I reached across Jess for the mouse and double-clicked on the live feeds. “Are they off?”
“Yes.”
“OK.” I put my thoughts in order. “I don’t think my conscience will let me do this, Jess. Madeleine’s dangerous. For all I know, her creep of a husband is as well. If he was truly interested in protecting his child, he’d have reported her himself. What if she has another go at Lily? Could you live with that…because I certainly couldn’t.”
“No.”
“We have to report her.”
“I know.” She sighed. “But who to? Bagley?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “We can do what Lily would have done…send everything to her solicitor and let him decide.”
The angry protests that erupted simultaneously from Madeleine and Nathaniel sent Jess reaching for an envelope. It seemed they were considerably more worried about the man who held the purse strings than they were about the police.
From: [email protected]
Sent: Thur 26/08/04 10:12
To: [email protected]
Subject: Your extraordinary resilience
Dear Connie,
I’m impressed by your resilience, though not as impressed as Nick Bagley seems to be. After what you’ve been through, he’s astonished by your determination to stay put and carry on. I explained that you’ve been in worse situations and survived them but with MacKenzie still on the loose, Nick feels you should be more afraid. Your response appears to be “out of character for a woman.” I might have cast aspersions against Dorset ladies, but he says your friend Jess is being equally bullish.
I’ve had several conservations with Nick re MacKenzie’s disappearance. He tells me there’ve been a number of sightings across the south-west although none is reliable. He’s interested in MacKenzie’s alleged SAS training (still to be corroborated) and asked if I thought it possible/likely that the man never left Winterbourne Valley. I said I thought it unlikely as I understand the entire area was swept twice and no trace of him was found. I hope I’m correct, Connie. If not, please take extra precautions. The consequences could be extremely serious for you if MacKenzie is still in the vicinity.
I was sorry to hear that one of Jess’s mastiffs died trying to protect you. It’s not a breed I know much about except that they’re large and extremely powerful. Nick tells me the “Hound of the Baskervilles” was a mastiff-he referred to it as “a huge beast that hunted men and ripped their throats out”-and I know he views Jess’s pack with the same alarm. He keeps a close eye on them, although he’s surprised they’re now confined to their enclosure when Jess’s previous routine was to exercise them daily across her land.
Finally, Nick is surprised that you didn’t destroy the DVD of your captivity when you had the chance. From the concerns you expressed both to me and Dr. Coleman about being filmed (and Dr. Coleman’s description of what he saw), Nick wonders why you seem so indifferent to the fact MacKenzie still has it. I presume you aren’t, and that you’re still anxious about it?
Yours as ever,
Alan
DI Alan Collins, Greater Manchester Police
From: [email protected]
Sent: Fri 27/08/04 08:30
To: [email protected]
Subject: My extraordinary resilience
Dear Alan,
Thank you. I deeply appreciate the thoughts behind your email.
So…for your reassurance…
Nick Bagley would have been no less suspicious if Jess and I had folded ourselves into heaps and demanded 24-hour protection. Peter Coleman’s evidence about our courage was so OTT that a sudden collapse afterwards would have looked very odd. We can only be what we are, Alan, and there was no sense assuming different personas to satisfy Bagley’s view of how women ought to behave. You know very well I could have kept up a sham for as long as I liked-I’ve done it successfully in the past-but Jess is too honest.
I took your Thucydides quote to heart. “The secret of happiness is freedom; the secret of freedom, courage.” I’ve tried to explain to Bagley that merely confronting MacKenzie was a liberation. I saw him for what he was-not what my imagination had made of him-and I’m a great deal happier for it. I can’t, and won’t, pretend a fear I don’t feel anymore. Bagley’s given me a panic alarm, but I’m sure MacKenzie won’t come back. He seemed far more frightened of me that night than I was of him.
