A Place Of Safety (37 page)

‘I ran over - I nearly fell on the stairs I climbed so fast - but there was no one there. And I realised it must have been left open by accident.’

He gripped her fingers so tightly she almost cried out.

‘God, Lou, if only I’d left then. Why didn’t I just walk away? If I’d done that he’d still be alive.’

Louise closed her face against joy. Shuttered the light in her eyes. ‘I know, love, I know.’

‘Then there was that click on the phone you get when someone picks up an extension, and I thought it might be him. And that he might be ringing me. I swear that was it, Lou. I wasn’t spying or anything. And when I heard his voice, I couldn’t believe it! So tender, so loving and gentle . . . saying things I’d never dared to even dream of hearing. That she was the only one who had ever mattered, first in his heart now and always, not to worry about anything, he would be with her as soon as he could get away, everything would be all right . . .’

Louise’s heart turned over with pity. She produced more tissues and once more patiently dried his face. She would need to be very patient in the weeks and months to come. Patient and disingenuous. Tender, loving and gentle.

‘And then, of course, I had to know. I had to see her. Not to do harm, though I was blind with jealousy, but just to see what sort of person could bring this miracle about. So I sat and watched. And when Jax left the house I followed him.

‘He drove to this place in the East End. I just stopped the car, left it where it was and ran after him. They were in a room at the top of the stairs. The door was open and I could see them hugging, laughing. You’d think they hadn’t seen each other for years. And then he saw me - on the landing. And everything changed.

‘I’ve never seen such anger in a human being. He screamed and shouted, and the more I tried to say I was sorry, the more violent he became. How dare I bring my . . . my dirt, my filth into her home. I was a sick fuck. A pile of vomit. I wasn’t fit to live. I think he was half mad. And all the time she was talking quietly, trying to calm him down. And then he hit me.

‘I fell down and as I was getting up I heard her cry, Terry, Terry, don’t. And I saw his face and I’ve never been so frightened in my life. I thought, he’s going to kill me. So I started to fight back, I couldn’t help it, and we were on the landing when he . . .’

Louise gently rested her hand on his arm. A fragile comfort but he cringed as if battered. ‘Val, it was an accident—’

‘It was my fault!’

‘They’ve got to understand that. You can’t spend the rest of your life in prison.’

‘I don’t care where I spend the rest of my life. I just hope to God it’s bloody short.’ He fell silent for a moment then said, ‘The joke is, Lou, the bloody tragic joke is
I
would have died for
him
.’

In the adjoining room, Troy drained his cup of lukewarm tea and Barnaby peered inside his third sandwich (rather fatty ham, pale pink tomato and salad cream) and put it back on the plate. Troy was just stacking both cups and saucers on the tray when Fainlight started to speak again. Barnaby grabbed his sergeant’s arm and hissed for quiet.

‘The odd thing was I’d seen her before, this girl.’

‘Really?’ Louise sounded incredulous. ‘How could you have?’

‘At the Old Rectory. It was Carlotta.’

‘But . . . that’s wonderful, Val! Everyone thought she’d drowned. I must tell Ann—’ And then she stopped, remembering.

‘Her hair was different, a funny orange colour, and cut all short and spiky. But it was Carlotta all right.’

In the end they caught her quite quickly. Barnaby had feared she would go to earth, change her appearance again and simply vanish into the city’s underworld. If not London then Birmingham or Manchester or Edinburgh. And with no photograph to circulate, the chances of picking her up were practically nil.

But, to cover every exit, both of the names she had been using were flashed to all air and sea ports and rail terminals to the Continent. She was spotted by the Eurostar departure point at Waterloo, travelling under a name that Barnaby immediately recognised. The name by which she had first introduced herself, Tanya Walker.

A sorrier sight, thought Barnaby as she was brought into the interview room, he had rarely seen. When he was a constable on the beat he had sometimes had to answer calls from department stores who had found a toddler that had become separated from its mother. The same bewildered panic in her eyes, the same wailing loss. What was it about that vicious bastard Jackson that could bring this girl and Fainlight likewise to their knees in sorrow?

