Текст книги "Dead Dream Girl"

Автор книги: Richard Haley

Соавторы: Richard Haley
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 12 страниц)

NINE

Crane went to Ilkley by the moor road. The sun shone from a clear sky and the rooftops of Ben Rhydding were as sharply defined as an engraving. He drove rapidly, the greeny-brown mass of the moor’s terrain rising to his left. He was tense, restless, impatient to know what Anderson had learnt. He had to admit that he was a bright bloke, he’d not be crowing that he thought they were there if he’d not got the strongest lead of all. Crane couldn’t shake off his disappointment that a young reporter could get ahead of a police-trained PI. All right, he’d had a massive stroke of luck. It didn’t make him feel any better.

He knew this would probably be a pointless journey, but he couldn’t settle. He’d decided to see Julia Gregson if only to eliminate someone else who appeared to have got to know Donna rather well, going by the deliveries she’d had her make. That other detail still nagged at his mind, some connection he couldn’t quite make.

‘Miss Gregson?’ he’d asked on the phone.

‘Who is this?’ she’d said sharply, in the imperious way moneyed people often had.

‘The name’s Frank Crane. I’m investigating the murder of Miss Donna Jackson on behalf of her parents. The original suspect has been cleared. Could you spare me a little time if I called on you?’

The silence was so lengthy he thought he’d been cut off. Then, ‘I … fail to see what help I can give you. All she did for me was deliver shrubs and bedding plants.’ There was a decided tremor behind the assured hauteur.

‘She made an awful lot of deliveries.’

‘I’ve got an extremely large garden.’

‘Did you become friends, Miss Gregson?’ he said, in a soft tone.

‘There’s nothing I can help you with, Mr Crane. Goodbye.’

‘I’m liaising with the police,’ he said quickly. ‘I shall have to pass on to them this information, and as they’re now on the point of reinvestigating the case themselves I think you’ll find they’ll insist on talking to you. I could possibly spare you that.’

After another silence, she said in a subdued tone, ‘Oh, very well, I’m in all evening.’

The house was off the Ilkley-Skipton road, isolated and standing in extensive grounds, around which ran a high perimeter wall. He drove in through an archway with ornamental gates that stood open. Cheyney Hall was a very grand residence: gabled, chimneyed, stone-built and with a delicately-columned portico sheltering the main entrance. The front garden was mainly sweeping lawn and mature trees, but a central fountain played into a carved stone basin.

She opened the door herself. ‘Come in, Mr Crane.’

She led him across a spacious hall, half-panelled and hung with landscapes in oil, and heavy with the scent of freshly cut flowers, which stood in ornate vases. There were more flowers in the lofty reception room she took him into, in more vases standing on carefully polished antique tables: roses, lilies, marguerites, sweet pea and many more he couldn’t put names to. It brought to Crane’s mind a French tag he’d once read somewhere: Qui fleurit sa maison fleurit son coeur.

Aphone sounded in a distant corner. She excused herself and left him standing by the window. It was rear facing and the spread of land on this side of the house seemed as vast as a park. It was overlooked by a balustraded terrace and in the foreground the garden was formal and geometrical in the precision of its layout, with a pool that was more like a small lake. Beyond it stretched walkways, tapestried hedges, a gazebo and tiny, separate, secluded gardens, shrouded by cherry, apple and laburnum trees. A distant strip of dense woodland formed a boundary. A lengthy, lavishly stocked conservatory ran from the left of the house at right angles. It was the largest garden Crane had ever seen enclosing a private house. He was so absorbed by the scale of the place that for a few seconds he was unaware of her return. She stood watching him in a wary silence.

‘Miss Gregson,’ he said politely, ‘may I ask why you had all those deliveries made of plants and shrubs you didn’t really need?’

She went on watching him in silence. She was about five-six and had dark brown hair looped back into an elegant bun, slightly protruding brown eyes, a rather aquiline nose and an olive complexion. She wore a black rib cardigan and a straight, black, ankle-length skirt. He seemed to detect in her eyes the same bottomless sadness he’d seen several times before in the Donna Jackson case.

