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THIRTEEN

Dave Holland was shown into the living room by a female Family Liaison Officer and watched as the woman who had just become a widow rose from an armchair to greet him.

‘No, please,’ Holland said, gently urging her to stay seated.

‘Let me go and get you some tea or something,’ the woman said. ‘You look like you could do with warming up.’

‘I’m fine, honestly.’

‘I’ll get it,’ the FLO said.

‘Oh, all right then.’ The woman sat down again. ‘Thanks, love.’ She nodded her gratitude as the FLO closed the door behind her, then looked across at Holland and produced a shaky smile. ‘It’s definitely getting colder, isn’t it?’

Karen Sadler lived in a semi-detached house in Southgate, only a few hundred yards from where she worked at a local opticians and less than five miles from where her husband had been found, lying broken and bloody beneath the Dollis Brook viaduct several hours before.

The body of Daniel Sadler had been discovered on the otherwise deserted B-road that ran beneath the bridge by a still-traumatised driver who had been forced to swerve to avoid running it over.

‘I thought it was just a bag of rubbish at first,’ he’d told the attending officers.

Holland sat down on a small sofa and formally introduced himself.

Karen Sadler was, he guessed, somewhere in her early fifties.

A slight, fine-featured Black woman wearing furry slippers and a thick blue dressing gown, the same one – Holland presumed – that she’d been wearing when she’d nervously answered the door to two police officers a couple of hours before.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ Holland said.

The woman nodded quickly and waved a hand as though condolences were the very last thing she needed.

‘I’m glad you’re here, because we need to talk about all that,’ she said.

‘Try and clear it up, you know?’ She leaned forward and lowered her voice, nodding towards the kitchen.

‘She’s very nice and everything, but you’re obviously .

. . senior , so I’m hoping we can get to the bottom of things.

’ She leaned towards Holland. ‘I mean, it’s obviously been a stupid mistake, because whoever the poor soul was they found under that bridge, it can’t be Daniel. ’

Holland wasn’t thrown, because he’d seen this before.

Denial and desperation; a grasping for that last sliver of hope in the face of what was all too dreadfully obvious.

He’d witnessed every variety of response from those in the same awful position as Karen Sadler.

He’d seen shock transmute into a terrible stillness that bordered on catatonia; rage and hysteria that had resulted in him being slapped more than once as well as getting kicked and spat at.

There was no such thing as a normal reaction, no behaviour this situation could prompt for which Holland was unprepared.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Sadler, but there’s been no mistake. They—’

‘It’s Karen.’

‘I’m sorry, Karen, but—’

‘No,’ the woman said. Simple and brooking no argument. ‘No.’

‘There will need to be a formal identification, obviously, although we can wait until you’re ready.

But the officers on the scene found your husband’s wallet on his body.

’ Holland knew these were the same two uniformed officers who had then had to deliver the death knock, as though their Sunday morning had not been hideous enough. ‘His motorbike was found nearby.’

It might have been the mention of her husband’s motorbike, but for whatever reason the tears came then.

There was no noise to go with them, no sobs or sniffles.

The tears simply ran down her face as she spoke.

‘It was his pride and joy, that bike. I mean, he’d always been into his bikes, but he really loved that one and it was brilliant that he’d found a job where he could ride the daft thing all day long, you know? ’

Holland didn’t know. ‘What did your husband do for a living?’ He leaned down to the box of tissues on the low table between them and handed them across.

‘He was a courier. Delivered all sorts on that bike.’ She dabbed at her eyes and looked at Holland. ‘Where did you say they found it?’

‘It was on Crescent Road,’ Holland said. ‘In Finchley.’

‘That’s near this viaduct, then, is it?’

‘It’s not far.’

‘So, how did he . . . ’

It was a single branch line, carrying tube trains between Finchley Central station and Mill Hill East. There was an eight-feet-high metal fence just yards from where Daniel Sadler had parked his bike.

Once he’d climbed over that, he’d have needed to clamber up a grass bank, then walk the hundred metres or so along the tracks until he reached the viaduct which, at sixty feet, was the highest point on the whole network.

