The Circle

by Peter Lovesey

  'Not usually. I hope not,' she said. 'I'm not much of an actor. He'd see something was wrong as soon as he looked at me.' She was cracking up.

  'Correction,' Hen said. 'Something isn't wrong, sweetie. It's right. We're making sure he's safe. You've done nothing he could object to.'

  Her radio buzzed. 'Excuse me.' She moved a few steps away and turned her back. 'Mallin.'

  It was Andy Humphreys, from out in the road. 'Found a car up the lane, guv, a bit far from any houses. Engine still faintly warm. No sign of the driver.'

  'Do an index check.'

  She lit a cigar and waited. Could it really be as simple as this to nick the arsonist? If so, Andy Humphreys was Detective of the Month.

  'Guv, the vehicle check gives the owner as Thomasine O'Loughlin. Twenty Blake Avenue.'

  Thomasine1? Not the name she expected or wanted.

  'Does it, by God? Can you disable it?'

  'Will do.'

  'Are you alone?'

  'There's assistance not far away if I need it.'

  'Have someone keep it under obbo.'

  She put out a general message that Thomasine's car had been found and she was presumed to be in the grounds. 'Tell me the moment you spot her, but don't approach her. Repeat, don't approach her.'

  Kate, saucer-eyed, still lingered with the tray. 'So is it a woman?'

  Hen told her to wait downstairs. These were dangerous moments.

  'Snap it up, Chalybeate,' she said aloud.

  She leaned out of the open window and willed his headlights to penetrate the darkness. The only light was the tip of her own cigar.

  Another five minutes went by. He was overdue now.

  Over the radio came Johnny Cherry's voice. 'Someone passed me on foot, heading straight towards the house. Shall I follow?'

  'Man? Woman?'

  'Can't tell'

  'Stay put.'

  She crushed out the cigar and ran downstairs. Kate came out of the kitchen and said, 'Is he here?'

  'Where's the switch for the security light? Oh bugger!'

  Too late. Two halogen lamps triggered by the approaching figure flooded the entire housefront and drive in brilliant light.

  There was no doubt now that the figure was Thomasine O'Loughlin, dressed for action in a tracksuit and trainers, and caught in the dazzle like a rabbit. But she wasn't carrying petrol or a bundle of oily rags. This wasn't what Hen wanted. She flung open the front door.

  Lacking a loudhailer, she put her hands to her mouth and shouted. 'Police. Get down, get down, get down. Face down on the ground, hands stretched in front of you.'

  Total compliance. Thomasine sank down.

  'Move yourself, Johnny!' Hen shouted.

  Johnny Cherry stepped into the pool of light and handcuffed her.

  'Bring her in here.'

  Seconds after Thomasine was bundled inside, the security light went out.

  'I'm just praying he didn't see that,' Hen said. 'If he did, we might as well all go home and watch TV.' To Thomasine, she said, 'What were you playing at? Oh, don't bother. You looked at the website and worked out what was happening.'

  'I didn't know you would be here,' Thomasine said, her eyes awash with shock and humiliation.

  'My job, isn't it? Johnny, take her into a back room somewhere and cuff her to a radiator. We've got a real situation to deal with - if she hasn't fouled it up.'

  Before Johnny had marched Thomasine out of the room, Hen's radio crackled. Duncan's voice. 'Porsche just arrived,' guv.'

  She could hear it herself moving up the drive.

  'Thank God for that. Talk about nip and tuck.'

  She slammed the front door and returned to her observation point upstairs. If Lord Chalybeate decided to enter the house instead of using the sauna he'd find it as he would expect.

  The security light was activated again. The Porsche came to a halt on the gravel area in front of the house. Hen swayed back from the window so as not to be caught in the light. She couldn't see Chalybeate, but she heard the car door slam, followed by steps across the gravel that seemed to be going away from the house. She risked leaning closer to the window.

  He was definitely walking towards the detached wooden building that was the sauna.

  She let out a long breath and muttered, 'Have a good sweat.'

  Now the real stake-out could begin. Breathing more easily, she got back in radio contact and told her team, 'The heat's on, boys and girls.'

