“The thing is, Mr Smartarse Biographer, it was the other way round. I was exploiting you.”
“But why?”
“My father. Funny how everyone’s so interested in him now, when there’s money to be made, reputations at stake. Nobody gave a toss when he was killed.”
Franks shut his eyes, cursing his own sloppiness. He should never have accepted her story at face value. Normally he’d try to verify any information, especially when it was offered to him on a plate, but on this occasion lust had won the day.
“Leslie Jones?”
“Give the man a prize.”
And now he had it: the American accent had gone and in its place a featureless Home Counties tone. Perhaps a hint of South London roughness, burnished by education and travel.
She stepped back, flicked the shears to her right. “Into the bedroom.”
He gripped the sides of his chair. “Please,” he said. “I can help you. We can really make Randall suffer for this.”
“Oh, I did that when I killed his wife.” She spoke so casually that it took a few seconds for him to comprehend. “Right now, I’m more concerned with making you suffer.”
“What have I done?”
“Raped me, for a start.”
“What? That’s preposterous. Everything we did was consensual.”
“One more chance,” she said. “The bedroom.”
Truculently, he said, “No. I’ve nothing to apologise for.”
He saw her look away and followed her line of vision, realising too late it was a bluff. He tried to raise his hands as the shears swung at his head, but he wasn’t quick or strong enough to deflect the blow.
***
They were slowing down at the approach to the Dartford Tunnel when Nick’s phone rang. It was Melanie Pearce, and she sounded excited.
“I’ve had someone look at the Focus. The CCTV was clear enough to read the plate, but I’m afraid –”
“Registered with false details?”
“Afraid so.” She sounded suspicious. “You seem to know more than I do.”
Nick quickly ran through the situation with Howard Franks. When he finished, Pearce said, “I also rang the witness. He’s pretty sure Sarah was with a man, but then admitted that was largely because of the height difference.”
“The woman I’m picturing is tall and broad-shouldered.”
“You’ve met her?”
“That’s another story,” said Nick. “Do you think I could be right?”
“Using an untraceable car suggests pre-planning. You need to see the CCTV as soon as possible.”
“Okay. We’re about to go into the tunnel so we might lose you. There’s one other thing.”
Pearce groaned. “Go on.”
“I spoke to Franks about half an hour ago, but the call was disconnected and now I can’t get through. I’m worried this woman, Lindsay, might be there.”
Pearce didn’t hesitate. “Give me his address. I’ll get a car sent round.”
Nick read out the address. “Take care,” said Pearce. “Don’t approach the house till the police arrive.”
“They’ll be there long before us,” said Nick. He ended the call and added sadly, “I hope.”
Caitlin glanced over, then gave his leg a friendly squeeze. “We’ve done our best,” she said.
***
When Franks regained consciousness he found himself stripped naked and lying spread-eagled on the bed, his hands and feet securely bound to each corner of the frame. In a bitter irony, the restraints were a set of silk ropes he’d purchased for use in sex games with various lovers – games in which Lindsay had refused to participate.
She had also stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth and run packing tape over it. He had to swallow constantly to suppress the gag reflex. He knew if he vomited he could choke to death.
His head was throbbing from the blow with the shears, and he could feel blood trickling over his ear. He struggled to lift his head a few inches from the mattress and saw he was alone. He listened intently, praying she’d thought better of her actions and fled the house. Found himself compiling an inventory of the precious items she might have stolen.
Then the sound of movement downstairs brought him back to reality, and the most precious item of all: himself.
She’s not going anywhere, idiot. She hasn’t had her fun yet.
He let out a hopeless sigh and stared at the ceiling. How on earth had he landed in a situation like this?
A familiar hissing noise caused him to frown. Furniture polish? The woman was a psychopath. Why would she tie him up and then start on the housework?
It was such a ridiculous image, his body trembled with hysterical laughter. Then it occurred to him that she was wiping away fingerprints, erasing all trace of her presence.
In a frenzy he began pulling on the restraints, ignoring the pain as they bit into his skin and drew blood. He tried to cry out but the gag moved deeper into his throat. He choked, phlegm and bile spraying from his nostrils.
“Afternoon naps. Aren’t they refreshing?”
She moved into his eye line and stood at the foot of the bed. She was wearing an apron and rubber gloves.
“Quite a fashion accessory,” she said, displaying her arms and flexing the fingers. “Or are they another of your sex toys?”
He shook his head. Perhaps she was some kind of insane puritan.
“Shame we missed out on the barbecue,” Lindsay continued. “I’d intended this for after the meal, but Randall seems to have excelled at playing detective. Ah well. I’ll take the steaks with me, if it’s all the same to you?”
She waited for an answer, and then tutted. “Silly me. You can’t speak, can you?” She moved around the bed and he squirmed, contorting himself in a futile attempt to keep away from her.
“It’s not pleasant, is it, that feeling in your throat?” She leant over the bed, her face inches from his. “That’s what it’s like having your filthy cock in my mouth. And I had to enjoy it.”
She turned and bent down by the bed, picking up something from the floor. He shut his eyes, then decided it was worse not to know.
