‘We’d kept in touch.’
‘I know. Cards. Christmas and birthday. But you can’t keep in touch without both of you sending cards. Therefore you’d know her address. Therefore, you could have produced her here, alive and well, if it was really necessary.’
She didn’t answer. I’d anticipated it, and she did it, snatched for her cigarettes, lit one, and drew in smoke as though it was her only friend in the whole world. She was playing for time.
‘May I have an answer, Bella?’
‘I wasn’t sure exactly where she was,’ she said, not much above a whisper. ‘She’d moved.’
‘From where to where?’
‘Does it matter?’ she demanded.
‘It matters.’
She glanced desperately at Jay, who seemed no longer ready to pounce to her defence. He stared back with what I supposed was agony for her situation. At last she spoke to Connaught, but her eyes were on the cigarette between her fingers. ‘I can’t answer that.’
‘Then I’ll help you. Was her most recent address in Pasadena?’
She whirled on Jay. ‘Damn you!’
Jay lifted his shoulder high, pouting.
‘Did he know?’ asked Connaught innocently.
‘No. I don’t know. How else...’
‘I’ve been in touch with the police in New Haven, Bella. There are more details available. Even a photograph of the woman found dead in your holiday place.’ He slid a hand inside his pocket, producing a glossy five by three. ‘It all came by Federal Express,’ he told her. ‘I have a copy of the full dossier, and in no time at all. Is this your sister, Bella?’
He held it out. She made no attempt to reach for it, merely stared at him, or just beyond his shoulder. ‘You knew my sister, Arnold Connaught. You can tell me.’
‘She was sixteen or seventeen when I knew her last, which was ten years ago. This woman appears to be close to forty.’
‘Too old, then.’
‘But you would know.’ He stood there, the photograph held out, reversed so that she could see it, slowly raising it to her eye-level. She turned her head away, but he simply waited, smiling, aware that she would have to look at it eventually, and ‘that the longer she hesitated the more she would be demonstrating her knowledge of what she would see.
Then slowly she forced herself to look, said, ‘Argh!’ in a sound of complete disgust, and turned her back to it.
Connaught stood there, still smiling, waiting.
‘Let me see it,’ I said, going to his side quickly, anything to break the taut silence. Without taking his eyes from her he handed it to me.
The picture showed a woman, sprawled across an expensive rug, one arm flung above her head and the other lying in front of her, one hip high, with the legs bent as though she was attempting to crawl away, and her face turned to stare up at the camera — to face her killer — as though in supplication.
She was a tatty blonde, the hair untidy and matted and darker, almost auburn, at the roots, her face aged and torn and raddled, possibly with horror but I guessed with drugs, as Jay had implied. It was impossible to guess what she had been like before, as the bone structure of her face was not visible, the flesh in folds and pouches, her mouth a rough and inaccurately scrawled red, her eyes black with smeared eye-shadow, her eyebrows plucked to extinction and painted in higher arches. Her neck was wrinkled, down to its disappearance into the neck of her jumper, filthy and tattered, her legs clad in torn jeans, one foot bare and one foot in a broken sandal. She was staring at me with wide, dead eyes.
And I was supposed to look like that! No — I was supposed to look like the young and beautiful girl she had been, I assured myself.
Connaught snatched it back. He was suddenly furious, went over to Bella and thrust it beneath her nose. ‘Tonia Felicity Fields!’ he shouted into her face. ‘They managed a trace. Tonia Felicity Fields, prostitute, address: the streets of Pasadena. And you kept in touch! Where did you address the cards to? Which gutter in which street? Did you send her money for her habits? A PO box? Was that it? Money to keep her a whole nation away from Roma Felucci...’
But by that time Jay had crossed the room, like a tiger leaping, had caught Connaught’s arm and whirled him round. ‘Leave her alone!’ And that millstone of a fist was raised high.