‘I … yes … you’re right,’ she said heavily at last. ‘I ordered many things I didn’t need. Would never need. I … I liked to see her. I grew to care for her. She was so very sweet, such a friendly little thing. That’s really all there is to know about Donna and me.’

‘You had deliveries made simply to see her for a short time?’

She turned away, absently adjusted an already perfect flower arrangement. ‘Well, obviously I’d ask her in for coffee. I live a rather solitary existence. She’d stay and chat for a quarter of an hour. They seemed not to mind at Leaf and Petal.’

‘She never talked about boyfriends at all, Miss Gregson? Apart from Mahon, the man the police originally thought responsible for her death?’

For a second, he thought she was going to faint. She closed her eyes, swayed. He caught her arm.

‘Are you all right?’

She took several deep breaths, plucked his hand away with a look of distaste. ‘She never talked about men. Never.’

‘Not even a man called Adrian?’

‘She never talked about men! She … she knew …’ She let the sentence dangle.

The outburst abruptly supplied the key Crane hadn’t stopped searching for. Her name was Julia and there was a J in Donna’s diary he and Patsy had been unable to fit a name to. Crane had assumed it could only be another man. Until now.

‘Did you ever see Donna apart from when she made deliveries, Miss Gregson?’ he said carefully.

She shook her head, began swallowing. ‘Of course not. Why should—’

‘She didn’t come back in the evening now and then? Or at the weekend?’

She shook her head again, but was now swallowing so rapidly she couldn’t speak. She burst into tears. He’d seen few women cry as she did. She cried noisily, endlessly, crouching as if in barely endurable physical pain, the tears streaming down her cheeks and dripping off the end of her chin. Few cases he’d known had involved such heartbreak. He crossed to a sideboard, poured brandy from a decanter, returned and put it carefully into her shaking hand. She gradually calmed herself, taking sips of the liquor between sobs. She sat on a shield-back chair beside one of the flower-bearing tables.

‘You must have guessed what I am,’ she said, in a thin, wavering tone.

‘You fell for her?’

‘She’d come at weekends now and then. I adored her. I begged her to be my secretary-companion. I’d take her all over the world. My father was in property. I couldn’t spend what he left me in two lifetimes. But she … she wasn’t as I am. She’d stay with me, even sleep with me, but …’ Her haggard gaze passed over the flawless precision of the formal garden. Crane guessed she’d dressed in black since the discovery of Donna’s body. ‘We both wept one night because she was, well, she was normal, couldn’t commit to …’

He looked down ruefully at her bowed head. He could have told her that the only reason Donna had wept was because she couldn’t hack it permanently with another woman, even if that woman happened to be one of the wealthiest in the West Riding.

‘Did you give her money, Julia?’

Her eyes rested on his. ‘Not for sleeping with her. Never for that. She’d not have taken it. She was too genuine, too caring. Sleeping together was simply part of our close friendship. But … yes, I did give her a little money now and then. I’m wealthy, she was poor. The family depended on what she made at the nursery. You’ll probably know her father’s too ill to work. She’d only ever take money, and so very reluctantly, to help her parents.’

Her eyes began to well with tears once more. It struck Crane then what an incredible inspirer of dreams Donna had proved to be: a companion for Julia, a star model for Fletcher, a billboard queen for Hellewell. She seemed to embody dreams like those legendary actresses who appeared so sensitive, spiritual and pure, and yet, away from the screen, always seemed to live the raciest lives.

‘How did it end?’ He spoke with deliberate bluntness.

There was a sudden brooding look in her eyes, startling in its intensity. ‘I thought it was just me,’ she said, in a low raw tone. ‘I accepted that we weren’t the same, knew she’d have to leave me one day. Some man, children, all that nonsense. All I asked, while we were together, was for it just to be me.’ She fell silent for seconds. ‘But … but she was seeing someone else. A man. A man!’ She ended on a note of near-anguish.

