Swan song, p.30
Swan Song, page 30
‘Meaning the father refused and the others did as they were told?’
‘That was the impression Farrell got. Dunn just went on insisting that he wanted what was best for his daughter, and that that didn’t include leaving her in Grimsby any longer than was absolutely necessary. Nor did it include putting her through a painful investigation and trial. Farrell says he was sympathetic to what the old man was suggesting and that he didn’t press him too hard to reconsider. Two days later, the girl was well enough to travel and her father arranged for a private ambulance to take her home. That’s as much as Farrell can remember about any of it. There was no comeback, no repercussions, nothing to suggest to him that the girl hadn’t recovered, and that the father hadn’t been right all along in doing what he did for her.’
Mitchell put his hand over the phone. ‘Ask him if Dunn’s daughter was pregnant,’ he said.
I shook my head and pulled his hand away. ‘What was the extent of the girl’s injuries?’ I said.
‘I don’t know. I asked Farrell, but he could only guess. But they can’t have been too serious if the hospital let her go after two days.’
‘There was no lasting damage,’ I said. ‘Like I said, I met her, I know her. She married James Weaver.’
And I also knew her near-identical daughter.
And now I might even have known the cause of her daughter’s disability.
And if I knew both of those things, then I also knew the killer, and why he was doing what he was now doing.
Mitchell and Ruth were making these same hurried and scarcely credible calculations, and my mind was so full of these half-formed convictions and reckonings, that I almost missed what John Maxwell said next.
‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘You haven’t met her,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I said you haven’t met her. You don’t know her.’
‘Her name’s Pauline Weaver,’ I said. ‘Pauline Dunn as was. Angela’s mother; Weaver’s wife.’
‘No it isn’t,’ he said. ‘Her name was Anna Dunn, and she died two years after the attack. In the summer of seventy-seven. She was nineteen.’
All three of us looked hard at the receiver.
‘Died?’ I said. ‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Farrell said he remembered seeing it in the paper. Nothing big, just a notice. Apparently, it had more to say about her father, about the family name and business, than it did about her. And that’s it – all there is to know – beginning, middle and end.’
‘Weaver’s wife is called Pauline,’ I said, still unable to accept how suddenly and completely everything had moved beyond my grasp. ‘She answered every question I asked her about her father, about the disabled girl and about the family business.’
‘The girl who was attacked, and who died two years later, was called Anna,’ he repeated.
Ruth waved to attract my attention. She held up two fingers. ‘Dunn had two daughters,’ she said.
‘Listen to her,’ John Maxwell said, overhearing the remark.
I switched off the public address and thanked him for all he’d done. He told me he’d send me a bill for the call to Alicante. I knew he would have been forced to reminisce with Michael Farrell, and I knew it was something he disliked doing.
He said it was late and that he was tired, and then he hung up.
Mitchell and Ruth both sat and faced me across the remains of our meal, our warm breath still clouding the cold air.
Before either of them could say anything, I called Sunny. There was still no word from either Emily Carr or the couple at Withernsea.
When I turned back to Mitchell and Ruth, they were both on their phones, speaking in hurried whispers. I could hear those whispers all the way back to Lister.
It was two in the morning, and out on the deepwater channel of the Humber Road a waiting tanker sat directly upon the reflection of the full moon.
I needed time to myself. Time to reconsider, and to stop having to second-guess everything that was happening. I told them I was going for a walk.
‘We’ll be here,’ Mitchell said as I went, his phone cupped and hidden in his hand.
33
FIVE HOURS LATER, at seven thirty that same morning, I stood and looked at Pauline Weaver through the ornate stained-glass door of her Bishop Burton home. She appeared at the far end of the wide hallway, a cup and saucer in her hand, a newspaper beneath her arm, and looked back at me. I’d been about to press the bell when she’d appeared and seen me there.
We stood like that for several minutes, looking at each other, each of us working out what was about to happen next, each of us knowing only one thing – that the past and the present had once again come to this abrupt and unstoppable collision in the short distance between us.
She continued looking at me, the cup and saucer in her hand, the paper tucked beneath her arm, and I looked at her. And those sharp, pressing fingers of the inescapable past drew us together.
I’d returned to Humber Street at three in the morning to find that both Mitchell and Ruth had gone, and I doubt if any of us had slept in the hours since then.
Pauline Weaver came towards me and the newspaper fell from beneath her arm. She paused briefly to look where its pages lay scattered on the tiles at her feet.
She stopped again as she reached the door and put down the cup and saucer, our faces now only a few feet apart through the patterned glass. Her hand rose mechanically towards the lock.
I’d called Mitchell from my office at six and told him I was going to see her alone.
He told me immediately that neither he nor Ruth had revealed anything of John Maxwell’s revelation to Lister. ‘But now it’s time for him to be told,’ he said. ‘Think about it. It’s the only way forward.’
‘You have to see it like that,’ I told him, knowing he was right, but still determined to see Pauline Weaver alone before everything was taken away from me, and before either Lister or Brownlow took all the responsibility and credit for whatever happened next.
