Speak No Evil

by Martyn Waites

  ‘Your victim?’

  Another nod.

  ‘So what did you do?’

  Another sigh. He notices her hands are shaking. Her eyes are still closed. ‘I said we’d play hide and seek. I said I’d shut my eyes, count to a hundred. But I didn’t. I kept my eyes open. I watched where he went. Into this old, half-demolished house. I went after them. After him. I went up the staircase, found him upstairs. Told him to be quiet, that we were still playin’, that this was still part of the game. Told him to lie down. Lie down like he was a statue. Or like he was dead. He did.’

  Tears crept from the comers of her screwed-up eyes. The shaking spread up her arms.

  ‘I got on top of him. Put … put my hands round his throat … and … and …’ She opens her eyes. ‘Killed him.’

  He keeps looking at her, waiting, expecting more. It seems nothing more is forthcoming. The spell was broken when she opened her eyes.

  ‘Killed how?’

  ‘Strangled him,’ she says, although it’s clear she’s not going to elaborate.

  ‘What about the scissors? The cuts?’

  She sighs, closes her eyes again. Opens them. ‘I need a coffee.’

  ‘What about the scissors?’

  She screws her eyes up tight again. ‘Leave me alone …’

  ‘The scissors, Anne Marie, tell me …’

  ‘All right …’ She shouts. ‘I slashed him. Got the scissors out and slashed him.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Can’t remember.’

  He leans forward. ‘Where?’

  ‘Here …’ She points to her groin and stomach. ‘Here …’

  The sobbing starts again. He looks at her. Gets up.

  ‘Thank you. I’ll put the kettle on.’

  22

  Amar rang the bell of the house, stood back, waited. No reply. He rang again. Same thing. He looked round. No one watching. Oh well, he thought. Time for a little B and E.

  The house was on Royal York Crescent in Clifton. Probably the most desirable address in the whole area, if not the whole city. But Martin Flemyng’s house wasn’t in the desirable part. Near the shops and without any of the Georgian adornment that made the rest of the crescent so attractive, it looked less like a desirable town house and more like a terraced house that would have been given over to servants quarters. It was now the kind of house that only university students, or their teachers, could afford.

  He checked the windows on either side of him. No one there. He took out a lockpick tool that he always carried. Peta had showed him how to use it. She was very adept with it and had tried to teach the rest of them how to use it. But he had never had the patience to master it as well as she had. As he inserted it into the lock, he was wishing he had paid more attention to what she had said.

  But he remembered more than he had realized. It wasn’t as hard as he had thought. He felt it move within the grooves, felt the levers click into place. A couple more moves and turns, gentle turns … nearly there …

  ‘Can I help you?’

  He looked up, startled. A woman was standing next to him, looking at him with suspicion in her eyes. Lots of suspicion. She was in her thirties and, from the look of her clothes and appearance – a long skirt, striped cardigan, cord jacket with scarf and lots of dark, wild hair – he guessed she was probably another university teacher.

  Amar straightened up, weighed up his choices. He could run, which apart from immediately marking him as suspicious wouldn’t help get him the information he wanted, or he could brazen it out. He decided on the latter.

  ‘Do you live here?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘do you?’

  He smiled. ‘No I don’t. Can I ask if you know the person who lives here?’

  ‘Can I ask why you want to know?’

  He smiled. He admired her spirit, even if it was making his job more difficult. Maybe she just wasn’t used to seeing Asian men trying to break into houses in broad daylight, he thought. Good job it wasn’t Jamal in his place.

  He came to a decision: he would tell her the truth, see what she said then.

  ‘My name’s Amar Miah,’ he said. ‘I’m a private investigator working for a solicitor in Newcastle. I’ve got a letter in my pocket I can show you if you like.’ He made a mental note to thank Donovan for insisting on that piece of paper at the start of every job. Made his life so much simpler.

  She was taken aback by his words, not expecting this, but recovered quickly. ‘Show me please.’

  ‘Can I ask who you are?’

  ‘I’m a neighbour.’

  ‘Called?’

