No Escape (33 page)

‘
No
!’ Sandra yelled after her, and her hands, helpless, frenzied, flew to either side of her head, clutching, grabbing handfuls of her own hair. ‘They
can’t
! Tell them they
can’t
!’

‘They can,’ Tony said, quietly.

The other strangers followed their colleague, faces bland, showing no feelings at all, either for the screaming child or the distraught woman who had already lost her only daughter and was now,
at this very instant, also losing her only grandchild.

Sandra stared after them, then at the people left behind. Keenan, his thin face wretched; Karen Dean, tight-lipped, trying not to look at her.

And Tony, still standing, like a block of wood.

‘You
bastard
!’ She flung herself at him, began pounding at him with her fists, weeping as she hit him, and still he remained motionless, not looking at her, looking past her
into the distance. ‘You stupid, selfish
bastard
!’

‘Mrs Finch,’ Keenan said gently. ‘Why don’t we—’

‘How could you let them
take
her?’ The nails of Sandra’s right hand caught her son-in-law’s cheek, drew blood. ‘How could you
do
that?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ Tony said, at last, though still he didn’t move. ‘It’s the law,’ he said, softly. ‘We knew it was coming.’

Karen Dean came up behind Sandra, put her hands on the older woman’s arms to restrain her, but there was no need. All the strength, all the fight had gone out of her now, and her own arms
fell limply to her sides, hung there.

Tony Patston, arrested and bailed after his confession on Saturday, and treading water since then, hardly able to breathe, let alone function, was no longer looking past Sandra into the
distance.

He was looking at Keenan –

– who now stepped forward and began to speak to Tony.

‘Anthony Patston, I am . . .’

Sandra was aware of the inspector’s voice, low and steady, but if she heard the words he used as her son-in-law’s pale, now bloody, face grew even whiter, sicker, she was incapable
of making sense of them.

All she could hear, ringing in her ears, as she thought they would forever, were the screams of her murdered daughter’s only child as she was carried away.

Lizzie’s tour began at five on Thursday morning with Susan arriving, bleary-eyed, to collect her from Marlow and drive her to Oxford for her first radio interview of the
day, after which there was to be a signing in Waterstones, followed by lunch with the
Oxford Mail.
Then on to Cheltenham for the
Gloucestershire Echo
, before Gloucester itself for
another radio interview. Then two more signing sessions and down to Bristol for drinks with the
Western Daily Press
and dinner with the
Evening Post
at the Marriott, where they were
overnighting before another early start for breakfast television.

It was Friday, after six-thirty, when she walked wearily, but with the sense of warm relief the hotel always gave her, into the Savoy and up the stairs to the American Bar, where Robin Allbeury
was waiting at a corner table.

‘You look tired.’ He kissed her cheek, then pulled out a chair for her to sink into. ‘Lovely, of course, but worn out. And possibly hungry?’ He sat again too.

‘Hungry, yes,’ Lizzie said. ‘Lovely, most definitely not.’

‘You’ll forgive me for disagreeing with that.’ He watched her sit back and look around. ‘Bit hectic, isn’t it? How about just one glass of something here, and then
elsewhere for a quiet dinner?’ He saw her dubious expression. ‘Somewhere you can just collapse and not have to watch everything you say.’

‘Sounds wonderful,’ Lizzie said. ‘So long as it’s not too late. Susan’s got me up before the crack of dawn for GMTV.’ She saw him frown. ‘Something
wrong?’

‘Only that I probably should have asked Susan to join us.’

Lizzie shook her head. ‘She was dying to get home. No weekend off for her either, don’t forget.’

‘Still,’ he said, ‘I should have thought.’

‘Susan isn’t easily offended,’ Lizzie said.

They had a glass of champagne each, and then Allbeury drove her out of town to a cosy restaurant in a West Hampstead side road run by two hospitable men who’d clearly
known Allbeury for years.

‘You don’t have to talk at all,’ Allbeury told her after they’d ordered, ‘unless you want to. And I can either chat away or be silent, if you’d
rather.’

‘I think,’ Lizzie said, ‘I wouldn’t mind listening for a bit.’

‘A barrister I know has told me how tiring performing can be.’

‘Did you never want to be a barrister? I could imagine you in court.’

‘In a wig and gown?’ he said. ‘I can’t.’

‘So why matrimonial?’

‘It was an area that interested me.’

‘But not so much any more?’ Lizzie remembered him saying at their dinner party that he no longer worked full-time.

He nodded. ‘There were other things I wanted more time for.’

‘Intriguing,’ Lizzie said.

He smiled. ‘Not really.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

‘You’re just being interested,’ he said. ‘Which is nice.’

Their first course arrived, a creamy cauliflower soup that Lizzie found herself devouring as if she hadn’t eaten for a week, and after that she was almost too busy with her melting fillet
steak and
frites
to talk much, and she noticed, more than once, that Allbeury – who’d ordered a good Burgundy, but was not drinking – was sitting back watching her eat,
smiling.

‘Do I have mustard on my cheek?’

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Was I staring?’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘This is far too good for me to mind anything.’

‘Good.’ He paused. ‘How’s Christopher?’

‘Fine. Being a more-or-less house husband in Marlow while I’m off being wined and dined all over the UK.’

‘Very commendable,’ Allbeury said.

‘Gilly’s there too, of course,’ Lizzie said. ‘And he has patients to see in one of the local BUPA hospitals.’

‘So it’s not all child-minding?’

