Monday, 3 April, 10 a.m.
Monkmoor Police Station, Shrewsbury, is buried away in a large housing estate on the eastern side of the town. The station itself is a typical sixties cheap and ugly building. But it houses a largely happy force who cope with government cuts with a certain dogged acceptance and resilience.
It was a building now so familiar to DI Alex Randall that he could have found his way around it in a blackout. But never like this. Never from this angle.
It was a strange feeling, being on this side of the questioning. It felt unreal, this role reversal, this nightmare. He scooped in some long, slow breaths and listened to Sergeant Paul Talith almost with disbelief. ‘Just confirm your name, sir.’
You already bloody well know it.
He swallowed the words. ‘Alex Fergus Randall.’
It was all very well responding as honestly and politely as he could to his own detective sergeant, but the penetration of his home life, the home life he had struggled so hard to keep secret from his colleagues, was painful. And when Martha learned the sordid details … Anticipating her response, DI Alex Randall winced. He was paying the price for having dared to dream the fool’s dream.
His heart felt as heavy as the millstone that had hung around his neck for the last few years. That’s what Erica had been. Heavy, dragging, depressing. But, paradoxically, now he was freed from the millstone, he felt the burden had grown heavier. Perhaps it was because it hadn’t really sunk in that she was dead, but privately he knew it wasn’t that at all. It was the ambiguous circumstances surrounding his wife’s death that would form a cloud of suspicion over him, a permanently poisonous miasma. Like the sulphurous cloud that sits over a volcanic pool, it would cling to him, possibly forever. That was why, relieved of her physical presence, the cloud she had left behind seemed more menacing and harder to free himself from. He felt no lighter because he could see all too clearly into his own future. And it was even uglier than his past.
DS Paul Talith cleared his throat and apologized again. ‘I’m so sorry about this, sir,’ he said. ‘You understand we just need to know what happened.’ He gave a noisy, embarrassed scrape of his throat. ‘Fact finding, you know? In your own words.’
DI Randall responded wearily, ‘It’s all right, Talith,’ he said, ‘I understand completely.’
His mind right-angled, unexpectedly finding a track of its own, recalling Erica as she had once been before life and something else, nameless and terrible – something heavy and grey as a winter’s sky – had destroyed it, her own and his. In this memory she was still alive, not twisted and dying at the bottom of the stairs, eyes pleading into his. It was as though, in those final moments, she had become herself again. He drew in a deep breath and felt trapped in this dreadful position. He closed his eyes and saw her, the Erica of years ago. She was dancing and singing, humming and twirling, hands on pregnant belly, right in front of his eyes, tempting, unpredictable and oddly bewitching. Bewitching? His mind, always prosaic, objected to the word. Who did he think she was? Blaming events on witchcraft? She wasn’t a witch. But she had been a woman damaged by life’s events and in those last few months the damage had seemed to compound. Unpredictable since that one terrible day when their son had been born dreadfully, morbidly damaged, happiness had become a stranger to him and her, never visiting their home again except for the briefest of moments. The odd second when they could both forget. Little more than blinks of an eye. And lately she had been worse – bordering on violent. Unpredictable, sometimes looking almost mad, like the women who stared out of the windows of Victorian bedlam. She had almost frightened him, so he had taken to locking his bedroom door at night fearing that her threats of violence would come true and he would be found one morning, a knife sticking out of him. But, in the end, it wasn’t he who had been found dead but Erica herself. And, as far as he could tell, it hadn’t been during one of her violent, vindictive acts but a simple accident. The trouble was he could never prove it.
And it had ended in this.
He knew the procedure only too well. There would inevitably be a lengthy inquiry which he feared would lead nowhere except to leave a dirty residue. A permanent stain on him. A tide mark of scum. A question mark hanging over his head that he was powerless to remove. How could he? There had been no witnesses. Just the two of them. Neighbours would have heard screams and shouts, as they must have done on numerous occasions before. Randall was a realistic man, not given to bouts of self-pity or despair, but now he felt swamped by both.
And he was brave enough to face that it could even mean he would have to resign from the police force. Everything that could have planted happiness in his life was drifting away downstream, moving farther and farther away, and he could not swim after it to retrieve it. He was man enough to face the facts, look upstream to the long river of his future and prepare himself for it as he now met DS Paul Talith’s eyes and recognized the sympathy that beamed out of them. He wanted to get this over with. And at the same time, as he folded his arms, he knew it never would be ‘over with’. It would always be a noose of loose rope lying around his neck waiting for the opportunity when someone would tug hard and unexpectedly. And then what? Oblivion.
Inadvertently he put his hand around his neck as though to check whether the rope was already there.
It was not.
Talith prompted him. ‘In your own words, sir. In your own time.’
10.28 a.m.
Martha eyed the phone, knowing that, inevitably, it would ring.
Any minute now.
Soon.
DS Paul Talith had waited until she would have been in her office for well over an hour. He was dreading it. His boss and the coroner had what might be called a cordial working relationship. He hadn’t even worked out how he was going to put this, but the call had to be made. Someone was dead. She was the coroner and as such had to be informed. It was the law. As he dialled the number reluctantly, he was hoping that inspiration would come and he would be able to speak his part.