Gladwin’s mobile could offer nothing better than a promise to take a message and get back as soon as possible. ‘It’s Thea. I’ve remembered quite a lot more about Melissa. I think you might want to hear it. Let me know where and when, okay?’
Leaving a message was deeply unsatisfying. ‘What if I forget it all again?’ she worried. ‘There’s so much rushing around in my head, I can barely focus for two minutes at a time.’
Her mother had made two large mugs of tea and was slumped on the sofa, looking drained. Hepzibah had jumped on top of her, and they were enjoying a rare cuddle that made Thea feel excluded.
With the phone still in her hand, she tried to assemble her thoughts. The quest for an explanatory key was growing increasingly urgent. Loose ends and unanswered questions swarmed on all sides, with nothing to suggest a remotely credible pattern. One persistent motif came back to her: undertakers. The bodies had both been laid out as if for burial, the Meadows family were London funeral directors – a fact that suggested at least some kind of connection. And Thea knew an undertaker rather well. What better excuse – reason, she amended – to call him?
She went upstairs with her phone, muttering something about seeing to the beds. Her mother took very little notice and the dog stayed where she was. Holding the gadget tightly, Thea realised that her hand was shaking and her heart pounding. Don’t be so silly, she adjured herself silently, resisting the message her body was trying to send her.
She could text him instead. Perhaps that would be safer, less of a transgression. But how could she possibly word it? The story was far too complicated, the questions too imprecise. If he was in the middle of a funeral, she might leave voicemail, inviting him to call her back. If Maggs was listening, he could pretend she was someone else. If he never wanted to speak to her or think of her again, he could be cool and unresponsive. The shaking and thumping grew worse as she considered these alternatives.
Just get on with it, her rational mind shouted. This is ridiculous.
So she instructed the phone to make the call with a few little motions of her thumb, and stared out of the window as she listened to the rhythmic warble as it summoned him. Outside the leaves were yellowing, the grass dry and brittle. The last gasps of summer were going unnoticed at Thistledown, which seemed to Thea another shame, to add to those already accumulating.
‘Hello?’ came his voice, slightly wary, slightly breathless, entirely friendly. ‘I saw you on the telly.’
She wasn’t sure whether to bless or curse the technology that had already told him who was calling. Wasn’t it a pity that surprises had become so difficult to find these days?
‘Did you? I tried to dodge the camera, actually.’
‘Yes, I could tell. I’ve been thinking about you all day.’
Don’t say that! she wanted to tell him. You mustn’t say that. ‘There’s been another killing this morning. Two in two days. It’s horrible.’
‘Are you still in Winchcombe?’
‘Yes I am. My mother’s here with me. I think she’s involved somehow.’
‘Explain.’
She ran through the basics, relieved to discover that she could give a lucid account of the people and how they connected to each other, and to herself. ‘The thing is,’ she concluded, ‘I thought you might know about the Meadows people. Or you can find out. There must be a directory of funeral directors.’ She giggled at the phrase. ‘There’s something going on with Oliver, for a start. And the Henry Meadows who runs the business seems a bit of a taboo subject.’
‘Thea – haven’t you been following the news? It was all over the place last week. TV, radio, papers. Even I couldn’t avoid it, and I can promise you I don’t have much time for all that these days. If it wasn’t for Stephanie always wanting the telly on, I suppose I’d have missed it.’
‘What? What news?’
‘There’s a big trial going on at the Old Bailey. It’s highly unusual, because the alleged crime took place about sixty-five years ago. The old man Meadows, who’s over eighty, has been accused of abusing a dozen or more little boys, back in the fifties. It’s all been brought out into the light, and apparently it was so gruesome they’ve realised they can’t keep a lid on it.’
‘And Stephanie watches that sort of thing, does she?’
‘She doesn’t understand any of it. But she did spot you last night. She called me in to see. I only got the final couple of seconds.’ He sounded regretful.
‘Okay.’ She thought about his revelation of the trial. ‘So I’m guessing that that’s where Oliver has gone. To watch his brother standing trial. Poor old chap – no wonder he was a bit distracted. And no wonder he didn’t want to tell me about it. And,’ she realised, ‘that explains one or two things about Fraser. He must know the whole story, as well.’
