Asking For Trouble (30 page)

And why not? He wasn’t a dropout who lived in a squat, but a respectable member of society with a clean record sheet and probably some influential friends.

‘You’re no good as a detective, Fran Varady,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re full of big ideas but, when it comes down to it, you’ve accomplished zilch. A couple of fuzzy snapshots and an unprovable theory about a will.’

I’d just meddled, that’s what I’d done. Made things worse. Meddlers make themselves unpopular. Jamie wouldn’t just be satisfied with clearing his name with Janice. He’d want to drop me in it, Gan also, if he could. He’d counter my theory with another for Janice to consider. In his scenario, I’d be the villain.

At this gloomy point in my musings, exhaustion took over. Not even the hard floor could keep me awake. I drifted off into uneasy sleep.

I dreamed about Abbotsfield. I was standing just inside the churchyard, by the tomb on which I’d sat to eat my sandwich. The church was ahead of me and Terry was standing some distance off by her lopsided cross in a long white nightgown. Her long fair hair fluttered around her face.

She called to me and asked what I was doing there. I said I’d come to see her and began to walk towards her. She beckoned encouragingly. But when I got closer I saw that the grave stood open. I wasn’t surprised. Obviously she’d climbed out. I saw now that her white gown was smeared with earth. I felt very cold but I knew she was colder.

She was smiling with her lips but not with her eyes, which were like the round glass eyes of the toy animals, quite expressionless and unblinking. She held out her hand for me to take, but I was afraid to take it, because I knew I could never free myself from her grip and she would drag me down with her into the open pit behind her.

I turned and ran blindly, until I found myself, with the strange logic of dreams, in Terry’s room. All the plush toy animals which had been on top of her cupboard were there. They came to life and walked round, glaring at me with those accusing glass eyes, like Terry in the churchyard. I told them to leave me alone and they began to squeak at me, as soft toys do when you press their plush stomachs.

At that point I woke up. All the nightmare visions vanished, but not the cold, and not squeaks. I could still hear those.

It was pitch dark. Ganesh’s plastic sheet hadn’t kept out the damp. No wonder I’d dreamed as I had. I didn’t know what time it was. Then I heard that shrill squeak again. Not floorboards or wainscoting, not this time. A different noise. Something outside in the garden? Something inside? A rat?

Oh God! I sat up in a panic, fumbling for the torch. Before I could find it, I heard a louder noise and I realised that what I could hear was someone manoeuvring the loosened board over the kitchen window. Someone was climbing in.

Chapter Eighteen

Even now, when I think of that moment, I get goose bumps. I can’t tell you what it was like. That was something you’d have to experience although I hope you never do. Fear held me paralysed. My brain refused to send any messages to my limbs telling them to move. Even to breathe was an effort. My heart must have been beating, but to me it was as if it had stopped. Everything had stopped. The only thing which moved was out there and, very soon, would be coming this way.

There was a dull thud as whoever it was dropped to the floor inside the house. The sound broke the spell which held me frozen. I slid out of the sleeping bag and managed to find the torch, gripping it with clammy fingers and afraid it would slip from my grasp. At least I had the presence of mind not to switch it on yet. Its sudden beam would give me a powerful surprise weapon, throwing the intruder off track. Whoever it was couldn’t know I was there. Like me, he was probably looking for a place to doss. The sudden beam of the torch would frighten him. For a moment I would be in charge. I had to stay in charge. With luck, we could come to some arrangement.

Even as I worked all this out, I knew I was grasping at straws. The surprise was on me and the advantage his. For all I knew he could be some psychopath or schizophrenic released into what’s laughingly known as ‘community care’. I could be shut in here with a madman.

Then I had a thought which was as bad or even more frightening. Perhaps he
did
know I was there. Perhaps he wasn’t just some homeless wanderer of the streets or a junkie looking for a place to indulge his habit or a kid bent on sniffing glue. Perhaps he was looking for
me
. I remembered how scared I’d been on the staircase at the flats. Perhaps, whoever he was, he had been there too, waiting in the dark, and only the presence of Ganesh had thrown him off his stride.

I tried to tell myself that, just as back at the flats, it might turn out to be Ganesh again, come back to check on me.

