The Philosophy of Disgrace Read online

  Feeling frightened and alone she perched herself on the edge of a shredded armchair, clutching her phone and praying that Charlie would ring. The policewoman had told her not to touch anything in the house, but it was difficult to just sit amidst the chaos and simply wait. Who on earth would do this to an old lady’s home? She asked herself, biting back the tears that threatened to engulf her. Everything that represented Delia was gone, smashed and ruined. A whole life trashed in the blink of an eye. It felt like a whirlwind had whipped through the house and turned it upside down. Everyone knew that Delia loved junk, but to see it all shattered like this, just made it look all the more ridiculous and tawdry. Headless kittens, limbless glass clowns, an eye here, a tail there, photographs torn apart in frenzy. China dolls, grotesquely disfigured by the destruction, their faces chipped and cracked, their dresses torn. In fact, now that it was all broken, it looked to Amy almost sinister. Instinctively she got up and picked her way back through the mess to the kitchen, where she decided to wait for the police outside. The gnome that hid the key grinned up at her with big Disney eyes, it made her shudder so she kicked it, figuring one more broken thing wouldn’t make much difference today.

  Just as Edie’s mother had said, Barrington Jones had been a pimp. Well known to the police and wanted for questioning in connection with the disappearance of Molly Kerr and her son. Molly had been working for him, and had been reported missing by one of the other girls. No trace of her or the child had ever been found, and when they had finally caught up with Barrington he was beyond giving any account of himself. He was found in an alley, his body bloated with drugs and his skull caved in.

  Technically the case was still open, but no one bothered too much about pimps and whores, especially back then. The loss of Barrington Jones had been a good thing for the town, and one less whore and her kid was no great loss to anyone. Angela found no record of him ever marrying Delia, or of her ever marrying anyone for that matter. It seemed she had just taken his name. It also seemed like she just melted away for a year afterwards too. Just like the other women who had worked with Jones. The next time Delia popped up was a year after, with a three-year-old child in tow. The people she had associated with back then had loose morals, loose tongues and unfortunately loose memories too. No one had cared that Delia had acquired a child of three; the only thing that had mattered to Delia’s old associates was where their next drink was coming from. Besides, Delia had become respectable, so what was she to them anymore?

  Angela had found most of this out from a retired officer who had worked the case. She had tracked him down to his allotment and had shared a cup of tea with him in his potting shed while they talked over old times. He had been clearly amused by her interest in a case that only had cursory attention at the time. His attitude had been that sometimes it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. She had asked him what he had thought of Delia back then. He had laughed and referred to her as a hard faced cow. Delia’s career on the game had been brief, and she hadn’t caused them too much trouble as he recalled. Somehow, the picture didn’t tally with the cuddly granny image belied by Delia now. Angela had asked him if they had ever considered that Charlie Jones might be the son of Molly Kerr, he’d shrugged, mulled it over and asked her if it really mattered anymore. Angela had thanked him for his time and made her exit. Deciding that it mattered a great deal.

  She got back to the station just in time to find Ratcliffe extracting himself from an extremely small courtesy car, ‘Don’t you dare laugh Watson!’ he huffed as she approached him.

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it sir. Want to know what I’ve been doing while you’ve been playing in your Noddy car?’

  While she was filling him in on her days work, a memo was put on his desk, informing them that Delia’s house had been the target of an apparent burglary. A computer programme had flagged up the name and address, linking it to their case. A conversation with the uniformed officers who had attended told them that nothing had been taken and that there were no signs of forced entry to the property. ‘What the hell?’ Ratcliffe asked as he put down the phone. ‘Are we really considering that a 77 year old woman is a serial killer who is still active?’ he asked Angela, sincerely hoping, but without conviction, that she was going to firmly disabuse him of the notion.

  Angela nodded slowly and watched him sigh heavily and hold his head in his hands. ‘I don’t effing believe this’. He said through his fingers. ‘So where the hell is she now? According to uniform she hasn’t been back to the house all day.’

  Angela shrugged, and then realisation dawned ‘Why exactly did you make me stay at the hospital earlier boss?’

  Ratcliffe waved his hand dismissively, ‘Some stupid deal I had with Frances Haines to get her to talk, a precaution really, she was convinced Rachel was at risk because of what happened to Stella...’ His words trailed off and he shot out of his chair. ‘Shit, she was telling the truth!’ he yelled. Angela was already walking towards the door.

  Charlie had left Diana in the hospital canteen, claiming that he needed some fresh air and to stretch his legs. Besides he needed to put another ticket on the van, which reminded him that he’d thrown the London parking ticket into the foot well, he ought to retrieve it and sort it out before the fine escalated. Anything to distract him from the oppression that he felt sitting next to Rachel’s bed, feeling like he was waiting for her to die. It had been a long time since he had wanted to cry. The last time had been the day after she had left, when the shock and anger had subsided and the total rejection had set in. Now she was threatening to leave them again and he just didn’t think he could take it. Not that he would blame her if she just gave up the fight. Perhaps all this was just irretrievable.