I needed to hear everything Pauline Weaver now had to tell me about her dead sister, not to hear it retold and repackaged at one of Lister’s self-serving press conferences. And certainly not at the gathering at which he finally rose above all the criticisms and complaints, smiling and triumphant, and bathed in the warm golden glow of his own beckoning and richly deserved future.
Ruth took the phone from Mitchell. ‘I could come with you,’ she suggested.
‘And anything Pauline Weaver told him in front of you would be ruled inadmissible as evidence,’ Mitchell said, taking the phone back.
‘However and whenever James Weaver is arrested,’ I said, ‘the likelihood is he’ll confess to nothing, at least not immediately, and certainly not fast enough to do Emily Carr any good.’
‘That’s if—’ Mitchell said and stopped.
‘I know,’ I said. ‘If she’s still alive. But either way, Weaver’s going to clam up. Anything we’re going to get now, we’ll get from his wife, not him.’
‘All of which might prove just as inadmissible,’ he said.
‘Perhaps. But by my reckoning, she’s in this as deep as he is, and if she’s prepared to come clean about her own part in everything, then it’s going to shine a dirty light on him when his part in it all comes to be investigated.’
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
‘And once they’re arrested, they’ll be kept apart,’ Mitchell said eventually. ‘And if Pauline Weaver is as forthcoming as you seem to think she will be, then neither of them will stand an earthly of walking on bail.’
‘So what makes you think the good wife will be ready to confess all?’ Ruth asked me.
‘Because we already know too much, and because when she understands and accepts that, her first thought will be for her so-called daughter.’
‘And you’ll use the girl – the girl who hasn’t even recognized her for thirty years – to get her to talk?’
‘Tell me your better plan,’ I said.
By then it was almost seven.
After returning to my empty office in the night, I’d gone back out and walked for a further hour along the Humber, from the aquarium to the open, empty space of the West Wharf and back. There had been no news of Emily Carr in all that time, and I began to accept that, in all likelihood, she was already dead.
‘And Weaver himself?’ Mitchell said. ‘Lister isn’t going to listen to what you or I have to say and then just rush straight in and arrest him.’
‘No. But Brownlow might. Think how good that will look for him on his own clumsy little scramble up the greasy pole.’
He considered what I was suggesting. I didn’t want anything to alert Weaver to what I was preparing to do at Bishop Burton. At least not until it became impossible for him either to extricate himself from the events about to be set in motion there, or to contact his wife before his own arrest.
‘Lister would give Weaver too much warning,’ I said.
‘The old pals’ act. Whereas Brownlow might prefer his much-loved and tested bull-in-a-china-shop approach?’
‘Especially if we convince him beforehand of Weaver’s guilt,’ Ruth said.
The pair of them had considerably more to lose than I did if anything now went wrong with this simple plan. They both knew this, but neither of them used it against what I was proposing.
It had been a cold and cloudless night, and waiting at Humber Street, I’d watched the first of the fruit lorries arrive at four. I’d encountered some of the traders upon my return from the West Wharf and they’d assumed that I’d spent the night drinking, or that I’d stayed somewhere close by, and they shouted to me as I walked the length of Humber Street trying to imagine where Emily Carr’s corpse might already lie waiting to be found.
At seven, I left and drove to Bishop Burton.
En route, I called Sunny, who was woken by my call. Yvonne was still asleep beside him, he said. I asked him to wake the couple at Withernsea and check their messages. I told him I’d get to the agency later in the morning when everything was over.
He didn’t ask me what I meant by this, saying only, ‘Good luck’.
Yvonne woke, took the phone from him and asked me what I was doing.
‘Wish me luck,’ I told her.
‘You don’t need it,’ she said. ‘You lead a charmed existence.’ And then she said, ‘Good luck,’ because not to have said it might have cost us all considerably more than we would ever be prepared to lose.
Arriving in Bishop Burton, I parked where I could see the entrance gates to the Weavers’ house. On the higher land, away from the green and the pond, there was a light mist, thickening in the headlights of the few cars that moved through it.
Weaver left the house at twenty past seven. The gates remained open behind him.
I left my car and walked to the churchyard. A short search of the more impressive stones brought me to the grave of Paul Dunn. His wife, parents, two brothers and a sister lay beside him. And alongside these, beside an old and twisted hawthorn tree, lay the grave of his daughter, Anna, born 1958, died 1977.
I crouched down and wiped the dust from her sculpted name. It was a small stone, flecked black marble with simple gold lettering. Something private and unassuming. There were no other details on the stone, only the word ‘Beloved’. The weight and sorrow, joy and despair of the world in a single word.
It was all I needed to see.
Pauline Weaver finally opened the door and then shivered involuntarily at the rush of cold air into the house. Her eyes held mine for a moment, and then she looked over my shoulder at the mist and rising light behind me. The gravel drive again lay banked with leaves. There were no fires on that damp morning, but the smell of burning still clung to the place.
‘I came from the graveyard,’ I told her.
‘I see.’ She closed her eyes for a moment.
‘Where’s Emily Carr?’ I said. She knew why I was there, and I saw no sense in either of us pretending otherwise.
