I interrogated him again on what he’d gleaned from Thames Valley police, what we could expect of Worrell. The facts combined against the man, no question. But all I could hear in Steven’s replies was a febrile certainty, his clinging to a new and miraculous faith in a proof that could absolve Leon – and, of course, himself. In that faith he had set doubt aside. Yet still he felt the need of back-up … I found myself wondering if I had the right to refuse, much less accept. Finally the debt to friendship forced my hand. But the argument between us was strenuous – I felt the afternoon pass away, and I only wish now that we’d argued all night.
The rendezvous was set for dusk, 7pm. I drove us, parked at a distance. The sky had been overcast, darkness now closed in fast. Steven led the way unerringly, we passed the locked gates and at a shaded spot he gave me a footer over the cemetery wall, then clambered over himself. Two overgrown schoolboys, playing a hazardous game.
It was a ghastly old place, Victorian Gothic, grey and dismal, hemmed by juniper and cypress, clearly unmanaged and in disrepair, certainly a setting made for illicit/illegal activity. The graves had long been overgrown around the tombs and old stone crosses – those that hadn’t already crumbled or keeled over. In great disquiet we picked our way past the resting places of dissenting priests, dearly beloved husbands, wives and children, some of the fallen of the Napoleonic Wars. One tomb, I saw, bore an inscription from the Psalms: ‘My flesh also shall rest in hope.’
Through the trees Steven led us, as instructed, to a derelict chapel at the rear of the grounds. Its stone walls were solid but the roof was staved in by two fallen trees. Rogue branches had long ago invaded the window frames, picked clean of glass. We peered into the near-pitch-black depths: the wooden font was intact, all else shattered, dilapidated. In the stillness we were alone. Steven asked that I hide myself, per our plan, so as to do nothing to ‘alarm’ Worrell. I picked a spot in the trees twenty yards back, hunkered down at the foot of a yew, watching Steven retreat into the chapel. It was a sombre vigil: the murk, the wind in the grass and the boughs. I was cold, anxious, my conscience bad.
Some clock tower chimed seven. Steven’s face re-emerged in the shade of the chapel door, looking about as if to locate me. Then I heard the swishing approach, we both did, Steven visibly stiffened, and I sensed movement between the trees to my right – the figure of a man, making haste, but with a prowl in his stride. This, my first sight of Leon Worrell in the flesh, and he was in shabby condition, visibly a man sleeping rough, wearing a hooded jersey like a boxer. But his eyes were like thunder in his head, and he was a strapping great creature, no question.
Into the chapel he ducked, whereupon I broke cover, scuttled my way to a spot by the door. There, unsighted, I could only hear Worrell’s harsh breathing, so I decided to hazard a look. Steven and Leon were embracing, I heard sobs, saw Steven’s hand consoling on Leon’s broad back – a pitiful pose, held for some moments in the half-light. At last they separated.
‘It wasn’t me. They think it’s me, don’t they? It wasn’t. On my boy’s life.’
‘Leon, no one thinks anything yet, they don’t know. You have to tell them. Tell me, exactly what happened.’
‘We got run off the road, doc. They followed us from that hotel, just sat behind us. Soon as I knew I tried to lose them but they got right onto us, ran us into a ravine.’
‘Help me understand, Leon. Who was following you?’
‘Keaton’s mob. His stooges. Two, in a black Beamer. She’d called him, see, I said she shouldn’t but she told him she was finished with him, he was no father of hers. And he flipped, I mean, you don’t know what he’s like—’
‘I do, Leon, trust me.’
‘Cos I’ve had the stooges round before, yeah? Passing on his messages. How I got no business with his little girl.’
‘You were threatened before?’
‘Me and her both.’
‘And Eloise, she was sure too, this car was her father’s men?’
‘Oh yeah. First I hadn’t wanted to panic her, I just floored it a bit, did some overtaking, but they stuck on us, man. She saw something was up, I couldn’t keep it from her.’
‘There’s a witness, says the two of you struggled, in the car?’
