The Trail Killer

Fifteen

There'd been half a bottle of white wine in the fridge for the two adults. Shields now poured the final drops into her and Jessica's glasses.

"To the chef!". It was difficult to find an appropriate smile in accompaniment, but she tried her best. "Quite some talent you've got."

"Ah come on, we're only talking a bit of sausage and mash. Hardly cordon bleu!"

"Yea, but even so." Shields nodded to her sons' empty plates. "Rare sight that, believe me."

Jessica took a sip of her wine. "The thing about cooking, it's not really a talent - it's just about following the rules, that's all. You know, the right temperatures, the right timings, the right measurements, that sort of thing."

Shields' smile was unforced this time: self-mocking, wry. "Following the rules. Not exactly my forte, it would seem." The call had already come: the hearing would take place at Wynmouth station the following Thursday morning.

"A gentle slap on the wrists," soothed Jessica. "That's all it'll be, you'll see."

But Shields shook her head, far from convinced.

"You know when I first decided I wanted to become a copper? When I was seven, straight after my dad took his life." As earlier with the surprise Easter message the boys had been painting, she felt a tear bulge in her eye. "The first patrol car that made it out to the Wyn suspension bridge that afternoon, it was young constable inside."

From across the table came an audible gasp. "The Wyn suspension bridge, but that... that's..."

"Huge," Shields nodded. "Ginormous."

As if in search of sustenance, she swigged down the last of her wine, thudded the glass back to the table.

"During the war, he was stationed out in Burma. Ended up in a Japanese POW camp."

Jessica raised a hand to her mouth. "Oh Christ."

No, thought Shields - one didn't need to be an expert on the history of the Second World War to comprehend the basic implications of this. It was enough to have a distant relative who'd suffered a similar fate, or, failing that, to have stumbled across the Alec Guinness classic Bridge On the River Kwai on TV one rainy Sunday afternoon. To Hirohito and his military subordinates, the Geneva Convention hadn't meant a damn bloody thing.

"Starvation diet, back-breaking labour from dawn to dusk. Was one of only a dozen or so of his entire platoon to make it through, so I've been told. Before they made it back to Blighty, were shipped off to Canada for a few months to fatten 'em up a bit. Government policy dictated it would have been too traumatic for their families and the local community as a whole to have seen them as walking skeletons."

Still the hand hovered over Jessica's mouth. "Jesus."

"I remember the way he used to... to just kind of drift away sometimes. Mum or me, one of the neighbours, whoever - we'd be talking to him about something and for a while he was right there with us. Engaged, cooperative. Then all of a sudden he'd be gone, off to some unimaginable place and time. As a little kid there was no way I could have known of course, but that's where he went - that hell-on-earth Japanese POW camp during the final years of the war."

She paused to suck down a couple of breaths.

"Another thing I remember is the beads of sweat that'd come tumbling down his brow even in the depths of winter. How my mum'd rub her hands over his shoulders, whisper soothing words into his ear, offer him a shot a whisky or some such. Post-traumatic stress disorder they now call it, I believe, but back in the early-fifties it was still just known as shell shock. Just this little 'thing' a few ex-serviceman suffered from. A minor side effect of war, that was all."