by Rebecca Tope
Caz stood up and calmly replied, ‘Sir?’
‘Come with me.’
So she went, with the faintest of rueful grimaces at Thea.
Stephanie looked up, wide-eyed and pulled the plug out of her ear. ‘What?’ she said, like a deaf person. ‘Is she going?’
‘Apparently.’
‘Did you tell her about Lucy?’
‘Sadly, no. I was just about to, when she had to go. I suppose it doesn’t much matter. It’s not really for her to deal with. We ought to get a doctor or something.’ The importance of Lucy Sinclair’s vapourings had already receded. ‘I expect she was just overwrought because of her operation and everything,’ she said vaguely.
‘She’s crazy,’ said Stephanie. ‘And crazy people are scary.’
Thea was sitting back, pressing into the wooden bench behind her, trying to sift her thoughts. Echoes of Raskolnikov reverberated insistently. She did read Crime and Punishment when she was seventeen and had a boyfriend three years older who told her if she didn’t read it then, she never would. It had made disappointingly little impression on her. ‘I thought Raskolnikov was the man in Doctor Zhivago,’ she muttered.
‘What?’ said Stephanie again. She had watched the film with Thea and Drew only a month earlier.
‘The Tom Courtenay chap. The one driving the train just before the intermission.’
‘Strelnikov,’ said Stephanie instantly. ‘Nothing like what you just said.’
‘Silly me,’ said Thea cheerfully. ‘What would I do without you?’
‘I’ve finished,’ the child announced, having scraped every atom of grilled cheese from the edges of her dish. ‘It was yummy.’
‘So have I,’ Thea noticed, wondering how she had eaten so much while talking so intently to Barkley. ‘We should go.’
‘Where? What’s happening now?’
‘I don’t know. I have no idea.’ They stood in the town square again, pulling up collars against a nasty east wind that had come from nowhere. ‘Maybe we should have a look at the church. Isn’t that one of the things we came for?’
‘I don’t really want to now. I think we should go back and see if Lucy’s all right.’
‘Stephanie Slocombe – you’re a much better man than I am,’ Thea announced. ‘I’d already forgotten about her.’
The girl giggled. A year ago, she would have protested We’re not men! But now she let it pass. Thea’s jokes took some getting used to, but it was great when you did. Nobody else was quite as funny as Thea, once you got the hang of her. ‘You can’t have really forgotten about her,’ she said.
‘Well, let’s say she slipped my mind for a moment. You think we should go and check on her, then? It’s right here, so I suppose we should.’
‘Where did Caz go? Is she coming back?’
‘Her boss wanted her. I thought we might see something going on out here, but it’s as quiet as always.’ The only sounds were of voices and laughter in the pub behind them. The church clock struck half past one, for good measure. ‘We’ve only been here an hour,’ said Thea. ‘I thought it was a lot more than that.’ It amazed her how much could be said, absorbed, understood and imagined in such a short time. ‘I get the feeling the whole thing is coming to a head.’
‘But where?’ asked the child, looking round.
‘In a house, maybe. There are quite a lot of them, spread around. I thought I knew who must have killed Ollie, but now I’m not at all sure. And it could be anyone – somebody I’ve never met or even heard of.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Stephanie, shivering in the wind. ‘Let’s not just stand here. I’m freezing.’
‘Right. Come on, then. The car’s outside Lucy’s house, anyway, so we have to go there whether we want to or not.’
‘I don’t want to, but I think we should,’ said Stephanie stoutly.
When did she get so grown-up, wondered Thea, not sure that she altogether liked it.
The door of Lucy’s house was wide open as they approached, heading for the spot where Thea’s car stood ten yards further down the street. A woman was standing there, looking into the house.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Stephanie, showing an unwarranted confidence that Thea would know.
Except the confidence was entirely warranted. ‘I think it’s Tessa. Kevin Sinclair’s woman. I wonder what she’s doing?’
