Now You See Me (30 page)

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Authors: Sharon Bolton

BOOK: Now You See Me
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‘Y
OU'D BETTER COME AND STAY WITH US TONIGHT,' SAID Helen, looking down at me. ‘Dana keeps the spare room made up in case the two of us have a row.' I looked up and tried to smile. Helen's long blonde hair was plaited behind her head. It made her look younger.
‘I'll stay with her,' said Joesbury from the doorway. He'd spoken to Helen, but then dropped his eyes to me. ‘If you'd prefer to stay here, Lacey.'
I could sense Helen's eyebrows rising towards her hair. I nodded. ‘Thank you,' I said, to no one in particular.
‘How're they doing out there?' asked Helen.
‘They're done for now,' said Joesbury. ‘They're going to seal off the shed and the garden. Just in case there's anything left to find in daylight. Let's hope the rain holds off.'
‘Have they taken it away?' I asked.
‘Yep,' said Joesbury.
‘You've been very brave,' said Helen, her hand on my shoulder.
The three of us were in my sitting room. The clock on the cooker told me it was nearly four in the morning. I was on the sofa, Helen perched on one arm. Dana and the rest of the team were processing the crime scene my garden and shed had become. I hadn't moved since Helen had sat me down and wrapped the duvet around my shoulders shortly after she'd arrived. She'd made me tea, but my hand had been shaking too much to drink it. She'd suggested I
might be in shock and that perhaps I should be taken to A&E. I'd refused and begged her not to mention it to Dana. So far she hadn't.
‘Did the cameras pick anything up?' I asked Joesbury.
‘Not a sausage. We had them all angled towards the house, not the ruddy garden shed.'
‘How did she even get in there?' asked Helen.
‘The key wasn't hard to find,' said Joesbury. ‘Tully has just torn me off a strip for not securing the shed as well as the flat.'
‘Is she leaving uniform outside for the rest of the night?' asked Helen.
Joesbury nodded.
‘Good. Not that I don't have complete faith in you, of course.' She gave my shoulder a squeeze. ‘Lacey, you need to be very careful. Just because she hasn't hurt you yet doesn't mean she won't. She could just be saving you for last.'
‘Way to cheer the girl up,' said Joesbury, shrugging off his jacket and draping it over the back of a chair.
‘Yeah, well I don't know about you, but I prefer my girls scared and alive,' said Helen.
 
Ten minutes later, Dana and Helen said goodnight. I still hadn't moved. The clock on my cooker is silent and yet I swear that night I could hear it ticking. Steady, relentless. I heard Joesbury turning the key in the conservatory door, pulling the bolts. The alarm beeped as he turned it back on. Then the door between the bedroom and the conservatory was locked and bolted. He came into the living room and crossed it without looking at me. The front door got the Joesbury treatment. We were shut off from the world.
‘Can I get you anything?' he said from the door.
I shook my head and felt, rather than heard, him come closer.
‘Come on,' he said. He was standing in front of me, holding out his hand. I took it and stood up, holding the duvet around me.
Time was running out. I didn't know how much longer I had. I didn't know what or when it was all going to come to an end. All I knew was that I wanted Mark Joesbury – impossible to pretend otherwise any longer – and this might be my last chance.
Together, we walked into the bedroom.
I think he flicked off the lights. I know I put the duvet down on
the bed and pulled it straight. I climbed beneath it without removing my clothes. I wanted to feel his hands pulling them off. He sat on the edge of the bed with his back to me and took off his shoes.
The rooms at the back of the house are so dark. He was little more than a shadow now but I caught the glint in his eyes and heard the rustle of the mattress and knew he'd turned to face me. I pulled the duvet back, inviting him in, holding my breath, waiting to feel his weight pushing me down.
Instead he wrapped the duvet round me, before leaning away as if about to stand up.
Well, I wasn't giving in that easily. I sat upright and caught hold of his arm. The tip of my nose brushed against his face and I found his mouth. Taking his bottom lip between both of mine I pulled gently. Then I did the same with his top lip. I ran my tongue lightly around the outline of his mouth and blew gently across it. He didn't move.
I raised my hand and reached for his face, meaning to hold him still while I kissed him long and deep. Moving faster than me, he caught my hand in his.
‘No,' he whispered. Then he stood up.
I could have persisted. Gently stroking fingers, soft kisses in the right places. He was only a man, when all was said and done. But I learned something that night. When everything else is slipping away, pride is one thing you cling on to. I didn't push it. Instead, I lay back down on the bed and waited for the morning.
 
