‘And it’s where Geoffrey Piggott is due to be at exactly eight o’clock to ring the bell that starts the concert.’
All three of them exchanged glances as they considered the repercussions if Dawson’s gut was right.
‘Oh shit,’ they all said as they began to run.
One Hundred Two
Laurence Winters closed the door and stood in front of it.
‘Graham, what the hell are you doing?’ he asked.
Kim caught up with the pure hatred that travelled across the pool between the parent and the school counsellor. As she looked around at them all she realised she was the only one who looked shocked.
‘I’m finishing it, Laurence,’ Graham said, heaving Saffie to her feet. The girl cried out but most of the sound was absorbed by the material in her mouth. Terror shone from her eyes.
What the hell was he finishing?
Kim tried frantically to fit the pieces together. Graham and Laurence had been Spades at the same time twenty-five years ago, but what did that have to do with Lorraine Peters and the murders of Sadie and Shaun? Had Graham been the father of Lorraine’s child? Had Laurence hurt her, and Graham was avenging her death by killing Laurence’s child?
But why do that twenty-five years later? It didn’t make sense.
Joanna had given Graham the abortion poem to decipher and explore with Sadie. He had pretended that he hadn’t understood it. And then Joanna had asked for it back to show her at the pub the night she’d died.
She suddenly realised that Graham had been able to tell them a great deal about Sadie’s inner feelings despite the fact she’d never opened up in her sessions.
Graham Steele had been in possession of the girl’s diary.
Graham Steele and Thorpe had been told by Joanna that it was Christian Fellows she had sent to look for Shaun Coffee-Todd.
Suddenly, Graham took a knife from his pocket and flicked it open.
He placed it at Saffie’s throat. The girl screamed.
Hannah gasped and reached out.
‘No one come any closer or I’ll slit her throat, I swear.’
‘Graham, I’m sure we can sort all this out if you just let Saffie go,’ Kim said.
He looked at her as though only just realising she was in the room. His eyes dismissed her as he turned back to Laurence Winters.
‘You don’t deserve any children, you bastard, after what you did.’
Again, Kim realised she was the only person in the room that had no clue what was going on. She knew that everything that had happened was linked to the death of Lorraine Peters right here in this pool twenty-five years ago.
‘Look at you, you fucker. Look at the both of you,’ he said, including Hannah in his sneer. ‘Look at the life you’ve lead. The charmed, perfect, entitled life with your happy little family. The fucking golden couple. Not so fucking happy now, is it, Laurence?’
‘You killed Sadie?’ Kim asked, taking a step along the length of the pool. She realised that he only had eyes for the Winters.
‘Of course I killed her,’ he spat over Saffie’s head. ‘And I’m going to kill this one and then we can call it a hat trick.’
The pieces suddenly fell into place in her head like an explosion playing backwards. Lorraine hadn’t been sleeping with Graham as she’d originally thought.
‘You were the father of Lorraine’s baby?’ she said, turning to Laurence Winters.
Before his response, Kim saw the distaste on the face of his wife. Kim was right: Hannah had known. All along she had known about the two of them.
All four of them now stood around the swimming pool where Lorraine had met her death.
‘But you pushed her?’ she said, turning to Graham. ‘You pushed her into an empty pool?’
He said nothing but continued to stare at Laurence. As did she.
‘Laurence, you knew she was pregnant with your child and you convinced him to push her. She was meeting the father of the baby that night. She was going to start telling people who you were.’
Laurence remained stubbornly silent. But Graham did not.
Still he did not look her way as he spoke, only at Laurence Winters. ‘It was my initiation into the Spades, wasn’t it, you bastard? You wanted me to play a joke. That’s what you said it was. You said there was a girl who was getting on your nerves, stalking you, bothering you. Teach her a lesson, make her feel stupid so she’d leave you alone.’
