Dead Memories (D.I. Kim Stone #10)(18)

He pulled alongside the kerb in front of a home without a recreation vehicle but with a four-year-old BMW.

The small front garden was awash with summer colour. Flowers tumbled out of hanging baskets either side of the door. The ground popped with pinks, purples and vivid yellows, so much that the eyes couldn’t take it all in.

This household had never heard the phrase less is more.

The door was opened by a woman Kim guessed to be mid-sixties and instantly reminded her of Judi Dench.

‘Mrs Wilde?’ Kim asked, unsure.

She shook her head. ‘I’m her mother,’ she explained, waiting.

Bryant took out his identification, and the woman stood aside.

Kim stepped into a small hallway that didn’t match the perception of space alluded to from outside.

The woman pointed to the right, and Kim followed her direction into an airy open-plan kitchen diner with patio doors out onto the small but colourful garden.

A woman sat at the breakfast bar looking out.

‘Mrs Wilde?’ Kim said.

She turned to reveal reddened eyes and a dumbfounded expression. Kim couldn’t quite relate to the loss of a child but she did understand the realisation that someone you loved was never coming back.

Bryant offered their condolences and moved forward to offer his hand.

Mrs Wilde uncurled it from the mug of something and returned it limply.

‘Tea?’ asked Mrs Wilde’s mother from behind the breakfast bar.

Both Kim and Bryant refused as they took a seat.

‘Lovely photos,’ Kim said of the collection of formal posed pictures on the fireplace wall.

‘Andrew loved getting them done,’ she said, glancing over. ‘And he always looked so handsome in his uniform.’

He certainly did, Kim agreed, and although she wasn’t a fan of formal photos there was something about this collection that got her attention.

Despite different poses and different backgrounds, one thing stayed the same. On each photo there was a brightness. The smiles were open and honest, eyes bright with enjoyment. Almost like one of them had said something funny just a nanosecond before the camera took the shot. This had been a happy family.

‘Mrs Wilde, I know it’s painful but may we ask you some questions about Amy?’

Kim couldn’t help glancing at the latest photo on the wall where Amy appeared to be about 15 years old with braces and nicely rounded cheeks. Her long hair had been cut and thinned from previous photos.

The kid bore no resemblance to the girl Kim had seen fighting for her life the other night.

‘Of course, but I haven’t seen her for a while, officer. Five months to be exact. She came to see me in hospital.’

‘And, how was she?’ Kim asked, wondering if anything five months earlier offered any significance or insight into her daughter’s death.

‘High,’ she answered. ‘I could see it in her eyes and she couldn’t keep still for two minutes. She shouted at the woman in the next bed for snoring after surgery and closed everyone’s curtains laughing her head off. The nurses asked her to leave.’

Kim couldn’t help glancing at the photo on the wall.

‘Did she say anything at all, any trouble she was having with anyone?’

Mrs Wilde dabbed at her eyes. ‘Told me she was fantastic and hashtag loving life, whatever that means. I hadn’t seen her for about six months prior to that, around the time I refused to give her any more money to put that shit into her arm. I always thought she’d come back in her own time, that something would happen to make her realise what she was doing to herself.’

And she might have done, Kim thought. But that choice had been taken away from her.

‘I’d have been waiting, you know,’ she said, as a sob broke out of her. ‘If she’d have given me any encouragement I would have supported her through getting off it. And now she’ll always be known as the druggie who overdosed while chained to a radiator.’

Kim could offer no response because it was true.

‘Mrs Wilde, may I ask how the two of them met. They don’t seem a likely couple. Mark’s background…’

‘Oh, I know all about his background,’ Mrs Wilde said, her face and voice turning hard at the same time. ‘Amy told me all about it while trying to persuade me to let him move in.’ She shook her head. ‘And I probably should have let him, because that’s the day she left.’

‘Because you wouldn’t let him live here?’ Bryant asked.

With a daughter not long out of her teens Kim could hear the outrage in his voice.

‘Yes, she’d been seeing him for a few months by then. Fell over his bag of Big Issues as she left Tesco’s in Cradley Heath. Helped him pick them back up and that was that. Next day she went back to talk to him again and the next, and the next until she couldn’t bear to be parted from him for even a minute.’

Kim heard a sniff from behind her. The grandmother had turned her back.

Kim saw Mrs Wilde’s wish to comfort her mother but she looked away. Her own pain was just too great to take on anyone else’s.

Due to the time of estrangement between mother and daughter Kim was not convinced there was any more to be gained.

The girl could have made countless enemies, been involved in a dozen different situations that her mother would have known nothing about.