37

Thursday 24 July 2014

Ever since Brannon’s arrest, Sarah’s team had been flat out, picking up the pieces.

Sarah had been interviewed about her entry into Lizzie’s flat and her assault on Brannon, which had given him concussion severe enough to see him hospitalized. She’d had a representative from the Police Federation to support her, and a lawyer – after all she’d hit Brannon hard in the back of the head twice with her asp without giving a warning. When she’d got back to the office, there had been flowers on her desk from the team and a signed card with that quote about the sheepdog: The sheep do not want the dog around . . . She suspected she knew where the idea for that had come from. Still, it touched her to see the flowers. Elaine had left a gift pack of speciality Nespresso capsules. Only thing I could be sure you wanted. No way was I buying you fags.

In between all the work on the Brannon case, Sarah had found time to visit Morville Park.

The ground had been churned up in several places. Three trees had been felled: a broad beech and two oaks. Sarah had watched as they came down, heard the whine of the chainsaws, seen the young tree surgeons swinging over on their ropes, amputating the broad branches until the trees stood only as denuded trunks. She’d smelled the petrol fumes of the chipping machine as the trees were fed into its teeth.

Feeling fragile, she hadn’t wanted to inform Tania’s mother that they were digging. She knew the turned earth would be a territory of strange hopes and fears, of wishing and not wishing. And that at the end, it might all be for nothing. They might well not find Tania. But Elaine had insisted it was her duty to keep Claire informed, and of course Elaine was right and Sarah had let her do it. Claire, who seemed to see putting herself through every painful failed line of inquiry as an act of continuing devotion, had wanted to see the site where her daughter might have been lying. Early morning, Sarah had waited for her in the Morville Park car park. She arrived in her new Hyundai, smart and practical in trousers and a windcheater and sensible flat brown shoes, holding a bunch of cream roses. Sarah sat next to her while the park keeper, Tom, drove them both to the site in his electric vehicle, bouncing over the ground and quickly giving up on small talk about the weather. Claire laid the flowers on the ground by an oak tree and then stood at the edge of the dig and watched as the leafy beech came down. She mentioned quietly how it reminded her of the lilac that had fallen opposite her house on the night of the storm.

But today Sarah had had to accept that they would find nothing except the frame of a bike and the skeleton of a dog. Again Elaine had taken responsibility for telling Claire, quietly understanding that Sarah didn’t feel up to that either.

Dr Stichill, his boots caked in mud, had packed up his equipment. Seeing Sarah standing smoking on her own, he had turned and taken a few steps to talk to her in private.

‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘If she’s not there, I can’t find her.’

‘And you are sure now, sure that she’s not there?’

‘Yes, as positive as I can be. It’s not an exact science.’

Sarah had looked out over the muddy ground. It brought to mind those photos of the dismembered trunks on the battlefields of France. But it was neither a battlefield nor a grave, just a suburban wood that she had wilfully shattered on a hunch.

Before she got back into her car, she called the hospital for the regular update on Lizzie: still critical. Still stable.

The envelope had been waiting in the hallway when she got home, conspicuous among its less remarkable companions, which included an electricity bill, an offer of a credit card, and a mail-out from a local estate agent. The heavy textured paper and the black ink handwriting immediately identified the sender. There persistently, in spite of his years running an inner-city parish, was her father: the grammar-school boy with his gradually emptying bottle of ink. She had not wanted to read it straight away. Instead she’d let the dog out, run a bath, placed her glasses, a towel and the envelope by the side of the tub.

She pretty much knew the letter’s contents. It would be an account of the memorial service for her sister that she had missed. She knew how hurt her father would be that she hadn’t been there. She knew how much it meant to him. Every year he laboured over the service, poring over his books, looking things up, sticking post-it notes in pages. Always the same village chapel, light filtering blue and red through the simple triple lancet window. Susie’s old school friends arriving, parking their cars higgledy-piggeldy on the lane, bouncing up the bank and into the hedgerows. At first they brought boyfriends then husbands, then children who broke free to run around unchecked in the aisle and pews, finally running away forever as they disappeared into their lives. Her father climbed the wooden stairs of the pulpit more slowly now than in the beginning.

