Sophie Hannah_Spilling CID 04 (59 page)

‘Why did Aidan give Gemma Crowther your painting?’ Waterhouse asks.

Silence. Or else they’re talking but I can’t hear them any more. When I hear Mary’s voice, I’m relieved. ‘He said they deserved each other. Gemma and the picture.’ She’s crying. ‘As if a painting’s a moral agent, as if it can
deserve
anything. Monday night was going to be the last time he saw her—he told me. He wanted nothing more to do with her, or me. He was going to leave
Abberton
with her because it seemed
appropriate
, he said. And then he’d be rid of us both for ever, me and her.’

‘Makes sense,’ says Waterhouse. ‘That’s why you made him lock
Abberton
in the boot of his car before forcing him at gunpoint to drive here. It wasn’t only about framing him for Gemma’s murder, was it? It was symbolic. You wanted to show him he couldn’t shake you off so easily.’

He as good as sent the police straight to your house, Mary, to see if you’d tell them. If you were going to ruin his life again, he wanted you to get it over with. He was trying to force your hand. You could easily have told Waterhouse or Charlie Zailer the truth: that your name used to be Martha Wyers, that Mary Trelease was the name of a woman Aidan had killed. You could have told them about the painting in his exhibition,
The Murder of Mary Trelease
.

No answers come. No one can hear the questions going round in my head.

What was in the picture, Aidan? Nothing obvious. You’d only have risked calling it
The Murder of Mary Trelease
if it wasn’t too much of a giveaway. It can’t have been a painting of you strangling her in which you were recognisable as the killer—people like Jan Garner and Saul Hansard would have asked questions. So what was it?

‘Me, frame Aidan? He’s a murderer—a cold, calculating murderer. He strangled a woman—he told you so himself and you were too stupid to listen.’

‘Which woman did Aidan kill?’ Waterhouse’s voice swims under the surface of my consciousness. ‘Mary? You said he killed a woman. Which woman?’

‘Me! He killed me!’

‘Simon!’ A third voice. Not mine. A woman’s. I have to open my eyes again. When I do, I see Waterhouse turning, Charlie Zailer at the window, Mary lunging for the gun.
No . . .

She’s got them both now, the gun and the hammer, one in each hand. There’s something wrong with the way she’s holding the hammer.

‘Bussey’s alive, Seed’s dead,’ Waterhouse says.

I breathe in, breathe out. I think to myself that I ought to stop if I want to die.
Suicide: a sin.
Does it count if all you do is stop breathing, when breathing’s so hard? If there’s a God, does he have a view on that?

‘Aidan’s not dead,’ Mary says quickly. ‘If he were dead, I’d be dead, and I’m not.’

‘Put the gun and hammer down, Mary,’ Charlie Zailer says. ‘There’s an ambulance outside. This has to stop now.’

‘Aidan’s not dead! Check.’

I hear movement; then, a few seconds later: ‘She’s right. There’s still a pulse.’

Relief washes through me.
There’s an ambulance outside, Aidan. Just hold on a little bit longer.

‘Stay away from me!’ Mary growls like an animal. She’s behind Waterhouse, pressing the gun against his head. Her hand is shaking, her finger wobbling the trigger. ‘I’ll kill him if you come any closer.’

‘That’s my fiancé you’ve got there,’ says Charlie. ‘Did you know that? Remember, we talked about him? You wondered why I wouldn’t choose to paint him, if I had to paint somebody.’

‘I don’t care who he is. Stop where you are, or I’ll shoot him. I mean it!’

‘I love him. We’re supposed to be getting married, even though everyone we know thinks it’s a really bad idea.’

‘Shut up!’

‘It isn’t a bad idea, though, because I can’t be happy unless I’m with Simon. And after what I’ve been through, I think I deserve to be happy. You know all about what happened to me, right? You told me you did. I’m just like you, Martha. My life was in pieces, all because of a man . . .’

‘Don’t call me that!’

‘. . . but I was lucky enough to find a way out of my despair. I’ve got a chance to be happy now, and . . . well, the thing is, Simon and I haven’t actually been happy together yet, even though we’ve known each other for years. All we’ve done is waste time.’

Mary swings the gun round, points it at Charlie. The hammer falls from her left hand. That’s right: she broke her fingers.