  They were under orders to keep watch, keep in contact and do nothing until they got the order from her. According to Kate the housekeeper, Chalybeate took about forty minutes over his sauna. Patience was wanted now. The security light had gone off. All was quiet.

  Her thoughts focused on the arsonist, waiting somewhere in the darkness with a can of petrol and some rags. Killers may be cunning, but they seem incapable of changing their m.o. Why mess with a formula that works? But there was a change here, an enforced change. The timing had to be earlier than usual. Would that be a disincentive? Hen hoped not. In open country here, well back from the road, with no other neighbour within hailing distance, there was no need to delay until the small hours.

  Another cigar.

  The suspense was hard to endure. She would have avoided this tiger trap with its attendant risks if at all possible. She preferred a simple knock on a suspect's door. In this case it was not possible.

  Chalybeate had turned on the interior light of the sauna and the windows on two sides were sharply outlined. Steam suffused with light was already wafting from the tops of the windows and the little chimney on the pitched roof.

  Fifteen minutes passed, and seemed like fifty.

  Then the radio silence was broken. Stella's voice. Stella's position was close to the sauna. 'Someone approaching.'

  'Okay, this is it, Stell. Don't go too soon. I want them stinking of petrol, right?' She radioed everyone and ordered them to move in closer to the sauna and await the order.

  Steam in large amounts was billowing from the sauna. It was easy to picture the middle-aged, bollock-naked man inside, ladling water on the hot stones, unaware of the arsonist closing in, or the police in wait. He'd never have agreed to do this.

  But it put a heavy responsibility on Hen to get the timing right.

  'Guv?'

  'Stell?'

  'Suspect at the door.'

  'Okay,' Hen said in as calm a voice as she could manage. Everyone on the team was listening. 'Can you see the can?'

  'Not yet, but I think the door's open.'

  This had to be it. She couldn't risk waiting any longer.

  'Go, go, go!'

  She'd have liked to lead the charge, but she had to get down the stairs and across the drive to the sauna entrance. She was in time to see in the glare of the lights the suspect felled like a tree as three of the team grabbed at the same instant. The resistance was brief and useless, the cuffs in place and a hood over the head.

  'Top result,' she said. 'Bring 'im in the house.'

  Keen to see who the prisoner was, they streamed through the front door and into the hall and surrounded Hen and the prisoner. She asked Shilling to remove the hood. There were gasps from the team.

  Hen said,'Idon't believe this.'

  They had nicked Bob Naylor.

  He was blinking a lot. 'Something in my eye,' he said. 'Do I have to wear these bracelets?'

  'What was he carrying?' Hen asked Stella.

  'Nothing, guv.'

  'No petrol? Smell his hands.'

  Shilling lifted the cuffed hands and sniffed at them, causing the prisoner to bow. 'Nothing I can tell, guv.'

  'What the hell were you up to?' Hen asked Naylor when he'd been allowed to straighten up.

  'Look, my eye's giving me gyp.'

  Ridiculous. 'Someone give me a tissue,' Hen said.

  Stella produced one and Hen wiped the corner of Naylor's eye. 'Now will you tell us what you're doing here?'

  His words came in a burst. 'I was trying to find Thomasine,
wasn't I? She's here somewhere. Her car's on the road outside. I get back from work today and listen to my calls and there's this message she's left and some others about a website I ought to be looking at, so my daughter got it up on the screen and I guessed straight away what Thomasine was up to. Bloody dangerous, going it alone, but she's like that - fearless. It took me some time to find out where Lord Chalybeate's place is, but I did, and came looking.' He paused. 'She's got to be somewhere around here.'

  'In the back room,' Hen said with resignation. 'You two have screwed up an entire police operation. Why couldn't you leave it to us?'

  'Guv.'

  Hen turned to listen to Stella, who was by the door. 'What's that?'

  'The sauna's on fire.'

  31

  You must think about people's reactions to afire in terms of the three basic stages of making sense of what's going on, preparing to act and then acting.

  Professor David Canter, quoted by Nicholas Faith in Blaze (1999)

  And it was well alight, flames and sparks leaping high into the night sky.

  It couldn't get any worse than this. Now there was a helpless man about to be incinerated.

