by Kate Ellis
Karen shrugged.
‘What about the murders?’ Joe asked quietly.
Karen giggled. ‘That doll bit got you really confused, didn’t it?’
‘So it was all planned? Brett brought the doll to the club so you could kill Natalie that night?’
Karen grinned. ‘He had it in his rucksack – left it behind one of the bins near Bluebell City till we were ready.’ She gave another giggle. ‘We reckoned you’d just think Caleb was up to his old tricks again. It was so funny …’ She began to laugh then suddenly she clamped her hand to her mouth. But when she withdrew it, the amused smirk was still there.
Joe saw the solicitor give her a look of distaste. ‘I think my client’s had enough for now,’ he suggested hopefully. The interview hadn’t exactly been going Karen’s way, Joe thought. He could almost read the solicitor’s mind – if he could only have another firmer word with her, advise her how to answer and how to conduct herself, he might be able to limit the damage already done.
But Karen was having none of it. She ignored the man by her side and carried on talking. ‘It was amazing. I can’t begin to describe how it felt, deciding whether someone lives or dies. Watching someone walking down the street and thinking “she’s going to die tonight”. It’s fantastic. I can’t explain …’
‘Why don’t you try?’ said Joe.
Karen’s eyes darted between Joe and Emily, a ghost of a smirk still visible on her lips. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Make us,’ said Emily, barely able to hide her disapproval.
Karen thought for a few moments. ‘It was like being high on something. You have this power over life and death and when anyone puts you down you think to yourself you don’t know who you’re dealing with. You’re like God. You decide who lives and who dies.’ Her eyes were shining again. Joe had seen people like this high on drugs but never high on the ultimate power over life and death.
He opened his mouth to speak but thought better of it.
It was Emily who brought the proceedings back to the mundane. ‘I’m a bit puzzled about the handbags,’ she said. ‘Did they really get mixed up at the club?’
Karen shook her head. ‘No, it was when we …’ She gave another small giggle. ‘I dropped my bag and Nat must have landed on top of it. I picked hers up by mistake. The stupid bitch had seen mine and bought one just like it. Always copying me, she was.’ Karen’s eyes flickered from side to side. Joe knew that she was still deluding herself.
‘Natalie thought you were her friend.’
Karen leaned forward and put her face close to Emily’s. ‘Friends don’t put you down all the time. Friends tell each other secrets. Why didn’t she tell me she was screwing Cassidy … and my own brother.’ She sat back and shook her head. ‘She was just a stupid cow.’
‘How did you persuade Natalie to go to Singmass Close?’
‘That was easy. I told her the place was supposed to be haunted and I said it’d be a laugh to walk back that way. I dared her. Me and Brett followed her but when I saw her talking to Chris in Mum’s car I thought we’d have to call it off and do it another time. But then Chris drove off and …’ Her eyes glowed with relish at the memory.
‘What about the man you spent the night with?’
‘I joined him afterwards back in The Devil’s Playground, didn’t I? Then we went back to his room.’ She smirked. ‘I tell you, I was ready for it. It was good. Best ever.’
There was a long silence, then Joe spoke. ‘What about Abigail Emson?’ he asked. ‘What had she done to offend you?’ He was finding it hard to keep the anger out of his voice.
Karen shrugged casually … maddeningly. ‘We were waiting for the right person to come along … and she did. I called out to her and the silly cow had to come and see who it was. It was her own fault. That’s all.’
‘That’s all?’ Emily’s voice was raised an octave. ‘That’s all. She had family and friends. People loved her and you just snuffed her life out on a whim.’
Joe put his hand on her arm. The last thing he wanted was for Emily to give the lawyer any reason to complain about the way the interview was being handled.
‘And what about last night? Why did you and Brett want to kill Polly Pledge and her little girl?’
‘Polly Pledge … is that her name.’ She gave a little giggle. ‘Polly Pledge, Polly Pledge,’ she repeated as though she found the sound of the name amusing.
‘Why did you try to kill her?’
The giggles stopped. ‘We saw the kid looking out of the window on the night we killed Nat. Staring right at us, she was. When the police had gone we called at the house but there was no answer. I think they’d gone away. Then when we saw a light on in her house again we knew they’d come back and we couldn’t take the chance of the kid saying something or identifying us, could we? And if we killed one, we’d have to kill both of them. Makes sense, doesn’t it?’ She said the words in a matter-of-fact voice that chilled Joe’s blood. ‘Brett broke in with a credit card in the afternoon while they were out. We hid in the coat cupboard under the stairs and waited for them to go to sleep.’ Another giggle. ‘We peed in the umbrella stand. It was so funny.’
