Maddie shrugged.
I cast about for suggestions. Tried a few: ‘The park, the cinema, baking?’
‘The Arndale,’ she proposed, with a pleased little nod.
I hated shopping malls as much as she loved them. ‘Perhaps,’ I said weakly.
She smiled.
‘But we won’t stay long. Is Tom still asleep?’
‘Yes – and he’s snoring.’
‘Well, see if he wants to come when he wakes up.’
‘I’ll wake him!’ She dashed out.
‘Maddie—’ I called to stop her but she ignored me, her feet drumming up the stairs.
Ray got back from walking the dog. I steeled myself as he came into the kitchen.
‘Ray, I was thinking,’ the words were clotted in my mouth, ‘Laura’s number – someone where she works might give you it.’
‘It’s personal information,’ he said coldly, peering into the cupboard, ‘they’ll hardly hand it out on spec.’
‘I just thought—’
‘Christ, Sal!’ He slammed his hand on the counter. ‘I’m going round there, I told you last night. Just give me chance.’
‘Don’t shout at me!’ I yelled.
Digger barked and skittered into the kitchen, ready to defend his lord and master. Jamie jerked; startled by the noise, her lip began to tremor. My phone rang.
I swore and picked it up, slid it open. ‘Hello.’
‘It’s Chloe.’
My heart sank. I didn’t want to talk to her or discuss her flaky brother’s chances at the moment. ‘Chloe, this really isn’t a good time,’ I said quickly. ‘Can I ring you Monday?’
‘It’s Damien,’ she said, her voice odd. Then, in a rush: ‘He’s dead. They found him hanging in his cell this morning.’ And her voice cracked. ‘He’s killed himself. He’s gone and killed himself.’
TWELVE
Chloe’s house was busy with well-wishers. Neighbours or family, I’m not sure. No one introduced me. There was an atmosphere of shock, accompanied by that sudden intimacy of strangers in the wake of any disaster.
‘Is she here?’ I asked the woman who answered the door.
‘In the back.’
I went through the living room, where the hum of conversation was louder than the muted TV. Chloe’s kids were there in front of the set, another child beside them and on the sofa and assorted chairs maybe half-a-dozen people.
There were people crammed in the kitchen and others smoking in the backyard. Chloe was seated in the same place at the kitchen table. She looked up, relieved to see me, and someone stood up to give me their seat.
Chloe looked washed out, her eyes red-rimmed. Like Damien’s had been.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I told her, ‘it’s a terrible thing.’
She nodded, biting her lip, and then sniffed hard. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, her mouth working. ‘The stupid—’ She hit at her forehead with the heel of her hand. I put a hand out and caught her wrist. Felt the heat there.
‘How was he?’ she asked me. ‘You saw him.’
I recalled Damien’s fingers dancing on the table, his mercurial shifts of attitude. ‘Restless. He told me more than he had done before, remembered more.’
‘Did he say anything?’
I knew what she was asking. I cleared my throat; my mouth felt dry. ‘He said he couldn’t get it out of his head. And that he couldn’t do time. But he’d booked to see a doctor.’ That last image of him: his head on the table, drained. You don’t believe me, he’d shouted. I hurried on. ‘Chloe, if I’d had any idea.’
She raised her hand to stop me. ‘He was only twenty-two,’ she said. ‘Barely a man. His whole life—’
Someone behind me murmured agreement.
‘I still want to clear his name.’ Chloe stared at me. ‘Did he tell you anything new? Stuff we can use?’
I hesitated. ‘Bits and bobs. I’m not sure.’
A change came over her face and she drew back a fraction, her eyes hardening. ‘You don’t believe him,’ she accused. The atmosphere in the room bristled and people stilled. I could hear people talking outside and someone coughing.
‘You can deal with all this later, Chloe,’ an older woman spoke gently. ‘You’ve enough on.’
