Jack-Knifed

by Wonny Lea

  Before receiving the call from DC Davies, she had been to lunch with Norman and Sandy and had been appalled by the wretched sadness in the house. They had been told they could go ahead with making arrangements for Mark’s funeral, and asked her for her ideas on what songs he would want at the service.

  As they had crossed the Severn Bridge and Paula noticed the rain clouds gathering, she remembered that Mark had often said that whatever the weather and whatever was happening, the one thing that kept him going was his music. It wouldn’t be a particularly cool choice, but Paula wondered if ‘Thank You For The Music’ would fit the bill. She knew that Sandy loved Abba, and her son had loved music so it could be a song that would unite them – she would suggest it to them when she rang them later.

  Matt caught her arm as she slipped slightly on the edge of the wet pavement, and she walked between the two men who knew the way to the HDU and seemed in a hurry to get there. Paula remarked that hospitals didn’t smell like hospitals anymore and suggested that with the shops and cafes dotted around one could be at an airport or such-like.

  She was chattering away because she felt very nervous and the thought of coming face to face with Mark’s sister was now hitting home. After all, Mark had been her best friend and this woman was one of his family, a family that had caused him most of the misery in his life. More than that, if the snippets of conversation she had picked up on the journey were true, his sister could have had some part to play in his murder …

  She asked the men to slow down a bit, and they took it easy walking up the second flight of stairs. ‘I need a couple of minutes to get my head around this,’ she said.

  ‘What about having a coffee first?’ Matt suggested.

  ‘No, on second thoughts, let’s get it over with,’ Paula replied, as they all entered the doors of the High Dependency Unit.

  All the beds were occupied, the nurses and doctors looked to be at full stretch, and there was more equipment than ever in use. Charge Nurse Paul Dobbs caught their eye and indicated they should wait while he checked on the status of Amy Wilson, who was behind one of the two bed screens.

  When he had checked, he came over to them and Martin introduced him to Paula. ‘Not much change in Amy’s mental condition,’ he told them. ‘She’s still away with the fairies most of the time, although I hope the fairies have ear plugs as her language has not improved. We are getting more concerned about her physical health, as there appears to be more damage to her major organs than first thought. She could come out of this but we are getting more and more worried by this somewhat unexpected deterioration.’

  ‘Is she fit to see us?’ Martin asked, almost dreading a negative response.

  ‘As fit as she is going to be,’ Paul said, and they all walked towards Amy’s bed.

  Paul pulled back the curtains to reveal Amy lashing out at one of the nurses, who was attempting to adjust a line that was coming adrift from a vent going into the patient’s arm. Amy looked up as the curtains opened and raised one eyebrow in the unusual way Martin had seen her do before. The effect was that the raised eyebrow sort of twitched involuntarily like a nervous tic – nothing of any significance just something she did.

  The effect for Paula was anything but insignificant, and as she clutched Martin’s arm he watched the colour drain from her face and her knees buckle as she headed towards a faint but somehow managed to stave it off.

  ‘You all right?’ He asked the usual senseless question of Paula but was also aware that the same question could be directed at Amy, who also looked shocked.

  It was Amy who recovered first from their mutual shock and spoke. ‘Bloody fucking Paula!’ The words were spat out as Martin and Matt looked at one another in total confusion.

  Paula whispered something that Martin didn’t quite catch, but she repeated it louder as her legs steadied and she became a bit more certain of herself.

  ‘Anne! It is Anne, isn’t it? So why did they say you were Mark’s sister, and what in the name of hell have you done to yourself?’

  Barely giving her time to finish the question Amy shouted back. ‘I’m not Anne, I’m not fucking Anne, and I never was fucking Anne, but she was how I got close to Mark.

  ‘I always knew how to find him and when he went to art college, well, that made it easy. I was good at art – much better than my freak of a brother – but I hated it almost as much as I hated you and soppy bloody Suzanne fawning over Mark’s work and saying how good it was.

  ‘When he was adopted by Mr and Mrs Too-much-fucking-money I hated all of you for making him out to be something special – he never was, he was always a fucking freak, from the minute he was born.

  ‘He always thought me – his big sister – would come running to him at some time and that’s why he fixed up his spare room – it was a glorified shrine for a pretty, pretty person who never existed – I hated it – I hated him. My father is all I have left thanks to your precious Mark and since my father was put away it’s been my mission in life to get rid of Mark – I just didn’t know how to do it.

  ‘I needed money and the fucking idiot even provided me with that! It beggars belief. When “Anne” cried to him over the phone because she had got herself into debt, the moron offered to give her a thousand pounds a month until she got back on her feet. I made sure that money was used to finish him off.’ She screamed and the whole ward froze at her last words. ‘Imagine paying for your own murder!’

  After this rapidly delivered outburst, liberally punctuated with obscenities, Amy suddenly and without any warning flung herself off the bed in Paula’s direction, bringing medical equipment crashing down. Paula, transfixed with the shock of what she had just heard, was unable to move and would have been an easy target.

