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  Hilary Norman and The Murder Room

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  Ralph’s Children

  Hilary Norman

  People speak wistfully of the innocence of childhood.

  Of the still untainted honesty of child’s play.

  Harmless games of unspoiled imagination and open minds.

  Yet some children play, from early years, with instincts far from pure.

  Some play their games with the souls of killers.

  And then they grow up.

  Contents

  Cover

  The Murder Room Introduction

  Title page

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Before

  The Game

  Kate

  Laurie

  The Game

  Kate

  Ralph’s Journal

  Laurie

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Laurie

  The Game

  Kate

  The Game

  Laurie

  The Game

  Kate

  Laurie

  The Game

  Kate

  The Game

  Laurie

  The Game

  The Game

  Kate

  Laurie

  The Game

  Ralph

  Ralph

  The Game

  Laurie

  The Game

  Ralph

  The Game

  Laurie

  The Game

  Ralph

  The Game

  Ralph

  Laurie

  The Game

  Ralph

  The Game

  Ralph

  The Game

  Ralph

  The Game

  Kate

  After

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Laurie

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Ralph

  Kate

  Ralph’s Children

  Kate

  Ralph

  Outro

  by Hilary Norman

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  About the author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  When the lights went out in prison, most inmates longed for sleep.

  But the sounds went on and on, making it impossible. The moaning and coughing and spitting and calling and headbanging and . . .

  Lying on his bunk in his cell in Oakwood Prison, the teacher closed his eyes and strove for the hundredth or more time to transport himself forward to another place and time, to the day that surely had to come when they finally believed him.

  Innocent, for pity’s sake.

  Sleep had become a double-edged sword with its nightmares, so that the teacher had come to dread night as much as day, because that was when they came back to him again, the faceless monsters who had done this to him, who had brought him to this place, destroyed him.

  Madness, all of it.

  ‘Beast,’ they had called him, over and over again.

  Beast.

  One day, he told himself, one day . . .

  No days left.

  Now.

  It came so swiftly that he had no time to prepare himself.

  First, the sound. Different from all the many others.

  Different.

  Someone entering his cell.

  ‘What—?’

  The last word he said before the horror was stuffed into his mouth.

  Last word ever, no time left.

  Cloth; strips of sweat and piss-stinking material, filling his mouth, pushing over his tongue and into his throat while his jerking arms and legs were pinned down and his vomit rose up.

  The worst death in the world, the devil himself in his cell.

  ‘Message for you, Beast.’

  The man’s voice came through the roaring in his ears.

  Them again, the teacher registered as he began to die.

  ‘End game,’ the voice said.

  Them.

  Oxford Examiner

  4th August

  Alan Mitcham, the Barton schoolteacher convicted last month of the Summertown newsagent’s armed robbery, was found dead in his cell at Oakwood Prison yesterday morning.

  Despite the massive weight of evidence against him, Mitcham, who used a replica gun to terrorize Sanjit Patel, protested his innocence throughout his trial, claiming he had been forced to commit the crime last December by a ‘gang of abductors’. The jury at Oxford Crown Court failed to believe his story and Mitcham was jailed for ten years.

  A spokesman for the prison said it was too early to speculate on the cause of death.

  Before

  The Game

  On the evening of the tenth day of October, they gathered in a bedroom above the Black Rooster public house, as the woman known in the game as Ralph addressed them via the speakerphone on the bedside table.

  ‘This time,’ she said, ‘we’re going to do a killing.’

  Outside, rain fell out of darkness on to the road and surrounding Berkshire landscape. It was a dull, characterless kind of rainfall, with no wind to lend it any dramatic sweep; the sort of weather to make one glad to be at home and draw curtains, switch on lamps and be cosy.

  The room in which they sat was anything but cosy. Drab and meanly furnished, and too small to comfortably accommodate four adults at one time, but the group had met in many far worse surroundings than this over the years.

  Venues always the last thing on their minds.

  They were all present, which was one of the rules: every member to attend whenever a game plan meeting was called. Every member except Ralph, who did the summoning but was never there these days, yet who was, despite that, still their leader, as she had always been.

  In the old, early days, they had held their meetings in the burial chamber at Wayland’s Smithy. Not any more. Too much risk.

  In the old days, they had seen each other all the time, but over the past ten years their reunions had become rare events and were all the more intense for that.

  The most special times of their lives.

  Though not as special as the games themselves.

  ‘We’ve done killing before,’ said the man known in the game as Pig.