‘Put the gun down, Mary,’ says Waterhouse.

‘Keep quiet!’ Her voice is shaking so much, I barely recognise the words. ‘Or I’ll shoot you so you die, like Gemma. Not like these two. I never wanted to kill them. Ruth’s my friend.’

‘You didn’t want to kill Aidan?’ Charlie says. ‘You shot him in the chest.’

‘I shot him in the shoulder. I . . . I meant to aim higher. I didn’t want to shoot him at all, but he wouldn’t . . .’

‘Wouldn’t what?’

‘He wouldn’t admit that he loves me.’

I hear a series of noises that are painful to listen to: shrill one minute, rasping the next. Can they all be coming from Mary? They don’t sound human.

‘The medics need to come in here and help Aidan and Ruth,’ says Charlie gently. ‘You’re going to let them do that, aren’t you, Martha?’

‘Martha’s dead!’

‘You said you didn’t want to kill them . . .’

‘If I do what you’re asking, what will happen to me?’

‘Prison. You know that. You’re not stupid. You’ll be able to paint there, though. Or write, if you want to. I’ll make sure of that. I’ll look after you, but first you’ve got to put the gun down.’

‘What about my paintings, the ones in my house? What will happen to them?’

There’s a pause. It seems to last a long time.

‘Nothing. They’ll be waiting for you when you get out. And you will get out. You’ve got to trust—’

‘How long?’

‘I don’t know exactly. With extenuating circumstances taken into account, perhaps five years.’

‘You’re lying!’ Mary waves the gun in the air as if she can’t decide who to aim for. ‘Five years for a murder and two attempted murders? That’s too little. How long? Tell me the truth.’

‘You’ll be allowed to keep some of your paintings with you on the inside,’ says Charlie. I hear fear in her voice for the first time. ‘I’ll do everything I can to make sure—’

‘I wouldn’t be able to take them all with me, would I? All my pictures?’

‘Hand the gun to me and I’ll make sure they go with you, every single one of them.’

‘You’ve seen how many there are.’ Mary’s voice shakes. ‘They won’t fit in a prison cell. I can’t not have them with me.’

‘There are prisons that have other kinds of accommodation, not only cells. Women’s prisons especially. Some prisoners have their own rooms, or they share with one other person, but the rooms are a decent size.’

‘Sounds like a Villiers dorm.’

‘It’s true, Mary,’ says Waterhouse. ‘We’ll make sure you have the space you need for your paintings.’

‘You’re lying, both of you,’ she says, sounding calmer. ‘That’s okay. I won’t hold it against you.’ She lifts the gun, holds it to the side of her own head. When she speaks again, I can hear that she’s smiling, even though her face is turned away from me. ‘Now, Martha,’ she says. ‘No mistakes this time.’

‘No!’ Charlie screams.

‘I think yes,’ says Mary, and pulls the trigger.

‘The CPS won’t touch it with a bargepole unless we can do better than this,’ said Proust. His ‘World’s Greatest Grandad’ mug lay on its side. He rolled it back and forth on his desk, smacking the handle against the wood every few seconds. ‘It doesn’t help that Aidan Seed’s in the habit of confessing to killings that never took place. He still hasn’t offered a satisfactory explanation for why he did that—why tell us he’d killed one woman when in fact he’d killed someone altogether different?’

‘He’s still in bad shape, sir,’ said Charlie. ‘Ruth Bussey’s explained it in Seed’s presence. I was there. I saw him confirm her explanation as best he could. Seed regretted having told Bussey he’d killed Trelease. He got cold feet about facing up to the truth after all these years, and by that time he knew Martha Wyers was calling herself Mary Trelease, so he decided to turn what he’d originally intended to be the beginning of his true confession—“I killed Mary Trelease”—into an easily disprovable false one.’ Charlie shrugged. ‘I know you don’t like it, but it does make sense, sir.’

‘If that’s your opinion, Sergeant Zailer, then you have my condolences.’

‘We’ve been through this,’ said Simon impatiently.

‘Not everyone’s mind works in exactly the same way yours does, sir.’

Proust gave Charlie the look he reserved for despicable traitors.

‘Even if we accept Bussey and Seed’s explanation and a revised confession from Seed, it’s going to be an uphill struggle if Len Smith sticks to his story,’ said Sam Kombothekra.