The inheritance, p.18
The Inheritance, page 18
Sarah thought of trying to call Warren but in the end she decided to turn up on his doorstep instead, having first checked that he lived in a quiet suburb in a house overlooked by others, so she would feel comparatively safe there. The memory of David Young’s outburst when she had questioned him was still comparatively fresh in her memory and she’d had the protection of his doctor with her in the same room at the time. There would be no professional person with her when she spoke to Warren and he was an unknown quantity at this point. Her strategy where he was concerned was to hear him out, to judge for herself whether he had never seen Lucy that day and if he had a plausible explanation.
The man who answered the door to her was in late middle age and scruffily dressed but he still looked a lot like the young man whose face she had seen on the internet. Warren Evans regarded her warily and when Sarah told him why she was there, he flared up. ‘I don’t speak to journalists,’ he hissed. ‘How many times do I have to say it?’
‘I’m not a journalist,’ she told him, ‘or a police officer or a private detective.’
‘What are you then?’
She almost said ‘I’m family’ but instead launched into a long-winded explanation about her aunt’s wish to discover the truth about Lucy.
‘I don’t know how long I have to keep on saying it. I did not kill that girl!’
‘I don’t think you did. You had no reason to.’
He seemed taken aback by that, as if having no reason to do something wasn’t mitigation enough for most people. She hoped that doubting he was the murderer might win him over. In truth, she had lied about that part. Sarah did not necessarily believe that he was the murderer but had certainly not ruled him out either.
‘Then why are you here?’
‘I just want five minutes of your time, please, for you to tell me about that day from your perspective, so I can understand it?’
He seemed to be deciding whether to trust her or not.
Warren glanced over her shoulder then and she turned to see a couple walking down the road close to his house. They looked over towards him and though they seemed innocuous, with no particular interest in him, this was enough to rattle Warren.
‘Christ,’ he hissed, ‘will you get in?’ and he gestured for her to come inside. As she walked through his door, she did consider the wisdom of entering a potential killer’s house, but it was broad daylight and two people had just seen her standing on his doorstep. Would that be enough to protect her? She pulled out her phone and fake-dialled it then held it up to her ear.
‘Hi Patrick,’ she told the dead line. ‘Yes, I’m with him now. At his home, that’s right, so I’ll meet you where we said later. Thanks.’
‘Who was that?’ he asked.
‘My lift home.’ She had parked the Sunbeam around the corner because it was so conspicuous. She now had the additional security of knowing that Warren thought she had just given her location to a male friend.
He sat down in a chair and she took that as an invitation to take a corner of the sofa.
‘The anniversaries are the worst,’ he told her. ‘You get a new set of reporters but they’re exactly the same as the last ones. You can’t trust them. If I talk to them, they twist my words, so I don’t speak to them and they stitch me up anyway. They write things down that I never said and they make …’ He was searching for the right word.
‘Insinuations?’
‘Yes.’ He seemed surprised that she actually understood.
‘I’ve read their reports. They do make things sound bad,’ she told him, ‘and that interview with your ex-girlfriend was …’
‘Disgusting.’ He was still angry about it, even now. ‘She wrote to me, you know?’ Then he clarified, ‘Jane. She wrote to me to apologize. Hah!’ It was clear the apology had not been well received. ‘She was sorry for all the things she’d said about me – she was just a silly little girl back then and dazzled by that reporter, who’d made up half of what she said.’ Sarah could tell Warren didn’t believe Jane’s account, even though he’d had similar experiences himself with the press.
‘That girl ruined my life. Her and the bloody Woodfell family. This has stayed with me. There isn’t a day when I don’t think about it. I haven’t been able to move on.’ He shook his head as if reliving the trauma of that time. ‘The police wanted to lock me up and throw away the key. They kept on and on at me, telling me to confess. “Get it off your chest, son, you’ll feel better.” Maybe I should have done.’ He added hastily, ‘Even though it would have been a lie. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything. I was just there, that’s all. But maybe if I had copped for it, I wouldn’t be living like this.’
It was a strange thing to say when the alternative would have been life in prison, but she could see Warren was clearly not at peace.
‘I’m sorry to go over it all again, but I want to find out what really happened to Lucy,’ she explained. ‘If I can learn something from you that helps me work it out, then maybe you will get some peace of mind.’ He seemed to accept this. ‘Did you know Lucy Woodfell before she disappeared?’
He shook his head. ‘Not at all. That was another thing the police didn’t believe. They kept saying the village was a small place, but she didn’t live in the village, did she? She lived at the big house and didn’t hang out with the rest of us. I’d never even seen her around.’
‘You can see why the police wanted to talk to you?’ she said. ‘A number of people saw you sitting there on your own, you’d had an argument with your girlfriend and must have been angry, you were close to the path and Lucy would have walked right past you. She was never seen again.’
‘And I never saw her either,’ he assured her.
‘That’s the bit of your story that no one believes,’ she told him. ‘Four witnesses saw Lucy leave the house to walk to the beach that day: her oldest brother, her sister, the other brother and the nanny. They all saw her heading that way.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I never disputed that but I didn’t see her.’
