Narrow is the Way (20 page)

But having a shovel walloped down on the back of your head when you weren’t looking – now that was staring eternity in the eye.

He swallowed hard, his gag reflex kicking in as he watched the man who would have killed him, being sick all over the lawn. He leaned forward, letting his hands dangle between his knees and hung his head low, taking deep breaths. Little black dots danced on the back of his closed eyelids. He felt definitely iffy. Like he was going to pass out.

‘Frank, you all right? You got any pains in the chest?’

He opened his eyes abruptly and lifted his head, only to find Hillary Greene crouched in front of him, one eye on the
dropped shovel, one on the suspect, and one (how the hell did she have three eyes?) on him.

‘What?’ he said hazily.

‘Are you having chest pains?’

‘No.’

‘OK. I’ll ring for an ambulance anyway,’ she said, and got up, bringing the phone to her ear.

And in that moment, Frank suddenly realized that his misery was only just starting. Because now the fact that he’d only been a second or two away from death was nothing when he compared it to the fact that it had been Hillary Greene who’d saved him.

Hillary Greene
.

No, this was just too much. This just wasn’t fair. For two pins, Frank could have cried.

The sound of the ambulance arriving within three minutes – Hillary wondered if that was a record – was what finally brought Vivian Orne out of the house.

She’d been on her way to the front window in the lounge to see where the ambulance was going, and which of her
neighbours
was in trouble, when she’d been side-tracked by the sight of strangers in her back garden.

Now, as she stepped out into the cold autumn air, her gaze went from the fat man sitting comically on her patio, to the poker-faced woman watching her and then, finally, to her husband, who was kneeling on the grass, alternately retching and groaning.

‘Terry, love, are you all right?’ she heard herself ask stupidly, starting towards him. ‘What’s going on. Who are you people?’ Then, with a sharp edge of fear, ‘I’ll call the police.’

Hillary reached for her ID and held it up. ‘We
are
the police, Mrs Orne. I’m Detective Inspector Hillary Greene, this is Sergeant Frank Ross.’

At this, Terry Orne’s head shot up and he regarded Frank with a look of surprise. ‘You’re not the bastard on the phone?’

‘Eh?’ Frank said, also lifting his head to look across at the
man who’d tried to kill him. The man who
would
have killed him. Curiously, Frank felt no desire to rip the bastard’s head off.

He was still trying to come up with ways and means of turning this around. Suppose he told everyone back at the nick that
he’d
laid out Orne? No, it wouldn’t wash. Orne himself would probably deny it. Besides, Frank knew, Hillary would have her own version and he had no illusions as to who would be believed.

But there had to be a way to down play it some. After all, there was not a mark on him. He could say Hillary was blowing things up out of all proportion. Yeah, that might work. Play the hysterical-woman card. There’d always be some who’d believe it. Not many, but enough to raise doubts. Right now, that was the only crumb of comfort he had.

The thought of being grateful to Hillary Greene never even crossed his mind. And Hillary, for one, would have been
astonished
if it had.

Right now, though, she had other things on her mind as she looked at Vivian Orne, a lean, stringy-looking woman with surprisingly wide shoulders and large feet. What had Innes’s file said about Vivian Orne’s occupation? Aerobics and dance instructor. Which meant muscles. You had to be strong and fit for that. And Julia Reynolds had been drunk and smaller and not at all physically a match for Vivian Orne.

Back at the bank vault, she’d assumed the Ornes were in on it together. Now, she believed it possible that Vivian’s husband really had no idea of what she’d done.

‘I thought you were the one who’d been bothering my wife,’ Terry Orne said, gasping a bit through blue-tinged and
vomit-speckled
lips. He was still staring at Frank as if it was all
his
fault.

‘I never even met your wife, dummy,’ Frank snarled. In his ears, he was beginning to hear the jaunts and jibes that would ring around the Big House. Frank Ross, the one who needed to hide behind his boss’s skirts. And worse. Much worse.

It was more than he’d be able to bear. Perhaps now was the
time to quit. He’d put in enough time to get his full pension. Maybe eke it out with a part-time job. Night watchman was a doddle, they said. Yeah, maybe now was a good time to quit. He could devote all his time to tracking down Ronnie’s loot. Perhaps put a tail on his kid.

