Devil's Game

by Patricia Hall

  ‘You might be better talking to me than to some of the London reporters when they turn up, as I’m sure they will,’ Laura said mildly.

  Quite suddenly Terry Bastable seemed to fall in on himself, like a deflating Michelin man, his face crumpled and his eyes filled with tears as he stepped backwards and held the door open for Laura.

  ‘You’d best come in,’ he said. ‘I’m going barmy here, with the kids in bits and the bloody police still thinking I did it. It’s a bloody nightmare, it’s been a nightmare since Karen left, and I don’t know what the hell to do.’

  Cautiously, Laura followed the big man into the living room, where she found a blond boy playing a computer game on the huge flat TV screen, and a red-headed girl crumpled in a heap on the sofa, fast asleep beneath a grubby blanket. Both looked as pale as their father and had dark circles under their eyes. Bastable shrugged at the littered and dusty space the two children inhabited and waved a helpless fist.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with them.’ he said. ‘They won’t go to school. They won’t do owt I say. I’ve been laid off from work and I don’t know where the next penny’s coming from, do I? You’d best come in t’kitchen. I’ll make us a cup of tea.’

  Speechless, Laura followed him through into an equally cluttered and dirty kitchen, the sink piled high with washingup and the debris from what looked like several recent meals cluttering the table. Bastable extricated a kettle from the clutter, filled it with water at the sink and put it on.

  ‘Here, let me,’ Laura said, picking out what appeared to be the cleanest mugs from the chaos and washing them at the tap. Then she waited while Bastable came up with tea bags from a cupboard and a bottle of milk from the fridge, which he sniffed suspiciously before adding it to the brew and handing her one of the mugs.

  ‘You’d best sit down,’ he said grudgingly, waving her onto one of the stools at the table and taking one himself. He looked at Laura, eyes startlingly blue within the red rims. ‘I’m at the end of my bloody tether,’ he said. ‘No one round here’ll gi’me the time o’day. They all think I killed her, don’t they? The fuzz have more or less admitted that they haven’t got any evidence against me, but there’s not a single beggar on Wuthering believes that. The kids were being run ragged when they went back to school for a day or so, being teased and bullied, called killer’s kids… In the end they ran off home, and t’school says they’ll be better here for a bit while t’fuss dies down. But what am I supposed to do with ’em stuck here all day? And now all sorts of folk have started ringing up, newspapers, television, wanting my side of the story. I don’t have a side of the story, do I? She went off one night and never came back. And now it looks like some bastard’s killed her. And it weren’t me!’

  ‘Don’t you have any family who could take the children for a while?’ Laura asked, but Bastable shook his head.

  ‘They don’t speak to us, do they? They don’t like my politics, do they? Too extreme for them. My sister married a bloody darkie, a n…’ He hesitated and then let the word go. Laura had noticed the faded BNP sticker in the front window. ‘They even send me bloody Paki policewomen,’ he muttered half under his breath, and took a slurp of tea.

  ‘Have the police told you you’re no longer a suspect?’ Laura asked.

  ‘I’m still on police bail, aren’t I?’ Bastable said bitterly. ‘But as far as I can see, all their prying and searching and tests’ve come up with nowt. Which is right, because there’s nowt to find. I didn’t kill Karen. All right, I followed her up there that night and saw what was going off, but that was it. I came home. I might have killed her if she’d come back, the cheating cow, but she never did, so I didn’t, did I?’ He pushed clenched fists into his eyes for a moment as if to keep not just tears, but a whole welter of pain inside his shaven head. Laura felt a surge of pity for him, as she would for a tormented bull in the Spanish ring. She disliked the man, and hated his politics, but no one, she thought, deserved this.

  ‘You had no idea that this sort of stuff was going on?’ Laura asked. ‘No rumours around the estate?’

  ‘Well, it weren’t blokes from round here, even if some of the lasses were,’ Bastable said, his former belligerence flooding back. ‘You could see that from the sort of cars that were going up there. A Volvo, a Beamer, an Audi Quattro – not the sort of motor you find on the Heights, are they, unless you’re dealing drugs? Stands to reason, they wouldn’t want their own women joining in. That’d never do. Just a few slags from the Heights that no one’ll miss if owt nasty happens to them. Bastards!’