‘I’ve walked that path. It’s not so very long and only a small number of people used it to get from the house to the beach. I’d say it’s unlikely that someone hid to one side of it on the off-chance that one of the Woodfell girls would come by so they could grab them.’
‘I don’t think anyone would try and grab someone there,’ he agreed. ‘It’s too close to the beach and people walk by with their dogs.’
‘So we think she left the house and we reckon she safely navigated the path to the beach, which means she had to have come out right by you. Yet you still say, after all these years, that you never saw her. How can you account for that, Warren?’
‘I can’t. Don’t you think I want to?’
‘Did you give the police any explanation?’ she asked, her frustration building now. ‘Did you say you fell asleep?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘because I never fell asleep.’
‘Were you facing the sea?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you saw other people go by?’
‘Yeah, and they saw me. They told the police I was there but no one ever said I was talking to Lucy or that I was even with a woman, apart from Jane – but she wasn’t there long.’
‘What was your argument about?’
He looked frustrated then too. ‘I was jealous,’ he admitted, ‘because Jane kept flirting with other guys. I got angry and we had a row, and yes, I do know how that makes me look.’
‘Like someone who might take out his anger on another woman, do you mean?’
‘That’s pretty much what the police reckoned, yes.’
‘How long did you stay on the beach after Jane left?’
‘Hours,’ he said. ‘I was pissed off and upset and I just wanted to be on my own.’
‘But didn’t you get bored? What did you do, read a book or something?’
He shook his head. ‘I listened to music.’
‘You had a radio.’
‘No. A Walkman, it had those headphones, you know.’
‘Were you sitting up or lying down?’
‘Both. I mean, I sat for a while and lay down for a while.’
‘Did you close your eyes?’
‘I didn’t go to sleep but I may have done, for a few minutes.’
‘So if you were lying there with your eyes shut and your music coming out of your headphones, could Lucy have slipped past you?’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
He corrected himself then. ‘Not to you. It’s what I said to the police when they interviewed me.’
‘What did they say?’
‘They didn’t believe me.’
‘Why not?’
‘I think they’d made their minds up about me by then and that was that.’
‘But they let you go in the end.’
‘Only because they had nothing on me. There was no evidence, I didn’t know the woman and they never found her. Oh, and that other guy showed up and turned himself in.’
‘David Young.’
‘Yes, and that guy was an actual killer so, you know, he got their attention for a while.’ He shook his head in annoyance. ‘I still get mentioned in the same breath as him and he killed a lass with his bare hands. How is that right? He did life, you know.’
‘I do know,’ she said, ‘and now he is out.’
‘So for him it’s over, but for me it never ends. I just want to forget about it. All I want is for everyone to leave me alone so I can move on. Then this nightmare might finally be over.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
September
Later that morning Sarah received the latest extract from Kirsten. In it, Evie gave Sarah a glimpse of the world inhabited by another Woodfell: the oldest sibling, Oliver.
If you absolutely must burn through a sizeable family fortune then you would be advised to take up the two most expensive hobbies known to man: gambling and drugs.
Oliver gambled with the urgent rashness of a man who had already lost a shameful amount of money and had to win it back quickly, before anyone noticed it was gone. His sense of wretchedness at his own weakness led him to seek oblivion in more drugs and his habit was not just costly but life-threatening. Twice he overdosed and had to be rushed to hospital. It was clear that something had to be done and he was eventually persuaded to check into a rehab clinic in Switzerland. Somewhat surprisingly, he pursued a course of treatment for some months. Even Lucy was guardedly optimistic and she drove out to the airport to pick him up and bring him straight home before he could come into contact with anyone who might lead him astray again, then she stayed at the manor house with him.
After all the therapy and rehab, it was entirely typical of Olly to ruin everything with one rash act. He had only been back at Cragsmoor for a couple of days before he took a massive overdose of heroin and died.
Oliver was dead for four and a half minutes. That’s how long it took to bring him back. Later, Freddie said it was like watching someone trying to start a clapped-out car with jump leads.
When Oliver came round, he denied that the drugs he had taken in his room were his, claiming they had been deliberately left there by someone else to tempt him. By then we were all used to Oliver’s lies and this one was the final straw for his father, who started legal proceedings that eventually led to Oliver being disinherited in favour of his younger brother. Freddie told members of the family that he would take on the responsibility of the estate, to secure it for future generations. It had something of a hollow ring to it even then.
Once in charge, the first thing Freddie did was to buy himself an old Jaguar car, in racing green. He used to tell everyone that Jag could go from nought to sixty in nine seconds and it once belonged to a racing driver; Stirling Moss, I think. He liked to roar up and down the roads around the estate in it, terrifying the locals. His sister tried to get him to slow down. She was worried he might run over a child. Freddie used to laugh at the notion that he might not be fully in control, but he was about to embark on a series of disastrous projects that brought the family to its lowest point in five hundred years.
