by William Paul
She hung on to his arm as they went down the stairs and kissed in the doorway. He put his hand under her T-shirt on the small of her back and let it rest on the waistband of her jeans. His next problem would be what to do with Angela, Hilary’s black dress doppelganger.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said.
‘Promise you’ll come back.’
‘You don’t get rid of me that easily.’
Fyfe held her by the wrist and carefully wrote his phone number on the inside of her forearm. When he had finished he bent down and pressed his lips against the softness of the flesh. He kissed her hand and backed away down the path. The security light came on, holding his shadow ahead of him, draping it across the low hedge and on to the pavement and road. By the time he reached his car the shadow had shrunk to nothing. He looked back. Hilary’s door was shut and the light in the sitting-room had been switched off.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Sunday, 18.37
Maureen Gilliland drove through the city silently, cruising inside the darkly warm cocoon of the Mercedes. She had no conception of where she was going, or that she was even moving. She kept her eyes fixed on the boundary carved from the darkness by the headlights. Instinct made her react to junctions and traffic lights, but in the main she was oblivious to the physical actions she was performing.
Occasionally she would notice where she was and what she was doing: one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the gearstick, feet resting on the pedals, accelerator pressed down, speedometer needle turning, raindrops on the windscreen, red warning lights on the dashboard for low fuel and an unfastened safety belt. But it was like seeing a landscape briefly illuminated by a shaft of lightning before it was plunged back into invisibility and she was being borne along effortlessly on a magic carpet of powerful, supercharged emotion. She had blanked out the encounter with Gregor Runciman outside the office. Instead, Val was beside her, his fingertips caressing her thigh and pattering like a small animal’s feet across her stomach and up over her breasts, under her chin and into her mouth. He was whispering in her ear, telling her how much he loved her, telling her of the things he wanted to do to her, embarrassing things, terrible things, disgusting things, indescribable things, that made her shiver with the thrill of anticipation. And he kept promising that soon, very soon, the whole world would know the truth about their loving relationship. The irrefutable documentary evidence, the final vestiges of their mortal lives, was laid out to be found. People would talk about them in hushed voices. ‘Who would have believed it of our Maureen?’ they would ask each other incredulously at the office of Randolph and Runciman. ‘I don’t believe it,’ they would say at the church.
But they would believe. They would have to believe. They would have no choice but to believe because the facts would be staring them in the face. Inescapable, unavoidable facts that revealed how she and Valentine Randolph had been lovers. She sucked at the fingers in her mouth, tasting a sickly sweetness. They could carve it on the headstone above her grave.
The wheel was abruptly wrenched from Gilliland’s grip as the front offside tyre mounted the pavement. She grabbed it with both hands and turned it back. The entrance to Val’s garden opened in front of her, human shapes fled from the parabola of light sweeping the ground ahead of her. The stone gatepost slammed into the side of the car. Her door burst open and the darkening evening roared in, damping the side of her face with its rain, terrifying her with its inhuman babble of noise. She stamped on the accelerator and the car leapt forward. The impulse of momentum closed the door, restoring the silence, shutting out the outside world. The car struck something else, forcing it out of the way.
The frontage of Val’s house was directly in front of her, frozen in the headlights. There were cars across the steps to the main door, people moving around them, faces turning to watch her.
Red spots glowed on the bottom fringe of her eyesight, spilling their colouring upwards, splitting the fat drops of water on the windscreen into spectral rainbows. Val’s hand tightened on her thigh, his mouth closed over her throat preventing her breathing. Her right foot was hard to the floor. The house rushed at her, inflating to gigantic proportions, and in the fraction of a second before she collided with it she realised there was no one beside her in the car, that she was alone as she had always been alone. In that instant her elation was transformed into blind terror and she screamed as the silence exploded around her with a deafening blast like a pin-punctured balloon.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sunday, 18.39
Fyfe had just been waved through the garden gate police cordon keeping the reporters and camera teams at bay when the red Mercedes smashed into the rear of his purple Volvo. The collision caused his head to whiplash. A sharp pain stabbed into his neck. His head butted the rim of the steering wheel. The car lurched to the left, flattening a border of small shrubs, ploughing into the soft flower bed, and coming to rest with a bump against a staked tree that was knocked thirty degrees from the vertical.
Fyfe staggered out of his car, rubbing his neck and running towards the scene of chaos twenty yards in front of him that was illuminated by floodlights set into the lawn. The Mercedes had accelerated fiercely once he had been pushed to the side and smashed head-on into the driveway pillar of the stone balustrade that lined the set of four steps leading up to the front door of the house. The cordon at the gates had broken as the Mercedes crashed. Reporters were circling the wreck. Photographers were taking pictures. Television cameramen were filming anything that moved.
