Innocent Victims

by Minette Walters

  He consulted a piece of paper on his desk. “Mrs. O’Riordan’s made fifty-three emergency calls in the eight months since Patrick was remanded for the murders,” he said, “only thirty of which were considered serious enough to send a police car to investigate. In every case, the attending officers filed reports saying Bridey was wasting police time.” He gave an apologetic shrug. “I realise it’s not what you want to hear, but we’d be within our rights if we decided to prosecute her. Wasting police time is a serious offence.”

  Siobhan thought of the tiny, wheelchair-bound woman whose terror was so real she trembled constantly. “They’re after killing us, Siobhan,” she would say over and over again. “I hear them creeping about the garden in the middle of the night and I think to myself, there’s nothing me or Liam can do if this is the night they decide to break in. To be sure, it’s only God who’s keeping us safe.”

  “But who are they, Bridey?”

  “It’s the bully boys whipped up to hate us by Mrs. Haversley and Mr. Jardine,” wept the woman. “Who else would it be?”

  Siobhan brushed her long dark hair from her forehead and frowned at the detective inspector. “Bridey’s old, she’s disabled, and she’s completely terrified. The phone never stops ringing. Mostly it’s long silences, other times it’s voices threatening to kill her. Liam’s only answer to it all is to get paralytically drunk every night so he doesn’t have to face up to what’s going on.” She shook her head impatiently. “Cynthia Haversley and Jeremy Jardine, who seem to control everything that happens in Sowerbridge, have effectively given carte blanche to the local youths to make life hell for them. Every sound, every shadow has Bridey on the edge of her seat. She needs protection, and I don’t understand why you’re not giving it to her.”

  “They were offered a safe house, Mrs. Lavenham, and they refused it.”

  “Because Liam’s afraid of what will happen to Kilkenny Cottage if he leaves it empty,” she protested. “The place will be trashed in half a minute flat. . . . You know that as well as I do.”

  He gave another shrug, this time more indifferent than apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but there’s nothing we can do. If any of these attacks actually happened . . . well, we’d have something concrete to investigate. They can’t even name any of these so-called vigilantes . . . just claim they’re yobs from neighbouring villages.”

  “So what are you saying?” she asked bitterly. “That they have to be dead before you take the threats against them seriously?”

  “Of course not,” he said, “but we do need to be persuaded the threats are real. As things stand, they seem to be all in her mind.”

  “Are you accusing Bridey of lying?”

  He smiled slightly. “She’s never been averse to embroidering the truth when it suits her purpose, Mrs. Lavenham.”

  Siobhan shook her head. “How can you say that? Have you ever spoken to her? Do you even know her? To you, she’s just the mother of a thief and a murderer.”

  “That’s neither fair nor true.” He looked infinitely weary, like a defendant in a trial who has answered the same accusation in the same way a hundred times before. “I’ve known Bridey for years. It’s part and parcel of being a policeman. When you question a man as often as I’ve questioned Liam, you get to know his wife pretty well by default.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and clasping his hands loosely in front of him. “And sadly, the one sure thing I know about Bridey is that you can’t believe a word she says. It may not be her fault, but it is a fact. She’s never had the courage to speak out honestly because her drunken brute of a husband beats her within an inch of her life if she even dares to think about it.”

  Siobhan found his directness shocking. “You’re talking about things that happened a long time ago,” she said. “Liam hasn’t struck anyone since he lost the use of his right arm.”

  “Do you know how that happened?”

  “In a car crash.”

  “Did Bridey tell you that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not so,” he countered bluntly. “When Patrick was twenty, he tied Liam’s arm to a table top and used a hammer to smash his wrist to a pulp. He was so wrought up that when his mother tried to stop him, he shoved her through a window and broke her pelvis so badly she’s never been able to walk again. That’s why she’s in a wheelchair and why Liam has a useless right arm. Patrick got off lightly by pleading provocation because of Liam’s past brutality towards him, and spent less than two years in prison for it.”