I didn't expect to sleep, but I must have done because some time later I woke to hear breathing. I turned, soundlessly. Joesbury was in the chair at the foot of the bed, his head turned my way, his eyes open. I stared at him, at his face that was just starting to emerge from the darkness, and he didn't move.
That's when what I'd suspected for a while became certainty. Mark Joesbury wasn't here for my protection. He was here to protect other people. From me.
He thought I was Victoria Llewellyn.
13 September, ten years earlier
 
V
ICTORIA LLEWELLYN IS STRUGGLING TO BREATHE. AIR IS GOING in, and out again, faster than feels normal, but it's just not having the right effect. There isn't enough oxygen getting to her brain and that light-headed, drifting-away-from-reality feeling is coming over her again. It's a common enough reaction to grief, she knows, sudden breathlessness, but what she can't deal with is this sense of the world slipping away, leaving her behind, alone, in the void.
She's sitting, bent forward almost double, her head just above her knees. She can't remember finding a bench on the towpath, the last thing she can remember is seeing a houseboat like the one Cathy had been living on, and then stumbling away, but the wooden slats are hard and damp beneath her and she's grateful. Because while she's sitting down, she won't fall.
They are getting increasingly common, these periods when she can't remember anything. When her life has just been wiped away like an old lesson from a school whiteboard.
A cardboard drink cup floats past her downriver and she tries not to think of Cathy and those other kids being swept away, sinking down into the depths. She tries not to think about the washed ivory skin and the matted fair hair of the drowned girl she identified only a few days before.
Cathy is gone.
She has a sense of someone hurrying past. She glances up in time to see
the suspicious look, the hurrying footsteps, and she realizes that the knife is in her hand again. Her knuckles are white, her fingers starting to hurt. Without noticing it, she's been slicing into the wooden seat beneath her. A dozen or more score marks show where she's dug the blade repeatedly into the wood. She almost drops the knife, then, with a huge effort, manages to close it and slip it back into her pocket.
Cathy is gone. Nothing will bring her back now. Might as well get used to it.
She gets up and makes her way home.
Mary
‘ … he watches to strike his blow with unfailing and remorseless cunning …'
Star
, 10 November 1888
Saturday 6 October
 
W
HEN I WOKE AGAIN, JOESBURY WAS STILL IN THE CHAIR. As I sat up, he took a long, deep breath and let it out slowly. For a second he seemed to stop breathing. Then his chest rose and fell. His eyelashes flickered and settled again. Some time in the very early morning, my guard had fallen asleep.
I got up and found clothes. When the shower had washed away some of the weariness I dried myself, cleaned my teeth and dressed. As I left the bathroom, I could hear someone moving around in the kitchen.
‘Morning,' said Joesbury, glancing up from the previous day's copy of the
Evening Standard
. The kettle was coming to the boil.
‘Sleep well?' I asked him and got a grin in return that I think could have broken my heart, had it not been far too late for any nonsense of that sort. I'll say one thing for Joesbury, he kept his sense of humour till the end.
‘Ready for a road trip?' he asked me, handing over black coffee.
‘Where?' I said.
‘Cardiff.'
He squeezed past and I heard the bathroom door being closed and locked. It wasn't quite six in the morning and the two of us couldn't have had more than four hours' sleep; in his case, half of it had been in a chair. And now he thought we were going to Cardiff?
‘No offence, but three's a crowd in my book,' I said, when he emerged damp around the edges ten minutes later. ‘Gayle Mizon will be packing her best underwear as we speak.'
‘Well, you've got fifteen minutes to pack yours. We can get breakfast on the way.'
‘I'm not coming to Cardiff. And I don't have any best underwear.'
He yawned and scratched behind one ear. ‘Flint,' he said, ‘we're leaving in fifteen minutes, in my car, and you can come with underwear or without it. Your call.'
‘I want to talk to DI Tulloch,' I said.
Joesbury leaned against the worktop, effectively blocking my way out of the kitchen. ‘First, she gets very grouchy in the morning, so sooner you than me,' he said. ‘Second, Helen's flying back to Dundee today, so she'll be in an extra-bad mood, and third, she'll only tell you what she and I agreed a few hours ago. We need you out of London for a while. Last night was a bit close to home.'
I couldn't leave London right now. And I certainly couldn't go to Cardiff.
‘Here is where I need to be,' I said. ‘Llewellyn's done with number four now. She'll be ready for number five. She'll do it soon and I'm still the best chance of catching her. You and Mizon don't need me tagging along.'
‘Gayle isn't coming,' said Joesbury. ‘It's just us two.'
‘And that's supposed to make a difference?'
Joesbury finished his coffee and rinsed the mug out in the sink. ‘If sulking keeps you quiet, that's fine by me,' he said. ‘Ten minutes.'
 
