Critical Incidents

Valerie Woodson looked at Robin, expectant, and for a moment she was thrown. What now? Her instinct – her training, so ingrained it was second nature at this point – was to get details of Rebecca’s associates, her employers, friends, exes, but how did Maggie work? Did she have to agree formally to take on the case? Did she want to? Writing down names would look like a commitment. And what about Valerie’s side of it – was there some kind of contract? A fee? What were Maggie’s terms?

She played for time. ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Since I was born,’ Valerie said. ‘I’m the only original Brit on the street now. My parents bought the house in the Fifties, I’ve never lived anywhere else. My dad retired about the time I met Graeme and we bought it from them. They moved out to Worcestershire, bought a bungalow near Inkberrow.’

‘Nice.’ Jesus, the idea of living in one house your whole life. ‘Did you ever see any evidence of Rebecca using drugs?’

The non sequitur took Valerie aback, unsurprisingly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Sorry – I mean, have you ever seen her with them? Found them in the house?’

‘Of course not.’ Now she looked indignant. ‘I wouldn’t stand for that.’

Robin glanced back up the hall and saw Maggie open the front door, step out and pull it closed behind her.

Valerie saw, too. ‘Is it something to do with Rebecca?’

‘I don’t think so. No. The police wouldn’t know to call us about her. We’ve only just made contact with you, so …’

‘That’s true. Yes, that’s true. God.’ She put her face in her hands. ‘Sorry. It’s just … Do you have children?’

‘One. A daughter, too.’

‘So you understand.’

‘A little bit, yes. You must be … extremely worried.’ Quick, she thought, deflect the conversation. The last thing she wanted to get into was her life or how she came to be working with Maggie. Her homicide experience wouldn’t be a comfort, either. ‘Where do they go when they’re out, Becca and her friends?’

‘With her old friends, Lucy and Harry, they go – they used to go, before she started at The Spot – to this thing, what’s it called, The Digbeth Dining Club? Street food, she called it, lots of different stands that …’

The front door – Valerie’s head whipped round. Following her gaze, Robin saw Maggie step inside and close it. For a moment, turned away, she seemed to pause. Then, deliberately, she walked back to the kitchen. Her face was oddly composed, un-Maggie-like. Robin tried to meet her eye but found she couldn’t.

‘Valerie,’ Maggie said, ‘I’m sorry but we’re going to have to go. Something’s come up. I’ll ring you as soon as I can. In the next hour or so.’

The woman’s chair shrieked against the floor. ‘What’s happened? It’s Becca, isn’t it?’

‘Becca?’ Maggie seemed confused. ‘Becca – no. No. Robin, can we …?’

Robin stood, her heart starting to beat faster. What the hell? It was there, she wasn’t imagining it, the care with which Maggie said her name. Disorientated, she followed her down the narrow hallway and back outside. The door banged shut behind them. It had started drizzling again while they were inside, she’d seen it through the kitchen window, but now it was properly raining. ‘What’s going on?’

‘In the car.’

The automatic fob flashed the lights. Robin opened the door then hesitated. As she dropped into her seat, she realized she was begging: Please, not Lennie.

Maggie’s door slammed shut. She bowed her head then took a breath. ‘That was Alan Nuttall on the phone.’

Relief, followed immediately by guilt. ‘So it is Rebecca?’

‘No, it’s nothing to do with this. He was calling to see if I knew about something that came in last night.’

Last night – not Lennie. Sheer, exhilarating relief – thank god. ‘So what was it?’

‘There was a house fire in Edgbaston. They’re still looking for the husband – he’s missing. The boy’s injured, badly injured, but alive. The wife … she didn’t make it.’ Maggie reached across the gearstick and took her hand.

Robin stared at Maggie’s giant turquoise ring. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘What I’m trying to say … Rob, it’s Corinna.’

Chapter Three

In the raw, disorientated, underground early months of Lennie’s life, Robin had used to wait for Corinna’s key in the door as if they were married. She’d start watching the clock at six, when the shop closed, and she’d imagine where she was now and now and now, picturing her tracking back towards them – the walk up to Notting Hill Gate, the number 94 bus – and then, at last, the rattle of the key, the thud as the carrier bag hit the hall floor. ‘Hello? Lennie? Where’s my favourite girl?’ Normality suddenly, as if it had blown in with Corinna when the door opened. The crushing panic, the waves of What have I done? How the hell am I going to do this? retreated, driven back by a cold bottle of Singha beer from the corner shop and the oven on for jacket potatoes.

