Naomi's Room Page 4

  The policeman would not let me drive myself back to London. It was not simple kindness, I imagine, but prudence. I was in no state to drive; a drunk man would have fared better. He had no details to give me, nothing but the bleak message he had been instructed to give, that Naomi was dead.

  During the journey, he asked a few questions, as much to distract me as anything. How old had she been? Did we have other children? I answered him by rote; but my mind was elsewhere, imagining the unimaginable. He had children of his own, he said. They were at home waiting for him, waiting to pick up the threads of an interrupted Christmas. He was not intentionally cruel, just a little thoughtless. Even I could not believe that I too would not soon be home again, eating Christmas lunch with Laura and Naomi.

  I was driven straight to the City of London Police Headquarters, in Old Jewry. The policeman told me that, although the case had initially been handled by the Metropolitan Police, Naomi’s body had been found in Spitalfields, which fell under City jurisdiction. It meant nothing to me at the time, of course; why should it have done?

  Laura was already there, pale-faced and shaking in a small office on the third floor. They left us alone for a while. I remember saying over and over again that I was sorry, that I was to blame. And I remember Laura stroking my hands, stroking my face, telling me not to worry, I had nothing to blame myself for. I think that, just then, while she said those things, Laura did not really believe Naomi was dead.

  They did not leave her long in that state of bliss. About twenty minutes later, there was a knock at the door. A policewoman entered, accompanied by a man in plain clothes. The man was tall, clean-shaven, with thin, sand-coloured hair. He stooped as he came through the door. I made to stand, but he shook his hand at me and I remained seated. He closed the door behind him, quite slowly, as though it weighed a great deal. As he entered, he coughed heavily, cupping one hand to his mouth. When the coughing subsided, he looked at us both carefully before speaking.

  ‘My name is Ruthven,’ he said. He pronounced the name ‘Riven’. ‘Detective Superintendent Ruthven. I have just been assigned to the case of your daughter’s murder.’

  I saw Laura flinch. Ruthven must have seen it too, but he kept on talking.

  ‘I know you would prefer to be alone, but there are urgent questions that have to be asked. Your daughter was found in an alley near Spitalfields market. Not far from Liverpool Street station. We think the killer may have seen her there when you arrived. He may still be in London, but he won’t know we’ve found the body yet. It was well hidden. I want to catch him before he makes a run for it.’

  ‘What makes you think it’s a man?’ I asked.

  Ruthven hesitated, then said very deliberately, ‘I’ve just come from viewing your daughter’s body. I would like to think that a woman could not be capable of . . . what I saw.’ Another round of coughing took hold of him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized. ‘I’ve been trying to throw this cold off for the past three days.’

  ‘Can we see her?’ Laura was on her feet. ‘Perhaps there’s a mistake. Another little girl . . .’

  Ruthven shook his head.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Hillenbrand. There’s been no mistake. I’ve brought along her clothes to enable you to make a formal identification. They fit the description you gave us.’

  ‘I’d like to see her.’

  He shook his head again. He was in his fifties, not so much blunted by his occupation as tired of it. I later learned that his own daughter had died of a drugs overdose a year or two earlier. She had been twenty-one.

  ‘I don’t think you should see her. You have a right to, of course, but in this case . . . Please take my advice. I’d prefer it if your husband carried out the identification.’

  The policewoman asked us to come over to a small table on the far side of the room. I noticed for the first time that she carried a small case. From this she took out a number of transparent plastic bags. Each was labelled and held an article of clothing. She laid them in a short row on the table.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I wish we didn’t have to do this. Could you tell me if you recognize these clothes?’

  We looked at them in turn: the blue dress, the shoes, the underclothes. There was blood on all of them. A lot of blood. Laura retched, but nothing came up. I felt the blood drain from my face, my hands. I wanted to touch the clothes, but my hands encountered cold plastic.

  ‘She had a coat,’ I said. ‘And a scarf and gloves.’

