Lost River bcadf-10 Read online

  ‘Everybody knows that.’

  ‘You hate being put into a category by the system. So you decided to categorize yourselves. I understand that, I really do. It’s a way of taking back control, asserting your own identity. Everyone needs an identity. You have to belong to a group, a family, a tribe. Or a gang.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You wanted to get into the m1 Crew, didn’t you? You badly needed to be part of the gang, to feel you belong. But they weren’t really like you at all. Were they, Vince? They thought you were much too soft, a kid with no street cred. You couldn’t get their respect. So you made them a gift. Was that the deal you made?’

  Fry recalled Andy Kewley’s words. This wasn’t one of the primary suspects, but he knew who was involved all right, and he helped to cover up. A real piece of work. He was as guilty as anyone I ever met.

  Vince shook his head. ‘It wasn’t me. You didn’t see me there.’

  ‘But you were there that night.’

  ‘You don’t understand anything.’

  ‘I understand you, Vince.’

  ‘No way. You can’t ever understand. You’re a copper.’ He stopped and stared at her, as if suddenly scared by her expression.

  And so he should be. A vivid memory had come to her now. No confused images or blurred impressions any more. She almost had it last time, stood here in this flat, but she’d been distracted by the crack pipe, the blonde girlfriend. She remembered that shudder when she heard him say, ‘She’s a copper.’ It wasn’t just the accent. The voice was the same. A familiar voice, coarse and slurring. Of course it was familiar. She’d lived in the same house with him for years.

  ‘Vince,’ she said, ‘I didn’t see you. But I heard you.’

  Fry sat for some time in her car, staring blindly at the traffic on Birchfield Road, streams of motorists hurtling past Checkpoint Charlie, oblivious to the fact that they were crossing the borderland in the deadly turf war between Birmingham’s street gangs.

  She couldn’t have said how long she sat there before she finally turned on the engine, wound down the windows, and swung out on to the underpass, heading for Perry Barr.

  Jim Bowskill answered the door in his slippers, with his sleeves rolled up to expose white forearms. He looked as though he’d been cleaning, or doing the washing up. The impression of domestic banality turned her heart over.

  ‘Your mum’s not here,’ he said. ‘She’s a doing a bit of shopping.’

  ‘Good. It’s perhaps better this way.’

  ‘You should have let us know you were coming, love. I’ll put the kettle on. Alice won’t be more than half an hour or so. She popped across to the One-Stop. She said we needed some fresh meat. I don’t know why, when we’ve got plenty of stuff in the freezer. Would you like tea, or coffee?’

  ‘No, Dad. Don’t bother.’

  Why did people talk so much when there was nothing to say? Fry wondered if they felt they had to fill the silence with noise to prevent reality from leaking into their minds, as if the truth was hiding in the pauses.

  ‘Can we sit down for a minute? There’s something I want to tell you.’

  ‘Of course, love. But are you sure you don’t want — ’

  ‘No, Dad. Sit down.’

  They sat opposite each other, Jim in his usual armchair, but perched anxiously on the edge of the seat, Fry on the settee like a visitor.

  ‘We’ve never really talked about this before,’ she said. ‘I mean, the night of the assault.’

  Even now, she felt reluctant use the word ‘rape’ when speaking to Jim Bowskill. It was as if she had to protect him from the harsh world out there, the one he didn’t seem to see passing his window.

  ‘We’re always here if you want to talk,’ he said. ‘Your Mum would love — ’

  ‘I know,’ said Fry. ‘I know that, Dad. Thanks, really. But there’s something…a bit of information that I’ve only just realized myself. It affects you personally, Dad. You have to know about it.’

  He gazed at her steadily, a look of concern crossing his face. Or was it an expression of fear? Fry hesitated now. Was she about to turn Jim’s world upside down?

  ‘Go on, love,’ he said.

  ‘It’s about Vincent. He was one of the group that night. In Digbeth, you know. He was part of the gang involved in the assault.’