‘They’ll be astonished that you don’t. It’s all terribly public.’
‘I don’t think my mother has much idea, either. Maybe it’s less prominent than you think, and you only picked it up because they’re in the same line of work as you.’
‘I doubt it. You still don’t really get it. The Meadows have had an empire for generations. They’re rich and famous and much loved in the East End. There were stories about how gallant and heroic they were in the war, collecting bodies from the rubble in furniture vans and giving them all a decent burial. It’s the stuff of legends. The old man lived to be almost a hundred, so Cedric wasn’t the boss for very long before he passed it all down to his son – I forget his name.’
‘Henry,’ said Thea. ‘That’ll be Henry. So if there was a daughter called Melissa – granddaughter, I suppose – everyone would know about her?’
‘Probably,’ said Drew doubtfully.
‘Actually, Drew, I don’t think undertakers are ever properly famous. They’re always in the background, aren’t they? People find them embarrassing or depressing.’
‘Tell me about it. But, Thea, there’s more. Your Oliver, the younger half-brother, was one of the abused boys. He’s in London to give testimony against Cedric, not just to sit and watch. That’s the best bit, as far as the media are concerned. A family torn apart, and all that stuff. I’m still amazed that you’ve managed to miss it all. I’m even more amazed that you’re his house-sitter. That’s fantastic.’
‘Not in a good way, it isn’t. I feel rather stupid, actually. But nobody has said a word about a trial. Not Gladwin or Mo or anybody.’
‘Because it’s such a nasty subject. And the victims are all so old now, people feel uncomfortable about it. As far as I can understand it, Cedric gave up his wicked ways quite early on and settled down to family and business life like the most model citizen.’
‘Does that ever happen? Do men give up that sort of stuff?’
‘I’m sure they do. Lots of people go through a period of being sinful, or whatever you want to call it, and then pull themselves out of it. Maybe it was the love of a good woman that redeemed him, or straightforward fear of the consequences.’
‘Drew, you sound ever so animated. Are you …? You know – getting over it? Karen, I mean. How has it been?’
‘I might be starting to get over it, but only just. Oddly enough, I think today is the first day I’ve felt a bit more normal, as if my old self is still in here somewhere. We’ve got four new funerals today, which is a major boost, I can tell you. Maggs is a new woman, with the prospect of a bit of money coming in at last. It’s been terribly tight for all of us.’
‘Four! That’s incredible!’
‘I know. I think it’s a record. And it’s not three o’clock yet. There could be more.’
‘Steady on!’ she laughed. ‘Don’t get too ambitious.’
‘You’re right. We might not get anything else for a fortnight.’
‘That’s the other extreme. Anyway, it’s good that things are busy.’ She tried to inject sincerity into this last remark, despite a sense that it was not altogether good. It meant there was no chance of his joining her in Winchcombe, or dashing up to London to sit in the public gallery of the Old Bailey. ‘And it’s really nice to chat again,’ she added, this time with genuine feeling.
‘Glad to be of service,’ he said, like an undertaker. ‘Although I can’t quite see where it gets you.’
‘Nowhere, probably, but it’s filled in a lot of the blanks. Thanks, Drew.’
They rang off, each feeling there had been much more they could have said.
Gladwin called back at three-fifteen, sounding stressed and impatient. ‘I know, I know,’ she barked. ‘I have to get back to basics and talk you through it all again. We’ve had the post-mortem report on the girl, which helps. But there’s nobody in the UK called Melissa Meadows who remotely fits her description. So she can’t be who she said she was.’
‘She could have been using her mother’s name.’
‘Of course. Yes. And how the hell are we meant to find that?’
‘Well, all I really wanted to say now was that she definitely must have known Oliver. Anything else is too ridiculously far-fetched. And I know where he is today. I imagine you do, too, by this time.’
‘Thea – it’s been about thirty hours since you found her body. We’ve spent much of that time looking for her car, putting out calls for help with identification, examining the scene and going through her boxes. And then another killing happened and we had to start all over again with him. The wife alone has taken most of the day. She’s in bits, and says she can’t believe what’s happened and knows nothing about anything. I’ve never seen such drama. She screamed for ten minutes.’
