Liar

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘I wish you’d drop all this,’ Peanut said, as he drove her back to the office. ‘Tell Jack you’ve had enough. He won’t pressure you to carry on.’

  Amelia looked at Peanut reflectively. She admired, trusted, and liked him. ‘Why are you so worried?’ she asked. ‘I’m touched that you care but, really, what harm can come to me when the police take me to work and bring me home? And there’s you too!’

  Peanut turned off the main road towards the Thames. He said he wanted to talk to her for a few minutes before he returned to the office. Amelia thought that sounded a bit ominous, but she could hardly insist he drove her straight back.

  ‘You’re young and vulnerable, and that worries me,’ he said, with a big sigh as he parked by the river. The water had taken on the grey of the sky, and a stiff breeze was whipping up silvery-topped waves. ‘I know you have a family, but for reasons I can only guess at you have nothing to do with them. Until you met Max you were always alone, and now, when most girls with a new love would be devoting themselves to him, you’re off somewhere else.

  ‘You’ve immersed yourself in all three of the murdered girls’ lives. I swear you’ve entered their minds to try and solve the mystery of their killer. I find that deeply perturbing, my dear.’

  ‘Don’t all would-be journalists get like that with a meaty story?’ She laughed.

  ‘Only the obsessive ones,’ he said. ‘And don’t laugh at me, this is serious.’

  ‘How many really good opportunities come our way in a lifetime?’ she asked heatedly. ‘Two, three? Well, as far as I’m concerned, this is maybe the one and only opportunity for me. Besides, I’m not sure Max is right for me. He’s becoming very controlling.’

  ‘Now why doesn’t that surprise me?’ Peanut shook his head sadly. ‘I’ve never told anyone on the paper this, so please keep it to yourself. But I work as a counsellor in the evenings. And you, my dear, are almost a textbook likely-to-become-abused woman. I may be speaking out of turn, but I suspect your father was a bully – was he?’

  ‘Yes,’ Amelia admitted, her face flushing with shame. ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘The way you willingly do anything Jack asks, the way you stand back and watch life from the sidelines. There are many clues if you know what to look for.’

  ‘I thought I hid my insecurities well,’ she said, in a small voice.

  ‘You do. Most people would never guess anything was amiss, except people like me, who try to help – and, of course, men with a tendency towards controlling. They can sniff it out, like a dog can home in on a piece of meat. I suspect by trying to solve these murders you feel more powerful.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said indignantly.

  ‘I know you do. Now if you were learning to play the piano or doing gymnastics, I’d be happy you were throwing yourself into learning something new, but I can’t be happy with this. Apart from anything else, the killer is clever. He’s targeted these girls, and almost certainly knows everything about them. He’ll have done the same with you, Amelia. Don’t kid yourself he hasn’t. I don’t think he intended to kill you the other week – it was a warning for you to back off. But if you persist, he may feel he has to kill you too.’

  ‘You’re scaring me now.’

  ‘Good. Maybe you’ll take my warning seriously. So, it’s back to the office, I think.’

  As Peanut stopped in front of the building to let her out, he took her hand. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve made you nervous. That wasn’t my intention, only to get you to drop it and leave it to the police.’

  Amelia gave him a weak smile. ‘I know, and I’m sure you are right. I can’t promise to do as I’m told, though.’

  13

  That evening, Peanut’s warning kept coming back to Amelia. She wasn’t particularly worried by it: he was just being a bit of an old woman. After all, how would the killer know who she was visiting? He might have been following her the day she went to Kew, but unless he had mounted guard over the house in Bedford Park, he couldn’t know she’d been there or that she’d visited Mabel. There was no one around, not when she got there or when she’d left. It was the same when she’d gone to Mabel’s. Peanut was just a well-meaning old worry-guts.

  Regardless of what he’d said, she had every intention of going out to Richmond tomorrow with Henry and she was also going to see the vicar he’d told her about.