‘The man you’re thinking of is a Mr Gregory Innes,’ Hillary said, looking from husband to wife. ‘Isn’t that so, Mrs Orne?’

Vivian Orne slowly reached her husband, and, ignoring the wet and muddy grass, knelt down beside him. Wordlessly, she put her arms around him. She wasn’t sobbing, but Hillary could clearly see huge tears running down her face.

‘Who’s Gregory Innes?’ Terry Orne said.

‘Do you want to tell him, or should I, Mrs Orne?’ Hillary asked. She knew that now was the optimum time to strike. They were off balance and vulnerable. Briefly, she felt a flash of distaste for what she was doing. Had Tommy Lynch been here, she knew he’d have looked away with a hastily hidden grimace of disgust.

Had Janine been here, she’d be scribbling in her notebook, but even she, Hillary suspected, wouldn’t have felt any sense of satisfaction about this situation: the Ornes had been through so much already.

But long ago, a mentor of Hillary’s had said something to her that had stuck with her, and remained inviolate, through all the shit life in this job had thrown at her. He’d been an old desk sergeant, retired from the field, but too bored to quit
altogether
. He’d been like a sage to Hillary back then, she and others of her generation, this man who must have been on the fringes of many a murder case.

Quite simply, the old man had told her, a victim of murder could rely on no one but the investigating officer to fight his or her corner. The family and friends of a murder victim might, for some reason, abandon them. The victim might never even be identified. The case might be open and shut, or never solved. But the dead can’t ask questions, or justify themselves, or hunt the guilty, or prosecute, or do any other thing a living person could. The dead needed you.

And, right here and now, Julia Reynolds needed Hillary to do her job. And do it she would.

‘Mr Innes is a private investigator, Mr Orne,’ Hillary said softly, but quickly closed her mouth when Vivian Orne raised one hand.

She had a long, strong face, that went well with a
no-nonsense
cut of dark hair and brown eyes. Her arms, hard with muscle, still bore the traces of a late summer tan. But she looked gaunt. She looked like a woman who’d just buried her child.

‘I hired him to find a donor, Terry. One of the nurses at the hospital let it slip that one had been found, but wasn’t going to go through with the surgery.’

Terry Orne began to wretch again. But his stomach was already empty, and he began to cry instead.

‘And he found her,’ Vivian carried on, her voice as dead as the look in her eyes. ‘It was a girl. A girl out Oxford way. She wouldn’t go through with the procedure though. The doctors tried everything to persuade her. But she just wouldn’t. She let our Barry die. I couldn’t take it. I had to see her, face to face, to let her know what she’d done. To show her our Barry’s picture. I wanted to hear what she had to say for herself.’

‘What do you mean? Who?’ Her husband stared at her with a growing fear in his eyes that made even Frank look away.

‘The girl. The one whose bone marrow would have saved Barry,’ Vivian said. ‘Mr Innes gave me her address. I went to her house, but she was being picked up by this man. She was going to get married. Or at least, that’s what I thought. She came out dressed like a bride. Can you believe it, Terry? A bride? Our Barry was dead, would never grow up, would never have a bride of his own. And here she was, this heartless bitch, going to get married.’

Terry Orne looked dazed, as if he was unable to follow what his wife was saying.

‘But of course, she wasn’t getting married. I mean, it was dark. You don’t get married at night, do you? No, she was
going to a party. A bloody party!’ Vivian’s lovely sense of numbness finally went as she wailed the final words with a cry of anguish.

Terry Orne closed his eyes then shook his head. ‘Viv,’ he said wretchedly, urgently, ‘Shut up. Don’t say another word.’

But his wife couldn’t stop. Not now.

‘I followed them to this big farmhouse. I could hear the music inside. I didn’t know what to do. I was all fired up, ready to face her. I’d been screwing myself up to do it ever since Mr Innes gave me her name and address. I knew it was too late – Barry was already dead, but I had to go through with it. I just couldn’t put it off.’

‘Viv, what have you done?’ Terry whispered.

‘At first, I just wandered around. I found the cowshed, and all those beautiful cows. I walked around a bit, but it was dark, and I kept coming back again and again to the
farmhouse
. Then I realized Mr Innes had given me the phone number of her mobile, as well as her land line. I was sure she’d have it with her, and she did.’

‘You rang her?’ Hillary asked, surprised. No witnesses had mentioned seeing Julia use her mobile.

