by Ann Troup
After slowly ascertaining that Matt Bastin was a lonely obsessive and that Sophie Hedley was a trouble magnet, she took the chair that Matt had offered and listened to Sophie’s story about the events of the previous day. As the girl talked – her speech hampered by the swollen, busted nose – all the pieces began to drop into place for Alice. By being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sophie had managed to pull all the threads together – placing Sam Campion firmly in the centre of a series of crimes that went way beyond arson. This was big, very big, and Alice finally allowed herself the smug smile she tried so hard to keep off her face.
The girl seemed horrified to see it, and despite knowing Alice’s status had no qualms about launching a verbal attack on her. Alice found it hard not to burst into laughter as the indignant girl uttered her incoherent tirade.
‘Dobe you sid dere fuckid smilib! My fred died ib dat fire!’
‘Whoa there miss. Slow down – neither of the bodies brought out of that house were Edie Byrne. We’ve identified both victims. I have no idea what happened to your friend and can only assume that she got out some other way, but she didn’t die in that house, I can assure you of that.’
Alice’s words seemed to rob the wind from Sophie’s sails and cause her to visibly deflate. Much as she had been indignant at the attack, Alice couldn’t help but feel for the kid, she had been through one hell of an ordeal in the last twenty-four hours and Alice hadn’t been exactly the soul of sympathy. ‘I’m sorry Sophie, I didn’t deliver that as a sensitively as I could have. Wherever Edie is, I’m sure we’ll find her.’
‘Youb bedder hab!’ Sophie said grudgingly as she turned her face away and looked at Matt. ‘Dey neeb to fide her Mad’ she pleaded.
‘They will Sophie, they will.’ He smiled at Sophie then turned to Alice. ‘What about the third victim?’
‘We’re awaiting news on that I’m afraid.’ Alice said, hedging her reply. The information blatantly displayed on Matt’s wall hadn’t been lost on her and she knew exactly what he was thinking. To her surprise he passed her a small floral notebook.
‘Read that, then tell me you don’t know who you found in that house.’
While she read, drinking in every word of what was essentially Lena Campion’s confession, he busied himself making coffee. The whole time she was reading Sophie’s eyes never left her face. If what she was reading hadn’t been so shocking, she might have felt unsettled by the attention, but Lena’s diary was a compelling read indeed.
When she had finished absorbing and making sense of the contents, she closed the little book and held it up. ‘Where did you get this?’
Matt handed her a cup of coffee and exchanged a conspiratorial look with the girl. ‘Let’s just say it fell into my hands by accident.’ he said.
‘I suppose you’re hoping that this will form the basis into a re-investigation into your father’s case? One that will result in a posthumous pardon?’
Matt sighed and looked at her. ‘Well I’m not exactly going to get a voluntary apology, am I? Your lot aren’t exactly known for saying “sorry, we fucked up”, are they?’
Alice ignored his question, assuming that it was purely rhetorical. ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you that Lena Campion passed away earlier today. It’s going to be hard for you to prove without her testimony, Mr Bastin.’
To her surprise he seemed remarkably unmoved by the news, as if he already knew. If she hadn’t already been told that Lena had suffered a massive heart attack she might have been more suspicious. His dogged pursuit of what he deemed the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth littered the room, telling her that he was more than a little obsessed. Obsessed enough to drive a woman to her death? Alice didn’t know, and at that moment she had bigger fish to fry, but she’d be keeping a close eye on Matthew Bastin. She turned back to Sophie. ‘You’re going to have to come down to the station and make a formal statement regarding everything you’ve told me, Sophie. When we get Sam Campion, it’s your testimony that we’re going to rely on, do you understand that?’
Sophie nodded, a look of grim satisfaction on her face. ‘Brig id.’ she said in her stoic, comical, stifled voice.
Alice couldn’t help but like the girl, despite her comedy accent and the fact that she looked like something the butcher had thrown away. ‘Come on then Miss Gumption, let’s get this done.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Since arriving at the woman’s house Johnno had been sent out once for whisky and a second time for pizza. Sam was in the posh kitchen feeding his face on it now, while he, Johnno, like some bloody gopher, had been sent out to search the garage for rope. Like someone would have left a coil of rope in an empty garage.