  Yet she was astounded that Peanut had known her father was a bully, and that she might be a target for similar men. She didn’t think for one moment that Max would ever hit her: all she had to do was be firm with him when he did that controlling thing. She was already sorry they’d parted with bad feeling. She wished she was on the phone so she could ring him at his hotel and hear his voice. Perhaps on reflection he was talking sense about buying a house. Now that she thought about it, imagine anyone wanting to stay in a room like hers, sharing a bathroom and clearing up after other people, when they could have a house of their own.

  Was she really intending to spend the rest of her life being afraid to take a step outside her familiar world?

  With all these conflicting thoughts spinning in her head, she felt on edge and lonely. She made herself some cheese on toast, checked that her policeman was still outside, then undressed and got into bed. Sleeping had always been her way of dealing with problems. It didn’t solve them, of course, but sometimes solutions appeared in the morning, and even if there was no solution, nothing ever looked so bad by day.

  It was bright sunshine when she woke the next morning at seven. She remembered then that she didn’t have to go into the office, as Jack had said Sam the policeman could take her to Chiswick at ten thirty. Jack was being amazingly kind to her, but maybe it was just a ploy to make sure she brought any good stories straight to him.

  Making tea and taking it back to bed while the gas fire warmed the room was a real treat. She heard the geyser in the bathroom popping as someone turned it on to run a bath. That meant the bathroom wouldn’t be quite as icy as usual, which was good. She wondered what it was like to live in a centrally heated house, to take a warm dry towel from a heated rail and be able to wallow in a bath without turning blue with cold.

  Maybe it was time to go along with Max’s plan. But did that mean they’d get married? He hadn’t made that clear. If they didn’t, what security would she have? At least this place was hers. He couldn’t make her leave it if they fell out. But maybe he’d taken yesterday’s row seriously when she’d told him to get out. What if he didn’t come back?

  Aware she was making problems for herself by thinking such negative thoughts, she picked up her book by Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye. As she read that the black narrator of the book thought she could be beautiful only if she had blue eyes like white people, it crossed her mind that she had a similar problem. She imagined she’d be okay if she’d been born into a different family.

  What did a girl have to do to escape what she’d been born into? Was it even possible to escape your roots, or were they just that, roots that went down so far you could never pull them up?

  She’d learned to speak better and dress well, had mastered shorthand and typing, and could fool most people into believing she came from a middle-class home, but when she was alone she was just Amelia White from White City, the girl who had lived at number eight, the most squalid house in Bradley Close.

  ‘Enough of that,’ she told herself aloud, as she got out of bed. ‘You can be anyone you want to be. Stop wallowing in negativity.’

  She switched on her radio and ‘I’ll Be There’ by the Jackson Five was playing. She sang along as she got out the jeans and an Arran sweater she intended to wear that day. She wasn’t allowed to wear jeans to work, but she didn’t think walking in Richmond Park counted as work.

  Aware she could be out in the cold all day, she pulled out the embroidered Afghan coat she’d bought in Kensington indoor market a few years ago. She’d felt a million dollars in it back then, the ultimate coat for a ‘groovy chick’, as the salesman had sai
d.

  It was looking a bit bedraggled now, but it was very warm. With her long red boots, red bobble hat, matching scarf and gloves, she felt she looked good.

  ‘You look nice,’ Sam said, when he called to pick her up. ‘I always wanted a coat like that, but it wasn’t quite the right image for a policeman.’

  Amelia laughed. ‘People would find a hippie policeman too strange.’

  As they pulled out of Godolphin Road, she asked him if there had been any developments in the case.

  ‘We’ve had two crackpots confessing to be the murderer.’ Sam grinned. ‘One lives in Manchester and couldn’t even give a London address where he’d been staying when he was supposed to have killed the girls. It soon became clear he’d never even been to London. The other bloke was a Londoner, but he said he’d strangled the girls rather than stabbed them. Why on earth would anyone want to admit to a murder they didn’t do?’

  ‘For five minutes of fame perhaps.’ She laughed. ‘Unless they have a yen to live in prison.’

