Текст книги "Vows of Silence "
Автор книги: Susan Hill
Жанры:
Криминальные детективы
,сообщить о нарушении
Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 17 страниц)
“So it’s coincidence?”
“Coincidence happens, doesn’t it, ma’am?” The DI spoke. “This is a lunatic with guns. He likes shooting. Doesn’t care where or who.”
Andy Gilligan shook his head. “That sounds casual and careless, and he’s neither.”
“Or she.”
“Unlikely, but all right if you want to be correct. The murder of Melanie Drew was carefully timed. Not many people about, she was alone in the flat, it may well be that it was being watched. The club shooting was from a carefully prepared spot, probably from the roof of Bladon House, though possibly from the old granary next door. There is absolutely no trace of anything or anyone—forensics are still going over it but there isn’t even GSR. Someone who is a good marksman, someone who has prepared a getaway meticulously c this isn’t a lunatic roaming round Lafferton with a pistol; this is a clever, cunning psychopathic killer.”
“Who will kill again.”
“Almost certainly.”
“But if there is no connection between his victims how can we second-guess where he will be next?”
“We can’t,” Simon said, taking a swig of water. “We can’t cover the entire town. We don’t have the justification.”
“Or the resources,” the Chief put in.
“This isn’t a terrorist.”
“And no warnings? No demands?”
“Not a thing.”
The Super leaned back with a groan. “The worst bugger of all.”
“Young women,” Paula Devenish said. “Let’s think of places where young women congregate. Let’s try to get one step ahead of him. Schools. The college. Where else?”
“There are two gyms and there’s the swimming pool.”
“The ice-rink.”
“Any more clubs?”
“There’s a place called The Widemouthin Monmouth Street c it’s a bar with dancing, though, not really a nightclub, and it’s more upmarket than the Seven Aces. It’s popular with the twenty-somethings. Stays open till midnight.”
“Any place opposite that a marksman could hole up in and get them in his sights?”
Serrailler and the DI said, “The multi-storey,” as one voice.
“Right. Let’s have some visible patrolling up there and in the streets around, especially when they’re spilling out at the end of the evening.”
Simon sat bolt upright. “The Jug Fair,” he said. “That’s coming up—weekend after next.”
“Why would he stake out the Jug Fair?”
“Why not? Plenty of young women, crowds, lots of noise to cover the sound of shots.”
“Well, it’s possible.” Andy sounded doubtful.
“There’s always a strong police presence there,” Simon said. “We’ve had some yobbishness, drunken louts causing trouble. I wonder if he would take the risk?”
“Better have ARV on high alert, even so.”
“We’re on it already, ma’am,” Andy said.
“Now, as there are two items on the agenda for this meeting, let’s move on to the second. As you know, the Lord Lieutenant’s daughter is getting married in the cathedral on the tenth of November and there are royals on the guest list. Security is tight, as always of course, but in view of all this, it’ll have to be even tighter. Royal protection will come from the Tactical Unit but Clarence House have noted the shootings and want a meeting. Eleven o’clock next Tuesday morning in my office—you too, Simon. Meeting with Sir Hugh Barr—the Lord Lieutenant and father of the bride—his PA, someone from Clarence House, someone from royal protection, the Dean and myself.” The Chief got up. “We could do without a high-profile wedding with royal guests.”
“At least they’ll pay for their own protection.”
The Chief looked over her shoulder on the way out. “We should be so lucky.”
Twenty-six
“Dr Deerbon?”
Short. Dark, close-cut hair. Clipped voice. She glanced at Cat. “And you are Dr Deerbon’s partner?”
“Wife.”
“Please sit down. Just give me a moment, would you?” She flipped open a file. Turned over a couple of sheets. Looked for some minutes at one, then a second. Turned to address Chris. “And you came in last night by ambulance to A & E?”
“No, I brought him—well, my father and—”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why on earth did you bring him by car? He needed an ambulance. With symptoms like that in a car without any paramedics c” She shook her head.
“I’m a doctor. So is my father.”
“GP?”
“I am—Chris and I both are. My father is a retired consultant.”
“Neurologist?”
“No.”
“Right.” She pursed her lips and was silent again, reading the file, turning the sheets over and back.
She was mid-thirties. She had not smiled. Always smile at the patient, Cat thought.