‘Any idea who the man was?’

Another silence, her gaze unfocused. ‘We were … she was coming to me on Saturday after work. She cancelled, said Joe wanted her to work late, they were so busy. I was very upset. Couldn’t quite believe her. I drove to Leaf and Petal and waited in a corner of the car park the staff use. She came out at the usual time, but didn’t drive her car, took a taxi. I followed it. It took her to the Raven, out towards Kirby Overblow. He was waiting for her in the car park.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I only saw him from a distance, and only from behind. I daren’t be seen, I might never have seen Donna again.’ Her face looked crumpled in the gathering dusk, as if she’d developed age lines. ‘He was fair, well-built, tallish. I took the number of his car when they’d gone inside, then came home. I don’t know why I took the number – to challenge her with it, I suppose. I never did, of course.’ Her voice had fallen to a whisper.

‘Have you still got it?’

‘You can have it, for what it’s worth.’

It may not be worth spit now. Crane was beginning to feel very uneasy, was beginning to wonder if he’d possibly begun to get ahead of Anderson. She’d been crazy about Donna, like so many others, but it had begun to turn ugly at the point where a man had entered the equation.

‘Did you ever visit Tanglewood reservoir with Donna?’ he said flatly.

She flushed. ‘What can you be thinking?’ she said. ‘What can you be thinking?’

‘Well, did you?’

‘You can’t imagine I had anything to do with—’

‘I’m asking if you went to Tanglewood with her.’

Shaking now and agitated, she watched him again in one of her silences, bottom lip caught in teeth. ‘She … once came here by taxi,’ she muttered reluctantly. ‘Her motor wasn’t very reliable. She couldn’t stay over, it was mid-week. I drove her home. She didn’t want me to see where she lived, not that I’d have minded. We … we said our goodbyes at Tanglewood. Sitting on a bench near the lower one. Then I dropped her off on the outskirts of, what do they call it, the Willows?’ Her eyes brimmed with tears yet again.

‘Julia,’ he said, still bluntly, ‘Donna kept a diary.’

Her mouth fell open, her moist eyes suddenly wide with shock. ‘Oh, no,’ she whispered. ‘Dear God, no …!’

Crane let the silence roll. Then he said, ‘She didn’t enter names in it or how she spent her time, she just used single initials. The initial J occurs again and again. It gives the impression that up to the day she died she was here every weekend.’

Mouth still open, the pupils of her eyes rimmed in white, she cried, ‘But she didn’t! She came a lot, perhaps one weekend in three, but not every week.’

She spoke with a vehemence that threw Crane. ‘I … think you’ll find the police will put the same interpretation on the diary as me, Julia.’

She fell silent yet again, giving an impression of some kind of mental struggle. Finally, she said, ‘Wait,’ in a voice of intense reluctance. She got up, crossed to a chiffonier, opened a drawer, returned. She held an inch-thick, leather-bound book. ‘If you won’t believe me … I kept a diary too.’ She held it out, but hesitantly, as if prepared to snatch it back if he tried to take it. ‘Look at it, if you must,’ she said sighing.

He drew it slowly from her, turned to the Saturday Donna had last been seen alive. ‘Donna,’ the entry read, ‘didn’t come today …

I wanted her to, of course but mustn’t be clingy. Have to accept that she does other things, sees that bloody man, I suppose. Oh God, how I miss her. Can’t stop thinking of when she was here last and we took a picnic basket along to the Wild Garden. She does love flowers so, begs me to fill the house with them, even though she seems not to know one from another. She was wearing a little blue dress and the sun made her hair shine, and she was the loveliest creature I’d ever seen. I spent most of the day helping Norman with the borders. Then I had a solitary dinner and watched an old film. I was in bed for half-ten. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t stop thinking of how she looked, laughing and chatting and sipping Muscadet. And how much I loved her.

Crane said, ‘Do you mind if I look back for three months?’

