“We’ll get her back,” he had said fiercely. “I promise you that. Let me stop over and I’ll go to the meeting with you tomorrow.”
“I’m OK, Kevin,” she had insisted. “I haven’t done anything wrong, whatever that bastard inspector Walter says. I need a decent night’s sleep. I’ve got some pills. Then I’m going to see the kids at the Project as usual. And at two o’clock you can come with me to see social services. They’re well out of order with what they’ve done and I’ll have Emma back tomorrow if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll see you in the morning.”
But she hadn’t, because at nine that morning DCI Thackeray had called Mower in and told him to keep away from the Heights, an instruction it had only taken him a couple of hours to decide to ignore. He could see even from a distance as he got out of the car and buttoned his fleece against the downpour that the Project was in darkness and the doors closed, which was normal enough at this time of day. A couple of girls lingered outside, clutching thin jackets around themselves against the sharp wind and bone-numbing wet but they would not be allowed in until the adults returned to unlock the doors at two.
Leaving his car at the foot of Priestley House he made his way up the concrete stairs where the rain ran down in small waterfalls between the litter. He splashed through puddles along the walkway until he reached Donna ’s door. There were no lights on inside the flat in spite of the gloom and when he tried the door he found that it was locked. He knocked again and again but there was no reply. Alarmed now, he called Dizzy B on his mobile.
“Anything?” he asked, but the answer was negative.
“Shit,” Mower said to himself. Looking round to make sure that he was still alone on the walkway, he pulled a credit card from his wallet and slid it against the lock, which held for a moment and then slid open, allowing him to slip into the flat apparently unobserved. Inside, when he turned on the light everything appeared normal enough. The small living room was tidy, and in the kitchen the glasses and plates which he and Donna had used the previous evening had been washed and left to dry on the draining board. He glanced into Emma’s small room where the bed had been neatly made and a Barbie doll leaned against the pillow, and then knocked lightly on the door of the main bedroom before opening it. There the double bed had evidently been slept in and the bedclothes left thrown back with a blue silky nightdress lying across the pillows. A bottle of pills stood on the bedside table and he glanced briefly at the pharmacist’s label without surprise, recognising the tranquilliser she had evidently been prescribed, although he had never seen her take them while he had been at the flat. But of Donna herself there was no sign.
Only the bathroom was left and Mower turned the door handle with a growing sense of alarm. At first he could see very little but as his eyes adjusted, even before he tugged on the light-pull, he could see that the water Donna was lying in was dark and he knew instantly what that meant. She was lying with her head still above the water and her eyes half open but sightless, her arms floating gently and revealing deep gashes across both wrists.
“Oh, God, no,” Mower said despairingly, leaning against the door as his knees threatened to give way beneath him. He fought back waves of nausea for a long time before he felt able to step across the damp floor and look down directly at the dead woman. He checked for a pulse in her neck but without any expectation of finding one. A single razor blade lay on the floor close to the side of the bath, he noticed. It was probably one of his own. Donna had been dead some time, the water in the bath was cool to the touch and her naked body felt cold. She must have been lying here, dying here perhaps, for hours, he thought bitterly. If only she had allowed him to stay the night as he had wanted. If only. He gently closed her eyes as if to allow her to rest in peace.
“Oh, Donna, why?” he whispered. “We were going to get her back. Why, oh why, did you give up on it now?” Desolation overwhelmed him, this new death reopening the still barely healed wound left by Rita Desai’s violent death. It was as if he was fated to bring destruction to women he allowed himself to grow fond of, he thought, as if what he touched he destroyed.
It was not until some time later, sitting in Donna’s living room, with tears drying on his face, that he realised that there were things he must do. He glanced at his watch. It was two thirty and the case conference Donna should have attended must have convened itself and dissolved itself by now. He called police HQ first and asked the duty officer to deal with what appeared to be a suicide, then he caught up with Dizzy B, still patiently waiting for news in the pub. Next he phoned social services and told them that Emma Maitland’s mother was dead. They seemed less than anxious for Mower to see the child and he had not the heart to argue his case. Still dazed, he went into the kitchen and splashed his face with cold water and dried it on a tea-towel. Then he stood on the balcony outside the flat, taking deep gulps of rain-sodden air waiting for the patrol cars and the officers who would deal with the incident to arrive down below.
As the fresh air cleared his brain he finally began to consider his own position which, he thought, whichever way you looked at it was not a comfortable one. While Michael Thackeray might just concede that fear for Donna’s safety was a reasonable excuse for ignoring his instruction to keep away from the Heights, he was sure that the drug squad would be less than impressed when they discovered his willingness to disobey orders, as inevitably they would now do. Worse, it was conceivable that they might read far more into his relationship with Donna and her death than was justified. If Donna had reached rock bottom during the night, Mower was sure it was the threat of losing her daughter which had reduced her to despair. Ray Walter might well see it differently, interpret her death as an admission of guilt and be even more anxious to link Mower and Dizzy B, and quite possibly even Joyce Ackroyd, to whatever he believed had been going on at the Project.
Drenched by a particularly gusty squall, and seeing no sign of blue lights flashing on the approach to the estate, Mower went back into the flat to wait. He knew better than to touch anything just in case this apparently not very suspicious death turned into something more sinister when the pathologist had examined Donna’s body, but he wandered from room to room, partly for something to do and partly because he could not sit still. He knew that he had spent enough time in the flat over the last few weeks for forensic traces of his presence to be everywhere if it came to that.
He had hoped he and Donna had finally understood each other. She might have been keen to find a new father for Emma, but he had given her no reason to imagine that was how he saw a future for the three of them. He did not think he had deceived her. He did not think he had pushed her to this desperate solution. But he was no longer sure of anything, and he began to cast around the flat for a note or message of some kind, perhaps addressed to Emma rather than himself, but could find nothing. She had no answerphone on which she could have recorded a message. And as he searched, and the effects of shock began to dissipate and his mind cleared, he began to feel that what had happened could not be the whole story, not in the sense that he could not believe the evidence of his eyes and that Donna was not dead, but that the method and even more the timing of her death did not make any sort of sense for the woman he thought he had come to know well. She might have spent the previous night frantic with worry and far closer to desperation than she had anticipated when she had sent him away, but the one thing he was sure she would never have done was abandon her daughter. Her death might have all the hallmarks of a suicide, but somehow it did not ring true.