‘Blimey. So you don’t know where Oliver is?’
‘It’s possible that one of the team has found him and not yet told me. We can have another go at making Fraser Meadows tell us, if we have to.’
‘He’s at the Old Bailey. His brother’s on trial for child abuse a million years ago. More than that, probably. Everybody’s in their dotage, but they’re trying him anyway. Oliver’s a witness.’
Gladwin went silent for half a minute. ‘That trial? The one the media’s been full of for a week or more? I don’t believe it.’ But she did – Thea could tell from her voice.
‘Why should you make the connection?’
‘Because it’s the same name, damn it. How could we not? This team must have a collective IQ of a pigeon, to have missed it. I hate to say it – again – Thea, but sometimes I don’t know how we’d manage without you.’
‘It wasn’t me,’ said Thea modestly. ‘It was Drew.’
Just saying his name felt like sucking a creamy toffee.
‘So Oliver might be able to tell them who Melissa was,’ Thea summarised to her mother, who was showing a keen interest in the results of the two phone calls. ‘Even if Fraser has never seen her before in his life, I’m sure his brother has.’
‘She could be a niece or something. Is that what you think?’ Maureen pulled at an earlobe, as if trying to speed up her own thought processes.
‘Well, not a niece, unless she’s the offspring of big brother Cedric. I suppose that’s possible. Actually, in theory, she could be the unacknowledged daughter of any of them. Including Fraser. She didn’t call herself Meadows, which implies she wasn’t born in wedlock.’
‘Honestly, Thea, I don’t see how she can be Fraser’s. He’s so adamant that she’s not. I wonder what was on the memory gadget. Maybe it was the whole family tree, all neatly set out.’
Thea smiled indulgently. ‘But why would she be killed? And which of the brothers could be capable of it? They’re all so old.’
‘It wasn’t Fraser. He was with Mo from Saturday afternoon until he collected me from Damien’s yesterday. You can ask her. And Oliver was in London …’
‘People can get back here from London easily enough. And any of them might have paid somebody else to do it. We need to figure out why. That must be the key to it all.’
‘And why the other murder? What had that poor young man done to deserve it?’
‘Classically, it would be because he saw something or knew something that might implicate Melissa’s killer. It’s the logistics of that one that defeats me. I don’t see how it could have been done in broad daylight like that.’
‘I suppose he couldn’t have just died of heart failure or something, there in the alleyway? Or committed suicide? There weren’t any marks on him, were there?’
Thea tried to conjure the image of the dead Reuben. Until then she had superimposed it onto the dead Melissa, finding them almost identical in every respect. ‘I don’t remember any,’ she admitted. ‘And he was much less pale than she was. Her face was a ghastly white, as if all the blood in her had drained away. He looked almost rosy, didn’t he? There’s something about being strangled – you can die of a heart attack, not suffocation. I can never remember it properly.’
Maureen shivered. ‘It must be dreadful,’ she moaned. ‘Beyond words – to do something like that to another person. I couldn’t do it to a rabbit.’
‘Nor me,’ agreed Thea. ‘But apparently it comes rather easily to some.’
‘No, no. I can’t believe that. They must suffer terrible guilt afterwards. Or fear of being discovered. Or a kind of self-loathing that turns them into monsters. Subhuman monsters. It’s such an enormous thing to do.’
Thea smiled forbearingly. ‘I’m not sure that’s how it is,’ she disagreed. ‘I’m afraid it’s all less difficult than that. People are so clever at rationalising. They’ll persuade themselves it was justified, that it wasn’t such a wicked thing to do, that it wasn’t really them that did it at all. A powerful inner force took them over, made them mad, so they lost control. I have a ghastly suspicion that at the actual moment, it’s really alarmingly easy to kill.’
‘I don’t want to believe that.’ Simultaneously, they acknowledged the differences in their experience. Thea had increasingly intimate connections with the police, involving herself in cases where people had committed terrible acts for seemingly banal motives. She could see her mother withdrawing, anxious not to be forced to listen to stories of murdered boys and their callous killers. Even old men, who also got themselves slaughtered from time to time, made gruesome corpses, not to be contemplated. ‘I think you must have a much stronger stomach than me,’ her mother added, with little suggestion of approval.