Siren song, p.30
Siren Song, page 30
‘It’s not the kind of question I’d ever ask him,’ she said. ‘Though more for my own sake than for hers, I suspect.’ She gazed for a moment without speaking at the distant Holiday Inn, perhaps remembering our night there. ‘He thinks that soon she might not be in a position to decide for herself what she does and doesn’t want. I told him that when that happened, then I would know what she wanted and make sure she got it. He told me I didn’t fully understand what I’d be taking on, what a responsibility it would be to bear.’ She mimicked the man’s voice.
‘And?’
‘And I told him she was my mother and that the only responsibility I had was to her. I told him to stick to all his useless predictions and endless tampering with her painkillers and every other God-knows-what drug she’s been given. He made me angry. I absolved him of all responsibility. He’d said what he had to say and his own conscience was clear. I must have sounded like the worst kind of ungrateful bastard after all he’d done for her. He apologized and then I apologized. He even asked me if there was anything I needed. He told me I was taking too much on, even with the nursing care. He knows about all this, too, about Helen, though he’s careful not to mention it, of course. He’s been my mother’s doctor for twenty years. He helped her through all the earlier bouts. When she told him she didn’t want to endure any more of his or anyone else’s treatment this time round, he agreed with her and supported her. He wants what I want – what’s best for her – so why do I antagonize him at every opportunity?’ She refilled her glass.
‘Perhaps because there are things you haven’t told him?’ I suggested.
‘What things?’
‘Perhaps he thinks you’ve made plans which don’t include him,’ I said.
She finally understood what I was saying. ‘Perhaps they’re the same plans he’d make and undertake in a perfect world.’
‘Talk to him,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘This is between me and her,’ she said. ‘Me and her.’
I took the folded sheet of paper from my pocket and laid it on the table.
‘Do you know what happened?’ she asked me. She touched the tip of her finger to the paper, but left it where it lay.
‘Three things,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to keep anything from your mother that I believe is directly related to Helen’s death, and I’d appreciate it – however you choose to tell her – if you did the same.’
She nodded her agreement at this. ‘And two?’
‘That all three of us accept that this is a less than perfect or complete understanding of how or why Helen died, but that it’s probably as close as anyone is going to get after all this time.’
‘That sounds like an excuse,’ she said.
‘It probably is, but it’s what your mother asked of me.’
‘And three?’
‘That we also accept that there may be no way forward from this.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I mean that however convinced I might be that what I’ve discovered concerning Helen’s death is a plausible version of events, I still have no solid evidence to back it up. We can make all the allegations we like, throw as much mud at Fowler as we like, but none of it’s going to change that fact. And for your mother’s sake—’
‘We should adopt the non-mud-slinging option?’
‘I was going to suggest that first and foremost we consider what she needs to gain from all of this. Revenge was always the least of our options.’
She considered this, looking for the first time at the bruise on my neck, which was at its most impressively coloured. She touched it as tentatively as she had touched the sheet of paper, and as gently as she had touched my face only four days earlier.
‘In the line of duty,’ I said.
‘Fowler?’
I shook my head. ‘Nor Marco. Just somebody else I managed to upset.’
She was still considering the third of my stipulations.
‘How convinced are you that what you’ve uncovered is the truth?’ she said.
‘As convinced as I can be without a full confession from anyone involved, and I doubt very much if that’s ever going to happen.’
‘From Fowler, you mean?’
‘And others.’
‘But Fowler’s definitely implicated, right?’
‘More than.’
She relaxed slightly. She asked me if I had a scale of charges for various injuries.
‘I’ll consider compiling one,’ I said, anxious not to divert us from the single, narrow and painful course ahead of us.
She finally picked up the sheet of paper, unfolded it and read it. And then she refolded it and put it back down. ‘Go on,’ she said.
I told her about my meeting with Steven Rix that morning, and about the syndicate in London. I told her about the collapse of the inquiry and what everyone involved had lost and gained from this. I told her about the three traffickers, especially the one who had gone missing from his prison in Albania. I told her that the man was convinced either that Fowler still owed him money, or that Fowler and the others had deliberately allowed him and his brothers to walk into the same trap they themselves were already walking away from. On top of this, I said, he probably also blamed Fowler for the death of his youngest brother in prison.
She understood all I was telling her.
‘And you think this man traced Fowler to Hull and followed him here.’
‘Either to get his money or his revenge for what had happened, yes. Probably the former, possibly both. Or possibly Fowler had talked him out of the revenge option with an offer of more money.’
‘And he was the one on the yacht with Helen?’
‘No one ever knew who he was because he was already missing and there was never any record of him ever having returned here – let alone to Hull – after he was deported, tried and imprisoned.’
‘Is that why their bodies never turned up?’
‘Fowler would never risk the man being found and identified. It would tie him too securely to everything that had happened in London, to everything he’d come here to leave as far behind him as possible. The trafficker was the final thread that needed severing.’
‘And Helen was killed why?’
But I knew by the way she said it that she was already beginning to work out her sister’s part in what had happened.
