Only Darkness Page 11

  There is another truth that photographs can’t tell.

  Friday night, ten. Rob Neave was sitting alone in his flat, contemplating getting seriously drunk for the first time in eighteen months. He’d opened the whisky bottle as soon as he had got in, but stopped drinking after one glass, and now he couldn’t decide. He picked up a book at random from the table. It was Debbie’s book of poetry. He felt a tired anger. He couldn’t stay here. He could go to the pub over the road and quietly drink himself into oblivion. The pub he’d been in with Debbie the night before … He could see her face as they talked at lunchtime. He hadn’t meant to do that to her. Looking for distraction, he turned the radio on. Piano music, one of Chopin’s nocturnes. Angie …

  A cold winter’s afternoon, a Sunday. Outside, it was frozen and still. The sound of piano music drifted through from the other room. He was sitting in front of the fire, a couple of cans of beer beside him, half an eye on the time. Flora was on his knee, making small complaining noises and kicking her legs. He had been playing with her, making her squeal and laugh, but she was tired now. He lifted her on to his shoulder, rocking her gently, and gradually she became a limp weight against him. He was fascinated by her, her compliance, her dependency. He slid her down on to his lap, into the crook of his arm. Fine, one hand free for opening a beer can and using the TV remote.

  He heard the piano in the other room stop, and after a minute, Angie came in. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Having a beer, and’ – he checked his watch – ‘in ten minutes I’m watching the match.’ He heard her ‘Tch!’ of exasperation.

  She leant over his shoulder and stroked the fine hair on their daughter’s head. He reached backwards and pulled her down, catching her off balance so that she ended up sprawled across his knee. She laughed, and he kissed her, enjoying the feeling of holding his wife and his child in his arms. It had been like that when Angie was pregnant. It hadn’t been a particularly easy pregnancy. Towards the end, she had to rest, so they didn’t go out, but spent long evenings lying on the bed together, talking, making plans that had seemed like good plans at the time. He still thought of Flora as part of Angie, not yet quite separated from her mother, but becoming so, bit by bit.

  Angie was wearing a deep-blue dress, fitted around her waist with a full skirt that had ridden up in her fall. He ran his fingers across the soft skin at the top of her thighs. Perhaps he could give the match a miss. But she sighed and sat up. ‘I’m going out, remember? Jean asked me over to look at that piece she’s planning to play. Daniel will be there, so I’ll take Flora.’ She stood up, and leant over to kiss him. ‘You spend the afternoon being primitive. Watch the match, drink beer, scratch yourself. We’ll see you later.’ She scooped Flora up, ignoring her cross wail, and said, ‘Come on, lovely, let’s get you changed and into your warm coat.’

  Ten minutes later, they were gone. He never saw them again.

  Berryman told him afterwards that he’d gone berserk when they wouldn’t let him see the bodies. He didn’t remember that. The car had skidded, it seemed, on black ice at the worst place, that sharp bend where the land dropped away to the woods below. They’d used dental records to identify Angie. He couldn’t remember going berserk. He couldn’t remember much at all of the days immediately after the accident. There was just that hollow silence, and the dullness of a light going out. It didn’t leave him in darkness – he wouldn’t have minded the darkness – but all the colours had faded and he was left with the shadows. It was like that time when he was young, twelve, thirteen, something like that, someone had taken him into a cathedral. A huge rose window had glowed above him, and then the sun went in. He could remember the sense of expectant silence, of dark expanses and shades of grey, as if something important had left and wasn’t coming back.

  Julie Fyfe’s funeral was on the Saturday morning. The weather, which had raged and stormed on the night she died, saw her laid to rest with stillness. She was buried in Sheffield, where she was born and where her parents still lived. The cemetery stood at one of the highest points of the city, looking away to the city centre to the east, and across the bare trees of Rivelin Valley to the west. The sky was leaden, uniform grey unchanging into the distance, and the air was ice. Mick Berryman, standing at the cemetery gates, watching the cortege pass through, thought that this bleak burial ground was appropriate for a life ended before it had really begun. What had Julie Fyfe done to have everything taken from her – her lovers, her children, her happiness, her hurt – there was no Julie any more and never would be again.