Connaught was very still, his eyes on Jay’s. Only one hand moved, a quick gesture to the man sitting on my bed. A restraining gesture. A bottom was lowered, a notebook was replaced on a knee, a note was noted. He had confidence in his inspector.
‘Don’t be stupid, Jay,’ said Connaught softly. ‘Assaulting an officer in the performance of his duty! How’ll they manage at the studio without both of you?’
Jay relaxed with a heavy sigh. His hand fell away and he stood back. Connaught flexed his arm and massaged his muscle.
‘Well, Bella?’
She turned. The incident had given her time to recover. She was calm and in control. ‘We kept in touch,’ she admitted softly. ‘She would phone me. I would send her money. A post office box, as you said.’
‘So it was she who told you the houses were coming down?’
‘No! That’s not so.’ She took a breath. ‘That’s not her. It just can’t be.’ She was jabbing a finger towards the photograph, as though trying to thrust it away.
‘It’s her. Fingerprints. They’d put her away a few times before, so they had them on file. Go on. You were saying?’
She shuddered. ‘It was I who told her. I’d had this phone call, you see. A man...’
‘Yes,’ he said impatiently, when she hesitated. ‘And?’
‘And nothing. I told her. I said I would make the trip. It was possible — we’d got a break in the scheduling… I said I’d come here, and… and… see.’
‘Because you expected at least one skeleton?’
She tried to laugh lightly, tried to act it. But it caught on something and came out as a gargle. ‘We… we suspected something like that at the time.’
‘At the time you left? Suspected?’
‘You know very well what it was like at that time, Arnold.’ She took a deep breath. Her brain was operating again, and this was to be a new approach, one of confidence and appeal, as to an old friend. ‘We had a good idea our father had been killed, and where else… where else could he have been hidden except under the floor of the house next door?’
‘So you did expect one skeleton to be turned up?’
‘Yes.’ It was terse.
‘Not two?’
‘No, not two.’
‘Then why did you involve Philipa Lowe in this, pretending she was your sister?’
‘I did not. You assumed.’ She raised her chin.
‘Now don’t try to be clever, Bella. You were expecting two skeletons, and we got two skeletons.’
‘It was not,’ she said with distant contempt, ‘until there were two skeletons that the… suggestion of Philipa arose.’
‘I see. And this was so that you could eventually claim to me that you’d used her only to be able to say, “Oh, I was so afraid you’d think it was Tonia.” Is that it?’
‘No.’
‘And yet you’d planned it ahead.’
‘That is not so.’
‘You recognized a similarity when you met her on the QE2.’
‘Well yes, if you like. I was struck by it.’
‘But with no intention of using it?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Because you knew that you could always, if pushed, produce the real and genuine Tonia?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even though Tonia was not, at this time, what one might call an arguable reproduction of the Tonia we all used to know?’
‘Are you trying to be funny, Mr Connaught?’ she demanded angrily.
‘By that — am I to take it — you’re telling me you were not aware of how much she’d changed?’
‘We hadn’t actually met.’ She was calm again, feeling she had got through the worst, ‘For years
.’
‘So you expected to be able to produce her if required as recognizably Tonia?’
‘Exactly. Why’re you picking at this?’
‘Well… she’d be difficult to produce if she was dead.’
‘How could I possibly have known —’
‘She was shot with your gun in your holiday villa at New Haven, just two days before you boarded the QE2. It’s logical to assume that with a crisis facing you, such as the possible uncovering of two bodies, you would send for her to meet you at New Haven, send her the money for the trip, then ask her to join you in a trip here, if only to offer a double resistance, and that you shot her —’
He was cut short by her bitter and dismissive bark of laughter. ‘Tcha! Why would I do that? Because she doesn’t look like the old Tonia? It’s fantastic. Ridiculous. Try again, Connaught.’
‘By all means. I’m suggesting she did travel east to New Haven, to meet you at the holiday villa, or whatever it is, and you realized that in the condition she was in, booze and drugs nearly destroying her, she’d be no good to you at all. In fact — a drag. She would crumble, would say anything. So she had to die.’