At that time of the morning there would have been no passing trains to spot him and nobody to alert anyone.

Holland knew how much effort and determination it would have taken because he’d made the journey himself before coming to Karen Sadler’s house; scaling that fence and climbing up that steep, muddy bank to get to the tracks.

If the woman had spotted the nasty-looking graze on his palm or the stains on his trousers she hadn’t mentioned them.

‘He just walked along the line,’ Holland said.

‘It still doesn’t make any sense.’ Now, the crying had taken hold, her words spluttered out between sobs.

‘We’d been talking about a few days away somewhere, a bit of winter sun or whatever.

He’d been looking at places online and he was excited about it, and you don’t do that if you’re planning to .

. . ’ She balled up a handful of tissues and pressed them to her face. ‘You tell me if that makes sense.’

Holland couldn’t, because it didn’t, but he knew very well that sense, or what most people thought of as sense, didn’t come into it if the balance of someone’s mind was sufficiently disturbed.

Yes, it seemed bizarre that anyone could take their own life when they were so clearly planning ahead, when they had an outing to the theatre underlined in their diary or dinner booked at a nice restaurant.

Why on earth would someone book a plane ticket to Barbados for Monday and then kill themselves on Sunday night?

Because they did. It was as simple as that. They just did.

‘I can’t,’ Holland said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He waited until the sobbing had eased a little. ‘How did he seem the last time you saw him?’

‘He seemed fine. Just . . . himself, you know, but I was half asleep to be honest, because this would have been three o’clock in the morning. I woke up and there he was out of bed, getting dressed.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘Well . . . we know where he was going, don’t we?’

Holland nodded, thinking about Daniel Sadler trudging along those tracks in the dark towards the viaduct. ‘Of course, I’m sorry. What did he tell you, though?’

‘He just said he had to meet someone. That it was some work thing and that it was important.’

‘Had he ever had a work thing at that time in the morning before?’

‘No, never. I mean, sometimes he worked until the early hours, got in after I’d gone to bed, but he’d never gone out at that time.

I suppose I should have asked him about it, but like I said I was half asleep.

He told me he wouldn’t be very long, so I wasn’t to worry.

Then he gave me a kiss and told me to go back to sleep.

I must have gone straight off again, because I don’t even remember hearing the front door shut or his bike revving up . . . ’

Holland watched her for a few moments, knowing that now she was remembering that last kiss; that she would always remember it, lying awake and seeing his face and thinking about what it had meant. That her husband had been kissing her goodbye.

There were things that could never be forgotten.

Some memories that bled and would never stop.

‘How long were the two of you married, Karen?’ he asked.

That shaky smile appeared again. ‘Feels like ages, but it’s only been ten years .

. . eleven in a couple of months. Second time round for both of us, you see.

Daniel’s got a couple of kids from his first marriage, and I’ve got a grown-up son, but everyone gets on and mucks in.

All round here for Christmas . . . well, every other year, anyway. ’

‘Sounds nice,’ Holland said.

‘It is.’ The smile vanished and Karen’s face crumpled. ‘It was . . . ’

Holland stood up. ‘Why don’t I see how she’s getting on with that tea?’

Karen Sadler was already turning to reach behind her, leaning to lift a framed photograph off the window ledge. She held it out for Holland to take. ‘See?’

Daniel Sadler standing next to his motorbike, posing proudly in full leathers with a crash helmet under his arm and grinning like an idiot.

‘Daniel was happy,’ she said. ‘Perfectly happy. I know he was. We had our ups and downs, course we did, because everybody does. But he loved his job and he doted on his kids and on me, and . . . we had a good life.’

The door opened and the FLO reappeared, bearing a tray. ‘I didn’t know how everyone wanted it,’ she said, ‘so I brought milk and sugar.’

‘Thanks,’ Holland said.

Karen Sadler did not seem remotely interested in tea. She reached to take the photograph back and stared down at it. ‘A good life.’