‘You kidding me? She was scared, man – freaked, said we had to get away. But that old Jag didn’t have it. So I pulled off, soon as I could, followed a trail into these woods – we lost them, I thought. I got us hidden on a dirt track, killed the engine, just sat. But then we heard them, the Beamer nosed onto the top of the track and right down on top of us. And this track was hairy, man, all I could do was reverse and reverse, and they revved and revved, then we were sliding … Ellie, she was desperate, they bumped us, she swung the wheel and I lost control, we went over – through this nothing barrier, down the ravine – forty-five degrees and we must have gone fifty feet, clipping all trees ’til we hit one dead on. It was so fast, you know, branches thumping the screen, being thrown around – I didn’t know anything ’til I opened my eyes. My chest was right on the wheel, felt broken. Then I saw Ellie. She wasn’t moving, her head was just blood, like a crack in it, and I put my ear to her heart and it was – gone …’
He hung his head. Steven embraced him again. High drama, yes. I wasn’t remotely sold. It seemed to me a performance, a soliloquy.
‘How did you manage to get away, Leon?’
‘I was fighting just to get out my door, then I saw them, coming down the slope, grabbing on branches to keep from slipping, but one’s got a tool in his hand. I just hacked my way down that slope to the foot of the ravine, then I ran. But I heard the car go up. I’d smelt petrol, the tank had leaked. I dunno – could have stood my ground.’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘I was a coward.’
Steven took his shoulders. ‘Leon, you have to come in with me. To the police.’
Worrell’s proud head shook. ‘No chance, man. No chance.’
‘It’s the only chance, Leon, you have to tell them this story.’
‘Bullshit, no one’ll ever believe it.’
‘I believe it. I believe it.’
‘Then you tell them. I’m keeping free, as long as I have to.’
‘You won’t be able to run for long, believe me.’
‘Watch me. You just watch me, Steven.’ He had turned resolute with a knife-edge rapidity. ‘Now listen, have you got something for me? Like what I asked?’
‘That’s no good. It won’t help.’
‘No, c’mon, tell me you brung me something.’ In the silence I clearly heard a sharp sucking of teeth. ‘You want to help me or not, boy? I’ve begged you. Can you not do one simple thing I ask? I need money, Steven. Give me some fucken money.’
That was game up to me. I stepped from cover, strode toward them, a little shaky, seeing anew Leon’s big six-foot frame and club hands. Moreover, he had taken a hold of Steven’s lapels.
‘Leon, this is my friend Grey,’ Steven blurted, still blind, it seemed. ‘He’s a doctor, you can trust him.’
Leon released his grip on Steven, turned his gaze on me, stepping slightly onto his back foot. I saw his left hand clench into a fist, his right plunge into his jersey pocket. Was he palming something there?
‘You got something for me then? Doctor Grey?’
‘Just advice. Steven’s right, Mr Worrell, if your story’s true and you’re innocent, you need to stop acting so guilty.’
He was looking from one to the other of us. ‘Fool, I was …,’ I think he heard him mutter, the tenor of the voice altered. And then … his frame seemed to relax, and it was as though a puppeteer had let go of the strings, stepped out from behind the velvet curtain. He looked up and around him at the darkened treetops, the night sky, and I thought for a moment he would laugh.
‘Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel …,’ he proclaimed, then grinned in the face of our stupefaction. ‘I’m sorry, how things went for you, Steven. Must feel like the end of the world. But you have to know for me it’s fa
r worse.’
I butted forward. ‘You did it, didn’t you? Killed the girl?’
His gaze hardened. ‘I had no choice, Grey. You couldn’t understand – or care, I’m sure – how I’ve suffered. But in here, you see, it is very dark …’
His presence had become disturbingly quiet, nested into his imposing bulk. At my side I felt Steven twitching, breathing shortly. But his apprehension, clearly, was gone, replaced by fire.
‘You are despicable,’ he snarled. ‘The worst.’
‘No. You haven’t lived, Steven. Don’t know you’re born. Is it my fault all your love was in vain?’