Eight minutes later, with a soundtrack of the house/jazz/funk rhythms that Joesbury didn't seem able to operate a car without, we were heading for the river. On Vauxhall Bridge I closed my eyes and pretended I'd fallen asleep. We stopped for five minutes outside the big white Georgian house in Pimlico where Joesbury had a flat. As we reached Chiswick I risked peeping and saw a rosy glow in the passenger wing mirror. The sun was coming up.
When we hit the M4 Joesbury turned up the volume and picked up speed. A lot of speed. Given the events of the previous night, there seemed a significant risk of his falling asleep at the wheel and killing us both.
All things considered, there were worse ways this could end. So I closed my eyes again and tried to ignore the nagging voice telling me that every mile took me further from where I needed to be. I managed to stay calm enough for the sleep act to be reasonably convincing. Somewhere along the way, exhaustion got the better of adrenalin and the charade became reality. When I woke, Joesbury had pulled into a service station.
‘Where are we?' I asked, as he parked the car and switched off the engine. The music died.
‘Membury,' he answered. ‘Hungry?'
Surprisingly, I was. We both ordered the full English breakfast and took a table beside the window. I managed about half my plate before my stomach started knotting itself up again. If I walked out on Joesbury now, what were the chances of hitching a lift back to London?
‘So, are you going to ask why we're off to Cardiff?' asked Joesbury, as I concentrated on the industrial-strength tea.
I knew exactly why we were going to Cardiff. Joesbury was going to parade me in front of people who'd known Victoria Llewellyn in the hope that one of them would recognize me.
‘Why are we going to Cardiff?' I asked.
‘First up, we're going to talk to Sergeant Ron Williams,' he answered. ‘He was the custody sergeant the night of the rape. He may be able to give us some background on the Llewellyn girls. Or at least, a more accurate idea of what really happened than we'll ever get from the boys or their dads. Are you eating that?'
‘Help yourself.' I pushed my plate across the table.
‘Then we're going to see a woman called Muffin Thomas,' Joesbury went on, in between mouthfuls. ‘She lived next door to the girls for a while, a couple of years before the rape. Lives somewhere called Splatt or Splott or some such.'
‘Muffin being a very common Welsh name,' I said.
Joesbury reached into his pocket and pulled out a notebook. He opened it and turned it to face me.
‘Myfanwy,' I said, deciphering his scrawl.
‘Say again?'
‘Muff-an-wee,' I repeated.
‘Do you actually speak Welsh?'
‘No. Why would I?'
‘Just wondered. Fancy driving from here? I'm wrecked.'
 
Joesbury's car was effortlessly fast, so much smoother and easier to handle than my Golf. In a little pocket by the gear stick I found a Black Eyed Peas album and put it on. In very different circumstances, I might actually have enjoyed the journey.
As we drove into South Wales, an autumn mist started to creep closer to the edges of the motorway. Sleeping Beauty woke up just before Newport and spent the next twenty minutes on the phone to Tulloch.
‘Definitely Karen Curtis's head, no forensic evidence in your shed or garden that will help us, and Jacqui Groves is still very much alive and under close guard,' he said, after ending the call. ‘Tully wishes us a good trip and told me to behave myself.'
‘She'd be proud of you so far,' I muttered, without taking my eyes off the road.
Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Joesbury smiling to himself.
The traffic was heavy going into Cardiff centre and it wasn't far off noon when I pulled up in the Sophia Gardens car park. Joesbury jumped out and went to the ticket machine. There was drizzle in the air and a thick mist was coming off the River Taff.
‘Police station?' I asked when Joesbury got back.
He shook his head and pulled the collar of his jacket up. ‘Nope,' he said, nodding towards the footbridge. ‘We're going for a stroll.'
 
