Bleeding heart yard, p.26
Bleeding Heart Yard, page 26
‘She was very cool, I thought,’ says Kim. ‘Six foot tall, Swedish blonde.’
‘Sounds just my type,’ says Jake.
‘She’s Danish,’ says Harbinder. ‘And she’s not your type. She’s my type.’
She doesn’t wait to see how Jake takes this.
Harbinder uploads the film from her body cam. ‘It’s all here,’ she says. ‘It’ll be hard for him to backtrack, but we obviously need a proper forensic interview. I know I can leave that to you, Jake.’
‘You can,’ says Jake. ‘I’ll take Tory with me. I think it might be good to have a woman in the room.’
‘Your call,’ says Harbinder. She supposes that Tory, especially if she does her wide-eyed thing, might lull Pete into a false sense of security.
‘At the rugby reunion, Pete overheard Gary phoning Isabelle and telling her that he knew who killed David. It seems that Gary told quite a few people this, including Sonoma Davies. I think it was because, when they were out clay pigeon shooting, Gary saw Pete with a gun. That must have triggered a memory of seeing him in the old warehouse that day. Pete killed Gary to keep him quiet. He was quite matter-of-fact about it. Said that he killed Gary with one of Cassie’s syringes after knocking him out first.’
‘Then injected him in the arse,’ says Jake. ‘Nice.’
‘Then Pete put coke round Gary’s nostrils, chucked the syringe away and calmly went back to the party. I’m betting we find his DNA on the syringe. Or on Garfield’s body. It hasn’t been released to the family yet.’ Although Paula is clamouring for this every day.
‘What about Henry?’ says Kim, taking a biscuit. They are the classy sort, from M&S.
‘Henry left a voice message on Cassie’s phone. In it he said he knew who killed David. He’d seen a figure in the old warehouse that day and initially thought it was Anna. Something about a hat, I didn’t follow it all. But, sometime on the Tuesday night, he must have realised it was Pete. Maybe he remembered Pete holding a gun too. He was there at the clay pigeon shoot. Pete listened to the message on Cassie’s phone, deleted it, then texted Henry, pretending to be Cassie. He arranged to meet him at Bleeding Heart Yard. My guess is that Pete’s the man seen talking to Henry on CCTV.’
‘Cassie slept on the sofa that night,’ said Kim. ‘God help me, I thought that pointed to her.’
‘Me too,’ says Harbinder. ‘But actually, it meant that Pete could sneak out, kill Henry, and be back in time for breakfast.’
‘Cassie often took sleeping pills too,’ says Kim. ‘I remember her telling me once.’
‘OK,’ says Harbinder. ‘Let’s get as much detail from Pete as possible. We also need witness statements from Anna Vance and from Mette, my flatmate.’
‘Anna must be quite traumatised,’ says Kim.
‘Actually, she seems in good shape,’ says Harbinder. ‘She was really brave.’
‘She was holding hands with Chris Foster when I saw them downstairs,’ says Jake. ‘Are they an item?’
‘Who says “an item”?’ laughs Kim. ‘Are you a hundred years old, Anton?’
‘I think so,’ says Harbinder. ‘They certainly seem very close. I think they’re both shocked about Pete.’
‘I am too,’ says Kim. ‘He seemed so nice, so reliable. Cassie will be shattered.’
‘She’ll need a lot of support,’ agrees Harbinder. ‘You know, she thought she’d killed David Moore?’
‘Really?’ says Kim. ‘Did she tell you that?’
‘Yes. She said she thought she’d pushed him under the train. I wasn’t sure at the time if it was a reliable account. There seemed to be a lot of holes in it. And Cassie described this explosive noise, which didn’t sound like a Tube train to me. It must have been the gunshot. Pete travelled down from uni to see Cassie on the last day of the exams. He followed Cassie and David from the school to the station, “surveilled them”, in his words, and, when he saw them struggling on the platform, he shot David. I don’t know where he got the gun but I’m guessing that Pete has quite a collection at home. I’ll request a search warrant.’
‘Pete injected Gary with insulin and stabbed Henry,’ says Jake. ‘Must be a cold-blooded bastard.’
‘I think he must be,’ says Harbinder, remembering the clinically tidy study and the way Pete had suddenly appeared in the doorway. She’d been slightly frightened of him then, she realised.
