Blood on the Marsh Read online

  ‘There’s no baked beans,’ she said.

  ‘No baked beans?’ Holden felt she needed some guidance.

  ‘No baked beans, and no camping gear.’

  ‘You mean he’s gone camping?’

  ‘It looks like it. He loves camping.’

  ‘Well that must be a relief for you. That he’s only gone camping.’

  Maureen looked at Holden, but there was no sign of relief in her face. ‘You don’t understand. He always tells me if he’s going off anywhere. Always. And it’s us he goes camping with. Twice he’s been camping with my friend Jaz. But never on his own. And anyway, why would he go camping at this time of year? Don’t you understand? Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.’

  It took them several minutes to calm Maureen Wright down. The two female detectives sat on the bed either side of her, trying to reassure her. It was the younger woman, Lawson, who put her arm round her, consoling her, while Holden sat slightly further away, maintaining a distance physically and emotionally. Meanwhile Fox and Wilson tried to conduct a search as quickly and discreetly as the circumstances allowed.

  Wilson found something almost immediately. Fox had started to make a more thorough search of the wardrobe, whereas he had gone straight to the chest of drawers by the bed, and there in the second drawer, under a collection of rolled-up pairs of socks, he located a diary. He sat down on the side of the bed, his back facing the backs of the three women, and opened it. David Wright had filled in his personal details on the page for them near the front: name, address and mobile number. There was no email address, Wilson noted, and the name of his employer was Frame It, which Wilson knew to be just off the Cowley Road – Princes Street, he thought.

  He leaned forward, into January. It wasn’t exactly, Wilson reckoned, stream of consciousness stuff. He wasn’t sure quite what stream of consciousness was, but he remembered the expression from school – as far as he could recall, it was when someone writes long and rather tedious, badly punctuated, self-centred sentences that ramble all over the place without ever getting anywhere much. Anyway, whatever it was, David Wright didn’t do it. What he did write was arguably duller, but from Wilson’s point of view it was no less useful for that. For example, the week beginning 5 January 2009: on the Monday there was the single word, ‘Work’; on Tuesday, ‘Work’; on Wednesday, ‘Work’; and underneath that ‘Dinner at Mum’s’ (not ‘Mum’s and Dad’s’ Wilson noticed); on Thursday, ‘Work’ again, and on Friday, ‘10.00 a.m. Dentist – no work’; on the Saturday, ‘No Oxford game’; and on the Sunday ‘Roast lunch at Mum’s’. It was a similar pattern the following weeks – work, meals on Wednesdays and Sundays at his mum’s, and on Saturdays and other days Oxford United games to which he’d normally ‘listen on radio’ or ‘go to’. Occasionally he would record another activity.

  Wilson took a wedge of pages in his right hand, and began to flick quickly through them, allowing himself the opportunity to check for any obvious change of pattern. He knew that the most interesting and probably most useful material would be at the back of the diary, in the month of December, but he was methodical and thorough by nature. There was nothing, however, that caught his eye. ‘Camping with Mum and Dad and Vickie in the New Forest’ was the longest entry, repeated eight times, for a whole week at the end of May. He paused briefly over that – Vickie’s half term, he told himself – and then moved steadily on through the summer and autumn until he got to the beginning of December.

  The first week of that month (and including the Monday 30 November) had five days of ‘Work’, two Oxford games, a ‘Dinner at Mum’s’ and a ‘Roast lunch at Mum’s’. Wilson had kept a diary once, though not for that long. Every night for several weeks he had sat in bed and laboriously recorded the events of that day, and sometimes his own reactions to those events, until the entries had got so short he gave up. Other people, like his mum, had kept a diary to organize her and her son’s life. Those, he reckoned, were the two types of diary, one looking back, one forward. David’s however, was a mixture of the two. He used his diary as a planner – work, visits to his mum’s, the dentist, and Oxford United – and yet he also used it to record what had happened. Against each Oxford game, for example, he recorded the results and the Oxford players who had scored.

