The Devil's Feather

by Minette Walters

  MacKenzie should have taught me the dangers of complacency. And he did, as far as he was concerned. But it never occurred to me that a twisted psychopath, who raped and mutilated women, had anything in common with a Dresden china blonde in high heels and an elegant shirtwaist. I should have paid more attention to Jess. From day one, she had described Madeleine as a manipulative, narcissistic personality of shallow emotions, who demanded instant gratification, resorted to bullying when she didn’t get it and showed no remorse for the impact her behaviour had on others.

  And that’s as good a definition of a psychopath as you’ll find.

  22

  I’D EXPECTED a slap across the face, not an all-out assault on my eyes with crimson fingernails. I was on the floor, shielding my head from her kicking shoes, almost before I knew she’d attacked me. It was very fast and very noisy. I remember her screaming “Bitch” as she grabbed me by the hair and spun me round so that she could aim at my face, but I curled into a tight ball and took most of the punishment on my arms and back.

  She wasn’t fit enough to keep it up for long. The kicks became less frequent as her mouth took over. How dare I question her? Didn’t I know who she was? Who did I think I was? It was an interesting insight into her character. At no point did she consider the consequences of what she was doing or whether my provocation had been deliberate. Quite simply, a red mist descended and she went ape.

  I won’t pretend it wasn’t painful-her shoes were leather with pointed toes-but it was a walk in the park compared with Baghdad. Her balance was precarious, her aim was bad, and her foot had very little weight behind it. I put up with it because anger, like alcohol, loosens tongues, and she thought my refusal to fight back meant she had nothing to fear.

  “It was the best day of my life when the Derbyshires died…the only one left was the runt…and she was so feeble she tried to kill herself. I told my mother she should have let her bleed to death…and do you know what she said? Be nice… you owe it to her…you have Nathaniel. God, I hated her! She couldn’t keep her mouth shut…had to talk to her brother…had to apologize…wanted me to call him uncle. I said I’d rather die than admit I was related to a slut’s bastard…and he laughed and said the feeling was mutual. Then he had the nerve to beg my mother to keep the secret…for the sake of his children…”

  She referred obliquely to the cruelty she and Nathaniel had inflicted on Lily. “I told Nathaniel no one would help her…she was such a bitch they never went near her. Even Peter wasn’t that bothered…he said the troll would always tell him if things got worse. Blame her for neglect…she’s the one who walked away and left me to deal with it…as if I were the servant…”

  I’d have let her run her head even farther into the noose if she hadn’t decided to grind her heel into my hip bone. Enough was enough. I was out from under her heel and on my feet while her gabby mouth was still flapping about her status in life, and she wasn’t ready for the pile-driving charge that drove her against the Aga rail and knocked the wind out of her.

  I don’t think she noticed when I slipped her right wrist through a fabric loop and pulled it tight, but she certainly struggled as I grabbed her left wrist and yanked it the other way. “My God, you really are a piece of work,” I said in disgust before raising my eyes to the webcam on a cupboard next to the sink. “Did you get all that, Jess?”

  Jess pushed the scullery door wide and the sound of her hard-drive fan intruded noticeably into the kitchen. “The camera in the hall failed,” she said, coming in, “but the three in here worked perfectly. Are you OK? It looked pretty bad on screen but as you didn’t yell-” she broke off to stare at Madeleine. “I don’t think she’s ever taken on anyone of her own size before…just frail old ladies and children.”

  I rubbed my shoulder gingerly where a bruise was beginning to form. “Not so different from MacKenzie then. I wonder what else they have in common.”

  “Arrogance,” said Jess, examining the other woman curiously as if she’d never seen her before. “I should have guessed it was Dad who wanted it kept secret. He used to say if any of us pretended we were better than we were, he’d disown us. I thought it was because we came from working stock, but now-” she jerked her chin at Madeleine-“I think he was terrified we’d turn into this.”

