Fell Purpose (32 page)

She was sure it was. She had been to his house and had a good look at him when Atherton interviewed him; she knew his height and shape, the big shoulders, the large head with the thick bushy hair, the corner of his glasses just visible because of the angle of his head. She couldn’t see his face, but she was sure it was him. He was wearing grey trousers and a dark-red checked short-sleeved shirt that could have been brother to the dark-blue one she had seen him in before. He was just standing there, unnaturally still, not fidgeting or shifting his weight, and his hands hung loosely at the end of his arms in a way that, to her, suggested despair. A normal man stuffed his hands in his pockets, or clasped them, fiddled with a button or scratched his ear, but in the time she watched him he didn’t move them at all. It was the pose, the immobility, of a man who had given up.

Obviously she must approach him, but what if he ran, or resisted? He was considerably taller and stronger than her and she’d have a job restraining him. She stepped back carefully around the edge of the railway arch, where she could conceal herself but still keep an eye on her quarry, and radioed in.

Nicholls was still the relief sergeant, and she asked to speak to him personally. He was quick on the uptake when she explained the situation to him.

‘I want to try going up to him quietly, Skip, and see if he’ll come with me, which he might just do. He looks totally banjoed. But if he runs, I’ll need help catching him. He’s a lot bigger than me. Could you radio D’Arblay and warn him? But tell him
not to look
.’

‘Aye, I’m with you. You don’t want them staring at him and spooking him. I’ll tell him to warn Gostyn. But d’you think Wilding’s likely to be violent? I don’t want you taking any chances.’

‘I don’t think he’ll hurt me, Skip. He’s not that kind of desperate. But he may run, and if we have to bring him down he’ll struggle.’

‘OK, lassie,’ Nicholls said. ‘I’ll get straight on to them. Let me know how it comes out.’

Cautiously, Connolly moved forward again under the bridge to a position where she could see the two PCs. They were just standing there in the sun, not talking. She saw D’Arblay bend his head and put his hand up to the radio switch, but she couldn’t hear anything from this distance. She willed him not to look across at Wilding and, bless him, he didn’t. With a wonderfully casual movement he stretched his arms and then took a couple of steps, as though needing to ease his muscles, turning his back on the railway bridge and blocking Gostyn for a moment as he spoke to him. Connolly saw D’Arblay grip Gostyn’s arm, and could imagine the low, urgent command, ‘Don’t look over there, whatever you do.’ She moved forward quietly, on the further side of the road from Wilding because she didn’t want to creep up on him and startle him. He saw the movement and turned his head towards her at the same instant that Gostyn, unable to control his impulse, looked directly across at Wilding.

There was a breathless moment of tension as Connolly’s system flooded with adrenalin and her nerves and muscles prepared to leap into action. She felt the hair lift on her scalp in animal reaction. It was Wilding all right, now she could see his face. He was unshaven, his hair was unkempt, and he had bags under his eyes you could have travelled to Australia with, but mostly it was the expression of his face that made her shiver. He looked like a man who had looked down into Hell.

‘Mr Wilding,’ she said, trying for a normal rather than a humouring-lunatics tone. ‘You remember me? I’m PC Connolly. I came to your house on Tuesday. I’ve been hoping we could have another word with you.’

He shook his head slowly, though it seemed rather in bewilderment than as a negative. She stepped closer. He looked at her dully, as if not understanding what she had said, and not caring much to try.

‘Would you come with me? Just for a chat?’ she said. Another step, and she was able to lay her hand on his arm. She didn’t want to touch his bare skin – she was afraid that would be too intimate a contact – so she laid it against his upper arm, just below his shoulder. She felt him trembling, a faint, fast vibration. Exhaustion, she wouldn’t wonder. Still he looked at her. His lips were dry. ‘How about a cup of tea?’ she said. ‘I bet you could do with one.’