She opened her eyes. ‘The pregnant girl?’ she said. She said it dismissively, almost irritated, as though neither the name nor the girl nor her unborn child were of the slightest consequence to her. ‘I thought she might have been somewhere safe by now.’
The remark surprised me, and I wondered if she meant because that’s what I should have ensured by then.
‘Like Tracey Lucas was somewhere safe when you drove your husband’s car to York and back via Goole to act as a kind of decoy while he abducted and killed her?’ I said.
‘Is that what I did?’ she said absently.
‘What did your husband do – go to Goole in another car knowing that the cameras would pick up and identify his car with you and your perfect little alibi driving it?’
‘Make up as many stories as you like,’ she said.
‘They’re not just my stories,’ I said.
She took several steps away from me and told me to come in.
‘I know all about your sister,’ I told her. ‘I know about the baby she had, that she died, and that you pretended afterwards, coming home from Belgium after those three years abroad, that the baby was your own.’
She stumbled at hearing the words and held the post at the bottom of the stairs for support.
‘Then you know it all,’ she said, her voice again even and calm.
‘Not all,’ I said. ‘But I do know that Angela was your sister’s child, not yours, and that your sister was assaulted in Grimsby thirty years ago, and that the men who did that to her are the fathers of the recently murdered girls, and of Paul Hendry, a boy and only child.’
She walked ahead of me into the conservatory. Lights shone on the walls above us, but beyond these the garden stretched into darkness. The buildings at the far end of the lawn were barely visible through the mist.
‘If you know all this, why are you here alone?’ she said. ‘Why hasn’t Alexander Lister surrounded the house with cars and flashing lights?’
‘Call him,’ I said. ‘Call him and tell him I’m here. I’m sure he’d send someone to throw me out for harassing you.’
She considered this. ‘By which I take it that there is someone somewhere waiting to pounce when you click your fingers, and that you’re here alone because you believe I’m going to tell you everything you want to know before that happens. What is it – poor deluded wife charmed by Svengali-like killer? Am I just another victim in all of this?’
I guessed at the unspoken calculations and guesses she was already making as she spoke. And I remembered then that a motorist on Holderness Road had said he thought he’d seen Alison Wilson walking with another woman towards her bus stop. And I remembered what Karen Smith had told me about the woman approaching her daughter the day before she was killed and telling her she’d known Kelly’s father. The woman in the rain and the man sitting in the car waiting for this one final act of confirmation to be completed.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But you’re the “mother” of a daughter who, in all probability, may never see you again. Or you her.’
This suggestion shocked her and I saw her hands tighten on the arms of her chair.
‘And you’re in a position to give me that?’ she said disbelievingly.
‘In more of a position than Lister would be if he knew I was here and what was happening.’
She let her hands fall into her lap.
And then she reached beneath a magazine, pulled out a photograph and gave it to me. It showed her and Anna standing together, teenagers, grinning, with their arms around each other’s waist. They wore similar dresses, and Pauline Dunn wore a necklace of large beads. She was only an inch or two taller than Anna, and her head was tilted down at her sister. Their smiles were identical, and I saw by the creases in their dresses that they clutched each other rather than merely held each other close for the photograph.
‘I dug it out after your last visit,’ she said.
I looked at the picture for a moment longer and then handed it back to her. She laid it face-up on the table, a third and whispering presence in all that now happened between us.
‘How many months pregnant was your sister when she was attacked?’ I asked her.
A minute passed before she was able to answer me. ‘Five. Anna herself was only seventeen. She hardly showed. They punched and kicked her. She was engaged to James. He was five years older.’
‘And your father made sure—’
‘My father knew nothing about it. He only found out later that night, in Grimsby hospital, when he came barging in with James in tow demanding to know how badly injured his daughter was. My father and James had been invited to dinner in the town by one of his biggest suppliers. Anna had insisted on going too. Then she and James had argued – probably over what she regarded as James’s willing subservience to my father – and she’d stormed off. It was what she usually did. She stormed off, leaving everybody to worry about where she’d gone, and then she got lost. It was that simple. The police called our housekeeper, and she called the supplier, who told my father his daughter had just been taken to the hospital. That was when he found out about her being pregnant. No-one could tell him for certain what harm might have been done to the unborn child. It was why the Grimsby doctors wanted to keep Anna for longer than he was prepared to let them. The baby’s heart was still beating, it was still there. But beyond that, they couldn’t tell him anything. He insisted he wanted Anna treated by specialists, here, this side of the river, privately – doing what he always did and throwing his name and his money at the problem. And when the Grimsby doctors finally agreed to release her – and only then because she appeared to have no lasting injuries – he brought her home and then flew her to Brussels and had her cared for there. Angela was born almost two months prematurely seven weeks later.’
‘Was the pregnancy accidental?’
‘Of course it was. She was seventeen. She was in the middle of exams. After which she’d go wherever she wanted to go, do whatever she wanted to do. He’d see to that. Whatever Anna wanted, Anna got. She was always his favourite, always that little bit more willing than I ever was to bend to his wishes.’