‘Let’s get a confession recorded,’ she says.
Jake heads off to find Tory but Harbinder calls Kim back.
‘Did I hear someone call me Susie just now?’
‘Yes. It’s your nickname. Didn’t you know?’
‘Why Suzi?’ says Harbinder. If it’s racist, she thinks, she’ll sue.
‘After Suzi Quatro. Because you wear a leather jacket. Shows the average age of people around here.’
Harbinder is not, strictly speaking, displeased to be compared to the iconic rock singer.
‘They call me Suzi at work,’ Harbinder tells Mette. ‘After Suzi Quatro.’
‘Down in Devil Gate Drive,’ sings Mette. ‘That’s very cool.’
They are lying on Mette’s bed. Outside, the lights of London twinkle and promise. Pete Fitzherbert has admitted to the murders of David Moore, Garfield Rice and Henry Steep. Harbinder has issued a statement saying that a forty-two-year-old male (always male, never man, in police parlance) has been arrested. The Sunday papers will lead with the story. Harbinder is going to visit her parents tomorrow and will read the Observer on the train. She’s slightly hoping to be recognised.
Mette plays with a strand of Harbinder’s hair. ‘Finally,’ she says. ‘Finally we’re in bed together.’
‘Have you wanted to be, then?’ says Harbinder.
‘Have I wanted to? I’ve given enough signals. Asking you out to the pub, wandering around naked, saying that I liked the lesbian character in Buffy.’
‘I didn’t realise you were gay,’ says Harbinder. ‘I just thought you were being Scandinavian.’
Mette laughs, a rich full sound that chases away any remaining demons. ‘You’re the only person in the world who didn’t realise. My workmates knew immediately. Even the builders yesterday knew.’
‘They said it was their day for seeing beautiful women,’ says Harbinder. ‘I might have known they meant you. It was so amazing,’ she says, not for the first time, ‘when you appeared like that.’
‘I always ride my bike along the corridors,’ says Mette. ‘It’s quicker and easier. When I heard a gunshot, I just went in that direction.’
‘You were very brave,’ says Harbinder. ‘You saved my life.’
‘Let’s make the most of it,’ says Mette.
46
Cassie
One of the uniforms drove Izzy, Oliver and me to the station. ‘We’ll need to take statements from all of you,’ said Terry, the desk sergeant, ‘and then you’ll be free to go.’ He looked at me very kindly. ‘Are you OK, Smoothie?’ I didn’t think he knew the whole story but he obviously realised that something was up. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Do you want me to stay with you?’ asked Helen, the FLO, as Izzy and Oliver were ushered away. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ll be OK.’ I’ve worked with Helen on a few cases and she’s nice enough but I didn’t think I could face her looking at me with professional pity. I imagined her gossiping with her colleagues later. ‘Who would have guessed it of Cassie’s husband? Mind you, I always thought he was a bit weird. She must have suspected too, don’t you think? Maybe they were in it together.’
I didn’t recognise the DC who took my statement and I was grateful for that. But, afterwards, Harbinder came into the interview suite and asked if I wanted to see Pete. Her face was suitably serious but I knew that inside she was glowing with the satisfaction of a job well done. She’d got a result. Upstairs the team would be celebrating. There might even be Champagne. There would certainly be biscuits from M&S. I wished, more than anything, that I could be with them, that I’d never heard of Pete Fitzherbert, or been lifted over his head to see one of the Spice Girls. But, without Pete, I wouldn’t have my children and I couldn’t wish them away.
Pete was in one of the holding cells. Harbinder left us alone together, which was certainly stretching the rules.
‘Are you all right?’ I said. There was a bruise on his face. I’d heard someone say that Harbinder’s flatmate had knocked him down with a bicycle but you can never believe anything you hear in a police station.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. And he looked so the same, large and dependable, his big hands on his knees, that I was almost tempted to forgive him. But then I remembered; this man had killed three people, two of them my friends.
‘Why did you do it?’ I said. Harbinder told me that he had made a full confession.
‘They knew about David,’ he said. ‘They knew I’d killed him. All those years ago.’
‘Why did you kill him?’ I said.
‘I was protecting you,’ he said. ‘I saw you struggling with David on the platform. So I shot him.’