Johnno considered himself to be a resourceful type, good in a fix and able to think on his feet. He knew that Sam thought he was a fuckwit, and it suited him to keep it that way. What Sam didn’t know, Sam couldn’t worry about. For instance, what Sam didn’t know was that the minute he had called Johnno from Beaconsfield services telling him to start the fire and demanding to be picked up, Johnno had rung Pascoe. As far as Johnno was concerned Sam had royally fucked up and right royally fucked him over. His life in the square had been sweet as a nut and now it was gone. Johnno knew he could never go back, not even with Pascoe’s blessing. Pascoe had a lot of power, but he didn’t have the law in his hand, gone were the days of bent coppers turning a blind eye. Johnno had thought it through; Sam had robbed everyone through his own stupidity – Pascoe wanted justice and so did Johnno. Their kind of justice. An eye for an eye.
He wandered back into the kitchen and watched the man who thought he was in charge chow down on another slice of pizza. Sam didn’t even look round when he came in, just carried on troughing like he didn’t have a care in the world. The whisky bottle stood on the worktop, still half full. Greedy bastard hadn’t even offered him a glass of that, not that Johnno was a whisky fan. Foul stuff. The bottles came in handy though. In one deft movement he swept it up, braced its neck in his hand and brought it down on the back of Sam’s neck. He didn’t go down with the first blow, it took two more, but he went down. And when he did, he went down like the sack of shit he was.
There hadn’t been any rope in the garage but there had been an indoor washing line. Johnno had severed a few strands with the knife he ritually carried, just enough to hog tie the bastard and hold him firm until Stefan came to pick him up. The deal had been that he gave them Sam, and he got to go free. The problem was, there was nowhere left to go.
***
In an empty house you hear everything; when your hands and legs are tied and your mouth is covered and all your functional senses are on adrenaline-fuelled high alert, you hear even more. You heard people talking about how they were going to kill you, and you heard the indifference in their voices. Edie had heard the door through to the garage open and shut, she’d heard a series of sickening thuds and grunts and now she could hear the heavy tread of someone ascending the stairs. She could hear him breathing in short, determined breaths and she could feel her own fear emanating from her in pulsing waves. This was it, her time to die. Strange that it would be in this house, and yet it was fitting. Years of her unhappiness had already soaked into the walls, tingeing the paint. To Edie, magnolia was the pale shade of misery.
He entered the room, his heavy shoes leaving marks on the good carpet. Simon would not have liked that: the rule had always been no shoes indoors. The thug had a knife but she wasn’t worried, you didn’t need a knife for a hanging.
The knife sliced through the duct tape he’d used to bind her feet – she sighed with relief as her aching limbs sagged, and winced as the pins and needles began. He hauled her to her feet by the front of her T-shirt and propped her against the wall, aware that for a moment or two her legs wouldn’t hold her.
Then it began, the frogmarch along the landing. She slowed as they reached the bannister, unwilling but ready for the inevitable.
‘Move!’ he said, pushing her in the back. She didn’t und
erstand but did as she was told and stumbled forward towards the stairs. He forced her down, twisting the back of her T-shirt in his big hands, presumably to stop her falling as she couldn’t use her hands for balance. At the bottom she turned to him, the question on her tape silenced lips conveyed through her eyes as she looked at him, then up at the bannister.
‘Change of plan.’
There was no sign of Sam and no sound to betray his presence. As they passed through the kitchen she spotted the greasy remains of a pizza sitting in its box, and a whisky bottle – a smear of blood miring the glass and trapping a few wisps of hair. Her stomach lurched, sending bile into the back of her throat where it lingered for a moment, acrid and bitter, until she swallowed it down because there was nowhere else for it to go. He pushed her on, through the back door, which he locked with his free hand, leaving the key on the step. Clearly he wasn’t concerned about anyone getting in, only about Sam getting out.
