‘Hello, darling inspector! Have I missed you!’ She released him only sufficiently to look at him, and her face slithered from rapture into concern. ‘What’s the matter? You look awful!’
‘Lack of sleep, that’s all,’ he said.
‘No it’s not,’ she contradicted. ‘Something’s happened.’
‘It’s the case – we’ve made an arrest.’
‘You’ve cracked it? Oh brilliant! But why aren’t you happy? Have you got the wrong man?’
‘Come and have a cup of tea and I’ll tell you.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. Please.’ There was nowhere safer, or more anonymous, than an airport terminal. Just at the moment he found that reassuring.
‘God, it’s awful,’ she said at last. ‘No wonder you look so grim. All of them? She killed all of them?’
‘Not Hulfa. According to her that was suicide after all. She was still working on him when he jumped the gun. He had been being treated for severe depression.’
‘But the others—?’
‘One by one, planned and executed. And that’s what it was to her, of course – an execution. They had let her Daddy die, so they had to be punished. Saving the best till last, as Norma put it.’
‘But did she really believe Neal had murdered Forrester?’
‘It’s hard to know what she really believed. I don’t think it’s very clear to her any more, she’s been living with it for so long.’
‘Do you think Sears really told her that story, though?’
‘No. I think Sears probably said that he and the others felt guilty about Forrester’s death, and she made up the rest for herself. It didn’t really matter, though, whether it was an accident or not – they were morally responsible in her eyes.’
She had cried in the end, sobbed like a child – the child she really was in one part of her mind, hurt so much by what had happened that she had shut that bit off from the rest to protect it. Schizophrenia, absolutely classic, Norma had said afterwards. But she had flung herself weeping into Slider’s arms, and what he had held was a hurt and pitiful child.
‘You don’t think – it’s not just one of those mad confessions?’Joanna said suddenly. ‘You know, people confessing to things they haven’t done, for the notoriety.’
He shook his head. ‘She has a notebook – she gave it to me up in the flat. Names, dates, every detail. Things she couldn’t possibly have known if she hadn’t been there. She’s been keeping it, waiting for the moment when I’d come for her.’
‘But how could she—?’
‘Me, or someone else. Once it was all over, there was nothing left for her to do but confess, and die.’
‘Well she won’t die, will she? What will happen to her?’
‘They’ll put her in a psychiatric unit for a few years, then decide she’s not dangerous and let her go. It’s at times like this that I wish we hadn’t abolished hanging. Oh, not for our sake,’ he added, seeing Joanna’s surprise. ‘For hers. She’ll have to go on living with it for the rest of her life.’
‘So you think she wanted to be caught? Then why didn’t she tell you the first time you interviewed her?’
‘She tried to help me along. She told me she was on duty the night Neal died, which wasn’t true. As soon as that was checked, we’d be bound to be back. But I suppose she felt she had to go on trying as long as the curtain was up.’
‘She was acting a part?’
He paused, waiting for the right words. ‘Not just that.’ She was trapped in the inevitability of a situation. ‘Once she started along the path, she had to go on. At least, I think that’s how she felt.’
‘Like a Greek hero. The plaything of the gods, in the grip of Moira.’
‘Moira?’
‘Fate. Or like the chap in the limerick, you know:
There once was a man who said “Damn
It is borne in upon me I am
Just a being that moves
In predestinate grooves
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram.” ’
‘Oh, Joanna!’ An unwilling smile tugged his lips.
‘Sorry. But I can’t bear to see you hurting so much about this. It isn’t your fault, or your worry. And why so much sympathy for her? Think of all the misery she caused.’
‘That’s part of it.’ He thought of Mrs Webb, left to bring up her children in so much ugliness. Of Mrs Neal, watching the door like the faithful dog that will never understand he’s not coming home any more. Of Jacqui Turner, brooding over her precious, pathetic notes.
‘And poor old Gorgeous George, caught up in her plans. Your Head’s going to take some convincing that he was just being used by her.’
‘It’s a funny thing about that,’ Slider said. ‘Her original plan was to kill Neal at the flat. It would have been much easier for her, and less risky. But at the eleventh hour she changed her mind, cleared out from the flat, and made Neal take her to a motel.’
‘Why d’you suppose she did that.?’
‘I think, so that she wouldn’t mess up Gorgeous George’s flat. Because at the last minute she realised she liked him.’
Joanna grunted through a mouthful of tea. ‘It’s nice to know she had some human feelings. And talking of the motel, why did she take Neal’s car keys away?’
‘Because she’d left her suitcase in the boot of his car. She had to retrieve it.’
‘And his wallet and credit cards?’
‘She wasn’t clear about that. I think it was to rob him of his identity, to leave him with nothing. She wanted him brought low, utterly destroyed.’
‘And all for Gilbert Forrester’s sake. He must have been some man.’
‘There were a whole lot of reasons mixed up. So mixed up it’s going to be hell trying to put them in any sort of order anyone will understand.’ Love, jealousy, fear, hurt pride, a child’s defiance which, once begun, was hard to leave off. ‘Self preservation, for one thing. She had to adore her Daddy because otherwise she’d have to admit to herself that Neal was her father, and she hated Neal for betraying Forrester and sleeping with her mother.’