To do that for someone. And then – at that age. Even now, years later, Robin thought about it and was amazed. An hour after she’d jumped off the bus hurtling her and the bean that was the start of Lennie towards the appointment at the Marie Stopes clinic, she’d phoned Corinna in Birmingham and by eight o’clock that evening – the first time Robin had ever ordered herself an orange juice at a pub – Rin had been in London, sitting opposite her at the sticky table, stunned but not shocked, not trying to ‘make her see sense’ as Christine had screamed later but talking about how they – they – could make it work.

Over the next few months, Corinna had uprooted her life for them. She’d been on the WHSmith management trainee scheme then and she’d arranged a transfer from the New Street branch to the one on High Street Kensington and, two weeks before Robin’s due date, she’d packed her bags and driven her Ford Fiesta down the M40 to London. She’d lived with them until Lennie was eighteen months old and she’d never once made Robin feel as if she were even doing her a favour. ‘Oh, shurrup,’ she’d said in the Yorkshire accent she put on when dodging anything serious. ‘Helping you? What makes you think I’m not using you? I’d never do this without you – I’m probably going to be in Birmingham forever after this, aren’t I, with Josh and the factory? This is my adventure.’

And sometimes, when she was there and Robin had had a four-hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep, it had felt if not like an adventure, at least not terrifying. Doable. Amid the anxiety – was Lennie getting enough milk? If she rolled in the night, would she suffocate? How was she, Robin, going to afford a child? – there were times when they’d start laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of their being in charge of a baby and not be able to stop. So many things: the way they’d had to take off their jeans to give Lennie a bath because the tub was cracked and leaked onto the floor; Psycho Mike-o from number 14 who’d asked Rin out three times a week; even the snails that came in under the back door overnight and left silvery trails over the grim nylon kitchen carpet. For a year and a half, that flat off Uxbridge Road had been their world, their tatty, semi-subterranean bunker of a world, and now no one else knew about it.

Except Josh, because he’d been there, too, more weekends than not. Though his dad was training him up to run their family business back in the Midlands, most Friday nights he’d arrived on the doorstep in Shepherd’s Bush with a curry – ‘Not the Balti Triangle but it’ll do’ – and stayed ’til Sunday. He’d watched Euro 2004 on their scratchy green sofa, giving Lennie a bottle, and when they’d all gone out together, he’d taken her in the baby carrier, her cheek pressed sideways against his chest, little feet bumping the tops of his thighs. He’d only been twenty-four but if anyone ever thought Lennie was his, he’d never jumped to deny her like some of her other mates had, the ones who’d treated Robin as if she was suddenly a different, mildly contagious person, The Girl Who Got Knocked Up.

The slam of a car door. Lifting her head from her hands, she saw a tall black woman in a three-quarter-length coat on the pavement outside. A second later, as the woman checked her phone, a shiny blue-black head emerged from the driver’s door on the far side. Robin froze.

Riveted, she watched as the man rounded the back of the car. The hair was right, he was Indian or Pakistani, but then he looked up and – oh, thank fuck – she saw that the face underneath it was wrong: too young, too fine-boned, too light. And as he stepped onto the pavement, she saw that he was too short – two or three inches too short, under six feet. She leaned backwards into the cover of the dining-room curtains, heart thudding.

Energetic footsteps on the path, then the four Big Ben notes of the doorbell. Her mother appeared in the archway, eyelids swollen. ‘They’re here, love. Shall I let them in?’

‘I’ll do it.’ The room tilted as she stood, the floor underfoot uncertain. Her body moved as if she were operating it by remote control – left leg, good, now right leg – normal communication between brain and muscles suspended. When Maggie had dropped her back a couple of hours ago, direct from Sparkhill, she’d walked up the front path like the Tin Man, stood with her arms by her sides, thousand-yard staring as Maggie told Christine what had happened.

Through the pebbled glass panel beside the front door now, the shimmering outlines of the police made them apparitions, visitors from another dimension.

‘Robin Lyons?’

DCI, to you.

