Singled Out (24 page)

‘Whereas in fact Michael was in a pub in Ladbroke Grove on Friday evening.'

‘So …? The information was wrong.'

Laura looked into Kent's eyes. ‘I've just been down to your house,' she said.

‘What?'

‘Down to Hotwells.'

‘Why?'

‘I was scared. I needed to see you. But you weren't there.'

‘No …' He looked bewildered. He didn't know where all this was leading.

But Laura knew. ‘I couldn't make anyone hear when I rang the bell, so I let myself in. I went upstairs. There was music coming from the master bedroom.'

Kent was now staring at her, an expression of anticipated horror on his face.

‘Viv and Denise were on the bed,' said Laura quietly. ‘They were making love.'

Kent averted his head as she went on, ‘They're not mother and daughter, are they? They never were mother and daughter. Yours has always been … what's the expression that's used in these circumstances … a marriage of convenience …?'

Kent looked up at her defiantly. ‘So why the hell not? We'd known each other in London. Viv and Denise had been together for years. We were moving to a new place with no history. We both knew how nosy and unforgiving people can be if you don't fit into one of their stereotypes – particularly in a gossipy, backbiting organization like the police force. The world is full of couples, you see, and if you become part of a couple, ninety per cent of the world's curiosity about you instantly vanishes.'

‘So you and Viv made a deal?'

‘To our mutual benefit, yes. We'd get married, we'd pass off Denise as a product of Viv's disastrous first marriage …'

‘Which never existed?'

‘Too right.' Kent let out a bark of bitter laughter. ‘She'd never let a man near her.'

‘So she and Denise always slept in the master bedroom and you in the spare room?'

‘Yes. And we very rarely saw each other. Shift patterns in our kind of work can easily be manipulated to keep two people apart.'

‘But didn't anyone suspect?'

Kent shook his head. ‘No. As I say, when you're part of a couple, people lose interest in you. Anyway, you and I, of all people, know what can be hidden behind the net curtains of a nice middle-class house, don't we, Laura?'

She looked thoughtful. ‘I can see what was in the arrangement for Viv and Denise, but what did you get out of it, Kent?'

‘The same as they did. Freedom from prying eyes. Nobody trying to find my dark secrets.'

‘What dark secrets?'

He laughed harshly. ‘
You
have to ask me that. Would it make it clearer if I said
our
dark secrets.'

Laura looked at her brother, and suddenly she understood. ‘Oh, my God, Kent …'

‘What?'

‘You sent the fax, didn't you? You lured Michael to the bridge … How did you do it? Tell him I wanted to see him? Tell him I'd changed my mind and I was going to give him some money? Oh, Kent …'

Her brother was silent.

‘I got it right, didn't I?' Laura continued in an even voice. ‘About the murderer's motivation. The knowledge that I was having sex put such mental pressure on him that he became homicidal. That was why the stranglings happened. Only thing I got wrong was the casting. I thought it was Michael who was affected like that. But no, it was you, wasn't it, Kent? All the time it was you.'

He sank down into a chair, with his head in his hands. Something between a choke and a sob racked his body.

‘Oh, Kent …' said Laura. ‘Why couldn't you have talked about it?'

‘You don't talk about things like that,' he replied in a strangled voice. ‘You pretend everything's all right. You go through the motions, you do everything you should … until the pressure becomes intolerable, and then you do the only thing you can do.'

Laura looked down pityingly at the knotted muscles of her brother's back under the inevitable grey jacket.

‘We were damaged, Laura. We were so damaged. It wasn't what he did to me, I could stand that. It was what I saw him doing to you. It was so cruel. I needed to protect you. And yet at the same time I could feel a bit of what he felt. I could feel the anger, the hatred of women that was in him when he fucked you – the hatred that is perhaps in all men when they fuck women.'

‘No,' said Laura. ‘No.'

‘And with this need to protect you, all the time I also felt the need to hurt you. You were a woman and I hated your sex. I hated the two-facedness of women – the charming, the demure, polite, untouchable bit – and then the hungry, lustful, the greedy …' he swallowed ‘… sexuality. And the hatred and the lust and the violence all … got mixed up,' he concluded lamely.