  He watched the mourners at the grave side. Her parents standing apart from each other, the mother with the calmness of a grief that had gone beyond weeping; her father with that look of helpless bewilderment that Berryman had seen before on other faces. They couldn’t help each other. The person they were most used to turning to in grief was deeply enmeshed in something that would never – completely – go away. Other relatives of victims, in the past, had said to him, Have you got him, will you get him? as though the apprehension, conviction and punishment might offer some consolation. Berryman wondered if anything could assuage that kind of grief. Maybe it made a difference. He had nothing else to offer them.

  After the interment, he went up to the parents, said the things he said on such occasions, tried to reassure them that everything that could be done was being done, that they would be told how the investigation was progressing. Berryman told himself that he would at least try to make sure that they would hear of any arrest before the press did – or at the same time.

  He evaded the questions put to him by journalists covering the funeral – No further developments, still following up leads – and walked between the gravestones to the far end of the cemetery. He’d brought a flower, a rose. The grave was becoming overgrown now. It didn’t look as if anyone tended it. He looked at the headstone. Angela Kerridge Neave, 1968–1996. Flora Neave, 12th August 1995–23rd February 1996. The sun also rises and the sun goes down. That was all it said. He put the rose on the grave, and left the cemetery.

  8

  Lynne Jordan sipped a cup of tea and looked at the young man in front of her. Stuart Griffin, 28, husband of the first victim, Lisa, law-abiding citizen with a well-founded dislike of the police. Or at least of Mick Berryman. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you, Mr Griffin,’ she said, ‘but we’re just trying to get a bit more of a fix on the days before your wife –’

  He interrupted before she could finish the sentence. ‘OK, all right, I said I’d talk to you. What do you want to know?’

  ‘According to your original statement –’ Lynne began, but he interrupted again.

  ‘According to my original statement, I didn’t kill my wife, I didn’t kill Lisa. Fat lot of attention you paid to my original statement then.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Griffin.’ Lynne wasn’t going to apologize for Berryman’s doing his job. ‘I know this must be upsetting, but if you could just go over one or two things again, I’ll be able to get out of your way.’ She flipped through the pages of his statement until she got to the marked section. ‘You said your daughter, Karen, talked about the ugly man shortly before …’

  He was frowning at the mention of his daughter, but he said fairly mildly, ‘She had some nightmares. Lisa didn’t know what it was about, but she said Karen thought he was in her bedroom and had nightmares.’

  Lynne thought. ‘Did Lisa, or you, have any reason to think she really had seen anyone? Did Lisa see anyone that worried her, or anyone that she didn’t know following her or hanging around?’

  He sighed. ‘You asked me all this at the time. No. I don’t remember. What I said then will be right. I can’t remember now.’ He was getting agitated, but what he said agreed with his statement. He hadn’t known about anything at the time.

  ‘Can you remember anything else about this ugly man Karen talked about? Did she have any more dreams after her mother…’ After his originally stopping her, Lynne found it difficult to complete her s
entences when they referred to Lisa’s murder.

  ‘Of course she bloody did,’ he said. ‘Her mother was dead. Of course she had bloody dreams.’

  Lynne cursed herself. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Griffin. I didn’t mean like that, I meant specifically about the ugly man.’

  ‘No, not really. I don’t remember any more of those.’ He looked at the floor, scuffing the pattern on the carpet with his shoe, thinking. Lynne didn’t interrupt him. She looked round, waiting. She could remember this room nearly two years ago when they’d first come round, when he reported his wife missing. It had been – not pristine, but glowing with care; paper, cushions and curtains carefully matched, small tables with ruffled cloths and lace overlays, carefully placed ornaments, floor and table lights set to illuminate chosen chairs or pictures. It had been a room someone had created with real love and pride. She’d asked him about it at the time, trying to distract him a bit from his worry. She’ll come back, Mr Griffin, we get a lot of these calls and it’s usually a misunderstanding. This is a lovely room. He’d told her that Lisa sewed. She did all this – pride again in his wife who had made all of this for him. Now, the glow was gone. Some of the cloths were still on the tables, but stained and placed unevenly. Other tables had ring marks from cups, sticky marks where a child’s fingers had touched. There were dark patches on the settee, dust on the carpet. There was a thin layer of dust over everything.