Chloe ignored her. ‘Well?’ she asked me.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I do.’ She was shaking. She took a breath. ‘He left a note, right. A note saying he didn’t do it. That he was innocent and he just couldn’t stand it any more.’ She blinked and tears splashed from beneath her lashes. She wiped them away with both hands and blew her nose on a tissue. ‘That’s proof,’ she said hoarsely. ‘You’re not going to lie about something like that if you’re going to end it all, innit.’
‘It counts for a lot,’ I agreed. Deathbed confessions do carry weight. People don’t want to depart the world wreathed in lies.
‘Will you see his lawyer; tell her what he told you?’
‘Yes.’
That satisfied her. Someone put a mug of coffee in front of her and a pack of tablets. ‘There’ll be an inquest, sometime,’ she said. ‘They’ll want to talk to you.’
‘Yes.’
I thought of all she had to deal with: registering the death, the funeral arrangements, collecting his possessions from the prison. And Damien’s mother – would she know about her son’s death? Was she still alive herself?
There was knocking at the front door, then voices, businesslike. A man came through from the living room. ‘Chloe? It’s the BBC, local news. Want to know if they can talk to you.’
Chloe thought for a second and made her decision. ‘Yeah, bring ’em in.’
Should I have been able to tell how fragile Damien’s state of mind was? Wouldn’t the prison officers, his fellow inmates, be better placed? They’d seen him every day; I’d visited twice. I didn’t want to blame myself. But no matter how determined I was not to get into any guilt trips there was some fickle part of my soul that was whispering in the wind: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa. You’re trying to trick me, he’d yelled. I can’t do time. The weal on his arm. You don’t believe me.
Would it have made any shred of difference if he’d left that room thinking I did?
Libby was still my client and I needed to let her know what was happening, to talk to her before she came across it on the news. She was doing a site visit at Tatton Park, a large estate with a stately home, a deer park and an impressive lake fifteen miles to the south of the city. She’d be there for the next hour and a half but after that had a family lunch to get to. It made sense for me to drive down and meet up with her there.
We rendezvoused in one of the car parks inside the park. The rolling heath land was planted with stands of Scots pine and broadleaf trees, shrouded in mist. The air was cool and moist and smelt of damp wool. I got out of my car and Libby waved me over to hers. A few hundred yards away three large marquees were being erected. Trucks stood by with more scaffolding and planking which would be used for the floors.
Libby suggested we sit in her car; she had Rowena in the back. ‘I don’t often bring her out but she sleeps mornings regular as clockwork. Don’t know what I’ve done to deserve that.’ She smiled.
The baby was a similar age to Jamie but physically very different: solid and chubby, with a bald head. There wasn’t space in my head to think about Jamie, about the situation at home. It lurked there, a tight ball in my guts, a pressure at the back of my skull.
‘Takes after Charlie.’ Libby smiled again. ‘Rugby player.’
‘Did he play?’
‘Nah. Just built like one. Liked to watch. That and motor racing. Liked to put his foot down. He always said he had enough exercise lugging stuff about at work. You said you had some news?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid it’s bad news, about Damien Beswick. Sad, too. Damien committed suicide last night.’
‘Oh, my God.’ Her hand flew to her face.
‘I saw him yesterday,’ I said. ‘We went o
ver his new version of events. He was reasonably cooperative. He maintained he didn’t attack Charlie. And he left a note, last night, saying the same.’
‘What does this . . . I don’t know what this means,’ she said quickly, thumping the steering wheel with one fist. ‘Are you saying he didn’t do it?’ Her face was mobile with confusion.
‘It’s more likely that he’s innocent than it was before,’ I said. A plane flew overhead, coming in to land at the airport close by.
She glared at me. ‘Did they know he might do this? Had he tried anything before?’
‘He was unsettled. He’d self-harmed. He was on some medication to calm him down. But his sister implied he had access to illegal stuff, too. She says the drugs made him worse but he found it hard to cope without them. But he wasn’t considered to be a suicide risk, no. I saw him yesterday and it never crossed my mind that he’d do something like this.’
There was movement in a copse to our right and a pair of red deer, large with huge antlers, walked into view. They seemed like creatures from another age.
‘And his version: did it add up?’
