‘Don’t you lecture to me about being rational, son. Just cast your mind back fourteen years ago . . .’
Mark tore off his parka still with the newspaper jutting from its pocket and slung it over the coat rack.
‘Yeah? And?’
‘I wouldn’t have described you as being exactly normal.’
‘For God’s sake,’ she stepped in. ‘This slanging match isn’t going to get us anywhere. We’ve had this awful news about poor Rhiannon George and her kids, and now the sweep . . .’
‘What?’ Hector’s face blanched. ‘You don’t mean old ‘Simnai’?’
‘Chop chop,’ smiled Mark. ‘Not very tidy either, according to Lucy here.’
Hector looked at her for some explanation.
‘I called to see him this morning. No big deal,’ she shrugged. She’d been interrogated enough and putting two detailed statements together had almost squeezed the lemon dry.
‘Apologising about the ravens if you please.’
‘Fair enough, son. Fair enough.’ He returned to his study. ‘Could have got us in a spot of bother that little episode. We’re not in the line of fire are we?’
‘No. Our plods are fingering Llew Bevan, or so I heard down the Cwm. Doesn’t surprise me, mind. Nasty piece of work, he is.’
Hector’s colour returned to normal but his eyes, she noticed, seemed on fresh alert, focused now for some reason on the field to the left of the driveway.
‘Four people dead, and why? That’s what I’d like to know,’ he muttered.
‘Any news about the waterfall?’ she judged it a good moment to ask him, since the Rhayader Constabulary had clearly had no luck so far.
‘I have been busy, I can assure you,’ Hector said, making for the bar and considering the bottles on offer. ‘My trip was well worth while, and all I can say at this stage is that wheels are in motion. When we know more, then that information will be passed on to you.’
To her, this sudden formality was alarming and she noticed how Mark too had paled.
‘We? What do you mean?’ he demanded.
Hector poured himself a hefty dose of gin and not much tonic. In three gulps it was gone.
‘I still have friends, remember? Good friends who can help. Now, that’s all I’m prepared to say, except that given what we know you, Lucy, were lucky to leave that unsafe place with your life.’
‘My God.’
She slumped into one of the worn old chairs. It wasn’t just hunger making her legs weak, but a creeping sense that something horrendous was determined to turn her world upside down. A world which, against all the odds, she’d struggled to rebuild. Now it seemed that dreamy book which through her childhood years had brought her and her father so close together, was nothing more than sugary icing on a mouldy cake. In fact, all deception.
She looked over towards Mark for support but for some reason he’d buried his head in his hands. What could have upset him? Surely any help to find what had happened there was a bonus? Then the disquieting thought niggled in her mind that maybe, for him, the police were bad news. She only had to remember his face that very morning as she’d left the police station. And what about the grilling she’d been subjected to later?
Hector meanwhile, fingered the gin bottle, obviously contemplating another drink. He then turned to her and Mark, looking older, frightened.
‘I would urge you not to mention anything about what you heard at the waterfall to anyone. And I mean anyone. Understood? This is lowkey, at the moment, and we don’t want information reaching the wrong ears. Now then sir,’ he looked across at his son. ‘What’s up?’
‘You.’
She bit her lip again as Mark got up and walked out. He slammed the door behind him and left a relieved silence in his wake.
‘Damned boy.’
‘Look, what about that note I had?’ she asked, to divert attention from the floorboards juddering overhead.
‘I still need to keep it for the time being. It’s quite safe, believe me. And I’m sorry if I gave you a scare, earlier on,’ he said, ‘but I don’t get the wind up easily.’
‘I’d be lying if I said it’s OK. I was scared stiff if you must know.’ She could hear the noise of doors banging upstairs. Of drawers being opened and closed. But surely, Mark’s room was next to hers. ‘Is that his bedroom?’ she asked as evenly as she could.
‘Yes. And he’s a noisy fucker. Always has been.’
‘So, whose is the room the other side of your wife’s?’
‘His brother’s. Why?’
‘No reason at all.’
