No Escape

by Hilary Norman

  ‘Or perhaps,’ he suggested, ‘I can give you a nice, relaxing glass of something at the end of one of your interview days.’

  In her study at the house, Lizzie told Allbeury that would be lovely, gave him her mobile number, then hung up and leaned back.

  The thought of meeting up with him, possibly on her own, if that was how it happened to work out (and Christopher had already arranged to be in Marlow for the children for at least part of her tour) was quite surprisingly appealing.

  Careful, Lizzie.

  She thought back to their dinner, ran through the memory to see if she’d felt, at any point, that the solicitor had been flirting with her, and decided that whatever Susan had said to the contrary, he had not. And she, even more so, had been far too preoccupied with the children coming down with their colds to give any impression of flirtation back to him.

  Yet her memory of Robin Allbeury was of a decidedly attractive, very charming man. And rather a nice one too, she’d thought.

  Susan had said she’d thought he ‘fancied’ her.

  Lord knew that was the last complication she needed.

  Careful, she told herself again.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Sandra was on her daughter’s kitchen phone on Wednesday morning, pretending to listen to Lilian West – her next-door-neighbour in Edmonton – telling her about her husband’s forthcoming prostate operation, when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Lilian, I have to go.’

  She heard movement from the living room, knew it would be DC Dean, rather than Tony, going to answer, and that was becoming almost routine, her son-in-law sitting morosely in his chair, letting other people take care of things, and Sandra knew it wasn’t laziness, could read the now permanent fear in his eyes, and she understood that emotion well enough now, saw it in her own eyes each time she glanced in a mirror. She’d been so sure ever since they’d found Joanne that there was nothing left to be afraid of, but now that she knew the truth about the adoption – now that the police knew too – knew the endless fear that her own poor child must have endured, day in, day out, of losing Irina, Sandra too, had fallen into a permanent state of terror.

  Of hearing the doorbell.

  Of this moment.

  She heard the voices at the door. Heard Karen Dean going back into the living room, saying something to Tony, heard him start to shout.

  Sandra began to tremble as she opened the kitchen door.

  The hall seemed full of strangers, two women and a man, and DI Keenan was there, too, in the background, and DC Dean coming from the living room . . .

  She heard the cry then.

  Irina’s cry. Wordless, but shrieking.

  ‘Sandra, I’m so sorry.’ Dean looked distressed as she came towards her.

  ‘What?’ Sandra pushed past her, saw that a woman with orange hair had picked up Irina, was holding her tightly. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Leave it, Sandra.’ Tony was behind the woman, holding a piece of paper in one hand, his face very pale, just standing, doing nothing, just standing, watching them take his daughter away.

  ‘They have to take her,’ Dean told her, put out a hand to touch her arm.

  ‘No!’ Sandra moved suddenly, arms out, fingers splayed, trying to grasp at Irina, but the orange-haired woman dodged sideways, and all Sandra’s desperate fingers caught at was the sleeve of her coat. ‘Give her to me!’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do, Sandra.’ Dean’s eyes were wet.

  ‘Give her to me!’ Sandra wailed.

  She saw Irina’s scared, huge eyes staring at her, and the child’s mouth was open, but for that instant or two she wasn’t actually crying, just open-mouthed with shock and bewilderment. And then the woman holding her turned around and began to walk out of the door, and Irina began to scream again.

  ‘No!’ Sandra yelled after her, and her hands, helpless, frenzied, flew to either side of her head, clutching, grabbing handfuls of her own hair. ‘They can’t! Tell them they can’t!’

  ‘They can,’ Tony said, quietly.

  The other strangers followed their colleague, faces bland, showing no feelings at all, either for the screaming child or the distraught woman who had already lost her only daughter and was now, at this very instant, also losing her only grandchild.

  Sandra stared after them, then at the people left behind. Keenan, his thin face wretched; Karen Dean, tight-lipped, trying not to look at her.

