‘Gina.’
‘Well, Gina, there’s nothing the matter with my nerves. Nerves of steel I’ve got. I like a drink, that’s all. I’m a drunk. I’ve been pretty much on the wagon while I’m doing this show – you know about my show?’
‘Yes, I’ve seen it – with your understudy.’
‘Poor you. Well, I’ve fallen off only a few times, but the child got herself in a state about it. Thought I’d lose the part and we’d have no money. She wasn’t bright but even she could see that her father wasn’t bringing home any bacon.’
‘And maybe she was afraid you might take her off to Switzerland again, where something very bad happened to her,’ I say.
She looks at me and takes a swallow of her drink. ‘Maybe,’ she says.
David crackles in again. ‘Get on with it. You’re losing momentum. Surprise her.’
‘Anyway,’ I say, opening up the book, ‘Marina wrote that she came home early one day. “Mummy’s friends from the theatre were doing something wrong. There were some children there with them and it was wrong. My brother was there too and I wanted to tell Mummy about it but he said it was a deadly secret and I must swear not to tell anyone, not even Mummy because it would upset her and make her ill.”
‘So she went and wrote it all down. Marvellous!’
‘I suppose she thought that wasn’t telling anyone. After all, diaries are private, aren’t they?’
‘Well, it’s all nonsense of course, anyway. God knows where she’s picked up this stuff from. Off the internet, I suppose.’
‘You don’t know about Edmund then?’
‘What about Edmund?’
‘He’s been arrested – yesterday – to do with child pornography, I gather.’
She slams her glass down on the floor beside her, where it keels over and whisky trickles out in a brown stream onto the carpet. ‘Why wasn’t I told? He’s only a boy. They’ve no right to arrest him without telling his parents.’ She stops and looks at me. ‘How do you know, anyway?’
‘I teach at Marlbury Abbey School. I believe the police tried to contact you yesterday. And so did the school.’
‘Well, I was at the theatre and Hector doesn’t answer the fucking phone. I’m going to the police station now. I’ll pay his bail or whatever and bring him home. They can’t possibly have any evidence against him. This is all nonsense. This story of hers must have got round and no-one has the sense to see that it’s just a child’s horror story.’
‘The police have got evidence against Edmund. There’s –’ David nearly bursts my ear drum. ‘You’re not a police officer. Don’t know too much.‘
‘Well,’ I backtrack. ‘I think there’s some sort of evidence – fingerprints on DVDs was what I heard.’
She jumps to her feet. ‘I’m going to the police station now. Where are my car keys?’ She takes a step and treads on her glass. ‘Fucking thing,’ she says, kicking the broken glass under the chair. ‘Car keys. Where are my fucking car keys?’
‘You’re not in a fit state to drive,’ I say. ‘If you get breathalysed you’ll just be in more trouble. And the roads are icy. I’ll drive you to the police station – when we’ve finished this conversation.’
‘I don’t want to finish the conversation. I want to see my son.’
‘And so you shall,’ I say implacably, ‘when we’ve just sorted a few things out.’
I put the exercise book down on the coffee table in front of me and pat it gently. She finds the glass she brought in for me and half fills it. She takes two good swallows and sits down.
‘So the situation was,’ I say, ‘that Marina had seen something going on – your friends and your son making porn DVDs involving children, I guess.’
‘You guess. Guessing is what it is. It’s all guesswork this – guesswork and her lies.’
‘It’s a bit more than a guess, in fact. I’ve seen one of the DVDs.’
Her eyes do that extraordinary thing that they do, blazing open for a moment, a very bright blue, and then closing to slits, much like a cat’s. ‘You’ve what?’
‘I came across one. Well, they’re all over the place, dressed up as recordings of your show. Here in your stables, down at the theatre. I even saw one in The Burnt Cake one day. Edmund was selling it. Anyway, it was pretty nasty stuff. I’m not surprised Edmund didn’t want you to know about it.’ She slurps her whisky and says nothing. ‘So there was a dilemma,’ I continue. ‘A thirteen-year-old girl knows about the business and can’t be trusted to keep quiet for long, even if she has been threatened. What’s to be done? Answer – kill her. Silencing her was the only safe move. But now I have a problem with the story: who killed her?’