  She told Stella to call the fire service. Then she raced across the drive with the rest of them to see what they could do.

  Not much. The door to the sauna stood open and the fire had ripped through the ventilated area where you were supposed to cool off. Chalybeate's only chance of survival was that the closed inner room of the sauna was insulated to hold in the heat. But it was all made of timber and would soon be ablaze.

  'No way we can reach him,'Johnny said. 'Can't get through that lot to the inner room.'

  'Then we'll force our way in through the walls.' Hen looked around for something to use. There wasn't much at the front of the house.

  The sauna had a solid look. Chalybeate didn't go in for flimsy building. This wasn't a job for shoulders. Or boots.

  She stared across the drive.

  'Can someone start the car, please?'

  'The Porsche?' Johnny said.

  Hen didn't answer. There was only one car in view.

  'Duncan?'

  DC Shilling knew about cars. First he opened the door of the Porsche and checked that the key wasn't inside. Then he released the bonnet lid and started loosening the leads to make a contact. The ignition fired and the engine started. He slammed down the lid.

  'Go on, then!' Hen said.

  Shilling got in, revved the engine like a racing driver on the grid and drove the Porsche straight at the sauna. Some of the wood splintered and some of the car buckled and there was glass everywhere, but the meeting of metal and wood wasn't a total success. He reversed and tried again. This time there was a definite splitting of the tongue-and-groove facia of the building, not to mention a concertina effect in the Porsche. It must have been well designed because it still responded when Shilling went into reverse. At the third attempt most of the bonnet burst through the structure. With a rending and scraping, Shilling backed away. A hole the size and shape of the knee-space under a desk was left. And out of it crawled a naked man.

  'Is he all right?' Hen said.

  Stella and Johnny got to Chalybeate together and helped him upright. He was wide-eyed and shocked, but unhurt. They hustled him away from the burning building with little time to spare. A sheet of flame ripped through the space he'd come from.

  Kate the housekeeper came running from the house with a white bathrobe. Speechless, Chalybeate drew it round his shoulders. Whether it was the near-death experience, or the destruction of his sauna, or his Porsche, it was all too much.

  'Where's the boss going?' Stella said.

  Hen was haring away into the darkness.

  32

  If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass. If it persists, you probably ought to write a novel.

  Lawrence Block, Writing the Novel: from Plot to Print (1979)

  All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter.

  Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (1977)

  So what had caused Hen to run? In the last minutes the clouds had parted over a large section of the sky and areas of the garden were now moonlit. She had good night vision and near the limit of her range she'd spotted a movement. Something or someone was running at speed across the lawn towards the main gate.

  On impulse she set off in pursuit. She was no sprinter, and not athletic in any way. Determination powered her. She ought to have sent someone else, but the time it would take to tell them was too long. The quarry was already swallowed by the darkness. She let her short legs carry her at the best speed she could manage across the turf. And somehow she got the figure in sight again, saw that it was human for sure, dressed mostly in dark clothes.

  She felt certain this was the arsonist. She'd read somewhere, some time, that the sickos who do this stuff like to remain at the scene to watch the result of their crime, deriving satisfaction that was as good as sex. This one, though, was a killer first, an arsonist second. The psychology didn't necessarily apply.

  Her legs started to ache and her throat had gone dry, but she ran on. She wasn't closing the seventy metre gap and she couldn't think how she would, but at least she had the killer in sight. She guessed there was a parked car or a bike nearby, even though the team hadn't located it. This was where the chase was heading. The first target was the main gate.

  The running movement interfered with her vision in this faint light. She couldn't make out much more than the flash of white socks or trainers. At this distance there was no chance of identifying the person or what else they were wearing.

  Then she had her first piece of luck all day: the fire engine moving fast along the road. She saw the pulsing blue light before she heard the siren.

  The person ahead saw it, too, and veered sharp left, so as not to be sighted by the fire team. Helpful to Hen. She cut the angle and reduced the distance between them. Better still, as the fire engine reached the gate, the arsonist stopped and crouched at the foot of a tree.

  Hen ran on, realising with an upsurge of adrenalin that she hadn't been spotted yet. I'm going to get there, she thought, without any conception of how she'd cope. She got to within twenty metres before she was seen.