  Fortunately, Amy didn’t get very far, and demonstrating just why the hospital staff had cause to be so concerned about her physical condition, she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  But for Matt Pryor’s intervention, Paula would have landed on top of her, as this time she did faint, albeit as a transient episode. Matt managed to get his arms under her shoulders and gently pulled her outside the curtained area. Her eyes had already reopened but she was obviously in a state of shock.

  Charge Nurse Williams didn’t have a clue what was going on, but understood well the effects of psychological trauma and helped Matt take Paula to the relatives’ room.

  Martin stayed behind the curtains and waited on one side while the HDU staff got Amy back to a place of physical safety. All the time she continued pouring out the story of her sad life, that to Martin was very illuminating, but the hospital staff were more surprised this time by the lack of expletives than by anything else.

  After a few minutes, much of what Amy was saying made little sense, and it became obvious that she was either drifting off to sleep or perhaps losing consciousness. He asked one of the nurses, who confirmed that Amy had been sedated but also that her underlying condition was deteriorating.

  Martin left her bedside and joined Matt and Paula in the relatives’ room, where they were both drinking the coffee that had been provided. Paula looked shell-shocked, but by now she had put together the pieces of the jigsaw and understood at least some of the saga that had unfolded.

  ‘I just can’t believe it, I really can’t,’ she told Martin, as he too accepted the coffee that was on offer. ‘I mean, I’ve known Anne for years, twenty-odd years! And it was Mark who first introduced her to me and to Suzanne. She hadn’t come from Whitchurch High School like the three of us, she met Mark at art college and then worked for the same graphic company as him – but she only lasted there a few months.’

  ‘And you don’t think Mark ever recognised her as his sister?’ asked Matt, who had already heard Paula go over some of this.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ responded Paula quickly. ‘He told me on many occasions that he would give the world to be reunited with his sister, so I’m certain he had no idea of Anne’s real identity.’ She turned her face towards Martin. ‘Anyway, yo
u met and interviewed Anne, and then you had the photographs of Amy – did you think they were one and the same person?’

  ‘Not for one minute,’ acknowledged Martin. ‘Apart from their strikingly different appearances, there was nothing to take us down that road – I have to confess it never entered my head.’

  ‘You hear about it, don’t you? People leading double lives, and even having totally separate families with both being totally unaware of the existence of the other. If that is possible, then what Anne did was not that difficult. I’m sorry, but I can’t get my head around having to think of her as Amy. Although I thought the four of us were close friends, if I think back now we weren’t actually that close to Anne at all – well, me and Suzanne weren’t, anyway. It’s not as if we ever lived together, and we met up on a prearranged basis so she always had plenty of notice to change her appearance – and with work and everything even those catch-ups weren’t that often these days. Do you think Mark found out the truth before he died?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Martin replied. ‘I think it’s likely that Amy turned up on his doorstep last Saturday night and he welcomed her as Anne into his home. We don’t believe her to be responsible for the actual murder of her brother, but we know she had been in the lounge just before it and may well have destroyed his sofa and attempted to burn his documents. But she would not have been alone.’

  Paula shivered. ‘It seems impossible that she would have known – caused – what had happened, and then just turned up on his doorstep with us a short time later and act all concerned. She must have really, really hated Mark, but she never showed any signs of it. How could she have just waited all these years … and who do you think actually did kill Mark?’

  ‘We think we know,’ said Martin. ‘However, we need evidence to back up our theories – it would have been good if we could have formally interviewed Amy following your identification but that is not going to be possible for the time being. We have to visit a house in Bristol but we also need to get you back to Cardiff.’

  Paula came up with an unexpected solution to that problem. ‘I have a cousin living about fifteen minutes away from here,’ she said. ‘I know I would be welcome there, and to be honest I can’t bear the thought of going back to my flat with all this going round in my head. Carole will come and pick me up if I ring her, and if you don’t mind that’s really what I’d like to do.’

  Martin agreed readily, and told Paula that although she could offload her experience and tell her cousin what had happened she should not for the present say anything to either Suzanne or Mark’s parents. ‘We’ll let you know the outcome of our planned investigations as soon as possible – then when everything is in the public domain you’ll probably all have a lot of talking to do.’

  Paula nodded, and made the phone call to her cousin who, as expected, said she was on her way. The nursing assistant who had provided the coffee agreed to stay with Paula until her cousin arrived and so the detectives made their way to the car, moving quickly as the rain was now coming down in sheets.

  This time Martin did not park away from the house. He drove right up to it and parked behind the dark blue Vauxhall that he recognised as one of the Bristol police surveillance vehicles. The checks that had been done on Jack Thompson showed him to be the owner of a black BMW, but there was no such car in evidence.

  Matt made their presence known to the driver of the blue car, who informed them that there had been no activity at the house since his arrival and that the best he had got from the lady of the house was her face at the window telling him to go away.

  He added that as his brief had been limited to looking out for Jack Thompson he had decided to sit tight until receiving more information or new orders. He had one of the pictures distributed by Bristol Prison, but said that he had been involved when Jack’s father Leo had been arrested, so he knew what his boy looked like.

