No Escape

by Hilary Norman

  The door opened, and Karen Dean looked in.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘There’s a call for you.’

  Keenan stood up. ‘You’ll excuse me?’

  Tony nodded, said nothing, leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes.

  Keenan went out into the hall.

  ‘Mrs Patston’s car’s been found in Hall Lane Car Park,’ Dean told him quietly. ‘That’s the shoppers’ car park next to Sainsbury’s in Chingford.’

  ‘Near the library?’

  ‘Practically opposite,’ Dean said. ‘Nothing at first glance in or around the car, sir.’ She paused. ‘And no joy yet from fingertip search on a weapon.’

  Keenan nodded, started to turn away, then stopped. ‘I’m going to ask you to act as family liaison on this one, Karen, if you’ve no objection.’

  ‘I’d like to keep working on the enquiry too, sir, if that’s possible.’

  Keenan nodded again. ‘We’ll get a uniform to stay around the Patston house when you’re out in the field, but I do want you as liaison.’

  Dean’s eyes, dark, slightly slanted and sharp, betrayed fleeting disappointment, mixed with a dread Keenan readily sympathized with.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  At ten past five, Clare telephoned Allbeury to see if he knew where Novak was.

  ‘He did call me a while back,’ she said, ‘then had to go suddenly and said he’d phone back, but he hasn’t, which isn’t like him, and now he’s turned his phone off, and he usually keeps it on silent.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t help you, Clare,’ Allbeury said. ‘I’m waiting to hear too.’

  ‘If you do hear first,’ she said, ‘please ask him to call me.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘You said murder,’ Mike Novak said to DS Reed when he finally came back into the interview room at MIS headquarters in Theydon Bois, carrying two polystyrene cups of coffee. ‘Who’s been murdered?’

  ‘What were you doing hanging around that road?’ Reed set down Novak’s coffee in front of him, took the lid off his own. ‘You said black, no sugar, didn’t you?’

  Novak knew there was no point now in prevaricating.

  Not too much anyway.

  ‘Is it Joanne Patston?’ he asked.

  ‘Do you know Mrs Patston?’ Reed asked.

  ‘I’ve met her once,’ Novak answered. ‘Briefly.’

  ‘Why were you sitting outside her mother’s house, Mr Novak?’

  ‘Has Joanne Patston been murdered?’ Novak persisted.

  DS Reed stared at him for a long moment.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last.

  ‘Christ.’ He remembered the nervous woman hanging her husband’s shirts on the line in her back garden while her child played with a red ball. ‘Oh, dear Christ.’

  Was it the husband? That was what he wanted to ask, come right out with, no time-wasting. But unless it became unavoidable, Allbeury didn’t want the police knowing about his involvement.

  ‘I need to make a call,’ he said. ‘To my client.’

  ‘Client?’ the policeman queried.

  ‘I’m a private investigator.’ Novak paused. ‘I was there on a job.’

  ‘Who’s your client?’

  Novak disliked getting stroppy with the police, but he had no choice. ‘I’m not under arrest for anything, am I?’

  ‘Should you be?’ Reed asked.

  ‘No,’ Novak said, ‘so I’d appreciate a couple of minutes to make the call.’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  Novak took out his phone, turned it on. ‘Alone?’ he said to Reed.

  ‘Don’t push it,’ the other man said, but stood up.

  Novak waited till he’d left the room, saw there were several missed calls, ignored them and dialled Allbeury’s mobile.

  He picked up right away. ‘What’s happening, Mike?’

  Novak gave him the news.

  ‘Murdered?’ Allbeury’s shock was audible. ‘Christ almighty, Mike.’

  ‘I know.’ Novak hesitated, hoping for direction. ‘Thing is . . .’

  ‘What have you told them?’

  ‘Nothing. That I’m an investigator and that I had to phone my client.’ Novak heard the silence. ‘I didn’t have much choice, Robin, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t worry about that now.’ Allbeury was already regrouping. ‘Mike, don’t get yourself in difficulties on my account. Tell the truth.’ He paused, choosing his words carefully. ‘Namely that Mrs Patston was in an unhappy marriage and had asked me for help, hence your surveillance. The usual – I’m a divorce lawyer, but this was off-the-record.’

