The Pure in Heart (21 page)

He did not want Martha to have a bleak cremation, over in ten minutes, the whole thing shoved out of the way as if they were ashamed, and he knew that Cat, the only firm believer and regular churchgoer in the family, would side with him. But Cat was in no state at the moment to join him in a fight with their father and Simon wondered if he had the heart and strength
to go it alone if it was going to upset his mother so much.

‘Her room looked so bright,’ Meriel said now, ‘the red balloon and your flowers.’

‘Shirley had painted her fingernails pink and tied that ribbon in her hair. She loved her.’

His mother looked across at him, her eyes distant. ‘How strange,’ she said slowly. ‘How strange that was.’

She looked up sharply as Richard Serrailler’s car stopped
outside.

‘It’s OK,’ Simon said, putting his hand out and covering hers across the table.

His father came briskly into the kitchen. ‘That’s done.’

Meriel got up to make fresh coffee.

The morning’s post was in a pile on the table and Richard Serrailler picked off the top letter, read for a few seconds, then looked up at Simon.

‘Why aren’t you out catching criminals?’ he said with a small smile.

‘If the phone hadn’t rung at that moment, and it hadn’t been Chris with the news, I honestly think I might have punched him in the face.’

‘How very suitable for a DCI,’ Cat said, speaking to Simon, but looking down at her infant son.

The light from the bedside lamp shone in a soft circle on the two of them as they lay together in the high hospital bed.

It was just after six in the evening.
Simon sat beside her looking at the charmed circle. ‘Damn, I wish I’d brought my sketch pad. It’s perfect.’

Cat smiled. ‘Plenty of other times … we’re not going anywhere.’

‘Sam and Hannah been in?’

‘Of course. Sam made his aeroplane take-off noise the whole time and Hannah was pink with pleasure.’

‘So am I.’

When Chris had phoned, seconds after Richard Serrailler’s cynical remark about catching
criminals, Simon had felt a lift of the heart which made him realise how low he had been.

‘What did Mother say?’

‘The inevitable … the one about heaviness lasting a night …’

‘… but joy cometh in the morning … Well, someone had to.’

‘Odd how it’s so often true though … a death and then a new life.’

‘Every day,’ Cat rubbed her son’s back gently, before putting him to the other breast, ‘every,
every day.’

‘Has he a name?’

‘He has two. Felix Daniel.’

Simon watched his new nephew snuggle into the breast, his mouth working, eyes tightly closed and a wave of emotion came roaring up through him. There was no one else in the world before whom he could have wept openly as he did now.

Cat reached out her hand to him. She thought when he had gone that tears might overcome her too, but Simon
had pent-up emotion which had been simmering since Freya’s murder. Martha’s death and now this new birth had released it and she was glad. But she said nothing, merely kept her hand on his. Now was not the time for a doctor’s pious words.

After a few moments, he got up and went into her bathroom. She heard the taps running. Felix nuzzled more deeply into her breast and his fingers curled in bliss.

The door opened on Chris as Simon emerged, his fair hair wet, his face slightly flushed.

‘OK, I’m off … I think I’m going to sleep the clock round.’

Simon bent and kissed his sister and cupped his hand round Felix’s damp, warm head. ‘Good,’ he said, and left, touching Chris briefly on the arm as he went out.

In the corridor, he stood to blow his nose, and wipe his arm over his eyes again. His
hand was shaking.

‘Remember, you’re a policewoman not a friend. You’re on our side not theirs. You don’t go native on us.’

The reminder from the DCI had been necessary at times like this, when Kate had to keep out of the way and be tactful and unobtrusive, yet to see and hear and pass on everything she heard of the row between the Anguses. An FLO was just that – a liaison between the family and the
police, not a counsellor nor a shoulder to cry on, not a family friend. It was a thin tightrope on which to balance and Kate had already caught herself siding with Marilyn.

They had been in the kitchen making a cottage pie, Kate peeling potatoes, Marilyn browning the mince, when the front door had slammed. It was not much after six and Alan Angus had not been home earlier than eight since Kate
had been here.