  Jim Bowskill didn’t say anything, but lowered his head and looked at his hands. They lay in his lap, strong hands but with slightly swollen knuckles, a result of his years spent working at the engineering factory. He was grasping his fingers together, and Fry saw that he was trying to stop them from shaking.

  ‘Dad? Are you all right? I didn’t think you would be so upset about Vince. You must have known what sort of company he’d got into.’

  He shook his head, and Fry was shocked to see a tear break free from his cheek and plop on to the back of his hand.

  ‘Diane, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re both really sorry. We didn’t know what else we could do.’

  He spoke in a very small voice, as if it was painful for him to get out the words. At first, Fry didn’t understand. She wanted to go over to his chair and comfort him for his distress, but something was holding her back. Somehow, she knew that his words were more than just an expression of sympathy. That had all been said before, years ago. This was something more, something much bigger. These were words that would change everything. Jim Bowskill was apologizing.

  ‘Dad?’ she said. And then she asked the toughest question of all. ‘You knew?’

  ‘Yes, Diane,’ he said. ‘We knew.’

  29

  Once again, Cooper allowed himself to be swept up in the activity, the arrival of the whole caravan in response to his call. The field had been taped off, and a scene-of-crime tent stretched across the dry river bed to the opposite bank, though it was much too late to worry about protecting the remains.

  Sergeant Wragg had attended from Ashbourne, and DC Becky Hurst arrived from Edendale, close behind the medical examiner. There was nothing for Cooper to do at the scene now, so he moved himself out of the way.

  Only now, when he stood back on the roadway, did Cooper notice the limestone cliff above the swallet hole. Crevices and fissures in the rock had formed the crude outline of a face, like a primitive wall carving. Two eyes, a nose, and a narrow cleft for a smiling mouth.

  No, not a wall carving. It was just like a cartoon face, drawn by a child.

  The medical examiner brushed dirt off his gloves as he walked back across the field.

  ‘You’ll need a forensic anthropologist for a specialist opinion,’ he said. ‘The pathologist won’t be too interested in this one. Not enough flesh or soft tissue left on the bones. Well, there wasn’t much there to start with.’

  ‘Meaning, Doctor?’

  ‘A neonate. It was a new-born baby. No more than a few hours old, I’d say. Perhaps it was never even alive.’

  ‘Will we be able to tell that?’

  The ME shrugged. ‘Well, a birth is considered live if the child breathes after being born. Since most killings of neonates occur immediately after birth, before the ingestion of food or healing of the umbilical stump, the only method of determining whether a child was born alive is by examination of the lungs.’

  ‘The lungs?’ said Cooper.

  ‘A hydrostatic test.’ He stripped off his gloves and gestured with his hands. ‘Basically, you take out the lungs and put them in water. If they sink, we can presume the child was stillborn. If the lungs float, the child was born alive and breathed. A bit like the test for witchcraft, I always think.’

  ‘What? Oh, yes. If you float, you’re guilty. If you drown, you’re innocent.’

  ‘That’s it. But obviously, there’s a problem here. The remains are too decayed, from exposure to the air. There are no lungs.’

  Cooper turned away. He’d seen and heard enough here.

  ‘You haven’t asked me how long the remains have been here,’ said the ME. ‘Don’t you usually want t
o make unreasonable demands for my estimate on the time of death?’

  ‘I don’t think I need to ask that,’ said Cooper. ‘It would be around two years ago, I imagine.’

  The ME raised his eyebrows. ‘A very good guess, DC Cooper.’

  ‘Acting DS.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Promotion obviously improves your speculative abilities.’

  ‘Actually, I’d go a bit further,’ said Cooper. ‘I’d say this child died on the thirtieth of June.’

  Cooper was walking slowly back down the trail towards his car when his phone rang. He heard a young woman’s voice.

  ‘Hello. You gave me your card. At the funeral.’

  ‘Is that Lauren?’ said Cooper.

