‘It’s your dad …’

  Oh my God!

  ‘What about him?’ I ask, ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘No, he’s not dead – but he’s had a major heart attack.’

  SEVENTEEN

  On the first leg of the journey – from Oxford to Manchester – the railway line is electrified, and the train dashes through the countryside at what seems almost break-neck speed.

  Chickety-chick-chickety-chick-chickety-chick.

  Then, in Manchester, I change trains, boarding a squat, snub-nosed diesel which is really not much more than a country bus on rails.

  This train – with its ker-clunk-ker-clunk-ker-clunk – holds out no promise of urgency. It does little more than trundle through the outskirts of the city and, though it picks up some speed as it passes the small towns and villages which separate Manchester from Whitebridge, there are times when it almost seems as if walking would be quicker.

  Sitting in an almost-empty second-class carriage, I feel as if I am taking a voyage back in time – and, in a way, I am.

  I find myself – not entirely surprisingly – thinking about my father, and search as I might, the only moment of real intimacy I can uncover is the time he apologized to his redheaded daughter for giving her the name Redhead.

  We were a family which didn’t really talk to each other, perhaps because we were afraid that talking could turn into disagreement, and disagreements might lead to the kind of rows the people whom my mother regarded as our more unsavoury neighbours had – rows which could be heard even from the street.

  We didn’t pay each other compliments, either – my father might have told me that my mother once had hair like rich dark chocolate, but he would never have dreamed of saying it to her, because that would have been to risk upsetting the emotional (or perhaps unemotional) balance of our household, and that was a risk it was better not to take.

  And so we said nothing that wasn’t almost perfectly neutral, thus allowing our worries and fears, our angers and resentment, to quietly fester away beneath a veneer of amiability.

  Fifteen minutes after picking up a taxi at Whitebridge railway station – a Victorian relic which stands as a reminder that this was once an important cotton town – I am standing on the street in front of my parents’ house.

  I can remember the day we moved in. At last we had our own three-bedroom semi in a respectable neighbourhood, with a little car in the garage. After years of wandering through the wilderness of rented accommodation and council estates, we had arrived in the Promised Land.

  It was less than a year before there was trouble in paradise. It began when our next-door neighbour, Mr Hopkins – who was a senior clerk at one of the few remaining mills, and, according to my mother, ‘a very nice, very quiet man’ – announced that he was moving out. For days, Mum fretted about who might take his place, and she was right to worry, because when someone did move in, it was a man called Mr Culshaw, who was (horror of horrors!) a plumber.

  It did not take the disreputable Culshaw family long to show their true colours by throwing a house-warming party.

  ‘That music went on half the night,’ my mother had said in disgust, the next morning.

  ‘That’s not true, Mum. I looked at my watch when they turned off the music, and it was only half-past ten.’

  ‘That’s as maybe – but did the guests go home once they’d turned the music off? No, they did not. They stayed around – talking!’

  Talking!

  With all this talking going on, our street was rapidly turning into a Lancashire version of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  I walk up to the front door. I have a key, but somehow I would feel like a fraud to use it, so I knock, instead.

  The door is opened by my cousin, Enid. She has the kind of look on her face that people always feel obliged to assume when talking to television reporters about someone else’s personal tragedy.

  It tells me all I need to know.

  ‘My dad’s dead, isn’t he?’ I say.

  She nods. ‘He passed away at five thirty-seven.’

  Why does everybody need to be so precise about the time of death? And what does she expect me to say in response – Oh, thank God for that. It would have been simply awful if he’d died at five thirty-nine?

  ‘Where’s my mother?’ I ask.

  ‘She’s upstairs. The doctor’s given her a sedative, and he says she’ll probably sleep through to morning.’

  We go into the kitchen, and she brews a pot of tea.

  ‘I’ve made up your bed, and a bed in the spare room,’ she says. ‘I will be staying the night.’

  Enid is the paragon of virtue in our family. We were the first two of the Clan Redhead to go university, but she was the one who made the sensible choice, doing Business Studies at a college close enough to Whitebridge for her to be able to bring her dirty washing home. And when she graduated, she got a job in Whitebridge, like any sensible person would.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be moving back up here, now, Jennifer,’ she says, as she pours the tea.

  ‘What!’ I exclaim.

  ‘Now your dad’s dead, I suppose you’ll be moving back up here,’ she repeats, saying the words more slowly this time, since I seem incapable of understanding plain Lancashire English any longer.

  ‘Does my mother need looking after?’ I ask. ‘Has her health taken a nose dive since the last time I was here?’

  ‘Well, no, not exactly,’ Enid admits.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘She doesn’t need looking after in the physical sense, but she’s had a big shock, and I’m sure she’ll want her family around her.’

  ‘I can’t just pack up everything and move back home,’ I say. ‘How would I earn a living here? There not enough work in Whitebridge for a full-time private investigator.’

  ‘Private investigator!’ she repeats, as if she thinks it’s a pretend job – no more than a pathetic excuse to cover my own laziness.

  And maybe that is what she really thinks!

  We sit in uncomfortable silence for several minutes, then I say, ‘Do you mind if I go out for a walk?’