‘Remember you don’t know about the alibis,’ David hisses.
‘Your friends from the theatre?’ I continue. ‘Did I mention that they’ve been arrested as well? Or Edmund? Well, you’d like to think that a boy wouldn’t kill his own sister. The chaps at the theatre I’ve met and they seem nasty enough for anything, but there’s someone else who keeps coming into my head. I read the newspaper reports about Marina’s death at the time and there was one person whose behaviour that afternoon didn’t seem to make any sense.’
‘And who was that?’ she asks, looking at me over the rim of her glass.
‘Dr Fletcher,’ I say.
I watch her very closely but she hardly flickers. She just takes a swig and says, ‘Colin?’
‘Yes. I know Colin well. His wife’s a great friend of mine and he’s been our GP for years, but I couldn’t make any sense of what he did that afternoon.’
‘And why is that?’
‘Well, piecing it together from the papers and from talking to Eve, it seems that around lunchtime he came out here to see you – and that’s odd in itself because GPs don’t go out to patients any more, do they? Not to young women with sprained ankles they’ve already treated?’
‘Colin is an old friend.’
‘I think he must be more than that, but we’ll come to that later. Let’s take it, for the moment, that he came out to see the ankle – or maybe to take a look at your nerves – then what did he do? He drove you to the station, went back to his surgery and then drove out here again, where he broke into the house, found Marina dead and called the police. Now, why did he come back? What was that about?’
‘We hadn’t left a message for her. He thought she’d be worried if she got home and found me gone.’
‘But he’s a doctor. He’s not your private physician, he’s not a chauffeur, he’s not a nanny and he’s not Marina’s father, yet he was behaving like all of those, apparently. I know Colin, and he’s pretty brisk when he’s in doctor mode. I just can’t see him driving round the countryside on errands in the middle of a working day.’
‘Perhaps you don’t know him as well as you thought you did.’
‘That’s what I started to think. I asked myself what I would think of his behaviour if I didn’t know him and think he was a nice man. And I thought, supposing he was part of this child pornography thing – very shocking, of course, a family doctor, a father and grandfather, but supposing he was – then he’d be desperate to keep it secret, wouldn’t he? If Edmund told him that Marina knew, he’d have a choice between killing her and losing everything.’
She’s watching me intently, all the affected indifference gone. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, at first I thought you must have summoned him to tell him that Marina knew, and – ‘
She raises a hand in protest. ‘Don’t bring me into this. I knew nothing about it – if there was anything to know. I just wanted stronger painkillers for the ankle.’
’OK. But you asked him to drive you to the station, so he knew the house would be empty. He went back to work and returned at about four, expecting Marina back from school at the usual time. She was already there of course, and he killed her, and then called the police. Or so I thought, but that doesn’t work because he’d be the prime suspect if the police arrived and found her newly dead. So
, he must have killed her earlier – between taking you to the station and going back to Marlbury. But then why did he go back later?’
‘Perhaps he’d left something incriminating behind.’
‘Yes, I thought that. Maybe he wanted to clean away any possible fingerprints. It was dangerous, though, because it brought him into the frame, got him involved.’
She sits for a long time, swirling her drink round, her feet tucked up under her in her chair. ‘I knew there was something odd,’ she says finally, in little more than a whisper. ‘Alex and Neil were so secretive about what they were doing when they were here. And I did think I could hear a child’s voice sometimes out at the back there. But people came and went, you know, from the theatre – stage hands and so on – and I never dreamt… as for Edmund being involved, it’s nonsense, I’m sure. Alex and Neil are trying to save their own skins by blaming him. A boy! How could they do it?’
‘And Colin Fletcher?’
‘He was very strange that day. Very jumpy. He leapt at the idea of taking me to the station. Now I see why. I can hardly believe it. Colin. You never really know people, do you?’
I allow a good ten seconds of silence and then I give her a little round of applause. ‘A great performance,’ I say. ‘One of your best.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘And you would happily let him take the rap, wouldn’t you?’
‘What the hell are you talking about? You’re the one who –’
‘Yes, I was, wasn’t I? I was interested to find out just how rotten you are.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘No, I don’t think I will. If Colin Fletcher killed Marina, you were in on it too. What my account left out was your phone call to Renée Deakin. Because it was your phone call, wasn’t it? Whoever made that call did it to make sure the house would be empty when Marina came home, but there was no point in getting rid of Renée if you were there, was there? The caller had to know that you weren’t going to be there either, and the only person who knew that was you.’
She has uncoiled from her chair and has her feet on the ground. She is watching me with a kind of feline intensity. She is still clutching her glass but she has stopped drinking.
‘Actually,’ I continue, ‘I was pretty sure that it was you who made the call all along. Ever since Renée told me what you’d actually said. It was that quote from Macbeth that did it – about battering at your peace. It put paid to the bungled burglary theory, anyway. Burglars’ accomplices don’t quote Macbeth, but you do, don’t you? Your whole family. Edmund told me so. You put on a dark wig, nipped down to the phone box, called Renée, faking a cold to make it more plausible when you denied it later, and the coast was clear for you. You’d prepared the ground well: you’d done a leap from the stairs – which needed a bit of courage, I must admit – so you could persuade the police that it was you the killer had been out to get, and you’d given Marina whatever the signals were that would make her think you might go on a binge, so you could be pretty sure she’d come home at lunch time. I’m not sure what you fixed with Colin. Did he know what you were planning to do? Did you plan it between you, or was it an inspiration of yours to call him out so he could give you an alibi?’
I pause. I’m not really expecting her to answer but I’m feeling rather sick. I don’t want to have to tell this bit of the story. She says nothing – just goes on watching me – so I have no option but to carry on. ‘Well, anyway, I don’t know exactly what happened that afternoon, but I guess it went something like this – do stop me if I’m wrong. You heard Marina’s key in the lock and you waited upstairs in your bedroom. Marina came in and looked around for you downstairs. She couldn’t find you so she went up to try your bedroom, and there you were, too nervous to go downstairs on your “broken” ankle. ‘Just give me a hand, darling,’ you said. ‘Let me lean on you.’ Then you put a hand on her shoulder and limped to the top of the stairs. And then you got yourself in position and gave her a good, hard push. You’re a strong woman – I remember the way you wielded that spade. She was off guard, off balance, and down she went, top to bottom, onto the stone floor. And then you went down, took a golf club out of Edmund’s bag and hit her hard on the head. That’s the bit I don’t understand. She was dead. The fall killed her. You must have seen that. Why did you need to smash her head in?’
For the first time, she peels her gaze away from me and looks down into her glass. She mutters something I can’t hear. I can feel David holding his breath on the other end of my wire. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I didn’t hear you.’
She still doesn’t look at me but concentrates on swirling the drink round in her glass. The she says, quietly but clearly, ‘I couldn’t stand her twitching.’
‘Wait,’ David’s voice is whispering. ‘Don’t say anything. Give her space.’ I wait. She speaks again, angry this time. ‘Her body – twitching – arms and legs like a big spider. I had to stop it. I had to make her still.’ I go on saying nothing. I don’t think I could speak if I wanted to. Finally, she drains her glass, reaches for the bottle and says, as she pours a glass full, ‘And now you’re going to say, How could you? Your own daughter!’
My voice, as I answer, comes out cracked, as though I’ve breathed in lungfuls of plaster dust. ‘No, I’m not,’ I rasp out, ‘because she wasn’t your daughter, was she?’ She doesn’t answer – just takes a swig from her glass. ‘Marina was three years old when you married her father. You had a son, Hector was a widower with a little daughter. It was good publicity for you. Bury the drink and drugs rumours, underplay the rackety first marriage, hype up the family-life-in-the-country image. And it worked well. You made a perfect instant family – except I suppose it wasn’t perfect, was it?’
