Chapter 14
Kelly agreed that they’d done all they could for the evening.
She’d been in liaison with the uniforms in Grasmere working on the Water Nymph case.
A search of the surrounding area had turned up nothing about the dead woman.
House-to-house visits had drawn a blank.
Nobody saw how she ended up under the Water Nymph and it was as if she’d been deposited there by aliens.
The guests at Heron Hall were frazzled, and Kelly knew she must push lightly to get the best out of them. The witnesses were beginning to leave but she’d agreed with Tilda Dent and Hank Hampton that some of them would be available for statements in the morning.
Everybody needed a good night’s sleep, though she didn’t imagine they’d get one after what had happened.
Lee Lovett had confirmed, after liaising with the general manager who was based in their sister spa hotel in Manchester, that the hotel was closed to the public for the time being and the current guests could stay another night without charge.
Kelly had noticed his hands locked with the scientist’s when she’d seen them together in the dining room earlier.
Their hands had touched, and not by accident.
Sandy Cooper spotted her looking too. It provided another element to her case, though it could be nothing.
People jumped in and out of each other’s beds at these functions all the time.
It was none of her business if a hotel manager fucked a guest old enough to be his mother.
Good on Doctor Cooper, she thought.
She dropped Kate off at home at gone 10 p.m. and met Ted back at her place. Ted took Millie home and Kelly cooked a very simple light supper. Lizzie had been awake but the sight of her grandfather at least distracted her from her teeth for a while and she watched as they sang and played.
Later, around eleven, Kelly washed the pots and listened to Ted reading a story to Lizzie.
Occasionally, the two-year-old would butt in and finish a word or a sentence.
Her chatter was non-stop, and Ted had the patience of a saint.
Lizzie was bathed and ready for bed and Kelly saw her eyes closing as her grandfather read to her about fire engines and unicorns.
Finally, her daughter’s muttering grew less and less until Ted stopped reading, and Kelly saw that Lizzie was asleep in his arms. They took her upstairs and settled her into her cot and closed the door to her room gently.
Back downstairs, Ted finished off the pots from their supper.
At first, after Johnny left, Kelly noticed his absence keenly whenever they might have shared time together late at night after Lizzie went to bed.
It had been one of the only times of the day when they’d been able to be a couple again.
Now, she faced the loneliness of not having a partner to chat to at the end of a hard day, but she also had a new type of freedom which released her from some of the unwelcome boundaries that had crept into their romance.
Secrecy.
His unusual behaviour towards the end of their relationship, mainly over his wife, Carrie, had begun to seep into her psyche and make her feel uncomfortable at home.
It was as if there was no place for her to be herself.
It had never been like that with him. Now, when she missed the practical stuff, like him helping to bathe their daughter, fixing broken cupboards, doing the shopping, or collecting wood for the fire, she caught herself falling into the habit of pining for what once was, just in time to remind herself that they’d been heading for inevitable disaster.
He’d lied to her, plain and simple, and no matter how comfortable she was in his arms, she couldn’t allow herself to continue to lie to herself. Accepting Carrie was still his wife would have been a betrayal of everything they’d built their trust on.
But she missed him.
She’d spent time with Fin, in hotels, here in her house, walking in the national park, getting to know one another, and she’d felt herself wanting to like him more.
It was as if she’d forced herself to make another relationship work.
But it was too soon. She wanted to experience life selfishly, without picking up the pieces for somebody else. After Fin, she’d promised herself that.
Besides, Fin Maguire didn’t like kids. Lizzie irritated him.
It had been awkward at first when she’d suggested they call it a day. Her mother would have called their relationship ‘flogging a dead horse’. He took it better than she thought he might, and their working relationship never suffered, and only Kate Umshaw knew the truth.
‘I have no idea why anyone would want to hurt a child,’ she said to Ted out of the blue. They dried pots together in the kitchen.
‘What brought that on?’ he asked her.
‘I have no idea,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’m suddenly philosophical.’
‘Be careful, a philosophical copper is an unhappy one.’
‘Why? Because we never make a difference?’
‘Something like that. If you stop too long to ponder all the pain out there, you’d never be able to do your job.’
‘I get that. I see it all the time. Do you think people go through stages?’
‘In their careers?’ he asked.
She nodded.
He took a sip of red wine. They finished drying up and went into the lounge.
There was no fire needed between May and August. Her terrace doors were flung open, even though it was terribly late, and the light of the moon flooded through onto the wooden floor.
Shadows of purple and silver changed the walls into a kaleidoscope of mystery.
They sat down.
