The Devil's Feather

by Minette Walters

  “No one’s accusing you of murder, Ms. Burns.”

  “Well, it feels like it,” I said. “The only difference between you and one of Mugabe’s henchman is that I still have some fingernails left.”

  He lost patience with me. “Interviewing witnesses is a necessary part of any criminal inquiry, and it’s not police policy to exempt women. I agree it can be a stressful experience…however, given your views, I’m surprised you feel unequal to it.”

  I grinned. “Ouch!”

  He took an irritated breath. “Did you or Ms. Derbyshire move MacKenzie’s canvas bag from the office to the hall, Ms. Burns?”

  “My bag,” I corrected. “He stole it from me in Baghdad.”

  “Did you move it?”

  “Yes. I handed it to Jess on my way to collect her clothes so that she could check the pockets. He’d put her knickers in the flap, but I thought he might have taken her bra as well. He was that kind of pervert.”

  “Do you remember what she did with it?”

  “I think she left it on the chair.”

  “Did either of you take anything out of it?”

  “I can’t speak for Jess, but I didn’t.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “I should have done. My father’s binoculars and mobile were in it. Why do you ask?”

  “Just tying up loose ends.” He saw my frown. “The SOCOs found your imprints on the office floor, but none that matched those by the front door. We wondered why, since you and Dr. Coleman both said the bag was by the desk.”

  He was very thorough, I thought. “Have you found the bag? Why did you think we might have removed something?”

  “It was a hope, Ms. Burns. If you’d kept something of MacKenzie’s we’d have a better chance of extracting some DNA.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “We have foot- and fingerprints but nothing else. There might have been saliva traces on your father’s mobile or an eyelash on the binoculars, although the most likely source would have been your clothes, since you came into contact with him when you tied him up. If Ms. Derbyshire’s dogs had drawn blood or the axe had broken his skin-” he shrugged.

  “What about Jess’s clothes or Peter’s clothes?”

  He shook his head. “If you’d left Ms. Derbyshire’s untouched, we might have found a rogue hair, but there was too much moving and handling…and Dr. Coleman lost anything on his way back to his house.”

  “Do you need DNA evidence if you have his fingerprints? Peter and I can both identify him.”

  Bagley smiled rather grimly. “It depends if he’s recognizable when we find him, Ms. Burns.”

  CHAOS FOLLOWED hard on the arrival of the police and the ambulance. I remember the terrible clamour as the sirens wailed into the drive, and the ensuing confusion as Peter tried to explain that the “patient” had vanished. We all had different priorities. Mine was to find out what had happened to my parents, Jess’s was her dogs, and the police wanted a clear picture of events before they did anything at all.

  In the first instance, they wanted to know whose blood was all over the floor and why it had been trodden in so freely, and they weren’t prepared to accept that it had all come from Bertie. Neither could I when I looked at it through the objective eyes of startled newcomers. What the dogs hadn’t flicked around in the immediate aftermath of Bertie’s death, Peter, Jess and I had tracked across the flagstones in our movements to and fro. It looked like a bloodbath and felt like a bloodbath, and the police chose to view it as one until tests proved different.

  We learnt later that Bertie suffered massive haemorrhaging from his carotid artery where MacKenzie had slashed the flick knife across one side of his throat. Jess’s grief was that he didn’t die immediately but continued to pump blood until his heart gave up. Mine was that I hadn’t used the axe sooner to split MacKenzie’s head open. In the great scheme of things, Bertie’s contribution to life, liberty and happiness so outweighed MacKenzie’s that there was no contest between which of them deserved to live and which deserved to die.

  Much to Jess’s and my annoyance, we were relegated to second place behind Peter. While he was invited into the dusty dining-room to give the first account of what had happened, we were instructed to wait in the kitchen under the eagle eyes of a WPC. By that time, several more police cars had arrived and the house and garden were being scoured for MacKenzie. I kept trying to raise the issue of my parents but no one wanted to hear. “One thing at a time,” I was told. In the end Jess threatened to punch the WPC if she didn’t whip up some action, and instructions were finally given to alert the Metropolitan police.

  Inspector Bagley was curious about why I hadn’t used my mobile to contact my parents myself. If they were such a priority, he argued, I’d have headed for the attic as soon as Peter left the house. “You could have phoned Alan Collins,” he pointed out. “He knew the history, and he was already in contact with the Met.”

  I did understand his dilemma. An obsessive need to clean seemed a poor excuse when the lives of well-loved parents were at stake. Predictably, we disagreed about how long Jess and I had been alone with MacKenzie-the Inspector favoured forty minutes (Peter’s assessment), while I favoured twenty. We compromised on thirty when police records showed that the time lapse between Peter’s 999 call and the arrival of the first police car was just over twenty-three minutes, allowing seven minutes for Peter to drive home from Barton House. But, in the Inspector’s view, even thirty minutes suggested I hadn’t accounted for all my actions.

  “That’s a mighty lot of washing, Ms. Burns, and it doesn’t explain why you only remembered your parents when we arrived. You admit you saw your father’s binoculars in the bag. Why didn’t they prompt you to contact him?”

  His suspicion wasn’t helped by the fact that I didn’t tell him DI Alan Collins of the Greater Manchester Police had a file on MacKenzie. Alan only entered the equation when he contacted Dorset police himself at lunchtime on Sunday, after hearing via the Met in London that my father had been rushed to hospital at three o’clock in the morning after being found, brutally attacked, in his sitting-room. With no details of what had happened at Barton House, the Met simply informed Alan that Keith MacKenzie was a suspect in the assault, and the request to check the flat had come from Dorset police.

  In the belief that MacKenzie would head straight for me, but unable to warn me because he didn’t have my address or number, he rang Dorset’s Winfrith headquarters. What he told them subsequently of my history with MacKenzie, which was a great deal more detailed than anything I’d said, persuaded Bagley that I was not only well-practised at withholding information but also made a habit of it.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that you failed to report this man to the Iraqi authorities, Ms. Burns? Or that it’s only in the last two weeks that you’ve divulged any information at all about your captivity?”

  I toyed with saying, “You didn’t ask,” but decided he wasn’t in the mood for flippancy. “There hasn’t been time. I’ve tried to fill in some of the gaps, but most of your questioning has been about what happened here.” I looked him straight in the eyes. “I suppose I could have insisted on talking about Baghdad, but wouldn’t that have made you more suspicious?”

  His eyes didn’t drop, but a perplexed frown puckered his forehead. “I can’t make you out at all,” he said. “From Dr. Coleman’s description of the video, you suffered the most appalling abuse at this man’s hands…Alan Collins says you were so frightened of him you wouldn’t divulge his identity and went into hiding…Ms. Derbyshire says you haven’t eaten or been out for a week…your parents are in hospital…MacKenzie’s still free…yet you’re sitting here in front of me as cool as a cucumber.”

  “Is that a question?”

  He smiled in spite of himself. “Yes. Why are you so calm?”

  “I’m not sure a man would understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “In the first place, my parents aren’t dead,” I said.

  There was no mystery about how they
both ended up at the flat as MacKenzie’s prisoners. My father did exactly as Jess described, set out to lure MacKenzie into a trap, using himself as bait. Afterwards, he was given the same lecture I received about vigilantism and revenge but, as Dad took most of the punishment, no charges were brought despite question marks over his purchase of wood and nails on Friday morning.

  He wasn’t very forthcoming about the details of his plan-claiming only that his intention was to confine MacKenzie and call the police-and denied knowledge or responsibility for the homemade “stingers” that ended up in Barton House. Of course Jess and I did, too, which left MacKenzie as the guilty party. I told Alan privately that my father had made them, and MacKenzie had brought them to Barton House; but, with the law as it was, none of us was going to admit to it publicly.