Marilyn had looked at her in alarm and gone quickly through to the hall, leaving Kate to pull the meat off the gas ring.

‘What’s happened?’ she heard Marilyn say urgently. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘What do you mean? Nothing’s wrong.’

‘Have they rung you? Have you heard something?’

‘No. You’re the one with the police here, you’ll be the one to hear anything.’

‘Then why are you early?
You’re never this early.’

‘Just a cancelled operation … it does happen.’

‘It never happens.’

‘Death happens and this patient died. All right?’

‘Alan, I have to talk to you … it’s very hard to do that.’

‘Why ever should it be?’

‘You’re never here.’

‘I’m here now.’

‘You’ve cut yourself off from me … and from Lucy. She notices.’

‘What good would it do for me to stay in the house all day?
Would it help find him? Would it help you or Lucy? Not to mention my patients?’

‘Oh yes, your patients.’

‘If you can convince me I’d be better hanging about here with you all day instead of doing my job I’ll happily stay.’

The voices retreated as Alan Angus headed for the stairs and his wife followed.

Kate finished peeling the potatoes, cut them up and put them in a pan of water, then looked
around for a carrot. As she did so her phone rang.

‘DC Marshall.’

‘Hi Kate, it’s Nathan.’

‘Something happened?’

‘Not much … only something came up as a result of the recon. Bloke phoned this morning. He’s just been in. He’s a cyclist. Says at first nothing clicked, only when he got to work he remembered.’

‘What?’

‘Remembered that he saw David Angus standing at the gate … his school bag was
on the ground … he was looking up the road … round about ten past eight.’

‘And?’

‘And that’s it.’

‘Oh.’

‘So eyewitness … he was definitely there.’

‘Well, we knew that already …’

‘Mightn’t have … might have been a wind-up.’

‘How?’

‘Dad might have come back. Said he was taking him after all.’

‘Oh come on. Anyway, forensics have been all over the dad’s car – always do. You know as well as
I do – suspect the parents first, so try and pin it on them first. Well, they couldn’t. Did the cyclist see anything else?’

‘Nope. Sorry.’

‘OK. Thanks, Nathan.’

Kate found a sharp knife and an onion and began to slice it, with the cold tap running the way her mother had always done, and which wasn’t a damn bit of use for stopping your eyes watering.

So now she had to tell the Anguses that
there was news, but no news … nothing they didn’t already
have. If only the man on the bike had been a minute or two later, he might … But you couldn’t think like that. Deal in facts, she’d learned over and over again, never speculation. Never dash hopes but never build them up either. Stick to what you know, don’t indulge in fantasies, don’t get involved in theirs …

From upstairs she heard their
voices, raised and angry. The slam of a wardrobe door. One single shout of anguish.

She went out of the kitchen as Marilyn was coming down, hands to her head, her face contorted with tears and rage.

‘Don’t say it’s all right, because it’s not … it’s never going to be all right again. What’s happened? You’ve heard something …’

Kate led her into the kitchen.

All over Lafferton David Angus’s
face looked out from posters, in shop windows, and the windows of houses, on noticeboards, in pubs and clubs, the library, the sports centre, the swimming pool. But not only over Lafferton; now, the poster had been taken up countrywide. David Angus, the nine-year-old schoolboy with an earnest face and protruding ears, saw, if he could have seen, mothers pull their own children closer to them and schoolteachers
watch anxiously at school gates and in playgrounds; heard, if he could have heard, what everyone said about ‘that poor child’, ‘those poor parents’; and worse, heard the words ‘dead’ and
‘murdered’ and, most frequently of all, the word ‘hopeless’.

As Simon Serrailler walked down the blue carpet towards the exit doors of the maternity wing at Bevham General, David Angus’s eyes followed him from
the noticeboards. He realised that the extreme tiredness he felt was partly the result of hunger. There was precious little in his larder and the last thing he felt like was eating out, even in a pub, but the sight of the Sprat and Mackerel Fish Shop on the corner of March Street was cheering.

He bought freshly cooked haddock and extra chips, had them double-wrapped and sped down the road towards
home.

