The Seagull Read online

  Freya seemed in a hurry and almost ran out of the lift. She was young, blonde-haired, dressed in a little floral print dress and ballet pumps. She reminded Vera of Alice in Wonderland, chasing the White Rabbit. She led Vera into a meeting room with a big, pale-wood table. They sat at one end, and Vera slid her warrant card across to the social worker. Freya took it and wrote Vera’s name in her notebook. Her tongue was trapped between her teeth for a moment, and now she looked like a kid concentrating on her homework.

  ‘What’s your involvement with the Keane family, Inspector?’ Freya looked up from her notebook and frowned. ‘Has Patty been in trouble with the law? I haven’t been notified.’

  ‘Nothing like that.’ Vera tucked the card back into her purse. She’d lost it once and it had been a nightmare. ‘She might be a witness in an ongoing investigation. I called round this morning and she didn’t seem very well, and I just wanted to check that someone was keeping an eye out.’

  ‘Were the kids in school?’

  ‘Aye.’ Vera paused. ‘Is school attendance a problem?’

  ‘It has been in the past. The kids turning up late, not very well turned out.’

  ‘How long have you known the family?’

  ‘Me personally, about a year. The department, nearer five. Patty was married to a man called Gary Keane. Older than her.’ The words came quickly. Freya was still in a hurry. ‘He had his own business selling and repairing computers, but he liked spending the money he made from it better than he liked earning it. Apparently, even when he married Patty there were debts.’

  Vera thought of the woman she’d talked to that morning. There’d been a big TV in the house, gadgets for the kids to play on. But perhaps Patty had added to the pile of debt, or perhaps John Brace was still funding the family from inside prison. ‘Patty can’t have been much of a catch, though. If he was looking for a meal ticket.’

  ‘She had a job,’ Freya said. ‘She was still living with her family when he met her, and they had a nice house out on the coast.’

  ‘What work did she do?’

  ‘She was a nurse. Newly qualified, working on the geriatric ward in the city. She had a regular income. I guess Gary would have liked that.’

  ‘How did social services first get involved?’ Vera struggled to imagine the woman she’d met that morning coping with the responsibility of being a nurse.

  ‘Patty was admitted to A&E with an overdose of prescription medication.’

  ‘A suicide attempt?’

  Freya nodded. ‘Keane had left her a few months earlier. Archie, her youngest boy, was still a baby. She’d gone to her GP and he’d prescribed antidepressants.’

  ‘But she was still desperate.’ Vera could understand that. Being left alone on a soulless street, with three young kids. In the same place, she’d want an escape.

  ‘She’d phoned 999, so I’m not sure how serious she was about killing herself.’ The woman’s voice sounded hard. ‘We arranged for her mother to go in and look after the kids while she was in hospital.’

  The adoptive mother, who cared so much about her daughter that she’d since run back to Surrey.

  ‘And then what did you do?’

  ‘We called a “children in need” meeting of all the people involved with the family. Teachers, health visitor, GP. Though the GP never came. Too busy, he said. Gary wasn’t around – he’d disappeared for a while, without leaving Patty any contact details. Patty’s parents. Patty herself, of course.’

  ‘But what did you do practically to help Patty out?’

  There was a brief moment of silence. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She was depressed enough to take an overdose, had no friends on the street, and you sent her back to that house with three small children.’ Vera tried to keep her voice even. ‘Then expected her to go through the stress of a meeting with a bunch of professionals, all judging her.’

  ‘There was no evidence that the children had been harmed or neglected. And Patty’s mother lived locally and seemed extremely competent. She was a teacher.’

  She was Patty’s adoptive mother and they’d never been very close. Vera felt like crying. She was ten years old again, back in the house in the hills, watching the social worker’s car disappear down the track, feeling totally alone.

  ‘Couldn’t you have put someone in? Given Patty a bit of a hand?’

  Freya seemed astonished. ‘That’s not our role.’

  ‘There must be someone! A charity, maybe.’

