The Full Legacy (23 page)

I grinned up at her as best I could, stitched and pinned as I was. ‘I’m pleased!’ I said.

Then I had to fight for breath against a tidal wave of bosom as she flung her arms around me and covered all the uninjured bits of my head with kisses.

Betrayal

Suzanne went to the Press. She bared her soul to some nasty little sleaze-ball with a cheque book and photographer in tow and was rewarded with a Front-page spread in one of the lower-end tabloids entitled ‘Death Plunge Artist’s Daughter in Lesbian Love Shame.’

God knows why she did it. Maybe it was revenge or guilt for the way things had turned out with Mary... Or maybe she really did feel that Turner had used her? I don’t think it was the money. Kay told me her fee just about paid for a holiday in Tenerife that she didn’t want and didn’t really enjoy. So, I don’t know why she chose to twist the knife on us like that and I’ve never spoken to her about it. In fact, since the day the revelations went to press, I’ve never spoken to her again.

All I can say is that it was sordid and humiliating. The first thing I knew about it was when I saw the headline on the WI trolley being pushed down the ward that morning. Like everyone else, I paid my money and read the lurid details of how my girlfriend had ‘seduced’ Suzanne when she attempted to confide her worries about Mary; the ‘kinky sex romps’ in Turner’s office; the unceremonious ‘dumping’ in a five star London Restaurant when Turner moved on to ‘pastures new’ with a ‘lesbian backstreet glamour photographer’. There was a pouty looking photograph of Suzanne wearing a lot of lipstick and showing an inordinate amount of cleavage for someone claiming to be heartbroken and ‘racked with guilt’. There was also a blurred image of Turner on one of her visits to me in hospital that had obviously been sold on by one of the local hacks and, bizarrely, a rather risqué still from one of my mum’s early film appearances in her ‘Carry On’ walk-on totty days.

The worst thing though was the veiled accusation that Turner had somehow been instrumental in what had happened to Mary and to her mother. The press pack outside swelled and eyebrows around the ward rose rather higher than usual as people cast me covert glances over their tabloids.

Then the local TV news started to run the story. I watched the photos on some kind of continuous silent loop on the TV set wall-mounted at the end of the ward. I noticed a lot more people than usual had their headphones on that night.

I missed Turner. She couldn’t come to see me apparently because she was ‘Helping the police with their enquiries.’

And for once, I wished that my mum could be there to take centre stage and take some of the heat off
me
.

The Second Interview

The police came back to see me too. The mousey-haired police woman brought an older male officer this time. DS Gary Jackson was unshaven and smelt of cigarette smoke. He looked like a character in an ITV police drama. Something by Lynda La Plante maybe, where the hero goes to bed clutching a bottle of whisky and it’s never quite daylight. His colleague was DC Jackie Walker. As soon as he said the name, I vaguely remembered it from before.

‘This doesn’t smell right,’ he said. ‘People have a tendency to end up getting hurt when your girlfriend’s around.’

‘Look,’ I protested. ‘I’ve already told you what happened...’

 ‘But I’m sure you can see why I’m concerned,’ he talked over me in his dour Cockney accent. ‘It’s like... your friend Mary gets a threatening phone call from your bit o’stuff and next thing we know, she’s under a lorry on the M25. Then the dear old mum goes to the family pile to talk about all the shenanigans and, oops, just happens to fall out of the attic window. Oh... and then, just to put the icing on the cake, your lady friend gets to inherit everything. Some people might say that’s not bad for a week’s work, eh?’

They’d told me I was still being interviewed as a witness rather than as a suspect, though I wasn’t entirely sure about that. It wouldn’t take a huge leap to imagine that Turner and I could have been working together and her mother had just put up more of a fight than we’d expected.

‘This must all be explained in Joyce Waters’ suicide note.’ I said. I figured it was worth a try.

‘Suicide notes can be dictated love. We’re checking the forensics on the gun even as we speak...  All the guns in the house actually, and trust me, there were a fair few... We’ll see who’s had their mitts on them.... ‘Cos I can see it all now. Poor old bird with a gun pointed at her head, scribbling away frantically, confessing all.’