In so far as anyone can guarantee anything, I guarantee that MacKenzie is NOT in the valley. Dorset police searched it twice from end to end, and there was no sign of him on either occasion. He may have holed up somewhere else but I’m sure the more likely explanation is that he left the country under a different passport. He seems to have unlimited access to them.
FYI, Dan has requested a filter on all Reuters files to pull out anything relating to unexplained murders, so if MacKenzie starts again somewhere else we may be able to spot him.
Re the Hound of the Baskervilles. Conan Doyle describes it as a mastiff/bloodhound cross, the size of a small lioness with phosphorous flames dripping from its jaws (!), and trust me, even Bagley’s interesting imagination would have trouble embroidering Jess’s soft-mouthed mutts into anything so exciting. It’s true you can’t move when they sit on you, but their favourite occupation is to drool saliva into your lap not grab you by the throat and shake you. She’s keeping them in for the moment because Bertie’s buried in the top field and she’s worried they’ll dig him up. Once the turf has grown over the grave, they won’t be interested. She explained this to Bagley but, unfortunately, it seems to have made him more suspicious.
Re the DVD. It never occurred to me to destroy it. Am I still anxious about it? No. If I’m honest, I’m rather proud of it. I even wish Bagley could see it. It might help him to understand why I’m so jubilant about taking MacKenzie on a second time. As a wise man once said: “Winning is everything.”
You’ve been a good friend, Alan, and I hope I’ve set your mind at rest. In passing, if I ever do kill MacKenzie I won’t bother to hide his body. There’ll be no point if I can hack him to death in the hall with a blunt axe and plead self-defence. Maybe I should have done it when I had the chance!
With my love and thanks,
Connie
23
I DIDN’T KNOW THEN if Madeleine kept her appointment with Inspector Bagley. If she did, he never referred to it. He fell into the habit of dropping in unexpectedly, both at Barton House and Barton Farm, sometimes making two or three visits in a day. He usually found me working at my computer, but invariably missed Jess, who was out in her fields, bringing in a late harvest after one of the wettest summers for years.
On several occasions she discovered his car in her drive and the man himself poking around in her outhouses, but she took it all in good part, even though he didn’t have a search warrant. She told him he was welcome any time, and suggested he keep checking the back garden so that he could satisfy himself the only bones there were beef bones. Her dogs lost their suspicion of him once they learnt the sound of his engine, but he never lost his suspicion of them.
I, too, remained wary around them. Some phobias aren’t susceptible to logic. I could cope with one dog at a time but the four en masse still alarmed me. It was clear they missed Bertie. Outside, they patrolled their wire enclosure looking for him, and, inside, sat by doors, watching for his return. Jess said they’d do it for a month before they forgot him, but Bagley didn’t believe her.
“They’re not waiting for the other dog to return,” he told me one morning, “they’re trying to get out.” He was standing behind me, reading what was on my computer screen, a complicated paragraph on post-traumatic stress statistics. “You haven’t got very far with that, Ms. Burns. You’ve only added one sentence since last night.”
I clicked “save” and pushed my chair back, narrowly missing his foot. “It would go a lot faster if you didn’t keep coming in and breaking my train of thought,” I told him mildly. �
��Can’t you ring the doorbell once in a while? At least give me a chance to pretend I’m out.”
“You said I could walk in whenever I felt like it.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to take up residence here.”
“Then shut your back door, Ms. Burns. It’s an open invitation to anyone to enter.” He offered me a cigarette. “After what happened, I’m surprised you’re so unconcerned about unwanted visitors.”
It was a variation on a question he’d asked a hundred times already. I accepted a light. “I’m not unconcerned,” I answered patiently, “but the alternative is to turn this place into a prison. Is that what you want me to do? I thought modern policing was all about persuading victims to get back to normal as fast as possible.”
“But this isn’t normality for you, Ms. Burns. Normality was checking the locks on the doors and windows every two hours.”
