Sour Grapes

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

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  Contents

  Natasha Cooper

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  Natasha Cooper

  Sour Grapes

  Natasha Cooper

  Natasha Cooper lives in London and writes for a variety of newspapers and journals. She was Chairman of the Crime Writer’s Association in 2000/01 and regularly speaks at crime-writing conferences on both sides of the Atlantic. N. J. is the author of the Trish Maguire series and has also written psychological suspense novels as Clare Layton.

  Chapter One

  ‘Are you deaf? They fitted me up. I told yer. They nicked the tyre lever from me garridge and left it by the body with’er blood all over it. ’Course it’s got my fingerprints on it. ’Smine. But I never done it, see. I hated the bitch, but I never killed’er.’

  Emma switched off the tape recorder, relieved to be able to silence the resentful, accusatory voice at last, and pushed the matching polygraph chart to one side. As it slithered over the edge of her desk it took a pile of others with it and knocked over a box of paperclips, spilling the contents across the mud-coloured carpet. She put her head in her hands and tried to remember what enthusiasm felt like.

  Nearly twenty-five, she was working for a postgraduate degree in criminology at the newly established University of St Albans and hoping to make a career in lie-detection. At that moment it seemed a mad idea, and ludicrously over-ambitious too.

  The man to whose voice she had just been listening was serving a life sentence for the murder of his mother-in-law. By the time Emma had gone to him in search of material for her thesis, he had been in prison for five years. Seeing the fury in his eyes, hearing it in his voice, feeling it as he leaned towards her each time he accused her of stupidity or deliberate misunderstanding, she had found it easy to imagine him bludgeoning someone to death.

  At the same time she had sensed in him a vulnerability that had upset her. His obvious need for reassurance had made her feel brutally exploitative as she questioned him about the killing in order to record the changes in his heart rate and breathing whenever he switched from truth to lies or back again. She had left his prison disliking herself and wishing that she had never heard of lie-detection.

  She was the youngest of three children born into a family that had lived in the same part of Gloucestershire for generations. Her parents would have denied any suggestion that they were rich, but they lived in a large and beautiful old house her father had inherited, and they had always had enough money to pay for the things they considered important, which Emma had come to believe was a pretty good definition of wealth. All their friends came from similar backgrounds to their own, and they treated most outsiders as either dangerous or contemptible.

  Emma had not been a particularly happy child, but she had not questioned any of her family’s assumptions until her late teens, when she had moved to a semi-independent life in London. There she had begun to allow herself to admit not only that she loathed the hypocrisy and snobbishness of their world but also that she might be happier outside it. Later she had become convinced that she had only to escape in order to find everything she wanted. Her confidence had proved to be unjustified.

  The work she was trying to do in St Albans was hard, but she had been prepared for that. What she had not expected was the hostility she kept meeting from the other postgraduates. Lots of the people she had encountered when she was doing her first degree at London University had laughed at her accent, her clothes, her assumptions, and the few things she had told them about her life at home, but they had been relatively kind in their amusement. It had been easy to like them.

  Her fellow criminologists were quite different. They seemed to believe that she was fair game for whatever malicious or mocking impulses they might feel, and they felt a great many. Emma had long ago modified her accent, flung her velvet hairbands in the bin, and never talked to anyone about the life she had lived in Gloucestershire, but it was becoming very clear that she had not yet done nearly enough to placate her colleagues.

  Some were police officers, others psychologists or social workers; one was a solicitor. Most of them were older than Emma and, unlike her, they had had formal dealings with criminals or their victims before they even arrived at the university. They could talk to each other with the ease brought by shared experience, and most of them seemed to enjoy showing the one outsider among them just how ignorant they thought she was.

  It all seemed horribly reminiscent of the way her mother’s friends had behaved when a newly rich couple had bought a house in the neighbourhood. They had committed a whole series of solecisms that still seemed trivial to Emma and yet had unleashed torrents of contemptuous malice from everyone else. They had endured it for less than a year and then sold the house, taking an enormous loss, and moved back to London. One of the very few things of which Emma remained certain was that she was not going to follow their example, however tempting it might seem.

  There were not many other women taking her course and she had been surprised to discover that they were quite as aggressive as the men. One of the most difficult was a police officer called Janet Ranton. Right at the beginning of their first week, she had looked Emma up and down and asked what on earth could make someone like her think of taking up criminology.

  Surprised by that first example of unprovoked hostility, Emma had decided to make the insult bearable by turning it into a joke, which was her usual defensive strategy. Imagining herself wearing one of the hairbands and her long-discarded pearl earrings, she had retrieved her inherited drawl and swallowed vowels and murmured, ‘Well cooking rectors’lunches had got fearf’lly boring, and I couldn’t stand another seas’n in Klosters, so I had to think of something else to do. Crim’nol’gy seemed like a t’rrific gas, acshly.’