The sound of the silence as he opened the front door had never been more welcome. He closed the wooden shutters against the wet night, switched on the lamps, and put his supper in the warming oven, before pouring himself a large glass of Laphroaig. He was not a big drinker, especially when at home alone, so that what he had now would be plenty to relax him and take the edge off his tiredness
and the chill in his bones which he knew was more emotional than physical.

He would eat and drink, make coffee and read – not the new biography of Stalin which he had bought the previous day; glass in hand, he browsed along his bookshelves.
The Diary of a Nobody
.
Three Men in a Boat
… but he knew he did not want to laugh and in the end took down a
Hornblower novel he had not reread for some years.

Before eating, he rang in to the station.

‘Is Nathan still there?’

‘Just gone, sir.’

‘Anything happened?’

‘Afraid not … most people have called it a day … they’re all a bit dispirited.’

‘I know. Everyone needs a good night’s sleep.’

Except the people who most need it, he thought, putting down the phone, the Anguses. The FLO had told him Marilyn Angus only slept when she took one of the tablets
Chris had prescribed for her but that she hated doing so, in case there was news and she needed to be alert.

And David? Was he sleeping? Or dead?

Some lines danced through Simon’s head.

From the kitchen came the smell of warming paper. He opened the oven door and was about to take out the plate and the package of fish and chips when his doorbell rang. He remembered Chris saying that he might
call round on his way home, and went to the intercom.

‘Hi, Chris, come on up.’

He went to meet his brother-in-law at the flat door.

‘Hi …’

But it was not Chris Deerbon who came up the last flight of stairs towards him.

‘Hello, Simon. I took advantage … I realise it wasn’t me you were expecting.’

The last person, Simon thought, the last person in the world.

‘Diana.’

He stood in the doorway
looking at her and she was a total stranger, this tall, red-headed, slim woman, smart, scented, well-made-up. He did not know her. Had he ever known her? Yes, in another life, when he had been another person.

‘What are you doing here?’

He did not want to let her in. The flat, his sacred space, was forbidden to her. She had never been inside it. They had never met in Lafferton at all.

‘You’re
hard to track down.’

He did not reply.

‘Do I take it you would rather I turned round?’

‘I’m sorry … of course not.’ He held the door open.

‘If it isn’t convenient …’

Sod it, no, it is not ‘convenient’ – your coming here will never be ‘convenient’.

‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘That depends.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I do have the car. So it depends on how long I stay as to whether I have a drink – or not.’

‘I was about to put some coffee on. Sit down. Just give me a moment.’

Simon went into his immaculate galley kitchen, closed the door and leaned back against it. Damn. Damn and blast.

He filled the coffee percolator with water and pulled the overhead cupboard open too hard. The packet of fish and chips was on the plate in front of him, cooling. He ripped it open and stuffed a handful of chips
and a lump of fish and batter into his mouth. He was starving. Anger that Diana should have come here made a knot in the middle of his chest. He had met her abroad, and for a few years they had had a loose relationship uncomplicated, for him at least, by much emotion. They went to a play or a film, and often out to dinner. Afterwards, they usually went to bed, at Simon’s hotel or Diana’s mews house.
She had always asked him to stay there with her. He never would. He enjoyed her company … she was attractive, intelligent, informed; ten years older than him and a widow; hands-on owner of a highly successful chain of brasseries.

And that was it. Or rather, that was that.

Diana had telephoned him a couple of times the previous year, once shortly after Freya Graffham’s murder, once a few weeks
later but had had to leave messages on his answerphone. He had not returned them. He had assumed she would have understood what his silence meant, and until now she had barely entered his mind.

There was no uncertainty about what he was going to do when she had finished her coffee. He took up the tray and opened the door.

She was wearing a cream knitted suit and emerald earrings, expensive shoes
and she had her back to
him as she studied one of his drawings on the wall.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t have any biscuits … empty larder.’

She turned and looked at him coolly. ‘That’s fine, Simon. Just coffee will see me on my way.’

He did not respond, only bent to the cups.

‘Are you involved with this missing schoolboy case?’

‘I’m heading it up.’

‘Oh God. Any news of him?’