Worse than Death (Anna Southwood Mysteries)

by Jean Bedford

  “Confess?” I glanced wildly at Graham, but he looked grave and wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “I made up the last phone calls,” the Colonel said in a grim voice, looking straight ahead. “Bit bored, I suppose. Not enough to do. Liked you youngsters, liked the interest you took the first time. Deeply sorry.” He’d gone a dark red in the face.

  I stared. “Oh dear,” I said weakly. I went on in a tentative voice: “Look, you don’t have to have an excuse like that to call in, you know. You’re always welcome for a coffee.” I had an inspiration. “And now that Graham’s rehearsing, I’m sure there’d be the odd thing to do around here, if you were interested. Just going through the mail, that sort of thing.”

  He was embarrassing in his thanks, and we arranged that he’d come in a couple of mornings a week and see what there was to do. I sighed inwardly at the thought, but I was sorry for the lonely old thing. Perhaps I could put him onto investigating electronic surveillance equipment — we still had the brochures somewhere, and it would get him out a bit.

  He left, straightening his shoulders in true military fashion, and we collapsed on the couch, laughing. It was a great relief after the tension of the last day or so.

  *

  Later in the afternoon we sat in my garden — Lorna and Graham and I — and put together the rest of it. Glenn had rung and said the body had definitely been identified as Kylie Johnson and her parents were flying up.

  The forensic experts could no longer tell, of course, if she’d been raped or not, but she’d probably died of strangulation — small bones in the neck were cracked. They thought it was likely the broken jaw had been inflicted after death. They weren’t sure when the other head injuries had occurred.

  “I guess she just went a bit too far with her teasing,” Lorna said. “And he couldn’t stop. He probably didn’t mean to kill her.”

  I looked at her with surprise.

  “Making excuses for Rex? That’s not like you.”

  “Jesus!” Graham said. “How old was she? Twelve?”

  “He’d been doing it to Beth practically since she was a baby,” I said. We were all silent for a moment, absorbing the reality of it.

  “She must have arranged to meet him,” Lorna said. “Where? In one of the mobile homes?”

  “I think so,” I said. “But they must have organised it before that last dinner. He must have told her to copy her dad’s keys. He was on night shift, she could have done it during the day when he was asleep and Carol was at work.”

  “Why’d she agree?” Graham said. “She must have known what she was in for.”

  “I don’t think so.” Lorna was thoughtful. “She was probably just flattered and excited that he was interested. She was a flirt — she probably didn’t realise just how far it would go.”

  “No.” I could imagine it — the promise of a picnic perhaps, champagne and hamburgers, and a romantic illicit night in one of the little houses. Even her mother thought she was a bit of a tearaway — she could have seen it as an act of rebellion. Perhaps she’d already had a taste of sex, but at the last moment she was frightened — Rex was so much older, and stronger.

  “I think you’re right,” I said to Lorna. “I don’t think he did mean to kill her. He thought they’d get away with her excuse of being at Beth’s — Carol wouldn’t have checked up normally, not if she’d come home at the right time next day. And he did look kind of… sad, at the crypt. He put flowers there for her every week.”

  *

  Lorna and Graham left and I went upstairs. My flat felt empty, sterile and bleak, and so did my life. I put Chopin on the stereo, hoping his liquid music would warm up the rooms, then got out a new bottle of wine. I’d just taken the first sip when the phone rang.

  “Anna, it’s Paul Whitehouse. I owe you an apology, I guess, for not taking you seriously. And also thanks.”

  “That’s all right,” I said weakly. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Well… at least let me buy you dinner…”

  “Okay. When?” I lifted the glass to myself in the mirror, waiting tensely.

  “Are you free tonight?”

  I could have played hard to get, but I didn’t. I put the phone down and grinned at my reflected image.

  After trying on several of my new outfits I settled for an old pair of black silk pants and last year’s long-sleeved green T-shirt. I corked the bottle of Riesling and opened one of Bollinger. I looked at my cigarettes, then threw them and the lighter into the bin. Paul didn’t smoke. I took a pink-stemmed flute of champagne out to the balcony and sat in the dusk watching the sky darken, and the water turn to glittering corrugated slate while I waited for Paul.

  A mellow path formed across the sea from the rising full moon, seeming to pass under the bridge with its twinkling beacons. The lights of small boats winked on as they came and went in the busy harbour, weaving through the ferries. I thought of the hundreds of lives out there on the water, men coming home to wives, couples heading for a romantic evening, women, children, old men, all absorbed in their own unknowable lives, and it came to me suddenly, like a memory, a comfortable anti-climax, what the Channing case had really been about.

  We’d been so caught up in the public face of things — the conspiracies, the power-mongering, drugs, bent police, the vice and corruption — and none of these was the real story. That had been private, domestic, personal. It was really very simple — two people who’d once loved each other and then hated. A man who couldn’t control his twisted desire for his own sort of love, and a mother who would have given up her own life to protect her young.

  I thought of Leonie’s hostility that morning, and then I thought of Paul. I didn’t know if it would go anywhere, but I was going to give it my best shot. I was going to go on with the agency, too, I realised, and no more pretending that it was a game, or setting up Graham as the front man. I’d been knocked about a bit emotionally by this case, but I’d also learned something about myself, and my insatiable curiosity about others had been satisfied to some extent. I didn’t even care if Rex was in some bar in Hong Kong, toasting the memory of Jack Robinson, or Jack Rowley, or whatever his name was. I was even prepared to remember the negative attraction I’d felt for him. People were all complicated, even the worst of them.

  The night was turning cold and I went inside, calling to Toby.

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