Siren song, p.37
Siren Song, page 37
The question exasperated him further. ‘I’ve already told you – he’s got his source, an accelerant, and a probable cause of death. And, like me, he’s got better things to do than waste his time getting your love life back on course. Besides, he’s got other things on his mind right now.’
‘Such as?’
‘Not that it’s any of your business, but there was a fire at a house on Mayfield Street early this morning. Multi-occupancy.’
‘Asylum-seekers?’
‘There you go again.’
‘Owned by’ – I almost said Fowler – ‘Webster?’ Mayfield Street was a minute’s walk to the west of the agency, just as Walmsley Street had been a minute to the east.
‘You’re grasping,’ he said. ‘No one was killed or even badly injured.’
‘Just terrified out of their wits? What happened? Webster start his brownfield site clearances earlier than expected?’
‘The trouble with you, Rivers, is that you want all this to fit too neatly into your version of events. And when something doesn’t fit, you start twisting things and seeing things where they don’t exist. Stop looking. You got what you wanted. Stop pretending you’re some kind of champion of the underdog, because you’re not.’
‘Like Yvonne, you mean?’
‘Is that what she is? She’s ridiculous. She’ll get a fifty-quid fine and be bound over to keep the peace for a year. It’s hardly the Bandit Queen, is it? I’m going now. I hope this is our last conversation. Either that, or I hope that the next time we talk you’ve got something to give me that makes some sense from where I’m standing.’
He hung up.
46
I WAITED UNTIL the early evening before finally returning to the hospital.
Alison Brooks still lay unconscious, her arm fed by the drip, her face half-covered by the oxygen mask. She looked pale, the skin of her forehead and cheeks tight. Her eyes fluttered occasionally, but never opened.
I was there to do a terrible thing, and perhaps because I was the coward both Sunny and Brownlow had accused me of being, I wanted to reassure myself that Alison Brooks, in these last hours of her life, was finally beyond all true understanding of what I was there to do. She was dying, and I was there to take away from her the last of everything she had once loved and held dear to her.
I sat with her for ten minutes. I held her hand, but nothing registered with her – nothing to suggest that she was even remotely aware of my presence.
The liquid painkiller continued to drip in its slowly deflating bag. I followed its course through the slender pipe and the same steady dripping in the valve at her wrist.
The ward was peaceful at the end of the day. There were a few other late visitors, but most of these sat in the same uncomfortable silences around the other beds.
Louise came to me at eight. Her hair was wet. She looked tired.
‘I went home for a shower and a change of clothes,’ she said. She showed no surprise at seeing me there. She looked at her mother. ‘She’s been like that since you were last here.’
‘Is she dying?’ I asked her.
‘The doctor thinks so.’
‘Did he say how long?’
‘Nothing too specific. You got to talk to her just in time.’
‘To tell her everything she wanted to hear?’ I said.
She looked at me for a moment. ‘Everything I wanted her to hear, you mean? You can say it. I know you’ve been trying to get in touch. I know you’ve probably worked everything out by now. I know why you’re here. I’ve taken a few days’ leave so that I can be with her until . . .’
‘Can she hear us?’ I asked her.
She shook her head.
‘Is this why you didn’t come to the Guildhall yesterday?’ I said.
‘Fowler’s big day? I never had any intention of giving him the satisfaction of seeing me there.’
I rose from the chair beside her mother and she took my place. She held and caressed her mother’s fingers.
‘I found this,’ I said. I put the piece of material on the bed beside their two hands.
‘Her yellow scarf,’ she said. ‘That was careless of me.’
‘I recognized it from her first visit to me.’
‘I hoped Nicholson might still have some of his wife’s clothes around the place – you know, as proof that he was still expecting her to return to him.’
‘Marco will have talked him into getting rid of everything long ago.’
‘I took some of my own stuff along, and some of the things my mother would never wear again, just in case.’
‘Because you not only wanted to kill Nicholson, but also to point to his lost wife. Why?’
‘Because no one ever pointed to my lost sister – at least no one who ever counted. And because after all you’d told me about Nicholson, I knew as well as you did that she’d be the key to Fowler and Marco’s involvement in everything else.’
‘The police don’t believe me,’ I said. ‘And without her body or a confession from Marco, there’s nothing else I can do.’
She leaned forward and kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘Can we go outside?’ she said. ‘Anywhere, away from the bed.’
She rose and I followed her out of the ward and to the lifts.
We descended in silence.
As we reached the ground floor, she asked me if she could have the piece of scorched yellow scarf. I gave it to her.
‘I’ll let you have it back,’ she said. ‘You’ll need it as evidence.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
We walked through the reception area and out of the main entrance.
‘I cut the labels out of everything,’ she said. ‘I made sure that all that was left was enough to be identified as pieces of a woman’s clothing. I even sprayed some of Nicholson’s wife’s cheap and nasty scent onto the remains. He’s still got a bottle in the bedroom. Probably sprays it onto his pillow on the few occasions he wants to remember her.’
