by Bryce THOMAS
‘What are you trying to convince Jack for?’ Lucy asked again. ‘You know you’ve been paid to kill him.’
‘What!’ Norton’s voice resonated with anger.
‘And why?’ Lucy ploughed on, her heart pounding.
‘Because he knows company secrets, just like the ones
Michael Colson knew.’
‘You stupid young girl,’ Norton growled, her mask splintering into a ferocious sneer. ‘You are interfering with police work. I’m going to have you removed!’ As she said it, she was reaching into her shoulder bag. Her hand reappeared with a cell phone already open and ready to dial. The tones sounded. ‘Get yourself round to Melrood NOW!’ she bawled, her dry voice breaking as she coughed again. She snapped the phone closed.
‘You need somebody to do your killing for you nowadays, then?’ Lucy demanded. ‘Can’t bring yourself to do the menial tasks any more, eh? Remember that night, the one when you shot Michael. You were doing your own shooting then. You bragged about it, didn’t you? You bragged to Dianne Derby before you turned the gun on her.’
Norton’s face was even redder. ‘Who’s been telling you all this?’ she demanded. ‘Just what have they been putting in your feeble little head?’
‘You’d have put that bullet in Dianne Derby’s head if she hadn’t gone for you, wouldn’t you.’ Then Lucy suddenly remembered something else. ‘That’s right, I remember now, Dianne stamped her high heel into the bridge of his foot and when he flinched she pulled her arms free from his grasp and ran at you.’
She paused for just a second while the sequence of events cleared in her mind. ‘Your nose!’ Lucy exclaimed.
‘She grabbed a glass bowl as she ran at you and hit you in the nose! That’s something you can’t possibly have forgotten. You still carry the scars!’
More and more events of that evening were coming back to Lucy now. ‘You were going to shoot her in the head, then make it look like she had shot Michael. You were going to make it look like she was so full of remorse that she turned the gun on herself. But it didn’t work out like that, did it? When she rushed at you and grabbed the gun, it went off and you shot her in the chest instead.’ Norton continued to glare at Lucy, her mouth open, her face redder than ever.
‘Bang went your suicide story,’ Lucy pushed on.
‘Excuse the pun, but I bet that took a bit of explaining.’
‘It took no explaining at all, brat! Nobody could have seen me there. There was nothing to connect me to those killings.’
‘Not even the person who held her?’ Lucy yelled. His face was becoming clearer in her mind. It was another police officer, but higher ranking than Sergeant Norton. That’s it! She remembered now. It was Norton’s chief. What was his name?
‘Baxter wouldn’t have told you anything,’ Norton gasped. She put her hand to her throat and coughed again. Lucy was really getting to her now.
Baxter! That was his name!
‘Baxter wouldn’t have told me what?’ Lucy said.
‘That he asked you whether the people who controlled the company could trust Dianne Derby? Can she be trusted? He asked, didn’t he? You said I don’t know.’
‘Then he asked if I… if she…’ Lucy paused to get the exact words. ‘Is she coming round? he asked, didn’t he? To meet Michael? And you said she was, Soon.’ She was beginning to remember every word of the dream she’d had when she first regained consciousness in the hospital.
Norton shook her head, some of her hair floating loose in the still air as she coughed again. ‘Why would he have told you this? Why? He had no reason to tell anybody anything. Nobody else knew.’
‘But you didn’t know she was already there, did you,’ Lucy ploughed on, ‘She was listening; she heard everything? She heard you tell him that you’d killed Michael. That’s when his dog barked, remember? It was a little Jack Russell. It had spotted Dianne because when you said you had killed Michael she gave out a gasp of sheer horror, and the dog barked. That’s right, isn’t it?’
Norton Just glared. She had clenched her jaws together and was taking deep, long, sucking breaths through her teeth. She was clearly finding it hard to breath.
Lucy pressed on. ‘But Dianne couldn’t run very fast because she was wearing a long dress. It was the night of the YangseTek ball, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, the ball!’ gasped Norton.
‘Baxter ran after her and caught her. Surely you remember!’
Norton was now so creased with anger that the redness that welled up from her neck and into her enraged face was turning crimson. She looked hot and flustered with her hair sticking out. And because she had no makeup on, her thin lips were whiter than the fingernails that were biting into the side of her bag. Makeup. Lucy remembered now. Yesterday Norton wore makeup. And jewellery.
‘Okay, so Baxter’s told you everything. That won’t help,’ Norton said as she stopped to take another breath.
‘He died over a year ago, you young fool.’ She was sneering viciously now. ‘I needed to let you keep talking so that you would reveal where you’d got all this information. Your source is dead you little twerp! And so are you.’ She broke into a dry rasping chuckle. ‘End of problem, because you aren’t going to live to tell the story to anyone else.’
