Crouching low he looked down the jetty towards the sea. Yes, there she was, leaning over and peering into the dark water. Then he blinked, hardly able to believe his eyes as incredibly another figure came up behind her. Who the hell was it? He couldn't see. By its stature it looked like a woman. Bella Westbury? No, it was far too slender for her. Who then? Julie, the hired help? His heart sank. His escape would be more difficult now. How did he know she too didn't have a gun or had fetched more ammunition for Laura? There might even be bullets left in Laura's gun. He had to get to a phone.
Laura turned and froze. Then suddenly the two figures were wrestling, and looked in danger of falling into the water. His heart somersaulted. Jesus! It wasn't Julie but Thea. She was alive. But not for much longer if Laura had her way.
He sprang up, cursing through his chattering teeth, and propelled himself on to the jetty, his speed and agility hampered by his sea-soaked clothes and his shivering body. He cried out as he grasped the jetty with his wounded arm, the pain ripping through his body. Then he was running towards them. Were there any bullets left in that gun? He hoped to God not. Would Thea get hurt? At last he was there, grabbing Laura, pinning her arm behind her.
'She attacked me,' Laura cried. 'She's mad. She killed her brother and Jonathan, and she tried to kill me.'
Horton stared at Thea's thin, drawn face and saw anxiety and fear. He turned to Laura. 'Good try and it might have worked if you had stuck to your original story and hadn't already confessed to me.'
'Prove it,' she shouted defiantly.
'I think this is proof enough.' He indicated his arm which was throbbing like mad.
'She grabbed the gun from me and shot you.'
Horton followed Laura's gaze and saw that Thea was holding the gun. Suddenly, realizing it was in her hand, Thea looked as though she was about to throw it in the sea when Horton quickly said, 'I'll take that.' He held out his hand but Thea seemed reluctant to pass it over. Quietly he said, 'It's OK, Thea. I know what happened.'
She handed it over. Keeping his strong right hand on Laura, and trying not to think of the pain in his left arm, he managed to disable the gun seeing, with relief, that the magazine was empty anyway.
'You've got no evidence to show I was involved in any of these murders,' Laura cried. 'She's the killer. She's unbalanced. Owen told me.'
'It won't work.' Horton said, dragging her towards the summer house with a feeling that maybe it would. She would deny everything she had told him. They had found no evidence that Laura had been in Anmore's barn, and even if they did she'd claim she had met Anmore in his barn on other occasions. And her car had not been seen anywhere near it. She must have parked it some distance away and walked to the barn, killed Anmore and then walked back to her car using a torch to guide her. There would be no evidence on her boat either, because they'd have washed it down, and the sea would have destroyed the rest. But they might get something from the summer house though Jonathan had probably hosed it out and scrubbed it down; a tiny shard of glass meant nothing. Even then they couldn't actually prove Laura had shot Owen. And no one could prove she had killed Arina, unless a witness came forward, which was unlikely, or the silent Julie would help them, but somehow he doubted that. All he could get her on was the Whitefields land fraud, but even then she'd claim that she had been young, and completely infatuated with Jack. And she knew it.
Was there something he had missed? Something that would prove she was the killer. She stared boldly and defiantly at him in the bright light of the summer house. Thea looked worried. Horton could imagine what was going through her mind. They would still believe she had killed her brother, and now her prints were on Laura's gun. But they had no real evidence to prove that Thea had killed Owen or Anmore, and she hadn't even been in the country when Arina was killed. She was safe . . . but even then his gut told him a clever barrister would make mincemeat of him, and tear Thea to shreds, and Laura Rosewood could afford the best there was.
As if reading his mind she repeated with conviction, 'There is no evidence linking me to any of this.'
With disgust, Horton thrust her on to the sofa. He was chilled to the bone and Thea was also soaked to the skin, but he couldn't use a blanket or any type of covering in here and risk contaminating any fragment of evidence that might still conceivably exist from Owen's murder. He didn't want to think about the maggots and how Jonathan must have cleaned this place out.
He said, 'They'll believe the word of a police officer rather than you.'
'Not one who was recently suspended for raping a girl,' she declared smugly. Thea eyed him warily. 'Especially when you stormed into my house, assaulted me and forced me to lie. I was running away from you when you attacked me. I had to shoot you in self-defence. Or perhaps I'll claim that Thea showed up to kill me because she knew that Owen had confided his concerns about his sister's health to me. She wrestled with me, took my gun and shot you. I am a very persuasive woman, Andy, and a highly respected one with very good contacts in the police and the European Commission.'
He believed her. She was clever all right, but maybe not quite clever enough. It was time to tell her something which, he hoped, might provoke her into a fit of remorse, though he wasn't counting on it.
With as much confidence as he could muster he said, 'It's all been for nothing, Laura.'
She looked surprised for a moment but still cocky. 'What do you mean?'
'All these deaths. You needn't have done them.'
'You're talking rubbish,' she snapped.
Now for it. 'The scandal at Whitefields that Christopher Sutton told his daughter about had nothing to do with your land deal. It was Sir Christopher's role there fifty years ago.'