She couldn’t deny that some part of her had done it on purpose. He’d asked her for dates and she hadn’t told him to rule out the upcoming on-call period – always the busiest time when it was impossible to get leave.

She lay in the bath and read. There were no crossings-out, no blotches. That spoke to her of how careful was the chatty tone. He’d edited until he was entirely satisfied and then taken a fresh sheet to copy it. She imagined him sitting at his desk in his slippers, drafting, just as he had once written his sermons.

She knew what she hoped for from the letter. She could have written it herself, supplied the scripture she would have liked to read.

Everyone that loveth is born of God.

That would do well enough. Why the hell not? But the letter was carefully scant on scripture, and her father’s tone was determinedly cheerful. There was a joke about Job and his boils before her father moved on to understanding completely that her professional commitments had prevented her being there. Still, what a shame that she couldn’t make it! Everyone had missed her, and so many of her old school friends had been there. He hoped the investigation was going well. How much people need and long for justice! He was proud of her and her work.

Mum and I love you dearly.

That was true enough. Dearly certainly. She remembered falling from a wall in the back garden when she’d still been at primary school. She’d looked at the deep cut, sickeningly white and blue the moment before the blood gushed. Her father lifted her up and carried her through to the sitting room where he’d dressed the cut and then, smiling, pinched the tip of her nose gently between thumb and index finger’. He’d been more free with his use of bible quotation in those days. ‘“A merciful and gracious God,”’ he had said with a huge smile, ‘“abundant in loving kindness.”’ Then he had kissed her on the forehead and given her a big slice of chocolate cake.

Things had been simpler then.

Now, more circumspect, he signed off his letter with the only bit of scripture he had permitted himself.

And so, my dear daughter, may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace, always your loving father.

It was there, she thought, hiding in that quotation – the faintest suggestion that he might know she was not in truth filled with joy and peace and that there was some stumbling block that could not be alluded to.

The letter was swollen and warped where she had been holding it. She dropped it on the floor beside the bath. She should be filled with joy and peace but not be herself. That was a hard trick to pull off.

No point going round all those thoughts again.

It wasn’t her father’s fault. He was a man of principle. He couldn’t let himself off the hook just because it was personally painful to him. She had some sort of intimation what that was like. Wasn’t it after all the sin Steve had accused her of when she’d gone after Lizzie over the Portland Tower deaths: dogmatism, not seeing the bigger picture, not having a heart.

Perhaps that was why he had mentioned the agony of Job in his letter. Perhaps he wanted to say it pained him too – to be always loving her but never permitted to accept her. Job was all about the unfathomability of God. To not only take Job’s children, but to send boils too! And when Job complained what did God answer?

‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?’

When her sister had died, Sarah had dreamt that a hole had been beautifully carved in her, as if she were a sculpture that the wind was blowing through.

The water was getting colder and colder, but she continued to lie in the bath, the spaniel stretched out on the stone floor beside her. She looked down on the fish-eye view of her own body. The small floating breasts, the vulnerable flat curve of her stomach submerged beneath the line of water, the crest of her hips . . . She, who spent so much of her working life examining the intimacies of strangers, felt as though she was a stranger to herself.

She remembered the body of the teenager Farah Mehenni, too young to be so cold and dead. Sarah had been certain then too – not only that she would get a result, but also that it was the right thing to do. But in the end, even that conviction had wavered. She’d been left with nothing, a feeling of empty hands.

Then she thought of Lizzie in intensive care, still critical. She’d seen her just once: unconscious, attached to monitors, a tube feeding from her chest into a bottle of liquid by the side of the bed.

She should have gone into the flat sooner.

She stood up and stepped out of the bath. She began to dry herself quickly with some determination.

After the conclusion of the investigation into Farah and Hadley’s deaths, the counsellor had explained that this habit of turning her thoughts over and over wasn’t part of the problem. It was the problem. It had a name all to itself. Rumination. Sarah had come to think of this Rumination as a cowled sci-fi character, a Darth Vader that moved around secretly with her, sucking the flavour out of her food and the colours out of her day.