  Wilson turned to the following week. The general pattern was the same – work, meals at his mum’s, and two more Oxford United games – but there was more than that. ‘Fish and chips – Vickie’ on Tuesday; that was clear enough. But it was the entry for Saturday that caught and held his attention: underneath the expected reference to Oxford’s games against Hayes and Yeading (a rather dull 1–0 win – Wilson hadn’t gone, but he had read the reports), were two words: ‘Mother’s flat!’ Wilson stopped reading. Now that was odd. David’s mother didn’t have a flat, did she? He looked again, and noticed the exclamation mark. That was odd too. He flicked back through the last few pages to check he hadn’t missed something. No. The fact was that David Wright didn’t really use punctuation at all except for dashes. No full stops, no commas, no semi-colons or colons, and certainly no exclamation marks. So why this? And then he spotted it. The most obvious thing. ‘Mother’s flat!’ Not ‘Mum’s flat!’ but ‘Mother’s flat!’

  ‘How’s it going, Constable?’

  He stood and turned round. Holden was clearly talking to him, because Lawson was guiding Maureen Wright out of the flat. He paused, waiting for them to leave. It wasn’t something to raise in front of Maureen, without first sharing it with his DI.

  ‘It’s David’s diary, Guv,’ he said quietly, as if afraid his words might pursue Maureen down the stairs. ‘And there’s something very odd about it.’

  Lawson drove Maureen Wright back to Lytton Road in silence. It was a short trip and the woman was in a fragile enough state, and Lawson didn’t want to risk any more emotional storms until they were both sitting down with a soothing cup of tea. The others would be following in due course, but she reckoned that would take a while.

  Maureen insisted on making the tea herself, and even dug out some chocolate digestives. Then they sat at the kitchen table, sipping and chewing, until Maureen suddenly looked up and broke the silence.

  ‘I really don’t know what to think.’

  Lawson couldn’t come up with an immediate response. If she’d had a husband who had been hit by a train and a son who’d gone missing, she doubted she’d have known what to think either.

  ‘Maybe you should just try and think about where David might have gone camping. Does he have a favourite place, for example?’

  ‘He came wherever we went. The New Forest, Devon, Cornwall and the Forest of Dean. I don’t know that any of them were his favourite. He liked them all.’

  ‘And he never goes camping on his own? Not even for the weekend?’

  ‘No.’

  Lawson frowned. She needed to come at it from a different angle. ‘Does David have a car?’

  ‘A car? How could he afford a car? He’s not even attempted his driving test either.’

  ‘So how does he get around?’

  ‘How does anyone get around? He walks when he comes to see us, and he catches the bus to work. Occasionally he’ll get a taxi.’

  ‘Has he ever been camping in Oxfordshire?’

  Maureen opened her mouth, but didn’t immediately say anything. But a thought had occurred, and Lawson could almost see it circling her brain. ‘When he was a scout,’ she said eventually, this time in a much less irritable tone. ‘He was in the scouts for two or three years, but he found relating to all the other boys tricky. In the end the scout master told us that David just didn’t fit in, and that it was bad for general discipline …’ She never quite finished the sentence. Her eyes, Lawson couldn’t help noticing, had gone all damp again. Oh shit, she said to herself, with sudden insight; that poet who said that parents fuck up their children, didn’t he realize that children fuck up parents too?

  ‘They used to camp up at Boars Hill. He loved it there.
He used to say it was like being lost in a forest miles from anywhere, but he always knew he was only a few miles from home.’

  They never got any further in the conversation. The doorbell rang. Lawson went to answer it, and found Holden, Fox, and Wilson outside.

  ‘We’re just having a cup of tea,’ she said.

  ‘I need to ask Mrs Wright some more questions,’ Holden said softly.

  In reality, nearly ten minutes elapsed before Holden started asking her questions. That was because she needed to go to the loo. She had wanted to at David’s flat, but what with it being small and with Fox and Wilson hanging around, it had all felt a bit too public. Maureen offered her a choice – the one by the front door or the main bathroom up the stairs. Holden opted for upstairs.

  When she came down, the four others were sitting in the living room. More tea had been made, and a full cup sat in front of the one free chair. Holden sat down and took a sip.

  Fox passed David’s diary to her. She picked it up and looked at it, and then at Maureen. ‘This is David’s diary.’ It was a statement, but she said it as if it was a question.