‘Why were you even there?’ I said. It was hard to equate this version of events with the one that had lived in my head for so long. David and I had struggled. My push hadn’t sent David to his death. He had, apparently, been dispatched by a bullet.
‘I came to see you,’ he said. ‘I knew it was the last day of exams. I wanted to talk to you, to tell you that I loved you. Then I saw you leaving the school with David. So I followed you.’
I remembered the feeling I had, when I was walking to the Tube station with David, that I was being followed by an angel who would protect me. Except that it wasn’t an angel.
‘Why did you have a gun with you?’
‘I often used to carry a gun in those days,’ said Pete casually ‘It was one of my dad’s.’
I knew that Pete’s father had a gun, a relic of his army service. He often boasted about it, adding that it was properly licensed and that he ‘knew how to handle himself.’ But it seemed that he had failed in the first requirement of gun ownership. He hadn’t locked the weapon away.
‘It was lucky I had it,’ Pete continued. ‘I was able to act when he assaulted you.’
Lucky was not the word I would have used.
‘What about Gary?’ I said. ‘Why did you kill him?’
‘He knew,’ said Pete. ‘I heard him telling Izzy on the phone after the clay pigeon shoot. He said he knew who’d killed David. So I injected him with your syringe. He was no loss. He thought he was so wonderful but he was just another corrupt politician. Besides, I always thought he was after you.’
Pete always had been jealous of Gary. He would call him ‘your boyfriend’ in that tone of voice, remembered how we had gone out together at school, when we were in Year 10 and Pete was in the sixth form. I thought that Pete and Gary might have bonded at all those rugby and football reunions, but I think, on some level, Pete was just biding his time. ‘He didn’t love me,’ I said. ‘I think he always loved Izzy.’ Saying those words filled me with a great sadness. Perhaps Izzy and Gary should always have been together. Anna and Chris too. How many lives had we ruined that afternoon at the abandoned Tube station?
‘What about you?’ said Pete.
‘I loved you,’ I said, realising that this was true. I had thought that, on some level, I was still in love with Gary but really I had loved the life I had built with Pete, even though that turned out to be based on a whole foundation of lies.
‘I’m going now,’ I said.
‘Will you come back?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
Izzy and Oliver were waiting in the reception area. They were both very kind. Izzy hugged me. ‘Do you want to come back to our house tonight? We could pick the children up on the way.’ Lucy and Sam were at a friend’s birthday party. I remembered making the arrangement, writing it smugly on the Mummy Pig calendar, pleased to have them both occupied for the afternoon.
‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I just want to go home.’
I didn’t tell Lucy and Sam. Let them have one more night of not knowing, I thought. I didn’t tell my parents either. Or Pete’s. After the kids were in bed, I sat in the kitchen with Kevin and drank the best part of a bottle of wine. Pete didn’t like me to drink too much. It was one of a whole series of restraints, offered subtly in the form of caring, designed to form me into his perfect wife. On our first date when he lifted me into the air, I’d chosen to see this as romantic but was he really just displaying his superior strength? Pete was certainly never violent but, in his soft-spoken way, he undermined me all the time. You should get promotion, your boss is younger than you, take your sleeping pills, don’t eat your crusts, stay at home and look after me. And I let him do it because, deep down, I didn’t feel I deserved any better.
It’s funny, when I confessed to Harbinder, I thought I was ending my life. I thought I might go to prison, that I’d never see the children again. When Harbinder gave me absolution, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I went home feeling like a whole new person, a clean slate, a white page. I didn’t tell Pete though. I wonder why now.
But then, the next day, Izzy appeared on my doorstep with the crazy idea of reconstructing the events leading up to David’s death. We should lay the ghost, she said, sitting there wet-eyed, talking about how much she had loved Gary. Why did I agree to it? I suppose I wanted to know. Harbinder had made me doubt myself. Izzy talked about buried memories and I thought: what have I buried alongside David in that grim Baron’s Court cemetery? Because I had visited the grave many times. David Nathaniel Moore 1980–1998. Beloved Son. Once Arthur found me there, laying some flowers, which confirmed my angelic status in his eyes.