Every day, on waking, she’d reached out and religiously squeezed those little pills the doctor had prescribed out of the blisters of their packaging. She had done what she’d been told. Kept moving. Not let Rumination sit down next to her and take her by the hand. She’d exercised. Changed her routines. Gardened. Taken the tablets. It had been like hoping a rope would hold in a very strong current.

Recently she had been able to tell herself that her self-discipline had been effective. She had been getting better.

When she’d found that Stephenson was being investigated for child sexual exploitation, she’d felt vindicated. Even driving over to Lizzie’s and parking up and waiting for the rapid-entry team, she’d felt clever, cleverer than the other cops. On top of her game. It made her shudder now, the silly vanity of the excitement she had felt. She could see Lizzie, unconscious, the shudder of the electricity passing through her unresponsive body when they administered the defibrillator.

It was time to tell someone now, get signed off sick before things got worse. She needed help, she recognized that, much more help than those tablets could offer. She needed to make a big change. She’d resisted it, feared the damage it would do to her career and what in turn that would do to her life. There was nothing she could think of that she could do except policing; nothing else that gave her such a deep satisfaction. But she had to face that too. She couldn’t survive on prosecutions and guilty findings. It wasn’t dedication after all. It was a personality disorder.

Daisy had got up from the floor and was wagging her tail.

‘Yes, darling, just enough time for a late-night walk.’

But as she climbed the hill, Rumination walked steadily beside her.

She’d set too much store by finding Tania Mills. How pathetic it was to pin so much on an investigation over which you had so little control.

She turned. The great city of London cast an orange glow on the curve of the distant horizon. The dog was fussing around her legs. Sarah felt her hard claws through her trousers. She knelt down and stroked her. Thoughts came to her now that caused her shame and slid away from her as she tried to look at them. She remembered once standing on the edge of a tube station platform, the rush of the train . . .

Her phone pinged. She withdrew it from her pocket. A message from Caroline.

So what about that meet-up you promised?

She texted back, aiming for an upbeat tone. How very like her father she was.

Yes, sorry. Still busy, I’m afraid. I’ll be in touch in a week or so.

The phone started ringing. She looked at it for a moment, then answered.

‘Don’t give me that bullshit. If you want to see me, make a date.’

‘I’m busy . . .’

‘You’re always busy, aren’t you? Did you get cold feet?’

Sarah looked out over London. She thought of her father’s letter – may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace – and she thought of the cold wind blowing through her. Despair, after all, was a sin too.

She made herself choose a date. Just over a week away. It would be a Friday going into a rest day. ‘The first OK for you?’

‘You’d better not cancel.’

Caroline hung up.

The dog was nosing Sarah’s face. She stroked her little shoulders and head while her tail wagged from side to side.

‘Yes, good dog. Good dog. Don’t you worry, don’t you worry.’

She started walking back towards her house.

And then it came to her with the force of utter conviction. Richard Stephenson, the fastidious violin teacher, volunteering to dig in a park? Of course they’d missed Tania. She must be there.

Her footsteps stopped and the dog stopped too and looked back at her. As soon as she had had the thought, Sarah was questioning it. It was an unpleasant sensation to no longer trust her own judgement. Was this latest impulse the informed perception of a trained investigator, or was it rather the irrational compulsion of someone on the edge? Was she suffering from a detective’s fixation on a suspect? That trait was notorious – even the best could chase a subject blindly, leaving other serious lines of inquiry unexplored. There was a nervousness to her thinking, a hesitation that she didn’t like. She’d already made a fool of herself with all that digging. But once she’d had the thought, she couldn’t not follow it . . . It was an untrustworthy phenomenon: police instinct. The just-doesn’t-feel-right that could be either genius or prejudice.

Daisy wagged her tail anxiously. Sarah had the retired park warden’s number on her phone and she got it out of her pocket and contemplated the keyboard before beginning to text. She might as well go the whole hog and completely blow her reputation before she admitted she was having a breakdown.

Harry, sorry for texting late. Any chance you could meet me early tomorrow morning?