by Clare Chase
Blake’s heartbeat was in overdrive. ‘We were, but that was a long time ago. It’s over, Babette. I’ll always want to be a part of Kitty and Jessica’s lives, and we mustn’t expose them to this any more than we have to – but staying together would be worse for them now. No one benefits from growing up in this sort of atmosphere.’
Babette was looking down at the table. There was a long pause before she lifted her head. ‘You never got past Kitty being another man’s, did you?’
Was that really what she thought? She didn’t know him at all. That was the one part of all this that meant nothing. He was too angry to speak. The kitchen was silent apart from the noise of his own ragged breathing. A second later, he was aware of a slighter sound: that of Babette crying.
‘Garstin, you’re right. I’ve tied myself in knots. I should have told you everything, properly, from the moment I asked you to take me back. I—’ She gulped for air. ‘I just didn’t know how. The truth is…’ She paused again and put her head in her hands. ‘The truth is, Kitty is yours.’
For a second he felt winded. It was as though time had stopped and all he could feel was a sort of pressure, pushing at his head and body, stopping him from moving or breathing.
‘What?’ But the effect only lasted for a moment. Of course, this was just one more lie; one more last-ditch attempt to get him to stay, and a wild one at that.
Babette took a deep breath. ‘You remember I got a DNA test done? Matt had been away for a while, traveling, but when he came back he got interested in Kitty. He said if she was his that I should leave you. We could make a new life together. He’s always been very… mercurial, I guess you’d say. Suddenly he was all for making us a permanent thing, and he loved the idea of being a father. He’d never wanted to commit before – and I thought he never would.’
Which was why she’d decided to marry Blake, presumably. A second-best option.
‘I took a sample of Matt’s hair, but I got two tests done: one using yours, from your hairbrush, and one using his. It was yours that came back positive. He didn’t know what I’d done, and there were no names on the test of course, so I just showed him the positive result – same as I did you. And you both believed me that he was the father.’
His eyes felt wide and dry. The breathlessness was getting worse. ‘And you told me to stay out of Kitty’s life and let her be with her natural dad. You said it would be selfish if I tried to follow you, or make contact with her. You made me believe that I had no place in her future, and it was my duty – for her sake – to let her forget me.’ He could hardly see the room around him. Everything blurred with his effort to contain his anger.
‘It was colossally stupid – a dreadful mistake. And I was the one that was selfish – I can see that now, Garstin. I was a fool. That’s what I’ve always told you. I’ve regretted what I did every minute of every day since. But at least you know Kitty’s yours now.’
Far from it – she’d say anything – but it was irrelevant. It was all he could do not to shake her. ‘I’ve never cared about that! I’ve always loved her and I always will, whether she’s mine, Matt Smith’s or the milkman’s!’ He’d let his voice get louder, but he managed to rein it in. ‘Babette, it’s your deceit I can’t stand. Your attitude to me. Can’t you see that?’ He thought for a moment. ‘So, let me guess. He found out? Is that why you came home?’ It was the logical conclusion – big enough to send her running after two short weeks in Australia.
She hung her head. ‘You’ve got to believe me, Garstin – I realised I’d made a mistake on my way to the airport before we flew out in the first place. I kept thinking of your face as I took Kitty away. And on the flight out, Matt had no patience with her at all. It was awful. The draw he’d always had for me, over the years, always unattainable, always desirable, started to fade very quickly.’
How touching.
‘Kitty kept crying for you. Each time she asked for “Daddy”, Matt kept saying, “I’m your daddy”. She was so confused and upset and he didn’t get it at all. Then one day, he overheard me talking to Kitty. She was asking for you again and I said, “Matt’s going to be there as your daddy now.” I didn’t even know he was in the flat. I must have missed the sound of his key in the door, what with Kitty’s crying. It wasn’t much, that one small sentence, but he saw the truth. Maybe he’d started to think how easy it would have been for me to lie about the DNA test. He confronted me – and I was in a state, worn-out and crying myself. When he threatened me unless I told the truth, I admitted what I’d done. He hit me. I was scared, Garstin, and I really knew at that point that I’d been an utter fool.’