  Wearily he bent down to rummage in the van, groping under the seat for the screwed up ticket. His hand found something hard, it felt like a book. Confused he pulled it out, sure that it didn’t belong to him. It looked like a diary, an old one, the binding worn, the small brass catch that held it shut scuffed and tarnished. He vaguely remembered seeing it in Rachel’s bag at the hotel. He figured that she must have dropped it in the van when he took her back to London. Dare he look inside, find out what she had written over the years they’d been apart, or was he better off not knowing? He weighed it in his hand, it smelled musty. He tossed it back onto the seat. He would give it to her later, if she ever woke up. He figured he had better check his phone whilst he was out of the hospital, god knows how much work he had lost in the last few days because of all this. The number of missed calls from Amy told him that something was badly wrong. What else was life going to chuck at them, hadn’t they had enough. The message service connected him to Amy’s panicked voice, telling him that his mother was missing and that someone had trashed her house. Immediately he rang Amy’s number. She answered on the second ring.

  ‘Dad! Did you get my messages? We can’t find Nan, I don’t know where she’s gone and the house is a mess. The police have just left me here and I don’t know what to do!’ She sobbed.

  ‘Wait there, I’m on my way.’ He said, ramming his keys into the vans ignition before he had even ended the call.

  By the time he pulled up outside his mother’s house, the police were back. Lots of them. Amy was outside sobbing her heart out, being comforted by a WPC who was plying her with tissues. Another was keeping the neighbours back. People in white paper suits were walking in and out of the house with what looked like evidence bags. ‘Amy! What the hell is going on?’ he shouted, half pushing the policewoman out of the way to get to her.

  ‘Dad, thank god. They came back just as I was waiting for you, but no one will tell me what’s happening. Something bad has happened to Nan hasn’t it?’ she sobbed clutching at him.

  Someone waved a warrant card in front of his face, ‘DC Haddon. Would you mind coming with me Mr Jones? We have some questions’.

  ‘Oh my god, you can’t arrest my dad!’ Amy shrieked hysterically, throwing herself in front of Charlie.

  Haddo
n smiled, ‘I’m not arresting anyone, but I do need to ask some questions. All we are going to do is sit in the car and talk for a minute. OK?’

  Charlie didn’t cope well in such situations, being forced to sit in the back of a police car, even without handcuffs was stressful. In his experience, cops rarely listened to reason and in these situations acted like hounds with the scent of blood in their noses.

  Haddon slid into the front seat and turned to him with a smile that Charlie assumed was meant to be reassuring. It wasn’t, it just made him want to punch the smug bastard. ‘Do you know the whereabouts of your mother Mr Jones?’ Haddon asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not able to tell you that at this point, but we do need to know where we can find her. It’s extremely important’.

  Charlie wanted to mull it over, wanted a chance to work out what might be happening here, but he knew that the more he stalled the worse it would look. ‘She’s at the hospital, visiting my wife. Are you going to tell me what’s going on now?’

  ‘Just a moment sir.’ Haddon said, climbing out of the car and moving swiftly towards a colleague, who nodded at him and pulled out his radio. Charlie strained to listen but couldn’t hear anything. Haddon brought Amy over to the car, ‘Please wait here with your father miss. I’ll be back shortly to let you know what’s happening’.

  Bemused, Amy sat next to her father in the police car and stared out at the scene.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Rachel awoke abruptly; still in the waiting room but aware that she was no longer alone. A familiar figure stood over her ‘Delia? What are you doing here?’ She asked, puzzled.

  Delia wasn’t smiling. ‘It’s time that you were gone.’ She said, but her voice seemed distant.

  ‘Where am I going to go?’ Rachel asked, still sleepy, still bleary, still not with it.

  ‘Time you went where you belong lady.’

  Rachel felt confused, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You just won’t give in will you, after everything you just keep bouncing back like a bad penny. I should have done this, years ago.’

  ‘Done what? What’s wrong Delia?’

  In one brief flash, the waiting room was gone and Rachel felt herself being sucked into darkness, darkness so thick, so tangible that it felt like black velvet, folding itself about her and choking out everything. In sheer panic, she fought against it, tearing at it, pushing it away from her, struggling to breathe. She was drowning in nothingness.

  In all her tears of nursing on the ICU nurse Jane Bucknall had never been confronted by the act of an elderly woman ripping out a patients breathing tube and then holding a pillow over the patients face. In utter shock, for just a moment, she found herself absently observing the event. Until a tall woman swept into the room and launched herself across the ward, blatantly bashing the old woman across the head with a chair.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  DC Haddon and his colleagues had patiently sifted through the debris in Delia’s house, and had come up with absolutely nothing other than the receipt of a salutary lesson in the dangers of ordering goods from Sunday supplement magazines. The general consensus was that Delia had trashed the place herself, but only god knew why. Frustrated, he wandered out onto the street, stood next to Charlie’s van and rummaged in his pockets for cigarettes, managing to drop his lighter in the process. As he bent to retrieve it, something on the seat of the van caught his eye. Something that looked suspiciously like an old red diary, with a little lock.