When he opened them, she was holding the shears.
He started thrashing uselessly, making a terrible crooning noise in his throat, some distant part of his brain registering pity at his lack of dignity. A rush of warmth flooded his thigh as his bladder opened.
Lindsay watched with the expression of detached amusement that he knew only too well. “Good idea,” she said. “Savour that last one while you can.”
It took him a second to work out what she meant. By then she’d moved down the bed, and he heard a metallic rasp as the blades opened.
He tried to scream as the shears brushed against his belly and closed around the soft, delicate skin of his shrivelled penis.
***
It took Nick and Caitlin over an hour to reach Franks’s home, in a leafy exclusive part of Highgate. Nick thought it might be difficult locating the exact address, but he needn’t have worried. An ambulance and a cluster of police vehicles marked the house, blue lights reflecting against the windows.
“Uh oh,” said Caitlin.
“Quite,” said Nick. “Do you have a feeling we’re too late?”
Caitlin parked as close as she could and they got out of the car. A couple of uniformed officers were unrolling crime scene tape around the perimeter of the property. The WPC intercepted them as they approached.
“Other side of the road, if you wouldn’t mind, folks.”
“Is this where Howard Franks lives?”
“You know him, do you?”
“We’re the reason you’re here,” Nick said. He explained his call to DCI Pearce, and her decision to alert the Metropolitan police. The WPC listened with undisguised scepticism and then went inside the house. She returned almost immediately with a slender grey-haired man of about fifty, who introduced himself as Detective Chief Inspector Phil Clements.
“I spoke to DCI Pearc
e a little earlier,” he said in a soft Welsh accent. “I take it you’re Mr Randall?”
“That’s right. Can you tell us what happened?”
“I think your phone call saved his life, that’s what happened.”
Nick found it difficult to conceal his surprise. His own interpretation was that he had sealed Franks’s fate, but perhaps DCI Clements hadn’t worked that out yet.
“It was an extremely savage attack,” Clements explained. “If it was this woman that DCI Pearce described, she left him to bleed to death.” He nodded back at the house. “As it was it’s taken the paramedics quite some time to stabilise him. They’re preparing to move him now.”
“Will he be all right?” Caitlin asked.
The detective shrugged. “They expect him to live, if that’s what you mean.”
“What did she do?” said Nick.
For a moment he seemed reluctant to tell them. “It looks like she knocked him unconscious and tied him to his bed…” The detective glanced back at the house, and winced. “Then she castrated him.”
P ART THREE
Septem ber 2003
A visit to a hospice on a bright, cold afternoon changed Alex’s life completely. With secondary tumours ravaging her body, Hilda Jones was rapidly shrinking, bitterness and hostility leaking from her like acid. All she ever talked about was the money.
Hilda’s spinster sister had died the year before and left everything to her only niece: Alex. Thanks to the overheated property market her modest bungalow in Dorchester fetched nearly two hundred thousand pounds. For Hilda, who’d never owned property or had any savings, it was a catastrophic blow. By that stage the cancer was too far advanced for the money to be of any use, but it didn’t stop her griping about what might have been.
“Could have had one of those luxury cruises,” was a typical lament. “I always wanted to see the Mediterranean.”
“You hate foreigners, remember?” Alex would say.
“I hate ‘em living in Croydon. Wouldn’t mind if they was serving me drinks and cleaning up after me.”
On her way up, one of the nurses had drawn Alex aside and warned of her decline. Alex was careful to exhibit the right degree of concern, and made sure she expressed her admiration for the palliative care staff.
There was a smell of decay in her mother’s room, impervious to the cleaning solvents and the bouquet of freesias that Alex had dutifully supplied. She pulled up a chair by the bedside and regarded what seemed no more than a husk beneath the blankets. She pictured a roaring furnace as her mother’s body was committed to the flames. Found herself licking her lips in anticipation.
Two weeks ago she’d happened upon a Sunday Times feature on Howard Franks. Her impression was of an arrogant self-publicist, but his intended biography of Eddie Randall had intrigued her. After years of trying to forget what had happened to her father, years of unhappiness, of failed relationships and thwarted ambition, she’d begun to wonder if she should confront her feelings rather than suppress them. Perhaps it was time to do something to correct the injustice.
If she could get close to Franks she’d have a rich source of information about the men who conspired to kill her father. What she would do with that information exactly, she could decide later.
Her mother stirred and made a cracking, stuttering sound. Alex lifted her head slightly and moistened the old woman’s throat with a sip of water.
“Billy?” she gasped, her eyes still shut. In her lucid moments she complained about the money. The rest of the time, drifting on morphine dreams, she talked to her son. There was a tiny ragged photograph of him by her bed, taken the Christmas before he died: eight-year-old Billy proudly clutching a new football. No pictures of her daughter, Alex noted.
“It’s me, Mum,” she said. “Billy’s dead.”
Hilda sank back into the pillow and was almost engulfed by it. After a couple of ragged breaths she said, “You killed him, didn’t you?”