“And a fat lot of good it did me,” I pointed out. “It raised my stress levels, and MacKenzie got in anyway.” I fingered the panic alarm round my neck. “In any case, I now have this. It’s given me confidence that the cavalry will turn up…which was the intention, wasn’t it?”
He smiled rather sourly as he dropped into the armchair beside the desk. “Indeed, but I suspect it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. Are you ever going to use it? Ms. Derbyshire refuses to wear hers.”
“There’s no point when she’s out in the fields. It needs a landline or a telephone signal to work.”
He cast his usual glance around the office as if something would suddenly show itself to him. “I had a word with Alan Collins last night. He said you’re too clever for me, and I might as well give up now. He also said he won’t be shedding any tears if MacKenzie’s never heard of again. If anyone deserves what he gets, it’s your attacker.”
I doubted Alan had said anything so crass, particularly to an opposite number in a different county. “Really?” I asked in surprise. “I’ve always thought of him as such a stickler for the rule of law. I can’t imagine him ever going on record with favourable views about summary justice and vigilantism.”
“It wasn’t on record,” Bagley said. “It was a private conversation.”
“Still…will he repeat those remarks to me, do you think? I like the one about my being too clever for you. If I were to broaden that out into a general piece, contrasting IQ levels among the police with those of prison inmates-” I raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?”
“That you’re probably the most annoying person I’ve ever met,” he said grimly. “Why doesn’t it worry you to be interviewed, Ms. Burns? Why doesn’t it make you angry? Why don’t you have a solicitor? Why isn’t he arguing police harassment?”
“He? If I had one, don’t you think he’d be a she?”
Bagley flicked ash irritably into the ashtray on the desk. “There you go again. Everything has to be turned into a joke.”
“But I enjoy your visits,” I said. “Winterbourne Barton’s a black hole as far as social interaction’s concerned.”
“I’m not here to entertain you.”
“But you do,” I assured him. “I love watching you poke around the garden looking for clues. Have you found anything yet? Jess says you keep going back to her granary, so presumably you’re wondering if we buried MacKenzie under a ton of wheat? It wouldn’t have been easy, you know. Grain’s like quicksand. We’d have had trouble lugging a corpse on to the heap without sinking in ourselves.”
“She’s added another ton in the last couple of weeks.”
“And it’s all about to be shifted to a commercial grain store. Don’t you think someone will notice if a body tumbles out?” I watched his mouth turn down. “I don’t understand why you can’t accept that he freed himself and took to his heels. Is it because you’d have killed him if you’d been in our shoes?”
He took a thoughtful drag of his cigarette. “I’m sure you dreamt of revenge.”
“All the time,” I said with a small laugh, “but it did me even less good than checking the window locks. I lost so much weight over it that I feel like an old hen about to drop off her perch. Look.” I extended a bony right arm. “If there’s any useful meat on me you’d need a microscope to find it. How could that”-I cocked my left forefinger at a grape-sized bicep-“vanish a corpse in thirty minutes?”
He smiled reluctantly. “I’ve no idea. Would you like to tell me?”
“There’s nothing to tell, but even if there were you wouldn’t be able to use it. You’re on your own and there’s no recorder. Anything I said would be inadmissible as evidence.”
“For my own satisfaction then.”
I glanced towards the hall. “I wanted to kill him,” I admitted. “I would have done if I’d been a better shot. I was aiming for his head when I hit his fingers…and the only reason I didn’t take another swipe was because it felt as if I’d been electrocuted when the axe slammed on to the flagstones. I had judders all the way up my arms and into the base of my neck. That’s when I decided it would be better to tie him up.”
I squashed my fag end into the ashtray. “Jess wanted to kill him, too-she was devastated about Bertie-but we couldn’t see how to do it. Peter had already left and there wasn’t time to work anything out. I suggested we untie MacKenzie and argue self-defence, but Jess said we’d have to corner him to do it”-I sighed-“and I had this sudden picture of the women in Sierra Leone…all huddled against walls because there was nowhere else to go.” I fell silent.