  And Tony, still standing, like a block of wood.

  ‘You bastard!’ She flung herself at him, began pounding at him with her fists, weeping as she hit him, and still he remained motionless, not looking at her, looking past her into the distance. ‘You stupid, selfish bastard!’

  ‘Mrs Finch,’ Keenan said gently. ‘Why don’t we—’

  ‘How could you let them take her?’ The nails of Sandra’s right hand caught her son-in-law’s cheek, drew blood. ‘How could you do that?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Tony said, at last, though still he didn’t move. ‘It’s the law,’ he said, softly. ‘We knew it was coming.’

  Karen Dean came up behind Sandra, put her hands on the older woman’s arms to restrain her, but there was no need. All the strength, all the fight had gone out of her now, and her own arms fell limply to her sides, hung there.

  Tony Patston, arrested and bailed after his confession on Saturday, and treading water since then, hardly able to breathe, let alone function, was no longer looking past Sandra into the distance.

  He was looking at Keenan –

  – who now stepped forward and began to speak to Tony.

  ‘Anthony Patston, I am . . .’

  Sandra was aware of the inspector’s voice, low and steady, but if she heard the words he used as her son-in-law’s pale, now bloody, face grew even whiter, sicker, she was incapable of making sense of them.

  All she could hear, ringing in her ears, as she thought they would forever, were the screams of her murdered daughter’s only child as she was carried away.

  Case No. 6/220770

  PIPER-WADE, E.

  Study/Review

  Pending

  Action

  Resolved

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Lizzie’s tour began at five on Thursday morning with Susan arriving, bleary-eyed, to collect her from Marlow and drive her to Oxford for her first radio interview of the day, after which there was to be a signing in Waterstones, followed by lunch with the Oxford Mail. Then on to Cheltenham for the Gloucestershire Echo, before Gloucester itself for another radio interview. Then two more signing sessions and down to Bristol for drinks with the Western Daily Press and dinner with the Evening Post at the Marriott, where they were overnighting before another early start for breakfast television.

  It was Friday, after six-thirty, when she walked wearily, but with the sense of warm relief the hotel always gave her, into the Savoy and up the stairs to the American Bar, where Robin Allbeury was waiting at a corner table.

  ‘You look tired.’ He kissed her cheek, then pulled out a chair for her to sink into. ‘Lovely, of course, but worn out. And possibly hungry?’ He sat again too.

  ‘Hungry, yes,’ Lizzie said. ‘Lovely, most definitely not.’

  ‘You’ll forgive me for disagreeing with that.’ He watched her sit back and look around. ‘Bit hectic, isn’t it? How about just one glass of something here, and then elsewhere for a quiet dinner?’ He saw her dubious expression. ‘Somewhere you can just collapse and not have to watch everything you say.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful,’ Lizzie said. ‘So long as it’s not too late. Susan’s got me up before the crack of dawn for GMTV.’ She saw him frown. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘Only that I probably should have asked Susan to join us.’

  Lizzie shook her head. ‘She was dying to get home. No weekend off for her either, don’t forget.’

  ‘Still,’ he said, ‘I should have thought.’

  ‘Susan isn’t easily offended,’ Lizzie said.
>
  They had a glass of champagne each, and then Allbeury drove her out of town to a cosy restaurant in a West Hampstead side road run by two hospitable men who’d clearly known Allbeury for years.

  ‘You don’t have to talk at all,’ Allbeury told her after they’d ordered, ‘unless you want to. And I can either chat away or be silent, if you’d rather.’

  ‘I think,’ Lizzie said, ‘I wouldn’t mind listening for a bit.’

  ‘A barrister I know has told me how tiring performing can be.’

  ‘Did you never want to be a barrister? I could imagine you in court.’

  ‘In a wig and gown?’ he said. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘So why matrimonial?’

  ‘It was an area that interested me.’

  ‘But not so much any more?’ Lizzie remembered him saying at their dinner party that he no longer worked full-time.