Sixty-Six
Blake had only had an hour’s fitful sleep in a chair after his row with Babette, but the wakeful thinking time had allowed bits of his personal life to slot into place. It wasn’t helping with his concentration at the station though. He was currently trying to understand what Paul Kemp was doing in his office.
‘I’ve got to be honest with you,’ the ex-cop said, his roguish grin splitting his rugged face, ‘Tara told me just a tiny bit about the case.’ He held up a hand. ‘Never normally does, she’s as tight as a— well, anyway, this time I guess her mind was wandering a bit. You know, after the bump on her head.’
Blake gave a hollow laugh. Tara couldn’t leave the case alone, and if she was stopped from investigating personally, Kemp was the next best thing. They might not be in a relationship – not now, anyway – but they were as thick as thieves. All the same, he couldn’t help respecting the guy. Being instrumental in getting rid of Patrick Wilkins had to count for something. And he trusted Tara’s judgement, anyway. He was as sure of her as he was of anyone.
‘I might have to let her off, just this once,’ Blake said. ‘And all information gratefully received.’ At that moment he felt as though he was wading through treacle. He’d been back at the station since dawn and as well as Bella Chadwick and Lady Lockwood, he now had Sir Alistair on site too. He’d spent the last two hours trying to get the man to slip up and admit to the job Bella said he’d given her. So far, he’d had no joy at all.
‘I’ve not got much as yet,’ Kemp said hastily. ‘Circumstantial and all that. It might not help. All I had to go on was Scotland and the name of the hamlet where Lady Lockwood’s mother lived. I managed to find that online – she spent some of her upbringing there, according to Wikipedia. Though the main family home was in Surrey.’
Blake nodded.
‘I couldn’t find any hint of a scandal at the hamlet itself, but then I looked at the route the Lockwoods would have likely taken if they were travelling up from Cambridge. I found an unsolved crime, here.’
He took out a road atlas he’d got with him and pointed to a tiny village, south of Veronica Lockwood’s mother’s hamlet. Blake caught his breath. Lady Lockwood had deleted the photo Bella had taken of Julie’s notepad, but the tech guys had managed to retrieve the file. The name of the village on Kemp’s map matched the name Julie had noted.
‘What happened there?’ he asked.
‘Hit and run – not in the village – a little way outside. End of July the year John Lockwood would have turned twelve, judging by his school dates on LinkedIn. Late at night, the investigators reckoned. Bad weather. Two people killed, travelling in a small, rusty Mini.’ Kemp’s eyes met his. ‘The reports reckon the car was hit by another, larger vehicle – there was a scrape along the Mini’s side – which sent it off course, straight into a tree trunk. The driver was a mother, travelling with her daughter. The reports reckon the woman would have died instantly, but the girl – she was only eight – probably hung on for hours. The medics said she could have been saved, if she’d got the right attention. Whoever sent them careering into the tree made the conscious decision to beat it and save themselves instead of doing the right thing. From the tyre marks on the road, the investigators concluded the other car involved must have skidded to a halt before being driven away. They’d have been well aware of the accident they’d ca
used. Not pretty.’
‘No.’
Kemp shrugged his huge shoulders. ‘It might not help. And I could be duplicating. Tara said that Jez was looking into the Scotland connection, but she reckoned he might have got distracted.’
‘He did.’ He’d been busy with the haulage company transporting Lady Lockwood’s harp, and liaising with the CSIs examining the woman’s car, stairs, sitting room and drinks decanter.
There’d been something in Kemp’s eye when he’d mentioned the new DC’s name. ‘Have you met Jez?’ If he had, that must have been round at Tara’s place, surely?
‘Briefly.’ Kemp’s tone said it all.
‘Ah.’ Blake let his eyes convey his own views.
They exchanged a look.
Kemp handed him a printout of the articles he’d found. ‘The web addresses are there for reference, too.’
