Road Closed (36 page)

‘The electricity’s off,’ Sophie Cliff said casually, as though this was a normal power cut. ‘They never put it on again. You have to do everything yourself.’

Geraldine looked down at her hands, straining uselessly against the cord. She turned her attention to her ankles which seemed to be more loosely secured. If she had enough time, she thought she could work them free. With difficulty she hoisted herself into a kneeling position so her feet were behind her, hidden from view.

‘Sophie.’ She was relieved her voice sounded calm. ‘Untie me please. I want to help you.’

‘You let him go.’

‘What?’

‘It was you. I remember. You found him and you let him go.’ Sophie’s voice rose in a shrill crescendo. ‘He killed Tom and you let him walk away.’

‘Sophie, I want to help you. Believe me, I want to see Tom’s killer brought to justice as much as you do, but I have to work within the law.’ She resisted the hysteria threatening her composure.

‘Justice? Law?’ Sophie shrieked, losing all vestige of control. ‘There is no justice. Not in this world. But it’ll all be over very soon. You and me, we’re going to burn.’ She seized a candle and held it high above her head.

‘Sophie, put the candle down before there’s an accident.’ Geraldine rubbed her ankles together frantically. The cord was definitely loosening.

Sophie flung the candle on the bed, still attached to its saucer. Smothered by the folds of the duvet, the flame went out. She ran round the room, seizing candles and hurling them at the bed. ‘For Tom!’ she yelled. ‘For Tom!’ Only some of the candles went out. Geraldine watched, desperately trying to free her feet.

With a sudden rush the bed burst into flames. Geraldine groaned. Terror threatened to paralyse her. The pain in her ankles helped her remain alert. Scraping the skin off the top of one foot she broke free of the cord around her ankles and
leapt to her feet. Flames flickered up the wall. The wooden slats of the headboard began to hiss above the blazing bed.

Geraldine forced her legs to carry her forwards. She found herself praying. ‘God, get me out of this alive.’ A voice was whimpering in fear. Her ankles stung from chafing. Her eyes were smarting. Instinctively she ducked her head as she walked forwards, step by step.

Sophie Cliff was staring, aghast. Flames licked the ceiling. She clutched at Geraldine’s arm, as though she had just woken up to what was happening. ‘Help me. Please. Help.’ She swayed once then pitched forward, head first. Geraldine struggled to keep her balance as she stepped forward to break the other woman’s fall.

Geraldine walked backwards to the door, dragging Sophie across the carpet. It wasn’t easy, with her hands tied together. Smoke engulfed them. The heat was almost intolerable. The confusion of pain and terror threatened to overwhelm Geraldine, but she wasn’t alone. She focused her mind on saving the unconscious woman in her charge.

As soon as she managed to haul Sophie through the bedroom door, Geraldine leaned her shoulder against it and pushed it closed. There wasn’t much time. The room was about to reach flashpoint.

Sophie was so light, Geraldine was able to lean down and scoop her up, even with her hands tied. Holding Sophie across her outstretched forearms, she lurched along the landing and had nearly reached the stairs when her legs gave way. Behind her, she heard the roar of flames, accompanied by loud crackling sounds. The bedroom was ablaze. Spurred on by fear, Geraldine shuffled backwards on her elbows and knees, pulling Sophie along in her wake. When her feet reached the top step, she lost her grip on Sophie and fell, slithering down the stairs.

At the foot of the stairs she hesitated. She couldn’t remember if this was the house with a double locked security front door.
But first, she had to struggle back up for Sophie Cliff. She was halfway up the stairs, crawling on her elbows and knees, when she heard crashing and shouting. Over her shoulder she saw a bright light and two uniformed officers burst in.

‘Over here!’ Geraldine shouted. The hoarse whisper that issued from her lips was barely audible above the hissing of the flames.

‘I’ve got her,’ a man’s voice called out. ‘A female. On the stairs. We need medical assistance here right away.’

‘Fire!’ a second voice bellowed. ‘Any other doors or windows open?’

Geraldine tried to speak but at that moment the wooden railings of the banister above them burst into flames, hissing. She screamed.

‘Get her out of here!’ another voice shouted. A man was leaning over her. Lifting her.

‘There’s a woman up there. At the top of the stairs. She’s unconscious.’

‘Up there! Anyone else in the building?’ Two figures raced past her up the stairs.