'What are you talking about?' She eyed him with irritation.
'Sir Christopher was transferred from the British Military Hospital in Tripoli during his National Service in late 1958 because he was caught in bed with a female member of staff. He was sent to Whitefields where he agreed to help out on secret drug experiments with the mentally ill patients. He didn't much mind because it was his field of specialism, pioneering new mind drugs and therapies.' Horton didn't know this for a fact but he could hazard an educated guess that this was the scandal that Arina had alluded to, and why Bella Westbury had been his housekeeper.
He said, 'The year in question, 1959, was the height of the Cold War. And that was the secret Sutton confessed on his deathbed, which you overheard Arina telling Owen. And one which would cause an international political scandal if it ever came out. It had nothing to do with your sordid, money-grabbing crime.'
Laura was eyeing him as if he was mad, but he thought he detected a glimmer of uncertainty in her keen blue eyes – though that could be wishful thinking on his part.
He continued. 'When Arina died so suddenly, Owen began to wonder if it was true and if the security services had silenced Arina. So he attempted to find out. He called on Dr Nelson, Sutton's colleague at Tripoli, who told him about the nurse and Sutton being sent away. When you hinted to Owen that you might know something about Whitefields he thought you might have discovered this secret through your political contacts or that perhaps Sir Christopher had hinted to you what he had been doing there. Owen understood and was more than willing to go along with your demands for caution and secrecy because he knew how dangerous it was. You killed him for the wrong reasons, Laura. Owen had no idea about your fraud or the fact that you'd been involved in the murder of his parents.'
'Rubbish!'
But he could see her trying to grasp this new knowledge. Horton threw Thea a look. She seemed in control of her emotions, but he guessed the turmoil inside her. 'You could have got away with it, Laura. You could have carried on quite happily. It's all been for nothing.'
The truth was beginning to sink in. There wasn't so much confidence about her eyes. But still with a trace of defiance, she said, 'You still can't prove I've killed anyone.'
'I think Inspector Horton can,' Thea said quietly.
'What do you know about it?' Laura hissed at her.
Thea dashed a glance at Horton. She said, 'I had the last postcard my mother sent me lodged in a book called The Lost Ghosts of the Isle of Wight. It was a photograph of Whitefields, but I didn't know where it was, and what it meant, until I visited Gordon Elms and saw the painting on his wall. I asked Owen about it and then he told me what Arina had said about Whitefields. He was scared the house was bugged so we talked in Owen's wild garden.'
Which, Horton recalled, was where Evelyn Mackie had seen them talking on the Friday before Owen's disappearance.
'That proves nothing,' Laura declared contemptuously.
'There's a witness.'
Horton stared at Thea, surprised.
She gave him an apologetic glance. 'I only discovered it this afternoon, which is why I came here. I didn't know whether she would be here and what I would do when I got here if she was, but I needed to be where Owen had died.' She shivered and hugged her arms around her slender chest as her sad eyes scoured the summer house. Horton wanted to go to her, but he couldn't afford to take his eye off Laura Rosewood.
Pulling herself together, Thea continued. 'I've been staying at Quarr Abbey in the guest house. I needed to be somewhere safe. I didn't know who I could trust. Jonathan Anmore called me at the hospital and told me that he knew who had killed my brother. He asked me to meet him by the marina in Yarmouth.'
And Horton knew that Laura had asked Anmore to call Thea to incriminate her further in her brother's death and to frame her for Anmore's murder.
Thea said, 'I got a lift from Mr Elms but as soon as I was at Yarmouth I felt a premonition of danger.'
'Why didn't you call me?' Horton cried, half annoyed and half in anguish.
'How could I? Who would believe me?'
Horton recalled his own disbelief of Thea's psychic powers on the Duver the morning he'd found her and felt a stab of guilt as she continued.
'DCI Birch made it quite clear to me from the beginning that he thought I was mad. I have a record of mental illness. It would only be a matter of time before everyone believed I had killed Owen. They'd have said I had an accomplice to help me get Owen's body to the Duver. They'd have thought of something to prove I did it.'
Sadly he knew that was true.
She was saying, 'I was going to cross to the mainland, then I realized that running away would make me look guilty. I didn't know where to go until I saw a poster advertising Quarr Abbey and I thought the monks would take me in. I managed to hitch a lift to Fishbourne with a woman who was catching the ferry to Portsmouth. She was returning to London after being on the island for a week. From there I walked to the Abbey.
'There's a rule of silence at the Abbey. No one can speak to me except the monk designated to take care of me. Tonight he could see how upset I was so I told him what had happened. Then amazingly he said he'd seen my brother. The resemblance between us is striking. He'd seen Owen walking along the beach early on Saturday afternoon, and spoke to him, but Owen didn't answer. Brother Joseph said Owen seemed upset and deeply troubled. He watched him head towards the pontoon with a woman whom he described to me. It was her.' She pointed at Laura. 'Brother Joseph heard a gun shot shortly afterwards, but he thought it was the farmer shooting rabbits. He didn't connect it with Owen, why should he? The Abbey doesn't have a television, radio or any contact with the outside world, so he had no idea what had happened.'