  He nodded. ‘There were other things I wanted more time for.’

  ‘Intriguing,’ Lizzie said.

  He smiled. ‘Not really.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’

  ‘You’re just being interested,’ he said. ‘Which is nice.’

  Their first course arrived, a creamy cauliflower soup that Lizzie found herself devouring as if she hadn’t eaten for a week, and after that she was almost too busy with her melting fillet steak and frites to talk much, and she noticed, more than once, that Allbeury – who’d ordered a good Burgundy, but was not drinking – was sitting back watching her eat, smiling.

  ‘Do I have mustard on my cheek?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Was I staring?’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘This is far too good for me to mind anything.’

  ‘Good.’ He paused. ‘How’s Christopher?’

  ‘Fine. Being a more-or-less house husband in Marlow while I’m off being wined and dined all over the UK.’

  ‘Very commendable,’ Allbeury said.

  ‘Gilly’s there too, of course,’ Lizzie said. ‘And he has patients to see in one of the local BUPA hospitals.’

  ‘So it’s not all child-minding?’

  She heard the touch of irony, felt compelled to rise to Christopher’s defence. ‘He wouldn’t mind if it was.’ She smiled. ‘Though Edward, our oldest, would most definitely mind hearing himself described as a child in need of minding.’

  Allbeury nodded, asked about Jack and Sophie, followed that up with a few questions about DMD – intelligent queries that Lizzie found quite easy to cope with. And it was, all in all, one of the most relaxing evenings she could remember having in a long time. Allbeury told her a little more about his practice and his partners, said that he’d always made a point of trying to work, if possible, with people he liked or at least respected. He told her about a former unnamed partner he’d let go because of his preparedness to accommodate a client who’d turned out to be a thug; though even that experience, Allbeury added, smiling, had led him to one of his now favourite colleagues, a young private investigator named Novak, who ran a small agency with his wife.

  ‘Nice people,’ he said.

  It was only as they neared the end of the evening, en route to Holland Park, that Lizzie realized how skilfully Allbeury had drawn facts, opinions and even, to a degree, feelings out of her, while telling her next to nothing of real consequence about himself.

  She already had a husband who was attractive and charming.

  A husband you only stay with for the children.

  And Robin Allbeury, she decided again, glancing at him sideways as he drove, really was extremely attractive.

  Careful, Lizzie.

  That self-caution again.

  He halted the Jaguar outside the flat and turned off the engine.

  ‘So, back again in a few days, didn’t you say?’

  She felt, suddenly, absurdly, like a teenager saying goodnight after a first date outside her parents’ home.

  Not a date.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, quite briskly, ‘but only after Manchester, Leeds, York, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Lakes.’ She picked up her bag from the floor. ‘By which time, I’ll almost certainly be ready for nothing more than total collapse.’

  ‘Then if you should happen to want a friend to collapse with,’ Allbeury said, ‘or if, by remote chance, you have just a sprinkling of strength left, I hope you’ll remember my number.’

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Keenan had eaten his wife’s Sunday roast beef and Yorkshires, and he’d played football with his boys and cuddled his daughter, but all the while inside his mind he’d been seeing the little adopted – not really adopted – girl being carried out of her house by a stranger, and the thought that he might have been in any way instrumental in that made him feel sick and useless, because it was all so wrong and lousy, and he couldn’t see a decent end to it.

  He’d told poor Sandra Finch that he would try and help in any way he could, and he was going to do his damnedest, but he couldn’t see himself making any difference, not about the little girl, anyway.

  ‘At least Irina’s not at risk from Patston any more,’ Terry Reed had said, because Tony Patston was back home again, the only charges against him to date relating to the adoption, and they’d been trying, now, to trace the Georgious, the Patstons’ neighbours, in Cyprus, in the hope that they might be able to shed some useful light on the relationship between Tony and Joanne, but nothing as yet there either.

  Reed had meant well enough. They’d all meant well enough.