  ‘We haven’t found those yet, sir. Could you confirm that these clothes belonged to your daughter Naomi?’

  I nodded. Laura nodded.

  ‘Is that “yes”, Dr Hillenbrand? I have to have a verbal assent. For the record.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Those things belong to Naomi. I’m sorry. Belonged to Naomi.’ I turned to Ruthven. ‘May I see her now?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll accompany you to the mortuary.’

  ‘How did she die? Can you tell me that?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Not yet, sir. She’s in the hands of our forensic examiners at the moment. They’ll have to carry out a post mortem. I’ll be able to tell you more after that.’

  He knew even then, of course. Not the fine details, but the more obvious things, like the fact that her hands were missing. The rest came out at the inquest. Laura was not there, her doctor refused to let her attend. But I sat through it, I listened to everything. That is why I do not turn round when she comes. Sometimes she visits me as herself, as I remember her. And sometimes she is what her killer made her: handless, bloodied, featureless. The thing I saw on a table in a mortuary, that is what visits me.

  He did not rape her, if that is what you are thinking. That might have made it a crime of passion, I might have tolerated that. In its fashion, it was, of course, but not his passion, not her killer’s. They let it slip out at the inquest that she did not die quickly. I never told Laura, it would have finished her. I have always carried that burden myself.

  Sometimes I wonder if that had something to do with what happened afterwards, whether those events might not have taken place if he had given Naomi a quick death. But then I remember the photographs. And the house that Dr Liddley had built for his wife and his little girls. For little Caroline and little Victoria.

  The inquest was held in London in the first week of January. I had to attend as the person who had identified Naomi, but Laura stayed at home. They arranged for me to enter and leave through a rear door, so I would not be pestered by the press. Back at home, however, we would see photographers sneaking about, taking shots of the house, hoping for a chance view of Laura or myself. The coroner adjourned the inquest until February, to await developments in the police inquiry.

  Laura’s parents stayed with us during the worst part, the funeral, the memorial service in college, the inquest. Then my sister Carol came. She took over the running of the house, brought a semblance of normality into our lives. But she had a job and a child to go back to. She was building her solicitor’s practice in Northampton, her daughter Jessica could not stay with her grandparents indefinitely. Friends came in, did what little they could, and left again.

  If there had been another child, if Laura had had someone dependent on her, someone who might have suffered by her neglect, she might have pulled through. But there was only me. The doctor came and prescribed tranquillizers. They did nothing for her. Her problem was grief, not some chemical imbalance. Day by day she deteriorated. I began to fear, first for her sanity, then for her life.

  The university gave me indefinite leave of absence. At first, I just sat in the house and moped with Laura. We were no good for each other, my grief exacerbated hers, the very sight of her reminded me at once of my loss. And I knew so much that I could not tell her.

  We went away for a while, to Egypt. It was Carol who suggested it, and everyone concurred: my parents, Laura’s parents, our doctor. ‘You need a change,’ they said, ‘you need to get away from this place.�
� The doctor thought sunshine might help. Nowadays, they write books about it, how a lack of sunlight makes some people depressed, how natural light can stimulate recovery. But Laura was not depressed, that was what they failed to see. She was dying inside.

  For a month we lived in the sun, in the moist heat of Lower Egypt and the dry, desert warmth of the south. We took a cruise-boat from Cairo to Aswan, stopping at all the sights. Our fellow travellers were Europeans, but we kept to ourselves. In the long nights, beneath a sky riddled with stars, Laura would stand at the ship’s rail staring into the darkness. We passed silently like ghosts through a landscape of tombs.

  Someone recognized our name, a woman from Ullapool on her first trip abroad. She and her dull husband made a point of coming up to us one lunchtime. They wanted to commiserate with us in our loss. That was how she put it: ‘Arthur and I would like to commiserate with you in your loss. She was such a beautiful child. We’ve not been blessed with children ourselves, so in a way we understand what you must be going through.’ The warped logic of the insufferable. She had flat red hair and freckled skin that would not take the sun. Her husband was something in insurance. I looked at her, fighting back . . . not anger, but pity. I did not want to pity her. Her own pain, her childlessness, her ugliness.