“I have the scan results here. Are you experienced at interpreting an MRI?” She looked at Chris but did not wait for him to answer. “It’s the best tool we have. It’s pretty watertight. How long have you had symptoms?”
He shrugged.
“He didn’t mention anything. We’ve been in Australia,” Cat said.
The doctor ignored her.
“Hard to say.” Chris looked at his hands. “I had a headache. All the last week we were in Sydney, but we were packing up, it was hot. I didn’t think anything of it.”
“Visual disturbance?”
“Slightly. I thought I might need stronger reading glasses.”
“You make it sound very vague. It can’t have been. Not with a scan like this.”
“I suppose I was trying to ignore it.”
“Not a good plan.”
“If it’s a grade-four glioma it wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“But I don’t think it is. Grade-three, possibly. Not a four. And though I think it’s unlikely to be benign, we need a biopsy to be sure. I could be wrong.”
But you think that is almost out of the question, Cat thought. Self-belief is your speciality.
“Thanks.” Chris stood up. “Not a lot more to say, is there?”
“Treatment. There’s that to say.”
“There is no treatment. Don’t take the piss.”
“If you’d sit down, I could go through the options. You may not be up to speed. GPs rarely are, I find. How long is it since you diagnosed a grade-three glioma?”
“About two months ago, as a matter of fact. Thirty-six-year-old man, six foot six, bronzed and fit, swimmer, diver, one of Australia’s many outdoor sports fanatics.”
“So in that case you know that in many situations we can operate to relieve pressure.”
“Depending on the site of the tumour.”
“This one looks possible.”
“There’s no point.”
“You won’t say that when the headaches become more intense, which could be any day now. We’ll also give you the maximum number of radiotherapy bursts—ten I should say. That will keep the worst of the symptoms at bay for a time. I’ll put you down to start next week. We want to get on top of this. It won’t wait.” She stood up. As she did so, Chris turned to Cat as if he was about to say something but instead was suddenly and violently sick.
In the car park he said, “Remember.”
Cat did not need to hear more. “Chris, don’t ask me. I would do anything to help you, to get you through this.”
“Anything except what I want.”
“You can’t ask your wife or anyone else to kill you—I can’t, I won’t and you shouldn’t even think it, no matter what’s happening to you. I don’t want to have this conversation again.”
He sat beside her in silence all the way home. Dear God, Cat prayed silently, get us out of this.
She made an egg salad and coffee and set the table on the terrace. It was as warm as June, the wasps sailing insolently close to their plates, but the stems of a dogwood at the far end of the garden were already turning red, blazing in the sun. The grey pony came ambling across the paddock to the near fence.
Chris said, “I didn’t understand what patients meant when they said, “I can’t take it in. I haven’t taken it in.” Well, I do now because I can’t.”
“No.”
He put down his fork. “Tell me what to do, Cat.”
She reached for his hand. The feel of his skin and flesh and bone, the utter familiarity of this man’s hand, was unnerving. She was thinking of it as the hand of someone dying, a hand she should not love too much because it was going to be taken away from her. It was unimaginable.
“I think you do as she said. She was a bitch. She should be in a lab, not dealing with people—God knows how other patients cope with her, totally bewildered by everything in there, not only by what might be happening to them but by the jargon and the procedures. She should never have to speak to a patient again for the rest of her life. But she was right. You have to do what she said. You know that.”
“Is there any point? How long is it going to take—six months? Max. Do I want to spend that time recovering from brain surgery, exhausted by radiotherapy? I’m not sure I do.” He sounded infinitely weary, even at this stage, too tired to bother with any of it.
“Yes. They need to do a biopsy. They can reduce the size of the tumour.”
“To buy me time.”
“What’s wrong with time?”
“Oh, nothing whatsoever from where I’m standing.”
“Surgery and radiotherapy will buy you time—and good time, Chris. Maybe quite a long time. And if the biopsy is good—”
“It won’t be. They never are.”
“Rubbish and you know it.”
“Do I? What do we doctors say? Listen to the patients, they’ll give you the diagnosis. So listen to me.”
She smoothed her fingers over the back of his hand, memorising the feel of it. She said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“No point.”
“Chris, I’m your wife.”
“You were going to find out. Why spoil the last bit of Australia, why put you through it before it was inevitable?”