‘And you felt all this violence towards me?'

‘Yes. Yes. Not when you were yourself, when you were innocent and feminine and gentle, but … when I thought of you as a sexual being … when he fucked you … when anyone fucked you.'

‘And then you felt an urge so strong that you had to go out and find someone else to … take it out on?'

He nodded, almost metronomically. ‘And when I'd done it, when I'd strangled the other woman – the woman who was Laura but at the same time wasn't Laura – then I felt better. The pressure was relieved, the thoughts had gone away, I could get on with my life.'

‘But you must have known the risks you were taking. Weren't you afraid of being found out?'

‘No.' He smiled with something like pride. ‘I was clever enough to get away with it – and of course uniquely placed to get away with it. As a detective I was on the spot, I could control the way an investigation went.

‘I can control the way this new investigation at the bridge goes. I can edit my version of what happened to Michael. There won't be any problem. The police like open-and-shut cases.'

‘And what about the investigation into Emily's murder?'

‘Control that one too. See which enquiries are made, which aren't made.'

‘But how could you have killed her, Kent? She was only a child.'

‘I had to, Laura,' he replied seriously. ‘Had to. I'd seen you going back to Temple Meads with Philip. I thought he was on his way back to London. But when I saw you coming out again, arm in arm, I knew … I knew how it'd end up.' He swallowed uncomfortably.

‘I saw you when you came back here. I sat on a bench in Brandon Hill Park and … the pressure started to build up again. When I saw Emily arrive, I knew what I'd have to do. And when she came out …'

The sentence didn't need finishing, but his perverse boastfulness continued. ‘And take that man – Tom's father. Once I'd tracked him down it was easy to fabricate enough evidence to have him pulled in for questioning. Easy enough to arrange time alone with him in his cell – and to make it look like suicide.'

‘But why did you do that, Kent? Why did you have to kill him?'

‘To punish you, Laura.' He looked at her smugly. ‘I was very annoyed by what you'd done. You had to be made to suffer for it.'

‘So all I went through – all the agonies of thinking my son's father was a murderer – you set that up?'

‘Yes,' said Kent. ‘Looking after someone is not just being nice to them, you know. Sometimes, if they get out of line, they have to be disciplined. You had to be disciplined. I was being cruel to be kind.'

‘So you've been watching me? All the time you've been spying on me, Kent?'

He smiled and nodded. ‘It shows how much I care for you. I set up the marriage with Viv so that no one would think it odd my staying down here near you. I've even turned down promotion because it would have meant moving away from you, Laura.'

‘But why? Why have you done all this?'

‘Because I love you, Laura. I've always loved you.'

‘You have a pretty damned peculiar way of showing it.'

‘Yes.' He chuckled. ‘Yes, I do, don't I?'

‘But all those murders … The three girls, Tom's father, Michael … Do you realize that's five people you've killed, Kent? Five human lives you've taken away?'

He was confident now, almost preening as he corrected her. ‘Six.'

‘Six?'

‘Our father was capable of abusing us, but he hadn't got the balls to commit murder.'

‘You mean, you …?'

Kent nodded complacently. ‘I'd seen him fucking you the day before. All the thoughts built up. It was intolerable. I could feel the violence welling up in me. At first I turned it inward, I decided to top myself. I even went downstairs to the kitchen to find the carving knife. And then she came in. She asked what I was doing with the knife and I told her. I told her I was going to kill myself … and do you know what she said …?'

Wordlessly, Laura shook her head. Kent chuckled as he spoke, ‘She said, “No, you mustn't do that. What will people think? What kind of upbringing will they think we've given you?” And that was so typical of her – pretending nothing was wrong, ignoring the hell he was putting us through. My anger just welled up, and my hands were round her throat before I had time to think about it. She looked very like you,' he reminisced fondly.

