by Neil Cross
‘What if she asks for it back?’
‘Will she do that?’
‘Who knows?’
Shepherd read the email twice more. He wondered if it might have helped his children, had he written something similar, had he explained to each how he loved them. Or would it have been worse than wordless abandonment and suicide?
He folded the printout into quarters along the translucent creases and handed it back to Robert. He tried to betray no exhilaration at the first psychic scent of William Holloway.
He considered waking Lenny and asking about the technicalities of tracing emails. Then he thought that, wherever Holloway had been when he wrote the email, he’d be there no longer.
But it didn’t matter. William Holloway was abroad. Perhaps he was awake and alert at this very moment. Active in the world.
Shepherd said: ‘I need to see her, Robert. I need to see her again.’
Robert shook his head.
‘She’s not in a good way. It wouldn’t be good for her.’
‘I think she knows where he is.’
‘No can do. Sorry.’
‘Then her mother. Is she with her mother?’
‘I don’t think Kate wants to see you. She warned Caroline not to.’
‘Please,’ said Shepherd.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You said yourself that Caroline wanted me to see the letter—’
‘But she can’t know that I showed it to you. I promised her.’
Shepherd balled his fist.
‘Then what good will it do?’
Robert ripped open a bread roll. He began to spread a triangle of soft cheese.
‘I can t.’
‘Bloody hell, though, Robert,’ Shepherd hissed between his teeth. ‘We’re so close.’
Robert ate his roll with cheese, clod by clod.
‘I could try speaking to Kate,’ he said, when the roll was finished. He began to prepare a second. ‘But I’m not promising anything.’
Shepherd reached over and grabbed his shoulders.
‘Please,’ he said.
‘She won’t want to know.’
‘But you’ll try?’
‘I’ll try,’ he said. ‘Once more.’
III
Eloise and Lenny were still not up and about when, early that afternoon, Robert drove Shepherd to a village twenty kilometres out of town. He parked the MPV in a small tourists’ parking lot and pointed out the sole café. Robert waited while Shepherd went and got himself a coffee.
Shepherd tried again to read the newspaper. The meaning and context of the printed words shifted. Every few minutes, he glanced at his watch. Kate Holloway was twenty-five minutes late.
He heard the café door open, looked up and knew it was her. She was shorter and perhaps older than he’d imagined.
‘Mr Shepherd?’
He pushed back the chair and stood. She displayed not a flicker of anxiety at his size or his appearance.
‘Please sit,’ he said. ‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘Mineral water.’
Neither seemed able to break the silence and they listened to the ticking of the clock until the bottle of Evian arrived on a small tray, with a straight glass containing ice and a slice of lemon.
‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ he said.
Before she could answer he gave her a pained smile.
He said: ‘That’s not quite what I meant to say.’
If he’d hoped for an encouraging grin for this nervous ineptitude, none was forthcoming.
‘Let’s be clear about this from the outset,’ said Kate Holloway. ‘I’m here because Robert practically begged me to see you. That’s the only reason. He’s been good to my daughter. He’s taken a lot of this mess on his shoulders. It hasn’t been easy for him. He’s still a boy, for goodness sake. It’s cost him at least a year of study, but he’s stuck by her. There’s not many that would. But I wish to God he’d chosen to have nothing to do with you—because God alone knows why he did. But Robert asked me to see you, and out of respect for him, here I am.
‘I’m here to tell you that I’m not interested in your crackpot theories about who killed that poor girl. Because my ex-husband killed her. Is that clear?’
Shepherd couldn’t meet her eyes. He looked intently at the back of his hand and scratched an itch that was not there.
He said: ‘I don’t think he did.’
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Good for you. I’m sure that helps you sleep at night. So: I’ve heard what you’ve got to say, and I’m not interested. Now stop bothering me, and stop bothering my daughter. Or I’ll call the police and I’ll prosecute you for stalking us. Do you understand me? I’ll have you sent to prison, Mr Shepherd. Don’t think that I won’t.’
‘But he needs help.’
‘Of course he needs help,’ she said. ‘Of course he needs help, for Christ’s sake. But he doesn’t need your help.’
‘Mrs Holloway—’
‘Ms Summerland. I haven’t been Mrs Holloway for a long time.’
‘Of course. Ms Summerland, I can’t explain how, or why, but I feel a strong connection to your husband—’
‘I’ll bet you do.’
He wanted to continue but the look in her eyes warned him to stop. Her irises raged like hot metal.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘Robert assures me you mean well. But I have no idea who you are, and I have no idea where you come from. So please let me say this once: none of this has anything to do with you. You have nothing to do with me, or with my daughter. You have nothing to do with Will, or with what he did. You have nothing to do with anything. You have no business here, of any kind. Can you understand that? However much you imagine it to be otherwise, there is no special connection whatever between you and my ex-husband. If I can do anything for you, it’s this: I can suggest that you go home and think about your reasons for coming here—really think about why you’ve gone to all this time and effort, and come all this way just to harass me and my daughter—’
He bristled like a hedgehog.