  ‘Yes. How did you know?’

  ‘It wasn’t too hard to figure out. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to say.’

  ‘But you do want to talk to me?’

  ‘Alex told me you’d been asking questions,’ she said.

  ‘So you’ve been in touch with Alex?’

  ‘I emailed him. We keep in contact that way. Then he can delete my messages, so Mum never finds out.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Cooper. ‘I suppose I ought to have guessed that.’

  Cooper watched the activity taking place around the dry river bed.

  ‘Lauren…’ he said hesitantly.

  She seemed to detect a seriousness in the tone of his voice.

  ‘You’ve found out something, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m near Wetton Mill right now. At the spot where the river goes dry. You know where I mean, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Lauren, we found the remains.’ He paused to let it sink in. ‘Please, tell me — whose baby was it?’

  There was a long silence, and for a while Cooper thought he’d lost her. But he could hear her faintly in the background. She had either put down the phone, or taken it away from her ear so that she didn’t have to hear what he said next. She sounded to be having trouble breathing. He heard a ragged sob, and wondered if she was totally on her own somewhere, with no one to comfort her.

  ‘Lauren, don’t go. Where are you? I’ll come and meet you anywhere. Lauren?’

  ‘I’m still here,’ she said.

  Cooper could barely hear her, because her words were almost swallowed by her sobbing.

  ‘It’s all right, Lauren. Everything’s okay. I just need to know — ’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The baby was mine.’

  Cooper drove through Ashbourne, negotiating another busy market day to reach Church Street, and heading towards some of the oldest buildings in the town — the alms houses, the original grammar school. At least they were made of stone. It made him feel a bit more at home.

  Lauren was waiting for him near the entrance to the churchyard, a dark figure in black clothes that swung as she turned to meet him.

  ‘The same place that we met before,’ was all she’d said. Of course, here was where her sister Emily had been buried. Perhaps Lauren’s floral tribute still lay here somewhere, too. Remembering 30th June for ever.

  Lauren’s Doc Martens crunched on the gravel as they walked towards the newest gravestones and stood for a moment in front of Emily’s gleaming, pristine memorial.

  ‘I don’t know how you managed to keep it quiet,’ said Cooper.

  She shrugged, feigning indifference now.

  ‘It wasn’t that difficult. I wore a lot of baggy clothes, so nobody would notice for a while. It helps when nobody expects you to dress in the latest fashions. And, to be honest, I was a bit on the big side then, anyway. I put a lot of weight on when I got to my teens. I think I was stress eating. I hated myself for it, but Mum just kept putting more food in front of me.’

  ‘It’s her way, I think.’

  ‘Right. I wouldn’t have got away with it much longer, though. I would have had to go down with some illness or other, even though I was due to leave school about then. But the baby came early. Very early, actually.’

  ‘Your mother must have known about the baby, Lauren.’

  ‘Oh, yes. She knows everything, or she thinks she does.’

  ‘And when the time came?’

  ‘We had to dispose of it. That’s what Dad told me. He said — ’

  She looked up from the grave, no longer able to get out the words.

  ‘He said it was born wrong and it had to die,’ suggested Cooper.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘I got it from your brother. I think Alex must have heard it somehow.’

  ‘Oh, Alex knew was what happening. He was the only person I could tell. Me and Alex, we were really close at one time. It’s funny to think that, I suppose. We’re so different.’

  ‘He was only eleven, Lauren.’

  ‘I know. I’m not sure he understood everything.’

  ‘Did it occur to you what it might do to him?’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘No,’ said Cooper. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  Two women entered the churchyard with fresh flowers to place on a grave. Cooper and Lauren moved on to stay out of earshot. They walked down past the front of the church hall and came to a path along the side of the Henmore Brook.

  ‘You could have got the morning-after pill,’ said Cooper. ‘Didn’t they do that at your school? Or you could have gone to a clinic. To your GP.’

