Dead Dream Girl (15 page)

Anderson suddenly spoke again. ‘You weren’t the only one, Julia, wanting to help her. You were standing in line. There was Fletcher wanting to get her face in the glossies, Hellewell wanting to turn her into a logo, you wanting a
companion. Well, I wanted her to be someone you
could
take to London and not have everyone think she was just another five-star call girl.’

Crane watched him warily. He wasn’t commenting now, he was admitting. He couldn’t begin to guess what his game was, he was just certain that with this unpredictable man there had to be one.

‘So you did get to know her?’

‘Norfolk Gardens bar. She was waiting for friends. We got talking, hit it off. She stopped waiting for the others and I took her to one of those fancy restaurants she was rapidly getting herself accustomed to.’

‘And she was just as secretive about you as all the rest?’

Once more, that almost subliminal wince of pain. ‘I told her that if she went out with me there hadn’t to be any other men. I said I’d take her to London, set us up in a decent flat. She couldn’t wait to get to London. I said I’d fill the gaps in her education, take her to the theatre and the opera and the art galleries. I’d show her what to read so she’d know what they were talking about, the sorts of people we’d be mixing with.’

Despite his self-control, Crane heard that slight break in his voice he’d heard in the voices of all the others who’d spoken about Donna: Mahon, Fletcher, Hellewell, Julia. Had that really been his own dream for her, to turn her into a woman who was as cultured as she was beautiful, who could speak his language like Carol and the others who met up at the Glass-house?

‘So it was
you
!’ Julia cried. ‘You she had that frightful dream about! Wanting to change her and control her and not let her be herself.’ The gun swung wildly in her hands and Crane hoped to God she didn’t fire it by mistake.

‘It was what she
wanted
,’ Anderson told her, almost patiently. ‘She wanted to get away from the Willows and make a new start. She wanted me to help her broaden her mind. All she needed was guidance, encouragement. I gave her books to read to get her started. She was thrilled, grateful. You can’t believe how grateful she was that I wanted to improve her mind.’

‘That’s odd,’ Crane said, ‘the only books she had in her room at home were two Jeffrey Archer thrillers—’ Crane broke off. He’d suddenly made a new connection. ‘Jeffrey Archer …
Jeffrey
. That explains the other J in the diary, doesn’t it, the one who wasn’t Julia? She obviously thought your name was spelt with a J and not a G. And you knew the J was you, Geoff, right?’

Anderson watched him in silence. But not with
irritation
this time that Crane had found yet another piece in the puzzle. It seemed more a look of resignation. Perhaps he’d not been aware that the books he’d carefully selected for her had been tossed in the wheelie-bin the minute she got home.

‘I couldn’t bear to take an empty-headed slapper to London, Frank,’ he said at last in a low voice. ‘I was crazy about her. Christ, who wasn’t? But when we weren’t in bed I needed someone I could talk to. Someone who’d heard of Colette and Updike and knew who’d painted
Woman in the Green Bugatti.’

‘Her looks and Carol’s mind,’ Crane said. ‘The cake and the ha’penny.’

‘You bastard!’ Julia’s voice was a near shriek. ‘That’s what men are all about. You couldn’t just let her be herself, could you?
That’s
what love is. You never understood that, did you? It’s accepting people exactly as they are.’

‘What do
you
know?’ he cried. ‘You’d no idea what she was. You thought she was as innocent as she looked, all sick parents and Lady of the fucking Lamp.’

‘It wouldn’t have mattered, you evil swine, it wouldn’t have
mattered
!’

The anguished echo of her words seemed to die slowly in the scented silence, Anderson turned back to Crane. It seemed as if he needed to talk now, as if unable to control the urge to give him some idea of the way things had been. But Crane was still on full alert, convinced the reporter knew a way to get himself out of this.

‘Just give yourself up, Geoff.’

A ghost of the old engaging smile briefly flickered. ‘For giving Julia a tap on the head? She’s in one piece, would she really get the law on me and have all the hassle of being in the paper about her private life?’

It was as if he’d read Crane’s mind earlier. ‘I mean about what really matters,’ Crane said, with a sense of genuine sadness. ‘Donna’s murder.’