“Did Ms. Derbyshire agree with you?”
“Yes. She said it might have been different if he’d been blindfolded but it wasn’t possible after she’d seen into his eyes.” I pulled a wry smile. “I don’t think it’s easy killing people. I don’t think it’s easy killing animals. I couldn’t kill a rat if it looked at me the way MacKenzie did. I can’t even kill woodlice. There’s a nest in some of the rotten wood in Lily’s drawing-room and the only way I can deal with them is to hoover them up and chuck them outside…”
H. L. MENCKEN ONCE SAID: “It’s hard to believe a man is telling the truth when you know you would lie if you were in his place.” If I’d realized earlier that Bagley shied away from killing animals, I’d have introduced rats and woodlice at the beginning. His views on psychopaths and sadists were extreme-they should all be hanged-but he empathized strongly with my inability to crush the life out of vermin. I’m not sure I ever fully understood the logic of his argument, but apparently my clear reluctance to kill anything was more convincing than repeated denials that I’d killed MacKenzie.
In a shameless PR exercise to encourage complete exoneration, I persuaded Jess to release her dogs in front of him. As she predicted, they headed straight up the field for Bertie’s grave and began a mournful howling around it. Bagley asked how they knew he was there and Jess said they’d attended the first funeral. Like elephants, they never forgot. Whether he believed that, I don’t know, but he declined her invitation to dig poor Bertie out a second time. The remaining dogs showed no inclination to go anywhere else in the valley, and had to be dragged away from the grave on leashes.
After that, Bagley left us in peace. Alan was amused by the motives I ascribed to this sudden end to suspicion, saying it had more to do with an absence of evidence than Bagley being unable to kill woodlice, but I still feel I showed my best side as a woman when I mentioned the hoover.
***
THE SECOND WEEK of September saw the arrival of my parents and the beginnings of an Indian summer after the rains of July and August. Jess took to them immediately, and in no time at all my father was up at the farm, lending a hand. My mother worried that he was over-exerting himself after his injuries, but Jess assured us he was only driving a tractor and helping Harry feed the livestock.
The subject of MacKenzie was taboo. None of us wanted to talk about him or what had happened. For all of us, it was done and dusted, and there was nothing to be gained by conducting a ghoulish post-mortem on who had suffered the most. Nevertheless, within a few of day
s of her arrival, my mother read some signals that were invisible to me and sought out Peter for a long chat.
I’d hardly had any contact with him since the incident, but I assumed he was still making regular visits to Jess. She’d mentioned his attendance at Bertie’s exhumation, and defended him for some of the information he’d given Bagley, but, bar a phone call one evening to ask if I was all right, he hadn’t been near me. I remember cutting the conversation short when he insisted on beating himself up for sins of omission and commission, but as Bagley arrived shortly afterwards Peter dropped out of focus again.
My mother gave me a hard time over it. I, more than anyone, should have understood how crippling it was to feel a failure. It was worse for men. They were expected to be courageous, and it destroyed their confidence to realize they weren’t. Tongue in cheek, I asked her if it would have been better for Peter if Jess and I had failed the bravery test as well, and she echoed Bagley’s statement about finding me deeply annoying.
“I don’t like to see you gloating, Connie.”
“I’m not gloating.”
“I don’t like to see your father gloating either.”
“He’s having fun,” I protested mildly. “Ploughing Jess’s fields is a lot more exciting than sitting at a desk all day.”
“He’s been cock-a-hoop since you phoned him in hospital,” she said accusingly. “What did you say to him?”
The demons are dead and buried… “Nothing much. Just that we’d all survived and MacKenzie had run away with his tail between his legs.”
Mum was peeling some potatoes at the sink. “Why should that please him? He wanted the beastly man dead or behind bars, not free to do the same thing to someone else. I can’t understand why you’re all so unconcerned about him getting away. Aren’t you worried that he’ll murder some other poor woman?”
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