  She looks at me in a way which suggests that any decent person would stay where she was, cloaked in her own misery, and that only a heartless bitch would consider anything as hedonistic as walking.

  ‘I intend to stay here, but I suppose you’ll do what you like,’ she says.

  Oh, thank you, thank you, blessed Saint Enid.

  I wander up to the Drum and Monkey, where I hope to see another of my small, select band of friends – Monika Paniatowski, whom I used to baby-sit for when she was first promoted to detective inspector. But, to my disappointment, Monika’s habitual table in the corner of the public bar is empty.

  I suppose I could go and knock on her door – I know she would welcome me in, however tired she was – but I really don’t want to impose.

  I drink two gin and tonics in rapid succession, and then return wearily to my parents’ home.

  Enid has gone to bed by the time I get there, and I go straight up to my old room, where my cousin has made the bed, tucking the sheets in so tightly that I have to prise them apart before I can climb in between them.

  It is hard to believe that only eighteen hours ago I was standing on the bank of the Isis, waiting for the St Luke’s boat to arrive.

  I wonder how the investigation is getting on without me.

  It is morning, and I am lying in the narrow bed of my childhood. I know that you are supposed to feel affection for your old bedroom, but I don’t. The fact is, I ceased to think of it as ‘my’ room long before I moved out. It wasn’t a sudden, dramatic dissociation or anything like that, but rather a gradual drifting, as I slowly came to realize that there were better ways to live than within the close confines of a life in which joy was sacrificed on the altar of respectability.

  I go downstairs. Enid – good old Enid – is preparing breakfast, and my mother is sitting at the table.

  My instinct is to hug my mother, but we have never hugged in my family, so I just say, ‘Hello, Mum. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘There has to be an autopsy,’ she says, in an accusatory voice which almost – but not quite – suggests it’s my fault. ‘The funeral won’t be until sometime next week.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I ask.

  ‘No, your cousin Enid’s making all the necessary arrangements. She’s had business dealings with Thorburn’s funeral directors before—’

  ‘I know young Mr Thorburn personally,’ Enid chips in.

  ‘And they think very highly of her there,’ my mother concludes.

  I eat only a little breakfast – Enid has somehow managed to turn the toast into corrugated asbestos – then I say, ‘If the funeral isn’t until next week, why don’t you come back to Oxford with me, Mum? You can have my bed, and I’ll doss down on the sofa.’

  ‘You’re surely never going back to Oxford – with your father still warm?’ Enid asks, outraged.

  Actually, Enid, he won’t still be warm – because they’ll be keeping him in cold storage.

  ‘You heard Mum say there’s nothing for me to do here,’ I tell Enid, ‘whereas in Oxford, I’m involved in a case which could determine the whole future of an innocent young girl.’

  ‘A case which could determine the whole future of an innocent young girl,’ Enid repeats mockingly. ‘If you ask me, you watch far too much television for your own good, our Jennie.’

  ‘Will you come back with me, Mum?’ I ask, ignoring my cousin. ‘It will do you good to get away for a few days.’

  ‘No, I will not go back with you,’ my mother says firmly. ‘It wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be right?’ I wonder. ‘Who says it wouldn’t be right?’

  My mother folds her arms firmly across her chest.

  ‘It wouldn’t be right,’ she repeats, as if repetition can easily kick the shit out of logic any day of the week.

  I was not expecting my mother to come with me to the door when the taxi arrived, but she does.

  I peck her on the cheek and pick up my bag – but she still has one parting shot to fire.

  ‘It broke your father’s heart when it was in all the papers about you and that lord,’ she says. ‘It did. It broke his heart.’

  I want to say that was his problem, not mine – that if I had slept with Charlie I’d have been doing nothing illegal, and that I have to live my life by my own standards, not by the standards imposed by some invisible theoretic community of Right and Not Right.

  But the woman has just lost her husband, and so I just say, ‘I’m really sorry, Mum.’

  And, to my horror, a look of triumphal vindication comes to her face.

  ‘You may well be sorry – but that’s no good to your father now, is it?’ she asks.

  As I climb into the taxi, I think that no one really knows when their time is due, and that if either of us should die before we can meet again, those will be the last words she will ever have said to me.

  ‘You may well be sorry – but that’s no good to your father now, is it?’

  I realize I’m sobbing softly to myself – and I don’t quite know why.

  I sense the change in the atmosphere the moment I walk into St Aldate’s police station. It feels like a small boring town, the day after the carnival has departed – or like a boxing arena in which the popular champion has been unexpectedly knocked out, and everyone has gone home despondent.

  ‘Where can I find DCI Macintosh?’ I ask the sergeant on desk duty.

  ‘He’s in his office,’ the sergeant replies, hardly bothering to look up. ‘Can you find your own way?’

  I tell him I can, and he presses a button on his desk which temporarily opens the door to the secure part of the building.

  As I climb the stairs to Macintosh’s office, the atmosphere of defeat begins to affect even me, and my legs feel as heavy as lead.

  The moment I step into his office, Ken Macintosh says, ‘I’m sorry, Jennie, I did what I could.’

  My God, I think, he looks so bloody old. He’s aged at least ten years in one day.