She began to laugh again. Joe looked at Emily and guessed that she was fighting the impulse to slap the girl’s face. Instead she spoke, loudly and clearly. ‘Daisy Pledge, the little girl you tried to kill, wasn’t at home on the night you killed Natalie. She was staying with her mother’s friend. So you couldn’t have seen a little girl looking out of that window, could you? There was a doll in the window but …’
Karen stopped laughing. ‘You’re a bloody liar. It wasn’t a doll I saw. It was a little girl. All sort of pale she was … wearing white. She was there watching us … real as you are.’
‘You must have been seeing things,’ Emily said. ‘Like I said, Daisy wasn’t there that night.’
‘Perhaps you saw a ghost,’ Joe said with a smile, his eyes focussed on hers.
Karen Strange uttered an obscenity and leapt up, sending her chair flying. ‘You saying I’m mad? I’m not fucking mad,’ she screamed, clawing at Emily’s face.
Joe pressed the panic strip and the alarm began to sound as he pulled the furious girl off the DCI.
‘What do you reckon, Joe, is Karen Strange mad or bad?’ Emily asked, sipping from a large mug of coffee, bought from a coffee shop nearby. The stuff from the machine was virtually undrinkable … and they were celebrating.
Joe had pondered the question since they’d interviewed her. Emily still bore the scars of battle in the form of a cluster of red raw scratches on her face, patched up by the doctor and now expertly covered with make-up. ‘If I had to put money on it, I’d say bad,’ he said. ‘But I could be wrong.’
Emily put her hand up to her face and winced. ‘Wonder what made Brett do it. He was brainy. He was bound for Cambridge.’
‘But that wasn’t what he wanted, was it? He wanted to keep up socially and sexually. And Karen was always in Natalie’s shadow – the duller friend. That can really hurt at that age. Resentment and powerlessness can be a lethal mixture sometimes.’
She smiled. ‘Ever thought of taking up psychology as a career? Funny about Karen swearing they’d seen the kid at the window.’
Joe hesitated. If he mentioned the ghostly children of Singmass Close she might think he needed psychological help himself. ‘It’s something that can’t really be explained,’ he said, hedging his bets. He paused. ‘Has your Sarah still got this imaginary friend?’
Emily smiled. ‘Grizelda? She suddenly seems to have faded into the background, thank God. Yesterday our Sarah went back to school after half term and she made a new friend – a little girl who’s just moved into the area. She’s called Kayleigh and so far Sarah thinks the sun shines out of her backside so … To tell you the truth, I reckon Sarah was probably lonely. When you think about it, she’s not been at that school here very long. We’d taken her out of her old school in Leeds when we moved up here and … It take
s time to make friends, doesn’t it?’
‘Problem solved then,’ he said.
She gave him a weary smile. She looked exhausted. ‘I keep forgetting to ask you about Maddy. How …?’
‘She’s taking the London job.’
He saw Emily open her mouth to say something but she thought better of it. Then, after a few seconds, she gave a forced smile. ‘Hey, this doesn’t mean you’ll be applying for a transfer, does it?’
Joe shook his head and when he looked up at the DCI he thought he saw relief on her face. But it could have been his imagination.
Emily stood up. ‘Look, why don’t we both go home,’ she said. ‘Make a fresh start in the morning.’
Joe didn’t argue.
CHAPTER 30
A month later
‘You must miss Maddy.’ Canon George Merryweather handed Joe a mug of strong coffee. The mug was chipped. But then George never noticed things like that.
They sat in George’s office next to the cathedral chapterhouse and to Joe its homely chaos seemed strangely comforting.
‘She’d given the move a lot of thought. It was too good a chance to miss. She called me yesterday. Everything’s going well.’
George gave a small nod and waited for Joe to carry on.
‘If she hadn’t gone she’d always have wondered whether she’d done the right thing.’
‘That’s very true.’ George took a sip of coffee then he looked Joe in the eye. ‘I was talking to someone who knows you yesterday. She asked to be remembered to you.’
‘Who?’
‘Polly Pledge. She moved out of Singmass Close a couple of weeks ago. Her husband’s just been released from prison.’
Joe nodded, wondering what was coming.
‘Do you remember me telling you that she consulted me a while ago? Her daughter acquired an imaginary friend when she rented that house in Singmass Close?’ He smiled. ‘She said you were a bit of a hero, Joe. Said you saved her life.’
Joe gave a modest shrug. ‘Me and a few dozen others.’ He paused. ‘Mary – the imaginary friend’s name was Mary.’