She heard the touch of irony, felt compelled to rise to Christopher’s defence. ‘He wouldn’t mind if it was.’ She smiled. ‘Though Edward, our oldest, would most
definitely mind hearing himself described as a child in need of minding.’

Allbeury nodded, asked about Jack and Sophie, followed that up with a few questions about DMD – intelligent queries that Lizzie found quite easy to cope with. And it was, all in all, one
of the most relaxing evenings she could remember having in a long time. Allbeury told her a little more about his practice and his partners, said that he’d always made a point of trying to
work, if possible, with people he liked or at least respected. He told her about a former unnamed partner he’d let go because of his preparedness to accommodate a client who’d turned
out to be a thug; though even that experience, Allbeury added, smiling, had led him to one of his now favourite colleagues, a young private investigator named Novak, who ran a small agency with his
wife.

‘Nice people,’ he said.

It was only as they neared the end of the evening,
en route
to Holland Park, that Lizzie realized how skilfully Allbeury had drawn facts, opinions and even, to a degree, feelings out of
her, while telling her next to nothing of real consequence about himself.

She already had a husband who was attractive and charming.

A husband you only stay with for the children.

And Robin Allbeury, she decided again, glancing at him sideways as he drove, really was
extremely
attractive.

Careful, Lizzie.

That self-caution again.

He halted the Jaguar outside the flat and turned off the engine.

‘So, back again in a few days, didn’t you say?’

She felt, suddenly, absurdly, like a teenager saying goodnight after a first date outside her parents’ home.

Not a date.

‘Yes,’ she said, quite briskly, ‘but only after Manchester, Leeds, York, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh
and
the Lakes.’ She picked up her bag from the floor.
‘By which time, I’ll almost certainly be ready for nothing more than total collapse.’

‘Then if you should happen to want a friend to collapse with,’ Allbeury said, ‘or if, by remote chance, you have just a sprinkling of strength left, I hope you’ll
remember my number.’

Keenan had eaten his wife’s Sunday roast beef and Yorkshires, and he’d played football with his boys and cuddled his daughter, but all the while inside his mind
he’d been seeing the little adopted – not
really
adopted – girl being carried out of her house by a stranger, and the thought that he might have been in any way
instrumental in that made him feel sick and useless, because it was all so wrong and lousy, and he couldn’t see a decent end to it.

He’d told poor Sandra Finch that he would try and help in any way he could, and he
was
going to do his damnedest, but he couldn’t see himself making any difference, not about
the little girl, anyway.

‘At least Irina’s not at risk from Patston any more,’ Terry Reed had said, because Tony Patston was back home again, the only charges against him to date relating to the
adoption, and they’d been trying, now, to trace the Georgious, the Patstons’ neighbours, in Cyprus, in the hope that they might be able to shed some useful light on the relationship
between Tony and Joanne, but nothing as yet there either.

Reed had meant well enough. They’d all meant well enough.

Didn’t make it right.

Didn’t stop Keenan from looking at his own children and wanting to punch a hole in his living room wall.

Shipley was beginning to accept that obsession might, after all, be the right diagnosis for what was ailing her.

The thing was, no matter how strong her hunches, she’d always been able to recognize when a case or a situation was over, even if she’d been proven wrong. Till now. She’d
tried,
really
tried, dumping this or at least shoving it to the back of her mind and getting on, wholeheartedly, with the drugs case, but Lynne Bolsover and Joanne Patston just
wouldn’t get lost. And it made little real sense, given that both prime suspects were filth, for her to be as vexed as she was.

As
obsessed.

Except that something she and Keenan had lightly touched on after calling on Allbeury – that Keenan had then dismissed – was back in her head now, needling,
itching
at
her.

What if it
was
the men, those two scummy husbands, that Allbeury, self-styled defender of unhappy women, was after? Killing the women, maybe putting them out of their misery, in order to
send the men down?

Patston hit the kid, not his wife.

Defender of unhappy women and children.

And maybe – Shipley took the line of thought further a few hours later, prodding absently at her roast beef meal-for-one, while the
Eastenders
omnibus screeched its way through
early Sunday afternoon – there had been more than two shitbag husbands? More than two unhappy wives?

‘Christ,’ she said, and pushed away the food.

She thought again about the Bolsover murder weapon, remembered Kirby calling her paranoid when she’d told him she thought the discovery reeked.

No one was going to listen to something this wild, either. This
groundless.
And without official back-up it was going to be incredibly tough to try sifting through old wife-slaying cases
searching for invisible links with Robin Allbeury.

So only one thing to do, Shipley decided, wrapping her dinner in an old Tesco plastic bag and going to get dressed.

Ask him.

‘May I be frank, Mr Allbeury?’

‘I’d appreciate that.’

She had phoned ahead to say she needed another word, and had thought she’d heard him sigh, but then he’d said she was welcome to return, and that was
one
thing she was
determined to try to do, she’d decided on her way back to Shad Tower, try needling him out of that infuriatingly calm courtesy, maybe reach the other side of him.

If it existed, a cautionary voice had said.

They were on the terrace, outside the living room, which Shipley now saw ran the full length of the apartment. It was warm for mid-October, and Allbeury was sipping mineral water and wearing a
black short-sleeved polo shirt and jeans.

‘I don’t understand you,’ she said.

‘Do you need to?’ he asked.

‘I don’t much enjoy puzzles I can’t solve,’ Shipley said. ‘You’re a puzzle.’

‘I find all sorts of people puzzling,’ Allbeury said.

‘If we weren’t dealing with the murders,’ she went on, ‘of two very nice women, I wouldn’t give a stuff about trying to work you out.’