A Deep Deceit

by Hilary Bonner

  Carter looked as depressed as I felt but not at all surprised. We were talking in his first-floor office. He rummaged in a trouser pocket and produced a crumpled packet of cigarettes. ‘Smoke?’ he enquired. I shook my head. He nodded his. ‘Horrible filthy habit,’ he said just as grumpily. ‘Bloody private security,’ he went on. ‘Ever since Centurion took over transporting prisoners it’s been bloody chaos.’

  His vocabulary might have been limited but he was being much more communicative than previously and even in the state I was in I noticed that he was being uncharacteristically indiscreet. He was angry, I could see. I did not speak. I did not want to break the spell.

  ‘Half the time there’s no police presence at all over there on court days,’ he said, gesturing vaguely through the window in the direction of St John’s Hall. ‘Everything’s about saving bloody money, isn’t it? And Centurion operate on minimum staff. We’ve had people being given custodial sentences and asked to wait at the back of the court till a security officer can be found to cart them off somewhere. They just bloody walk out, don’t they? Bloody madness.’ He shook his head woefully. ‘Six months I’ve got left of my thirty years, then I’m on my toes. And now this has happened. I’m supposed to be winding down gently, I am. Some bloody hopes . . .’

  His mood had its uses. But I was beginning to have had enough. ‘Is Sergeant Perry back in Cornwall yet?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘No such bloody luck.’

  We both felt the same about that, then.

  ‘Look. I still can’t understand how Carl got away. He was already in custody, wasn’t he? Surely he would have been in a cell.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Carter spat out the word. ‘In a cell with the bloody key left in the lock. Stupid bastards deny it, of course, but this isn’t the first time. All Johnny has to do is put his hand through the hatch in the door, turn the key, then leg it up the steps out into the car park. There’s only a Yale lock on that outer door. Dead easy. ‘E’s away and those buggers from Centurion don’t even know it, dozy lot of bastards . . .’

  DS Carter took a long, slow drag on his cigarette. Maybe the nicotine jerked his brain into action. ‘Right Mrs Peters, now you know,’ he said, trying, although not succeeding very well, to sound brisk and efficient. ‘And it’s me supposed to be doing the interviewing. So let’s have some answers from you, shall we?’

  I only wished I had some answers to give.

  ‘Have you any idea where your husband might have gone?’

  I shook my head. I did not even know why he had run. Surely he couldn’t think he would get away for good. But if he hadn’t planned it, just grasped an unexpected opportunity in the way DC Carter had described, well, that did make a kind of sense. After all, I knew only too well that it was in Carl’s nature to run away from things, to try to hide rather than to face reality.

  ‘Might he be trying to find you?’ Carter asked.

  I thought about it. I considered it quite likely. I had not had any contact with him since that one visit at Exeter. I had not answered his only letter and that would have hurt him deeply. He knew that I had lost all trust in him and for a time had believed him capable of almost anything. Yet I did not doubt that Carl would still love me, still want me. That was the kind of man he was.

  ‘Maybe,’ I replied. ‘I just don’t know. I’m stunned, you see. Whatever I expected it wasn’t this. Never this. I didn’t even imagine someone like Carl could escape . . .’

  I was indeed bewildered.

  ‘Why did you want to see him so desperately today, anyway?’ Carter’s voice was sharper now and it made me concentrate, or at least attempt to focus properly upon the events of the day.

  ‘I found out that Carl wasn’t behind any of the threats. It changes things. I’m not sure quite how much, but I need to know . . .’ I heard my own voice trailing off.

  ‘What threats?’ asked DC Carter.

  In spite, or maybe because, of my distress I was suddenly irritated. It had been like this ever since DS Perry had been shipped off to Plymouth. Carter had never appeared to get to grips with the case. I suppose the whole thing had already seemed like a mere formality to him. All he had to do was tie the final knots. It was rather more than that to me and, of course, to Carl. Maybe if Carter had had his finger properly on the pulse, things would not have gone as far as they had. I had no real reason for thinking that, I just didn’t know what to think any more.

