Cassie had managed to return the box and its contents to the wardrobe and get out of the bedroom without being caught. Now she was striding down the canal towpath – the fastest route into central Camden whether from her gran’s or her own place, twenty minutes’ walk in the other direction.
Out here, a mile west of the market, tranquility reigned – the traffic rumble tamed to a distant backdrop, the canal’s stillness broken only by the paddling of ducks and the occasional chirrup of a moorhen. This was usually her haven, a calming headspace where she could prepare for the day ahead, but since the encounter with her father her thoughts wouldn’t stop churning, like dirty clothes on a never-ending wash cycle.
She kept looking around, half-expecting to see Callum’s gaunt outline on the towpath or one of the bridges crossing the canal.
Half hoping to see it, too. She pushed the thought away.
After seeing the wedding photo, a new and unwelcome idea had shouldered its way into Cassie’s consciousness. Her mother hadn’t wanted her. The younger Katherine the camera shutter had captured in the market had looked so happy – keen to go to university, with an exciting future ahead of her – before discovering she was pregnant. That had narrowed her horizons to a single narrow path: a shotgun wedding and a marriage that went sour. Together with Cassie’s recurring dream of her mother weeping, it was impossible not to draw the obvious conclusion: that her unwanted arrival had ruined her parents’ relationship.
The sun had come out, burning off the morning mist and softening the winter chill. Cassie slowed for a moment to check the best route to Holborn Library.
The cutting from the local paper she’d found in her grandmother’s mementoes box had given her an idea. She had already searched online for details of her mother’s murder and her father’s trial – in vain: the national papers had digitised their back editions, but apparently, yet another wife-murder wasn’t big enough news to make their pages in the first place. But she’d discovered that hard copies of the local rag, the Camden Gazette, going back to the 90s were archived at Holborn Library, and it was open on Saturdays.
The sound of traffic and human hubbub mounted as she reached the footbridge just before the lock. Pausing in the middle to look towards the market she tried to locate the spot where her mum had been standing in the photo, but it was now home to a sprawl of hot food stalls sending up a spicy cloud of Indian, Korean and Moroccan aromas. In a couple of hours the aisles of the market would be heaving with sightseers. Self-respecting locals avoided the place – the original traders who had sold an eclectic mix of antiques, decent leather goods, home-made jewellery, and vintage clothes were now outnumbered by stalls flogging mass-produced tat from China which you might as well buy off Amazon. Worse, only a handful of the original clubs and music venues survived in the Victorian warehouse buildings that ringed the market.
Jesus, listen to yourself, woman. Moaning on about a lost golden era again.
Passing a busker murdering ‘Another Day in Paradise’ reminded Cassie of the band mentioned in the newspaper cutting. Something her grandmother had said years ago, in one of her rare comments about Callum, came back to her: ‘Singing wasn’t a proper job for a husband and father.’
Of course! Poitín must have been her father’s band. He was a Northern Irish Catholic and the name looked like one of those unpronounceable Gaelic words. The cutting was the souvenir of a proud girlfriend in love with the front man in a rock band.
*
A sign in the lobby of the shabby 60s-era library directed her to the archive up on the first floor but there she found the door locked. After knocking at the wired glass she saw a girl get up from the reception desk to come to the door.
‘I’m sorry, but we’re closed for stocktaking,’ she said. ‘It should say so on the website.’
Cassie must have looked gutted because she didn’t close the door.
‘What is it you need to see?’
A few minutes later she was in, and the kind-hearted librarian was setting down a pile of eight oversized bound books holding the Camden Gazette for 1997 and 1998 – Cassie having figured that while the murder would have been reported straight away, the case would have taken a while to reach court.
‘You’re in luck,’ said the librarian. ‘Anything earlier is on microfiche and I can’t spare the time today to show you how to use the machine.’
Cassie nodded knowledgeably. What the fuck was a microfish?
The smell of the old newspaper was the first thing that hit her. Musty but not unpleasant, it made her feel . . . nostalgic. At first she couldn’t figure out why, but then she remembered, it smelled a bit like the second-hand copy of Gray’s Anatomy her grandmother had given her on her eleventh birthday. Picturing herself lying on her bed, poring over its intricate illustrations of organs and musculature, memorising the names, she smiled. How many other grandmas would have handled a childhood fascination with the dead so matter-of-factly?
Although Cassie had visited her mum’s grave she couldn’t remember the exact date of her death, recalling only that she had died in the autumn of 1997, so she started with the September ’97 editions. Entering the Camden of two decades ago felt like descending in a diving bell into a lost world.
The Parkway Cinema, now an Odeon, had been showing Trainspotting and Dead Man Walking, two of her favourite films. Then Toy Story. Yes! She remembered her father taking her to see it. When the little boy had mothballed his old favourite, the cowboy Woody, she’d been inconsolable. Hadn’t her dad given her some sweets to comfort her?
Fizzy cola bottles. She could still recall the transgressive thrill when they landed on your tongue. Why hadn’t had her mum been with them?
In the music listings, legendary venues like the Roundhouse and Electric Ballroom were still going strong but she was disappointed to see them hosting mostly metal, indie, funk, and jazz acts – or raves. She’d stupidly been expecting to see her personal heroes like The Clash, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Ramones . . . when of course the punk/post-punk scene had waned at least a decade earlier.
Even the good old days had a good old days.
Leafing past ads for flats on sale at 90k – which would now go for five times that – she was amused to find an actual Lonely Hearts page – Attractive lady, 39, seeks professional gentleman for theatre visits and possible marriage. No swiping right back then: you had to write to a box number, which sounded a bit filthy.