Every word from Leon’s mouth emerged mockingly, on the edge of a breath – quite some composure from a murderer on the run. I stepped to close the distance between us. ‘Don’t waste your time goading us, you’re in a world of trouble, friend. It’s about to get worse, I promise you that.’
‘Not possible. Don’t you be threatening me, boss. I got height and weight on you, if it comes to a ruck …’ Hearing that I was dumbfounded, and he saw as much. ‘Listen, I’ll not confess again. I done it just for you, friends. Because it brings closure. Now you should take Steven’s confession, Grey. The two of you would be closer still.’
I glanced to Steven, who only stared, newly wary, at Worrell. ‘I never meant to drag you both into this,’ he breathed. ‘Not even you, Steven – my ungrateful old friend, who despises me. I’ve borne it all from you, haven’t I? And are you so stalwart, always? Were you such a friend to Tom Dole?’
‘Shut your mouth,’ muttered Steven.
‘The hell are you talking about, Worrell?’ I exclaimed.
‘Ask him,’ Leon replied coolly.
Steven looked deathly. ‘Did Robert Forrest tell you that?’
‘“Tell me”? No. But certain effects of Doctor Forrest have come into my possession …’
I saw bitter relish in Leon’s stare, knew I’d seen that look before. But then he thrust the heel of his palm to his brow, winced as if in pain, staggered slightly. I didn’t hesitate, rushed right at him. He shoved me aside and I swung my right, but he feigned, hit me a club of a blow to the jaw and I fell. Then his boot was stamping on my legs and torso, and I feared the worst – until Steven threw himself at Leon, heavy as a sack of coal, and brought him down. Briefly they grappled beside me in the damp leaves, before Steven rolled aside, choking grievously, clutching his throat. Worrell gave him a swift kicking too. Then he was away, hurtling through the trees and the gloom, with uncommon speed.
We lay there for some long moments, battered and winded and coughing. Finally I took out my phone, punched 999, but Steven seized my wrist. In the warning on his face, I did weigh up my own greatly compromised position.
We limped away from the scene. I drove us home in silence. At the kitchen table we made up bags of ice, I examined Steven’s neck, he checked my vision. Livy was at Susan’s, thank God, but Cal did saunter down the stairs, curious. I told him we’d been mugged and the boy, incensed, was all for roaming the streets with a baseball bat. I calmed him down, asked him to fetch Glenlivet and help us lick our wounds. Eventually I led Steven up to the attic room, taking the bottle. And there he made his confession, much of it with his eyes closed and fingertips pressed to the lids, as if everything behind there was burning.
It was six years ago, he still an NHS psychiatrist, pre-Tessa, but at the death-knell of his relationship with Jessica, over which – he said, and I remembered – he’d become very morose. He had been treating Tom Dole, a troubled young man raised alone and in straitened circumstances by his mother, herself an erratic character. Dole had displayed some flair for poetry, also a passion for leftish political groupings and causes – also a tendency to aggressive, ungovernable behaviour and near-self-annihilation by strong drink and hallucinatory marijuana. Steven diagnosed a rapid-cycling bipolar disorder. But he also developed real affection for the lad, invested much time and care in him, won his trust and admiration by turn, went to some lengths to keep him out of psychiatric hospital. They were pals, spent some social time together. But in this way Steven lapsed into an uneasy tolerance of Dole’s drug use, and came to find his excesses alarming. Dole in turn saw this as his most precious friendship, wouldn’t let Steven free of it. This much I was familiar with. I’d never guessed what he told me next.
On the day in December when Jessica moved out – for all that the relationship had been moribund for months – she sensitively chose to tell Steven his indulgence of Tom had been ‘part of the problem’. A broken heart can make a man incapable, sink him in a sort of insensate self-pity. Late that same night Dole rocked up at Steven’s back door, as was his wont, utterly incapable. Steven let him stagger inside, but that night (having drunk a little himself ) he had no patience to play nurse. ‘I’d had enough of Tom,’ he told me now. ‘I thought someone else could bear his shoulder …’ When Dole groped for the kitchen phone, barely able to form words, Steven took it out of his reach. Dole tumbled to his knees. Steven shut the door, locked it and left him there, ‘to stew’. He went upstairs to his small study. An hour or so later he returned with a pillow and a duvet, found then that Dole hadn’t been drunk or high – rather, at the onset of a massive cerebral haemorrhage, which had now completed its work.
