Fragile Cord (9 page)

You know Carl, you wouldn’t believe the
day I’ve had either…

Shivering, she stepped out of the
shower, drying herself roughly on an oversized towel before
throwing on an old sweatshirt and jeans. She towel dried her hair,
staring into the mirror to see if the day had left a visible mark
as well as the scar on her soul. She closed her eyes, tried to
focus on happy thoughts. Stepping into Ben’s room, her spirits
soared at his sleepy smile when he saw her approach his bed.
Lifting the covers she slipped in beside him, held him close as she
breathed in his little boy scent – buttery toast and Play-Doh.

He was warm.
Alive
. She clung onto
him like a limpet, pushing all bad thoughts out of her head.
Blinked away images of Kyle Kavanagh in the bath, cold and bruised
and dead.

Was it possible to look into the eyes
of your child and see how he’d turn out? Sometimes, when she
studied Ben, she’d glimpse the man that he’d become. It was there
in his face, in the set of his jaw. The turbulent teen; the
faithful friend; the apple of her eye. This transition into manhood
was already creeping up on them and soon, before she was ready, the
hugs he gave her now would drop away, that sooner than she’d like
he’d stop holding her hand to cross the road. One day he would
shrink from her touch and grunt answers to her questions, but would
he have changed so much where it mattered? The thought of him no
longer needing her was terrifying. She gave him a squeeze, nuzzled
into the nape of his neck.

‘You’re squashing me.’ He chided before
falling asleep. She kissed him on the top of his head then quietly
slipped out of the room.

Her new suit lay on the bedroom floor
where she’d discarded it. She picked it up, placing it carefully
onto its hanger. She pulled off threads from the carpet that had
stuck to the skirt; straightening creases, brushing make-up from
the lapel. She wondered if the fibres were from Angus’s clothing
when she’d pulled him away from his son; if the make-up was
Tracey’s.

It was a beautiful suit.

Expensive.

She never wore it again.

It was probably the point when
the pathologist folded the baby’s face forward to expose its skull
that Coupland hoped he’d seen it all. That once this was over,
nothing else could ever shock him. Surely, he thought now, as he
looked as the stretched skin and tissue that had once been Tracey’s
Kavanagh’s unborn child, nothing could be more disturbing to watch
than the examination of an innocent, snuffed out by his mother
before he’d taken his first gasp of air.

The hospital mortuary was a
large dank room with tiled walls. A corridor behind double doors
led off to the fridges where the dead awaited their final
inspection alongside cadavers donated and stored for the medical
school.

There was a stone sink, a metal
trolley laid with surgical instruments, and a set of weighing
scales perched on a work surface beneath a wipe-clean board. In the
middle of the room stood a rectangular metal table upon which lay
the un-named baby of Angus and Tracey Kavanagh.

The palms on Coupland’s hands
began to sting, and when he looked down he saw that he’d been
clenching his fists so tightly his fingernails had cut through his
skin, leaving a trail of bloodied half-moons. He looked over at
Alex standing on the other side of the table, raised his eyebrows
at her, silently signalling his concern:

Are you OK?

She nodded.

A thousand unspoken questions
passed between them:

How could she?

What was she thinking?

What kind of a woman could do
this?

What kind of
a
mother….?

Alex’s stricken face told him she
thought there was more she could’ve done, as though Tracey and
Kyle’s death were her fault because she hadn’t arrived in time to
stop the young mother taking their fate into her own hands. Despite
knowing it would be futile, Coupland had tried to reassure Alex
that she could’ve done no more but she was determination to beat
herself up. Back and forth they served and volleyed each silent
question, and they continued to parry like this until Benson opened
the baby’s skull with a saw, began his inspection of the brain.