I used to think about Sliding Doors, the film I’d seen with David. Gwyneth Paltrow misses her Tube train and the film shows what would have happened if she’d caught it, how her whole life would have been different because of that one small detail. David said that I looked a bit like Gwyneth but then he pounced on me and the rest of the story is a bit of a blur. I used to wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t gone to Imperial that day, if I hadn’t killed a man.
When I saw the station again, the door propped open, I was surprised how calm I felt. Because it wasn’t the same. I wasn’t an eighteen-year-old who had just failed to answer coherently about The Tempest. I was a middle-aged woman in one of my husband’s jumpers. Oliver wasn’t David, he was the man in that TV series about a cop who doesn’t seem to have heard the word ‘procedure’. Even when we went down those still foul-smelling steps, it wasn’t the same. But then, on the platform, Oliver said something like, ‘Give us a kiss, darling.’ It was such an obvious piece of acting that Chris, lurking in the background, laughed. But it jolted me. I looked up. And I saw a figure staring out from the building opposite. A figure wearing a dark cap.
And I remembered.
47
Anna
Even though, this time, I was a witness and not a suspect, it was still scary being interviewed by the police.
‘Just tell us what you remember,’ said Kim, all sympathy, leaning forward in her chair. There was another officer there too. A large man who said very little. ‘Just tell us what happened today, Anna. In your own words.’
What did I remember? ‘Memory is dynamic,’ Aisha had said. But I had to try to pin down what had actually happened before my imagination started adding extra detail. I remembered entering the apartment block, the builders’ badinage, feeling self-conscious as I walked away from them. I remembered finding the open door, the hallway with the smell of paint, the wires sprouting like fungus in the corner of the room. I remembered opening the window, looking down on the station platform, seeing Oliver and Cassie walking along like extras in a film. Oliver moving forward, Cassie stepping back, Cassie looking up, Cassie screaming.
After that, it was more difficult. The voice saying ‘Anna?’ that I didn’t immediately recognise. Turning to see Harbinder with a gun to her head. The gunman resolving himself into Pete, my friend’s husband, the man whose wedding I had attended. Asking him questions, the need to know temporarily stronger than the instinct for survival. Harbinder warning me to do what he said, her voice reminding me how serious the situation was. Harbinder touching my hand, silently telling me to run. The corridor, stretching for ever like something from The Shining, the gunshot. And then the gleaming figure on the bike, Pete sprawled on the ground, Harbinder saying, ‘Pete Fitzherbert, I’m arresting you . . .’ Suddenly Chris was there, holding my hand, and I could have sworn that Harbinder was holding the cyclist’s hand too. I didn’t add this last bit.
‘I do need to ask you something, Anna. Just to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.’ What’s coming now? I wondered. Kim continued, almost apologetically, ‘We have a CCTV image of you walking past a garage on the Sutton Estate in the early hours of Wednesday the twenty-fifth of September.’
I remembered. After that meeting with Henry, when he told me that I’d seen a murder, I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d got up, dressed and had walked to the garage to buy some chocolate. In the end, I hadn’t even gone in. The lighted forecourt was enough to remind me that life, in all its messy glory, was still going on. The tarmac had shimmered with a petrol rainbow. A taxi driver was leaning against his cab, drinking a cup of coffee. I told all this to Kim, as best I could.
‘I thought you’d popped out to buy cigarettes,’ she said.
‘I don’t smoke.’
‘Very wise.’ But I thought she sounded slightly disappointed in me.
When Kim read my statement back, it sounded fantastical, less believable than anything I’d written in my unfinished crime novel. But I agreed that this was what happened and signed at the bottom of the page.
Once again, Chris was waiting outside.
‘They’re giving us an escort home,’ he said. ‘We must be the good guys at last.’
I realised that the last time Chris was in this building, he was being arrested on suspicion of murder. He seemed remarkably sanguine about the whole thing. ‘They thought I’d killed Gary because I was so angry about global warming,’ he told me afterwards. ‘It was quite flattering really, that they thought I was that much of an eco-warrior. Apparently, someone – probably Cassie – heard me arguing with Gary at the reunion. We did argue. I told him I’d never forgive him for selling out the way he had. Being a Tory was one thing but pretending to be a climate change denier because it suited his business interests? That was unforgivable. I think I really hated Gary when I said those words. But it wasn’t much to build a case on.’