Geraldine struggled to answer. ‘No one. I’m all right. I can walk.’ An officer ran down the stairs with Sophie Cliff across his shoulder. Geraldine followed and they hurried out of the building.

Outside, all seemed confusion, then uniformed constables had a cordon in place, a fire engine thundered up and was manoeuvred into position and a hose unfurled as the huge vehicle reversed slowly up the drive.

Geraldine waited by the gate. Her hands had been untied. She shivered inside a silver foil blanket someone had thrown over her shoulders. Fire officers brought the blaze under control.

‘You’re sure there’s no one else inside?’ a fire officer asked her, shouting above the noise.

‘We were here a couple of weeks ago,’ Geraldine heard a voice say as a small group of fire officers hurried past her. She watched as paramedics carried Sophie Cliff, still unconscious, into an ambulance.

‘She was lucky. You were nearly too late to save her,’ a fireman told Geraldine.

‘Ten days too late.’

The officer opened his mouth to reply, but Geraldine turned and limped away past the police cordon, through the gathering crowd of onlookers shocked into silence by the second calamity to close their road in as many weeks. She started up her engine and drove round the corner where she pulled over and sat, shocked and trembling. Her hands stung as she clutched the steering wheel. She felt utterly alone and wished Peterson had been with her at the end.

64

Life

Geraldine’s spirits sank as she pulled into the hospital car park. It took a frustrating few minutes before she manoeuvred the car into a tight space. The mortuary never fazed her but she disliked everything about hospitals. Perhaps it was the idea of people in pain that upset her. Corpses suffered only indignity. Sophie Cliff was the third patient Geraldine had been to see in Harchester General in almost as many days. No one had yet thanked her for visiting. Somehow she doubted if Sophie Cliff would be any different. Passing the hospital shop, she bought a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums. As soon as she paid for them, she regretted her impulse. They were half dead before they left the shop.

Unlike Gordon and Barker, Sophie wasn’t in a room by herself. Geraldine entered the ward and a strong smell of disinfectant hit her. A row of faces glanced up as she walked past. They wore a variety of hopeless expressions. Sophie Cliff lay at the far end of the ward, gazing listlessly up at the ceiling, white as the bed sheets. Geraldine almost didn’t recognise her without her glasses. She looked quite pretty in an ordinary kind of way.

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ Sophie greeted Geraldine as she approached. It sounded like an accusation. Geraldine clutched the weary bunch of chrysanthemums and wondered what to do with them. Sophie’s brows drew together. ‘What do you want?’

‘I just came by to see how you are, that’s all. I’m not here on an official visit.’

‘Not come to interrogate me then.’

‘No. Someone will be along to question you soon.’

Sophie turned her head away and Geraldine saw tears in her eyes. ‘Why did you do it?’ she whispered fiercely. ‘They must all think you’re a great heroine,’ Sophie turned to face Geraldine, suddenly angry, ‘rescuing me like that… I tried to kill you…’

‘Well, I’m still here.’ Geraldine tried to smile. ‘And so are you.’

‘You don’t understand. I should have stayed there in the house, like he did. In the smoke. I meant to do it. Only I was scared. The fire… I wanted to run away. You shouldn’t have been there. It shouldn’t be like this.’ She was crying in earnest now, her pale cheeks glistening. She made no attempt to wipe her face. ‘You should have left me there. You had no right to be there.’ Geraldine swallowed her meaningless platitudes. How could time heal Sophie Cliff’s wounds? It wouldn’t bring her husband back.

‘Why did you do it?’ Sophie asked again. She was staring at Geraldine now. ‘They told me what happened. You risked your own life to save mine, after I tried to kill you. Why?’ They gazed helplessly at one another for a moment. ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

Geraldine lay the flowers on the bed. ‘The courts will be sympathetic’

‘I didn’t mean that. I don’t care what they do to me. But how am I going to manage for the rest of my life without him?’

Geraldine turned and walked out of the ward. She didn’t look back.

‘Don’t worry, she’ll soon be up and about, right as rain,’ a sturdy nurse assured her. Geraldine hurried past without answering.

‘What did you expect?’ the DCI asked when Geraldine told him about the visit. He closed the door of her office, turned and raised his eyebrows at her.

‘She made me feel as though I’d done the wrong thing.’