  ‘We did refer her for a parenting class,’ Freya said. ‘But there was a long waiting list and, when her name did come up, she didn’t attend.’

  Well, there’s a surprise! Send her along to something else she’d think she’d fail at. Of course she wasn’t going to be keen.

  ‘But you’re still involved with the family?’

  ‘I visit once a month. Keep a watching brief.’ Freya obviously sensed Vera’s disapproval because she added, ‘Look, Patty loves those kids. She’s a bit chaotic but she cares for them, feeds them and gets them to school on time most days. There are lots of families with much worse problems taking up our time.’

  ‘And what would happen if you had any real concerns?’ Vera paused a beat. ‘No, let me answer that, pet. I know. You’d call a meeting!’

  For the first time in the conversation, Freya gave a wry little smile.

  * * *

  Back in the station, Vera called her own meeting. She’d bought iced buns from the bakery on the corner on her way in and sent Holly to get tea. Then she sat on Charlie’s desk, with her feet on a spare chair. Happy.

  ‘So what have we got so far? Hol, let’s start with you. I’ve been to see Patty this morning and I’ve had a chat with the social worker with responsibility for the family, but it’d be good to get the background.’

  Holly could have been presenting an academic paper. ‘Patty’s not known to us, though her kids are subject to a “children in need” plan with social services. That seems to be down to her mental-health problems.’

  Vera nodded. ‘According to her, John Brace fell madly in love with her heroin-addict mother, but was too honourable to leave his wife, so Patty was taken into care. Hmm. And those are little piggies I see flying over Front Street. The adoptive parents were high-achievers and Patty felt a bit lost. Though she did manage to go to Northumbria Uni and get a nursing degree, so she was hardly a failure.’ Vera stopped short. ‘Sorry, Hol. This is your shout, not mine. Back to you.’

  Holly gave a little nod, forgiving Vera for the interruption. Cheeky madam. But Vera was secretly pleased that Hol seemed more confident these days.

  Holly went on, ‘Her ex-husband Gary Keane is known to us. He’s been done for fraud and receiving stolen goods, but has avoided prison so far.’ A pause. ‘There’s some intelligence that he’s worked for serious criminals, hacking into computers, disabling alarm systems, but he’s never been caught. There’s a file on him, and Organized Crime kept an eye. Recently he seems to have gone quiet.’

  So Brace would have known him. Known of him, at least. ‘Do we know where he’s based now? Is he still local?’

  ‘Yes, he’s got a little shop in Bebington, selling reconditioned computers and mending laptops. He lives in the flat above the business. Nice-enough place in a part of the town that’s on the up. You’d think it was beyond his means, but he seems to have cleared all his debts, so perhaps he’s still helping out the big boys. Here’s a photo.’ She handed round printouts, and Vera looked at a man with film-star good looks and an easy smile. It was clear why Patty had been attracted. And she must have been bonny then. They’d have seemed a well-matched pair.

  ‘John Brace described him as a maniac,’ Vera said. ‘Does he have his own mental-health issues?’

  Holly shook her head. ‘Never been diagnosed. But he’s famous for his temper. There’ve been fights with bouncers, and he put one guy in hospital after a road-rage incident. When it came to court, though, the victims always decided to withdraw their
complaints.’

  ‘So he’s being protected. Or he scared the victims himself.’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  Vera thought about that. A young woman who already saw herself as a failure, taking up with an older man with anger-management issues, sounded like a recipe for domestic abuse to her. ‘Any suspicion that he hit Patty or her kids?’

  ‘No record that we were ever called to that address.’

  ‘Maybe we could check out A&E? See if she turned up with unexplained injuries. Social services weren’t involved with the family until after Gary Keane left.’

  Vera was aware of Joe Ashworth fidgeting. ‘Got something to say, Joe?’

  ‘I’m just not sure how relevant all this is. Aren’t we interested in what happened to Robbie Marshall all those years ago? Murder. Not some lass with domestic problems now.’

