The Sixth Soul (9 page)

‘The truth, however unpleasant, is the truth and must be told.’

‘She sent the children packing back to Social Services. She stopped speaking to all the neighbours. You want to know what happened to all the other foster-children, the ones that had grown
up and used to knock on her door with flowers? She wouldn’t answer the door to them. One girl, Susie Armitage, she was eighteen or thereabouts, came over the road to me with some flowers,
asked me to mind them, to hand them over to Isobel. Susie broke down on the doorstep. I brought her inside and she showed me this letter that Isobel had sent to her. Poor Susie.’

Mrs Nicholas produced a piece of folded white paper from the pocket of her cardigan and offered it to Bellwood.

‘What is this, Mrs Nicholas?’

‘Susie asked me to throw it away as she left. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t do it. It’s the letter Isobel sent to Susie.’

Bellwood took the paper and unfolded it.

‘Can I hang on to this?’

Mrs Nicholas nodded. ‘That’s why no one called, not even Susie, who was the favourite of them all. The police never caught Gwen’s killer; they seemed to think at the time it
was a schoolboy who did it. Some schoolboys were questioned by the police but no one was ever charged with Gwen’s murder. I think that just drove Isobel deeper underground.’

Mrs Nicholas fell silent.

‘Did Gwen have a middle name?’ asked Bellwood.

‘Just Gwen Swift.’

‘You’ve been an enormous help, Mrs Nicholas. Thank you.’ Bellwood handed Mrs Nicholas her card. ‘If anything else occurs to you, please call me straight away on this
number.’

‘Make sure you shut the door properly on your way out. This road, you know, is a magnet for murderers.’

In the hall on the way out, Rosen took out his mobile phone and Bellwood closed the front door behind them with a reassuring slam.

On the step, Rosen dialled.

‘Who are you calling?’ she asked.

‘Archives, Gwen Swift’s cold case file,’ replied Rosen.

Walking down the path, Bellwood took out her mobile.

‘Who are you calling?’ asked Rosen.

‘Social Services. We need to track down the foster-children.’

‘I was just about to ask you to do that.’

‘I guessed you would,’ said Bellwood.

Rosen’s phone rang and he waited.

‘I think this is the worst case I’ve ever tackled in my life,’ he said.

The phone kept ringing as the clouds thickened against the sun.

‘Carol?’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s good to have you on board.’

She nodded and, turning away from Rosen, could do nothing to stop the brief smile blossoming on her face.

I
t took several phone calls and two and a half hours for Social Services to come up with the list of the twelve long-term foster-children on Isobel
Swift’s books. Along with the names, an email arrived with the last known contact details of the twelve and a resolute promise to find the names of the short-term foster-children. Contact
details for the twelve went back as far as the mid-1970s and continued up to the early 1980s.

Bellwood looked around the incident room and saw Harrison, staring at his laptop screen, sullen to the marrow, with a pile of printouts from the internet following his search for Alessio
Capaneus.

As she began the obligatory task of ringing round the last known numbers, Bellwood watched Harrison make his way to Rosen’s desk to drop off the Capaneus printouts. Harrison hovered there,
scanning its surface.

He picked up the one framed picture of Rosen’s wife and smirked at the image. Bellwood watched, resisting the urge to tell Harrison to put it down.

‘Is it true she lost her marbles?’ asked Harrison.

‘Who?’

‘Rosen’s wife. I overheard some talk in the canteen when I first came to this nick.’

Bellwood didn’t want to have the conversation with Harrison but he already had a little information, so she decided to appeal to any semblance of a better nature in him.

‘I don’t know the details, Robert, but yes, she did suffer with her nerves though she’s well now. Did you hear why she became ill?’

‘Nah.’

‘They had a baby; this is going back years. Hannah, they named her. She died of cot death.’

‘Oh.’ He looked completely untouched and Bellwood wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

Harrison passed Bellwood on the way back to his desk. Her face was set, her eyes lowered, her attention locked onto the phone.

‘Tough-looking bitch, that old Mrs Rosen,’ said Harrison. ‘Wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of her in a darkened corner.’