  All three men were aware that their conversation was being witnessed, by Jack’s mother as her face was just visible in the downstairs window. At least two other faces could be counted in the windows of the adjoining houses – police activity at the Thompson household had been routine in the past, so maybe they had reason to expect some kind of show now.

  Martin walked the short path in a couple of strides and rang the doorbell twice, not really expecting or getting any response. ‘Mrs Thompson,’ he shouted through the still-gleaming letterbox. ‘You may remember me. I am Detective Inspector Phelps from the Cardiff CID and I need to talk to you some more about your son Jack.’

  There was still no movement from inside the house and Martin’s patience was wearing thin. He continued. ‘Look, we can do this the easy way with you opening the door, or we can break the door down – either way we will be coming in so you have just two minutes to decide which type of entrance we choose.’

  It took less than a minute for Eileen Thompson to decide she wanted to preserve the appearance of her front door, and reluctantly she undid two bolts and released the lock to let them in. If she had looked old beyond her years before, she now looked older than even her mother would have … if her mother had not been murdered by her husband.

  Despite himself and the current situation, Martin felt a surge of sympathy towards the woman, but it quickly faded as she spoke. ‘Don’t know what you lot want back here – I told you, Jack’s not here, and I don’t know where he is, and that’s all I have to say and you can’t make me say any more, so there.’

  ‘OK,’ replied Martin. ‘If you don’t know where your son is, then you don’t know where he is, and we understand that. But you in turn need to understand that it is of the utmost importance that we find him as soon as possible.’

  ‘You lot never leave us alone’ she complained. ‘Just because Jack’s father is no bloody good it doesn’t mean that my Jack is the same – he’s a good boy, not the same as his father at all.’

  ‘That may well be the case’ responded Martin. ‘We still need to speak to him, though, so if you know of anywhere he hangs out, or if there are any friends who may know where he is, then I urge you to tell us.’

  The tone of Martin’s voice left no doubt as to the seriousness of her son’s position, but Eileen Thompson didn’t respond to the question, instead asking a question of her own. ‘What’s he supposed to have done – robbed a bank or somethin’?’

  ‘“Or something” would be more accurate,’ said Martin. ‘At this moment in time we can’t prove that your son has done anything, but our investigations are regarding the brutal murder of a man in Cardiff last Saturday.’

  At the mention of ‘brutal murder’, Eileen lost the full use of her legs, and just managed to get to a chair before collapsing. But then she seemed to go on automatic pilot as she spoke. ‘Well that rules my Jack out, don’t it – he was here all day last Saturday – with me – here with me, his mother.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ Matt questioned. ‘He didn’t go out all day or during the evening – not even for a couple of hours?’

  ‘Don’t you lot listen? I just told you he was here all the time so you’d better go and find someone else to stitch up for this – you’re not getting my Jack.’ Mrs Thompson’s voice, that had been quivering, now held firm as she fervently defended her son and gave him the alibi neither officer wanted to hear.

  ‘If you are sure there is nothing more you can tell us, then all we can do is to wait until your son turns up, and until that time I’m afraid our friend in the blue car out there is going to remain on your doorstop.’ Walking towards the front door, Martin could not be sure if he really heard something or if it was just a gut feeling that made him whisper to Matt. ‘Ask our friend in the blue Vauxhall to send for backup and then get back here pronto.’

  Matt hurried to do as requested while Martin went through the routine of thanking Mrs Thompson for her help and encouraging her further co-operation. As soon as Martin saw his DS coming back up the path, he stepped behind Mrs Thompson and made his way up the stair
s.

  The reaction from Jack’s mother was spontaneous, leaving Martin in no doubt that his suspicions were correct as she shouted in a voice triple its normal strength, ‘Look out Jack, they know you’re up there!’

  Three doors faced Martin at the top of the stairs, but only one had a lock as part of the furnishing and Martin stood outside that one waiting while Matt checked the other rooms.

  ‘Nothing here, guv,’ he confirmed. ‘Just the same amazing level of tidiness and cleanliness we have seen everywhere else, the woman is a bloody fanatic.’

  ‘This house is probably all she has in life,’ responded Martin. ‘Except the son who is behind this door, and we’re about to take that from her.’

  Both men stared at the door. All their instincts told them to wait for the backup they had requested, but another thought had occurred to both of them and Matt expressed it. ‘We will look a bit bloody stupid if he decides to top himself in there with us standing outside, guv, what do you think?’

  ‘Well, the door is just your average internal door, but that lock will take some busting – how strong are you feeling?’

  Needing no second bidding Matt thanked the gods for his rugby training and raised his leg so that his foot hit the lock full-on, followed by the not inconsiderable force of his body weight. In films and on the television, detectives always seem to use their shoulders to break down doors, but Matt’s method was definitely more effective. Most of the lock gave way immediately, and with just another couple of strategically placed kicks they had gained entry to Jack’s room.