And yet this was where that shoe box and its grisly contents lay. Could this be a room full of other secrets, she asked herself, with Mark as its zealous caretaker?
Chapter Thirty-Five
And what will you do when your father comes to know
My son come and tell to me?
Oh I’ll set foot in a bottomless boat
And sail and sail across the sea
And sail across the sea.
The Brothers. Irish Trad.
While a badly bruised Jade Gregory lay unconscious on the riverbed’s wet stones near the edge of the Pit of Hell, Elizabeth Benn heard her husband leave the house, knowing he was on his way to the local newsagent in Burton Minster to collect a copy of the Dorset Gazette. Immediately she heard the front door click shut behind him, she transferred the bodkin from inside her slipper to her nightdress sleeve and reminded herself that from now on she must keep that right arm straight.
He’d not slept at all, she could tell by the protesting sighs of what had once been their mattress under his restless weight. And now at 6.45 a.m. back in her own bedroom, she could hear him getting up, using the lavatory and then the buzzing whine of his electric shaver. She hated that sound more than anything, because she could imagine the shaver’s head on his skin, smoothly caressing, just as her foolish fingers had done so long ago.
Now she longed to hear a gasp of pain, to know that he’d nicked those jowly flaps which during recent years of excess, had so altered his looks. But James was far too careful with himself for that. Except for Conquests 2001, which anyone but the blind could easily have discovered. Unless he’d wanted her to find it, of course. To drum home that, as his wife she was literally bottom of his fucking heap.
She felt numb with exhaustion. The last few days almost beyond endurance but she’d felt Katherine had been with her, willing her to survive his cunning cruelty. The disorientation games he’d learnt in the army. Even the fact that Lucy Mitchell had declined her offer of money hadn’t depressed her as much as she’d imagined. After all, she told herself, hearing the front door slam behind him, it would only take one and the rest would follow.
She propped herself up higher in her bed and reached over to lift up the nearest venetian blind. She’d need a little light – not too much – and where sunlight would have been inappropriate, so this dull grey strip of morning was perfect. She heard the phone ring in his study, not just once, but twice and then again. She smiled to herself, despite her hunger pangs. So, the news was out. The bush telegraph clearly in full swing. All she must do, knowing that Guy Roper was on her side, was compose herself, raise her will over her bodily failings in readiness for what the next hour might bring.
The sound of his key in the front door came first. Next, it closing. Once upon a time this was an event she’d looked forward to, but never Katherine, even as a youngster, and he’d resented this until the day she died. He’d crave attention from a cockroach, would James Benn, she thought bitterly, listening now to his every move. She recalled how he’d never attended any school concerts where his violin-playing stepdaughter, not he, was centre stage.
What now? She angled her head towards the bedroom door, puzzled by the unexpected silence. Was he shoeless to confuse her? Or had he gone out again, perhaps to the garage or garden, leaving a door ajar?
With the greatest effort and the worst pain ever in all her joints, she moved her legs sideway
s until both bare feet touched the floorboards. The wood felt cold against her skin, but at least sitting there, actually facing the only point of entry made her feel less vulnerable against the inevitable . . .
Eight a.m. . An hour gone already, but the dull light from outside stayed resolutely unchanged. Her stomach rumbled on emptiness as she blinked repeatedly to stay awake, because even one second’s dozing off would give him the advantage. He’d already snatched her mobile before handing her something disgusting called a Pot Noodle at five o’clock yesterday, with no means of eating it except with her fingers. The smell of it still lingered. Chicken and mushroom, now that was pure fiction, with bits of yellow noodles dried on to her nightdress. She eyed the empty plastic carton on her bedside table. Its glossy unopened sauce packet lurking inside . . .
She saw neither the door open nor his beige socks. When she did, she gasped in fear. He was smiling with no teeth showing. The most dreaded expression in his repertoire.
‘Well, Elizabeth, my dear,’ he produced a folded newspaper from behind his back and presented it to her with the heavy black banner headline facing her way. ‘Take a look at this.’
TOP DORSET AUTHOR ACCUSED OF RAPE
‘Someone’s been having fun.’