Laura leapt up. 'I'm not going to prison,' she cried, and before Horton could stop her she was out of the door and running towards the jetty. Cursing, he raced after her, but he didn't have the speed with his wet clothes and his freezing body, not to mention his arm feeling as though it was on fire. She was heading for the RIB. He knew he wouldn't get there in time to stop her.
Then she stalled and quickly he saw that the RIB had broken its mooring and was tossing on the tumultuous waves about three yards out to sea.
She dashed a glance at him. 'I'm not going to prison,' she repeated.
'Laura, it's over.'
'No.' She turned back to the sea and in that instant Horton knew what she was about to do.
'Laura. No.' But already he was too late. She was in the sea.
Frantically he looked around but there was no lifebelt or line to throw her. He peered into the pitch-black evening. Where the hell was she? Then his eyes picked out what he thought was a figure. Incredibly she was trying to swim towards the RIB. She'd never make it. He made to dive in after her when Thea grabbed his arm.
'Leave her,' she said urgently.
He strained his eyes out to sea, every instinct within him aching to go after her, but he knew that Thea was right. He was exhausted and he would be pretty useless with his wounded arm. Already the darkness had swallowed her up. She might make it. He should have tried.
'We have to call the coastguard and the lifeboat.' He turned and began running towards the house, knowing his mobile was useless after the soaking it had taken. His footsteps were heavy. He was too slow. If only they could reach her in time . . .
He crashed through the door, rushed for the phone and called the station. He told them to alert the lifeboat and coastguards. Then he called Cantelli.
'Are you still on the island?'
'We're just heading for the car ferry, though I don't much fancy the crossing in this weather.'
'Postpone it.' Horton gave him instructions on how to find Tideways and rang off. Cantelli would take him to A & E. He replaced the phone knowing they wouldn't find Laura Rosewood alive. He felt drained and exhausted, but turning to Thea standing behind him he knew that she was feeling worse than him. Swiftly he crossed to her and put his arms around her, feeling her thin, shivering body lean into his chest. Resting his chin on the top of her head, he closed his eyes and tried not to see the body of Laura Rosewood washed up on a beach, or the bloody, maggot-infested body of Owen Carlsson in the sand. Maybe Thea was thinking the same. He felt her pain, borne silently. She shed no tears. Maybe they would come later, maybe never.
After a moment she pulled away from him.
'Are you OK?' he asked. He always seemed to be asking her stupid questions, but she nodded.
'I didn't think she'd run away like that. I thought she'd try and bluff it out. She could have said Brother Joseph was mistaken, or that Owen had come here and left, or that I'd gone after him and I'd killed him.'
'There was too much building up against her. But being wrong annoyed her more than anything. She was angry at herself, for being trapped. She wasn't thinking straight. I should have stopped her.' He moved away from Thea.
'There was nothing you could do. You're bleeding, and freezing. What chance would you have of surviving? To die trying to save a killer would be a waste of your life.'
Horton knew she was right, but he didn't like it. 'I'll fetch us some blankets.'
'No. I'll go.'
He flicked the kettle on, then pulled off his sodden jacket and peered at his bloody T-shirt. His arm was throbbing and burning but he could see that the bullet had only taken a chunk of flesh out of his upper arm and hadn't penetrated the muscle.
Thea returned within minutes with a blanket draped around her shoulders and another for him. She was also carrying a first-aid box.
She began to clean his wound. He watched her for a moment, feeling a deep tenderness towards her that given time he knew could become more. After a while he said, 'Why didn't you answer the phone after Owen went missing?'
'For the same reason I didn't talk to Mrs Mackie, and why Owen and I talked in the garden. We didn't know who we could trust.'
'You trusted me the first time we met – why?'
She gave a small, tired smile. 'Let's just say it was a matter of instinct.'
He returned the smile, deciding not to press her further on that one. He felt his affection deepening with each passing moment before the bitter voice of past betrayals echoed in his head. Well, that could sod off for once.
Thea said, 'Both Bengal and I would be
dead if it hadn't been for you. How is he?'
'Wormed his way into Evelyn Mackie's affections, I'd say.' Like you have into mine.
'Good. I'd like him to find a comfortable home.'
She wouldn't be taking him back to Luxembourg with her then. Would she even be returning there? He guessed so and felt a pang of disappointment. He hoped it wouldn't be too soon. But those were questions for another day. Now he asked the question that had been bothering him.
'Did Jonathan Anmore tell you where to find Owen?' Laura Rosewood had said he'd called Thea, but Thea hadn't answered Terry Knowles' calls so why should she have answered Anmore's call?
She sat down beside him, her pale blue eyes sad and hollow with fatigue. Her hands were shaking slightly. Her chin came up and she held his gaze. 'No, he didn't.'
He knew it was the truth. He took her hands in his. They seemed so small and so thin. She made no effort to withdraw them.
Blood on the Sand Page 27