The pavement was so wide that they could have walked past leaving six feet or more of space between themselves and the doorway, and probably escaping notice. Tessa appeared to be calm and there was every reason to leave her to straighten Lucy out in whatever way seemed best. But there were invisible currents criss-crossing the quiet street, with Lucy caught in the meshes. She had known about Artie and Faith and had told Bobby. That alone justified feelings of hatred and revenge towards her. Not only the erring couple but their significant others had reason to blame Lucy for their lives falling apart. It explained, in fact, the need for a house-sitter. This came to Thea in a flash, while she was still a yard away from the door. Details had yet to formulate themselves, but the stark vulnerability of the property was already clear. Now Tessa was here, a woman who had no reason to feel warm towards her partner’s former wife. And, for good measure – rather more than a good measure, really – a male voice was heard coming up behind them. ‘Ah – Mrs Slocombe, if I’m not very much mistaken. Here again, is it? What magnetic charm this dull little village must have for you.’
She turned round slowly. ‘Mr Lanning,’ she said.
‘Guilty as charged,’ he said fatuously. But there was an intelligent gleam in his eye. ‘And this is … ?’ he indicated Stephanie with a tilt of his chin.
‘My daughter,’ said Thea, for economy. She saw no need to elaborate.
The house door was still open, but Tessa had moved a few steps into the hallway. There was no sign of Lucy. Hearing the voices, Tessa turned round. ‘The door wasn’t locked,’ she said.
‘I suppose that was me,’ said Stephanie. ‘Most doors lock themselves, don’t they? I mean, when you shut them behind you.’
‘It wasn’t you. I was here after you,’ said Thea.
They all looked at the mechanism; even Thea felt a need to check what she already knew. It was a basic Yale with a metal nub that you slid up or down depending on whether you wanted the lock to engage. For all her apparent paranoia, Lucy had failed to update her security in that respect. Most likely, thought Thea, her fears lay in more subtle directions.
‘So where is she?’ said Tessa.
‘Why do you want her?’ asked Thea. Then she looked at Hunter. ‘And you – were you coming here as well?’
‘Not specifically,’ he said unhelpfully.
‘It’s the drugs,’ said Tessa obscurely. ‘I wanted to confront her about her lies about the drugs.’
The presence of Stephanie was having a subduing effect on them all. Nobody could clearly speak out about sex or drugs or violent death with a child in their midst. Even Thea felt inhibited, when she wanted quite badly to immerse herself in what felt like an oncoming climax. It only needed Higgins and Caz to come hurtling up, tyres screeching, to complete the picture.
‘They’ve convinced Kevin that his son has never used any hard drugs,’ Tessa went on, her tone quite conversational. ‘So he’s had to think back to where the idea came from – and it was Lucy. Two months ago, she told him quite plainly that his son was injecting heroin and was stealing money, living in a squat and mixing with undesirable characters. But before that – long before that, when Ollie was a teenager – she made similar accusations. She turned Kevin against the boy, then and now.’
Thea looked up at the windows over their heads. Lucy was almost certainly inside one of them, and quite probably hearing what was being said. ‘But why?’ she said.
Tessa sighed. ‘Jealousy, we assume. It all came pouring out last night. Poor Kev, he’s completely wrecked. Destroyed. If Lucy wanted him to suffer, she’s certainly achieved her purpose.’
‘Jealous
y of what?’
‘Kevin having children that weren’t hers. She was desperate for her own, but he went for a vasectomy without telling her. Lied about it for a bit. Stupid of him, but she was always difficult to confront, apparently. He only confessed when she was too old for it to matter any more. He says she took it very well, as far as he could tell. Started adopting all those animals, training herself up to work with computers, spending his money on the barn conversion. Ollie and his sister were off making their own lives by then, so her nose wasn’t being rubbed in it any more. But then Ollie came back, and Kevin was away in his lorry most of the time, and suddenly they were getting divorced.’ She frowned. ‘I’m still a bit hazy about what was the final straw.’
Everything had come out in good order, making sense and clearly assumed to be true. There were even credible motives behind the accusations. But Thea’s thought processes were still clogged with information that Bobby Latimer had so recently revealed. She still assumed that everyone hated Lucy for their own good reasons, but that none of them linked directly to Ollie Sinclair.
Hunter Lanning had put a large hand on Stephanie’s shoulder, and she was trustingly leaning against him. ‘This is all a bit rich, eh?’ he murmured to her. ‘All these people – what are they like?’