He said: ‘Harass is rather a strong word.’
‘Is there another? Clearly we didn’t want to be found. Clearly we don’t want anything to do with you. But that didn’t stop you. That sounds very much like harassment to me. So, please: go home, back to wherever you’re from and—’
‘And what?’
‘See a doctor,’ she said.
It felt like a kick in the stomach.
She remained rigid in her seat, elbows on the table, fingers locked. Eyes incandescent and unblinking.
‘I dream about it,’ he said. ‘Every night.’
‘So do I. So do we all.’
‘I dream that I killed her.’
The rage dimmed and modulated and became fear. Kate glanced over her shoulder. She seemed to seek the eyes of the watchful patron.
Suddenly, it became clear to Shepherd that Kate had phoned ahead. She’d told the patron she was coming along to confront an obsessive stalker. She would appreciate it if he were to remain close at all times. Shepherd noticed that the patron’s hand hovered over the telephone. Kate shook her head minutely. He took the hand away.
Her fear waned. The contempt shone brighter.
‘You’re not a psychic,’ she said. ‘You’re a fantasist. You have a mental illness. There’s no connection: not to Will, not to me, or to Caroline and I hope to God not to poor Joanne Grayling. You want there to be a connection, I’m sure you even see a connection. But it’s entirely delusional.’
He tried not to sound sullen and angry. His voice came out flat and uninflected.
‘You think he did it.’
‘Of course I think he did it. Because he did it.’
He watched her read his face. He saw her frustration and irritati
on that he presumed to feel wounded on Holloway’s behalf.
She said: ‘Listen. I’ll tell you something. He’d already had one nervous breakdown. Seven, eight years ago. Around the time we separated. First he became obsessed with a murderer, a man called Bennet. My God. How I remember the name. At the same time, he found out I’d been having an affair. He smashed up my house and he slashed his wrists and forearms with a breadknife. And he punched me in the face and fractured my cheekbone and the orbit of my eye. He might’ve killed me if the police hadn’t arrived. There was so much blood around, they thought he already had.
‘We’d already separated when that happened. Much later, I allowed him to move in with me and Caroline in Bristol. I nursed him back to health. It took a long time. He’d beaten me up, remember. He’d put me in hospital; he’d traumatized my daughter, but I still took him in, and I nursed him until he was well. Are you listening to me?’
He was still examining the back of his hand.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. We separated because I had an affair with a man called Dan Weatherell. This was seven or eight years ago, you understand?’
He nodded.
‘The night before they say Joanne Grayling was killed, Will phoned Dan Weatherell in New Zealand and threatened to kill him. The night before. He was ranting and raving and threatening to cut him open. To cut him open. I know that because Dan phoned to ask what on earth was going on. Let me tell you, he was really scared. As well he might be. When Joanne is found, she’s got my name written on her body in red lipstick. Does that sound like an innocent man to you? Does it sound like a man who is reconciled to the past? Does it sound like a man who’s grateful that the woman he assaulted loved him enough to take him in and make him better? Does it sound like a sane man?’
She waited.
Shepherd didn’t know how to respond.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t sound like that, because it wasn’t. It was the act of a dangerous man. An obsessed man. A sick man. Don’t tell me what William Holloway is or is not capable of, Mr Shepherd, because there’s only one person in the world who knows that better than me. And she’s dead.’
She stood. The water remained untouched in its bottle on the table, the ice slowly melting in the sweating glass.
‘I want this all to go away,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to have these thoughts in my head. I was getting married this year, for God’s sake. Imagine that. I was going to get married. My daughter was going to be my bridesmaid. You know the one; the sick, pale girl you spoke to yesterday. The girl who’s trying to come to terms with what her father did to another girl, who wasn’t much older than her. He cut Joanne Grayling’s arms off while she was still alive. So I want you to go away, Mr Shepherd. I want you to go away and leave us alone. And if you don’t go away and leave us alone, I will do everything in my power to ensure that you’re punished as severely as the law will allow. Do you understand me?’
He burned with shame and injustice. But he kept his gaze low and nodded.
He didn’t watch her leave, but he heard the slamming of the café door, the rattle of the glass in the old wooden frame.
He couldn’t bear the continued, silent scrutiny of the patron and took a franc note from his wallet without checking the denomination. He left it under a saucer and trudged outside.
He found a low wall and rested until some of his strength had returned. Then he went and found Robert in the MPV. Robert was listening to David Bowie.
Robert drove Shepherd back to the hotel, but only in order to check out and pick up his luggage. He had decided to spend a week or two with Caroline and Kate. He still had not told Shepherd where they were actually staying, and he never did.
Shepherd shook Robert’s hand and thanked him. Robert said he wished he could have been more help. Shepherd said he had been a great help, and insisted on taking his bags and loading them into the taxi.
He stood on the pavement, waving awkwardly as the taxi pulled away. The sight of Robert’s bald spot filled him with paternal tenderness. He went to the hotel bar and ordered a scotch, which he nursed in silence until Lenny and Eloise returned at six. They were laden down with shopping bags.
Shepherd smiled. It was good to see them.
