‘No!’ She put a hand to her mouth. ‘I am not happy talking to men about such things. The doctor is so kind. Perhaps I can ask his advice soon but not yet. There is too much else to consider. I think I am in great danger, Alex. If … I am found by people who think they should … it is so hard to explain. They think I have dishonored them and that I should be punished.’ She finished with her eyes downcast and her hands still in her lap. The bruises, fading to green and yellow, were an insult on her smooth skin.
‘I don’t understand things like that,’ Alex said honestly. ‘I know what you’re talking about, I think, but not enough to deal with it. We have to have help from people who do know it all.’ She hadn’t expected this.
‘A man from my family thinks he must do this thing. I have been warned that I’m not safe anywhere. And now I have been warned again … in a different way, I think.’
Alex wanted to be receptive; she didn’t want Radhika to stop talking because she decided Alex was shutting out what she said. ‘Why now? You mean, you’ve heard from this man?’ Where was he? Until now she’d only read of these issues and heard snippets on the news.
‘I don’t know.’ Radhika closed her eyes and bowed her head. ‘I think I was told again. I left Cornwall because I heard from my brother that I had been found wanting because I would not marry the man my family agreed to. He said I could still go to the man – but I could not. I left, ran away, and was lucky to come here to Pamela. She understood what I told her and had me stay with her. We knew each other from the clinic where I worked before. And she was the kindest person I have ever met.’
‘But you’ve heard from your brother again?’
‘I don’t know. In my head, I hear it. Perhaps I am not well – really not well, in my mind.’
‘You’ve had a horrible experience,’ Alex said. ‘It’s too soon to be over what happened to you.’
‘I think I should go away again and hide but it’s hard until I am really well. Everyone would look at me like this. How should I make sure I am not noticed?’
‘Look at me,’ Alex said, and waited until Radhika raised her face. ‘You must not go anywhere. We have to find out if what’s happening … no, what’s happening in Folly is nothing to do with you. I’m going to help. Please let me help you. If you run, you put yourself in danger. You shouldn’t be alone and we can keep you safe here.’
She didn’t know how much of Radhika’s story she believed. It was possible the thump on the head and the shock she’d sustained had caused a subconscious issue, but how would anyone but an expert know?
‘I would trust Tony,’ Radhika said softly. ‘Perhaps you might ask him what he thinks. When I close my eyes I think I am losing my mind.’
Three light taps on the door startled both of them.
‘Who is it?’ Radhika asked, her voice surprisingly steady.
‘Sergeant Lamb,’ the man said as he opened the door. ‘The ladies said you were visiting Radhika, Alex. I need you to listen to something and tell me if it means anything to you. You, too, Ms Radhika, if you would.’
Lamb’s smile at Radhika made a different man of him. Charm and interest glowed in his light-blue eyes. Now here, Alex thought, was a cause lost before it began.
‘Of course,’ Radhika said with a shy smile that almost made Alex groan.
Lamb closed the door. ‘Thanks. It’ll only take a few seconds. He took out his mobile and pressed a button. Music played, slightly tinny, only a few bars then it stopped.
Alex swallowed. Her skin prickled.
‘Ah, yes,’ Radhika said, touching first one, then the other suddenly damp eye. ‘It is the music someone left for Pamela quite often. On her answering machine. She called it a message to make her happy, and she would laugh.’
‘What is it?’ Lamb said a few minutes later when Alex followed him hurriedly from Radhika’s room. ‘What’s on your mind?’
There was no helping Mary’s presence in the sitting room. ‘I’ve heard that music, too, but not on Pamela’s phone,’ Alex said. ‘It was on a small recording device on Harry Stroud’s kitchen counter.’
His narrowed eyes and full attention were to be expected. ‘Stroud’s?’
‘I will tell you all of it later but it’s too long now. I was there. He wasn’t at the time. I did something foolish and got stuck in his flat. I was looking for a mobile.’ She shook her head emphatically to stop his next question. ‘Let me finish. I think something’s going to happen and you have to find Harry. Why would he have the same little snatch of “Greensleeves” on a recorder as you found on Pamela’s phone?’