This guy really
was
a maverick. His colleague stared studiously at the floor. I wondered how she felt about working with him. Probably thought he was a total knob. And it was good to tell that he’d never met Joyce Waters. ‘Dear old mum’ and ‘Poor old bird’ were hardly words I’d use to describe her. Under the circumstances though, I thought it was safer not to check that he was talking about Turner’s mother and not her granny.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said.

‘Alright,’ he perched on the edge of my bed. He wasn’t supposed to. Any movement hurt me still. I noticed his colleague flicking her eyes at him to get off. He moved across to the chair and left her standing beside him as he stretched out his long skinny legs and hooked his hands behind his head, revealing large dark sweat-rings under his armpits. ‘What
was
it like then?’

I hesitated. I’d had a lot of time to think since I regained consciousness and I thought I’d got the measure of things. It was a gamble though. And if I’d got it wrong I reckoned Turner would almost certainly end up behind bars. If I’d got it
very
wrong, I might even end up there with her.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘You want this from the beginning?’

‘Right from the start, sweetheart. I’m all ears.’

I told them the story, in so far as I knew, or guessed it. I think he saw the logic in what I was saying. And there was something about the way his colleague nodded quietly at salient points that made me think it must fit with the suicide note.

‘So, you are confirming that Mrs Shaw had the opportunity to erase the answerphone message?’ he clarified, ‘even though she denied it to you.’

‘Yes. I’m sure she was lying. She knew about the message, and she certainly had the opportunity to delete it. But I think the call was from Turner’s mother rather than from Turner. I reckon Turner listened to the recording when Suzanne asked her about it - recognised her mother’s voice – knew that she must have arranged to meet Mary on the night she died - and wiped the tape to protect her.’

‘So, you think Mrs Shaw believed her mother had killed Mary and destroyed evidence that would incriminate her?’

It didn’t sound great when he put it like that.

‘I think she wanted to talk to her mother about it.... Ask her what had happened.’

‘And destroy valuable evidence in the meantime?’

This wasn’t going well. I could see that.

‘Yes... or no?’ pressed Jackson.

‘Yes,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I think so.’

‘Okay.... And on the night Mrs Waters died?’

‘She joined us at the house in the early hours of the morning. She’d spoken to Adam on Turner’s behalf and, I believe, persuaded him to tone down his demands regarding a divorce settlement.

I was in the kitchen when she arrived and by the time I met her in the drawing room, Turner was on the phone to Adam. She... Turner, that is... seemed relieved when she joined us. She said the conversation had gone well. Then Mrs Waters asked if she could speak to Turner alone and I left the room, but I overheard some of what they were saying after I’d gone.’

‘Was that because they were shouting at each other?’

‘No, it was because I stayed outside the door for a while... I wanted to know what was going on.’

‘So you were eavesdropping?’

I nodded, feeling myself blushing. It seemed that it wasn’t only my body that had taken a battering since Turner came into my life. My bruised self esteem cringed within me.

‘Don’t blame you,’ said DS Jackson, flipping effortlessly into ‘Good Cop’. ‘I’d have wanted to know what was going on too if I were you... Right bloody can o’worms if you ask me. Bet you were starting to wonder if you were gonna get murdered in your bed.’

I ignored the last part of this, though I’m ashamed to say that my conscience felt slightly mollified by the first.

‘I’d already seen some letters in the study that morning. They were in a copy of “Bonjour Tristesse”.’ I figured I may as well confess to all my snooping at once.

And I had to restrain a slight smile as DC Walker leant over her boss and whispered ‘That’s double S...E sir. And that ‘O’ should be a ‘U’.’

He grinned. ‘Never could get a handle on all that foreign lingo,’ he said, correcting his notes.

‘Anyway,’ I continued. ‘Mrs Waters seemed upset about Turner having a same sex relationship... or maybe I should say relationships in the plural.’ I cringed inside as I said this, but there was no point denying it. ‘She thought it may be linked to a teacher who had behaved inappropriately with her at school.’

Jackson glowered. ‘Don’t have a name for the bastard, do you? We might be able to nail him. ‘Specially if there’ve been other complaints.’

I warmed to him then.

‘Actually, it was a woman.’