‘DS Thomas,’ said the woman, showing her ID. ‘We spoke on the phone. This is DC Patel.’ Up close, he looked even younger than he had outside, twenty-five or -six, baby-faced. Thomas wasn’t that much older, early thirties, perhaps her own age, but her vibe was completely different. Meerkat-straight, shoulders back, posture accentuated by the crisp angles of the coat and a pair of black trousers with a sharp centre crease. Her hair was cut short at the sides, the longer top shaped into a wedgy quiff that reminded Robin of Emeli Sandé. Masculine-feminine. Got my shit together, was the message.

‘Come in.’

They followed her to the sitting room where Robin watched the woman look around, taking in the three-piece suite, a patterned aqua monstrosity whose curved backs and fluted arms recalled Botticelli and his giant scallop. It was too big for the space and so the sofa could only go against the wall, making the room look even more corridor-like than it was. Opposite was the tiled fireplace, a vase of dried grasses in the hearth, the Spode figurine of an Edwardian lady with a stupidly large hat on the mantelpiece. The least offensive thing was the gilt-framed watercolour of the Lickey Hills that had been Granny Lyons’.

‘My parents’ house,’ she said, and saw the flicker in the woman’s eyes: at her age? Robin gestured at the furniture. ‘Please, have a seat.’

They took the sofa, leaving her the armchair. If you were curled up in it, feet tucked under, it was okay, shell-like in a good way, even, but sitting properly, Robin was dwarfed by it, shrunk down like Alice in Wonderland, her feet barely skimming the floor. It added to the disorientation, the sense that everything was off-kilter. Unreal.

‘Thanks for talking to us,’ the woman said, pulling out her notebook. ‘As I said on the phone, DI Nuttall gave us your name. Maggie Hammond told him you and Corinna were close.’

‘She was my best friend. Since senior school. She saved my life, I think.’

The woman’s eyebrows went up.

‘Not literally. Maybe literally. I’m a single mother – I got pregnant by accident in my last year at university and she moved down to London, moved in with me. She cooked dinner so I could work, changed nappies, did one of the night feeds if I was about to go insane from lack of sleep. Made it all seem like less of an unholy fuck-up. I don’t know how I would have done it otherwise – I might have lost my mind. I definitely wouldn’t have finished my degree.’

‘Losing her must be tough for you.’

It was a statement but also a question. Unlike her mother, who’d burst into tears the moment she’d heard, she hadn’t cried. There was a fierce pressure in her chest but she couldn’t get to it mentally, couldn’t translate it. ‘I haven’t begun to process it,’ she said. ‘I know but I don’t know. I saw her three weeks ago – I was texting with her yesterday. Lennie – that’s my daughter – we were supposed to go over there tomorrow night for dinner.’ As she said it, she realized that even that, that small bright spot on the immediate horizon, had been extinguished. And there would be no more.

‘What time were you texting?’

‘Afternoon.’ Robin checked her phone. ‘Just after four – eight minutes past. My last reply to her at four ten.’ Last.

‘What were the texts about? How did she sound?’

‘Fine, normal. Herself. I mean, she didn’t mention herself. She was checking in on me – I only moved back here yesterday, she knew I … had reservations.’

‘You moved yesterday?’ Patel looked up from his notebook.

‘Yes. From London.’

DS Thomas nodded, glanced at him: Make a note. ‘How much do you know about what happened?’

‘Almost nothing. That there was a fire at their house. Corinna’s dead.’ She heard herself say the words as if from across the room. ‘Maggie said Peter’s badly injured. And Josh’s missing – what does that mean? Are you waiting for a formal ID?’ She felt a wave of nausea at the thought of dental records, a body so badly burned that they couldn’t be sure it was him – or even a man. She’d seen those: blackened, pink-shiny lumps of flesh, the features, genitals burned away.

DC Patel – Baby Cop – shot a sideways look at Thomas, who leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees. ‘It’s very early, obviously, but as things stand, our priority is locating Mr Legge.’

‘Locating?’

‘We’ve only found Mrs Legge’s body. And Mr Legge’s car is missing,’ said Patel.

It took her a moment but then relief flooded through her: Josh hadn’t been there. He hadn’t been at the house. If Peter recovered – when he did – he’d have at least one parent. Thank god – thank god. ‘He wasn’t there?’