  ‘My daughter,’ I said, ‘was only lost for a short time.’ I said it between my teeth, I forced the words out. She wore a Marks and Spencer frock, a cheerful white frock with green flowers. Her husband wore a khaki suit in some synthetic material.

  ‘After that he started killing her. It took several hours. Her killer threw out what was left. What the police found was not beautiful.’

  The woman from Ullapool and her husband did not speak to us again, but they watched circumspectly from a distance and encouraged others in our party to do the same. By the end of that day, everyone on the boat knew. It made no difference to Laura or to me.

  The river churned past us like a long, unbroken dream. We stopped at Beni Hassan and Abydos and Luxor, where we would walk – a little apart from the others – between fallen pillars and the heads of giant statues come to earth. Laura would trace with a childless hand the painted forms of gods and dancers on the walls of deep-shafted tombs. We were so far away from our old life, from any life, so taken out of things, and yet not a moment passed, not a bird rose up from the dark reeds of the riverbank, not a star twinkled in the night sky, but we thought of Naomi. I, above all, thought unceasingly of that moment when, in a flicker of forgetfulness, I lost her.

  We returned to Cambridge a month later, suntanned and exhausted, but otherwise untouched by our interlude abroad. The remedy had not worked, our absence had served only to make our hearts grow fonder and, as a consequence, more fragile. We took a taxi for the short drive from the station. It was early afternoon, and the snow had gone, leaving a tangled and sodden garden. Without its mantle of white, the house seemed old and deserted. We took our cases wearily from the boot of the cab and set them down by the steps. I paid the driver and turned back to enter the house.

  As I did so, something made me look up. Even now, I cannot be certain what I saw, whether, indeed, I saw anything. Or anyone. But in an upstairs window I was sure I saw a quick movement, almost furtive, as though someone, watching from above, had let a curtain drop and fall back into place. But that didn’t make sense. The window in which I thought I had seen the movement was the attic window. It had no curtain. No one went up there. It had been locked for years.

  6

  I can hear something upstairs. Far upstairs, in the attic. The sounds carry sometimes. I have come to recognize them. Why do I stay? For Laura’s sake, of course. And for . . . other reasons.

  In our absence, little had changed. Nothing spectacular had occurred to advance the police investigation into Naomi’s death. No one had confessed, no one had been arrested. I don’t think either would have mattered much to us. Hundreds of potential witnesses came forward. Several told stories of having seen Naomi and myself that day in either Liberty’s or Hamleys, or Naomi alone in the toyshop, or Naomi being taken out of the store by a stranger, weeping as she went. As might have been expected, none of these stories tallied well with one another. But they were the best leads the police had, so they pursued them vigorously, made Identikit pictures of possible suspects, and pulled in known child molesters for questioning.

  I had all this from Ruthven in the course of a long session at the City Police Headquarters one afternoon. He still seemed tired, but for the first time I sensed in him a vigour for the investigation. In the time I knew him, that vigour grew to an obsession. Perhaps the loss of his own daughter had sensitized him, perhaps the case insinuated itself into his unconscious. It would have been better if it had not.

  As I have already said, the police were not, in fact, looking for a child molester. Bringing those men in was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the police, and, as anyone could have told them, it came to nothing. Naomi had not been raped or even interfered with sexually. It is ironic how that single fact lent a frisson to the case, took it out of the realm of the ordinary. The newspapers made much of it and indulged themselves in reports of Naomi’s sufferings: the severed hands, the long knife-wounds on her shoulders, the eyes. Technically, she died from strangulation, her neck squeezed hard and finally snapped by a pair of powerful hands. A man’s hands, or so the coroner thought.

  One or two of the more sensational dailies made wild speculations as to the motives of the killer or killers. There were the inevitable comparisons with the activities of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady. One paper suggested a ring of Satanists.