‘Possibly. At the very least there were some inconsistencies that I’d like to look at again and talk to the police about. I did go to see Geoff Sinclair but that was before this.’ What would he make of Damien Beswick’s sudden death? ‘Even if you don’t want me to carry on,’ I said to Libby, ‘I’ll be passing on what I know to the authorities.’
‘Well, I can’t just leave it like this,’ Libby said. ‘Not knowing. If he was innocent then that’s two lives lost, not just Charlie. And if they got it wrong, if it wasn’t him, then who was it?’
‘I don’t know. Look, Nick Dryden, did the police ever talk to him?’
She stared at me. ‘I’ve no idea. You think he might have done it?’
I watched the deer move off, silhouetted against the sky as they crested a slope. ‘He’s the only enemy that’s ever been mentioned. He should be ruled out.’
‘Can you find out?’
‘I can see what Geoff Sinclair knows.’
She sat back, resting her head on the head brace, her face tilted up. ‘Can they reopen the case with Damien dead?’
‘I imagine it will be harder but not impossible. It’ll be easier if there are enough grounds to try someone else.’
‘What a mess.’ She shook her head. ‘How did he . . .?’
‘He hung himself.’
She shuddered and shifted in her seat. ‘Do what you can.’
I opened the door and got out of the car. Then bent down as another thought occurred to me. ‘The press might be back.’
She groaned. ‘Oh, God. Yeah. OK.’
As I shut the door, I could see a group of fallow deer making their way down to the lake. The expanse of water lay blurred by the mist: a steely grey reflecting the sky above. Ducks swam and cormorants posed still as stone on the palings near the shore. But even the sombre weather didn’t dampen the brilliant flare of ginger and purple in the patches of heather and the blaze of copper in the trees across the lake.
I drove home via Hale. I had no obligation to Heather and Alex Carter; nevertheless, I felt I ought to show my face and see if they had heard the news. It wouldn’t be easy for them. No matter how sure they were about Damien’s guilt, his deathbed confession – or retraction to be precise – would disrupt any sense of closure they had. Everything would float to the surface again. I had an ulterior motive, too: Heather Carter would know more about Nick Dryden than Libby. And might be able to tell me whether the police had spoken to him while investigating Charlie’s death.
Valerie Mayhew answered the door. She tilted her head to one side when she recognized me. ‘Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage?’
Her tone took me aback. Before I could respond Heather appeared behind her in the hallway. Smaller than her friend, her cherry-red sweater replaced by a similar one in mustard yellow. Her face was pallid, her forehead creased in dismay. ‘Valerie, it’s all right.’
‘You’ve heard?’ I spoke directly to Heather.
She nodded. ‘Damien Beswick? Just the basics. The family liaison officer we had rang me. It’s already on the local radio.’ Heather moved back and Valerie did, too, allowing me in. Alex came out of the living room. He glanced at me and gave a shy nod. Rowena’s half-brother, I realized with a jolt. They shared Charlie’s large-boned build.
‘You should close the gates,’ Valerie told Heather, ‘before they turn up.’ In the scale of things a prison suicide wouldn’t bring out the press pack but the murder itself had been a huge news story and the death of the convicted killer and his claim to innocence would rekindle interest.
‘I’ll do it,’ Alex offered and disappeared into a doorway off the hall. He was soon back and joined us in the dining room.
‘He was disturbed, wasn’t he?’ Heather asked me. ‘An addict. They said that at the time.’
‘Do you think your interest, dragging it all up again, could have contributed?’ Valerie jumped in.
My cheeks burnt; licks of shame. Had it? ‘It’s possible.’ I swallowed. Damien had resisted my probing with his attempts to distract me, rambling about trivia. Was it simply too traumatic for him to recall in detail? Had facing those memories pushed him over the edge? ‘I was invited to talk with him,’ I said, ‘by his family – his sister.’ I didn’t mention it was Libby who was footing the bill.
‘The one who wrote the letter?’ Alex asked softly. His eyes swivelled my way but never met mine.
‘Yes.’