  ‘The threatening letters we received, the damage to our van, the writing on our door,’ I recited as patiently as I could manage.

  He looked blank.

  This time I could not keep the irritation out of my voice. ‘Horrible messages which frightened me so much I went to the police. It was what started everything. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a kidnap charge against Carl . . .’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember,’ said Carter, but I wasn’t sure whether he did or not. ‘He’d still be wanted on a manslaughter charge in the States, though, wouldn’t he?’

  My patience was running out. ‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ I snapped, although I knew what I was saying could not be true.

  ‘And the man did kidnap you and drug you. Whatever brought it about, he had the capacity to do that. Nothing alters that.’

  He was right, of course. But the fact remained that if Will Jones hadn’t launched his hate campaign against us it was highly possible that none of this would have happened. Perhaps Carl and I would still be living our quiet, contented, obsessively close lives in Rose Cottage. Is that what I wished for? I had come to believe that Carl had deceived me terribly throughout our time together, but maybe that wasn’t so, after all. Not entirely, anyway. I wasn’t sure of anything except that I was desperate to know the whole truth. I had changed in the last few weeks. I didn’t want to be an ostrich any more. I didn’t want to hide my head, or any other part of me, come to that, in the sand for the rest of my life.

  ‘So, these letters and the rest of it, do you know who was responsible?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, who was it?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I replied and in a way it didn’t. Carl was not responsible, which was all that mattered.

  ‘Whoever did so has almost certainly committed an offence and could be prosecuted for harassment,’ continued DC Carter in a flat monotone.

  I knew that and I didn’t want it to happen. There would be another trial. I would have to give evidence. I was afraid of Will, after all that he had said and done, but I told myself that he was no longer a threat and that reporting him to the police could make him more of a danger rather than less.

  ‘More importantly, maybe Carl will go after him,’ DS Carter went on.

  It seemed extraordinary to hear Carl described in these terms. In spite of everything it just wasn’t the way I saw him. ‘Carl doesn’t even know who did it.’

  ‘Indeed, and it must be driving him mad not knowing, mustn’t it. Not knowing who destroyed his life. Perhaps he is trying to find out right now and what will he do when he does, I wonder?’ Carter’s words were ominous.

  I was startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The man you call your husband is a kidnapper, wanted in America on a manslaughter charge, Mrs Peters. What the hell do you think I mean?’

  I just stared at him. I knew all of that was true, but I still just could not relate any of it to the gentle man I had shared my life with, the man who had rescued me from another kind of hell. I had lived with violence. I knew it inside out. Carl didn’t fit the bill and yet his record did. I gave in to the pressure. ‘Will Jones,’ I said. ‘He runs the Logan Gallery in St Ives.’

  Carter then questioned me for a few minutes about why Will had made the threats, what they had said, what they meant and how many there had been. Some of it was old ground, some of it wasn’t. I told him everything I could.

  Eventually the detective constable nodded in a vaguely approving way. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now we’re getting somewhere at last. I’ll send a team r
ound straight away, as much for the sad bastard’s own safety as anything else.’

  Again the chilling inference.

  ‘Right, now what to do about you,’ said Carter, thumping the table. ‘It’s back to St Ives, I reckon.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I’ll go home, I’ll get the train . . .’

  Maybe Carl would try to contact me. After what Carter had said I didn’t know whether I hoped he would or not. My emotions were so mixed now.

  ‘You’re joking,’ said Carter. ‘He could be waiting for you. I’ll drive you over. He’s not there yet, we know that much. Uniform are already watching the place. Just give me one moment.’

  He left me alone in his office for no more than a couple of minutes before returning with a uniformed woman constable whom he introduced as WPC Carol Braintree. ‘She’s coming with us,’ he said. By the book, I assumed. I felt as if I was getting to know DC Carter,

  As he led the way through the station towards the front reception I became very aware that all around was the bustle of a major manhunt. The terrible reality of it was only just beginning to hit me. Carter briefly opened a door of a room where a number of police officers were manning phones, studying wall charts and checking information on computers.