It was avuncular, witty, self-confident and entirely benign. Stephanie looked up at him and laughed. Thea felt torn between a conventional panic about middle-aged men and pre-adolescent girls on one side and an instinctive knowledge that there was no harm in the man on the other. Perhaps he was genuinely and extraordinarily open-minded, as he claimed. Perhaps everything was to be tolerated equally. Perhaps that was actually quite a saintly way to be.
‘Shall we go for a little walk?’ he went on, with a wink at Thea. ‘Just down to the end of the street and back. Give these ladies a chance to clear the air. We won’t go out of sight,’ he promised.
‘All right,’ said Stephanie, with a look at her stepmother that combined apology with an awareness that she was not meant to be involved too closely with whatever came next.
Which left just Tessa and Thea together on Lucy’s doorstep, directly visible to any Latimers who might be in their front room over the road, and obliquely so to people in adjacent houses. Faith and Livia would have to peer sideways through their downstairs windows, or else lean out from upstairs. It could not be assumed that none of this was happening.
‘I’m going in,’ said Tessa, and did so. Thea was not conscious of any definite decision. She just followed automatically.
‘Stephanie was here before lunch – just her and Lucy,’ she told Tessa. ‘She ran off because she was scared. She said Lucy was behaving like a madwoman and went upstairs in hysterics. They were talking about forgiveness of sins.’
‘Huh!’ said Tessa. ‘Sounds about right. The kid seems fine again now, anyway. Hunter’s the perfect chap to be keeping an eye on her.’
‘You know him?’
‘Everyone knows Hunter. He’s like a king around here.’
‘Lucy!’ Thea called, more loudly than she’d intended. ‘Where are you? We’re coming upstairs to find you.’
It was like a perverse game of hide-and-seek. She almost added Ready or not.
There was a thud from one of the bedrooms, which sent both women up the stairs at top speed, Thea in front. On the landing there were three closed doors. ‘This is her room,’ said Thea, and took hold of the doorknob.
‘Careful!’ said Tessa, her face suddenly pale. ‘You don’t know what she might do.’
But Thea pushed and the door opened and she went in.
Lucy was standing by a wardrobe, a suitcase on the floor at her feet. ‘I dropped it,’ she said blankly. ‘I forgot it had things in it.’
‘Are you going somewhere?’ Thea asked. The glittering eyes and rigid mouth all too starkly confirmed Stephanie’s diagnosis of insanity.
‘Or are you on something?’ Tessa said. ‘You look as high as a kite.’
‘That’s not drugs,’ said Thea slowly, while her heart thundered in her chest. ‘That’s guilt.’
‘I guess you’re right,’ said Tessa, sinking her substantial body onto the side of the bed and staring hard at Lucy. ‘You planned it every step of the way, didn’t you, you bloody bitch. Just to get at poor old Kev.’
‘Poor old Kev!’ Lucy shrieked with a ghastly grin. ‘That man deserves everything he gets. He’s ruined five lives at least with his selfishness and carelessness and total lack of responsibility. He had to be shown. Somebody had to show him.’
Thea had once before been forced to compare current events with ancient legends. Medea had cropped up before, and here she was again. The woman who killed a man’s children in order to teach him a lesson. The final act of a wife with no more weapons in her armoury. ‘You killed Ollie,’ she said. ‘Just to teach Kevin a lesson?’
‘Five lives?’ Tessa was trying to calculate who they were, caught up with a silly distraction. ‘Ollie, Sayida, Annie – who else?’
‘Me, you fool.’
‘That’s only four.’
‘Don’t forget yourself,’ sneered Lucy. ‘You might not know it yet, but you were going to be just another one he betrayed, sooner or later.’
‘I don’t think so. Kevin’s no saint, but he’s just an ordinary man. It doesn’t do to have unrealistic expectations.’
Thea was speechless at this bizarre exchange. A woman had come close to confessing to a deliberate murder of an innocent young man, and her accuser was worrying about irrelevant details. ‘Planned?’ she managed to say.