Another sideways glance from Baby Cop, missed or at any rate unacknowledged by the woman, whose eyes were trained instead on Robin’s face. ‘Again, to be clear, it’s early,’ she said. ‘Lines of enquiry are wide open and we’re still waiting on the Fire Investigator, SOCO, but even without their reports … There’s evidence of an accelerant at the scene. The fire was almost certainly started deliberately.’

‘What?’ An electrical fault, the iron left on – she’d imagined a malevolent spark spitting from the fire, nestling deep among the fibres of Corinna’s sheepskin rug, glowing, taking hold as they slept unwitting upstairs. But – arson?

‘Mr Legge may have killed his wife then set the fire to destroy evidence.’

A sort of bark escaped her. She almost laughed. ‘Josh? You think Josh killed Corinna? That’s … No. There’s no way. No way.’

‘His car is missing,’ said Patel again, as if that settled it.

‘So? He’s a businessman – he travels. He’ll have been away for the night.’ Oh god – it dawned on her that if that was the case, Josh didn’t know. If he was out of contact, no one had reached him, he still had to find out. Rin dead, Peter in hospital – she closed her eyes.

You moved yesterday.

Suddenly Robin stiffened. The floor seemed to shift beneath her chair.

‘We’ve spoken to Mr Legge’s secretary.’ Patel’s voice reached her from a distance. ‘There were no plans for him to be away. But more importantly, the neighbours on both sides reported seeing his car on the drive yesterday evening. Monday is bin day over there – he took their rubbish out after ten last night, spoke to one of them.’

Could it …? Could someone …?

She pressed her hands against her knees to try and stop them shaking. Focus, she told herself, focus. ‘In the extremely unlikely event that Josh, who loved Corinna beyond all reason …’ She faltered, seeing Patel scribble in his pad. ‘I don’t mean literally beyond reason. Just – he loved her. He really loved her. In the event that he had some sort of mental breakdown or psychotic episode – again, extremely unlikely – and killed her in a moment of madness, there’s no way he would have hurt Peter.’

‘Do you know how Peter sustained his injuries?’ Thomas this time.

‘No. But fire – smoke inhalation, burns?’

‘Inhalation, yes, but actually the worst of his injuries came from the fall.’

‘He fell?’

‘He jumped. Into the back garden from a skylight on the second floor. Broken legs, pelvis and three ribs, one of which punctured his left lung.’

Robin covered her mouth.

‘We haven’t been able to talk to him, he’s unconscious, but he was wearing pyjamas so our guess is he was asleep and woke to discover the fire, jumped to escape.’

She thought of him at Christmas the year before last. They’d spent it in Edgbaston with Corinna and Josh. It had worked really well; they’d all had proper time together, and Len had made trips over here to see her grandparents. In the evenings, after Josh had got him into his PJs, Peter had come to the dining table to say goodnight. Those legs – in tight jersey bottoms printed with aliens and flying saucers, they’d been long and spindly as breadsticks. She’d looked at Corinna, who’d folded her lips together to contain the laugh, the I know, it’s too much of maternal love.

‘It’s an hypothesis – a theory,’ said Patel.

She gave him a look: I know what a fucking hypothesis is.

‘That having killed his wife in the heat of the moment, Mr Legge came to himself, realized what he’d done and knew he couldn’t bear his son to know. But knowing also that he couldn’t actively kill his son – the moment had passed, whatever had led him to kill Mrs Legge – he set the fire not only to destroy evidence but in the hope that his son, who he knew to be asleep upstairs, would die from smoke inhalation without ever waking up.’ He laid it in front of her, formal as a barrister.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not possible.’

‘As Mrs Legge’s closest friend, were you a person she confided in? Shared her secrets with?’ Thomas.

‘Yes, when there were any.’

‘What sort of things would they be?’

Robin took a silent breath, tried to calm the storm in her head. Arson. ‘Rin’s dad was an alcoholic,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t physically violent, nothing like that, but he was useless, Trevor. Worse than. Her mum was basically a single parent when Rin and Will – her brother – were growing up. Oh god – does Di know?’

Thomas nodded.

‘It was the full Monty with him: sleeping rough round the coach station, going AWOL for weeks at a time, getting beaten up. Lost his teeth. Mrs Pascoe brought up Rin and Will on her own and she’s a nurse so they never had much money. It’s why Rin didn’t go to uni – she was more than capable, she was with me at the grammar school, she got two As and a B at A-level. She wanted to start earning straight away, though, help her mother.’ She remembered Corinna walking out of the British Heart Foundation in town, that Yorkshire accent: ‘You know what, pet? I’ve ’ad it up to me neck with cast-offs. Time to get a job.’