  ‘Taking Mrs Peters back, boss,’ he shouted to an officer wearing a uniform that even to my inexperienced eye indicated a very senior rank.

  There was a brief exchange concerning whether or not Rose Cottage had yet been searched.

  ‘He can’t be there, boss, but we’ll check the place out now just to make sure,’ said Carter.

  I heard mention of roadblocks and railway checks. I tried to focus on the wall chart at the far end of the room. I wasn’t given long enough.

  ‘Right, c’mon then,’ said Carter, propelling me along. WPC Braintree kept very close to me as if she suspected that at any moment I might try to join Carl on the run. I looked back over my shoulder at the bustling room. It seemed extraordinary that Carl was the cause of all that activity.

  Carter smiled grimly. ‘We’re closing off Cornwall,’ he said. ‘He won’t get far, your Carl. It’s one of the advantages of being stuck on the end of England. One road and one railway line, and that’s about your lot. We can shut the county down just like that . . .’ He snapped his fingers. I couldn’t believe any of it was happening.

  In the car – Carter’s own private vehicle, I thought – the radio came on as he switched on the ignition. Within minutes there was a news bulletin. ‘A man has escaped from police custody in Penzance’ I heard. There followed a brief description of Carl and what he had been charged with, and then the words which perhaps hit me harder than anything at all. ‘Police advise that this man is dangerous and on no account should be approached. If you see anyone answering to his description contact any police station . . .’

  Seventeen

  Rob Partridge, in jeans and sweater, was leaning against the wall at the end of Rose Lane trying desperately to look inconspicuous. Difficult when you have bright-orange hair. And not only did the hair not help, but he was so well known in St Ives that half the town would have recognised him at once, with or without his uniform, and assumed from his behaviour that he was on some kind of watching brief. Including Carl, I reflected wryly.

  We had to drive past at first because Carter could not find a parking space. Rob waved in a resigned sort of way. Eventually the detective managed to park, several hundred yards up the hill. He and WPC Braintree walked on either side of me as we made our way back down to the alleyway.

  ‘No sign of him, then?’ remarked Carter, rather unnecessarily, I thought.

  Surely not even Rob Partridge would have remained standing around like a spare one if he had spotted the man who appeared suddenly to have become the most wanted criminal in England – well, the west of England, anyway.

  Rob shook his head.

  ‘Right,’ said Carter. ‘Time to search the place.’

  Rob spread his hands in front of him. ‘He’s not in there, Ray. There’s only one way in, and I’ve been here ever since I got the alert. He couldn’t have arrived before me . . .’

  I knew, of course, that you could get in over Mrs Jenkins’s wall at the back, but I couldn’t be bothered to mention it. In any case, Carl would still have had to go through Mrs Jenkins’s front gate and make his way along the path between the two houses to get into her back garden, which was, apart from the climbable wall into our place, completely surrounded by other tall buildings.

  Carter grunted. ‘I’m doing this one by the book, Rob,’ he said. ‘Six months I’ve got to go. Six flaming months. If anything goes wrong with this can of worms I’m not going to be carrying it.’

  I thought I knew what he meant. Rob grinned amiably. WPC Braintree remained silent. She didn’t say a lot. For a fleeting moment I thought I half caught her rolling her eyes to heaven. If she had done so neither Carter nor Partridge spotted it.

  ‘Stay watching, Rob,’ said Carter. The orange-haired policeman shrugged indifferently. He had always seemed like the kind of man who would prefer to be told what to do rather than have to make decisions.

  I used my key to unlock the front door and led the way inside the cottage. If I had any doubts at all that Carl might have sneaked his way past the police guard outside – however dubious it might be – I knew straight away that it hadn’t happened. He wasn’t there. He hadn’t been there. Difficult to explain how I was so sure, but this was my house and he was my man. I knew.