  ‘And if they want more?’

  ‘You don’t have any more.’ Allbeury paused. ‘If they need to speak to me, I will, of course, get in touch right away.’

  The door opened and Reed came back in.

  ‘DS Reed’s just come back,’ Novak said.

  ‘Take it easy, Mike,’ Allbeury said, ‘and find out what you can.’

  ‘I will,’ Novak said. ‘And Robin, could you tell Clare I’m okay?’

  He ended the call, turned the phone off again and told Reed – already sitting down again opposite him – what Allbeury had asked him to pass on.

  ‘So it was Mrs Patston you’ve been watching?’

  ‘Not so much watching,’ Novak said. ‘Looking for. At her home and her mother’s.’

  ‘Was Mrs Patston wanting a divorce then?’ Reed asked.

  ‘I don’t know any details,’ Novak said.

  ‘But your client is a divorce lawyer?’

  ‘He is, but he takes other cases too, sometimes, I think.’

  ‘You think.’ Reed paused. ‘You said Mrs Patston had asked for help.’

  ‘That’s what Mr Allbeury told me.’

  ‘And when you met her?’ Reed asked.

  ‘That was just to arrange a meeting,’ Novak said.

  ‘Why not just phone?’

  Novak shrugged. ‘I was in the neighbourhood. It seemed easier. Friendlier.’

  ‘And did you just see Mrs Patston? Or was her husband there?’

  ‘Just her. And her little girl. Poor kid.’

  ‘Yes,’ Reed agreed. ‘So you don’t know why the lady was unhappy? You did use that word, didn’t you?’

  Novak was about to claim ignorance, but then the memory came back again. She’d looked so nice, so vulnerable, pegging up those shirts, and then the little girl had run to her, huddled close to her mummy. And now her mother was gone, forever, and they were going to find out about Tony Patston anyway, and if he didn’t at least start them off on the right track . . .

  ‘All I know,’ he said, abruptly, ‘is that there was some question of possible violence – unproven, so far as I know – in the family.’

  ‘Against Mrs Patston?’ The beady eyes were sharper.

  ‘Against the daughter,’ Novak said.

  He tensed against further questions, for Clare’s sake, and Maureen Donnelly’s, too, as the source of the information; didn’t relish getting a well-meaning nurse into trouble because of his flapping mouth.

  Not to mention Robin. Because this wasn’t the first time a client of his had been murdered, was it? And Novak didn’t know what, if anything, he was supposed to make of that. All he wanted, right now, was to get this interview sorted and to get the hell out of here as quickly as possible.

  ‘And who is alleged to be using violence against Irina Patston?’ DS Reed asked.

  ‘Her father. The husband,’ Novak answered. ‘That’s why I’ve been hanging around. Keeping a bit of an eye on the situation.’

  ‘Have you been inside the Patstons’ house?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘How long has this surveillance been going on?’

  ‘Not really surveillance,’ Novak said.

  ‘What would you call it?’

  ‘Keeping an eye, like I said.’

  ‘How long?’ Reed repeated.

  ‘Yesterday mornin
g,’ Novak answered.

  ‘Why then?’

  ‘Because my client wanted to get in touch with Mrs Patston, and she didn’t seem to be home.’ Novak paused. ‘Because he was concerned about her.’

  ‘And the child?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you reported this alleged violence to anyone?’ Reed asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Has your client—’ Reed glanced at his notes ‘—Mr Allbeury – reported it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Novak said. ‘It might all have been nothing.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem very likely now, does it?’ Reed said.

  Novak didn’t answer, picturing Joanne Patston again.

  ‘Who brought this allegation of violence to your client’s attention, Mr Novak?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Novak said, conscious that it was the first outright lie he’d told.

  ‘Are you sure about that, Mr Novak?’ Reed asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  Case No. 6/220770

  PIPER-WADE, E.

  Study/Review

  Pending

  Action

  Resolved

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  ‘How are you doing?’