His car, with which she was all too familiar having spent a good deal of time in its boot, was parked at the side of the house. She felt an impending sense of claustrophobia begin to rise as she anticipated becoming reacquainted with the confines of the boot and came to a dead stop on the gravel, causing him to give her a painful shove in the back. He swung her around and slammed her into the side of the car, knocking the wind out of her chest and making her sag to her knees with the effort of not throwing up into her sealed mouth. She would rather hang than choke to death on her own vomit.
He crouched in front of her, his face in line with hers, and cocked his head to one side, looking at her as if she was some curious specimen in a zoo.
‘Here’s the deal, lady. I’m not going to hurt you, but I will if you so much as think about taking the piss. We’re getting out of here and we can do it the easy way, or the hard way. The easy way is that you promise not to give me any shit and you can sit in the car with me all nice like. Or you can go in the boot and I’ll dump you in the nearest ditch and leave you for dead.’
Everything she was feeling – confusion, fear, panic – must have shown in her eyes, because he reached out, knife in hand, and slit the duct tape that he had bound around her head. The tape was ripped from her mouth, bringing what felt like half her skin and a good portion of her hair with it. She squealed and gasped as the pain rang through her nerve endings like an electric shock. In films it would have been a tiny strip of tape, no worse than a waxing strip, its removal causing no more than a brief sting and a haughty look of objection. In films she would have screamed her head off and called for help. In reality screaming was no use, Simon had bought the house for its splendid isolation and had always been inordinately smug about their lack of neighbours. Edie had always thought it the loneliest place on earth.
Bracing her heels into the hard ground beneath the gravel, she pushed her shoulders against the car and used both forces to lever herself up. He rose with her, watching her progress and giving her a sly grin of appreciation for her determination.
‘Gutsy little piece, aren’t ya.’ he said.
She treated him to the best look of utter contempt that she could muster. ‘I have my moments.’
He folded his arms and smirked at her, shaking his head in what looked like amused disbelief.
‘Why didn’t you just leave me in the house if you want to get away? Why bother with all this?’
‘Now that there is a very good question. I could, and if you piss me off again I will, but the people who are coming here are not people you want to be dealing with. Right now they don’t know you’re here, but if they found you, well, let’s just say they’d make me look like a pussy cat in comparison.’
‘Doesn’t that suit you, getting someone else to do the dirty work?’
He laughed and shook his head again. ‘Consider it part of my payback. It’s not me that wants you dead lady, frankly I couldn’t give a shit, but it amuses me to put one over on that bastard in there. Now, we’re going to get in the car, I’m going to drive you back to civilisation and I’m going to drop you off. Win win.’
‘I don’t get it, why do you care what happens to me?’
‘I don’t, not really. But I look at it this way, if I kill you, or leave you to die, I’m wanted for your murder too. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t intend to be hanging around to answer for anything, but you never know do you? So, I look after you and when the shit hits the fan I’m the good guy. They can arrest me for being a cunt, but they can’t charge me for it.’
Edie almost wanted to laugh at his bizarre logic, it was as if he believed that arson, attempted murder, kidnapping, GBH, ABH and God knows what else were minor infringements. Perhaps they were to someone like him, but it wouldn’t pay her to argue. Besides, her only way out of this was to play along. ‘OK, it suits me.’
‘Good girl. Now let’s get the fuck out of this God forsaken shit hole.’
To her surprise he cut the tape on her hands and let her sit in the front of the car. He didn’t seem remotely concerned that she might grab the wheel or try to overpower him. The thought of that made her laugh. As if she could – her arms felt like they were made of rubber and she was so exhausted she doubted that she could knock the skin off a rice pudding, let alone take on a thug in a moving car. That kind of bravery was for TV and idiots. Edie had been surviving brutality for too many years to be an idiot.
They drove in silence for a few miles, him concentrating on the winding country lanes, her nursing her privations and willing life to come back into her limbs so that the dull, intense, nagging pain would stop. Her head was hurting like a bastard and the motion of the car was making her feel sick. She had to focus on something other than how lousy she felt.
