A Place Of Safety Page 29
‘Really?’ Louise sounded incredulous. ‘How could you have?’
‘At the Old Rectory. It was Carlotta.’
‘But . . . that’s wonderful, Val! Everyone thought she’d drowned. I must tell Ann—’ And then she stopped, remembering.
‘Her hair was different, a funny orange colour, and cut all short and spiky. But it was Carlotta all right.’
Chapter Twelve
In the end they caught her quite quickly. Barnaby had feared she would go to earth, change her appearance again and simply vanish into the city’s underworld. If not London then Birmingham or Manchester or Edinburgh. And with no photograph to circulate, the chances of picking her up were practically nil.
But, to cover every exit, both of the names she had been using were flashed to all air and sea ports and rail terminals to the Continent. She was spotted by the Eurostar departure point at Waterloo, travelling under a name that Barnaby immediately recognised. The name by which she had first introduced herself, Tanya Walker.
A sorrier sight, thought Barnaby as she was brought into the interview room, he had rarely seen. When he was a constable on the beat he had sometimes had to answer calls from department stores who had found a toddler that had become separated from its mother. The same bewildered panic in her eyes, the same wailing loss. What was it about that vicious bastard Jackson that could bring this girl and Fainlight likewise to their knees in sorrow?
The tape was running. And, unlike the interview two days earlier, this time there was no difficulty extracting information. She answered all his questions unhesitatingly, without ever a pause to reflect, in a flat, colourless voice. She did not care. She had nothing left to lose. And thank God she did, thought the chief inspector, for with Jackson dead, how else would he have unravelled the tangled mess that had been jamming up his thought processes for the past two weeks.
Though Barnaby had had several hours to prepare for this interview, there was more than one aspect to the case and he had not quite decided which to broach first. He turned them over in his mind in reverse order of importance. First came the least interesting - the girl’s relationship with Jackson. She was plainly in love with him, he had had power over her, she would do anything to please him - the old, old story. Then her version of what had happened in Lomax Road. Third, the background to her connection to Carlotta Ryan, the girl who had lived in the room next door. Finally her exact role in the elaborate intrigue at the Old Rectory which had culminated in the murder of Charlie Leathers. Though this last was by far the most interesting and important, Barnaby perversely chose to begin with the third.
‘Tell me about Carlotta, Tanya.’
‘I told you about her. When you come to the flat.’
‘What happened to her?’
She looked vacantly at him.
‘Is she still alive?’
‘Course she’s still alive. What you on about?’
‘Then where is she?’ asked Sergeant Troy.
‘Having the time of her bloody life, I should think. Halfway round the world on a cruise ship.’
‘And how did that come about?’
‘An ad in that stage paper. She auditioned about ten days before she was due to go down the Rectory. They offered her the job, topless dancing. A year’s contract. She jumped at it.’ Tanya looked across at Sergeant Troy and for the first time showed a spark of animation. She said, ‘Wouldn’t you?’
Troy did not respond. It would not have been appropriate but also he didn’t want to. He remembered his first meeting with this girl and how touched he had been by her appearance and larky chatter and the sad fact that she did not know who her dad was. Probably just another lie. He tightened his lips against the chance of a smile, unaware of how sanctimonious it made him look.
‘So whose idea was it that you go to the Lawrences instead?’ asked Barnaby, pleased that at least he knew now why the flat had been cleaned out. ‘Yours or hers?’
‘Terry’s. He liked the thought of being able to keep an eye on me. Mind you, he’d get up the Smoke when he could. He was here when you turned up. Hiding in the bedroom.’
Barnaby cursed silently for a moment. But his voice was even as he said, ‘So you knew him before?’
‘For ever. On and off.’
‘Must have been mostly off,’ said Sergeant Troy. ‘All the time he’s been banged up.’
‘Yeah, mostly.’ Tanya looked across at Troy then with grave contempt. Troy flushed with resentment and thought she’d got a bloody cheek. Even so, he was the first to look away.