She looked at him. Brown hair. Brown eyes. Long nose. Wide mouth. Flat ears. Not handsome. Not ugly. Not a face that stood out in a crowd. Not a face anyone would see and be unable to forget. Chris’s face.
He lifted up her hand and pressed it to his cheek.
“The thing is,” he said, “it’s not only that I don’t want to leave you and I don’t want to leave the children. I don’t want to miss them growing up. I don’t want not to be here, doing what we do, in this place. The thing is c it isn’t even that I don’t want to die.”
She felt the stubble on his skin. She thought that if she tried she could even feel the flow of the blood beneath it.
She said nothing. Waited. Whatever it was, he had to say it. To tell her. Whatever it was.
But he was silent. He held her hand to his face a little while longer, then let it go before getting up and wandering away across the garden towards the paddock. Cat watched him and as she watched saw that his gait was odd, uneven and slightly unsteady. She closed her eyes, knowing why, too terrified to watch any more.
Twenty-seven
The grounds of the hotel ran down to the river. There was a small hooped wooden bridge beside willow trees where almost every one had a photograph taken—the bride and groom standing romantically together with the willow branches bending over them, the water gliding by. Photographers were clever with reflections. The bridegroom would hold up a branch of willow for the bride to pass under. They would stand hand in hand, leaning over the bridge rail looking down. It never failed.
Amy Finlayson, Events Manager and Wedding Coordinator for the Riverside Hotel, stood on the lawn watching the gang erect the marquee for the following day. The double doors of the dining room would be open onto the small flight of stone steps, the marquee entrance just below, and with a bit of luck, they could open up the back too so that people could see the lawn leading to the river and stroll down there later. This lot were having fireworks at ten. The team would set them up in the paddock. She’d earned her bonuses and the extra tips this year. People were generous when a wedding went well, they were lavish with gratuities. By the end of October she’d be taking her holiday in Canada.
“I don’t understand you,” the manager had said. “Why don’t you go for sun and a beach? Why not somewhere like Mauritius?”
“Because Mauritius means one thing,” Amy said. “Bloody weddings.”
From where he stood, concealed behind the thick stump of a pollarded willow, he had the perfect view—the woman pointing, the marquee men. The line of sight was ideal. Up the lawn, through the tent to the open French windows.
He looked carefully around him. Behind, a wooden fence into a field. He could climb over easily enough but the field was fully open to view from the hotel. The footpath beside the river was also open and visible. Only if he went left did he have any chance of slipping away unseen and it was a risk because although there were screening trees and a hedge, both had significant gaps. It was also a long way to the road. Too long. There was nowhere he could safely hole up, either.
No. It would be clear exactly where any shots had been fired from. The patrol cars, especially just at the moment, would be fast on the scene. He had no chance. Unless c
He smiled. Unless.
It was so obvious he could have worked it out as a ten-year-old boy.
What kept you? he thought.
Alison had dreamed of a marquee—the inside had been designed in her head for years, with pink and white ribbons tied round a maypole, a pink and white awning and swags of flowers. It had all come together in the weeks before. Cost a fortune. Her mother paying. Paying for a grand wedding.
It was what she wanted and what she wanted was fine by him.
Alison.
He drove home feeling the sparks of anger, that always smouldered, rekindle and burn hard. When something reminded him, it affected his breathing. He felt a tightness in his chest. Even his vision sometimes changed, clouding a little.
Alison.
He put the car away and locked it, then went out again, a quarter of a mile to the pub he preferred because no one was interested in anyone else, no one behind the bar wanted to chat.
He bought his pint of keg, hating the sweet thick taste of the real ale they tried to push, took it to a corner with the local paper and a biro in case he needed to mark anything out.
It was full of the shootings. Three deaths. No leads. No clues. Lots of blether filling page after page but nothing real. Nothing that troubled him.
Twenty-eight
Simon Serrailler lay on his back on the floor and rolled first to the left and then to the right, left and right, left and right. He was a tall man and his back had been giving him trouble but in the past two weeks he had been working fifteen-hour days and although he knew he should go to the physio for treatment there had been no time.
He rolled over left to right a dozen more times and then lay on his back again, arms behind his head, in the quiet of his living room. Before long the bells would start to ring. Thursday night was full practice night. But for now, only the floorboards creaked occasionally, settling back after he had disturbed them with his exercise.
