Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves Page B

strange to him at first. A woman leading a team of men. But when he’d met her a couple of times he could understand how she managed it.
    “So there was.” Vera was noncommittal.
    “What was she called?” His memory was a sludge as he grasped for a name. All he could see was a woman in silhouette, sat in the kitchen at the house on the Point. Light from a low winter sun was pouring through the window behind her. She was very smart in a black suit, short skirt, fitted jacket. He’d noticed the legs in sheer, black tights. Even then, when they’d thought Jeanie was a murderer, he’d found himself looking at the legs and wondering what it would be like to stroke them.
    “Fletcher,” Vera said. “Caroline Fletcher.”
    “She thought Jeanie was guilty. Right from the start. Not that she wasn’t polite with us. Perhaps that was how I could tell. The sympathy, you know. The pity. She knew what we’d have to go through when it came to court.”
    “She left the service a while back,” Vera said. “You’ll have to make do with me this time. Not so nice to look at, huh?”
    “Easier to talk to though.” He hadn’t found it easy to talk to Inspector Fletcher. She asked a lot of questions but he had the feeling that she wasn’t really listening, that behind the polite smile and the glossy eyes her mind was already racing ahead to form conclusions that had nothing to do with the words he was speaking.
    “That’s why I’m here,” Vera said. “I want you to talk to me.”
    “I could have got her parole,” he said suddenly. “If I’d said she could come here, that I’d support her when she came out. She’d still be alive if I’d believed her story.”
    There was an angry set to her mouth as she put down her mug and faced up to him. He thought she was going to let fly at him, tell him what she thought of his lack of faith in his daughter.
    “You didn’t put her there.” She spoke very slowly and deliberately, an emphasis on every syllable as if she was marking the beat in a piece of music. “We did that. Us. The police and the Crown Prosecution Service and the judge and the jury. Not you. You’re not to blame.”
    He didn’t believe her but he was grateful to her for saying it.
    “What do you want to know?”
    “Everything,” she said. “Everything about that time.”
    “I’m not sure I’m up to remembering. I might get things wrong. Details.”
    “Nah,” she said. “It’s the details we get right. That’s what we remember best.”
    Chapter Eight
    Peg had been the only other person Michael could have talked to like this, and when he broke off his story occasionally to look at Vera’s face to check that she was listening or judge her reaction to something he’d said he was shocked because he half expected to see his wife’s features. Vera always was listening.
    He started right from the beginning. “I was never bothered about kiddies. I thought we were happy as we were, but it mattered to Peg. She’d have liked a big family, I think she was one of five girls. Her father farmed up Hornsea way. When she found out she was pregnant she was thrilled. She’d pretty well given up hope of it happening. I was pleased for her, like, but not so much for myself. I couldn’t see how things could get any better.
    “And then Jeanie was born on the night of a big spring tide. She was long and skinny, even as a baby, with thick, black hair.”
    “You were living on the Point then?”
    “Aye, it was a part of the job. And we didn’t think it’d be a bad place for a child to grow up. There was space to run around. Good fresh air. It’s not a lonely place. There were other kids in the lifeboat houses and when she was bigger, Peg brought her into Elvet for the play group But she never needed company much, even when she was little. It was always books and music with her. Right from the start.”
    He looked up. “Peg always said she took after me, but I could never see it myself. I’m not one for