‘But you pretended otherwise?’ said Barnaby.
‘S’right. He didn’t want the connection to show.’
‘Because of the grand plan?’
‘Partly. But also it’s his nature to conceal things. It was the only way he ever felt safe.’
‘So how was it supposed to work?’
‘It was brilliant. We had two plans, one for day, one for after dark, depending on when Mrs L took off. I lifted some jewellery, old-fashioned stuff she were keen on.’
‘It belonged to her mother.’
‘Yeah, whatever.’
Barnaby held out his hand. ‘You wouldn’t happen . . .?’
Tanya hesitated.
‘Come on, Tanya. You’ve admitted taking them. Giving them back will look good on your sheet.’
Tanya opened her bag and put the earrings in Barnaby’s hand. They looked very small. Small but beautiful.
‘Now you’re going to flog ’em, ain’tcha?’
‘That’s right,’ said Sergeant Troy.
Barnaby asked what happened next.
‘When she come to my room about it I went mad, tearing up stuff and screaming me life was over. Then I ran away. We knew she’d come after me ’cause she was like that.’
‘Concerned,’ suggested Barnaby.
‘It worked perfect. If it hadn’t, Terry’d got plenty other ideas up his sleeve.’
‘She thought she’d pushed you in,’ said Barnaby. ‘She was frantic.’
‘That was the point,’ Tanya explained patiently. ‘She ain’t going to pay up if I’d jumped, is she?’
‘Why should she pay up at all?’ snapped Sergeant Troy.
‘Because she can afford it. Because she’s got a bloody great house and somebody to clean it for her and somebody else to do the fucking garden. And because she’s never done a stroke of work in her life!’
‘I take it you didn’t like her,’ said Barnaby.
‘Ohh . . .’ Tanya sighed. ‘She weren’t too bad. It were holy Joe I couldn’t stand. Always touching you. Accidentally on purpose - know what I mean? Hands like damp dishcloths.’
‘So where did you get out of the river?’
‘Same place I got in. Terry had floated an old tyre days before. Tied with a rope to a hook under the bridge. I grabbed it, hung on till she’d run away then climbed out.’
I knew about the tyre. Barnaby flashed back to the river-bank search report. A patch of scrub - crisp packets, a pushchair frame, an old tyre. Used as a swing, the description had said, because it still had the rope round it. And I passed on that. Perhaps Joyce was right. Maybe it was time to pack it in.
‘Then where did you go?’ Sergeant Troy was picturing her, despite himself, cold, shivering and soaking wet in the late dark.
‘Nipped back to the house. Hid in the garden till Terry come home. Spent the night in his flat. Next day hitched to Causton and took a train to the Smoke.’
Barnaby controlled his breathing, kept the rising anger in its place. Put aside his thoughts on hours, days even, of wasted time (not least his own), shifting seas of paper detailing useless interviews regarding the night in question, extensive inquiries with wide-ranging health and police authorities about a possible drowning. In short, a massive waste of desperately stretched police resources.
‘So what went wrong?’ asked Sergeant Troy. He had noted the savage set of the chief’s mouth and the angry flush on his cheeks and felt the next question might be better coming f
rom him.
‘That cross-eyed git, Charlie Leathers. He’s what went wrong. Terry’d done his blackmail letter, addressed to her, marked Personal. I posted it, first class, main office in Causton. Being that close you nearly always get twenty-four-hour delivery. He watches for the van then makes up some excuse to get into the house to see she’s got it all right.’
‘How was he supposed to know that?’ asked Sergeant Troy.
‘Do me a favour,’ said Tanya. ‘She ain’t going to be tripping around singin’ oh what a perfect day, I wanna spend it with you, with that burning a hole in her pocket, is she?’
‘I suppose not,’ said Barnaby. He was thinking of Ann Lawrence. Kind, ineffectual, innocent. Going quietly about her daily business. Opening her post.