  Initially, my father had some difficulty agreeing with Met detectives that his idea of an ambush was ill-considered and naïve, but under pressure from my mother he ate humble pie. Perhaps it was a mercy he could only nod his agreement, because the air would have turned blue if he’d been able to speak. The only detail he genuinely conceded was that, had he entered the flat accompanied by a police officer, MacKenzie wouldn’t have taken him prisoner so easily.

  It’s unclear how long MacKenzie had been there-several hours if his intensive search of the place was anything to go by-but my father had no inkling of danger when he let himself in on the Friday evening. The last thing he remembered was stooping to collect the post; the next, waking up trussed and helpless in the sitting-room. He’s even less communicative about this experience than he is about Mugabe’s thugs, but when he reached hospital sixty hours later, he had five fractured ribs, a dislocated jaw and so many bruises his skin was a uniform purple.

  My mother says he refused to tell MacKenzie anything and would probably have allowed himself to be punched and kicked to death if she hadn’t decided to go back to the flat herself on Saturday afternoon. “I knew something was wrong,” she said. “I tried phoning him at the flat and on his mobile, but both went straight to voice messaging. Then I called you and the same thing happened.” She smiled rather ruefully. “I could have murdered you that morning, Connie. I was so worried.”

  “Sorry.”

  She squeezed my hand. “It all worked out for the best in the end. If you had answered…or if Jess had passed on my message a little more promptly…you’d have persuaded me to stay in the hotel. And where would your father be then?”

  Six feet under, I thought. There’s a limit to how much punishment anyone can take, and MacKenzie’s frustration would have killed him eventually. He’s a good old boy, my Dad-a tough old boy-but he’s lucky one of his ribs didn’t snap completely and puncture a lung. I asked my mother why she hadn’t called the police, instead of going to the rescue herself, and she said it would have required too much explanation.

  “Did you get the vigilante lecture?” I asked her.

  She shook her head with a twinkle in her eyes. “I burst into tears and said how foolish I’d been…but then I’m not as bullheaded as you and your father.”

  In fact, despite a gut-feeling that Dad was in trouble, she was more inclined to think there was a rational explanation for the phones not being answered. As I had done, she wondered if he’d gone out for food or was refusing to answer because he’d instructed her not to contact him.

  “I expected to have my head bitten off for meddling,” she admitted, “but I couldn’t let the nonsense go on. You must have known he’d do something silly when you refused to talk to him. There isn’t a cut-off point when a man like your father stops trying to prove himself, Connie…any more than there is for you. I wish you’d learn that caring what others think is a form of slavery.”

  Her safety net in the event of trouble-a little simplistic as things turned out-was to ask the taxi driver to wait while she went inside for his money. As he wouldn’t leave until she paid him, she must either return with her wallet or force him to come knocking on the door. “I was as naïve as your father,” she said. “I should have realized the driver wouldn’t care who handed over the money as long as he got it.”

  MacKenzie must have been watching from the window because he was waiting behind the front door when Mum opened it. As soon as she was over the threshhold with her suitcase, he slammed it shut and had her mouth and hands bound with duct tape before she even reached the sitting-room. When the knocking began and an angry voice demanded payment, he calmly bundled her out of sight, took her wallet from her bag and paid up. “He’s not stupid,” she said reluctantly. “Most people would have panicked.”

  “Did you?” I asked her.

  “I did when I saw your father. He looked terrible-face all bruised and misshapen-body curled into a ball to protect himself. He started crying when MacKenzie threw me on the carpet beside him.” She shook her head. “That’s the only time I felt I shouldn’t have gone back. Poor love. He was devastated. He’d tried so hard to protect me…and there I was.”

  She had no qualms about bargaining my address against their lives. “It would have been madness to do anything else,” she said. “While there’s life there’s hope, and I knew you’d worry if you couldn’t get me at the hotel. I prayed you’d phone that policeman friend of yours in Manchester. Your father was unhappy about it…but”-she squeezed my hand again-“I was sure you’d understand.”