  He shuddered again at the memory, w
hich was not, of course, his own recollection, but seemed to him, each time it assaulted his sensibilities, as vivid as if he had been there – haunting his dreams, too, on a regular basis. Pictures and sounds of Mitcham’s gagging terror that August night as the ripped, bunched-up prison sheet had choked and suffocated him to kingdom come.

  ‘Only because we had no choice,’ Ralph’s voice reminded him.

  ‘And not really we, in fact,’ said the woman known as Simon.

  ‘It’s all “we”,’ Ralph corrected her. ‘All accountable. You know that.’

  ‘Still such a fucking wuss, Sy,’ said the man known as Jack.

  ‘We all hated it, as I recall,’ Ralph said.

  ‘Not all.’ The woman known in the game as Roger spoke for the first time.

  ‘Not you,’ Jack said. ‘Gotta have real feelings for that.’

  ‘It scared me shitless,’ Pig said.

  ‘Everything scares you shitless,’ said Jack.

  ‘He wasn’t the only one,’ Simon said, defending Pig.

  ‘Anyone object –’ Ralph’s voice brought them to order – ‘to us moving on?’

  They all fell silent.

  The thrill filling them, as it always did. Always had.

  ‘There’ll be another difference, too, this time,’ Ralph said. ‘If you all agree.’

  This poky bedroom over the pub near Childrey had been reserved for them by Ralph. Only Simon, though, would stay the night, and that only to avoid attracting notice, since she, like the others, could easily have gone home.

  Jack had bought the speakerphone with cash from the Carphone Warehouse in Didcot that afternoon, had pulled out the old phone and bedside lamp from the jack and socket in the grimy wall and plugged in the new one to be ready for the call.

  Now they stayed silent, hearts beating faster, mouths dry with anticipation.

  Waiting for Ralph to tell them about the next game.

  And what was to be different about it.

  Kate

  ‘For the last time, Rob, why don’t you just piss off and leave me alone.’

  Kate Turner’s closing words to her estranged husband last Tuesday evening, after their ‘friendly’ drink near the fireplace at the Shoulder of Mutton had degenerated to a point well below acrimony. She’d regretted the words almost as soon as they were out of her mouth, but regret had come too late. Rob had pissed off, leaving Kate wanting to cry, but staying instead like an obstinate stone in her seat.

  Stupid, she was still castigating herself by Thursday.

  Why had she done that?

  She might not have minded quite so much had Rob been the only significant person she’d used her shoot-first-think-later PMS tongue on in the past few days.

  Richard Fireman – the editor of her weekly column, Diary of a Short-Fused Female, in the Reading Sunday News – had summoned her to his office that morning to pass some reasoned critical comments about the Christmas draft she’d emailed him that morning, and Kate had reacted by flinging practically all her toys out of her pram – narrowly avoiding sending her job flying with them.

  She’d never had much truck with the festive season. In years gone by, her mother, Bel Oliver (from whom Kate had inherited curly auburn hair, hazel eyes, small breasts and a low voice that sharpened with mood), had always drunk a great deal more than usual – ‘usual’ being more than enough as it was – which had inevitably led to rows with Michael Oliver, Kate’s father. But family issues aside, over the years Kate had grown increasingly hacked off with the seasonal rituals and the claustrophobia of the shutdown days themselves.

  It was all just so downright depressing, and this year, with the fragmenting bones of her own marriage following her parents’ on to the rocks, she’d been dreading Christmas more than ever and had, it seemed, brought that spirit somewhat too gloomily into her proposed column.

  ‘Fuck’s sake, Kate, you’ll have them slitting their wrists before they’ve even uncorked the bloody sherry.’

  Fireman’s opener.

  He was a stocky man with a round, boyish face, receding downy fair hair, and granny glasses. His office was cluttered, but the area immediately around his computer screen and keyboard was scrupulously tidy.

  ‘I hoped I’d been entertainingly wry about it,’ Kate had said.

  ‘Not especially wry, and definitely not entertaining,’ he’d said. ‘And no warmth, Kate, that’s the worst of it. Any fool can take the piss, but you’ve always been able to make us feel you give a damn.’

  ‘I do,’ she’d said, with a sudden urge to cry.

  He’d looked at her and recognized the signs. ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Kate had warned. ‘Just don’t.’

  Fireman had shrugged and looked back at his screen. ‘Write it again.’

  ‘All of it?’ Indignation had replaced misery. ‘Some of it’s quite funny.’

  ‘Colonoscopies and funerals come to mind,’ he’d said.

  ‘Yours, preferably,’ Kate had said.