  Siobhan shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.” He rubbed a tired hand around his face. “Trust me, Mrs. Lavenham.”

  “I can’t,” she said flatly. “You’ve never lived in Sower­bridge, Inspector. There’s not a soul in that village who doesn’t have it in for the O’Riordans and a juicy tidbit like that would have been repeated a thousand times. Trust me.”

  “No one knows about it.” The man held her gaze for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “It was fifteen years ago and it happened in London. I was a raw recruit with the Met, and Liam was on our ten-most-wanted list. He was a scrap-metal merchant, and up to his neck in villainy, until Patrick scuppered him for good. He sold up when the lad went to prison and moved himself and Bridey down here to start a new life. When Patrick joined them after his release, the story of the car crash had already been accepted.”

  She shook her head again. “Patrick came over from Ireland after being wounded by a terrorist bomb. That’s why he smiles all the time. The nerves in his cheek were severed by a piece of flying glass.” She sighed. “It’s another kind of disability. People take against him because they think he’s laughing at them.”

  “No, ma’am, it was a revenge attack in prison for stealing from his cell mate. His face was slashed with a razor. As far as I know, he’s never set foot in Ireland.”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she ran her hand rhythmically over her skirt while she tried to collect her thoughts. Oh, Bridey, Bridey, Bridey . . . Have you been lying to me . . . ?

  The inspector watched her with compassion. “Nothing happens in a vacuum, Mrs. Lavenham.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  “Meaning that Patrick murdered Mrs. Fanshaw”—he paused—“and both Liam and Bridey know he did. You can argue that the physical abuse he suffered at the hands of his father as a child provoked an anger in him that he couldn’t control—it’s a defence that worked after the attack on Liam—but it won’t cut much ice with a jury when the victims were two defenceless old ladies. That’s why Bridey’s jumping at shadows. She knows that she effectively signed Mrs. Fanshaw’s death warrant when she chose to keep quiet about how dangerous Patrick was, and she’s terrified of it becoming public.” He paused. “Which it certainly will during the trial.”

  Was he right? Siobhan wondered. Were Bridey’s fears rooted in guilt? “That doesn’t absolve the police of responsibility for their safety,” she pointed out.

  “No,” he agreed, “except we don’t believe their safety’s in question. Frankly, all the evidence so far points to Liam himself being the instigator of the hate campaign. The grafitti is always done at night in car spray paint, at least a hundred cans of which are stored in Liam’s shed. There are never any witnesses to it, and by the time Bridey calls us the perpetrators are long gone. We’ve no idea if the phone rings as constantly as they claim, but on every occasion that a threat has been made, Bridey admits she was alone in the cottage. We think Liam is making the calls himself.”

  She shook her head in bewilderment. “Why would he do that?”

  “To prejudice the trial?” he suggested. “He has a different mind-set from you and me, ma’am, and he’s quite capable of trashing Kilkenny Cottage himself if he thinks it will win Patrick some sympathy with a jury.”

  Did she believe him? Was Liam that clev
er? “You said you were always questioning him. Why? What had he done?”

  “Any scam involving cars. Theft. Forging M.O.T. certificates. Odometer fixing. You name it, Liam was involved in it. The scrap-metal business was just a front for a car-laundering operation.”

  “You’re talking about when he was in London?”

  “Yes.”

  She pondered for a moment. “Did he go to prison for it?”

  “Once or twice. Most of the time he managed to avoid conviction. He had money in those days—a lot of money—and could pay top briefs to get him off. He shipped some of the cars down here, presumably with the intention of starting the same game again, but he was a broken man after Patrick smashed his arm. I’m told he gave up grafting for himself and took to living off disability benefit instead. There’s no way anyone was going to employ him. He’s too unreliable to hold down a job. Just like his son.”

  “I see,” said Siobhan slowly.