Exercise also helped to clear his mind. Work he could deal with. He had been in the game too long now to carry it home in his head. Earlier that day he had said, “We’ll get him and I’ll tell you why. Because he’ll make a mistake. Yes, he is clever and cunning, yes, he is planning carefully. But with firearms there are any number of mistakes he can make and sooner or later he will make one of them and give himself away. I don’t mean we sit and wait for him to do it. We’re being as proactive as possible on this one. But I’m confident that when he does cock up, in however small a way, we’ll be there and we’ll have him.”
He believed it.
He had closed his eyes. Now he opened them and looked around his room, drawing from its calm order. Then he stood up, twisted this way and that a few times, and went to fetch himself a whisky. He was spending the evening in, alone, watching a documentary about Italy and reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s biography of Stalin. It was time he desperately needed, time he had been looking forward to, limited enough for him to relish every moment. He wanted to go through his sketchbooks of his spring break in the Faroes where he had gulped in lungfuls of crystal-cold air and walked among seabirds and grass-roofed houses and felt both invigorated and deeply peaceful. He had an exhibition next year, half of which would be of these drawings, the rest of portraits, many of his mother. He wanted to sift through them, place them in perfect order which would take a long, careful time.
He stretched out on the sofa. It was not only time which he did not have. He needed a calm emotional sea and he could not see when he might get one.
His brother-in-law had a brain tumour. Simon knew enough to be aware that his chances were slim. He was very fond of Chris, he would find it hard if he were not around, but it was his sister he had most in his mind and in his heart. Her future, with three young children and a stressful job but without her beloved husband, was unimaginable. She would need Simon. He would need to have strength and time and love for all of them. There was no one else.
The cathedral bells started up. Simon went to the window and looked down on the close.
Not true, a voice niggled, not true and you know it. There is Dad. And now there is Dad and Judith.
Judith Connolly.
She is a nice woman, the voice niggled. She is warm and kind and seemingly straightforward and she will do your father a power of good. What possible reason is there for your being so antagonistic towards her? None.
While work was muddied and turbulent, while Chris was ill and very probably dying, and Judith was in his mother’s place, he could settle to nothing here, could not take pleasure from his drawing and planning his next exhibition, could not relax and simply be.
The phone rang.
“Si?”
Cat.
She was crying.
“I’ll come,” Simon said.
It was another mild night, another day had stretched out the long decline of summer even further. The close was empty, the bells ringing on through the evening. Simon stood for a moment listening. He was neither musical nor spiritual—he left that to Cat. She did music and God for both of them, she had once said. But he thought about Chris, facing a horrible illness, and a horrible treatment and very possibly a horrible death, and his thoughts were as close to prayer as he ever came.
If a SIFT case came up now and looked like taking him away from Lafferton for any length of time, he decided that he would ask to be left out. He was needed here, not halfway across the country after an elusive and anonymous murderer, though if he wanted one of those, he didn’t have far to look.
As he sped through the narrow town streets, his mobile rang. He ignored it. Right now Cat came first.
Twenty-nine
“Jamie, be quiet and go to sleep.”
He was a good sleeper. If he hadn’t been, Bethan Doyle would have gone off her head. He woke before six but in any case they had to be ready to leave the house at seven so it didn’t matter. She walked to the nursery, then caught the bus to Bevham to be there at eight. Mornings were death but she’d rather that than depend on Foster, rather be independent, rather have no money. Not that she had much money now by the time she’d paid for the nursery and her rent. But she was her own woman. And if her wedding-dress business took off she might even give up the day job.
Jamie wailed. She closed the door and switched on Corriebut the wails came through the wall. There wasn’t anything wrong with him.
The television wailed too, the Corriesignature tune, drowning him out for a minute. Bethan went into the kitchen and switched on the kettle, but when she came out, Jamie’s cries were so loud that next door were banging.
She went into the dark bedroom. His cot was in one corner, her bed in the other. Poky little room. She suddenly wanted to throw things around, she hated the pokiness so much. And the street it was in and the people next door and the rest of them all round. She was on the council list but they’d only offered her on the roughest estate in Bevham and she wanted to stay here. Lafferton was a step up and it was away from Foster. When the time came the schools were decent. If she could get a job here so she didn’t have to fork out for fares, it would be even better.