Bute Park is long and narrow, stretching several miles out from the city centre towards the surrounding countryside. Once over the footbridge, we started walking directly across it. After a few minutes the outline of modern buildings on a nearby main road began to take shape. A watercourse, that could have been a backwater of the Taff, or even a drainage ditch, marked the furthest boundary of the park. When we reached it, Joesbury turned right and we headed back towards the city. He hadn't explained why we were here and I wasn't going to ask. It wasn't like I couldn't guess.
‘What do you reckon, Flint? Look like a copper to you?'
I raised my eyes from the path to see a tallish, plumpish man in
his early sixties standing on a narrow, red-brick bridge that crossed the backwater. As we drew closer, the shortness of his hair, the stubbornness of his jaw and just something in his bearing marked him out as one of us.
Sergeant Ron Williams greeted Joesbury first and I waited quietly for my turn. I was wearing my best suit, with a stiff white blouse and tights. My hair was scraped back into my neatest librarian bun and I was wearing glasses. No make-up, of course.
When they'd exchanged a few pleasantries, Sergeant Williams turned to me. Conscious of Joesbury watching the two of us, I gave them both a few seconds.
‘You should see the other guy,' I said, when I figured they'd had long enough. Forcing a smile, I held out my hand for Williams to shake. ‘I'm DC Lacey Flint.'
‘Nice to meet you, DC Flint,' replied Williams, his accent marking him immediately as a man from the Valleys. ‘Now, you're stretching the old grey matter a bit. It was all a long time ago. Shall we start with where it happened?'
Joesbury agreed and Williams led us further along the path in the direction of the city. We were close enough now to see the tall Norman keep and, beyond it, the Gothic-fairytale elegance of Cardiff castle. As we drew level with the castle wall, Williams left the path and set off across the grass. Joesbury followed and, a little way behind, so did I.
‘This is the magnolia lawn we're crossing now,' said Williams. ‘It's quite something in spring.'
The twisted branches of the old trees looked like tendrils reaching out for us. A little way ahead, tall stones began to emerge through the mist.
‘So, you think what's been going on in London is something to do with the Llewellyn girls?' asked Williams, taking out a large white handkerchief and pressing it to his face as we drew nearer to the stones. I'd already noticed his eyes were bloodshot and his nose reddened. Williams was fighting a losing battle with a heavy cold.
‘Just covering all angles,' said Joesbury.
‘I can't see it myself,' said Williams. ‘They were nice girls.'
Joesbury's walk slowed a fraction. ‘That's not the way the boys' families tell it,' he said.
Williams stopped when we were metres away from the stone circle. ‘Aye well, I'm not saying they were angels,' he replied. ‘Cardiff lasses rarely are and the older one did run a bit wild. The younger one, though, good as gold she was. Didn't deserve what happened. She died, I heard.'
In front of us, eleven rough-cut stones made a circle of about thirty metres in diameter. The two largest seemed to form a natural entrance. Williams and Joesbury walked through. I trailed along behind.
‘You were on duty the night of the alleged rape?' asked Joesbury.
‘I was. And then I came down here with the older girl as soon as it was light,' answered Williams. When we were almost in the centre of the circle he stopped.
Joesbury turned on the spot, taking in the upright stones, and the huge flat central one like a sacrificial altar. ‘Is this an ancient monument?' he asked.
Williams blew his nose and shook his head. ‘No,' he said. ‘It was put up in the late seventies. Although the central stone was supposedly part of something Neolithic found in the park. So, do you want me to talk you through it?'
‘Please,' said Joesbury.
‘Victoria and Cathy met up with the boys in the Owain Glyndwr on St John Street,' said Williams. ‘The girls left about twenty past eleven and headed towards the bus stop. When they got to the main road just outside the park, they heard the boys running up after them.'
‘The boys followed them from the pub?' asked Joesbury.
‘Probably, but what they told the girls was a gang of local lads had started some trouble back in the pub and were hot on their heels. They asked how they could get away quickly.'
‘They came in here?' said Joesbury.
Williams nodded. ‘Victoria said she wasn't worried about the boys at that point. In the pub they'd been polite, well behaved. She knew that once they were in the park, they could make for the pedestrian bridge across the river and get into the Sophia Gardens car park. They climbed that gate over there, the one in the wall, the boys helping the girls over.'
Joesbury and I both turned to where Williams was pointing. We
could just about see a darker line in the mist where we knew the huge stone perimeter wall of the park would be.
‘And then it all went wrong,' said Joesbury.
‘Victoria said she and Cathy set off through the park and the boys followed behind. Before long, though, she knew something wasn't right. The boys fell back, out of sight, but they could hear them, catcalling, whispering to each other. Victoria told me she realized she'd made a big mistake so she grabbed hold of Cathy and scarpered.'
‘She tried to outrun them?' asked Joesbury, his eyes flicking from the park entrance to where he judged the bridge would be.

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