  Stuart Griffin got up abruptly. He went over to a desk that stood in the window, and pulled open the top drawer, rummaged through some papers, pushed the drawer half shut. ‘When Karen started having the dreams, Lisa got her to draw pictures, to get it out of her system.’ He came back to his seat with a large manila envelope in his hand, and started spreading the contents out on the floor. ‘I haven’t looked at this for a while,’ he said.

  Lynne saw a collection of child’s drawings, some photographs, a faded newspaper cutting. She picked it up. ‘May I?’ she said. He nodded, still sorting through the drawings. It was a picture of Stuart Griffin and Lisa – Lynne recognized her because she saw Lisa’s picture every day – Lisa looking proud and pretty, with Karen in front of them dressed in a frilly skirt with ribbons in her hair. The caption was Karen-Can, and the brief story underneath was about how Karen had won a nursery school fancy-dress competition as a cancan dancer. Lynne looked at the young face of the mother, the beaming, chubby face of the little girl, and felt anger and a sense of weary frustration.

  Stuart pulled a drawing out of the pile he was looking through and showed it to Lynne. ‘There,’ he said. He was holding out a typical child’s drawing of a person, a round head with arms coming out of the sides. There were other circles on the head that could have been glasses. Despite the childishness of the drawing, Lynne thought it had a sense of menace, especially the way the figure loomed over the other figure in the drawing, much smaller than the first.

  ‘Is that meant to be her?’ Lynne asked. ‘Karen?’

  ‘No,’ Stuart said, ‘that’s Lisa, that’s Mummy.’

  After a moment, Lynne said, ‘Can I take this, Mr Griffin?’ He nodded. He didn’t speak again, just gathered the papers up from the floor into an untidy bundle and took Lynne to the door. ‘Thank you,’ she said, as she left.

  Berryman decided that he wanted Julie Fyfe’s boss down at headquarters for the interview. ‘Talk him into it, Lynne. I want him off his own territory.’ Lynne had taken Dave West with her, and by dint of calling at Andrew Thomas’s house when his wife was in, managed to persuade him to come and talk to DCI Berryman at the Morehead offices.

  ‘He couldn’t get us out of the house quick enough,’ West told Berryman cheerfully. Now Berryman was sitting back in his chair, listening to Lynne gently pressuring the information they wanted out of the man.

  ‘Just tell me again,’ she was saying, ‘exactly what happened after you promoted Julie.’

  Andrew Thomas was starting to look uneasy, realizing that the attractive woman at the other side of the table had a far wider agenda than he had first thought. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with her death, Officer. I must say …’

  Pleased that he was starting to bluster, Lynne smiled gently and said, ‘We have to check everything, Mr Thomas, as I’m sure you understand. Now, Julie was promoted in August, according to your records.’ He shifted impatiently in his chair. She looked him in the eye. ‘You don’t have any problems answering these questions, do you?’

  ‘No, of course not. I just don’t enjoy having my time wasted.’ He must have been in his fifties, Lynne estimated. A bit overweight, a bit unfit. She wondered when he was going to tell her that he played golf with the Chief Constable. She kept on smiling and waited him out. ‘Summer. August, yes.’

  ‘Why then?’ Lynne looked at her notes.

  He looked as if he was going to object again, but thought better of it. ‘She was a good worker, wanted to get somewhere. She’d got herself these extra qualifications, so I thought, we thought, that is, that we should encourage her.’

  ‘Which qualification was that?’

  ‘She hadn’t actually got it, she’d started it. One of these new things, GNVQ in business studies.’ He loosened his collar.

  Lynne looked at her notes. ‘But she didn’t actually start the course until November,’ she said.

  He waved away an irrelevancy. ‘But she had plans, that was the thing.’

  Lynne went back to her notes. ‘In fact, you had to contact the college and put some pressure on to get them to take her as a late applicant, isn’t that right?’ He was silent for a minute. ‘Mr Thomas?’ Lynne prompted.

  ‘Well, yes.’ He looked flushed now.

  Lynne switched topics. ‘I understand that Julie went on a trip for the company, to a conference. Could you tell me something about that?’

