Night Fall

by Frank Smith

  He was right. Amanda did look grim when Paget tapped on the door and entered her office. She waved him to a seat, then sat looking at him across the desk for a full half minute before she spoke.

  ‘I received a call from Mr Brock following the press conference last night,’ she said abruptly. ‘To say that he was less than pleased would be an understatement, in fact he called it a public relations disaster. He told me that neither he, nor the assistant chief constable, nor the chief constable are happy with the lack of progress on these serial killings, and then went on to say he attributes that to a lack of cooperation between you and me.’

  Amanda paused, eyes narrowed as if searching for something. ‘I don’t know where he’s getting his information from,’ she continued, ‘but he went on to say there have been rumours – or as he put it disturbing rumours – that you and I are not working well together because of something in our past relationship in the Met, and because you resent being passed over by me when I was given this job. He went on to suggest that you may have been dragging your feet in this investigation because of that resentment, and said that if we can’t resolve our differences and work together to clear up this case, then perhaps one or both of us should consider a transfer to what he called a “more productive environment”.’

  Paget eyed Amanda levelly. ‘Were you given an opportunity to reply?’ he asked.

  Amanda looked up at the ceiling and let out a long breath. ‘I was,’ she said, ‘and I tried to be diplomatic, but I’m afraid my tongue got the better of me. I suggested that if he had read my daily progress reports more carefully, he would see that we have followed every possible lead, but until we can establish a connection between the victims and come up with a motive, or find some physical evidence to work with, our hands are tied. In retrospect, I should have shut up then, but the man’s whole attitude annoyed me, so I went on to tell him I would be more than happy to listen to any suggestions he might have regarding what we could have done differently, and I asked him to point out exactly what we’ve missed. I also told him I had every confidence in your work; that you’ve given me your full cooperation on every level and your record should speak for itself.’

  The corners of her mouth twitched in what might have been a wry grin if the muscles hadn’t been quite so taut. ‘I’m afraid that little speech didn’t go over very well,’ she said. ‘Hardly surprising, I suppose, considering his background. The man hasn’t got a clue about on-the-job policing. I like to know the backgrounds of people I’m dealing with, so I made it my business to learn about Detective Chief Superintendent Brock’s background, and, as I’m sure you know, he came up through the admin side of the service, and he’s never done a day on the front line in his life.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ she continued with something like a sigh of resignation, ‘he is still my boss, and he reminded me that I was very much on trial here and told me not to be impertinent. Then he switched to what he called “these rumours about the bad blood between the two of you”, and demanded to know what that was all about.’

  Amanda’s eyes locked with Paget’s own. ‘So I told him, yes, there had been a bit of friction between families years ago, but you and I had resolved our differences and it was no longer an issue.’ Amanda stopped speaking, but her gaze never wavered. ‘But that’s not true, is it, Neil?’ she said softly. ‘We haven’t resolved our differences, at least with regard to Matthew, have we?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid we haven’t, Amanda, and to be honest, I don’t know if we ever will. I’ll continue to do my job, but every time I see you I think of Matthew and the way he died, and what that did to Jill. That was cruel, Amanda, and I can’t get past that.’

  ‘I understand that,’ she said quietly, ‘and I know I can’t expect you to believe me, but I had to make a choice, Neil, and I did the best I could under the circumstances . . .’ She broke off and made a gesture of complete helplessness, then tilted her head back and covered her face with her hands.

  ‘God! I hate this!’ she said fiercely. ‘I’m so sick and tired of keeping silent; tired of being hated by the people I loved; tired of living this lie. You hate me because of what you think I did to Jill, and I don’t blame you for that, but I went through hell trying to protect Jill, because I knew what it would do to her if she knew the truth. Jill wasn’t just my best friend, Neil, she was more than that. There was a special bond between us from the very first day we met, and the last thing I wanted to do was hurt her. I grew up in foster homes, Neil. I never knew my mother and father. I had no relatives. Nobody cared about me but Jill . . .’ Amanda swallowed hard. She was clearly fighting back tears, but she forced herself to go on. ‘We were just kids, thirteen years old, but Jill took me under her wing, and for the first time in my life I had a friend. She was my lifeline. I loved her and I would never knowingly do anything to hurt her.’