Alex faked incomprehension, but underneath she was running through her options. Who knew? Who would believe it? Would she have to silence her mother right here and now? She glanced round, checking for eavesdroppers at the door.
“Why do you say that?”
“Billy was careful in the water. He was scared of the sea.” A single tear leaked from her closed eyes. “Pity he wasn’t scared of you.”
Alex said nothing. She folded her arms and waited.
“First my Leslie. Then Billy. All I had.”
The remark was a clumsy attempt to wound her, but Alex remained impassive.
“Tell me what happened,” Hilda said. “Nothing I can do now, is there? I just want you to admit it.”
Alex shrugged, smiled a gloating smile. “All right. I killed Billy. I held his head under the water and watched him die.”
Hilda didn’t speak for a long time. Alex began to think she’d fallen asleep. How easy it would be to press her mother’s face into the pillow and have done with it. She hadn’t killed for more than five years, and suddenly she realised how hungry she was to experience that power again.
And then the old woman’s eyes sprang open, and she uttered the words that opened the door: “You weren’t his, you know.”
Alex gulped, then hated herself for the satisfaction it gave her mother. “What do you mean?”
“Leslie. He wasn’t your dad. We’d only just got together when I found out I was carrying you.”
Alex examined her mother’s face carefully. The old witch might have concocted the story to torment her.
“Then who…?”
“Ha!” An exhalation of pure disgust. “He was evil. A monster. Just like you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Lowest of the low. A man who enjoyed hurting people. And when he wanted a woman, he took her.”
Alex hesitated. The information was coming too fast to process. “You mean he raped you?”
“Yeah. And I got you in return. The devil’s daughter.”
Alex turned away. This time she was struggling to hide her pain and confusion. Hilda was trying to lift her head, a dark intensity in her eyes.
“He’s rotting in hell now. And one day you’ll join him.” Her cracked lips began to quiver. “My Billy wouldn’t hurt a fly. You didn’t have to… didn’t have to…”
She couldn’t continue, and Alex in any event was no longer listening. She walked to the window and gazed out over the grounds of the hospice, the oak trees around the perimeter shivering in the wind. A plane rose out of Heathrow, cutting a bloodless incision in the sky.
Leslie and Alex, proud father and devoted daughter. Them against the world.
She spun round and returned to the bed, jostling her mother when the old woman refused to acknowledge her presence.
“Did Dad know? Did he know I wasn’t his?”
“Course he knew, silly cow. It was him that made me keep you. Weren’t my idea.”
“But why? Why would he…?” Baffled, she let the question hang in the overheated air.
“Because he was a good man. Decent. Just never had a chance in life, that’s all. There’s some that get it all handed on a plate, while the likes of my Leslie…”
Her voice grew weaker as the familiar litany emerged, until she was barely mouthing the words. Alex closed her eyes and experienced a moment of pure delight as the purpose of her existence became clear.
It was Leslie who had made her life possible. And he had loved her like a real daughter, cherished her as nobody before or since had done. That made his death all the more unjust, and Alex vowed right then that everyone associated with it would be punished, and their families made to suffer. This was her mission. Her project.
Her mother died that night. The next day a woman named Lindsay Price sent an email to Howard Franks’s publishers.
TWENTY- FOUR
It was after ten o’clock when Nick and Caitlin emerged from the police station in Hornsey, where they’d given lengthy statements and also, in Nick’s case, bee
n party to a conference call with DCI Pearce in Eastbourne. Over the course of a long evening Nick helped piece together an increasingly frightening scenario in which the daughter of a small-time 1960s villain had embarked on a mission of revenge against the men she held responsible for her father’s death.
Leslie’s daughter had been identified as Alex Jones, born February 1959, whose last known whereabouts was West Yorkshire, where she had worked in the microbiology department at the Leeds General Infirmary in the mid-1990s. After that, nothing. But Nick told them he was almost certain Sarah had been befriended by a woman called Alex a few months before her death. The detectives agreed that tracing Alex Jones would be their top priority.
In the meantime DCI Clements intended to hunt down and review what paperwork still existed for Leslie Jones’s murder. Other officers were assigned to investigate Mickey Leach’s death in a Bedford nursing home. And someone would be speaking to Ted Wheeler.
“Becoming Franks’s girlfriend was a masterstroke on her part,” Nick said. “It gave her access to everything he knew.”
“If that’s what happened,” Clements said, and then conceded, “although it does seem the likeliest explanation.”
“I suppose we should be grateful Franks never managed to find Wheeler.”
“Hmm. I don’t anticipate much co-operation there,” Clements observed. “An old pro like Wheeler won’t risk incriminating himself.”
Nick had mixed feelings about this. He’d felt duty bound to explain the allegations that Alex, posing as Lindsay, had made about his father, but Clements had greeted them with a degree of scepticism.
“What I can’t guarantee,” he cautioned, “is that the press won’t hear about it.”
Nick nodded. “Howard Franks will see to that, I’m sure.”
“If he lives to tell the tale.”
“If it’s not him, it’ll be someone else.” Nick knew that might sound callous, but by then he was past caring.
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