Tessa nodded. ‘Right from those lies about drugs. She needed to keep Kevin estranged from Ollie right to the end, to make it all the worse for him. Don’t you see? If they’d got back together, everything she wanted would be gone. Her whole life has been spent in resentment and jealousy and hating. I know all about you, Lucy Sinclair. Never making any lasting friends, using people, trying to make them fit your own ideas of them, and throwing them aside when they wouldn’t play ball. All nice and smiley on the outside, and a total sociopath underneath. Those animals you rescued were a good smokescreen, a perfect foil, giving you their love whether you deserved it or not. And then you killed Ollie,’ she tailed off in a whisper. ‘For no real reason at all.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucy. ‘I thought it would be easy.’
She turned to Thea. ‘I never guessed that you’d be the one to ruin it. I should have done, after the Hampnett business. You were always in the wrong place, saying the wrong thing, refusing to co-operate. And after all that, your bloody kid, so wide-eyed and innocent, talking about sin without the slightest idea of what she was saying.’ The hysterical laughter erupted without warning. ‘That was just so funny. That’s the thing about life, you know. It’s just one big joke.’
‘I have no idea what you mean,’ said Thea untruthfully. When she had time to think about it, she supposed it would turn out to be disconcertingly accurate.
‘See what I mean?’ said Tessa. ‘She was even trying to manipulate you. You were intended to be a distraction, a red herring. Instead, you kept asking questions and getting in the way.’
‘Like I always do,’ sighed Thea. Then her phone pinged with a text and she took it out of her pocket, Stephanie at the forefront of her mind.
Instead it was from Caz Barkley.
Found the murder weapon
Thea texted right back.
And I’ve found the murderer
Chapter Twenty
Lucy put up no resistance at all when the police came to the house and listened to the story. Hunter and Stephanie came back; Tessa phoned Kevin and gently reported what had happened; the neighbours all kept away and Thea drove herself and her stepdaughter home.
‘Don’t go anywhere,’ Caz said. ‘We’ll need a proper statement.’
In the car, Thea tried to keep the conversation safely abstract, but was minimally successful. Stephanie was quiet but composed. The adult world was still a surprising place, full of
unanticipated shocks and revelations, which she quickly processed as part of growing up. If this was the reality, she was going to have to accommodate it, and take it in her stride. She already knew that people died when they were young, at the hands of others who were bad or sometimes mad. It fitted with fairy tales and films and old legends. ‘I feel lucky, sort of,’ she said, as they turned off at Stow to take the short way home.
‘Lucky?’
‘To be seeing so much that’s real,’ she tried to explain. ‘Not just on the tablet or phone. It’s the difference between 2D and 3D, if you see what I mean. It makes me feel special.’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ said Thea.
Caz did not appear until the next day. The children were outside with Drew, Andrew and Fiona. There appeared to be an earnest conversation going on. Hepzie was with them, wandering aimlessly between the various pairs of legs, sniffing at the walking stick that Andrew leant on.
‘She confessed,’ said Caz. ‘She’s not a bit sorry. I felt physically sick. How anyone could do that to a harmless young man …’
‘What did she do exactly?’
‘You probably don’t want to know exactly. It was a pruning saw, with jagged teeth. Sharp and very nasty.’
‘How did you find it?’
‘Fluke. She’d dumped it in a litter bin, pushed down to the bottom. And then a tractor accidentally knocked it over, and the farmer was trying to pick everything up when he found the weapon. He wouldn’t normally have done anything about it, but one of his Ukrainian workers was with him and made the connection. It’s not easy to dispose of a murder weapon, you know. Almost as tricky as a body.’
‘What happened in the hospital, then? Before the operation? Nurse Kate said she thought it was emotional – stress or something.’
Caz shook her head. ‘No idea. It never came up. But stress sounds about right. She just never imagined how it would take her afterwards. She must have done the deed late on Tuesday or the early hours of Wednesday – that’s what she says, anyway. Then most likely not slept all that night, before going off to have her surgery. It wasn’t anything very major, you know. She fixed it all up with the hospital – you can name your date, pretty much, when you go private. It was meant to be a cast-iron alibi, with the visit to you muddying the waters on Tuesday, and then organising it that Ollie wouldn’t be found for days.’