Cages, p.23
Cages, page 23
Ruth pulls a face. ‘He wasn’t chummy with anybody. Had an awful time at school, which doesn’t sound very good value for five grand a term. Very much a mummy’s boy. It was just her and him, you see. Older mum, hadn’t ever expected to be blessed with a child. They were living on savings, rattling around in this big old place down in Cambridgeshire. She was a funny fish, and I’m using that as a euphemism for “fucking nuts”. We don’t know who the father was, which no doubt wasn’t easy to deal with back then. Old money, as it were. She doted on him. Had him believing he was somebody destined for greatness. Had him believing he was going to be remembered through the ages. Reality kicked in when he went to boarding school. Older kids used to dress him up as a girl and have him sleep in their beds, if you can believe that was allowed to go on. He was the designated “pretty boy” in the dorm. Must have messed him up, or at the very least, added another layer to what was there before.’
Rufus smokes his cigarette. Thinks of the small, inscrutable man in his writing group. Can’t help but feel a surge of pity for the child he was.
‘Mother had him thinking he was the new Renaissance – got him playing instruments and translating Latin and Greek texts when he was still a nipper. Went half-loony before he was five, opening the house up to all of the hippies and bohemians who wanted the Summer of Love to last for ever. God knows what he was exposed to.’
‘And Wilson something-or-other?’ asks Rufus.
‘Father figure, I suppose. Lived not far off and was paid to keep the house shipshape. Don’t ask me if there was something going on with him and Mum as I don’t know. Either way, they were close. My source who went to prep with Cox – he reckons that Wilson was the one who put a stop to the bullies in the end. One of the ringleaders woke up to find a stranger in the dorm. He’d been tied to his bed and there was tape over his mouth. Told his pals that he’d thought he was having a nightmare: this grotesque thing with a hook nose and a gnarled back, sitting on his bed like a succubus. He tried to cry out but couldn’t make a sound. Then the man leaned over him, took off the tape, and told him to open his mouth. Poor posh lad did as he was told. His visitor poured dirt down his throat.’
‘Dirt?’
She shrugs. ‘Mud. Sand. Ash. I don’t know. But it nearly choked him. Visitor didn’t speak other than to tell him to leave Griffin alone. Then he was gone.’
Rufus stares up at the clouds, hoping for a square of blue. Grinds out his cigarette. He’s had enough. Wants to get home. Wants to put this whole silly game behind him.
‘This Wilson – you think it was him?’
‘Makes sense,’ says Ruth, taking out her phone and snapping off a couple of shots of Rufus looking bemused. ‘He’s loyal enough to have looked after the old house all these years. Loyal enough to have visited Cox once a fortnight since he was arrested. Hasn’t been to see him since he moved over to Holderness, but that’s no doubt because he was ill. Must have come as a shock to Cox to find his old pal turning on him. Wonder what he did to deserve that?’
Rufus chews on his cheek, thinking hard. ‘His connection to the missing teens,’ he says, softly. ‘Ben said they were all of a similar profile?’
Ruth nods. ‘All relative innocents, if there is such a thing. Clever, insightful, talented – not necessarily beautiful but certainly not tearaways.’
‘And how did they come into contact with Cox?’
‘In Bronwen’s case, she took part in a junior music contest he was present at. Something of a Renaissance man, as I told you. His furniture company sponsored the trophy so he was on the panel of judges. According to the family, that was around the time somebody started to send her presents. Wrote letters. Sent her a nightingale in a cage, if you’ll credit it …’
Rufus points at Ruth’s pocket. Says nothing until he has another cigarette. ‘And when she vanished?’
‘They told the police about it. Police at the time were looking for a student – maybe a local boy she might have fallen for. It was a long time before anybody made the connection to the nice quiet man who’d met her at the recital. She was a flautist, you see. Cox too. Played as a child and kept it up through university. Even won a couple of scholarships to study in Italy under one of the greats. I think he’d hoped to go in that direction, but then his mother died and he lost the enthusiasm for it. Took a job with a family friend and rather drifted after that. But each of the cases that Cox has been questioned about involved somebody with a particular skill. Singer. Writer. Melanie Grazia, the girl from the boarding school – she was a dancer and we know he was at the school for a prize-giving at the same time she was involved in a rehearsal for a school production and could well have seen her. But it’s all circumstantial. Hence the need for something solid. Forensics. A witness. A confession.’