Kim looked at the emotion in the counsellor’s face, the anguish. Despite what he’d done there was something he didn’t know. Something Keats had picked up when looking at Lorraine’s post-mortem notes and now clear in her mind when she remembered a conversation with Saffie’s ex-boyfriend.
Kim knew she couldn’t suddenly take a rush at him to save the girl. He was too far away. The blade would have sliced across Saffie’s throat by the time she got there. A plan started to form in her mind. She knew that she held a surprise for all of them. If only she could get close enough to deliver it.
‘You told me to hide behind the diving board,’ he continued. ‘You said that’s where you always met. You told me to keep the lights off and then just push her into the water. I’d had a drink; I was nervous; I wanted to succeed. I was new and wanted to be a Spade. I should have realised there was no water in the pool. I should have seen that,’ he raged.
She took a step forward.
‘And you did it?’ Kim asked.
‘I didn’t know the pool was empty, and I didn’t know she was pregnant.’
Kim took another step forward as the blade hovered close to Saffie’s throat.
‘Every night I’ve dreamed of that baby. Of that innocent child I killed because of you. It’s haunted my dreams, picturing that life I took.
‘But you just lived your life happily, never once thinking of Lorraine or your child, just happy to be shot of them. You’ve lived guilt free while I’ve shouldered it all. My life ruined because you wanted to fuck the new—’
‘Graham,’ Hannah cried.
Kim took another step forward.
‘Oh fuck off, Hannah. You knew all about it. You were the golden couple. King of Spades and Queen of Hearts. You were meant for each other. Both intelligent, gorgeous, blessed, wealthy. A real power couple with a rosy, bright future ahead of you. Except Laurence wanted a bit of rough, didn’t he?’
‘But why Shaun?’ Kim asked taking another step towards her target. But she already knew. Shaun’s dad was the kid whose DNA had been tested twice.
‘Because that bastard covered for him. They somehow swapped samples so that Laurence would never be found out. It’s what Spades do.’
‘Why didn’t you come forward, Graham?’ Kim asked, taking another step.
‘He threatened me. Said he’d swear I was jealous and had killed Lorraine in a rage, and Cordell and the others would back him up. Told me I was a Spade and that my life would be hell for me and my family if I told the truth. Said he could arrange for my dad to lose his job and worse. He was an assembly line worker at Rover. I was a scholarship kid. He told me that Spades were everywhere.’
Kim stared into Saffie’s face. Their eyes met. Kim gave her a small nod.
Saffie looked confused.
‘So, you killed his child too?’ Kim asked.
‘These people don’t deserve children, and these two certainly didn’t deserve poor Sadie,’ he raged.
The point of the knife caught Saffie’s neck. A bubble of blood appeared.
To the girl’s credit she winced but didn’t cry out. Kim tried to reassure her by maintaining eye contact as she stepped once more to the side.
‘You know what they did, don’t you?’ Graham said, addressing her for the first time.
‘Yes, I know that Saffie recently had an abortion,’ Kim said.
‘An illegal abortion,’ he said. ‘Another child dead at the hands of these people. And it was a child, make no mistake. They can’t keep deciding which children get to live or die while their own remain unaff
ected.’
Kim saw the tears begin to flow over Saffie’s cheeks. What she had initially misread for disinterested detachment and coldness was really grief and mourning for her dead child. Her boyfriend, Eric, must have found out what she’d done and finished with her. It explained the hurt and disgust she’d seen in his eyes.
‘She’s too young to be a mother,’ Hannah cried.
‘Then she should have thought about that before she opened her legs. But I don’t blame her. I blame you two. It was you who arranged for her to go to Cordell for the termination. You think the law can’t touch you. You’re protected by the Spades. Justice can never punish you. But I can.’
The tears were running openly over Saffie’s cheeks and falling from her chin, leaving Kim in no doubt that the termination had not been Saffie’s choice. Kim now understood why the girl had refused to go home after Sadie’s death. Right now, she could not stand to be around the people who had forced her to abort her child.
