“A dreadful case,” said Hunter. “Knowsley Social Services faxed the records over. It came to court five years ago. The grandfather got life: he’ll die inside, with any luck. He’s seventy-five now. The mother died six years ago from a drugs overdose.”
“Selena’s mother? Or grandmother?”
“Mother and sister. The family’s a tangle: it’s a fucking rat king of relationships.” Hunter’s face was grim. “He had at least four daughters and two sons, but only three of the births were registered. Selena’s never was. They kept moving around: Blackpool, Preston, Widnes, Runcorn, Merseyside, didn’t go to school most of the time, and social services never caught up. He abused the whole lot of them. Said it was his right. Took pictures of them. Videos. Brought his mates in on the act.”
“How did he get away with it?”
“The kids were too scared to tell, I suppose. Though who knows? Children accept whatever happens in their family as the norm. It takes them a while to realise it’s not. Takes them even longer to break out. It’s not easy. One of the sons tried to kill himself by jumping under a truck.”
“Christ.”
“Quite. He ended up in A and E and spilled out the whole story. He’s in a mental hospital now. But Selena disappeared. Nobody chased it up for long: she’d already got a conviction for prostitution by then, and they assumed she was working the red-light areas somewhere.”
I thought of Russell’s portrait: Selena trapped like a fish in a net. No matter how much pompous drivel he talked, what he had painted was the truth. “Then she reappeared with a new name?”
He nodded. “Somewhere along the line, she met Matt. He took her under his wing and introduced her to Luke. It seems he planned to marry her, eventually. Oldest story in the book. Kill the husband, marry the widow, inherit the lot. Even with that false birth certificate, it might have worked.”
“But Matt loved Luke once,” I said.
“Did he? Who can say?” Hunter shrugged. “Perhaps he did, and didn’t want to. It’s possible to love and hate someone both at the same time.”
“Don’t I know it.” It just slipped out; but it was irrelevant. “Go on,” I said.
“What? Well, possibly Matt hated Luke partly because he loved him. Because he wanted Luke when he was trying to persuade himself he wasn’t gay. When Luke betrayed him he became obsessed with revenge. He couldn’t forget Luke, and he couldn’t forgive him. He hit on using Selena as a way of owning Luke: and of taking everything he owned.”
I frowned. “Hang on. How much would Selena actually inherit? I thought you said the farm belonged to the National Trust.”
“It does. Raven How doesn’t.”
“Raven How? But the place is falling down.”
“Planning laws,” said Hunter. “It was the original house. No change of use required to turn it into a luxury home. Could be worth a million.”
A bit more than the Wordsworth letter, I reflected. But Matt and Luke had been too greedy there; they hadn’t done their research. When Isaac found it, and the MOTs, he’d known that Luke was up to no good. I wondered what had been said, and how much it had added to the burden of Luke’s anguish and self-hatred...
That letter gave me a pang. I recalled the excited buzz I’d felt, when I thought it might be genuine. So what was different now? If it looked as good as the real thing, why did it now feel worthless?
“There’s more,” said Hunter. “Take a look at this.” He opened a black box file on the desk, and slid out a brown envelope. From the envelope he pulled a photograph.
“It’s called The Lady of the Lake,” he said.
It wasn’t a lake at all. It was a bathroom with a corner bath, black tiles. The girl was standing in it, long dark hair wet and streaming, mouth open, eyes gazing somewhere else. She looked maybe thirteen.
She was showing everything, but she wasn’t naked. She wore a long red robe, a dressing gown, soaked and sodden and dragging round her bare knees: her hands held it open like a pair of curtains.
It was Selena. A young Selena, but unmistakable.
“Where did this come from?”
“Thousands of photographs were confiscated when Ralph was arrested,” Hunter said. “They went back twenty years. However, this wasn’t one of them. This was picked up by vice squad on a routine trawl of the internet. He’d uploaded this years back, it seems, and the Lady of the Lake has been floating around cyberspace ever since. This is a still from a video. It’s the mildest bit. You don’t want to see the rest.”
He was right. I didn’t. “How old was she?”
He shrugged. “She’s not sure. They took so many films and photographs, she says. But under sixteen.”
The Lady of the Lake, standing in the water in her long wet coat… her long, red coat, just like Griff had said.
“But that’s what Griff–” I stopped.
“That’s what Griff called her. Yes. Vice squad had him in their files too. Under investigation for downloading child pornography at work. He claimed it was by accident.”
“He wasn’t prosecuted?”
“He fell ill before the investigation was complete. The CPS decided that there was no realistic prospect of a successful prosecution given his mental disorder. He couldn’t give evidence, and it couldn’t be proven that no-one else had accessed his computer.”
“So that was it? No follow-up?”
Hunter shook his head. “After a few months he was judged not to be a danger to the public or himself and released into his wife’s guardianship.”
I stared down at the image. Griff had recalled it, in part... It lay on that wavering boundary where his memory plunged into the black hole of spiralling oblivion. The Lady of the Lake, forever hovering on the event horizon of his damaged mind.
Hunter slid the picture back into its envelope. “I read your statement again,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and looked at me. “It hadn’t registered before. That was quite a swim.”
“Well, I had to.”
“But you’re all right, aren’t you?” Cool and distant. His tone set up an ache somewhere in my chest. I replied equally coolly.
“Oh, yes. And so are you. Aren’t you? What will the enquiry say?”
He rubbed his chin. “I don’t know. These things can go either way.”
“But you’re the golden boy: the hero. They’ll go your way.”
“Don’t,” he said.
“When are you going to apply to become a detective?”
He was silent for a few seconds. “That evening at the farm: I got it wrong. Then I nearly cracked up trying to get it right again. And I didn’t succeed, whatever the enquiry may decide. I can’t take responsibility for life and death decisions unless I know I’m going to get it right. And there’s no guarantee I will.”
“Nobody gets it right all the time.”
He shook his head. “But you should, in the police. You shouldn’t let your judgement be compromised. I’m not convinced I’ve got the necessary resilience.”
“Don’t be daft! You’re as resilient as a barbed-wire fence,” I said, and watched his eyes narrow as he tried to work this out. “You’ve got to have a go.”
“Well. Possibly.” There was still that distance between us, and I knew why. I flexed my fingers against each other, looking at his resting on the table: his good hand wrapped around the maimed one, hiding the hurt.
But he had not hidden from me his imagined failure. He was trying to share something with me: maybe friendship, maybe something else. I wasn’t close enough to him to tell.
If I wanted to get any closer, I would have to meet him halfway. So I said,
“Hunter, I don’t know what to do. That thing you saw me painting in Selena’s kitchen.”
“Go on.” Barbed wire wasn’t in it.
“I met a woman in jail. Called Dawn. She was a big shot, pulling lots of strings, a finger in lots of pies. She’s still inside.” I saw his eyes narrow again. “Well, that painting was a commission from her. She had me tracked dow
n and sent a man to see me. I don’t know exactly what she wants from me, but I’d rather not have anything to do with it.”
“But you did the painting anyway.”
“Just to see if I could. The story of my life, really. I don’t know what it’s for. It’d have no value as a forgery.”
“It’s the hook,” said Hunter. “The first of many. The proof of willingness.”
“Well, I’m not willing. But I’m scared about what might happen if I turn them down.”
He leaned across the desk. “How did they contact you?”
“By text. But my phone’s swimming with the fishes now. I don’t know how they’ll get hold of me this time. They might have tried already.”
“If they want you badly enough, they’ll find a way to reach you,” Hunter said. His eyes gleamed. “When they do, arrange it. Let me know.”