“Please. Please believe me Natalie. This is new to me. All of it. I swear to you that Ken and I do not have that kind of relationship.”
“You don’t?” Her questioning stare was confused, yet, when I was able to return her clear unblinking gaze, I hope she believed me.
“What makes it even more surprising is that Ken told me he was upset because he thought you were having an affair with a man called Rupert Pendry. If he’s not interested in you, why would he be jealous of this guy?”
“Rupert Pendry? Good God, he’s a private detective I’ve been employing to follow you.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you! To try and find out when you meet Kenneth. Dates, times, meeting places – and if you’ve got other boyfriends that Kenneth doesn’t know about. It’s pathetic really isn’t it? I wanted to spoil his relationship with you by making him think you were unfaithful.”
Followed. She’d had me followed. So that was the explanation for the character who I’d recently seen following me. I wasn’t imagining it.
And then I told her everything I knew about the murder of Miranda Prowse. When I told her that I suspected that Ken had killed Miranda, she looked up, a sudden realisation dawning in her eyes.
“It was after he came home after that week you were away that he changed,” she said thoughtfully. “There was something about him that was different – he became so cold and withdrawn. The night he returned he cried for hours, and I asked him what was wrong, he just said there was trouble at work, and he was dreading going back there because he was afraid he might be getting sacked, and he couldn’t keep on top of things, that Giles Mander, his colleague in the editorial department, didn’t like him, was always stirring up trouble for him. But I knew it was something worse than that. Something really bad. And another silly little thing that he was going on about. He’d lost his St Christopher medal, the one he always used to wear on a chain around his neck. His lucky St Christopher he always used to call it. He’d lost it in Cornwall.”
“Yes, I remember now. He was searching through all our luggage as if he was obsessed it was in amongst our clothes or something, he was really upset about it.”
“It was his grandfather’s. Sentimental attachment.”
I went on to tell her about my theory concerning Shelly Hart.
“Thursday evening,” she said. “He was drunk when I got home. Practically paralytic. He doesn’t normally drink.”
“No.”
“I have to go home,” she said at last. “This is it. I have to face this and deal with it once and for all. I can’t possibly stay with him now, or let him have anything to do with the children. I’m going right now, and I’d better take the children to my parents’ house and stay with them for the time being. Do you know, at the back of my mind, I knew there was something seriously wrong with his behaviour. That he nursed this burning anger about something. I thought it was all directed at me. Oh God help me,” she began to cry. “I just can’t believe this is happening. It seems so unreal, like a nightmare that never ends. And it never is going to end, is it?”
She absent-mindedly stirred her un-drunk coffee.
“Do the police know all the things you’ve told me?” she asked when she’d pulled herself together.
“Yes. But as far as I know they haven’t got any evidence.”
“Will they arrest him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if all this is guesswork. It just seems the most likely answer.”
She covered her face with her hands. “How can I possibly face him on my own? After what you’ve just told me? When I know he may have murdered two women!”
“I’ll come with you. I have to confront him too.”
We drove back to Wimbledon in grim silence. She cried for some of the time, then sat back in the seat and stared ahead, a look of blank misery in her eyes.
A young girl, whom I assumed to be Gillian, was in the hall when Natalie opened the front door.
“Where’s my husband?” asked Natalie.
“I’m sorry, I thought you knew,” the young girl said, looking from one to the other of us. “Mr Taylor said some emergency had cropped up and he had to leave at once. He asked me if I’d look after the children until you came home.”
* * * *
Ken knew that he was likely to be arrested, or at least taken in for questioning, so he’d run away. That seemed to clinch things for me finally. Perhaps he’d left some kind of incriminating evidence at either Miranda’s or Shelly’s murder scene that was enough for the police to charge him, and he knew it was only a question of time before they did.
I felt like the lowest form of traitor. Ken had been my closest friend, who’d helped me in so many ways. And yet I now had to face the fact that he had done two murders. Then I thought of Miranda Prowse, the girl that even now I still thought about, the woman who had slipped through my fingers, murdered for no good reason at all.
No. If Ken had killed Miranda, and then afterwards Shelly, I didn’t owe him any loyalty at all.
I was worn out, so tired I could hardly see. As I drove back home to Brookham, I realised there was nothing more I could do until I could think clearly. I needed to have a long rest before the police picked me up for questioning, as they inevitably would.
As I continued along the M20 I reasoned that, although nothing was definite, the likelihood was that this was the beginning of the end. Assuming that Ken was guilty, all the police needed was convincing evidence for his guilt of one of the murders, and then they could charge him.
It was night-time again. I yawned, longing to get back home and sleep, try and make sense of the day’s ghastly events, which even now I couldn’t fathom. The lights beside the road flashed back at me. Until Natalie had mentioned it, I’d completely forgotten about the St Christopher medal Ken had lost in Cornwall, and the way he’d gone on and on about it.
I arrived home feeling more tired than I’ve ever felt before in my life. Drew the car to a halt in the gravelled drive.
Then, suddenly I remembered something.
The time I’d phoned Ken when I’d been sitting on the roof of the Mansh. It seemed like a lifetime ago now, when I was in blissful ignorance of the situation I was in.
