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He turns his attention back to Mrs. Poole. “What happened between you and Elijah Cole?” he asks softly.
Sandra abruptly stops talking. Romilly’s confused. Sandra and Elijah? Why is he asking—?
But Sandra’s face has gone white. “Wh-What do you mean?” she stutters. “There was nothing—”
“This is important, Sandra. This is a murder investigation. We need the truth, and we need it now. What happened?”
The woman is shaking, her body collapsed in on itself, her hands over her face. The helpful, obliging mood has gone. Only a sick feeling remains in its place.
Romilly reaches out and gently touches her quivering arm. “Sandra, please. Tell us.”
“Elijah … he …” she burbles through her fingers. “Joanna, your mother. She was ill.” But then her head lifts. “I loved him. I respected him. I believed your father was a good man.” Her face is bitter as she looks Romilly right in the eye.
“But he raped me,” she spits. “Your father raped me.”
CHAPTER
64
ROMILLY CAN FEEL Jamie’s impatience radiating off him. This is clearly important, but the woman is traumatized, now shaking uncontrollably.
Romilly moves to sit next to Sandra and puts her arm around her. A thousand thoughts are pummeling Romilly’s brain, but she knows she needs to focus on the here and now. Finding out more. To find Adam.
Push too hard, too soon, and they’ll get nothing.
“What happened, Sandra?” she asks gently.
Sandra takes a long shuddering breath in, and when she speaks her voice is unsteady. “I was working late one night at the surgery.” She sniffs and Romilly hands her a tissue from a crochet-covered box. Sandra dabs at her eyes. “Elijah came back. He’d been at the pub. He was … he was very drunk. Slurring. He said that your mum had just been diagnosed with cancer, and …” She lets out a quick jerking cry. “I went to comfort him. But not like that. Not like … I said no. But he …”
She puts her head in her hands and starts weeping again. Romilly can only just make out her words under the wet sobs. “I tried to stop him, but he was too strong. He held me down. There was nobody there, nobody to help. I just remember … that look in his eyes. He knew he was hurting me, and he didn’t care.”
In her head, Romilly is doing the math. If her mum had just been diagnosed, it must have been about 1988. Before her mother died. Before Cole started killing.
Sandra could have stopped this.
“Why didn’t you report him?” Romilly says. It takes her utmost effort to keep her voice level.
Sandra looks up again, her eyes pleading. “He said he was sorry. He begged my forgiveness. He had a young daughter. You.” She squeezes Romilly’s hand tightly. Romilly suppresses the urge to recoil. “Your mother was dying. What was I supposed to do?”
“You should have gone to the police.”
“Nobody would have believed me. An upstanding man of the community like Elijah versus me? A single woman? No chance. I wanted to move on with my life. Forget it happened. But then I found out I was pregnant.”
Romilly knows blaming Sandra is irrational. Sandra couldn’t have known what Cole had planned, what other evil thoughts were lurking in his corrupted mind. And Sandra is right: no one believed Cole could kill, even when the bodies were being dug up from his garden. Sandra had never had a chance about the rape.
Romilly frowns. “Mrs. Poole,” she asks carefully, “why don’t I remember you being pregnant? Or even there being a baby around?”
Sandra shakes her head mournfully. “I couldn’t do it,” she whispers. “Not at first. I went away for a while, and then, when the baby arrived, I had her adopted. A little girl. She was perfect, but all I could see when I looked at her face was Elijah. Holding me down … forcing me … I hated him. Hated the baby. So I gave her up. And things got better.” She smiles now. “I met Robert. A good man. We got married. I forgot about … about him.”
“But you were still working at the surgery?”
“I worked all over the place. A and E, the hospital. Other clinics around the area. We needed the money. We wanted to have kids of our own, but Robert, he …” She swallows a sob. “It wasn’t meant to be. And then I started to wonder. What had happened to the baby. So I asked.”
“What had happened to her?”
“She’d been fostered. At first. But the placement hadn’t worked out.” Sandra fixes her gaze to the floor; she turns the ball of tissue around in her withered hands. “She’d been neglected. And … oh Christ. They’d abused her. That poor little girl. No more than three years old, and they’d done such horrible things to her. My daughter.”
Sandra is sobbing now, her head lowered almost completely. Romilly battles with her emotions. This poor woman. That girl. No more than victims themselves.