  Didn’t make it right.

  Didn’t stop Keenan from looking at his own children and wanting to punch a hole in his living room wall.

  Shipley was beginning to accept that obsession might, after all, be the right diagnosis for what was ailing her.

  The thing was, no matter how strong her hunches, she’d always been able to recognize when a case or a situation was over, even if she’d been proven wrong. Till now. She’d tried, really tried, dumping this or at least shoving it to the back of her mind and getting on, wholeheartedly, with the drugs case, but Lynne Bolsover and Joanne Patston just wouldn’t get lost. And it made little real sense, given that both prime suspects were filth, for her to be as vexed as she was.

  As obsessed.

  Except that something she and Keenan had lightly touched on after calling on Allbeury – that Keenan had then dismissed – was back in her head now, needling, itching at her.

  What if it was the men, those two scummy husbands, that Allbeury, self-styled defender of unhappy women, was after? Killing the women, maybe putting them out of their misery, in order to send the men down?

  Patston hit the kid, not his wife.

  Defender of unhappy women and children.

  And maybe – Shipley took the line of thought further a few hours later, prodding absently at her roast beef meal-for-one, while the Eastenders omnibus screeched its way through early Sunday afternoon – there had been more than two shitbag husbands? More than two unhappy wives?

  ‘Christ,’ she said, and pushed away the food.

  She thought again about the Bolsover murder weapon, remembered Kirby calling her paranoid when she’d told him she thought the discovery reeked.

  No one was going to listen to something this wild, either. This groundless. And without official back-up it was going to be incredibly tough to try sifting through old wife-slaying cases searching for invisible links with Robin Allbeury.

  So only one thing to do, Shipley decided, wrapping her dinner in an old Tesco plastic bag and going to get dressed.

  Ask him.

  ‘May I be frank, Mr Allbeury?’

  ‘I’d appreciate that.’

  She had phoned ahead to say she needed another word, and had thought she’d heard him sigh, but then he’d said she was welcome to return, and that was one thing she was determined to try to do, she’d decided on her way back to Shad Tower, try needling him out of that infuriatingly calm courtesy, maybe reach the other side of him.

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nbsp; If it existed, a cautionary voice had said.

  They were on the terrace, outside the living room, which Shipley now saw ran the full length of the apartment. It was warm for mid-October, and Allbeury was sipping mineral water and wearing a black short-sleeved polo shirt and jeans.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ she said.

  ‘Do you need to?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t much enjoy puzzles I can’t solve,’ Shipley said. ‘You’re a puzzle.’

  ‘I find all sorts of people puzzling,’ Allbeury said.

  ‘If we weren’t dealing with the murders,’ she went on, ‘of two very nice women, I wouldn’t give a stuff about trying to work you out.’

  ‘So how do you propose I help you to work me out?’ For the first time, he showed a touch of irritation. ‘I’ve answered all your questions – and DI Keenan’s – as well as I could. You apparently suspect me of something – perhaps even something in connection with these dreadful deaths. I can do no more than assure you that you couldn’t be more wrong.’

  ‘You can do a lot more,’ Shipley said. ‘You can tell me what you really think – really feel – about Lynne Bolsover and Joanne Patston and any of the other women you’ve supposedly tried so hard to help.’ She watched Allbeury, sitting perfectly, infuriatingly, still. ‘You can tell me exactly why you claim to care about them.’

  ‘I have my reasons.’

  ‘Which are?’

  ‘Private.’

  Shipley shook her head.

  ‘I’m sorry to exasperate you,’ Allbeury said. ‘I get no pleasure from it.’

  ‘And what do you get out of helping those women?’

  ‘Simply the knowledge, when I’m successful, that I am doing just that.’

  ‘How,’ she asked, ‘do you measure success?’

  ‘That depends on the individual case.’

  She took her time. ‘In the case of Lynne Bolsover, do you consider that you succeeded or failed?’