‘They were friends,’ he said slowly. ‘Good friends. Could have been a joke between them.’
‘Yes. Or it could have been their signal to get together. What if on the night Pamela went to Ebring Manor – which must have been where they usually met – that message was left to let her know he expected her?’
FORTY-ONE
Tony’s friend Stephen Hansen found his way around the cyber world with the kind of ease that mystified Tony but he was grateful to have his help. If Stephen came through with the photos he was sure he could get, they would force O’Reilly to take Tony and Alex absolutely seriously. With the obscure details already printed out and ready to go, it would be impossible for the police not to go into action.
Tony waited with Katie at his feet. A cat recovering from minor surgery cried in the next room and a recently spayed dachshund grumbled in her sleep.
Ducks swam by on the tiny river trickling by outside his windows. The near silence didn’t bring him any peace. He watched his screen and felt ready to leap from the chair.
Even if he got what he expected, there was more work to do. But he’d proved there could be supposedly small things hidden from the all-seeing eye of the great electronic watchdog – the Web. How suitable a name that was. Almost everything got captured in its sticky tendrils.
Nothing was likely to change fast, not until all the players were gathered in, but he wanted to be where he needed to be when the pieces started falling into place; with Alex.
His service rang in. They had a personal call for him and he had it put through. ‘Harrison here.’
‘Son,’ his dad’s strong voice said. ‘I ran into that nice Dr Molly Lewis. She’d have my guts for garters if she knew I was passing this on, but Jay Gibbon was already paralytic when the exhaust got to him. By the levels that showed up in toxicology, if the alcohol hadn’t poisoned him regardless of the fumes, we’d all be surprised.’
‘But he still put the line from the exhaust into the car and shut himself in,’ Tony said.
‘Not in that condition, he didn’t. Left alone, he would probably have died anyway. The window dressing was almost just that, although it probably speeded things up. He wasn’t a suicide.’
FORTY-TWO
Mary Burke wasn’t smiling. The pinched, apprehensive expression on her fine-skinned face showed Alex how anxious the old lady was and it only intensified her own tension.
They had looked at each other while Bill Lamb ran downstairs and the bell over the front door jangled as he left.
‘Will you say what that was all about?’ Mary asked, her eyes darting behind very thick glasses. ‘Should we be taking extra care with Radhika? We won’t let anyone hurt her, y’know. I shouldn’t say this, but Harriet and I have a way to look after ourselves and that young woman – and you – if necessary.’
Alex didn’t pursue that. ‘It’s all right. We can trust the police.’ She must not reveal anything else.
Mary didn’t ask for more information.
‘I should go down now,’ Alex said. ‘I have to find out what Tony’s up to and check in at the Dog.’ She didn’t say that she kept expecting O’Reilly to descend on her with his promised questions.
‘You go,’ Mary said. ‘We’ll be here looking after Radhika.’
Harriet waited below, still shuffling books back and forth although she didn’t appear to have shortened the piles. ‘What did he wan
t?’ she asked. ‘Lamb, I mean. Not my business, I suppose.’
‘I think we all have a stake in this,’ Alex told her.
Her mobile rang and she checked but didn’t recognize the caller’s number. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, wishing it had been Tony.
At first all she heard was sobbing and garbled words.
Alex held still, steadying the phone with both hands. Bogie had followed her down and bumped against her knee for attention.
The caller was incoherent.
Harriet stepped toward her, alarm tightening her features. The sound from the phone would be easy to hear. Alex shook her head and put a finger to her mouth.
‘Alex?’ At last a clear word, loaded with tears and hiccups and rasping breath. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, as steadily as she could. ‘Who is this?’
‘Vivian,’ the voice shrieked. ‘I’m terrified. I don’t know what to do next. The police will come for me and they won’t believe me. He’s planned it all and now … I don’t know what to do. Have you seen him? I can’t find him but he’s around, I know him. He’s here and waiting to finish what he started.’
The last person Alex expected to hear sobbing into her mobile was Vivian Seabrook. ‘Shush, Vivian. What’s happened?’
‘H-Harry. He planned this. I’m going to be blamed for everything. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. All I did was love her.’
Alex’s mind blanked.
‘I loved Pamela. She was my best friend and the only one who ever cared what happened to me. But it was more than that and he couldn’t stand it. He had to poison everything. I don’t know what happened but he’s made sure I’ll get the blame, I tell you. It’s that bag the police asked about.’
‘What—’
‘You’ll help me, won’t you?’ Vivian said, her voice grating but no longer broken by sobs. ‘I want you to see this. You’ll understand. You’ll believe me.’
Her mind spun but reason didn’t fly away. ‘The police will understand. If there’s something Harry’s done, they’ll deal with it.’
Vivian hung up.
Staring at the phone, Alex marshaled her thoughts, ugly, confused thoughts. She redialed the number and it rang six times before Vivian answered with a whispered, ‘Yes?’
‘Meet me,’ Alex said. ‘Let me help you.’
More tears, volumes of tears followed. Vivian finally gasped out, ‘Thank you.’
‘Where are you?’
‘At the stables.’ Her voice broke into a high wail. ‘With my horses.’
‘I’ll come to you. Just stay put. Is anyone else there?’
‘They left when they heard me,’ Vivian sobbed. ‘Must have sh–shocked them. I want to be in here with my mare. Pamela gave her to me.’
‘OK,’ Alex said gently. ‘I’ll come. Just hang on. We can talk, then I want you to go to the police with me and let them help.’
‘Noooo,’ Vivian keened. ‘They won’t believe me. There’s a letter from her. Poor, Pamela.’
‘I’m coming, Vivian.’ She frowned at Bogie but Harriet took hold of his collar and waved her outside.
At least the Fiesta was familiar and light enough to handle. Not big enough to please her, but something she didn’t have to think about. Lily hadn’t been amused, although Alex’s insistence that she was only going up the hill helped. She hadn’t told her mother exactly where on the hill.
The Derwinter stables were reached by a road branching away from the main long drive to the big house. Alex took this and drove the wide sweep around one of several grassy mounds topped with copses of trees before setting off on the uphill drive to famous Derwinter Stables and Riding School.
Draped in blankets because of the threatening rain, horses nibbled grass in nearby fields. The stables, with riding rings behind them, stretched in a long line. No horses poked their heads from the open upper halves of their stall doors and a wide entrance was open at one end of the building.
It looked as if Vivian was right and she’d managed to scare off staff and anyone else in earshot.
Alex parked and scrambled out as fast as her gammy foot allowed. She had grabbed a cane left in the umbrella stand at the Black Dog and moved much faster than she could with a crutch.
Lily had sewn a long zip into the leg of Alex’s jeans and she was grateful to be a little more comfortable again. She wished she’d brought a jacket but the long-sleeved blue T-shirt would do.
‘Vivian!’ she called, entering the stables. Horse, hay, and cleanup work yet to be done congregated into their own scent. ‘Vivian, where are you?’
In one of her uniform tweed jackets, breeches and boots, Vivian appeared at the end of the hay-strewn walkway between stalls. ‘Down here,’ she said. ‘It’s here.’
Alex tried to hurry. The uneven floorboards made walking more difficult.
Vivian was in a corner area with a stall on either side of her and open doors at the back. Feed bins, tack strung from hooks and shelves lined with supplies almost filled the space. Gracie, the mare Pamela Gibbon had left Vivian, grazed outside with reins tossed over a post.
‘We’ve got to keep our voices down just in case,’ Vivian said. Her normally rosy complexion resembled tear-streaked putty. ‘I found it in there.’ She pointed to an open feed bin. ‘He knew I would. That’s Gracie’s and I’m the only one who feeds her. He knew I’d see the bag before I refilled the bin.’ She pressed a fist to her mouth and closed her eyes.