‘Thanks – I appreciate it.’
‘Think it’ll help?’
‘I think it might.’
Kemp rose to his feet. As Blake showed him out, he imagined the accident as viewed from the Lockwood’s car. Two children sitting in the back – John and Douglas. They’d kept their parents’ secret buried for years. And they must have shared their guilt for what had happened, too. The position they’d been in didn’t bear thinking about. If they’d been on their way to their grandmother’s, they might have been out of contact and off the grid for weeks. Shut up with two adults who had left a child to die – and a grandparent who maybe knew nothing. He imagined Sir Alistair and Lady Lockwood speaking to their children. Had family loyalty been enough to keep them quiet? Or had they used threats to drive home the need for silence? If the boys had spoken up, they might have been told they’d lose their family home, their school places, their friends, their future.
No wonder John had gone off the rails. He was beyond their reach now, but Douglas – a chip off the old block though he seemed to be – might crack under questioning, if all this speculation was true.
Blake could face him with one of the news articles. Douglas would be mystified if they were on the wrong track – but he was sure they weren’t. And if the story was all too familiar, he’d assume the police knew more than they did. That would be the key to his mother and father’s undoing.
Sixty-Seven
Blake felt uncharacteristically nervous as he entered Tara’s hospital ward a little later that day, clutching a bunch of scented stocks. He’d got some in his cottage garden in Fen Ditton, though these were from a florist. They were his favourite and he thought they might help mask the hospital smells of disinfectant and rubber flooring. But as he approached her, he realised his offering would be dwarfed by a showy bouquet of roses and lilies.
‘Someone beat me to it,’ he said, taking a seat by her bed, and feeling that he’d like to be closer to where she lay.
She shifted to pull herself more upright. ‘Jez.’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘I have to confess, he’s gone to town.’
He felt his insides sink. ‘A grand gesture?’
Her cheeks coloured slightly. ‘The stocks are lovely.’ She took them from his hands and sniffed. A nurse appeared with a vase filled with water a moment later. She put the flowers in the shade of his DC’s bouquet.
There was an awkward silence. ‘It’s lucky I ended up with a bed here,’ Tara said at last. ‘There are no flowers allowed on the orthopaedics wards, but they were full.’
Tara never made small talk. Blake looked at her closely. ‘Are you okay? Apart from having a broken foot and head injuries, that is?’
She seemed to come to, and pasted on a smile. ‘Dandy, thanks very much. So, tell me what’s happening.’
He wasn’t entirely convinced, but he ran through the events up until the point that Kemp had come to see him. At the mention of the ex-cop’s name, Tara looked down.
‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have told him what was going on, but the nurses were breathing down my neck. I knew they’d have a go at me if I tried to call work again, and Kemp came to visit with Bea, so…’
Blake gave her a look. ‘A law unto yourself – as usual.’
‘At least I told everyone where I was going this time, when I went off with Bella.’ Despite her light words and ironically raised eyebrows, her voice had a slight shake to it.
‘There is that. And I have to confess, Kemp’s information was invaluable. He told you what he found, I presume?’
She nodded. ‘He dropped in earlier to bring me some bits and pieces from home.’
‘On the back of his research we brought Douglas Lockwood in for questioning. We’d already got his mother and father on site, so it was starting to feel like a game of happy families. Only they’re all a lot less chirpy than they were this time yesterday.’
Tara leant back against her pillow. ‘That sounds promising. The questioning went well, then?’