She had plans. It all took so long but she did have plans. Jamie hadn’t been planned, far from it, but he was here so the plans had to be for them both. Children grew up, it wasn’t forever. Her plan was to go to the college, do dress design and business studies and move from sewing at home to opening a wedding shop. Already her ads had brought in some work. She had a beautiful beaded dress on the go now. If she could just go out there and shout at all the girls as easily led by boys as she had been. If she could force them to see. But she’d make it. She was sure.
She pushed Jamie’s damp hair back from his forehead. It was close in the room. That was probably why he couldn’t get off.
Bethan drew the curtains back and opened the window a notch. A warm breeze blew in, ruffling Jamie’s blanket, which hung on the end of his cot, and making him laugh. Blowing in the smell of chips too.
She could have killed for a packet of hot fish and chips but that was another thing you didn’t know about, how you were completely stuck, tied to them. Some mothers would have left their babies, run out to the chip shop a couple of blocks away. Some would stay out for a drink as well. Some would leave two or three kids together with an older one supposedly responsible enough to look out for them, aged all of ten or eleven.
The smell of chips was taunting her.
“Jamie, lie down. Come on, it’s night, it’s sleep time. Lie down.”
He had been on his knees but now he pulled himself up and held out his arms to her, a big fat smile on his face.
“Jamie, come on, lie down. Look, here’s Mousey.”
There was a ring at the bell. Jamie began to bounce up and down waving Mousey with one hand, holding onto the end of the cot with the other.
She wouldn’t go. It would be someone collecting or selling or just kids. Kids were a pain but she didn’t blame them. They were bored.
Jamie was still standing up and now he was banging on the side of the cot. Sometimes he banged his head there which woke her up. That was worrying. Why would he bang his head so hard it must hurt? She had mentioned it to the doctor when she had taken him for his jabs but the doctor hadn’t seemed interested, just shrugged and said, “They do it sometimes. One of mine did it.” Bang bang bang.
Then the bloody bell again.
She left the bedroom door open so that Jamie could hear her. If she closed it he would bang his head and shake the cot bars even more.
The chain was across the door. She was always careful, locked the windows at night, kept the chain on whenever she was in by herself, which was usually.
She shifted the Yale and opened the door the short distance until the chain tightened.
“Hello?”
Silence.
Bloody kids.
She didn’t let the chain off, just put her head out a bit further.
The noise of the shot made Jamie sit down suddenly in the cot. He stared through the bars, to where his mother had been standing in the hall and was now lying there, and then he began to scream.
He screamed for a long time. The front door had been pushed shut and his mother still lay. Jamie banged on the cot bars. No one came. After a time, he sat and looked at his feet, then he crawled across and reached for Mousey and lay down pressing the toy to his face. He shouted once or twice, but Mousey was there, soft and comforting, and at last he fell asleep. The hall light stayed on and after a while it rained in through the open bed room window onto the sill. The child stirred and woke and tried to get under the blanket but sleep came over him again.
He woke twice, and once he stood up and banged the cot, first with his fists then with his head. He banged for a long time. His mother still lay on the floor and would not come to him and the light stayed on. The rain was heavier now, soaking the curtain.
In the end, the darkness thinned to grey and the child fell across the cot and slept, Mousey beneath his body. He slept past six o’clock and seven, and did not wake until after eight. But nothing was different. The rain beat on the windows and the light was still on and his mother still lay on the floor in the hall and the child began to cry quietly now, realising the point less ness of shouting and banging the cot, hungry and dirty and cold.
But still nothing happened. Nothing changed. No one came and his mother did not get up.
Thirty
Jane Fitzroy drove slowly up the long drive between the rows of swaying poplars whose leaves lay in soft golden heaps on the grass. The convent buildings had not yet come into view. There were just the mown fields on either side, and the trees of the park. The trees, of course, had grown and been cut down and others planted and matured, but in the same places, so that the parkland could not have changed much since the eighteenth century when it was laid out. The main house and a hundred or so acres had been bestowed on the abbey fifty years later and was theirs in perpetuity. Which in itself was a worry, Jane had found out within a short time of arriving there. Once there had been 120 nuns in the community. Even thirty years ago there had been over seventy. Now there were twenty-two and more than half of them well into their eighties. New postulants arrived occasionally and a few made their vows and remained. But, in ten years, there would not be enough nuns to justify the upkeep of the house and grounds. There probably were not enough now but they had a generous benefactor. When she died, no one knew what would happen to the abbey or the nuns.