‘Blimey!’ I saw his eyes glaze briefly and suspected that he’d wandered off on some soft-core lesbian gymslip fantasy. DC Walker rolled her eyes. I wondered, not for the first time, if she was ‘family’. Then Jackson snapped himself back into reality.

‘Name?’ he prompted.

I struggled to remember it. ‘Miss Christie.... I think... You could check it with Turner.’

‘Is she likely to still be working with kids?’

‘I don’t know. She left the school suddenly. Somebody tipped off Turner’s mum and she intervened in some way. I
hope
she did it the right way and spoke to the headmistress, but I doubt that she would have wanted to make things that public. So I suspect she will probably have just warned the woman off... maybe even
paid
her off. In either case, I’m not sure whether an agreement about never working with girls again would have been part of the deal.’

 ‘Okay, we’ll check it out. Put the fear of God into the headmistress if she’s still at the school. I’m guessing it was some posh private place?’

‘Yes, Turner said it was fee-paying. She was boarding there.’ I felt tired. It was hard sustaining concentration over the pain medication. I struggled on. I knew that I needed to get to the end before I lost their sympathy. ‘So... then they must have moved closer together and I couldn’t hear anymore, so I went to bed. Turner came up about half an hour later and she was worried about her mother. She said she’d suddenly got upset when she mentioned about Mary.’

‘ “Mentioned about Mary”?... That’s how she put it?’

‘Yes. But she hadn’t confided in me remember. I think what she really meant was that she asked her mother what the hell had happened that night.’

I wondered why I’d struggled to piece it all together for so long. I guess my thinking had been clouded by my distrust of Turner... my suspicion that, just maybe, she had done something that had spiralled into tragedy for everyone concerned.

‘I didn’t put it all together at the time. There was such a lot going on. I’m sure now that Mrs Waters met Mary up in that pub car park where they found her abandoned Fiesta. But I don’t think she knew until Turner told her, that Mary was dead. She got really upset again when I asked her about it later in the loft. I thought she might be drunk, but I think she was in shock. She kept saying that she hadn’t known. That she’d just bolted like a scared animal... That it shouldn’t have happened... stuff like that.’

Slowly, I watched Jackson and Walker exchanging looks. My mouth was dry. I wondered if it would look as if I were lying if I had a sip of water. I daren’t risk it. I pushed on.

‘To all intents and purposes, on the day it happened, Mary’s death was either suicide or a tragic road accident. I don’t think it even made it onto the local news.... And Turner’s mother had already gone off to stay with friends by the following morning anyway. I think she was horrified when she found out what had happened. I think she blamed herself. And the guilt was just too much for her.’

Jackson pulled thoughtfully at his lip.

‘Doesn’t make sense to me,’ he said. ‘Why would Mary run like that? She was holding all the cards.’

I took my final gamble, staking everything on the “we” that Joyce Waters had used when she spoke of that night.

‘I think she had Adam there as back-up,’ I said. ‘I know he went round to see Joyce that evening because Turner complained to me about it. And Joyce told me that she and Adam had always done their best to protect Turner. I doubt that she will have mentioned it to you, but Turner’s bipolar... And from what Joyce said, this certainly wasn’t the first scrape the two of them had taken it upon themselves to extricate her from.’

‘Bipolar, right?’

‘That’s an “i” sir,’ said DC Walker....

‘So, I’m guessing Joyce phoned Mary and suggested meeting. And I think she deliberately chose somewhere lonely to put the frighteners on her. It was late at night, in a deserted pub car park. Joyce arrived first and tried to reason with Mary – probably even offered her cash to shut her up.  Then Adam turned up. And Mary will have panicked when she saw a strange man walking towards them. She’ll have thought she’d been set up. She’d had a bad childhood and she was nervous of men anyway. She wasn’t to know he wouldn’t beat her up – or worse. Turner’s mum said that Mary “bolted, like she’d been spooked” She must have been scared out of her wits to run so blindly. I think they probably tried to chase after her, but that would have just frightened her even more and I think she got away from them.’

 Poor Mary, even as I described the sequence of events, I could see it all, as I’d witnessed it in my dream and only half remembered. It broke my heart to think of how frightened she must have been. I could imagine Joyce Waters wanting to frighten Mary to protect her daughter. But I knew she would never have intended to actually harm her. After the way she had tried to help me, I knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt.