Sour Grapes

by Natasha Cooper

  Chapter Twelve

  Willow had expected some difficulty in finding Susie Peatsea, in spite of the unusual surname, but when she looked in the telephone directory, there was an entry for Peatsea, P. G., at the number George Tedsmore had given her with an address in Uxbridge.

  Having changed into an anonymous navy-blue suit and paler blue shirt to make herself look like a government official of some kind, and taken an old clipboard from the bottom drawer of her desk, Willow drove to Uxbridge. She found a parking space easily and knocked on the blistered black wooden door of the Peatseas’ house. It was opened by a dumpy young woman in her late teens or early twenties.

  She had a round, reddish face with small muddy-coloured eyes and an upturned nose, unbecomingly short, dull-brown hair and an even more unbecomingly short pink skirt worn with a tight white shirt.

  ‘Susie Peatsea?’ said Willow, trying to make her voice sound bright and official.

  ‘Yes?’ said the young woman, looking mystified and rather worried. ‘What d’you want?’

  Willow pulled her clipboard from under her arm, consulted an imaginary note on it and then looked up. ‘I believe you have some information for us about Terry Lepe.’

  ‘I never,’ she said at once, trying to shut the door and looking as though she might cry. Willow stepped forward, saying kindly but firmly, ‘Now, now, Susie, please don’t be silly. I have evidence that you telephoned him at his company’s head office a great many times. Now, let’s get on with it, shall we?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Oh, dear. Why’s that? Shall I come in? We do need to talk about this, you know.’

  ‘No,’ she said, but she sounded terrified rather than stubborn.

  Willow smiled reassuringly and said briskly, ‘Now come along.’

  Susie walked a little further out on to the doorstep and hissed, ‘Mum’d kill me. Honest I can’t let you in.’

  ‘Then where can we talk? It has to be today. It’s imperative,’ said Willow, deliberately picking a pompous, official-sounding word. It seemed to have the desired effect as Susie’s shoulders sagged in defeat.

  ‘OK, then, if I have to. There’s a café down the road. You go and I’ll join you. Joe’s Café, it’s called. But please don’t make a noise now.’

  It had not taken Willow long to realise that Susie was less than bright, but even so she was surprised not to have been asked for her name or even which organisation she represented. She was older than Susie, dressed in the sort of clothes people in authority might wear, and she spoke with confidence; that appeared to be enough.

  ‘Very well. I shall await you at Joe’s Café. Please be as quick as you can.’

  Hoping that Susie would not find enough courage to ignore her instructions, Willow walked down to the road to the café. It was pleasanter than she had expected and much cleaner. She ordered a cup of tea and a fresh-looking flapjack from a pile under a perspex dome on the counter.

  Before they had been brought to her table, Susie appeared in the doorway. Willow stood up and beckoned.

  ‘Would you like tea?’ she asked when Susie reached the table. ‘Or something else? And what about a flapjack?’

  ‘Tea. Ta, I don’t want nothing to eat.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Willow and signalled to the waitress for another cup of tea. ‘Well now, sit down and tell me what you know of Terry.’ She laid the clipboard on the table and sat with a felt-tipped pen poised to write.

  ‘I don’t know nothing.’

  ‘Now, come along, Susan, and don’t play games with me.’ Willow was letting herself sound more severe. ‘He was your boyfriend, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Well, sort of. Don’t tell my mum, will you? Please, don’t tell my mum. She’d kill me.’

  ‘We have no interest in telling your family anything,’ said Willow, beginning to think that Susie might have nothing more to offer than an illicit relationship with an unsatisfactory young man. ‘When did you start going out with Lepe?’

  Susie blushed and twiddled her fingers and then counted on them and eventually announced that it was December three years earlier, which would have made it about two months before the crash. Willow wrote the date on her clipboard and decided to get straight to the point. If Susie knew nothing about Terry Lepe’s dealings with Andrew Lutterworth, there would be no point tormenting her with questions about him.

  ‘Did he ever tell you anything about a Mr Andrew Lutterworth?’