We were sat around the teak dining table. Close to Heather was a bowl of potpourri: shards and curls of wood that smelt like cedar. She was playing with it, her nails sifting through the fragments.
‘What did he tell you?’ Valerie asked me. ‘Anything that made sense or was this change of heart something the sister dreamt up?’ Her clipped words and the brusque delivery plunged me back into the headmistress’s office. I resented her attitude. And felt sorry for the souls who were sent up before her on the magistrate’s bench. She was much sharper than when I’d talked to her at the Civil Justice Centre. I put it down to her wanting to shield her friend from fresh troubles.
I looked at Valerie steadily then shifted my gaze to include Heather, whose face was pale and intent. ‘Damien left a note,’ I said, ‘repeating that he was innocent.’
‘No,’ Heather gasped and covered her eyes with her hand. ‘Why did he confess in the first place, then?’ she demanded.
Alex looked at his mother, his face glum. I got the sense that he felt clumsy, miserable; a teenage boy at a loss in the emotionally fraught situation.
‘I think you’d better go,’ Valerie said.
‘No.’ Heather lifted her head, plucked at the neck of her jumper with one hand. ‘His new story . . . what did he say happened?’
Valerie looked from Heather to Alex, obviously concerned for them. Heather gave her a little nod – she could take this.
I went over the basics of Damien’s account: getting thrown off the bus, walking to the cottage, passing a walker coming the other way, finding the door unlocked, Charlie already dead, taking the wallet, fleeing.
When I finished Valerie’s voice was sharp with scepticism: ‘And had he any decent explanation as to why he admitted to the crime?’
‘Only to get out of the interview situation, to tell them what he thought they wanted to hear. As you know he was an addict and he thought they’d reinstate some sort of supply once he’d owned up.’
‘It beggars belief,’ Valerie complained, her harsh expression emphasizing the angular planes of her cheekbones.
‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘But I think also he realized that if he said he was guilty he wouldn’t have to face a trial or go over events. It seemed the easier option in his head, at that time. Can I ask you about Nick Dryden?’ I asked Heather.
‘Nick Dryden?’ She was surprised. ‘What do you mean?’
Alex looked at his mother, startled.
; ‘He and Charlie fell out,’ I said.
‘Yes. He was a horrible man. We’d no idea at first. Charming, funny, friendly, some good business ideas. It was all a front. He was a heavy drinker. And a vicious drunk.’
Alex sighed; he’d probably remember this – seven years ago, Libby had said. Had Nick Dryden been the uncle, the family friend who turned nasty? Had Alex frightening memories of the man?
‘When Charlie discovered we’d lost almost everything,’ Heather said, ‘that Nick had been draining us dry, paying for gambling debts and fancy suits and God knows what else . . . thousands of pounds, we had to remortgage the house. There was a file this thick,’ she used her hands to measure it out, ‘of unpaid bills and bogus accounts: dozens of jobs where Nick had taken a deposit and never gone back. He left people a false business card. Charlie reported him. It got very nasty.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘That winter. He turned up here with a baseball bat and put the windows of the Jeep in. Then he started on the conservatory. We were terrified.’
‘Mum.’ Alex flashed a look imploring her to stop.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. She reached across the table and rubbed at his arm.
‘What happened to Dryden?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she answered.
Was he missing? I’d a flash of an image: the man in a shallow grave, gone a step too far, trying to con the wrong punters. Or was he elsewhere, charming more unwitting mates into an exciting business venture, a sure-fire winner, pocketing the cash and ruining more lives? Fraudsters change their names a lot but not their way of working.
‘There were rumours he’d gone to Spain,’ Heather said. ‘We never saw a penny. There were calls every now and then. He’d get drunk and ring up. Horrible calls – foul mouthed.’
‘Recently?’
‘No. They stopped.’
Because Dryden had finally got his revenge? My skin tightened. ‘When?’
‘It’s hard to remember. Last autumn?’ she said uncertainly.
‘Have there been any calls since Charlie’s death?’
She shook her head.
‘He had a family?’ I asked her.
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