  MADELEINE’S IGNORANCE of Jess’s proficiency in computer technology and film-making meant we could only convince her of what we had by moving Jess’s hard-drive and monitor into the kitchen, playing the scene again from the perspective of three different cameras and demonstrating how easy it was to copy the images to disk. She harangued us fluently throughout, accusing us of blackmail and kidnap-both of which were true-but when I retrieved a pack of envelopes from the office and started addressing them to the inhabitants of Winterbourne Barton, she quieted down.

  “You can have a go at persuading the neighbours it was a joke or a piece of play-acting,” I told her, “but it doesn’t show you in your best light, does it?” I glanced thoughtfully at the muted monitor. “I wonder what your smart friends in London will make of it.”

  Madeleine stopped trying to wrestle her wrists free and took a deep breath. “What do you want?”

  “Me personally? I’d like to see you charged with attempted murder of your mother and assault on me but”-I gestured towards Jess-“your cousin’s even less inclined to admit a relationship with you than her father was…and she won’t have a choice if we send these disks out and the police become involved. The easiest solution will be for you to instruct Lily’s solicitor to sell this house. That way you can cut your ties with Winterbourne Barton and Jess can keep the secret.”

  She gave an angry laugh. “Is this some sort of joke?”

  “No.” I wrote on another envelope.

  She wrenched at the fabric tape again. “I’ll have you prosecuted for this.”

  “I doubt it. You may be the stupidest woman I’ve ever met, but you’re not that stupid.”

  “Go ahead,” she spat. “Make as many copies as you like. There’s no better proof that you set out to blackmail me. What does a film prove? I’ll say you held me prisoner and forced me to do it.”

  “The cameras are still running,” I said mildly. “Every word that comes out of your mouth is being recorded.”

  “Yours, too,” she hissed. “Are you going to try and claim this isn’t blackmail?”

  “No. We’ll give you one hour to make up your mind-we’ll even let you consult with Nathaniel via loudspeaker phone-but if you don’t call your mother’s solicitor at the end of it…and if he doesn’t confirm to Jess that the house will be up for sale at the end of my tenancy”-I put my hand on the envelopes-“these will be on everyone’s doorsteps in the morning. Including Bagley’s.”

  “What if I refuse? Are you planning to keep me prisoner forever? What do you think Nathaniel’s going to do when I tell him you’ve tied me up?”

  “Give you some good advice, I hope. We’ll let you go at the end of the hour whatever you decide. You can have your interview with Bagley and say whatever you like about us. You can do the same in the village. You’ll have twelve hours to convince everyone that we forced you to implicate yourself before we mail-drop our version.”

  “You’re mad,” she said in disbelief. “The police won’t let you.”

  “Then take the gamble,” I urged. “You’ve nothing to lose.”

  None of us spoke again until Jess had connected the speaker phone from the office to the socket in the kitchen. She set the dial tone buzzing through the amplifier. “Is he at the flat?” she asked Madeleine. “OK.” She punched in a series of numbers from a piece of notepaper. “Your hour starts as soon as he picks up.”

  Madeleine wasted the first five minutes by gabbling at high speed and high volume about being taken prisoner by me and Jess, forced to say and do things for blackmail and being threatened with the sale of the house. It made sense to her and us, but none at all to Nathaniel. He could hardly get a word in edgewise, and when he did her striden
t voice overrode him, ordering him to listen.

  I was interested by Jess’s reaction. She sat impassively, staring at the monitor, apparently uninterested in the exchange until Madeleine called Nathaniel a moron. With a hiss of frustration, she picked up the receiver and spoke into it. “This is Jess. The situation is this…” She explained it succinctly in a few sentences, then put him back on loudspeaker. “Now you can talk to Madeleine again. You’ve got fifty minutes.”

  There was a short hesitation. “Are you listening, Jess? Is the other woman listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you recording this conversation?”

  “We’re filming it.”

  “Christ!”

  “Stop being-” Madeleine began.