‘And when I'd done it, when I'd killed her, I felt liberated. It was all right. I now knew what I had to do when the pressure got too bad.' He sniggered. ‘And also of course I'd got rid of him at the same time. It was easy for me to invent a history of domestic violence, and the police were more than ready to swallow it. Anyway, I arranged her body so that it looked as if he'd done it.'

‘So all the time that our father was protesting his innocence, he was actually telling the truth?'

‘I'd never call him innocent, Laura. Not after what he did to us.'

‘No, not innocent, but innocent of murder.'

‘Well, he got punished for it, anyway. And that meant he couldn't get at you any more, so everything was all right … until you married Michael.'

‘And then it all started again?'

Kent nodded. The confession seemed to have relaxed him.

‘You'll have to tell someone,' said Laura. ‘There are people who can help you.'

‘Crap! I don't need help. I'm fine as I am.'

‘Don't be ridiculous. You know how damaged you are.'

‘Oh yes, but I've learned to live with the damage. My whole life, you could say, has been an exercise in damage limitation. And now comes the moment that it has all been leading up to.'

He was on his feet so quickly Laura did not have time to move away as his muscular arms pulled her up towards him. She felt the fierce rigidity of his erection against her.

‘I love you, Laura,' said Kent. ‘I've always loved you. At last, this is the real thing.'

She tried to move away, but his hands clamped her head to push her lips to his. The hands slipped down to rest either side of her neck. Gently at first. Lightly. Then the fingers stiffened and the hands closed inexorably together.

It was relaxing, somehow right. And strangely erotic, thought Laura, as the air was squeezed from her and consciousness waned. She was almost disappointed by the commotion, the shouts. She was aware of one of Kent's hands releasing its grip, and then the other. She slipped down to the floor.

She can only have been out a few seconds. When she opened her eyes, she saw Kent standing at bay, holding the gun. Opposite him stood Tom and a bulky youth she had never seen before.

‘Either of you make one move and I'll shoot!'

‘Don't do that, Kent.' Laura's voice was drowsy and languorous. ‘That won't solve anything.' Somehow she managed to pull herself up to her feet. She advanced towards her brother with hand outstretched. ‘Give me the gun, Kent.'

‘I'll shoot you.'

‘No,' she purred. ‘That's not your method. That wouldn't be half as much fun. Come on, hand it over.'

Kent stood for a moment undecided. Then, with the gun still in his hand, he turned on his heel and went out into the hall. Laura heard the front door bang shut as she moved across to the bay window. She twitched the curtain aside. Kent's car was parked in the thin beam of a streetlamp. Laura saw him get in. The interior light was doused as the door closed.

She waited for the sounds of the engine starting, but they did not come. Instead she saw a little flare of orange from inside the car, followed by a sound like the bursting of an inflated paper bag.

Laura really liked Craig, the bulky youth who had helped Tom to save her life. So did Tom. In fact, Tom loved Craig.

‘I'd known him for a while,' he explained to her later as they sat over lunch in her favourite Thai restaurant. ‘I was really attracted, but I still held off.' He grinned wryly. ‘Tried to be straight, conventional, live up to your nice middle-class standards, you see, “Mummy”.'

‘I haven't got nice middle-class standards,' Laura objected.

‘Oh, but you have. They're the last things to die. Most inherited traits can be whittled away in a few generations, but if a family's ever been touched by the fatal kiss of the bourgeoisie, that never goes away.'

‘Nonsense,' said Laura affectionately, delighted to see how much more relaxed her son had become.

‘Emily was the last-ditch attempt on my part to be straight,' he went on. ‘And for a time I thought it'd work. We got on well intellectually, I was quite happy to let her organize my life, I even began to think marriage was a possibility. You'd have been pleased if I'd got married, wouldn't you, “Mummy”?'

Laura just managed to curb her instinctive, ‘not to Emily'. Mustn't speak ill of the dead, though she couldn't pretend that she'd found the girl anything other than a self-centred, repellent little prig.

‘You see, with Emily it was only all right while it stayed platonic. Suited me well that she wanted to defer sex, you know, gave me more time to convince myself that the whole thing might work. But when we got into bed …' He shook his head ruefully. ‘Can't pretend then, can you?'