She slumps back in her chair and talks to me with her eyes closed. ‘I don’t like babies. I don’t like their mess and their clinginess and their whingeing. Edmund wasn’t bad. He got used to the way I lived. I could leave him with anyone and he’d just get on with it. And he was such a beautiful child. Everyone admired him. A little star. And then I got landed with Marina – a clingy, whingeing little thing, always pulling at my clothes, mauling me about. And her father encouraged it, always picking her up and plonking her on my lap. There we are! Go to Mummy then! And there she’d sit, yattering away and peeing on me – it took her forever to get toilet-trained.’ Then she looks at me. ‘Oh don’t sit there looking so pi. You want to try bringing up someone else’s kid.’
‘She had no mother,’ I say. ‘Her mother died. It’s the worst thing that could happen to a tiny child.’
She laughs. ‘Oh no. Worse is getting the wicked stepmother, isn’t it?’
‘Keep calm’, David murmurs. ‘Don’t lose it.’
‘Tell me,’ I say – and my voice is admirably steady – ‘did you know the children were being abused when you were in Switzerland? Because that was what happened, wasn’t it? The “very bad things” that Marina wrote about?’
‘Of course I didn’t. If I’d thought anyone was harming Edmund, I’d – their bloody father was supposed to be looking after them.’
‘But Edmund told you about it eventually, I suppose. He’s a bright boy – very mature. He wasn’t prepared to be a victim. He saw a business opportunity and when you all came back to England and money was tight, you and he hatched a plan for a nasty little business. And you knew a couple of nasty little men who could help you. A perfect set up: you provide the premises, they have the contacts with the child model agencies. And distribution? Does Edmund manage that?’
She says nothing. I feel exhausted. I’m on the last lap now but my legs are going from under me. ‘Then,’ I say, ‘Edmund told you that Marina knew what was going on and you decided you’d have to kill her. But you couldn’t do it all on your own. You needed an alibi, and who better to give you one than Dr Colin Fletcher, respected local GP?’ I give her a moment but she doesn’t respond. ‘You’re going to have to help me out a bit here,’ I say, ‘but I guess you rang Colin Fletc
her just before you expected Marina home. You knew when to expect her – coming home at lunch time was what she did when she saw one of your “states” coming on. You told him something terrible had happened and asked him to come right away. I’m sure you put on a good performance. And when he arrived, did you tell him what you’d done?’
Her eyes open in genuine amusement. She throws back her head and laughs. ‘What? Dr bleeding-heart Fletcher? I loved your story, by the way, making him into a murderer, but you’re quite right – that won’t wash. No, I couldn’t risk telling him, not even with the way things were.’
I’m not sure what she means by this but I decide not to pursue it. Instead, I ask, ‘So, what did you tell him?’
‘You’re so clever, you tell me.’
‘Well, I suppose you told him it happened while you were – what – out in the garden? You came in and found her there. You were distraught, terrified. You didn’t know if it was an accident or murder and if it was murder then the killers might still be in the house, so you called Colin. Most people call the police. How did you explain calling Colin?’
‘My nerves,’ she says.
‘Of course. Your nerves. You couldn’t possibly deal with it all – not after the terrible shock you’d had, and the grief – we mustn’t forget the grief. Being interviewed by the police would be more than you could handle. It would drive you over the edge again, and this time you might not recover. Am I right?’
She looks at me. She’s bleary from the whisky now, not as sharp as before. ‘More or less.’
‘And then you asked him to drive you to Marlbury – not Shepton Halt – to catch the train to London. It takes less than fifteen minutes from here to Marlbury on a clear road, but it takes twenty-five on the train because it’s on a single track and it stops at all the piddling little stations on the way. If you made a quick getaway, you could get the 1.58 train from Marlbury and be safely in London when Marina’s body was found. And, of course, if the police thought you’d got on the train at 1.33 at Shepton Halt, then they’d assume that you’d had to leave the house before Marina got home.’
All the Daughters Page 27