‘But what about the other proof that you killed Dianne Derby?’ Lucy was thinking, desperately trying to tie everything together in her mind. ‘Hard evidence that links you to her murder. And if you fired the gun that killed her, then you fired the gun that killed Michael Colson. Baxter knew about it.’
‘What proof? You are totally mad,’ she declared, gasping for breath again. She tried to clear her dry throat. A bead of sweat trickled from her temple, past a wisp of floating hair and down the side of her face. Her eyes were beginning to look puffy.
‘The bullet that killed Dianne Derby damaged her pearl drop necklace, didn’t it?’
Norton’s hand went back to her throat.
‘Don’t say you’ve still got it on! How vane! You obviously liked it enough to steal it, but I would never have thought you would have been stupid enough to keep it and wear it. You were wearing it yesterday; Dianne’s necklace. I recognised it by the groove in the tip of the pearl; by the tiny chip taken out of it as the bullet that killed her, nicked it.’
Norton shook her head. She was taking deep breaths each time she spoke, trying to get enough air in her lungs to complete each sentence. She lifted her bag and, clutching it to her chest, pushed her hand inside.
‘I don’t know why Baxter told you all this,’ she said, gasping again, her voice almost gone, ‘but you can’t prove anything if you are dead. I’ll have got rid of the necklace by the time they find the three of you.’ She pulled out a small automatic pistol.
Lucy fought hard to stop herself from showing the fear that began to well up inside her. Her heart beat even faster, as she considered rushing at Norton, but she couldn’t move. Just the idea of it froze her to the floor. But, determined to get Norton to tell all she knew, something still drove Lucy on. ‘What did you do with Dianne’s pistol? I’d have thought you would have kept that as a memento as well.’
Norton coughed and cleared her throat. ‘I got rid of that the night I used it. It will never be found; it’s at the bottom of the Yangtze River!’ she boasted as her chest heaved air into her lungs. She pointed her gun at Lucy, her long thin arm waving unsteadily. ‘You’re dead,’ she cackled, her breath whistling from her throat. ‘You’re dead!’
Lucy thought about the irony of what Norton had just said. The woman couldn’t have said a truer word, but Lucy just continued to stare at Norton with her jaw clenched.
Now, Norton’s entire face was scarlet. Her eyes were swollen. Lucy saw that Jack was stepping towards her, his hand reaching for the gun, when, suddenly, Norton began to sway and then, inexplicably, she sagged against the kitchen wall, clasping at her throat. Before Jack could reach her, the gun clattered to the floor. ‘When Ackley gets here you’ll all be dead,’ she whispe
red dryly. Her voice had gone. She closed her eyes and sank down onto her knees.
‘So it was Ackley you called just now, then, was it?’ Lucy asked, coolly.
Norton didn’t answer. She looked decidedly worse for the confrontation. ‘Looks like you are having a seizure or something,’ Lucy said quite void of any sympathy.
Norton didn’t look at all well. Her eyes bulged as she clasped her throat. She was wheezing, trying to draw in breath.
Lucy watched as her adversary seemed to wilt into a shadow of what she had been when she bounced into the kitchen.
Some of Norton’s long, loose hair spiked out and wafted about freely as if suddenly attracted by some static electrical force.
Relieved but curious, Lucy wondered just how the confrontation could have brought this street-hardened rogue so easily to her knees. She stared at her and watched, spellbound for a moment, as more of Norton’s hair spiked outwards.
Then, snapping out of the daze, she suddenly realized what was really happening. It wasn’t a seizure at all.
She spun around and looked at Loanne. She was still standing there, her face as white as skimmed milk, seemingly watching in a daze, not speaking; not really blinking. Quickly, Lucy went over to her, grabbed her arm and led her from the kitchen, up through the hallway and out of the back door. Loanne just followed along happy to be led, it seemed. Neither of them spoke until they got outside.
‘Stop it now, Loanne,’ Lucy ordered. Loanne just continued to stare blankly.
‘Loanne, listen to me. Loanne!’ Lucy was shouting now. ‘You must stop this immediately.’ She slapped her across the face and gripped her shoulders. ‘Loanne!’ she yelled, shaking her as hard as she could.
Loanne blinked. ‘What?’ she asked, breaking her trance as if just waking from a deep sleep.
‘Stop it. Stop now, Loanne,’ Lucy repeated.
‘Is she…?’
Loanne shuddered as Lucy shook her again, firmly.
‘We’re safe now! It’s over,’ Lucy said quietly. ‘We’ve won. It’s all on the tape.’
–––––––
When Lucy and Loanne went back into the kitchen, Jack was bending over Norton.