Vivian Orne glanced at her blankly. ‘Yes. She was in the loo. I heard it flush.’

‘But how did you get her to meet you in the cowshed?’ Hillary asked. ‘Wasn’t she afraid of you? Afraid to face you?’

‘Viv, for pete’s sake, don’t tell her. We need a lawyer,’ Terry Orne yelped.

But Vivian Orne was still staring at Hillary although, in reality, Hillary rather thought that the other woman was seeing that night instead. That night she’d hung around whilst a party was going on, and a woman inside, who’d let her son die, answered her ringing mobile phone.

‘I told her I’d make it worth her while, of course,’ Vivian Orne said simply. ‘I told her I’d pay her to talk to me. I told her I was the mother of the little boy who’d died. I told her I had over a thousand pounds in cash in my purse. I just wanted to talk to her.’

‘And she
agreed
?’ Hillary asked, stunned.

‘Yes. She was drunk, I think. You know how belligerent drunk people can be? Anyway, I was already halfway up the path, the one that leads to the shed, when she came out of the house. She could see I was a woman alone. I don’t suppose she felt particularly afraid of me. Why should she?’

Vivian Orne wiped the tears from her eyes. ‘I didn’t go there to kill her, you know. It wasn’t on my mind.’

Hillary nodded. She hadn’t gone armed. No jury would convict her of premeditation, at least. ‘So she followed you, and you went into the cowshed?’ she prompted. ‘What happened then?’ She needed to get the whole story out, with Frank as a corroborating witness, before her husband succeeded in getting through to her instincts for self-
preservation
and shut her up.

‘It was beginning to drizzle and she didn’t want her dress to get dirty. Besides, the cowshed had lights, and she wanted to count the money, so it wasn’t hard to get her inside.’ Vivian spoke without any sort of emotion in her voice at all now. Not scorn, not hatred. Not even surprise.

Hillary had come across this phenomenon before. She suspected that Vivian Orne had gone over and over that night for so long and so often, that now every emotion had been wrung out of it. It simply was. Things had just happened as they’d happened.

‘Did you have any money?’

‘No. She became angry. The girl.’

‘Julia Reynolds,’ Hillary said. ‘Her name was Julia Reynolds.’

Vivian Orne nodded, but said nothing.

‘She was drunk, like I said,’ she continued listlessly. ‘I asked her why she’d refused to save my son. And she said she was scared of needles.’

At that Vivian gave a harsh laugh. ‘I told her that they could have arranged to give her gas - like at a dentist. But then she said she had this thing about hospitals. Couldn’t stand them, she said. So I asked why she carried a donor card if that was
the case, and she said she’d forgotten about it. That she’d forgotten she still had it in her purse.’

Vivian shook her head. ‘Can you imagine that? To me, to us,’ – she reached across and took her husband’s hand – ‘that donor card meant everything. We spent months and months, hoping for a call. Hoping someone, somewhere, had registered as a match for our son. Praying for a miracle. Can you imagine?’

Hillary could. That was the problem.

‘So, what happened?’ she forced herself to ask. ‘What made you strangle her?’

‘Viv!’ Terry Orne said, going white. ‘Viv?’

‘Shush,’ Vivian Orne said, sighing heavily. ‘It was when she told me that she didn’t want to have a scar,’ she said,
matter-of
-factly, turning once more to look at Hillary. ‘She said she was getting married soon, to a rich man’s son, and couldn’t have an ugly old scar on her back.’

Hillary couldn’t meet her eyes any longer and looked away. They collided with Frank Ross, who also looked quickly away.

‘I just went for her,’ Vivian Orne said. ‘She’d turned away from me and was walking away, as if I was nothing. As if I meant nothing. As if
Barry
had meant nothing. His death meant nothing. I just went for her pretty, worthless neck and squeezed and squeezed and, well, that was it. I felt her scratching the backs of my hands, but it didn’t seem to hurt. Then she went all limp. I let her fall to the floor, then I went out and got in my car and came home.’ Her voice was utterly exhausted.

Hillary nodded. ‘I see.’

Vivian Orne looked up from her position beside her husband, who was still staring at her helplessly, as if not sure who she was.

‘Are we going now?’ Vivian Orne asked quietly.

‘Yes. We’re going now,’ Hillary said, just as quietly.