  Curiously enough, that suggestion sounds less bizarre nowadays, when even responsible newspapers, led by a bevy of psychologists and sociologists, tell us that child abuse through satanic cults is not merely recorded, but is endemic in our society. And perhaps they are right. Perhaps that is what he really was. By the time we knew, it hardly seemed to matter any longer. Our quest for motives had given way to a search for something else.

  It was, in fact, a newspaperman who first alerted us to the existence of other events, events taking place beneath the surface, as it were. He was a photographer from the Daily Mirror, a man called Lewis, Dafydd Lewis I think it was. If I remember rightly, he came from somewhere obscure and semi-rural in South Wales – Neath or Port Talbot or Ammanford. One of those places neither Dylan Thomas nor Vernon Watkins ever wrote about.

  By the look of him, Lewis had been a rugby player in his youth. He had the build, that Welsh stockiness that fits them so well for sheep farming and the mines. He had been a hard-drinking man once, or so he told me, but he was down-to-earth for all that. Not that it would have mattered. He had his evidence, I did not have to depend on his appearance or his word.

  He was a quick-witted man, sociable and likeable, if not entirely cultured. He telephoned first, and when I said we wanted no photographs and made to put the phone down on him, he protested and said it was about another matter, something that was causing him to lose sleep at night. When I still demurred, he promised to come without a camera, and said he would bring some photographs with him, photographs on which he wanted my opinion. I hesitated, but agreed in the end. Had I not done so, would things have been any different?

  Something is coming down the stairs. It is very slow, and I think it stops and listens every step or so. If I hold my breath and wait, I can almost hear it breathing. Please God, help me get through this, help me get through tonight at least.

  Lewis arrived the same afternoon by car. A friend had called and taken Laura to Town. People were very kind in those days, they did what they could to help, although I know they found it difficult at times.

  He was a rather bedraggled man, his untidy appearance worsened by his choice of a fur-hooded anorak, the sort of garment that would make even Rudolf Nureyev look foolish. That was unfortunate, for above all else, Lewis was a serious man and, whatever else he might have been, most certainly not a fool. For my part, I was predisposed against
him: by his appearance, by his Welshness, by his profession.

  He hung his anorak in the hall.

  ‘I’ve left my camera in the car,’ he said. ‘But I’ve not come empty-handed.’

  In his hand he held a large cardboard folder the size of a small portfolio.

  ‘Would you like something to drink?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Better not,’ he said. ‘You might think I’m a drinking man. It’s better you don’t think that.’

  ‘Shall we go to the study, then?’ I suggested.

  He nodded.

  ‘Wherever you like,’ he answered.

  When we had settled, I poured myself a glass of sloe gin, taken from one of the Christmas bottles that had remained unopened. In some parts of the house, it might still have been Christmas. In the nursery, for instance, where Naomi’s presents remained wrapped. Laura would not listen to suggestions that she get rid of them. The wardrobe was full of Naomi’s clothes, the sheets on her bed had not been changed since the day of her disappearance. It was as though she had just gone out into the garden to play.

  ‘What can I do for you, Mr Lewis? What is it you want to show me?’

  For answer, he took from his cardboard folder a collection of black-and-white photographs about six inches by ten square. He laid the bundle face down on top of my desk and turned to look at me. We were seated close together, me in my armchair, he perched on the chair I use for typing, the one I am sitting on now. If I close my eyes, I can see him, less than a foot away from me, his earnest Welsh face close to mine, like a doctor scrutinizing me for some suspected defect.

  ‘Dr Hillenbrand, just before you went away, my office sent me down here to take photographs. They wanted shots of this house, and, if possible, of you and your wife or anyone else I could catch going in or out. You’ll have seen us about, me and the other photographers. You didn’t think well of us, I know, and I don’t blame you for that. But it’s my job, you see. I have to make a living. So I came down and I hung about.