‘I think some cases always come along that affect you more than others.’
‘Does it get to you too?’
‘Of course. I’m not immune. I look at each one of the people on my slab and see the life they lived. It’s an ending to one life and a gateway to the next. That’s the way I see it.’
‘Like religion?’
‘Not necessarily, I just don’t buy it that the end of our biological existence is the end of us.
We are more than just our organisms. I see signs of people with superhuman strength fighting back in the face of unspeakable danger, and I just believe there’s something else to us.
A force that lives inside us that can’t be destroyed. ’
‘Gosh, I like that,’ Kelly said. She sighed. ‘This country is so small. You would think there’s nowhere to hide. Yet thousands of people simply vanish into thin air. They get erased from the face of the earth.’
‘Is it a good time to suggest finishing that Netflix show?’ he half-joked.
‘The true crime one?’
He nodded.
They’d got into a show about serial killers in the USA and they critiqued it from the standpoint of their respective experiences. It was almost like a game for them, each bringing something different to the investigation in question. This was their Risk, their Monopoly.
‘You know what they say about people who watch true crime in their leisure time?’ she joked.
‘Psychopaths? Yes, I’ve heard that. Well, I won’t tell if you don’t.’ He winked at her. She yawned.
‘Is it too late?’ he asked.
She got up and flicked on the TV in answer and searched for the correct link. They were on part three of a seven-part series.
‘Do you often wonder why these things are so popular?’ she asked him.
He thought for a bit and then sipped some more wine. ‘I think people love the brutality and the drama. Netflix is our circus.’
‘Our circus?’ she asked.
‘You know, give the masses bread and circuses… It keeps them in check and all that. The Romans… People attribute it to Cicero, but I think it was Juvenal.’
‘Who?’
‘A satirist.’
‘Hmm,’ Kelly pondered.
‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked her.
She finished her drink and started the credits of the third episode. ‘Conspiracy theorists.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘Aren’t they the modern-day social commentators, a bit like your Juvenal? Social media rebels who challenge the establishment? After all, plenty of them talk about placating the masses.’
He stared at her, and she laughed.
‘I know, right? This case has got to me. I did a bit of research on Hampton-Dent, and guess what I found?’
Ted waited. Kelly paused the TV.
‘There’s one podcaster in particular who is a thorn in the side of these big pharmaceutical companies. He has millions of followers; he’s called the DiggerMan because he won’t stop digging until he gets to the truth,’ Kelly said with a grin.
‘I like him already,’ Ted said.
‘I know, right? Well, he goes for Hampton-Dent regularly and they hate him. There have been a few lawsuits but he has money behind him and they haven’t been able to silence him yet.’
‘Silence him for what?’
‘Accusing them of corporate manslaughter, illegal clinical trials, dodgy patents, it’s all conspiracy stuff which can’t really be proved.’
‘So he’s playing with fire.’
‘Yes, but don’t you find it interesting? I searched Jamie Robbins’ name and he came up a few times; Joe Folly appealed to him publicly to be a guest on his podcast. Coincidence?’
Ted raised his tired eyebrows. ‘I think it’s time for my bed.’
‘It’s potential motive, Dad. Do you think there are people out there powerful enough to kill people who get in their way?’
‘I think you’re getting ahead of yourself. You don’t seem to have a break from work nowadays.’
‘Is this your way of telling me I’m turning into a sad loner who watches too much Netflix?’
He laughed. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Remember Colin Day?’
She referred to a local case – her first in Cumbria – when a man who controlled the narrative in local government and media turned out to be a money-laundering, people-trafficking murderer.
‘Big Pharma is a thousand times more powerful than him. And they have way more money,’ she said.
Kelly had seen the amounts of cash flowing through Colin Day’s bank accounts and she shuddered to think of how a multi-billion-pound corporation could skew a narrative across media platforms. A seed had been planted in her mind, and she couldn’t ignore it.
‘Have you got any evidence?’ he asked her.
She shook her head.
‘I guess we’ll know more once I perform the postmortem tomorrow.’
Kelly nodded.
She resumed the documentary.
‘Let’s finish this episode,’ Ted said.
They fell silent as the murderer on screen closed in on his victim from a reconstruction.
In hindsight, it was always so easy to warn a woman in danger to avoid certain hazards, particular pitfalls and lapses of judgement, but the whole point of programmes like this was to strike fear into women, not make society stop killing them.
In Kelly’s head, it wasn’t the woman who walked alone, or took a risk, or failed to predict danger in her life who was at fault; it was those around her who failed to do anything about it.