‘Anyway, she’d got it all right. He found her half dead with fright and the letter on the floor. Trouble is, it weren’t his letter. It had stuck-on writing just the same but there was less words. And arranged different. You can imagine how he felt.’
‘Must have been quite a blow,’ said Barnaby.
‘Yeah. But he’s at his best, Terry, with his back against the wall. So, figuring a blackmail letter means payment, he watches her all the time. He thought she’d probably have to deliver at night and that’s what happened. So he tails her, planning to pick up the money hisself. After all, we’re the ones who earned it. But it weren’t his intention to kill nobody.’
Barnaby, tempted to say, ‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ restrained the impulse. He would do nothing to interfere with this, so far, wonderfully simple unravelling.
‘But Charlie got there first. He was actually taking the money when Terry spotted him.’
‘Some people,’ muttered Sergeant Troy.
‘Just as well Terry happened to have a length of wire in his pocket,’ said Barnaby.
‘You gotta carry something for protection in this dee and ay,’ Tanya explained, less patient by now. Her attitude seemed to be that Barnaby, of all people, should appreciate what a wicked world was out there. ‘And just as well he did, the way things went.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Charlie drew a knife on him. They had a terrible struggle.’
The two policemen looked at each other. Both remembered the orderly neatness of the murder scene.
‘So it was definitely self-defence.’ Tanya, having noticed and read the look, became quite vehement.
‘And what about the dog?’ asked Sergeant Troy. ‘Was that “self-defence”?’
‘What you on about? What dog?’
Barnaby put his hand quickly on his sergeant’s arm to stop any passionate denunciation of Jackson’s cruelty to the animal. The last thing he wanted was an emotional diversion.
‘So what happened to Terry’s letter, Tanya?’
‘It come the next day. He caught the mail van, offered to take the post up to the house and got it back. Then he sent another, by hand this time, like Charlie, asking for five.’
‘And no doubt it would have been more the third time?’
‘Why not? Terry reckoned that place must have been worth a quarter of a million. Anyway, he said we should give her a breather - a false sense of security, like. Maybe for a month. We was going to Paris for a few days. He’d got the five grand—’
‘And you’ve got it now, Tanya. Right?’
‘No. He never brought it with him.’
‘You expect us to believe that?’ said Troy.
‘It’s true. He hid it ’cause he thought you might be round the flat with a warrant. Then he couldn’t pick it up ’cause that filthy poof was spying on him. With binoculars.’
Barnaby thought that certainly tied in with what Bennet had later told him about Fainlight. The money was probably stashed with the clothes in the rucksack. Find that and you’d copped the jackpot.
‘Do you know how he came by the second lot of money?’ Sergeant Troy attempted ironic patience but, as always, failed to pull it off. Even to himself he sounded merely peevish.
‘Same as the first time. How many ways are there to collect a drop?’
‘Try following the victim, crashing her head down on the bonnet of a car and just taking it.’
Tanya stared at Barnaby who had spoken, then at Sergeant Troy and back to Barnaby again.
‘You tricky bastards. You wouldn’t tell such lies if he was here to defend himself. She left it in Carter’s Wood just like the first time.’
‘Mrs Lawrence didn’t leave any money anywhere. She’d decided not to pay and was returning it to the bank.’
‘Yeah, well, that might be what she says—’
‘She isn’t saying anything,’ said Troy. ‘She’s been in intensive care for the last three days. It’s not even certain that she’ll recover.’
Barnaby looked across the table at the girl. She had begun to look pitifully uncertain and his gaze was not unsympathetic.
‘He did have a record of violence, Tanya.’
‘No he didn’t.’ She immediately contradicted herself. ‘There was reasons.’
‘For a knife attack on—’
‘He never done that. Terry was the youngest, he took the blame so he could belong. The actual guy would’ve got life. On the streets you gotta be accepted. If you’re not, you’re finished.’
Troy wanted to ask about the old man left in the gutter but was strangely reluctant. The fact was he was fighting sympathetic feelings himself. Not for Jackson, never that, but for her. She was visibly distressed now and was struggling not to cry. Barnaby had no such qualms.