  Maureen nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘You’ve seen it before.’

  ‘Seen it, yes. But I’ve not looked inside. Diaries are private,’ she added reproachfully. ‘David didn’t let people read what was inside.’

  Holden frowned, the implications of Maureen’s tone apparently lost on her. She opened the diary at random near the beginning, and showed it to Maureen. It was a week from the beginning of March. ‘There’s nothing very private here. Look! Merely what he was planning to do. Go to work, watch the football, come to you to for a meal. Look here, for example, on the Sunday. “Roast lunch at Mum’s”.’

  ‘So why are you showing me it?’ There was more than a tinge of aggression now.

  Holden pulled the diary back to herself, turned to somewhere near the back, and pushed it in front of Maureen again. ‘Last week was a bit different though. Busier for a start.’ She paused, letting Maureen take a look. ‘But it’s the entry for Saturday that intrigues me. Not the football game, but the rest of it. Here.’ And she pressed her finger down on the page. “Mother’s flat”!’ she read, as if Maureen was an illiterate 5-year-old. ‘What do you make of that?’

  Maureen studied the page for several seconds. ‘I don’t know,’ she said firmly. ‘I really don’t know.’

  ‘He didn’t come and see you on Saturday night, did he?’

  ‘No.’ She spoke the word reluctantly, wishing it wasn’t the truth.

  ‘And you don’t have a flat, do you?’

  ‘No,’ she repeated, even more reluctantly.

  ‘So, Maureen, who is Mother?’

  ‘I’m his mother!’ She bristled, a hen protecting its chicks. ‘You know I’m his mother.’

  Holden stabbed the diary with her forefinger, and when she spoke, tact and diplomacy had been tossed out the window. ‘So what is this all about?’

  ‘I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘David’s adopted, isn’t he? I remember that’s what your husband said. Vickie is your own child, but David was adopted.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Maureen stared at the woman who was tormenting her. ‘What the hell difference does that make?’ she hissed. ‘They’re both my children. Equally! And they always will be. You wouldn’t understand that, though. You don’t look the type to have children. You wouldn’t know what it was like to care for them for all those years, through the good times and the bad, the sleepless nights, being hauled into school because someone’s complained. Or to see your son heartbroken because some creep with a Hitler complex has thrown him out of his beloved Boy Scouts.’ She dribbled to a halt.

  ‘I think this refers to David’s birth mother,’ Holden said quietly, as if the torrent of abuse had been directed at someone else altogether. ‘He calls you “Mum” in the diary, always. This here is “Mother”, and she appears to live in a flat. Do you know who she is?’

  Maureen said nothing for some time. She was having to think quickly – whether it was best to tell the truth, or to lie, or maybe a bit of both. ‘Sorry,’ she said eventually, and sat down again. ‘That was over the top.’ And now, for the first time, she looked Holden in the eye. ‘I did know something had happened. I knew something had changed for David. I could tell by his behaviour. But on my life, I didn’t know he had met up with his birth mother. But if he has, then that would explain an awful lot.’

  Holden nodded, more thoroughly than she intended, for she too was having to think quickly. ‘It wasn’t just a diary we found at David’s flat,’ she said. ‘My sergeant found something else too. A number of drawings. Portraits of people.’

  ‘Those would be David’s,’ Maureen replied quickly. ‘He’s good at drawing.’ The pride she took in her son, adopted though he was, was obvious.

  Holden gestured to Fox, who passed over a sheet of A5 paper. ‘Do you recognize this person?’

  Maureen looked at it for several seconds before she spoke. ‘It looks like the auxiliary from Sunnymede. Bella. She was very good to David’s gran.’

  ‘We thought it looked like Bella too.’

  ‘What’s your point? He must have done it one day when he was visiting her at Sunnymede.’

  ‘I don’t think so. She’s not in uniform. And it looks to me like she’s sitting in a bus.’

  ‘I can’t say I’d noticed. Anyway what does it matter?’