  The woman was getting rattled. ‘Why d’you need to know that?’

  ‘Because you’re stopping me doing my job. And my job, in this instance, is very important. Your name, please?’

  ‘Elizabeth. Elizabeth Galloway.’

  He took the letter out, showed her. It was a standard letter their lawyer, Sharkey, had composed for just such a situation. While she was reading he continued. Just go for it, he thought. ‘Well, Elizabeth, I believe this is the home of Martin Flemyng. We had a meeting with him yesterday in regard to some irregularities in statements he made regarding abuse at a children’s home several years ago.’

  She put the letter down, looked at him, eyes wide. ‘What?’

  ‘We tried to contact him again today and were told he hadn’t turned up for work. I came round here to see if he was in.’

  ‘Oh my god. You mean Martin … I work with him …’

  So his assumption had been correct. ‘Well, you never know. Sometimes, and I’m not saying this is the case, but sometimes if people have done something horrendous and think they’ve got away with it, when their past catches up, they might be tempted to do something drastic.’

  ‘Oh my God … you’d better come in. Come through my house, we can go through the back way.’

  She led him through the house next door. From the fleeting glimpses he had of the décor it was how he would have expected a university teacher’s place to be. Comforting, warm. Intelligently and culturally decorated. They went through to the back yard, skipped over the fence. There were double-patio doors at the back of Flemyng’s property.

  ‘I’ve got the key,’ Elizabeth said, and opened them.

  Amar stepped inside. Elizabeth followed. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ he said to her. ‘Just in case.’

  She immediately put her arms by her sides.

  Amar stepped into the back room. It too was quite comfortably furnished, but messy. He checked all the downstairs rooms. No sign of Flemyng. He gingerly made his way upstairs, taking his own advice, keeping his hands off the banisters. He checked the bedrooms. Nothing.

  He thought quickly. There were dirty dishes in the kitchen, the remains of a hastily eaten breakfast. The bed was unmade, the wardrobe doors open, empty hangers showing he had packed quickly. Downstairs in the back room that Flemyng clearly used for an office, there were papers all over the dining table, a laptop still open. Flemyng had clearly left in a hurry.

  Amar went back downstairs, sat in front of the laptop. Made a mental note to clean his prints off it afterwards.

  ‘How well do you know him?’ Amar asked.

  ‘Quite well,’ she replied.

  ‘Did he have a girlfriend? Boyfriend?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Not … usually … but he did say there was someone once, a girlfriend and a little boy. They were like a family, he said …’

  ‘He mention her name?’

  ‘Anne, I think. Talked like the boy was his own …’ She looked down at Amar. ‘What are you doing?’ she said, still keeping her arms at her sides.

  ‘Checking something. He’s not here and it looks like he left in a hurry. Must have been something I said. If he’s left in that much of a hurry, he might have left a trail …’

  He powered up the laptop, waited for it to come on. ‘Right …’ He opened the internet connection, checked through recent history. ‘Here we are …�
� He opened the relevant screens. ‘Ah.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Martin Flemyng made a reservation on the eleven-thirty from Bristol Temple Meads to Edinburgh. Bit stupid not to cover his tracks.’ He checked his watch. ‘I’ve just got time to catch him.’

  He looked at Elizabeth who was standing there, her eyes wide. So far out of her comfort zone she didn’t know how to react.

  ‘Have you got a car?’

  She nodded numbly.

  ‘Good.’ He gave his most winning smile. ‘Then could you give me a lift to the station?’

  The tea was milky and watery but Tess took the proffered bone-china mug with a smile of gratitude. She had known she would get into Sylvia Cunliffe’s house. Journalism, she often thought, was a mixture of charm, tenacity and saying the right things to the right people at the right time.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, looking at the unappetizing, thin liquid. ‘Just what I fancied.’