  Thackeray would no doubt be matching up expensive cars to well-heeled owners, Laura thought, before the Gazette unleashed the information to an unsuspecting Bradfield public that he was seeking a brutal sexual killer amongst the town’s great and evidently not so good. Terry Bastable, the most immediate victim, would not be the only person outraged by the news.

  ‘If you give me an interview it’ll probably keep the national reporters out of your hair,’ she said. ‘It’s obvious the police don’t consider you a serious suspect anymore, so the London press will be chasing up the new leads the police have announced this morning. But my news editor wants a short piece about how you and the kids are getting on. D’you think you could cope with that?’

  Bastable stared at her, his eyes blank.

  ‘It’s a mucky job you’ve got there, lass,’ he said. ‘Aye, get on with it, then. It makes no odds to me. There’s enough round here coming to have a good gawp at us. The whole town might as well join in.’

  Laura pulled her tape recorder out of her bag and switched it on, feeling faintly sick.

  ‘Talking might just help,’ she murmured.

  ‘Aye, and pigs might fly, an’all. So what do you want to know?’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Kevin Mower rolled over lazily in bed and reached out for the companion he had fallen asleep beside. When his inquiring arm found nothing but a crumpled sheet, he snapped fully awake and sat up, looking around his small hotel room in surprise. Had he dreamt the previous evening’s pleasures? he wondered, and then realised that watery noises were coming from the en suite bathroom. Whether the cold morning light would be as kind to the improbably named Juniper as the semi-darkness of the nightclub had been eight hours previously he rather doubted, but at least he knew that she had not crept away at dawn with his wallet and credit cards in her bag. He was a fool, he thought, but it had been fun.

  He rolled out of bed himself, pulled on boxer shorts and a T-shirt and tapped on the bathroom door.

  ‘D’you eat breakfast, honey?’ he asked, and when an answer came in the negative, he rang down to order himself a continental breakfast anyway.

  Two hours later, showered, shaved and well satisfied after another brief session in bed, he found himself being driven through Kentish Town by DS Doug Mackintosh on their way to interview Leroy Jason Green’s sister, Leanne.

  ‘Did you tell her what it was about?’ Mower asked.

  ‘Just that we wanted to talk about her brother,’ Mackintosh said as he negotiated a double-parked white van which was adding to the usual traffic chaos on the approach to the Archway junction, where the A1 debouched into the maelstrom of inner London. ‘She didn’t seem particularly surprised, just said she hadn’t seen him for years.’

  ‘No one seems to have seen him for years,’ Mower said. ‘But he was in Yorkshire ten days ago in close proximity to a mutilated body. We know that without any doubt.’

  ‘So what’s he been doing for nine or ten years?’ Mackintosh wondered, as he negotiated the junction and turned into a side street and parked on a double yellow line, sticking a Metropolitan Police sticker on his dashboard.

  ‘They clamp you as soon as look at you,’ he said, by way of explanation, getting out of the car and heading towards one of the Victorian terraced houses that lined both sides of the street, leaving Mower to follow before he locked the car with his remote over his shoulder.

  Leanne Parsons, formerly Green,
opened the door to them almost as soon as they rang the bell. She was a tall, elegant woman with smooth straightened hair and non-committal eyes, who took her time to assess the two men on the doorstep and study their warrant cards.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said grudgingly, leading the way into a vibrantly decorated sitting room to the right of the front door and offering both men the chance to admire her back view in figure-hugging jeans and top. ‘You were lucky I have a day off work today.’

  ‘And you do what, exactly?’ Mackintosh asked.

  ‘I’m a social worker,’ Leanne Parsons said as she waved her visitors into armchairs and sat opposite them on the other side of the fireplace, knees together and hands clasped demurely in front of her. Mower smiled faintly. In his experience, social workers did not generally look quite like this.