  He blinked, confused by the change of topic. ‘What do you want to know? It was in September, in London. It was for firms wanting to set up partnerships for a funding programme.’

  ‘How long did the conference go on for?’ Lynne knew where this was going, but patiently took it step by step.

  ‘It was just the two days.’ He was looking anxious now.

  ‘According to your company’s diary, Mr Thomas, Julie was away for a week on that conference.’ She let him think through his response, but before he could answer, she said, ‘And interestingly, you were away at the same time – the twenty-third through to the twenty-ninth.’ She waited. She hoped he was just going to tell her now. She didn’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon drawing blood from this particular stone. She looked him in the eye and waited.

  He looked evasive, gave a half smile and said, ‘Well, it’s got nothing to do with all this, but Julie and I …’ The story came out – pretty young clerical officer, susceptible boss, and Julie had done rather well out of the whole thing. He couldn’t be so naive, Lynne told herself, as to believe that they could ignore this, accept his word that it had nothing to do with the killing.

  They took a break. She and Berryman talked it through in his office. ‘What do you think, sir? Could it be a copycat cover-up?’

  Berryman shook his head. ‘Could be, but it has all the markers for our man. I don’t think so, but let’s sweat this bastard until we’re sure.’

  ‘Will he go on cooperating?’

  Berryman smiled grimly. ‘If I’ve got to arrest the bugger, I will. Then let him try and keep his wife in the dark. He’ll cooperate.’

  Saturday morning, Debbie and her mother walked back from the cemetery into the centre of Goldthorpe. Debbie hadn’t been to her father’s grave since early summer. She didn’t often feel the need – she knew that her father wasn’t there. But it seemed important sometimes just to go and stand there, put some flowers in the small metal container on the headstone, read the inscription, and remember him among the quiet of the graves. He came back to her now as her young father. His older, defeated self had been her earlier memory, after he died. She had dreamed, more than once, that she was w
alking down the road to her house, the house he’d never seen, and he was standing in the window, watching up the road. She’d felt relief in the dream – he wasn’t dead – but his face had been so lost and vacant that she had been frightened, had tried to run to the house to see what was wrong.

  Her mother, she knew, went to the graveyard once a week, kept the grave clear of weeds, put fresh flowers there. ‘Does it help,’ she said, suddenly, ‘coming to the cemetery?’

  Gina didn’t answer. Debbie looked at her, and saw that she was thinking. ‘He isn’t there,’ Gina said, after a minute, ‘but he isn’t anywhere else. I can see him in you, of course. And I can remember him, years of memories. Straight after he died, I used to think he was in the room with me sometimes, I could feel him so clearly, but that’s gone now.’ She opened her handbag and took out a tissue, then took off her glasses and carefully cleaned the lenses. ‘I don’t think he’s anywhere any more, but I still miss him.’

  Debbie squeezed her mother’s arm. ‘I do too,’ she said.

  As they walked back through the centre, Gina stopped every few paces to greet friends, catch up on local news, talk to people who’d known Debbie since she was a baby and wanted to catch up on her current life. Debbie smiled and fielded questions about how she was, whether she was courting, how her job was going, why she didn’t come back more often, whether she was courting … Gina nudged her in the middle of one of these exchanges. ‘Here, Debbie,’ she said, slipping her a piece of paper. ‘Here’s the list. Go and get the shopping in.’ Debbie escaped.

  Goldthorpe was built on either side of one main street, the rows of shops run down and in need of paint and repair. The shops were mostly small – there were none of the big chains in the town. The supermarket was piled high with bargain boxes, tins, jars, the cooling cabinets turned off and used as storage for cut-price goods with strange brand names Debbie didn’t recognize. She couldn’t find any of the things she wanted. She went back out on to the main street, trying to get her bearings. It seemed that things changed each time she came back. The old cinema was a carpet warehouse now, selling roll ends, smelling of cut carpet and damp. She went on down the street towards the chemist. The café wafted the smell of steam and boiled milk into her face, and a group of children pushed past her, racketing a skateboard that had seen better days between them. One of them shouted in triumph as he leapt on to the board and flipped it round into the road, steering away from the group, manoeuvring with skilful turns of his hips. The group turned as one and chased the leader back up the road, oblivious of Debbie and any other walkers on the pavement.