‘Hey, hey, don’t go laying that at
my
door. Hellewell’s the one who’s away on his toes. I simply wanted Julia’s diary. To make sure my name wasn’t in it. I didn’t want to be linked to her. I’d not killed her, but I didn’t want the hassle either. It could only have brought the kind of publicity a crime reporter can do without.’

Crane was now in a state of total confusion. Could that be true? Or had it been something he’d thought out during that lengthy early silence? It was Julia who spoke first, appearing to have fought a hard-won battle for her
self-control
. ‘You’re lying about her,’ she said, almost calmly. ‘You were trying to
make
her do things. Manipulate her, turn her into something she simply couldn’t be. She must
have hated that more than anything, must have wanted to get right away from you.’ She sighed. ‘I knew she’d had little education. Nothing in my house remotely interested her: the books, the paintings, the ornaments, the antiques. I stopped talking about them as I could tell she was bored. She liked to gossip and giggle, she’d ask to see programmes with names
Casualty
and
Big Brother
that I barely knew existed. I knew from the first weekend she simply wanted to be herself and I never attempted to change her. It was enough just to know her. It was enough …’

‘You were wrong!’ he said, almost in desperation. ‘She
wanted
to be made over, you wouldn’t believe how much she longed—’

‘She wanted a ticket to London, Geoff,’ Crane cut him off. ‘She knew exactly which buttons to press to get herself there.’

His slight flush could be seen, even in the bleaching glare of the high-powered lamps. ‘She wanted to be a different woman in a different milieu,’ he said angrily.

‘The National Gallery and the Albert Hall and Covent Garden? Is that really what she was pining for? Sure it wasn’t Stringfellows and the Hard Rock Café?’

‘She just needed
guidance
!’ he cried.

‘For a ticket to ride. She told you what you wanted to hear, like she told everyone. Think she gave a tinker’s toss about your London? The only use she had for you was to get her there.’

‘What can you know, you never even met her!’

‘I’ve learnt plenty about her. I know what she’d do for money, which was just about anything. Know what I think? I think she knew she could make it as a class A
model and knew Fletcher wasn’t up to it. So it had to be London, where she knew she’d be properly managed. Only London’s a big, scary place to a Bradford teenager and she knew all about kids from the provinces being sucked into King’s Cross rat holes overnight. So she needed someone to lean on till she found her feet. Someone she could trust to find his way around and show her the way.’

‘That’s not
true
,’ he shouted, face a deeper red. ‘She wanted my career to come first and she was going to train for a decent career of her own.’

‘You must have seen through that,’ Julia said in a low, tremulous voice. ‘There were things about her even I couldn’t accept and I was blind to almost everything. She … she said she’d be my companion if we could live in London. Yes, she’d already tried it on with me, you see. But I knew that once we were there it would be men. Modelling and men. I knew it could only bring more heartache than I already had.’

Crane said, ‘Julia’s right. And where do you think you’d have been once she’d got the West End sussed? A woman with her looks and stamina could earn £10,000 a day as a top model. What could you earn, even on the
Sunday Times
? Sixty, seventy grand a year? That would be
makeup
money to Donna.’

‘But it couldn’t have lasted! It would only be for a few short years till her looks—’

‘By which time she’d have married a multi-millionaire. We both know how carefully she looked to her future.’

‘You don’t get it, do you? It was
me
she wanted. She said I was the only man who’d seen her as a complete person, with a mind as well as a body.’

‘Geoff, the reason other men didn’t see her as a complete person was because she was a bear of very little brain. Far-sighted and cunning, yes. She could have graduated in cunning.’

‘And no one
minded
, you bastard!’ Julia gave a half-sob. ‘It was enough just to be with her.’

‘When did the knocking begin?’ Crane said. ‘When did she decide you were boring her senseless about your London and your future? Was it when she twigged it could be months before you could get her to London anyway, seeing as you’d not even got the promise of a job yet? How soon was it before she began telling you you could stuff the opera and the Royal Court and the
two-room
flat south of the river on a salary that wouldn’t keep her in shoes?’

‘Shut it, Crane! Just
shut
it!’

‘It’s what she did to Bobby Mahon, right? Wound him up rotten, so that in the end he’d lay one on her. Patsy was positive she liked the buzz of driving Bobby to the end of his tether. Drew the line at being throttled though.’