  ‘What?’ Susie sounded as though his name meant nothing to her, but something had sparked in her eyes at the mention of his name. Willow spoke even more briskly than before.

  ‘It’s a simple enough question. Did Terry Lepe ever tell you about a man called Andrew Lutterworth, who worked for the company where he was a security guard?’

  ‘He never.’

  Willow frowned. ‘But you’ve heard the name, haven’t you? Who did talk to you about him? Come along You’d do better to get it off your chest while I’m here. This is your one chance to straighten everything out’

  ‘I haven’t got nothing to get off of my chest,’ said Susie, crying. She did not have a handkerchief and was snivelling into her cupped hand when Willow fetched a bundle of paper napkins from the counter.

  ‘Take these, drink some tea and try to pull yourself together,’ she said. When Susie had obeyed most of the instructions, Willow added, ‘Now, where have you heard his name?’

  ‘I never heard it. I saw it, like, in the paper.’ Susie’s voice wavered. ‘About the crash, see.’

  Hardly able to believe that they had got so quickly and easily to the point of the interview, Willow said, ‘When did you see his name in the paper?’

  ‘Two years ago, it was. When the woman at the Job Centre, she said I ought to try and read them. And I do try, honest. Every day. And there was all them stories about him and the crash.’

  ‘Was that the first you knew of the crash?’ asked Willow, realising that the articles would have been published after Andrew’s conviction.

  She had always assumed that he had spent several months on bail before his case reached the top of the court lists, but she had never stopped to wonder how he had spent the time or what the inevitable tension must have done to his relationship with Jemima. It seemed likely that the other partners of Hill, Snow, Parkes would have asked him to take gardening leave until after the verdict. They could hardly have wanted to embarrass their clients with the presence of a man who might go to prison and yet they could not possibly have sacked him in advance of a verdict that might just as well have proved him innocent.

  ‘Susie?’

  She shook her head, more tears poured down her cheeks and made her nose run.

  ‘Then when did you first hear about it?’ asked Willow as her naturally suspicious mind latched on to the fear she could see in Susie’s waterlogged eyes.

  ‘I didn’t hear. I saw it. That night. See?’ Susie looked up piteously at Willow.

  ‘Were you there? At the crash I mean?’ She wondered whether Susie could be so short of excitement in her life that she had fantasised about being part of a dramatic story she had read in the tabloids. It did not seem particularly likely, and when Willow looked more carefully at Susie, she thought she could see real torment in her eyes as well as fear. ‘You were there, weren’t you, Susie?’

  ‘Don’t tell my mum. Please don’t tell my mum.’

  ‘I won’t. But you must tell me everything now. You will feel very much better when you’ve done that. I shall write it all down and then you can forget about it.’

  ‘Will I have to go to prison?’ she asked through her snivels.

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought so,’ said Willow, salving her conscience with the fact that it really did seem unlikely. ‘Unless you were driving. You weren’t, were you?’

  Susie shook her head. Yet more tears sprayed out of her eyes.

  ‘I can’t drive. But he said it was my fault. He said if I hadn’t been making such a caterwauling and distracting him, it would
n’t never of happened.’

  ‘Andrew Lutterworth?’ said Willow, quite unable to believe that any man responsible for commissioning the house she had seen or being married to Jemima could have had any kind of relationship with the pathetic, plain young woman in front of her. Susie looked up in dumb astonishment, shaking her head.

  ‘It was Terry. I thought you knew. I thought that’s why you come. Who are you?’

  ‘We just need confirmation,’ said Willow quickly, writing something meaningless on the clipboard. ‘Was that why you were trying to get in touch with him two years ago?’

  Susie nodded. ‘He said no one would know it was me so long as I kept my mouth shut. Till I read the paper, I thought they must of been all right, like he said. He was going to get an ambulance, see. They weren’t bad hurt, he said. They’d be all right and if I kept my mouth shut I’d be all right, too. He said I couldn’t see him in case people guessed it was my fault. An’I did what he said. Honest. Till I read about it in the paper and that other man going in prison for it.’

  Susie stopped her eyes full of horror. ‘He went to prison for what we done.’