The word ‘tea’ made him try to lick his lips, and his tongue was so dry it stuck to them. He closed his eyes a moment and lowered his head with a sigh. Then he opened them, and looked at her with resignation. He was too tired, she thought, to care any more what he did.

‘Come on,’ she said kindly. ‘My car’s just down here.’ And with only a little urging, she got him to start walking. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw D’Arblay speaking into his radio again, presumably reporting her success. Gostyn, the big goon, was staring as if his career depended on it, and she was afraid any moment he’d come running at them and Wilding would take off. She didn’t feel safe until she had let him into her car and closed the door on him. When she got in at her side, the smell of his sweat was filling the hot interior, intensifying her sense of him and his distress. It was like shutting herself into a confined space with a dangerously wounded animal – a bear, perhaps, or a lion – which might turn in its pain and kill her. The journey back to the station seemed horribly long, and she had never been more aware of the fragility of the female human frame.

Slider had tea and sandwiches sent in to Wilding, and despatched one of his uniforms, armed with Wilding’s car keys, to fetch in his car, which he said was in Wulfstan Street. Not that it would be any help to the investigation, for even if they found traces of Zellah in it, why wouldn’t they? But you never knew.

Wilding drank two cups of tea, but didn’t touch the sandwiches. When Slider went in with Atherton to question him, he saw this, and asked if Wilding would like something different to eat.

‘I want nothing,’ he said stonily. ‘My life is over. I have no wish to preserve it.’

‘I understand,’ Slider began.

‘Spare me your empty pieties. You don’t understand.’

It was a little flash of spirit, and Slider was glad of it. There was still something there to work with, a spark that cared a tiny bit about
something
, whatever it was.

‘What were you doing at Old Oak Common?’ he asked.

‘Why should I tell you?’

‘Is there some reason I shouldn’t know?’ Slider countered conversationally.

Wilding stared heavily at nothing. ‘I wanted to see . . . the place where she died. I couldn’t get close to it. I was waiting for those men to go away.’

‘They’ll be there for some time yet,’ Slider told him.

‘I can wait,’ Wilding said with massive indifference.

‘There’s nothing to see there. Why do you want to?’ No answer. ‘If you had come to me, I could probably have arranged for you to go in.’

‘With you there, and the constables, and all the paraphernalia of your futile investigation? No, thank you. I will wait until you have gone away and left it as it was before, when she was alive. I want to stand there, where she was.’

‘And what then?’

‘I will kill myself.’

No, Slider thought; despite those words he was not quite at the last gate. He still wanted to ‘tell’ – that human urge that was of such value to policemen like him. But to tell what?

‘Why do you call the investigation futile?’ he asked. ‘Do you think we won’t find out who did it? We always do.’

‘I don’t care if you do. What difference does it make? It won’t bring her back.’ Tears began to seep out of his eyes, and he pulled out a handkerchief and pressed it against them. ‘Don’t imagine that it’s anything you can say that makes me weep. I can’t stop, that’s all. It’s a nervous reaction.’

The handkerchief was filthy, and Slider pushed a box of tissues across to him. He ignored it. ‘What do you want from me?’ he asked after a moment, when the tears seem to be stopped. ‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know the truth,’ Slider said.

Wilding looked at him bitterly. ‘Oh yes, you have the luxury of intellectual curiosity. And the vanity. You haven’t lost everything that gave meaning to your life. What does the truth matter to me? I don’t care about it. My daughter is dead.’

‘Then why did you tell lies and sign your name to them? Your daughter was dead then. It seems you cared then about concealing the truth.’

A consciousness stirred in his eyes. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘In your statement about your whereabouts that evening, you said you were at home the whole time. But you weren’t. You went out in your car shortly after Zellah left. You followed her, didn’t you?’

The tears began to leak again. He pressed them back, Canute-like, with the filthy handkerchief.