Leaning over the bin in the dingy corner, Alex saw the same heavy green canvas bag she and Tony had found at the top of the tower at Ebring Manor on the night they discovered Pamela’s body. ‘You said you knew what was in it,’ Alex said. ‘But you left it in there.’
‘I put it back to show you where it was.’ Vivian hooked the end of a pointed shovel through the bag handles and hauled it out. She held the spade toward Alex until she took off the bag.
She thought about that night. An officer had … a figure had left the tower during the search as they secured the scene. It didn’t have to have been a policeman.
Inside she found the box of glacé chestnuts and the Zeiss binoculars.
Vivian cried, and sniffled out, ‘Look at the bottom of the bag. Under everything.’
What Alex found was a long, stiff envelope with a card inside. On the front, a giraffe with an impossibly long neck said he’d never been so happy.
‘Read it,’ Vivian said. ‘She’s dead now so I don’t have to guard her privacy.’
A single folded sheet of paper slid from inside the card and Alex started to read:
Hello, my hero, I should have come to you about this as soon as I knew but I’ve never been good at trusting. I was wrong to wait. We have something more than the great sex. I love you. Now I’ve said it. And I’m going to have our baby.
Of course it’s a shock, but it makes us act. You need out from Venetia’s thumb and all that rubbish with your parents and I need you. You’ll never have to worry about money again and you can go into business for yourself – if that’s what you still want.
We have to talk. This wasn’t something we ever thought about but it’s happened and I want the baby. I’m asking you to marry me – something I never thought I’d do. I won’t cramp your style, we won’t cramp your style, only give you more of the freedom you love.
I’m giving you this because I want to watch your face. I’m hoping you smile. I’m hoping for all kinds of things. We can’t change what is, Harry, so let’s make a damn great success of it.
Pamela
Staring down at the page, sadness flooded Alex, and amazement at the woman’s clumsy approach to something guaranteed to change the man’s life without telling him the facts first and seeing where that took them.
‘He had to have her,’ Vivian said behind her. ‘But he didn’t want more than a fling.’
‘We can’t be sure of that.’
‘He spoiled everything, leaving his mark on her like that. I told her to get rid of it but she wouldn�
�t listen. I even said I’d bring up the baby with her if that’s what she wanted. She laughed at me. Look what she made me do.’
A stabbing jab, like an attack by a poisonous insect, a huge poisonous insect, assaulted her ribcage and intense burning flowered in the side of her body. Alex caught herself on the feed bin as her knees would have given out.
She turned to stare at Vivian. The other woman held an empty syringe. ‘What have you done? Oh … oh … Vivian, help!’
Vivian didn’t say a word. She watched Alex’s legs give out and the loose, heavy impact of her body against the wooden floor. When she tried to speak, her tongue lolled to the side in her mouth.
‘If you and Tony had left it all alone I wouldn’t have to do this,’ Vivian said. Her face swelled and shrank before Alex’s eyes. ‘I know you’re looking for things that should never be brought into the light again. I can’t let you do that. I’ve suffered enough already. He took the only one I ever wanted away, and she let him. I need to pay him back and I’ve only got one more chance. I have to have it.’
Alex tried to get up but it was as if she had no arms or legs and she didn’t think she moved at all.
She started to laugh, the sound like a snorting animal. Tony will come, and the police, she wanted to shout. Softly colored flowers floated past her eyes, their petals moving like bee wings. Nausea flooded her, knocking out her breath. She couldn’t breathe anyway.
Turning her, rolling her this way and that on the floor, Vivian handled Alex’s heavy arms and legs. She was tying her up. As if … as if she could move. The flowers faded into flashes. There were misshapen crows, their wings luminous.
No part of her body would do as she told it. This was Vivian’s plan, her reason to get Alex up here, so she could paralyze her and then kill her slowly.
She was to watch her own death.
‘I expect your Tony will be here soon.’ Vivian’s voice came from a distance. She took a big red can from behind the bins, unscrewed the cap and put it close to Alex’s head.
Alex tried to speak but her tongue filled her mouth.
Out Comes the Evil Page 24