But I knew with an awful sickening certitude, that it was Jamie Monkton – or Lundy – or both.

Of course Jamie wasn’t going to leave me free to roam around poking and prying into Theresa’s death. I’d left Abbotsfield suddenly and within hours, the police had been down at the dell, digging up Squib’s remains. The two things couldn’t be unconnected. He must have guessed that if I hadn’t found Squib, then Ganesh had. He had seen Ganesh’s van parked in the dell. He was going to do something about us both, something final to shut us up and he was beginning with me. He didn’t know what else I’d found out. But he did know about this house.

If he’d been to the tower block and seen the smashed-up flat, he’d have worked out I’d come here. That I’d run like a hunted animal back to my den. He’d killed Terry and poor Squib, even Squib’s dog, and he’d have not the slightest compunction about killing me. No one would ever know, because he’d be away by morning. Ganesh would find my body and it would be another unsolved crime.

I didn’t have time to dwell on that now. Jamie – or his executioner – was moving down the hallway towards the front room where I had been sleeping. I started cautiously towards the door, hoping to get behind it as it opened. The idea was that I’d slip out behind him, make it to the kitchen and get out of the window before he could stop me. All very unlikely, but the only chance I’d got.

But the plastic sheeting Ganesh had put down was slippy under my feet in socks, and as I skidded and tried to keep my footing, the door opened.

At first I couldn’t see him. I could hear his breathing, a laboured breath because he’d struggled through the forced window with difficulty. Then my eyes adjusted to the degree of moonlight which had entered with him through the kitchen window. I saw his silhouette. If I’d had any lingering hope that it would be Ganesh, it was dispelled. The silhouetted figure was too tall and bulky. Besides, after the mistake at the flats, he would have called out at once to let me know he was there. Both Jamie and Lundy were a lot bigger than Gan. The menacing figure in the doorway could be either.

I did the only thing I could think of. I switched on the torch and directed the beam straight at him, hoping to dazzle him so that I could run past.

But I didn’t run. I just stood there transfixed. Because the face the torchlight picked up, making it shimmer and gleam yellow and unreal, wasn’t that of Jamie Monkton or the unlovely Lundy. It was Nick Bryant’s.

I asked stupidly, ‘Nick? What are you doing here?’

His voice, in reply, sounded odd, as if some switch had been flicked, distorting it in pitch and tone. ‘I thought I’d find you here.’ No expression in the words, no satisfaction or enmity. Nothing at all. A crazy voice, belonging to someone with whom there could be no reasoning.

The paralysis of fear and horror threatened to return and I thrust it away. I didn’t entirely understand all this, but I must not just fold in the face of it. He had moved into the room and I saw he was cradling something in his arms: a double-barrelled shotgun.

‘What do you want?’ Another silly question. My voice croaked it out, sounding in all probability as distorted as his.

All the time my brain was racing. Nick?
Nick
? It didn’t seem possible. Had I got it all wrong? Nice was
nice
. He was a nice person. His mother was a nice person. And he
liked
me. Nick liked me. I knew he did. He wouldn’t hurt me, would he?

Yes, he would. I knew it.

I must have moved because he swung up the shotgun and I found myself staring down the twin barrels.

‘No!’ he ordered. ‘Just sit down, right there where you are.’

I sat down on the quilted sleeping bag, wrapped my arms round my knees and waited. He moved towards me and kicked the crate across the room. He sat on it, between me and the door, and rested the shotgun on his knees.

I was still holding the torch and he said, ‘Put that down beside you and don’t touch it again.’

I put it down. Its beam shone straight ahead along the floor and illuminated his feet. The rest of him was in dusk but the shotgun barrels gleamed.

I said, ‘If you fire that, someone will hear.’

‘Who? This street is nothing but empty houses. Nothing between here and that corner shop. Anyway, around here if anyone heard a gunshot they would pretend they hadn’t. Or even if they rang the police, by the time the coppers got here, I’d be gone.’

There was a horrid logic about his argument. I hadn’t an answer to that one. My father used to say that there was an answer to all our problems if we thought about things calmly. But I wasn’t in a state to think calmly and I don’t think it would have helped if I had been.