‘Fowler used Helen to lure the man on to the yacht. He was probably no more of a sailor than she was,’ I said.
‘Lure?’ she said absently.
I waited a moment before going on. ‘Fowler’s story of what happened that day only works because the only ones ever telling it were the solitary eye-witness and then Fowler and Marco afterwards. It worked because it was all anyone ever had to go on, and because there was never any plausible alternative for anyone to consider. Once Fowler’s minute-by-minute alibis were firmly in place, and after Nicholson had told everyone what he had allegedly seen, then there can’t have been any reason for anyone to go on asking questions. If there were any doubts to be aired, then that didn’t happen until long after the inquest and even then they were never made public.’
‘Especially after everyone had more or less agreed to wait for the bodies to show up before going any further,’ she said.
‘Everything Fowler said to me, he said because he knew that that was never going to happen. He wanted everyone looking in the same direction, waiting for the same impossible event.’
‘And after a while, everyone, including the coroner, lost interest.’
‘There was no other course open to him,’ I said. ‘It was what Fowler knew would happen.’
‘But why kill Helen if she was only doing what he was telling her to do?’
‘I can’t answer that honestly. I believe the man the marina officer saw on the yacht with Helen was Marco. We only have Fowler’s word that Marco returned to him after delivering Helen to the marina. I believe the trafficker was already on board. I believe he’d been there a few days and that Helen had been with him. I think she went from the yacht to her lunch with Fowler. The yacht was certainly well provisioned, and no one would notice one new strange face with the new sailing season getting under way and people coming and going all the time. Plus the yacht was moored about as far from the marina office as it’s possible to be. Marco knew how to sail. It’s my belief that he took the yacht out, careful not to reveal himself to anyone on the way.’
‘And all the time, Helen was below with the other man?’
‘Until she was required to show herself and let the marina officer see her so that he could positively identify her afterwards, yes.’
‘So despite all the reports and accounts always referring to there ever only being two people on board, there were three.’
‘Reports based on what people here at the marina saw, and then afterwards based solely on what Peter Nicholson said he saw. Both of which allowed Marco to do what he had to do, then get back to Fowler in time for their alibis to mesh – and, remember, they were never exactly suspects in the first place. Fowler grieved loudly and publicly and let his perfect alibis be uncovered and joined together, and Marco walked around in his shadow. With Nicholson’s testimony there was never any need to go looking for suspects – suspects for what? – only the need to try and better understand what had led up to the terrible accident in which Helen and her companion had lost their lives.’
‘It still doesn’t explain why she died,’ she said.
‘It may never have been part of Fowler’s plan,’ I said, this being the least likely and least convincing of all the alternatives I had considered.
‘I find that hard to accept,’ she said.
‘Perhaps because it’s what you don’t—’
‘Don’t patronize me,’ she said angrily, immediately lowering her voice, putting her hand on mine and apologizing.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘The only other answer is that Fowler wanted rid of her as much as he wanted rid of the man he had lured on to the yacht using her. He told me he hadn’t seen her for four days prior to their lunch appointment on that day, and Laura Lei told me she hadn’t been back at the house on Park Grove during those same four days. Perhaps she was on the yacht all that time.
‘Perhaps the trafficker had shown up and Fowler had made his deal with him, and while the man was waiting for his money, and while Fowler was making his preparations to get rid of him, the man and Helen were staying on the yacht together.
‘The man had nowhere else to go, and Helen was there solely to keep him occupied and to make sure he didn’t wander. The marina master told me there was enough food and drink on board for a dozen people.’
She moved her hand back and forth over mine as I said all this.
‘Fowler lied to me,’ I said. ‘He said he called her at Park Grove because she was late for their lunch date. He knew all along that she was on the yacht. It always struck me as strange that, not having seen her for four days beforehand, Fowler had arranged for them to have both lunch and dinner together on the day in question. The dinner date and his uncancelled reservation were all part of his alibi.’
‘And lunchtime?’
‘So that Fowler could ensure she was drunk, and so that he could reluctantly suggest the same at the inquest. So that everything that happened took place in a restaurant full of people who knew him well.’
‘It all makes sense,’ she said.
‘As much sense as the alternative explanation.’
‘Which is?’
‘That Fowler never intended to kill her at all, that something went wrong with the holding and the killing of the trafficker, and that Helen was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
She shook her head at this.
‘He made sure she was on that yacht,’ she said. ‘And he made sure she was never able afterwards to tell anyone what happened there. He could just as easily have kept her off it. She was there to keep the man on board, and then she was killed, and that way Fowler kept everyone more interested in what had happened to her than in the man who had died alongside her.’
‘He still might have considered her a loose cannon,’ I said.
‘He used her,’ she insisted. ‘To keep everyone looking away from where they might otherwise have been looking. The death of Helen was connected to Fowler here and now. The killing of the trafficker took everything back to London all that time ago.’ She was shouting again, and stopped abruptly, looking at the people around us who were watching her.
‘Whatever else Fowler did,’ I said, ‘he certainly wasn’t stupid enough to want to leave any new loose ends lying around – especially not after all the trouble he’d gone to to get rid of those old ones.’