Pallor suddenly wiped away the flush. He looked past Crane with unfocused eyes. ‘I did everything for that bitch. The dinners I paid for. The promises I made. I knew I could fix her up with a respectable job: PA, gofer, public relations, God knows she had the makings. I’d pay for everything till she started working. We’d be able to dine out on my talents and her looks. But she had to put the past behind her: modelling, other men, all that shit. I
had
to be the only man in her life …’ His voice trailed off and they stood silent again in the lamps’ steady glare, the water of the pool as dark as oil behind them, the façade of the great old house forming a backdrop. Crane was now
certain Julia’s mastery of the gun had become even more unreliable with the tears that now blurred her vision.

‘That’s what really did it, eh, Geoff? There’d never been a woman in your entire life who’d not thought you were Mr Wonderful. And Donna had exactly the same problem, no one could resist her. You couldn’t cope with anything being the slightest bit different, could you, the pair of you? You both took it for granted you were always to be the star. Neither of you was ever going to accept the other’s ego, having your own way was a God-given right. It had absolutely nothing to do with love, but neither of you knew anything about that either, did you?’

‘She was a scrubber!’ he screamed. ‘A slag! Before I took her up she was just disco fodder. I was saving her from middle-aged swingers ready to shell out a fistful of tenners for a night’s arm candy. I was the best chance she was ever going to have. A life, a career, with a man who was going somewhere in journalism. Only she’d not stop
whoring
! She was very clever, oh yes, very discreet, always a little mobile tucked away in her frillies, set to vibrate, not ring, so she could go to the loo to arrange another
seventy-sov
jump. But she didn’t fool me, not with my experience of human trash.’ He suddenly gazed at Crane with wild, staring eyes, as if a totally different man now lived inside his head. ‘Then one night I told her, told her straight: it had to stop.’

He was visibly shaking. Crane had always sensed the rigid self-control he concealed behind the jokes, the smiles, the easy manner. But Crane had learnt to be very wary of people with too much control. It could mean they were bottling emotion that might be distilling itself the longer it found no outlet, and if the valve ever did blow it could
cause disproportionate damage. Julia looked on stunned, mouth falling open, the gun forgotten and pointing once more towards the ground.

‘What happened, Geoff,’ he said quietly, ‘the night you went for a walk at Tanglewood to have it all out for once and for all?’

‘You can’t believe,’ he almost whispered, and then he shouted, ‘you can’t
believe
the sheer filth she could come out with someone who looked the way she did. You can’t believe the viciousness! That I didn’t earn shit and I’d never earn more than shit, not in newspapers. I bored her arse off and I was rubbish in bed, and she’d either find someone else to go to London with or she’d go on her own, and all I’d ever see of her then, if I ever got there myself, would be someone driving along Park Lane in a chauffeured limo, giving me the finger and shouting “Up yours!”’

The last words were like a scream of anguish. Comedy seemed to blend absurdly with tragedy, as it sometimes did, like the two masks that symbolized the theatre. They stood in yet another silence, both he and Julia, sharing, Crane felt, the same sense of profound shock.

‘Give yourself up, Geoff,’ Crane said finally, as calmly as he could. ‘They’ll get you now, whatever you do. It was a crime of passion. They’ll be lenient with a man of your clean record. Ten years top whack. An open prison. You’ll still be young enough to make a new start.’

He looked about him, seeming almost stupefied, as if he’d emerged from a sort of fit that had briefly blanked his mind. When he spoke again it was with the old engaging smile, which Crane now found unbearable. ‘Frank, you don’t seriously believe I’d go inside for a trick-artist like
Donna Jackson? I shall clear off, vanish, give myself a new identity. I shall go to America or Australia. Big places to lose yourself in. Come back to London when the dust has settled.’

‘You’re not going to walk away, Geoff. Julia has you covered and I’m going to ring Benson.’

‘The only problem with that is that Julia’s gun isn’t loaded. When I was trying to find a way out of her mansion I stumbled over a cloakroom where the gun lives. It was the work of seconds to knock out the shells.’

Julia’s shoulders sagged, as did Crane’s spirits. It had never paid to underestimate Anderson’s resourcefulness, and he’d felt all along that he’d have one final trick up his sleeve or he’d surely not have confessed to Donna’s killing.