Jesus
, this time Coupland found
himself unable to meet Alex’s eye,
surely
it didn’t get more soul destroying than this…

It had been hard enough to
stand through Kyle’s post-mortem, and afterwards, he’d stood in the
car park smoking his way through a packet of Silk Cut listening to
the vitriol that poured from Alex’s mouth as she used words he’d
never heard her utter before to describe her feelings towards the
young mother that was now Tracey Kavanagh, deceased. There’d been
no stopping her, so he’d resigned himself to listening to her
barrage of anger as he mentally prepared himself for the next
examination.

It was better
in a way, he thought, that she vented these feelings while she was
at work, rather than take them home. He blew out his cheeks,
shaking his head in disbelief. Christ, since when was
he
an expert in
relationships? He lit a fresh fag from the dying embers of the last
one while he’d searched for an answer to
that
.

It wasn’t that he disapproved
of Alex’s antagonism towards Tracey Kavanagh; in many ways this
case was too personal for his DC to deal with objectively. Tracey
was no older than Alex. Both were attractive young mothers with
their lives ahead of them. Watching Benson dissect Tracey’s corpse
had been a grim reminder of Alex’s own mortality. It wasn’t
something anyone came to terms with easily. It was just that,
having sat through the young woman’s post-mortem and the removal of
her foetus for further investigation, Coupland felt drained.

He’d stood by watching Benson
togged up in his surgical gown and gloves lean over the woman’s
body and rummage wrist-deep inside her womb, working a sharp knife
to release her unborn child. He’d tried to train his gaze so it
stayed on her face, her alabaster skin contrasting sharply with
long black hair, sightless eyes gazing up towards heaven or
wherever the place was that people went to when they left their
body by their own hand, but it was impossible. The sound of blood
sloshing into the gulley beneath the table soon drew his eyes
downwards, back towards the open cavity and the sight of Benson
examining Tracey’s baby before placing it into a metal basket at
the end of the table.

It had been hard enough
watching Angus Kavanagh crumple at the sight of his wife and child
laid out before him, nothing but useless platitudes to offer him as
he wept beside their bodies. No longer capable of either opinion or
thought, Coupland wanted to be done, to be out of there. The smell
was beginning to get to him too.

Severed organs and
disinfectant.

What he really wanted was to
hold Lynn tight, tell her that he loved her, that he’d never
stopped, that he was an idiot alright but her was her idiot. She’d
been late home last night from her exercise class, told him she’d
stopped off for a drink with the girls. By the time he’d followed
her to bed she was spark out, or pretending to be.

Had he lost her already?

Pushing the thought right out
of his mind he focussed on the present, just in time to see Benson
remove the baby’s tiny brain so he could weigh it. At this point
Coupland dipped his head and stared at his shoes, noticed they’d
lost their shine.

Turnbull was making headway. During the
immediate hours following Ricky Wilson’s assault he’d ordered the
pub landlord to lock everyone indoors to prevent anyone from
leaving the premises before they’d been questioned. It had been a
painstaking task, made worse by the amount of alcohol consumed and
the fact that half the punters had been off their faces. He’d drawn
a map of the wine bar and labelled every table, identified each
drinker with a number and marked down where they’d been sitting or
whereabouts near the bar they’d been standing when the assault had
taken place. Over the last couple of days he’d cross referenced
each statement, corroborating with each drinker – or as much as was
possible under the circumstances – who’d they’d been sat with or
near, and whether anyone remembered someone slipping in or out of
the bar during the minutes leading up to Ricky Wilson getting
stabbed.

At first, he’d blamed the reticence of
the crowd that evening on a general unwillingness to get involved,
the universal
can’t be arsed
attitude of the public in
general. It had gnawed at him, that a local man could be attacked
in front of his family, and instead of outrage he’d come across a
gutless acknowledgement that these things happen, as long as they
happen to someone else. But now he had second thoughts, had reason
to believe it was more than that. He’d run routine checks on the
names of the drinkers he’d interviewed from that evening, the
majority of the regulars were pretty unremarkable. Nothing out of
the ordinary: possession of controlled substances, speeding fines;
driving without insurance; nothing there to concern him at all. But
then he’d looked more closely at the staff…

“The body of a six year old boy and a
young woman thought to be his mother were found dead in their home
on the outskirts of Salford yesterday evening. A Police
spokesperson has advised that they are not looking for anyone else
in connection with this investigation.”