  ‘Why did you let them go?’ I ask. ‘You were legally allowed to hold them for forty-eight hours.’ I look down at my watch. ‘It’s barely thirty-six since you brought them in.’

  ‘The chief constable asked me for some tangible evidence that they were guilty, and, of course, I couldn’t give him any. That’s when he called my bluff, and issued a written order that Crispin Hetherington and all his crew should be released immediately.’

  ‘The spineless bastard,’ I say.

  ‘You can’t blame him,’ Macintosh tells me. ‘He’s a good copper and a good man, but he was under pressure from every direction.’

  ‘Whoever was pressurizing him, he could have held them off for another twelve hours,’ I say unbendingly.

  ‘Maybe he could have – if we’d given him even a little something to hold them off with,’ Macintosh says, ‘but, as I told you, we hadn’t got anything to give.’

  ‘So you simply opened the door and let them all walk out,’ I say, knowing I’m being unreasonable, but not able to help myself.

  ‘We didn’t let Jeff Meade go. He’s been charged with soliciting a criminal act and an attempted breach of national security. He’s being kept in the custody suite until we can put him up before the magistrate tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Did any of them say anything that might just help us with the investigation?’ I ask.

  Macintosh shakes his head. ‘What they did all say was the same things – over and over again. They didn’t rape the girl, because she was a more than willing participant. And once it was over, she left the function room of her own volition and under her own steam. They have no idea where she went, they claim, but none of them went with her, and they have alibis to prove it.’

  ‘If you could get me access to the transcripts, I just might be able to find something that you’ve—’ I begin.

  ‘You haven’t quite grasped the situation, yet, have you, Jennie?’ Macintosh interrupts. ‘Since you’ve been away, this place has been besieged by reporters, and when the papers come out tomorrow morning, the Thames Valley police – or this particular part of it, anyway – will take a real battering. They’ll say we arrested ten of the country’s brightest and best students, on no evidence at all, and subjected them to hour after hour of unnecessary questioning.’

  ‘There was plenty of circumstantial—’

  ‘They’ll have quotes from the students – anonymous, of course, because the wee laddies are totally innocent, and have to be protected at all costs. Can you imagine what those quotes will say, Jennie?’

  ‘I think you’re blowing this a little out of—’

  ‘Because I can imagine them – all too easily. “I always believed this was a free country, but for a few terrible hours, it felt to me like I was living in a police state,” said student X, who still appeared to be in a state of shock. “My nerves are shattered, I’m terrified of going to sleep in case I dream of that police station, and I have to take my final examinations in a few weeks,” said student Y, in a weak, strained voice.’

  ‘Nobody really believes what they read in the papers.’

  ‘And then, as the real kicker,’ he says, not even bothering to consider what I’ve just told him, ‘they’ll say that DCI Macintosh – and they’ll use my name, because they can – DCI Macintosh was unavailable for comment.’

  ‘And that’s precisely why we have to fight back,’ I say. ‘That’s why we need to—’

  ‘It’s over, Jennie,’ Macintosh says wearily. ‘We always knew that our only chance to nail them was to get a confession from one of them in the first few hours – and we failed. And it’s something we can only do once.’

  ‘So they’re going to get away with it?’

  ‘Yes, I’m very much afraid that they are.’

  ‘And what about poor, innocent Linda Corbet? What the hell’s going to happen to her, now?’

  ‘I don’t know, and for me – the father of three daughters – that’s the hardest part of all to take. But there’s absolutely nothing we can do. If she is being held in some sort of clinic, maybe they’ll release her when they see the papers and realize she’s no longer a danger. If she’s just run away, maybe she’ll read the papers and come back home.’

  I scour my brain for something that I can use to turn the whole situation around.

  I need a magic bullet to punch a large hole in all the obstacles that stand in my way.

  I want my own personal Excalibur, to cut down the barriers behind which the guilty crouch.

  But what I do come up with is no magic bullet or enchanted sword – in fact, it is not very much of anything.

  ‘Let me talk to Jeff Meade,’ I say.

  Macintosh sighs. ‘What good would that do?’

  ‘Did he have any money on him when he was picked up by the police in Dover?’

  ‘Yes, he had over five hundred pounds.’

  ‘He’s a working-class lad – there’s no way he could have laid his hands on that amount of money himself.’

  ‘So what’s your point?’

  ‘My point is that it must have been given to him by the other members of the Shivering Turn.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Why did they give him the money?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘It’s obvious – they gave it to him because they thought he was the weak link in the chain!’

  ‘When he was brought back here,’ DCI Macintosh says, ‘he stuck by the story just as strongly as the others did.’

  ‘But that’s because I wasn’t here to advise you on how to approach him,’ I argue. ‘I know all about lads like him, because I was brought up with them. Give me fifteen minutes with him, and I’ll get him to break down.’

  ‘I don’t think you will.’

  ‘And even if I don’t get a complete confession out of him, he might inadvertently let slip something we can use.’

  ‘I’ve told you, Jennie, the investigation’s closed.’

  ‘What harm can it do for me to see him?’ I plead. ‘What possible harm can there be in giving it one last shot?’