The tape was running. And, unlike the interview two days earlier, this time there was no difficulty extracting information. She answered all his questions unhesitatingly, without ever a pause to reflect, in a flat, colourless voice. She did not care. She had nothing left to lose. And thank God she did, thought the chief inspector, for with Jackson dead, how else would he have unravelled the tangled mess that had been jamming up his thought processes for the past two weeks.

Though Barnaby had had several hours to prepare for this interview, there was more than one aspect to the case and he had not quite decided which to broach first. He turned them over in his mind in reverse order of importance. First came the least interesting - the girl’s relationship with Jackson. She was plainly in love with him, he had had power over her, she would do anything to please him - the old, old story. Then her version of what had happened in Lomax Road. Third, the background to her connection to Carlotta Ryan, the girl who had lived in the room next door. Finally her exact role in the elaborate intrigue at the Old Rectory which had culminated in the murder of Charlie Leathers. Though this last was by far the most interesting and important, Barnaby perversely chose to begin with the third.

‘Tell me about Carlotta, Tanya.’

‘I told you about her. When you come to the flat.’

‘What happened to her?’

She looked vacantly at him.

‘Is she still alive?’

‘Course she’s still alive. What you on about?’

‘Then where is she?’ asked Sergeant Troy.

‘Having the time of her bloody life, I should think. Halfway round the world on a cruise ship.’

‘And how did that come about?’

‘An ad in that stage paper. She auditioned about ten days before she was due to go down the Rectory. They offered her the job, topless dancing. A year’s contract. She jumped at it.’ Tanya looked across at Sergeant Troy and for the first time showed a spark of animation. She said, ‘Wouldn’t you?’

Troy did not respond. It would not have been appropriate but also he didn’t want to. He remembered his first meeting with this girl and how touched he had been by her appearance and larky chatter and the sad fact that she did not know who her dad was. Probably just another lie. He tightened his lips against the chance of a smile, unaware of how sanctimonious it made him look.

‘So whose idea was it that you go to the Lawrences instead?’ asked Barnaby, pleased that at least he knew now why the flat had been cleaned out. ‘Yours or hers?’

‘Terry’s. He liked the thought of being able to keep an eye on me. Mind you, he’d get up the Smoke when he could. He was here when you turned up. Hiding in the bedroom.’

Barnaby cursed silently for a moment. But his voice was even as he said, ‘So you knew him before?’

‘For ever. On and off.’

‘Must have been mostly off,’ said Sergeant Troy. ‘All the time he’s been banged up.’

‘Yeah, mostly.’ Tanya looked across at Troy then with grave contempt. Troy flushed with resentment and thought she’d got a bloody cheek. Even so, he was the first to look away.

‘But you pretended otherwise?’ said Barnaby.

‘S’right. He didn’t want the connection to show.’

‘Because of the grand plan?’

‘Partly. But also it’s his nature to conceal things. It was the only way he ever felt safe.’

‘So how was it supposed to work?’

‘It was brilliant. We had two plans, one for day, one for after dark, depending on when Mrs L took off. I lifted some jewellery, old-fashioned stuff she were keen on.’

‘It belonged to her mother.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’

Barnaby held out his hand. ‘You wouldn’t happen . . .?’

Tanya hesitated.

‘Come on, Tanya. You’ve admitted taking them. Giving them back will look good on your sheet.’

Tanya opened her bag and put the earrings in Barnaby’s hand. They looked very small. Small but beautiful.

‘Now you’re going to flog ’em, ain’tcha?’

‘That’s right,’ said Sergeant Troy.

Barnaby asked what happened next.

‘When she come to my room about it I went mad, tearing up stuff and screaming me life was over. Then I ran away. We knew she’d come after me ’cause she was like that.’

‘Concerned,’ suggested Barnaby.

‘It worked perfect. If it hadn’t, Terry’d got plenty other ideas up his sleeve.’

‘She thought she’d pushed you in,’ said Barnaby. ‘She was frantic.’

‘That was the
point
,’ Tanya explained patiently. ‘She ain’t going to pay up if I’d jumped, is she?’

‘Why should she pay up at all?’ snapped Sergeant Troy.

‘Because she can afford it. Because she’s got a bloody great house and somebody to clean it for her and somebody else to do the fucking garden. And because she’s never done a stroke of work in her life!’

