Echoes of the Dead (7 page)

‘Tell me about her friends,' Woodend said softly.

‘She didn't really have any – not after her dad died. It was like . . . it was like, lookin' after him robbed her of somethin'.'

‘It forced her to grow up quickly,' Sergeant Bannerman said.

And he sounded as if he thought that that was a
good
thing, Woodend told himself – as though Bannerman believed that childhood innocence was a thing to be discarded as rapidly as possible.

‘That's the thing, it
didn't
make her grow up,' Mrs Dawson said. She shook her head in frustration, desperate to express herself and yet unable to find quite the right words. ‘It . . . it froze her,' she concluded, finally.

‘I'm afraid I really have no idea what you're talking about, Mrs Dawson,' Bannerman said.

Then you should bloody well take a few lessons in sensitivity! Woodend thought angrily.

‘What you mean is, she stayed the little girl that she'd been when her dad took ill,' he said to Mrs Dawson.

‘That's right,' the woman agreed, gratefully. ‘She clung on to her dolls, long after all the other girls had got bored with them. An' then there were the animals.'

‘What animals?' Bannerman asked.

Mrs Dawson stood up. ‘Come an' see,' she said.

She led them into the backyard. Next to the hand-turned mangle stood a rabbit hutch, in which three plump complacent rabbits twitched their pink noses and scratched at the straw.

‘It wasn't just rabbits she kept,' Mrs Dawson said. ‘There were her guinea pigs and hamsters as well. An' just before she . . . just before she died, she was mitherin' me to get a budgerigar. She'd have turned the whole house into a zoo, if I'd let her.' She paused for a moment. ‘I . . . I don't know what to do with the rabbits now she's gone.'

‘I'm sure there's some little kid down the street who'll be glad of them,' Woodend said.

They all went back into the house.

‘Would it be all right if we had a quick look at Lilly's bedroom?' Woodend asked.

‘Why would you want to go in there?' Mrs Dawson wondered, with something close to panic in her voice.

‘It might assist us in gettin' a clearer picture of Lilly,' Woodend told her.

‘But I don't see how that would help,' the grieving mother protested.

No, she wouldn't, Woodend thought.

Because, to her, her daughter's death had nothing to do with Lilly herself. The girl had been killed by an evil man – a monster – and there wasn't anything that Lilly had done – or had failed to do – which could have prevented it.

She had to think that way, of course, because the idea that Lilly had contributed to the tragedy would have been unbearable to her.

But the sad fact was that while some victims were selected randomly, others were chosen because of a weakness that the killer detected in them – and while he thought that he already knew what Lilly's weakness was, he needed to go the girl's room to confirm it.

‘I don't know . . . I'm not sure that I want you to . . .' Mrs Dawson said hesitantly.

He was within his rights to insist, of course, but he didn't want to do that unless he absolutely had to.

‘What about if I left Sergeant Bannerman here – to keep you company – an' just went for quick look myself?' he suggested.

‘Well . . .' Mrs Dawson said, weakening.

‘I promise you, I won't disturb anything,' Woodend pressed her.

Mrs Dawson shrugged, as if she wanted to continue resisting but didn't have the strength.

‘It's the second door on the left, at the top of the stairs,' she said.

‘I'll not be more than five minutes,' Woodend promised her.

And then he shot a look in his sergeant's direction which he hoped would convey the message that, while he
was
upstairs, he didn't want Bannerman saying anything that would make Mrs Dawson feel any worse than she already did.

SIX

H
ow the hell can Lilly's room be the second on the left?' Woodend wondered, as he climbed the steep stairs which led to the first floor of Elsie Dawson's home. ‘There is no second on the left.'

At least, he amended, there'd been no second on the left in
any other
terraced cottage he'd ever visited. Two-up two-down was what this type of house was called, and two-up two-down was exactly what you got – one bedroom over the front parlour, and another over the kitchen.

And yet, when he reached the top of the stairs, he saw that there was not just the small landing he had been expecting, but a narrow corridor to his left, with two doors opening on to it.

He opened the first door, and looked inside.

‘Well, bugger me!' he said softly to himself.

The house had a
bathroom
! The Dawson family didn't need to go
outside
to the toilet on cold, wet winter nights. They didn't need to bathe in a large tin bath in front of the kitchen fire. They – unlike most of the other working-class families in Whitebridge, including Woodend's own parents – had an
indoor
bathroom!

Up until that moment, he had been picturing Mr Dawson as the helpless invalid he must have been towards the end of his life. What he was looking at now changed all that. It showed him a man who had so wanted to make a comfortable home for his wife and daughter that he had done what few men from his background would ever dream of doing – he had scrimped and saved and built them a bathroom.

The man was a hero, Woodend thought – not the towering hero of legend, but a hero nevertheless. And his death, which already seemed tragic enough, took on a new poignancy.

The journey from the dead man's monument to the dead girl's bedroom was just two short steps along the cramped corridor.

Lilly's room looked out on to the back yard, where she had kept her rabbits. It was small, and furnished with only a single bed and a cheap dressing table. There was a shelf above the bed, where most kids would have kept their books, but Lilly seemed to have no interest in reading, and instead the shelf was filled, from end to end, with stuffed toys – most of them cuddled threadbare.

Woodend sighed. What he was seeing was pretty much what he had
expected
to see – but, even forewarned, it was still sad.

What did come as a surprise were the drawings. They were pinned to the walls, and there were so many of them that very little of the purple-flowered wallpaper underneath managed to show through.

Some of the pictures were of animals – rabbits, hamsters and donkeys, inexpertly but loving drawn – but the majority of them were of a girl and a man.

‘So why are there no pictures of her mother?' Woodend said softly.