‘Well,’ I said quietly, struggling for words, ‘you couldn’t have stopped the vessels in his head from rupturing.’
‘He could have been saved. You know that. I knew it.’ He flinched. ‘It’s— that’s not the worst, Grey.’
Panicked, afraid, Steven called Robert. In not so many words he was asking for a solution, a get-out, release from what would follow if he called an ambulance. Robert, of the ice-cool head, drove over immediately, parked in the garage, assessed the scene and Steven’s state – and, quite calmly, said the body had to be removed, deposited in water, before lividity was fully established. They shouldered the dead man into the back of Robert’s Lexus, Steven propped him there as Robert drove to a park in Hackney, a mile or so from Dole’s home, they smuggled him in and together toppled his body into the shallow water of the lake.
Steven later spoke at the inquest, in a manner that Dole’s mother found comforting. A toxicology report had found traces of drugs and alcohol in the body. The park was known to be a haunt of his. The coroner spoke of ‘a tragic end to a blighted life’.
And me, I sat there staring at Steven as though he had been body-snatched and a stranger was occupying his clothes and my armchair, spilling out these impossible lies about my two dearest friends.
‘I know you can only think less of me, Grey,’ he said into his chest. ‘I swear there’s not a day I don’t live with it.’
I did pity him, I did, for the deep, pointless injury he’d done to himself, through deception after deception. But by now the night had deepened round us, silences weighed heavy.
‘I know you’ll feel the police have to know – what happened tonight – I know they do.’
‘Yes, Steve. Christ alive, what else are we meant to do?’
‘I know that. But I have to ask you … to please keep me out of it. I can’t face where it could lead … Please don’t incriminate me.’
It was awful cowardice, I couldn’t stop the expression that crossed my face, one he saw and that hit home, I know. My foundations had taken too hard a shaking, by this ghastly vision of my friends, reputable medical men, creeping about like Burke and Hare.
But, but … what was done was done. The truth today is of no help to anyone. At this time in our lives – all friendships entail heavily accrued debts, on all sides. If I’m now less sure my friends were the men I believed them to be … Was I wilfully blind? At any rate, in every respect, it is just too late in the day.
I told Steven I would lie for him – where I could, where necessary. Mutely he accepted the censure of my tone. I told him I had to have something from him in turn. ‘I’ve heard your confession, I need you to hear mine.’ Misery loves company, he might even have hoped to find me suddenl
y guilty of some past indiscretion. No, what I wanted from him was help with some inductive reasoning.
‘Back when this business began. My first feeling – strongest feeling, if I’d had to bet my life – was that Robert had been ‘taken’, somehow – kidnapped, abducted. I’d a nagging suspicion, about a woman, you may recall. But I … I couldn’t quite trust my own head. Then when Killian MacCabe went crazy … I definitely believed, for a while, that he’d taken out some unfinished business on Robert, done something to him out of jealousy, envy, whatever. And that theory survived Killian’s death, for me. But then Darren Carver came into our lives. What do we make of that poor critter? What I thought – or went back to thinking – was that there was some kind of ransom on Robert, and maybe we were about to learn what it would cost to get him back. But no. All Carver ever asked for was a bit of spare change …’
Steven, studying the floorboards until now, flicked his haunted eyes up at me. I asked if he had a different view to mine. He shook his head. I continued. ‘No, so, the trail goes cold. Then along comes Leon Worrell – this caring, hard-working man – he and Robert linked by a woman, just as Robert and Killian were. Then, just like Killian, Leon shows himself as a monster – kills the woman he loved, who loved him. Why? Is it because he’s jealous of what Robert had with Eloise Keaton? That’ll be what the newspapers will say.’
The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 21