‘I take it you didn’t like her,’ said Barnaby.

‘Ohh . . .’ Tanya sighed. ‘She weren’t too bad. It were holy Joe I couldn’t stand. Always touching you. Accidentally on purpose - know what I mean? Hands like damp dishcloths.’

‘So where did you get out of the river?’

‘Same place I got in. Terry had floated an old tyre days before. Tied with a rope to a hook under the bridge. I grabbed it, hung on till she’d run away then climbed out.’

I knew about the tyre. Barnaby flashed back to the river-bank search report. A patch of scrub - crisp packets, a pushchair frame, an old tyre. Used as a swing, the description had said, because it still had the rope round it. And I passed on that. Perhaps Joyce was right. Maybe it was time to pack it in.

‘Then where did you go?’ Sergeant Troy was picturing her, despite himself, cold, shivering and soaking wet in the late dark.

‘Nipped back to the house. Hid in the garden till Terry come home. Spent the night in his flat. Next day hitched to Causton and took a train to the Smoke.’

Barnaby controlled his breathing, kept the rising anger in its place. Put aside his thoughts on hours, days even, of wasted time (not least his own), shifting seas of paper detailing useless interviews regarding the night in question, extensive inquiries with wide-ranging health and police authorities about a possible drowning. In short, a massive waste of desperately stretched police resources.

‘So what went wrong?’ asked Sergeant Troy. He had noted the savage set of the chief’s mouth and the angry flush on his cheeks and felt the next question might be better coming from him.

‘That cross-eyed git, Charlie Leathers. He’s what went wrong. Terry’d done his blackmail letter, addressed to her, marked Personal. I posted it, first class, main office in Causton. Being that close you nearly always get twenty-four-hour delivery. He watches for the van then makes up some excuse to get into the house to see she’s got it all right.’

‘How was he supposed to know that?’ asked Sergeant Troy.

‘Do me a favour,’ said Tanya. ‘She ain’t going to be tripping around singin’ oh what a perfect day, I wanna spend it with you, with that burning a hole in her pocket, is she?’

‘I suppose not,’ said Barnaby. He was thinking of Ann Lawrence. Kind, ineffectual, innocent. Going quietly about her daily business. Opening her post.

‘Anyway, she’d got it all right. He found her half dead with fright and the letter on the floor. Trouble is, it weren’t his letter. It had stuck-on writing just the same but there was less words. And arranged different. You can imagine how he felt.’

‘Must have been quite a blow,’ said Barnaby.

‘Yeah. But he’s at his best, Terry, with his back against the wall. So, figuring a blackmail letter means payment, he watches her all the time. He thought she’d probably have to deliver at night and that’s what happened. So he tails her, planning to pick up the money hisself. After all, we’re the ones who earned it.
But it weren’t his intention to kill nobody
.’

Barnaby, tempted to say, ‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ restrained the impulse. He would do nothing to interfere with this, so far, wonderfully simple unravelling.

‘But Charlie got there first. He was actually taking the money when Terry spotted him.’

‘Some people,’ muttered Sergeant Troy.

‘Just as well Terry happened to have a length of wire in his pocket,’ said Barnaby.

‘You gotta carry something for protection in this dee and ay,’ Tanya explained, less patient by now. Her attitude seemed to be that Barnaby, of all people, should appreciate what a wicked world was out there. ‘And just as well he did, the way things went.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Charlie drew a knife on him. They had a terrible struggle.’

The two policemen looked at each other. Both remembered the orderly neatness of the murder scene.

‘So it was definitely self-defence.’ Tanya, having noticed and read the look, became quite vehement.

‘And what about the dog?’ asked Sergeant Troy. ‘Was that “self-defence”?’

‘What you on about? What dog?’

Barnaby put his hand quickly on his sergeant’s arm to stop any passionate denunciation of Jackson’s cruelty to the animal. The last thing he wanted was an emotional diversion.

‘So what happened to Terry’s letter, Tanya?’

‘It come the next day. He caught the mail van, offered to take the post up to the house and got it back. Then he sent another, by hand this time, like Charlie, asking for five.’