‘There was another incident. An old man—’
‘Billy Wiseman. He was lucky.’
‘Lucky?’
‘I know people - he’d never have got up again.’
‘What do you mean, Tanya?’
‘I were ten when they fostered me, him and his wife. What he done - I couldn’t even say it in words. Over and over. Sometimes in the middle of the night I’d wake up and he’d be . . . Then, when I were fourteen, I were down by Limehouse Walk with Terry. I just started talking and it all came out. He never said nothing. But his face was terrible.’ Tanya gave a single cry then. A wild sound, like a frightened bird.
Barnaby said, ‘I’m sorry.’
And Troy thought, Christ, I’ve had enough of this.
‘I hadn’t seen him for ages. He’d been in two or three places, then Barnardo’s. I’d been moved about - once we lost touch entirely. Not knowing where each other was. And that was the worst. Like everything in the world closing down at once.’ Tears poured down like rain. ‘He was the only person who ever loved me.’
Troy clumsily attempted comfort. ‘You’ll meet someone else, Tanya.’
‘What?’ She gazed at him blankly.
‘You’re young. Pretty—’
‘You stupid fuck.’ She drew away from them then, staring from one to the other with fastidious contempt. ‘Terry wasn’t my boy friend. He was my brother.’
They would have solved the crime anyway in a couple of days as things turned out. When the prints in Tanya’s room in Stepney turned out to be a perfect match with the ones in the Old Rectory attic.
Or when Barnaby remembered that Vivienne Calthrop had described Carlotta as far too short to be a model so how come she had to duck her head not to bang it on the Old Rectory door frame? Or when the bicycle on which Jackson had ridden back from Causton was found propped against the wall of Fainlight’s garage under half a dozen others. And the money, still in the saddle bag. The rucksack and clothes were never found. Received opinion in the incident room had it that Jackson had buried them under the other rubbish in the Fainlights’ wheelie-bin the day before it was emptied.
Valentine Fainlight, when questioned further, admitted that he had shown Jackson round the house and garden on one occasion when his sister was out. And that the man could have taken the garden key away while he was looking elsewhere but what the hell did it matter now anyway and, Jesus, when in hell were they going to leave him alone?
‘Presumably he biked over that back field, through the gate into the garden, down the side of the house and into the garage. Then he could duck down behind the Alvis, change clothes and hide his stuff to be sorted later.’
‘What d’you think he’ll get, Fainlight?’
‘Depends. Murder’s a serious charge.’
‘It was an accident. You heard what he said to his sister.’
‘I also heard him say he was blind with jealousy. He knew the man, Troy. They had a relationship. Which means murder is a possibility. The Met were right to charge him.’
‘But he was allowed bail.’ Troy was getting quite worked up. ‘That must mean something.’
‘It means he’s not regarded as a danger to the public. Not that he hasn’t committed any crime.’
‘So he might be found guilty?’
‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘Whether anti-homosexual bias can be weeded out in the jury. How impressed they are by Fainlight’s standing as a well-known author. How appalled they are when Jackson’s record is read out. How they respond to Tanya Walker’s testimony, which will be hostile to say the least.’
Tanya’s interview had concluded with her description of the fight that led to her brother’s death. According to her, Valentine had burst in, attacked Terry, dragged him over the landing and forced him back through the stair rail. Afraid for her own life, she had run away down the fire escape.
‘The Crown have a witness as well, chief. DS Bennet.’
‘He only saw Jackson fall. She can say what led up to it.’
‘And lie.’
‘Probably. The girl’s heart is broken, she’ll want revenge. And who could prove perjury?’
‘Do for his books, this, won’t it?’
‘As he writes for children, I would say so.’
Barnaby had been shocked at Fainlight’s appearance. He looked like a zombie. In his eyes the death of all life and hope. There was not even the colour of despair. His frame, now much less stocky, folded in on itself with utter weariness. He seemed inches shorter, pounds lighter.