  He waited for her to go on, and when she didn’t he said: “Leopards don’t change their spots, Mrs. Lavenham. I wish I could say they did, but I’ve been a policeman too long to believe anything so naive.”

  She surprised him by laughing. “Leopards?” she echoed. “And there was me thinking we were talking about dogs.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Did the police ever intend to let them wipe the slate clean and start again, Inspector?”

  He smiled slightly. “We did . . . for fifteen years. . . . Then Patrick murdered Mrs. Fanshaw.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “He used the same hammer on her that he used on his father.”

  Siobhan remembered the sense of shock that had swept through the village the previous June when the two bodies were discovered by the local milkman after his curiosity had been piqued by the fact that the front door had been standing ajar at 5:30 on a Sunday morning. There­after, only the police and Lavinia’s grandson had seen inside the house, but the rumour machine described a scene of carnage, with Lavinia’s brains splattered across the walls of her bedroom and her nurse lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen. It was inconceivable that anyone in Sowerbridge could have done such a thing, and it was assumed the Manor House had been targeted by an outside gang for whatever valuables the old woman might possess.

  It was never very clear why police suspicion had centred so rapidly on Patrick O’Riordan. Gossip said his fingerprints were all over the house and his toolbox was found in the kitchen, but Siobhan had always believed the police had received a tipoff. Whatever the reason, the matter appeared to be settled when a search warrant unearthed Lavinia’s jewellery under his floorboards and Patrick was formally charged with the murders.

  Predictably, shock had turned to fury but, with Patrick already in custody, it was Liam and Bridey who took the full brunt of Sowerbridge’s wrath. Their presence in the village had never been a particularly welcome one—indeed, it was a mystery how “rough trade like them” could have afforded to buy a cottage in rural Hampshire, or why they had wanted to—but it became deeply unwelcome after the murders. Had it been possible to banish them behind a physical pale, the village would most certainly have done so; as it was, the old couple were left to exist in a social limbo where backs were turned and no one spoke to them.

  In such a climate, Siobhan wondered, could Liam really have been stupid enough to ratchet up the hatred against them by daubing anti-Irish slogans across his front wall?

  “If Patrick is the murderer, then why didn’t you find Lavinia’s diamond rings in Kilkenny Cottage?” she asked the inspector. “Why did you only find pieces of fake jewellery?”

  “Who told you that? Bridey?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at her with a kind of compassion. “Then I’m afraid she was lying, Mrs. Lavenham. The diamond rings were in Kilkenny Cottage along with everything else.”

  2.

  11:45 p.m.—Monday, 8th March, 1999

  Siobhan was aware of the orange glow in the night sky ahead of her for some time before her tired brain began to question what it meant. Arc lights? A party? Fire, she thought in alarm as she approached the outskirts of Sower­bridge and saw sparks shooting into the air like a giant Roman candle. She slowed her Range Rover to a crawl as she approached the bend by the church, knowing it must be the O’Riordans’ house, tempted to put the car into reverse and drive away, as if denial could alter what was happening. But she could see the flames licking up the front of Kilkenny Cottage by that time and knew it was too late for anything so simplistic. A police car was blocking the narrow road ahead, and with a sense of foreboding she obeyed the torch that signalled her to draw up on the grass verge beyond the church gate.

  She lowered her window as the policeman came over, and felt the warmth from the fire fan her face like a Saharan wind. “Do you live in Sowerbridge, madam?” he asked. He was dressed in shirtsleeves, perspiration glistening on his forehead, and Siobhan was amazed that one small house two hundred yards away could generate so much heat on a cool March night.

  “Yes.” She gestured in the direction of the blaze. “At Fording Farm. It’s another half-mile beyond the crossroads.”

  He shone his torch into her eyes for a moment—his curiosity whetted by her soft Dublin accent, she guessed—before lowering the beam to a map. “You’ll waste a lot less time if you go back the way you came and make a detour,” he advised her.