Jay bellowed, ‘Now just you cut that out! You’re not goin’ to say she —’
‘Shut up, Jay!’ she snapped. ‘Let the damn fool talk himself into trouble.’ Then she smiled at Connaught, a smile that ought to have buckled him to his knees. But it bounced off him.
‘She had to die, Bella, because she knew the truth as well as you did. You would have had to tell her, because it was too big to carry around yourself, on your own shoulders. Oh yes, I can see it was too big to mention to anybody, and you’d be afraid to confide in any other friend. But… your own sister… in the end you would have to tell her. She would have to be told, no getting away from it. When she was old enough to understand, she would have to know.’
I had the impression he was stringing this out, wanting to watch for any dawning knowledge in Bella’s eyes, any impact registered. There was shock, certainly.
‘Know what? Know what?’ Her voice was close to hysteria.
‘Bella!’ Now there was genuine sympathy in Connaught’s voice, that and something else, a quiet menace he was attempting to control. ‘We’ve finally managed to get a good identification of that second skeleton. The female one. We’re certain it’s that of your mother, Dulcie. Who went missing when you were only four.’
I held my breath. He was approaching what I knew to be quite horrible, and yet he was smiling softly, as though he enjoyed torturing her. Even the shorthand writer was suspended, his eyes on his inspector’s face. Jay was like a tense feral animal, caught in the moment before a pounce on its prey, and the only sound was Bella’s deep and throbbing intake of breath.
‘Only four!’ she whispered. There was no outcry of distress relating to her mother’s death. But to her, her mother had been dead twenty-five years, and time had eroded the distress of it, leaving only the memory.
‘At that time,’ went on Connaught steadily, ‘your father was involved in a complex emotional tangle. Your mother was about to run away with another man living in this town, Joey Payne. I think something went haywire in your father’s head. He strangled your mother, and buried her in the soil beneath the floor-boards of the house next door.’
‘What the hell!’ Jay breathed.
Bella raised her chin. It was not a time to fall back on Roma, but she couldn’t very well fall back on herself. Now, she hadn’t the strength.
‘I believe, Bella,’ said Connaught, not completely committing himself, ‘that you witnessed that burial.’
I watched her lips shaping the word, ‘No!’ But not a sound was made.
‘A little girl!’ said Jay, shocked. ‘You must be mad.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Connaught, ‘I feel I’m going mad, in this job.’ But he didn’t glance in Jay’s direction.
It was as Terry had suggested. The ending of it had to be terrible for Bella, who at last managed to expel the word, ‘No!’ In a bark of fury.
‘I believe you saw it,’ Connaught said. ‘You were possibly too young at that time to understand, to hate, to be anything but terrified, but at the age of sixteen you were given your mother’s ring. Yes, the one you’re wearing now.’ Because she’d reached across to it with her left hand. ‘You know, I can remember it. Rowley was showing it around in the pub, the ring he’d bought for Dulcie, and we all had to admire it and congratulate him, though we were all as jealous as hell. And later, of course, I could remember Dulcie wearing it. That very ring.’
His voice had become softly nostalgic; perhaps he wished to lighten the mood. He recalled to my mind the fact that he’d himself been one of Dulcie’s hangers-on. There was nothing left of that adoration but a calm and persistent voice, but now I understood that steely background tone. There was a bitter anger stirring inside him.
‘I think, at that time,’ he went on, when it became clear she was going to make no comment, ‘which would be at the age of sixteen or so, your hatred must have begun to grow. In the back of your mind the image of your mother persisted. And you’d loved your mother. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that ring’s grown into a symbol, almost religious, as a memory of her.’
With which she’d cut Jay’s face, and delighted in it!