But Kim needed to keep Graham talking to continue her journey along the pool. She had one tool in her arsenal, and it had to be timed perfectly.
‘It was you who sent the messages to Monty Johnson, you who welcomed him back to the group in exchange for the murder of Joanna Wade,’ Kim said. ‘You knew when she asked for the poem back that she was going to give it to me and I’d realise what had set these events in motion.’
‘You two seemed awfully close,’ he said, glancing her way.
‘Christian saw you, didn’t he?’ Kim asked. ‘He saw something when you were murdering Shaun in the locker room. You took him into the janitor’s room and strung him up, thinking you’d killed him. He’d done nothing wrong, you bastard,’ she growled.
‘I’m not the bastard,’ he said, looking at Laurence Winters, whose eyes were trained on his daughter. ‘He’s the cause of this. It all started with him.’
Kim knew she had to re-engage Saffie’s attention. The girl had to be ready to act when she got the opportunity, and Kim could only provide it once.
She took another step to the side.
‘And the guilt for killing that child all those years ago was the catalyst for the murders?’ Kim asked.
He nodded. ‘That event has shaped my whole life while they have cheerfully continued with theirs, ignorant of the torture. The guilt I’ve lived with for twenty-five years. That I took a life, two lives and—’
‘Except you didn’t,’ Kim said, finally arriving at her target. ‘Did he, Mrs Winters?’
One Hundred Three
‘What are you talking about?’ Hannah asked, looking Kim straight in the eye.
Kim remembered everything she’d learned from Keats about the death twenty-five years ago; the marks around Lorraine’s neck that didn’t fit with being pushed into the pool.
For the first time she saw shock on Laurence Winters’s face and knew she was right.
She had realised that Laurence wouldn’t have climbed down into the pool to finish Lorraine off. He hadn’t had the courage to do it the first time, he’d tricked Graham, so he wouldn’t have had the backbone to do it when that plan failed. It was Hannah who had warned Alistair Milton away from Saffie. He had called her the ruthless one.
‘Graham didn’t kill Lorraine. You did.’
Kim glanced towards Saffie, who moved away from the counsellor in the first few seconds of his confusion. She stumbled and fell but Graham was not looking her way anymore. She scrabbled across the tiled floor towards Kim.
‘You pushed her into the empty pool, Graham, but she didn’t die. Not until Hannah Winters climbed down there and finished the job just to be sure. Nothing was going to break up the power couple.’
Graham staggered forward. ‘No… no… no…’
‘Yes, Graham, she’s allowed you to suffer for the last twenty-five years knowing you didn’t kill her. Hannah finished her off with her bare hands around her neck.’
Laurence’s gaze was fixed on his stricken wife, numbed by shock.
‘Hannah?’ he said, doubtfully.
Stung by the horror in his face, her eyes hardened.
‘One of us had to make sure she was dead,’ she spat. ‘She would never have left us alone. She would have had that child and been tied to us for the rest of our…’
Her words trailed away as Graham began running towards the couple that had ruined his life.
Laurence Winters stepped into the path of the raging bull who could only see the woman that had allowed him to fester in his own guilt. His eyes locked on her, hatred radiating from his gaze.
Kim lurched towards them but knew she didn’t have the time.
‘Noooo…’ screamed Hannah as the knife slid effortlessly into Laurence’s torso.
Immediately the blood began to stain the pure white tuxedo.
Hannah stood motionless as her husband buckled to the ground.
Graham stood, rooted to the spot, holding the dripping knife.
Laurence falling to the ground offered Graham a clear path to the true object of his hatred. He took a step forward.
Kim grabbed his wrist as he turned the knife towards Hannah. She dodged out of its path as he held fast to the knife and waved it around.
‘Give it to me, Graham,’ she said urgently.
She locked the fingers of her free hand around his grip trying to loosen his hold.
The expression in his eyes was murderous as Hannah took a step towards her writhing husband.
‘Graham, give me the knife,’ she said, again.