Bellwood said nothing, but committed every word and action to memory.

M
emory.

Herod sat on the cold stone floor of his basement. The dim blue light gave him the sense that he was hundreds of metres below the surface of the water and the silence that filled his head was
like the pressure of a whole ocean bearing down on him.

He surveyed the basement, its doors and fortified walls. If he’d designed it himself, he couldn’t have come up with a more user-friendly suite of rooms.

The estate agent who’d sold it to him had been reluctant to fill him in on the background to the basement. But the property had been growing stale on the books and so he had decided to
spice things up with a little house history.

‘Mr Graham, the farmer who lived here, was in the RAF during World War II. He was an observer when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. He never got over it. He’d seen what a little
bomb could do at first hand. Actions have consequences. He believed he was going to be paid back. Hence the underground bunker.’

The squalor of the living space above the basement had been in stark contrast to the minimalist perfection below. It was the perfect house. A basement with three rooms. He had asked the estate
agent about the door in the basement wall. There was no mention of it in the particulars, or in his sales pitch. The agent had shrugged, opening the half-door to reveal a gouge of darkness.

‘It’s a tunnel. It’s well constructed and it leads to a manhole in the farmyard. Built by Mr Graham in case the radiated survivors out there got down here.’

He had stuck his head into the mouth of the tunnel, breathing in the damp, stale air.

Herod had offered the asking price there and then.

He blitzed the house with two tranches of ten thousand pounds. One pot of money went to a gang of Serbian builders who ripped the place to shreds and restored it to a structurally sound,
plastered skeleton. The second pot went to an overfed interior designer who – on his instruction – made the whole place neutral in fixtures, fittings and decor. And with a third pot of
five thousand pounds he bought a flotation tank and paid a plumber to install the tank in the basement, along with the oxygen pump. A plumber who insisted on talking about his recent wedding and
who, without asking first, had showed a photograph of his bride.

But all that seemed long ago.

The time for the fifth unbirthing was drawing near.

I
t didn’t take long for the foster-child trail to go cold on Bellwood.

She managed to trace a Jean White to Perth in Australia where she had
moved with her husband and two children. There was a temporary address in Perth but no phone number.

Bellwood replaced the receiver and, as she did so, the phone rang.

‘Is that you, Carol?’

It took her a second to work out who the caller was.

‘Mrs Nicholas, how are you?’

‘I’ve got your card here, that card you gave me, remember?’

‘Yes, of course . . .’

‘But you’ve been engaged an awfully long time: I had to use ringback in the end and that’s expensive, but this is important so never mind.’

The old lady went from virtual jabbering to utterly silent in a solitary beat.

‘Is there something you’ve recalled?’ probed Bellwood.

‘No.’

Bellwood could hear another voice. There was someone in the room with Mrs Nicholas.

‘Are you alone, Mrs Nicholas?’

‘No. Her name’s not Armitage any more because she got married. She’s Mrs Cooper now, aren’t you, Susie?’ In the background, someone replied in the affirmative.
‘Carol, guess who I’ve got here? In the very chair in which you were sitting?’

‘I don’t know.’ Bellwood played along and made a fist of delight beneath her desk. Hope danced on the horizon.

‘I’ve been trying to call you all day but your line’s been busy.’

‘I do apologize for that, Mrs Nicholas.’ Playing to the old lady’s sense of theatre, she asked, ‘Who are you sitting with, Mrs Nicholas?’

‘Susie, Isobel’s favourite. Would you like to meet her?’

‘I’ll be there in half an hour. Please can I speak to her now, briefly?’

Seconds passed.

‘Hello?’ Susie Cooper sounded anxious and upset. ‘I’ve never spoken to a police officer before, regarding, you know, an investigation into
murder
.’

‘Susie, my name’s Carol, DS Carol Bellwood. Can you wait where you are? You have nothing to worry about, but I would like to speak with you.’

Susie agreed and Bellwood grabbed her coat, anxious to get there quickly in case Susie changed her mind about talking.

‘A
s soon as I read about . . .’ Susie struggled for the next words.

‘Your old foster-mother,’ said Mrs Nicholas. ‘That’s who she was.’