Then, as he studied the pictures in more detail, the answer to his question slowly came to him – and, as it came, he started to feel nauseous.

The girls in the pictures never varied. They were all excessively small – totally out of proportion to the men – and had a desperate fragility about them. None of the men, in contrast, looked like any of the others. Some had dark hair, some were fair. Some smoked a pipe, others a cigarette. The only thing that they had in common was that they were holding the little girl's hand.

There are no pictures of her mother because her mother's not bloody well
dead
, Woodend thought, angry with himself that he'd taken so long to grasp this simple point.

What he was looking at, he now realized, were not pictures of her
real
dad – she had seen him slowly waste away, and knew he was not coming back.

No, they were an attempt to create a
new
dad for herself – someone who would fill the aching void she felt deep inside her.

She had tried, and she had failed. None of the men had seemed quite right, and so she had kept on drawing, hoping against hope that she could eventually produce a figure who she could believe in.

Her coloured pencils lay on the dressing table. They were Lakeland brand, Woodend noted, some of the most expensive available. Lilly's mother, living on a meagre widow's pension, must have thought long and hard before buying them. So perhaps the fact that she
had
bought them meant she understood her daughter's need, and had seen to it that she had best tools available to her as she embarked on her hopeless quest.

He picked up one the pencils, and saw that the end had been bitten into so deeply that the coloured lead was exposed.

‘It didn't really help, did it, Lilly?' he asked, as he felt a great wave of sadness wash over him. ‘However hard you tried to draw yourself a new dad, it didn't really help.'

He found himself thinking of his daughter, Annie – who, as his mother had pointed out, resembled the dead girl in so many ways.

The two girls' faces merged together in his mind, and he pictured Annie in this room, drawing frantically as tears slowly slid down her cheeks.

‘Don't do it, Charlie,' he told himself urgently. ‘For Christ's sake, don't bloody do it!'

But the idea was in his head – the connection was made – and the thought would simply not go away.

He imagined Annie being dragged into a car against her will . . . taken to a shed on an abandoned allotment . . . having her legs roughly forced apart as she screamed out for a little kindness . . . gasping desperately as her killer's hands closed around her throat . . .

He felt the sudden urge to vomit.

‘Easy, Charlie!' he ordered himself, as he tried to regulate his breathing. ‘Remember who you are. You're a hardbitten copper – a professional – an' you should be able to keep all this under control.'

But he was fighting a losing battle – and he knew it.

He turned and rushed from Lilly's bedroom to the bathroom. He only just had time to lean over the toilet bowl before his stomach heaved and all the sadness – and all the anger and all the fear – came spewing out.

It was a full ten minutes before Woodend felt he could face the world again, and even then his legs were still shaking as he re-entered the kitchen.

Bannerman was sitting at the table, a copy of the
Evening Telegraph
spread out in front of him, and his lips set in a supercilious twist. There was no sign of the woman.

‘Where's Mrs Dawson?' Woodend demanded.

Bannerman looked up. ‘She said she needed to go outside for a breath of fresh air,' he replied, with marked unconcern.

‘Why was that?' Woodend asked, suspiciously. ‘You've not said anythin' to upset her, have you?'

‘Me?' Bannerman said, with a look of comic surprise on his face.

‘Well, I don't see anybody else in the room, so, yes, I do mean
you
,' Woodend countered.

‘Now what could
I
possibly have said to upset her?' Bannerman wondered innocently.

‘Do you want me to give you a list?' Woodend demanded. ‘Because, if you do, it'll be a bloody long one!' He sighed. ‘Sorry, lad, I didn't mean it. I needed to lash out at somethin' – an' you just happened to be in the way.'

‘That's all right, sir,' Bannerman said, with easy grace. ‘What's that you've got in your hand?'

Woodend looked down, and – though he didn't even remember picking them up – saw that he was holding some of Lilly's pictures.

‘Look at these,' he said, laying them out on the table.

Bannerman studied the drawings for a few moments, then said, ‘Well, if we're to believe her mother, she may indeed have been immature in some ways – but she certainly seemed to have a very grown-up attitude to men.'

An' to think, it's barely a minute since I apologized to this bastard! Woodend thought angrily.

‘Are we lookin' at the same pictures, do you think, Sergeant?' he asked, in a tone which was much leveller than the rage he was feeling inside.

‘I'm sorry, sir?'

‘Aye, an' so you bloody well should be! From what you've just said, it sounds as if you think she was the kind of girl who was so hot for men that she had no elastic in her knickers.'

‘Well, you must admit, she did seem to have had something of an obsession for the opposite sex,' Bannerman replied.

For the briefest of instants, Woodend seriously contemplated showing his sergeant the error of his ways by the simple expedient of smashing his fist in Bannerman's face and breaking his upper-middle-class nose. But the moment passed, and before he had time to substitute a verbal beating for the – much more satisfying – physical one, the back door opened, and Mrs Dawson walked into the kitchen.

‘I . . . err . . . I needed to get out for a bit,' she said to Woodend.

‘Aye, love, my sergeant said,' Woodend replied, as he noted that she had obviously been crying again. ‘We've got a few more questions,' he continued. ‘Do you feel strong enough to answer them?'

‘I . . . I think so.'

‘Then sit yourself down, an' it'll be all over before you know it.'

Mrs Dawson sat, deliberately positioning herself so that, while she could look directly at Woodend, Bannerman was just out of her line of vision.

‘Did anythin' unusual happen in the week before your Lilly disappeared?' Woodend asked softly.

‘Unusual?' Mrs Dawson repeated.

‘Did you, for example, see any strangers hangin' around in the street?'

Mrs Dawson shook her head. ‘That sort of thing doesn't happen round here, Chief Inspector. People would notice strangers. They'd ask them what they thought they were doin'.'