‘How did she find out about that?’
‘She walked in on them once. She says that’s when it suddenly came home to her, as well, about his funny toes.’
‘My God, it really is like a Greek tragedy – Oedipus, only in reverse.’
‘But she must have guessed it subconsciously a long time before that.’ He remembered the photographs, the eternal and indivisible happiness. ‘I think they all had a pretty shrewd idea of the truth.’
‘Dear Lord, though, what a frightful thing to do! To seduce her own father – and go on seducing him over a period of weeks – while she plotted his murder. How could she bear to do it?’
‘Because she loved him, of course. That’s the whole point – you have to understand. A little girl’s crush that gradually got out of hand. She must have been horrified when she found out he was her father. And she hated him for loving her mother more than her. There was a whole seething cauldron of emotions building up between those four people over the years. Three of them at least were too intelligent for their own good. If they had been dull and stupid, none of it would have happened. Dick and Marsha would probably have married straight out of school—’
‘And be perfectly normally divorced by now,’ Joanna added. ‘Shall we make a move? I’m longing for a bath and a decent drink.’
‘All right,’ he said, standing up automatically. She heard from the dullness of his voice that there was more to come, that he needed to talk it out. It was all hurting him too much, the horror of it, which he hadn’t yet fully communicated to her. Well, walking would help the words along. It was quite a distance to the car.
‘I think it’s Mrs Forrester I feel most sorry for,’ she said when they had found a trolley. It ran along jauntily in front of them, looking for a slope down which to misbehave. ‘She must have known that Eleanor knew about her and Neal.’
‘Eleanor said no
t, but I agree with you. I can’t believe in all those flaming rows they had about her wanting to be a firewoman that she didn’t throw that at her mother.’
‘Do you suppose Mrs F suspected about the murders?’
‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. She’s not the sort to give us even a supposition to use against her daughter. My guess is that even if she did, she wouldn’t let herself believe.’ If she had, she’d have had to begin to wonder whether it would be her turn next.
‘And what about Lister? Do you think he’d worked it out?’
‘I think Lister probably thought it was Marsha. If he’d worked out the why, then the who would have seemed obvious, as it did to us. Marsha had the motive and the skills. He wouldn’t have thought of Eleanor, who was only a child when it all happened.’ A child, watching and listening in the background, knowing, probably, that her mother blamed Red Watch for her father’s death. Was that when the seed was planted? The soil was well-prepared by then, and what a tropical-sized tree had flourished!
‘Why didn’t Lister go to the police, I wonder?’
‘I suppose he must have thought it was imagination after all. If he said to Neal, beware of Marsha, and Neal said, I haven’t spoken to her in years, he might have felt there was nothing to worry about. Then when Marsha phoned him up to say Dick was dead, the shock was too much for him.’
‘Why did she phone? To find out how much he knew?’
‘Maybe. Maybe.’
The car park, grey and echoing. He had first set eyes on Joanna in a car park – at the Barbican, oh occasion of blessed memory. The instant recognition of his mate in her had made even a multi-storey seem briefly like heaven. Not this one, though. Even having her beside him was not enough. He wanted to get out of here. Where the hell had he left his car?
‘So the Neary connection was purely coincidental?’ she said.
‘She was looking for a way to be near Webb so that she could get to know him in her Helen Woodman persona. She got the job at the Nearys’ pub because it was live-in, and of course, being a noticing sort, she got to know that Gorgeous George had a place in Hammersmith, and stored the information away. Later when she wanted to get near Neal, Gorgeous’s flat was just what she wanted.’
‘And Webb didn’t recognise her?’
‘Why should he? Why should any of them? They’d last seen her when she was twelve years old, and they hadn’t seen all that much of her even then. You don’t particularly notice other people’s children, not to recognise them twelve, thirteen years later.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘And as Gorgeous George said, it was clever makeup – theatrical makeup, designed to deceive.’
‘Yes. I suppose she must have been a clever actress, to take so many people in for so long.’
‘She lived her parts. All things to all men – what’s that saying?’
Out in the sunshine now, thank God, and the green verges of the M4, heading towards London, Chiswick, Joanna’s flat. He remembered her saying she’d once told a man she’d met in Wales that to find her place he should go straight down the M4 and turn left at the first lights.
‘Her father was mad about the theatre – that’s why his nickname was Larry, after Olivier. Being stationed at Shaftesbury Avenue put him in the heart of theatreland—’
‘Must have been heaven for him.’
‘And of course he shared his passion with his little girl. Took her to plays as soon as she was old enough to understand. Got to know all the stage door keepers, took her behind the scenes. She starred in all the school plays, and then went on to amateur dramatics. Acting was a way of life to her.’
‘Especially given all she had to hide.’
‘Yes.’ Shadows chased each other across green fields where cows and horses grazed. A pretty approach to London, he always thought: a nice first impression for the tourist.
‘It explains why there was the long gap before the killings started – school, and then VSO. And I suppose in Israel she heard the word revenge in many a conversation.’
‘It wouldn’t have been an impossible concept to her, by the time she got back.’