The news bulletin was brief and
raised more questions than answers, answers Coupland wasn’t sure
they’d ever uncover. After the post mortem he and Alex had returned
to the station to determine what preliminary investigations needed
to be completed before preparing a report for the coroner’s office.
The officers assembled in the CID room were irritable and jumpy, no
one liked cases like these, everything about them represented a
waste – of life, of resources, of their own bloody energy. Danger
was supposed to lurk in dark corners, to jump out when least
expected, not manifest itself in the one thing that embodied
security and love – a mother.

‘Tracey had returned home from
the school run.’ Coupland began, ‘She’d stopped off at the local
supermarket on the way over to school to pick up groceries. The
time on the till receipt tells us that she went to the supermarket
straight before school – it’s about a ten minute drive away, and
that she was at the check-out by 3.20pm, time enough to drive from
there to school to pick up Kyle before returning home.’

Coupland’s voice was
professional, devoid of emotion. Which was the exact opposite of
what he was feeling. The catalogue of Tracey’s actions leading up
to her suicide was grotesquely powerful, each word like a hammer
blow to the stomach and he watched the officers around him flinch,
shifting around uncomfortably for there was nowhere to vent their
anger. No evil bastard to hunt down.

‘Her husband found their bodies
when he returned home just before five pm.’ Coupland looked around
the room; to a man he could see they were thinking

the same thought:

What had it been like for Angus
Kavanagh to come home and stumble upon carnage like that?

Each officer imagining him or
herself in Angus’s shoes, opening the front door to their own
homes……

Robinson sat frozen, head
bowed. Turnbull, grim-faced, had turned to stone. Coupland was
unable to think of anything to lift the men from their thoughts,
yet he could see he needed to bring them back. ‘By the time Angus
found them,’ he emphasised, ‘both Kyle and his mother had been dead
for some time.’

He aimed this comment pointedly
at Alex, who was seated to his left, to emphasise that she could
have done nothing more for this family, that her conscience was
clear. Several pairs of eyes turned in her direction as she studied
a file in front of her; she glanced up to see approval and sympathy
in equal measure. Forcing her lips into a smile, she acknowledged
Coupland’s gesture.

She looked pale and drawn, he
thought, nothing a decent night’s sleep couldn’t fix. He doubted
anything could be done for the dullness that remained behind her
eyes.

‘When are Kavanagh’s parent’s
arriving?’ he asked.

‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ she
replied. ‘I said I’d pick them up from the airport, get a chance to
suss out their opinion of their daughter-in-law privately before
they go and see their son.’

Coupland
nodded. ‘O.K.’ then: ‘Can you pay a visit to the school? Find out
what impression the other mothers had of Tracey,
and
the father for that
matter.’

‘I’ve still got the names from
their address book to go through,’ Alex reminded him, ‘do you want
me to carry on with that?’

Coupland nodded. ‘Might as
well, we need to get as complete a picture of this family as we
can.’ A pause, ‘I’m going to go back to speak to the husband,’ he
added, ‘find out more about him and his business,’ he pictured the
PC’s notebook with the word happy underlined several times, ‘I want
to find out how rosy everything really was in their garden.’

‘But it was a suicide,
yes?’

He heard the hope in Alex’s
voice, her desire that this was a cleverly constructed murder laid
bare for everyone to see.

Mothers did not kill their
children.

‘C’mon Alex,’ He said evenly,
‘you know the statistics.’

It was true enough, despite the
uproar every time a paedophile snatched a small child, the grim
reality was that most child murders were committed by a family
member, a close one at that.

So much for Stranger Danger.

‘There was no sign of a break
in, nothing stolen, in fact the house was a picture of calm.’