Free Sins of the Fathers by Patricia Hall

treacherous ground. She had never seen a photograph of Thackeray’s wife and son from the time before his marriage disintegrated in tragedy. She guessed he had either destroyed them or hidden them away long ago.
    ‘Not this family.’
    ‘I did an interview with a psychologist today,’ she said. ‘I wanted to talk to him about what drives people to do these things.’
    ‘Did you ask him if he knows how to prevent them doing them,’ Thackeray said. ‘That’d be a lot more useful.’
    ‘You still think the father did it?’
    ‘What else can we think?’ Thackeray said wearily. ‘If he didn’t do it, where the hell is he? And where’s the boy? There are so many holes in this whole scenario that I don’t know what to think, to be honest. It’d be a whole lot clearer if we found the boy – one way or the other.’
    Alive or dead, Laura thought, and she knew that it was becoming increasingly unlikely that the fugitive pair would be found alive.
    ‘How’s the child in hospital?’ she asked. ‘Is there any change there?’
    ‘The doctors seemed a little bit more hopeful before I came away this evening,’ Thackeray said. ‘But she’s still not conscious. And even when she is, the chances are she won’t remember much about what happened.’
    ‘This psychologist at the university, he wasn’t very optimistic about anything really,’ Laura said. ‘He said Christie sounds like the classic family killer – intense, controlling, wanting everything to be perfect, and then losing it completely when something runs out of his control. And the other cases I’ve looked at in the cuttings are all the same. Father is a perfectionist and can’t bear anything to threaten his perfect family, so he kills himself and takes the family with him. Quite often the trigger is the threat of the marriage breaking down.’
    She knew that she was not telling Thackeray anything that he did not know already and that he was only half listening to her. But she felt an intense need to keep ontalking. Anything to distract Thackeray from the thoughts which threatened to torment him all night.
    ‘He said if the killer runs off with a child, or children sometimes, he tends to go back to somewhere the family’s been happy together; the seaside, quite often, or a beauty spot. It’s as if he wants to kill himself somewhere he has good memories…’
    ‘This is Dr Prothero, at the university, is it?’ Thackeray asked. ‘I’ve talked to him before.’
    ‘So you know it all? Sorry,’ Laura said.
    Thackeray shrugged.
    ‘Usually when you search a house when something like this has happened you build up a picture of what the family was like,’ he said. ‘But in this case Kevin Mower said he wasn’t able to get hold of anything personal in that place. It was as if Christie had somehow wiped the slate clean at some point, and then kept everything strictly impersonal. There was nothing there to give a handle onto either of the parents at all. No letters, no address books, no records of the children being born or growing up, nothing at all more than three years old. It’s as if they parachuted into Staveley from outer space. And then – carnage.’ His voice trailed away.
    ‘Michael,’ she said. ‘You can’t let this case damage you as well.’
    ‘No,’ he said, his eyes bleak. ‘There’s been enough of that, hasn’t there?’
    ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said.
    He got up from the table and stood behind her chair with his arms round her shoulders for a moment.
    ‘Don’t ever leave me, Laura,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t survive without you.’
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Truly, I do know that.’

Chapter Six
    Ted Grant’s bulging blue eyes told Laura Ackroyd that he was not likely to be deterred by her objections to his latest brainwave. He brandished the outline of her feature on family murders which she had printed out for him, and scowled.
    ‘Human interest,’ he said. ‘That’s what it needs. All this psycho-babble