‘Only … only to check out the weekends. As you can imagine, no one was ever intended to see it.’

The diary provided a complete sheet for each day. He flicked back through the pages covering each Saturday and Sunday beneath her watchful gaze, to check the weekends Donna was present. If the diary was accurate, she really had seen her only about once every two or three weeks. In which case, who was the other J Donna had recorded? Hellewell? The entry for the Saturday Donna went missing was the last. He guessed she’d have written that on the Sunday before she’d heard the news.

‘I was too distraught to write anything at all when I was told the police were searching for her,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve never kept a diary since.’

‘Well,’ he said, in a gentler tone, ‘thank you for your time, Julia. I’m sorry for the distress I’ve had to cause you.’

She showed him out. ‘Can I be allowed to put all this behind me?’ she said in an almost pleading tone, as they stood on the marble tiling beneath the front door’s portico.

‘I’m … sorry. I’m afraid, your involvement with her was such that the police will have to know about it.’

She gave a fatalistic nod. She knew as well as he did she was now a suspect and would need to be formally eliminated. Assuming she was innocent. Crane knew he was getting mixed vibes. She could have written up a diary that absolved herself some time after the event.

As he turned to go, she said quietly, ‘Frank?’

He turned, waited. The light flowing from the hall outlined her sturdy figure. ‘Donna … one night she woke up trembling. She’d had a frightful dream. I sometimes wonder if it was a premonition. She was in a state. Normally she never spoke about her … other life. She was very discreet. It was something to do with the photography man, the one who wanted her to be a fashion model. In the dream she’d decided he wasn’t good enough, hadn’t got the connections. She told him she wanted to enrol with a professional agency. He went berserk. Said she’d never work for anyone but him. He’d … he’d discovered her. He made the most appalling threats. To her looks, to her …’

‘Go on, Julia.’

‘She calmed him down, said she hadn’t meant it, she’d just been silly. None of it was really as I’m telling you. She was utterly distraught, almost incoherent. It must have been the dream. She was usually so self-possessed. And she was sobbing her heart out, poor darling. Said she didn’t want to go away with him. Not now. She said he was trying to control her, make her into something she wasn’t. She wanted to live her own life. She was certain he’d try to change her …’

Crane was becoming puzzled. ‘This was still the photographer?’

‘I don’t think so. It was all so very disjointed, but I think it was another man she was talking about then, who wanted her to go away with him. I think it was the man I saw at the Raven.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I made her a warm drink. When I came back she was her usual self. Made light of it. Even began to giggle. It had just been a bad dream and I’d not to take any notice, she could handle it.’

‘Thanks for telling me. You didn’t think to pass it on to the police originally?’

‘I … I couldn’t face my life with her coming out, perhaps even getting in the papers. I’m a very private person. And it seemed so likely that this man Mahon …’

He watched her, wondering if she might not have felt an overwhelming sense of relief when no police had come knocking on her own elegant door eight or nine months ago.

Anderson was already at Patsy’s, scribbling on the flipchart, on the page devoted to Joe Hellewell, as wound up, it seemed, as Crane himself was. ‘Where have you been, you bugger, when it’s all happening?’

‘What about the siege?’

‘All over in an hour.’ He grinned. ‘I told the desk to hold two inches at the bottom of page nine unless something really big had broken like a cat up a tree. The gun was an imitation and he was so gone on skunk I don’t think he knew which century it was, let alone day.’ He turned to Crane with a look of triumph. ‘There’s your killer, sunshine.’

‘Hellewell?’

‘Don’t bother with the flip chart just yet. Listen to this.’ He put a micro-cassette recorder on the table. Crane glanced at Patsy, who shrugged, drawing down her mouth at the corners.

He said, ‘Just before you begin, how come you know Kirsty so well?’