  ‘Ah,’ Mackintosh said. ‘So your brother’s record is a bit of an embarrassment, I suppose?’

  ‘His record is old, Sergeant Mackintosh, as I think you must know if you’ve done your research properly. Like many young men he got into trouble as a teenager and then began to sort himself out later. It’s not unusual. And in any case, as I told you on the phone, I haven’t seen him for many years. Can you tell me exactly why there’s this sudden interest in him?’

  Mackintosh waved a hand in Mower’s direction.

  ‘My colleague here from Yorkshire would like to talk to him,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave him to explain.’

  ‘You’ll appreciate that I can’t go into detail,’ Mower said quietly, wondering what effect it would have on this poised woman if her brother was eventually charged with a horrific murder. ‘But we have evidence that connects Leroy Green to a very serious crime.’

  ‘What evidence?’ Leanne shot back, and Mower guessed that she would be fierce in defence of anyone she thought was being unjustly accused.

  ‘Forensic evidence you can’t argue with,’ he said flatly. ‘A fingerprint that matches your brother’s that are still on file. We need to speak to him very urgently.’

  Leanne’s knuckles whitened as she clasped her hands together more tightly and dropped her head for a moment. She said nothing for a moment, and it was as if she was conducting a fierce dialogue in her own mind as various emotions seemed to flit across her face.

  ‘Very serious?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Very serious,’ Mower said.

  ‘OK,’ Leanne said. ‘I’ll tell you everything I know, but I don’t think it’s going to be much help. I honestly don’t know where he is, and I haven’t seen him for at least eight years. It was sometime around the millennium. He’d already moved on and I was quite surprised when he turned up on the doorstep to wish me a happy New Year. I was still living down Paddington way then. Once I got married and moved up here, he wouldn’t have known where to find me even if he’d wanted to. He didn’t leave a forwarding address so I couldn’t let him know, and my mother died about that time. I couldn’t even tell him that, so he didn’t come to the funeral. It was as if he wanted to have a completely new life somewhere else, nothing to do with his past, or his family.’

  ‘Your mother must have been upset by that,’ Mower said.

  ‘She was, yes,’ Leanne said. ‘He was the only boy, eight years younger than me, two sisters in between. But he ran wild in his teens. Broke my mother’s heart. And then he cut off contact with us all.’

  ‘Did he give you any idea what he was doing for a living, or where he was living?’ Mower pressed.

  Leanne shrugged.

  ‘He seemed happy enough but he gave very little away.’ She gazed out of the window for a moment before going on.

  ‘I think he mentioned living in the Midlands but whether that was then or previously I don’t remember. He was cagey, very cagey. But he never shared much with us girls. He was the youngest and my mother spoilt him rotten, and he more or less did as he pleased from being about ten or eleven. I was much less surprised by the fact that he fell into drugs and crime than I was by the possibility that he’d reformed himself somehow. If he’d told me that on that visit I probably wouldn’t have believed him.’

  ‘So could it have been a criminal lifestyle that he didn’t want you to know about?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Leanne said. ‘Has he been in trouble since? You’re more likely to know about that than I am.’

  ‘Not as far as we’re aware. Not under that name, anyway.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Leanne asked.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ Mower shot back. ‘Do you think he could be using a different name?’

  ‘Perhaps it wouldn’t surprise me,’ Leanne said thoughtfully. ‘Before he disappeared he’d started going to an evangelical church in Bayswater. It really seemed to grab him. My mother was a churchgoer but the rest of us had given it up as we got older. But suddenly Leroy seemed to want all that old-time religion. He started reading the Bible morning, noon and night. He talked about a new start, a new birth even, getting baptised, all sorts of stuff. I took it all with a pinch of salt. And then suddenly he packed his bags and took off.’

  ‘Do you recall which church it was?’ Doug Mackintosh asked.

  ‘Some creationist church off Queensway. I don’t think it was all black, like a lot of them are. The pastor was a white man. I remember Leroy saying that.’