I said, ‘You fired before at me. You fired in the plantation and made the horse bolt. Were you trying to hit me or just spook the mare?’

‘Knew you couldn’t ride,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d break your neck.’ He moved slightly as he spoke and twitched as if that switch had been thrown again. When he next spoke, his voice sounded more reasonable. I realised he had hyped himself up to this. In his own way, he was as nervous as I was. He’d tried to kill in the plantation by stealth. This, face to face, was trickier.

‘I’m sorry about this, Fran.’ The gun barrels sank a little, no longer aimed at my chest but at my shins. He sounded as if he did regret it. But not enough to make him change his mind. ‘You’re a really nice girl. But you ask too many questions and you’re too bright. I’ve just got to stop you.’

‘I can’t believe this,’ I told him. ‘How could you? How could you do what you did to Terry?’

‘It was her fault!’ The gun barrels quivered and pointed at my chest again. I should have kept my big mouth shut. I hoped his finger wasn’t going to slip on the trigger.

‘I loved her. I really did!’ he said hoarsely.

That made me angry. I stopped being scared and snapped, ‘You killed her! What kind of love is that?’

‘I didn’t mean to do it!’ he shouted.

‘Oh? You strung her up there from the light fitting by accident? And after trying to rape her, too, to go by the bruises!’

‘Shut up!’

He was in a rage and a voice in my head told me I ought to shut up. The madder he got, the sooner he’d do something drastic. Another voice told me that he was going to do that, anyway. However, the longer I kept him talking and the calmer I kept us both, the longer I had to think of something, although I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what. I made a superhuman effort. He was nervous, scared, dreading the moment when he was going to have to shoot me. He, too, might long to put it off for a minute or two. Just until he could get his nerves under control. Nervous people talk.

‘Tell me about it,’ I invited in a nice pleasant voice.

‘You wouldn’t understand.’ He sounded sullen.

‘Try me.’

He hesitated. ‘She was so beautiful. You didn’t see her when she was pretty. When she lived here, she’d changed. When I saw her here I could’ve cried, honestly. She looked so thin and dirty and as if no one cared. But I cared, even though she’d changed so much. If you’d known her a few years back, there was no one like her, she was perfect.’

Terry the pretty doll. Alastair, Ariadne and Nick had all wanted to preserve her like that, in Cellophane. No wonder she’d run away. I thought of Kelly in the stable-yard. She’d never stood a chance of capturing Nick’s attention. Nick had eyes only for the pretty little girl with the fair hair like spaniel’s ears. Galumphing Kelly with the ham-like thighs would’ve made a first-rate farmer’s wife for Nick, capable and devoted. But we don’t want what we can have – and we certainly never like what’s good for us.

Nick had momentarily wandered away down memory lane. ‘I’d watched her grow up. Every time she came home from school on holiday she was prettier. She’d chat to me too those days. She wasn’t afraid. Things changed one evening. It was at a Young Farmers’ Club Christmas dance. Her hair was pinned up on top of her head and she had a really nice dress. She looked – I can’t describe it. Just beautiful, that’s all.’

He spoke the words with an almost pathetic naïveté and I remembered the photograph I’d seen on Ariadne’s mantelshelf, showing Terry in a ball gown, looking like a million dollars. I told him I’d seen the photo of her in her finery and I could imagine how she’d looked at the Young Farmers’ bash. That pleased him and he smiled. But I spoiled it straight off, because I couldn’t dismiss an incongruous image of all those red-faced, healthy country types, lumbering around the dance floor with the cream of the county crumpet in their arms.

‘You’re
laughing
! Nick exclaimed and the shotgun barrels leapt again in a way I really didn’t like.

‘No, I’m not! Why on earth should I be laughing now, for goodness sake? In my situation?’

‘OK,’ he said grudgingly but he relaxed, I was pleased to see, and even turned the gun barrels away from my chest. ‘I told her that night that I loved her. It was true. But the more I tried to tell her how I felt, the less I seemed able to make her understand. Sometimes she acted as if she was scared of me. But I only wanted to love her. She should have understood that.’

He looked up suddenly and I could see the craziness on his face. I had to keep him talking. It was the only thing I could do. Keep him talking until I thought of something.