A Mind to Kill

by Brian Freemantle

‘Yes.’

  ‘So you know Mrs Lomax very well?’

  ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  ‘You sound reluctant?’

  ‘It depends upon what you mean by very well.’

  ‘What do you mean by very well, Ms Nicholls?’

  Damn the ‘Ms’. Rebecca said, ‘We really haven’t seen as much of each other in the last couple of years… longer maybe… as we once did. That’s what I mean. That we’ve kind of drifted apart.’

  ‘You were much closer when she worked here? When she lived in London?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you know of her affair with Gerald Lomax, when she worked here?’

  ‘That’s an impertinent question!’

  Bentley smiled. ‘That’s what policeman do, Ms Nicholls. Ask impertinent questions. Did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because you were close friends? Or because in these working surroundings…’ Bentley gestured to the open-plan, all-glass working area. ‘… it’s difficult to hide anything?’

  ‘As a friend, first. Then it became pretty much common knowledge.’

  ‘How did you feel about it?’

  ‘Feel about it?’

  ‘Gerald Lomax was a married man.’

  ‘It was their business, not mine.’

  ‘You didn’t have any moral feeling?’

  ‘I said it was their business!’

  ‘Why did Jennifer Lomax kill her husband?’

  Rebecca didn’t have to feign the surprise at the abrupt, hard demand. ‘I haven’t the slightest idea! How on earth should I know?’

  ‘She’d found out, hadn’t she? About you and Gerald?’

  Rebecca didn’t speak. From the warmth she knew she was colouring. ‘There was nothing to find out about Gerald and me.’

  ‘It’s difficult to hide anything in a place like this,’ reminded Bentley.

  There was no proof. The bastards down below might have guessed but they didn’t know – she and Gerald had been far more discreet than he had been with Jennifer – so they didn’t know and no-one could prove anything. ‘I had no relationship with Gerald Lomax.’ Rebecca was pleased at the steadiness in her voice.

  ‘It’s a nice flat, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gerald’s, here in London. A nice flat?’

  ‘I’ve only been there once. At a party for Emily. But yes, it is a nice flat.’ She shouldn’t have qualified the visit.

  ‘When would that have been?’

  ‘It must be more than a year ago.’ What was he getting at? They’d always been discreet there, too.

  ‘Not weeks ago? Or just days?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The security would have influenced Lomax’s choice, I suppose,’ said Bentley, conversationally. He loved questioning people who despised him: thought they were cleverer. ‘Very American.’

  Rebecca felt emptied by uncertainty. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re on the CCTV recording, Ms Nicholls. We’ve got you several times. It’s a long loop but it doesn’t go back years.’

  Rebecca Nicholls sat motionless, without expression, for several moments, before she began to sob. There were no tears.

  Bentley and Rodgers afterwards agreed that it was always the same: once the dam broke you got washed away in the confessional flood water until in the end you had to say something positive to get them to stop telling you the sexual fetishes of their grandmother’s pet hamster.

  Rebecca Nicholls admitted the affair had begun a month before Emily had been born and gave dates and hotels where she and Gerald Lomax had travelled together on overseas business trips, in addition to her accompanying him on the three-times-a-year updating and assessment returns to New York.

  ‘But Jennifer never knew.’

  ‘You want me to pull down those screens and tell me that again?’ demanded Bentley. He had what he wanted. He didn’t have to go around in circles any more. This was the part when she learned he wasn’t the dickhead she’d thought him to be but the hardest bastard she’d ever met and that he’d been playing with her – enjoying himself – all the time.

  ‘Are you going to charge me with anything?’

  ‘Fucking a married man isn’t a crime. Not in this country at least.’

  ‘What then?’ She showed no outrage at the dismissive obscenity. He’d won. She supposed it was a spoil of victory to humiliate her.

  ‘Bring a proper prosecution against Jennifer Lomax.’

  ‘She didn’t kill Gerry because of me.’

  ‘Sure.’ It was going to be a good case after all. Fuckable woman, eternal triangle, jealousy, revenge, all the ingredients. Plus a bloody clever – convincing almost – load of bollocks about hearing voices telling Jennifer what to do. Bentley was conscious of Rodgers looking at his watch beside him. He gave an imperceptible nod in return.