  ‘How did you know it was the same crash?’

  ‘It must of been. It was in that village where it happened. And there was a woman with a baby in a buggy. I saw the notice of the village then. It was big letters, see. I could read it. Honest I could. And there was the picture of the car in the paper. It’s what it looked like. It said in the paper they were dead, the woman and her baby, and she might’ve lived if anyone had got an ambulance. Terry said he’d phone for one, but in the paper they said no one had. And that man was in prison, but it was us. It was me. I had to ask Terry what to do. But he wouldn’t talk to me. Then when I said I’d go round and see him, ’ cos I had to, then he did. He phoned later ever so cross with me. If I tell anyone I’ll go to prison, he said. And it would be for longer than that man got because it was my fault he was there just like it was my fault they got killed.’

  ‘And you believed him?’

  Susie looked so puzzled by Willow’s question that it was obvious she had believed him implicitly.

  ‘I see. Well, we’ll have to speak to Terry about this, Susie. How can we find him?’

  ‘I don’t know. He said he was going to America and he’d send for me when he could, but he hasn’t. Oh, miss, will I have to go to prison? Mum’ll kill me.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, Susie. If it was Terry who was driving, then I don’t think you’ll have to go to prison whatever happens. But I’ll find out for you. And I won’t say anything to your mother.’ Susie’s dull, stupid honesty forced Willow to add, ‘I’m not in the police force, you know.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Susie, apparently not particularly interested.

  ‘No. Shall I telephone you, when I know more?’

  ‘No, don’t phone. My mum—’

  ‘Could I ring you at your work, then?’

  ‘I don’t go to work.’

  ‘But you said you’d been at the Job Centre two years ago.’

  ‘That’s right. But they never give me a job, see.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I do see. Well, I’ll come by, shall I then? At about this time in the afternoon and bring you along here to the café and tell you anything I’ve discovered?’

  Susie nodded, still looking scared. ‘And you won’t tell, will you?’

  ‘I’ll have to see. I don’t want to frighten you, but the truth will have to come out in the end.’

  Susie nodded again without speaking, and Willow could see that she had always assumed she would be found out one day. Willow felt outraged at what Terry Lepe had done to her.

  ‘I do need some more details of what happened that night, before I go, Susie. What happened? Did Terry come to collect you in the big car?’

  ‘Yes. He didn’t usually, see. He came in his own car. But this time he said a mate of his had lent him the car and he’d take me for a drive. It was lovely, with a music centre and all. CDs and heating and a rug, too. And he had whisky. It was a bad night, all wet and black and cold. He wanted me to drink it, but I didn’t like it. He had some, though.’

  ‘Where did he take you?’

  ‘Bucks he said it was. He drove really fast down the motorway. I’d never been that fast before. At first I liked it; then it was scary. So he turned off and took us to a wood. Burning Beeches he called it or something like that. And he went off through a gate into a sort of field thing and stopped. He kissed me.’

  She stopped talking.

  ‘Was that the first time he’d kissed you?’ asked Willow, excited by the first real breakthrough in the case but at the same time reluctant to force Susie to relive something that had so clearly frightened her. Willow comforted herself with the thought that Susie might have fewer nightmares if she could bring the story out into the open and have it accepted by someone else, someone she clearly believed carried some kind of authority.

  ‘Never like that before. It was like the motorway. At first I liked it, but then I didn’t. I’d never been with a boy before. You know, like… sex and that. And he got…’ Her voice died again and her bright pink face grew redder.

  ‘He got a bit rough, did he?’

  ‘How did you know?’ she asked as though amazed that anyone should understand. Willow’s heart was wrung with pity and impatience. ‘And he started pulling off my clothes and I screamed. Then he hit me across the face and said I was a silly bitch. I thought he was going to…’

  ‘But he didn’t?’ prompted Willow hopefully.

  ‘No. He hit me again and pushed me back in my seat and put his seat belt on again and drove off. He went even faster and he was swearing about silly bitches and cunts and that. Oh, I’m sorry, miss. And I was so scared and then he was racing through that village and I saw them and I screamed and he drove into them. He said if I hadn’t of screamed it wouldn’t of happened. It was my fault, see. It was.’