  Instead of laughing, as Emma had expected, Janet Ranton had taken the answer at face value and become even more disdainful. Later, when Emma had read a closely reasoned analysis of various interrogation techniques to a select group in her supervisor’s room, she had had the satisfaction of watching Janet’s pityingly superior expression change to one of stupefaction.

  Sighing at the memory of her short-lived triumph, Emma bent down to retrieve the polygraph charts and collect the scattered paperclips. As she sat up again, she decided that her gloom came from nothing but ludicrous self-pity. She reminded herself of the one excellent friend she had made in St Albans, vigorously slapped the papers into neat piles on her desk and decided to give up work for the evening.

  Washing the dust and carpet fluff from her fingers, she stared into the mirror that hung over
the basin. The fluorescent light was harsh and drained away most of the colour in her cheeks, but it did nothing to disguise the girlish blueness of her eyes or the fairness of her hair. In spite of everything she had done since she had left home properly, she still looked almost exactly as she had in the days when she was trying to believe that happiness lay in obedience to her family’s shibboleths. She bared her teeth at her reflection in the mirror and reached for the bottle she had bought in Boots some days earlier.

  By the time she had finished, her thick short hair was black and she thought she looked much better and infinitely tougher. She tried out various expressions and was glad to see that even her smile looked less gently acquiescent than usual.

  Not until she had cleaned the basin and thrown away the black-streaked towel did she begin to imagine the taunts her new look might arouse from her colleagues and to practise suitably throwaway responses. None of them seemed as convincing as she would have liked and she let herself think a little wistfully of the one person who could be relied upon to be encouraging about what she had done. Emma decided to tell her about it at once.

  Dear Willow,

  I’ve just dyed my hair. Are you pleased? Do be. I rather need

  someone to please about something at the moment.

  I thought of red, but, unlike lucky old you, I haven’t the right

  sort of face for that and so I’ve gone black; well, dark-brown

  really. I almost look French, I think, and even a bit actressy.

  Quite different anyway.

  You asked how the thesis is going and I must admit (to you

  and you alone) that I can’t seem to get anywhere very useful

  with my lie-detecting. Several of the people I’ve been

  interviewing in prison do seem to be innocent of what they’ve

  been banged up for, but that’s as far as I’ve got. I can’t see

  any pattern in the things they said to the police or the reasons

  why they said them, and I’m sure that’s what I need to do.

  Otherwise I’ll just be regurgitating their cases without coming

  to any kind of conclusion.

  Some of them (like a woman in Holloway for killing her

  four-year-old child) are ‘pleasers’, who seem to have confessed

  in order to placate angry authority (which, as you can imagine,

  I can understand all too easily!); others seem not only seriously

  dim but positively babby (I’m sure you’ll appreciate my careful

  avoidance of jargon here!), not really able to distinguish reality

  from fantasy; and yet others seem to have confessed because

  that was the only way to stop a hostile interrogation they

  could no longer bear. Then there are a few who seem to have

  felt such strong guilt about themselves generally that they

  came to believe they must be guilty of the crime they were

  accused of as well as all the rest.

  It all fits with the published material, which is a good thing,

  I suppose. At least it suggests I’m on the right lines, but I need

  to find something new. I can’t just rehash other people’s work.

  Oh, Willow, what am I going to do? I sometimes think that

  if I have to go to one more prison and talk to one more

  furious, miserable, possibly violent inmate, I’ll crack up. There

  are times when I get back here and find I have to fling off all

  my clothes, scrub myself under the shower and wash every

  single thing I was wearing.

  That’s that. Sorry to be so dull and moany. How are you?

  And Tom and Lucinda? Whenever I get really low, I think of

  you all in the Mews and feel MUCH better. I hope the book’s

  going all right. Will you give them both my love—and my

  respects to Mrs Rusham? I wouldn’t dare send her anything

  more than that!

  Lots of love,

  Emma

  PS Don’t worry about any of that. I was just getting the moaning off my chest because I know you’re a safe and sympathetic listener and won’t take any of it too seriously. After all, it’s none of it at all important, and I wouldn’t even post this letter except that I can’t bear the idea of lying to anyone I care about. All the above is what I wanted to say to you and so I’ve said it. I’ve given up pretending about anything. At least, I hope I have. Most things anyway. But please, please, dearest Willow, don’t think that I expect you to read any of it!