‘So – two birds, one stone,’ she said.
We sat without speaking for several minutes. I wondered if I’d told her anything she hadn’t already imagined a thousand times over.
‘So what exactly happened out on the river?’ she said.
‘Marco killed the man, and then – by design or accident – he killed Helen and—’
‘Don’t say it like that,’ she said.
‘Like what?’
‘“By design or accident.” It makes you sound as mealy-mouthed and evasive as the rest of them.’
‘I’m just telling you what little I know for certain and filling in the blanks,’ I said. ‘He killed them both and then ran the yacht aground on the Foulholme Sands.’
‘Where good old reliable Nicholson was waiting to witness the whole thing,’ she said absently.
‘Except Nicholson’s story never tallied – the tides, the timing, the darkness, the depth of the water. Perfect in itself, but it never quite matched up to what everyone else said and expected. It’s my belief that everything happened at least an hour – perhaps two – sooner than Nicholson said it did. Giving Marco time to get ashore with the bodies in the dinghy, possibly guided and then helped by Nicholson, who, once Marco was safely on his way back into Hull, went back to the shore to raise the alarm, perhaps at a signal from Marco.’
‘He could have been back in the city centre in twenty minutes,’ she said. ‘So everything Nicholson said he saw was a lie?’
‘Everything was made into a lie by the timing.’
‘That, and him being the perfect expert witness,’ she said. ‘Why did he do it?’
‘Because Fowler offered him a lot of money?’ I said. ‘Because Nicholson harboured a grudge against all the others involved? Perhaps both. Greed and getting one over on everyone else.’
At the start of my investigation I had not even been convinced that Nicholson himself hadn’t been accidentally or unwillingly involved in the whole thing, and that, having witnessed the beaching by chance, he hadn’t then been coerced by Marco into helping him. It was a plausible theory, especially in light of the friendship between Nicholson and Marco’s father. But the more I had subsequently discovered, the more convinced I had become that Nicholson had been involved from the outset.
I remained less convinced that the abduction and killing of his wife had been sanctioned or even known about by Fowler, and felt that this had been wholly concocted between Marco and Nicholson alone. It seemed equally unlikely to me, however, that Fowler would not have learned of this afterwards – perhaps when Marco convinced him of Nicholson’s lasting silence – but by then it would have been too late. The third man and his loaded, pointed gun had already joined the circle.
The marina master had said that Helen Brooks had diverted his attention from the man at the wheel as they left the marina that afternoon, suggesting that she was aware of what was about to happen to the man out of sight below, even if not of her own precise part in those proceedings. I still considered it likely that Fowler had had her killed because he could no longer trust her to keep silent – either about the appearance of the man or his eventual murder.
Equally likely was the fact that the only way Fowler had been able to placate the trafficker upon his unexpected appearance was by using Helen Brooks to take him to the yacht and then to keep him company there while Fowler and Marco worked out how to get rid of him. Perhaps they persuaded him that he would have to wait while Fowler collected the money he was demanding. Whatever the truth of the situation, Helen Brooks’s fate was sealed the instant Fowler started using her.
In all likelihood, the trafficker had been drugged and unaware that they were even leaving the marina that day, and it would be difficult to believe that Helen Brooks had played no part in that particular part of Fowler’s plan.
And contrary to what Andrew Brownlow had suggested to me about everything having taken place so publicly, it was precisely this open and public nature of the accident which had kept everyone focused on the death of Helen Brooks and not her companion.
And whatever Fowler’s reasons for killing Helen Brooks, he had afterwards used her death to create sympathy for himself, and to suggest to anyone asking questions that the man had most likely been someone she had known, rather than anyone connected to Fowler himself. Certainly, there was speculation at the time of the deaths that the man might have been romantically attached to Helen. I think I’d known that this was not the case from the outset, from the moment Fowler, knowing the bodies would never again be seen and examined, had dropped his guard with me and revealed the thin, cold snarl behind his smile.
Whatever his reasons for killing her, Helen Brooks’s life had meant nothing to Fowler, and whatever might or might not be proved in the future with regard to the trafficker, it was because of this – the killing of Helen Brooks – that I most regretted that nothing of what I had so far revealed to Louise might be used to re-open the police investigation into the two deaths.
She understood this as well as I did and was no less disappointed by the realization.
‘Do you have any idea at all where the bodies might have ended up?’ she said eventually.
‘He went to a lot of trouble to get rid of them in the first place. I doubt he’d take any chances once they were off the yacht and away from the river.’
‘How do you think Marco killed them?’
‘The man at the salvage yard showed me a hole that had been smashed in one of the panels in the cabin. I think Marco shot them and then smashed the panel to hide the bullet hole at its centre. I think part of the need for a delay in what Nicholson said he saw was so that there were no obvious signs of what had happened. I think Marco took the bodies ashore in the dinghy – the marina officer definitely saw one on board, and Fowler was adamant that all the safety and rescue equipment was serviced and present. I think that was why Nicholson was told to include it in his story – suggesting that it was launched but that it drifted beyond reach and was lost.’