He shook her off easily. He wasn’t hearing or seeing anything, only the woman leaning down on the ground.
Kim knew that any rational logic had left him. Anyone that got between him and his target would be hurt.
Three more steps and he’d be on Hannah.
Kim thought quickly. There were two places men were equally vulnerable whatever their size. His front was heading away from her, which ruled out the first.
She raised her right leg in the air and kicked hard at the back of his knees.
He stumbled and fell forward; the sound of the blade clattered against the tile.
Kim pounced on his back at the waist as though riding a horse. She had to stop him doing any more damage. Kim felt herself being lifted as he tried to buck her off his back. She held on tight to his jacket. She had to get that knife, and her only chance was while he was on the ground.
She lurched forward and landed around his middle back. His hand was back on the knife. She leaned forward, covering him, her breasts pushed against the back of his head.
She balled her hand up into a fist and smashed it down onto his fingers.
He cried out as his fingers splayed open.
She pushed the knife out of his reach as he lifted himself onto his knees, which caused her to topple off his back onto the tile. He lifted his injured hand and towered above her, his legs splayed above her knee. She raised her leg and struck him full force in the groin.
He tumbled down on top of her.
The weight knocked the breath from her body, but she took the opportunity to wriggle from beneath him. She balled up her fist and punched him in the face as hard as she could. The pain shot from her knuckles right up to her wrist.
Blood spurted from his nose as his eyes rolled into unconsciousness.
Kim turned to see Saffie nodding towards his right hand.
It took Kim three seconds to catch up.
Hannah Winters had disappeared and so had the knife.
One Hundred Four
Kim bent over Laurence Winters who was holding onto his stomach. The initial blood stream had slowed and from the noise he was making it was not life-threatening. He’d live and so would Hannah Winters if she had anything to do with it.
‘Saffie, are you okay?’ she asked, removing the gag from her mouth.
‘Y-yes… but my Dad…’ she said, moving towards him.
‘He’ll be fine,’ Kim said, grabbing Saffie’s wrists and untying the bandage that had bound her.
/> Saffie dropped to the floor beside her father.
‘Dad… dad… it’s me…’ she said, as the tears rolled over her cheeks.
‘Get his phone and call for an ambulance,’ Kim shouted as she tied Graham’s feet together and his wrists to the metal handrail that led into the pool.
‘He’s secure,’ she said, taking out her mobile phone. She could sure use a hand right now.
She groaned when she saw the cracked screen. Her thumb failed to light it up. It must have happened when Graham landed on top of her.
Damn it, she couldn’t waste any more time.
Kim looked at the distraught girl cradling the head of her groaning father, but she had to get after the girl’s mother.
She hit the fire alarm button as she raced out of the door. The siren rang out immediately, blasting her ears. But it was the fastest way to get help to Saffron and her father. Yes, she could wait for help from whoever responded to the fire alarm but every second that passed put space between her and an emotionally distraught woman with a four-inch blade.
She looked up and down the corridor and saw a flash of silver gown disappear around the corner.
And even though she was on her own she could see where Hannah Winters was heading.
One Hundred Five
Kim heard the sobbing as she opened the roof door.
‘There’s nowhere to go, Hannah,’ Kim said, spotting the woman to the left of a roof light. The knife sat on the ledge beside her hand.
‘Don’t come any closer,’ she said, without turning.
Kim ignored her and took a step as quietly as she could. In Hannah’s twisted mind the roof was a link to Sadie.
‘It’s all gone,’ she said quietly. ‘Sadie is dead, Laurence is dead, Saffie hates me.’
Kim should have guessed that her only regret was for herself.
‘Laurence isn’t dead,’ Kim said, using her voice to cover the fact she was taking another step.
Kim saw her nod her head. ‘Good, not that it matters. You saw the look on his face. Doesn’t matter that he was the one who planned it. And I was the one that made sure it happened. It’s because I never told him. I let him suffer all the guilt for her death.’
Dying Truth: A completely gripping crime thriller Page 28