‘How did she die?’ asks Rufus, turning his back on the bleak farm and beginning to head back towards the car. Ruth falls into step beside him. ‘His mum.’
‘She’d suffered a stroke about a year before she popped her clogs,’ says Ruth, tactlessly. ‘Wheelchair bound. Needed lots of help, apparently. He came home from Italy to care for her. She suffered a nasty tumble: wheelchair went down the steps out the back of the house. Lay there for hours in the fancy garden she loved: statues and sundials and stuff. Nobody could see her from the house. Died of exposure and head trauma.’
‘And Cox?’
‘The people who remember the funeral say he sang. Tried to, anyway. Broke down. Wept like it was a Greek tragedy, poor bastard. And then, like I say, he drifted.’
‘I can see why the police like him as a suspect,’ says Rufus, thoughtful. He shakes his head. ‘But that’s only because I’m viewing it through the filter of the notion that he’s guilty of abducting and killing a load of teenagers. I mean, as you said, it’s circumstantial.’
Ruth shrugs. ‘Your mate Miss Harris would know better than me, wouldn’t she? What’s her name? What’s her name again? Lillyanna, or Arrabella, or something, wasn’t it?’
‘Annabeth,’ he corrects her, then pauses, one hand on the car door. Could it be that easy? Could Fellowes simply have remembered the unusual name? Mentioned it to his pad-mate in conversation. He can picture Cox, filing the name away. Seeing it in the prison mag. Setting his big old mind whirring. Would that be around the time Wilson last visited him? Could he have been telling him that he was ill? That he was going to clear his conscience and tell the police? Cox had requested the transfer, after all. Begged to be on Annabeth’s course.
He throws the cigarette away and opens the car door. Is about to ask another question of Ruth when he realizes she’s stopped, just in front of the gate. She’s studying her phone intently, her lips twitching. She glances up: sees him watching.
‘Can you drop me back?’ she asks, urgently.
‘Sure. Why? What’s—’
‘Cox,’ she says, breathlessly. ‘Cox has escaped.’
THIRTY-TWO
At the same moment that Rufus was taking his third bite of a sausage and egg McMuffin and wondering whether to throw himself in the Humber, Annabeth Harris was rushing from the medical wing at HMP Holderness to find Dr Lechmere. Griffin Cox had started fitting; his body convulsing; blood running from his mouth as his teeth mashed down upon his tongue.
In the absence of the doctor – stuck in traffic on Hedon Road and listening to an operatic CD that drowned out the sound of her mobile phone – she located the resident nurse practitioner: an ex-Army staff sergeant named Matthew Keighley whose CV described a man of great experience with a commendable history of remaining cool in high pressure situations. His online employment history called him a ‘robust and capable clinical thinker’ and painted a glorious pen-portrait of the kind of individual tailor-made for dealing with such a set of circumstances as these. Nowhere on his application for the job did the word ‘fraud’ appear. Nor did ‘chancer’. The phrase ‘kept his head down and lucked his way through twenty-two years of service’ was notably absent.
When confronted with the unnerving sight of Officer Annabeth Harris running into his little cubicle office and demanding he come and tend to a bona fide emergency, Keighley did what he had been trained to do in times of extreme crisis, and excused himself from performing any function that could carry even the slightest whiff of negative repercussions. He followed the rule book. He did what he had been told. He called an ambulance, registered the incident, amended the inmate’s prison file. He didn’t move from his chair: just stayed at his desk eating a multi-pack of donuts. It was left to Annabeth and PO Barry Lambert to wheel the gurney carrying the wide-eyed, trembling Cox down the sloping floors towards the maintenance exit and load him into the rear of the waiting ambulance; his right hand twisted shut as the paroxysms of pain gripped him like so many coils of barbed wire.