  ‘People have come forward about seeing someone in Ravenscourt Park at the time of Carol’s death. But what they saw is the same as the couple who helped you when you were attacked. Tall, wearing dark clothes. So that’s not much help.’

  ‘It seems completely impossible for anyone to kill three people in a built-up area and not be seen.’

  ‘I know, but the way the bodies were left, with no attempt to conceal them, suggests the killer is very aware of how little notice people take of one another in London. He seems to realize that you can be almost invisible.’

  ‘Could that be his problem? That no one has ever taken any notice of him? Someone so ordinary that he blends in with his surroundings?’

  ‘That has to be a cast of thousands, if not millions,’ Sam said. ‘But it might account for why he picked those three girls. None of them would ever have been overlooked.’

  ‘So maybe it’s a kind of sex thing. They’re the sort of girls he’d like to go out with, but they wouldn’t look twice at him.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Sam turned into Bedford Park. ‘How are you getting on with Mr Lark?’

  ‘To be honest, I’m not quite sure what he wants of me. He asked me to go for a walk with him so we could talk, but I think we’ve done all the talking now. He hasn’t told me one thing that I could claim was a clue.’

  ‘Talking does help grieving people,’ Sam said, as he pulled up in front of the Larks’ house. ‘He may suddenly remember something relevant, so hang on in there. I’ll see you tomorrow, I expect.’

  Amelia turned to look at him as she got out. ‘It’s really good seeing you every day,’ she said impulsively. She liked the way he looked: take away his uniform, let his fair hair grow a bit longer, and he could have been a Beach Boy in summer. But it wasn’t just his looks: she liked the way he spoke to her, as if she was important, and really listened. ‘You’ve made me feel safer.’

  ‘I like seeing you every day,’ he said, looking at her intently. ‘I want things to get better for you too.’

  He drove away then, leaving her wondering if he meant better with Max, this case being solved, or if he could possibly be thinking of them dating.

  She shook herself mentally, wondering what had made her think he could be interested in her that way.

  ‘It’s a shame we haven’t got a dog,’ Amelia said, after they’d been walking for about an hour in Richmond Park. ‘This place is enormous – you wouldn’t know you were so close to a huge city.’

  She was trying to get Henry to talk. He seemed to be wrapped up in his thoughts and it was making her feel uncomfortable. Because it was a weekday and very cold, there were few people about. The earlier sun had disappeared behind thick grey cloud, and everything looked grey. Leafless trees, scrubby grass, not a scrap of colour anywhere, except her red hat, scarf and boots. She wished he’d call it a day and want to go home.

  ‘What did Mabel tell you?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Just how she met Rosie mostly. I asked if they’d had any people hanging about watching them while they were working. Anyone who made them feel nervy.’

  ‘She didn’t work very often with Mabel,’ he said sharply.

  ‘Yes, I realized that,’ Amelia said. ‘But they did talk about their work, and therefore creepy people hanging around would’ve come up. She said Rosie was good at deflecting that kind of attention.’

  ‘What did she mean by that?’ His tone was now aggressive.

  ‘That she had a knack of putting people in their place without being rude.’ She thought Henry could do with a lesson in that himself.

  ‘Did she tell you if Rosie had any boyfriends?’

  ‘She didn’t say. I took it to mean there was no one special enough to mention. But surely you would know if there had been someone.’

  ‘Girls don’t always tell their parents such things. Do you think Mabel told you everything?’

  ‘I believe she told me everything that might have some bearing on what happened to Rosie. I wouldn’t expect a real friend to start spilling the beans about everything they shared.’

  They walked a little further in silence. She felt he was brooding on her last statement. They came to a little copse of trees on a mound, but instead of walking round it he went straight towards it.

  ‘When Rosie was little, she used to run into these odd little copses to hide,’ he said, as an explanation. ‘I reckon she imagined we’d think she’d completely disappeared.’