‘Last summer Leaf and Petal had a lot of saplings destroyed. The police nailed someone from another nursery trying to damage their trade. I went to report on it with a camera man. Hellewell was away on business at the time and I spoke to Kirsty. I think she took a bit of a shine to me.’ He smiled with a faux modesty as carefully honed as his charm. ‘One of their runabouts is a Scenic and I casually mentioned I fancied one myself. She made me borrow it for a couple of days to see if I liked it. Really nice woman. And then, when Donna’s body was found, I was along there again, talking to her and Hellewell and the rest of the staff.’

Crane recalled Carol at the Glass-house, acting a giggle, and asking him had there been any woman involved in the Donna affair who might have caught Anderson’s eye. Well, maybe there had been.

Anderson said, ‘I asked her if she’d mind if I used this; she said she actually wanted it on record.’

He pressed the PLAY button. They heard Kirsty say, ‘I’m very, very worried, Geoff. I should have told the police at the start. He was seeing Donna.’

‘Joe? We’d thought he might have been.’

‘I began to suspect when he wanted to keep her on for that first winter. She was quite useless for any of the real work we do in winter, all the preparation for the new season. It meant we paid her virtually to do nothing. But he wanted to be certain of having her in place the following spring.’ She gave a sigh. ‘He had a point, she really did seem to pull in the customers. She was a right little charmer. But then he couldn’t keep away from her. I knew perfectly well there was something going on. I should have had it out with him, threatened divorce, but … well, we’re not simply married, we’re married to Leaf and Petal. We have two kids, they’re keen to come into it one day.’ There was a lengthy pause. ‘I should have told the police at the time.’

‘Why didn’t you, Kirsty?’

‘Because I simply couldn’t believe it could be him who … he was so gone on her. It broke him up when they found the body. I just couldn’t believe … Not Adrian.’

‘Adrian?’ Anderson’s voice repeated, high with surprise. ‘But … but we’re talking Joe here.’

‘Oh, dear, I sometimes forget. His names are Adrian Joseph, but he always felt Joe sounded more friendly with customers and staff. We call him Adrian at home: family, close friends.’ She gave a hollow chuckle. ‘A bit like the Royal family, official and unofficial names, King George being called Bertie behind the scenes.’

Anderson paused the recorder. ‘Adrian, guys!’ he cried gleefully. ‘Adrian! The first piece in the jigsaw. But it gets better, a whole lot better. Stay tuned!’

He pressed PLAY again, to the sound of his own voice. ‘I see. Two different names. Do you think he was Adrian to Donna?’

‘Probably. I think he felt it made him two separate people. I was genuinely sorry about Donna, truly, and though he was so dreadfully upset I felt we had a chance to get our own lives on track again, Ade and me, only …’ There was another lengthy silence. ‘And then … and then I found out he was bisexual. I overheard two of the girls talking in one of the greenhouses about a wealthy customer of ours, Clement Hebden. One of them said, “All that lolly and those cool looks, why does he have to be one of them?” It gave me such a shock. I’d no idea he was gay. Adrian spent an awful lot of time with him, but he was supposed to be helping him landscape his garden. But the night Donna went missing Adrian said he’d stayed the same night at Clement’s. Said he’d had a drink too many.’

‘That’s what he told us earlier.’

‘I’ll spare you the details of how I proved to myself he was … that way, but I just had to. It had already been too much trying to cope with his affair with Donna, but, well, if there were men involved too … I knew I couldn’t handle it, Geoff. He was making what he thought were secret trips to Tanglewood. I … got it together. For months now I’ve been trying to decide the best way to break with him. It was when I read about that poor man called Ollie being almost battered to death that I began to get really, really frightened, because he was just thought to be a harmless gossip. I couldn’t help wondering if he’d somehow found out too much. And then I began to wonder if Adrian really had something to do with … Donna’s death, and his gay friends were perhaps …’

‘Covering for him?’

‘Yes,’ she said flatly. ‘And with Bobby Mahon out of it …’

Anderson flicked off the recorder, almost shaking with excitement. ‘You see? You see? She’s reached exactly the same conclusion we did, from the inside!’