‘I smelled it,’ I said.
‘You were never meant to go there,’ she said.
We crossed Argyle Street and sat on the low wall of the hospital car park.
‘Did you kill him because of what I uncovered about his lies concerning the night Helen died?’
‘Of course I did. But don’t blame yourself for any of this. I had a choice. Just as Nicholson and Fowler and Marco had choices. No one forced me to do what I did.’
‘Not like you believe Fowler forced Helen?’
‘Is that what I believe? How much forcing do you think it took? It was her choice to stay with Fowler after everything my mother and I had done to try and warn her, after everything we’d told her about him.’
‘Beginning with how he’d cheated your mother over the florist shops?’
‘He didn’t cheat her. She had the chance to sell early, but she didn’t; she held on for reasons which made no good sense. That wasn’t his fault.’
‘It was still something you made sure I knew about before I heard it all from Fowler himself,’ I said.
‘We thought it best. Or at least I thought it best, and persuaded her to go along with telling you.’
‘The same time you both lied to me about being at the hospital together immediately after she’d been to see me?’
‘We thought it might add a sense of urgency to the proceedings – not that we needed it, as it turns out.’ She looked across the road to the fourteen floors of the hospital, searching for the block of light within which her dying mother now lay.
‘And when you first came to see me alone?’ I said.
‘I waited. I took the morning off work, waited, and then made everything appear casual, unplanned.’
‘I was late that morning,’ I said. ‘You must have waited for two hours. Why?’
She shrugged. ‘Because anything else might have seemed too much, too obvious?’
‘And because you wanted me properly involved and up to scratch on everything – Fowler in particular – before I started putting two and two together for myself?’
‘Something like that.’
‘What did you kill Nicholson with?’
‘A crowbar. From Maintenance. No one missed it. I’ve still got it; I’ll give it to you.’
‘The police think a falling timber crushed his skull.’
‘I saw it come down on him.’
‘Was he alive before it fell?’
She nodded. ‘I watched him burn, scrambling around, barely conscious, choking. I could see that he was still breathing. When the timber fell, everything else started falling.’
‘And so you left.’
‘And so I left.’
‘What if he’d still been alive, even then?’
‘And what if Helen had still been alive when he helped Marco drag her off the yacht?’
‘You even warned Nicholson that I was going to visit him, didn’t you. Why?’
‘Just to get him jumpy again. I had no idea about his wife. I pretended to be calling from the coroner’s court, told him there had been some new developments, that someone might need to talk to him again.’
‘Making sure he went straight to either Fowler or Marco.’
‘I thought Fowler. I was wrong.’
‘And then I showed up asking questions.’
‘You did what we asked of you,’ she said. ‘It was the only way to get things moving.’
‘It seems a little callous to have waited fifteen months before—’
‘What – because I waited until my mother’s cancer had returned and knew that this time she would refuse all their treatment? Because I used her illness to convince you of our sincerity, of our need to see all this resolved once and for all?’
I nodded. ‘I also assume that you believed that Helen’s death had something to do with your mother’s decision not to accept any more treatment, that she’d lost the will to persist, to endure.’
‘“Endure”?’ she said disbelievingly. ‘Of course she’d lost the will to endure. This was the third time it had come back. And how exactly do you think that made me feel? How long would she have persisted, how long would she have endured if it had been me who had been killed, and if Helen had still been alive?’ She covered her mouth with her hand. Her exhaustion showed in her every word and gesture. Her feet were off the ground and she swung them gently from side to side.
‘I understand what you thought you’d lost with the arrival of Helen,’ I said.
‘I didn’t think I’d lost it: I lost it.’
‘And the fact that she was pregnant?’ I asked her.
She stopped swaying her feet and bowed her head. Ahead of us, an ambulance, its siren blaring, negotiated the Anlaby Road roundabout and went into the hospital driveway. We both stopped talking to watch it.
‘Would it have given too much away to have told me?’ I asked her.
‘My mother never knew.’
‘And you were never certain whether Fowler knew or not, and you couldn’t risk him throwing it back at her?’ I knew that this could not have been the full story.
‘It was more complicated,’ she said, unwilling to explain further.
‘Did it have something to do with your own termination?’
‘My mother always wanted grandchildren. After my termination, I was never able to do that for her.’
‘And the next-best option, ten years later, was Fowler’s baby to your drug-addicted sister.’
‘Fowler’s baby to my drug-addicted sister who didn’t give a toss one way or the other about whether she had the baby or not, and who, in all likelihood, would have held either the decision or the kid itself over my mother like a sword.’
‘How hard did your mother try and persuade you to leave the circumstances of Helen’s death behind the two of you?’ I said.
‘Hard enough.’
‘And then the cancer returned and she finally relented? Is that why she called John Maxwell after all those years – just to help set everything in motion?’
‘It’s probably no consolation,’ she said, ‘but if we’d gone to anyone less interested, less involved than you, then everything might have taken too long.’