  Sylvia Cunliffe grunted and sat down in an armchair opposite Tess leaving her perched on the sofa. She looked round. The house was in a late-Sixties estate in Grimley, five miles out of Newcastle. The room was as she had expected. A widow living on a budget, the furniture and fittings weren’t the newest or the best quality. She had done what most women would have done in her situation, filled up the remaining space with pictures of her children and grandchildren. Most of the pictures were recent, or fairly recent, with one exception. Some black and white shots of a grinning, curly haired boy. Taken on a run-down housing estate, he looked like something out of an old Ken Loach film.

  ‘Is that Trevor?’ Tess asked, pointing to the photo.

  ‘Aye, that’s him.’ She slurped her tea. ‘All I’ve got left of him. His sisters got married an’ that, had kids so I’ve got grandkids, like, an’ I love them, but that’s all I’ve got left of him. That’s all she left me of him.’ The statements were matter of fact, dry, without emotion or elaboration, but Tess doubted that meant there was none. Time had crusted over her memories but not healed them.

  Tess nodded, gave what she hoped was her sympathetic look. It usually worked. If not, she had other methods. ‘So you live here alone?’ she said.

  She nodded. ‘Me husband died a few years ago. I don’t think he ever recovered from losin’ Trevor. I don’t think our marriage did either. But he stayed with me. That’s some-thin’, isn’t it? Not many would do that these days, is there?’

  Tess agreed that there wasn’t. She studied her as she took another mouthful of tea. Her eyes were hard with either anger or fear, she didn’t know which. Perhaps both. Whatever, it was what drove her, kept her alive.

  Sylvia Cunliffe placed her tea on a coaster with a picture of a Scottish piper on it and took out her cigarettes. She didn’t offer her one, just lit up. Once the smoke had escaped her lungs, she seemed to relax slightly.

  ‘The doctor says I shouldn’t be doin’ this, says it’s bad for me. An’ it is, I know it is. That’s how I got the emphysema. But what else can I do? It’s me little bit of joy, me luxury. I can’t give that up otherwise I’d have nothin’.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Tess. ‘We all need a bit of luxury.’ She wondered when she herself had last had any and placed her mug on a similarly tartaned coaster on the coffee table, her eyes going to a scrapbook sitting next to it. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s me,’ said Sylvia. ‘That’s all my clippin’s. Stuff from the papers, magazines, everythin’. I’ve got some new stuff as well, from this week, but I haven’t got round to puttin’ them in yet.’

  She reached for it. ‘D’you mind?’

  ‘Course not, pet, that’s what it’s there for.’

  Tess took the scrapbook, placed it on her lap, opened it. Some of the clippings went back years, the paper yellowed and brittle, the glue and tape thick and congealed. She started from the beginning. The first few showed Sylvia as a young woman, the same picture of Trevor in the articles. Even then, Tess thought, she had a sense of the self-regarding, the dramatic. She found that quite calculating, deliberate. She thought of her own scrapbook and recognized something kindred in her.

  The articles went through the years. The same picture of Mae Blacklock that had been used around the time of the trial. The one all the tabloid editors had trotted out over the years to accompany a story about her. In its way it was as iconic as the photo of a blonde Myra Hindley. Tess skipped forward. There was Sylvia railing against … well, anything really. The Bulger case had a quote from her. Ian Huntley. The Wests. Everything and anything to do with premeditated violent death and she was there. Tess read some of the quotes.

  ‘Well, he’s just evil, isn’t he? I mean, I’d call him an animal but that’s an offence to animals, isn’t it? My dog’s an animal and he wouldn’t behave like that.’ That was about Fred West.

  ‘Well, they say you can’t believe it but you can. You can. And they always think that it’ll never happen to them but it will. Look at me, I used to say that. It happened to me.’ The two boys in the Bulger killing.

  ‘They should just lock them up and throw away the key. Let them rot.’ The Bulger case again.

  Tess looked up. Something dark, sad and conflicted had stirred in her while reading the pieces but she quickly pushed it out of her mind. ‘It’s a very impressive collection.’

  Sylvia almost smiled. She nodded as if to confirm her impression. ‘It is. It’s a lifetime’s work. And it’s still goin’ on.’

  Tess nodded.

  ‘So what did you want to talk to me about?’