  “I can’t. Our driveway leads off the crossroads by Kilkenny Cottage and there’s no other access to it.” She touched a finger to the map. “There. Whichever way I go, I still need to come back to the crossroads.”

  Headlights swept across her rearview mirror as another car rounded the bend. “Wait there a moment, please.” He moved away to signal towards the verge, leaving Siobhan to gaze through her windscreen at the scene of chaos ahead.

  There seemed to be a lot of people milling around, but her night sight had been damaged by the brilliance of the flames; and the water glistening on the tarmac made it difficult to distinguish what was real from what was reflection. The rusted hulks of the old cars that littered the O’Riordans’ property stood out in bold silhouettes against the light, and Siobhan thought that Cynthia Haversley had been right when she said they weren’t just an eyesore but a fire hazard as well. Cynthia had talked dramatically about the dangers of petrol, but if there was any petrol left in the corroded tanks, it remained sluggishly inert. The real hazard was the time and effort it must have taken to manoeuvre the two fire engines close enough to weave the hoses through so many obstacles, and Siobhan wondered if the house had ever stood a chance of being saved.

  She began to fret about her two small boys and their nanny, Rosheen, who were alone at the farmhouse, and drummed her fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. “What should I do?” she asked the policeman when he returned after persuading the other driver to make a detour. “I need to get home.”

  He looked at the map again. “There’s a footpath running behind the church and the vicarage. If you’re prepared to walk home, I suggest you park your car in the churchyard and take the footpath. I’ll radio through to ask one of the constables on the other side of the crossroads to escort you into your driveway. Failing that, I’m afraid you’ll have to stay here until the road’s clear, and that could take several hours.”

  “I’ll walk.” She reached for the gear stick, then let her hand drop. “No one’s been hurt, have they?”

  “No. The occupants are away.”

  Siobhan nodded. Under the watchful eyes of half of Sowerbridge village, Liam and Bridey had set off that morning in their ancient Ford Estate, to the malignant sound of whistles and hisses. “The O’Riordans are staying in Winchester until the trial’s over.”

  “So we’ve been told,” said the policeman.

  Siobhan watche
d him take a notebook from his breast pocket. “Then presumably you were expecting something like this? I mean, everyone knew the house would be empty.”

  He flicked to an empty page. “I’ll need your name, madam.”

  “Siobhan Lavenham.”

  “And your registration number, please, Ms. Lavenham.”

  She gave it to him. “You didn’t answer my question,” she said unemphatically.

  He raised his eyes to look at her but it was impossible to read their expression. “What question’s that?”

  She thought she detected a smile on his face and bridled immediately. “You don’t find it at all suspicious that the house burns down the minute Liam’s back is turned?”

  He frowned. “You’ve lost me, Ms. Lavenham.”

  “It’s Mrs. Lavenham,” she said irritably, “and you know perfectly well what I’m talking about. Liam’s been receiving arson threats ever since Patrick was arrested, but the police couldn’t have been less interested.” Her irritation got the better of her. “It’s their son who’s on trial, for God’s sake, not them, though you’d never believe it for all the care the English police have shown them.” She crunched the car into gear and drove the few yards to the churchyard entrance, where she parked in the lee of the wall and closed the window. She was preparing to open the door when it was opened from the outside.

  “What are you trying to say?” demanded the policeman as she climbed out.

  “What am I trying to say?” She let her accent slip into broad brogue. “Will you listen to the man? And there was me thinking my English was as good as his.”

  She was as tall as the constable, with striking good looks, and colour rose in her cheeks. “I didn’t mean it that way, Mrs. Lavenham. I meant, are you saying it was arson?”

  “Of course it was arson,” she countered, securing her mane of brown hair with a band at the back of her neck and raising her coat collar against the wind which two hundred yards away was feeding the inferno. “Are you saying it wasn’t?”