  To Diana’s surprise, the chair just bounced off the old woman, who then immediately turned round and aimed a surprisingly powerful punch to the centre of Diana’s face. The impact sent her reeling and a starburst of pain flooded her head. It took three nurses, two of them male, to bring Delia Jones down. This was how Ratcliffe and Angela found her, pinned to the floor face down under the weight of a six-foot charge nurse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Amy opened the wardrobe and ran her hand across the satins, silks, and furs. ‘My god dad, have you seen this? This place is like vintage heaven! These clothes must be worth a fortune. The fur is a bit dodgy though.’

  Charlie sighed and threw her another black sack, ‘Whatever Amy, can we just get this place sorted out?’ The activity of clearing out Rachel’s flat had been profoundly depressing. It was like archiving the contents of a museum. All except Rachel’s room, which had been as Spartan as a nun’s cell and all the more saddening because of it. He would be glad when they were done and he had could close the door on the place. Let the next tenant deal with the ghosts. It was a shame you couldn’t put all aspects of the past in a bin bag and take it to the tip where it would be out of sight and out of mind.

  He sat on the bare mattress and watched his daughter shove Chanel suits and Dior dresses into the black plastic sack, and suddenly felt very old and very tired.

  Amy glanced at him and paused what she was doing. ‘Dad, you OK?’

  He shook his head, ‘Just tired, that’s all.’

  She tied the sack, ‘we should have got a house clearance firm in to do this really.’

  ‘No. I wanted to do it; I wanted to be the one who shut the door on it once and for all. Closure as you so charmingly put it.’ He explained with a weak smile.

  ‘Speaking of closure, have you thought anymore about what I said, about some kind of service, a memorial or something?’

  He shook his head, ‘I can’t face it, too public. You wouldn’t get people who genuinely wanted to pay their respects, just a bunch of voyeurs who want to pick over the past and speculate. There has been enough of that already.’

  She sat down next to him, ‘I know, people are pretty sick really. All they want is the gory details. But we need to mark it somehow.’

  ‘I’m going to arrange a burial, and Diana is going to give a service, nothing religious just a few words. And only us. I don’t want anyone else there.’

  She nodded in agreement and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘When will they release the body?’

  ‘I don’t know, soon I think, once they’ve got all the evidence they need I suppose. Angela Watson said she would ring and let us know. Anyway, can we change the subject now? We’ve still got a lot to do.’ He said slapping his hands on his knees and rising wearily from the bed. ‘Fair play, the charity shop is going to be chuffed to bits with this lot.’

  ‘Are you absolutely sure this is the right thing to do, us to just get rid of all this? She hung on to it all for so long. It seems a bit odd just bagging it all up and dumping it’

  ‘Didn’t do her any good did it? Just anchored her to misery as I see it. Let’s just get it over with shall we?’

  Amy just shook her head, shrugged and opened up another bag.

  Charlie picked up two full bags and heaved them out of the flat and down the stairs to the van. As he opened the back doors, he noticed the curtains of the ground floor flat twitch and the face of a small bichon frise appear. That meant that Miss Barnes- Harman was watching his every move. Despite everything that had happened, she still looked at him as if he were the devil incarnate. As if, elderly women were a benign force for god’s sake! For good measure, he gave her a polite wave.

  Amy came down the steps carrying another bag, ‘Di just rang. We need to go home. Ratcliffe has just rung up and he wants to talk to us, about...Gran. He’s coming round tomorrow morning’ She said the word Gran hesitantly, still worried about how he might react to it, still unable to find a better descriptor for the woman who had pretended to be his mother.

  Ratcliffe perched awkwardly on the edge of Charlie’s sofa and accepted a cup of tea from Diana. ‘Ta. I’m dying for this.’ He said gratefully, always a welcome prop, tea.

  ‘You’re welcome.’ Diana replied ‘So now that we’re all here, and we’ve all got tea you can tell us the news.’

  Ratcliffe glanced at Charlie. ‘Are you happy for me to talk about this now?’

  Charlie nodded, ‘I think Diana has as much right to know
what’s going on as the rest of us by now.’

  ‘Damned right, bloody woman broke my nose!’ She said with a smirk.

  Ratcliffe sighed, ‘OK. Here goes, the crown Prosecution Service are not going to take it to trial, after extensive psychiatric assessment it has been deemed that Delia Jones is unfit to stand trial. She is has been assessed as mentally unstable, and therefore cannot be held responsible in a court of law for her actions.’

  Charlie hung his head; Diana nodded sagely and with the wisdom of youth, Amy vented her spleen. ‘You mean that evil woman is going to get away with it! I can’t believe it! She has utterly and completely ruined all our lives, and you’re telling me that it’s not even going to court! Unbelievable!’ She huffed, her voice saturated with disgust.

  ‘No, she’s not going to get away with it at all. Under the circumstances she will remain, for an unspecified length of time, in a secure psychiatric unit. The chances are she will never come out. If at 77 she is still capable of murder, it’s unlikely she will ever be able to be treated, and she still poses a threat. She’s going to be put away for the rest of her life.’ The lack of real justice rankled with him too.

  Amy looked away, suddenly embarrassed by her outburst. She ought to have known that really. ‘OK’. Was all she said.