by Ann Troup
‘What did Delia want from your mother?’
‘Money. It’s what everyone wanted: her, Roy, Patsy. They all did. It was why we never had any. Too many hands in the pot.’
‘What did Patsy Jones have to do with it?’ Haddon wanted to know. He was still playing catch-up from the file.
‘She found out about Rachel’s parentage. She and Roy were going to run off together. She was convinced there must be money to be had somewhere. Roy hadn’t managed to bully it out of us, so she did some rooting, put two and two together and came up with four. She tried to blackmail Mother. Mother just laughed at her, so she tried Stella, threatened to have Rachel taken into care.
‘Stella had pretty much lost the plot by then and Rachel was the only thing she lived for. She panicked; it was Stella who killed Patsy. She got a kitchen knife and stabbed her, left her in the hallway, then went to pick Rachel up from school as if it never happened. Of course, Charlie found her there later, and he was charged with killing her. But it wasn’t him.’
‘You knew this and you let an innocent man go to prison?’ Haddon asked.
‘She was family; he was the son of a woman who had dominated us for years. He was nothing; Patsy was nothing. What would you have done?’
She said it so calmly, as if it were a matter of fact and it stood to reason. For a fraction of a second, Ratcliffe felt himself inclined to see her point. ‘Did you witness Stella kill Patsy?’
‘No, but I knew she had. She was the only one in the house; everyone else was out. I knew it wasn’t Charlie. I saw him walk into the house just before Stella and Rachel did.’
It was as if she was describing an average, normal event, like the dustbin being collected on a Monday.
‘So did you keep your mouth shut to get some kind of vicarious revenge on Delia Jones?’ Ratcliffe asked.
She thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Maybe, I don’t know. It was just simpler to allow things to take the course they did.’
Ratcliffe was having trouble getting his head around just how fucked up this family was. Haddon was flicking through the file like a mad thing, trying to bring himself up to speed with all the characters in this insane play.
Ratcliffe had a macabre image in his head that he just couldn’t shake off. ‘So you didn’t know that the baby was still in the house?’
‘Not until my husband informed me, no. Where is my husband anyway?’
Ratcliffe looked away, didn’t speak.
‘He’s left me, hasn’t he? I thought he might,’ she said with resignation. ‘He never did like a mess.’
Ratcliffe leaned forward. ‘You’ve told us quite a story, Frances. There’s only one problem: there is no one who can corroborate it.’
‘Oh yes, my mother can.’
‘Your mother is dead, Mrs Haines,’ Haddon said coldly.
‘Yes, I realise that. But she kept a diary. I didn’t find it in the house, so it must have been with the other body. It’s all in there.’
If there hadn’t been a tape running, Ratcliffe would have sworn. He would have uttered the worst, most profane words in his vocabulary. ‘A diary,’ was all he said.
‘Yes, it’s red, with a little lock.’
‘So we’re looking for a red diary in a house that’s just burned down?’ he added.
Frances shrugged. ‘She will have left it with the other body.’ Ratcliffe knew for a fact that there had been no diary with that body, just like he knew there had been no ring on Roy Baxter’s finger. He had stuck his neck out to listen to a fairy tale. ‘So what do you think happened to Stella? And who do you think burned down The Limes?’ he asked, unable to hide the weariness in his voice.
‘Delia Jones, of course. It’s why I asked you to place someone with Rachel. She’s not safe. Now that Roy’s body has been found, none of us are safe. She killed Stella; she burned down the house to hide any other evidence. And she’s out to get Rachel. She knows we’ll talk. None of us has anything to lose.’
‘But Rachel doesn’t know any of this. Why would she be at risk?’ Or was there something Rachel hadn’t told them? Ratcliffe wondered.
‘No, she doesn’t know anything. But she is back on the scene, with Charlie. Delia won’t allow that. Rachel is a threat.’