‘Yes. I had to come back. All that time, lying dead, no one calling.’

‘Don’t blame yourself, Susie. She sent you away, after she changed.’

Both Susie and Mrs Nicholas looked directly at Bellwood.

‘My parents didn’t abandon me. I want you to know that. They didn’t not want me. Dad died and Mum had health problems, you know, with her nerves.’

Bellwood felt a welling-up of compassion for the woman in her fifties who spoke of her parents with the defensiveness and uncertainty of a twelve-year-old girl.

‘I believe you were the “head girl” in Mrs Swift’s house.’

‘I was, yes. What’s this police business you want me for?’

‘Maybe you could help me. I need to know the whereabouts of the other foster-children.’

Susie was quiet, blank faced, and Bellwood feared she was about to dismiss the idea because she, too, was in the dark.

‘Then you’ve come to the right place. I’m in touch with nine of the twelve. I’ll talk to them. I know they’ll help if they can.’

She reeled off a list of names and, as Bellwood ticked off those in her notepad, she found it strange how the sound of words could make a taste like butter on her tongue.

‘I know that Jean went down under in the early nineties,’ said Bellwood. ‘But what about John Price?’

‘Johnny died in the Falklands War.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. There’s one last name then. Paul Dwyer?’

‘Poor little Paul. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing now but I pray to God for him each day. He was the baby.’

‘Did he die?’

‘No!’ Susie looked uncomfortable, began to shift in her seat. ‘It was worse than that. On his seventh birthday, on his party day, the doorbell rang, just as he was blowing out
the candles and making a wish. Some wish.’

‘A fate worse than death, Susie?’ prompted Mrs. Nicholas.

‘Almost. He’d been with Isobel since he was just days old.’

‘Who rang the doorbell that day?’

‘His real mother. She called to collect him, to take him back.’

‘And that was a fate worse than death?’ Bellwood asked.

‘My foster-mother tried to fight it but it was no good. He didn’t come back, Paul. It was the last we saw of him.’

Bellwood held back, giving Susie room to elaborate.

‘That’s about all I can think of for now.’ she concluded.

Bellwood thanked her for the information and wanted nothing more than to jump up from her seat, call Rosen and hit the HOLMES laptop. Instead, she stayed where she was, and counted to thirty to
avoid the appearance of indecent haste. As she sat there, she stripped the years away from Susie’s face. It wasn’t definite but Bellwood would have wagered a month’s salary on her
observation.

Susie Cooper was the girl in the gold locket.

B
axter didn’t announce his intention of attending the five o’clock team briefing, and his silence, when Rosen passed him on his way to
address the troops, was loaded. Rosen guessed Baxter was going to hit him with details of the peer review of the case. The peer review was a useful tool when used fairly; it was an extra set of
eyes in the dense thickets of casework, but it would be applied by Baxter to humiliate Rosen while giving himself distance in a high-profile case where progress was slow and painful.

‘Oh, David . . .’ said Baxter, making him stop and have to turn back. ‘One of the deputy CCs, Hargreaves, made a good point this morning. He was a beat bobby in West Yorkshire
back in the eighties. He hasn’t known an atmosphere like this since the West Yorkshire Constabulary made a balls-up of the Peter Sutcliffe debacle. Funny how history repeats itself,
huh?’

Rosen didn’t respond. He made his way to the head of the room and called for silence. Registering the faces of those present, he noted the absence of Bellwood.

‘Mrs Isobel Swift, the body in 24 Brantwood Road, has been confirmed as a murder victim, eighteen months previously. Is this murder linked to the abduction next door? I’m pretty
certain that it is. I’m pursuing a line of enquiry at the moment that should confirm this in more concrete terms, but there is a degree of competence at work in the murder of Mrs Swift
that’s reflected in the Herod killings. More on that as things develop.

‘Second up, we’ve had a fairly speculative offer of help from a Roman Catholic priest, Father Sebastian, an expert social anthropologist. It could be something, it may be nothing,
but that’s a very fresh item and we’re still ascertaining the authenticity of the volunteer.’