses a renowned paedophile at large with
petrol and sets fire to him because no-one will do anything about
him. The villagers have done nothing to stop him over twenty to
thirty years, and nor have the police. She is arrested, and shortly
afterwards is found hanging in a police cell, having apparently
committed suicide. What a gift to the conspiracy theorists! A
suspect who is denouncing the police for their gross negligence is
found dead in her cell. The newspapers are already phoning in a
thousand at a time. Somehow Dave Cheveley of The Sun got through to
me but, generally, it is a wonderful day for any petty criminals to
go about their rounds. Nobody could report them, even if they
wanted to. All the lines are jammed. And I bet you that somebody
will do just that. I know human nature, or at least I sometimes
believe that I do.

The second
shock that happened two hours ago was when Joey, one of our
French-speaking team, phoned l'Inspecteur Herbert in Béziers.
Scanning through Julia's narrative, it seemed opportune to try to
contact him.

“
You have
found her?” he exclaimed.

“
Found her?
Well, we know where she is. We didn't know you were looking for
her.”

“
Half of
France is looking for her. Half of the rest of Europe is supposedly
looking for her too. We want her in connection with the murder of
Mlle. Alice Picard, although we have yet to find her body. If you
have her, we would like to extradite her without any
delay.”

“
She is
dead.”

“
Oh.”

“
She died
this morning. She killed herself.”

“
Are you
sure?”

“
You think
someone killed her?”

“
No. I want
to make sure that she is dead.”

“
Yes, she is
definitely dead.”

“
Oh, I am
sorry.”

“
Yes, so are
we”

“
It is an odd
thing to say, perhaps. We need her for trial here.”

“
Too late, I
am afraid.”

“
Yes, that is
the end of our hopes. How did she die?”

“
She hanged
herself.”

“
How did she
manage to do that?”

“
With a rope.
We don't know how she got hold of it.”

“
Ah. We don't
have the death penalty in France.”

“
Nor in
Britain, I assure you.”

“
Not
officially, anyway.”

“
Not at
all.”

“
Well, thank
you for contacting me. We will need to talk again. I must make a
formal statement to the press here. I assume that I will be in a
position to provide copies of all your paperwork to my
superiors.”

“
We will be
pleased to co-operate with you.”

“
When will
that be?”

“
I am not
sure. Possibly three to four weeks, maximum two months.”

“
That is not
acceptable. This is a case of national importance.”

“
For us, too.
We will do our best.”

“
I will have
our Ministry of the Interior contact yours.”

“
You do
that.”

“
Thank
you.”

The third
shock came an hour ago. We had an e-mail from Records as they could
not get through by phone. There is only one record of a Julia
Blackburn. Two years ago, she formally changed her name from Julian
Benson. He never officially changed his sex.

Julian Benson.
I knew his mother, Lucy Benson, very well. I was madly in love with
her. I adored her. No wonder I was so fond of Julia. That is the
link - invisible but detectable. That energy between us, that
genetic affection.

Lucy was
magnificent, untouchable. She was considered too wild to be handled
as a child, too hot to be handled as a teenager, and too tragic to
be handled as an adult. She drove Tom Willows mad with the desire
of the unattainable, and me.

“
I realise
what I do to people,” she once told me, “and there is nothing I can
do about it. After what happened to me, I cannot stand anyone
anywhere near me. If you want me, John, you will have to rape me.
Maybe I will forgive you. Maybe it will cure me, but I will fight
you, and bite you, and scratch you, and kick you, and do anything
to stop you all the same.”

The savage
laser expression was quite enough to scare me off at the time. She
kept her nails more like talons, and she had already bitten me
once. It hurt like hell while she told me that she felt a lot for
me, that I was very special to her. Love hurts.

“
And
Tom?”

“
Tom? Tom?
Tom is a dog!” and she shook her hair in disgust.

What had
happened to her was Jeff Berringer, of course. And it was Mary
Knightly, her sister, who betrayed her to him. She came rushing
round to Lucy's foster parents' house one night, begging to speak
to Lucy. It was so urgent, it was a matter of life or
death.

“
Lucy, are
you up there?”

“
Yes.”

“
Can you come
down? Your sister, Mary, has something urgent she needs to talk to
you about.”

“
I'll be down
in a few minutes. There is just something I have to finish
off.”

When she
finally came down, Mary grabbed her arm. “You have got to come and
talk to them. I am desperate. You have got to help me.” Mary's
beseeching brown eyes are still very persuasive.

“
OK.”

Lucy rushed
round with Mary to where she lived. They ran into the house. Only
Jeff was there, in the sitting room, waiting for her. He grabbed
her coldly, and meticulously raped her, while Mary watched,
exultant. Mary was ten. Lucy was twelve.

But that is
not how Julian was born. Well, it sort of was, I
suppose.

* *
*

Another day,
and another shock. The French police have told us that they have
never heard of Mary Maloney.