  I did. I do. Whatever nightmares I still have would be a thousand times worse if I were carrying my parents’ deaths on my conscience. My mother believes my father’s “unhappiness” related entirely to his fears for me, but his concerns were rather more practical. He was appalled at her naïve assumption that a man like MacKenzie would honour a promise to leave them alive if she gave him the information he wanted.

  He tried to dissuade her, but his dislocated jaw had seized the muscles in his face, making speaking difficult. To stop any further attempts, MacKenzie muzzled him completely by winding several turns of duct tape round his head. The ironic upside was that, with his jaw supported, my father’s pain lessened, and he survived the next twelve hours in considerably more comfort than he would otherwise have done. The downside was that it increased my mother’s concern for him, thereby encouraging compliance.

  “Weren’t you worried that MacKenzie would kill you anyway?” I asked her.

  “Of course…but what could I do? He threatened to strangle your father in front of me if I refused. At least there were slivers of hope if I betrayed you…none at all if I betrayed Brian.” A small crease of doubt furrowed her brow. “You do see that, don’t you, darling? It was a card game…and you were my only trump. I had to use you.”

  I didn’t know how to answer. Absolutely…? Don’t worry about it…? I’d have done the same…? They were all just anodyne forms of words that meant nothing if she didn’t believe them. “Thank God you had enough faith in me,” I said bluntly. “Dad wouldn’t have done. He still thinks of me as a little girl in pigtails who screams every time she finds a spider in the shower.”

  “Only because he loves you.”

  “I know.” We exchanged smiles. “He was very brave, Mum. Is his tail wagging now? It damn well ought to be.”

  Her smile played around her eyes. “You’re so alike, you two. You both assume the only way to win is to show no weakness. You should have played bridge with Geraldine Summers. I’ve never known anyone conjure so many triumphs out of hands that contained nothing.”

  “By bluffing? Is that what you did with MacKenzie?”

  “I couldn’t do anything until he removed my gag because he wanted the password to your father’s laptop. Before that, he went through my suitcase. I told him he wouldn’t find your address in the computer, but I suggested he read the email you sent to Alan Collins. I hoped he’d realize how pointless it would be to kill any of us.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That you’d chosen a good parallel in the story of the death-ray and the Chinaman. The only point of killing was to gain from it. He wasn’t ve
ry talkative-I doubt he spoke more than twenty sentences from the moment I arrived-and he became extremely agitated when I asked what he gained from killing. That’s when he said he’d strangle your father if I didn’t tell him what he wanted…and the gain would be the look on both our faces when it happened.” She shook her head. “And I’m sure he was telling the truth…I’m sure that’s why he does it.”

  I felt a shiver of goosebumps on my arms. “Then why didn’t he go ahead with it?”

  “Because your address was my trump card, darling. Supposing I was lying? He had no way of checking unless he phoned you-which would have alerted you-so I persuaded him to take me along as security. It was the only bargaining chip I had…and it meant your father and I stayed alive for a few more hours. I felt I’d won the trick when he produced the car keys and demanded to know where the car was parked.” She laughed suddenly. “Poor Brian! I don’t know which offended him more…my pandering to the brute or the brute driving his precious BMW.”

  “You know damn well,” I said severely. “He was worried sick for you.”

  Again, my father never speaks about the hours he lay on the sitting-room floor, except to say that his lowest moment was when I left my message and he couldn’t answer. I know he imagined the worst-we all do when situations are outside our control-but it wasn’t until the police broke into the flat in the early hours that the search began for my mother. She doesn’t dwell on those hours either, several of which were spent in the BMW’s boot, but her cramps were so severe by the time she was found that she had to be given morphine before her back and legs could be straightened out.

  “It’s only when the bidding starts that you realize how many cards you have,” she went on. “The wretched man had to free me to walk to the car, and my price for not attempting to escape or draw attention to myself was that we left your father alive. If he could have put me in the boot immediately, I’m sure he’d have gone back to finish Dad off, but”-another laugh-“I’ve never been so glad of street parking before. You can’t mistreat women with half of Kentish Town watching.”