  ‘Then why . . .?’ Paget began, but Amanda carried on as if he hadn’t spoken.

  ‘Jill was a wonderful friend,’ she said, ‘though God knows why I’m telling you that, Neil. We both loved her in our own way and I know she loved both of us. But if there was one person in Jill’s life who was just that little bit extra special, it was her brother Matthew. The sun rose and set on Matthew, the big, friendly, loveable bear, the man I married, and the man who killed himself supposedly because of what I’d done.’

  ‘Supposedly, Amanda . . .?’ Paget’s withering look said more than words, but Amanda was on her feet now and speaking again. ‘I had hoped that enough time had gone by that you and I would be able to put the past behind us,’ she said, ‘but clearly I was wrong, and I can’t go on like this. So I’m going to tell you the truth and you can believe me or not. Please lock the door.’

  ‘Lock the door?’ Paget echoed. He shot a puzzled look at Amanda. ‘It’s Sunday morning. There’s no one else up here.’

  ‘Humour me,’ Amanda said tersely. She stood waiting.

  Baffled by her strange request, but curious, he got to his feet and turned the key in the lock, then stood with his back to the door and folded his arms. ‘All right,’ he said coldly, ‘the door’s locked. Now what?’

  Amanda took off her jacket and draped it over the back of her chair, then began to unbutton her blouse.

  Downstairs in the incident room Tregalles picked one of the cards at random and looked at it. ‘Mrs Agnes Breckenridge, The Cedars, 12 Littlewood Lane,’ he said. ‘Claims to have sighted our man down by the sports grounds yesterday afternoon. Saw the picture on TV last night, but didn’t report it till this morning, because she thought there would be nobody here that late at night.’ He groaned as he waved it at Ormside. ‘You know this is going to be a waste of time, Len. Haven’t you got anything better than this?’

  ‘How do you know which one will be better than another?’ Ormside countered. ‘You know as well as I do that they’ve all got to be checked out, regardless of where they come from or who reports them.’ He sat back in his chair and looked at his colleague through narrowed eyes. ‘So what’s your problem, Tregalles?’ he asked. ‘It’s not just this, is it? You’ve been out of sorts for days.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Tregalles said irritably. ‘It’s just that . . . it’s like we’re working blind. I mean where the hell is Paget these days? I know it’s Sunday, but normally he’d be down here in the thick of things, and out there talking to some of these people himself. It’s not been the same since she came,’ he added darkly. ‘It’s almost as if he’s left us to go it alone.’

  ‘I should have taped that,’ Ormside growled. ‘You should listen to yourself, Tregalles. I never took you for a whinger, but that’s what you sounded like just now. You’ve had it too soft all these years with Paget leading the way. He’s got his work cut out bringing the new super up to speed, and doing his own job as well, so perhaps he thinks it’s time you flew on your own.’

  ‘I wasn’t whinging!’ Tregalles said heatedly. ‘I was just saying, that’s all. It doesn’t seem right for him not to b
e down here the way he used to be. You know how it was, Len. We were partners. We worked like that for years.’

  ‘Well, things change, so get used to it, Tregalles. And they’re liable to change a lot more before we’re done. Now, are you going out to see Agnes Breckenridge or not?’

  TWENTY-ONE

  Standing with his back to the locked door, watching Amanda take off her clothes, he didn’t know what to expect . . . until she removed her blouse and bra and stood there, naked to the waist.

  ‘This,’ she said quietly, ‘is what Matthew, that great big loveable bear, did to me, Neil. So take a good look and remember it while I tell you what happened and why I did what I did.’

  The scarred tissue covered almost half of her upper body, beginning at the shoulder and ending just above the waist. The left breast was misshapen, and there were scars, faded but still ugly. He found it very hard to look at; even harder to look away.