Jane stopped the car and got out and the amazing silence washed over her. There was a ripple of sound from the breeze in the poplar branches and a slight rustle as it shifted the piles of leaves, but otherwise, nothing. Silence. The most astonishing, palpable silence she had ever known. It filled her with a sense of calm now, as it had done every day of the six months she had spent here. The silence had become part of her for that time, had lodged inside her, and something of it had remained for her to draw on even after she had left. Now, as she breathed it in and let it fill her again, she felt that she was topping up her inner store, to see her through the next few months. If it had only been a question of simply living with this silence, she would be here still.
It was ten past eleven. The abbey would be at work. She got back in her car, drove up to the side of the building, parked and wandered back into the grounds. No one was about. Deer grazed in the distance. A squirrel raced up a tree trunk and peered down at her. Jane walked on, to the oak with the bench around its base where she had sat so many times, reading, thinking, saying the office. And struggling with herself. Now it felt pleasant to sit here free of the struggle, decision made. It had been painful and messy but she knew now that however happy she was to be back as a visitor she had been right to leave.
Life had been a confusion of plans made and unmade, sadness and above all restlessness—for over two years, she realised now. It had begun when she’d gone to Lafferton, which had turned out to be the wrong place for her in some senses, the right in others. But in Lafferton things had been frightening and unsettled. She had been naïve, she had antagonised some people, not given others a chance. Even before she had been ordained as a priest she was fascinated by the monastic ideal, had read extensively about it in the past and present and some part of her longed for the cloister. She had come to the abbey in an emotionally vulnerable and fragmented state and her time here had given her healing and a measure of peace. It had restored her to herself, put many things into perspective and, in a strange way, helped her to finish whatever growing up she had had to do. She had been content and the time had been satisfying and absorbing. But from the first week, although she had clung to her dreams, and known that she was gaining a great deal from this place and the people in it, she had also known that the life was not for her. Not permanently. The reality, she saw now, was not so much too rarefied as too mundane, and what had unsettled her most had been the claustrophobia of living with a small group of other women in confined circumstances. Because the convent routine was utterly confining, in spite of the house being huge and the park and gardens being free and available, Jane had missed the outside world. She realised she had romanticised monasticism and mistaken her own capacity to live it. The truth had come as a shock and a lesson in humility. She had been ashamed and crestfallen, but the other nuns had treated her with admirable and exceptional kindness and common sense. “You’re not the first and you won’t be the last,” the abbess had said. Sister Catherine was a realist.
Jane got up and wandered back and entered the paddock where the chickens were pecking about the grass around their wooden coops. There was the sound of a machine. She went through the gate. The last runner beans had been harvested. One of the sisters, wearing boots and ear-muffs, habit carefully tucked up, was going over a large strip of ground with a rotavator. Jane watched until she reached the far end, turned expertly and came towards her, glanced up and then began to wave madly. The nun stopped the machine. There was a rich smell of freshly dug soil.
“Jane! I’d have known that hair anywhere! How lovely to see you. Have you come to stay? Have you come for lunch?” Sister Thomas opened her arms and wrapped Jane in a warm hug, then held her at arm’s length, smiling. “You look so well. The world suits you. You’d grown peaky in here, you know, and look at you now. No one told me you were coming. Look, when you left I was sowing and now we’ve harvested almost everything and I’m turning the ground for the autumn broad beans and the sprouts are well on. Come on up to the house, does the abbess know you’re here, she’ll be thrilled, everyone will be pleased to see you and looking so well, the world suits you, did I say that? Yes, well it’s true and we miss you but I think it was for the best, looking at you now, Jane, you were needed elsewhere. Tell me now, where are you, what have you been up to?”
Sister Thomas, kind-hearted and enthusiastic, had always chattered nineteen to the dozen during the periods when they were not in silence, as if everything was pent up in her for hours and came pouring out when the stopper was removed. Others spoke little at any time, as if they had forgotten how to, had lost words, so locked were they in their world of silence and contemplation.