  Jim Keenan, having been called out of the living room by Karen Dean to report a call from DS Reed, had gone back in to see that Patston had gone out into the garden, so, feeling it an appropriate moment for a break in the questioning, he’d come into the kitchen where Sandra Finch was sitting at the table.

  The window, he saw, overlooked the small garden, the light from within cast right across it so that even in the dusk, in the unlikely event that Patston tried to leg it over the back fence, he or Dean would certainly notice.

  ‘I know what a foolish question that is, Mrs Finch,’ he said, with sincerity. ‘I don’t think any of us ever learns the right things to say at a time like this.’

  ‘It can’t be easy,’ Sandra said, kindly.

  She was very pale, but quite composed. It wasn’t real composure, of course, Keenan knew that. It was in place partly because the truth had probably not yet fully penetrated, but mostly, he thought, because of the child.

  ‘When you feel,’ he ventured carefully, ‘the time has come to tell Irina about her mother, and if you need a little support, I know Karen – DC Dean – might be a good person to have around.’

  Karen Dean left the kettle she’d been filling, came closer to the table. ‘I won’t intrude, Mrs Finch,’ she said, ‘unless you want me to.’

  ‘Sandra,’ the bereaved woman said. ‘If you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Dean said.

  ‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ Keenan asked. ‘Talk for a bit?’

  ‘Why would I mind?’ Sandra said. ‘I want to help, don’t I?’

  Keenan glanced towards the ceiling. ‘Is Irina a good sleeper?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ the grandmother answered. ‘Usually, I think.’

  ‘She’s a very beautiful little girl,’ Keenan said.

  The woman smiled, tears springing into her eyes. ‘She was adopted, you know. When she was three months old. She was an orphan, from Romania.’

  ‘Irina,’ Keenan said, understanding the exotic name and almost black eyes.

  ‘What a wonderful thing to do,’ Karen Dean said.

  Sandra nodded, struggled against tears, failed, and pressed an already sodden tissue to her eyes. ‘Joanne waited such a long time to have Irina,’ she said after a moment, wiping her face, then clenching the tissue in her right fist. ‘She was desperate to have a baby, but they couldn’t.’

  ‘Adoption’s a big decision for most couples,’ Keenan said. ‘I know it can be tough for some dads, bringing up another man’s child.’

  Karen Dean strolled back towards the kettle, closer to the window.

  ‘I wouldn’t say my—’ Sandra stopped.

  ‘What wouldn’t you say, Mrs Finch?’ Keenan asked benignly.

  Her voice was lower. ‘I was going to say that I never thought of my son-in-law as a very paternal man, but he was completely behind Joanne about the adoption.’ She shook her head, remembering. ‘They saw one of those programmes about the orphans over there, you know, and after that, it was all they wanted to do.’

  ‘Can’t have been easy.’ Dean dropped tea bags into the blue and white pot.

  ‘It wasn’t,’ Sandra said. ‘Joanne wouldn’t talk about it much – she was superstitious, afraid if she said too much it wouldn’t happen – but she was always telling me how Tony just wouldn’t give up.’ She paused. ‘Four and a half years since they brought Irina home.’ Her voice caught. ‘It made Joanne so happy – she was such a wonderful mother.’

  For the first time, she broke down, her sobs deep and bereft, her face in her hands, as Patston’s had been earlier, shoulders heaving.

  From upstairs, as if her grandmother’s pain might have woken her, they heard the sound of Irina crying too.

  Sandra lifted her head, got quickly to her feet, tugged a couple of tissues from the box on the table and dried her eyes. ‘I’d better go to her.’ She blew her nose, went across to throw them into the pedal bin and saw Tony outside, kicking disconsolately at a grass verge. ‘He gets very upset when Irina cries.’

  ‘Really?’ Keenan asked. ‘All children cry, after all.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sandra paused to listen, but there was no sound now from above. ‘Joanne never said much about it, but it was obvious all the same because she was always making sure Irina wasn’t left to cry for more than a minute. She was always giving her an extra bottle when she was little, or picking her up when it might have been fine to leave her for just a bit, you know?’

  ‘Does Tony get angry when she cries?’ Keenan asked, casually.

  ‘I don’t know about angry,’ Sandra said, awkward suddenly. ‘I’d better go up.’

  ‘You mustn’t worry,’ Keenan said, ‘about saying the wrong thing.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Sandra said, still uncomfortable.

  ‘All that matters now,’ Keenan pressed on, ‘is telling us anything at all that might help us find out what happened to Joanne, and why.’

  Sandra Finch’s face visibly changed, went even paler, her eyes widening in new shock. ‘You’re surely not suggesting that Tony . . .’

  ‘No one’s suggesting anything, Mrs Finch. These are just routine questions, to help us get to the bottom—’

  ‘How can you use words like that?’ Sandra exclaimed. ‘My daughter – that little girl’s mother—’ she glanced up at the ceiling ‘—has just been murdered. How can anything be routine?’

  Chapter Sixty

  Clare was already up on her feet as Novak came through the door of their flat shortly after seven, and he saw instantly from her face that she knew.

  ‘Robin told me,’ she said. ‘He phoned to give me your message, and I could hear from his voice that something was wrong.’

  ‘I wanted to be the one to tell you,’ Novak said.

  ‘He tried not to tell me, but I got it out of him.’

  ‘You’re good at that.’ Novak went to put his arms around her.

  ‘Poor woman.’ She burst into tears. ‘And that poor little girl.’

  ‘She’ll be okay,’ Novak said, knowing that was a lie.

  ‘But she’s not safe.’ Clare’s voice was muffled against his jacket. ‘Not while she’s living with that monster.’

  ‘The grandmother’s been looking after her,’ Novak said soothingly, ‘so it stands to reason she’ll probably move in with Patston now.’ He drew back, looked into his wife’s face. ‘And after what I just told one rather sharp DS, it’s pretty likely they’ll be looking at Tony Patston very hard indeed.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Clare wiped her eyes.

  ‘Just enough.’ Novak fished in his pocket for a handkerchief, dabbed at her face, then handed it to her. ‘I didn’t mention you or Maureen or the hospital. But I did say that Joanne had been very unhappy, and that there was a
suspicion that Patston had been violent against the child.’

  ‘Good.’ Clare blew her nose. ‘If it weren’t for Maureen, I’d go to the police myself, this minute.’

  ‘No need, sweetheart,’ Novak said. ‘They’ll get there without you.’

  Both Tony Patston and Sandra Finch had been fingerprinted, and Tony had elected to give a hair rather than a mouth swab for DNA – all strictly for purposes of elimination, Keenan had assured them. But after that, the awareness that just a few miles away a police team was searching his own house began to weigh on Patston heavily.

  ‘I want to go home,’ he said to Keenan in the kitchen while Sandra was upstairs checking on Irina. ‘Isn’t this all terrible enough without being made to stay away while strangers make Christ knows what kind of a mess in my house?’

  ‘I can assure you—’ Keenan remained gentle ‘—that no one will be treating your property with anything but respect. As I’ve told you, it’s all simply part of the routine.’

  ‘It’s routine to suspect husbands, isn’t it?’ Tony said. ‘You always read it, don’t you, but it’s different when it happens to you.’

  ‘It’s true to say that in all such cases, it’s normal procedure to try to rule out close relatives and colleagues.’

  ‘Jo didn’t have any colleagues,’ Tony said. ‘And you wouldn’t think her mum killed her, so that’s just me left, isn’t it?’ He began to weep again. ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh, my God, this is unbelievable. I’ve just lost my wife, and instead of leaving me in peace so I can grieve, I have to put up with this shit.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Patston,’ Keenan said, immovably. ‘I can assure you that the last thing we want to do is harass an innocent man who’s—’

  ‘But you don’t think I’m innocent,’ Tony interrupted, distraught, ‘do you?’

  ‘Why don’t you sit down for a bit?’ Keenan suggested. ‘Have a cup of tea.’

  Tony sank down onto one of the kitchen chairs and stared up at the detective inspector. ‘You think I did it, don’t you? You think I killed my own wife.’

  Chapter Sixty-One