  And from there it had nosedived all the way to the moment when Kate had pushed her way around to his side of the desk and tried to delete her column. And no one touched Fireman’s computer, and she knew, when the mists had cleared, how lucky she was that her editor was tolerant and still quite liked her work, or else she’d probably have found herself seriously unemployed with twenty-something lousy shopping days to go . . .

  ‘You’re your own worst enemy.’

  Her mother’s contribution on the telephone soon after.

  ‘Not exactly what I need to hear, Mum,’ Kate had said.

  ‘The trouble with you,’ Bel had started to say, ‘is that—’

  Kate had put down the phone.

  Not in the mood for Bel Oliver right now.

  In her younger days, Bel had designed jazzy party clothes for a handful of private clients, but her craving for wine and vodka Martinis had taken its toll, since when too many of Bel’s designs had been tailored to make Kate’s father, Michael Oliver, feel guilty and as miserable as she was.

  When the marriage had at last broken down, most of their mutual friends had gravitated towards her husband, leaving Bel’s life horribly empty but for her friend Sandra West, a widow from Goring she’d met at a depression self-help-group meeting; a mousy looking but pushy, frequently spiteful woman whom Kate greatly disliked.

  Her mother considered Sandi West something of a saviour.

  ‘She believes in me,’ Bel had told Kate more than once. ‘In my talent.’

  ‘Why not?’ Kate had replied. ‘You are talented.’

  Sandi also pronounced Michael a fool to have left Bel, and Kate cold not to have invited her mother to move in with her; and, according to Bel, despite chronic back pain and money problems, Sandi always seemed to manage to make time for her.

  ‘A cross between a fan and a bully,’ Kate had described her once to Rob.

  ‘Your mum’s hardly the oppressed type,’ he’d pointed out.

  Which was true enough, though Kate had wondered now and again about the timing of Mrs West’s arrival in Bel’s life such a brief while before the final crashing of the marriage. Had wondered, too, if Sandi might not be in love with her mother, and frankly Kate didn’t think she’d mind if Bel swung herself around sexually, so long as she could finally become truly happy.

  Preferably with anyone except Sandi West.

  More than a fair share of the blame for the break-up of Kate’s parents’ marriage lay at her father’s door, and Michael Oliver was the first to admit it.

  ‘I’m just not the man Bel signed up to marry,’ he said once.

  Which was also true, Kate supposed. An attractive, long-legged man with friendly grey eyes, matched these days by greying hair, Michael had been a criminal lawyer who’d suddenly decided he no longer wanted to practice law because the wrong people kept getting punished.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Bel had said at the time, ‘you’ve always known that.’

  ‘But suddenly it seems to matte
r to me a great deal,’ Michael had explained.

  ‘Bollocks,’ Bel had said.

  And with his wife’s failure to back him up at that pivotal moment seeming like one disillusionment too many, Michael had decided after a while that he didn’t really want to be her husband any more either. In fact the only thing he really, passionately, wanted to continue being – of all the relationships and occupations that had shaped his identity till then – was Kate’s father.

  ‘I couldn’t stand to think,’ he’d told her, ‘that you might never forgive me.’

  ‘It’s not me,’ Kate had replied, ‘who has to do the forgiving.’

  ‘But I know how tough it’s been on you,’ Michael had said.

  ‘Obviously,’ Kate had told him. ‘Because I love you both.’

  ‘Love,’ her father said wryly. ‘Blessing or curse.’

  ‘Bit of both, I suppose,’ Kate had said, and had promptly gone away to use that as the opening gambit of that week’s column.

  However much she did love both her parents and – for better or worse – Rob, Kate often spun into monthly denial of that with her dark plunge into PMS, blowing their smallest shortcomings out of all proportion, carping, bitching and generally doing her best to drive loved ones away. Ending up despising herself most of all.

  ‘I’m such a lucky cow,’ she remembered saying once to Rob, ‘that you put up with me. With this.’

  Only a year since she’d said that, while they’d still been happy.

  She had felt so lucky then, knew just how sweet life had been to her, how comfortable her upbringing in Henley-upon-Thames, how easy her years in Sheffield studying journalism, how convenient her return after landing a trainee job at the Sunday News – and lucky too that Richard Fireman had warmed to her chatty style and eclectic palette of topics, and that she’d found a studio flat off Church Street in Reading just around the corner to the newspaper’s offices in Prospect Street.

  ‘Why not London?’ Abby Wells, a friend from university, had asked when Kate had accepted the job.

  ‘Not sure,’ Kate had said. ‘Lack of confidence, I think.’

  ‘You?’ Abby was surprised. ‘You can write, you know how to make people listen to you, how to make them let you write.’