  ‘Terry drove into the woman and her baby?’

  ‘Yes. Then he swore again ‘n’stopped, and went to look. Then he came back and pulled me out of the car and said he’d have to protect me or I’d go to prison. He said I had to do everything he said and then it’d be all right. And I asked him if he was still angry. An’ he stopped for a minute and touched my face where he’d bruised it. He was all nice to me again then. In a hurry but nice. And he said he was sorry about my face. But I shouldn’t of done it’cos men can’t stop, like, not once they’ve started. He told me all about it. And he did say he was sorry even though it was my fault.’

  ‘Susie, it was not your fault,’ said Willow as clearly as she could. ‘Neither the crash nor his anger. He shouldn’t have tried to make you kiss him when you had said you didn’t want to. He shouldn’t have pulled off your clothes and he certainly shouldn’t have hit your face.’

  ‘It was cut too, I saw after. I had a split lip. Mum was ever so cross with me when I had to go to school looking like that.’

  ‘So did Terry bring you home then after the accident?’

  ‘Oh yes. He took me across the fields to somewhere he said he had friends and made me wait in a phone box. It was all wet and smelly and I was so scared. I thought p’raps he’d gone to get the police after all. But he hadn’t. He came back in a car. A Metro, it was. I recognised it. I don’t know many cars, but I know them ones. It was really old. He brought me back and told me what I had to say and do so I wouldn’t go to prison. He was nice again then. Honest he was.’

  ‘And that was the end of it, was it, until you saw the papers?’

  ‘Yes. Till I left school and Mum made me go to the Job Centre.’

  ‘So how old were you when Terry took you for that drive?’ Willow tried to keep all the boiling anger out of her face and voice so as not to frighten Susie any more.

  ‘Fifteen I was then. When it happened.’

  ‘Oh, Susie.’ Willow wanted to hug the poor stupid ugly child and take her away and educate her in the facts of life and law so that she had some chance of st
anding up for herself even if she never did achieve a paying job. ‘I don’t think you need to worry about going to prison. I’m not absolutely certain, but I think it’s very unlikely. I’ll find out some more and I’ll let you know, shall I?’

  ‘Yes, please, miss,’ she said, looking up at Willow with a sickening dependence.

  When Willow left the café, in an even more furious rage with Terry Lepe, she hoped that his erstwhile colleague was right and that he had fled to the North of England rather than to America. It would be hard enough to find him in England, but probably impossible in America. She drove home through the rush-hour traffic, looking forward to telling Emma of the extraordinary coup she had achieved, and wondering all over again why Lutterworth had lied for so long and landed himself in prison.

  It was past six when she reached the Mews and she ran guiltily into the house, well aware that she was late for Lucinda’s bath. Hearing sounds of splashing and squeaking, she realised that the dependable Mrs Rusham had stepped into the breach once more.

  ‘Hello, you two,’ she said, pushing open the bathroom door, and then she saw her husband bending over the bath, scooping water over Lucinda’s bare back. Willow dropped her bag and notebook on the floor, hearing the keys clattering out of it. ‘Tom.’

  ‘Hello, Will,’ he said, continuing to scoop water and not looking at her.

  She wondered whether to ask him what he was sulking about and then decided that would probably be counterproductive. He liked correction as little as she did. Keeping as much of the excited smile as possible on her face, she asked him when he had got home.

  ‘About three this afternoon. Mrs R said she didn’t know where you’d run off to and so I dumped my stuff and went to the office. Got back a few minutes ago to discover that there was still no news of you and Lucinda needed her bath. Didn’t you, Lulu?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, kicking up vast fountains of water all over the floor and Willow’s good blue suit. Lucinda giggled. Tom still did not meet Willow’s gaze.

  ‘Yes, I was held up. I’m sorry. I’m so glad you’re back, Tom. You two look as though you’re getting on well, so I think I’d better go and change out of this wet suit. Is Mrs Rusham in the kitchen?’