‘And you still weren’t sure how long she had left. Is that why she pretended to be much better than she felt when she came to see me?’
She held up the piece of yellow material. ‘Wearing this. Yes. She was laid up for three days afterwards. I was waiting round the corner for her. That’s why I made the follow-up visit and not her. We were both worried in case we’d left it too late.’
‘Was it you who told Fowler she was ill?’
‘Fowler?’
‘When he first broke into my office with Marco, he knew then that your mother was going to die. Just like he knew from the very start that Helen’s body was never going to reappear. All that mattered to him then was that everything would end with the death of your mother.’
‘Perhaps Helen told him.’ She was lying.
‘Fifteen months earlier? No – you’d already seen him. Why? To plead with him?’
‘Plead? Plead?’
‘To threaten him, then. To tell him that you knew something about him that Helen had told you before she was killed. To threaten him with the non-existent photograph of her proof of whatever that might have been. It was why you let me believe that Helen herself might have been blackmailing him.’
‘Think what you like,’ she said. ‘What does any of it matter now?’
‘Of course it matters.’
She pointed to the hospital. ‘That’s what matters to me now, none of this.’
‘You still killed Nicholson,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you crow a bit louder and tell me I’ve probably saved Fowler a job?’ She turned to face me. ‘Yes, I killed Nicholson. What now – you run back to the police with the news, they arrest me and my mother gets to die all alone up there?’
I shook my head.
She calmed down and put her hand on my arm.
I struggled hard for the words to say what I next wanted to say to her.
She sensed this, and said, ‘What?’ But even as the question died between us, I knew that she knew what I was about to say.
‘You killed the man in the salvage yard,’ I said. ‘Why? What did he know about what had happened on the yacht?’
‘Nothing. He called me. After your visit.’
‘Because he knew I’d gone there looking for something that both you and Fowler had gone there looking for fifteen months earlier? What was it? Something Helen had hidden? Evidence of how she’d been killed, who she’d been with? What?’
She shrugged. ‘He told me he’d called Fowler and told him about your visit,’ she said.
‘Did he tell you he’d found something you might both be interested in?’
‘No, but he said it would be worth my while going to see him and taking along my cheque book.’
‘And you think he’d already said the same to Fowler?’
‘It seemed more than likely. The man had just lost his job.’
‘What do you think Fowler did?’ I asked her.
‘When I got there he confessed that he hadn’t yet called Fowler.’
‘Because he knew that Fowler’s approach to the situation might not lead to the outcome he’d hoped for? And when you knew for certain that you were the only one he’d spoken to . . .’
‘He was welding something. There was a stack of empty canisters nearby. He told me he was there illegally, made a joke about me promising not to tell anyone.’
‘Which you promised him.’
‘Which I promised him.’
‘Had he found anything?’ I said.
She shook her head.
‘He told me he had, but I knew he was lying.’
‘Neither you nor your mother told me you’d been to the yard.’
‘We knew you’d find your way there eventually.’
‘But you still didn’t want me to know that you’d already been there or to start thinking too soon about what you’d gone looking for.’
‘We’d just lost everything we’d hoped for in the coroner’s court,’ she said. ‘We went because we knew that if we could find some evidence of who’d been on the yacht with Helen, and which implicated Fowler, which proved he’d been lying when he said he didn’t know who’d been with her – who he’d killed – then we could have had the case re-opened immediately, while the police were still interested. You know as well as I do that everything fell apart and Helen was denied justice because everyone just sat back and waited and then lost interest. Why go looking for the absolute truth when all those convenient little suppositions and guesses amount to something that might be ninety-nine per cent true anyway?’
‘You still killed him knowing I’d assume Fowler had been back there, knowing I’d assume my visit to him might have alerted him to the possibility of making some money now that he was unemployed.’
‘Fowler wouldn’t have tolerated his demands for long,’ she said.
‘And you did? After which you still let me go on believing that Fowler had killed him, and that I’d led him back to the man.’
‘I had no choice.’
‘No – you had a choice, and you made it.’
‘And you saw the hole in the cabin wall where someone had done their best to hide something else.’
It had grown dark by then, and the streetlights flickered into life, darkening further the sky above us.
‘How long do you think Helen had been on the yacht?’ I asked her.
‘What does it matter?’
‘It’s what alerted me to Fowler’s lies about the day she died,’ I said. ‘He told me when I first saw him that he hadn’t seen her for four days beforehand. On the day she died, he told me he’d called her at home to ensure she hadn’t forgotten their lunch appointment.’
‘And?’
‘When I saw Laura Lei, she told me Helen hadn’t been at Park Grove for that same length of time. She certainly wasn’t there on the day Fowler went to so much trouble to place himself with witnesses every minute of the day. He was lying. The trafficker had turned up and he had nowhere else to keep him out of sight.’
‘Using Helen to make sure the man didn’t get bored.’
‘It would account for all the provisions she took on board, her coming and going.’