Eloise said: ‘We bought you a jumper.’
He wore it the next day, behind the wheel of the people-carrier. As they headed towards England, Lenny suggested they take a detour to Normandy. He wanted to see the site of the D-Day landings. This time they indulged him. On a blustery, squally day they walked the length of Utah beach and back again, while Lenny rhapsodized about the incomprehensible scale and import of what had transpired there: about the violent murder of all those thousands of young, frightened men. He wondered aloud how it could be that such a place was not haunted.
Neither Eloise nor Shepherd, tramping arm in arm through the damp sand behind him, could answer him why. But it was true. The beach was a strip of brown, edged with black oil and shiny kelp. The grey sky bulged low above their heads. White gulls, points of light, flitted in shifting currents of air.
There were no ghosts.
17
I
Six days after the death of Joanne Grayling, William Holloway boarded the Eurostar at Waterloo station. He wore a week’s stubble, aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap with the peak shadowing his face. The casual clothes of a much younger man.
His commitment to escape had been immediate and total. Within a very few minutes of ripping the last door from the last potting shed, he stole a cancerously rusty Vauxhall Astra. Observing the speed limit, he drove the Astra to Bath and dumped it. In Bath he stole a Honda Civic, which he swapped in Swindon for a Volkswagen Polo. He discarded the Polo on a residential street in Ealing. He left all three vehicles unlocked with the driver’s side window rolled down.
By the time he arrived in Ealing, the sun was rising. He walked a couple of miles and caught the tube at Ealing Broadway. The carriage was nearly empty and the train’s rhythm was soporific. His head lolled on his chest. When he woke, the carriage was full of pale, hazy London commuters and a ragged east European beggar. He changed at Holborn.
Outside King’s Cross station, he stepped into the shimmering, profaned London daylight.
The journey to the capital afforded him time to meditate on the immediate future. He was determined that escape should be his sole consideration. It was an intricate discipline to reflect on nothing else.
He knew it would be many hours, possibly days, even weeks before Avon and Somerset began to piece together what had happened. Nobody had the least idea where he might be or what had happened to him. His own car had been abandoned outside the phone box in Stockwood. Nobody but the kidnapper knew that that he’d driven to the drop-off in a Capri, let alone where the drop-off point might have been. He’d done all he could to ensure the cars he stole were stolen again.
Nevertheless, he imagined helicopters clamouring in the Bristol darkness, ensnared in pillars of bright, white light. In his mind they buzzed and probed fields and gardens. He imagined all the cars he had driven that day being immediately recovered, identified and fingerprinted. He imagined an email from the Friends of George Bailey arriving on James Ireland’s desktop: the scanned newspaper articles that would be attached; the video clip of Kate brushing the sweaty hair from her brow, laughing throatily, grinding down on David Bishop. Poor David Bishop, who they found dead long ago, lying in his bed with screwdrivers pushed through his eyes.
The low-resolution video clips: William Holloway and Joanne Grayling in a black cocktail dress.
He weeps.
Kate, he says.
Sometimes he was able to re-absorb the swell of panic, to drive it back inside himself like a prolapsed organ. And sometimes it almost pleased him to think of the chaos he’d left behind, the utter confusion.
Either way, he knew that in due time the pol
ice would arrive at the conclusion nobody wanted to arrive at.
But by then he would be long gone.
He spent the first night in a corroding backpackers’ hotel off the Edgware Road. The mattress was mildewed and damp and skittered with parasites.
He rose early. He knew what to do, but first he had to find out where to go.
It was easy.
Thirty-six hours after his arrival in London, the full repercussions of the story had not fully broken. News reports were fragmentary, confused and contradictory. Jim Ireland had yet to make a clarifying statement. There was limited consolation to derive from this. Ireland would presume Holloway to be monitoring the investigation. Such was the proclivity of the personality type that committed crimes of this nature. Ireland would not suffer the investigation’s progress to be jeopardized by releasing potentially compromising details to the media.
Probably, when the time came to make a full statement, a senior officer would subtly insult him, perhaps implying he was sexually impotent and of below average intelligence. This would be contrived to provoke and offend what they assumed to be his maniacal hunger for status and peer recognition.
He wondered what his former colleagues thought of him. He knew well that coppers distanced themselves from the varieties of carnage they commonly encountered. The more brutal the death, the blacker the humour of those who attended it. Emergency ambulance crews awarded style points to the bodies and bits of bodies strewn over motorway sliproads and suburban pavements.
So he wondered what Avon and Somerset were saying about him, privately. Probably they loathed him: not for murdering Joanne Grayling, about whom they would care little, but because he had caused them great embarrassment and compulsory overtime.
He wondered about his daughter.
He made himself stop.
After one more night in a soiled hotel, Holloway took possession of two fake passports of acceptable quality in the back room of a three-storey, terraced house close to Highbury stadium. He also bought £3,000 in clean money at 40p to the pound. The passports and the cash were brought to him by a bulky spud of a man in Arsenal colours. He heard the sounds upstairs of a game of poker under way.