The Mercedes, sideswiping two police cars on its way past, had climbed half-way over the balustrade and stuck there, half tilted on to its side. The bonnet was crumpled and steam was blowing out from its edges. The windscreen was shattered but intact and bulging outwards. One front wheel was sticking out on a bent axle, still spinning but winding down slowly. The boot, with its yellow and black number plate VR 1, was untouched but as Fyfe approached he saw flames beginning to lick up from underneath it where the fuel tank was situated. There were people milling around the car. Some were trying to wrench open the driver’s door which was jammed, others were at the front apparently trying to lift it up. The sight of the quickly fattening flames caused cries of alarm and a redoubling of effort. The Mercedes door came free suddenly and a woman’s limp body fell out on to the gravel. Her face was smeared with blood a brighter red than the colour of the car. One shoulder seemed to be missing, the arm emerging from her torso low down. Fyfe took an ankle and helped to carry her to the grass where she was laid out on her back. A policeman knelt over her and began giving the kiss of life. Another thumped on her chest. A cameraman knelt by her feet, recording everything. A floodlight was directly behind them, creating a theatrical silhouette.
Fyfe turned back to the wreck. People were trying to pull a body out from under the front. They were screaming at each other because the body was trapped by the weight of the car and no one was sure what to do.
‘It’s Sapalski,’ somebody said. ‘He’s been crushed.’
A fire extinguisher hissed loudly at it spread foam over the rear chassis, snuffing out the flames. Fyfe joined with half a dozen other people to push the car further over, breathing heavily with the exertion, straining to take the weight when the shout came for it to allow two officers to crawl in and drag Sapalski out with them. His clothes were dirty and torn but otherwise he seemed unharmed. There were two parallel scars on his chin but they were not bleeding. His eyes were only half open, or half shut, as if he had a bad hangover. He looked deflated. There was no width to his chest. No one bothered to give him the kiss of life when he was laid on the lawn. They had given up on the woman too. The faces of both dead bodies were covered by uniform jackets. Silver buttons sparkled in the harsh lighting. Sirens wailed in the distance. Dark shapes moved stealthily through the upward shooting beams, already flecked with the shadows of swooping gulls.
Fyfe stood transfixed. ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he said over and over again. ‘For
fuck’s sake. For fuck’s sake.’
He didn’t answer when somebody asked him if he was all right. He didn’t answer when a young reporter with pink-framed spectacles asked him if he could explain what was going on. He turned his back when he noticed a camera filming him. He didn’t want them to see the tears that were running down over his cheeks and into the corners of his mouth. He tried to wipe his face dry and saw blood on his trembling fingers. He hadn’t realised he was bleeding. It was not much, hardly anything at all, flowing from a cut at the side of his eye, but at least it told him he was still alive.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sunday, 20.35
What was he doing here? Fyfe had never met Wilma Sapalski before, never talked to her, never wondered what she might look like. Yet, for some instinctive reason he didn’t pretend to understand, he had insisted on personally breaking to her the news of her husband’s violent death. He hadn’t particularly liked Sapalski. Then he hadn’t disliked him, hadn’t really thought much about it. But he kept thinking that if he had pulled rank and prevented Sapalski going home temporarily, or if he had not been sidetracked into a couple of lost hours by Hilary, the investigation would have moved more quickly and Sapalski would not have been standing at the foot of the steps when the suicide driver in the Mercedes came roaring up the drive. He would not have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A few seconds either way and the car would have smacked harmlessly into a stone wall. Maureen Gilliland would still have died but that was what she wanted and her death would have been the end of it. Sapalski, saddened by the unnecessary loss of life when he himself was about to bring new life into the world, would have seen to the paperwork and gone home safely to his pregnant wife. Instead, the chain of chance circumstance meant an unborn child would never know its father.
‘Why him?’ Wilma wailed. ‘Why my John?’
Good question, Fyfe thought. Bereavement training for police officers warned that such deceptively reasonable questions should not be answered directly for fear of getting embroiled in an impossible philosophical discussion. Be practical, be sympathetic, be understanding, be supportive was the advice, but leave the metaphysics and the spiritual stuff to visiting clergy or bleeding heart social workers.
Pregnancy had puffed up Wilma’s face. Her hands and ankles too were bloated. Fyfe could see two fingers with deeply inset rings that were almost concealed by the puffiness. Her hair was lank and greasy and she had very little make-up on. Yet she had a vibrant quality and an inner confidence about her that transcended her physical condition and made her look very attractive. It was the glow of approaching maternity. At least she had looked attractive before Fyfe knocked on her door, broke the news and put out the internal lights.
He was well practised in telling women they had become widows. Angela had been one of them, all those years ago. She hadn’t been pregnant at the time when husband Mike splattered his brains over walls and ceiling rather than give himself up. But there had been a smile on her face when she opened the door to Fyfe. It had faded rapidly. He had been practical, sympathetic, understanding, and supportive. They had ended up in bed together and forged a bond that he could not break.
Fyfe tried not to stare at the huge mound of Wilma’s belly but it exerted a cruel fascination on him. It trembled every time a sob wracked her body as though the baby contained inside her was shivering with equally inconsolable grief. Fyfe stood helplessly, watching Sheila Grant, the policewoman delegated to accompany him, do all the comforting and the patting on the back. There was nothing else he could say or do. No point in telling her what a great guy Sapalski had been. No point in saying he understood how she felt because he didn’t have the slightest idea. No point in claiming she would get over it because she might never get over it. Wilma would be allowed to weep for a while then Sheila Grant would gently coax her out to formally identify Sapalski’s broken body. Fyfe had stood beside the doctor as corroborative witness when Sapalski’s life was pronounced extinct on the lawn. Human emotion had to be overcome, bureaucratic procedures had to be followed and as a result there was no point in Fyfe doing anything more here.