  ‘That is what a saucepan full of boiling soup will do to you,’ Amanda continued as she put her bra and the rest of her clothes on again. He could see that the left side of the bra contained some padding and a moulded cup to cover the misshapen breast. ‘Not very nice to look at, is it? And it wasn’t very nice when it happened, believe me. Sorry if that was over-dramatic, but I felt I had to make sure I had your full attention, so please sit down and let’s get this out of the way once and for all . . . if you’re willing to listen?’

  ‘You’re saying Matthew did that to you? Deliberately?’ he said as he moved to his seat and sat down.

  ‘That and more. Much more. Now, tell me honestly, Neil: how do you think Jill would have reacted if I’d tried to tell her that Matthew, the brother she adored, was not only an alcoholic but a control freak, who systematically abused me, and finally did this to me?’

  ‘She wouldn’t have believed you,’ he said. ‘And neither would I without proof.’

  ‘Exactly. And if I had given her proof, you know as well as I do what that would have done to her. She would have been devastated. As I said, I loved Jill dearly, but she had a blind spot when it came to Matthew. He could do no wrong in her eyes.’

  ‘I’ll concede that Matthew had his faults,’ Paget said, ‘and I know he used his charm and good nature to gloss over the fact that he’d never quite grown up. In and out of university; changing courses; in and out of jobs; and you’re right, Jill thought the world of him. But as for being an alcoholic, it was only after you left him that he began to drink heavily – and it was drink that led to his death in the end. As for the rest, in all the years I knew Matthew, he was always pleasant and easy-going to a fault.’

  ‘That was the problem,’ Amanda said. ‘Everyone who knew Matthew would tell you the same thing, so I don’t blame you for doubting me. The thing is, are you willing to listen to what I have to say before you judge me?’

  The scars she had shown him were real. He couldn’t deny that. He nodded slowly and said, ‘Go ahead, then, I’m listening.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Amanda drew a deep breath. ‘Then the first thing I have to tell you is that no one knew, except perhaps for a few bartenders, that Matthew was an alcoholic, and had been for a long time before I married him. I know you’ll find that hard to believe, but don’t judge until I’m finished. Matthew was very good at concealing his addiction to alcohol. He could be completely drunk, yet appear to be normal. In fact he was so good at concealing it that we’d been married for several months before I realized there was something wrong.

  ‘Even then, I made excuses for him, because he always seemed to be trying so hard, yet things never seemed to turn out right for him. I felt sorry for him. We all did, if you remember. Then there were the “migraines”. Remember them, Neil? It took me months to realize they were hangovers, but he was clever enough to make sure that no one else, especially you and Jill, ever saw that side of him.

  ‘And that side of him was pretty dark. We would go on for days leading a normal, happy life and everything would be fine. Then, suddenly, I would come home to find him in a foul mood, and nothing I could do or say would be right.’

  Amanda went on to say that the first real argument they’d had was over her name. She’d kept her own name when she married Matthew, and he’d made no objection to it then, but suddenly he wanted to know why she wouldn’t take his name. ‘He wanted to know if I was ashamed of his name, and if I’d kept it because I didn’t want the men I worked with to know I was married. It was so bizarre; I didn’t take him seriously, but when I tried to make light of it, he became very angry and stormed out of the house.

  ‘He came back around midnight. I’d gone to bed, still baffled by his strange behaviour, so I was still awake. He came in and went down on his knees beside the bed and begged me to forgive him. Over and over again he said he was sorry, he didn’t know what had got into him, and he promised it would never happen again.

  ‘But it did happen again,’ Amanda said tonelessly. ‘Time and time again. Everything would be fine for several days, sometimes a week or more, then suddenly it would change, and I never knew what to expect when I got home.’ She went on to say that the next flare-up was over the time she got home from work. Why couldn’t she be home at the same time every evening like other people? Did she think more of her job than she did of him?