‘How about more recently than that? Was there anything on her mind? Anything worrying her?’

Robin tried to think. ‘No. Nothing that would even remotely … They would have liked another baby.’

‘But they didn’t?’

‘She had a difficult time with Peter – placenta praevia. He was early, she lost a lot of blood. It was Josh who was most afraid of going through that again – losing her.’

Another little note in Patel’s book.

‘Did she talk to you about their relationship?’

‘Never negatively. Unless you count joking about how they never had enough sex – too bloody tired after work, being parents, the house, what’s for dinner, you know.’ Maybe they didn’t; Baby Cop was too young and Thomas didn’t look like she’d settle for less than perfection in any area of her life. ‘But it was nothing, just idle talk over a bottle of wine, nothing to do with how much she loved him, which was a lot. They’d been together since she was sixteen.’

‘You never had reason to believe she felt frightened of him?’

‘No.’

‘Did he try to control her at all – dominate her? Did you ever see him behave in a way you’d describe as intimidating?’

The image appeared in her head without warning; she shoved it away.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Generous, protective, kind, yes; controlling, dominating, no.’

‘DI Nuttall contacted Maggie Hammond because he knows she sometimes works with local women experiencing domestic violence.’

‘Maggie knew Corinna but only through me. She wouldn’t have anything different to tell you about Josh. She’d have told me – today if not before.’

‘And what about Corinna herself – the other side? You never had reason to think she might have been bored of the marriage? That there was someone else? They’d been married for …’ Patel flicked back a couple of pages in his notebook, ‘twelve years.’

‘No, she never even hinted at that.’

‘And she would?’

‘Yes.’

‘If she’d met someone else or was thinking of leaving him – for whatever reason – might that be enough to make him lose control? If he loved her as much as you say.’

‘Didn’t happen.’

‘Infidelity can make people react in extreme ways,’ pronounced Patel as if he was whipping back the cloth on a remarkable truth. ‘Not just men, either. Totally normal people can go completely off the deep end and behave in a way no one could predict. It could also explain why Josh would set the fire knowing his son was upstairs – these kinds of killings can be a misguided attempt to keep a family together, in death if not in life.’

‘I’m aware.’

DS Thomas sat back and crossed her legs as if to signal that she was satisfied, the heat was now off. Robin braced herself.

‘You were in the job yourself, weren’t you?’ Thomas said. ‘The Met.’

Here it came.

‘DCI with HMCC.’

‘That’s …?’ Patel, pen poised.

‘Homicide and Major Crime Command. I led a murder investigation team.’ Fifty people.

‘Until quite recently.’ An eyebrow rose towards the Emeli Sandé quiff.

‘Just after Christmas.’

‘You left because …?’

‘I didn’t leave, I was fired.’ Robin looked Thomas in the eye. ‘Misconduct. It was in the papers – Jamie Hinton.’

Thomas nodded and Robin saw that of course she’d known all about it; she’d just wanted to hear her say it. How she’d say it.

‘Tell us about that.’

Robin looked at her. She’d probably read the whole thing on her phone while Patel drove them over here. ‘We – my team – were investigating the murder of a guy called Jay Farrell. Officially, he was a property developer – thirty-three, good-looking, big house in Hammersmith a couple of streets back from the river – but as we discovered, he also had a couple of sidelines, significantly, running illegal parties. Raves. It started with a house he was converting to flats, before the building work, but it was such a success, he started hiring places – barns, a big empty house out in Hertfordshire. Word went out on Facebook and hundreds of people turned up, the Nineties all over again. He charged them entry and sold them drugs – which he’d bought from Jamie Hinton.’

‘Okay.’

‘Hinton’s a career crim – previous for GBH and acquiring criminal property, known gangland ties. A friend of a friend introduced them but they’d become mates themselves. They were very similar – both all about the lifestyle, the clothes, the cars, the girls. When we got Farrell’s phone, there were selfies of them out together at clubs.

‘But then – word is, at least – Hinton was robbed. A big stash of coke and E taken from a house in Richmond – a house Farrell knew about because he’d been there. His body was found in a park on the Thames towpath, tortured in various ways – cigarette burns, lacerations.’