Silent Scream

by Lynda La Plante

  ‘So she couldn’t have been involved in the murder?’

  He hesitated. ‘Suppose not.’

  Langton took over again.

  ‘That still leaves you, so take us through exactly what happened when Miss Delany returned home early that morning.’

  Lester wiped his face.

  ‘I told you. I said to her I’d checked everything out and nothing seemed to be of concern, so I left.’

  ‘So both you and Jeannie Bale went out of the garden doors and then down the alley back to the main road?’

  ‘Yeah, ’cos my car was parked up there.’

  Langton opened his file again and made a note.

  ‘Why didn’t you park in the mews?’

  ‘Ah well, there is a reason. My brother Harry would be driving her back from the film unit, right? And I didn’t want him to know I was there waiting for her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have approved. Both he and Tony are sticklers for keeping artists at arm’s length, very professional they are.’

  Langton closed his folder again, and picked up his pen and replaced the cap. Anna followed suit. Their ploy worked. It appeared that they were finishing the interview, which made Lester relax. He smiled.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve wasted your time. I should have said some of this to you before in my first interview, but I’ve explained my reasons.’

  Langton nodded and thanked him. It was Anna’s turn.

  ‘Do you have any tattoos?’ She asked pleasantly.

  He jerked with surprise. ‘No.’

  ‘Would you please take your shirt off, Mr James?’ She spoke quietly and Lester looked at his solicitor in confusion.

  ‘Is there a reason you wish my client to remove his clothes?’ the solicitor asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Anna replied. ‘If Mr James refuses, then we’ll have to stop the interview for now and get the necessary authority to strip-search him.’

  Lester glanced once more at his solicitor, who gave him a small shrug of his shoulders as if to say it was up to him. First Lester undid the buttons on his cuffs and then slowly, button by button, he opened his shirt. He stretched it wide for them to see his bare chest.

  ‘Take the shirt off, please,’ Anna said firmly.

  ‘Why? You looking for scratches or something?’ Lester glared at her. ‘There won’t be any ’cos I never was involved. This is stupid.’

  ‘Just take your shirt off, and then stand up and turn around.’

  Langton looked at Anna, frowning. Lester pushed back his chair to stand in front of the table. His muscles stood out, as did his six-pack and small waist, as he inched the shirt away from his trousers and took it off. He held it in one hand, staring at both of them.

  ‘Satisfied? Or do you want my pants off as well?’

  ‘Turn around, please.’

  Slowly Lester turned. Even his solicitor peered at his back with interest and then with shock.

  Over almost his entire back Lester had a tattoo of Amanda Delany’s face. It was a good if rather exaggerated likeness, with her blue eyes and blonde hair and wide lips parted in a sexual pout.

  ‘You can put your shirt back on now, Mr James,’ Anna instructed.

  Lester remained standing as he drew on his shirt, carefully buttoning up the front, leaving the sleeves loose.

  ‘Sit down, please.’

  Langton looked at Anna, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘It must have hurt a lot when she laughed at your tattoo. Maybe not to your face, but she wrote about it in her diary, said it wasn’t a good likeness. I disagree, it’s very good – pity she didn’t see the finished tattoo. You had it completed in Amsterdam, didn’t you?’

  Lester nodded. It was as if all the fight had drained out of him.

  ‘Do you turn to see it in your mirror? Or is just knowing she’s there enough?’

  He swallowed. It was almost painful to watch the many expressions passing across his face, hurt being uppermost.

  ‘You loved her, didn’t you?’ Anna asked gently.

  He gave a small nod and his eyes welled up with tears.

  ‘What did she say to you that made you so angry you made sure no one else could have her?’

  He remained silent. Anna continued in the same low tone of voice, not wanting to break the mood. She suggested that after Jeannie Bale left him in the lounge at Amanda’s house, something must have happened for him to lose control, wanting perhaps to hurt Amanda Delany the way she had hurt him. She got no reaction; Lester remained sitting like a block of wood in front of them. Now Langton leaned forward.

  ‘Come on, Lester, give it up. You stabbed Amanda Delany over and over again and then you combed her hair and spread it over the pillow, never touching her face so she looked perfect, just like she looks on your body.’

  ‘No,’ he said softly, and then his body shook as he took a deep breath.

  ‘Stabbed her repeatedly, didn’t you? Neat fast incisions, one after the other. Did she cry out? Beg you to stop?’

  ‘No.’ It sounded like a low moan.

  ‘Unless the first stab silenced her, and you knew what you were doing, one, two. Did she shudder, beg you to stop, or did she—?’

  ‘The first stab killed her. I’m a professional. I’m not sure how many other times I stabbed her, but she didn’t cry out, she didn’t feel any pain.’

  Lester gradually became more composed. Looking at his solicitor, he said quietly that he had done it. There was no point in pretending any more, he was admitting it.

  ‘That’s best for you, Lester,’ Langton urged him. ‘Tell us what exactly happened to make you do it… Come on, you’ll feel better if you let it all out.’

  ‘I loved her, I’d have done anything for her,’ Lester said, almost dreamily. ‘Five years I’d taken care of her, five years or more she’d depended on me. I never liked her taking drugs, but she insisted. I only got the drugs for her to keep her happy, and when she wanted gear for her friends I did that too, but I’ve never touched them myself – I value my health too much. She needed them to function, used to say that unless she had them, unless I got them for her, she’d go to some street dealer and get shit given to her, and then the press would find out. So I did it, always made sure it was good quality stuff, and I never let her use heroin. But she got into crack cocaine and that was her undoing. That movie actor Colin O’Dell was the first to give it to her, and then she used to get real nasty with me if I didn’t score it for her, so I did.’

  It took a long time for Lester to retrace the events that drove him to commit murder. It was when Amanda made him score for her friends that he became angry. But the biggest insult had come when she insisted he drive Colin O’Dell and Scott Myers and he had had to listen to the two of them laughing and talking about their threesome and what a slag Amanda was. He had wanted to stop his car and get out and beat the living daylights out of the pair of them, but he had controlled himself. He had rarely had full consensual sex with her and never in her bed, but he had always believed that one day she would realise that he was the only person who really cared about her.

  ‘She told me her grandfather had sexually abused her from when she was only six years old, that her parents would never believe her because her grandfather paid for everything, and even when she had told her mother that he was molesting her, all she had said was it didn’t matter because he had done the same to her.’

  Lester passed a hand over his eyes.

  ‘What kind of a mother is that, to allow it to go on, simply to maintain their luxurious lifestyle? Sick people – sick, perverted people – they never knew what they had done to her. Amanda was damaged goods and that’s what made me so protective of her. She always said that without me there was no one else.’

  Lester described how he had tried to persuade her to get help, but even at the worst time of her life, her parents had let her down again.

  ‘She was pregnant, and she’d spent all the money she’d earned on her film on that bunch of
no-hopers she shared a flat with. She fed them, paid the rent, gave them money and drugs and they were always wanting more, especially that parasite Jeannie Bale. Amanda felt guilty about her losing the part to her, so she was constantly trying to make up for it by giving her clothes and stuff’

  Anna asked if it was true that Amanda was pregnant by her grandfather and he shook his head.

  ‘No, it was one of them she was seeing, Scott Myers or Colin O’Dell, but she didn’t know which one, and they wouldn’t admit it. She was so desperate she went back to her parents wanting an abortion, but they wouldn’t give her the money. So she came back and by this time she was four months gone, and I said to her that it was dangerous to have it terminated. I told her that I’d marry her and look after her and the kid, that’s how much I loved her, but that piece of shit Jeannie Bale got the address of some abortionist over in Wandsworth, and Amanda made me drive her there and wait while she had it done.’

  Langton gave a covert look at his watch, as Lester told them about how he had driven her for the next two years, as she became more famous and more dependent on drugs. By now she was fodder for the media and she loved it. Sometimes she would call the paparazzi herself to make sure they were outside a club or party to see her falling over and having one sexual affair after another.

  ‘But she always came back to me.’

  He described how he’d picked up Amanda’s diary from the Maida Vale flat and had given it back to her straight away.

  ‘Did you read it?’ Anna asked.

  ‘No, it was private, and I knew Jeannie was lying about what was in it as she just wanted to get me all riled up.’

  ‘What did Amanda say when you returned it?’

  ‘She hugged me and then began to act all crazy, dancing around with it, saying she was gonna make a lot of people sorry for treating her like shit. I assumed she was talking about her parents.’

  ‘When did you know what it contained? That it had lots of references to you?’

  Lester closed his eyes to think. They could almost see the wheels in his brain turning.

  ‘I wanted to find her BlackBerry – you know, get back in her good books because she believed that I’d taken it – and that was when I went back to that horrible flat.’

  Jeannie Bale had been at home, and she had sneered at Lester, told him again that if he had any sense he would walk away from Amanda as she was using him and laughing about him behind his back. Jeannie repeated things that she’d read in the diary, and as she knew about the tattoo, he started believing her and became very upset. She said that Amanda was going to make a lot of money, millions, by selling her life story to a publisher.

  ‘Then I got a call from Amanda, in a right state as she’d heard someone screaming the night before and it had woken her up. She said she was scared to go home and wanted me to check the place out and act as a bodyguard for her.’

  Lester said that he had gone to the film unit as Amanda was filming on nights. She said that she wouldn’t be released until around five in the morning and would be scared to be alone in her house. She gave him her own set of keys, and instructed him to wait in the house until she got home.

  ‘I didn’t like the way she ordered me around and kept on asking me if I was sure no one had seen me entering her trailer as she didn’t want any gossip about it. I honest to God intended doing just what she asked me to do, but then I thought I had enough time as it was only about twelve. I could pick up Jeannie and we’d both go over there. It was ’cos I was pissed off at the way I’d been spoken to, know what I mean?’

  ‘Why would you do that? Take Jeannie Bale to the mews?’

  Lester paused, then looked at his solicitor, who said, ‘Just tell them the truth, Lester.’

  ‘In enough shit, am I?’ He gave a rueful smile.

  Anna repeated the question.

  ‘All right, Jeannie kept on at me about the diary, and she said I should read it ’cos of all the stuff Amanda had written about me, and to be honest, I was starting to believe her, especially as she was going on and on about how much money it was worth. She kept on saying I had a right to a cut of the money.’

  ‘She wanted to get her hands on it, did she?’ Langton asked, and Lester nodded.

  Langton directed Lester to give them the details of exactly what happened when he and Jeannie were at Amanda’s house, this time the truth.

  ‘The diary, that was all I was there for.’

  ‘Did you find out what was written about you?’

  He nodded. Anna jotted a note and passed it to Langton, reminding him that Jeannie had stated that she had found the diary hidden in the toy rabbit and had taken it, leaving Lester alone. But if, as he said, he had read it, then Jeannie was lying.

  ‘I couldn’t find it, and we was careful we both put gloves on, and kept the lights off. We searched everywhere, in all the cupboards. It took ages and I had to keep my eye on Jeannie because I was worried she’d nick something. Anyways, I finally found it. It was on Amanda’s bed inside this fluffy rabbit she carried around with her. It had a zip up the back, and she always kept her stash of cocaine in it.’

  ‘So you then read it?’

  ‘Yeah, I started it. I couldn’t believe the stuff she’d written about me, it made me sick to my stomach. This was when Jeannie said we should just take it if it was worth money, and I told her to put it back where we found it, but she wouldn’t and we were pulling at it between us when we heard the car driving into the mews. I got panic-stricken and I knew if Amanda found Jeannie there she’d go crazy so I told Jeannie to get in the kitchen and let me do the talking.’

  Lester had looked out of the window, seen his brother’s car and stayed in the bedroom, waiting for her to let herself in.

  ‘For a second, I thought Harry was coming in with her, but he just waited until she’d shut the front door and then he reversed and drove out of the mews. She called out my name, and I said to her I was in the bedroom. I was worried she was going to go into the kitchen and find Jeannie in there, so I opened the door and she was switching on the lights in the hall.’

  Amanda had gone upstairs to the bedroom, and he had told her that he’d checked everything out and there was nothing to worry about. She said that she was tired and wanted to go straight to bed. She waved Lester away as if he was annoying her.

  Lester reached for a bottle of water and unscrewed the cap. No one spoke, waiting for him to continue, while he gulped two mouthfuls down. Then he told them how he had confronted her with the diary.

  ‘I held it up. I’d got the fucking rabbit in one hand and the diary in the other, and she went for me, screaming at me to give it to her. She was like a crazy rat scratching at me, and I pushed her down on the bed, said to her that I’d read it, and I was disgusted with her, as all I had ever done was look out for her.’

  He was close to tears as he described how Amanda had started to undress, teasing him, saying that she had only written the truth, that he was useless in bed and all he had ever really wanted was to fuck her. Now he could if he wanted to, she didn’t care – he could take his kit off, see if he could get it up, and she was laughing cruelly as he threw the diary at her.

  ‘She picked it up and flicked through the pages until she came to something about me, and she was doin’ a funny voice, and I went closer to the bed. She could see I was getting into a real rage with her and she kept on telling me to undress. I pulled at the belt and I had my Commando knife there. You know, I was there to see if there were any problems, so I’d come prepared, and I unsheathed it and … I stabbed her. It was so fast, and she sort of flopped back with her mouth open, and she just looked at me, so I did it again. She didn’t move or cry out, she did nothing to try and stop me, so I did it again, and again, and again …’

  He began to sob, and Anna passed him the water, as he tried to get his handkerchief out of his trouser pocket.

  ‘I think the second stab killed her because there was so little blood, nothing spurted out, and I just stood th
ere, staring down at her, and then I heard screaming. It freaked me out. It was Jeannie standing in the doorway, screaming her head off, asking me over and over what had I done …’

  ‘So Jeannie Bale was still in the house?’ Anna asked.

  Lester nodded. They had cleaned up the bedroom, and Jeannie had shouted at him when she saw him combing Amanda’s hair. They had to get out, she said. He noticed that the rabbit and the diary were gone. Jeannie had said that she would keep silent if he let her take them; she said she would destroy them, but only if he never told anyone about her being there that night. She left the back way, as he stayed on, clearing up anything that might show he had been there.

  Lester went on to describe how he had been the one to pass heroin to Dan Hutchins, and the part Jeannie had played when she called Lester to say he should buy the computer from Dan, as Dan needed the money, in case there was anything about the diary on it. Lester had taken the computer home and smashed it up, then left for Amsterdam. He had no idea that Jeannie had attempted to sell the diary to Amanda’s father or had approached the publishers. He too suspected Jeannie of pushing Felicity Turner overboard; she was a real piece of work, and if she had stuck to their deal, he would have never implicated her in covering up the murder.

  ‘Jeannie Bale only ever wanted to be Amanda. She was obsessed by her and felt that everything she had should have been hers.’

  Chillingly, Lester described how Jeannie had helped him stretch out Amanda’s body to lie as if sleeping on the bed, the way she had cut up a black plastic binliner to cover her clothes so as not to get any bloodstains on them. Only when he had combed Amanda’s hair had she become hysterical.

  Lester’s last words to Langton and Anna before he was taken down to the cells were wretchedly sad.

  ‘First time I had ever seen her naked was that night, first time I had ever held her body. It was like holding a fragile doll, so thin, her ribs stuck out, her hipbones, her legs were like a skinny child’s. The stab wounds must have cut right through her, she was so tiny, and all that was perfect was her face, and now I have her with me for ever. If she’d seen my tattoo completed she wouldn’t have laughed, she’d have been proud.’