  ‘It finally dawned on me that what was really bugging him was the fact that I had a career and he didn’t, and things became even worse when I became a sergeant. He kept hinting that my promotion must be due to the fact that I was having an affair with someone at the office, and that was why I’d been coming home late some evenings.’ Her voice turned brittle. ‘And, in case you’re wondering, Neil, I wasn’t. I earned my stripes the hard way.

  ‘I tried,’ she continued, ‘I really did try to understand what was going on in Matthew’s head, but it didn’t seem to matter what I said or did, it was wrong, and it was driving me mad. I was losing sleep, I was finding it hard to concentrate at work. I had to talk to someone, and who should know Matthew better than Jill? I even wondered if he’d confided in her, and maybe she would be willing to help us sort things out. I knew how sensitive she was when it came to even the slightest criticism of Matthew, so I tried very hard to be careful.’

  Amanda brushed aside a stray wisp of hair; her eyes clouded, and she looked beyond Paget as if reliving a painful memory. ‘But when I told Jill that things weren’t going as smoothly in our marriage as I thought they should, hoping for her to respond in a way that would encourage me to tell her at least a little of what was happening, she laughed at me and told me that all married couples have some adjustments to make. She left me with the impression that she thought I was being unreasonable, because Matthew had always been so easy to get along with. I knew then that if I pushed it, there was a very good chance that it could affect our friendship, so I dropped it. And that,’ she concluded, ‘was when I finally had to admit to myself that no matter how much I loved him, Matthew was never going to change, and things could only get worse. So I stopped acting like a love-sick girl and started acting like a policewoman, and began to record everything, using a pen recorder I “borrowed” from work.’

  Amanda reached down and unlocked the middle drawer of her desk. She took out an ordinary looking pen and a memory stick and set them on the pad in front of her. ‘I still have it,’ she said. ‘Technically, legally, I suppose it’s stolen property; it belongs to the Met, and I took it without permission, but I knew no one would believe me without hard evidence, because Matthew was so very, very good at switching roles and he could be so very charming with everyone he met.’

  Her eyes shifted once again to a point beyond him, brow furrowed in concentration. ‘I couldn’t leave the house without Matthew demanding to know where I was going,’ she continued. ‘He was drinking heavily, and it was becoming harder for him to hide it, so we stopped going out and mixing socially. We were always making excuses; you must remember that, Neil? The times you or Jill would phone to ask us to join you, but we’d be busy
or working, or not feeling too well?’

  He did remember. There had been a period when he and Jill and Matthew and Amanda had spent a lot of time together. Dinners, barbecues, parties, shows when they could afford them, and they’d had a lot of good times. But Amanda was right. He and Jill had put it down to the fact that with three out of the four of them moving up the ladder, working shifts and odd hours, it was becoming harder to arrange something where all four could get together. That was the way it was. Part of the job; part of the price you paid.

  Amanda was speaking again. ‘I know it must sound foolish, even stupid to you now, but even then, I wanted to save Matthew from himself. I kept remembering the man I’d married, and more than anything I wanted to get back to the way things had been then. If only I could get Matthew to stop drinking, everything would be all right and nobody would have to know. Especially Jill.’

  Amanda grimaced. ‘In hindsight, I probably made matters worse by thinking I could change things, because after every outburst, Matthew would say he was sorry and plead with me to forgive him, and he would sound so damned sincere that I couldn’t bring myself to give up on him. At one point I really thought I’d made a breakthrough when he said he would join AA. I was so happy when he did that. He went off religiously on meeting nights, but I found out later that he wasn’t going. Even then, idiot that I was, I still thought I could save him.’

  Tears glistened in Amanda’s eyes. ‘Until he did this to me,’ she whispered. Her hand went to her chest. ‘I came in late one night. I knew he would probably start in on me again, but I took off my coat and jacket and went to find him. He was in the kitchen, standing at the stove, heating up some soup. It seemed an odd thing for him to be doing, because he didn’t care for soup, but I kissed him on the cheek, then saw that the soup was bubbling like mad, so I said something like, “You should never boil soup like that, love”, and started to walk away. But he called to me in quite a gentle voice, so I turned round to face him.’