We have
started our search for her body in the garden of Hanburgh House.
Nothing yet.

* *
*

I must take
some fresh air. With the renewed press attention, it is difficult
to decide where to go. I would naturally head for the pub, and have
a couple of pints and maybe something to eat, but I wouldn't get a
moment to myself in there. The reporters would pile in on me first,
then the good people of Hanburgh would descend for the late
pickings.

I decide to
walk up the dale. It is getting rather late, so I will not be going
very far, but it is peaceful climbing up the hill accompanied by
the clacking of my footsteps. I am passing Hanburgh House. From the
road I can see a light through the branches of the trees. There
should be nobody there that I know of. Forensics must have left
hours ago. Who else would be there?

I enter the
driveway, trying to step quietly over the gravel. As soon as I can,
I transfer to the grass which means tangling with the large conifer
tree that dominates the top part of the garden. The light is in the
hallway. There is no obvious sign of movement.

I peer up
close to the window. There is someone there. I can see a shadow.
Suddenly, a face looms up right opposite mine through the glass. It
is deathly pale, and yet totally recognisable. My brain screams
“Julia” at me, as I turn and run, and do not let up until I reach
the bottom of the hill and the heart of the village.

Maybe I was
wrong. Perhaps a car's headlights sweeping up the hill showed me my
own reflection. Sometimes, thinking back, it could have been Lucy.
In my memory, she seemed to be trying to kiss me through the glass.
That is the sort of thing Lucy would have done, Julia never.
However, on balance, and trying to lay all prejudices and
expectations aside, I am convinced it was Julia. I will swear it to
my dying day.

It was a
cowardly response to run away, a betrayal. I had been so close to
her over recent months, and yet also so far, as I am discovering.
However, when your survival instincts take over, and the danger
appears immediate and acute, you just leg it, don't you?

I went back
the next morning in the safer light of day. I have to admit that I
was, if not terrified, nervous to the extent of a trembling body
and icy skin. The light was still on in the hallway, and there was
not the slightest possibility of my going inside to turn it off. I
marched straight up the driveway this time, and peered sharply at
the window, ready to run, and initially from a much greater
distance. The sun glinted on the window. I had to move obliquely to
my left to slip the reflection, which also meant I had to edge
closer and closer to the window. I kept glancing into the sitting
room, daring another face to appear. Nothing yet, a step further,
nothing yet. At last, I had a clear view. The reflection had edged
into the corner. And there, in the middle of the window, at human
height, was some lipstick in the shape of a kiss.

* *
*

Mary Knightly
phones me at the station. The lines are clear now.

“
Is it
correct that Julia Blackburn was really Julian Benson, my
nephew?”

“
Yes, Mary,
that is correct. What a sad story. What a sorry waste of so many
lives.”

“
That makes
me her next of kin,” she ruminates.

I cannot
fucking believe it. In the midst of all this human misery, Mary is
counting her inheritance, creating it almost.

I chuckle. I
have never enjoyed saying anything as much as I enjoyed telling
Mary Knightly this. “Not exactly, Mary. I was his father. So, as I
say to all my clients, I'll see you in court.”

The protracted
silence at the other end of the line is most gratifying. I can
almost see her speechless face, her peevish eyes as she settles
down to concoct another plan.

* *
*

Julia, it is
your funeral today. It is turning into the usual media circus witch
hunt. The press knows it has discovered a perfect story of sex and
death, steeped with lashings of shame and degradation, to be
unearthed, like open-caste diamonds, with a minimum of digging. The
dust is stirring. I am about to be torn apart.

As a policeman
of over thirty years, I have experienced these atavistic rituals
before, where morality is deliberately outraged to stoke money.
There is so much cash to be made here, so many ephemeral
reputations that will ultimately only survive in career
reminiscences around a rowdy old codgers' beer-soaked table, so
much popular anger to unleash.

Barely
constrained below the surface of us all, lies the magma of outrage
against the world and its failure to deliver on its promises to us.
We complain about the injustices suffered by others, but only as a
reflection, as a star to a moon, of our own grievous
disappointments. Everything, but everything, we are told by our
parents, by school, by the media, by the church, and by politicians
is a lie, or at least an extreme over-sell, designed to make us
want to carry on.

I don't know
where we should start the cycle of life, but let us say that two
teenagers meet each other, as I met your mother. The promise is
that they will fall in love, albeit after a tense and complicated
act of courtship, have a fairy-tale marriage where they are the
stars and everyone smiles all the time, especially at key moments
of the ceremony such as the “I do”, the “I now declare you man and
wife”, the speeches, and the cutting of the cake. They go on to
have perfect little babies who will be brought up in wondrous
familial harmony to become handsome, exciting, professional
achievers, and renew the cycle with their own lives. The promise
rather glosses over our twilight years, except as supporting
players to the new generation.