The paramedics checked his pupils, placed a breathing mask around his nostrils, and muttered in low voices that he seemed to have suffered a cerebrovascular haemorrhage and that his temperature was ‘through the roof’. Annabeth and PO Lambert squeezed themselves in to the rear of the vehicle as the sirens wailed into life and the driver swung them through the big arched gates and out onto the rain-streaked country roads of Holderness. Lambert suggested they cuff him to the stretcher. The paramedic told him there was no way he was going to permit that. Lambert tried to get a signal on his mobile to update his line manager about the sudden development. Annabeth made a great show of doing the same – leaving a voicemail for Governor Hussain and explaining she had done as instructed and made sure she was on hand to provide a reassuring presence for their most high-profile prisoner.
The paramedic who tended to Cox did a professional job. He knew nothing about the patient in his care – just that he looked bloody awful and that his heartbeat was erratic and there appeared to be blood in one of his eyes. Annabeth filled him in on the patient history. He’d been stabbed the previous day – taken to hospital and sewn up. He’d complained of a high temperature and sickness in the night. He’d been given painkillers but the wound smelled a little funny beneath the bandages and she was concerned that he had picked up an infection.
The ambulance was just passing the entrance to Hull’s Victoria Dock estate when the miracle occurred. The ambulance slowed down to skirt the roundabout that turned left into the great tract of identikit new-build homes, rising from the broken foundations of the filled-in dock. The paramedic leaned forward and peeled back the bandage on his pale, bony chest. He leaned forward, examining the stitches and seeking any sign of the infection that the professional, halfway pretty prison officer had suggested. And then Cox opened his eyes. The transformation was sudden and absolute. The figure who, moments before, had seemed like somebody recently disinterred, had sprung with a strength and ferocity that came from somewhere deep within. His right hand, twisted into an unyielding claw, changed position to better grasp the canister of pepper spray upon his palm, and unloaded the stinging liquid straight into the hapless medic’s eyes.
Later, the drivers of the vehicles that were near the ambulance, would tell police that the vehicle seemed to swing suddenly to the right, as if somebody had grabbed the wheel, and then barrelled straight towards the centre of the roundabout, crashing into the side of a Kingston Communications van, then rear-ending a Land Rover that had pulled in to the let the ambulance scream by. Moments later, the doors burst open, and a squat, plumpish man in a prison officer’s uniform collapsed onto the road, clawing at his eyes. Moments later, a wiry figure, barefoot and wearing pyjamas, leapt down to the road, dragging a female prison officer by the hair; something sharp at her throat. He dragged her to the nearest vehicle: a red Suzuki Swift with white stripes up the bonnet and roof, and yanked the driver’s door open before she had the presence of mind to lock it. He sprayed the driver straight in the eyes with the aerosol, then let go of his hostage for long enough to drag the driver onto the road and stamp on her head, twice, in quick succession. He pushed his prisoner into the driver’s seat, and jumped in the back, pressing the shard of glinting metal back against her throat. Then the little car squirmed up the muddy bank round the waiting vehicles, and sped off into the maze of the estate, leaving only the scream of the siren and the desperate shouts of ‘help me, help me’ from the officer on the floor. It would be six minutes before the police arrived. They would find the paramedic unconscious on the gurney, eyes streaming, a great trench on his crown where he had been struck, hard, with the base of the small fire extinguisher from the shelf above the medication locker. They would find the driver sitting at the side of the road, weeping into his hands, blood streaming from his nose, having lost control of the vehicle the moment he heard the commotion from the rear of the ambulance. It would be four months before the detectives at Humberside Police would untangle the complex transactions and maze of accounts that had been used to disguise the £50,000 deposited in his account by one Wilson Iveson to make sure it was he who answered the emergency call to the prison.
It would be several hours before Annabeth presented herself at the doctor’s surgery on the Victoria Dock estate, dripping wet and bleeding from a head wound, puking up sea water and mud and trying to tell the frightened receptionist to call the police, to call the hospital – to get divers in the water. He’d crashed through the sea wall, she said. He’d taken them into the water at forty miles per hour. The car was at the bottom of the river. As far as she knew, Cox was still inside. She’d only escaped because the windscreen had smashed when they hit the sea wall and she’d been able to drag herself free. Cox, who had taken the wheel once they were away from prying eyes, hadn’t been able to untangle himself from the airbag before the water rushed into the car, and down his throat. She had no doubt he was dead. Dead, at the bottom of the river. And then she had crumpled in on herself, and begged those who rushed to provide blankets and hot tea and motherly arms, to ring her son. To tell Ethan she was so sorry. It was the only part of her story that wasn’t a lie.