‘So that,’ Connaught went on flatly, ‘when the trouble came, when your father Rowley Fields was seen as a villain throughout the town — and stood to lose his life — at that time your grandmother sent for you. There was a distressing scene between you. I went to see her, Bella, this afternoon. She told me. You left there, she said, just before you left the district altogether, genuinely hating your father, at last able to accept that hatred. Oh, I know you’d said before — you and Tonia — that you hated him, but that was different. The wrong word — too strong. It was more a distaste. Not a killing hatred. But now, that was what it became. All that emotional upset of the past years, which you’d probably never been able to straighten out in your mind, it all came together. So you went home and you killed him, probably with the spade you buried him with later, you and Tonia. Maybe even the same spade he’d used to bury your mother, lying there on the earth under the floor-boards.’
Bella had been silent a long while, looking distant, lost in shock, as his voice bored on into her brain. Now at last she reached out. ‘It’s not true.’ Such a weak voice it was, lacking in any feeling. Bella, this was, at last resorting to a genuine emotion all her own, despair and disgust and fury inside, and emerging as three simple toneless words.
‘Then how the hell did they come to be buried side by side, unless you’d seen Dulcie buried?’ Connaught shouted, suddenly, frighteningly.
At last, in that second, he was emotionally involved. Then it was gone, he sagged, and said: ‘Isabella June Messenger, I am charging you with the unlawful killing of your father, Rowland Fields, and with his unlawful burial. Do you wish to say anything? You are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so but whatever you say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence.’
Bella turned her back to him. We were into Rule 3.
Chapter 14
I hung about feeling useless, until the WPC Connaught had had waiting in his car was brought up to advise Bella what she would need. Jay walked around muttering to himself, uncertain and suspicious about British legal proceedings, and completely confused by the possibility that this could happen without the presence of a lawyer.
Connaught said nothing. This too was sound procedure. No relevant word would be spoken until she was officially under interrogation. Jay said something to him, and Connaught nodded his agreement. But Bella, who had heard, threw over her shoulder a curt, ‘I don’t want you, Jay. Stay out of this.’ And that was that. Jay, a born doer, was restless when he could do absolutely nothing to help.
I walked out of the room, leaving them to it, walked down the corridor, and knocked on the door of Oliver and Terry’s room. There was no immediate response. I
tapped again. Gently.
‘Who is it?’ Terry’s voice was close to the door, quiet.
‘It’s Phil. Open up, Terry.’
He did so, standing in a restricted opening at though guarding it. ‘Phillie? What on earth...’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It’s after eleven.’
He was in his pyjamas, with bare feet, no dressing-gown. I eased in, forcing him to step back.
‘Haven’t you gone to bed?’ he asked, when I’d have thought it was obvious.
I could see very little chance of sleep in the immediate future, and in fact I was never more awake. ‘Things have been happening, Terry. Bella’s been arrested for the murder of Rowley. Connaught came out with your own theory.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
We had been speaking quietly, and I could see beyond him that Oliver was tucked in his bed, awkwardly on his left arm, and fast asleep. I was feeling out the situation, being uneasy with what I proposed to do yet uncertain whether I could drag Terry away and leave Oliver alone.
‘I’ve got to go out,’ I said.
‘Out where, for heaven’s sake?’
‘To Waterford Farm. I must see Flora Porter again.’
‘It’s too late, Phillie. You can’t go alone… can’t it wait until the morning?’
I wasn’t sure that it would, being terribly afraid that it might be too late tomorrow. ‘No, it can’t. Terry, I wondered if you could leave him. Leave a note or something in case he wakes.’
‘To hell with that.’ Terry threw a glance towards Oliver’s bed. ‘It’ll keep.’
I bit my lip. It would take too long to explain that I wanted to check only one small detail with Flora, and that if my reasoning was correct she could be in danger until she’d passed it on. What I now wished to say to Terry demanded a louder and more forceful comment than I could risk. ‘All right,’ I whispered. ‘If that’s your attitude — I’ll go alone. But I didn’t want to...’
‘He’d kill me if I let you.’
But apparently our voices had become raised. Oliver stirred. ‘What is it?’ He lifted his head. ‘Phil? What’s going on?’
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