What had our conversation been about?
Jane Redfern.
About how I felt about her. It had been just after she’d phoned to tell me she wasn’t married and wanted to see me again, and I was excited, elated, longing to tell someone my good news. As far as I knew Ken didn’t know where she lived. But I couldn’t know that for sure.
My heartbeat ratcheted up several notches as I found Jane’s number in my contact list and pressed CONNECT.
“Hello?”
Thank God, I breathed deeply in relief.
“Jane–”
“Jack? I told you not to call me.”
“Jane, I think you’re in danger.”
I heard someone talking in the background.
“What do you mean, in danger?”
“It’s Ken,”
“Yes, what the hell is he doing here? Your friend has turned up out of the blue and I haven’t got a clue what he wants. What right did you have to give him my address?”
“Be careful – Jane, he’s–”
“NO! GET OFF ME!”
When I heard her scream it was the most terrifying sound in the world.
Disconnecting the call I pressed three nines.
But before I could thumb CONNECT the car door swung open beside me and two phut phut sounds erupted behind my ear. The windscreen shattered as the phone was knocked out of my hands.
“Hello Jack.”
I turned to see the pistol’s long silencer levelled at my head.
“It’s been a long time.”
As I recognised Edward Van Meer’s face, I felt a cloth thrust underneath my nose and was aware of a strong overpowering smell.
Chapter 17
EDWARD VAN MEER
“Ever wondered what it fee
ls like to be buried alive?”
I woke up to find myself lying on my back. I tried to move, but I was fastened to the ground, my hands firmly held behind my back. Beneath me, I felt the sharp contours of stones and bricks digging into my flesh. Van Meer’s face was directly above my own: short silver hair, neatly combed and parted, thin lips, frameless glasses, the pale pale skin.
Again I tried to get up, to move my head, but something was tethering me tight to the ground. I recognised the surroundings: my back yard, my partly completed extension. I was lying on top of the hardcore that had been prepared for the concrete.
“I’ve made a wooden box to go around your body – a bit like a coffin without a lid,” he explained. “I found the concrete mixer here, you’ve got plenty of sand, and I’ve brought some quick-drying cement. You can’t move – I’ve tied you down firmly to the ground. I’m going to mix up some concrete and pour it in on top of you. I guess it’ll take about a couple of hours before it starts to get solid. It’s going to cover you completely. I’ll give you a straw to breathe through. But this is the clever part: you’ll be able to breathe through the straw for a short time, but as the concrete dries it’s going to expand. As it expands, I estimate that it’ll crush the straw, so that only then will you suffocate. You’ll stay alive for long enough to understand what’s happening, to really and truly panic and know that nothing on earth can save you.”
“Why do you hate me so much?”
“Because you took away my freedom Jack. You stopped me living my life.”
“No. The police were already on to you. I had nothing to do with them tracking you down.”
“Oh but you did, Jack. They never gave you the credit, but if you hadn’t told them about Ann and Jackie Aggrette they’d never have caught me. Everyone hushed it up afterwards, they rubbished your reputation, unfairly in my view, but it was your ideas that pointed them in my direction. It was Harcourt you told, wasn’t it? He took the credit for himself, denying you’d tipped him off in the first place. Had it not been for you tracing the Aggrettes I might still be out there, enjoying myself in the world.”
Ann and Jackie Aggrette. The women he’d killed seconds before I’d arrived at their flat. I’d phoned Harcourt before entering the building, but he hadn’t been there, so I’d left a message. He’d always denied receiving it, telling everyone they’d traced Van Meer’s latest victims independently, a day later, but that wasn’t true. They’d never have caught him, had it not been for my phone message. Not that it mattered now, but could it possibly be true, that the police had, in fact, made use of the lead I gave them? Some mix-up meaning that they didn’t act on my information for a day, pretending they knew about it all along, so that they could take the credit and destroy my own reputation? Sly treacherous Harcourt had always hated me, never given me an inch. It was an appropriate kind of revenge for me showing him up by catching on to a lead which the police had missed. Typical that I should find out now, when it was too late to matter.
Van Meer walked away and out of the corner of my eye I could see him stripping off his jacket. He switched on the mixer, and the steady rumble-roll of the motor began. Then, he poured a bucket of water into the mixer’s drum, and tipped in a bag of cement – I could tell by the smell in the air, the musty choking dusty aroma. Finally he slit open a bag of ballast – a mixture of sand and pebbles – and poured that into the revolving drum, and shortly I heard the slurp-slop slurp-slop as the mixture swished around the metal box, spattering droplets out across the floor. Then he wheeled the mixer across to near where I was and tipped it up, sluicing the wet grey mixture on top of me.
I shivered as I felt the freezing cold of the slurry seep into my clothes, ooze out along my skin until it was halfway up my legs. When the cement mixer was empty he wheeled it away and repeated the process once more.
Ciment fondu: quick-setting cement, otherwise known as aluminous cement. I’d used it to repair a ceramic underground drainpipe once, and I remembered that it began to harden within half an hour, was pretty firm by an hour. By three hours it was rock solid, equivalent to the drying effects of three days of ordinary Portland cement.