PART THREE
THIRTY-THREE
Rufus is sprawled in a sun-bleached wooden chair, tucked away in the overgrown garden at the rear of his home, attempting to allow an unfamiliar sunlight to undo some of the damage that his lifestyle has done to his face. It isn’t working. He’s just hot and sweaty and half asleep. He isn’t normally fond of hot days: preferring to see the beauty in grey skies and bleak, zig-zagging rain. But the school holidays have filled the house with teenagers, and the only place he feels able to sit, and think, and drink himself insensible, is in the little tangle of wildflower-strewn grass between the courtyard garden and the orchard. It’s a pleasant spot – the apple trees forming a lacy parasol overhead and the shadows moving with a pleasingly haphazard choreography. He has his eyes closed. There is a cigarette clasped between his lips: a dog-turd of ash threatening to tumble onto his stubbled chin. He’s wearing a wrinkled linen shirt, shorts that won’t fasten over his belly, and deck shoes with broken backs: his feet having stamped them flat. In the twists of bluebell, dandelion and cowslips that surround the rickety chair in which he reclines, hardback books form colourful stepping stones. Two wasps are slowly dying in the sticky residue of his home-made elderflower gin. He knows they will die happy.
‘Not a bad spot, this. If I didn’t know your financial situation I’d think you were doing well for yourself.’
Rufus sits forward, opening an eye like a dog asleep in front of the fire. He recognizes the voice. DC Ben Neilsen. He’d expected as much. He hasn’t returned any of his phone calls or made arrangements to give a statement, as requested, so the handsome detective’s presence at Rufus’s home in North Yorkshire comes as no surprise.
‘Pull up a tuffet,’ says Rufus, grimacing as the sunlight makes his head spin. ‘You want a drink? Do you like your elderflower gin with or without wasps?’
Neilsen stands directly in front of him, blocking out the sun. Rufus raises a hand to his forehead. He’s sweating. Everything aches. He’d hoped vitamin D would be some miraculous cure-all but he just feels hot and tired. His thoughts seem to have been dulled by the sun. He wants to sleep. To roll into the soft grass and doze off with the smell of spring suffusing his senses.
‘You didn’t call me back,’ says Neilsen, with a sigh.
Rufus looks him up and down. He looks like something from a magazine. He wears a light grey suit with a pale shirt and open collar. There’s not a bead of sweat upon him and he looks as though he has just been professionally cleaned. Rufus would hate him for it, if he had any energy for the task.
‘Your wife said I would find you out here. She didn’t seem surprised to see me.’
Rufus feels ash patter onto his chin. Removes the dog-end and rubs his hand across his bristles. ‘I don’t think Shonagh has the capacity for surprise, Ben. I think the juice ran dry on that score a few years ago. Gave too many feelings away too freely, you see. All the good ones. Compassion, lust, sense of humour, creativity – let them gush when we first met. Now the barrel is empty. Still got a few kegs of bitterness and disappointment left though. She can spray that around like an elephant spraying water.’
Neilsen looks around and locates an old stone birdbath. It’s heavy, but he picks it up without much effort and moves it nearer to where Rufus is sprawled. Sits himself down and peers at the books which surround him.
‘You’re re-reading Metamorphoses?’ he asks, drily. ‘Psychopath textbooks. The Gates of Janus? That’s by Ian Brady, isn’t it? Not exactly light reading, Rufus. Anybody would think you were studying for an exam. Heading on Mastermind, are you? Chosen subject: true evil.’
Rufus runs his tongue around his mouth, wishing that somebody, anybody, liked him enough to bring him a glass of water. He sighs, and tries to sit up. There’s an unpleasant sound as he unpeels his sweaty skin from the wood of the chair. He laughs at the absurdity of it all. At the ridiculousness of the picture he must present.