‘I don’t understand,’ she tried to make her frown convincing as she read Guy Roper’s damning report. ‘This really is terrible. It can’t be true, so why’s this . . . this creature saying it is?’
Benn sat next to her, immediately causing her to tilt towards him. And still he smiled.
‘You tell me.’
In close up, his shaved skin resembled that of sunburnt pigs she’d once seen in Spain. His eyes the hardest she’d ever seen, but when he suddenly hit her, they became a multitude.
‘No. It’s preposterous,’ she blurted. ‘Even about the screaming he says he heard when he spoke to you.’
Benn snorted spittle into her face. ‘That’s the fucking least of it. So why did Roper tell me you’d stitched it up, by offering money to the tart?’ He leaned closer so she could smell him and when her normal vision returned, the capillaries in his cheeks were the rivers of hell. His wet mouth an adulterer’s cave . . .
So, she thought. Thank you for that, Guy Roper. So much for trust . . .
‘He’s making this up. He’s got to be. I’ve never heard of the man.’
But Benn wasn’t listening any more. She could tell. Instead he pulled her mobile out of his inside pocket and waved it in front of her face.
‘I should have found this on you sooner. Do you realise, woman, this could finish me? All my years of writing and re-writing, the research, the fucking degrading creeping and crawling to get myself noticed . . .’ He then flung it to the floor where it splintered and died and all the while Elizabeth could feel his thigh against hers where her nightdress had rucked up to expose it.
‘You’ve planned this all along. Blow by fucking blow . . .’ His fist connected with her cheek and the spasm of hurt made her bladder release hot pee down her legs on to the floor. ‘You filthy lying bitch.’
This time, her mouth took the third hit and immediately she felt her teeth loosen and float in a thick coppery stew. Her left hand began to move as if to check the damage, but instead rested near her nightdress’s other sleeve. It would be so easy. He was as close as he’d ever been during the past five years. As close as he would ever be again, and she was thankful that his clothes, minus the usual vest, were lightweight. Her weapon lay firm, invisible against her palm. She would be quick and accurate. Something for which Lance Hewitt had always praised her. And now this was for herself, and Katherine.
Her husband made no sound as the bodkin’s length pierced his heart, just a rather strange gurgling sigh from the depths of his open throat, before he keeled over behind her. She checked his pulse above his flaccid freckled hand. It had gone.
She turned her head to see a crimson trickle appear from the corner of his mouth and added to it by spitting out a mix of blood and teeth on to his upturned face. She then slid away from him and on to her knees. After half an hour she’d crawled from this ground floor bedroom to his study, surprisingly unlocked, and managed to reach the telephone.
Guy Roper wasn’t available, so she left her brief toothless thanks to await his return. Then she eased James’s signed hardbacks and paperbacks off the lower shelves, slewing them one by one across the hall’s parquet floor. Elizabeth the heaviest of all, then Tribe, Fellow Bones and Stark Light Rising – the rotten fruit of all his lies . . .
She had to keep spitting out blood, but that didn’t matter now because once she’d formed a sizeable pile of volumes in the middle of the floor and found his cigar lighter handily near the edge of his desk, it only took a click of its lid to produce a compact little flame. Blue and hungry.
‘I couldn’t destroy the garden, dearest Katherine,’ she said, letting its bright tongue nudge against the first book he’d ever had published. ‘Because that was your special place. The only spot on this earth where you were truly happy. And now soon, at last, I’ll be joining you . . .’
She felt a comforting warmth already begin to reach her punished body and watched dispassionately as the pages of her eponymous book crumpled and browned with startling ease. Those sombre photographs of her life soon devoured, together with all previous plans to save herself.
As the heat increased and the flames began to lick the chandelier above, she heard the phone ring then the answerphone with Guy Roper returning her call. Elizabeth smiled once more, recalling that Flower Fairy poem as the hem of her nylon nightdress which lay closest to the blaze, began to melt . . .
‘I was a warrior
When, long ago,
Arrows of Dogwood
Flew from the bough . . .’