After the third drum full of concrete, the wet hardness had completely covered most of my body. I could just about see the top of my chest. It was around my face, up to my jaw, just beginning to seep closer to my eye sockets.
The feeling of being entombed was more terrifying than anything I could ever remember. I panicked but I couldn’t move, and I knew that the feeling of stiffness that was all around me would very soon become tighter, like an all-enclosing vice.
Van Meer leaned across me, smiling, his eyes alive with an evil joy. He pushed a straw into my mouth. I gripped it between my teeth, my lips trembling so much with terror I almost bit the end off.
“I’m going to sit here and watch you die,” he said slowly. “You’ll panic. You’ll begin to hyperventilate, your lungs will practically burst. And you’ll feel yourself locked up . Squeezed into your own living grave.”
The next two mixer fulls. After the first, I closed my eyes tight, the heavy cold slurry pressing down hard, rising higher and higher. Gripping the straw in my mouth, I prayed for a few more seconds of life, for the straw to hold firm as the concrete covered my face. As it covered my ears, the tiny sounds I took for granted disappeared and everything was horrendously, awfully, silent. I felt my blood pounding in my veins as the terror mounted. I kept my lips firmly closed as it spread across them, felt it creep up and over my nose.
Time stopped for me. I prefer not to remember those moments of sheer dread and panic that I never thought would end. I may have fainted at that point, I don’t know. All I do know is that the next thing I knew was feeling a slight pressure above my forehead, a scratching. The feeling of something scratching and scraping, then the unbelievable sensation of the weight coming away from my flesh, my nose, my eyes. My face was being sluiced with water, the semi-hard concrete being wiped away from my skin.
“It’s okay Jack, you’re safe.”
Was I dead? Was I dreaming?
It was Ken’s voice.
Then I was able to open my eyes. Felt the heavy wetness being pulled from my chest, my legs.
Finally, I felt a sawing action. My head could move, lift from the ground, then, with a tremendous effort, I managed to raise my body.
Edward Van Meer was on the ground beside me, his head twisted at an impossible angle, his features nothing but a mass of bloody pulp.
Ken helped me to sit up.
“All the time you were in London he must have been hiding here, in your house,” Ken said. “My God, what would have happened if I hadn’t got here in time?”
Ken? Why was he here? He’d killed Miranda, Shelly and Jane.
Yet he’d just saved my life.
“The police came to our house, but I pretended to be out. Then I slipped away out of the back door, later.” Ken said, using a trowel to clear the rest of the concrete from my legs and feet. “I abandoned the car in London, withdrew all the cash I could so I don’t have to use credit cards. Thank heavens I made it. You gave me a key, do you remember Jack? You said if you’re ever passing just drop in. I rang the bell, there was no reply but your car was here, so I knew you were in. This bastard,” he indicated the dead man on the ground, “charged towards me when I came through here and found that coffin thing – I knew it was Van Meer from the newspaper photographs, I knew he hated you, and it didn’t take too much imagination to realise what he’d done. He was heading for me with a knife in his hand. I managed to grab the sledge hammer. The first swing knocked him against the wall. The second, I aimed straight at his head. There was a frightful splintering noise, and he sank to the ground. I think I’ve smashed his skull.”
We looked at the ruined head of the man who’d blighted my life for the last two years. I could just make out an eye amongst the blood, the smashed lens of his spectacles.
The front door was open, and I recognised the car, a Vauxhall Cors
a, with the number plate I remembered. “That’s Jane’s car,” I said to him. “Where is she?”
“Don’t you worry about that.”
“Tell me!” I leapt for him, grabbing him by the throat.
We fought for a while, and he lashed out at me, knocking me back against the wall. As I moved closer I stopped when I saw the gun in his hand: the same one that Van Meer had used to threaten me with.
Chapter 18
NO WAY BACK
“Right, Jack, let’s calm down.” Ken said, panting. “You’ve got to have a shower, get the rest of that muck off you, then we’d better be off.”
“Tell me about Jane.”
He sighed. “You told me how you felt about her, didn’t you? When you came to see me the other day I grabbed your phone when you were out of the room. I scrolled through your texts and she’d texted you her address, and I just memorised it. When I ran away from Wimbledon, I took a cab to her flat. I bluffed my way inside – when I said my name she knew who I was because you’d mentioned me to her. She seemed to believe that you’d sent me, that I had an important message to give her. Poor cow still had feelings for you, I think. She was standing quite close to the open window, and as you may remember she’s five floors up. We struggled for quite a bit, but one of my punches knocked her senseless for long enough for me to push her onto the window ledge. She was groggy from my blow, even so, the hardest part was swinging her body up and out, but I managed it. Doubt if she was even aware of what was happening in the seconds before she hit the ground. It would have been quick, Jack, I promise you that. Afterwards I just got out as quickly as I could, before anyone saw me. Her car keys were on the table, so I took her Vauxhall. I had to get here as quickly as possible, before the police caught up with me. But there’s no time to talk now, Jack, we’ve got to get away.”
Rock'n'Roll Suicide (Jack Lockwood Mystery Series Book 1) Page 28