  ‘Oh, I’m interested in everything, Joe. That’s why I’m a bloody brilliant detective.’ She gave him her widest smile. ‘That’s why I’m in charge and you’re sitting there, doing as you’re told.’

  Chapter Six

  John Brace lay in his cell and dreamed. He wasn’t quite asleep but he dreamed all the same. In his head he was thirty years old, fit and at the height of his powers. A good detective. Even the officers who hated him had to admit he was great at catching criminals. He spent his off-days walking in the hills, all that space and clean air washing away the stink of foul interview rooms and filthy council flats. Giving him an excuse to escape from his respectable wife and her golf-club friends. Often Hector Stanhope was at his side, pointing out nests and finding eggs, lifting them carefully and putting them into the egg boxes he always carried in his rucksack. Making a bit of extra money for them both, though it had been the collecting that had been the motivation, not the profit. John Brace admired Hector for his knowledge of country ways, the confidence that came from being the son of landed gentry, even though his family had disowned him years ago.

  That had been thirty-five years ago – 1982, two years before the miners’ strike. There were still pits in Northumberland and still men working at the Swan Hunter shipyard on the Tyne. Heroin no longer the drug of rock stars, but of the unemployed kids who ranged the streets of the already decaying colliery villages. Dealers stood outside school gates to tempt the teenagers as they drifted out of the playground. And John Brace had arrested Mary-Frances Lascuola for possession and for soliciting.

  When she gave him her name he didn’t believe her at first. What kind of a name was that, for a working girl in tight black jeans and a white goth face? But he didn’t sneer or yell or call her a liar, because something about her appealed to him. He’d traded sex before with women he’d arrested, reckoning that for them it would be just another deal. He’d be just another punter. Letting them off with a caution instead of charging them. So instead of taking her to the station and locking her up, he took her to an all-night cafe on the A1. There was something fragile about Mary-Frances. He thought she was worth taking time over. He bought her coffee and sausage, egg and chips and watched her eat it tidily. She wiped her mouth with her paper napkin, took another cup of coffee, though she said it was very bad coffee. Only then did he ask her about the name.

  ‘My grandfather was Italian.’ She looked at him over the thick china mug. Her eyes were huge and brown. ‘A prisoner of war. He married a local woman.’

  John liked the story. It made Mary-Frances exotic, more than just another girl selling sex on the street. He found out that she’d gone to a convent school and he found that exciting too. ‘So how did you end up like this?’

  She shrugged. Through the flimsy material of her lacy top he saw shoulders that were painfully thin, sharp bone poking through pale skin. ‘I’m an addict,’ she said. ‘It’s an illness, but there’s no cure. Nobody to help.’

  He wanted to say that he’d help. But he was a cop, not a doctor, and anyway she was probably playing him for a fool, telling him what he wanted to hear. He took her back to his car, which was parked in a dark corner, hidden from the road by rows of trucks, and he fucked her on the back seat. It was what she’d been expecting, but he sensed her disappointment. She’d hoped for more from him. Afterwards he felt disappointed too and came close to apologizing. He dropped her where she wanted to be taken. A flat in Whitley Bay, not far from the Dome and the Spanish City. He helped her out of the car carefully and kissed her lightly on the cheek. There’d been a smell of seaweed and candyfloss, as well as piss and squalor. ‘I’d like to see you again.’

  ‘Next time,’ she said flatly, ‘you pay.’

  He drove back to the house in Ponteland. It was in darkness. Judith didn’t wait up for him these days. Judith, his wife, daughter of a magistrate, churchwarden and Sunday School teacher. Mother to his stillborn child, and heartbroken. Cold now as the statues of the saints in the church where she knelt to pray. Judith had been his passport to respectability and he owed her. He’d sat for a while in the car on the drive, listening to a barn owl call, wondering where the nest was and if Hector would like the eggs.