‘That really is one clever lady!’ Crane forced himself to look as jubilant as he sounded. ‘Well done, Geoff! It’s all circumstantial, but once the police have a chance to interview them separately, Hellewell and Hebden, they could be home and dry. If Hellewell really is in the frame I reckon Hebden’s going to crack about that alibi.’

‘Oh, Geoff, I’m so glad!’ Patsy said. ‘It’s going to mean so much to Mam and Dad if they can see an end to it.’

Crane wished he could feel genuinely pleased. He was certain the reporter had got there. And he was equally certain Kirsty Hellewell would never have talked to him as she’d talked to Anderson. Anderson had had an incredible stroke of luck, and though Crane was exasperated with himself he knew he was going to feel upset about the Donna Jackson case whenever it came into his mind, even though all that mattered was nailing the killer. Amateurs, one, pros, nil, he thought bitterly, behind his smile.

‘Well,’ he said wryly, ‘while you were writing up all this gold-plated stuff from Kirsty, I was in Ilkley talking to a Miss Julia Gregson. She’s one of the Js in Donna’s diary. There seem to be two Js, but I doubt if the second one’s relevant.’

He gave them an outline of what he’d been told at Cheyney Hall, writing up the key points on a sheet of the chart he’d set aside for Julia. Anderson became unusually silent as he talked and scribbled, and when he turned back to them he’d begun to go pale with what looked to be barely controllable anger, an anger so powerful he seemed almost to be quivering. But he quickly forced his usual amiable smile and bantering tone, though Crane sensed it was not without considerable effort.

‘Christ, Crane, is there anyone your equal for turning up jokers?’

‘I’m not with you,’ he said, genuinely puzzled.

‘Well, from where I’m standing it now looks as if the killer could be any one of three.’

‘Oh, come on, Gregson’s not in the same league as Hellewell. Nor is Fletcher. Why the frustration, you’ve brought the bacon home? Gregson was genuinely heartbroken and she’d kept what looks to be a genuine diary.’

‘They’re all heartbroken. And the diary could have been written after the event, as you said yourself. And why didn’t she tell the police? She’d been with Donna at Tanglewood, just like Hellewell.’

Crane watched him in a surprised and uncertain silence. The intensely competitive animal that Anderson was still thought he was outclassing him. Only that could explain the barely concealed fury. But his powerful reactions were raising fresh doubts in Crane’s own mind. He’d virtually ruled out Julia on hearing the tape, but she’d had a long time to make her story authentic, even if her emotions had to have been totally genuine. But then he saw he was overlooking the crucial aspect of this very complex case. ‘Ollie Stringer!’ he said. ‘Don’t forget Ollie. I ask him about Adrian and two days later he’s lying in a hollow left for dead.’

‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that Hellewell and Gregson might have colluded, Frank? You say Gregson’s sturdy, so she’d have had the strength to see off a small woman like Donna. But what if she was seen the night they sat on the bench? What if one of the gays told Adrian, out of spite? Adrian certainly knew Donna was with Gregson a lot. What if he twigs Gregson did it and puts the bite on her for some of her loot? He’d still have the motivation to duff up Ollie if he thought Ollie was asking too many of the wrong kinds of questions.’

It hadn’t occurred to him that Adrian and Julia might be in it together. The cocky, quick-thinking beggar had him there. At one time he’d not have thought a woman like Julia Gregson could possibly have been involved in such a scene, but having been in the police he’d quickly come to accept that almost anyone could be involved in almost any bloody thing.

‘Good thinking, Anderson,’ he said, trying for the other’s affable manner with the same limited success. He believed he had it sussed now, why the reporter had been so incensed. He’d had his ace trumped with what Crane had uncovered at Cheyney Hall. Instead of winning the race he had merely dead-heated.

‘Well, why aren’t you jumping up and down, you two?’ Patsy asked, in amazement. ‘With all the new things you’ve found out between you?’

Crane knew it was because they were both too evenly matched, both very, very touchy about their skills, and were in a situation that was like one of those games of chess where it seemed that neither player was going to win.