A photographer took photos of every corner of the house for his glossy ‘coffee-table’ book. They littered the library because it took him ages to choose the right ones for the book. When it was finally published, no one bought it. Lucy and I were both working in publishing by then and had warned him against it but, characteristically, he refused to listen to us.
His next idea was to open part of the house as an upmarket hotel, complete with golf course. It never got off the ground but it was a better idea than his zoo. We will never know how much he spent on the tigers, lions, zebras and giraffes he housed there, but it didn’t last long.
The depleted finances and insurmountable problems with the estate would have severely taxed a brilliant man, and Freddie was far from brilliant. Sephy offered to help him out and she came back to Cragsmoor almost every weekend for months, to provide support then solace, as one scheme after another failed and more money was lost. If her husband objected to this, he did not let on in public. She may have been able to restrain Freddie from his wildest excesses but she couldn’t save the estate. By now everyone could see how this was going to end. It was just a matter of time.
After reading that extract, Sarah decided that Oliver Woodfell should be next on her list for a surprise visit. She was keen to discover just how he had dealt with being disinherited by his father, only to see his younger brother make an even bigger mess of managing the family estate than he had. Oliver must have harboured resentment towards his siblings, none of whom seemed to have supported the idea of keeping him in charge. His greatest rancour would surely have been directed towards Freddie, however, and not Lucy, unless there was something about his relationship with his half-sister that Sarah had not yet discovered.
As she drove out to see the eldest of the Woodfell siblings, she made sure to follow Sephy’s advice by arriving at his home in the morning, before Oliver was too far into his drinking. When she rang his doorbell she found Oliver up, dressed and coherent, and he peered at her suspiciously. Oliver was a cadaverous figure. Years of drug and alcohol abuse had turned him into an emaciated, undernourished soul.
Sarah explained who she was and why she was there. To talk about Lucy. Unsurprisingly, he did not appear to have any recollection of her earlier phone call.
‘And why would I talk to you about Lucy? Why wouldn’t I just tell you to fuck off?’ he asked her.
‘Because I might be the only person who believes your story.’
‘What story?’
‘The one about the drugs you overdosed on,’ she said. ‘You claimed they weren’t yours and that someone had left them there. I believe you.’
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. ‘Why? No one else did.’
‘I understand you were in that Swiss clinic for months. Even if you knew how to score in Geneva, I don’t think you would have risked bringing heroin home on the plane and Lucy met you off it, so you couldn’t go and meet any of your druggie mates.’
‘That’s right, she did.’
‘Something also tells me that you wouldn’t have hidden heroin in your bedroom when your family and the servants would have been looking out for you to relapse and you had managed months in that expensive clinic without any. I don’t think you would have taken an overdose unless someone put it there on a plate for you.’
Oliver regarded her closely. ‘It almost sounds as if you were there,’ he said, meaning she had hit the nail on the head. ‘Are you some sort of private investigator?’
‘No.’
‘And you’re obviously not a police officer?’
‘I’m not a police officer. I told you, I’m here because of my aunt, Evelyn.’
‘Which magazine or newspaper is paying you to dredge this all up again?’
‘No one. Like I said, I’m just Evelyn’s niece and I have a couple of questions about the day Lucy disappeared, then I promise I’ll leave you alone.’
‘People are always promising to leave me alone,’ he told her, ‘but they never do.’ Then he leaned into a space behind the door and pulled out a coat which he struggled into. ‘I’m off to the pub,’ he announced. ‘If you want to ask your questions there, you can, on the strict understanding that you’re paying for everything.’
‘All right.’
‘Good, but be warned, I have quite a thirst.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The pub was no more than two hundred yards from Oliver’s home, and when they reached it he sat down heavily on a bench seat outside at one of the quieter tables, which was set slightly apart from the others. No one else sat outside. The weather wasn’t warm and it was threatening to rain, but perhaps he didn’t want to answer her questions in public.
‘You’re going to the bar,’ he ordered. ‘I’m having a pint of bitter and a large Bushmills. You’re having whatever you’re having,’ and he waved a hand imperiously. ‘Now run along, my girl, and don’t dawdle.’ Sarah supposed he thought he was being amusing, but she considered his rudeness a small price to pay for his cooperation.
The landlord eyed her suspiciously because he must have looked out and seen who she’d arrived with. ‘Tell him from me, if he gets loud or nasty he is barred, and this time it will be for good.’
She came back with Oliver’s beer and Irish whiskey, as well as a Coke for herself, because she was driving, though she would have preferred something stronger to tolerate Oliver’s company. She didn’t tell him what the landlord had said, in case he marched inside and started an argument, then they would both be thrown out.
He took a very large gulp of his beer. ‘It was an absolute stitch-up,’ he recalled. ‘I’d been clean in that clinic, went through the whole godawful process, with all the withdrawal symptoms. I stayed clean for another few days in the UK and tried desperately not to think about drugs. I had put myself in a position where I couldn’t score even if I wanted to, because I was miles from the nearest dealer, then I went up to bed one night and it was there, waiting for me.’