‘She seems to be recovering a little,’ he said. ‘It must all have been too much for her.’ And then he added,
‘Thankfully.’
‘Too much good living, more like,’ Loanne said sarcastically. She began to walk towards Norton. ‘People like you make me sick,’ she grated, as she got nearer to the crumpled figure. ‘Not exactly Miss Incredible now are you?’ she shouted, her rising voice filled with derision.
Remembering what Loanne had also tried to do to Ackley when he went down in the hawthorn hedge, Lucy took a firm grip on Loanne’s arm and pulled her away.
Jack held up his cell phone. ‘I’ve dialled 999. Some real police are on their way.’
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
Neither Ackley nor Albright turned up. Lucy wondered if somehow they had heard the emergency call go out, and they were keeping clear. Perhaps Albright would try and bluff it out. Or perhaps he would confess now that Norton had been broken. The truth is, nobody can ever predict just what will happen when something really big goes down. Jack was still in danger as long as he was waiting to attend the trial of one of his former bosses, but at least he could get real protection from people who, hopefully, were not in the grip of XowiTech, and were not being paid to silence him.
The flashing lights of the police cars at Melrood brought Doctor Murray and Mrs. Lockhart racing over. They assumed, quite rightly, that their daughters were the flux that fired up all the afternoon’s activity at the farmhouse yet again. But perhaps the phone call from Maurice telling them that their daughters were visiting their next door neighbour also had something to do with raising their suspicions.
At first it was unclear if the uniform branch would arrest a detective chief inspector. But Norton was whisked away to hospital with a suspected heart attack, so that left only the problem of explaining just what had been going on. Lucy thought that Jack did admirably in that department, telling them about Norton’s confession. He would make an excellent prosecution witness at the already up and coming trial, Lucy thought. But Jack didn’t mention the recordings. Both he and Lucy wanted to give Maurice time to get copies just in case the originals happened to disappear.
–––––––
Maurice presented the original video and the sound tracks to the police later that afternoon. Lucy presumed he had kept copies, but she didn’t really have time to ask, because her mother insisted on returning to their own home immediately. Of course, Lucy would be called back at a later date for an interview, at which her mother would deny that Lucy had ever known anybody called Baxter. Inevitably, it would mean that Lucy would have to explain how she knew what she did and how she became the architect of Norton’s confession. But no one except Lucy (and Loanne with whom she had sworn a pact of secrecy), could explain how she knew these incredible things and, since Norton disappeared on the way into the hospital before she could be interviewed or charged with any offence, Lucy had long ago decided not to enlighten them. After all, who knows what happens when the mind is recovering from severe trauma? To all the adults involved, therefore, she would be just a young girl who had sustained and was recovering from a severe head injury. Eventually, after several taped interviews in front of a panel of people that comprised of a psychiatrist, a social worker, several senior police officers and a strange woman from some obscure ministerial department or other, it would be decided, for clarification, that Lucy must have read something about Dianne Derby somewhere at some time in her past. Whether justice would be done remained a task for the police and the judicial process.
In the meantime, and with a sense of regret and yet one of total relief, her mother whisked Lucy away home that very same evening. Apparently, having had more worry and excitement than she might have wished for in a dozen weekends, Mrs. Lockhart claimed that she was looking forward to getting back to work, mundane and unexciting as it was. But, no doubt, Doctor Murray had her telephone number, and Loanne and Lucy had exchanged theirs. So there was hope for their parents even if the two girls had to deliberately plot another weekend together to accomplish any possible objective.
But perhaps the most exciting thing of all was that, about three months later, Jack bought Melrood. Now that definitely had possibilities.
And Lucy? She was going to enjoy catching up with everything that had happened in her own life in Penfold Street, and at school in Wieldworth, and with all the other things that were, and made up, the true and complete life of Lucy Lockhart. And that life, inevitably, included football. She wondered how she could get Loanne to come over and be goalie for their team.
As regards her remembering another life, well there was something exhilarating about knowing and being Dianne. It was, Lucy realized, something that she would have to keep under wraps and strictly under control. Like the genie released from its bottle, however, there was little chance of forcing it back in again. Nor did Lucy want to, but she still had much to get used to; knowing things about languages, and people and places that she didn’t even have to look up in a book or on the internet. It opened up all sorts of possibilities. It did mean, however, that life would never be the same for Lucy.
In fact, the exciting life of Lucy Lockhart really was just beginning.
– THE END –
COMING SOON
If you liked this story then watch out for
Lucy Lockhart: Wall of Silence
Like most secrets, it wasn’t going to stay hidden for ever. After all, certain people had heard, seen and were already analyzing the recordings of
Detective Chief Inspector Norton’s confession.