  ‘Gerry was going to tell her. Get a divorce.’

  ‘Did he?’ pounced Rodgers, sharing the questioning now.

  ‘No! He said he’d tell me before he did. But he didn’t say anything. So he hadn’t told her.’

  It was wrong, reflected Bentley, to believe it was only men who had their brains between their legs. ‘So you tell me, Ms Nicholls, why you think Jennifer Lomax came in here yesterday and tried to turn her husband into hamburger?’ The Americanism for an American had come to him after he’d begun speaking and he was proud of it.

  ‘I wasn’t responsible for his death.’ Real tears began, at last.

  ‘If it hadn’t been you it would have been someone else,’ said Rodgers. It was well past conclusion time.

  ‘We loved each other. We were going to get married.’

  ‘And live happily ever after?’ said Bentley.

  ‘Yes! Jennifer was a mistake. Like Jane had been a mistake.’

  Jesus, thought Bentley. ‘It’s a bastard, the search for eternal happiness. Maybe he’s found it now.’

  ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  ‘You’ll be called, as a witness.’

  ‘I won’t testify.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what you are or are not going to do, Ms Nicholls,’ warned Bentley, savouring the attitude Rebecca had attempted towards him at the beginning. ‘If you try to be stupid you’ll be subpoenaed. And if you refuse in court you’ll be jailed for contempt, among all those tongue-licking dykes. And if you try to leave the country I’ll apply for an international arrest warrant, which won’t achieve much but it’ll guarantee your name and photograph all over every newspaper you can think of and everyone can make up their own mind whether you were responsible or not.’

  ‘Bastard!’

  ‘Believe it.’

  ‘I’ll lose my job.’

  ‘You probably will,’ agreed Rodgers. It had just gone past the floodgates time.

  Bentley thought the same. ‘Thank you for your help.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back downstairs. Not this afternoon.’

  ‘Go home then,’ said Bentley.

  ‘Isn’t there any other way?’ pleaded the woman, tentatively.

  Not even on your back with your legs splayed, thought Bentley. ‘A man has been murdered, horribly. My only interest is in seeing that justice is done.’

  ‘She has to know? Jennifer, I mean?’

  ‘She already does, doesn’t she?’ Bentley pointed out.

  ‘I suppose so. Gerald should have told me.’

  ‘Gerald should have done a lot of things he didn’t.’

  ‘And not done a lot of the things that he did,’ picked up Rodgers, as the door closed behind the girl. He stood, looking down critically at the other man. ‘What the hell were you trying to do to me, about seeing that justice is done!’

  They both laughed.

  Bentley said, ‘Lomax must have had a dick like a donkey.’

  ‘And used it like one,’ agreed Rodgers. ‘You took a hell of a chance about a security camera. We don’t even know if there is one.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have
known either. She was too arrogant.’ He grinned. ‘Just like one of those television films, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Lucky,’ insisted Rodgers.

  ‘But I was right about another woman, wasn’t I!’

  ‘You took longer than an hour to prove it,’ argued Rodgers.

  Ceremoniously Bentley took a five-pound note from his wallet and handed it to the other man.

  ‘You could have done it under the hour,’ said Rodgers, accepting the bet.

  ‘I can’t stand superior cows like that: I enjoyed myself, bringing her down. That was worth five pounds. Can you imagine those legs locked around your neck?’

  Rodgers offered the money back. ‘You were right, about the case itself.’

  Bentley took his money back. ‘Wrapped and parcelled. We’ve got the classic woman-scorned scenario.’

  ‘What’s the voice in her head going to tell her now?’

  ‘That she tried but lost,’ said Bentley. ‘It’s a fucking nuisance we’ve got to go through things properly.’

  ‘That was part of it, wasn’t it?’ realized Rodgers. ‘Refusing any statement until she had a solicitor.’

  ‘Jennifer Lomax is a very cunning killer,’ judged Bentley. ‘We’ve got ourselves another good one here, Malcolm. It’ll run.’

  For the second night in succession, Bert Feltham got a call at home from Humphrey Perry.

  ‘Things look very different,’ announced Perry. ‘There was another woman. It looks as if Jennifer Lomax found out.’

  ‘She’s faking the voice in her head?’ It still inevitably had to be a guilty plea but it could turn out better. No-one liked insanity.

  ‘Bentley wants to interview her tomorrow at the hospital. Your man’s got to be there with me, obviously.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘There could be more mileage in this than we thought.’

  ‘Isn’t that why I have your home number?’

  Perry was being wise after the event but Feltham didn’t challenge him.

  Chapter Eight

  Jennifer – Jennifer Stone as she then was – had been Enco-Corps’ leading London trader during her last two years with the firm: it had been one of Lomax’s early jokes that he’d fallen in love with her professionally long before he’d been attracted in any other way.

  All traders have to ‘know’ markets, to be able to assess margins and percentages but the very best additionally can ‘feel’, to judge instinctively when a price has peaked and is about to fall or whether it has the buoyancy of a few more points or a commodity can go up a few more cents to attain that extra eighth or quarter per cent that turns a good position into a spectacular one. Jennifer could ‘know’ and ‘feel’ and had the added ability of a gambler able photographically to memorize every card played in a poker game: indeed, it was a soon abandoned party trick for her mentally to add and multiply and subtract complicated equations faster than people could compete on pocket calculators.

  All of which still only made up part of the legend of Jennifer Stone. It was completed by an awesome determination to be the best – to overcome any opposition or obstacle – in any trading deal upon which she embarked. It was another of Gerald Lomax’s remarks that he’d had Jennifer in mind when he attached ‘for piranha fish’ to the description of the totally glassed office as a goldfish bowl.

  The combination of abilities and attitudes made Jennifer special and without conceit or arrogance she knew it, like she knew she definitely wasn’t mad. To allow herself to think that would be the final abandonment, giving Jane the ultimate victory. And she’d never do that.

  It had been good – fulfilling – to have an unusual, unique mind: to be different. Living as she’d lived after her marriage had never been quite enough. She’d never admitted it but she’d felt wasted, unused, when she’d finally accepted it would be untenable for her to remain on a trading floor controlled by her husband or work on another in competition against him.

  Now she didn’t have that special mind any more. It had been stolen from her – invaded – and when she forced herself beyond the horror of Gerald’s killing and the numbing ebb and flow of exhaustion and the terrifying, unbelievable unreality of what was happening to her – ghosts didn’t exist! spiritual possession was nonsense! – Jennifer’s overwhelming feeling was of outrage, of being mentally raped.

  She’d lost Gerald, whom she’d adored. She wasn’t going to lose anything more. She was going to defeat Jane – stop whatever it was being done to her – whatever it took, whatever she had to do to achieve it. She’d never lost anything upon which she’d set her mind in the past and she wasn’t going to lose now.

  It took a long time for Jennifer to get to that conclusion. Jane was constantly with her every unsteady step of every weary thought, knowing each thought as it came, jeering and gloating over every one to goad Jennifer into the furious, even shouted, responses that were met with sighs and headshakes from the successive, guarding policewomen.

  Bur Jennifer learned in the persistently interrupted, disjointed process.

  It was unconscious at first, an impression rather than a proper awareness. Her bone-aching exhaustion triggered it, at Jane’s mockery of how grotesque she would look after the second utterly sleepless night she intended to impose: that and the physical sensation of numbness which Jennifer had imagined to be all part of the same fatigue. Until, that is, she made a different connection. The tingling, like the tingle of knocking the humerus in her elbow, seemed to precede by the merest fraction of a second the sound of Jane in her head. When there was no voice – a momentary gap in the possession – there was no numbness. It wasn’t a positive experiment – Jennifer then hadn’t learned enough.

  In the evening of the second day, confronted with the agony of not sleeping again, Jennifer very positively experimented, waiting for a moment of normality when the nurses were fixing another drip before blurting, ‘Please give me something very strong tonight to make me sleep.’

  The feeling at once suffused her. ‘ No! ’

  Jennifer’s jaw hurt in her determination not to speak.

  ‘ No! You don’t want it! ’

  ‘There was a note from the night staff yesterday that you didn’t sleep,’ agreed one of the nurses. ‘You were… distressed.’

  ‘Please,’ gritted Jennifer, through clamped teeth, careless of the pain from her lip. ‘I need something… so tired… very tired…’

  Jennifer’s skin was on fire, worse than ever before.

  ‘You all right?’ said the second nurse. ‘You’re very red.’

  ‘Just want to sleep.’ If she said anything about Jane they would dismiss her wanting a sedative as part of the madness: not give her anything.

  ‘ Say it! ’

  Jennifer stayed rigid faced.

  ‘ Say it, damn you! ’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ promised the first nurse. ‘It should be all right.’

  Jennifer’s shaking, which the nurses and the policewomen had become accustomed to, was from the physical effort of hanging on – of staying silent – until the nurses left the room. As soon as the door closed behind them Jennifer said, ‘Beat you.’ She spoke very quietly, her head sunk on her chest. The nearest policewoman looked, aware of the mutter but not hearing the words.

  ‘ You won’t, not again. ’

  ‘We’ll see.’ Jennifer was euphoric, wanting to laugh.

  ‘ Laugh then.’

  Jennifer tightened her mouth again. ‘Another mistake. Warned me against it.’ Jennifer tried but couldn’t stop the moan at the screech of anger that pounded agonizingly through her head. ‘Beat you,’ she managed. ‘Beat you again.’

  ‘ You can’t drug me out. They can’t drug me out. ’

  ‘Why are you so frightened then? So angry?’

  There was another echoing scream, as loud as before.

  ‘So angry, Jane? Lost control, haven’t you? Lost control to me.’ She wasn’t going to laugh aloud but she was still buo
yant at the excitement of fighting back.

  ‘ Not going to do you any good though, is it? Still won’t be able to convince anyone you’re not mad. Still the rest of your life in a mental asylum ’

  Jennifer shook her head. ‘I’ll find a way, like I found this way.’

  Jennifer brought her head up at the arrival of two new policewomen for the night-shift change-over.

  ‘Anything?’ asked the newly-arriving sergeant, ignoring Jennifer.

  The departing sergeant said, ‘Spent all afternoon mumbling to herself. Totally off her head.’

  ‘ Listen to them! ’

  ‘I’m not off my head!’ shouted Jennifer.

  None of the women bothered to look at her.

  ‘ Jennifer Stone’s

  A stupid drone

  So much off her head

  Might as well be dead. ’

  ‘Shitty poetry,’ dismissed Jennifer.

  ‘ I thought it was funny. ’

  Jennifer went to speak but quickly stopped, halted by the entry of the nurse who’d changed the saline drip. Now she carried a kidney bowl covered by a cloth.

  ‘ I’ll over-ride it! ’

  ‘The doctor says it’s OK. That you need to get some sleep.’

  ‘ Waste of time! ’

  ‘Please,’ said Jennifer, offering her free arm, sighing at the prick of the needle going into her arm. ‘Thank you. Thank you so very much.’

  Jennifer never fully lost consciousness. It was like the sort of half-asleep awareness she’d sometimes had when she knew she was dreaming and stayed like a spectator, refusing properly to wake up. Except this wasn’t a dream but the distant, frenzied voice of Jane trying to get through the sedation, becoming even more hysterical when Jennifer refused, as she’d refused with the real dreams.

  It was still early, although daylight, when she did surrender. But Jane wasn’t inside her head. Jennifer remained lying as she was, waiting but there was nothing and hurriedly Jennifer began thinking of the day ahead, seizing the respite. Humphrey Perry hadn’t given a time but she expected him to come that morning. With the barrister, he’d said. Jeremy Hall. Nice enough name. But not a QC. It probably wasn’t etiquette to make the protest direct to the man but she would. Bypass Perry completely and if he didn’t like it engage another solicitor. She couldn’t be bothered with niceties as desperate as she was. She’d still do her best not to offend Hall, of course. Make it clear she wanted to retain him as well but insist her defence be headed by the most experienced person. Proudfoot himself, in fact.