‘That’s ridiculous. You saved the woman’s life. If you hadn’t been there, she almost certainly wouldn’t have made it. She has a chance now.’

‘I don’t think she wants a chance, sir.’ Geraldine stared wretchedly at the floor. ‘She chose to die and I prevented it.’

‘Well, if that’s what she wants, there’s nothing stopping her. Unless you plan to stand guard over her for the rest of her life. She still has the option to kill herself. There’s plenty that do. But she also has the option to live her life. And if it wasn’t for you, she wouldn’t have that choice. So please don’t start bleating on about saving the poor woman when all she wanted was to die. Chances are in a few years’ time she’ll have remarried and be – oh, I don’t know, raising a family, growing prize roses. Whatever it is people generally do when they choose to live their lives.’

‘Once she’s served her time.’

‘Yes. There is that. Well, perhaps a spell behind bars will help salve her conscience. And she deserves to be punished for what she did. Being miserable doesn’t give anyone the right to take the law into their own hands. Nothing sanctions that.’

‘I know. And I daresay the courts will be lenient, under the circumstances. I reckon they’ll find she was temporarily deranged after the death of her husband, don’t you think, sir?’

Ryder let out a vexed sigh. ‘Totally deranged, if you ask me. Round the bend and up the bloody wall.’

‘She had just lost her husband, sir.’

‘My point exactly. Anyone who gets married and wants to stay that way has to be completely barking.’ With that enigmatic statement, the DCI left the room, leaving Geraldine to wonder, not for the first time, about his personal circumstances. She had been working closely with James Ryder for three weeks, but she knew nothing about him.

65

Friends

Geraldine spent the following day finishing off her final report and packing up her things. There was still paperwork to tie up, but the investigation was over. The flimsy internal wall of Geraldine’s office shook as someone knocked. Before she could respond, the door opened and Peterson stuck his head in. ‘Are you coming, gov? We’re all off to the pub.’

‘You’re looking cheerful today.’

‘We sorted it out.’ He stepped into the office and closed the door.

‘Sorted it out?’

‘Me and Bev. It was this, funnily enough.’ He pointed at his black eye. ‘You’d think it would’ve put her off but soon as she saw it she was all over me. So we’re back on. Till the next time.’ He grinned. ‘She said we belong together.’

Geraldine smiled back, wondering if anyone would ever say that to her. She didn’t even belong in her own family. She turned away, suddenly brisk. ‘That’s great. Now, I must get packed up here –’

‘Sure. Sorry, gov. See you over the road.’ The wall trembled as he closed the door. Geraldine sat down at her desk and opened a drawer stuffed with papers. She sighed and began rifling through them.

She had just about finished when James Ryder strode in.

‘Still working, Geraldine?’ He sounded put out but when she looked up she saw he was smiling. ‘You coming for a drink?’ Geraldine wished fleetingly it was a personal invitation from
a man who wanted to spend time with a woman, not a DCI summoning his DI to a team drink at the end of a case.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Is everything all right?’ He hovered just inside the room.

‘Yes, thank you sir.’ She turned to collect her coat which she had thrown on the filing cabinet behind her.

She heard the door close but when she turned round, Ryder was inside the room. ‘I always feel a bit low when a case ends,’ he confessed. ‘Once the adrenaline rush fades, and there’s nothing left but paperwork.’ Geraldine nodded, uncertain how to respond. ‘But we’ve done a good job, so let’s go drink to that. Come on, there’s someone over the road who wants to see you.’

‘Yes, sir.’ For a second their eyes met, then he turned and left. The image of his tall figure lingered in her mind. With a sigh she pulled on her coat and left the room. It was no longer her office. There would be no more visits from James Ryder. Geraldine wondered if they would work together again.

The pub was packed. Geraldine saw Kathryn Gordon at the bar, beaming, and made her way over. The DCI’s face had lost its grey sheen. She looked more robust than ever. Geraldine wondered with a pang if she would work with James Ryder again, now that Kathryn Gordon was back. She looked around but couldn’t see him. She turned to Kathryn Gordon.

‘You look great, ma’am. You look as though you’ve just had a holiday.’

Kathryn Gordon was not so kind. ‘I wish I could say the same for you, Geraldine. You look washed out. I hope you haven’t been overdoing things? You’re a valuable officer. You have to look after yourself.’