  And now it was down to whose legs moved faster. The arsonist was up, but not away yet. Hen, so near now, raised her strength for a last surge of speed. She could hear the breathing coming in gasps and thought, this bastard is feeling worse than I am.

  The gap closed to a couple of metres and Hen flung herself forward. As a rugby tackle, it wouldn't have pleased a purist, but it was effective. Her right hand grabbed a shin and held on. The other person tipped forward and toppled over.

  Hen scrambled to get a better hold. She needn't have troubled, because the fall had taken any fight from the fugitive.

  The stink of petrol was unmistakable.

  She took the handcuffs from her back pocket and slammed them on. After catching her breath she managed to say, 'You're nicked.'

  Andy Humphreys was the first to get to her, followed by Duncan Shilling and two others.

  'Who is it, guv?' Andy said.

  Hen was still on the ground beside her capture. 'We haven't met before, and she hasn't spoken yet, but this is Miss Snow. Amelia Snow, supposedly burnt to ashes over a week ago.'

  Now that she had her first proper look at the Chichester arsonist, a terrified middle-aged woman, lips quivering as she gasped for air, Hen had to admit to herself that the chase hadn't been quite the physical challenge it had seemed.

  'Duncan.'

  'Guv?'

  'Arrest her for the murder of Edgar Blacker. And give her the caution. We're doing this by the book.'

  Overnight, Miss Snow's clothes were taken for forensic examination and there was little doubt what they would confirm. When Hen Mallin and Stella Gregson faced her across the table in Interview Room One next morning, it was apparent that s
he was ready to tell all. There was that stunned look of capitulation Hen had learned to recognise in first offenders. Miss Snow's first night in a cell had not resulted in much sleep. The red-lidded eyes had been to the abyss and looked over. The hands would not stay still.

  She hadn't even tried to tidy her hair.

  After Stella had spoken the necessary words for the tape, Hen said, 'I have to give you credit, Miss Snow. You gave us the runaround for longer than I care to admit. It was only in the last twenty-four hours I seriously began to think you might be alive, only when we found the nude shots of you in that sex magazine. But let's deal with this in sequence, shall we? It's a complex case and I'm not sure my colleague believes in it even now.'

  Miss Snow gave a despairing shrug that didn't augur well.

  Hen hoped she wasn't going to go silent on them. 'It's a matter of record that you posed for those photos. Were you primed with drink? It looks as if you were.'

  Now she nodded, but added nothing.

  'So you weren't a professional model?'

  A faint sigh said enough.

  'You were tricked, and you regretted it for the rest of your life?'

  She managed an audible, 'Yes.'

  Hen had the good sense not to dwell on the humiliation. 'You did everything possible to put the episode behind you, and it seemed you'd succeeded. You got your professional qualifications in accountancy. You had a good career and earned plenty of respect in Chichester, doing charitable work as well as keeping the books for some of the pillars of local society. You joined the writers' circle and became their treasurer and secretary. You had hopes of being published soon. Am I being fair?'

  She responded with a firmer, Yes.'

  'Well, you're going to have to help me now. We want to hear in your own words about Edgar Blacker.'

  Miss Snow shook her head, but in regret rather than denial. She began to speak in a clear, soft tone, articulating every word. 'I didn't know until he turned up at our meeting that he was the man who took those vile pictures.' She hesitated as if to draw on her reserves of strength. 'If you know the sort of person I am, it's incredible that I posed like that. It beggars belief. And I still don't know how it happened.' She dipped her face to avoid eye contact. 'He introduced himself at a party we had for one of the dancers in the show I was appearing in, said he was a photographer and how photogenic I was and how I ought to have a portfolio of pictures. He said he'd seen me dance and I was so much better than the others that I could easily become a solo performer - the kind of flattery you want to believe, and do if you're a stagestruck girl, as I was. Well, the next day I turned up at the house he called his studio. I'd brought a suitcase of costumes as he suggested. I knew it was risky in a way, but I was a showgirl and I'd met men before and kept them at arm's length if I needed to. He took a few pictures of me in costume and then we had lunch. He'd brought in some cold chicken and salad.'