  ‘Look at the date,’ Holden pressed. ‘He’s written it on the bottom: 4 December 2009. So you see, Maureen, what we were thinking, putting two and two together, was maybe Bella is David’s mother? What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ came the instant reply. Too instant, Holden thought. She is too nonchalant. She is not surprised. She is lying.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Maureen conceded. ‘How should I know? We never met his so-called parents when we adopted him. There was no contact. Not then, not ever.’

  ‘I see,’ Holden said in a tone that implied she really didn’t see.

  ‘Anyway,’ Maureen snapped, ‘what does it matter? Right now, what matters is that David is missing, and you’re doing nothing. I was telling your constable that David used to camp up in Boars Hill, when he was part of the Boy Scouts, so maybe he’s gone there.’

  Holden nodded, as if giving due consideration to the woman’s theory. ‘Or …’ She paused, determined to get Maureen Wright’s attention. ‘Or maybe he hasn’t run off at all. Maybe he’s gone to his birth mother.’

  ‘Why the hell should he have?’

  ‘Perhaps he likes her.’ As replies went, this was about as low as Holden could possibly have gone, except perhaps by adding the words that she had left unspoken, but hanging in the air: ‘more than you’.

  Maureen Wright looked at Holden as if she couldn’t believe what she’d heard. ‘You bitch,’ she said quietly. ‘You fucking bitch.’

  Holden should have apologized. Immediately. She knew that. But knowing was one thing and doing was another. And besides, how do you behave towards a woman who may have lost a beloved husband, or alternatively may have anchored him to a railway line and watched as the London train ran him down.

  ‘She’s not herself, today, Inspector.’ The voice came from the doorway, where a girl had appeared.

  ‘Vickie,’ her mother said, plaintively, ‘there’s no need—’

  ‘There’s every need, Mum,’ she cut in, and moved forward to give her a prolonged hug. Then she stared down at Holden. ‘My mother has been through a lot this morning, Inspector. In case you haven’t noticed, her husband’s been murdered, and her son has run away, so maybe you should try being nice to her.’

  Holden bowed her head. It might have been an apology, but she said nothing to support that theory. Fox, watching from the sidelines, reckoned it was at least half way to one. He had seen his boss in many situations, but rarely had he seen her apologize. And yet this time he sensed that she was at least embarrassed by Vickie’s challen
ge. Fox tried to suppress a smile. DI Holden taken to task by a 12-year-old. Now that was something.

  ‘I didn’t recognize you, Vickie.’

  ‘Why should you? We’ve never met.’

  ‘You’re not like the photos.’

  ‘Photos?’

  ‘The school photos. You and David. In the upstairs loo.’

  ‘Best place for them.’

  ‘It’s funny though.’

  ‘Funny?’ Vickie, who had perched on the arm of her mother’s chair, stared at Holden, suspicion in her eyes. Not that it was easy for Holden to see them, for her long black hair fell lank down either side of her pale face, like half-pulled curtains.

  ‘Most girls – most women in fact – would give their eye teeth for your blonde hair….’

  ‘What’s that to you, Inspector?’ Maureen Wright, sitting next to her daughter on the sofa, had no intention of putting up with any crap. ‘It’s a free world, and if she wants black hair, that’s her choice. End of.’

  It wasn’t just black hair, though. It was the clothes too – black long-sleeved blouse, black skirt, dark patterned tights, and black Doc Martens boots – not to mention the black eyebrows and black lipstick. The whole Goth transformation.

  ‘I dyed my hair black once,’ Holden said, dropping her voice as if this was something secret that only they were sharing. ‘I was older than you, maybe sixteen or seventeen. My father went spare.’

  Vickie lifted her head a bit more and gave it a shake. She looked again at Holden, her face tilted at a slight angle. ‘Really?’

  ‘Look, what’s this got to do with anything?’ It was Maureen cutting in again, a mother trying to protect, and maybe control too.

  ‘Just small talk,’ Holden replied, though her eyes were still on Vickie.

  Maureen gave a snort. ‘You coppers don’t do small talk!’

  Vickie looked at her mother, defiance in her eyes. ‘Actually,’ she said with exaggerated pause, ‘Mum did go spare.’

  ‘Did she?’ Holden, like Vickie, turned to look at Maureen.