‘You knew where she was going,’ Slider tried. ‘Why follow her? Or did you, perhaps, think that she
wasn’t
going to Sophy’s house? Did you think there was some deception going on?’ Wilding still didn’t answer, but now he reached for a tissue and blew his nose, and then took another to blot at his eyes. He had done it in what seemed an automatic gesture, but Slider saw it as a sign of lowered resistance, and pressed a little more. ‘I’m surprised you should suspect your lovely daughter of hiding something from you. Or did you have some reason to think her friends were conspiring to do her harm?’

That provoked him. ‘Zellah would never have done anything like that if it hadn’t been for those others corrupting her,’ he cried in a little flash of defensive spirit.

‘Done anything like what?’ Slider asked.

Wilding didn’t answer that, but he talked. ‘I tried to keep her safe. I tried to keep her away from bad influences. That was all I ever wanted, to keep her as she was – so beautiful, so perfect. Was that wrong?’ He laid his big, hard hands on the table in a gesture of finality. Even after only three days away from his bench, the little nicks and scratches were healing, the recent scars fading. Life could be very cruel, in its thoughtless regeneration. ‘But everything was against me. The whole of modern society is a disease. What can one man do against it?’

‘Her friends, Sophy and Chloë . . .’ Slider began.

The fire lit in him. ‘Those girls!
She
wanted them as Zellah’s friends – my wife. Her own
mother
was complicit in corrupting her.
Friends
? What kind of mother would want her child to mix with creatures like that? Trollops with empty minds. Hussies with no interest in
anything
, beyond sex and celebrities and clothes.’ He rocked back and forth in an anguish of mourning. ‘But that’s what her mother wanted. She wanted my daughter, with all her wonderful intelligence and talent, to be . . . a
model
.’

His tone of disgust and outrage and grief said this was the worst fate a girl could encounter. Worse than death? Well, perhaps. Perhaps.

‘And what did you want for her?’ Slider asked quietly, hoping to slip his questions in isotonically so Wilding would hardly notice.

‘To be something that mattered. To be herself. To use all her abilities, not just her looks. Not to waste herself. But all the time I was fighting against the world. The foul, trivial, dirty, corrupting world.’ Slider felt Atherton’s ears prick, though he was not looking at him. ‘It was the world that took my Zellah from me,’ Wilding cried. ‘I tried to save her, but in the end . . .’

He didn’t finish the sentence, which was a pity, because the conclusion of it might have been ‘the only way I could save her was to kill her’ or words to that effect. The tears were seeping out again and Wilding took another tissue. Atherton stirred just very slightly, so that Slider knew he thought Wilding was hiding in there and ought to be winkled out. But Slider didn’t think so. There was a momentum now. He just had to keep it going.

‘What made you decide that particular day that something was going to happen?’ he asked, without emphasis. ‘Was it the fact that she was staying over?’

‘I was always against that,’ Wilding answered without pause. ‘I could understand Zellah wanting to – the other girls often did it, and she was too innocent to see the danger they represented. But her mother wanted it, too. There’s no excuse for
her
. Good God, she
prides
herself on being worldly!’ he said bitterly. ‘They both asked, over and over. Zellah sounded so wistful. Pam – well, I knew she wouldn’t let up. In the end . . . But I shouldn’t have given in. I shall always blame myself for that.’

‘What were you afraid was going to happen?’

‘I had no specific apprehension. I just knew it would not be good for her to spend time unsupervised with those creatures. But then . . .’ He paused so long that Slider was on the brink of prompting him when he went on, very low, his head bent, so it was hard even in the silent room to hear him. ‘It was the deceit that was so hard to bear. I was used to it from Pam. I expected it from her. But not Zellah. Not . . . my little girl.’

Slider took a chance. ‘You found her mobile phone,’ he suggested.

‘Almost as soon as she’d left the house,’ he said. ‘I went up to her room. It was lying on her bed. I was worried about her being out without it. I thought I could catch her up in the car and give it to her.’