Ratcliffe suspended the interview there. He had heard enough. If he had been allowed to, he would have thrown both tapes in the bin there and then. Back in the office, he apologised to Haddon.
‘S’all right, guv. Quite entertaining really. I’ve always wanted to be in on a case where the butler did it. It was a bit like Cluedo in there: housekeeper, on the landing, with the iron.’ He laughed.
Ratcliffe sighed, and rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Aaaagh! This bloody case is driving me mad! I’ve just spent God knows how long listening to a complete fairy tale in there!’
‘Don’t worry about it – I’ve read the file. You have enough forensic evidence to see her away for life; she can say what she likes. She’s got no brief, she’s off her rocker, and she doesn’t stand a chance in court,’ Haddon said reassuringly.
‘Yeah, but I still have to find a suspect for the fire and Stella Baxter’s murder.’
‘And you think it’s a little old lady? According to this, Delia Jones is seventy-seven years old,’ Haddon said, handing Ratcliffe the file.
‘And Harold Shipman was a GP,’ Ratcliffe said quietly, fishing his phone out of his pocket to phone Angie and let her off the hook.
Chapter 35
Charlie let Amy and Diana have first dibs on the bathroom. By the time he’d had his turn, Amy had disappeared into her room to sleep off the long night, and Diana was tidying his kitchen.
‘Feeling better?’ she asked, handing him a cup of tea. ‘You look better.’
Physically he felt cleaner. He’d had better days with his body, which was shot with accumulated exhaustion. Mentally he felt like he had been abducted by aliens and dropped into some surreal parallel universe.
‘You should get some sleep,’ Diana said.
‘I should do a lot of things.’
He wandered through to the lounge and sat down on the sofa, easing his aching limbs into its softness, and groaned. ‘I should go back soon, see if there’s any progress.’
‘You should get some rest, or you’ll be no good to man or beast. They’ll phone if there’s any change,’ Diana told him. There was no doubt in her mind that Rachel would recover. There was every concern in her mind about what would happen next. Was it possible that Rachel could stay on with Charlie and Amy and resume a life that had barely started? It was equally difficult to imagine that she could just go back to London and carry on the life – no, the existence, that she had there.
Whatever line had been drawn in the past had been overstepped now. There could be no going back either way. Diana’s concern was whether any of them were ready for what might come next. ‘What happens when she gets better? What then?’
‘If she gets better,’ Charlie said with a degree of resignation that surprised Diana.
‘You don’t think she will?’
‘I don’t think she wants to. Why would she?’
‘For Amy, if nothing else. Maybe even for you.’
Charlie shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I can’t think about that. I thought things might change when she knew the truth, but I just can’t picture a resolution. I certainly can’t see a happy ending. None of us are in control of this any more; it’s like watching a train crash in slow motion. More and more crap keeps happening, things coming back to haunt us, to haunt her, and it’s not done yet. There will be more. How can she find a way out of it, even if she does get better?’
His voice had risen with every sentence, illustrating the escalation of events that had left him feeling so utterly hopeless. ‘Please don’t tell me that time heals, and that love conquers all. I’m sure those things are true, but not for us. Time keeps throwing up more and more crap. Time is closing the gaps between events, not widening them. As for lo
ve, we might feel it, I feel it, but none of us know how to do it. Not one of us knows how to conduct ourselves as loving people. Look at us – we haven’t got a clue!’
Diana couldn’t think of a thing to say. He was right. Every time one of them tried to express love and care, it backfired. Their interpretation of the thing was all wrong. They were so busy trying to protect everyone else, save everyone else and sacrifice themselves that they just ended up hurting each other in the worst possible ways. Lies, secrets, death, chaos.
Diana was a great believer in the concept that charity began at home. Her interpretation was that one had to take care of oneself first in order to help others. None of these people knew how to be kind to themselves. Consequently they were inadvertently cruel to each other. Charlie was right; none of them had a clue. Even Amy, the most stable of the lot, had grown up with the lie of her mother’s death. An untruth formed to protect her by the people who claimed to love her. If that was her example, how would she manage the next steps?
On the train journey they had shared, Amy had explained that she was training to be a psychiatric nurse so that she might understand what made people tick, learn to see what they needed in order to be well again. The girl was looking for a tool kit, one that should have been provided by her family, but they had never had the tools to pass on. With this in mind, she patted Charlie on the shoulder. ‘Let’s just concentrate on Rachel getting better for the time being.’ There wasn’t much else she could say.
***
Charlie gave her a weak smile and drank his tea. His jaw ached where he’d been gritting it for so long. All he wanted to do was get in his van and drive, anywhere, somewhere. As long as it wasn’t here.
Knowing that Rachel was in London, that she had left of her own accord, that she didn’t want him, had been far more bearable than this. Now the damage had been done and he only had two options: watch her die in that hospital bed, or watch her live and struggle on. He wasn’t sure which would be more painful, but he did know which would hurt for the longest.
Instinct demanded that he find someone to blame, and his mind erred toward his mother. She was so certain that she was doing the right thing, always had been. He supposed it was because she’d had a tough life and she’d had to survive the hard way. It had made her a hard woman – she had corners and you knew all about them if you ran into one.
He couldn’t remember his father, had never known him, but there were early memories of his mother – indistinct, fleeting – that suggested a softer woman than the one he knew. Memories of a time when she even looked different, when she had laughed sometimes, smelled nice, felt soft. He couldn’t picture her back then, but he knew she was nothing like the tough, determined, single-minded woman he’d grown up with.
Delia Jones didn’t believe in harping on about the past. You just put it behind you and carried on. You didn’t talk about it, you didn’t dwell on it, you just kept moving forward. No, he couldn’t blame her; she had done her best. She’d put up with Valerie Porter for years just to put food on the table. She had been loyal to that woman through thick and thin. Surely, that had to count for something, for some strength of character? He wished he’d inherited her fortitude, however misguided it might have been. That way he might have been able to put the blame at his mother’s door, and let himself off the hook.
He should have taken her advice all those years ago and kept well away from Rachel, kept well away from all of them. That was the only thing he could blame his mother for: binding their lives too closely with the Porters. The rest had been his fault. All his.
Diana was right. Perhaps they should just focus on whether Rachel would pull through.
Move forward, don’t dwell, he told himself.
***
Delia Jones, however, was busy breaking her own code. It wasn’t so much that she was dwelling on the past; it was more that the past was dwelling in her head. Normally things just unfolded in a logical, orderly manner. All her actions were dictated by events as they came along. She just did what she needed to do and moved on.
But something had changed; things had started to unravel. The past and the future were colliding unpleasantly in her mind, creating disorder and confusion. It felt like as soon as one disaster was cleared up, another was about to happen. Given that everything she had ever done had been so carefully managed, she couldn’t understand what was going wrong.
Obviously when Valerie died, someone would find Roy in the shed and she had planned for that. Frances’s hair and an earring were in his hand. They had been there for a long time. She had put them there herself when the silly bitch had fainted. If that failed, if the evidence had been destroyed by time, she had made sure that the blame would fall on Stella.
It had been a lot of hard work over the years to make Stella pay for her part in things; it had taken time and patience to derail her sanity to the extent where no one would give her credibility. It had been a slow drip method, but it had worked. The woman was as mad as a box of frogs. But for some reason, and Delia couldn’t fathom why, it had gone wrong. Stella had fought back.
Delia had been surprised that the police had let Stella go so quickly. What she hadn’t anticipated was that Stella would go back to the house, that she would scrawl all over the walls and tell everyone everything. It had only been chance that Delia had found her there at all. She had gone to The Limes to look for Valerie’s diary. It had been obvious that Frances had already looked, and had probably burned it, but Delia needed to be sure.
With Frances banging her head and ending up in hospital, she hadn’t had the chance to check whether it had been found and destroyed. When she got to the house, Stella was there, scribbling over the walls like some demented child doing lines on a blackboard.
It had been a split-second decision to kill her, and a split second more to make the decision to burn the house down. If the book was there, it would go up with the house, and with a bit of luck Stella would go with it. Frances had used petrol to light the bonfire – there had been plenty left in the shed, plus turpentine, meths, old newspapers and rags. Delia had used the lot, spreading them all around the house to make sure it all burned well.
Then she had gone to the flat, hadn’t thought it through, hadn’t been thorough, hadn’t taken a key, had panicked and tried to do the job too quickly. Not that it mattered – nothing in the flat would point back, but it would have been better if it looked like Stella had done it.
It had all happened in the wrong order. That was the problem when you were under stress. Delia didn’t do stress, didn’t like split-second decisions, never had, but she’d had to make a few over the years. But this time something had gone wrong. She had been thinking about it for days, trying to track things back to the point where it had all started to fall apart.
Everything linked to Rachel coming back.
If she hadn’t come back, if Charlie hadn’t seen her, if Amy hadn’t found out, everything would have panned out fine. Delia didn’t do panic, didn’t react wrong, but she had that night, when she’d foreseen the loss of Charlie and Amy because of Rachel. Her talent for thinking on her feet had lapsed. She had told Charlie the truth, or a version of the truth, and she couldn’t believe she had laid herself open like that. Everything had collapsed so fast, and the words were out of her mouth before she’d realised. Stupidly she had sent him running!
Only after he had gone had she realised that Rachel might tell a different story, might tell him that it was Delia who had told her he was her father – not Valerie. This was the problem when lies strayed too far from the truth. She had to tell Rachel that Frances was her mother for two reasons. First, Rachel would never have believed Charlie would sleep with Stella, and second, Rachel and Frances hated each other – they weren’t likely to talk.
Rachel had already turned her back on Valerie and Frances; she might not have felt so strongly if she’d thought that Stella was her real mother. But that hadn’t been the point. Delia’s mind was mixing it up again, getting
confused. Rachel had been about to take Charlie and the baby away, move them to London, away from home, away from Delia. That couldn’t happen. Rachel had to go.
It was easy to kill people who wouldn’t be missed, like Roy, like Barrington, like Molly Kerr. Rachel would have been missed. There would have been trouble. It had been a risk, but it had paid off. A calculated gamble that Rachel, meek and pathetic, wouldn’t question what she was being told. A low self-esteem was a powerful thing in Delia’s experience. A useful tool when you wanted to convince a girl she only had a ring on her finger because a man felt guilty about an unplanned baby.
The more she went over it, the less sense it made. Everything was disjointed. She couldn’t remember the logic of it all any more. It used to fit. Everything had fitted perfectly, now it didn’t. Pieces were missing; things had gone wrong. If Rachel hadn’t come back, if Rachel had done the sensible thing and topped herself like anyone else would have in her shoes – and God knows, Delia had hinted at it enough over the years. Like with Stella, she had drip-fed guilt and shame and doubt into the kid – only to see the little shit grow up and try to take her son!
In sheer rage she swept her arm across the mantel and sent its contents flying. No one took what Delia didn’t want them to take. No one.
Chapter 36
Angie tried Ratcliffe’s number yet again, still no answer. The stupid git must have switched his phone off. She left yet another message and ended the call with a sigh. How was she supposed to help solve this thing if she was stuck at a hospital minding an unconscious woman and, for that matter, why exactly was she minding Rachel? Ratcliffe knew something she didn’t, and the fact that he was pushing her out of the loop was making her really, really angry.
Frustrated, she returned to the ward and resumed her vigil by Rachel’s bed and watched the hypnotic movement of the respirator as it forced oxygen in and out of the woman’s failing lungs. ‘What’s so special about you then, that you deserve a babysitter, eh?’ she asked the inanimate woman quietly. ‘Know something you haven’t told us – is that it?’