The crime coverage was dominated by drug-dealing busts, but there were none of the drug-related knifings that all too often ended up on her mortuary table; the only report of a stabbing – non-fatal – arose out of two guys having a fight outside a pub over a girl.
The biggest story was about a local police corruption case – a Camden detective, who had pocketed twenty-five grand for turning a blind eye to organised crime activity, caught in a sting by an anti-corruption unit.
Cassie paused to stretch. She’d reached the end of September without finding any mention of her mother’s murder.
Halfway through the seventh volume she reached the front page for October 6, 1997 – and met her mother’s trusting gaze.
BRUTAL MURDER OF CAMDEN MOTHER, 26
She suddenly knew what they meant when they said a headline screamed. The block capitals jumped off the page in a shriek that raised the hairs on her forearms. Then her eye fell on the black-and-white photo down the page – a cobbled street under a railway bridge, and one of those white tents the police used to cover bodies. She pushed her chair back from the table with a grating screech.
Next thing she knew, someone was telling her to take deep breaths. She opened her eyes to see the criss-crossed laces of her own DMs. Lifting her head cautiously she met the librarian’s wide-eyed gaze.
‘I’m OK. Sorry about that.’ She managed a weak smile. ‘No breakfast.’
‘Are you sure?’ After casting a glance at the headline, the girl retreated.
Christ. Fancy throwing a whitey! Scooping up people who fainted was usually her job.
Once the initial shock had passed, Cassie found herself able to read the article more coolly, as if the two-decade-old crime had happened to someone else.
Local mother of one, Katherine Raven, twenty-six, was found dead in Prowse Place early on Sunday morning. Police are treating it as murder. ‘This was a brutal crime and Camden Police offer our sincere condolences to Katherine’s family,’ DCI Stanley Neville told the Camden Gazette. ‘We will not rest until the perpetrator has been brought to justice.’ He appealed to anyone who saw Katherine in the area around Camden Road station on Saturday night or has any other information, to contact him or DS Gerald Hobbs directly.
The cops didn’t reveal how Katherine had died – which Cassie knew was standard procedure at the early stage of an investigation.
Barely three weeks later the paper ran the headline TRAGIC KATHERINE – HUSBAND CHARGED WITH MURDER above a close-up of a smiling Callum, which looked like it had been cropped from a publicity shot of his band. The piece, which was only three paragraphs long, repeated the basic facts; reporting restrictions presumably preventing the paper saying more before the trial.
The first day of Callum Raven’s trial was 13 April 1998. It had been held at Snaresbrook Crown Court from where the paper’s crime correspondent filed detailed reports.
First up in the witness box was DS Hobbs. He described how he’d arrived at Prowse Place after a 999 call from the early morning dog walker. He had found Katherine bludgeoned to death, evidently many hours previously – and had recovered the presumed murder weapon, a bloodied half-brick that lay nearby. Later that day, when he and his DCI Stanley Neville had interviewed Callum Raven, Hobbs said they found his account of what had happened as ‘confused and defensive’.
The case put by the prosecution over the following ten days was this: Callum and Katherine had gone for a rare evening out, and – in a detail that brought Cassie up short – had left their four-year-old daughter on a sleepover at her grandparents’. Callum said that the couple were drinking in The Hawley Arms until just before 9 p.m. when he’d left his wife there, to go to a mate’s house to watch football – stopping for a ‘quick pint’ at a second pub on the way. But when the prosecution called the barman at the Hawley, he reported that he’d had to eject Callum after he started shouting at Katherine. Distressed and tearful, she had stayed for another drink before also leaving around 10 p.m.
From the time she was last seen alive leaving the pub and the pathologist’s calculations, Katherine’s murder was estimated to have happened between 10 p.m. and midnight. A key witness for the prosecution was a middle-aged male eyewitness who reported looking out of his window and seeing a man running down Prowse Place just before midnight – a man he later ID-ed as Callum in a line-up.
Damningly, when his wife failed to return home that night Callum hadn’t even called the police, claiming that he’d assumed she’d gone to her mother’s.
The name of the final witness for the prosecution was unexpected. Weronika Janek. Cassie’s grandmother was called to give a picture of the marriage and was quick to paint her son-in-law as a work-shy drunk, prone to angry outbursts, before going on to report the time she’d called unexpectedly at the couple’s flat to find her daughter nursing a black eye. Kath claimed she’d fallen over and hit her face on the edge of the bath. ‘And what did you make of her account?’ asked the barrister. ‘It was an untruth,’ she said. ‘My daughter was always a hopeless liar, from when she was a tiny girl.’ The defence barrister couldn’t leave the jury to draw the obvious conclusion, so on cross-questioning he asked whether Katherine had given Weronika any reason at all to believe that Callum had hit her. Her response had been succinct but effective: ‘She didn’t need to.’
Hearing an echo of her dream – the distant sound of her mother weeping – Cassie felt her whole body tense with rage. As a child she had no doubt heard the sound of her mother crying after just such a beating.
‘Sorry to interrupt—’
Cassie jumped in her seat. It was the librarian.
‘Oh, sorry! But I need to go into the archive now and I can’t leave anyone here unattended.’ Her kind eyes looked anxious.
She let Cassie make photocopies of the relevant articles, including the ones she hadn’t had a chance to read yet, and gave her a couple of rubber bands to make them into an easy-to-carry scroll. She declined Cassie’s attempt to pay with a little ‘don’t worry’ wave before unlocking the door for her. ‘Good luck with your research’ – her tentative smile recognising that Cassie’s quest was personal and important.