‘That’s right. And there’s an interesting little addendum to the story. Did you read in the local paper about a plumber finding the mummified remains of a child during the renovation of the old Ragged School? He’d been drilling through a part of the cellar ceiling and lo and behold a little skeleton tumbled down onto the cobbles in front of him. Gave the poor chap the fright of his life.’
‘As a matter of fact we were called in – had to make sure the body was old … not our concern.’
George smiled. ‘Of course.’ He leaned forward, as though he was about to share a secret. ‘I was called upon to give the poor child a Christian burial. And funnily enough it was on the day the body was buried that Mary disappeared. Polly popped in to tell me that Daisy suddenly announced that Mary had gone – at precisely the time of the funeral.’
‘How is Polly?’ Joe tried to make the question sound casual. But he saw that George was watching him intently, almost as though he’d guessed.
‘She looked well. And she said she’s seen her husband again. She says things are still awkward and he’s still angry with her for not trusting him but … Perhaps in time there’ll be some sort of reconciliation, who knows.’ George thought for a few moments before he spoke again. ‘I was shown an old exercise book that was found near the body of that child in the Ragged School. The child it belonged to had practised her name. Mary. She’d copied it over and over again in her best handwriting.’
‘Mary was a common name in those days,’ said Joe.
George didn’t answer. He drank his coffee. It was all over. And one of the little ghosts of Singmass Close could now rest in peace.
When Joe walked home past the arch that led to Singmass Close, he couldn’t resist making a detour to take a quick look. The rain had long since washed away Brett Bluit’s blood and number six stood empty, a ‘to let’ sign outside.
He had seen enough. As he turned to make his way back to his empty flat, he thought he saw a movement just out of his line of vision; the impression of a ragged boy with a filthy face in the corner of his retina. A boy who’d been watching him with Brett Bluit’s cold blue eyes.
He hurried on past the Ragged School and back onto Gallowgate. Too much solitude fed the imagination.
Other gripping titles in Kate Ellis’ Wesley Peterson series available from Piatkus:
THE MERCHANT’S HOUSE
DS Wesley Peterson, newly arrived in the West Country town of Tradmouth, has his hands full when a child goes missing and a young woman is brutally murdered on a lonely cliff path. Then his old friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, unearths the skeletons of a strangled woman and a new born baby in the cellar of an ancient merchant’s house nearby.
As the investigation continues, Wesley begins to suspect that these deaths, centuries apart, may be linked by age-old motives of jealousy, a sexual obsession and desperate longing. And the pressure is on if he is going to prevent a further tragedy …
Kate Ellis’s wonderfully addictive series of West Country set crime novels feature Wesley Peterson, one of Devon’s first black detectives.
‘A beguiling author who interweaves the past and the present’ The Times
978-0-7499-3699-0
THE ARMADA BOY
Archaeologist Neil Watson did not to expect to find the body of American veteran Norman Oppenheim in the ruins of the old chantry chapel … He turns to his old student friend, Detective Sergeant Wesley Peterson, for help. Ironically, both men are looking at an invading force – Wes the WWII Yanks and Neil a group of Spaniards killed by outraged locals as they limped from the wreckage of the Armada. Four hundred years apart two strangers in a strange land have died violently – could the same motives of hatred, jealousy and revenge be at work? Wes is running out of time to find out …
‘Star author. Unputdownable’ Bookseller
978-0-7499-3698-3
AN UNHALLOWED GRAVE
When the body of a middle-aged woman is found hanging from a yew tree in Stokeworthy Churchyard, the police suspect foul play. But the victim is an unlikely one. Pauline Brent was the local doctor’s receptionist, respected and well-liked. She seems to have no real enemies – and yet someone killed her.
D.S. Wesley Peterson is determined to discover the truth and, once again, it is history that provides him with a clue. For Wesley’s archaeologist friend, Neil Watson, has excavated an ancient corpse at a nearby dig; a body that has been buried at a crossroads, on unhallowed ground. The cause of death suggests that the body is that of a young woman whom local legend has it was publicly executed in the churchyard centuries before.
It seems an unlikely coincidence – two women hanged from the same tree five centuries apart. Wesley is forced to consider the possibility that the killer also knows the tree’s dark history. Has Pauline been ‘executed’ rather than murdered – and, if so, for what crime?
To catch a dangerous killer Wesley has to discover as much as he can about the victim. But Pauline Brent appears to have been a woman with few friends, no relatives and a past she has carefully tried to hide …
‘Detective fiction with a historical twist – fans …will love it’ Scotland on Sunday
978-0-7499-3700-3