  Carter didn’t think Carl was there either, I suspected, but he went through the motions. By the book, like he said.

  WPC Braintree was despatched upstairs. Carter looked carefully around the dining room and made something of a show of peering under the table. I pulled one of the chairs back from the old table and sat down to wait. It wouldn’t take long to search Rose Cottage, that was for certain.

  Carter began to head for the kitchen. Just in time I remembered that I had not replaced the flagstone. ‘Careful,’ I warned. ‘The cellar’s open.’

  ‘What’s down there anyway?’ he asked.

  I explained about the old forgotten cellar, which Carl and I had discovered and which we used as a store-room.

  ‘Right, better have a gander, then.’ I could see him through the kitchen door bending over looking down into the hole in the floor. ‘Can’t see a darned thing; pitch black down there. Gotta torch?’ he called.

  I joined him in the kitchen, picked up the torch, still sitting quite obviously where I had left it on the worktop as it happened, and passed it to him. He climbed down the ladder and shone it meticulously into every corner. Completely unnecessary. It was, after all, very small and all that was left in it were the few discarded bits and pieces from Carl’s studio and our old Christmas decorations. Clearly, there was nowhere for anyone to hide.

  After emerging up the ladder, he made his way out into the backyard, He asked for a key to Carl’s studio, which I gave him even though you could actually see into it well enough from outside through the big windows that ran along its entire length.

  Eventually he seemed satisfied and WPC Braintree had by then come down from upstairs to announce, predictably, that there was no one up there either, nor anything of any interest.

  ‘Right,’ said DC Carter. ‘I don’t think you should stay here, Mrs Peters.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ I asked.

  Carter sighed. ‘Because your husband is a dangerous man. He has already held you in captivity. He could well be intending to harm you.’

  I still could not get my head around it. I listened in amazement.

  ‘Have you anywhere you could go?’ asked WPC Braintree.

  I could only think of one place: poor Mariette and her mother. They really didn’t deserve to be lumbered with me again and in any case I wasn’t at all sure that was what I wanted, either. ‘I’d much rather stay here,’ I said. ‘I’m sure Carl won’t hurt me. Anyway, I doubt he’ll even try to come back to the cottage. He must know that you’d be
looking here . . .’

  ‘Mrs Peters, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in thirty years of policing it is that birds always come home to roost.’ DC Carter sounded weary.

  ‘Pardon?’ I said.

  Carter sighed again. ‘People escape, build a new identity, all of that, but they can’t shrug off the past.’ He was echoing Rob Partridge and, whatever my reservations about both policemen, I had to accept that they presumably had some experience of the situation I had suddenly found myself in. I had none.

  Carter was still talking. ‘. . . You put people on witness protection schemes, resettle them with a new name, new history, new home, the lot. All they want to do is go back where they came from. They know it’s bloody dangerous but they don’t seem able to stop themselves. You’d be surprised how often they take themselves off back to their old stamping grounds. Happens all the time.’

  ‘Look, I’ll be fine . . .’ I suddenly longed to be alone.

  ‘Mrs Peters, I don’t think you quite understand. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I can’t take responsibility for your safety if you stay here.’

  It was my turn to sigh. ‘All right, all right,’ I said.

  ‘Now, is there someone you’d like to call?’

  I nodded dumbly. He passed me his mobile phone. I called Mariette.

  She had been in the library all day and had not heard the news. ‘I just don’t believe it, Suzanne,’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course I’m all right,’ I said. ‘It’s just that the police won’t let me stay here. They think Carl’s dangerous. It’s nonsense, of course . . .’

  ‘I don’t think it’s nonsense,’ said Mariette. ‘He is dangerous. He kidnapped you, tied you up and drugged you, for God’s sake. He killed his own daughter, didn’t he?’

  Why did everybody have to keep telling me these things? Did they think I didn’t know?

  ‘Of course you must come to us. I’ll call Mum, and I’ll meet you there.’ Mariette hung up before I could make polite noises about not having to leave work early for me.