  ‘I know the one you mean, and it’s still there,’ Mackintosh said. ‘Perhaps we should take a look and see if anyone there remembers him, or knows where he ended up. What do you think, Kevin?’

  Mower glanced at his watch and nodded. He felt that the wanted man’s sister had proved a dead end. They knew little more now than they had when they arrived so another lead was welcome, and he did not have to report for work in Bradfield until the next morning.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s do it.’ He handed Leanne Parsons his card.

  ‘If you think of anything else that might help us trace him, give me a call,’ he said. Leanne studied the rectangle closely.

  ‘Bradfield,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know where that is.’

  ‘Well, your brother evidently does,’ Mower said. ‘And believe me, when I say we need to talk to him, the need is urgent.’ Leanne looked him straight in the eye for a moment.

  ‘Is it murder?’ she asked.

  ‘I can’t tell you that,’ Mower prevaricated but Leanne nodded to herself, as if he had confirmed it.

  ‘I’m just glad my parents have passed on,’ she said. ‘He was the apple of their eye when he was a little boy, but I always knew he was trouble.’

  Three-quarters of an hour later, after passing Paddington Green police station, outside which Mower had declined the offer of a cup of canteen tea, they ground to a halt again beside a vaguely classical edifice in a quiet side street not far from the Bayswater Road, where Mackintosh repeated his double-yellow-line-and-police-business routine before leaving the car.

  ‘This is Westminster,’ he said heavily. ‘Here they tow you away before you can get the kids out of the back seat.’

  ‘It is a bit more hairy than when I worked here,’ Mower said. ‘I’m glad I came down on the train.’

  ‘Believe it, mate,’ Mackintosh said. ‘Now then, this is the place I thought must be our boy’s salvation – or not, as it’s turned out. The Congregation of the Blessed. Pastor: the Rev Stephen Pemberton Wright. And it looks as if the place is open even if it is a Wednesday morning so we’re in luck.’

  The two officers went up the steps and tried the handle of the heavy wooden doors between columns and pediment and found they obligingly swung open. Inside, a lofty white space was filled with rows of chairs facing a solid wooden pulpit, and a wooden dais and benches which looked as though they were designed for a choir, while the walls were covered with framed biblical scenes in garish colours. At the other end was what looked like a large tiled communal bath, with wooden steps leading up to its rim and down into the slightly murky-looking water. The place was warm and clean and well decorated; unusually so, Mower thought, for
the base of a sect which he guessed had no truck with more established churches. As far as the two officers could see, the place was empty, but as they walked towards the pulpit, their footfalls echoing on the tiled floor, a door at the side opened and a heavy, middle-aged man, with a shock of untidy grey hair, came in. He did not seem especially surprised or pleased to see them and made his way slowly between the rows of chairs until they met in the central aisle, where he placed himself squarely in front of them.

  ‘You look like policemen,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’ Mower and Mackintosh showed him their warrant cards and he waved them into seats before turning a chair to face them, placing himself heavily in it as though movement was painful. His fleshy, grey face seemed to pale slightly with the effort but the eyes, bright blue above heavy violet bags, were sharp and alert.

  ‘And you are, sir?’ Doug Mackintosh asked. Their host was not in clerical dress but wore a comfortable, worn-looking pair of old-fashioned grey flannel slacks and a slightly threadbare woollen sweater of muddy brown with a polo neck.

  ‘Stephen Wright,’ he said. ‘This is my church. How can I help you, gentlemen?’

  ‘Have you been here long, Mr Wright?’ Mower returned question for question.

  ‘About twenty years, since the church opened. This used to be a non-conformist chapel, Unitarian, I believe, but it fell into disuse. It was in serious disrepair, sadly, but in spite of property prices round here, we were able to renovate it, with the help of some generous friends.’

  ‘Are you part of a wider group? I can’t say I’ve ever heard of the Congregation of the Blessed,’ Mower ventured.

  ‘We began years ago meeting in private houses for prayer and Bible work, but felt that we needed our own large meeting place eventually… But can I ask what brings you here? I’m sure it’s not a casual visit, gentlemen, and I have other matters which need my attention.’