‘How come you decided to do the dirty on Sam, I thought you two were best buddies?’
He glanced at her with an amused smile on his face. ‘No such thing as best buddies in my world lady, just money and favours – and respect. Sam disrespected me. Torching a house is one thing, finding out that there are two people inside is another. I’m a lot of things lady, but a killer isn’t one of them, not by choice anyway.’ He seemed to add this as if it was an afterthought. ‘He ripped me off and screwed me over, so I returned the favour.’
Edie gathered that honour amongst thieves must be the myth she had always suspected it to be. There was a bag on the back seat, she’d heard them talking about it, about how much of the contents Sam intended to give Johnno in ‘compensation’. She guessed that Johnno hadn’t thought it was enough and had simply helped himself. ‘Dog eat dog,’ she said, under her breath. ‘Aren’t you worried that I’m going to go to the police?’
He gave out a derisive snort. ‘Do what you fucking like love, I’ll be long gone.’
Edie felt suddenly utterly defeated. All her life she had felt stifled and punished through everyone else’s need for power and control. She had been nothing but a chattel to everyone. Even on her good days her mother had treated her as if she was a prize of some sort – like something she’d won in a raffle, not valued, but coveted because it was hers. No wonder she’d ended up with Simon, his attentions had held a familiarity that wasn’t so much appealing, as compelling. People were drawn towards what they knew. Even Rose treated her like a servant, assuming that she would do her bidding without question. And now there was Sam, who had used her as a means to an end and considered her ultimately disposable. Even Johnno, sad article of humanity that he was, seemed to have more compassion for her than the people who had declared their love; at least he was giving her a chance. Not that Sam had ever expressed any love, but she’d felt something between them at one point – a spark of attraction that had seemed to feel deeper than just an appreciation of each other’s aesthetics. How ridiculous it had all been and what a sad, sorry article she was. Poor Edie, everybody’s pawn. It occurred to her that she had turned into Dolly, everybody’s helpmeet. A future of loneliness, neediness and eventual madness was more than she could bear and for a moment she considered grabbing the wheel and s
ending them both to their deaths. The world would be better off without Johnno, and nobody would miss her. Sophie came into her mind as someone who might, and the thought of it seemed to ignite a little flame inside her that began to illuminate the darkness of her mood. There might be life beyond all this yet.
They seemed to drive for hours, in silence now, Edie had nothing more to say to Johnno – there was little point in trying to convince him of the error of his ways, and any such conversation was more likely to result in mortal injury to her, not his sudden conversion to the light. She had even dozed for a while, resting her head against the window and drifting in and out of sleep, only the tension of her current situation and the pain in her head preventing her from slipping into oblivion. Having been lulled by the motion of the car, and the comparatively benign situation, she felt a profound sense of apprehension when he finally pulled up. They were opposite a railway station, she had no idea where, he had parked in the shadows away from the lights and a tree obscured the sign.
‘This is it lady, this is where me and you part company.’ He leaned across the back of the seat and rummaged in the bag, then threw a bundle of money into her lap. There must have been at least two grand there. ‘Buy yourself a ticket and give the rest to the kid.’
Edie stared at the money, then at Johnno, and couldn’t help what came out of her mouth. ‘Sophie? I thought you hated her? When I first found her you’d beaten her up and made her life a misery.’
Johnno shrugged. ‘My kid, my prerogative. Didn’t want her living on the square, did I? No one’s kid should have to live there, it’s a bad place, lady. I should know, I made it that way. She didn’t want to leave nicely so I gave her a little incentive.’
Edie couldn’t see how a busted face and bruised ribs would be much of an incentive for anything except depression and fear. Johnno seemed to have taken feral parenting to a whole new low. ‘Does she know?’
‘That she’s mine? Maybe, dunno. Just tell her there’s no such thing as bad blood, she can be whoever she wants to be. Time to go lady, out you get.’ He leaned across and opened the car door, less an invitation, more a demand.