  ‘This one is the kind of place I would’ve made a camp in,’ Amelia said. They were right on the edge of it now and the trees were so close together it would be hard to go right through it.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit dour today,’ Henry said, turning to her and putting his hands on her shoulders. ‘You’ve been so understanding about what I’m going through.’

  When he drew her to him, she didn’t back away. She thought he was going to give her a fatherly hug. But suddenly his arms were locked around her, his mouth was on hers, his tongue forcing its way into her mouth, like a fat, disgusting slug.

  She tried to wriggle from his embrace, but he was holding both her arms tightly to her sides and, even more frightening, he was nudging her backwards into the copse of trees. She wrenched her mouth from his, screamed and head-butted him, but he pushed her back against a tree and once again forced his lips over hers. His breath was heavy with excitement, but when he let go of one of her arms to push his hand into her crotch, her hand flew up to rake at his face with her nails, and at the same time she kneed him in the groin.

  The surprise made him stagger back, and she took the chance to flee, tearing down the mound onto the path they’d walked along to get there. She had never been a fast runner, and her thick coat held her back, but terror drove her on at a speed she might have been proud of back at school.

  All at once she understood why Peanut had looked concerned when he’d taken her to meet Henry Lark. He clearly had a sixth sense that the man wasn’t safe with young women.

  She could hear Henry shouting at her, but she didn’t turn to look, just kept on running till she felt her heart would burst. She kept hoping to see someone to help her, but the park was deserted.

  After she felt she’d covered around a quarter of the distance to where Henry had parked his car, she stopped to look back. He was a long way behind, bent over as if he had a stitch.

  ‘I hope you die of a heart attack,’ she muttered, then began to run again.

  About ten minutes on, she saw two people with a large black dog coming up a path to her left and realized she didn’t need to get back to the car park. With another glance behind her, she saw she’d passed trees that blocked her view of him, and vice versa. But though it was tempting to run to the people coming towards her and seek their assistance, it was too complicated a story to blurt out to strangers, and Henry might catch up with her.

  She ran past the couple with the dog, reached the trees at the edge of the park and found a road behind them. Like m
ost roads that overlooked parks, the detached houses looked like they belonged to rich, successful people. They had manicured hedges and, doubtless, in the spring and summer their gardens would be beautiful. Having no idea where she was, or which direction to go in, she decided the only course of action open to her was to knock on a door, and ask if she could use the telephone to ring the police. It was fortunate that they had given her a card with a number to ring in an emergency. She took it out of her shoulder bag and went up the garden path to the nearest house.

  It was almost half an hour before the police arrived. Janet Grey, the owner of the house, had taken over. Knowing nothing more than Amelia’s name and that she’d been attacked in the park, she took the card from her hand, and rang the police.

  Her crisp, rather plummy voice, her beautiful home, which smelt of a cake baking, and her obvious concern reassured Amelia. She had been completely out of breath when she knocked on the door, holding her side as she had a stitch. The effort of making herself understood suddenly brought what had happened into sharp focus. She broke down in tears. Mrs Grey hugged her, told her she was safe now, and as soon as she’d got her breath back, she’d make her some tea.

  The two policemen who came for her were not among the ones Amelia already knew. Sergeant Roper was in his fifties, a tall, stern-looking man, and PC Blunt, who had accompanied him, was perhaps thirty with flame-red hair and a freckled, kindly face.

  It was clear they knew exactly who Amelia was, and Sergeant Roper said he would prefer to take her statement about the incident at the police station.

  ‘She’s very shaken,’ Mrs Grey told them. ‘I understand you need to interview her but let her finish her tea and gather herself first.’

  Later that day, Amelia looked back on Janet Grey and her home as a model of how she’d like to be and to live. She was perhaps forty, and elegant, wearing a pale pink twinset and a toning pleated skirt. Her shoulder-length hair was light brown, very well cut and shiny. Her house radiated warmth, not just from the central heating but from her, and though Amelia had only seen the kitchen, she had loved the order: the red poppies on the curtains, a tea-cosy like a thatched cottage, and a row of bright green frogs looking down from the dresser.