  She shook her head. ‘I was terrified people would talk, or they would ask me who the baby’s father was. You don’t know what it’s like in a place like this.’

  ‘Surely if it was just some boy at your school — ’

  ‘A boy?’ Lauren looked at him and laughed bitterly. ‘You don’t know everything then, do you? You’re not quite as smart as I thought you were.’

  Cooper stopped walking. Down here, there was no sound, except for the trickle of the brook, a few birds calling in the yew trees in the churchyard.

  Lauren strode on a bit further, then she stopped too. Instead of turning towards him, she stayed with her back to him, her head down, hair falling over her face, the purple streak incongruous against the trees. She seemed to be staring at her boots, as if the pattern of the laces and steel hooks had some significance.

  Cooper had a sudden realization of the full horror in that phrase her father had used. It was born wrong and it bad to die. There could only be one meaning. Why had he been so stupid? Lauren was right. He really wasn’t all that smart.

  The girl looked up at him now, to see if he understood.

  ‘It didn’t feel like a baby, you know?’ she said. ‘Just some dirty little secret that I had to keep quiet about and hide from the world.’

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘He came into my room one night. I was really upset about something, you know? But I can’t remember what it was now. Isn’t that stupid? It was something so trivial that I can’t even tell you what it was all about. It seemed so important to me at the time, but now it’s just…a big nothing in my memory. Meaningless, because of what came after.’

  ‘And your father forced himself on you?’

  ‘He was trying to comfort me. I think he meant well. At first, anyway. Mum was away that night. Not that she would have been any better. She’s no use in situations like that. She doesn’t like things being out of control. It would have ruined her routine.’

  Cooper shook his head in despair. ‘I can’t understand how he would do something like that.’

  ‘Well, he’d been drinking on the way home from work. Things had started going badly at the store. It must have been about the time the new supermarket moved into town, and he thought it was all over. He told Mum he thought he was going to have to lay off all his staff, and go on the dole himself, for the first time in his life.’

  ‘It doesn’t excuse — ’

  ‘Anyway, he was really stressed, you know?’ she said. ‘He didn’t usually drink, so it affected him badly when he did. I don’t think Dad knew what he was doing
that night. Honestly, I don’t think he did.’

  She must have seen the doubt in his eyes. Cooper suspected she was about to start putting the blame on herself again. That wouldn’t do anyone any good.

  ‘I’ve always felt guilty about it,’ she said. ‘Guilty about everything.’

  ‘You shouldn’t. What your father did was very wrong. It was rape.’

  ‘But was it?’

  ‘Yes, of course it was. You were under age.’

  ‘Well, it’s got to be partly my fault. I suppose I was lucky it wasn’t worse.’

  ‘You mustn’t talk like that.’

  Lauren’s black eye make-up was running now, streaking her pale cheeks.

  ‘I did something bad to Alex, though,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I?’

  Cooper thought she had, but he couldn’t explain to her quite what. He didn’t really know what had been going on in her brother’s mind.

  ‘I suppose you told Alex where the baby was buried?’ he said.

  ‘I took him there, and showed him the place.’

  ‘What? Oh, Lauren.’

  She wiped a sleeve across her face, only making the streaks worse.

  ‘I had to. It was like a memorial service, just me and him. It was the only way my baby’s death would ever be remembered.’

  ‘Well, Alex remembers it all right,’ said Cooper grimly.

  ‘How did he react?’

  ‘He was a bit strange, you know? He went right down on to the river bed, stood on the exact spot where the water disappeared through the ground. I think he had to do that, to make it real. He was very quiet afterwards. But then, he always was a bit withdrawn.’

  ‘Was the baby born alive, Lauren?’ asked Cooper.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  She shrugged hopelessly. ‘Not to me.’

  They walked slowly back towards the church, Cooper allowing Lauren to walk a little way ahead. Following her black coat, he felt like a mourner in procession to the grave. When they got back to the gate, she spoke to him again, more composed and reflective now.