It wasn’t until 9.45 a.m. that a perturbed Nick Merrill, who’d been trying to contact his author since the news broke, called the Dorset police. At ten o’clock, against a backdrop of church bells tolling out the hour on that dismal morning, two officers from the Blandford Constabulary arrived at the Manor House but could get no further than the gate.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Ständige Nacht, Köningreich der Morrigan, Phantomköningin, dessen Sexgeruch dieses Nichts verdebt, während des Eisatems von ihrer Kehle kein mitbringt, nur Todesschrein. Wie viel Leiden kann sie noch zufügen? Wie viel mehr irdischen Tod? Der kahlköpfige Rabe verliert nie meine Seite, doch ich habe mehr Angst vor seinem Schnabel, als vor dem, welch er von meinem Verstand stehlt, da ich weiss, was so eine Waffe tun kann. Und was ist mit meinen Lügen? Meinen überspannten Konfekten, die zu viele geködert haben, in meiner Dunkelheit zu teilen? Verzeih’ mir.
IGM No time
At 10.30 a.m. as the Manor House in Burton Minster smouldered like the last of some huge bonfire, and the Benn’s charred remains were being transferred to Dorchester in a flurry of flashing lights, Lucy took a thank you call from DC Pugh about the incident at Water Break Its Neck. She’d been planning to make herself some toast from a new loaf she’d bought yesterday, but after just two minutes had something far less pleasurable to think about. She knew for a fact that Hector Jones hadn’t gone anywhere near any newsagents in Llanfihangel-Nant-Melan on Monday morning, or contacted any of his so-called “friends” in the force.
In fact, the officer had seemed puzzled she’d even mentioned him in connection with the affair, and his tone also slyly suggested that the ex-Cardiff copper wasn’t fully compos mentis. So, why had Hector lied about even that? Why the exhortation for secrecy? she asked herself as she stared at the uncut loaf with suddenly no desire to eat. These questions persisted as the DC continued.
‘The young woman we located there is, unfortunately, in a coma. It’s touch-and-go at the moment, I’m afraid.’
‘My God. So it was a young woman’s scream she’d heard. Her gut instincts had been right after all.
‘What happened to her?’
‘We can’t be sure yet. But she certainly fell a long way.’
‘Is there anything else I can do? Has she any family?’ she asked, because just then, any kind of normal supportive family seemed the most precious commodity in the world.
‘That’s very kind of you, Miss Mitchell, but her parents are already on their way from London.’
London . . . What a strange word already . . .
‘That’s something then,’ she said bleakly, keeping a wary eye on the open kitchen door as she sat at the table with her Wern Goch file and the lilies’ foul odour for company.
‘We’ve also spoken to staff at The Granary Café,’ he went on. ‘At around half-past eleven the lad serving there saw a young female matching her description with a man who had a definite Australian accent.’
‘Australian?’
‘That’s right.’
Something was niggling at her again; to do with that typical Aussie expression “no worries” which Paul had used on Saturday. No, she berated herself. That was totally and utterly crazy, everyone uses Aussie slang these days. It’s a universal language. And so busy was she with these new thoughts that she missed the beginning of DC Pugh’s response.
‘. . . and very personable he was too, according to the young waiter and an assistant at Booth’s bookshop who remembers him well. Apparently, on Wednesday evening he’d purchased a copy of the Mabinogion.’
‘That’s odd.’
‘We’re also investigating a brutal rape which took place above the Garreg Ddu reservoir in the Elan Valley in the early hours of Monday morning . . .’
She forgot to breathe. Both her hands gripping the table edge.
‘You don’t think this rapist is connected to that woman as well? I mean . . .’ she couldn’t finish.
‘We’re keeping an open mind at this stage, but certainly wouldn’t rule out a connection. The rape victim also claims her assailant might be Australian. In both cases a black 4×4 has been seen in the vicinity.’
Again.
There was no time to offer her sympathy, because Mark was coming downstairs. She immediately made for the scullery where the officer continued.
A Night With No Stars Page 29