  “Shut up!” he ordered her. “If you keep digging you’re going to be in real trouble.” Another pause. “OK, Jess, have I understood you right? You’ve got some film of Madeleine abusing your friend and some kind of admission that she also abused her mother. In return for keeping that under wraps, you want her to approve the sale of Barton House. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if she refuses you’ll release her to say whatever she likes, then you’ll send out copies of the DVD to anyone who’s interested.”

  “Yes.”

  Madeleine tried again. “They won’t be able-”

  “Shut up!” A longer silence. “Can I talk to the other woman? Is it Connie? What do you really want?”

  “Exactly what Jess has told you. Madeleine can approve the sale or she can explain the DVD. It’s up to her. Either way she won’t be able to stay in Winterbourne Barton. She’s given too many details of how you and she terrorized Lily.”

  “That’s a lie,” Madeleine called out. “I said hardly any-”

  “Jesus!” Nathaniel shouted down the line, showing real anger suddenly. “Will you keep your mouth shut? I’m damned if I’ll let you drag me into this. There’s only one devil in this family…and we all know who that is.”

  “Don’t you dare-”

  “You say one more thing, Madeleine, and I’ll hang up. Do you understand?” He let a beat pass. “OK,” he went on more calmly, “I want to hear what you’ve got, Jess.”

  “You don’t have time for it all,” she told him, “so I’ve keyed in the seven minutes that matter. You’ll hear Connie’s voice at the beginning saying: ‘You know, what really surprises me,’ then-”

  Nathaniel cut across her. “How come you’ve already keyed it in?”

  “I knew you’d ask for it.”

  “How do I know it hasn’t been edited?”

  “No time, but in any case I ran a clock on the three cameras. For the DVD, I’ll do a split screen to show the action synchronized.” She pointed to the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. “I’m showing Madeleine the digital numbers so that she can tell you if any of them are out of sequence.” She clicked her mouse. “Running now.”

  Madeleine and I went through our motions again on screen, but, to me, the more I saw the clip, the less convincing it became. Madeleine won hands-down on the photogenic front. Even at her most furious, she remained elegant and pretty, and it was hard to believe that her Jasper Conran designer shoes were doing any damage at all. I just looked ridiculous. Why hadn’t I fought back instead of allowing myself to be kicked?

  I don’t know if Jess was aware of my dejection, but when the clip ended she spoke before anyone else could. “The images are graphic and don’t flatter your wife, Nathaniel. She’s enjoying it too much. If I decide to run the fight in slow-motion, which I will for the DVDs, it’ll be even more obvious. No one’ll believe she didn’t do the same thing to Lily. You said she’s done it to the kid.”

  “That’s a lie,” Madeleine shouted.

  Jess glanced at her briefly then leaned towards the telephone speaker. “Was it, Nathaniel? You told me you can never leave her alone with Hugo…which is why he never comes to Dorset with her. Is that true or not?”

  We all heard him take an audible breath through his nose. “True.”

  “Liar!” Madeleine stormed. “Don’t you try and blame-”

  Nathaniel cut in again. “I had nothing to do with any of this, Jess. You’ve got to believe that. My only involvement was to pass on what you told me about the power of attorney and phone Madeleine when I picked up your message about social services.”

  “Connie thinks you came down the night I found Lily.”

  “No. The last time I came down was when I spoke to you in November. Hugo and I didn’t see Madeleine at all for most of December and January. We thought she was looking after Lily-it’s what she said she was doing-playing the dutiful daughter in the hopes of reversing the power of attorney. If I’d guessed-” he broke off abruptly. “Lily was supposed to die of hypothermia that night, Jess. Madeleine was furious when you turned up and took her away.”

  There was a short silence.

  Jess stirred herself. “She was here? She was watching?”

  “All the time.”

  “Staying in the house?”

  “Yes. She couldn’t abandon Lily completely. Anyone could have arrived out of the blue, and there’d have been hell to pay if they’d found Lily drinking from the fishpond. Madeleine switched the water on and off as it suited her…sometimes Lily had water…sometimes she didn’t…the same with the lights.”

  “He’s lying,” Madeleine said. “It’s all lies.”

  “She made Lily take cold baths, then locked her in her room in the dark. The only thing she couldn’t turn on and off at will was the Aga, so she booked herself into a hotel some nights to have a bath and a decent meal. That’s when Lily got out and went looking for help in the village.”

  There was a horrible logic to it. “Why did no one see Madeleine?” I asked.

  “Because she was only going to show herself if someone came to the door. Her story would have been that she’d just arrived and discovered Lily in extremis. It never happened.” He gave a hollow laugh. “She said it wouldn’t. She said if her mother died, the body would lie in the house for weeks until Jess went in.”

  I glanced at Jess’s bent head. “Why didn’t she show herself when Jess found Lily outside?”

  “Too scared. She’d parked her car in the garage at the back so that no one would see it…and she never did that normally. In any case, the house was in darkness, and she had no explanation for why she hadn’t turned on the lights to look for her mother as soon as she arrived.” He paused. “You let her off the hook by taking Lily to the farm, Jess. If you’d stayed and called an ambulance, Madeleine would have been trapped in the house.”

  When Jess didn’t say anything, Nathaniel spoke again. “I can’t see her being prosecuted for it. It’s maybe what you want but”-he faltered briefly as if deciding how honest to be-“I don’t think you’d be doing this if you had any real evidence.”

  “We do now,” I said. “You’ve filled in the gaps.”

  “I can’t swear to any of it-I wasn’t there-and Madeleine will deny it. I’ve only said as much as I have because I’m hoping you’ll back off for Hugo’s sake.” He appealed to Jess. “You know what’ll happen if you go public, Jess. Madeleine will accuse everyone but herself-me included-and the only person who’ll suffer will be the child. I really don’t want that.”

  “If I go straight to the police-” Madeleine began.

  “You’ll be screwed,” he told her harshly. “Can’t you see that? Whatever you do, you’ll be screwed. If you try to justify yourself in advance, Jess will quietly dispose of the film and leave you to hang yourself on your own…and if you call her bluff, and she sends it out, you’ll be in the police station with her answering questions. Maybe she and Connie will get done for blackmail but it’s nothing to what’ll happen to you if you can’t keep your stupid trap shut.”

  Jess raised her head. “It’s not blackmail if we only show it to the police,” she said. “It’s evidence.” She looked at me with troubled eyes. “What should I
do? I’m not sure anymore.”

  Neither was I. The idea had been to give Jess some leverage over Madeleine so that she could be rid of the woman with a clear conscience. Lily’s will would allow Madeleine to inherit the money eventually, and none of the history of the two families need ever come out. We also hoped we could scare her back to London without talking to Bagley. There was a canvas bag and a DVD that I’d successfully hidden from the police-both of which I regarded as my private property-but, in any case, I resented the idea that my story might be handed to a woman who would certainly sell it, or use it to enhance her standing. She’d drop my name and the details of my captivity all over London if she thought it would earn her some kudos.

  Jess had been sceptical when I proposed the idea the previous evening. “Even if she does say something damaging, she’ll never agree to the sale of Barton House. What do we do then? I don’t mind filming her and threatening her with blackmail”-her eyes lit with mischief-“I’ll even enjoy it-but we can’t do it for real. She’ll be into Bagley’s office like a rat down a drainpipe.”

  “Then you’ll have to come clean about Lily’s will,” I said cheerfully. “Just give her an hour of hell before you do it. Think of it as Lily’s revenge. Yours, too, if you like. At least let Madeleine know what you think of her before you hand her a million and a half quid on a plate. Personally, I’d rather see you inherit this house-I’m sure it’s what Lily wanted-but there’ll be no keeping quiet about the Derbyshire-Wright connection if you do.”

  Neither of us had expected to hear revelations of attempted murder. Jess had felt she could live with the knowledge of absentee cruelty and neglect-“It’s what Madeleine’s been doing all her life”-but that was a far cry from sending a confused old lady into the cold and standing idly by while she succumbed to hypothermia. What stuck in my throat more than anything was the idea that Madeleine might profit from what she’d done.