‘We told Douglas we knew what had happened on the way to his grandmother’s in Scotland – and then I showed him the newspaper article Kemp found. I said at this stage, under the circumstances, it was far better for him to tell the truth. I made the point that he wasn’t personally guilty – and that people would look leniently on a schoolchild who’d been put in that sort of position. Though in fact, I think he’s just as hard as his parents – it seems to have been John who really suffered. Anyway, it worked. He was all too keen to put himself in the best possible light, once he thought the whole story was bound to come out anyway.’ He met Tara’s eye. ‘He says his father was at the wheel that night. They’d set off for the journey later than planned. The weather was stormy and Alistair Lockwood was driving like a demon. He rounded a bend in the middle of the road at high speed in his expensive four-by-four and caught the side of an oncoming car. The blow sent the other vehicle off the road and straight into a tree. Lockwood managed to keep his car under control, and got out to see what had happened. He even opened the door of the other car, apparently – Douglas says he always wore driving gloves. His father told them the woman was dead and the little girl as good as. Then Veronica Lockwood turned round to her kids and said it was too late. She claimed there was nothing anyone could do, and if they called an ambulance the child would still die, and their own lives would be in ruins. Douglas remembers that his father had had a whisky or four at the pub where they’d stopped mid-evening. As he grew up, he realised their secret was vulnerable. It’s clear the pub landlady told the police about Sir Alistair, when she heard about the accident. She had no name or number plate, but she knew he was with a family, and had an upper-class accent. The Lockwoods were safe, so long as the rest of the jigsaw puzzle pieces were missing. But if John had talked, the evidence on file would probably have been enough to put them in the frame.’
Tara was very still. ‘They condemned that child to a certain death, just as Veronica did Julie.’
Blake nodded. ‘Douglas said Alistair got back in the car and put his foot down. Their vehicle wasn’t that badly damaged. He drove it back to Cambridge just as it was, two weeks later, and got it fixed by a local garage, so no one would make the connection. He told the mechanic they’d hit a deer.’
‘Did Douglas seem upset?’ He could hear the horror in her voice.
‘At what’s happening now, yes. But at what happened back then?’ He shook his head. ‘Not genuinely, though he went through the motions. He claims he believed his parents, that the girl couldn’t be saved – as though that makes what they did all right. He said John seemed stunned. He hardly spoke the entire time they were staying at their grandmother’s house. And so his parents were able to persuade him that he was complicit – he hadn’t protested when it counted, so he’d clearly been happy to go along with the plan. They were all in it together. It had been a terrible accident, but they couldn’t have altered events once they’d been set in motion.’
‘Family above all else,’ Tara said.
‘I’m afraid so. I wonder how much Julie had managed to find out.’
‘I don’t think she can have got as far
as Kemp; we’d have seen it in her search history if she had. I guess she was stopped in her tracks.’
‘I agree. I wonder how she came to have the place name of the village nearest the hit and run.’
‘Did she?’
Blake explained about Bella’s photograph of Julie’s notepad.
‘If she was looking at it the day she died, that makes it sound like a recent discovery,’ Tara said. ‘Maybe John let the name slip when he was drunk – or talked in his sleep. He might not have told anyone about what happened, but it sounds as though it was forever on his mind. I’ll bet he looked up all the press coverage of the accident at some stage and knew the details inside out.’
‘It’s possible. What’s your guess about Julie’s motivation, then?’
Tara bit her lip. ‘I reckon she was in love with John and could see how much he was suffering. I guess she didn’t know why, but she saw how he’d distanced himself from his parents, and imagined they were to blame in some way. She would have wanted to investigate Lockwood’s anyway – she had that sort of company in her sights. But then perhaps, as she got to know more of John’s history and his preoccupations, she began to realise whatever had destroyed him was something unrelated to the business.’ She raised her eyes to Blake’s. ‘I’d guess that’s why she went snooping round the Master’s Lodge when she found the cat. She was probably hoping she’d unearth some kind of clue as to what had left John so broken. The statue didn’t provide the answer, of course, but maybe she photographed it for the reason my journalist contact suggested. It would have been the perfect illustration to bring a dry story about Lockwood’s to life, if she ever finished her article about them. So, what happens now?’
‘Douglas’s evidence makes Bella Chadwick’s version of events look much more likely than his mother’s. The two women and Sir Alistair are all under arrest. We’re onto the garage that fixed the family’s four-by-four, all those years ago, as well as the former landlady of the pub where Sir Alistair drank his whiskies.