  ‘Well, it was about the two boys killed this week.’

  She nodded, as if ready to dispense her wisdom.

  ‘Who d’you think killed them?’

  She thought for a moment. Tess surreptitiously slipped her hand into her jacket pocket, switched on her tape recorder. ‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘these kids on these estates these days have got no respect. I mean, you can’t blame them for everythin’. Just look at the parents.’

  ‘Right. So you think it was other kids that did this?’

  She nodded, took a drag on her cigarette. ‘Who else? I mean these days you’ve got drugs like you never used to an’ they bring their own problems. Dealers, an’ that. An’ then there’s no jobs or nothin’ for them to do. Nowhere to play. An’ the parents don’t care. They’re just as bad.’

  Tess nodded, expression blank, biding her time. ‘Absolutely. Now. What if I told you it might not be kids. What if I told you I had another theory?’

  Her brow creased. ‘Like what?’

  ‘What if I said that living on the estate, right now, was someone who had been released from prison and given a new identity.’

  ‘What?’ Syliva went into a coughing fit.

  Tess waited until she had regained her composure. She took another drag on her cigarette, exhaled and she was listening again.

  ‘Now this killer with the new identity. What if I told you this killer had killed children?’

  Sylvia waited. Tess, the dark conflict of a few moments ago now completely banished, could barely contain her excitement as the words left her mouth.

  ‘In fact what if I told you that this killer was responsible for the death of your son? Had killed Trevor?’

  Another coughing fit. This one so severe, Tess thought she might expire. She looked round frantically for something, anything, that would help, a glass of water – wasn’t that what they gave them in films?

  It wasn’t necessary. Svlvia rode it out. As she regained composure, Tess got a sense, from the look on her face, of what her life had been what kind of struggle she had gone through just to keep going. She was the last person to judge her about the choices she had made to help her keep going.

  ‘No … not Mae Blacklock …’

  Tess nodded. ‘The very same. We’re running a feature on it in the paper tomorrow. Just wanted your reaction before you saw it. Thought it only right that you should be the first to know.’

  She nodded, the nasty light back in
her eye. ‘Aye. You’re right, pet.’

  ‘So what d’you think about that?’

  ‘I think … I think … it’s too much of a bloody coincidence, is what I think. She turns up an’… an’ those bairns get killed. Well, what would you think? What would anyone think?’

  Tess nodded, struggled to keep a triumphant smile off her face.

  Sylvia continued. ‘It’s a bloody disgrace. She should have been locked up for the rest of her life where she couldn’t do any harm again. Except to herself, mind. But that doesn’t matter. Anyway, they have it cushy in prison these days, so it wouldn’t be much of a punishment, would it?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Tess, wondering whether she had actually been in a prison lately. Or ever. ‘So you think it’s her then? Up to her old tricks?’

  Sylvia was sitting bolt upright again now, feeding off her own anger. ‘Well, who else could it be? When you say that, it’s got to be her, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Right. So what should we do about it then?’

  ‘Get her out,’ she said with no hesitation, no doubt in her voice. ‘Get her out. By force if necessary. I mean, how long before another one gets it?’

  Tess nodded. Bingo. This was gold dust.

  She let her go on but she had the quote she wanted. She nodded sympathetically, fake-matched her anger and told her, with all the sincerity she could muster, that her words would be the centrepiece of her article and she was to look out for it tomorrow.

  ‘I get your paper every day. Think it’s a great paper.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said, smiling.

  She left as quickly as she could. She felt like she was about to faint, she was so excited. That or the painkillers.

  Elizabeth’s car, an anonymous Renault Clio, pulled up in front of Bristol Temple Meads Station. Amar had the passenger door open before Elizabeth had put the brake on.

  ‘Hey,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, getting out, ‘but I have to catch him.’

  ‘Look,’ she said, grabbing his arm, ‘I have done the right thing, haven’t I? Helping you? You’re not some kind of con man?’

  He quickly reached inside his pocket, took out a business card. ‘Phone this number if you’ve got any worries. Or if you want to see what happens.’