  In the cell in Warkworth Prison John Brace shook his head to clear the memory of the emptiness he’d felt that night. He listened for the late-night prison sounds on the ED Wing. One man with early dementia was shouting for help – he was always confused at night; during the day he seemed almost normal. And always the jangle of keys that mirrored the jangling of Brace’s nerves. He longed to be out on the fells with Hector, or in the untidy house in the hills, with its view of the valley, with Hector and Robbie Marshall, the men who had become his only real friends. He’d had a deeper bond with them than with any of his colleagues at work.

  Sometimes they’d waited for another visitor, for the last member of the Gang of Four. When the Prof. came, it was with tales of a very different world. He mixed with people John Brace saw in the smart Sunday newspapers. Sitting in Hector’s cluttered living room in front of an open fire, John could relax and be himself. Sometimes a surly teenage girl made tea for them, before stamping away to her room. Vera Stanhope. He knew she was the person who’d put him in here. But now she was his hope of salvation.

  Chapter Seven

  Joe Ashworth had spent the morning researching John Brace and felt dirty just by association. Joe’s dad had been a Methodist lay preacher, a moral man, and Joe had joined the police service because he had a sense of duty. He thought it was an honourable profession, though it hadn’t been easy to convince his father of that. Things had been different during the 1980s. Joe had heard the stories of the miners’ strike, the busloads of southern cops sent up to fight back the pickets, waving their overtime slips to goad the strikers to violence. Not, Joe thought, that some of them had needed much goading. His father liked simple tales of goodies and baddies, and the events of that time had been turned into myths and folk songs. In the eyes of his father and his friends, the police had always been baddies.

  Even by the standards of the eighties, Brace had been a bad police officer. A bully, a corrupter of younger officers, a liar. But it had been decades before he’d been brought to justice. Joe had arrived at the station early that morning and had trawled the reports on Brace’s charge and conviction in connection with the death of Glen Fenwick, the gamekeeper on the Standrigg Estate. He’d found a video clip of Brace swaggering into court in 2009 as if he couldn’t believe that he could possibly be found guilty. There had been earlier disciplinary procedures: complaints from members of the public about extreme rudeness; from a solicitor whose client had been beaten up in the cells; from the leader of a women’s refuge who claimed Brace had abused one of the women in her care. It seemed that Brace had always managed to slide away from the charges unscathed, and that he’d been promoted despite the suspicion of corruption and dishonour. Joe wasn’t sure if that had been the culture of the service at the time or if Brace had friends in very high places.

  Now, sitting in the open-plan office, Joe listened to Holly and Vera talking about Patty Keane and found himself growing impatient.
He was sorry if the lass was going through hard times, but he thought the times couldn’t be that hard if she was living rent- and mortgage-free in a house provided by a bent detective father. Vera had fulfilled her commitment to Brace; she’d done a visit and checked that there was no danger of his grand-bairns being taken into care. But Brace had said a man had been murdered, and that should be the focus of their discussion. Vera should take herself back to Warkworth and demand more information.

  When she had asked him what he’d thought, Joe had told her and got one of Vera’s snide comments for his trouble. He should be used to her sarky remarks by now, but still it stung, especially when it was in front of the rest of the team. So he sat quietly and listened to Charlie telling them all he knew about Robbie Marshall. The sun was slanting through the windows. It was the weather they always seemed to get in early September, just after the kids went back to school; and, listening to Charlie’s voice, Joe felt as if he was a child again, sitting on the carpet in front of the teacher, listening to stories of long ago.

  ‘John Brace and Robbie Marshall were at school together,’ Charlie said. ‘They both got to Bebington Grammar, so they were bright boys. John’s dad was a deputy at the pit and Robbie’s father ran his own butcher’s shop. Neither of the families posh, but respectable. They were friends together then, joined the school natural-history society, went out onto the hills for field trips. There was a master who sparked the interest in lots of the boys. Neither of them went to university. John joined the police when he was eighteen, and Robbie started as an apprentice at Swan Hunter’s, turned out to be better with figures than with his hands and worked in requisitions. He ended up taking some exams and, when he disappeared, he was procurement officer.’