‘I told him to go,’ Wilma was saying. ‘I told him to get out. I was very selfish. He wanted to stay with me but I wanted to be alone. Why didn’t I let him stay with me?’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Sheila Grant repeated like a mantra. ‘You must not blame yourself.’
‘Why didn’t I let him stay?’
‘You must not blame yourself.’
‘I could have stopped him.’
‘It’s not your fault.’
‘I should have stopped him.’
‘Don’t fret.’
‘He would still be alive.’
‘There, there.’
‘Why him? Why my John?’
‘It’s not your fault.’
Wilma held her swollen belly and wept despairingly. Fyfe turned away, anxious to escape but careful not to appear hasty. Bill Matthewson was waiting for him in the squad car outside. There was another bereaved woman to be visited, not a widow this time but a mother. Close enough. Every man had to be some mother’s son.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sunday, 21.16
What was he doing here? Fyfe had thought it a good idea to keep busy, to do the rounds and wrap up the inquiry. If he had to justify the way he spent his time on the evening Sapalski died he could give an itinerary of his movements, ending for the time being with this visit to the woman driver’s elderly mother who sat red-eyed and breathless in an armchair stroking the black and white cat on the tartan rug covering her lap. A walking-stick was balanced against the arm of the chair. She was confused. She slowly shook her head, unable to take in what she had been told about her only daughter, her freshly dead daughter.
‘Mrs Gilliland, did Maureen’s recent behaviour lead you to think something like this was likely to happen?’
‘I didn’t suspect a thing. I don’t believe it.’ She tutted like a schoolmistress rubbishing a tall story told by one of her pupils. ‘Are you sure it’s my Maureen, not someone else?’
They were sure. Her younger brother, listed as next of kin on Gilliland’s kidney donor card, had already identified her. He said he didn’t believe it either even with her laid out in front of him. The organ donation was nipped in the bud too. Her body was needed for further examination, given the circumstances, and could not be tampered with.
‘Were you aware of her love affair with Mr Randolph?’ Fyfe asked her elderly mother.
The mother looked at him, closing one eye as though sighting on him down the barrel of a rifle. She looked right over the head of policewoman Anna McGrory who was kneeling in front of her holding her hand.
‘No,’ she said finally.
‘Not even a suspicion?’
‘No.’
‘Did she have other boyfriends?’
‘She never had anything to do with men, not since she grew up. I always assumed Maureen was . . . you know.’
‘What?’
She lowered her voice, casting a glance over at the kitchen where her daughter-in-law was keeping out of the way. ‘Not interested in that kind of thing.’
‘Even though she was in her forties?’
‘Oh yes. She looked after me. With her work and that, she said she didn’t have time for a social life.’
‘So you didn’t know about Mr Randolph?’
‘She sometimes mentioned him, I think. He was her boss, you see. His personal assistant. It was her job. They were members of the same church. St Andrew’s. Do you know it? It’s such a nice church. I used to go every week but I don’t get about so much now.’
Fyfe put on his best sympathetic expression. He knew Mrs Gilliland was hiding her pain below a display of civilised politeness, or it might have simply been shock. He had tried to explain about the murder of Zena McElhose and Valentine Randolph being in hospital and then Maureen dying in the car crash, but he wasn’t sure she was absorbing the in
formation properly. He hadn’t told her the car was crashed deliberately, sealing the fate of one innocent bystander, John Sapalski.
It was several seconds after she first mentioned St Andrew’s Church that he realised McElhose had been a member there as well. So had Randolph. The connection between the threesome was reinforced. Maureen Gilliland would not be the first secretary to indulge in a bit of secretive hanky-panky with her boss. Nor would she be the first dutiful daughter to deceive a mother who would rather not know about her ageing offspring’s sexual habits. Zena McElhose would not be the first lonely widow to find solace with a widower who failed to inform her he was knocking off an equally lonely spinster. Lust among the pews, playing footsie during the hymn singing, lascivious glances when heads were bowed for prayer, jealousy festering. Amen to that. Fyfe hoped he would be as rampant as Randolph when he reached his age. And he also hoped he would be able to avoid the divine retribution that had broken their unholy triangle.
The room was dimly lit and smelled musty. A fireplace of smokeless fuel was burning low, yellow flames licking round the nuggets of fuel like ghostly cats’ tongues. The real cat clawed with a hind leg at its collar, scratching the old woman’s hand and drawing a thin thread of blood. It jumped to the floor when she let go of it. Fyfe handed her a paper tissue. She ignored the bleeding and used the tissue to dab at her eyes.
‘It’s a new collar,’ she explained. ‘He’s still getting used to it.’
‘Of course,’ Fyfe said in pretend small talk. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Maureen called him Randy. It’s Norwegian apparently.’