  Emma read through the deliberately casual, slangy letter, noticing the plethora of childish exclamation marks, and smiled at Willow’s probable reaction. Putting a small asterisk at the end of the postscript and another before the salutation, she added: ‘You’d better read the PS first. It’s the only sensible bit of all this stuff. Love, Em.’

  Willow King opened the letter after breakfest two days later. Her husband, Superintendent Tom Worth, was away in Strasbourg, attending a conference on Euro-policing and international terrorism; Mrs Rusham, her nanny-cum-housekeeper, had taken two-year-old Lucinda out to the park; and Willow herself was supposed to be getting down to work on her latest novel.

  It had stopped moving for her and seemed duller than anything else she had ever written, almost duller than anything else she had ever read. She had not sunk quite so low as to believe it worse than her nearest rival’s new book, but she was clinging on to that last scrap of dignity with difficulty.

  Having reread Emma’s letter and considered the misery in which it must have been written, Willow decided that she would have to do something to help. If it had not been for her, Emma might never have thought of taking up criminology and would probably have been a great deal happier.

  Willow poured herself another cup of coffee and carried it upstairs to her bedroom. There, sitting on the edge of her bed, she dialled Emma’s number, glad that as a postgraduate she was allowed the simple luxury of her own telephone.

  ‘Emma Gnatche.’

  ‘Hello, Em. It’s Willow here. I got your letter. I…’

  ‘I felt awful about sending it. I am sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It was fine. But you sound as though you need to get away from that place for a bit. How about coming to spend the weekend with Lucinda and me?’

  ‘Wouldn’t I be in the way?’

  ‘Far from it. Tom’s away Europolling, and we’d love some company. Come on Friday evening and spend the weekend with us.’

  ‘I must say that sounds like my idea of heaven.’

  ‘I’m being selfish,’ Willow went on, ‘because it would be wonderful for me if you could give me a hand with Lucinda on Mrs Rusham’s day off. She’s quite an appealing little bundle in her own way—Lucinda, I mean—but she takes a lot of effort. You’d be a real help.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful,’ said Emma with a deep sigh, ‘but it would be a bit pathetic of me to run away.’

  ‘Nonsense. While you’re here, I thought I might be able to give you a hand with the thesis.’

  ‘But I…’ Emma began and then stopped.

  ‘What I thought we ought to do is get hold of Jane Cleverholme,’ Willow went on as though hardly aware of the interruption. ‘The Daily Mercury’s bound to have run lots of juicy stories about injustice after false confessions, and, as editor, Jane must have access to all the facts behind the stories. A false confession is what you’re looking for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Probably, although…’ Once again Emma found it impossible to complete her objection.

  ‘There you are then,’ said Willow briskly. ‘If you had a really dramatic case that no other lie-detector has written up, it surely wouldn’t matter too much if your conclusions turn out to be the same as other people’s.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Emma. After a moment, she added, ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘I am. Why don’t I ring Jane and see if she’ll come for dinner while you’r
e here?’

  ‘Well, if you really don’t mind,’ said Emma, not wanting to be ungrateful. After a moment she added more brightly, ‘Actually, I think it’s a brilliant idea. I can’t imagine why I never thought of talking to Jane myself.’

  ‘She may not have any better cases than the ones you’ve already looked into,’ said Willow, as though she thought she had to armour Emma against possible disappointment, ‘but I’d have thought it was worth a try.’

  ‘Yes. No, I mean. Actually, I’m not sure what I do mean, but even the thought of a new way of tackling it all is great. And the prospect of seeing you is even better. It is sweet of you to be so sympathetic.’

  ‘I’ve been glum myself in the past,’ said Willow, lightly skating over her own current difficulties. ‘So shall I see you on Friday in time for dinner?’

  ‘Yes, you will. And Willow?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Chapter Two

  Emma rang the bell of the Worths’Belgravia mews house at ten past six the following Friday evening. Mrs Rusham opened the door and said with all her usual formality, ‘Good evening, Ms Gnatche.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Emma, impressed that her radically changed appearance had been accepted without either a comment or any obvious surprise.

  ‘Mrs Worth is upstairs giving Lucinda her bath. She suggested you might like to leave your luggage to me and go up to join them.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Mrs Rusham. But there’s no need for you to do anything with my bag. There’s hardly anything in it and I’ll deal with it later. How are you?’

  ‘Well, thank you.’

  ‘I am glad.’

  Before Emma could say anything else, the housekeeper had shut the front door, murmured something about completing her preparations for dinner, and returned to the kitchen. Emma obediently went upstairs to find Willow on her knees beside the bath, assisting her two-year-old daughter to drive a flotilla of boats up and down the length of water. There was also an incongruous dinosaur, which Lucinda seemed to prefer to the real boats, and an old, cracked, plastic mug, which she liked even more.