‘So then she got to know her victims socially, seduced them, and then murdered them? Reproducing the circumstances of her father’s death – suffocation, hanging, burning.’ He nodded, watching the traffic. ‘You were right about Neal’s death having the appearance of a ritual killing,’ she mused.
‘But how could Dick Neal not recognise her?’ she added after a long silence. ‘I mean, I can understand the others, but he’d virtually watched her grow up. She must have given herself away in a hundred ways in those three weeks of intimate contact.’
‘I think he did,’ Slider said. ‘I think he probably knew all along who she was.’
‘And still went to bed with her?’ Joanna sounded shocked.
‘Think of his life, what it had become,’ Slider said. ‘Think of what we know of his desperation and hurt. Maybe he didn’t know the very first time he went to bed with her – not for certain – but afterwards, once he did know, what was he to do? Turn from her in disgust? Denounce her? A lot of men commit incest, you know, and they aren’t all evil brutes. A lot of them do it because they love their daughters.’
‘Love,’ she said. It was so without inflection that he didn’t know if it was ironic, derisive or doubtful.
‘He loved her. He was lonely. And she was Marsha’s daughter. She looked a lot like Marsha.’
‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘all his women were tall redheads, weren’t they? He was searching for his lost love in all of them.’
‘That’s why Eleanor wore the red wig, I think. And why it worked.’
‘So he loved her, and she killed him. Like a lamb to the slaughter—’
‘He knew,’ Slider said, staring blankly ahead through the windscreen. ‘He knew that last night what was going to happen. Lister had warned him – told him about the others. He wasn’t stupid; and he of all people knew what she was capable of, how much she was hurt.’ She was Larry’s daughter. She was following in father’s footsteps, following the dear old dad. But which one to follow? That must have been something of a poser for her.
‘But surely—’
‘No. He said to Collins that last night, “I’ll never leave her as long as I live”. He knew it was coming. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. But he went willingly to his death. It must have beckoned to him like quiet sleep, after all he’d been through.’
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘Oh God, Bill, I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry?’ He was surprised.
‘For you. It’s been so awful for you. And I wasn’t here. Darling, it’s all over now.’
‘Not for her,’ he said.
The bath had to wait – his needs were too urgent. As soon as they got inside the door he took hold of her, and she put down her bags and received him into her arms, and then backed with him to the bedroom, understanding more than he was probably aware of. He made love with pent-up passion, and she with a tenderness so acute that afterwards when he lay panting against her like a spent rabbit, tears ran sideways out of her eye corners, and she let them, rather than sniff and let him know she was crying for him.
But then afterwards it was all right; afterwards he was just tired. She ran a bath and got in, and he sat on the floor beside her. Two tall gin and tonics sat in the soap dish, and the steam condensed prettily on the cold glass.
‘Well, anyway, it’s a good result, isn’t it? And you were right all along, and Head was wrong, and that’s something to celebrate,’ she said, soaping an arm.
‘Absolutely,’ he said, his eyes fixed on her. How comfortable this was. Just looking at her fed something in him. She looked tired, too, he thought. There was a greyness about her skin, and the lines at her eye corners seemed more marked. She was no mere girl, of course. A vast surge of tenderness for her passed through him from the head downwards, and his penis stirred slightly like someone half asleep who thinks th
ey’ve heard their name called. Not now, lad. Later. Plenty of time. He wasn’t going home tonight.
‘What would you like to do? Go out for a meal?’ he asked.
‘We’ll have to go out a bit, at least – there’s no food in the house,’ she said. ‘But we can get some stuff in and cook, if you’d prefer.’
‘Yes,’ he said, a nice idea blooming in his mind. How did it manage it, when he was so tired? Must be the gin. ‘How about we pop down to the shop on the corner and get the makings, and then I’ll cook you a huge pot of spaghetti bolognese.’
She smiled. Blackpool illuminations. ‘Terrific idea! And if we get one of their small French loaves, I can make garlic bread to go with it. And there’s that special bottle of chianti left from my Italy tour last year.’
‘You wouldn’t want to open that, would you?’
‘Why not? It’s a special occasion. You’ve solved your case, and you’re staying the night.’
Oh dear. He saw the thought come into her eyes at the words, and she saw him see it. Now they were both thinking about it, and it would have to be said, and maybe the evening would be spoiled.
‘Bill, you said when this case was over, you’d sort things out.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
She made a movement of irritation, not easy to do in a bath. ‘What does that mean, yes? Are you going to talk to Irene?’
‘Yes, I will, but the thing is – well, I don’t want to do it just now.’
An unlovely hardness came to the lines of her mouth. ‘And why not now? What’s the excuse this time?’
He was nettled. ‘It’s not an excuse, it’s a reason. Look, she’s doing this special thing at the moment – she’s involved with a gala charity performance at Eton, and she’s so happy about it all, I don’t want to spoil it for her. When it’s over, then I’ll talk to her. It’ll only be a few weeks.’
‘A gala charity performance,’ she said in a dead voice.
It sounded idiotic on the lips of an outsider, someone who didn’t know Irene. ‘Yes,’ he said defensively.
Death Watch (The Bill Slider Novels) Page 29